The most enduring monument to President Roosevelt and his Progressive faith is in the snowcapped mountains, sagebrush plains, rimrock canyons, rivers, lakes, wildlife and wildflowers of America. "Is there anything," he asked once, "to keep me from declaring a bird sanctuary on Pelican Island? No? Well, I so declare it." He declared 51 wild bird refuges, doubled the number of national parks from 5 to 10, set aside nearly 150 million acres of government timberland as national forest reserve and enacted National Monument protection for 16 more sites, including the redwoods of Muir Woods in California, Mount Olympus in Washington and the Grand Canyon.
No president before or since has had a better intellectual grasp of the relationship between an expanding economy and the environment, or of the subtle interactions of the natural environment. No one has had a more sublime vision of the power of nature to teach human humility.
This is not to say T.R. was proof against the blood lust considered normal for a gentleman born in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was all his life an ardent, if clumsy, hunter. But the president most often photographed with a dead beast at his feet was a passionate naturalist from an early age, and even as a child showed a reverence for life in all its forms. His father's guests were apt to find one of Teedie's snakes in the water pitcher; on one occasion he absentmindedly lifted his hat to a lady on a Conservation was a fairly new concept-indeed an unfamiliar word-when T.R. became president in 1901. The West, as James Bryce noted, was in too much of a hurry to think about the way it was squandering its splendid natural gifts. Local politics were geared to greed. There was widespread corruption in the acquisition of public land and of mineral and timber rights. T.R. moved resolutely on a broad front with his three musketeers, Frederick H. Newell, the father of reclamation; Gifford Pinchot, his chief forester; and his malleable secretary of the interior, Ethan Allen Hitchcock. The three previous presidents had set aside 50 million acres of forests for the public good; but under Harrison and McKinley these had been leased to private companies to exploit their timber and mineral resources. Roosevelt did not favor a pristine preservation of all public lands, but he did withdraw 26 million acres from private entry. He encouraged Hitchcock to investigate public land frauds. More than 1,000 people in 20 states were indicted, among them several senators; 126 land sharks went to jail. In 1902, against Speaker Cannon's protests, Roosevelt supported a Democratic bill that became the great National Reclamation Act. It put an end to the piecemeal exploitation of water-power sites by private utilities, paving the way for Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona, Hoover Dam on the Colorado, Grand Coulee on the Columbia, and Franklin Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority.
The resentment in the Republican Congress at what it saw as T.R.'s usurpation of power came to a head in 1907. Oregon's Republican Senator C. W. Fulton, speaking for the timber interests, led a drive to stop the creation of any more forest reserves in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. He attached a rider to an agricultural appropriations bill, declaring that future withdrawals of public lands from private exploitation in these states could only be made by an act of Congress. It was approved without even a roll call vote and T.R. seemed to be beaten. But he had ten days to sign or veto the bill and in that time he and Pinchot went to work with the gusto with which they battered each other in their boxing matches. Pinchot's young aides worked day and night drafting maps for areas where the land was wooded enough to justify the President's withdrawing it. In those ten days T.R. was able to proclaim national forests in all six states named in the rider, putting in a total of 21 new reserves and 16 million acres. When Pinchot was fired by Taft, there were 193 million acres of national forest, by comparison with 20 million in 1898.
T.R. not only saved the forests. He used his bully pulpit to sell the idea of them, and of conservation, to the American public. He appealed on pragmatic grounds of sound husbandry for future development, and on grounds of morality, for the preservation of America's heritage for future generations. It was a perfect harmonization of self-interest with idealism, manifest in most of the best American accomplishments of the century. One of his prophecies was borne out in the Dust Bowl within twenty years: "When the soil is gone, men must go; and the process does not take long."
streetcar and several frogs leapt out. His collected letters show a president moving nimbly from warships and ambassadors to bears and fish. What could be done about the bears in Yellowstone Park who were getting their feet stuck in tin cans? Stop this nonsense of cutting down an elm tree in Lafayette Square to make way for a statue. Be sure to find ways of propagating the golden trout in Mount Whitney's Volcano Creek. His concern was democratic. The wonders of America should not be reserved "for the very rich who can control private reserves." He wanted all his fellow Americans to have a chance of enjoying the solace and satisfaction, and the replenishment of spiritual strength, he himself found in nature. This meant he was soon at war with both parties. "Not a cent for scenery," snarled Joe Cannon, the autocratic Republican Speaker.
HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN and THE WILDERNESS HUNTER
by Theodore Roosevelt
RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
by Edmund Morris