U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [240]
was a sickly youngster, suffered from asthma, was
very nearsighted; his hands and feet were so smal it was hard for him to learn to box; his arms were very short;
his father was something of a humanitarian, gave
Christmas dinners to newsboys, deplored conditions, slums, the East Side, Hel 's Kitchen.
Young Theodore had ponies, was encouraged to
walk in the woods, to go camping, was instructed in boxing and fencing (an American gentleman should
know how to defend himself) taught Bible Class, did mission work (an American gentleman should do his
best to uplift those not so fortunately situated);
righteousness was his by birth;
he had a passion for nature study, for reading
about birds and wild animals, for going hunting; he got to be a good shot in spite of his glasses, a good walker in spite of his tiny feet and short legs, a fair horseman, an aggressive scrapper in spite of his short reach, a crack politician in spite of being the son of one of the owning Dutch families of New York.
In 1876 he went up to Cambridge to study at
Harvard, a wealthy talkative erratic young man with sidewhiskers and definite ideas about everything under the sun,
at Harvard he drove around in a dogcart, col ected
-142-stuffed birds, mounted specimens he'd shot on his trips in the Adirondacks; in spite of not drinking and being somewhat of a christer, having odd ideas about reform and remedying abuses, he made Porcel ian and the
Dickey and the clubs that were his right as the son of one of the owning Dutch families of New York.
He told his friends he was going to devote his life to social service: I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.
From the time he was eleven years old he wrote
copiously, fil ed diaries, notebooks, loose leaves with a big impulsive scrawl about everything he did and
thought and said;
natural y he studied law.
He married young and went to Switzerland to
climb the Matterhorn; his first wife's early death broke him al up. He went out to the badlands of western
Dakota to become a rancher on the Little Missouri
River;
when he came back to Manhattan he was Teddy,
the straight shooter from the west, the elkhunter, the man in the Stetson hat, who'd roped steers, fought a grizzly hand to hand, acted as Deputy Sheriff,
(a Roosevelt has a duty to his country; the duty of a Roosevelt is to uplift those not so fortunately situated, those who have come more recently to our shores) in the west, Deputy Sheriff Roosevelt felt the
white man's burden, helped to arrest malefactors, bad men; service was bul y. Al this time he'd been writing, fil ing the maga-zines with stories of his hunts and adventures, fil ing political meetings with his opinions, his denunciations, his pat phrases: Strenuous Life, Realizable Ideals, Just Government, when men fear work or fear righteous
-143- war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom, and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and highminded. T.R. married a wealthy woman and righteously
raised a family at Sagamore Hil .
He served a term in the New York Legislature,
was appointed by Grover Cleveland to the unremunera-tive job of Commissioner for Civil Service Reform, was Reform Police Commissioner of New York,
pursued malefactors, stoutly maintained that white was white and black was black, wrote the Naval History of the War of 1812,
was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
and when the Maine blew up resigned to lead the Rough Riders, Lieutenant-Colonel.
This was the Rubicon, the Fight, the Old Glory,
the Just Cause. The American public was not kept in ignorance of the Colonel's bravery when the bul ets sang, how he charged without his men up San Juan
Hil and had to go back to fetch them, how he shot a running Spaniard in the tail. It was too bad that the regulars had gotten up
San Juan Hil first from the other side, that there was