III
As a boy Theodore Roosevelt always had a soft spot for Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his vaguely bohemian “Uncle Rob.” A creative contrarian and lover of animals, birds, and especially fish, Uncle Rob was always caught up in the maelstrom of his times. He simply never sat upright in his carriage. With a bristle-cropped beard, receding hairline, bad eyesight, and frameless spectacles, R.B.R. (as the family called him) would be easy to mistake for any of the bewhiskered American presidents elected between Grant and McKinley. Imbued with an outlandish catholicity of interests, the conspicuous Robert B. Roosevelt epitomized the many-sided Victorian-era bon vivant. For decades the Roosevelt family—owing to his philandering with chorus girls and trollops—treated him as a black sheep. Somehow he just couldn’t control his streak of lechery. Embarrassed by his wayward morals and intellectual incongruities the family, to some extent, banished R.B.R. from the fold. Nevertheless, his shiftiness aside, he was greatly admired in his day by the public at large.45
Robert B. Roosevelt was considered the great U.S. conservationist during the years from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War. “Uncle Rob,” as his nephew Theodore Roosevelt called him, was a many-sided Victorian reformer. In recent years the New York Historical Society (manuscript Department) has opened R.B.R.’s personal scrapbooks for scholarly viewing.
Robert B. Roosevelt. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)
While not quite a bigamist, Robert B. Roosevelt came awfully close to being one. The simple fact was that he led a double life, married to Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt (T.R.’s Aunt Lizzie) while having a long-standing affair with a neighbor, Minnie O’Shea (Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue), whom he hired at the New York Citizen.46 Secretly R.B.R. fathered four children with this mistress. Later, after Elizabeth died, he married Minnie.47 Unfortunately, this affair was so widely frowned upon that Robert B. Roosevelt has not been fully appreciated by recent environmental historians. His diaries and papers were largely hidden by the Roosevelt family for 100 years. Usually R.B.R. sported a porkpie hat and a gray jacket as he squired women around town. As a kind of territorial marker he gave elegant green gloves—purchased in bulk at A.T. Stewart’s department store—to the women he slept with. Society types used to laugh whenever they walked down Fifth Avenue or rode a carriage in Central Park and spied a woman wearing these gloves, which might as well have been the Scarlet Letter.48 Apparently, these women didn’t realize the negative connotation of the gloves.
But R.B.R.’s womanizing was, in truth, the least interesting aspect of him. To many it seemed that he had distinct parts and switched roles dexterously. Casting off and putting on personas, he could be a barroom enthusiast, a romantic adventurer, a barrister, a rousing orator, a husband, an adulterer, a sage, an animal protection advocate, a gourmet cook, a humble farmer—R.B.R. could even write memorable prose as a novelist and satirist. As was typical of the British upper class, Robert, never in need of money, dedicated himself to public service.49 Known for switching jobs with kaleidoscopic quickness, he served as coeditor of the reformist newspaper New York Citizen (which rallied its readers against the nefarious William Marcy Tweed’s ring).50 He was one of the Committee of Seventy, which broke the Tweed ring, causing the notorious boss to leave public life in disgrace.
During the Civil War R.B.R. served in a New York volunteer regiment; this experience provided him with enduring friendships. During Reconstruction he took his gusto for reform into the political sphere in 1870 and was elected to Congress; the only reason he ran was to establish federal fish hatcheries. Following a successful two-year stint in Washington, D.C., promoting pisciculture, he wrote plays and became commissioner of the Brooklyn Bridge (1879–1881), overseeing architectural adjustments and maintenance issues. As U.S. minister to the Netherlands under President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Roosevelt was at his smooth-functioning best in promoting a special “Dutch-American” relationship. Extremely adept at fund-raising, he served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee in 1892, helping elect Cleveland for a second (nonconsecutive) presidential term.51
Erudition came easily to Robert B. Roosevelt. A self-styled man of letters, he wrote one mediocre novel—Love and Luck (1880)—which didn’t sell well. But his comic satire Five Acres Too Much (1869), which spoofed the virtues of farming, struck a chord in the immediate post–Civil War years, when laughs were in short supply.52 His other offbeat novel, Progressive Petticoats (1874), a lampoon of women suffragists, was also enthusiastically received. (For a modern-day comparison, he was the David Lodge of his generation). His pasquinades had ardent fans. As a personal favor, Robert B. Roosevelt also edited the flowery poetry of General Charles G. Halpine (Miles O’Reily), his coeditor at the New York Citizen.53 Sometimes R.B.R. wrote limericks himself—which were topical, like most efforts in this genre, and uniformly bad. On the whole, Roosevelt’s literary efforts, read a century after they were written, no longer sparkle; posterity has thrown them overboard. Only occasionally does his wit hold up. But R.B.R.’s furious advocacy of “fish rights,” the nonprofit sine qua non that became his sustainable legacy, has enduring historical importance, though it has been undervalued by academic scholars.54 R.B.R., more than any other direct influence, turned Theodore Roosevelt into a conservationist as a teenager.
Born on August 27, 1829, Robert B. Roosevelt grew up in New York City. Turning his back on the mercantile life of his father, Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, and the Quakerism of his mother, Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt, R.B.R. became a maverick who gravitated toward the pageantry of wild things.55 Later in life Hamilton Fish—who had served as governor of New York and Grant’s secretary of state—dubbed R.B.R. “Father of all the Fishes.”56 Robert’s unconventionality first became clear when he changed his middle name, Barnhill, to Barnwell to avoid jokes about manure. As a teenager, he fished the briny waters of Long Island Sound for striped bass and bluefish whenever the opportunity presented itself. College, however, wasn’t important to the short, portly R.B.R. For all his erudition, he was happiest outdoors, whether at sea or on land. He flouted civil niceties, always speaking his mind candidly. Even his enemies—and there were many—couldn’t deny that he was frank.
When Robert turned twenty-one years old, he married Elizabeth Ellis and embarked on a political career as a Democrat. His decision to remain a Democrat, even after Abraham Lincoln walked onto the national stage, cast a lingering haze of suspicion over him in family circles. In aggregate, the reason R.B.R. gave for not following the family line was the galloping tempo, unhampered corruption, and rake-offs that characterized New York politics in the late 1850s and 1860s. Democrats, he believed, while fools, were less beholden to robber barons, and that made all the difference to him.57
Like other New York gallants Robert B. Roosevelt belonged to the so-called club set of the late 1850s. With corks popping, often overdrinking and straining his constitution, he enjoyed discussing political, literary, and culinary affairs. R.B.R., in fact, developed a virtual mania for joining elite “societies,” perhaps because he was very sociable. Robert (or “Rob” as he was usually called) was very everything, in fact. Very blue-blooded, though he aspired to be a populist. Very mannered, though he used the rake’s characteristic tactics of cajolery and the nod and the wink. As a gourmet chef he proudly founded the Pot Luck Club, whose intellectual members cooked five-star meals, judged truffles, and drank the finest French wines. Every year he also chaired the annual dinner of the Ichthyophagous Club, helping educate aspiring gourmets about the “unsuspected excellence” of many neglected varieties of American fish. Usually, the naturalist Joaquin Miller (whom he called the “sweet singer of the Sierras”) was at his side. Fishing stories in a comical vein were told at these dinners. The British, R.B.R. used to say, while always filling the champagne glasses, had to learn there was more to life than cod. The roomful of fish lovers roared with delight. A few specialty dishes were Darne de saumon, garni d’éperlans à la Roosevelt and Filet of striped bass with shrimp
s à la Baird.58
Perhaps more than anybody else in his era, Robert B. Roosevelt argued for fish conservation because he enjoyed eating perch and trout so much. Turtle soup was another one of his specialties. Writing in his diary of the “turtle trial,” in fact, Robert was a contrarian, considering both Henry Bergh and the judge flat wrong. Sea turtles, he believed, weren’t insects or reptiles, but fish. Deeming the Pot Luck Club the “very head and centre of gastronomic, ichthyologic, zoo-logic,” he declared turtle too delicious a culinary delight to be an insect. “Then we have the sea turtle,” he wrote, “the glorious monster who sleeps in the mid-ocean in the amplitude of his thousand pounds of excellence.” Just hearing all that talk about sea turtles during the turtle trial, in fact, made R.B.R. want to “luxuriate in the green fat and the yellow fat.” Only an imbecile, he scoffed, could possibly eat turtles thinking they were insects or reptiles. “It had been claimed that turtles are snakes developed in Darwinian theory,” he recorded. “That a very intelligent and highly gifted snake, feeling sensitively the unprotected nature of a tail that dragged its slow length an unnecessary distance behind by taking much though added a shell to his body and converted the longest and slimmest of figures into the stoutest and roundest. That a turtle, and above all a snapping turtle, is but a snake in disguise…. I, for my part, cannot accept a serpent when I ask for a turtle; I repudiate the ‘snaix’ even under the head of a terrapin. Why should not a turtle be a fish?”59
Even though Robert B. Roosevelt found Manhattan’s social life fulfilling, he was continually drawn to the woods of rural Long Island. Trolling in the waters of the Great South Bay became his favorite hobby. Eventually, Robert purchased property along the bay, where the snipe and geese were plentiful, to build a country estate surrounded by pristine nature. But R.B.R.’s primary residence remained the five-story brownstone on East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, next door to what the National Park Service now oversees as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace.* A door on the second floor connected the two residences, making them a single-unit dwelling.60 (There remains speculation in the Roosevelt family that Theodore Sr. moved to West Fifty-Seventh Street to get his impressionable children away from their colorful uncle Rob61).
Animal stories were the mainstay of R.B.R.’s skill as a first-rate raconteur. To Uncle Rob treed opossums and sneaky foxes were more colorful than boring gossip about the sexual affairs of fellow socialites. Whenever young Theodore visited his uncle’s home, in fact—as he often did—he encountered a veritable menagerie: guinea pigs, chickens, parrots, and ducks coexisting in total mayhem. A cow even pastured in the parlor while a pony walked in circles around the dining room table.62 A pet spider monkey dressed in ruffled shirts would often greet visitors at the front door. A German shepherd was allowed to dine at the main table. Somewhere along the line Uncle Rob made it a consuming hobby to collect “Brer Rabbit” stories from African-Americans and dutifully wrote them down as an ethnologist would, mastering the slave-culture diction. Unfortunately, when he published these stories in Harper’s, readers paid them little mind. “They fell flat,” T.R. would later recall, although he was proud that Uncle Rob had been ahead of Joel Chandler Harris in collecting this Georgian folklore. “This was a good many years before a genius arose who in ‘Uncle Remus’ made the stories immortal.”63
That R.B.R.’s affinity for animals eventually developed into conservationist activism owes much to the influence of a British-born outdoor writer, Henry William Herbert. The indefatigable Herbert had been educated at Cambridge University and launched a literary career as a romance novelist, influenced by Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. Moving to America in 1831, he adopted the pseudonym Frank Forester for his outdoor writing.64 Both a fine writer and a pen-and-ink artist, Herbert cofounded the Atlantic Monthly in 1833, believing that outdoors prose needed a fresh, clever popular outlet. The magazine flourished. But it was Herbert’s conservationist activism in such books as The Warwick Woodlands (1845)—denouncing “game hogs” and advocating a measured conservationist approach—that caused alarm in hunter-angler circles.65 R.B.R., for one, took keen notice of Herbert’s grim warning that “the game that swarmed of yore in all the fields and creeks of its vast territory are in such peril of becoming speedily extinct.”66
Robert B. Roosevelt joined Herbert’s crusade to replenish the trampled fisheries of New York. In 1844 Herbert helped found the New York Sportsmen’s Club, whose mission was to have the state legislature place seasonal limits on the hunting of deer, quail, and woodcock. The club’s first successes were the passage of model game laws in three counties: New York (Manhattan), Orange, and Rockland. As soon as R.B.R. joined, he championed an important auxiliary mission for the club, declaring that his priority in life was to enact laws protecting trout, shad, and perch. Indiscriminate fishing practices in general, he believed, had to be curtailed at once if the waterways of New York were to maintain even a semblance of their old abundance.67 Thus R.B.R. became—as his editor friend at the New York Times John Bigelow dubbed him—the “Piscicultural High Priest or Pontifex Maximus.”68
What Robert B. Roosevelt admired about Frank Forester was that he was an able practitioner of “outdoor” literature. Writers in this genre recounted hunting and fishing trips, as opposed to nature writers (who usually refrained from killing wildlife) and latter-day environmental writers (who were more technical in their approach). When Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, most outdoors writing was Anglophile. It was impossible to find a good angling book, for example, about Florida’s reefs, Louisiana’s bayous, Hawaiian atolls. John Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine in 1829 was filled with pedestrian prose. Henry’s creation of Frank Forester changed all this, demonstrating that American soil was fertile ground for outdoor writing. Single-handedly, he made “hook and bullet books” respectable; this was the genre at which Theodore Roosevelt was determined to excel.69
Young Theodore, however, never fully cottoned to Frank Forester’s instructive style. To him, outdoor writing meant pushing one’s limits, seeking danger, and developing survivalist instincts in the brutal wild. Forester was too tame for him, too concerned with what was proper hunting attire for flushing grouse after noontime tea. T.R. was drawn to the more adventurous stories of Captain Mayne Reid. (Roosevelt also fell under the spell of the founder of Forest and Stream,* Charlie Hallock, whose 1877 Vacation Rambles in Michigan made him curious about the Great Lakes islands and grayling.70) Eight-pound trout, snarling cougars, grizzly-bear paws larger than a human’s head, virgin forest that even Lewis and Clark hadn’t trampled—these were the kind of “manly” pursuits the teenager wanted to read about in the 1860s and early 1870s. He wanted to experience outdoor life before the telegraph wire spoiled it all. “Unfortunately, [Forester] was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports,” T.R. later wrote, “and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself.”71
Following Herbert’s suicide in 1858, R.B.R. eased away from his other civic obligations and focused on protecting the fish populations. He wrote a Herbert-like tract on New York and New England angling. Game Fish of the Northern States of America, and British Provinces was a sensational critical hit, blending personal experiences and conservationist convictions with recipes for cooking fish.72
Young Roosevelt was only four years old in 1862, when the success of Game Fish resulted in Uncle Rob’s being praised as the “Izaak Walton of America.”73 Although R.B.R.’s main concern was recreational fishing, his book included chapters about how millions of Americans would become deprived of a great foodstuff if U.S. rivers and lakes were fished out. Much of the book was about fish hatching. The editor of London’s Land and Water, in fact, credited R.B.R. with introducing American fish into English waters, feeling he deserved more public credit for this transatlantic pisciculture.74 Usually fishing books, even Walton’s venerable The Compleat Angler, appealed only to a select audience of pat
rician sportsmen. But Game Fish managed to have a profound influence, becoming the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Only Thaddeus Norris’s encyclopedic American Angler Book (1864) came close with regard to celebrating the fish found in the United States’ waters.
What worried R.B.R. most was the scarcity of fish. The two waterways flanking Manhattan—the East and Hudson rivers—for example, had become cesspools for industrial waste and raw sewage. The situation wasn’t much better for the waterways of Long Island, which were serving as garbage dumps. In the Hudson, river men used to netting tons of shad were coming back to land empty-handed. Regarding the Great Lakes Robert worried the walleye and trout might soon go the way of the dodo and the great auk. Ferociously, he corresponded with fellow gentlemen anglers in New Hampshire and Vermont, who had toyed with scientific concepts like “artificial propagation” to replenish their fished-out lakes and streams.75
Wildlife management was embryonic in the mid-nineteenth century, but R.B.R. pioneered in introducing scientific concepts relating to fish. Refusing to temporize, in a torrent of lucid (if self-indulgent) books, articles, and harangues, R.B.R. urged fishermen to develop “moderation, humanity, patience, and kindness under all circumstances.” He promoted fly-fishing mainly because it’s far harder and more of a sporting challenge than bait fishing (it also resulted in fewer ancillary kills), as he simultaneously awakened the nation to the perils of overharvesting lake fish. In his second book, Superior Fishing; Or, the Striped Bass, Trout, and Black Bass of the Northern States (1865), which recounted a trip to Lake Superior and its tributaries (plus other freshwater fishing sites), Roosevelt jumped to the then radical conclusion that fish “poachers,” those scoundrels who netted whitefish and yellow perch out of season, should receive the “contempt of all good sportsmen” and deserved nothing less than “the felon’s doom.”76
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