 FORWARD OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEODORE ROSEVELT 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 moral duty, initiative, and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that of 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 cool judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest charity towards the wrongdoer that is compatible with relentless war against the wrongdoing. We must be just to others, generous to others, and yet we must realize that it is shameful and a wicked thing not to withstand oppression with high heart and heady hand. With gentleness and tenderness we 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 ROSEVELT SAGAMORE HILL, OCTOBER 1, 1913, END OF FORWARD THEODORE ROSEVELT, 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, Claes Martinson 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 Welch 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 XIV 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 18th 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, TRIPPETRAPETRONNES. 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 immigrants 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 knew little beyond what is implied in some of his books and have come down to me, The Letters of Junius, a biography of John Paul Jones, Chief Justice Marshall's Life in Washington. They seemed 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 bookshelves. 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 streets. He promptly mounted a big bore 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 termed 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, Doctor. To a dinner given by his Excellency, the Governor and Council to their Excellencies, the Minister of France and General Washington and Company, 1783, December. To 120 dinners at 48 pounds. To 135 bottles Madeira, 54 pounds. To 36 bottles of Port, 10 pounds, 16 chillings. To 16 bottles English beer, 9 pounds. To 30 booze punch, 9 pounds. To 8 dinners for music, 1 pound, 12 chillings. To 10 dinners for servants, 2 pounds. To 60 wine glasses broken, 4 pounds, 10 chillings. To 8 cut decanters broken, 3 pounds. To coffee for 8 gentlemen, 1 pound, 12 chillings. To music fees, et cetera, 8 pounds. To fruit and nuts, 5 pounds. Total, 156 pounds, 10 chillings. By cash, 100 pounds, 16 chillings. 55 pounds, 14 chillings. We, a Committee of Council having examined the above account, do certify it, amounting to 156 pounds, 10 chillings, to be just. December 17, 1783. Isaac Roosevelt, James Dwayne, Egbert Benson, Frederick J, received the above contents in full, New York, 17 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 8 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 60 wine glasses were broken. During the Revolution, some of my forefathers, North and South, served respectively, 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 Bullock 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 200 years. My mother's great-grandfather, Archibald Bullock, 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 have 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 story about the slaves. One of the most fascinating referred to a very old darkie 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 18th century edition printed in Glasgow. On October 27th, 1858, I was born at number 28 East 20th Street, New York City, in a 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 shammy disproportionately small for the hunter and large for the mountain just across the ridge. This always fascinated us, but there was a small shammy kid for which we felt agonies lest the hunter might come on it and kill it. There was also a Russian moujik drying, a gilt sledge on a piece of a malachite. Someone 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 14th 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 ladder, but I'm 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 someone should have given him the same name as the pony. 30 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 the two realistic manner by staining ourselves and incidentally our clothes in liberal fashion with poke cherry juice. Thanksgiving was an appreciated festival but 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 grownups 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 at its own table in the drawing room, the doors to which were thrown open after breakfast. I never knew anyone 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 unsulfishness. 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 on 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 diddy 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 boot jack 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 anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father or anyone who more wholeheartedly 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 and northern households and especially in their later years when they had moved uptown 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 46, 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 foreign 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 and 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 foreign hand driving was done in the summer afternoons when we 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 foreign 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 over much 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 Saturday'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' 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 Great Heart 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 Bullock, 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 in 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 children 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 in the much wider expanse of sofa on the other side of father were outsiders for the time being. My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to us children as was my mother herself and we were equally devoted to her in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the Georgia plantations, of hunting fox, deer and wildcat, of the long-tailed driving horses, boon and Crockett and of the riding horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic exultation during the Mexican War and of the queer goings-on in the Negro quarters. She knew all the Brer Rabbit stories and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them and he took them down from her dictation, publishing them in harpers where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who in Uncle Remus made the stories immortal. My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoody Bullock and Irvine Bullock came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under assumed names as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty. Uncle Jimmy Bullock was a dear old retired sea captain, utterly unable to get on in the worldly sense of that phrase as valiant and simple and upright as soul as ever lived, a veritable Colonel Newcomb. He was an admiral in the Confederate Navy and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel, Alabama. My Uncle Irvine Bullock was a midshipman on the Alabama and fired the last gun discharge from her batteries in the fight with the Cure Sarge. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war. My Uncle Jimmy Bullock was forgiving and just in reference to the Union forces and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire fairness and generosity. But in English politics, he promptly became a Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone. The only occasions in which I ever shook his faith in me were when I would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My Uncle was one of the best men I have ever known and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how good people can believe of me, the unjust and impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bullock's perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy in both public and private life. I was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person and of sitting up in bed gasping with my father and mother trying to help me. I went very little to school. I never went to the public schools, as my own children later did, both at the Cove School at Oyster Bay and at the Ford School in Washington. For a few months I attended Professor McMullen School in 20th Street near the house where I was born, but most of the time I had tutors. As I have already said, my aunt taught me when I was small. At one time we had a French governess, a loved and valued maimzel in the household. When I was 10 years old, I made my first journey to Europe. My birthday was spent in Cologne and in order to give me a thoroughly party feeling, I remember that my mother put on full dress for my birthday dinner. I do not think I gained anything from this particular trip abroad. I cordially hated it, as did my younger brother and sister. Practically all the enjoyment we had was in exploring any ruins or mountains when we could get away from our elders and in playing in the different hotels. Our one desire was to get back to America and we regarded Europe with the most ignorant chauvinism and contempt. Four years later, however, I made another journey to Europe and was old enough to enjoy it thoroughly and profit by it. While still a small boy, I began to take an interest in natural history. I remember distinctly the first day that I started on my career as zoologist. I was walking up Broadway and as I passed the market to which I used sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries, I suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it was killed and was informed in the harbor. I had already begun to read some of Maine Reed's books and other boy's books of adventure and I felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before me. As long as that seal remained there, I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it and I recall that not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot roll, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements and at once began to write a natural history of my own on the strength of that seal. This and subsequent natural histories were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of, in some way or another, owning and preserving that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal skull and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. The collections were at first kept in my room until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs. It was the ordinary small boy's collection of curios, quite incongruous and entirely valueless except from the standpoint of the boy himself. My father and mother encouraged me warmly in this as they always did in anything that could give me wholesome pleasure or help to develop me. The adventure of the seal and the novels of Main Read together strengthened my instinctive interest in natural history. I was too young to understand much of Main Read accepting the adventure part and the natural history part, these enthralled me. But of course my reading was not wholly confined to natural history. There was very little effort made to compel me to read books. My father and mother having the good sense not to try to get me to read anything I did not like unless it was in the way of study. I was given the chance to read books that they thought I ought to read but if I did not like them I was then given some other good book that I did like. There were certain books that were taboo. For instance, I was not allowed to read dime novels. I obtained some surreptitiously and did read them but I do not think that the enjoyment compensated for the feeling of guilt. I was also forbidden to read the only one of Weedah's books which I wished to read under two flags. I did read it nevertheless with greedy and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy but as a matter of fact all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression on me whatever. I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general adventures. I think there ought to be children's books. I think that the child will like grown up books also and I do not believe a child's book is really good unless grown ups get something out of it. For instance, there is a book I did not have when I was a child because it was not written. It is Laura E. Richards, Nursery Rhymes. My own children love them dearly and their mother and I love them almost equally. The delightfully lighthearted man from New Mexico who lost his grandmother out in the snow, the adventures of the owl, the eel and the warming pan and the extraordinary genealogy of the kangaroo whose father was a whale with a feather in his tail who lived in the Greenland Sea while his mother was a shark who kept very dark in the Gulf of Caribbean. As a small boy I had our young folks which I then firmly believed to be the very best magazine in the world. A belief I may add which I have kept to this day unchanged for I seriously doubt if any magazine for old or young has ever surpassed it. Both my wife and I have the bound volumes of our young folks which we preserved from our youth. I have tried to read again the main read books which I so dearly loved as a boy only to find alas that it is impossible. But I really believe that I enjoy going over our young folks now clearly as much as ever. Cast away in the cold, grandfathers struggle for a homestead, the William Henry letters and a dozen others like them were first class, good healthy stories, interesting in the first place and in the next place teaching manliness, decency and good conduct. At the cost of being deemed effeminate I will add that I greatly liked the girl's stories, pussy willow and a summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's life just as I worshiped little men and little women and an old fashioned girl. This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my revealing in such tales of adventure as Valentine's stories or Marriott's midshipman easy. I suppose everybody has kinks in them and even as a child there were reports which I ought to have liked and did not. For instance, I never cared at all for the first part of Robinson Crusoe and although it is unquestionably the best part I do not care for it now. Whereas the second part containing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe with the wolves and the Pyrenees and out in the Far East simply fascinated me. What I did like in the first part were the adventures before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sally Rover and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo zoologist I disliked the Swiss family Robinson because of the wholly impossible collection of animals that were met by that worthy family as they ambled inland from the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I began to read certain books of poetry notably Longfellow's poem The Saga of King Olaf which absorbed me. This introduced me to Scandinavian literature and I have never lost my interest in and affection for it. Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by Main Read about mammals illustrated with pictures no more artistic than but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography. When my father found how deeply interested I was in this not very accurate volume he gave me a little book by J.G. Wood, the English writer of popular books on natural history and then a larger one of his called Homes Without Hands. Both of these were cherished possessions. They were studied eagerly and they finally descended to my children. The Homes Without Hands by the way grew to have an added association in connection with the pedagogical failure in my part. In accordance with what I believed was some kind of modern theory of making education interesting and not letting it become a task I endeavored to teach my eldest small boy one or two of his letters from the title page. As the letter H appeared in the title an unusual number of times I selected that to begin on my effort being to keep the small boy interested not to let him realize that he was learning a lesson and to convince him that he was merely having a good time. Whether it was the theory or my method of applying it that was defective I do not know but I certainly absolutely eradicated from his brain any ability to learn what H was and long after he had learned all the other letters of the alphabet in the old fashioned way he proved wholly unable to remember H under any circumstances. Quite unknown to myself I was while a boy under a hopeless disadvantage in studying nature. I was very near-sighted so that the only things I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over. When I was about 13 I was allowed to take lessons in taxidermy from a Mr. Bell, a tall, clean shaven, white-haired old gentleman as straight as an Indian who had been a companion of Audubon's. He had a musty little shop, somewhat in the order of Mr. Venus's shop in Our Mutual Friend, a little shop in which he had done very valuable work for science. This vocational study, as I suppose it would be called by modern educators, spurred and directed my interest in collecting specimens for mounting and preservation. It was this summer that I got my first gun and it puzzled me to find that my companions seemed to see things to shoot at which I could not see at all. One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard and I then realized that something was the matter for not only was I unable to read the sign but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to my father and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a clumsy and awkward little boy and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant of what I was not seeing. The recollection of this experience gives me a keen sympathy with those who are trying in our public schools and elsewhere to remove the physical causes of deficiency in children who are often unjustly blamed for being obstinate or unambitious or mentally stupid. This same summer too, I obtained various new books on mammals and birds, including the publications of Spencer Baird, for instance, and made an industrious book study of the subject. I did not accomplish much in outdoor study because I did not get spectacles until late in the fall, a short time before I started with the rest of the family for a second trip to Europe. We were living at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson. My gun was a breech-loading pin-fire double barrel of French manufacture. It was an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy. There was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty, it could be opened with a brick without serious damage. When the cartridges stuck, they could be removed in the same fashion. If they were loaded, however, the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially unburned grains of powder more than once. When I was 14 years old in the winter of 72 and 73, I visited Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of my education. We went to Egypt, journeyed up the Nile, traveled through the Holy Land and part of Syria, visited Greece and Constantinople, and then we children spent the summer in a German family in Dresden. My first collecting as a student of natural history was done in Egypt during this journey. By this time, I had a good working knowledge of American bird life from the superficially scientific standpoint. I had no knowledge of the ornithology of Egypt, but I picked up in Cairo a book by an English clergyman, whose name I have now forgotten, who described a trip up the Nile and in an appendix to his volume gave an account of his bird collection. I wish I could remember the name of the author now, for I owe that book very much. Without it, I should have been collecting entirely in the dark, whereas with its aid, I could generally find out what the birds were. My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which are collected and classified by the aid of such books as this one. The birds I obtained up the Nile and in Palestine represented merely the usual boy's collection. Some years afterward, I gave them together with the other ornithological specimens I had gathered to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and I think some of them also to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I am told that the skins are to be found yet in both places and in other public collections. I doubt whether they have my original labels on them. With great pride, the directors of the Roosevelt Museum, consisting of myself and the two cousins, after said, had printed a set of Roosevelt Museum labels in pink ink, preliminary to what was regarded as my adventurous trip to Egypt. This bird collecting gave what was really the chief zest to my Nile journey. I was old enough and had read enough to enjoy the temples and the desert scenery and the general feeling of romance, but this in time would have pawled if I had not also had the serious work of collecting and preparing my specimens. Doubtless, the family had their moments of suffering, especially on one occasion when a well-meaning maid extracted from my taxidermis outfit, the old toothbrush, with which I put in the skins the arsenical soap necessary for their preservation, partially washed it, and left it with the rest of my wash kit for my own personal use. I suppose that all growing boys tend to be grubby, but the ornithological small boy, or indeed the boy with the taste for natural history of any kind, is generally the very grubbiest of all. An added element in my case was the fact that while in Egypt I suddenly started to grow. As there were no tailors up the Nile, when I got back to Cairo I needed a new outfit, but there was one suit of clothes too good to throw away, which we kept for a change, and which was known as my smike suit, because it left my wrists and ankles as bare as those of poor smike himself. When we reached Dresden, we younger children were left to spend the summer in the house of Ermingvich, a member of either their municipal or the Saxon government, I have forgotten which. It was hoped that in this way we would acquire some knowledge of the German language and literature. They were the very kindest family imaginable. I shall never forget the unwary patience of the two daughters. The father and mother and a shy, thin student cousin who was living in the flat were no less kind. Whenever I could get out into the country I collected specimens industriously and enlivened the household with hedgehogs and other small beasts and reptiles, which persisted in escaping from partially closed bureau drawers. The two sons were fascinating students from the University of Leipzig, both of them belonging to dueling corps and much scarred in consequence. One, a famous swordsman, was called Derroth Erzog, the red duke, and the other was nicknamed Ernasshorn, Sir Rhinoceros, because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again. I learned a good deal of German here, in spite of myself, and above all I became fascinated with the Nibelungen Lied. German prose never became really easy to me in the sense that French prose did, but for German poetry I cared as much as for English poetry. Above all, I gained an impression of the German people which I never got over. From that time to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans were really foreigners. The affection, the Gemüseite, a quality which cannot be exactly expressed by any single English word, the capacity for hard work, the sense of duty, the delight in studying literature and science, the pride in the new Germany, the more than kind and friendly interest in three strange children. All these manifestations of the German character and of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the least define at the time, but which is very vivid still, 40 years later. When I got back to America at the age of 15, I began serious study to enter Harvard under Mr. Arthur Cutler, who later founded the Cutler School in New York. I could not go to school because I knew so much less than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others. In science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and French, I was strong but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics. My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a number of years before and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer home of his family also. Along with my college preparatory studies, I carried on the work of a practical student of natural history. I worked with greater industry than either intelligence or success and made very few additions to the sum of human knowledge. But to this day, certain obscure ornithological publications may be found in which I recorded such items as, for instance, that on one occasion, a fish crow and on another an Ipswich sparrow were obtained by one Theodore Roosevelt Jr. at Oyster Bay on the shore of Long Island Sound. In the fall of 1876, I entered Harvard, graduating in 1880. I thoroughly enjoyed Harvard and I am sure it did me good but only in the general effect for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me in afterlife. More than one of my own sons have already profited by their friendship with certain of their masters in school or college. I certainly profited by my friendship with one of my tutors, Mr. Cutler, and in Harvard I owed much to the professor of English, Mr. A. S. Hill. Doubtless through my own fault, I saw almost nothing of President Elliott and very little of the professors. I ought to have gained much more than I did gain from writing the themes and forensics. My failure to do so may have been partly due to my taking no interest in the subjects. Before I left Harvard, I was already writing one or two chapters of a book I afterwards published on the naval war of 1812. Those chapters were so dry that they would have made a dictionary scene light reading by comparison. Still, they represented purpose and serious interest in my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain mark and corrections of them by a skilled older man who would have impressed me and have commanded my respectful attention. But I was not sufficiently developed to make myself take an intelligent interest in some of the subjects assigned me, the character of the Graci, for instance. A very clever and studious lad would no doubt have done so, but I personally did not grow up to this particular subject until a good many years later. The frigate and sloop actions between the American and British sea tigers of 1812 were much more within my grasp. I worked drearily at the Graci because I had to. My conscientious and much-to-be-pity professor dragged me through the theme by main strength with my feet firmly planted in dull and totally idea-proof resistance. I had at the time no idea of going into public life and I never studied elocution or practice debating. This was a loss to me in one way. In another way, it was not. Personally, I have not the slightest sympathy with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to whether those maintaining it believe in it or not. I know that under our system, this is necessary for lawyers, but I am fatally disbelieving it as regards general discussion of political, social, and industrial matters. What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of the right, not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong as their interest bids them. The present method of carrying on debates on such subjects as our colonial policy or the need of a navy or the proper position of the courts and constitutional questions encourages precisely the wrong attitude among those who take part in them. There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction. On the contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have nothing to do with their arguments. I am sorry I did not study Elocution in college, but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to think rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which he is assigned without regard either to what his convictions are or to what they ought to be. I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the first 10th of my class, if I remember rightly, although I am not sure whether this means the 10th of the whole number that entered or of those that graduated. I was given a Phi Beta Kappa key. My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon or Wilson or Baird or Kuwaitite, a man like Hart Merriam or Frank Chapman or Hornaday today. My father had from the earliest days instilled into me the knowledge that I was to work and to make my own way in the world, and I had always supposed that this meant that I must enter business. But in my freshman year, he died when I was a sophomore, he told me that if I wished to become a scientific man, I could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work because if I went into it, I must make it a serious matter, that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunitory of work, of value, if I intended to do the very best work there was in me, but that I must not dream of taking it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have always remembered, namely that if I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that would accompany a money-making career and must find my pleasures elsewhere. After this conversation, I fully intended to make science my life work. I did not, for the simple reason that at that time, Harvard, and I suppose our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the final naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated biology as purely a science of the laboratory in the microscope, a science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute forms of marine life, or else in section cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was, no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then, there was a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme. Thorinus in minutia, as the only end of study, had been erected into a fetish. There was a total failure to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists. The kind of work which Hart Merriam and his assistants in the biological survey have carried to such a high degree of perfection as regards North American mammals. In the entirely proper desire to be thorough and to avoid slip shot methods, the tendency was to treat as not serious, as unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally different direction and I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly, I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless, this meant that I really did not have the intense devotion to science which I thought I had, for if I had possessed such devotion, I would have carved out a career for myself somehow without regard to discouragements. As regards political economy, I was of course, while in college, taught the laissez-faire doctrines, one of them being free trade, then accepted as canonical. Most American boys of my age were taught both by their surroundings and by their studies, certain principles which were very valuable from the standpoint of national interest and certain others which were very much the reverse. The political economists were not especially to blame for this. It was the general attitude of the writers who wrote for us of that generation. Take my beloved, Our Young Folks, the magazine of which I have already spoken and which taught me much more than any of my textbooks. Everything in this magazine instilled the individual virtues and the necessity of character as the chief factor in any man's success, a teaching in which I now believe as sincerely as ever for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardless of the rights of others. All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Crowley's Promise of American Life and Walter E. Wiles' New Democracy would generally at that time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy. The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself, that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate, but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was and is, and always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my textbooks and my surroundings is a healthy, anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacency excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own home, but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I belonged. End of chapter one, recording by Roger Maline. Chapter two, part one of Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading by Kara Schellenberg. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter two, The Vigor of Life. Part one. Looking back, a man really has a more objective feeling about himself as a child than he has about his father or mother. He feels as if that child were not the present he individually, but an ancestor. Just as much an ancestor as either of his parents. The saying that the child is the father to the man may be taken in a sense almost the reverse of that usually given to it. The child is father to the man in the sense that his individuality is separate from the individuality of the grown up into which he turns. This is perhaps one reason why a man can speak of his childhood and early youth with a sense of detachment. Having been a sickly boy with no natural bodily prowess and having lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired, ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge and Morgan's Rifleman to the heroes of my favorite stories, and from hearing of the feats performed by my southern forefathers and kinsfolk and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them. Until I was nearly fourteen I let this desire take no more definite shape than daydreams. Then an incident happened that did me real good. Having an attack of asthma I was sent off by myself to Moose Head Lake. On the stagecoach ride thither I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age but very much more competent and also much more mischievous. I have no doubt they were good-hearted boys but they were boys. They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return. The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me. I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I would not again be put in such a helpless position and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own I decided that I would try to supply its place by training. Accordingly with my father's hearty approval I started to learn to box. I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil and certainly worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement whatever. My first boxing master was John Long, an ex-prize fighter. I can see his rooms now with colored pictures of the fights between Tom Hire and Yankee Sullivan and Heenan and Sayers and other great events in the annals of the squared circle. On one occasion to excite interest among his patrons he held a series of championship matches for the different weights. The prizes being at least in my own class, pewter mugs of a value I should suppose approximating 50 cents. Neither he nor I had any idea that I could do anything but I was entered in the lightweight contest in which it happened that I was pitted in succession against a couple of reedy striplings who were even worse than I was. Equally to their surprise and to my own and to John Long's I won and the pewter mug became one of my most prized possessions. I kept it and alluded to it and I fear bragged about it for a number of years and I only wish I knew where it was now. Years later I read an account of a little man who once in a fifth rate handicap race won a worthless pewter medal and joyed in it ever after. Well as soon as I read that story I felt that that little man and I were brothers. This was as far as I remember the only one of my exceedingly rare athletic triumphs which would be worth relating. I did a good deal of boxing and wrestling in Harvard but never attained to the first rank in either even at my own weight. Once in the big contests in the gym I got either into the finals or semifinals, I forget which but aside from this the chief part I played was to act as trial horse for some friend or classmate who did have a chance of distinguishing himself in the championship contests. I was fond of horseback riding but I took to it slowly and with difficulty exactly as with boxing. It was a long time before I became even a respectable rider and I never got much higher. I mean by this that I never became a first flight man in the hunting field and never even approached the Bronco busting class in the West. Any man if he chooses can gradually school himself to the requisite nerve and gradually learn the requisite seat and hands that will enable him to do respectably across country or to perform the average work on a ranch. Of my ranch experience as I shall speak later. At intervals after leaving college I hunted on Long Island with the Meadowbrook hounds. Almost the only experience I ever had in this connection that was of any interest was on one occasion when I broke my arm. My purse did not permit me to own expensive horses. On this occasion I was riding an animal, a buggy horse originally which its owner sold because now and then it insisted on thoughtfully lying down when in harness. It never did this under the saddle and when he turned it out to grass it would solemnly hop over the fence and get somewhere where it did not belong. The last trait was what converted it into a hunter. It was a natural jumper, although without any speed. On the hunt in question I got along very well until the pace winded my ex buggy horse and it turned a somersault over a fence. When I got on it after the fall I found I could not use my left arm. I supposed it was merely a strain. The buggy horse was a sedate animal which I rode with a snaffle. So we pounded along at the tail of the hunt and I did not appreciate that my arm was broken for three or four fences. Then we came to a big drop and the jar made the bones slip past one another so as to throw the hand out of position. It did not hurt me at all and as the horse was as easy to sit as a rocking chair I got in at the death. I think August Belmont was master of the hunt when the above incident occurred. I know he was master on another occasion on which I met with a mild adventure. On one of the hunts when I was out a man was thrown dragged by one stirrup and killed. In consequence I bought a pair of safety stirrups which I used the next time I went out. Within five minutes after the run began I found that the stirrups were so very safe that they would not stay in at all. First one went off at one jump and then the other at another jump with a fall for me on each occasion. I hated to give up the fun so early and accordingly finished the run without any stirrups. My horse never went as fast as on that run. Doubtless a first class horseman can ride as well without stirrups as with them but I was not a first class horseman. When anything unexpected happened I was apt to clasp the solemn buggy horse firmly with my spurred heels and the result was that he laid himself out to do his best in the way of galloping. He speedily found that thanks to the snaffle bit I could not pull him in so when we came to a downgrade he would usually put on steam. Then if there was a fence at the bottom and he checked at all I was apt to shoot forward and in such event we went over the fence in a way that reminded me of Leach's picture in punch of Mr. Tom Naughty and his mare jumping a fence in the following order. Mr. Tom Naughty won his mare too. However I got in at the death this time also. I was fond of walking and climbing. As a lad I used to go to the North Woods in Maine both in fall and winter. There I made life friends of two men Will Dow and Bill Sewall. I canoed with them and tramped through the woods with them visiting the winter logging camps on snowshoes. Afterward they were with me in the west. Will Dow is dead. Bill Sewall was collector of customs under me on the arrow-stuck border. Except when hunting I never did any mountaineering save for a couple of conventional trips up the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau on one occasion when I was in Switzerland. I never did much with the shotgun but I practiced a good deal with the rifle. I had a rifle range at Sagamore Hill where I often took friends to shoot. Once or twice when I was visited by parties of released Boer prisoners after the close of the South African War they and I held shooting matches together. The best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot there was Stuart Edward White. Among the many other good men was a staunch friend Baron Speck von Sternberg afterwards German ambassador at Washington during my presidency. He was a capital shot, rider and walker a devoted and most efficient servant of Germany who had fought with distinction in the Franco-German War when barely more than a boy. He was the hero of the story of the pig dog in archibald Forbes's volume of reminiscences. It was he who first talked over with me the raising of a regiment of horse riflemen from among the ranch men and cowboys of the plains. When ambassador the poor gallant tenderhearted fellow was dying of a slow and painful disease so that he could not play with the rest of us but the agony of his mortal illness never in the slightest degree interfered with his work. Among the other men who shot and rode and walked with me was Cecil Spring-Rice who has just been appointed British ambassador to the United States. He was my groomsman, my best man when I was married at St. George's Hanover Square which made me feel as if I were living in one of Thackeray's novels. My own experience as regards marksmanship was much the same as my experience as regards horsemanship. There are men whose eye and hand are so quick and so sure that they achieve a perfection of marksmanship to which no practice will enable ordinary men to attain. There are other men who cannot learn to shoot with any accuracy at all. In between come the mass of men of ordinary abilities who, if they choose resolutely to practice, can by sheer industry and judgment make themselves fair rifle shots. The men who show this requisite industry and judgment can, without special difficulty, raise themselves to the second class of respectable rifle shots and it is to this class that I belong. But to have reached this point of marksmanship with the rifle at a target by no means implies ability to hit game in the field especially dangerous game. All kinds of other qualities, moral and physical enter into being a good hunter and especially a good hunter after a dangerous game just as all kinds of other qualities in addition to skill with the rifle enter into being a good soldier. With dangerous game, after a fair degree of efficiency with the rifle has been attained, the prime requisites are cool judgment and that kind of nerve which consists in avoiding being rattled. Any beginner is apt to have buck fever and therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game. Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity. It may affect a man the first time he has to speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck or goes into battle. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must by custom and repeated exercise of self mastery get his nerves thoroughly under control. This is largely a matter of habit in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of willpower. If the man has the right stuff in him his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it and if he has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game hunting or in need of any other form of sport or work in which there is bodily peril. After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and the control over his nerves which will make him shoot as well at the game as at a target he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting and he will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the outsider is apt to imagine. A man who can hit a soda water bottle at the distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that distance and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to a standstill. All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda water bottle and to do this requires nerve at least as much as it does physical address. Having reached to this point the hunter must not imagine that he is warranted in taking desperate chances. There are degrees in proficiency and what is a warrantable and legitimate risk for a man to take when he has reached a certain grade of efficiency may be a foolish risk for him to take before he has reached that grade. A man who has reached the degree of proficiency indicated above is quite warranted in walking in at a lion at bay in an open plane to say within a hundred yards. If the lion has not charged the man ought at that distance to knock him over and prevent his charging and if the lion is already charging the man ought at that distance to be able to stop him. But the amount of prowess which warrants a man in relying on his ability to perform this feat does not by any means justify him in thinking that for instance he can crawl after a wounded lion into thick cover. I have known men of indifferent prowess to perform this latter feat successfully but at least as often they have been unsuccessful and in these cases the result has been unpleasant. The man who habitually follows wounded lions into thick cover must be a hunter of the highest skill or he can count with certainty on an ultimate mauling. The first two or three bucks I ever saw gave me buck fever badly but after I had gained experience with ordinary game I never had buck fever at all with dangerous game. In my case the overcoming of buck fever was the result of conscious effort and to deliberate determination to overcome it. More happily constituted men never have to make this determined effort at all which may perhaps show that the average man can profit more from my experiences than he can from those of the exceptional man. I have shot only five kinds of animals which can fairly be called dangerous game that is the lion, elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo in Africa and the big grizzly bear a quarter of a century ago in the Rockies. Taking into account not only my own personal experience but the experiences of many veteran hunters I regard all the four African animals but especially the lion, elephant and buffalo as much more dangerous than the grizzly. As it happened however the only narrow escape I personally ever had was from a grizzly and in Africa the animal killed closest to me as it was charging was a rhinoceros all of which goes to show that a man must not generalize too broadly from his own personal experiences. On the whole I think the lion the most dangerous of all these five animals that is I think that if fairly hunted there is a larger percentage of hunters killed or mauled for a given number of lions killed than for a given number of any one of the other animals. Yet I personally had no difficulties with lions. I twice killed lions which were at bay and just starting to charge and I killed a heavy mained male while it was in full charge. But in each instance I had plenty of leeway the animal being so far off that even if my bullet had not been fatal I should have had time for a couple more shots. The African buffalo is undoubtedly a dangerous beast but it happened that the few that I shot did not charge. A bull elephant, a vicious rogue which had been killing people in the native villages did charge before being shot at. My son Kermit and I stopped it at 40 yards. Another bull elephant also unwounded which charged nearly got me as I had just fired both cartridges from my heavy double-barreled rifle in killing the bull I was after. The first wild elephant I had ever seen. The second bull came through the thick brush to my left like a steam plow through a light snowdrift everything snapping before his rush and was so near that he could have hit me with his trunk. I slipped past him behind a tree. People have asked me how I felt on this occasion. My answer has always been that I suppose I felt as most men of like experience feel on such occasions. At such a moment a hunter is so very busy that he has no time to get frightened. He wants to get in his cartridges and try another shot. Rhinoceros are truculent blustering beasts much the most stupid of all the dangerous game I know. Generally their attitude is one of mere stupidity and bluff but on occasions they do charge wickedly both when wounded and when entirely unprovoked. The first I ever shot I mortally wounded at a few rods distance and it charged with the utmost determination where at I and my companion both fired and more by good luck than anything else we brought it to the ground just thirteen paces from where we stood. Another rhinoceros may or may not have been meaning to charge me I never have been certain which. It heard us and came at us through rather thick brush snorting and tossing its head. I am by no means sure that it had fixedly hostile intentions and indeed with my present experience I think it likely that if I had not fired it would have flinched at the last moment and either retreated or gone by me. But I am not a rhinoceros mind reader and its actions were such as to warrant my regarding it as a suspicious character. I stopped it with a couple of bullets and then followed it up and killed it. The skins of all these animals which I thus killed are in the National Museum at Washington. But as I said above the only narrow escape I met with was not from one of these dangerous African animals but from a grizzly bear. It was about twenty four years ago. I had wounded the bear just at sunset in a wood of lodgepole pines and following him I wounded him again as he stood on the other side of a thicket. He then charged through the brush coming with such speed and with such an irregular gate that try as I would I was not able to get the sight of my rifle on the brain pan though I hit him very hard with both the remaining barrels of my magazine Winchester. It was in the days of black powder and the smoke hung. After my last shot the first thing I saw was the bear's left paws he struck at me so close that I made a quick movement to one side. He was however practically already dead and after another jump and while in the very act of trying to turn to come at me he collapsed like a shot rabbit. By the way I had a most exasperating time trying to bring in his skin. I was alone travelling on foot with one very docile little mountain mare for a pack pony. The little mare cared nothing for bears or anything else so there was no difficulty in packing her but the man without experience can hardly realize the work it was to get that bear skin off the carcass and then to pack it wet slippery and heavy so that it would ride evenly on the pony. I was at the time fairly well versed in packing with a diamond hitch the standby of Rocky Mountain Packers in my day but the diamond hitch is a two man job and even working with a squaw hitch I got into endless trouble with that wet and slippery bear skin. With infinite labour I would get the skin on the pony and run the ropes over it until to all seeming it was fastened properly. Then off we would start and after going about a hundred yards I would notice the hide beginning to bulge through between two ropes. I would shift one of them and then the hide would bulge somewhere else. I would shift the rope again and still the hide would flow slowly out as if it was lava. The first thing I knew it would come down on one side and the little mare with her feet planted resolutely would wait for me to perform my part by getting that bear skin back in its proper place on the McClellan saddle which I was using as a makeshift pack saddle. The feet of killing the bear the previous day sank into nothing compared with the feet of making the bear skin ride properly as a pack on the following three days. End of chapter two part one. Read by Kara Schellenberg, www.kray.org on April 17th, 2008 in San Diego, California. Chapter two part two of autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Chris Amos. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter two, The Vigor of Life, part two. The reason why I was alone in the mountains on this occasion was because for the only time in all my experience I had a difficulty with my guide. He was a crippled old mountain man with a profound contempt for tender feet. A contempt that in my case was accentuated by the fact that I wore spectacles, which at that day and in that region were usually held to indicate a defective moral character in the wearer. He had never previously acted as a guide or as he expressed it, trunbled a tender foot, and though a good hunter who showed me much game, our experience together was not happy. He was very rheumatic, unlike to lie a bed late so that I usually had to get breakfast and in fact do most of the work around camp. Finally one day he declined to go out with me saying that he had a pain. When that afternoon I got back to camp I speedily found what the pain was. We were traveling very light indeed. I having practically nothing but my buffalo sleeping bag, my wash kit and a pair of socks. I'd also taken a flask of whiskey for emergencies. Although as I found that the emergencies never arose and that tea was better than whiskey when a man was cold or done out, I abandoned the practice of taking whiskey on hunting trips twenty years ago. When I got back to camp the old fellow was sitting on a tree trunk, very erect with his rifle across his knees and in response to my nod of greeting he merely leered at me. I leaned my rifle against a tree, walked over to where my bed was lying and happening to rummage in it for something or found the whiskey flask was empty. I turned on him at once and accused him of having drunk it to which he merely responded by asking what I was going to do about it. There did not seem much to do so I said that we would part company. We were only four or five days from a settlement and I would go in alone, taking one of the horses. He responded by cocking his rifle and saying that I could go alone and be damned to me but I could not take any horse. I answered, all right, that if I could not, I could not and began to move around to get some flour and salt pork. He was misled by my quietness and by the fact that I had not in any way resented either his actions or his language during the days we had been together and did not watch me as closely as they ought to have done. He was sitting with the cocked rifle across his knees, the muzzle to his left. My rifle was leaning against a tree near the cooking things to his right. Managing to get near it, I whipped it up and threw the bead on him, calling, Hands up! He, of course, put up his hands and then said, Oh, come, I was only joking! To which I answered, Well, I am not. Now straighten your legs and let your rifle go to the ground. He remonstrated, saying the rifle would go off and I told him to let it go off. However, he straightened his legs in such a fashion that it came to the ground without a jar. I then made him move back and picked up the rifle. By this time he was quite sober and really did not seem angry, looking at me quizzically. He told me that if I would give him back his rifle he would call it quits and we could go on together. I did not think it best to trust him, so I told him that our hunt was pretty well through anyway and that I would go home. There was a blasted pine on the trail and plain view of the camp about a mile off and I told him that I would leave his rifle at that blasted pine if I could see him in camp but that he must not come after me, for if he did I should assume that it was with hostile intent and would shoot. He said he had no intention of coming after me and as he was very much crippled with rheumatism I did not believe he would do so. Accordingly I took the little mare with nothing but some flour, bacon and tea in my bedroll and started off. At the blasted pine I looked round and as I could see him in camp I left his rifle there. I then travelled till dark and that night for the only time in my experience I used in camping a trick of the old-time trappers in the Indian days. I did not believe I would be followed but still it was not possible to be sure. So after getting supper while my pony fed round I left the fire burning, repacked the mare and pushed ahead until it literally became so dark that I could not see. Then I pigeted the mare, slept where I was without a fire until the first streak of dawn and then pushed on for a couple of hours before halting to take breakfast and to let the little mare have a good feed. No planesman needs to be told that a man should not lie near a fire if there is danger of an enemy creeping up on him and that above all a man should not put himself in a position where he can be ambushed at dawn. On the second day I lost the trail and toward nightfall gave up the effort to find it, camped where I was and went out to shoot a grouse for supper. It was while hunting in vain for a grouse that I came on the bear and killed it as above described. When I reached the settlement and went into the store, the storekeeper identified me by remarking, you're the tenderfoot that old Hank was trundling, ain't you? I admitted that I was. A good many years later after I had been elected vice president, I went on a cougar hunt in northwestern Colorado with Johnny Goff, a famous hunter and mountain man. It was midwinter. I was rather proud of my achievements and pictured myself as being known to the few settlers in the neighborhood as a successful mountain lion hunter. I could not help grinning when I found out that they did not even allude to me as the vice president-elect, let alone as a hunter, but merely as Johnny Goff's tourist. Of course, during the years when I was most busy at serious work, I could do no hunting and even my riding was of a decorous kind. But a man whose business is sedentary should get some kind of exercise if he wishes to keep himself in as good physical trim as his brethren who do manual labor. When I worked on a ranch, I needed no form of exercise except my work. But when I worked in an office, the case was different. A couple of summers I played polo with some of my neighbors. I shall always believe we played polo in just the right way for middle-aged men with stables of the general utility order. Of course, it was polo which was chiefly of interest to ourselves, the only onlookers being the members of our faithful families. My two ponies were the only occupants of my stable except a cart horse. My wife and I rode and drove them and they were used for household errands and for the children and for two afternoons a week they served me as polo ponies. Polo is a good game, infinitely better for vigorous men than tennis or golf or anything of that kind. There is all the fun of football with the horse thrown in and if only people would be willing to play it in a simple fashion it would be almost as much within their reach as golf. But at Oyster Bay our great and permanent amusements were rowing and sailing. I do not care for the latter and am fond of the former. I suppose it sounds archaic but I cannot help thinking that the people with motor boats would miss a great deal. If they would only keep to rowboats or canoes and use ore or paddle themselves they would get infinitely more benefit than by having their work done for them by gasoline. But I rarely took exercise merely as exercise. Primarily I took it because I liked it. Play should never be allowed to interfere with work and a life devoted merely to play is, of all forms of existence, the most dismal. But the joy of life is a very good thing and while work is the essential in it play also has its place. When obliged to live in cities I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form. I was reluctantly obliged to abandon both as I grew older. I dropped the wrestling earliest. When I became governor the champion middleweight wrestler of America happened to be in Albany and I got him to come around three or four afternoons a week. Incidentally I may mention that his presence caused me a difficulty with a controller who refused to audit a bill while I put in for a wrestling mat explaining that I could have a billiard table, billiards being recognized as a proper gubernatorial amusement but that a wrestling mat symbolized something unusual and unheard of and could not be permitted. The middleweight champion was of course so much better than I was that he could not only take care of himself but of me too and see that I was not hurt for wrestling is a much more violent amusement than boxing. But after a couple of months he had to go away and he left as a substitute a good-humored stalwart professional oarsman. The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling. He could not even take care of himself not to speak of me. By the end of our second afternoon one of his long ribs had been caved in and two of my short ribs badly damaged and my left shoulder blades so nearly shoved out of place that it creaked. He was nearly as pleased as I was when I told him I thought we would vote the war a failure and abandon wrestling. After that I took up boxing again. While president I used to box with some of the aides as well as play single stick with general wood. After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling for in one bout a young captain of artillery crossed countered me on the eye and the blow smashed the little blood vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye but the sight has been dim ever since and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot. Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jujitsu for a year or two. When I was in the legislature and was working very hard with little chance of getting out of doors all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second rate prize fighter the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped and some days later I received a letter of woe from him from the jail. I found that he was by profession a burglar and merely followed boxing as the amusement of his lighter moments or when business was slack. Naturally being fond of boxing I grew to know a good many prize fighters and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached. I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of this I regard boxing whether professional or amateur as a first-class sport and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing but this is true of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports. Most certainly prize fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in connection with big business. Powerful vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent. When I was police commissioner I found and Jacob Reese will back me up in this that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all but they had to have some outlet for their activities. In the same way I have always regarded boxing as a first-class sport to encourage in the young men's Christian association. I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders at slope like a champagne bottle. Of course boxing should be encouraged in the army and navy. I was first drawn to two naval chaplains, fathers Chadwick and Rainy, by finding that each of them had brought half a dozen sets of boxing gloves and encouraged their crews in boxing. When I was police commissioner I heartily approved the effort to get boxing club started in New York on a clean basis. Later I was reluctantly obliged to come to the conclusion that the prize ring had become hopelessly debased and demoralized and as governor I aided in the passage of and signed the bill putting a stop to professional boxing for money. This was because some of the prize fighters themselves were crooked. While the crowd of hangers on who attended and made up and profited by the matches had placed the whole business on a basis of commercialism and brutality that was intolerable. I shall always maintain that boxing contests themselves make good healthy sport. It is idle to compare them with bull fighting, the torture and death of the wretched horses in bull fighting is enough of itself to blast the sport no matter how great the skill and prowess shown by the bull fighters. Any sport in which the death and torture of animals is made to furnish pleasure to the spectators is debasing. There should always be the opportunity provided in a glove fight or bare fist fight to stop it when one competitor is hopelessly outclassed or too badly hammered. But the men who take part in these fights are hard as nails and it is not worthwhile to feel sentimental about their receiving punishment which as a matter of fact they do not mind. Of course the men who look on ought to be able to stand up with the gloves or without them themselves. I have scant use for the type of sportsmanship which consists merely in looking on at the feats of someone else. Some as good citizens as I know are or were prize fighters. Take Mike Donovan of New York. He and his family represent a type of American citizenship of which we have a right to be proud. Mike is a devoted temperance man and can be relied upon for every moment in the interest of good citizenship. I was first immediately thrown with him when I was police commissioner. One evening he and I, both in dress suits, attended a temperance meeting of Catholic societies. It culminated in a lively set to between myself and a timidy senator who was a very good fellow but whose ideas of temperance differed radically from mine and as the event proved from those of the majority of the meeting. Mike evidently regarded himself as my backer. He was sitting on the platform beside me and I think felt as pleased and interested as if the set to had been physical instead of merely verbal. Afterward I grew to know him well both while I was governor and while I was president and many a time he came on and boxed with me. Battling Nelson was another staunch friend and he and I think alike on most questions of political and industrial life. Although he once expressed to me some commiseration because as president I did not get anything like the money returned from my services that he aggregated during the same term of years in the ring. Bob Fitzsimmons was another good friend of mine. He has never forgotten his early skill as a blacksmith and among the things that I value and always keep in use is a pen holder made by Bob out of a horseshoe with an inscription saying that it is made for and presented to President Theodore Roosevelt by his friend and admirer Robert Fitzsimmons. I have for a long time had the friendship of John L. Sullivan then whom in his prime no better man ever stepped into the ring. He is now a Massachusetts farmer. John used occasionally to visit me at the White House his advent always causing a distinct flutter among the waiting senators and congressmen. When I went to Africa he presented me with a gold-mounted rabbit's foot for luck. I carried it through my African trip and I certainly had good luck. On one occasion one of my prize-fighting friends called on me at the White House on business. He explained that he wished to see me alone sat down opposite me and put a very expensive cigar on the desk saying have a cigar. I thanked him and said I did not smoke to which he responded put it in your pocket. He then added take another put both in your pocket. This I accordingly did. Having thus shown at the outset the necessary formal courtesy my visitor an old and valued friend proceeded to explain that a nephew of his had enlisted in the Marine Corps but had been absent without leave and was threatened with dishonorable discharge on the ground of desertion. My visitor a good citizen and patriotic American was stung to the quick at the thought of such an incident occurring in his family and he explained to me that it must not occur that there must not be the disgrace to the family although he would be delighted to have the offender handled rough to teach him a needed lesson. He added that he wished I would take him and handle him myself for he knew that I would see that he got all that was coming to him. Then a look of pathos came into his eyes and he explained that boy I just cannot understand. He was my sister's favorite son and I always took a special interest in him myself. I did my best to bring him up the way he ought to go but there was just nothing to be done with him. His tastes were naturally low. He took to music. What form this debasing taste from music assumed I did not inquire and I was able to grant my friend's wish. End of chapter two part two. Recording by Chris Amos www.