The House

This is the week of homecoming, warm welcomes, families gathered, and blessings counted.  And the places we connect ourselves with.  A recent Hallmark movie, The Thanksgiving House, caught the nostalgia that polarizes the feelings for people we love.

There was once a house in uptown Manhattan.  In 1873 when it was built, it was at the city’s edge, two blocks away from 800 acres of newly-plotted Central Park.  The family who lived there could look out its upper windows to see picnickers in summer and ice skaters in winter.  It was very large, so much so that it could accommodate 500 guests at a time, which it did for the elder daughter’s debut into society.  Stately on the outside, its interior gave a glimpse of the indulgent late Victorians: wood paneling and fireplaces, thick Persian carpets, custom carved furnishings, and room after room of brick-a-brack.

Harvard University photo.

Six West Fifty-Seventh Street was home for Theodore Roosevelt as he grew into manhood, and the setting for much of my book.  But I found that aside from a few pictures showcasing the interior, it was gone.  I could not find what the outside looked like, what they would have seen walking in the front door or leaving for the opera, or any other visual idea to help me understand their lives at the time.  I could do that for their early home downtown, which has been reconstructed and is a National Parks site today.  Or Sagamore Hill, Theodore and Edith’s permanent home on Long Island, which is close to a hundred percent the way it was when they lived there.  Even his small cabin in North Dakota is open to the public.

Why had this home vanished?

The head of the family, Theodore Sr., died there in 1878, a major blow to the family.  The mother and her adult children continued to live in the home for another six years, but then, the unthinkable happened: Martha and her daughter-in-law, Alice, succumbed to different illnesses there on the same day.  Brother Elliott told Theodore there was a curse on it, and in at least one place it is referenced as being “the bad luck house.”  It was too much for the rest of the family.  The shell of memories was sold off and household possessions dispersed, and in the 1920s it and adjoining houses on the block were torn down to make way for commercial buildings.

I started digging to find out what it had looked like.  I found one photograph on a blog that was mistakenly identified (which turned out to be one of the Vanderbilt homes) and many other well-documented photos of mansions on another blog, Daytonian in Manhattan.  Just not the one I needed.  At the New York Public library I discovered a picture of the cousins’ house at Four West Fifty-Seventh Street, right before demolition.   Then I found one of the row of houses on the street, taken from Fifth Avenue, which showed horses and carriages passing by.

Third on the left, with bay windows, is the Roosevelt home on West Fifty-Seventh Street.  This photograph was taken from Fifth Avenue.  Across the street is the Cornelius Vanderbilt mansion, the largest home ever built in New York City, where the Bergdorf-Goodman department store is today.  New York Public Library photo.

Finally, in the archives of the New York Times, there was a Sunday article, “President’s Roosevelt’s Many Homes,” from October 1905.  There, although grainy and overprinted by the family crest, were the bay windows and the brick, the face of Six West Fifty-Seventh.  Theodore’s sister, Bamie, remembered, “From the beginning Father had brought to the house the people who were most delightful to know, people interested in political and civic matters.”  Among them were John Hay, Joseph Choate, Louisa Schuyler, and William Dodge.  From the home the family went to society dinners, weddings, cotillions, art galleries, and concerts.  Then, of course, there were family gatherings, which could have been almost daily since the James Alfred Roosevelts lived next door.  The teenaged children had friends over after the picnics and ice skating, and Theodore’s nature club often met there to report on their adventures.

 

One of the buildings between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets today.

Happiness.  Tragedy.  The story of a family.  As in all of our lives, it is good to remember the times, even measured in a few short years, when doors are closed and voices and laughter ring out inside.

Greatheart

You’d think by now I would have covered most of the story of TR’s father, “Thee,” among posts about the rest of the immediate family.  But the elder Theodore’s influence was very, very, large.  It is hard to imagine it occured in a lifetime of only forty-six years, before telephones and motorized vehicles.  In his time he was mightily revered by the people of New York.

President Theodore Roosevelt kept a portrait of his father above his desk.

He was his parents’ youngest, born in 1831.  A friend of the family remembered that people would say, “There is lovely Mrs. Roosevelt with those five horrid boys.”  Coming from a Quaker background, she told her sons that along with greater wealth came greater responsibility to the less fortunate.  Thee took this to heart.

He didn’t attend college, which his father thought would ruin him, but instead traveled in Europe and became a junior partner in the family glass importing business.  He courted and won a southern girl for his wife.  After he brought her north to New York City to live, they had four children, but each one suffered from a physical malady: a defect of the spine, or asthma, or seizures.  In the meantime their father’s “troublesome conscience” was struck by the multitude of poor immigrants living in the city.

 Brooklyn newsboys, late Nineteenth Century.  New York Public Library photo.

The Children’s Aid Society had several divisions, one of which was the Newsboys’ Lodging House.  Thee visited the boys there every week, eating supper with them and talking with them as if they were his own.  He helped send many children to homes in the west, one of whom became the governor of Alaska.  In other charity work, he was careful to make inquiries into the actual conditions of the poor and not “do harm by teaching those who were independent to rely on others for their support.”

During the Civil War he did not join the army because of his wife’s Confederate sympathies, and regretted the decision the rest of his life.  He was away for weeks at a time in an organized effort to support families of soldiers.  With philanthropist William Dodge, he started the Allotment Commission to urge troops to send some of their paychecks home instead of wasting money on sutlers.  He stood out in cold, muddy fields enrolling men in the program with great success.  When he returned home himself, he did his best to help injured veterans get back into the workforce, finding jobs they could do without the use of an arm or a leg.

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Seventh Infantry of New York, 1861.

He taught a missions class, and when his sister-in-law saw him gathering his own little ones outside the church, it reminded her of the character “Greatheart,” protector of children, in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  He helped start a new building for the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital by inviting wealthy friends to his own parlor.  Children with spinal and bone defects were waiting there, along with braces and devices that might help them if funds were given.  When he entered friends’ offices, the checkbooks automatically came out.  “How much this time, Theodore?” they would ask.

Thee was neither solemn nor sad.  The Sunday School teacher who also gave daily Bible lessons to his young children was a strong, handsome man who dressed well and enjoyed life in general.  He danced at parties late into the night, never seeming to get tired, and drove fine horses.  He took his family on a Grand Tour of Europe not once, but twice.  In the cultural arena, he was in on the founding of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History.

It seemed he was the healthiest in the family, but he was the one who left first.  After a brief foray into politics, he died in horrific pain of cancer, in 1878.  Hundreds of men, women, and children waited outside his home at Six West Fifty-Seventh Street that February hoping for news of his recovery.  When he passed away, he was mourned and remembered from pulpits all over the city.  The son named for him tried his best to carry out his ideals as long as he lived: in the battlefield, in the state, the nation, and the world.  It is odd no one would have written a biography of such a man.  There is one, however, currently in the works by Keith Muchowski, an academic librarian and National Park Service volunteer.  Thee’s older son said many times, “He was the best man I ever knew.”  He was Greatheart, the first Theodore Roosevelt.

There Were Never Such Devoted Sisters

Irving Berlin wasn’t thinking of Anna and Corinne Roosevelt when he wrote the song for White Christmas, but that line certainly describes them.  Except their devotion was, as long as they lived, for their brother, Theodore.  Anna, four years older than he, was called “Bamie” or “Bysie.”  Corinne, three years his junior, was known as “Conie.”

Bamie was put in the category of the “big people” by Theodore, Elliott, and Corinne from the beginning.  She was very smart and strong-willed, and resembled their father in the ways she guided and managed people.  In the summer when the boys were small, she had them pretend they were horses in a toy harness, running with them up and down the beach.   Although she suffered from Pott’s disease, tuberculosis of the spine, it never slowed her energetic pace.

Bamie with niece Alice Roosevelt.  (American Museum of Natural History)

A natural mentor, Bamie encouraged Theodore in his wildlife projects.  He probably wrote to her as often as he did to his parents.  She studied at Mlle. Souvestre’s School near Paris and at eighteen had two debutante parties: one in Philadelphia because their new home wasn’t finished, and the other in New York when it was, for 500 guests.   After the fashion of young ladies of the time she didn’t attend college herself, but went to get Theodore’s room ready at Harvard the summer before he left.  When Theodore’s first wife died, it was Bamie who took care of their newborn daughter (she also lovingly helped another niece, Eleanor).  Later, when Theodore was president, he walked over to Bamie’s home on N Street in Washington to talk over issues he was dealing with.

Theodore and Corinne.

Corinne was same age as, and best friends with, Edith Carow, Theodore’s second wife, from the time they were little.  At age four, when the family had just moved to the country for the summer, Corinne spoke up ahead of her brothers to be the first to ride a new pony.  “I think I did it just to see the light in my father’s eyes,” she said.  She, like Theodore, was severely asthmatic.  In Harvard’s Houghton Library is her little diary of the first family trip to Europe.  The eight-year-old drew a picture of herself on the first page and looped her script carefully, as one who has just learned the art.  Corinne wanted to do everything her brothers did, even if it meant tripping on her skirts and falling down as she ran alongside the carriage in the Alps.  In Europe again two years later, Corinne patiently listened to Theodore’s “lecture” on quail.  She also cut her finger dissecting a bird, which was the extent of her career as a naturalist.  Staying at a German home that summer with her brothers, she wrote stories, as they did, for a literary club they had with cousins their age who were also living abroad.

 

Later Bamie married William Sheffield Cowles, an admiral in the navy, and had one son.  Corinne and her husband Douglas Robinson, a financier, had four children.  The sisters and their husbands dined with Theodore the first night he stayed in the White House, as Edith and the children were still in Oyster Bay.  Strangely enough, Bamie, whom some thought could have been president if she’d been a man, never believed in women’s suffrage.  But Corinne introduced presidential candidate Leonard Wood at the Republican National Convention of 1920 in Chicago.  She wrote My Brother Theodore Roosevelt two years after he died, and also books of poetry.  Both sisters outlived Theodore by several years, collaborating on the reconstruction of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace in Manhattan, their childhood home.  It is operated by the National Park Service today.  The past preserved, it is a place where visitors can lose themselves for a time in the story of our twenty-sixth president’s family, which included two very devoted sisters.

 

Mittie (Part Two)

Martha Bulloch Roosevelt’s mother, who never wanted to know of a Union victory, passed away before Lee surrendered.  Then came the day when seven-year-old Theodore and six-year-old Elliott watched Lincoln’s funeral procession from their other grandparents’ mansion on Union Square.  As if to physically lift the gloom of the previous four years, Mittie redecorated the  townhouse on East 20th Street.  She had the haircloth parlor furniture covered in blue damask.  Brighter wallpaper, draperies, and carpets replaced the neutral backgrounds of the past.

The parlor at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace today reflects the stylish choices Mittie made after the war.  National Park Service photo.

Mittie was more beautiful than ever.  Still the belle, she wore white in every season because her husband, Thee, liked to see her in it.  Two of her brothers who’d fought with the Confederacy had moved to England and she desperately wanted to visit them.  So in the spring of 1869, the family left by steamboat for Europe.  It was the first of two year-long Grand Tours they would take.

During the first trip, they had a happy reunion with the Bullochs and saw the Old World in style.  Art galleries, museums, zoos, famous castles and cathedrals provided lessons for the children.  Thee and Mittie had supper with titled ladies and gentlemen at the estate of the Duke of Devonshire; they all loved hiking in the fresh air of the Alps.

On the second trip, which began in 1872, they rode a houseboat down the Nile River where teenaged Theodore quenched his thirst for bird hunting.  They camped in tents in the Holy Land and took in the Vienna Exposition, of which Thee was an American commissioner.   Then he returned home to work and oversee the building of a new house close to Central Park.  Mittie and Bamie headed to Carlsbad for mineral baths and to Paris for shopping; the youngest three stayed with a German family to study.  When all were reunited at home, it was the grand new place on West 57th Street.

This photograph of Mittie’s parlor uptown was taken after Elliott’s hunting trip to India, with his tiger rug before the fireplace.  National Park Service photo.

Mittie, according to some, went into a decline of sorts.  Her headaches and digestive troubles lingered.  She had always been fashionably late for carriages that waited in the street, but sometimes she didn’t make it out to them at all.  Bamie often acted as hostess for her father when callers came.  Mittie also had a fettish for cleanliness, insisting that a sheet be put on the floor for doctors who came to see her.

The children grew; Bamie had her debut; summer homes changed; Theodore went to Harvard.  In 1878, his second year there, Thee died of cancer.  Then the children took even greater care of their “little motherling.”  In 1880 Mittie welcomed Theodore’s bride, Alice Lee, into the family, with teas and receptions.  But the end came too soon for Mittie, also, four years later from typhoid fever.  It was an unthinkable double tragedy: Alice died on the same day in the same house.  Perhaps in the midst of the grief for the young mother who would never know her child, there was lost some reflection on the life of the forty-eight-year-old “unreconstructed” lady from the South.

A friend who had known the Bullochs in Georgia observed that Theodore Roosevelt got his splendid “dash” from his mother.  Though Mittie was delicate as a china doll, her influence on her children was great.  Daughter Corinne said simply, “Her devotions wrapped ’round us as with a mantle.”

Mittie (Part One)

She was a dainty, dark-haired southern girl in white.  Her pale complexion seemed to exhale fragrance from the peach trees on Georgia’s hills.  With her blue eyes flashing, she could be funny, poetic or reproachful, but one thing she could never be: a Yankee.  She loved the plantation and its way of life until she died, when they were just memories.

If you are thinking of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, it is not an accident.  For a newspaper story Margaret Mitchell once interviewed a woman nearing ninety who reminisced about dances, picnics, and riding parties before the Civil War.  Evelyn King Baker also told of being a bridesmaid in a beautiful wedding at nearby Bulloch Hall.  It is believed Mitchell used details from that interview in her famous story of the Old South (the movie celebrates its 75th anniversary this year).  In real life, Mrs. Baker had been the attendant in white muslin; Martha Bulloch the vivacious bride in white satin; and Theodore Roosevelt of New York, the groom.  Mr. Roosevelt, she said, was “firm against slavery.”

National Park Service photo.

Martha was called “Mittie.”  Descended from the Scots, she grew to her adult height of just five feet in a big house fronted with pillars and surrounded by white oaks near Roswell, Georgia.  Besides Mittie’s childhood nurse Mom Grace, her widowed mother owned about twenty slaves who worked in the house and fields.  Theodore Roosevelt, also called “Thee,” came calling in the early 1850s, having heard of Mittie through his brother’s wife.  They courted, and the southern belle and northern gentlemen were married and moved to New York.  Her world changed forever.

In 1854 the Roosevelts moved into a Manhattan townhouse that was a gift from his parents, Cornelius Van Schaach and Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt.  The Roosevelts followed Dutch traditions.  The father and five brothers imported plate glass for city storefronts and buildings elsewhere.  Margaret, herself a gentle Quaker from Pennsylvania, had married into a family different than her own and probably felt empathy for her southern daughter-in-law.  It was a rather stiff group with which to spend Sunday evenings.

Thee and Mittie’s first child was a girl, Anna, also called “Bamie” for “bambino.”  Their second was a little boy who was born on October 27, 1858.  He looked like a terrapin, his mother said to her own mother and sister who’d come to help out.  The son was named Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.  Mittie couldn’t bear for her family to return to Georgia and pleaded with them to stay.   So they did.  They remained in New York City for the births of two more babies, a son, Elliott, in 1860 and a daughter, Corinne, in 1861.  By the last child’s September arrival, the nation was at war.

How did three southern women cope with that?  They were caught, living with the people who were destroying their past.  But Mittie loved Thee, and it was his love for her that kept him from enlisting as he wanted to (a decision that he later regretted).  He thought it would destroy her if he fought against her brothers.  He hired two substitutes in his place and joined the home guard.  Then he helped create the Allottment Commission, which urged soldiers to send some of their pay home to their families instead of wasting it on sutlers.  While Thee was away in Washington and various fighting fields talking to troops, Grandmama, Mittie and her sister Anna sent supplies past the Union blockade to their family.  Then came news that General Sherman’s army had surrounded Bulloch Hall.  It was spared, probably because of a Masonic emblem on the house.  Soldiers on the offense could not burn the home of a fraternal brother, even if he lived on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Bulloch Hall today.

In the meantime the children were growing and learning.  Aunt Annie was their tutor, teaching them letters and numbers, but more special, telling stories as their mother did about the Georgia home.  The sisters were experts at mimicry and music.  They spent long evenings remembering their old way of life for the children who would never see it.  There were mysterious tales of slave quarters, Indian fighters, men of valor, and duels.  The strain of life far from her people’s sympathies and four rambunctious children with various infirmities took its toll on Mittie, but she stayed a vibrant force in everyone’s lives.  Soon she would, along with her husband and children, become a traveler and connoisseur of the world.

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Don’t miss Ken Burns’ new documentary, The Roosevelts, which begins on PBS this Sunday, September 14!

Skinny and Swelly

Elliott Roosevelt was Theodore’s younger brother.  When he died an alcoholic at only 34, Theodore wrote to their sister Corinne that they should think of him as the boy who played with them in the hotels of Europe – “Do you remember how we used to do it?”  In their Victorian childhood Theodore, Elliott and Corinne referred to themselves as “We Three.”  Older sister Anna (Bamie) was in the category of the adults, for it seemed she had always been one.

Harvard University photo

Little Elliott was kind-hearted.  Once on a chilly day, he returned from a walk without his coat, having given it to a boy who didn’t have one.  He was concerned about the welfare of the family’s servants, and when they attended a circus, about the performing animals.

The family took a second grand tour in 1872.  This time, the three youngest stayed in a German home to study.  Theodore and Elliott took breaks from their lessons with rounds of boxing, wearing gloves sent by their father.  Each pummeled the other: getting black eyes and bloody noses, seeing stars, and enjoying every minute.  They called each other “Skinny” and “Swelly.”  Theodore was “Skinny,” asthma stricken, frail but tough; Elliott was “Swelly,” more handsome, more robust.

In his late teens Elliott started drinking, partly to numb strange incidents of blood rushing to his head.  Was it a psychosomatic illness?  Was it because of one too many boxing blows?  His parents sent him away on long hunting trips instead of to Harvard University where Theodore had gone.

Harvard University photo

Then, in the middle of Theodore’s sophomore year of college, their father died of an agonizing stomach tumor.  When Theodore was in the state legislature at Albany, their mother and Theodore’s beautiful wife Alice died in the same house on the same day.  In both cases Elliott was left behind at home to deal with the terrible events that marked the end of the lives of people Skinny and Swelly dearly loved.

FDR Library photo

“Good Old Nell” was an attractive man, a natural socializer, and after marrying beautiful Anna Hall (pictured above) he joined the hunt club set.  He grew apart from the rest of the family, sinking deeper into drinking and then philandering.  Sister Bamie attempted  to save him with a European trip for the family, which by the early 1890s included three children, but it ended in Elliott’s commitment to a sanitarium.  He relinquished his property to his wife.  Anna died of diphtheria in America; he died soon afterwards.

Of the couple’s children, Eleanor and Hall lived to adulthood.  Eleanor was educated at a private school, Allenswood, in England and married a fellow crusader, her fifth cousin Franklin.  She had a profound role in the White House during World War II.

During the hunt for information for my book, I visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York.  It was the first such library designed by a sitting president and built next to Franklin’s boyhood home, which began as a farmhouse but was largely remodeled.  I enjoyed the tour of the great house and noted birds on display from his own collection.  It seems that James Roosevelt told his son he could take taxidermy lessons like cousin Theodore had, if he could find and stuff one of each species seen on their property.  I marveled at the rope-controlled elevator with which Franklin built his upper body muscles as he sat in a kitchen chair converted to a wheelchair.  The rose garden surrounding the presidential couple’s gravesite was breathtaking.

In the library I read a few of Elliott’s boyhood letters.  He once wrote that he had been excited to get a new watch for his birthday, but when he ran to show Theodore, his brother told him he already knew about it.

I looked at letters Elliott wrote to little Eleanor after her mother died.  They were very sad.  His love for his family was evident, but he could not overcome the demons that prevented him from nurturing his family.

 

FDR Library photo

On display downstairs in the FDR Library is a necklace made of tiger claws which Elliott brought back from a hunting trip to India.  Ironically, this was an animal Theodore had wanted to bag but never did.  Its skin was prominently draped before the fireplace at his mother’s home on West 57th Street in New York, and the stunning piece of jewelry went to his wife, Anna.  Eleanor inherited it and wore it as first lady.

It is a reminder of a tragic life in a family that left a lasting influence on the world.  Ken Burns’ new documentary, The Roosevelts, will air beginning September 14 on PBS.  Undoubtedly it will shed more light on the relationships and contributions of these fascinating Americans.

Five Funny Stories About Young Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt had an infectious personality and told lots of funny stories.  He also was the subject of reminiscences by family and friends.

1. His father, the first Theodore Roosevelt, was concerned about the health of his children and wanted them to get as much fresh air as possible.  So at the back of their brownstone in New York City, he removed a wall from a second story bedroom to make an open porch. The two boys and two girls went out on pleasant days to exercise. According to older sister Anna, one day a neighbor happened to look up to see nine-year-old “Teedie,” as he was called, on the end of a seesaw.  He, on the far seat, and his cousin, on the seat closest the house, were balancing it on the railing two stories up! The neighbor rushed in to tell his mother, Martha, who went out and firmly pulled the boys in. She said, “If the Lord wanted Theodore, He’d have taken him long before now.”

 “Teedie.”  National Park Service photo.

2. During the family’s second trip abroad when Theodore was fourteen, the three younger children stayed with a German family to learn the country’s culture.  He caught the mumps, though, and his asthma flared up.  His mother came to take them to Switzerland for the mountain air.  They packed, and Theodore told Martha he was ready to go, so she checked his trunk.  It seemed unusually heavy.  He’d removed quite a few articles of clothing and replaced them with large rocks he wanted to study.  The clothes went back in, but he managed to take some smaller rocks along in his pockets.

3. Fred Osborn was a good friend who shared an interest in nature and often invited Theodore to his home near Garrison, New York.  Fred’s brother Henry told of the time the boys were on a walk and doffed their hats as they met the carriage of Hon. Hamilton Fish, the current United States Secretary of State, and his wife.  A frog jumped from Theodore’s head to the ground, having been stored under the hat because his pockets were full.

4. Theodore hunted birds and game in the Adirondack Mountains.  At fifteen he was guided around St. Regis Lake by a man named Mose Sawyer.  To show appreciation after the trip, Theodore gave him two stuffed birds preserved with arsenic.  Unfortunately, the birds, and Mose’s cat which ate them, did not last long.

 

Theodore at sixteen.  Harvard University photo.

5. He was shy in his teens though he attended social events such as dancing parties. At the family’s summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Theodore liked to take girls out for rowboat rides. His sister Corinne wrote about an early morning when he rowed to a dock close to a girl’s house.  As it was several hours before he said he’d be there and no one was around, he undressed to go for a swim.  Then he crawled under the dock and took a nap.  He woke up to the sound of two girls talking on the boards above his head.  Too late he realized the boat had drifted away with his clothes in it, and had to wait until they left before he could finally swim to the boat and his clothes, and return home.

All right, I have one more, but it is not about the young Theodore.

When he was grown, he and two guides took a hunting trip in Idaho. He had a camera with him and wanted to photograph a particularly beautiful waterfall. To get closer, he asked the men to lower him over a cliff with one end of a long rope tied around his waist and the other end anchored to a tree. He took the picture and signaled for them to pull him back up. They pulled. And they pulled. And they pulled.  None of their efforts could raise him. He was dangling so far above the river that it would have been dangerous to cut the rope, and finally they decided the only thing to do was double a shorter rope and tie it to the first to get him closer to the water. One of the men ran down to the shore where Theodore tossed the camera to him; the other cut the rope. He fell into the river, bruised but otherwise all right. Does this remind you of the little boy in the first story? One of TR’s friends said, “You must always remember he is about six.”

President Roosevelt at Yosemite, several years after the incident in Idaho.  Harvard University photo.

Sources: Lillian Rixey, Bamie, Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister; Frank Russell, Theodore Roosevelt Typical American; Henry Fairfield Osborn, Impressions of Great Naturalists; Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt the Naturalist and Theodore Roosevelt the Making of a Conservationist; and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt.