He would not tolerate in us children
selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.
As we grew older he made us understand that the same standard of
clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that
what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man. With great
love and patience and the most understanding sympathy and
consideration he combined insistence on discipline. He never
physically punished me but once, but he was the only man of whom
I was ever really afraid.' *
*Autobiography, 16.
Thus the President, writing nearly forty years after his father's
death. His mother was Martha Bulloch, a member of an old Southern
family, one of her ancestors having been the first Governor of
Georgia. During the Civil War, while Mr. Roosevelt was busy
raising regiments, supporting the Sanitary Commission, and doing
whatever a non-combatant patriot could do to uphold the Union,
Mrs. Roosevelt's heart allegiance went with the South, and to the
end of her life she was never "reconstructed.
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