The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [18]
With two colleagues, he drafted a bill for the appointment of unpaid Allotment Commissioners, who would visit all military camps and persuade soldiers to set aside voluntary pay deductions for family support. This proposal, which eventually became standard military practice, seemed eccentric, if not downright suspect, in 1861, as a family friend recalled many years later:
For three months they worked in Washington to secure the passage of this act—delayed by the utter inability of Congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage. When this was passed he was appointed by President Lincoln one of the three Commissioners from this State. For long, weary months, in the depth of a hard winter, he went from camp to camp, urging the men to take advantage of this plan; on the saddle often six to eight hours a day, standing in the cold and mud as long, addressing the men and entering their names. This resulted in sending many millions of dollars to homes where it was greatly needed, kept the memory of wives and children fresh in the minds of the soldiers, and greatly improved their morale. Other States followed, and the economical results were very great.31
Lincoln’s private secretary, a round-headed, slant-eyed youth named John Hay, proved a willing conduit to the President, and Theodore Senior made the most of his assistance. “It is a great luxury to feel I am at last doing something tangible for the country,” he wrote Mittie. Homesickness nevertheless tugged at him. “I cannot,” he confessed, “get Bammie’s and Tedee’s [sic] faces, as they bid me goodbye at the door, out of my mind.”32
It is significant that Theodore Junior, when he came to write his own autobiography, made no mention whatsoever of his father’s role in the Civil War—his invariable practice being to leave painful memories unspoken, “until they are too dead to throb.”33 To serve in mufti was, in his opinion, something less than manly, and his tacit disapproval of the episode is the only indication that Theodore Senior was ever less than a god to him. Many biographers, including his own sister, have suggested that guilt over that substitute soldier explains the future Rough Rider’s almost desperate desire to wage war. He himself, at the age of three, made no bones about his wish to be at the front. “Teedie was really excited,” wrote Annie Bulloch, “when I said to him, ‘Darling, I must fit this zouave suit …’ his little face flushed up and he said, ‘Are me a soldier laddie?’ I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain.”34
His liveliness, abnormal even for a small boy, was something of a trial to the languid Mittie. Six weeks after Theodore Senior’s departure she complained: “Teedie is the most affectionate and endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require Papa’s discipline rather sadly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”35
Yet the child was simultaneously sinking into what seemed like chronic invalidism. From the moment his father left home, the catalog of Teedie’s ailments became continuous. He suffered from coughs, colds, nausea, fevers, and a congenital form of nervous diarrhea which the family euphemized as cholera morbus.36 “I feel badly,” he told his mother one morning, “—I have toothache in my stomach.” On top of all this, his asthma was worsening. “Rarely, even at his best, could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair,” remembered Corinne. Lack of appetite brought about symptoms of malnutrition. At one stage his whiteness and fragility were such that Annie Bulloch compared him to a very pale azalea. It seemed that he would not live to see his fourth birthday.37
The other children were not much healthier. Bamie, who had been dropped as a baby, suffered from a spinal defect that obliged her to wear a harness; Elliott was prone to colds and rushes of blood to the head; even little Corinne was ailing, and would soon fall victim to asthma as well.38
To Theodore