The President was taken to a hospital and then to the home of friends where he was reported to be resting easily.
The Chicago police arrested Emma Goldman but the judge turned her loose for lack of evidence. Editorials demanded the deportation of foreign anarchists.
Senator Mark Hanna, who had first heard the news with stunned unbelief at the Union Club in Cleveland, hurried to the President’s bedside, as did members of the Cabinet and Vice President Roosevelt. The early bulletins of the medical men were so reassuring that Colonel Roosevelt decided to take a few days off with his wife and children in the Adirondacks before returning to politics and to Oyster Bay.
He joined Mrs. Roosevelt and the children at the Tahawus Club up above Keene Valley in the headwaters of the Ausable River. When a messenger arrived announcing that President McKinley’s condition had taken a sudden turn for the worse the Vice President was climbing in the mountains. A guide, set off in search of him, found him towards dusk on the trail down from Mt. Tahawus. He rode all night in a wagon and reached the railroad station at North Creek where his secretary was waiting with a special train to rush him to Buffalo.
When he reached Buffalo towards midday he found that Mr. McKinley was dead and was immediately sworn in as President of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to be President. When he moved into the Executive Mansion, which he preferred to call the White House, he brought with him the romping uninhibited family life of Sagamore Hill, where politics and amateur boxing and a passion for wild creatures and wild country mingled with jingo enthusiasms and a real taste for history and for certain kinds of literature. Since Jefferson, whom T.R. acutely disliked, no American president had exhibited such varied interests, or shown himself so completely to the manor born.
He was the descendant of six generations of eminent New Yorkers. From his mother, a southern gentlewoman from one of the great plantation homes in Georgia, he absorbed the conviction so general among the daughters of the defeated Confederacy, that if the human race had an aristocracy they belonged to it. This established preconception made for social selfconfidence, and enabled him to deal with King Edward or the Kaiser or Manhattan wardheelers or the cowhands on his ranch or his sparring partners from the Tenderloin, on a basis of courteous give and take between equals. The foundation of his personal magnetism was an ardent fellow feeling for all sorts and varieties of men. A man who could be friends with Sir Cecil Spring Rice and John L. Sullivan at the same time could really boast that nothing human was strange to him.
In his autobiography he described himself as having been “a rather sickly rather timid little boy very fond of desultory reading and natural history, and not excelling in any form of sport.” As a child he suffered terribly from asthma. Very early he was fascinated by the animal kingdom. He used to say that it was the feeling of romance and adventure he got from the sight of a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood outside of a Broadway market that started him on his career as amateur taxidermist and zoologist.
His parents worried about his nervousness and timidity, but when he found other kids beating him up he took to developing his muscles with dumbbells and exercises. His father arranged for lessons in boxing and wrestling.
As he grew older he developed a ferocious energy. Overcompensation with a vengeance. In spite of extreme nearsightedness he became a fair shot. He took to long walks and mountainclimbing. He acquired a good seat on a horse.
Though he loved life outdoors he had a bookish streak. He wrote fluent and expressive English. While still at Harvard College he started, probably under the influence of his mother’s brothers who had both been officers on the blockaderunner Alabama, a highly technical history of American seamanship in the War of 1812.
The fall after graduating from college he married a Chestnut Hill girl named Alice Lee whom he had fallen desperately in love with during a country walk. The couple settled down at his mother’s house in New York so that T.R. could study law at Columbia, but he was more interested in the assorted characters he met at the local Republican Club. He took up ward politics as he took up boxing, just to prove that he could do it.
At twentythree as a representative of the “better element” he found himself elected to the state legislature from the Twentyfirst Assembly District, known as the Diamond Back District, one of the few safely Republican districts in New York. In spite of the embarrassment of a Harvard drawl, dundreary whiskers and pincenez anchored by a black ribbon, he made such an impression on the assemblymen that he was soon being talked of as a possible minority leader. He was beginning to make a name for himself by exposing a stockjobbing scandal in connection with the financing of one of the new elevated railways when he suffered a crushing blow.
Hurrying joyfully home from Albany one winter weekend to greet his firstborn child he found his Alice dying and his mother desperately ill with typhoid fever. “There is a curse on this house” his brother Elliott cried. Their mother died during the night and Alice the next afternoon. “… as a flower she grew and as a fair young flower she died … when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her,” Theodore wrote in a memorial which he circulated among the family, “the light went from my life for ever.”
T.R. was no man to let grief get him down. Spring Rice once described his friend Theodore as “pure act.” After finishing up his duties with the legislature as best he could, he headed for the wild west. His father had left him a moderate income. As he put it, he had the bread and butter but he must earn the jam. His first effort to make himself some money was to invest in a Dakota ranch. In his bereavement he decided to give cowpunching his personal attention.
He stopped off in Chicago to attend the Republican convention. The nomination of James G. Blaine, whom he considered somewhat less than honest, to run against Grover Cleveland, thoroughly disgusted him. When he was asked whether he was going to make ranching his business he said no but it was the best way to avoid campaigning for Blaine.
The last thing T.R. wanted was to lose himself in the western wilderness. Immediately an item appeared in The Bad Lands Cowboy, a recently established newspaper in the recently established tanktown of Medora: “Theodore Roosevelt the young New York reformer made us a very pleasant call Monday in full cowboy regalia.”
T.R. took to the cowhands and the cowhands took to him. He was affectionately known as Four Eyes. He didn’t drink or smoke. He couldn’t shake off his Harvard drawl. His profoundest cussword was By Godfrey, but his energy and nerve and knack for leadership won him the amazed admiration of the whole countryside.
He was made a deputy sheriff and helped round up some horsethieves and was asked to run for Congress. He lost every cent of the sixty thousand dollars he invested in cattle but he wrote a successful book on his experiences called Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. The frontispiece was a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in sombrero hat, beaded buckskin shirt, chaps and boots with silver spurs: the greatest showoff of his generation.
Not many months later he was in England marrying Edith Carow at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Cecil Spring Rice, then a sprightly young fellow just out of Oxford whom T.R. had taken a shine to on the boat, was best man. Theodore and Edith had been playmates in Gramercy Park when she was a little girl and he was a small boy. Probably she had been a motherly little girl. All their lives it was to be Mrs. Roosevelt who would watch over Theodore along with the other children, seeing that he got the proper meals and didn’t spend his money foolishly and changed his clothes when he came home drenched from a hike in the snow.