Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  “Mummy, can’t I go without you?” he pleaded.

  “You mean you’d visit people you’d never met?” she asked, astounded.

  “I’d go anywhere to see those birds!” he answered.

  Tired of Franklin’s pestering, James and Sara agreed to let their son take the two-hour train ride alone. Foljambe embraced Franklin as if he were kin. Bursting with sophisticated enthusiasm, he showed the young American his world-class collection of birds from the faraway Amazon and Arctic. Franklin considered the experience a high-water mark in his European education.

  Over time, Franklin grew into a decent taxidermist. But, as Sara noted, cutting out the insides of an owl or bluebird often turned him “green.” More and more, warnings about the lethal effects of arsenic—a chemical commonly used in taxidermy—gave her pause. A public health campaign was under way to outlaw arsenic. Under parental sway, Franklin eventually farmed his specimens out to professionals in Poughkeepsie and New York City. A number of Franklin’s preserved birds were accepted by the American Museum of Natural History—the first serious accomplishment in the future president’s storied career.62

  On March 3, 1895, Sara brought Franklin to Manhattan for a meeting of the Linnaean Society of New York. Named after naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who laid down a lasting foundation for the categorization and naming of species, the organization provided a lively outlet for the study of natural history and ornithology. Among its founding members were nature essayist John Burroughs, editor George Bird Grinnell, and botanist Eugene Bicknell, after whom Bicknell’s thrush (Catharus bicknelli) was named. Theodore Roosevelt had been a dues-paying member of the Linnaean Society since 1878. As part of Franklin’s education, Sara took her son to hear Dr. William Libbey III, a professor of physical geography at Princeton University and director of its esteemed Elizabeth Marsh Museum, deliver a lecture about Hawaii at AMNH. Franklin, fascinated, took careful notes. Once back at Springwood, Sara helped her son polish his jottings into a full-fledged essay worthy of submission to the Linnaean Society; his piece was ambitious for a boy his age.63

  Franklin, age ten, practiced archery while on vacation with his family in Germany in 1892. He and his parents visited the resort of Bad Nauheim in south-central Germany every summer during his boyhood. Throughout the surrounding Watterau Valley, he was exposed to the idea of careful forest management, something barely known in America at the time.

  Franklin wrote an able description of Maui’s Iao Valley, indigenous plant life, and the kukui nut tree (Aleurites moluccana), which yielded “great quantities of oil for lamps.” But it was Hawaii’s active volcanoes—in an area that President Woodrow Wilson would preserve as Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in 1915—that set his imagination aflame. “The volcano of Kilauea is the highest in the world, being over 14,000 feet high, as high as Mt. Blanc,” Roosevelt wrote in careful cursive. “Near the volcano are many cracks in the soil from which sulphurous steam comes out. At one end of the crater is the Burning Lake or Lake of Fire, in which Prof. Libbey threw a log of wood and proceeded to run for his life, as the log of wood with a quantity of molten lava was thrown high into the air. The whole surface of the lake was bubbling up and quantities of steam rose from it. Around the crater are several underground passages, in which are huge lava stalactites which sometimes fall around and break with a fearful crash.”64

  Inclement weather never curtailed Roosevelt’s ornithological pursuits around Dutchess County. Combating the whistling winter winds, he started keeping “Bird Diaries,” written in his elegant penmanship, early in 1896. He marked the date a bird was seen, the weather and temperature at the time of the sighting, the number of specimens he counted, and any other notable traits and characteristics he deemed relevant. Birds were by nature difficult to count, but Franklin tried his hardest. Here’s a sample entry from the first Bird Diary:

  Wea. FineMon. Feb. 10, 1896Ther. 30°

  SHOT

  1 fine red male Pine Grosbeak & saw 1 other.

  Also, 1 Blue Jay.

  SAW

  1 flock of about 50 Pine Grosbeaks.

  Also, another flock of about 25 individuals.

  Also, 14 single Grosbeaks at other times.

  Chickadees, Nuthatches, Juncos, Jays, Crows, and Downy Woodpeckers.

  Sent Grosbeak to W. W. Harts & Co. New York.65

  Just a few days after Franklin Roosevelt entered those observations in his field diary, he returned to New York City for a tour of the American Museum of Natural History with the head ornithologist, Dr. Frank M. Chapman, a dear friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Always eager to talk about birding, Chapman was an expert guide. Charged with educational outreach for the museum, he viewed Franklin as a promising protégé. In 1894 Chapman had become the associate editor of the Auk, an organ of the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU).66

  Modeled on the British Ornithological Union, the AOU was created with a primary mission similar to that of the National Audubon Society: preventing bird extinction in North America.67 Two friends of the Roosevelt family—Dr. Elliott Coues of Washington, D.C.; and ornithologist Dr. C. Hart Merriam of Locust Grove, New York—were among its founders in 1883. The chairman of the AOU was William Brewster, who became the curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in 1885. The AOU led in the creation of waterfowl sanctuaries throughout Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In 1886, the AOU’s Committee on the Protection of Birds drafted a “model law,” which was adopted later that year by the government in New York. Making non-game birds safe from hunting, while defining what species would be considered game birds, the new law was the opening salvo in the modern wildlife-protection movement.

  But even more significantly, the AOU, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, persuaded the U.S. Department of Agriculture to establish the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy under the leadership of Dr. Merriam in 1886. While ostensibly this division was funded to help farmers deal with pests, like the English sparrow (Passer domesticus), Merriam used his connection to the AOU to begin conducting field surveys and distributing studies of birds, mammals, and other biotic communities.68

  By the first decade of the twentieth century the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy had evolved into the Bureau of Biological Survey (the precursor of today’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).69

  Young Franklin was enthralled by the naturalists he was able to meet—and they were impressed by him. In addition to leading the American Museum of Natural History and helping to edit the Auk, Dr. Chapman would travel as the British West Indies and Mexico in search of rare species. However, it was his homespun expertise on the “common” birds of the Hudson River Valley—like the robin—that brought him the most acclaim.70 In the process, as the New York Times observed, Dr. Chapman became the most influential man since John James Audubon in getting Americans “interested in birds.”71

  Roosevelt was a willing follower and Dr. Chapman offered the boy an associate membership in the AOU. Poring over Chapman’s Birds of Eastern North America (first published in 1895) became a ritual for FDR. His bird list grew rapidly throughout late 1896 and 1897, filled with tallies of specimens “shot & stuffed or skinned by F. D. Roosevelt.” One banner day Franklin acquired both a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea) and an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea)—an admirable ornithological feat.

  Joining Franklin in his devotion to birding was a fellow River Family boy, Maunsell Crosby. Five years younger than FDR and raised at Grasmere, an estate just outside the village of Rhinebeck, the boy was the scion of the Livingston family, which had played an important role in the founding of the United States. Philip Livingston had signed the Declaration of Independence, William Livingston had helped draft the Constitution, and Robert Livingston had administered the oath of office to George Washington. Inspired by Dr. Chapman, Maunsell decided early on to become an ornithologist, and he, too, had been granted associate membership in the AOU. Like FDR
, he attended Linnaean Society meetings in New York City. In coming years Crosby would conduct the first Audubon “Christmas count” in Dutchess County.72

  For use in ornithological study by others, Franklin’s birds needed to be tagged for identification. In May 1896, soon after he started his Bird Diaries, Franklin noted, “I am to send about 1 dozen Grosbeaks to Museum of Natural History for local collections.”73 It was in fact ten Dutchess County pine grosbeaks (Pinicola enucleator) that Franklin eventually donated to the museum. These robin-sized birds, cute like finches and with a slightly forked tail, usually foraged for food in the trees at Springwood. Permanent residents of the Hudson Valley, they made a mellow teu-teu-teu sound that Franklin found soothing. Because of their wide distribution, the pine grosbeaks weren’t considered rare. Nevertheless, Franklin amassed a good mixture of regional specimens—male and female—for Chapman’s shop to study, considering ornithology “one of my chief avocations.”74 That year he also wrote a short article on birds for a children’s magazine, the Foursome (unfortunately much of his piece had been plagiarized).75

  Roosevelt often romped around Hyde Park with his half brother, Rosey. Twenty-eight years older than Franklin, Rosey lived only a mile down the Post Road from Springwood. Close despite their age difference, he and Franklin both eagerly anticipated the migration of bird flocks, which occurred every winter and spring. “Shot a Pine Finch,” FDR wrote on an outing with his half brother. “The bird was alone in a small pine tree and he appeared very shy. I had trouble shooting him.”76

  IV

  While tutors supervised Franklin’s early education, James Roosevelt remained a strong influence on him, especially when it came to land stewardship and forest conservation. Cardiac problems, however, kept James from engaging in strenuous planting or pruning at Springwood. Even though the actual upkeep of Springwood took a backseat to his New York City investment interests in coal and railroads, James continued to instill in Franklin his conviction that proper land management was the best way to protect nature and have a fulfilled life. FDR embraced this belief as his own.

  Franklin, thirteen, and his father, James, sixty-seven, posed together in 1895. James, formerly the president of two railroads, had retired early in favor of the country life in Hyde Park. Despite James’s flagging health, father and son were playmates, as well as friends. James taught Franklin to ride at the age of four and to sail at six.

  A high-water mark in James Roosevelt’s public life came in 1892, when he was chosen as an alternate commissioner to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, organized to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World. The exposition grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and planner Daniel Burnham on a six-hundred-acre site; it included a wooded island park and the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long amusement park. The fair, sometimes referred to as the “White City” because of its classical-style architecture, opened in May 1893 and drew an astounding twenty-six million visitors before it closed late that October.

  The highlight of the Exposition for FDR—who attended with his Hyde Park friend Edmund Rogers, the colonel’s son, arriving via James’s private railcar—was watching Native Americans pick up pennies using long whips and studying the taxidermy displayed in dioramas.77 With wide-eyed wonder, Franklin could see more than fifty thousand specimens of flora and fauna displayed at the Exposition (these became the nucleus of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History).

  An exhibit of trees native to New York State was Franklin’s favorite attraction at the fair. The caption under an elegant photograph of a stand of sweet gums explained how, in 1802, Alexander Hamilton had brought Liquidambar styraciflua saplings from Mount Vernon in Virginia to the upper end of Manhattan Island to plant himself. The plot in Manhattan where America’s first secretary of the treasury planted the sweet gums became known as Hamilton Grange.78 This display made Roosevelt keenly aware of the symbolism behind planting “historical seeds” at Springwood in the coming years.

  Studying natural history—not just ornithology—was Franklin’s pastime when his parents took him on another European trip in 1896. That summer, the Roosevelts visited half a dozen cities—and Franklin dashed off to as many natural history museums as he could. In London, when he learned that the Prince of Wales (later, King Edward VII) was presiding over the opening of a new ornithology exhibit at the South Kensington Museum, he was especially excited. Admission to the event, however, was by invitation only. Undeterred, Franklin and his private tutor, Arthur Dumper, artfully crashed the soiree. Roosevelt slipped his American Museum of Natural History membership card to Dumper, who, in turn, presented it to security in lieu of a proper invitation. The guard carefully studied the document, deeming it a valid credential. As Roosevelt later wrote, he and Dumper were thereafter accorded the courtesies due true scientists.79

  Once the family returned from abroad, Franklin prepared to enter Groton School in Massachusetts. Reverend Dr. Endicott Peabody, the boarding school’s headmaster, was an Anglican minister who had been educated at the prestigious British schools Cheltenham and Cambridge. Founded in 1884, Groton was situated along the Nashua River not far from Boston. Peabody’s aim was to make Groton a preparatory school on par with British public schools and prepare the sons of the wealthy and prominent for an Ivy League education. Every night following evening prayers, Peabody shook the hand of each boy in a ritual that became known as the “go-by” as they wandered off to bed.

  Because Franklin was only fourteen when he started at Groton, there is a mistaken tendency to see him as a blank slate, overparented but well tutored in foreign languages and history. But Franklin—carrying 140 pounds on his nearly six-foot frame—wasn’t an enigma or clay to be easily molded. Quite simply, Roosevelt was already what novelist Wallace Stegner called “a placed person,” fully belonging to the Dutchess County countryside.80 As historian David Schuyler noted, Roosevelt, like others from the region, saw the Hudson River Valley as a “sanctified landscape” that represented “a place of transcendent importance to a regional and national cultural identity.”81 No matter what longitude or latitude Roosevelt happened to be in, his inner compass was always pointed toward the Hudson. Over the years he developed the philosophy that Hyde Park, with its strong cultural identity, was a model for other American villages to emulate. Cardinals never seemed so red to Roosevelt, or trees so elegant and full-bodied as on the Springwood grounds. “All that is in me,” FDR said, “goes back to the Hudson.”82

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I JUST WISH I COULD BE AT HOME TO HELP MARK THE TREES”

  I

  Posing with a camera, Franklin shows off during a stop at the home of his mother’s relatives in the sea town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in 1897. The fifteen-year-old was on his way to the northern part of the state to enter Groton—the first school he ever attended, after years of private tutoring.

  Fourteen-year-old Franklin Roosevelt was homesick during his first semester at Groton School in the fall of 1896. Wedded to country living, he missed the way the blue light shifted hues by the hour on the Hudson, the sight of the Catskill Mountains deep on the western horizon, and the string of Hudson River barges traveling past Springwood. But he adapted to boarding school, falling under the spell of the thirty-nine-year-old headmaster Reverend Dr. Endicott Peabody. With his slight build and lack of experience with sports, Roosevelt wasn’t much of an athlete. Sailing, collecting stamps, and ornithology remained his hobbies.1 Roosevelt was susceptible to infection and, exposed to boys his age en masse for the first time, fell ill with debilitating conditions such as scarlet fever, measles, and mumps. Although he wasn’t an academic star, he enjoyed Greek, Latin, history, literature, and science. Overall, his grades hovered in the “just average,” B– range. Nevertheless, Dr. Peabody deemed him a “model Grotonian” and a “champion of its precepts.”2

  Not everyone agreed with Peabody’s sterling assessment. In the eyes of his Groton peers, Franklin Roosevelt w
as handsome and likable, if a little delicate and over-mothered. He had a quick, infectious laugh that was accentuated by his wide and mischievous smile. One classmate recalled that Franklin “developed an independent, cocky manner and at times became very argumentative and sarcastic.” The same classmate remembered that FDR “always liked to take the side opposite to that maintained by those with whom he was talking.”3 What nobody disputed was his exuberance of spirit and his easy acclimation to Spartan dormitory living.

  Franklin’s longing for the Hudson River Valley was a constant theme in his letters home. He made the best of having the Nashua River nearby, regularly prowling around the thickly forested hillsides along its banks in search of winged visitors. “The lovely birds are beginning to arrive,” Roosevelt wrote to his parents one spring day. “So far Song Sparrows have come in full force and I have heard several Bluebirds and seen one Robin. It is too bad the holidays come so early this year as only a few birds will have arrived and very few things will be out.”4

  Most parents mailed packages to Grotonians filled with medicine, baked goods, jams, and cheeses. But FDR’s parents sent him Scientific American magazine, W. M. Gibson’s A Rambler’s Calendar of 52 Weeks Among Insects, Birds, and Flowers, and books by John Burroughs. During his sophomore year, Sara mailed him the recently published two-volume Audubon and His Journals. He was spellbound. “I have wanted Audubon’s Journal ever since it came out and it is the nicest present you could possibly give me,” he wrote in appreciation. “I shall spend every moment on it, but I don’t really think I could give such a lovely book to the library as I should very much like to have it at home on my ornithological book-shelf!”5

  Franklin lost himself completely in the world of Audubon’s indefatigable treks through Florida, Louisiana, and Kentucky in the 1830s. Next, he asked Sara to send his Dutchess County bird specimens—including his favorite barn owl. “I am very glad my sparrow-hawk came from Rowland and many thanks for sending it,” he reported in his next letter home, “and also paying my A. O. U. subscription [for the Auk].”6 Audubon and His Journals spurred Roosevelt to re-form the defunct Groton natural history club, adopting guidelines similar to those of the American Ornithologists’ Union. “Today a very important event in the history of the school took place, at least I hope so,” Roosevelt wrote home in May. “Four or five of us boys have with the approval of the rector formed a natural history society. You know a large room has been set apart in the new school-building for a museum, and there are at present no collections to put in it, so we are to do systematic work.”7