Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One: "Teedie"
Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was the center of his children's world. As soon as they heard his key rattle in the lock of the front door of the family brownstone at 28 East Twentieth Street in New York City, * the three youngest children-Theodore, Jr., Elliott, and Corinne-raced to be the first to greet him. Usually, he brought fruit or trinkets as special treats and they clung to him as he pressed on into the house. For an hour or so, he talked and played with them. While he dressed for dinner, recalled the future president, "we would troop into his room ... to stay there as long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out of his pockets which could be regarded as an attractive novelty."
The elder Roosevelt was often away on business, so his children vied among each other for his attention when he was at home. "We all craved him as our most desired companion," said Corinne, indicating an active if unacknowledged rivalry among the children. Every morning, they lined up at the foot of the stairs eagerly waiting for Father to comedown for the ritual of daily prayers. As soon as he appeared, they ran into the library to contend for the "cubby-hole," the space between him and the arm of the sofa where he sat to read from the Bible. This was considered the seat of favor while the other children felt momentarily like outsiders.
Roosevelt never laughed at his children when they asked questions - he laughed with them often-and no question seemed too troublesome or unimportant to answer. A firm believer in the benefits of outdoor life, he taught them to swim, to sail, to ride, and to climb trees. One morning he surprised the children with anew pony. "Who will get on first?" he asked. As her two brothers hung back, four-year-old Corinne jumped on the animal's back, and he declared that from then on, the pony was to be hers. "I think I did it," she later wrote, "to see the light in Father's eyes."
In the years just before the Civil War, New York was already a metropolis of more than a half million people where the rumble of loaded wagons, the stamping of big dray horses, and the hooting of tugboats on the rivers were never stilled. Ugly, overcrowded, and dirty, the city was sharply divided between rich and poor. While the Renaissance palaces of the wealthy were beginning to march uptown along Fifth Avenue, the poor huddled in foul, ratinfested slums such as the notorious Five Points in lower Manhattan. "All that is loathsome and decayed is here," observed the touring Charles Dickens. Only a few miles away, what Edith Wharton described as the fashionable "pioneers of the younger set" were taking over rows of stolid brownstones newly erected in the tree-shrouded streets adjoining Gramercy Park. "Thee," Roosevelt and his wife, Georgia-born Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, were among the most engaging couples in this society.
Tall, handsome, and with a leonine head, Roosevelt had a glossy chestnut beard and the natural grace of an athlete. He was the youngest of the five surviving sons of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt who, along with William B. Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and A. T. Stewart, was one of the city's wealthiest men. Although active in Roosevelt & Son, the family glass-importing business in Maiden Lane, Thee was more interested in charitable work and philanthropy, which eventually became his main interest."Mittie" Roosevelt was a reigning beauty of Knickerbocker society. Fine-featured and with lustrous, jet-black hair, she had a tiny waist and coral-tinged skin that was, according to her daughter Anna, "the purest and most delicate white, more moonlightwhite than cream-white." Every day she took two baths, and she wore white both summer and winter.
The Roosevelt family had lived in New York City for more than two centuries, but after Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., became president, he insisted that his background was quite ordinary. For example, in his Autobiography he described Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, the family's founding father in America, as "our very common ancestor" and observed he had come over from the Netherlands in the seventeenth-century version of steerage. In reality, however, this was part of a conscious effort to skew accounts of his life, to downplay the advantages of a privileged background to bridge the chasm between himself and most Americans. Roosevelt was not a common man, and he knew it. Nevertheless, he wished to share the thoughts and aspirations of the average American-and if this created a somewhat synthetic personality, it was an intellectual rather than a moral failing.
Claes settled in New Amsterdam, the struggling Dutch settlement at the tip of Manhattan, sometime before 1648. Like that of many immigrants to America before and since, his past is a recordless blank. One of the few clues is his name, which rendered into English is Nicholas, son of Martin, of the Field of Roses. In those days, Dutchmen took in addition to their baptismal name that of their father and the locality from which they came. The family name, spelled a dozen different ways inthe old records - Roosevelt, Rosewelt, and Rosvelt among others-indicates that the ancestral home of the Roosevelts was the island of Tholen in the province of Zeeland, where a Van Rosevelt family was once prominent. Their family motto, Qui Plantavit Curabit - He Who Has Planted Will Preserve-was adopted by the American Roosevelts. The family name is pronounced by all its branches as "Rose-uh-velt."
When Theodore, Jr., was a small boy, Dutch was still spoken at the Saturday dinners at his grandfather's mansion on the southwest comer of Broadway and Fourteenth Street, just across from
Synopsis
Nathan Miller's critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt is the first complete one-volume life of the Rough Rider to be published in more than thirty years. From his sickly childhood to charging up San Juan Hill to waving his fist under J.P. Morgan's rubicund nose,
Theodore Roosevelt offers the intimate history of a man who continues to cast a magic spell over the American imagination.
As the twenty-sixth president of the United States, from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt embodied the overwheliming confidence of the nation as it entered the American Century. With fierce joy, he brandished a "Big Stick" abroad and promised a "Square Deal" at home. He was the nation's first environmental president, challenged the trusts, and, as the first American leader to play an important role in world affairs, began construction of a long-dreamed canal across Panama and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for almost singlehandedly bringing about a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War.
In addition to following Roosevelt's political career, Theodore Roosevelt looks deeply into his personal relations to draw a three-dimensional portrait of a man who confronted life-wrenching tragedies as well as triumphs. It is biography at its most compelling.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 593-603) and index.
About the Author
Nathan Miller, a four-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of FDR: An Intimate History, The Roosevelt Chronicles, and The U.S. Navy.