The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [442]
Much as H. L. Mencken or (in our own time) Maureen Dowd cleverly attacked politicians, Twain started eviscerating Roosevelt, deriding the president as one of the most “impulsive men in existence.” Twain was baffled as to why the president was so widely admired as an embodiment of America malehood. Solve that mystery, and you would know the soul of the American people in all their cruelty and glory. Typically, Twain provided his own answer, saying that Roosevelt would “slap the Devil on his back and shoulder and say ‘Why Satan, how do you do? I am so glad to meet you. I’ve read all your books and enjoyed every one of them.’ Who wouldn’t be popular with an act like that?”
Twain’s feud with Roosevelt dated back to 1898, when they had opposing views of the Spanish-American War. Twain was twenty-three years older than Roosevelt, and the generational gap was a factor in his antagonism. Believing that his own hard-earned wisdom was much richer than Roosevelt’s impetuous vitality, Twain differed with Roosevelt on issues such as England against the Boers in South Africa and the revolution in Panama. But something more than foreign policy or disagreements over imperialism erected a barricade between these two colorful figures. Roosevelt’s idea of great literature tended to lean toward swashbuckling epics and romantic sagas. He disdained cynicism, irreverence, and irony in books; but all three attributes were Twain’s trademarks. Roosevelt did, however, consider Twain a “real genius” and thought that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi were three all-time American “classics.” But he disliked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court because it mocked the noblemen of the Round Table.63
What Twain was chastising Roosevelt about in 1907 was the Boone and Crockett Club’s “hunting ethos.” As Twain saw it, Roosevelt and other elite hunters would always stalk the largest male big game, the animals with the biggest antlers, tusks, heads, or necks. These hunters, then, were obsessed with bigness. Some modern scientists now believe that Twain was on to something—that, perversely, such selective hunting causes the decline of the very species that elite outdoorsmen want saved. If Charles Darwin was correct in saying that “a law” was the “ascertained sequence of events,” then the shrinking of antler and horn sizes by the twenty-first century was probably an unintended result of hunters’ aiming particularly at game with large antlers and horns. In a landmark report in the January 2009 issue of Proceedings of National Academy of Science, Professor Chris Darimont of the University of California-Santa Cruz offered startling data about the fate of Canadian bighorn sheep’s shrinking curved horns. According to Darimont, modern-day hunters, by aiming for the “mightiest” and “lordliest” big game, had left surviving generations with a noticeably slimmer, less sturdy gene pool. “Human-harvested organisms,” Darimont told National Geographic, regarding his findings, “are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild.”64
What the National Academy of Science was claiming in 2009 turned the Rooseveltian sportsman’s ethos on its head while proving Darwin’s theory of natural selection once again prescient. Natural selection occurred quickly in the hypertechnological twenty-first century. Trophy hunting and pound-fishing for the biggest quarry were injuring species’ long-term chances for survival.65 “Hunting, commercial fishing, and some conservation regulations like minimum size