Teddy Roosevelt

Maverick in the Making , 1882 - 1901

Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in a brownstone house on Twentieth Street in New York City. A re-creation of the original dwelling, now operated by the National Park Service, replicates the tranquility of Roosevelt's earliest years. His father, Theodore Roosevelt

Sr., was a prosperous glassware merchant, and was one of the wealthy old

Knickerbocker class, whose Dutch ancestors had been living on Manhattan

Island since the 1640s. His mother, Martha Bulloch, was reputedly one of the loveliest girls to have been born in antebellum Georgia. Together the parents instilled in their eldest son a strong sense of family loyalty and civic duty, values that Roosevelt would himself practice, and would preach from the bully pulpit all of his adult life.

Unfortunately the affluence to which the young Theodore grew accustomed could do little to improve the state of his fragile health. He was a sickly, underweight child, hindered by poor eyesight. Far worse, however, were the life threatening attacks of asthma he had to endure until early adulthood. To strengthen his constitution, he lifted dumbbells and exercised in a room of the house converted into a gymnasium. He took boxing lessons to defend himself and to test his competitive spirit. From an early age he never lacked energy or the will to improve himself physically and mentally. He was a voracious reader and writer; his childhood diaries reveal much about his interests and the quality of his expanding mind.

Natural science, ornithology, and hunting were early hobbies of his, which became lifelong.

In the fall of 1876, Roosevelt entered Harvard University. By the time he graduated magna cum laude, he was engaged to be married to a beautiful young lady named Alice Lee. The wedding took place on Roosevelt's twenty- second birthday. Amid the intense happiness he experienced during his first year of marriage, he laid the foundations of his historic public career. "I rose like a rocket," he said years later. Ironically, when he chartered his own path for public office--the White House in 1912--he failed bitterly.

When others had selected him--as they did for the New York Assembly in

1881, for the governorship in 1898, and for the vice presidency in 1900-- his election was almost a foregone conclusion. Politics aside, Roosevelt shaped and molded his life as much as any person could possibly do. He could not control fate, however. On Valentine's Day, 1884, his mother died of typhoid fever and his wife died of Bright's disease, two days after giving birth to a daughter, Alice Lee. Amidst this personal trauma,Theodore Roosevelt was on the verge of becoming a national presence.

Between 1882 and 1884, Theodore Roosevelt represented the Twenty-first

District of New York in the state legislative assembly in Albany. An 1881 campaign broadside noted that the young Republican candidate was

"conspicuous for his honesty and integrity," qualities not taken for granted in a city run by self-serving machine politicians. This was the start of Roosevelt's long career as a political reformer.

Roosevelt's political alliance with Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts began in 1884, when the two were delegates to the Republican National

Convention in Chicago. In time, both men would become leaders of the

Republican Party. Their extensive mutual correspondence is an insightful record of shared interests and American idealism at the turn of the twentieth century. After serving in the United States House of

Representatives for six years, Lodge became a senator in 1893 and retained his seat for the rest of his life. Like Roosevelt, Lodge was an advocate of civil service reform (he recommended Roosevelt to be a commissioner in

1889), a strong navy, the Panama Canal, and pure food and drug legislation.

A specialist in foreign affairs, Lodge acted as one of Roosevelt's principal advisers during his presidency. Yet Lodge did not support many of

Roosevelt's progressive reforms—women's suffrage, for instance—and he refused to endorse his friend in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912.

Love of adventure and the great outdoors, especially in the West, were the bonds that sealed the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and

Frederic Remington. "I wish I were with you out among the sage brush, the great brittle cottonwoods, and the sharply-channeled barren buttes,"