The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (4 page)

Once Roosevelt became president, under his initiative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had already publicly supported the various
Audubon societies, and in its
Yearbook 1902
it pleaded with farmers and hunters to leave nongame birds alone.
³⁵
With the future of Pelican Island in the balance, the bird population about to be wiped out, Chapman understood that the time to seek President Roosevelt’s support on banning the bird slaughter there was
now
. If the dollop of land was not declared a USDA reservation, it would soon be a dead zone like the ground-down New Jersey Flats.

III

In early March 1903 President Roosevelt was mired at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. trying to push forward an anti-anarchy bill and was meeting with newly elected U.S. senators (from Idaho, Kentucky, Washington, and Utah) at the White House. Nevertheless, he still made time for his ornithologist friends. William Dutcher updated T.R. on the status of lighthouse keepers employed by the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) in Key West and the Dry Tortugas (seven islands located seventy miles off the mainland in the Straits of Florida) to protect nesting roosts. The bird-lovers also swapped stories about the health and well-being of their various friends in the Florida Audubon Society, an organization of which Roosevelt happened to be an honorary founder.
³⁶
(Dutcher himself would soon become the first president of the new National Association of Audubon Societies.
*
)

The gregarious president liked showing off his extensive knowledge about the state’s ecosystem, which included varied habitats like sea grass beds, salt marshes, and tree hammocks. Roosevelt’s library had a half-shelf of books about Florida’s wildlife. During the Spanish-American War he had been stationed at Tampa Bay waiting to be dispatched to Cuba. His Uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his father’s brother, a famous mid-nineteenth-century naturalist, had written a landmark ornithological book in 1884,
Florida and the Game Water-Birds of the Atlantic Coast and the Lakes of the United States
. (It was Uncle Rob who taught Theodore about the importance of what is now called ecology.) At the time T.R. was forty-four years old. He was stocky, with piercing blue eyes. His rimless spectacles and robust mustache dominated a remarkably unlined face. He spoke in clipped sentences, often making hand gestures and grimaces to underscore a point. This was followed by a hearty chuckle that bellowed up from his very depths. Emphatic and worldly in manner, a tireless op
timist with thousands of enthusiasms to juggle, in Rudyard Kipling’s terminology Roosevelt—who liked to be called the Colonel, in recognition of his service in the Spanish-American War—was quite simply a “first-class fighting man.” The journalist William Allen White perhaps summed up Roosevelt’s gregarious personality best: “There was no twilight and evening star for him,” White wrote. “He plunged headlong snorting into the breakers of the tide that swept him to another bourne, full armed breasting the waves, a strong swimmer undaunted.”
³⁷

As expected, Roosevelt assured both visitors that
of course
he cared a great deal about the fate of Florida’s brown pelican, egrets, ibises, and roseate spoonbills. He always had, since childhood. He had, in fact, recently read Chapman’s
Bird Studies with a Camera
and loved the vivid chapter on Pelican Island. Chapman and Dutcher couldn’t have had a more receptive audience that March afternoon in Washington.

The American Ornithologists Union had been trying to purchase Pelican Island outright from the federal government for three years, to no avail. That winter, members of the AOU finally had a constructive meeting with William A. Richards, the Department of the Interior’s new General Land Office (GLO) commissioner.
³⁸
Dutcher, acting as chair of the AOU’s committee on bird protection, along with Frank Bond, explained their quandary to Richards (a nononsense former governor of Wyoming). For years AOU had demanded that Pelican Island be surveyed—a prerequisite for placing a purchase bid on it. Now, with the official 1902 survey about to be filed, AOU felt boxed in. Legally, homesteaders’ applications had to be given preference when GLO land was sold. With homestead filings imminent, the AOU’s application would be shunned or given a low priority. And that meant the brown pelicans might not survive as a species on the Atlantic coast.

A hunter and conservationist himself, Richards wanted to help AOU, and he summoned Charles L. DuBois, his chief of the Public Surveys Division, into the meeting. Was there an ingenious way to circumvent the homesteaders-first provision? DuBois, a jurist who always dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, at first said no. But he offered Dutcher and Bond one long-shot alternative. President Roosevelt
could
make Pelican Island a bird refuge by issuing an Executive Order. Worried that a firestorm would ensue if the U.S. Department of the Interior seemed to be in collusion with AOU, DuBois instead suggested pushing the Executive Order through the USDA, where it would go virtually unnoticed in the Biological Survey Division headed by Dr. C. Hart Merriam.

Now that the AOU had a credible, legal way to protect Pelican Island,
Dutcher wrote to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson asking that a federal bird reservation be created. A stamp on the top corner shows that the secretary received it on February 27. Immediately using Frank M. Chapman as his conduit, Dutcher pushed for a meeting with the president about Pelican Island. Time was of the essence. With minimal difficulty Chapman procured a White House meeting that March.
³⁹

After listening attentively to their description of Pelican Island’s quandary, and sickened by the update on the plumers’ slaughter for millinery ornaments, Roosevelt asked, “Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?” The answer was a decided “No” the island, after all,
was
federal property. “Very well then,” Roosevelt said with marvelous quickness. “I So Declare It.”
⁴⁰

For the first time in history the U.S. government had set aside hallowed, timeless land for what became the first unit of the present U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Refuge System. History teaches that a zeitgeist sometimes develops around a fountainhead figure, that sometimes a transforming agent—in this case President Theodore Roosevelt—serves as an uplifting impetus for a new wave of collective thinking. Building on a growing ardor for federal intervention into the regulation of the private sector, Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” was in line with the legacies of all the Republican presidents since Lincoln. The Union victory in the Civil War, in fact, meant that the U.S. federal government had emerged as the principal proponent of national reform movements like conservation.

Recognizing the need for scientific wildlife and land management, every U.S. president in the gilded age considered himself conservationist-minded to some limited degree: certainly Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley did. Each, in fact, had landmark “forest reserves” accomplishments in his portfolio to showcase for history. Yet they all lacked long-term vision, concerned instead with only the forestry issues and water-shortage emergencies of the moment. But Roosevelt was vastly different; nature was his rock and salvation. Refusing to be hemmed in by the orthodoxies of his time, he burst onto the national stage—first as civil service commissioner and governor and vice president and then as president—promoting the Gospel of Wilderness. Bridging the gap as a naturalist-hunter, he deemed songbirds liberators of the soul and bison herds incalculably valuable to the collective psyche of the nation. Even though local communities across the American West complained about federal land grabs, Roosevelt insisted he was preserving wilderness for their own good, for the sake of the American heritage.

With nationalistic optimism, Roosevelt’s patriotic summons essentially called for deranking the Louvre, Westminster Abbey, and the Taj Mahal as world heritage sites. The United States had far more spectacular natural wonders than these worn and tired man-made spectacles: it had the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, the Petrified Forest, Key West, the Farralon Islands, the Tongass, Devils Tower, and the Bighorns. American bird flocks, he insisted, were far more glorious than those found in the steppes and forests of staid Old Europe. The implicit assumption was that Roosevelt’s utter love of “American Wilderness” always had a heavy component of raw nationalism. When asked as ex-president in 1918 why he loved wildlife so much, Roosevelt had a characteristically direct yet unreflective answer: “I can no more explain why I like natural history,” he said, “than why I like California canned peaches.”
⁴¹

Now, with this imperious decree of March 1903, the irrepressible naturalist was saying that a part of wild Florida should be saved for the sake of imperiled birds and endangered animals. President Roosevelt’s guiding eco-philosophy was that habitat preservation for animals mattered, completely. Any reasonable person, he believed, should understand this. In the new century, market hunters had an obligation to stop their rampage and bow to the forces of biological conservationism and utilitarian progressivism as far as land and wildlife management were concerned. Forests needed to be treasured as if life-giving shrines. Citizens had to rally to save remnant populations of wildlife
everywhere
before species extinction became epidemic. Biodiversity was apparent and essential in nature, Roosevelt believed, wherever open minds looked. A huge cornucopia of wild creatures and plants, diverse in purpose and structure, with beauty and utilitarianism beyond the most fertile imagination, was an omnipotent God’s blessed gift to America.

A relieved Chapman rejoiced when he heard Roosevelt’s verdict—“I So Declare It”—realizing this was a new precedent for wildlife protection. He vowed to convey to future generations that March 1903, was
the
turning point in the birds’ rights movement. True to his word, Chapman would laud Roosevelt in
Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist
(1908) and
Autobiography of a Bird-Lover
(1933). Filed away in Chapman’s personal papers on the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, in fact, is the letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1908, claiming that “The Naturalist President” had, “more than any other person,” inspired him to write
Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist
.
⁴²
In that long memoir, Chapman credited the “characteristic directness” of President Roosevelt with guaranteeing the “future safety of pelicans” for perpetuity.
⁴³
“Not only shall
I enjoy the book, but what is more important, I feel the keenest pride in your having written it,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman in gratitude. “I like to have an American do a piece of work really worth doing.”
⁴⁴

With that one sweeping “I So Declare It,” President Roosevelt, the big game hunter, had entered John Muir’s aesthetic preservation domain. And Pelican Island wasn’t a passing whim of a president showing off to ornithologist colleagues. It was an opening salvo on behalf of the natural environment. No longer would slackness prevail with regard to conservationism, for Roosevelt—the wilderness warrior—would coordinate the disparate elements in the U.S. government around a common “great wildlife crusade.” Perhaps the historian Kathleen Dalton in
The Strenuous Life
summed up Roosevelt’s evolved attitude toward biota circa 1903 best: “Despite his official commitment to the policy of conservation of natural resources for use by humans he held preservationist and romantic attachments to nature and animals far stronger than the average conservationist.”
⁴⁵

On March 14, 1903 President Roosevelt officially signed the Executive Order saving Pelican Island. By slipping the federal bird reservation into the domain of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as Charles DuBois of the Interior Department had suggested, T.R. was hoping to avert the notice or controversy that keeping it in the Interior Department would have generated. Whenever he was faced with an obstacle, Roosevelt liked figuring out a way to circumvent it. Remarkably, T.R.’s Executive Order sailed through the bureaucracy in just two weeks. Legally it had to be approved by both Agriculture and Interior before the president could sign it.
⁴⁶
Without any note of toughness—and only fifty words long—the order was a seminal moment in U.S. Wildlife History: “It is hereby ordered that Pelican Island in Indian River in section nine, township thirty-one south, range thirty-nine east, State of Florida, be, and it is hereby, reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”
⁴⁷

The first unit of the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System was now a reality. And Sebastian, Florida—the hamlet closest to Pelican Island—was its birthplace. Eighteen months later, Roosevelt created the second federal bird reservation, at Breton Island, Louisiana. By 2003, when Pelican Island celebrated its centennial, the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System comprised more than 540 wildlife refuges on more than 95 million acres. Taken together, this woodlands, bayous, desert scapes, bird rocks, tundra, prairie, and marshland make up 4 percent of all United States territory.
⁴⁸
At the time, however, the Pelican Island declaration garnered
very little national attention—the
New York Times
never mentioned it, nor did the Jacksonville
Florida Times-Union
.
⁴⁹
But future generations took serious notice; the impetus for a National Wildlife System had sprung to life. Saving Pelican Island initiated Theodore Roosevelt’s evolving idea of creating greenbelts of federal wildlife refuges everywhere the American flag flew. Very quickly these refugees grew exponentially in numbers under Roosevelt’s influence until the map of the lower forty-eight states was vastly altered. From this single small island in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon grew the world’s greatest system of land for wildlife. In the remaining six years he was in office, Roosevelt created fifty more wildlife refuges. Writing in his well-received
An Autobiography
(1913), Roosevelt explained how his ambition hardened to create these refuges without his ever making an on-site inspection trip: