The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [184]
A rare photograph of Theodore Roosevelt with Grover Cleveland (on left).
T.R. with Grover Cleveland. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
President Cleveland met with immediate blowback from many western senators. Words like traitor, fink, thimblerigger, Judas, blackleg, bamboozler, mountebank, stool pigeon, and patsy were hurled his way. “So hostile and powerful were these forces,” the historian Char Miller remarked in Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism, “that through their representatives in Congress they had managed to suspend Cleveland’s action pending congressional hearings.”45 Senator John Lockwood Wilson of North Dakota, for example, excoriated Cleveland for a “dastardly blunder” carried out to please East Coast elitists like the Boone and Crockett Club. Wilson predicted that westerners would ignore the edict and continue to log timber as they saw fit. Senator Richard Franklin Pettigrew of South Dakota called Cleveland “a disgrace to civilization and a disgrace to the Republic.” Nearly every western senator, in fact, believed that Cleveland had betrayed America. Cleveland’s action in kicking over the hornet’s nest, they argued, was in part pathological, a punishment because the Democratic Party had lost the 1896 election. (This didn’t make any sense, however, because Bryan was no friend of the forest reserves.)
Meanwhile, the Seattle chamber of commerce was in high dudgeon over President Cleveland’s last-minute “sneaky” forest grab. The mere pun on his last name—Cleave-land—got its members hopping mad. “The reservations, of no benefit to any legitimate object or policy, are of incalculable damage to the present inhabitants of this state,” these northwestern businessmen argued. “If they were allowed to stand, not only will the mining industry be destroyed, but the great railroad trunk lines of the Central West which are now heading for Puget Sound will be prevented from coming here. All the passes in the Cascade mountains by which the railroads can reach the Sound are embraced in these reservations.” 46
But the New York Times, in a spate of editorials, applauded President Cleveland’s parting proclamation as a historic accomplishment on behalf of the general public and posterity. “To leave [pristine forests] to private enterprise is to make sure within a generation or two of reducing the Western land now wooded to the condition in which countries once well watered and fertile, like Greece and Spain, have been reduced by like improvidence,” the Times argued. “It is to dry up the streams now stored by the forest and to expose the country the water supply which they protect to an alternation of drought and flood.”47 That August John Muir also vigorously defended Cleveland’s public lands act in an article in Atlantic Monthly titled “The American Forests”—though he also noted that sometimes “wild trees” had to make way for “orchards and cornfields.”48 To Roosevelt’s mind the sworn enemies of the Cleveland reserves were (politically speaking) at the polar opposite ends of the political spectrum: Bryan Populist-Democrats from the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions and Republican Wall Street types and monopoly-minded captains of industry on both coasts.
Unlike Roosevelt, President Cleveland had too much dignity to call his opponents horrific names in 1897. Nevertheless he ably defended himself nine years later in a book titled Fishing and Shooting Sketches. Cleveland wrote that the “criticisms” and “persecutions” from “mendacious” newspapers and “shameless” Western politicians were “nothing more serious than gnat stings suffered on the bank of a stream—vexations to be borne with patience and afterward easily submerged in the memory of abundant delightful accompaniments.” For the rest of his life Cleveland gloated that the granite-ribbed San Jacinto Mountains around