2. Roosevelt’s wealth enabled him to choose politics as his career
While Roosevelt was at Harvard his father died, and the young man inherited the equivalent of just over $3 million in today’s money. After graduating with honors he returned to New York, enrolling in Columbia Law School, where he worked on his book on the War of 1812. He also entered politics, attending meetings of the District Republican Association which met at Morton Hall. The meetings and the number of allies he developed among his peers caused him to choose politics as his career. He did not complete his law degree and later described his decision as “I intended to be one of the governing class”. Roosevelt’s New York was dominated by machine politics at the time.
Roosevelt was still in school when he married Alice Lee. Like his father, the young man chose a New York socialite for his bride. In 1884 Alice gave birth to their daughter, Alice Lee Roosevelt, before dying of complications of kidney disease two days later. Earlier that same day, in that same house in an upstairs room, Roosevelt’s mother had died after being stricken with typhoid fever. The devastating double blow drove the young man into depression, he left his daughter in New York in the care of his younger sister. He returned to Albany hoping to bury himself in his work. Though it offered him some distraction from his grief, he never mentioned his wife Alice in his diaries or conversation again, beyond the diary entry, “The light has gone out in my life” on the day she died.