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and foremost a bird preservationist whereas Pinchot was not). And they both enjoyed night work and end-of-the-day confidences. “They were appalled by the human destruction of nature everywhere visible in early twentieth-century America,” the historian Char Miller has noted. “The solution, they believed, lay in Federal regulation of the public lands and, where appropriate, scientific management of these land’s natural resources; only this approach, guided by appropriate experts, would ensure the land’s survival. So parallel ran their thoughts that Roosevelt reportedly assured Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine, that on questions of conservation the chief forester was in truth the keeper of conscience.”27

Not only did Pinchot agree to run the Division of Forestry in Interior, but over Thanksgiving he inserted paragraphs about conservation into the December 3 annual message. To many western senators these insertions were out-and-out heresy. The intensity and boldness of Roosevelt’s address, read by a clerk (as was traditional), encouraged conservation enthusiasts on many levels, though the speech was somewhat short on details. And it wasn’t just a cranky outburst. It was hard-core Rooseveltian conservationist philosophy, presented on the nation’s center stage. For those familiar with Roosevelt’s allegiance to the Boone and Crockett Club and various Audubon societies, it wasn’t very shocking—but the sheer breadth of the wildlife protection plank was unexpected. Even though most New Yorkers had accustomed themselves to the proposition that the sportsman Roosevelt, when it came to wildlife protection or forestry policy, was never content to be a spectator, Congressmen on both sides of the aisle were surprised by the piercing vigor of his conservationist agenda.

Nobody has recalled President Roosevelt’s First Annual Message with such elegance and insight as historian Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex. Combining actual passages of Roosevelt’s address with vivid descriptions of individual legislators and the atmosphere, Morris wrote about that frigid December day as if he had been sitting in the visitors’ gallery witnessing history.28 Regardless of its overall eloquence, the annual message consisted of important reports and helpful comments that the White House had received from various departments (in other words, it was cobbled together).29 For starters Roosevelt, in strong language, condemned filthy anarchists; he was seething because three presidents in his lifetime had been struck down in their prime by lunatics. Thunderous applause arose from Congress as the clerk, reading Roosevelt’s bracing prose, exclaimed with pent-up frustration that the American people, usually “slow to wrath,” when “kindled” (by an anarchistic abomination like the murder of McKinley) ignited like a “consuming flame.”30 As president he planned on ridding the nation of anarchists, sending them scurrying like mice across the floorboards of national life.

Although Roosevelt offered some uplifting chamber of commerce-like pronouncements about improved business confidence, his address was notable for its stinging language about corporate trust-busting. Industrialists interpreted the address as a sneer from the pulpit. Clearly, Roosevelt planned on restraining the business class, and even openly challenging it over stock market manipulations and monopolist attitudes. Throughout the Gilded Age huge corporations worked overtime to abuse the public welfare, affecting millions of Americans; such abuses were going to be curtailed with Roosevelt in the White House. He promoted immediate federal intervention in regulating corporations. And—like a boot stuck in mud suddenly coming free—he said that workers were no longer going to be treated as industrial wage slaves. Demanding improved labor laws, Roosevelt lambasted, as Morris puts it, politicians that were “fattened at the public trough.”31 Many of those seated—particularly senators from the Deep South still furious over the Booker T. Washington affair—were leaning forward with fingers clasped and