Heir to the Empire City by Edward P. Kohn

Author:Edward P. Kohn [Kohn, Edward P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780465069750
Publisher: Basic Books

DARK SHADOWS HAD ALWAYS cast themselves across Roosevelt’s life. In his youth he had been small and sickly. By age twenty-five, Roosevelt had grieved the loss of the three people who were dearest to him: his father, his mother, and his first wife. Another shadow that loomed was the declining mental and physical health of his beloved brother Elliott. Born less than two years apart, as boys “Ellie” and “Teedie” had been constant companions. As they grew older their differences became apparent. Elliott was handsome, charming, and a born athlete. Theodore was the introverted naturalist who was destined for Harvard. All the Roosevelt children seemed to have been born with some illness, whether it was Anna’s spinal deformity or Theodore’s asthma. From a young age, Elliott had learned to control his periodic fits of convulsions with large quantities of alcohol. In 1880, when he took his brother west on a hunting trip just before Theodore married Alice, Roosevelt wrote home about Elliott’s drinking. “As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat,” Roosevelt wrote his sister Corinne, trying to be funny. “Then a milkpunch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was so hot; a brandy smash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach;’ and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite.” At dinner, Roosevelt recounted, Elliott then imbibed “beer, later claret and in the evening shandigaff [sic],” the last better known as a shandy, or beer mixed with lemonade. Between the end of the hunt and bedtime, then, Elliott drank an unknown quantity of about eight different alcoholic beverages. He was only twenty years old at the time.

By the time Roosevelt left for Washington to become civil service commissioner, Elliott’s health was in steep decline. Roosevelt knew that Elliott’s alcoholic lifestyle contributed to his constant need for medical care, but he could do little but offer aid and compassion. During the summer of 1888, when Elliott was bedridden with simultaneous attacks of rheumatic gout, inflammatory rheumatism, and neck abscesses that prevented him from swallowing, Roosevelt expressed his displeasure at his younger brother’s debauched lifestyle at his own Oyster Bay estate, Hempstead. “I do hate his Hempstead life,” he wrote their sister. “I do’n’t [sic] know whether he could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.” By July 1889, Roosevelt was begging Elliott to seek round-the-clock professional help at an institution of some kind, but to no avail. A complete breakdown later that year prompted a move with the family to Europe, where Elliott eventually checked himself into a fashionable German asylum. His wife, Anna, was pregnant with their third child; their first child, Anna Eleanor, who would later marry Franklin Delano Roosevelt and become First Lady, was then not quite five years old. Back in America, a servant girl named Katy Mann was also pregnant with Elliott’s baby. Armed with gifts and letters that Elliott

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