The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [41]
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.6
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.7 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.”8
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,”9 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.”10
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.”11
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