Ep. 21: How You Create a New West, and a New America | The American West

Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a lifestyle and political career that made him the most important president in history for the creation of a West and a country centered on conservation. In the process his obsession with nature finally took the U. S. in a different policy direction than the countries of western Europe we had tried for three centuries to emulate. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Along with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt was the American president most fascinated with nature and with the American West. And like Jefferson, Roosevelt transformed the region he loved. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  How you create a new West and a new America.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  He was a former President of the United States and might hold that office again. He was also an internationally known sportsman and advocate of adventurous living whose demise would have caused shockwaves. But descending the unexplored Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, in early 1914, Teddy Roosevelt was injured and ill and had watched his great South American adventure with legendary explorer Candido Rondón almost disintegrate in the Brazilian jungle. No novelist could have written the scene better for him. “We’ve reached a point where some of us must stop,” he told his son Kermit.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  “I feel I am only a burden to the party.” It was classic Theodore Roosevelt, a romantic hero who despite his fame was willing to sacrifice himself for his companions. The party had none of it, of course, but the incident is a window on the characteristics that led Theodore Roosevelt to the life of accomplishment and adventure he created. Few things Teddy Roosevelt ever did were easy. Maybe that is why he gloried so and challenged. By sheer force of will, he turned himself from a weak, sickly adolescent into a hardy

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  and robust Harvard undergraduate who boxed and hunted, and eventually into a lifelong advocate of what he called “the strenuous life.” That same determination marked his administrations as President of the United States, enabling him to enact major progressive social policies, central to which was the first comprehensive environmental program in American history. Roosevelt’s ideal image of an American was someone who knew the natural world, which was why conservation of an endangered nature was central to his accomplishments. As with Thomas Jefferson, whose goals for the West enabled Americans to grasp its outlines,

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  we shouldn’t be surprised to discover a similar fascination with nature in the president who laid down America’s and the West’s environmental foundation.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  But in contrast to Jefferson, who sat on his mountain in Virginia and imagined the West, Roosevelt experienced the West and the world firsthand. Roosevelt was from one of the eastern families of patrician elites so visible in the history of the West. His birth in 1858 almost made him a Civil War baby, but as his mother was a Southerner, the Civil War and Reconstruction were always forbidden topics. Nature, wild animals, and the West, on the other hand, were the focus of long discussions

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  between Roosevelt's father, who was an early disciple of Darwin and a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, and an uncle who was a naturalist. When he was only 10, Roosevelt's family toured Europe, and despite young Teddy's frequent attacks of asthma, he and his father climbed Mount Vesuvius. Three years later, they were on a boat descending the Nile in Egypt, where with a new shotgun, Teddy shot and collected more than 100 birds for his own "museum," as he called it. In a situation of many options, Teddy did not surprise his family when he announced that he wanted to train as a naturalist.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Like a significant number, though not all of nature-obsessed Americans, Audubon was one, so were George Bird Grinnell and Aldo Leopold, Teddy Roosevelt and his interest in nature began in a boyhood of observing, pursuing, and hunting wild animals in wild country. His journey to make natural history a profession was officially abandoned at Harvard, though. Teddy wanted a natural history career after the fashion of the great naturalists like Alexander von Humboldt or John James Audubon. He wanted to explore exotic locales and hunt and collect new species.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  By his time at Harvard, natural history had become a Darwinian exercise of laboratory work. Teddy and a fellow ornithology enthusiast instead worked on and published "The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks," and by his junior year, Roosevelt had decided that the professional natural sciences was not going to be his career.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Long interested in history and in writing, interests that turned out to be a way to explore and hunt and collect in the imagination. With a Harvard degree in hand, Roosevelt turned to a book project about how the American frontier had advanced from the eastern seaboard westward. Although much of his story was set east of the Mississippi with men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as its heroes, Roosevelt called the book "The Winning of the West." By this time in his life, Roosevelt had made a series of trips to outback Maine, and in 1880, he and his younger brother Elliot journeyed to Iowa and Minnesota,

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  where, as was common at the time, they killed more than 400 birds and animals, yet were disappointed with their take. To this point in his life, Roosevelt had not yet been to the actual West, where in his imagination, it was still possible to experience the world of the frontier hunters he was writing about. But in September 1883, after running his first political campaign and getting elected as an Assemblyman to the New York Legislature, he finally boarded a train with connections to the real West. To Roosevelt, cultured men looked to Europe, but manly men looked to the West for their inspiration.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  So his destination was as far in the Dakota Territory as trains would take him, and his mission was specific. Roosevelt wanted to engage in that most western of acts, shooting a buffalo before such a thing was no longer possible. His younger brother by then was hunting tigers in India and had faced a stampeding buffalo herd in west Texas. Everyone knew buffalo were almost gone by then, but there were a few, and a buffalo head on the wall of your study would convey where your sympathies lay.

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  Until the late 1880s, however, Roosevelt seems not to have faced the issue of declining animal populations with much awareness. His soon-to-be friend in the conservation field, journalist George Bird Grinnell, was already developing a much more progressive credo. Roosevelt’s and hence the country’s ideas about the natural world we’d inherited were about to be shaped into a modern form by this Western experience. Buffalo had become the mammalian representative of America for all the world in the 19th century, but their story had now taken a much darker tone.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Everyone knew that American market hunters were killing buffalo by the thousands on a daily basis. “The last of the buffalo” became a phrase that defined the 1880s the way the roaring 20s would define a decade forty years later. It was the decade when William Hornaday collected bison specimens for the National Museum’s diorama in the belief that this might be the only way future Americans would get to see buffalo. The painter Albert Beirstot finished his grand oil, The Last of the Buffalo, in 1890, the same year a band of Lakotas was massacred by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee for performing a dance to return buffalo to the West.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Grinnell also chose The Last of the Buffalo as the title for his widely-read book from Scribner’s and Sons. The demise of America’s most iconic animal was in the air, and many wondered what that meant. In 1883, though, for Roosevelt, a buffalo trophy represented America’s ultimate prize. Stepping off the train in North Dakota, he hired a guide named Joe Ferris, who in perfect symmetry for that decade was from eastern Canada and had himself only been on the scene in the West for a year. They made the Maltese cross ranch their headquarters and set out on horseback on what turned into

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  a 15-day quest.

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  The days of Audubon describing the sound of the vast herds in this same country as resembling continuous rolling thunder were now gone forever. That year of Roosevelt's hunt, the Fort Benton shipper IG Baker sent a grand total of 5,000 buffalo hides down the Missouri River. The next year, he shipped none at all. The bison story was already exemplifying that in the scope of world history, the United States had engaged in a more complete destruction of wild animals and a wider diversity of them than any modern country in existence. Roosevelt's bison hunt was a revelation to him.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Initially, he wrote his wife Alice that "Buffalo are too rare for me to hope to get one." Over the course of two weeks of horseback travel that took them into Montana Territory, they found a handful. Roosevelt wounded one bison he never found and missed shots at another pair before finally downing an unsuspecting bull barely 50 yards distant. "A handsome animal whose glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of the sun," he said. The celebration became the stuff of Western romance. Teddy did a freestyle Indian dance and paid Ferris $100 on the spot.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Hooked on the curious fantastic beauty of the Badlands, before he departed, he bought an interest in his first ranch there, the Maltese Cross. On a return trip the next year, 1884, he bought a second property he called the Elkhorn along the Little Missouri, the nearest neighbor 12 miles away. These Western experiences were pivotal in Roosevelt's life. They gave him a base of operations in the West and put him in contact with individuals whose character stood naked in that setting. He later commented that he learned how to evaluate people in those years, an affirmation

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  of his evolving belief in strength, directness, and the will to make things happen. He also learned much more now about the Western animals he had read about. From elk horn, he hunted deer and pronghorns, and farther west, in the bighorns and the bitteroots, grizzlies, elk, and moose. He hunted mountain goats in the Kordalanes and caribou in the Selkirk Range. Working on the grand history that became the Winning of the West, Roosevelt concluded that this kind of life, a life roaming the wilderness and hunting, was the very path that had allowed Europeans to become Americans.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Living it, he felt, as he put it, "absolutely free as a man could feel." But experiencing the West of the 1880s was accompanied by a sadder realization.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  In a violation of his Western fantasies, Roosevelt was discovering that, in fact, there is not much game. Buffalo were gone. Elk and deer and grizzlies weren't far behind. When it shot his buffalo, he knew full well that it was, as he put it, "part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race." Yet he had still shot his bull. That had to have been on his mind when he began to realize that, in fact, everything seemed to be disappearing. This onslaught on Western nature was being delivered by what Roosevelt now referred to as "skin hunters and greasy nimrods," all of them products of greed and self-interest.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  The wild, wild West afforded remarkable freedom. That was evident. But frontier anarchy without restraint was devouring the world with no regard whatsoever, either for its perpetuation or for future generations.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  This was unexpected and depressing. So was losing both his wife and his mother almost simultaneously that decade, which sent him into an emotional spiral. Calling on the sunshine and champagne air of the West to help overcome these tragedies, Roosevelt turned to writing articles for a magazine called Outing and working on a book he would title Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which appeared in print in 1885. By the time the winter of 1886-87 ruined his ranching operation, he had enough material for another pair of hunting books, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail in 1888 and The

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Wilderness Hunter in 1893. These were the books that established Roosevelt's reputation as someone who knew the West and understood what was happening to it. They also brought him into contact with people who were about to push him much farther along the road to environmental thinking. Roosevelt met Grinnell, editor of a famous conservation-themed magazine called Forest and Stream, following Grinnell's quite critical review of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Bursting into Grinnell's office demanding to know why the journalists had been underwhelmed, Roosevelt ended up impressed with his fellow Ivy Leaguer's knowledge of the state of the

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  West and its fast declining wildlife. With Grinnell's coaching and friendship, over the next 15 years of his career, Roosevelt launched the intellectual journey that would ultimately transform America and bring it into the 20th century. Their organization of elite hunters, the Boone and Crockett Club, along with Grinnell's Audubon Society, provided platforms that translated their Western experiences into a rethinking about freedom and nature.

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  The particular epiphany that became the foundation for this rethinking wasn't an easy one. But for those who loved American nature, the evidence for it was everywhere. Pure self-interest of the Adam Smith sort, which had driven capitalism for most of American history, was growing close to leaving nothing for the future. Largely through witnessing the loss of the wild animals he loved, Roosevelt was coming to an undergirding principle for the political revolution known as progressivism. Capitalism's excesses, it turned out, were going to have to be curbed and regulated.

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  And the lesson then being offered by railroad and oil company domination of state governments meant to Roosevelt and progressives that the only entity truly powerful enough to regulate capitalism was the federal government. In search of a word that might symbolize what he had in mind, Roosevelt borrowed the term "conservation" from British governance of India. To conserve something meant to save it, to ensure its perpetuation. As an American, Roosevelt saw conservation in democratic terms. He would develop programs wherein the federal government would conserve American nature

• 18:51Speaker 02

  for what he called "the greatest good for the greatest number and for the longest period of time." A great country and a great civilization, Roosevelt believed, needed to understand itself. The first step involved taking some sort of action to curb the market hunt for wildlife that for three centuries had systematically destroyed everything from deer, turkey, great ox, passenger pigeons, and plume birds like snowy egrets in the east, to a near obliteration of western wildlife, most shamefully, America's iconic animal, the bison. Until 1900, the US federal government had stood by and allowed unregulated capitalism

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  to have its way with wildlife. But in that year, an Iowa congressman named John Lacy stepped forward with a plan to engage Washington in halting these abominations.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Lacy acquired his status with the new wildlife activists following a series of celebrated incidents in Yellowstone Park in the early 1890s. U.S. Army game warden Ed Wilson had arrested a notorious park poacher whom a local judge promptly released citing a lack of any law to prosecute him. A few weeks later, Wilson vanished without a trace. Other wardens found Wilson’s hidden remains a year later. That story brought a Forest and Stream reporter to Yellowstone who soon elicited from another poacher that his own arrest and release had involved the massacre of 80 buffalo, most

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  of the bison still left in the park. At that point, Lacy introduced and secured passage in Congress of the 1894 Yellowstone Park Protection Act with $1,000 fines for killing wildlife. Six years later, Lacy decided to take on the biggest monster of them all, a practice that since colonial days could have made fair progress filling the Grand Canyon with the bodies of all the American birds and animals killed for money. White-haired, bearded, slender, Lacy was about to turn 60. In history and in his career, the time had come.

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  Calling on the federal government’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, Lacy drew up an act he called the Wild Birds and Game Preservation Act that at last landed a body blow on the wild animals’ economy. At long last, a federal law stopped the shipping of slain birds, animals, and their body parts from states where market hunting was still legal to states where it wasn’t.

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  It was already too late for passenger pigeons and wild bison. It verged on too late for snowy egrets, Carolina parakeets, and a lengthening list of others. But the Lacy Act finally put a long hesitant US federal government in play. In his speech describing the bill before Congress, Lacy referenced both passenger pigeons and bison, but he proclaimed that "all was not lost," that "there still remains much to preserve," as he put it. In truth, the Lacy Act put the burden for enlightened laws on the states. Following a Supreme Court case that ruled that wildlife was the property of the states

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  where the animals resided, states now began creating what they called "game departments" and enacting policies on behalf of at least some of their wild animals. For guidance in that endeavor, they looked to the new US Biological Survey headed up by another Ivy Leaguer, C. Hart Miriam.

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  In 1901, when an assassin's bullet cut down President William McKinley early in his second term, his vice president was a 42-year-old former New York congressman and city mayor, who Republican Party operatives referred to as that damned cowboy. Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest man ever to serve as president, with a prodigious manic depressive personality, had the chance to transform America fall into his lap. Here was a stunning opportunity to take on the issues that had dominated his life since childhood. If celebrated individual freedom was the very cause of the destruction of America's animals,

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  not to mention its forests, its grasslands, its fisheries, its archaeological sites, then expanding government power to regulate such freedom was the only course that could preserve the country.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  What he and his policymakers called “conservation” became his personal campaign to save the animals and landscapes he believed had created Homo Americanus in the first place. “The whole standpoint of the people toward the proper aim of government,” Roosevelt would write, “were brought out first by this conservation work.” The proper aim of government, he was now convinced, was to moderate the selfishness and thoughtlessness inherent in human nature. What conservation and progressivism would do was set America on a different path, a

• 27:03Speaker 02

  sharp detour from the three-century attempt to make the US a clone of the countries of Western Europe. The idea was to create a nation that stood separate and new. Nothing in Roosevelt’s programs said that quite like his enthusiastic endorsement, once he became president, of the existing public land system. Roosevelt’s massive additions to this distinctly American form of land ownership and public access in the form of new national parks, national forests, wildlife and bird refuges, and national monuments amounted to a wholesale reset. I’ll have more to say in the next episode about the origins and direction of America’s

• 27:47Speaker 02

  public lands, one of our very best contributions to world ideas and policy. But it was Teddy Roosevelt who took that embryonic system and made it a badge of American uniqueness. Histories of the presidency tend to label Roosevelt’s conservation programs as one of the nation’s grand transformative policy triumphs, and that claim is no exaggeration. Conservation’s successes were breathtaking. To begin, Roosevelt oversaw the creation of six new national parks, a form of preserved wildlands America had invented with Yellowstone and Yosemite three decades earlier.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Starting with Pelican Island in Florida, which he designated by executive order in 1903 as a reserve and breeding ground for native birds, and continuing with a pair of national bison ranges in Oklahoma and Montana to rescue our iconic mammal, then on through his lame duck period, when new bird reservations, a total of 51 of them, seemed to precipitate like rain from the heavens. Roosevelt created a national wildlife refuge system that preserved millions of acres of prized bird and mammal habitat. The forest reserves that he and Grenell celebrated in the 1890s were at 42 million acres when Roosevelt assumed the presidency.

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  Renamed national forests by Roosevelt's chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, they swelled to 172 million acres, including Tongass, a 17 million acre monster in Alaska by the time Roosevelt left office. Using the new Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect America's archaeological sites and to set aside landscapes of unique geological importance, he proclaimed another extensive body of preserves from the public lands in the form of 18 national monuments, a new conservation category. Devil's Tower in Wyoming, one of many scores of nature spots,

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Christian Americans had assigned a satanic association, became the first of these. But the Grand Canyon itself was another of those early national monuments. In just eight years, Roosevelt removed more than 230 million acres of general land office holdings from private entry, retaining them in public ownership, setting aside more public lands than any other president, and transforming the future of the country in the process. Providing refuges for America's big mammals and birds was a primary reason he did almost all of it. Douglas Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior, probably the best recent biography of him,

• 30:44Speaker 02

  lays that triumphant story out in point by point detail.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  But Roosevelt was human, and as are we all, a product of his time and place. While he could explain the tragedy of wildlife loss with lovely analogies, "The destruction of the wild pigeon and the Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if the cat's gills or the palisades were taken away," he wrote. "When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished." But despite that, he resisted drawing the conclusions from Darwin that many disciples thought the great naturalists intended.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Roosevelt had grown up versed in Darwin, read Darwin himself when he was a young teenager floating the Nile, believed from that point onward that humans were indeed primates that had evolved from earlier forms. Nonetheless, the animals he hunted did not, perhaps for him simply could not, become evolutionary near kin of humans. While Roosevelt was president, his writer friend John Burroughs precipitated a public controversy about the accuracy of a popular new genre, a form of literary natural history that attempted to provide insight into the lives of wild animals.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Most of the new authors of animal stories were not scientists, but many of them, notably John Muir, Jack London, and Canadian writer Ernest Thompson Seton, had extensive outdoor experience and employed scientific methodology. Seton, ironically enough, won the John Burroughs Medal for his comprehensive Lives of Game Animals book. William T. Hornady praised Seton's work.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Looking back on this "nature faker" controversy, labeled so by Roosevelt, from today's vantage, what seems apparent is that its practitioners were trying to take on the big implications of Darwinism in the world around them. Theirs was a response, and it strongly appealed to the reading public, to the bleak "nature red in tooth and claw" conclusions that Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Lord Tennyson drew from evolution. Instead of finding humans condemned because we'd turned out to be mere animals, nature writers like Seton looked for examples among birds and mammals of traits humans admired:

• 33:31Speaker 02

  compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and ability to reason and to transfer cultural learning across generations. And most of all, self-awareness and individuality. In one of Seton's stories in Scribner's in 1900, a captured female coyote named Tito sits chained in a ranchyard observing the techniques Stockman are using to wipe out the coyote kind. When she escapes and has litters of her own, she passes on her knowledge about how to avoid traps and poison, which, in Seton's telling, was why coyotes were surviving when so many other creatures were not.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  In his famous wolf story, Lobo, King of Karumpa, Seton wrote about a canny New Mexico wolf with one fatal flaw: his fidelity to his mate. As he put the matter "in wild animals I have known," Seton's theme was "we and the beasts are kin." Given the perspective of contemporary 21st century bird and mammal research with its emphasis on self-awareness, tool use, theory of mind, perceptions of fairness, cultural transmission, grief over the loss of mates, and individuality, all those things these

• 34:53Speaker 02

  writers seem to be working with, all that seemed to be lacking in the best writings of the Seton/London-Muir genre were double-blind, replicable experiments.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  But at the time, the well-respected Burroughs, furious at what he saw as chicanery, went on the attack. "Non-human animals," Burroughs thundered, "were purely creatures of instinct, nothing more." That drew Roosevelt into the fray. "Simply enough, the nature fakers were misleading their readers," he told the public. In a private communication to the editor of Collier's magazine, Roosevelt went further. He echoed the lines in Darwin's The Descent of Man when he wrote the editor, "I believe that the higher mammals and birds have reasoning powers which differ in degree rather than kind from those of humans."

• 35:50Speaker 02

  But, he continued, "he meant different in degree from the lower reasoning powers of, for instance, the lower savages." In other words, if we can take this astonishing comment literally, Roosevelt believed the resonances and parallels between animals and humanity did not really apply to modern first-world humans, only to tribal indigenous peoples who were lower in their evolutionary progress. Obviously Roosevelt had not absorbed the lessons of Colombian anthropologist Franz Boas, who was already arguing against Western ethnocentrism by positing that all humans

• 36:33Speaker 02

  were equally evolved but with cultures that followed very different trajectories. Jack London, at least, would eventually get a measure of revenge, telling Collier's readers that the truth was that President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  That sentiment surfaced in a particularly troubling way in Roosevelt's public endorsement of a book by fellow Ivy Leaguer and conservationist Madison Grant. Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, with its advocacy of eugenics, made enough of a white nationalist case to impress Adolf Hitler while getting ridiculed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The first time I visited the American Museum of Natural History, I'll confess to doing a double take of the statue of Teddy outside the main entrance. It presented Roosevelt as the classic great man on horseback, looking out over Manhattan's Central Park.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Innocent enough, until you realized that he was being flanked and escorted by both Native and African Americans on foot on either side of him. The effect in modern New York was jarring enough that in January of 2022, the statue was taken down. John Muir got in a twist of the knife, too. Making a case for protecting a much bigger piece of Yosemite, including the Tuolumne Canyon, soon to be the target of a dam, Muir and the president spent three nights camping in Yosemite without bodyguards. That gave the legendary writer-activist, No Shrinking Violent himself, a chance to confront

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Roosevelt around their campfire. His question was something many had wondered about, but only the Scottish poetico-trampo was willing to broach. "Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things?" Author of numerous books and magazine articles on hunting, probably already planning the African safari he would take as soon as he was out of office, Roosevelt's response was an evasive, "Muir, I guess you're right." Roosevelt then went on to support the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite Park, and in an eight-month

• 39:08Speaker 02

  expedition to Africa in 1909, proceeded to shoot 5,013 mammals, 4,443 birds, and 2,322 reptiles and amphibians. All for science and the Smithsonian's cabinets, of course.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  So then, like everyone else who lived in the past, Roosevelt's worldview did not always conform to our sense of right and wrong in the present. But Teddy Roosevelt still works for me as an American hero. The country lost something of incalculable value when, as the author of yet another book he titled "The Strainuous Life," Teddy Roosevelt stepped away from the presidency in 1909 after serving only one full term. Then went on his safari in Africa, followed by his exploration and mapping of the least-known remaining source tributary of the great Amazon River.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Back home, the most nature-obsessed president since Thomas Jefferson had turned the country over to his successor, Portly William Howard Taft, whose passion about outdoor endeavor was for the rugged and manly sport of golf.

• 40:37Speaker 05

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• 41:41Speaker 01

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• 42:26Speaker 01

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• 43:08Speaker 07

  Dan, at the beginning of this episode, as I was reading through the script, one thing really struck me. And I think when I, when all the real famous anecdotes about Teddy Roosevelt come to mind, he sort of has this boyish quality to him.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 07

  And as I'm reading this, this script, you realize just how young he was when he's doing a lot of this stuff. Like he goes, when he goes to hunt the last buffalo, he's 25.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 43:39Speaker 07

  And you think about when he bursts into George Bird Grinnell's office to argue with them. He's still in his twenties.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 43:45Speaker 07

  And that sort of behavior all of a sudden starts to make a little more sense. Obviously he carried that with him, but even the, even the Boone and Crockett club, he's, he's less than 30 years old when, when he establishes that. And that really struck me in the first part of this episode was how active he was from finishing at Harvard up until, you know, his early 30s.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he becomes president when he's forty-two, and that's in nineteen oh one. So the those those scenes in the beginning of the of this particular episode happen in the eighties, you know, and so it's like he, as you said, he's in his twenties. And so he's a very young man. He's, you know, and he's sort of got what almost certainly one would argue as a kind of a manic depressive kind of personality. And fortunately for America and the world, he's in the manic stage for most of his life. I mean, he certainly has some moments of depression, but yeah, so he's a very young guy.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  And he's, you know, and he's ambitious. And of course, he comes out of this kind of patrician, elite New York family that enables him to kind of view the world as his oyster. He can do anything he wants to do. He can be any kind of person he wants to be. And what he decides he wants to be from a very early age is he wants to be a naturalist. He wants to sort of be Alexander von Humboldt or, or, you know, John James Audubon, someone like that who gets to go out into the world and have adventures and hunt. And he hunts throughout his life, everywhere he goes, even on that Brazilian adventure

• 45:37Speaker 02

  on the Rio de Janeiro. I mean, he takes time out to go on a jaguar hunt. And he gets himself a jaguar on that particular trip, too. So that's kind of, he's a person who had every opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do in life. But he knew from a very early age what it was. And I mean, he went for it with a tremendous amount of energy.

• 45:57Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I think.

• 46:03Speaker 07

  Another point that stood out to me in this, in this chapter is you emphasize how his conservation ethos fit within this broader progressive stage in American political development.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 07

  And I think that's, unless you've studied progressivism and you're familiar with it as a movement at the turn of the century, it, it sort of gets left out of our understanding of conservation. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you mean when you, when you refer to the progressivism of the Roosevelt era and sort of what shape that took and what impulses guided it.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that's a useful question to be sure, to provide some context. I mean, what I did with the script for this particular episode was to couch progressivism for Roosevelt primarily in conservation. And that's, I think that's the natural direction from which he comes to it. But progressivism was a, a kind of a bigger movement in American life in those years, a political movement. It was a, it was a movement that prevailed in both parties, both the Republican and the Democratic parties. And I mean, Roosevelt was a Republican, but he was certainly strongly influenced by progressivism.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  And it was kind of a, an argument at the turn of the century that capitalism, particularly big corporate capitalism that was emerging in those days, was a pretty scary force in American life. And it needed to be corralled and reined in some. And the argument became in the conservation realm and in several other realms too, that the federal government was the primary player in doing that, although many of the states had strong progressive kind of political developments as well. But the idea was to insert the, the government, whether at the state level or the federal

• 48:06Speaker 02

  level, into the economic life of the country in order to do thing like.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Regulating drugs that were sold in pharmacies and having the government began to intervene in making sure that the food that was sold in grocery stores was healthy. And it extended to child labor laws and a variety of different things. What I try to do in this particular script, as I mentioned a minute ago, is to couch what Roosevelt's particular passion about progressivism is in the conservation movement that establishes very much the beginnings of the whole environmental movement in the United States.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  And this, of course, is 125 years ago that this happens. But much of what becomes the kind of framework of conservation and environmental thinking in America comes out of this particular period. And it does involve, as Roosevelt said, a different role for the government than had been the case in American life up to this point. So if you're a fan of, you know, kind of the anarchy of the wild, wild west, this is the point at which Americans, and particularly someone like Teddy Roosevelt, who thinks, as he says, "A great civilization and a great country needs to understand itself," that

• 49:38Speaker 02

  you have to step in and say, "Okay, you know, that level of freedom is great, but we're going to have to regulate things and make sure that just kind of pure selfishness doesn't prevail to the detriment of the future especially."

• 49:53Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm. And the other, the other sort of intellectual thread that shapes Roosevelt's worldview is, as you point out, that of Darwinism. And...

• 50:07Speaker 07

  You also point out that he fit within a ongoing debate between what the implications of Darwinism were and how that, I mean, I think it's interesting to point out that you can look at a wild animal and think of it in two very different ways through the lens of Darwinism.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 07

  As you did in this, in this chapter.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I tried, I tried to do this in a way to provide a kind of a fresh look at that sort of famous nature faker controversy where Roosevelt and William Burroughs in particular charged these writers like Jack London and John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton with, with faking the animals that they were writing about. And the truth is, with the perspective of another 125 years of research, it looks as

• 51:10Speaker 02

  if actually the people who were getting it right were probably the writers themselves, you know, and, and I think Roosevelt stepping into the fray, which he, of course, he couldn't resist doing, for one thing, this was a subject dear to his heart, and for another thing, he's, you know, he inhabits the bully pulpit as the president, and he tends to sort of step into every debate that's out there. And I think that what you get out of that story, as I told it in this particular episode, is probably a fresh look at how, how this played out and who in fact probably had the

• 51:52Speaker 02

  better notions about the relationship that people and, and other animals have. I mean, that, you know, I've always loved that line that Ernest Thompson Seton uses in Wild Animals I Have Known, where he says, "We and the beast are kin," and that's what these writers are trying to convey. But Burroughs and Roosevelt in particular pushed back, they were resistant to that. And so it makes for a kind of an interesting take on Roosevelt. I mean, we tend to think of him, you know, in pretty heroic terms, but sometimes he wasn't right about things, and I think this may have been one of those times.

• 52:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, and at the beginning, you you link him and maybe again at the end, you link him to Jefferson as the two, you know, chief executives who are most interested in the West. And Jefferson, I think, you know, they both have a curiosity about animals and landscapes. But when it comes to their legacy, sort of thing about Jefferson is redrawing the boundaries. And then Roosevelt is sort of reorganizing internally what the West would look like in terms of public lands and and all that. So

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 07

  I don't often think of the two of them in the same in the same breath, but it's an interesting, it's an interesting pair to just sort of consider the the similarities between the two.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, and I'm not not sure exactly when I began associating Jefferson and Roosevelt, although the West is a common denominator for both of them. And in a podcast like this, I mean, we sort of started back in some of the early episodes with Jefferson and Lewis and Clark and the the expedition up the Red River into the Southwest. So there's a there's a kind of a natural combination there, I think. But at some point, you know, in my thinking over the years, I began to sort of look at American presidents and say, okay, so among them, who are the ones who are sort of interested in the kind of values that I'm interested in?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  In nature, in wilderness, in in landscapes, in wild animals? And the two, of course, who immediately pop to the top of that list are Thomas Jefferson and and Teddy Roosevelt. And, you know, and since Roosevelt, it's difficult to really find another American president. I mean, for one thing, we don't have very many presidents coming from the West, where as a result of the lifestyle we get to have in the American West, that, you know, it's probably more possible for someone to be interested in those kinds of subjects. But Yeah, it's almost as if Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson are the, almost the only

• 54:53Speaker 02

  ones who have that kind of concern. And so that makes them kind of particular heroes of people who are interested in Western history.

• 55:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, and last question here, which dovetails nicely with that answer. We do often think about Roosevelt as a hero. On the other hand, he's one of these figures, as you point out, the big controversy over his statue outside of the American Museum of Natural History.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 07

  And I, he's one of those figures where I think he's obviously, you can read things that he's written and he espouses viewpoints and values that are at odds with my own viewpoints and values. On the other hand, you can't help but acknowledge the tremendous amount of good he did for wild places, wild animals and all that. And so, I don't know, I don't know if there's necessarily a question there, but he's sort of like an uncle where you don't, you don't really agree with everything he says, but

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 07

  you don't dismiss him out of hand for, for what some might chalk up today as like these, these horrible, you know, racial views, things of that nature, especially when you lump him in with characters like Madison Grant and

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it was unfortunate that he, he blurbed Madison Grant's book, of course, which is a, a book that a lot of people regard as an unfortunate production from someone in the United States who shouldn't have been thinking in those terms.

• 56:30Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Uh, but you know, what I will say, and I said it in the script here, is that you, you know, as someone who's interested in history, and I know Randall, you know this too, because we used to talk about it in graduate classes. You have to think about people in terms of the times they live in. And I mean, you can't look at someone like Teddy Roosevelt and say, okay, so this guy, he should be smart enough to understand the way we think in Right. in the 2020s. I mean, the truth is, a century from now, we have no idea what thoughts and expressions

• 57:11Speaker 02

  and values that we have that might be regarded as completely unsatisfactory to somebody living 100 years in the future. And so I have a difficult time looking back on people like that and divorcing them from their time Right. and the period they're living in, and trying to evaluate them based on how we would look at them today. It doesn't mean, I'm not willing to say things as I did in the script about the particular status. I mean, that wasn't Teddy Roosevelt, that was, you know, other people Right. using the Roosevelt image. But he did do the Madison Grant thing, and he did say some unfortunate things about

• 57:52Speaker 02

  what groups of people, you know, might actually share the cultures and abilities of wild animals. And it wasn't, you know, Western humanity in his view. It wasn't the people who sat around the dinner table with him, in other words. So I think that you can be critical and understand somebody in the past, but also try not to, you know, to just completely dismiss them. I mean, I think that's an unfortunate thing that we've been doing recently. And I'm encouraged a little bit by the fact that I think we're getting to get over that. Yeah, there does seem to be a bit of, bit more pause. I think there's a bit more pause.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  And I think, I mean, you know, we're trained as historians to, to think in terms of history. And historicism is about doing that sort of thing, understanding that people occupy a particular point in time, and you have to understand their time to fully appreciate who they are. Well, Dan, thank you. Always fun to chat Roosevelt. Oh, it is indeed. No kidding.

• 59:15Speaker 01

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