Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  ON 12 MAY, forty-five state and territorial executives dined at the White House on the eve of the Governors’ Conference. They were joined by thirty other dignitaries and Roosevelt acolytes at a vast horseshoe table in the State Dining Room. The President sat with Chief Justice Fuller on his right and Speaker Cannon on his left (in a severe sulk at being downgraded). Elsewhere in the room, he could see members of what Owen Wister called his “Concert of Familiars”: Gifford Pinchot, hawk-nosed at the extreme south end of the shoe next to Frank McCoy, who had hauled down Old Glory in Havana, six years before; John Mitchell of United Mine Workers, dulled by drink; Justice Holmes, long since returned to presidential favor; handsome James Garfield; Commander William Sims, the Navy reformer, even handsomer; and Justice Moody, clean-shaven now, with a strange aloofness settled upon him, the most interesting-looking man in the room. Faces less intimately familiar looked back at him from among the many anonymous governors: Andrew Carnegie and James J. Hill, millionaires; Captain Archibald Willingham de Graffenreid Butt, his new Georgian military aide; Senator Newlands of Nevada; and William Jennings Bryan, probably the last person any social secretary would expect to see on the President’s dinner list, with the exception of Booker T. Washington.

  Bryan’s presence (and controversial placement next to Moody) signaled the democratic nature of tomorrow’s conference “on the conservation of natural resources.” When wood and water were endangered, the political differences between men of power dissolved. To Roosevelt’s regret, his only living predecessor, Grover Cleveland, was unable to attend because of illness.

  Many of the governors had never been in the White House before, and they were noticeably awed by the splendor of their reception. Roosevelt, wanting to stress the conference’s momentousness, had ordered that they be presented to him “as for a state dinner.” He had welcomed them one by one in the East Room, then led them down the great vestibule with Fuller walking alongside him, in a mimetic show of Power and Justice guiding Procedure.

  The dinner seating had been planned with further formality by the State Department, but Roosevelt, looking it over, had decided that enough was enough and rearranged it so that men with things to say to each other, such as James J. Hill and Theodore E. Burton of the Inland Waterways Commission, could sit together—conferring, after all, being the whole point of conferences. To further aid the flow of talk (and sherry, sauterne, and claret), he elected to have no toasts or speeches. Gentlemen from the West, who tended to eat more than they spoke, were awarded full command of a menu including littleneck clams on the half shell, coquilles of fresh caviar, strained gumbo, cold salmon Bayardère, squabs à l’Estouffade, filet piqué Richelieu, ice cream pralinée, “fancy cakes,” and coffee.

  “THEY WERE NOTICABLY AWED BY THE

  SPLENDOR OF THEIR RECEPTION.”

  Theodore Roosevelt hosts the first conservation conference, May 1908 (photo credit 30.2)

  Since the night was warm, cigars and liqueurs were served on the West Terrace. Roosevelt accepted neither, concentrating all his attention on Bryan. The two men talked at a small table for more than an hour. Captain Butt overheard the President saying, “I confess to you confidentially that I like my job.” The rest of the company strolled and admired the fragrant garden.

  In spite of himself, Roosevelt was impressed by the Commoner. “A wonderful man,” he remarked afterward.

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK the following morning, Roosevelt called to order a vastly larger assembly in the East Room. Present, along with the governors and their aides, were his entire Cabinet (minus only Taft, who was in Panama, and Metcalf, who was with the fleet in San Francisco); all nine Justices of the Supreme Court; an uncounted number of members of Congress; representatives of sixty-eight professional societies, including those of chemistry, law, medicine, publishing, social and political science, civil engineering, forestry, architecture, mining, scenic and historic preservation, statistics, drainage, farming, lumber, slack cooperage, and hay; twenty-one editors and reporters from technical, news, and popular publications; forty-eight special guests, including academics, geographers, entomologists, biologists, soil experts, and commissioners of labor and Indian affairs. In a major gesture toward universal representation, one seat was assigned to Sarah S. Platt-Decker, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

  Allowing for a few invitees not showing, and excluding a constant influx and egress of senators and congressmen, the Governors’ Conference totaled some 360 persons. The “Syllabus” prepared for its guidance by WJ McGee intimidatingly comprised ninety-five aspects of conservation, preservation, and planned exploitation under eleven headings: Mineral Fuels, Ores and Related Materials, Soil, Forests, Sanitation, Reclamation, Land Laws, Grazing and Stock Raising, Relations Between Rail and Water Transportation, Navigation, Power, and Conservation as a National Policy.

  “The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land,” intoned old Edward Everett Hale, the Chaplain of the Senate, “a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness. Thou shall not lack anything in it—a land where stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig copper.”

  Roosevelt delivered the opening address.

  You have come hither at my request, so that we may join together to consider the question of the conservation and use of the great fundamental sources of wealth of this Nation. So vital is this question, that for the first time in our history the chief executive officers of the states separately, and of the states together forming the Nation, have met to consider it. It is the chief material question that confronts us, second only—and second always—to the great fundamental questions of morality.

  Applause filled the room. Three days of serious discussion were only just beginning, yet already Roosevelt and Dr. Hale had sounded the conference’s keynote and pedal point: that the natural endowment was a gift of God, and that utilitarianism must be subject to human and spiritual constraints.

  Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.”

  Further applause interrupted the President. In the elegantly printed little program every guest had been issued, his speech bore the title: Conservation as a National Duty.

  He reviewed the energy policy of the United States from the days of General Washington, when “anthracite coal was known only as a useless black stone” and water was practically the only source of power outside human and animal exertion. Ignorant though Washington had been of the potentials of coal and steam, he had seen clearly that the future United States could be linked in perpetuity only by a common power network. To that end, the Father of the Country had pressed for, and brought about, an interstate waterways conference between Virginia and Maryland.

  “It met,” said Roosevelt, allowing his listeners to make what comparisons they chose, “near where we are now meeting, in Alexandria, adjourned to Mount Vernon, and took up the consideration of interstate commerce by the only means then available, that of water; and the trouble we have since had with the railways has been mainly due to the fact that naturally our forefathers could not divine that the iron road would become the interstate and national highway, instead of the old route by water.” Washington’s conference had led to another, much greater one in Philadelphia, involving all the states, that “was in its original conception merely a waterways conference; but when they had closed their deliberations, the outcome was the Constitution which made the States into a Nation.”
>
  Applause again surged, acting as a drumroll to his next, thematic sentence: “The Constitution of the United States thus grew in large part out of the necessity for united action in the wise use of our natural resources.”

  He proceeded to catalog the irresponsibility with which Americans, over more than a century and a quarter, had successively abused water, mineral, and forest resources, leading to the loss of more than half the nation’s original timber, and signs of exhaustion already visible in iron and coal reserves. The pristine waterway scheme of the Founding Fathers was now neglected, underused, and ill managed. The “soils of unexampled fertility” that had greeted pioneer farmers were leaching away through ignorance, “washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.” Again, he harped on the need for “foresight,” and again was applauded as his use of the word became rhythmic: “We have to, as a nation, exercise foresight … and if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will be the future!”

  It was the duty of the Governors’ Conference, he said, to formulate a national philosophy of conservation based on efficient use of finite resources and scientific management of renewable ones. For himself, he vowed to continue working through the Inland Waterways Commission, which he took pride in having created (“I had to prosecute the work by myself”) and which, if Congress persisted in depriving it of funds, he would perpetuate by executive means.

  This won him his loudest ovation yet, hardly quieter than the one that followed his praise of Gifford Pinchot’s initiative in making conservation a national priority. Then he won bursts of laughter by quoting a recent opinion by Justice Holmes (gazing at him from only a few feet away) in favor of the right of “the State as quasi sovereign” to prevent private property owners from despoiling a waterway, even though “there are benefits from a great river that might escape a lawyer’s notice.”

  “I have simply quoted,” Roosevelt said, as the audience guffawed.

  He concluded with another invocation of conservation as morality, and sat down amid cheers.

  Rules were announced for orderly conduct of the conference’s discussion sessions, set to begin after lunch. Experts presenting overlong statements would be subjected to the discipline of bells; governors would have chair powers; the proceedings of the conference would be recorded and published in full; a Committee on Resolutions should be organized and authorized to formulate general conclusions.

  The hands of the East Room clock now stood at five minutes past noon. “Gentlemen,” Roosevelt called out, “I shall now have the pleasure of meeting you personally as you pass through the Blue Room.”

  HE STAYED WITH them through Andrew Carnegie’s postprandial paper on the conservation of ore. Then, having tried, and failed, to get William Jennings Bryan to speak extempore, he gracefully withdrew, explaining, “I have a good deal to do.” A good deal of that good deal apparently demanded his presence on the White House tennis court, but he was conscientious thereafter in opening each session and hearing each opening paper.

  The conference broke up on the afternoon of 15 May, after a “garden party” for attendees and their wives, hosted by Edith Roosevelt and hastily relocated indoors when rain descended. The governors issued a concluding declaration that upheld everything the President had said about the interrelationship of civilization and conservation, and conservation and morality, and morality and duty. They urged the “continuation and extension” of the Administration’s current forest and water policies, recommended the enactment of laws against wasteful practices in mines and heavy industry, and resoundingly agreed that “this conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly the attention of the Nation, the States, and the People in earnest cooperation.”

  THUS EMPOWERED, Roosevelt promptly created a National Conservation Commission, under the chairmanship of Gifford Pinchot, instructing it to compile the inventory he had called for at Memphis. He announced that he would also call a North American Conservation Conference, to enlist the aid of Canada and Mexico in protecting the hemispheric environment. Ultimately—if not in his own presidency, then perhaps early in the next—there should be an international conference with an even larger agenda, spreading the philosophy of conservation worldwide.

  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 President being, at last, “out of it” was enough to make Adams realize that there would soon be none left of his old Washington salon—excepting Henry Cabot Lodge, who was as much a cold stone statue, these days, as any of the capital’s growing population of sculpted statesmen. Whatever else might be said of Roosevelt, he had vigor di vita.

  “The old house will seem dull and sad,” Adams wrote, “when my Theodore has gone.”


  CHAPTER 31

  The Residuary Legatee

  MR. HENNESSY I don’t know whether th’ administhration is a success or not.

  MR. DOOLEY Me friends differ.

  MR. HENNESSY Rosenfelt says it is.

  MR. DOOLEY Rockefeller says it isn’t.

  MR. HENNESSY But annyhow, whether ’tis a success or not, it’s been injyable.

  THE FIRST DAY OF JUNE 1908 found Theodore Roosevelt alone in the White House, with only his youngest son for company. Edith and Ethel were cruising down the Potomac in search of sea breezes, Archie had transferred to Sagamore Hill, and his elder children were gone, or half gone, along their respective roads to independence. “Until Quentin goes to bed the house is entirely lively,” he wrote to Ted. “After that the rooms seem big and lonely and full of echoes. The carpets and curtains are all away, as the heat of summer has begun.”

  His office time was devoted largely to persuading as many still uncommitted delegates as possible to vote for Taft at the Republican National Convention, now little more than two weeks off. In doing so, he had to make fanatic Rooseveltians understand that he would not accept a draft himself, on any size of silver plate—difficult for them to believe, and depressing for him to reiterate, since the certainty that he would be elected if nominated was no less than that of Quentin growing taller.

  “Q,” as schoolmates called him, was an always cheerful, straight-A student with a love of long words, chopping them up patriarchally and grinning when he succeeded without stuttering. (“The Republican presidents have been most u-n-i-f-o-r-m-l-y good—but the Democrats have been, without e-x-c-e-p-t-i-o-n, terrible.” Some of the words were misapplied, or wholly invented; Q never let deliberation impede his eloquence.) He was ten and a half years old now, and Roosevelt noticed, with some sadness, that he was no longer interested in being read to. The White House Gang, an elite cadre of Washington’s most subversive small boys, accepted Q as their leader—not because he was the son of the President, but because with his big head, cyclonic energy, and moral decisiveness he simply was Theodore Roosevelt in their imitative world, just as placid, plump-cheeked Charles “Taffy” Taft, unquestioningly accepting Q’s orders, acted as Secretary of War in all confrontations with foreign powers, notably the District of Columbia Police Department.