Category Archives: Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

Women’s History Month at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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If you are looking for something to do in recognition of Women’s History Month in the coming weeks I might suggest the above programs at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace on these successive Saturdays. A guy with my initials even goes off on the 21st.

These past few weeks I have been pulling together my presentation, which focuses on the Roosevelt family’s response to the American Civil War. Young Teedie’s parents supported different sides during the conflict. His mother Mittie was a Georgia belle from a slave-owning family with a brother and several half-brothers in Confederate uniform; Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was a Union man, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay, who had his mail sent to the White House in care of Hay while out in the field registering men of the Army of the Potomac up for the allotment of their pay to their families back home. I tell the story in more detail in the manuscript of “Incorporating New York,” my history of Civil War Era New York City that will hopefully get published sometime in the future.

There is a rich assortment of speakers lined up for the house on East 20th Street in the coming weeks. Come out and take part in Women’s History Month in these waning days of winter.

Washington’s Birthday 1928

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Brooklyn, Charles Loring Brace, Fiorello La Guardia, George Washington, Memory, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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New York governor Al Smith reviewed the Kings County Volunteer Firemen’s Association on Washington’s Birthday in 1928 in the leadup to the presidential race.

I was reading a good-natured online debate the other between a couple of people arguing the merits and demerits of American holidays. One of the running threads–indeed, the instigation of the discussion–was the idea of President’s Day itself. Some were averring that the holiday we are observing this weekend is now a second-tier observance, which is tough to argue against. It was not always the case however. President’s Day began as George Washington’s Birthday, and is still legally considered as such in many of the fifty states. Up until around the Second World War however Washington’s Birthday was still considered one of our most prestigious holidays, ranking below Christmas and Easter and on par with the 4th of July. It makes sense that Americans would have two secular holidays–one in winter and the other in summer–of such consequence. From the early days of the Republic through the mass immigration of the early twentieth century these holidays gave Americans a shared narrative. The 4th of July is still part of that narrative, but Washington’s Birthday–or even the more general “President’s Day–not so much.

Some of the men assembled to speak at Brooklyn Borough Hall were in their 90s. Later that day Governor Smith and Congressman Fiorello La Guardia spoke at the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ Lodging House in Manhattan.

Here above we see a moment during which Washington’s Birthday was still very much part of our cultural fabric. In 1928 Governor Alfred E. Smith visited Brooklyn to review the organization of retired Kings County firemen. From the steps of Borough Hall he watched the procession of men, some in their 90s, as they hailed the man everyone knew would run for the presidency that coming November. The Eagle, whose offices were adjacent to Borough Hall, noted that “Only the Roman candles and fireworks of the old political campaigning [were] missing.” It was not just Brooklynites; firemen had come from throughout Long Island, Manhattan, and as far away as Philadelphia and Delaware to see and hear Smith.

The governor had been coming to this event throughout the 1920s. He had come down from Albany for a few days to appear at several events; after speaking to and lunching with the retired firemen in Brooklyn, Smith returned to Manhattan and dined at the Brace Memorial Newsboys’ House on William Street. Lodging houses like the one Smith spoke at on Washington’s Birthday 1928 dated back to the days when Charles Loring Brace and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. created them prior to the Civil War. There with Smith at the lodging house was U.S. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia. Smith’s message to the 1,200 assembled hardscrabble lads was to accept that life is difficult even under the best of circumstances. The governor and presidential aspirant understood difficulty, having been born a slum kid on the Lower East Side and toiling in the Fulton Fish Market before becoming a Tammany man and starting his rise.

(images/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Living with Moses

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler, Robert Moses, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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Alfred E. Smith, seen here at age four in 1877 at Coney Island, became governor of New York State in November 1918 five days before the Armistice. He was a good friend and mentor to master builder Robert Moses.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday. Looking out the window right now I see it is clear and bright blue. How cold it might be is another story. I’ll find out when I run some errands in a bit. I spent a good portion of the morning preparing lesson plans for the week, which includes a sizable number of images to accompany the talks. My colleague and I decided to focus our course this semester on Robert Moses, who for good and ill gave New Yorkers most of the city we live in today. What we most want students to get from the class is an understanding of the complexity of Moses’s legacy, that Moses was less a psychotic power broker and more a flawed and complicated public servant who did the best he could within his circumstances to build New York City and State as he believed proper within the historical moment.

In a sense the course picks up where my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, ends. I finish my manuscript about Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Louisa Lee Schuyler, and their cohorts in 1923 with the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace. Moses gets his first position of genuine authority in 1924, when his friend and mentor Governor Alfred E. Smith appoints him leader of the Long Island State Park Commission. By this time the balance has shifted in New York City from the old Dutch and British families to the Italians, Jews and others who had arrived from the Old World over the previous several decades. The major exceptions to that of course are Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, whose stars are rising in this period and would carry on until Eleanor’s death in 1962. Moses himself holds on until six years after that, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller relieves him of the remainder of his duties in 1968. Over the years the Roosevelts would be friends, allies, and sometimes adversaries of Smith and Moses. I have been rolling up my sleeves and digging in since the start of the year and will proceed thusly until Memorial Day Weekend. It has been a great deal of work but a blast at the same time.

(image/Museum of the City of New York)

Sunday morning coffee

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Heritage tourism, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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Louisa Lee Schuyler was a great granddaughter of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. She died in 1926 and is buried an hour north of New York City in Sleepy Hollow.

A friend and I traveled north of the city yesterday to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Neither of us had been there before and were not sure how it would work out logistically in terms of the distance from the train station, the size of the cemetery itself, how hilly it might be, and that sort of thing. We did not leave super early, as Sleepy Hollow is just an hour away from Grand Central. We caught 10:20, by which time the station was packed with people out enjoying the holiday season. We had a big checklist of potential headstones to visit, but only saw some of them because of the size of the cemetery. The one I was determined to see however is the one above: Louisa Lee Schuyler. Miss Schuyler was one of Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s best friends; the two worked hand-in-hand on philanthropic endeavors for years until his untimely passing at age 46 in 1878. She carried on for almost another half a century until her own passing in 1926. They are two of the main characters in my book manuscript about Civil War Era New York City.

After trekking through the cemetery for a few hours my friend and I ventured to Philipsburg Manor, where the staff gave us recommendations on where to get lunch in Neighboring Tarrytown and helped us call a cab. They weren’t wrong about good restaurants on Main Street.

I am not going to go into the details today but will say here that, while also enjoying the holiday season, I have been laying the groundwork for some 2019 projects. Next summer I hope to spend a fair amount of time exploring Old New York in the Hudson Valley and making some connections to local and national history. The Colonial and Early American Periods are things I actually know very little about. Though I do explore the early years of European settlement a little bit in Incorporating New York I intend to explore the topic more thoroughly, including how it relates to the Hamiltons, Roosevelts, Schuylers, and other leading families.

 

Rutherford B. Hayes at South Mountain

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Roscoe Conkling, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Rutherford B. Hayes was wounded at the Battle of South Mountain on this date in 1862. South Mountain is not as well known as it should be because it took place three days prior to the Battle of Antietam. Historians, accurately or not, usually interpret it not as its own set piece but as the prelude to the bloody day at Sharpsburg. That is entirely understandable but has also lessened the focus on the events of September 14. Hayes at the time was an officer in the 23rd Ohio. He and his men were eager to avenge the loss at Second Bull Run and were spoiling for a fight. They found it at Fox’s Gap, where Hayes received his wounds early in the morning. Of course he eventually recovered fully and became a general before entering the world of politics after the war.

Rutherford B. Hayes, seen here as a major in 1861, was wounded at the Battle of South Mountain on September 14, 1862.

In August 1885 now former president Rutherford B. Hayes attended Ulysses. S. Grant’s funeral. There too among the many other dignitaries was President Cleveland and former president Chester A. Arthur. I came across an interesting old newspaper article the other day that claimed that Arthur and Hayes were not selected as honorary pallbearers to avoid Hayes’s involvement in such a capacity. I have no idea if that is conjecture or if the writer of that piece in the 1880s had more information to go on. The standard narrative of the funeral is that former high-ranking officers were selected from the North and South as a reconciliationist gesture to aid in the reuniting of the country. Of course Arthur and Hayes had both been Civil War generals in their own right, so that theory would not necessarily preclude them from participating in such a capacity.

Arthur would have been a good fit for honorary pallbearer. he had been a long time Grant supporter, an ally and protégé of Grant ally Roscoe Conkling, and the first leader of the Grant Monument Association. Hayes’s involvement would have been a little more complicated. He had tried remove Arthur as Collector of the Port of New York in 1877 and replace him with Theodore Roosevelt Sr. That did not come to pass, in large part because of the political machinations of Senator Conkling. If the idea was to keep Hayes out then the idea of excluding Arthur would make sense: to ask one ex-president to be honorary pallbearer would mean having to ask the other. Arthur himself was a forgiving sort who rarely held grudges for long. A good illustration of that is that he attended Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s funeral in February 1878 just weeks after the Collector controversy. So if a decision was made on Hayes it was probably made by someone else. Both former presidents did participate in the funeral, riding in carriages in the procession. The decision-making in how to incorporate Arthur and Hayes into Grant’s funeral is a rabbit hole worth going down. I am sure the answer is out there somewhere in the literature on the Gilded Age.

(image/Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center)

The Adventures of Albert Smith Bickmore

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), William E. Dodge Jr., Writing

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Last night I completed what are for now the final edits on the manuscript for the book project whose working title is “Incorporating New York: Gotham’s Civil War Generation and the Creation of the Modern City.” I say “for now” because if and when it gets picked up by a publisher it will need a reading from a professional proofreader in addition to a final review by myself to spot any errors that certainly are there in the weeds. Two readers have read and commented earlier in the spring and I have spent much of the summer making their suggested revisions and corrections. Last night I also spent a considerable chunk of time (while listening to the Astros game and watching the rain) adding the references into Zotero. That is where the citations stand as of now. I have not incorporated them into the text because I do not know what format a prospective publisher might want and so am not going to create potential double work for myself.

Albert Smith Bickmore as depicted in the 1869 American edition of Travels in the East Indian Archipelago

I thought I would share the above image that comes from the 1869 American edition of Albert Smith Bickmore’s Travels in the East Indian Archipelago. The book was originally published in London the year before. As a student at Harvard just prior to the war Bickmore worked in Louis Agassiz’s Zoological Museum before joining the Forty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers after Fort Sumter. When the regiment was discharged in 1863 he studied in Europe, and after Appomattox returned to the United States briefly before taking this scientific voyage. When he returned from that, he came to Manhattan and spoke to people like William E. Dodge Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. about creating a natural history museum for New York City. By April 1869 it was done, with the charter ratified in the Roosevelt home on East 20th Street.

Interpreting Grant

11 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Chester A. Arthur, General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Grant’s Tomb, May 2018

I was in Upper Manhattan this afternoon for a meeting. I took the #1 train to 116th Street and when I emerged to street level Columbia students were packing their belongings into their parents’ cars and heading home for the summer. As I continued along I saw the doors open at Riverside Church and, with about fifteen minutes on my hands, went in to give it a look. As it happened, I stumbled into the Columbia University graduation ceremony, which I could hear and see going on inside the church from the lobby. A student in cap and gown standing in the lobby even asked me if I needed help but I politely said no, wished him well, and went on my way.

The reason I was in the area was because I had a meeting at Grant’s Tomb. As it turns out, I’ll be volunteering there at least over the summer. I am excited about this. I feel that in many ways things have been guiding me towards this for some time. I am already contemplating a number of interpretive possibilities. My first order of business though will be to ground myself in the basics of the site and its historic provenance. I have already just about completed the historic resource study written by a Park Service historian in the early 1980s.

Grant’s Tomb is a good fit because it ties in neatly with my book manuscript about Civil War Era New York City. Theodore Roosevelt Sr, Chester Arthur, Winfield Scott Hancock, Roscoe Conkling, Rutherford B. Hayes: the lives of all of these figures and others intertwined with Grant’s in substantial ways. I feel I’m well-positioned to take this on. I will not be starting until early June but after I do I will have regular updates about what is going on.

Abraham Graff, 1828?-1865

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by in ACW, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Those we remember

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Private Abraham Graff died 153 years ago today. As you can see from the muster roll above, Graff served in the 7th Veteran Infantry Regiment. This unit mustered in just in time to serve in Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. Graff himself did not see action in that bloody ordeal, having joined the Army on June 25, 1864. He was in Virginia for the Siege of Petersburg. What makes him interesting here, beyond that his was a life cut short, is how and why he entered the unit: Abraham Graff was Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s replacement in the American Civil War.

Passenger manifest from the Amalie listing an Abraham Graf arriving in New York City on June 23, 1864.

Little is known about Graff. We do know however that he was a German immigrant who had just come to the United States. I cannot tell with 100% certainty but the passenger manifest above lists an Abraham Graf having arrived in New York City on June 23, 1864, two days before “our” Graff mustered in. The last name is spelled differently (with one F here) and the age may be off a year or two according to what we know, but these types of things are not uncommon in historical records. We do know that the Abraham Graff that took Roosevelt’s place was freshly-arrived. This may well be our person. How many Abraham Graff’s could have come from Germany that same week or month?

Private Abraham Graff’s death certificate, complete with notation that he was Theodore Roosevelt (Sr.’s) substitute. Note that it lists the house number as 33 East 20th Street, not 28 as we know it today.

Graff’s Civil War experience was a difficult one. He was taken prisoner, let go, and died of scurvy in a Union hospital in Maryland on March 31, 1865.

Presidents Day 2018

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Union League Club

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I have spent the weekend wrapping up the penultimate chapter in my Civil War book, which ends with the death of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. in February 1878. As it happened I was writing yesterday of President Rutherford B. Hayes’s May 1877 trip to New York City. Hayes, wife Lucy, and much of the cabinet came to New York for a very public series of events spread over a few days. In today’s parlance, we would say that Hayes was consolidating his base. He actually had lost Manhattan to Samuel J. Tilden quite handily in the 1876 presidential election, on his way to losing the overall popular vote. Much of Hayes’s support came from individuals like Theodore Roosevelt Sr., John Jay, Joseph H. Choate and their allies in organizations such as the Union League Club. Roosevelt was at just about every one of the public and private gatherings held in Hayes’s honor.

Contemporary photograph of Fitz-Greene Halleck statue in Central Park

The dedication depicted here took place on 15 May 1877. A short list of those on hand to see President Hayes dedicate the statue to poet Fitz-Greene Halleck includes William Cullen Bryant, William M. Evarts and Carl Schurz, Generals Winfield Scott Hancock and William Tecumseh Sherman, and former New York governor Edwin D. Morgan. The Seventh Regiment Band played. After this event Hayes toured the American Museum of Natural History in its temporary quarters within the Central Park Arsenal escorted by Theodore Roosevelt Sr. It is strange how in popular memory we tend to jump from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, dismissing the administrations that came between. Abe and Teddy are the subjects of considerably more biographies than all the others between. I believe we serve ourselves poorly and that it is our loss for not doing so.

Enjoy your Presidents Day, everyone.

(images/top, NYPL; bottom, unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons)

A new museum for a new era

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Museums, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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I have been working on the draft of Incorporating New York for much of these past several weeks. I am now in December 1868. The book ends in 1878. I thought I would share the document you see above, which was sent on 30 December 1868, 149 years ago today. The letter was written by a number of New Yorkers to the commissioners of Central Park seeking permission to place what would become The American Museum of Natural History within the grounds of the park. The signers include Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Howard Potter, J.P. Morgan, Levi P. Morton and others. This is an interesting period in the city and the nation’s history. Being the end of the year, the individuals were naturally in a mood of reflection and thinking about prospects for the future. It was more than that however. December 1868 is less than a month after the election of Ulysses S. Grant. The country had just gotten over the Andrew Johnson impeachment and trial. Johnson would leave office in just over three months. Just three weeks prior to this letter the Union League Club of New York held a reception for Grant at which many of these very were in attendance.

(image/1870 AMNH annual report)