CHAPTER 4 Hermann Hagedorn’s: The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt.

HE SEEKS OUT WISE FOLK OF VARIOUS SORTS, WITH VARYING RESULTS

TILDEN was running for President against Hayes, and the contest was close and hot.  Everybody who could make a speech was making several from the tails of carts; and everybody who couldn't make a speech was at least parading.  The Harvard Freshmen in the fall of 1876 paraded.  They could none of them vote, but they could make a great deal of noise, which is supposed to be the next best thing. 

The Republicans among them, armed with flickering oil-torches which ruined their overcoats, marched to Boston one night.  They were proceeding enthusiastically down, a Cambridge street when a second-story window was flung open and a Tilden supporter bawled out, "Shut up, you blooming Freshmen!"

That was pretty bad, but he also threw a potato, which was even more serious.  The paraders were indignant, and one wiry youngster with glasses flung down his torch furiously and shook his fist at the second-story malefactor with a whole-hearted anger that was good to see.  

One of his classmates turned to his neighbor.  

"Who's that man?" he asked. 

"That? Oh, that's Theodore Roosevelt, of New York. "

It was thus, some six weeks after he had dropped off the car at Harvard Square to enter upon the life of a Harvard undergraduate, that Theodore the younger, just eighteen, made his first impression on his classmates.  That impression deepened, for his indignation in the face of what he considered unjust treatment of a good cause was characteristic, and the enthusiastic energy he put into it was sufficiently rare to be conspicuous.  His classmates decided that he was worth knowing, for he was "different. "

There was no question about his being "different. " He was at eighteen much the same intense, single-minded youth he had been in Egypt three years previous, even to his absent-mindedness.  Just before leaving Oyster Bay, to go to Cambridge, he had, for instance, put a price on field-mice, which had become a pest five cents apiece, a quarter for a family.  Then he had promptly forgotten the matter and gone to college, leaving to "Bamie," his counselor and friend, the pleasant task of receiving and paying for the flood of field-mice that began to pour in.  His asthma, moreover, was still with him at intervals, and the agonies which he could share with no one demanded a constant self-discipline which deepened his character.  He was the best sort of companion, and yet he was, in the high sense of the word, self-sufficient; he made his own world.  He could associate most amicably and delightfully with congenial acquaintances; no one loved a good time more than he.  But he could also withdraw himself into his own personal world abruptly and completely, leaving his friends vaguely wondering what had happened to Theodore.  He permitted his friends to go just so far, and no farther.  Nothing was said, but suddenly there was a closed door barring the way that led to his inmost being.  What was behind that door he revealed to no one.  Perhaps he scarcely knew himself. 

Theodore Roosevelt came to Harvard with half his college career made in advance.  As a member of one of the oldest Knickerbocker families, he was predestined to certain societies and clubs (for Harvard was less democratic then than she is now) and in due time belonged to the best of them, the Institute of 1770, the "Dickie," the A.  D,, the "Pork," the Signet, and the "Pudding. " None of them interested him greatly, for he had not gone to college for social purposes. 

He had gradually come to the conclusion that he wanted to be a professor of natural history.  His father had not greeted this decision with enthusiasm, for he recognized in Theodore the younger qualities which, in his judgment, demanded a wider field for expression than that of the college professor or the scientific investigator.  But he was not the man to impress his personal judgment on his children, and gave his consent to Theodore's choice of a career, stipulating only that Theodore make up his mind to be a thorough scientist or none at all, for he had an abhorrence for the mere amateur.  Theodore him self did not think much of people who did things by halves. 

He began his college life, therefore, with a certain advantage over the majority of his classmates; for he knew exactly what he wanted to do.  He took rooms, accordingly, not in a dormitory (where work, he knew, would be difficult), but in a private house at 16 Winthrop Street, and there, surrounded by birds and beasts he had shot and stuffed, and sundry animals on whom he had as yet committed neither offense a monstrous live turtle, for instance, a snake or two, and now and then an armful of bad-tempered lobsters he lived his whole four years. 

Most of his classmates thought Theodore Roosevelt slightly "queer"; but it occurred to no one to call him a "grind. " For a grind is a poor worm that bores day and night in books and knows no other world; and Theodore Roosevelt was active, if not prominent, in every phase of undergraduate life.  He was not only a member of clubs; he started one of his own, for the existing clubs seemed to him too aristocratic and snobbish. 

He had endless enthusiasm for an almost endless variety of matters.  He was a member, and in his Senior year, undergraduate head, of the Natural History Society, which was flourishing under the presidency of that rare and valiant man, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, professor of geology, poet, scientist, and veteran of Gettysburg.  The Art Club heard him discoursing at Charles Eliot Norton's pleasant "Shadyside"; the Rifle Club saw him practising target-shooting at the Watertown Arsenal.  He organized a Finance Club, to study currency systems here and abroad; he read papers on politics before the "O.  K" Society; he started the movement that led to the institution of track meets between Yale and Harvard; he wrote the first chapters of a notable book on the War of 1812. 

With all this, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, which honors only those who are leaders in under-graduate scholarship; he was an editor of the Harvard Advocate and an active officer in at least a half-dozen organizations; he taught Sunday-school (and was requested to resign from one church because he had given a boy a dollar as a consolation for a black eye received in defending his sister); he drove a trap, gaily, badly, and often; he rowed; he boxed; he ran; he wrestled; he hunted in Maine; he danced in Chestnut Hill; he acted in a comic opera; he inspired the whole Senior class with a sudden passion for skipping rope. 

He was not especially brilliant at any of these things.  But he put into each one of them every ounce of energy, ability, and enthusiasm which he had, and consequently in some cases did them better than men more gifted by nature than he. 

Meanwhile he found time for measles and for recurrent attacks of his old enemy, asthma; and, most important of all, for a new and deepening friendship with a girl a year or two younger than himself who lived in Chestnut Hill. 

Between his eighteenth year, when he entered college, and his twenty-second, when he graduated, Theodore Roosevelt grew from a shy and timid boy, frail in body, into a vigorous and determined man.  Into those four years he crowded the natural growth of ten, for from the very beginning he had a goal in view.  For him there was no groping, no stumbling about in blind alleys, no wasting of time and strength in the pursuit either of false, enervating pleasures or of vague social, political, and religious theories.  He knew exactly what he wanted. 

He wanted to become a man who did things. 

That was his goal.  He had seen it clearly from his fifteenth year, and with ever-increasing clearness he saw the road, the only road, that led to it.  The name of that road was Work.  He worked to build up his body, not for the sake of mere bodily strength; he worked to build up his mind, not for the sake of mere mental agility; but both together as muscle and sinew for that spiritual power which constitutes the backbone of great men. 

Exactly what it was that he wanted to do he did not yet know.  The desire to become a natural scientist evaporated as his college experience taught him what such a career would mean.  Scientific investigation, he found, meant in those days laboratory work and the microscope, and these only; for the faunal naturalist and observer of nature there was, it seemed, no place in the world of science.  The idea of spending his life peeking into a microscope was, for Theodore the younger, too absurd to be considered.  He decided that the life of a professor was not for him. 

This decision, meanwhile, in no way affected the main object of his life, which was to make himself a man as vigorous in body as he was alert in mind.  There were few forms of athletic sport with which, during these years, he failed in some way to associate himself; but he was most active as a boxer and wrestler.  He excelled in neither, but his indomitable spirit carried him far in both.  He was plucky, moreover; he took punishment with a grin, and he was a good sport. 

Once, for instance, in the middle of a hot bout, time was called.  He promptly dropped his hands, but his opponent did not.  That young man drew back and struck him square on the nose.  There were some classmates watching, and an indignant roar of '' Foul! Foul!" arose. 

Roosevelt, his face covered with blood, ran to the referee.  Above the noise of the angry protests his voice could be heard shouting: "Stop! Stop! He didn't hear! He didn't hear!"

Whether the other man really hadn't heard, and whether Roosevelt really thought he hadn't heard or was merely giving him the benefit of the doubt, we shall probably never know.  But the rumpus subsided.  Theodore the younger shook hands heartily with his opponent, resumed hostilities, and gave him the drubbing of his life. 

There was another fight, a more formal affair.  Theodore the younger had won his way to the finals in the light-weight sparring-contest, and was matched at last with a certain "Mr.  Hanks. " That gentleman seems to have defeated him, but not without some difficulty. 

"It was no fight at all," said one of his classmates, describing the bout.  "Hanks had the longer reach and was stronger, and Roosevelt was handicapped by his eyesight.  You should have seen that little fellow staggering about, banging the air.  Hanks couldn't put him out and Roosevelt wouldn't give up.  It wasn't a fight, but, oh, he showed himself a fighter!"

Many forces, besides time, operate to make a boy into a man.  In the case of Theodore the younger the guiding force was his own spirit, with one hand fighting bodily weakness, fighting timidity; and with the other plunging enthusiastically into the midst of life, as into a gigantic grabbag, for every wholesome pleasure and peril it contained. 

Yet there were other forces.  One was the joyous, circle of girls and boys in Chestnut Hill and that new friend who was its radiant center. 

Another was a backwoodsman of Aroostook County, bearded, and six foot four. 

That new friend's name was Alice Lee.  The backwoodsman's name was Bill Sewall.  They were not at all alike.  But they were destined both to play a great part in the building of his manhood. 
It was during the winter of his Freshman year in college that Theodore the younger first met Bill Sewall.  His tutor, Arthur Cutler, had "discovered" Sewall the year previous on a hunting trip with Theodore's cousin, Emlen Roosevelt, and had urged Theodore to run up to Island Falls with him as much for the privilege of knowing Bill Sewall as for the hunting.     For Bill Sewall, he said, was a man to know. 

Theodore found him all that Cutler had described, and more.  He was a great, stalwart man of thirty-three or so, with a vigorous, reddish-brown beard; warm, friendly eyes, that flashed on occasion; enormous physical strength; an alert mind; an indomitable spirit.  Theodore himself was eighteen, thin, pale, asthmatic, outwardly the typical "city feller. " In physical appearance they were, indeed, as far apart as a mountain-oak and a fuchsia. 

"I want you to take good care of this young fellow," said Cutler, taking Sewall aside.  "He's ambitious, and he isn't very strong.  He won't say when he's tired, he won't complain, but he'll just break down.  You can't take him on the tramps you take us. "

Bill Sewall listened, making no comments.  One day, shortly after, without thinking much about it, he took Theodore tramping twenty-five miles or more "a good, fair walk for any common man," he admitted.  Theodore survived, making no protests; and Bill Sewall decided that, in spite of his asthmatic "guffle-ing" as he called it, Theodore Roosevelt was no weakling.  Besides, as he told his nephew, Wilmot Dow, after a week, Theodore was "different" different from any other human being he had ever met. 

Theodore, on his part, saw in the great backwoodsman the living embodiment of his boyhood heroes.  For Bill Sewall belonged to the company of those sinewy and dauntless fighters who at heart are the same in all ages, though they be Roland's men at Roncesvalles or King Olaf's men of the northern seas or Washington's men at Valley Forge or brothers of Boone and Crockett on the Western frontier.  There was more than a hint of the viking in Bill Sewall. 

"I don't know but what my ancestors were vikings," he said to Theodore one day.  "There was a baby found on a sea-wall after the wreck of a viking ship on the English coast.  That's where the name comes from, they say.  I'm not so sure but what there's something in it. "

Theodore rather thought there was a good deal in it.  There was something about Bill Sewall that the dark, surrounding forests could not quite account for, a fierce glorying in the conflict with wind and storm, an exultant defiance of the elements that made his eyes burn and his lips burst into poetry.  Out in a canoe on Mattawamkeag when the waves were highest and the wind was blowing a gale, he would fling back his head and repeat:

                              He scorns to rest 'neath the smoky rafter,
                                  he plows with his bark the raging deep. 
                              The billows boil and the winds howl after.  
                                 The sea-king loves it better than sleep. 

It was not strange that Theodore, with dreams of sea-kings in his heart, should have been thrilled.  Everything in him that loved heroic actions turned fervidly to this heroic figure of the Maine woods.  Through him he learned that the line to which King Olaf and John Ridd belonged is not extinct.  Here, where a man brought down with his ax forty to fifty giants of the primeval forest in the course of a day's work, here were his heroes in flesh and blood.  With all his soul he wanted to be like them.  Reluctantly he admitted to himself that that was impossible.  It was characteristic of him that he decided that he would be as much like them as he could. 

"We hitched up well, somehow or other, from the start," said Bill Sewall, a long time after.  "He was fair-minded, Theodore was.  And then he took pains to learn everything.  There was nothing beneath his notice.  I liked him right off.  I liked him clear through.  There wasn't a quality in him I didn't like.  He wasn't headlong or aggressive, except when necessary, and as far as I could see he wasn't a bit cocky, though other folks thought so.  I will say, he wasn't remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion. "

They "hitched up" well, indeed, for the boy of eighteen and the man of thirty-three were equally clear-eyed in judging men, not by the externals of body and speech, but by the essentials of character and spirit. 

"He didn't look for a brilliant man when he found me," said the backwoodsman, many years later.  "He valued me for what I was worth. "

And a thousand miles away the blue-blooded aristocrat said, "How could I be a snob when I admired him so much?"

Twice a year at least during his college course Theodore Roosevelt explored the woods and waters of Aroostook County with his friend Bill Sewall, shooting ducks, partridges, and rabbits, but no big game, not even a deer, though once they started a bear and another time followed a caribou that eluded them. 

Those journeys in the wilderness, and especially on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag and in the forests that bordered it, saw the growth of a deep and significant friendship.  They talked much of life and politics, finding that they wonderfully agreed in their opinions of what was right and what was wrong.  Bill Sewall was a democrat from his heels to his head, and there was one poem which he took a certain unobtrusive pride in repeating to Theodore Roosevelt on their expeditions through the great, quiet woods:

Who are the nobles of the earth,
The true aristocrats, 
Who need not bow their heads to kings
Nor doff to lords their hats? 
Who are they but the men of toil
Who cleave the forest down 
And plant amid the wilderness
The hamlet and the town? 
These claim no god of heraldry
And scorn the knighting-rod.  
Their coats of arms are noble deeds,
Their peerage is from God. 

Theodore Roosevelt had probably heard all that sort of thing before.  But he had never heard it from exactly such a source.  That made all the difference in the world. 

And so it came about that a backwoodsman in the heart of Maine taught a New York aristocrat and respected member of Harvard's most exclusive club a lesson in the meaning of democracy. 
Four years seem a century on the day a man enters college, and merely a watch in the night on the day he leaves it.  Into his own four years Theodore Roosevelt crowded a succession of fall and glowing days, clouded for a time by a great grief, when his father, that stanch and inspiring best friend of his, died in his Sophomore year; and lit by a great happiness when, two years later, he became engaged to Alice Lee. 

Those years found him at their beginning a frail boy, intellectually mature, but in many ways a child still.  They found him at their close a man in body and mind and spirit, matured by the experience of sorrow and joy, by physical hardship, independent thought, and contact with men of varied interests and divers surroundings.  In academic standing he graduated twenty-first in his class; in the affection of his classmates he stood far nearer the top. 

Theodore Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in June, 1880.  He had every reason to believe that he had before him an active and useful life of hardship and dangers and great endeavors. 

A day or two before he left Cambridge he went to his physician for a last physical examination. 

The doctor told him that he had heart trouble, that he must choose a profession that would demand no violent exertion, that he must take no vigorous exercise, that he must not even run up-stairs.  It was a stiff blow, but he took it as he had taken other blows.  "Doctor," he said, "I am going to do all the things you tell me not to do.  If I've got to live the sort of life you have described, I don't care how short it is. "

In October he married.  The following summer he went abroad and ascended the Matterhorn for no earthly reason except that two Englishmen with whom he was conversing seemed to be under the impression that they were the only ones who had ever ascended it and the only ones who ever would. 

And he survived in spite of the pessimistic doctor.