The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (95 page)

So when President Roosevelt wrote to Kermit, a week before Election Day, about a “big sum of substantive achievement” he wasn’t boasting falsely. Still, his successes were of the executive kind; his record of working with Congress was mediocre at best. Only his close alliance with Lacey had paid dividends. “Now as to the election chances,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit. “At present it looks as if the odds were in my favor, but I have no idea whether this appearance is deceptive or not. I am a very positive man, and in consequence I both attract supporters and make enemies that he [Parker] does not, in a way that he cannot.” Enemies of Roosevelt included
Collier’s Weekly
and the
Evening Post
, racist southerners, railroad companies, western developers, timber and mining concerns, Wall Street financiers, and the great capitalists (with the exception of Andrew Carnegie and a few others). The Standard Oil Company had publicly attacked Roosevelt when his administration established the Bureau
of Corporation, seen by the Rockefeller crowd as an insult and as antagonistic to big oil. In the weeks before the election, sensing that Roosevelt was going to win, Standard Oil wrote a $100,000 check for his campaign fund. Boldly, Roosevelt rejected the money, asking that the donation be returned, not wanting to be tainted by oil money. Roosevelt insisted that presidents during the automobile age could not, under any circumstances, afford to take a contribution “from an oil company seeking government influence.”
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IV

On November 8, 1904, Roosevelt won a decisive victory over Alton Parker, with 336 electoral votes to 140. The socialist Eugene V. Debs had run as a third-party but didn’t earn a single electoral vote. Roosevelt had earned the White House. This was, in fact, the largest plurality for a U.S. president up until that time. As for Congress, the Republicans swept both houses, picking up many new seats. It’s been estimated that about thirty of the freshman Republican legislators elected were ardent Rooseveltian conservationists. Because Roosevelt had publicly pledged that he would not run again in 1908 (a decision he came to regret), he was free to push forward his ideas on national forests, wildlife protection, western irrigation, and federal bird reservations. Ironically, Roosevelt’s premature pledge not to run again had the beneficial effect of letting him be more aggressive about creating forest reserves. He had learned something from the way President Cleveland had protected 21 million acres before leaving the White House in 1897. Responding to a congratulatory note from Owen Wister, Roosevelt bragged about his successes in irrigation and forestry, claiming he had the “college bred” men of the country on his side.
⁵⁵
With executive power and no more elections, Roosevelt was off to the races regarding conservation—he was determined to create a new environmental infrastructure for America, one that would become a triumph of twentieth-century policy and planning.

When word of Roosevelt’s election went out on the AP and UPI wires, telegrams of congratulations poured into the White House from all over the world: the writers included Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Emperor Meiji of Japan, and Prime Minister Balfour of Great Britain. Only one world leader, however, was clever enough to have sent con
gratulatory gifts
before
election day, anticipating Roosevelt’s victory: Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia had sent two monkeys, two ostriches, one zebra, and one lioness on the Atlantic Transport liner
Minneapolis
.
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Menelik wanted Roosevelt to receive the gifts on election night—and he did. Roosevelt was impressed and promptly saw to it that the animals were donated to zoos. A year later three huge elephant tusks arrived from Menelik—one of them was nine feet long. Roosevelt donated two of these to the National Museum and kept one for himself.
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⁵⁷

A few days after his election a confident Roosevelt, usually shy about fund-raising, asked Andrew Carnegie directly to fund a forest museum and library that Pinchot had been promoting; it would be a kind of Bronx Zoo for trees. (In 1901, Carnegie had formed the Carnegie Institution of Washington to “encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.”
⁵⁸
) As Roosevelt saw it, the “forest life” museum would contain “specimens and models, the material for actual study of the life of the forest firsthand, or as it exists in the woods.” The desired effect was to increase “our knowledge of the forest on a new plane and vastly increase the possibility of using it wisely and well.” Deforestation was a global curse and Roosevelt wanted to confront it on a global level. “In other words,” Roosevelt went on, in a letter to Carnegie, “such a collection, supplemented by a complete library of literature of forestry, and supported by funds for original research, would mark a
wholly
new step in the progress of forestry. Its creation would be a signal service not only to the United States but to every region of the world where trees grow. I’m strongly of the opinion that the plan is a good one.”
⁵⁹

Never before had Roosevelt written in this way to ask for funds from a rich and powerful man. But Pinchot’s ideas of a revolution in forestry were so vital for America that he was willing to approach Carnegie, who was widely celebrated by 1904 for embracing a wide array of educational advancement schemes. Carnegie libraries were springing up on Main Streets all across America. Unfortunately for Roosevelt, however, Carnegie had little or no interest in a tree museum. To his mind, it smacked of a boondoggle. Courteously, the old man rejected the appeal, but he did
help Roosevelt promote bird rehabilitation projects in Florida. (Roosevelt thanked him for this in
An Autobiography
.) Still, the idea of a tree museum continued to intrigue Roosevelt and Pinchot. Making a return visit to the Saint Louis World’s Fair with Edith, the president studied all the buildings with an eye for fine architectural touches, imagining how best to create a forestry museum that would attract visitors by offering modern exhibits. Predictably though, his favorite state-sponsored attraction at the fair was the North Dakota exhibit, which had his “Maltese cross cabin” on display. Roosevelt had succeeded in being the Pike, Carson, Boone, and Crockett of his time in the popular imagination—quite an accomplishment for a Manhattanite of the Knickerbocker aristocracy who had been sickly as a child.

What a thrill it was for President Roosevelt to see his Maltese cabin at the North Dakota display at the fair! Although it was just an ordinary log cabin, it had been carefully dismantled, shipped to Saint Louis, and then reconstructed to look exactly as it did from 1883 to 1886. Two pairs of Sunday trousers, an old straw hat, and high hunting boots once belonging to Roosevelt were put on display. Tourists came to study the ranch brand burned onto one of the logs. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s famous Badlands hunts, expertly hammered onto the side of the cabin were perfectly mounted speciments of the deer, elk, eagle, fox, and owl. Besides his own frontier house, a childhood cabin of Lincoln and a dwelling constructed by Grant before the Civil War had also been erected as attractions at the fair; this was exactly the Republican presidential company Roosevelt liked to keep.
⁶⁰

During the four-month wait between his reelection in November 1904 and the inaugural ceremony in March 1905, Roosevelt, who reaffirmed his belief in the Monroe Doctrine in tough words, also stayed busy with conservation. President Charles William Eliot of Harvard University, for example, had published
John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman
for the Christmas season, and Roosevelt promoted it enthusiastically. Gilley was in the rough-hewn American tradition, like Seth Green, Paul Kroegel, and William Sprinkle—so Eliot had produced the very type Roosevelt wanted to hire to defend forests, wildlife, natural wonders, scenic vistas, and waterways.
⁶¹

Roosevelt also meditated, that holiday season, on deer and wolves. Predictably, he had an explicit desire to hunt bear on the outskirts of Yellowstone now that its bear population was increasing. When a discussion turned to national parks Roosevelt, drawing on his 1903 trip with Burroughs, objected fiercely to
ever
allowing “sheepmen, cattlemen, or any
other transgressors” into them.
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Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s old ranchhand Bill Merrifield came to see him at the White House one afternoon, shedding his ranchman garb in favor of “a severely correct frock coat, cravat, and top hat.” The two men swapped stories for hours about 1880s North Dakota; Roosevelt’s chief concern was that this simple, humble plainsmen felt comfortable as if in the “people’s house.”

New animals were continually being added to the Roosevelt family menagerie, and to lull his children to sleep at night the president would read them
The Deerslayer
out loud. An expansive renovation was also under way at Sagamore Hill: Grant La Farge was helping the president redesign the house to look like a Kenyan hunting lodge.
⁶³
And Roosevelt began strategizing about how best to save the Alaskan seal rookeries from British and Japanese fur hunters in the Bering Sea. Every time he read of entire seal colonies being slaughtered, pain struck his heart. The secretary of state, John Hay, was doing his best to get Britain to forgo seal hunting within a sixty-mile radius of the Pribilof Islands and to shorten the hunt seasons. Unfortunately, Hay’s negotiations weren’t going well.
⁶⁴
Roosevelt began haranguing the specially formed Bering Sea Tribunal to ban “seal killing” during the spring breeding season. How could Great Britain consider itself a civilized country, Roosevelt fumed, when Britons slaughtered “nursing mother seals on the high sea?”
⁶⁵

One of President Roosevelt’s first significant postelection acts was to transfer the federal forest reserves from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry on February 1, 1905. This had been Gifford Pinchot’s dream since 1898. On March 3, with Inauguration Day approaching, the Bureau of Forestry was renamed the Forest Service. Roosevelt had two major reasons for going along with Pinchot’s transfer plan: the GLO was filled with pro-business appointees who knew nothing about scientific forestry, and the centralization of the GLO caused long delays in issuing grazing, mining, and lumbering permits to regional reserve users.
⁶⁶

Unlike his boss, Roosevelt, Pinchot was interested in forest administration rather than wildlife protection per se. Wise use of timber resources was his objective. Pinchot, in fact, was extremely hesitant to regulate game animals on the forest reserves (which were yet again renamed National Forests in 1907) for fear of infringing on states’ rights and giving western critics such as Senator Mitchell of Oregon reasons to disband the reserves by congressional legislation. This utilitarian attitude regarding forests made Pinchot the bane of Roosevelt’s friends who favored wildlife protection, such as Muir, Burroughs, Hornaday, and Finley. According to
Pinchot’s “The Use Book”—rules and regulations for rangers to follow—the Forest Service offices would “cooperate with game wardens of the State or Territory in which they serve.” A couple of years later Pinchot made this perfectly clear by means of a provision in the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1907: “hereafter officials of the Forest Service shall, in all ways that are practicable, aid in the enforcement of the laws of the States or Territories with regard to…the protection of fish and game.”
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Yet Roosevelt didn’t believe only in Pinchot’s notion that national forests were to be mainly
conserved
, not preserved. For Roosevelt, always interested in animals, the forests were also “cradles of wildlife.”
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V

As Inauguration Day, March 4, neared, Roosevelt received the best gift imaginable from sixty-seven-year-old John Hay (still serving as secretary of state), short of saving Alaska’s seals or naming yet another elk after him. Hay, who was seriously ill, presented Roosevelt with his precious Lincoln hair-ring. The connotations of this gentlemanly gift brought Roosevelt to tears, especially since Hay had sometimes belittled him. Hay, who was a friend of Roosevelt’s father, had also been Lincoln’s loyal personal assistant. When Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth and was brought across the street to the Petersen House, the attending doctor had clipped locks of hair from the dying president’s head. Hay somehow inherited them and made a special ring with the hairs set like a diamond. “Please wear it to-morrow,” Hay had written Roosevelt in his presentation note; “you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.”

Moved by Hay’s gesture, Roosevelt wrote back that he was wearing the ring and would do so when taking the oath of office on March 4. (Later, Roosevelt claimed to have encountered Lincoln’s ghost a few times in the White House corridors.
⁶⁹
) The ring was a farewell gesture. On July 1 Hay died at his summer home in Newbury, New Hampshire, from what doctors believed to be a pulmonary embolism. His death was harder for Roosevelt to absorb than the assassination of McKinley. Without delay, however, Roosevelt appointed the intensely loyal Elihu Root to be Hay’s replacement at the State Department. It was an inspired choice, for in the coming years Root would successfully remove the consular service from the “spoils system” by placing it under the direction of the Civil Service, maintain the “open door” policy in the Far East, help create the Central American Court of Justice, and eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912.

Roosevelt’s inauguration parade of March 4, 1905, was quite a spectacle. In the presidential stand 1,200 dignitaries from all over the world sat arm-to-arm. A light blanket of snow was draped over the White House, creating a fine, calming white hush. The half inch of snow wasn’t enough to create serious problems.
⁷⁰
In fact, a mild front had blown into town, making Washington pleasant though still cold. Once again, Roosevelt was lucky. Acting as the impresario for his own inauguration, he had imported the heroic staff figures from the Saint Louis world’s fair representing colorful pioneers, plainsmen, and scouts.
⁷¹
At his request, thirty Rough Riders strode next to him as his special guard throughout the day. Representatives from every state and territory participated in Roosevelt’s gala parade. Bands blared and boys’ glee clubs sang. More than 2,000 American flags were handed out by the War Department so they could be waved by onlookers as the parade went by. A cold northwest wind swept through Washington, but throngs of sunburned cowboys from Texas and Oklahoma arrived to cheer Colonel Roosevelt.