The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [46]
This Keatsian passage, composed when Theodore was only eighteen, foreshadows the best of his mature writing in its simplicity and atmospheric effects. Yet he kept it and other such effusions strictly private: in his published works he seemed determined to be scholarly. Summer Birds was followed in due course by a similar study, Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay. Thirty-five years later, when the ex-President was writing his memoirs, he would look back fondly on these “obscure ornithological publications,” which formally launched him on his career as a professional natural historian.36
That career was the subject of a solemn discussion between father and son during the late summer of 1877. Theodore’s courses in his freshman year had all been prescribed; now, as his sophomore year loomed, he could choose some of his own—and begin to follow his future course in life. Summer Birds, which was favorably reviewed, must have convinced Theodore Senior that his son was already one of the most knowledgeable young naturalists in the United States.37 The boy’s collection of birds and skins, now numbering well into the hundreds, was probably unequaled in variety and quality by any American of his age. He was regarded as “a very promising taxidermist, appeared in a national directory of biologists, and very likely had no peer, as a teenage ornithologist, in his knowledge of bird coloration, courtship, flight, and song.38 His future as a scientist would therefore seem to be assured. Yet Theodore Senior gave him surprisingly little encouragement.
My father … told me that if I wished to be a scientific man I could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value if I intended to do the very best work that was in me; but that I must not dream of taking it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my pleasures elsewhere.
After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work.39
Returning to Harvard as a sophomore in the fall of 1877, Theodore elected two courses in natural history: elementary botany, and comparative anatomy and physiology of vertebrates. (His instructor in this course, which he found “extremely interesting,” was William James.) He also chose two courses of German and one of French, and was prescribed courses in rhetoric, constitutional history, and themes. In this demanding schedule he was to surpass the record of his freshman year with an excellent average of 89. He scored 96 and 92 in German, 94 in rhetoric, 89 in botany, and 79 in anatomy. His average would have been even higher, but for a hairs-breadth 51 in “that villainous French.” Even so, with six honor grades out of eight, he once again confounded his academic critics, and there was no more talk of scholastic mediocrity. “He distinctly belonged,” said Thomas Perry, instructor in themes, “to the best twenty-five in a very brilliant class.”40
With respect to the other two hundred and twenty, Theodore gradually relaxed his rather snobbish standards. “My respect for the quality of my classmates has