The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [493]
“When London says this,” a furious Roosevelt wrote to the editor of Collier’s, Mark Sullivan, “he deliberately invents statements which I have never made and in which I do not believe.” 77 Roosevelt considered White Fang a decent work as fiction. But zoologically, its behavioral descriptions of wolves and lynx irked him enough that he publicly called it “mischievous nonsense.” Its purported facts were all wrong. In his letter to Collier’s, Roosevelt inventoried all of London’s offenses against biological accuracy. Sounding less like a president than like a fact-checker, he offered exact page references in White Fang where London’s veracity failed to pass muster.
Had Roosevelt really enough free time to engage in such a hypothetical, picayune debate with a writer of fiction? Nobody came out ahead in these “nature-faker” controversies, but London did get in a few truly memorable lines at Roosevelt’s expense:
Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur. He may know something of statecraft and of big-game shooting; he may be able to kill a deer when he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot it; he may be able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics of tom-tits and snipe, and, after he has observed it, definitely and coherently to convey the information of when the first chipmunk, in a certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the spring and chattered and gambolled—but that he should be able, as an individual observer, to analyze all animal life and to synthetize and develop all that is known of the method and significance of evolution, would require a vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required for us to believe the biggest whopper ever told by an unmitigated nature-faker. No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.78
Words are slippery, but London was a master of them. Nothing, short of insulting his family, cut into Roosevelt’s sense of self more than a claim that he didn’t understand Darwinism. But it was 1908, a presidential election year, so Roosevelt let the matter go. When pressed, Roosevelt could often behave like a cuttlefish which, when unable to extricate itself from a dangerous situation, blackens the surrounding waters, eventually becoming invisible in the murk. That’s how he dealt with London in the end, writing him off as a black-hearted fraud.* Now, a century later, the “nature-faker” debate smacks of childish egoism, particularly on the part of a sitting American president. But to dismiss Roosevelt’s obsession with proper descriptions of wildlife as mere conceit is to misread a central facet of his complex personality—his all-encompassing belief that he understood evolution. Roosevelt was a faunal naturalist, steeped in Darwinian biology, and he knew more about wolves than perhaps anyone else in the country. If London was going to count himself as a literary realist, then lynxes twice the size of the Biological Survey’s heaviest specimen had no business in his art. In this instance, as often before, Roosevelt was more than happy to risk being exposed as an intellectual bully if doing so meant that he could set a record straight.
That September, Roosevelt was also championing farmers: he was deeply involved in getting his new Country Life Commission up and running. Although the reference work Roosevelt Cyclopedia doesn’t mention it, the Country Life Commission was a direct outgrowth of his reading of John Burroughs’s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works. Roosevelt’s motto came from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”79
Over the summer, Roosevelt had persuaded Liberty Hyde Bailey, director of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University,