Class _jE_££L£ 
 
 Book 
 
 Copyright N° 
 
 COI'YKIGIIT DEPOSIT. 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 AS AN UNDERGRADUATE & & & 
 
 BY DONALD WILHELM j& j& j& j& ,& j& 
 
 BOSTON JOHN W. LUCE 
 AND COMPANY, MCMX 
 
Copyright, 1910, 
 
 by L. E. Bassett 
 
 Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 
 
 •CI.A268974 
 
Respectfully Dedicated 
 
 to 
 
 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, 
 
 A Classmate of 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 I take this opportunity to express my 
 gratitude to Mr. Roosevelt for the privilege 
 of reprinting such of his essays and other 
 compositions as appear in this book. Al- 
 though he has not read my manuscript, several 
 of his college associates and classmates have 
 done so, and to them, to the editors of the 
 Harvard "Graduates' Magazine," "Crimson," 
 and "Advocate," and to all the other Har- 
 vard men who have assisted mo, I express my 
 thanks. The hearty interest they have shown 
 in the vigorous little man who trod their 
 path for a time, has been the most pleasing 
 consideration in following him from the gate- 
 way to undergraduate life down the bright 
 lane to the portal of the bigger world. 
 
 DONALD WILHELM. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE. 
 
 AN AUTUMN wind rouses and swirls 
 the dust of the unpaved triangle 
 called Harvard Square ; on two sides of 
 it standing close to one another are stores, 
 on the remaining and longest side a three 
 rail wooden fence circles a group of quiet 
 buildings nestled among the elms. The 
 tinkling bell of an approaching horse car 
 is heard and soon the car itself bumps its way 
 around the curve from the direction of Boston. 
 A thin-chested, nervous, spectacled little fel- 
 low swings himself from the rear platform, 
 stands for a moment in the eddying dust, then 
 turns about, passes through an opening in the 
 low fence, thence between two of th old build- 
 ings and finds himself in a rect gle over- 
 arched with entwining boughs and bounded by 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 dignified college buildings. To one of these 
 squarely in the middle of the side opposite to 
 him lead all the gravel paths, and to it ad- 
 vances our young freshman. 
 
 Three years before at a family luncheon a 
 guest had noticed near one end of the table 
 this same lad, with his spectacles and a mouth 
 like a band of blued steel. Round his plate 
 were scattered dead butterflies and beetles, 
 which he studied while he ate, as if alone by 
 a camp fire in some deep forest. Such power 
 of concentration in a boy the guest had never 
 seen. She inquired who that odd little fellow 
 might be, and was told in a voice that seemed 
 softened by respect, "Little Theodore Roose- 
 velt, the brightest lad of all the family." 
 
 For generations strong ancestors had been 
 shaping the character of this boy as in the 
 years long before they had struggled in the 
 dykes of Holland and fought among the crags 
 of Scotland. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, 
 a bearded man of Dutch descent had married 
 Martha Bulloch of Georgia, a beautiful woman 
 of the languorous southern type. 
 
 When this son Theodore was born the tense 
 spirit of war was already in the air and two 
 years later the guns at Sumter were to crash. 
 
ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 With wealth and influence his father supported 
 the national government with all his might; 
 his mother sympathized with her two brothers, 
 one serving the Confederacy abroad, the other 
 destined to give the command that made the 
 last gun flicker at the approaching Kearsarge 
 from the battered side of the Alabama. From 
 his father the child inherited an intense ad- 
 miration for manliness, his homely vigor of 
 mind and of body; from his mother a warm- 
 hearted, impulsive sincerity. 
 
 Now, a lad of eighteen, he was trudging out 
 from the shelter of home and kin into the 
 realm of strange faces and new surroundings. 
 Up the stone steps of the administrative build- 
 ing he climbed to an unpretentious college 
 room and there leaned low over a desk so that 
 he could see as he registered his name in large 
 boyish writing. Into the room his classmates, 
 over two hundred of them, came, or chatted 
 in groups in the hall. One would not have 
 chosen him to excel in anything. Most of 
 them were physically stronger than he — in 
 eyesight, muscle, and endurance. Some had 
 commanding personalities and the golden gift 
 of making friends. Some had noteworthy an- 
 cestors. One, taller and stroriger than he, was 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 to batter him in a boxing match, and years 
 later cross his path like a defiant ship out of 
 the night, and disappear; another, whose elec- 
 tion to the captaincy of the freshman crew 
 he opposed, was to serve him in a high office 
 of the nation; another, under whom he was to 
 serve on the editorial board of the "Harvard 
 Advocate," was to edit a history of the nation. 
 All looked out on a college of equal oppor- 
 tunities. Compared with the Harvard of to- 
 day, it was a small college content in its tradi- 
 tions and its neighborly solidarity; there were 
 only eight hundred students, now there are 
 twenty-three hundred. The social center of 
 this little community, where all but few of 
 the undergraduates lived, was the college Yard, 
 the quadrangle with its covering of elms. 
 There was no "Union" with its newspapers 
 and easy chairs, no pretentious clubs and but 
 one private dormitory. In the spring under 
 the trees in the Yard the undergraduates lolled 
 on pillows tossed from nearby rooms, and in 
 classes — for the elective system was just com- 
 ing into effect, — round firesides, and in ath- 
 letics, they mingled so frequently that many 
 men knew all their classmates. They formed 
 a cordon of on-lookers, the only fence, while 
 
 4 
 
ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE 
 
 watching the bright-clad athletes on Jarvis 
 Field. They applauded contestants in the old 
 gymnasium, now but an alcove in a gigantic 
 system of museums, or fought for the honor 
 of their class. On these contests the under- 
 graduate publications — the "Crimson, the 
 "Advocate," and the "Lampoon," just coming 
 into existence-— commented with the intimate 
 spirit of village weekly papers ; indeed, to this 
 neighborly feeling many of the instructors 
 and all of the undergraduates contributed; 
 the graduate departments were not prominent, 
 there were few men on the outskirts of real 
 college life. In spirit, then, in housing and in 
 government the busy center of learning of to- 
 day is as different from the little village of 
 thirty years ago as the tripling of numbers 
 naturally makes it. 
 
 In this little community every element of 
 Roosevelt's personality was to get new 
 strength. In a different college, one may say, 
 he would have developed differently; another 
 may say there never was a man so fixed in his 
 own course in life, but it is reasonably sure 
 that not the least element in his development 
 was the influence of the great wealth of per- 
 sonality Harvard College was then harboring 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 in its faculty and in the great men who met in 
 its shades. As a disputatious youth who ar- 
 gued with his instructors in class, who sought 
 out their friendship, and who mingled with 
 great men in club house and in chapter room, 
 Roosevelt must have felt their influence and 
 known their example. His college friends 
 agree that never have they known a man who 
 has retained the characteristics of his youth 
 so faithfully as Roosevelt has retained them. 
 His undergraduate life, down to its smallest 
 details, prefigured the Roosevelt of today. 
 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 HIS VARIETY OF INTERESTS. 
 
 ROOSEVELT was one of those rare 
 men who can stand apart and survey 
 their own lives and comprehend their 
 own needs. He was not content to tramp 
 along with other undergraduates, to learn 
 merely what they learned, but he must desert 
 into new paths and master the smallest de- 
 tails of his way. He has confessed that one 
 reason why he has succeeded is because he 
 has consciously put himself in the way of 
 learning new things and of getting new ex- 
 perience. His unflagging spirit of inquiry, his 
 precocious desire to participate in national 
 politics and to have a voice in whatever took 
 place about him, was the characteristic of an 
 unusual youth ; although there have been some 
 undergraduates at Harvard more popular, there 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 have been few whose social and practical in- 
 terests were so judiciously apportioned. 
 
 Only in his freshman year did he hold him- 
 self aloof from activities outside the pale of 
 his college work. He was one of eight young 
 men, all destined for prominence in college 
 and in after life, who, at the opening of college 
 went apart from the other students at Memor- 
 ial Hall to organize a dining club in a house 
 a short distance from the Yard, first at Mrs. 
 Morgan's on Brattle street, and for the last 
 three years, at Mrs. Wilson's on Mt. Auburn 
 street. Here, round an unpretentious table, in 
 a bare little room, he was to cherish contented- 
 ly seven of his most intimate friends. He never 
 dined regularly at Memorial Hall. He was 
 not elected a member of the Kappa Nu, the 
 only freshman society, nor was he an officer 
 in his freshman class. Only once does he 
 stand out in its activities; then, in a meeting 
 called to elect a new captain of the freshman 
 crew, Robert Bacon, he climbed on a chair and 
 in his first stump speech quoted Lincoln's 
 time worn but sound aphorism "that it is 
 not best to swap horses when crossing a 
 stream." 
 
 The "society fever" at Harvard was not as 
 
 8 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 fervent as at many colleges. The clubs had 
 no conspicuous badges, nor costly structures 
 with lofty windows and iron-barred doors. 
 The members were happy with simple insignia 
 hung in their rooms and capacious quarters 
 where good fellowship might rule. The walls 
 of a club typical of those to which Roosevelt 
 belonged were adorned with engravings and 
 paintings of historic and classic worth. In 
 one corner stood a piano invitingly open with 
 a varied collection of books shelved nearby; 
 hung in a little alcove waiting to be used were 
 foils and fencing masks, boxing gloves and 
 rifles, and a roomy stage for the presentation 
 of student theatricals filled one end of the 
 room. 
 
 After the election of new members the club 
 marched to the middle of the Yard and there, 
 round a leader, they spelled in unison the 
 names of the chosen men. Time after time 
 Roosevelt's name was sent floating up among 
 the elms, and roommates, sitting upright in bed, 
 scrambled to the open window, and, when the 
 last cheer had died away into the night, often 
 fell to talking about this slender little man. 
 Visitors to Roosevelt's rooms in a house at 
 1 6 Winthrop street, where he lived alone dur- 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ing his entire college course, found scattered 
 among college pennants, hunting trophies, and 
 pictures of trap and chase the insignia of a 
 dozen organizations, from the bronze plate of 
 a rowing club to the ribbons of the Hasty 
 Pudding. 
 
 The Hasty Pudding Club was one of the 
 most prized of those devoted primarily to 
 good fellowship. 
 
 To this were usually graduated in their sen- 
 ior year the members of the Institute of 1770, 
 the oldest of the societies at Harvard. Roose- 
 velt was among the first fifteen from his class 
 to be chosen for the Institute, the fifth to be 
 chosen for the Pudding and later its treasurer. 
 He was, moreover, a member of the Porcel- 
 lian, a discriminating and expensive organiza- 
 tion, of the Alpha Delta Phi, and an honorary 
 member of the Glee Club. There were other 
 purely social organizations at Harvard quite 
 as prominent, but, in a general sense, when he 
 entered the life of one he entered the life of 
 all. 
 
 Another evidence that at the end of four 
 years of college he was one of the most popu- 
 lar men in his class is that he was one of six 
 men nominated by his class for second mar- 
 
 10 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 shal and though failing of an election to 
 that position was chosen a member of the 
 Class Day Committee, and an efficient member 
 he proved to be. "At about quarter to seven," 
 the Crimson said, the senior class was called 
 to order and "nominations were made for chair- 
 man of the Class Day Committee. After sev- 
 eral nominations and withdrawals, Messrs. 
 Woodbury and Morgan were left, and Mr. 
 Woodbury was elected. The election was 
 made unanimous. The leading candidates for 
 the second place on this committee were 
 Messrs. Bement and Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt 
 was elected." 
 
 In recognition of excellent scholarship 
 Roosevelt was chosen in his senior year a 
 member of the honorary society of Phi Beta 
 Kappa. Oliver Wendell Holmes presided over 
 the Harvard Chapter and Rev. Edward Everett 
 Hale and Rev. Phillips Brooks often attended 
 its meetings. These men were also members 
 of the Alpha Delta Phi, and Roosevelt met 
 them repeatedly. He also met the historians, 
 George Bancroft and Charles Francis Adams 
 and the poet, James Russell Lowell, then a 
 professor in the college, and innumerable other 
 eminent men who were graduate members of 
 
 ii 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 the Hasty Pudding Club and returned for its 
 annual celebrations each year, doubtless to 
 mingle with the undergraduates as their 
 guests. 
 
 This association with men of distinction is 
 perhaps one of the best yet least-reckoned bene- 
 fits of such social organizations as those 
 Roosevelt belonged to. He had every oppor- 
 tunity to estimate his own capabilities, not 
 only by personal acquaintance with them but 
 by intimate stories told at club dinners and in 
 the confiding air of the chapter room of great 
 men gone before. 
 
 From such social organizations Roosevelt 
 knew he derived immense good, but there were 
 others wholly different from which he might 
 also profit. Of such was the Rifle Club. In 
 competitions held on the grounds of the Wa- 
 tertown Arsenal Roosevelt was never success- 
 ful nevertheless he learned substantially all 
 that was necessary, and when the Spanish War 
 broke out he could take his place at the head 
 of his Rough Riders confident that he could 
 use a rifle efficiently if he was called upon to 
 do so. 
 
 He joined the Art Club, over which Profes- 
 sor Charles Eliot Norton presided, and was 
 
 12 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 soon a member of the Natural History Society, 
 flourishing under the presidency of that re- 
 markable man, Professor Nathaniel Southgate 
 Shaler. In the absence of Professor Shaler, 
 Roosevelt himself presided, for he was elected 
 undergraduate vice-president in his junior year. 
 As a boy he was intensely interested in natural 
 history and his constant enthusiasm was one 
 of the causes of Professor Shaler showing such 
 a distinct fondness for him. When the great 
 teacher was told how a bag of lobsters which 
 Roosevelt was bringing from the Boston 
 wharves for dissection escaped confinement 
 and went crawling in all directions over the 
 floor of a crowded street car, he laughingly 
 slapped his thigh and told the story over time 
 and again at a meeting of the faculty the fol- 
 lowing day. 
 
 Professor Shaler also heard how, late on a 
 rainy night four students who lived in the 
 same house with Roosevelt heard the frantic 
 neighs of a horse in a neighboring barn. They 
 called to one another through the dark, donned 
 their clothes and gingerly went forth to ex- 
 plore. In the barn feverishly striving to ex- 
 tricate the horse's leg from a hole in the side 
 
 13 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 of the stall, they found Roosevelt, half- 
 clothed, hatless, even without his spectacles. 
 
 About a year before Roosevelt was elected 
 vice-president of the Natural History Society, 
 the Crimson said that the "Society have on 
 foot a project to utilize the valuable dredging 
 apparatus in the possession of the University. 
 The proposed plan is, sometime during the 
 spring to hire a steam tug, and, during a two 
 days' cruise in Massachusetts Bay, to gain a 
 practical knowledge of sea dredging." This 
 project was never accomplished. What in- 
 fluence it had on Roosevelt's election can only 
 be conjectured but it is safe to presume that he 
 was not indifferent to any such plan. 
 
 In his junior year Roosevelt organized, we 
 are told, a club which is recalled by its mem- 
 bers as one of the bright spots in their under- 
 graduate life. This was the Finance Club. 
 It was founded as the outgrowth of interest 
 in a course given by Professor Dunbar on the 
 financial history of the United States, to make 
 a study of the currency systems of other na- 
 tions, particularly of England. For a time 
 Roosevelt presided and the extraordinary 
 swath the club cut in the field of undergrad- 
 uate activities was in great measure due to his 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 energy. The Advocate, in editorials of differ- 
 ent date repeatedly praised the organization: 
 
 "The Finance Club enters the field for the 
 first time," it said. "One lecture which proved 
 both instructing and instructive has already 
 been given under its auspices. Two more are 
 to follow; the first, by Professor Sumner of 
 Yale on 'The Relation of Legislation to 
 Money;' and the second by Professor Walker 
 of Yale on 'The Principles of Taxation.' "... 
 
 "The enterprise of the Finance Club met with 
 deserved success in the lecture of Professor 
 Sumner . . . The Theatre was well filled, a 
 larger body of students beirig present than 
 we have seen on such an occasion in Sanders 
 for years." . . . 
 
 "The club is to be congratulated on the suc- 
 cess of its efforts to excite interest in domestic 
 subjects. Organized only in December it has 
 already had five papers read before it by mem- 
 bers and has given four public lectures." . . . 
 
 A year later: 
 
 "The enterprise of the Finance Club remains 
 
 15 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 unabated. Already its members are arranging 
 for a course of lectures for next year. They 
 have secured such eminent lecturers as Gen- 
 eral Garfield and Abram S. Hewitt, and are in 
 correspondence with Secretary Schurz." 
 
 Another club the results from which were 
 to be quite as useful to Roosevelt in future 
 life was named the "O. K.," a paper on the 
 meaning of its name being read by each candi- 
 date at the initiation supper. 
 
 In it a discussion of the authorship of the 
 "Letters of Junius" occupied three of the 
 monthly meetings. When Roosevelt's turn 
 came to read a paper, his subject was "The 
 Machine of Politics." The tenor of the club 
 is typified by these subjects, all of literary 
 or of political significance. 
 
 Just before the Presidential election of 1880 
 intense party feeling was aroused among the 
 students and an informal vote, was suggested, 
 probably by Roosevelt, as he was put in 
 charge of the polls. The candidates voted for 
 were Grant, Sherman, Blaine, Bayard and 
 others of less importance. His classmates 
 say that Roosevelt voted for Senator Bayard, 
 
 16 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 a democrat. Only four years later, after two 
 years of brilliant effort in the New York Leg- 
 islature, he was forced to arrive at a decision 
 bound to affect his whole future. On one side 
 he found the Democratic party, with George 
 William Curtis, Secretary Schurz, and most of 
 the men on whom he put strongest reliance, 
 on the other side a Republican party appar- 
 ently on the wane. As quick of decision as 
 Roosevelt is it took him several weeks of de- 
 liberation on his western ranch before he de- 
 cided to publish a statement affirming his al- 
 legience to the party that was to make him 
 President. 
 
 From the editorials in the Advocate it ap- 
 pears that Roosevelt was at the head of this 
 student movement to choose a President, and, 
 though the Republicans outnumbered the 
 Democrats, to show "that intelligent and con- 
 servative men will not allow party affiliation 
 to rule their better judgement and force them 
 to support an unfit or corrupt candidate" or 
 one seeking a third term. In its appeal to stu- 
 dents to vote the paper said that "No doubt 
 there are some who think taking an informal 
 vote for President is a departure from the 
 sphere of the student to that of the politician 
 
 17 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 and others who regard it as only time thrown 
 away ... It should not be forgotten that a 
 representative government is such only so 
 long as the whole people are represented, the 
 intelligent and good, as well as the ignorant 
 and bad, and that, as a small force is not 
 infrequently big in result, the indication of 
 the choice of the University in this matter may 
 be effective in securing the nomination of some 
 man who is a type of the best American citi- 
 zen. The gentleman in charge of the polls is 
 a proof that the movement is not one of idle 
 curiosity, but of earnest purpose." The vote 
 for Bayard was 233, Grant 146, Sherman 139; 
 at Yale it was Grant 213, Sherman 205, Bay- 
 ard 82. 
 
 The last sentence in the editorial of the 
 Advocate is a singular tribute to an under- 
 graduate by a college paper, without a parallel 
 in any of the college publications during the 
 four years Roosevelt was an undergraduate. 
 It shows as nothing else could that he was rec- 
 ognized as a leader of undergraduate opinion. 
 
 The evening the informal vote was an- 
 nounced this future President might have been 
 seen setting out for Boston with a torch on 
 his shoulder and the dusty road underfoot, in 
 
 18 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 the van of the torchlight parade. It was going 
 along noisily but peaceably through a street 
 in Cambridge when down from a second-story 
 window was bawled: "Hush up, you blooming 
 freshmen!". "Every student there," relates 
 Professor Hart, "was profoundly indignant. I 
 noticed one little man, small but firmly knit. 
 He had slammed his torch to the street. His 
 fists quivered like steel springs and swished 
 through the air as if plunging a hole through 
 a mattress. I had never seen a man so angry 
 before. 'It's Roosevelt from New York,' some 
 one said. I made an effort to know Roosevelt 
 better from that moment." 
 
 Roosevelt was the only member of the Dutch 
 Reformed Church in the College ; in fact his 
 name appears opposite membership in that 
 church after a long series of ciphers for pre- 
 ceding classes. He was liberal-minded never- 
 theless, and his very liberalism caused him as 
 an undergraduate to be thrust into the lime- 
 light of the college community at Cambrid'ge 
 quite as prominently as he was in later years 
 at Rome. 
 
 At the beginning of his senior year he was 
 engaged to teach the Sunday School at Christ 
 Church, the oldest edifice in Cambridge, 
 
 19 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 "Here divine service was held December 31, 
 1775, General and Mrs. Washington being pres- 
 ent." Here for several weeks the energetic 
 young teacher turned up re'gularly every Sun- 
 day afternoon to teach young people religious 
 tenets as he conceived them. 
 
 One day the report spread that he had been 
 summarily removed by the new rector, Doctor 
 James Field Spaulding. "The news spread 
 about college like flames through a building," 
 relates one of Roosevelt's classmates. "We 
 learned Roosevelt had been removed because 
 he was not a confirmed member of the Epis- 
 copalian church. Everybody lauded Roose- 
 velt. The instructor in one of our courses said 
 something about religious toleration by neigh- 
 boring ministers, and the students cheered. 
 One professor actually withdrew from the con- 
 gregation. But Roosevelt did not take the oc- 
 currence to heart. The next three Sundays 
 he tau'ght at the Church of the Ascension in 
 East Cambridge and then continued in a 
 church in Chestnut Hill, the home of Miss Lee, 
 to whom he was engaged." 
 
 Not long after Roosevelt's adventure in 
 teaching Sunday school, one evening he at- 
 tended the Boston Theatre. After one of the 
 
 20 
 
HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 
 
 acts a group of undergraduates gave a cheer 
 for Harvard. The ushers remonstrated, for 
 trouble with students had been experienced 
 before, and Roosevelt hurried across the lobby 
 and remonstrated with the ushers, so stren- 
 uously that he, with the real offenders, was 
 made to leave the theatre. The Boston papers 
 made space of the occurence. Professor Dun- 
 bar and Professor Shaler found the accounts 
 so unfair that both published protests. The 
 Boston Herald designated that of Professor 
 Shaler in the Atlantic Monthly as a "turgid 
 stream of rhetoric," and the college papers 
 then directed their editorial comment at the 
 Herald. 
 
 Roosevelt was often the victim of caprice 
 that knew not the regulator, self conscious- 
 ness. He was not an ascetic, yet, "he was, 
 next to my own father," a classmate wrote 
 to Jacob A. Riis, "the purest-minded man I ever 
 knew." There is no evidence that he ever 
 smoked, and, what is more significant, no evi- 
 dence that he ever tried to. Even that stern 
 old woodsman, William W. Sewall, with 
 whom Roosevelt spent his summers in the 
 Maine forests, comes out of his reticence to 
 write that he never met a man with such ab- 
 
 21 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 solute ideas of right and wrong, such re- 
 markable strength on the one hand, such lov- 
 able sympathy on the other. 
 
 With care not to exaggerate it may be con- 
 jectured that in the history of Harvard College 
 there have been few undergraduates with an 
 array of interests more varied and more judi- 
 ciously apportioned than Roosevelt's. He 
 delved into social and intellectual life so en- 
 thusiastically that he held important offices in 
 five organizations and belonged to six others, 
 he advocated political policies, discussed art 
 and natural history, heard optional lectures on 
 literature, and besides teaching Sunday School, 
 hunting in the Maine woods, yachtin'g on Long 
 Island Sound, assisting to edit a college paper, 
 beginning a book, and manifesting an intense 
 interest in athletics, he maintained high col- 
 lege rank, in recognition of which he was 
 elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While other men 
 followed the beaten track he deserted to the 
 farthest reaches of undergraduate life. The 
 leader of college opinion was fitting himself 
 as a leader of opinion in his country. 
 
 22 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 HIS STUDIES. 
 
 THE accurate determination of any man's 
 college rank is usually of small 
 importance, especially after thirty 
 years have intervened since his gradu- 
 ation and his worth has long since been 
 tested to sterner standards than those 
 of the rank-list; but no one will deny 
 legitimate curiosity, perhaps even, of scientific 
 interest. 
 
 Probably no one is less curious about his 
 college marks than Mr. Roosevelt ; perhaps he 
 never knew or has quite forgotten his exact 
 rank, but if he has not forgotten, doubtless he 
 relishes a "certain piquant pleasure" at the 
 visible disproportion between his college rank 
 and his success in after life, for his rank in a 
 class of one hundred and sixty-one was but 
 
 2& 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 twenty-first, the same as Grant's at West 
 Point, about the same as that of Emerson and 
 of Holmes at Harvard. 
 
 There is a difference, as Baoon points out, 
 between excellence and excelling. Roosevelt 
 went to Harvard for an education, he did not 
 go to compete for marks. Had he done so 
 he would have taken before graduation an ex- 
 amination for final honors in natural history, 
 a special mark of distinction he could have 
 easily won. "No man ever came to Harvard 
 more serious in his purpose to secure first of 
 all an education," his intimate friend, Ex- 
 Governor Curtis Guild, Jr., says, "he was for- 
 ever at it, and probably no man of his time 
 read more extensively or deeply, especially in 
 directions that did not count on the honor-list 
 or marking-sheet. He had the happy power 
 of abstraction, and nothing was more common 
 than a noisy roomful of college mates with 
 Roosevelt frowning with intense absorption 
 over a book in the corner. He did not read for 
 examinations but for information." 
 
 Of academic distinctions he won but few. He 
 did not win a prize for reading, nor for English 
 composition; the center-table in his room was 
 not adorned with a "Detur," a book given as 
 
 24 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 a special mark of merit; he won neither sec- 
 ond-year nor final honors in a single subject, 
 and he did not deliver the "dissertation" to 
 which he was entitled at Commencement. The 
 only honorable mention set down in his degree 
 was in natural history. His political antithesis, 
 Josiah Quincy, who shone brightly as an un- 
 dergraduate, received two prizes for reading, 
 one for speaking, one for English composition, 
 a "Detur," and besides being a prolific and able 
 contributor to the college papers, received in 
 his degree honorable mention in Greek, Latin, 
 English composition, and political economy, 
 and delivered a dissertation at Commencement. 
 When Roosevelt was at Harvard, as to a les- 
 ser extent now, a student had to take certain 
 prescribed courses in fundamental subjects. 
 In the freshman year all his courses were pre- 
 scribed although a freshman could enter ad- 
 vanced sections of certain courses if he had 
 shown unusual efficiency in his entrance ex- 
 aminations; in the sophomore year and in the 
 junior year about one-third of the work was 
 prescribed, in the senior year only a few for- 
 ensic themes. In addition to these prescribed 
 courses each sophomore was required to 
 choose from a list of elective studies courses 
 
 35 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 amounting to ten exercises a week, each junior 
 and senior courses amounting to twelve exer- 
 cises a week. 
 
 These elective courses were intended to give 
 a student considerable freedom to follow nat- 
 ural "bent," and those selected by Roosevelt 
 reflect clearly his inclinations as an under- 
 graduate. Viewed as a whole, the courses he 
 chose were essentially "practical," as distin- 
 guished from "literary" or "esthetic." In his 
 college work as in his morals he stood with his 
 feet firmly planted on mother earth. He knew 
 the keen value of mathematics and of science, 
 he felt the absolute need of modern languages. 
 Each year his love and appreciation of these 
 studies grew and at the end the plan of his 
 college work was a well-moulded and con- 
 sistent one. 
 
 Just one-half of Roosevelt's total elective 
 work was devoted to natural history, almost 
 a third to modern languages, but not a single 
 hour did he give to Latin or Greek, not a sin- 
 gle hour to English composition or history. 
 Grant, leader of the "largest civilized armies 
 the world ever saw," at West Point read nov- 
 els and almost failed to pass in the study of 
 army tactics; Webster, scholar, logician, dis- 
 
 3$ 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 liked Greek and hated mathematics; Emerson, 
 philosopher, fared not too well in philosophy; 
 and now Roosevelt — historian, journalist, lover 
 of the classics, is found in the ranks of the 
 anomalies. He took no more history, no more 
 literature, no more classics than was required, 
 and moreover, in the single Latin and Greek 
 courses that were required he failed to get a 
 grade of seventy percent. Indeed, even before 
 he entered college he did not affect the classics, 
 for he chose the set of entrance examinations 
 that demanded the minimum of the classics 
 and the maximum of mathematics, and passed 
 the examination in mathematics with so high 
 a mark that he was admitted with a very few 
 others to the advanced freshman course. Yet 
 Mr. Jacob A. Riis, one of Roosevelt's most 
 intimate biographers, surmises, "I have a no- 
 tion that he did not like arithmetic. I feel 
 it in my bones, somehow." Who, indeed, 
 would have conceived such a reversal in a 
 man's aptitudes? Who will now say that as 
 the boy is so will be the man, or, that as the 
 man is so was the boy? 
 
 Mr. Riis' inference suggests another that 
 he, Professor Hu'go Munsterberg and other 
 writers have made, that Roosevelt, who has 
 
 27 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 written, as well as made, so much history, 
 must have delighted in the study of English 
 composition and of history when an under- 
 graduate. Yet he took only the prescribed 
 courses in those subjects. 
 
 He took but a single course in history, that, 
 in his sophomore year, a not very comprehen- 
 sive one requiring attendance at two lectures 
 a week during one-half the college year. His 
 required work in English composition was 
 more comprehensive, however, extending 
 through the first half of his sophomore year 
 and through his junior year and demanding 
 four forensic themes in his senior year. In 
 these courses Mr. Roosevelt did not succeed 
 too well, yet, Mr. Guild says that "in writing, 
 Roosevelt's ability was thoroughly understood 
 but very little displayed," and his election as 
 an editor of the "Advocate" was a recognition 
 of his ability to write. The courses in com- 
 position required the writing of sophomore 
 themes, junior themes, junior forensics, and 
 senior forensics. In junior themes he obtained 
 a fair place on the rank-list, but in the other 
 courses his name is missing, that is, he did not 
 get a grade of seventy per cent.; and in one 
 of these other courses, senior forensics, he was 
 
 28 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 one of the very few men whose efforts failed to 
 be discerned by Professor Andrew Peabody, 
 "that much-loved professor whose very fail- 
 ings leaned to the rank-list side." Mr. Roose- 
 velt, like most writers, is not proud of hia 
 college themes and says he would rather they 
 were not brought into the light, but his con- 
 tributions to the college papers are discussed 
 in another chapter. 
 
 There was a reason, and a just one, why 
 Roosevelt neglected his senior forensics. His 
 friends told him he could write well, and now 
 the full-ripe plan of his first book dangled be- 
 fore his eyes ready to be plucked and shaped 
 by his eager hand. Who would not choose the 
 writing of a book to the writing of college 
 themes? And who cannot picture the impa- 
 tient Roosevelt fretting within the limits of 
 theme paper and fifteen hundred words? Who 
 cannot see him trying to tear himself away 
 to fields of larger endeavor and greater deed? 
 
 As for his rank in other studies — in his 
 single history course, as in most of his pre- 
 scribed courses, that is, in rhetoric, logic, and 
 psychology, Roosevelt's marks were high. In 
 all of his elective courses, except one in French 
 given once a week, his name is found, on the 
 
 29 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 rank-list well toward the top ; in eight of these 
 elective courses his mark is eighty-nine per 
 cent, or over, and in one of them, a popular 
 but not easy course in political economy, his 
 name is first upon the printed rank-list. In 
 his advanced courses in political economy, 
 involving the study of Cairnes, McLeod, and 
 Bastiat, his marks were commendable. Of his 
 German courses, one was "historic prose" 
 and the other two were devoted to composition 
 and oral exercises. His courses in Italian re- 
 quired a great amount of reading and ap- 
 proached more nearly to pure literature than 
 any of his chosen studies. 
 
 The term "natural history" comprehended 
 more thirty years ago than now. Roosevelt's 
 courses in that subject, in which he received 
 honorable mention in his degree, included com- 
 parative anatomy and physiology of ver- 
 tebrates, elementary botany, physical geogra- 
 phy and meteorology, geology, and elementary 
 and advanced zoology. In all these subjects 
 he succeded in getting marks so high that he 
 could easily have won final honors, which are 
 prized far more highly than honorable men- 
 tion, by taking extra examinations; but have- 
 ing got substantially all he could from his 
 
 30 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 college course he cared little for the laurel — 
 he went to college, we have seen, not for fine 
 marks but for an education. 
 
 Roosevelt was a disputatious youth whose 
 presence in class was always felt. In his fresh- 
 man year he disturbed a class when the in- 
 structor, calling the roll for the first time, 
 addressed him as "Ruse-felt." The spectacled 
 little man was instantly on his feet insisting 
 very earnestly that he was of Dutch descent 
 and his name should be pronounced "Rose- 
 velt." A thousand times since that day he has 
 heard people mispronounce his name and if one 
 listens to one's neighbor one concludes that 
 half the nation go on saying "Ruse-felt" or 
 "Rus-e-velt" for "Rose-velt." 
 
 Roosevelt's classmates remember a slender 
 nervous young man with side-whiskers, eye- 
 glasses, and bright red cheeks red-hued from 
 a bright necktie, who climbed with them in 
 the freshman year to a small recitation room 
 on the top floor of University Hall. "We 
 were having problems from Todhunter's Plane 
 Trigonometry," one of them writes, "and they 
 were more difficult than any given before. In 
 those years if the instructor did not arrive be- 
 fore five minutes past the hour at which the 
 
 3i 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 lecture was to commence we were allowed a 
 'cut.' This day we looked into the room, 
 compared our watches and lingered in the 
 hall until the time was up. Then we romped 
 down stairs; that is, most of us did; but there 
 was one youth who was there for business. 
 He went into the room, looked at the black- 
 board just at the right of the door and found 
 it covered with trigonometric formulae. One 
 after another he read, following the blackboard 
 round the room, and when he had almost 
 reached the end he all but bumped into the 
 engrossed instructor writing away behind the 
 open door. We were sauntering across the 
 Yard when we heard Roosevelt shout from the 
 steps. 'Come on back fellows. He's behind 
 the door.'" 
 
 The students in sophomore rhetoric remem- 
 ber that Roosevelt was the first to question 
 the instructor, that thin-voiced, sandy-haired, 
 blue-eyed man, that famous rhetorician, Adams 
 Sherman Hill. Most of the class, one of its 
 members said, were quite satisfied to take what 
 was given them, but "Roosevelt was always 
 asking questions, always pinning the instruc- 
 tor down to hairbreadth points." Professor 
 Hill grew tired, as professors in their dignity 
 
 32 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 do, of having this over-zealous censor wait on 
 his remarks, and looked about for a gentle way 
 to silence him; perhaps he learned it in con- 
 versation with other instructors about Roose- 
 velt, perhaps he divined it one bright day when 
 he was reading to the class a theme as an ex- 
 ample of precocious sentimentality. For sud- 
 denly, so one of the students says, he paused 
 and looked thoughtfully at Roosevelt ; then he 
 asked him to criticise the theme. The censor 
 for once lacked his usual assertiveness, and 
 Professor Hill seemed encouraged. A second 
 later he glanced up and asked Roosevelt to 
 state specifically what he thought of under- 
 graduates prematurely falling in love. Roose- 
 velt stammered and was quiet, and the class 
 laughed cruelly and long, and soon all the col- 
 lege knew, when they turned and saw him 
 blushing as furiously as a girl. 
 
 Roosevelt always took his inclination to 
 question and to investigate with him ; he never 
 got through investigating and being investi- 
 gated, he wrote to the secretary of his class 
 years later when Civil Service Commissioner. 
 One such man in a community is often dis- 
 concerting, but two seek one another out like 
 giants of the woods. They always respect 
 
 33 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 one another and they are always happy to- 
 gether, just as they would be if turned adrift 
 on a flood or left in the middle of the Sahara. 
 
 The two score of undergraduates in Geol- 
 ogy IV, a course conducted by Professor Sha- 
 ler, still remember a scene in a small low-ceiled 
 classroom at Harvard thirty years ago. That 
 tall, light-haired man, with his bright eyes 
 gleaming out of a bushy beard, moved about 
 with his startling activity on a small platform. 
 He talked and illustrated, now facing a chart, 
 now facing the students gathered in a semi- 
 circle at long uncomfortable red plank desks. 
 They felt that the little room had an air of 
 home-like informality, that the impromptu 
 words of the master were falling like the pleas- 
 ant discourse of a father to his son. He made 
 them feel free to show their interest by asking 
 questions, but they felt that questions bothered 
 him, trying as he was to review a large field 
 of knowledge in a short time; they felt, in 
 fact, that questions had been showering too 
 rapidly upon him — that over-live Roosevelt 
 with his abounding curiosity asked most of 
 them. 
 
 They had just settled on the hard benches 
 and the lecture was hardly under way. Pro- 
 
 34 
 
HIS STUDIES 
 
 fessor Shaler was facing a chart, pointer in 
 hand, talking. In a few moments they were 
 sitting erect, marvelling at a point as it was 
 driven skilfully to the close of a perfect rhetor- 
 ical climax. Then a disharmonizing, vehement 
 question broke in and anticipated the conclu- 
 sion. 
 
 Again they were sitting erect, following 
 with eager interest a long periodic sentence 
 rolling melodiously from the lips of the mas- 
 ter. Again a question in that same vehement 
 voice interposed, and again the master an- 
 swered. . He turned back to the chart : 
 
 "As I was saying, gentlemen, when Mr. 
 Roosevelt asked his second question." And 
 those who were near Roosevelt saw his bright 
 eyes twinkle. Then, sharp as two taps of the 
 pointer on the chart, they heard two questions 
 pop into the expectant air. The gray-bearded 
 teacher whirled about and a storm was in his 
 bright eyes. 
 
 "Now look here, Roosevelt," he said, "let 
 me talk. I'm running this course." The 
 storm had gone in a playful gust. 
 
 No wonder Roosevelt loved this soldier, 
 writer, scientist and man of action, who had 
 walked round the coast of the British Isle on 
 
 35 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 a pleasure jaunt. If one could detect the in- 
 fluence one man has on another, half the prob- 
 lem of biography would be solved, but this be- 
 loved old man was long a peculiar inspiration 
 to Harvard men. "Is it a mere conceit," as 
 Mr. Ranlett asks, " to think that from the 
 study of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, keen ob- 
 server, good fighter, good friend, hater of 
 shams, some strong and vital emanation of 
 spirit may have passed into the character of 
 Theodore Roosevelt?" 
 
 36 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 ONE autumn afternoon in his senior year 
 Roosevelt moved about among the 
 shelves of the college library seeking 
 a subject for a forensic theme. Quite una- 
 ware that in that busy and ordinary place he 
 was to take his first great stride into the 
 world's activities, he stood before one shelf 
 after another, his hands deep in his trousers 
 pockets. Now he pulled down a book, only to 
 shove it energetically back into place, now he 
 rested one in his left hand and turned its 
 leaves with his right. Finally he reached for 
 a dusty green-backed old volume crowded 
 against the wall. With real affection he 
 glanced at the well-worn name of the author — 
 the author he had loved as a boy for his tales 
 of sea and of war, that popular writer a few 
 generations ago, James Fenimore Cooper. 
 
 37 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 But now boyish days were past and not as 
 a boy did he turn the dog-eared leaves. He 
 remembered his uncle, a naval officer, regret- 
 ting that there was no trustworthy historian 
 of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. At 
 a time when unprejudiced assertion was un- 
 looked for and partiality was considered pat- 
 riotism, James had written for Englishmen, 
 Cooper for Americans. Only absolute fair- 
 ness, Roosevelt knew, only a mind so precise 
 that Americans and Englishmen must agree 
 with it, could reconcile their works. He 
 seated himself at one of the long reading ta- 
 bles with the dusty old volume in front of 
 him and thought no more of his college theme 
 that day. 
 
 A few months later the "Crimson" said that 
 a "prominent member of ' '80' had of late 
 'turned editor.' " Two years later this prom- 
 inent member had finished "The Naval War 
 of 1812." In the preface occurred these words: 
 
 "It is worth while to study with some care 
 that period of our history during which our 
 navy stood at the highest pitch of its fame; 
 and to learn anything from its past it is neces- 
 sary to know, as near as may be, the exact 
 
 38 
 
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 truth. Accordingly the work should be writ- 
 ten impartially, if only from the narrowest 
 motives. Without abating a jot from one's 
 devotion to his country and flag, I think a 
 history can be made just enough to warrant its 
 being received as an authority equally among 
 Americans and Englishmen." 
 
 Only a short time afterwards the English- 
 men themselves recognized the young Ameri- 
 can historian by asking him to write the chap- 
 ter on the naval operations of the War of 1812 
 for the "History of the Royal Navy." 
 
 Roosevelt dived deeper into literature than 
 he had first planned to do, for his avowed pro- 
 fession during the last years of his college 
 course was journalism. 
 
 The perfect education of a journalist is an 
 old question which educators have argued, 
 about which our greatest journalists have 
 agreed. They have been consonant in this: 
 that a journalist should have a plenteous store 
 of information about all a newspaper is con- 
 cerned with; that he must learn to work as 
 persistently as news is in coming in; that he 
 must get on with his fellows, must know how 
 to writ* clearly, accurately and fearlessly. 
 
 39 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Even when in college Roosevelt seems to 
 have felt that a journalist should know some- 
 thing about everything — enough business to 
 discover a merchant's profits, enough theology 
 to criticise the reasoning of the preacher, 
 enough law to judge of the logic of the lawyer, 
 enough general information to understand the 
 bulletins of a physician, the machinations of 
 politician or pawnbroker. He set about to 
 store this information with the scientific zeal 
 with which he strove to build up a weak 
 body. He fed habitually on what was at hand ; 
 if a newspaper or a book he studied it; if a 
 college lecture he questioned; if he walked in 
 the fields, he studied nature; if rowing, he 
 watched the toiling oarsmen in the next 
 wherry; if an athletic contest, he noted how 
 the runner braced and flung himself forward 
 at the shot ; if a meeting with his fellows round 
 a fireside or under the elms in the Yard he 
 studied them and learned the secrets of their 
 personalities, discovered their weaknesses and 
 their powers. The naturalist looks out on the 
 universe from the point of view of a naturalist ; 
 the physicist, lawyer and moralist look out 
 from theirs; the student of languages glances 
 over his book on a certain perspective, a per- 
 
 40 
 
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 spective differing from that of the scientist in 
 his laboratory or the mathematician in his 
 study. Each of these men, every man in all the 
 world, sees his surroundings in a certain in- 
 dividual light, and each observes more sharply 
 within a certain familiar field. This rule of 
 familiarity holds in the smallest acts of life — 
 the winding of a watch, the stroke of a tennis 
 racquet. Consider now from what different 
 points of view, with what enthusiasm for each, 
 this self-centered youth must have looked on 
 all that goes to make environment. 
 
 "Never have I seen or read of a man with 
 such an amazing array of interests," says Hon. 
 John Woodbury, one of Roosevelt's classmates. 
 "He used to stop men in the Yard, or call them 
 to him. Then he would block the narrow 
 gravel path and soon make sparks from an 
 argument fly. He was so enthusiastic and had 
 such a startling array of deeply-rooted inter- 
 ests that we all thought he would make a great 
 journalist." 
 
 No one has denied that Roosevelt has a 
 ponderous store of fact, no one has denied that 
 he is a relentless worker, that he gets on with 
 his fellows, that he writes clearly, accurately, 
 and fearlessly. Yet these are the simpler 
 
 4i 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 characteristics that great journalists thought 
 necessary to their profession. And who will 
 deny that Roosevelt has the intuitive power 
 of a great public leader, a power that runs 
 along ahead, coach-dog fashion, pointing out 
 the way that slow-moving public opinion is to 
 traverse? He had that power of rushing to 
 conclusions when an undergraduate. In the 
 man it has been called impulse, politics, or 
 radicalism. 
 
 Roosevelt's is the typification of the Ameri- 
 can mind. His conclusions seem to come in- 
 tuitively, as quickly as those of a woman, with 
 quite as surprising rapidity as Jackson's did 
 a century ago. It makes him dangerous in 
 theory; in practice it makes him immensely 
 popular. 
 
 Although the similarity has not been pointed 
 out, he is remarkably like Jackson in many 
 ways. A few years ago the nation thundered 
 applause for the doughty leader of the Rough- 
 Riders, a century before the rash old soldier 
 thundered at his troops in the Everglades ; the 
 leader of the Rough-Riders had entered poli- 
 tics as an avocation and the indomitable old 
 man before him was forced to do so ; the young 
 element of the West found an ideal in Roose- 
 
 42 
 
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 velt and demanded his nomination as Vice- 
 President, just as a century before the young 
 men came out of the Mississippi Valley and 
 put Jackson into office ; there he waged war 
 on a Congress often recalcitrant or inert by 
 appealing to public opinion, and a century 
 later Roosevelt's relations with Congress were 
 almost the same. What will be remembered, 
 however, as even more remarkable than the 
 similarity in their relations to history, will be 
 that both had this peculiar type of intuitive 
 mind, acting not merely in politics but in the 
 smallest affairs of life. 
 
 But Roosevelt has, what Jackson did not 
 have — that bigness of soul found so gloriously 
 common in the utterances of the great men of 
 Greece and Rome. To the spirit of many of 
 these men, Thucydides, for one, the spirit of 
 Roosevelt's utterances is remarkably analo- 
 gous. His messages and the "Strenuous Life" 
 have been found adapted to translation into 
 Greek and into Latin. Nevertheless, if we may 
 judge by random selections, we have the puzzl- 
 ing consideration that Roosevelt employs 
 fewer words of classic origin than Lincoln did, 
 and Lincoln, we know, used in some passages 
 fewer Latinized words than are found on many 
 
 4a 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," the ideal 
 typification of almost pure Saxon. 
 
 Roosevelt has, apparently, fewer words of 
 Latin derivation in his messages than in his 
 essays, fewer still in his letters* — the less 
 literary is his effort, the fewer words of classic 
 derivation does he use. He employs only as 
 many such words as are absolutely necessary 
 to make his meaning clear, in fact sometimes 
 he chooses several Saxon words where one 
 Latinized one would suffice. Even as an un- 
 dergraduate he preferred the Saxon. His com- 
 positions then, such as are preserved, although 
 about athletics, a subject which requires ex- 
 pressions of modern origin, have even fewer 
 of the old words than his later writings. He 
 loves classic literature, evidently, and reads 
 it for what it is, but loves his own literature 
 better and finds it more in harmony with the 
 expression of his thoughts. Doubtless in dic- 
 tating — for he dictates nearly everything he 
 writes — he uses the first word that comes into 
 his mind, and such words are usually Saxon. 
 This fondness for modern languages has never 
 left him open to the accusation of not making 
 his meaning clear; his utterances percolate to 
 the most uneducated and to the most cultured, 
 
 44 
 
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 and, like a wandering prince, everywhere he 
 is understood and the force of what he says 
 is felt. 
 
 So Roosevelt's bigness of soul is not literary 
 skill; it must be personality. In Lincoln's 
 speech at Gettysburg there is more than great 
 benignant earnestness, more than a certain 
 restraint and the feeling of war itself, more 
 than a wonderful choice of words, "there is 
 something else there." This unknown quality 
 is found, though in a less degree, in Washing- 
 ton's Farewell Address. If Lincoln had been 
 a contented lawyer during the years previous 
 to his famous speech instead of a sad-faced 
 man watching the nation crush at his feet like 
 floating ice, if Washington had been a con- 
 tented farmer instead of a disheartened soldier 
 and a maligned President, their words would 
 not have fallen like flakes of fire ; the distin- 
 guished strength would have been wanting. 
 It seems to come from only a great personality 
 kindled by intense emotion. Roosevelt has not 
 suffered as Lincoln or Washington did, yet 
 he has suffered more acutely than most men. 
 At one time he was hurrying from Europe to 
 the funeral of his fair young wife, to the death- 
 bed of his beautiful little mother. At another 
 
 45 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 time a dying President lay in a city quaking 
 with shouldering crowds, and afar off, amid 
 the balmy febrifuge of mountains and pines, 
 he was pacing back and forth before a lighted 
 cottage, awaiting the word that was to raise 
 him to the highest office of his nation. Such 
 a crisis fired the soul of Vice-President Ar- 
 thur with new strength ; perhaps it gave Roose- 
 velt that peculiar power that makes his utter- 
 ances so effective. 
 
 Roosevelt's writings first impress one as ad- 
 monitory, for it is the privilege of a public man 
 to be admonitory, then as friendly, then as 
 almost paternal. No man ever knew the power 
 of iteration better than he. He would have 
 made a great preacher and there is room for 
 one. "Without being fanciful, we may fairly 
 think" that this pleading for the ideal "comes 
 down to him from those ancestors of his own 
 who died in the dykes of Holland, for the 
 freedom of their country and for their re- 
 ligious faith or who gave up their lives in 
 support of the Convenant among the rugged 
 hills of Scotland." 
 
 So Roosevelt is sincere, Roosevelt is earnest, 
 Roosevelt is a practical idealist. Now let us 
 go back thirty years and see if all these char- 
 
 46 
 
AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 
 
 acteristics are not found in a single excerpt 
 from one of his editorials in the "Harvard 
 Advocate : 
 
 *The football season is now fairly opened 
 and it is well to take a glance at what our 
 rivals are doing ... At present it hardly seems 
 as if the team would be as good as last year's, 
 but their playing is improving every day, and 
 nothing but very hard work will enable our 
 men to win the victory . . . What is most nec- 
 essary is, that every man should realize the 
 necessity of faithful and honest work, every 
 afternoon. Last year we had good individual 
 players, but they did not work together nearly 
 as well as the Princeton team, and were not 
 in as good condition as the Yale men. The 
 football season is short; and while it does last, 
 the men ought to work faithfully, if they ex- 
 pect to win back for Harvard the position she 
 held three years ago." 
 
 Seldom do undergraduates rise up and 
 preach to other undergraduates; usually they 
 only strive to be agreeable. Yet this excerpt 
 is from one of three little sermons wedged in 
 college trivialities and fun. They stand out 
 because they are so earnest, because they are 
 
 47 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 frank, because they preach, they preach the 
 doctrines of hard work. 
 
 Roosevelt was not active as an undergraduate 
 journalist. The three articles that he wrote, 
 two of which are signed by the initial "R," 
 were arranged for at a meeting of the editorial 
 board of the paper shortly before the issue of 
 October 17, 1879, in which they appeared and 
 in which his editorialship was announced. . He 
 did not enter a competition for his place on the 
 board but was made an editor, Professor Hart, 
 who was President, says, because he was rec- 
 ognized as an able writer. He rarely attended 
 the meetings of the board. Though not lack- 
 ing in enthusiasm he was overwhelmed with 
 accumulating activities. About this time he 
 resigned from his office in the Natural History 
 Society. He was at work on his book, and, 
 moreover, he was all but engaged to Miss 
 Lee. 
 
 48 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 IN ATHLETICS 
 
 IT is a remarkable fact that Roosevelt, the 
 frail little freshman of a hundred pounds, 
 thoiigh he could not hope to attain a place 
 on any crew or team representing Harvard, 
 could not, in truth, hope to win in any individ- 
 ual contest of physical strength, should have 
 accomplished out of mere enthusiasm, perhaps, 
 more for American athletics than any man in 
 his class; for to Roosevelt is due in no small 
 measure the credit of founding the dual track 
 meets between Harvard and Yale. 
 
 In his senior year, in a letter over his initial 
 to the "Advocate," he urged that the impulse 
 needed to make track athletics at Harvard 
 what they should be was a series of contests 
 with Yale in the spring and fall of each year. 
 In the next issue the "Advocate" said that the 
 Yale papers upheld the plan but Yale herself 
 was without any "official association to act 
 
 49 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 in the matter." Four years later, by vote of 
 the few Yale men who evinced an interest in 
 track athletics, Howard Stafford Brooks was 
 elected captain, and he straightway set to 
 work to raise a thousand dollars from the 
 graduates of the two universities for the pur- 
 chase of a cup. Not long afterwards the two 
 teams began their regular contests in the 
 spring and fall which later, because of the 
 popularity of football, were resolved into the 
 single great contest still held each spring. 
 
 About the time dual meets were suggested 
 by Roosevelt all sports seemed to be taking on 
 new life. It was long before the stadium, giant 
 grandstands, and tens of thousands of spec- 
 tators; then the two colleges were struggling 
 for what in the public eye stood not only for 
 supremacy in American athletics but the su- 
 premacy of American colleges as well. With 
 its onlookers standing round the uneven field 
 a football game between the greatest of Ameri- 
 can colleges was like a high-school game now. 
 But even then the undergraduate heart at Har- 
 vard beat faster at the mention of Yale. 
 
 Harvard played her first football game with 
 Yale in the fall of 1876, when Roosevelt was 
 a freshman. She had played Canadian teams 
 
 5o 
 
IN ATHLETICS 
 
 as early as 1874 in both the spring and fall. 
 In 1875 the team lost to Princeton but won 
 from Columbia, Tufts, and McGill. No game 
 was played with Yale because she insisted on 
 playing with eleven men and Harvard's games 
 had all been played with fifteen. This differ- 
 ence was settled and enthusiasm ran rife when 
 the first game between the two universities 
 was announced for November 18, 1876, at New 
 Haven. 
 
 "At two o'clock," the correspondent of the 
 "Advocate" wrote, "we were on our way to 
 Hamilton Park, a mile or two from the Col- 
 lege. The field is an excellent one, but the 
 preparations were wretched. Pieces of clothes- 
 line supplied the places of cross-bars on two 
 very short goal-posts; there was nothing on 
 one side and only a faint streak of lime on the 
 other, to mark the touch-lines; and nothing 
 but a guess could indicate the centre of the 
 field, where the ball was to be placed for the 
 kick-off. The two teams made a very pretty 
 appearance on the field in their bright new 
 uniforms." 
 
 Yale won this game by a single goal though 
 Harvard — for they scored differently then — 
 got three touchdowns. Two years later Yale 
 
 5i 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 won another game at Boston and the follow- 
 ing year the most exciting contest held up to 
 that time in America was fought to a tie on 
 the Yale grounds. The year Roosevelt was 
 graduated Harvard lost to Yale. 
 
 In baseball, however, an older and more es- 
 tablished sport, Harvard was winning year af- 
 ter year. In 1876 her team was victorious in 
 two of the three games played, and so again 
 in 1877; in 1878 and 1879 the Harvard team 
 won three of five games in each year, one in 
 the latter year, a shut-out. In 1880 each team 
 won two games. 
 
 In the crew races, too, Harvard was victor- 
 ious over Yale. She won in the first three 
 years Roosevelt was in college but lost in 
 1880. That year, in fact, was disastrous to 
 all the Harvard teams, and, though Roosevelt's 
 class might have found some solace in the fact 
 that its freshman football team had defeated 
 Yale's, yet the freshmen crew lost its race 
 at Saratoga to Cornell, and in the class races, 
 which were begun in Roosevelt's junior year, 
 eighty was last in one race and not far from 
 last in the other. 
 
 Lacrosse and cricket were almost unknown 
 at Harvard, and to play tennis designated what 
 
 52 
 
IN ATHLETICS 
 
 Roosevelt has called a molly-coddle ; the under- 
 graduate papers were continually poking fun 
 at the effeminate men who were addicted to 
 this new pastime, and, although a tournament 
 was held, it was not until 1883 that a team rep- 
 resenting Harvard was organized. 
 
 In this day of the beginning of indoor athlet- 
 ics, and till the completion of the Hemenway 
 Gymnasium in 1880, they were held in what 
 is now the Germanic Museum. In some of 
 the meets there were but one or two entries. 
 The accommodations, as one of the college 
 papers described in 1876, were wholly inade- 
 quate : 
 
 "There are freshmen playing around like 
 calves in a meadow, getting in everyone's way, 
 and, in their childlike innocence, deluding 
 themselves with the belief that they are ex- 
 ercising. There are boating men and grinds, 
 and vain men and modest men, all breathing 
 the same bad air. One has to wait his turn 
 at almost every piece of apparatus, and several 
 pieces it is impossible to use at all, on ac- 
 count of the lack of room; while it is impos- 
 sible to move around without running the risk 
 of a broken head from an Indian club, or the 
 
 53 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 external application of a dumbbell to the pit 
 of the stomach." 
 
 Here Roosevelt used to exercise religiously 
 and here at least one furtive freshman is re- 
 called as having met him. He was exercising 
 one day when he observed next to the ap- 
 paratus he was using a set of parallel bars be- 
 tween which another freshman pushed himself 
 backward and forward more violently and 
 more rapidly than any one else. When all out 
 of breath, he dropped to the floor and gasped : 
 "My name's Roosevelt. What's yours?" 
 
 He showed his interest in all branches of 
 athletics. Classmates recall him as a foot- 
 ball scrub with a bright red jersey, tripping 
 about Holmes Field, the man with the morn- 
 ing in his face. He had announced his inten- 
 tion of entering a light-weight sparring con- 
 test from which his classmate, William A. 
 Gaston, who was heavier and stronger, with- 
 drew to make a place for him. For this Roose- 
 velt was anxious to assist his friend in some 
 way so he encouraged him to enter a wrestling 
 match — but Mr. Gaston has told the story : 
 
 "The rules for wrestling matches in those 
 days were arbitrary — different at each meet- 
 ing according to the views of the umpire. If 
 
 54 
 
IN ATHLETICS 
 
 you thought a decision unfair, all you could 
 do was to appeal to the committee in charge of 
 athletics. 
 
 "There was going to be a lightweight 
 wrestlirig match. I hesitated about entering 
 it. Roosevelt said, 'Come on, Bill, I'll train 
 you.' He didn't know any more about wrestl- 
 ing than I did. The first day I threw two men 
 and had just got the first fall from a third 
 when the umpire called off the sports for the 
 day, insisting that the last fall I had got should 
 not count. Of course that meant that I should 
 have to throw my opponent three times and 
 he throw me but twice to win a victory. Roose- 
 velt banged his foot down on the floor. 'Out- 
 rageous ! Bill, it's outrageous ! Come on, we'll 
 go and appeal to the committee.' 
 
 "-'Now Bill, you're hot-tempered,' he warned 
 as we approached them. 'I don't want you to 
 say a word. I'll talk to them. I'll explain 
 this thing.' In ten minutes Roosevelt had of- 
 fered to fight everyone of them. I had to pac- 
 ify him and smooth things over. We won our 
 point though." 
 
 Roosevelt weighed but a hundred and thirty- 
 five pounds when he entered the lightweight 
 sparring contest, the only event he ever en- 
 
 55 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 tered. There were only six contestants, the 
 "Advocate" says. "In the first bout Mr. 
 Hanks won. The second bout, between Mr. 
 Coolidge and Mr. Roosevelt, was won by the 
 latter, who displayed more skill and coolness 
 than his opponent. Mr. Cushing easily won 
 the last bout. 
 
 "Mr. Hanks was then paired with Mr. 
 Roosevelt, and a spirited contest followed, in 
 which Mr. Hanks succeeded in getting the 
 best of his opponent by his quickness and 
 power of endurance." 
 
 "It was no fight at all," says one of the 
 students who were gathered round the toiling 
 men. "Hanks had the longer reach and was 
 stronger and Roosevelt was handicapped by 
 his eyesight. I can see that little fellow yet, 
 staggering about and banging into air. His 
 opponent could not put him out and he would 
 not give up. He showed his fighting qualities, 
 but he never entered another bout." 
 
 In his vacations and in one Christmas re- 
 cess, while hunting in the Maine woods, Roose- 
 velt showed his grit in other ways. "He was 
 undersized for eighteen," William W. Sewall, 
 his guide, writes, "but what he lacked in 
 strength he made up for in courage. "He had 
 
 56 
 
IN ATHLETICS 
 
 enough moral and physical courage for a man 
 who weighed a ton." One day when the snow 
 was deep and they were tramping through the 
 white woods after caribou Roosevelt lost one 
 of his snowshoes while fording a rapid stream, 
 but with only moccasins he insisted on climb- 
 ing Mt. Katahdin, to where they were camped. 
 His feet were terribly bruised but he had not 
 uttered a whimper. In the West, a few years 
 later, Mr. Sewall says, Roosevelt's horse reared 
 and fell on him, breaking the point of his 
 shoulder blade, nevertheless he kept to the 
 trail for three days before the injury was at- 
 tended to by a physician. His bravery crop- 
 ped out one day when he heard that a cowboy 
 rough had threatened to shoot him full of 
 holes. Roosevelt looked for the man, rode up 
 to him, and asked him if the report was true. 
 The cowboy promptly denied it. He was also 
 threatened with a real French duel by a real 
 Frenchman, but he took such vehement delight 
 in furthering arrangements that the opponent 
 apolo'gized and actually invited Roosevelt to 
 dinner. 
 
 Some students take their exercise as others 
 go to church — sighing on their way, bringing 
 a subject to cogitate on while there, and exult- 
 
 57 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ing when the thing is done with. But in exer- 
 cise Roosevelt showed the practical applica- 
 tion of an earnest man. Probably today he 
 relishes no more exquisite gratification than 
 knowing that not only did he accomplish much 
 by his enthusiasm, but that he has consciously 
 built up the weak frame of the little freshman 
 who entered college thirty-five years ago into 
 the body of a strong man. 
 
 58 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 GRADUATION. 
 
 WHEN Roosevelt's class put out from 
 college to lose itself in the classes of 
 two hundred and fifty years, the 
 Advocate commented on the number of prom- 
 inent men it contained — men prominent in 
 scholarship, in literary ability, in executive 
 talent, in athletics ; but the Crimson could find 
 use for no adjectives stronger than creditable, 
 good, and average. And now the years have 
 gone by and no class within twenty years of it, 
 perhaps no class in the two centuries Harvard 
 has given men to the nation, has cut so deeply 
 and in so many ways in the activities of the 
 world. In it were Albert Bushnell Hart, edi- 
 tor, teacher, historian ; Robert Winsor and Ar- 
 thur Perry, successful Boston financiers; Doc- 
 tor Henry Baldwin, noted alienist; Arthur 
 Hale, general superintendent of transportation 
 of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the late 
 
 59 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Henry B. Chapin, general traffic manager of 
 the Boston & Albany; John Woodbury, secre- 
 tary of the Metropolitan Park Commission of 
 Boston; Richard W. Welling, chairman of the 
 Civil Service Commission of New York City 
 by appointment of Mayor Gaynor; William S. 
 Andrews, judge, New York Supreme Court; 
 William A. Pew, colonel of Spanish War Vol- 
 unteers; Charles G. Washburn, Congressman; 
 William A. Gaston, organizer of the Metropoli- 
 tan Street Railway system of Boston, repeat- 
 edly a nominee for governor; Josiah Quincy, 
 assistant secretary of state, Mayor of Boston, 
 nominee for 'governor ; Robert Bacon, secretary 
 of State, ambassador to France; Theodore 
 Roosevelt, President of the United States. 
 
 Imperceptibly, as unconscious as a tree 
 grows, these men were rounded out by four 
 years of association. Although genius is not 
 infectious, the homely virtues are, and by these 
 Roosevelt and his classmates have risen. 
 Never were the benefits of friendship better 
 exemplified than by the careers of two of 
 those eight men of whom Roosevelt was one, 
 who gathered together for their meals through 
 their four years at Harvard. One of them, G. 
 Gorham Peters, has suffered ill health; of the 
 
 60 
 
GRADUATION 
 
 other seven, Richard M. Saltonstall, Roose- 
 velt's nearest college friend, is a leading Bos- 
 ton attorney ; Ralph N. Ellis, 1a successful busi- 
 ness man; Charles Ware, a successful physi- 
 cian; C. Minot Weld, a millionaire cotton bro- 
 ker ; Henry G. Chapin was at his death general 
 traffic manager of the Boston & Albany Rail- 
 road ; Charles G. Washburn is head of a large 
 wire corporation and a prominent Congress- 
 man ; Theodore Roosevelt, Ex-President of the 
 United States. 
 
 Yet these men never knew their strertgth 
 till, like fishermen in their yawls, they put out 
 alone. There was George von L. Meyer, in 
 the class of '79, with whom Roosevelt loved to 
 talk about undergraduate athletics, later to 
 swing alongside and be his postmaster-general 
 in the conduct of a nation; there was Bacon, 
 whose election as captain of the freshman crew 
 Roosevelt opposed, destined to be his secretary 
 of state; and Leonard Wood, a freshman in 
 the Medical school when Roosevelt was a sen- 
 ior in the College, and Curtis Guild, Jr., neither 
 of whom Roosevelt more than knew, both of 
 whom became his intimate friends during the 
 Spanish War, after which Roosevelt secured 
 Wood's election to the only honorary member- 
 
 61 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ship in the class of 1880; there was Henry 
 Cabot Lodge, a writer and an instructor in 
 history in Harvard College, whom Roosevelt 
 did not like and whose courses he refused to 
 take because he thought he "marked papers too 
 hard," to whom he was to be tied by the bond 
 of friendship when each became the champion 
 of his respective state in supporting the move- 
 ment to nominate Edmunds for President in 
 1884. There was C. S. Hanks, who pummelled 
 Roosevelt in a boxing match and years later 
 rose into publicity with the assertion that he 
 could get from scheming railroads information 
 that the President could not get, who was told 
 to go ahead, who failed, and died soon after- 
 wards; Professor Sumner of Yale, who ad- 
 dressed the Finance Club, Charles Eliot Nor- 
 ton, president of the Art Club — two old guards 
 of anti-imperialism, two strong foes of expan- 
 sion, whom Roosevelt oppugned with all his 
 might. There was President Charles William 
 Eliot. 
 
 One day a committee of students climbed 
 to the office of the austere educator, who rose 
 from his desk chair to greet them. There was 
 a pause. "Gentlemen," said the President, ex- 
 pectantly. Then the student with the most 
 
 62 
 
GRADUATION 
 
 words to his tongue stammered forth an intro- 
 duction, after this fashion: "Mr. Eliot, I am 
 President Roosevelt." Too prophetic perhaps 
 to be believed, yet true. 
 
 As for the undergraduate, Roosevelt, if there 
 is any virtue taught by his student life it is 
 wide-awake practicality. Intensated by all 
 the starts and sallies of his capricious tempera- 
 ment Roosevelt's life is there in the records, 
 the life of a deliberator. Opportunists do not 
 set out in lifelong struggles to build up their 
 bodies, nor plan with care their mental pur- 
 suits, nor value the shifting moment. But 
 Roosevelt did all these things. If this spirit 
 of deliberation were applied to the capturing 
 of an office it would be called, opprobriously, 
 ambition, but if that is ambition, then all really 
 sucessful men are ambitious; for without 
 power to discover his own needs, to survey 
 his own course, to forge ahead, a man is like 
 a ship without a rudder, drifting. 
 
 Roosevelt was no dream child drifting on a 
 tranquil stream to fame. He labored all his 
 way. Thirty-five years ago we saw that he 
 dropped from a horse car in Harvard Square, 
 thin-chested spectacled, nervous and frail. 
 Now there hangs in the living room of the 
 
 63 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Harvard Union, after all this distance and 
 change, the portrait of a sturdy, gray-locked 
 figure, watchful, decisive, confident, — looking 
 down on the endless procession of youth. The 
 little freshman of thirty-five years ago has 
 become a strong man. 
 
 64 
 
PART II. 
 
PART II. 
 
 CLASS REPORTS. 
 
 AT stated intervals it is the custom for 
 each Harvard graduate to furnish his 
 class secretary with a brief outline of the 
 principal incidents in his career for publica- 
 tion in the class reports. 
 
 The following, which includes such extracts 
 from Mr. Roosevelt's letters to the secretary 
 as he has seen fit to quote, have appeared in 
 the reports of the class of 1880. 
 
 COMMENCEMENT, 1883. 
 
 During the winter of 1880-81, the sec- 
 retary of the class supplied the information 
 that Roosevelt attended the Columbia College 
 Law School. Was married October 27, 1880 to 
 Alice H. Lee of Chestnut Hill, Mass. Spent 
 the summer of 1881 in Europe, and while in 
 Switzerland ascended the Matterhorn and 
 Jungfrau. 
 
 In November, 1881, ran for the New York 
 
 6% 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Legislature from the Twenty-first Assembly 
 District, and was elected by 1,500 majority, 
 running 50 ahead of the ticket. Writes as 
 follows: "Paid attention chiefly, while in the 
 Legislature, to laws for the reformation of 
 Primaries and of the Civil Service; and en- 
 deavored to have a certain Judge Westbrook 
 impeached on the ground of corrupt collusion 
 with Jay Gould and the prostitution of his 
 high judicial office to serve the purpose of 
 wealthy and unscrupulous stock-gamblers, but 
 was voted down." In November, 1882, ran 
 again and was elected by 2,400 majority, run- 
 ning 2,000 ahead of the ticket. On January 1, 
 1883, was nominated by the Republican legis- 
 lative caucus as candidate for Speaker. As 
 the Democrats had the majority this was 
 merely a complimentary nomination as leader 
 of the Republican side of the House. 
 
 Has written "The Naval War of 1812," pub- 
 lished in 1882 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New 
 York ; and various political pamphlets. 
 
 (A picture of the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt 
 appeared in Harper's Weekly, April 21, 1883) 
 
 COMMENCEMENT, 1886. 
 In 1883 Roosevelt was elected for the third 
 
 68 
 
CLASS REPORTS 
 
 time to the New York Assembly. He was 
 made chairman of the Committee on Cities, 
 the most important position next to that of 
 Speaker, and also of a Legislative Investigat- 
 ing Committee which did more work than had 
 ever been done by a similar body. As chair- 
 man of the committee he introduced and passed 
 a series of laws which practically revolution- 
 ized the municipal government of New York. 
 
 In 1884 he captured the State Republican 
 Convention for Edmunds as against Blaine 
 and Arthur, and went as the head of the New 
 York delegation to the National Republican 
 Convention. In the ensuing presidential cam- 
 paign he took part on the Republican side, 
 speaking in New York, New England and 
 New Jersey. He refused a nomination to the 
 Assembly, and also refused two nominations 
 for Congress. 
 
 In 1885 he opened the Republican campaign 
 in Northern Ohio, and spoke also in New York 
 and Massachusetts. 
 
 Writes as follows from Elkhorn Ranch, 
 Medora, North Dakota, April 15, 1886: 
 
 "In 1883 and since have spent most of my 
 summers on my cattle ranch on the Little 
 Missouri in western Dakota, or in making 
 
 69 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 hunting trips from it after bear, elk, buffalo, 
 etc. 
 
 "In 1883 published an enlarged edition of 
 my 'Naval War of 1812/ In 1885 wrote 
 'Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,' have just got 
 out a second American and a first English edi- 
 tion. Have contributed a number of political 
 essays and sketches of sport and adventure 
 to the Century Magazine, the North American 
 and New Princeton Reviews, and to Harpers.' 
 
 "In New York am a member of the Century, 
 Union League, University and other clubs, in- 
 cluding the Meadowbrook, as I am fond of 
 riding to hounds. Have now built a country 
 house at Sagamore Hill, my place at Oyster 
 Bay, Long Island, where I intend to live. 
 
 "My time has been pretty nearly divided 
 between ranching, literature and politics. My 
 address is New York. 
 APRIL 10, 1890: 
 
 "In the fall of 1886 I ran for Mayor of New 
 York on the Citizens' and Republican ticket, 
 against Henry George, the labor candidate, 
 and Abram S. Hewitt, the nominee of the 
 united Democracy, who was elected. In the 
 presidential campaign of 1888 I was on the 
 stump for the Republican ticket. On May 10, 
 
 70 
 
CLASS REPORTS 
 
 1889, I was appointed United States Civil Ser- 
 vice Commissioner, and for the past year have 
 been up to my ears in one unending fight to 
 take and keep the Civil Service out of the 
 hands of politicians, and I may say without 
 question that during this year the law has 
 been observed in the classified service under 
 our charge more rigidly and more impartially 
 than ever before. 
 
 "In 1886 I wrote the 'Life of Thomas Hart 
 Benton,' in the American Statesmen series, 
 and in 1887 the 'Life of Gouverneur Morris' 
 for the same series. In 1888 I published my 
 'Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail,' and in 
 1889 the first two volumes of 'The Winning 
 of the West.' Have contributed a number of 
 political essays and sketches of sport to the 
 Century, St. Nicholas, Murray's Magazine 
 (London), etc. 
 
 "Made a trip through Europe in the winter 
 of 1886-87. I spend a couple of months on my 
 ranch or hunting in the Rockies each year, 
 and the rest of my time on my place at Saga- 
 more Hill, except for a winter visit to New 
 York. This year I have been obliged by my 
 official duties to live most of the time in Wash- 
 ington." 
 
 71 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Washington, D. C, March 25, 1895— ."Since 
 1890 my residence has been Washington, 
 in winter, Oyster Bay, Long Island, in sum- 
 mer, except when I was on my ranch on the 
 Little Missouri or on a hunting trip. I have 
 been United States Civil Service Commissioner 
 all the time, having been appointed such May 
 9, 1889. 
 
 "I now have five children. My third child, 
 a second son, Kermit, was born October 15, 
 1889, my fourth child, Ethel, August 10, 1891, 
 my fifth child, Archibald Bulloch, April 9, 
 1894. 
 
 "I haven't made any journey in foreign coun- 
 tries, save a flying trip to Erigland and France 
 early in '91, but I have made several hunting 
 trips in the Rocky Mountains, which were a 
 good deal more important and interesting than 
 going to Europe. 
 
 "Civil Service Commissioner is about all the 
 office I have held. 
 
 "My 'History of New York' was published 
 in 1891; my 'Wilderness Hunter' in 1893, the 
 third volume of the 'Winning of the West' in 
 1894. I have written for the Century, Atlan- 
 tic Monthly, and Forum on various occasions, 
 but I do not recollect the dates and titles of the 
 
 72 
 
CLASS REPORTS 
 
 pieces now. I don't remember how many ad- 
 dresses I have made at public meetings. 
 
 "Except the fact that I have been annually 
 investigated by Congress and have made about 
 monthly investigations of other officials my- 
 self I do not know that I have had many in- 
 teresting experiences, unless you include bear 
 hunting in the list." 
 
 Roosevelt resigned as United States Civil 
 Service Commissioner April 30, 1895, having 
 been appointed by Mayor Strong Police Com- 
 missioner of New York City, which office he 
 accepted and still holds. 
 
 COMMENCEMENT, 1900 
 
 "I shall be at the dinner. 
 
 "Answering your questions : I am now Gov- 
 ernor of New York, having been elected in 
 November, 1898. Since writing you, five years 
 ago, I have been assistant secretary of the 
 Navy under President McKinley's administra- 
 tion, and lieutenant-colonel and afterwards 
 colonel of the First United States Volunteer 
 Cavalry in the war with Spain, being brevetted 
 as brigadier-general and acting as such in com- 
 mand of the Second Brigade of the Cavalry 
 
 73 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Division during the latter part of the Santiago 
 campaign. 
 
 "On November 17, 1898, I had a son, Quen- 
 tin, born to me. I now have four sons and two 
 daughters. 
 
 "June, 1899, Columbia University made me 
 an LL. D. 
 
 "I have published 'American Ideals,' 'The 
 Rough Riders,' and a 'Life of Cromwell.' 
 
 "Member Board of Overseers of Harvard 
 College, term expiring 1901." 
 
 COMMENCEMENT, 1910. 
 
 He was Governor of New York from Janu- 
 ary 1, 1898 to December 31, 1900. He was 
 Vice-President of the United States from 
 March 4, 1901, until September 14, 1901, when, 
 on the death of President McKinley, he suc- 
 ceeded to the office of President. He was 
 elected President of the United States on No- 
 vember 8, 1904, by the largest vote ever given 
 to a candidate for that office, and was inaugu- 
 rated on March 4, 1905. 
 
 74 
 
PART III 
 
PART III 
 
 ADDRESSES 
 
 LONG after Roosevelt, the undergraduate, 
 had put out from Harvard, he addressed 
 the college men of America. On one oc- 
 casion through the pages of the "Harvard 
 Graduates' Magazine;" on the other in an ad- 
 dress at the Harvard Union. Both were able 
 and vigorous pleas for the rational idealism 
 which he in his college life had in a large 
 measure given expression to. So few men re- 
 tain the ideals of early youth that no feature 
 of these mature expressions of opinion on Mr. 
 Roosevelt's part is of greater interest than the 
 marked evidences running through them of the 
 unchanging standards which years before he 
 had set for himself. 
 
 77 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 THE COLLEGE MAN. 
 
 An Address Delivered at the Harvard Union. 
 
 "It is idle to expect, nor indeed would it 
 be desirable, that there should be in col- 
 lege a uniform level of taste and associa- 
 tion. Some men will excel in one thing and 
 some in another; some in things of the body, 
 some in things of the mind ; and where thous- 
 ands are gathered together each will naturally 
 find some group of especially congenial friends 
 with whom he will form ties of peculiar social 
 intimacy. These groups — athletic, artistic, 
 scientific, social — must inevitably exist. My 
 plea is not for their abolition. My plea is that 
 they shall be got into the right focus in the 
 eyes of college men; that the relative impor- 
 tance of the different groups shall be under- 
 stood when compared with the infinitely 
 greater life of the college as a whole. Let 
 each man have his special associates, but let 
 him remember that he cannot get the full bene- 
 fit of life in college if he does nothing but 
 specialize; and that, what is even more im- 
 portant, he cannot do his full duty by the col- 
 lege unless his first and greatest interest is in 
 
 78 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 the college itself, in his associates taken as a 
 mass, and not in any small group. 
 
 "Our chief interest should not lie in the 
 great champions in sport. On the contrary, 
 our concern should be first of all to widen the 
 base, the foundation in athletic sports; to en- 
 courage in every way a healthy rivalry which 
 shall give to the largest possible number of 
 students the chance to take part in vigorous 
 outdoor games. It is of far more importance 
 that a man shall play something himself, even 
 if he plays it badly, than that he shall go with 
 hundreds of companions to see some one else 
 play well, and it is not healthy for either stu- 
 dents or athletes if the teams are mutually ex- 
 clusive. But even having this aim especially 
 in view it seems to me we can best attain it by 
 giving proper encouragement to the cham- 
 pions in the sports, and this can only be done 
 by encouraging intercollegiate contests. As 
 I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or 
 any other college turn out mollycoddles, in- 
 stead of vigorous men, I may add that I do 
 not in the least object to a sport because it 
 is rough. Rowing, baseball, lacrosse, track and 
 field games, hockey, football, are all of them 
 good. ... If necessary, let the college author- 
 
 79 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 ities interfere to stop any excess or perversion, 
 making their interference as little officious as 
 possible, and yet as rigorous as is necessary 
 to achieve the end. There is no justification 
 for stopping a thoroughly manly sport because 
 it is sometimes abused, when the experience 
 of every good preparatory school shows that 
 the abuse is in no shape necessarily attendant 
 upon the game. We cannot afford to turn 
 out of college men who shrink from physical 
 effort or from a little physical pain. In any 
 republic courage is a prime necessity for the 
 average citizen if he is to be a good citizen; 
 and he needs physical courage no less than 
 moral courage, the courage that dares as well 
 as the courage that endures, the courage that 
 will fight valiantly alike against the foes of 
 the soul and the foes of the body. Athletics 
 are good, especially in their rougher forms, 
 because they tend to develop such courage. 
 They are good also because they encourage 
 a true democratic spirit; for in the athletic 
 field the man must be judged, not with refer- 
 ence to outside and accidental attributes, but 
 by that combination of bodily vigor and moral 
 quality which go to make up prowess. 
 "I trust that I need not add that in defend- 
 
 80 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 ing athletics I would not for one moment be 
 understood as excusing that perversion of ath- 
 letics which would make it the end of life in- 
 stead of merely a means in life. It is first-class 
 healthful play, and is useful as such. But 
 play is not business, and it is a very poor bus- 
 iness indeed for a college man to learn noth- 
 ing but sport. There are exceptional cases 
 which I do not need to consider; but disre- 
 garding these, I cannot with sufficient em- 
 phasis say that when you get through college 
 you will do badly unless you turn your at- 
 tention to the serious work of life with a devo- 
 tion which will render it impossible for you 
 to pay much heed to sport in the way in which 
 it is perfectly proper for you to pay heed 
 while in college. Play while you play and 
 work while you work; and though play is a 
 mighty good thing, remember that you had 
 better never play at all than to get into a 
 condition of mind where you regard play as 
 the serious business of life, or where you per- 
 mit it to hamper and interfere with your doing 
 your full duty in the real work of the world. 
 
 "A word also to the students. Athletics 
 are good; study is even better; and best of 
 all is the development of the type of character 
 
 81 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 for the lack of which, in an individual, as in 
 a nation, no amount of brilliancy of mind or 
 strength of body will atone. Moreover, let 
 the students remember that in the long run 
 in the field of study judgment must be ren- 
 dered upon the quantity of first-class work 
 produced in the way of productive scholar- 
 ship, and that no amount of second-class work 
 can atone for failure in the college to produce 
 this first-class work. A course of study is of 
 little worth if it tends to deaden individual in- 
 itiative and cramp scholars so that they only 
 work in the ruts worn deep by many predeces- 
 sors. 
 
 "American scholarship will be judged, not 
 by the quantity of routine work produced by 
 routine workers, but by the small amount of 
 first-class output of those who, in whatever 
 branch, stand in the first rank. No industry 
 in compilation and in combination will ever 
 take the place of this first-hand original work, 
 this productive and creative work, whether 
 in science, in art, in literature. The greatest 
 special function of a college, as distinguished 
 from its general function of producing good 
 citizenship, should be so to shape conditions 
 as to put a premium upon the development of 
 
 82 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 productive scholarship, of the creative mind, 
 in any form of intellectual work. The men 
 whose chief concern lies with the work of the 
 student in study should bear this fact ever be- 
 fore them. 
 
 "When you college men graduate you will 
 take up many kinds of work; but there is one 
 work in which all of you should take part 
 simply as good American citizens, and that is 
 the work of self-government. Remember, in 
 the first place, that to take part in the work 
 of government does not in the least mean of 
 necessity to hold office. It means to take an 
 intelligent, disinterested and practical part in 
 the everyday duties of the average citizen, of 
 the citizen who is not a faddist or a doctrin- 
 aire, but who abhors corruption and dislikes 
 inefficiency ; who wishes to see decent govern- 
 ment prevail at home, with genuine equality 
 of opportunity for all men so far as it can be 
 brought about, and who wishes, as far as for- 
 eign matters are concerned, to see this nation 
 treat all other nations, great and small, with 
 respect, and if need be with generosity, and at 
 the same time show herself able to protect 
 herself by her own might from any wrong 
 at the hands of any outside power. 
 
 83 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 "Each man should feel that he has no excuse, 
 as a citizen in a democratic republic like ours, 
 if he fails to do his part in the government. 
 It is not only his right to do so, but his duty ; 
 his duty both to the nation and to himself. 
 Each man should feel that, if he fails in this, he 
 is not only failing in his duty, but is showing 
 himself in a contemptible light. 
 
 "A man may neglect his political duties be- 
 cause he is too lazy, too selfish, too short- 
 sighted, or too timid ; but whatever the reason 
 may be it is certainly an unworthy reason, 
 and it shows either a weakness or worse than 
 a weakness in the man's character. Above all, 
 you college men, remember that if your edu- 
 cation, the pleasant lives you lead, make you 
 too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the 
 rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the 
 world, if you become overcultivated, so over- 
 refined that you cannot do the hard work of 
 practical politics, then you had better never 
 have been educated at all. 
 
 "The weakling and the coward are out of 
 place in a strong and free community. In a 
 republic like ours the governing class is com- 
 posed of the strong men who take the trouble 
 to do the work of government; and if you are 
 
 84 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 too timid or too fastidious or too careless to 
 do your part in this work, then you forfeit your 
 right to be considered one of the governing 
 and you become one of the governed. 
 
 "Like most other things of value, education 
 is good only in so far as it is used aright, and 
 if it is misused or if it causes the owner to be 
 so puffed up with pride as to make him mis- 
 estimate the relative value of things, it be- 
 comes a harm and not a benefit. There are a 
 few things less desirable than the arid culti- 
 vation, the learning and refinement which 
 lead merely to that intellectual conceit which 
 makes a man in a democratic community like 
 ours hold himself aloof from his fellows and 
 pride himself upon the weakness which he mis- 
 takes for supercilious strength. 
 
 "Small is the use of those educated men who 
 in after life meet no one but themselves, and 
 gather in parlors to discuss wrong conditions 
 which they do not understand and to advocate 
 remedies which have the prime defect of being 
 unworkable. The judgment on practical af- 
 fairs, political and social, of educated men who 
 keep aloof from the conditions of practical 
 life, is apt to be valueless to those other men 
 who do really wage effective war against the 
 
 85 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 forces of baseness and evil. From the politi- 
 cal standpoint, education is a harm and not 
 a benefit to the men whom it serves as an ex- 
 cuse for refusing to mingle with their fellows 
 and for standing aloof from the broad sweep 
 of our national life in a curiously impotent 
 spirit of fancied superiority. The political 
 wrong-headedness of such men is quite as 
 great as that of wholly uneducated men, and 
 no people could be less trustworthy as critics 
 and advisers. The educated man who seeks to 
 console himself for his own lack of the robust 
 qualities which bring success in American pol- 
 itics by moaning over the degeneracy of the 
 times, by railing at the men who do the actual 
 work of political life, instead of trying him- 
 self to do the work, is a poor creature, and, so 
 far as his feeble powers avail, is a damage and 
 not a help to the community. You may come 
 far short of this disagreeable standard and still 
 be a rather useless member of society. Your 
 education, your cultivation, will not help you 
 if you make the mistake of thinking that it is 
 a substitute for, instead of an addition to, those 
 qualities which in the struggle of life bring 
 success to the ordinary man without your ad- 
 vantages. 
 
 86 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 "Your colle'ge training confers no privilege 
 upon you save as attested by the use you make 
 of it. It puts upon you the obligation to show 
 yourselves better able to do certain things than 
 your fellows who have not had your advan- 
 tages. If it has served merely to make you be- 
 lieve that you are excused from effort in after 
 life, that you are to be excused from contact 
 with the actual world of men and events, then 
 it will prove a curse and not a blessing. 
 
 "If, on the other hand, you treat your edu- 
 cation as a weapon, a weapon to fit you to do 
 better in the hard struggle of effort, and not as 
 excusing you in any way from taking part in 
 practical fashion in that struggle, then it will 
 be a benefit to you. Let each of you college 
 men remember in after life than in the fun- 
 damentals he is very much like his fellows who 
 have not been to college, and if he is to achieve 
 results, instead of confining himself exclusively 
 to disparagement of other men who achieve 
 them, he must manage to come to some kind 
 of working agreement with these fellows. 
 There are times, of course, when it may be 
 the highest duty of a citizen to stand alone 
 or practically alone. But if this is a man's 
 normal attitude — if normally he is unable to 
 
 87 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 work in combination with a considerable body 
 of his fellows — it is safe to set him down as 
 unfit for useful service in a democracy. In 
 popular government results worth having can 
 only be achieved by men who combine worthy 
 ideals with practical good sense, who are reso- 
 lute to accomplish good purposes, but who can 
 accommodate themselves to the give and take 
 necessary where work has to be done, as al- 
 most all important work must necessarily be 
 done, by combination. Moreover, remember 
 that normally the prime object of political life 
 is to achieve results and not merely to issue 
 manifestoes — save, of course, where the is- 
 suance of such manifestoes helps to achieve 
 the results. 
 
 "It is a very bad thing to be morally cal- 
 lous, for moral callousness is a disease. But 
 inflammation of the conscience may be just as 
 unhealthy, so far as the public is concerned; 
 and if a man's conscience is always telling 
 him to do something foolish he will do well to 
 mistrust its workings. The religious man 
 who is useful is not he whose sole care is to 
 save his soul, but the man whose religion bids 
 him strive to advance decency and clean liv- 
 88 
 
THE COLLEGE MAN 
 
 ing and to make the world a better place for 
 his fellows to live in. 
 
 "During the last few years much good has 
 been done to the people of the Philippines; 
 but this has been done, not by those who 
 merely indulged in the personal luxury of ad- 
 vocating for the islands a doctrinaire liberty 
 which would have meant their immediate and 
 irretrievable ruin, but those who have faced 
 facts as they actually were, remembering the 
 proverb that teaches that in the long run the 
 most uncomfortable truth is a safer companion 
 than the pleasantest falsehood. 
 
 "There have been some men in public life 
 and some men in private life whose action has 
 been at every point one of barren criticism 
 and fruitless obstruction. These men have 
 had no part or lot in the great record of 
 achievement and success — the record of good 
 work worthily done. Some of these men have 
 been college graduates; but all of them have 
 been poor servants of the people, useless where 
 not harmful. All the credit for the good thus 
 accomplished in the public life of this decade 
 belongs to those who have done affirmative 
 work . . . not to those who, with more or less 
 
 80 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 futility, have sought to hamper and obstruct 
 the work that has thus been done, 
 
 "In short, you college men, be doers rather 
 than critics of the deeds that others do. Stand 
 stoutly for your ideals, but keep in mind that 
 they can only be realized, even partially, by 
 practical methods of achievement. Remember 
 always that this republic of ours is a very 
 real democracy, and that you can only win suc- 
 cess by showing that you have the right stuff 
 in you. The college man, the man of intellect 
 and training, should take the lead in every 
 fight for civic and social righteousness. He can 
 take that lead only if in a spirit of thorough- 
 going democracy, if he takes his place among 
 his fellows, not standing aloof from them, but 
 mixing with them, so that he may know, may 
 feel, may sympathize with their hopes, their 
 ambitions, their principles and even their prej- 
 udices — as an American among Americans, a 
 man among men. 
 
 90 
 
HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS. 
 
 (From Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Oet. 
 1892. — By Theodore Roosevelt, '80.) 
 
 A fair proportion of the men who have 
 graduated from Harvard during the last 
 twenty years or so have gone into public 
 life. In a certain sense it is of course 
 the duty of every Harvard man to do this. He 
 is false to the tradition and spirit of American- 
 ism if he does not conscientiously and faith- 
 fully perform his political duties; I do not 
 mean merely vote, but take an active interest 
 in politics and do his part in controlling the 
 political organization to which he belongs ' r or, 
 if he belongs to none, do his part, in company 
 with others who feel as he does, in helping as 
 far as may be the political movements or the 
 political candidates in which he is interested. 
 He can accomplish a certain amount by criti- 
 cism if his criticism is intelligent and honest, 
 but he can of course accomplish infinitely more 
 by action; and possibly it may be of interest 
 to Harvard graduates to point out the kind 
 of work that is done in politics by those of 
 their number who are men of action. 
 
 2 1 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Massachusetts usually leads in any good 
 movement, and so it is not surprising that we 
 have to turn first to Massachusetts when we 
 think of Harvard graduates in public life. 
 There are at this moment many who deserve 
 well of their Alma Mater ; and these are among 
 both parties, and are to be found in the public 
 service of both the nation and the state, — men 
 like Governor Russell and Congressmen An- 
 drew and Hoar, or like Assistant Secretary of 
 State Wharton, Congressman Lodge, and ex- 
 Congressman Greenhalge, not to mention the 
 many Harvard men who are at the present 
 moment members of the Massachusetts state 
 or of the Boston municipal legislatures. Speak- 
 ing only of that with which I am most familiar, 
 I wish to point out some of the ways in which 
 Harvard men have been able to do peculiarly 
 good work in the national Congress during the 
 past few years. 
 
 Often much of the best service that is ren- 
 dered in Congress must be done without any 
 hope of approbation or reward. The meas- 
 ures that attract most attention are frequently 
 not those of most lasting importance; and 
 even where they are of such importance that 
 attention is fixed upon them, the interested 
 
 92 
 
HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 
 
 public may not appreciate the difference be- 
 tween the man who merely records his vote 
 for a bill and the other who throws his whole 
 strength into the contest to secure its passage. 
 A man must have in him a strong and earnest 
 sense of duty and the desire to accomplish 
 good for the commonwealth, without regard to 
 the effect upon himself, to be useful in Con- 
 gress in the way that men like Lodge, Green- 
 halge, Andrew, Hoar, or George Adams of Chi- 
 cago, are useful. 
 
 Take the work that these men have done on 
 subjects like the Copyright Bill, the building 
 of the navy, legislation in the interest of scien- 
 tific bodies, such as the Smithsonian Institu- 
 tion, and various bills affecting Civil Service 
 Reform. There is great popular interest in 
 certain quarters about the navy ; but I am sorry 
 to say that I do not think that this interest 
 is always sufficiently keen to make the pub- 
 lic intelligent in backing up the men who strive 
 to make our naval policy consistent and steady. 
 There is no kind of legislation more intimately 
 connected with the national honor than that 
 affecting the navy; yet during this very ses- 
 sion of Congress we have not only seen nar- 
 row-minded Congressmen from interior dis- 
 
 93 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 tricts strenuously opposing the building of the 
 navy, but also at least passive help extended 
 to them by certain representatives from dis- 
 tricts which are intelligently interested in our 
 maritime supremacy. It would be difficult to 
 overestimate the amount of good work done, 
 without any hope of recognition therefor, by 
 the men who have taken the chief part in pre- 
 paring and pushing through the naval legis- 
 lation, first on the naval committees of the two 
 Houses, and then through the legislative 
 bodies themselves ; and this is peculiarly a 
 work unselfish and patriotic, and which Har- 
 vard College ought to be most anxious to fos- 
 ter and most prompt to recognize when done 
 by her graduates. 
 
 So it is with the Copyright Bill. Every 
 reading man, every man interested in the 
 growth of American literature, and finally, 
 every man who cares for the honor of the 
 American name and is keenly anxious that no 
 reproach shall be rightly cast upon it, must 
 rejoice that we have the present Copyright 
 Law. It was won in the teeth of a violent and 
 ignorant opposition, and in spite of the fact 
 that many who had been supposed to be its 
 friends turned against it at the last moment, 
 
 94 
 
HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 
 
 on the shallow pretense that it did not go as 
 far as they desired. It certainly should be a 
 matter of congratulation for Harvard that her 
 representatives were among the leaders in the 
 fight on its behajf. 
 
 In the copyright struggle, as in all other 
 Congressional contests, there were many dif- 
 ferent kinds of difficulties to be encountered, 
 In the first place there was undoubtedly a ker- 
 nel of dishonest opposition to the bill, due to 
 the presence of an active lobby, subsidized by 
 certain third-rate newspaper and book con- 
 cerns. In the next place, there was a mass of 
 inert indifference to be overcome. Thirdly, 
 the friends of the bill had to meet the bitter 
 opposition of perfectly honest and very able, 
 though, as we believe, entirely misguided, 
 opponents of the measure, — men like Roger 
 Q. Mills, for instance, whose character and 
 capacity rightly gave them great weight in 
 Congress. Finally, there was the need of guard- 
 ing against the crankiness of certain friends 
 of the measure, which actually threatened to 
 defeat the whole bill merely because it con- 
 tained some features to propitiate the prin- 
 ters, — features which were absolutely essential 
 to its passage, and which were entirely non- 
 95 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 essential when viewed from the standpoint 
 either of abstract right or of expediency. The 
 Senate passed the bill in one form ; the House 
 passed it in another, after having first rejected 
 it in yet a third. Then in the very last hours 
 of the session a most strenuous effort had to 
 be made, after having persuaded the confer- 
 ence committees of the two Houses to agree 
 upon a common measure, to persuade the 
 Houses themselves to pass the conference re- 
 port. No one who was not himself present 
 in the Capitol during these final, vital hours of 
 the fight can appreciate the tact, resolution, 
 energy, and downright hard work of the men 
 who were prominent in passing the bill. This 
 had to be done with absolute disinterestedness. 
 No man did anything for the Copyright Bill 
 from selfish motives. It was pressed by a 
 body of men without political influence, and 
 it was passed solely as a measure of justice, 
 and from the highest motives. The men who 
 were instrumental in passing it deserve to re- 
 ceive the credit always attaching to effective 
 and disinterested work for a worthy ideal. 
 
 In no respect has our government done bet- 
 ter work than in its scientific departments. 
 The different government publications on 
 
 96 
 
HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 
 
 scientific subjects rank very high, and it is 
 through these that many of the most eminent 
 American scientists have been able to render 
 their most distinguished services. No work 
 that has been done by us as a nation has been 
 more creditably performed, and the scientific 
 bureaux are pecularly worthy of being well 
 sustained by both the Congressional and Ex- 
 ecutive branches. The work they do, however, 
 is of a kind which can apply only to the higher 
 intellectual faculties, and both the demagogue 
 and the honest ignorant man always select 
 these bureaux as peculiarly vulnerable objects 
 of attack. There is not any very widely ex- 
 tended public interest in them; the newspapers 
 devote but small space to them, and there are 
 no districts where there are any bodies of 
 voters whose interests are in any way bound 
 up with theirs. In consequence, they must 
 rely for support upon the wholly unselfish, and 
 usually unappreciative, efforts of a number of 
 men in both branches of Congress, who do rec- 
 ognize the importance of the work that is be- 
 ing done, and are willing to take great trouble 
 that it may not be stopped. A Harvard gradu- 
 ate who has been bred and trained to the 
 knowledge of the usefulness of public scientific 
 
 97 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 and artistic institutions can with difficulty re- 
 alize the enormous number of people to whom 
 such institutions, when supported by the pub- 
 lic money, are objects of positive dislike. It 
 would be a revelation to the readers of this 
 paper if they would turn to the Congressional 
 Record and read some of the speeches made 
 against the Smithsonian and kindred institu- 
 tions in the last session. These speeches were 
 so effective, and the forces to whose feelings 
 they gave utterance so powerful, that at one 
 time it looked as though all our scientific work 
 would have to be stopped. The calamity was 
 averted only by the strenuous endeavor of sev- 
 eral of the Congressional leaders, who took not 
 only an active and intelligent but very reso- 
 lute part on behalf of the menaced institutions. 
 Among these men, I am happy to say, one or 
 two of the most prominent were Harvard grad- 
 uates. Yet I doubt if the mass of our graduates 
 even understood that there had been a struggle, 
 far less that they felt any particular gratitude 
 towards the men who had staved off Congres- 
 sional action which would have amounted to 
 a national disgrace. 
 
 So it is with the unending fight over Civil 
 Service Reform, — a fight waged so equally 
 
 98 
 
HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 
 
 against the active and interested opposition of 
 the great army of political place-hunters and 
 against the indifference of that numerous class 
 which is incapable of high ideals or of sensitive- 
 ness to any cause that does not at the moment 
 appeal to their pockets. The best work for 
 Civil Service Reform that has been done in 
 Congress of recent years must be put to the 
 credit of Harvard graduates; who at the time, 
 be it remembered, were also taking prominent 
 part in the conflicts waged over those ques- 
 tions in which the whole public are interested, 
 such as the tariff and the currency. 
 
 These are but samples of the unrewarded 
 and yet all important tasks which every Har- 
 vard man who goes into public life will find 
 ready to his hand, and if he is worthy of his 
 college,— as those men whose names I have 
 given above, and scores of others like them, 
 most assuredly are, — he will not shrink from 
 these tasks, but will rather choose them gladly, 
 because of the very fact that most public men 
 will be glad to leave them to him, and because 
 by doing them he will render most honorable 
 and useful service to the State and nation. 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT ) '8o. 
 
 99 
 
PART IV 
 
 COLLEGE EDITORIALS 
 
 From the HARVARD ADVOCATE— 
 
 October 17, 1879, by Theodore Roosievelt. 
 
 The Fall Meeting of the Athletic Association 
 is very near at hand, and from the present 
 prospect it does not seem likely that any pre- 
 vious records will be lowered. This does not 
 arise from lack of encouragement from the 
 Association, which certainly has done every- 
 thing possible to induce men to train for the 
 events, but from the indisposition prevalent 
 among college men to do the hard work nec- 
 essary. There is yet time remaining for men 
 to get ready for this meeting, and we most 
 warmly encourage them to do so and not let 
 the fear of being beaten hinder any one from 
 doing his best. 
 
 The statement of the financial condition of 
 the Association shows it very much in need 
 
 100 
 
COLLEGE EDITORIALS 
 
 of money, and we hope that all will do their 
 part toward paying off this debt, and that all 
 who have not done so will join the Associa- 
 tion. 
 
 In conection with our athletic meetings we 
 call attention to a letter in this issue, the spirit 
 of which we heartily approve; we could rec- 
 ommend it to the consideration of the Athletic 
 Association as a very excellent suggestion for 
 making our sports in every way better. If 
 Yale can be brought in, it seems likely that the 
 increased competition would result in better 
 training, the only thing needful to improve 
 Harvard's records. 
 
 To the Editors of the Harvard Advocate : 
 
 In view of increasing the interest in our 
 athletic meetings a plan is suggested which 
 would seem to bring about many results. 
 
 At present we have two field meetings dur- 
 ing the year, one in the fall and the other in 
 the spring, a good track, and every inducement, 
 it would seem, for men to try to win prizes; 
 but the great difficulty has always been to get 
 enough men to train for the different events to 
 make them interesting, either on account of 
 closeness in the result, or by reason of the es- 
 
 101 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 pecially good records made. Very seldom do 
 we have the pleasure of seeing either of these 
 results. 
 
 Now, what induces men to train so well and 
 faithfully for the Football Team, Crew, or Base- 
 ball Nine? Simply the desire to beat Yale. 
 Would not they train equally well for our ath- 
 letic sports if they were to try against Yale 
 there too? It seems probable that the mere 
 desire to win from Yale is all that is now 
 needed to make our athletic meetings a com- 
 plete success. 
 
 The plan proposed is for one college to send 
 a team to compete in the sports of the other. 
 For example : Let Harvard send ten men to 
 Yale in the fall, and Yale send ten men there in 
 the spring. 
 
 It seems clearly that this would be just the 
 impetus which would make our sports what 
 they should be. The number of spectators 
 would be much greater, many men would train 
 for the events, better time would be made, and 
 our athletic sports would take their place with 
 football and baseball ; and more important than 
 all, we should not see our events filled by men 
 who had no previous training, and only entered 
 to "fill up." R. 
 
 103 
 
COLLEGE EDITORIALS 
 FOOTBALL AT OTHER COLLEGES. 
 
 The football season has now fairly opened, 
 and it is well to take a glance at what our rivals 
 are doing. Yale has lost Thompson, who has 
 twice turned the scales against us; but other- 
 wise her team will probably be much the same 
 as last year's, and there is plenty of good 
 material from which to fill the vacancies. 
 Captain Camp has already begun to put his 
 men into regular training, running them in 
 the gymnasium. Thirty men have been pledged 
 to play against the team every afternoon, and 
 games will probably be played with both Am- 
 herst and Trinity; so that there will be no 
 danger of her men suffering from lack of prac- 
 tice. At present it hardly seems as if the team 
 would be as good as last year's, but their play- 
 ing is improving every day, and nothing but 
 very hard work will enable our men to win 
 the victory. 
 
 Princeton will undoubtedly have a good, 
 team, although the lower classes do not seem 
 to possess very good material from which to 
 choose; but it must be remembered that in 
 Princeton, where there is no crew, all the best 
 men go out on the football field, and work with 
 103; 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 a faithfulness not very common at Harvard. 
 At Cornell there has been some talk of or- 
 ganizing a team, but it is doubtful if it can be 
 done this year. What Columbia will do, it is 
 difficult to say. On the whole .the prospect 
 should be by no means discouraging to us. 
 We certainly have good teams to fight against 
 us; but there is plenty of excellent material 
 in College, and our captain deserves most 
 hearty praise, whatever be the result, for the 
 pains he has taken, not only in keeping the 
 men at work on the field, but in running them 
 on the track every afternoon. What is most 
 necessary is, that every man should realize 
 the necessity of faithful and honest work, every 
 afternoon, .Last year we had good individual 
 players but they did not work together nearly 
 as well as the Princeton team, and were not in 
 as good condition as the Yale men. The foot- 
 ball season is short ; and while it does last, the 
 men ought to work faithfully, if they expect 
 to win back for Harvard the position she held 
 three years ago. 
 
 R. 
 
 T04 
 
APPENDIX 
 
ROOSEVELT'S 
 COLLEGE COURSES 
 
 FRESHMAN YEAR. 
 (Courses all prescribed) 
 
 Classical Literature — Twenty lectures. One 
 a week. Assistant Professor Everett. 
 
 Greek — Lysias (select orations) ; Plato (Apol- 
 ogy and Crito) ; Euripedes (one play) ; 
 Homer (Odyssey, Books V, VI, VII, 
 IX, and XI); Goodwin's Greek Moods 
 and Tenses ; Unprepared translation and 
 composition; Selections from Grote's 
 History of Greece, to illustrate the 
 authors read. Three times a week. 
 Messrs. J. W. White and Croswell. 
 
 Latin — Livy (Books XXI, XXII); Horace 
 (Odes and Epodes) ; Cicero; Merivale's 
 General History of Rome (chaps. XLII- 
 LIII; extemporaneous translations and 
 composition. Three times a week. As- 
 sistant Professors Everett and Smith 
 and Mr. Gould. 
 German — Peissner's Grammar; Joynes's Ot- 
 
 107 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 to's Reader; German stories. Three 
 times a week. Messrs. Faulhaber and 
 Emerton. 
 
 Mathematics — (advanced sections) Solid Ge- 
 ometry (Chauvenet) ; Plane Trigonome- 
 try (Chauvenet) ; Analytic Geometry 
 (Peck). Three times a week in the 
 first half-year and after May i, twice a 
 week in second half-year till May i. 
 Assistant Professor Byerly and Mr. 
 Briggs. Algebra (Todhunter). Once a 
 week from the beginning of the second 
 half-year till May i. Assistant Profes- 
 sor C. J. White. 
 
 Physics — Chamber's Matter and Motion ; 
 Goodeve's Mechanics (selections). 
 Twice a week. Mr. Wilson. 
 
 Chemistry — Elementary Chemistry (24 lec- 
 tures.) Once a week. Professor Cooke. 
 
 SOPHOMORE YEAR. 
 Prescribed Courses. 
 
 Rhetoric — Hill's Principles of Rhetoric and 
 Punctuation; Abbott's How to Write 
 Clearly. Twice a week. Professor A. S. 
 
 108 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Hill and Mr. Ware. Six themes. Mr. 
 Perry. 
 History — Freeman's Outlines of General His- 
 tory (to p. 272) ; Flander's Exposition 
 of the Constitution of the United States ; 
 Ewald's The Crown and its Advisers. 
 Twice a week. Mr. Macvane. 
 
 Elective Courses. 
 
 German IV — Scientific Prose. Twice a week. 
 Mr. Hodges. 
 
 German V — Composition and Oral Exercises, 
 Once a week. Assistant Professor Bart- 
 lett. 
 
 French IV — Litterature francaise au XVII 
 erne siecle. Themes. Three times a 
 week. Assistant Professor Jacquinot. 
 
 Natural History III — Comparative Anatomy 
 and Physiology of Vertebrates. Three 
 times a week. Assistant Professor James. 
 
 Natural History VIII — Elementary Botany. 
 Gray's Structural and Systematic Bot- 
 any. Three times a week. Assistant 
 Professor Goodale. 
 
 109 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 JUNIOR YEAR. 
 Prescribed Courses. 
 
 English — Six Themes. Professor Hill and 
 Messrs. Ware and Perry. Four Forensic 
 Themes. Assistant Professor Palmer. 
 
 Philosophy — Jevon's Logic. Twice a week 
 for a half year. Professor Peabody. 
 Metaphysics; Ferrier's Lectures on the 
 Greek Philosophy. Twice a week for 
 a half year. Assistant Professor Pal- 
 mer. 
 
 Elective Courses. 
 
 German VIII — Richter; Goethe (Faust and 
 Aus meinem Leben) ; German lyrics; 
 Composition. Three times a week. 
 Professor Hedge. 
 
 Italian I — G. Gozzi (L'Osservatore) ; Silvio 
 Pellico (Le Mie Prigoni) ; Toscani's 
 Grammar; Prose Composition. Three 
 times a week. Mr. Bendelari. 
 
 Philosophy VI — Political Economy ; J. S. 
 Mill's Political Economy ; Financial Leg- 
 islation of the United States. Three 
 times a week. Professor Dunbar and 
 Dr. Laughlin. 
 
 no 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Natural History I — Physical Geography, Het- 
 erology, and Structural Geology. Twice 
 a week. Mr. Davis. 
 
 Natural History III — Zoology (elementary 
 course). Three times a week. Dr. 
 Mark. 
 
 SENIOR YEAR. 
 
 Prescribed Course. 
 
 English — Four Forensic Themes. Professor 
 Peabody. 
 
 Elective Courses. 
 
 Italian II — A. Manzoni (I Promessi Sposi) ; 
 Modern Plays ; Alfieri ; Torquato Tasso ; 
 Syntax and Prose Composition. Three 
 times a week. Assistant Professor Nash. 
 
 Political Economy III — Cairnes's Leading 
 Principles of Political Economy; Mc- 
 Leod's Elements of Banking; Bastiat's 
 Harmonies Economiques ; Lectures. 
 Three times a week. Professor Dunbar. 
 
 Natural History IV — Geology. Three times 
 a week. Professor Shaler and Mr. Da- 
 vis. 
 
 Natural History VI — Advanced Zoology. 
 Three times a week. Dr. Faxon. 
 
 ill 
 
CLASS OF 1880 
 
 Allen, Frederick Hobbs 
 Allen, Russell Carpenter 
 Alley, Wiliam Henry 
 Almy, Frederic 
 Andrews, William Shankland 
 Atwood, Charles Edward 
 Bacon, Robert 
 Baldwin, Henry Cutler 
 Barrows, Morton 
 Barstow, Henry Taylor 
 Bartlett, Nathaniel Cilley 
 Beale, Charles Frederic Tiffany 
 Bement, Gerard 
 Benton, Charles Horace 
 Billings, Sherard 
 Bishop, Robert Roberts 
 Bissell, Herbert Porter 
 Blair, Charles Benton 
 Blodgett, William Tilden ' ' 
 
 112 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Bond, Hugh Lennox 
 
 Brackett, Frank Herbert 
 
 Bradford, Russell 
 
 Bradley, Charles Wesley 
 
 Breed, Amos Franklin 
 
 Brigham, Clifford 
 
 Brigham, Nat Maynard 
 
 Brown, Louis Mayo 
 
 Buckley, Philip Townsend 
 
 Butler, George Minot 
 
 Cabot, Francis Elliot, 
 
 Carpenter, Frank Oliver 
 
 Carruth, Ignatius Sumner 
 
 Chapin, Henry Bainbridge 
 
 Chapman, Charles Henry 
 
 Chase, George Thorndike 
 
 Clark, William Bradford 
 
 Cole, Walter 
 
 Collison, Harvey Newton 
 
 Cook, William Hoff 
 
 Davis, Charles Stevenson 
 
 Doane, John 
 
 Dodd, Edwin Merrick 
 
 Dodge, Frank Faden 
 
 Dwight, Jonathan 
 
 Eaton, Arthur Wentworth Hamilton 
 
 Edwards, Pierrepont 
 
 113 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Ellis, Ralph Nicholson 
 Eustis, Herbert Hall 
 Fessenden, James Deering 
 Field, James Brainerd 
 Fish, Charles Everett 
 Foster, Charles Chauncey 
 Fowler, Harold North 
 French, Henry Gardner 
 Fuller, Eugene 
 Gardiner, Frederic 
 Gaston, William Alexander 
 Geddes, James 
 Gest, Joseph Henry 
 Gilbert, Samuel Cotton 
 Gilley, Frank Milton 
 Gilman, John Bradley 
 Gooch, William Wallace 
 Greeley, Louis May 
 Griswold, George 
 Guild, Henry Eliot 
 Hale, Arthur 
 Hall, Arthur Lawrence 
 Hall, Frederic Bound 
 Hall, William Dudley 
 Hanscom, Arthur Lee 
 Harrison, Mitchell 
 Hart, Albert Bushnell 
 
 n4 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Hatch, George Baptiste 
 Hawes, Edward Southworth 
 Henderson, Harold Gould 
 Hibbard, George Abiah 
 Hills, William Henry 
 Hines, Fletcher Stephen 
 Hobbs, Charles Austin 
 Hooper, William 
 Houston, John Wesley 
 Howe, James Torrey 
 Huidekoper, Frank Colhoon 
 Hurst, Arthur 
 Jackson, Henry 
 
 Johnson, Laurence Henry Hitch 
 Jones, Henry Champion 
 Jordan, Frederick Dolbier 
 
 Keene, Francis Bowler 
 
 Kelly, George Reed 
 
 Kenneson, Thaddeus Davis 
 
 Kent, Percy 
 
 Kilburn, Henry Whitman 
 
 Lamson, John Lamson 
 
 Lea, Arthur Henry 
 
 Learned, William Pollock 
 
 Lester, James Louis 
 
 Lum, Edward Harris 
 
 March, Charles Dudley 
 
 "5 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Merrill, George White 
 Messervy, George Passarow 
 Miller, Andrew 
 Moors, Arthur Wendell 
 Morgan, Charles 
 Morrison, Sanford 
 Morss, Charles Henry 
 Mould, David 
 Muzzey, Austin Kent 
 Nickerson, Thomas White 
 Norton, Charles Phelps 
 O'Callaghan, William Francis 
 O'KeefeJohn Aloysius 
 Opdycke Leonard Eckstein 
 Parker, Charles Albert 
 Pellew, Wiliam George 
 Pennypacker, James Lane 
 Perry, Arthur 
 Perry, George Murdock 
 Perry, Herbert Mills 
 Peters, George Gorham 
 Pew, William Andrews 
 Pilsbury, Ernest Henry 
 Price, Wesley Frank 
 Quincy, Josiah 
 Rand, Harry Seaton 
 Ranlett, Frederick Jordan 
 
 116 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Rhett, Walter Horton 
 Richardson, William King 
 Rollins, Frank Blair 
 Roosevelt, Theodore 
 Russell, Eugene Dexter 
 Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott 
 Sanger, Chester Franklin 
 Savage, Henry Wilson 
 Sharon, Frederick William 
 Sharp, William Beverly 
 Shaw, Henry Russell 
 Skinner, Samuel Wiggins 
 Smith, Frederick Mears 
 Smith, Walter Allen 
 Stevens, William Stanford 
 Stow, Vanderlynn 
 Suire, Frank Overton 
 Talbott, William Houston 
 Taylor, Arthur 
 Taylor, William George 
 Tebbets, John Sever 
 Thomsen, John Jacob 
 Tiffany, Walter Checkley 
 Townsend, Howard 
 Trimble, Richard 
 Tupper, Frederic Allison 
 Turpin, Bradford Strong 
 
 117 
 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Wakefield, John Lathrop 
 Ware, Charles 
 Warreti, Charles Everett 
 Washburn, Charles Grenfill 
 Webb, Henry Randall 
 Weimer, Albert Barnes 
 Weld, Christopher Minot 
 Welling, Richard Ward Greene 
 Wheelan, Fairfax Henry 
 Whitcomb, Silas Merrick 
 White, Franklin Davis 
 White, William Howard 
 Whiting, Frederick Erwin 
 Wilkinson, Alfred 
 Williams, Otto Holland 
 Winlock, William Crawford 
 Winsor, Robert 
 Woodbury, John 
 
 118 
 
AUG 15 1910 
 
One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
 
 MJ8 15