The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [18]
A precocious young T.R. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Just over a year after Roosevelt’s birth, the British naturalist Charles Darwin published his great scientific treatise On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Deeply personal in tone, without esoteric graphs or undecipherable tables, On the Origin of Species set off heated global debate over religious beliefs that underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s great idea was evolution by natural selection, a death knell to the ancien régime of rudimentary biology. Although the Darwinian catchphrase “survival of the fittest”—which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer and which Roosevelt adopted practically as a creed—didn’t appear until a revised 1869 edition, by the time Theodore was ten or eleven the biologist was his touchstone, a Noah-like hero. He was enthralled by the idea of collecting species in faraway places, and in his youthful imagination the Garden of Eden was replaced by Darwin’s Galápagos Islands. (Almost twenty years before On the Origin of Species raised tantalizing questions about the Creation, Darwin had written about circumnavigating the world collecting specimens of animals and plants—both alive and dead—in The Voyage of the Beagle). Once Roosevelt grasped the concept of natural selection his bird-watching instincts went into overdrive. Suddenly he understood that the biological world wasn’t static. Observed similarities between living creatures were often a product of shared evolutionary history. With Darwinian eyes he now studied every bird beak and eye stripe, hoping to reconcile anomalies in the natural world.7 As an adult he would often carry On the Origin of Species with him in his saddlebag or cartridge case while on hunts.8
There was nothing unusual about a nineteenth-century child being enamored of animals and wildlife. Whether it’s Aesop’s Fables or Mother Goose, the most enduring children’s literature often features lovable, talking animals. But the young Roosevelt was different from most other children: from an early age he liked to learn about wildlife scientifically, by firsthand observation. The cuteness of anthropomorphized animals in the popular press annoyed Theodore; Darwinian wildlife biology, on the other hand, captured his imagination and had the effect of smelling salts. Roosevelt loved the way the British naturalist had gone beyond physical similarities of anatomy and physiology to include behavioral similarities in his extended analysis The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). This devotion to Darwin, a real sense of awe, continued long after Roosevelt was an adult. Even when he was president, grappling with showcasing the Great White Fleet and building the Panama Canal, stories abounded about Roosevelt hurrying across the White House lawn exclaiming “Very early for a fox sparrow!” and then suddenly stopping to pick up a feather for closer coloration inspection.9 Believing that evolution was factual, President Roosevelt nevertheless conceded that the concept of natural selection needed to undergo constant scientific experimentation, and the more data the better.10
But before Roosevelt discovered Darwin there were the picture books and outdoors narratives aimed at the boys’ market. Every parent recognizes the moment when a child displays a special aptitude or precocity for learning, when hopes arise that it’s a harbinger of great educational accomplishment to come. Such sudden bursts of enthusiasm from a toddler indicate both personality and preference. When Theodore Roosevelt obsessed over the lavish illustrations in David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa and asked questions about Darwin’s theory of evolution, his parents, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, realized their son was an aspiring naturalist.11
A Scottish physician and African missionary, Livingstone always had a high-minded scientific