The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [487]
According to Howard, the president, with a fiercely playful gleam in his eyes, barely acknowledged Bryan’s smug compliment. Instead, he looked over Bryan’s shoulder and waved to Merriam. “I am pleased,” Roosevelt muttered to Bryan perfunctorily, and then quickly pivoted toward Merriam, as if dismissing the Democratic Party’s contender to succeed him in 1908. “How are you, Hart?” Roosevelt greeted Merriam with pointed warmth. “What do you suppose John [Burroughs] and I saw on the twenty-fifth of March at Pine Knot? A yellow warbler, by George!” Roosevelt then turned to Howard. “Hello, Doctor!” the president said, “How are the bugs?”60 As Roosevelt moved off into the crowd, away from Bryan, Howard looked back to see Bryan, still rooted in place, realizing that the president had just gotten the better of him. Howard’s anecdote revealed two things about Roosevelt: his allegiance to the naturalist community and his contempt of Bryan.
To the president, increased interstate cooperation on behalf of conservationism was a stark necessity. If, for example, Missourians dumped sewage in the Mississippi River, then it would travel downstream, adversely affecting citizens in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Garbage didn’t respect state lines. Likewise, it would do no good to save some white pelicans at Stump Lake, North Dakota, only to let them be slaughtered while they were roosting in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. Migration made state game laws pointless. “One of the most useful among the many useful recommendations in the admirable Declaration of the Governors relates to the creation of state commissions on the conservation of resources to cooperate with a federal commission,” Roosevelt wrote to one friend. “This action of the Governors cannot be disregarded. It is obviously the duty of the Federal Government to accept this invitation to cooperate with the states in order to conserve the natural resources of our whole country.”61
A cloth-bound three-volume report of the National Conservation Commission would be made available to the public in January 1909. As an accommodating gesture, Congress would receive an advance copy in December. Roosevelt believed that the publication of the findings would be a historical landmark of his administration, and a turning point in conservation history (though in truth it never acquired any true cogency). He glowed in the aftermath of the conference. “The grounds are too lovely for anything, and spring is here, or rather early summer, in full force,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Archie on May 17. “Mother’s flower-gardens are now as beautiful as possible, and the iron railings of the fences south of them are covered with clematis and roses in bloom. The trees are in full foliage and the grass brilliant green, and my friends, the warblers, are trooping to the north in full force.”62
When Roosevelt was at Pine Knot with Burroughs, he had reported to Chapman that their trip was a feast of bird-watching worthy of Audubon. His cabin sat smack in the middle of a mecca of Virginia bird-watching, where every streak and eye mark could potentially signify a new species. Unbelievably rare birds could be seen—his passenger pigeons were a case in point. Eagerly, Roosevelt listed for Chapman the various gnatcatchers and summer redbirds they’d seen. Burroughs and Roosevelt had used Chapman’s accessible guide, Birds of the Eastern United States, and had spent hours analyzing the noted ornithologist’s various disquisitions. “When I see you again I am going to point out one or two minor matters in connection with the song of the Bewick’s wren and the looks of the blue grosbeak, where we were a little puzzled by your accounts,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman on May 10. “I suppose that there is a good deal of individual variation among the birds themselves as well as among the observers.”63
Chapman was gratified to receive a letter from the White House detailing Roosevelt