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to succeed, Theodore Sr. usually dressed in a white neckcloth and a dark suit, forgoing the broad-brimmed high hats favored by his fellow aristocrats. He gave the impression of a groomed man on top of his life’s game. His nephew Emlen Roosevelt, in fact, claimed that he personified “abundant strength and power” in every pursuit he decided to tackle.75 The wellspring of Theodore Sr.’s enthusiasm for living creatures—both wild and domestic—came from his father, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt (T.R.’s grandfather), who was born in 1794. Cornelius dropped out of Columbia College and devoted his full attention to Roosevelt and Son hardware. Before long he had a near-monopoly on American plate glass imports. With money to invest, Cornelius founded Chemical Bank of New York. Basically, the Roosevelt family business, as befitting the urban gentry, was now financial investment.

The son of the exceedingly rich Cornelius Roosevelt, Theodore Sr., a leisured gentleman, born into the Dutch aristocracy of New York, never experienced poverty. Still, he had compassion for the underprivileged. (So did his son Theodore Jr., the future president.) Theodore Sr. mixed easily with both rich and poor. Among his many civic-minded good deeds was his cofounding of the Newsboys’ Lodging Home and New York’s Children’s Aid Society. Calm, cheerful, deeply thoughtful, and a devoted Dutch Reform Protestant, Roosevelt was determined that his children—Anna (nicknamed Bamie), Theodore Jr. (Teedie), Elliott (Nell or Ellie), and Corinne (Conie)—would have an ideal childhood. Studying the natural world, he insisted, would be a big part of their education. Summers spent in the fresh air of upstate New York and New England helped fulfill this desire. Trips abroad were always structured for maximum educational uplift. Although not a naturalist, the elder Theodore Roosevelt was known throughout Manhattan as a devotee of the Hudson River valley. It’s little wonder that he became a founder and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History. To be a civilized person, Theodore Sr. believed, meant honoring the biological history of On the Origin of Species, the most revolutionary book of the nineteenth century.

Now a New York landmark and a national treasure, the museum began when Dr. Albert S. Bickmore, who had been a student of the zoologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, arrived in Manhattan. Fresh from collecting species throughout the East Indian archipelago, Bickmore began telling colleagues of a dream he had of founding a museum of natural history. They all agreed it would take a lot of money. So Bickmore was directed to 28 East Twentieth Street, where Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., resided. The elder Roosevelt had an abiding philanthropic interest in promoting nature education and was friendly with the leading Darwinian scientists in America. Although his reputation for good works was renowned, he wasn’t a pushover. If Theodore Sr. didn’t like a sales pitch, he’d give a firm, definitive no, even if his directness bruised sensibilities. Theodore Jr. wrote in An Autobiography that his father was the “best man” he ever knew but “the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”76

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