The senior Theodore Roosevelt was to New York what George
Bennett and Allan Emery are to Boston. Wealthy, but fully engaged
in charitable works, he was deeply concerned for the unfortunate.
As one of the most prominent men in the city, he worked face-to-
face with homeless children, helped to establish hospitals and
museums, served on boards, and gave of both his time and money.
He was a staunch Christian believer. David McCullough, in Morn-
ings on Horseback, his essential book on young Roosevelt, writes:
The older Theodore’s pious and adoring sister-in-law called him
Greatheart. The name had come to her on a Sunday morning
as she watched him walk to church with his children—the war-
rior Puritan, Greatheart, from The Pilgrim’s Progress, stout Great-
heart, guide and protector of wayfaring innocents, fearless
leader in life’s purposeful journey.
He loved children, and he loved his frail, sickly little “Teedie.”
When the boy’s asthma attacks would come in the night, he
would walk the floor with him in his arms or bundle him for a
carriage ride in the night air. He took all his children on adven-
turous trips, and his little namesake adored him.
He also challenged the fearful boy to “make his body,”
acknowledging that the workouts would be “hard drudgery,” but
he believed his son could do it.
Although Teedie rose to the challenge with weights, pulleys,
and punching bags—hour after hour, month after month—his
persistent effort produced little. He was still a thin, frail boy at the
beginnings of adolescence. “I was nervous and timid,” T.R. wrote
in his autobiography:
Yet... I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and
who could hold their own in the world, and I let this desire take
no more definite shape than daydreams. Then an incident hap-
pened that did me real good. Having an attack of asthma, I was
sent off to Moosehead Lake. On the stagecoach ride thither I
encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age,
but very much more competent and also much more mischie-
vous. They found that I was a foreordained and predestined vic-
tim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me.The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham