The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [514]
All of Roosevelt’s cabinet dutifully came to see him off at Union Station, but he lingered longest with Pinchot.79 In coming years Pinchot would become governor of Pennsylvania, forestry advisor to F.D.R., and the co-author of Darwinian travel odyssey from New York to Key West and on to the Galapagos. Pinchot would have the huge burden of keeping the conservation movement kinetic while Roosevelt was in British East Africa. Soft-spoken, almost tearful, Roosevelt was attentive and considerate to everybody at Union Station: children carrying teddy bears; army troops; porters; bystanders; and congressmen with whom he no longer had to negotiate. Already, scholars were trying to determine precisely where Roosevelt would fit in the spectrum of American presidential history. Roosevelt himself believed that he was a smart hybrid of both Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses with modern Darwinism added for good measure. “I have no use for the Hamiltonian who is aristocratic or for the Jeffersonian who is a demagogue,” Roosevelt wrote to William Allen White shortly before leaving office. “Let us trust the people as Jefferson did, but not flatter them; and let us try to have our administration as effective as Hamilton taught us to have it. Lincoln, and Washington, struck the right average.”80
At three-twenty that afternoon, Roosevelt left for Oyster Bay as the youngest ex-president in American history. There was about T.R. an air of moral satisfaction. Like Washington and Lincoln, he had accomplished much. He was still walking singular among America’s political class. Regarding conservation alone he had left two watchdogs strategically behind to mind the store. The first was Gifford Pinchot, who would be a gadfly every time Taft failed to protect a Roosevelt natural wonder or forest reserve. And, devilishly, Roosevelt had left a big game trophy at the White House: the head of a huge bull-moose, shot in Maine, still adorned a wall in the executive dining room. For weeks that bull-moose would loom over every presidential meal or conference, until eventually it was taken down. Both the bull moose and Gifford Pinchot were harbingers of difficult days ahead for William Howard Taft. The reign of Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t really ended on that snowy March afternoon. The conservation movement had spread all over America, and his acolytes had just begun to fight for the inheritance of unmarred public lands.
There was no going gently into retirement for Roosevelt. He remained America’s hubristic flywheel and nationalistic sage. British East Africa. Egypt. Rome and Berlin. Paris and London and Oxford. Brazil. Chile. Uruguay. Argentina. The Grand Canyon and the Federal Bird Reservations of the Gulf of Mexico. He visited them all. He dined with European princes and prayed in the Hopi kivas of northern Arizona. And every single day, like an unbroken stream, he crusaded for conservation to prevail over the global disease of hyper-industrialization. “We regard Attic temples and Roman triumphal arches and Gothic cathedrals as of priceless value,” Roosevelt decreed, full of wilderness warrior fury. “But we are, as a whole, still in that low state of civilization where we do not understand that it is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams