That first evening together, after hopscotching from one topic to the next like red-bellied nuthatches scouring for insects at one decayed stump after another, Roosevelt and Pinchot—in an act of primordial male bonding—put on gloves and boxed. Weaving and jabbing, throwing right and left jabs, ducking punches, Roosevelt was able to size Pinchot up as an honest man with a killer instinct. “Pinchot truly believes that in case of certain conditions I am perfectly capable of killing either himself or me,” an amused Roosevelt wrote. “If conditions were such that only one could live he knows that I should possibly kill him as the weaker of the two, and he, therefore, worships this in me.”23
But that evening it was the six foot and two inches tall Pinchot who seemed the stronger—at least at first. “I had the honor,” Pinchot wrote in his autobiography, “of knocking the future President of the United States off of his very solid pins.” Fellow Boone and Crocketters had been saying that the patrician Pinchot was, surprisingly, a “man’s man,” who could “outride and outshoot” anybody. Roosevelt put the Yalie’s reputation to the test and came out with a favorable impression.24
Roosevelt, not to be defeated, shrugging off the boxing loss, immediately challenged Pinchot to a wrestling match, anxious to show off some pinning techniques. This time Roosevelt easily won the match. The score was now even at 1 = 1. Shrewdly Pinchot decided that it was best to safeguard the tie; a split decision, he reckoned, was the best outcome in dealing with a family friend with such a large ego and such a competitive disposition. Sometime during the punches and take-downs, Roosevelt decided to trust Pinchot; he liked the Old Boy’s gameness, the way he didn’t refuse a challenge, his aristocratic mien, and his abiding sense of noblesse oblige. And, more important, Pinchot wholeheartedly shared Roosevelt’s ideals regarding scientific forestry. Pinchot was also impetuous, and the governor liked impetuousness in a man. Patience, Roosevelt believed, was a bent card that the dim and selfish played. Grinnell remained Roosevelt’s muse on wildlife protection issues, but the irrepressible Pinchot, Roosevelt’s junior by seven years, now was effectively anointed his guru on forest policy. Roosevelt and Pinchot formed an alliance that would have a profound effect on the modern conservation movement. Together, they would promote America’s forests with firm confidence and zeal.
Ironically, even though Pinchot advocated forest conservation, he was seen as a sellout by thoroughgoing preservationist friends of Roosevelt, such as John Muir and William Temple Hornaday. The fact that Pinchot wanted to allow regulated tree harvesting in the Western Reserves was nearly anathema to them. Governor Roosevelt knew about this, but he thought the put-downs unfair. After all, Pinchot’s family was about to donate $150,000 for Yale University to start a forestry school and was starting a forestry camp at Grey Towers to teach a new generation wise use policy.25 “Gifford Pinchot is the man to whom the nation owes most for what has been accomplished as regards the preservation of the natural resources of our country,” Roosevelt later said. “He led, and indeed during its most vital period embodied, the fight for the preservation through use of our forests.”26
Pinchot embraced Governor Roosevelt’s notion that New York should have one superintendant who could replace the five-man Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission.* Roosevelt would promote this concept, saying that a “system of forestry” needed to develop “along scientific principles.”27 Roosevelt also implored the chief of the U.S. Forestry Division to help him preserve the Adirondacks as completely as Yellowstone and Yosemite. The east coast population centers, he believed, needed wilderness parks to help revive city dwellers’ spent spirits. As Pinchot and La Farge headed to the Adirondacks to help establish a land management plan, setting up camp at Lake Colden, located midway up the mountain, they had the governor on their side. Roosevelt, in fact, gave them carte blanche to use his name as expedient. Roosevelt was starting to understand that Pinchot wasn’t merely a forester but a revelation.
What really sealed the deal between Roosevelt and Pinchot was their shared admiration of 5,344-foot Mount Marcy, the tallest peak in New York. More than thirty years after Roosevelt first saw its summit, Mount Marcy (named in 1837 after Governor William Learned Marcy) still had magnetic appeal to him. (Sometimes Mount Marcy was called Tahawus, Cloudsplitter, or High Peak of Essex by locals.28) Compared with four larger eastern summits—Mount Mitchell, Mount Washington, Clingman Dome, and Mount Rogers—Marcy was a “bump” yet its slopes were still covered by primeval forest.29 Now, in freezing February temperatures, Pinchot and La Farge were planning on snowshoeing to the top of Mount Marcy with the help of two Indian guides; theirs would be only the second ascent ever attempted in winter. Upon hearing about their planned adventure, Roosevelt lit up like a Christmas tree. Bully! If he hadn’t just started his job as governor, he would have joined the Ivy League explorers on the historic climb. Reacting as if they were about to go to the North Pole or Antarctica, Roosevelt demanded that Pinchot and La Farge report to him in Albany after the ascent. Hungrily, like a city editor, he wanted details of the twenty-foot snow drifts and ice squalls. The trip to Mount Marcy, Pinchot recalled, was “exactly in his line.”
Yes, yes, both Pinchot and La Farge vowed to Roosevelt, they would visit Albany with firsthand reports of the summit immediately following their ascent. They had suddenly become Roosevelt’s pro tem wilderness correspondents. True to their word, Pinchot and La Farge braved the mountain, but because of a blizzard it was rougher than they expected. Even Governor Roosevelt would have deemed them demented for challenging Old Man Winter so brazenly. As in tundra country, all the evergreens were, as Pinchot put it, “a monument of snow.” Pecking out footholds wherever possible, Pinchot and La Farge pressed forward, half a step at a time, constantly shivering. Underdressed for the arctic temperatures, they nevertheless progressed incrementally in the squall. Both guides quit: one claimed that his snowshoes were too long, and the other had developed numbness in a leg. Normally, the pragmatic Pinchot would have retreated, recognizing that mountaineering in such brutal weather was like Russian roulette: one Canadian cold front could bring death faster than sleep. But he didn’t want to tell Governor Roosevelt he had failed. So Pinchot and La Farge, minus the guides, pressed on.
Grant La Farge later wrote about the climb for Outing, saying that the gale-force wind was like a “battery of charging razors.”30 Also, visibility was no better than what might be seen through a sheet. About three-quarters up Mount Marcy, they were reduced to crawling on hands and knees to reach the summit. Pinchot said that he held his “head down in the squalls” and stopped “every minute or two to rub my face against freezing.” 31 Even their mustaches and eyelashes froze. Eventually, through sheer willpower, they arrived at the summit’s signal pole, but they saw nothing but snow and ice. “Got to the top,” Pinchot wrote in his diary. “Foolish.”32
Worried about contracting grippe or whooping cough, Pinchot and La Farge snapped photographs of each other and then crawled back down Mount Marcy as quickly as possible—dizzy, terrified, suffering from frostbite.33 The three-day ordeal was the most dangerous of their lives. Once they were warm by a lodge fire, Pinchot and La Farge, to their horror, learned that they had been climbing in the blizzard of 1899—called the “Storm King” by the press. Unprecedented arctic temperatures had socked and crippled the entire Northeast. Water pipes, it was said, had burst throughout every county in New York. The weight of snow had caused house roofs to cave in. They were lucky—very lucky—to be alive. Both men later retold the story of ascending Mount Marcy as if they were characters in a knockabout comedy.
Their harrowing climb, however, produced one positive result. Returning to the executive mansion in Albany as promised, Pinchot and La Farge had wild stories to regale Governor Roosevelt with. Feeling left out, Roosevelt announced that he too would conquer the Adirondacks’ tallest summit come August or September when the weather got better. Full of “dee-light,” pleased to hear about their mountaineering antics, Governor Roosevelt had come to embr
ace Gifford Pinchot as a new member of his extended outdoors family. Given how close their fathers had been, they fell into an easy camaraderie as if they were long-lost blood brothers. (La Farge, an early member of Boone and Crockett Club, had long ago received T.R.’s stamp of lifetime approval.) 34
II
One New York leader Governor Roosevelt was constantly trying to outfox was Thomas “Boss Platt. Ever since he served as a New York assemblyman from 1882 to 1884, Roosevelt refused to join Platt’s Republican rubber stamps. He was unimpressed by Platt and distrusted him—Platt had flunked out of Yale and had worked as a pharmaceutical salesman and, in Michigan, as a lumber operator. Roosevelt, however, was deferential to Platt—his elder by twenty-five years—merely because political expediency demanded it. He didn’t want to spar unnecessarily with a slugger. As past president of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, Platt knew at least one thing about geology: that the land had glorious treasures which could be extracted. He considered nature sightseeing a fey enterprise. He had been elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1896, and when his photograph appeared in the New York Tribune on January 21, 1897, it was the first halftone reproduction ever published in a daily newspaper. As of 1899, only Governor Roosevelt was a more recognizable New York personality than the fit, trim, bushy-sideburned Platt. In his dogged, confident, shrewd, relentless way, Platt was a formidable counterpart to Roosevelt; their values, however, were at the opposite ends of the Republican Party’s spectrum. Nevertheless, after only a month in office, Roosevelt wrote to John Hay that, to his surprise, he was “getting on well” with Platt.35
Almost monthly Governor Roosevelt and Senator Platt engaged in parlor debates at roundtables on topics such as corporate taxes, improved schools, and funding state infrastructure. Sometimes Roosevelt and Platt found themselves in general agreement on foreign policy issues including the annexation of Cuba and the building of an interoceanic canal. But when it came to conservation issues they were like positive and negative jumper cables; when their ideas touched, sparks flew in all directions. Quite simply, Roosevelt refused to water down his conservationist beliefs to curry favor with Senator Platt. They differed on scientific forestry, the Palisades, antipollution laws, and the need for watersheds.36 Wisely, Boss Platt—who was never bored in Roosevelt’s “impulsive” presence—let him have the parklands, preferring to have him champion birds’ rights than meddle in antimonopoly fights on Wall Street, where huge sums of Republican money were at stake. Platt was careful not to denounce Roosevelt publicly; instead, he paid Roosevelt a backhanded compliment by saying that at least the Colonel wasn’t a slacker. “Politicians found [Roosevelt] a hard customer,” John Burroughs recalled of his stormy relationship with men like Boss Platt. “His reproof and refusal came quick and sharp. His mannerism was authoritative and stern…. His political enemies in Albany, early in his career, laid traps for him, in hopes of tarnishing his reputation but he was too keen for them.”37
As of April 1899, Governor Roosevelt’s ideas about pushing oneself to the limits were only implied, or only written in letters to friends. Certainly, reading about the virtues of the pioneers in The Winning of the West or about military fortitude in The Rough Riders made it clear that Roosevelt believed overcoming hardship built character; oddly, he always seemed happiest with no accoutrements except a horse and rifle. There are even wisps of evidence that he was a devotee of recapitulation theory: a belief, propounded by a professor of pedagogy and psychology, G. Stanley Hall, founder of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, that “overcivilization was endangering American manhood.” According to Hall, American boys were becoming effeminate and needed to return to primitivism instead of wallowing in Victorian-era “ideologies of self-restrained manliness.” Too many American men, Hall argued, were having neurasthenic breakdowns. Among Hall’s many prescriptions for this decline of American manliness were the promotion of the “savage” in boys, the introduction of nature into their workweek, the creation of physical fitness regimens, and the rejection of the bureaucratic-corporate economy. Hall “believed that by applying Darwinism to the study of human development,” the historian Gail Bederman says, “he could do for psychology what Darwin had done for biology.”38
Addressing the Hamilton Club in Chicago on April 10, the thirty-fourth anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Roosevelt pulled together all his “up from asthma” thoughts and presented them to the American public preparing to enter the twentieth century as the doctrine of the “strenuous life.” He was introduced by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. “In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant,” Roosevelt began, “men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”39
What immediately strikes one upon reading about Roosevelt’s promotion of the “strenuous life”—besides its overtones of recapitulation theory—was that he was preaching a philosophy of survival of the fittest that echoed Herbert Spencer. Roosevelt had larded his “strenuous life” doctrine with sociobiology, the misguided belief that Darwin’s evolutionary principles could best be expressed by humans through imperial expansionism, military hyperpreparedness, free-enterprise economics, and eugenics. Damning the “life of ease” and the hesitating manner, Roosevelt wanted Americans to engage in strenuous endeavors of every kind. Tiredness, he said, wasn’t fitting in a country of such natural vitality. Nation building, he believed, was undertaken by a population that shunned soft hands and conquered weakness and was engaged to the fullest in the consciousness of its times. Every healthy American man, if he was lucky enough to have leisure time, Roosevelt believed, should hike, camp, hunt, and fish. Men could find exhilaration in the wild. Rules were already available; just follow the sportsman’s code: “Let us, therefore, boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word, resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.”40
The mere fact that Governor Roosevelt delivered this inspirational speech in Chicago instead of New York made his words newsworthy. New York’s governor was telling Americans in Illinois to go hard into whatever they believed in, whether it was farming, football, forestry, or factory work. Interestingly, Roosevelt never mentioned God in “The Strenuous Life” in many ways, in fact, the doctrine defied most Christian traditions by putting the obligation of personal power on the individual rather than in the otherworldly, mystical, or communal. Roosevelt’s doctrine not only smacked of Spencer—and Hall—but also had a heavy dose of Nietzsche’s superman. The saving grace of Roosevelt’s philosophy—which liberates him from what was later called fascism—was that he was democratic in spirit, believing anybody could rise to greatness in America. And there wasn’t an iota of cynicism in his doctrine: it was pure free-range optimism.
The following year, Roosevelt’s speech in Chicago had become so popular throughout America that it was published as a chapter in the appropriately titled book The Strenuous Life. Remembering how he had wisely disregarded the advice of a Massachusetts heart doctor in 1880 who had told him to never climb mountains, Roosevelt now touted exertion and physical education as national imperatives. As governor he wrestled, boxed, practiced jujitsu, and swam in the Hudson River just for the bracing sensation. Citizens didn’t have to be frail. Lean into your ailment, he believed, and defeat it. Urbanization had caused an unnatural deficiency in young people, and the schools needed to reverse this unhealthy trend by teaching Emersonian self-reliance. Implying that imperialism could be justified as part of the “strenuous life,
” Roosevelt was really applying the basic tenets of Darwinism to a program for Homo sapiens, in the spirit of Horatio Alger’s fictional stories about self-made men. If Darwin was correct in saying that humans had evolved from apes and were therefore animals, then it made sense, Roosevelt believed, for the strongest and swiftest among the species to rule the human kingdom. That meant, in his mind, the Americans. As Bederman aptly put it, “Roosevelt believed that bitter evolutionary conflict allowed the fittest species and races to survive, ultimately moving evolution forward toward its ultimate, civilized perfection.”41
Besides sharing the “strenuous life” of boxing and mountain climbing, Roosevelt and Pinchot believed that vast forestlands were necessary so that men could develop survivalist qualities not known in the overly civilized cities. It was as if once the forests disappeared, manhood would also vanish. Roosevelt, as governor of New York, was now in a position to act. In 1899 alone, Roosevelt had the state purchase 69,380 acres for forest reserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks. He wanted the iron-ore companies regulated. He began the ultimately successful process of turning Watkins Glen—a Finger Lakes scenic spot—into a state park. On November 28, 1899, echoing his first annual message, he wrote a scathing letter to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, claiming that New York’s wardens were woefully ignorant of proper forest and wildlife management techniques.42 He demanded a full report from the five commissioners on each warden in the state, and he intended to replace most of them with scientific experts and woodsmen. Furthermore, Roosevelt wanted the Adirondacks protected as if the region were a national park, “both from the standpoint of forestry and from the less important but still very important standpoint of game and fish protection.”43
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