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On Christmas Day his father presented him with a double-barreled breech-loading shotgun, and the boy’s delight knew no bounds. “He is a most enthusiastic sportsman,” wrote Theodore Senior, “and has infused some of his spirit into me. Yesterday I walked the bogs with him at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours … but I felt that I must keep up with Teedie.”25
He was “very seasick” during a short cruise to Greece (whose ruins did not impress him), “very sick” with colic in Constantinople, “very seasick” in the Black Sea, and “had the asthma” again while sailing up the Danube.
“It seems perfectly wonderful,” he wrote Mittie, “looking back over my eighteen years of existence, to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault. When I think of this and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am) I feel I have an immense amount to be thankful for.”
In addition to boxing, wrestling, body-building, and his daily hours of recitation, the young freshman attended weekly dancing-classes, hunted in the woods around Cambridge, taught in Sunday school, stuffed and dissected his specimens, organized a whist club, took part in poetry-reading sessions, followed the Harvard football team to Yale (“The fellows … seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours”), and, in time-honored undergraduate fashion, caroused with his friends, making the night hideous with his harsh, unmusical singing.
“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.”
“I have absolutely no idea what I should do when I leave college,” he wrote in despair. “Oh Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!”
This double achievement, in two such diametrically opposed subjects, was enough to reawaken his career dilemma of the previous winter. He had rejected Professor Laughlin’s advice to make government, not science, his career.
If he was not happy during these first months of his senior year, Theodore was too busy to be depressed. “I have my hands altogether too full of society work,” he mildly complained, “being Librarian of the Porcellian, Secretary of the Pudding, Treasurer of the O.K., Vice President of the Natural History Soc., and President of the A.D.Q.; Editor of the Advocate.”
Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.”
Unable to find solace in reading books, he began to write one, entitled The Naval War of 1812.78 His insomnia worsened to the point that for night after night he did not even go to bed.
“The little witch led me a dance before she surrendered, I can tell you,” he confided to his cousin John, “and the last six months have been perfect agony … Even now, it makes me shudder to think of some of the nights I have passed.”
In order to spend every available minute with her, he resigned many of his official positions, including the vice-presidency of the Natural History Society, neglected his editorship of the Advocate, and began to cut recitations freely.
the upbuilding of a colossal pyramid whose apex was the sky. The eternal stability of this pyramid would be insured only through honest, intelligent, interworking and cooperation, to the common end of all the elements comprised in its structure. Individual elements might strive to build intensively and even high; but never well. Never well, because lacking an adequate base—the united stabilizing support of the other elements—they might never attain to the zenith.
“The fact that I had fought hard and efficiently … and that I had made the fight single-handed, with no machine back of me, assured my standing as floor leader. My defeat in the end materially strengthened my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I could have accomplished as Speaker.”
There was nothing Roosevelt could do but read and reread his two telegrams, and summon up all his self-discipline against that unmanly emotion, panic.
ROOSEVELT DREW a large cross in his diary for 14 February, 1884, and wrote beneath: “The light has gone out of my life.”
Through all these tears, Roosevelt sat white-faced and expressionless. He had to be handled like a child at the burial ceremony in Greenwood Cemetery.80 “Theodore is in a dazed, stunned state,” wrote Arthur Cutler, his ex-tutor, to Bill Sewall in Maine. “He does not know what he does or says.”
In quitting him so early, she rendered him her ultimate service. In burying her, he symbolically buried his own lingering naïveté. At the time, of course, he felt that he was burying all of himself.
spend an absolute minimum of time eating and sleeping. Even in happier days, he had been insomniac and febrile; now his only instinct was to sleep less and labor more. The pain in his heart might be dulled by sheer fatigue, if nothing else. “Indeed I think I should go mad if I were not employed.”
That night he tries to rest, but without much success (“He feels the awful loneliness more and more,” Corinne tells Elliott, “and I fear he sleeps little, for he walks a great deal in the night, and his eyes have that strained red look”).
Meanwhile, de Morès was spawning new business ideas with codfish-like fertility. He would plant fifty thousand cabbages in the Little Missouri Valley, and force-feed them with his own patented fertilizer, made from offal; he would run a stagecoach line along the eastern rim of the Badlands; he would invest $10,000 in a huge blood-drying machine; he would extend a chain of icehouses as far west as Oregon, so that Columbia River salmon could be whisked, cold and fresh, to New York in seven days; he would open a pottery in Medora to process the fine local clay; he would string a telegraph line
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The manuscript was sent to New York for private publication and distribution.70 Roosevelt sank briefly back into total despair. Gazing across the burned-out landscape of the Badlands, he told Bill Sewall that all his hopes lay buried in the East. He had nothing to live for, he said, and his daughter would never know him: “She would be just as well off without me.”
Some extraordinary physical and spiritual transformation occurred during this arduous period. It was as if his adolescent battle for health, and his more recent but equally intense battle against despair, were crowned with sudden victory. The anemic, high-pitched youth who had left New York only five weeks before was now able to return to it “rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health,” to quote a newspaperman who met him en route.
This particular Independence Day (the first ever held in Western Dakota) found him feeling especially patriotic. He was filled, not only with the spirit of Manifest Destiny, but with “the real and healthy democracy of the round-up.” The completion of another book, the modest success of his two ranches, his fame as the captor of Redhead Finnegan, the joyful thought of his impending remarriage, all conspired further to elevate his mood. These things, plus the sight of hundreds of serious, sunburned faces turned his way, brought out the best and the worst in him—his genuine love for America and
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He spent three weeks checking the manuscript of Benton in the Astor Library, then—yet again—kissed “cunning little yellow headed Baby Lee” good-bye, and headed back to the Badlands in a mood of restless melancholy.78 It was ironic that at this time of resurgent political ambition he could see “nothing whatever ahead.”79 The city of his birth, his child, his home, his future wife, all lay behind him, pulling his thoughts back East, even as the train hauled him West. Much as he loved Dakota, he knew now that his destiny lay elsewhere: it must have been difficult to escape the feeling that he was
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rights the final returns, as headlined that day, should have made him wince. Hewitt had scored 90,552; George, 68,110; Roosevelt, 60,435.67
To compound his humiliation, he found that he had run far behind every state and city candidate on the Republican ticket, including those for minor posts on the Judiciary and Board of Aldermen.
The evidence is that he was—deeply so.70 This third political defeat in just over two years became one of those memories which he ever afterward found too painful to dwell on. It rates just one sentence in his Autobiography.
The end of August found Roosevelt the hunter in Idaho’s Kootenai country. He spent most of September in the mountains, sleeping above the snow-line without a jacket and feasting lustily on bear-meat.
So intoxicated is Roosevelt as he rides these waves that he sweeps uncaring past such solid obstructions as Institutional Analysis and Land Company Proceedings. (“I have always been more interested in the men themselves than the institutions through which they worked,” he confessed.)13 He might have added, “and in action rather than theory.”
Once civilization was established, the aborigine must be raised and refined as quickly as possible, so that he may partake of every opportunity available to the master race—in other words, become master of himself, free to challenge and beat the white man in any field of endeavor. Nothing could give Roosevelt more satisfaction than to see such a reversal, for he admired individual achievement above all things. Any black or red man who could win admission to “the fellowship of the doers” was superior to the white man who failed.
Turning from global to national matters, Roosevelt discusses the phenomenon of the “stationary state,” in which a freely developing nation tends to become rigid and authoritarian as its period of upward mobility comes to an end.
“Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—”
“There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.”
Years later, when events had conspired to embitter her toward him, she wrote that the “peculiar attraction and fascination” of the young Theodore Roosevelt “lay in the fact that he was like a child; with a child’s spontaneous outbursts of affection, of fun, and of anger; and with the brilliant brain and fancy of a child.”
Roosevelt, like Hanna, began to feel pangs of real dread. He was “appalled” at Bryan’s ability “to inflame with bitter rancor towards the well-off those … who, whether through misfortune or through misconduct, have failed in life.”36 Remarks like this suggest that Roosevelt, for all his public attacks upon “the predatory rich,” for all his night-walks through the Lower East Side, was congenitally unable to understand the poor. People who lacked wealth, even through “misfortune,” had “failed in life.”
One of the Chairman’s tactical decisions was to cancel a plan to send Roosevelt into Maryland and West Virginia. Instead, he was put on Bryan’s trail in Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota during the second and third weeks of the month.46 Hanna obviously believed him to be an ideal foil to the Democratic candidate: an Easterner whom Westerners revered, an intellectual who could explain the complexities of the Gold Standard in terms a cowboy could understand.
Roosevelt was surely reminded that he had assumed his duties as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on 19 April 1897. It had taken him exactly one year to bring the war about.
But all this clamor only served to convince Roosevelt that he must do what he had to do. Evidently his friends and admirers had never quite believed his vow to fight when the time for battle came. It was therefore vital that he prove himself, once and for all, a man of his word. If he backed down now, what of any future promises he might make to the American people? “I
Secretary Alger would not have to look far for someone to be colonel of the first regiment, since the nation’s most prominent frontiersman, horseman, and marksman was already pounding on his desk at the War Department. That same day, he offered the command to Theodore Roosevelt.
was as if that barbed-wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it he left behind him in the bridle path all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life, and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness, the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, perhaps, the most admired and best beloved of all Americans in Cuba.
Fresh blood flowed as Church snipped open Mauser holes in order to dress them. Wherever a casualty lay, the predators of Cuba collected in rings: huge land-crabs shredding corpses with their clattering claws, vultures tearing off lips and eyelids, then the eyeballs, and finally whole faces.71 But the most despised predators were Cubans themselves, who invariably materialized from the jungle to strip the dead of clothing, equipment, and jewelry, and rummage around for jettisoned food-cans. Was it for these squat, dull-eyed peasants that the flower of America had died?
THE AVERAGE HEIGHT among the Americans,” reported a Barcelona newspaper, “is 5 feet 2 inches. This is due to their living almost entirely upon vegetables as they ship all their beef out of the country, so eager are they to make money. There is no doubt that one full-grown Spaniard can defeat any three men in America.”
“Darkness came and still we marched,” one Rough Rider remembered. “The tropical moon rose. You could almost envy the ease with which this orange ball crossed the sky. It was all we could do to lift our muddy shoes.”
The island’s bugs were in their veins, the smell of its dead in their nostrils, the taste of its horse meat and fecal water in their mouths. It would be days before the Atlantic breezes, cooling and freshening as they steamed north, swept away this sense of defilement. Yet the farther Cuba dropped away, the brighter shone the memory of their two great battles—in particular that rush up Kettle Hill behind the man with the flying blue neckerchief.
“Should the worst come to the worst I am quite content to go now and to leave my children at least an honorable name,”
HE SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS enjoying the forgotten delights of civilization: cool summer clothes, good food, the conversation of women and children, hot water, clean sheets, green lawns, birdsong. Every night he changed into a tuxedo for dinner and joined his family and guests on the piazza overlooking Long Island Sound.
Chapman had always admired Roosevelt, in the way thinkers follow doers, but now the admiration deepened into reverence.
