Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, raised in Newburgh, was strong willed and attractive, with brown hair and bright eyes. She had a lifelong passion for learning. In girlhood she cruised to Hong Kong and traveled Europe extensively. Sir Walter Raleigh’s six-volume History of the World was her favorite literary work.28 Fluent in German and French, she learned to paint portraits and landscapes from Hudson River Valley artist Frederic Edwin Church, who lived in nearby Greenpoint at his estate, Olana, overlooking the Hudson. And she loved the fresh air, often saying, “All weather is good weather.”29
For generations, the seafaring Delanos had made fortunes in the trade of opium, sugar, and tea from China; Sara traveled there for the first time at age eight. The Delanos could trace their roots back to the Mayflower and to French Huguenot immigrants of the seventeenth century. In 1817 Captain Amasa Delano of Massachusetts wrote the first quasi-scientific tract about the Galápagos Islands, decades before Charles Darwin’s expedition on the Beagle. One of Sara’s grandfathers had been a New Bedford whaling captain; in the early nineteenth century, he built a home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, within a day’s sail of Buzzards Bay and Naushon Island.30 “Despite Sara’s far-flung travels,” biographer Jan Pottker wrote, “her schooling abroad, and her frequent trips to Manhattan, she preferred the country to city life.”31
Sara was a careful mother who instinctively played the role of Hyde Park matriarch.32 Blessed with a gift for homemaking and enabled by a loyal staff, she indulged Franklin’s every whim.33 Any playground scratch or bruise her boy suffered was dramatized into a life-threatening medical crisis. He was raised to become a Dutchess County gentleman—the most fitting trajectory for a patrician lad. All of her husband’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s sweat-and-blood rhetoric, as typified in his Darwinian philosophy of the “strenuous life,” left her stone cold. “My son Franklin is a Delano,” she insisted, “not a Roosevelt at all.”34
There were seminal differences between the Oyster Bay (Long Island) and Hudson River Valley branches of the Roosevelt family. The Oyster Bay clan was Republican; those in the mid-Hudson, like James, were Democrats. Though Theodore Roosevelt was only FDR’s fifth cousin, he cast a long and triumphant shadow. To FDR, he was always “Uncle Theodore,” his idol and counselor. Both the Oyster Bay and the Hudson River clans believed passionately in the conservation of natural resources. They shared the idea that depleted soil, polluted water, clear-cut forests, and dwindling wildlife could all be restored to their former glory with proper scientific management. Although the reform-minded TR articulated the sentiment best, the entire family was appalled at the crime, poverty, and urban blight that had turned so many New York City neighborhoods into hellholes of squalor. All the Roosevelts believed cities needed to imitate the virtues of small towns like Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, by maintaining tree-lined streets and building handsome parks. While not antiurban per se, the Roosevelts championed “regional cities” where cosmopolitanism could intersect with community values and nature to form an ideal.
Sara Roosevelt idealized the Hudson River Valley with a blend of unabashed sentimentality and plain reasoning. There was something magical, she knew, about the 825 square miles of Dutchess County with its many pristine pockets of wild greenery and thick woods. With the exception of the city of Poughkeepsie, life in the county was quietly pastoral and agricultural. In 1938, while Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House, Sara Roosevelt wrote a nostalgic foreword to a locally published book, Crum Elbow Folks, that pined for the “pat of horse’s feet in the gray sand dust.” Like that of the nature essayist John Burroughs, who lived across the Hudson from Springwood in West Park, her favorite bird was the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus)—“the shyest of songsters”—because it “poured forth” glorious woodland melodies. Sara bemoaned the plight of the fox grape, a musky-scented vine that, she recalled, “filled the air with its perfume,” while in autumn “the little bunches of bright blue grapes were hung thick among the branches.”35 She maintained that the grape was “ruthlessly destroyed” by misguided farmers who had no aesthetic appreciation for the vine.
Both James and Sara, as good Democrats, thought Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, New York, was a model leader. They supported his campaigns for governor and president with ardor, admiring his bravery in confronting the Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall. Cleveland served two separate terms as president, winning in 1884 and 1892, but losing in 1888. James and Sara felt President Cleveland had used his veto power impressively to prevent special interests from gaining a foothold in his government and successfully kept the country out of international entanglements. At one point, James took Franklin to Washington to meet President Cleveland at the Executive Mansion (it was renamed the White House by Theodore Roosevelt in 1901). “I’m making a strange wish for you, little man, a wish that I suppose no one else would make,” Cleveland said to Franklin, placing his hand on the young man’s head. “I wish for you that you may never be president of the United States.”36 At the time, in the mid-1890s, Franklin’s distant cousin, Theodore, was beginning his path to the White House, as president of the board of the New York City Police Commissioners.
Young Franklin was proud that another distant cousin, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt was considered the preeminent pisciculturist of New York during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. While RBR, a Democrat, had an amazing résumé—including a term representing New York in Congress, a stint as ambassador to the Netherlands under President Cleveland and political prominence as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee—wildlife protection was his true calling. He wrote stylish essays about the art of angling and about the biology of trout, perch, and shad. A devoted follower of Charles Darwin, RBR documented the evolution of eels and frogs. He railed against industrial outfits that dumped contaminants into the Hudson River, thereby preventing Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) from successfully reproducing.37 The prolific RBR wrote esteemed books including Game Fish of the Northern States of America and British Provinces (1862), The Game-Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of Northern States of America (1866), and Superior Fishing (1884).38 Every June, he celebrated the northern migration of striped bass (Morone saxatilis) from his Long Island home to the coastal waters of New England. Working with fish culturist Seth Green of Caledonia, New York, RBR helped establish state-run fish hatcheries in Cold Spring Harbor and Rochester.
RBR was one of the early “riverkeepers” of the Hudson. By the late 1890s the waterway was being destroyed by runoff from quarrying; its water was often too toxic to drink. Unregulated factories had turned quiet backwaters and tributaries of the great river into dumping grounds. Oil spills from ships on the Hudson, particularly in the summertime, caused “petroleum vapor conflagration”; this, in turn, triggered respiratory illnesses.39 Pollution came not only from industrial pollutants but also from human waste. In an era before modern sanitation, pits under privies were supposed to be emptied regularly by “night soil” workers, but sometimes the waste made its way into the Hudson and other rivers in New York—especially as the population grew. The water became contaminated and the incidence of cholera and other communicable diseases soared. After a cholera outbreak killed thousands in 1832, the Old Croton Aqueduct was built alongside the Hudson, running through the towns of Westchester County before entering the Bronx at Van Cortlandt Park. By the 1890s, New York City received 90 percent of its drinking water via this aqueduct.40
Prominent River Families like the Harrimans, Osborns, Borgs, Luddingtons, and Morgenthaus, who believed the river helped define them, fought to make water from the Hudson healthy.41 Like the Roosevelts, these wealthy families considered the river America’s Rhine—placid, restrained, and seldom reaching flood stage. Together they labored to save their beloved Hudson from ruin.
II
In the summer of 1883, Sara, James, and Franklin went north on a holiday. Their destination was Campobello Island in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, situated where the Saint Croix
River meets the Bay of Fundy (only a moat of water separated Campobello from the fishing hamlet of Lubec, Maine, the easternmost point of the United States).42 Once the train deposited the Roosevelts in Eastport, Maine, the family took a ferry across the border to get to Campobello, a fifteen-square-mile island.43 The Roosevelts stayed at Tyn-y-coed (House in the Woods), a secluded inn with wonderful waterfront views and a “reputation for fresh air.”44
The Roosevelts had such a grand time at “Campo” that they returned there year after year. Eventually they bought a four-acre parcel on the conifer-dotted island, where they built a sprawling, gable-roofed, maroon house of thirty-four rooms. They were finally able to stay in the mansion, dubbed “Granny’s Cottage,” beginning in 1895.45 Every summer James Roosevelt would dock his sailing yacht at the island. With Franklin as his first mate, they’d navigate the windy Passamaquoddy Bay, an inlet of the Bay of Fundy characterized by rocks, vicious currents, and drastic tides. When Franklin was six, a photograph was taken of him clutching the steering wheel, seeming at least “momentarily in command” of the vessel.46
Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite ships were schooners with two or more masts. These rakish vessels had sailed in great numbers in the Atlantic Ocean from 1830 to 1920. By the time Franklin turned ten, he had become a solid sailor with an understanding of how to “change tack,” remain flexible in changing winds, and navigate capably even in fierce chop. Everyone was impressed with how easily he read nautical maps and understood weather conditions at sea. For Franklin’s sixteenth birthday, his father gave him a twenty-one-foot knockabout; he named the boat New Moon.47
In late summer the Roosevelts traditionally left Campobello for a month’s vacation in the Saint Regis area of the Adirondack Park. From the favored lodge grounds Franklin studied mountainsides replete with hemlock, pine, and spruce trees.48 Even the decaying tree trunks were of interest to him. Families with vast wealth and good taste—the Rockefellers, Astors, Vanderbilts, and Roosevelts among them—built or leased “camps” high in the Adirondacks to escape the summertime heat and the congestion of their city lives. These camps weren’t mere tents in the forest any more than the marble palaces of Newport were “cottages.” The stateliest variety, which the Roosevelts favored, were rustic mansions built with timber and stone. The wealthy Adirondacks set shared a belief that small-scale family logging, mindful of reckless forestry practices such as clear-cutting, were vastly preferable to giant outfits like the Hudson River Pulp Company, then using new technology for processing paper pulp from ground wood.49
Shuttling around the Adirondacks, New York City, Hyde Park, Campobello Island, and western Europe became commonplace for young Franklin. By the time he turned fourteen, he had already made seven voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, on trips ranging in duration from two to four months.50 On one such holiday, in May 1891, James, suffering from heart problems, brought his family to Bad Nauheim, a German spa. As people had done since the time of imperial Rome, he sought relief at the world-famous hydrotherapy facilities. While his father “took the cure,” Franklin went sightseeing in such nearby cities as Cologne and Heidelberg, and attended a German-language school. He particularly enjoyed exploring the well-tended German forests—managed successfully for centuries—that surrounded Bad Nauheim. “The interesting thing to me, as a boy even,” Roosevelt later recalled, “was that the people in that town didn’t have to pay taxes. They were supported by their own forest.”51
III
Barely a day went by when Franklin didn’t talk about the world of birds. At ten years old he started dabbling in oology, the collecting of eggs and nests. There is a well-circulated story about young Franklin racing into a family Easter party holding a blue-speckled robin’s egg in his hand as if it were a Tiffany jewel. James Roosevelt eventually discovered drawers full of nests and eggs hidden in his son’s bedroom. Displeased, he ordered Franklin never to rob a nest of more than one egg. That wildlife conservation lesson stuck. So did Franklin’s love of birds. As a boy, he began a very grown-up course of study, reading copiously, making field notes, and demonstrating to others his ability to organize in his own mind all that he was learning. Soon the boy gained his own reputation, independent of his family, as a local authority on birds.52
On occasion, Franklin gave impromptu lectures at Springwood and Campobello for family members, neighbors, and household servants on subjects such as the Atlantic Flyway (although this term for the bird migration route stretching from Canada to the Caribbean wasn’t officially used until 1947). “Many people do not know what a great variety of birds we have,” he wrote in his first ornithological essay. “They can always point out a robin but probably could not tell the difference between a Fox Sparrow and a Song Sparrow and think that a nuthatch is a woodpecker.”53
When Warren Delano of Newburgh heard his grandson hold forth on “The Shore Birds of Maine,” he gifted Franklin a lifetime membership in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And he introduced Franklin to the organization’s esteemed president, vertebrate paleontologist Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn.54 Not only was Osborn a great advocate for Hudson River and Jamaica Bay (between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens) ecological preservation, he also headed the Save-the-Redwoods League in California.
The Roosevelts had other connections to important conservationists. Their close friend George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, had established the first Audubon Society in 1886, just four years after Franklin’s birth. The Audubon Society’s declared mission was to outlaw the mass slaughter of wild birds that weren’t fit for human consumption; the vandalizing of nests and stealing of eggs; and the use of feathers in fashion or as ornaments.55 Women’s fashion of the period dictated that sophisticates wear hats adorned with exotic plumage from herons and egrets. Whole flocks of migratory waterfowl were being shot in Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana by hunters eager to supply New York milliners with feathers.56
On Franklin’s eleventh birthday, James Roosevelt gave his boy a handsome pellet gun for the purpose of collecting bird trophies. It wasn’t long before his mother was able to record that his first shot struck a crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos).57 The hobby stuck. Wandering around his family’s woodlands, he learned that different species of birds had their own favorite kinds of trees. The cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum), for example, gravitated toward hawthorns, while the red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis) claimed longleaf and slash pines. One day near the hamlet of Staatsburg, Franklin studied a Cooper’s hawk (Accipiter cooperii) that flew right up to him “and appeared to be tame”; the unafraid raptor had probably migrated from Canada and never before encountered humans.58 Obsessed with bird checklists, Franklin shot and classified three hundred species native to Dutchess County.59 Most of the bodies were carefully preserved. Family members—Roosevelts and Delanos alike—joked that Franklin was himself a magpie, a collector of everything related to ornithology. Learning the complete taxonomy of species, he painstakingly wrote Latin labels for each specimen to place near its claws. “It was not long before the big mahogany cabinet in the library acquired a collection of brand new inhabitants,” Sara Roosevelt recalled in her memoir, My Boy Franklin. “There was an oriole, a heron, a robin, a woodpecker, and even a hawk, but the winter wren was missing.”60
Whether Franklin Roosevelt would ever snag a winter wren (Troglodytes hiemalis) became a popular dinner-table topic at Springwood. It was a challenge that the self-styled ornithologist took up with gleeful determination. One afternoon he nonchalantly walked into the main house looking for his fowling piece. “There’s a winter wren way up in one of the big trees down there,” he said confidently. “I want to get him.” His mother chuckled at his boyish naïveté. “And do you think that wren is going to oblige you by staying there while you come in and get your gun to go back out and shoot him?” Franklin was undaunted. “Oh yes,” he replied, “he’ll wait.”
An amused Sara Roosevelt watched her son race across the lawn,
prepared to tease him for coming home empty-handed. But to her imperishable surprise Franklin returned to the house a single shot later with the dead winter wren in hand.61
The majority of Roosevelt’s specimens were from Springwood and Crumworld Forest, the neighboring estate belonging to Colonel Archibald Rogers, which may have been the best natural environment in the Hyde Park area for bird-watching. Rogers had worked with the department of forestry at Cornell University to turn his Hyde Park property into an outdoor aviary consisting of a combination of shady tree groves, thick underbrush, and specialized plantings. It was Rogers who encouraged the Cornell Agriculture Experiment Station to help him gather data for a series of Dutchess County residential reforestation projects. Rogers had completed his house in 1889 after buying five smaller estates to form his impressive grounds, and every spring he had trees planted by the thousands. He encouraged the Roosevelts to develop a scientific forestry plan for Springwood. Even after automobiles became ubiquitous, the colonel preferred to travel on horseback to avoid scaring birds. His primary ambition in life was to be the kind of land steward George Washington would have warmly embraced as a neighbor in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
Owing to Franklin’s enthusiasm, ornithological pursuits were built into the Roosevelts’ European itineraries. While in London one year, Franklin wanted to make an excursion to Osberton, the Nottinghamshire seat of Cecil Foljambe (earl of Liverpool, a friend of the Roosevelts), to study his famous collection. When James canceled the Nottinghamshire trip for business reasons, Franklin was inconsolable.
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