Michael L. Cooper Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  SOURCE NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  AVAILABLE UP CLOSE TITLES:

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  HARPER LEE by Kerry Madden

  THURGOOD MARSHALL by Chris Crowe

  ELVIS PRESLEY by Wilborn Hampton

  RONALD REAGAN by James Sutherland

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Michael L. Cooper

  BABE RUTH by Wilborn Hampton

  JOHN STEINBECK by Milton Meltzer

  OPRAH WINFREY by Ilene Cooper

  FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT by Jan Adkins

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

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  First published in 2009 by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Text copyright © Michael L. Cooper, 2009

  Photo credits:

  Pages 14, 25, 50, 63, 70, 102-103, 112, 121, 141, 154, 162: Theodore Roosevelt Collection,

  Harvard College Library

  Page 129: Courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior

  Page 185: Library of Congress

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  To three professors who nurtured

  my love of history: John Duncan,

  Dan Carter, and Alan Brinkley

  FOREWORD

  FOR TWENTY YEARS I’ve been wanting to write about Theodore Roosevelt. This author, big-game hunter, conservationist, explorer, historian, naturalist, rancher, reformer, soldier, and twenty-sixth president of the United States appeals to me on many levels.

  As someone who grew up camping and hunting, I understand the pleasure that Roosevelt, a New Yorker, found sleeping under the stars on the Dakota prairie or tramping through the Maine woods. And going out west to become a rancher as Roosevelt did was one of my childhood fantasies.

  He and I both fell in love with books at a young age. As an adult he read nearly a book a day, while also writing thirty-eight of his own. And what book lover wouldn’t admire a man who as president plucked the great poet Edwin Arlington Robinson out of poverty and gave him a government job with instructions to write lots of poems?

  I also identify with the illness that robbed Roosevelt of so much of a regular childhood. My own health problems kept me out of school and in a hospital or convalescing for a year, reshaping my adolescence. I envy Roosevelt his loving family, whose support gave him the determination to overcome his illness.

  Even though people seemed to forget it at times, Roosevelt was human and had his faults. He was self-centered and self-righteous. With his children he could be overbearing. And he could be unbearably preachy about morals and personal behavior. People of color, Roosevelt believed, weren’t as “advanced” as Anglo-Saxons. While he was a man of great courage, it was at times a foolhardy courage that made him flirt needlessly with danger, as though challenging death. And as a government official Roosevelt could bend the truth or the law when it suited his purposes. He did this in the months before the Spanish-American War, which made him a national hero, and when he secured the Panama Canal, which he considered one of his greatest achievements.

  Of course, few of us would know anything about Roosevelt if he had not been president. Throughout most of his life, America was undergoing a dizzying transformation from a nation of farms and small towns to a nation of fast-growing cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit and huge corporations such as Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, which possessed more wealth and power than many countries. There was a succession of lackluster presidents after the Civil War who were unable or unwilling to face the new challenges of governing. At the beginning of the twentieth century along came Roosevelt. With enormous energy, magnetic personality, and extraordinary intelligence, he was the hero America needed.

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN SHRANK HAD been stalking Theodore Roosevelt for three weeks. Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term as president of the United States. On October 14, 1912, standing less than ten yards from the candidate outside the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Shrank shot Roosevelt with a .38 pistol. The bullet pierced his overcoat, steel spectacles case, and a thick copy of a speech folded in his breast pocket before lodging between his ribs. The impact knocked Roosevelt back, but he didn’t fall. “As I did not cough up blood I was pretty sure the wound was not a fatal one,” he later explained.

  “Stand back,” Roosevelt yelled as the crowd seized his assailant. “Don’t hurt that man.” He wanted to see who had tried to kill him. Roosevelt stared into Shrank’s eyes for several seconds before turning aside.

  The gunman later said President William McKinley’s ghost had told him to kill Roosevelt. McKinley had been assassinated eleven years earlier and Vice President Roosevelt had become president. McKinley’s ghost said the vice president had been the assassin. Shrank spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.

  Instead of rushing to the hospital, the wounded candidate insisted on going to the Milwaukee Auditorium, where he was scheduled to speak. He was greeted there, as he was everywhere, by a large, cheering crowd. “Friends,” he said from the podium, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” The crowd gasped and th
en fell silent.

  Roosevelt unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloody shirt. Taking his fifty-page speech out of his coat pocket, he held it up, explaining, “There is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a long speech, but I will try my best… . I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I cannot speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being shot … my concern is for many other things. It is not in the least for my own life… . No man has had a happier life than I have led.”

  Theodore, age eight, 1866.

  1

  THE STORY OF one of America’s greatest presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, begins with his father.

  “I owe everything,” he once said, “I have or am to Father.” His father was Theodore Roosevelt Sr., but the family called him Thee. He was a handsome man with broad shoulders, blue eyes, a square jaw, and chestnut brown hair and beard. Thee was the youngest of five children, all sons, born to Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt.

  According to an 1858 magazine article, Cornelius was one of New York City’s ten bona fide millionaires. He was both rich and old New York. His Dutch ancestors settled on Manhattan Island in 1649 when it was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Cornelius made the family’s fortune in the 1830s by investing in real estate, which afforded his sons comfortable livings.

  At age nineteen, while visiting Georgia, Thee fell in love with a southern belle four years younger than he was named Martha “Mittie” Bulloch. The Bullochs, an old and prominent family, lived north of Atlanta in a white-columned mansion on a plantation worked by slaves. Three years after they met, in 1853, Thee and Mittie married and settled into a town house, a wedding present from his father, on East 20th Street in Manhattan.

  Thee and his brother James managed the family’s extensive real estate holdings and plate-glass importing company, but the family business wasn’t his main focus. “He was interested in every social reform movement,” young Theodore recalled, “and he did an immense amount of practical charitable work himself.” Thee devoted much of his time to helping poor kids in the Children’s Aid Society and similar organizations. He also helped found two major New York institutions, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  In their first eight years of marriage Thee and Mittie had two girls and two boys. They named the first child Anna, but called her “Bamie,” short for bambina. No one in the family was called by his or her given name. When the future president was born four years later, October 27, 1858, his parents called him Teedie, which was pronounced T.D. The third child, Elliott, was born sixteen months afterward and called Ellie. And Corinne, nineteen months younger than Elliott, was called Conie. All of them except Bamie eventually outgrew their nicknames.

  The Roosevelt children were privileged in all ways except good health. Bamie, Thee’s favorite, had a spinal defect. As a child she wore an iron brace and as an adult had a slight hunch in her shoulders. Elliott had convulsions, perhaps epilepsy, that caused him to black out, and he was an alcoholic before he was an adult. The youngest, Corinne, had mild asthma.

  As for Teedie, “nobody seemed to think I would live.” He was a frail, undersized child with large blue eyes that never seemed focused on anything. He suffered almost daily from headaches and diarrhea, which the family delicately referred to with a made-up Latin-sounding term, cholera morbus. But Teedie’s most serious problem was asthma.

  No one at the time knew what caused asthma or how to stop the frequent attacks that often came at night and lasted hours or days. They made Teedie feel as though he was drowning, and he constantly gasped for breath. Afterward he would be drenched in sweat and exhausted.

  It was Teedie’s father who often comforted him during these attacks. “I could breathe, I could sleep, when he had me in his arms.”

  Doctors weren’t much help, but one recommended plenty of fresh air and exercise. You “have the mind, but you have not the body,” Thee told his son, “and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” Teedie, always eager for his father’s approval, vowed he would. This was the beginning of his lifelong devotion to vigorous exercise, which included hiking, boxing, and, in the early 1870s when the family built a new mansion uptown on 57th Street, lifting weights in his own gym. Exercise and being outdoors did appear to improve Teedie’s health. As he got older, he became more robust and his asthma bothered him much less.

  At about the same time he began exercising, Teedie was cured of another affliction, nearsightedness. One day he realized he was the only one who couldn’t read large letters on a billboard. Soon afterward, Teedie happily wrote in the journal he kept, I “got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened a new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.”

  Teedie’s earliest memories were of the worst crisis the United States had faced in its eighty-five-year existence—the Civil War. Mittie’s brothers fought for the Confederacy, so she persuaded Thee not to join the Union Army. Like many affluent Northerners, he hired a substitute to fight. But for the remainder of his life, according to Bamie, her father felt “he had done a very wrong thing” by not putting “every other feeling aside” and fighting for the Union.

  The Roosevelt children’s friends were either cousins or the children of other wealthy New Yorkers. As a child, Teedie was too frail to hold his own when roughhousing, even with his younger brother. But as an adolescent strengthened by daily exercise, he was fiercely competitive. One year, Teedie noted in his journal, several of the boys held jumping, running, vaulting, wrestling, and boxing contests. There were fifteen events and Teedie won fourteen of them. Although he wasn’t a particularly good boxer, he relished the fighting. “If you offered rewards for bloody noses,” Teedie told his father, “you would spend a fortune on me alone.”

  Thee and Mittie educated their children mostly at home. Their first lessons in reading and writing came from Mittie’s sister, Aunt Anna, and her mother, Grandmother Bulloch, who both came to live with them in 1856. Later the children had a French governess.

  Even before he could read, Teedie discovered books. He was four when he found in his family’s library an oversized copy of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa. For days he dragged it around asking adults to tell him about the colorful illustrations of hippos, zebra, and other exotic animals.

  Once he learned to read, Teedie devoured books. He “worshipped Little Men and Little Women,” he recalled, even if they were “girls’ stories.” He liked boys’ books such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Mayne Reid’s The Boy Hunters, which gave him a “great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world and I had a great desire to be like them.”

  Teedie also enjoyed Our Young Folks, which he pronounced “the very best magazine in the world.” He kept copies and reread them even as an adult. The magazine’s stories reinforced what Thee and Mittie taught their children about “manliness, decency, and good conduct,” and helped Teedie develop strong convictions of right and wrong. The boy didn’t like dirty jokes and rarely cursed. Teedie once dropped a friend, he told his father, because “he swore like a trooper.” When he was grown, he drank moderately and believed sex was only for married people. A political colleague once said Theodore often acted like he had discovered the Ten Commandments.

  While sheltered in many ways, the Roosevelt children saw more of the world than most American children or, for that matter, most adults. Twice Thee took the family on yearlong trips abroad. In 1869, they went on a grand tour of nine European countries.

  They first visited Liverpool, England, where Mittie’s two unreconstructed brothers lived in exile. Teedie was fascinated by his uncles’ exploits during the Civil War. James Dunwoodie
Bulloch, a former Confederate admiral, had helped launch the famous Confederate raider, Alabama, and his younger brother, Irvine, had been a crew member. Both uncles told Teedie stories about the Alabama’s battles, and he would retell them in graphic detail for years afterward. This was probably the best part of the trip for ten-year-old Teedie. He wrote that he “cordially hated” the rest of it.

  Teedie had a much better time four years later when the family visited Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. In Egypt the family lived and traveled for three months on a houseboat on the Nile River as they visited such famous sites as the Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid in Giza. At the end of the tour, the three youngest Roosevelts spent five months with a family in Dresden, Germany, so they could study German and French.

  The lack of formal schooling was a problem when Thee decided he wanted Teedie and Elliott to attend Harvard University. He hired a recent Harvard graduate, Arthur Cutler, to tutor the boys for two years in Greek, Latin, math, and other subjects needed to pass the admission exams. Teedie applied himself to his studies with characteristic zeal, working eight or more hours a day. “The young man never seemed to know what idleness was,” his tutored observed, “and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.” Elliott lost interest in his studies and dropped out, but Teedie finished ahead of schedule and easily passed his admission exams. In 1876 he enrolled in Harvard where he was no longer Teedie, but “Roosevelt of New York,” or Theodore or Teddy, his least favorite name because it was too informal.

  Theodore planned to study “out-of-doors natural history.” He had been fascinated by insects, birds, and other animals since age seven when he saw a dead seal on the sidewalk outside a fish market. “That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure,” he recalled. The boy kept notebooks with sketches and observations of ants, spiders, and beetles. After receiving his first shotgun as a Christmas present at age fourteen, in the name of science Teedie had killed thousands of birds and small animals. He learned taxidermy—the practice of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals to look lifelike—and he usually did the work in his room.