The Everything Theodore Roosevelt Book (46 page)

Wood and Roosevelt were two of a kind, according to their commanding officer in Cuba. He wrote: “The conduct of Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt … deserves my highest commendation. Both Colonel Wood and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt disdained to take advantage of shelter or cover from the enemy’s fire while any of their men remained exposed to it—an error of judgement but happily on the heroic side.”

Wood earned even more respect from TR for his administration of the island. According to TR:

“Leonard Wood was left in as Governor for two or three years, and evolved order out of chaos, raising the administration of the island to a level, moral and material, which it had never before achieved.” That was what he was trying to do in his various government roles.

The Philippines Fiasco

Things did not always go smoothly with TR and Wood. As with any of his relationships, there were peaks and valleys. An incident in the Philippines in 1906 placed the pair in a corner, although the problem lay more with TR’s opponents than with them.

In 1906, Wood’s troops killed approximately 600 Moros, including men, women, and children, hiding inside a crater. TR praised Wood for his brilliant leadership. He sent the general a telegram on March 10, 1906, that said, “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”

The United States annexed the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, which was unpopular with many vocal Americans, e.g., Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan. Filipino forces fought U.S. troops in battles for their independence throughout TR’s administration. Wood led a violent American campaign against one tribe in particular, the Moros, which incurred the wrath of TR’s opponents.

The press in the United States and his political opponents excoriated both men. Many of them stressed that Wood should not be leading troops since he had a medical background. Moreover, they said, TR appointed Wood to his position as commander in the Philippines out of friendship, not because the general had any military acumen.

TR, who stood by his friends in most cases, wisely let the matter die. The case was a prime example of how much TR valued friendships and why they lasted so long.

Wood and TR survived the incident and the resulting bad press. Wood stayed in the army until 1921, retiring as a major general. He and TR remained four-star friends until Roosevelt died. Wood was among the mourners at TR’s funeral, along with Henry Cabot Lodge. That was a testament not only to TR, but to friendship.

Jacob Riis

TR began a long friendship with Riis when he was a young man, but it evolved to a higher level when he started his police commissioner stint in New York City. The two men conducted night police patrols of the city together.

Riis enjoyed their time together immensely. “For two years we were to be together all the day, and quite often most of the night, in the environment in which I had spent twenty years of my life,” he wrote. “And these two were the happiest by far of them all.”

Riis provided an invaluable service for TR. He had grown up in the slums of New York City, where he had lived in boardinghouses run by the police department for poor people, which TR closed during his regime as commissioner.

Riis knew the slums of the city backward and forward and took TR to places he might never have found on his own. The visits gave TR fresh insights into the depressed conditions in which some New York City residents lived and prompted him to make some major changes to improve their lives.

“The midnight trips that Riis and I took … gave me personal insight into some of the problems of city life,” TR acknowledged. “It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness.”

Jacob Riis revealed in his biography of TR that New York City Police Chief Byrnes warned the new commissioner that police work would break him. “You will yield. You are but human,” Byrnes said. Riis reported that it did no such thing. TR’s answer “was to close the gate of the politicians to police patronage,” which was his plan all along.

The First Patrol

The first time TR and Riis went on patrol together, they discovered that 90 percent of the patrolmen assigned to duty were nowhere to be found. Riis commented on that in the newspaper the next day. His story had the desired effect.

Starting the next day, and throughout TR’s term as police commissioner, more cops started taking their jobs seriously—and patrolling their beats lest he should find them missing.

As a result of their working arrangement, Riis and TR formed a mutual admiration society. Riis, in summing up TR’s work as police commissioner, wrote, “We rarely realize, in these latter days, how much of our ability to fight for good government, and our hope of winning the fight, is due to the campaign of honesty waged by Theodore Roosevelt in Mulberry Street [the Police Department’s headquarters].”

A Tribute to Riis

Riis rated high among TR’s friends and influences. TR credited Riis with opening his eyes wider to the problems of tenement living and the need to resolve them.

Jacob Riis died on May 26, 1914. Immediately, TR petitioned to change the name of Telawana Park in New York to Jacob A. Riis Park. By July 1914, the change was completed. TR made possible a memorial to his friend and to one of the United States’ most prominent social reformers. The park is now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area in New York.

Years after TR left the White House, he said that his “whole life was influenced by my long association with Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew.” That was the level of esteem TR held for Riis the reformer—and for Riis the friend.

Muir and More Friends

Just as TR formed a series of friendships throughout his life that were durable and mutually rewarding, he also participated in some that were temporary and expedient. The latter category was important to him because of what he learned from each friend and how the knowledge shaped his life, regardless of how long the friendships lasted.

Among the people who entered his circle of friendship at critical times in his life and faded away as time went by and circumstances changed were people like John Muir; members of the Rough Riders, whose reunions he attended on occasion; and William Howard Taft, who was a surprise attendee at TR’s funeral.

The people TR called friends throughout his lifetime were a diverse group. They ranged from former presidents to the cowboys he fought with in Cuba. Regardless of who they were, they all shared a common bond: they helped shape TR’s life—and vice versa.

QUIZ

18-1 John Owens of Newcastle, Wyoming, is a side note in the Theodore Roosevelt saga. He was:

A. the first outlaw TR arrested in the Badlands.

B. a medal winner in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

C. the governor of Wyoming during the Spanish-American War.

D. a cowboy in Seth Bullock’s “posse” who missed TR’s 1905 inaugural parade.

18-2 Until 1900, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell and the Biltmore Forest School in Asheville, North Carolina, were the only two schools of forestry in the United States:

A. available for forestry students.

B. that contained the letter “e” in their names at least three times.

C. that received endowments from Gifford Pinchot’s father, James.

D. that granted TR honorary degrees.

18-3 Who was the first person to earn a PhD in political science from Harvard?

A. Theodore Roosevelt

B. Henry Cabot Lodge

C. Gifford Pinchot

D. Seth Bullock

18-4 Which one of TR’s closest friends was Georgia Tech’s football team captain, second football coach, and the star of its first football victory, a win over the University of Georgia?

A. John Muir

?. “Ramblin” Wreck

C. Leonard Wood

D. “Buffalo Bill” Cody

18-5 Jacob Riis was:

A. the inventor of a peanut butter-based candy bar.

B. a shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

C. a famous nineteenth-century social reformer in New York City.

D. the premier of Denmark in 1898.

ANSWERS

18-1. D: Sheriff John Owens left the “Cowboy Brigade” in Broken Bow, Nebraska, due to illness. The Newcastle News-Journal on March 3, 1905, reported that he “cried when he had to give up and leave his associates.” The account highlights the affection the cowboys felt for one another–and for TR.

18-2. A

18-3. B

18-4. C: On November 4, 1893, in the first football game between the schools, Georgia Tech beat the University of Georgia, 28-6, in Athens, Georgia. Leonard Wood, then stationed at nearby Fort McPherson, enrolled at Tech just in time to play in the game. He scored the school’s first touchdown in history during that game–and left the school a few weeks later.

18-5. C

CHAPTER 19

Theodore the Family Man

“… compared to this home life everything else was of very small importance from the standpoint of happiness.” (Theodore Roosevelt to his son Kermit)

TR recognized that families were important. He made sure that his own children received every opportunity to succeed in life. All of them did, although none were ever as famous as their father. His sons Theodore Jr., Quentin, and Archie became military heroes. Theodore Jr., like his father, earned the Medal of Honor. Quentin, an aviator, was shot down by German fighter pilots in WWI. The Germans gave him a burial with full battlefield honors despite his enemy status. That epitomized the respect people throughout the world had for TR.

The Roosevelt Family Heritage

The Roosevelt family arrived in America from the Netherlands around 1660, under the name van Rosenvelt. The name was changed to Roosevelt by a second-generation family member, Nicholas Roosevelt, in the late 1600s. Nicholas also established a family tradition when he became an alderman.

The list of families to which the Roosevelts are connected is like a “Blue Blood Hall of Fame” roster. It includes the Delanos, DuPonts, Astors, Alsops, Arnolds, and Longworths. The Roosevelts who did not marry into those families often chose members of other noted clans, i.e., TR and Edith Carow, and Quentin and Flora Whitney, who never reached the altar because of Quentin’s untimely death.