The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [281]
Such was the power of a cartoonist and a stuffed toy.
II
For the last two or three months of 1902, President Roosevelt carefully weighed his options for where to create his inaugural forest reserve, taking extra precautions not to set off a firestorm in Colorado and Montana, where timber titans and sheep farmers were already on the verge of hanging him in effigy. Right after Christmas Roosevelt had written to Alexander Agassiz, president of the National Academy of Sciences (and son of the great Harvard zoologist) to help him launch a “comprehensive investigation” of the natural history of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Shrewdly, Roosevelt struck first on January 17, 1903, just after the Christmas holiday season ended, helped by recommendations from Agassiz and a report written by John Gifford of Florida (who was worried about the illegal felling of trees in Puerto Rico).34 Having risen to fame in the Caribbean as a Rough Rider, and deeply fascinated by the rare tropical wild-life that populated the rain forests, particularly the bright green Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vitatta), Roosevelt created the 28,000 acre Luquillo Forest Reserve (renamed the Luquillo National Forest in 1907).35
Nobody in official Washington objected to the Luquillo. Roosevelt would visit Puerto Rico himself in 1906 to see the rainforest firsthand; as an Auduboner he knew it was a famous aviary for parrots and banan-aquits. As further evidence of Roosevelt’s interest in tropical forests, as ex-president he went to the Amazon and wrote magnificently about them in “A Naturalist’s Tropical Laboratory,” an article for Scribner’s Magazine. “In the heat and moisture of the tropics the struggle for life among the forest trees and plants is far more intense than in the North,” he wrote. “The trees stand close together, tall and straight, and most of them without branches, until a great height has been reached; for they are striving toward the sun, and to reach it they must devote all their energies to producing a stem which will thrust its crown of leaves out of the gloom below into the riotous sunlight which bathes the billowy green upper plane of the forest. A huge buttressed giant keeps all the neighboring trees dwarfed, until it falls and yields its place in the sunlight to the most instantly vigorous of the trees it formerly suppressed.”36
From a political perspective creating the Puerto Rican rain forest park was a painless endeavor. In 1900 Puerto Rico had surrendered its sovereignty to the U.S. military authority. President McKinley had issued the Organic Act (known as the Foraker Law) establishing civil government and open commerce between Washington, D.C., and San Juan. Puerto Rico was declared America’s first unincorporated territory, and the new Puerto Rican government was assigned a governor appointed by the White House (Charles Herbert Allen), who was helped out by five Puerto Rican cabinet members. Treating Puerto Rico as part of the spoils of the Spanish-American War, the McKinley administration established free trade and a democratic electoral process. During the first full year of Roosevelt’s presidency a second round of elections was held (under the Foraker Act), a telephone company was established, and English was made one of the two official languages, along with Spanish. By the authority of a 1902 act of Congress, President Roosevelt was allowed to do as he saw fit with all “crown lands” ceded to America by Spain.
As with the Badlands and the Rockies, Roosevelt had adopted the Luquillo National Forest—the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. National Forest System—as an object of unending fascination and wonder. The Luquillo had a romantic lure that appealed to Roosevelt’s image of David Livingstone and to his sense of the lost jungle. With quiet reasoning T.R. studied every biotic aspect of the newly acquired sanctuary located on the east side of Puerto Rico, especially