Theodore Roosevelt | Page 5

Yorkers say, they were "straight New York."
Immigrant or settler, or whatever Klaes van Roosevelt may have been,
his children and grandchildren had in them more than ordinary ability.
They were not content to stand still, but made themselves useful and
prosperous, so that the name was known and honored in the city and
State even before the birth of the son who was to make it illustrious
throughout the world.
"My father," says the President, "was the best man I ever knew.... He
never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of
whom I was ever really afraid." The elder Roosevelt was a merchant, a
man courageous and gentle, fond of horses and country life. He worked
hard at his business, for the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War,
and for the poor and unfortunate of his own city, so hard that he wore
himself out and died at forty-six. The President's mother was Martha
Bulloch from Georgia. Two of her brothers were in the Confederate
Navy, so while the Civil War was going on, and Theodore Roosevelt
was a little boy, his family like so many other American families, had
in it those who wished well for the South, and those who hoped for the
success of the North.
Many American Presidents have been poor when they were boys. They
have had to work hard, to make a way for themselves, and the same
strength and courage with which they did this has later helped to bring
them into the White House. It has seemed as if there were magic
connected with being born in a log-cabin, or having to work hard to get
an education, so that only the boys who did this could become famous.

Of course it is what is in the boy himself, together with the effect his
life has had on him, that counts. The boy whose family is rich, or even
well-off, has something to struggle against, too. For with these it is
easy to slip into comfortable and lazy ways, to do nothing because one
does not have to do anything. Some men never rise because their early
life was too hard; some, because it was too easy.
Roosevelt might have had the latter fate. His father would not have
allowed idleness; he did not care about money-making, especially, but
he did believe in work, for himself and his children. When the father
died, and his son was left with enough money to have lived all his days
without doing a stroke of work, he already had too much grit to think of
such a life. And he had too much good sense to start out to become a
millionaire and to pile million upon useless million.
He had something else to fight against: bad health. He writes: "I was a
sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and frequently had to
be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One of my
memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his
arms at night, when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed
gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me. I went very little
to school. I never went to the public schools, as my own children later
did." [Footnote: "Autobiography."] For a few months he went to a
private school, his aunt taught him at home, and he had tutors there.
When he was ten his parents took him with his brother and sisters for a
trip to Europe, where he had a bad time indeed. Like most boys, he
cared nothing for picture-galleries and the famous sights, he was
homesick and he wished to get back to what really pleased him,--that is,
collecting animals. He was already interested in that. And only when he
could go to a museum and see, as he wrote in his diary, "birds and
skeletons" or go "for a spree" with his sister and buy two shillings
worth of rock-candy, did he enjoy himself in Europe.
His sister knew what he thought about the things one is supposed to see
in Europe, and in her diary set it down:
"I am so glad Mama has let me stay in the butiful hotel parlor while the

poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galary."
These experiences are funny enough now, but probably they were
tragic to him at the time. In a church in Venice there were at least some
moments of happiness. He writes of his sister "Conie":
"Conie jumped over tombstones spanked me banged Ellies head &c."
But in Paris the trip becomes too monotonous; and his diary says:
November 26. "I stayed in the house all day, varying