Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [136]
For four hours, the child California bloomed like a rose before him.
THE SIGHT OF AN enormous redwood towering above Santa Cruz three days later was expected also to enchant the President. But he frowned at its petticoat of calling cards and advertising posters. “Those cards pinned up on that tree give an air of the ridiculous to this majestic grove,” he said angrily. He began to lecture bystanders. “Do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful scenery of this wonderful state unmarred by vandalism or the folly of man.” Refusing an official escort, he went to cool off in a nearby grove. When he came back, the cards had been taken down.
“There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty,” Roosevelt declared the next day. He was speaking at Stanford University, whose architecture and setting, half Pacific, half Mediterranean, enhanced his impression of California as the loveliest of states.
In a major conservation address, he urged the students to respect their natural heritage. “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.” This was not to say that most of the North American forest could not be “used” scientifically and efficiently, if government exerted its just powers. Properly protected, woodlands and grasslands would function forever as spongelike sources of water for irrigation, making immense tracts of arable land available to homesteaders under the national reclamation program. “Water speculation”—rentals charged by the private owners of dams and streams in semidesert areas—would dwindle as public reservoirs swelled. Monopoly, whether of wood or water, would be confounded, and land laws refined to their original democratic purpose.
“We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Mountains and great plains states will take the lead in the preservation and right use of the forests,” Roosevelt roared. He did not add that he had quietly expanded the federal woodland by one third in his first year as President. Such a boast would only antagonize western reactionaries.
CONCERN MOUNTED, MEANWHILE, behind boardroom doors on Wall Street that Theodore Roosevelt was “an extremely dangerous man.” For all his lip service at Milwaukee and St. Paul to laissez-faire ways, he seemed to stand, in the eyes of Henry W. Taft, for “a pretty pronounced type of socialism.” He had shown prejudice against railroad owners, beef packers, and coal-mine operators; he had won a referral of Knox’s Northern Securities suit to the Supreme Court, and stirred up hell in the South; now he was protecting foliage and threatening to strengthen the public-land laws. His professed truce with the trusts was likely to last as long as it took him to win the Presidency in his own right. Once he got the executive bit between those grinning, biting teeth, there would be no holding him.
A group of financiers, asked whom they would prefer to see as the Republican nominee in 1904, replied almost unanimously, “Somebody like Hanna.”
MORE THAN 2,500 MILES, and a greater distance between prejudice and perception, prevented Roosevelt’s capitalist critics from seeing him address a conservative audience of “citizens of the Golden State” at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 12 May. Had they done so, they might have been reassured as to his fiscal soundness. Standing in white tie over a table spread with cloth of gold, beneath hanging golden garlands two feet thick, he accepted