Theodore Roosevelt and His Times | Page 5

his best to avoid trouble, but that, when he could
not avoid it honorably, he took care to make it "serious trouble" for the
other fellow.
Even after he became President, Roosevelt liked to box, until an
accident, of which for many years only his intimate friends were aware,
convinced him of the unwisdom of the game for a man of his age and
optical disabilities. A young artillery captain, with whom he was
boxing in the White House, cross-countered him on the left eye, and the
blow broke the little blood-vessels. Ever afterward, the sight of that eye
was dim; and, as he said, "if it had been the right eye I should have
been entirely unable to shoot." To "a mighty hunter before the Lord"
like Theodore Roosevelt, such a result would have been a cardinal
calamity.
By the time his experiences in the West were over, Roosevelt's fight for
health had achieved its purpose. Bill Sewall, the woodsman who had
introduced the young Roosevelt to the life of the out-of-doors in Maine,
and who afterward went out West with him to take up the cattle
business, offers this testimony: "He went to Dakota a frail young man,
suffering from asthma and stomach trouble. When he got back into the

world again, he was as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who
wasn't dependent on his arms for his livelihood. He weighed one
hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit."
This battle won by the force of sheer determination, the young
Roosevelt never ceased fighting. He knew that the man who neglects
exercise and training, no matter how perfect his physical trim, is certain
to "go back." One day many years afterward on Twenty-third Street, on
the way back from an Outlook editorial luncheon, I ran against his
shoulder, as one often will with a companion on crowded city streets,
and felt as if it were a massive oak tree into which I had bumped.
Roosevelt the grown man of hardened physique was certainly a
transformation from that "reed shaken with the wind" of his boyhood
days.
When Theodore Roosevelt left Harvard in 1880, he plunged promptly
into a new fight--in the political arena. He had no need to earn his
living; his father had left him enough money to take care of that. But he
had no intention or desire to live a life of leisure. He always believed
that the first duty of a man was to "pull his own weight in the boat";
and his irrepressible energy demanded an outlet in hard, constructive
work. So he took to politics, and as a good Republican ("at that day" he
said, "a young man of my bringing up and convictions, could only join
the Republican party") he knocked at the door of the Twenty-first
District Republican Association in the city of New York. His friends
among the New Yorkers of cultivated taste and comfortable life
disapproved of his desire to enter this new environment. They told him
that politics were "low"; that the political organizations were not run by
"gentlemen," and that he would find there saloonkeepers, horse-car
conductors, and similar persons, whose methods he would find rough
and coarse and unpleasant. Roosevelt merely replied that, if this were
the case, it was those men and not his "silk-stocking" friends who
constituted the governing class--and that he intended to be one of the
governing class himself. If he could not hold his own with those who
were really in practical politics, he supposed he would have to quit; but
he did not intend to quit without making the experiment.
At every step in his career Theodore Roosevelt made friends. He made
them not "unadvisedly or lightly" but with the directness, the warmth,
and the permanence that were inseparable from the Roosevelt character.

One such friend he acquired at this stage of his progress. In that District
Association, from which his friends had warned him away, he found a
young Irishman who had been a gang leader in the rough-and-tumble
politics of the East Side. Driven by the winter wind of man's ingratitude
from Tammany Hall into the ranks of the opposite party, Joe Murray
was at this time one of the lesser captains in "the Twenty-first"
Roosevelt soon came to like him. He was "by nature as straight a man,
as fearless, and as stanchly loyal," said Roosevelt, "as any one whom I
have ever met, a man to be trusted in any position demanding courage,
integrity, and good faith." The liking was returned by the eager and
belligerent young Irishman, though he has confessed that he was first
led to consider Roosevelt as a political ally from the point of view of
his advantages as a vote-getter.
The year after Roosevelt