The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [66]
Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the College Yard, and chatted together in the interval when business was slack. We discussed what we intended to do after graduation. “I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York City; I don’t know exactly how,” said Theodore.
I recall, still, looking at him with an eager, inquisitive look and saying to myself, “I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears.”106
Theodore was, however, in dead earnest. For his senior thesis he chose the most controversial political subject of the day: it was entitled “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights.”107 The very first sentence struck the keynote of his career as a politician. “In advocating any measure we must consider not only its justice but its practicability.” Some of his less realistic classmates were shocked by this frank admission that a principle could be both just and impracticable. Yet Theodore made no bones about his real feelings later in the document:
A cripple or a consumptive in the eye of the law is equal to the strongest athlete or the deepest thinker, and the same justice should be shown to a woman whether she is or is not the equal of man.… As regards the laws relating to marriage, there should be the most absolute equality preserved between the two sexes. I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name … I would have the word ‘obey’ used not more by the wife than the husband.108
By these remarks Theodore laid himself open to charges of effeminacy, and at least one instructor suggested he was too much influenced by “feeling” to be entirely masculine.109 For the rest of his life he would remain acutely aware of the needs and sensibilities of women. Few things disgusted him more than “male sexual viciousness,” or the Victorian conceit that a wife is the servant of her husband’s lusts. Although a woman’s place was in the home, he believed that the home was superior to the state, and that its mistress was therefore the superior of the public servant. The question of suffrage, as his dissertation made plain, was not so much controversial as unimportant. If women wished to vote, then they should be allowed to do so. Yet he could not resist adding, “Men can fight in defense of their rights, while women cannot. This certainly makes a powerful argument against putting the ballot into hands unable to defend it.”110
ON 30 JUNE 1880, Theodore Roosevelt graduated from Harvard College as a B.A. magna cum laude, twenty-first in a class of 177.111 His family was present in force, and so was a large contingent from Chestnut Hill. President Eliot placed an embellished diploma in his hand, and murmured the special congratulations due a Phi Beta Kappa. Marching back to his seat in the bright sunlight, with his gown swirling triumphantly and a battery of adoring eyes upon him, Theodore could be excused a moment of self-satisfaction. His academic record was excellent; he was already, at twenty-one, a prominent member of society in Cambridge, Boston, and New York; he had been runner-up in the Harvard lightweight boxing championship; he was rich, pleasant-looking, and, within a limited but growing circle, popular; he was the author of two scholarly pamphlets, a notable thesis, and two chapters of what promised to be a definitive naval history. To crown it all, he was engaged to a beautiful young woman. “Only four months before we get married,” he told himself. “My cup of happiness is almost too full.”112
Yet there was wormwood in his cup, unknown to anybody but the graduate and Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant, college physician. On 26 March, after announcing his engagement, Theodore had undergone a complete physical examination, and had been told to his satisfaction that he had gained twelve pounds since coming to Harvard. But the doctor had other, less satisfactory news. Theodore’s heart, strained by years of asthmatic