The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (112 page)

As a result of the land withdrawal of March 2, the executive branch was sued. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said Roosevelt was acting like a tribal
chieftain unaccountable to constitutional law. The defense attorneys said the lawsuits were small-minded. At issue was whether the Roosevelt administration had abused executive powers. Eventually, in 1910, the dispute was brought before the courts, first in
U.S. v. Grimaud
(220 U.S. 506) and then in
Light v. U.S.
(200 U.S. 523). In both cases the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in T.R.’s favor. Big timber had been stymied. The threat of these court cases served only to impel Roosevelt forward with his far-reaching conservationist agenda.
¹⁰

Convinced that the future of America was imperiled, Fulton kept up his dogged pursuit of Roosevelt. That spring Roosevelt had told
Everybody’s Magazine
that westerners who didn’t understand subspecies of deer and elks weren’t good stewards. The president’s attitude was plain as day: timber companies were bandits, and westerners incapable of biologically identifying moles were nature fakers. What rubbish! To Fulton, the president was as crazy as a loon—and
dangerous
. But Roosevelt later patted himself on the back for being a political fox. “When the friends of the special interests in the Senate got their amendment through and woke up, they discovered that sixteen million acres of timberland had been saved for the people by putting them in the National Forests before the land grabbers could get at them,” Roosevelt bragged in
An Autobiography
. “The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action.”
¹¹

The combination of the Antiquities Act, the new natural forests, and the debate over nature fakers put Roosevelt in a mood for sparring. He was now forty-nine, and there was about him the cockiness of a gambler who has been winning and is itching for more action. Unleashing Garfield on the corporations was his latest sport. Another favored sport was lambasting faux naturalists untutored in Darwinian biology. “You will be pleased to know that I finally proved unable to contain myself, and gave an interview or statement, to a very good fellow, in which I sailed into Long and Jack London and one or two others of the more preposterous writers of ‘unnatural’ history,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs. “I know that as President I ought not to do this; but I was having an awful time toward the end of the session and I felt I simply had to permit myself some diversion.”
¹²

The seemingly arbitrary forest reserve designations of March 1907 stung the Western politicians the most. As the
Congressional Record
noted, even as late as World War I the mention of what Roosevelt had done “still
brought forth the wrath from certain quarters.”
¹³
In 1907 the
Walla Walla Weekly
accused Roosevelt of putting the small logging operations out of business in Washington state with his mania for national forests. As this argument went, rich corporations like the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company already owned millions of acres. They weren’t adversely affected by T.R.’s conservationism; the little guys were. The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
sarcastically wondered why T.R. didn’t just declare the entire state a national forest. Some people in Seattle and Tacoma argued that Roosevelt’s obsession with land fraud made him believe, mistakenly, that national forests were a “panacea.” Governor Albert Mead of Washington declared that “Gifford Pinchot, the United States forester, has done more to retard the growth and development of the Northwest than any other man.”

Roosevelt scoffed at such criticism as juvenile. There was more to the Pacific Northwest and northern California than fresh-cut boards. The Pacific slope was more wonderful than any place in Europe. The mere thought of Mount Shasta and Mount Olympus made Roosevelt ache, and intensified his love of the United States. America’s three West Coast states taken together were larger than any European country. California alone was bigger than Great Britain or Italy. American mammal life also far exceeded that in spent-out Europe. In Oregon, for example, the bears ate both clams and berries and slept in primeval forests and on rock-strewn beaches. Roosevelt called the soil of the San Joaquin Valley the prerequisite for its becoming a God-ordained garden. And the forestlands of these three states, he was convinced, were the finest in the world. “There is nothing quite like the Coast, either in America or anywhere else,” Roosevelt would write. “Nature is different from what it is elsewhere. The giant sequoias and redwoods, the wonderfully beautiful isolated mountain peaks and great mountain ranges, the giant chasms like the Yosemite, the forests, the flower meadows, the soft, sunny, luxurious beauty of Southern California, the colder but equable wet climate of the Northwest coast proper, the marvels of Puget Sound, the Valley of the Columbia and of the rivers running into it—all these things, taken separately, may be matched elsewhere, but not when taken together.”
¹⁴

One of Roosevelt’s strongest conservationist statements was a long letter he wrote on June 7, 1907, to Secretary of the Agriculture James Wilson. Obviously composed with posterity in mind, Roosevelt abandoned his usual cheerleading on behalf of “America the beautiful” in favor of a sober-minded analysis of the importance of protected forests for national security. “If the people of the states of the Great Plains, of the mountains, and of the Pacific slope wish for their states a great perma
nent growth in posterity they will stand for the policy of the administration,” Roosevelt wrote, disgusted that a Public Lands Convention was being organized in Colorado to overturn his policies. “If they stand for the policy of the makers of this program, they should clearly realize that it is a policy of skinning the land, chiefly in the temporary interest of a few huge corporations of great wealth, and to the utter impairment of its resources so far as the future is concerned. It is absolutely necessary to ascertain in practiced fashion the best methods of reforestation, and only the National Government can do this successfully.”
¹⁵

II

Criticism of Roosevelt’s national forests of March 2 wasn’t confined to California, Washington, and Oregon. Newspapers in the grazing states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana also slammed into Roosevelt. Many editors considered the large-scale withdrawal of timber and coal lands completely unacceptable. Inequity was involved because the federal government had grabbed western forestlands while leaving eastern forests in private hands. Demands were made for nullification. An editor of
Denver Field and Farm
fumed that one-fourth of Colorado was now a national forest: soon, decent Coloradans wouldn’t even have land left to bury the dead. The
Centennial
(Wyoming)
Post
of March 30 suggested that after March 2, an old cowboy song needed a new verse:

Bury me not on the range

Where the taxed cattle are roaming

And the mangy coyotes yelp and bark

And the wind in the pines is moaning

On the reserve please bury me not

For I never would then be free;

A forest ranger would dig me up

In order to collect his fee!
¹⁶

Roosevelt’s forest conservationism brought him a lot of hate mail during the spring of 1907. Everybody west of the 100th meridian—which drops from the Manitoba–North Dakota border through Greater Bismarck and straight down to the streets of Laredo—seemed to have a quarrel with him. The White House mailroom grew leery of any letter postmarked Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, or California. The
hugeness
of what Roosevelt was doing seemed to be the principal
concern. Roosevelt claimed that he was only stopping shifty businessmen, trust titans, and oil hogs from despoiling the national landscape, and that he was surprised when Wall Street called him a “wild-eyed revolutionist.” This was disingenuous on his part. Various captains of industry had pleaded with him to ease up on his apparent rancor toward railroads and oil. But Roosevelt refused to capitulate. With muckrakers cheering him on, Roosevelt enjoyed being a wilderness warrior. In his letters, he expressed a somewhat overstated preference for hiking Rock Creek Park to study fauna rather than dealing with unscrupulous robber barons. “The grounds are now putting on their dress of spring,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit about the White House lawns. “The blossom trees are in bloom; perhaps the most beautiful spot at the moment is round the north fountain with the White Magnolia, the pink of the flowering peach, and the yellow of the forsythia.”
¹⁷

In the West, cowboys played a game called “chapping,” slapping one another with leather chaps to see who would cry uncle first. During the spring of 1907 Roosevelt was engaged in chapping with big timber, in particular. Circumventing Congress, he began appealing directly to the general public in his addresses about conservation. In a sadistic way that no historian, no journalist, and no political commentator can overstate, Roosevelt
enjoyed
making the timber companies suffer. What infuriated his opponents was how he appealed directly to the public, with prosecutorial zeal. It unnerved them. The press always allowed Roosevelt to cloak his conservationism in patriotism and morality—and the newspapers’ readers in the nonwestern and southern states fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

No president ever manipulated the press with the consummate skill of Roosevelt. Part of his cunning was treating even minor journalists as if they mattered. Reporters, as a rule full of self-importance, used the fact that Roosevelt was a man of letters, a member of their tribe, to justify their puffery. A voracious bibliophile, inspired by the Saint Augustine admonition to (“Take up, read!”), Roosevelt never missed a major article in any contemporary periodical, even an obscure academic journal. As Roosevelt liked to joke, he was at heart a “literary feller.” The novelist Ellen Glasow tried to explain why, against her better instincts, she regularly surrendered to Roosevelt’s bravado. She believed that Roosevelt had “dubious literary insight,” but she confessed that he also had a strange “human magnetism.”
¹⁸

Another factor also aided Roosevelt’s career. As the historian Ron Chernow has pointed out indirectly in
Titan
, Roosevelt was a direct
beneficiary of “a newly assertive press.” Thanks to two technological developments—linotype and photoengraving—the number of glossy magazines proliferated during the Roosevelt era. Too often, Chernow believes, historians have focused on the “strident tabloids” and “yellow journalism” of the period.
¹⁹
The circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, for example, were an impetus for sensational copy.
²⁰
But this was also a serious era, when investigative reporting was significant. Periodicals like
McClure’s, Outlook
, and
Scribner’s Magazine
loved Roosevelt for two primary reasons: he wrote for them and he applauded their exposés of corporate corruption. Add into the mix the sheer electricity that Roosevelt produced in his public appearances, the way he sucked the air out of any room, and the trust titans didn’t have a chance. Roosevelt didn’t lull reporters’ sense of right and wrong; he challenged them to write the right thing by flattery and by making good copy.

A case in point occurred on April 14, when Roosevelt delivered a major policy address on Arbor Day, promoting trees. His message was direct: posterity would weave no garland for farmers who overharvested trees and didn’t plant new ones. Roosevelt was sure of that. Arbor Day, to Roosevelt, was a holiday to equal the Fourth of July. It had started in 1872, when Nebraska had very few trees: the state board of agriculture had sensibly distributed elms, oaks, and pine seeds for citizens to plant. Arbor Day evolved into a competition in which cash prizes were awarded to whoever planted the most trees. According to the
Omaha World-Herald
, more than 1 million trees were planted on the first Arbor Day. What began as a state holiday in Nebraska soon became a national effort.
²¹
Many states held annual spring Arbor Day events. Now Roosevelt—with western senators and Rockefeller’s supporters clamoring for his head—transformed Arbor Day 1907 into a rallying cry for his visionary conservationist policies. To an audience made up of children from the Washington, D.C. area, Roosevelt preached the wonders of national forests. “It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation’s need of trees will become serious,” he said. “We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship: but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed, and because of this want you will reproach us not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.”
²²

The eastern press loved this lecture. The
Washington Post
covered it on the front page under the headline “President for Trees.”
²³
But Senator
Fulton considered it a sickening spectacle of Roosevelt manipulating the press. “A people without children would face a hopeless future: a country without trees is almost as hopeless,” Roosevelt had said. “Forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves would soon vanish, and with them all their benefits. A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood, and at the same time a reservoir of water. When you help to preserve our forests or to plant new ones, you are acting the part of good citizens. The value of forestry deserves, therefore, is to be taught in the schools.”
²⁴

Roosevelt kept saying that the “shortsightedness” of deforestation would be solved only by planting trees and reducing lumbering. However, with regard to forest reserves—unlike national monuments—after March 1907 Roosevelt was still forced to work with an irritated Congress on bills aimed at purchasing for the federal government great forest reserves in the White Mountains and Southern Appalachians. Many congressmen felt bruised by Roosevelt’s obvious contempt for them. They were hardly in the mood to squander political capital for the sake of his eccentricities. “The only agreement of the bills,” Roosevelt lamented to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, “is that of their great expense.” Roosevelt had calculated which states were doing a good job of preserving forests (New York and Pennsylvania) and which states weren’t (Michigan and Wisconsin). What brought him great pride was that the western states were far more fortunate than “their eastern sisters” because his administration had shoved “requisite foresight” down their throats.
²⁵
Not on his watch would America become a lumber exporter to the world.