Wednesday, August 13, 2008
T.R. Post 3/5
Posted by Zach in Art News Stories Teddy Roosevelt


illustration by J. Gerard

“We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.” –Theodore Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt was a firm advocate of the strenuous life, though few who saw him as a child were likely to ever suspect such a thing. He was a sickly boy afflicted with asthma and poor eyesight, and considers himself to have been rather timid. From his considerable reading he found that he admired men who were rather opposite from him. Men like the soldiers at Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen. He writes, “… I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a desire to be like them.”

One time young Theodore went on a trip by himself. He rode in a stagecoach with other boys his own age. He recounts that the other boys were “… very much more competent and also much more mischievous.” They bullied him, and eventually he fought back. He writes

“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.

“That 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.”

Roosevelt continued to box the rest of his life. He boxed in the Staterooms of the Whitehouse until a blow detached his left retina. He wasn’t a bad boxer either. At Harvard he placed second, but he doesn’t even mention it as a mark of distinction (presumably because he didn’t win). He writes, “I did a good deal of boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attended 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 semi-finals, I forgot which; but aside from this the chief part I played was to act as a trial horse for some friend or classmate who did have a chance of distinguishing himself in the championship contests.”

Though he dismisses his college boxing triumphs, he does dwell a bit on his boyhood efforts.

“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 … 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 fifty 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 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.”

Theodore Roosevelt is a fine example of a man who sets about knowing and conquering his weaknesses. He was as intellectually rigorous as he was physically rigorous and sought to cultivate both equally, not one in exclusion to the other. In a speech given at the Sorbonne in Paris he said, “Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastiduosness that unfits him for doing the rough work of the workaday world … The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, a fop, or a voluptuary.” This wasn’t merely rhetoric. Elting Morrison lauds Roosevelt’s consistent lifestyle when he writes that Theodore Roosevelt, “is certainly the only president who read Anna Karenina while on a three-day search for cattle thieves.”

Roosevelt powered his will by the desire to live a life that mattered. No one can dispute that he did exactly that. In his speeches and writings we find the interpreter of our better selves.

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