Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
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 are 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 after life. 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 Eliot
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 seem light reading by
comparison. Still, they represented purpose and serious interest on
my part, not the perfunctory effort to do well enough to get a certain
mark; and corrections of them by a skilled older man 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 Gracchi, 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 Gracchi because I had to; my conscientious
and much-to-be-pitied professor dragging 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 practiced 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 emphatically disbelieve in
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 in 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 tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure
whether this means the tenth 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 Coues type--a man like Hart
Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day. 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 career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up
such a career and do non-remunerative 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 could 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 faunal
naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated
biology as purely a science of the laboratory and 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; thoroughness in minutiae 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
slipshod 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 text-books. 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 regardful 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 Croly's
"Promise of American Life" and Walter E. Weyl's "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 text-books and
my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which
by complacently 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.
CHAPTER II
THE VIGOR OF LIFE
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