Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [22]
A town sign flashed by: RENOVO. Edith had vacationed here as a child. The name—Latin for I renew—sounded mocking in these dying uplands of the Susquehanna. About the only renewal Roosevelt could see was a station repair yard, where flatcars were being overhauled to carry away more and more trees. He understood (as most Americans did not) the tendency of transport and industrial combinations to consume the environments they served. United States railroads owned more timberland than all the nation’s homesteaders.
To him, conservation—a term just becoming politically fashionable—meant “not only the preservation of natural resources, but the prevention of the monopoly of natural resources, so they should inhere in the people as a whole.”
IT WAS NEARLY time for lunch. Roosevelt ordered places laid for himself and the Secretary of War, and went to pay his respects to Mrs. McKinley. Ravaged, almost comatose with grief, she did not detain him long. By 1:30, he was back in his car and the congenial company of Elihu Root.
He felt at home with conservatives. Whether or not the term applied to himself, he owed his political advancement to men of Root’s type: wealthy Republicans who belonged to the Union League Club, read the North American Review, and were coldly polite to butlers. More conservative rhetoric followed after lunch, as the other Cabinet officers on the train came in one by one to see him. With the exception of Attorney General Philander Chase Knox, a polished little man of forty-eight, they were venerable figures. There was his old boss, Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long, portly and lumbering at sixty-three. Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson was sixty-six, Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock sixty-five, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith fifty-nine. Elihu Root was fifty-six. The two absent Secretaries, John Hay and Lyman Gage, were sixty-two and sixty-five respectively.
McKinley had chosen carefully: a more orthodox phalanx of Republicans would be difficult to assemble. To a man, these conservatives believed in the sanctity of property and the patrician responsibilities of wealth and power.
Their eyes were honest, but hard (Knox again the exception, with his veiled, astigmatic stare). They were accustomed to luxury travel on complimentary railroad passes, and a myriad of other corporate privileges. They were prepared, in return, to give trust lords such as J. P. Morgan their favorable support in disputes between capital and labor, or local and interstate commerce. They tacitly acknowledged that Wall Street, rather than the White House, had executive control of the economy, with the legislative cooperation of Congress and the judicial backing of the Supreme Court. This conservative alliance, forged after the Civil War, was intended to last well into the new century, if not forever. Senator Hanna was determined to protect it: “Let well enough alone!”
Roosevelt was too restless and too reform-minded to heed such a motto. On the other hand (to use his favorite phrase), he despised the theorists who advocated radical change. Not for him Eugene Debs’s vision of a society purged of aggression, with all citizens pooling their assets in a state of torpid bonhomie. He tended toward a biological view of the common man as a brute—albeit capable, with encouragement, of self-refinement. Years of sweaty acquaintance with cowboys, policemen, and soldiers had convinced him that their instincts were benign, that greater social efficiency was as much their desire as his. All they needed was enlightened leadership.
In a fundamental disagreement with Social Darwinist thinkers, Roosevelt condemned “that baleful law of natural selection which tells against the survival of some of the most desirable classes.” His own field studies, both scientific and political, had shown him how populous species, whose competition was ferocious, advanced more slowly than those whose selection was determined by reasonable