Exuberance: The Passion for Life (2 page)

Life for Theodore Roosevelt, said one friend, was the “
unpacking of endless Christmas stockings.” This would have gotten no argument from Roosevelt, a man who well into his fifties delighted in Christmas as an occasion of “
literally delirious joy,” and who believed that the entirety of life was a Great Adventure. The man “
who knows the great enthusiasms,” he held, lays claim to the high triumphs of life.

Born in 1858 into one of New York City’s wealthiest families,
Theodore Roosevelt seems to have burst into the world a full-throated exuberant. For this, he owed a considerable debt to his father. “
I never knew any one who got greater joy out of living than did my father,” he wrote, and the seasons of his childhood, so beholden to his father’s love and enthusiasms, “
went by in a round of uninterrupted and enthralling pleasures.” From his earliest days he exulted in life. At the age of ten, he wrote to his mother with breathless enthusiasm: “
What an excitement to have received your letter. My mouth opened wide with astonish
[sic]
when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you. I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mocking bird.”

Roosevelt, years later, was still jumping.
One debutante said he did not so much dance as “hop.” Another recounted his “
unquenchable gaiety” and his unerring ability at formal dinner parties to send her into such uncontrollable fits of laughter that she had no choice but to leave the table. His Harvard classmates depicted him as a fast-moving, rapid-talking enthusiast who often wore them out with his boisterous exuberance. He held his far-flung interests with delight and stocked his college rooms with piles of books, a large tortoise, sundry snakes, and a collection of lobsters. He zoomed, he bolted, he boomed and gesticulated wildly as he went.

Roosevelt’s vivacity receded when his father died. He felt, he said, as though “
I should almost perish.” It was a devastating loss. For the rest of his life he would miss, though himself incorporate, his father’s rare mixture of infectious joy and keen sense of public duty. “
Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss,” he wrote in his diary a few months after his father’s death, “I feel as if I should go mad.”

Stoked by a restless energy not uncommon in those with exuberant temperaments, Roosevelt drove his desolation into action. He rowed, hiked, hunted, boxed, and swam furiously during the
fevered weeks following his father’s death. With slight cause other than annoyance he impetuously shot and killed a neighbor’s dog. He nearly drove his horse into the ground through reckless gallops in the Oyster Bay countryside and was no easier on himself: “
He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired,” remarked one doctor of Roosevelt’s frenetic behavior. Yet through it all there remained an irrepressible sense of life: “
I am of a very buoyant temper,” he wrote his sister not long after their father died. It was a temper that would serve him well and ill, but mostly well.

In the years immediately following his father’s death, Roosevelt fell passionately in love, married, graduated from law school, and published the first of the nearly forty books he would go on to write. In 1881 he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where, as he put it, he “
rose like a rocket.” An ardent reformer, and lustily so throughout his political life, he became a mercurial, unstoppable irritant to his fellow Republicans.

Roosevelt’s life in politics was abruptly broken when, on St. Valentine’s Day of 1884, both his wife and his mother died. “
You could not talk to him about it,” said a close friend. He drew a cross in his diary for the date of the fourteenth of February and wrote, “
The light has gone out of my life.” In a pitch of energy reminiscent of the period following his father’s death, Roosevelt abruptly took off for the Dakota Badlands, where he lived out his conviction that “
black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” He hunted, wrote an improbable number of books, and ran a cattle ranch. The hard work ultimately made wide inroads into his grief. “
We felt the beat of hardy life in our veins,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.” Despite his distress, he said, “
I enjoyed life to the full.”

He returned to the East, remarried, and threw himself back into politics with gusto. He became a gale force in Washington. President
Benjamin Harrison, who had appointed him civil service commissioner, said that the crusading Roosevelt “
wanted to put an end to all the evil in the world between sunrise and sunset.” Rudyard Kipling found himself caught up in a gentler form of Roosevelt’s persuasive energies and, like most, he was completely captivated. After dining with him one evening at the Cosmos Club in Washington, Kipling knew himself bewitched: “
I curled up on the seat opposite and listened and wondered until the universe seemed to be spinning around and Theodore was the spinner.”

Roosevelt loped onward from post to post. He served energetically as assistant secretary of the Navy, and then led the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” during the Spanish-American War. His zest for war, as for life, knew few limits. He had, one journalist put it, enough “
energy and enthusiasm to inspire a whole regiment.” Roosevelt exulted that the war was “
bully,” “the great day” of his life. It was, he said, his “crowded hour.” He seemed to relish his brushes with death as passionately as he loved the rest of life. He was recommended for the Medal of Honor and returned to politics a war hero, a legend. He was elected governor of New York and then, within a few years’ time, vice president of the United States. When William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, Roosevelt became, at the age of forty-two, the youngest president in American history. He was also the liveliest.

The new president’s exuberance was captured by a reporter from the
New York Times:
“
The President goes from one to another … always speaking with great animation, gesturing freely, and in fact talking with his whole being, mouth, eyes, forehead, cheeks and neck all taking their mobile parts.… A hundred times a day the President will laugh, and when he laughs he does it with the same energy with which he talks. It is usually a roar of laughter, and it comes nearly every five minutes … sometimes he
doubles up in paroxysm. You don’t smile with Mr. Roosevelt; you shout with laughter with him, and then you shout again while he tries to cork up more laugh[ter] and sputters: ‘Come gentlemen, let us be serious.’ ” Another journalist wrote,
“You go into Roosevelt’s presence … and you go home and wring the personality out of your clothes.”

The White House rang out not only with laughter but with the squeals of children and the clattering of their ponies going up and down the marble stairs of the presidential mansion. Roosevelt was frequently to be found chasing or being chased by his children and their animals around the White House grounds. “
You must always remember,” said a British diplomat, “the President is about six.” Certainly Roosevelt did nothing to dispel that impression. His zeal was infectious. His magnetic force, said one observer, “
surrounded him as a kind of nimbus, imperceptible but irresistibly drawing to him everyone who came into his presence.” Roosevelt used his infectious enthusiasm, which was tethered to a highly disciplined intelligence, to render unprecedented reform through the actions of the federal government. Nowhere was this more obvious and lasting than in his drive to conserve the American wilderness.

Roosevelt’s passion for the American land and for natural history went back to his childhood. His father, one of the founders of the American Museum of Natural History, enthusiastically encouraged his young son’s collecting and stuffing of animal specimens for the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” which the boy set up in the family’s New York City mansion. He wrote in his autobiography that he had “
fully intended to make science my life-work,” an ambition reflected by his being first in his class in zoology at Harvard. When Roosevelt returned to New York from the Dakota Badlands, he formed the Boone & Crockett Club to promote preservation of big game animals and to encourage forest and land conservation. It was an effective group, later influential
in establishing Yellowstone Park and in saving great stretches of timberlands.

By the time Roosevelt became president, America’s natural resources had been stripped.
Native bison herds were decimated; only eight hundred or so of the original sixty million animals survived. Many other species of birds and mammals were on the edge of extinction and nearly half of all forest lands had been logged. “
Ever since man in recognizably human shape made his appearance on this planet,” wrote Roosevelt, “he has been an appreciable factor in the destruction of other forms of animal life.”

Roosevelt acted quickly to stop the destruction. “
There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country,” he declared. “We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many, nor do we intend to turn over to any man who will wastefully use them by destruction, and leave to those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so much.” He ended his remarks in revival fervor: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Roosevelt engaged not only the Lord, but the Congress and the American public as well. With characteristic vigor he set out on a campaign of persuasion. Action must be taken, it must be bold, and it must be now. His outrage was visceral, and his persuasiveness nearly absolute. “
He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, if not the planet, to-day,” observed the naturalist John Burroughs. “He is many-sided, and every side throbs with his tremendous life and energy.… His interest in the whole of life, and in the life of the nation, never flags for a moment. His activity is tireless.”

Roosevelt’s exuberant campaign was manifestly successful. He doubled the number of national parks, created 150 national forests, added nearly 150 million acres of timber to the government reserves, set up more than fifty federal wildlife preserves, initiated
thirty major irrigation programs, and established sixteen national monuments. One journalist commented that if Roosevelt continued to create reserves “
there would be little ground left to bury folks on.” The president’s own summing up of his conservation efforts was different but equally succinct: “
During the seven and a half years closing on March 4, 1909, more was accomplished for the protection of wildlife in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park.” He had been audacious in his use of the presidency and deft in his employment of conviction and enthusiasm.

Roosevelt’s passion for saving the wilderness stayed with him. “
Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property of the people alive to-day, but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander,” he wrote a few years before he died. “It is barbarism to ravage the woods and fields, rooting out the mayflower and breaking branches of dogwood as ornaments.” These were sustaining passions—“
A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias,” he believed, “should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral”—and these passions and great enthusiasms made Roosevelt the activist he was. Without them it is unimaginable that the nation’s wilderness would be as vast and wonderful as it now is.

Shortly before Theodore Roosevelt went to Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize in 1910 he gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, in Paris. It was his most eloquent tribute to the centrality of exuberance in action: “
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have … known neither victory nor defeat.”

John Muir was different from Theodore Roosevelt in a thousand particulars. An immigrant Scot who knew neither a loving father nor a privileged upbringing, he preferred the company of mountains to that of men, had no desire to govern, and did not willingly put down in cities. But, like Roosevelt, he had a passion for wild places and a persuasive exuberance that vaulted passion into action.

Muir was born in 1838 on the east coast of Scotland. His lasting childhood influences, he said, were the sea and hills and his father’s restless, often cruel, evangelical Presbyterianism. Nature was Muir’s deliverance: “
When I was a boy in Scotland,” he wrote, “the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.… Kings may be blessed; we were glorious, we were free—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness.”

“Glorious” was a term Muir would invoke time and again in his accounts of nature, despite his conscious attempts to eradicate it from his writing. “Glorious” and “joy” and “exhilaration”: no matter how often he scratched out these words once he had written them, they sprang up time and again to dominate his descriptions of the world as he experienced it. His exultant roots were deep, and never, as a writer or as a speaker, was he fully able to bridle the abounding delight of his language.

The Muir family emigrated to America in 1849. Young Muir worked at a brutal pace on their Wisconsin farm until he was able to escape, first to Madison and then, as a student, to the University of Wisconsin. A chance lesson in botany from a fellow classmate who
queried him on the unlikely similarities between a straggling pea vine and the hardwood locust tree sent Muir “
flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.” Before long, his college room, like Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was brimming with life but instead of lobsters and tortoises he kept gooseberry bushes, wild plum, posies, and peppermint plants. He collected the specimens and studied them late into the night: “
My eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen,” he later recalled.