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By Root 3947 0

York. On the other hand, Mark Hanna openly wept, shaking his head in dismay and mumbling, “That crazy cowboy.”33 The Rough Rider was now vice president (or would be as of his swearing in on March 4 on the U.S. Capitol steps). Roosevelt’s Democratic critics immediately scoffed that being vice president was a boot-polisher’s job (anticipating John Nance Gardner’s remark that it wasn’t worth “a bucket of warm spit”). The unconventional Roosevelt, who had made bold reformist improvements in New York, they said, fearlessly standing up to Boss Platt on conservation issues, among others, had been relegated to a lifeless position. Poor Teddy Roosevelt had become the “fifth wheel of the executive coach.”34 Typically, Roosevelt would have none of such talk. “If I have been put on the shelf,” he said, “my enemies will find that I can make it a cheerful place of abode.”35 This quip was, of course, touche defensiveness and smart public relations.

Days after McKinley’s reelection, Roosevelt, showing how easily he could shift from being governor of New York to being a national office holder, wrote a long open letter to the National Irrigation Congress about the “vital necessity” of “storing the floods and preserving the forests.” No longer was he pontificating just about the Catskills and Adirondacks. Wanting to bring western life to the national forefront, he had arid places like the Great Basin and the San Joaquin Valley in mind. Refusing to mince words he laid out a blueprint that the federal government would soon adopt. Dams and reservoirs would be constructed to help irrigate even the “vast stretches of so-called desert in the West.” Herein lay the seeds for what would soon become Roosevelt’s reclamation of the American West as U.S. president. Not pausing to think if it was smart to build cities in the Mojave or Sonoran deserts, Roosevelt’s open letter made some fine points about how deforestation of the arid West must be prevented. Certainly, Roosevelt had his heart in the right place—even if he wasn’t foresighted enough regarding the potential menace of dams.36

Besides writing to the National Irrigation Commission, Roosevelt took time that December to settle scores with politicians who had mocked, obfuscated, or taken advantage of loopholes in New York’s game and fish laws. Reports from wardens that one of his commissioners was abusive toward them, scoffing at fish hatcheries, really set him off. Roosevelt’s ire toward one of his five Fisheries, Game, and Forests commissioners in particular—Percy S. Lansdowne, former secretary of the Erie County Fish and Game Association, nominated by Roosevelt that March—was triggered by the illegal loan of a state wildlife boat as a donor’s perk. To Roosevelt this was simply stealing from the state. Furthermore, Lansdowne had been known to mock Roosevelt’s idea that the ticky-tacky tourism around Niagara Falls wasn’t good for nature. Now, as governor, preparing to be vice president, Roosevelt lit into Landsdowne in a letter, calling him an untrustworthy, lying, thieving scoundrel and part of the “patronage machine.”37

That December Roosevelt also took stock of his own duty and destiny. As of New Year’s Day his tenure as governor would be finished. After delivering the most speeches ever in a U.S. presidential campaign, he felt as if he had jumped off a twenty-story ledge, had landed in a fire department net, and was now strolling around Oyster Bay with his hands in his pockets, glowing and in a “what next” trance. He worried about falling into an inward desolation of spirit. The open letter on western irrigation was for public consumption, but Roosevelt also wrote beautiful, serene letters to fellow naturalists about the disappearance of wildlife and forests in the American West. He lamented that the “great mountain forests” he encountered in 1891 in Idaho and Montana and Wyoming were “growing bare of life.”38 A meditation poured out of his pen on how wilderness had cured him of asthma.39

There was, however, a strange melancholy in Roosevelt’s voice, perhaps indicating delayed depression after