The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [512]
Other biological books added to the “pigskin library” included Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Huxley’s Essays.63 Roosevelt had also started reading a book on neo-Darwinism by Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (lectures delivered in 1907–1908 at the University of Aberdeen). This work, which was both factual and meditative, proved to be a helpful scaffolding for Roosevelt’s Oxford University lectures, “Biological Imperatives in History,” in 1910. A German biologist known as a pioneer in embryology, Driesch spent years operating out of the Marine Biological Station in Naples, Italy, experimenting with the division of embryo cells of sea urchins. These were complicated experiments encompassing biology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Roosevelt strove to understand Driesch’s findings in depth. He was enthralled to find that Driesch had included the issue of coloration of bears in Science and the Philosophy of the Organism. “Do we understand in the least why there are white bears in the Polar Regions if we are told that bears of other colours could not survive?” Driesch inquired. “In denying any real explanatory value to the concept of natural selection I am far from denying the action of natural selection. On the contrary, natural selection, to some degree, is self evident.”64
Roosevelt also scrounged around for grant money to help Professor John A. Lomax of the University of Texas continue his fieldwork collecting cowboy ballads. Roosevelt went hat in hand on Lomax’s behalf to potential benefactors. Writing to the president of the Carnegie Institution, Roosevelt asked that Lomax be given $1,000, quickly, for his “very original and instructive study into a phase of native American literary and intellectual growth which of course has been totally neglected.”65 However, his request was rejected.
Frustrated that some intellectuals rolled their eyes at the idea of cowboy culture as serious academic fare, Roosevelt turned to the French ambassador, Jean-Jules Jusserand, to find financial assistance for Lomax. “A Texas professor is doing some really good work in collecting frontier ballads in the cow country of Texas,” he wrote to Jusserand. “They are of course for the most part doggerel (as I believe to be true with the majority of ballads as they were originally written); but these are interesting because they are genuine. The deification of Jesse James is precisely like the deification of Robin Hood and the cowboy is a hero exactly as the hunter of the greenwood was a hero. Also, the view taken of women seems to be much the same as that taken in many of the medieval ballads.”66 This time Roosevelt found Lomax a grant.
Filled with growing enthusiasm for Texan culture, Roosevelt wrote an introduction for Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910).67 At the same time he drafted speeches that he planned to deliver at Oxford, the Sorbonne, and Berlin University in 1910, once he emerged from the African wilds. Darwinian themes were apparent in all three addresses, accentuated by his own philosophy of the strenuous life. Then, on March 2, with just forty-eight hours left of his presidency, he wrote heartfelt thanks to Merriam, Garfield, and Pinchot. Together, these warriors had challenged the titans of the Gilded Age and beyond—railroads, timber companies, and mine owners.68 Only in writing to Edith or to his children had Roosevelt ever been so sentimental and emotional. “As long as I live I shall feel for you a mixture of respect and admiration and a general affectionate regard,” he wrote to Pinchot, saluting his work as first chief of the Forest Service. “I am a better man for having known you. I feel that to have been with you will make my children better men and women in after life; and I cannot think of a man in the country whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the Nation than yours