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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,