We went recently to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, and afterward I said I could imagine his wife, Edith, saying, “Not one more polar bear rug, water buffalo head, or hippopotamus foot inkwell, Teddy, not one more.”
“He shot anything that moved,” our dentist said when I told him a few days afterward of our visit, put off these many years.
I once described Roosevelt as a cross between Eugene Debs and Attila the Hun, a description one of my co-workers found to be apt, but putting aside for the moment the annexation of the Philippines (as did a short film we saw later in Sagamore Hill’s garden shed), you can’t help but admire his irrepressible energy, boundless curiosity, and love for the natural world, which impelled him to preserve so many of our country’s national parks. We owe a great debt to him for that alone.
There were no trees, we are told, when he bought 155 acres at Cove Neck in 1880, just a barn, and now it is a wonderful place, with majestic trees, trees you can talk to, many of them gigantic oaks whose girth you’d find out here only on Gardiner’s Island.
So, yes, I’m glad we finally went, driving up to Oyster Bay after a morning spent at J.F.K. so that in the future we’ll whisk through airports on our way to and from international destinations as our fellow travelers are herded cattle-like toward the conveyor belts.
“To dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day,” Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party cited as among its raisons d’être in its platform of 1912, which also promised, among other things, “strict limitation of all campaign contributions and expenditures, and detailed publicity of both before as well as after primaries and elections”; minimum wage standards to provide a living wage to men and women in all industrial occupations; “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use”; the formation of organizations to protect workers’ interests and to promote their progress; constructive regulation; taxation of large inheritances; the promotion of immigrants’ assimilation, education, and advancement, and the demand that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”
That was written more than a century ago, and we are not yet saved.
Four portraits are above the mantel in the library — Lincoln, Washington, Grant, and Chief Justice John Marshall. Our guide told me her favorite president was Washington — as was the case, I told her, with my late stepfather. Lincoln, I said, was mine . . . in large part probably because he was so reflective and wrote so well. Teddy Roosevelt is up there too.