The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [51]
We traveled twenty-five miles afoot one day on that first visit of his, which I maintain was a good fair walk for any common man. We hitched well, somehow or other, from the start. He was different from anybody that I had ever met; especially, he was fair-minded.… Besides, he was always good-natured and full of fun. I do not think I ever remember him being “out of sorts.” He did not feel well sometimes, but he never would admit it.
I could see not a single thing that wasn’t fine in Theodore, no qualities that I didn’t like. Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive, but I never found him so except when necessary; and I’ve always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing. He wasn’t a bit cocky as far as I could see, though others thought so. I will say that he was not remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion.67
Theodore, for his part, found Sewall to be a figure straight out of The Saga of King Olaf. The backwoodsman agreed. “I don’t know but what my ancestors were vikings.”68
Tramping through the woods together, they were an oddly matched yet complementary pair: Sewall slow and purposeful, advancing with bearlike tread; Theodore wiry and nervous, cocking his gun at any hint of movement in the trees, stopping every now and again to pick up bugs. Since both men loved epic poetry, and could recite it by the yard, the squirrels of Aroostook County were entertained to many ringing declamations, including Sewall’s favorite lines:
Who are the nobles of the earth,
The true aristocrats,
Who need not bow their heads to kings
Nor doff to lords their hats?
Who are they but the men of toil
Who cleave the forest down
And plant amid the wilderness
The forest and the town?69
The words may have been familiar to Theodore, yet falling from the lips of a man whose father had been a carpenter and whose mother a seamstress, they took on new, defiantly democratic overtones, which were not lost on the scion of the Roosevelts.70
ON 27 SEPTEMBER 1878, Theodore was welcomed back to Cambridge by his classmates, and to his surprise “was offered the Porcellian.” Membership in this club was the highest social honor Harvard could bestow, and he was acutely embarrassed to refuse it. His scruples had nothing to do with the possible disapproval of a Bill Sewall. It was just that he had already been offered the A.D., and had accepted that instead.71 Greatly regretting his hastiness, for he wished very much to be “a Porc man,” he turned to the more important business of choosing a schedule for his junior year.
It proved to be an ambitious one, covering nine subjects and at least twenty hours a week of classroom and laboratory work. His electives were once again German and two natural history courses (zoology and geology), plus Italian and philosophy. Those prescribed were themes, forensics, logic, and metaphysics. In this formidable curriculum he was to score the best marks of his academic career, averaging 87 and standing thirteenth in a class of 166.72 In two of his electives—philosophy and natural history—he stood first.73
No sooner had Theodore settled down to his familiar routine of recitations, study, exercise, and “sprees” than the Porcellian once more opened its doors to him. Early in October there happened to be a drunken quarrel in the Yard, during which a Porc man told an A.D. man that Teddy Roosevelt, given the chance, would have chosen his club first. When the taunt became public, the A.D. announced that as its new member had not yet signed in, he was free to reconsider his acceptance. “Of course by this arrangement I have to hurt somebody’s feelings,” Theodore wrote agitatedly in his diary. “… I have rarely felt as badly as I have during the last 24 hours; it is terribly hard to know what the honorable thing is to do.” He decided that honor lay in the direction of the more prestigious club, and accepted the Porc’s offer on 6 October. “I am delighted to be in,” he told Bamie.