Will absorbed Sumner’s central teaching—that property rights demanded protection against the onslaught of radical theories and socialist ideals. Like Sumner, he argued that “princely profits” represented the just reward for “the men of judgment, courage and executive ability who have conceived and executed the great enterprises.” Unlike Sumner, however, he did not place the businessman at “the highest pinnacle of honor and trust.” Nor did he regard property rights as absolute, deserving precedence at every turn over human rights. From his father he had learned that the man who devoted himself to his community—“the lawyer who makes man’s peace with man; the doctor who makes his peace with Nature; the minister who makes his peace with God”—deserved greater praise than the man who pursued wealth for its own sake. Wealth was honorable only to the extent that it contributed to the well-being of the community.
Honors were showered upon Will Taft during his senior year. His proud father boasted to Delia in late October 1877 that Will had been chosen by his classmates to be class orator, “the greatest prize in college,” valedictorian notwithstanding. “He has in this respect surpassed his older brothers,” Alphonso noted. “The honor too is of the historical kind which will not be forgotten by his class.” He would “have his hands full, however,” Alphonso explained, for the chosen student was expected to deliver “a long speech of half an hour to the class, carefully written & committed, & practiced.”
Almost immediately, as Will anticipated his performance, anxiety set in. Two months after his selection, with more than five months left to prepare, he so agonized over his insufficient progress that he determined to forgo Christmas vacation in Cincinnati. “We shall regret that Willie cannot come home, but believe he does right in giving time to the great work,” Alphonso wrote Delia. “I rely on his strength of purpose, & of intellect to accomplish it all and raise his reputation every time.” As spring approached, Will lamented that his oration was “coming on slowly.” Though he had settled upon his theme, he had not formulated how to present it. A month later he was still struggling, “finding it rather difficult to adapt its tone to the occasion.” Another vacation was spent toiling in New Haven alone.
In the end, young Taft delivered a splendid oration before an overflow crowd at the Battell Chapel. “The sound of approaching music was heard,” the New York Times reported, “followed by the measured tramp of the Class of ’78, as in long line they filed up the aisle and took their places for the last time in their accustomed seats, where they would listen to the address of the Class Orator.” No accolade could have pleased Taft more than the comparisons to his father drawn by the Times. “The orator in physique, in the method of handling his subject, and in style of oratory, presented some strong resemblances to his distinguished father. The address was characterized throughout by a transparency of thought, a clearness of statement, and an appearance of manly sincerity.”
In the weeks before his graduation, Will had grown increasingly alarmed and troubled by news that his brother Peter had suffered a nervous breakdown and been committed to a private hospital for the insane in College Hill, Ohio. “I wish you could get Peter to come to Commencement,” he beseeched his father. “We might turn his thoughts back to his college days and ease his mind considerably. President [Noah] Porter asked about him. I told him that we thought he was suffering from some mental disease.”
Before his breakdown, Peter had begun practicing law in Cincinnati. There he met and married Tillie Hulbert, daughter of another prominent and wealthy local family. Unfortunately, his marriage did not share the productive harmony of Charley’s. The union shortly proved disastrous, and his old anxieties multiplied. “Peter continues so strange,” his mother confided to her sister. “He is very cross to Tillie and quarrels about everything in the arrangement of the house. He . . . puts in partitions, buys paper, carpets & furniture and changes the position of everything in the house in opposition to Tillie’s wishes.” Tormented by a series of ailments, including wild mood swings and a recurrence of the mysterious eye trouble that rendered him unable to read, Peter began the first of several treatments at the sanitarium.
“I am doing my best to be reconciled to the treatment in this institution,” he wrote his father. “You have thought it best, and whatever your judgment thinks best I shall obey. But the course here is very hard. The Doctor gives me a kind of tonic that heats my head very much, and makes my mind so sensitive that any exercise of it deprives me of rest at night. . . . You are proceeding on a mistaken theory in my case. What I need is, not to be shut off from you and the family, but to be drawn to you and made to feel your love. . . . It seems to me that I am on a downward path. Whatever is the result of treatment, remember always that I, your son, love you more than I do any living mortal, and I respect your will above all others.” Despite the entreaties of both Will and Peter himself, Alphonso decided that Peter should remain in the hospital rather than join the family at Yale.
On June 27, 1878, Will Taft was honored as salutatorian of his class, having surpassed all of his 132 classmates save Clarence Hill Kelsey, who would become a lifelong friend.
Even as he prepared to enter Cincinnati Law School the following fall, much of Will’s motivation continued to stem from his father’s high expectations rather than from any strong internal drive. Indeed, years later, Taft would credit his father’s indomitable will and lofty aspirations in prompting his own achievements. When his father lay dying, he described this enveloping paternal spirit to Nellie: “I have a kind of presentiment that Father has been a kind of guardian angel to me in that his wishes for my success have been so strong and intense as to bring it, and that as his life ebbs away and ends I shall cease to have the luck which has followed me thus far.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS BORN THIRTEEN months after Will Taft, on October 27, 1858, in a four-story town house at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan. “Teedie,” as he was nicknamed, was by his own admission “a sickly and timid boy . . . a wretched mite,” whose childhood was shaped by an assortment of troubling ailments, the most dangerous of which was asthma. When these agonizing attacks came, he found himself frantically gasping for breath, terrified he would suffocate. “Nobody seemed to think I would live,” he recalled. His younger sister, Corinne, remarked on the irony that “Theodore Roosevelt, whose name later became the synonym of virile health and vigor, was a fragile, patient sufferer in those early days of the nursery.” His fierce determination to escape an invalid’s fate led him to transform his body and timid demeanor through strenuous work; Taft, on the other hand, blessed from birth with robust health, would allow his physical strength and energy to gradually dissipate over the years into a state of obesity.
During the worst of Teedie’s asthmatic attacks, when the constriction in his chest made sleep impossible, his father comforted him with “great and loving care.” “Some of my earliest remembrances are of nights when he would walk up and down with me,” Roosevelt later wrote. “I could breathe, I could sleep, when he had me in his arms.” If carrying the gasping child from room to room around the house proved inadequate, Theodore Senior drove him with horse and carriage through the gaslit city streets, hoping that the chill gusts of wind would fill the boy’s lungs with air. “My father—he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength—life.”
Teedie’s father, known as “Thee,” was the youngest of five sons born to Margaret and Cornelius Van Shaack Roosevelt, a glass merchant who had amassed a substantial fortune in real estate and banking. Considered “one of the five richest men in New York,” C.V.S. hired tutors to educate his sons in the basement study of his imposing brick mansion on Union Square. Instead of enrolling Thee in college, which he feared would “spoil” him, C.V.S. sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe when he turned nineteen. Returning from the year abroad, Thee followed his older brother, James, into the family business. As the years went by, however, his keen sense of social justice began to shift his focus from the firm. Increasingly, he was drawn to philanthropic efforts to i
mprove the lives of the poor at a time when extravagant wealth and abject poverty stood side by side.
In 1853, at age twenty-one, Thee married seventeen-year-old Martha “Mittie” Bulloch, daughter of a high-spirited family from Roswell, Georgia. Mittie had been raised in Bulloch Hall, a white-columned antebellum plantation mansion, where every need was attended to by a dozen slaves. The story of their courtship suggests an intense attraction from the moment they met in Roswell when Mittie was only fifteen. They renewed their acquaintance when she came north to visit relatives in the spring of 1853, and within weeks they were engaged. A southern beauty with delicate features, blue eyes, black hair, and radiant skin, Mittie possessed a quick mind and playful sense of humor. She proved irresistible to a young man raised amid the staid gentility of the Roosevelts’ ordered social world.
In June, Thee came to Roswell to meet the members of the large Bulloch clan. “I am trying to school myself to coolly shaking hands with you when we meet—before the family,” Thee told her. After his visit, Mittie assured him she was now “confident” of her “own deep love,” confessing that “everything now seems associated with you. Even when I run up the stairs going to my own room, I feel as if you were near, and turn involuntarily to kiss my hand to you. I feel, dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I only live in your being.” Her words so thrilled Thee that he felt “the blood rush” to his temples, forcing him “to lay the letter down, for a few minutes to regain command” of himself. “O, Mittie,” he declared, “how deeply, how devotedly I love you!” Within four months, the young couple settled into their new 20th Street home, one of two adjoining houses that C.V.S. had purchased for Thee and his brother Robert.
Here, in the eight years that followed, four children were born: Anna, who was nicknamed “Bamie”; Theodore, Elliott, and Corinne. The advent of the Civil War, however, blasted the idyllic days of Thee and Mittie’s marriage. While Thee passionately supported the Union cause, Mittie remained loyal to her homeland. Her brother, two stepbrothers, and all the young men she had known in Georgia had enlisted in the Confederate Army. Before the outbreak of war, Mittie’s widowed mother, Martha, and her sister, Anna, had left Georgia and moved in with Thee and Mittie. Their plantation eventually fell into the hands of Union soldiers. “If I may judge at all of the embittered feeling of the South against the North by myself,” Martha told her daughter, “I would say they would rather be buried in one common grave than ever again live under the same government. I am confident I should.” The strain of a divided household took a toll on Mittie’s health. “I shudder to think of what she must have suffered,” Bamie later said. “I remember that Mother for a long time never came to the dinner table.” Unable to bear the inevitable arguments, she withdrew more and more to the sickroom, plagued by an assortment of ills: palpitations, stomach troubles, and debilitating headaches.
Thee suppressed his impulse to volunteer for the Union Army, fearing that it would destroy his fragile wife “for him to fight against her brothers.” Reluctantly, he decided to purchase a substitute. Although it seemed the only choice at the time, he “always afterwards felt that he had done a very wrong thing,” recalled Bamie, “in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” Thee worked tirelessly on behalf of the Union cause, devoting all his time and abundant energy to the great work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the Union League, the U.S. Allotment Commission, and the U.S. Employment Bureau, which found work for soldiers who had lost limbs, yet the decision not to enlist caused an indelible regret.
All four Roosevelt children idolized their father, “the most dominant figure” in their childhood, especially since their mother’s fragility absented her from so many of their activities. He was “the most intimate friend of each of his children,” Corinne recalled, “and we all craved him as our most desired companion.” Theodore described the joyful anticipation when “we used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him.” Bamie was convinced “there was never anyone so wonderful” as her father, while Elliott marveled that “he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves.” He took the children sailing on the swan boats in Central Park and brought them to museums. He tutored them in riding (first on Shetland ponies and then saddle horses) and in tree-climbing, pointing out “the dead limbs” to avoid.
In contrast to Alphonso Taft, who was rarely able to “turn aside from his business for the pursuit of pleasure,” the elder Theodore Roosevelt skillfully balanced work and leisure in his family’s life. “I never knew anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father,” Theodore declared, “or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty.” His hard work in both business and philanthropic activities never precluded a rich social life. He reveled in the company of friends at dinner parties, relished a good cigar, danced into the early morning hours, and raced his four-in-hand coach through the streets. While acknowledging the often cruel class divisions that drove Alphonso from New York, he saw the city “not so much for what it was as for what it might become” under enlightened leadership. In an era when assistance to the poor remained mainly in the hands of private charity, Thee developed a sterling reputation for his dedication to improving the lives of tenement children through his work with the Newsboys’ Lodging House, the Children’s Aid Society, Miss Sattery’s School for Italian Children, and the Five Points Mission. “Father was the finest man I ever knew, and the happiest,” Roosevelt later told his journalist friend Jacob Riis.
Their father’s affection and vitality compelled the Roosevelt children to surmount serious physical ailments. Bamie was deformed at birth by a severe curvature of the spine which gave her a hunchbacked appearance. Elliott was afflicted by what were considered epileptic attacks. Corinne, like Teedie, suffered from asthma, though her illness was not as severe as her brother’s. Concern with the children’s health prompted Thee to arrange home tutoring rather than send them to school. They were taught the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic by Mittie’s sister, Anna, but their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encouraged pursuit of their special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urged them to recite poetry. In addition, their mother provided a romantic and engaging perspective on history through accounts of her childhood in the vanished world of plantations, slaves, and chivalrous codes.
Even at a young age, Teedie held a distinct place among his siblings; the asthma that had weakened his body seemed to have inordinately sharpened his mind and sensibilities. “From the very fact that he was not able originally to enter into the most vigorous activities,” Corinne noted, “he was always reading or writing” with a most unusual “power of concentration.” He especially loved animal stories, adventure tales, and inspiring chronicles of “men who were fearless” in battle. His voracious reading gave him a rich cache of ideas for stories of his own to entertain his younger sister and brother. “I can see him now struggling with the effort to breathe,” Corinne recalled, describing her eight-year-old brother’s winding serial narratives, “which never flagged in interest for us” though at times they “continued from week to week, or even from month to month.”
In the summers, Thee sought a broader field of educational activities for his children in the country, moving the family first to the Hudson Valley, and then to Oyster Bay, in the rambling house called Tranquillity—although Corinne wryly observed that “anything less tranquil than that happy home,” crowded with cousins and friends of all the children, “could hardly be imagined.” Her friends Edith Carow and Fanny Smith were regular visitors every summer. To Fanny Smith, these summer sojourns to Oyster Bay seemed a blissful round of ??
?riding, driving, boating, picnicking, games and verse-writing—no day was long enough.” Fanny was so taken with “the extraordinary vitality and gusto with which the Roosevelt family invested life” that she felt as if they had all been “touch[ed] by the flame of the ‘divine fire.’ ”
In the woodlands surrounding the Roosevelts’ summer retreat, young Theodore’s avocation as a naturalist took shape. As he roamed the forest trails, he began to observe the birds, listening to their distinctive songs, carefully noting flight patterns, beak and bill shapes, and coloration. When his interest expanded to a wide range of animals, he studied in scientific books, and then took lessons, which his father arranged, from a professional taxidermist. He began to collect, prepare, and mount hundreds of meticulously labeled specimens. Encouraged by Thee, he set about establishing his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” with the fervent aspiration to become the next J. J. Audubon or Spencer Baird.
The expansive education the Roosevelt children enjoyed, with boundaries stretching far beyond the classroom, closely resembled the ideal of learning envisioned by Horace Taft, when he wished that he and his siblings had been exposed to the natural world, to the arts and music, to reading unconfined by pedantic needs and standards. Years later, when Roosevelt was president, he tried to interest Taft in birds and nature. “He loves the woods, he loves hunting,” Taft said of Roosevelt; “he loves roughing it, and I don’t.” On one occasion, when Taft served as Roosevelt’s secretary of war, he entered the Oval Office while Roosevelt was speaking with an ornithologist. Taft was anxious to talk about the Philippine tariff bill, but Roosevelt tried to engage Will in his discussion. “Sit down, Will, and we will talk about something more interesting; we’ll tell you something about birds,” the president exclaimed. Taft responded with a laugh: “I don’t believe that you can interest me in natural history, and I don’t want you to send me any more such books as you sent me the other day. I read it because you asked me to, and it took me nearly all night. What do I care about dog-wolves, and whether they help she-wolves in procuring food for their young. I don’t think I ever saw a wolf, and certainly . . . I am not interested in their domestic affairs.”