The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [40]
Years after, family tradition would hold that these two “had an understanding”70 by the time he went up to Harvard in the fall, but if so, there is no formal record of it. Nevertheless, seeds had been sown, and some sort of future flowering seemed assured.
CHAPTER 3
The Man with the Morning in His Face
Trained for either camp or court,
Skilful in each manly sport,
Young and beautiful and tall;
Art of warfare, craft of chases,
Swimming, skating, snow-shoe races
Excellent alike in all.
ON THE NIGHT OF 26 October 1876, the normally quiet streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, were disturbed by the roars of a student demonstration. Freshman supporters of the Republican candidate for President stamped on the cobblestones and echoed a shout that could be heard in electoral districts across the nation: “Hurrah for Hayes and Honest Ways!!” Torchlight flickered redly on their optimistic faces and waving banners. After eight years of governmental scandals under the Grant Administration, it seemed at last that Civil Service Reform, so dear to the hearts of young progressives, was on the way. The United States, just one century old, stood thrillingly poised, like themselves, at the threshold of maturity. There was a crackle of excitement in the fall air, a promise of power and future glory. The demonstrators were in great good humor, and not altogether in earnest: one lopsided banner called for FREE TRADE, FREE PRESS, AND FREE BEER.1
“Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him.”
Theodore Roosevelt the Harvard freshman, 1877. (Illustration 3.1)
All at once, from a second-story window, came the jeering voice of a Democratic senior: “Hush up, you blooming freshmen!” Albert Bushnell Hart, who was in the crowd, noted the effect of this insult upon his classmates, and upon one of them in particular:
Every student there 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.2
According to other accounts, a potato came whizzing in the little man’s direction, and his language in reply was unprintable.3 A trifling incident, perhaps, but the Hayes demonstration was the first sign of any political interest in young Theodore. It happened to occur on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. He had been at Harvard for only one month.
CAMBRIDGE 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.4
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