The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [55]
IT MUST NOT BE SUPPOSED that Theodore’s obsession with Alice Lee caused him to neglect his studies, or that he ceased to partake of the clubby delights of Harvard. “I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he boasted in a letter home, “having been elected into several different clubs.”14 Apart from the Porc and its partridge suppers, he attended regular meetings of the Institute of 1770, and its secret caucus, “the old merry brutal ribald orgiastic natural wholesome Dickey.”15 He presented papers to the Harvard Natural History Society on such subjects as “The Gills of Crustaceans” and “Coloration of Birds.” He lectured learnedly on sparrows at the Nuttall Ornithological Club (whose middle-aged members, discomfited by his knowledge, accused him of being vain and “cocksure”). He was put up for the Hasty Pudding early in the New Year, and won election as fifth man in the first nine.16 When his instructor in political economy asked him to form a Finance Club, he not only did so immediately, but wrote a joint paper, with Bob Bacon, on “Municipal Taxation,” and presented it at the club’s inaugural meeting.
“We little suspected,” wrote Professor J. Laurence Laughlin many years later, “that we were being addressed by a future President of the United States and his Secretary of State.”17
Thus, in February of 1879, Theodore Roosevelt revealed that the political animal within him was at last beginning to stir. About the same time he made his first public speech, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Crimson. It was an awkward effort, yet vividly remembered by William Roscoe Thayer:
Since entering college I had met him casually many times and had heard of his oddities and exuberance; but throughout I came to feel that I knew him. On being called to speak he seemed very shy and made, what I think he said, was his maiden speech. He still had difficulty in enunciating clearly or even in running off his words smoothly. At times he could hardly get them out at all, and then he would rush on for a few sentences, as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice. He told the story of two old gentlemen who stammered, the point of which was, that one of them, after distressing contortions and stoppages, recommended the other to go to Dr. X, adding, “He cured me.”
A trifling bit of thistledown for memory to have preserved after all these years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time and made a deeper impression by his spoken word.18
Although Theodore continued to dream of being a natural historian when he left college, he confessed that the prospect of three extra years of overseas study—a necessary academic requirement—made him “perfectly blue.”19 Politics, on the other hand, was beginning to appeal to him so strongly that he asked Professor Laughlin if he should not perhaps make that his career instead. Laughlin replied that the halls of American government were much more in need of idealistic young men than were zoological laboratories.20 Still, Theodore clung to his imagined vocation, until a softer, more influential voice persuaded him to abandon the chimera forever.
Whether it was the prospect of losing her beau to some foreign university for three years, or simply his distressing tendency to produce creepy-crawlies, Alice Lee did not relish the idea of Theodore becoming Professor or Doctor Roosevelt. Her disapproval of his collecting was probably the reason for a startling remark he made to Harry Minot at the end of his sophomore year: “As you know, I don’t approve of too much slaughter.” Much later Theodore himself admitted that courting Alice “brought about a change in my ideas as regards