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By Root 2980 0

Roosevelt laid out the Progressive platform, emphasizing conservation and promoting the principles of public domain lands, women’s suffrage, regulation of corporations, roadside beautification, federal assistance to the poor, better schools, and so on. He set forth a liberal domestic agenda for the twentieth century that Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Obama would build on. Roosevelt lambasted mechanization and human abuse of the environment. If financial titans thought the conservation movement was over, they were doomed to disappointment. Botany, biology, geology, soil science, entomology, and forestry offered clues to humans’ relationship with Earth. To Roosevelt, it was impractical to discuss land policy without placing people’s concerns first and foremost. However, it was blasphemous to rape and loot the landscape for profit, as the placer miners had done along East Creek near Fairbanks. If Taft was going to be anticonservation, Roosevelt would sink him like the Titanic—a disaster that was still fresh in people’s minds. “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in the country,” Roosevelt declared. “Just as we must conserve our men, women, and children, so we must conserve the resources of the land on which they live.”68 As Pinchot pointed out, for Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party, conservation was a “moral issue.”69

Throughout the 1912 campaign, Alaskan fishermen went on strike against Roosevelt and Taft’s policies regulating fishing. They claimed the right to use salmon traps. Big canneries likewise insisted that the traps were a necessity. In Pacific Fisherman, their trade journal, packers called the huge clamlike traps, which were designed to funnel migrating salmon, “the best and only friend the canners have in Alaska.”70 A tender such as Little Tom would take the salmon—hundreds brailed from a fish trap—all day long. The goal was to “fish out” a place, then move somewhere else. Roosevelt wanted to shut the packers down for illegal fishing methods; otherwise, these “big fish” companies would deplete Alaska of salmon.

Most sourdoughs (or old-timers) in Alaska despised everything about the Bull Moose Party. Although Roosevelt was respected as a big-game hunter, his federal land grabs between 1902 and 1909 on behalf of wildlife and forests infuriated them. None of them, however, voted in the 1912 elections, so they didn’t matter. But coal and timber corporations in Washington and Oregon used the sourdoughs’ antifederal attitude to arouse contempt for all regulation of the extraction industries.

By September 1912, President Taft, his popularity diminished, was looking irrelevant. Every rally for Taft was lackluster, sweltering hot, and newsless. Roosevelt, the youngest of the presidential candidates, relished attacking the “husks” of the Democratic and Republican parties, which had nominated “boss-ridden” men of weak moral fiber.71 Roosevelt called the president a “flubdub with a streak of the common and the second rate in him.”72 The combustible campaign centered on the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson’s “new freedom” versus Theodore Roosevelt’s “new nationalism.” Wilson, a former president of Princeton University and popular reformist governor of New Jersey, pushed his attacks on corporate abuses even farther left than Roosevelt. Wilson, in some cases, claimed to support federal control of companies. But Roosevelt still held the progressive high ground when it came to the environment. Roosevelt considered Wilson nothing more than a “sham reformer,” embracing dull precedent because that was politically expedient.73

To Roosevelt and his supporters, Wilson was also hostage to the laissez-faire doctrine, an ignorant, outdated philosophy for the twentieth century. Only money-grubbers would put laissez-faire over the collective good of the American people. “Now the governmental power rests with the people, and the kings who enjoy privilege are the kings of the financial and industrial world,” Roosevelt said at rallies, promoting progressive democracy. “And what they clamor for is