Written from London on June 8, 1886, this letter made the strength of Edith’s feelings for Theodore abundantly clear, even as she appealed to him to be patient while she tried to put her “heart on paper.” Never having troubled much about her appearance, Edith admitted she was suddenly anxious “about being pretty” in order to please him. “I perfectly love your description of the life out west for I almost feel as if I could see you and know just what you are doing, and I do not think you sentimental in the least to love nature; please love me too and believe I think of you all the time and want so much to see you.”
Edith’s diffident and beseeching tone disappears the moment she turns to literature, whether expressing her fascination with Coleridge’s Kubla Khan or noting the “digging” required to excavate meaning from Browning’s poems. Her critique of the lead singer’s performance in a production of Carmen, which she had heard the previous night, displays a confident, acerbic wit: “He is middle aged, ugly and uninteresting with not enough voice to redeem his bad acting. His one idea of making love is to seize the prima donna’s arm and shake her violently. I am so glad it is not your way.”
As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted the larger world. Like Edith, Theodore filled pages of his letters with talk of authors and their creations. He had carried Anna Karenina with him during this trip west and told Corinne that he “read it through with very great interest.” Although he considered Tolstoy “a great writer,” he found his work deeply unsettling. “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history—a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers.”
Roosevelt read this novel of multiple marriages, broken marriages, and an assortment of adulteries at a time when the nature of marriage and remarriage, its moral and ethical reverberations, was of signal importance to the newly betrothed widower. From its very first sentence—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina confronted Theodore in an intensely personal fashion and his comments upon it illuminate his own nature more brightly than Tolstoy’s novel.
“I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it,” he observed. The history of Levin and Kitty “is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but is also perfectly healthy. Annas most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passion, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother, Stiva.” Roosevelt’s revulsion at Tolstoy’s infantile, pathetic, endearing bon vivant—his categorical interpretation of healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships—reveals a deep-seated disgust with physical and moral slackness that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
While he continued to enjoy the simple, invigorating routine of his life at the ranch, with long days free to read and write, ride and hunt, his engagement to Edith provided a welcome sense of clarity about his future. He began to muse on the satisfactions and exhilaration of political life that he had abandoned in New York. He contemplated an offer from Mayor William Grace to assume the presidency of the Board of Health, but it ultimately fell through. Still, he admitted to Henry Cabot Lodge in August, “I would like a chance at something I thought I could really do.”
In late August and early September, Roosevelt accompanied his ranching partner Bill Merrifield on a hunting trip in Idaho. When he returned, he was appalled to find that news of the engagement had leaked into the social columns of the New York Times and that Bamie, assuming the report must be unfounded gossip, had demanded a retraction. Theodore faced the difficult and necessary prospect of revealing the truth to his sister after months of deceit.
“Darling Bamie,” he wrote on September 20, 1886, “On returning from the mountains I was savagely irritated by seeing in the papers the statement that I was engaged to Edith Carow; from what source it could have originated I can not possibly conceive. But the statement itself is true. I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean and marry her. You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He proceeded to reiterate his condemnation of second marriages. “You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness, as I reproach myself,” he maintained. “Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgement about myself I shall most assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.” He was particularly anxious that his family never question their long history of affection toward Edith, that none should mistake her in any fashion for a schemer or interloper.
“As regards yourself, my dearest sister,” he continued, “I can only say you will be giving me the greatest happiness in your power if you will continue to pass your summers with me. We ourselves will have to live in the country almost the entire year; I thoroughly understand the change I will have to make in my life. As I have already told you, if you wish to you shall keep Baby Lee, I, of course paying the expense. . . . I will explain everything in full when I see you. Forever your loving brother.” This arrangement for the child of his previous marriage would prove more problematic than he anticipated.
His plans to return home were delayed by troubles at the Elkhorn ranch. A calamitous drop in the price of cattle had persuaded Sewall and Dow that the ranch was no longer a viable operation. “It looked to me as if we were throwing away his money,” Sewall reported, deeply distressed by the prospect of failing his friend Roosevelt. The two men and their wives reluctantly returned to Maine, later reflecting that despite “all of the hardships and work it was a very happy life [they] had lived all together,” indeed, “the happiest time” they had ever known.
Roosevelt, too, never forgot his years in the Badlands. Though he would ultimately lose a sizable portion of his fortune when a blizzard decimated his cattle herd, he considered his experience with “fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier” to be “the most educational asset” of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president. “It is a mighty good thing to know men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them,” Roosevelt explained. “When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.” Just as his daily work in the assembly had taught him to live down “the defective moral quality of being a stranger” among colleagues with whom he initially had little in common, so his years in the Badlands taught him “to speak the same language” as men who spent their days herding cattle, roping steer, and hunting game in the open country. Men who routinely faced danger and hardship recognized no superiority in social class or family background. His ranching days enabled him “to interpret the spirit of the West,” fostering a genuine national perspective foreign to most eastern politicians.
With his wedding planned for December 1886, however, Theodore returned to the city and his preparations for a renewed life with his oldest friend. Immediately upon his arrival in New York, he “was visited by a succession of the influential Republicans of the city to entreat [him] to take the nomination for Mayor.” He understood that it was “of course a perfectly hopeless contest,” since Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 50,000 votes. Nevertheless, he agreed to make the sacrificial three-week run, knowing that it would elevate his stature within the party.
The race pitted twenty-eight-year-old Roosevelt
against both the Democratic candidate, Abraham Hewitt, a socially conscious industrialist, and the independent labor candidate Henry George, a radical, whose hugely popular book Progress and Poverty had become a bible for reformers. In powerful prose that struck a chord throughout the country and made the book one of the top ten best sellers in American history, George argued that the “enormous increase in productive power” during the previous decades had not diminished poverty nor lifted “the burdens of those compelled to toil.” On the contrary, the progress that accompanied the Industrial Revolution had produced ever harsher lives for the masses of the people. He contended, in opposition to the social Darwinists, that “the want and injustice of the present social state are not necessary.” The gap between the rich and the poor was not a consequence of unchanging natural laws or the survival of the fittest, but of environments made by man and changeable by man. Under the right laws, George insisted, “a social state is possible in which poverty would be unknown.”
Roosevelt responded that “the mass of the American people are most emphatically not in the deplorable condition of which you speak, and the ‘statesmen and patriots of to-day’ are no more responsible for some people being poorer than others than they are for some people being shorter, or more nearsighted, or physically weaker than others. If you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water. . . . Some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied; others, though real, can only be gotten over through the capacity for steady individual self-help which is the glory of every true American, and can no more be done away with by legislation than you could do away with the bruises which you received when you tumbled down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.”
“The best I can hope for is to make a decent run,” Roosevelt conceded in a letter to Fanny Smith Dana. “The simple fact,” he explained, alluding to a famous painting, “is that I had to play Curtius and leap into the gulf that was yawning before the Republican party.” As the days progressed, however, with George firing up audiences across the city, Roosevelt worried that the gulf into which he had leapt was even deeper than he had first thought. He feared that many of his “should-be supporters” in the Republican Party would desert him in the end, voting for Hewitt to prevent the election of a radical mayor. Nonetheless, he committed to the campaign with his customary zeal. From sunup to sundown, tirelessly canvassing the city, he roused audiences with his fighting spirit, heartily shook endless hands, and freely granted interviews to reporters. He brought overflow crowds to their feet, pledging, “I am a strong party man myself [but should] I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off even if he is the highest Republican in this municipality.”
Friends and family were thrilled to see Roosevelt again step into the public arena. “It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more,” Bamie wrote to Edith in London. “Ever since he has been out of politics in any active form; it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at this early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work . . . this is the first time since the [assembly] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power except Father who possessed it in a different way; of making me almost worship him.”
Despite the excitement generated by Roosevelt’s return to public life, the Democratic candidate, Abraham Hewitt, won the election. Moreover, since thousands of Republicans voted for Hewitt in fear of the radical George, Roosevelt came in a distant third. Nonetheless, the press praised Roosevelt for a spirited campaign. “Fighting is fun for him, win or lose,” the New York Sun editorialized.
Three days after the election, Theodore set sail for England, accompanied by his faithful sister Bamie. Three weeks later, on December 2, 1886, he married Edith Carow in a simple ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in London. Theodore and Edith swiftly departed for a three-month honeymoon that would take them across England, France, and Italy. Typically, even as they explored Florence, Venice, and Paris, Theodore managed to complete a half-dozen articles on ranching life for the Century magazine. “I read them all over to Edith,” he reported to Corinne, “and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.”
During these halcyon days, Edith realized hopes and longings harbored since she was a girl. More than a decade after her honeymoon, she claimed to “remember them all one by one, and hour by hour.” Her marriage to Theodore commenced what appears to have been a rich sensual life. Many years later, her biographer Sylvia Morris reports, Edith amazed a granddaughter by openly mentioning “that wonderful silky private part of a woman.” When the Roosevelts returned home in March 1887, Edith was already three months pregnant.
The young couple returned from this idyllic interlude to face complications in uniting their daily lives. When Edith learned that Theodore was planning to leave three-year-old Alice in Bamie’s care, she surprised him with powerful opposition, insisting they incorporate the little girl into their new household. Edith’s reaction created a painful dilemma for Theodore, who well knew the devotion his childless older sister had shown her “blue-eyed darling.” “I hardly know what to say about Baby Lee,” he uncomfortably informed Bamie. “Edith feels more strongly about her than I could have imagined possible.” For Bamie, the loss was devastating. “It almost broke my heart to give her up,” she confessed. Although she maintained her composure, conceding that it was best for Alice to be with her father, she avoided further emotional attachments for some time thereafter.
The situation must have been terribly confusing for Alice, whose happiest memories revolved around Bamie’s warm and loving home, where “the lovely smell of baking bread coming from the kitchen” heralded “the pleasure of English-style afternoon tea with piping-hot Earl Grey’s tea and lots of paper-thin bread and butter.” Alice never forgot the wrenching and bewildering day Theodore returned with his new wife: “I in my best dress and sash, with a huge bunch of pink roses in my arms, coming down the stairs at my aunt’s house in New York to meet my father and my new mother.”
The small child was expected simultaneously to transfer her affections to a new mother and pray each night for her “mother who is in heaven,” though her father kept steadfastly mute about the beautiful woman who had been his first love. “In fact,” Alice lamented, “he never ever mentioned my mother to me, which was absolutely wrong. He never even said her name . . . I think my father tried to forget he had ever been married to my mother. To blot the whole episode out of his mind. He didn’t just never mention her to me, he never mentioned her name, to anyone. . . . He obviously felt tremendously guilty about remarrying. . . . The whole thing was really handled very badly. It was awfully bad psychologically.”
Edith, too, had to adjust her conception of domestic bliss to the new realities of married life. As mistress of Sagamore Hill, she had envisioned a quiet life in the country with her husband and children, filled with books, writing, and a few like-minded friends. Unlike her husband, she was not a naturally gregarious person. “Where she was reserved,” Theodore’s cousin Nicholas Roosevelt recalled, “he overflowed with exuberance and enthusiasm.” Their divergent natures would require both Theodore and Edith to balance private family life and public pursuits, necessitating compromise and cooperation.
Initially, Theodore focused intently upon his new wife. She happily recalled “rowing over to a great marsh, filled with lagoons and curious winding channels,” reading aloud from Browning and Matthew Arnold. The household seemed complete when she gave birth to a son, Theodore Junior, on September 12, 1887. “She was extremely plucky all through,” Theodore reported to Bamie. “I am very glad our house has an heir at last!”
For a time, the placid existence suited Theodore. After compl
eting his book on Senator Benton, he had embarked on a short biography of founding father Gouverneur Morris and was beginning research on what would be his major work, The Winning of the West. “I have a small son now,” he wrote to a friend, “and am settling down more and more to country life for all but a couple of months of the year. My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really take rank as in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”
It was not long, however, before his abundant energy and expansive nature required an outlet that tranquil family life could not provide. Even his conception of domestic satisfaction included a continuous stream of houseguests arguing over books or politics at dinner, hiking together in the woods, enjoying canoe races and competitive games of tennis or polo. He assumed that his entire family, which had always been a kind of self-contained universe, would spend weeks together in his rambling home.
For a time, Edith tried to isolate her new household and create a more secluded family life. “Theodore,” she would quietly say, “I think this winter we’ve seen a great deal of Douglas and Corinne and I don’t think we’ll ask them down for a little while—yet. We may ask them later.” At first he would agree: “Very well, very well, Edie, we’ll have them later.” But soon he “put his foot down” and insisted upon opening their home to the company, stimulation, and activity he needed. Clearly, two very different temperaments had to be reconciled. Edith later acknowledged to Theodore Junior that it had been a great “temptation” to withdraw from society, but “Father would not allow it.” Slowly, she began to open her house to her husband’s family and friends, while wisely turning the drawing room into her sanctuary, “the place where she kept her own books and treasures.” In this elegant room, furnished with bookcases, chairs, and sofas that had been in her family, she found the privacy she craved. Children and guests were told to knock and await permission to enter.