The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (21 page)

N
O SOONER HAD
the lovesick junior returned to Winthrop Street after Thanksgiving than he formally entered in his diary the vow that he would marry Alice Lee.
⁸
To make it doubly formal, he arranged a “tintype spree,” or trip to the photographer’s, so that he
might pose beside his beloved at the very onset of their courtship. Clearly it would be improper to suggest that Alice come to the studio alone, so Rose Saltonstall was roped in as a convenient third party. There is more than a hint of nervousness in Theodore’s first letter to Alice, reminding her of their rendezvous. Even at this stage he seems afraid that his doe might wander.

“Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls.”
Alice Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Rose Saltonstall, 1878
. (
Illustration 4.2
)

Alice did not forget, and the group portrait, so momentous to Theodore, survives. Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls, carefully clutching his hat and cane. Alice, seated lower, leans toward him, almost touching his right thigh. Her skirts droop sexily over his shoe. She wears a lace-fronted dress and high feathered hat. Her gray eyes gaze dreamily into the camera: she seems unaware of the giant resolve looming next to her.
¹⁰

By now Alice Lee was occupying Theodore’s thoughts through every waking hour, and would continue to do so, according to his own testimony, for the next year and a quarter. At times her girlish waywardness would drive him to despair; in one particular moment of frustration he ripped the pages containing the Thanksgiving vow bodily out of his diary.
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There is a suggestion of sexual torment in Theodore’s entry for 11 December 1878, when he asks God’s help in
staying virtuous, as his father would have wished, “and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very …” Here the eager researcher turns the page, only to find a huge blot of ink. Somehow its very blackness and monstrous shape convey more of Theodore’s misery than whatever words he had scribbled beneath it.
¹²

Such fits of depression were, however, rare in the early days of his courtship. “Teddy” continued to be welcome at Chestnut Hill, and Alice was quick to atone, with a soft word or look, for any bruise she may have inflicted upon him. At any such sign of favor he positively radiated with joy, and would exult, when alone with his diary, in his youth, his social and academic success, and the luck which had led him to Chestnut Hill. “Truly,” he wrote, as 1878 passed into 1879, “these are the golden years of my life.”
¹³

I
T MUST NOT BE SUPPOSED
that Theodore’s obsession with Alice Lee caused him to neglect his studies, or that he ceased to partake of the clubby delights of Harvard. “I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he boasted in a letter home, “having been elected into several different clubs.”
¹⁴
Apart from the Porc and its partridge suppers, he attended regular meetings of the Institute of 1770, and its secret caucus, “the old merry brutal ribald orgiastic natural wholesome Dickey.”
¹⁵
He presented papers to the Harvard Natural History Society on such subjects as “The Gills of Crustaceans” and “Coloration of Birds.” He lectured learnedly on sparrows at the Nuttall Ornithological Club (whose middle-aged members, discomfited by his knowledge, accused him of being vain and “cocksure”). He was put up for the Hasty Pudding early in the New Year, and won election as fifth man in the first nine.
¹⁶
When his instructor in political economy asked him to form a Finance Club, he not only did so immediately, but wrote a joint paper, with Bob Bacon, on “Municipal Taxation,” and presented it at the club’s inaugural meeting.

“We little suspected,” wrote Professor J. Laurence Laughlin many years later, “that we were being addressed by a future President of the United States and his Secretary of State.”
¹⁷

Thus, in February of 1879, Theodore Roosevelt revealed that the political animal within him was at last beginning to stir. About the same time he made his first public speech, at the annual dinner of the
Harvard Crimson
. It was an awkward effort, yet vividly remembered by William Roscoe Thayer:

Although Theodore continued to dream of being a natural historian when he left college, he confessed that the prospect of three extra years of overseas study—a necessary academic requirement—made him “perfectly blue.”
¹⁹
Politics, on the other hand, was beginning to appeal to him so strongly that he asked Professor Laughlin if he should not perhaps make that his career instead. Laughlin replied that the halls of American government were much more in need of idealistic young men than were zoological laboratories.
²⁰
Still, Theodore clung to his imagined vocation, until a softer, more influential voice persuaded him to abandon the chimera forever.

Whether it was the prospect of losing her beau to some foreign university for three years, or simply his distressing tendency to
produce creepy-crawlies, Alice Lee did not relish the idea of Theodore becoming Professor or Doctor Roosevelt. Her disapproval of his collecting was probably the reason for a startling remark he made to Harry Minot at the end of his sophomore year: “As you know, I don’t approve of too much slaughter.” Much later Theodore himself admitted that courting Alice “brought about a change in my ideas as regards science.”
²¹

Their intimacy ripened slowly during the early weeks of 1879. There were polite teas with the Saltonstalls and dances at the Lees’, winter walks and coasting parties (Alice occasionally allowing him to share her toboggan) on the crisp slopes of Chestnut Hill. “I like the two girls more and more every day,” he told Bamie, “especially pretty Alice.”
²²
Determined to make himself as irresistible as possible, he nurtured his reddish whiskers to the size of powder puffs, and grew increasingly resplendent in his dress, with high glossy collars, silk cravats and cameo pins, fobbed watch chains, and coats rakishly cut away to show off the uncreased, cylindrical trousers of a man of fashion.
²³

T
OWARD THE END OF
F
EBRUARY
, Theodore began to suffer from a surfeit of polite conversation. The drawing-rooms of Chestnut Hill suddenly became claustrophobic to him: he decided to clear his head, and his lungs, with another vacation in Maine.
²⁴
When he reached Mattawamkeag Station on 1 March, Bill Sewall was waiting in a sleigh to escort him to Island Falls, thirty-six miles away.

For hour after hour, as they hissed north over a three-foot shroud of snow, Theodore marveled at a landscape wondrously changed from the one he had explored six months before. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he told his mother afterward. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal.”
²⁵

At Island Falls, he renewed his acquaintance with Sewall’s nephew and partner Wilmot Dow, whom he had met only briefly the previous September. Dow, just twenty-three, was as big a man as
Sewall, and, by the latter’s admission, “a better guide … better hunter, better fisherman, and the best shot of any man in the country.” In time this impassive, smooth-faced youth would become as good a friend to Theodore as his uncle.
²⁶

For the first few days in Aroostook County, the subzero temperatures troubled Theodore’s asthma, or “guffling,” as Sewall called it. But after a pung trip to a lumber camp at Oxbow, even deeper in the wilderness, he breathed clear again, and “enjoyed every minute” of his stay.
²⁷
The Aroostook lumbermen, many of whom were unlettered, and had spent all their lives in the woods, were the roughest human beings he had yet encountered. Sewall noted how he charmed them and held their interest.