The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (16 page)

C
AMBRIDGE IN 1876
was essentially the same peaceful village it had been for more than two hundred years. The occasional shriek of a horsecar’s wheels around a sharp corner, the slap of cement on bricks, the hiss of hydraulic dredges down by the marsh, warned that a noisier age was on its way, but as yet these sounds only accentuated the general sleepy calm, so soothing to academic nerves. In the center of the village stood the ivy-hung buildings of Harvard Yard, widely spaced with lawns and gravel walks, securely surrounded with iron railings, an oasis within an oasis. Through these railings could be glimpsed the intellectual elite of New England, men whose very nomenclature suggested the social exclusiveness, and inbred quality, of America’s oldest cultural institution.
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The eight hundred students of Harvard College echoed, in their dress, mannerisms, and behavior, the general parochial atmosphere. Although President Eliot’s revolutionary new administrative policies had freed them from the hidebound conformity of former years, they still tended to wear the same soft round hats and peajackets, quote the same verses of Omar Khayyhám, smoke the same
meerschaum
pipes, walk with the Harvard “swing” (actually an indolent saunter), and speak with the Harvard “drawl,” with its characteristic hint of suppressed yawns. Their pose of fashionable languor was dropped only on evenings “across the river,” when they would drink huge quantities of iced shandygaff in Bowdoin Square, and make loud nuisances of themselves at variety shows in the Globe Theater.
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They cultivated a laissez-faire attitude to the outside world and its problems, elegantly summarized by George Pellew, class poet of Theodore’s senior year, in his “Ode to Indifference”:

These lines do not appear to have offended the future apostle of the Life Strenuous, when he heard them recited at the Hasty Pudding Club. He had other things on his mind at the time. Even so, it is surprising that he did not react to them as furiously as he did to the jeer, and the whizzing potato, of the Hayes demonstration. No philosophy, certainly, could be more foreign to his ardent nature than that of Indifference; as President he would wax apoplectic over much milder material.

The truth is that “Roosevelt from New York” was much more comfortable with the languid fops of Harvard than his apologists would admit. He not only relished the company of rich young men, but moved at once into the ranks of the richest and most arrogantly fashionable. Within a week of his arrival in Cambridge, he forsook
the bread-slinging camaraderie of meals at Commons and joined a dining-club composed almost exclusively of Boston Brahmins.
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Showing the self-protective instinct of a born snob, he carefully researched the “antecedents” of potential friends. “On this very account,” he wrote Corinne, “I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”
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Although his class numbered some 250—each of whom could, on graduation day, consider himself privileged above fifty thousand American youths—Theodore considered only a minute fraction to be the “gentleman-sort,”
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and took little notice of the rest. But his personality was too warm, and his manners too good, for him to ignore them completely. “Roosevelt was perfectly willing to talk to others,” recalled a member of the lower orders, “when the occasion arose.”
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As a result of this attitude, his popularity at Harvard was confined to the minority who could call him “Teddy.” Partly because he gave so little of himself to the majority, and partly because the variety of his interests kept him constantly on the move, vignettes of him during those early days at Cambridge are sketchy and dissimilar. Yet all are vivid. He trots around Holmes Field in a bright red football jersey, “the man with the morning in his face.” Flushing with indignation, he leaps to his feet during roll call, and protests harshly the mispronunciation of his name; he drops from a horsecar in the Square, “thin-chested, spectacled, nervous and frail”; he hunches over a book in a roomful of noisy students, frowning with absorption, oblivious to horseplay around his chair, and to the fact that his boots are being charred by the fire; he stands in the door of Memorial Hall, talking vehemently, stammering, baring his teeth; he actually
runs
from one recitation to another, although it is not considered Harvard form to move at more than walking speed; again and again he leaps to his feet at lectures, challenging statements and demanding clarifications, until a professor shouts angrily, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk.
I’m
running this course.”
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Perhaps the most revealing anecdote is that of Richard Welling, who was, at this time, the strongest student in the records of Harvard Gymnasium. His first impression of Theodore was “a
youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development,” drearily swinging between vertical poles. Later that winter, when the youth invited him to go skating in bitter weather, Welling changed his mind. Theodore escorted him to Fresh Pond, which was

Theodore Senior, admitting to an “almost sinful” interest in his son’s progress, worried sometimes about the physical phenomenon he had helped create. “His energy seems so superabundant that I fear it may get the better of him in one way or another.”
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Clearly, the young man was going to have to do something about his temper. Arguments at his eating club provoked him to furious volleys of food-throwing, and on one occasion he slammed a whole pumpkin down on the head of an adversary. He reacted to personal abuse with instant fisticuffs, even punching friends who tried to restrain him.
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At first the social butterflies of Harvard did not know what to make of this hornet in their midst. His name was too foreign, his manner too “bumptious” to win instant acceptance. However, it did
not take the Minots and Saltonstalls and Chapins long to discover that he was the brother of Bamie Roosevelt, the charming Knickerbocker who had summered in Bar Harbor, Maine, the last few years, and that his bumptiousness was a side-effect of his uncontrolled enthusiasms. They found it hard to dislike someone so supremely unconscious of his own peculiarity. “Teddy” happened to be a fascinating, if spluttery, talker: he could analyze lightweight boxing techniques, discuss the aerodynamics of birds and the protective coloration of animals, quote at will from the
Nibelungenlied
and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and explain what it was like trying to remain submerged in the Dead Sea. He was “queer,” he was “crazy,” he was “a bundle of eccentricities,” but he was wholly interesting.
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It was the custom in those days for members of Harvard’s more exclusive clubs to wander through the streets after election meetings, and serenade each new addition to their rolls. At least a dozen times, during the years 1876–80, the name that floated up through the night air was that of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
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F
EARING THE DAMPNESS OF
ground-floor dormitories, to which freshmen were traditionally assigned, Theodore took a room on the second floor of Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse at 16 Winthrop Street, about halfway between the Yard and the Charles River. Furnished and decorated by Bamie, it was already “just as cosy and comfortable as it could look” when he moved in on 27 September 1876. Four big windows, facing north and east, supplied all the light an amateur taxidermist could wish for. The walls were tastefully papered, the carpet deep and warm. Cushions and a heavy fur rug awaited him on the chaise longue. There were his birds under domes of glass, and his bowie knives crossed over the mantel. A massively carved table stood in the center of the room, under the gas jet, along with the hard, bare chair which New Englanders considered appropriate for study. Theodore gazed about him in delight. “When I get my pictures and books,” he assured Bamie, “I do not think there will be a room in College more handsome.”
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As he settled in, and felt for the first time the joy of adulthood,
he overflowed with gratitude to the parents who had brought him thus far. “It seems perfectly wonderful,” he wrote Mittie, “looking back over my eighteen years of existence, to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault. When I think of this and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am) I feel I have an immense amount to be thankful for.”
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Another letter dating from the early months of his freshman year is full of documentary detail:

From time to time, as Theodore sat writing, he could glance over his shoulder and see the firelight reflected in the eyes of salamanders. He had established an impromptu vivarium in the corner of the room, where animals awaiting execution had an opportunity to review their past lives. At first this collection was small enough to reassure his landlady, but its population gradually expanded to include snakes, lobsters, and a giant tortoise. The latter managed to escape from its pen while Theodore was out, and wandered through the house in search of freedom: Mrs. Richardson, stumbling upon it, was frightened into hysterics. Rooseveltian eloquence presumably saved the day, for Theodore continued to reside at 16 Winthrop Street throughout his college career.
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