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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
Table of Contents
About The Book
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" (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.
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.
ardOrdinarily, 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."
Together at dinners and balls, he and the exquisite Mittie made a picture people did not forget. It was in the Roosevelt tradition to be solicitous to women. While their mother was alive, the five brothers stopped regularly every morning en route to work to pay her their respects. But Theodore seems to have genuinely preferred the company of women -- he had an eye for feminine beauty, his children all remembered -- and the attention he showered on Mittie was exceptional even for that day and those circles. An employee at one of his charities remarked that he had never understood the meaning of the word "gentleman" until the evening he watched Theodore Roosevelt escort his wife about the premises.
In all Theodore was a seemingly uncomplicated person. He had no particular gifts. He was not musical as Mittie was. He shared little of her love of art. He was not creative; he did not write or charm after-dinner audiences as Robert could. He dabbled in nothing. He was perfectly intelligent, to be sure; he enjoyed books, enjoyed the talk of lawyers, editors, and others who traded in words and abstract ideas, but he was unintellectual. In matters of taste he habitually deferred to his wife, refusing even to buy a bottle of wine unless she had passed on it. If he regarded himself as an authority on anything, it was horses.
But greatest of all was his interest in and feeling for children. He responded immediately to them, and they to him. "My personal impression," a nephew would recall, "...is that he was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man with an intense sympathy with everything you brought to him. He loved children especially."
From childhood he had been called Thee and as the youngest son, the Benjamin of the family, he had been doted on. He was Mama's darling and did nothing but shine in her eyes until her dying day. In turn, he adored her and would credit any good qualities he had to her and her "settled notions." She had been an event in the Roosevelt line, the first non-Dutch entry on the family tree. She was Margaret Barnhill of Philadelphia. Her background was English-Irish-Quaker. She was gentle but dominating and the first of the Roosevelts to espouse the spirit of noblesse oblige. Great wealth imposed obligations, she preached; the opportunities bestowed by private fortunes must be put to "some good purpose." Bamie, as the oldest of her father's children, could remember going as a very small child to call on her at the house on Union Square. There was a cavernous front hall with a floor of polished black-and-white marble and great mahogany doors with silver knobs and hinges that opened to the dining room. "In the dining room, where a bright soft-coal fire was always burning in the fireplace, between two south windows, we invariably found my grandmother sitting in her corner with her work basket on a table near her, and some books, always apparently delighted to see us, and with a most lovely smile."
Through Theodore's youth, dinner conversation in that same room, at his father's end of the table, had been in Dutch. Short, homely, pink-faced, invariably punctual, CVS Roosevelt regarded his brood with rather quizzical large, round eyes that were made to look even larger by his small, square gold-framed spectacles. He was the essence of old-fashioned New York. "Economy is my doctrine at all times," he had once informed Margaret Barnhill in the midst of their courtship, "at all events till I become, if it is to be so, a man of fortune." And though Roosevelt and Son had been founded by his own father and grandfather, it was he, CVS, who had become the family's initial man of fortune, the first Roosevelt millionaire. It was he who switched the family business from hardware to importing plate glass. And still more fortuitously, in the Panic of 1837, when Theodore was a child of six, he bought up building lots, "hither and yon," on the island of Manhattan, all at a good price.
Theodore's formal education had been limited and erratic, as his spelling gave evidence. There had been a private tutor through boyhood and never a lack of books at hand, but college was ruled out because CVS thought it would ruin him. (Weir Roosevelt, the oldest brother, had gone to Columbia College, but to study law, which apparently made it tolerable in the father's eyes; Robert, in his turn, had become a lawyer without going to college, as was still possible then.)
In 1851, however, at age nineteen, Theodore was sent off on a Grand Tour, something his brothers had been denied and that Robert for one greatly envied. It was the year of the London Exhibition and the opening of the Crystal Palace, an event of obvious importance to a family in the glass business. He saw the Exhibition, traveled the Continent, even went on to Russia, which was unheard of. He improved his French, acquired a little German and Italian, and sent home dutiful, descriptive letters that were his mother's joy and to Robert a large annoyance.
"I'm afraid, Theodore, you have mistaken the object of traveling," Robert lectured. "It is not to see scenery, you can see finer at home. It is not to see places where great people lived and died, that is a stupidity. But it is to see men. To enlarge your mind, which will never be enlarged by looking at a large hill, but by conversing with, and seeing the bent of the minds of other people."
A month later, after still more from Theodore on the churches and monuments he was seeing, Robert could barely contain himself.
I have it in mind to go to all the big stores in Broadway and write you an account. So look out as sure as you describe to me any more big buildings, you may know what to expect. Now answer seriously, have you been anywhere but to monuments, etc.? Have you been to a masked ball, a theater, an opera, or even into a French store where little girls tend the counters? Have you seen a Dutchman, a Frenchman, an Irishman; besides the porters who carried your trunks? If so, what did you say to them and what did they say to you? Have you seen anything odd or original? Where have you been, where are you going?
But six months later, Robert felt obliged to rescind.
Firstly, Advice. Don't write any more experience in the lower walks of life, or moralize upon its wickedness....Mother gets into a pigeon fit and thinks her "darling innocent" is going straight to destruction. And the old gentleman ruminates on the disappearance of the £1,000 and looks blank when it is suggested to him that he is supporting Theodore's "French teacher." The old lady takes it hard and no matter what you do perhaps you had better not write about it. You had better keep to towers and castles.
Russia -- the overwhelming splendors of St. Petersburg, the squalor of Moscow -- affected Theodore profoundly. "I scarce know terms strong enough to express my feelings...Everything is in the extremes." Conceivably it had taken Robert's admonitions to bring him to see the human element; still, the kind of sensitivity that began to emerge in his letters and in his journal was very much his own. He toured a Moscow foundling hospital where every year some six thousand infants were received. On the edge of the city early one Sunday he watched a thousand prisoners start the long march to Siberia. A dignified, elderly figure he identifies in the journal only as Dr. Haase had come to bid the prisoners farewell. Nothing or no one that Theodore encountered in his travels seems to have impressed him as this man did.
He was dressed in the old style with silk stockings and slippers, his breast decked with honor...He is one of the finest-looking old gentlemen I ever saw and his actions carry out his appearance. He went around among the prisoners asking them if they were well and content...when they were departing he distributed among those whom he thought deserving. It was more the universal feeling of kindness which prompted every movement than any particular action which I can adduce which evinced his character.
The prisoners must be fairly treated, the old man insisted, for at Judgment Day their word would count as much as that of anyone. Though a few of the sick had been put in wagons, the rest had started off on foot with the prospect of six months of continual walking before them.
To the great relief of his father, Theodore came home with no new revolutionary ideas or worldly airs. Nor, apparently, was it with the least misgiving that he entered directly into the family firm, downtown at 94 Maiden Lane. The Russian journal would be taken up and reread from time to time and one "treasure" among the few he had brought back, a small square of malachite supporting a small gilt Russian peasant pulling a gilt sledge, was to occupy a prominent position in the 20th Street parlor. Only after they were grown would the children become aware that it was anything other than a priceless work of art.
The impression is that the family business more or less ran itself. CVS had announced his retirement soon after Theodore joined the firm, and another brother, James Alfred Roosevelt, was made senior partner. James Alfred, as nobody disputed, had the best head for business. He was shrewd and tough, and he had married an Emlen from Philadelphia, a move which, in the words of one descendant, "did the family's fortune no harm." James, too, like his father, was made a director of the Chemical Bank, and the Chemical Bank, with real estate, was of greatest importance to the Roosevelts and their standing in the financial community. CVS had been a founding father of the Chemical Bank, the only bank in New York that had never failed to meet its obligations in gold, even during the Civil War.
The family's real-estate holdings were lumped under what was called the Broadway Improvement Association, of which James Alfred was also head and chief spokesman.
So it was James Alfred, ultimately, who had the final say on all questions pertaining to money, a subject about which all Roosevelts cared deeply, but which they preferred also to keep altogether private. When, in 1868, a publication called Gallaxy presented the names of New York's ten bona fide millionaires, with CVS listed among them, Weir Roosevelt responded angrily in a letter to The New York Times that no man's privacy was safe any longer. "I ask you whether it is the present opinion of the respectable newspapers that a rich man has no rights, or, in other words, whether the mere accumulation of property by a private citizen is of itself a sufficient offense against society to call for a public exposure and justify the interference of the press?"
One of Theodore's rare observations on the atmosphere at Roosevelt and Son is contained in a love letter to Mittie written hastily at his desk in 1853, shortly before they were married. So wonderful was the mere thought of her, he said, it could even brighten a day at 94 Maiden Lane, "where such a thing as sentiment would be laughed at as a humbug worthy of Mr. Barnum's collection." The bookkeeper, he cheerfully informed her, had warned him never to marry a southern girl.
As a businessman Theodore appears to have been miscast. He had no apparent aversion to trade, or any philosophical conflict with moneymaking as such. (For a time he even thought seriously of leaving the family firm in order to make more in some other line, though what that might be he had no idea.) Rather he appears to have found little or no satisfaction in the work. His letters rarely touch on it. The one picture we get of him having any fun on the job, evincing any of his usual enthusiasm, is an account of a winter day in Washington when he scaled the snow-covered roof of the new Treasury Building to measure for skylights. He felt like a mountaineer, sometimes sliding thirty or forty feet down the roof. All he needed was his alpenstock, he said. Otherwise, the impression is of years at a desk going through the motions, performing dutifully as the proper Victorian breadwinner, a prudent, attractive figure, quite in the Roosevelt mold, but uninspired, unaggressive, and, probably, not very good at what he did.
The power rested in the older brother's hands. Theodore was free to do Europe at will, while James Alfred stayed on and ran things, and Theodore seems to have gone off to Europe -- or to the country or to his eager philanthropy -- at every chance.
As time went on, his crusades among the needy, his hospital and museum projects, became his true vocation. It was thus that he became one of the prominent men of the city, as truly a good citizen as New York had ever known. "Whatever he had to do, he did all out," remembered Charles Loring Brace, the pioneer social worker. To some, he seemed strangely driven. John Hay, another friend, spoke of his "maniacal benevolence," and in letters to his wife Theodore himself infers occasionally that "with so much to do" he has no choice. "I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live."
Together with Brace and a friend named Howard Potter, he had helped establish the Children's Aid Society, to do something for the city's homeless children -- "street rats" as the police chose to call them -- whose numbers by 1869 probably exceeded twenty thousand. Largely through Theodore's initiative a permanent Newsboys' Lodging House had been established on West 18th Street, where nightly several hundred stray boys, most of them newsboys, were given a clean bed in a warm room for five cents, a fraction of what was charged by the lowest kind of commercial flophouse. It was Brace's contention -- the theme by which he appealed for funds and enlisted the efforts of men like Theodore -- that decent society had no greater threat than the existence of a "class of vagabond, ignorant, ungoverned children." The time would come, Brace warned, when these children would have the vote, "the same rights as ourselves" -- a very different justification for Christian mercy from that espoused by Theodore's old gentleman in Moscow, but one that carried Brace and his projects far.
The mission of the Children's Aid Society was to bring "moral disinfectants" to the festering "crime nests" of New York. A kind-hearted agent or "visitor" was first dispatched to the "infected quarter," someone who could naturally befriend the homeless waifs, this being work that Theodore, for one, did extremely well. Then an informal religious meeting, or mission class, was established; then a reading room, then an industrial school or workshop. Presently came the Lodging House. But the long-range objective was to return as many of the children as possible to their own families, if such existed, or, more often, to ship them off to farms in the Middle West or beyond, to get them out of the city entirely. By 1869 some 4,500 children had been thus dispatched to Ohio, Illinois, and points beyond. In time more than 100,000 would be sent.
When Brace first asked Theodore if he might spend every other Sunday evening at the Lodging House, talking with the boys, Theodore declined, saying his "troublesome conscience" would not permit it. He would be there every Sunday.
He "threw himself" into the work, Brace remembered: "He knew them by name, he knew their histories...they would gather round him, and he would question each one as to what he was doing, and give him advice and sympathy and direction. You felt the moment Mr. Roosevelt was in the room that he was a help to those poor fellows."
As generous with his money as his time, he gave regularly to this and other causes, and raised still more among his well-to-do friends, some of whom eventually learned to take out their checkbooks the moment he came into their offices. One man, on hearing that Theodore was going abroad, estimated it would save him at least a thousand dollars.
Importantly, Theodore's influence was felt just at that stage in the city's growth when it could have the greatest effect, a point he never lost sight of. He believed in New York, he said, not so much for what it was as for what it might become, the example it could set. No city offered more opportunity for those wishing to do something for the good of mankind; his joy, he said, was being connected with new work, worthy institutions in their infancy, the influence of which would be felt throughout the country. The year following the war he helped start the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, for the treatment of children deformed by spinal disease. With Joseph Choate, Pierpont Morgan, Howard Potter, and others he had founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. It was in the front parlor at 28 East 20th Street that the original charter for the Museum of Natural History was approved the evening of April 8, 1869.
No one seems ever to have spoken ill of him. A man who knew him in business for more than twenty years said he never heard him utter an angry word, never saw him out of sorts. When Albert S. Bickmore, the brilliant young naturalist, first came to the city with his idea for a natural history museum, it was to Theodore that he went, because he had been told that Theodore Roosevelt was "just the man" to make such a project a success. Thirty years later Bickmore could still quote Theodore's response: "Professor, New York wants a museum of natural history and it shall have one, and if you will stay here and cooperate with us, you shall be its first head."
Most memorable was what Brace called his "rich power of enjoyment of everything human." Pious as he was, as solemn sounding as his religious speculations might become, he adored parties and would dance all night. Like the new President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, he had a passion for fine horses and to see him astride one of his own in Central Park was, as one friend remarked, to see the model of Christian manhood.
He would make the most of any situation, of every moment, often replenishing his energies with occupations or chance conversations that others would have found irksome or boring. "I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out," he would say of someone he met on a train.
Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life. He loved flowers, yellow roses especially, and the Palisades along the Hudson River. Separated from home and the beloved "home faces," he could slip rapidly into abject homesickness and sound, on paper at least, most uncharacteristically plaintive. He felt bereft of real friends, he wrote to Mittie one such summer evening. "The city is deserted by all my acquaintances and I scarce meet anyone now in the Park that I know."
I wonder in so large a city, living here all my life, how it comes that I have so few intimate friends; it seems strange, especially when I know that you consider me so very sociable. But I have no more time to moralize. Those who I love love me and I would not give up their affection for the lukewarm article called by that name by thousands.
To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was as though he was in league with them. As Ellie once told him, he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves -- "just my ideal," Ellie said, "made to govern and doing it so lightly and affectionately." Sweetest of all was his undivided attention, the "sunshine of his affection."
Day began with the three youngest poised at the foot of the long stairway waiting for his descent and their morning prayers together, this ritual being held on the library sofa, two of them seated to one side of him, the third wedged into what they regarded as the prime position between him and the arm of the sofa. Evenings, in the library, they would wait for the sound of his key at the door, then rush to greet him and troop after him up the stairs to his room to watch him dress for dinner. (He always dressed for dinner and with what seemed to them the most amazing speed.)
He taught them to ride and to climb trees. Conie remembered "the careful way in which he would show us dead limbs and warn us about watching out for them, and then, having taught us and having warned us, he gave us full liberty to try our wings..." As they grew older he tried to include them in his own outside activities, taking along one or more, for example, on his Sunday-night visits to the Newsboys' Lodging House. Those evenings when he brought some friend of special interest to the house -- John Hay, Matthew Arnold, Albert Bickmore -- he saw that the children sat and listened to what was being said.
His own preachments were fundamental and heartfelt, and it would be hard to overemphasize the extent to which they charged the atmosphere. Cultivate a hopeful disposition, he told them. Accept the love of others and you will be loved.
"I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking." (To show their love for him, they could improve their handwriting or learn to swim or memorize a passage from the Bible.)
"I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language."
He hated idleness. Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did. Get action, he said. Seize the moment. "Man was never intended to become an oyster."
Deceit or cowardice was not to be tolerated. Courage he rewarded openly and sometimes with dramatic effect. At a rented country house in New Jersey one summer, he surprised the three youngest children with a new pony. When he asked who would jump on, Conie, then four, was the only one not to hang back, and so he declared the pony was hers, to the humiliation of her older brothers. "I think I did it," she would write long afterward, "to see the light in Father's eyes."
That a great, bearded figure of a man was also one so readily touched by the sufferings of others, so tender-hearted with children, so sensitive to the pulls of conscience, seemed strangely incongruous to some who knew him. But to those closest to him this androgynous quality was the essence of his personality. Howard Potter, the friend who probably knew him best, saw him as a "singular compound of feminine and masculine qualities, lovable as a woman, and as strong as a man."
To Teedie, the little namesake, he was at once the most magnificent creature on earth and quite frightening, but then Teedie was full of fears of all kinds, as he would acknowledge in time. Anna Bulloch Gracie, the elder Theodore's pious and adoring sister-in-law, called him Greatheart. It had come to her on a Sunday morning as she watched him go off to church with his children -- the warrior Puritan, Greatheart, from The Pilgrim's Progress, stout Greatheart, guide and protector of wayfaring innocents, fearless leader in life's purposeful journey. "Come now, and follow me, and no hurt shall happen to you from the lions...."
"There never was anyone so wonderful as my father," Bamie remembered. And the fact that he swept in and out of the house, in and out of their lives, the fact that he was not always around as their mother was, made him seem all the more special and "wonderful."
Of the four children it was Bamie who most closely resembled him; Bamie, who, to use her own words, never let herself be young, and who, as would be said, probably had the best mind in the family.
Bamie was the mainstay, then and for as long as she lived. For a girl born into New York society she was also severely handicapped. She was not in the least pretty, for one thing. Her dark-blue eyes were deep-set, the lids heavy, which made her look tired and years older than she was. In repose she could look painfully sad.
More seriously, she was also somewhat physically deformed. The standard family explanation for this has been that as an infant she had been dropped by a careless nurse. However, no mention of such an incident is to be found in family records dating from the time it supposedly occurred, or afterward. The one specific early reference to the problem is in a letter written by Grandmamma Bulloch, an observant member of the household in that earlier day. Writing of the infant Bamie, she said, "I am quite uneasy about her back. There is something wrong there. She cannot stand more than a second on her feet, then her countenance expresses pain, and she crumbles down."
The problem, in fact, was Pott's disease, the form of tuberculosis which softens and destroys the bones and which, when localized in the spine, causes hunchback. Known to have been a child crippler since the time of the Pharaohs, it was first identified in the eighteenth century by a British physician, Percivall Pott. Still, by the late nineteenth century, it remained a mystery and was thought to be incurable.
In Bamie's case the effect was severe curvature of the spine and intense suffering. At age three, at the time of Teedie's birth, she was fitted with her "terrible instrument," a heavy steel-and-leather apparatus that left her immobile and rubbed a hideous sore on her back. The doctor came regularly each morning to wash and dress the sore and to strap her in again, and through the rest of the day she had to be picked up and carried from room to room or out to her sofa on the piazza. She could lie face down only. In the evening it was her father who removed the apparatus and at bedtime Grandmamma Bulloch would rub her legs until she fell asleep.
Her father's devotion became the most important thing in her life. A summer when she had to be left behind at 20th Street while her mother, grandmother, the new baby, and Dora Watkins went off to the country was a summer of untold happiness because he was there with her so much of the time, because at the end of his business day he would come directly to her on the piazza, bringing her ice cream or fresh peaches or some small gift, because he would sit with her while she had her supper, then carry her to bed "with his very strong arms."
She was also released from the "terrible instrument" that same summer, the summer of 1859, when she was four. He had found another doctor for her, Charles Fayette Taylor, an orthopedic surgeon who in some professional quarters was thought to be a quack. Pott's disease was Taylor's specialty. He treated it with what he called the "movement cure," a form of physical therapy based on Swedish techniques that he had learned in Europe. Bamie was among his first patients and he not only transformed her daily regimen, giving her virtually a new life, but interjected into the family circle his conviction that physical well-being and mental outlook are directly correlated.
She was fitted with a radically different kind of back brace, a custom-made "spinal assistant" that was light in weight and designed so that she could be up and moving about, which, Taylor stressed, was the whole point. He wanted her moving about, both for her back and for what it would do to her spirits. Improvement was slow but unmistakable, and it was seeing this, seeing what Taylor had done for his own child, that led Theodore to establish the Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital with Taylor at its head.
A full cure was never to come, however. Through most of childhood she was required to lie down part of every day and, by Roosevelt standards, her physical activity was limited. The rest of her life she wore a piece of ram's wool on her back beneath her clothes in order to sit comfortably in a chair. She was not, by the time she attained her full growth, exactly a hunchback, but she did have an odd hunched stance. The small figure she presented to the world, or that she confronted in the hall mirror, was plainly "curious," thick through the shoulders.
"Poor little thing," her father wrote when she was seven. "I never think of Bamie without pain. It seems such a dreary life that is in store for her."
He wanted her with him whenever possible. At some point during the war, on one of his periodic trips to Washington -- the exact date is not known -- he took her along and she sat on Abraham Lincoln's lap. She would remember nothing of the event, only that she had been with her father.
In a family notable for its intense attachments, theirs was perhaps the most intense of all. She was emphatically "Papa's pet." He kept her photograph in a leather case and carried it with him wherever he traveled. His letters to "My own Darling Bamie" were overflowing with tenderness, with concern for her every move, with advice, warnings, and not a little baring of his own soul. "Try to cultivate a quiet sober style," he would write, "and bottle up your spirits a little until I have possession of you. Then you may let them out again as much as you please."
The one and only time he ever physically punished Teedie -- possibly the only time he ever physically punished any of his children -- was when, at age four, Teedie bit Bamie on the arm.
Bright, conscientious, she picked things up quickly (French, the piano) and her energy was very nearly the match of Theodore's. "Dear busy Bamie," Grandmamma Bulloch called her. But it was her odd, almost quaint maturity that set her off. She was "competent beyond her years," even when very small. She had no interest in games or toys. She wished only to be "useful," to look after her own needs, to look after the younger three, to whom she never seemed like anything but another grownup. Teedie, by way of introduction to his diary of the European tour, was to explain, "When I put 'We 3' I mean Ellie, Conie, and I. When I put 'big people' I mean Papa, Mama, and Bamie." That she was plain and deformed seems never to have figured in their picture of her. Not once in all that Mittie wrote about her children is there even a trace of pity or worry over Bamie. Bamie was strength. Bamie was good sense, the one to lean on, to turn to for help. She was, as Teedie would tell her fondly, "a kind of little feminine Atlas with a small world on her shoulders."
Of the youngest three, Ellie was the best-looking and the most convivial, and in many ways the most endearing. As a baby he had been "decidedly pretty." At two he could speak more clearly than his older brother and in no time became larger, better coordinated, the natural athlete of the two. Little brother was big brother. He was also distinguished by a sweet, even temper and what seemed an inordinate fund of kindness for someone so young. Once, at about the age of seven, he had gone off for a walk wearing a new overcoat and returned without it. He had given it away, he explained, to a ragged child who had none and looked cold.
Unlike Bamie, whose hair was dark brown, he, Teedie, and Conie were all fair-haired and Conie was known for her "ardent" blue eyes.
Teedie, in Bamie's expression, was the "great little home-boy" of the family. He was extremely frail and undersized for ten, a nervous, timid, often solitary child with bad color and what his mother described as a "quiet patrician air...his large blue eyes not looking at anything present." His joy was in stories of high adventure, in birds and animals, almost anything to do with nature. "My mouth opened wide with astonish[ment] when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you," he had written to his mother the spring before, in April 1868, when she was in Savannah. "I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mockingbird, get some of its feathers if you can." He kept pet mice in a bureau drawer, and, in partnership with a cousin, West Roosevelt, had founded his own "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History" in the back hall on the fourth floor, a collection already comprising some several hundred specimens.
Teedie was an asthmatic. His attacks had started at about the age of three and more even than Bamie's affliction they had had a profound effect on the life of the family -- summer plans, sudden cancellations of dinner engagements, changes in plans of all kinds being determined time and again by the status of his health. During the first few days at any summer house or hotel, his mother would keep her bags packed, knowing from experience that some unknown something might trigger an attack and off she would have to go with him, back to the city or to try still another, different locale.
Conie, too, had "the asthma," but very infrequently and never so seriously. Teedie, moreover, was beset by chronic stomach trouble, by headaches, by colds, fevers, and a recurring nightmare that a werewolf was coming at him from the bottom of his bed. Earlier in the year, in January 1869, he had fallen into such a low state that Mittie had taken him off to Philadelphia for a stay with her half sister, Susan, whose husband, Hilborne West, was a physician. Teedie, as Mittie said, kept everyone "on the stretch." Rarely could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair, so difficult was it for him to breathe. For a time, his father had thought possibly the trouble had something to do with the furnace at East 20th Street.
The attacks were a dreadful experience for everyone. They happened nearly always at night and there was little anybody could do. Theodore would gather the child up in his arms and walk the floor with him for hours. Some nights, in desperation, he would bundle him up against the cold, servants would be roused to fetch the carriage to the door, and father and child would drive off in the dark in the hope that the sudden change of air might bring relief -- which sometimes it did.
Like other parents of their social position, the Roosevelts did not wish to see their children "coarsened" by public schools. But mainly it was from worry over their health that all four were kept from school of any kind, public or private. They were tutored within the home walls and from within the home ranks by their own Aunt Anna, who, until her marriage to James K. Gracie in 1866, was, like Grandmamma Bulloch, a vital part of the household. At one point Teedie and Ellie were sent down the street to private classes only a stone's throw from the house, these conducted by Theodore's own boyhood tutor, but even so cautious a departure had proved unsatisfactory. The boys were withdrawn after only a month or two and not made to go again.
Since school played no part in their lives, they were cut off from their contemporaries. The only accessible -- the only permissible -- playmates were those within the family circle, namely cousins and the approved offspring of a few old family friends of comparable station and antecedents. Bamie seems to have had no childhood friends, while the youngest three had but one who had figured significantly thus far -- little Edith Carow, who was Conie's age and the daughter of Charles Carow, a lifelong friend of Theodore's.
But then neither did any of them suffer from a lack of affection or stimulation. If anything, there was a surplus of both. Aunt Anna, who had no children, was as devoted as though they were her own. Grandmamma in her lace cap was famous for her "melts," overwhelming outbursts of maternal, southern affection; and nurse Dora Watkins was considered so overly indulgent to the children as to be a possible hindrance to their health and/or moral character. Years after her death, the mere mention of Grandmamma's name was enough to make the youngest three burst into tears.
The charming, erudite Dr. Hilborne West, the Philadelphia uncle, spent part of each summer with them, read and acted Shakespeare with all four children under the trees, and allegedly no one had more to do with their "early stirring of intellectual desires." "The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father," wrote Conie years afterward, "the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning."
It was, plainly, a family of paradoxes: privileged and cushioned beyond most people's imagining, yet little like the stereotype of the vapid, insular rich; uneducated in any usual, formal fashion but also uninhibited by education -- ardent readers, insatiable askers of questions; chronically troubled, cursed it would often seem, by one illness or mysterious disorder after another, yet refusing to subject others to their troubles or to give in to despair.
Of the tawdriness and drudgery of the workaday world they knew almost nothing. They had never experienced drought of hunger or steerage or any of a dozen other ordeals common to so many Americans of the day. They were never without money or servants. They scarcely knew what it was to clean out a stall or put their hands in dishwater. When a cook got drunk one evening at the Union Square house and CVS went to see what the fuss was about, it marked the first time he had set foot in his own kitchen.
They knew themselves to be aristocrats, though it is unlikely they used that word: "people of good family" was preferred. They had little patience with bad manners, no use for social climbers, little knack for the kind of easy familiarity that businessmen and politicians traded on and that Europeans thought so very American. "Be careful always in chance acquaintances" was another of father Theodore's admonitions to the children.
"Family" and "stocks" or "antecedents" were favorite topics. Their own position relative to that of the common herd was an accepted fact of life. Theodore was no more averse to using an expression like "our class" than was anyone else of comparable background. But if conscious of their position, they were also conscious of their duty. They had standards, standards which they never questioned. They were Roosevelts, but, being Roosevelts, that in itself could never be thought of as enough. Duty and the family name demanded more.
And then, in addition, there was Mittie, in some regards the most fascinating of them all, "darling little Mittie," a Roosevelt by marriage only.
Copyright © 1981 by David McCullough
Reading Group Guide
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Reader's Group Guide
1. In 1851, Theodore was sent on a Grand Tour. With a jealous sentiment, Robert critiqued Theodore's pattern of experiences saying, "it [traveling] is not to see scenery, or places," but rather to see and have conversations with men of other cultures to see their points of view. Do you agree with this statement? How do most Americans travel and why? What is your goal when you travel? What would you want your family to take from an experience over seas?
2. In exploring the effect of asthma over Teedie's life and the Roosevelt family, McCullough writes, "For a child as acutely sensitive and intelligent as he, the impact of asthma could not have been anything but profound, affecting personality, outlook self-regard, the whole course of his young life, in marked fashion...But he knows also that his particular abnormality lends a kind of power." What power is McCullough speaking of? How does Teedie's illness positively affect his life, interests, and ultimate passions and goals? Explain.
3. Teedie was encouraged by his father to build up his body as a way of overcoming his illness. His father says, "Theodore you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should...you must make your body." Do you think this was the correct approach in dealing with Teedie's asthma? What approach would you use in dealing with an asthmatic child? Would you be overprotective, or would you encourage self-sufficiency? Explain.
4. During the Depression, business for the Roosevelts was stagnant and competition was high. As opposed to putting more effort into import trade, the Roosevelt brothers; Theodore and James Alfred became financers. When Alexander Graham Bell proposed his newly invented telephone, Theodore did not believe it had any real future outside of toys. Explain how Roosevelt could have arrived at this decision. In you r lifetime, can you think of new technologies that you wished you had invested in? Discuss.
5. In 1869, Charles W. Eliot was named president of Harvard University. He believed, "to be educated in science was to be educated in the future," and that "science was the firm foundation for man's faith in himself and in the present infinite creator." The Harvard administration's commitment to excellence in Science under Eliot aligned well with Teedie's interests. For a young man so well traveled, when did Teedie gain most from his Harvard education?
6. Theodore, Jr. courted Alice for quite a while before she reluctantly surrendered to his affection. Although, he had many girlfriends and admirers Alice was exceptionally beautiful to him. After marriage, their relationship was as loving and intense as his father and mother. Compare Theodore, Jr. and Alice's relationship with Theodore, Sr. and Mittie. Of Alice's characteristics which of those did Teedie fall most for? In Teedie's upbringing, what did he learn about what's most important in a wife?
7. On a tiger hunt south of Hyderabad in India, Teedie shoots and kills one of the largest tigers ever seen in that area. To his father Teedie writes, "it is the life, old man. Our kind. The glorious freedom, the greatest excitement... How everything here would have pleased your fondness for the unusual and the dangerous." What does Teedie imply by "our kind"? If you were a Roosevelt, how would you live? What would be the most important aspect of your lifestyle?
8. As a member of the State Assembly at the age of twenty-three, Theodore, Jr. proved to be an irreverent spirit in politics. After meeting Samuel Gompers and learning of the working conditions of cigar makers, Theodore supported the Cigar Makers Bill while simultaneously stepping on the toes of the notorious Jay Gould. What was Theodore's mistake in taking on Gould? How did he inadvertently fashion his political image? How was his polarized sense of right and wrong constructed by his upbringing? Was he wrong in his judgment of "the wealthy criminal class"?
9. Theodore often felt jaded about law as a profession, saying lawyers do not serve justice, they serve their clients; often equating a lawyers career with moneymaking and not with public service. If Theodore had similar sentiments about law, what did he say about politics, especially since he had a similar regard for the political profession? What was Theodore's ultimate goal in politics?
10. After the sudden deaths of Mittie and Alice, Theodore threw himself into his work as a way of compensating for his grief. In Alice's eulogy, he writes, "When my heart's dearest died, the light went out from my life for ever." Explain how he handled this sudden turn of events. How has his experience as an asthmatic prepared him for such fate?
11. Theodore's fascination with The Bad Lands and the romanticized West seemed the perfect antidote for his broken heart. What was it about the West that intrigued him and helped him to deal with life as a widow?
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 12, 1982)
- Length: 480 pages
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Raves and Reviews
Denver Post A fine account of Roosevelt's rise to manhood, well written and, like its subject, full of irrepressible vitality.
Detroit News 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.
John Leonard The New York Times We have no better social historian.
Awards and Honors
- National Book Award Winner
- Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography (1981)
- New York Public Library Literary Lion Award (1981)
Resources and Downloads
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Mornings on Horseback Trade Paperback 9780671447540
- Author Photo (jpg): David McCullough Photograph by William B. McCullough(0.1 MB)
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About Modern Language & Literatures
Language study is desirable for liberally-educated people because such study provides insights into other peoples and cultures. It also heightens awareness of language and generally strengthens knowledge of English.
A concentration in modern languages and literature provides its graduates with both a specific area of skills and competence and a sense of the relationship between a particular discipline and the large body of knowledge that is the patrimony of liberally educated persons.
Whittier College's program in modern languages and literature stresses both practical and humanistic goals. A series of graduated language courses permits acquisition of oral, aural, and written mastery of a foreign language. A comprehensive program of courses in literature and civilization ranges from general introductory surveys through period and genre offerings, to seminars treating individual major authors. This program provides, in depth and in breadth, the experience of another culture and of its modes of thought and expression. The study of Chinese, French, Japanese, or Spanish contributes to this crucial goal by nurturing the development of a sensitive use of the verbal medium.
As educators, we believe that learning languages is essential preparation for participation in the global economy. The United States cannot be a leader in the world while our citizens are captive of their inability to communicate beyond our borders. Knowledge of other languages is essential for business and trade and, more importantly, can be an important bridge to the understanding of other countries, cultures, and customs. All college students must be knowledgeable about the broader world and conversant in another language.
Committed to interdisciplinary studies, the Department of Modern Languages & Literature also offers several paired courses in the College's Liberal Education Program. When paired, these courses are taught in English and are generally numbered at the 100- or 200-level.
The department also serves as a resource for preparation for professional careers in government, commerce, law, journalism, science, social work, women's studies, bilingual education, and teaching, among others.

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Monday, January 16, 2023
Genesis 27:41
And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him.
We will move to Genesis 27 for our devotional, but first let me point out to you the "confirmation" of the Abrahamic Covenant to Isaac found in Genesis 26. Jesus Himself appears to Isaac, Genesis 26:1-4, and makes the same promise that He made with Isaac's father, Abraham.
This is an assurance to not only the Jews of the fulfillment of all the promises that the Lord made to the Jews through their "patriarchs", Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; but to all Christians who God makes promises that must be fulfilled, because they were made by "God".
Now, let's look to our devotional reading for today. I have selected only a portion of the entire chapter for our extended reading. However, let me suggest that you read the whole chapter for all the background.
You will see how Jacob and his mother connived to "steal" the "blessing" from Esau. What is so interesting about the manipulation by Jacob and Rebekah for both the taking of the "birthright" and the "blessing" did not have to take place since the Lord told Rebekah that Esau, the older son, would serve Jacob, the younger son, while the boys were still in her womb, Genesis 25:23.
As we go over the reading for today let me share some thoughts that may give you insight into the plan of God for the future. Verses 26 to 33 record Isaac giving Jacob the "blessing". Isaac repeated what God had told his father Abraham in Genesis 12:3, that "cursed be everyone that curseth thee and blessed be he that blesseth thee", verse 29.
Esau was very upset when he found out that Jacob had received the blessing and wanted his father to give him a "blessing" also. In fact, Esau cried an "exceeding bitter cry" and almost demanded from his father a blessing also, verse 34.
Isaac did, in fact, give Esau a blessing, verses 39-40. Part of that blessing was that he would serve his brother Jacob. This made Esau very mad, enough so, that he purposed in his heart to kill his brother Jacob after the death of their father, verse 41.
It was at this time that Rebekah decided it best for Jacob to go live with her brother in Haran, verse 43, until Esau's "fury turned away". This trip would result in Jacob marrying his two cousins, Rachel and Leah, and having with them the twelve sons that would become the "twelve tribes of Israel".
We see in this chapter of Genesis the beginnings of so much of Bible prophecy. The "line of promise" would be passed from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob and that was in the "blessing" that Isaac bestowed upon his son Jacob.
Also, the two brothers would become two "nations" in the world, in the last days. Jacob's descendants would become Israel of today, the Jewish State. Esau's family-line can be traced to the Palestinians of today. The stage is set for Bible prophecy to be fulfilled, and seemingly in the near future.
PRAYER THOUGHT: Lord, I am amazed at how the ancient Jewish Prophets were able to "pre-write" history. Thank you for this tangible proof of how prophecy was fulfilled, and will be fulfilled in the future.


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CHICAGO – Jeff Samardzija was at home pitching on the South Side.
Samardzija threw a complete game, two-hit shutout and Julio Borbon hit a two-run home run and the Chicago Cubs beat the Chicago White Sox 7-0 on Monday.
Samardzija (3-6) pitched the Cubs' first complete game shutout since Randy Wells shut out the Giants on Aug. 29, 2011. The last time the Cubs shut out an opponent as a team came against the Rockies on Aug. 26, 2012.
The first White Sox hit came from Conor Gillaspie in the third inning. Samardzija then got Jeff Keppinger to hit into a double play as he faced the minimum through four innings.
He struck out Alejandro De Aza to end the sixth. He then retired 12 straight before giving up a walk to Tyler Flowers in the ninth inning.
He bounced back by striking out De Aza, then after a single to Alexei Ramirez, he got Alex Rios to pop out to end the game.
The once anticipated interleague series in Chicago lost some of its luster with the fans as the Cubs entered the game in last place in the NL Central and the White Sox are struggling to play .500. The announced attendance was 30,631 at U.S. Cellular Field.
Samardzija who grew up in Northwest Indiana, enjoys pitching against the White Sox.
"I love this place," Samardzija said. "I loved coming here to watch games here as a kid. I loved watching these guys play for a long time. "I've always been a fan, so to come here and to have my whole family here, 30 minutes from home from my backyard, it's fun. I love being here. I love the atmosphere here. I love these games against the White Sox, they are always fun, unfortunately they cut them down to four. This is what baseball is all about, these rivalry games,"
"You got the smell of the steel mills in the background, it's not the most beautiful scent in the world, but it smells like home."
Anthony Rizzo doubled and hit a two-run triple in his first Crosstown Classic and Alfonso Soriano added three hits as the Cubs won two in a row after losing six straight.
Cubs manager Dale Sveum was impressed by how Samardzija featured his fastball.
"Sometimes he reverts back to probably thinking a little too much instead of just knowing what he is. He is a big-time power guy," Sveum said. "You guys saw his split-finger pitch tonight, it is pretty much a non-hittable pitch when he is committed it and throwing it like that. Not that he's not a pitcher, but sometimes he wants to be this pitcher that is pitching like a Greg Maddux. He is not that kind of a pitcher."
It was Samardzija's first career shutout.
"I am going out with the mindset to pitch deep in every game. If you want to be one of the guys the team turns to in a big situation, that's the number one thing, pitch deep into games and give your offense a chance to win the game. We saw what happened tonight."
White Sox starter Jose Quintana (3-2) allowed four runs and four hits. He struck out five and allowed three walks.
The White Sox lost for the second time in seven games.
With one out in the first inning, Quintana walked Starlin Castro then struck out Rizzo as Castro was attempting to steal second. Flowers was unable to throw to second because Ramirez forgot to cover second base. Soriano followed with a single off the left field wall to score Castro.
"Again, I don't know if it was the pitcher who made us flat, but there was enough of a lack of focus that needs to be there," White Sox manager Robin Ventura said.
In the fifth inning, Borbon hit a two-run shot to right on the first pitch. It was his first homer and the first RBIs of the season.
Rizzo led off the sixth with a double and scored on Scott Hairston's sacrifice fly to make it 4-0. In the seventh, Rizzo hit a two-run triple off the center field wall and scored on Soriano's single to extend the Cubs lead to 7-0.
White Sox reliever Nate Jones allowed three runs and four hits in the seventh inning.
"Right now he needs to fix it here," Ventura said. "We've seen it. It's there. I don't know if it's the lack of confidence or what. Stuff-wise, it's not a velocity issue at all. It's going to be more location and the confidence of being able to continue to do that."
NOTES: White Sox ace Chris Sale is on schedule to start Tuesday night against the Cubs after missing his previous start because of tendinitis in his left shoulder. The left-hander had no setbacks after a bullpen session on Sunday. ... RHP Edwin Jackson is the Cubs scheduled starter Tuesday. He is 1-7 with a 6.11 ERA on the season and is 1-4 with a 6.60 ERA in his career against the White Sox.


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Biomass power plant to open at Ga. paper mill
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has announced that Dublin-based Green Power Solutions will open a power plant in Laurens County, creating 35 permanent jobs with an initial capital investment of $95 million. This new biomass-fueled plant is the culmination of more than 18 months of collaboration between Beasley Forestry Products and Land Care Services, and it will support up to 200 additional jobs in the forest industry. Having already received approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission, the GPS plant is slated to be the largest renewable energy qualifying facility developed to date in Georgia.
"Georgia is increasingly becoming a go-to location for biomass-based energy ventures, so we are encouraged by Green Power Solutions' decision to choose Dublin and Laurens County for this innovative renewable energy plant," said Deal. "Companies such as Green Power Solutions do well in Georgia due in large part to our plentiful forestry resources and existing workforce trained for this industry."
The GPS power plant will be located at an existing paper mill in Laurens County that was recently purchased by SP Fiber Technologies LLC. The planned capital expenditures will allow GPS not only to provide the steam required for the paper mill's daily operations but also to generate 56 megawatts of electricity that will be provided to the electrical grid. GPS will provide base load power, which will be sold to Georgia Power Co. under a 20-year power purchase agreement.
"This is a great project that will help the local economy and advance the goal of energy independence by utilizing locally produced renewable resources," said Tim Kennedy of Green Power Solutions. "We look forward to working with the community as the facility takes shape and begins operations."
GPS will also construct a new wood yard in connection with the project and expects to utilize in excess of 1 million tons of round wood, bark and other woody biomass annually from the local area.
"We are excited about the new partnership with SP Fiber Technology and GPS. SP Fiber's commitment to sustainability growth in our community is without comparison," said Jimmy Allgood, past chairman of the Dublin-Laurens County Development Authority. "The team at GPS makes this project viable for long-term growth in Laurens County. The Dublin-Laurens County Development Authority completely endorses this new technology for our community, state and nation."
The Georgia Department of Economic Development collaborated with the Dublin-Laurens County Development Authority to manage this project. GDEcD Regional Project Manager Ryan Waldrep assisted Green Power Solutions on behalf of Georgia.
"Our state's profile in the renewable energy sector is raised significantly when companies such as Green Power Solutions choose to do business in Georgia," said GDEcD Commissioner Chris Cummiskey. "Our goal is to be recognized not only as the best place for business, but also as a strategic location for companies in the fast-growing biomass energy industry."
Construction at the Green Power Solutions plant is scheduled to begin in May 2013, with commercial power plant operations beginning in 2015.


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Lincoln High School Batting Cage Ecoroof
May 14, 2010 at 3:18 PM 1 Comment
With great weather in Portland today, we took a walk to Lincoln High School in downtown Portland to take a look at their new ecoroof project. Last December, Portland Public Schools was awarded the ecoroof incentive for their new batting cages. We caught the project team from Land Worx in the middle of installing 5,000 plugs on the nearly 3,000 ft² roof. (Not sure, but this might be the first ecoroof on a batting cage.)
We'll post more pictures when the project is complete. Congrats to the project team and to Lincoln High School for making this happen!
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Update! Episode 11 featuring Nicole Sullivan on CSS optimization is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.
If writing good CSS is tough, fixing someone else's (or multiple someones') bad CSS is a rarified art calling for the skill of a surgeon, the sensitivity of a Stradivarius, the patience of a saint, and the diplomacy of a Zheng He. Nicole Sullivan is one of the best and most successful of that small pool of CSS troubleshooters. Dan Benjamin and I are thrilled to have her as our guest on Episode 11 of The Big Web Show. Join us today, 8 July 2010, for the live taping at 1:00 PM ET.
Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with the W3C for their beta redesign, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud.
Nicole is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites. She speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at An Event Apart, The Ajax Experience, ParisWeb, and Web Directions North.
The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.


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BERLIN – Berlin can now count updated geographic
information among its planning and infrastructure tools, with the delivery of a
new geographic information system (GIS).
The Mayor and Council authorized the geographic
information project to map the town's tax information, and sewer and water
systems, last April, asking Dr. Mike Scott of Salisbury University's Eastern
Shore GIS Cooperative to undertake the project.
Scott presented the maps to the town council during the
Monday meeting. The co-op charged Berlin $8,000, he said, much less than the
$30,000 it would cost in the private sector.
"Geographic data is anything you can map," Scott said
during his presentation. Municipalities are good candidates for GIS mapping, he
said, because of the large amounts of descriptive data they have about
everything from water billing records to nuisance complaints. The GIS process
links the data with the maps.
"By the time we're done, we have the real world," Scott
For Berlin, Scott and his team at the GIS Cooperative used
a wide variety of material, including water and sewer maps, aerial photography
and Army Corps stormwater data to create an accurate digital picture of certain
aspects of the town, such as the ground, water and sewer infrastructure.
The team scanned 479 separate as built drawings,
generating a sewer system map including 635 manholes, 547 sewer segments and
1,430 lateral branches. The water system is now mapped down to 1,678 meters and
269 hydrants.
"We pulled it together in forms you can actually use,"
said Scott.
Town officials said the benefits of the maps would be
"It'll be used a number of times," said Berlin
Administrative Director Linda Bambary. "It's supposed to provide us quick
access to multiple layers of information, tax information, zoning information."
The information could be used in the planning process to
determine what kind of sewer and water infrastructure is already in place near
a proposed development, for example, she said.
The maps will be updated when more accurate information is
discovered, such as the actual size of a water pipe, which will benefit future
repairs and improvements.
Scott said the GIS system could be used to
create new maps using criteria the town desires, from crime to abandoned
properties. He showed a tax parcel map color coded by assessed value. Each
property can be clicked on for detailed information.


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Country: I live in Quezon City, which is part of Metro Manila, Philippines. Metro Manila is the political and economic capital of the Philippines. Many will also say that it is the literary capital of the Philippines.
Blog: Into the Wardrobe, an international blog on literature for the young and young at heart.
Your Favourite YA title: My favorite YA novel is Good Enough by Paula Yoo, because it perfectly captures the academic pressures of senior year in high school. Paula Yoo is my favorite YA author because not only does she write cool books for children and teens, she also writes for cool TV shows and plays cool violin music!
Book Blogging from The Philipines
Author blog you are most likely to be found stalking: I visit jama rattigan's alphabet soup almost every day. Jama is a picture book writer and her blog is about children's and YA books - and food!
Best thing about being from the Philippines:
What is the state of YA literature in the Philipines?
How accessible are international YA titles in the Philipines:
I just wish that more Australian YA was available in the Philippines. :o( I really want to read Australian YA!
Authors that you would recommend:
I also recommend G.T. Los Baños, who wrote Playing It Safe, a very enjoyable Filipino YA novel in English about sports, university life, and relationships.
Most popular YA author in your country:
Best thing about YA blogging:
YA blogs that you would recommend from the Philipines:
International YA Blogger Celebration posts:
Marjolein from The Netherlands
Rhiannon from Melbourne, Australia
Silvia from Ripollet, Spain
Thao from Vietnam
Jo from London, UK
Lauren and Alex from Canada
Alea from USA
Prodhi from Bangladesh
and more to come each day...


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Project Director Fabian Wagmister presents project
Wagmister speaks to event attendants.
Event attendant views project on phone.
Attendants view project on their mobile devices.
Project Welcome Page on phone.
Questions and Comments.
Wagmister demonstrates project at Broadway Bridge.
Group of attendants explore the mobile website on guided walk.
Wagmister and event attendants at historical hotspot.
Attendants listen to presentation.
Attendant explores the project's media on mobile device.
State, City and UCLA officials at unveiling event.
Project Director Fabian Wagmister speaks about project.
Craig Sap, California State Parks.
David Szymanski, National Park Service.
LASHP-Trail Project Team during the public unvailing event at the Wellspring interactive sculpture
Yam Tam, Franklin High School.


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Robert Ewald Anderson
Madison – Robert Ewald Anderson, age 94, passed away peacefully at Sunny Hill Healthcare Center on Dec. 29, 2012. Robert was born Aug. 21, 1918 in Superior, WI to parents Carl E. Anderson and Borghild (Braaten) Anderson. In 1936, Robert graduated from Central High School in Duluth, MN. Robert joined the US Navy in 1944 and was an electrician's mate third class. He served in WWII until his Honorable Discharge in 1946. Robert met his wife, Joyce, at a square dance. They were married Oct. 15, 1951 and were dairy farmers in Baldwin, WI until moving to Madison in 1965. Robert was a member of Bethel Lutheran Church for 45 years. He was employed as a machinist with the University of Wisconsin, Madison until his retirement
Robert was preceded in death by his wife Joyce Anderson, parents Carl and Borghild Anderson, and his brother Erland Anderson. Robert is survived by his daughter Carol (Jim) Brandenburg of Minneapolis; daughter Shirley (Dan) Dettmann of Madison, and grandchildren, Josh, Aaron and Melissa; son Donald (Beth) Anderson of Waunakee, and grandchildren, Cory, Carly, Cale and Casey; foster son Tri (Addie) Nguyen of Madison, and their children, Timothy and Arielle.
Private services will be held in Minnesota.


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The Silicon Valley companies that store our personal data have a growing responsibility to protect it from government snooping, according to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Discussing the growing role of Internet companies in the public sphere, Ellsberg said companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter need to take a stand and push back on excessive requests for personal data.
"You're on the spot," he told a roomful of Silicon Valley executives at a Churchill Club event in Santa Clara, California, Wednesday night. "You are facing a challenge at this moment of profound implications for our democracy."
Ellsberg was on a panel talking about Wikileaks and the relationship between the U.S. government -- eager to shut it down -- and corporations such as Amazon, eBay, Visa and Mastercard -- who all recently severed ties with Wikileaks in response to government pressure.
Ellsberg's take: If companies don't push back, the government will get too much power as more and more of our private lives -- logged in photo uploads, status updates or online check-ins -- is recorded online.
As the government fights to keep its own secrets, it wants to know as much as possible about our lives, said Ellsberg, who was himself targeted by government investigators after he began leaking classified military documents that described what the U.S. government knew as it escalated its war in Vietnam.
"Facebook, Google, Twitter: Put them all together. If they're all working together, their ability to manipulate us, to know [about us], this is absolutely antithetical to democracy," he said. "People in this audience have the ability to decide that they are ready to take a risk in their lives to fight to preserve democracy in this country and to preserve us from total transparency to our executive branch."
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published 13 electronic guidebooks, from companies such as Facebook and MySpace, used to explain to law enforcement how it should go about requesting sensitive information from those websites. The guidebooks "show that social-networking sites have struggled to develop consistent, straightforward policies to govern how and when they will provide private user information to law enforcement agencies," the EFF said.
The issue came up recently when Twitter fought a gag order that prohibited the company from telling users associated with Wikileaks that their Twitter messages had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Department of Justice. The gag orders are typically used to keep criminals from knowing that they are under investigation, but in the case of Wikileaks, Twitter's lawyers fought the order and won -- allowing the existence of the subpoenas to be made public.
Facebook won't say whether it has had similar requests, but in an e-mail message Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes shed some light on Facebook's approach. "We are required to regularly push back against over-broad requests for user records. ... [I]n most cases we are able to convince the party issuing legal process to withdraw the overbroad request, but if they do not we fight the matter in court (and have a history of success in those cases)."
Facebook has been hit with a "growing volume of third party data requests," he said. The company isn't saying exactly how many requests it's received, or how fast the number has been growing, but it's thinking of publishing some data on this in the future.
Google declined to comment for this story.
Earlier in the discussion, Ellsberg talked about the many similarities between his case and that of Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who is in jail on charges that he leaked classified documents to Wikileaks. Ellsberg said he felt a "very great affinity with Bradley Manning."
"If Manning were to be tried, he'd have to be tried for treason, and he is no more traitor than I was," Ellsberg said.
Robert McMillan covers computer security and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at @bobmcmillan. Robert's e-mail address is email@example.com


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A type of distributed denial-of-service attack, DNS amplification, has risen sharply, according to new research from Symantec.
The security vendor said it saw a 183 percent increase in DNS (Domain Name System) amplification attacks, which abuse recursive DNS resolvers, from January through August.
Recursive DNS resolvers look up a domain name and return an IP address, which can be called into a browser.
But these types of servers return a large amount of data. Attackers abuse them by making requests but substituting the IP address of their victims.
That directs a large amount of data to the victims, consuming up to 50 times more bandwidth, making it an "amplification" attack.
The problem is that there are 28 million open DNS resolvers, which should be locked down and secured, wrote Symantec's Candid Wueest, a threat researcher, in a report.
"Until this problem is addressed, DNS reflection attacks will continue to be used for large DDoS attacks," he wrote. "In the past, we have also noticed that some attackers set up their own deliberately vulnerable DNS servers and then misused them for reflection attacks."
DDoS attack continue to be a problem, as a variety of groups -- from hackers to extortionists -- use the method to punish or embarrass companies and organizations.
Most of the DDoS attack traffic for the first half of this year came from India at 26 percent, with the next highest source being the U.S. at 17 percent, Symantec wrote. The reason may be a high number of poorly configured servers that can be abused for amplification attacks.
The most common type of organizations targeted by DDoS flood attacks are those in the gaming industry, then software companies and media organizations.
DDoS have become shorter in duration but tend to focus a larger amount of traffic toward a victim. Larger but shorter attacks follow initial probes that are intended to figure out what defenses are in place.
"In other attacks, small bursts were enough to temporarily disrupt the victim's operations," Wueest wrote. "For example, in online games, a short offline window of a few minutes can be enough to settle the odds on who will win the game."
DDoS attackers were quick to exploit the "Shellshock" flaw, a vulnerability discovered in September in Bash, a command-line shell processor present in most Unix and Linux systems.
"Within 24 hours after news about the ShellShock Bash vulnerability was published, we saw the first use of an exploit against the issue, where attackers aimed to install DDoS malware scripts on Unix servers," Wueest wrote.
DDoS scripts such as PHP.Brobot and Backdoor.Piltabe were installed on vulnerable Unix servers, abusing their high bandwidth for attacks.
The going rate for DDoS hire services -- often referred to as "booter" or "stresser" services -- range from as little as US$5 to $1,000, charged according to the attack's duration and size.
"These services are commonly offered in the gaming community to temporarily get rid of competing teams," Wueest wrote.
Send news tips and comments to firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk