The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [70]
MR. AND MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, JR., took up formal residence at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York City, on Saturday, 13 November 1880. They were welcomed back with a “perfect ovation” by the rest of the Roosevelt clan, and Theodore lost no time in assuming the mantle of Elijah. On Sunday, after church, he presided over the traditional family lunch, was “at home” to a variety of relatives and friends in the afternoon, and that evening sat in his father’s seat at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House Dinner.7 Before the winter was out, he would inherit two more of Theodore Senior’s responsibilities, being elected a trustee of both the Orthopedic Dispensary and the New York Infant Asylum. But the charitable role did not suit him. Many years later he told a friend, “I tried faithfully to do what father had done, but I did it poorly … in the end I found out that we each have to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”8
Striking that “way” took Theodore a full year, although, as things turned out, it led a mere hundred yards east of his front door. Two other routes temporarily diverted him. The first led three miles south to the Columbia Law School.9
EMERGING FROM 6 West Fifty-seventh Street early on the morning of 17 November, Theodore sucked in a lungful of chill, crisp air (marriage had done wonders for his asthma), turned into Fifth Avenue, and marched briskly downtown to 8 Great Jones Street.10 It was a good forty-five-minute walk, even at the characteristic Rooseveltian gait: arms pumping, toe caps shooting out sideways, every heelfall biting like a pickax.11 Theodore’s first recitation was scheduled for 8:30, and he did not want to miss a word that fell from “the golden lips” of Professor T. W. Dwight, America’s most revered legal pedagogue.12
The Columbia College Law School, which Dwight had founded in 1858, was little more than a cavernous old house, its floors and walls blotched with tobacco-juice, its windows jammed shut against the traffic-noises of Lafayette Place. Within, an atmosphere of rowdy informality prevailed. Students threw their hats and coats over every available protuberance, argued boisterously in the library, and fought for places in a stuffy little lecture theater. Those who arrived late were obliged to squat around the platform, or wedge themselves onto dusty windowsills, until there was not an inch of standing or sitting space left.13
From the moment the white-haired, mildly smiling professor strolled into the room, a cathedral-like hush descended. Dwight was famous for the clarity and persuasiveness of his oratory, the profundity of the questions with which he would every now and again challenge his audience. No conundrum was too knotty for him to untangle, no statute too obscure to exhume and ponder. The thin blood of seven generations of Puritan clergymen, authors, and educators flowed in his veins; his logic was unpolluted by human emotion.14
Professor Dwight and his students now discovered that they had in their midst a young man who was impatient with logic, and who, instead of waiting for questions from on high, wished to ask his own. Theodore at Columbia proved to be as harshly persistent an interrupter, as irrepressible a jack-in-the-box, as he had been at Harvard. Time and again he would leap to his feet, glasses flashing, to argue “for justice and against legalism,” and express his contempt for the “repellent” doctrine of caveat emptor. Why, the young man wanted to know, did this side of the law preclude bargains “which are fair and of benefit to both sides”? He shrilly insisted that the accepted standards