The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [164]
“Here was a person of refinement … and much sexual potential.”
Edith Kermit Carow at twenty-four. (Illustration 12.2)
CHAPTER 13
The Long Arm of the Law
“Death be to the evil-doer!”
With an oath King Olaf spoke;
“But rewards to his pursuer!”
And with wrath his face grew redder
Than his scarlet cloak.
UNABLE TO TEAR HIMSELF away from Edith, Roosevelt remained in the East for a “purely society winter,” as he called it, of dinners, balls, and the Opera. At the height of the season, through January and February 1886, he was going out every other night.1 Fanny Smith Dana saw him often with Edith, yet suspected nothing: to an old family friend they looked as natural together as brother and sister.2
What the couple were at pains to conceal in public, they also concealed in private. Page after page of Roosevelt’s diary for the period contains nothing but the cryptic initial “E.”3 One can only sigh for the rhapsodies of self-revelation that Alice Lee evoked. But Roosevelt had been a boy then, as much in love with love as with a girl. Now he was a man in love with a woman, and his passion was correspondingly deeper, more dignified. Edith was not the sort of person to encourage rhapsodies, anyway. She disapproved of excess, whether it be in language, behavior, clothes, food, or drink. Too much ardor was just as vulgar as too much cream on too many peaches—another Rooseveltian tendency she was determined to restrain. In her opinion, any revelation of the intimacies between lovers, even in a man’s diary, was abhorrent. The thought of such details ever becoming public obsessed her, to the point that “burn this letter” became a catch-phrase in her own correspondence. Her influence over Theodore was already sufficient to control his pen in the winter of 1885–86; yet it must be remembered that he, too, had become something of a self-censor. The mature Roosevelt wrote nothing that he could not entrust to posterity. Many of his purportedly “family” letters were quite obviously written for publication. On such occasions he signed himself formally THEODORE ROOSEVELT instead of his usual “Thee.”4 Only in his letters to Edith did he spill out his soul, in the secure knowledge that she would read, understand, and then destroy. By some freak chance one of these love letters has survived. Although written in old age, it is as passionate as anything he ever composed during his courtship of Alice Lee.
“We took them absolutely by surprise.”
Deputy Sheriff Roosevelt and his prisoners:
Burnsted, Pfaffenbach, and Finnegan. (Illustration 13.1)
They continued to suppress details of their engagement, and in later years Edith even went through family correspondence to weed out every single reference to it.5 Why she should be quite so secretive is unclear, for it flowered out into a famously successful marriage. Possibly there were quarrels, even estrangements; both she and Theodore were powerful personalities, used to getting their own way. Whatever the case, history must respect their fierce desire for privacy.
As the season proceeded, Roosevelt saw more and more of Edith. He grew bored and restless when forced to socialize without her. “I will be delighted when I get settled down to work of some sort again,” he told Henry Cabot Lodge. “… To be a man of the world is not my strong point.”6 Lodge was now president of the Boston Advertiser, had contracted to write a life of George Washington for the prestigious American Statesmen series, and was determined to run again for Congress later in the year. On a trip to New York at the end of January, he projected such