Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in New York City, at 28 East Twentieth Street.  The first Roosevelt of his family to come to this country was Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt who came from Holland to what is now New York about 1644.  He was a “settler,” and that, says Theodore Roosevelt, remembering the silly claims many people like to make about their long-dead ancestors, is a fine name for an immigrant, who came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century.  From that time, for the next seven generations, from father to son, every one of the family was born on Manhattan Island.  As New Yorkers say, they were “straight New York.”

Immigrant or settler, or whatever Klaes van Roosevelt may have been, his children and grandchildren had in them more than ordinary ability.  They were not content to stand still, but made themselves useful and prosperous, so that the name was known and honored in the city and State even before the birth of the son who was to make it illustrious throughout the world.

“My father,” says the President, “was the best man I ever knew....  He never physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”  The elder Roosevelt was a merchant, a man courageous and gentle, fond of horses and country life.  He worked hard at his business, for the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, and for the poor and unfortunate of his own city, so hard that he wore himself out and died at forty-six.  The President’s mother was Martha Bulloch from Georgia.  Two of her brothers were in the Confederate Navy, so while the Civil War was going on, and Theodore Roosevelt was a little boy, his family like so many other American families, had in it those who wished well for the South, and those who hoped for the success of the North.

Many American Presidents have been poor when they were boys.  They have had to work hard, to make a way for themselves, and the same strength and courage with which they did this has later helped to bring them into the White House.  It has seemed as if there were magic connected with being born in a log-cabin, or having to work hard to get an education, so that only the boys who did this could become famous.  Of course it is what is in the boy himself, together with the effect his life has had on him, that counts.  The boy whose family is rich, or even well-off, has something to struggle against, too.  For with these it is easy to slip into comfortable and lazy ways, to do nothing because one does not have to do anything.  Some men never rise because their early life was too hard; some, because it was too easy.

Roosevelt might have had the latter fate.  His father would not have allowed idleness; he did not care about money-making, especially, but he did believe in work, for himself and his children.  When the father died, and his son was left with enough money to have lived all his days without doing a stroke of work, he already had too much grit to think of such a life.  And he had too much good sense to start out to become a millionaire and to pile million upon useless million.