The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (50 page)

But even as Roosevelt immersed himself in military affairs, he found time to duel intellectually with Dr. C. Hart Merriam over the nature of species and subspecies. Merriam, the reviewer whose praise for
The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks
, back in 1877, had helped establish Roosevelt’s bona fides as a naturalist, was now chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Ornithology and Mammalogy (Biological Survey). Nobody admired Merriam more than Roosevelt, who regularly sent notes of appreciation for his steady work on behalf of biological inquiry, mammalogy, and biogeography. Roosevelt always enjoyed seeing Merriam’s name in print. There was always an air of collaboration about the two men. Sometimes, for example, Roosevelt sent Merriam sketches and drafts that he was working on. Who else but the overly conscientious Merriam would take the time to examine 27,000 specimens of white-footed mice before issuing a report on their habits?
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Every time Merriam spoke publicly in science forums, even the people in the back rows whispered in awe at his illustrious erudition. There was something about this government scientist’s deportment that demanded respect. He had a knack for making even trifles interesting.

Starting in the mid-1890s Merriam plunged headfirst into the debate over the classification of bears. Boldly he declared there were ten bears to be saved, as well as a new subspecies. Back in 1890, when Merriam, following a trip to the San Francisco Mountains of Arizona, announced his “life zone” theory (i.e., that temperature and humidity were
the
leading factors in species development), Roosevelt applauded the findings. But now these sudden pronouncement about bears left him baffled. Perhaps, he thought, Merriam was just overworked. So in an unusual gesture of
solidarity Roosevelt tried to disagree only quietly, letting the biologist create new textbook designations.

Although Darwinism had been fully embraced in the Ivy League schools, save for a few recalcitrant professors, its crossover into the mainstream culture was fraught with dissent. Being a pioneering biologist like Merriam, one who insisted that germs were living organisms (like people), was mistakenly interpreted as tantamount to declaring Adam and Eve a farce. For hard-core creationists—who were a large majority of Americans—Merriam was pushing scientific inquiry too far for comfort. When Henry Cabot Lodge, serving as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, wrote a letter to Roosevelt, intimating that Merriam was getting a little too loopy with his Darwinian claims in the U.S. Biological Survey, Roosevelt objected. “Now, I was a little disturbed at what you said to me about Hart Merriam,” Roosevelt wrote. “On most matters I accept your judgment as much better than mine. On this you for the time being accept mine. The only two men in the country who rank with Merriam are [Alexander] Agassiz and [David] Jordan.”
*
⁶⁵

Out of all Roosevelt’s naturalist friends, only Merriam (and the botanist Asa Gray) took Darwinian pursuits such as cross-pollinating flowers—anthers and pistils—seriously. Merriam was like Roosevelt in that loafing wasn’t part of either man’s personality. For Merriam, every waking minute was sacred time for further scientific inquiry into the mysteries of life. He had become the workhorse of the U.S. Biological Survey. Besides publishing the definitive two-volume work
The Mammals of the Adirondack Region, Northeastern New York
, he had visited seal rookeries in Newfoundland, helped found the National Geographic Society, conducted collecting trips in the Mojave and Sonoran desserts, served on the American-British Seal Commission, and written a groundbreaking Darwinian interpretive text, “The Geographic Distribution of Life In North America, with Special Reference to the Mammalia” in
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
.
⁶⁶

At the time of his disagreement with Roosevelt about overspecialization or organisms, Merriam was organizing an expedition to 14,179-foot Mount Shasta, a dormant volcano in Siskiyou County, California,
the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range. Groves of conifers on its slopes had already been recklessly denuded by a lumber company.
*
Raised in New York, Merriam was admired as a highly effective administrator by the East Coast aristocracy who frequented the gentlemen’s clubs—Metropolitan, University, Cosmos, and Century. The railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, for example, hired Merriam in 1899 to head a famous eight-week expedition to Alaska. Harriman’s primary personal goal was to hunt a brown bear. Paid a retainer, Merriam organized the travel arrangements, booked the best polar scientists for the voyage, and, most famously, hired John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell to come along. Once in Alaska, Merriam, for the sake of American natural science, hiked across Howling Valley in Glacier Bay, wrote on the volcanic island of Bogoslof, and pondered the fate of seals. Eventually he compiled “The Merriam Report,” a multivolume account everything learned on the expedition, for E. H. Harriman himself. A deskbound Roosevelt was envious because he hadn’t been able to go along on the historic expedition.

Considering the high level of mutual admiration, one suspects that what actually started the feud with Merriam was his encroachment into the study of bears, considered Roosevelt’s bread-and-butter area of expertise. Merriam stoked up a controversy regarding bears in 1896 by publishing (for the Biological Society of Washington) the paper “A Preliminary Synopsis of the American Bears.” Claiming that for fifteen years the classification of North American bears had been done with imperfections and unscientific contractions, Merriam wanted to challenge orthodoxy. Taxonomic revisions of various genera of bears, he said, owing to field research, were now needed. Having collected 200 to 300 bear skulls and skins as samples, he insisted that the results were crystal clear. There were many more bear species than previously known. That possibility seemed so fantastic, so incomprehensible to Roosevelt that he could barely absorb the assertion calmly. Merriam might as well have claimed to have discovered Sasquatch.

Calling for a comprehensive treatise on bears, Merriam admitted that “much additional material is coveted from North British Columbia, and
the coast regions of Alaska south of the Alaskan peninsula.” Nevertheless, from studying so many skulls Merriam confidently declared in his synopsis that there were ten full bear species (and one subspecies in Canada), not the smaller number that Roosevelt had supposed. To give just two examples, there were now a small black (
Ursus floridanus
) whose range was the Everglades and a huge brown bear (
Ursus dalli
) found in Yakutat Bay and the St. Elias Alps which needed to be added to zoology books.
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In other words, some of the information in Roosevelt’s published essays on bears, while entertaining, was, in Merriam’s view, technically wrong.

Roosevelt could hold his tongue no longer. Feeling bruised by an article of 1897 in the
New York Times
proffering Merriam’s views about bear species, Roosevelt suddenly saw things Henry Cabot Lodge’s way. Merriam, it seemed, had indeed gone Darwin-mad, playing the clairvoyant, turning Linnaeus on his head, and wanting to rewrite zoology books to support his field research, which called for new ways to classify species. As if the bears weren’t enough, Merriam was about to publish an article in
Science
claiming that more species breakdowns of many other mammals were needed to cover such factors as color variation, differences in horn size and shape, whiskers, and hoofprints. Regarding coyotes in America, for example, Merriam believed there were actually eleven distinct species. Roosevelt, urging modification of Merriam’s theory, balked at the species approach to classification. Merriam’s heavy emphasis on species classification, he argued, would merely confuse the general public. “I have been greatly interested in Dr. Merriam’s article as to discriminating between species and subspecies,” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn. “With his main thesis I entirely agree. I think that the word ‘species’ should express degree of differentiation rather than intergradation. I am not quite at one with Dr. Merriam, however, on the question as to how great the degree of differentiation should be in order to establish specific rank.”
⁶⁸

Osborn, who would go on to become the preeminent advocate of Darwinism in the early twentieth century, was Roosevelt’s ally in the well-mannered dispute of 1897. In a letter to Osborn, Roosevelt admitted his own “conservative instincts,” but added that when it came to creating entire new species of bears, wolves, elks, and coyotes, he was sanely skeptical.
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If Merriam’s theory were true, that meant his trophy collection at Sagamore Hill of North American big game would never be complete, and every year he’d have to try to bag newly designated species. Roosevelt saw Merriam’s idea as akin to having an “old familiar friend” suddenly “cut up into eleven brand new acquaintances.” Although Roosevelt loved Merriam dearly, he thought Merriam’s new zoology was off-kilter and not
worth expounding in serious periodicals like the
New York Times
and
Science
. Turning a blind eye toward Merriam’s research, Roosevelt insisted that varied species—like mule and white-tailed deer—were smart “arbitrary divisions” devised for “convenience’s sake.” But he didn’t find value in suddenly catapulting black-tailed deer, for instance—comfortable as a subspecies—into the species category on a biological whim. At the end of the day they were
deer
. He believed their “essential likenesses” far more important than their “minor differences.” While Roosevelt fully supported having Merriam’s Biological Survey field collectors record variations in species discovered in different regions of America—and in fact coveted such information himself—he didn’t want to “lumber up our zoological works” by adding unnecessary new terminology, thereby overloading the binomial system.

One wonders what Secretary of the Navy Long thought of his underling, whom he didn’t know well, being involved in naturalist squabbles throughout the spring and summer of 1897 (Long’s diary suggests he had strong reservations about Roosevelt’s sanity). Roosevelt’s Darwinian-influenced views spread into his public policy pronouncements, including his pro-expansionist sentiments, when he flat-out stated that “the rivalry of natural selection” was “one of the features of progress.”
⁷⁰
On April 30, Roosevelt published a rebuttal to Merriam in
Science
. In “A Layman’s View on Specific Nomenclature,” Roosevelt started out by praising Merriam as “one of the leading mammalogists and he has laid all men interested in biology under a heavy debt”—but then he attacked. Using examples like coyotes of the Rio Grande Valley, bears of the Bighorns, and cougars everywhere, Roosevelt challenged Merriam’s thesis as clumsy. “The excessive multiplication of the species in the books cannot, as it seems to me, serve any useful purpose,” Roosevelt wrote, “and may eventually destroy all the good of the Latin binomial nomenclature.”
⁷¹

The next month, a taxonomic debate between Merriam and Roosevelt was held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.—a little mansion on Madison Place that had served as something of a living room for John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and the Geological Survey community in general—in front of an audience of America’s leading naturalists. It had been arranged by L. O. Howard of the Bureau of Entomology.
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Merriam, who lived nearby on Sixteenth Street, often used the Cosmos library as his own salon, occasionally reading Huxley and Thoreau in an easy chair as a break from arsenic and formaldehyde. There were few other places in Washington, D.C., where you could you simply pluck from the bookshelves classics of exploration without so much as consulting a reference librarian.

Just as
Marbury v. Madison
was carefully studied in law schools for decades after the decision, the rancorous disagreement between Roosevelt and Merriam had a long shelf-life in graduate biology programs. At its core was the question: What constituted a species? On Roosevelt’s side were “lumpers,” old-fashioned taxonomists uncomfortable with “undue cleavage of the genus.” The “splitters” were Merriam’s followers, who insisted that wildlife that integrated “must be treated as subspecies and bear trinomial names; forms not known to integrate, no matter how closely related, must be treated as full species and bear binomial names.” To Roosevelt these “splitters” were essentially perpetuating a gimcrack theory, smothering in its implications (although he didn’t phrase his view in quite such a degrading way). Merriam made plenty of valuable points defending his research. Nevertheless he was not, as a rule, a good speaker. For visual effect he brought with him wolf and coyote skulls, with mixed results.
⁷³

Roosevelt, by contrast, made the room shake when he spoke. Thrusting his hands out of his shirt sleeves, he lectured on the need for biology not to overcomplicate everything. One point, which Roosevelt essentially conceded, was that ornithology was a relatively “finished science” whereas mammalogy, particularly throughout the American West, was “yet in its infancy.” Merriam saw this concession as an opening. Daily the Biological Survey was getting mammals with skull variations and tails different from others in the same genus. Was it really so irresponsible to believe, Merriam wanted to know, that new species were being discovered?
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Essentially, Roosevelt won the debate on extempore elocution while Merriam did better on specifics; in other words, it was a draw.

Besides his sharp argument with Merriam, Roosevelt’s obsession with species bled into his job at the Navy Department in other, unexpected ways. On behalf of entomology, for example, Roosevelt wanted the new class of U.S. torpedo boats to carry names like
Wasp, Hornet,
and
Yellow-Jacket
.75 Under the aegis of a decorator, Roosevelt filled his office with a wide assortment of antlers; it looked like a Wyoming hunting lodge. And even though war with Spain was looming and naval procurement was one of his responsibilities, Roosevelt continued to mercilessly prune and edit articles that hunters were submitting to the Boone and Crockett Club. “Wherever the young idiot speaks of papa, father should of course be substituted, and, if possible, the allusion should be left out all together,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell after reading an article on deer hunting submitted in August 1897. “It is not advisable to put in nursery prattle. In the next place all of the would-be-funny parts must be cut out ruthlessly.
If there exists any particularly vulgar horror on the face of the globe is it the ‘funny’ hunting story. This of course means that we shall have to cut down the piece to about half its present length; but if that is done I think it will be good.”
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