Page:Americans (1922).djvu/288

 was absolutely negligible. Rooseveltism can never be interpreted to mean dressing for dinner. Practically he was a powerful aider and abettor of the movement to banish the word "gentleman" from the American vocabulary, except as a term of contempt. He was ostentatious about his friendships with Mike Donovan, Fitzsimmons, Sullivan, and Battling Nelson, just as he was about his pursuit of the big game of North America, because he loved the larger vertebrates and wished to implant an affection for them in the national mind. In his sports he can hardly be called a typical American; the typical American cannot employ the champion pugilists, nor follow the Meadowbrook hounds, nor hunt elephants with a regiment of bearers. These are the sports of emperors and rajahs and the sporting sons of multimillionaires. Still Mr. Roosevelt took them up and journalized them in behalf of a strenuous athletic ideal for the nation. A powerful animal himself, he gloried, day in and day out, in the fundamental animal instincts and activities, reproductive and combative, the big family and the big stick, the "full baby carriage" and "hitting hard and hitting first;" and he preached them in season and out of season.

I will give two illustrations. On his return from slaughtering elephants in Africa, he stopped off in Berlin to tell the Germans about the world-movement. That was in 1910; and perhaps the Germans were then almost as well informed with regard to