Theodore Roosevelt, the boy and the man

Front matter

By permission "I The Outluuk

From a drawing by George T. Tobin

The BOY and the MAN

Contents

I. A Son of the North and the South

II. Boyhood Battles .

III. College Days

Chapter I

October 27, 1858, Theodore Roosevelt born. — Descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families of New York and from a noted Southern family. — Deep shadow cast upon his childhood home by the Civil War. — His father's noble work for the boys in blue. — His mother's Confederate brothers, one building the Alabama and other Southern cruisers, and another firing the last shot in the great battle with the Kearsarge. — His father's devotion to the poor. — The son's tribute to him and to his gallant Confederate uncles. — The strenuous life chosen in preference to a life of ease.

Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Abraham Lincoln and other leaders whom the American people have delighted to honor and follow, was not born in a log cabin. On the contrary, he was born to wealth and position in the city of New York. Fortune spared him the anxious struggle for a living, which most of us must make from earliest boyhood.

He was reared in an elegant home and educated in one of the famous universities of the country. He read law, but he had no need to practise a profession. His father had retired from business, and there was no occasion for the son to take up a business career. b 1

He tasted the enjoyments of travel in the Old World. The pleasure-loving society of his native city was open to him; his Knickerbocker name was a passport to the drawing-rooms of fashion and to the exclusive clubs. A life of ease was his if he chose. Not a few of his friends made this choice and gave themselves up to luxurious idleness.

But Theodore Roosevelt preferred for himself a life of toil — the strenuous life. In this decision he accepted the part which nature seems to have been preparing for him through generations of his family history.

He is descended, on his father's side, from a sturdy race of Dutch burghers, and he himself has a head which Rembrandt might have painted on one of his immortal canvases. The first Roosevelt, or Claes Martenszen Van Rosenvelt, as he was named, came from Holland to New York, or New Amsterdam, as it was then called, in 1649 or 1650. The place was a bit of quaint old Holland transplanted to the New World, and its people, with their wooden shoes, big breeches, and long pipes, with their thrift, their cleanliness, and their windmills, were as loyal Dutch as those that stayed in the homeland behind the dikes.

For full one hundred years the Roosevelts in this country made no marriage outside their race. The family name, Van Rosenvelt at first, then Rosenvelt and Rosavelt, did not get its present form of Roosevelt until after 1750. Theodore Roosevelt's early forbears were christened Nicholas, and Johannes, and Jacobus, and not until the Revolution did his ancestors adopt English names.

They were plain people, those founders of the family in America, and they got their living by their hands. In the beginning they lived at the Battery, the very lower end of Manhattan, but they have steadily moved up the island, generation by generation. A large tract of land was bought by one of Theodore Roosevelt's ancestors for $500, and through it Roosevelt Street was laid out. His grandfather lived in Union Square, while his father's home was in 20th Street, and he himself has lived in 57th Street, within two blocks of Central Park.

The social condition of the family kept pace with this upward movement geographically. As far back as 1750 one of the Roosevelts is dignified in the official records of the city with the title of Esquire, and in 1765 another is set down as "gentleman." Like the honest burghers that they were, the Roosevelts discharged their civic duties as aldermen from time to time, and in some branches there were one or two state senators, a congressman or so, and a judge. But, as with most New York families, they were generally men of business.

For a century and a half they have been in the enjoyment of wealth. Theodore Roosevelt's grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, inherited a large fortune, and, as a glass importer and banker, he added a good deal to his inheritance. He was a most successful business man. Having himself left Columbia without graduating, he distrusted a college training for young men going into trade, and bred his son, Theodore, to follow in his footsteps.

This son was the father of the President. It was while he was a member of the prosperous house of Roosevelt & Co. in Maiden Lane, and on a journey to Georgia as the groomsman of a friend from Philadelphia, that he met Miss Martha Bulloch, the beautiful young woman who was to be the mother of the President. She was the sister of his friend's bride and in a year they, too, were married.

The Bullochs were as notable a family in the South as the Roosevelts in the North. Mrs. Roosevelt's father had been a major in the Mexican War and her great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first Governor of the state of Georgia in the time of the Revolution.

Only a few years after this union of the North and the South, the great war between the sections shook the land. Nowhere in the North did it cast a deeper shadow than on the home of the Roosevelts. While her husband was deeply moved by loyalty to the Federal government, all of Mrs. Roosevelt's kindred in the old home went with the Confederacy. \ Mrs. Roosevelt's elder brother, Captain James Dunwoody Bulloch, had been in the United States navy, but at the outbreak of the war was in the merchant marine, commanding a ship plying between New York and New Orleans. This ship, the Bienville, was in port at New Orleans at the time of the secession of Louisiana from the Union, and the governor commanded Captain Bulloch to turn her over to the state. The Captain refused, and his fealty to the South was brought into doubt. Nevertheless he believed that honor required him to deliver the vessel into the hands of her owners in New York. Until he had done that he did not feel free to join the Confederacy.

On offering his services to Jefferson Davis he was at once commissioned a captain in the Confederate navy and despatched to England to buy arms for the new government. He discharged this duty successfully and delivered his purchases, being the first to run the blockade.

His next assignment was one of the most important and delicate tasks that fell to a Confederate officer. He returned to England to buy and equip vessels of war for the South. The British government was forbidden by the laws of neutrality to permit such a thing to be done in her ports. The minister of the United States did his utmost to prevent the launching of the Confederate vessels which Captain Bulloch built, and commissioners were hastened from Washington, with $10,000,000 in United States bonds, in a last effort to stop his work.

But he was not checked until he had set afloat fully half a dozen ships under the stars and bars of the South, among them the Alabama, and when the war was over Great Britain was compelled, by the arbitration of Geneva, to pay the government of the United States $15,000,000 for the damages which Captain Bulloch's ships had inflicted on Northern shipping.

Mrs. Roosevelt's younger brother won a commission in the navy of the South and was the navigating officer of the Alabama in the destructive cruise of that ship. When the Alabama was sunk in a battle with the United States ship Kearsarge off" the coast of France, he commanded the last gun that was in action and fired the last shot from her sinking deck. The men of the Alabama were rescued by an English yacht, and Irvine Stephens Bulloch married the daughter of one of his English rescuers.

President Roosevelt has not hesitated to say that he is proud of the gallantry of his Confederate uncles in the war, and of one of them he has said, "My uncle always struck me as the nearest approach to Colonel Newcome of any man I ever met in actual life."

It was not the strife, but the suffering of the war that appealed to Theodore Roosevelt the elder. True, he helped to raise and equip regiments at the outset and was an organizer of the Union League Club for the purpose of rallying the supporters of the cause of the Union. But when the war was well under way, he gave himself almost entirely to aiding the sick and wounded, to caring for the families and the widows and orphans of the soldiers. He was among the foremost in starting and carrying on the Sanitary Commission, which did so much for the health and comfort of those who bore the battle.

It was he who went to President Lincoln with a bill, which he had drawn and which Congress adopted with the President's approval, authorizing each state to receive such sums of money as the soldiers were willing to set aside from their pay and to see that this money was given to their families. Many of those whose breadwinners had gone into the army were almost starving, while the soldiers at the front, sometimes without safe means of sending money home and often careless of their obligations to those they had left behind, were wasting their wages.

Mr. Roosevelt went from camp to camp on long, hard winter journeys, persuading the men in New

York regiments to assign to the state more or less of their monthly allowance. In this way several million dollars were rescued in the course of the war and delivered to the wives and mothers of the boys in blue, enabling them to keep roofs over their heads and homes to which they welcomed the veterans when they came back from the war.

On the return of peace, when hundreds of thousands of young men were suddenly mustered out of the army and thrown upon their own resources, Mr. Roosevelt formed in New York, whose streets were thronged with idle and moneyless men, a Soldiers' Employment Bureau. To see that they got their just dues from the government without being robbed by claim agents, he joined in establishing the Protective War Claims Association.

The call to these nobler duties, which the war had brought him, turned the elder Theodore Roosevelt from the business career which his father had planned for him. The philanthropic tendencies of his family, manifested in every generation for a hundred years, became the controlling force in his life. His grandfather had given his services as commissary to the Continental Army without pay.

His father had been a liberal contributor to charity, and one of his kinsmen had given the larger part of his fortune to found the great Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

Theodore Roosevelt, the elder, belonged from birth to the House of Have, but he determined to give his heart to the House of Want. He was not rich, as riches are counted in New York; but he had all that he and his family needed, and he would not go on piling up a hoard of unneeded wealth.

Nearly all his life he had made it his practice to set apart one day of every week, wholly for the service of the less fortunate, visiting and cheering them as a friend, while he meant to let no day pass without some act of kindness to its credit.

"I remember seeing him," his son fondly said of the father, "going down Broadway, staid and respectable business man as he was, with a poor little sick kitten in his pocket, a waif which he had picked up in the street."

He withdrew from business more and more, until, at last, he quit it entirely that he might give himself, as well as his money, to lighten, as he could, the burden of the poor in the great city. Thus he was free to devote himself to his children and to those other children of his sympathies, the children of the people. He was the active head of the Children's Aid Society, and for years never missed a Sunday evening at the 18th Street lodging house of that society. His generous activities were widely recognized, and he was made chairman of the State Board of Charities.

Heavy as his sense of duty was and keen as were his sympathies with those in misfortune, Mr. Roosevelt was yet a pleasure-loving man, and his distinguished son has boasted, "My father was the finest man I ever knew, and the happiest." He delighted in the woods; he was fond of sailing his yacht, took part in many athletic sports and drove a four-in-hand with skill in the park.

In politics he was loyal to the principles of his party, but he was as independent of the bosses as his son has shown himself to be. President Hayes honored him for this independence and nominated him to the highest federal office in the state, the collectorship of the port of New York. But the bosses knew that they could not control him and they had the power to cause the Senate to reject his name.

Mr. Roosevelt died in what should have been his prime, but yet not until he had seen his son and namesake, over whom he had watched with so much loving anxiety and upon whom he had looked with the proudest hope, a student at Harvard, and displaying among his fellows a promise of that strength and soundness, alike in body and in character, which he had done his best to give him. As the good man lay dying, the children of the tenements brought him flowers and sent him tear-stained letters, and when he died, the flags of the city were lowered to half-stafF in honor of this modest, great-hearted private citizen. "His life," the members of the Union League Club declared in their resolutions, "was a stirring summons to the men of wealth, of culture and of leisure, to a more active participation in public affairs."

This is the summons which Theodore Roosevelt, the younger, has obeyed. The spirit of service was bred in him. He stands the embodiment of his father's devotion to public duty on the one hand, and on the other, of the gallantry of those Confederate uncles, whose daring feats have been his admiration since childhood.

Chapter II Boyhood Battles

A youth beset with disadvantages. — The first rich man's son to find a way to leadership in American history. — The only city-born boy to reach the Presidency. — A long struggle against ill health. — Schooling interrupted. — Seeking strength in Europe and at home. — How he won the first and hardest of his battles and fitted himself to play a man's part in life.

The boyhood of Theodore Roosevelt was beset with disadvantages such as few have had to overcome. It is true that he did not need to toil in the wilderness, as Washington did in his youth, or, like Lincoln, walk many miles to get a book to read. But struggles and privations of that kind are believed to have been the making of many of our foremost men.

Among all the youths born to wealth, Roosevelt alone has gained an important place in the history of our democracy. Shielded and pampered in youth, the average rich boy has no heart for the rude shock of manhood's battles, and learns with despair that there is no royal road to fame. "Theodore Roosevelt, a bright, precocious boy, aged twelve," the family physician wrote in his "case book," and then remarked to his partner, "he ought to make his mark but for the difficulty that he has a rich father.'*

Not only have all our foremost men been without rich fathers, but Roosevelt is the first city-born boy to reach the Presidency. All of his twenty-four predecessors were country or village lads, and grew up where life was simple and the paths of duty plain. But a boy born in a big city opens his eyes upon a world that is like a tangled network.

In the primeval wilderness a boy's work is cut out for him. There are trees to be felled, houses to be built, stumps to be pulled, and soil to be turned. In the wilderness of a great city, where the hand must seek its task, the boy" too often is lost while trying to find the thing that needs to be done. Thus of all the hundreds of thousands of boys native to New York one may count on his fingers the few who have found the road to fame. The men who achieve most in the city have come from the country, as a rule, and were trained in the country.

Ill health, however, was the first and greatest of all of Roosevelt's disadvantages. "When a boy," he has said, "I was pig-chested and asthmatic."

BOYHOOD BATTLES

From earliest infancy he was called to battle with asthma. It lowered his vitality and threatened his growth. This was the longest and hardest of his fights. No encounter of his Rough Rider campaign, no wrestle with the Senate or the trusts or the bosses, has been equal to that conflict in his childhood with the grim enemy of health. But faith and will are his chief support in every contest he enters and they sustained him then. His body was frail, but within was the conquering spirit. He determined to be strong like other boys.

In this he had the loving help of gentle parents. On the wide back porch of their 20th Street home they fitted up a gymnasium, where he strove for bodily vigor with all his might. It is among the fond recollections of his family that although at the start his pole climbing was very poor, he kept trying until he got to the top. He would carry his gymnastic exercises to the perilous verge of the window ledge, more to the alarm of the neighbors than of his own family. "If the Lord hadn't taken care of Theodore," his mother would say, "he would have been killed long ago."

In the Roosevelt home the simple life reigned

is always. But the summer was the season of Theo dore's delight. Then he ceased to be a city boy. At his father's country place, "Tranquillity," some three miles from his present home at Oyster Bay, he learned to run and ride, row and swim. And when the long, sleepless nights came, the fatherwould take his invalid boy in his arms, wrap him> up warmly and drive with him in the free open air through fifteen or twenty miles of darkness.

He had his father's love of the woods and the fields, and he studied and classified the birds of the neighborhood until he knew their songs and plumage and nests. He and his young friends could be relied on to find the spot where the violets bloomed the earliest, and the trees on which the walnuts were most plentiful, as well as the pools where the minnows swarmed and the favorite refuge of the coon.

"I never wanted to go to school," he has admitted. Yet he never was a stranger to books, which he read quickly but thoroughly. He did not believe in skipping the big words merely because they were hard. That seemed to him too like shirking. His sisters still smile at the recollection of one characteristic instance, when he was a very little

BOYHOOD BATTLES chap in stiff white petticoats, with a curl on the top of his head. He was reading Dr. Livingstone's African travels, a ponderous volume of which he carried around the house in search of some one who would take the trouble to tell him what "foraging ants" were. At last he commanded attention and pointed out the term in the book which had aroused his curiosity. But it proved to be no new discovery in natural history. Dr. Livingstone had only referred to the "foregoing ants."

Weakness so often interrupted his studies that he took no pleasure in the competition of the schoolroom, although the records of the public school, which he attended for a time, give him 97 in geography, 96 in history, and 98 in rhetoric. Even 86 in spelling is pretty good for a spelling reformer. It is remembered by his teachers that he was strong in composition and declamation and that he had uncommon skill in map making. His schooling, however, was necessarily irregular, and he was prepared for college by private instruction.

He was taken to Europe in 1869 in the hope that it would benefit his health. "A tall, thin lad with bright eyes and legs like pipe stems," is the memoryc 17 picture drawn by one who was a playmate of his on the ship. Again, in 1873, he crossed the seas and went to Algiers, for his weakened lungs were giving his family some concern and the warm African air was sought as a balm for them. By President Grant's appointment, his father was the American commissioner to the Vienna exposition in that year and Theodore, with his brother Elliott and sister Corinne, now Mrs. Douglas Robinson, were brought from Algiers to Dresden, in Germany, where they were placed in the home of a tutor.

This tutor interested Theodore because he was an old revolutionist of '48 and had suffered in prison for German liberty. He was, moreover, a member of the German parliament or Reichstag in 1873. It is recalled in this family that their young American guest was an eager and enterprising student, but not a brilliant scholar. Nevertheless, one member of the household has lived to vow that she predicted then that he would be President of the United States. "He seemed to pick up things, one did not know how." He delighted in the German classics and he laid the foundation for speaking German well, although his asthma, while in Dresden,

BOYHOOD BATTLES made uninterrupted conversation by him very difficult.

He took drawing lessons and showed an unusual interest in natural history. When the Roosevelts were leaving Dresden for Switzerland, it was found that Theodore's trunk was so filled with the stones he had collected that he had discarded some of his clothing. His mother thought it better to leave the stones than the clothes, but as fast as she threw them out of the trunk, the young disciple of nature picked them up and put as many of them as he could in his pockets.

Dresden has always remained a happy memory to Mr. Roosevelt, and just before entering Harvard he wrote to his old friends in Germany: "I shall not go into business until I have passed through college, which will not be for four years. What business I shall enter then I do not know." He did not need to cross that bridge until he came to it.

He had won the battle of his boyhood. He had vanquished the enemy and was ready to play a man's part in life. "I made my health what it is," he has said. "I determined to be strong and well and did everything to make myself so. By the time I entered

Harvard I was able to take part in whatever sports I liked. I wrestled and sparred and I ran a great deal, and, although I never came in first, I got more out of the exercise than those who did, because I immensely enjoyed it and never injured myself."

Chapter III

Enters Harvard in 1876. — Welcomed by the select clubs, but popular with all his classmates. — Plucky boxing in the light-weight class at the gymnasium. — Pursues sport, not for success, but for his physical development. — A characteristic experience while teaching Sunday school. — Camp life with Bill Sewall in the Maine woods, where he learned to love the wilderness and brought himself nearer still to his constant goal, a vigorous body. — Graduates twenty-second in the class of 1880.

At Harvard, where he was a member of the class of '80, Theodore Roosevelt was neither a "grind" nor a trifler. His name and his means, two things that count for a good deal in Cambridge, gave him a chance to splurge. But his boyhood struggle had given him simple tastes, and he could not be a snob because he had been brought up to respect the feelings of others.

He selected two rooms in a lodging house near Harvard Yard and these he fitted up plainly. Instead of the unbecoming extravagance and frivolity, with which well-to-do students sometimes furnish their quarters, at an expense running into the thousands, his were ornamented by the skins of stuffed animals and by rare birds which he himself mounted. He did sport a high and fancy trap, which was the latest fashion then, for he loved a horse, although he was not yet the master of the saddle which he afterward became.

All the more select clubs and societies took him in and his name was enrolled among the chosen few of his class in the Institute of 1770, the Porcellian and the Alpha Delta Phi, more renowned as the A. D., while he was secretary of the famous old Hasty Pudding Club. At the same time he is remembered pleasantly by that other and far larger part of his classmates, who were not of this coterie, although he had not yet gained the full measure of his active democratic spirit which his broader life out of college was to give him.

While he did not by any means make himself a stranger to, the homes in Cambridge and in Boston, which were cordially open to him, his chief interests were apart from formal society. He welcomed the chance to meet his fellows in the friendly rivalry of vigorous sports, and to put to the test the strength and skill he had acquired on his back porch gymnasium at home. To develop the muscles of his legs, which were not yet the firm support that they were to be in his full maturity, he took to skipping the rope. Others caught the habit from him, and rope skipping passed into the fashion of the day. Wrestling was another of his hearty pastimes, and he pursued it as a science.

His boxing, however, is best remembered at Harvard of all his sporting activities. His delicate appearance amazed those who saw him make his first ventures with the gloves in the gymnasium. He weighed only one hundred and thirty and was a very doubtful-looking entry in the light-weight class. Besides, he had to go into combat with a pair of big spectacles lashed to his head, a bad handicap, which put his eyesight in peril every time he boxed. To offset this disadvantage, he aimed to lead swiftly and heavily and thus put his opponent on the defensive from the start.

Not a few old Harvard men recall a characteristic instance of Roosevelt's sportsmanlike bearing. He was in the midst of a hot encounter when time was called. He promptly dropped his hands to his side, whereupon his antagonist dealt him a heavy blow squarely on his nose. There was an instant cry of "Foul, foul," from the sympathetic onlookers and a scene of noisy excitement followed. Above the uproar, Roosevelt, his face covered with blood, was heard shouting at the top of his voice, as he ran toward the referee, "Stop! stop! he didn't hear! he didn't hear!" Then he shook the hand of the other youth warmly, and the emotion of the little crowd changed from scorn of his opponent to admiration of him.

He may never have come in first, as he has said, but he was always so ready, even to meet the class champion himself, and took the knocks in such good part that he never was second in the regard of all who delighted in pluck. Moreover, he did not go in to win so much as to get out of the game all the fun and exercise he could. Sport for sport's sake was his standard. He did not adopt base ball, foot-ball, or any form of team work or spectacular display. He was spared, therefore, the fate of too many athletes, who let their play become the serious business of their college days, and whose false point of view works them a lifelong injury by stunting their minds and warping their characters.

Nothing better shows the even balance which Roosevelt kept than that while he was active in the gymnasium, he was also active in the Sunday school. He had joined the old church of his fathers, the Dutch Reformed, in New York, before going to Harvard. There being no church of his denomination in Cambridge, however, he took a class in an Episcopal Sunday school.

He had learned the spirit of service from his father. He must not live unto himself alone; he must feel he was doing something for others. He got along famously with his boys. When one of them came into the class with a black eye, the teacher questioned him earnestly about it. The boy explained, with manifest truthfulness, that his sister had been pinched by a boy who sat beside her. He had told the offender to stop and he would not stop, whereupon the gallant brother had fought for her.

"You did perfectly right," said Roosevelt, the muscular Christian, and he gave him a dollar as a poultice for the black eye. The class hailed this as a fine example of justice, and drew nearer than before to their teacher, for there is no way to get a firmer grip on a boy's heart than by taking his part in battle. Some of the grave elders of the parish, however, hearing of the matter, were much displeased. In the end, Roosevelt left this field of labor and found a class in another Sunday school.