The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [227]
If you and I were alone in the world I should advise fighting her as a pure blackmailer, yet as things [are] I did not dare …
The woman must admit that on her own plea she must have been a willing, probably inviting party. But she has chosen her time with great skill. During that week [of the alleged seduction] you were very sick, and for hours at a time were out of your head, and did not have any clear recollection of what you were doing. You wandered much about the house those nights, alone. She could get testimony that you were often wild and irresponsible, either from being out of your head or from the use of liquor or opiates. At present you are not in any condition to go on the stand and be cross-examined as to your past and your personal habits by a sharp and unscrupulous lawyer. So that however the suit went, it would create a great scandal; and much would be dragged out that we are very desirous of keeping from the public.
This appeal to his brother’s sense of reason was rendered academic by a letter from Bamie the next day, saying that Elliott had begun to suffer from delirium tremens.53 Worse news arrived with almost every mail. Elliott no longer denied sleeping with Katy Mann; he merely said “he could not remember” doing so. He refused to be shut up against his will, and threatened to cut Anna off without a penny if she deserted him. Simultaneously he threatened to go off on a long sea voyage as soon as her baby was born.54 “He is evidently a maniac morally no less than mentally,” Theodore wrote in despair.55
As the Commissioner pondered each fresh letter and telegram, he could detect a certain animal ruthlessness in Elliott’s behavior. What that golden sot really wanted was to have everything—to hold on to his wife and children as symbols of respectability, to drink as much as he liked, sleep with whomever he pleased, and squander his money on himself, rather than alimony and paternity suits.56 Elliott could not care less about Katy Mann’s threats. He knew that the family elders were so afraid of scandal they would silence her at all costs. If he refused to pay her the $4,000, somebody else assuredly would.
Theodore did not doubt this, having already, in an unfortunate gaffe, told Elliott that an uncle was willing to provide the hush-money.57 He confessed to Bamie on 20 June that he was at his wits’ end as to what to advise; he could only insist, ad nauseam, that Anna must come home and not condone Elliott’s “hideous depravity” by continuing to live with him “as man and wife.”58 But there seemed little chance of that: Bamie wrote to say that Anna had called longingly for Elliott while giving birth to their son, Hall, on 28 June. “It is dreadful to think of the inheritance the poor little baby may have in him,” Theodore wrote somberly—and prophetically.59
The thought of Elliott now being free to return to Anna’s bed saddened and sickened him. In his opinion, sex between them should cease until Elliott “by two or three years of straight life” had canceled out the sin of adultery.60 It did not occur to him that Anna, who had no sins to atone for, might be in any way inconvenienced by such an arrangement.
ROOSEVELT’S WORRIES ABOUT Katy Mann, aggravated by nervousness over the political consequences of his Baltimore report (still pigeonholed despite frantic pleas from reformers for its release), plunged him into gloom as June gave way to July. “I am at the end of my career, such as it is,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge. “… I often