The Wilderness Warrior

It is a testament to the fascinating life that Theodore Roosevelt led that this doorstop of a biography, The Wilderness Warrior, weighing in at over 800 pages, ends with Roosevelt leaving the presidency. It also has a singular emphasis--Roosevelt's abiding passion for protecting the wilderness. As the subtitle suggests, he was a crusader with an evangelist's zeal.

Douglas Brinkley has written an exhaustive study of Roosevelt's almost radical approach to preserving wildlife and its habitation. There is a long look at his precocious childhood, when his enthusiasm for animals and worship of Darwinism made it look like he would become a naturalist. He had his own museum of stuffed animals in his bedroom in Manhattan, and his father would be one of the founders of the Museum of Natural History (Roosevelt would, in turn, help found the Bronx Zoo).

Brinkley branches off to take estuaries that cover other major figures in zoological and conservation history, as Roosevelt went to Harvard. He became disenchanted with a career in biology, though, and ended up in politics, but he never lost his love for nature (his critics said he was more interested in birds than in the Constitution). Brinkley lands on all the frequent stops--his ranching days in North Dakota, his stint as New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider warring against the Spanish in Cuba, Governor of New York, Vice-President, and then, at age 42, unexpectedly president. But those stops are filled in by Roosevelt as lover of the wild, with extensive details on his forays, whether they be youthful hikes in Maine, or hunting trips in Dakota.

Viewed in modern terms, Roosevelt's attitude about animals contains a major contradiction--he loved them, but he also loved to hunt. He first went to Dakota out of concern that the buffalo were disappearing--before he had a chance to shoot one. He grew up a sickly child, and through his own efforts built himself into a "manly" man, and he maintained that American men must lead the "strenuous life" to avoid feminization, and that included hunting. (It also included war). He was never really dissuaded from this view, even by the likes of John Muir, who on an important meeting with Roosevelt at Yosemite during his presidency chastened him for the "boyish" fascination with killing things.

It was on a hunting trip to Mississippi that provided the inspiration for the Teddy Bear--Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear, because it was chained up and badly abused, and in his view not a sporting opportunity. The story and especially a political cartoon inspired two different toymakers to name stuffed bears after him, and the most popular toy that has ever been made was born (although he hated being called Teddy).

What Roosevelt did for preservation is the most lasting legacy of his presidency, and it is exhilarating to even contemplate it. As pointed out in my post on The National Parks, Roosevelt exploited a law called the Antiquities Act, which allowed him, with a stroke of a pen (and the spoken words "I so declare it") to set aside land from development. He did this with impunity, and scoffed at those who criticized him for it. He declared bird refuges and national forests, so much that if you do the math it turns out he protected 80,000 acres a day for every day in his presidency.

Brinkley's book doesn't examine all of Roosevelt's policy--it's not a thorough biography. He does touch on the major aspects, but we don't get the full effect of his presidency, particularly of his embrace of manifest destiny. We do get that he was loved by many (though not in the South, who wouldn't forgive him for dining with Booker T. Washington in the White House), and he fought those in his own party, which seems impossible today. The book ends with his departure from the White House (he promised he would not run again, and almost instantly regretted it). Thus we don't read about his safari to Africa, the 1912 presidential race, or his almost fatal trip to South America.

Brinkley's prose is very accessible, and at times almost novelistic, as when he describes a family pet as "poem of a dog." I really liked this passage: "Unfortunately, Roosevelt never published his campfire stories. With meat in the pot and log flames jumping high and low, on these outdoor outings Roosevelt would recount moments from the strenuous life with cliff-hanging suspense. There were accounts of sumo-wrestling with a 300-pound Japanese man; tramping toward the Mississippi River headwaters, boxing with the heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan, and encountering rattlesnakes in North Dakota. Holding his audience's attention with theatrical gestures, Roosevelt made it seem as if he had strode over the Alleghenies and down the Ohio River valley with Daniel Boone." He was the real life version of that guy in the Dos Equis commercials--the world's most interesting man. He was the first president to publish a book while in office, and it wasn't about politics, or economics, or foreign affairs--it was called The Deer Family.

The book does have a few problems. After a while one grows weary of yet another hunting trip, and he declared so many wilderness areas off limits that the accounts pile up like cord wood. And there are some shocking lapses in copy editing. We hear that Roosevelt loved the coincidence that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day: February 22, 1803. Except that they were born on February 12, 1809. And consider this eye-opening sentence: "As every American schoolchild of Roosevelt's generation knew, July 1, 1873, was when the Battle of Gettysburg began." That's funny, because of every schoolchild of my generation knows, it began on July 1, 1863.

Inspired by the book, I went to a place that has been a short drive for three decades that I had never been to--Sagamore Hill, his summer home on the north shore of Long Island. It is well worth the trip, with a guided tour through the home, which is heavily adorned with the trophies of his hunting trip. There is hardly a room that doesn't have an animal's head on the wall, or a rug made out of skin on the floor. A museum gives a quick but thorough look at his life, and his gravesite is a short drive down the road. Theodore Roosevelt was a great man, not without his faults. We could use his like again, right now.