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By Root 2939 0

” Roosevelt made it abundantly clear that he wanted the Republican Party to prosper in the midterm election come November. He would hold his nose and vote for Taft. “I have a much larger following west of the Alleghenies than east of them,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted, “and have my own difficulties here in New York simply because New York is of course the center of big business, of the big lawyers who guide the big business men, and of the multitude of small business men and small lawyers who take their care from the men at the top of their respective professions.”36

That November the Democrats gained fifty-seven seats in the House and ten in the Senate. The party of William Jennings Bryan now had outright control of the House (and working control of the Senate in combination with a smattering of progressive Republicans). The Democrats were pulling down the shade on the Republican Party for the first time since Grover Cleveland had worked his electoral magic in 1892. But Roosevelt didn’t feel paralyzed. The midterm defeats suffered by the Republicans turned his attention more toward his conservationism. Briefly swearing off politics, Roosevelt returned to wildlife biology, his lifetime passion, swapping information with professional peers. The entomologist Willis Stanley Blatchley, for example, had sent Roosevelt a book on beetles. Roosevelt knew that Darwin, just a few weeks before dying, had written about a water beetle that attached itself to a clam in a pond in the English Midlands. Feeling diffident about his own knowledge of beetles, Roosevelt was glad to study Blatchley’s fine new research. “There was one beetle found on Lake Victoria Nyanza that almost came in the category of big game,” Roosevelt wrote to Blatchley that Christmas, using a kind of insider’s shorthand. “It was considerably larger than a mouse. You of course know all about it, it is called the galia beetle.”37

The Christmas season of 1910 also found Roosevelt defending the immense national forests and federal bird reserves in Alaska that had been created during his presidency and were now, in some quarters, targets of cynicism. To Roosevelt (prodded by Pinchot), protecting the Tongass and Chugach national forests became a high priority. The Democrats’ victories in 1910 caused a wave of resource development advocacy aimed at undoing Roosevelt and Pinchot’s forestland initiatives in Alaska, Washington state, and Oregon. Acting as a lobbyist, Roosevelt fired off sharp letters to new members of Congress, explaining why federal protection of timberlands in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest was imperative. On behalf of Pinchot’s new, nonprofit National Conservation Association (the forerunner of today’s Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC),38 Roosevelt urged legislators to stop desecrating mountaintops and slopes across the country. “At this very moment we are endeavoring to get the United States Government to take over from the Eastern states the Appalachian and White Mountain reserves, just because the states have not done as well as the Nation is doing or can do,” Roosevelt wrote to one recently elected congressman, Abraham Walter Lafferty, a Republican from Oregon. “There are two reasons why the National Forests in Oregon, for example, should not be turned over in trust to the state. The first and most important one is that the forest in question is necessarily, through its connection with the rivers and in other ways, an interstate question, and the National Forests can be handled far better for the general welfare by the Federal Government than by the State.”39

By January 1911, Gifford Pinchot was suggesting either that a progressive Republican (Roosevelt) should challenge Taft for the Republican nomination or (a less attractive possibility) that Roosevelt should bolt and create a third party. Certainly, Roosevelt paid close attention to all this political maneuvering. He had toured America enough, talked with enough farmers and laborers, and answered enough sacks full of mail, to believe that Taft was bad for the Republican Party. Deeply embarrassed