The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [399]
Roosevelt actually wanted Standard Oil of New Jersey (a holding company, which controlled more than sixty other companies) dissolved. He felt virtuously outraged by Rockefeller and others who always had a price and were never concerned about the dignity of land. So while Roosevelt was on the offensive to save places like Devils Tower and the Petrified Forest of Arizona in 1906, he was also on the warpath against the “swine,” corporate types like Rockefeller who were interested only in personal enrichment. By contrast, Roosevelt himself was concerned for public enrichment, and his trust-busting was making him wildly popular. Building on the damning evidence amassed by Ida Tarbell in her two-volume History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Roosevelt had his Bureau of Corporations further investigate the oil industries; a report was due in the summer of 1907. This was part of Roosevelt’s “campaign against privilege,” which was “fundamentally an ethical movement.”9
II
Saving Devils Tower and the Petrified Forest was on Roosevelt’s mind during early January 1906, when he learned that his trusted hunting guide in Colorado, John Goff, had been mauled by a cornered cougar. Roosevelt seemed more grimly interested in how the cougar had attacked Goff than in how many stitches Goff needed. Did the cougar lunge? Was it rabid? Or had it been protecting cubs? How deep were the incisions? “Do let me know about it,” President Roosevelt anxiously wrote to Yellowstone Park’s superintendent, John Pitcher. “I am interested for Johnny’s sake, and besides, I have a zoological interest and am anxious to know how the job was done.”10
Roosevelt was highly attuned to western affairs that January. Even though he was fighting for appropriations to build the Panama Canal, passing legislation concerning railway rates, and calculating a tariff for the Philippines, he vigorously championed statehood for the three western territories of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. In addition, the process for creating Sevier National Forest in south central Utah began that January (eventually, more than 375,000 acres were set aside by the U.S. Forest Service). Utah’s Great Basin—known for spectacular canyon scenery—was becoming a federally protected wonderland. In Utah, communities like Ogden, Salt Lake City, or Provo seemed like run-of-the-mill settlements compared with the magnificence of the canyonlands.
There were also hard fought battles going on in Colorado, pitting railroads against coal companies over land. Roosevelt jumped right into the controversy with shirtsleeves rolled up, like a negotiator for labor and management. In Idaho and Montana, angry miners were starting to organize behind radical groups, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), which had been founded in June 1905. Roosevelt insisted that the so-called Wobbly syndicalists (Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, and other industrial unionists) must be law-abiding and operate without violence. To Roosevelt the danger of industrial unionism was that its proponents saw it as superior to Americanism. The IWW had been created, in part, because the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had organized only 5 percent of the nation’s workers. Roosevelt didn’t care for the IWW, for two specific reasons: it was trying to monopolize labor, and it was a threat to free-market capitalism. And Roosevelt, refusing to be intimidated, sent federal troops into Goldfield, Nevada, to crush a miners’ strike. He deemed the protest harmful to the nation. “I wish labor people absolutely to understand that I set my face like flint against violence and lawlessness of any kind on their part,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, “just as much as against arrogant greed by the rich.”11
It would take a good psychiatrist to understand why Roosevelt hated anarchy in any guise. If there wasn’t order, he couldn’t function properly.