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).43 “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.”44
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.”45 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.” 46
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.”47 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.”48 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.
Unlike Roosevelt, President Cleveland had too much dignity to call his opponents horrific names in 1897. Nevertheless he ably defended himself nine years later in a book titled Fishing and Shooting Sketches. Cleveland wrote that the “criticisms” and “persecutions” from “mendacious” newspapers and “shameless” Western politicians were “nothing more serious than gnat stings suffered on the bank of a stream—vexations to be borne with patience and afterward easily submerged in the memory of abundant delightful accompaniments.” For the rest of his life Cleveland gloated that the granite-ribbed San Jacinto Mountains around Palm Springs, California and the Uinta Mountains of Utah one-hundred miles east of Salt Lake City, and eleven other wilderness areas had been saved due to his boldness.49
That May the U.S. Senate tried to make an immediate amendment to President Cleveland’s forest lands act. A Lieu Selection Act (passed on June 4, 1897) was created to offer money to homesteaders booted out of the new forest reserves. Emotions ran high. Northern Pacific Railroad agents throughout Washington state, for example, encouraged residents to simply disobey the federal government. It was up to the new president—William McKinley—to grapple with the fracas the anticonservation politicians and extractioners were making. What added to these senators’ fury was that President Cleveland had issued his order without consulting them in any way. If Grover Cleveland had stayed in power, the Sundry Civil bill—called the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” Act (by conservationists) or the “Midnight Reserve” Act (by pro-development westerners)—would probably have been nullified. The continuation of the forest reserves rested squarely on President McKinley’s broad shoulders. As Muir noted in Our National Parks, promoting his aesthetic view of nature, forest reservations were useful not as “fountains of timber” but as “fountains of life” capable of rejuvenating the human spirit and rescuing it from the “vice of over-industry” and the “deadly apathy of luxury.”50 Avoiding political quicksand, and following the old legal adage about cooling out the client, McKinley adroitly held the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” in abeyance for a year; the act didn’t become officially operative until March 1, 1898.51
The fact that President McKinley didn’t recoil from or play the ostrich on Cleveland’s 21-million-acre coup impressed Roosevelt tremendously. McKinley, in fact, got lucky, for the discovery of gold in Yukon-Alaska in 1896 eventually caused many people in the Pacific Northwest to give up on lumber and instead start developing Seattle and Portland as major ports and outfitting centers. “I am exceedingly glad that President Cleveland issued the order,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell that summer, “but none of the trouble came on him at all. He issued the order at the very end of his administration, practically to take effect in the next administration. In other words he issued an order which it was easy to issue, but difficult to execute and which had to be executed by his successor…. I think that credit should be given the man who issues the order, but I think it should be just as strongly given to the man who enforces it…. President McKinley and Secretary [Cornelius] Bliss took the matter up, and by great resolution finally prevented its complete overthrow.” The estimable point Roosevelt was trying to drive home to Grinnell was that McKinley and Cornelius Bliss, his secretary of the interior, deserved credit equal to Cleveland’s for the creation of these thirteen reserves.52
Bliss was a New Yorker, a successful businessman, a member of all the right clubs, and a bit of a dandy. When McKinley nominated him to be secretary of the interior, conservationists like Roosevelt knew that their movement would have an ally in the executive branch. Bliss was easily confirmed by the Senate, over the objections of Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, who claimed that such an “Eastern man” knew “nothing of the great Western matters constantly arising in the Department of the Interior.”53 The real reason for Teller’s objections was perhaps that he wouldn’t be able to make sweetheart deals wit
h a man of Bliss’s moral fiber. Within two months of being confirmed, Bliss got a sort of revenge on Teller by appointing a forester, Gifford Pinchot, as his “confidential special agent” to look into how to both protect and create new western reserves.54
There was another reason Senator Teller made a terrible mistake in going after Bliss. As the old Arab proverb goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Given that there were few easterners whom Senator Teller disliked more than Theodore Roosevelt, once Bliss was confirmed, he joined Henry Cabot Lodge in suggesting that Roosevelt become assistant secretary of the navy. Ostensibly, Roosevelt would be in the Navy Department, but Bliss knew he would interfere in western land issues left and right. The secretary of the interior—a prominent contributor to the American Museum of Natural History—welcomed his fellow New Yorker’s interference. Nobody was a better backstop than Roosevelt. As secretary of the interior, Bliss, backed by the Boone and Crockett Club, championed forest reservations in Alaska, the surveying of Yosemite National Park, the saving of prehistoric sites in the Arizona Territory, and the commissioning of the special forest agent, Pinchot, to assess how best to preserve and use vast tracts of public land in the Pacific Northwest.55 As Roosevelt boasted, Bliss was 100 percent in line with the Boone and Crockett Club’s agenda. (In 1900 Roosevelt even promoted the idea of Bliss as the Republican vice presidential nominee, instead of himself.)
A graduate of Yale, Pinchot was tasked with making recommendations about forest management and building public support for the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves.” Known for giving himself airs, he traveled up and down the West Coast, meeting with newspaper editors, politicians, Rotary clubs, and citizen groups. The assignment required a delicate balancing act. Constantly Pinchot had to pluck up enough nerve to tell lumberjack types about the virtues of forestry and preservationists about the need for paper products. In Seattle, for example, Pinchot got into an ugly dispute with John Muir over sheep grazing in national parks and forest reserves. Even though Pinchot had personally reassured Muir, while they were hiking together in the Cascades, that he was against the “hoofed locusts,” in an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer he switched stories. An infuriated Muir shouted hypocrite, accusing Pinchot of currying favor with the Wool Growers Association. Spitting mad, his “eyes flashing blue flares,” Muir told Pinchot, “I don’t want anything more to do with you.”56
Throughout 1897, as groups like the wool growers fought tooth and nail to overturn the federal “lockup” of forest lands, with their congressmen promoting a spate of amendments and nullification bills, Roosevelt vehemently defended Cleveland and McKinley’s policy. At least on paper and in principle, many of his most cherished wilderness places (including Wyoming’s Bighorns and Tetons and Montana and Idaho’s Bitterroots) had been saved in part for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enjoy. But westerners didn’t like the government’s incursion into their lives. The arrival of a federal land officer, a scientist from the Biological Survey, or an inspector from the Interior Department caused many westerners to reach for their guns. A forest ranger coming to an outbank town like Bend, Oregon, or Spokane, Washington, for example, was greeted with all the hospitality that would have been extended to a plague of locusts. In Montana alone, suddenly the Flathead reserve was assigned nine rangers, Lewis and Clark seven, and the Bitterroots nine (though part of this reserve is in Idaho). These mounted rangers formed a “chain of patrol” around each forest preserve, looking for fires, poachers, and outlaws.57
Meanwhile, a consensus had started to form in America that big business was insensitive to the environment. The educated class was coming to believe that the federal government needed to intervene before the rivers ran dry and the forests disappeared like the buffalo herds. While working for the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, the poet Kenneth Rexroth reflected on the character of a typical 1890s Californian businessman, for example, willing to destroy natural wonders like Mount Shasta for the sake of mineral exploration. “He is most often a stranger to the country in which he operates, with no interest in its well being and no care for the conservation of its resources,” Rexroth wrote in the WPA Guide to California. “He is interested in the immediate exploitation of the irreplaceable commodity. The effects of that exploitation on the surrounding country and its population, or on the workers…[are] the least of his cares. Former mining areas are littered with abandoned machinery, the streams are polluted, the forests are destroyed, and the aboriginal population murdered or enslaved.”58
The challenge Roosevelt, more than any other high-profile American, addressed in the 1890s was how to get farmers and backwoods families to hop on the new conservation bandwagon. Thousands of settlers in the Rocky Mountains, California, and Pacific Northwest accepted the arguments of the mining and timber industries and disobeyed federal law—for instance, cutting timber down in the reserves in broad daylight. Federal geological reports collected in 1897 made the feelings of local citizens vividly clear. “Nearly all illicit lumbering and other timber depredations are looked upon by settlers as blameless ventures,” the investigator George B. Sudworth wrote after on-site investigations of Colorado’s White River Reserve. “Such operations furnish a limited amount of employment to the poorer classes…. They are considered to be taking only what rightfully belongs alike to them and all other settlers. The depredator’s good name is not thought to be sullied by the veritable theft of timber from the national domain. The spirit of some landless settlers…is well illustrated by the following remark made to this writer by a party suspected of selling dead building logs: ‘This timber belongs to us settlers and we’re going to get it! The Government officials can’t prevent us either, with an army! If they attempt to stop us, we’ll burn the whole region up.’”59
Roosevelt remained convinced that increased law enforcement, in the newer “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” as well as Yellowstone, was the answer. He wanted to lock up any and all scoundrels trying to despoil the federal forestlands. This was a continuation of his brag that he would have shot the slimy hide hunter Edgar Howell in the face for killing the Yellowstone buffalo. If anarchic, anti–federal government followers of senators Teller and Pettigrew wanted to challenge the authority of the executive branch over the forest reserves by acts of civil disobedience, Roosevelt’s view was “Bring them on.” Their conniptions were music to his ears; after all, the federal government was now on his side. If these debasers defied federal authority, then off they’d go to Fort Leavenworth Prison or Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico, where they would rot behind bars whittling driftwood as the sun rose and set. Because Roosevelt had studied the life of Zebulon Pike for Volume 4 of The Winning of the West, he became especially incensed that shepherds in Colorado were destroying the grasses in the forest reserve named after the bravest scout of the Jeffersonian era. As Muir squared off against the “hoofed locusts” of Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra, Roosevelt likewise fought to save the Colorado Rockies.
V
Drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs in New York had been abuzz in early 1897 over what job Theodore Roosevelt would get in the new McKinley administration. He was known to want a post that would be intellectually stimulating, and there were some early murmurs that he might be given Interior. The anti-forestry legislators deserved nothing less. But only a fool took them seriously. The effect of Bliss’s expedient confirmation put an immediate wet blanket on that low-burning fire. Roosevelt was much too volatile a pro-conservation figure to deal with the western politicians, so McKinley could not make that appointment. However, watching the Republican boss Mark Hanna hold court at a party in New York made Roosevelt grow ashamed and leery of any kind of connection with the McKinley administration. Hanna was a political operative—a breed of man he disliked. Not wanting to be associated with such immoral types, he developed a mild case of self-revulsion.60 “I felt,” Roosevelt wrote, “as if I was personally realizing all of Brooks Adams’s gloomiest anticipations o
f our gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered future.”61 For his part, the new President McKinley was reluctant to appoint Roosevelt to any meaningful post; he wrote Roosevelt off as “too pugnacious.”62
Things may have remained at a stalemate had Henry Cabot Lodge not orchestrated a lobbying appeal to have his friend appointed as assistant secretary of the navy. As America’s foremost expert on the naval battles of the War of 1812, and having been a great success as police commissioner in New York City (where he increased the force by 1,600 men), Roosevelt seemed an ideal number two administrator for the Navy.63 McKinley had qualms but soon, as a favor to Henry Cabot Lodge and Secretary of the Interior Bliss, he agreed to appoint Roosevelt to the post. Roosevelt assumed his duties on April 19, 1897.
Although the post of assistant secretary hadn’t been created until 1861, Roosevelt now felt that he was part of a club that stretched all the way back to John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the Revolutionary War. Roosevelt remained forever grateful to Bliss for vouching for his character and helping to secure the appointment. But if McKinley and Bliss knew what Roosevelt was revealing in his private correspondence that spring, they would probably have fired him. For example, he told the British scholar Alfred Thayer Mahan that the McKinley administration planned to annex the Hawaiian Islands, cut a canal through Nicaragua, construct a modern naval fleet, and kick Spain out of the Caribbean. (Those were all programs he wanted implemented.*) In a second letter he suggested that Mahan lobby T.R.’s boss, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, for the United States to build more battleships.
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