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sensation. Citizens didn’t have to be frail. Lean into your ailment, he believed, and defeat it. Urbanization had caused an unnatural deficiency in young people, and the schools needed to reverse this unhealthy trend by teaching Emersonian self-reliance. Implying that imperialism could be justified as part of the “strenuous life,” Roosevelt was really applying the basic tenets of Darwinism to a program for Homo sapiens, in the spirit of Horatio Alger’s fictional stories about self-made men. If Darwin was correct in saying that humans had evolved from apes and were therefore animals, then it made sense, Roosevelt believed, for the strongest and swiftest among the species to rule the human kingdom. That meant, in his mind, the Americans. As Bederman aptly put it, “Roosevelt believed that bitter evolutionary conflict allowed the fittest species and races to survive, ultimately moving evolution forward toward its ultimate, civilized perfection.”41

Besides sharing the “strenuous life” of boxing and mountain climbing, Roosevelt and Pinchot believed that vast forestlands were necessary so that men could develop survivalist qualities not known in the overly civilized cities. It was as if once the forests disappeared, manhood would also vanish. Roosevelt, as governor of New York, was now in a position to act. In 1899 alone, Roosevelt had the state purchase 69,380 acres for forest reserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks. He wanted the iron-ore companies regulated. He began the ultimately successful process of turning Watkins Glen—a Finger Lakes scenic spot—into a state park. On November 28, 1899, echoing his first annual message, he wrote a scathing letter to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, claiming that New York’s wardens were woefully ignorant of proper forest and wildlife management techniques.42 He demanded a full report from the five commissioners on each warden in the state, and he intended to replace most of them with scientific experts and woodsmen. Furthermore, Roosevelt wanted the Adirondacks protected as if the region were a national park, “both from the standpoint of forestry and from the less important but still very important standpoint of game and fish protection.”43

III

You didn’t have to be an investigative reporter or an intellectual to realize that Governor Roosevelt was crazy about birds. Regularly, he invited ornithologists to visit the executive mansion to discuss bird protection issues. His son Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt Jr., at age twelve, would go nest-gathering with his father each week, amassing a fine collection.44 (As a matter of ethics, however, they refused to collect the eggs of wild birds.) Using his political clout to promote the Audubon Society (New York), he wrote to Frank M. Chapman, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History, on February 16, 1899, delineating how to dramatically increase the avian presence in the state. “The loon ought to be, and under wise legislation, could be a feature of every Adirondack lake,” Roosevelt said. “Ospreys, as everyone knows, can be the tamest of the tame; and terns should be a plentiful along our shores as swallows around our barns. A tanager or a cardinal makes a point of glowing beauty in the green woods, and the cardinal among the white snows. When the bluebirds were so nearly destroyed by the severe winter a few seasons ago, the loss was like the loss of an old friend, or at least like the burning down of a familiar and dearly loved house. How immensely it would add to our forests if only the great logcock were still found among them!”45

What disturbed Roosevelt most was that many bird species, because of human recklessness, were becoming either rare or extinct. As a boy he had shot at passenger pigeons for his Roosevelt Museum and was proud of having done so. But he no longer saw it as an achievement. The lessons of John Burroughs had taught him better. “The destruction of the wild pigeon and the Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if the Catskills or the Palisades were taken away,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman.