Mornings on Horseback

by David McCullough

The great reformation of physique to which he had devoted so many hours would have been judged a flat failure by anybody unfamiliar with the circumstances. A classmate named Richard Welling, seeing him for the first time during a workout at the Harvard gym, could hardly believe his eyes. He confronted, Welling said, a “youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development” who was standing between two upright poles, gripping them with both hands and swaying forward and back, rising nicely on tiptoe at each forward thrust. “What a humble-minded chap this must be,” Welling thought, “to be willing to give such a ladylike exhibition in a public place.”

Coming home I was upset in a great drift, and dragged about 300 yards holding on to the reins, before I could stop the horse . . .

It was because so few legislators knew of such conditions, Gompers said, that nothing was done to change the system or alleviate the distress.

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside. Alice lingered on another eleven hours. Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.

The day, June 3, 1884, marked his debut in national politics, his first chance on the national stage.

(Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield had all been nominated in Chicago),

The gallant young man rushed away from the Chicago convention full of heat and bitterness. Now that he has expanded his lungs with the rarefied air incident to the high altitudes of the earth and cooled his intellectual brow in the streams which flow down from regions of virgin snow he might confer a favor on mankind by simply saying explicitly whether he is for or against Blaine.

He was, as Wister said, the pioneer in taking the cowboy seriously. He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired the unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. (Recalling his father years later, he would use very nearly the same words: “He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.”) The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most important of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

“But what a change. . . . The voice which failed to make an echo in the . . . [Albany] capitol when he . . . piped ‘Mistah Speakah,’ is now hearty and strong enough to drive oxen.”

The subsequent career of the Marquis was one most people who had known him preferred to put out of their minds. Following a tiger hunt in India, he went home to France to proclaim himself the victim of a Jewish plot. The Chicago beef trust was now portrayed as the “Jewish beef trust.” He turned to politics, launched a crusade to save France, a blend of socialism and rabid anti-Semitism, and went parading about Paris at the head of a gang of toughs, all of them dressed in ten-gallon hats and cowboy shirts. With the collapse of the French effort at Panama, he joined with the unsavory Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite, in an attempt to blame that failure too on the Jews. It was this mania that led eventually to the Dreyfus Affair, and the Marquis, before he went storming off to Africa, kept himself in the forefront. His platform rantings set off riots, and in a series of duels with important Jewish army officers he became known as one of the most dangerous duelists in France.

He read to them at night, told ghost stories (of which he knew many), joined headlong in their games (pillow fights, hide-and-seek, running obstacle courses down the halls of the White House); he bounced with them in the haymow at Sagamore Hill, led them on long morning excursions on horseback, exactly as his father had done and over the same hills, a half dozen of their cousins or friends usually joining the cavalcade.

“To be with him was to have fun,” remembered one of the cousins, “if for no other reason than that he so obviously was having a good time himself.” “I love all these children and have great fun with them, and am touched by the way in which they feel that I am their special friend, champion, and companion,” he wrote Edith’s sister. The letters he wrote his children—from Cuba, the White House, Panama, whenever separated from them—were to become famous when published as a best-selling book the year of his death.