Theodore Roosevelt Read Free Page A

annals of military glory for the gap that the Roosevelts had suffered. Theodore Jr.’s throwing up of his assistant secretaryship of the navy in 1898 to become a Rough Rider when duty would have seemed to point to his staying at his post, his violent efforts as an ill and elderly man to get to the trenches in World War I, and his posting of his sons to battle all seem to stem from a barely rational compulsion. It is one thing for a father to salute his sons as they march off to fight for the right; it seems to me quite another to appeal, as he did, using all of his immense influence and prestige, to military authorities to speed them to the front. When his son Kermit thought he might get into action sooner by joining the British forces, his father did his best to pull strings to accomplish this, excusing himself to his friend Cecil Spring-Rice by saying that it was asking for a favor, “but the favor is that the boy shall have the chance to serve, and if necessary be killed in serving.” And what is one to think of his attitude toward his son Archie, later to be severely wounded, when the latter asked for a few days’ leave to be married before shipping to France and was accused of being a “slacker”? Or when he reproved his nephew-in-law, Franklin, assistant secretary of the navy and the father of five, for not chucking his job and enlisting? Had he, TR, not been in just that position in 1898? And was Franklin not by birth and marriage doubly a Roosevelt?
    Teedie was an asthmatic child. His attacks could last for hours or days. He couldn’t get enough air, gasping and choking and wheezing. When the attack was over, he would lie, sweat-soaked and trembling, dreading the next one. He was not sent to school except briefly to a local one; most of the time he was educated by tutors. German, French, and some Italian were learned on two very extended European sojourns that the Roosevelts took in the decade that followed the Civil War. Teedie was absorbed in natural history, particularly at first in birds, and he became adept at taxonomy at an early age. He also, sometimes to the distress of the household, collected a private zoo of snakes, turtles, and mice.
    When he was twelve his father called him in for a very serious talk that probably changed his life. “You have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body!” The boy at once gave himself up to a strenuous course in calisthenics, the spirit of which he never again relaxed.
    He developed his physique and with it a passion for the active outdoor life, which took him on expeditions to the wilderness where he cultivated the joy of hunting. By the time he entered Harvard he was sufficiently robust and full of a zest for life, with an income greater than the salary of Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot. However, college presidents were not then well compensated, and many of the gilded youth of Boston and New York enjoyed greater allowances than young Theodore. But he did well enough for himself; he had his own rooms off campus and a horse and buggy with which to visit the beautiful Alice Lee, a Brahmin from Chesnut Hill, whom he had met early in his college career and whom he was already frantically determined to marry. He was also enthusiastic about his studies, asking so many questions in one class that the professor had to reprove him with a “I’m running this course, Mr. Roosevelt.” And he eagerly cultivated the students of his own social background; it would take him a couple of years to shed his inherited snobbishness, and we find him writing home that he stood nineteenth in his class, with only “one gentleman” ahead of him. But he was well enough liked, if considered a bit eccentric—his friend Robert Bacon would not visit his rooms because of the smell of his zoological specimens—and he was duly elected to the