Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [311]
Americans began to be aware of the extent to which he, often by stealth over the past six years, had used his powers (Joseph Cannon would say, misused them) to set aside an extraordinary large and varied swath of the national commons. He had created five national parks, doubling the total bequeathed to him in 1901, and struggled against mining interests to make a sixth of the Grand Canyon. Unsuccessful in that quixotic task, he had made the canyon a national monument instead, under the new Antiquities Act, effectively preserving it for future parkhood. In fewer than six months, since passage of the Act, he had proclaimed fifteen other national monuments, interpreting the latter word loosely to include environments as different as Muir Woods, California, and Gila Cliff Dwellings, New Mexico. He had initiated twenty federal irrigation projects in fourteen states under the National Reclamation Act. He had declared thirteen new national forests—a total that Pinchot intended to vastly multiply, now that “Conservation” was at last part of the American ethos.
Perhaps nearest to Roosevelt’s own heart, he had created sixteen federal bird refuges, starting with Pelican Island, Florida, in an executive coup that was already part of his legend. (“Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation? Very well, then I so declare it.”) At Wichita Forest, Oklahoma, he had made the first federal game preserve. His three environmental commissions, on public lands, inland waterways, and national conservation, had embarked on the probably ill-fated but historically important task of educating corporate skeptics to an awareness of the rape of the American wilderness.
And Roosevelt had nine months left in office to expand on these beginnings, as relentlessly as he was able.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Congress adjourned, with no last-minute legislative largesse thrown the President’s way, and its members hastened to prepare for their respective national conventions. Roosevelt remained in Washington to monitor the last few days of Taft’s campaign for the Republican nomination, and quell yet another little flurry of rumors that he was hoping to be drafted for a third term. “Any man who supposes that I have been scheming for it, is not merely a fool, but shows himself to be a man of low morality,” he wrote to Lyman Abbott. “He reflects upon himself, not upon me.” In the midst of this protest, he could not help adding, “There has never been a moment when I could not have had practical unanimity without raising a finger.”
Two West Virginia delegates elected under instructions for Taft actually announced that they were switching their votes to the President. Roosevelt was obliged to write a letter to their congressman, urging him to tell them how strongly he objected to any such pledge. He had the letter copied in case of any other defections, but doubted that he would have to use it. Taft, having managed to defeat Senator Foraker’s attempt to co-opt the Ohio GOP, was now far ahead of the two other ranking candidates for the nomination, Governor Hughes and Senator Knox. Roosevelt assured Henry Adams that “Will” would get a two-thirds vote on the first ballot in Chicago. As for himself, he was “now safe out of it.”
Adams had to admit, in the privacy of his own correspondence, that these words had struck a chill. For twenty years, he had pretended to detest Roosevelt, joked and gossiped about him, and mocked his every supposedly thoughtless, bull-calf blunder. But the mere thought of the