The Christmas season of 1910 also found Roosevelt defending the immense national forests and federal bird reserves in Alaska that had been created during his presidency and were now, in some quarters, targets of cynicism. To Roosevelt (prodded by Pinchot), protecting the Tongass and Chugach national forests became a high priority. The Democrats’ victories in 1910 caused a wave of resource development advocacy aimed at undoing Roosevelt and Pinchot’s forestland initiatives in Alaska, Washington state, and Oregon. Acting as a lobbyist, Roosevelt fired off sharp letters to new members of Congress, explaining why federal protection of timberlands in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest was imperative. On behalf of Pinchot’s new, nonprofit National Conservation Association (the forerunner of today’s Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC),38 Roosevelt urged legislators to stop desecrating mountaintops and slopes across the country. “At this very moment we are endeavoring to get the United States Government to take over from the Eastern states the Appalachian and White Mountain reserves, just because the states have not done as well as the Nation is doing or can do,” Roosevelt wrote to one recently elected congressman, Abraham Walter Lafferty, a Republican from Oregon. “There are two reasons why the National Forests in Oregon, for example, should not be turned over in trust to the state. The first and most important one is that the forest in question is necessarily, through its connection with the rivers and in other ways, an interstate question, and the National Forests can be handled far better for the general welfare by the Federal Government than by the State.”39
By January 1911, Gifford Pinchot was suggesting either that a progressive Republican (Roosevelt) should challenge Taft for the Republican nomination or (a less attractive possibility) that Roosevelt should bolt and create a third party. Certainly, Roosevelt paid close attention to all this political maneuvering. He had toured America enough, talked with enough farmers and laborers, and answered enough sacks full of mail, to believe that Taft was bad for the Republican Party. Deeply embarrassed for having chosen “Willy-Boy” Taft as his successor in the first place, he wanted to turn back the clock to March 1909 and send Taft back to Ohio. Taft’s firing of Pinchot had stuck in Roosevelt’s craw; also, Roosevelt couldn’t believe that Taft had supported the Payne-Aldrich Act, which continued high tariff rates. Demonizing the incumbent president now became a sport for Rooseveltians. Preparing to challenge Taft for the Republican nomination, Roosevelt simply didn’t want to admit that the president did anything right pertaining to conservation. (Taft’s record actually wasn’t all that bad. He had, for example, saved the Oregon Caves in Oregon, Rainbow Bridge in Utah, and Devil’s Potspile in California by declaring them national monuments.40 Taft had also created the first national monument in Alaska: Sitka, a lush, temperate rain forest containing more Northwest Indian totem poles than anywhere else.41)
For the first six months of 1911, Roosevelt avoided the warfare within the Republican Party, although there was an element of burlesque in his disclaimers. Instead, he worked hard throughout the spring to get the National Museum to properly prepare the skins, fur, and skulls from his African expedition for presentation to the scientific community. He was also hoping to arrange for Charles Sheldon to publicly display his specimens from Alaskan offshore islands in a coastal diorama. It wasn’t enough, Roosevelt wrote to Charles Wolcott, to merely “collect”—full reports from both Sheldon and himself should be furnished to the public at large. He didn’t want the Roosevelt Collection to go unattended, shut away in closets like Carl Akeley’s ape specimens at the Field Museum of Chicago. And Roosevelt wanted to keep Edward Heller—who had been on his safari in British East Africa as the Smithsonian’s leading naturalist—in Washington, D.C., until all of his specimens were stuffed by taxidermists and ready for public viewing.42
While Roosevelt was preparing his African mounts that April, a report was published in the New York Times that the last bull moose in New York state had been killed. These ungulates, with their huge racks, were once plentiful in the Adirondacks, but lumberjacks and hunters had slaughtered them. The Algonquin, a New York tribe, had called them moose (“twig-eaters”). The last moose had weighed 1,200 pounds, had immense antlers, and was shot by a poacher and left to rot in the snow. Roosevelt’s love of these generally solitary herbivores was bone-deep. Hearing their low mooing in the forest was one of the most moving experiences in the North American wilderness. In the following years, Pinchot and Garfield saw the “last bull moose” as standing for Theodore Roosevelt himself. “A curious thing about the bull moose,” the Independent would write the following year about what became the symbol of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, “at such moments of emotional excitement [it] readily answers a call and comes headlong to meet it.”43
As president, TR had already created the Fire Island National Game Reservation (Executive Order No. 1038) on February 27, 1909, using the Antiquities Act of 1906. Fire Island—located near the head of Cook Inlet offshore from Anchorage—was the most important federally run breeding ground for moose in the United States.44 Roosevelt nurtured in his mind the notion of having many similar moose sanctuaries in Alaska, Minnesota, Vermont, New York, and Maine. According to Rooseveltian conservationists, Alaskan miners were overkilling moose for meat for use in their placer camps. Every camp had a moose specialty: moose hash, moose tenderloin, and crown roast of moose, among other recipes. Conservationists recommended canned hams or imported beef as better alternatives.45
III
Because Roosevelt had initiated the protection of bull moose in Alaska, his name was mud in the mining camps of the Kenai Peninsula, where there was a tornado of sentiment against his ethos of wildlife protection. A coalition known as the Coal Party, for example, was created by Alaska boomers hoping to recover the acreage of Roosevelt’s national forests and federal bird reserves. In May 1911, the former mayor of Cordova, Alaska, accompanied by an angry group of “territory rights” activists and debt-ridden people from the chambers of commerce, engaged in an act of civil disobedience reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party. They raided the wharves where the Copper River and Northwestern Railway was storing imported anthracite, split open crates, and dumped tons of imported Canadian coal into Controller Bay.46 “The Cordovans were striking back at a distant colonial government,” the historian Char Miller explained in his biography of Pinchot. “Then they put the torch to their own King George III, burning an effigy of Gifford Pinchot, denounced by The Alaska-Yukon Magazine, as a man who ‘thinks more of trees than people.’ ”47
Well-organized protests against Roosevelt and Pinchot erupted throughout Alaska that year. When Pinchot voyaged to Alaska on a fact-finding mission in September, the predominant complaint in the territory was that federal laws were stunting the economic growth of Alaska.48 Such legislation was called conservation colonialism. All the major Alaskan newspapers thought that Richard Ballinger—a former mayor of Seattle and the current U.S. secretary of the interior—was a hero and Pinchot a scoundrel. Covetous boomers intuited that they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive a wedge between Roosevelt’s conservationism and Taft’s pro-development philosophy; and prospectors who had missed out on the Klondike gold rush believed that coal mining would give them a second chance at wealth. Alaskan town hall meetings resounded with antigovernment rants and calls for direct action. Angry protest was everywhere. In the towns of Seward (on the Kenai Peninsula) and Valdez (on the eastern side of Prince William Sound), for example, President Roosevelt’s national forest orders of 1908 limiting corporate mining in the Tongass and Chugach were posted and defaced with an angry X. In the timber town of Katalla, unhappy loggers and miners burned Roosevelt’s order of 1908 in a public display of defiance. In another Alaskan town, a threatening placard that looked like a “Most Wanted” notice was posted:
PINCHOT, MY POLICY
No patents to coal! All timber to forest reserves! Bottle up Alaska! Put Alaska in forest reserves! Save Alaska for all time to come!49
Wherever Pinchot traveled in Al
aska, he defended conservation in front of audiences full of skeptics. Pinchot argued that Ballinger had been ousted in a necessary effort to “prevent men who were trying to plunder and monopolize Alaska from carrying out their plan.”50 Town hall meetings turned volatile if Pinchot’s name was even mentioned. Many citizens in Valdez, situated on the lip of the Chugach, thought him hopelessly wrongheaded for locking up the forestlands. The Cleveland Press, for example, reported that a satirical anti-Pinchot banner had been hung in Seward, Alaska: “Conservation prices . . . British Columbia coal, $17 per ton . . . Wood, $7 a cord . . . But you must not mine your own coal, nor cut down your own wood . . . All reserved for future generation . . . signed Pinchot . . . ‘Pinhead.’ ”51
While a cabal of defiant Alaskans were up in arms over the Tongass and Chugach national forests, which they saw as having been grabbed by the U.S. government, Roosevelt was entering a nasty (if erudite) public argument with the naturalist Abbot H. Thayer of New Hampshire, who was a theoretician. The disagreement centered on theories of concealing coloration. Roosevelt first challenged Thayer, at some length, in Appendix E of African Game Trails. He also inveighed against Thayer in the introduction to Life History of African Game Animals (a magnificent two-volume zoology reference book whose coauthors were Roosevelt and Heller). Then—in the August 23, 1911, issue of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History—in a 40,000-word monograph titled “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Animals,” Roosevelt intensified his thesis with new field data from Africa. He particularly objected to Thayer’s claim that the stripes and spots of mammals had protective value against predators. Roosevelt himself argued, correctly, that these markings attracted mates. Rattling off the names of species in which coloration was clearly not protective, Roosevelt floated the theory of advertising.52
During August 1911, Gifford Pinchot, James Garfield, William Kent, and other conservationists were doggedly urging Roosevelt to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination against Taft in the coming year. They argued that his candidacy was an imperative if the conservation movement was to survive. Roosevelt thought the three men were becoming too self-righteous—they had forgotten to smile. “Come, come!” Roosevelt wrote to Kent, who in 1908 had given an old-growth redwood grove, Muir Woods near San Francisco, to the U.S. government to become a national monument. “You and Gifford are altogether crazy about Taft. I have been very much disappointed in him, of course, but you use language about him that is not justified.”53
Roosevelt believed that if there was a cardinal sin in public life, it was becoming a “dull pointless bore.”54 A political convention wasn’t a corporate board meeting; it was a roller-coaster ride at Coney Island, a fiesta in San Antonio, a horse race in Kentucky, a confetti-filled celebration in Times Square. Perhaps he would take on Taft over conservation issues. But he wouldn’t do it out of anger or for revenge. “We must not preach all the time or we will stop doing any good,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend who urged him to challenge Taft. “Life is a campaign, and at best we are merely under-officers or subalterns in it.”55
For self-given Christmas presents in 1911, Roosevelt read Charles Sheldon’s The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon, enthralled by the naturalist’s field reports of fast-ebbing currents, V-shaped flocks of geese, and previously unstudied mountain ranges north of Skagway.56 Sheldon, a young naturalist, had sent Roosevelt chapters of a proposed new book, Wilderness of the North Pacific Coast Islands, to proofread; it was published in 1912. In Roosevelt’s mind, Sheldon was the real deal—an outdoorsman who had become the Thoreau of the Yukon River basin, a hunter who understood that unlike land (which could be bought and sold), wild country had a personality distinctly its own.57 There was a touch of the old-fashioned faunal naturalist in Sheldon—a love of peace, solitude, wild things, and serenity—that Roosevelt stoutly admired.
At Sagamore Hill that Christmas, Roosevelt had a lot more to reflect on than Alaskan moose reserves, debates over bird coloration, and wilderness outings. In January, moderate Republicans split from their party and formed the National Progressive Republican League. The Progressives, championing Roosevelt, advocated reforming the political system to give control to the people, rather than to party hacks who had no ethics, no decency, and no commitment to the long-term interests of the American people. The Progressives supported the direct election of senators, presidential primaries, and the use of volunteer initiatives such as referendum and recall. They also called on Roosevelt and other leaders to challenge the anticonservationist “milquetoast mannequin”—that would be William Howard Taft—for the Republican nomination in 1912.
While Pinchot started plotting a Progressive campaign strategy for 1912, Roosevelt went back to the occupation he had preferred since leaving the White House: being a Darwinian naturalist. Roosevelt had discovered a new ornithologist with the potential to be another William Finley (of Oregon) or Herbert K. Job (of Connecticut). His name was Francis Hobart Herrick. Considered America’s authority on eagles, Herrick was named a professor of biology at Western Reserve University in Ohio. In 1901, he wrote The Home Life of Wild Birds, and by 1917 he had published a fine two-volume biography of John James Audubon.58
What really caught Roosevelt’s eye, however, was a pamphlet Herrick had written on nest building. Roosevelt and Herrick exchanged thoughtful letters discussing their ideas on modern biology. “Darwin and the great scientific men of his day forced science to take an enormous stride in advance in the decades succeeding the publication of On the Origin of Species, but for nearly fifty years now we have tended to make the same mistake that the schoolmen of the Middle Ages made about Aristotle,” Roosevelt wrote to Herrick. “The rediscovery of the works of Aristotle produced an immense forward movement in knowledge. Then there came a period of fossilization, when everybody accepted Aristotle as having summed up all possible knowledge, and when in consequence he became a positive obstacle to advance. It has been somewhat so with Darwin and the Darwinians.”59
Roosevelt was worried that a sense of complacency had engulfed university biology departments, whose members were willing to accept—without conducting new research, collecting species, or doing field studies—everything Darwin had proved about evolution. Where was the sense of excitement about the Alaskan outdoor laboratory? Who would be the new Gregor Mendel, describing the nature of inheritance? Weren’t the Aleutians the new Galápagos? Why was eighty-nine-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace still clinging to a theory of natural selection that he first articulated as early as 1858? Where were the neo-Darwinians who could offer the world something more than half-baked theories of protective coloration and nesting habits? Roosevelt hoped Herrick would become one of the new bright lights. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel had promised a practical application of the theory of evolution and had achieved dramatic results. Likewise, August Weismann in 1882 denied that a species could pass on acquired characteristics to its offspring through germplasm. What had happened to these people since then? Were they resting on their laurels?60 “I doubt if we have ever seen anything less scientific than the extreme dogmation of men like Haeckel,” Roosevelt complained, “and the solemn acceptance as facts of Weismann’s extreme theories.”61
Because the universities were slow to make discoveries about the natural world, Roosevelt placed more faith in the National Geographic Society (NGS). On June 9, 1912, for example, the Novarupta volcano erupted in Alaska’s Katmai district. Since the ice age there had been seven major eruptions in the Katmai volcanic cluster, and this was the worst. A preceding series of earthquakes had been followed by enormous ejections of red-hot pumice and ash over an area the size of Maine. More than forty square miles of verdant Alaskan forest were literally scorched, buried under a thick blanket of volcanic soot, in some places up to ten feet deep. To put Novarupta into a historical perspective, the blast was ten times more devastating than the eruption of Mount Saint Helens in 1980. Only the eruption on Santorini in Greece in 1500 B.C. produced more volcanic matter than Novarup
ta. The cracked Alaskan earth shot up steam vents more than 500 feet high at more than a thousand holes in the Katmai district. Strange gas clouds formed and emanated from Earth. Dr. Robert Griggs of Ohio State University, a botanist who worked closely with the NGS, led a scientific expedition to the Katmai in the fall of 1912 and called the weird, smoking landscape the “valley of ten thousand smokes.” But Griggs optimistically understood that within a few years the ash-laden hillsides would become alive with “verdure.”62
The fissure floor of the Katmai—at the head of the Alaska Peninsula—was declared a geologic wonderland. Roosevelt thought that Novarupta, even more than Lassen Volcanic National Park in California,* could equal Yellowstone National Park as a tourist attraction. Nowhere else could volcanism and tectonic events be better understood by schoolchildren. Because Alaska was so sparsely settled, not a single person died in the natural event at Katmai. From 1912 to 1918, scientists traveled there to study waterfalls and lava flows. “It was as though all the steam engines in the world, assembled together,” Griggs wrote, “had popped their safety valves at once and were letting off surplus steam in concert.”63
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