however, that in those chapters where he adhered
to what Brander Matthews called the method of
"improvisation" he recorded recollections of a
peculiar charm, both from a personal and a literary
point of view.

It is hard to say whether that portion of his
literary work which was dictated or that which
was written with his own hand was done with the
greater care. The danger of dictation always is
that one is apt to be verbose, but all his dictated
work he always went over very carefully — after
it was typed — correcting, deleting, and interlining
with his pen. This was true even of his letters.
To the latter he often added postscripts in his
own hand which not infrequently proved to be
the flavouring kernel of the entire letter.



180 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

As an illustration of the variety of Roosevelt's
work and of the appeal which he made to his fellows,
it may be recorded that Brander Matthews in-
timates that Roosevelt ought to have chosen the
writing of history as his profession for "his ulti-
mate reputation as a man of letters will most
securely rest upon his stern labours as a historian";
while Father Zahm thinks that a great scientist
was lost when he entered upon a political career.
Father Zahm says :

Those who have read any of the Colonel's books bearing
on natural history — especially his recent works: "Life His-
tories of African Game Animals" and "Through the Brazilian
Wilderness" — know what a keen and trained observer he was,
and how not even the most trifling peculiarities of form and
colour escaped his quick and practised eye. But the general
reader is not aware that Colonel Roosevelt's first love was
natural history and not politics, and that it was only an un-
toward combination of circumstances that prevented him from
embracing the career of a naturalist.

I am not sure but that Father Zahm has the
weight of evidence for his claim. It does not seem
to me that Roosevelt's historical essays, such as
those which form the basis of his addresses at the
University of Berlin and Oxford, are comparable
in style or charm, or even in originality, with some
of his more human and spontaneous writing. I
do not know where, for example, one can find a



A MAN OF LETTERS 181

more simple and yet a more vivid picture of sunset
on the desert than is found in the account he wrote,
in three articles, of a western trip which he took
in 1913. His articles were written for the Outlook
and, so far as I know, have not been republished.
The sunset passage is as follows:

During the afternoon we shogged steadily across the plain.
At one place, far off to one side, we saw a band of buffalo,
and between them and us a herd of wild donkeys. Otherwise
the only living things were snakes and lizards. On the other
side of the plain, two or three miles from a high wall of ver-
milion cliffs, we stopped for the night at a little stone rest-
house, built as a station by a cow outfit. Here there were big
corrals, and a pool of water piped down by the cowmen from
a spring many miles distant. On the sand grew the usual
desert plants, and on some of the ridges a sparse growth of
grass, sufficient for the night feed of the hardy horses. The
little stone house and the corrals stood out, bare and desolate,
on the empty plain.

Soon after we reached there a sand-storm rose and blew so
violently that we took refuge inside the house. Then the
wind died down; and as the sun sank toward the horizon we
sauntered off through the hot, still evening. There were
many sidewinder rattlesnakes. We killed several of the gray,
flat-headed, venomous things; as we slept on the ground, we
were glad to kill as many as possible. Except this baleful
life there was little save the sand and the harsh, scanty vege-
tation.

Across the lonely wastes the sun went down. The sharply
channelled cliffs turned crimson in the dying light; all the
heavens flamed ruby red, and faded to a hundred dim hues
of opal, beryl, and amber, pale turquoise, and delicate emer-
ald; and then night fell and darkness shrouded the desert.



i82 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

His "Winning of The West," as Brander Mat-
thews says, is probably "an abiding contribution
to American historical literature." On the political
side, however, I think his "Naval War of 1812"
and his "Life of Gouverneur Morris" ought not
to be — and will not be — forgotten. He himself
had, for some reason, a peculiar interest in a
volume: "Hero Tales from American History"
which he wrote in collaboration with Henry Cabot
Lodge. In 1916 I was preparing a list, for a cor-
respondent, of books on American history which
could be read by a young layman with the kind of
interest which such readers take in narrative rather
than in technical studies. I wrote to Roosevelt
telling him what I was doing and saying that I
had put in Rhodes's "Oxford Lectures on the Civil
War" (a great favourite of mine) and his own
"Naval War of 1812." In reply he said:

I would certainly put in Rhodes' Oxford Lectures on the
Civil War. If you want anything from me, don't take the
"War of 1 81 2," but take "Hero Tales from American His-
tory," which Lodge and I wrote together.

The chapter in the "Hero Tales" on the Death
of Stonewall Jackson affords a good example of
Roosevelt's strong admiration for the type of man
who is an upright and righteous and yet hard-
fighting soldier.



A MAN OF LETTERS 183

He was a voracious and omnivorous reader.
It is impossible to estimate the amount of Roose-
velt's reading but it must have been phenomenally
large for he read all sorts of books, modern and
ancient, at all sorts of times and with almost un-
believable rapidity. In the life of Robert Houdin,
the famous French conjuror and magician of the
early nineteenth century it is related that he had the
gift, developed and augmented by constant practice,
of being able to pass through an elaborately fur-
nished room and then to describe in minute detail
the various articles of furniture and ornament
which it contained. His eye received and his mind
grasped in a moment or two impressions which it
would take the ordinary man half an hour to
tabulate.

Roosevelt had this gift in reading. The child
laboriously reads syllable by syllable or word by
word; the practised adult reads line by line; Roose-
velt read almost page by page and yet remembered
what he read. Mr. Neil, United States Commis-
sioner of Labour, during Roosevelt's administra-
tion once described to me how he took a report to
the President on which he had spent a laborious
month of preparation. It consisted of a number
of typewritten pages. Roosevelt took the report,
fixed his eyes upon it — or rather his eye, for one



\



i8 4 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

had been so damaged in boxing that for many
years he saw only dimly with it — turned over the
sheets about as steadily and rapidly as an old-
fashioned Grandfather's clock ticks, finished the
document and handed it back to the Commissioner
with comments and suggestions so fresh and perti-
nent that it was quite clear that he had not only
read the words of the report but had clearly under-
stood its scope and significance. "It had taken
him less than thirty minutes/' said Mr. Neil, "to
understand, and to improve by adding new facts
and arguments, the treatment of a subject to which
I had devoted hours of study."

It was not only because he read with extraor-
dinary speed but because he used spare minutes
for reading that his range was so wide.

He read while waiting for trains and for people
to keep appointments and when driving in his auto-
mobile to the city. I have seen him pick up a
book surrounded by a roomful of talking and laugh-
ing friends and in a moment become so absorbed
in it that he had no more knowledge of what was
going on about him than if he had been in a cloister
cell. During the railway journey from Khartum
to Cairo on the tour of 1910, described more fully
in a later chapter, a special dinner was to be served
one evening in the private saloon dining car placed



A MAN OF LETTERS 185

at Roosevelt's disposal by the Governor-General
of the Sudan. This dinner was to be attended by
some important officials and other guests, who had
taken the train at one of the stations we 1 passed
through and were to leave it at another specified
stopping-place. It was therefore essential that the
company should assemble at the table promptly,
but when dinner was announced Mr. Roosevelt was
nowhere to be found. I searched the train for
him and finally discovered him in one of the white
enamelled lavatories with its door half open where,
standing under an electric light, he was busily
engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the
angle of the two walls against the swaying motion
of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings.
The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky's
"History of Rationalism in Europe. ,, He had
chosen this peculiar reading room both because
the white enamel reflected a brilliant light and he
was pretty sure of uninterrupted quiet. This was
typical of the way in which he seized spare mo-
ments for the information or entertainment that
books afford.

The fact, however, that it was Lecky, instead of
Mark Twain or O. Henry, was purely fortuitous,
for he was no pedant. He liked novels and stories
of adventure and books of humour, but he wanted



1 86 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

them to be written by men of intelligence and skil-
ful workmanship. Books of travel and explora-
tion especially appealed to him although he was not
interested, as he once told me, in mere biography.
At the Mohammedan University in Cairo which
we visited, an ancient and medieval seat of learn-
ing, established in a spacious building, where the
chief subject of study appeared to be the Koran
taught to classes of boys and men squatting upon
their haunches on the floor in Oriental fashion,
Roosevelt was especially interested in the library.
The language of the University was Arabic, but
we had with us a Syrian interpreter who, having
been educated at the American College at Beirut,
spoke English fluently. Roosevelt was surrounded
by an interested group of Mohammedan teachers
and officials, both young and old. He had not
been long in this library of ancient literature when
he asked through the interpreter if they had in
their collection the travels of Ibn Batuta. When
that name was mentioned there was a great light-
ing up of faces and a great scurrying of willing
messengers, who presently came back with a vol-
ume printed in Arabic which Roosevelt took in his
hands with almost devout interest. "Read that,"
said he to the interpreter, pointing to the first page,
which the interpreter proceeded to do, with a dozen



A MAN OF LETTERS 187

heads bent over the hieroglyphics. "Yes," said
Roosevelt, as the reading finished, "that's it. Now
doesn't he say so-and-so further on?" Where-
upon the interpreter turned over the pages and,
sure enough, Ibn did say so-and-so at the beginning
of the next chapter, to the delighted surprise of the
Arab group surrounding us who were literally over-
joyed to find that the famous visitor from the West
knew one of their great authors. When we went
out Roosevelt explained to me that Ibn Batuta
was the Arabian Marco Polo who made a voyage
around Africa in the fourteenth century and left
an account of his great adventure in the volume
we had just been looking at. Roosevelt had read
it many years before in a French translation and
had remembered it with such accuracy that he
could point out a specific passage not, of course, in
the Arabic text, but from the context as translated
by the interpreter.

He had a human interest in universities although
he was not in the slightest degree academic, in
spite of the fact that he had received as many
academic honours as any man of his time, including
the greatest one that can be conferred upon a
modern — that of being created a D. C. L. by
Oxford. But when universities did things that
seemed to him contrary to social morals he had little



1 88 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

use for them. He once wrote me a letter of outraged

protest when Columbia and Yale had paid marked

distinction to two American journalists who, he

thought, had exercised a sinister influence upon

American life. But after he had let off his steam

of vigorous criticism, he cheered himself, as he

often did, by a quizzical comment: "Universities

are middling queer creatures, aren't they!" was

his conclusion of the matter.

Unless the literature was the fiction of adventure

or of humour Roosevelt chiefly got either social

or industrial suggestions and inspirations out of his

reading. This aspect of his work as a man of

letters is shown in a communication I received from

him while he was in Africa in 1909-1910. It was

one of the letters written in his own hand with

indelible pencil.

Naivasha, October 21st.
If President Eliot's "List of Best Books" is complete, will
you send it to me? If I am able I'd like to write something
on it; I don't believe in a list of " 100" or "25 " "best" books,
because there are many thousands which may be "best" ac-
cording to the country, the time, the condition, the reader;
but I do believe in "a" 25 to 100 or any other number of
"good" books, each such list being merely complementary
to and not a substitute for many other similar lists. The
books in my pigskin library on this hunt are good; they are
no better than any one of the totally different sets I took on
each of my last three hunting trips, except that I have a
longer list for the longer trip.



A MAN OF LETTERS 189

I liked Kennan's article on what I said about Tolstoi — I
like everything that he writes! — and am in fundamental
agreement with what he says, especially in his unsparing
condemnation of the cruel, ruthless, bureaucratic tyranny
under which Russia lies in festering misery. But there are
one or two points on which I should like to give reasons for
what I said; if you care to you can send this to him.

First as to Tolstoi's immorality. Have you ever read his
" Kreutzer Sonata" (if that's the way to spell it) ? I read it,
or rather as much of it as was necessary to a pathological
diagnosis. The man who wrote that was a sexual and a
moral pervert. It is as unhealthy a book, as vicious in its
teaching to the young, as Elinor Glyn's "Three Weeks" or
any other piece of pornographic literature — for I need hardly
say that the worst pornographic literature is that which, with
conscious or only half-conscious hypocrisy, calls itself by
some other name; some of the very vilest of such books are
often written under the pretense of being in the interests of
social or hygienic reform. In your father's delightful Vesper
Sermons was one the other day on the Song of Solomon,
which dealt with the love of married lovers in a spirit which
I believe to be as true as it is lofty. I think that the love of
the really happy husband and wife — not purged of passion,
but with passion heatened to a white heat of intensity and
purity and tenderness and consideration, and with many
another feeling added thereto — is the loftiest and most ennob-
ling influence thatcomes intothe life of anymanorwoman,even
loftier and more ennobling than wise and tender love for chil-
dren. The cheapest, most degrading, and most repulsive cy-
nicism is that which laughs at, or describes as degraded, this
relation. Now the " Kreutzer Sonata" has, as its theme, that
this relation is bestial and repellent, and its whole purpose is to
paint the love of husband and wife as loving exactly the same
as the squalid and loathsome intimacy between a rake and a
prostitute. When that book appeared it seemed to me to re-
veal, as by a flash, the strange hidden perversion of morals



190 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

which has made Tolstoi in his professedly moral writings, as
distinguished from his really far more moral novels, inveigh
against all the relations of man and woman as if the highest
and most ennobling and the lowest and most depraved stood
on the same plane. No greater wrong can be done humanity
than to inculcate such doctrine; at its best it makes the wife
feel that she ought to regard herself as on a par with a pros-
titute; at its worst it enables the "man swine" to say that,
after all, he is not a bit worse than his most upright neighbour.
How can there be more revolting and monstrous teaching?

Now about hypocrisy. If there is one thing upon which
we should insist in writer and talker, but above all in pro-
fessed prophet and reformer, it is that he shall make his words
measurably good (it is not in human nature completely to
realize an ideal) by his deeds. I believe that the root-vice
in our political life is the demand by part of the public that a
candidate shall make impossible promises, and the grin of
cynical amusement and contempt with which another portion
of the public regards his breaking even the promises he could
keep; and one attitude is as bad as the other. As it is with
politicians, so it is with philosophers. I think Rousseau did
much good by some of the principles he advocated; and more
harm because he taught people by his actions to regard the
enunciation of lofty aspirations as a substitute for lofty deeds
and indeed as an atonement for a life that gave the lie to the
aspirations. Mr. Kennan quotes Tolstoi's words as proofs
of repentance. Repentance must be shown by deeds, not
words. One lapse is quite pardonable; but persistence in
doing one thing while preaching another is not pardonable.
It seems to me that Tolstoi is one of those men, by no means
uncommon, of perverted moral type who at bottom consider
the luxury of frantic repentance — and the luxury of profess-
ing adherence to an impossible and undesirable ideal — as full
atonement for, and as really permitting, persistence in a line
of conduct which gives the lie to their professions. Tolstoi
preaching against those relations of man and woman, without



A MAN OF LETTERS 191

which there would either be no humanity, or a humanity
perpetuated by those of its members who stand closest to
beasts, is a contemptible figure in my eyes; but he is made
more contemptible when we know that all the time he is hav-
ing sons and daughters.

I saw X (once a man of high and fine promise) ruined,

and rendered a worse than worthless citizen, by falling under

Tolstoi's baleful influence; and Y has, because of the same

influence, sunk from being a most useful citizen to the posi-
tion of a well-meaning agitator who latterly has done rather
more harm than good, by sheer folly, committed in the name
of philanthropy.

About the Douma. I agree absolutely with Kennan as
to the cause of the Douma's inefficiency. But I think harm
comes to the cause of morality and reform in Russia if, be-
cause of our sympathy with its advocates, and our abhor-
rence of what it seeks to overthrow, we are betrayed into
acquiescence in either wickedness or folly. Bryan, for in-
stance, favours a section of the Douma which, if its doctrines
were put into practice, would within a year make men hail
any tyranny or despotism as a relief from a system in which
folly raised to the Ath power would inevitably produce a
grade of wickedness proportionately high. Think of the
Douma passing a proposed law to do away with capital pun-
ishment and at the same time refusing to pass a resolution
condemning the murder of officials! We all warmly sym-
pathize with the overthrow of the Ancien Regime in France;
but when the so-called friends of liberty brought about the
Red Terror they did France a wrong so hideous that the
nation has not yet wrought out its atonement. There!
You'll never want to hear from me again.

Does not this comment on Russia, written nearly
ten years ago, take on the aspect of prophecy in the
light of the present results of Russian Bolshevism?



192 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I find that naturally I come back to the political
and social aspect of Roosevelt's work as a man of
letters. In October, 191 2, he published a short
paper in the Outlook entitled "How I Became a
Progressive." I print it here because it has not
been dug out of the pages of that periodical by
anybody else so far as I know and it deserves a
permanent form both as an autobiographical docu-
ment and as a specimen of Roosevelt's simple,
direct, and popular style.



I suppose I had a natural tendency to become a Progres-
sive, anyhow. That is, I was naturally a democrat, in be-
lieving in fair play for everybody. But I grew toward my
present position, not so much as the result of study in the
library or the reading of books — although I have been very
much helped by such study and by such reading — as by
actually living and working with men under many different
conditions and seeing their needs from many different points
of view.

The first set of our people with whom I associated so in-
timately as to get on thoroughly sympathetic terms with
them were cow-punchers, then on the ranges in the West.
I was so impressed with them that in doing them justice I
did injustice to equally good citizens elsewhere whom I did
not know; and it was a number of years before I grew to
understand — first by association with railway men, then with
farmers, then with mechanics, and so on — that the things
that I specially liked about my cow-puncher friends were,
after all, to be found fundamentally in railway men, in
farmers, in blacksmiths, carpenters — in fact, generally among
my fellow American citizens.



A MAN OF LETTERS 193

Before I began to go with the cow-punchers, I had already,
as the result of experience in the Legislature at Albany,
begun rather timidly to strive for social and industrial justice.
But at that time my attitude was that of giving justice from
above. It was the experience on the range that first taught
me to try to get justice for all of us by working on the same
level with the rest of my fellow citizens.

It was the conviction that there was much social and in-
dustrial injustice and the effort to secure social and industrial
justice that first led me to taking so keen an interest in popu-
lar rule.

For years I accepted the theory, as most of the rest of us
then accepted it, that we already had popular government;
that this was a government by the people. I believed the
power of the boss was due only to the indifference and short-
sightedness of the average decent citizen. Gradually it
came over me that while this was half the truth, it was only
half the truth, and that while the boss owed part of his power
to the fact that the average man did not do his duty, yet that
there was the further fact to be considered, that for the
average man it had already been made very difficult instead
of very easy for him to do his duty. I grew to feel a keen
interest in the machinery for getting adequate and genuine
popular rule, chiefly because I found that we could not get
social and industrial justice without popular rule, and that
it was immensely easier to get such popular rule by the means
of machinery of the type of direct nominations at primaries,
the short ballot, the initiative, referendum, and the like.

I usually found that my interest in any given side of a
question of justice was aroused by some concrete case. It
was the examination I made into the miseries attendant
upon the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses that first
opened my eyes to the need of legislation on such subjects.
My friends come from many walks of life. The need for a
workmen's compensation act was driven home to me by my
knowing a brakeman who had lost his legs in an accident,



i 94 IMPRESSIONS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

and whose family was thereby at once reduced from self-
respecting comfort to conditions that at one time became
very dreadful. Of course, after coming across various con-
crete instances of this kind, I would begin to read up on the
subject, and then I would get in touch with social workers
and others who were experts and could acquaint me with
what was vital in the matter. Looking back, it seems to me
that I made my greatest strides forward while I was Police
Commissioner, and this largely through my intimacy with
Jacob Riis, for he opened all kinds of windows into the matter
for me.

The Conservation movement I approached from slightly
different lines. I have always been fond of history and of
science, and what has occurred to Spain, to Palestine, to
China, and to North Africa from the destruction of natural