“The man of the West throughout the successive stages of Western growth has always been one of the two or three most typical figures,” Roosevelt wrote, “indeed I am tempted to say the most typical figure in American life; and no man can really understand our country, and appreciate what it really is and what it promises, unless he has the fullest and closest sympathy with the ideals and aspirations of the West.”55
How earnestly Roosevelt still believed that the American character was connected to the restorative power of outdoors life was evident in recommendations he gave the U.S. Army War College before stepping down as president. Having learned that the army’s regulations for field service were being modernized, he inserted himself into the internal debate over the revisions. Even though the forerunners of jeeps were being introduced to the army, Roosevelt stood by the symbolic power of horses. Fixing cars was fine, and mechanical skills were always helpful, but all army servicemen, Roosevelt believed, needed to be skilled climbers and equestrians. “We must not allow packing to become a lost art in the army,” Roosevelt wrote in a report. “The old timers in the Rocky Mountains are passing away and we must look to the army to keep up the knowledge of this essential and invaluable service art.”56
One American range that Roosevelt was itching to explore in February 1909 was Washington’s fog-shrouded Olympic Mountains. Before he headed to Africa, Roosevelt saved Mount Olympus (7,980 feet in elevation) as a national monument. Ever since Merriam had named the huge elk in the Olympic range Cervus roosevelti, the president had hungrily read whatever he could about the region. As Time would later note, geologists were unsure exactly how snow-mantled Mount Olympus had been formed. Folklore in Washington state claimed that Paul Bunyan had journeyed to Puget Sound to milk an orca to cure Babe (his devoted blue ox) of a life-threatening illness. When Bunyan thought Babe was going to perish, he dug a huge grave, and the dirt pile became Mount Olympus.57 The very fact that such a folktale survived in the Pacific Northwest was a sure sign that wilderness still existed in the Cascades circa 1909—and the same would be true of the later legend of Bigfoot. Somehow it was fitting that on March 3, Paul Bunyan, Babe, Bigfoot, the giant elk, and Theodore Roosevelt became linked in the Cascades folklore with the creation of Mount Olympus National Monument. Furthermore, Professor Daniel G. Elliot, a co-author of The Deer Family, had been promoting national monument status for Mount Olympus for over two years.
Since the successful reintroduction of bison on the Wichitas and Flathead reserves, Roosevelt had tried to create the National Elk Reserve in the Olympics. However, Congress had prevented him from saving remnant bands as part of Olympic Elk National Park. Roosevelt was furious at being stymied. His Grand Canyon National Game Reserve was a model of proper wildlife reserve management. So, Roosevelt circumvented Congress on March 3, declaring Mount Olympus and 615,000 acres of lush valley, spectacular mountains, fish-filled streams, and old-growth forests off-limits to any kind of hunting, timbering, or extraction.58 Quite literally, Mount Olympus was North America’s most amazing temperate rain forest. In Proclamation No. 869 creating the national monument, Roosevelt described the ecosystem as follows: “the slopes of Mount Olympus and the adjacent summits of the Olympic Mountains…embrace…numerous glaciers, and…the summer range and breeding grounds of the Olympic Elk…a species peculiar to these mountains and rapidly decreasing in numbers.”59
Corporations in Seattle and Tacoma erupted in protest over Mount Olympus National Monument. As with the Grand Canyon, the dissenters said, T.R. was abusing the intent of the Antiquities Act. The onetime mayor of Seattle, Richard A. Ballinger, a reformer and low-key conservationist, thought Mount Olympus should be timbered. Comical remarks circulated in newsrooms that Roosevelt was leaving the White House to dwell on Mount Olympus with his buddies Jupiter and Apollo and his supersize species of Irish elk. The New York Times eventually defended Roosevelt’s new national monument, addressing the humorists by concluding, “Mr. Roosevelt is always right here on earth. If he were on Olympus there would be no room there for Jupiter or Apollo.”60
What a wondrous, moss-draped world the Mount Olympus rain forest was! For a lover of big game, seeing a 700-pound Roosevelt elk browsing in the lush primeval forest constituted an experience unequaled in North America. Mount Olympus, with glaciers descending its rugged slope, was to this national monument what Old Faithful was to Yellowstone. The northern spotted owl, a threatened species, could be found easily on Mount Olympus by just hiking the trails. Three sui generis Olympic species—the Olympic marmot, Olympic snow mole, and Olympic torrent salamander—weren’t found anywhere else in the world. For sheer picturesque beauty, Soleduck Falls, swollen from frequent rains and melting snows, was also in a class of its own. Sometimes naturalists described Olympic as three parks in one—dramatic glacier-capped mountains, miles of wild Pacific coast, and a temperate rain forest. Mount Olympus also had the largest Alaskan cedar and Douglas firs in America.
When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, he deemed Roosevelt’s Proclamation No. 869 excessive and downsized Mount Olympus National Monument from 615,000 to 300,000 acres. Roosevelt was furious. When he died in 1919, a movement was under way to return the ecosystem to its original 615,000 acres. But presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were unwilling to do it, wanting to secure the “timber vote” of the Olympic Peninsula. At last, in 1938 Franklin D. Roosevelt, by presidential proclamation, returned his cousin’s acreage to the monument. And he changed Mount Olympus’s designation to Olympic National Park. In 1958 about seventy miles of rugged Washington coastline was added to the park by President Dwight Eisenhower. Joining the Roosevelt elk in federal protection were whales, dolphins, sea lions, and sea otters. The entire Olympic Peninsula, with the surf slapping hard on the offshore rocks, was Bar Harbor and then some. Four valleys facing the ocean—the Queets, the Quinault, the Hoh, and the Bogachiel—produced endless botanical surprises for visitors. Juncos flit about the grasses and woodpeckers excavate old logs. Deer are everywhere. The tide pools full of invertebrates of countless shapes, sizes, colors, and textures at Olympic National Park could have kept Charles Darwin busy for 100 years.61
V
During his last days in the White House, Roosevelt thought a lot about Charles Darwin. His knowledge of the great naturalist had matured since he drew men as storks when he was a teenager in Dresden. In preparation for his African expedition Roosevelt had On the Origin of Species wrapped in a waterproof cover to avoid damaging it on safari. It was part of what he called his “pigskin library” of favorite titles. On February 25, just two days before he created his federal bird reservations, Roosevelt had reflected on Darwin. “I think the trouble about Darwinism is that people confound it with evolution,” Roosevelt wrote to James Joseph Walsh, a professor of physiological psychology who had just dedicated his book Catholic Churchmen in Science to President Roosevelt. “I suspect that all scientific students now accept evolution, just as they accept the theory of gravitation, or the general astronomical scheme of solar system and the stellar system as a whole; but natural selection, in the Darwinism sense, as a theory, evidently does not stand on the same basis. It must be tested, as the atomic system is tested, for instance.”62
Other biological books added to the “pigskin library” included Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Huxley’s Essays.63 Roosevelt had also started reading a book on neo-Darwinism by Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (lectures delivered in 1907–1908 at the University of Aberdeen). This work, which was both factual and meditative, proved to be a helpful scaffolding for Roosevelt’s Oxford University lectures, “Biological Imperatives in History,” in 1910. A German biologist known as a pioneer in embryology, Driesch spent years operating out of the Marine Biological Station in Naples, Italy, experimenting with the division of embryo cells of sea urchins. These were complicated experiments encompassing biology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Roosevelt strove to understand Driesch’s findings in depth. He was en
thralled to find that Driesch had included the issue of coloration of bears in Science and the Philosophy of the Organism. “Do we understand in the least why there are white bears in the Polar Regions if we are told that bears of other colours could not survive?” Driesch inquired. “In denying any real explanatory value to the concept of natural selection I am far from denying the action of natural selection. On the contrary, natural selection, to some degree, is self evident.”64
Roosevelt also scrounged around for grant money to help Professor John A. Lomax of the University of Texas continue his fieldwork collecting cowboy ballads. Roosevelt went hat in hand on Lomax’s behalf to potential benefactors. Writing to the president of the Carnegie Institution, Roosevelt asked that Lomax be given $1,000, quickly, for his “very original and instructive study into a phase of native American literary and intellectual growth which of course has been totally neglected.”65 However, his request was rejected.
Frustrated that some intellectuals rolled their eyes at the idea of cowboy culture as serious academic fare, Roosevelt turned to the French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, to find financial assistance for Lomax. “A Texas professor is doing some really good work in collecting frontier ballads in the cow country of Texas,” he wrote to Jusserand. “They are of course for the most part doggerel (as I believe to be true with the majority of ballads as they were originally written); but these are interesting because they are genuine. The deification of Jesse James is precisely like the deification of Robin Hood and the cowboy is a hero exactly as the hunter of the greenwood was a hero. Also, the view taken of women seems to be much the same as that taken in many of the medieval ballads.”66 This time Roosevelt found Lomax a grant.
Filled with growing enthusiasm for Texan culture, Roosevelt wrote an introduction for Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910).67 At the same time he drafted speeches that he planned to deliver at Oxford, the Sorbonne, and Berlin University in 1910, once he emerged from the African wilds. Darwinian themes were apparent in all three addresses, accentuated by his own philosophy of the strenuous life. Then, on March 2, with just forty-eight hours left of his presidency, he wrote heartfelt thanks to Merriam, Garfield, and Pinchot. Together, these warriors had challenged the titans of the Gilded Age and beyond—railroads, timber companies, and mine owners.68 Only in writing to Edith or to his children had Roosevelt ever been so sentimental and emotional. “As long as I live I shall feel for you a mixture of respect and admiration and a general affectionate regard,” he wrote to Pinchot, saluting his work as first chief of the Forest Service. “I am a better man for having known you. I feel that to have been with you will make my children better men and women in after life; and I cannot think of a man in the country whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the Nation than yours would be. For seven and a half years we have worked together, and now and then played together—and have been altogether better able to work because we have played; and I owe to you a peculiar debt of obligation for a very large part of the achievement of the administration.”69
Predictably, Roosevelt didn’t forget about his obligations to American ornithology on his way out of power. In 1908, Lucy Maynard, a member of the Audubon Society, had met with him at the White House for a nature lecture. She was updating a new edition of her work on birds in Washington, D.C., and wondered whether the president had any interesting recent sightings to report. “Why, yes,” Roosevelt answered gleefully. “But I’ll do better than that. I’ll make you a list of all the birds I can remember having seen since I have been here.”70
A few days later, Roosevelt sent Maynard a long list, which she published in 1909 as the introduction to her Birds of Washington and Vicinity. In all, ninety-three species were listed, some with brief commentary. For example:
Night Heron. Five spent winter of 1907 in swampy country about one-half mile west of Washington Monument.
Sparrow Hawk. A pair spent the last two winters on and around the White House grounds, feeding on the Sparrows—largely, thank Heaven, on the English Sparrows.
Screech Owl. Steady resident on White House grounds.71
Inauguration Day, March 4, brought a swirl of snow. Ten inches had fallen, and everything was shrouded in white that concealed rock-hard ice. Horse-drawn plows were working overtime to at least keep Pennsylvania Avenue passable for Washingtonians and other guests. Carpenters had worked until the last minute erecting a reviewing stand for the parade outside the North Gate of the White House. But the snow-removal efforts and the carpenters couldn’t keep up with the snowfall. For the first time in U.S. history the inauguration ceremonies were moved indoors, to the Senate chamber.72 The essence of Roosevelt as a phenomenon was evident in the way his departure was receiving more attention in the newspapers than Taft’s arrival. Even with the bad weather, Roosevelt was exuberant: “I knew there’d be a blizzard when I went out,” he had said on inauguration eve. Clapping his hands, he declared the storm the “Roosevelt Blizzard,” and said that’s what history would call it. Trying to hold his own, determined from the outset not to be Roosevelt’s “creature,” Taft remarked that he thought not.73 “You’re wrong,” Taft said. “It’s my storm. I always said it would be a cold day when I got to be President of the United States.”74
At ten o’clock on Inauguration morning, Roosevelt and Taft headed to the Capitol in a twelve-team carriage. Snow was swirling about, and many of the bleachers lining Pennsylvania Avenue were empty owing to the inclement weather. Both men usually had a hearty sense of humor, but it wasn’t on display that day, although T.R. waved to the shivering spectators. Nellie Taft broke all precedent by riding in a carriage with her husband.75 At the Capitol, Roosevelt signed some last-minute bills, hugged some close friends, and prepared to relinquish power. Vice President James S. Sherman of New York had already been sworn in. Just after noon, Roosevelt and Taft walked into the Senate Chamber, receiving enormous foot-stomping cheers. For a few minutes they looked like a united front. Then a century-old Bible was held out and Taft took the oath.76 “Observers were struck by Roosevelt’s immobile concentration as his successor was sworn in,” the historian Edmund Morris wrote in Theodore Rex. “Those who did not know him thought that the stony expression and balled-up fists signaled trouble ahead for Taft.” 77
Not since Lincoln had America had such a folk figure as Roosevelt for its president. He was beloved. Groups from all over America wanted to memorialize Roosevelt, chisel his face in granite, or cast a bronze of his likeness. But such gestures were hardly commensurate with his accomplishments, such as saving the Tongass and Mount Olympus. “For millions of contemporary Americans, he was already memorialized in the eighteen national monuments and five national parks he had created by executive order, or cajoled out of Congress,” Morris maintained. “The ‘inventory,’ as Gifford Pinchot would say, included protected pinnacles, a crater lake, a rain forest and a petrified forest, a wind cave and a jewel cave, cliff dwellings, a cinder cone and skyscraper of hardened magma, sequoia stands, glacier meadows, and the grandest of all canyons.”78 In seven years and sixty-nine days, Roosevelt had saved more than 234 million acres of American wilderness. History still hasn’t caught up with the long-term magnitude of his achievement.
All of Roosevelt’s cabinet dutifully came to see him off at Union Station, but he lingered longest with Pinchot.79 In coming years Pinchot would become governor of Pennsylvania, forestry advisor to F.D.R., and the co-author of Darwinian travel odyssey from New York to Key West and on to the Galapagos. Pinchot would have the huge burden of keeping the conservation movement kinetic while Roosevelt was in British East Africa. Soft-spoken, almost tearful, Roosevelt was attentive and considerate to everybody at Union Station: children carrying teddy bears; army troops; porters; bystanders; and congressmen with whom he no longer had to negotiate. Already, scholars were trying to determine precisely where Roosevelt would fit in the spectrum of American presidential history. Roosevelt himself believed that he was a smart hybrid of both Jeffersonian and Ha
miltonian impulses with modern Darwinism added for good measure. “I have no use for the Hamiltonian who is aristocratic or for the Jeffersonian who is a demagogue,” Roosevelt wrote to William Allen White shortly before leaving office. “Let us trust the people as Jefferson did, but not flatter them; and let us try to have our administration as effective as Hamilton taught us to have it. Lincoln, and Washington, struck the right average.”80
At three-twenty that afternoon, Roosevelt left for Oyster Bay as the youngest ex-president in American history. There was about T.R. an air of moral satisfaction. Like Washington and Lincoln, he had accomplished much. He was still walking singular among America’s political class. Regarding conservation alone he had left two watchdogs strategically behind to mind the store. The first was Gifford Pinchot, who would be a gadfly every time Taft failed to protect a Roosevelt natural wonder or forest reserve. And, devilishly, Roosevelt had left a big game trophy at the White House: the head of a huge bull-moose, shot in Maine, still adorned a wall in the executive dining room. For weeks that bull-moose would loom over every presidential meal or conference, until eventually it was taken down. Both the bull moose and Gifford Pinchot were harbingers of difficult days ahead for William Howard Taft. The reign of Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t really ended on that snowy March afternoon. The conservation movement had spread all over America, and his acolytes had just begun to fight for the inheritance of unmarred public lands.
There was no going gently into retirement for Roosevelt. He remained America’s hubristic flywheel and nationalistic sage. British East Africa. Egypt. Rome and Berlin. Paris and London and Oxford. Brazil. Chile. Uruguay. Argentina. The Grand Canyon and the Federal Bird Reservations of the Gulf of Mexico. He visited them all. He dined with European princes and prayed in the Hopi kivas of northern Arizona. And every single day, like an unbroken stream, he crusaded for conservation to prevail over the global disease of hyper-industrialization. “We regard Attic temples and Roman triumphal arches and Gothic cathedrals as of priceless value,” Roosevelt decreed, full of wilderness warrior fury. “But we are, as a whole, still in that low state of civilization where we do not understand that it is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.”81
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