Theodore Roosevelt | Page 8

three or four clubs,--the Institute, the Hasty
Pudding and the Porcellian. He was one of the editors of the Harvard
Advocate, took part in three or four college activities, and was fond of
target shooting and dancing. It is told that he never spoke in public,
until about his third year in college, that he was shy and had great
difficulty in speaking. It was by effort that he became one of the best
orators of his day.

Roosevelt did not like the way college debates were conducted. He said
that to make one side defend or attack a certain subject, without regard
to whether they thought it right or wrong, had a bad effect.
"What we need," he wrote, "is to turn out of colleges young men with
ardent convictions on the side of right; not young men who can make a
good argument for either right or wrong, as their interest bids them."
He did one thing in college which is not a matter of course with
students under twenty-two years old. He began to write a history,
named "The Naval War of 1812." It was finished and published two
years after he graduated, and in it he showed that his idea of patriotism
included telling the truth. Most American boys used to be brought up
on the story of the American frigate Constitution whipping all the
British ships she met, and with the notion that the War of 1812 was
nothing but a series of brilliant victories for us.
Theodore Roosevelt thought that Americans were not so soft that they
were afraid to hear the truth, and that it was a poor sort of American
who dared not point out to his fellow-countrymen the mistakes they
had made and the disasters which followed. It did not seem patriotic to
him to dodge the fact that lack of wisdom at Washington had let our
Army run down before the war, so that our attempts to invade Canada
were failures, and that we suffered the disgrace of having Washington
itself captured and burned by the enemy.
There was a great deal to be proud of in what our Navy did, and in the
Army's victory in the Battle of New Orleans, and these things
Roosevelt described with the pride of every good American. But he had
no use for the old-fashioned kind of history, which pretends that all the
bravery is on one side. He did his best to get at the truth, and he knew
that the English and Canadians had fought bravely and well, and so he
said just that. Where our troops or our ships failed it was not through
lack of courage, but because they were badly led, and what was worse,
since it was so unnecessary, because the Government at Washington
had lost the battle in advance by neglecting to prepare.
Before he was twenty-four, Roosevelt was so well-informed in the

history of this period that he was later asked to write the chapter
dealing with the War of 1812 in a history of the British Navy.
At his graduation from Harvard he stood twenty-second in a class of
one hundred and seventy. This caused him to be elected to the Phi Beta
Kappa, the society of scholars. Before he graduated he became engaged
to be married to Miss Alice Lee of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
He told his friend, Mr. Thayer, what he was going to do after
graduation.
"I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York
City," he said. And he added:
"I don't know exactly how."

CHAPTER III
IN POLITICS
When he graduated from college Roosevelt was no longer in poor
health. His boxing and exercise in the gymnasium, and still more his
outdoor expeditions, and hunting trips in Maine, had made a well man
of him. He was yet to achieve strength and muscle, and his life in the
West was to give him the chance to do that.
His father died while he was in college and he was left, not rich, but so
well off that he might have lived merely amusing himself. He might
have spent his days in playing polo, hunting and collecting specimens
of animals. What he did during his life, in adding to men's knowledge
of the habits of animals, would have gained him an honorable place in
the history of American science, if he had done nothing else. So with
his writing of books. He earned the respect of literary men, and left a
longer list of books to his credit than do most authors, and on a greater
variety of subjects. But he was to do other and still more important
work than either of these things.

He believed in and quoted from one of the noblest poems