The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  The Darwinian naturalists—including young Roosevelt—believed all animals and birds could feel pain; therefore, its deliberate infliction had to be stopped. Wild turkeys, lizards in pet shops, passenger pigeons, overworked donkeys—all needed to be treated fairly, in a humane, pain-free way. Roosevelt even believed some animals had thought processes and emotional lives similar to those of humans. During his presidency, he wrote to Mark Sullivan, the editor of Collier’s, “I believe that the higher mammals and birds have reasoning powers, which differ in degree rather than kind from the lower reasoning powers of, for instance, the lower savages.”4

  As for hunters, Roosevelt, like his father, insisted that they follow an ethical code that would protect “wild creatures” from “destruction” by “greed and wantonness.”5 True gentleman sportsmen, Roosevelt learned as a child, needed to seize the initiative in protecting both domestic and wild animals from abusive treatment. For example, gravely wounded animals, in all circumstances, had to be immediately put out of their misery by hunters. For his entire life Roosevelt disdained steel-jaw traps. Animal shelters and horse ambulance fleets, the Roosevelt family believed, needed to be established in major cities. A form of sterilization (spaying) was needed to stop dogs and cats from overbreeding. Drawing on British notions that cockfighting and bullbaiting were intolerable, the Roosevelt clan insisted that mercy be extended to all of God’s creatures.6

  As young T.R. saw it, Darwin’s Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals broke down the egocentric notion that humans were godlike and all other creatures—even chimpanzees, baboons, orangutans, and gorillas—were inconsequential vermin or a food source. In 1641 the French philosopher Réne Descartes had actually promoted the notion that animals had no feelings and were essentially machines; that same year, however, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first legal code to protect domestic animals in North America.7 Influenced by his grandfather Cornelius V. Roosevelt and his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., throughout his life T.R. held that animal protection groups needed to be established and maintained. (At first he had domestic animals in mind; later in life, he included wild animals.) As he put it, “harmless life” deserved to be treated with respect, not as “waste products without feelings.”8

  Certainly, Roosevelt wasn’t a vegetarian or what would later be called a vegan. Although he was only five-foot-eight, he ate enough beef and wild game for a football squad. Nobody of his generation promoted hunting—and eating game—more assiduously than Roosevelt. As Darwin’s idea of survival of the fittest implied, the natural world was violent. Deer, elk, rabbits—and many other species—usually died violently, torn to pieces by predators. Hunting, if done correctly, was the least violent way for an animal to die. A principle with universal application, according to Roosevelt, was that living creatures, even cattle or lambs on their way to slaughter, needed to be handled with dignity. (Roosevelt was prescient in this regard. In 1958 the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act mandated that a cow had to be knocked out as painlessly as possible before an incision was made.) 9

  II

  One of the Roosevelt family’s friends, in fact, was Henry Bergh, a founder of the modern animal protection movement. The son of a wealthy shipbuilder, Bergh had grown up in New York City and then drifted through his early adulthood, spending the Civil War years traveling around Europe. After a brief stint during the Lincoln Administration as a secretary to the American legation in Russia, where he had befriended the czar, Bergh and his wife, Matilda, settled down in London. There, he had a religious epiphany, a humane vision pertaining to animals.10 Since childhood, Bergh had always been concerned about their well-being. In London he met Lord Harrowby of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to explore how he could take the group’s anticruelty creed to the United States and create a similar organization in New York City. An incensed Bergh explained to Lord Harrowby how sickened he had been watching Russian and Caucasian peasants whip donkeys with sticks until their legs buckled and their backsides were full of festering welts. Such mistreatment, he believed, needed to be stopped. A prohibition movement had to be launched at once.11 His new motto for his life emanated from the pages of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason: “Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”12

  Bergh’s father had died, leaving Henry and his brother and sister an enormous inheritance. Once Bergh returned to Manhattan from abroad, immediately claiming his money, he embarked on changing the way Americans looked on animals, pushing for numerous new anticruelty laws. Many of his early supporters had become active in both the abolition of slavery and public health advocacy.13 Whether it was designing ambulances for horses or sponsoring “clay pigeons” for shootists, Bergh and his followers were on a tub-thumping mission to reverse barbaric behavior. Stray dogs in the city pound, for example, were being captured and crammed into large iron cages, and then lowered into the Hudson and East rivers and drowned. Aghast at such rank cruelty, Bergh wanted to find more humane ways to euthanize dogs. His efforts in this regard were successful, as a progression of more ethical killing techniques—for example, administering gas into decompression chambers and sodium pentobarbital injections—soon prevailed.14

  An omnivorous pamphleteer, Bergh printed a circular trumpeting a society that would prohibit “thoughtless and inhuman persons” from hurting “dumb animals.” He mailed this broadside throughout the state, but his search for people to sign a petition encountered a lot of resistance. The pervading sentiment in New York was that an owner of an animal could treat it however he or she wanted. To start legislating whether a farmer should slaughter a billy goat or whether a barkeeper could shoot a garbage-eating tabby was tantamount, most people thought, to interfering with constitutional rights of ownership. “Without animals you would have no meat, no milk, no eggs,” Bergh snapped at his critics in a public statement. “There would be fewer vegetables and little grain, because the farmer would have to pull his own plow. You would have to walk everywhere you go instead of riding. Your shoes, your coat, that beaver hat, your gloves, the silk scarf you were wearing—all of these things and many more you have only because of the world’s dumb creatures. Since we are so dependent on them, I consider it morally wrong to be needlessly cruel to them.”15

  Puck showed Henry Bergh as “The Only Mourner” to follow the dog cart to the New York City pound.

  Henry Bergh cartoon in Puck. (Courtesy of the ASPCA)

  While some other New Yorkers scoffed at Bergh’s plea for the humane treatment of animals, the Roosevelt family embraced his animal rights program (as did the legendary editor Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and former president Millard Fillmore). A massive lobbying effort began in 1865, with Bergh heading the grassroots effort in Albany. A constant force at his side was Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, who insisted that the humane treatment of animals had to become law. On April 10, 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was officially incorporated in New York state and laws were passed prohibiting abuse of animals.16 A man who beat a mule or horse could now be charged with a misdemeanor. When the ASPCA was officially incorporated at a public meeting at Clinton Hall in Manhattan later in April—with Mayor John T. Hoffman in attendance—Bergh was unanimously elected president. Today the ASPCA’s first annual report (1867) is on display at the organization’s facility on Ninety-Second Street in Manhattan. Both Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt and John J. Roosevelt (T.R.’s granduncle, who was twice elected to the New York state legislature) had chartered the new organization.17

  Knowing that Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, John J. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and other powerful New York philanthropists were on his side, an empowered Bergh now began patrolling downtown like a cop twirling a billy club, looking for animal abusers to arrest.* For cruel attitudes and practices to end, a few animal abusers would have to be handcuffed and carted off to jail. Or maybe—as
the extreme believers in animal rights advocated—these abusers could be put in the stocks or dunked in a barrel. Somehow, an example had to be made of the animal abusers if the laws were to have an impact. It didn’t take Bergh long to act. Just outside the ASPCA’s tiny office at the corner of Broadway and Twelfth Street, he spied a butcher with a cart full of hog-tied calves, crammed so tightly together that they were bleeding from hoof lacerations and bellowing loudly in agony. Bergh, who was on horseback, chased the butcher’s cart, and finally caught up with it at the Williamsburg Ferry slip. Hopping off his horse, Bergh implored the butcher to release the calves or else go to jail. “Yah,” the butcher yelled, as if being accosted by a lunatic. “You’re crazy.”18

  Tempers flared and a shouting match ensued. The police were called in to settle the rancorous dispute. The result was a lawsuit filed by the ASPCA against the butcher. It was the first of many suits Bergh would file in the coming years. Sounding as impassioned as the captured John Brown after his Harper’s Ferry raid, Bergh resorted to courtroom theatrics, hoping to persuade the magistrate to side with the humane movement. His passionate pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. Half of New York’s farmers and hay hands would be imprisoned, the judge reasoned, if cattle mistreatment were prosecuted to the letter of the new law. So the judge imposed only a minuscule fine on the relieved butcher and asked the ASPCA not to bring such frivolous cases before his court anymore. “Ridicule was regularly cast on the efforts of the society to enforce the law,” the historian Roswell McCrea recalled in The Humane Movement, “and many of its supporters became discouraged.”19

  The determined Bergh, however, continued pushing his ASPCA agenda forward. The rumor soon spread that he was a fanatic, an unhinged fool who thought feral cats, kitchen pigs, and leopard frogs had rights. Bergh, for example, challenged the poultry industry, insisting it was inhumane to drop live chickens into a scalding bath. Old horses, he also insisted, should never be turned out in the streets to die. The great impresario P. T. Barnum, livid because Bergh had the temerity to claim he treated his prize circus animals in an “abominable” fashion, fired back a volley, denouncing Bergh as a “despot.”20 Quite simply, Bergh became a citywide laughingstock, accused of caring more about hens than about battered women. Lies circulated that he had pet dragonflies and caterpillars. “It hurt him when people were amused at a picture of him with donkey ears, surrounded by animals laughing at him,” his biographer Mildred Mastin Pace said, “or a caricature of him wearing a horse blanket instead of a coat.”21

  A repetitive cycle soon developed that stymied the ASPCA. Every time Bergh succeeded in arresting an abuser, the judge would throw the case out, usually ridiculing it. Even his friends said he had a crusader complex. Recognizing that for the ASPCA to become effective he would have to forgo street rumbles and win a landmark legal decision, Bergh tempered his impetuous patrols. Matter-of-factly, he now started searching for a litmus test, a case he could win. It was hard to make above-the-fold news in the New York Times or Herald-Examiner in cases about whipping mules. There wasn’t much inherent drama in a stubborn mule that wouldn’t budge; it boiled down to a semantic argument over what constituted a heavy hand. To succeed, Bergh needed a ruse that would grab everybody by the lapels and say, “Wake up! New laws have been passed!” Seeking controversy, Bergh made a strange but inspired tactical leap. In 1866 he decided to bet the ASPCA franchise on defending green sea turtles that were being systematically tortured on the East River wharves without so much as a murmur of public protest.22

  For starters, Bergh felt pity for the sea turtles, which had been shipped to New York from the Mosquito Lagoon area in Florida (and various Caribbean islands) to be sold for soup and stews. They were valued for their meat and calipee (the cartilaginous part of the shell), and their eggs were also being collected from beaches to be used in cooking and as curatives. The East River fishermen had pierced the huge fins of their captured greens with a screw-like device and then tied them up with straitjacket thongs, giving them no food or water. The 400-pound turtles lay on the dock, writhing in pain, piled up like cordwood, one on top of another. Often they were left upside down, struggling to right themselves. Marching up to Captain Nehemiah Calhoun, the fisherman responsible for the turtles’ mistreatment, Bergh informed him that he was under arrest for cruelty to animals. As Bergh and Calhoun argued back and forth a mob of spectators arrived hoping for a pistol duel or a fistfight. Before violence ensued, the police intervened and Captain Calhoun was escorted to the nearby police precinct. Waving a copy of the anticruelty bill, Bergh had the police arrest the captain. After Calhoun endured fingerprinting, a court date was set for later in the week.

  Bergh was defeated in the courtroom, but this loss turned out to be a boon for the ASPCA. After the hearing, a counter-sentiment in Bergh’s favor started to swell. The courtroom loss jacked up ASPCA’s fund-raising a hundredfold or more. Thousands started writing contribution checks or offering their pocket money to the ASPCA. Others just sent in coins as if dropping them into a collection basket. Donations arrived in amounts ranging from one cent to $1,000. Meanwhile, owing to the media attention, Bergh had become an A-list celebrity in New York, appearing at Broadway openings so frequently that he was mistaken for a stagehand, imploring autograph seekers to demonstrate moral elasticity when it came to animal rights. Everybody had now heard of the ASPCA and the ubiquitous “turtle man.” That was a good thing. Daily, Bergh’s office was besieged with reports of starving horses, mauled dogs, cats set on fire, and illegal cockfights. Determined to win in the long run, full of resilience, refusing to let the humane movement be ghettoized or demoted into the kooky slipstream of the time, Bergh started hiring investigators to look into complaints of abuse, paying them ten to sixteen dollars a week.

  Getting hard-earned traction for the ASPCA—laws against abuse of animals were starting to be seriously enforced—in 1873 Bergh once again upped the ante. With the legendary attorney Elbridge T. Gerry—a great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence—at his side, Bergh rescued a young girl named Mary Ellen Wilson from an abusive home. Owing to a series of family deaths, the ten-year-old Mary Ellen had ended up in a deplorable tenement house, and her body was bruised and scarred when a social-worker type discovered her.23 The Bergh-Gerry team successfully used an innovative interpretation of the writ of habeas corpus as their legal weapon. Acting as a private citizen, feeding his friends at the New York Times details of Mary Ellen’s plight, Bergh took the child’s abusers to court. Deeply saddened by the way children were regularly mistreated, Bergh, with Theodore Roosevelt Sr., as a principal ally, formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; the modern-day humane movement for child protection was born.24

  III

  Young Roosevelt admired his family for embracing the humane movement of the late 1860s and 1870s in all its forms. Constantly throughout his life, he would place both his grandfather Cornelius and Theodore Sr. on pedestals, pleased by their association with high-minded men like Henry Bergh. But he was also ashamed of his father for having avoided service in the Union army during the Civil War. Family obligations, Theodore Sr. said, prevented him from fighting. When Fort Sumter was attacked, Theodore Sr. was supporting, at the Twentieth Street house, his wife, Mittie; her mother, Martha; her sister Annie; and his and Mittie’s own three children (and they had a fourth coming). These were ample reasons for not volunteering in the Union Army. Instead of marching off to war, Theodore Sr., as rich men were apt to do, hired a surrogate soldier. Although it is true that Theodore Sr. helped create an Allotment Commission, which eased the financial burdens for Union soldiers fighting at places like Shiloh and Antietam, he himself nevertheless had avoided combat. (The commission saved for the New York families of 80,000 soldiers more than $5 million dollars of their wages.25) Some 620,000 men had died in the war. American women endured losing sons, husbands, and fathers over high-minded principles like abolition. Theodore Sr., however, never even smelled gunpowder from the
time of Bull Run to Appomattox. Mortified by this, T.R. spent his entire life waging policy and battlefield wars, anxious to prove that cowardice didn’t run in the family’s bloodline.26

  Theodore Sr. routinely supported nonprofit activists like Bickmore and Bergh, not to mention grappling with family financial matters, and he was nothing if not intrepid. As Emerson had been fond of saying—and Theodore Sr. believed wholeheartedly—there was only truth in transit. Having squired his children around Europe, the elder Roosevelt decided that having his brood see the Holy Land and Egypt was an essential component of their education. A few days before T.R.’s thirteenth birthday, the family set sail from New York on the S.S. Russia, bound for Liverpool. As was to be expected, en route T.R. kept a diary and drew images of animals he saw, many of them resembling cave paintings but others looking like thoughtless doodles. Even with the tumultuous Atlantic affecting his stomach, he dutifully reported seeing gulls, terns, and kittiwakes. While the ship was in the Irish Sea, he grew excited because a snow bunting was on board and was captured by the crew.27

  But T.R. had something more in mind than sketchbook drawings on this journey to the Nile. Recently he had taken taxidermy lessons from John Bell, a wizard at the art who had trekked with John James Audubon up the Missouri River in 1843. According to the Ornithological Dictionary of the United States, the sage sparrow (Amphispiza belli), in fact, was named after Bell by the great Audubon himself.28 Decades later, Roosevelt would recall the lanky, white-haired Bell fondly as being “straight as an Indian,” with a “smooth-shaven clean-cut face” and a “dignified figure always in a black frock.”29 It was at Bell’s crammed shop at the corner of Broadway and Worth that T.R. eagerly learned the “art of preparing” wild-life. The high odor of microminerals, in fact, became almost a perfume to Roosevelt. In particular, he was attracted to cleaning skulls and other bones with the larvae of dermestid beetles. To Roosevelt, Bell’s office was straight from Mr. Venus’s shop in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. In his “Notebook on Natural History,” he recorded a story Bell had told him about a death match between a rooster and a field mouse. “The field mouse fought long and valiantly,” Roosevelt recounted, “but at last was overcome, although not until after a protracted battle.”30