The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [197]
The most significant, from his own point of view as well as the nation’s, was to do not with animals but with forestry. Roosevelt had a profound, almost Indian veneration for trees, particularly the giant conifers he had encountered in the Rockies.90 Walking on silent, moccasined feet down a luminous nave of pines, listening to invisible choirs of birds, he came close to religious rapture, as many passages in his books and letters attest. Hence, when the American Forestry Association began its struggle to halt the rapid attrition of Western woodlands, Roosevelt threw the full weight of his organization behind it. Thanks to the club’s determined lobbying on Capitol Hill, in concert with other environmental groups, the Forest Reserve Act became law in March 1891. It empowered the President to set aside at will any wooded or partly wooded country, “whether of commercial value or not.”91 The time would come when Theodore Roosevelt joyfully inherited this very power as President of the United States. One wonders if he ever paused, while signing millions of green acres into perpetuity, to acknowledge his debt to the youthful president of the Boone & Crockett Club.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Roosevelt sat discussing big-game preservation with his dozen dinner guests, President Cleveland dumbfounded Congress with the first Annual Message ever devoted to one subject. The tariff bulked even larger than Civil Service Reform as a political issue in those last days of 1887; as will be seen, the two major parties were diametrically opposed in their attitudes toward it. To provoke a similar division of opinion in the electorate, as Cleveland did by publicly coming out against the tariff, was in effect to decide the result of the next national election, still eleven months off. Republicans reading the text of his message reacted with incredulous joy, while Democrats wondered privately if the Big One had gone mad.92
Simply described, the tariff was a system of laws, hallowed for decades by successive Republican administrations, which levied high duties on imported goods in order to protect American industry and provide revenues for the federal government. So vast were these revenues (about two-thirds of the nation’s income) that a surplus had been building up in the Treasury every year since 1879. It now waxed enormous,93 and President Cleveland believed that it posed a malignant threat to the economy. To spend excessive money was wasteful; yet to hoard it, when it could have been in healthy circulation, was even more so. Cleveland, having silently pondered American tariff schedules for two years, decided that they were “vicious, inequitable and illogical.” Congress was instructed to reduce most rates, and abolish others altogether: wool, for example, should be allowed to come in free. The tariff, wrote Cleveland, would be “for revenue only” and not for protection.94
By his unfortunate use of the word “free” the President thus laid himself open to charges that he was a Free Trader, while by attacking Protection he identified that comfortable doctrine with the Republican party. “There’s one more President for us in Protection,” crowed James G. Blaine,95 leaving few observers in doubt as to which President he had in mind. A wave of optimism spread through the party as bells across the country rang in another election year.96
But Roosevelt remained in the