The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [185]
That May the U.S. Senate tried to make an immediate amendment to President Cleveland’s forest lands act. A Lieu Selection Act (passed on June 4, 1897) was created to offer money to homesteaders booted out of the new forest reserves. Emotions ran high. Northern Pacific Railroad agents throughout Washington state, for example, encouraged residents to simply disobey the federal government. It was up to the new president—William McKinley—to grapple with the fracas the anticonservation politicians and extractioners were making. What added to these senators’ fury was that President Cleveland had issued his order without consulting them in any way. If Grover Cleveland had stayed in power, the Sundry Civil bill—called the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” Act (by conservationists) or the “Midnight Reserve” Act (by pro-development westerners)—would probably have been nullified. The continuation of the forest reserves rested squarely on President McKinley’s broad shoulders. As Muir noted in Our National Parks, promoting his aesthetic view of nature, forest reservations were useful not as “fountains of timber” but as “fountains of life” capable of rejuvenating the human spirit and rescuing it from the “vice of over-industry” and the “deadly apathy of luxury.”50 Avoiding political quicksand, and following the old legal adage about cooling out the client, McKinley adroitly held the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” in abeyance for a year; the act didn’t become officially operative until March 1, 1898.51
The fact that President McKinley didn’t recoil from or play the ostrich on Cleveland’s 21-million-acre coup impressed Roosevelt tremendously. McKinley, in fact, got lucky, for the discovery of gold in Yukon-Alaska in 1896 eventually caused many people in the Pacific Northwest to give up on lumber and instead start developing Seattle and Portland as major ports and outfitting centers. “I am exceedingly glad that President Cleveland issued the order,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell that summer, “but none of the trouble came on him at all. He issued the order at the very end of his administration, practically to take effect in the next administration. In other words he issued an order which it was easy to issue, but difficult to execute and which had to be executed by his successor…. I think that credit should be given the man who issues the order, but I think it should be just as strongly given to the man who enforces it…. President McKinley and Secretary [Cornelius] Bliss took the matter up, and by great resolution finally prevented its complete overthrow.” The estimable point Roosevelt was trying to drive home to Grinnell was that McKinley and Cornelius Bliss, his secretary of the interior, deserved credit equal to Cleveland’s for the creation of these thirteen reserves.52
Bliss was a New Yorker, a successful businessman, a member of all the right clubs, and a bit of a dandy. When McKinley nominated him to be secretary of the interior, conservationists like Roosevelt knew that their movement would have an ally in the executive branch. Bliss was easily confirmed by the Senate, over the objections of Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, who claimed that such an “Eastern man” knew “nothing of the great Western matters constantly arising in the Department of the Interior.”53 The real reason for Teller’s objections was perhaps that he wouldn’t be able to make sweetheart deals with a man of Bliss’s moral fiber. Within two months of being confirmed, Bliss got a sort of revenge on Teller by appointing a forester, Gifford Pinchot, as his “confidential special agent” to look into how to both protect and create new western reserves.54
There was another reason Senator Teller made a terrible mistake in going after Bliss. As the old Arab proverb goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Given that there were few easterners whom Senator Teller disliked more than Theodore Roosevelt, once