The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [272]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI BEAR HUNT AND SAVING THE PUERTO RICAN PARROT
I
Deep in the southern Mississippi Delta near what was then the village of Smedes—on land situated between the Mississippi River to the west and the Little Sunflower River to the east—a historical marker in front of the Onward Store on Highway 61 now commemorates the most celebrated hunt in American history. In mid-November 1902 President Roosevelt, exhausted from mediating between mine owners and the striking members of the United Mine Workers (UMW), was in need of a short vacation. A few weeks earlier, public schools and government offices throughout the Northeast and Midwest had to be closed because there wasn’t enough coal to heat them, and the president had threatened to send federal troops to reopen the locked mines of Appalachia. Finally, a settlement was reached with the mine owners through arbitration, and a relieved Roosevelt was ready to go hunting.1 This particular six-day Mississippi expedition, from November 13 to 18, resulted in a stuffed animal different from the kind produced by taxidermy: the most popular toy ever manufactured—the teddy bear (plus several apocryphal hunting yarns that have masqueraded as fact for more than a century).2
After the coal crisis and the carriage crash, President Roosevelt eagerly accepted long-standing invitations from friends to come south for the bear hunting season. No state matters were going to detain him. An open air-vacation was to be the order of the day. The only real outdoors “breaks” he had in 1902 had been the Berkshires and a visit to the Bull Run Historic Battlefield to hunt for Virginia wild turkey on a chilly afternoon. He didn’t get one.3 Naturally, politics also figured into Roosevelt’s decision to go south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Mississippi’s newspapers and politicians had been attacking the president with a vengeance over the Booker T. Washington affair. The white supremacist James K. Vardaman was a divisive and contentious newspaper publisher, who had lost a race for the governorship to Andrew Longino (a moderate on racial issues). Vardaman had daggers out for the president. In addition to being a bigot, Vardaman was a gaffe machine, unable to achieve even a semblance of political correctness.4 When Democrats who favored Vardaman heard that Roosevelt was coming to Mississippi to hunt, they denounced the president as that “coon-flavored miscegenist in the White House” and a “nigger lover” hell-bent on destroying the last remnants of Confederate culture. Vardaman—like many white Southern Democrats—was still furious that this Republican president had invited Washington to dine at the White House the previous year. It was an unforgivable affront, he said, to Anglo-Saxon culture. Vardaman ran derogatory advertisements in newspapers in Jackson, Vicksburg, and Meridian in hopes of derailing the presidential trip. One read: “WANTED: 16 COONS TO SLEEP WITH ROOSEVELT WHEN HE COMES DOWN TO GO BEAR HUNTING WITH MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR LONGY.” Roosevelt’s claws of detractors were not limited to Southern Democrats. An anti-Roosevelt insurgency was brewing among the so-called “lily-white” Republicans, who wanted Mark Hanna to be the party’s presidential nominee in 1904.5
Roosevelt wasn’t intimidated by the vile accumulation of race baiting, but he was acutely aware that this hunt was going to be carefully followed by the press. The Illinois Central Railroad gladly took care of Roosevelt’s transportation. He, in turn, cut quite a figure on the 1,000-mile journey from Washington to the Mississippi delta. The towns his train thrummed through—Tunica, Dundee, Lula, Clarksdale, Bobo, Alligator, Hushpuck-ena, Mound Bayou, Cleveland, Leland, Estill, Panter Burn, Nitta Yuma, Aguilla, and Rolling Fork—are today on or near the American “blues highway,” considered by