The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [235]
Obviously, as New York’s governor Roosevelt engaged in other reformist measures not connected to forestry or oyster conservation. He established a state hospital to care for crippled and deformed children, promoted consistent pharmaceutical standards, fought to end racial segregation in public schools, and demanded antiracism efforts in schools. Compulsory seating areas for employees in factories, he declared, were mandatory. Disapprovingly, he toured sweatshops with Jacob Riis, furious that such sickening squalor existed in America, stopping just long enough to ask the most pertinent questions about city services in the down-and-out neighborhoods. And his interest in integrating Native Americans into the main fabric of national life continued. For example, he pushed for compulsory education on the Alleghany and Cattaraugus reservations in New York. The time was long overdue, Roosevelt believed, for Native Americans to be given a fair shake. Long before the term “affirmative action” was in use, Roosevelt was promoting the concept on behalf of Indians. And he started corresponding with three African-American intellectuals whom he deeply admired: Booker T. Washington, William Henry Lewis, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.22
By June 1900 Governor Roosevelt was described by the New York Sun as the greatest reformer in American politics. That month, as testimony to his meteoric rise, the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia nominated him to run as President William McKinley’s vice president, despite Mark Hanna’s fervent objections. (Hanna actually had a heart attack shortly after T.R.’s nomination, but lived.) Wearing a huge black top hat, Roosevelt had stood out at the convention amid a sea of straw boaters like, as Edmund Morris put it, “a tent in a wheat-field.”23 He remained coy, however, about whether he wanted the official vice presidential nomination in the first place. Boss Platt understood that in any case Roosevelt would get the nod. Famously, he quipped, “Roosevelt might just as well stand under Niagara Falls and try to spit water back as to stop his nomination by the convention.” 24
Amid the political theater of June 1900, Roosevelt nevertheless found time to read books by fellow naturalists. Back in 1882, he had read Camps in the Rockies by the British sportsman William Adolph Baillie-Grohman and was floored by its accurate description of elks. Now, while the Republican convention was going on, Roosevelt read Baillie-Grohman’s newest effort, Sport in the Alps, and was again pleased. “Ever since I read your Camps in the Rockies I have felt tantalized because you had nothing about bear and bison hunting,” Roosevelt wrote to him. “I know you look down on the latter, but after all it was something peculiar which has passed away forever and I do wish you had written about it. I shall always feel defrauded until you write a couple of chapters on Wapiti and Big Horn in your Camps in the Rockies. By the way, your Sport in the Alps was exactly the book which I had long been hoping to see written. Again here I wish you could have extended your researches to take in the records of bison and aurochs shooting in Lithuania and Poland in former centuries.” Realizing, perhaps, that he was being too critical of a writer he admired, Roosevelt invited Baillie-Grohman to Sagamore Hill to see his favorite black-tailed buck head, an award-winning Boone and Crockett Club trophy.25
Once Roosevelt became the vice presidential nominee in June, he traveled throughout New York, speaking to huge crowds in Minneola, Brooklyn, Newburgh, Auburn, Syracuse, and Niagara Falls, plus numerous hamlets in between. A radiant atmosphere seemed to accompany his every step. “I am as strong as a bull-moose,” he told Hanna, who was running McKinley’s reelection campaign, “and you can use me to the limit.”26 Once again Roosevelt went to Chicago, on September 3, this time to discuss the “labor