Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [299]
Judge Gary said he would endorse the Morgan plan, but only if Roosevelt endorsed it, too. He liked the President, and believed him to be a pragmatic man, responsive to reasoned argument. Early on Monday, 4 November, he and Frick visited the White House for breakfast. Roosevelt was so impressed by their willingness to consummate an undesirable deal in order to forestall a “general industrial smashup,” that he agreed within twenty minutes to let them go ahead. Immediately after their departure, he let Attorney General Bonaparte know that the acquisition had his approval.
The New York Stock Exchange had not yet opened when Gary called George Perkins to advise him of Roosevelt’s goodwill. Perkins passed on the news just before nine o’clock. Relief flooded the market, and within hours prices began to rally.
ON 11 NOVEMBER, Roosevelt signed forty-six copies of a document, which more than any other he had ever written could justifiably be called a “posterity letter,” in that it addressed itself, with the utmost urgency, to the future. It was his promised call for a national conservation conference. One copy went to each state and territorial governor, and a further five hundred copies to a cross-section of the most influential men in the country, from members of Congress and Justices of the Supreme Court to industrial tycoons and editors of major newspapers.
“It seems to me time for the country to take account of its natural resources,” the President wrote, “and to enquire how long they are likely to last.”
The suggestion that anything so unquantifiable as the mineral and vegetal and hydrological wealth of one of the world’s largest nations might, in fact, be rendered into an “account” was almost as shocking as the cold, hard tone of Roosevelt’s last seven words. He wrote with the finality of a man who had, with his own eyes, seen the last few flutterings of a species that had once been capable of blackening the sky.
“We are prosperous now,” he continued, not even bothering to qualify his statement. Wall Street’s current recession was as trivial, historically speaking, as a waver in one of a redwood’s hundreds of growth rings. “We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” He repeated what he had said at Memphis about the gravity of the responsibility Americans had to pass on to their children a protected natural heritage. For more than a century, that endowment had been “depleted and in not a few cases exhausted,” especially in the northeastern states. The situation was already so serious that it was a matter for all government, not merely the federal government, to face:
I have therefore decided, in accordance with the suggestion of the Inland Waterways Commission, to ask the Governors of the States and Territories to meet at the White House on May 13, 14, and 15 [next], to confer with the President and with each other upon the conservation of natural resources.
It gives me great pleasure to invite you to take part in this conference.… I shall also invite the Senators and Representatives of the Sixtieth Congress to be present at the sessions as far as their duties will permit.
The matters to be considered at this conference are not confined to any region of groups of States, but are of vital importance to the Nation as a whole and to all the people. These subjects include the use and conservation of the mineral resources, of the resources of the land, and the resources of the waters in every part of our territory.…
Facts, which I cannot gainsay, force me to believe that the conservation of our natural resources is the most weighty question