The Art of Manliness - #194： The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so if you've been

00:00:18.940 following the art of manliness for a while you know we're big fans of theodore roosevelt around

00:00:23.140 here the guy crammed a lot into a lifetime there's a new biography out about him that takes a look

00:00:29.160 at his life as a natural historian conservationist hunter and it uses tr's actual field notes that he

00:00:36.400 took out in the field as the primary source to write this biography it's called theodore roosevelt

00:00:41.420 in the field today on the show the author michael canfield and i discuss what we can learn about

00:00:46.840 teddy roosevelt's approach to life from his field notes that he meticulously began as a boy he started

00:00:51.580 this when he was like eight or nine years old and he continued uh throughout his even throughout his

00:00:55.620 presidency we also talk about how his field notes that he took helped sharpen his keen sense of

00:01:01.240 observation and how that helped him during his presidency and his political life and then finally

00:01:05.920 michael and i discuss what life lessons men can take from the field notes of the bull moose himself

00:01:11.580 theodore roosevelt really interesting show uh be sure to check the show notes out after you listen

00:01:16.240 because you can actually see actual scanned images of teddy roosevelt's field notes as well as links to

00:01:22.540 resources mentioned the show you can find the show notes at aom.is slash canfield and that's spelled

00:01:28.860 c-a-n-f-i-e-l-d mike canfield welcome to the show thank you for having me so you got a great biography

00:01:45.600 out about theodore roosevelt um but this one's unique it's called theodore roosevelt in the field

00:01:51.840 and it's unique in that you focus on his life as a natural scientist hunter conservationist using his

00:02:00.580 field books field notebooks that he kept all throughout his life as your primary source

00:02:06.020 i'm curious how did you get interested in this part of teddy roosevelt's life that's a good question i

00:02:13.720 got interested in his field notes from a previous project that i did on how currently living scientists

00:02:21.260 and naturalists keep their notebooks and journals and kind of try to figure out how people would

00:02:26.960 actually keep scientific and natural history information in the field as opposed to how we

00:02:33.580 think they might or what we would imagine and so out of that process uh and project i did a little bit

00:02:41.620 of consideration on historical field notes darwin linnaeus uh even lewis and clark's notes from their

00:02:49.820 expedition and stumbled across theodore roosevelt's notes um which are here at harvard um about two

00:02:57.320 thirds of the notebooks are in our theodore roosevelt collection and i found them and i was actually just

00:03:03.240 talking to somebody about them at one point describing the africa diary the 1909 africa diary with

00:03:08.860 these these images that roosevelt wrote these little sort of scrawled images of all the animals he

00:03:14.760 shot and it kind of just took off from there so yeah you use these notebooks uh they have some of

00:03:22.020 them at the the archives at harvard university um you know and it's crazy how do we have field note

00:03:28.780 and field notebooks from when he was a nine-year-old boy because he started this as a very young man we'll

00:03:33.100 talk about his career as a natural scientist or a naturalist as a as a child but you know i i had a

00:03:40.420 journal when i was in second or third grade so about the same age as theodore roosevelt when he was

00:03:44.960 doing his field notebooks but i threw him away so why why why what was it about how did teddy roosevelt

00:03:52.660 why did he keep these field notebooks from when he was a eight nine-year-old ten-year-old boy

00:03:56.520 i think that part of it was that he was very serious about his natural history study his study

00:04:04.320 of the world um there's no question about that he was very studious um and i think there was more

00:04:11.140 of a tradition back then of keeping diaries in other words um writing in diaries and then and then

00:04:18.260 maintaining them one thing i found very interesting though was that there's evidence that he actually

00:04:23.680 copied over his diaries and journal accounts so one of the earlier journals from his what they call

00:04:31.860 his grand tour um when he went off with his family to europe the first time he kept a diary and there

00:04:39.940 is a diary actually which he kept as a little herbarium he pressed plants in it which still survives we have

00:04:45.680 this diary and we have the little pressed plants inside and then there's another journal which is not

00:04:51.780 not in the diary format that has like you know the names or the dates and the lines printed on the

00:04:57.920 pages but just a blank journal that he wrote in and some of them are actually some dates have a

00:05:04.480 entry in the diary and then there's in a separate journal the same diary entry that's been copied over

00:05:14.140 but actually the punctuation and the grammar is slightly better so what roosevelt had done is he'd gone

00:05:20.840 back to some of his diaries and copied them over into journals like actually copied over the accounts

00:05:26.680 so it's not clear that all the original actually the original documents actually survived um but but

00:05:33.880 many of these journals and diaries survived and i think he they were just very important to him and he

00:05:38.820 was serious about his recording partly because it allowed him to tell stories and narratives of his

00:05:45.880 adventures which we can get to later but it certainly showed up in the badlands and and when he was

00:05:50.020 doing more professional writing on his adventures well let's talk about his the seriousness that he

00:05:55.820 took his i mean he even as a boy he thought of himself as a natural scientist i guess they'd call

00:06:01.880 himself a natural historian yeah um i mean so how did this boy he grew up in a brownstone in new york city

00:06:08.140 so an urban area how did he develop this intense love for the outdoors and all things nature

00:06:16.100 um despite growing up in an urban area yeah well that's a great question and i think it probably

00:06:22.280 has a number of um potential answers which i don't think we can know for sure um you know wilson and

00:06:29.680 other people might call it biophilia people who you know people just love nature and are naturally

00:06:34.920 connected to nature but roosevelt obviously was an extreme case in this instance along with many others

00:06:41.880 but he he loved it from a very young age he was drawn to it and he had so i guess what i was what i

00:06:49.540 would say is that he had a natural predisposition he just seemed to love to go out and study nature but it

00:06:56.040 wasn't just about studying nature he just loved to go out and do things in the world and that's a facet

00:07:02.860 that i think is people look to his early natural history study and say oh he was a naturalist from a young

00:07:08.020 age and i would agree that's true absolutely he loved nature but he also i would say that's a

00:07:15.460 symptom of a larger character um element in roosevelt that he loved to just go out to what

00:07:22.700 i call the field he loved to go out and do things in the greater world connect directly with his greater

00:07:29.440 world and the early natural history stuff was an example of that his father especially but his family

00:07:36.700 made a lot of those early expeditions possible early on he went to the great swamp area of new jersey

00:07:43.040 this town called lawanica there's a little brook called lawanica brook where they went and rented a

00:07:49.400 house and he rambled around in nature looking at birds and cicadas and all the rest and then later

00:07:54.860 obviously they went to oyster bay and up into the adirondack so his family took him out a lot away from

00:08:01.380 new york city um to natural areas uh and they spent a lot of time in the summers especially in those

00:08:07.560 areas and speaking of how his father encouraged this um i mean what other ways i mean i thought

00:08:13.580 when i read this part of roosevelt's life i really admired his father uh he was actually a really great

00:08:19.760 example of what it means to be a good dad i mean what were some of the other ways that teddy

00:08:24.360 roosevelt's father theodore roosevelt's father uh encouraged this love of nature in his son

00:08:29.760 yeah well i mean certainly just making the expeditions happen if you want to call them

00:08:36.720 expeditions going up to upstate new york etc i would say also he his father theodore senior went with

00:08:45.560 roosevelt on some of these things there's a great passage where roosevelt describes in his diary

00:08:50.860 his father reading to him from the last of the mohicans around a campfire in upstate new york 0.97

00:08:58.600 while he fell asleep so to me that's just a such a great symbol or poignant moment when you see

00:09:06.120 roosevelt's father instilling this love of the field in roosevelt what could be better than being

00:09:12.640 out on a canoe trip with your dad and he reads you know the last of the mohicans to you and you fall 1.00

00:09:18.100 asleep it's awesome yeah um another another element i think that um his dad who was not a naturalist

00:09:25.480 himself um but just saw this interest early on in roosevelt um when roosevelt you know was theodore

00:09:31.340 was carrying these books around the his family's library from david livingstone or you know about

00:09:36.700 africa and all these other things he he recognized in his son that this was an interest and he was going

00:09:42.780 to foster it roosevelt senior helped found the american museum of natural history so albert s

00:09:50.400 bickmore who was an advocate had come to see theodore senior for funding and and support to create the

00:09:57.760 amnh in new york and theater theodore roosevelt's dad really helped and helped found it in in their

00:10:03.260 living room at the brownstone um and another example is when they um came back from their trip to uh

00:10:11.980 roosevelt's trip um to europe he his father actually hooked him up with john bell who was a taxidermist

00:10:19.900 who had worked with john james audubon he was the kind of audubon's right hand man this being bell

00:10:27.040 who had a taxidermy shop and i interpret i'm not it doesn't say explicitly that his father

00:10:33.620 made the connection although roosevelt sort of says that it seems that roosevelt's father really got

00:10:40.860 him a position working and learning from john bell of how to prepare uh ornithological specimens so

00:10:47.660 there are a bunch of different ways that his dad really nurtured that and i guess the last thing is

00:10:53.420 that when he went to college his father said something like i can't quote it just off off the

00:11:00.020 top of my head but he said something like if you want to be a scientist you're free to do so i will

00:11:05.400 support you in that you're not going to make as much money you're not going to have as as sort of

00:11:10.660 elaborate a life as you have here but you can make that decision and i always thought that was a pretty

00:11:15.760 nice thing for a father to do too to be realistic but put the decision in his son's court yeah i love that

00:11:23.400 and going back to how serious roosevelt took himself as a naturalist even as a boy like you

00:11:30.620 talk about in the book he you know kept very detailed notes or records of animals he saw the

00:11:37.500 habitats etc but like he even kept he had a museum inside his his house yeah yeah he did and he they

00:11:47.280 called it the roosevelt museum of natural history and he founded this with his cousins and a few other

00:11:53.020 associated compatriots um and they had a natural history society as well a group so they they had

00:12:00.320 this museum right where they contributed their collected specimens and then they also had what

00:12:05.980 they called a society where they actually would present papers to one another so they would write

00:12:10.720 up a little paper on one of them is about my the migration of whales and roosevelt would read this

00:12:17.600 paper and they would talk about it so he wrote this thing out and they would present it to each other and

00:12:22.100 talk about the finer points of whales migrating so they were serious they they were modeling kind of

00:12:28.680 what happened in the linnaean society and some of the you know professional natural history

00:12:34.020 biological societies in the world um but they were acting this out in a serious way not just sort of

00:12:41.420 put you know collecting a few shells and birds eggs and stuff um and that really led to him

00:12:47.100 studying with bell and preparing specimens and as he you know went through his teenage years and into

00:12:52.780 college he then you know had a had a pretty extensive collection of bird skins and knowledge

00:12:58.220 of birds um that led to some of his his first publications as well right just to remind people

00:13:03.780 like they were he was having these natural history society meetings when he was like eight or nine years

00:13:08.020 old uh that yeah i mean that was a little i think the the main natural history society things when

00:13:14.380 um they presented papers were a little later probably 13 14 ish um but yeah he started collecting

00:13:21.460 and that whole question of childhood natural history museums was was kind of a thing but you know

00:13:28.860 people kids would do that um not everybody obviously but but other people who were his peers and um

00:13:36.100 that was kind of a a reasonably common thing for kids to do who were really kind of biologically

00:13:42.440 inclined um would do some of that so but i think he took it to a little bit more of a professional

00:13:50.180 sense than most kids most kids would just have stuff in their room or whatever but he they formalized

00:13:54.940 this there's a document um which you can read in the book and um at harvard the you know that is the

00:14:01.760 roosevelt museum of natural history history document that is sort of their their charter

00:14:06.680 where they wrote it all out um so it wasn't just an informal thing they were serious about it yeah and

00:14:13.600 i thought there was a funny scene where i think someone either a maid or his mother threw out

00:14:20.020 some animals that he had collected right the mice yeah i mean yeah there were they're periodic

00:14:27.040 examples of him butting up against these things you know some at home when he originally had the

00:14:35.940 museum in his bedroom and then the maid sort of said this is not okay with us and so they had to

00:14:42.340 move it up to a more remote location in the house and then when he was in dresden the um you know he was

00:14:50.720 keeping mice and other things and the family he was staying with with just were you know trying to get

00:14:56.680 rid of all these crazy animals that roosevelt was keeping in the house um so you know he his um how

00:15:03.880 should i say this his tolerance and interest in having a little natural history museum in his room

00:15:09.680 didn't always fit with um how other people thought about it and i guess even when he came to to harvard

00:15:16.280 um his boarding house uh on winthrop street which i'm actually just looking out the window right now

00:15:21.940 and it's at that site the the the um boarding house is no longer there um but where he lived here

00:15:28.660 if you look at the photographs he brought a lot of that kind of thing into his boarding house room as

00:15:35.800 well when he was in college so yeah he brought his taxidermy kit yeah all that kind of stuff like

00:15:41.120 you know he'd bring in turtles or whatever whatever kind of stuff he found um into his room yeah

00:15:48.100 so did uh theodore roosevelt actually make contributions to the field of natural history

00:15:53.640 as a young man or was this i mean was or was this just a hobby yeah i i think that you could make the

00:16:00.820 case that he definitely did um early on you know in his teenage years his collections were pretty

00:16:08.320 how should i say it's pretty professionalized for that age he wrote species accounts especially for the

00:16:15.800 um specimens that he collected on the trip to egypt and the holy lands for example he has multiple

00:16:23.600 accounts of them multiple specimens that he's dissected and documented the contents of the crops

00:16:29.440 and um all that so there's really good natural history information there it's that set of information that he

00:16:38.960 created there was never published in that form and isn't a real scientific contribution

00:16:45.040 but it allowed him to then when he came to harvard um if he ended up assessing the i guess you'd call

00:16:57.400 it the ornithological fauna the the birds of the adirondacks and the birds of oyster bay where he'd

00:17:02.820 spend a lot of the summers and then they published um a couple of bird lists which are a true contribution

00:17:10.120 to natural history because when you make a a list a faunal list of say the adirondacks or oyster bay

00:17:18.780 then that gives sort of a snapshot in time of what organisms live there in this case birds

00:17:25.860 that can people then can compare to later on or can go down there and know what's there so yes he

00:17:32.780 absolutely did and um some of the work he did as a late teen in oyster bay folded into that stuff

00:17:38.860 that he then published in the oyster bay um bird list very cool um so you you mentioned earlier that

00:17:47.120 pivotal moment where roosevelt's father told him like you can be a natural scientist and i'll support

00:17:53.820 you um you know i was kind of that was his career trajectory but what at what point did roosevelt

00:18:02.300 decide that he wasn't going to be a full-time natural historian and instead devote himself

00:18:07.660 to politics that's a great um moment i think in roosevelt's development when he came to harvard i

00:18:17.300 he really was interested in becoming a scientist and he did enjoy his natural history courses here for

00:18:25.000 sure um there's clear evidence of that um in his notebooks but also in how he talked about his time

00:18:32.220 but i my interpretation is that there are a few pieces that caused him to pivot away from that

00:18:38.320 one caused him to pivot away from becoming a full-time sort of naturalist scientist of the day

00:18:47.060 um one was the studies that were going on here and the way that uh natural history and science was being

00:18:55.000 um was being taught in the museum of comparative zoology which is our sort of the natural history

00:19:01.680 museum at harvard um the way it was being taught at the time really grew out of a a german school

00:19:10.800 where they were doing a lot of section cutting and pulling organisms apart and looking at very small

00:19:17.420 things under the microscope etc and with a lower um how should i say this it was a lower focus on

00:19:25.200 field work and field work was really where roosevelt wanted to be he wanted to be out in the field

00:19:29.300 you know looking at animals in their natural habitat etc and so i think over time he enjoyed

00:19:35.900 his natural history courses but that just wasn't for him sitting in the museum a lot um so that's one

00:19:41.360 piece and he also had an interest i think in uh politics and history and other things but that

00:19:50.880 came i think out of partly when his father died in um around christmas 1877 his father became sick

00:19:59.620 and roosevelt went home and um of course his dad gave him a shotgun for christmas which is a good

00:20:05.740 good rooseveltian present um but then roosevelt came back afterwards to harvard and it wasn't long

00:20:13.080 that his father really descended into uh had a had a stomach tumor um an intestinal tumor and ended up

00:20:20.640 dying uh in february and so roosevelt i think at that point it changed a lot of things but he became

00:20:30.620 the head of the family um and i think it it changed the optics of how it looked to be say a natural

00:20:38.420 historian who's not going to make a whole lot of money and i think that helped him pivot toward doing

00:20:44.180 something that was a career and what he thought of as public service going into um you know politics

00:20:49.960 the law etc and he you know after graduation he immediately started law school but didn't finish

00:20:55.140 um because he started um in the legislature so that's one thing and i think the the third thing

00:21:00.400 is that he met alice lee he fell in love he got a girlfriend and i think that also in some of the

00:21:09.980 writings and some of the things in his letters and in his notebooks you can see him completely falling

00:21:15.100 head over heels for alice lee and realizing that he wanted to have a settled existence and that going

00:21:22.220 off to germany to do graduate work in natural history study or all these other things was not

00:21:27.820 going to be the kind of life that he wanted with his darling little sweetheart alice lee and so i think

00:21:33.580 all those things kind of pulled kind of came together and caused him to move more toward what at that

00:21:41.160 point was called political economy he started writing the naval war of 1812 and um some of those things

00:21:46.940 and then pretty quickly after he graduated um did law school and then became an assemblyman

00:21:51.860 and uh but at the same time he didn't abandon the field completely he always looked for ways to

00:21:59.140 get back out there and continue in some small ways work as a natural historian absolutely yeah i think

00:22:06.480 that's um kind of one of the arguments that i'm trying to advance or for consideration is that

00:22:12.140 you can see at all these little turning points even though he didn't decide to be a professional

00:22:19.440 naturalist or professional natural history writer for his full career he was president at one point

00:22:25.840 at all these points along the way he took the opportunity to turn back to the field and do

00:22:31.640 things for example it wasn't long after you know he hadn't been assemblyman that long until he met this

00:22:40.260 guy at um one of his free trade club meeting um who had a place in the badlands and had bought

00:22:47.920 but land in the badlands and roosevelt had always wanted to go out and shoot a buffalo or a bison as

00:22:53.840 it's called um and he quickly signed up and went out there on his own it turns out in the end um the

00:23:02.480 man grinch didn't decide to go with him um but that's what roosevelt did even before alice lee died

00:23:08.640 um roosevelt just turned from the assemblyman stuff at one of their breaks to go out to the field

00:23:14.960 to shoot a buffalo and that is a perfect example of the kind of thing that he wanted to do and then

00:23:22.500 later on he obviously expanded on that work in the badlands um which we can talk about more but

00:23:27.560 i think that was just a feature if you start adding it up over his life it's it's no mistake he just

00:23:34.000 that's the way he lived he would do things sort of in the office professionally etc but even while

00:23:40.360 president he would escape to the field to hunt to do conservation work to do whatever it was so yeah

00:23:46.740 let's talk about his badlands experience so the thing that kicked that off was both his wife and his

00:23:53.420 mother died on the same day um and roosevelt decided to get out of dodge needed something needed a change

00:24:02.360 so he went out to the dakotas to the badlands bought a ranch tried his hand as a cattle rancher

00:24:06.860 and in the process you know had some adventures along the way right how did that experience in

00:24:13.800 the badlands shape roosevelt's life i mean what insights did you get from his field notes

00:24:19.320 that you saw that a transformation was taking place yeah well there are a whole bunch of elements and i

00:24:25.680 think one of the things is that the badlands destination and badlands piece of his life started

00:24:32.840 before alice lee and his mother died you know died on the same day um he had gone out to as we said to

00:24:41.440 go shoot a buffalo and bought the ranch right so he had already invested and wanted to go out there

00:24:48.560 and had written to alice lee about this saying you know this is really important to me basically and he

00:24:54.580 had already envisioned the badlands being a destination where he wanted to explore

00:24:59.780 it obviously took on a different place once alice died um it was a place where he went out

00:25:06.900 for seclusion and to to sort of work through the grief there's no question about that but that

00:25:13.060 had been set in motion going to badlands that is well before um alice lee died so sometimes people tell

00:25:21.820 the story that that's the place where he went to deal with this grief which is absolutely true but

00:25:29.600 he had already set that place up before he knew alice was going to die obviously so

00:25:35.660 the the question you have i think is like what did it do for him how did it shape his life well there

00:25:42.360 are a lot of different pieces of that one that i really focused on in the book is

00:25:47.460 roosevelt i think originally purchased the land in and bought the stake in the ranch in the badlands

00:25:58.460 to go out and tell stories he wanted to tell stories about the american west he was fascinated

00:26:05.160 with the frontier literature and he wanted to be someone who acted out these hunting narratives etc and

00:26:11.760 then write them and that's exactly what he did you know he went out there for periods of time

00:26:17.320 ranched and then wrote about it um wrote about it in magazine articles and then you know those got

00:26:23.460 clumped into books ranch life and the hunting trail and uh the wilderness hunter etc these really

00:26:29.640 really pretty fascinating books sizable um volumes that he wrote and what i found really interesting is

00:26:38.220 if you look at his field notes for example you can see the early versions i mean his diaries are

00:26:45.540 really in some cases early drafts of the chapters in his books they're the they're the kind of brief

00:26:53.560 notes that then led to the stories he told in his books so he was yeah he just he was finding fodder

00:27:00.220 for his stories that he wanted to tell yeah i think so i mean again i think he wanted to live that way and

00:27:06.260 then he thought it was also a money-making proposition he made money off of his books and

00:27:10.500 you know he wanted to be one of the people telling those stories and and living them out and

00:27:16.200 he's gotten criticism for that you know certainly early on especially some people like grinnell and

00:27:22.020 others would give him a hard time in a way um sort of saying he was acting as if he'd been out there

00:27:28.340 longer than he had that he knew more about these animals than he did um but he certainly went out there

00:27:34.960 and and collected some really really interesting stories that he told the rest of his life

00:27:40.180 certainly the the boat thieves story is one of the best ones um when you know if these guys stole

00:27:45.560 his boat and he went after them so yeah and he arrested them um and i think i thought it was

00:27:51.220 interesting too you know being the storyteller like you know there's that famous picture that everyone's

00:27:55.460 probably seeing of roosevelt with his gun he's got the two guys looking sad like it was like it was

00:28:02.040 a posed picture i don't even think the people like no they weren't even like the real criminals were

00:28:06.780 there it was just no other people stand-ins yeah stand-ins for sure yeah and it was just him

00:28:12.440 trying to tell a story i mean and i think that's another thing people who don't know about roosevelt

00:28:16.540 like the way he made his living mostly was through writing a huge bit of it yeah he made a lot of his

00:28:23.320 actual income through his written work and the it's fascinating to me when you think about when

00:28:30.740 you look across his writings um just his natural history writings are massive the number of books

00:28:38.040 and articles that he wrote is just it's incredible it's actually hard to quantify um it's hard to

00:28:44.720 actually write down i included a sort of a selected set of writings um sort of bibliography in in my

00:28:51.540 work um but actually the definitive uh bibliography of all his writings has never been published because

00:28:59.520 it's too big um i mean you know whatever he wrote like 43 books or or similar depending on how you

00:29:06.980 quantify them you know are the edited books because he edited some with um henry catalog and other people

00:29:13.640 um but all the articles that he wrote have never been fully um put into a list you know there i think

00:29:23.640 there is a there's a set of index cards in the hilton library that has that but it's thousands and

00:29:28.560 thousands of them wow so uh starting as a boy roosevelt was an avid hunter like he had a gun

00:29:35.360 as a young age and he would kill he was even in egypt he was shooting birds um and then that love

00:29:41.800 of hunting grew as he got older and you know one of the criticisms thrown at roosevelt that he you

00:29:47.100 know had an insatiable bloodlust um because some some of these trips maybe you can talk about some of

00:29:51.860 his hunting trips like the amount of trophies he would collect i mean what was like a typical hunting

00:29:56.840 trip like for roosevelt well i don't you know it's funny what is a typical hunting trip i i think um

00:30:06.640 there are a few that were pretty iconic or ones that were the most extreme obviously the african 0.94

00:30:15.440 safari when he finished as president he went on this year-long african safari where there was a joint

00:30:22.340 expedition really with the smithsonian and he shot you know many many hundreds of animals and there

00:30:31.420 was also a couple of naturalists that went along that were collecting other things like small mammals

00:30:35.780 and things like that um edgar mearns and uh edmund heller and some people who were professional

00:30:42.840 naturalists went along so it was a big expedition but even on that uh there were a number of

00:30:48.580 instances where one can point to and really ask legitimate questions about the amount of things

00:30:56.880 animals that roosevelt shot and whether they were really a reasonable number given the aims even of a

00:31:04.600 of a collecting expedition for a museum you know for example the white rhino um even at that time was

00:31:12.520 extremely rare and roosevelt knew this he wrote about it being very rare but then he also wrote

00:31:20.480 that he wanted to get some basically i mean the subtext is he wanted to get some before they were

00:31:25.760 gone for these museums in the united states and a few other places so there's a question there whether

00:31:31.000 he really should have done that or done that in the extensive way that he did the white rhino obviously

00:31:36.120 is you know an endangered species even at that time so it's a big question about that i mean that

00:31:42.440 question links even back to when he was going out to shoot the buffalo or the bison if you want to

00:31:48.500 call it by its scientific name um he knew at that point that they were gone and there's even a

00:31:54.380 a quote that's sort of attributed to him that he wanted to get one while they were still buffalo left

00:32:00.460 to shoot not a not a really great justification for shooting up buffalo from a conservationist

00:32:09.120 standpoint but roosevelt's full of contradictions as many historians have pointed out that he's this

00:32:15.140 many-sided american and he also then later established all these lands where the bison then 0.98

00:32:23.060 came back right that these were the places that he established for them to be basically repopulate

00:32:31.260 the plains um in certain contexts so he there were there are different pieces of this but certainly you

00:32:37.340 can see in his notes places where he overshot for sure and yeah that's that is the contrary i mean

00:32:45.460 because he laid he was one of the the big people involved in laying the conservation movement here in

00:32:50.360 the united states i mean he loved animals like he genuinely loved animals like and i heard once

00:32:55.780 someone said like he loved them so much like he he wanted he had to kill them which is sort of weird

00:33:00.220 like he just yeah yeah i mean it's a it's a really hard contradiction especially for us now i think

00:33:07.440 earlier on um around roosevelt's time less people saw that as quite so incongruous although mark twain

00:33:15.280 sort of really went after roosevelt about it there were animal rights people then who really felt like he

00:33:21.100 was a really brutal and um kind of a barbarian um and it's a it's a complicated question and i think

00:33:29.800 you know the question of hunting just in general whether it's okay what the moral aspects of hunting

00:33:36.360 even in the first place of any mammal although even now there are groups that um are opposed to

00:33:43.580 butterfly collecting um so it's not even just mammals so that's a big question and i tried not to sort of

00:33:50.360 carve that piece off so to speak of trying to get through all those aspects of the morality the

00:33:56.540 the manliness aspects of hunting if you will there's certainly a a question around the literature around

00:34:03.960 gender identity that that you know looks at historically hunting um but i tried to not delve

00:34:12.900 into that too much but just try to understand a little bit about how roosevelt sort of thought about

00:34:17.880 if there are any echoes of that and certainly later in his life especially around birds there's some

00:34:22.920 passages where he clearly indicated that they no longer really should be shooting songbirds for example

00:34:30.040 um and he looked back and saw that you know he probably collected more than he needed to and that

00:34:37.040 that wasn't really appropriate anymore for example yeah and i think there's a few moments uh you see

00:34:42.140 in his diaries that you mentioned in his book where these two competing drives that he had with him to

00:34:47.560 to hunt and then but to also protect animals there's that moment in africa with the hippo that he ended up

00:34:54.100 yeah shooting a hippo that and he he could tell that he wasn't really happy that he did it right

00:35:00.260 so he tried to hide well yeah that moment um when he was on he was trying to get um hippo uh and he wanted

00:35:07.840 to get a bull and all that stuff he he was in a boat where this launch and one hippos are actually

00:35:16.080 one of the more dangerous things to hunt uh partly if you're in a boat because you can't figure out

00:35:21.640 where they are and they can um they're submerged below you and if they surface they can knock the

00:35:27.500 boat over knock you into the water and and then there you're in the water with a school of hippos

00:35:32.040 so this happened to him that he was in this launch and they were going out to shoot one but then

00:35:38.540 this um he found that these this school of hippos started to surface or at least one under the boat

00:35:45.780 and the the other men in the the story goes the other men in the boat started to shout that he should

00:35:51.220 shoot and so he shot and he shot several of them and didn't he was trying to shoot the one that was

00:35:59.080 coming up below it but he ended up shooting four or five hippos that you know once once the boat sort

00:36:06.420 of settled back down he didn't realize it at first but then slowly hippo carcasses started to come to

00:36:13.720 the surface and he felt very bad about it one because he didn't need all those and two because he knew

00:36:18.880 that he was already under sort of the spotlight for his hunting there and didn't want to be seen as

00:36:25.580 what they called a game butcher and he didn't want that to get out to the press um and and have it be

00:36:31.280 another example of how he was a game butcher and not just selecting things for the for the museum at

00:36:36.800 the smithsonian interesting so yeah a lot of things you can gleam from his field notes and i what i love

00:36:41.060 about his field notes too and you have them in your book is that on his hunting trips you know he would

00:36:45.480 draw pictures these very rudimentary pictures of the animals that he he bagged but then he'd show you

00:36:51.720 know where he shot them at so you again like the meticulousness that he that began as a child like

00:36:56.180 he carried that with them even after and he's i guess he's in his 50s by now yeah yeah yeah i mean

00:37:03.380 he was really um he was a very keen observer and he would really pay attention to whatever he was doing

00:37:10.460 and i think that's another piece of what i really learned about roosevelt by looking at his field notes and

00:37:16.280 by kind of examining what they meant he clearly was someone who had a careful eye spent a lot of

00:37:24.880 time trying to understand what was going on around him and documenting it which doesn't seem to just

00:37:31.760 apply in his work in nature or out in the field i think there's a case to be made which i didn't make in

00:37:39.760 the book explicitly i didn't go through this part but i think if you look at his that those features

00:37:45.840 of of a naturalist being you know observe things collect a bunch of different parts and elements

00:37:52.760 and then try to make sense of them that's something that he did in all sorts of parts of his life

00:37:58.460 um when he was looking to enact conservation legislation he went out and tried to understand

00:38:06.340 john mirror for example but he also tried to understand lumbermen and ranchers and collect

00:38:11.680 all that information from those observations and then decide what to do with it so those things to

00:38:17.320 me aren't totally separate from one another but the fact that he went out to the field with john mirror

00:38:25.300 to understand what yosemite was all about he wanted to go there and sleep outside that's an element of his

00:38:32.320 sort of political and professional pursuits as president that harkens back to this mode that we've been

00:38:40.420 talking about the mode of the naturalist observer

00:38:42.780 so um we talked about his africa trip after he was president what was his other final big expeditions

00:38:51.200 that he took before he died yeah well so he did the africa expedition then he came back and um

00:38:59.320 had the bull moose party got shot and then after that he did the river of doubt expedition um which

00:39:06.840 was you know down this unknown river into the amazon which has been you know really written about a lot

00:39:12.820 and uh it's an incredible story and then after that there were a few more that haven't been written

00:39:19.020 about nearly as much but i find extremely uh interesting there's he went and um on a moose hunt

00:39:24.940 in quebec which was uh has some great stories in it one being chased by this moose which was kind

00:39:32.480 of a wild rutting uh moose and rut and and it kind of went after them and roosevelt ended up shooting

00:39:38.320 it um which is a great story and then i think my favorite one actually is his trip to sanibel and

00:39:46.440 captiva island um with this man named russell coals who was a tobacco dealer by trade but um was someone

00:39:53.120 who was a i mean a hunter of of manta rays and became sort of an expert on how to hunt these

00:39:59.880 giant mantas which can have what we think of as wingspans of like 18 feet they're huge and they

00:40:08.000 would go out and basically harpoon them and ride them you know hold on to this harpoon and and throw

00:40:14.620 these drogues into the water to try to slow them down and eventually they would just expire and when

00:40:19.040 roosevelt heard about this he thought that is really amazing i want to try that and so he ended up going

00:40:24.980 down um and doing this and and hunting some giant mantas uh off off the coast of captiva island so i

00:40:32.300 think that's a great story and just as far as the how it fits into his life so when roosevelt did that

00:40:40.540 it was 1917 and um roosevelt then didn't die until the early days of 1919 but one of the last letters

00:40:50.840 he wrote before he died roosevelt was to russell coals and he was saying to russell that he felt

00:40:58.780 utterly worthless at that point because he was sick but he was planning on coming back down for another

00:41:04.740 manta hunt with archie his son who had been injured in um world war one and he really wanted to get archie

00:41:12.380 out to the field with him um to go hunting with russell coals so his mind even though his body was

00:41:18.040 really expiring his mind was going back to the field with his own son um to do another manta hunt and

00:41:25.900 and that's why i think that one's so important when you look at those letters they're really moving

00:41:29.840 um because you see a dad who was trying to get his in you know his veteran son who'd been injured

00:41:36.580 significantly um in world war one out to the field with him on this experience so he he had some some

00:41:43.420 other a few other trips too he he'd gone to the caribbean to visit william beebe who was um a big

00:41:50.620 naturalist at the time and did uh he continue his field notes with these trips as well not so much

00:41:58.880 um at least they don't survive his later field notes and this is something i think is pretty

00:42:03.960 fascinating to me is that when he was in africa you know you can see in the book and otherwise you can

00:42:10.320 see his 1909 and 1910 diary he filled them up the days he was in africa he wrote profusely in his

00:42:16.860 diary of the things he collected observations the stomach contents of lions etc and then

00:42:24.180 also in africa he kept um a manuscript pad that he would write on a pad of paper that

00:42:34.280 was carbon and had three copies so he would write the chapters of african game trails which was his

00:42:41.200 book on africa um he would write them in the field so his field notes also were manuscript pages

00:42:49.540 and he would send them off and trip it in three different directions actually in africa so that

00:42:55.080 one one would survive and got back to robert bridges in new york so that they could publish

00:43:00.900 these first they published them in scripner's magazine and then and then as a bound book african

00:43:05.760 game trails so in in africa he has both the field notes in his diaries and then these other field

00:43:12.420 notes which were manuscripts on the river of doubt he no diary accounts survive from him

00:43:19.460 kermit his son who went along kept a diary and we have those at the library of congress but

00:43:26.160 roosevelt doesn't seem to have kept any diaries it's um but he just did the same thing he did in africa

00:43:31.360 he wrote these manuscript pages while he was in the field there's a iconic photo of roosevelt sitting at

00:43:37.860 a folding table with a head net and gauntlet gloves to keep biting insects off of him in the jungle kind 1.00

00:43:46.100 of um when he was on the river of doubt so it seems like later in his life as he progressed further

00:43:51.800 he did much more just keeping um just keeping manuscript notes etc um so they didn't have

00:44:00.700 uh we don't have notebooks or field notes from his later expeditions it's interesting yeah so michael we

00:44:08.060 we really just uh scratched the surface here of you know what what we you can find in roosevelt's

00:44:14.280 field notes but i'm curious as you you read through them i mean these are things that roosevelt

00:44:18.680 actually touched he actually wrote down and studying his life were there a few lessons life

00:44:25.440 lessons that you gleamed or took away from looking at roosevelt's life through his field notes

00:44:30.940 yeah i think so i mean aside from just being sort of a manuscript nerd and finding it really inspiring

00:44:38.000 to look at them which in fact the harvard ones are all um are scanned almost all of them are scanned

00:44:43.980 and you can look at them they're freely available um it's not quite as good as looking at them directly

00:44:48.840 but it's still pretty moving um i think that my the biggest lesson that i took and the thing i learned

00:44:56.140 about roosevelt as a personal lesson was his dedication to going directly to the source

00:45:02.780 to directly connecting with his world that he went out and with whatever it was yes he was really

00:45:10.440 fascinated with hunting and and doing these kinds of things but the conservation thing was something he

00:45:17.500 went out and met with john muir in yosemite he didn't just think about it he didn't just read about it

00:45:23.480 he wanted to understand lions so he went to africa and he faced went face to face with lions

00:45:29.620 um dramatic yes but when you look at his notes there's a credibility to that and we didn't talk much

00:45:36.760 about the um the trip to cuba in the spanish-american war uh but he left his post as the assistant

00:45:44.160 secretary of the navy much to the chagrin of his friends and family to go be on the front lines in cuba

00:45:51.800 um and you see that in his notebooks uh his documents uh that he was there and he wanted

00:45:58.820 to be there on the front lines in the battlefield people have made a lot of you know reasons why that

00:46:05.700 was the case some that he was sort of mad but he lived his life by connecting with his world and

00:46:12.120 going out there and observing it directly and understanding it firsthand that's what i find

00:46:17.640 most inspiring about roosevelt and the thing i take from him and try to remind myself of is

00:46:22.300 it's great it's important to go to the source and to not live just uh in a secondary fashion but to

00:46:29.860 experience our world and that's what it's going to take i think it's really important that our leaders

00:46:34.640 do that um as much as possible well michael canfield thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure

00:46:40.460 thank you i really appreciate you having me and um i hope that uh things continue to grow well with

00:46:47.260 the with the art of manliness it's a great it's a great site i appreciate that my guest today was

00:46:51.980 michael canfield he's the author of the book theodore roosevelt in the field you can find it on amazon.com

00:46:56.720 and bookstores everywhere and be sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash canfield to see

00:47:02.280 scanned images of roosevelt's field notes as well as links where you can browse more of them online

00:47:06.960 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:47:26.300 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy

00:47:30.180 this podcast i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher that helps get the

00:47:33.940 word out about the show as always i appreciate your continued support and until next time this is

00:47:38.140 brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - April 22, 2016

#194： The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt

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