The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [476]
For those Arizonans displaced by the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt could muster little sympathy. He saw only their greed or simplicity, and he firmly believed that when archaic land claims from the mid-nineteenth century clashed with the moral imperatives of the progressive era, morality must win out. Beyond that, however, this was a struggle between personal profit and the public good. The country’s future depended on the outcome. So he took a stand. The resources of the Arizona Territory belonged not to local residents only, but to all Americans. Arizonans would have to shake off ignorance and accept that the Grand Canyon was a national treasure. His former Rough Riders who lived in the territory had already done so.
When Benjamin Harrison was a U.S. senator, after Reconstruction, he had introduced legislation in 1882, 1883, and 1886 to preserve the Grand Canyon as a “public park.” The bills had all perished in committee. When he became president, he used his new executive powers to create the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve. But Harrison’s legislation had allowed entrepreneurs to construct commercial monstrosities on the rim, and these had cheapened the canyon’s appeal. With hotels now appearing along the rims, and tourists arriving in unprecedented numbers by both road and rail, Roosevelt maintained no illusions that the Grand Canyon would remain completely “unmarred,” as he had called for in 1903. However, Roosevelt insisted that the north rim stay exactly as it had been when Spanish explorers first encountered it in the early sixteenth century. He believed that by repeatedly refusing to declare the Grand Canyon a national park, Congress had thrust the responsibility for protecting it on his shoulders. This time, he wouldn’t give Congress a chance to stop him. Somebody had to change the old land-use ways for the new progressive ethos. As Mark Twain once quipped, Roosevelt may have been a “spotless” character, but he was always ready to “kick the Constitution into the back yard.”17
Weighing the options presented to him by the Department of the Interior, Roosevelt decided to again implement the Antiquities Act of 1906, using it to confer national monument status on the Grand Canyon on January 11, 1908. In the following decades, Arizonan libertarians would claim (accurately) that the Antiquities Act had been intended only to preserve scientifically valuable sites of 5,000 acres or less, and that Roosevelt’s edict was an abuse of executive power. But regardless of the legality of Roosevelt’s maneuver, the Grand Canyon—the great American temple of nature—would never again return to private hands. From 1908 to 1918, even as the land-use status of the new national monument was hotly debated in both Arizona and Washington, D.C., the increasing tourist appeal of the Grand Canyon made its reprivatization politically unfeasible. The Grand Canyon finally became a national park by an act of Congress on February 26, 1919. The now legendary announcement came just a month after Roosevelt’s death. Furthermore, in 1975 President Gerald Ford passed the Grand Canyon Enlargement Act, placing the entire Colorado River corridor under the management of the National Park Service.18 In 1990, the area between Bright Angel Point and Cape Royal was renamed Roosevelt Point to honor the twenty-sixth president.19 And tourists come by the millions to experience what is now a World Heritage Site, just as Roosevelt predicted during his presidency. “To none of the sons of men,” Roosevelt wrote of his new national monument, “is it given to tell of the wonder and splendor of sunrise and sunset in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.”20
Not that Roosevelt was anxious about how his preservation of the Grand Canyon would be evaluated in history books. Certitude was his greatest political strength. In fact, on the same afternoon