The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (18 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
My father … told me that if I wished to be a scientific man I could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value
if I intended to do the very best work that was in me;
but that I must not dream of taking it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my pleasures elsewhere.
After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work.
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Returning to Harvard as a sophomore in the fall of 1877, Theodore elected two courses in natural history: elementary botany, and comparative anatomy and physiology of vertebrates. (His instructor in this course, which he found “extremely interesting,” was William James.) He also chose two courses of German and one of French, and was prescribed courses in rhetoric, constitutional history, and themes. In this demanding schedule he was to surpass the record of his freshman year with an excellent average of 89. He scored 96 and 92 in German, 94 in rhetoric, 89 in botany, and 79 in anatomy. His average would have been even higher, but for a hairs-breadth 51 in “that villainous French.” Even so, with six honor grades out of eight, he once again confounded his academic critics, and there was no more talk of scholastic mediocrity. “He distinctly belonged,” said Thomas Perry, instructor in themes, “to the best twenty-five in a very brilliant class.”
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With respect to the other two hundred and twenty, Theodore gradually relaxed his rather snobbish standards. “My respect for the quality of my classmates has much increased lately,” he wrote Corinne, “as they no longer seem to think it necessary to confine their conversation exclusively to athletic subjects. I was especially struck by this the other night, when after a couple of hours spent in boxing and wrestling with Arthur Hooper and Ralph Ellis, it was proposed to finish the evening by reading aloud from Tennyson, and we became so interested in
In Memoriam
that it was past one o’clock when we separated.”
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His best friend continued to be Harry Minot, but as time went on he showed an increasing fondness for Richard Saltonstall, a large, shy boy from the highest ranks of Boston society. With Bob Bacon, too, he maintained an easy friendship, and was invited with him to join the prestigious Institute of 1770.
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About the time he turned nineteen in October 1877, Theodore was informed that his father had been appointed Collector of Customs to the Port of New York by President Hayes. He dutifully expressed “the greatest interest” in subsequent movements toward confirmation by the Senate, but the interest was personal rather than political.
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Since his appearance at the Hayes demonstration a year before, he had shown no further concern for politics; his letters
of the period, so full of bubbling curiosity about other aspects of life, are bare of any reference to national affairs. Now, however, events conspired to force politics brutally upon his attention.
Theodore Senior, who had himself just turned forty-six, was as politically naive as his son. He assumed at first that the Collectorship was a reward for distinguished services to New York City, but disillusionment came rapidly. President Hayes, it turned out, had chosen him merely as a symbol of the Administration’s commitment to Civil Service Reform. By elevating this decent and incorruptible man up to public office, Hayes hoped to embarrass Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the corrupt New York State Republican machine, who was demanding the reappointment of Chester A. Arthur as Collector. The fact that Arthur was himself decent and incorruptible only increased the savagery of the resultant battle for Senate confirmation. Roosevelt lay helpless as a pawn between the clashing forces of Old Guard “Spoils-men” and Reform Republicans.
Since Boss Conkling happened to sit on the Senate committee that must consider the appointment, it was subjected to endless delaying tactics. Yet Hayes would not withdraw his nomination, and Roosevelt, as a patriotic citizen, had no choice but to remain at the President’s disposal.
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He loathed Conkling with all his soul, and felt contaminated by any contact with the machine. Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals. Humiliated by the scrutiny of his inferiors, exhausted by week after week of worry, he began to deteriorate physically under the strain. He was racked by mysterious intestinal cramps, which worsened as the struggle dragged on into December. By then the “Collectorship row” was making nationwide headlines, and while the nomination seemed doomed, suspense continued to torture the nominee.
His son, following daily developments in Cambridge, grew increasingly worried. “Am very uneasy about Father,” he wrote on 16 December, after the nomination had been finally rejected in the Senate by a vote of 25 to 31. “Does the Doctor think it is anything serious?”
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Two days later Theodore Senior collapsed with what was diagnosed as acute peritonitis. For a while he lay desperately ill,
but as Christmas approached he began to recover. The Roosevelts celebrated with exhausted relief, vowing to have no more to do with politics.
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B
ACK AT
H
ARVARD
early in the New Year, Theodore recorded in a private diary his father’s parting assurance “that after all I was the dearest of his children to him.”
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As always, the deep voice and all-seeing eyes inspired a determination to be worthy of “the best and most loving of men.” He was cramming hard for his semiannual examinations when, late on the afternoon of Saturday, 9 February, an urgent summons arrived from New York.
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Theodore ran to catch the overnight train, knowing that his father must have suffered a relapse, yet unaware that screams of agony were echoing through the Roosevelt town house. Theodore Senior’s “peritonitis” was in reality a malignant fibrous tumor of the bowel, and since its brief period of remission over Christmas it had grown so rapidly that it was now strangling his intestines. The pain that he suffered had, in a matter of weeks, turned his dark hair gray; even now, as his elder son rushed to his bedside, it was all the other children could do to hold him down. “He was so mad with pain,” Elliott recorded, “that beyond groans and horrible writhes and twists he could do nothing. Oh my God my Father what agonies you suffered.”
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Theodore arrived on Sunday morning to find the flags of New York City flying at half-mast. “Greatheart” had died shortly before midnight.
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Alone in his room later that day, the new head of the Roosevelt family drew a thick slash down the margin of his diary for 9 February 1878 and wrote: “My dear Father. Born Sept. 23, 1831.” Here his pen wavered and stopped.
W
HEN
T
HEODORE RESUMED
writing on 12 February, the words flowed tumultuously, as if to wash away his grief.
He has just been buried. I shall never forget these terrible three days; the hideous suspense of the ride on; the dull, inert
sorrow, during which I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away, and the two moments of sharp, bitter agony, when I kissed the dear dead face and realized that he would never again on this earth speak to me or greet me with his loving smile, and then when I heard the sound of the first clod dropping on the coffin holding the one I loved dearest on earth. He looked so calm and sweet. I feel that if it were not for the certainty, that as he himself has so often said, “he is not dead but gone before,” I should almost perish.
None of the Roosevelts, least of all Theodore himself, could have foreseen how shattered he would be by the premature loss of his father. “He was everything to me.” For a while, it seemed as if the youth could not survive without him. Like a fledgling shoved too soon from the bough, he tumbled nakedly through the air; some of his diary entries are not so much expressions of sorrow as squawks of fright.
They give the impression of a sensitivity so extreme it verges on mental imbalance. For month after month Theodore pours a flood of anguish into his diary, although his letters remain determinedly cheerful. Only in private can he allow his despair to overflow, yet the effect is therapeutic. By the end of April he is able to note: “I am now getting over the first sharpness of grief.” With perhaps unconscious symbolism, he shaves off his whiskers, and in consequence is “endlessly chaffed by the boys.” On the first day of May, with the smell of spring in the air, he is surprised to find that his thoughts of Theodore Senior have suddenly become “pleasant” ones.
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His grief, however, was by no means over. It continued to flow well into the summer, and spasmodically through the fall. Purged of terror, it became sweetened with nostalgia. Memories of his father surfaced in the form of dreams and hallucinations of almost photographic vividness. “All through the sermon,” he wrote one Sunday, “I was thinking of Father. I could see him sitting in the corner of the pew as distinctly as if he were alive, in the same dear old attitude, with his funny little ‘warlike curl’, and his beloved face. Oh, I feel so sad when I think of the word ‘never.’ ”
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Never—
it was the word he had repeated over and over again in his childhood diaries, when longing for the unrecoverable past. Inevitably, his earliest and most poignant memory floated up: “I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms for hours together, night after night, and oh, how my heart pains me when I think that I never was able to do anything for him in his last illness!”
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This, of course, was not his fault—early news of Theodore Senior’s relapse had actually been withheld from him so as not to affect his studies—but it did not stop him reproaching himself, often in tones of bitter self-contempt. “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father should have had a son of so little worth as I am.… How little use I am, or ever shall be in the world … I realize more and more every day that I am as much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.”
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After the terror and the nostalgia, it was desire that eventually healed him. Longing for the man who had been his best friend in life was translated into an even more desperate longing to be worthy of him in death. “How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name!”
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In this ambition he would succeed so well that the name of Theodore Roosevelt would one day become the most famous in the world; ironically its very luster would obliterate the memory of its original bearer. But the large, kindly spirit of Theodore Senior hovered always over the shoulder of his son.
“Years afterward,” Corinne recalled, “when the college boy of 1878 was entering upon his duties as President of the United States, he told me frequently that he never took any serious step or made any vital decision for his country without thinking first what position his father would have taken on the question.”
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