The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [506]
Taft had even promised to keep Pinchot as the head of the Forest Service—a real concession following the dismissal of Garfield. Roosevelt had created his own circle or set of outdoorsmen in government, including Pinchot and Garfield, who agreed with his every sales pitch, plea from the bully pulpit, executive order, sermon about outdoorsmen, and writ concerning wildlife. And the first eight weeks of 1909 were their golden time. These acolytes weren’t Luddites ready to sabotage the cutting blades in defense of nature. Many were evolutionists—such as David Starr Jordan and Henry Fairfield Osborn—who understood the arcane biology of how conjunction took place in colonial protozoa and cared deeply about species recognition marks. Roosevelt had nevertheless kicked down the door of the wildlife protection movement, knocking it off its hinges, by giving evolutionists places of honor at his table in the White House. As an ex-president, Roosevelt would travel to Florida and Louisiana to inspect his revolutionary rookeries, pleased at his accomplishments on behalf of “citizen bird.” “The number and tameness of the big birds showed what protection has done for the bird life of Florida of recent years,” he wrote after inspecting his federal bird reservations in the Gulf of Mexico. “The plumed lesser blue herons, and more rarely the great blue heron and the lovely plumed white egret, perched in the trees or flapped across ahead of the boat.”37
II
While Merriam remained Roosevelt’s go-to biologist in early 1909, Pinchot was first among equals in T.R.’s conservationist group. Pinchot, one of the most effective administrators to ever operate within the federal bureaucracy, expanded the U.S. forest reserves from approximately 43 million acres to about 174 million acres from 1901 to 1909. Besides serving on such presidential commissions as the Organization of Government Scientific Work and Public Lands (1903), Department Methods (1905), Inland Waterways (1907), and Country Life and the National Conservation Commission (1908), Pinchot had also led the highly successful governors’ conference of 1908. A tireless worker, he crisscrossed America promoting forestry, and he established the first press bureau ever within a federal agency. Much like Roosevelt—his boss and hero—Pinchot manipulated the press like a puppeteer, knowing exactly which strings to pull. Pinchot’s home on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, D.C., became a veritable salon where smart journalists could have a drink and talk about the western reserves. Roosevelt noted of Pinchot that “among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, he, on the whole, stood first.” 38
On February 18, 1909, Roosevelt convened the North American Conservation Conference at the White House, following Pinchot’s directive that conservation had to go global.39 “The keynote of the conference was that international streams are affected by cutting forests on either side of the boundary line,” the Washington Post wrote, “and that conservation plans, to be the most practical, must be international.”40 The U.S. delegates at the North American Conservation Congress included Chief Forester Pinchot, Secretary of State Bacon, and Secretary of the Interior Garfield (all members of the “tennis cabinet”—the term that reporters had given to Roosevelt’s inner circle at the White House). Ottawa and Mexico City sent their appropriate counterparts. Meetings were held at the White House, at the State Department, and at Pinchot’s home. After first agreeing to some “conservation measures” of “continental good” the statesmen announced a trilateral “Declaration of Principle” aimed at the creation of a World Conservation Congress to meet at The Hague in September 1909 to push Rooseveltian conservationism forward on a global level. Pinchot’s dream, in fact, was for President Taft to go to The Hague and champion issues like international wildlife reserves, parks, and tree planting; the banning of poaching and overfishing