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The difference between Theodore’s final two years at Harvard and the first two was enormous. In the first two he had discovered he could handle the work and function reasonably well socially. His name, background, all that comprised his own “antecedents,” had also proved an advantage, something that was not to occur very often again in his life. He had fallen in immediately and quite naturally with the young Brahmins and their respective families, after which, with the death of his father, he had become a subject of great sympathy among them. But it was not until his junior year that he found himself a social success all at once. “People knew who he was,” as said William Roscoe Thayer. Indeed, he enjoyed a celebrity of a kind, for the first time ever. He knew things were to be different almost from the day he arrived at Cambridge that fall of 1878 and the feeling was heady.
“All the fellows greeted me with enthusiasm,” he writes in his diary, September 27. “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he tells Mittie a little later, “having been elected into several different clubs.”
In no time he belonged to nearly everything one was supposed to—the Hasty Pudding Club, the “Dickey” (DKE), the lofty Porcellian—and several others as well. The night of his initiation into the Porcellian, which occupied several rooms over a store on Harvard Street, he got “‘higher’ with wine than I have ever been.” “Of course” he was “delighted to be in,” he reported to Bamie; “there is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch room, etc., and my best friends are in it.”
Apart from the drinking, he embraced the new life with open arms. (He suffered so from a hangover the morning after the Porcellian rites—his “spree”—that he drank but sparingly, if at all, from then on. Besides, he noted, “Wine always makes me fighty.”) He was savoring partridge suppers at “the Pore,” served by a dignified liveried black man named George Washington Lewis. He was picking up expressions like “Jove” and “dear old boy.” “Pore men” were “perfect trumps.”
“Roosevelt was right in this group in every way,” recalled classmate Rand. Roosevelt would talk to others if the occasion arose, Rand said, “though such did not often occur.”
“Please send my silk hat at once,” he demanded in a letter to Mittie written on Porcellian stationery, “why has it not come before?”
He was regarded as a “little fellow” and richer even than his elegant friends, and while this may have been no guarantee of success, it did lend an aura. Henry Jackson, one of the Bostonians who had gone to New York for the Christmas parties their freshman year, would remember for the rest of his life the splendor of the “Roosevelt establishment” on 57th Street. (Real-life butlers and footmen were not ordinarily part of domestic life among Bostons best families.) In his junior year, furthermore, Theodore kept his own horse in Cambridge, something few could afford, and during his senior year he drove a smart little tilbury, or “dog cart,” which pleased him no end. With horse, cart, whip, and lap robe, he had, he said, “as swell a turnout as any man.”
He spent his money in grand style, as he would never have dared were his father alive. His inheritance from his father, he had been informed by Uncle James Alfred, was $125,000, and from this he could expect an annual income of approximately $8,000 a year, a princely sum. It was, for example, considerably more than the salary of the president of Harvard. On $5,000 a year Charles Eliot kept a comfortable home, entertained, owned a summer house, a boat, and put his own two sons through Harvard. But Theodore, as he wrote in his diary, judged himself only “comfortable, though not rich,” which may have been the way Uncle James Alfred had expressed it to him by way of encouraging a degree of financial caution.
For additions to his wardrobe in his junior year, we know from his neat accounts, he spent $685.80 (in a day when the best suit cost about $35); in his senior year, he spent a whopping $761.59 more on clothes. This was more for clothes than some students had to cover all expenses. And clothes and club dues combined for those same two years added up to $2,400, a sum the average American family could have lived on for six years.
Just to stable the horse cost more than $900 a year. In present terms it would correspond to spending an annual $12,000 on clothes and clubs, plus another $9,000 or more to have a car at college.
But while it is hard to imagine him daring to live quite so lavishly under his father’s eye, it is also obvious that, consciously or not, he was actually behaving very like his father—that side of the father that was the dandy, the lover of fine horses, expensive clothes, the best clubs. Once, as Theodore would later relate, his father had given him a brief lesson in economy—this in view of his possibly entering a life of science wherein he could expect to earn little or no money. The great trick was to “keep the fraction constant,” his father had said. If one could not increase the numerator, then he must reduce the denominator. But it would have been an extremely unobservant boy indeed who failed to sense the kind of figures the father himself had to be working with in his own “fraction.” Expenditures on the order of those the family was accustomed to obviously added up to a very large denominator indeed, but they also implied an equally large or larger numerator. The elder Theodore was a rich man who knew how to spend money—to enjoy his money—and the son, thus far, was doing the same. And extravagant as he might appear, he was still spending less than his income.
He could hardly have been more conspicuous, it seems—or more energetic. He was a figure of incessant activity (as he himself said), of constant talk, constant hurry, a bee in a bottle. He rowed on the Charles in a one-man shell (and posed for a photographer wearing rower’s skullcap and knee breeches, barefoot and bare-chested, arms folded and his whiskered face set in a defiant scowl). He took boxing lessons and enrolled in Papanti’s Dancing Class. (”. . . am very fond of dancing,” he would note in his diary; “it is my favorite amusement, except horseback riding.”) He wrestled and went off on long hikes of the kind President Eliot approved. “He was always ready to join anything,” remembered Richard Saltonstall, who became the nearest thing to a close friend. He was “forever at it,” said another man. There was no one who possessed such an amazing array of interests, said John Woodbury, who came to be one of his most steadfast admirers.
He joined the Rifle Club, the Art Club, the Glee Club. (Even if unable to carry a tune, he could help raise money.) He was vice president of the Natural History Society, helped start a Finance Club, and was named to the editorial board of the Advocate, the undergraduate magazine, which in turn “opened the door” to the O.K. Society.
His grades were excellent. In his junior year, his best academically, he carried nine courses—German, Italian, themes, forensics, logic, metaphysics, Philosophy 6 (as Dunbar’s course in political economy was known), Natural History 1 (geography, meteorology, and structural geology), and Natural History 3 (elementary zoology)—and finished with an 87 average. During his senior year, in addition to his thesis, he began work on a book, his study of the naval side of the War of 1812; and though his grades were down some from the year before, he finished with an overall average high enough to qualify him for Phi Beta Kappa.
It was hard for others to imagine how he could possibly do all that he did, quite aside from his social schedule, which with the advent of Alice Lee in his life consumed as much of his time—or more—than everything else. There was always the possibility, of course, that his involvement with the extracurricular activities and organizations was something less than met the eye. The editor of the Advocate, for example, could not recall that Theodore ever attended a board meeting and knew of only one article he had written.
Nor, for all his joining, did he seem to belong in the way others did. There was always something “different” about him. The “unchastened eagerness” that one was supposed never to show was what showed most of all. He was wholly—constitutionally—incapable of indifference. He was the kind who spoke up in class. The strange, shrill manner of speech persisted. George H. Palmer,
his professor of metaphysics in his junior year, remembered that he “sort of spluttered” as he spoke, his thoughts charging on faster than his mouth could handle them. The sound, said Palmer, was something like water coming out of a thin-necked bottle. Yet he would be heard and at length if necessary. Shaler, the geologist, a man of tremendous bearing and his own expansive enthusiasms, is said to have exclaimed on one such occasion, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk, I’m running this course.”
Crossing the Yard between classes, he scurried when one was supposed to saunter. At the gymnasium some afternoons he could be seen skipping rope (!) and his rooms on Winthrop Street were said to contain live lizards, snakes, and other such “loathsome” creatures, so intense was his passion for natural science. In fact, he may have kept nothing of the kind at Winthrop Street—Richard Saltonstall, who lived on the floor below, remembered no caged animals, or anything, for that matter, which was the least out of the ordinary about Theodore’s rooms, and a photograph said to be of his living room looks not unlike any number of others from the time, except for a few mounted birds in bell jars to be seen on top of a bookcase. But the story was one everybody liked (then as later), which was more important. It was “Teddy exactly,” off to himself with his books and bird skins and creepy live things, and it became standard. Robert Bacon is supposed to have been so repulsed by the mere thought of Theodore’s quarters and all therein that he refused to go near the place.
Forty years later, sorting out his own personal recollections of “Roosevelt at Harvard,” William Roscoe Thayer remembered thinking of him as chiefly comical, “a joke ... active and enthusiastic and that was all.” Thayer had certainly perceived no portents of greatness, though one spring day in Theodore’s senior year, they had talked about the future. They were sitting in a window seat in Charles Washburn’s room in Holworthy, overlooking the Yard, and Theodore had said something to the effect that he might try to help the cause of better government in New York, though he hardly knew how. Thayer’s only reaction, as he remembered, was to look hard at Theodore and ponder to himself “‘whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities which he appears.’”
The ever-admiring John Woodbury seems to have been alone in his forecast of distinction. Woodbury, as he said later, figured Theodore might amount to something—as a professor of history perhaps—if only because he seemed to know what he wanted.
To most others he remained likable but peculiar (”queer”), and much too intense for comfort. “Some thought he was crazy,” said Woodbury.
Martha Cowdin, a Boston debutante known to all the class because she was engaged to Robert Bacon, described Theodore as “not the sort to appeal at first.” He was too eccentric, she said, too ambitious, while Bacon, by contrast, was “a wonderful normal human being.”
“He danced,” said Rose Lee, sister of Alice, “just as you’d expect him to dance if you knew him—he hopped.” Charles Washburn remembered how he ate chicken “as though he wanted to grind the bones.”
Washburn was one of the relative handful of classmates “good and true” whose friendship mattered most to Theodore. The others were Saltonstall, Bacon, Harry Chapin, Henry Jackson, Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, and Minot Weld. They were Boston to the bone, and following graduation, with but few exceptions, they would settle happily in good, predictable Boston careers in banking, finance, or the law. (Jackson, who chose medicine, returned to a position on the Harvard faculty.) Their names figure time and again in Theodore’s letters and in the pages of his diaries. Saltonstall—“Old Dick”—a large, well-fed young man with a big, soft, bland face, is certified “my most intimate friend,” with Harry Shaw coming second. And since Saltonstall was also Theodore’s entrée to the Lee household at Chestnut Hill, and thus to Alice, he would always be regarded in a different light from the others. By their senior year Saltonstall qualified for the highest rating possible: “Old Dick I place on par with the Roosevelts.”
There were also two acknowledged “dig friends” who should be mentioned, both New Yorkers—George Pellew, the class poet, who afterward became a writer for the New York Sun, and Richard Welling, later a prominent New York attorney and reform crusader. Welling was a particularly interesting young man, a serious student and a powerful physical specimen. It was he, during their freshman year, who had been so astonished by Theodore’s namby-pamby workout at the gymnasium, and once, sometime later, during a skating expedition to Fresh Pond, he had discovered how very mistaken he had been in that first impression.
The day was bitterly cold, with a furious wind blowing, and the ice was much too rough. Any sane man would have given up and gone home, Welling recalled, but Theodore had kept exclaiming his delight as they beat their way across the pond, arms flailing, neither knowing how to skate very well. The harder the wind blew, the more miserable Welling felt, the greater Theodore appeared to be enjoying himself. (Welling actually remembered him shouting, “Isn’t it bully!” but then Welling wrote his account of the incident a very long time afterward.) “Never in college was my own grit so put to the test,” Welling said, “and yet I would not be the first to suggest ‘home.’”
They were out on the pond nearly three hours. Only when it became too dark to see did Theodore at last say that perhaps they ought to stop. Had there been a moon, Welling surmised, they might have gone on until midnight.
Like some of the other stories, this one could be taken two ways, as proof either of an indomitable will—what Welling called Theodore’s amazing vitality—or of mental imbalance.
He would be remembered reading by the fire in a room full of friends, unmindful of their talk or the fact that his boots were being singed. In another story he flies into a rage when a drunken clubmate does an imitation of his facial contortions—the teeth, the thrusting jaw. In still another he becomes so flustered on entering Eliot’s office that he announces, “Mr. Eliot, I am President Roosevelt.”
The truth of such anecdotes is hard to gauge. Even the best-known of the Harvard stories may be largely apocryphal. It appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post some twenty years later, in an article by Owen Wister. Alice Lee, “pretty ... in nice furs,” is said to have been watching from the balcony as Theodore fought for the Harvard Athletic Association’s lightweight boxing cup in the spring of his junior year. The setting was the Harvard gymnasium—the “old” gymnasium, as it would be known, since it was shortly replaced by a larger, more up-to-date building—and his opponent was the defending lightweight champion, a senior named C. S. Hanks. When the referee called time at the end of a round and Theodore dropped his guard, Hanks is said to have landed a smashing blow on the nose that produced a great spurt of blood and angry booing and catcalls from the crowd—whereupon Theodore raised an arm for silence. “It’s all right,” he said, “he didn’t hear him.” Then, with bloody face, Theodore stepped over to Hanks to shake his hand and we are left to imagine the effect on the girl in the balcony.
That Theodore fought Hanks and lost on March 22, 1879, is a matter of record. Hanks was entered at 133 1/2 pounds, Theodore at 135, and Hanks was much the better of the two, “punishing Roosevelt severely,” according to an account that appeared in The New York Times. But the old gymnasium had no balcony and no women were present. In his diary, where he never let modesty stand in the way if there was something of which he was proud, Theodore states only the fact that he was beaten. The Times reports no display of high sportsmanship, nor does the Advocate in its comments on the event, and to picture a reporter of that day passing up a scene such as Wister described is a little hard to imagine. Fiction was Wister’s specialty and the mere thought of his friend Theodore seems at times to have inspired the Parson Weems in him. Another eyewitness to the Hanks-Roosevelt bout, a man named George Spalding, who was sitting beside Wister, called Wister’s account “the most barefaced egregious manufactured history ever conceived.”
Theodore never became a champion boxer at Harvard, never distinguished himself at any sport. He was n
ot a good or natural athlete. He had no interest in organized athletics, played on no team and shunned—because of his poor eyesight—any game that involved a moving ball, with the exception of lawn tennis, the new game, which he played socially only and poorly.
He was, to be sure, a rabid competitor in anything he attempted. He was constantly measuring his performance, measuring himself against others. Everybody was a rival, every activity a contest, a personal challenge. “As athletes we are about equal,” he wrote the summer between his junior and senior years, comparing himself to his brother; “he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc.” On another expedition to Maine later that summer, he climbed Mount Katahdin carrying a forty-five-pound pack and noted in his diary that both Cousin Emlen and Arthur Cutler had given up in exhaustion long before reaching the top.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 299