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  Roosevelt had come west to hunt buffalo, and in time, he bagged a prime bull. But the buffalo were being hunted to extinction, and the weeks of hunting involved long days on the trail. Roosevelt’s guide Joe Ferris was impressed by his bespectacled client’s endurance. “He could stand an awful lot of hard knocks, and he was always cheerful,” Ferris recalled. He was shocked the morning they woke up after a rainy night in four inches of cold standing water and heard Roosevelt mutter, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!”

  As the days passed, Roosevelt began to think about going into ranching. He and Ferris had been staying in a cabin with Gregor Lang, a Scottish investigator who had come to Dakota to look into a rancher’s finances but had stayed to start a ranch of his own. After one long evening of conversation, Roosevelt broached the subject. “Mr. Lang,” he said, “I am thinking seriously of going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?” Lang said he didn’t want to give advice, but added: “I have every faith in it. . . . As a business proposition, it is the best there is.”

  With that fragile assurance, Roosevelt decided a few days later that he would go ahead. He asked Lang if he would “take a herd of cattle from me to run on shares,” but Lang said he was obliged to work for his financial backer. When Lang recommended a pair of Canadian frontiersmen, Sylvane Ferris and Bill Merrifield, Roosevelt sent a message to their ranch. When they told Roosevelt it would take some $40,000 to stock a ranch, with a third of the money up front, he wrote them a check for $14,000, shrugging off their offer of a receipt.

  Roosevelt had inherited $125,000 from his father, and he would get another $62,500 when his mother’s will was settled. But he was spending heavily to build his summer home at Oyster Bay, and he had invested $20,000 in a partnership with the publisher of his naval history. This impulsive deal would consume a third of his inheritance, and the check he had just written exceeded his income for the year. Ranching might be a good business, but it was clearly risky and would take years to return a profit. But Roosevelt, no businessman, never looked back. Then and later, he seemed convinced that he need not worry about money.

  When he returned the following year, he was a widower trying to escape his grief. Merrifield and Sylvane had gone to Minnesota to buy another herd of cattle, and Roosevelt rode through the Badlands, rejoicing in the endless landscape. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” After five days, he felt “as absolutely free as any man could feel.”

  Roosevelt had planned to spend the summer writing, but he was restless. The town of Medora, founded by the entrepreneurial Marquis de Morès, was a thriving cluster of eighty-four buildings, too close for Roosevelt’s taste for solitude. He set out thirty miles north, crossing successive bends of the meandering river, until he found a patch of grassy bottomland with a grove of cottonwood trees and a view of the Badlands stretching, it seemed, to eternity. He resolved instantly to claim the site and build a log ranch house with a veranda, stone fireplace, and rocking chair. It would become his own ranch, called the Elkhorn. To build and manage the house, he called on two old friends, guides he had met in Maine, Wilmot Dow and Bill Sewall. When he guaranteed them a share of the profits and promised to pay them wages if the ranch lost money, they were glad to move west.

  The spring roundup of 1884 was a turning point for Roosevelt. Though the misfit arrived pale and thin, he soon proved he could ride a 100 miles in a day, stay up on watch all night, and ride another 100 miles the next day. He roped cattle, controlled stampedes, tamed broncos, and wrestled calves. Once, he spent forty hours straight in the saddle, wearing out five horses. When a horse fell over backward on him, dislocating his shoulder, he kept working “as best I could, until the injury healed of itself.” The roundup went on for a month, and the ordeal transformed the effete Easterner; he acquired muscle and authority at the same time. Bill Sewall said Roosevelt was “clear bone, muscle, and grit.”

  At the same time, Roosevelt always avoided “the familiarity which would assuredly breed contempt.” Sewall and Dow were his friends, but they called him Mr. Roosevelt. (To the public, he was Teddy, but not to his friends; after Alice’s death, the name became anathema. In the family, he took on his father’s nickname, Thee. The friends who didn’t call him Theodore addressed him as T.R.)

  Roosevelt was also living up to his own vision of a rugged man of the frontier. He killed vast quantities of game that summer, including a charging 1,200-pound grizzly. Roosevelt dropped the bear with a shot “as exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.” When a drunken bully who had been shooting up a barroom derided him as “Four-Eyes” and ordered him to buy drinks for the house, Roosevelt punched him and took away his guns. When E. G. Paddock, who was now the Marquis de Morès’ right-hand man, spread word that Roosevelt’s Elkhorn homestead was Paddock’s land and “Four-Eyes” would pay for it in dollars or blood, Roosevelt confronted Paddock: “I understand that you have threatened to kill me on sight. I have come over to see when you want to begin the killing.” Paddock said mildly that he had been “misquoted.”

  ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO New York, where the presidential campaign was underway. The Democrats had chosen Grover Cleveland to face James G. Blaine, and the race was plumbing new depths of invective. Blaine was under fire for an old scandal involving favors for railroads in which he held bonds. Incriminating letters had recently surfaced. Democrats chanted: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine. ‘Burn this letter!’” Cleveland, meanwhile, was accused of fathering an illegitimate child. The GOP chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”

  Roosevelt had backtracked on his refusal to endorse Blaine, sensing that a defection would doom his future with Republicans. Henry Cabot Lodge had made the same decision. But both of them came under fire from their former allies in the reform movement, who were repelled by Blaine’s record of profiting from official favors. Roosevelt’s endorsement became more enthusiastic; as the campaign intensified, so did his rhetoric. Now, to his embarrassment in later years, he stumped in October for the man he had denounced in June. As many of his fellow GOP reformers voted for Cleveland, Roosevelt denounced the Democrat for “the immorality of breaking the Seventh Commandment.” As Morris wrote, “Nobody has ever satisfactorily reconciled” Roosevelt’s “bewilderingly contradictory” stances in the 1884 campaign.

  Blaine was defeated due to a last-minute October surprise: He failed to object when a Presbyterian minister sharing his platform accused the Democrats of representing “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and the resulting headlines cost him thousands of Catholic, anti-prohibitionist, and Southern votes. Roosevelt retreated to the Badlands, where Sewall and Dow had finished building his house, and began writing a book of hunting stories.

  Edith Carow occupied Roosevelt’s thoughts that year. He wanted to spend time with her but was afraid to betray the memory of Alice. He wrote both Bamie and Corinne, telling them that while he knew they were still close to Edith, they should be careful not to have her visit while he was in New York, where his daughter lived with Bamie. But one day in the fall of 1885, after his book was published and he had spent time in his newly finished Oyster Bay home, he arrived at Bamie’s Madison Avenue townhouse just as Edith was leaving.

  Some surmise Bamie staged the encounter. In either case, it was enough to rekindle the attraction between Roosevelt and Carow. Within three weeks, they were secretly engaged – secretly because Roosevelt was conflicted about marrying again, and because a quick remarriage, less than two years after Alice’s death, would create a scandal in their social circle.

  Edith had suffered troubles of her own. Her alcoholic father, owner of a shipping business, was forced into bankruptcy during her childhood. Afterward, the family was hardly able to keep up appearances in the New York social scene. But after her father died in 1883, Edith and her mother, who was in poor health, made plans for an extended stay in E
urope. Her friends, one by one, married, and there were rumors that Edith might marry for money, but she clung to her independence. She celebrated Roosevelt’s marriage to Alice and mourned her passing, but she never forgot her childhood sweetheart. When they were eventually engaged, she wrote him: “You know all about me darling. I never could have loved anyone else. I love you with all the passion of a girl who has never loved before.”

  They told no one, not even their families, and Edith sailed to Europe with her mother and younger sister while Roosevelt returned to the Badlands to work on his next book, a biography of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton; he appealed to Roosevelt as an advocate of the United States’ manifest destiny to encompass as much of North America as possible. But the drought that year in the Dakota Territory had the cattle market in turmoil; in Chicago, the best price to be had was $10.00 less than it cost to raise and ship each steer. Sewall and Dow told Roosevelt they were wasting his money; they wanted to end their contracts and return to Maine. Roosevelt was having misgivings about the ranching business, so he needed little argument. He sent the remaining Elkhorn herd to Merrifield and Ferris and closed Elkhorn. From then on, he only used the property as a hunting lodge.

  At the urging of his party, Roosevelt came back briefly to New York to make a token run for mayor in the fall of 1886. The Republicans were given no chance that year, and as everyone expected, he lost to Democrat Abram Hewitt, but he renewed his public presence and brought crowds to their feet with his fervent pledges of clean government. “Fighting is fun for him, win or lose,” said an editorial in the New York Post. The ballots had hardly been counted when Roosevelt and Bamie steamed off for London for his quiet wedding to Edith. The couple would honeymoon for three months in England, France, and Italy, and she would come back to New York pregnant with their first child.

  The couple had to make adjustments. Edith was a quiet, reserved woman, who shared little of her husband’s exuberance. She had looked forward to a placid country life in the Oyster Bay house, which he had planned to call Leeholm to honor Alice but had renamed Sagamore Hill in honor of the chiefs of a local Indian tribe. For a brief period, she got her wish. Edith wrote happily of days rowing on the bay and reading poetry to each other.

  With Democrats occupying the White House, the Governor’s Mansion, and the New York mayoralty, Roosevelt’s political prospects were dim. He became what he called “a literary feller,” writing a biography of Founding Father Gouverneur Morris and beginning what would be his major work, The Winning of the West.

  Roosevelt wanted to fill his rambling house with friends and relatives, but Edith cherished her privacy; for a while, he gave in and curtailed his invitations, but then threw the house open, ensuring an endless round of tennis, hiking, book talk, and political debates. Edith made the drawing room her refuge, an elegant place for reading and contemplation. Children and guests were instructed to knock and wait for permission to join her.

  In September, Edith gave birth to a son, Theodore, Jr., and his father rejoiced at having a male heir. But the new baby wasn’t the only child in the house. Although Roosevelt had planned to leave three-year-old Alice in her aunt Bamie’s care, Edith would not hear of it. She insisted that Alice’s place was with her, and her duty was to raise her husband’s daughter as her own.

  Bamie was devastated, but she relented. Theodore and Edith, returning from Europe, moved in with Bamie in New York until the summer, and then Bamie and Alice went with them to spend the season at Oyster Bay. The transition was difficult for Alice, who never forgot the day her father and Edith arrived: “I in my best dress and sash, with a huge bunch of pink roses in my arms, coming down the stairs at my aunt’s house in New York to meet my father and my new mother.” Alice spent her life dealing with Roosevelt’s guilt over remarrying.

  Roosevelt was no longer a wealthy man. While he was honeymooning in Europe, blizzards had devastated Dakota; he arrived in New York to find alarming letters from his ranch, and a trip to the Badlands confirmed the disaster. Most of his herd had been killed, and at least half of his $85,000 investment had been wiped out.

  With the presidential election of 1888, Roosevelt’s shrewd political instincts re-emerged. Republican Benjamin Harrison was challenging Grover Cleveland, and Roosevelt had what he called “immense fun” on a twelve-day trip through the Midwest campaigning for Harrison. He reveled in the cheers of large crowds and hoped to win an appointment as assistant secretary of state if Harrison was elected. But Harrison’s secretary of state, James G. Blaine, vetoed him as too “brilliant and aggressive.” Instead, Roosevelt was offered a position as one of three Civil Service Commissioners.

  His family and friends considered the job beneath him, but Roosevelt thought it had possibilities. The 1883 Pendleton Act had called for one-fourth of all federal jobs to be filled by competitive exams rather than political reward under the old “spoils” system. But Cleveland’s administration had replaced two-thirds of the federal bureaucracy with Democrats, and the reformer in Roosevelt foresaw delectable battles to prevent Harrison’s men from reversing the process. Shrugging off Edith’s warning that his skimpy salary of $3,500 would not cover his expenses, he hurried to Washington to plunge into the fray. Edith, pregnant again, would stay at Sagamore Hill until their second child was born. To economize, Roosevelt would stay with Henry Cabot Lodge, who had just become a Massachusetts congressman.

  He arrived in his new post like a gust of wind, commandeering the largest of the three commissioners’ offices and overwhelming the staff with his toothy grin, genial authority, and the sense that he could help people accomplish their goals. Almost immediately, he was immersed in a battle to root out the corruption that most of his colleagues saw as the natural order. His friends foresaw what one called “a long, hard, discouraging struggle,” and Roosevelt himself was under no illusions: Both parties profited from the spoils system, he wrote, “and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.” But he believed passionately that the old axiom, “To the victors belong the spoils,” was “nakedly vicious” and a “cynical battle-cry.” Government jobs must be won on merit, he vowed, adding, “I intend to hew to the line, and let the chips fly where they will.”

  As he had in Albany, Roosevelt knew he had to enlist the public in the fight to put pressure on the lawmakers. But few voters cared about the Civil Service system, so Roosevelt worked to interest the press in his cause. He launched an investigation into the New York Customs House, where clerks were selling the Civil Service exam questions to job candidates for $50. When he issued a scathing report calling for the firing and prosecution of the clerks, he got headlines and approving editorials across the country.

  The New York investigation also established that party leaders were requiring low-level clerks and stenographers to pay “voluntary contributions” if they wanted to keep their jobs. Since such corruption was too widespread for the commission’s staff to address, Roosevelt enlisted a network of reporters to conduct local investigations, which the commission could then verify.

  True to his vow to “let the chips fly,” he didn’t flinch when one trail led to the Indianapolis postmaster, a close friend of President Harrison’s; the man was publicly humiliated by Roosevelt’s charges. But when Roosevelt turned his sights on another postmaster, George Howard Paul of Milwaukee, it was too much for Harrison’s Postmaster General, John Wanamaker. Roosevelt wanted Paul fired for doctoring civil-service exam scores for candidates favored by Republicans. Wanamaker appealed to Harrison, who decreed a compromise in which Paul would resign. Roosevelt had no choice but to go along, but he resented it. “It was a golden chance to take a good stand, and it has been lost,” he said.

  He promptly went after yet another post office, this time in Baltimore, where Roosevelt charged that postal appointments were being used as a “bribery chest.” Wanamaker retaliated with his own investigation of the case, which predictably found no wro
ngdoing except by Roosevelt, whom Wanamaker’s report called “unfair and partial in the extreme.” At that, Roosevelt sent Wanamaker an open letter accusing him of “gross impertinence and impropriety” and calling him the “head devil” of the spoils system.

  The press relished this public feuding, which The Washington Post called “war, open, avowed, and to the knife.” Roosevelt’s two fellow commissioners, who had made no objections to his effective takeover of the Civil Service cause, began to grow restive, and President Harrison detested the commotion. In a letter to Bamie, Roosevelt called Harrison “the little gray man in the White House looking on with cold and hesitating disapproval.”

  There were rumors that Roosevelt would be fired, but with so many influential newspapers backing the commissioner, Harrison remained silent. Congress, favoring the time-honored spoils system, could only starve the commission of resources, to the point that the shortage of workers left it three months behind in grading examinations. But in the end, public clamor was loud enough that the House Committee on Reform in the Civil Service launched an investigation into the controversy, with days of public testimony in which Roosevelt dominated the headlines. After months of delay, the committee’s report endorsed Roosevelt, saying he acted “with entire fidelity and integrity,” adding that “the public service has been greatly benefited, and the law, on the whole, well executed.” Vindicated, Roosevelt went back to work.

  AFTER THE BIRTH of their second son, Kermit, Edith moved to Washington in December 1889, where the Roosevelts lived in a rented townhouse. She had dreaded leaving her quiet life at Sagamore Hill for the political obsessions of Washington society, but she quickly felt at home.