The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [44]
In considering the Roosevelt Museum it’s important to remember that Theodore was always trying to emulate both Linnaeus and his father. Just as Theodore Sr. had planning meetings, fund-raising drives, and specimen hunts, so too did his son. Ecstatic about the Fifty-Seventh Street house, particularly because it had more room for his collectibles and curiosities—not to mention a modern gymnasium on the top floor with free weights and parallel bars—Theodore decided to hold a spontaneous Roosevelt Museum “directors’ meeting” on December 26, 1873. Playing the adult, he met with his cousins James West Roosevelt and William Emlen Roosevelt behind closed doors. Big issues needed to be decided, now that he had acquired all these strange Old World birds to add to the New World collection. A professionalization process—imitating the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University—was under way. The document that T.R. drafted illustrates just how businesslike he had become about being a naturalist and scientist:
There has been no meeting for two years owing to the absence of a majority of the members in foreign countries collecting specimens.
Whereas the size of the Museum requires entire reorganization it is resolved that a new constitution be adopted.
Said new constitution having been read and signed by directors. It is also resolved that Mrs. James K. Gracie, Miss Elizabeth Lewis, Mr. Elliott Roosevelt and Mr. John Elliott be constituted members.
It is also resolved that in consideration of the great services rendered by Messrs. Elliott Roosevelt and John Roosevelt that they be not obliged to pay any initiation fee.
It is also resolved that any of the directors be authorized to sell or exchange duplicate specimens of the Museum the proceeds to be given to the Museum.
It is also resolved that Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. President of the Roosevelt Library present at the next meeting written proposition for the incorporation of the Library and Museum.
Present at the meeting:
T. ROOSEVELT, JR.
J. W. [JAMES WEST] ROOSEVELT
W. E. [WILLIAM EMLEN] ROOSEVELT.6
Clearly there was a lot of faux erudition going on here. Although Theodore did keep minutes of the Christmastime meeting, the so-called board didn’t convene again for five months, and then met only to agree on letting Theodore spend $8.50 to purchase new ornithological specimens.7 That modest financial request is the last surviving document pertaining to the Roosevelt Museum. West Roosevelt eventually became chief resident physician at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and Emlen Roosevelt became the senior partner of the Wall Street firm Roosevelt and Son. But Theodore stepped up his naturalist pursuits through a private tutor instead of a board of directors. According to biographer Edmund Morris, acceptance at Harvard “floated ever nearer” and if the “grail eluded his reach, he might not have the strength to grasp it again.”8
Theodore Sr. was elated with his son’s advances toward maturity and with young Theodore’s steady attempt to streamline his naturalist hobby into a serious scientific pursuit. In An Autobiography, in fact, Roosevelt reflected on his father’s sage advice that “if I wished to become a scientific man I could do so,” but as a corollary he had to be dead certain “that I really intensely desired to do scientific work.”9 As of the early 1870s biological studies such as botany and zoology had become truly scientific disciplines. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of modern geography—who died when Roosevelt was one year old—had pioneered in studying the interchange between organisms, habitat, and geography.10 Then, in the early 1880s, the microscope had been invented to study germs. Theodore enjoyed On the Origin of Species, but Theodore Sr. worried that his boy wasn’t going to buckle down in chemistry and physics classes; his son liked bear variations, not cell theory. “I am a belated member of the generation that regarded Audubon with veneration, that accepted [Charles] Waterton