The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  II

  President Roosevelt, now living in the White House, became extremely controversial on a number of fronts besides recruiting rangers and running roughshod over Interior in the late fall of 1901. Roosevelt couldn’t help showing his thornier side and his streak of independence, scoffing at both the GOP party line and concerns over states’ rights. Roosevelt had planned to head to Alabama that fall to meet with the “negro leader” Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. However, suddenly thrust into the presidency, Roosevelt had to cancel this trip. “I write you at once to say that to my deep regret my visit south must now be given up,” Roosevelt informed Washington. “When are you coming North? I must see you as soon as possible. I want to talk over the question of possible appointments in the South exactly on the lines of our last conversation together. I hope that my visit to Tuskegee is merely deferred for a short season.”18

  Everything about Booker T. Washington impressed Roosevelt. Born a slave in Virginia, too poor to attend school, the self-taught Washington nevertheless founded, in 1881, the Tuskegee Institute, a technical school for African-Americans. A believer in Washington’s “accommodationist” view toward whites, Roosevelt declared Washington “the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his race in the world.” In office only a month, Roosevelt invited Washington to the White House as a courtesy on October 4 to discuss a federal judgeship in Alabama. A productive dialogue on race relations ensued; the two leaders stood four-square on many important national issues. Washington was invited back to the White House in mid-October to brainstorm about ways to enhance educational possibilities for African-Americans in the South. Eventually, Washington and Roosevelt, enjoying each other’s breathless enthusiasm, broke for dinner. Joining them were the first lady, Edith Roosevelt (she hadn’t gotten used to being called that), and a professional friend, Philip B. Stewart of Colorado, cougar hunting fame. Everybody had a most enjoyable time.

  Holy hell broke out in the South the next day, however, when an AP wire story simply stated that Roosevelt had dined with Washington in the White House. The ground rumbled and the southern press went berserk. A segregationist code had been shattered. Headlines like “Our Coon-Flavored President” and “Roosevelt Dines a Darkie” appeared throughout the former Confederacy. The New Orleans Statesman grumbled that the meal was “little less than a studied insult to the South.”19 The Memphis Scimitar ran an editorial stating, “It is only very recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of fact. But inviting a nigger to his table he pays his mother small duty. No Southern woman with a proper self-respect would now accept an invitation to the White House, nor would President Roosevelt be welcomed today in Southern homes. He has not inflamed the anger of the Southern people; he has excited their disgust.”20

  Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington became great friends. Besides inviting Washington to dine at the White House in 1901, Roosevelt also visited Tuskegee Institute in 1904.

  T.R. with Booker T. Washington. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)

  Southern segregationists ripped into Roosevelt with a fusillade of cruel, bigoted, ugly language. James K. Vardaman—publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth, who was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and a Mississippi Democrat and would become governor and then a U.S. senator—surmised that the “White House was so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” Roosevelt became nauseated by these insults—such hatred in America was cancerous. The southerners, Roosevelt lamented, had indicted him for trying to encourage literacy and help fight poverty among African-Americans. The Richmond (Virginia) Times was aghast at Roosevelt’s tolerating the idea that “negroes shall mingle freely with whites in the social circle—that white women may receive attentions from negro men.”21 Never one to cower in the face of threats, Roosevelt decided to go hunting in Mississippi sometime in 1902—to go into the belly of the beast, almost as an act of defiance. Not for a split second was he going to let ex-Confederates—of all people—assault his character. In coming months he would continue consulting with his friend Booker T. Washington; only he back-pedaled away from dinners in favor of meetings at ten o’clock in the morning. Roosevelt, however, did live up to his pledge to tour Tuskegee, though not until after the 1904 presidential election when being photographed with a “negro” wouldn’t cost him votes.22

  On December 3, Roosevelt was to deliver his First Annual Message to Congress, so he surveyed various friends (including Chapman, Grinnell, and Merriam) about what he might say regarding conservation and wildlife protection. A key to President Roosevelt’s vision of the American West was a vast increase in forest reserves and western irrigation. These tenets would be a fundamental part of his annual message. At the time of McKinley’s death in September 1901 the number of U.S. forest reserves had increased from twenty-eight to forty: a total of more than 50 million acres. Not bad. Building on that adequate legacy, President Roosevelt strategized about how to triple McKinley’s effort. He succeeded in increasing the number of national forests from forty to 159, with a total of more than 150 million new acres.23 Put another way, the U.S. forest reserves went from about 43 million acres in 1901 to 194 million acres in 1909 under Roosevelt’s leadership. As the historian John Allen Gable computed in the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Roosevelt’s new forestlands constituted an area larger than France, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined.24

  Forest reserves aside, President Roosevelt looked back in bafflement over why McKinley had rejected stringent wildlife protection laws. Didn’t McKinley want elk and antelope to populate the Great Plains? Was he really opposed to a moose reserve for Maine? The fact of the matter was that McKinley simply hadn’t wanted to squander political capital with powerful western senators over what he considered fringe issues, such as protecting ungulates. That indifference immediately changed with Roosevelt in power. From the get-go Pinchot, in fact, at Roosevelt’s behest, had brought into the forefront of U.S. conservation policy initiatives which the Boone and Crockett Club had formulated: mainly, having game reserves inside national forests. Anxious for his administration to make these bold leaps toward wildlife protection, Roosevelt asked Gifford Pinchot to push the ideas about game reserves through Congress. It didn’t prove easy going for Pinchot. Western development interests didn’t give a damn about buffalo, deer, and elk. Working with the Boone and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological Society, Roosevelt, with the essential help of Congressman Lacey, nevertheless soon made historic strides in getting wildlife protection legislation.

  Deciding unilaterally to change the name of the Executive Mansion to the White House that October, Roosevelt asked Pinchot to head the Division of Forestry in Interior. He promised him “an absolutely free hand”—free, that is, from the gaze of Ethan Allen Hitchcock. Roosevelt claimed his White House desperately needed Pinchot’s help on selecting ideal sites for forest preserves and on intelligent habitat management (including selective timber thinning and brush control). As a lure or incentive Roosevelt told Pinchot that his recommendations for forestry would become—in essence—the de facto administration policy. Pinchot, not Hitchcock, would be the ultimate arbiter at Interior. And while ostensibly Pinchot was merely head of a division, in reality he would have more power than Secretary Hitchcock or the GLO commissioner, Binger Hermann (a former Republican congressman who was an attorney in Oregon). Hitchcock would be a useful figurehead—and an ally of sorts—kept only to placate the McKinley’s old guard. As for Hermann, he smelled to Roosevelt like an enemy, an Oregonian more interested in pork for river and harbor appropriations than in protecting places like Crater Lake, Three Arch Rocks, or the Cascades. Point-blank reality was that Pinchot (as division head) would be making federal forestry policy.25 (Later, in 1905, Pinchot would become the first chief of the new forestry service).

  Gladly, Pinchot accepted the president’s gracious offer. In
the coming years their vigorous friendship continued to blossom. Roosevelt found Pinchot to be a bundle of invaluable insights. Together they would often hike in Rock Creek Park, swim in the Potomac River, play tennis, watch birds, and chop firewood near National Cathedral School. While Pinchot wasn’t given to lyrical outpourings like Burroughs or Grinnell, he was a far better conservationist tactician than anybody else orbiting around Roosevelt. In Roosevelt’s so-called “tennis cabinet” (“kitchen cabinet” sounded too sissified for Roosevelt), Pinchot was probably his most trusted colleague. Pinchot, in fact, became something of a “faithful bodyguard,” always willing to defend Roosevelt from attacks.26 Seldom did Roosevelt and Pinchot see things through different lenses. (There, however, was one big difference between them: Roosevelt was first and foremost a bird preservationist whereas Pinchot was not). And they both enjoyed night work and end-of-the-day confidences. “They were appalled by the human destruction of nature everywhere visible in early twentieth-century America,” the historian Char Miller has noted. “The solution, they believed, lay in Federal regulation of the public lands and, where appropriate, scientific management of these land’s natural resources; only this approach, guided by appropriate experts, would ensure the land’s survival. So parallel ran their thoughts that Roosevelt reportedly assured Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, that on questions of conservation the chief forester was in truth the keeper of conscience.”27

  Not only did Pinchot agree to run the Division of Forestry in Interior, but over Thanksgiving he inserted paragraphs about conservation into the December 3 annual message. To many western senators these insertions were out-and-out heresy. The intensity and boldness of Roosevelt’s address, read by a clerk (as was traditional), encouraged conservation enthusiasts on many levels, though the speech was somewhat short on details. And it wasn’t just a cranky outburst. It was hard-core Rooseveltian conservationist philosophy, presented on the nation’s center stage. For those familiar with Roosevelt’s allegiance to the Boone and Crockett Club and various Audubon societies, it wasn’t very shocking—but the sheer breadth of the wildlife protection plank was unexpected. Even though most New Yorkers had accustomed themselves to the proposition that the sportsman Roosevelt, when it came to wildlife protection or forestry policy, was never content to be a spectator, Congressmen on both sides of the aisle were surprised by the piercing vigor of his conservationist agenda.

  Nobody has recalled President Roosevelt’s First Annual Message with such elegance and insight as historian Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex. Combining actual passages of Roosevelt’s address with vivid descriptions of individual legislators and the atmosphere, Morris wrote about that frigid December day as if he had been sitting in the visitors’ gallery witnessing history.28 Regardless of its overall eloquence, the annual message consisted of important reports and helpful comments that the White House had received from various departments (in other words, it was cobbled together).29 For starters Roosevelt, in strong language, condemned filthy anarchists; he was seething because three presidents in his lifetime had been struck down in their prime by lunatics. Thunderous applause arose from Congress as the clerk, reading Roosevelt’s bracing prose, exclaimed with pent-up frustration that the American people, usually “slow to wrath,” when “kindled” (by an anarchistic abomination like the murder of McKinley) ignited like a “consuming flame.”30 As president he planned on ridding the nation of anarchists, sending them scurrying like mice across the floorboards of national life.

  Although Roosevelt offered some uplifting chamber of commerce-like pronouncements about improved business confidence, his address was notable for its stinging language about corporate trust-busting. Industrialists interpreted the address as a sneer from the pulpit. Clearly, Roosevelt planned on restraining the business class, and even openly challenging it over stock market manipulations and monopolist attitudes. Throughout the Gilded Age huge corporations worked overtime to abuse the public welfare, affecting millions of Americans; such abuses were going to be curtailed with Roosevelt in the White House. He promoted immediate federal intervention in regulating corporations. And—like a boot stuck in mud suddenly coming free—he said that workers were no longer going to be treated as industrial wage slaves. Demanding improved labor laws, Roosevelt lambasted, as Morris puts it, politicians that were “fattened at the public trough.”31 Many of those seated—particularly senators from the Deep South still furious over the Booker T. Washington affair—were leaning forward with fingers clasped and heads shaking: no, this traitor to his class and race can’t be real. “In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of great corporations,” Roosevelt stated. “The nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business.”32 No company was above the law or deserved special treatment from the U.S. government. He outright rejected corporations that wanted rebates and rate fixing. “Great corporations,” Roosevelt proclaimed, “exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”33

  Following these cautionary swipes at corporations President Roosevelt launched into his conservation plank, based on the philosophy of Pinchot and Grinnell. Nothing would palsy his resolution regarding wilderness protection. The West had 6 million inhabitants in 1901; by the time Roosevelt left office there were over 10 million citizens and the population was still growing. Much of Roosevelt’s conservationist thinking in the annual message was directed toward this region. With the West so much in the forefront, he was, as Morris noted in Theodore Rex, “striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances.”34 Nothing about Roosevelt’s conservationist rhetoric could have been misconstrued as give-and-take. He was telling Congress the new lay of the land. Disgusted that the United States had cut down almost 50 percent of its timber, and that valuable topsoil had been washed away, Roosevelt was sending a wake-up call.35 He wanted Congress to save pristine American land while it still existed. Whether they were coniferous forests in the Pacific Northwest or strands of Douglas fir far older than the republic in the Front Range of the Rockies, forests had to be saved. His far-reaching conclusion, after much consideration, was that he wanted the western reserves vastly increased. Decades of study had taught him the symbiotic relationship between timber, soil, and water conservation. “The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity,” the address stated. “We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forests, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our own well being.”36

  And the conservationist creed—albeit carefully modulated—didn’t stop there. It would be up to the federal government—not big business—to lease lands for logging or mining, and not just near the famous destinations like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Throughout the West, the prettiest scenery not deforested or contaminated would be on the table for consideration as national parks or forest reserves. Not on his watch would such lovely Pacific Northwest ranges as the Cascades and Olympics be turned into heaping mounds of slag as in Appalachia. No western state would go unaffected. Praising the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Roosevelt promised to sponsor even more science-based studies pertaining to trees, plants, and grasses through its Biological Survey division run by Dr. Merriam. Roosevelt’s address was pure radical Americanism—especially the ten paragraphs dealing directly with conservation. That November, just a few weeks before the First Annual Message, John Muir had published the essay collection Our National Parks, which included his classic Atlantic Monthly articles “The American Forests” and “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West.”37 Roosevelt had found them highly stimulating and persuasive. Roosevelt did not mention Muir in his annual message but nevertheless sided with Muir’s ecologically sensible crusade to save the great forests of the Pacific Slope. Roosevelt, in fact, l
iked to quote Muir, who wrote in 1897: “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”38

  Roosevelt was the new Delphic oracle of conservation, the political authority of the forestry movement, best-selling author, wilderness trooper, birder, hunter, and moral advocate for nature. For most presidents, give-and-take with Congress was important. Roosevelt, however, believed in only one solution: his own. But, by and large, Congress wasn’t persuaded by Roosevelt’s far-reaching promotion of forestry in the First Annual Message. Roosevelt, for example, recommended consolidating forest work under the Bureau of Forestry. “This recommendation was repeated in other messages,” Roosevelt carped in An Autobiography, “but Congress did not give effect to it until three years later. In the meantime, by thorough study of the Western public timberlands, the groundwork was laid for the responsibilities which were to fall upon the Bureau of Forestry when the care of the National Forests came to be transferred to it.”39

  Besides forest reserves Roosevelt spoke out in the First Annual Message on behalf of wildlife protection as formulated by the Boone and Crockett Club, implying that many federal preserves would eventually be created to protect elk, pronghorns, mule deer, and mountain goats. Even though wildlife didn’t have the economic importance of timber or water, it was the most endangered resource of twentieth-century America. To Roosevelt the forest reserves, in consequence, should “afford perpetual protection to the native fauna, and flora, safe havens of refuge to our rapidly diminishing wild animals of the larger kind.”40 Eventually Roosevelt would sell suspicious western developers on the need for wild-life protection by offering a quid pro quo. Predator control would serve as an inducement. Once established, federal game reserves would thin out wolves and coyotes in a region, keeping these predators away from domestic livestock in the government lands. This, in turn, would also mean far less predators in communities near forest reserves. Roosevelt had Merriam at the Biological Survey begin printing pamphlets on how best to poison coyotes and wolves.41