Theodore Roosevelt Read Free Page B

exclusive Porcellian Club. It is interesting to note that he chose for the topic of his senior essay “the practicability of equalizing men and women before the law,” and that he didn’t believe that in marriage a woman should assume her husband’s name.
    One thing he got off his mind at Harvard was all serious thought of a career in science. The emphasis was then all on laboratory work, and he was keen only for the out-of-doors. After graduation he married Alice Lee and settled down, following a honeymoon in Europe in which he abandoned his lovely bride long enough to scale the Matterhorn, to a New York life of mild law school and many social engagements. But that makes his life sound much less intense than it actually was. In the morning, yes, he attended law lectures at Columbia Law, not liking them very much but always attentive, and in the afternoon he moved to the public library, where he worked on a history of the War of 1812, which, however dry, has been continually praised and cited for the accuracy of its factual research. And if the evenings began with dinner parties they soon ran into competition with his new interest in Morton Hall, headquarters of the Twenty-first District Republican Association, whose meetings and discussions he began to attend, sometimes, to the amusement of the group, in evening dress, but always with a seriousness and dedication that they came to respect.
    We do not know much about Alice’s attitude toward this new interest of her husband’s, but I think it safe to presume that it was a completely docile one. She is a slightly vague figure, an improbable partner for her dynamic spouse, but all seem to agree that she was sweet and agreeable—probably a bit dull. Anyway, he seems always to have adored her.
    His fundamental interest in people was now bringing him closer to men of different backgrounds. He was also learning to appreciate the fact that social progress can only be accomplished by means that gentlemen of his sort had previously scorned. He was later to say: “I knew both the machine and the silk-stocking reformers fairly well.… The machine as such had no ideals at all, although many of the men composing it did have. On the other hand, the ideals of many of the silk-stocking reformers did not relate to the questions of real and vital interest to our people.”
    After two years of law school he gave it up to run as a Republican candidate for the Assembly in Albany and was elected for the year 1882, and thereafter reelected twice, for the years 1883 and 1884. His youth, his high, shrill voice, his aggressive desire to be heard, and his fancy clothes made him at first an object of curiosity and some ridicule, and it was felt even by some of his party that he was too violent in his denunciations of Democrats, but it didn’t take him long to establish himself as a man to be heard. “I rose like a rocket,” he later observed.
    One of his early targets was a New York State judge, T. R. Westbrook, who corruptly aided Jay Gould in corruptly gaining control of the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, going so far as actually to hold court in the offices of the speculators engaged in depressing the stock. TR went after him like a bulldog, distressing some of his associates who were inclined to use soft gloves in any sparring with such a power as Gould. But he obtained the judicial investigation he sought, and even though Westbrook was cleared he was publicly tarnished, and his subsequent death may well have been a suicide. TR, however, was not yet a notable liberal. Opposing a proposed ameliorization of conditions of virtual slavery in state prisons, he said he had “no maudlin sympathy … for men who had deliberately placed themselves outside the pale of society.” In his final term in the Assembly he voted against a bill limiting the hours of streetcar conductors to twelve a day as a protection insulting to workers.
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