Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

found himself at the helm.
    Roosevelt, prior to his presidency, had shown no extraordinary concern either for labor or for the disadvantaged. He cared about them as all decent persons cared, but they were not among his primary concerns. A deeply moral man, he was first and foremost taken up in a lifelong and enthusiastic fight against lawbreakers; he was a policeman at heart, which was obviously why he had done so well as a commissioner in New York. And above all, he detested bullies: the foulmouthed gunmen he had seen terrifying customers in western bars, the backroom machine politicians who milked the urban poor, the Pennsylvania mining tycoons who exploited their ignorant immigrant laborers. Like a Byronic hero he wanted not so much to raise the poor as to lower the proud.
    But such can be a fertile soil for the growth of a wider compassion, and this is what happened to him in the Washington years.

Five
    â€œIt’s a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way,” TR wrote, “but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it.” And morbid was something he never was. But soon, despite the care that the Roosevelts took to do nothing that would jar the national mourning, an air of busy exuberance began to emanate from the White House and steal across the country. Lincoln Steffens offered this glimpse of the forty-two-year-old president:
    His offices were crowded with people, mostly reformers, all day long, and the President did his work among them with little privacy and much rejoicing. He strode triumphant around among us, talking and shaking hands, dictating and signing letters and laughing. Washington, and the whole country, was in mourning, and no doubt the President felt he should hold himself down; he didn’t, he tried to, but his joy showed in every word and movement.
    Edith Roosevelt, who busied herself removing the tasseled remnants of late-Victorian bad taste and restoring the White House interior to something more like its classical simplicity and dignity, presided with quiet grace over the evening festivities, always insisting that the public had no right to interviews with the first lady, and that all such attention should be focused on the president himself. But even she found it difficult to shield her noisy and active brood from the loving attention of the crowd. Her stepdaughter, beautiful and decidedly independent, was known to an admiring press as “Princess Alice,” and the boys were an integral part of the White House vision as it appeared to every visitor. A crowd waiting outside the gate was once astonished to see the departing president making grotesque faces out the window of his carriage, not realizing that he was continuing some game with little Quentin waving from the doorstep.
    TR was a devoted father and never missed some sort of romp with his offspring every evening, even on the busiest day. He adored them and they him, but this was never at the expense of any homework or discipline, and the whole family, with enacted gravity, could lend itself to a deserved punishment, as shown in this charming excerpt from one of TR’s letters:
    Last night I had to spank Quentin for taking something that didn’t belong to him and then not telling the truth about it. Ethel and Mother acted respectively as accuser and court of first resort, and then brought him solemnly into me for sentence and punishment—both retiring much agitated when the final catastrophe became imminent. Today Quentin has become as cunning as possible. He quite understood that he had brought his fate on himself.
    TR needed a good deal of physical exercise, particularly to control a waistline responding to his hearty meals. He played tennis with aides, but he preferred riding and long hikes. On one of the latter, accompanied by some more or less willing diplomats, he encountered a stream that could be forded only by the removal of all clothing. J. J. Jusserand, the French ambassador and