The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (27 page)

A
SENSE OF DELICIOUS PRIVACY
, of port after stormy seas, possessed Theodore as he settled into the domestic routine which he would always consider the height of human bliss. “I am living in dreamland,” he told himself.
⁵
At breakfast Alice prettily presided over the tea-things, “in the daintiest little pink and gray morning dress, while I, in my silk jacket and slippers, sit at the other end of the table.” Later she proved herself his equal on the tennis court, and kept pace with him on “long fast walks” through the countryside. There were many excursions, no doubt, up the slopes of Theodore’s favorite hill. Alice was persuaded to approve the purchase, for $10,000, of an initial sixty acres overlooking the bay. Together they devoured the newspapers (“Our only intercourse with the outside world”) and endlessly discussed “everything … from Politics to Poetry.” They took afternoon buggy rides over the hills, evening rows across the bay, and feasted on woodcock and partridge. After dinner Alice would curl up in front of a roaring wood fire while Theodore read aloud from the novels of Scott and
Dickens. All through the night her long soft body lay beside his. “How I wish it could last forever!”
⁶

M
R. AND
M
RS
. T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT
, J
R.
, took up formal residence at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York City, on Saturday, 13 November 1880. They were welcomed back with a “perfect ovation” by the rest of the Roosevelt clan, and Theodore lost no time in assuming the mantle of Elijah. On Sunday, after church, he presided over the traditional family lunch, was “at home” to a variety of relatives and friends in the afternoon, and that evening sat in his father’s seat at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House Dinner.
⁷
Before the winter was out, he would inherit two more of Theodore Senior’s responsibilities, being elected a trustee of both the Orthopedic Dispensary and the New York Infant Asylum. But the charitable role did not suit him. Many years later he told a friend, “I tried faithfully to do what father had done, but I did it poorly … in the end I found out that we each have to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”
⁸

Striking that “way” took Theodore a full year, although, as things turned out, it led a mere hundred yards east of his front door. Two other routes temporarily diverted him. The first led three miles south to the Columbia Law School.
⁹

E
MERGING FROM
6
West Fifty-seventh Street early on the morning of 17 November, Theodore sucked in a lungful of chill, crisp air (marriage had done wonders for his asthma), turned into Fifth Avenue, and marched briskly downtown to 8 Great Jones Street.
¹⁰
It was a good forty-five-minute walk, even at the characteristic Rooseveltian gait: arms pumping, toe caps shooting out sideways, every heelfall biting like a pickax.
¹¹
Theodore’s first recitation was scheduled for 8:30, and he did not want to miss a word that fell from “the golden lips” of Professor T. W. Dwight, America’s most revered legal pedagogue.
¹²

The Columbia College Law School, which Dwight had founded in 1858, was little more than a cavernous old house, its floors and walls blotched with tobacco-juice, its windows jammed shut against the traffic-noises of Lafayette Place. Within, an atmosphere of rowdy informality prevailed. Students threw their hats and coats over every available protuberance, argued boisterously in the library, and fought for places in a stuffy little lecture theater. Those who arrived late were obliged to squat around the platform, or wedge themselves onto dusty windowsills, until there was not an inch of standing or sitting space left.
¹³

From the moment the white-haired, mildly smiling professor strolled into the room, a cathedral-like hush descended. Dwight was famous for the clarity and persuasiveness of his oratory, the profundity of the questions with which he would every now and again challenge his audience. No conundrum was too knotty for him to untangle, no statute too obscure to exhume and ponder. The thin blood of seven generations of Puritan clergymen, authors, and educators flowed in his veins; his logic was unpolluted by human emotion.
¹⁴

Professor Dwight and his students now discovered that they had in their midst a young man who was impatient with logic, and who, instead of waiting for questions from on high, wished to ask his own. Theodore at Columbia proved to be as harshly persistent an interrupter, as irrepressible a jack-in-the-box, as he had been at Harvard. Time and again he would leap to his feet, glasses flashing, to argue “for justice and against legalism,” and express his contempt for the “repellent” doctrine of
caveat emptor
. Why, the young man wanted to know, did this side of the law preclude bargains “which are fair and of benefit to both sides”? He shrilly insisted that the accepted standards of corporation lawyers were incompatible with youthful idealism; they encouraged “sharp practice.”
¹⁵

Theodore’s pertinacity in raising such subjects vastly irritated a fellow student, Poultney Bigelow. “Roosevelt was then what he was in the White House—an excellent example of the
genus Americanus egotisticus.”
Bigelow may have been a prejudiced witness—those who hated Theodore did so with passion—yet he early detected the future President’s lifelong compulsion for center stage. “He was
predestined for politics … he could not escape the fate of being persistently in the public eye.”
¹⁶

Professor Dwight, on the other hand, did not seem to mind Theodore’s interruptions. Most of the other students were impressed by the newcomer. He quickly became a favorite, and was accepted as a man with a future, although it was plain to all but himself that he had no future in law. As one classmate dryly put it, “The intricacies of the rule in Shelley’s case, the study of feudal tenures as exemplified in the great work of Blackstone, were not the things upon which that avid mind must feed.”
¹⁷

All through the winter and spring of 1880–81 Theodore continued to march down Fifth Avenue, Blackstone’s
Commentaries
under his arm and a determined expression on his face. “I like the law school work very much,” he told himself.
¹⁸

T
HE SECOND ROUTE
that Theodore followed, at the close of his morning classes, led west from the Law School to the Astor Library, on the other side of Lafayette Place. Here he proceeded mysteriously to bury himself in speckled tomes and ancient periodicals. He remained closemouthed about this scholarly activity, not even mentioning it to his diary until March 1881, and then with deliberate vagueness: “Am still working on … one or two unsuccessful literary projects.”
¹⁹

Just when Theodore became aware of his potential as a writer is unclear. His juvenile letters and diaries had been no more remarkable than those of any intelligent boy; his adolescent notebooks and ornithological pamphlets were strictly scientific; his Harvard themes were laborious, unimaginative, and lacking in “style.” Even his eulogies for Theodore Senior and effusions over Alice Lee, while undoubtedly passionate, were expressed in Victorian clichés. Only rarely, as in the stories he used to improvise as a bedridden boy, the humorous letters from Dresden, and the descriptions of birdsong in the Adirondacks, had he shown any flashes of originality. These somehow seem to have convinced him that the name Theodore Roosevelt might one day ornament the spine of this or that leather-bound volume.

From his late teens on he had begun to write, consciously or unconsciously, to an audience. Even the diaries he ostensibly marked “Private” show signs of this urge to communicate. It is impossible to read them at any length without feeling that one is being addressed. Many entries are deliberately prosy and tell Theodore’s imagined readers things he does not need to tell himself. Even when he wishes to be genuinely private, he feels the stare of the public, and is obliged to erase paragraphs, tear out whole pages, and curtly announce that some things are “too sacred to be written about.”

That other instinct of the born author—the compulsion to write—was also strong in him. Theodore’s habit, in moments of joy or sorrow, had always been to reach for a pen, as others might reach for a rosary or a bottle. During the winter of 1879–80, when Alice was driving him to despair, he had begun to write a book, the most technically challenging one he could think of. Now, in the happy winter of 1880–81, he turned again to
The Naval War of 1812.
²⁰

Although Theodore protested that the two introductory chapters he had already completed at Harvard “were so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison,” he was entitled to be proud of them, for they were a formidable achievement.
²¹
Before starting the book he had known little about academic research, and less about marine warfare. Merely to master the technicalities of naval strategy and tactics, along with a complex nautical vocabulary, was a task before which any professional historian might quail. To collect and analyze, in terms of comparative firepower, thousands of ballistic and logistic figures (correcting the inaccurate ones
passim)
required the brain of a mathematician—which Theodore did not have. So he had to double-check his calculations until every last discrepancy had worked itself out.

Yet somehow he had managed to do all that—whether successfully or not, the reviewers would have to decide. In the meantime, with his 42 “dry” pages behind him, he could move on to 450 more full of the spray and salt and smoke of real battle.

Despite the enthusiasm with which he took up this work, Theodore was determined not to let his imagination run away with him. He made full use of the research facilities of the Astor Library in an effort to document every sentence of his manuscript. He
consulted naval histories published on both sides of the Atlantic, including several French works which he quoted in his own translation. He burrowed through the lives and memoirs of participating admirals. Determined to be scrupulously fair, he consulted such British sources as the
Naval Records, Nile’s Register
, and the
London Naval Chronicle
. He sent to Washington for carloads of official captains’ letters, logbooks, and shipyard contracts previously untouched by any scholar. He compiled his own construction plans, tactical diagrams, and “tables of comparative force and loss.”
²²
With these spread out around him, he could ponder such questions as the relationship between a ship armed with long 12s and another presenting 32-pound carronades. Which one would prevail in battle? “At long range the first, and at short range the second,” concluded Theodore, who dearly loved a balanced statement. But then the booming of guns in his ears would be interrupted by the library clock chiming three. It was time to march back uptown and take Alice out for her afternoon drive.
²³