The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (91 page)

From Oregon Roosevelt headed to Seattle, using the Hotel Washington as his operational base to inventory everything about the town. Shipbuilding and Pacific trade were the themes that dominated Roosevelt’s speeches in Seattle. To his chagrin, he never got a chance to see a Roosevelt elk grazing in the Olympic rain forests. He did smell the raw
fir boards for sale along the wharf. Not surprisingly, given his adroitness as a politician, Roosevelt met with the who’s who of greater Seattle. No debutante failed to receive a presidential bow. With such a crowded itinerary Roosevelt simply didn’t have the time to experience the moss-grown snags of Puget Sound County. In general, he hadn’t given himself enough time to explore Washington state. Heading back to Washington, D.C., from Seattle on the “Roosevelt Special,” the president was in a sulky mood over this fact. With no appointments to keep, the pace of travel seemed sluglike. Even though Loeb had run a pretty good rolling White House, there was a backlog of bureaucratic work that needed the president’s immediate attention. Wall Street financiers were sowing the seed of monopolies, and Roosevelt knew he had to be a regulator of the economy for the sake of the people. He had been spending time with high-caliber men like Burroughs, Pitcher, Muir, Bullock, Lacey, Young, and Finley, and now his heart shriveled when he had to grapple with dry-lipped New York types whose life purpose was making money.

Roosevelt gave hurried conservation-infused speeches in towns like Walla Walla, Washington, and Helena, Montana, as the Roosevelt Special went eastward. Neither community had many buildings from the nineteenth century, and Roosevelt’s speeches were stale re-runs. He was starting to feel like an itinerant carny at a medicine show. The flame, spark, and glory of the Great Loop tour were over. The hour for paperwork had returned. No more acting like a child or savage in the wild. On the upside, Roosevelt was eager to get back to Edith and his six children. Nineteen-year-old Alice had just gone to Puerto Rico on a goodwill trip, and her father was as proud as a peacock. “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel like you liked them,” he wrote, “and took an interest in them, and your presence was accepted as a great compliment.”

Although Roosevelt was “pretty well tired” from the western trip, he wanted to tell stories about all the natural wonders he had explored. Draw your chair up, and Roosevelt would gladly tell a antecdote about Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, or Yosemite. Furthermore, he had taken a real liking to Josiah, keeping the little badger as his constant companion on the train. He knew his children would love the cute little critter. “So far he is very good tempered and waddles around everywhere like a little bear submitting with perfect equanimity to being picked up,” he continued to Alice, “and spending much of his time in worrying the ends of anybody’s trousers.”
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When Roosevelt arrived at the White House his wife was surprised to see him looking so healthy and fit. He was also immaculately groomed.
If anything, all that travel seemed to have invigorated him. He was full of incredible stories about the Wyoming Rockies, Nebraska tree nurseries, the whitecapped Colorado River, towering California sequoias, comical Oregon puffins, and the unforgettable gentleness of John Muir in the snow. He was gripped by a hunger for the golden West, which defied description for those who hadn’t experienced it. Encounters with bears, fawns, raccoons, and so on had suddenly become well-honed campfire-like yarns at the White House. Heartland citizens had handed animals to Roosevelt as gifts—over a dozen of them—and most were being shipped off to zoos by Loeb. But Roosevelt hadn’t come home empty-handed. Josiah—just starting to cut its teeth—was the president’s new companion, having been nursed on a bottle all the way from Kansas. With great ceremony, Roosevelt presented the badger to his seven-year-old son Archie as a gift. The family had grown by one.

It seems that every decade some writer, anxious for quick money, publishes a book on White House pets. One star attraction in this lightweight pulp fare is Josiah. (Another is Calvin Coolidge’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Billy.
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) If anything spoke of eccentricity, keeping a badger at the White House did. As a species, badgers have some undesirable traits: they are unpredictable, frequently carry parasites, have sharp claws, and vomit often in captivity. Sometimes Roosevelt, full of glee, allowed Josiah free rein in both the White House and Sagamore Hill. Over time, Josiah became exhibit A of Roosevelt’s over-the-top anthropomorphic enthusiasms. “Josiah, the young badger, is hailed with the wildest enthusiasm by the children, and has passed an affectionate but passionate day with us,” the president wrote to a friend that June. “Fortunately his temper seems proof.”
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Now, with the western trek finished, Roosevelt was ready to make the badger instead of the teddy bear his political symbol. After all, 1904 was an election year and the president wanted to rip the Bryan Democrats and the big-business Republicans to shreds for—among many other things—not understanding the imperatives of preservation, which had become synonymous with the type of progressivism known as Rooseveltian conservationism. The Great Loop journey had convinced Roosevelt not only that his conservationist agenda was on track in the West, but that it needed to be amplified for the ages. And his friendships with Muir, Burroughs, and Finley—key allies—had been enhanced.

I

P
resident Roosevelt started 1904 by writing a spate of letters to family and various friends. The contents were history, and nothing seemed off-limits. Showing a considerable breadth of knowledge, Roosevelt mused about everything from “pagan” Rome to nineteenth-century naval power. Outdoing himself as an intellectual president, perhaps even equaling Jefferson in bookishness, Roosevelt contemplated the lasting achievements of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Milton, and a dozen others. It was as if Roosevelt was trying to see where he himself fit into world history. Interestingly, he seemed to feel compelled to insist that Francis Parkman—who had died in 1893—was a more talented historian than the entire American Historical Association membership combined. In Roosevelt’s book
Hero Tales from American History
, in fact, Parkman was considered on equal terms with the likes of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. “He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships, living in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a band of Ogallalla Indians,” Roosevelt noted after his idol’s death. “With them he remained despite his physical suffering, and from them he learned, as he could not have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was.”
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As president, Roosevelt began using Sir George Otto Trevelyan, author of
Life of Macaulay
, as his chief historian correspondent. Roosevelt, even though he was grappling with international crises in Japan, Russia, Colombia, and Morocco (and in a presidential election year), found time to reflect with Trevelyan on the need for more “faunal naturalists” in the grand tradition of John James Audubon. Perturbed by the germanization (i.e., overspecialization) of American colleges and universities—which Roosevelt continued to believe were strangling the talent out of the new generation of naturalists—the president lamented the unfortunate triumph of the pedantic, petty twentieth-century men who had contaminated history with dullness: there was a “lamentable dearth in America,” the president wrote, of new naturalist work of “notable and permanent value” in the tradition of Audubon, Thoreau, and Burroughs.
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Forty-five years earlier the world had received Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, followed by
The Descent of Man
. Roosevelt now wondered what had happened in the naturalist field since then that was truly innovative and exciting. All America had to offer the post-Darwinian world was Dr. C. Hart Merriam of the Biological Survey, who was a “great mammalogist” but apparently had no ability to write triumphant, redefining zoological works. The fact that Merriam wasn’t producing a
big book
continued to perturb Roosevelt. “[Merriam] himself suffers a little from this wrong training, and I am afraid he will never be able to produce the work he could, because he cannot see the forest for the trees,” Roosevelt confided to Trevelyan. “He cannot make up his mind to write a great lasting book, inasmuch as there continually turns up some species of shrews or meadow mice or gophers concerning which he has not quite got all the facts; and he turns insidiously aside once more to the impossible task of collecting all these relatively unimportant facts. Still, he does understand that we should not leave to storybooks the vital life histories of our birds and mammals.”
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Roosevelt also seemed somewhat estranged from Grinnell because of the flap between them over the article in
Forest and Stream
that had attacked John Burroughs. By April 1904 Grinnell had finished editing the Boone and Crockett Club’s fourth volume,
American Big Game in Its Haunts
—for the first time without Theodore Roosevelt as coeditor. Yet the lead article, “Wilderness Reserves”—later collected in
Outdoor Pastimes
—had been written by Roosevelt; it also appeared in
Forest and Stream
. “Mr. Roosevelt’s account of what may be seen [in Yellowstone],” Grinnell wrote, “is so convincing that all who read it and appreciate the importance of preserving our large mammals, must become advocates of the forest reserve game refuge system.” As if trying to bridge the gap between Roosevelt and himself, Grinnell went on for several pages about what a “great thing” Roosevelt’s “accession to the Presidential chair” had been for forest reserves, national parks, big game, and birds in general.
⁴
“Aside from his love for nature, and his wish to have certain limited areas remain in their natural condition, absolutely untouched by the ax of the lumberman, and unimproved by the work of the forester,” Grinnell wrote, “is that broader sentiment in behalf of humanity in the United States, which has led him to declare that such refuges should be established for the benefit of the man of moderate means and the poor man, whose opportunities to hunt and to see game are few and far between.”
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Roosevelt’s essay “Wilderness Reserves” began with a photograph of tourists at Yellowstone, all dressed in Sunday clothes, watching black
bears eat in an open field, and another of Oom John meditating by a clear stream, with traceried wrinkles around his all-seeing, naturalist’s eyes. Once again railing against “greedy and shortsighted vandalism,” Roosevelt explained why preservation of both forests and wildlife was essential to the long-term health of America:

“Wilderness Reserves,” in which Roosevelt used his 1903 trip to Yellowstone and Yosemite for color and details, was his greatest call yet for preservation. Because there had been no hunting involved in his “western trek,” Roosevelt was able to focus his writing on
seeing
such wildlife as golden eagles, magpies, scores of black-tails, and an antelope band numbering about 150. There were many Darwinian food-chain anecdotes, including coyotes feasting on deer carcasses and eagles swooping down for mice. Roosevelt was calling for maintaining the
balance of nature
without unwarranted human intrusions. But the scenic wonders of the West—the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the three Tetons glistening in snow, the gulls circling Three Arch Rocks, the Grand Canyon at dusk, the great Mojave Desert with its lonely barren hills—impelled Roosevelt to declare that they should be “preserved for the people forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”
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Roosevelt was also deeply troubled by the Park Commission’s overreach. He rejected the idea of construction along the National Mall from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument in favor of “green
space.” In a display of outrage that anticipated a later concept, NIMBY, Roosevelt insisted that the Mall should be used for “monumental purposes” only.
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Too many new buildings, he believed, would ruin the park-like essence of official Washington, turning it into a crass thoroughfare. Critics of Roosevelt’s greenspace accused him of hypocrisy, for building a West Wing on the White House (which he wanted architecturally renovated and enlarged) and also a tennis court. “It is true that I have a tennis court in the White House grounds,” Roosevelt wrote in his own defense. “The cost of it has been trivial—less than 400 dollars. It has been paid for exactly as the adjacent garden, for instance, is paid for. The cost is much less than the cost of the greenhouses under Presidents Grant, Harrison, Cleveland, etc.”
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Because there were eight Roosevelts in the White House—Theodore, Edith, Teddy Jr., Kermit, Alice, Quentin, Ethel, and Archibald—not to mention a flood of guests, expansion and remodeling had begun in 1902. Roosevelt wanted the White House divided into living quarters for the first family (East Wing) and office space for the president (West Wing). The architecture firm of McKim, Mead, and White was brought in to do the job. Overseeing it all was Edith, who was determined to transform the old Executive Mansion into “the recognized leader of Washington official Society,” and to make it a “moral” factor in the “social life of America.” By 1904 Edith had become the most popular first lady since Frances Cleveland. Part of Edith’s appeal was that she good-humoredly allowed the six Roosevelt children to collect animals of all kinds. And, as the historian Lewis L. Gould put it, Edith took tremendous care of the president, “the largest child in Mrs. Roosevelt’s brood.”
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One of Edith’s wildlife management problems at the White House was Josiah the badger, now full-grown. Because the president allowed Josiah to roam freely, it constantly gnawed into any leg within reach of its teeth, occasionally drawing blood. Furthermore, President Roosevelt built a durable house for Josiah so it could dig tunnels in the White House lawn.
¹¹
“At present he looks more like a small, flat mattress, with a leg under each corner, than anything else,” the reporter Jacob Riis recalled after an afternoon at Sagamore Hill. “That is the President’s description of him, and it is a very good one. I wish I could have shown you him one morning last summer when, having vainly chased the President and all the children, he laid siege to Archie in his hammock. Archie was barelegged and prudently stayed where he was, but the hammock hung within a few inches of the grass. Josiah promptly made out a strategic advantage there, and went for the lowest point of it with snapping jaws. Archie’s efforts to
shift continuously his center of gravity while watching his chance to grab the badger by its defenseless back, was one of the funniest performances I ever saw. Josiah lost in the end.”
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Then there was Jonathan Edwards, an untamable cinnamon bear that had been given to Roosevelt by a group of Republicans from West Virginia and named after the Puritan minister (an ancestor of Edith’s). The bear had what Roosevelt called “a temper in which gloom and strength were combined in what the children regarded as Calvinistic proportions.”
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Roosevelt enjoyed taking Jonathan Edwards for walks, feeding it honey and nuts, and playing hard with it, as with an oversize dog. Eventually, when it got too big, the president had to donate it to a zoo.
¹⁴
As Riis noted in his
Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen
(a well-written campaign biography of 1904), the family had so many pets they were hard to count. White rats, opossums, and raccoons were at one time or another White House residents.
¹⁵
Peter the rabbit hopped about, sometimes sleeping under sofas or inside closets. In between important meetings, Roosevelt would feed mice to his barn owl, a reddish-chested female. Aquariums were full of horned toads, painted turtles, and salamanders. A medium-size iguana used to wander about the White House corridors as freely as did Maude the pig. Roosevelt’s son Theodore Jr. raised a pet lamb named “Teddy” as if it were a family dog. All that was missing was a pushmipullyu, or the White House could have been renamed Puddleby-on-the-Marsh.
¹⁶

When President Roosevelt was awake late, he sometimes recorded habits of his domestic cats, usually for his children to enjoy. “Tom Quartz is certainly the cunningest kitten I have ever seen,” he wrote to Kermit from the White House. “He is always playing pranks on Jack and I get very nervous lest Jack should grow too irritated. The other evening they were both in the library—Jack sleeping before the fire—Tom Quartz scampering about, an exceedingly playful wild creature—which is about what he is. He would race across the floor and then jump upon the curtains or play with the tassels. Suddenly he spied Jack and galloped up to him. Jack, looking exceedingly sullen and shamefaced, jumped out of the way and got upon the sofa, where Tom Quartz instantly jumped upon him again. Jack suddenly shifted to the other sofa where Tom Quartz again went after him. Then Jack started for the door, while Tom made a rapid turn under the sofa and around the table and just and away and the two went tandem out of the room—Jack not reappearing at all; and after about five minutes Tom Quartz started solemnly back.”
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Roosevelt had long been a promoter of guinea pigs as first-rate pets for children; and he kept
five
in the White House: Admiral Dewey, Dr. John
son, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, and Father O’Grady.
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And then one afternoon a sixth materialized out of thin air. A few weeks after New Year’s 1904, the magician Harry Kellar put on a show for the president’s family. “I went along and was as much interested as any of the children, though I had to come back to my work in the office before it was half through,” Roosevelt reported to his son Kermit. “At one period Ethel gave up her ring for one of the tricks. It was mixed up with the rings of five other little girls, and then all six rings were apparently pounded up and put into a pistol and shot into a collection of boxes, where five of them were subsequently found, each tied with a rose. Ethel’s however, had disappeared, and he made believe that it had vanished, but at the end of the next trick a remarkable bottle, out of which many different liquids had been poured, suddenly developed a delightful white guinea pig, squirming and kicking and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey, with around its neck Ethel’s ring, tied by a pink ribbon.”
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