The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (58 page)

Almost monthly Governor Roosevelt and Senator Platt engaged in parlor debates at roundtables on topics such as corporate taxes, improved schools, and funding state infrastructure. Sometimes Roosevelt and Platt found themselves in general agreement on foreign policy issues including the annexation of Cuba and the building of an interoceanic canal. But when it came to conservation issues they were like positive and negative jumper cables; when their ideas touched, sparks flew in all directions. Quite simply, Roosevelt refused to water down his conservationist beliefs to curry favor with Senator Platt. They differed on scientific forestry, the Palisades, antipollution laws, and the need for watersheds.
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Wisely, Boss Platt—who was never bored in Roosevelt’s “impulsive” presence—let him have the parklands, preferring to have him champion birds’ rights than meddle in antimonopoly fights on Wall Street, where huge sums of Republican money were at stake. Platt was careful not to denounce Roosevelt publicly; instead, he paid Roosevelt a backhanded compliment by saying that at least the Colonel wasn’t a slacker. “Politicians found [Roosevelt] a hard customer,” John Burroughs recalled of his stormy relationship with men like Boss Platt. “His reproof and refusal came quick and sharp. His mannerism was authoritative and stern…. His political enemies in Albany, early in his career, laid traps for him, in hopes of tarnishing his reputation but he was too keen for them.”
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As of April 1899, Governor Roosevelt’s ideas about pushing oneself to the limits were only implied, or only written in letters to friends. Certainly, reading about the virtues of the pioneers in
The Winning of the
West
or about military fortitude in
The Rough Riders
made it clear that Roosevelt believed overcoming hardship built character; oddly, he always seemed happiest with no accoutrements except a horse and rifle. There are even wisps of evidence that he was a devotee of recapitulation theory: a belief, propounded by a professor of pedagogy and psychology, G. Stanley Hall, founder of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, that “overcivilization was endangering American manhood.” According to Hall, American boys were becoming effeminate and needed to return to primitivism instead of wallowing in Victorian-era “ideologies of self-restrained manliness.” Too many American men, Hall argued, were having neurasthenic breakdowns. Among Hall’s many prescriptions for this decline of American manliness were the promotion of the “savage” in boys, the introduction of nature into their workweek, the creation of physical fitness regimens, and the rejection of the bureaucratic-corporate economy. Hall “believed that by applying Darwinism to the study of human development,” the historian Gail Bederman says, “he could do for psychology what Darwin had done for biology.”
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Addressing the Hamilton Club in Chicago on April 10, the thirty-fourth anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Roosevelt pulled together all his “up from asthma” thoughts and presented them to the American public preparing to enter the twentieth century as the doctrine of the “strenuous life.” He was introduced by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. “In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant,” Roosevelt began, “men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
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What immediately strikes one upon reading about Roosevelt’s promotion of the “strenuous life”—besides its overtones of recapitulation theory—was that he was preaching a philosophy of survival of the fittest that echoed Herbert Spencer. Roosevelt had larded his “strenuous life” doctrine with sociobiology, the misguided belief that Darwin’s evolutionary principles could best be expressed by humans through imperial expansionism, military hyperpreparedness, free-enterprise economics, and eugenics. Damning the “life of ease” and the hesitating manner, Roosevelt wanted Americans to engage in strenuous endeavors of every kind. Tired
ness, he said, wasn’t fitting in a country of such natural vitality. Nation building, he believed, was undertaken by a population that shunned soft hands and conquered weakness and was engaged to the fullest in the consciousness of its times. Every healthy American man, if he was lucky enough to have leisure time, Roosevelt believed, should hike, camp, hunt, and fish. Men could find exhilaration in the wild. Rules were already available; just follow the sportsman’s code: “Let us, therefore, boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word, resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.”
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The mere fact that Governor Roosevelt delivered this inspirational speech in Chicago instead of New York made his words newsworthy. New York’s governor was telling Americans in Illinois to
go hard
into whatever they believed in, whether it was farming, football, forestry, or factory work. Interestingly, Roosevelt never mentioned God in “The Strenuous Life” in many ways, in fact, the doctrine defied most Christian traditions by putting the obligation of personal power on the individual rather than in the otherworldly, mystical, or communal. Roosevelt’s doctrine not only smacked of Spencer—and Hall—but also had a heavy dose of Nietzsche’s superman. The saving grace of Roosevelt’s philosophy—which liberates him from what was later called fascism—was that he was democratic in spirit, believing anybody could rise to greatness in America. And there wasn’t an iota of cynicism in his doctrine: it was pure free-range optimism.

The following year, Roosevelt’s speech in Chicago had become so popular throughout America that it was published as a chapter in the appropriately titled book
The Strenuous Life
. Remembering how he had wisely disregarded the advice of a Massachusetts heart doctor in 1880 who had told him to never climb mountains, Roosevelt now touted exertion and physical education as national imperatives. As governor he wrestled, boxed, practiced jujitsu, and swam in the Hudson River just for the bracing sensation. Citizens didn’t have to be frail. Lean into your ailment, he believed, and defeat it. Urbanization had caused an unnatural deficiency in young people, and the schools needed to reverse this unhealthy trend by teaching Emersonian self-reliance. Implying that imperialism could be justified as part of the “strenuous life,” Roosevelt was really applying the basic tenets of Darwinism to a program for
Homo sapiens
, in the spirit of Horatio Alger’s fictional stories about self-made men. If Darwin was correct in saying that humans had evolved from apes and were therefore animals, then it made sense, Roosevelt believed, for the strongest and
swiftest among the species to rule the human kingdom. That meant, in his mind, the
Americans
. As Bederman aptly put it, “Roosevelt believed that bitter evolutionary conflict allowed the fittest species and races to survive, ultimately moving evolution forward toward its ultimate, civilized perfection.”
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Besides sharing the “strenuous life” of boxing and mountain climbing, Roosevelt and Pinchot believed that vast forestlands were necessary so that men could develop survivalist qualities not known in the overly civilized cities. It was as if once the forests disappeared, manhood would also vanish. Roosevelt, as governor of New York, was now in a position to act. In 1899 alone, Roosevelt had the state purchase 69,380 acres for forest reserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks. He wanted the iron-ore companies regulated. He began the ultimately successful process of turning Watkins Glen—a Finger Lakes scenic spot—into a state park. On November 28, 1899, echoing his first annual message, he wrote a scathing letter to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, claiming that New York’s wardens were woefully ignorant of proper forest and wildlife management techniques.
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He demanded a full report from the five commissioners on each warden in the state, and he intended to replace most of them with scientific experts and woodsmen. Furthermore, Roosevelt wanted the Adirondacks protected as if the region were a national park, “both from the standpoint of forestry and from the less important but still very important standpoint of game and fish protection.”
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III

You didn’t have to be an investigative reporter or an intellectual to realize that Governor Roosevelt was crazy about birds. Regularly, he invited ornithologists to visit the executive mansion to discuss bird protection issues. His son Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt Jr., at age twelve, would go nest-gathering with his father each week, amassing a fine collection.
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(As a matter of ethics, however, they refused to collect the eggs of wild birds.) Using his political clout to promote the Audubon Society (New York), he wrote to Frank M. Chapman, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History, on February 16, 1899, delineating how to dramatically increase the avian presence in the state. “The loon ought to be, and under wise legislation, could be a feature of every Adirondack lake,” Roosevelt said. “Ospreys, as everyone knows, can be the tamest of the tame; and terns should be a plentiful along our shores as swallows around our barns. A tanager or a cardinal makes a point of glowing beauty in the green woods, and the cardinal among the white snows. When the blue
birds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. How immensely it would add to our forests if only the great logcock were still found among them!”
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What disturbed Roosevelt most was that many bird species, because of human recklessness, were becoming either rare or extinct. As a boy he had shot at passenger pigeons for his Roosevelt Museum and was proud of having done so. But he no longer saw it as an achievement. The lessons of John Burroughs had taught him better. “The destruction of the wild pigeon and the Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if the Catskills or the Palisades were taken away,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman. “When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if we had lost all instead of only part of Polybius or Livy.”
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And Roosevelt considered the Palisades Park between New York and New Jersey a landscape masterpiece. Getting Andrew H. Green (his go-to guy at the Bronx Zoo) to help him establish a 700-acre refuge from Fort Lee (New Jersey) to Piedmont (New York), in order to preserve the sill cliffs (commonly called “Palisades sill”) on the west bank of the Hudson River, had become a priority for Roosevelt. He sought to halt the unsightly mining that was ravaging the local scenery of the world’s greatest city. As Roosevelt envisioned it, a thirteen-mile stretch of the preserved Palisades along the Hudson River would become a forerunner of other interstate parks nationwide. To damage the cliffs was sacrilegious. Every month Roosevelt grew more and more disquieted, knowing that New Jersey’s quarry operations were destroying the scenic backdrop to the city.
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The view from Riverside Drive, for example, would be forever ruined if the Jersey side of the Hudson was marred with only factories, storefronts, and houses.

Besides getting the right men onto the New York State Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission (which today is the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation) and establishing Palisades Park, Roosevelt wanted to find ways to educate New York citizens about nature. On May 2, 1899, when he had been governor for only four months, Roosevelt signed into law an educational initiative very dear to his heart. After looking into the curricula of the public schools, Roosevelt was horrified to learn that natural history and geography weren’t being taught. Immediately, he sought appropriation funds so that classes presenting men like Audubon, Darwin, Burroughs, and Marsh could be offered in every county.
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Young citizens, he believed, needed to understand the
evolutionary process and learn why dumping sewage and refuse into the Great Lakes and Hudson River was unacceptable. In a sense, promoting Earth Day seventy years ahead of time, Roosevelt believed that humans couldn’t afford to recklessly poison their own environment without incurring a heavy toll in ill health, environmental ugliness, and corrosion of the spirit.

A quick look at Governor Roosevelt’s time line for 1899 clearly shows that he wasn’t a stationary executive. Even mundane talks about tax law became moments for impassioned theater. Although forestry and wild-life issues didn’t monopolize his engagements, these topics were a high priority for him on the speaking trail. Refusing to weaken the conservationist plank in his first annual message, Roosevelt overcame a drubbing from the timber industry for extending state forest reserves in Delaware, Green, Sullivan, and Ulster counties. In May he hiked around the Adirondacks, preaching Pinchot’s gospel of forestry science to people living around the McIntyre Iron Works. Seizing the initiative from Robert B. Roosevelt, T.R. got the New York legislature to pass Amendment (Ch 729) to the Fisheries Law, which forbade the pollution of any rivers, lakes, or streams used by the state fish hatcheries.

At one juncture Roosevelt went to inspect Niagara Falls to see if it could become a national park. The Transcendentalist philosopher Margaret Fuller had once stated that the great falls were “the one object in the world that would not disappoint.”
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Roosevelt disagreed. Doing a good amount of fast walking, he spent days surveying the cataract, exploring the cliffs of Goat Island, refusing to ride the new electric streetcar, and upset that a suspension bridge promoted by Boss Platt was going to mar the natural view of the thundering falls. (Wasn’t the steamer
Maid of the Mist
enough?) The saga of Niagara Falls had begun 600 million years ago, Roosevelt lamented, and now a group of transportation hotshots, after dollars, wanted to demote the natural wonder into a tourist trap. The garishness of their plans sickened him. In the spirit of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, there were already five-legged calves and two-headed goats on display near the falls. Almost nothing irritated Roosevelt more than the use of deformed animals in freak shows. As Governor Roosevelt envisioned the situation, Niagara Falls needed to become an intercountry national park administered by both Washington, D.C., and Ottawa. But Roosevelt dropped the issue—the concessionaires had already seized Niagara Falls, and there was no turning back. Instead, Governor Roosevelt headed southward to camp out for a few days in the Peekskill woods (better known as John Burroughs Country).
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