Theodore Roosevelt (10 page)

Roosevelt was fully aware of Taft's preference and was both fair and reasonable about it. He not only offered him the seat of retiring associate justice Henry Brown; he promised him that if he were still in office when the chief justiceship became vacant he would elevate him to that post. But he nonetheless still urged him to run for president as his primary duty to the nation:

As I see the situation it is this. There are strong arguments against your taking this justiceship. In the first place my belief is that of all the men that have appeared so far you are the man who is most likely to receive the Republican presidential nomination and who is, I think, the best man to receive it and under whom we would have the best chance to succeed.… The good you could do in four or eight years as the head of the nation would be incalculable.

Mrs. Helen Taft may have been the deciding influence. She was strongly and articulately in favor of her husband's running. When he at last consented and started campaigning for the nomination she urged him to soft-pedal his endorsement of TR's social program, which is certainly interesting in view of what later happened. She wrote her husband:

I do hope that you are not going to make any more speeches on the Roosevelt policies, as I think the matter should be left alone for the present—and you are simply aiding and abetting the President in keeping things stirred up. Let the corporations rest for a while. It is soon enough to talk about it when something needs to be done, and, whatever the West may be, in the East it has an aggressive air.

It is hard not to suppose that Roosevelt saw in Taft a future president whom he could dominate or at least one who would always seek to avail himself of the wisdom gained by longer experience in the job. At any rate, he threw the entire crushing weight of his own prestige and popularity into the fight for Taft's nomination in 1908 and with it the voices of the party members whose loyalty he had gained in seven years of astute political handling.

Lodge, chairman of the Republican convention, paced the platform for twenty minutes while the delegates howled their enthusiasm for Roosevelt, crying “Four years more!” When the tumult at last died down, he quelled the surge toward his friend's nomination with a few cold and decisive words:

His refusal of a nomination, dictated by the loftiest motives and by a noble loyalty to American traditions, is final and irrevocable. Anyone who attempts to use his name as a candidate for the Presidency impugns both his sincerity and his good faith, two of the President's greatest and most conspicuous qualities, upon which no shadow has ever been cast.

Taft was now easily nominated and easily defeated William Jennings Bryan in the election that fall, polling 51.6 percent of the popular vote to Bryan's 43 percent and winning the electoral vote 321 to 162.

It was a pity that TR, whose record on race relations was a good one for his day, should have clouded it by his action in an incident in 1906. In the border town of Brownsville, Texas, some twenty armed men engaged in a shooting riot that resulted in the wounding of one man and the killing of another. The townspeople accused members of the all-black Twenty-sixth Infantry Regiment of having instigated the riot in revenge for some racial slurs. Defenders of the regiment accused the town of staging the riot to discredit the blacks. On interrogation the entire regiment refused to testify, and all three companies, a total of 167 men, were discharged from the army “without honor.” The sentence, though vigorously criticized, was not overturned by the president, though ultimately fourteen of the men were allowed to reenlist. TR became very indignant when people questioned his judgment in the case, insisting that he would have acted in the same fashion had the regiment been all white, but that was not the way it was generally viewed, and it may be significant that he made no mention of the incident in his autobiography.

An interesting difference between Roosevelt's campaign in 1904 and Taft's four years later is in the treatment of contributions from business interests. In TR's time it was still considered improper and undignified for a sitting president to barnstorm the country. TR, of course, had found this attitude very trying; he likened it to “lying still under shell fire,” as he had experienced during the war in Cuba. But it heightened the importance of political contributions, and in 1904, as we have seen, the “malefactors of great wealth” had not yet been scared out of their traditional support of the Republican Party and gave heavily to TR's campaign. These payments may have been concealed from Roosevelt, but in any event he proved much less sensitive on the subject in 1908 than the actual candidate.

Federal law at the time forbade political contributions from corporations but was silent about those from corporate officers or directors. When William Nelson Cromwell, the notorious lawyer who had helped to engineer the Panamanian revolt for a huge fee, offered Taft the sum of fifty thousand dollars, the candidate insisted that it be lowered to ten thousand dollars. This may seem a dubious kind of laundering, but at least it was a step in the right moral direction. TR thought it overscrupulous and wrote:

You blessed old trump, I have always said you would be the greatest president, bar only Washington and Lincoln, and I feel mighty inclined to strike out the exceptions. My affection and respect for you are increased by your attitude about contributions. But really I think you are oversensitive.

George R. Sheldon, the party treasurer, would have deemed this a masterpiece of understatement when he received Taft's direction to accept no contributions from representatives of Standard Oil or from any officer or director of a company that might in Taft's term of office face prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act or other federal law.

“I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism,” Taft wrote TR, “but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.”

When Sheldon demanded where, under such restrictions, he was expected to raise the funds needed to defeat the populist William Jennings Bryan, who was again the Democratic nominee, Taft told him to go after the smaller businesses. He did so and collected $1.6 million less than the $2.2 million raised in 1904, but enough to win the election. Perhaps the scarecrow of Bryan had frightened enough of the middle class to elect his opponent even without the aid of the moguls.

Taft's acceptance speech at the Republican convention may have epitomized his go-slow policy in implementing TR's Square Deal:

The chief function of the administration, in my judgment, is distinct from, and a progressive element of that which has been performed by President Roosevelt. The chief function of the next administration is to complete and perfect the machinery … by which lawbreakers may be promptly restrained and punished, but which shall operate with sufficient accuracy and dispatch to interfere with legitimate business as little as possible.

And Taft's letter to TR after the farewell White House dinner to the outgoing president on March 3, 1909, expressed already what sounds like an only pious hope:

People have attempted to represent that you and I were in some way at odds during the last three months, whereas you and I know that there has not been the slightest difference between us, and I welcome the opportunity to stay the last night of your administration under the White House roof to make as emphatic as possible the refutation of any such suggestion.

Twelve

Gifford Pinchot was the handsome, patrician, ambitious, and idealistic son of a rich father who encouraged him to undertake the extensive training that would enable him to achieve his ambition of becoming America's first professional forester. Initially employed in 1892 to manage the forest on George W. Vanderbilt's immense estate in Asheville, North Carolina, he proved his mettle by reducing expenses to a minimum through the expedient of selective logging: excluding cattle from the forest (he called them “horned locusts”) and cutting only the trees that shaded the younger still-growing ones. He was soon called to government work in Washington, and in 1898 he was named chief of the Division of Forestry under the jurisdiction of the General Land Office in the Department of the Interior. The Land Office was totally incompetent to manage a cornfield, let alone a forest, but young Pinchot would soon enough change all that.

TR, as newly elected governor of New York, now called on Pinchot for a plan to manage the forests of that state, and he went to Albany. As Pinchot wrote in his memoirs: “I laid before the governor my plan for a single-headed New York Forest Commission instead of the spineless, many-headed commission of those days, and he approved it entirely. TR and I did a little wrestling at which he beat me; and some boxing during which I had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very sturdy pins.”

It was the beginning of a friendship, not only of vital importance to the history of American conservation but to the story of the breakup of TR's friendship with Taft and the split in the Republican Party.

Roosevelt called for Pinchot's assistance almost immediately after taking office as president. It is believed that Pinchot contributed this portion of TR's first State of the Union address:

The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity. We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forest, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our well-being.

Pinchot, throughout Roosevelt's two terms, was a power in the land. He never obtained cabinet rank, but he had constant access to the president, who always listened to him, and that, as in the case of Harry Hopkins under FDR or Colonel House under Wilson, was all he needed to implement his projects.

They were sorely needed. Of 250 billion board feet of national timber, 40 billion were being cut annually and replaced by only 10 billion. The president could map out areas of the public domain and declare them natural forest-land and subject their new occupants, homesteaders or lumber interests, to regulations of yield cutting, cattle grazing, irrigation, and other protective restrictions.

Pinchot's interests as a naturalist were much narrower than Roosevelt's. He did not share the latter's passionate and expertly informed enthusiasm for birds or beasts. When Roosevelt claimed to have been the last person to spot a passenger pigeon in the wild, the ornithologists believed him. Nor did Pinchot share, at least to anything like the same degree, TR's reveling in beautiful nature. He was not as bad as “Uncle Joe” Cannon, representative from Illinois and long-term Speaker of the House, who wouldn't vote a cent for “scenery,” but his philosophy was distinctly utilitarian. He wanted to make the forests useful to man. And he reached out beyond government to the owners of vast private forests to join as many of them as he could in the Society of American Foresters to spread knowledge of how to prevent and contain forest fires and how to provide power sites for water and electricity.

Pinchot and TR addressed the problem of water shortage in the arid lands of the West. Aided by Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada they worked for the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 whereby the proceeds of the sale of certain lands in the public domain would be allotted by the secretary of the interior for irrigation projects.

When Roosevelt took office there was no protection for wildlife except in national parks. In 1903 he declared Pelican's Island in Florida, once a teeming source of bird mating but subsequently abandoned because of hunters, the first national wildlife refuge, and three years later he created six more. Edith Roosevelt joined her husband in the denunciation of women who wore egrets' plumes in their hats. “If anything,” her husband wrote to a bird lover, “Mrs. Roosevelt feels more strongly than I do.”

In 1905 Pinchot achieved his goal of transferring the Division of Forestry, of which, of course, he was chief, from the Department of the Interior to the more sympathetic and knowledgeable one of Agriculture. But his difficulties with the former, as we shall tragically see, were not over.

Although TR, as we have seen, was no great enthusiast for the American Indian—at least while they were still in belligerent opposition to westward-moving white men—he had a great respect for their reservations and origins once they had been quelled. He even obtained the passage of the National Monuments Act to preserve their tribal relics.

Toward the end of TR's second term the opposition to his conservation policies, which had long rumbled, became fierce. Homesteaders who claimed that too much land in the pubic domain was set aside for grazing, and lumber interests that maintained too much was set aside for forests, were now listened to by congressmen, and there was even some wild talk in parts of the far West of secession. The government went down to defeat in its fight for the establishment of an Inland Waterways Commission to regulate navigation, irrigate arid lands, protect low areas from flooding, and supply water for domestic and manufacturing purposes.

Worse was to come. A bill was introduced in Congress to deprive the president of his power to create national forests from the public domain in the states of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Knowing it was sure to pass and with only a few days to lose, TR sent Pinchot to map out areas that he could nominate as forestland while he still had the power to do so. Pinchot laid out thirty-three such areas, and the president thus added sixteen million acres to forestland—to the fury of the lumber interests.

Despite all opposition, Roosevelt as president increased our national forests from 42 million acres to 172 million and created fifty-one national wildlife refuges. As Senator Robert La Follette said of him: “His greatest work was actually beginning a world movement to staying terrestrial waste.”