Mornings on horseback Book

A satisfying and well written portrait of Roosevelt’s youth. It’s up to the reader to make the linkages between his origins and him as President. That’s the only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars. For what McCullough intends, it was very satisfying to me:

My intention was not to write a biography of him. What intrigued me was how he came to be. … There were pieces of the puzzle that fascinated me—his 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 borrowing from others who were important to him? … 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.

A lot of attention is paid to his parents and the domestic scene of his childhood in one of the richest families in New York City in the late 19th century, the “Age of Innocence” as termed by Edith Wharton’s novel (who was a friend of the family). They didn’t make their money as robber barons, but through commerce in glass, real estate, and investment banking. The father, Theodore Senior, came off as very likable and public spirited. His philanthropy and “good works” included reform of mental hospitals and orphanages, the founding of a hospital, and development and construction of the Museum of Natural History. Teddie’s mother was a plantation belle from Georgia and, along with many family members who fought with the Confederacy, the source of many adventurous stories that fired the imagination of young “Tee Dee” (his childhood name). The Roosevelt family, which included two sisters and a brother, made use of their wealth to provide an idyllic childhood for Teddie, with summers at their estate at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and long trips in Europe and the Middle East.

His father imbued in Teddie the philosophy of a physically active life as a key to health and pathway away from the indolence of idleness. Teddie’s lifelong interest in nature, hiking, and horseback riding are well accounted for. A thoughtful chapter on Teddie’s debilitating asthma provides insight into its physiological and psychosomatic components, leaving it open whether it was physical activity or psychological aspects that allowed Teddie to largely surmount it as a handicap in his life. The war with the disease as an antecedent to his drive for success and self-confidence is nicely summed up in this paragraph:

For a child as acutely sensitive and intelligent as he, the impact of asthma could not have been anything but profound, affecting personality, outlook, self-regard, the whole course of his young life, in marked fashion. The asthmatic child knows he is an oddity; that somehow, for some reason no one can explain, he is a defective, different. But he also knows also that his particular abnormality lends a kind of power. He knows, in ways a normal child can scarcely imagine, what it is to be the absolute center of attention.

When he arrived at Harvard, we see his struggle to gain respect and social acceptance:
At seventeen the boy was as tall as he would grow, five foot eight inches, and he weighed at most 125 pounds. His voice was thin and piping, almost comical. The blue-gray eyes squinted and blinked behind thick spectacles, which when he laughed or bobbed his head about, kept sliding down his nose. The sound of his laugh was described by his mother as an “ungreased squeak.”

While he became involved in every club imaginable, he made no close friends and surprisingly showed little sign of being destined for greatness. One acquaintance noted: “Most of his classmates simply did not like him.” McCullough is surprised that his scientific interests were not fulfilled: He never found any real intellectual excitement there, for all his good grades. He was never inspired to reach or push himself academically. At no point did he churn with intellectual curiosity or excitement.

What he did fulfill was having a good time and falling in love with future wife17-year old Alice. The imagine of him riding his horse or horsecart the six miles to her home in Chestnut Hill to woo her was fun to imagine. After college and marriage, he began to get interested in politics, with a focus on reform of corruption. We won a seat in the State Assembly at age 23 and began to make a mark for himself. Why a Brahmin would dirty his hands with such an avocation is summed up by McCullough:

It was a chance at last to do battle. , good against evil, in New York itself and in what he liked to call “the full light of the press,” light he very obviously loved. He relished the publicity and he relished the battle itself. He loved a fight, even more than his father had. It was possibly the chief reason he love politics, needed politics.

McCullough also finds that politics fulfilled his drive to do something of lasting significance:
Theodore said later it was a combination of curiosity and “plain duty” that led him into politics, and that “I intended to be one of the governing class,” which may be taken as another way of saying he wanted power. In the novel “The Bostonians” (1896), Henry James would portray a leading character as “full of purpose to live … and with high success; to become great in order not to become obscure, and powerful not to be useless.” The description would apply perfectly to Theodore. Obscurity, one imagines, would have snuffed him out like a candle.”

Another major shaping event on his life is the death of both his mother Mittie and Alice in a single day (to typhoid and chronic nephritis, respectively). Alice had just given birth to a child. Afterward, he threw himself in work and repressed his grief so much that in an autobiography much later in his life, he barely even mentions either of them. McCullough tries to capture the impact of the losses on his character:

The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life, the sense that the precipice awaited not just somewhere off down the road, but at any moment. An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back, and all Papa’s admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all. Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had only been forty-eight; Alice, all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.

His foray on the national stage came with his role at the Republican Convention in leading coalition efforts to try to stop the nomination of Blaine as the nominee for Presidential candidate:

He was still all of twenty-five; it was his first national convention. Yet from the first day he had proved himself a force to reckon with, by friend or foe, and the attraction he had for newspaper attention was the kind every politician dreams of. He was a natural politician. He had a born genius for the limelight, for all the gestures and theatrics for politics. In his undersized, overdressed way he had presence. Unquestionably, he had nerve.

An interesting irony in light of the current scene in politics was that his wealthy background was considered a disadvantage in politics by some:
The Chicago Times … made the point that he had to get where he was in politics despite his background. “The advantage of being a self-made man was denied him. An unkind fortune hampered him with an old and wealthy family.”

At this point, his political career takes a hiatus as Teddie becomes captured by the dream of the frontier of the American West. He sinks a lot of resources in a huge cattle ranch in the Bad Lands Dakota Territory and for three years throws himself into the endeavor. Though the image he projects as a “manly man” by posing in an expensive outfit suggests a laughable dilettantism, he truly pushed himself in the physical work of ranching and gained the respect of many of the locals. In his books based on his experience, a linkage with the values of his father is pointed out by McCullough:

He wrote of their courage, their phenomenal physical endurance. He liked their humor, admired their unwritten code that ruled the cow camp. “Meanness, cowardice, and dishonesty are not tolerated,” he observed. “There is a high regard for truthfulness and keeping one’s word, intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and a hearty dislike for any man who shirks his work.” It was, of course, exactly the code he had been raised on. … The cowboy was bold, cared about his work; he was self-reliant and self-confident. Perhaps most importantly of all, the cowboy seemed to know how to deal with death, death in a dozen different forms being an everyday part of his life.

The book ends with a return to New York and his failed attempt at the mayoral election. Whether or not the book achieves originality as history, it is a well written window into the character of an important figure in the transition of the U.S. to a global power and of New York City into the modern metropolis it became. Published in 1981, it is an early book in McCullough’s career. The negative views about his book production “factory”, as covered in this Salon piece may not applicable to this book.


Becoming a 'manly man': Teddie in fancy frontiersman garb.