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By Root 3109 0

sleep. Pinchot served on the Roosevelt Permanent Memorial National Committee, and he knew that the Roosevelt mystique would continue to influence a national audience for only so long. Pinchot wrote an aggressive article, “Overturning Roosevelt’s Work,” for the Christian Science Monitor, lambasting corporate Republicans who wanted to put Alaska’s natural sites on the auction block. Concerned that Roosevelt’s national forests in Alaska—the Tongass and Chugach—were going to be irreparably marred by private-sector entities searching for oil, gas, and phosphate, Pinchot reminded leaders that Roosevelt, in a message to the Fifty-Ninth Congress, had denounced the “looting” of public lands. Pinchot argued that the real memorial to Colonel Roosevelt would be for big business itself to renounce the molestation of Alaskan landscapes.16

Harold Ickes, a feisty, combative bureaucratic infighter, wanted to keep the Bull Moose conservation movement alive, and he succeeded. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected U.S. president in 1932, he selected Ickes as secretary of the interior. For the next eight years, Ickes always asked himself when reading documents: What would Theodore Roosevelt do? The answer was quite simple—promote the outdoors life, save parts of wild America, create wilderness areas, and properly manage forests and game for future generations to enjoy. Ickes had learned from the Colonel, who always promoted conservation, a central lesson: the U.S. government was the best steward of public lands—not the corporations or businesses that leased them for quick, short-term profits.

A roster of those who sought to thwart Roosevelt’s conservation movement from 1901 to 1919 isn’t worth a lot of ink. The Bristol Bay canneries Roosevelt had worried about succumbed to coastal erosion and fires.17 There were also the Alaskan timber barons who tried to destroy the Tongass, politicians in Juneau who wanted to blast gaping holes in the Wrangell–Saint Elias, and reindeer and caribou breeders in Nome, ignorant of genetics. A group of U.S. senators from western states almost persuaded Congress to abolish the Chugach National Forest. Rich and powerful in their day, they’ve ended up in the trash can of U.S. history as exploiters of public lands. During his seven and a half years in the White House, Roosevelt outflanked the land skinners by withdrawing coal, minerals, oil, phosphate, forests, and waterpower sites from private ownership, and thereby saving wilderness from ruin for the people. Abusers of the land, when attacked by Roosevelt, curled up into a ball, afraid to be poked at under the glare of publicity. William Howard Taft learned the hard way what double-crossing Roosevelt with regard to Alaskan lands meant in raw political terms. Taft’s allowing Alaskan coalfields to be exploited by the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate, in essence, impelled Roosevelt to leave the Republicans to form the Bull Moose Party.18 Taft is now remembered as a nearly bottom-rung president, lacking in executive skill.

“America has known over-concentrations of power before,” David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote in a foreword to Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage. “Such men as Theodore Roosevelt, assuming a mandate summoning great courage, and deciding that he would rather wear out than rust out, came to grips with the graspers of power. He won that round. But graspers don’t stay down, are not self-limiting, and are usually too insensitive to perceive the damage they do. The people have to speak.”19

One old-school naturalist who truly grieved over Roosevelt’s death was John Burroughs. Oom John, as Roosevelt had called him, purposefully avoided the funeral on Long Island; he felt unable to bear the spectacle of thousands of mourners lining up pro forma to stare at an ex-president’s coffin. Burroughs waited for all the horse-drawn carriages and automobiles to leave Oyster Bay and then made his own journey from Poughkeepsie to Long Island with only an escort. Burroughs, now at least eighty, needed a walking stick to climb up the knoll to Roosevelt