The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [505]
From Hawaii to Florida and Michigan to Alaska, birding areas and habitats were put off-limits and set aside for the future. Their status would be enforced by the Biological Survey, National Audubon Society, and AOU. In Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, and Florida the plumers were isolated and suppressed, forced to operate clandestinely, like criminals. And when Roosevelt wrote that birds should be saved for reasons “unconnected with dollars and cents,” he wasn’t speaking just for himself.31 Groups like the National Audubon Society and AOU had swept across the land. The unstated presumption was that weird beaks, webbed claws, and wingspreads had aesthetic value for a generation of Americans who championed “citizen bird” and were fed up with market butchers. When Senator George C. Perkins, (among other things) a forestry advocate, questioned T.R. over wildlife protection policy the president snapped. “I would like to break the neck of the feebly malicious angleworm who occupies the other seat as California’s Senator,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted; “he is a milk-faced grub named Perkins.”32
With the exception of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and a few others, industrialists of the time were perplexed by Roosevelt’s passion for protecting loons, cormorants, and herons. What would lead a hero of the Spanish-American War to insist that shooting a dark-eyed junco was akin to grand larceny? Didn’t Roosevelt’s infatuation for birds constitute fanaticism? Roosevelt, for example, had shut down prime Florida real estate to make life comfortable for egrets. “I have no command of the English language that enables me to express my feelings regarding Mr. Roosevelt,” the railroad tycoon Henry Flagler said. “He is shit.”33
Flagler was correct in considering Roosevelt a vicious adversary. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted, T.R., despite his disarming toothy smile, “feared nobody” and was a “dangerous antagonist.” And there was a cost to interfering with Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and petrels: T.R. would blast his anticonservationist critics as hopeless “spoilers,” “fools,” “demagogues,” “exploiters,” and “idiots.” The novelist Booth Tarkington, long after Roosevelt died, reflected on how T.R. had subjected people he perceived as anticonservationist to verbal tirades. “The Colonel had his own way of saying ‘swine,’ and it gave that simple Gothic word a peculiarly damning power,” Tarkington wrote. “The swine he had in mind seemed to be incomparably more swinish than the ordinary swine that other people sometimes mention.”34
Likewise John Burroughs explained in his Journals how Roosevelt could be a cutthroat political adversary when it came to the defense of songbirds. “He was a live wire, if there ever was one, in human form,” Burroughs wrote in his journal. “His sense of right and duty was as inflexible as adamant. His reproof and refusal came quick and sharp. His manner was authoritative and stern. He was as bold as a lion and, at times, as playful as a lamb.”35 Every word Roosevelt uttered on behalf of wildlife protection seemed to have an exclamation point. When it came to squaring-off with politicians he was a specialist at haranguing, never crying uncle, giving his opponents the back of his hand. When challenged about the legality of his national monuments, federal bird reservations, or national forests, he took on that lean, ravenous look of a famished wolf. America had a new conservationist code to promote, thanks to Roosevelt: pummel the exploiters until they were licked.36 He believed that his successor, William Howard Taft, would