The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (9 page)

The courteous and knowledgeable Bickmore, however, received a warm welcome. Hours of fine conversation ensued, with Bickmore’s dream coming into realistic focus by the time the teapot was emptied. “Professor,” the elder Roosevelt told his guest, “New York wants a museum of natural history and it shall have one, and if you will stay here and cooperate with us, you shall be its first head.”
⁷⁷

This was not idle encouragement. Applying his Dutch fortitude and beneficence, the elder Roosevelt helped spearhead the nascent effort to
build a world-class nature museum in Manhattan. Vouching for Bickmore with his rich friends, he envisioned the museum as an educational place to offer schoolchildren and working people a chance to study stuffed elephants, desert dioramas, birds’ nests, and porcupine quills. A few months later, on April 8, 1869, the charter for the American Museum of Natural History was approved in the front parlor of the Roosevelt brownstone. Two days later, Governor John Thompson Hoffman of New York signed a bill establishing the museum. The elder Roosevelt’s partners in this grand philanthropic endeavor included the future U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph Choate, the finance magnate J. Pierpont Morgan, and the U.S. congressman William E. Dodge, Jr.
⁷⁸

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was one of eighteen Manhattanites who signed a letter to the commissioner of Central Park requesting a building site on the Upper West Side for the new museum. The spot chosen was Manhattan Square, which ran along Central Park West from Seventy-Seventh to Eighty-First Street. The
New York Times
singled out the elder Roosevelt as being “deeply interested in the enterprise” from the moment Bickmore had knocked on his door.
⁷⁹
President Ulysses S. Grant laid the museum’s cornerstone in 1874. As was to be expected, ideas regarding the mandate and magnitude of the new museum collided. Early bickering, for example, centered on whether dinosaur fossils should be displayed. The elder Roosevelt—a trustee—was for displaying them; paleontology, after all, as the French scientist Georges Cuvier had dramatically proved, was an exhilarating part of natural history. (Critics of fossils, however, believed they were a Darwinist ploy to somehow discredit what would become Creationism.) At Theodore Sr.’s request a delegation was sent to France to study Cuvier’s dinosaur bones and acquire outstanding taxidermy by Jules Verreaux.
⁸⁰

From the time it opened its doors in 1877, the American Museum of Natural History was a marvelous ticket-taking success. Visitors streamed en masse to see the new architectural wonder looming over a largely underdeveloped neighborhood. The original neo-Gothic building anchored the area, then home to squatters and goats. Huge turrets, conical roofs with heraldic eagles, and granite walls all added to its baronial elegance. At nighttime the illuminated museum could be seen from New Jersey, across the Hudson River.
⁸¹
The interior decor was heavy with black walnut and ash. The museum attracted nearly as much press attention as the opening of the Empire State Building eventually would; even President Rutherford B. Hayes was on hand for the formal opening late in 1877.
⁸²
The inaugural displays focused on the glory of Darwinism (even though
On the Origin of
Species
had been published eighteen years earlier, its impact in America was just being felt), scientific achievement, geographical discovery, and the natural sciences. An extraordinary collection of fossil invertebrates—purchased for $65,000 from the official New York state geologist—attracted the longest lines.
⁸³

Young Theodore came home from Harvard University to attend the museum’s opening and marveled at the seashells, beetles, and bird skins. He had donated twelve mice, a turtle, four bird eggs, and a red squirrel skull to the collection.
⁸⁴
Respectfully, he listened to President C. W. Eliot of Harvard, a dull blade on the podium, extol the “divinity” of the natural sciences. He was particularly drawn to the second floor of the main hall, which showcased Professor Daniel Elliot’s collection of North American birds. A stuffed dodo, a mummified crocodile, and a huge badger all apparently fascinated him no end.
⁸⁵

Nobody could have guessed that Theodore Jr., running around the museum excited about a mammoth tooth and a badger claw, would decades later have a wing of the museum dedicated in his honor for his efforts on behalf of U.S. conservation. Other great presidents—like Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson—have beautiful memorials in Washington, D.C., along the Potomac River tidal basin, to celebrate their statesmanship. The New York museum, by contrast, fittingly became the New York state shrine to Roosevelt (along with a nature preserve called Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the badlands of North Dakota). The Upper West Side museum was rededicated after Roosevelt’s death to honor the “scientific, educational, outdoor and exploration aspects” of his life—not the political aspects. And while it’s true that sagacious conservationist sayings of his were carved on the marble walls—“The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value” might be the best—they were undercut by some of his most strident imperialist maxims.
⁸⁶

But the museum was a repository for dead wildlife only, whereas the elder Roosevelt—like young Theodore—also cared deeply about live animals. Wandering down the corridors of the museum lacked the domestic intimacy of mousing with a cat, let alone the thrill of hearing a cougar snort. So Theodore Sr., teaching his four children another lesson, brought the family into the animal protection movement.

I

C
ruelty to animals infuriated Theodore Roosevelt even when he was a child. The mere sight of a horse being flogged or dog kicked made him sick at heart. Overcrowded poultry cages and bounties for shooting cats, for no clear-cut scientific reason bothered him. After the Civil War, companion animals like dogs and cats were seen by society at large as a quirk of sophisticates. Working-class people, worried about rabies and flea infestation, thought of such animals mainly as disease vectors.
¹
(Roosevelt himself, as a college student, shot a mad dog that was menacing his horse on Long Island.
²
) To the Roosevelt family, however, a domesticated dog or cat was part of the family. During the Victorian era one’s obligation to a pet included making sure it didn’t suffer undue pain. No less a person than Darwin decided not to be a physician (even though his father and grandfather were physicians) because he couldn’t stomach watching hideous premodern surgical procedures (such as amputations) performed without anesthetics. Morphine and ether would not come into medical practice until the 1850s. “When the concern about pain was combined with the changing understanding of similarities between humans and animals, it became obvious that animals were also capable of suffering and feeling pain,” the historian Stephen Zawistowski has explained in
Companion Animals in Society
. “Thinking on this had come full circle from the Cartesian assertion that animals were automations incapable of feeling pain.”
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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.)
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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.
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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