Theodore Rex (55 page)

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY
opened up ahead, and Roosevelt began to encounter a wilder species of western fauna: Rough Rider veterans. Importunate, noisy, and side-armed, they demanded preferential access to their Colonel, even in small desert towns at 3:00 in the morning.

At Santa Fe, he was corralled by his former Mexican-American sergeant into serving as godfather at the baptism of Theodore Roosevelt Armijo in an old adobe church. Candle in hand, looking at the back of the father’s swarthy neck, he reflected that “
his ancestors and mine had doubtless fought in the Netherlands in the days of Alva and Parma, just about the time this mission was built and before a Dutch or English colonist had set foot on American soil.”

In the plaza afterward, Roosevelt spoke seriously on his new theme, the conservation of natural resources. “This is a great grazing state. Because of the importance of the grazing industry I wish to bespeak your support for the preservation in proper shape of the forest reserves of the state.” He was conscious of opposition in his audience, many of whom were sheep farmers. As such, they must be aware that their flocks destroyed forest growth: he tried to make them understand that forest pasturage, restricted and supplemented by irrigation schemes, could be self-renewing. They stood quietly in the hot square, cowboys in pale sombreros, muscular Mexican women in lace tea gowns, bandy-legged soldiers in khaki, priests in black-and-red cloaks, plump, prosperous-looking shepherds, and stockmen frowning at his words.

A similar audience awaited Roosevelt on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The stupendous chasm, which he had not seen before, powerfully affected him. “
I don’t exactly know what words to use in describing it. It is beautiful and terrible and unearthly.” He was relieved to hear that the Santa Fe Railroad had rejected a plan to build a hotel at Rowe’s Point. “
Leave it as it is,”
he implored the crowd. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it—keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.”

Those last words were to become a recurrent theme in Roosevelt’s speeches as he crossed the Sierras and descended the Pacific slope. All the landscape was new to him now. He exulted in California’s lush, feminine fertility. Here, literally blossoming around him, was desert made flowerland by irrigation: houses embowered with roses and grapevines, deep orchards, acres of golden poppies, wildflowers speckling the sage in pointillistic patterns. Here, he told himself, “a new type” of American child was growing up, indigenous as the flowers, half familiar yet exotic. New York seemed impossibly far away; Europe a historical memory. “
I felt as if I was seeing Provence in the making—that is, Provence changed by, and in its turn changing, a northern race.”

Fifteen hundred children and millions of flowers greeted him at Redlands on 7 May. The roadway under his carriage was so thick with rose petals that he rolled along soundlessly and fragrantly. When he arrived in front of the Casaloma Hotel, the children serenaded him; they pelted him with blossoms as he stood up to speak. Again he talked of irrigation, of conservation, and of procreation. There were yet more children, and roses, at San Bernardino and Riverside and Pasadena (their upthrust arms, holding bouquets, seemed to undulate in the breeze of his rhetoric). Roosevelt became slightly incoherent, as if drunk on the scented air: “
this plain tilled by the hand of man as you have never tilled it until it blossomed like the rose … blossomed as I never dreamed in my life that the rose could blossom …”

But the horticultural climax to his visit was yet to come. He reached Los Angeles on 8 May, in time for the final parade of the Fiesta de Flores. Looking dazed, he sat on the reviewing stand as marshals rode by, perched on saddle blankets apparently woven from carnations and roses. They were followed by a barren float piled with sand and bones: the desert as cadaver, unlamented. Then came a tableau of efflorescent California: waterworks spraying mist over seedlings and grain; harsh sunflowers yielding to lilies and pansies; citrus and olive groves jiggling with fruit. The floats, drawn by ropes and chains of flowers, became ever more extravagant: a thirty-foot mobile garden, courtesy of the Los Angeles Parks Department; an eight-foot pyramid of white carnations, symbolizing the purity of organized labor; a submarine of scarlet geraniums; and a flower globe of the Earth, with the United States picked out in yellow daisies, between oceans of undulating fern.
Amid all the color and luxuriance, nubile girls in white waved prettily, to the President’s obvious pleasure.

For four hours, the child California bloomed like a rose before him.

THE SIGHT OF AN
enormous redwood towering above Santa Cruz three days later was expected also to enchant the President. But he frowned at its petticoat of calling cards and advertising posters. “Those cards pinned up on that tree give an air of the ridiculous to this majestic grove,” he said angrily. He began to lecture bystanders. “Do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful scenery of this wonderful state unmarred by vandalism or the folly of man.” Refusing an official escort, he went to cool off in a nearby grove. When he came back, the cards had been taken down.

“
There is nothing more practical in the end than the preservation of beauty,” Roosevelt declared the next day. He was speaking at Stanford University, whose architecture and setting, half Pacific, half Mediterranean, enhanced his impression of California as the loveliest of states.

In a major conservation address, he urged the students to respect their natural heritage. “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates.” This was not to say that most of the North American forest could not be “used” scientifically and efficiently, if government exerted its just powers. Properly protected, woodlands and grasslands would function forever as spongelike sources of water for irrigation, making immense tracts of arable land available to homesteaders under the national reclamation program. “Water speculation”—rentals charged by the private owners of dams and streams in semidesert areas—would dwindle as public reservoirs swelled. Monopoly, whether of wood or water, would be confounded, and land laws refined to their original democratic purpose.

“We have a right to expect that the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Mountains and great plains states will take the lead in the preservation and right use of the forests,” Roosevelt roared. He did not add that he had quietly expanded the federal woodland by one third in his first year as President. Such a boast would only antagonize western reactionaries.

CONCERN MOUNTED, MEANWHILE
, behind boardroom doors on Wall Street that Theodore Roosevelt was “an extremely dangerous man.” For all his lip service at Milwaukee and St. Paul to
laissez-faire
ways, he seemed to stand, in the eyes of Henry W. Taft, for “a pretty pronounced type of socialism.” He had shown prejudice against railroad owners, beef packers, and coal-mine operators; he had won a referral of Knox’s
Northern Securities
suit to the Supreme Court, and stirred up hell in the South; now he was protecting foliage and threatening to strengthen the public-land laws. His professed truce with the trusts was likely to last as long as it took him to win the Presidency in his own right. Once he got the executive bit between those grinning, biting teeth, there would be no holding him.

A group of financiers, asked whom they would prefer to see as the Republican nominee in 1904, replied almost unanimously, “Somebody like Hanna.”

MORE THAN 2,500 MILES
, and a greater distance between prejudice and perception, prevented Roosevelt’s capitalist critics from seeing him address a conservative audience of “citizens of the Golden State” at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on 12 May. Had they done so, they might have been reassured as to his fiscal soundness. Standing in white tie over a table spread with cloth of gold, beneath hanging golden garlands two feet thick, he accepted a gold loving cup and reverently invoked the need for “a gold basis” for the nation’s currency. His subsequent call for a more elastic money supply could have been written by Senator Aldrich, and indeed possibly was.

The next morning, at Mechanics Pavilion, Roosevelt changed guises, reverting to the exultant imperialism of his prepresidential days. He looked toward the Orient and saw nothing but an American ocean, veined with American cables and crisscrossed by American freighters, the largest in the world:

He reviewed the rise and fall of seagoing civilizations from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the more recent navies and the merchant marines of northern conquerors. California—America’s new Greece—must now rise to the commercial and cultural challenges of “the greatest of all the seas.” The United States as a whole must follow its westward destiny until West and East merged. This meant a new global strategy:

The audience understood Roosevelt’s last reference very well. He was bringing his historical survey right up-to-date. Current newspapers agitatedly
reported a crisis situation in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Tsar Nicholas II, whose forces had occupied that industrialized region for five years, had failed to honor a promised withdrawal timetable. Now Russian officials were conspiring to keep Manchurian ports closed to foreign trade—a clear breach of Secretary Hay’s Open Door policy in the Far East—while profiting themselves from mining and shipping concessions. And much to Japanese alarm, the Trans-Siberian Railway, with its seemingly limitless capability to bring in military reinforcements, was nearing completion.

In other disturbing Russian news, dispatches reported a mass killing of Jews in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev.
Casualty figures “worse than the censor will permit to publish” were leaking out.
The American Hebrew’s
estimate was one hundred and twenty killed and five hundred injured in anti-Semitic riots; the Tsar himself was rumored to have ordered the slaughter.