The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (53 page)

Before Roosevelt headed down to San Antonio for the training, he gave away his Elkhorn Ranch to Sylvane Ferris and sold his last head of cattle. (He had visited the ranch only infrequently in 1893, 1894, and 1896.
²³
) Roosevelt nevertheless differentiated himself in San Antonio from the other Ivy Leaguers in the Rough Riders. Without falsity, he presented himself as both a Knickerbocker and a wilderness hunter to the rank and file training along the San Antonio River. As Owen Wister put it, Roosevelt embodied both the East (as a socialite) and the West (as a cowboy). Regularly, Roosevelt jogged and rode horseback for miles in the lean May sunshine with his regiment, not far from the Alamo. Many of the Rough Riders had fought against the Comanche and Apache, and had won. Roosevelt knew that in cow country, along the wild borderlands with Mexico, men gave each other nicknames like Red Jim, Bear Jones, or Dutchey; he was honored to be called “the Colonel” by everybody.
²⁴

II

The Rough Riders eventually boarded a slow-moving train to Tampa Bay on May 30, with Arizona providing the regimental colors. Before the departure from San Antonio Roosevelt worried that the warhorses, ears pricked, snorting, and rattling the boards in the railcar stalls, were being
bullied and whipped as they were loaded onto the railcars by supposed horse masters. The harassing shouts of “Yahah!” bothered him. Taking charge of the situation, Roosevelt waved the others away and loaded the ponies properly into their compartments for the journey to Florida.
²⁵
Back in 1894 Owen Wister had written a short story, “Balaam and Pedro,” in
Harper’s Monthly
about the abuse of a horse he encountered on a western trek; the Wyoming character who stopped the inhumane treatment became the hero of
The Virginian
. (Wister, in fact, praised Henry Bergh’s movement to prevent cruelty to animals in his 1905 novel.
²⁶
) Now Roosevelt, like the protagonist of Wister’s tale, was protecting horses under his command.

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in his Rough Riders uniform
.
T.R. in Rough Riders uniform.
(Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

Once the train reached Galveston the dry heat was replaced by muggy humidity. Nobody, however, really seemed to mind. The railway cars were roofless, giving the procession the aura of a parade, with Rough Riders waving at villagers as the train passed slowly by. At every stop in Louisiana and Mississippi folks poured out of the countryside to have a quick look at Colonel Roosevelt and his cowboy-garbed regiment. Moms with baked goods and girls with pitchers of fresh milk greeted them at depots. Watermelon wagons appeared regularly, providing snacks for the soldiers. Roosevelt basked in the limelight at each depot, offering a running commentary on American exceptionalism. Before the fighting in Cuba even began, there was going to be a showbiz side to the Rough
Riders, but they would soon also touch the heartstrings of America. And, from the start, Colonel Roosevelt was the willing leader.

These Rough Riders were the pride of Roosevelt’s heart, and his inextinguishable enthusiasm kept their morale high. Good-heartedly Roosevelt gave up his private berth to a trooper with measles, taking a coach seat with his men. He was determined not to treat his privates like indentured household servants. To kill time, some of the men, while waving away hatching flies, wrote a jingle about going down the “dusty pike” with Colonel Roosevelt, ready to “throttle the sons of Spain.”
²⁷
Roosevelt was reading Edmond Demoulins’s
Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons
(1897), a foray into social Darwinism. Demoulins wrote that France, his native country, lacked the “independence and ability to fight life’s battles fearlessly,” qualities that the Anglo-Saxons possessed in spades.
²⁸
He also believed that education—at which the British excelled—was
the
key to developing a great country. All this was music to Roosevelt’s ears. As the train rumbled eastward Roosevelt consoled himself with Demoulins’s notions of natural selection in the human arena.

Once he finished the book, Roosevelt, flaunting his authority, called his men together at a depot stop near the Sabine River. He lectured them on Darwinism, describing how natural selection explained everything, from the size of their noses to the wings on the mosquitoes they were swatting. Many of the Rough Riders had taken to calling the Spaniards “greasers” or “dagoes,” and Roosevelt promised to explain shortly why the epithet wasn’t entirely unfair.
²⁹
Seizing Darwin’s image of a “tangled bank,” which ended
On the Origin of Species
, Roosevelt now made it his own. “Through all nature,” Roosevelt intoned, “it is a case of the survival of the fittest. Look at the magnificent trees along the river. The ones that started crooked were crowded out and died. The strong and the straight saplings appropriated all the food.”
³⁰

That wasn’t the extent of Roosevelt’s lecture on Darwinism. Inspired by Demoulins, he took a leap forward, bringing humans and mammals into the mix. “It is the same with wild animals,” he continued. “The cripples and the inefficients that cannot support themselves are killed off.” Humans, Roosevelt maintained, were just highly developed animals. So just as the Chinese purged themselves of the criminal class and the wicked, the United States, if it wanted to achieve greatness, needed to sanitize its society by getting rid of criminals. (To be fair, he did, however, add the important point that the blind or crippled or chronically infirm of sound mind needed to be cared for by society at large.)

Roosevelt then segued into the unfitness of Spaniards, the weak link
in European affairs. Most, he said, were shiftless and of weak moral fiber. As Americans, his men had a newfound responsibility to liberate Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, because the Spanish had proved themselves tyrannical. Obviously Roosevelt was trying to arouse his fighting forces. Verbally attacking the enemy in training was a practice older than Rome. Taking the jingoist notion one step farther, Roosevelt, as if reeling off a paragraph of Kipling, boasted that the Rough Riders had a sacred obligation to revenge the
Maine
. “The old vigilantes in Montana did not have a single law,” he reminded them, “but they did have a simple, wholesome code which everyone knew. Life and property are secure as a consequence.”
³¹

Notions of natural selection had long ago been stamped into Roosevelt.
On the Origin of Species
had taught him that evolution had some important implications for human societies. Still, the lecture was overblown and felt wrong. While Roosevelt was not a strict evolutionist in human affairs, he nevertheless was in the clutches of the general Spencerian notion “root, hog, or die.” To Roosevelt it was a slogan akin to gospel.
³²
As he articulated in his 1895 essay “Kidd’s Social Evolution,” published in
North American Review
(a scholarly analysis of Benjamin Kidd’s just-published reflection on natural selection), Roosevelt believed humans had two sides—one inspired by Darwin (“the rivalry of natural selection”) and the other being moral character (essentially the Ten Commandments). There were laws, he wrote, which governed mankind’s reproduction in every generation “precisely as they govern the reproduction of the lower animals.”
³³
But Roosevelt also understood that the rivalry of natural selection was just one way—not all-encompassing—in which
Homo sapiens
judged progress:

Probably the best way to understand Roosevelt’s thinking on social Darwinism—besides reading “Social Evolution,” which was reprinted as a chapter of his 1897 book
American Ideals
*
—is to study a lecture given by John Burroughs in the 1890s, “The Biological Origin of the Ruling Class.” Fulsomely embracing Darwin as a naturalist, Burroughs believed that the law of the strong overcoming the weak offered a valuable viewing of “the drama of human politics and business.”
³⁵
To Burroughs, the fittest usually rose to the top in American life. Undoubtedly evil charlatans sometimes tried to rig the reality. Scum often rose in life’s pond—but on the whole, every generation of Americans produced its heroic natural elite. These winners rode herd on human affairs, directing their course, helping civilizations and societies to survive cataclysms. Whenever truly bad leaders, imposters, reached a pinnacle of power, eventually they would be destroyed by the natural elite. Competition of all kinds, Burroughs went on in his lecture (which was a set piece), should be supported so that the best-and-the-brightest could earn their rightful positions of societal power. As for the poor and disabled, Burroughs believed the natural elite had a moral responsibility to take care of them.
³⁶

III

After four days on the train, the Rough Riders arrived in Florida. The unit was assigned to the U.S. transport
Yucatan
, but the departure date from Tampa Bay kept changing. Roosevelt worried that if the boat didn’t leave soon, his men’s livers weren’t going to withstand all the hiatus booze. The first day was incredibly humid, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and scant wind. Luckily, Edith came down from Oyster Bay for a few days’ reunion at the Hotel Tampa. Anxious for war, Theodore was unperturbed by the omnipresent swarms of chiggers and sand flies. To kill time he studied Florida’s botanical wonderland. At a glance, he could distinguish holy trees from blue beech and ironwood. Yet, Roosevelt found waiting deeply frustrating—ceaseless delays, widespread discomfort, missing cargo, confusion in command. One afternoon a jolt of excitement hit the camp: there was a rumor that Spanish warships were patrolling the Straits of Florida. But, alas, it was just a rumor.
³⁷

While waiting to be shipped out, Roosevelt studied the waterfowl along the wharf front and marshy inlets—ibis, herons, and double-crested cormorants, among scores of others. These were the species his Uncle Rob had written about so ably in
Florida and Game Water Birds
. Beneath Roosevelt’s army boots on the Tampa beaches were sunrise tellin and wide-mouthed purpura and ground coral, bay mud, tiny pebbles mixed with barnacles and periwinkles. Writing to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt turned quasi-geobiologist, delineating Florida’s semitropical sun, palm trees, sharks swimming in the shallows, and sandy beaches much like those on the French Riviera.
³⁸
The Gulf of Mexico, the ninth-largest body of water in the world, interested Roosevelt no end. Its barrier islands from Texas to Florida were home to myriad songbirds and shelled mollusks. Captain Mayne Reid had written about the region as a place of high adventure, where swells were 150 feet long, the throw of the surf was unpredictable, and pirate bands camped on isolated coral islands, eating clams and octopuses, fugitives from all governments.

Spending these days in Tampa Bay, various U.S. Fish and Wildlife historians believe, later influenced Roosevelt’s creation of federal bird sanctuaries along both of Florida’s coasts. What Roosevelt understood from being stationed on the Gulf Coast was that the market hunters were having a bad effect on Florida’s ecosystem, including the Everglades, Indian River, Lake Okeechobee, and the Ten Thousand Islands. The previous year, Roosevelt’s New York–based ornithologist friend Frank M. Chapman had warned him once again that tricolor herons and snowy egrets were being slaughtered for their feathers. Now, huge mounds could be seen around the port of Tampa, bird carcasses piled twenty or thirty yards high and rotting in the sun. If the slaughter wasn’t stopped, the bird roosts of Florida would vanish, species going the extant way of the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the Labrador duck.
³⁹
*

As President McKinley concentrated on the Spanish-American War, the American conservationist agenda in 1898 was left in the hands of Secretary of the Interior Bliss. Realizing that creating new forest reserves was inevitably controversial, Bliss focused on enlarging existing federal reserves, such as Pecos River in New Mexico and Trabuco Canyon in California. In addition, the lands in the Alaskan Territory were protected
under an experimental program for the Department of Agriculture. President McKinley himself bragged about these forest reserves—and other accomplishments—in his third State of the Union address.
⁴⁰
Meanwhile, Roosevelt noticed in Tampa Bay that Florida—one of the richest states in the Union in terms of wildlife—was being treated as a worthless swamp, instead of as the amazing array of ecosystems his Uncle Rob and Charlie Hallock had written about. As Chapman, who was spending much of his year in Florida, told Roosevelt, wildlife protection had to be enforced there, or else dozens of species would soon be destroyed forever.