My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt

by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

During the year abroad there were lovely times when we were not obliged to think of sculpture or painting—weeks in the great Swiss mountains when, in spite of frequent attacks of his old enemy, my father writes that “Teedie” walked many miles and showed the pluck and perseverance which were so strikingly part of his character. In another letter he is described, while suffering from a peculiarly severe attack of asthma, as being propped up all night in a big chair in the sitting-room, while his devoted mother told him stories of “when she was a little girl” at the old plantation at Roswell; and yet within two days of that very time he is following my father and brother on one of the longest walks they took in the mountains. All through the letters of that period one realizes the developing character of the suffering little boy. My mother writes in a letter to her sister: “Teedie and Ellie have walked to-day thirteen miles, and are very proud of their performance. Indeed Teedie has been further several times.”

And so the year of exile had its joyous memories, but in spite of them never were there happier children than those who arrived home in America in the spring of 1870.

Earlier in our lives my father, always thinking of the problem of the fragile health of his two older children, conceived the idea of turning the third room of the second story at 28 East 20th Street into an out-of-doors piazza, a kind of open-air gymnasium, with every imaginable swing and bar and seesaw, and my mother has often told me how he called the boy to him one day—Theodore was now about eleven years of age—and said: “Theodore, 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. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” The little boy looked up, throwing back his head in a characteristic fashion; then with a flash of those white teeth which later in life became so well known that when he was police commissioner the story ran that any recreant policeman would faint if he suddenly came face to face with a set of false teeth in a shop-window—he said, “I’ll make my body.”

That was his first important promise to himself and the delicate little boy began his work; and for many years one of my most vivid recollections is seeing him between horizontal bars, widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed—but a drudgery which eventuated in his being not only the apostle but the exponent of the strenuous life.

What fun we had on that piazza! The first Theodore Roosevelt, like his son, was far ahead of his times, and fresh air was his hobby, and he knew that the children who will cry if they are made to take dull walks on dreary city streets, will romp with dangerous delight ungovernessed and unmaided in an outdoor gymnasium. I use the word “dangerous” advisedly, for one day my lovely and delicate mother had an unforgetable shock on that same piazza. She happened to look out of the window opening on to the piazza and saw two boys—one of whom, needless to say, was Theodore—carefully balancing the seesaw from the high rail which protected the children from the possibility of falling into the back yard, two stories below. Having wearied of the usual play, the aforesaid two boys thought they would add a tinge of excitement to the merriment by balancing the seesaw in such a manner as to have one boy always in the thrilling position of hanging on the farther side of the top rail, with the possibility (unless the equilibrium were kept to perfection) of seesaw, boys, and all descending unexpectedly into the back yard.

One may well imagine the horror of the mother as she saw her adventurous offspring crawling out beyond the projection of the railing, and only great self-control enabled her to reach the wooden board held lightly by the fingers of an equally criminal cousin, and by an agonized clutch make it impossible for the seesaw to slide down with its two foolhardy riders.

Needless to say, no such feat was ever performed again, but the piazza became the happy meeting-ground of all the boys and girls of the neighborhood, and there not only Theodore Roosevelt but many of his friends and family put in a stock of sturdy health which was to do them good service in later years. At the same time the children of that house were leading the normal lives of other little children, except for the individual industry of the more delicate one, who put his hours of necessary quiet into voracious reading of history, and study of natural history.

Again the summers were the special delight of our lives, and the following several summers we spent on the Hudson River, at or near Riverdale, where warm friendships were formed with the children of our parents’ friends, Mr. and Mrs. William E. Dodge, Mr. and Mrs. Percy R. Pyne, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Harriman, and Mr. Robert Colgate.

Groups of joyous children invented and carried into effect every imaginable game, and, as ever, our father was the delightful collaborator in every scheme of pleasure. There began Theodore’s more active collection of birds and animals. There he advertised for families of field-mice, and the influx of the all-too-prolific little animals was terrifying to the heart of so perfect a housekeeper as my mother. The horror produced by the discovery of several of the above-named families in the refrigerator was more than trying to the nerves of one less devoted to science. My sister Anna, the most unselfish of older sisters, was the chief sufferer always, as, in spite of her extreme youth—for she was only four years older than my brother—her unusual ability and maturity made her seem more like a second mother than a sister. On one special occasion Theodore, having advertised and offered the large sum of ten cents for every field-mouse and thirty-five cents for a family, left for a trip to the Berkshire hills, and my poor sister was inundated by hundreds of active and unattractive families of field-mice, while clamoring country people demanded their ten-cent pieces or the larger sum irrelevantly offered by the absentee young naturalist. In the same unselfish manner my sister was the unwilling recipient of families of young squirrels, guinea-pigs, etc., and I can see her still bringing up one especially delicate family of squirrels on the bottle, and also begging a laundress not to forsake the household because turtles were tied to her tubs!

Those summers on the Hudson River stand out as peculiarly happy days. As I have said before, we were allowed great freedom, although never license, in the summer-time, and situated as we then were, with a group of little friends about us, the long sweet days passed like a joyous dream.