The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [348]
Now, with the western trek finished, Roosevelt was ready to make the badger instead of the teddy bear his political symbol. After all, 1904 was an election year and the president wanted to rip the Bryan Democrats and the big-business Republicans to shreds for—among many other things—not understanding the imperatives of preservation, which had become synonymous with the type of progressivism known as Rooseveltian conservationism. The Great Loop journey had convinced Roosevelt not only that his conservationist agenda was on track in the West, but that it needed to be amplified for the ages. And his friendships with Muir, Burroughs, and Finley—key allies—had been enhanced.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BEAUTY UNMARRED: WINNING THE WHITE HOUSE IN 1904
I
President Roosevelt started 1904 by writing a spate of letters to family and various friends. The contents were history, and nothing seemed off-limits. Showing a considerable breadth of knowledge, Roosevelt mused about everything from “pagan” Rome to nineteenth-century naval power. Outdoing himself as an intellectual president, perhaps even equaling Jefferson in bookishness, Roosevelt contemplated the lasting achievements of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Milton, and a dozen others. It was as if Roosevelt was trying to see where he himself fit into world history. Interestingly, he seemed to feel compelled to insist that Francis Parkman—who had died in 1893—was a more talented historian than the entire American Historical Association membership combined. In Roosevelt’s book Hero Tales from American History, in fact, Parkman was considered on equal terms with the likes of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. “He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships, living in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a band of Ogallalla Indians,” Roosevelt noted after his idol’s death. “With them he remained despite his physical suffering, and from them he learned, as he could not have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was.”1
As president, Roosevelt began using Sir George Otto Trevelyan, author of Life of Macaulay, as his chief historian correspondent. Roosevelt, even though he was grappling with international crises in Japan, Russia, Colombia, and Morocco (and in a presidential election year), found time to reflect with Trevelyan on the need for more “faunal naturalists” in the grand tradition of John James Audubon. Perturbed by the germanization (i.e., overspecialization) of American colleges and universities—which Roosevelt continued to believe were strangling the talent out of the new generation of naturalists—the president lamented the unfortunate triumph of the pedantic, petty twentieth-century men who had contaminated history with dullness: there was a “lamentable dearth in America,” the president wrote, of new naturalist work of “notable and permanent value” in the tradition of Audubon, Thoreau, and Burroughs.2
Forty-five years earlier the world had received Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, followed by The Descent of Man. Roosevelt now wondered what had happened in the naturalist field since then that was truly innovative and exciting. All America had to offer the post-Darwinian world was Dr. C. Hart Merriam of the Biological Survey, who was a “great mammalogist” but apparently had no ability to write triumphant, redefining zoological works. The fact that Merriam wasn’t producing a big book continued to perturb Roosevelt. “[Merriam]