The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (107 page)

Just three days after Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, there was a strange event in Iowa. At the Republican county convention in Fairfield, a prankster let loose an elephant—wearing a banner that read “G.O.P.”—to rampage through the crowded hall. Mayhem ensued in the hall as the frightened elephant trumpeted madly about. Republican delegates fled through the windows and doors. According to the
New York Times
, one terrified politician broke an arm in the panic. When the
elephant was finally calmed down and the shock of the event had subsided, there was a police inquiry. As it turned out, a group from the pro-Roosevelt and pro-Lacey wing of Iowa’s Republican Party had hired the elephant from Robinson’s Circus for the prank. “The elephant’s name is ‘Teddy Roosevelt,’” the
Times
reported, “and the convention was afraid of it.”
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At Lotus Lake in Long Island that June, Robert B. Roosevelt’s health was breaking down: he was seventy-nine and had many ailments.
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Reports circulated that he wouldn’t live long.
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Nevertheless, R.B.R. led a high-profile campaign on Long Island to replant white pine trees wherever any had previously been chopped down. Even on his deathbed, R.B.R. was engaged in life. Having already planted white pines at his own estate, he implored all his neighbors from Montauk to Brooklyn to do the same. Long before Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, R.B.R. had started a regional forerunner on Long Island. It was a crusade for him, just as stopping the indiscriminate killing of birds and fish had been following the Civil War.
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President Roosevelt was at Oyster Bay on June 14 when Uncle Rob died. Coincidentally, the president had just had a species of trout named after him in California. The obituary in the
New York Times
noted that R.B.R. had been the famous author of
The Game Fish of North America, The Game Birds of the North, Superior Fishing, Fish Hatching and Fish Catching
, and
Florida and Game Water Birds
—all notable conservationist accomplishments. A funeral was scheduled, and the president came to say a proper good-bye. An era had ended, but all of R.B.R.’s conservationist aspirations—everything he had stood for, except his bohemian lifestyle and his philandering—lived on in his nephew in the White House.

Following the funeral, in July 1906, President Roosevelt started planning to save both Devils Tower and Petrified Forest in the fall. The paperwork was now in order. He dashed off a note of gratitude to Congressman Lacey for championing more knolls, buttes, spurs, ruins, and ravines than anybody else in America. It was Lacey who taught Roosevelt to look at petrified logs as gems or precious stones—they were that valuable. Believing that Lacey’s methodical approach to saving antiquities was good for the republic, Roosevelt told Lacey that “certain gentlemen” were filled with a “deep sense of obligation” for all his work. This rather dull and stern Iowan, a Civil War veteran of the Mississippi River campaign, who always wore a standard-issue gray suit, had done more for America’s environmental and cultural heritage during the progressive era than anybody else. He was a giant like Gifford Pinchot, Jane Addams, or
John Muir. Roosevelt suggested that these “gentlemen” wanted to name a park, a monument, or a memorial in his honor for engineering the Antiquities Act of 1906: they wanted to honor him with a mountain, forest, or canyon. The modest Lacey was amused, and he demurred. Nevertheless, Roosevelt signed “An Act to Protect Birds and Their Eggs in Game and Bird Preserves” into law that June as a tribute to Lacey.
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Encouraged now that Mesa Verde had become a national park, Lacey urged Roosevelt to use the Antiquities Act to declare the Petrified Forest a national monument. Time was short. Couldn’t the Roosevelt administration somehow circumvent the slow, tedious process of obtaining congressional approval for a national park? The miles of petrified logs, the multihued badlands, the Painted Desert, the historic buildings, and the archaeological ruins would, if
preserved
, be Lacey’s legacy. Roosevelt had the Department of the Interior look into it at once. Meanwhile, as the logistics were worked out, Roosevelt wanted trespassers arrested for stealing prehistoric pottery fragments or for setting off a rock slide from a hill in the Petrified Forest. Wetherill was keeping Lacey informed about any syndicates stealing wagons of petrified wood—but the small-time thief was nearly impossible to apprehend.

V

After the success of the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt’s intensity in the West increased. On June 19 he signed a joint congressional resolution enlarging Yosemite National Park by 41.67 square miles (nearly 27,000 acres)—no small clump of trees. Suddenly two of California’s crown jewels, which Roosevelt had seen on his 1903 western trek with John Muir at his side—Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove—were acquired by the Department of the Interior. But instead of being elated, Roosevelt grew concerned. Lacey was right. If Congress was so slow to act on behalf of an already established national park like Yosemite, what would it do when he introduced the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Mount Olympus for consideration as national parks? Would the extractors be able to prevail over the protectors during the congressional process? For a national park designation, Roosevelt needed Congress; but designation as a national monument required only determination.

An ardent believer in statehood for the Territories, Roosevelt now indicated that admittance into the Union entailed a quid pro quo—turning over natural and archaeological wonders like the Grand Canyon, the Canyon de Chelly, and the Petrified Forest to the Department of the Interior to become national monuments). This horse-trading wasn’t put
in writing—he wasn’t that foolish—but the precondition was implied. In territories like New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma the president had the advantage (just as he did in establishing the Luquillo National Forest in Puerto Rico). Consultation wasn’t essential for action in de facto colonies. “The Territories are filled with men and women of the stamp of which I grew to feel so hearty a regard and respect during the years that I myself lived and worked on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains,” Roosevelt wrote to Mark A. Rodgers, secretary of the Arizona Statehood Association. “It was from these four Territories that I raised the regiment with which I took part in the Cuban campaign. Assuredly I would under no circumstances advise the people of these Territories to do anything that I considered to be against either their moral or their material well-being.”
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Unquestionably, Roosevelt took a paternalistic attitude toward Arizona. He regarded Arizona’s mining, timber, and real estate interests with amused disdain, and with steadily increasing distrust. To most people on the Atlantic seaboard, Arizona seemed far, far away; but Roosevelt considered it his backyard. The Geological Survey had reported, gravely, that Arizona’s mineral deposits (except for coal) would be largely extracted by the end of the twentieth century as a result of overmining. This prediction caught Roosevelt’s full attention. The insatiable mining outfits would destroy wild Arizona if the federal government didn’t intervene.

Congressman Lacey was likewise disgusted by overindustrialization, but he took it as a given in the modern world. As Roosevelt saw it, the true enemies in the West were aridity, adroit political malfeasance, poaching of relics, and thieving of timber. Roosevelt failed to understand that his reclamation projects—especially hydroelectric dams—were aimed at dominating nature on behalf of settlers; they, too, ruined landscapes and made some regions dependent on federal funding. Lacey believed that the solution to western problems was more federal responsibility and preservationist morality, achieved by congressional authorization. But Congress seemed uninterested in the Four Corners region. Action was required. Roosevelt, the “preacher militant,” as of the summer of 1906, refused to accept a feather-duster approach to the Southwest. Roosevelt’s warrior side wanted to crush his enemies into the dust, not outfox them with legalities. To Roosevelt hate could be a creative impulse for the common good. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and national monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents’ faces in his wilderness philosophy of living.

Still, underlying Roosevelt’s hostility toward despoilers was his fear of
America without a wilderness. Conservation was a way for Roosevelt to grapple with this anxiety. By saving heritage sites and forests, Roosevelt was providing a way for the body politic to stay healthy. By reclaiming the prehistoric past, Indian relics, volcanic mounds, hidden lakes, fish-filled streams, stands of trees, weird-looking buttes, desertscapes, and petrified wood, Roosevelt believed he could preserve the old pioneer spirit that had made American civilization so special. To Roosevelt, industrialization was a corrosive problem in that it led to urbanization, which in turn stripped citizens of their attachment to the land. A whole generation of youngsters were suffering from what we might now call a nature-deficiency disorder. It was the wilderness, Roosevelt insisted, with reverence, that made American special. The novelist Frank Norris had an octopus to war against—the huge agricultural concerns. Similarly, Roosevelt had the trust titans to rally against, because their concept of laissez-faire economics was unpatriotic. They valued money more than Old Faithful or the Great Smoky Mountains. “If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers,” Burroughs commented about the naturalists around Roosevelt in 1905 “we go to woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were.”
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VI

It wasn’t just the Far West that Roosevelt was worried about. An ugly international incident had occurred in the Alaska Territory, involving Japanese seal hunters wielding clubs, knives, and guns in the Pribilof Islands. On July 16 a small fleet of Japanese vessels attacked the Alaskan seal rookery at Saint Paul Island. Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the Roosevelt administration maintained a small naval–biological research facility on this island, which is in the Bering Sea. The American sailors there were fond of the seals, which had originally been saved by President Grant and were celebrated by Rudyard Kipling in
The Jungle Book
, first published in 1894. A few of the sailors intervened to stop the Japanese poaching raid, and a melee occurred. Sickened because the Japanese had clubbed baby seals and then skinned them alive, the Americans killed five of the raiders, wounded two others, and apprehended another twelve. An international brouhaha erupted over the Japanese butchery and the American’s heavy-handedness. The
Japanese Times
, for example, said that although seal poaching was a misdemeanor, the U.S. Navy had responded with murder. In contrast, the San Francisco press published gruesome details of the hunt, supported the U.S. Navy, and said that the merciless
slashing and beating of American seals in American waters was outrageous.
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One side effect of the San Francisco earthquake was a thoughtless increase in anti-Japanese prejudice on the Pacific coast. When people are under duress, they may look for a scapegoat: in San Francisco the recent Japanese immigrants provided one. The Russo-Japanese War had left the United States and Japan as the preeminent powers in the Pacific basin. The negotiated Portsmouth Treaty also bestowed on Japan strategic, political, and economic interests in Manchuria, and these threatened to undermine America’s open-door policy as formulated by Hay. Roosevelt greatly respected Japan but feared its rise to power. With nativist emotions running high in San Francisco, an anti-Japanese backlash occurred, manifested in school segregation, riots, and a spate of anti-Japanese legislation in Sacramento. In San Francisco between May 6 and November 5, 1906, for example, there were more than 290 cases of assault, most perpetrated against Japanese immigrants. Two eminent seismologists from Tokyo were stoned for investigating the San Andreas Fault; some San Franciscans didn’t want foreigners to tell them not to live on a fault. These racist attacks and stonings angered the Japanese government, particularly because it had given $246,000 to San Francisco for relief after the earthquake. Therefore, a deep distrust already existed between Tokyo and Washington, D.C. when the “Alaskan seal incident” occurred.

The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor quickly submitted a report confirming that many of the seals had indeed been skinned alive. Aleuts who lived on the island were unbiased eyewitnesses. Even more disturbing were the photographs taken of seals half-skinned, hobbling about maimed and apparently bleating in pain. Many bigots in California used the incident as a pretext for sweeping condemnations of the Japanese character. Roosevelt’s own reaction was beyond words. Poaching always set him off like a bomb, and the poaching in this case made him apoplectic. Realizing that the Aleutian Islands were the remotest land in North America, and that policing the 1,200-mile archipelago was an impossible task, Roosevelt nevertheless was proud of the U.S. Navy for attacking these and other raiders. Tokyo wanted the Roosevelt administration to try the sailors for the murder of the five Japanese men. Japanese lawyers, as noted above, argued that according to the Alaskan criminal code, seal poaching was not a felony but a misdemeanor, and that committing murder to stop a misdemeanor was not justifiable in a republic based on democratic principles.

Determined to flummox Roosevelt, the bitter Japanese government
developed a legal argument and recommended punitive measures. But Roosevelt was unbending with regard to seal or bird rookeries. Instead of court-martialing the sailors, he congratulated them for being outstanding watchdogs for Alaska’s priceless seal herds. However, not wanting to go to war with Japan over this incident, he told Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte to remove all U.S. ships from Asian waters. The international incident should be settled by diplomats, not battleships. With tension so high on both sides, Roosevelt privately feared an international incident, even while publicly expressing militaristic bravado.