The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [496]
From Roosevelt’s perspective, the difference boiled down to this: he himself was a champion of Darwinism, agricultural science, conservationism, and irrigation. By contrast, Bryan was promoting silver, the Russian Revolution, and a half-baked Christianity. But not everybody in the Taft campaign was happy with Roosevelt’s presenting himself as a hunter-conservationist. During the fall of 1908, for example, at the Irrigation Congress held in Albuquerque, Roosevelt and Pinchot’s forestry ethos was itself taken as demagoguery. Western Republicans at the Irrigation Congress accused extremist forestry policies of possibly costing them the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the November presidential election. At issue were the Crowded Hour Reserves. “No policy of recent years has done so much to alienate the friends of Government as the mistaken policy of the forest service, and if any of the mountain states shall go Democratic this fall, it will be chiefly for that reason,” D. C. Beaman of Denver told the gathering in New Mexico. “If a State Government had treated its people in such a manner it would have been ousted at the next election. Shall we stop mining coal, shut down our steel works, gas and electric plants and go back to the blacksmith shop and the tallow candle?”87
Election day was a relief to Roosevelt. He had been occupied by politics throughout the fall, and even as he planned his African safari he had been coaching Taft on how to win Catholic votes, state by state, away from the “small Protestant bigots.” He had also tried promoting conservationism to American farmers. Few major politicians had ever advocated keeping religion out of politics with quite the fervor of Roosevelt. In his role as coach during the campaign, Roosevelt had always wanted Taft to attack Bryan with more fury, to skin him like a skunk. That was eventually Roosevelt’s general attitude toward Bryan. Taft, disregarding Roosevelt, played his cards just right. November 3 was Taft’s day, not Bryan’s. The electoral count was 321 to 162: a landslide. The election couldn’t have turned out better for the Republicans, all around. According to the French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt’s “joy” over Taft’s victory was “overflowing.” Roosevelt deemed it a vindication of his own policies. “We beat them,” Roosevelt gloated, “to a frazzle.”88
Even though Taft had won, the general public seemed more enamored of Roosevelt—a rare American political leader who willingly turned his back on power. Excerpts of from the Country Life Commission report now ran in rural newspapers all over the country. And (with the exception of Colorado) virtually all the western states where Roosevelt had created national forests, national monuments, and federal bird reservations voted for Taft. Roosevelt’s far-reaching conservation policies were winning over what he called “the base and sordid materialism” of Bryan’s evangelical buffoons.89
VII
Nobody that holiday season in America could really envision T.R. as a private citizen. Life after the White House has always been entirely a matter of personal preference. John Quincy Adams, for example, became a U.S. congressman for eighteen years. Ulysses S. Grant barnstormed around the country for some time. For Roosevelt, stepping down meant returning to his life as a big game hunter, wilderness wanderer, and faunal naturalist. But he hoped that his conservationist acolytes—including his fourth cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a die-hard advocate of forestry—would continue fighting the crusade in Washington.
“Every now and then solemn jacks…tell me that our country must face the problem of what it will do with its ex-Presidents,” Roosevelt wrote to Ted