The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (21 page)

Near the end of his life, Roosevelt presented his wilderness days in the North Woods as the apogee of his happiness during adolescence. He became the adventitious expert on Maine. In a nostalgic essay, “My Debt to Maine,” published as part of a volume celebrating the Pine Tree State’s centennial in 1919, Colonel Roosevelt (as his byline read in
Maine, My State
) noted that camping out in the North Woods had been transformative for him. His memories ran deep: the soft-needled branches; collecting kindling; shoveling snow; building a rainproof bonfire; stirring up embers with a walking stick; the smell of drifting woodsmoke; the cry of a hawk, loud and clear; roasting grouse, venison, or trout on a spit; concocting new dishes like muskrat and fish-duck (merganser) stew; and ladling out Boston baked beans for breakfast. But more than anything else, those shrill high-wind whistles, all those aromas of pine and hemlock and spruce, never faded away.

Maine, to Roosevelt, was where he first found his authentic self. Men acquired the skills of survival early, in such a rugged terrain, if they wanted to succeed in life. In the North Woods, unlike official Washington or Harvard, there was no gyp game. Nor was Maine benevolent or controllable. Death by avalanche, death by frostbite, death by becoming lost—these were hazards men like Sewall and Dow had learned to overcome. The entire state had a stimulating effect on Roosevelt, almost as if it made him drunk. “I owe a personal debt to Maine because of my association with certain staunch friends in Aroostook County,” he wrote, “an association that helped and benefited me throughout my life in more ways than one.”
⁷⁵

I

T
he Harvard Athletic Association was sponsoring its spring boxing competition and twenty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt had entered in the lightweight division. The rounds were all held on campus, at the old gymnasium near Memorial Hall. Although once denounced as immoral because of its brutality, boxing in 1879 had become chic, particularly in the Boston area, where the Irish-American John L. Sullivan had brazenly challenged anyone with enough guts to fight him for a $500 wager. Even the
New York Times
and
Harper’s Weekly
were pro-boxing, asserting that the sport enhanced physical fitness and manliness. Sullivan was nicknamed the Boston Strongboy; Roosevelt deserved a more Ivy League moniker like the Cambridge Clerk or the Harvard Horticulturist. Even though Roosevelt had been training for months, nobody imagined he’d actually be in a twenty-four-foot ring fighting for a college championship trophy.

That was precisely what happened on March 22, 1879. Besides undergoing intensive training Roosevelt had carefully studied the official Queensberry rules, determined not to lose by default owing to a technical infraction or an illegal maneuver. Grueling as it sounds, the Harvard Athletic Association organized the competition by a process of elimination. You boxed not just one match but two or three in the same day. With the gymnasium packed, his friends and classmates cheering him on, the 130-pound Roosevelt, to the shock of most present, with a couple of good right punches, actually beat a senior, W. W. Coolidge of the class of 1879, in his first square-off. It was considered something of an upset. According to the
Harvard Advocate
, Roosevelt “displayed more coolness and skill than his opponent.” Meanwhile, C. S. Hanks of the class of 1879 had defeated his opponent in his semifinal round. Therefore, the championship fight that afternoon would be Roosevelt versus Hanks.
¹

Sitting on a floor seat watching the fisticuffs was Owen Wister, an aristocratic Pennsylvanian who would go on to write the classic western novel
The Virginian
. Two years behind Roosevelt at Harvard, Wister was
something of a class clown, famously contributing both the music and the libretto for the Hasty Pudding Club’s comic opera
Dido and Aeneas
. As a product of boarding schools in New England and Switzerland, Wister had become extremely erudite by the time he arrived in Cambridge. Just as Roosevelt was an accomplished ornithologist of sorts upon entering Harvard, the easy-tempered Wister had composed songs he thought rivaled the worst of Stephen Foster, which was at least a starting place in show biz. Like Roosevelt, Wister suffered from bad health. Throughout his life he had nervous breakdowns, migraine headaches, sudden tremors, and even prolonged hallucinations; and—again as with Roosevelt—only Mother Nature, it seemed, brought him relief from his physical anguish.
²

A shrewd judge of character, Wister studied Roosevelt with puzzlement that afternoon in the old gymnasium, figuring he was going to get his block knocked off by Hanks. As a freshman Wister knew Roosevelt only by reputation but was pulling for him as the well-muscled underdog of the bout. According to the
Advocate
, it was a “spirited contest,” but Hanks got the “best of his opponent” by his impressive “quickness and power of endurance.” Yet something occurred that afternoon that Wister never forgot, and years later he showcased it as the prized anecdote of his memoir
Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
. According to Wister, amazingly, near defeat, Roosevelt, by virtue of his good sportsmanship, became the real winner of the Harvard bout. As Wister put it, the packed crowd witnessed that “prophetic flash of the Roosevelt that was to come.”

At one point during the bout, in accordance with the Queensberry rules, the referee called time-out, thereby ending a round. However, in the frenzy of the fight, Hanks didn’t hear the referee’s intervention, and just as Roosevelt relinquished his guard, Hanks smashed him in the face. Blood spurted everywhere. The audience gasped; boos and hisses filled the gym. What a cheap shot! But Roosevelt held a boxing glove up in a theatrical gesture, demanding silence from the crowd. “It’s all right,” he reassured the crowd. “He didn’t hear him.”
³

As Wister recounted in his memoir, he watched mesmerized as the junior walked over to Hanks with extended hand, simply refusing to be victimized. (Some scholars, however, doubt the veracity of Wister’s story, feeling that the novelist had probably confabulated the bloody-champ aspect of the spectacle.
⁴
) With his fine eye for nuance, Wister noticed that Roosevelt’s conciliatory gesture combined dash and spirit. “He was his own limelight, and could not help it,” Wister surmised; “a creature charged with such voltage as his, became the central presence at once, whether he stepped on a platform or entered a room.”
⁵
One can only
imagine how proud Alice Lee must have felt learning that her Theodore won over the crowd’s heart by losing the boxing match with such dignity. (Wister intimated that Lee was among the spectators, but it seems unlikely.)

Although Roosevelt kept collecting a multitude of birds, as 1879 turned to 1880 he toyed with the idea of a career in politics for the first time. Business or law brought home income; ornithology clearly didn’t. Also, he was itching to be a public servant for the state of New York; politics ran deep in the family gene pool. Upon his engagement to Alice Lee in February, in fact, he wrote Minot a very telling letter about his future plans. “I have made everything subordinate to winning her,” he wrote, “so you can perhaps understand a change in my ideas as regards to science.” Roosevelt’s main goal in life, as he put it, was to “keep up” the family name.
⁶
He and Alice would marry in October. “Natural History was to remain a genuine avocation,” his biographer Carleton Putnam rightly noted in
Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years
, “but it never loomed again as a feasible career.”
⁷

By Roosevelt’s senior year at Harvard his classmates respected him for more than just losing boxing bouts and misplacing turtles at 16 Winthrop with a patrician air. Everywhere he walked on campus (or took his dogcart, pulled by his favorite horse, Lightfoot) he was met with “uproarious cordiality.” The combination of having his own horse plus his doggedness and vitality had made Roosevelt legendary by his junior and senior years. Everybody had to admit that Roosevelt was sui generis, that he wore no man’s collar. Although President Eliot later scoffed that Roosevelt took “soft courses” during his last years, keeping a “very light schedule,” he nevertheless received A’s and B’s. Reading over his journal for the senior year 1879–1880 makes it clear that Roosevelt’s worst problem was insomnia. Unable to turn off his mind, he’d spend “night after night” walking by himself in the Cambridge woods near Fresh Pond, sometimes never catching even a couple of hours of shut-eye.
⁸
It appears that Roosevelt was afflicted with some kind of mania.

In Kay Redfield Jamison’s 2004 book about manic depression,
Exuberance
, Roosevelt is exhibit A for this condition. His set of symptoms—propulsive behavior, deep grief, chronic insomnia, and an all-around hyperactive disposition—demonstrate both the manic and the depressive phases of bipolar disorder. Too often, Dr. Jamison argued, people mistakenly thought manic depression meant despondence and withdrawal from human endeavors. Usually it does. But those afflicted with exuberance, she argued, go in the opposite direction; behaving as relentless human
blowtorches they’re unable to turn down their own flame. Diagnosing Roosevelt’s medical condition more than eighty years after his death, Jamison claimed that the highs of the exuberance phase brought many wonderful gifts; but, she warned, there was also a sharp-edged downside. Living by throwing up skyrockets—as P. T. Barnum once put it—wore one down to nothing. No sleep, for example, wasn’t good for the heart or other vital organs. Only by exhausting oneself in physical activity—like climbing Mount Katahdin or ice-skating on the Charles River in a winter storm—could an exuberant manic like Roosevelt turn himself off.
⁹

Essentially, Roosevelt’s exuberance syndrome was both a source of power and a sometimes curse. The poet Robert Lowell once described manics like T.R. as harboring “pathological enthusiasm;”
¹⁰
Jamison tended to agree. What Jamison admired about Roosevelt, however, was that he channeled his manic-depressive energies in constructive ways, taking what could have been a terrible handicap and using it as an asset. A friend of Roosevelt once colorfully explained T.R.’s ceaseless zest as the “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings,” a description Roosevelt wouldn’t have minded.
¹¹
Constantly calling life “The Great Adventure,” Roosevelt derived “literally delirious joy” from Christmas, never wanting the holiday season to end. The more candles lit and carols sung, the happier he was.
¹²

Unfortunately, even though Roosevelt felt fit as a fiddle operating on intermittent sleep, his exultancy was taking a physical toll. On March 26, 1880, Roosevelt went to see Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant, the university physician. On the preexamination form, Roosevelt noted that asthma had bothered him since childhood. As of late, however, he was feeling well and expected a clean bill of health. After thoroughly examining Roosevelt from head to toe, however, Dr. Sargeant pulled his patient aside with troublesome news. There was something wrong with Roosevelt’s heart—it was terribly weak. If he kept exerting himself, he would die young. Sternly Dr. Sargeant told Roosevelt to cease all activity that would make his heart rate go up. Mountaineering, twenty-mile hikes, and even climbing staircases would have to stop. All exertion was unhealthy.

Such a bleak diagnosis didn’t go over well with Roosevelt. He didn’t want to live gently. If he had only a few seasons left to breathe, so be it. Instead of pampering himself or living like a baby he would fight with both fists against the tide of gloomy fatalism. Going back to being a weakling, a runt in the litter of life, was unacceptable to him. Dismissing Dr. Sargeant’s verdict out of hand, Roosevelt started planning a six-week hunting trip with his younger brother, Elliott, to the Midwest heartland. They would
start from Chicago, go northwest to Iowa, and eventually wind up on the western edge of Minnesota. Inspired by an earful of Elliott’s Texas bird-hunting triumphs in Galveston and the Big Thicket, eager to learn more about grouse and prairie chickens, Theodore read Coues’s pioneering
Birds of the Colorado
in preparation.

Later in life, as a politician, Roosevelt downplayed his Harvard years, recognizing them as a liability in a country more impressed with log cabins and cowboy mythology. Furthermore, only one in every 5,000 Americans graduated from college in 1880; merely receiving a diploma meant that one was part of an elite.
¹³
Roosevelt’s diaries, however, show that he was elated at finishing twenty-first in a class of 177.
¹⁴
And the Phi Beta Kappa graduate had even managed to publish two ornithology chapbooks, a thesis on women’s rights, and wrote chapters of
The Naval War of 1812
. “I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he recorded in his diary. “I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had half a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation; and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together—I have won the sweetest girl for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.”
¹⁵

After dutifully following all the rituals on commencement day—spending time, for example, with Alice Lee’s family in Chestnut Hill—Roosevelt packed up the contents of Winthrop Street and shipped them to the Fifty-Seventh Street house in New York. His plan was to first spend a few weeks in Oyster Bay and then head to the blue-green Maine coast to sun, sail, and explore. Instead of climbing Mount Katahdin, he would enjoy the tumble of the surf on Mount Desert Island, the second-largest island on the Eastern Seaboard. Surrounding the main island were numerous tiny shore islands, each with marine enchantment all its own. After some days with friends Alice would join him.

Partly because Roosevelt was writing
The Naval War of 1812
—an act of genuine hubris for a twenty-two-year-old—he wanted proximity to the boundless Atlantic Ocean to study the cold, buffeting waters around Mount Desert Island.
*
Two of Roosevelt’s favorite painters of the Hudson
River school, Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, had summered around the Maine island in the 1850s. Recognizing the island as one of God’s great galleries, Church had both painted and sketched landscapes of the indented shoreline with great skill. Two of his faithful renderings—
Fog of Mount Desert
and
Newport Mountain
—were beloved by locals for generations. As for Cole, he sketched sixteen natural sites on Mount Desert Island ranging from bold headlands to strands of northern white cedar, red spruce, and black spruce. A particular emphasis was given to blasted pine standing alone on rocky cliffs and to the gorgeous islets that dot Frenchman Bay.
¹⁶

Roosevelt went to Mount Desert Island with his friends Dick Saltonstall and Jack Tebbetts. They lodged four miles from Bar Harbor near Schooner Head, a huge jagged rock very near the Atlantic Ocean. The trio called the bungalow where they slept “bachelors’ hall.” Right outside their door was the stony beach where crab skeletons, seaweed tangles, and broken shell bits were washed ashore. An immediate favorite locale for Roosevelt was Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard, and the first place in the United States where you could see the sunrise. Roosevelt also rode horseback over stone bridges and hunted for sea urchins among the shell heaps on Fernald’s Point. He was lulled by the murmuring ocean; he picked baskets of cranberries, collected shellfish in the tidal marsh, and gathered wild berries; and when Alice, unchaperoned, arrived, strolled “with my darling in the woods and on the rocky shores.”