The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (15 page)

I
N THE SPRING OF 1874
the Roosevelts moved, as was their custom, into the country. Theodore Senior’s growing desire to put down roots, symbolized by the town house on West Fifty-seventh Street, led him this time in the direction of Oyster Bay, Long Island, where his father and brothers had long since established a family colony by the sea. Here he rented a gracious, plantation-style residence whose white columns and wide veranda no doubt appealed to Mittie’s Southern taste.
⁵⁷
The house, which was to become their permanent summer home, was called Tranquillity.

This name caused considerable amusement among friends and neighbors, for the Roosevelt way of life was anything but tranquil. From dawn to dusk both house and garden resounded with activity. At any hour of the day, including breakfast-time, Theodore Senior might call upon his children for off-the-cuff speeches or recitations, whereupon they would roaringly oblige. Amateur theatricals were always being rehearsed or performed, practical jokes plotted, and violent obstacle races improvised, at great danger to life and limb. Teedie and Elliott took delight in blackening each other’s eyes in boxing matches, and collapsing, at unpredictable moments, into wrestling
bouts which would continue until they were too exhausted to disentangle themselves. Invariably, these explosions of energy were followed by a general dash into the waters of Oyster Bay. “We were all absolutely amphibious,” recalled Bamie, “and one of the old fishermen used to say he was pretty sure dem Roosevelts were web-footed, as no one ever knew when we were in or out of the water.” In the evening they would read aloud from classics of history or literature, prompting discussions which would last far into the night. An extraordinary intimacy seemed to bind them together: they unashamedly hugged and kissed one another in spasms of mutual affection which Mittie called “melts.”
⁵⁸

Since the children were all growing up rapidly, their individual personalities became more and more defined in this first summer at Tranquillity. Bamie was kindly, capable, and domineering, already at nineteen a poised hostess and socialite. Teedie, not yet sixteen, was still something of a scholarly recluse, yet, when not bent over his books and birds, high-spirited and unaffected. Fourteen-year-old Elliott was “the most lovable of the Roosevelts,”
⁵⁹
a budding Apollo with an eye for the girls, and twelve-year-old Corinne, mercurial and gushy, had already begun her lifelong career as a composer of sentimental poetry.

Understandably, some of the more staid members of New York society considered the Roosevelts eccentric. Others, such as the teenage Fanny Smith, an early admirer of Teedie, found them a family “so rarely gifted that it seemed touched with the flame of ‘divine fire.’ ”
⁶⁰
With Edith Carow—ripening now into attractive adolescence—she became one of the many “regulars” who stayed at Oyster Bay every summer, and attended a weekly dance class at Dodsworth’s Ballroom during the New York social season.

Although it may be presumed that Teedie was not insensitive to the appeal of the opposite sex in 1874 and 1875 (he makes approving references to girls in his letters, and admits that he enjoys dancing) his main interests continued to be study and exercise.
⁶¹
Not even his triumph in the preliminary Harvard entrance examinations of July 1875 (“Is it not splendid! … I passed in all the eight subjects I tried”) was allowed to affect the inflexible program he had devised for himself. Four times a year he took a recess of a week to ten days, but even these breaks were doggedly purposeful: he would head for
the lakes of the Adirondacks, or the woods of Long Island and New Jersey, collecting specimens and data and loping for miles, gun in hand, after wild game.
⁶²
He described one such excursion to Edith’s summer place at Sea Bright as being full of “ornithological enjoyment and reptilian rapture.”
⁶³

His battle for health would appear to have been mostly won by the end of 1875. A sporting calendar has been preserved which records that from 21 August through 11 December he engaged his brother and several male cousins in a series of fifteen athletic contests—running, jumping, vaulting, wrestling, and boxing—and won fourteen of them, drawing the other one. On 1 November he noted his physical measurements:

From this, and from the descriptions of others, we can conjure up the picture of a skinny, sunburned boy, just seventeen years old, with wiry muscles and a clean glow of health about him. Occasional attacks of asthma still came and went, but did not bother him unduly. He affected a pair of side-whiskers, which emphasized the hard thrust of his jaw; his mouth, during moments of thoughtfulness, clamped “like a band of blued steel.”
⁶⁵
At other times, when he allowed his natural humor to bubble over, it seemed to consist of nothing but perfectly white teeth.

Although he was not handsome, he was an attractive youngster, and Fanny Smith, for one, adored him unashamedly. She was convinced that he would become President, and said as much to her sister; but the prophecy seems to have been as skeptically received as
Fräulein Anna’s, two years before. In particular Fanny worshiped his courage and “high-mindedness.” Some of her friends found him priggish, but she felt only a sunny charm, which still warmed her when she was an old woman of eighty-nine:

That Fanny herself was something of a rival to Edith Carow is implied in another passage from her memoirs. She describes a winter afternoon when Elliott, always more forthcoming than Teedie, paid her and her sisters a courtly visit. While chatting in a window seat she suddenly noticed Teedie, “looking blue with cold,” walking rapidly up and down outside.

M
UCH LESS IS KNOWN
of the relationship between Edith and Teedie, except that it deepened steadily into intimacy during the summer of 1876, his last before entering college. Having completed
the equivalent of three years of college preparation in less than two,
⁶⁸
he could finally relax and allow his social personality to develop. He would gallantly row her across Oyster Bay, “in the hottest sun, over the roughest water, in the smallest boat,”
⁶⁹
and Edith tolerated it with her usual inscrutable sweetness. They would read and recite endlessly to each other, Edith showing a decided preference for
belles-lettres
, Teedie for rhythmic poetry and warlike, heroic prose.

Years after, family tradition would hold that these two “had an understanding”
⁷⁰
by the time he went up to Harvard in the fall, but if so, there is no formal record of it. Nevertheless, seeds had been sown, and some sort of future flowering seemed assured.

O
N THE NIGHT OF 26
October 1876, the normally quiet streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, were disturbed by the roars of a student demonstration. Freshman supporters of the Republican candidate for President stamped on the cobblestones and echoed a shout that could be heard in electoral districts across the nation:
“Hurrah for Hayes and Honest Ways!!”
Torchlight flickered redly on their optimistic faces and waving banners. After eight years of governmental scandals under the Grant Administration, it seemed at last that Civil Service Reform, so dear to the hearts of young progressives, was on the way. The United States, just one century old, stood thrillingly poised, like themselves, at the threshold of maturity. There was a crackle of excitement in the fall air, a promise
of power and future glory. The demonstrators were in great good humor, and not altogether in earnest: one lopsided banner called for FREE TRADE, FREE PRESS, AND FREE BEER.
¹

“Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him.”
Theodore Roosevelt the Harvard freshman, 1877
. (
Illustration 3.1
)

All at once, from a second-story window, came the jeering voice of a Democratic senior: “Hush up, you blooming freshmen!” Albert Bushnell Hart, who was in the crowd, noted the effect of this insult upon his classmates, and upon one of them in particular:

According to other accounts, a potato came whizzing in the little man’s direction, and his language in reply was unprintable.
³
A trifling incident, perhaps, but the Hayes demonstration was the first sign of any political interest in young Theodore. It happened to occur on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. He had been at Harvard for only one month.