The use of this text or audio material is subject to the TR American Patriot user agreement located at: TR American Patriot.com 

LIFE AND WORK OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEMORIAL

 CHAPTER TWENTY ONE 

ANECDOTES OF ROOSEVELT

Interesting Little Stories that Will Long Survive the Beloved Colonel, Illustrating His Fearlessness, Energy, Versatility, Patriotism and Other Outstanding Traits of His Many-Sided Character.
The life of Theodore Roosevelt was a succession of dynamic events, and he put action into everything with which he came into contact. As President he fought red tape continually, was always impatient with the slow functioning of Congress, and spoke his 'mind freely. There were besides so many novel events in his career that good stories about him are told in abundance. Many of these anecdotes are reproduced in this chapter, including a large number that illustrate his amazing energy and versatility.
On every occasion the elemental human feelings of Colonel Roosevelt were apparent. When America got into the war he applied, not for command of the first expeditionary force, but for command of a brigade in that force—the lowest rank open to a man of his age. President Wilson refused his request. A Western newspaper man saw him in New York the next day. But he hardly mentioned the incident, although it was naturally a bitter disappointment to Mm.
The thing that was engrossing his thoughts was the word that his two oldest sons, who had obtained commissions at the Plattsburg training camp, had thrown up their commissions to enlist in the expeditionary force under Pershing.

"I wouldn't have it otherwise for the world," he said. "And yet I can't bring myself to think of it. I have lived my life. My work is probably done. It wouldn't make the slightest difference if I were killed. But it's different with boys with their lives before them. Of course I know in reason that if all my boys go over early in the war, they won't all come back. We can't talk about it yet at home.''
A few weeks later he remarked to a friend that for the first time in his life he couldn't sleep. He had always been able to throw off any worries while he was President. "But now," he said, "I wake up in the middle of the night wondering if the boys are all right, and thinking how I could tell their mother if anything happened."

Then came Quentin's death in France. A friend saw the Colonel at the Harvard Club a few minutes after the news had come.

'' I know what you want to say,'' the Colonel said, '' I know what is in your heart. But we mustn't think about that. The only thing to think of now is how to win the war."
The Roosevelt impulse to "speak right out in meeting" was indelibly impressed on the minds of a number of Denver citizens a few years ago. The innocent cause of the frank outburst was Judge Ben Lindsey of juvenile court fame, who was a friend of Colonel Roosevelt for years. The incident was staged at one of the side entrances of the Denver Auditorium, where Colonel Roosevelt was scheduled to deliver an address. The time was in early September, 1910. The late Mayor Speed headed the committee which had charge of the day's ceremonies. Inasmuch as Judge Lindsey and the "powers" controlling Denver at that time were very much at outs, Judge Lindsey was not invited to serve on the committee.

Desiring to at least say "How-do" to his distinguished friend, the judge stationed himself at the side entrance which the Colonel would use to reach the speaker's stand. As Colonel Roosevelt stepped from the motor ear preparatory to entering the building he saw Judge Lindsey. "Hello, there, Ben; where have you been keeping yourself? Come on in!" was the Roosevelt greeting.

"I have not been invited," replied Judge Lindsey, shaking hands. At once fire showed in the Colonel's eyes and, turning to the committee, he said:

"Gentlemen, haven't you made arrangements for Judge Lindsey to sit on the stage with us?"

"One of the party spoke up: "No, Mr. Roosevelt, we did not make any arrangements for the judge to be with
us."

"Well," snapped the Colonel, "he is going to be one of the party just the same—come along, Ben!"

Grabbing the astounded judge by the arm, Colonel Roosevelt piloted him to the stage and placed him in a front seat close to the speaker's stand.

The committee gasped a few times, but had not aword to say.		

The general public saw Colonel Roosevelt chiefly as a first-class fighting man, stern, energetic, dealing and taking heavy plows. To his friends, incuding jounralists in all parts of the country, he was altogether a different personality—"buoyant, exuberant, witty, full of boyish enthusiasm to the very end, and human to the last degree.''

A visitor from the Kansas City Star, for which the Colonel wrote a daily editorial, saw him at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York a fortnight before his death. He had been laid up for several weeks with rheumatism and was sitting in his dressing gown beside the bed. He listened with the greatest interest to the gossip that the visitor brought from Washington and commented on it with keen insight.

The subject of international relations came up, and he discussed other nations and leading foreign statesmen with the quaint humor that was characteristic of him.

"In dealing with the Japanese," he said, "we ought to do absolutely the reverse of what Hearst is doing. He is constantly denouncing and attacking them. We ought to treat the Japanese with the utmost politeness and consideration. When they join with us in patrolling the Mediterranean or in a Bed Cross drive, we ought to give them the most generous recognition. And then we ought to send the fleet around once in a while so they can look at it."

Then he added this general principle of diplomacy. "In dealing with other nations we ought always to get on beautifully unless we are prepared to protest about something and go to the mat over it. We should never take the middle course in wrangling- over matters that we don't intend to see through. That simply produces irritation and gets nowhere."

Of course this was simply another way of putting his famous maxim: "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
A leading Republican Senator had asked the Kansas City man to deliver a message to the Colonel.' Tell him for me,'' the Senator had said,'' that I think he is getting in bad with the people by talking so favorably about England. His saying that we ought to have a treaty for universal arbitration with England, and that we don't need a navy as big as England's—that sort of thing doesn't sit well."

The message was duly delivered with the comment that the visitor didn't agree with it. "Nor do I," exclaimed the Colonel. "I alienated the entire German vote in 1916 because I thought it was necessary to speak out against Germany in the war. Does anybody suppose I am going to keep from saying what I think ought to be said about England now, in order not to alienate the anti-English vote? I don't do business that way."
The talk drifted to President Wilson's latest address to Congress and his insistence on ratifying the Colombian treaty.

"It seems to me," he said, "that I merely applied the famous principle of 'self-determination for small peoples' to the state of Panama."
The League of Nations was mentioned, and the Colonel remarked that of course he was as anxious as anybody possibly could be to make the peace settlement as lasting as possible. "But I have had enough experience in affairs to know the danger of attempting to bind the American nation in a permanent alliance with the continent, '' he added. '' A friend of mine has been up arguing with me about it. He insisted that the people of Europe had had a change of heart on account of the war. 'Yes, I said, 'about as much as the people of New York would have if they all got together in a mass meeting and adopted resolutions that there should be no more vice in New York City.' "
Colonel Roosevelt had a host of friends in Philadelphia. His last words there were spoken at the Broad Street Station on the morning of January 10,1917:

"I've had a bully time."

He used the same words in describing his whole life. They might serve for his epitaph.
In 1902 the Colonel spoke at the dedication of the new Central High School building, Philadelphia.

He gave the boys the famous advice which he said he had heard on the football field: '' Don't flinch, don't foul, and hit the line hard."

A Philadelphia friend wrote him only a few days before his death, reminding him of an occasion on which he had uttered the same doctrine at Harvard when he talked to a small audience of undergraduates on "Playing for Harvard." Those were the days when he was Police Commissioner in New York.

Colonel Roosevelt's answer was dated January 1, 1919. In it he paid a warm tribute to "Dave" Goodrich, a leading athlete, who was his right-hand man in Cuba.

He said at Harvard, with his teeth set, as he restlessly paced the platform:

"If I had a son who refused to play polo for fear of breaking his neck—I'd disinherit him."

When the time came, none of his sons was found wanting.
At the beginning of Mr. Roosevelt's first administration as President he insisted on frequent target practice for the navy. He requested and received one very large appropriation for ammunition, and Congress expressed amazement when he demanded almost immediately more money. Asked what had happened to the first fund, he said:

"Every cent has been spent for powder and shot, and every bit of powder and shot has been fired."

When he was asked what he intended doing with the additional sum, he said:

"I shall use every dollar of that, too, within the next thirty days in practice shooting. That's what ammunition is made for—to burn."

Soon after that, Mr. Roosevelt, as President, prescribed that officers of the army, navy, and marine corps should ride ninety miles in three days as an endurance test. He rode ninety-eight miles himself in a driving storm of rain, snow, and sleet in one day. He left the White House at 3:40 a. m., rode to Warrenton, Va., and got back to the White House at 8:30 p. m.
James Bliss Townsend, who was born in Oyster Bay and had been a friend of Roosevelt from boyhood, told at a dinner after his death that he went to Colonel Roosevelt in 1916 and asked him what he would have done in the Lusitania case.

Colonel Roosevelt, according. to Mr Townsend, said that hindsight, of course, was easier to show than foresight, but that if he had been President he would have sent for Ambassador von Bernstorff immediately after the advertisements warning passengers not to travel on the Lusitania were printed in the newspapers. He said he would have asked if the advertisements were official, and if he had been told they were he would have given the German Ambassador and all of his staff two hours to get out and would have forced them to take passage on the Lusitania on what turned out to be her last voyage. Colonel Roosevelt added:

"I am sure the Lusitania would not have been sunk had I been the President then."
A year as physician at the "White House enables Captain George A. Lung, Medical Corps, U. S. N., commanding the New York Naval Hospital, Brooklyn, to recount many anecdotes of Colonel Roosevelt. Dr. Lung was detailed to the White House in August, 1902, and remained with the President a year.

"President Roosevelt was always a good patient," said Captain Lung. "He obeyed orders, though sometimes impatient about being kept in bed. He used to say: 'If I live long enough I will get well.'

"On our trips he used to thrust his head out of the car windows to wave at folk at railroad stations. We cautioned him against the danger of being shot or bombed and he would reply, 'Better put me in a conning tower.'

"In New Hampshire we were going up a steep hill. The Colonel got out and said he would hike it. I followed suit. The others remained in the carriage. He started up the hill at breakneck speed. I had on light patent leather shoes. For three miles we plodded on at a high pace. I panted and gasped. My collar wilted. I perspired. It was a pace of four miles an hour.

"At the end the Colonel was all in. So was I. But the 'President exclaimed, 'Great, bully!' I said, 'This exercise ought to be made a test for promotion.' The Colonel thumped his hands together and shouted, "By George, I'll do it!' And I have an idea that is what inspired his order that army officers go through severe physical tests."
Captain Lung was with him when the Colonel's carriage was run into by a trolley outside Pittsfield, Mass., September 3, 1902, and a secret service man in the carriage was killed.

"The car was filled with people," said the Captain, "who were on their way to the country club, to give the President a farewell cheer as he left the town. The President was thrown out and landed on his knees. I helped him to rise and gently squeezed his chest to see if any ribs were broken. He resented the action and asked to be left alone.

"Then he walked over to the motorman who had run him down and told him that if the collision was an accident it was excusable, but that if it were due to carelessness it was damnable. That was the only time I ever heard him utter a profane word.''
When the American fleet went to Kiel the Kaiser visited the flagship Louisiana and saw the President's photograph hanging in a conspicuous place and, upon leaving, he grandly presented a photograph of himself and said that if he had any preference as to where it should be hung he would select the spot President Roosevelt’s picture adorned. The substitution, it is hardly necessary to state, was not made. Colonel Roosevelt used to tell that story with a great deal of relish and laughed heartily at the idea of the Kaiser wanting to take his place.
Half a dozen Senators and Representatives were in the waiting room at the President's office one morning. None of them could get in to see the President, however. Finally a Senator said to Captain Loeffler: " Go in and see what's holding us up."

Loeffler came back and reported: '' The President is giving a reception to the Harvard baseball team.''

"Well," said another Senator, "tell him there are a lot of Senators and Representatives here." Loeffler went back and returned.

"What did he say?" chorused the waiting statesmen.
"
He said he knew it," replied Loeffler, "but he told me that Senators and Representatives must be taught their places when a Harvard delegation is about.''
Here is a story that Colonel Roosevelt told in the White House after Old Bill Sewall, his Maine guide, had called on him. They were on a moose hunt and were camped out in the woods.

One morning while Roosevelt was trying to keep warm and Bill was chopping wood a moose walked into the clearing. The President grabbed his rifle and fired.

The moose ran a short distance and then fell. Bill laid down his ax and dashed over to the moose.

'' You 've got him!" he yelled after a short inspection. "How did it happen?"

"Why, I aimed for his breast," the President said.

"First class!" shouted Bill, "first class! You done well. You hit him in the eye.''
The very house where the Colonel was born used to figure in anecdotage. It was an old brick front, 28 East Twentieth street, New York. In 1903 a detective squad raiding gamblers' places went through it. All the gambling evidence they could find was a pile of ashes in a fireplace, and a quaint gathering of sportive and furtive gentry busily playing checkers. But on a mantelpiece they discovered a hand-painted card, with the truthful legend: "President Roosevelt Was Born in This House."
This story has been vouched for by members of the Colonel's family: On the east side of Madison Square, when he used to play there as a little shaver, stood a Presbyterian church, and the sexton one day noticed the little 'un timidly peeping in. But he wouldn't come in for a look around; nothing could induce him. "I know what you've got in there," he explained. And later he confided to his mother that what the sexton had in there which was terrible was "the zeal," probably something like a dragon or an alligator. This reduced itself to his memory of Psalm Ixix, 9: "For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up."
The Colonel liked to draw his illustrations from familiar and homely scenes. "Every now and then," he once said, "I have to remind myself that there are a lot of Jim Jimpsons in the world. I employ two men at Sagamore Hill. Jim always has been second man. On several occasions I tried to promote him to first place. But he could never hold the job. It was beyond his capacity. He was born at Oyster Bay and has never been to New York. Once he got as far as Mineola, but the magnificence of that metropolis overwhelmed him and he hurried back to Oyster Bay.
It was known of Colonel Roosevelt that he had a quick temper. He could use mighty harsh words in the heat of passion. But his strongest expressions when he was not excited were "By Godfrey!" and "By Jove!"
Colonel Roosevelt liked to pick out someone in his audience and talk straight to one person when making a speech in public. This often embarrassed the person selected. Formerly he always began with, "Ladies and gentlemen, and you"---------filling in the name of the particular body he was addressing. Of late years, however "My fellow citizens" was his favorite introduction.
Roosevelt's fondness for his Rough Riders was proverbial. Many stories are told of his custom of neglecting others for them. Thus Senator Bard of California took a constituent to see Roosevelt when he was President. The friend had served in the Rough Riders.

"Mr. President," began Bard, "I want to present my friend"	

"Why, hello, Jim!" the President broke in.    "How are you?"

And for ten minutes the President and Jim talked while Bard stood neglected. As the two were leaving Roosevelt said: "By the way, Jim, come up to dinner tonight and bring Bard with you.''
Jacob A. Riis wrote of Colonel Roosevelt once: "His love for children, especially for those who have not so good a time as some others, is as instinctive as his championship of all that needs a life. I doubt if he is aware of it himself. He does not recognize as real sympathy what he feels rather as a sense of duty.
"Yet I have seen him, when school children crowded around the rear platform of the train from which he was making campaign speeches to shake hands, catch the eye of a poor little crippled girl in a patched frock, who was making frantic but hopeless efforts to reach him in the outskirts of the crowd, and, pushing aside all the rest, make a way for her, to the great amusement of the curled darlings in the front row."
President Roosevelt's impatience of red tape was proverbial. The story is told of one committee that had been meeting him daily for a week in Washington, always to adjourn without perceptible progress. When the committee left on this occasion one of them said they would do something "tomorrow."

"Tomorrow!" the President exploded. "Gentlemen, if Noah had had to consult such a committee as this about building the ark, it wouldn't have been built yet."
There is one New York man to whom the Colonel owed a small financial debt—United States Marshal Thomas D. McCarthy.

"Yes, the Colonel was my debtor to the extent of one penny," said the Marshal. "Here's how it came about: On March 3, 1909, just as President Roosevelt was to retire in favor of President Taft, I was sent to Washington to present to him a handsome hunting knife, the gift of Justice, later Ambassador, James W. Gerard, with whose court I was associated at the time.

" 'Be sure to get a coin, a penny, from the President when you give him the knife,' the Justice told me. 'Remember the old superstition that a gift of that sort cuts friendship unless a small payment is made for it.'
"When I gave Colonel Roosevelt the knife I asked him for the penny. He didn 't have one in his pocket. Neither did his secretary, Mr. Loeb. Neither did Senator Chamberlain, who was present. So I volunteered: 'Here, Mr. President, I'll lend you a cent.' He took it and put it in his vest pocket.

"After ten minutes of conversation, during which time he gave me an autographed photograph for myself and a book for my father, who always admired him, the President suddenly reached into his pocket, withdrew the coin and said: 'Mr. McCarthy, it gives me great pleasure to hand you, in return for Judge Gerard's gift, this one-cent coin.' Ever since then I have prized the photograph and the book Mr. Roosevelt gave me as one of the most cherished possessions of my father. And I always have been proud of the fact that a President of the United States owed me a penny."
George William Douglas, in his book, "The Many-Sided Roosevelt," tells the following story of his life as a young man in the West:

"One evening after supper he was reading at a table in the public room of a frontier hotel, where he was passing the night. The room was office, dining room, barroom, and everything else. A man, half-drunk, came into the hotel with a swagger, marched up to the bar, and with a flourish of his arm, commanded everybody to drink. Everybody was willing to obey; that is, everybody but Mr. Roosevelt. He still sat at the table busy with his book.

" 'Who's that fellow?' the man asked, pointing in Roosevelt's direction.

" 'Oh, he's a tenderfoot, just arrived,' someone said.
" 'Humph,' he grunted. Then he turned square around and called out: 'Say, Mr. Four-eyes, I asked this house to drink. Did you hear me?'

"Mr. Roosevelt made no reply. The man swaggered over to him, pulling out his pistol and firing as he crossed the room.

" 'I want you to understand that when I ask a man to drink with me, that man's got to drink,' he threatened, fondling his still-smoking pistol.

" 'You must excuse me tonight. I do not care for anything to drink,' said Roosevelt.

" 'That don't go here. You just order your drink or there'll be more trouble.'

" 'Very well, sir,' Roosevelt replied, rising slowly to his feet and waiting till he was firmly poised on them before completing his remark. 'I do not care for anything, but if I must'	

"With the word 'must' he let his fist fly, striking the bully a terrific blow on the jaw and knocking him on the floor. In an instant Roosevelt was astride of him, with his knees holding down the man's arms. After taking away all the weapons he could find, he let the man up.

'' ' Now, I hope you understand, sir, that I do not care to drink with you,' said the young tenderfoot, who had hardened his muscle to some purpose before he went West.
Colonel Roosevelt himself was authority for the story about the time when, riding the ranges alone, reports of hostile Indians about notwithstanding, he noticed three mounted braves converging in his direction. As they were where friendly Indians had no business to be, he slid off his pony, set the sights of his Winchester for long range and showed himself aiming carefully, but did not pull the trigger. The trio talked it over and sheered off. Colonel Roosevelt said it was the nearest he ever had come to actual Indian fighting.
Probably no man of his time had more pictures taken of him than Colonel Roosevelt. They were stacked up in every newspaper office. Many stories are told of his experiences with photographers and here is one.

On his trip to South America, where he discovered the "River of Doubt," he was accompanied by several motion picture photographers. One was a free lance who was a trifle sensitive about his standing on board.

During the celebration of the Feast of Neptune, when the ship crossed the Equator, there was a pillow fight on a rail over a tank of water. The photographers lined up to get the picture of the struggle, with the Colonel in the background. One of the regular photographers slipped a cap over the free lance's camera.

One of the contestants had just been knocked off the pole into the water and Colonel Roosevelt, laughing and applauding, turned to the free lance, who was grinding away at his useless machine, and said:

'' Take off your cap, young man!''
The free lance frowned at the Colonel, thinking he was being joshed, and said:

"I am an Austro-Hungarian subject and have never become an American citizen. I don't see why I should.''

The Colonel, continuing to smile, said:

"I was merely going to say that if you will take the cap off the lens of your camera, we will have the bout fought over again so you can obtain a good picture."

The free lance sheepishly took off the cap from the camera, and then bared his head to Colonel Roosevelt.
"Better faithful than famous," used to be one of his characteristic sayings, wrote Jacob Riis in his life of the former President. "It has been his rule all his life. A classmate of Roosevelt told me recently of being present at a Harvard reunion where a professor told of asking a graduate what would be his work in life.

" ' 0,' said he,' really, you know, nothing seems to me much worth while.' Roosevelt got up and said to the professor:

" 'That fellow ought to have been knocked on the head. I would take my chances with a blackmailing policeman sooner than with him,' "
An old story about Mr. Roosevelt dates from his term as president of the old New York City Board of Police Commissioners, in 1896. Commissioner Roosevelt had been giving a little dinner to post office officials from Washington whom he had known there while United States Civil Service Commissioner.

"1 gave it," he told a newspaper man, "because of their hearty co-operation with me in civil service reform.''

"Was Fourth Assistant Robert Maxwell there?"— Maxwell being one official who notoriously hadn't "co-operated" to any alarming extent.

"No, no," came back with the Roosevelt snap, "and you mustn't be such a wag, either!"
The great courage of Mr. Roosevelt and his lack of fear were shown after he was shot in Milwaukee on October 14,1912. When he had recovered from his wound he was told that he was foolhardy to make a speech after he had been shot
"Why," said Roosevelt in reply, "you know I didn't think I had been mortally wounded. If I had been mortally wounded I would have bled from the lungs. When I got into the motor I coughed hard three times and put my hand up to my mouth; as I did not find any blood I thought I was not seriously hurt and went on with my speech."

It is remembered that when his physician on this occasion urged him to return to the hotel and not go to the Auditorium to speak, the Colonel replied, "I will deliver this speech or die, one or the other."

When he completed this memorable address his shoes were filled with blood that had rushed from his gaping chest wound. The Colonel displayed heroic courage of the highest type.
Along with his marvelous memory of people he had ever met anywhere, and of all the associations of the meetings, went a memory of each standing joke he had enjoyed with them. His reference to one of these jokes, in a telegram to a Western friend immediately after he was shot, in 1912, mystified so many people, who took it for anything from delirium to a private wire code, that he had to explain it.

"Probably a .38 on a .45 frame," he had telegraphed. The allusion was to revolvers and their calibres and had been a stock phrase of some old plainsman whom he and his friend had known.
E. J. Cunningham, the famous African hunter, who was in charge of Colonel Roosevelt's hunting expedition in East Africa, said he had never found "any other so easy to get along with, and no other man who, by his character, made every man in his service so anxious to do the best possible for him." He told the following story of "one very near squeak" the Colonel had. Said he:
"The Colonel was determined to get an elephant, and a tusker at that. I told him what that meant, and how much risk there was, but he said he was willing to face it. That was the Colonel all over. Tell him the risks and he would size them up quietly. If he decided they were worth while, that was all there was to it. He just went ahead and took them without saying another word.
"Well, we found an elephant in a forest on Genia Mountain. We had been hunting for three days, and it was really hard work for a man of the Colonel's bulk in that heat and at that altitude, 11,000 feet. At last I caught sight through a thick bush of elephant hide and a tusk, about thirty-five feet away, just enough to tell me it was a fine specimen. I pointed it out to the Colonel, and he fired with complete coolness and got the elephant in the ear and dropped him.

"As the shot went off the forest all around roared with trumpetings. We were in the midst of a herd of cows and young bulls, and one of the latter thrust his head through the bushes right over the Colonel's head. I was right behind him and fired at once and bowled it over. Then I rushed up to the Colonel and said: 'Are you all right, sir!' But I could see he was before I spoke. He hadn't turned a hair. At any moment the cows might have blundered through the bush over us, but he never thought of that. He went up to the old chap he had killed and gave it the coup-de-grace and then let himself loose. I never saw a man so boyishly jubilant."
For a long time after Roosevelt's return from Africa he was often referred to throughout the world as "Bwana Tumbo." That was the name given to him by the natives of Africa, and meant "Big Chief."
While Colonel Roosevelt was President he talked with the greatest freedom to the newspaper correspondents, always relying on their discretion to put what he said in diplomatic language. It was in these conversations that some of his famous epithets were first used.

"Senator So-and-So," he remarked, "seems to have sweetbreads for brains."

Of a somewhat effeminate public man he said: "Mollycoddle is too harsh a term to apply to Freddie."

"Yes, So-and-So is a loyal friend," he remarked on
another occasion,'' there is always in the back of his head
the feeling that if we were cast away on a desert island I
would kill and eat him." 	

In the last few weeks before his death, the question of the presidential nominee for 1920 was much in the minds of Republican congressional leaders in Washington. The feeling was general that Colonel Roosevelt had been the man who had been right on preparedness and on the Great War long in advance of anybody else; that he had blazed the way and made the issues, and that he had earned the party leadership. The Colonel himself was absolutely indifferent. He told his friends he would not turn his hand over for the nomination.

"So far as I am concerned," he said, "my position is exactly what it was in 1916. I am not at all concerned whether the party nominates me or not. What I am concerned in is that it nominates a man and adopts principles that I can support."
Mr. Roosevelt's passion for study and his purpose always to improve the time was displayed by his plan made soon after becoming Vice-President and following his realization that he would have much leisure, as the duties of the office were not onerous. He asked Justice White of the Supreme Court whether it would be dignified and becoming were he to attend a course of law at one of the Washington universities, to prepare himself for the bar. The Justice thought it would not be and suggested that he should give the Vice-President some law books for study and once a week "quiz" him. This plan was approved by Mr. Roosevelt, but the assassination of President McKinley interrupted its execution.
Just before the expiration of his last term Mr. Roosevelt was discussing the advisability of a pension for ex-Presidents. He himself didn't need one, he said, because he would be able to earn his living by writing. But Mr. Cleveland had been in extremely straitened circumstances until Mr. Ryan made him a trustee of the Equitable Life at $25,000 a year.

"A President who entertains much," he said, "can't save much money on $50,000 a year. The last time I entertained a distinguished foreign visitor with a state dinner I said to Mrs. Roosevelt: 'There goes another child's schooling for a year.'
Mr. Roosevelt's sense of humor is illustrated in remarks he ma"£.e in 1896 when speaking of the Southern Populists. He said:

"Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. Senator Tillman's brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he never wore either an overcoat or an undershirt."
A few days before the inauguration of Mr. Taft a party of insurgent Congressmen called at the White House to get help from the President in dealing with Speaker Cannon. Already the disposition of the former Secretary of War to ignore the man who made him President was noticeable.

"I'd like to help you with the new President," said Mr. Roosevelt, "but you remember the skipper of the Gloucester fisherman who said to Ms mate, 'All I want out of you, Mr. Jones, is civility—and damn little of that.' "
On leaving the White House President Roosevelt declined an offer of the presidency of a large corporation at a salary of $100,000 a year. He did this because he had determined to make no commercial use of his name. He accepted the office of associate editor of The Outlook at a salary of $12,000, because he believed it offered him the means to reach the people.
The people of Philadelphia still remember the Colonel as—waving his black Stetson—he swept into the fray there in October, 1914, in behalf of Pinchot and Vance McCormick versus Penrose.

He styled Penrose "one of a gang of political gun jrammed up against the wheel of his taxicab outside the First Regiment Armory while he made an out-of-door speech, his audience could fairly see his eyes flash and hear his teeth click. What a splendid physical energy it was that burned itself out prematurely!
Bishop Biermans, Vicar Apostolic of the Upper Nile, said in June of 1915, just after visiting Colonel Roosevelt at Oyster Bay:

'' He told me he would never again be the same man— that his trip to South Africa was too much for him.''
On June 10, 1917, the Colonel went to speak for a memorial meeting of the railway brotherhoods at the Metropolitan Opera House, Philadelphia.

He was as chock-a-block with vital electricity as Billy Sunday at the top of his form, said one of his hearers.

When he went to the Bellevue-Stratford for lunch, the elevator boy in his agitation passed the floor of the Blue Room.

" Don't be hard on him!'' exclaimed the Colonel. '' He probably thinks there is something of value in the Blue Boom that I might carry off with me, but he might know I am surrounded by detectives."
A few years ago the Colonel was visiting at the home of W. E. Nelson in Kansas City. Looking about the library, he said to a member of the family: "Where does your father keep his Greek dramatists ? You can always tell a man of real literary instincts by his Greek dramatists. '' Happily the Greek dramatists were in a fitting place on the book shelves.
The paper cover that publishers put on books is always a hotly disputed matter with readers. Those who detest it detest it. A visitor from the West who saw the Colonel not long before his death carried him a book on international affairs. The Colonel expressed his pleasure while removing the wrapper, crumpling it into a wad and throwing it on the floor.
At a state dinner when he was President a woman guest noticed with apparent disapproval that he refused a cigar.
"Why, Mr. President," she remonstrated. "Don't you smoke?"
"No, madam," he replied, "but I like to go to prize fights. Won't that do?"
"I had the honor," Colonel Roosevelt once said, "to be written up by Creel in "The Masses." I must say he took rather a jaundiced view of me."
John Mitchell, the great leader of the mine workers, was always a welcome visitor at the White House when Roosevelt was President. Organized labor was recognized by Roosevelt as a necessity. He believed in the enforcement of all labor laws and in the right of the workers to organize. In relation to the protective tariff he said: "I am for a protective tariff that gets past the mill offices down into the pockets of the workingmen."
A friend who visited the Colonel at the hospital heard of the numerous political visitors who were calling on him, including standpatters as well as progressives.

"My, my, Colonel," said the visitor, "what company you have been keeping.''
"Well," replied the Colonel with a grin, "like the late Colonel Breckinridge of Kentucky, 'I am not a narrow man.' "
As between two of his political antagonists who had fallen out Colonel Roosevelt remarked: "My position is one of malevolent neutrality."
Colonel Roosevelt always disclaimed being a genius. He said with regard to the successful man: "The average man who is successful—the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success—is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities, who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree."
Many persons thought of Colonel Roosevelt as constantly figuring on politics, and how policies would affect him politically. The exact opposite was true. Men most intimately associated with him never heard him discuss his own political fortunes. The only thing he asked about a policy was: "Is it right?"
One day a strong Roosevelt Progressive met Senator Penrose, king of the old standpat crowd.

"What about the candidate, Senator?" he asked.

"Well, how about the Colonel?" answered Penrose.

"Oh, I'm for him, all right. But I didn't suppose you would be."

"I'm for him. He's about the squarest man I ever ran up against."
"Do you know the thing that makes me madder than almost anything else?" the Colonel once said to W. E. Nelson. "That is to see a husky man going along with his wife, letting her carry the baby. I know that sort of a fellow is no good."
A characteristic story is that of a friend who took him to task for some mistake he had made in one of his appointments. The former President in reply to the criticism said: "My dear sir, where you know of one mistake I have made, I know of ten."
In his capacity as contributor to the Kansas City Star the men on that paper say the Colonel was the most considerate of men to work with. He had nothing of the small man's pride in what he wrote.

"If you think any of my stuff is rotten," he said, "don't hesitate to throw it away. I always like criticism. Secretary Root was invaluable in my cabinet, because he was always ready to oppose my ideas. We used to go round and round, and when he didn't convince me I was wrong he frequently convinced me that I would have to modify my position. John Hay disagreed with me. But he was too kind-hearted to say so. So he didn't help me so much."

In his writings he was rarely humorous or ironical. In conversation he was habitually so.
Former Congressman Charles G. Washburn of Worcester, Mass., after remarking that Roosevelt had a lively sense of humor in his college days at Harvard, says in his book: "I remember well with what glee he told us that he had gone to Boston to get a basket of live lobsters for laboratory purposes and on the way back they escaped, much to the consternation of the women in the horse car."		
Colonel Roosevelt liked new martial or sporting implements things he could play with as keenly as any boy. In 1906 the Mikado sent the President as a token of esteem a complete suit of samurai armor from the thirteenth century. The President excused himself to an informal caller for a moment. Off went his frock coat and on went the armor. Presto! and he made a costume parade of one up and down the corridors of the White House.		

While the Colonel and his son Kermit were shooting in Africa, London Punch, with a genial inspiration, published a cartoon of the Roosevelts in the Egyptian desert carefully stalking the Sphinx. The Colonel was saying, '' Steady, Kermit; we must have one of these!'' When he saw it he was so pleased with it that he wrote to London and asked to have the original, which was sent to him.
Speaking of the Rough Riders, Colonel Roosevelt said: "It was necessary to get that regiment into action, otherwise it would have been laughed at. We came near being left behind, and I admit that I pulled every wire in sight to get that regiment to Cuba, and we got there. If we had not I should never have been President."
A cowboy who had been with him with the Rough Riders , sure of his sympathy, wrote him from a jail in Arizona:

"Dear Colonel:—I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not intend to hit the lady, I was shooting at my wife."

To show the live sympathy that all who had been associated with him expected, a story is told that an old comrade in arms approached him and said: "Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman."

"How did you do it?" asked the President, inquiring for the circumstances.

"Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame," replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of a tool the trick was done.

(The Colonel referred to this incident in a telegram to a friend after the Milwaukee shooting.)
As a nature lover and observer the President became best known to the country in 1907, just after his criticism of the nature fakers and his own vigorous denials that his interest in nature and wild game was that of the sportsman merely.
President Roosevelt took a dignitary out with him for a stroll one afternoon, and in the course of the walk sighted a steep and rocky knoll, toward which he directed his course. He turned to his companion and observed as they began making the ascent: '' We must get up to the top here,'' and after much panting and laboring the feat was accomplished.

"And now, Mr. President," asked the official, "may I ask why we are up here?"

"Why, I came up here," returned Roosevelt laughing, "to see if you could make it."
Mr. Roosevelt was a tireless reader of books and on his long railroad trips usually carried half a dozen volumes. But the side pocket of his traveling coat always held one stoutly bound, well-thumbed book—a copy of "Plutarch's Lives." On campaign tours and pleasure jaunts he took a daily half-hour dose of Plutarch.

"I've read this little volume close to a thousand times," he said one day, "but it is ever new."
"Mr. Roosevelt's creed?" wrote Jacob Riis, his close friend for many years in police work in New York. '' Find it in a speech he made to the Bible Society. ' If we read the Book aright,' he said, 'we read a book that teaches us to go forth and do the work of the Lord in the world as we find it; to try to make things better in the world, even if only a little better, because we have lived in it. That kind of work can be done only by a man who is neither a weakling nor a coward; by a man who, in the fullest sense of the word, is a true Christian, like Great-heart, Bunyan's hero.' "
A message from Theodore Roosevelt was inserted in the Bibles given in 1917-18 to the American fighting men by the New York Bible Society. This message read:

"The teachings of the New Testament are foreshadowed in Micah's verse: 'What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'

"Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for these nations in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth.

"Love mercy; treat prisoners well; succor the wounded; treat every woman as if she were your sister; care for the little children, and be tender with the old and helpless.

"Walk humbly; you will do so if you study the life and teachings of the Saviour."
"Colonel Roosevelt's life," said Judge Ben Lindsey at a memorial meeting in Chicago, "was marked always by a fortitude which nothing could frighten. During the free silver campaign he went to Cripple Creek, the very center of the silver movement, to fight for the gold standard.

"His visit began by the citizens pelting him with stones. It ended by Theodore Roosevelt winning the population over. The same thing occurred in Denver.

"With this same fortitude he bore the news of his son's death. He was tremendously proud of his boys, as all America was. He said to me one day:

" 'Judge, if this war keeps up another year I won't have a son left. They're all bears when it comes to fighting, if the fighting is worth while. They're bears, every one of them.' "
During a visit to Palo Alto, Gal., Colonel Roosevelt standing on the platform of his railway car, singled out a wide-eyed boy just at the edge of the platform and made of him a hero in Boyville by leaning down and saying to him in a series of explosive sentences:

"Young man, be game, but be decent. If you are game, but not decent, it would be better to hunt you out of society."

The little fellow said, "Yes, sir!" and edged away to the outer rim of the crowd to think it over.
"Anyway, I've had a corking time!" Theodore Roosevelt said back in the '80s when beaten at the polls for Mayor of New York. "I've had a corking time," he repeated in March, 1909, turning over the Presidency to William Howard Taft. And on January 6, 1919, in the dawn, though no one mortal heard, would it not have been like him, glancing back at the broad roofs on Sagamore Hill, ere he hurried on to seek out Quentin in the shining ranks of the young men "gone west," to have said, yet once more, that he had had a corking time? He always did.
On one of President Roosevelt's Southern trips his train stopped at Charlotte, N. C. A committee of women, led by Mrs. Thomas J. Jackson, widow of General Stonewall Jackson, was at the depot to greet him. When he was introduced he referred to himself as by right a Southerner, and then being introduced to Mrs. Jackson he added a remark which simply flashed through the South.

"What? The widow of great Stonewall Jackson? Why, it is worth the whole trip down here to have a chance to shake your hand,'' and he reminded her that he had appointed her grandson to a cadetship at West Point.
Mr. Roosevelt once told this story at a cabinet meeting in Washington: As President, on a Western trip, an old Rough Rider of his boarded the train and renewed their acquaintance. Later the President received a letter from the cowboy asking for $150 to help him defend himself against a charge of stealing horses. The Colonel sent the money. A month later he received a letter from the cowboy thanking him for the money, but saying that he no longer needed it, as his political party "had elected their candidate for district attorney."
Theodore Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy, was instrumental in the selection of Dewey to take charge of the Pacific squadron during the Spanish-American war. San Francisco and a few other cities objected. They did not know Dewey.

A delegation was sent to Washington to kick against the appointment. The delegation was finally turned over to Roosevelt. He listened patiently to their objections and said:

"Gentlemen, I cannot agree with you. We have looked up his record. We have looked him straight in the eyes. He is a fighter. We'll not change now. Pleased to have met you. Good day, gentlemen.''
A few days after President McKinley had been shot, when physicians had given the opinion that he would recover, no one felt more joyful than Vice President Roosevelt.

"To become President through the assassin's bullet means nothing to me,'' he said at the home of Ansley Wilcox in Buffalo. "Aside from the horror of having President McKinley die, * there is an additional horror in becoming his successor in that way. The thing that appeals to me is to be elected President. That is the way I want the honor to come if I am ever to receive it."
Roosevelt was in Idaho one day when he saw a copy of his book, "The Winning of the West," on a newsstand. In talking to the proprietor he casually asked, pointing to the book:

"Who is this man Roosevelt?"

"0, he is a ranch driver up in the cattle country," the man replied.
    ^“What do you think of his book ?"

"Well, I've always thought I'd like to meet the author and tell him if he 'd stuck to running ranches and not tried to write books, he'd cut a heap bigger figger at his trade."

"Theodore Roosevelt is a humorist," wrote Homer Davenport in the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1910. "In the multitude of his strenuousness this, the most human of his accomplishments, has apparently been over looked. There is a similarity between his humor and Mark Twain's. If Colonel Roosevelt were on the vaudeville stage he would be a competitor of Harry Lauder. At Denver, at the stock growers' banquet during his recent western trip, Colonel Roosevelt was at his best. He made three speeches that day and was eating his sixth meal, yet he was in the best of fettle. You couldn't pick a hallful that could sit with faces straight through his story of the blue roan cow. He can make a joke as fascinating as he can the story of a sunset on the plains of Egypt."	_

Professor Thayer's "Life of John Hay" contains a good deal of delightful Rooseveltiana. Here is a letter that Mr. Hay, as Secretary of State, addressed to President Roosevelt on November 12, 1901.

"Count Quadt [of the German Embassy] has been hovering around the State Department in ever narrowing circles for three days, and at last swooped upon me this afternoon, saying that the Foreign Office, and even the palace, Unter den Linden, was in a state of intense anxiety to know how you received his Majesty's Chinese medal, conferred only upon the greatest sovereigns.

"As I had not been authorized by you to express your emotions I had to sail by dead reckoning, and considering the vast intrinsic value of the souvenir—I should say at least 30 cents—and its wonderful artistic merit, representing the German eagle eviscerating the Black Dragon, and its historical accuracy, which gives the world to understand that Germany was It and the rest of the universe nowhere, I took the responsibility of saying to Count Quadt that the President could not have received the medal with anything but emotions of pleasure commensurate with the high appreciation he entertains for the Emperor's majesty, and that a formal acknowledgment would be made in due course.

"He asked me if he was at liberty to say something like this to his government, and I said he was at liberty to say whatever the spirit moved him to utter.''
Here are other interesting passages from John Hay's diary:

"Nineteen hundred and four—January 17—The President came in for an hour and talked very amusingly on many matters. Among others he spoke of a letter received from an old lady in Canada denouncing him for having drunk a toast to Helen (Hay) at her wedding two years ago. The good soul had waited two years, hoping that the pulpit or the press would take up this enormity. 'Think,' she said, 'of the effect on your friends, on your children, on your own immortal soul, of such a thoughtless act!"
"March 18.—-At the Cabinet meeting today the President said someone had written asking if he wanted to annex any more islands. He answered: 'About as much as a gorged anaconda wants to swallow a porcupine wrong end to.' He was berating someone, when it was observed that the man was doubtless conscientious. 'Well,' he burst out, 'if a man has a conscience which leads him to do things like that he should take it out and look at ik—f or it is unhealthy.' ''
"April 26.—At the Cabinet meeting this morning the President talked of his Japanese wrestler, who is giving him lessons in jiu-jitsu. He says the muscles of his throat are so powerfully developed by-training that it is impossible for any ordinary man to strangle him. If the President succeeds once in a while in getting the better of him he says, 'Good! Lovely!' "
"May 8.—The President was reading 'Emerson's Days,' and came to the wonderful closing line, 'I, too late, under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.' I said, 'I fancy you do not know what that means.' ' Oh, do I not ? Perhaps the greatest men do not, but I in my soul know I am but the average man, and that only marvelous good fortune has brought me where I am.' '
"October 30.—The President came in for an hour. We talked a while about the campaign (1904) and at last he said, 'It seems a cheap sort of thing to say, and I would not say it to other people, but laying aside my own personal interests and hopes—for of course I desire intensely to succeed—I have the greatest pride that in this fight we are not only making it on clearly avowed principles, but we have the principles and the record to avow. How can I help being a little proud when I contrast the men and the considerations by which I am attacked and those by which I am defended?' "
And Hay tells how John Morley, the British statesman, had said, "The two things in America which strike me as most extraordinary are Niagara Falls and President Roosevelt."

"He is a superman if ever there was one," said Conan Doyle at the time of his last visit to the United States.

Roosevelt
At dawn he passed; no somber west, No evening star or twilight gray, No solemn close of weary day,
No dying sun; his way was best.
At dawn he passed, the long night through; For him no dusk, no mystic gleam Of fading light or pale wan dream;
He went at dawn as workers do.
Don't mourn, rejoice!   His words live on, Be ours to hold his message high, To fight his fights till perils fly
And traitors, cowards, fears are gone.
At dawn he passed where shadows lurk But to no mist-swept, ghostly land; His valiant soul and eager hand
Have found some new, still nobler work.
At dawn he passed, and marched away Beyond our little time and space With strange, new sunlight on his face
And new strength for another day.
—Paul McCurdy "Warner.