The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [58]
At first, the team of Roosevelt and Green made a tactical blunder in initiating public fish hatcheries in New York. The folksy Green went along the banks of the Hudson, telling groups of river men that the hatchery movement was about to make “fish cheap on the open markets.” It was poor public relations, and the New Yorkers were soon acting like their Connecticut neighbors. The fishermen used oars, axes, and sledge hammers to smash shad-hatching boxes, destroying all Green’s initial work.
An infuriated R.B.R. cursed the “inborn cussedness of human nature” and suggested that wardens were needed on the Hudson River to protect state property. Nevertheless, for a few months R.B.R. also sought a rapprochement with the river men. But when Roosevelt heard that Green had been physically harassed by river men for placing hatchery boxes in the Hudson—cigarette butts were flicked at Green and dead shad were thrown in his face—he headed to river towns such as Beacon and Poughkeepsie, threatening to have the saboteurs clapped into prison. “Furious, Roosevelt went in person and harangued the men,” a daughter of R.B.R. wrote in her diary. “Anyone who knew him would realise that this must have been to him not only a relief but a genuine pleasure. He had a surpassing command of irony, sarcasm, and vitriolic incentive combined with a powerfully paternal method of appealing to one’s better nature, that would bring a sob to the throat of the most callous and horny-handed son of toil. So long as the latter was unaware that it was merely forensic eloquence…the fishermen had no chance.”86
Over the years a strong friendship developed between R.B.R. and Green. Whenever Roosevelt took his yacht to Newfoundland or Maine, Green went along in search of nature’s secrets. Constantly trying to update the general public on scientific improvements, in 1879 they cowrote Fish Hatching and Fish Catching and received solid reviews. Their explorations in 1883 of wild Florida’s “abundance, beauty and fragrance of flowers” resulted in another book, Florida and the Game Water Birds. In it, Green was portrayed as a stubborn foil, continually asking unanswerable questions about local diamond-backed terrapins, stingrays, and sharks.87 Taken as a whole, Florida was described by R.B.R. as a “floral El Dorado.”88 Never before had he seen so many ducks and waterfowl. For an educational appendix to Florida and the Game Water Birds, R.B.R. provided a brief paragraph about each avian species he encountered in Florida. He was building on the traditions of William Bartram and John James Audubon. “There are no dangerous animals in Florida, only a few of Eve’s old enemies,” R.B.R. wrote, “and the sportsman is safer in the woods at night under the moss-covered trees and on his moss-constructed mattress than in his bed in the family mansion on Fifth Avenue.”89
The pliable Green, however, wasn’t always just a sidekick to R.B.R.’s Huck Finn. He did write Robert B. Roosevelt a letter later that year as his rich friend was fueling speculation about running for mayor of New York City. Green saw that his employer’s pigheadedness would make political compromise impossible. “I know you have a big solid head,” he wrote to Roosevelt. “But the ware and tare of if you was mayor of New York would be more than it would be on the yacht. There you don’t have but a few to conquer & some times you find you are wrong and have to take water…. I know you would be always right if you was mayor but there is so many thieves they would keep you awake nights. I know you would get the best of them but it would take a heap of work.”90
Truth be told, R.B.R. was enjoying rural life on Long Island’s Great South Bay (a lagoon) too much to be mayor of any city. In 1873 he had paid $14,000 for a two-acre estate near Sayville. The Suffolk County News described the estate as “a comfortable but unpretentious villa.”91 Living in a dream of bliss, R.B.R. named