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Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
Chapter I. The Young Fighter
by Howland, Harold
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There is a line of Browning's that should stand as epitaph for
Theodore Roosevelt: "I was ever a fighter." That was the essence
of the man, that the keynote of his career. He met everything in
life with a challenge. If it was righteous, he fought for it; if
it was evil, he hurled the full weight of his finality against
it. He never capitulated, never sidestepped, never fought foul.
He carried the fight to the enemy.
His first fight was for health and bodily vigor. It began, at the
age of nine. Physically he was a weakling, his thin and
ill-developed body racked with asthma. But it was only the
physical power that was wanting, never the intellectual or the
spiritual. He owed to his father, the first Theodore, the wise
counsel that launched him on his determined contest against ill
health. On the third floor of the house on East Twentieth Street
in New York where he was born, October 27, 1858, his father had
constructed an outdoor gymnasium, fitted with all the usual
paraphernalia. It was an impressive moment, Roosevelt used to say
in later years, when his father first led him into that gymnasium
and said to him, "Theodore, you have the brains, but brains are
of comparatively little use without the body; you have got to
make your body, and it lies with you to make it. It's dull, hard
work, but you can do it." The boy knew that his father was right;
and he set those white, powerful teeth of his and took up the
drudgery of daily, monotonous exercise with bars and rings and
weights. "I can see him now," says his sister, "faithfully going
through various exercises, at different times of the day, to
broaden the chest narrowed by this terrible shortness of breath,
to make the limbs and back strong, and able to bear the weight of
what was coming to him later in life."
All through his boyhood the young Theodore Roosevelt kept up his
fight for strength. He was too delicate to attend school, and was
taught by private tutors. He spent many of his summers, and
sometimes some of the winter months, in the woods of Maine. These
outings he thoroughly enjoyed, but it is certain that the main
motive which sent him into the rough life of the woods to hunt
and tramp, to paddle and row and swing an axe, was the obstinate
determination to make himself physically fit.
His fight for bodily power went on through his college course at
Harvard and during the years that he spent in ranch life in the
West. He was always intensely interested in boxing, although he
was never of anything like championship caliber in the ring. His
first impulse to learn to defend himself with his hands had a
characteristic birth.
During one of his periodical attacks of asthma he was sent alone
to Moosehead Lake in Maine. On the stagecoach that took him the
last stage of the journey he met two boys of about his own age.
They quickly found, he says, in his "Autobiography", that he was
"a foreordained and predestined victim" for their rough teasing,
and they "industriously proceeded to make life miserable" for
their fellow traveler. At last young Roosevelt could endure their
persecutions no loner, and tried to fight. Great was his
discomfiture when he discovered that either of them alone could
handle him "with easy contempt." They hurt him little, but, what
was doubtless far more humiliating, they prevented him from doing
any damage whatever in return.
The experience taught the boy, better than any good advice could
have done, that he must learn to defend himself. Since he had
little natural prowess, he realized that he must supply its place
by training. He secured his father's approval for a course of
boxing lessons, upon which he entered at once. He has described
himself as a "painfully slow and awkward pupil," who worked for
two or three years before he made any perceptible progress.
In college Roosevelt kept at boxing practice. Even in those days
no antagonist, no matter how much his superior, ever made him
"quit." In his ranching days, that training with his fists stood
him in good stead. Those were still primitive days out in the
Dakotas, though now, as Roosevelt has said, that land of the West
has "'gone, gone with the lost Atlantis,' gone to the isle of
ghosts and of strange dead memories." A man needed to be able to
take care of himself in that Wild West then. Roosevelt had many
stirring experiences but only one that he called "serious
trouble."
He was out after lost horses and came to a primitive little
hotel, consisting of a bar-room, a dining-room, a lean-to
kitchen, and above a loft with fifteen or twenty beds in it. When
he entered the bar-room late in the evening--it was a cold night
and there was nowhere else to go--a would-be "bad man," with a
cocked revolver in each hand, was striding up and down the floor,
talking with crude profanity. There were several bullet holes in
the clock face, at which he had evidently been shooting. This
bully greeted the newcomer as "Four Eyes," in reference to his
spectacles, and announced, "Four Eyes is going to treat."
Roosevelt joined in the laugh that followed and sat down behind
the stove, thinking to escape notice. But the "bad man" followed
him, and in spite of Roosevelt's attempt to pass the matter over
as a joke, stood over him, with a gun in each hand and using the
foulest language. "He was foolish," said Roosevelt, in describing
the incident, "to stand so near, and moreover, his heels were
closer together, so that his position was unstable." When he
repeated his demand that Four Eyes should treat, Roosevelt rose
as if to comply. As he rose he struck quick and hard with his
right fist just to the left side of the point of the jaw, and, as
he straightened up hit with his left, and again with his right.
The bully's guns went off, whether intentionally or involuntarily
no one ever knew. His head struck the corner of the bar as he
fell, and he lay senseless. "When my assailant came to," said
Roosevelt, "he went down to the station and left on a freight."
It was eminently characteristic of Roosevelt that he tried his
best to avoid trouble, but that, when he could not avoid it
honorably, he took care to make it "serious trouble" for the
other fellow.
Even after he became President, Roosevelt liked to box, until an
accident, of which for many years only his intimate friends were
aware, convinced him of the unwisdom of the game for a man of his
age and optical disabilities. A young artillery captain, with
whom he was boxing in the White House, cross-countered him on the
left eye, and the blow broke the little blood-vessels. Ever
afterward, the sight of that eye was dim; and, as he said, "if it
had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to
shoot." To "a mighty hunter before the Lord" like Theodore
Roosevelt, such a result would have been a cardinal calamity.
By the time his experiences in the West were over, Roosevelt's
fight for health had achieved its purpose. Bill Sewall, the
woodsman who had introduced the young Roosevelt to the life of
the out-of-doors in Maine, and who afterward went out West with
him to take up the cattle business, offers this testimony: "He
went to Dakota a frail young man, suffering from asthma and
stomach trouble. When he got back into the world again, he was as
husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn't dependent on
his arms for his livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty
pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit."
This battle won by the force of sheer determination, the young
Roosevelt never ceased fighting. He knew that the man who
neglects exercise and training, no matter how perfect his
physical trim, is certain to "go back." One day many years
afterward on Twenty-third Street, on the way back from an Outlook
editorial luncheon, I ran against his shoulder, as one often will
with a companion on crowded city streets, and felt as if it were
a massive oak tree into which I had bumped. Roosevelt the grown
man of hardened physique was certainly a transformation from that
"reed shaken with the wind" of his boyhood days.
When Theodore Roosevelt left Harvard in 1880, he plunged promptly
into a new fight--in the political arena. He had no need to earn
his living; his father had left him enough money to take care of
that. But he had no intention or desire to live a life of
leisure. He always believed that the first duty of a man was to
"pull his own weight in the boat"; and his irrepressible energy
demanded an outlet in hard, constructive work. So he took to
politics, and as a good Republican ("at that day" he said, "a
young man of my bringing up and convictions, could only join the
Republican party") he knocked at the door of the Twenty-first
District Republican Association in the city of New York. His
friends among the New Yorkers of cultivated taste and comfortable
life disapproved of his desire to enter this new environment.
They told him that politics were "low"; that the political
organizations were not run by "gentlemen," and that he would find
there saloonkeepers, horse-car conductors, and similar persons,
whose methods he would find rough and coarse and unpleasant.
Roosevelt merely replied that, if this were the case, it was
those men and not his "silk-stocking" friends who constituted the
governing class--and that he intended to be one of the governing
class himself. If he could not hold his own with those who were
really in practical politics, he supposed he would have to quit;
but he did not intend to quit without making the experiment.
At every step in his career Theodore Roosevelt made friends. He
made them not "unadvisedly or lightly" but with the directness,
the warmth, and the permanence that were inseparable from the
Roosevelt character. One such friend he acquired at this stage of
his progress. In that District Association, from which his
friends had warned him away, he found a young Irishman who had
been a gang leader in the rough-and-tumble politics of the East
Side. Driven by the winter wind of man's ingratitude from Tammany
Hall into the ranks of the opposite party, Joe Murray was at this
time one of the lesser captains in "the Twenty-first" Roosevelt
soon came to like him. He was "by nature as straight a man, as
fearless, and as stanchly loyal," said Roosevelt, "as any one
whom I have ever met, a man to be trusted in any position
demanding courage, integrity, and good faith." The liking was
returned by the eager and belligerent young Irishman, though he
has confessed that he was first led to consider Roosevelt as a
political ally from the point of view of his advantages as a
vote-getter.
The year after Roosevelt joined "the governing class" in Morton
Hall, "a large barn-like room over a saloon," with furniture "of
the canonical kind; dingy benches, spittoons, a dais at one end
with a table and chair, and a stout pitcher for iced water, and
on the walls pictures of General Grant, and of Levi P. Morton,"
Joe Murray was engaged in a conflict with "the boss" and wanted a
candidate of his own for the Assembly. He picked out Roosevelt,
because he thought that with him he would be most likely to win.
Win they did; the nomination was snatched away from the boss's
man, and election followed. The defeated boss good-humoredly
turned in to help elect the young silk-stocking who had been the
instrument of his discomfiture.
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