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By Root 3997 0

wasn’t put in writing—he wasn’t that foolish—but the precondition was implied. In territories like New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma the president had the advantage (just as he did in establishing the Luquillo National Forest in Puerto Rico). Consultation wasn’t essential for action in de facto colonies. “The Territories are filled with men and women of the stamp of which I grew to feel so hearty a regard and respect during the years that I myself lived and worked on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains,” Roosevelt wrote to Mark A. Rodgers, secretary of the Arizona Statehood Association. “It was from these four Territories that I raised the regiment with which I took part in the Cuban campaign. Assuredly I would under no circumstances advise the people of these Territories to do anything that I considered to be against either their moral or their material well-being.” 42

Unquestionably, Roosevelt took a paternalistic attitude toward Arizona. He regarded Arizona’s mining, timber, and real estate interests with amused disdain, and with steadily increasing distrust. To most people on the Atlantic seaboard, Arizona seemed far, far away; but Roosevelt considered it his backyard. The Geological Survey had reported, gravely, that Arizona’s mineral deposits (except for coal) would be largely extracted by the end of the twentieth century as a result of overmining. This prediction caught Roosevelt’s full attention. The insatiable mining outfits would destroy wild Arizona if the federal government didn’t intervene.

Congressman Lacey was likewise disgusted by overindustrialization, but he took it as a given in the modern world. As Roosevelt saw it, the true enemies in the West were aridity, adroit political malfeasance, poaching of relics, and thieving of timber. Roosevelt failed to understand that his reclamation projects—especially hydroelectric dams—were aimed at dominating nature on behalf of settlers; they, too, ruined landscapes and made some regions dependent on federal funding. Lacey believed that the solution to western problems was more federal responsibility and preservationist morality, achieved by congressional authorization. But Congress seemed uninterested in the Four Corners region. Action was required. Roosevelt, the “preacher militant,” as of the summer of 1906, refused to accept a feather-duster approach to the Southwest. Roosevelt’s warrior side wanted to crush his enemies into the dust, not outfox them with legalities. To Roosevelt hate could be a creative impulse for the common good. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and national monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents’ faces in his wilderness philosophy of living.

Still, underlying Roosevelt’s hostility toward despoilers was his fear of America without a wilderness. Conservation was a way for Roosevelt to grapple with this anxiety. By saving heritage sites and forests, Roosevelt was providing a way for the body politic to stay healthy. By reclaiming the prehistoric past, Indian relics, volcanic mounds, hidden lakes, fish-filled streams, stands of trees, weird-looking buttes, desertscapes, and petrified wood, Roosevelt believed he could preserve the old pioneer spirit that had made American civilization so special. To Roosevelt, industrialization was a corrosive problem in that it led to urbanization, which in turn stripped citizens of their attachment to the land. A whole generation of youngsters were suffering from what we might now call a nature-deficiency disorder. It was the wilderness, Roosevelt insisted, with reverence, that made American special. The novelist Frank Norris had an octopus to war against—the huge agricultural concerns. Similarly, Roosevelt had the trust titans to rally against, because their concept of laissez-faire economics was unpatriotic. They valued money more than Old Faithful or the Great Smoky Mountains. “If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers,” Burroughs commented about the naturalists around Roosevelt in 1905 “we go to woods much more, and are much