The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (73 page)

Reporters had swarmed around the president all that first day, hoping to send colorful dispatches. But no bear shot by the president was ever hung in the camp. Meanwhile the reporters were stuck in the middle of nowhere, twelve miles from the Smedes telegraph line, with no lively copy to offer from the delta. Some reporters quipped that the president would have been better off fishing for smallmouth bass or chasing after moccasins to exterminate. Any way you sliced it, the story was a non-story: the president didn’t bag a bear. Roosevelt took his failure stoically, saying that it was the “nature of the chase.” But reporters loath a void. Many of the journalists lampooned Roosevelt for his failed hunt, but several wrote glowingly of Collier, describing his almost superhuman single-handed capture of a large, wild bear at the age of fifty-six. Soon other stories were manufactured. By the time Roosevelt left Mississippi, heading north to Memphis, the buzz was that the president had befriended Holt Collier—a black man. This, combined with the lingering effect of Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington, perhaps contributed to a boycott by the Tennessee Governor’s Guard and Confederate veterans’ groups of the president’s scheduled parade in downtown Memphis.
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Yet the long-term effect was good for Roosevelt’s reputation. Berryman’s cartoon of the president refusing to shoot a captured bear had captured the public’s imagination. A middle-aged Brooklynite, Rose Michtom, impressed by Roosevelt’s sportsmanship, made two plush toy bears, stuffed with excelsior and adorned with black shoe-button eyes, as a tribute to the compassionate president who had refused to fire on a captive beast. Her husband, Morris, put the stuffed bears in the window of his stationery and novelty store, and they sold immediately. Then Morris Michtom had a brainstorm: why not seek President Roosevelt’s permission to market the toy as “Teddy’s Bear”? Michtom sent a letter to the president, apparently in February 1903. The president supposedly wrote back a few lines, essentially saying OK. “I don’t think my name will mean much to the bear business,” he reportedly said, “but you’re welcome to use it.”
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The couple’s son, Benjamin Franklin Michtom, remembers that his parents framed Roosevelt’s letter and hung it on a wall of their summer home in Florida; after they died and the house was sold, the letter disappeared. No copy has turned up among Roosevelt’s voluminous personal papers, housed at Harvard University, or among his presidential papers at the Library of Congress.
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Although Roosevelt’s letter has been lost and some scholars question
whether it was ever written at all, two things are certain: the teddy bear became a rage in the toy business, and the Michtoms made a fortune. Their bears sold for $1.50 apiece, and they couldn’t fill the orders fast enough. By 1907 the demand for the cuddly stuffed bears—most with jointed heads, arms, and legs—was so great that the Michtoms formed the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company and moved to a more spacious factory-style building. Coincidentally, in the small medieval town of Giengen, Germany, Margarete Steiff, a seamstress who had been a victim of polio, was also making little plush bears. In the previous few years, she had created a line of appealingly detailed stuffed elephants, donkeys, horses, camels, and pigs. When her nephew, the artist Richard Steiff, began sketching brown bears at the zoos in Stuttgart and Munich and urged her to design a mohair bear toy, she agreed. At first nobody bought the Steiff bears. When one was put on display at the 1903 Leipzig Fair, however, a wealthy American buyer fell in love with it and ordered 3,000 to be shipped to New York. Upon being presented with one of the Steiff bears, Roosevelt supposedly roared his approval and ordered several hundred to be used as table decorations for his daughter Alice’s wedding reception. That sealed the deal: the Steiffs, like the Michtoms, officially dubbed their new toy the “Teddy Bear.”
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The teddy bear craze set off by Steiff and Ideal Toy and Novelty reached its zenith while Roosevelt was president. In 1903 the Steiffs manufactured 12,000 bears; in 1907 the number had soared to 974,000. Dozens of other companies produced their own teddy bears, with various stylistic alterations. Claiming that its version was
the
authentic teddy bear, the Steiff Company began sewing a small metal button into one ear of each of its stuffed toys, to hold the trademark label that still distinguishes the Steiff brand. But Roosevelt always gave credit for the phenomenon to Clifford Berryman, who thereafter included a little bear in all his cartoons of the president. “My dear Mr. Berryman, you have the real artist’s ability to combine great cleverness and keen truthfulness with entire freedom from malice,” Roosevelt wrote on January 4, 1908; “good citizens are your debtors.”
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The fad continued after Roosevelt left the White House in 1909. One toy company, eager to cash in by bestowing on the incoming president, William Howard Taft, his own stuffed animal, designed a plush opossum marketed under the slogan, “Good-Bye Teddy Bear. Hello Billy Possum.” Unfortunately, with its weird pink eyes, frightening grin, and ratlike tail, Billy Possum was one stuffed critter children refused to hug. The toy was a flop. Other presidents might be remembered as anglers—among
them Cleveland, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush—but only Theodore Roosevelt was firmly established as an outdoorsman. The teddy bear probably had more to do with this image than his setting aside of more than 230 million acres of federal parklands.
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Once he was back in Washington, Roosevelt initiated a correspondence with Collier, sending him letters and promising to stay in touch. Presumably a literate friend read these letters to Collier. With so many parvenus in town Roosevelt enjoyed staying in touch with a outdoorsman like Collier. Although it took a few years, Roosevelt would again go hunting with Collier in 1907. Roosevelt pronounced him a better hunter than even John “Grizzly” Adams, Ben Lilly, or Wade Hampton III. At the turn of the twentieth century men used to vie for being considered the best shot; Roosevelt was giving the gold medal to Collier. “He was a man of sixty and could neither read nor write, but he had all the dignity of an African chief,” Roosevelt wrote, “and for half a century he had been a bear hunter, having killed or assisted in killing over three thousand bears.”
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A young novelist from Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner, drawing on Roosevelt’s enthusiasm, later modeled a character in his allegorical short story “The Bear” on Collier, though he made his fictional figure a Chickasaw chief.
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Capturing the mythical tenor of the bear hunt, Faulkner wrote of his character Sam Fathers that he was an “old man of seventy” and that “the woods” were his “mistress and his wife.”
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Although the correlation isn’t provable, Holt Collier’s outdoors acumen may have influenced President Roosevelt in another, unexpected way. Roosevelt had long been an admirer of the buffalo soldiers—the 14,000 African-American men who served in cavalry and infantry units during the Indian Wars on the Great Plains. After his trip to Mississippi Roosevelt suddenly assigned them to patrol the three national parks of California: General Grant, Yosemite, and Sequoia. Additional buffalo soldiers were put in charge of Monterey’s Presidio. Roosevelt had developed the idea that African-Americans made fine wilderness police. Captain Charles Young—the third African-American West Point graduate, and a personal friend of Roosevelt—was named acting superintendent of Sequoia National Park. Young’s outfit would escort Roosevelt to Yosemite in 1903, discussing with the president ways to protect the “big trees.”

From Collier’s perspective Roosevelt’s hunt was all upbeat. Fame came to him like a race horse. For Roosevelt, unlike Collier, the Mississippi bear hunt had an unfortunate outcome, which plagued him to the grave and beyond. More than ever, Americans now called him Teddy—the
name he loathed. The first sign that individuals knew absolutely nothing about the real Roosevelt was that they dared to say “Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill” or boasted that “Teddy Roosevelt was in town.” Newspaper columnists were famous for this. Why didn’t they call Lincoln “Abie” or Washington “Georgie” while they were at it? Whenever J. P. Morgan, John Hay, and Mark Hanna called Roosevelt “Teddy”—as they often did—he took it as a direct insult. “No man who knows me well calls me by the nickname…,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend on December 9, 1902. “No one of my family, for instance, has ever used it, and if it is used by anyone it is a sure sign he does not know me.”
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Such was the power of a cartoonist and a stuffed toy.

II

For the last two or three months of 1902, President Roosevelt carefully weighed his options for where to create his inaugural forest reserve, taking extra precautions not to set off a firestorm in Colorado and Montana, where timber titans and sheep farmers were already on the verge of hanging him in effigy. Right after Christmas Roosevelt had written to Alexander Agassiz, president of the National Academy of Sciences (and son of the great Harvard zoologist) to help him launch a “comprehensive investigation” of the natural history of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Shrewdly, Roosevelt struck first on January 17, 1903, just after the Christmas holiday season ended, helped by recommendations from Agassiz and a report written by John Gifford of Florida (who was worried about the illegal felling of trees in Puerto Rico).
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Having risen to fame in the Caribbean as a Rough Rider, and deeply fascinated by the rare tropical wild-life that populated the rain forests, particularly the bright green Puerto Rican parrot (
Amazona vitatta
), Roosevelt created the 28,000 acre Luquillo Forest Reserve (renamed the Luquillo National Forest in 1907).
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Nobody in official Washington objected to the Luquillo. Roosevelt would visit Puerto Rico himself in 1906 to see the rainforest firsthand; as an Auduboner he knew it was a famous aviary for parrots and banan-aquits. As further evidence of Roosevelt’s interest in tropical forests, as ex-president he went to the Amazon and wrote magnificently about them in “A Naturalist’s Tropical Laboratory,” an article for
Scribner’s
Magazine. “In the heat and moisture of the tropics the struggle for life among the forest trees and plants is far more intense than in the North,” he wrote. “The trees stand close together, tall and straight, and most of them without branches, until a great height has been reached; for they are striving toward the sun, and to reach it they must devote all their energies to
producing a stem which will thrust its crown of leaves out of the gloom below into the riotous sunlight which bathes the billowy green upper plane of the forest. A huge buttressed giant keeps all the neighboring trees dwarfed, until it falls and yields its place in the sunlight to the most instantly vigorous of the trees it formerly suppressed.”
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From a political perspective creating the Puerto Rican rain forest park was a painless endeavor. In 1900 Puerto Rico had surrendered its sovereignty to the U.S. military authority. President McKinley had issued the Organic Act (known as the Foraker Law) establishing civil government and open commerce between Washington, D.C., and San Juan. Puerto Rico was declared America’s first unincorporated territory, and the new Puerto Rican government was assigned a governor appointed by the White House (Charles Herbert Allen), who was helped out by five Puerto Rican cabinet members. Treating Puerto Rico as part of the spoils of the Spanish-American War, the McKinley administration established free trade and a democratic electoral process. During the first full year of Roosevelt’s presidency a second round of elections was held (under the Foraker Act), a telephone company was established, and English was made one of the two official languages, along with Spanish. By the authority of a 1902 act of Congress, President Roosevelt was allowed to do as he saw fit with all “crown lands” ceded to America by Spain.

As with the Badlands and the Rockies, Roosevelt had adopted the Luquillo National Forest—the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. National Forest System—as an object of unending fascination and wonder. The Luquillo had a romantic lure that appealed to Roosevelt’s image of David Livingstone and to his sense of the lost jungle. With quiet reasoning T.R. studied every biotic aspect of the newly acquired sanctuary located on the east side of Puerto Rico, especially its rain forests. Courtesy of the USDA, Roosevelt had learned that in 1824 Spain had established a forest conservation law, eventually administered by a public forestry commission, to protect the dim, mysterious, green-roofed jungles. Never one to turn down a good idea, Roosevelt felt that America’s forestry service could learn a few things about land management from these old, impressive Spanish laws and regulations. In 1876, only a few years after Yellowstone was established, King Alfonso XII of Spain had officially proclaimed the towering Luquillo forests and masses of vines (approximately twenty-five miles from San Juan), a “forest reserve.” Lush beyond words, the Luquillo forests received over 200 inches of rainfall annually. This meant that the dark-green ausubo trees and the wide variety of ferns received 100 billion gallons of freshwater a year. Commonly referred to by
Puerto Ricans as “El Yunque”—which roughly translates as “Forest of the Clouds”—Roosevelt’s first national forest was a tropical paradise of the first order. Four distinctive forest types were here: the Tabonuco, Sierra Palm, Palo Colorado, and Cloud Forests. Peaks rose over 3,500 feet with trees blanketed with moss, algae, and bromeliads with bright red flowers. San Juanites would picnic and swim at La Mina Falls. But there was trouble in paradise. Throughout the Sabana River valley, like a ring of rust surrounding a jewel, was chronic deforestation due to reckless coco farmers and rubber merchants.

For a conservationist like President Roosevelt the 5,116-acre Luquillo forest was a biotic plum dropped into his lap. There are approximately 100 million species on earth, and half of them exist in tree foliage and trunks. Who knew what undiscovered species lurked in that largely un-chartered and unmapped jungle? There were, for example, eleven coqui species (i.e. tiny tree frogs as loud as an opera singer after it rained). Roosevelt immediately assigned a USDA team of botanists, ornithologists, and foresters to write and publish a scientific report on the Luquillo forest. Roosevelt wanted to know everything about it. (A forest ecology report was published in 1905, to Roosevelt’s great satisfaction.) Roosevelt marveled at the proliferation of tabonuco trees (which grew at low elevations and could be 100 feet tall), unusual wild palm fruits, and picturesque waterfalls as exotic as something Gauguin might have painted in the South Seas. Sound forest management would be needed to protect this wonderland where more than 240 types of trees coexisted. If the deforestation that had taken place in Haiti was allowed to occur in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt believed, San Juan would lose its fresh water supply. A real disaster. (Likewise, Pinchot was dispatched to the Philippines to write a forest inventory report.)