| Chapter : | Introducing the Green Roosevelt |
microbiologists already viewed as a “superficial sort of investigator,” rendering TR a kind of lovable, endangered species himself, a throwback.30 Heller, Osborn, Merriam, and others sympathized with the old, whole-horse, ecological view embodied by the President. “Roosevelt,” Heller summarizes, “emphasized the idea that the real laboratory in which to test theories and study of animal behavior is the great out-of-doors, the field, where all life is struggling for existence and exhibiting its characteristics for our study and observation.” Though well-read in the field, Roosevelt lacked the academic credentials he might, according to Heller, otherwise have gained at Harvard, where a “deprecatory attitude kept [Roosevelt] the student from taking up faunal natural history as his life work.”31
Thus Roosevelt was less a scientist, less an advancer of original hypotheses, and more watchdog-debunker-lightning rod where nature was concerned. Perhaps the best evidence of this Rooseveltian posture is the protective coloration controversy, in which TR went toe to toe with artist and concealing-coloration theorist Abbot H. Thayer, who claimed in “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration” that “countershading” (animals' dark tops and whiter “bellies”) protected animals from predation. Roosevelt, veteran by this time of his African expedition and calling to mind his earlier experience with the pronghorn of the American West, cited many examples of beasts that defied Thayer's simplistic formulation. The zebra, the leopard, and the giraffe Roosevelt knew to possess essentially conspicuous rather than concealing coloration.32 Unlike Thayer, Roosevelt had arrived at this knowledge in the African savannah, firsthand, rather than in a drawing room. To set the record straight, the naturalist-executive-scientist, readied his poison pen in defense of accuracy. “Messrs. Thayer,” he wrote, “make the sky the exact color of the peacock's blue neck, and when they give a picture of the prongbuck they make the sky the exact color of the antelope's white rump. If instead of being an artist, one of the Mr. Thayers were an engineer, and were employed by a business organization to investigate some proposition and report on it…he would be promptly dismissed from his position; and if the corporation tried to float shares on the strength of