Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 7

Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 7

Entering the house, Mr. Roosevelt invited Mr. Riis to go up with

him to see the babies. Mrs. Roosevelt met them in the hall with the

warning that he was not to play bear, that the baby was being put to

sleep. However, when the two arrived in the nursery, the baby itself

squirmed out of the nurse’s arms and growled and clawed at the father

very much like a little bear cub, and, thus incited, the rest of the

children flew upon him with all of the amazing vigor of childhood. The

house was in a turmoil. No menagerie in its wildest moment gave forth

more shrieks, howls and thumps. As a climax the door opened and Mrs.

Roosevelt, wearing a look of great sternness, stood viewing the scene.

Thereupon her husband arose meekly from the floor explaining that the

baby was thoroughly awake when he arrived. This story explains the

following:

 

One day, when Roosevelt was Police Commissioner, a policeman was

ordered before him on charges. Roosevelt reviewed his past offences

and resolved to dismiss him. The stage was set for the dismissal;

only the formalities remained. But someone had told the culprit the

Commissioner’s weak side. In the morning as Roosevelt came from a romp

with his babies, the doomed policeman stood before him surrounded by

eleven weeping youngsters.

 

Roosevelt’s stern __EXPRESSION__ relaxed to one of instant sympathy.

 

“Where is your wife, O’Keefe?”

 

“Dead, Sir!”

 

Dead! And this man, left alone with all these children! Clearly it

would be inhuman to discharge him. He must be given one more chance.

 

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, LE GENDRE

 

ROOSEVELT, THE FIGHTER]

 

Out went the patrolman with his new lease of life. And his first duty

was to return to his neighbors in the tenement the nine children he had

borrowed to accompany his own two in his task of melting the heart of

the Comissioner.

 

Some years ago, a man Roosevelt had met out West wrote this letter to

him:

 

“Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble. I have shot a

lady in the eye. But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the lady. I was

shooting at my wife.”

 

Roosevelt replied to his friend in need that while he appreciated

marksmanship in almost every form, he drew the line at shooting at

ladies, whether or not they were related to the man who held the gun.

 

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, LE GENDRE

 

ROOSEVELT, THE MAN]

 

Roosevelt, much as he understood the character of the Western man, was

even more interested in and sympathetic to the Western woman. It was

on the prairie that Roosevelt learned the doctrine which he afterward

preached, that “the prime work for the average woman must be keeping

the home and rearing her children.” When with his men on the ranch

he listened by hours to their accounts of the charms and virtues of

their sweethearts, while from his own close observation he acquired a

knowledge of the homely virtues of the women pioneers of the plains

that led him to show small sympathy in later years with the idle,

luxury-loving women of the big cities.

 

In his description of frontier types Roosevelt pictured how the

grinding work of the wilderness drives the beauty and bloom from a

woman’s face long before her youth leaves her. She lives in a log hut

chinked with moss, or in a sod adobe hovel; or in a temporary camp.

 

Motherhood comes and leaves her sinewy, angular, thin of lip and

furrowed of brow. She is up early, going about her work in a dingy gown

and ugly sunbonnet, facing her many hard duties, washing and cooking

for her husband and children; facing perils and hardships and poverty

with the courage her husband shows in facing his own hard and dangerous

lot. She is fond and tender toward her children. Yet necessity

dictates that she must bring them up in hardihood. One of the wives of

Roosevelt’s teamsters, when her work prevented her giving personal care

to her flock picketed them out, each child being tied by the leg with a

long leather string to a stake driven in the ground and so placed that

it could not get into a scuffle with the next child nor get its hand on

breakable things.

 

Independent and resourceful as the frontiersman became in contact

with the desolate prairie, his wife was no less similarly developed.

Roosevelt met one of these women living alone in her cabin on the

plains, having dismissed her erring husband some six months previously.

Her living she earned by making hunting shirts, leggins and gauntlets

for neighboring cow-punchers and Indians, and every man who approached

her cabin door was made to walk the straightest kind of line.

 

The West had its lewd women--as have our big cities today--but

Roosevelt testified that the sense of honor and dignity of the average

plainswoman was as high as that found in the centers of culture. In

the cowboy balls, to which men and women flocked from the surrounding

towns, the greatest decorum was observed, and those behaving

unseemingly were banished and punished with typical cowboy celerity and

vim.

 

In his later years Roosevelt wrote a vigorous paper on the parasite

woman, appealing therein to American women to rear strong families for

their country, and to train them to be prepared for military service

if needed. A Michigan woman of the same brave pioneer stamp described

above formed the conclusion that Roosevelt was writing without

knowledge of the hardships many of her sex were forced to undergo, and

wrote to him this letter:

 

“Dear Sir: When you were talking of ‘race suicide’ I was rearing

a large family on almost no income. I often thought of writing to

you of some of my hardships, and now when ‘preparedness’ may take

some of my boys, I feel I must. I have eleven of my own and brought

up three stepchildren, and yet, in the thirty years of my married

life I have never had a new cloak or winter hat. I have sent seven

children to school at one time. I had a family of ten for eighteen

years, with no money to hire a washerwoman though bearing a child

every two years. Nine--several through or nearly--of my children

have got into high school and two into State Normal School, and one

into the University of Michigan. I haven’t eaten a paid-meal in

twenty years or paid for a night’s lodging in thirty. Not one of

the five boys--the youngest is fifteen--uses tobacco or liquor. I

have worn men’s discarded shoes much of the time. I have had little

time for reading.

 

“I think I have served my country. My husband has been an invalid

for six years--leaving me the care and much work on our little

sandy farm. I have bothered you enough. To me race suicide has

perhaps a different meaning when I think my boys may have to face

the cannon. Respectfully.

 

“MRS. ----”

 

Roosevelt’s reply to her was warmly sympathetic, but there was no

withdrawing from the principles he had set forth. The following

paragraphs from his reply illustrate that tender yet just attitude that

Roosevelt took toward American women, including, of course, the women

of his own household:

 

“Now, my dear Mrs. ----, you have described a career of service which

makes me feel more like taking off my hat to you, and saluting you as

a citizen deserving of the highest honor, than I would feel as regards

any colonel of a crack regiment. But you seem to think, if I understand

your letter aright, that ‘preparedness’ is in some way designed to make

your boys food for cannon.

 

“Now, as a matter of fact, the surest way to prevent your boys from

being food for cannon is to have them, and all the other young men of

the country--my boys, for instance, and the boys of all other fathers

and mothers throughout the country--so trained, so prepared, that it

will not be safe for any foreign foe to attack us. Preparedness no more

invites war than fire insurance invites a fire. I shall come back to

this matter again in a moment. But I will speak to you first a word as

to what you say about race suicide.

 

“I have never preached the imposition of an excessive maternity on any

woman. I have always said that every man worth calling such will feel

a peculiar sense of chivalric tenderness toward his wife, the mother

of his children. He must be unselfish and considerate with her. But,

exactly as he must do his duty, so she must do her duty. I have said

that it is self-evident that unless the average woman, capable of

having children, has four, the race will not go forward; for this is

necessary in order to offset the women who for proper reasons do not

marry, or who, from no fault of their own, have no children, or only

one or two, or whose children die before they grow up. I do not want to

see Americans forced to import our babies from abroad. I do not want to

see the stock of people like yourself and like my family die out--and

you do not either; and it will inevitably die out if the average man

and the average woman are so selfish and so cold that they wish either

no children, or just one or two children.

 

“We have had six children in this family. We wish we had more. Now the

grandchildren are coming along; and I am sure you agree with me that

no other success in life--not being President, or being wealthy, or

going to college, or anything else--comes up to the success of the man

and woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their

children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.

 

“Mrs. Roosevelt and I have four sons, and they are as dear to us as

your sons are to you. If we now had war, these four boys would all go.

We think it entirely right that they should go if their country needs

them. But I do not think it fair that they should be sent to defend

the boys who are too soft or too timid ‘to face the cannon,’ or the

other boys who wish to stay at home to make money while somebody else

protects them.”

 

 

THE BRINGER OF CULTURE

 

In the lore of the Middle West brilliantly stands out the figure of

Johnny Appleseed, who traveled westward distributing apple-seeds to the

farmers and ranchers, from whence sprang up the great apple orchards

that have blessed these regions.

 

It was service of a similar kind that Roosevelt performed when he went

among these primitive people of the wilderness. Schools were scarce in

those days and opportunity for culture was almost entirely lacking. But

here had come among them a man who had graduated from one of the great

Eastern colleges, and who had brought with him a choice library of

books that contained characters and philosophy entirely comprehensible

by these untutored minds when interpreted by such an enthusiastic and

sympathetic expounder as young Roosevelt.

 

On the long winter evenings Roosevelt’s fireside became the rendezvous

for the ranchers and their wives. Roosevelt would select a classic

story and begin reading. The tale would be a familiar one to him, and

yet the genius of the author would again cast its spell over him, and

he would read with interest and __EXPRESSION__ that were magnetic. Swiftly

the night passed, and when in the late hours his hearers went to their

rest they lay awake remembering the poetry of “that chap Browning” or

the Rosalind or Lear of “Mr. Shakespeare,” conning them over in their

minds until they became part of their beings, to be transmitted later

to the minds and lips of their children, and thus to become a part of the civilization of their section.