The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [155]
What made Roosevelt different from Grinnell, Baird, or Merriam was that while he fully embraced Darwinism and Marshism, he wouldn’t throw away Mayne Reid’s potboilers or the notion of the Alamo as a heroic line in the Texas sand. Roosevelt stubbornly refused (or was intellectually unable) to become part of the “dry as dust” world of science. “I know these scientists pretty well, and their limitations are extraordinary, especially when they get to talking of science with a capital S,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell. “They do good work; but, after all, it is only the very best of them who are more than bricklayers, who laboriously get together bricks out of which other men must build houses. When they think they are architects they are simply a nuisance.”99
Although when it came to studying bears, elks, deer, and antelope Roosevelt too was something of a bricklayer, he had appointed himself as the architect of the burgeoning scientific conservation movement. It was Roosevelt, for example, who dramatically testified before the Public Lands Committee of the House of Representatives against railroad expansion and the YIC’s development schemes. During a question-and-answer session Roosevelt acted like a conservationist hit man, ready to take out any un-American corporations or individuals undermining the new wild-life protection ethos and forestry. Unlike Baird, for example, Roosevelt never demanded data. For both better and worse, Roosevelt believed in the cumulative power of firsthand observations over empirical laboratory results. All the biological conservation theory and forestry science in the world, he insisted, wouldn’t add up to much if the American people didn’t believe the findings.
Although Roosevelt worried that Merriam, at the U.S. Biological Survey, was overdoing classification, he insisted that big game, songbirds, and even reptiles should be saved like rare, precious gems. To protect animals as endangered species, moreover, Roosevelt believed you had to make people care about their survival. Roosevelt, susceptible to the ideas of naturalist-inclined poets like Whitman and Burroughs, was the kind of polymath not usually admired by serious scientists. To make nature dull like the “little half-baked scientists,” Roosevelt believed, was fraught with peril. Darwinism needed to be communicated directly to people in simple ways that they could understand and that wouldn’t dethrone God as the creator. Like Darwin himself, Roosevelt was a “nature theologist,” holding that nature was proof positive of the genius of God, who had masterminded everything from sparrows’ eyes to Pike’s Peak.100
Thus, by 1891, serving as civil service commissioner and as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt was already the heart and soul of the burgeoning conservation movement. One reason for this was that he was the only Darwinian-trained biologist who wore a shapeless broad-rimmed rancher’s hat, carried guns, and knew how to attract a large audience both inside and outside official Washington. When Roosevelt offered homilies about grizzly bears and elk herds, the general public listened. As a Washington-based politician, he had clout: for example, he dined regularly with Secretary of the Interior Noble at the Metropolitan Club. He could also glad-hand with backwoods types in the West on his hunting trips. It’s one thing to set aside timber tracts with Section 24 as President Harrison did; it’s quite another to change an American mind-set about wildlife and timber management—a mind-set committed to plowed land and sawmills—as Roosevelt was attempting to do, seemingly overnight.
In the early 1890s people needed familiar points of reference to make the leap from Creationism