The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [245]
Furthermore, that June Roosevelt started grappling with the whole Darwinian concept of man as descended from apes in a serious way. With the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, he hoped Arthur Erwin Brown, vice president and curator of the Academy of National Sciences of Philadelphia, would put all his anthropological articles and pamphlets on the subject of human evolution into a book. What could be more exciting work, Roosevelt thought, than tracing the real origins of man? Not for a minute, however, did he suggest that natural selection determined human advancement. He leaned toward eugenics but never accepted it. The species with the greatest fecundity—such as rats and mice—had hardly advanced up the biological pecking order. “It has always seemed to me that we should ultimately have to put the branching off of man’s direct ancestors from the mass of the other primates to a remote tertiary period,” Roosevelt wrote to Brown, “and I am interested in your view that the parent stem branched off directly from the early lemuroid forms, instead of from some monkeylike form after the latter had itself branched off. As I understand it, the belief now is that the existing species even of the sharply defined and small rhinoceros family represent three stems which have remained wholly distinct since eocene times.” 73
Besides birds and books at Sagamore Hill there were, of course, trips to be taken. Determined to get road dust on his shoes, he escorted Edith that May to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and went back to Colorado on his own to deliver a speech and gather more information about cougars for Merriam. There was also a side trip to give a lecture in Minnesota, where he sneaked some Mississippi River bird-watching into the itinerary. Basically, Roosevelt was trying to stay out of President McKinley’s way, avoiding the front page, presenting himself as a loyal lieutenant, not a usurper. He was cognizant that he might be able to run for president in 1904, and it was extremely important that he didn’t appear hungry for power. Roosevelt’s muse throughout these months was the always blunt Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted him to cool down the cougar-hunting heroics; they had the deleterious potential of making President McKinley think he was grandstanding in the Rockies for future western votes.
Roosevelt spent some of the summer writing essays on deer, cougar, and other North American big game. And then, time permitting, there would even be a Minnesota-Wisconsin series on wood animals like wolverines or badgers with sharp claws and flesh-eaters’ teeth that were difficult to tame. Having time on his hands, Roosevelt made arrangements to study law after the Senate reconvened in the fall, and he started collecting walking sticks as a hobby. “I have very ugly feelings now and then,” Roosevelt wrote to William Howard Taft that April, with a straight face, “that I am leading a life of unwarrantable idleness.”74
That summer Roosevelt also started boning up on Vermont’s enlightened conservationist laws. Although President McKinley was only moderately interested in conservation, Roosevelt—with the loyal Secretary Bliss at his side—believed he could increase America’s forest reserve acreage at the rate of something like three Delawares a year. Reserves aside, Roosevelt also wanted America to have the same strict game laws as Vermont. In early September, just when the apple orchards were bearing fruit, Roosevelt went up to the Green Mountains of Vermont on a fact-finding trip. He had never before visited Vermont in an official capacity. Basically he wanted to get places like Alaska, Colorado, Montana,