"reed shaken with the wind" of his boyhood days.

When Theodore Roosevelt left Harvard in 1880, he plunged promptly
into a new fight--in the political arena. He had no need to earn
his living; his father had left him enough money to take care of
that. But he had no intention or desire to live a life of
leisure. He always believed that the first duty of a man was to
"pull his own weight in the boat"; and his irrepressible energy
demanded an outlet in hard, constructive work. So he took to
politics, and as a good Republican ("at that day" he said, "a
young man of my bringing up and convictions, could only join the
Republican party") he knocked at the door of the Twenty-first
District Republican Association in the city of New York. His
friends among the New Yorkers of cultivated taste and comfortable
life disapproved of his desire to enter this new environment.
They told him that politics were "low"; that the political
organizations were not run by "gentlemen," and that he would find
there saloonkeepers, horse-car conductors, and similar persons,
whose methods he would find rough and coarse and unpleasant.
Roosevelt merely replied that, if this were the case, it was
those men and not his "silk-stocking" friends who constituted the
governing class--and that he intended to be one of the governing
class himself. If he could not hold his own with those who were
really in practical politics, he supposed he would have to quit;
but he did not intend to quit without making the experiment.

At every step in his career Theodore Roosevelt made friends. He
made them not "unadvisedly or lightly" but with the directness,
the warmth, and the permanence that were inseparable from the
Roosevelt character. One such friend he acquired at this stage of