THE ROARING TEDDY BEAR

By Edwin Cooney

(For MONDAY, OCTOBER 27TH, 2008)

The clock read 7:45 p.m. on the night of Wednesday, October 27th, 1858. The scene was a brownstone located at 28 East 20th Avenue in New York City. The occasion was the birth of a very special baby. He would be named after his father Theodore Roosevelt and, for the next sixty years and seventy-one days, life in the Roosevelt family would be nearly always exciting and seldom predictable.

Theodore Roosevelt was the second child and oldest son of Theodore and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt. His older sister Anna was called either Bamie or Bysie. Young Theodore wasn’t called Teddy, a name he never liked; rather, he was called Teedie until he was in his mid teens. His younger brother Elliott, whose daughter Eleanor would marry her fifth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, was known as Ellie and their youngest sister Corinne was called Conie (spelled with one “n”). Teedie, Ellie, and Conie, who were closer in age to each other than they were to their older sister Anna, referred to themselves as “we three.”

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was a prosperous glass import merchant and banker in mid- nineteenth century New York City. Teedie’s mother Martha Bulloch Roosevelt was a Southern Belle, which brought about some discomfort during the Civil War when Teedie’s father was away giving aid and comfort to Union troops. Martha’s two brothers were fighting with the Confederacy while her young son Teedie prayed aloud every night that God would grind Confederate troops into the dust.

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was a kind and generous man to all who knew him. His charities included the YMCA, the News-Boy’s Lodging House, and the New York Orthopedic Hospital. The Roosevelt family lineage was Dutch, Scotch, English, Huguenot and Welch.

Teedie suffered throughout his childhood from severe attacks of asthma. He was physically weak and underweight. These maladies would be mastered as he began a physical training program in the family gymnasium and grew into adolescence.

Teedie’s childhood experiences included two trips abroad, one in 1869 through the spring of 1870 and the second lasting from 1872 through much of 1873.

During his first trip abroad he spent the Christmas season in Rome where he had occasion to meet and kiss the hand of Pope Leo IX. Once, being an energetic and occasionally mischievous child insensitive to the plight of the poor, he led “we three” in tossing cake into the midst of a crowd of beggars to watch them scramble for the crumbs. “We three,” also entertained themselves another time by shooting cap guns in a public square, thus scaring the dogs.

During the 1872-73 visit abroad, Teedie and his father climbed to the top of the Egyptian pyramids. He also spent time in Dresden Germany at a private school while his parents conducted other affairs.

From the time he was seven, Teedie was interested in natural history. At around age nine, he wrote a rather learned paper on the natural history of insects. He also learned to do taxidermy. This enabled him to preserve the carcasses of birds and the small game that he shot. Over time, the idea of shooting animals presented somewhat of a conflict to Teedie, but hunting would always be one of his favorite sports.

Due to his various illnesses, most of young Teedie’s education was at home where he learned the fundamentals from his Aunt Annie, his mother’s sister. During his mid teens he did attend a private school during his preparation for his 1876 admission to Harvard.

While at Harvard between September 1876 and June of 1880, in addition to his studies, he was librarian of the Porcellian club, secretary of the Hasty Pudding club, vice president of the Natural History club, and he founded the Finance Club. Additionally, he was runner-up for the Harvard light heavy-weight boxing championship. He also scored where it counted, graduating Phi Bata Kappa as well as magna cum laude and ranking twenty-first in a class of one-hundred and seventy-seven.

In 1878, TR suffered the tragedy of the death of his father. He also discovered the joy of romance when he met and fell in love with Alice Hathaway Lee whom he would marry on his twenty-second birthday in 1880.

Surrendering to Alice’s plea that he give up his plans to become a naturalist, TR entered Columbia University Law School in the fall of 1880. Law, he decided, would lead him into public life. However, following his marriage and extensive European honeymoon, he decided to skip the law degree and plunge into politics. Thus, in the fall of 1881, he was elected to the State Legislature representing New York State’s twenty-third Assembly District.

His three years in the New York State Assembly saw him fight corruption and cross the political aisle in support of Democratic Governor Grover Cleveland’s civil service reform proposal. However, it would be interrupted by a St. Valentine’s Day tragedy.

On that day, under the same roof, TR would lose his mother to typhus and his beloved Alice to Bright’s disease. Alice had given birth two days previously to a baby girl. She would be named after her mother and become throughout her life one of America’s most fascinating political and social personalities. Devastated by the double tragedy, TR, after completing his duties in the Assembly and participating as a delegate at the 1884 GOP convention, headed to the badlands of the Dakota Territory.

For two years, TR would live the harsh life of a cattle rancher and serve as a deputy sheriff of Billings County.

In 1886, he returned to New York and lost his bid to become Mayor. Then he went on to London, England where he won a new bride. Her name was Edith Carow. Edith had loved Theodore since they played together as children. She even attended his 1880 wedding to Alice Lee and wished him well. Now they became one and raised a family of four sons and a daughter in addition to young Alice.

To write of Theodore Roosevelt is to write of an historian (his first book published in 1882 was a naval history of the war of 1812), a naturalist, a rancher or “cowboy,” a soldier, and, ultimately, a politician and United States president. Between 1890 and 1901, he served as a federal civil service commissioner, President of the New York City Police Commission, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York and, from March 4th to September 14th of 1901, Vice President of the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt was an extraordinary person and politician. By no means was he always either politically selfless or in tune with the voters. However, there was a definite and genuine righteousness about him.

It was apparent to some as early as 1895, when he was President of the police Board of Commissioners, that Theodore Roosevelt was headed for the presidency. Author Lincoln Steffens and a friend were in TR’s office at police headquarters one day and wondered aloud if perhaps TR might sometime become a presidential candidate. Suddenly, TR leaped to his feet with rage on his face:

“Don’t you dare ask me that!” he almost screamed. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head! No friend of mine would say a thing like that. Never, never, must either of you remind a man on a political job that he may be president. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve, he can’t do his work, and he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility.”

When the Spanish American War broke out in 1898, TR left his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to raise a private regiment, popularly known as “The Rough Riders,” to fight in Cuba. On July 1st of 1898, he led a charge up Kettle Hill (popularly understood to be San Juan Hill) to overrun an enemy gun emplacement. Thus, thirty-nine year-old Theodore Roosevelt became, in the public’s mind, as much a war hero as Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant were. Narrowly elected Governor of New York that November 8th, TR would be president within three years.

A “reform governor,” TR defied the wishes of traditional Republican leaders and passed labor legislation limiting the hours children and women could be compelled to work. He also strengthened civil service laws to take jobs away from political patronage-hungry politicians and put them into the public sector. Thus, New York Republican leaders pressed President William McKinley to take TR as his running mate in 1900. The President agreed and the GOP ticket of McKinley and Roosevelt was elected that fall on the promise of “a full dinner pail.”

Six months and two days after Inauguration Day, President McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz while attending the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.

Sunday September 22nd, TR’s first full day in the White House was the President’s late father’s birthday. Making note of that, the new President told his family that his presidency would reflect his father’s sense of public spirit.

Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency would be dedicated to the strengthening and expansion of American military power and influence abroad. To that end, TR would purchase America’s right to build the Panama Canal. He issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine justifying American intervention in the affairs of Latin America, brokered a peace treaty between Japan and Russia in 1905 (for which he would be awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize) and sent the “Great White Fleet”—in defiance of Congress—on a round-the-world “good will tour” in 1907.

At home, President Roosevelt dedicated the presidency to the welfare of the people. During the 1902 anthracite coal strike, he urged management (with limited success) to recognize the legitimacy of labor unions and labor’s issues. He ordered his attorney general to bring suits against the big railroads and the beef and tobacco combinations. He also purchased millions of acres of land for the purpose of land and resource conservation projects. In 1903, he signed legislation creating the Department of Commerce and Labor. In 1906, he signed the Pure Food and Drug act and the Hepburn act which strengthened the Commerce Department’s ability to regulate railroad rates for goods and for passengers crossing state lines.

Popular from the outset of his presidency, he defeated his Democratic opponent, New York State Supreme Court Judge Alton B. Parker, by over two million votes in 1904 when he sought a full term.

When he left the presidency in 1909 to his friend William Howard Taft, he was as popular as ever. Unlike his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt sought to react to people’s needs rather than simply reacting to Congress’s measures. A proactive rather than a reactive presidency was his ultimate gift to the American people.

Even more, the person of Theodore Roosevelt made an impression on the people. His large boisterous family made news. His boys Theodore, Kermit, Archie and Quentin and his two daughters Ethel and Alice were frequently in the news. The boys slid down the banisters and occasionally even roller skated through the formal rooms of the mansion. One day, when Quentin was ill, his sisters and brothers brought his pet pony up to see him in his third floor room via the White House elevator.

His daughter Alice became known as “Princess Alice” in the newspapers. As willful as her father, she responded to his directive that she couldn’t smoke under his roof by responding:

“Alright father, I’ll smoke on top of your roof,” and she did: she smoked on the roof of the White House.

“Princess Alice” married Ohio GOP congressman Nicholas Longworth at the White House on February 17, 1906.

It was the President, however, who made the biggest news. In his first months as President, he angered southern congressmen by inviting black educator Booker T. Washington to the White House. True, he never repeated the gesture, but he never apologized for it either.

Additionally, there was boxing and wrestling at the White House in which the chief executive took part. There were also the obstacle hikes led by TR which took the President, newspaper reporters and even White House guests through parks, forests, swamps and even across streams—with and without clothes.

No President enjoyed his job more than Theodore Roosevelt. That could be part of the reason why he quarreled with his two successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. His quarrel with Taft would ultimately be healed in a dramatic reunion in 1918 at a Chicago restaurant. However, he and Woodrow Wilson came to heartily dislike one another—a breech that would never be healed.

Some may well argue that TR’s ultimate legacy crossed political, historic, and social barriers that Washington, Jackson, or even Abraham Lincoln never came close to crossing.

While visiting Mississippi in November 1902, where he’d been invited to settle a land dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana, his hosts invited him on a hunting trip. Newspaper cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew a cartoon depicting a bear cub that the President supposedly refused to shoot. Sometime later, Morris and Rose Michtom, a couple who owned a candy and novelty store in Brooklyn, New York, wrote and asked the President if they could sell a stuffed bear designed by Mrs. Michtom. They sent the president a sample of the bear which they asked permission to call a “Teddy bear.” Permission was granted. Within a year’s time, Morris and Rose Mitchtom ran a toy company rather than merely a candy store.

TR’s lifetime was just sixty years and seventy-one days, but what years and days they turned out to be! Like his fellow citizens, Theodore Roosevelt had his assets and liabilities, his gifts and his blind spots, his triumphs and tragedies. He could be scrupulously truthful and willfully devious. Although he almost never engaged in self- pity, he could be self-righteously cruel to those who got in his way.

Theodore Roosevelt loved and lived life to the absolute fullest. Mostly devoid of subtlety, he often laughed as freely as a happy child, but he could also roar like a bear---a Teddy bear that is!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY