Theodore Rex (122 page)

ON 12 MAY
, forty-five state and territorial executives dined at the White House on the eve of the Governors’ Conference. They were joined by thirty other dignitaries and Roosevelt acolytes at a vast horseshoe table in the State Dining Room.
The President sat with Chief Justice Fuller on his right and Speaker Cannon on his left (in a severe sulk at being downgraded). Elsewhere in the room, he could see members of what Owen Wister called his “Concert of Familiars”: Gifford Pinchot, hawk-nosed at the extreme south end of the shoe next to Frank McCoy, who had hauled down Old Glory in Havana, six years before; John Mitchell of United Mine Workers, dulled by drink; Justice Holmes, long since returned to presidential favor; handsome James Garfield; Commander William Sims, the Navy reformer, even handsomer; and Justice Moody, clean-shaven now, with a strange aloofness settled upon him, the most interesting-looking man in the room. Faces less intimately familiar looked back at him from among the many anonymous governors: Andrew Carnegie and James J. Hill, millionaires; Captain Archibald Willingham de Graffenreid Butt, his new Georgian military aide; Senator Newlands of Nevada; and William Jennings Bryan, probably the last person any social secretary would expect to see on the President’s dinner list, with the exception of Booker T. Washington.

Bryan’s presence (and controversial placement next to Moody) signaled the democratic nature of tomorrow’s conference “on the conservation of natural resources.”
When wood and water were endangered, the political differences between men of power dissolved. To Roosevelt’s regret, his only living predecessor, Grover Cleveland, was unable to attend because of illness.

Many of the governors had never been in the White House before, and they were noticeably awed by the splendor of their reception.
Roosevelt, wanting to stress the conference’s momentousness, had ordered that they be presented to him “as for a state dinner.” He had welcomed them one by one in the East Room, then led them down the great vestibule with Fuller walking alongside him, in a mimetic show of Power and Justice guiding Procedure.

The dinner seating had been planned with further formality by the State Department, but Roosevelt, looking it over, had decided that enough was enough and rearranged it so that men with things to say to each other, such as James J. Hill and Theodore E. Burton of the Inland Waterways Commission, could sit together—conferring, after all, being the whole point of conferences. To further aid the flow of talk (and sherry, sauterne, and claret), he
elected to have no toasts or speeches. Gentlemen from the West, who tended to eat more than they spoke, were awarded full command of a menu including littleneck clams on the half shell,
coquilles
of fresh caviar, strained gumbo, cold salmon
Bayardère
, squabs
à l’Estouffade
, filet
piqué Richelieu
, ice cream
pralinée
, “fancy cakes,” and coffee.

“THEY WERE NOTICABLY AWED BY THE
SPLENDOR OF THEIR RECEPTION.”
Theodore Roosevelt hosts the first conservation conference, May 1908
(photo credit 30.2)

Since the night was warm, cigars and liqueurs were served on the West Terrace. Roosevelt accepted neither, concentrating all his attention on Bryan. The two men talked at a small table for more than an hour. Captain Butt overheard the President saying, “
I confess to you confidentially that I like my job.” The rest of the company strolled and admired the fragrant garden.

In spite of himself, Roosevelt was impressed by the Commoner. “
A wonderful man,” he remarked afterward.

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK
the following morning, Roosevelt called to order a vastly larger assembly in the East Room. Present, along with the governors and their aides, were his entire Cabinet (minus only Taft, who was in Panama, and Metcalf, who was with the fleet in San Francisco); all nine Justices of the Supreme Court; an uncounted number of members of Congress; representatives of sixty-eight professional societies, including those of chemistry,
law, medicine, publishing, social and political science, civil engineering, forestry, architecture, mining, scenic and historic preservation, statistics, drainage, farming, lumber, slack cooperage, and hay; twenty-one editors and reporters from technical, news, and popular publications; forty-eight special guests, including academics, geographers, entomologists, biologists, soil experts, and commissioners of labor and Indian affairs. In a major gesture toward universal representation, one seat was assigned to Sarah S. Platt-Decker, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Allowing for a few invitees not showing, and excluding a constant influx and egress of senators and congressmen, the Governors’ Conference totaled some 360 persons.
The “Syllabus” prepared for its guidance by WJ McGee intimidatingly comprised ninety-five aspects of conservation, preservation, and planned exploitation under eleven headings: Mineral Fuels, Ores and Related Materials, Soil, Forests, Sanitation, Reclamation, Land Laws, Grazing and Stock Raising, Relations Between Rail and Water Transportation, Navigation, Power, and Conservation as a National Policy.

“
The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land,”
intoned old Edward Everett Hale, the Chaplain of the Senate,
“a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness. Thou shall not lack anything in it—a land where stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig copper.”

Roosevelt delivered the opening address.

Applause filled the room. Three days of serious discussion were only just beginning, yet already Roosevelt and Dr. Hale had sounded the conference’s keynote and pedal point: that the natural endowment was a gift of God, and that utilitarianism must be subject to human and spiritual constraints.

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully
civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.”

Further applause interrupted the President. In the elegantly printed little program every guest had been issued, his speech bore the title:
Conservation as a National Duty
.

He reviewed the energy policy of the United States from the days of General Washington, when “anthracite coal was known only as a useless black stone” and water was practically the only source of power outside human and animal exertion. Ignorant though Washington had been of the potentials of coal and steam, he had seen clearly that the future United States could be linked in perpetuity only by a common power network. To that end, the Father of the Country had pressed for, and brought about, an interstate waterways conference between Virginia and Maryland.

“It met,” said Roosevelt, allowing his listeners to make what comparisons they chose, “near where we are now meeting, in Alexandria, adjourned to Mount Vernon, and took up the consideration of interstate commerce by the only means then available, that of water; and the trouble we have since had with the railways has been mainly due to the fact that naturally our forefathers could not divine that the iron road would become the interstate and national highway, instead of the old route by water.” Washington’s conference had led to another, much greater one in Philadelphia, involving all the states, that “was in its original conception merely a waterways conference; but when they had closed their deliberations, the outcome was the Constitution which made the States into a Nation.”

Applause again surged, acting as a drumroll to his next, thematic sentence: “The Constitution of the United States thus grew in large part out of the necessity for united action in the wise use of our natural resources.”

He proceeded to catalog the irresponsibility with which Americans, over more than a century and a quarter, had successively abused water, mineral, and forest resources, leading to the loss of more than half the nation’s original timber, and signs of exhaustion already visible in iron and coal reserves. The pristine waterway scheme of the Founding Fathers was now neglected, underused, and ill managed. The “soils of unexampled fertility” that had greeted pioneer farmers were leaching away through ignorance, “washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.” Again, he harped on the need for “foresight,” and again was applauded as his use of the word became rhythmic: “We have to, as a nation, exercise foresight … and if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will be the future!”

It was the duty of the Governors’ Conference, he said, to formulate a national philosophy of conservation based on efficient use of finite resources and scientific management of renewable ones. For himself, he vowed to continue working through the Inland Waterways Commission, which he took
pride in having created (“I had to prosecute the work by myself”) and which, if Congress persisted in depriving it of funds, he would perpetuate by executive means.

This won him his loudest ovation yet, hardly quieter than the one that followed his praise of Gifford Pinchot’s initiative in making conservation a national priority. Then he won bursts of laughter by quoting a recent opinion by Justice Holmes (gazing at him from only a few feet away) in favor of the right of “
the State as quasi sovereign” to prevent private property owners from despoiling a waterway, even though “there are benefits from a great river that might escape a lawyer’s notice.”

“I have simply quoted,” Roosevelt said, as the audience guffawed.

He concluded with another invocation of conservation as morality, and sat down amid cheers.

Rules were announced for orderly conduct of the conference’s discussion sessions, set to begin after lunch. Experts presenting overlong statements would be subjected to the discipline of bells; governors would have chair powers; the proceedings of the conference would be recorded and published in full; a Committee on Resolutions should be organized and authorized to formulate general conclusions.

The hands of the East Room clock now stood at five minutes past noon. “Gentlemen,” Roosevelt called out, “I shall now have the pleasure of meeting you personally as you pass through the Blue Room.”