CHAPTER 4

Champion of Women and Children

      MANY people misunderstood Roosevelt.  Seeing the virile, fighting side of his nature, they came to look at him as representing strength without tenderness.  On the contrary, no man was more tender to women, children and animals.  He always impressed his close friend, Jacob Riis, as being as tender as a woman.

One day while Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he prevailed on Mr. Riis to go home with him.  In those days the Roosevelt children were little.  Instead of rushing upon Mr. Roosevelt when he entered the door, as was their custom later, they waited their father's coming in the nursery.

Entering the house, Mr. Roosevelt invited Mr. Riis to go up with him to see the babies.  Mrs. Roosevelt met them in the hall with the warning that he was not to play bear, that the baby was being put to sleep.  However, when the two arrived in the nursery, the baby itself squirmed out of the nurse's arms and growled and clawed at the father very much like a little bear cub, and, thus incited, the rest of the children flew upon him with all of the amazing vigor of childhood.  The house was in a turmoil.  No menagerie in its wildest moment gave forth more shrieks, howls and thumps.  As a climax the door opened and Mrs. Roosevelt, wearing a look of great sternness, stood viewing the scene.  Thereupon her husband arose meekly from the floor explaining that the baby was thoroughly awake when he arrived.  This story explains the following:

One day, when Roosevelt was Police Commissioner, a policeman was ordered before him on charges.  Roosevelt reviewed his past offences and resolved to dismiss him.  The stage was set for the dismissal; only the formalities remained.  But someone had told the culprit the Commissioner's weak side.  In the morning as Roosevelt came from a romp with his babies, the doomed policeman stood before him surrounded by eleven weeping youngsters.

Roosevelt's stern expression relaxed to one of instant sympathy.

"Where is your wife, O'Keefe?"

"Dead, Sir!"

Dead! And this man, left alone with all these children! Clearly it would be inhuman to discharge him.  He must be given one more chance.  Out went the patrolman with his new lease of life.  And his first duty was to return to his neighbors in the tenement the nine children he had borrowed to accompany his own two in his task of melting the heart of the Commissioner.

Some years ago, a man Roosevelt had met out West wrote this letter to him:

"Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble.  I have shot a lady in the eye.  But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the lady.  I was shooting at my wife."

Roosevelt replied to his friend in need that while he appreciated marksmanship in almost every form, he drew the line at shooting at ladies, whether or not they were related to the man who held the gun.

Roosevelt, much as he understood the character of the Western man, was even more interested in and sympathetic to the Western woman.  It was on the prairie that Roosevelt learned the doctrine which he afterward preached, that "the prime work for the average woman must be keeping the home and rearing her children." When with his men on the ranch he listened by hours to their accounts of the charms and virtues of their sweethearts, while from his own close observation he acquired a knowledge of the homely virtues of the women pioneers of the plains that led him to show small sympathy in later years with the idle, luxury loving women of the big cities.

In his description of frontier types Roosevelt pictured how the grinding work of the wilderness drives the beauty and bloom from a woman's face long before her youth leaves her.  She lives in a log hut chinked with moss, or in a sod adobe hovel; or in a temporary camp.

Motherhood comes and leaves her sinewy, angular, thin of lip and furrowed of brow.  She is up early, going about her work in a dingy gown and ugly sunbonnet, facing her many hard duties, washing and cooking for her husband and children; facing perils and hardships and poverty with the courage her husband shows in facing his own hard and dangerous lot.  She is fond and tender toward her children.  Yet necessity dictates that she must bring them up in hardihood.  One of the wives of Roosevelt's teamsters, when her work prevented her giving personal care to her flock picketed them out, each child being tied by the leg with a long leather string to a stake driven in the ground and so placed that it could not get into a scuffle with the next child nor get its hand on breakable things.

Independent and resourceful as the frontiersman became in contact with the desolate prairie, his wife was no less similarly developed.  Roosevelt met one of these women living alone in her cabin on the plains, having dismissed her erring husband some six months previously.  Her living she earned by making hunting shirts, leggings and gauntlets for neighboring cow punchers and Indians, and every man who approached her cabin door was made to walk the straightest kind of line.

The West had its lewd women as have our big cities today but Roosevelt testified that the sense of honor and dignity of the average plainswoman was as high as that found in the centers of culture.  In the cowboy balls, to which men and women flocked from the surrounding towns, the greatest decorum was observed, and those behaving unseeingly were banished and punished with typical cowboy celerity and vim.

In his later years Roosevelt wrote a vigorous paper on the parasite woman, appealing therein to American women to rear strong families for their country, and to train them to be prepared for military service if needed. (web site note This statement could be miss-leading.  The term “parasite woman” was not a coined phrase of TR it refers to a vernacular of some men which TR took issue with in “THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD” By Theodore Roosevelt).

 A Michigan woman of the same brave pioneer stamp described above formed the conclusion that Roosevelt was writing without knowledge of the hardships many of her sex were forced to undergo, and wrote to him this letter:

"Dear Sir: When you were talking of 'race suicide' I was rearing a large family on almost no income.  I often thought of writing to you of some of my hardships, and now when 'preparedness' may take some of my boys, I feel I must.  I have eleven of my own and brought up three stepchildren, and yet, in the thirty years of my married life I have never had a new cloak or winter hat.  I have sent seven children to school at one time.  I had a family of ten for eighteen years, with no money to hire a washerwoman though bearing a child every two years.  Nine  several through or nearly of my children have got into high school and two into State Normal School, and one into the University of Michigan.  I haven't eaten a paid meal in twenty years or paid for a night's lodging in thirty.  Not one of the five boys the youngest is fifteen uses tobacco or liquor.  I have worn men's discarded shoes much of the time.  I have had little time for reading.

"I think I have served my country.  My husband has been an invalid for six years leaving me the care and much work on our little sandy farm.  I have bothered you enough.  To me race suicide has perhaps a different meaning when I think my boys may have to face the cannon.
Respectfully.	
"MRS. (Doe) 	"

Roosevelt's reply to her was warmly sympathetic, but there was no withdrawing from the principles he had set forth.  The following paragraphs from his reply illustrate that tender yet just attitude that Roosevelt took toward American women, including, of course, the women of his own household:

"Now, my dear Mrs. (Doe)	, you have described

a career of service which makes me feel more like taking off my hat to you, and saluting you as a citizen deserving of the highest honor, than I would feel as regards any colonel of a crack regiment.  But you seem to think, if I understand your letter aright, that 'preparedness' is in some way designed to make your boys food for cannon.

"Now, as a matter of fact, the surest way to prevent your boys from being food for cannon is to have them, and all the other young men of the country my boys, for instance, and the boys of all other fathers and mothers throughout the country so trained, so prepared, that it will not be safe for any foreign foe to attack us.  Preparedness no more invites war than fire insurance invites a fire.  I shall come back to this matter again in a moment.  But I will speak to you first a word as to what you say about race suicide.

"I have never preached the imposition of an excessive maternity on any woman.  I have always said that every man worth calling such will feel a peculiar sense of chivalric tenderness toward his wife, the mother of his children.  He must be unselfish and considerate with her.  But, exactly as he must do his duty, so she must do her duty.  I have said that it is self evident that unless the average woman, capable of having children, has four, the race will not go forward; for this is necessary in order to offset the women who for proper reasons do not marry, or who, from no fault of their own, have no children, or only one or two, or whose children die before they grow up.  I do not want to see Americans forced to import our babies from abroad.  I do not want to see the stock of people like yourself and like my family die out and you do not either; and it will inevitably die out if the average man and the average woman are so selfish and so cold that they wish either no children, or just one or two children.

"We have had six children in this family.  We wish we had more.  Now the grandchildren are coming along; and I am sure you agree with me that no other success in life not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or anything else comes up to the success of the man and woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.

"Mrs. Roosevelt and I have four sons, and they are as dear to us as your sons are to you.  If we now had war, these four boys would all go.  We think it entirely right that they should go if their country needs them.  But I do not think it fair that they should be sent to defend the boys who are too soft or too timid 'to face the cannon,' or the other boys who wish to stay at home to make money while somebody else protects them."

THE BRINGER OF CULTURE

In the lore of the Middle West brilliantly stands out the figure of Johnny Apple seed, who traveled westward distributing apple seeds to the farmers and ranchers, from whence sprang up the great apple orchards that have blessed these regions.

It was service of a similar kind that Roosevelt performed when he went among these primitive people of the wilderness.  Schools were scarce in those days and opportunity for culture was almost entirely lacking.  But here had come among them a man who had graduated from one of the great Eastern colleges, and who had brought with him a choice library of books that contained characters and philosophy entirely comprehensible by these untutored minds when interpreted by such an enthusiastic and sympathetic expounder as young Roosevelt.

On the long winter evenings Roosevelt's fire side became the rendezvous for the ranchers and their wives.  Roosevelt would select a classic story and begin reading.  The tale would be a familiar one to him, and yet the genius of the author would again cast its spell over him, and he would read with interest and expression that were magnetic.  Swiftly the night passed, and when in the late hours his hearers went to their rest they lay awake remembering the poetry of "that chap Browning" or the Rosalind or Lear of "Mr. Shakespeare," conning them over in their minds until they became part of their beings, to be transmitted later to the minds and lips of their children, and thus to become a part of the civilization of their section.

To the women, with their starved existence  so far as education was concerned Roosevelt proved a benefactor indeed; but no less did he administer to the mental craving of his men comrades.

Monotonous and threadbare grew the conversation at a cow camp.  Seldom did the talk vary from such topics as these, described by him:

"A bunch of steers had been seen traveling over the buttes to the head of Elk Creek.  A stray horse, with a blurred brand on the left hip, had just joined the saddle ponies.  The red F.  V.  cow had been bitten by a wolf.  The old mule, Saw back, was getting over the effects of the rattlesnake bite.  The river was going down, but the fords were still bad, and the quicksand at the Caster Trail crossing had worked along so that wagons had to be taken over opposite the blasted cottonwood.  Bronco Jim had tried to ride the big, bald faced sorrel belonging to the Oregon horse outfit and had been bucked off and his face smashed in.  It was agreed that Jim 'wasn't the sure enough bronco buster he thought himself,' and he was compared very unfavorably to various heroes of the quirt and spurs who lived in Texas and Colorado."

These topics having been exhausted, the rumor was discussed that the vigilantes had given notice to quit to two men who had just built a shack at the head of the Little Dry River, and whose horses included a suspiciously large number of different brands, most of them blurred.  Then the talk became more personal.  Roosevelt would be asked to write or post letters for the cow punchers.  Then his companions, growing friendly, would make him the confident of their love affairs, and make him listen for an hour to the charms of their sweethearts.

Here Roosevelt's books stood both him and his companions in good stead.  No matter what adverse conditions surrounded the young ranch owner, favorite volumes were at hand, and out they came at the first opportunity.

On one occasion, while hunting on Beaver Creek for a lost horse, he met a cowboy and made friends with him.  Caught in a heavy snowstorm, they lost themselves, and after eight or nine hours of drifting, finally came across an empty hut near Sentinel Butte.  Making their horses comfortable in a sheltered nook with hay found in an old stack, the two cold and tired men sat down to spend the long winter evening together.  Out of Roosevelt's pocket came a small edition of Hamlet.  His cowboy companion was greatly interested in the reading, and Roosevelt tells us that he commented very shrewdly on the parts he liked, especially Polonius's advice to Laertes.  His final comment was extremely gratifying to the man who had introduced to him the treasures of the world's greatest dramatist, and would doubtless have given great pleasure to the immortal bard himself:

"Old Shakespeare saveyed human natur' some!"

On another evening the men at the Roosevelt ranch began to discuss the English soldiers.  Thereupon Roosevelt got down "Napier" and read them extracts from his descriptions of the fighting in the Spanish penisula.  He also told them about the fine appearance and splendid horses of the cavalry and hussars he had seen.

Thus when the East called Roosevelt home there was left behind in the minds of the sons and daughters of the great West not only the recollection of a tried and true comrade, but also the seeds of a culture whose fruitage is still springing forth from the lives he touched.

From a business standpoint Roosevelt's ranch ing venture was a failure.  The country was poorly adapted to cattle raising.  His reviving interest in politics and his engagement to Edith Carow came to draw him back to the fields where happiness and success waited.  Sewall and Dow returned East with him.

The duty of a biographer is to record and not to speculate, yet as we look at Roosevelt's later life in his unpretentious home at Sagamore Hill; when we think of the democratic sewing circle at Oyster Bay to which Mrs. Roosevelt goes regularly to sew garments for crippled children, and when we see the democratic simplicity with which Roosevelt mingled with his neighbors and shared their experiences and confidences; when we read of him or Captain Archie playing Santa Claus to the village children, we are led to pronounce this judgment, which we feel Roosevelt, if he were living, would heartily second that while he gave to the men and women of the West the best that was in him, he also received from their kind hearts and frank and open natures a deepening and ripening of his sense of brotherhood that was equivalent in value to the finest gifts he gave these frontier folks.