The Wilderness Warrior
Page 48
III
You didn’t have to be an investigative reporter or an intellectual to realize that Governor Roosevelt was crazy about birds. Regularly, he invited ornithologists to visit the executive mansion to discuss bird protection issues. His son Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt Jr., at age twelve, would go nest-gathering with his father each week, amassing a fine collection.44 (As a matter of ethics, however, they refused to collect the eggs of wild birds.) Using his political clout to promote the Audubon Society (New York), he wrote to Frank M. Chapman, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History, on February 16, 1899, delineating how to dramatically increase the avian presence in the state. “The loon ought to be, and under wise legislation, could be a feature of every Adirondack lake,” Roosevelt said. “Ospreys, as everyone knows, can be the tamest of the tame; and terns should be a plentiful along our shores as swallows around our barns. A tanager or a cardinal makes a point of glowing beauty in the green woods, and the cardinal among the white snows. When the bluebirds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. How immensely it would add to our forests if only the great logcock were still found among them!”45
What disturbed Roosevelt most was that many bird species, because of human recklessness, were becoming either rare or extinct. As a boy he had shot at passenger pigeons for his Roosevelt Museum and was proud of having done so. But he no longer saw it as an achievement. The lessons of John Burroughs had taught him better. “The destruction of the wild pigeon and the Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if the Catskills or the Palisades were taken away,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman. “When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if we had lost all instead of only part of Polybius or Livy.”46
And Roosevelt considered the Palisades Park between New York and New Jersey a landscape masterpiece. Getting Andrew H. Green (his go-to guy at the Bronx Zoo) to help him establish a 700-acre refuge from Fort Lee (New Jersey) to Piedmont (New York), in order to preserve the sill cliffs (commonly called “Palisades sill”) on the west bank of the Hudson River, had become a priority for Roosevelt. He sought to halt the unsightly mining that was ravaging the local scenery of the world’s greatest city. As Roosevelt envisioned it, a thirteen-mile stretch of the preserved Palisades along the Hudson River would become a forerunner of other interstate parks nationwide. To damage the cliffs was sacrilegious. Every month Roosevelt grew more and more disquieted, knowing that New Jersey’s quarry operations were destroying the scenic backdrop to the city.47 The view from Riverside Drive, for example, would be forever ruined if the Jersey side of the Hudson was marred with only factories, storefronts, and houses.
Besides getting the right men onto the New York State Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission (which today is the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation) and establishing Palisades Park, Roosevelt wanted to find ways to educate New York citizens about nature. On May 2, 1899, when he had been governor for only four months, Roosevelt signed into law an educational initiative very dear to his heart. After looking into the curricula of the public schools, Roosevelt was horrified to learn that natural history and geography weren’t being taught. Immediately, he sought appropriation funds so that classes presenting men like Audubon, Darwin, Burroughs, and Marsh could be offered in every county.48 Young citizens, he believed, needed to understand the evolutionary process and learn why dumping sewage and refuse into the Great Lakes and Hudson River was unacceptable. In a sense, promoting Earth Day seventy years ahead of time, Roosevelt believed that humans couldn’t afford to recklessly poison their own environment without incurring a heavy toll in ill health, environmental ugliness, and corrosion of the spirit.
A quick look at Governor Roosevelt’s time line for 1899 clearly shows that he wasn’t a stationary executive. Even mundane talks about tax law became moments for impassioned theater. Although forestry and wild-life issues didn’t monopolize his engagements, these topics were a high priority for him on the speaking trail. Refusing to weaken the conservationist plank in his first annual message, Roosevelt overcame a drubbing from the timber industry for extending state forest reserves in Delaware, Green, Sullivan, and Ulster counties. In May he hiked around the Adirondacks, preaching Pinchot’s gospel of forestry science to people living around the McIntyre Iron Works. Seizing the initiative from Robert B. Roosevelt, T.R. got the New York legislature to pass Amendment (Ch 729) to the Fisheries Law, which forbade the pollution of any rivers, lakes, or streams used by the state fish hatcheries.
At one juncture Roosevelt went to inspect Niagara Falls to see if it could become a national park. The Transcendentalist philosopher Margaret Fuller had once stated that the great falls were “the one object in the world that would not disappoint.”49 Roosevelt disagreed. Doing a good amount of fast walking, he spent days surveying the cataract, exploring the cliffs of Goat Island, refusing to ride the new electric streetcar, and upset that a suspension bridge promoted by Boss Platt was going to mar the natural view of the thundering falls. (Wasn’t the steamer Maid of the Mist enough?) The saga of Niagara Falls had begun 600 million years ago, Roosevelt lamented, and now a group of transportation hotshots, after dollars, wanted to demote the natural wonder into a tourist trap. The garishness of their plans sickened him. In the spirit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, there were already five-legged calves and two-headed goats on display near the falls. Almost nothing irritated Roosevelt more than the use of deformed animals in freak shows. As Governor Roosevelt envisioned the situation, Niagara Falls needed to become an intercountry national park administered by both Washington, D.C., and Ottawa. But Roosevelt dropped the issue—the concessionaires had already seized Niagara Falls, and there was no turning back. Instead, Governor Roosevelt headed southward to camp out for a few days in the Peekskill woods (better known as John Burroughs Country).50
Not all of Roosevelt’s travels were within New York. In June 1899 he headed by train to Las Vegas, New Mexico, for the first annual Rough Rider’s reunion. Las Vegas was situated along a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico Territory, and Roosevelt had wanted to see the town for years, particularly the Spanish colonial-style plaza where Stephen W. Kearny once delivered a cracker-jack speech on manifest destiny during the Mexican War.* Western figures like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Mysterious Dave Mather had spent so much time in the decorative adobes of Las Vegas that Roosevelt found every block intriguing. Billy the Kid had even once called the town home. By coming to the Rough Riders’ reunion, Governor Roosevelt was weaving himself into southwestern lore. (In 1940, Las Vegas, New Mexico, was chosen as the Rough Riders’ official reunion headquarters, with a museum dedicated to them.)
Besides making terrific press, Governor Roosevelt was able to see for himself the beauty of the rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains he had heard about so frequently in Cuba from the Rough Riders. This was where the western edge of the Great Plains met with the southern edge of the Rockies. Las Vegas was in the heart of the Central Flyway, one of the four major migration routes in North America—this flyway followed the Great Plains and extended from Central Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Tall ponderosa pines rose along the canyon rims, and some of the finest piñon, pine-juniper, and groves of gambel oak could be easily enjoyed. Over 270 bird species spent time in this ecosystem.51 Just seeing Swainson’s hawks—which often congregated in the short-grass prairie that later became the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge—was enough of an attraction to induce Roosevelt to travel more than 2,000 miles.52
Upon returning home from Las Vegas, as Roosevelt’s train went though Kansas, huge crowds greeted him at depots. “I cannot tell you how much impressed I was by the rugged look of power in Kansas men whom I met along the line of the railroad,” Roosevelt wrote to William Allen White about the famed journalist’s home state. “What a splendid type it is! I can
see their faces now. Our country is pretty good after all!” 53
Only a portion of Governor Roosevelt’s energy was given to forestry, birds’ rights, and wildlife protection in 1899. For one thing, starting in January, Scribner’s magazine began serializing Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders, about his exploits in the Spanish-American War; in May it was published as a book and became a runaway best seller. With a vengeance, Roosevelt also wanted to start taxing corporations in New York to help finance conservation programs. Many disgruntled Republicans, including Boss Platt, insinuated that he was a traitor to his class. Such insults were music to Roosevelt’s ears. In May 1899, for example, he addressed the City Club of New York and didn’t mince words. “A corporation is simply a collection of men, who may do well or who may do ill,” he said. “The thing to do is to make them understand that if they do well you are with them, but if they do ill you are ever and always against them.”54
Such anticorporation speeches angered some Republican bigwigs, who worried that Roosevelt might paralyze the party. But such rhetoric put independent voters strongly on the side of Roosevelt’s “sock it to the rich” spiels. Throughout the summer of 1899, while Roosevelt worked hard on writing a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector of England from 1653 to 1658), newspaper editorials began to pop up, suggesting that he should become President McKinley’s vice presidential nominee in the coming election of 1900. The word was that Vice President Garret Augustus “Gus” Hobart—who had been raised in luxury in Long Branch, New Jersey—was seriously ill and that Roosevelt would be a logical replacement. Henry Cabot Lodge, always Roosevelt’s sponsor, began promoting the nomination wherever he went. Others thought Roosevelt should become secretary of war or of the interior. Ironically, Boss Platt and the corporate financiers wanted Roosevelt out of Albany, and hope was that they could elevate him to Washington, D.C., to get him out of their hair.55
On November 21, 1899, Vice President Hobart died. His heart had given out. “No one outside of this home,” President McKinley said in Paterson, New Jersey, “feels this loss more deeply than I do.”56 Expectations ran high during the holiday season that Roosevelt would be McKinley’s replacement, at least for the reelection ticket in 1900. (Mark Hanna would serve as an interim number two in the chain of command.) The other names bandied about—for example, John D. Long and Timothy Woodruff—by contrast to Roosevelt, seemed stale. Disregarding all this speculation, Roosevelt unambiguously said forget it; he had no interest in the number two spot. Even though President McKinley had treated Hobart almost as a copresident, bringing the vice presidency up from its low estate, Roosevelt really wanted nothing to do with any kind of candidacy.57 Santa Claus was preparing to visit Oyster Bay, the nineteenth century was coming to a close, and he didn’t have time for guessing games or parlor politics. Much of what Roosevelt had to be grateful for—his colonelcy, his status as a war hero, his governorship—had come his way within the past two years. His strenuous life was on the upswing. He was considered an icon. Only Buffalo Bill took the oxygen out of a room as easily as Governor Roosevelt. While Roosevelt’s restless urge to make a mark on American politics persisted, he didn’t think riding on President McKinley’s coattails was the proper way for advancement.
Instead of corresponding about Vice President Hobart’s death on November 21, Roosevelt preferred to write about the newest addition to the household menagerie: a baby opossum, which he had requested from his friend Bradley Tyler Johnson. “The opossum arrived all right and Archie received it with such loving admiration that I gave it to him, a little to the jealousy of Ted and Kermit,” the governor wrote. “In spite of your assurance that it is tame, Archie does not venture to pet it, and its only intimate acquaintance with him is when I take it up by the nape of the neck, and on such occasions it always opens its jaws like an alligator. Archie still regards it with unqualified respect. It has utterly unsettled the nerves of the terrier who sits in front of its cage for hours, showing the most eager, but I fear unfriendly desire to get in.”58 About ten to fourteen days later Roosevelt, worried that Ted’s feelings were hurt because the opossum wasn’t his, got Ted a guinea pig to even the score.59
Roosevelt was always a fine correspondent, and that December the letters poured out of him. In many he expressed thanks to his close friends, such as George Bird Grinnell and Henry Cabot Lodge, for always being at his side. In others he reflected on how parochial Albany was compared with Washington, D.C. Already Pinchot was soliciting Roosevelt to side with him in a campaign to transfer the forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture.60 But mainly they were a form of cheerleading; he was trying to unite his allies in his reform crusade through graciousness. “Oh Lord!” Roosevelt wrote Elihu Root, “I wish there were more of you. I think I have made a pretty good Governor, but I am quite honest in saying that I think you would have made a better one; for in just such matters as trusts and the like you have the ideas to work out whereas I have to try to work out what I get from you and men like you.”61
IV
Governor Roosevelt’s second annual message to the New York state legislature on January 3, 1900, was the most important speech about conservation ever delivered by a serious American politician up until that time. Everything from illegal hunting to forest fire protection and watersheds was covered. The governor tried hard to persuade the legislators that forest preservation was of “the utmost importance to the State.” Disposing of land abusers as parasites, Roosevelt stated—insisted, really—that the “Adirondacks and Catskills should be great parks kept in perpetuity for the benefit and enjoyment of our people.”62 His speech led to what Conservation Biology later called a “revival of democracy” through the nature movement.63 Like a sentry standing watch, Roosevelt was going to protect New York’s wilderness from despoilers of every stripe. “As railroads tend to encroach on the wilderness,” Roosevelt warned, “the temptation to illegal hunting becomes greater, and the danger of forest fires increases.”64
Although Governor Roosevelt gave a small compliment to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission for the propagation of hatcheries producing valuable food, his address was essentially a litany of woes he wanted corrected. Lumbering in state forests, Roosevelt declared, had to be placed “on strictly scientific principles no less than upon principles of the strictest honesty toward the state.” Both lakes and rivers, he said, needed to be protected from the indiscriminate effects of hyper-industrialization. Game wardens, he claimed, weren’t doing their jobs correctly. He wanted “woodsmen” with a background in science to take over these posts. State forests had to be consistently treated with the utmost respect by lumber companies. “The subject of forest preservation,” he said, “is of the utmost importance to the State.” And then he took up specific issues of birds’ rights:
The State should not permit within its limits factories to make bird skins or bird feathers into articles of ornament or wearing apparel. Ordinary birds, and especially song birds, should be rigidly protected. Game birds should never be shot to a greater extent than will offset the natural rate of increase. All Spring shooting should be prohibited and efforts made by correspondence with the neighboring States to secure its prohibition within their borders. Care should be taken not to encourage the use of cold storage or other market systems which are a benefit to no one but the wealthy epicure who can afford to pay a heavy price for luxuries. These systems tend to the destruction of the game: which would bear most severely upon the very men whose rapacity has been appealed to in order to secure its extermination.
The open season for the different species of game and fish should be made uniform throughout the entire State, save that it should be shorter on Long Island for certain species which are not plentiful, and which are pursued by a greater number of people than in other game portions of the State.65
Never before in U.S. history had a governor championed forest preservation and bird rights with such forthrightness.66 As Roosevelt wrote to Grant La Far
ge, he had done this without a “particle of popular backing of the effective kind.”67 Pinchot, who had been somewhere out West at the time the speech was delivered, would later memorize passages as if it were the Gettysburg Address. Overnight, the ornithologists praised Roosevelt’s second annual message to the skies; it was a fulfillment of a dream. Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History, for example, considered January 3 one of the greatest days of his life—Roosevelt’s hard-hitting, visionary defense of birds in his second annual message was, Chapman believed, the tipping point for the Audubon Movement, the wave which crashed down on an entire new generation anxious for preservation to triumph over annihilation. A governor of New York, for the first time, took on both the lumber and the cold storage lobbies.
Not that Chapman was surprised. Starting in early 1900, Governor Roosevelt began promoting the virtues of “citizen bird” with a new zeal. Public awareness, the governor and his followers believed, was always the first step in winning a political battle in the United States. The previous year, the magazine Audubon had come into existence; its editor, Frank M. Chapman, was hoping to lead an effort to create bird reservations throughout the United States (particularly in New York and Florida). There was a movement afoot, encouraging individual participation in field research projects, surveys, censuses, and polls. The central idea was that every American community could have its own bird sanctuary. People were encouraged to have binoculars or field glasses ready at home. For the first time backyard bird feeders and ceramic birdbaths were erected by everyday citizens hoping to attract crossbills and grosbeaks. Sunflower seed feeders, for example, attracted jays, finches, and chickadees. One company started manufacturing nectar feeders—tubes filled with sugar water—to attract hummingbirds. Vacations were planned around simply spying on a new bird with alert eyes. Hard-core enthusiasts, those rich enough to travel, could be found looking for the greater prairie chicken in the sand hills of Nebraska or sighting the Chihuahuan raven in the borderlands of Texas.68