The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [191]
The next month, a taxonomic debate between Merriam and Roosevelt was held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.—a little mansion on Madison Place that had served as something of a living room for John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and the Geological Survey community in general—in front of an audience of America’s leading naturalists. It had been arranged by L. O. Howard of the Bureau of Entomology.72 Merriam, who lived nearby on Sixteenth Street, often used the Cosmos library as his own salon, occasionally reading Huxley and Thoreau in an easy chair as a break from arsenic and formaldehyde. There were few other places in Washington, D.C., where you could you simply pluck from the bookshelves classics of exploration without so much as consulting a reference librarian.
Just as Marbury v. Madison was carefully studied in law schools for decades after the decision, the rancorous disagreement between Roosevelt and Merriam had a long shelf-life in graduate biology programs. At its core was the question: What constituted a species? On Roosevelt’s side were “lumpers,” old-fashioned taxonomists uncomfortable with “undue cleavage of the genus.” The “splitters” were Merriam’s followers, who insisted that wildlife that integrated “must be treated as subspecies and bear trinomial names; forms not known to integrate, no matter how closely related, must be treated as full species and bear binomial names.” To Roosevelt these “splitters” were essentially perpetuating a gimcrack theory, smothering in its implications (although he didn’t phrase his view in quite such a degrading way). Merriam made plenty of valuable points defending his research. Nevertheless he was not, as a rule, a good speaker. For visual effect he brought with him wolf and coyote skulls, with mixed results.73
Roosevelt, by contrast, made the room shake when he spoke. Thrusting his hands out of his shirt sleeves, he lectured on the need for biology not to overcomplicate everything. One point, which Roosevelt essentially conceded, was that ornithology was a relatively “finished science” whereas mammalogy, particularly throughout the American West, was “yet in its infancy.” Merriam saw this concession as an opening. Daily the Biological Survey was getting mammals with skull variations and tails different from others in the same genus. Was it really so irresponsible to believe, Merriam wanted to know, that new species were being discovered? 74 Essentially, Roosevelt won the debate on extempore elocution while Merriam did better on specifics; in other words, it was a draw.
Besides his sharp argument with Merriam, Roosevelt’s obsession with species bled into his job at the Navy Department in other, unexpected ways. On behalf of entomology, for example, Roosevelt wanted the new class of U.S. torpedo boats to carry names like Wasp, Hornet, and Yellow-Jacket.75 Under the aegis of a decorator, Roosevelt filled his office with a wide assortment of antlers; it looked like a Wyoming hunting lodge. And even though war with Spain was looming and naval procurement was one of his responsibilities, Roosevelt continued to mercilessly prune and edit articles that hunters were submitting to the Boone and Crockett Club. “Wherever the young idiot speaks of papa, father should of course be substituted, and, if possible, the allusion should be left out all together,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell after reading