Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [290]
To his current demand for an all-big-gun battleship of “at least eighteen thousand tons,” he added a request that Congress fund it along with last year’s vessel, funds for which had not yet been appropriated. He released for publication letters to the chairmen of both naval-affairs committees, urgently arguing “the superior value of battleships of large displacement, high speed, and great gunpower.”
On 15 February, there was a brief flurry of budgetary protest in the House of Representatives. But with the war scare at its height, few lawmakers wanted to look irresolute. The President got his dreadnoughts. Three days later, the immigration bill was passed with the exclusion amendment intact, trans-Pacific tensions subsided, and Roosevelt handed the by-now-tired subject of arms limitation over to Elihu Root.
AS THE END OF the session approached, Roosevelt had to deal with a new challenge thrown on his desk by Senator Charles W. Fulton, Republican of Oregon. On 22 February, Fulton attached to the Agricultural Appropriations bill an amendment proposing that every public tree, sapling, or sprout in six northwestern states, totaling some sixteen million acres, be withdrawn from the President’s protection and placed at the disposal of Congress. Or, as Fulton (infuriated by two years of land encroachment by Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot) put it: Hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress. On 25 February, the amendment was enacted and sent to the White House for signature.
Roosevelt let it lie on his desk.
The bulk of the American public had probably not noticed that in his last Message to Congress, he had for the first time used the plain word Conservation as a subject heading. There had been Forest Conservation and Water Conservation in his First Message, but they had denoted specific and separate programs, on par with Reclamation in 1903 and Public Lands in 1905. Conservation, by itself, was at once more general and more philosophical—religious even, a writ preaching the common sanctity of wood and water and earth and flora and fauna. It even had its menorah: the many-armed drainage basin, WJ McGee’s “harmonious interrelationship of parts,” purging the countryside of pollution, restoring the ravages of erosion, imposing order on human settlement, controlling floods, nurturing species, and generating power.
Roosevelt had virtually asked for a fight over forest reserves. It was he—working always with Pinchot, a favored member of the Tennis Cabinet—who had persuaded Congress in 1905 that forest care was a form of crop management, and should be transferred from the Department of the Interior to that of Agriculture. In the process, the Forest Bureau, run by bureaucrats, had become the Forest Service, run by foresters. Pinchot had used its enlarged budget and semiautonomous powers to acquire control of grazing licenses, hydroelectrical leases, and even police summonses in the national parks. He had stretched the meaning of the word forest so much that some westerners wondered when the Great Salt Lake was going to need his urgent protection.
The wonder was that the Transfer Act had not precipitated a fight at the beginning, rather than the end, of the Fifty-ninth Congress. But Roosevelt’s interim blitz of regulatory legislation, and other distractions such as Brownsville and the Cuba intervention, had enabled Pinchot to