Theodore Rex (115 page)

Roosevelt decided on a moderation of his attitude, not just to soothe redneck neuroses, but because of the much more dangerous mood of the Japanese government.
Tokyo’s response to the San Francisco segregation order had been a formal complaint against the “stigma and odium” it entailed. Such language was not to be ignored, coming from a war-hardy Pacific nation at a time when the United States battle fleet was entirely concentrated in the Atlantic. And Culebra was not yet cut.

The result was a gathering war scare in Washington, stirred up by the anti-Japanese rhetoric of Senator George C. Perkins of California. Roosevelt the balancer sought to steady both sides by attaching to a pending immigration bill an amendment that would significantly reduce the number of Japanese arriving in America from Hawaii. Its language, authored by Root, gave him power to deny entry by “any aliens” to both the United States and her insular possessions. The last phrase was vital, because Hawaii had become a cornucopia of coolie labor. Yesterday’s pineapple pickers were today’s almond hullers and tomorrow’s stokers for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

“
Why should I have to pay a fireman six dollars a day for work that a Chinaman would do for fifty cents?” James J. Hill asked Finley Peter Dunne, over lunch at Au Savarin in New York. “Let down the bars!”

To win passage, the exclusion amendment needed advance approval from Japan. That authoritarian empire was able to restrict emigration of her nationals by simple denial of exit permits. In fact, she had already discreetly promised Root she would do so, if the San Francisco school ban was rescinded. Once the immigration bill was passed (nowhere citing the Japanese as “Japanese”), Tokyo would cooperate with Washington to keep the flow of cheap labor at an acceptable level.

The only flaw in this commitment was something hard for imperialistic minds to understand: the government of a federal republic, while able to wage war, could not tell a local school board what to do. Negotiation, not coercion, was required. Hence the presence of Roosevelt’s two most persuasive Cabinet officers at the White House on 13 February 1907. They were in the midst of an extraordinary six-day series of meetings with Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz of San Francisco, trying to convince him and members of his school board that their action stood, as Root put it, “
in the way of an international agreement.”

Schmitz, who was currently under indictment for embezzlement and extortion, was not unwilling to make a deal, if he could return home with dignity enhanced. Cowed by the President, beguiled by Taft, and outclassed by Root, he agreed to readmit Japanese children to the San Francisco school system, providing they spoke some English and were not overaged. And he could boast, if he wanted, that he had helped initiate a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan that would determine Pacific policy for as far ahead as anyone could see.

SINCE ROOSEVELT’S ADMIRATION
of the Japanese was based in large part on their fighting qualities, he did not delude himself that a stately exchange of diplomatic notes was enough to counter the threat posed by Admiral Togo’s navy. In the glow of peacemaking at Portsmouth, he had briefly decided that
the American fleet was large enough—
his first term had seen it double in planned size. One new battleship a year, from 1905 on, seemed all that was necessary to compensate for the attrition of older vessels.

He had even gone along with the Tsar’s recent efforts—understandable, in view of the near obliteration of the Russian Navy—to bring about a Second Hague Conference, which might slow the battleship race among Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Japan.
The idea of arms limitation appealed to Roosevelt in theory. However, “I do not feel that England and the United States should impair the efficiency of their navies if it is permitted to other Powers, which may some day be hostile to them, to go on building up and increasing their military strength.”

This ambivalence between containment and competition had abruptly modulated toward the negative immediately after the San Francisco school order.
In a letter to Sir Edward Grey, Roosevelt wrote that “the race question” was an “immediate source of danger” in Japanese-American relations, and worriedly admitted that “in the event of war we should be operating far from our base.” He was thinking of the Philippines, but also of the long-term threat to Hawaii and the West Coast posed by battleships like the
Satsuma
, a dreadnought under construction in the Yokosuka shipyard.

To his current demand for an all-big-gun battleship of “at least eighteen thousand tons,” he added a request that Congress fund it along with last year’s vessel, funds for which had not yet been appropriated. He released for publication letters to the chairmen of both naval-affairs committees, urgently arguing “the superior value of battleships of large displacement, high speed, and great gunpower.”

On 15 February, there was a brief flurry of budgetary protest in the House of Representatives. But with the war scare at its height, few lawmakers wanted to look irresolute. The President got his dreadnoughts.
Three days later, the immigration bill was passed with the exclusion amendment intact, trans-Pacific tensions subsided, and Roosevelt handed the by-now-tired subject of arms limitation over to Elihu Root.

AS THE END OF
the session approached, Roosevelt had to deal with a new challenge thrown on his desk by Senator Charles W. Fulton, Republican of Oregon. On 22 February, Fulton attached to the Agricultural Appropriations bill an amendment proposing that every public tree, sapling, or sprout in six northwestern states, totaling some sixteen million acres, be withdrawn from the President’s protection and placed at the disposal of Congress. Or, as Fulton (infuriated by two years of land encroachment by Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot) put it:
Hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the States of
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress
. On 25 February, the amendment was enacted and sent to the White House for signature.

Roosevelt let it lie on his desk.

The bulk of the American public had probably not noticed that in his last Message to Congress, he had for the first time used the plain word
Conservation
as a subject heading. There had been
Forest Conservation
and
Water Conservation
in his First Message, but they had denoted specific and separate programs, on par with
Reclamation
in 1903 and
Public Lands
in 1905.
Conservation
, by itself, was at once more general and more philosophical—religious even, a writ preaching the common sanctity of wood and water and earth and flora and fauna. It even had its menorah: the many-armed drainage basin, WJ McGee’s “harmonious interrelationship of parts,” purging the countryside of pollution, restoring the ravages of erosion, imposing order on human settlement, controlling floods, nurturing species, and generating power.

Roosevelt had virtually asked for a fight over forest reserves. It was he—working always with Pinchot, a favored member of the Tennis Cabinet—who had persuaded Congress in 1905 that forest care was a form of crop management, and should be transferred from the Department of the Interior to that of Agriculture. In the process, the Forest Bureau, run by bureaucrats, had become the Forest Service, run by foresters. Pinchot had used its enlarged budget and semiautonomous powers to acquire control of grazing licenses, hydroelectrical leases, and even police summonses in the national parks. He had stretched the meaning of the word
forest
so much that some westerners wondered when the Great Salt Lake was going to need his urgent protection.

The wonder was that the Transfer Act had not precipitated a fight at the beginning, rather than the end, of the Fifty-ninth Congress. But Roosevelt’s interim blitz of regulatory legislation, and other distractions such as Brownsville and the Cuba intervention, had enabled Pinchot to slink expertly through government groves, adding twenty million acres to his domain, and a proportionate increase of revenue to the budget of the Forest Service. He left few tracks, until his acquisitions were announced by presidential proclamation.

There was something pantherlike about the Chief Forester, with his long, lean walk and hypnotic stare. Acquaintances differed on the exact quality of that gaze: it was erotic to some women, while men tended to see an idealism bordering on fanaticism. “The eyes do not look as if they read books,” Owen Wister wrote, “but as if they gazed upon a Cause.” Not that Pinchot was unlettered. He had the right cultural credentials: Exeter, Yale, postgraduate study at the École Nationale Forestière in France, and research spells in the ancient woodlands of Switzerland and Germany. And he was, to Roosevelt’s
approval, a New England gentleman, rich and well-connected, with a strong social conscience.

The two men had known each other since the 1890s. What the President especially liked was Pinchot’s killer instinct, coupled with the fact that he fought cleanly. That made him all the more dangerous, because he was invulnerable to charges of corruption. He did have an Achilles’ heel, and Roosevelt recognized it with some amusement: “
Pinchot truly believes that in case of certain conditions I am perfectly capable of killing either himself or me. If conditions were such that only one could live, he knows that I should possibly kill him as the weaker of the two, and he, therefore, worships this in me.”

President and Forester, fighting together, were an adroit combination. This became evident when Roosevelt, still holding off on the Agricultural Appropriations bill, managed to co-opt all the public lands Senator Fulton thought he had saved from being saved.
A forced draft of Administration clerks—some of them working forty-eight-hour shifts—completed by Saturday, 2 March, all the paperwork necessary for the President to proclaim twenty-one new forest reserves, and eleven enlarged ones, in the six states specified.

He immediately signed these executive orders, knowing that Congress had no power to stop them except by a formal vote—which he would at once veto.
Thus came into existence, along with others, the national forests of Holy Cross and Montezuma, Colorado; Medicine Bow, Colorado and Wyoming; Priest River, Idaho and Washington; Big Belt, Big Hole, and Otter Forest, Montana; Toiyabe, Nevada; Blue Mountain, Oregon; Olympic Forest, Washington; Rainier, Washington; Cascade, Washington; and Bear Lodge, Wyoming.
Only after the last acre was reserved did Roosevelt sign the Agricultural Appropriations Act, allowing Fulton’s now worthless clause to float over his proud
Theodore Roosevelt
.

ON 4 MARCH
, the political season whistled to an end, literally, with some sifflation from the rostrum of the House by Representative Frank B. Fulkerson (R., Missouri). James Bryce, the new Ambassador from Great Britain, listened enchanted as the slender stream of sound filled the great hall, and the hands of the clock converged on noon. Then Uncle Joe Cannon reached for his gavel, and banged the Fifty-ninth Congress out of existence.