The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (48 page)

IV

That month also saw a career development: Roosevelt left the U.S. civil service to become a member of the Board of Police Commissioners of New York City.
^†
He had lived as a bureaucrat in the District of Columbia and was ready to return home. At the time, New York’s police department was perceived as untrustworthy and corrupt; the new commissioner would have to make public integrity his first priority. From day one, Roosevelt had a two-pronged approach to running the force: do away with bribery and force officers to abide by the law. Making the city’s police department more honest, however, proved difficult. The Bowery, in particular, a mile-long row of brothels, bars, and burlesque clubs, was the most notorious tenderloin district in America; the police patrolling the beat were mostly on the take. Always “prudish as a dowager,” as one biographer put it, Roosevelt thought prostitution caused moral debasement and was a menace to health.
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Roosevelt began making surprise visits to Bowery saloons, firing officers if they were found partaking in the draft beer and revelry.
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Nothing at the police department pre-Roosevelt, it seemed, had been done on the up-and-up. Roosevelt found that even instituting a standard for the promotion of police officers was fraught with controversy. “The public may rest assured that so far as I am
concerned,” Roosevelt stated on accepting the appointment, “there will be no politics in the department and I know that I voice the sentiment of my colleagues in that respect. We are all activated by the desire to so regulate this department that it will earn the respect and confidence of the community.”
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Commissioner Roosevelt wasn’t just handcuff-happy in the Bowery or on the Lower East Side. Bitten by the temperance bug, he tried to enforce the moribund blue law against allowing saloons to be open on Sunday and went after nefarious dealers of exotic pets like a tyrant. Following the old Henry Bergh–ASPCA line, Roosevelt believed in ethical treatment of captured wildlife for both humane and sanitary reasons. Although many Americans liked to have some of the world’s 350 parrot species as pets, a majority of these parrots died in transit from South America or Africa. Roosevelt wanted to have such importation regulated to ensure the birds’ safe passage. But exotic birds hardly consumed much of his time. To instill discipline on the force, Roosevelt took to taking “midnight prowls” to investigate the cops’ beats. Determined to run a squeaky-clean department, he insisted that public integrity was an essential component of proper law enforcement, that a single bad apple poisoned the nobility of the entire force. “Two years and eight months left to me on this Board,” he boasted after just a few weeks in office, referring to his appointed term “and that is time enough to make matters very unpleasant for policemen who shirk their duty.”
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But even as Roosevelt succeeded at modernizing the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, introducing bicycle squads and implementing pistol shooting practice, he continued his work for the Boone and Crockett Club. In late 1895, for example, the National Academy of Sciences asked him for his opinions on the condition of America’s national forests. Gleaning information from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (Biological Survey), Roosevelt didn’t like what he found. In his report, he worried that the 13 million acres of national forests set aside by the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 were being plundered for timber, and that the sheep pasturing in forest reservations would destroy all the herbage. In addition, Roosevelt once again called for the U.S. Army to do more policing of western reserves; urged the hiring of dozens of wardens; and, last, recommended to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith that still more forest acreage be set aside by the Cleveland administration.

As New York’s police commissioner, Roosevelt appeared in the newspapers daily throughout the spring of 1896. In particular, the press re
ported his searching the streets and saloons for “slacking cops.”
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Not that Roosevelt, in his zeal to end corruption on the force, ignored the need to fight crime. For instance, when Owen Wister spent some time with Roosevelt on Mulberry Street, he was impressed by how committed his old friend was to stopping gambling and prostitution in the city. After one lunch Wister dutifully noted that Roosevelt’s jaw was “acquiring a grimness which his experience of life made inevitable; and beneath the laughter and the courage of the blue eyes, a wistfulness had begun to lurk which I had never seen in college; but the warmth, the eagerness, the boisterous boyish recounting of some anecdote, the explosive expression of some opinion about a person, or a thing, or a state of things—these were unchanged, and even to the end still bubbled up unchanged.”
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Truth be told, Roosevelt wasn’t happy as police commissioner, finding the work “grimy” and “inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating.”
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Firing underlings for gross incompetence was demoralizing, and the job left him hardly any time for the outdoors life. Roosevelt found consolation in the fact that at least he wasn’t forgotten as a historian. The final volume of
The Winning of the West
was published in June 1896, to a fourth round of positive reviews. However, this time Roosevelt received no psychic uplift from the publication, and perhaps he was relieved that the long work, based on antiquated ideas he had first paraded before the public seven years ago, was at last over. Instead of reviewing Volume 4, the
New York Times
presented a feature article about how Roosevelt couldn’t wait to tramp around the West (where he hadn’t been in two years) with a new small-caliber Winchester. Roosevelt commuted back and forth on the Long Island Railroad from Sagamore Hill to his Mulberry Street office, preferring the pastoral Oyster Bay to the hurly-burly of the carriage-choked city. Roosevelt would have preferred to make his way to Yosemite or Alaska to write a book, just as John Burroughs had done—his friend had just published
Birds and Bees and Other Studies of Nature
. Roosevelt would title his book, the article intimated, something like
Bears and Deer of the American West and Beyond
.
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That August Roosevelt managed to spend a couple of weeks in the Dakotas and Montana. He was preparing to close the Elkhorn ranch while in the west he campaigned tirelessly on behalf of Republican William McKinley of Ohio. Once Roosevelt returned to New York, in fact, he accused the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, of being a wild-eyed anarchist willing to usher in dissolution and disunion. Roosevelt never before had so much fun belittling an opponent. He told everybody in the Boone and Crockett Club that Bryan, a Nebraskan who served two
terms in Congress, besides being an agrarian radical (and admittedly a first-class orator) was against forestry science, wildlife protection, and national parks. Roosevelt warned that as Election Day neared Bryan would become downright demagogic, turning the worst class of voters into a rabble armed with pitchforks, demanding that the dollar be leveraged on the silver standard instead of gold. If Bryan was elected, Roosevelt worried, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 (and any other wise federal government initiatives) would be overturned, for his supporters had the kind of peasant mentality that would end up even denuding Pikes Peak and Mount Olympus in what Roosevelt saw as a “Witches Sabbath.”
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In any event, Roosevelt needn’t have worried. On Election Day, McKinley bested Bryan and the existing U.S. government’s timberlands—at least on paper—were safe.
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That holiday season Roosevelt was in high spirits, lunching with Burroughs and plotting with Grinnell.

A great moment in U.S. conservation history occurred a few weeks before William McKinley’s inauguration on March 4, 1897. On Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1897, ten days before the end of his term, the outgoing president, Grover Cleveland, created thirteen new or expanded forest reserves totaling 21 million acres; much of this land was in the verdant Pacific Northwest. Naturally howls of protest came roaring into Washington, D.C., from lumberers, grazers, and miners.
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“The rage of the lumber and railroad men,” the reporter George B. Leighton later noted in
Five Cities
, “knew no bounds.”
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Timber barons, in particular, felt that they had been blindsided by the fat, hatless departing president. From their entrepreneurial perspective Cleveland had just served them strychnine in their coffee. Western businessmen couldn’t believe the sheer treachery of Cleveland’s parting shot. They were on the verge of mutiny. Suddenly
all
the milling of lumber and hauling of river stone had to cease at Cleveland’s designated forest areas unless the U.S. government said otherwise. Always predisposed to underrate Cleveland, Roosevelt was surprised and grateful that the outgoing president had unsheathed a sword. “This action,” he and Grinnell later bragged, “was directly in the line of recommendations urged in the Boone and Crockett Club books.”
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Of course, Roosevelt wished that millions more acres had been put aside, particularly in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, where the Painted Desert, Black Mesa Valley, Canyon de Chelly, and Grand Canyon lay vulnerable. Although he had seen the Grand Canyon only in photographs from the rim, he knew—ever since reading John Wesley Powell’s
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
as a teenager—that
it needed to become a national treasure. Nevertheless, he heartily approved of the forests and natural wonders the Cleveland administration had the fortitude to save: the San Jacinto and Stanislaus (California); Uinta (Utah); Washington, Mount Rainier,
*
and Olympic (Washington); Bitterroot, Lewis and Clark, and Flathead (Montana); Black Hills (South Dakota); Priest River (Idaho and Washington); and Teton and Big Horn (Wyoming).
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“It was a serious matter taking this great mass of forest reservations away from the settlers,” wrote Roosevelt. “That it needed to be done admits of no question, but the great bulk of the people themselves strongly objected to its being done; and a great deal of nerve and a good deal of tact were needed in accomplishing it.”
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A rare photograph of Theodore Roosevelt with Grover Cleveland (on left).

T.R. with Grover Cleveland.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

President Cleveland met with immediate blowback from many western senators. Words like traitor, fink, thimblerigger, Judas, blackleg, bamboozler, mountebank, stool pigeon, and patsy were hurled his way. “So hostile and powerful were these forces,” the historian Char Miller remarked in
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism
, “that through their representatives in Congress they had managed to suspend Cleveland’s action pending congressional hearings.”
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Senator John Lockwood
Wilson of North Dakota, for example, excoriated Cleveland for a “dastardly blunder” carried out to please East Coast elitists like the Boone and Crockett Club. Wilson predicted that westerners would ignore the edict and continue to log timber as they saw fit. Senator Richard Franklin Pettigrew of South Dakota called Cleveland “a disgrace to civilization and a disgrace to the Republic.” Nearly every western senator, in fact, believed that Cleveland had betrayed America. Cleveland’s action in kicking over the hornet’s nest, they argued, was in part pathological, a punishment because the Democratic Party had lost the 1896 election. (This didn’t make any sense, however, because Bryan was no friend of the forest reserves.)

Meanwhile, the Seattle chamber of commerce was in high dudgeon over President Cleveland’s last-minute “sneaky” forest grab. The mere pun on his last name—
Cleave-land
—got its members hopping mad. “The reservations, of no benefit to any legitimate object or policy, are of incalculable damage to the present inhabitants of this state,” these northwestern businessmen argued. “If they were allowed to stand, not only will the mining industry be destroyed, but the great railroad trunk lines of the Central West which are now heading for Puget Sound will be prevented from coming here. All the passes in the Cascade mountains by which the railroads can reach the Sound are embraced in these reservations.”
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But the
New York Times
, in a spate of editorials, applauded President Cleveland’s parting proclamation as a historic accomplishment on behalf of the general public and posterity. “To leave [pristine forests] to private enterprise is to make sure within a generation or two of reducing the Western land now wooded to the condition in which countries once well watered and fertile, like Greece and Spain, have been reduced by like improvidence,” the
Times
argued. “It is to dry up the streams now stored by the forest and to expose the country the water supply which they protect to an alternation of drought and flood.”
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That August John Muir also vigorously defended Cleveland’s public lands act in an article in
Atlantic Monthly
titled “The American Forests”—though he also noted that sometimes “wild trees” had to make way for “orchards and cornfields.”
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To Roosevelt’s mind the sworn enemies of the Cleveland reserves were (politically speaking) at the polar opposite ends of the political spectrum: Bryan Populist-Democrats from the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions and Republican Wall Street types and monopoly-minded captains of industry on both coasts.