The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The biography ends with two brief chapters tracing Morris’s decline into cantankerous old age. There are hints of certain “treasonous” tendencies during these “discreditable and unworthy” last years (Morris had been part of a Federalist group contemplating secession from the Union in 1812). Yet, in a final-page summary of the whole life, Roosevelt is willing to bestow his highest praise upon Gouverneur Morris. “He was essentially a strong man, and he was American through and through.”65

  REVIEWS WERE NEGATIVE when Morris came out the following spring. The Book Buyer felt that there had been insufficient character analysis, and complained of some “rather dry” stretches of prose. The New York Times commented, “Mr. Roosevelt has no style as style is understood,” but allowed that “his meaning is never to be mistaken.” The Dial, while praising him for “an exceedingly interesting narrative, artistic in its selection, forcible in its pungent expression,” called his scholarship “rather more brilliant than sound,” and said that his irreverent treatment of the American Revolution, not to mention certain “slurs” upon eminent men of the past, were “beneath the gravity of historical writing.”66 It was generally agreed that Gouverneur Morris was clever, patchy, and superficial—a verdict which posterity can only endorse.

  ROOSEVELT’S “STRAITENED FINANCES” made the summer of 1887 an uneventful one.67 He was kept from being too restless by the intensity of his work on Morris (the 92,000-word manuscript was researched and written in little over three months). Sometimes he took a day off to row his pregnant wife to a secluded spot in the marshes, where they would picnic and read to each other.68 For other recreation, he chopped wood, played tennis (winning the local doubles championship and promptly splurging his share of the “cup” on a new Winchester), taught himself the rudiments of polo, and now and then allowed his hunting-horse to “hop sedately over a small fence.” There were many wild romps on the piazza with Baby Lee, who was now an enchantingly pretty little girl of three. His letters are full of fond anecdotes about “the blue-eyed offspring” and “yellow-haired darling.”69

  The only recorded houseguests to Sagamore Hill in 1887 were Bamie, the Douglas Robinsons, and Cecil Spring Rice. Roosevelt’s happiness in being remarried and settled at last en famille warmed them all, and sent them away glowing. Spring Rice went back to Washington vowing that he liked Theodore “better every day I see him.”70

  By late summer Roosevelt had worked himself into a state of such nervous excitement over Morris, and Edith’s approaching confinement, that he was felled by a surprise recurrence of asthma. The arrival of an eight-and-a-half-pound baby on 13 September seems to have shocked him back into health. Later that day, in a letter announcing the birth, he proudly added the word “Senior” to his signature.71

  In October the hunting season got under way. Roosevelt pounded energetically after Long Island fox, but a longing for nobler game soon overwhelmed him. It had been more than a year since he had killed anything substantial. His herds in Dakota offered a convenient pretext for another trip West. Early in November, therefore, he set off with a cousin and a friend for five weeks’ ranching and shooting in the Badlands.72

  Ten days of “rough work” on the range were enough for his two companions, who hurried back to New York on 14 November. He was not sorry to see them go. “As you know,” he wrote Bamie, “I really prefer to be alone while on a hunting trip.”73 Little is known about his wanderings during the next three weeks. One can only speculate, but during that solitary period some shock seems to have awakened a long-dormant instinct in Theodore Roosevelt—prompting him to take certain actions immediately after returning East.

  The speculation is that as he rode farther and farther afield, he found the Badlands virtually denuded of big game—although he did manage, by an extraordinary fluke, to kill two black-tailed deer with one bullet.74 Even in 1883 he had been hard put to find any buffalo this side of Montana; a year later the elk and grizzly were gone. In 1885 he had complained that bighorn and pronghorn were becoming scarcer, and in 1886 noticed that some varieties of migratory birds had failed to return to the Little Missouri Valley.75 All this was due to the white man’s guns and bricks and fences. Roosevelt had regretted the loss of local wildlife, but he took the conventional attitude that some dislocation of the environment must occur when civilization enters a wilderness. One day, perhaps, a new balance of nature would be worked out.…

  Now, in November 1887, it was frighteningly obvious that both the flora and the fauna of the Badlands were facing destruction. There were so few beavers left, after a decade of remorseless trapping, that no new dams had been built, and the old ones were letting go; wherever this happened, ponds full of fish and wildfowl degenerated into dry, crack-bottomed creeks. Last summer’s overstocking, together with desperate foraging during the blizzards, had eroded the rich carpet of grass that once held the soil in place. Sour deposits of cow-dung had poisoned the roots of wild-plum bushes, so that they no longer bore fruit; clear springs had been trampled into filthy sloughs; large tracts of land threatened to become desert.76 What had once been a teeming natural paradise, loud with snorts and splashings and drumming hooves,77 was now a waste of naked hills and silent ravines.

  It would be hard to imagine a sight more melancholy to Roosevelt, who professed to love the animals he killed. For the first time he realized the true plight of the native American quadrupeds, fleeing ever westward, in ever smaller numbers, from men like himself. Ironically, he had always been at heart a conservationist. At nine years old he was “sorry the trees have been cut down,”78 and his juvenile hobby of taxidermy, though bloody, was in its way a passionate sort of preservation. His teenage slaughter of birds had been scientifically motivated; only as a young adult had he learned to kill for the “strong eager pleasure” of it.79 Even then he always insisted that a certain amount of hunting by responsible sportsmen was necessary to keep fecund species from multiplying at the expense of others.80 But by 1887 the ravages of “swinish game-butchers” (and could he, in all conscience, exclude himself from that category?) were plain to see; the only thriving species in Western Dakota were wolves and coyotes.81 Roosevelt was now in his twenty-ninth year, and the father of a small son; if only for young Ted’s sake, he must do something to preserve the great game animals from extinction.

  HE ARRIVED BACK in New York on 8 December, and lost no time in inviting a dozen wealthy and influential animal-lovers to dine with him at 689 Madison Avenue. Chief among these was George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, and a crusader against the wanton killing of wildlife on the frontier. He had become Roosevelt’s close friend after printing a complimentary review of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman; the two men had already spent many evenings together discussing “in a vague way” the threat to various American species. But, as Grinnell afterward explained, “We did not comprehend its imminence and the impending completeness of the extermination … those who were concerned to protect native life were still uncertainly trying to find out what they could most effectively do, how they could do it, and what dangers it was necessary to fight first.”82

  Roosevelt now decisively answered these questions. His twelve dinner guests must join him in the establishment of an association of amateur riflemen who, notwithstanding their devotion to “manly sport with the rifle,” would “work for the preservation of the large game of this country, further legislation for that purpose, and assist in enforcing existing laws.”83 The club would be named after Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, two of Roosevelt’s personal heroes, and would encourage further explorations of the American wilderness in their honor. Other objectives would be “inquiry into and the recording of observations on the natural history of wild animals,” and “the preservation of forest regions … as nurseries and reservations for woodland creatures which else would die out before the march of settlement.”84 From time to time the club would publish books and articles to propagate its ideals.

  The proposal was approved, and in January 1888 the Boone & C
rockett Club was formally organized with Theodore Roosevelt as its president. It was the first such club in the United States, and, according to Grinnell, “perhaps in any country.” Membership rapidly grew to a total of ninety, including some of the nation’s most eminent scientists, lawyers, and politicians. Through them Roosevelt (who remained club president until 1894) was able to wield considerable influence in Congress.85

  Among his first acts was to appoint a Committee on Parks, which was instrumental in the creation of the National Zoo in Washington. He ordered another committee to work with the Secretary of the Interior “to promote useful and proper legislation towards the enlargement and better government of the Yellowstone National Park”—then a sick environment swarming with commercial parasites. The resultant Park Protection Act of 1894 saved Yellowstone from ecological destruction. Still other Boone & Crockett committees helped establish zoological gardens in New York, protect sequoia groves in California, and create an Alaskan island reserve “for the propagation of seals, salmon, and sea birds.”86

  When he was not working on these committees himself, Roosevelt joined forces with Grinnell in editing and publishing three fat volumes of wilderness lore, written by club members. American Big-Game Hunting (1893), Hunting in Many Lands (1895), and Trail and Camp-Fire (1897) won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and prompted the establishment of Boone & Crockett-type clubs in England and various parts of the British Empire.87 A glance at Roosevelt’s own contributions as an author shows that he by no means lost his relish for blood sports. It remained strong in him through old age, although an apologist claims “he then no longer spoke of hunting as a pleasure, rather an undertaking in the interest of science.”88 Roosevelt was a complex man, and, as will be seen, his complexity grew apace during the middle years of his life. But as founder and president of the Boone & Crockett Club, he was the prime motivational force behind its conservation efforts.89

  The most significant, from his own point of view as well as the nation’s, was to do not with animals but with forestry. Roosevelt had a profound, almost Indian veneration for trees, particularly the giant conifers he had encountered in the Rockies.90 Walking on silent, moccasined feet down a luminous nave of pines, listening to invisible choirs of birds, he came close to religious rapture, as many passages in his books and letters attest. Hence, when the American Forestry Association began its struggle to halt the rapid attrition of Western woodlands, Roosevelt threw the full weight of his organization behind it. Thanks to the club’s determined lobbying on Capitol Hill, in concert with other environmental groups, the Forest Reserve Act became law in March 1891. It empowered the President to set aside at will any wooded or partly wooded country, “whether of commercial value or not.”91 The time would come when Theodore Roosevelt joyfully inherited this very power as President of the United States. One wonders if he ever paused, while signing millions of green acres into perpetuity, to acknowledge his debt to the youthful president of the Boone & Crockett Club.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME that Roosevelt sat discussing big-game preservation with his dozen dinner guests, President Cleveland dumbfounded Congress with the first Annual Message ever devoted to one subject. The tariff bulked even larger than Civil Service Reform as a political issue in those last days of 1887; as will be seen, the two major parties were diametrically opposed in their attitudes toward it. To provoke a similar division of opinion in the electorate, as Cleveland did by publicly coming out against the tariff, was in effect to decide the result of the next national election, still eleven months off. Republicans reading the text of his message reacted with incredulous joy, while Democrats wondered privately if the Big One had gone mad.92

  Simply described, the tariff was a system of laws, hallowed for decades by successive Republican administrations, which levied high duties on imported goods in order to protect American industry and provide revenues for the federal government. So vast were these revenues (about two-thirds of the nation’s income) that a surplus had been building up in the Treasury every year since 1879. It now waxed enormous,93 and President Cleveland believed that it posed a malignant threat to the economy. To spend excessive money was wasteful; yet to hoard it, when it could have been in healthy circulation, was even more so. Cleveland, having silently pondered American tariff schedules for two years, decided that they were “vicious, inequitable and illogical.” Congress was instructed to reduce most rates, and abolish others altogether: wool, for example, should be allowed to come in free. The tariff, wrote Cleveland, would be “for revenue only” and not for protection.94

  By his unfortunate use of the word “free” the President thus laid himself open to charges that he was a Free Trader, while by attacking Protection he identified that comfortable doctrine with the Republican party. “There’s one more President for us in Protection,” crowed James G. Blaine,95 leaving few observers in doubt as to which President he had in mind. A wave of optimism spread through the party as bells across the country rang in another election year.96

  But Roosevelt remained in the pessimistic minority. His political instinct told him the tariff was too complex an issue to divide the electorate neatly.97 He had to admit that Blaine was a certainty for renomination, and stood at least an even chance of being elected. This made Roosevelt’s own hopes for appointive office even more forlorn than they had been the previous spring. President Blaine would be no more likely to favor him than President Cleveland. The Plumed Knight was a man of long memory: he would not forget the rejection of his advances in the mayoral campaign of 1886.

  “I shall probably never be in politics again,” Roosevelt wrote sadly to an old Assembly friend. “My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really take rank in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”

  THUS, IN A CRYPTIC CONFESSION dated 15 January 1888,98 did Roosevelt give his first hint that he was musing the major work of scholarship that would preoccupy him for the next seven years. Four volumes, perhaps eight, would be required to do the subject justice: his theme was enormous but vague. Within its blurry parameters (conforming roughly with the shape of the United States), he began to see heroic figures fighting, moving, pointing in one general direction.

  The process of literary inspiration does not admit of much analysis. Writers themselves are often at a loss to say just when or why a given idea takes possession of them. Roosevelt, certainly, never indulged in such speculation.99 Yet it is possible to mention at least some of the fertilizing influences upon what he proudly called “my magnum opus.”100 In those first weeks of 1888 he happened to be checking through a batch of page proofs from England, comprising several chapters of The American Commonweath, by James Bryce, M.P., whom he had met in London the previous winter. Bryce wanted his expert opinion on various passages dealing with municipal corruption. As Roosevelt read the proofs through, he realized that he held a masterpiece in his hands. It was, he decided, the most epochal study of American institutions since that of de Tocqueville; it made his own Gouverneur Morris (whose galleys also lay upon his desk) seem pathetically trivial in comparison.101 Bryce’s reference to him, in a footnote, as “one of the ablest and most vivacious of the younger generation of American politicians” was flattering but ironic, given the present stagnation of his political career; it only served to increase his yearning to write a work “in the very first class,” which would earn him similar respect as an American historian.102

  Back of this immediate ambition swirled a mass of past influences, with little in common except their general geographic orientation. Among them were his years in the West, living with the sons and grandsons of pioneers; his belief, inherited from Thomas Hart Benton, that America’s Manifest Destiny was to sweep Westward at the expense of weaker nations; his fascination with the racial variety of the West, and its forging of a characteristic frontier “type,” never seen in the Old World; his wide readings in Western history; his efforts
, through the Boone & Crockett Club, to save Western wildlife and promote Western exploration—all these combined into one mighty concept which (the more he pondered it) he saw he might handle more authoritatively than anyone else. It was nothing less than the history of the spread of the United States across the American continent, from the day Daniel Boone first crossed the Alleghenies in 1774 to the day Davy Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836.103 He decided to call this grand work The Winning of the West.

  His first act was to dedicate the book to the ailing Francis Parkman.104 Like most well-read men of his class, Roosevelt had been brought up on that writer’s majestic, seven-volume History of France and England in North America. Parkman was a scholar who combined faultless research with the narrative powers of a novelist. With that other sickly, half-blind recluse, William H. Prescott, he wrote sweeping sagas full of color and movement, in which men of overwhelming force bent nations to their will. Roosevelt set out to follow this example. Not for him the maunderings of the “institutional” historians, with their obsessive analyses of treaties and committee reports. He wanted his readers to smell the bitter smoke of campfires, see the sunset reddening the Mississippi, hear the tomahawk thud into bone. While reveling in such detail (which he would meticulously annotate, lest any pedant accuse him of fictionalizing), he would strive for Parkman’s epic vision, the ability to show vast international forces at work, whole empires contending for a continent.105

  BY MID-MARCH he had a contract from Putnam’s—committing him rather ambitiously to deliver his first two volumes in the spring of 1889106—and he plunged at once into the somewhat rodent-like life of a professional historian. He burrowed through piles of ancient letters, diaries, and newspapers in Tennessee, and unearthed many long-forgotten documents in Kentucky, including six volumes of Spanish government dispatches, and some misspelled but priceless pioneer autobiographies; he inquisitively searched some two or three hundred folios of Revolutionary manuscripts in Washington, and ferreted out thousands of letters by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, untouched by previous scholars; he devoured the published papers of the Federal, Virginia, and Georgia governments in New York, and pestered private collectors as far away as Wisconsin and California to send him their papers.107 By the end of April he had amassed the bulk of his source material, and began the actual writing of The Winning of the West on 1 May, at Sagamore Hill.108