Theodore Roosevelt Read Free

grandsons, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Elliott. Their father, Theodore Sr., lived more modestly in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street, where Theodore Jr., the future president, was born in 1858. He had been preceded by a sister, Anna, nicknamed Bamie, who in middle age married a naval officer, W. Sheffield Cowles, and was followed by another sister, Corinne, who wed the wealthy Douglas Robinson, and a younger brother, Elliott. The sisters, brilliant and admirable women, were lifelong devotees of their brother Theodore, but Elliott, despite good looks, charm, and intellectual ability, took early to drink and died a miserable failure, somewhat redeeming himself to history by fathering Eleanor.
    Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had little inclination for business and devoted the time that his means afforded to substantial work in city charities and hospitals, attaining a wide reputation for good works. Theodore Jr. adored and worshiped him, but he also admitted that though his father had never once physically punished him, “he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.” After the latter’s premature death at forty-six he said: “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father should have had a son of so little worth as I am.”
    Theodore Sr. had married a southern belle, Martha (“Mittie”) Bulloch, from Georgia, who was lovely, gentle, self-indulgent, and something, one surmises, of a hypochondriac, who lay back on sofas and was waited on, hand and foot, by devoted family and servants. Her son Elliott called her “a sweet little Dresden monument.” She had a brother, James Bulloch, of more vigorous character, the Confederate agent in Britain who masterminded the construction there, contrary to international law, of the commerce raider Alabama, which sank or captured fifty-seven Union merchant ships until at last it was sunk by the USS Kearsage off Cherbourg. Another brother of Mittie’s, younger, a midshipman, Irvine, was rescued from the raider’s wreck and was supposed to have fired its last shot.
    I emphasize this because I think it had a strong effect on the whole life of young Theodore, or “Teedie,” as he was known as a boy. Teedie’s mother made no secret of her Confederate sympathies and was even (probably unreliably) credited with having draped the front of her house with the stars and bars after a Southern victory. But Teedie was fiercely Yankee and did not hesitate to pray aloud for the crushing of the Southern foe even in the presence of his beloved mother. How must he have felt when his hero father made the painful decision not to take up arms against his wife’s compatriots and bought a substitute to fight for him? Oh, it was all very high-minded, and Theodore Sr. took up the complicated and unrewarded volunteer job of organizing a mailing system whereby servicemen could assign some of their pay to their often indigent families, but what was that to a boy who saw his maternal kin fighting for glory? Theodore Sr. came to regret his decision; according to Bamie he felt he should have put every other feeling aside to join the fighting forces. And Corinne believed that her brother’s determination to make a military reputation was “in part compensation for an unspoken disappointment in his father’s course in 1861.”
    I should put it even more strongly. The “unspoken” tells a tale. Theodore Jr. made a point of not mentioning the things that were most sacred to him. It is well known that he would never refer to his deceased first wife, even to their daughter, Alice. That he should not ever have discussed his father’s course of action in a conflict as continually talked over in his day as the Civil War shows how deeply it must have penetrated. I have no doubt that he exonerated his father completely; saints could not be besmirched. But the saints’ issue could be left with an ineluctable obligation to make up in the