The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [51]
Neither Grant nor Harrison has been properly credited for small steps in protecting Alaskan wildlife from harpooners and market hunters. As Roosevelt later noted, the foresight of his two fellow Republican presidents regarding Alaskan wildlife had mattered. It proved that the federal government could, when necessary, intervene effectively to help mammals survive as species. Also, it showed that the government would protect the intricate tapestry of nature if the reason for doing so was economically compelling—in the case of Yellowstone, wildlife was being protected for tourism; in Alaska, the motivation was the long-term benefit of the seal-hunting industry.
This economic conservationism was a postulation that T.R.’s uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt—who lived in a brownstone adjacent to T.R.’s birthplace on Twentieth Street in New York City—put to the test regarding the fished-out streams and lakes of North America.
III
As a boy Theodore Roosevelt always had a soft spot for Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his vaguely bohemian “Uncle Rob.” A creative contrarian and lover of animals, birds, and especially fish, Uncle Rob was always caught up in the maelstrom of his times. He simply never sat upright in his carriage. With a bristle-cropped beard, receding hairline, bad eyesight, and frameless spectacles, R.B.R. (as the family called him) would be easy to mistake for any of the bewhiskered American presidents elected between Grant and McKinley. Imbued with an outlandish catholicity of interests, the conspicuous Robert B. Roosevelt epitomized the many-sided Victorian-era bon vivant. For decades the Roosevelt family—owing to his philandering with chorus girls and trollops—treated him as a black sheep. Somehow he just couldn’t control his streak of lechery. Embarrassed by his wayward morals and intellectual incongruities the family, to some extent, banished R.B.R. from the fold. Nevertheless, his shiftiness aside, he was greatly admired in his day by the public at large.45
Robert B. Roosevelt was considered the great U.S. conservationist during the years from the Civil War to the Spanish-American War. “Uncle Rob,” as his nephew Theodore Roosevelt called him, was a many-sided Victorian reformer. In recent years the New York Historical Society (manuscript Department) has opened R.B.R.’s personal scrapbooks for scholarly viewing.
Robert B. Roosevelt. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)
While not quite a bigamist, Robert B. Roosevelt came awfully close to being one. The simple fact was that he led a double life, married to Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt (T.R.’s Aunt Lizzie) while having a long-standing affair with a neighbor, Minnie O’Shea (Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue), whom he hired at the New York Citizen.46 Secretly R.B.R. fathered four children with this mistress. Later, after Elizabeth died, he married Minnie.47 Unfortunately, this affair was so widely frowned upon that Robert B. Roosevelt has not been fully appreciated by recent environmental historians. His diaries and papers were largely hidden by the Roosevelt family for 100 years. Usually R.B.R. sported a porkpie hat and a gray jacket as he squired women around town. As a kind of territorial marker he gave elegant green gloves—purchased in bulk at A.T. Stewart’s department store—to the women he slept with. Society types used to laugh whenever they walked down Fifth Avenue or rode a carriage in Central Park and spied a woman wearing these gloves, which might as well have been the Scarlet Letter.48 Apparently, these women didn’t realize the negative connotation of the gloves.
But R.B.R.’s womanizing was, in truth, the least interesting aspect of him. To many it seemed that he had distinct parts and switched roles dexterously. Casting off and putting on personas, he could be a barroom enthusiast,