The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [52]
During the Civil War R.B.R. served in a New York volunteer regiment; this experience provided him with enduring friendships. During Reconstruction he took his gusto for reform into the political sphere in 1870 and was elected to Congress; the only reason he ran was to establish federal fish hatcheries. Following a successful two-year stint in Washington, D.C., promoting pisciculture, he wrote plays and became commissioner of the Brooklyn Bridge (1879–1881), overseeing architectural adjustments and maintenance issues. As U.S. minister to the Netherlands under President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Roosevelt was at his smooth-functioning best in promoting a special “Dutch-American” relationship. Extremely adept at fund-raising, he served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee in 1892, helping elect Cleveland for a second (nonconsecutive) presidential term.51
Erudition came easily to Robert B. Roosevelt. A self-styled man of letters, he wrote one mediocre novel—Love and Luck (1880)—which didn’t sell well. But his comic satire Five Acres Too Much (1869), which spoofed the virtues of farming, struck a chord in the immediate post–Civil War years, when laughs were in short supply.52 His other offbeat novel, Progressive Petticoats (1874), a lampoon of women suffragists, was also enthusiastically received. (For a modern-day comparison, he was the David Lodge of his generation). His pasquinades had ardent fans. As a personal favor, Robert B. Roosevelt also edited the flowery poetry of General Charles G. Halpine (Miles O’Reily), his coeditor at the New York Citizen.53 Sometimes R.B.R. wrote limericks himself—which were topical, like most efforts in this genre, and uniformly bad. On the whole, Roosevelt’s literary efforts, read a century after they were written, no longer sparkle; posterity has thrown them overboard. Only occasionally does his wit hold up. But R.B.R.’s furious advocacy of “fish rights,” the nonprofit sine qua non that became his sustainable legacy, has enduring historical importance, though it has been undervalued by academic scholars.54 R.B.R., more than any other direct influence, turned Theodore Roosevelt into a conservationist as a teenager.
Born on August 27, 1829, Robert B. Roosevelt grew up in New York City. Turning his back on the mercantile life of his father, Cornelius V. S. Roosevelt, and the Quakerism of his mother, Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt, R.B.R. became a maverick who gravitated toward the pageantry of wild things.55 Later in life Hamilton Fish—who had served as governor of New York and Grant’s secretary of state—dubbed R.B.R. “Father of all the Fishes.”56 Robert’s unconventionality first became clear when he changed his middle name, Barnhill, to Barnwell to avoid jokes about manure. As a teenager, he fished the briny waters of Long Island Sound for striped bass and bluefish whenever the opportunity presented itself. College, however, wasn’t important to the short, portly R.B.R. For all his erudition, he was happiest outdoors, whether at sea or on land. He flouted civil niceties, always speaking his mind candidly. Even his enemies—and there were many—couldn’t deny that he was frank.
When Robert turned twenty-one years old, he married Elizabeth Ellis and embarked on a political career as a Democrat. His decision to remain a Democrat, even after Abraham Lincoln walked onto the national stage, cast a lingering haze of suspicion over him in family