The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [64]
Truth be told, Roosevelt—as of 1874—didn’t have the self-confidence or the desire to date with marriage in mind. He was busy just trying to understand his father’s expectations. The awkward Roosevelt, who was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 124 pounds, strove to improve himself in every way. He grew bushy side-whiskers, developed compact forearms, and wore pressed clothes fit for a sportsman hunting. He always looked as if somebody had slapped the creases out of the fabric for the sake of upholding the family name. Although his parents often straitjacketed Theodore in formal attire, he preferred dressing down like a muskrat trapper or stable keeper; this fashion attitude would change at Harvard.
Visiting Edith at her summer home at Sea Bright, New Jersey, for a week in July 1874, Roosevelt noted that the sand dunes of the barrier beach were brimming with “ornithological enjoyment and reptilian rapture.”15 Playing a Darwinian biologist, he pickled in jars all the toads, frogs, and salamanders he caught for more careful study of their evolutionary stages. Romance with Edith was put on a back burner in favor of writing about New Jersey’s avians in his Notes on Natural History. “Whether inland or on the coast the most conspicuous bird was the fishawk,” he wrote. “It was most plentiful by ponds, and over one of these several pairs of singular birds could almost always be observed, circling through the air on almost motionless wings, usually far out of gunshot range. On a suitable fish being seen, the hawks swoops down with arrow like swiftness, causing a whistling, booming sound as it descended, and stooping with such force as sometimes to totally immerse itself in water.”16
With the hungry speed of youth, Roosevelt was dead certain about his career direction. As his father conceded when they returned from the trip to Europe and the Middle East, he was predisposed to be a scientific naturalist or wildlife biologist. But Theodore Sr. warned his son that a life of science meant long hours in a sterile laboratory; field collecting was only a small part of the profession. Either way, the importance of being accepted at Harvard weighed greatly on young Theodore. When word of his acceptance came in the spring of 1876, he was elated, but he also knew that the time had come to professionalize his infatuation with animals. “When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type,” Roosevelt recalled in An Autobiography, “a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.” The key phrase here is “out-of-doors” he didn’t want to be an indoor scientist, the kind of scientist Captain Reid had shunned.17
Throughout the summer of 1876, as America was in the midst of celebrating its centennial, a Grand Exposition was held in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. It celebrated the industrial march of progress from Alexander Graham Bell demonstrating the telephone to a massive 650-ton steam engine built by Rhode Island’s George Corliss (standing seventy feet high, it was the largest engine ever constructed). At one point, Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass sat side by side onstage; a photograph of them together spoke volumes about the Union victory in the Civil War. The Grand Exposition, in fact, was the first world’s fair held in the United States, and more than 10 million people attended. Young Theodore was one of them. The Department of the Interior created a pioneering display showcasing America’s original native inhabitants in colorful ethnological detail. When Roosevelt visited the fair, what he marveled at most was the display of U.S. wildlife