The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [430]
The eastern press loved this lecture. The Washington Post covered it on the front page under the headline “President for Trees.” 23 But Senator Fulton considered it a sickening spectacle of Roosevelt manipulating the press. “A people without children would face a hopeless future: a country without trees is almost as hopeless,” Roosevelt had said. “Forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves would soon vanish, and with them all their benefits. A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood, and at the same time a reservoir of water. When you help to preserve our forests or to plant new ones, you are acting the part of good citizens. The value of forestry deserves, therefore, is to be taught in the schools.” 24
Roosevelt kept saying that the “shortsightedness” of deforestation would be solved only by planting trees and reducing lumbering. However, with regard to forest reserves—unlike national monuments—after March 1907 Roosevelt was still forced to work with an irritated Congress on bills aimed at purchasing for the federal government great forest reserves in the White Mountains and Southern Appalachians. Many congressmen felt bruised by Roosevelt’s obvious contempt for them. They were hardly in the mood to squander political capital for the sake of his eccentricities. “The only agreement of the bills,” Roosevelt lamented to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, “is that of their great expense.” Roosevelt had calculated which states were doing a good job of preserving forests (New York and Pennsylvania) and which states weren’t (Michigan and Wisconsin). What brought him great pride was that the western states were far more fortunate than “their eastern sisters” because his administration had shoved “requisite foresight” down their throats.25 Not on his watch would America become a lumber exporter to the world.
III
That same spring Roosevelt had received the report by the Bureau of Corporations on the unlawful activities of Standard Oil of New Jersey. It infuriated Roosevelt no end: Standard Oil had engaged in price-cutting practices, collusive deals, public misinformation, and so on. How to deal with such abuses? First, Roosevelt increased his calls for much stronger regulation of corporations. This infuriated conservative Republicans, but Roosevelt knew that it was good politics. The banking system and the stock market were going through a severe downturn. Why not make the petroleum industry the scapegoat? The Roosevelt administration issued seven lawsuits against Standard Oil and its subsidiaries (these lawsuits were coupled with numerous antitrust cases that state attorneys general issued). Part of Roosevelt’s motivation was trust-busting as nation-building. Criticism was hurled at Roosevelt by Wall Street financiers who claimed that he was stifling the stock market with his gloomy pronouncements. By dismembering Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad, Roosevelt was trying to show that the United States was run by the federal government, not by self-interested capitalists with huge bank accounts and no scruples. To Roosevelt, men like Rockefeller and Harriman were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”26
Roosevelt loved Arbor Day because it gave American citizens a chance to do something productive. Every April new trees would be planted across America.
T.R. at Arbor Day tree planting. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Even though gasoline automobiles had infiltrated Washington, D.C., in 1907, Roosevelt insisted on either speed-walking or horseback riding around town. Cars didn’t appeal to him—the idea of placing gasoline on top of a hot engine seemed perverse and worrisome, and the rumble of engines scared