The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [429]
In the West, cowboys played a game called “chapping,” slapping one another with leather chaps to see who would cry uncle first. During the spring of 1907 Roosevelt was engaged in chapping with big timber, in particular. Circumventing Congress, he began appealing directly to the general public in his addresses about conservation. In a sadistic way that no historian, no journalist, and no political commentator can overstate, Roosevelt enjoyed making the timber companies suffer. What infuriated his opponents was how he appealed directly to the public, with prosecutorial zeal. It unnerved them. The press always allowed Roosevelt to cloak his conservationism in patriotism and morality—and the newspapers’ readers in the nonwestern and southern states fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
No president ever manipulated the press with the consummate skill of Roosevelt. Part of his cunning was treating even minor journalists as if they mattered. Reporters, as a rule full of self-importance, used the fact that Roosevelt was a man of letters, a member of their tribe, to justify their puffery. A voracious bibliophile, inspired by the Saint Augustine admonition to (“Take up, read!”), Roosevelt never missed a major article in any contemporary periodical, even an obscure academic journal. As Roosevelt liked to joke, he was at heart a “literary feller.” The novelist Ellen Glasow tried to explain why, against her better instincts, she regularly surrendered to Roosevelt’s bravado. She believed that Roosevelt had “dubious literary insight,” but she confessed that he also had a strange “human magnetism.”18
Another factor also aided Roosevelt’s career. As the historian Ron Chernow has pointed out indirectly in Titan, Roosevelt was a direct beneficiary of “a newly assertive press.” Thanks to two technological developments—linotype and photoengraving—the number of glossy magazines proliferated during the Roosevelt era. Too often, Chernow believes, historians have focused on the “strident tabloids” and “yellow journalism” of the period.19 The circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, for example, were an impetus for sensational copy.20 But this was also a serious era, when investigative reporting was significant. Periodicals like McClure’s, Outlook, and Scribner’s Magazine loved Roosevelt for two primary reasons: he wrote for them and he applauded their exposés of corporate corruption. Add into the mix the sheer electricity that Roosevelt produced in his public appearances, the way he sucked the air out of any room, and the trust titans didn’t have a chance. Roosevelt didn’t lull reporters’ sense of right and wrong; he challenged them to write the right thing by flattery and by making good copy.
A case in point occurred on April 14, when Roosevelt delivered a major policy address on Arbor Day, promoting trees. His message was direct: posterity would weave no garland for farmers who overharvested trees and didn’t plant new ones. Roosevelt was sure of that. Arbor Day, to Roosevelt, was a holiday to equal the Fourth of July. It had started in 1872, when Nebraska had very few trees: the state board of agriculture had sensibly distributed elms, oaks, and pine seeds for citizens to plant. Arbor Day evolved into a competition in which cash prizes were awarded to whoever planted the most trees. According to the Omaha World-Herald, more than 1 million trees were planted on the first Arbor Day. What began as a state holiday in Nebraska soon became a national effort.21 Many states held annual spring Arbor Day events. Now Roosevelt—with western senators and Rockefeller’s supporters clamoring for his head—transformed Arbor Day 1907 into a rallying cry for his visionary conservationist policies. To an audience made up of children from the Washington, D.C. area, Roosevelt preached the wonders of national forests. “It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation’s need of trees will become serious,” he said. “We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though