Hunting Big Game in the Eighties…
[Roosevelt, Eleanor]. Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt Sportsman. Edited by His Daughter Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. New York: Scribner’s, 1933.
8vo.; frontispiece of Elliott Roosevelt with tissue overlay, foxed; blue cloth stamped in gilt, lightly worn at top and bottom of spine; beige dust-jacket printed in blue, few closed tears.
First edition, trade issue. Inscribed by Eleanor to her brother: Hall dearest with my love. E.R. Hall Roosevelt, Eleanor’s younger brother by seven years, was born on June 2, 1891. Their parents were Anna and Elliott Roosevelt. Soon after Hall’s birth, Teddy Roosevelt, Elliott’s brother, told Anna that Elliott was “a maniac, morally no less than mentally,” (Cook, p. 65), and should be institutionalized for his alcoholism and his violent and dangerous behavior. Anna refused to divorce Elliott, believing his alcoholism was curable; she did, however, allow Teddy to ship Elliott to France for treatment. Somehow the story got out and the family was humiliated when, in August 18, the New York Herald ran a story on them, beginning: “Elliott Roosevelt Demeted By Excesses…Wrecked by Liquor and Folly, he is now Confined in an Asylum for the Insane near Paris...” In an attempt to win back the family’s honor, Elliott wrote to the paper denying the story (the letter was printed August 21): “I am in Paris taking the cure at an establissement hydrotherapeutique, which my nerves shaken by several severe accidents in the hunting field, made necessary...”
Teddy did not want any family trouble to stand in the way of his political career: the following year, 1892, he traveled to Paris to shame Elliott into being a more responsible husband and father. Elliott was allowed to return to the U.S. with the stipulation that he not make personal contact with wife or children until he had proven himself a responsible man. Elliott wrote Eleanor many affectionate letters, and continued to do so after Anna died in 1892, but he was extremely unreliable, seldom fulfilling his promises to visit her. Eleanor, like many children of alcoholics, loved her absent father very much, and imagined him into the heroic and dashing character that looms behind these published letters. She concludes the book:
There were no more letters after this to me or anyone else, for he died in the summer of 1894 and with him went for me all the realities of companionship which he had suggested for the future, but as I said in the beginning he lives in my dreams and does to this day and I hope that I have given you through my memories and his letters, a picture of the kind and loving and charming personality which I want you to remember.
In many ways Eleanor preferred this relatively unknown parent to her mother, but it was her uncle Teddy who probably had the most influence on Eleanor in her youth.
The eight-year-old Eleanor and the infant Hall were raised by their maternal grandmother, but when Hall began school at Groton, Eleanor took over most of Hall’s mothering. After she married FDR (the wedding took place on March 17, 1905; Uncle Teddy, who had become President in 1901, gave the bride away), Hall spent his school vacations with the young couple in their apartment in New York. Brother and sister continued to be close: Eleanor wrote to Hall “virtually every day, so that he would never forget that he belonged to somebody. She took him on trips, arranged parties for him, and in every way served as his maternal parent and confidante” (Cook, p. 127).
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