The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [233]
Roosevelt’s heartfelt appreciation of Whitman, Emerson, and Darwin grew as he read more and more of Burroughs’s books. If Captain Reid was too juvenile and Charles Darwin too scientific, Burroughs fell into the middle zone; he wrote in a way Roosevelt could emulate. Burroughs, you might say, further stoked the key ingredient to Roosevelt’s penchant for faunal naturalism: compassion for all wild creatures, especially birds. Once Burroughs became the first vice president of the New York Audubon Society, in fact, Roosevelt would do whatever he could to help the organization (of which he was also a member) flourish. “I know your Society will frown upon the milliner’s use of bird skins,” Burroughs wrote in 1897, accepting the vice presidency. “I hope it will also discourage the senseless collecting of eggs and nests which so many young people take up as a mere fad, and which results in the destruction of so many of our rarer birds.”10
To Burroughs, On the Origin of Species was a “true wonderbook”—the exact sentiment Roosevelt had toward it. The debt both naturalists felt they owed Darwin could never be repaid. Both men learned to scoff at Darwin’s critics as dimwits who couldn’t comprehend basic scientific laws of nature. Only Shakespeare and Emerson, they believed, had a comparable grip on the universal condition. Darwin “is the father of a new generation of naturalists,” Burroughs enthused in his journal. “He is the first to open the door into Nature’s secret senate chambers. His theory confronts and even demands the incalculable geological ages. It is as ample as the earth, and as deep as time. It mates with and matches, and is as grand as, the nebular hypothesis, and is the same line of creative energy.”11
What about the role of God in all this orthodox Darwinian celebration? Both Roosevelt’s and Burroughs’s views can be summed up in a single, often quoted line: natural selection may “account for the survival of the fittest, but not for the arrival of the fittest.”12 God was the one who created Darwin’s world order. Independently, Roosevelt and Burroughs both understood that Darwin believed natural selection was a process, not a cause.13 “The influence of Darwinian thought on Roosevelt’s generation,” the historian John Morton Blum noted in The Republican Roosevelt, “was profound.”14
Realizing that calling Burroughs “John” was too pedestrian (and “Mr. Burroughs” too formal) Roosevelt settled on “Oom John”—oom being Dutch for uncle. Obviously, this was meant not in the sense of a “Dutch uncle” but as a salutation expressing deep and abiding love and kinship for time immemorial. Even though Burroughs continued to call Roosevelt “Mr.” or “Governor” or “Mr. President”—old-school propriety to the maximum degree—to T.R. he was Oom John, the wisest mentor of them all. Oom John, in fact, approved of the Boone and Crockett Club books and thought his politically powerful young friend’s book The Wilderness Hunter, in particular, excellent. There was, Burroughs recognized about Roosevelt, a fine naturalist buried under the yarns about twelve-point antler trophies and the Rough Rider’s braggadocio. Not that Burroughs minded hunting per se. Like Roosevelt, Grinnell, and the others in the Boone and Crockett Club, Burroughs believed seasonal hunting was an imperative for thinning out herds and game-bird flocks. Roosevelt was in awe of Oom John’s ability to notice field marks on birds—color, feather pattern, eye-catching markings, gender, and shape. But Burroughs preferred Roosevelt’s more poetic side, admiring the way he wrote about nighthawks flying over a canyon or the coloration of Old World chats. To Roosevelt there was no higher compliment than Oom John’s writing to him to say that he admired Roosevelt’s hunting books because