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Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (Paperback)
by David McCullough
| Category:
Biography, American history, American presidents, Leadership |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
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¥ 158.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
An insightful review of Teddy Roosevelt's character development, and his eventual rise to power as one of America's greatest presidents. |
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Author: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: May, 1982
ISBN: 0671447548
Pages: 370
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00678
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0671447540
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- Awards & Credential -
Winner of National Book Award (in the USA). David McCullough is one of the greatest social historians and the tow-time winner of Pulitzer Prize (Truman and 1776). |
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- MSL Picks -
The life of Theodore Roosevelt spanned some of the most momentous times of American History - born prior to the Civil War, Roosevelt witnessed the end of the Old West as a Cowboy, was part and parcel of the Gilded Age and the beginning of the Progressive Era, raised troops and fought in the Spanish-American War as the leader of the Rough Riders. He became President as American power asserted itself on the world scene, and died just after the end of the First World War.
David McCullough has always been an outstanding Historian with a gift to present History in a narrative form that is relatively easy for his readers to follow. IMHO I think he outdid himself more so on "Mornings on Horseback" than he did on "Truman" or even the well-received "John Adams". This being said even though it is NOT a complete biography of TR.
For McCullough provides the reader with the goods of what made TR - Teddy what he later became. A father whom he loved greatly, yet always seemed disappointed in him for not having served the Union cause during the Civil War.(TR Senior did help the Union War effort, but in great part due to the pressure of his very pro-Confederate wife never served in the Union Army though he wanted to, and regretted not doing so) A mother with Southern views - her brothers - TR's Uncles James and Irvine Bulloch served with distinction in the Confederate Navy; the former U.S. Navy officer James as the procurer of blockade runners and ironclad warships from Britain for the Confederacy; Irvine as an officer on board one of those ships - the fearsome CSS "Alabama". TR's later interest in building up the U.S. Navy when he became President came in great part from idolizing the seafaring exploits of his Confederate Navy uncles.
Theodore himself was a sickly boy who nearly died of asthma and other diseases as a child. Somewhere along the line he built himself up, excelled at boxing, went on to Harvard, sparred in a literary sense with Jefferson Davis, became a bestselling author - and went on to be a power broker on the New York Republican Party scene. He also went out West and became a Cowboy - capturing outlaws and other badmen, raising cattle on the Montana Badlands - and faced down a hotheaded, obnoxious French bigot by the name of the Marquis De Mores.
Indeed the chapter ("Glory Days") on Roosevelt's life as a happy Cowboy in Montana as the Old West began to fade are the most appealing and enduring of McCullough's classic biography.
Placed together with Pringle's Pulitzer Prize winning biography, this is a Teddy biography that belongs on the bookshelves of all who are interested in TR's life - or in those times that followed the Civil War as America - and Theodore Roosevelt - matured.
(From quoting Alan Rockman, USA)
Target readers:
Readers who are interested in Theodore Roosevelt, American presidency, American history, leadership, political skills, and/or great biographies; English majors, and advanced English readers.
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David McCullough is the author of The Johnstown Flood (1968), The Great Bridge (1972), and The Path Between the Seas (1977), all of which received wide critical and popular acclaim, and the last (a book about the Panama Canal) not only won a number of literary prizes, including the National Book Award, but also was a major factor in the consideration of this nation's policy with respect to the Canal.
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From Publisher
Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as "a masterpiece" (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.
The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR's first love. All are brought to life to make "a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail", wrote The New York Times Book Review.
A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about "blessed" mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.
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Chapter 1
Greatheart's Circle
In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brownstone, numbered six, exclusive of the servants.
The head of the household was Theodore Roosevelt (no middle name or initial), who was thirty-seven years of age, an importer and philanthropist, and the son of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the richest men in the city. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt - Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, or Mittie, as she was called - was thirty-three, a southerner and a beauty. The children, two girls and two boys, all conceived by the same father and mother, and born in the same front bedroom, over the parlor, ranged in age from fourteen to seven. The oldest, Anna, was known as Bamie (from bambina, and pronounced to rhyme with Sammy). Next came ten-year-old Theodore, Jr., who was called Teedie (pronounced to rhyme with T.D.). Elliott, aged nine, was Ellie or Nell, and the youngest, Corinne, was called Conie.
Of the servants little is known, except for Dora Watkins, an Irish nursemaid who had been employed since before the Civil War. Another Irish girl named Mary Ann was also much in evidence, beloved by the children and well regarded by the parents - it was she they picked to go with the family on the Grand Tour that May - but in family papers dating from the time, nobody bothered to give Mary Ann a last name. Concerning the others, the various cooks, valets, coachmen, and housemaids who seem to have come and gone with regularity, the record is no help. But to judge by the size of the house and the accepted standards for families of comparable means and station, there were probably never less than four or five "below stairs" at any given time, and the degree to which they figured in the overall atmosphere was considerable.
The house stood in the block between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, on the south side of the street, and it looked like any other New York brownstone, a narrow-fronted, sober building wholly devoid of those architectural niceties (marble sills, fanlights) that enlivened the red-brick houses of an earlier era downtown. The standard high stoop with cast-iron railings approached a tall front door at the second-floor level, the ground floor being the standard English basement, with its servants' entrance. A formal parlor (cut-glass chandelier, round-arched marble fireplace, piano) opened onto a long, narrow hall, as did a parlor or "library," this a windowless room remembered for its stale air and look of "gloomy respectability." The dining room was at the rear, again according to the standard floor plan. Upstairs were the master bedroom and nursery, then three more bedrooms on the floor above, with the servants' quarters on the top floor.
Only one thing about the house was thought to be out of the ordinary, a deep porch, or piazza, at the rear on the third-floor level. Enclosed with a nine-foot wooden railing, it had been a bedroom before the Roosevelts tore out the back wall and converted it to an open-air playroom. It overlooked not only their own and neighboring yards, but the garden of the Goelet mansion on 19th Street, one of the largest private gardens in the city, within which roamed numbers of exotic birds with their wings clipped. Daily, in their "piazza clothes," the children were put out to play or, in Bamie's case, in early childhood, to lie on a sofa.
The house had been a wedding present from Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt - CVS to the family - whose own red-brick mansion on Union Square, six blocks south, was the figurative center of the Roosevelt tribal circle. The father of five sons, CVS had presented them all with houses as they married and the one given Theodore, youngest of his five, adjoined that of Robert B. Roosevelt, the fourth son, who was a lawyer.
With their full beards and eyeglasses, these two neighboring brothers bore a certain physical resemblance. The difference in age was only two years. Beyond appearances, however, they were not the least alike. Robert was the conspicuous, unconventional Roosevelt, the one for whom the family had often to do some explaining. Robert wrote books; Robert was bursting with ideas. He was a gifted raconteur, a sportsman, yachtsman, New York's pioneer conservationist (fish were his pet concern), an enthusiastic cook, an authority on family origins. He was loud and witty and cherished the limelight, seeking it inexplicably in the tumult of Tammany politics. Until the Civil War, the Roosevelts had all been Democrats. As late as 1863, Theodore had still been an avowed War Democrat - one who supported the war and thus the Republican Administration - but when he and the rest of CVS's line at last turned Republican, Robert alone remained in the Democratic fold and was never to be anything but proud of the fact. ("Our party is the party of the people!")
Robert's middle name was his mother's maiden name, Barnhill, but in anticipation of what his political foes might make of this ("manure pile" or variations to that effect), he had changed it to Barnwell and it was as Uncle Barnwell that he was sometimes known to the small nieces and nephews in the house beside his.
Robert's wife, Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt, was called Aunt Lizzie Ellis to distinguish her from still another Aunt Lizzie in the family, and she too was considered "unorthodox." At the back of her third floor - the floor corresponding to the piazza next door - she maintained a marvelous and odorous menagerie of guinea pigs, chickens, pigeons, a parrot, a monkey, "everything under the sun that ought not be kept in a house." The monkey, her favorite, was a violent little creature that bit. She dressed it like a fashionable child, complete with ruffled shirts and gold studs. Once Aunt Lizzie Ellis aroused the neighborhood with the purchase of a cow that had to be led from East 20th Street into her back yard by the only available route, through the house, an event that, for excitement, was surpassed only by the removal of the cow, once Aunt Lizzie Ellis was threatened with legal action. On the return trip through the house the animal became so terrified it had to be dragged bodily, its legs tied, its eyes blindfolded.
To the children next door such occasions naturally figured very large, as did Uncle Barnwell with his talk of fishing and hunting, his yacht, and his flashy political friends. So it is somewhat puzzling that so little was to be said of him in later years. His immediate proximity would be passed over rather quickly, his influence barely touched on. He is the Roosevelt everybody chose to forget about. Politics undoubtedly had much to do with this, but more important, it would appear, was his private life. For in addition to all else, brother Rob was a bit lax in his morals. He was what polite society referred to as a Bohemian, the kind of man who kept company with "actresses and such." An admiring later-day kinsman would describe him as an Elizabethan in the Victorian era and a story has come down the generations of the ladies' gloves Robert purchased in bulk at A. T. Stewart's department store, these in a violent shade of green. The gloves had been on sale, according to the story, and he distributed them liberally among his "lady friends," with the result that for years those who knew him well knew also to watch for the gloves while strolling Fifth Avenue or driving in the park.
Ordinarily, such stories might prompt some question as to whether Robert only seemed scandalous -- so very straitlaced was the family, so quick was "the best society" to leap on the least deviation from the prescribed code and call it, if not immoral, then indecent. But in truth Robert was something more than a mere rake or charming boulevardier. He was a man living a remarkable double life, keeping another woman and ultimately an entire second family in a house only a block or so distant on the same street, an arrangement that would come to light only long afterward as a result of genealogical research sponsored by some of his descendants. Her name was Minnie O'Shea, or Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue, as he had decided she should be called, and in 1869 she was already pregnant with their first child.
How much of this Theodore knew, how strenuously he disapproved, if at all, is impossible to say. But the contrast between the two could hardly have been more striking.
Theodore was invariably upright, conservative, the very model of self-control. He cared nothing for public acclaim, "never put himself forward," as friends would remember. Theodore was the model duty-bound husband and father, a junior partner at Roosevelt and Son. He was a faithful communicant at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, who often attended two services on the same Sunday. He belonged to the Union League Club and the Century Association. He served on charitable boards, raised money for museums. Not in seven generations on the island of Manhattan had the Roosevelts produced so sturdy or so winsome an example of upper-class probity, or so fine a figure of a man - physically imposing, athletic, with china-blue eyes, chestnut hair and beard, and a good, square Dutch jaw. In his formal photographs, the eyeglasses removed, he is someone who will do what he has to, direct, sure of himself. Only the eyes raise questions, with their unmistakable hint of severity, which seems odd in a man remembered mainly for the "sunshine of his affection."
Clothes concerned him. The choice of a suit, the right hat for the occasion, were issues of consequence. His suits were of the best quality and beautifully tailored. Appearances mattered. Indeed, it may be said that appearances figured quite as much in the life at 28 East 20th Street as everywhere else within the circumscribed world of New York's "good old families." "Did I tell you that he took the other end of the table at the dinner I gave to Captain Cook and behaved admirably?" Theodore writes of brother Rob to Mittie. "He was dressed perfectly, except for a colored cravat with his dress suit."...
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John Leonard (The New York Times), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
We have no better social historian.
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Detroit News (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
This is a marvelous chronicle of manners and morals, love and duty, and as captivating as anything you will find between book covers in a long while.
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Denver Post (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
A fine account of Roosevelt's rise to manhood, well written and, like its subject, full of irrepressible vitality.
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John Dorman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
In this gift to all lovers of history, the early life of Theodore Roosevelt is illuminated and explained. Historian David McCullough brilliantly recognized that any great life is shaped by its earliest years. He undertook the task of researching and formulating those important years in TR's life into powerful and beautiful language, and he succeeded mightily.
Roosevelt was born into an extremely wealthy family, but one that was also firmly grounded in the realities of life. This was due to the influence of his father, Theodore (or Greatheart, as he was known to the children). Although immensely rich, Greatheart's real concern was with the impoverished and forgotten of society, and his dedication to helping those in need impacted young TR early on. This did not mean that Greatheart and his family did not live lavishly, however. Every need or wish was provided for, and no discomfort was ever really felt. The true discomforts of the Roosevelt family stemmed from health problems, which no amount of money seemed able to cure. Young Teddy suffered from severe asthma, and McCullough painfully recreates some of the boy's attacks, and documents the frequency and regularity with which they occurred. McCullough also goes into detail regarding the illness suffered by Teddy's brother Elliott, which seemed to be epillepsy, but went undiagnosed. Teddy's oldest sister Bamie also deals with spinal problems from a young age, having to wear a brace for several years and never fully recovering. Thus, the Mighty Roosevelt family, as some would see them, is actually plagued with illness and discomfort. These illnesses would also bring out the best in their father, whose caring spirit and dedication to his children is evident in each case.
Teddy's siblings are also discussed at length, and with good reason. Each has a unique story of their own, and each affected Teddy deeply and in different ways. Bamie is seen as possibly the most intelligent of all the children, and her lifelong dedication to Teddy is apparent and important. She also became the mother figure and sole caretaker of her niece, Eleanor Roosevelt (whom was given away at her wedding to Franklin by her uncle Teddy)!
There are tragic figures as well in the story, these being Teddy's brother Elliott and his wife Alice. The family money and prestige do nothing to help Elliott's outlook on life, and he loses touch with the ideals and teachings of his childhood, eventually abandoning his family in shameful fashion (especially for a Roosevelt). This is a great disapointment for Teddy, and causes him much pain.
His wife Alice is also discussed at length, and McCullough has an undeniable ability to create characters, cause them to come alive in vivid detail, and build them up before revealing the reality of what occurs in their lives. This ability is fully put to use in the case of Alice Roosevelt, but I will leave the rest to the reader.
Ultimately, this book is a triumph in it's capturing of the spirit of a young Teddy Roosevelt, through his wide variety of experiences as a young man. Some have complained that this book ends abruptly, but this is in no way meant to be a definitive bio on TR. It chronicles his early life, and the experiences that shaped him as a man and that stayed with him as President. It's a fascinating concept and it is successfully executed by a master historian.
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