The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [242]
For all of his cutting-edge talk of science, Roosevelt was really an old-fashioned camper type, a rustic, enamored with the very notion of log cabins or hunters’ and naturalists’ shacks. As he took his oath of office his primary concern wasn’t Spindletop or J. P. Morgan; it was conservation. As for foreign policy, Roosevelt promised he would backstop President McKinley’s policies. When it came to building a new great naval fleet and administering the Philippines, Roosevelt believed, President McKinley, to his credit, was an expansionist. Roosevelt’s only real complaint (and it was a big one) was that McKinley was a slow-moving, incremental expansionist. As an admirer of Mahan, Roosevelt wanted the United States to make permanent naval bases in Cuba, Panama, Guam, and Puerto Rico. In February 1900 he had written a sharp protest letter to Secretary of State John Hay over the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty; he felt U.S. rights to build an isthmus canal across Panama or Nicaragua hadn’t been properly protected under the terms.57
The challenge for Vice President Roosevelt—particularly when it came to conservation—was to be a team player in the McKinley administration. The Senate session Roosevelt presided over lasted for only five days—March 4 to 8—and then adjourned until the late fall. Roosevelt’s big accomplishment as vice president was, as the historian H. W. Brands succinctly put it, having “gaveled the session open and closed.”58 Roosevelt was forced to console himself by considering that his real work took place during the campaign, so it didn’t now matter whether he fell into a life of “unwarrantable idleness.”59
Fame has an ugly dark side in America: the sniping by the tabloid press. Because Roosevelt was the vice president–elect while he was in Colorado, hunting cougars, he was a particularly tempting target for irresponsible journalism. A story was propagated by Senator Thomas MacDonald Patterson of Colorado—the Democratic, free-silver populist editor of the Rocky Mountain News—that Roosevelt had been drunk on a train with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and a few others. It was pure rubbish. The Associated Press also went after Roosevelt for “grossly dissipated conduct.” In defense, Roosevelt claimed that the wire service was “controlled” by Bryan, who wanted him bruised.60 A barrage of belittling stories appeared in the Colorado press about Roosevelt’s White River hunts, alleging that he was afraid of bears and that he shot treed cougars chased down by other men. For the first time ever, Roosevelt had journalists turn on him in packs. “To go mountain lion hunting sounds much more ferocious, but it really is not,” Roosevelt wrote to Winthrop Chanler of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The only danger I run is from the infuriated yellow press, and this is moral, not physical. It is very exasperating to have humiliating adventures which never occurred attributed to me in connection with bears and wolves (neither of which animals did I so much as see) and then to have the very same papers that have invented the lies state that they were sent out by my press agent with a view to my own glorification. However, I suppose it is all in a day’s work of a public man in our free and enlightened country.”61
That March Vice President Roosevelt—after reading a draft of “The Merriam Report” from the Harriman expedition—had become obsessed with protecting Alaskan wildlife.