The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [424]
Roosevelt wanted somebody to go after the perpetrators of land fraud in the West, a fellow Republican progressive unafraid of controversy. Garfield was his beau ideal. The handsome forty-two-year-old Garfield had served in the Ohio state senate from 1896 to 1899. He was rara avis because of his old-fashioned sense of bedrock loyalty, always a character trait in short supply. As a silver-star bonus, Garfield was the son of James A. Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, and had been weaned on national politics. For all their differences, Roosevelt knew that the elder Garfield had been a man of biting intelligence. Young James was a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, when his father was assassinated and he had witnessed the ghastly shooting, which happened at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C., during his summer break. Somehow he had absorbed the assassination faster than much of the country did, and he refused to let the tragedy derail his ambition. In 1881 he enrolled at Williams College, where he earned straight A grades. Following college Garfield earned a J.D. degree from Columbia University, developing a formidable, Rooseveltian prosecutorial bent. Garfield wasn’t afraid to rouse lions from their lairs in the name of good government.
“Teddy in Timberland” was a popular cartoon that ran in syndication.
“Presidential Timberland.” (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)
From 1902 to 1903 Garfield was Roosevelt’s eyes and ears at the U.S. Civil Service Commission. His professional attitude was characterized by following orders and saying “Yes sir.” Bosses, including Roosevelt, naturally admired that sort of man; and in addition, Garfield was competent. He was promoted to commissioner of corporations at the Department of Commerce and Labor. With the zeal of Lincoln Steffens he lashed out against the corrupt industries of the era: oil, steel, railroads, and meatpacking. Perhaps Garfield was only following orders, but he seemed to relish what we might now describe as being Roosevelt’s pit bull. At the very least Garfield understood that the fight for national forestry would be prolonged and intense. Now, in early 1907, Roosevelt wanted to sic Garfield on the timber thieves and land hustlers. As Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Garfield saw it, forestry was a science based on truth—not a political game in which you tried to score points in order to be reelected. “He has a man’s job before him now,” the Washington Post wrote of Garfield that spring. “The Department of the Interior controls the public domain, the forests, the Indians, the patents, the pensions, the Bureau of Education, the Geological Survey, and the Reclamation Service. All the land grafters, all the Indian grafters, all the sharks who are trying to get the timber and the oil and the coal for nothing must come to him and pass under his eye.”2
The unflappable Garfield immediately was in full stride, walking directly into the line of fire. When the Republican Party lost House seats, pro-business newspapers started attacking Roosevelt for his antagonistic attitude toward Wall Street, big timber, and Standard Oil. For example, Edward Payson Ripley, president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, said that Roosevelt didn’t have the public interest at heart in creating forest reserves and national monuments. To Ripley, Roosevelt was simply obsessed with the wilderness. The railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman—who had sponsored the Alaska expedition that included Dr. C. Hart Merriam and John Burroughs, had a similar opinion—deeming Roosevelt a self-promoter and a traitor to his class. Roosevelt,