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By Root 4326 0

T.R. OK’d. Roosevelt saw himself as the master preservationist but also beamed as a master builder. Save the Grand Canyon while building the Roosevelt Dam—that was his conservationist policy. To Roosevelt, conservation could be another form of conquest; development and protection working in harmony for an Edenic civilization. When push came to shove, economic growth often took precedence over his preservationism. He made his decisions case by case. Conservation as big business was regularly given precedence over conservation as protection—but there were many exceptions. Over the decades, this has made him something of a bogeyman to the Sierra Club types. Following President Dwight Eisenhower’s speech about the industrial-military complex in 1961, for example, Roosevelt’s Reclamation Service was denounced by anti-war enviromentalists like Dave Brower and Wallace Stesner as scientific capitalism run amok. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, historians lacerated Roosevelt for his imperialistic views, which they equated with the policies that had led to Vietnam. And, unlike John Wesley Powell, a generation of enviromental historians led by Donald Worster complained, Roosevelt liked big dams—big everything, including a big intrusive federal government.

But the anti-Roosevelt critics went too far. President Lyndon Johnson’s entire “New Conservationism” of the 1960s was purposefully modeled on ideals T.R. had first propounded. And modern environmentalists were aware that Roosevelt had also liked big national forests: in 1908, for example, he created the Tongass National Forest, which stretched over 500 miles from north to south in Alaska and included more than 11,000 miles of rugged coastline (a figure equal to nearly 50 percent of the entire coastline of the lower forty-eight.) 94 As Roosevelt’s attitude toward the redwoods showed during this California trip, he was emotionally a forest preservationist while politically a utilitarian conservationist. It was the right combination for his times. But never for a moment did Roosevelt purposely seek to abuse the American West in any way. But such sincerity had its limits: Roosevelt lacked self-awareness regarding his very real contradiction, his insistence on bigness wrought on the western landscape. Yet, always, he wanted to create model cities surrounded by greenbelts of wilderness. He was a promoter of sustainability before the concept came into vogue during the Clinton era of the 1990s.

Journalists throughout California commented on how hard Roosevelt was working during his two-week statewide tour to inject conservation into the political bloodstream. The Los Angeles Times wrote of his “strenuosity,” and the Oakland Tribune called him a “drayhorse working every hour.”95 And although she was not involved in policy, the first lady did participate in tree (or at least shrubbery) preservation in the East. Edith Roosevelt was making news by objecting publicly when remodelers at the White House wanted to remove more than seventy bushes from the terrace. She had grown fond of the shrubbery and wanted it to stay put. Even when she was told that the bushes would be carefully removed and replanted in New Jersey, she insisted that they be left unmarred and unmoved.

VII

After shaking so many hands, Roosevelt needed an outdoor adventure in the Sierras. Shortly after midnight on May 15 he left San Francisco for Yosemite Valley with an honorary doctorate from the University of California–Berkeley in hand. Accompanying him was his delegation, which included the Sierra Club’s president, John Muir; Governor George C. Pardee of California; and Benjamin Wheeler, president of the University of California–Berkeley. The party enjoyed the scenic mountain ramparts en route, and then Roosevelt’s train stopped at Raymond, the railroad depot closest to Yosemite. Three previous U.S. presidents had visited Yosemite—James Garfield in 1875, Ulysses S. Grant in 1879, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1885—but not while in office, so Roosevelt’s visit was a first. And instead of coming to the national park merely as