WILDNESS

ON A SUNDAY IN THE LATE 1870S, A TEENAGER SPORTING A black eye sheepishly joined his Sunday school class at Christ Church in Boston. As he entered the room, the other students in the class whispered to each other and wondered what their teacher would do when he saw the spreading bruise. When he arrived moments later, the teacher saw what had happened and knew better than to add to the young man’s humiliation. Instead, he casually asked about the black eye. The boy explained that a bully much bigger than he was had been pinching his sister. Despite repeated requests, the bully refused to stop. Finally, the smaller boy knew he had to come to his sister’s defense and he soon found himself in a fight. Thus the black eye.

The students watched wide-eyed. In upper-class Boston, fighting wasn’t condoned. The sons of the elite did not brawl, particularly sons of families that attended Christ Church, which sat a short distance from prestigious Harvard University. Surely the teacher would chastise the young man and perhaps ban him from the class.

The students were stunned to hear the teacher tell the young man he had done the right thing. Sometimes violence served righteous ends and defending a sister’s honor certainly qualified. After further discussion, the teacher gave the boy a dollar and commended his valor to the class.

When members of the church’s board heard of this, they were incensed. A teacher at Christ Church encouraging one of its boys to fight in the streets like a vagrant? No. The board had to put a stop to this. A vote was called and the teacher was told that he had gone too far. He was fired. The board asked him not to return.

The teacher left and returned to his studies at Harvard. He had no regrets. He had given good counsel. His name was Theodore Roosevelt.

This story is particularly revealing given that Theodore Roosevelt later became an American symbol of “the strenuous life,” one of his favorite phrases. He believed in hard work, in pushing the body, in living on the aggressive, muscular, energetic side of life. He worried that his generation of men were going soft and that the body would rob the mind and then the manhood of the nation. He was right to be concerned.

Yet how had the son of a wealthy New York family come to learn such lessons, to know the value of a life that came more naturally from the frontier than the “sissified” East?

It is true Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 to the fineries of New York’s upper class. His childhood was filled with family tours of Europe, with scurrying servants tending a huge Main Street house—in 1865, young Teddy leaned out a front window to see the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln pass by—and with the services of expensive tutors. All was not well, though. He was tormented by an asthma of a severe, life-deforming kind.

Eminent historian David McCullough described this torment in his biography of Roosevelt entitled Mornings on Horseback.

The attacks, when they come are a shattering, numbing experience—always, no matter how many times it happened before. Nights are made a shambles, sleep is lost, nerves are frayed. Parents become intensely wary of anything that might bring on an attack. They grow increasingly protective, often engulfing in their good intentions. And if, as the years go by, the child shows no improvement, they begin feeling desperate and depleted; they see themselves caught in the grip of something altogether beyond comprehension and their ability to cope. Some mothers “just about go crazy” with worry.23

This was the childhood of Theodore Roosevelt. He was an intelligent child with a fierce curiosity and zeal for investigating life, but his body failed him. Exertions brought on breathlessness, which left him weak and bedridden. Even when he paced himself, he quickly ran out of energy. He seemed doomed to a nearly housebound life. Neighbors whispered that it was good the Roosevelts were rich. This son might never be able to work.

Finally, his father intervened. He had paid for every kind of innovative treatment—sulfur baths and massages and odd therapies involving electricity. Nothing worked. Finally, he relied on the spirit of his boy. In September of 1870, he sat “Thee” down but used his son’s full name rather than the family’s pet name. “Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”24

It was a turning point. What boy wishes to disappoint his father? What boy does not take to heart his father’s solution to a life-altering challenge?

A family member who watched this conversation later said that young Theodore, “the sorry little specimen,” looked up at his father, “threw back his head and declared he would do it.”²⁵

It was just the kind of challenge to better himself against a defining impediment that has made many exceptional men. Theodore devoted himself completely. He lifted weights, hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, and spent hours grunting himself into position on the horizontal bars.

Yet years went by and there was little improvement. His parents tried to hide their disappointment when he proudly showed them a new, adolescent muscle or a move he had mastered on the bars. It was still pitiful, as was his vastly undersized, near emaciated body.

He didn’t stop, though. He lifted and punched and strained for years. Finally, in his freshman year at Harvard, he began catching up. McCullough has written, “The picture that emerges, sketchy as it may be, is of an almost miraculous transformation.” It is incorrect to believe that Roosevelt defeated asthma with exercise. He would suffer asthmatic episodes for the rest of his life. Yet it is not going too far to say that his exercise regimen contributed to the grand reversal of ill health he enjoyed in his freshman year. It is also not going too far to say that those dreary years of exercise, hour after hour each day, made him into a man who knew the power of work, of will over body, and of the need for a man to live a strenuous life. Those years taught Theodore more than he could actually live out, but the day would come when all he had learned would rescue him.

Roosevelt’s public story is well known. He would graduate from Harvard and soon after enter the New York state legislature. A naval history he had started in college, The Naval War of 1812, was published in 1882 and earned him wide acclaim. He was appointed the US civil service commissioner in 1889, resigned to become president of the New York police board, and in 1897 was appointed assistant secretary of the navy by President McKinley. He led a volunteer unit in the Spanish-American War, returned a war hero, and was elected governor of New York. He served in that role until 1900, when he became McKinley’s vice-presidential nominee. The ticket was victorious. On September 6, 1901, McKinley was shot. When the president succumbed to his wounds on September 14, Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States. He was forty-two years old.

His writings, vision, and grand personality would endear him to his generation. His energy and triumphant spirit would also leave an imprint upon his age. Yet none of it would have been possible had he not known how to recover from the worst day of tragedy in his life.

It was February 14, 1884—Valentine’s Day. Theodore was in Albany tending the business of the legislature. His wife, Alice, was pregnant and distracted by plans for their new home on Long Island’s Oyster Bay. Theodore’s mother lived with the young couple as well. She was a comfort, for Alice’s pregnancy had not been smooth and she had been forced to remain in bed for weeks on end. When the child finally came on February 12, all danger seemed to have passed. Everyone was consumed with the beautiful new baby girl who graced their lives.

Theodore was called back to Albany soon after and this is when the trouble began. On the morning of the thirteenth, he received a telegram that the baby was fine and healthy but that the mother was “only fairly well.” Within a few hours, he received word he should return home immediately. When he finally reached home, his distraught brother met him. “There is a curse on this house,” Eliot Roosevelt declared. “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.”26 It was true. Alice was dying of Bright’s disease, a severe renal ailment, and Theodore’s mother, Martha Roosevelt, had fallen ill with what proved to be the final stages of typhoid.

The scene that unfolded was one of the most horrid ever to befall a future president. Both the people he loved most in the world, his mother and his wife, were dying on the same day and in the same house. Roosevelt rushed up and down stairs between the two women for many hours—praying, tending, and simply holding limp bodies in his arms when there was nothing more to do. His mother died shortly after midnight. His wife died the next afternoon. Two days later, Theodore Roosevelt sat in a pew at New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and endured a double funeral. The next day, at the same church, he participated in the baptism of Alice Lee Roosevelt, his new daughter. He would write of these days, “The light has gone out of my life.”27

He was destroyed. Death filled his home. He might have thrown himself into politics as an escape, but his Republican Party had already ceased being his home, its machinations and corruption demoralizing him. His baby daughter held his affection, but she was in need of a woman’s care.

What Roosevelt did at that moment in his life scandalized many in New York society but it completed the process of making him a heroic man. He handed his beloved daughter to his sister, sold nearly everything he had, and moved to the Dakota Territories, where for several years he had been investing in a cattle ranch that overlooked a bend in the Missouri River. He would remain there for three years.

Why did he go? Why such a dramatic move?

The answer seems to be that Roosevelt needed to restore and rebuild and he knew only one way to do it: return to the strenuous and the difficult. Perhaps those hours of lifting weights and balancing on horizontal bars had surfaced forces of soul he needed to summon once again. Perhaps a return to an arduous physical life was the only way he knew to quell the turmoil in his heart. Obviously, he needed space, wilderness, difficult tasks, and looming danger. He knew this was the key to healing. He had experienced this truth in his life before.

After arriving in the Dakotas, Roosevelt did not spend three years in a comfortable chair by the fire with a brandy in one hand and a book in the other. Instead, he became the western hero of his dreams. He herded cattle and broke bucking horses. He stood down grizzlies and fought off desperadoes. On one occasion, he tracked thieves for three days across three hundred miles in subzero temperatures. Once he took the criminals captive, he then traveled another six days and one hundred fifty miles to surrender them to authorities.

And the wildness healed him. He tamed the wilderness around him by way of taming the wilderness of his own soul. He grieved and got through it. He lived in the moment, in the physical, and in intimate connection with nature. It forced him from living entirely in his thoughts to living a rooted, earthy life in which thoughts come only after work is done.

He wrote during these years, and reviewers lauded his work as “masculine, fervid and innovative.”28 Over time, he helped create the literature of the Wild West. He was living what he wrote before he wrote it, though, and this made him authentic, not just as a public man but, more importantly, to himself. It gave him a brand of confidence and insight that marked him the rest of his life.

Roosevelt would return to the East. He would accomplish many things. Never would he forget the Dakota years. Listen to how he later described his memories of this time.

In after years there shall ever come to mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of vast, snow-clad wastes, lying and desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain passes; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness and of the silences that brood in its still depths.²⁹

Look carefully at these words. It is obvious that the land became more than something physical to him. It became an incarnation of his grieving soul. Wastes. Desolate. Melancholy. Brood. This is how Roosevelt experienced the land. It had somehow taken on the form of his inner world. To work the land was to clear the entangled scrub brush of his soul. To break a horse or turn trees into sturdy barns and bunkhouses was to make the raw and wounding into a place a man could peacefully live. This is what happened to Theodore Roosevelt in those essential Dakota years.

The man who would become the twenty-sixth president of the United States endured extreme tragedy and needed an extreme experience to deliver him of his grief. Yet all men need what Roosevelt found—a strenuous physical life, the possibility of harm, challenges to face, enemies to oppose, land to conquer. Our lives push us away from this. We work in cubicles or comfortable vehicles. Technology serves us and keeps us from exertion. We live in an opulent blandness—overfed, overtended, overentertained, and overly preoccupied with ourselves.

But men need aggressive physical lives. They need contest and conquest, strain and struggle. Otherwise, we lose ourselves to softness and effeminacy. It is not much of a surprise that a New Testament word that is translated effeminate from the original Greek actually means “soft through luxury.” It is a warning.

Most of us will not spend three years breaking horses and hunting down thieves in the snow. Nor should we. Still, we can let Theodore Roosevelt’s example remind us that we are not disembodied spirits. We are souls sealed into bodies. We need to work the machinery, be alive in both body and soul.

It will awaken the masculinity in us. It will help us to untangle our inner knots. It will remind us that we are men. Perhaps the women and children in our lives are waiting for this, waiting for us to recover ourselves. This alone would be worth the battle.