The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (67 page)

Gladly, Pinchot accepted the president’s gracious offer. In the coming years their vigorous friendship continued to blossom. Roosevelt found Pinchot to be a bundle of invaluable insights. Together they would often hike in Rock Creek Park, swim in the Potomac River, play tennis, watch birds, and chop firewood near National Cathedral School. While Pinchot wasn’t given to lyrical outpourings like Burroughs or Grinnell, he was a far better conservationist tactician than anybody else orbiting around Roosevelt. In Roosevelt’s so-called “tennis cabinet” (“kitchen cabinet” sounded too sissified for Roosevelt), Pinchot was probably his most trusted colleague. Pinchot, in fact, became something of a “faithful bodyguard,” always willing to defend Roosevelt from attacks.
²⁶
Seldom did Roosevelt and Pinchot see things through different lenses. (There, however, was one big difference between them: Roosevelt was first and foremost a bird preservationist whereas Pinchot was not). And they both enjoyed night work and end-of-the-day confidences. “They were appalled by the human destruction of nature everywhere visible in early twentieth-century America,” the historian Char Miller has noted. “The solution, they believed, lay in Federal regulation of the public lands and,
where appropriate, scientific management of these land’s natural resources; only this approach, guided by appropriate experts, would ensure the land’s survival. So parallel ran their thoughts that Roosevelt reportedly assured Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of
Century Magazine
, that on questions of conservation the chief forester was in truth the keeper of conscience.”
²⁷

Not only did Pinchot agree to run the Division of Forestry in Interior, but over Thanksgiving he inserted paragraphs about conservation into the December 3 annual message. To many western senators these insertions were out-and-out heresy. The intensity and boldness of Roosevelt’s address, read by a clerk (as was traditional), encouraged conservation enthusiasts on many levels, though the speech was somewhat short on details. And it wasn’t just a cranky outburst. It was hard-core Rooseveltian conservationist philosophy, presented on the nation’s center stage. For those familiar with Roosevelt’s allegiance to the Boone and Crockett Club and various Audubon societies, it wasn’t very shocking—but the sheer breadth of the wildlife protection plank
was
unexpected. Even though most New Yorkers had accustomed themselves to the proposition that the sportsman Roosevelt, when it came to wildlife protection or forestry policy, was never content to be a spectator, Congressmen on both sides of the aisle were surprised by the piercing vigor of his conservationist agenda.

Nobody has recalled President Roosevelt’s First Annual Message with such elegance and insight as historian Edmund Morris in
Theodore Rex
. Combining actual passages of Roosevelt’s address with vivid descriptions of individual legislators and the atmosphere, Morris wrote about that frigid December day as if he had been sitting in the visitors’ gallery witnessing history.
²⁸
Regardless of its overall eloquence, the annual message consisted of important reports and helpful comments that the White House had received from various departments (in other words, it was cobbled together).
²⁹
For starters Roosevelt, in strong language, condemned filthy anarchists; he was seething because three presidents in his lifetime had been struck down in their prime by lunatics. Thunderous applause arose from Congress as the clerk, reading Roosevelt’s bracing prose, exclaimed with pent-up frustration that the American people, usually “slow to wrath,” when “kindled” (by an anarchistic abomination like the murder of McKinley) ignited like a “consuming flame.”
³⁰
As president he planned on ridding the nation of anarchists, sending them scurrying like mice across the floorboards of national life.

Although Roosevelt offered some uplifting chamber of commerce-like
pronouncements about improved business confidence, his address was notable for its stinging language about corporate trust-busting. Industrialists interpreted the address as a sneer from the pulpit. Clearly, Roosevelt planned on restraining the business class, and even openly challenging it over stock market manipulations and monopolist attitudes. Throughout the Gilded Age huge corporations worked overtime to abuse the public welfare, affecting millions of Americans; such abuses were going to be curtailed with Roosevelt in the White House. He promoted immediate federal intervention in regulating corporations. And—like a boot stuck in mud suddenly coming free—he said that workers were no longer going to be treated as industrial wage slaves. Demanding improved labor laws, Roosevelt lambasted, as Morris puts it, politicians that were “fattened at the public trough.”
³¹
Many of those seated—particularly senators from the Deep South still furious over the Booker T. Washington affair—were leaning forward with fingers clasped and heads shaking: no, this traitor to his class and race can’t be real. “In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of great corporations,” Roosevelt stated. “The nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business.”
³²
No company was above the law or deserved special treatment from the U.S. government. He outright rejected corporations that wanted rebates and rate fixing. “Great corporations,” Roosevelt proclaimed, “exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”
³³

Following these cautionary swipes at corporations President Roosevelt launched into his conservation plank, based on the philosophy of Pinchot and Grinnell. Nothing would palsy his resolution regarding wilderness protection. The West had 6 million inhabitants in 1901; by the time Roosevelt left office there were over 10 million citizens and the population was still growing. Much of Roosevelt’s conservationist thinking in the annual message was directed toward this region. With the West so much in the forefront, he was, as Morris noted in
Theodore Rex
, “striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances.”
³⁴
Nothing about Roosevelt’s conservationist rhetoric could have been misconstrued as give-and-take. He was
telling
Congress the new lay of the land. Disgusted that the United States had cut down almost 50 percent of its timber, and that valuable topsoil had been washed away, Roosevelt was sending a wake-up call.
³⁵
He wanted Congress to save pristine American land while
it still existed. Whether they were coniferous forests in the Pacific Northwest or strands of Douglas fir far older than the republic in the Front Range of the Rockies, forests had to be saved. His far-reaching conclusion, after much consideration, was that he wanted the western reserves vastly increased. Decades of study had taught him the symbiotic relationship between timber, soil, and water conservation. “The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity,” the address stated. “We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forests, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our own well being.”
³⁶

And the conservationist creed—albeit carefully modulated—didn’t stop there. It would be up to the federal government—not big business—to lease lands for logging or mining, and not just near the famous destinations like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Throughout the West, the prettiest scenery not deforested or contaminated would be on the table for consideration as national parks or forest reserves. Not on his watch would such lovely Pacific Northwest ranges as the Cascades and Olympics be turned into heaping mounds of slag as in Appalachia. No western state would go unaffected. Praising the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Roosevelt promised to sponsor even more science-based studies pertaining to trees, plants, and grasses through its Biological Survey division run by Dr. Merriam. Roosevelt’s address was pure radical Americanism—especially the ten paragraphs dealing directly with conservation. That November, just a few weeks before the First Annual Message, John Muir had published the essay collection
Our National Parks
, which included his classic
Atlantic Monthly
articles “The American Forests” and “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West.”
³⁷
Roosevelt had found them highly stimulating and persuasive. Roosevelt did not mention Muir in his annual message but nevertheless sided with Muir’s ecologically sensible crusade to save the great forests of the Pacific Slope. Roosevelt, in fact, liked to quote Muir, who wrote in 1897: “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”
³⁸

Roosevelt was the new Delphic oracle of conservation, the political authority of the forestry movement, best-selling author, wilderness trooper, birder, hunter, and moral advocate for nature. For most presidents, give-and-take with Congress was important. Roosevelt, however, believed in only one solution: his own. But, by and large, Congress wasn’t persuaded by Roosevelt’s far-reaching promotion of forestry in the First Annual Message. Roosevelt, for example, recommended consolidating forest work
under the Bureau of Forestry. “This recommendation was repeated in other messages,” Roosevelt carped in
An Autobiography
, “but Congress did not give effect to it until three years later. In the meantime, by thorough study of the Western public timberlands, the groundwork was laid for the responsibilities which were to fall upon the Bureau of Forestry when the care of the National Forests came to be transferred to it.”
³⁹

Besides forest reserves Roosevelt spoke out in the First Annual Message on behalf of wildlife protection as formulated by the Boone and Crockett Club, implying that many federal preserves would eventually be created to protect elk, pronghorns, mule deer, and mountain goats. Even though wildlife didn’t have the economic importance of timber or water, it was the most endangered resource of twentieth-century America. To Roosevelt the forest reserves, in consequence, should “afford perpetual protection to the native fauna, and flora, safe havens of refuge to our rapidly diminishing wild animals of the larger kind.”
⁴⁰
Eventually Roosevelt would sell suspicious western developers on the need for wild-life protection by offering a quid pro quo. Predator control would serve as an inducement. Once established, federal game reserves would thin out wolves and coyotes in a region, keeping these predators away from domestic livestock in the government lands. This, in turn, would also mean far less predators in communities near forest reserves. Roosevelt had Merriam at the Biological Survey begin printing pamphlets on how best to poison coyotes and wolves.
⁴¹

Diligently, Roosevelt had tweaked drafts of the first annual message, searching for exactly the right phrases. This wake-up speech wasn’t a pedestrian tract on the virtues of utilitarian forestry. It was meant for the ages, meant to be bound in gilt-stamped leather. The embryonic wildlife protection movement (best epitomized by the Boone and Crockett Club and the Audubon societies) had now come to fruition on a large scale at the federal level. The U.S. government was headed into the business of saving elk, deer, and buffalo. Even though the address was read by the clerk, listeners could envision the president jabbing his finger at disputants, determined to topple their built-in predispositions. “Roosevelt respected expert opinion and made use of it to a degree which was unmatched among the public, men who were his contemporaries,” Pinchot explained. “Men of small caliber in public office find scorn of expert knowledge a convenient screen for hiding their own mental barrenness. So true is this that one of the best measures of his own breadth and depth of mind is the degree to which a public man acknowledges the value of
expert knowledge and judgment in fields with which he himself, in the nature of things, cannot be familiar. By this standard Roosevelt stood at the very top.”
⁴²

At about the time of the First Annual Message, Roosevelt encouraged Merriam to increase the hiring of so-called “camp men” who could help the Biological Survey’s field reporters inventory native plants and animals. For a salary of about twenty-five dollars a month, these camp men (usually hunt guides from the area) would assist the trained scientists working for the Biological Survey. Together the egghead and the rough-and-ready would set traps, prepare skins, and ship species back to Washington, D.C., where they could be carefully studied in laboratories. Roosevelt wanted thorough field notes with biotic summaries accompanying every shipment. One of Roosevelt’s favorites among Merriam’s “field agents” was J. Alden Loring (who upon his recommendation in 1899 became assistant curator of mammals at the New York Zoological Park). Always encouraging Loring to become a public figure, to stop concealing his genius, Roosevelt tapped him as a talent scout taps a promising athlete. Proud of the way Loring was following in Merriam’s estimable footsteps, Roosevelt later had the young naturalist collect for the U.S. National Museum in Europe. Loring also helped reintroduce buffalo back to South Dakota and accompanied former president Roosevelt on his 1909 African safari.
⁴³

What impressed Merriam about Roosevelt was that even while living the “strenuous life,” he never stopped being a faunal naturalist. The microscope had turned a new generation of biologists to studying minute organisms, but Roosevelt stayed focused on what Merriam called the more “obvious forms of life.” Starting in November 1901 and continuing until he left office in March 1909, Roosevelt would telephone Merriam quite regularly, particularly during the spring migration, making sure that the warblers in the White House elms were blackpolls or that the flocks of rusty blackbirds along the Potomac basin hadn’t decreased in numbers from the previous year. Not long after becoming president, in fact, Roosevelt had asked Merriam to take a twilight bicycle trip with him from the White House to Rock Creek Park to watch a beaver build a lodge. “He was ‘delighted’ to see the beaver cut a willow and swim with it to a floating log,” Dr. Merriam recalled in
Science
, “where he sat up and ate the bark.”
⁴⁴