The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (10 page)

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

So now, when the
Russia
dropped anchor, T.R., coughing unmercifully, his stomach weak from seasickness, he went wandering through the shopping district of Liverpool looking for arsenic, an odorless ingredient used by ornithologists for skinning and cotton-stuffing birds. “In the streets I was much annoyed by the street boys who immediately knew me for a Yankee and pestered me fearfully,” he wrote on October 26, 1872. “Requiring to buy a pound of Arsenic (for skinning purposes) I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadful thing, before I could have it!”
³¹

By the 1860s, taxidermy—a craft practically as old as Egypt itself—had become a high art, with specialists the world over vying to be the very best mounters. The etymology of the word derived from the Greek
taxis
(arrangement) and
derma
(skin). Taxidermy took a steady surgeon’s hands adept at making incisions carefully and treating skins delicately. Always the loyalist, young Theodore bragged that his prized teacher, John Bell, one of Audubon’s right-hand men, was
the
top taxidermist, the world champion.
³²
But critics instead preferred Jules Verreaux, whose innovative exhibit “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions” at the Paris Exposition of 1867 was novel in that the skinned and mounted animals were
displayed in a harrowing, gruesome diorama. The innovative Verreaux actually had a Barbary lion (now an extinct subspecies) ripping a helpless camel. Authentic skulls and teeth were used in the diorama, and a human figure wrapped in plaster of paris was added for increased dramatic effect. In 1869 the American Museum of Natural History acquired this pioneering work of taxidermy, which initiated a new way of displaying wildlife worldwide. Young Theodore was enthralled with Verreaux, because he opened up new possibilities for how naturalists and taxidermists could expand science and art.
³³
But his loyalty was with Bell for one overriding reason: Bell had the great Audubon on his résumé.

After procuring the arsenic, T.R. raced to see Liverpool’s natural history museum. He didn’t like its displays, concluding that Americans did taxidermy better. Perhaps because he was being teased by working-class European boys, a pronounced nationalism and family chauvinism began seeping into T.R.’s diaries. “The specimens,” he wrote in his diary, “are neither so well mounted or so rare as those in our own American Museum of Natural History in New York.”
³⁴

To practice his taxidermy in England, Roosevelt would purchase snipe and partridges at marketplace stands. Meanwhile, John James Audubon had entered Roosevelt’s life in a profound way. Studiously, Roosevelt pored over leatherbound volumes of Audubon in a succession of hotel suites and railway compartments, clutching an aunt’s copy of
Birds of America
like a fumbled but recovered football. And he also started to become enamored with Audubon’s three-volume study
The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
. While he was studying Audubon’s works, species extinction and animal abuse started to worry Roosevelt. In Turin, for example, he lamented the “miserable” treatment of horses. And his Berghian sentiments about how European carriage horses were treated in paddocks was once again noted in his diary. “The cabhorses are worse [off] than those of New York,” he complained at one juncture, “and the animals in general are treated much more badly.”
³⁵

Young Theodore was happy to be done with Europe when the Roosevelts finally arrived in Egypt a few days after Thanksgiving 1872. The very sight of the ancient city of Alexandria was like a tonic to him. “How I gazed on it!” Roosevelt wrote. “It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries! A land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Babylon was in its glory, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts, and it did.”
³⁶

No sooner did Roosevelt arrive at the dock than he started filling his diaries with descriptions of braying donkeys, foxlike yellow dogs with
perked ears, leashed baboons doing circus tricks on a street corner, and camels smaller than he expected. He hurried to a fowl stand and purchased a quail—after haggling with the Arab vendor over the price—for taxidermy. As the family continued on to Cairo by train, T.R. was enthusiastic about the wildlife he saw from his compartment window. “We passed through the Delta of the Nile and on all sides numerous birds of various spieces areose, while heards of buffaloes and zebus grazed quietly in the marshy fields,” he wrote. “Among the birds were snipe, plover, quail, hawks, and great black vultures.”
³⁷

A group photo of the Roosevelt family, taken in Egypt in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., is at center back row, seated; Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt is at his left. Seated on floor: Anna, Corinne, Theodore Roosevelt, and Elliott.
Roosevelt family group shot. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

The historian David McCullough has written that young Theodore had a deep aversion to attending church. He reached this conclusion by reading the boyhood diaries. He even ventured to claim that T.R.’s asthma attacks were often precipitated by not wanting to go to Sunday services. However, McCullough only hints at something that becomes abundantly clear in the diary entries of 1872; T.R. wrote religiously about the animals he saw
before
and
after
services. As a “natural theologist” of sorts, Roosevelt had an image of God that wasn’t a gray-bearded patriarch hurling thunderbolts down to earth but an omnipotent guardian who devised the exquisite intricacies of all living things. Here is a sample entry from Egypt on December 1: