David McCullough - Mornings on Horseback

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M Y FIRST ENCOUNTER with Theodore Roosevelt was in Pittsburgh about 1943. He was busy stealing the show in a Peabody High School production of Arsenic and Old Lace and I, at age ten or so, thought him sensational, and especially since in real life he was my oldest brother, Hax.

I have no idea how much or how little I knew of the historical TR before that night, but the impression that lasted was of a wondrously high-powered, comical, slightly loony, tremendously alive and appealing figure, all teeth, glasses, and mustache, who said Bully! at every chance and blew on a bugle and yelled C-H-A-R-G-E! at just the moment when it would bring the house down. I came away, in other words, with pretty much the impression of our twenty-sixth President that so many of us have grown up with, except that for me he happened also to be one of my very own family.

Years later, doing background reading on the Panama Canal, I encountered another Theodore Rooseveltstill the showman, still in command of the stage, but also shrewd, complex, a man of many gifts and masksand it was what I read of his early life in particular that led to this book. My intention was not to write a biography of him. What intrigued me was how he came to be. Having written about the creation of two of the most conspicuous inanimate wonders of his era, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and having acquired as a result great appreciation for the simple idea that such things dont just happen, I was interested in knowing what was involved in the metamorphosis of this most conspicuous animate wonder. There were pieces of the puzzle that fascinated mehis childhood battle with asthma, for example, his beautiful southern mother, the adoration he had for his father. What, who, were involved in the forming of all that energy and persistence? How much of him was playacting or a composite of borrowings from others who were important to him?

The underlying theme would be the same as that of my earlier workthe creative effort, the testing and struggle, the elements of chance and inspiration involved in any great human achievement. The book would end when I thought he was formed as a person, at whatever age that happened, when I felt I could say, when the reader could say, there he is. San Juan Hill, the White House, the Canal, the trust-busting and Big Stick wielding, the Bull Moose with his hat in the ring, would all be after the fact, another story, so far as my interests.

But it was when I discovered the range and richness of surviving Roosevelt family correspondencethe many thousands of letters written not just by TR but by his mother, father, sisters, brother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, the private diaries and journals in the great Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvards Houghton Librarythat I realized what a truly marvelous and very large subject I had. The letters, only a small fraction of which have been published, offered the chance to get inside the life of a well-to-do Victorian American familya very particular and vanished way of lifeto go below the surface of their world, in a way that is seldom possible for a writer, except in fiction. It became the most engrossing work imaginable. The point that one of their number was to make history one day seemed almost immaterial. It was a story I would have wanted to tell had their names been something other than Roosevelt or had none of them done anything special later in life.

During all this period New York was very much in the condition described in Edith Whartons novel The Age of Innocence, writes Anna Roosevelt, Theodores older sister, in a private reminiscence that is part of the collection; though naturally I did not realize it at the time, she adds. Nor, importantly, did any of the family realize then that they were to be figures in history. The name Roosevelt was not yet a household word. National fame had not as yet touched any of the family and there was no reason to expect it might. And so there is an absence of affectation in almost everything they wrote to one another then, a wonderful candidness not always present in surviving correspondence from later stages.

Few of the Roosevelts could spell very well and punctuation for them, as for so many Victorians, was largely a matter of personal preference. Theodore, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, had the poorest spelling of all. He could handle hippopotamus or come close with antediluvian, even as a small boy, but words like Chicago or forest could prove too much for him. His brother, Elliott, had to write him at one point, As you dont know how to spell my name, I have entirely forgotten how to spell yourn. Ellio t does not spell Elliott, my dear Teedore.

So for the benefit of the reader, the spelling in the writings quoted here has been corrected and punctuation made to conform to present standards, except in a few instances where the idiosyncrasy adds to the spirit of what is being said.

The volume of published work one must become familiar with when dealing with even part of such a life as Theodore led is almost overwhelming. It is not just that so much has been written about him and about other Roosevelts, but that he wrote and published so much himself and read so much that had a direct bearing on his life. Though a bibliography and source notes are included at the back of the book, I would like to express my particular indebtedness to two published works from the 1950s: the monumental The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (in eight volumes), edited by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and John J. Buckley; and Carleton Putnams masterful Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Numbers of other books were helpful and a pleasureHenry F. Pringles biased and lively Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Harbaughs The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, which is much the best one-volume biography of TR, John Morton Blums superb The Republican Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorns Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, Nicholas Roosevelts Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him but the Letters and the Putnam biography have been indispensable.

For his advice on research, his valuable comments on the manuscript, his friendship over the past four years, I thank especially Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and author of the definitive The Bull Moose Years. I am also greatly indebted to Wallace F. Dailey, Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, which in total comprises some seventeen thousand manuscript papers (mostly letters) and ten thousand photographs housed in the Houghton Library plus approximately twelve thousand volumes housed in the Widener Library. I thank Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, and Martha Eliza Shaw and the others of the Houghton Reading Room staff who were so helpful. I salute, too, the resourceful John D. Knowlton of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for his efforts in determining what was concealed beneath an ink blot in one of TRs diaries; I thank Timothy Beard of the New York Public Librarys genealogy division for sharing some of his latest findings on the remarkable private life of Robert B. Roosevelt. For the very thorough tour he gave me through TRs home at Oyster Bay, his quick and helpful answers to my written queries over the years, I thank Gary Roth, Curator of the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.