The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [250]
Overnight, from the relative obscurity of the vice presidency, Roosevelt was now in a governmental position where his every action could be a thunderbolt. The subtle hazards and perils of being president never dawned on him. He was all forward motion, ready to rule by righteousness and a bit of the belt. A friend once famously quipped that Roosevelt was “the meteor of the age,”2 imbued with unshakable self-confidence in his own ideas. In power of mind and disposition Roosevelt was an old-school military disciplinarian type always shouting “Charge!” and galloping up policy hills with flamboyant bravado. There was nothing fussy about him. Largely disdainful of automobiles and the telephone, Roosevelt remained a twentieth century saddle-horse man who favored written correspondence as his primary mode of communication.3 Untiring at his desk, vigorous and direct in his opinions, he was a virtual writing machine. It’s been estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters in his lifetime. (Harvard University Press published eight thick volumes of them between 1951 and 1954; these are, in effect, an epistolary biography of Roosevelt.) These letters were like chess moves to Roosevelt, helping keep his hyperactive mind fresh and his fighting instinct well honed. “Now talking with Roosevelt often does no good because he does all the talking,” William Allen White noted in December 1901. “But when you write him and he can’t talk back you get a chance to put in more.”4
After only a few days in office Roosevelt started bombarding western friends with exhortations to gear up for a fight to protect America’s heritage. According to the Forest Management Act of 1897, timber and water were the only natural resources that the U.S. government was officially sanctioned to protect inside forest reserves. Therefore, this stop-gap act had opened forest reserves to mining claims. And it ignored foraging because allowing livestock to graze in the reserves was still being hotly debated in Congress. Within a few weeks Roosevelt made it clear that his administration would keep voracious sheep—those goddamn hoofed locusts—out of the forest reserves. “Intellectually a sheep is about on the lowest level of the brute creation,” Roosevelt had written; “why the early Christians admired it, whether young or old is…always a profound mystery.”5 Roosevelt made it clear that sheepherders, or borregueros in the west, would be arrested if they trespassed on federal property. Instead, Roosevelt wanted to promote big game in its old, pre-Columbian range. Roosevelt insisted that white-tailed deer rather than livestock of any sort should populate places like the northern Arizona plateau. Eventually, after seven and a half years as president, he won that specific debate. There are literally hundreds of instances in which Rooseveltian wildlife protection trumped grazing. For example, when Roosevelt became president the Kaibab Forest of Arizona had only about 2,000 deer. Owing to Rooseveltian game management principles, this number swelled to 100,000 within a decade.6 And not a single sheep’s bleat could be heard in the Kaibab Forest.
Furthermore, Roosevelt built on postulations promoted by Charles D. Walcott (director of the U.S. Geological Survey), who insisted that there were “sentimental” reasons to save forests; they had recreational as well as commercial value. But before Roosevelt’s “new conservationism” could soar, the obligations of continuity and stability were met as protocol dictated. Roosevelt retained stalwarts from the McKinley administration—notably Secretary of State John Hay and Secretary of War Elihu Root—to reassure the nation regarding foreign affairs. The American government would not abandon Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines on his imperialistic watch. There was only one clear deviation in foreign policy. A more energetic push for an isthmus canal would be prioritized; it was a pet issue for Roosevelt.