Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss Page B

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.”

Thirteen
    This chapter will be devoted to quotations from TR’s correspondence during his two terms as president. I hope to illustrate the diversity of his interests even while he was concentrating his principal energies on a job that affected not only the nation but the planet itself.
    We start with his private injunction to a naval officer who, although promoted, had a drinking problem:
    But for your own sake and for the sake of the service which is so dear to us both I wish greatly that you would write me pledging your word as an officer and a gentleman that you would never again under any circumstances permit yourself to get under the influence