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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER  3

AT   HARVARD

THE family at home had done its part faithfully in the preliminary education of Theodore, and the time had come for a new factor to enter into his mental and moral life, that of a tutor to prepare him for college. A brilliant young Harvard graduate, Mr. Arthur H. Cutler, who had tried the woolen business in New York and had tired of it, concluded he would undertake the task of preparing boys and young men for college. He always said that fortune came his way when he was asked just then to tutor the Roosevelt boys. Theodore's father had just moved uptown to No. 6 West 57th Street, and young Cutler came up to that home from 9 to 12 every school day for three years to fit the Roosevelt boys for college. There were three of them—Theodore and his brother, Elliott, and his cousin, J. West Roosevelt. After three years of this special work of tuition, Mr. Cutler concluded that he would make the Roosevelt boys and the few others he had been able to handle himself the basis of a boys' preparatory school. Theodore Roosevelt was claimed as the first graduate, and the late Elliott Roosevelt and J. West Roosevelt graduated in 1877.

It would have been thought that Theodore's father, having been so strict a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, would have sent his son to Rutgers or to Princeton, but young Cutler's recommendation of Harvard and his splendid educational equipment influenced the father to send the boy to Harvard in the autumn of 1876. Theodore's respect for his tutor the first year was great; it increased the next year and the next, and the two were lifelong friends. Colonel Roosevelt never ceased to recognize the tremendous influence of this young teacher on his education, character and destiny. Dr. Cutler's school, which he founded on the Roosevelt boys, became one of the finest institutions of its kind in America, and numbered among its graduates the sons of some of the most influential families in New York City and elsewhere, among them: William Havemeyer, J. Pierpont Morgan, Prof. T. C. Janeway, the late doctor; John Harsen Rhoades, Harry Payne Whitney, Hon. Frank L. Polk, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many others. For forty years Professor Cutler through his school honored his profession and blessed the young manhood of America as few have done.

One of the masters, Prof. Herbert S. Boyd, told me this incident, illustrating not only the intimacy of Dr. Cutler with Colonel Roosevelt, but also Mr. Roosevelt's wide knowledge of books. Professor Boyd said: '' Dr. Cutler was always a most welcome guest at Sagamore Hill and at the White House. In his visits to the White House the old times were talked over and also matters of public interest. But the President always called up the question of the new books that had been written and their merits were discussed. Almost the first questions which the President would put to his old tutor was, 'What have you been reading?' And Dr. Cutler would tell him the books which he had read, and it seemed that Mr. Roosevelt had already read them. Dr. Cutler decided to get ahead of Mm, so he went to a book store and asked for the latest publication (a book in two volumes). Dr. Cutler took the first volume with him on the train to Washington and had the other sent to his own home in the city. Try as he might it was of such heavy reading that between New York and "Washington he could complete only about 200 pages. When Roosevelt asked him what he had been reading, he told him and expected to have the advantage of Mr. Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt asked him how he liked the book and Dr. Cutler attempted to discuss what 'he had read, but the President said, 'You know nothing about the book. Wait till you get to page 455 of volume two; that is where the work shines.' "

Theodore Roosevelt, fully prepared by Professor Cutler, entered Harvard in 1876, a slim young man of eighteen, not weighing over one hundred and thirty pounds and wearing a pair of side whiskers. He had not entirely recovered from his old enemy the asthma, and wheezed and suffered with it considerably through his college course, but he continued his physical exercise, walking, horse-back riding, boxing and other gymnastic exercises and retained his strength and gained muscle and general health despite his strenuous course. He was not counted a great student, did not stand very high in his class and did not win many honors. He never worked for marks. He was so busy in the investigation of the realm of science that he did not set himself to grind on the studies that did not appeal to him. He had very respectable marks, however; he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which is supposed to include the best intellects of the class, and was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi College Society, which indicated good intellectual rank.

While he was a member of the sophomore class his name was presented as one of the twelve to be selected from his class for the editorial staff of the Harvard Advocate, the college organ; and a committee was appointed to examine into his qualifications for that position and the chairman of that committee reported to the editors: "I cannot see that he is the kind of man we want, although I find that he is a thoroughly good fellow and much liked by his classmates. I do not believe that he has much literary interest. He spends his spare time chipping off pieces of rock and examining strata, catching butterflies and bugs, and would, I think, be better suited for a scientific society than for us." The editors rejected him. He was, however, elected, some time after, to a position on the editorial staff of the Advocate, but did not do any conspicuous work.

He was a game sport but was not large enough to figure in football or rowing or most strenuous games. He was physically disqualified from being at the front or even being included in the coveted team. He did some very clever light-weight boxing. There is a story that in one of these pugilistic encounters, his adversary struck him a blow on the nose, starting the red current, after time had been called. The spectators cried,'' Shame,'' and hissed him. He raised his hand demanding silence and called out that the man did not intend to give him a foul hit, that he had not heard the time called. He shook the man's hand and taking his place again gave his antagonist a left stroke on the chin that knocked him out for the round. This illustrates in the young man the same sense of fair play which he practiced himself and asked in others. The muscles of his legs were not as hard as he desired them to be and so he set himself to jumping a rope like a girl. He did this with so much enthusiasm that hundreds of boys in all the classes got ropes and started jumping.

There was something about the young student that was spectacular, that made people look at him and see what he was about. They wanted to see him when he boxed and they watched him jump the rope. They looked at the red and blue athletic stockings which he wore, and because the boys did make fun and demand that he take them off, he the more persistently wore them. The whole college knew about the stuffed birds and game he had killed, which decorated his apartment. They followed him with their eye when on his favorite horse he dashed through the streets of Cambridge and along the country roads. He was in the search of health as well as in the enjoyment of sport in his boxing. He was in search of health and for scientific knowledge in his trips on horseback and on foot. Yet whatever he did, and wherever he went, he was the object of attention and of deep interest. This was one of his most marked characteristics which accompanied him throughout his life.

He was exceedingly fond of college politics and was successful at the game, and had there an excellent start in the great lifework which he followed. He was also interested in the politics of the nation. In a heated campaign, the members of his class who were Republicans went over in a body to Boston to join in a parade. They carried torchlights and were enthusiastic as all college boys are. As they passed a certain house, a man of opposite political opinion, sitting in the second-story window laughed and jeered at the boys, and he backed, up his opposition by throwing a raw potato at the men in the line. Theodore Roosevelt rushed out of the line, laid down his torch, shook his fist at the man in the window and dared him to come down on the pavement and settle the matter on the spot. It is said that the man did not come down, that the taunts ceased and that no more potatoes were wasted. This indignation at an insult, this challenge to settle wrong-doing in a summary manner, though tempered by tact and experience, as the years passed, was one of the things that characterized him always and was an element of his greatness.

Perhaps the strongest mark that Harvard left on him was the social one. The fashionable set of Harvard and Boston was a complete change from his almost hermit life at his old home on 20th Street. But his home training had prepared him well for the social life of Harvard in preparation for the great wide world which was to receive him and of which he was to form so important a part. This son of wealth and aristocracy was immediately given a place in the influential social circles at Harvard and in Boston. He rode and drove a fast horse; he had a fancy high trap; he knew the rules of good breeding; he had to dress up for dinner at home from the time he was a boy, and knew exactly what to do in this elegant, influential social circle. It did not spoil him, as it does many young men, but aided largely in making him, in giving him social contact with the best people, a broader vision of life and a new set of enjoyments. The social life he made his servant and not his master, for he kept up his hard reading, his scientific investigation and his literary work besides. Some of fhese sons of splendid families who were in Harvard at the same time he was, and with whom he had such intimate social intercourse, became his friends for life. He mentioned the names of some of them to me as having been not only as dear to him as though they had been his own kin but also among the strongest instruments in his political promotion.

It seems like a paradox that this smart, rich man's son, with his fashionable equipment, his sporting habits, his posing as a prize-fighter and a star dancer, should be found teaching a Sunday school class, and a mission class at that. But the old house on 20th Street' had gotten in its work on him so thoroughly that it was the perfectly natural thing for him to be regular in his attendance upon church, devoted in his religious habits and engaged particularly in saving the souls of poor children. He was all through his life a paradox. The paradox is only a seeming contradiction and not a real one, so that the gay, young, rich sport at Harvard and the teacher in the mission school were not opposite at all, but the natural life of the one person. "We doubt whether in all American life there ever appeared such a paradox as he. From the beginning to the end, his life was full of apparent contradictions, which were not so at all, but in harmony with the same character, spectacular as ever.

There is this incident connected with young Roosevelt's teaching of the mission class. He had quite a scene in the school. It seems that a boy named Joe came into the class one Sunday with a black eye. The teacher naturally asked him how he got it. He told him that a boy had pinched his sister in Sunday school and that he had given the boy a good licking, but had himself got the black eye in the encounter. The teacher said, "You did exactly right. Here's a dollar I want you to take, as a mark of my appreciation of your courage in defending your sister." The mission class belonged to a high Episcopal church and the Sunday school authorities were rather shocked by this militant teacher of theirs. They were afraid that the doctrine he preached was rather too strenuous ; besides, the young Harvard student got tangled in the ritual service at times and, altogether, both the officers and the young teacher thought it would be just as well for him to offer his services to another Sunday school. So he took up a class in a Congregational mission Sunday school and remained an intensely popular and efficient teacher till the day of his graduation.

Mr. Roosevelt was very fond of his Alma Mater. President Roosevelt made an address at a Commencement dinner at Cambridge, June 25th, 1902. He said, "It was my great good fortune five years ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to replace him by another Harvard man! I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy like ours. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.''

Mr. Roosevelt's devotion to Harvard is illustrated by this story. It seems that some United States Senator had called on the President on an important matter. He waited for some time for his turn and asked the doorkeeper if he would not tell Mr. Roosevelt that he was there and would like to have an audience with him, which had been made by appointment. The man came back with the report that he would see him presently. There was another wait of some minutes and the Senator rather impatiently sent the doorkeeper in to insist that immediate attention be given to him. The man came back with the answer that the President said he was so busy receiving a call from the Harvard Baseball Club that the small matter of senatorial business would have to wait a few minutes. And he told a friend afterward that people ought to have better sense than to call on him at a time when the Harvard boys were making a visit.

Much as he loved Harvard, he did not hesitate while in college, and after he left it, to say some very plain things about some things he thought could be improved upon.

Theodore's father had talked to him so much about the necessity of depending upon himself, to work for a living, that he supposed he wanted him to follow his own career as a business man and perhaps in connection with his father's firm on Maiden Lane. But the appeal of God through nature to him in his boyhood still sounded in his ears while in college and with compelling force. He felt deep down in the bottom of his heart that he preferred to be a naturalist and determined that he would be such if his father should give his consent. This was while he was a freshman at Harvard and in an intimate talk with his father he revealed his deep desire and asked his father's consent that he should give himself up to natural science and prepare himself for a professorship in some university. His father gave his consent and at the same time told him that he would leave him money enough so that he might devote his life without any concern about a living to the work of a naturalist. He said to him that the money he would leave him would not support him in extravagance, but would take comfortable care of him and told him that if he wanted the extras, "the butter and jam," as he called them, he would have to get them out of his salary or profession. He was greatly delighted when his father gave his consent to the devotion of his life to science.

About a year from that time his father died, but he continued his college course with the understanding that he would* be a naturalist and a professor of some department of science in a university. But as he drew near the day of his graduation, he became mixed in his mind as to the wisdom of the calling he had selected. The work done in botany and in zoology at Harvard and most other universities in this country was done most of it indoors under the microscope, and his free nature craved the out-of-door investigation, the field work of the science. He felt that he would be too circumscribed in a professor's chair. But he did not know what to do, as two or three other callings suggested* themselves to him. So he went up to the silence and solitude at the summit of the Alps to talk with' God about it. And the God who spoke to Moses on the Mount spoke to him. In the execution of his Divine commission he came down from the mountain and passed through the doorway of a law office out into the public life to which he felt he had been called, and where he believed he would best develop himself, serve his fellowmen and honor his God.