PART THREE
CHAPTER NINE
1
“YOU BELONGED TO HARVARD, and she to you.” The bond was everlasting, asserted William Roscoe Thayer, Harvard ’81, who was a biographer and historian and for twenty-three years editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, which lent certain weight to anything he said. Moreover, “she” in that day—Theodore’s day—had been a “crescent institution ... in the full vigor of growth” and this “crescent spirit,” Thayer said, had been of enormous benefit to all fortunate enough to have been there at the time, however insensitive some were to what was happening to them.
Theodore, recalling his Harvard years, would credit Harvard mainly with providing him an especially good time.
The growth and change had begun well before either he or Thayer arrived on the scene. In 1869 Charles W. Eliot had been named president at age thirty-five and after that Harvard was not the same. Eliot insisted that Harvard become a modern university, and, by stages, instituted what has become known as the elective system. He enlarged the faculty, overhauled the Law School and the Medical School, raised money as never before, and commenced the greatest building boom in Harvard’s long history up to that time. A scientist by training, he held that science and the humanities were not incompatible; further, that to be educated in science was to be educated for the future. He believed, as he had said in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Natural History in New York, that science was “the firm foundation” for man’s faith in himself and in what he called “the present infinite Creator.”
Eliot wished the Harvard student to be treated like an adult, to flourish in an atmosphere of academic freedom. He got rid of petty disciplinary rules, so that by Theodore’s time the old rule book of nearly forty pages had been reduced to one of five. In back of his elective system was an unshakable faith in the instinctive capacity of free human beings to follow the path that was best for them. No one could master anything worthwhile “without a deal of drudgery,” but then with so much that was so urgent and difficult in school life—in any life—it seemed “superfluous to invent other disagreeableness, whether for children or for men.” “Do you think it is a wise parent who invents disagreeable tasks for his children, or enforces any observance simply because it is disagreeable?” He was a turning point for Harvard and for American education, and as an example of serene, Unitarian, Boston sagacity and rectitude none could match him. To those like William Roscoe Thayer who viewed the college as one big family, he was the supreme father whose influence—whose outlook and standards—touched all. He was large and straight, “with the back of an oarsman,” and unforgettable, since most of the right side of his face was covered by an ugly, liver-colored birthmark. He believed in public service and in duty. On a gate to the Yard he would have inscribed:
Enter to grow in wisdom
Depart better to serve thy country and thy kind.
His personal motto was a saying of one of his Overseers, Edward Everett Hale: “Look up and not down; look out and not in; look forward and not back, and lend a hand.”
But generations of Harvard undergraduates would also remember him stalking through the Yard looking neither left nor right and recognizing no one. They did not like him, for all the new freedoms he brought. He would be remembered for the few rules he enforced more than for the many he did away with. Owen Wister, a freshman in Theodore’s junior year, called him a “flagstaff in motion.” To others he was New England’s “topmost oak.”
Along with his liberal reforms, Eliot also brought a variety of memorable personal views. He disapproved of sermons that mentioned “that scoundrel King David,” for example, and he believed in the benefit to mind and body of strenuous physical activity in the open air. A morbid mental condition, he once told his own son, was of physical origin. He himself could work twelve hours a day and not feel tired. As part of his preparation for life, every boy ought to be able to row a boat and ride a horse, swim a mile and hike twenty-five miles. He approved of football, but had the odd idea that the ball carrier ought always to do the manly thing and hit the most resistant part of the enemy’s line, not look for holes. Baseball he did not much care for because it depended too much, he said, on the pitcher and the pitcher resorted too often to deceptions. The curve ball, a recent innovation, was to his way of thinking a low form of cunning.
The Harvard campus then, like the enrollment, was still comparatively small. About fifteen dissimilar buildings, mostly of red brick, stood near or facing a main parklike quadrangle, the Yard, as it had long been known, which was crisscrossed with straight gravel paths, shaded by numerous elms, and loosely framed by a low rail fence. Massachusetts Hall, built several generations before the Revolutionary War, was the oldest building. Thayer, Matthews, and Weld halls were new since Eliot had taken over. And just beyond the Yard, set apart between Cambridge and Kirkland streets, stood the great red-brick Memorial Hall, the university’s most magnificent building, which had been completed the year Theodore arrived as a freshman. It overtopped the trees with its turrets and pinnacles. Within was a huge central dining hall, or commons, hung with portraits, a theater, and a vaulted transept, the great marble-floored Memorial Hall proper, consecrated to the sons of Harvard—the Union sons only—who had fallen in the Civil War. The walls were lined with white marble tablets, each with the names of the war dead, student-soldiers fallen in battle, arranged by class and with eloquent inscriptions in Latin—“CONSUMMATI IN BREVE EXPLEVERUNT TEMPORA MULTA.” There was no comparable memorial to the war anywhere in the country. “The effect of the place,” wrote Henry James, “is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honor, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor. . .”
What, one wonders, was the effect on an impressionable youth whose father had hired a substitute?
The famous Museum of Comparative Zoology, the “Agassiz Museum,” where Theodore spent a good part of his junior and senior years, was another several blocks beyond Memorial Hall, opposite the Divinity School.
That was all to the north of the Yard. To the south and southwest were Harvard Street (later Massachusetts Avenue), where the Boston horsecars ran, and Harvard Square (actually a triangular junction of Harvard, Boylston, and Brattle streets), where a variety of modest shops clustered about the University Bookstore, the telegraph office, and the Cambridge Bank.
Winthrop Street, where Theodore lived, was two blocks from Harvard Street, in the direction of the Charles River. The quickest route was down Holyoke. The two-story frame house—Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse—stood on the southwest corner of Holyoke and Winthrop.
A student’s room at Harvard, by tradition, was his sanctuary. “Its occupant for the time being is its master,” we read in a contemporary account. “He can do as he will in it; lock his door and be not at home; admit all comers; sit alone and read or study, or sit with his congenial friend and talk out whatever he may have the good fortune to have in mind.” One was expected to have a personal library in view (“nothing furnishes a room so well”), a few sporting prints, family tintypes on the mantel, a tennis racket on the wall, and sufficient furniture (”nothing need match”) to suggest “solid comfort.” A convenient spittoon was usually of polished brass, but the fancier kind, of porcelain with hand-painted rosebuds, was not uncommon.
Theodore’s quarters, all four years, were those Bamie had picked for his freshman year and consisted of a living room or study and a small bedroom behind, to which various “improvements” had since been added. (”I had Harry Chapin in here the other day to look at the new bookcase,” he had written Bamie in his sophomore year, “... and after he had examined it he exclaimed, ‘Jove! Your family do act squarely by you!’”)
Harvard undergraduates numbered just over eight hundred, and at a time when only about one American in five thousand went to any college, let alone Harvard, they were an extremely privileged lot. They were not all the sons of rich men, as popularly supposed, and President Eliot’s own particular interest was in those of modest means, who, in his view, constituted “the very best part” of Harvard. But then they were hardly representative of the country that, by Eliot’s lights, they were supposed to serve. Judged by the color of their skin, the churches they attended, the number of syllables in their names, by almost any such criteria, they were as homogeneous an assembly of young men—and as unrepresentative of turbulent, polyglot, post-Civil War America—as one could imagine. It was not just the comparatively small scale of Harvard that gave it a “family” feeling, they all looked alike. There was virtually no diversity to be seen, except by the practiced eye, and then it was usually measured by such things as money or “family” or the cut of one’s clothes. William Roscoe Thayer, warming to his undergraduate memories, would write of the exceptional opportunity Harvard had afforded to meet students of many different views and from all parts of the country, but in fact the decided majority came either from Boston or from towns close by. A study of Theodore’s Class of 1880 shows that nearly two-thirds came from within a hundred-mile radius of the Harvard campus. Harvard, moreover, was supplied year in, year out by the same New England schools. In the case of Theodore’s class, more than half had come from Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Noble’s, Hopkinson, Adams Academy, and other such prestige training grounds. A high-school boy from some point beyond New England was a rarity (there were about a dozen among the 171 who finally graduated).
The same surnames appeared in class after class. In Theodores there were a Blodgett and a Cabot, a Guild, a Morison, a Quincy, and a Saltonstall. The Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott, was actually the sixth of his line to attend Harvard; the first, Nathaniel, graduated in the Class of 1695.
There were no blacks in the Class of 1880, suffice it to say, and no foreign students. There were exactly three Roman Catholics, but no Boston Irish, no Italians, Swedes, or Latin Americans, no one with a name ending in an i or an o; and there were no Jews. Full-page cartoons in the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, were sometimes crudely anti-Irish, anti-Semitic, or mocking of Negro aspirations.
“If you asked me to define in one word the ‘temper’ of the Harvard I knew,” reflected a contemporary named Samuel Scott, “I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears. . . .”
Birth of course counted for much, prominence in athletics was naturally a help, but scholarly attainments per se went for very littie, I fear. A certain amount of money was necessary, for a man had to dress decently and share in the pleasures and convivialities peculiar to youth, but wealth as wealth was no passport to anything in that community. . . .
This code, unwritten yet all pervading and all powerful, is difficult to define. Over and above the copybook virtues, it insisted upon a composure of manner, a self-suppression and a sense of noblesse oblige that were in happy contrast with the blatant self-assertions, the unbridled enthusiasms and misconceived doctrines of equality that were characteristic of the country in general. It gave its approval to those who understood that modesty was compatible with manliness, who knew how to combine self-respect with respect for authority and for the opinions of others, and who were firmly convinced that it was truer sport to lose the game by playing fair than to win it by trickery.
I think I am not exaggerating this influence in the college life.... It was all rather narrow and provincial, perhaps, but I still believe that those who were really in sympathy with such a discipline greatly benefited by it, while those who were not, must have been in some way affected by it.
About the only remaining vestige of “old Harvard” in the way of rules was compulsory chapel every morning at 7:45, from which a student could be excused only for reasons of health—for an asthmatic condition, for example—an option Theodore never exercised. Otherwise the student could live much as he chose, so long as he performed up to the mark academically. The elective system had also evolved sufficiently by Theodore’s time so that in his junior and senior years a student was free to pick just about any course he cared to.
The faculty, though still comparatively few in number, was strong in most areas, and when the names of the larger Harvard-Cambridge literary-intellectual community are included, the list is truly awesome.
Emerson, Phillips Brooks, and Charles Francis Adams were Overseers, as was the elder Theodore’s friend from the Cincinnati convention, Richard H. Dana. Francis Parkman (then at work on his Montcalm and Wolfe) was a member of the Corporation, and Longfellow, former professor of Belles Lettres—Old Poems, as he was called—could be seen strolling on Brattle Street in his familiar brown overcoat. The renowned botanist Asa Gray, Darwin’s chief spokesman in America, was officially retired from the faculty, but was still at work and also much in evidence. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler taught geology and zoology, and the younger faculty—all recruited since Eliot took over—included Charles Dunbar, Harvard’s (and the country’s) first professor of political economy; William James, who taught anatomy and physiology; and Charles Eliot Norton (Eliot’s cousin), who offered “Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients.” Recently, Henry Cabot Lodge had been installed to teach a new course in the history of the United States.
But by tradition Harvard students and Harvard professors were a different species and in this at least tradition held sway. Contact between them, apart from the lecture hall or classroom, was minimal. Henry Adams, who had given up teaching in 1877, found it nearly impossible to get students to talk to him. Others on the faculty, like the students, preferred it that way. To involve themselves in the lives or interests of undergraduates was simply not part of their job.
“Don’t take it upon yourself... to ask questions or offer observations in recitations,” the undergraduate newspaper, the Crimson, advised light-heartedly in Theodore’s freshman year. “Your questions would bore the students, and your observations would bore the tutors. And don’t talk to the tutors out of hours.”
In opposition to the Eliot ideals of academic freedom and individual initiative stood a modish student pose of indifference, not to mention the plain laziness that came as naturally to Harvard undergraduates as to any others. “We ask but time to drift,” sang Theodore’s friend George Pellew, class poet, in a Hasty Pudding show during their senior year:
We deem it narrow-minded to excel.
We call the man fanatic who applies
His life to one grand purpose till he dies.
Enthusiasm sees one side, one fact;
We try to see all sides, but do not act.
. . . We long to sit with newspapers unfurled,
Indifferent spectators of the world.
If everyone “flocked” to hear Charles Eliot Norton, it was because his course was a “snap”; while Henry Cabot Lodge, who was known to be difficult, soon had almost no students. “My system was simple,” Lodge later explained, “to make the students do as much work for themselves as possible and have them lecture to me.” His classes shrank from fifty students to three.
“A boy could go completely to pieces and there was no one whose job it was to know anything about it,” remembered a classmate of Theodore’s, who, like many, viewed the Eliot Epoch as a disaster. “There never was a worse time for a boy to be in Harvard.”
In Washington a historic blow for temperance had been struck by Lucy Hayes, the first First Lady with a college degree. “Lemonade Lucy” had banned all alcoholic beverages from the White House. (At state dinners, said William Evarts, the water flowed like champagne.) But no such edict stood in the way of Harvard undergraduates in these years of the Hayes regime. “Students got drunk then” was the terse assessment of another in Theodore’s class, John Woodbury. Even Charles Eliot, looking back, would concede that there had been “much intemperance,” though he thought it had been mainly in the clubs and particularly the Porcellian, the summit of Harvard’s social hierarchy. (He had thought the same of the Porcellian in his own undergraduate days and had refused to have anything to do with it.)
They drank whiskey, which was relatively cheap and easy to get. They drank French champagne and Burgundy, and endless quantities of beer and ale, which were cheapest of all, and shandygaff, a mixture of beer and ginger ale. (For Sunday mornings a concoction of ginger ale and rum was thought “just right.”) The favorite local stop was a grogshop called Carl’s below sidewalk level on Brighton Street.
There were at Harvard, said Scribner’s Magazine, “lads of good morals and lads with an inclination toward unwholesome experiment.” A Boston paper, angry over a student disturbance in one of the theaters, wrote that seeing the world to such young men meant only “gazing with watery eyes upon half-clad ballet girls and burlesque actresses, and hovering about them, later, like flies about a carcass.”
One wonders if the elder Theodore may have known more of Harvard life than he let on when he advised his son to take care of his morals first. Or if the decision to postpone any thought of Ellie going to college suggests something more than concern for his health alone, if possibly the father had sensed even then what the boy’s susceptibilities were.
The sharpest division within the undergraduate body was between those who were the sons of Boston’s elite and those who were not, and the line between them was clearly understood. In Theodore’s class the “set” or “high set,” “the club crowd” as it was also known, was composed of perhaps twenty-five young men, or no more than ten percent of the class. They were mainly all Bostonians and thought to be very rich and quite impressed with themselves. Their clothes were English in cut. They carried slim canes or walking sticks and wore the heavy gold watch fobs of the kind customarily worn by men twice their age. Several—Robert Bacon, Ralph Ellis, Josiah Quincy, Richard Saltonstall, Minot Weld—parted their hair in the middle, which to the average American was the hallmark of the pampered snob. General Grant was only the best known of those who disliked on sight any man whose hair was parted in the middle.
“The set had a new suit of clothes for every day of the week,” remembered a classmate named Rand, who because of Harvard’s alphabetical seating system was able to observe one such higher being, Josiah Quincy, at close range. Rand sat beside Quincy in class through all four years, yet Quincy never “deigned” to speak to him once. Quincy may have been the worst example, Rand conceded. Bacon and Saltonstall, for instance, would say hello.
But for those few non-Bostonians whom the set found acceptable, the Harvard years could be quite pleasurable, for their society included not just the “right” clubs, but entrée to the “right” families. As Owen Wister, a Philadelphian, observed, “pleasant doors in Boston, and round about in Milton, Brookline, and Chestnut Hill, stood open” to a world of “gentlefolk” who were truly hospitable—”not mere entertainers”—who could talk of books and horses and winters in Rome. It made all the difference, he thought, in how one benefited from Harvard.
Those students—that small minority—who insisted on taking their studies seriously, who worked hard and made no effort to conceal their academic ambitions, were known as “digs” and were naturally outcasts. Socially, they had no chance. As theCrimsonadvised, only a little in jest, digs might be “eminently worthy” as people and it was “well to have a pleasant, bowing acquaintance with them, for they may turn out in the future to be very great men,” but their manners, like their clothes, were “apt to be bad; and except at class elections, their friendship is of no sort of use.”
Still, anyone who did not take seriously the academic side of life—or who did not appear to take it seriously—was expected to “go in” for something else (the air of indifference notwithstanding), and athletics rated above all. The late 1870s would be regarded afterward as among the most brilliant years in the history of Harvard athletics. Football, like so much else at Harvard, was new—still spelled as “foot ball”—but already great status attached to anyone who played. (The Harvard-Yale “match” that Theodore saw in his freshman year was only the second time the two colleges had played each other in football and the first game in which the teams were limited to eleven men each, rather than fifteen.) In baseball Harvard was “repeatedly victorious” and Harvard’s eight-oar crew defeated Yale three years running—in ’77, ’78, and 79. Harvard’s color, as of 1875, had been officially designated as crimson—rather than magenta as before—and to wear the crimson on the playing field or as an oarsman on the Charles was the quickest way to notoriety and acclaim. In Theodore’s time there was never any question as to the most popular man in the class. He was Robert Bacon, “the manly beauty,” captain of the football team, heavyweight boxing champion, winner in the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile, number seven on the crew. The Class of 1880 was known then and later as Bacon’s class.
2
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 not 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.
Theodore, his cousin Maud Elliott had once observed, “always thought that he could do things better than anyone else.” But the impression is more of somebody who wants to prove, who must prove, he could do things better than anyone else.
Of course, one had to maintain a certain perspective. All rivals were not equal. Writing Bamie about his academic record the fall of his senior year, he put the matter succinctly and, apparently, in total seriousness.
“I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows,” he said. “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me.”
The memory of his father could still leave him “desolate and heartsore.” Those lone spells of brooding, however, the painful diary entries, were far fewer now, confined almost exclusively to special or commemorative calendar days—the eve of departure for Christmas vacation, an anniversary of his father’s death, or his own birthday.
“Oh, how little worthy I am of such a father,” reads the most anguished of such passages in the diary from his junior year. “I feel such a hopeless sense of inferiority to him; I loved him so.... But with the help of God I shall try to lead such a life as he would have wished, and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very . . .”
The next page, consisting of seven lines, has been carefully blotted out in heavy black ink. Apparently, he had gotten drunk again, or was still sorely distraught over what had happened the night of the Porcellian initiation. For under laboratory conditions, by back-lighting the page, it has been possible to determine two and a half lines of the seven he chose to censor: “angry with myself for having gotten tight when . . .”
“May God help me to live as he would have wished,” he repeats one more time, this in his senior year, as he turns twenty-one.
Morally, he had tied himself to the mast. He did not smoke—and never would—and he remained preeminently “pure,” as he said. He abhorred foul language, and humor smacking of what he called smut. One expression of righteous indignation to be found in the diary, this on the news that Cousin Cornelius had married a French actress, might be a line from an English drawing-room farce: “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”
The Sunday-school classes at Christ Church continued regularly each week for a total of three and a half years. He quit only in January of his senior year when it was discovered that he was a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian. He must either join the church, he was informed by the rector, or go.
“I told the clergyman I thought him rather narrow-minded,” he wrote Mittie. He then started teaching a mission class in the poorest section of Cambridge.
His health was superb, better even than during the first two years. Apparently he had but one bout with asthma all his junior year and none his senior year.
The attack during his junior year had again coincided with a trip to Maine, another arduous hunting expedition like the one before, again under the guidance of Bill Sewall, only this time in the dead of a Maine winter. “The first two or three days I had asthma,”he reported to his mother, “but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into [the logging] camp.” Beyond that he said no more on the subject. It was his joy in the wilds that he wanted to share with her. He had never beheld anything so beautiful as the Maine woods in winter. He had killed a buck and trapped a lynx, he also told her proudly.
He was a steadfast correspondent, certainly, however busy he was, and as he liked to remind those at home, writing was slow work for him. The words never came easily, a letter always took more time than they would ever suppose. His longest letters were to his “own sweet Motherling” and he signed himself now as his father had, as Thee.
Of the world at large, of events in the daily papers, he apparently thought no more than in previous years. The one odd note was a passing remark in an eight-page letter to Mittie written early in his junior year. He was enjoying especially Dunbar’s lectures inpolitical economy, as well as Palmer’s course in metaphysics. These, he wrote, were even more interesting than his natural-history courses.
3
Long afterward, looking back, he would say he had left Harvard little prepared for “the big world.” He thought what he had learned at Harvard of considerably less value than what he had learned at home. Further, he blamed Harvard for killing the old boyhood dream of a career in science. The emphasis, he said, had been entirely wrong for him, almost exclusively on laboratory work and the minutiae of biology, none of which appealed. (”I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician.”) Had Harvard encouraged the active life of a field naturalist, a career like those of his boyhood heroes—Audubon, Baird—things might have gone differently, he implied.
On the surface this would seem a sad and ironic commentary and especially if, as appears, Harvard had been chosen in the first place for its strength in the natural sciences. But there is little reason to believe that the young man at Harvard would have given anything like the same explanation, had he been asked. To judge again by what he said in the diary, he enjoyed particularly the time in the laboratory; and if grades are a fair index, it was in the sciences that he did his very best work at Harvard, scoring in the 90s in three of his four science courses in his junior and senior years, and an 89 in the fourth.
His boyhood dream, he later charged, had been the victim of a “total failure” on the part of the science department “to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists.” Yet a more outgoing outdoor naturalist, a more inspirational teacher than Nathaniel Southgate Shaler would have been extremely difficult to find. Shaler was the antithesis of the laboratory recluse and Shaler was the dominant spirit of the Natural History Department, which had all of three professors. His geology field trips were famous. (”If he hears you call him old man,” said a student, “he’ll walk your damned legs off.”) Reporters sometimes went along to describe the experience—the huge love of nature he exuded, his humor and unending intellectual enthusiasm. In the Agassiz tradition Shaler was “thoroughly human”; he wrote, he traveled, he was refreshingly outspoken. “He was much like what Roosevelt later became,” remembered President Eliot, “very energetic and large hearted.”
Indeed, every sign is that the boyhood vision of a lifework in natural history faded for Theodore in spite of the way science was taught at Harvard, rather than as a consequence. Not even Shaler could hold him. The fact that he had no praise for Shaler in later years, no Shaler stories of the kind so many of his contemporaries told, may not mean much, since he was often to be silent on people who had mattered in his life, and particularly, it would seem, if he felt they had somehow abandoned him, or he had abandoned them. The only Harvard professor he was to remember fondly, A. S. Hill, in the English Department, was also the only one he was known to have openly disliked as an undergraduate.
The fairest judgment seems to be that he had found other interests—such as the Dunbar lectures and Alice Lee. If Harvard failed him, or let him down, it was in other ways.
He never found any real intellectual excitement there, for all his good grades. He was never inspired to reach or push himself academically. At no point did he churn with intellectual curiosity or excitement. He was conscientious about his work and could give it all his concentration when need be. Like his father, he had the power of being “focused,” and because of this—and because he very carefully organized his time—he gave the impression of working relatively little. Richard Saltonstall, for one, was under the impression that he was pretty much coasting.
When President Eliot was asked long afterward if there was anything he could say as to the influence of Harvard on Theodore, he responded “No.” Eliot’s recollection of Theodore as an undergraduate was vague. He could recall only a “feeble” youth with prominent teeth, a boy who probably read a good deal but never got “to the bottom of things.”
He had had no real contact with Eliot, as almost no one did. William James, from whom he had taken anatomy in his sophomore year, made no apparent impression. The names of Emerson or Dana or Parkman fail to appear anywhere in his letters and diaries. Also, for someone supposedly enthralled by the works of Longfellow—someone so deeply moved by the heroic theme of King Olaf— it seems odd that he never reports sighting the Great Man himself, or makes any effort to go see him.
Nor, as time would tell, did Harvard provide him with any lasting male friendships. He was never anything but proud of his Harvard affiliations. He liked being known as a Harvard man. He would return for reunions. He would report dutifully on his career for class biographies and recall with conspicuous pride—and, on occasion, with something less than strict regard for the truth—his various undergraduate accomplishments. He would claim, for example, to have held Harvard’s lightweight boxing crown; and in describing his academic record, he would remember finishing in the top ten percent of his class, which was also inaccurate, since at graduation he stood number 21 out of 171.
Of his Porcellian connection he was proudest of all. The day would come when, in a letter from Washington, he would inform Kaiser Wilhelm II of the engagement of his daughter Alice, his own firstborn, and include the wonderful news that it was to be a match with a Porcellian man.
But his Harvard friendships were to become peripheral very rapidly. Except for Henry Minot, the departed friend from his freshman year, he had found no one with whom he shared common interests, beyond the social or athletic. Years later, having interviewed a number of those who had known him best, another Harvard man, the writer Hermann Hagedorn, would conclude that Theodore must have been lonely as an undergraduate. Several said they thought he had had few real friends. “I have discovered no one who was intimate with him and few who were sympathetic,” Hagedorn noted privately. “Most of his classmates simply did not like him,” he was told by Mrs. Robert Bacon.
It is certain, however, that Theodore had an extremely good time at Harvard, just as he remembered. When, midway through his junior year, he writes, “Truly these are the golden years of my life,” he means every word. He “can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.” “I doubt I shall ever enjoy myself as much again” is the emphatic declaration as his junior year ends. If he knew others thought him peculiar or “bumptious,” as one professor said, he never let on.
For Mittie, in the fall of his senior year, he provided this memorable social log:
Cambridge, October 20, 1879
DARLING MOTHERLING,
I have just returned from spending Sunday with the Guilds, cousins of Harry Shaw, who live out at Forest Hills near the Minots. I drove over there in my cart, and the ride home this morning was delicious. Yesterday (Sunday) Harry Guild and I drove over to the Whitneys’ to take tea.
Last Monday I drove Jack Tebbets over to call on the Miss Bacons, who are very nice girls. Wednesday I dined at the Lees’, and spent the loveliest kind of an evening with Rosy, Alice, and Rose. The two girls [Bamie and Corinne] must come on to Boston next month if only to see Chestnut Hill; and, by Jove, I shall be awfully disappointed if they don’t like it. Mamie Saltonstall’s birthday was on Friday; I gave her a small silver fan chain. Saturday I spent all the morning playing tennis with the two Miss Lanes; I forgot to say that on Thursday they took Dick and myself to call on the Chinese professor. We had a most absurd visit.
This afternoon I am going to drive Van Rensselaer over to Chestnut Hill; tomorrow he and I take tea and spend the evening at the Lanes’. Wednesday Harry Shaw and I give a small opera party to Mr. and Mrs. Saltonstall, Rose, and Alice. Thursday six of us—Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, Minot Weld, Dick Saltonstall, Harry Chapin, and myself—are going to take a four-in-hand and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm, where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls, etc.
He did have fun, time after time. And he did fall in love, head over heels.
“I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he begins one of the most candid and heartfelt entries in the diary, a summing up written shortly after graduation.
I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation, and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together, I have won the sweetest of girls for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.
He counted himself a success, and that too was an altogether new feeling.