The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (19 page)

O
N 23
F
EBRUARY 1878
, his first night back at Harvard after the funeral, Theodore noted casually: “I am left about $8000 a year: comfortable though not rich.” No doubt, as he penned these words, his mind harked back to the conversation he had had with Theodore Senior the previous summer, when he had been promised enough
money to subsidize his career as a natural historian. Now here it was. It had arrived shockingly soon, but his duty was clear. Grief or no grief, he must balance the numerator of independence with the denominator of work. With remarkable self-discipline, given the hysteria of his private emotions, he at once resumed his studies, and within a week had scored 90 percent in two semiannual examinations. Invitations poured in from sympathetic friends in Boston, but he would accept none until May, and kept “grinding like a Trojan” for the rest of his sophomore year. At the same time he continued faithfully to exercise and teach in Sunday school, obedient to a precept of his father’s, which he had never forgotten: “Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.”
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The excellence of his results in the annual examinations was achieved at much physical cost to himself. He was “unwell and feverish” during the latter part of May, and blamed his poor showing in French on “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma.”
⁵⁸
The ordeal was over at last on 5 June. Theodore caught the afternoon express to New York, and next morning began what he hoped would be a summer of “nude happiness … among the wilds of Oyster Bay.”
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N
UDE THE SUMMER
certainly was—at least in the restricted Victorian sense of the term. Theodore was soon “mahogany from the waist up, thanks to hours of bare-chested rowing.” But happiness was long kept at bay by unavoidable associations between Tranquillity and Theodore Senior. In every idle moment the skinny student might see the big, bearded man laughing, praying, snoozing in the shade, jumping into his trap at the station and driving off at a rattling pace, his white linen duster bagging behind him like a balloon. “Oh Father, how bitterly I miss you and long for you!”
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Just as he had distracted himself in college with work, Theodore now whipped himself into a frenzy of physical activity. Throughout July he rowed and portaged such exhausting distances, over such dreary wastes of water and mud-flats, that just to read his diary is to tire. On one occasion he rowed clear across Long Island Sound to Rye Beach, a total of over twenty-five miles in a single day. Rowing,
as opposed to the more leisurely sport of sailing, was deeply satisfying to him. As Corinne remarked, “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back, the actual sense of meeting the wave close to.” Yet he loved riding even more, and spurred his horse Lightfoot to prodigious feats of endurance, including one twenty-mile gallop. In between rows and rides, Theodore would burn off his excess energy by running at speed through the woods, boxing and wrestling with Elliott, hiking, hunting, and swimming. His diary constantly exults in physical achievement, and never betrays fear that he might be overtaxing his strength. When forced to record an attack of
cholera morbus
in early August, he precedes it with the phrase, “Funnily enough …”
⁶¹

Evidence that his heart, if not his body, was repairing itself came on 9 August. “It being Edith Carow’s 17th birthday, I sent her a
bonbonièrre.”
The young lady made her annual appearance at Oyster Bay a week later, and Theodore paid her his annual attentions, rowing her to Lloyds Neck, lunching out at Yellowbanks, and picking water lilies with her in Coldspring Harbor. Without reading more into the diary than is actually there, it is possible to discern the mounting excitement he felt in her proximity. On 22 August he let off steam by thundering off on a wild ride “that I am afraid … may have injured my horse.” Later the same day Edith joined him for a sailing trip, and in the evening they went to a family party together. “Afterwards,” his diary entry concludes, “Edith and I went up to the summer house.”
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With this enigmatic remark, a curtain of blank paper descends, and Edith is not mentioned again for months. Whatever happened in the summerhouse, it seems to have kindled some sort of rage in Theodore. Only two days later he was bothered, while riding, by a neighbor’s dog; drawing his revolver, he shot it dead, “rolling it over very neatly as it ran alongside the horse.”
⁶³
On a cruise up Long Island Sound with some male cousins, he blazed away with the same gun at anything he saw in the water, “from bottles or buoys to sharks and porpoises.”
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With the first chill of fall in the air, Theodore’s thoughts turned again to Harvard, and to his future. The uncertainty he had felt ever since committing himself to a scientific career was beginning
to worry him, so much so he turned to an uncle for reassurance. But the old gentleman, while sympathetic, was unhelpful, and Theodore’s bewilderment increased. “I have absolutely no idea what I should do when I leave college,” he wrote in despair. “Oh Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!”
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A
S IF TO SEEK REFUGE
from his doubts, he decided to spend the last few weeks of his vacation in the wilds of Aroostook County, in northern Maine. Arthur Cutler had hunted in the area—one of the last stands of virgin forest in the Northeast—and had suggested that Theodore might like to do the same. There was a backwoodsman there, said Cutler, named Bill Sewall; he kept open house for hunters, and was emphatically “a man to know.” Huge, bearded, and full of lust for life, Sewall loved to shout poetry as he fought his canoe through white water, or slammed his ax into shuddering pine trees. No doubt Cutler sensed that this magnificent specimen of manhood might satisfy Theodore’s cravings for a father figure. And since Sewall was humbly born, he might rub off some of the boy’s veneer of snobbism before it toughened into impenetrable bark.

Island Falls, where Sewall had his headquarters, was so remote from New York City that Theodore took two full days to get there, completing the last thirty-six miles in a buckboard. Two cousins, Emlen and West Roosevelt, and a Doctor W. Thompson accompanied him. The strain of the journey, coming on top of his frenetic summer, caused him to suffer a bad attack of asthma, and when he arrived at Sewall’s homestead, late on the evening of 7 September, he was wheezing. Sewall’s first impression of him was “a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart.”

Doctor Thompson took the backwoodsman aside. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.” Sewall agreed that Theodore looked “mighty pindlin’,” but soon found out that his appearance was deceptive.
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Theodore, for his part, found Sewall to be a figure straight out of
The Saga of King Olaf
. The backwoodsman agreed. “I don’t know but what my ancestors
were
vikings.”
⁶⁸

Tramping through the woods together, they were an oddly matched yet complementary pair: Sewall slow and purposeful, advancing with bearlike tread; Theodore wiry and nervous, cocking his gun at any hint of movement in the trees, stopping every now and again to pick up bugs. Since both men loved epic poetry, and could recite it by the yard, the squirrels of Aroostook County were entertained to many ringing declamations, including Sewall’s favorite lines:

The words may have been familiar to Theodore, yet falling from the lips of a man whose father had been a carpenter and whose mother
a seamstress, they took on new, defiantly democratic overtones, which were not lost on the scion of the Roosevelts.
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O
N 27
S
EPTEMBER 1878
, Theodore was welcomed back to Cambridge by his classmates, and to his surprise “was offered the Porcellian.” Membership in this club was the highest social honor Harvard could bestow, and he was acutely embarrassed to refuse it. His scruples had nothing to do with the possible disapproval of a Bill Sewall. It was just that he had already been offered the A.D., and had accepted that instead.
⁷¹
Greatly regretting his hastiness, for he wished very much to be “a Porc man,” he turned to the more important business of choosing a schedule for his junior year.

It proved to be an ambitious one, covering nine subjects and at least twenty hours a week of classroom and laboratory work. His electives were once again German and two natural history courses (zoology and geology), plus Italian and philosophy. Those prescribed were themes, forensics, logic, and metaphysics. In this formidable curriculum he was to score the best marks of his academic career, averaging 87 and standing thirteenth in a class of 166.
⁷²
In two of his electives—philosophy and natural history—he stood first.
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No sooner had Theodore settled down to his familiar routine of recitations, study, exercise, and “sprees” than the Porcellian once more opened its doors to him. Early in October there happened to be a drunken quarrel in the Yard, during which a Porc man told an A.D. man that Teddy Roosevelt, given the chance, would have chosen
his
club first. When the taunt became public, the A.D. announced that as its new member had not yet signed in, he was free to reconsider his acceptance. “Of course by this arrangement I
have
to hurt somebody’s feelings,” Theodore wrote agitatedly in his diary. “… I have rarely felt as badly as I have during the last 24 hours; it is terribly hard to know what the honorable thing is to do.” He decided that honor lay in the direction of the more prestigious club, and accepted the Porc’s offer on 6 October. “I am delighted to be in,” he told Bamie. “… There is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch-room &c, and my best friends are in it.”
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