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By Root 4325 0

salutes to Roosevelt as if he were the head of an old soldiers’ home—a position far more impressive to them than the presidency. In the most pugnacious speech of his western trip, delivered from a hastily constructed platform at the Mechanics’ Pavilion, Roosevelt declared that America’s destiny was on the Pacific Ocean. “Before I saw the Pacific slope I was an expansionist,” he said, “and after having seen it I fail to understand how—any man confident of his country’s greatness and glad that his country should challenge with proud confidence our mighty future—can be anything but an expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the progress of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the history of the world.”93

And the Californians cheered: the oyster pirates from Oakland, the grape growers of Napa Valley, the lumbermen from Marin County, the ragtag orphans from North Beach, the horse breeders from the San Joaquin Valley, the naval officers stationed at the Presidio, the old-time rustics from Point de Reyes, the fishermen from Sausalito, the dandies from Nob Hill, the restaurateurs from Chinatown, the academics from Berkeley, the avocado growers from Fallbrook, the raisin pickers from Fresno, the eggheads from Menlo Park, the flower merchants from Ventura, the old-time miners from the Sierras, and the buffalo soldiers providing backup Secret Service duty, in addition to every state bureaucrat and politician able to walk. A few Rough Riders had ventured north from Arizona—using their veterans’ pensions for train fare—hoping to rekindle remembrance of and pride in the Spanish-American War. And nature helped Roosevelt out. The May inrush of Pacific breeze stimulated the rally like a tonic. Newspapers tried to capture the collective energy of the throng, which hummed with the force of a bass organ pipe from Union Square all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

That May 13 in San Francisco marked the apogee of Roosevelt’s eventful days as president. All his nationalistic notions, it seemed, were pulled together into a credible narrative for the United States. To Roosevelt the main thrust of American history was western expansionism. The wars with Indians, redcoats, Mexicans, and Spaniards had been worth it. With the building of the Panama Canal the United States would have a two-ocean navy. With Hawaii and the Philippines the nation had steppingstone ports for the fabled China trade. America wasn’t going to be denied its economic empire. And California, he believed, was the gold star of empire. Of course, national politics was full of drum-beating American expansionists, imperialists, and proponents of manifest destiny. What was unique about President Roosevelt was his righteous insistence that Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the redwoods, Mount Olympus, the Painted Desert and so on were the rightful trophies of expansionism. As a conquering conservationist-preservationist he wanted them all saved. At a banquet at Cliff House, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt vowed that the aboriginal American spirit toward the wilderness had to flourish in the twentieth century. Nature was the great replenisher for the American people. His spirit deeply inspired by the beauty of the West, Roosevelt was a rare instance of constructive hyper-Americanism, since his message was that your state has something far more valuable than gold: green forests, sour green glades, box canyons, high plateaus, granitescapes, and lookouts around every bend. When it came to nature preservation, Roosevelt gushed a positively progressive effect onto the collective American psyche.

It’s been said by modern environmentalists that Roosevelt had a conflict of loyalties in the West between pro-growth policies like the Reclamation Act and pro-preservation policies like saving the redwoods. This is true. Basically, he wanted to have it both ways. Starting with Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River near Phoenix, Arizona, virtually every major waterway in the West was altered by environmentally destructive engineering projects that