The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [507]
Before Roosevelt left office, fifty-eight nations had, in fact, received invitations from the White House to meet at The Hague. Immediately, Great Britain, France, and Germany accepted. Other nations soon followed suit.42 But after only a few weeks in office, President Taft balked and called off the conference, feeling that Pinchot had overreached himself. The World Conservation Congress never had a chance to succeed. As the historian Paul Russell Cutright put it in Theodore Roosevelt: The Naturalist, “the project died aborning.” 43 The rift between Taft and Pinchot was becoming unbridgeable. “Pinchot, bitterly disappointed, never gave up hope of holding such a conference,” McGeary wrote in Gifford Pinchot, “especially since he later became firmly convinced that conservation of natural resources was a primary means of insuring a permanent peace.”44
That Taft was uninspired by Pinchot’s idea of a World Conservation Congress disappointed Roosevelt greatly. A breach in policy was starting to manifest itself between the incoming (conservative) and outgoing (progressive) GOP administrations. In December, for example, during a meeting on conservation at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, Pinchot had quite innocently introduced Taft as the “president elect.” “I’m not the President-elect,” Taft had snapped when he stood on the podium. “That is merely the imagination of Mr. Pinchot. I’m just a private citizen.”45
Determined to keep Roosevelt’s torch lit in public policy, Pinchot and Garfield co-wrote The Fight for Conservation (1910). When the first draft of the book was finished that February, Garfield asked the departing president to write a “foreword.” Basically they were looking for a letter of recommendation, a strong show of support, an embrace (in writing) from their boss. Somehow Roosevelt found time to compose a fine summation of the sterling qualities of his chief forestry advocates, giving his colleagues his indelible stamp of approval in glowing language. “Both have stood for absolute honesty, for absolute devotion to the needs of the public,” Roosevelt wrote. “Both have stood no less for entire sanity and for farsighted understanding of the many diverse needs of the Nation. They have been fearless in opposing wrong, whether by a great corporation or by a mob; by a wealthy financier, or by a demagogue.”46
January to March was a very busy period for the U.S. Forest Service. An eager Pinchot had decided to challenge the anti-Roosevelt forces one last time with many new forest reserves in the West. Pinchot and Garfield had been gathering data on what forestlands were doable. Roosevelt was well past worrying about the political repercussions of any last-minute reserves. “Keep it legal” was his only direction to Pinchot. Echoing Thoreau, Roosevelt planned on leaving the White House promoting forests and meadows and even corn as a sort of ecumenicism.47 Pinchot and Garfield, working with a few like-minded congressmen, made their mentor proud. Starting on January 20 with Humboldt, Nevada, and not stopping until the last hours of the last days of his administration on March 2 with Sequoia, California, Roosevelt declared thirty-seven new national forests: Humboldt, Moapa, Nevada, and Toiyabe (Nevada); Cleveland, Calaveras Bigtree, Modoc, California, Shasta, Trinity, Lassen, Plumas, Tahoe, and Sequoia (California); Klamath (California and Oregon); Mono (California and Nevada); Pecos, Gila, Datil, Lincoln, Alamo, and Carson (New Mexico); Prescott, Tonto, Sitgreaves, and Apache (Arizona); Zuni (Arizona and New Mexico); Dixie (Arizona and Utah); Marquette and Michigan (Michigan); Superior (Minnesota); Black Hills (South Dakota and Wyoming); Sioux (Montana and South Dakota). And for the first time Arkansas, without a battle, was brought into the fold with two new forest reserves: Ozark and Arkansas.48
III
By far the