Previously on "the Roosevelts, "
a sickly child roused himself into a life of action.
Don't fritter away your time.
Take a place wherever you are and be somebody.
Young Franklin and Eleanor struggled to fit in.
When he got to Groton and when he got to Harvard,
people didn't like him.
And an assassin's bullet brought a Roosevelt into the White House.
He was a new species, a new kind of man in a new century.
And now part 2
of "The Roosevelts, an intimate history."
In The Arena (1901-1910)
For the first few nights of his new presidency,
Theodore Roosevelt slept at the home of his sister, Bamie,
at 1733 n street,
while the widow of his murdered predecessor, William McKinley,
packed up to leave Washington.
But every morning at 8:30, he started toward his office
in the executive mansion 10 blocks away,
while his secretary struggled to keep up.
His first night there was to be September 23, 1901,
and since his wife and children had not yet arrived,
he asked his sisters Bamie and Corinne
and their husbands to join him for dinner.
The day before had been the birthday of the man whose memory
meant the most to him... his father, Theodore Roosevelt, senior.
"What would I not give if only he could have lived to see me
here in the White House, " the President said.
Then he noticed that the flowers on the dinner table
were Saffronia roses, the same variety his father had worn
every day in his buttonhole.
"I feel as if my father's hand were on my shoulder, " Roosevelt said,
as if there were a special blessing
"over the life I am to lead here."
The man and the moment were perfectly met.
This was America at the turn of the... what was to become
and Americans already felt it... The American century.
Telephones, internal combustion engines,
airplanes, all kinds of stuff.
And here came this, this man who was called a steam engine in trousers.
He just embodied the moment.
Roosevelt has the knack of doing things and doing them noisily, clamorously.
While he is in the neighborhood,
the public can no more look the other way than the small boy
can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by
a steam Calliope.
Theodore Roosevelt would prove to be
a brand-new kind of President for a brand-new century.
But at first, no one knew precisely in which direction
Roosevelt would lead his parade.
In the decades after Abraham Lincoln, most American presidents
had been content to be caretakers.
Real power lay with the congress, with the party machines
that controlled what did and did not happen
on capitol hill, and with the financial giants whose power
grew steadily and whose orders many senators followed without
a second thought.
"I did not care a rap for the form and show of power, "
Roosevelt remembered.
"I cared immensely for the use that could be made
of the substance."
One admirer hailed him as "a stream of fresh",
"pure bracing air from the mountains, sent to clear
the fetid atmosphere of the national capital."
But the novelist Henry James dismissed him as
"the monstrous embodiment of unprecedented
and resounding noise."
"You must always remember, " his friend the French ambassador warned,
"that the President is about 6."
I'm no orator, and in writing, I'm afraid I'm not gifted at all.
If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is
the gift of leadership.
He was the youngest President in history, just 42;
the first to have been born
in a city; The first to be known by his initials... t.R.
He was an author and naturalist, bird-watcher
and big-game hunter, historian and expansionist,
moral crusader and shrewd politician.
And he was also a proud husband and father
whose 6 boisterous children transformed the dark, formal
executive mansion into a giant playhouse overnight.
He is a hyperactive adult, is what Theodore Roosevelt is,
but the man is brilliant.
I think he's very close to a genius, if there is such a thing as a genius.
Of all the presidents of the United States.
He could speed-read before anybody knew the expression,
let alone how to do it,
and quote from what he'd read 5 years later.
He spoke a variety of languages terribly,
almost incomprehensibly in some cases,
but that didn't slow him down.
The first President to go down in a submarine; The first
President to leave the country during the course of his time
in office; The first President to send a transatlantic cable
for the purposes of diplomacy; The first President to own
an automobile; And more important than all of those,
the first President to win the nobel peace prize; And greater still
the first President ever to invite an African American
to dine with him in the White House.
And that's a short list.
He had pledged to "continue, absolutely unbroken,
the policy of President McKinley, "
but he also had a reputation for independence
and unpredictability.
He had been taught by his father to view the world
in terms of right and wrong...
And to see himself always as the defender of the right.
He carried a pulpit around with him.
He really was... this bully pulpit was an appendage.
He was a moralist first, last and always and not one
racked by doubts.
He also understood modern technology.
He understood the cycles of the newspaper business.
He understood that he could claim center stage if he wanted to.
And by claiming center stage he could get his message out
to the American people in a way previous presidents often
had not bothered to.
Among those waiting most eagerly to see what
Theodore Roosevelt would do were two young members of his own clan...
His orphaned niece, Eleanor, just 16, studying in england
and following his activities in the newspapers,
and his young fifth cousin, Franklin, a student at Harvard
but already intrigued by the idea of following into politics,
the man his mother called "your noble kinsman."
It was from Teddy Roosevelt that the American people first
got their sense of political excitement from the President.
They've looked for many things from Washington... competence,
leadership, help.
But excitement?
This is entertainment.
October 17, 1901, the "Atlanta Constitution."
Tonight, just before 8:00, a negro in evening dress
presented himself at the White House door, and, giving
his name, said that he was to dine with the President.
Booker Washington has made several visits to the White House
and his face is known there, so he was at once
admitted into the private apartment.
Within hours of becoming President,
Roosevelt had wired booker t. Washington,
President of the tuskegee institute
and the most powerful black man in America, asking him to
come and see him.
Each man wanted something from the other.
Negro citizens had been brutally and systematically
disenfranchised throughout the South.
Washington wanted the new President's assurance that he
would continue to appoint African Americans to federal jobs
and resist those Republicans who wanted to
crack the solid Democratic South by turning the party
of Lincoln "lily white."
Roosevelt, on the other hand, wanted to make sure that he
and he alone controlled all the black delegates to the
republican convention in 1904.
The dinner invitation for Washington was a matter
of simple courtesy, he said.
"The very fact that I felt a moment's qualm on inviting him"
because of his color made me ashamed of myself and made me
"send the invitation."
A reporter for one of the wire services noticed Washington's name
in the register of visitors and filed a story.
Although black slaves had built the executive mansion
and black servants had waited upon all of its occupants,
no black American had ever dined there before and not
only had the President dined with Washington but he had
done so in the company of his wife and teen-aged daughter, Alice.
White men of the South, how do you like it?
White women of the South, how do you like it?
The negro is not the equal of the white man.
Mr. Roosevelt might as well try to rub the stars out
of the firmament as try to erase that conviction from
the hearts of the American people.
"New Orleans times-democrat"
"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger, "
said senator Ben tillman of South Carolina,
"will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South
before they will learn their place again."
The President was astonished at the furor.
"I would not lose my self- respect by fearing to have
a man like booker t. Washington to dinner, " he wrote, " if it cost me
every political friend I have got."
Washington remained Roosevelt's most important
African-American ally, but the President never again asked him
or any other black person, to dine at the White House.
When Theodore Roosevelt became President,
industrial production had never been higher
or the profits greater.
But only a handful of men dominated American finance
and industry and reaped those profits.
Through the manipulation of some 250 big interlocking,
interstate corporations... Monopolistic trusts...
They dictated the rates farmers paid to ship their
products and the wages and hours and conditions
industrial workers had to accept.
They decided the cost to consumers of everything:
From coal to whiskey, canned carrots to lamp oil.
And they destroyed small businessmen who dared try to
compete with them.
J. Pierpont Morgan, the new York financial titan, who had
been a friend of the President's father,
spoke for most of the men who ran the trusts when he said,
"I owe the public nothing."
That attitude was anathema to Theodore Roosevelt.
He had a patrician scorn for mere wealth and an inbred
sense of responsibility toward society.
I have been in a great quandary over trusts.
I do not know what attitude to take.
I do not intend to play a demagogue.
On the other hand, I do intend to see that the rich man
is held to the same accountability as the poor man,
and when the rich man is rich enough to buy
unscrupulous advice from very able lawyers, this is not always easy.
I think Roosevelt understood
that the trusts were important but they were getting out
of control.
When, the Constitution was written in 1787, there were no
corporations, there were almost no banks.
So all this had sprung up in the 19th century
and particularly after the civil war.
The only counterweight to capitalism is government.
Labor would like to be the counterweight but it isn't quite yet.
So the one entity that can really create a restraining
mechanism on runaway capitalism is government.
And if the Constitution doesn't seem to want that,
we're gonna do it anyway.
On February 18, 1902, without any warning,
the President ordered his justice department to file suit
against one of the trusts in which j.P. Morgan had
a major interest, the northern securities company.
Its goal was the monopolistic control of all
of the rail roads between the Great Lakes
and the Pacific Ocean.
Morgan was stunned.
He hurried to the White House.
"If we have done anything wrong, " he told the President,
"send your man to my man and they can fix it up."
"That can't be done, " the President said.
"We don't want to fix it up, " his Attorney General
philander knox added, "we want to stop it."
Morgan asked if the administration planned to
attack any of his other interests.
Roosevelt replied, not unless they'd done something wrong.
The supreme court would eventually uphold
Roosevelt's actions, finding northern securities had been
in illegal restraint of trade.
The President never directly challenged Morgan again,
but he would invoke the sherman anti-trust act against
40 other trusts during his presidency, more than all
3 of his predecessors combined.
He did not believe that economic concentration
in itself was bad, but he was confident the federal
government had the power
and the moral duty to curb its worst excesses.
What was new in urban life, what was new in all these
cities into which immigrants were pouring as never before,
what was new was a kind of interconnectedness, a sense
in which what happened in Wisconsin to the price of milk
and what happened in Cincinnati to
the price of pork, and what happened to
the railway costs of shipping goods to the east and out to
the west and elsewhere, affected everybody.
Therefore, the federal government as the unifier
of the nation was implicitly involved in everything.
This was the beginning, at the beginning of the 20th century,
what the 20th century became in America:
A great centralizing nation-creating force.
The great corporations are the creatures
of the state, and the state not only has the right to
control them, but it is in duty bound to control them
wherever need of such control is shown.
Government was to be a countervailing power.
It's almost the language of newtonian physics,
the language of our Constitution, checks and balances.
This was checks and balances outside the Constitution.
That the meat trust and the steel trust and the oil trust
were big, maybe they're beneficial, maybe they're
inevitable, but they should not operate alone.
The government must grow to reach up to where they were.
I wonder how a man so thick-set, of rather abdominal contour,
with eyes heavily spectated, could have
so much an air of magic and wild romance about him,
could give one so stirring an impression of adventure
and chivalry.
The "metropolitan magazine."
Fueled by cup after cup of coffee,
served to him in a special mug his eldest son said was as big as a bathtub,
Theodore Roosevelt raced through his day.
Letters were answered upon receipt... A lifetime total of 150,000,
dictated to shifts of weary stenographers.
Jefferson wrote 22,000 letters, and we regard him
as one of the great correspondents
in American history.
Roosevelt wrote at least 150,000 letters.
He's the writing-est President in American history, by far.
And a number of his books are American classics.
So he's an intellectual.
He read a book a day, sometimes 3 books in a day
when he had some leisure.
You think of Jefferson as America's renaissance man,
but it's really Roosevelt.
He would not stop talking.
He was a one-man gasbag.
But it was so interesting that most people didn't mind.
One of my favorite stories is, when he heard that there was
a famous big game hunter in Washington, and he said to
some of the people on his staff, "get that man over here.
I'd really like to meet him."
So the this big, strapping, English fellow was taken into
the President's office.
And the door was closed and people outside the office
heard this talking going on.
Finally the man emerged about an hour and a half later
looking just beat down, just as though he'd been
through a storm.
And one of the President's staff said, "what did you tell"
the President?"
He said, "I told him my name."
We love him because of the energy.
His laugh was infectious.
His son Ted said, "my father had"
a dozen eggs for breakfast every morning."
So he's a large man, and he's larger-than-life.
Roosevelt once said, "there's nothing quite so exhilarating"
as being thrown over the shoulders of a 300-pound Japanese man."
He played all these wild games in the White House.
He wrestled with diplomats.
He played a game called single stick with Leonard Wood
in which they would wrap themselves up in cushions
and then beat the living daylights out of each other
with sticks until Roosevelt had to stop.
He boxed with a young aide, too, until a blow
caused him to lose vision in his left eye.
"Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I
had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing, "
he remembered.
"I then took up jiujitsu for a year or two."
Photographers were forbidden to cover his daily tennis games
because he thought voters considered tennis
a rich man's pastime.
But when a cameraman failed to capture his horse jumping over
an obstacle, he was more than happy to make the jump again.
"Roosevelt bit me, " the editor William Allen White said,
"and I went mad."
In the late summer of 1902,
Roosevelt set out on a two- week tour of New England,
campaigning for trust reform.
He was on his way to speak at the Pittsfield, Massachusetts,
country club on September 3rd...
When a trolley car slammed into his carriage.
His bodyguard was killed.
Roosevelt was hurled 30 feet, landed on his face,
and badly injured his left shin.
He was forced to spend several weeks in a wheelchair,
confronted now with a new crisis that threatened
not only the nation's economy but his own political survival.
Coal mining is a business... Not a religious, sentimental,
or academic proposition.
The rights and interests
of the laboring man will be protected and cared for
not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God
in his infinite wisdom has given control
of the property interests of the country.
George f. Baer,
President, Philadelphia & reading coal and iron company.
America ran on anthracite coal, much of it
mined from Pennsylvania hillsides.
It was a nightmarish business.
16-hour days.
The constant threat of cave-ins and explosions.
Boys as young as 10 breaking big chunks into small ones.
Low wages that had not been raised for more than 20 years...
And company-owned stores intended to swallow up what
little money the miners could scrape together.
And dominating all of it, mine owners adamantly opposed to change.
In the spring, the united mine workers union
had called for a strike.
140,000 men laid down their pick axes.
Management refused even to hear their grievances.
Over the next several months, the price of coal rose from
$5.00 to $30 a ton.
Winter was coming.
Homes would remain unheated.
Roosevelt believed there was a real chance of what he called
"the most awful riots this country has ever seen."
The administration was sure to take the blame.
And Roosevelt decided for the good of the country that he
needed to intervene.
The problem was he had no constitutional authority
of any sort to intervene.
The President summoned both sides to
Washington to discuss what he called "a matter of vital"
concern to the whole nation."
Roosevelt holds them together and he says, "gentlemen",
I want you to agree to arbitrate."
And the coal operators say, "no way, we're not doing it."
We don't have to."
And Roosevelt says, "very well then."
"I will nationalize the mines and use the United States army
to run them for the good of this people."
And they all say, "you have no constitutional authority"
of any sort to do that."
And he says, "I know I don't."
"The President has a moral duty to the American people that is
"higher than his constitutional duty.
And by Godfrey, I'm gonna do it if I have to."
A conservative congressman confronted
the President.
"What about the Constitution of the United States?" He asked.
"How could private property be put to public purposes without
due process of law?"
Roosevelt grasped his visitor's lapels.
"The Constitution was made for the people and not the people
"for the Constitution, " he said.
The mine owners retreated, but only slightly.
They agreed to follow the suggestions of a presidential commission
provided no member of the united mine workers union sat on it.
But Roosevelt was determined that labor have a voice
and appointed the head of the rail road conductor's union, instead.
The owners objected until the President told them,
with a straight face, that he was naming him as
a "sociologist, " not a union man.
I shall never forget the mixture of relief
and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact
that while they would heroically submit to anarchy
rather than have tweedledum, yet if I would call it tweedledee,
they would accept it with rapture; It gave me
an illuminating glimpse into one corner of the mighty brains
of these "captains of industry."
The mine owners continued to
refuse to recognize the union, but they did agree to
a 10% pay raise and a 9-hour day.
The strike ended.
American homes would be heated and in the midterm elections,
the Republicans would maintain majorities
in both houses of congress.
Roosevelt was jubilant.
He was the first President to mediate a labor dispute,
the first to treat labor as a full partner, the first to
threaten to employ federal troops to seize
a strike-bound industry.
And it had all worked.
Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 26, 1902.
Dearest mama, it has been very chilly here for the past week,
and the Harvard buildings have been cold through lack of fuel,
but now that the strike is settled, the coal has
begun to come in small quantities.
In spite of the President's success in settling the trouble,
I think that he makes a serious mistake
in interfering... politically, at least.
His tendency to make the executive power stronger than
the houses of congress is bound to be a bad thing,
especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds
him in office.
Ever with love, f.D.R.
Franklin Roosevelt
was a Harvard sophomore now and echoing the conservative
opinions of classmates whose well-to-do parents were
appalled at his cousin's willingness to deal directly
with labor.
His own mother disagreed.
"One cannot help loving and admiring him the more for it, "
she told her son, "when one realizes that he tried to"
right the wrong."
When James Roosevelt, Franklin's father,
had died in 1900, Sara moved to Boston to be
closer to her son.
She interested herself in every aspect of his life,
exulted in his successes and overlooked his failures,
just as she always had.
Successes did not come easily.
He was not an outstanding student or especially well-liked by his classmates.
Many of them thought him an over-eager lightweight,
just as his schoolmates at Groton had.
He did become the editor of the "Crimson, " and scored
a minor scoop when he learned his famous cousin was coming
to Cambridge, but when he ran for class marshal he lost.
Still too slight for sports, he led cheers
at a football game...
Though he admitted it made him feel "like a damned fool"
waving my arms and legs before several thousand
"amused spectators."
He was elected to several clubs, and fully expected
an invitation to join Harvard's most exclusive club,
the porcellian.
His own father had been
an honorary member; His famous cousin, Theodore, belonged.
But Franklin was blackballed, probably by someone who knew
him at Groton, which made it even worse.
As always, he let no one know how hurt he was, but 15 years
later, he would confide to a young relative that his
rejection by porcellian had been the "greatest"
"disappointment" of his life.
He was disappointed in love, as well.
Alice Sohier was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy
Massachusetts yachtsman...
The "loveliest" debutante of her year, Franklin remembered...
And after courting her for several months he asked her to
marry him.
One day he hoped to be President like his fifth cousin, he told her,
and he hoped to have no fewer than 6 children,
the same number that now called the executive mansion home.
Alice turned him down.
Later, she would say that she'd rejected his proposal
in part because "I did not wish to become a cow."
Franklin never told his mother about Alice, and to ensure she
did not know too much about his private life, had used
a secret code in his terse diary.
But within weeks of his parting with Alice Sohier
in the late summer of 1902, a new name began to
appear in its pages.
I have always been fond of the old west African proverb:
"Speak softly and carry a big stick and you will go far."
The American expansionism Roosevelt had advocated since long before
his days at the Navy department had succeeded
beyond his dreams.
The United States was now a world power.
It had annexed Hawaii, driven Spain from the new world,
dominated Cuba and Puerto Rico, wrested the Philippines
from the Spanish and then begun a brutal, bloody campaign
to subjugate the philippine people, who wanted
to be free of foreign rule by anyone, including Americans.
Tens of thousands died so that the United States could gain
a foothold in the pacific.
To anti-imperialists, like mark twain, such military
adventures betrayed American principles and Roosevelt
himself was nothing more than a "showy charlatan."
I am an anti-imperialist.
I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
Criticism did not much concern Theodore Roosevelt.
He divided the world into what he called "civilized" nations
industrialized and mostly white...
And "uncivilized" nations
that produced raw materials, bought products
instead of manufacturing them, and were incapable,
he believed, of self-government.
The great enemy of civilization was what he called "chaos."
To combat it, it was the duty of "civilized and orderly"
"powers" to police the rest.
Britain should be responsible for India and Egypt.
Japan...
Which Roosevelt now numbered among the "civilized" nations
because it had become an industrial
and military power...
Should control Korea and the Yellow Sea.
And the United States, and only the United States,
must police the Western hemisphere.
It was called the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine.
I don't think Americans by nature are very comfortable
with imperialism and never were.
And had he tried to be more imperialistic than he was,
he would have been stopped.
I think he believed in power.
He was not as good as he should have been in dealing
with foreign nations and particularly if he thought
they were inferior to our way of life or to us as a people.
His very high-handed treatment of the Colombians during the
negotiations for the Panama treaty was inexcusable.
For Roosevelt, one great expansionist vision
remained unfulfilled.
For more than half a century, American and European investors
had dreamed of a central American canal linking
the Atlantic to the pacific.
Roosevelt believed such an inter-ocean pathway was now
indispensable for the full exercise of American naval power.
A French company was already trying to build a canal across
the jungle-covered Panama province in the nation
of Colombia, but that effort had stalled, a victim of poor planning,
lack of money, and deadly tropical diseases.
When the French offered to sell their rights, Roosevelt
agreed to buy them, then instructed his
secretary of state, John Hay, to negotiate
a treaty with Colombia.
It called for a payment of $10 million, plus an annual
rental fee for a 6-mile "canal zone" across the isthmus.
But the Colombian senate rejected the deal, and then
demanded double the price.
Roosevelt was enraged.
"I do not think that the bogota lot of Jack rabbits
"should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future
"highways of civilization, " he said.
The refusal of the Colombian senate to honor its
government's commitment was just the latest embodiment
of the kind of "chaos" he deplored.
Roosevelt believed that a canal across the central
American isthmus would be good for the United States and good
for civilization.
It would also be good for Theodore Roosevelt.
He often mingled those three.
And he believed that anybody, any government, any person who
stood in the way of that was obstructing civilization.
And Roosevelt had very little patience for those people who
didn't see the way history was going, the way history is
supposed to go in the same light that he did,
and he simply wouldn't allow them to get in the way.
He was determined to get an American canal underway.
He would not attack Colombia directly, but he would exploit
the aspirations of the people of Panama province, who had
for 50 years asserted their wish to be independent
of bogota.
Roosevelt agreed to meet with Phillipe Bunau-Varilla,
a lobbyist for the French canal-builders, who was
in touch with rebels already eager to rise against
Colombian rule.
It was a delicate What did the
frenchman think was going to happen in Panama province?
"Mr. President," his visitor said, "a revolution."
Roosevelt was careful to say nothing about how the United States might respond.
His silence spoke volumes.
He had no assurances in any way, but he is a very able fellow,
and it was his business to find out what he
thought our government would do.
I have no doubt that he was able to make a very accurate guess
and to advise his people accordingly.
In fact, he would have been a very dull man
had he been unable to make such a guess.
5 days later, the rebels proclaimed their independence.
An American cruiser landed troops to overcome the handful
of Colombian soldiers the revolutionaries hadn't already
bought off.
It was all over within 72 hours.
The President was presiding at a cabinet meeting at 11:35
on the morning of November 6, 1903, when a messenger brought
him the happy news.
By the time lunch was served, the United States had
recognized the brand-new Republic of Panama.
"The people of the isthmus, " Roosevelt would claim, "rose literally as one man."
"Yes, " said a senate critic, "and that man was Roosevelt."
Work on the great canal began again,
but now it was an American project.
And Roosevelt himself would not be able to resist seeing it
for himself, the first President ever to leave
the country while in office.
The Panama canal is one of the great achievements
of the human race.
I mean just a stupendous achievement, wonderfully conceived,
brilliantly executed, with all kinds
of ancillary benefits... Conquest of disease
and other things.
And it's the sort of thing that America did just to
affirm its greatness.
It's better to do it that way than conquering other people.
This was a wholly beneficial addition.
Now we did get the land for the Panama canal by a not-too-salubrious deal
with certain central American countries.
But as was said at the time of the Panama canal treaty,
"we stole it fair and square."
I took the canal zone and let congress debate, and while
the debate goes on, the canal does, too.
And now instead of discussing the canal before it was built,
which would have been harmful, they merely discuss me...
A discussion which I regard with benign interest.
For Thanksgiving that year, Franklin Roosevelt and his mother
traveled to the delano family homestead at Fairhaven, Massachusetts,
rather than face the prospect of being
at Springwood without his father, Mr. James.
After dinner, Franklin took Sara for a walk in the garden.
He had something to tell her.
He had fallen in love with his fifth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt,
the orphaned daughter of the President's late brother, Elliot.
He had asked her to marry him.
She had said yes.
Sara was stunned.
Franklin was just 21; Eleanor only 19.
And if they married, she feared she would be left alone.
Franklin did his best to reassure her.
"You know, dear mummy, that nothing can ever change
"what we have always been and always will be to each other, " he wrote.
"Only now you have two children to love and to love you."
It is impossible for me to tell you how I feel
toward Franklin.
I can only say that my one great wish is always to prove
worthy of him.
I know just how you feel and how hard it must be,
but I do want you to learn to love me a little.
Being loved a little
was the best Eleanor Roosevelt dared wish for.
"Franklin had always been so secure in every way, "
she remembered, "and then he discovered that I was"
perfectly insecure."
Everything in her upbringing had seemed calculated to make
her feel that way.
Her beautiful mother, Anna hall, had been
distracted, disappointed in her daughter's looks
and called her "granny."
She made her feel unattractive.
And she made her feel diminished.
And Eleanor Roosevelt grew up really feeling both that her
mother didn't love her and that she failed her mother.
Her mother was very beautiful and quite
self-obsessed, I think.
But she was subject to headaches, and she would allow
Eleanor to rub her forehead and soothe her for hours.
And she says in her autobiography that that was
when she realized that the way to be loved
was to be of use to others.
And that lesson she never forgot.
I can't even bear to think of what it was like for her when
her mother would call her "granny."
And yet to be able somehow because of that sadness to
connect to other people for whom fate had also dealt
an unkind hand, somehow that connection gave her
the strength because her vulnerability could be
expressed by helping them.
Her largely absent father... whom she idealized
and would never stop yearning for... had in reality been
an erratic alcoholic and delusional.
From afar, he sent her letters full of promises he could
She would come and care for him someday, he said;
they would travel the world together; He would show her
the Taj Mahal by moonlight.
Eleanor Roosevelt suffered all her life from the romanticism
that happens when you lose a parent.
She had the notion that somehow her mother had driven
her wonderful father away when her father was, in fact,
an alcoholic.
And she believed somehow the way small children do that
the absent parent is a sort of fairy-tale person.
She never stopped believing.
When she was an old lady she asked a clergyman if she might
possibly be reunited with him in heaven.
So it really was a life-long unexamined thing.
And it gave her a sort of unrealistic view of what
men could be.
Both her parents were dead by the time she was 10.
She and her younger brother, hall, for whom she would
always feel responsible, were sent off to live with her
grim, pious, maternal grandmother
in Tivoli, New York.
An abusive nurse was with her, day and night.
An unstable aunt lived at home.
So did two drunken uncles.
None of them was much interested in Eleanor.
She was a lonely little girl, she remembered, timid,
withdrawn, and "frightened of practically everything"...
Mice, the dark, other children, "displeasing"
the people I lived with."
During her infrequent visits to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt
was always especially warm toward his late brother's daughter.
He once hugged her so hard, he tore the buttonholes
out of her petticoat.
Well, she spoke about him when she was a child
and how she was very fearful of her visits to his family
because they were a rowdy bunch of kids having a good time,
rushing around.
And also when her Uncle discovered she couldn't swim,
he threw her into the water and then she was
scared of water all her life.
"Poor little soul, she is very plain, "
the President's wife Edith Roosevelt had written.
"Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future."
It was the President's sister, Bamie, who would indirectly be
Eleanor's salvation.
Bamie had once spent a season studying overseas
with an extraordinary woman, named Marie Souvestre.
Now she suggested that Eleanor be sent to Souvestre's girl's school
just outside London... Allenswood.
I felt that I was starting a new life, free from all my
former sins and traditions.
This was the first time in all my life
that all my fears left me.
Eleanor spent 3 years at Allenswood,
the happiest of her life, she remembered.
Mademoiselle Souvestre insisted that her students be
independent-minded, intellectually alive,
and socially conscious.
"Why was your mind given you, " she liked to ask her students,
"but to think things out for yourself?"
She devoted herself to the tall, diffident American orphan
and brought out all the tact and intelligence,
discipline and energy and empathy that would
characterize her later in life.
Eleanor eventually became the most-admired girl
in the school.
It was at Allenswood, a cousin recalled, "that she"
for the first time was deeply loved and loved in return."
"Whatever I have become, " Eleanor would say many years
later, "had its seeds in those 3 years of contact"
with a liberal mind and strong personality."
But when she was 17, her grandmother insisted she
end her schooling and come home to prepare for her debut
in New York society.
In her grandmother's circle, you joined society,
you went to fancy dress balls, and you got married at 18.
And Eleanor Roosevelt was quite miserable about that,
and always, to the end of her life, complained about how she
was deprived of what she always wanted... a real education.
She spent that summer back at Tivoli,
where one of her alcoholic uncles had become
so uncontrollable, he could not be discouraged from spraying
buckshot from his bedroom window at anyone who dared
venture onto the lawn.
3 locks had to be installed on Eleanor's bedroom door.
"It was not, " she remembered, "a very good
preparation for being a gay and joyous debutante."
I imagine that I was well-dressed, but there was
absolutely nothing about me to attract anybody's attention.
By no stretch of the imagination could I fool myself
into thinking that I was a popular debutante.
On November 17, 1902, just 5 weeks after
Franklin Roosevelt had said good-bye to Alice Sohier,
he had attended the New York horse show at Madison square garden.
Several Roosevelt cousins were invited to sit in his half-brother Rosy's special box,
including Eleanor.
She and Franklin had seen one another casually at family
events over the years, but now he asked to see her again
and again and again.
It happened on the rebound.
She was also Theodore Roosevelt's favorite niece.
But I think that was a very small part of the equation.
She was very intelligent.
She was very substantive.
There was a lot there.
He was fascinated by her substance, I think.
He truly did love her.
I think that's very important to understand.
I think he saw in Eleanor somebody who had
deeper complexities,
the part of him that wanted to reach out to other people.
She cared about issues.
I don't know how many other women in that social world
that he was in would have talked that same way to him.
Perhaps it was opposites attracting in some ways.
He saw that stubbornness in her, that idealism.
He was much more pliable in a certain sense.
But it speaks really well of the depth to him that many
people might not have seen at the time, that Eleanor was
the girl that he fell in love with.
A little over a year later, he invited her to
Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game.
That evening, he wrote another entry in his diary: "After lunch",
I have a never-to-be- forgotten walk to the river
"with my darling."
He had proposed.
With her help, he said, he could make
something of himself.
She had asked him, "why me? I am plain."
I have little to bring you."
But she had also said yes.
When Franklin told his mother his big news at Thanksgiving,
she asked him to keep the engagement a secret
for a year, to see if their feelings for one another were
truly lasting.
His personality so crowds the room that the walls are
worn thin and threaten to burst outwards.
You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt
and hear him talk, and then go home to wring
the personality out of your clothes.
Richard Washburn child.
As the 1904 presidential election drew near, the executive mansion...
Newly rebuilt, refurbished, and officially renamed the White House...
Mirrored Theodore Roosevelt's enthusiasms.
Footmen wore blue-and- white Roosevelt livery.
The President's gilt initials gleamed from the sides
of 3 new carriages.
The stuffed heads of a dozen north American mammals he'd
shot personally stared down from the walls of the state
dining room.
Theodore and Edith Roosevelt delighted in the company
of writers, artists, and musicians, who were
frequent visitors to the White House.
The pianist paderewski performed at one
of Edith's musicales.
So did a promising young cellist named Pablo casals.
The President invited John singer sargent to live
with the first family for a week while he painted TR's
official portrait, and when Roosevelt learned that his
favorite poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, was working
12 hours a day in the New York subway, he got him
a less-demanding position at the New York customs house.
"A poet, " he said, "can do much more for this country
than the proprietor of a nail factory."
The public loved reading about the Roosevelt White House,
but they clamored to see the President in person, and he
was more than happy to oblige.
Huge crowds turned out to see him wherever he went,
and he went everywhere.
Whenever I stopped at a small city or country town,
I was greeted by the usual shy, self-conscious, awkward body
of local committeemen, and spoke to the usual
audience of thoroughly good American citizens.
That is, the audience consisted of the townspeople, but even more
largely of gaunt, sinewy farmers and hired hands
who had driven in with their wives and daughters,
from 10 or 20 or even 30 Miles round about.
And for all the superficial differences between us,
down at bottom these men and I think a good deal alike,
or at least have the same ideals, and I am always sure
of reaching them in speeches which many of my Harvard friends
would think not only homely, but commonplace.
He was the first American President
who had the look and the sound and the education
of a Harvard man, and there'd never been anything like that
in American politics.
And I think part of the immense appeal of Theodore Roosevelt
is that he didn't shed that background.
He didn't try to talk like the ordinary folk.
His upper-class accent, his upper-class tastes...
Once people got over that, then they realized we love him
because he is this way, because he isn't trying to be
just like we are.
He's himself.
And he's resolutely himself all through his life.
That year, the democrats nominated
judge alton b. Parker of New York for President...
An able jurist but also, as Roosevelt said privately,
"a neutral-tinted individual."
The President promised voters what he called a "square deal, "
favoring neither capital nor labor,
rich nor poor.
"If the cards do not come to any man, "
he said, "or if they do come, and he has not the power"
"to play them, that is his affair.
"All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness
in the dealing."
Here's what you can expect from your government.
You can expect a square deal, so that the rich man
and the poor man are treated fairly, that there is due process
that doesn't favor the rich.
Roosevelt's essential view was government needn't
redistribute to the lower orders, but it should never
align itself with the wealthy and the privileged against
common people.
At the very least, government needs to be absolutely neutral
in the way it treats the citizens of this country.
By late October, a Roosevelt victory seemed
so likely that the big financiers who both feared
and hated him scurried to write handsome checks
for his campaign.
Still, he wrote to one of his sons, he worried that he might
not be elected President in his own right.
If things go wrong on election night remember, Kermit,
that we are very, very fortunate to have had 3 years
in the White House, and that I have had a chance
to accomplish work such as comes to very, very few men
in any generation; And that I have no business to feel downcast
merely because when so much has been given me,
I have not had even more.
Your loving father.
Edith Roosevelt invited a few friends
for dinner on election night... "A little feast, "
she called it, "which can be turned into a festival"
of rejoicing or into a wake as circumstances warrant."
It was soon clear her husband would win by a landslide.
He took nearly every state outside the old
Democratic confederacy.
"Have swept the country, " he wired a friend.
"I had no idea there would be such a sweep."
Then at this moment of personal triumph, and without
consulting anyone, he made the worst blunder of his
political career.
The Constitution said nothing about how many terms
a President might serve.
But because George Washington had refused to stand
for a third term, none of his successors had dared try to
break that precedent.
Roosevelt could have argued that he would not really have
had two full terms since he had shared his first with the
assassinated William McKinley,
but he viewed that as a mere technicality.
"Under no circumstances, " he told the press, "will I
accept another nomination."
As he spoke, Edith and his daughter Alice
visibly flinched.
Roosevelt decided in the flush of victory on election night
that he was going to silence all of those people who said
that he was merely a politician.
And he said that he would not run for another term in 1908.
Now this appalled his wife, Edith.
It appalled all of his supporters.
It eventually appalled him.
"I would cut my hand off, " he told a friend,
"if I could recall that statement."
At the pinnacle of his power, he worried that he had made
himself a lame duck.
He would do everything he could to make sure that would
not happen.
Dear Franklin, we are greatly rejoiced.
I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter, and I
like you and trust you and believe in you.
You and Eleanor are true and brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly,
and golden years open before you.
May all good fortune attend you both. Give my love to your dear mother.
Your affectionate cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.
On December 1, 1904,
less than 3 weeks after Franklin Roosevelt
had proudly cast his first presidential vote
for his cousin, Theodore, he and Eleanor finally
announced their engagement.
The newspapers paid most attention to
the President's niece.
Franklin was identified only as a member of the New York
yacht club who'd lost an election for class marshal
at Harvard.
The year of secrecy about their relationship had been
hard on both Franklin and Eleanor.
They had to meet without arousing the curiosity
of friends or relatives or talkative servants,
and they could rarely be alone together.
"I want you so much, " Eleanor wrote after plans for one meeting had to be canceled.
Franklin's mother made things still more difficult.
She promised her son she would "love Eleanor and adopt her
"fully when the right time comes, " but meanwhile she
looked for ways to keep them apart, even took her son
on a Caribbean cruise in hope that he might get over
his infatuation.
Meanwhile, Eleanor had discovered the rewards
of useful work.
Like many debutantes of her era, she had volunteered to
work with immigrant children in a settlement house...
In her case, on Rivington street on the lower east side.
Unlike most of her contemporaries, she took her
work seriously.
She rode public transportation, worked
overtime, sometimes turned down invitations rather than
miss a class.
She meets with folks who create the junior league.
The junior league is made up of young women, just like
Eleanor Roosevelt, very affluent, born to privilege,
who recognize that there is no security for anybody when
there's insecurity and misery for many.
One afternoon, when Franklin dropped by to
visit, a little girl fell ill.
Eleanor asked him to carry her home.
He did and never forgot the sights and foul smells
of the tenement in which she lived.
"My God, " he told Eleanor.
"I didn't know anyone lived like that."
I think Eleanor Roosevelt played a very important part
in making Franklin see the world out beyond the very
elegant Harvard world that he had known,
and it had an enormous impact on him.
And I really think that went on throughout their lives,
when he couldn't move beyond his office she really
did become his eyes and ears.
She was far, far more than that.
But she told him what was really happening in the real
world all the time.
She loved her work, found fulfillment in helping
others that she never found elsewhere.
But she was willing to give up that work
and the independent life it promised
for marriage, hoping to find in her husband a confidant
and to find in his mother something like the loving
mother she had never had.
It was a bargain she would often regret.
Each wanted from a relationship something that
the other in the end couldn't quite give.
She wanted an intimate, someone she could confide in,
a husband who was always supportive and always
there for her.
He could not provide that.
He wanted someone who had all the devotion to him that his
mother had had but not the admonitory part, the part that
told him what to do and what not to do.
And sadly Eleanor couldn't be worshipful and had to
be admonitory.
On March 4, 1905, the President invited
the newly engaged couple to his inauguration.
Franklin and I went to our seats on the capitol steps
just back of Uncle Ted and his family.
I was interested and excited, but politics still meant
little to me, though I can remember the forceful manner
in which Uncle Ted delivered his speech.
I told myself I had seen an historic event,
and I never expected to see
another inauguration in the family.
Franklin never took his eyes off the President.
13 days later on March 17th, President Roosevelt
was to lead the St. Patrick's day parade up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt chose that day to marry
in a cousin's parlor on east 76th street, so that
the President could be there to give his late brother's
daughter away.
The wedding of miss Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin delano Roosevelt, her cousin,
took on the semblance of a national event.
The presence of President Roosevelt, the bride's Uncle,
Miss Alice Roosevelt, and Mrs. Roosevelt and, as some rather
enthusiastic if not discreet woman observed, the entire
family in every degree of Cousinship...
Made it very much like a "royal alliance."
The "New York Times"
When the reverend Endicott peabody of Groton, asked,
"who giveth this woman in marriage?"
The President shouted back, "I do!"
His oldest daughter Alice remembered that "father always"
wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse
"at every funeral, and the baby at every christening."
As soon as Franklin and Eleanor exchanged their vows,
he slapped the groom on the back.
"Well, Franklin, " he said, "there's nothing like keeping
the name in the family."
Then, he hurried into the room where refreshments were served
and held forth for an hour and a half.
The newlyweds were largely overlooked.
Franklin and Eleanor's honeymoon would last
more than 3 months.
He assured his mother he and Eleanor were
having a "scrumptious time."
But there were private hints of strain:
Franklin sleepwalked, suffered nightmares, developed
persistent hives.
Eleanor grew jealous when she chose not to accompany him up
an Italian mountainside and he went anyway, in a party that
included an attractive new York milliner who happened to
be staying at their hotel.
But everywhere they went, Franklin told his mother,
all anyone wanted to talk about was
cousin Theodore.
President Roosevelt had just succeeded at something no
other statesman had dared attempt... helping to end
the conflict that threatened to disrupt the balance of power
in the pacific.
For 2 years, Russia and Japan had been at war over
which would dominate manchuria and Korea.
Russia had found itself on the losing end.
Japan occupied Korea, took Port Arthur, and sank most
of the czar's fleet in the battle of Tsushima.
For the first time in centuries, an Asian power had
defeated a Western one,
but its victories had been won at a fearful cost.
Roosevelt believed that the United States needed to assert itself
and say, "we're a player."
We're not that isolationist nation across the Atlantic.
We're part of this story now and we're going to
"assert ourselves."
He decides it would be ruinous for the future of the planet
if either side won decisively.
He wanted Russia to be humbled by the Japanese and he admired
the Japanese.
But he realized that if the Japanese won outright
and devastated Russia, this would lead to
a destabilization of the pacific.
And so he wanted to settle this before it got too far
out of hand.
In August of 1905, President Roosevelt was able
to persuade both sides to agree to send representatives
to a conference near Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Before talks began, he invited them aboard the presidential
yacht in Oyster Bay, provided a stand-up lunch so that no one
could claim he'd been slighted by the seating
arrangements, and proposed a toast to which he insisted
there be no responses, asking "in the interests of all mankind
that a just and lasting peace may speedily be concluded."
Then, he worked behind the scenes to hammer out
an agreement... the treaty of Portsmouth.
Each side could claim some Russia
abandoned all claims to Korea; Japan dropped its demand
for payment for the costs of the war; The disputed island
of sakhalin was split in two.
This is splendid, this is magnificent.
This is a mighty good thing for Russia, a mighty good
thing for Japan, and mighty good for me, too!
Roosevelt's friend
and frequent critic, Henry Adams, declared him "the best"
herder of emperors since Napoleon."
For his efforts, Roosevelt was awarded the nobel peace prize,
the first American to win any nobel prize.
But the President remained a realist
about the prospects for a permanent peace
in the pacific.
Sooner or later, the Japanese will try to bolster up their
power by another war.
Unfortunately for us, we have what they want most:
The Philippines.
When it comes, we will win over Japan,
but it will be one of the most disastrous conflicts the world
has ever seen.
Oyster Bay. August 26, 1905.
Dear Kermit, the other day a reporter asked Quentin
something about me, to which that affable and canny young
gentleman responded, "yes, I see him sometimes; But I"
know nothing of his family life."
The country was as obsessed
with Roosevelt's family as it was with him.
Sagamore Hill still provided some privacy.
Roosevelt cousins gathered there during the summer,
sometimes 14 at a time.
The President led them on what he called
"point-to-point" walks...
Long strenuous dashes through woods and marshes, pushing
through brambles, crawling under fences or scrambling
over them, and never, ever going around anything.
He didn't tell his children, especially his sons, that they
needed to live up to his example.
But everything that he did indicated that people who
didn't live up to that kind of example were somehow
lesser individuals.
And the sons couldn't help but imbibe that attitude.
It was very difficult being a child, especially a son,
of Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore, Jr... Ted...
Was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman.
His father had pushed him so hard when he was small that
Edith and a physician had had to intervene.
He remained a "regular bull terrier, " his proud father
wrote, stoical enough to have finished a Groton football game
despite a broken collarbone.
16-year-old Kermit was shy, bookish, moody, a student
at Groton who sometimes suffered from the family curse
of depression.
But the White House was still home to 14-year-old Ethel
and Archie, age 11.
Both were quiet and sweet-tempered.
7-year-old Quentin was sweet-tempered, too.
But he was also mischievous and irrepressible, a "fine"
"little bad boy, " according to his mother, fond of big words
that he bit off just as his father did, and accustomed to
giving orders to the band of small boys that called
themselves "the White House gang."
His father's nickname for him was "quentyquee."
The children's' pets were allowed to roam everywhere...
Rabbits, raccoons, cats, dogs, a badger named josiah that
their father described as looking "like a mattress"
with legs."
It bit only legs, Archie assured nervous visitors,
not faces.
They smuggled a pony into the White House elevator and up to
the second floor, rolled giant snowballs down the White House roof
and onto the heads of policemen, spattered Gilbert Stuart's
portrait of George Washington with spitballs,
and used mirrors to reflect sunlight into the eyes
of clerks trying to work in the neighboring
state-war-Navy building.
Father doesn't care for me one-eighth as much as he does
for the other children.
It is perfectly true that he doesn't, and lord, why should he?
We are not in the least congenial, and if I don't care
overmuch for him and don't take a bit of interest
in the things he likes, why should he pay any
attention to me or the things I live for, except to look
on them with disapproval?
Alice Roosevelt.
Alice was 21, the daughter
of Theodore Roosevelt's first wife, Alice Lee, whose death
remained so painful to him he could not bear to
speak her name.
Her early life had been divided among her mother's
parents, her aunt Bamie and her father and stepmother
at Sagamore Hill.
Like her cousin Eleanor, she felt she had never had
a real home of her own.
She always felt like the fifth wheel.
She felt that for some reason or other TR resisted her.
And so there's a sort of tension in their relationship.
Alice had some of that mighty Rooseveltian energy.
But for a woman in this period, there were so few avenues to
release that energy in a socially useful way, so she
was straight-jacketed by the mores of her time.
Edith and Theodore had urged her to remain
ladylike, tractable, reserved...
To behave the way Eleanor did.
Instead, Alice set out to be "conspicuous."
She had been the first teen-aged girl to grow up
in the White House in a quarter of a century,
was attractive, outspoken, desperate to be noticed.
She did everything...
Or almost everything...
A young woman of her age and standing should not have done.
She smoked.
She bet on the horses, took long un-chaperoned
automobile rides in a bright red roadster, flirted
with battalions of wealthy young men in New York
and Newport and wore a green snake as a wriggling fashion
accessory to divert attention during one of her father's
meetings with the press.
Her face was everywhere...
Candy boxes, song sheets, the front pages of newspapers
around the world.
The German Navy named a ship for her.
Overseas crowds hailed her as "princess Alice."
The family was always telling me, "beware of publicity!"
And there was publicity hitting me in the face every day.
And once stories got out, or were invented,
I was accused of courting publicity.
I destroyed a savage letter on the subject from my father.
There was he, one of the greatest experts in publicity
there ever was, accusing me of trying to steal his limelight.
Alice Roosevelt would remain
a Thorn in the side of one Roosevelt or another
for decades.
The "Washington Post."
It is now universally recognized by experienced
politicians of all parties that Roosevelt has more
political acumen in one lobe of his brain than the whole
militant tribe of American politicians have in their
combined intelligence; That his political perception,
so acute as to amount almost to divination, is superior to
that of any American statesman of the present
or immediate past era.
In June of 1906, Theodore Roosevelt seemed almost invincible.
In his most recent message to congress, he had called
for a series of national solutions to national problems,
righting wrongs through progressive legislation.
The country was changing, and the "troublesome conscience"
he had inherited from his father would not let
him ignore those injustices.
Roosevelt realized that we were no longer a rural people.
We were an urban people.
He realized that industry was out of control.
So when he looked at this, he thought, "well what can we do"
to make sure that all Americans can thrive?"
So he's essentially trying to do what Jefferson was trying
to do in the "declaration of independence, " but he's looking
around at the technologies, the demographics,
the ethnicity, and he realizes that in order to achieve
a jeffersonian nation, you have to adopt hamiltonian means.
And so progressive is using government to bring
about reforms that will enable everyone to thrive even if
they don't have the advantages of the jeffersons,
the Madisons, the monroes, the white anglo-Saxon peoples
for whom the country works best.
The country has to work for everyone or it doesn't work
for anyone in Roosevelt's mind.
Now, over the furious objections
of the rail roads and the powerful republican senators
they controlled, Roosevelt won passage
of the hepburn act.
It empowered the interstate commerce commission to limit
the rates the rail roads could charge to move goods from
place to place, and for the first time in American history
gave the rulings of a federal agency the force of law.
One of Teddy Roosevelt's great accomplishments was
the hepburn act.
No one remembers it now, but it was a big deal at that time
because he not only favored federal regulation of rail road
freight rates, but he did something no one had ever done
before... he campaigned as President around the country
for a piece of legislation.
That was a shocking expansion of the pretenses
of the presidency.
Employing his skill to out think and outmaneuver
the opposition behind the scenes and his uncanny
ability to rally the people to his cause, he pushed through
more bills
that began to rewrite the role of government
in American life.
With indirect help from crusading journalists,
he championed the pure food and drug act, which demanded
that the producers of everything from patent medicines
to canned tomatoes accurately label their products.
And when the meat-packing trust tried to block
an inspection bill that would have cleaned up their
appalling slaughterhouses, Roosevelt released part
of the findings of a federal investigation into industry
practices and then threatened to make public the rest
if they didn't back down.
They did.
I attack.
I attack iniquities.
I try to choose the time for an attack when I can get
the bulk of the people to accept the principles
for which I stand.
Roosevelt enraged those whom he denounced
as "malefactors of great wealth", especially those
who had contributed to his 1904 campaign in hopes
of having some control over his policies.
"We bought the son of a bitch, " one said, "but he
wouldn't stay bought."
Theodore Roosevelt understood the enormous energies that
were being loosed in America.
And he saw that among the things they could devour,
these forces, if not contained, would be some
of the irreplaceable beauties of the country.
The antiquities act Roosevelt had also signed
in June of 1906 empowered the President to provide
protection for prehistoric ruins as well as "objects"
"of scientific interest" on federal lands
without having to ask permission of the congress.
He immediately reinterpreted the act so that he could also
save as national monuments some of the country's most
extraordinary natural wonders,
including devil's tower and the muir woods, mount Olympus,
and more than 800,000 acres of the grandest canyon on earth.
Before Theodore Roosevelt left office...
And over the objections of the speaker of the house, Joseph g. Cannon,
who liked to say, "not one cent for scenery"...
He would create 51 bird sanctuaries, 4 national game refuges,
and 18 national monuments.
He doubled the number of national parks from 5 to 10,
saving Western landscapes like those where he had first
learned that ceaseless action could defeat despair.
He also helped save the buffalo from extinction,
leather animal he had actionable loved to shoot. Air.
He set aside more than 280,000 square Miles of federal land
under one kind of conservation protection or another...
An area larger than the state of Texas...
And created the United States forest service to see that
the development of natural resources be done
in a responsible, sustainable way.
Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich
heritage that is theirs.
There can be nothing more beautiful than the yosemite,
the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods,
the canyon of the Colorado, the canyon of the yellowstone,
the 3 tetons.
And our children should see to it
that they are preserved for their children
and their children's children forever with their majestic
beauty unmarred.
We are not building this country of ours for a day.
It is to last through the ages.
Office of the mayor, brownsville, Texas.
Dear Mr. President, at a few minutes before midnight
on Monday, August 13, 1906, a body of soldiers
of the first battalion of the 25th United States infantry, colored,
numbering between 20 to 30 men,
began firing in town directly into dwellings,
offices, stores, and at police and citizens.
Our women and children are terrorized.
Back in August of 1906, President Roosevelt had
ordered the war department inspector general,
a white South carolinian, to investigate charges related to
an alleged rampage in brownsville, Texas, by black troops
that had left a white bartender dead and a police officer wounded.
The army was totally segregated then,
and the soldiers had been abused and insulted by whites
ever since they'd arrived in brownsville just 3 weeks earlier.
The soldiers denied any wrongdoing.
The regiment's white commanding officer backed them up.
His men had all been safely in their barracks
on the night in question.
A Texas grand jury failed to indict any of the soldiers.
Race relations had not improved since Roosevelt
invited booker t. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901.
More than 400 black men and women had been lynched since then.
Black voters were still barred from the polls
throughout the South.
And a new generation of African Americans was growing
impatient with booker t. Washington's caution and his coziness with Roosevelt.
The President had made a few symbolic gestures toward
civil rights.
He denounced the lawlessness of lynching and when whites
in Indianola, Mississippi, forced his black appointee as
postmistress to resign, he closed the post office
and made them travel 20 Miles to get their mail.
But he also made much of his confederate ancestry whenever
he was in the South and privately said it would take
black people "many thousands of years" to match
the intellectual powers of white people.
The inspector general's report
on the brownsville incident recommended that the President
should dismiss all of the soldiers, because none
would confess.
Booker t. Washington wrote to him and said, "please, Mr. President",
"I will not criticize you publicly.
"You are my dear friend.
But I ask you to reopen this case and to look again."
He refused and he got more and more righteous
and shrill about it.
This is without question the most dishonorable moment
of Roosevelt's long and extraordinary career.
Roosevelt waited till November 7th,
the day after hundreds of thousands of blacks cast their
votes for his party's congressional candidates all
across the north, and then dismissed all 167 men from the service.
One had fought alongside TR in Cuba.
That sergeant remembered splitting his rations
with Roosevelt himself after the battle of Las Guasimas.
None of the men would get a penny in pension.
Some black intellectuals, including w.E.B. Dubious,
began to suggest that African-Americans now abandon
the party of Abraham Lincoln for the democrats.
Roosevelt angrily denounced critics of his brownsville
decision as naive "sentimentalists, " but when
the time came to write his autobiography, he chose to make
no mention of the case.
A Christmas present to Franklin and Eleanor
from mama.
Number and street not quite yet decided... 19 or 20 feet wide.
In the winter of 1908,
Franklin and Eleanor moved into the 6-story New York townhouse
his mother had built for them at 49 east 65th street.
With them came their first two children, 2-year-old Anna
and 11-month-old James, as well as Eleanor's
younger brother hall and 6 servants.
Sara and 3 more servants occupied the house's twin
at number 47.
The Roosevelt family crest was carved above the common
entrance and open doors on three floors connected
the households.
Sara had hired the staff.
She and her son had also overseen the construction and furnishing.
Eleanor had played almost no part.
Not long after they moved in, Franklin found her weeping.
He asked what was wrong.
I said I did not like to live in a house, which was
not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about
and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.
Being an eminently reasonable person, he thought I was quite mad
and told me so gently, and said I would feel
different in a little while and left me alone until I
should become calmer.
Eleanor did calm down, she recalled,
but her outburst was the first sign
that in the interest of her marriage she had simply been
"absorbing the personalities of those around me and letting
"their tastes and interests dominate me" and that she resented it.
Franklin delighted in his children.
Eleanor seemed mostly puzzled by them.
"I had never had any interest in dolls or in little
children, " she remembered, "and I knew absolutely nothing
about handling or feeding a baby."
Nannies hired and fired by her mother-in-law saw to such details.
"Brother fell out of his chair this morning, " she noted one day.
"Anna did not come to breakfast because she said,
no, I won't. '"
misbehavior alarmed her; So did the nurses
who told her how to handle it.
I think Eleanor never found her stride as a mother,
in part because she had had such terrible mothering on her own,
her own mother being so cold to her, dying when
Eleanor was young, but also maybe never accepting Eleanor
for who she was.
So she had no model to go toward when she had her
own children.
Franklin had attended Columbia law school,
passed the New York bar, and, with the help of family
connections, had gone to work as a clerk for the Wall Street
law firm of Carter, led yard, and mil burn.
The law itself didn't interest him much.
A member of the firm recalled that he "tended to dance"
"on the top of the hills" and leave to others the hard work
on the slopes below.
But at the courthouse, he got to know all kinds of people
he'd never encountered at Groton or Harvard... ambulance
chasers and penniless plaintiffs and witnesses both
credible and incredible.
And "thanks to Uncle Ted, " his wife remembered, he was
already interested in politics.
A few months after the Roosevelts moved to 65th street,
Eleanor gave birth to a third child, at 11 pounds,
"the biggest and most beautiful of all the babies, "
she remembered.
They named him Franklin, Jr.
And immediately registered his name at Groton.
That July, Eleanor and several servants took the 3 children
to their summer home in Campobello, new brunswick.
Sara had bought the younger Roosevelts their own "cottage"
on the island, entirely separate from hers.
There was no electricity, no telephone; All the cooking
had to be done on a coal stove.
Eleanor loved it.
It was hers, the first real home she had ever known.
But as the weeks went by, it became clear that something
was wrong with the new baby's heart.
Doctors were consulted, first on the island, then
in Hyde Park, finally back in Manhattan.
No one seemed able to do anything.
November 1st.
At a little before 7 A.M., Franklin called my room.
"Better come, mama, baby is sinking."
I went in.
The little angel ceased breathing at 7:25.
Franklin and Eleanor are most wonderful,
but poor Eleanor's mother's heart is well nigh broken.
She so hoped and cannot believe her baby is
gone from her.
November 2nd.
I sat often beside my little grandson.
It is hard to give him up, and my heart aches for Eleanor.
Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.
Was buried in the Roosevelt family plot at St. James church in Hyde Park.
It seemed "cruel, " Eleanor wrote, "to leave him out there in the cold."
I reproached myself very bitterly for having done
so little about the care of this baby.
I felt he had been left too much to the nurse and I knew
too little about him, that in some way I was to blame.
Within a month of her baby's burial,
Eleanor would find herself pregnant again.
A man has to take advantage of his opportunities,
but the opportunities have to come.
If there is not war, you don't get the great general;
if there is not the great occasion, you don't get the
great statesman; If Lincoln had lived in times of peace,
no one would know his name.
Theodore Roosevelt accomplished a great deal
during his 7 years as President... the break-up
of northern securities, the coal strike settlement,
the Panama canal, the pure food and drug act, the hepburn act,
an end to the Russo-Japanese war, millions of wild acres
preserved for future generations to enjoy,
but he himself was not satisfied.
Roosevelt could not class himself as a great President
because he had faced no great crisis while in office.
There was no war, no crisis.
Some people thought he was the crisis.
But you don't have to have a war in order to be
immortalized as a great President.
He's shown that. He proved that.
Now hampered by his own pledge not to
run again in 1908, Roosevelt hand-picked
a successor, his good friend and secretary of war,
William Howard taft of Ohio, who promised to remain true to
the progressive principles Theodore Roosevelt had laid down.
Their friendship went a long way back,
and they shared a similar outlook on life.
They were both civil service reformers.
They spent so much time together that Corinne,
Theodore's sister, said that they seemed to love each other.
TR ran his campaign.
He told him advice at every moment.
He edited his speeches.
He said he was as nervous about taft's campaign as he
was about his own.
And he was thrilled when taft won.
He thought that this amiable person who seemed to share his
values and his progressive ideals would make the perfect
President to put into law all the things that he had then
put out there as executive orders,
but it didn't work out the way he hoped.
As he left the white house, Roosevelt did his best
to seem cheerful, but when a friend assured him he had not
finished with politics, he said,
"my dear fellow, for heaven's sake, don't talk
"about my having a future.
My future is in the past."
He was just 50 years old.
The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which
ever afterward remain fixed in his mind...
A giraffe looking over the tree tops at the nearing horsemen;
zebras barking in the moonlight, as the laden caravan
passes on its night March through a thirsty land.
And after years, there shall come to him memories
of the lion's charge, the gray bulk of the elephant
close at hand in the somber woodland,
of the rhinoceros, truculent and stupid, standing in the bright
sunlight on the empty plain.
These things can be told,
but there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit
of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery,
its melancholy, and its charm.
All his life, Roosevelt had dreamed
of hunting big game in Africa.
Now with his son Kermit at his side, he could make that
dream a reality and not be tempted to answer reporters'
questions about how his successor was doing.
On that subject, he promised to be as "silent as an oyster."
When he sailed for British east Africa, j.P. Morgan was
supposed to have said, "every American hopes that every lion"
will do its duty."
The Roosevelt safari reminded onlookers
of a military campaign.
A vast American flag flew over the ex-President's tent.
Skilled white hunters served as guides.
3 naturalists from the Smithsonian institution saw to
the steadily growing collection of specimens.
206 porters carried supplies, including
cans of California peaches and Boston baked beans,
90 pounds of jams, 4 tons of salt to cure animal skins,
and 60 miniature volumes, ranging from "Alice in wonderland"
to the "federalist papers."
His tent was cared for by 2 men. 2 more saw to his horses.
Another pair was responsible for his guns and ammunition.
For good luck on the hunt, the President carried
a gold-mounted rabbit's foot, given to him by his friend,
the former heavyweight champion, John I. Sullivan.
He didn't need it.
Together, his and Kermit's rifles accounted for 512 animals
and large birds, including 20 rhinoceroses...
17 lions...
11 elephants,
And 9 giraffes,
and not including countless smaller birds felled by
their shotguns.
They kept only a dozen trophies for themselves,
Roosevelt said, and "shot nothing that was not used"
either as a museum specimen or for meat."
The expedition would eventually send home crates
and barrels containing 11,397 preserved creatures.
Roosevelt was away from Edith and the rest of his family
for 11 months.
Sweetest of all sweet girls, last night I dreamed
that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream;
and when I woke up it was almost too hard to bear.
You have made the real happiness of my life.
Do you remember when you were such a pretty engaged girl
and said to your love,
"no, Theodore, that I cannot allow?"
Darling, I love you so.
How very happy we have been these last 23 years.
Your own lover, Theodore.
In March of 1910, Edith and Theodore
were finally reunited at khartoum and began
a 3-month parade across north Africa and Europe, making
headlines wherever he went.
He upset Egyptians by telling them they were not ready
for independence from Great Britain.
In Paris, he hurried Edith through the louvre...
Refusing to look at ruben's nudes because he thought them
not suitable for mixed company.
Near Berlin, he watched maneuvers
with kaiser Wilhelm and took the opportunity to warn him
that a war between Germany and england would be
"an unspeakable calamity."
Everywhere, crowds cheered him as if he still held office.
Father is so tired that whenever we go in a motor,
he falls asleep.
The people are quite mad about him and stand around the hotel
to see him go in and out.
Though it was midnight,
I had to send him out on our balcony before they would disperse.
King Edward VII of england died
while Roosevelt was still abroad and President taft
asked him to represent the United States
at the London funeral.
He spent so much time with royalty that week, he said,
that he felt "that if I met another king, I should bite him."
No one followed Theodore Roosevelt's travels
with more interest than his fifth cousin, Franklin, did.
He was eager now to begin following the political path
his relative had blazed.
But other members of the Roosevelt clan harbored
similar ambitions.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Was just 20 years old, still too young to run for office,
but already being called the "crown prince"
in the newspapers; His 3 younger brothers might choose
to run for national office someday, as well,
and all of them would run as Republicans.
When the Democratic dutchess county district attorney
dropped by Franklin's law office and asked if he'd be
interested in running for the state legislature, he jumped
at the chance.
It was, after all, the party of his beloved late father, Mr. James.
No democrat could win in dutchess county unless he
could peel votes away from the republican incumbent.
Who was more likely to do that than a personable young man
named Roosevelt?
Franklin saw no need to consult his wife.
I listened to all Franklin's plans with a great deal of interest.
It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.
I felt I must acquiesce in whatever he might decide to do.
I was having a baby, and for a time at least that
was my only mission in life.
Her husband always lived "his own life"
"exactly as he wanted it, " she remembered.
Only one thing held Franklin back.
He was worried that his cousin Theodore might object to
a member of the family running for office
on the Democratic ticket.
On the morning of June 18, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt
finally arrived home into New York harbor aboard
the German passenger ship "Kaiserin Auguste Victoria."
The cutter "Manhattan" drew up alongside, prepared to take
the Roosevelts ashore.
Among the newspapermen, old friends, and family members
on her top deck were Franklin and Eleanor.
At some point during the day's festivities, Franklin asked
his cousin for his blessing.
Theodore gave him the go-ahead.
It was too bad he was choosing to run as a democrat, the ex-President said,
but he knew he could be counted on to battle
the bosses in whatever party he chose.
A million New Yorkers were waiting to welcome him home,
including scores of reporters eager to ask him what he
thought of President taft and whether he would ever consider
running for the white house again himself.
He deflected every question.
But there was no way Theodore Roosevelt could stay out
of public life for long.
It is not the critic who counts; Not the man who points
out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer
of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; Who errs, who comes short again
and again, because there is no effort without error
and shortcoming; But who does actually strive to do
the deeds; Who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause; Who at the best knows
in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly
so that his place shall never be with those cold
and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt.
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