The Other Teddy Roosevelts

Appendix: The Unsinkable Teddy Roosevelt

Bill Fawcett doesn’t just write and edit science fiction. Recently he put together a book titled Oval Office Oddities (which thankfully were not confined to the Oval Office, or even to the years of the subject’s Presidency), and since my tastes are well-known to him, he asked me for the following chapter on Roosevelt.

So here we are, with one last look at the real Theodore (he hated the nickname “Teddy”.) Kind of hard to believe some of these anecdotes don’t belong in the stories you just read, isn’t it?

His daughter, Alice, said it best: “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

Of course, he had a little something to say about his daughter, too. When various staff members complained that she was running wild throughout the White House, his response was: “Gentlemen, I can either run the country, or I can control Alice. I cannot do both.”

He was Theodore Roosevelt, of course: statesman, politician, adventurer, naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist, cowboy, police commissioner, explorer, writer, diplomat, boxer, and President of the United States. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was widely quoted after inviting a dozen writers, artists, musicians and scientists to lunch at the White House when he announced that “This is the greatest assemblage of talent to eat here since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It’s a witty statement, but JFK must have thought Roosevelt ate all his meals out.

Roosevelt didn’t begin life all that auspiciously. “Teedee” was a sickly child, his body weakened by asthma. It was his father who decided that he was not going to raise an invalid. Roosevelt was encouraged to swim, to take long hikes, to do everything he could to build up his body. He was picked on by bullies, who took advantage of his weakened condition, so he asked his father to get him boxing lessons. They worked pretty well. By the time he entered Harvard, he had the body and reactions of a trained athlete, and before long he was a member of the boxing team. It was while fighting for the lightweight championship when an incident occurred that gave everyone an insight into Roosevelt’s character. He was carrying the fight to his opponent, C. S. Hanks, the defending champion, when he slipped and fell to his knee. Hanks had launched a blow that he couldn’t pull back, and he opened Roosevelt’s nose, which began gushing blood. The crowd got ugly and started booing the champion, but Roosevelt held up his hand for silence, announced that it was an honest mistake, and shook hands with Hanks before the fight resumed.

It was his strength of character that led to his developing an equally strong body. His doctor, W. Thompson, once told a friend: “Look out for Theodore. He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll ever say he’s tired.” In 59 years of a vigorous, strenuous life, he never once admitted to being tired.

Roosevelt was always fascinated by Nature, and in fact had seriously considered becoming a biologist or a naturalist before discovering politics. The young men sharing his lodgings at Harvard were probably less than thrilled with his interest. He kept a number of animals in his room. Not cute, cuddly one, but rather snakes, lobsters, and a tortoise that was always escaping and scaring the life out of his landlady. Before long most of the young men in his building refused to go anywhere near his room.

Roosevelt “discovered” politics shortly after graduating Harvard (phi beta kappa and summa cum laude, of course). So he attacked the field with the same vigor he attacked everything else. The result? At 24 he became the youngest Assemblyman in the New York State House, and the next year he became the youngest-ever Minority Leader. He might have remained in New York politics for years, but something happened that changed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Alice Hathaway Lee while in college, and married her very soon thereafter. His widowed mother lived with them. And then, on February 14, 1884, Alice and his mother both died (Alice in childbirth, his mother of other causes) twelve hours apart in the same house. The blow was devastating to Roosevelt. He never mentioned Alice again and refused to allow her to be mentioned in his presence. He put his former life behind him and decided to lose himself in what was left of the Wild West.

He bought a ranch in the Dakota Bad Lands…and then, because he was Theodore Roosevelt and couldn’t do anything in a small way, he bought a second ranch as well. He spent a lot more time hunting than ranching, and more time writing and reading than hunting. (During his lifetime he wrote more than 150,000 letters, as well as close to 30 books.) He’d outfitted himself with the best “Western” outfit money could buy back in New York, and of course he appeared to the locals to be a wealthy New York dandy. By now he was wearing glasses, and he took a lot of teasing over them; the sobriquet “Four Eyes” seemed to stick. Until the night he found himself far from his Elkhorn Ranch and decided to rent a room at Nolan’s Hotel in Mingusville, on the west bank of the Beaver River. After dinner he went down to the bar — it was the only gathering point in the entire town — and right after Roosevelt arrived, a huge drunk entered, causing a ruckus, shooting off his six-gun, and making himself generally obnoxious. When he saw Roosevelt, he announced that “Four Eyes” would buy drinks for everyone in the bar — or else. Roosevelt, who wasn’t looking for a fight, tried to mollify him, but the drunk was having none of it. He insisted that the effete dandy put up his dukes and defend himself. “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” muttered Roosevelt, getting up from his chair. The bully took one swing. The boxer from Harvard ducked and bent the drunk in half with a one-two combination to the belly, then caught him flush on the jaw. He kept pummeling the drunk until the man was out cold, and then, with a little help from the appreciative onlookers, he carried the unconscious man to an outhouse behind the hotel and deposited him there for the night. He was never “Four Eyes” again.

The dude from New York didn’t limit himself to human bullies. No horse could scare him either. During the roundup of 1884, he and his companions encountered a horse known only as “The Devil”. He’d earned his name throwing one cowboy after another, and was generally considered to be the meanest horse in the Bad Lands. Finally Roosevelt decided to match his will and skills against the stallion, and all the other cowboys gathered around the corral to watch the New Yorker get his comeuppance — and indeed, The Devil soon bucked him off. Roosevelt got on again. And got bucked off again. According to one observer, “With almost every other jump, we would see about twelve acres of bottom land between Roosevelt and the saddle.” The Devil sent him flying a third and then a fourth time. But Roosevelt wasn’t about to quit. The Devil couldn’t throw him a fifth time, and before long Roosevelt had him behaving “as meek as a rabbit”, according to the same observer. The next year there was an even wilder horse. The local cowboys knew him simply as “The Killer”, but Roosevelt decided he was going to tame him, and a tame horse needed a better name than that, so he dubbed him “Ben Baxter”. The cowboys, even those who had seen him break The Devil, urged him to keep away from The Killer, to have the horse destroyed. Roosevelt paid them no attention. He tossed a blanket over Ben Baxter’s head to keep him calm while putting on the saddle, an operation that was usually life-threatening in itself. Then he tightened the cinch, climbed onto the horse, and removed the blanket. Two seconds later, Roosevelt was sprawling in the dirt of the corral. A minute later, he was back in the saddle, and five seconds later, he was flying through the air again, to land with a bond-jarring thud! They kept it up most of the afternoon; Roosevelt climbing back on every time he was thrown, and finally the fight was all gone from Ben Baxter. Roosevelt had broken his shoulder during one of his spills, but it hadn’t kept him from mastering the horse. He kept Ben Baxter, and from that day forward “The Killer” became the gentlest horse on his ranch. Is it any wonder that he never backed down from a political battle?

Having done everything else one could do in the Bad Lands, Roosevelt became a Deputy Sheriff. And in March of 1886, he found out that it meant a little more than rounding up the town drunks on a Saturday night. It seems that a wild man named Mike Finnegan, who had a reputation for breaking laws and heads that stretched from one end of the Bad Lands to the other, had gotten drunk and shot up the town of Medora, escaping — not that anyone dared to stop him — on a small flatboat with two confederates. Anyone who’s ever been in Dakota in March knows that it’s still quite a few weeks away from the first signs of spring. Roosevelt, accompanied by Bill Sewell and Wilmot Dow, was ordered to bring Finnegan in, and took off after him on a raft a couple of days later. They negotiated the ice-filled river, and finally came to the spot where the gang had made camp. Roosevelt, the experienced hunter, managed to approach silently and unseen until the moment he stood up, rifle in hands, and announced that they were his prisoners. Not a shot had to be fired. But capturing Finnegan and his friends was the easy part. They had to be transported overland more than 100 miles to the town of Dickenson, where they would stand trial. Within a couple of days the party of three lawmen and three outlaws was out of food. Finally Roosevelt set out on foot for a ranch — any ranch — and came back a day later with a small wagon filled with enough food to keep them alive on the long trek. The wagon had a single horse, and given the weather and conditions of the crude trails, the horse couldn’t be expected pull all six men, so Sewell and Dow rode in the wagon while Roosevelt and the three captives walked behind it on an almost non-existent trail, knee-deep in snow, in below-freezing weather. And the closer they got to Dickenson, the more likely it was that Finnegan would attempt to escape, so Roosevelt didn’t sleep the last two days and nights of the forced march. But he delivered the outlaws, safe and reasonably sound. He would be a lawman again in another nine years, but his turf would be as different from the Bad Lands as night is from day. He became the Police Commissioner of New York City.

New York was already a pretty crime-ridden city, even before the turn of the 20^th Century. Roosevelt, who had already been a successful politician, lawman, lecturer and author, was hired to change that — and change it he did. He hired the best people he could find. That included the first woman on the New York police force — and the next few dozen as well. (Before long every station had police matrons around the clock, thus assuring that any female prisoner would be booked by a member of her own sex.) Then came another innovation: when Roosevelt decided that most of the cops couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with their sidearms, target practice was not merely encouraged but made mandatory for the first time in the force’s history. When the rise of the automobile meant that police on foot could no longer catch some escaping lawbreakers, Roosevelt created a unit of bicycle police (who, in the 1890s, had no problem keeping up with the cars of that era which were traversing streets that had not been created with automobiles in mind.) He hired Democrats as well as Republicans, men who disliked him as well as men who worshipped him. All he cared about was that they were able to get the job done. He was intolerant only of intolerance. When the famed anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came to America, New York’s Jewish population didn’t want to allow him in the city. Roosevelt couldn’t bar him, but he came up with the perfect solution: Ahlwardt’s police bodyguards were composed entirely of very large, very unhappy Jewish cops whose presence convinced the bigot to forego his anti-Semitic harangues while he was in the city. Roosevelt announced that all promotions would be strictly on merit and not political pull, then spent the next two years proving he meant what he said. He also invited the press into his office whenever he was there, and if a visiting politician tried to whisper a question so that the reporters couldn’t hear it, Roosevelt would repeat and answer it in a loud, clear voice.

As Police Commissioner, Roosevelt felt the best way to make sure his police force was performing its duty was to go out in the field and see for himself. He didn’t bother to do so during the day; the press and the public were more than happy to report on the doings of his policemen. No, what he did was go out into the most dangerous neighborhoods, unannounced, between midnight and sunrise, usually with a reporter or two in tow, just in case things got out of hand. (Not that he thought they would help him physically, but he expected them to accurately report what happened if a misbehaving or loafing cop turned on him.) The press dubbed these his “midnight rambles”, and after awhile the publicity alone caused almost all the police to stay at their posts and do their duty, because they never knew when the Commissioner might show up in their territory, and either fire them on the spot or let the reporters who accompanied him expose them to public ridicule and condemnation.

Roosevelt began writing early and never stopped. You’d expect a man who was Governor of New York and President of the United States to write about politics, and of course he did. But Roosevelt didn’t like intellectual restrictions any more than he liked physical restrictions, and he wrote books — not just articles, mind you, but books — about anything that interested him. While still in college he wrote The Naval War of 1812, which was considered at the time to be the definitive treatise on naval warfare. Here’s a partial list of the non-political books that followed, just to give you an indication of the breadth of Roosevelt’s interests:

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman

The Wilderness Hunter

A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open

The Winning of the West, Volumes 1–4

The Rough Riders

Literary Treats

Papers on Natural History

African Game Trails

Hero Tales From American History

Through the Brazilian Wilderness

The Strenuous Life

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail

I’ve got to think he’d be a pretty interesting guy to talk to. On any subject. In fact, it’d be hard to find one he hadn’t written up.

A character as interesting and multi-faceted as Roosevelt’s had to be portrayed in film sooner or later, but surprisingly, the first truly memorable characterization was by John Alexander, who delivered a classic and hilarious portrayal of a harmless madman who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt and constantly screams “Charge!” as he runs up the stairs, his version of San Juan Hill, in Arsenic and Old Lace. Eventually there were more serious portrayals: Brian Keith, Tom Berenger, even Robin Williams…and word has it that, possibly by the time you read this, you’ll be able to add Leonardo Di Caprio to the list.

Roosevelt believed in the active life, not just for himself but for his four sons — Kermit, Archie, Quentin, and Theodore Junior, and two daughters, Alice and Edith. He built Sagamore Hill, his rambling house on equally rambling acreage, and he often took the children — and any visiting dignitaries — on what he called “scrambles”, cross-country hikes that were more obstacle course than anything else. His motto: “Above or below, but never around.” If you couldn’t walk through it, you climbed over it or crawled under it, but you never ever circled it. This included not only hills, boulders, and thorn bushes, but rivers, and frequently he, the children, and the occasional visitor who didn’t know what he was getting into, would come home soaking wet from swimming a river or stream with their clothes on, or covered with mud, or with their clothes torn to shreds from thorns. Those wet, muddy, and torn clothes were their badges of honor. It meant that they hadn’t walked around any obstacle.

“If I am to be any use in politics,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “it is because I am supposed to be a man who does not preach what he fears to practice. For the year I have preached war with Spain…” So it was inevitable that he should leave his job as Undersecretary of the Navy and enlist in the military. He instantly became Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt and began putting together a very special elite unit, one that perhaps only he could have assembled. The Rough Riders consisted, among others, of cowboys, Indians, tennis stars, college athletes, the marshal of Dodge City, the master of the Chevy Chase hounds, and the man who was reputed to be the best quarterback ever to play for Harvard. They were quite a crew, Colonel Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. They captured the imagination of the public as had no other military unit in United States History. They also captured San Juan Hill in the face of some serious machine gun fire, and Roosevelt, who led the charge, returned home an even bigger hero than when he’d left.

While on a bear hunt in Mississippi, Colonel Roosevelt, as he liked to be called after San Juan Hill and Cuba, was told that a bear had been spotted a few miles away. When Roosevelt and his entourage — which always included the press — arrived, he found a small, undernourished, terrified bear tied to a tree. He refused to shoot it, and turned away in disgust, ordering a member of the party to put the poor creature out of its misery. His unwillingness to kill a helpless animal was captured by Washington Post cartoonist Clifford Berryman. It made him more popular than ever, and before long toy companies were turning out replicas of cute little bears that the great Theodore Roosevelt would certainly never kill, rather than ferocious game animals. Just in case you ever wondered about the origin of the Teddy Bear.

Some 30 years ago, writer/director John Milius gave the public one of the truly great adventure films, The Wind and the Lion, in which the Raisuli (Sean Connery), known as “the Last of the Barbary Pirates”, kidnapped an American woman, Eden Perdicaris (Candice Bergan) and her two children, and held them for ransom at his stronghold in Morocco. At which point President Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith, in probably the best representation of Roosevelt ever put on film) declared that America wanted “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” and sent the fleet to Morocco. Wonderful film, beautifully photographed, well-written, well-acted, with a gorgeous musical score. Would you like to know what really happened? First of all, it wasn’t Eden Perdicaris; it was Ion Perdicaris, a 64-year-old man. And he wasn’t kidnapped with two small children, but with a grown stepson. And far from wanting to be rescued, he and the Raisuli became great friends. Roosevelt felt the President of the United States had to protect Americans abroad, so he sent a telegram to the Sultan of Morocco, the country in which the kidnapping took place, to the effect that America wanted Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead. He also dispatched seven warships to Morocco. So why wasn’t there a war with Morocco? Two reasons. First, during the summer of 1904, shortly after the kidnapping and Roosevelt’s telegram, the government learned something that was kept secret until after all the principles in the little drama — Roosevelt, Perdicaris, and the Raisuli — had been dead for years…and that was that Ion Perdicaris was not an American citizen. He had been born one, but he later renounced his citizenship and moved to Greece, years before the kidnapping. The other reason? Perdicaris’s dear friend, the Raisuli, set him free. Secretary of State John Hay knew full well that Perdicaris had been freed before the Republican convention convened, but he whipped the assembled delegates up with the “America wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” slogan anyway, and Roosevelt was elected in a landslide.

Roosevelt was as vigorous and active as President as he’d been in every previous position. Consider: even though the country was relatively empty, he could see land being gobbled up in great quantities by settlers and others, and he created the national park system. He arranged for the overthrow of the hostile Panamanian government and created the Panama Canal, which a century later is still vital to international shipping. He took on J. P. Morgan and his cohorts, and became the greatest “trust buster” in our history, then created the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor to make sure weaker Presidents in the future didn’t give up the ground he’d taken. We were a regional power when he took office. Then he sent the Navy’s “Great White Fleet” around the world on a “goodwill tour”. By the time it returned home, we were, for the first time, a world power. Because he never backed down from a fight, a lot of people thought of him as a warmonger — but he became the only American President ever to win the Nobel Peace Price while still in office, when he mediated a dispute between Japan and Russia before it became a full-fledged shooting war. He created and signed the Pure Drug and Food Act. He became the first President to leave the United States while in office, when he visited Panama to inspect the Canal.

Roosevelt remained physically active throughout his life. He may or may not have been the only President to be blind in one eye, but he was the only who to ever go blind in one eye from injuries received in a boxing match while serving as President. He also took years of jujitsu lessons while in office, and became quite proficient at it. And, in keeping with daughter Alice’s appraisal of him, he was the first President to fly in an airplane, and the first to be filmed.

Roosevelt’s last day in office was February 22, 1909. He’d already been a cowboy, a rancher, a soldier, a marshal, a police commissioner, a governor, and a President. So did he finally slow down? Just long enough to pack. Accompanied by his son, Kermit, and the always-present journalists, on March 23 he boarded a ship that would take him to East Africa for the first organized safari on record. It was sponsored by the American and Smithsonian museums, which to this day display some of the trophies he shot and brought back. His two guides were the immortal F. C. Selous, widely considered to be the greatest hunter in African history, and Philip Percival, who was already a legend among Kenya’s hunting fraternity. What did Roosevelt manage to bag for the museums? 9 lions, 9 elephants, 5 hyenas, 8 black rhinos, 5 white rhinos, 7 hippos, 8 wart hogs, 6 Cape buffalo, 3 pythons, and literally hundreds of antelope, gazelle, and other herbivores. Is it any wonder that he needed 500 uniformed porters? And since he paid as much attention to the mind as to the body, one of those porters carried 60 pounds of Roosevelt’s favorite books on his back, and Roosevelt made sure he got in his reading every day, no matter what. While hunting in Uganda, he ran into the noted rapscallion John Boyes and others who were poaching elephants in the Lado Enclave. According to Boyes’s memoir, The Company of Adventurers, the poachers offered to put a force of 50 hunters and poachers at Roosevelt’s disposal if he would like to take a shot at bringing American democracy, capitalism and know-how to the Belgian Congo (not that they had any right to it, but from their point of view, neither did King Leopold of Belgium). Roosevelt admitted to being tempted, but he had decided that his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, was doing a lousy job as President and he’d made up his mind to run again. But first, he wrote what remains one of the true classics of hunting literature, African Game Trails, which has remained in print for just short of a century as these words are written. (And half a dozen of the journalists sold their versions of the safari to the book publishers, whose readers simply couldn’t get enough of Roosevelt.)

William Howard Taft, the sitting President (and Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor), of course wanted to run for re-election. Roosevelt was the clear choice among the Republican rank and file, but the President controls the party’s machinery, and due to a number of procedural moves Taft got the nomination. Roosevelt, outraged at the backstage manipulations, decided to form a third party. Officially it was the Progressive Party, but after he mentioned that he felt “as fit as bull moose”, the public dubbed it the Bull Moose Party. Not everyone was thrilled to see him run for a third term. (Actually, it would have been only his second election to the Presidency; he became President in 1901 just months after McKinley’s election and assassination, so though he’d only been elected once, he had served in the White House for seven years.) One such unhappy citizen was John F. Schrank. On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt came out of Milwaukee’s Hotel Gillespie to give a speech at a nearby auditorium. He climbed into an open car and waved to the crowd — and found himself face-to-face with Schrank, who raised his pistol and shot Roosevelt in the chest. The crowd would have torn Schrank to pieces, but Roosevelt shouted: “Stand back! Don’t touch that man!” He had Schrank brought before him, stared at the man until the potential killer could no longer meet his gaze, then refused all immediate medical help. He wasn’t coughing up blood, which convinced him that the wound wasn’t fatal, and he insisted on giving his speech before going to the hospital. He was a brave man…but he was also a politician and a showman, and he knew what the effect on the crowd would be when they saw the indestructible Roosevelt standing before them in a blood-soaked shirt, ignoring his wound to give them his vision of what he could do for America. “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he began. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” He gave them the famous Roosevelt grin. “But it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” It brought the house down. He lost the election to Woodrow Wilson — even Roosevelt couldn’t win as a third-party candidate — but William Howard Taft, the President of the United States, came in a distant third, capturing only eight electoral votes.

That was enough for one vigorous lifetime, right? Not hardly. Did you ever hear of the River of Doubt? You can be excused if your answer is negative. It no longer exists on any map. On February 27, 1914, at the request of the Brazilian government, Roosevelt and his party set off to map the River of Doubt. It turned out to be not quite the triumph that the African safari had been. Early on they began running short of supplies. Then Roosevelt developed a severe infection in his leg. It got so bad that at one point he urged the party to leave him behind. Of course they didn’t, and gradually his leg and his health improved to the point where he was finally able to continue the expedition. Eventually they mapped all 900 miles of the river, and Roosevelt, upon returning home, wrote another bestseller, Through the Brazilian Wilderness. And shortly thereafter, the Rio da Duvida (River of Doubt) officially became the river you can now find on the maps, the Rio Teodoro (River Theodore). He was a man in his mid-fifties, back when the average man’s life expectancy was only 55. He was just recovering from being shot in the chest (and was still walking around with the bullet inside his body). Unlike East Africa, where he would be hunting the same territory that Selous had hunted before and Percival knew like the back of his hand, no one had ever mapped the River of Doubt. It was uncharted jungle, with no support network for hundreds of miles. So why did he agree to map it? His answer is so typically Rooseveltian that it will serve as the end to this chapter: “It was my last chance to be a boy again.”

“Bully” — Asimov’s, 1991

“The Bull Moose at Bay” — Asimov’s, 1991

“Over There” — Asimov’s, 1992

“The Light That Blinds, the Claws That Catch” — Asimov’s, 1992

“The Roosevelt Dispatches” — F&SF, 1996

“Redchapel” — Asimov’s, 2001

“Two Hunters in Manhattan” — The Secret History of Vampires, 2007

“The Unsinkable Teddy Roosevelt” — Oval Office Oddities, 2008