The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (130 page)

The Country Life Commission was Roosevelt’s attempt to broaden the definition of the American town so that it would be more than just blocks with buildings on them. Small towns held the key to the perpetuation of American democracy; lose them and you would have, say, Brussels or Berlin. When Roosevelt was living in North Dakota, he had disapproved of people’s saying that the city boundaries were two miles long and four miles wide. Just as with migratory birds or roaming animals within the United States, boundaries weren’t the be-all and end-all. The American town had to include clean rivers and lakes outside the business district. Wilderness myths were part of a town. What was Helena, Montana, without stories of grizzlies or North Platte, Nebraska, without buffalo tales or Douglas, Arizona, without reports of a jaguar sneaking over the Mexican border? The town had to know the name of the old man dwelling in the shack down by the creek along the verdant meadow. The town didn’t need the city as much as it needed the country.

While not quite a boondoggle, Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission never really got off the ground. Although the commission had outstanding directors, including Henry Wallace (editor of
Wallaces’ Farmer
in Des Moines, Iowa) and Kenyon L. Butterfield (of Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst), Roosevelt’s folksy rural vision seemed antiquated in the brave new world of the Model T. People were thinking in terms of the cylinder, the engine, and the conveyor belt, not of ponies’ oats. Congress, in fact, scoffed at Roosevelt’s commission as romantic nonsense reminiscent of
Currier & Ives
. Both Democrats and Republicans had grown weary of listening to Roosevelt pontificating about the strenuous life, wilderness parks, national heritage sites, and the eternal virtues of the family farm. City nights were in vogue, as was owning a new car—not five o’clock suppers by candlelight in cabins like Pine Knot. But after his presidency, Roosevelt insisted in
Century Magazine
that his commission, though dismissed in 1908–1909, would someday be recognized and acknowledged for its agrarian wisdom. “The first step ever taken toward the solution of these problems [of rural life] was taken by the Country Life Commission, appointed by me, opposed with venomous hostility by the foolish reactionaries in Congress, and abandoned by my successor.” Roosevelt wrote. “Congress would not even print the report of this Commission, and it was the public-spirited, far-sighted action of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce which alone secured the publication of the report.”
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Roosevelt’s own sentiments, like those of the people whom he most
admired (John Burroughs chief among them) were decidedly antiurban and anti-industrial. Now, as his tenure at the White House wound down, Roosevelt wanted to do something for the “uplifting of farm life.”
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In essence, the commission was to teach farmers, with their close connection to the soil, to become America’s front line of conservationists—to protect forests from clear-cutting and streams from pollution. No matter how holy so-called
rural simplicity
might be, it could go only so far in the twentieth century. Recognizing that farms in America were worth $30 billion (with annual produce worth about $8 billion), Roosevelt boasted that the heartland was the greatest breadbasket the world had ever known.
⁸³
“Important tho the city is,” Roosevelt wrote to Herbert Mynick, editor of
Good Housekeeping,
“and fortunate tho it is that our cities have grown as they have done, it is still more important that the family farm, where the homemaking and the outdoor business are combined into a unit, should continue to grow. In every great crisis of our Government, and in all the slow, steady work between the crises which alone enables us to meet them when they do arise, it is the farming folk, the people of the country districts, who have shown themselves to be the backbone of the nation.”
⁸⁴

What disturbed Roosevelt about American farmers, however, was their lack of science education. Farmers mismanaged forests by overburning and overlumbering. That was an economic waste. The twentieth century was unmistakably going to be a century of science, and for farmers it would entail learning the newest techniques for increasing yields, as well as protecting their crops against disease and pests. A scientific examination of water had to take place in every town. Community water supply systems needed to be developed for the sake of public health. Farmers didn’t have to read Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams
to be modern; but they did have to read the Department of Agriculture’s annual
Yearbook
. Roosevelt wanted Congress to appropriate funds to open new agricultural colleges, establish conservation training camps, and increase the emphasis on tree planting in public schools.

In essence, Roosevelt was positioning himself as pro-farmers, on behalf of Taft and in opposition to the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. While Bryan appealed to the populist Deep South by attacking “government by privilege,” Roosevelt wooed Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—farm states that greatly valued education—by promoting agricultural science. Taft’s platform also included reforming the federal bureaucracy, increasing tariffs, and developing a sound currency—all positions that Roosevelt adhered to. But Roosevelt thought that Taft could score points against Bryan (the first three-time
presidential candidate for a major party) by promising family farmers federal benefits and better methods of growing, based on the “new conservationism.”

When Bryan dared to publicly chastise Roosevelt as soft on corporations at the expense of everyday folks, the president roared back. In a pamphlet-length letter to Bryan postmarked September 27, 1908, Roosevelt presented evidence of his warring against beef packers, Federal Salt Company, General Paper Company, Otis Elevator Company, American Tobacco Company, Powder Trust, Virginia Carolina Chemical Company’s conglomerates, and Standard Oil Company, among numerous others. Roosevelt boasted that he was the real progressive, whereas Bryan was a poseur. “I believe in radical reform,” Roosevelt said, “and the movement for such reform can be successful only if it frowns on the demagogue as it does on the corrupt; if it shows itself as far removed from government by a mob as from government by a plutocracy. Of all corruption, the most far-reaching for evil is that which hides itself behind the mask of furious demagoguery, seeking to arouse and to pander to the basest passions of mankind.”
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With a gift that fine writers often possess, Roosevelt was sometimes able to size men up—and he didn’t like what he saw in William Jennings Bryan. Ever since William Kent had donated Muir Woods to the federal government, Roosevelt corresponded with him about politics. Now, when many reporters were saying that Roosevelt was being too brutal in his public attacks on Bryan as a left-wing demagogue, claiming that the Democrats were sympathetic to the IWW and Russian radicals, the president explained his sledgehammer tactics to Kent. “I felt it was imperative to put aggressive life into the campaign,” Roosevelt wrote. “It seems to me incredible that people should fail to understand Taft’s inherent worth.” By contrast, Roosevelt said, Bryan was the “cheapest faker we have ever had proposed for President.”
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From Roosevelt’s perspective, the difference boiled down to this: he himself was a champion of Darwinism, agricultural science, conservationism, and irrigation. By contrast, Bryan was promoting silver, the Russian Revolution, and a half-baked Christianity. But not everybody in the Taft campaign was happy with Roosevelt’s presenting himself as a hunter-conservationist. During the fall of 1908, for example, at the Irrigation Congress held in Albuquerque, Roosevelt and Pinchot’s forestry ethos was itself taken as demagoguery. Western Republicans at the Irrigation Congress accused extremist forestry policies of possibly costing them the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in
the November presidential election. At issue were the Crowded Hour Reserves. “No policy of recent years has done so much to alienate the friends of Government as the mistaken policy of the forest service, and if any of the mountain states shall go Democratic this fall, it will be chiefly for that reason,” D. C. Beaman of Denver told the gathering in New Mexico. “If a State Government had treated its people in such a manner it would have been ousted at the next election. Shall we stop mining coal, shut down our steel works, gas and electric plants and go back to the blacksmith shop and the tallow candle?”
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Election day was a relief to Roosevelt. He had been occupied by politics throughout the fall, and even as he planned his African safari he had been coaching Taft on how to win Catholic votes, state by state, away from the “small Protestant bigots.” He had also tried promoting conservationism to American farmers. Few major politicians had ever advocated keeping religion out of politics with quite the fervor of Roosevelt. In his role as coach during the campaign, Roosevelt had always wanted Taft to attack Bryan with more fury, to skin him like a skunk. That was eventually Roosevelt’s general attitude toward Bryan. Taft, disregarding Roosevelt, played his cards just right. November 3 was Taft’s day, not Bryan’s. The electoral count was 321 to 162: a landslide. The election couldn’t have turned out better for the Republicans, all around. According to the French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt’s “joy” over Taft’s victory was “overflowing.” Roosevelt deemed it a vindication of his own policies. “We beat them,” Roosevelt gloated, “to a frazzle.”
⁸⁸

Even though Taft had won, the general public seemed more enamored of Roosevelt—a rare American political leader who willingly turned his back on power. Excerpts of from the Country Life Commission report now ran in rural newspapers all over the country. And (with the exception of Colorado) virtually all the western states where Roosevelt had created national forests, national monuments, and federal bird reservations voted for Taft. Roosevelt’s far-reaching conservation policies were winning over what he called “the base and sordid materialism” of Bryan’s evangelical buffoons.
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VII

Nobody that holiday season in America could really envision T.R. as a private citizen. Life after the White House has always been entirely a matter of personal preference. John Quincy Adams, for example, became a U.S. congressman for eighteen years. Ulysses S. Grant barnstormed around the country for some time. For Roosevelt, stepping down meant returning
to his life as a big game hunter, wilderness wanderer, and faunal naturalist. But he hoped that his conservationist acolytes—including his fourth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a die-hard advocate of forestry—would continue fighting the crusade in Washington.

“Every now and then solemn jacks…tell me that our country must face the problem of what it will do with its ex-Presidents,” Roosevelt wrote to Ted Jr. after Thanksgiving, “and I always answer them that there will be one ex-President about whom they need not give themselves the slightest concern, for he will do for himself without any outside assistance; and I add that they need waste no sympathy on me—that I have had the best time of any man my age in all the world, that I have enjoyed myself in the White House more than I have ever known any other President to enjoy himself, and that I am going to enjoy myself thoroly
[sic]
when I leave the White House and what is more, continue just as long as I possibly can to do some kind of work that will count.”
⁹⁰

As 1908 wound down, Roosevelt noted that despite his activist progressive agenda he had left America’s finances in better shape than they were in 1901. He had cut taxes slightly and reduced the interest-bearing debt. He had also reduced the amount of interest paid on America’s debt. His administration had a net surplus of $90 million, and receipts over expenditures for all seven and a half years. “I am especially pleased, because the average reformer is apt to embark on all kinds of expenditures for all kinds of things,” he wrote to the historian George Otto Trevelyan, “good in themselves, but which the nation simply cannot afford to pay for.”
⁹¹

Thinking about his own presidential legacy had a tendency to set Roosevelt spinning. Insisting that he was sure to be a winner in the contest of history, he churned out letter after letter extolling his successes in Cuba, Panama, Santo Domingo, and Venezuela. Internationally, his primary worry was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whose militarism bothered Roosevelt’s sense of decency. “The German attitude toward war,” Roosevelt lamented to the British editor John St. Loe Stachey, “is one that in the progress of civilization England and America have outgrown.”
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As for Russia, it was guilty of “appalling…well-nigh incredible mendacity.”
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Roosevelt, of course, was full of praise for his foreign policy advisers. Besides Root as secretary of state, Roosevelt had relied on Taft as secretary of war; Senator Lodge of Massachusetts; the ambassador to Russia, George Von Lengerke Meyer; the ambassador to Britain, Whitelaw Reid; and the troubleshooting diplomat Henry White. There were three foreigners living in Washington D.C. whom Roosevelt treated like
cabinet members: Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice and Arthur Lee of Great Britain, and the French ambassador to the United States Jean-Jules Jusserand. Working with these men, Roosevelt had developed his “big stick” diplomacy, based on what we would now call American realpolitik and a huge modern navy. Other Rooseveltian principles included always acting justly toward other countries; never bluffing; striking only if prepared to strike
hard
; and, finally, always allowing an adversary to save face in defeat.
⁹⁴

But Roosevelt’s conservation activism didn’t die-out merely because of an election. On December 7, 1908, he created a national monument in Colorado. It was called Wheeler, after Captain George Wheeler, who had explored the area in 1874 for the U.S. Army, and its eroded outcropping of volcanic ash geologically resembled the badlands of North Dakota. Roosevelt was intrigued by the jagged spires, reminiscent of organ pipes, and he also deemed Wheeler a scientific site of great importance. But as it turned out, Coloradans weren’t good custodians of this unique 30-million-year-old area, and in 1950 Wheeler lost its monument status. It was transferred from the National Park Service to the U.S. Forest Service. (Currently it’s called the Wheeler Geologic Area and is part of the La Garita Wilderness Area.
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)