Democrats knew it too, and they beat a hasty retreat from William Jennings Bryan’s more explosive rhetoric, endorsing the gold standard and selecting as their nominee a conservative New York judge, Alton B. Parker. With a socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, siphoning off 400,000 votes, the Democrats did not stand a chance of unseating the popular Teddy. Roosevelt crushed Parker and, more impressively, carried every single state except the South and Maryland, solidifying the western base brought in by McKinley.
The day before his inauguration, Roosevelt said, “Tomorrow I shall come into the office in my own right. Then watch out for me.”63 Safely reelected, Roosevelt again turned on the business community, especially the railroads. He supported the Hepburn Act, called “a landmark in the evolution of federal control of private industry.”64 It allowed the Interstate Commerce Act to set railroad rates. As part of the compromise to obtain passage of Hepburn, Roosevelt agreed to delay tariff reform, which became the central issue of his successor’s administration. In 1905, at his urging, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, prohibiting companies from selling adulterated foods, or foods or medicines that contained ingredients the FDA deemed harmful. Like most laws, the Food and Drug Act originated out of noble intentions. Americans had already been sufficiently alarmed about the dangers of cocaine, which had forced Coca-Cola to change its secret formula, and, after Sinclair’s horrifying novel, an even greater public outcry over tainted meat led to the Meat Inspection Act.
Summer Camps and Saving the Bison
At the turn of the century, a movement for conserving America’s natural resources sprang up. The first conservation legislation, in 1891, authorized President Harrison to designate public lands as forest reserves, allowing Harrison and Cleveland to reserve 35 million acres. Popular tastes had increasingly embraced a wilderness infatuation, especially among elite eastern groups. Writers had romanticized the wilderness since the Revolution’s Hector St. John and the early national era writings of James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau. Interest accelerated with the summer camp movement of the 1890s. Roosevelt institutionalized the conservation movement, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and appointing Yale University’s first professional forester, Gifford Pinchot, to head the agency.
Roosevelt’s action marked the culmination of the efforts of naturalists, artists, and anthropologists who had argued for application of Progressive management techniques to natural resources. That movement also had its origins in the efforts of John Muir, an Indianapolis carriage worker who was nearly blinded in a factory accident. When his sight returned, Muir resolved to turn his gaze to America’s natural wonders. In the late 1860s, a trip to Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada mountains led him to produce a series of articles called “Studies in the Sierra,” before exploring Alaska and Glacier Bay. It was in his series of articles appearing in Century magazine that Muir drew attention to the devastation of mountain meadows and forests by sheep and cattle. Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Century, joined with Muir to form the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect natural resources and public parks.65
Important differences separated Roosevelt and Muir, even though the two were friends and even camped together in Yosemite in 1903. Muir was a preservationist who envisioned maintenance of a pristine, sacred natural world in which any development was prohibited. He was also proven wrong in some of his more apocalyptic prophecies, such as his claim that the damming of the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley would doom Yosemite.
Needless to say, Roosevelt did not share the view that water for people’s cities was the practical equivalent of water for trees. It would be the same mentality that a century later would consign hundreds of Klamath, Oregon, farmers to poverty and financial ruin when an endangered fish was discovered in the basin, causing the federal government to shut off all water use.
The first most practical effect of the new conservation movement came in 1901, when thirty western senators and congressmen from seventeen western states agreed to a plan by Senator Francis Newlands of Wyoming to apply a portion of public lands receipts to reclamation, dam construction, and other water projects. Roosevelt jumped on the Newlands bandwagon and secured passage of the bill, which, without question, taxed some western farmers who lived in areas with heavier rainfall for others who did not. Roosevelt rejected the pristine view, signing the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which made possible the settlement and managed use of a vast, mostly barren, landscape.
As conservationists, Roosevelt and Pinchot saw the use of nature by people as the primary reason for preserving nature. In 1910, Pinchot—in sharp contrast to Muir—wrote that the first principle of conservation was “development, the use of natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of people who live here now [emphasis added].”66
Roosevelt, however, soon went too far, setting aside 200 million acres of public land (more than one third of it in Alaska) as national forests or other reserved sites. After being confronted by angry western legislators, Roosevelt backed down and rescinded the set-aside program—but not before tacking on another 16 million acres to the public lands map. Roosevelt overthrew the Jeffersonian principle that the land belonged in the hands of the people individually rather than the people as a whole. Only the public sector, he thought, could regulate the political entrepreneurs and their harvesting of ore and timber by enclosing public lands. This was Roosevelt’s elite, Progressive side taking over. His own experiences as a wealthy hunter won out over the principle that individuals should own, and work, their own land.
One of the most hidden facts of the conservation movement—perhaps deliberately buried by modern environmental extremists—involved the fate of the buffalo. When we last examined the Plains buffalo, white hunters had nearly exterminated the herds. Ranchers, noticing fewer buffalo, concluded that ownership of a scarce resource would produce profits. A handful of western American and Canadian ranchers, therefore, began to round up, care for, and breed the remaining buffalo. The federal government’s Yellowstone National Park purchased these bison in 1902, and other government parks were also soon established, including the Oklahoma Wichita Mountains Park, Montana’s National Bison Range, and Nebraska’s National Wildlife Refuge.67
Yet public control of natural resources contrasted with the fact that in many areas, TR had abandoned antibusiness inclinations in his second term. For example, he had slowly gravitated more toward free trade when it came to the tariff. During McKinley’s short second term, the Major had drifted toward an appreciation for lower tariff duties, speaking in favor of reciprocity, whereby the United States would reduce rates on certain imported goods if foreign countries would do the same on American imports. Roosevelt saw the logic in lower tariffs, especially after the 1902 Dingley Tariff provoked foreign responses in the form of higher rates on all American goods. One industry at a time, former advocates of high duties saw the light and swung behind lower tariffs. Iron, steel, foodstuffs, manufactured items—all were represented by important lobbies that gradually started to argue on behalf of lower duties.
As president, Roosevelt, who had in the past fought for lower duties, suddenly became cautious. He decided to do nothing on broad-based tariff reform. With his war on the trusts, the new emphasis on conservation of the resources, and the growing need for a water route linking the oceans through Central America, Roosevelt had a full plate, and he left the tariff issue to be taken up by his successor.
“Speak Softly…”
Most Americans are familiar with Roosevelt’s comment on international relations, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” As a Progressive, Roosevelt believed in the principle of human advance, morally and ethically, which translated into a foreign policy of aggressive intervention. He kept a wary eye on England and her ability to maintain a balance of power, but knew that the United States had to step in if Britain faltered. Roosevelt appreciated the value of ships and the power they could project. During his first administration, he pressed Congress for new expe
nditures, resulting in a near doubling of the navy by the end of his second term.
Both the strength and weakness of America, and the navy in particular, lay in the fact that two massive oceans protected the United States. Any blue-water fleet had to be capable of conducting operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific nearly simultaneously. That was before a short-cut route connecting the two oceans was conceived. For several decades, transit across Panama, a territory of Colombia, had required a stop on one side, unloading and transporting people and goods by rail to the other side, then reloading them to continue the journey. Warships had to sail all the way around South America to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and vice versa. The concept of a canal was obvious, and despite the presence of powerful American interests, a French company had acquired rights to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama in 1879. After ten years and $400 million, the French gave up, leaving the canal only partially finished. Desperately in debt, the French attempted to sell the assets, including the concession, to the United States for $109 million, but the United States balked at the steep price. An alternate route, through Nicaragua, offered the less difficult construction chore of merely linking several large lakes together, taking advantage of nature’s own “canal.” But Nicaragua had its own problems, including earthquakes, so the French, eager for any return on the investment, lowered the price to $40 million.
Congress liked that price, as did Roosevelt, who dispatched the new secretary of state John Hay to negotiate the final agreement with Tomás Herrán, Colombia’s representative, wherein the United States received a ninety-nine-year lease on the Canal Zone for $10 million down and $250,000 per year. The ensuing events brought out Roosevelt’s darker side, part of which he had revealed years earlier in his Winning of the West. “The most righteous of all wars,” he wrote, “is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under debt to him.”68
When Colombia heard of the new Hay agreement, the government rejected it, offering several possible replacements. One had Colombia receiving $20 million from the United States and $10 million from the French company. Roosevelt had no intention of renegotiating a deal he thought was his. By October 1903, his rhetoric had left no doubt where he stood on the Panama issue, calling the Colombian representatives “homicidal corruptionists” and “greedy little arthropoids.”69 The president saw Colombians as blackmailers. Although he had not been pressed to somehow intervene in Panama, “so as to secure the Panama route,” neither did he silence his friends, including The Outlook, which editorialized about the desirability of an internal revolution in Panama that might result in secession from Colombia.70 Although Roosevelt planned in his annual message to Congress to recommend that the United States take the Isthmus of Panama, he never sent it, nor was it needed: a November revolution in Panama, headed by a New Yorker named Philippe Bunau-Varilla, overthrew the Colombian government there and declared an independent state of Panama.
As soon as Bunau-Varilla and his associates ousted the Colombian authorities in Panama, the USS Nashville arrived to intimidate reinforcements from Columbia, since the United States had recognized Bunau-Varilla’s group as Panama’s official government. Bunau-Varilla, an agent of the French Canal Company, had lobbied Congress for the Panama route after the French enterprise ran out of money, and he helped insert a clause in the new treaty that gave the United States the ten-milewide Canal Zone for $40 million, protection against any recovery of money owed to Colombia. Some suggested that part of the deal was an under-the-table cash payoff of the French as well. Roosevelt denied any wrongdoing, but ultimately admitted, “I took the Canal Zone.”71 Yet his logic was commendable: “I…left [it to] Congress, not to debate the Canal, but to debate me.”72
Construction across the fifty miles of the isthmus is one of the miracles of human engineering. It completed the work begun in 1878 by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who had constructed the Suez Canal. Once the Canal treaty was finalized, Roosevelt authorized U.S. Army engineers to start digging. John. F. Wallace supervised most of the work. He spent two years assembling supplies and creating the massive infrastructure the project needed. He oversaw the construction of entire towns with plank walkways, hospitals, mess halls, and general stores—all dug out of the Panamanian mud. When it came down to the Canal, though, he could not drum up any enthusiasm: “To me,” he told Roosevelt, “the canal is only a big ditch.”73 By 1907 he realized that a sea-level canal would be too difficult, and instead proposed a series of locks to raise vessels from the Atlantic about thirty yards above sea level to Gatún Lake, then to the famous eight-mile-long Calebra Cut—one of the most daunting engineering feats in modern history. Roosevelt then brought in Colonel George Goethals, who by then also had the benefit of Colonel William Gorgas’s medical research on malaria, to direct the project.
Goethals infused the effort with new energy, even as he confronted the Calebra Cut, using more than 2,500 men to dynamite mountain walls, excavating more than 200 million yards of dirt and rock, which was hauled away by 4,000 wagons. Despite the use of 19 million pounds of explosives, only eight men perished in accidents. In 1913 the final part of the Calebra Cut was completed, and on the other side lay the locks at Pedro Miguel, which lower ships to the Pacific’s level. When the Canal finally opened, on August 15, 1914, Roosevelt was out of politics, but he could claim substantial responsibility for the greatest engineering feat in history.
The acquisition of the Canal Zone and the construction of the Panama Canal typified Roosevelt’s “big stick” attitude toward foreign policy. He was determined to keep Europeans out of the New World, largely in order to preserve some of it, particularly the Caribbean, for American expansion. When Germany tried to strong-arm Venezuela in December 1902 into repaying debts by threatening to blockade Venezuelan ports, Roosevelt stepped in. Eyeing the Germans suspiciously, Roosevelt decided that the United States could not allow them or any other European power to intervene in Latin America.
The resulting Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, delivered when Elihu Root read a letter from Roosevelt at the Cuban independence anniversary dinner in 1904, promised no interference with a country conducting itself “with decency” in matters of trade and politics. But the United States would not tolerate “brutal wrongdoing,” or behavior that “results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society.” Such activity would require “intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the United States cannot ignore this duty.”74 This sentiment formed the basis of a worldview that saw any unrest in the Western Hemisphere as a potential threat to U.S. interests. Roosevelt’s foreign policy blended Progressive reformism, a lingering sense of manifest destiny, and a refereshing unwillingness to tolerate thugs and brigands just because they happened to be outside American borders. In truth, his role as hemispheric policeman differed little from his approach to businesses and corporations. He demanded that they act morally (as he and his fellow Progressives defined “morality”) and viewed their refusal as endangering the American people when they did not.
Black and White in Progressive America
Shortly after he had succeeded McKinley, Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to a personal, formal dinner at the White House. The affair shocked many Americans, some of whom treated it like a scandal, and Roosevelt, though he maintained that Washington remained an adviser, never asked him to return. Still, the event showed both how far America had come, and how far it had to go.
Washington’s dinner invitation seemed trivial next to the Brownsville, Texas, shooting spree of August 1906, in which black soldiers, angered by their treatment at the hands of Brownsville citizens, started shooting up the town, killing a civilian, then managing to return to the base unobserved. None of the 160 members of the black units would provide a name to investigators, and after three months, Roosevelt discharged all 160 men, inc
luding six Medal of Honor winners. All the dishonorably discharged men would be disqualified from receiving their pensions (they were reinstated and all military honors restored by Congress in 1972). Northerners came to the defense of the soldiers, although the South was outraged at their behavior.
Since the end of Reconstruction, the South had degenerated into a two-tiered segregated society of Jim Crow laws ensuring the separation of blacks and whites in virtually every aspect of social life. Even in the North, however, Progressives used IQ tests to segregate education and keep the races apart.75 The federal government contributed to this with the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court ruled that the establishment of “separate but equal” facilities, including schools, was legal and acceptable. A case originating in Louisiana when a black man, Homer Plessy, rode home in a “whites only” railroad car (thus violating state law), Plessy v. Ferguson held of the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment that:
it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, that separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.76
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