THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I
Until the inauguration of , forty-seven was the age of our youngest president, General Grant. With the further exceptions of Polk, Pierce, Garfield, and Cleveland, no other had been under fifty. Roosevelt was not quite forty-three. Of twenty-seven presidents, he was the fifth whom death, instead of election, placed in the White House.
Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in his father's house, which was No. 28 East 20th Street, New York city. Like most of his predecessors in office, he comes of a family which has been American since early colonial times. For two hundred and fifty years New York has been the native soil of the Roosevelts. Since they made their beginnings in the colonies, they have been plentifully represented in public life and in good works; and a study of former Roosevelts shows them to have attained distinction as fighters, as writers, in politics, and in philanthropy. It would seem that President Roosevelt drew from all these ancestral sources the qualities that have so forcibly marked his career.
His boyhood was passed chiefly in the city of his
birth, and it was here that he received his early
schooling. In that day the health of his body
seems to have been fragile; the ordinary games
of boys were beyond his strength. But it is evident
there could have been no weakness in the health
of his mind. Perceiving the necessity for a vigorous
constitution, he set himself to the getting of
one. From this purpose he seems never to have
swerved, and by the time he was ready to enter
Harvard College he had begun to be robust.
His four years of college life show his character
and tendencies as completely as does any period
which has followed them. His energies were
directed to bodily exercise, to study, and to all the
social advantages that Boston afforded him. Although conspicuous in no single athletic sport, he was energetic in a variety, sparring and horsemanship being among them. His knowledge of sparring, besides the general benefit that it was to him, proved at least upon one later occasion in the West of particular service, and enabled him most successfully to surprise a typical saloon bully who had attempted to take liberties with him. As a student, he was as attentive and energetic as in muscular exercise; and here also, though not conspicuous in any one branch, he devoted himself with industry to several, political history being perhaps the chief of these. He read “The Federalist” with especial
interest and attention, and his mind evidently
turned as by instinct to such questions and problems
as our republic has solved already, or has still
to solve. During his college course he was an
editor of the “Harvard Advocate,” in whose
columns he made his first appearances in print. Besides political history, he continued an interest in natural history, which had been begun in those boyhood days when he was in search of health, and studied the birds of his country neighborhood near Oyster Bay. He was graduated in 1880, a student of sufficiently high rank to make him a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society.
Upon leaving college he traveled in Europe, and here also his time may be said to have been divided between study and hard physical exercise. This latter was mainly in Switzerland, where he climbed, among other peaks, the Matterhorn. Upon his return from Europe, where he had been absent for about a year, he studied law for a time in the office of his uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt. This was in the year 1881, which saw him attend his first primary and also write his first book, “A History of the War of 1812.” The book was the beginning of an eminent literary career, as the primary was the beginning of a political career still more eminent.
It is said that applause was the only result of
Roosevelt's first political speech, somewhat to his
surprise. His entire inexperience led him to
mistake the clapping of hands for a conversion of
morals; but the approval was only a good-natured
and half-ironic encouragement to a young beginner
who seemed in his innocence to be advocating
reform, and it went no further — the morals and
the votes remained as if Mr. Roosevelt had not
existed. Nevertheless, he had made an impression. Very soon after this first attempt there was a revolt in his district, the Twenty-first. Dissatisfaction with some of the leaders led to a split, and the party in revolt chose Roosevelt as their candidate to the assembly.