The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America's Greatest Political Family

DEDICATION

FOR T.D.H.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE ROOSEVELTS’ FAMILY TREE

PROLOGUE: THE LARGER PICTURE, 1960

PART I: CAIN AND ABEL, 1890–1891

PART II: EVERYTHING TO FEAR, 1893–1894

PART III: POPULAR AND POWERFUL, 1903–1905

PART IV: A SHOT, 1912

PART V: BELIEVING MORE THAN EVER BEFORE, 1918–1920

PART VI: ROUGH STUNTS, 1924–1925

PART VII: THE FUTURE AND THE PAST, 1932

PART VIII: CHANGING THE WORLD, 1936–1938

PART IX: TERRIFIC RESPONSIBILITY, 1943–1945

EPILOGUE: THE LAST SORTIE, 1962

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY WILLIAM J. MANN

CREDITS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The story of the Roosevelts is well-trod territory. Its various chapters have been masterfully chronicled by H. W. Brands, Ken Burns, Blanche Weisen Cook, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph Lash, David McCullough, Edmund Morris, Geoffrey Ward, and many others. This is not an attempt to duplicate what these excellent historians have done. Rather, my goal is to tell a story that has been embedded, entwined, in some ways hidden in plain sight, within the larger Roosevelt narrative. I set forth the family’s rise to power and prestige not as a record of politics and public policy, but rather as a series of personal contests (even, at times, as a blood sport) beginning with the rivalry between the brothers Theodore and Elliott Roosevelt and then passed down to the next generations. That the Wars of the Roosevelts, like the Wars of the Roses, was a dynastic struggle between two distant branches of a family has been documented before. What’s been less acknowledged is the fact that the battles went far deeper and were more personal than that, raging between parents, children, siblings, and spouses.

The rise of the Roosevelts is the story of a family at war, of survival of the fittest, where the strong devoured the weak and where the nonconformist—such as Elliott; his illegitimate son, Elliott Roosevelt Mann; the renegade James (Taddy or Jimmie) Roosevelt; and the tragic Kermit Roosevelt—were brutally relegated to nonexistence.

In this book, I view these rebels through a new lens, corrected for class privilege and outmoded moral judgments, allowing for their so-called transgressions to be reconsidered and their family’s responses reevaluated. And the most appropriate eyes through which to view this dynastic battlefield are those of Theodore’s niece Eleanor, as she was there from the beginning and, as much as any of them, experienced the personal costs of the Roosevelt ambition.

This is new information based on new research. For the first time, I tell the full account of the struggles of Elliott Roosevelt, including the unknown backstory of the shady lawyer appointed to deal with Elliott’s mistress and illegitimate son. In most previous accounts, Theodore Roosevelt’s actions in 1891–1894, when he did his best to commit his brother to an asylum, even if that meant splitting up Elliott’s family, have been presented as noble and inevitable. I take a somewhat different view. Also for the first time, I have fleshed out the life of Elliott Roosevelt Mann (no relation to my own family), who was as much a Roosevelt as any of the others, with the same ambition and skill, even if he was denied their surname and privilege of birth.

Likewise, the story of Franklin’s nephew Jimmie is told with many new details; my discovery that his wife, Sadie, was Jewish sheds fresh light on why the family was so opposed to her. I also reveal considerable new information about the lives of Kermit and Ted Roosevelt and the heretofore forgotten political scandals of Alice Roosevelt. Finally, I have attempted to bring a twenty-first-century understanding to Eleanor’s sexuality and her alternative, polyamorous marriage with Franklin—successful for the most part, although not without its challenges and difficulties.

I have not fictionalized these events. All scenes described come from primary sources: the thousands of letters written by the principals (which provide extraordinarily rich detail to recreate their worlds) as well as diaries, datebooks, telegrams, court records, FBI reports, contemporary newspaper accounts, maps, photographs, and daily weather bulletins. Nothing has been created simply for dramatic sake, and I do not venture carelessly into the minds of my subjects. If I write of inner thoughts or feelings, I’m basing my descriptions on letters or memoirs written by the subject in question, wherein such emotions, attitudes, or motivations have been disclosed or can be deduced. Full citations and explanations can be found in the notes. Anything in quotation marks comes directly from a primary source.

THE WARS OF THE ROOSEVELTS

PROLOGUE: THE LARGER PICTURE

1960

The old woman walked with her head thrust forward, as if she were in a hurry to get where she was going. The low-heeled shoes on her long, narrow feet were more practical than stylish, a smart choice given how much walking she did around the city. On her head she wore a kerchief, as a light rain had begun to fall. The sidewalks of New York’s Greenwich Village were wet and slippery that April morning, and the air was cool, not even fifty degrees.

As she walked, the old woman was lost in thought, a habit for which her friends frequently admonished her. For most of her seventy-five years, a barrage of ideas, hopes, desires, and regrets had been in constant collision in her mind. Something was always brewing, ready to burst. Ever since she was a small girl she’d been possessed of extraordinary drive and purpose, and while her body might be slowing down, her mind churned as fast as ever, light-years away from the mundane world around her. That week, she was consumed by thoughts about how to unite American women for decisive action against the threat of worldwide nuclear slaughter and how to pass laws to prohibit discrimination based on race, religion or national origin, as she wrote in her nationally syndicated newspaper column. So it was no surprise that when she stepped off the curb at Eighth Street, she failed to notice a car that was backing up toward her. Nor, unfortunately, did the driver see her.

The car struck her in the hip. Like an ancient tree, the woman fell onto the asphalt. A screech of brakes rent the air as the driver, a young man, realized what had happened. He jumped out of the car and ran around back.

The old woman seemed unhurt. With some effort, she got to her feet, clutching her purse and conscious of the stares of passersby. Her sharp blue eyes fixed on the driver. She told him he should go, drive away, before someone came along and made a fuss.

Did the young man recognize her? He might easily have, as the old woman with the braided gray bun was very familiar to most Americans in 1960, and to many people around the globe. For more than forty years she had lived in the public eye. Millions loved her for her work; some hated her for it. The widow of a president, the niece of another, she was also, finally, a stateswoman in her own right, a latter-day accomplishment few would ever have predicted when she was a neglected and ridiculed child.

If the driver of the car knew he had hit Eleanor Roosevelt, he never let the fact become public. He simply did as he was instructed. He got back in his car and sped away. Eleanor was glad of it. She didn’t want to be the cause of any trouble for the young man. She’d tell a friend the driver was a Negro, and she knew the trouble policemen could sometimes make for Negro boys.

Limping across the street on a swollen ankle, Eleanor arrived at the salon of François de Paris, the celebrity hairdresser, where she’d been asked to speak at a cancer fund luncheon. Despite her discomfort, she soldiered through the event, but afterward she gave in and allowed her doctor to wrap her ankle. That was all the coddling Eleanor would allow herself: she adamantly declined the doctor’s request that she cancel the rest of her day’s schedule. Hobbling in on a crutch to another fund-raiser that night, the former First Lady and current UN ambassador was clever enough to use her injury to her advantage. She told a friend later that when people saw she was in pain, they coughed up more cash.

The lightheartedness, however, belied the ache. Over the course of her seven decades, Eleanor had learned how to live with pain, how to manage it, even how to use it. That didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.

That sprained ankle, inconsequential on its own, marked the beginning of a long decline for Eleanor. Days later, she received a far more serious diagnosis from her doctor. She was suffering from aplastic anemia, for which there was no cure. It was the most basic of diseases, striking the bone marrow, the very core of what kept the body running. The diagnosis explained the increasing pain and fatigue Eleanor had been feeling, which she understood now would only get worse. Over the ensuing months, she would endure hospitalizations, transfusions, fevers, painkillers, and depression.

One night, hooked up to tubes in her hospital bed, with a machine to help her breathe constantly beeping in her ears, she awoke from a nightmare. Her brother Hall and her son Elliott, both deeply troubled men, had metamorphosed into one creature—like a Picasso drawing, Eleanor described it to a friend—and were trying to smother her. If, in her delirium, she dreamed of her brother and her son, she might well have dreamed of others, too: her husband probably, her cousins, her uncle, her lover quite possibly, her father almost certainly. Eleanor’s past was rushing in at her, unfinished and unresolved.

The world had come to think of Eleanor Roosevelt as a very wise woman, and she was, but she was also lonely and deeply conflicted, haunted by family secrets and lies that had followed her for decades. The Roosevelt family had changed America, rising to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and profoundly shaping the twentieth. They had not achieved their influence without struggle and cost. Eleanor had observed (and participated in) the internecine family battles as first her uncle and then her cousins and husband strove for power. She had witnessed the battles for supremacy; she’d seen firsthand how the strong and ambitious had utterly annihilated the weak and nonconformist. Indeed, Eleanor herself might have been one of those destroyed, but she had been tested in the fire and had emerged the strongest of them all, mastering politics and public policy as few women before her had done, negotiating confidently with presidents and prime ministers. Yet, in some ways, her family (the immediate and the extended, as her children and cousins would attest) always remained out of her reach, beyond the capacity of her understanding.

So, in the short amount of time she had left, Eleanor decided she needed to revisit the extraordinary life she’d lived. At the same time that she was making plans for her burial—in a plain wooden coffin, without embalming—she would also attempt to make sense of her story. She’d written three previous memoirs, but this one, she hoped, would go deeper. She hired a woman to help her, Elinore Denniston, a fifty-nine-year-old freelance writer who, being unmarried, could devote all her time to the enterprise. To get started, Denniston met Eleanor at her cottage, Val-Kill, nestled in the woods of Hyde Park, on the Hudson River, a place that had once hosted ambassadors and senators and a steady parade of friends, but that now stood mostly quiet, save for the woodpeckers rapping on the roof. Eleanor tried valiantly to learn how to use the modern tape recorder Denniston brought with her, but she never quite got the hang of it.

Her task was never going to be easy. She set out to reshape and reconsider the story of her life, cutting out all that was no longer relevant and adding material that seemed necessary for a better understanding of her story. Yet while her publisher was clamoring for a behind-the-scenes exposé of Washington politics, Eleanor, facing death, was no longer interested in the big important things of her life; what drew her now were the small and personal. In telling her story this final time, she had two simple objectives. One was to give a picture of the world in which I grew up and which today is changed in many ways. The second, and more important, was to give as truthful a picture as possible of a human being.

Could she do it? Was she strong enough? Could she make peace with her ghosts? Sifting through the residue of her life, Eleanor relived not only the triumphs of her family, of which there were many, but also the tragedies, of nearly an equal number. Her uncle Theodore had established the modern American presidency, and left behind a more equitable, meritocratic, and verdant nation. Yet in his climb to the top, he’d also found it expedient to destroy Eleanor’s father, ripping open a hole at the center of his niece’s life that would never be filled. He’d also left behind a brood of bruised, bullied children forever in competition with one another and with their cousins for custody of their father’s mantle; the Wars of the Roosevelts would pile more bodies on top of that of Eleanor’s father. Her husband, Franklin, had ended the Great Depression and won a world war, but on a personal level he’d failed Eleanor grievously, leaving a wound she thought was healed, only to find it torn open again at his death. Also, instead of learning from her own unhappy childhood, Eleanor had in some ways failed herself: her own children remained distant and estranged from her.

The effort of reconsidering her life took its toll on Eleanor. One day, after strenuous attempts to collect her thoughts, she said to Denniston, her hands trembling, I can’t work. She was full of apology. I don’t understand it. And you have come so far.

Time was running out for Eleanor. For all her sincere desire for honesty, how could she really tell the truth, given how the public had come to revere her and her family? How could she possibly tell the stories of the husband who had both uplifted and betrayed her; of the uncle who had shattered her young life in the cause of his own ambition; of the cousins who had tormented her and upon whom she had wrought a regrettable revenge; of the lover she had abandoned; of the brother she had failed and the brother she had refused to acknowledge; and most critically, of the father who had been everything to her and whose loss was never overcome?

Eleanor was astute enough to know that to tell her personal history, so intertwined with the rise of the Roosevelts, she would need the framework of a larger picture. Yet could she really attain this? Extraordinary distance would be needed from the events of her life if she were to understand not only what had been done to her but also what she had done to others. Very deep soul searching was going to be necessary to grasp how and why her fabled empathy and compassion could make a difference in the lives of millions of people around the globe, but hadn’t been able to rescue her own siblings and children. At this late date, was it even possible for her to construct such a complete and honest perspective on her life?

As always, Eleanor did her best. It was a Sisyphean task, though, and some part of her must have known that. To be truly successful, she would need to become omniscient, somehow gain insight into the lives of people she had never met or had barely known, yet whose lives had so imprinted hers. She would need to possess the ability of total recall, to summon up the words and phrases she’d heard swirling around her as a child in order to decode the mystifying events that shaped her early life. She would need to become a time traveler, to transcend the decades and find herself back in the world of which she wrote so fondly, a time when the Roosevelts were just coming to power, a time before automobiles and breathing machines and tape recorders, a time before the terrible demands of living in the public eye, a time before all the pain.

PART I

CAIN AND ABEL

1890–1891

WASHINGTON, DC

Like a colossus, Theodore Roosevelt stomped down the marble steps of the atrium of the courthouse, his footsteps echoing up into the vaulted ceiling. When he was like this, everyone knew to get out of his way.

He was not a very big man, standing just five nine, with a square face and a straggly mustache that looked like a plant in need of water, but he had intense blue eyes that squinted behind his spectacles whenever he wanted to emphasize something, which was nearly all the time, and broad shoulders and muscular arms and a powerful barrel chest. Throughout the capital, stories swirled of Roosevelt fighting off grizzly bears and surviving buffalo stampedes at his hunting ranch in North Dakota. Once, he’d pursued thieves up the Little Missouri River, capturing them and standing guard over them for forty straight hours, reading Tolstoy to stay awake. As civil service commissioner, Roosevelt’s legend was nearly as compelling: he’d publicly taken on various government officials in his much-publicized quest to reform political appointments and abolish patronage.

Yet it was not Washington politics that enraged him on this day. Rather, it was something far more personal. It was his brother, the brother with whom he’d been competing since boyhood and who now jeopardized all Theodore’s plans.

In the voluminous letters he wrote to his older sister, Bye (sometimes several a week, keeping her apprised of his accomplishments in the capital), Theodore made much of how he frequently walked between his office and his home, even in the coldest weather. Striding out on a brisk winter evening, Theodore would make his way west on Louisiana Avenue; in those days, the street ran roughly where Indiana Avenue runs today. Off to his left, shining above the trees that then covered the National Mall, rose the white obelisk of the Washington Monument. The capital was far more orderly than Theodore’s hometown of New York City, which was why his wife, Edith, preferred living there. Quiet and tree-lined, his daughter, Alice, would describe the Washington of her youth, with the atmosphere of a postbellum Southern town.

Theodore appreciated Washington for a very different reason: in its past he saw his future. On his way home, he strolled through squares named for Benjamin Franklin, General McPherson, and Admiral Farragut. When the spirit moved him, he took a detour to pass directly in front of the Executive Mansion. Whenever he did so, he admitted, his heart would beat a little faster.

Someday, he vowed, he would live there. Someday he would be president of the United States. In these plans, he was supported and encouraged by Bye, his chief booster and unofficial adviser. Bye, whose real name was Anna, was originally called Bamie, short for Bambina, her father’s nickname for her. She’d become Bye when she started traveling frequently: Hi, Bamie. Bye, Bamie. Still unmarried at the age of thirty-six, Bye possessed what many of her peers called the most brilliant mind in the family: if she’d been a man, many thought, she would have run for president herself. Yet Bye wasn’t a man, so she lived vicariously through Theodore, and she knew as well as he did that their shared dreams of glory were increasingly threatened by the behavior of their brother, Elliott.

Theodore had recently received a letter from the New York law offices of William Howe and Abraham Hummel, lawyers best known for defending prostitutes, chorus girls, and saloonkeepers. They were claiming that Theodore’s brother, Elliott, had gotten one of the chambermaids in his house pregnant, and the woman was in dire need of money. Theodore had no idea if the woman was telling the truth or was merely a con artist, but it was indicative of the kind of life Elliott led that such a claim could even have been made. Theodore’s brother drank too much and showed no respect for proprieties. For the past few years he’d been embarrassing the family at dinner parties and other social gatherings. At one soiree thrown by Bye, he’d been rude to her guests, finding them insufferably snooty. It is a perfect nightmare about Elliott, Theodore told his sister after getting a report of the evening. I am distressed beyond measure.

This couldn’t keep up. At the moment, Elliott was in Europe, living beyond his means with his extravagant wife, Anna, who in Theodore’s view only exacerbated the problem. Anna, Theodore declared, was Chinese in her moral and mental standards—in other words, she did not act like a good Christian woman. Although not deeply religious, Theodore was keenly aware of decorum and discretion, as any man with his eye on the presidency would be. He knew careers could be derailed in the drawing rooms of New York society, where Elliott and Anna had made themselves infamous. People would be very reluctant about backing a candidate with a black sheep such as Elliott in his family.

It was only seven years earlier, after all, that the cries of Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? threatened to derail Grover Cleveland’s campaign for president. Taunted about stories of an illegitimate son, Cleveland barely won an election he was supposed to have taken handily, eking out a win in the popular vote by just one quarter of one percent. (He did far better in the electoral vote tally.) Until the end, a Cleveland win remained in doubt, with preachers blasting him from their pulpits and the Republican press publishing frequent heartrending affidavits from the mother of the little boy.

Such dishonor could not attach itself to Theodore. After years of government corruption, he was positioning himself as a new kind of politician: moral, principled, incorruptible. His whole public persona was predicated on his integrity and character. He’d made his first mark as a New York state assemblyman at the age of twenty-four, when he exposed a corrupt judge in a railroad investment scandal. His intolerance of backroom deals was well known: Theodore refused to countenance patronage, misconduct, or disrepute of any kind. That was why Elliott’s shenanigans were potentially so dangerous.

Yet for all his crusading against patronage, Theodore’s own appointment had been a political plum. As a Republican Party operative in New York, he’d worked hard for the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, ensuring the defeat of the libertine Cleveland. Harrison thanked him by appointing him to the Civil Service Commission; it was, party bosses promised, a stepping-stone. Still smarting over his loss in the New York mayoral race in 1886 (a humiliating defeat, since he’d come in third, behind both the Democrat and a third-party candidate), Theodore yearned for redemption. The party bosses promised him his time would come.

Yet he was in a hurry. He was thirty-two years old. He didn’t want to be some gray-bearded codger when he finally grabbed the brass ring. He didn’t want to be President Harrison, in other words, the little gray man in the White House, as Theodore called him, who looked on with cold and hesitating disapproval at his civil service commissioner’s efforts at reform.

By seizing the mantle of change and winning the admiration of press and public for doing so, Theodore had essentially checkmated the president of the United States. The previous month, in Boston, he delivered a well-publicized speech to a group of businessmen, arguing that civil service had a moral as well as a business side. He told the group that he followed the Ten Commandments in his work as much as any party manifesto. Fairness for all was his goal, from the fourth-class postmaster to the Census Enumerator. The American way, Theodore declared, was achieved only through honesty and manliness. The next day, nearly every paper in the country reported on Roosevelt’s reform speech. With appearances like these, Theodore was making a name for himself far more effectively than he would have if he’d followed the party’s advice to toil for a decade as an anonymous, loyal bureaucrat. He wasn’t about to let anything get in his way now.

The walk home from the courthouse took about half an hour. Theodore’s town house, at 1820 Jefferson Place, Northwest, was small and cramped but quite comfortable, warmed by a fire and lit by flickering gas lamps. His three children routinely greeted him at the door: Alice, just about to turn seven; Theodore Junior, three; and Kermit, still in his nursemaid’s arms at the age of one. Wife Edith, as Theodore wrote to Bye, was always ready with the tea when he came home from the office.

Edith, in fact, had been a ready and willing partner to him in every way. They had taken Washington society by storm, turning themselves into one of the most popular young couples in the capital. On one recent night, they dined with Vice President Levi Morton; on other nights, they entertained thoroughly respectable, unimportant congressmen, as Theodore privately called them, men such as James W. Wadsworth of New York and John F. Andrew of Massachusetts. Their importance, however, might reveal itself later, when it was time to call in favors to accelerate his rise to the top.

Theodore’s ambition was deeply personal, rooted in a lifelong desire to excel, but it also grew out of an altruism instilled in him by his father, who saw in their class privilege a duty to do good in the world. For all his self-aggrandizement, Theodore truly wanted to make the nation a better, more equitable place; he simply believed he was the best and the right man for the job. I am very glad to have been in this position, he wrote to Bye after settling into his role as commissioner. I think I have done good work—and a man ought to show that he can go out into the world and hold his own with other men.

Exactly the lesson his brother Elliott had failed to learn.

Alone at night, after Edith and the children had gone to bed, Theodore sat at his desk and wrote letters to Bye back in New York, ruminating over their reckless brother. The problem with Elliott, Theodore firmly believed, was that he had let himself go soft. Nothing stopped Theodore when he wanted something. When he rode to the hounds, he always came in first, no matter what. Even when, on one horrific occasion, his horse slammed into a stone wall, smashing Theodore’s eyeglasses into his face and breaking his arm so badly that it resembled a length of liverwurst, he remounted and carried on, coming in behind only the huntsman. I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit, he quipped to a friend. I’m always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance.

In contrast, when Elliott broke his leg during an amateur charity circus, he took to his bed, getting hooked on morphine, laudanum, and an expanding supply of alcohol.

Yet, when they were younger, it was Elliott who was the stronger brother. Riding, hunting, climbing, swimming—all these came naturally to Elliott, whereas Theodore, until the age of eleven, was a frail, asthmatic child. He was his mother’s precious little Teedie, forever being rushed out of their Manhattan town house and into the countryside, or to the beach, or on a grand tour of Europe, whenever the first crackle of a wheeze was heard in his voice. Teedie’s sudden fits, usually late at night, terrified his parents, who kept the boy secluded in his room, treating him as if he were a fragile piece of china, liable to shatter if handled too hard.

Then, one day, his father, a wise old Knickerbocker, had had enough. He called his son in to see him. Theodore, he said, eschewing the childish family nickname, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. It was time for the boy to take control over his illness. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, Father Roosevelt acknowledged. But I know you will do it.

So Theodore started to run. He lifted weights. He spent hours assaulting punching bags. Creating his own gym on the piazza of the family’s five-story brownstone on East Twentieth Street, between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, he set out to widen his chest, presumably to give his lungs more room to breathe. He was terrified of being a pretender, of not being a man at all, as in Robert Browning’s poem The Flight of the Duchess. In it, Browning describes an effete young aristocrat as The pertest little ape / That ever affronted human shape. Theodore saw himself in that verse: after so many generations of comfortable living, with mansions and carriages and servants to chop the wood, his family line had grown soft, he believed, detached from the rigors that made men men.

So he willed himself to get stronger, to reclaim the manhood his people had lost. Eventually his shoulders thickened, his arms bulked up, and his chest widened just as he’d hoped it would. Slowly his asthma disappeared. If his parents had continued to coddle him, Theodore was convinced he would have died—or worse: he would have ended up a pampered patrician, propped up on pillows, dependent upon servants who were more men than he. Rather like his brother, Elliott.

How cavalier Elliott had been with his natural-born gifts, wasting all the strength and vitality Theodore had once envied. Their competition began in earnest the moment Theodore made himself strong. When Elliott came to visit him while Theodore was a student at Harvard, spending a few days in sporting and athletic activities, Theodore kept score in his journal: As athletes we are about equal: he runs best, I row best. He can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling and boxing. I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun. A decade later, out on Long Island, the rivalry continued. Racing their horses, Theodore noted that Elliott won the half-mile dash, while he came in fifth; in the quarter-mile dash, Elliott came in second, which would have evened things up, except that Theodore came in third. He wasn’t pleased.

Yet, to family members, Theodore insisted that while he was driven to show up every man around him, the one exception was Elliott, for whom he professed to feel no jealousy. After all, he’d dedicated his book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman to him: To that keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my brother, Elliott Roosevelt. Yet the very existence of the book (Theodore’s second, and there had been five since) was enough to show up Elliott, who’d never been able to publish a word. Theodore seemed unconscious of that fact, or of the weight his words might carry when he asserted that a grizzly bear was bigger and stronger than any tiger, since it was the head of a grizzly that hung on his wall and the skin of a tiger that lay across Elliott’s floor.

Elliott had also been the better-looking brother, carrying on a string of romances from his young teens. All the girls, Theodore would recall wistfully, from Helen White and Fanny Dana and May Higham used to be so flattered by any attentions from him. Theodore, on the other hand, had few romantic adventures in his youth, until he met the woman who’d become his wife. (Not Edith: there was a wife before her, though Theodore did his best not to think about his first wife.) Elliott’s luck with women was, in fact, legendary, and that luck, apparently, had continued. How many other chambermaids might come forward? Such sexual impropriety offended Theodore to his core.

When he underwent his physical transformation, he acquired more than just a strong body. He also emerged with a rigid set of principles. There was good and bad, right and wrong, strong and weak. Such an ironclad worldview often made him difficult to please. If I were to do something Theodore thought was weak or wrong, his younger sister, Corinne, explained to her husband, he would never forgive me, whereas Elliott no matter how much he might despise the sin would forgive the sinner.

Yet Theodore was never going to apologize for having standards. Although he liked a pretty girl as well as any man, he was married, and that was that: any excess energy, he believed, could be worked off by a swim or a hike. All the thrills and passion he needed in life could be obtained at his ranch in North Dakota, to which he repaired every summer to herd cattle and hunt elk. That was how a real man, a good man, a decent man, lived.

Also, a decent man needed a decent wife. Elliott’s wife, Anna, was no Edith. She was foolish and frivolous, Theodore thought, and her extravagance had eaten into her character like an acid. Whether she’d stand by her man if the claims of the chambermaid were proven true remained to be seen. So far, though, Anna had been an eager and equal accomplice in Elliott’s high living. The time had come to put an end to their games.

Since Elliott had abdicated his responsibilities, Theodore wrote to Bye, they needed to step in. The first thing Elliott had to do was get rid of his doctor. No matter that Dr. William T. Lusk was head of the faculty at Bellevue Medical College and president of the New York State Medical Association. To Theodore, Lusk was a fool because he hadn’t yet insisted Elliott check himself into an insane asylum. The fact that Lusk was a Yale man probably didn’t help.

Instead of Lusk, Theodore wanted Elliott to put himself completely in the hands of some first-rate man of decision, he told Bye, ideally Dr. William M. Polk, the son of a lionized Confederate general, a bishop in the Episcopal Church, and a man well known in Roosevelt social circles. Elliott needed to be put away, Theodore firmly believed, preferably in England or France, where he could do no harm to himself or anyone in his family. Either that or he should be sent on some long trip, preferably by sea, with a doctor as companion. If Elliott were under a reliable doctor’s care, Theodore wrote to Bye, it would be easy to get a court to commit him. Most people know he is out of his head, he told his sister.

From here on in, Theodore intended to seize the reins of Elliott’s life. In his letter to Bye, he dictated the terms. Anna and Elliott must live apart, he decreed. That Anna had recently announced she was pregnant complicated matters but did not change them. They have no right to have children now, Theodore insisted. It is a dreadful thing to bring into the world children under circumstances such as these. It must not be done. It is criminal.

What had made the situation so urgent was the letter from attorneys Howe and Hummel alleging the liaison with the chambermaid. If the charge was true, Elliott’s wife and his mistress were pregnant at the same time. A public scandal could erupt at any moment. So Theodore told Bye he was sending a trusted doctor, Gerardus H. Wynkoop, another scion of an ancient Dutch family, out to Brooklyn to examine the woman, named Catherina Mann, an immigrant from Bavaria. Wynkoop is going to try to get the truth, he wrote. No one stood in the way of Theodore Roosevelt’s ambitions—not his wayward brother, and certainly not some Bavarian chambermaid.

GRAZ, AUSTRIA

Thrice a day the bell inside the Glockenturm rang one hundred one times, a reminder that it had been cast from as many Turkish cannonballs, a defiant declaration of the city’s indestructibility. The bell tower had withstood the Turks and Napoleon, and the city of Graz below it had prospered, its Renaissance-era streets and structures still standing after three hundred years. Protected by the Alps to the north, the city lay within a basin open only to the south, allowing the air of the Mediterranean to rush in. In Graz, the sun shone longer than it did in Vienna or Salzburg, and the rain and wind came less frequently. In Graz, there was a feeling of safety, protection, refuge.

Not for Elliott Roosevelt, however, who had come to the city seeking precisely those things and who, so far, had turned up short. Elliott was in exile. His whole family, it seemed, had turned against him. Letters from back home arrived regularly scolding him for overspending his trust fund and dipping into the family capital. Yet Elliott had run out of options. He couldn’t go home. He was unwilling to live under the thumb of his brother, Theodore, any longer. For too long Theodore had looked down his nose at Elliott’s friends and askance at the parties Elliott and his wife, Anna, threw at their Long Island summer home. I do hate his Hempstead life, Theodore had written to Bye. It is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.

Elliott was well aware that he didn’t contribute to society in the ways Theodore did, with all his political work and commissions, but he had never possessed Theodore’s public spirit. He was a playboy, a bon vivant. Live and let live, Elliott would write in an unpublished short story he kept among his papers, whose protagonist seems modeled on him: Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter what the cost. Elliott might not be the philanthropist Theodore was, but charity, to his mind, was an instrument used by the civic-minded and the ambitious. He was neither. He lived for pleasure only, he wrote, and never did anything he disliked when he could avoid it. And when the end comes, he concluded, he would take it cheerfully. Strauss is going to be played at my funeral, no funeral march for me.

Despite his devil-may-care approach to life, Elliott had taken steps to respond to his family’s criticism. Most significantly, since fleeing to Europe, he’d stopped drinking; letters between Anna and Bye during these months attested to that fact. Elliott has been a perfect angel, Anna stated plainly. Also, by removing himself entirely from New York society, where Theodore feared he’d be an embarrassment, he had given in to his brother’s fervent demand that he get away [from the] club and social life. In Europe, Elliott hoped, he could find a fresh start away from his family’s control.

Even with all that, the criticism still came: Theodore wanted him to stop relying on Lusk, a doctor Elliott trusted completely. So it was with a great deal of bitterness that Elliott viewed his family back home. I am not going to speak of this all again, he wrote to Bye from Berlin, when he first arrived on the Continent in the summer of 1890. I am too sad and need no friends.

All he needed now, Elliott believed, was his wife and children, a girl, Eleanor, age six, and a boy, Elliott Junior, not quite two. While he remained unhappy about the schism within his family, he found, to his great pleasure, that his seven months abroad had rejuvenated his marriage and home life. Elliott hadn’t always been faithful to Anna; the previous summer, he had dallied with the family’s chambermaid, an immigrant girl named Catherina Mann. How much Anna knew about Catherina would never be entirely clear, but it was soon after the affair that the family abruptly closed the house and sailed for Europe. The children, however, had liked Catherina well enough; from the spa town of Bad Reichenhall, Germany, Elliott had sent his erstwhile mistress a photograph of Eleanor as a remembrance. Perhaps it was his way of ending the relationship on good terms.

Since then, Elliott had fallen in love with his wife all over again. To Bye, he called Anna noble [and] beautiful. To his mother-in-law, he wrote, She is my only friend, my precious Wife, describing the long walks they took together every morning. In Paris they’d ridden a jolly little pair of ponies . . . along the banks of the Seine. Once more they were very much a couple in love.

Just as special had been Elliott’s time with his daughter. Eleanor was an odd child, awkward and gangly. She had inherited none of her mother’s beauty. Anna sometimes seemed at a loss to know what to do with the dreamy, imaginative little girl, but Elliott adored her, playing with her on the beaches of Italy and building her snowmen in the mountains of Germany. For all the fears Elliott’s family had about the intemperate influence he might have on his children, Eleanor would remember only happiness with her father. He was always kind and loving and charming, she said, ruled by his heart and not his head.

The happy family, in fact, was about to get bigger. Anna had recently discovered she was pregnant with their third child. Elliott was delighted, but his brother’s reaction (no surprise) could be heard from across the Atlantic. Adding another child to the mix, Theodore grumbled, was just going to drive Elliott’s costs higher. For once, Elliott had to admit his brother was right.

He knew he couldn’t go on much longer without some sort of rapprochement with his family back home. While it wouldn’t be easy reaching out to Theodore, Elliott knew it would be prudent. Now that a new baby was on the way, he was going to need his family’s financial help. So he swallowed his pride and scratched out a warm, friendly missive to his brother.

They didn’t have much in common, these two brothers, at least not anymore, but they did have their daughters, born just a few months apart seven years earlier. Tell Alice, Elliott wrote, that Eleanor takes French lessons every day and tries hard to write so she won’t be far behind her when we return.

There it was: the competitive urge that had burned between Elliott and Theodore for decades. Now it had been bequeathed to their daughters.

Once, Elliott had loved his brother. Theodore was sixteen months older than he, but for the first decade of their lives, it had been Elliott who was stronger, more dependable, and more level-headed. In those days, Teedie was always coughing and wheezing, frequently reliant on his brother just to get up and down stairs. During the family’s grand tour of Europe in 1870, it fell to Elliott, who was called Nell, to provide a shoulder on which Teedie could lean. Many years later, Nell’s daughter, Eleanor, would cherish the stories that were passed down from that trip, describing her father’s consideration and thoughtfulness to his brother, Theodore, who, at the time, was far from being the strong person that he later made himself.

Then Teedie started to swim and ride and lift weights, and the asthma faded. Suddenly he was beating Nell in athletic contests; in a series of fifteen bouts waged between Teedie, Nell, and several male cousins in the second half of 1875, Teedie won fourteen and tied the fifteenth. Almost overnight, the brothers’ roles were reversed; now it was Nell who experienced fainting spells and fits. He would suffer from a form of epilepsy for years; some suspected the ailment was more emotional than physical. Hoping to toughen him up, Roosevelt père sent Elliott to a military camp in Texas. He also kept him regularly informed of Teedie’s continued progress in packing on the muscle and triumphing over the delicacy of his youth. Nell seemed painfully aware that he was now the inferior son. You are right about Teedie, he wrote to his father. He is . . . a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. Still, he added a cri de coeur: "Oh, Father, will you ever think me a noble boy?"

Elliott did his best at the camp to make his father proud. He learned to ride and shoot expertly. Athletic prowess and coordination had always come naturally to him, while for Theodore it had taken real courage and effort; perhaps that was why Theodore’s accomplishments always seemed to matter more to their father than Elliott’s. It was also why the strenuous life mattered more to Theodore. For all his inherent gifts as a sportsman, Elliott found more appeal in indoor pleasures. It was at the Texas camp, as a teenager, that he started to smoke and drink, and he proved very popular with the ladies of the frontier. In contrast to Theodore, with his blunt features, Elliott was quite handsome, with dark hair, striking blue eyes, a broad forehead, and a round face. At five ten, he stood an inch taller than his older brother, though he wasn’t nearly as muscled as Theodore.

When the brothers met again upon Elliott’s return from camp, their rivalry only accelerated. They were forever blackening each other’s eyes in boxing matches and dropping to the floor to wrestle. An inveterate hiker and hunter, Theodore had taken to studying, stuffing, and classifying the wildlife of upstate New York, but Elliott had a plan to outdo his brother’s foxes and hawks. Soon after his twentieth birthday, the younger Roosevelt embarked on a glamorous adventure to India, promising to bring back the tusks of an elephant and the hide of a tiger. Despite falling very sick in the Indian jungle and needing to be carried out on a litter by servants, Elliott succeeded at his goals. A letter he received from his mother telling him of the pride Theodore had taken in learning of Elliott’s slaughtered beasts likely made all his suffering worthwhile.

Still, in every other case, his brother outclassed him. While Elliott used his inheritance from his father to go to India, Theodore used his to go to Harvard, from which he would graduate magna cum laude. Theodore published a catalogue, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, but every time Elliott tried to write about his Indian expedition, he lost interest and went out riding and drinking with his pals instead. In the next decade, Theodore would write many other books, including an account of the War of 1812. He was called a prodigy, and was groomed for politics. Elliott tried joining the Republican Club, but his older brother was such a giant presence there that he eventually stopped going.

When Elliott chose to marry the beautiful Anna Hall, one of New York’s most popular socialites, Theodore didn’t approve. Anna’s love of fun and her disregard for convention matched her perfectly with Elliott, which left Theodore concerned. Elliott wooed Anna outside the normal protocol, sending her gifts even before they were fully acquainted. Writing to thank him for one such present, Anna admitted it was very wicked of him, but added, I must tell you how much pleasure it gave me. They were married soon afterward.

Theodore, at least from his brother’s perspective, had grown into sort of a prig, so it was no surprise when he was outraged at Anna’s spending spree during the couple’s first trip to Europe. Elliott wrote jovially to their sister Bye that his wife had a dissipated time buying dresses, hats and the Lord knows what . . . I don’t know what will become of [my] credit. Neither did the family.

Although the brothers both purchased summer homes on Long Island less than twenty miles from each other, they rarely visited; their circles didn’t overlap. Of the gay parties Elliott threw in Hempstead, Theodore did not approve. There was entirely too much wine and song.

Rapprochement was not going to be easy. Still, Elliott made a valiant effort. Writing to his brother from Graz, he presented himself as sedately as he could. He kept his letter light, filled with carefree little details such as Eleanor throwing snowballs with her German friends. His goal seemed to be to convince Theodore that he was serious and sober now, and that his brother should withdraw his controlling hand—not to mention release the monies necessary to continue their life abroad and care for a new baby.

What Elliott did not mention in his missive to his brother were the nights he sank into what Anna called a melancholy from which nothing moves him. The family scorn, which Elliott argued he had done nothing to deserve, had nonetheless left its mark. Especially now that he was no longer drinking, he often lapsed into deep despair, lamenting his loss of esteem within the family structure. His dark moods terrified his wife, who, quite unbeknownst to him, had taken pen to paper herself.

Some weeks before, Anna had written to Bye, and while she’d rejoiced over how very much better Elliott was, she was desperately frightened by how depressed he sometimes became. Anna told Bye that Elliott believed he had irretrievably disgraced himself in his family’s eyes with his lifestyle, and therefore could never go home again. What he needed, Anna said, was a gesture from Theodore. So would Bye ask Theodore to write him, praising him for keeping straight and for pulling himself together? That would make all the difference, Anna believed.

No such letter ever came.

By that point, it was perhaps too late to convince Elliott that the great and accomplished Theodore Roosevelt could ever find anything admirable about him again. So he continued to brood, gripped by some inchoate fear, as Anna told Bye, that something dreadful was lurking. They did not know yet of the letter Theodore had received from Catherina Mann’s attorneys, but Elliott seemed to sense that doomsday lay around the corner, and he could do nothing except wait for it to arrive.

MANHATTAN

Sometime in the middle of March 1891, a very heavily pregnant young woman and her aged mother walked up the steps of a single-family, two-story wooden structure at 32 East Thirteenth Street. Much of the street was vacant or under construction, but number 32 was bracketed by a saloon on one side (at the corner of University Place) and an inn on the other. The neighborhood had once been stately and aristocratic, but by 1891 it had fallen on hard times: a year later, the proprietors of the inn would be hauled into court on charges of running a disorderly house. One of its previous residents, however, Dr. Gerardus Wynkoop, was attempting to rebuild and upgrade much of the block.

The little house at 32 East Thirteenth would be Catherina Mann’s home for the last few weeks of her pregnancy. The place might not have been elegant, but it was far more private than the Brooklyn tenement where she had been living. The house had likely been secured for her by Wynkoop, since, against all odds, the wealthy society doctor had taken the servant girl on as a patient. Catherina was hardly typical of Wynkoop’s clientele: more often he treated the likes of the Cunard and Collier families. Yet, after being sent to see the immigrant chambermaid by Theodore Roosevelt, Wynkoop had begun treating her and, with his connections to the neighborhood, had apparently also found her a place to live.

That alone was a de facto admission by the Roosevelt family that they believed the child Catherina was carrying was one of theirs. There was further evidence of their belief, though: the house chosen for her lying-in was owned by a member of the family. Not a very near relation—that would have been taking too much of a risk if the young woman’s identity ever leaked—but the family knew it could trust the nearly ninety-year-old Clinton Roosevelt, a second cousin twice removed to Theodore and Elliott, who’d owned a large portion of the block since 1854. Originally the property was part of a sprawling eighteenth-century farm belonging to James (Jacobus) Roosevelt, Theodore’s great-grandfather, back in the days when little more than cornfields and pastureland stretched between Union Square and Canal Street. Yet even across such an expanse of generations, family ties remained: just two years earlier, Theodore, Elliott, and Clinton Roosevelt were all in attendance at the gala society wedding of another distant cousin.

Closer family connections could be found nearby as well. As Catherina settled into her new home, a glance out her eastward windows, across University Place, would have revealed the edge of the gardens that once belonged to C. V. S. Roosevelt, the grandfather of Theodore and Elliott. C.V.S. had owned the entire end of the block between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets along Broadway. There, Elliott’s grandmother had once sung him lullabies in Dutch. Yet as Catherina had sadly come to realize, Elliott wouldn’t be making any return visits to the old family neighborhood.

When she’d arrived in the United States six years earlier, at the age of twenty-three, on board the SS Habsburg, Catherina (whose friends called her Katie) was an idealistic young woman. According to the stories passed down by her family, she looked forward to a new life in America. Born in Grünstadt, on the northern border of the Palatinate Forest, she’d immigrated with her widowed mother. Katie’s brothers had already settled in the new country: Rudolph, a baker, and Bernhard, a barber, were raising large families. Katie hoped to do the same. She wanted, her descendants said, to find someone to marry, have babies, and live in a house with a garden all her own.

Soon after her arrival, she took a job as a servant to a wealthy family at 29 East Thirty-Eighth Street, accompanying them to their house on Long Island occasionally as well. At the time, Katie had no idea that the Elliott Roosevelts were part of such an important clan. She knew only that they were rich enough to offer her room and board, which was helpful. At first, she spoke little English; she picked up words and phrases by overhearing governesses teaching the little Roosevelt girl, Eleanor, who was fond of Katie. In fact, everyone was very kind to Katie, especially the handsome gentleman of the house. Occasionally, at night, he would come by her room to talk.

Very quickly Katie fell in love with the charming, handsome Elliott Roosevelt. She came to believe that he loved her, too, which was why, one night, she gave herself to him. Elliott made quite the show of professing his devotion to her, giving her gifts and writing her letters. At one point, her family would reveal, they even pledged their troth to each other. Katie was left dazed and besotted. Katie Mann was the victim of a mock marriage, her granddaughter would say years later, an immigrant girl who was confused and [who] believed the drunken Elliott Roosevelt when he ‘married’ her. Elliott called Katie his spiritual wife.

Then, apparently, his actual wife discovered their rendezvous, because all at once the family packed up, closed the house, and sailed off for Europe. Not only was Katie out of a job and bereft of her lover, but a short time later, she discovered she was pregnant. From Bad Reichenhall, Germany, she received a photo in the mail of little Eleanor, and most likely, according to her family, she tried replying to the letter. Yet Elliott was constantly moving, so no word ever reached him of her condition. Living in a small flat in Brooklyn with her mother, Katie took in laundry, barely making the rent. She felt desperate.

For as long as she could, she held on to the dream that when Elliott learned of her predicament, he’d come to her aid. She held on to the letters he had written to her expressing his devotion, and around her neck she wore a locket that he had given her, containing his picture. According to her family, Katie hung on to the belief that if Elliott knew she was pregnant, he’d leave his wife and be with her. Eventually, though, that belief faded.

What a naïve child she’d been, she came to realize by March 1891. When Elliott had made his protestations of love, Katie had disregarded the smell of alcohol on his breath. She’d believed what she wanted to believe. Now she saw the truth. Not one word had come from him since her lawyers contacted his family. No longer could she deny that he had deceived her. The man she loved had used her and discarded her.

Still, would he really abandon his child? Katie thought not. She remained hopeful that Elliott would take care of her and their baby.

In moving her to Thirteenth Street, Dr. Wynkoop promised her a safe and sterile delivery. To such an offer, Katie’s lawyers hadn’t objected; in fact, according to her family, they thought it was the least the Roosevelts could do, and they expected them to do much more. Ten thousand dollars was the amount Howe and Hummel were demanding. Raising a child as a single parent was going to be extraordinarily difficult on a laundrywoman’s wages, after all. Besides, the child was a Roosevelt: shouldn’t that be enough to entitle him or her to a comfortable life? Katie’s lawyers believed she had a solid case.

Howe and Hummel had rather shady reputations as defenders of prostitutes and striking workers, but usually they had their clients’ best interests at heart. Rarely did they represent hardened criminals or con artists. Underneath their flamboyance and silver tongues lay a real sense of honor. Judge Charles Van Brunt said that he’d rather have Howe’s word on something than a sworn affidavit, as Howe was a master at using every technicality he could find to weasel around the law, but his own word was sacrosanct. Howe was the soul of honor, Van Brunt said, if you put him upon his honor. Howe and Hummel promised that the Roosevelts would do right by Katie.

During that cold and rainy March of 1891, Katie and her mother settled into the house on Thirteenth Street. Although Katie was by now proficient in English, her mother, Elisabeth Köhler Mann, still spoke mostly German, and was becoming very frail. Katie, her youngest, was born when Elisabeth was past forty, and now the old woman moved slowly, suffering from arthritis and heart trouble. A tattered Lutheran prayer book, her family would remember, was usually in the pocket of her dress.

On the morning of March 11, after rain for four days straight, the sun finally broke through the clouds. The temperature edged past fifty degrees, the warmest it had been all month. Inside 32 East Thirteenth Street, Katie delivered a healthy baby boy. She named him Elliott Roosevelt Mann.

Yet when Dr. Wynkoop filled out the birth certificate the next day, he did not dare write the boy’s name. All he reported was a male child born to Katie Mann; in the blank reserved for the father’s name, he scrawled just two letters: O.W. Out of wedlock. That, Wynkoop hoped, would keep the child forever consigned to anonymity.

GRAZ, AUSTRIA

Nearly four thousand miles across the ocean, a little girl had no idea that she had a newborn baby brother. All that six-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt knew was that she had one brother and another on the way, or maybe