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the election chances,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit. “At present it looks as if the odds were in my favor, but I have no idea whether this appearance is deceptive or not. I am a very positive man, and in consequence I both attract supporters and make enemies that he [Parker] does not, in a way that he cannot.” Enemies of Roosevelt included Collier’s Weekly and the Evening Post, racist southerners, railroad companies, western developers, timber and mining concerns, Wall Street financiers, and the great capitalists (with the exception of Andrew Carnegie and a few others). The Standard Oil Company had publicly attacked Roosevelt when his administration established the Bureau of Corporation, seen by the Rockefeller crowd as an insult and as antagonistic to big oil. In the weeks before the election, sensing that Roosevelt was going to win, Standard Oil wrote a $100,000 check for his campaign fund. Boldly, Roosevelt rejected the money, asking that the donation be returned, not wanting to be tainted by oil money. Roosevelt insisted that presidents during the automobile age could not, under any circumstances, afford to take a contribution “from an oil company seeking government influence.”*54

IV

On November 8, 1904, Roosevelt won a decisive victory over Alton Parker, with 336 electoral votes to 140. The socialist Eugene V. Debs had run as a third-party but didn’t earn a single electoral vote. Roosevelt had earned the White House. This was, in fact, the largest plurality for a U.S. president up until that time. As for Congress, the Republicans swept both houses, picking up many new seats. It’s been estimated that about thirty of the freshman Republican legislators elected were ardent Rooseveltian conservationists. Because Roosevelt had publicly pledged that he would not run again in 1908 (a decision he came to regret), he was free to push forward his ideas on national forests, wildlife protection, western irrigation, and federal bird reservations. Ironically, Roosevelt’s premature pledge not to run again had the beneficial effect of letting him be more aggressive about creating forest reserves. He had learned something from the way President Cleveland had protected 21 million acres before leaving the White House in 1897. Responding to a congratulatory note from Owen Wister, Roosevelt bragged about his successes in irrigation and forestry, claiming he had the “college bred” men of the country on his side.55 With executive power and no more elections, Roosevelt was off to the races regarding conservation—he was determined to create a new environmental infrastructure for America, one that would become a triumph of twentieth-century policy and planning.

When word of Roosevelt’s election went out on the AP and UPI wires, telegrams of congratulations poured into the White House from all over the world: the writers included Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Emperor Meiji of Japan, and Prime Minister Balfour of Great Britain. Only one world leader, however, was clever enough to have sent congratulatory gifts before election day, anticipating Roosevelt’s victory: Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia had sent two monkeys, two ostriches, one zebra, and one lioness on the Atlantic Transport liner Minneapolis.56 Menelik wanted Roosevelt to receive the gifts on election night—and he did. Roosevelt was impressed and promptly saw to it that the animals were donated to zoos. A year later three huge elephant tusks arrived from Menelik—one of them was nine feet long. Roosevelt donated two of these to the National Museum and kept one for himself.*57

A few days after his election a confident Roosevelt, usually shy about fund-raising, asked Andrew Carnegie directly to fund a forest museum and library that Pinchot had been promoting; it would be a kind of Bronx Zoo for trees. (In 1901, Carnegie had formed the Carnegie Institution of Washington to “encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.”58) As Roosevelt saw it, the “forest life” museum would contain “specimens