Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [294]
He had collected and cataloged a specimen as a boy, noting even then that it was becoming rare on Long Island. Once it had been the most abundant feathered thing in the world, so prolific that a single flock, in 1832, had been assessed at more than two and a quarter billion birds. Old frontiersmen remembered passenger pigeons literally blotting out the sun. In 1856, the Ohio legislature had declared, “The passenger pigeon needs no protection.”
Thus encouraged, hunters had succeeded in obliterating it to such an extent that, by the end of the nineteenth century, shootings became almost as rare as sightings. W. B. Mershon’s valedictory The Passenger Pigeon, in press even as Roosevelt watched his flock circling and settling, recorded the last bird killed in Wisconsin in 1900.
Twice more that afternoon, the passenger pigeons swooped over Pine Knot. Their large size and rapid, circular movements seemed confirmatory, but they did not perch again, and vanished as quickly as they had come. Roosevelt stayed at the cabin for three more days, walking and riding with Edith through the woods from noon to sunset, and saw no evidence that he had not been dreaming.
CHAPTER 29
Such a Fleet and Such a Day
Q D’ye think he wants a third term?
A I do not.
OYSTER BAY. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay. Oyster Bay …
The agreeable monotony of Roosevelt’s schedule for late June 1907 was interrupted on the twenty-seventh by a captain from the General Board of the Navy and a colonel from the Army War College. They accompanied Victor H. Metcalf, the Secretary of the Navy, and Postmaster General George von L. Meyer, who had definitely not come to discuss rural free delivery. Meyer’s presence, indeed, helped explain his real role in the Cabinet, which was to advise the President on questions of extreme diplomatic delicacy.
Five weeks before, after returning to Washington from Pine Knot, Roosevelt had been exasperated to hear that anti-immigrant riots had broken out in San Francisco. “Nothing during my Presidency has given me more concern than these troubles,” he wrote Kentaro Kaneko. He argued that what was happening in California was nothing new. Nor was it essentially racial: it had plenty of precedents in European history over the last three centuries. France’s Huguenots, for example, had been as white as their coreligionists in Great Britain, but when they immigrated there, they had excited “the most violent hostility,” indistinguishable from what had happened at the Golden Gate. Then as now, mobs of workmen caused most of the trouble, expressing labor’s chronic fear of being devalued by competition. Now as not then, hope lay in the increased ability of “gentlemen, all educated people, members of the professions, and the like” to visit one another’s countries and “associate on the most intimate terms.” This was the particular responsibility of elected representatives. “My dear Baron, the business of statesmen is to try constantly to keep international relations better, to do away with the causes of friction, and to secure as nearly ideal justice as actual conditions will permit.”
Meyer himself could not have put the case with more finesse. But the fact remained that coolies were still coming, and having their faces beaten in. The Immigration Act was still not working as it should, the San Francisco Police Board had taken up where the school board had left off, reactionary newspapers were screaming, and Japanese opposition leaders were calling for war.
Elihu Root did not take