Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [297]
ONE THING THE ROMANS had understood very well was the role of fresh water in sluicing, sanitizing, irrigating, and beautifying both landscapes and townscapes. Old Father Tiber had been the fons et origo of a spreading web of canals, viaducts, underground pipes, and fountains that linked communities more effectively than any system of law.
WJ McGee, the visionary environmental scholar and proponent of the “interrelationship of parts” (as his compressed initials suggested) had long dreamed of a similar water-based network making one massive hydrosystem of the United States. Earlier in the year, he had found Gifford Pinchot a willing ally in persuading Roosevelt to appoint an Inland Waterways Commission that would prepare “a comprehensive plan for the improvement and control of the river systems of the United States.” The Commission, chaired by McGee, was due to report within a year. In the meantime, to publicize its work, it was sponsoring inspection trips of major lakes and rivers. Roosevelt delightedly accepted an invitation to cruise down the Mississippi on a paddle steamer with Pinchot and other commission members in the early fall. He thought he might combine it with a bear hunt in the canebrakes of Louisiana, to get himself in shape for dealing with the critters of the Sixtieth Congress.
By the time he came on board at Keokuk, Iowa, on 1 October, the steamer’s passenger complement had expanded to include some twenty state governors, and Pinchot and McGee were consumed with a new idea, which they wanted him to articulate en route, at Memphis. It was that a great conference on conservation should be held at the White House in the spring of 1908—the first such gathering in the history of any nation—and that every governor in the country would be asked to attend.
A sense that the President was about to announce something enormous gathered as the USS Mississippi, accompanied by a flotilla of lesser ships, thrashed its way south. Crowds lined both banks, craning for a sight of Roosevelt on deck. At night, when the river’s humid mists made navigation difficult, they burned huge bonfires to light his way. They took off their hats as he passed, and refrained from cheering lest they disturb his sleep.
Roosevelt made his announcement at Memphis on 4 October, tersely, in the course of an address to the Deep Waterways Convention. “It ought to be among the most important gatherings in our history,” he said, adding that the time had come to make “an inventory of the natural resources which have been handed down to us.” The rest of his speech amounted to a summary of McGee’s enviromental philosophy. “There is an intimate relation,” he said, “between our streams and the development and conservation of all the other great permanent sources of wealth.”
“THE PRESIDENT WAS AGAIN ABOUT TO ANNOUNCE SOMETHING ENORMOUS.”
Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot on the Mississippi River, October 1907 (photo credit 29.1)
The impact of this statement might have been greater if the New York Stock Exchange, which most Americans associated more clearly with wealth, had not again begun to show signs of deep unrest. Over the next two weeks, as the President lunged after bear in the canebrakes around Stamboul, Louisiana, some prices dropped to record lows, and others jiggled crazily. The initial cause of panic was a failure by two speculators, F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse, to take over the United Copper Company. They succeeded only in bankrupting two brokerage houses, another mining concern, and a bank. These implosions, headlined across the country, revealed to the Street that Heinze and Morse had been funded in their venture by the august Knickerbocker Trust, the very name of which signaled stability and money old and hard as bedrock.
The bedrock showed signs of crumbling on the afternoon of Friday, 18