Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate BiographyThayer, William Roscoe
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography
Thayer, William Roscoe
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
I think that all of us will agree with Mr. Washburn, who adds
another story of the same purport, and told by Roosevelt himself.
Another old comrade wrote him from jail in Arizona: "Dear
Colonel: I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not
intend to hit the lady; I was shooting at my wife." Roosevelt had
large charity for sinners of this type, but he would not tolerate
deceit or lying. Thus, when a Congressman made charges to him
against one of the Wild Western appointees whom he accused of
drinking and of gambling, the President remarked that he had to
take into consideration the moral standards of the section, where
a man who gambled or who drank was not necessarily an evil
person. Then the Congressman pressed his charges and said that
the fellow had been in prison for a crime a good many years
before. This roused Roosevelt, who said, "He never told me about
that," and he immediately telegraphed the accused for an
explanation. The man replied that the charge was true, whereupon
the President at once dismissed him, not for gambling or for
drinking, but for trying to hide the fact that he had once been
in jail.
In these days of upheaval, when the most ancient institutions and
laws are put in question, and anarchists and Bolshevists, blind
like Samson, wish to throw down the very pillars on which
Civilization rests, the Family, the fundamental element of
civilized life, is also violently attacked. All the more
precious, therefore, will Theodore Roosevelt's example be, as an
upholder of the Family. He showed how essential it is for the
development of the individual and as a pattern for Society. Only
through the Family can come the deepest joys of life and can the
most intimate duties be transmuted into joys. As son, as husband,
as father, as brother, he fulfilled the ideals of each of those
relations, and, so strong was his family affection, that, while
still a comparatively young man, he drew to him as a patriarch
might, not only his own children, but his kindred in many
degrees. With utter truth he wrote, "I have had the happiest home
life of any man I have ever known." And that, as we who were his
friends understood, was to him the highest and dearest prize
which life could bestow.
CHAPTER XVIII. Hits And Misses
In this sketch I do not attempt to follow chronological order,
except in so far as this is necessary to make clear the
connection between lines of policy, or to define the structural
growth of character. But in Roosevelt's life, as in the lives of
all of us, many events, sometimes important events, occurred and
had much notice at the moment and then faded away and left no
lasting mark. Let us take up a few of these which reveal the
President from different angles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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