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By Root 3089 0

Institution, the Roosevelt party had collected 8,463 vertebrates, 550 large and 3,379 small mammals, and 2,784 birds.11 Some wildlife biologists thought it was a slaughter. In city after city, Roosevelt met with conservationists, offering his support in local fights against rapacious land developers. He spoke of the need for a Global Conservation Congress—the multinational organization the Taft administration had nixed. “Conservation means development as much as it does protection,” Roosevelt told a crowd of farmers. “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them.”12

African Game Trails became a popular boys’ book, selling more than 1 million copies.13 Everywhere Roosevelt went that autumn, huge groups of adolescents paraded after him, hungering for stories of the wilderness and adventure. Never one to disappoint children, the ex-president regaled them with tales of Mount Kenyan fantail warblers, giraffes eating out of his hand, and the honeyguide birds that always led to trees of sweets. As if foreshadowing the New Deal, he urged young people to form a youth army to protect wilderness areas from vandals. “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm,” Roosevelt wrote; “swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts . . . mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths.”14

When Roosevelt stopped in Oak Park, Illinois, the ten-year-old Ernest Hemingway, awestruck, dressed in a khaki safari suit, stood with his grandfather in a receiving line to shake hands with his hero. Young Ernest had just received his first gun (a 20-gauge shotgun) from his grandfather, and he had been playing Teddy Roosevelt instead of cowboys and Indians. Hemingway also joined the Agassiz Naturalist Club, learned taxidermy, and pleaded to go on his own safari to collect specimens. The green hills of Africa were calling him. As a young adult Hemingway—aspiring to qualify for the CFCA—would retrace Roosevelt’s safari to British East Africa and would befriend one of the men who had been the ex-president’s guides in 1909.15 “More than any other individual in history, Roosevelt opened the African frontier to the imagination of America’s youths,” Sean Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, wrote in a helpful introduction to Hemingway on Hunting. “The fresh scent of a new frontier and the thrill of the hunt, both with their overwhelming sense of valor and excitement, would captivate Hemingway for the rest of his life.”16

During Roosevelt’s absence in Africa, President Taft had tried to garner a little of the “teddy bear” magic for himself. At a dinner in Atlanta, Georgia, Taft had been served a southern dish, barbecued possum. Imitating Roosevelt, Taft swore it was a “dee-licious” meal. Cartoonists jumped on the anecdote, calling Taft “Billy Possums.” A few cartoons ran in syndicated newspapers, and although these cartoons lacked pizzazz, Billy Possums cookouts became a brief fad in the Deep South. Also, enterprising entrepreneurs in New York quickly manufactured a new stuffed toy, Billy Possum. The sales were dismal, however. “A dealer—one of the biggest in the country—got a telegram on the night of the dinner,” the New York Evening Post reported. “He immediately went to a manufacturer. They put their heads together and possum skins were obtained. But the genuine skin, stuffed, looked like a gigantic rat.”17

The possum toy sank without a bubble. Nobody was going to get excited over a novelty associated with William Howard Taft. “Before long,” the biographer Kathleen Dalton noted, “cartoonists parodied Taft as a lost boy searching for his Teddy Bear.”18 By contrast, everything associated with TR, from stuffed toys to bobble-head dolls, boomed after his African adventure. Abercrombie