The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (70 page)

On June 17, 1902, the Fifty-Seventh Congress created the Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation) by approving the Newlands Act
(named for Francis Newlands, a Democratic representative from Nevada). Immediately the act was hailed as a triumph for the Roosevelt administration. “I regard the irrigation business as one of the great features of my administration and take a keen personal pride in having been instrumental in bringing it about,” Roosevelt wrote to Hitchcock that very day. “I want it conducted, so far as in our power to conduct it, on the highest plane not only of purpose but efficiency. I desire it to be kept under the control of the Geological Survey of which Mr. [Charles Doolittle] Walcott is the Director and Mr. [Frederick Haynes] Newell the Hydrographer.”
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The Newlands Act was a revolution for the American West. An overenthusiastic Roosevelt wanted to start with a few large dam projects divided among a few states. Overnight, however, Congressman Newlands was getting great press and Roosevelt grew envious. Why was everybody giving that Democratic fool Newlands all the credit? Roosevelt wanted the western Republicans—for example, William Morris Stewart of Nevada and Francis Emroy Warren of Wyoming—to have the credit for the historic irrigation act. Fuming to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, Roosevelt threatened to attack Newlands’s reputation through back channels.
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To Roosevelt, Newlands was a shameless grandstander who didn’t deserve to have an important act named after him. Truth be told, as the historian Donald Worster points out in
Rivers of Empire
, neither Roosevelt nor Newlands was very instrumental in the federalization of western water issues; they were both, in essence, latecomers. Stubbornly, Roosevelt nevertheless insisted in both writings and public speeches that the landmark western irrigation measures should be called the Reclamation Act,
not
the Newlands Act. (However, at Pinchot’s insistence he does toss Newlands a bone in
An Autobiography
.
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)

Why did President Roosevelt throw himself wholeheartedly into the drama of the Newlands Act? Certainly, Roosevelt saw himself as a man of the American West. Even though his views on protecting forests had made him vehement enemies in the region, he was (to his mind) the first western president in American history. (This didn’t mean, however, that he abandoned the establishment privileges provided by his aristocratic New York upbringing.) Owing to the dispiriting brouhaha over Booker T. Washington, Roosevelt’s name had become a dirty word in the Deep South. With his astute political antennae, Roosevelt knew he needed western support to succeed in national politics. During 1902, with reclamation being debated by the House Committee on Irrigation of the Arid Lands, Roosevelt didn’t want to be sidelined.

To Roosevelt, the West was the best hope for America. He rightly foresaw California, Oregon, and Washington as new Edens. Nobody believed more strongly than Roosevelt that the West
had
to be won; it offered landscapes of incalculable value. If the western citizens didn’t have water, he worried, they would perish, and their cities would become ghost towns. But dams and reservoirs (built cautiously, without pork-barrel waste) would allow the West to be settled by tens of millions of people. The American cities of tomorrow were Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Sacramento. The federal reclamation of the West, to Roosevelt, was the next natural step toward conquest. If reservoirs were created, the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle would be humming with jobs. With western populations swelling, Americans, he believed, would turn to the fabled China trade, using Hawaii and the Philippines as stepping-stones. And, finally, as Roosevelt envisioned it, with a proper reservoir system places like the Willamette Valley in Oregon and the San Joaquin Valley in California could become the most productive agricultural lands in the world; of course, he wasn’t wrong about this. “The forest and water problems,” Roosevelt insisted, “are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States.”
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By 1904 six reclamation projects were up and running. Even critics of the Newlands Act had to admit that Roosevelt had a genius for cutting red tape. Every year exciting projects were launched. For example, the linking of Colorado’s wild Gunnison River to the Uncompahgre Valley—a Herculean feat that required constructing a channel ten feet high, ten feet wide, and five miles long by blasting through mountain rock. In Arizona the Salt River was impounded by the 360-foot-high Roosevelt Dam, to create one of the world’s largest artificial bodies of water. Such reclamation projects led to agricultural booms in fruits, dates, sugar beets, alfalfa, on and on. More than 3 million acres of the West were cultivated under Roosevelt’s reclamation programs. Culverts, bridges, and canals were all engineered, at great expense. “The Roosevelt-Pinchot-Newell vision of millions of desert acres in bloom,” the historian Paul Russell Cutright wrote, “was well on its way to reality.”
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Serious books have been written on the Newlands Act—and this is not the place to do them all justice. It’s safe to say, however, that unlike the western agricultural boom, the studies with an eye on the environment don’t have a happy ending. The grand irrigation projects—Panama Canals on a reduced scale—destroyed many natural wonders. On the other hand, the engineering done by the Reclamation Service was impressive in both scope and innovation, overcoming mind-boggling obstacles.
While Roosevelt had sympathy for western farmers and ranchers worried about drought and rural poverty, one suspects an additional motivation behind his cheerleading for the Newlands Act: it smacked of American triumphalism. To Roosevelt the West—particularly the dry mountain air of the Rockies and the warm climate of California and the Southwest—was a cure for America’s industrial ills. Health-seekers by the trainload were moving to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, and San Diego, and he knew why.
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Roosevelt correctly surmised that someday the population of the West would equal that east of the Mississippi River. But only through efficacious forestry and irrigation, he believed, could the West live up to its limitless potential. Undoubtedly, Roosevelt wanted western greenbelts and scenic wonders saved to enhance the quality of life. This didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t also want to see large increases in the number of human settlers in the West. And, to repeat, without water, “Go West, young man!” would be foolhardy advice. Therein lay the rub of his advocacy of the Newlands Act. He believed the act would transform the social aspect of the West by substituting “actual homemakers, who have settled on the land with their families, for huge, migratory bands of sheep herded by the hired shepherds of absent owners.”
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(Somehow, the issue always got back to Roosevelt’s hatred of sheep.) Writing to Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon on June 13, 1902, Roosevelt explained his support of western reclamation and irrigation: “This is something of which I have made careful study…from my acquaintance with the Far West…. I believe in it with all my heart.”
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V

That August Roosevelt headed to New England for a busy tour, in his private Pullman train compartment, known as the
Mayflower
. Roosevelt had never been very popular in New England, so he considered this trip something of a goodwill tour.
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Yet he overbooked himself. He always seemed to be saying hellos and good-byes simultaneously. More than fifty reporters and newspapermen followed him, hoping to engage in conversational bouts. It was his first visit to Vermont since McKinley’s assassination. For the most part his stump speeches were about the ironclad Monroe Doctrine, trust-busting, and citizenship. For Labor Day weekend in early September, Roosevelt headed to Massachusetts to be with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and William Moody, son of the famous evangelist Dwight L. Moody. In Springfield more than 70,000 people came to hear the president lecture about not retreating from the Philippines. Accord
ing to Roosevelt, the United States had a sacred obligation to establish a democracy there. Always trying to sneak beautiful scenery into his itinerary, Roosevelt yielded to an impulse and spent a few days in the Berkshires, traveling in a landau drawn by four gray horses, leaving the
Mayflower
Pullman on the tracks in Stockbridge.

Throughout the New England trip Roosevelt had the Secret Service agent William Craig constantly at his side. Since McKinley’s assassination the presidential Secret Service had greatly increased. (In June, though, an armed lunatic had wandered into the White House, waving a pistol about like a drunkard until he was apprehended by the police.) Now, at Pittsfield, Craig ended up giving his life for the president. A runaway trolley, car 29, had run into Roosevelt’s carriage at the Howard’s Hill intersection, toppling it on its side like a sinking ship. The damage was extensive. Upon impact, Craig, known as “Secret Service Man Extraordinaire, and Plenipotentiary to the President,” had risen from his seat and thrown himself directly into the trolley so that Roosevelt wouldn’t take the direct hit. Craig was crushed and almost decapitated. Roosevelt was deeply shaken, his face bruised and bleeding. A fist-sized lump swelled on Roosevelt’s right cheek, and a coal-black bruise emerged under his right eye. Immediately, Roosevelt, a bit dazed, raced over to Craig, who was dead—the first U.S. Secret Service agent killed in the line of duty. Craig’s body was almost unrecognizable.

Once Roosevelt regained full consciousness, he grew angry at the trolley driver, who was arrested but later released on bail. An atmosphere of chaos prevailed, with onlookers screaming in horror and running in all directions. “I am all right,” Roosevelt kept saying. “I am unhurt.” When people saw that he had survived the crash, they began shouting enthusiastically. “Don’t cheer,” Roosevelt scolded them. “Don’t. One of our party lies dead inside.” Sipping brandy to steady his nerves at a physician’s office, deeply distraught over the death of his trusted friend, the president nevertheless continued his tour of Massachusetts, but he refused to speak to crowds, opting to instead praise William Craig’s courage. The novelist Edith Wharton heard Roosevelt speak in Lenox and noted that what he said was an appropriate response for the grim episode. Roosevelt had developed abscesses on his left leg, turning his ankle a weird purple-green. “This is a dreadful thing,” Roosevelt kept saying over and over again, “dreadful.”
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The
New York Times
ran a story with the subhead “Soft Earth Saves President” (he had fallen into a wash from the hill).
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Refusing to let the crash at Pittsfield preclude his visit to the Biltmore estate to study its forestry program firsthand, Roosevelt arrived as sched
uled on September 9, 1902, following tours of the Civil War battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga. The
Pittsburgh Times
suggested that the president needed to stop traveling so much, that the “strenuous life is sometimes overdone.” But onward he went. Local dignitaries in North Carolina poured onto Roosevelt’s railway car, eager to shake hands with the president, who, with artificial geniality, kept saying “dee-lighted.” His face was still battered and bruised from the accident, so polite people tried not to stare. Heading for Battery Park Hotel, built on the highest point in Asheville, Roosevelt peered out, mesmerized by the Great Smoky Mountains foothills. “Oh, this is magnificent!” he said. “This is indeed a most magnificent country—the grandest east of the Rockies!”
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After delivering a patriotic speech Roosevelt headed in his carriage to the Biltmore estate, in a bone-chilling wind. Full of questions, Roosevelt toured the mansion, inspected the lotus ponds, and talked with the levelheaded young foresters who had gathered to pay their respects. Ever since Pinchot had promoted the Biltmore at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, the effects of its forestry program (including how best to plant the seedlings of yellow poplar, black cherry, black walnut, and other species) had increased.
Garden and Forest
magazine, for instance, was raving about the experimental station. Under the guidance of Carl A. Schenck, Biltmore’s forestry school was setting a standard for scientific professionalism. To Roosevelt the Biltmore was the “cradle of forestry in America” (in 1968 President Lyndon Johnson commemorated it as such by a congressional act).
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Yet Roosevelt was piqued because Schenck wasn’t an American citizen (he kept his German citizenship), so their conversation didn’t go well. Although Roosevelt was at the Biltmore for only a few hours, he returned to Washington full of talk about timber physics, dendrology, and wood utilization. And he left all of Asheville abuzz, warmed by his scientific enthusiasm for forestry. “The president came and went yesterday,” the Biltmore reported to George W. Vanderbilt, who was in Bar Harbor, Maine. “It had been raining before he came and rained immediately after he left but it was clear while he was here.”
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Later that month Roosevelt headed to the Midwest. After speaking in Indianapolis he fell ill; his leg looked gangrenous. With the first flash of pain he tried to conceal a cold panic. Listlessness fell over him. He was placed under local anesthesia at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and doctors removed two ounces of serum from a sac in the anterior tibial region. Roosevelt slowly recovered from the makeshift operation, but he was never the same afterward. “I have never gotten over the effects of the
trolley car accident six years ago,” he wrote to Kermit in September 1908. “The shock permanently damaged the bone.”
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Physicians now believe that the accident in Pittsfield also led to phlebitis and thrombosis, conditions that would eventually become factors in his death.

Refusing to be nursed, Roosevelt threw himself back into the fray. Besides running the White House, he had six children to raise. His eldest, Alice, was sixteen years old; the youngest, Quentin, was four. Promoting the strenuous life for his own brood, the president oversaw pillow fights, wrestling matches, roller-skating, and leapfrog throughout the White House. Furniture and china were regularly broken. All sorts of native plants were ordered, to give certain rooms a more natural feel. Because the White House was under renovation, however, the Roosevelt family had to live at 22 Jackson Place—across from the White House—for several weeks. Whenever T.R. traveled away from Washington, D.C., he wrote his children letters. In the coming years they would receive missives from Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the lower Mississippi River, Yosemite, the Painted Desert, and dozens of other extraordinary American outdoor places he was determined to pass on to his progeny as a legacy.
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