The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [497]
As 1908 wound down, Roosevelt noted that despite his activist progressive agenda he had left America’s finances in better shape than they were in 1901. He had cut taxes slightly and reduced the interest-bearing debt. He had also reduced the amount of interest paid on America’s debt. His administration had a net surplus of $90 million, and receipts over expenditures for all seven and a half years. “I am especially pleased, because the average reformer is apt to embark on all kinds of expenditures for all kinds of things,” he wrote to the historian George Otto Trevelyan, “good in themselves, but which the nation simply cannot afford to pay for.”91
Thinking about his own presidential legacy had a tendency to set Roosevelt spinning. Insisting that he was sure to be a winner in the contest of history, he churned out letter after letter extolling his successes in Cuba, Panama, Santo Domingo, and Venezuela. Internationally, his primary worry was Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whose militarism bothered Roosevelt’s sense of decency. “The German attitude toward war,” Roosevelt lamented to the British editor John St. Loe Stachey, “is one that in the progress of civilization England and America have outgrown.”92 As for Russia, it was guilty of “appalling…well-nigh incredible mendacity.” 93
Roosevelt, of course, was full of praise for his foreign policy advisers. Besides Root as secretary of state, Roosevelt had relied on Taft as secretary of war; Senator Lodge of Massachusetts; the ambassador to Russia, George Von Lengerke Meyer; the ambassador to Britain, Whitelaw Reid; and the troubleshooting diplomat Henry White. There were three foreigners living in Washington D.C. whom Roosevelt treated like cabinet members: Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice and Arthur Lee of Great Britain, and the French ambassador to the United States Jean-Jules Jusserand. Working with these men, Roosevelt had developed his “big stick” diplomacy, based on what we would now call American realpolitik and a huge modern navy. Other Rooseveltian principles included always acting justly toward other countries; never bluffing; striking only if prepared to strike hard; and, finally, always allowing an adversary to save face in defeat.94
But Roosevelt’s conservation activism didn’t die-out merely because of an election. On December 7, 1908, he created a national monument in Colorado. It was called Wheeler, after Captain George Wheeler, who had explored the area in 1874 for the U.S. Army, and its eroded outcropping of volcanic ash geologically resembled the badlands of North Dakota. Roosevelt was intrigued by the jagged spires, reminiscent of organ pipes, and he also deemed Wheeler a scientific site of great importance. But as it turned out, Coloradans weren’t good custodians of this unique 30-million-year-old area, and in 1950 Wheeler lost its monument status. It was transferred from the National Park Service to the U.S. Forest Service. (Currently it’s called the Wheeler Geologic Area and is part of the La Garita Wilderness Area.95)
Next, inspired by Muir Woods, the Pinnacles, Cinder Cone, Lassen Peak, and other California sites that he had recently saved, Roosevelt began strategizing to make the six Farallon Islands off the coast of California a federal bird reservation, safe from human predation. The Farallons were a favorite roosting area for the common murre, black oystercatcher, and Leach’s storm petrel, but the Farallones Egg Company had plundered these islands