• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3105 0

battleship larger than the Dreadnought was received unenthusiastically by the British and adamantly opposed by Wilhelm II. TR then wrote Sir Edward Grey in October, suggesting that an attempt should be made to limit the number of ships being built. But his temporary ardor for arms control was clearly flagging. By early 1907 he had essentially lost hope and interest in the Second Hague Conference, whose proceedings he did not even follow. It fell to Elihu Root to direct American delegates at the conference, establish the Drago Doctrine (still in force), and push for the strengthening of the Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration. This idea broke down when the countries could not agree on how the judges would be chosen. By the time the conference closed on 18 Oct. 1907, it was generally considered a failure. TR, Letters, vol. 5, 601; Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 2, 75–79, 82. See Frederick C. Leiner, “The Unknown Effort: Theodore Roosevelt’s Battleship Plan and International Arms Limitation Talks, 1906–1907,” Military Affairs 48.3 (1984).

47 In a letter TR, Letters, vol. 5, 528–29.

48 Three days later Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 161; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 600–601. For Root’s unenthusiastic handling of the arms-limitation issue at the Second Hague Conference, see Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 2, 71ff. By February 1907, British interest in the subject had also waned, the Liberal government being at least as wary of Germany’s rearmament as the Roosevelt Administration was of Japan’s.

Historical Note: TR’s comments on arms limitation in 1906 and early 1907 have an oddly prophetic ring. He cites, over and over again, his fear that if “free peoples” disarm too much, they will become vulnerable to “military depotisms and barbarisms” (see, e.g., TR, Letters, vol. 5, 366). Eighty years in advance of Ronald Reagan’s cautionary motto regarding arms-control pacts, “Trust, but verify,” TR was writing the British Foreign Secretary about the Hague agenda proposals, “In view of the marvelous ability certain nations have of concealing what they are doing, we would have no real idea whether or not they were keeping down their armaments even in the event of an agreement to do so.” Ibid., 601.

49 AS THE END Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 203; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 604.

50 Conservation, by itself J. Leonard Bates, “Fulfilling American Democracy: The Conservation Movement, 1907 to 1921,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44.1 (1957); Lacey, “Mysteries of Earth-Making,” 386, 339.

Historiological Note: The date at which conservation acquired its modern, politicized meaning is as variously debated by historians as that for progressivism. Bates and Lacey agree that 1907 was when conservation became a social movement, as opposed to a complex of disciplines—and as contrasted with the sentimental preservation of John Muir and the Sierra Club. Bates directly links conservation to progressivism. Lacey stresses conservation’s scientific origins in the work of such pioneers as the explorer-geologist John Wesley Powell, the mammologist C. Hart Merriam, the forester-geographer Henry Gannett (bequeather of much data to Pinchot), and the prodigiously catholic WJ McGee. It was Gannett who first spoke of forest preservation as “almost a religion.”

51 Roosevelt had virtually Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 200; Harold T. Pinkett, Gifford Pinchot: Public and Private Forester (Urbana, 1970), 75–78; Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt, 216–17.

52 There was something The word hypnotic is that of TR’s childhood friend Fanny Parsons, in a description that emphasized Pinchot’s extraordinary attraction for women (Parsons, Perchance Some Day, 127). See also Wister, Roosevelt, 174; Roosevelt vs. Newett, 196; James Garfield diary, 30 July 1904 (JRG).

53 “Pinchot truly” TR qu. in Butt, Letters of Archie Butt, 147.

54 A forced draft Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 215.

55 Thus came into TR’s own “Memorandum on signing proclamations” appears in TR, Letters, vol. 5, 603–4. “Failure on my part to sign these proclamations would mean that immense tracts of