The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [425]
With the success of the Antiquities Act in 1906, Roosevelt had become even more dangerous to western developers, railroad companies, and oil companies. He usually donned a Stetson hat and often wore a bandanna around his neck, and his public rhetoric was full of western toponyms, cowboyisms, and Indian words not often heard in the East. From the White House, he was playing a Rocky Mountain man to help sell his radical conservationism. The oilmen, land developers, and trust titans wanted to see Roosevelt relegated to the sidelines of public life, like John F. Lacey. Instead, they had to confront not only Roosevelt but also Garfield. The timber industry believed that T.R.’s excessive conservationist initiatives were symptoms of his having gone berserk. But such hostility only encouraged Roosevelt to thrust himself forward as the true guardian of America’s natural resources. Figuratively, conservationism was simply the wise, righteous preservation of the American way, the prerequisite to Roosevelt’s building a republic like none other. “The grazing states, especially Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, protested vigorously against the new policies,” the historian Roy M. Robbins noted in Our Landed Heritage. “The stockmen of these states were compelled to use the meadows in the reserves inasmuch as the lower plains gave out during hot weather. The sheepmen were especially anxious, for fear that government regulation would curtail their operations in favor of cattle interests. Both those groups looked with suspicion upon policy which seemed to favor the homesteader.”5
Working closely with Pinchot, Roosevelt began scheming for innovative ways to create dozens of new national forests before Congress reconvened on March 3. These forests would humanize the soul—if not, the Dark Ages would come to America (or so Roosevelt supposed). On February 23, 1907, in fact, a disgusted senator—Charles Fulton of Oregon, a fellow Republican—introduced the following amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill: “hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the State of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress.”6
Fulton believed the whole Antiquities Act was nonsense and had to be curtailed. He was sick and tired of arrogant executive orders that gave petrified logs and spotted owls priority over business profits. Also, Fulton said, the lowly settler and the poor farmer were being denied the same rich timberlands by the Roosevelt administration. This was a grim consequence of the government’s irresponsible hoarding of resources.
Roosevelt’s answer to Fulton was dramatic. On March 2, 1907—four days before the amendment was slated for a vote—Roosevelt released a document to Congress as a presidential fait accompli. Thirty-two new forest reserves had been created, seemingly overnight. Behind each forest listed were snatches of complicated conversations his representatives had conducted with state legislators and land managers about soil erosion, runoff, and deforestation. Numerous papers, passes, exemptions, validations, dues, expansions, and