The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [190]
Roosevelt could hold his tongue no longer. Feeling bruised by an article of 1897 in the New York Times proffering Merriam’s views about bear species, Roosevelt suddenly saw things Henry Cabot Lodge’s way. Merriam, it seemed, had indeed gone Darwin-mad, playing the clairvoyant, turning Linnaeus on his head, and wanting to rewrite zoology books to support his field research, which called for new ways to classify species. As if the bears weren’t enough, Merriam was about to publish an article in Science claiming that more species breakdowns of many other mammals were needed to cover such factors as color variation, differences in horn size and shape, whiskers, and hoofprints. Regarding coyotes in America, for example, Merriam believed there were actually eleven distinct species. Roosevelt, urging modification of Merriam’s theory, balked at the species approach to classification. Merriam’s heavy emphasis on species classification, he argued, would merely confuse the general public. “I have been greatly interested in Dr. Merriam’s article as to discriminating between species and subspecies,” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn. “With his main thesis I entirely agree. I think that the word ‘species’ should express degree of differentiation rather than intergradation. I am not quite at one with Dr. Merriam, however, on the question as to how great the degree of differentiation should be in order to establish specific rank.”68
Osborn, who would go on to become the preeminent advocate of Darwinism in the early twentieth century, was Roosevelt’s ally in the well-mannered dispute of 1897. In a letter to Osborn, Roosevelt admitted his own “conservative instincts,” but added that when it came to creating entire new species of bears, wolves, elks, and coyotes, he was sanely skeptical.69 If Merriam’s theory were true, that meant his trophy collection at Sagamore Hill of North American big game would never be complete, and every year he’d have to try to bag newly designated species. Roosevelt saw Merriam’s idea as akin to having an “old familiar friend” suddenly “cut up into eleven brand new acquaintances.” Although Roosevelt loved Merriam dearly, he thought Merriam’s new zoology was off-kilter and not worth expounding in serious periodicals like the New York Times and Science. Turning a blind eye toward Merriam’s research, Roosevelt insisted that varied species—like mule and white-tailed deer—were smart “arbitrary divisions” devised for “convenience’s sake.” But he didn’t find value in suddenly catapulting black-tailed deer, for instance—comfortable as a subspecies—into the species category on a biological whim. At the end of the day they were deer. He believed their “essential likenesses” far more important than their “minor differences.” While Roosevelt fully supported having Merriam’s Biological Survey field collectors record variations in species discovered in different regions of America—and in fact coveted such information himself—he didn’t want to “lumber up our zoological works” by adding unnecessary new terminology, thereby overloading the binomial system.
One wonders what Secretary of the Navy Long thought of his underling, whom he didn’t know well, being involved in naturalist squabbles throughout the spring and summer of 1897 (Long’s diary suggests he had strong reservations about Roosevelt’s sanity). Roosevelt’s Darwinian-influenced views spread into his public policy pronouncements, including his pro-expansionist sentiments, when he flat-out stated that “the rivalry of