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II

One New York leader Governor Roosevelt was constantly trying to outfox was Thomas “Boss Platt. Ever since he served as a New York assemblyman from 1882 to 1884, Roosevelt refused to join Platt’s Republican rubber stamps. He was unimpressed by Platt and distrusted him—Platt had flunked out of Yale and had worked as a pharmaceutical salesman and, in Michigan, as a lumber operator. Roosevelt, however, was deferential to Platt—his elder by twenty-five years—merely because political expediency demanded it. He didn’t want to spar unnecessarily with a slugger. As past president of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, Platt knew at least one thing about geology: that the land had glorious treasures which could be extracted. He considered nature sightseeing a fey enterprise. He had been elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1896, and when his photograph appeared in the New York Tribune on January 21, 1897, it was the first halftone reproduction ever published in a daily newspaper. As of 1899, only Governor Roosevelt was a more recognizable New York personality than the fit, trim, bushy-sideburned Platt. In his dogged, confident, shrewd, relentless way, Platt was a formidable counterpart to Roosevelt; their values, however, were at the opposite ends of the Republican Party’s spectrum. Nevertheless, after only a month in office, Roosevelt wrote to John Hay that, to his surprise, he was “getting on well” with Platt.35

Almost monthly Governor Roosevelt and Senator Platt engaged in parlor debates at roundtables on topics such as corporate taxes, improved schools, and funding state infrastructure. Sometimes Roosevelt and Platt found themselves in general agreement on foreign policy issues including the annexation of Cuba and the building of an interoceanic canal. But when it came to conservation issues they were like positive and negative jumper cables; when their ideas touched, sparks flew in all directions. Quite simply, Roosevelt refused to water down his conservationist beliefs to curry favor with Senator Platt. They differed on scientific forestry, the Palisades, antipollution laws, and the need for watersheds.36 Wisely, Boss Platt—who was never bored in Roosevelt’s “impulsive” presence—let him have the parklands, preferring to have him champion birds’ rights than meddle in antimonopoly fights on Wall Street, where huge sums of Republican money were at stake. Platt was careful not to denounce Roosevelt publicly; instead, he paid Roosevelt a backhanded compliment by saying that at least the Colonel wasn’t a slacker. “Politicians found [Roosevelt] a hard customer,” John Burroughs recalled of his stormy relationship with men like Boss Platt. “His reproof and refusal came quick and sharp. His mannerism was authoritative and stern…. His political enemies in Albany, early in his career, laid traps for him, in hopes of tarnishing his reputation but he was too keen for them.”37

As of April 1899, Governor Roosevelt’s ideas about pushing oneself to the limits were only implied, or only written in letters to friends. Certainly, reading about the virtues of the pioneers in The Winning of the West or about military fortitude in The Rough Riders made it clear that Roosevelt believed overcoming hardship built character; oddly, he always seemed happiest with no accoutrements except a horse and rifle. There are even wisps of evidence that he was a devotee of recapitulation theory: a belief, propounded by a professor of pedagogy and psychology, G. Stanley Hall, founder of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, that “overcivilization was endangering American manhood.” According to Hall, American boys were becoming effeminate and needed to return to primitivism instead of wallowing in Victorian-era “ideologies of self-restrained manliness.” Too many American men, Hall argued, were having neurasthenic breakdowns. Among Hall’s many prescriptions for this decline of American manliness were the promotion of the “savage”