Eleanor and Franklin Read Online Free PDF

and boxing. I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc. . . . ” Elliott, although he wrote in 1880 that every day he was “more happy in the dear old brother’s good company,” must have been somewhat overwhelmed by a brother who, a friend noted, “always thought he could do things a little better than anyone else,” and, if he couldn’t, set out to overcome the infirmity with awesome resolution. The time was past when Elliott had to shield his older brother from bullies.
    The year Theodore graduated from Harvard, Elliott decided to undertake an expedition to India to hunt tiger and elephant, and to the Himalayas for the elusive ibex and markhor. He was pulled by the lure of adventure but was also pushed by the realization that Theodore, who had been his father’s favorite son, was returning to New York and would become the head of the family. Another consideration contributed to his decision to abandon New York: he had begun to drink heavily, so much so, one family report has it, that a girl whom he wished to marry refused him unless he changed his ways—which he apparently was unable to do.
    Elliott and Theodore spent two months hunting out West before Elliott left for the Orient. It was a happy trip, and they enjoyed “the return to the old delight of dog and gun,” Elliott wrote his mother, but it was also the occasion for an uneasy report by Theodore on what he called Elliott’s “epicurean” appetites. Only half in jest he reported after a week’s hunting in Iowa:
    As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julepbecause it was hot; a brandy mash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweet-bread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff.
    When Elliott set out on his big expedition to India, aware that his glorious adventure was also a flight, he assured Bamie that the duties of paterfamilias would be attended to,
    and by a far better man. Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old Boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory but fail to put into practice.
    Even as Elliott was journeying through India his brother won election as assemblyman from the “brownstone district” of New York and completed his first literary venture, The Naval War o f 1812 .
    â€œHas not our dear Thee done well at home this winter,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir, “and his plans for occupying the position he should as Father’s son and namesake seem [to be] going so splendidly smoothly—all success to him.” Elliott diagnosed correctly that he lacked “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.” And while he, too, was interested in politics and had helped his brother found the City Reform Club to interest “respectable, well-educated men—young men especially” in the political questions of the day, and he, too, loved being with the Newsboys, and he, too, had a literary flair, as was evident in his letters, he was incapable of sustained effort except in sports, and followed the easier and ever more tempting path of achieving success and approval through his charm and his accomplishments as sportsman and man-about-town.
    He would make frequent “new starts” in his short life, but the question of “paterfamilias” was settled for good.
    His trip to India was a series of glittering triumphs. On shipboard to England the James Roosevelts of Hyde Park, just married, asked him to make their rooms in London his headquarters. He had “long