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THEODORE ROOSEVELT

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT


By Theodore Roosevelt

PREPARER'S NOTE

This Etext was prepared from a 1920 edition,
published by Charles Scribner's Sons.
The book was first published in 1913.


CONTENTS

Forward
Boyhood and Youth
The Vigor of Life
Practical Politics
In Cowboy Land
Applied Idealism
The New York Police
The War of America the Unready
The New York Governorship
Outdoors and Indoors
The Presidency; Making an Old Party Progressive
The Natural Resources of the Nation
The Big Stick and the Square Deal
Social and Industrial Justice
The Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Canal
The Peace of Righteousness





FOREWORD

Naturally, there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be
written.

It seems to me that, for the nation as for the individual, what is most
important is to insist on the vital need of combining certain sets
of qualities, which separately are common enough, and, alas, useless
enough. Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not uncommon;
it is the combination which is necessary, and the combination is rare.
Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy
persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil
temper and bad character. Neither quality shall by itself avail. Justice
among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be
brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love
peace, but who love righteousness more than peace. Facing the immense
complexity of modern social and industrial conditions, there is need to
use freely and unhesitatingly the collective power of all of us; and
yet no exercise of collective power will ever avail if the average
individual does not keep his or her sense of personal duty, initiative,
and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that have
the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a
windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of
a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on
their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the
children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and
with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of
shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in
the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we
must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest
charity towards the wrong-doer that is compatible with relentless war
against the wrong-doing. We must be just to others, generous to others,
and yet we must realize that it is a shameful and a wicked thing not to
withstand oppression with high heart and ready hand. With gentleness and
tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor
and hardship and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto;
but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain
himself as not to be a burden to others.

We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our
several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can
live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live
dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge
rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not
on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and
vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off
and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits
the man with whom life has gone hard.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.





THEODORE ROOSEVELT



CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last used
in the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while he was a
small boy.

About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New
Amsterdam as a "settler"--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century
instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century. From
that time for the next seven generations from father to son every one of
us was born on Manhattan Island.

My father's paternal ancestors were of Holland stock; except that there
was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who was one of the Pilgrims who
remained in Holland when the others came over to found Massachusetts,
and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to New Amsterdam.
My father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her forebears had come to
Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the same ship with him; they
were of the usual type of the immigration of that particular place and
time. They included Welsh and English Quakers, an Irishman,--with a
Celtic name, and apparently not a Quaker,--and peace-loving Germans,
who were among the founders of Germantown, having been driven from their
Rhineland homes when the armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged
the Palatinate; and, in addition, representatives of a by-no-means
altogether peaceful people, the Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania
a little later, early in the eighteenth century. My grandmother was a
woman of singular sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch in
her relations with her husband and sons. Although she was not herself
Dutch, it was she who taught me the only Dutch I ever knew, a baby
song of which the first line ran, "Trippe troppa tronjes." I always
remembered this, and when I was in East Africa it proved a bond of union
between me and the Boer settlers, not a few of whom knew it, although at
first they always had difficulty in understanding my pronunciation--at
which I do not wonder. It was interesting to meet these men whose
ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America
two centuries and a half previously, and to find that the descendants
of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at
least of the same nursery songs.

Of my great-grandfather Roosevelt and his family life a century and over
ago I know little beyond what is implied in some of his books that have
come down to me--the Letters of Junius, a biography of John Paul Jones,
Chief Justice Marshall's "Life of Washington." They seem to indicate
that his library was less interesting than that of my wife's
great-grandfather at the same time, which certainly included such
volumes as the original _Edinburgh Review_, for we have them now on our
own book-shelves. Of my grandfather Roosevelt my most vivid childish
reminiscence is not something I saw, but a tale that was told me
concerning him. In _his_ boyhood Sunday was as dismal a day for small
Calvinistic children of Dutch descent as if they had been of Puritan or
Scotch Covenanting or French Huguenot descent--and I speak as one proud
of his Holland, Huguenot, and Covenanting ancestors, and proud that the
blood of that stark Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards flows in the veins
of his children. One summer afternoon, after listening to an unusually
long Dutch Reformed sermon for the second time that day, my grandfather,
a small boy, running home before the congregation had dispersed, ran
into a party of pigs, which then wandered free in New York's streets. He
promptly mounted a big boar, which no less promptly bolted and carried
him at full speed through the midst of the outraged congregation.

By the way, one of the Roosevelt documents which came down to me
illustrates the change that has come over certain aspects of public life
since the time which pessimists term "the earlier and better days of
the Republic." Old Isaac Roosevelt was a member of an Auditing Committee
which shortly after the close of the Revolution approved the following
bill:

The State of New York, to John Cape Dr.

To a Dinner Given by His Excellency the Governor
and Council to their Excellencies the Minnister of
France and General Washington & Co.

1783
December
To 120 dinners at 48: 0:0
To 135 Bottles Madira 54: 0:0
" 36 ditto Port 10:16:0
" 60 ditto English Beer 9: 0:0
" 30 Bouls Punch 9: 0:0
" 8 dinners for Musick 1:12:0
" 10 ditto for Sarvts 2: 0:0
" 60 Wine Glasses Broken 4:10:0
" 8 Cutt decanters Broken 3: 0:0
" Coffee for 8 Gentlemen 1:12:0
" Music fees &ca 8: 0:0
" Fruit & Nuts 5: 0:0
156:10:0
By Cash . . . 100:16:0
55:14:0
WE a Committee of Council having examined
the above account do certify it (amounting to
one hundred and fifty-six Pounds ten Shillings)
to be just.
December 17th 1783.
ISAAC ROOSEVELT
JAS. DUANE
EGBT. BENSON
FRED. JAY
Received the above Contents in full
New York 17th December 1783
JOHN CAPE

Think of the Governor of New York now submitting such a bill for such an
entertainment of the French Ambassador and the President of the United
States! Falstaff's views of the proper proportion between sack and bread
are borne out by the proportion between the number of bowls of punch and
bottles of port, Madeira, and beer consumed, and the "coffee for eight
gentlemen"--apparently the only ones who lasted through to that stage
of the dinner. Especially admirable is the nonchalant manner in which,
obviously as a result of the drinking of said bottles of wine and
bowls of punch, it is recorded that eight cut-glass decanters and sixty
wine-glasses were broken.

During the Revolution some of my forefathers, North and South, served
respectably, but without distinction, in the army, and others rendered
similar service in the Continental Congress or in various local
legislatures. By that time those who dwelt in the North were for the
most part merchants, and those who dwelt in the South, planters.

My mother's people were predominantly of Scotch, but also of Huguenot
and English, descent. She was a Georgian, her people having come to
Georgia from South Carolina before the Revolution. The original Bulloch
was a lad from near Glasgow, who came hither a couple of centuries ago,
just as hundreds of thousands of needy, enterprising Scotchmen have gone
to the four quarters of the globe in the intervening two hundred
years. My mother's great-grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, was the first
Revolutionary "President" of Georgia. My grandfather, her father, spent
the winters in Savannah and the summers at Roswell, in the Georgia
uplands near Atlanta, finally making Roswell his permanent home. He
used to travel thither with his family and their belongings in his own
carriage, followed by a baggage wagon. I never saw Roswell until I was
President, but my mother told me so much about the place that when I did
see it I felt as if I already knew every nook and corner of it, and as
if it were haunted by the ghosts of all the men and women who had lived
there. I do not mean merely my own family, I mean the slaves. My mother
and her sister, my aunt, used to tell us children all kinds of stories
about the slaves. One of the most fascinating referred to a very old
darky called Bear Bob, because in the early days of settlement he had
been partially scalped by a black bear. Then there was Mom' Grace, who
was for a time my mother's nurse, and whom I had supposed to be dead,
but who greeted me when I did come to Roswell, very respectable, and
apparently with years of life before her. The two chief personages of
the drama that used to be repeated to us were Daddy Luke, the Negro
overseer, and his wife, Mom' Charlotte. I never saw either Daddy Luke
or Mom' Charlotte, but I inherited the care of them when my mother died.
After the close of the war they resolutely refused to be emancipated
or leave the place. The only demand they made upon us was enough money
annually to get a new "critter," that is, a mule. With a certain lack of
ingenuity the mule was reported each Christmas as having passed away,
or at least as having become so infirm as to necessitate a successor--a
solemn fiction which neither deceived nor was intended to deceive, but
which furnished a gauge for the size of the Christmas gift.

My maternal grandfather's house was on the line of Sherman's march to
the sea, and pretty much everything in it that was portable was taken by
the boys in blue, including most of the books in the library. When I
was President the facts about my ancestry were published, and a
former soldier in Sherman's army sent me back one of the books with
my grandfather's name in it. It was a little copy of the poems of "Mr.
Gray"--an eighteenth-century edition printed in Glasgow.

On October 27, 1858, I was born at No. 28 East Twentieth Street, New
York City, in the house in which we lived during the time that my two
sisters and my brother and I were small children. It was furnished
in the canonical taste of the New York which George William Curtis
described in the _Potiphar Papers_. The black haircloth furniture in the
dining-room scratched the bare legs of the children when they sat on
it. The middle room was a library, with tables, chairs, and bookcases of
gloomy respectability. It was without windows, and so was available only
at night. The front room, the parlor, seemed to us children to be a room
of much splendor, but was open for general use only on Sunday evening
or on rare occasions when there were parties. The Sunday evening family
gathering was the redeeming feature in a day which otherwise we children
did not enjoy--chiefly because we were all of us made to wear clean
clothes and keep neat. The ornaments of that parlor I remember now,
including the gas chandelier decorated with a great quantity of
cut-glass prisms. These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar
magnificence. One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and
stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure,
a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and
convicted of larceny. There was a Swiss wood-carving representing a very
big hunter on one side of an exceedingly small mountain, and a herd
of chamois, disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the
mountain, just across the ridge. This always fascinated us; but there
was a small chamois kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might
come on it and kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drawing a gilt
sledge on a piece of malachite. Some one mentioned in my hearing that
malachite was a valuable marble. This fixed in my mind that it was
valuable exactly as diamonds are valuable. I accepted that moujik as
a priceless work of art, and it was not until I was well in middle age
that it occurred to me that I was mistaken.

Now and then we children were taken round to our grandfather's house;
a big house for the New York of those days, on the corner of Fourteenth
Street and Broadway, fronting Union Square. Inside there was a large
hall running up to the roof; there was a tessellated black-and-white
marble floor, and a circular staircase round the sides of the hall, from
the top floor down. We children much admired both the tessellated floor
and the circular staircase. I think we were right about the latter, but
I am not so sure as to the tessellated floor.

The summers we spent in the country, now at one place, now at another.
We children, of course, loved the country beyond anything. We disliked
the city. We were always wildly eager to get to the country when spring
came, and very sad when in the late fall the family moved back to town.
In the country we of course had all kinds of pets--cats, dogs, rabbits,
a coon, and a sorrel Shetland pony named General Grant. When my younger
sister first heard of the real General Grant, by the way, she was much
struck by the coincidence that some one should have given him the same
name as the pony. (Thirty years later my own children had _their_ pony
Grant.) In the country we children ran barefoot much of the time,
and the seasons went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling
pleasures--supervising the haying and harvesting, picking apples,
hunting frogs successfully and woodchucks unsuccessfully, gathering
hickory-nuts and chestnuts for sale to patient parents, building wigwams
in the woods, and sometimes playing Indians in too realistic manner by
staining ourselves (and incidentally our clothes) in liberal fashion
with poke-cherry juice. Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival, but it
in no way came up to Christmas. Christmas was an occasion of literally
delirious joy. In the evening we hung up our stockings--or rather the
biggest stockings we could borrow from the grown-ups--and before dawn we
trooped in to open them while sitting on father's and mother's bed;
and the bigger presents were arranged, those for each child on its own
table, in the drawing-room, the doors to which were thrown open after
breakfast. I never knew any one else have what seemed to me such
attractive Christmases, and in the next generation I tried to reproduce
them exactly for my own children.

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He
combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great
unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or
cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness. As we grew older he
made us understand that the same standard of clean living was demanded
for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could
not be right in a man. With great love and patience, and the most
understanding sympathy and consideration, he combined insistence on
discipline. He never physically punished me but once, but he was the
only man of whom I was ever really afraid. I do not mean that it was
a wrong fear, for he was entirely just, and we children adored him. We
used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key
rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him;
and we would troop into his room while he was dressing, to stay there as
long as we were permitted, eagerly examining anything which came out
of his pockets which could be regarded as an attractive novelty. Every
child has fixed in his memory various details which strike it as of
grave importance. The trinkets he used to keep in a little box on his
dressing-table we children always used to speak of as "treasures."
The word, and some of the trinkets themselves, passed on to the next
generation. My own children, when small, used to troop into my room
while I was dressing, and the gradually accumulating trinkets in the
"ditty-box"--the gift of an enlisted man in the navy--always excited
rapturous joy. On occasions of solemn festivity each child would receive
a trinket for his or her "very own." My children, by the way, enjoyed
one pleasure I do not remember enjoying myself. When I came back from
riding, the child who brought the bootjack would itself promptly get
into the boots, and clump up and down the room with a delightful feeling
of kinship with Jack of the seven-league strides.

The punishing incident I have referred to happened when I was four years
old. I bit my elder sister's arm. I do not remember biting her arm, but
I do remember running down to the yard, perfectly conscious that I had
committed a crime. From the yard I went into the kitchen, got some dough
from the cook, and crawled under the kitchen table. In a minute or two
my father entered from the yard and asked where I was. The warm-hearted
Irish cook had a characteristic contempt for "informers," but although
she said nothing she compromised between informing and her conscience
by casting a look under the table. My father immediately dropped on all
fours and darted for me. I feebly heaved the dough at him, and, having
the advantage of him because I could stand up under the table, got
a fair start for the stairs, but was caught halfway up them. The
punishment that ensued fitted the crime, and I hope--and believe--that
it did me good.

I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my
father, or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty; and no
one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life
and performance of duty. He and my mother were given to a hospitality
that at that time was associated more commonly with southern than
northern households; and, especially in their later years when they
had moved up town, in the neighborhood of Central Park, they kept a
charming, open house.

My father worked hard at his business, for he died when he was
forty-six, too early to have retired. He was interested in every social
reform movement, and he did an immense amount of practical charitable
work himself. He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face, and his
heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection,
and with the possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor.
He was very fond of riding both on the road and across the country, and
was also a great whip. He usually drove four-in-hand, or else a spike
team, that is, a pair with a third horse in the lead. I do not suppose
that such a team exists now. The trap that he drove we always called the
high phaeton. The wheels turned under in front. I have it yet. He drove
long-tailed horses, harnessed loose in light American harness, so that
the whole rig had no possible resemblance to anything that would be seen
now. My father always excelled in improving every spare half-hour or
three-quarters of an hour, whether for work or enjoyment. Much of his
four-in-hand driving was done in the summer afternoons when he would
come out on the train from his business in New York. My mother and one
or perhaps two of us children might meet him at the station. I can see
him now getting out of the car in his linen duster, jumping into
the wagon, and instantly driving off at a rattling pace, the duster
sometimes bagging like a balloon. The four-in-hand, as can be gathered
from the above description, did not in any way in his eyes represent
possible pageantry. He drove it because he liked it. He was always
preaching caution to his boys, but in this respect he did not practice
his preaching overmuch himself; and, being an excellent whip, he liked
to take chances. Generally they came out all right. Occasionally they
did not; but he was even better at getting out of a scrape than into
it. Once when we were driving into New York late at night the leaders
stopped. He flicked them, and the next moment we could dimly make out
that they had jumped. It then appeared that the street was closed and
that a board had been placed across it, resting on two barrels, but
without a lantern. Over this board the leaders had jumped, and there was
considerable excitement before we got the board taken off the barrels
and resumed our way. When in the city on Thanksgiving or Christmas, my
father was very apt to drive my mother and a couple of friends up to the
racing park to take lunch. But he was always back in time to go to the
dinner at the Newsboys' Lodging-House, and not infrequently also to
Miss Sattery's Night School for little Italians. At a very early age we
children were taken with him and were required to help. He was a staunch
friend of Charles Loring Brace, and was particularly interested in the
Newsboys' Lodging-House and in the night schools and in getting the
children off the streets and out on farms in the West. When I was
President, the Governor of Alaska under me, Governor Brady, was one of
these ex-newsboys who had been sent from New York out West by Mr. Brace
and my father. My father was greatly interested in the societies to
prevent cruelty to children and cruelty to animals. On Sundays he had
a mission class. On his way to it he used to drop us children at our
Sunday-school in Dr. Adams's Presbyterian Church on Madison Square; I
remember hearing my aunt, my mother's sister, saying that when he walked
along with us children he always reminded her of Greatheart in Bunyan.
Under the spur of his example I taught a mission class myself for three
years before going to college and for all four years that I was in
college. I do not think I made much of a success of it. But the other
day on getting out of a taxi in New York the chauffeur spoke to me and
told me that he was one of my old Sunday-school pupils. I remembered him
well, and was much pleased to find that he was an ardent Bull Mooser!

My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern
woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely
"unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my grandmother,
one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was distinctly
overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her heart
towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the close of the
Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert
understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views
about that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln Republican; and
once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during
the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor
for the success of the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers
before my mother in the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother,
but was also blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much
amused to punish me; but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under
penalty of my father's being informed--he being the dispenser of serious
punishment. Morning prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the
foot of the stairs, and when father came down we called out, "I speak
for you and the cubby-hole too!" There were three of us young children,
and we used to sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning
prayers. The place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the
"cubby-hole." The child who got that place we regarded as especially
favored both in comfort and somehow or other in rank and title. The two
who were left to sit on the much wider expanse of sofa on the other side
of father were outsiders for the time being.