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By Root 4267 0

Big business, in particular, anticipating revenge, couldn’t wait for Roosevelt’s passport to be stamped in some godforsaken African port. “Congress of course feels that I will never again have to be reckoned with,” Roosevelt noted, “and that it’s safe to be ugly with me.”9 In focusing so much on his forthcoming African safari, congressional Democrats, in particular, hoped Roosevelt’s radical conservationist crusade would peter out. However, regardless of what dark thoughts Taft harbored about Gifford Pinchot personally, he nevertheless had to embrace Roosevelt’s conservation on the campaign trail in 1908. To challenge Roosevelt on forestry would have been a death knell to Taft’s candidacy. “If I am elected President,” Taft said in Sandusky, Ohio, “I propose to devote all the ability that is in me to the constructive work of suggesting to Congress the means by which Roosevelt policies shall be clinched.”10

After enduring T.R. in the White House for seven and a half years, the legislators should have known that he would be setting traps in early 1909. “I have a very strong feeling that it is a President’s duty to get on with Congress if he possibly can, and that it is a reflection upon him if he and Congress come to a complete break,” the president wrote to Ted, Jr. “This session, however, they felt it was safe utterly to disregard me because I was going out and my successor had been elected; and I made up my mind that it was just a case, where the exception to the rule applied and that if I did not fight, and fight hard, I should be put in a contemptible position. While inasmuch as I was going out on the 4th of March I did not have to pay heed to our ability to cooperate in the fortune. The result has, I think, justified my wisdom. I have come out ahead so far, and I have been full President right up to the end—which hardly any other President ever has been.”11

So, while wags laughed about Roosevelt’s African trip, the president acted. Congressmen had been asleep in 1903 when Roosevelt had created his first federal bird reservation at Pelican Island, Florida. Now, with Dr. Merriam of the Biological Survey still his steadfast ally, Roosevelt began rapidly declaring federal bird reservations during the last six weeks of his administration. He began with the Hawaiian territory: on February 3, he signed Executive Order 1019, declaring an entire archipelago of the Hawaiian Islands a federal bird reservation.

In 1903 Roosevelt had sent U.S. Marines to safeguard the seabirds of the Midway atoll, securing it as an American possession. Now he was saving the relatively nearby islands around Nihoa Island to Kure atoll from plumers and Japanese poachers. If you looked in an atlas for these flyspeck islands—west of the world’s largest lighthouse, on Kauai—the phrase “far-flung” might come to mind. But although human civilization might not have been thriving in this island group, the birds were there in magnificent numbers.12 “To many these remote, shimmering, uninhabited islands are devoid of interest; to the naturalist, however, every square foot of the surface, and all the life that inhabits them, has an interesting story to tell,” a professor of zoology, William Alanson Bryan of the College of Hawaii, remarked in 1915. “The geologist finds in them subjects of the greatest interest and importance.”13

When Mark Twain wrote Roughing It in 1871, he presented Hawaii to the American reading public as an exotic place. Geologically, Twain had focused on a volcano (a “muffled torch”), claiming that in Hawaii lava flowed like a “pillar of fire.”14 To Roosevelt this was a sure sign of a lazy journalist resorting to clichés: Twain made no mention of humpback whales, spinner dolphins, koa trees, or yellow hibiscuses. And then there was Jack London, who went to Hawaii in the yacht Snark but knew nothing of sea urchins or the numerous types of dolphins and sadly believed that he grew funnier as the bottle emptied. Robert Louis Stevenson had spent time in Hawaii during 1889, but he had chosen to focus on leprosy.

From Roosevelt’s perspective