Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [291]
There was something pantherlike about the Chief Forester, with his long, lean walk and hypnotic stare. Acquaintances differed on the exact quality of that gaze: it was erotic to some women, while men tended to see an idealism bordering on fanaticism. “The eyes do not look as if they read books,” Owen Wister wrote, “but as if they gazed upon a Cause.” Not that Pinchot was unlettered. He had the right cultural credentials: Exeter, Yale, postgraduate study at the École Nationale Forestière in France, and research spells in the ancient woodlands of Switzerland and Germany. And he was, to Roosevelt’s approval, a New England gentleman, rich and well-connected, with a strong social conscience.
The two men had known each other since the 1890s. What the President especially liked was Pinchot’s killer instinct, coupled with the fact that he fought cleanly. That made him all the more dangerous, because he was invulnerable to charges of corruption. He did have an Achilles’ heel, and Roosevelt recognized it with some amusement: “Pinchot truly believes that in case of certain conditions I am perfectly capable of killing either himself or me. If conditions were such that only one could live, he knows that I should possibly kill him as the weaker of the two, and he, therefore, worships this in me.”
President and Forester, fighting together, were an adroit combination. This became evident when Roosevelt, still holding off on the Agricultural Appropriations bill, managed to co-opt all the public lands Senator Fulton thought he had saved from being saved. A forced draft of Administration clerks—some of them working forty-eight-hour shifts—completed by Saturday, 2 March, all the paperwork necessary for the President to proclaim twenty-one new forest reserves, and eleven enlarged ones, in the six states specified.
He immediately signed these executive orders, knowing that Congress had no power to stop them except by a formal vote—which he would at once veto. Thus came into existence, along with others, the national forests of Holy Cross and Montezuma, Colorado; Medicine Bow, Colorado and Wyoming; Priest River, Idaho and Washington; Big Belt, Big Hole, and Otter Forest, Montana; Toiyabe, Nevada; Blue Mountain, Oregon; Olympic Forest, Washington; Rainier, Washington; Cascade, Washington; and Bear Lodge, Wyoming. Only after the last acre was reserved did Roosevelt sign the Agricultural Appropriations Act, allowing Fulton’s now worthless clause to float over his proud Theodore Roosevelt.
ON 4 MARCH, the political season whistled to an end, literally, with some sifflation from the rostrum of the House by Representative Frank B. Fulkerson (R., Missouri). James Bryce, the new Ambassador from Great Britain, listened enchanted as the slender stream of sound filled the great hall, and the hands of the clock converged on noon. Then Uncle Joe Cannon reached for his gavel, and banged the Fifty-ninth Congress out of existence.
Simultaneously, a reshuffled Roosevelt Cabinet took office. No names made headlines, since the President had announced his appointments and reappointments before the last election. For the sake of continuity in congressional relations, he had kept most officers in their old jobs until now. One new face was that of Oscar S. Straus as Secretary of Commerce and Labor—the first Jew in Cabinet history. (Washington dinner-table opinion was divided as to whether Roosevelt had chosen Straus as a signal of goodwill toward the business community, or of contempt toward Russia, where the plague of pogroms had become endemic.)
A stranger choice, for the gossips, was that of Ambassador George von L. Meyer to succeed George B. Cortelyou as Postmaster General. Why should so suave and successful a diplomat, who hobnobbed with the Kaiser and the King of Italy, forsake the gilded halls of St. Petersburg