The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (9 page)

The splendors of the parlor soon palled. There was little to detain him in the dining room, except at mealtimes; besides, its black haircloth furniture scratched his bare legs. The kitchen was
terra non grata
to pesky children. Eventually he was forced to explore the most forbidding room in the house: a windowless library, with tables, chairs, and gloomy bookcases.
⁵³
Chancing upon a ponderous edition of David Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa
, Teedie opened it, and found within a world he could happily inhabit the rest of his days.

Although the book’s pages of print meant nothing to him, its illustrations were copious, explicit, and strangely thrilling. Here were rampant hippopotami with canoes on their backs, horizon-filling herds of zebra, a magnified tsetse fly, as big as his hand, and an elephant so spiked with assegais as to resemble an enormous porcupine. For weeks Teedie dragged the volume, which was almost as big as he was, around the library, and begged his elders to fit stories to the pictures.
⁵⁴

Among the first books Teedie learned to decipher for himself were an unscientific study of mammals by Mayne Reid, and two natural histories by the English biologist J. G. Wood.
⁵⁵
He pored endlessly over these in the library, curled up in a tiny chair which became his favorite article of furniture. Softly upholstered in red velvet, and fringed with long tassels, it seemed designed to comfort the scrawny angles of his body. For years the boy and his “tassel chair” were so inseparable it even accompanied him to the photographer’s studio for his formal birthday portraits.

The library’s gloom vanished at night, when gas lamps began to hiss, and the coal fire made its rugs and tapestries glow a rich, romantic red. Teedie was given free access to all the books on the shelves, save only a racy novel by Ouida,
Under Two Flags
. “I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression on me.… I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general adventures.”
⁵⁶

As his reading abilities developed, and his ill-health continued, he turned more and more to stories of outdoor action, in which he could identify with heroes larger than life: the novels of Ballantyne, the sea-yarns of Captain Marryat, Cooper’s tales of the American frontier. Epic poetry, too, inspired him—above all Longfellow’s
Saga of King Olaf
, with its wild warlocks, blaring horns, and shields shining like suns.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1863 Theodore Senior, whose voluntary war services were now more and more concentrated in New York State,
transported his ailing family to Loantaka, a country place in Madison, New Jersey. The children reacted to their rural surroundings with such delight, and with such general improvement to their health, that Loantaka remained the Roosevelt summer home for four consecutive seasons.

Here the bookish Teedie became aware of the “enthralling pleasures” of building wigwams in the woods, gathering hickory nuts and apples, hunting frogs, haying and harvesting, and scampering barefoot down long, leafy lanes. Despite his frail physique and asthma, he seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of nervous energy. This, combined with the ability to improvise countless stories about his environment, caused him to be accepted as an unquestioned leader by Corinne and Elliott, and such family friends as came to stay. (Bamie’s four-year seniority, along with a certain adult seriousness of manner, disqualified her from membership in his gang.) Even on days when illness confined him to bed, the other children would forsake the fields in order to be entertained by the prodigal Teedie. His stories, remembered by Corinne into old age, were “about jungles and bold, mighty and imaginary fights with strange beasts … there was always a small boy in the stories … who understood the language of animals and would translate their opinions to us.”
⁵⁸

Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters in the “tassel chair,” but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him. The other children noticed that their leader “also led a life apart from us, seriously studying birds, their habits and their notes.”
⁵⁹
At first this study was haphazard, and Teedie made no attempt to document his observations, beyond filing them in his retentive memory. Not until he was seven years old, and back in New York City, did his formal career as a zoologist begin.

His next major thesis was entitled “The Foregoing Ant.” According to Corinne, it was inspired by a passing reference in Wood’s
Natural History
. Teedie assumed that the adjective was physiological, perhaps referring to the ant’s gait, and his subsequent essay on the subject was read aloud to a circle of mystified adults.
⁶¹

Unfortunately for posterity, neither the Broadway Seal nor the Foregoing Ant appear in surviving records of Teedie’s museum. There exists, however, a rather more learned opus, entitled “Natural History on Insects,” which dates from his ninth year. “All the insects that I write about in this book,” the author declares, “inhabbit North America. Now and then a friend has told me something about them but mostly I have gained their habbits from ofserv-a-tion.” He discusses and illustrates various species of ants, spiders, lady-bugs, fireflies, horned “beetlles,” and dragonflies. Then, with a fine disregard for the limitations of his title, he moves on to the study of hawks, minnows, and crayfish. The latter rather defeats his childish powers of description: “Look at a lobster,” he suggests, “and you have its form.”
⁶²

Apart from such lapses, Teedie’s “ofserv-a-tion” is amazingly keen. A paragraph on the tree-spider, for example, notes that it is “grey spoted with black,” and lives “in communitys of about 20”
under patches of loosened bark; its web “looks exactly like some cotten on the top but if you take that off you will see several small little webs, all in a ‘gumble’ as we children yoused to call it, each having several little occupants.” Even more remarkable, for a nine-year-old boy, is the methodical arrangement of classifications, and the patient indexing.

Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. Houseguests at No. 28 learned to sit on sofas warily, and to check their water-pitchers for snakes before pouring. When Mittie, in great disgust, threw out a litter of field-mice, her son loudly bemoaned “the loss to Science—the loss to Science.”
⁶³

From time to time, members of the domestic staff threatened to give notice. A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?” Finally, when a noxious odor permeated the entire house, even the good-natured cook issued her ultimatum: “Either I leave or the woodchuck does.” Teedie had killed a fine specimen for anatomical study and ordered her to boil the animal, fur and all, for twenty-four hours.
⁶⁴

O
N 28
A
PRIL 1868
, Teedie wrote a letter to Mittie, who was paying a visit to Savannah along with Theodore Senior and Corinne. It is the earliest of his 150,000 letters to survive, yet there glitters, in virtually every sentence, a facet of his mature personality.

Promptness, excitability, warmth, histrionics, love of plants and animals, physical vitality, “dee-light,” sensitivity to birdsong, fascination with military display, humor, family closeness, the conservationist, the natural historian, the hunter—all are here. Teedie mentions,
passim
, the name of his future wife, and there is a hint of the two-hundred-pound President in the embarrassed postscript. Even the large, childish handwriting is touchingly similar to that of the dying Colonel Roosevelt, scrawling his last memorandum half a century later.

D
URING THE SUMMER
of 1868, about the same time he was completing his “Natural History on Insects,” Teedie began to keep a diary.
⁶⁶
The Roosevelts were then living in their new country place at Barrytown-on-Hudson, New York, and the little volume is full of the joys of bird-nesting, swimming, hiking, and long rides through grass “up to the ponys head.” Apart from one reference to “an attack of the Asmer” on 10 August, the diary reads like that of any normal nine-year-old. Yet Teedie’s health was as bad as ever: he was never well for more than ten days at a time. So accustomed was he, by now, to recurrences of illness that he rarely bothered to record them.