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By Root 3214 0

July 1880, 143–4; TR.Pri.Di. June 30, 1880. TR’s marks in his senior year were lower than those of previous years, but high enough to win him his Phi Beta Kappa key. There had been an attrition of 20 students in his class. In later life TR made light of his academic career, saying only that he was “a reasonably good student”; but as one classmate pointed out, his overall average matched those of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. TR.Auto.25; Wilhelm, Donald, TR as an Undergraduate (Luce, 1910) 24. On this Commencement Day, Henry Cabot Lodge marched in the procession as a Marshal, and John D. Long gave the main address.

112. TR.Pri.Di. June 29, 1880.

113. Put.198, Hag.Boy.63; Woo.118. TR kept the secret for thirty-five years. Not until January 1915 did he admit to an old classmate that “when he left college the doctors warned him of weakness of the heart.”

114. Hag.Boy.63; TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 10, 1880.

115. Ib., July 1, 1880.

116. Ib., July 4, 1880.

117. Hag.RF.6; TR, Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay; Natural History Notes, passim; Mor.73.

118. Qu. Put.200.

119. Mor.45.

120. She managed to take enough time off to win the Mount Desert Ladies’ Tennis Tournament.

121. Qu. Put.199.

122. Put.201 ff.; Rob.113; qu. Put.205.

123. TR to MBR, Aug. 25, 1880; Mor.46.

124. TR to B, Sep. 2, 1880 (TRB).

125. TR.Pri.Di. Sep. 1880, passim; Put.205–7. E to B, Sep. 12, 1880: “I think he misses Alice poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something else all the time.”

126. Mor.46.

127. Put.208.

128. Qu. Put.209.

129. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 6, 1880. This paragraph based on: TR to MBR, Oct. 21, 1880 (TRB); qu. Put.209; ib., 210.

130. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 13, 1880.

5: THE POLITICAL HACK

Important sources not in Bibliography: 1. Letters to and from the Roosevelt family and Elliott Roosevelt, traveling in Europe and the Orient, 1880–1881, in FDR.

1. Par.43; Put.210 and fn.

2. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 27, 1880. TR’s college Bible is marked at the following passage in Prov. V: “Let thy fountain be blessed; and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.”

3. Ib.; TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 28, 1880; Put.209.

4. TR to B, Nov. 10, 1880; Mor.47; TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 4, 1880.

5. Ib.

6. Ib., Nov. 1–9, 1880.

7. Ib., Nov. 13–4, 1880. Elliott Roosevelt was not there: he had left on Nov. 7 for an extended tour of Europe and the Orient. See Las. and Roosevelt, Eleanor, ed., Hunting Big Game in the Eighties (Scribners, 1933) for accounts of his travels.

8. TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 18, 1881; qu. Rii.36–7.

9. Put.217.

10. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880; MBR to E, Nov. 27, 1880 (FDR).

11. Film footage preserved in the Library of Congress documents TR’s rapid walking style.

12. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880; Bigelow, Poultney, Seventy Summers (London, 1925) 273; Bar Association of New York, In Memoriam Theodore William Dwight (1892).

13. Put.217; Bigelow, Summers, 273; Bar Assoc., Dwight, passim; “Life in the old Law School,” Columbia Spectator, Nov. 1, 1878.

14. Bigelow, Summers, 273; Put.218; Bar Assoc., Dwight, passim.

15. Put.218–9; TR.Auto.55; Bigelow, Summers, 273.

16. Bigelow, Summers, 273–4.

17. Put.219; Joseph A. Lawson in New York State, A Memorial to TR (1919), 53. TR’s law notebooks are preserved in the Columbia Law Library (7 vols.).

18. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880 and passim; Put.219; TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 4, 1880.

19. Put.221; TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 24, 1881.

20. Ib., May 2, 1881; Put.220. TR’s other “literary project” was a beautifully written account of an ornithological sailing expedition during which he and Elliott came near to death in a storm. Entitled Sou’ Sou’ Southerly, it was completed in March 1881 but remained unpublished in TR’s lifetime. It finally saw light in Gray’s Sporting Journal 13 (1988) 3.

21. TR.Auto.24.

22. See TR.Wks.VI for the complete text of Naval War. See also “Roosevelt as Historian” in Evening Post (N.Y.) Jan. 25, 1919.

23. Naval War, ch. 1; MBR to E, Nov. 27, 1880.

24. TR.Pri.Di. passim and Jan. 3, 1881; Brown, H. C., ed., New York in the Elegant Eighties: Valentine’s Manual of Old New York (NY, 1927) passim; TR.Pri.Di.