Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
By Theodore Roosevelt
PREPARER'S NOTE
This Etext was prepared from a 1920 edition,
published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
The book was first published in 1913.
CONTENTS
Forward
Boyhood and Youth
The Vigor of Life
Practical Politics
In Cowboy Land
Applied Idealism
The New York Police
The War of America the Unready
The New York Governorship
Outdoors and Indoors
The Presidency; Making an Old Party Progressive
The Natural Resources of the Nation
The Big Stick and the Square Deal
Social and Industrial Justice
The Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Canal
The Peace of Righteousness
FOREWORD
Naturally, there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be
written.
It seems to me that, for the nation as for the individual, what is most
important is to insist on the vital need of combining certain sets
of qualities, which separately are common enough, and, alas, useless
enough. Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not uncommon;
it is the combination which is necessary, and the combination is rare.
Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy
persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil
temper and bad character. Neither quality shall by itself avail. Justice
among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be
brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love
peace, but who love righteousness more than peace. Facing the immense
complexity of modern social and industrial conditions, there is need to
use freely and unhesitatingly the collective power of all of us; and
yet no exercise of collective power will ever avail if the average
individual does not keep his or her sense of personal duty, initiative,
and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that have
the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a
windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of
a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on
their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the
children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and
with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of
shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in
the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we
must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest
charity towards the wrong-doer that is compatible with relentless war
against the wrong-doing. We must be just to others, generous to others,
and yet we must realize that it is a shameful and a wicked thing not to
withstand oppression with high heart and ready hand. With gentleness and
tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor
and hardship and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto;
but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain
himself as not to be a burden to others.
We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our
several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can
live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live
dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge
rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not
on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and
vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off
and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits
the man with whom life has gone hard.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last used
in the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while he was a
small boy.
About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New
Amsterdam as a "settler"--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century
instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century. From
that time for the next seven generations from father to son every one of
us was born on Manhattan Island.
My father's paternal ancestors were of Holland stock; except that there
was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who was one of the Pilgrims who
remained in Holland when the others came over to found Massachusetts,
and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to New Amsterdam.
My father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her forebears had come to
Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the same ship with him; they
were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place and
time. They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,--with a
Celtic name, and apparently not a Quaker,--and peace-loving Germans,
who were among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged
the Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means
altogether peaceful people, the Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania
a little later, early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a
woman of singular sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in
her relations with her husband and sons. Although she was not herself
Dutch, it was she who taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby
song of which the first line ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always
remembered this, and when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union
between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at
first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation--at
which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose
ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America
two centuries and a half previously, and to find that the descendants
of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at
least of the same nursery songs.
Of my great-grandfather Roosevelt and his family life a century and over
ago I know little beyond what is implied in some of his books that have
come down to me--the Letters of Junius, a biography of John Paul Jones,
Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of Washington." They seem to indicate
that his library was less interesting than that of my wife's
great-grandfather at the same time, which certainly included such
volumes as the original _Edinburgh Review_, for we have them now on our
own book-shelves. Of my grandfather Roosevelt my most vivid childish
reminiscence is not something I saw, but a tale that was told me
concerning him. In _his_ boyhood Sunday was as dismal a day for small
Calvinistic children of Dutch descent as if they had been of Puritan or
Scotch Covenanting or French Huguenot descent--and I speak as one proud
of his Holland, Huguenot, and Covenanting ancestors, and proud that the
blood of that stark Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards flows in the veins
of his children. One summer afternoon, after listening to an unusually
long Dutch Reformed sermon for the second time that day, my grandfather,
a small boy, running home before the congregation had dispersed, ran
into a party of pigs, which then wandered free in New York's streets. He
promptly mounted a big boar, which no less promptly bolted and carried
him at full speed through the midst of the outraged congregation.
By the way, one of the Roosevelt documents which came down to me
illustrates the change that has come over certain aspects of public life
since the time which pessimists term "the earlier and better days of
the Republic." Old Isaac Roosevelt was a member of an Auditing Committee
which shortly after the close of the Revolution approved the following
bill:
The State of New York, to John Cape Dr.
To a Dinner Given by His Excellency the Governor
and Council to their Excellencies the Minnister of
France and General Washington & Co.
1783
December
To 120 dinners at 48: 0:0
To 135 Bottles Madira 54: 0:0
" 36 ditto Port 10:16:0
" 60 ditto English Beer 9: 0:0
" 30 Bouls Punch 9: 0:0
" 8 dinners for Musick 1:12:0
" 10 ditto for Sarvts 2: 0:0
" 60 Wine Glasses Broken 4:10:0
" 8 Cutt decanters Broken 3: 0:0
" Coffee for 8 Gentlemen 1:12:0
" Music fees &ca 8: 0:0
" Fruit & Nuts 5: 0:0
156:10:0
By Cash . . . 100:16:0
55:14:0
WE a Committee of Council having examined
the above account do certify it (amounting to
one hundred and fifty-six Pounds ten Shillings)
to be just.
December 17th 1783.
ISAAC ROOSEVELT
JAS. DUANE
EGBT. BENSON
FRED. JAY
Received the above Contents in full
New York 17th December 1783
JOHN CAPE
Think of the Governor of New York now submitting such a bill for such an
entertainment of the French Ambassador and the President of the United
States! Falstaff's views of the proper proportion between sack and bread
are borne out by the proportion between the number of bowls of punch and
bottles of port, Madeira, and beer consumed, and the "coffee for eight
gentlemen"--apparently the only ones who lasted through to that stage
of the dinner. Especially admirable is the nonchalant manner in which,
obviously as a result of the drinking of said bottles of wine and
bowls of punch, it is recorded that eight cut-glass decanters and sixty
wine-glasses were broken.
During the Revolution some of my forefathers, North and South, served
respectably, but without distinction, in the army, and others rendered
similar service in the Continental Congress or in various local
legislatures. By that time those who dwelt in the North were for the
most part merchants, and those who dwelt in the South, planters.
My mother's people were predominantly of Scotch, but also of Huguenot
and English, descent. She was a Georgian, her people having come to
Georgia from South Carolina before the Revolution. The original Bulloch
was a lad from near Glasgow, who came hither a couple of centuries ago,
just as hundreds of thousands of needy, enterprising Scotchmen have gone
to the four quarters of the globe in the intervening two hundred
years. My mother's great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first
Revolutionary "President" of Georgia. My grandfather, her father, spent
the winters in Savannah and the summers at Roswell, in the Georgia
uplands near Atlanta, finally making Roswell his permanent home. He
used to travel thither with his family and their belongings in his own
carriage, followed by a baggage wagon. I never saw Roswell until I was
President, but my mother told me so much about the place that when I did
see it I felt as if I already knew every nook and corner of it, and as
if it were haunted by the ghosts of all the men and women who had lived
there. I do not mean merely my own family, I mean the slaves. My mother
and her sister, my aunt, used to tell us children all kinds of stories
about the slaves. One of the most fascinating referred to a very old
darky called Bear Bob, because in the early days of settlement he had
been partially scalped by a black bear. Then there was Mom' Grace, who
was for a time my mother's nurse, and whom I had supposed to be dead,
but who greeted me when I did come to Roswell, very respectable, and
apparently with years of life before her. The two chief personages of
the drama that used to be repeated to us were Daddy Luke, the Negro
overseer, and his wife, Mom' Charlotte. I never saw either Daddy Luke
or Mom' Charlotte, but I inherited the care of them when my mother died.
After the close of the war they resolutely refused to be emancipated
or leave the place. The only demand they made upon us was enough money
annually to get a new "critter," that is, a mule. With a certain lack of
ingenuity the mule was reported each Christmas as having passed away,
or at least as having become so infirm as to necessitate a successor--a
solemn fiction which neither deceived nor was intended to deceive, but
which furnished a gauge for the size of the Christmas gift.
My maternal grandfather's house was on the line of Sherman's march to
the sea, and pretty much everything in it that was portable was taken by
the boys in blue, including most of the books in the library. When I
was President the facts about my ancestry were published, and a
former soldier in Sherman's army sent me back one of the books with
my grandfather's name in it. It was a little copy of the poems of "Mr.
Gray"--an eighteenth-century edition printed in Glasgow.
On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two
sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished
in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis
described in the _Potiphar Papers_. The black haircloth furniture in the
dining-room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on
it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of
gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only
at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room
of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening
or on rare occasions when there were parties. The Sunday evening family
gathering was the redeeming feature in a day which otherwise we children
did not enjoy--chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean
clothes and keep neat. The ornaments of that parlor I remember now,
including the gas chandelier decorated with a great quantity of
cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar
magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and
stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure,
a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and
convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a very
big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd
of chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the
mountain, just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there
was a small chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might
come on it and kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drawing a gilt
sledge on a piece of malachite. Some one mentioned in my hearing that
malachite was a valuable marble. This fixed in my mind that it was
valuable exactly as diamonds are valuable. I accepted that moujik as
a priceless work of art, and it was not until I was well in middle age
that it occurred to me that I was mistaken.
Now and then we children were taken round to our grandfather's house;
a big house for the New York of those days, on the corner of Fourteenth
Street and Broadway, fronting Union Square. Inside there was a large
hall running up to the roof; there was a tessellated black-and-white
marble floor, and a circular staircase round the sides of the hall, from
the top floor down. We children much admired both the tessellated floor
and the circular staircase. I think we were right about the latter, but
I am not so sure as to the tessellated floor.
The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.
We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything. We disliked
the city. We were always wildly eager to get to the country when spring
came, and very sad when in the late fall the family moved back to town.
In the country we of course had all kinds of pets--cats, dogs, rabbits,
a coon, and a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant. When my younger
sister first heard of the real General Grant, by the way, she was much
struck by the coincidence that some one should have given him the same
name as the pony. (Thirty years later my own children had _their_ pony
Grant.) In the country we children ran barefoot much of the time,
and the seasons went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling
pleasures--supervising the haying and harvesting, picking apples,
hunting frogs successfully and woodchucks unsuccessfully, gathering
hickory-nuts and chestnuts for sale to patient parents, building wigwams
in the woods, and sometimes playing Indians in too realistic manner by
staining ourselves (and incidentally our clothes) in liberal fashion
with poke-cherry juice. Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival, but it
in no way came up to Christmas. Christmas was an occasion of literally
delirious joy. In the evening we hung up our stockings--or rather the
biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups--and before dawn we
trooped in to open them while sitting on father's and mother's bed;
and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own
table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after
breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such
attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce
them exactly for my own children.
My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or
cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he
made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded
for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could
not be right in a man. With great love and patience, and the most
understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on
discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but he was the
only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was
a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him. We
used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key
rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him;
and we would troop into his room while he was dressing, to stay there as
long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out
of his pockets which could be regarded as an attractive novelty. Every
child has fixed in his memory various details which strike it as of
grave importance. The trinkets he used to keep in a little box on his
dressing-table we children always used to speak of as "treasures."
The word, and some of the trinkets themselves, passed on to the next
generation. My own children, when small, used to troop into my room
while I was dressing, and the gradually accumulating trinkets in the
"ditty-box"--the gift of an enlisted man in the navy--always excited
rapturous joy. On occasions of solemn festivity each child would receive
a trinket for his or her "very own." My children, by the way, enjoyed
one pleasure I do not remember enjoying myself. When I came back from
riding, the child who brought the bootjack would itself promptly get
into the boots, and clump up and down the room with a delightful feeling
of kinship with Jack of the seven-league strides.
The punishing incident I have referred to happened when I was four years
old. I bit my elder sister's arm. I do not remember biting her arm, but
I do remember running down to the yard, perfectly conscious that I had
committed a crime. From the yard I went into the kitchen, got some dough
from the cook, and crawled under the kitchen table. In a minute or two
my father entered from the yard and asked where I was. The warm-hearted
Irish cook had a characteristic contempt for "informers," but although
she said nothing she compromised between informing and her conscience
by casting a look under the table. My father immediately dropped on all
fours and darted for me. I feebly heaved the dough at him, and, having
the advantage of him because I could stand up under the table, got
a fair start for the stairs, but was caught halfway up them. The
punishment that ensued fitted the crime, and I hope--and believe--that
it did me good.
I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my
father, or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty; and no
one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life
and performance of duty. He and my mother were given to a hospitality
that at that time was associated more commonly with southern than
northern households; and, especially in their later years when they
had moved up town, in the neighborhood of Central Park, they kept a
charming, open house.
My father worked hard at his business, for he died when he was
forty-six, too early to have retired. He was interested in every social
reform movement, and he did an immense amount of practical charitable
work himself. He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face, and his
heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection,
and with the possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor.
He was very fond of riding both on the road and across the country, and
was also a great whip. He usually drove four-in-hand, or else a spike
team, that is, a pair with a third horse in the lead. I do not suppose
that such a team exists now. The trap that he drove we always called the
high phaeton. The wheels turned under in front. I have it yet. He drove
long-tailed horses, harnessed loose in light American harness, so that
the whole rig had no possible resemblance to anything that would be seen
now. My father always excelled in improving every spare half-hour or
three-quarters of an hour, whether for work or enjoyment. Much of his
four-in-hand driving was done in the summer afternoons when he would
come out on the train from his business in New York. My mother and one
or perhaps two of us children might meet him at the station. I can see
him now getting out of the car in his linen duster, jumping into
the wagon, and instantly driving off at a rattling pace, the duster
sometimes bagging like a balloon. The four-in-hand, as can be gathered
from the above description, did not in any way in his eyes represent
possible pageantry. He drove it because he liked it. He was always
preaching caution to his boys, but in this respect he did not practice
his preaching overmuch himself; and, being an excellent whip, he liked
to take chances. Generally they came out all right. Occasionally they
did not; but he was even better at getting out of a scrape than into
it. Once when we were driving into New York late at night the leaders
stopped. He flicked them, and the next moment we could dimly make out
that they had jumped. It then appeared that the street was closed and
that a board had been placed across it, resting on two barrels, but
without a lantern. Over this board the leaders had jumped, and there was
considerable excitement before we got the board taken off the barrels
and resumed our way. When in the city on Thanksgiving or Christmas, my
father was very apt to drive my mother and a couple of friends up to the
racing park to take lunch. But he was always back in time to go to the
dinner at the Newsboys' Lodging-House, and not infrequently also to
Miss Sattery's Night School for little Italians. At a very early age we
children were taken with him and were required to help. He was a staunch
friend of Charles Loring Brace, and was particularly interested in the
Newsboys' Lodging-House and in the night schools and in getting the
children off the streets and out on farms in the West. When I was
President, the Governor of Alaska under me, Governor Brady, was one of
these ex-newsboys who had been sent from New York out West by Mr. Brace
and my father. My father was greatly interested in the societies to
prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays he had
a mission class. On his way to it he used to drop us children at our
Sunday-school in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Church on Madison Square; I
remember hearing my aunt, my mother's sister, saying that when he walked
along with us children he always reminded her of Greatheart in Bunyan.
Under the spur of his example I taught a mission class myself for three
years before going to college and for all four years that I was in
college. I do not think I made much of a success of it. But the other
day on getting out of a taxi in New York the chauffeur spoke to me and
told me that he was one of my old Sunday-school pupils. I remembered him
well, and was much pleased to find that he was an ardent Bull Mooser!
My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern
woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely
"unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my grandmother,
one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was distinctly
overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her heart
towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the close of the
Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert
understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views
about that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln Republican; and
once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during
the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor
for the success of the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers
before my mother in the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother,
but was also blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much
amused to punish me; but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under
penalty of my father's being informed--he being the dispenser of serious
punishment. Morning prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the
foot of the stairs, and when father came down we called out, "I speak
for you and the cubby-hole too!" There were three of us young children,
and we used to sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning
prayers. The place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the
"cubby-hole." The child who got that place we regarded as especially
favored both in comfort and somehow or other in rank and title. The two
who were left to sit on the much wider expanse of sofa on the other side
of father were outsiders for the time being.
My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to
us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to her
in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and
my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on
the Georgia plantations; of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the
long-tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding
horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic
exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the
Negro quarters. She knew all the "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and I was
brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck
with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in
_Harper's_, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a
genius arose who in "Uncle Remus" made the stories immortal.
My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine Bulloch,
came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under
assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time
exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old retired
sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that
phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a
veritable Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy,
and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My
uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the _Alabama_, and fired
the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the
_Kearsarge_. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war.
My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the
Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire
fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a
Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could
admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone.
The only occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I
would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous
falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of
the best men I have ever known, and when I have sometimes been tempted
to wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible
things they do believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle
Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of
quite exceptional and nameless infamy in both public and private life.
I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently
had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One
of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in
his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in
bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me. I went very
little to school. I never went to the public schools, as my own children
later did, both at the "Cove School" at Oyster Bay and at the "Ford
School" in Washington. For a few months I attended Professor McMullen's
school in Twentieth Street near the house where I was born, but most of
the time I had tutors. As I have already said, my aunt taught me when
I was small. At one time we had a French governess, a loved and valued
"mam'selle," in the household.
When I was ten years old I made my first journey to Europe. My birthday
was spent in Cologne, and in order to give me a thoroughly "party"
feeling I remember that my mother put on full dress for my birthday
dinner. I do not think I gained anything from this particular trip
abroad. I cordially hated it, as did my younger brother and sister.
Practically all the enjoyment we had was in exploring any ruins or
mountains when we could get away from our elders, and in playing in
the different hotels. Our one desire was to get back to America, and
we regarded Europe with the most ignorant chauvinism and contempt. Four
years later, however, I made another journey to Europe, and was old
enough to enjoy it thoroughly and profit by it.
While still a small boy I began to take an interest in natural history.
I remember distinctly the first day that I started on my career as
zoologist. I was walking up Broadway, and as I passed the market to
which I used sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries I
suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me
with every possible feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it
was killed, and was informed in the harbor. I had already begun to read
some of Mayne Reid's books and other boys' books of adventure, and I
felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic
fashion before me. As long as that seal remained there I haunted the
neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall
that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth
with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully
made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to
write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This,
and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in
simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague
aspirations of in some way or another owning and preserving that seal,
but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however,
I did get the seal's skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started
what we ambitiously called the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History."
The collections were at first kept in my room, until a rebellion on the
part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities
of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase
in the back hall upstairs. It was the ordinary small boy's collection
of curios, quite incongruous and entirely valueless except from the
standpoint of the boy himself. My father and mother encouraged me warmly
in this, as they always did in anything that could give me wholesome
pleasure or help to develop me.
The adventure of the seal and the novels of Mayne Reid together
strengthened my instinctive interest in natural history. I was too young
to understand much of Mayne Reid, excepting the adventure part and the
natural history part--these enthralled me. But of course my reading was
not wholly confined to natural history. There was very little effort
made to compel me to read books, my father and mother having the good
sense not to try to get me to read anything I did not like, unless it
was in the way of study. I was given the chance to read books that they
thought I ought to read, but if I did not like them I was then given
some other good book that I did like. There were certain books that were
taboo. For instance, I was not allowed to read dime novels. I obtained
some surreptitiously and did read them, but I do not think that the
enjoyment compensated for the feeling of guilt. I was also forbidden to
read the only one of Ouida's books which I wished to read--"Under Two
Flags." I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy and fierce hope of
coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact all the parts
that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression
on me whatever. I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general
adventures.
I think there ought to be children's books. I think that the child will
like grown-up books also, and I do not believe a child's book is really
good unless grown-ups get something out of it. For instance, there is a
book I did not have when I was a child because it was not written. It is
Laura E. Richard's "Nursery Rhymes." My own children loved them dearly,
and their mother and I loved them almost equally; the delightfully
light-hearted "Man from New Mexico who Lost his Grandmother out in the
Snow," the adventures of "The Owl, the Eel, and the Warming-Pan," and
the extraordinary genealogy of the kangaroo whose "father was a whale
with a feather in his tail who lived in the Greenland sea," while "his
mother was a shark who kept very dark in the Gulf of Caribee."
As a small boy I had _Our Young Folks_, which I then firmly believed
to be the very best magazine in the world--a belief, I may add, which I
have kept to this day unchanged, for I seriously doubt if any magazine
for old or young has ever surpassed it. Both my wife and I have the
bound volumes of _Our Young Folks_ which we preserved from our youth. I
have tried to read again the Mayne Reid books which I so dearly loved as
a boy, only to find, alas! that it is impossible. But I really believe
that I enjoy going over _Our Young Folks_ now nearly as much as ever.
"Cast Away in the Cold," "Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead," "The
William Henry Letters," and a dozen others like them were first-class,
good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next
place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct. At the cost of
being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls'
stories--"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's
Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An
Old-Fashioned Girl."
This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling
in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne's stories, or Marryat's
"Midshipman Easy." I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as
a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not. For
instance, I never cared at all for the first part of "Robinson Crusoe"
(and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it
now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply
fascinated me. What I did like in the first part were the adventures
before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee
Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their
improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo
zoologist, I disliked the "Swiss Family Robinson" because of the wholly
impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they
ambled inland from the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of
adventures that most appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I
began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow's poem,
"The Saga of King Olaf," which absorbed me. This introduced me to
Scandinavian literature; and I have never lost my interest in and
affection for it.
Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by
Mayne Reid, about mammals, illustrated with pictures no more artistic
than but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography.
When my father found how deeply interested I was in this not very
accurate volume, he gave me a little book by J. G. Wood, the English
writer of popular books on natural history, and then a larger one of his
called "Homes Without Hands." Both of these were cherished possessions.
They were studied eagerly; and they finally descended to my children.
The "Homes Without Hands," by the way, grew to have an added association
in connection with a pedagogical failure on my part. In accordance
with what I believed was some kind of modern theory of making education
interesting and not letting it become a task, I endeavored to teach my
eldest small boy one or two of his letters from the title-page. As the
letter "H" appeared in the title an unusual number of times, I selected
that to begin on, my effort being to keep the small boy interested, not
to let him realize that he was learning a lesson, and to convince him
that he was merely having a good time. Whether it was the theory or my
method of applying it that was defective I do not know, but I certainly
absolutely eradicated from his brain any ability to learn what "H" was;
and long after he had learned all the other letters of the alphabet in
the old-fashioned way, he proved wholly unable to remember "H" under any
circumstances.
Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless
disadvantage in studying nature. I was very near-sighted, so that the
only things I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over.
When I was about thirteen I was allowed to take lessons in taxidermy
from a Mr. Bell, a tall, clean-shaven, white-haired old gentleman, as
straight as an Indian, who had been a companion of Audubon's. He had
a musty little shop, somewhat on the order of Mr. Venus's shop in "Our
Mutual Friend," a little shop in which he had done very valuable work
for science. This "vocational study," as I suppose it would be called
by modern educators, spurred and directed my interest in collecting
specimens for mounting and preservation. It was this summer that I got
my first gun, and it puzzled me to find that my companions seemed to see
things to shoot at which I could not see at all. One day they read aloud
an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then
realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to
read the sign but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to
my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles,
which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how
beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a
clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and
awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of
it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant
that I was not seeing. The recollection of this experience gives me
a keen sympathy with those who are trying in our public schools and
elsewhere to remove the physical causes of deficiency in children,
who are often unjustly blamed for being obstinate or unambitious, or
mentally stupid.
This same summer, too, I obtained various new books on mammals and
birds, including the publications of Spencer Baird, for instance, and
made an industrious book-study of the subject. I did not accomplish
much in outdoor study because I did not get spectacles until late in the
fall, a short time before I started with the rest of the family for a
second trip to Europe. We were living at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson. My
gun was a breech-loading, pin-fire double-barrel, of French manufacture.
It was an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy. There
was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be
opened with a brick without serious damage. When the cartridges stuck
they could be removed in the same fashion. If they were loaded, however,
the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially
unburned grains of powder more than once.
When I was fourteen years old, in the winter of '72 and '73, I visited
Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of
my education. We went to Egypt, journeyed up the Nile, traveled through
the Holy Land and part of Syria, visited Greece and Constantinople;
and then we children spent the summer in a German family in Dresden. My
first real collecting as a student of natural history was done in Egypt
during this journey. By this time I had a good working knowledge of
American bird life from the superficially scientific standpoint. I had
no knowledge of the ornithology of Egypt, but I picked up in Cairo
a book by an English clergyman, whose name I have now forgotten, who
described a trip up the Nile, and in an appendix to his volume gave an
account of his bird collection. I wish I could remember the name of the
author now, for I owe that book very much. Without it I should have been
collecting entirely in the dark, whereas with its aid I could generally
find out what the birds were. My first knowledge of Latin was obtained
by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I
collected and classified by the aid of such books as this one.
The birds I obtained up the Nile and in Palestine represented merely the
usual boy's collection. Some years afterward I gave them, together with
the other ornithological specimens I had gathered, to the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, and I think some of them also to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. I am told that the skins are to
be found yet in both places and in other public collections. I doubt
whether they have my original labels on them. With great pride the
directors of the "Roosevelt Museum," consisting of myself and the two
cousins aforesaid, had printed a set of Roosevelt Museum labels in pink
ink preliminary to what was regarded as my adventurous trip to Egypt.
This bird-collecting gave what was really the chief zest to my Nile
journey. I was old enough and had read enough to enjoy the temples and
the desert scenery and the general feeling of romance; but this in time
would have palled if I had not also had the serious work of collecting
and preparing my specimens. Doubtless the family had their moments of
suffering--especially on one occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted
from my taxidermist's outfit the old tooth-brush with which I put on
the skins the arsenical soap necessary for their preservation, partially
washed it, and left it with the rest of my wash kit for my own personal
use. I suppose that all growing boys tend to be grubby; but the
ornithological small boy, or indeed the boy with the taste for natural
history of any kind, is generally the very grubbiest of all. An added
element in my case was the fact that while in Egypt I suddenly started
to grow. As there were no tailors up the Nile, when I got back to Cairo
I needed a new outfit. But there was one suit of clothes too good to
throw away, which we kept for a "change," and which was known as my
"Smike suit," because it left my wrists and ankles as bare as those of
poor Smike himself.
When we reached Dresden we younger children were left to spend the
summer in the house of Herr Minckwitz, a member of either the Municipal
or the Saxon Government--I have forgotten which. It was hoped that in
this way we would acquire some knowledge of the German language and
literature. They were the very kindest family imaginable. I shall never
forget the unwearied patience of the two daughters. The father and
mother, and a shy, thin, student cousin who was living in the flat,
were no less kind. Whenever I could get out into the country I collected
specimens industriously and enlivened the household with hedge-hogs
and other small beasts and reptiles which persisted in escaping from
partially closed bureau drawers. The two sons were fascinating students
from the University of Leipsic, both of them belonging to dueling corps,
and much scarred in consequence. One, a famous swordsman, was called
_Der Rothe Herzog_ (the Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed _Herr
Nasehorn_ (Sir Rhinoceros) because the tip of his nose had been cut off
in a duel and sewn on again. I learned a good deal of German here,
in spite of myself, and above all I became fascinated with the
Nibelungenlied. German prose never became really easy to me in the sense
that French prose did, but for German poetry I cared as much as for
English poetry. Above all, I gained an impression of the German people
which I never got over. From that time to this it would have been quite
impossible to make me feel that the Germans were really foreigners.
The affection, the _Gemuthlichkeit_ (a quality which cannot be exactly
expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work, the
sense of duty, the delight in studying literature and science, the pride
in the new Germany, the more than kind and friendly interest in three
strange children--all these manifestations of the German character and
of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did
not in the least define at the time, but which is very vivid still forty
years later.
When I got back to America, at the age of fifteen, I began serious study
to enter Harvard under Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler
School in New York. I could not go to school because I knew so much less
than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others. In
science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German
and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and
mathematics. My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a
number of years before, and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer
home of his family also. Along with my college preparatory studies I
carried on the work of a practical student of natural history. I worked
with greater industry than either intelligence or success, and made very
few additions to the sum of human knowledge; but to this day certain
obscure ornithological publications may be found in which are recorded
such items as, for instance, that on one occasion a fish-crow, and on
another an Ipswich sparrow, were obtained by one Theodore Roosevelt,
Jr., at Oyster Bay, on the shore of Long Island Sound.
In the fall of 1876 I entered Harvard, graduating in 1880. I thoroughly
enjoyed Harvard, and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general
effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me
in after life. More than one of my own sons have already profited by
their friendship with certain of their masters in school or college. I
certainly profited by my friendship with one of my tutors, Mr. Cutler;
and in Harvard I owed much to the professor of English, Mr. A. S. Hill.
Doubtless through my own fault, I saw almost nothing of President Eliot
and very little of the professors. I ought to have gained much more than
I did gain from writing the themes and forensics. My failure to do
so may have been partly due to my taking no interest in the subjects.
Before I left Harvard I was already writing one or two chapters of a
book I afterwards published on the Naval War of 1812. Those chapters
were so dry that they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by
comparison. Still, they represented purpose and serious interest on
my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain
mark; and corrections of them by a skilled older man would have
impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention. But I was not
sufficiently developed to make myself take an intelligent interest in
some of the subjects assigned me--the character of the Gracchi, for
instance. A very clever and studious lad would no doubt have done so,
but I personally did not grow up to this particular subject until a good
many years later. The frigate and sloop actions between the American
and British sea-tigers of 1812 were much more within my grasp. I
worked drearily at the Gracchi because I had to; my conscientious
and much-to-be-pitied professor dragging me through the theme by main
strength, with my feet firmly planted in dull and totally idea-proof
resistance.
I had at the time no idea of going into public life, and I never studied
elocution or practiced debating. This was a loss to me in one way. In
another way it was not. Personally I have not the slightest sympathy
with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a
given proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to
whether those maintaining it believe in it or not. I know that under our
system this is necessary for lawyers, but I emphatically disbelieve in
it as regards general discussion of political, social, and industrial
matters. What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with
ardent convictions on the side of the right; not young men who can make
a good argument for either right or wrong as their interest bids them.
The present method of carrying on debates on such subjects as "Our
Colonial Policy," or "The Need of a Navy," or "The Proper Position of
the Courts in Constitutional Questions," encourages precisely the
wrong attitude among those who take part in them. There is no effort to
instill sincerity and intensity of conviction. On the contrary, the
net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have
nothing to do with their arguments. I am sorry I did not study elocution
in college; but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the
type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to
think rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which
he is assigned, without regard either to what his convictions are or to
what they ought to be.
I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the
first tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure
whether this means the tenth of the whole number that entered or of
those that graduated. I was given a Phi Beta Kappa "key." My chief
interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to
out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific
man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type--a man like Hart
Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day. My father had from the
earliest days instilled into me the knowledge that I was to work and to
make my own way in the world, and I had always supposed that this meant
that I must enter business. But in my freshman year (he died when I was
a sophomore) he told me that if I wished to become a scientific man I
could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely
desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it
a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up
such a career and do non-remunerative work of value _if I intended to do
the very best work there was in me_; but that I must not dream of taking
it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have
always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I
must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had
to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the
numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went
into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the
enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my
pleasures elsewhere.
After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work. I
did not, for the simple reason that at that time Harvard, and I suppose
our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal
naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated
biology as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope, a
science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute
forms of marine life, or else in section-cutting and the study of the
tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was,
no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then there was
a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German
universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been
carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study
had been erected into a fetish. There was a total failure to understand
the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists,
including what could be done by outdoor naturalists--the kind of work
which Hart Merriam and his assistants in the Biological Survey have
carried to such a high degree of perfection as regards North American
mammals. In the entirely proper desire to be thorough and to avoid
slipshod methods, the tendency was to treat as not serious, as
unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious
minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally
different direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a
microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly
I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless this meant
that I really did not have the intense devotion to science which I
thought I had; for, if I had possessed such devotion, I would
have carved out a career for myself somehow without regard to
discouragements.
As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught
the _laissez-faire_ doctrines--one of them being free trade--then
accepted as canonical. Most American boys of my age were taught both by
their surroundings and by their studies certain principles which were
very valuable from the standpoint of National interest, and certain
others which were very much the reverse. The political economists were
not especially to blame for this; it was the general attitude of the
writers who wrote for us of that generation. Take my beloved _Our Young
Folks_, the magazine of which I have already spoken, and which taught
me much more than any of my text-books. Everything in this magazine
instilled the individual virtues, and the necessity of character as the
chief factor in any man's success--a teaching in which I now believe as
sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will
never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the
right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of
insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of
the rights of others. All this individual morality I was taught by the
books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was
almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact
that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility,
there is a collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Croly's
"Promise of American Life" and Walter E. Weyl's "New Democracy" would
generally at that time have been treated either as unintelligible or
else as pure heresy.
The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It
was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued
with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of
himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that
socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay
in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his
dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the
unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others
in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and
excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that
this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence
upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime
necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and
my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which
by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would
finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps
alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual
no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But
such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence
in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as
destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism
of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more
than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own
home; but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted
to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans
to which I belonged.