The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America

by Timothy Egan

  Taft found a few moments of ceremonial relief, throwing out a pitch on opening day of baseball, the first president to do so. But he never mastered the public face, the bully pulpit, as Roosevelt had urged him to do. His political skills were abysmal. He couldn't bluff an opponent, nor could he scare one. Worse, for a politician, he could not remember names. Not yet halfway into his term, Taft sensed he was a failure. "There is no use trying to be William Howard Taft with Roosevelt's ways," he wrote his brother. The White House, he realized, was the "loneliest place in the world." Roosevelt would only make it lonelier.

  8. Spaghetti Westerners

  MORE THAN 5,000 MILES from the fires of the northern Rockies, a mother in the village of Rivara Canavese opened a letter from her son in the faraway American West. Domenico Bruno had left Italy with his friend Giacomo Viettone to find work in the United States. Every few months, the boys sent money back to their families, enough to allow them to keep some measure of dignity.

  Tucked away in the foothills of the Italian Alps, Rivara was nearly empty of its young men in 1910, like many places in Italy at the turn of the century. Though it was only thirty miles from the bustle and prosperity of Torino, the village had the feel of gloom and yesterday on it. Through the ages, under a succession of rulers dating to feudal times, Rivara had existed primarily to supply ore for European cities. People were poor, with little education, isolated from the outside world. The fortress walls of the Alps blocked weather systems from the west and north, making Rivara a balmy respite year-round. But with the mines nearly spent, wages fell to bare subsistence, and those who did have jobs worked six days a week. "We get old quickly," one miner said.

  Word spread, through anecdotal stories and pamphlets circulated by employment agencies in the United States, that a man with a strong back and good work ethic could make a year's pay in just a few months' time in America. Passage to the United States, in steerage, could be bought for $12, and it took little more than a week to cross the Atlantic. The copper mines of Arizona, the silver and lead havens of the Rocky Mountains — it was Italy, with gold on the streets! But these places were so remote, distant from the American cities that Italians had heard about. Where was Montana? Where was Arizona Territory? And what were the Bitterroot Mountains?

  Domenico Bruno had left his home, like many in the village, with the intention of making just enough money to help his family and build his own nest egg. After that, he would return to Rivara, if not a rich man, then at least with enough of a stake to buy a farm in the Canavese Valley, with its good grass and alluvial soil, replenished by snowmelt from the mountains. His father was a farm laborer, an aging peasant no longer able to work, who lived off his small garden and help from friends. The family's other son, Pietro, had been drafted by the military and sent to Tripoli. It was up to Domenico to save the family. He said goodbye in 1907, a year when 285,000 Italians went to America.

  Never before had so many people fled Italy for the United States. In that year, one in four immigrants came from Italy, a country that could barely feed its citizens as it tried to move, a latecomer, into the industrial age. By 1910, the high-water mark of emigration, Italy had given up more than two million of its people in less than a decade. Most of them were from the south, from Naples, with its corruption and crowded tenements, from Sicily and Apulia and other parts of the heel of Italy's boot—places where the soil was as tired and broken as the people, hopeless lands with dark suspicions. The north was considered more European, more prosperous, closer in identity and outlook to France, Germany, or Switzerland. One of the exceptions was the mountain valley northwest of Torino, the home of Domenico and Giacomo.

  Most immigrants landed in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, the docks thick with Sicilian dialect, which Domenico and his friends could barely understand. The cities were filthy and dangerous, and "many Italians were dazed by the complexity of existence" in these urban centers, the immigration commission reported. Everyone heard the story of the twelve-year-old Italian girl, Camella Teoli, who was working in a factory where cotton was twisted into thread when the machine tore off a big part of her scalp.

  Domenico and Giacomo hopped aboard a train, finding work in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a foul-aired boomtown six thousand feet above sea level. Rock Springs was treeless, raked by cold winds, populated by Finns, Chinese, Austrians, and Italians, each with their own ghetto. The Italian miners lived in a cluster of shacks near the railroad tracks north of town. The business of Rock Springs was coal, with mines dating to the first transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Domenico missed the green hills of home, the chestnut trees and balmy weather. But he was making money. In that first year in America, he sent his family $70, a fortune in the ragged village of Rivara Canavese. His friend Giacomo did just as well: after eighteen months of work, he mailed $150 back to his mother, who was blind in one eye and had five children at home with her.

  The Rivara immigrants heard about a place in Arizona Territory with better pay, six hundred miles to the southwest. Copper mining was said to be cleaner than digging coal. On a hunch, they headed for Morenci, where the Phelps Dodge Company ran the town with ironfisted consistency. The company favored Mexican and Italian laborers, who were cheaper and thought to be more docile than the Irish. What passed for law and constitutional protections in Morenci were thugs hired by Phelps Dodge. They maintained a three-tier wage system: one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians. Such attitudes were typical in a decade when nine million immigrants came to the United States, and one-third of the population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad. The Italian surge in particular angered those who felt the nation was no longer recognizable, had lost its sense of identity. And they hated all these strange languages spoken in shops, schools, and churches. The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Boston blue bloods with family ties to the old Tories of England, campaigned to keep "undesirable classes" from entering the country. They meant Italians, Greeks, Jews, and people from eastern Europe.

  "The scum of creation has been dumped on us," said the nativist politician Thomas Watson. "The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us." It was not just politicians who attacked Mediterranean immigrants as a threat to the American way of life. Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called Italian and Greek immigrants "beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggles for existence." Another educated expert cautioned Americans against "absorbing the excitable blood from Southern Europe."

  In 1880, the United States had barely forty thousand Americans of Italian descent. In little more than a generation's time, there were more than three million, a wave that prompted calls to close the doors of passage to Italy. Aside from the Chinese, who had been rousted out of many western mining towns at the end of a gun or pitchfork, the Italians received "the roughest treatment of all ethnic groups," as one study found. During a congressional hearing on immigration restrictions, a building contractor told the lawmakers he never referred to his Italian workers as white men. "No, sir, an Italian is a dago."

  In Arizona, Domenico was united with a lost uncle, Giuseppe Bruno, and another boyhood friend, Paolo Poletto. They joined a fraternal club in neighboring Clifton, La Società Fratellanza di Mu-tuo Soccorso, where they could drink wine made from California grapes, eat salted cod, and sing songs from the north. They also had their own saloon, run by the Spezia brothers. Despite a larger support group of his countrymen, Giacomo had trouble in Morenci. He loaned a friend money, was never paid back, and fell into a hole of debt. In 1907 and 1908, bad years for the American economy after a panic, he was not able to send anything home to his family. But in 1910, he started fresh, losing some of his bad habits and saving money with diligence. By the summer of that year, he had $280 set aside — enough for him to keep his family well for several years, or to buy that small farm in the Canavese Valley. It would not be long before he returned to the gr
een hills in the shadow of the high Alps.

  Domenico did even better: he mailed $80 in 1909, his best year yet, and was well on his way to surpassing that in 1910. But work in the copper mines was horrid, and the Italians grew tired of the war-zone atmosphere and the harassment from company guards. Morenci's other name, the one used by people who worked there, was Hell Town. People defecated and urinated in the streets. There was little fresh food. If you wanted a room in the company town, the rent was $18 a month, which could easily swallow up wages. Underground, conditions grew worse. Miners descended four thousand feet in rickety elevators, with limited oxygen. A man went down, every shift, not knowing whether he would make it back up. He felt swallowed by the earth itself, deep in that cold, dark intestine beneath Hell Town.

  So it did not take a lot of convincing for Domenico and Giacomo to head north in the summer of 1910, north to the Rocky Mountains, where the government was looking for young men to fight fires. These boys had the mountains in their blood. The air would be clean, or at least fresher than in the Phelps Dodge pits, and they'd be surrounded by trees, just like back in Italy, even if many of those trees were on fire. When the call for firefighters came in late July, the offers of immediate work paying 25 cents an hour, the two best friends from Rivara jumped on the next train. And after that, word was, there might be steady work in one of the bright new cities of the Pacific Northwest or its primeval woods. "There are Indians and huge forests," one Italian wrote home. "We are told there will be steady work for at least 50 years."

  ***

  Four months earlier, the squall that was Teddy Roosevelt had made landfall in Porto Maurizio, on the Italian Riviera, about 130 miles from the village where Domenico and Giacomo were raised. Roosevelt was trailed by an international press corps with rumors to stoke. Gifford Pinchot had sailed to Europe to meet his political soul mate after more than a year apart. At first he tried to stay out of sight, traveling under an assumed name. But the closer he got to Roosevelt, the more open he became, eventually shedding all inhibitions about what he and Teddy might be plotting. His presence alone spurred talk about a rift in the Republican Party. Would Pinchot and Roosevelt go after Taft, the man they had chosen to carry on their legacy? Did Roosevelt share Pinchot's view that his successor had betrayed the progressive cause? And if so, what did he intend to do about it?

  Roosevelt had been mum on the president since leaving office, trying to make good on a vow to refrain from comment about Taft. He had traveled north from Africa, up from the Sudan and Egypt, made his way to Rome to visit the Vatican, and then intended to renew his romance with his wife on the Ligurian coast. The Roosevelts had tried to sneak into Porto Maurizio with little fanfare, arranging to stay at a villa in the hills above the sea. But Pinchot's pending arrival disrupted the plan. Tipped by the press, crowds gathered as soon as the ex-president and his family came to town. A parade was organized, and Roosevelt was made an honorary citizen of Italy. On the day of his reunion with Teddy, Pinchot walked through the village in the early morning, as if trolling for attention. His time away from the hothouse of Washington politics had done him good: at age forty-five, he looked fit, everyone said, and was full of vigor. Asked how he felt, he replied, "Like a cock!"

  Roosevelt always did stimulate the adrenaline in Pinchot. On this visit, Pinchot intended to pour out his fury over Taft. He had seen his beloved Forest Service crack and begin to fall apart. The rangers were bereft, without money to fight fires or hold the network of stations together. Their enemies in Congress had just passed a law making it illegal for the agency to publicize itself, an attempt to undermine the constituency of support for the service and for conservation. Senator Heyburn went one step further: he said no federal money should be spent on forests, that it was a violation of states' rights. Worse, some of the land that Roosevelt had set aside had been turned over to private interests by Taft. The big man talked of conservation, but his actions showed otherwise. And his interior secretary, Ballinger, the administration's advocate for letting corporations have their way again with public land, was still in charge. Nor had the Alaska scandal knocked him from office. With every passing month of 1910, Pinchot's animus grew. Saving the Forest Service would require a Roosevelt Renaissance.

  Pinchot was sure that Roosevelt would see things his way, saying, "On that road, T.R. was with us all the way. He knew the forests and he loved them." But Teddy was also starting to see a side of Pinchot that concerned him—the missionary zeal, the cocky certitude, the loose cannon. So long as he was someone's subordinate, Pinchot held his excesses in check. As a free agent, he was a different man, a Roman candle of self-righteous indignation. "G.P. is a dear, but he is a fanatic with an element of hardness and narrowness in his temperament," Roosevelt said in a letter to his son.

  In Porto Maurizio, the men greeted each other with a round of robust back slaps and hail-fellow jokes. Walking among the olive groves and vineyards of the village, high above the azure Mediterranean near the French border, Pinchot was exhilarated. The final year of the Roosevelt presidency, he recalled, had given his life meaning. "Those were great days, days of the intensest action, and in them I did the hardest work of my life," he wrote in the rosy glow of hindsight. What they had created together, in Pinchot's mind, would outlive both of them—should it survive Taft's neglect. "The Conservation movement had grown from a series of disjointed efforts into the most vital single question before the American people," he said.

  Pinchot intended to get Roosevelt to break his silence, and in so doing, cripple the Taft presidency. With the sea breeze blowing in their faces, the two men talked all day and well into the night — a marathon even for these two famously robust conversationalists. For Pinchot, the meeting went beyond his expectations. "One of the best & most satisfactory talks with T.R. I ever had," he wrote in his diary.

  Roosevelt was left with a quandary: he wanted to honor his pledge of silence, but Pinchot had stoked his anger. When reporters pressed him for details afterward, he dropped a bomb. He would soon be returning the United States, and when he did so, he planned to go out west and make a major speech on conservation. The implication, of course, was that Taft had failed the country in what Roosevelt had started; it was up to Teddy to revive it. At least that's how the press and Pinchot interpreted it—a slap in Taft's face. "Most interesting report from home," Pinchot wrote a week later, from Paris. "Taft losing ground steadily." And in hindsight, it looks as if Roosevelt's decision to take on the man he had groomed for the highest office in the land was in fact made in the olive groves of Porto Maurizio. Pinchot said as much. "If you and I had made it to order, it couldn't be any better from our point of view," he wrote to his brother Amos.

  "I finally have to admit to myself," Roosevelt wrote at the same time to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, "that deep down underneath I had all along known I was wrong, on points which I had tried to deceive myself." Pinchot's gamble in Italy had paid off.

  Domenico Bruno and Giacomo Viettone arrived in Wallace in the first week of August and found a town under a skirt of smoke. Still, it was better than the open sewage of Morenci. The Bitterroots did look a lot like home: steep green flanks, the town pressed into the narrowest opening in the valley. At dusk, with eyes half closed, it could be Rivara. But everywhere people scurried in anticipation of disaster. The military was in the valley now, the 25 th Infantry, camped just south of Wallace. To some of the immigrants, the black troops were a curious sight. "It was here we saw our first negroes," one Italian miner wrote.

  For now, Domenico and Giacomo had a vital role in the new country. Though a cartoon in that year showed a sleeping Uncle Sam in a country overrun by Italians—"Wake up, Sam!" was the caption—Domenico, Giacomo, and hundreds of other Italians were now working for the pride and joy of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt. Their small part of the Great Crusade, just like the Buffalo Soldiers', was to save the centerpiece of the dream of the two easterners. Pinchot and T.R. would do the speechifying, the political lifting, whil
e these strong backs would hold the front line. The Italians were hired by Bill Weigle as part of his pledge to give Pulaski enough men to keep Wallace from falling to fire. The job interview took but a few minutes, and then they were put on a mountain crew. August 4 was their first day of work. They were sent over the ridge to join about fifty men under the overall direction of Pulaski. What they wore into the woods was what they wore when they arrived in town. They could expect to be on Uncle Sam's payroll for a month, maybe more, because their job was no small task: hold back the fires of August.

  Teddy Roosevelt had returned to New York on June 10, to a tumultuous dockside reception, a spit in the eye of his enemies. "That spring," the Kansas writer William Allen White wrote, "the country was politically seething with the yeast of a progressive movement." J. P. Morgan's fondest wish for Roosevelt's travels in Africa — "I trust some lion will do its duty" — had not come to pass. Teddy was back, ready to stir the progressive pot. A ticker-tape parade was arranged, showering Roosevelt with the kind of attention usually reserved for an expedition hero or someone who had broken a world record. All Roosevelt had done was leave the country for a year. During his last months in Europe, he went to Sweden to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded four years earlier for helping to resolve a conflict between Russia and Japan. And he gave a speech in Paris, at the Sorbonne, that came to define his life philosophy—the Man in the Arena speech. Better for a man to fail, he said, even "to fail greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

  Certainly, Gifford Pinchot had not retreated into timidity since his reunion in Italy with T.R. He dashed off a short book, a call to arms, The Fight for Conservation, almost a religious cry. He predicted that America might one day, within this century, be a nation of two or three hundred million people. And what would his generation leave them? Their duty was to the future. To ensure that people in 2010 would have a country of clean water, healthy forests, and open land would require battle with certain groups, namely "the alliance between business and politics." It was, he said, "the snake that we must kill."