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to serve as chairman of the commission tasked with analyzing the status of rural life in America. At first, Bailey turned Roosevelt down—he was too busy—but Roosevelt wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Your letter is not only a great disappointment but a great surprise to me,” Roosevelt wrote to Bailey on August 4, from Sagamore Hill. “I would not have gone into this thing at this time if I had not been assured as a matter of course from our conversation that you would accept. I believe you are entirely right when you say in your letter that this is the greatest opportunity that has yet presented itself for the influencing of country life conditions and the setting in motion of movements that shall organize and vivify the affairs of the open country. Yet my dear Mr. Bailey, by your action you are doing all you can to hurt this great opportunity. You have no right to do it, my dear sir. It is imperative from the standpoint of the work that you and I have so much at heart that you should accept the chairmanship of this Commission, no matter how little work you do with it.”80

The Country Life Commission was Roosevelt’s attempt to broaden the definition of the American town so that it would be more than just blocks with buildings on them. Small towns held the key to the perpetuation of American democracy; lose them and you would have, say, Brussels or Berlin. When Roosevelt was living in North Dakota, he had disapproved of people’s saying that the city boundaries were two miles long and four miles wide. Just as with migratory birds or roaming animals within the United States, boundaries weren’t the be-all and end-all. The American town had to include clean rivers and lakes outside the business district. Wilderness myths were part of a town. What was Helena, Montana, without stories of grizzlies or North Platte, Nebraska, without buffalo tales or Douglas, Arizona, without reports of a jaguar sneaking over the Mexican border? The town had to know the name of the old man dwelling in the shack down by the creek along the verdant meadow. The town didn’t need the city as much as it needed the country.

While not quite a boondoggle, Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission never really got off the ground. Although the commission had outstanding directors, including Henry Wallace (editor of Wallaces’ Farmer in Des Moines, Iowa) and Kenyon L. Butterfield (of Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst), Roosevelt’s folksy rural vision seemed antiquated in the brave new world of the Model T. People were thinking in terms of the cylinder, the engine, and the conveyor belt, not of ponies’ oats. Congress, in fact, scoffed at Roosevelt’s commission as romantic nonsense reminiscent of Currier & Ives. Both Democrats and Republicans had grown weary of listening to Roosevelt pontificating about the strenuous life, wilderness parks, national heritage sites, and the eternal virtues of the family farm. City nights were in vogue, as was owning a new car—not five o’clock suppers by candlelight in cabins like Pine Knot. But after his presidency, Roosevelt insisted in Century Magazine that his commission, though dismissed in 1908–1909, would someday be recognized and acknowledged for its agrarian wisdom. “The first step ever taken toward the solution of these problems [of rural life] was taken by the Country Life Commission, appointed by me, opposed with venomous hostility by the foolish reactionaries in Congress, and abandoned by my successor.” Roosevelt wrote. “Congress would not even print the report of this Commission, and it was the public-spirited, far-sighted action of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce which alone secured the publication of the report.” 81

Roosevelt’s own sentiments, like those of the people whom he most admired (John Burroughs chief among them) were decidedly antiurban and anti-industrial. Now, as his tenure at the White House wound down, Roosevelt wanted to do something for the “uplifting of farm life.”82 In essence, the commission was to teach farmers, with their close connection to the soil, to become America’s front line of conservationists