ABSTRACT
Theodore Roosevelt - soldier, statesmen, adventurer, intellectual, and president - was the embodiment of his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn's ideas about taking one's inbred characteristics and pushing them beyond their limits to achieve more. Osborn held up Roosevelt as the model of American character. In a speech given at the Depression-era dedication of the new Roosevelt wing of the museum in 1931, Osborn told his young listeners that TR's legacy was the lesson to 'live well regardless of personal advantage or disadvantage.' Osborn roused his audience to 'meet ... crisis by your own moral and intellectual backbone.' I For himself, however, Osborn was not the fearless, intrepid, brawny, outdoor type like Roosevelt or Roy Chapman Andrews, or even a hunting dandy like Madison Grant. While Osborn certainly enjoyed the outdoors, he was not a crasher through the brush, but more a genteel stroller down forest paths. He loved the smell of the trees and flowers, the grandeur of the mountains, and the contemplative uplift it gave him; he just preferred not to get his suit dirty. For all his talk about backbone and effort, he meant intellectual struggle as much as physical daring. In this respect, Osborn was not one of Herbert Spencer's 'henchmen:' those plutocrats and theologians in America who used Spencer's theories to justify capitalist gain, and the weak succumbing to the strong.2 Osborn's emphasis was on intellectual and spiritual advance, not brute strength. Struggle and effort were cleansing agents that would rid him and his species of an apish taint. He wanted the soap of the past to wash him clean of the dirt of the present, so that he could enter the Eden of the future pure and sparkling.
