"Do what you can, with what you have,
where you are."
The poor thing had asthma. Little
Teedie, as he was called, often had to sleep sitting up. Sometimes his father
drove their carriage as fast as he could through the streets so the wind would be forced into his tiny lungs.
His parents did everything imaginable.
They tried to rule out household allergies. They took him to the mountains, to
the beach, to the country, all in the hope that fresh air would help him.
They had him smoke cigars. They induced vomiting with syrup of ipecac. That’s what doctors thought would
help.
Nothing did help. (Perhaps avoiding
church might have done the child good. One historian has noted that most of
Teedie’s attacks came on Saturday nights and on Sundays.)
This pathetic child yearned for a
robust life. He devoured adventure stories and tales of “manliness.”
“I was nervous and timid,” Theodore 'Teedie' Roosevelt remembered. “Yet upon reading of the people I admired, ranging from
the soldiers of Valley Forge to Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite
stories, and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forbears and
kinfolk, and from knowing my father, I had 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.”
He loved wild animals. He wore frogs
under his hat on the streetcar. His parents let him have a
snapping turtle. He kept it chained to the legs of a sink in the back hall.
“How can I do the laundry?” groaned the maid.
Teedie also had a pet woodchuck. It stank. “Either I leave, or the woodchuck does,” the cook grumbled. Houseguests
even inspected water pitchers carefully before pouring, for fear Teedi might be
storing snakes in them.
One day after a severe asthma
attack, the doctor told Teedie’s father that he was “bright” and “precocious”
and that “more exercise” would do him a world of good.
"I know you
will do it."
With that wise counsel in mind, his
father sat Teedie down and said, “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not
the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it
should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I
know you will do it.”
“With a flash of white teeth,”
recalled a witness, young T.R. gave a grin and snarl of enthusiasm. He swore to
his father, “I’ll make my body!”
That he did. He took to lifting
weights and working his chest muscles on the parallel bars. Progress was slow.
It didn’t help that he was also horribly nearsighted. When he went shooting one
day with friends, he couldn’t understand why they hit their targets when the
fast flying birds were blurs to him.
“Soon afterwards, I got my first
pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me,"
he wrote, "I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those
spectacles.”
At Harvard, Roosevelt rowed a one-man
shell on the Charles River. He worked out in the gym. He loved boxing and was a
runner-up in a college competition. (His habit of amateur zoo keeping
continued. He kept lobsters, snakes, and a tortoise in his off-campus room.)
Given his penchant for all things
wild and smelly, he considered becoming a biologist. Instead he entered law school. Finding it maddening, he went into
politics. “I intended to be one of the governing class," he recalled.
Whirlwind would be the word
to describe Roosevelt's life. On his 22nd birthday, he married the
beautiful socialite Alice Lee. A year later he was elected a New York State
Assemblyman.
Four years later in 1884,
Roosevelt’s courage would be cruelly tested.
A day after Alice gave birth to
their first child, his mother died of typhoid fever in her bed at home. Eleven
hours later, Alice followed her to the grave, also at home. She succumbed to Bright’s
Disease, a kidney disorder whose symptoms had been masked by her pregnancy.
“When my heart’s dearest died, the
light went from my life for ever,” Roosevelt wrote.
He was not one to sit in darkness and mourn. He moved to Medora, North Dakota, and at the age of 26 became a
rancher and deputy sheriff. He chased down outlaws who stole his boat. After
nabbing them, he decided against hanging them. While a cowboy went for help, he
stood guard over them for 40 hours without sleep.
In the Bighorn Mountains, he and a
fellow hunter saw grizzly tracks. “It gave me rather an eerie feeling in the
silent, lonely woods, to see for the first time the unmistakable proofs that I
was in the home of the mighty lord of the wilderness.”
Suddenly, the monster rose 10
feet in front of them. It stood more than nine feet tall and weighed 1,200
pounds.
“Then he saw us, and dropped down
again on all fours the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle
as he turned toward us,” Roosevelt wrote. In an instant, he raised his rifle,
and looking into the beast’s “small, glittering evil eyes," he squeezed the
trigger.
Rearing back, “the huge beast fell
over on his side in the death throes, the ball having gone into his brain,
striking fairly between the eyes as if the distance had been measured by a
carpenter’s rule.”
Roosevelt also faced down the most
dangerous animal of all—the human animal. As he would later recount, “It was
late in the evening when I reached the place [a hotel bar in present day
Wibaux, Montana]. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I
disliked going in. But it was a cold night, and there was nowhere else to go.
“A shabby individual in a broad hat
with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with
strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two
or three holes in its face."
Seeing
Roosevelt's glasses, the drunk said, “Four eyes is going to treat!”
Roosevelt smiled, and thinking the
drunk's mood would pass, he took a seat. Then the man leaned over Roosevelt
with “a gun in each hand.”
Pretending to be intimidated, he said, “’Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to.’"
Roosevelt, the boxer, went into
action. “As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of
the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out and then again
with my right.”
The
drunk collapsed, his guns accidentally firing as he fell. No one was hurt,
and, the bully hopped a freight train the next morning.
Recalling his days as a
rancher, he said, “We led a free and hardy life with horse and rifle…We knew
toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as
they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one
another, but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the
glory of work and the joy of living.”
A man in a hurry, after returning home a year later, he ran for Mayor of
New York City, married again the year after that, and later became
a New York City police commissioner and then Assistant Secretary of the U.S.
Navy.
"The great day"
At age 39, he earned his nickname as
a “Rough Rider,” as Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry in the
Spanish-American War. On Kettle Hill in Cuba, he was the only man on horseback.
He rode from position to position, defying whizzing bullets, urging his troops to the top. When the shooting (and the war) stopped, the Spanish empire was
defeated. “The great day of my life,” he called it.
He served two successful terms as
president. After a four-year hiatus, he left the Republican Party and ran for
president in 1912 in his nearly formed Bull Moose party
At a stop in Milwaukee, before
delivering a speech, a deranged saloonkeeper shot him in the chest at close
range. The bullet's impact rocked Roosevelt. But the slug slowed substantially,
passing through his steel eyeglasses case and a 50-page speech folded in his
breast pocket. Nonetheless, it entered Roosevelt’s chest.
After
collecting himself, he noticed he was not coughing blood. As a hunter, he knew
that if the bullet had hit his heart, blood would have been coming up, and he would
soon be dead. Realizing he only had a flesh wound, Roosevelt ignored pleas to be rushed to the hospital.
Instead, he delivered his remarks,
speaking for 90 minutes, blood oozing onto his shirt. He began his address by saying,
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have
just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
MORAL: Give it your best
shot.
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