Theodore Rex (123 page)

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.”

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.

As an honorary member of the Gang, which operated out of the White House attic, the President was capable of considerable mischief himself. But when Q’s guerrilla activities threatened national security, he did not hesitate to exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief. One such occasion was the Battle of the Guidon, waged on the South Lawn between two divisions of the Gang, respectively led by Q and Taffy.

The property office of the War Department having condemned a moth-eaten silk artillery pennant, Company Q decided to fight Company T for possession of it. Whichever side held the colors for three minutes (Q, like his father, was an obsessive clock-watcher) would win the privilege of dictating Gang activities for the rest of the afternoon. Taffy (like
his
father a capable deployer of military matériel) staked the guidon about five feet from the nozzle of a hose, the strategic significance of which Q did not at first appreciate.

During the ensuing battle, Taffy, by far the largest combatant, maintained his grasp of the flagstaff and ordered an aide, Edward “Slats” Stead, to spin a concealed tap. Q and his force of three men were blasted head over heels in the resultant gush of water. Enraged, Q issued a counterorder (“Keep it up! Keep it up! I’m going to sinister this, immejitly!”) and disappeared. Suddenly, the gush lost its force. As the spray cleared, Q was revealed in possession of a fire ax, with which he had sliced the hose into several sections. His triumph was forestalled by a stentorian shout from the West Wing, and the President came charging through the Rose Garden, coattails flying.

Charles Evans Hughes, whose candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination had never recovered from
Roosevelt’s surprise attack in January,
could vouch for this advice, along with Senator Foraker, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and President Marroquín of Colombia. But the President was not finished with his son: