The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  Pinchot took his dismissal like a gentleman, or so it seemed at first. But as his biographers have remarked, he was ultimately simply unable to accept it. Seeking revenge, he hatched a hidden agenda against Taft. With the help of Garfield, Pinchot composed a sixteen-page memorandum for Roosevelt to read in Africa. Written as a prosecutorial brief, the memo detailed how Roosevelt’s conservation policies were being ravaged by the Taft administration, which had connections to unsavory syndicates. Taft, while not personally corrupt, was the enabler in chief. Pinchot told Roosevelt that “complete abandonment” of his Alaska policies was taking place. Furthermore, Pinchot claimed, Taft had surrounded himself with “reactionaries” from big business who were bragging about a “vicious political atmosphere” aimed at undoing Roosevelt’s conservationist accomplishments. According to Pinchot, Taft had “yielded to political expediency of the lowest type.”54

  What was initiated here was the eventual breakup of the Republican Party in the early twentieth century. Ballinger represented its free enterprise, big business wing; Pinchot represented the progressive-reform wing, with the “conservation doctrine” at its core. Taft was now the leader of the corporate conservatives; Roosevelt, essentially unreachable in the African bush, was the champion of the left-leaning progressives.

  While field collecting for the Smithsonian Institution along the White Nile, Roosevelt received from a runner Pinchot’s sixteen-point indictment of Taft in January 1910. He pored over the bracing document with gloomy curiosity. Was this memo accurate? Or was it a distortion by Pinchot? Cleverly, Taft had appointed Henry Solon Graves as Pinchot’s replacement to lead the U.S. Forest Service. Graves had been a fine director of the Yale School of Forestry from 1900 to 1910 and was a solid forester incapable of making a fuss. A graduate of Yale (in 1892), he was book-smart, and he had studied forests abroad at the University of Munich. As replacements went, Taft had chosen wisely. This did not mollify Roosevelt, however, because Graves had worked as a forester for the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Corporation in Michigan. Graves was too much of a forest industry insider to be trusted fully as a regulator of the federal forest reserve.55

  “The appointment in your place of a man of high character, and a noted forestry expert, in no way, not in the very least degree, lightens the blow,” Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot on March 1, 1910, attempting delicately not to trumpet a rival. “For besides being the chief of the forest bureau you were the leader among all the men in public—and the aggressive hard-hitting leader—of all the forces which were struggling for conservation, which were fighting for the general interest as against special privilege.”56

  Deeply disturbed by the feud, Roosevelt asked Henry Cabot Lodge to advise him in an unbiased way. Sentimentally, Roosevelt wanted very much to see Pinchot personally. But at the same time, internal warfare in his party wearied him. His affection for and his sense of obligation toward Pinchot won out. “I’m very sorry for Pinchot,” Roosevelt wrote to Lodge. “He was one of our most valuable public servants. He loved to spend his whole strength, with lavish indifference to any effect on himself in battling for a high ideal and not to keep him thus employed rendered it possible that his great energy would expend itself in fighting the men who seemed to him not to be going far enough forward.”57 Lodge, by contrast, wasn’t so affectionate toward Pinchot: he warily advised Roosevelt not to meet with the former forestry chief in Europe. Pinchot was guilty of vicious gossip and shameless politicking and had been wrong to smear Ballinger in the press by using allegations of Alaskan fraud.58

  Glad that Lodge had given him sound counsel, Roosevelt nevertheless wanted to hear from his forty-four-year-old protégé directly upon reaching Europe. By the time Pinchot reached Denmark in April 1910, Roosevelt was agitated about Alaskan forestlands being opened up by the Taft administration to big coal interests. But he was also cautious about publicly entering the Pinchot-Ballinger feud. Worried that his conservation legacy was deteriorating under Taft’s lackadaisical custodianship, Roosevelt nevertheless stayed mum. Perhaps Roosevelt also heeded his sixteen-year-old daughter, Alice, who warned him in a letter that Pinchot was self-serving and an advocate of “practically rank socialism.”59

  By telegram, Roosevelt suggested to Pinchot that they meet in Italy in April. Together, without drama or distress, they would calmly consider how best to protect Alaska’s natural resources. Word of this scheduled meeting leaked out to newspapers. “There is no question that this meeting created widespread anxiety among Republicans,” Pinchot’s biographer McGeary noted. “Administration stalwarts, as well as others, primarily interested in party unity, feared the political consequences of having current events presented to Roosevelt from Pinchot’s point of view.”60

  When Roosevelt finally appeared in Khartoum for his first press conference after months off the beaten path in the African bush—disheveled from travel, his shirtfront wrinkled, but his face glowing with a deep tan—questions were hurled at him by anxious reporters. Why was Pinchot fired? Will you challenge Taft in 1912 for the Republican nomination? Is conservation still the most pressing issue facing America? Fearful of giving clumsy answers, and not wanting to take on Pinchot’s encumbrances as his own, Roosevelt refused to discuss the controversial matter. He would talk only about his experiences in the African bush. He purposefully made many references to giant elands, but none to American politics.

  When Pinchot finally met with Roosevelt in Italy on April 11, they had a lot to talk about. The dapper Pinchot looked as elegant as ever, wearing exactly the right clothes for a daytime walk through vineyards and olive groves. A breeze made it a perfect day for an outing. With regard to American politics, however, Roosevelt was between a rock and a hard place. The nasty fact was that Taft had been Roosevelt’s choice as his successor. If Roosevelt attacked Taft outright, that would cause a deep rift in the Republican Party. So Roosevelt stalled. At a press conference in Porto Maurizio, he refused to talk about U.S. conservation policy until August 27, when he would deliver a major speech in Colorado.61 And Roosevelt’s stalling worked. The pack of European reporters backed off, just walking away en masse to look for a headline elsewhere. Roosevelt’s tactics effectively defused Pinchot as well.62 “One of the best and most satisfactory talks with T.R. I ever had,” Pinchot wrote of their meeting in Italy. “Lasted nearly all day, and till about 10:30 at night.” In Breaking New Ground, published after World War II, Pinchot admitted that he had put his mentor, Roosevelt, “in a very embarrassing position, but that could not be helped.”63

  That spring of 1910 Pinchot published his first book, aptly titled The Fight for Conservation. Capitalizing on his feud with Ballinger, Pinchot excoriated “stupidly false” businessmen who were either too greedy or ignorant to comprehend that there was no such thing as inexhaustible resources.64 Echoing George Perkins Marsh, whose work of 1864, Man and Nature, remained a bible to conservationists, Pinchot warned against plagues such as wildfires, dust bowls, famines, and floods that would devastate America unless huge forest reserves were maintained. Playing Cassandra, Pinchot warned that only a fool would think America’s supplies of coal, timber, petroleum, soil, forage plants, and freshwater were infinite.65 These resources belonged to the Americans and were not to be recklessly squandered for the benefit of a single generation. Pinchot ripped into financial titans who demanded special privileges or sought a monopoly with regard to natural resources. The only person mentioned by name in the slender volume, however, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, Pinchot declared, had promoted the “rapid, virile evolution of the campaign for conservation of the nation’s resources.”66

  Much of The Fight for Conservation reads like recycled speeches or mannerly bureaucratic white papers. After a few retrospective pages about the prescience of the founding fathers in holding American citizens responsible for “our great future,” the reader could be forgiven for dozing off. There is too much dull political speechifying and schoolmarmish scolding for the volume to be truly important. Nevertheless, Pinchot built his co
nservationist arguments on solid underpinnings from Yale’s forestry school. Ironically, as The Fight for Conservation celebrated its centennial in 2010, the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico was being destroyed by an oil spill of terrible proportions from a well owned by BP. Pinchot had always feared that corporations—if poorly regulated by the Department of the Interior—would abuse their privileges. In those hours of darkness during 2010, Pinchot seemed like an environmental sage from a distant era. Furthermore, he had envisioned the environmental movement of the 1960s when writing The Fight for Conservationism. Whenever U.S. natural resources were despoiled, he wrote, nature lovers would, like a “hive of bees, full of agitation,” swarm down on the corporate abusers “ready to sting.”67

  IV

  Never before had a former American president, not even Ulysses Grant, been sought after by the press corps as ardently as Theodore Roosevelt was in April to June 1910. Everybody in Europe wanted to read about his exploits in the wild African bush. Even the sophisticates of London, Rome, Copenhagen, and Berlin were awed by his gloriously strange articles for Scribner’s, accompanied by bizarre grayish photographs of an ex-president attired almost like a scarecrow. A beaming Roosevelt, proud of his trophies, had made Africa accessible to all. He was irresistible. As Roosevelt traveled around Europe sightseeing, he was peppered with questions about the Panama Canal, Africa, the Great White Fleet, the Grand Canyon, and Arctic exploration. And his conservation policy had been embraced by many European intellectuals. For example, Paul Sarasin, a celebrated Swiss zoologist, promoted the Rooseveltian notion of global conservation in speeches, articles, and books.

  Besides being the toast of the Sorbonne in Paris, Roosevelt was greeted in Vienna and Budapest by throngs of admirers who saw him as a representative American in Ben Franklin’s tradition. Admired for his African exploits, Roosevelt was also called the “king of America”! Nobody believed he was a “former” anything. Crowds waved big sticks and rawhide thongs in his honor, stamping their feet enthusiastically. A successful new cigarette in Scandinavia was marketed as “Teddies.”68 On May 5, in Oslo, Norway, Roosevelt finally delivered his Nobel laureate’s speech—he had won the Peace Prize for ending the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. He made headline news when he proposed a “League of Peace” to stop war forever; he also suggested that international disputes be mediated at The Hague.69

  Following his travels in Europe, Roosevelt went to Great Britain to serve as the U.S. special ambassador for the funeral of King Edward VII, who had died unexpectedly. For a few days, Roosevelt stepped into the world of the British royals, regaling them with tales of wildebeests, monkeys, and swarms of bugs. He and his son made a visit to Rowland Ward Ltd., in Piccadilly, to get some trophies mounted. Elephant feet were turned into ashtrays for the Roosevelt family to hand out as souvenirs. So much for science! So much for wildlife protection! And, as prearranged, Lord Curzon, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, had Roosevelt deliver the prestigious Romanes Lectures there. George John Romanes had been an intimate of Charles Darwin and the custodian of Darwin’s notebooks on animal behavior. He enraptured Roosevelt with vivid stories of the great naturalist. An impressed Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that Romanes was “right in my line.”70

  Although Roosevelt’s Romanes Lectures were well received, he felt that the students at Oxford were too subdued. Was there anything worse than a know-it-all twenty-year-old devoid of humor? But he fell in love with Cambridge University, which was less formal and more garden-like. He went there to receive an honorary doctorate and had a grand time, as if he were at the Hasty Pudding Club. “On my arrival [the students] had formed in two long ranks leaving a pathway for me to walk between them, and at the final turn in the pathway they had a Teddy Bear seated on the pavement, with outstretched paw to greet me,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “and when I was given my degree in a chapel the students had rigged a kind of pulley arrangement by which they tried to let down a very large Teddy Bear upon me as I took the degree—I was told that when Kitchener was given his degree they let down a Mahdi upon him and a monkey on Darwin under similar circumstances.”71

  While Roosevelt was in London, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey (later Viscount Grey of Fallodon), a fanatical bird-watcher, escorted him around the soggy woodlands of England to hear songbirds. Grey was flabbergasted at Roosevelt’s precise knowledge of avian species. If bird-watching were a trade, Roosevelt assuredly would have been a guild master. In his memoirs, Grey noted that their hike in the Itchen River valley, southwest of London, was an especially remarkable experience. Roosevelt had lectured Grey, saying that the English countryside should remain undefiled by industrialization. Bird reserves were necessary. “Though I know something of British birds, I should have been lost and confused among American birds, of which unhappily I know little or nothing,” Grey wrote. “Colonel Roosevelt not only knew more about American birds than I did about British birds, but he knew more about British birds also.”72

  What especially captivated Roosevelt about ornithology in 1910 was the growing bird-banding movement. John James Audubon had long been hailed in ornithological circles as the “father of bird-banding” (in 1804 he had attached silver wire rings to the toes of phoebe hatchlings).73 For more than eighty years, he owned the franchise. Beginning in 1899, however, Denmark started banding birds by attaching aluminum strips on the legs of white storks and starlings. It was the sort of breakthrough, Roosevelt believed, for which Nobel Prizes should be given. Denmark owned all of Greenland and was properly studying its abundant wildlife. Roosevelt hoped that at last the migratory patterns of Arctic birdlife could be scientifically understood. As U.S. president, Roosevelt had encouraged the Smithsonian Institution to follow Denmark’s lead and band more than 100 black-crowned night herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) with the inscription “Return to the Smithsonian Institution.” From 1909 to 1923, the ornithologist Paul Bartsch personally banded at least 20,000 Canada geese. Other bird enthusiasts did the same for Arctic Alaskan birdlife such as the tundra swan (Cygnus columbianus) and long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis).

  While in Africa, Roosevelt, in fact, had praised thirty members of the American Ornithological Union (AOU) for creating the American Bird Banding Association of New York City on December 8, 1909.74 Drumming up scientific support for the experimental monitoring technique, ornithological journals such as Auk and Bird Lore freely distributed bands to birders from Alaska to Florida. Fascinated by the migratory patterns of Arctic birds, about which virtually nothing was known, Roosevelt recognized banding as a way to monitor not only bird populations but also their migrations at the same time. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) also began issuing bulletins to farmers about how the stomach of an average mountain plover contained forty-five locusts, and the message was clear: birds would help the farmers combat pests, making the land more productive. When it came to nongame birds, Roosevelt was for leaving the bullet boxes at home. Roosevelt was also proud that the National Association of Audubon Societies had been formed by thirty-six state groups. The Audubon Movement, for which Roosevelt had signed up in 1887, was going to be around for the ages.75

  What worried ex-president Roosevelt most in Alaska was that “fair chase” hunters were a dying breed; market syndicates were wiping out all the wildlife. Taft seemed to have the U.S. government back in the seal slaughtering business in the Bering Sea. With improved rifles and ammunition becoming easy to obtain, Roosevelt feared the age of the slob hunter was arriving. Word had it that George Bird Grinnell, longtime editor of Forest and Stream, the most popular conservationist periodical in America, was about to lose his job. After thirty-five years as editor Grinnell was, indeed, retired. When Grinnell was at the helm of Forest and Stream, Alaskan wildlife had remained front and center. No longer. Roosevelt tried to rectify the situation by telling the “governing board” that this important periodical must continue to crusade for wildlife conservation. The new owners of Forest and Stream placated Roosevelt somewhat, allow
ing Grinnell’s and Merriam’s names on the masthead. But in reality the new editor was catering to a new market, and its readers were uninterested in the life expectancy of Dall sheep around Mount McKinley or the need to save Medicine Lake in North Dakota as a wildlife refuge.76 By 1915 the once irreplaceable Forest and Stream went from being a weekly to being a monthly. And by 1930 the magazine was defunct (although its subscription list was sold to today’s magazine Field and Stream).77

  What Roosevelt was experiencing in 1910 and later was a backlash against the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Biological Survey. Leading Democrats in Congress went so far as to demand that all national forest lands should be turned over to the states. The “two frothing horsemen” of anticonservationism—representatives William Humphrey of Washington and A. W. Lafferty of Oregon—deemed Roosevelt and Pinchot zealots. These westerners pushed for congressional bills to cut off all funding for the U.S. Forest Service. But Roosevelt and Pinchot had two Republican allies in the Senate who belong in any conservation hall of fame: Miles Poindexter of Washington (soon to be a Bull Moose) and later Charles L. McNary of Oregon.78 Most important, from 1910 to 1920, the Supreme Court continually validated virtually every facet of the Roosevelt administration’s conservation policies from federal bird reservations to national monuments.79

  Also riding to the rescue of Rooseveltian conservation was the fine novelist and memoirist Hamlin Garland. When Garland was thirty-one years old, in 1891, he received wide acclaim for Main-Traveled Roads, a collection of short stories inspired by his days in Wisconsin as a farm boy. Turning to the American West for material, Garland headed to the Yukon in 1899 to cover the Klondike gold rush. He ended up writing The Trail of the Gold Seekers in 1899, but something more important happened to him in northern Canada and Alaska: he became an ardent conservationist. The northern wilderness had him transfixed. Building on the success of Owen Wister’s best seller The Virginian, in 1910, Garland published Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger, a sophisticated western dime novel in which the protagonist is a brave U.S. Forest Service officer who rides the Great Plains on his horse along a “solitary trail” protecting federal lands. Garland’s realistic prose about the prairie was controlled and elegant, never purple. He described little fly-bitten cow towns like Bear Valley (paradise) and Sulphur City (grimly provincial) with marvelous exactitude.