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T.R. with Charles W. Fairbanks. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

No matter how cold Fairbanks was, he couldn’t compare to the nearly lifeless Judge Alton B. Parker of New York, the Democratic presidential nominee. With the fiery William Jennings Bryan sitting out the 1904 election, Parker had been nominated over William Randolph Hearst. Parker was a decent, fair-minded appeals court judge, but the only real campaign issue he took up was getting the gold standard endorsed in the party’s platform. Also, Parker had what modern-day media consultants call an “image problem.” He always seemed to be overshadowed by rows of law books—not an uplifting quality in a national politician. And Parker didn’t take criticism well: he was thin-skinned. Worse, Parker’s choice for vice president was an eighty-one-year-old millionaire, Henry G. Davis of West Virginia, who helped finance the lackluster campaign with his own funds. All things considered, the famous Roosevelt luck was in play. There couldn’t have been two less inspiring candidates for Roosevelt and Fairbanks to run against than the humdrum Parker and Davis.

During the campaign, with the media covering little else, Roosevelt appointed his “golden trout watcher,” Stewart Edward White, as a special inspector for the California forest reserves. White’s job was to stop illegal tree destruction and clear-cutting. Roosevelt also asked him to write a hunter-naturalist’s book about big game in California; it would be a sorely needed addition to America’s naturalist library. Meanwhile, Theodore’s fatherly letters to Kermit, who was attending Groton in Massachusetts, were full of anecdotes about hiking from the White House to Chain Bridge along the Potomac, and descriptions of the autumn foliage—the rusty leaves of the Virginia creepers and the brilliant saffron tones of the beeches, birches, and hickories. Only in the last paragraphs of the letter of October 15, as if embarrassed, did Roosevelt mention the fact that the Democratic Party was besmirching his reputation. “In politics things at the moment seem to look quite right,” he told Kermit, “but every form of lie is being circulated by the democrats, and they intend undoubtedly to spring all kinds of sensational untruths at the very end of the campaign.”53

Roosevelt had a lot to boast about on the campaign trail. For starters, nobody doubted that he was the titular head of the Republican Party. If Roosevelt had jotted down on a three- by five-inch card his list of his historic accomplishments since becoming president, he could have listed the Panama Canal, the forming of a Department of Commerce and Labor (in conjunction with the Bureau of Corporations), settling a boundary dispute with Canada over Alaska, avoiding war with Britain over Venezuela (by going through the Hague Commission), siding with mine workers in the anthracite coal strike, launching numerous antitrust suits against monopolies like the Northern Securities Company (these suits were intended to ensure that rich and poor were equal under the law). With regard to racial matters, he had stood up to bigots in the U.S. Senate such as Edward Carmack of Tennessee and Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina. In the area of conservation, Roosevelt had created three national parks, twenty-nine national forests, and two federal bird reservations. His emphasis on irrigating the West was making human settlement in the arid zones of Arizona, Nevada, and California possible. (Although this was not understood at the time, western reclamation led to overconsump-tion of water and fertilizer and in that regard proved extremely harmful to the environment.)

So when President Roosevelt wrote to Kermit, a week before Election Day, about a “big sum of substantive achievement” he wasn’t boasting falsely. Still, his successes were of the executive kind; his record of working with Congress was mediocre at best. Only his close alliance with Lacey had paid dividends. “Now as to