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LIFE AND WORK OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL

 CHAPTER THREE

 LIFE IN COLLEGE

Enters Harvard University—Appearance at That Time— A Studious Collegian—Vacations in the Maine Woods —Boxing at Harvard—Graduation—Another Trip to Europe,
When he returned to America from Europe at the age of fifteen, Theodore Roosevelt began serious study under tutors to enter Harvard. In 1876, when near eighteen, he was enrolled as a freshman and entered the University. Of all the members of the class of '80, his classmates have said, he was almost the last they would have picked out as a man destined for greatness. He who was to become the most rugged and impressive figure in the public life of his time went to college a stripling of average height, slim of build, with narrow shoulders and a rather flat chest. The fight for ruggedness was not yet fully won when he appeared on the campus at Cambridge.
Just before entering Harvard he had been sent by his family into the woods of Maine, where he developed his taste for woodcraft under an old guide, Bill Sewall of Island Falls. Here he learned to know and to love the wilderness. He camped and tramped with the old woodsman and made a lifelong friend of him. In the village of Island Falls the pale young man from New York is still remembered, and it is said, "Everyone in the Falls likes him, for he was as plain as a spruce board and as square as a brick." He had shot his first deer in the Adirondaoks at the age of sixteen, and in Maine he roamed the primeval forest with Bill Sewall, who pronounced the boy "grit clear through." Most of his college vacations subsequently were spent with Bill in the Maine woods.

A Good Student
In college the young Roosevelt was studious. He was neither a "grind" nor a trifler. His name and his means, two things that counted for a good deal at Cambridge, gave him an opportunity to splurge. But the struggle for health in his boyhood 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, we are told, 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 rooms were ornamented by the skins of stuffed animals and by rare birds which he himself had 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 finished horseman that he afterward became.

Though he never cared to "loaf," when he entered a room where loafing was going on he always gave a hearty greeting to "the roomful of fellows," then usually took up a book, probably one on natural history, and became dead to the world. While he studied industriously, he took more exercise than his friends realized. He ate "ravenously of plain food," and a man who sat at the same table with him for four years never heard biro "kick about the grub."
The more select clubs and societies at Harvard sought him out and took him in, and his name was enrolled among the chosen few of his class in the Institute of 1870, the Porcellian Club, and the Alpha Delta Phi, more renowned as the A. D., while he became secretary of the famous old Hasty Pudding Club. At the same time he is remembered pleasantly by that other and far larger number of his classmates, who were not of these fraternities, although he had not yet gained the full measure of the active democratic spirit which his broader life out of college was to give him.

While many homes in Cambridge and in Boston were open to him, he evinced little taste for formal society, his interests being in quite another direction. "He welcomed the chance to meet his fellows in the friendly rivalry of vigorous sports," says one of his biographers, "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."

An incident of his student life at Harvard shows how Theodore Roosevelt had already gained that readiness to act in any situation which was one of his marked traits at all times. A horse in a stable adjoining his lodgings aroused the neighborhood in the dead of night by a noise that indicated it was in sore trouble. Half a dozen men got up and dressed and went to the rescue, only to find, when they reached the stable, that Roosevelt was already on the scene and doing the needed thing to reliev the poor beast. For he had not stopped to dress nor even to take time to walk downstairs. He had gone to the rescue out of a second-story back window, and climbed down a piazza post in his night clothes.

In 1877 he was one of twelve members of the sophomore class mentioned for the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate. A committee was appointed to inquire into the fitness of the men for the places, that the board might vote with intelligence. When the editors came together to hear the reports, the man who had looked into the qualifications of young Roosevelt said:

"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 clipping 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 board sustained this view, and instead of Roosevelt elected a man who has since won considerable fame as a writer of fiction. Later in his course, however, Mr. Roosevelt was elected to the board, but did little editorial work.

Boxing at Harvard
Barred from baseball and football by poor eyesight and from the crew by his light weight of 130 pounds, he turned his attention to boxing, a sport in which above all things a man must have a keen sight for judging distance. He sometimes strapped a large pair of glasses to his head before beginning a sparring match and probably is the only man who ever took the chances of hard boxing with a pair of glasses on his nose. His delicate appearance amazed those who saw him make his first appearance in the gymnasium, and he was a very doubtful-looking entry in the lightweight class. To offset his handicaps, he aimed to lead swiftly and heartily, and thus put his opponent on the defensive from the start.

In many ways Roosevelt's later life was foreshadowed at Harvard. A remarkable similarity, reflecting his generally recognized straightforward sportsmanlike qualities, is found for example in incidents that took place in the sparring ring at Harvard and at Milwaukee in the fall of 1912 when he was campaigning as the Progressive candidate and was shot by erratic John Schrank. Here is an instance in which he showed the real sportsmanship that was always one of his most marked characteristics:

Sisters, parents and admirers had gathered in the name of their pet undergraduates for the fall athletic meeting in the old round gymnasium by Quincy Street and Memorial Hall at Cambridge. Roosevelt was a junior then and entered for the middle-weight sparring. His antagonist was a senior. The senior sparred with more coolness, but neither seemed to have the advantage.

At the end of a round "Time!" was called and Roosevelt dropped his defense. The senior, however, before he knew the round was over, landed a hai J jolt on the junior's nose and the blood flowed freely. Immediately a hiss went up and cries of "Shame!" It was only a second before Roosevelt, whirling round, checked the demonstration with a gesture demanding silence.

" It's all right! It's all right!" he exclaimed. '' He didn 't hear the call!'' And he seized his opponent's hand in a hearty grip.

Taught Sunday-School at Harvard
But while Theodore Roosevelt was active in the gymnasium at Harvard, he was also active in good works. Having joined the old church of his fathers, the Dutch Reformed, in New York, and for awhile taught a Sunday-school class there, it was natural that he should seek out a Sunday-school and a chance to teach as soon as he was settled at Harvard, and that his choice should have fallen upon a mission school. There being no church of his own denomination in Cambridge, he took a class in the handiest school, which happened to be of the high-church Episcopalian variety. "Theodore Roosevelt asked no questions, but went to work." He got on famously with his class of boys and girls.

Then one Sunday a boy came to school with a black eye, and owned up that he had got it in a fight. The young teacher questioned him earnestly about it. The boy explained that "Jim," who sat beside his sister, had been in the habit of pinching her during the lessons. So they had had a stand-up fight about it, and he had gallantly given "Jim" a good punching but had acquired a black eye for himself in the process of punishing the offender. The verdict of Theodore Roosevelt, muscular Christian, was prompt.

"You did perfectly right," he said to the boy, and gave him a dollar. The class hailed this as ideal justice, but it scandalized the officers of the school, with whom Roosevelt was not popular. He had failed to observe some of the forms of the Episcopal service, being unfamiliar with them, and the upshot of the matter was that Roosevelt moved over to a Congregational Sunday-school near by and taught there during the remainder of his four years' course in college.

Impressions of Harvard
"I thoroughly enjoyed Harvard and I am sure it did me good," wrote Mr. Roosevelt in later years, "but ther was very little in my actual studies which helped me in after life. Before I left Harvard I was already writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published, on the naval war of 1812. These chapters were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison. Still, they represented purpose and serious interest on my part.

"I had at that time no idea of going into public life, V and I never studied elocution or practiced debating. This was a loss to me in one way. In another way it was not. Personally I have not the slightest sympathy with the debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to whether those maintaining it believe in it or not. I know that under our system this is necessary for lawyers, but I emphatically disbelieve in it as regards general discussion of political, social, and industrial matters.

"What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of the right; not young men who can make a good argument on either right or wrong as their interest bids them. The present method of carrying on debates encourages precisely the wrong attitude among those who take part in them. There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction. On the contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have nothing to do with their arguments. I am sorry I did not study elocution in college ; but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to think rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which he is assigned, without regard either to what his convictions are or to what they ought
to be.
"As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught the laissez-faire doctrines—one of them being free trade—then accepted as canonical. Most American boys of my age were taught both by their surroundings and by their studies certain principles which were very valuable from the standpoint of national interest, and certain others which were very much the reverse. The political economists were not especially to blame for this; it was the general attitude of the writers who wrote for us of that generation."

Graduation and Travel
He graduated from Harvard with the degree of A. B. in June, 1880, standing twenty-second in his class, which, by the way, was about the same as Grant's rank at West Point. He won few academic honors. No commencement part fell to him and the only mentions he received were in natural history and economics. He had shaped his studies to some extent with the idea of fitting himself to be a professor in some branch of natural science, but gradually the desire for a more active career than that afforded by a college professorship possessed him.

After graduation at the age of twenty-two, young Roosevelt went almost immediately to Europe. An indication of his improved physical condition is found in the fact that he climbed the Jungfrau and the Matterhorn, thereby winning immediately membership in the Alpine Club of London, an honor not given to weaklings of soul or body. He returned to New York with the strongest sort of a bent for life in the open—and decided to become a lawyer.

He entered the Columbia University Law School, at the same time hammering away at the practical side of law in the office of his uncle, Robert Barnhill Roosevelt—a Democrat and distinguished Manhattan lawyer, who was a member of the old Committee of Seventy that dug into Tammany crookedness; a Democratic member of Congress in the early '70s, United States Minister to the Netherlands later, a national committeeman, and first president of the Holland Society.

But young Theodore Roosevelt never followed out the law to the extent of becoming a full-fledged lawyer. The death of his father in 1878 had left him with a fortune, modest but ample enough to wander into whatever fields invited, and, although he had only just become of age, the most tempting field to him even then was politics.

Advice to a Young Lawyer
Before Theodore had been in Robert Roosevelt's law office long enough to take his examination for admission to the bar, he was elected to the State Legislature. Though he never practiced law, he had definite ideas on the way to win success at the bar, and expressed them a few years later for the benefit of a struggling young lawyer.

"If I were you," he said, "I would hang out my shingle and get a case. I don't care how you get it. Your own wits ought to find one, at least, which no other lawyer has. I would not take a justice-shop case, either. I would find a case that was right up in the regular courts, and which possessed some merit. I wouldn't take it up for nothing, either, or on a contingency. I would have a decent fee attached to it. In other words, I would have as many respectable features attached to the case as possible under the circumstances.

"Having got that case, I would try it as if it were the last case I ever expected to have or which would ever be in the courts. I would not make a nuisance of myself you know enough to avoid that—but you can be so persistent that you will win the respect of everyone who in !any way comes in connection with the trial. Put all of yourself into the case. Get every side of it, and above all things hammer it into your client by the force of your actions that your integrity is above reproach.

"When you get done with the case you will have a reputation that many lawyers devote years in other ways trying to obtain. You will find that a second case is certain to come to you whether you lose or win the first case. I would treat the second case just as I did the first one. Live and act as if there never were such a case in existence before, and master it, just as you are required to master your studies at the law school. If you find yourself weakening at all, use the spur and whip until you have created an enthusiasm in your work that imparts itself to client, court, and jury, and results in your victory.

"Go at the third case in the same way. And for the matter of that, as your patronage increases, give the same treatment to all your cases. You will create confidence in yourself that will insure you a constant practice, and your clients, once secured, will never leave you."

It may be worth while noting, says Mr. George "William Douglas, that this theory worked, for the young man put it into practice and won his first case on a technical point which all the other lawyers had overlooked.