The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [143]
III
Whether Roosevelt was hunting bears or attacking spoilsmen, his level of activity wasn’t without critics. Ironically, he now got along splendidly with toothless trappers and cattle ropers, but was no longer as comfortable with the refined intelligentsia of the East Coast. Critics like John Hay and Henry Adams, to name the most prominent, belittled his talk of the “strenuous life” as counterfeit and self-aggrandizing (though they both liked his wife, Edith, tremendously). Whenever Roosevelt spoke about humans needing to have “healthy animalism” instilled into their lives, patricians rolled their eyes. Hadn’t he learned anything in Porcellian? Whenever he claimed that great knowledge could be gleaned from backwoods types like Hell Roaring Bill Jones or Yellowstone Kelly, they rebuked him for being a literary nationalist at best and folk-obsessed and jingoistic at worse. Hadn’t he traveled extensively through Europe and understood the great art of Leonardo and Michelangelo? Equating the beauty of Pike’s Peak with The Last Supper, they believed, was Wild Wolf macho nonsense.
With his trademark teeth and eyeglasses moving in unison as he spoke, Roosevelt countered that his critics were part of a stifled class, deaf to the clarion call of nation-building, unable to see that the United States’ frontier values made the nation vastly superior to Europe’s effete culture. His opponents could die in their Washington parlors, but he preferred to go out like a wild animal shot at dusk in an untrampled forest. The whole Hay-Adams circle viewed Roosevelt, in the words of Kathleen Dalton, as “an entertaining but dangerous man to have in a drawing room: he had spilled coffee all over the dress of one governor’s wife and bumptiously ripped another woman’s hem with a clumsy step.”40
The poet James Russell Lowell notably bucked this patrician crowd assessment, praising T.R. in the 1890s for being “so energetic, so full of zeal, and, still more, so full of fight.”41 (It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had quoted from Lowell’s poem “A Fable for Critics” to open the first volume of The Winning of the West.) As a conversationalist, Lowell would say, Roosevelt was in a league of his own. Clearly Roosevelt was a force of nature, a rare phenomenon, a well-rounded intellectual unafraid to enter the fray of national politics, conservation, military affairs, and academic scholarship. With the exception of Henry Cabot Lodge, however, Roosevelt was no longer fully comfortable with the Brahmins of mannered society. He consciously cultivated the manners of a background different from his own, eating with his fingers, reading books at the dinner table, waving off blessings, and carrying a loaded pistol for its shock value. Essentially five generations of etiquette had been abandoned in favor of the half-primitive insolence.
Although Roosevelt was impressed with the Hay-Adams crowd, wanted their airy approval, and admired them as perspicacious people who had personally known Lincoln, his respect went more to scientists. In the presence of biologists, naturalists, and surveyors like Grinnell, Baird, Coues, or Merriam, for example, Roosevelt was much more modest, soft-spoken, and open to criticism. He listened as much as he spoke. It was as if he had determined that politicians were corrupt and intellectuals fey, whereas U.S. government scientists (that is, those who knew how to write well) and members of the army or navy were the true pillars of American integrity. As for the pioneers themselves, Roosevelt proudly characterized them as “grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion.”42
In July 1889 the first two volumes of The Winning of the West were published to another round of critical acclaim. Best read as a bildungsroman about how