The Wilderness Warrior
Page 46
Roosevelt’s campaign for the New York governorship in the fall of 1898 did, however, face obstacles. Serious concerns were raised over whether the colonel was a resident of New York (he’d been paying taxes in Washington, D.C.).98 Even within the state Republican Party, there were some who refused to let this new hero of San Juan Heights forget his record as a dyed-in-the-wool reformist. At times, working hard at retail politics made Roosevelt feel like a draft animal. But once he took to the “Roosevelt Special,” a whistle-stop train in which he toured towns and cities, often with Rough Riders standing proudly at his side, the election was essentially secured. In Syracuse, for example, Roosevelt orated on his fortieth birthday from the back of a train with the ferocity of William Jennings Bryan, pounding his fist, spittle flying, speaking of the greatness of the American flag, and pronouncing that better days were just around the bend. It was quite a show. And on November 8, 1898, Election Day, Roosevelt rode triumphantly to victory, defeating fifty-two-year-old Judge Augustus Van Wyck by 17,794 votes (out of over 1.3 million cast).99 His election was a testament to his power as mythmaker of self. Roosevelt was once again prepared to take a city—in this case Albany—by storm just like in Cuba.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HIGHER POLITICAL PERCHES
I
January 2, 1899—inauguration day—was bitter cold in Albany. A layer of snow coated the streets, and the temperature hovered around zero. Along the Hudson River the bucking wind had brought all vessels, even the icebreakers, to a halt. As governor-elect, Roosevelt headed to the state capitol as part of a parade, the trombones following him “froze in silence,” with only the drums keeping up a Sousa-like beat.1 Even the photographers refused to take pictures, for fear of damaging their expensive equipment. That afternoon, following swearing of the oath of office at the capitol, Roosevelt moved his family into the state executive mansion on Eagle Street. Typically, he refused to allow the inclement weather to extinguish his euphoria at becoming governor. Come spring, the entire front yard would be blooming with a variety of roses known as New Yorkers, plus hundreds of other indigenous plants from every county in the state. But now, as the seasonal cycle went, the lawn offered only bare elms and some evergreen shrubbery caked in frost.2
Becoming governor of New York was quite a historic achievement for Roosevelt. He was following in the larger-than-life footsteps of John Jay, Martin Van Buren, and Grover Cleveland. Back in 1891 Roosevelt had published History of New York City, for some quick money, anatomizing past governorships for anecdotal well-springs of raw courage.3 Indeed, Roosevelt understood that he was part of a very special club—the governorship of New York—whose antecedents ran from the Revolutionary War to the Spanish-American War. Seventeen years previously, he had come to Albany as an assemblyman: now he was running the state with the largest population in America. Roosevelt was no longer simply moving through history. He was poised to make it.4
That first evening in Albany, Roosevelt left Edith and his children in the executive mansion with a night watchman on duty and ventured outside into the vicious sleet. It wasn’t family-friendly weather. Dinner was being served at a friend’s house for society types of his own rank, a five-course meal worthy of Delmonico’s in Manhattan. He didn’t want to be late. Upon his arrival cocktails were handed out on specially engraved silver trays. At the dinner table the talk centered on current events. In an adjacent room a violinist played movingly, but Roosevelt talked over the mellifluous music. All the hale-looking gentlemen, most with stylish mustaches, sat riveted as he held court over buttery foods. At eleven o’clock the governor-elect said good night to his hosts and was driven back to the executive mansion. Dismissing the carriage prematurely, Roosevelt walked across the veranda to the front door; it was locked. Three or four times he rang the bell, feeling slightly like a Cossack trying to get into the czar’s palace. Nobody came to his rescue—not Edith or the night watchman or an awakened child. Losing patience, worried he was going to turn as blue as a winter corpse, an east wind cutting through his topcoat, Roosevelt clutched his key ring as if it were brass knuckles and smashed his fist through the plate-glass window. Reaching through the hole, he flipped the catch and gained entrance for his first night’s sleep as governor. The following day the New York Times ran a whimsical headline: “Gov. Roosevelt Shut Out.”5
Theodore Roosevelt was governor of New York from 1899 to 1900.
Roosevelt as governor. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
That was the only time in Theodore Roosevelt’s two-year term as New York’s governor that the words “shut out” would appear next to his name. Starting with his first annual address, presented shortly after the inauguration, Roosevelt launched an activist reformist agenda. Sandwiched in between discussion of roads and the economy was a section Roosevelt called “The Forests of the State.” The governor declared he would work against both the “depredations of man” and “forest fires” to keep parts of New York forever wild. He wanted to realign state government on behalf of conservation and natural resource management, demanding scientific answers to statewide environmental problems. (If Roosevelt had an overriding conceit in early 1899, it was that he thought in terms of geological time and in biological imperatives, whereas lesser politicians in Albany were part of the pettiness and crudeness of campaign cycles). The first annual message also declared that fish and game laws would be “more rigidly enforced.” The Adirondack Park, under Roosevelt’s watchful stewardship, truly would become a monument to “the wisdom of its founders.”6
What infuriated Governor Roosevelt about conservation and wildlife protection in his home state was its politicization, which led to inveterate inefficiency and callous disregard of nature. The state Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, for example, was packed with self-serving politicians who didn’t know flickers from juncos, who had never read Darwin’s A Naturalist’s Voyage or marveled at John James Audubon’s drawings of elegant egrets. Their uninformed anti-forestry views had spread like dermatitis over the state, he believed, negatively affecting the Catskills and Adirondacks. Whether he was taxing corporations, improving the Erie Canal, revamping mental hospitals, issuing new labor laws, or crusading on behalf of forestry, Roosevelt was well aware that his reformist policies would influence other states. Owing to his leadership of the Rough Riders, his national popularity was sky high. Reporters from Maine to California, understood that he made terrific copy. Widespread fame had brought him all its perks and degredations. “Everything he did,” the historian G. Wallace Chessman reflected in Governor Theodore Roosevelt, “would go into the record, to be used for or against him in the future.” 7
From day one as governor, Roosevelt championed the hiring of biologists and scientific experts for the New York Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, preferably experts trained in the Ivy League, to replace the politicians—who were like bloodsucking ticks on the state’s resources. Too often they used their positions of power to promote sweetheart deals. An investigation of the commission, Governor Roosevelt threatened, was under way. Warily, Roosevelt sought to fire the politicians on the statewide game commission and replace them with independent-minded biologists, zoologists, entomologists, foresters, sportsman hunters, algae specialists, trail guides, botanists, and activists for clean rivers. In Germany this phenomenon was being called Darwinismus. “The state of New York is fortunate at present in having a Governor who is not only deeply interested in all matters of game, fish and forest preservation,” George Bird Grinnell noted in Forest and Stream in May 1899, “but also has so clear an acquaintance with these subjects that he can always be depended upon to act on them for the public good.”8
Grinnell believed that for all his Rough Rider’s machismo, in private Governor Roosevelt wasn’t a know-it-all. Constantly, as his own correspondence bears out, Roosevelt would seek advice from acclaimed zoologists and foresters. Which herpetologist was the expert on snapping turtles? Which forester knew about a new strain of invasive fungi? Shouldn’t G
eorge Perkins Marsh’s The Earth as Modified by Human Action be carefully studied before the state allowed a paper company access to Bear Mountain? Basically, Governor Roosevelt wanted the state bureaucracy reduced and cronyism purged from natural resource management. One good silviculturist or pisiculturist, he believed, was worth more than any number of politicians looking to have their palms greased. Governor Roosevelt, in fact, advocated changing the commission altogether: from having five members to having only one scientific forestry leader—an idea also enthusiastically promoted by Gifford Pinchot.9
Pinchot was only thirty-four years old in 1899 but had established himself as an independent progressive of some note. Although he had been born in Connecticut, he was uncommonly proud of his French ancestry.10 His father, James Wallace Pinchot, a broad-ranging intellectual, had been an intimate friend of the elder Theodore Roosevelt.11 A graduate of Yale University (class of 1889, summa cum laude), Pinchot played on its football team as a reserve and was a member of the campus-based YMCA and a regular volunteer at the Y’s Grand Street Mission in New Haven.12 Strong, handsome, and notable for his porcelain-blue eyes, Pinchot was in such fine pulmonary shape that he could read from The Compleat Angler while doing a one-armed push-up. After college Pinchot spent more than a year at the École Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France, studying forest conservation. As part of his education he toured the most ably managed ancient woodlands of France and Germany. Meteorology, botany, and even astronomy came easily to Pinchot; he took up anything that could help him decode the mysterious forests of the world. Pinchot’s father had been a mainstay of the American Forestry Association, strongly advocating conservation management. Inspired by his father, Pinchot decided in his early twenties to dedicate his life to forest conservation. As proof of his pro-forestry convictions, he helped transform the family estate, Grey Towers in Milford, Pennsylvania, into a tree nursery, “the first forest experiment station in the nation to encourage the reforestation of denuded lands.”13
At the time Pinchot began foresting at Grey Towers, the United States had no university or college forestry program. He wanted to change that unfortunate situation. In 1892 he began the first serious systematic forestry work in American history at the timberlands of George Vanderbilt’s mansion, Biltmore, outside of Asheville, North Carolina.14 At the start nobody knew whether it was an advanced pilot program against catastrophism or a hillbilly boondoggle. Before long, however, this wasn’t a question: Pinchot’s forestry methods helped Biltmore prosper. In 1892 he opened an office in New York City, marketing himself as a forestry consultant. Pinchot wanted Americans to avoid the kind of horrific deforestation that had taken place in Europe ever since the industrial revolution oversaw the reckless wholesale destruction of the continent’s natural resources. Pinchot was a devotee of George Perkins Marsh, the pioneering Vermont conservationist who wrote Man and Nature, and he took seriously Marsh’s concern that parts of Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece, and Alpine Europe had been deforested to the die-off point of being as barren as a moonscape. “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness,” Marsh had written, “of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”15
The label applied to Pinchot time and again, borrowed from the Scottish philosopher John Stuart Mill, was “utilitarian.” In conservationist terms, this meant a believer in wise use of natural resources. But the label also unfairly minimized (and at times maligned) Pinchot’s lifetime effort to preserve and expand many of America’s most magnificent forestlands. He was a tireless crusader for both utilitarian forest preserves and wildlife protection. “The eyes do not look as if they read books,” Owen Wister wrote of Pinchot, “but as if they gazed upon a Cause.”16
Pinchot first came to Governor Roosevelt’s serious attention in 1896, when President Cleveland appointed the Yalie chief forester; however, they had dined together once, in May 1894. (Roosevelt, in fact, wrote Pinchot a quick note following the meal: “I did not begin to ask you all the questions I wanted to.”) 17 By 1897, Roosevelt thought enough of Pinchot to nominate him for the Boone and Crockett Club.18 And in 1898, when Pinchot became President McKinley’s head of the Division of Forestry (renamed in 1905 the United States Forest Service), Roosevelt roared his approval. Independently wealthy, using the family fortune to help promote western reserves, almost British in demeanor, Pinchot saw himself as the Exeter-and Yale-trained advocate, press agent, and spokesperson of a new forestry movement. His nickname was: “the Chief” (or “G.P.”) and his forestry associates were “Little G.P.s.” In his 1936 book Just Fishing Talk, Pinchot said that when he was a teenager, the Adirondacks had been his touchstone place, the woodlands where he learned to catch brook trout and painted turtles. As with Roosevelt, the Adirondacks had given Pinchot, a world-class fly-fisherman, “a new and lasting conception of the wilderness.”19
In early February 1899 Pinchot finally spent significant time with his idol and family friend. The governor had invited him to spend an evening in the Eagle Street mansion. Roosevelt had become something of a roadside attraction in Albany since inauguration day, with everybody wanting a moment of his time. Cognizant of Roosevelt’s new Rough Riders fame, Pinchot was grateful to have been included in Roosevelt’s frenetically full calendar. Accompanying Pinchot to the meeting was the architect Grant La Farge, the son of the famous painter and draftsman John La Farge (whose closest friend was Henry Adams).20 Roosevelt not only liked Grant La Farge—a fellow member of the Boone and Crockett Club whose face had a scrubbed Bostonian intellectual look—but named him the New York state architect during his first year as governor. The firm of Heins and La Farge, in fact, was commissioned by Roosevelt to build the Bronx Zoo. At Roosevelt’s recommendation La Farge also received the contract to design the first buildings at the State University of New York–Albany.21
As Pinchot and La Farge waited to be called into the governor’s office, they grew slightly nervous. Understanding that the wildly popular Governor Roosevelt was the most celebrated outdoorsman alive, they hoped to form a united front with him on the pressing forestry issues of the era. Pinchot’s principal concern was that every hour, the United States had fewer trees than an hour before. Deforestation in such places as the Olympics, the Cascades, and the Front Range of the Rockies was now widespread in land tracts not protected by the Cleveland Reserves. (And it was taking place even in some acreage that was supposedly protected.) Too many unscrupulous deals for U.S. government leases were being made in and around the western reserves. Pretty soon all the raw land west of Denver might look defiled like in Haiti, China, and Italy. The dire warnings in Man and Nature had to be heeded. The lack of water for irrigation was also a serious problem in places such as California and Nevada. Pinchot essentially promoted two remedies: creating more forest reserves and allowing some regulated timbering within their boundaries. Pinchot’s scheme was to enlist Governor Roosevelt in the great cause. Roosevelt—a politician who refused to sit on the dais while the band played—was his best hope for developing a new, widespread public awareness of the perpetual benefits of the forest realm. America had to remain a land with luxuriant woods and verdant valleys. “We arrived just as the Executive Mansion was under ferocious attack from a band of invisible Indians,” Pinchot recalled in his autobiography Breaking New Ground, “and the Governor of the Empire State was helping a houseful of children to escape by lowering them out of a second-story window on a rope.”22
Gifford Pinchot and his forestry team.
Gifford Pinchot and forestry team. (Courtesy of Gray Towers National Historic Site, Milford, Pennsylvania)
What a grand time Pinchot and La Farge ended up having in Albany with the famous Rough Rider! They cut up like misbehaving kids and acte
d as if they were trail mates; and Governor Roosevelt told numerous stories about adventures off the beaten path. All three shared a gratifying intellectual curiosity about the natural world. Roosevelt, in fact, acted not as a governor with authority and power, but as a fellow wilderness enthusiast, a fraternity brother from the world of the Boone and Crockett Club. He was excited by the talk of the Pacific Northwest and the Front Range, and his facial muscles flexed as he spoke, while his knees bounced with boyish enthusiasm, as if he were overcaffeinated. Any moment, it seemed, he would climb out the window on a rope himself then break another plate-glass to get back inside the mansion. Keenly observant, Pinchot noted that when the Adirondacks were mentioned Governor Roosevelt perked up like a border collie eyeing sheep. Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, Algonquin Peak, Upper Ausable Lake, Lake George—such natural wonders had magical connotations for Roosevelt, as they would later for the painters O’Keeffe and Hartley.
Capitalizing on the governor’s love of this natural setting, Pinchot hoped to form an alliance with Roosevelt that afternoon and evening, for preserving the deciduous hardwoods of the Adirondacks—especially the sugar maple, American beech, and yellow birch. What was supposed to be a short chat with the governor on their way to examine forested acreage owned by the Adirondack League Club (renamed the Tawahus Club in 1897), turned into hours of rollicking storytelling about the outdoors. Clearly, Roosevelt was fascinated to hear about the old-growth forests of the Olympics and Cascades, which Pinchot had recently toured (and photographed) as President McKinley’s “confidential forest agent.” But Roosevelt’s immediate concern as governor was the deterioration of the Laurentian mixed forests from Nova Scotia to the bogs of Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, especially in the Adirondacks and Catskills.