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—to protect forests from clear-cutting and streams from pollution. No matter how holy so-called rural simplicity might be, it could go only so far in the twentieth century. Recognizing that farms in America were worth $30 billion (with annual produce worth about $8 billion), Roosevelt boasted that the heartland was the greatest breadbasket the world had ever known.83 “Important tho the city is,” Roosevelt wrote to Herbert Mynick, editor of Good Housekeeping, “and fortunate tho it is that our cities have grown as they have done, it is still more important that the family farm, where the homemaking and the outdoor business are combined into a unit, should continue to grow. In every great crisis of our Government, and in all the slow, steady work between the crises which alone enables us to meet them when they do arise, it is the farming folk, the people of the country districts, who have shown themselves to be the backbone of the nation.”84

What disturbed Roosevelt about American farmers, however, was their lack of science education. Farmers mismanaged forests by overburning and overlumbering. That was an economic waste. The twentieth century was unmistakably going to be a century of science, and for farmers it would entail learning the newest techniques for increasing yields, as well as protecting their crops against disease and pests. A scientific examination of water had to take place in every town. Community water supply systems needed to be developed for the sake of public health. Farmers didn’t have to read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to be modern; but they did have to read the Department of Agriculture’s annual Yearbook. Roosevelt wanted Congress to appropriate funds to open new agricultural colleges, establish conservation training camps, and increase the emphasis on tree planting in public schools.

In essence, Roosevelt was positioning himself as pro-farmers, on behalf of Taft and in opposition to the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. While Bryan appealed to the populist Deep South by attacking “government by privilege,” Roosevelt wooed Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—farm states that greatly valued education—by promoting agricultural science. Taft’s platform also included reforming the federal bureaucracy, increasing tariffs, and developing a sound currency—all positions that Roosevelt adhered to. But Roosevelt thought that Taft could score points against Bryan (the first three-time presidential candidate for a major party) by promising family farmers federal benefits and better methods of growing, based on the “new conservationism.”

When Bryan dared to publicly chastise Roosevelt as soft on corporations at the expense of everyday folks, the president roared back. In a pamphlet-length letter to Bryan postmarked September 27, 1908, Roosevelt presented evidence of his warring against beef packers, Federal Salt Company, General Paper Company, Otis Elevator Company, American Tobacco Company, Powder Trust, Virginia Carolina Chemical Company’s conglomerates, and Standard Oil Company, among numerous others. Roosevelt boasted that he was the real progressive, whereas Bryan was a poseur. “I believe in radical reform,” Roosevelt said, “and the movement for such reform can be successful only if it frowns on the demagogue as it does on the corrupt; if it shows itself as far removed from government by a mob as from government by a plutocracy. Of all corruption, the most far-reaching for evil is that which hides itself behind the mask of furious demagoguery, seeking to arouse and to pander to the basest passions of mankind.”85

With a gift that fine writers often possess, Roosevelt was sometimes able to size men up—and he didn’t like what he saw in William Jennings Bryan. Ever since William Kent had donated Muir Woods to the federal government, Roosevelt corresponded with him about politics. Now, when many reporters were saying that Roosevelt was being too brutal in his public attacks on Bryan as a left-wing demagogue, claiming that the Democrats were sympathetic to the IWW and Russian