Authors: Edmund Morris
30
“If this decision”
Boston
Record, 11
Apr. 1903; Satterlee,
J. Pierpont Morgan
, 401. Northern Securities stock dropped twelve points in three days after the St. Paul decision, reaching a low twenty-five points below its initial high.
The Washington Post
, 19 Apr. 1903.
31
William Loeb asked
New York
Sun
, 10 Apr. 1903. For a popular reaction to the Circuit Court decision, see Eitler, “Philander Chase Knox,” 71–73.
32
He had also
Healy,
United States in Cuba
, 203–6; Anthracite Coal Commission,
Report to the President
, 80–87; DuVal,
Cadiz to Cathay
, 211–14.
33
That did not
Medill McCormick to his parents, ca. Feb. 1903 (MHM); Topeka, Kans.,
Herald
, 21 Mar. 1903;
The New York Times
, 22 Mar. 1903; Pittsburgh
Press
, 15 Mar. 1903;
Boston Herald
, 16 Mar. 1903.
34
“Such a bosom”
Literary Digest
, Apr.–June 1903, 219.
35
ROOSEVELT WAS NO
George Bird Grinnell, “Theodore Roosevelt as a Sportsman,”
The Country Calendar
, Nov. 1905; Robert Underwood Johnson,
Remembered Yesterdays
(Boston, 1923), 309; Cutright,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 70–73; Jeremy Johnston, “Preserving the Beasts of Waste and Desolation: Theodore Roosevelt and Predator Control in Yellowstone National Park,”
George White Forum
15.4 (1988).
36
Or near solitude
The following account of TR’s sixteen days in Yellowstone is based on Major Pitcher’s diary, published in
The Washington Post
, 24 Apr. 1903; TR’s own account, “Wilderness Reserves: The Yellowstone Park,”
Works
, vol. 3, 266–93; Burroughs,
Camping and Tramping
, 23–75; Fred M. Davenport, “President Roosevelt in the Yellowstone,”
Outlook
142 (1926); Cutright,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 104–11; and “Comment” scrapbook.
37
Each day, he
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 461–64. He made a detailed list of his natural observations to send to C. Hart Merriam of the United States Biological Survey.
38
On 12
April
Pitcher diary, 12 Apr. 1903; TR,
Works
, vol. 3, 282–84; Burroughs,
Camping and Tramping
, 32–33.
39
Burroughs, who
Lindsay Denison in New York
Sun
, 24 Apr. 1903; Burroughs,
Camping and Tramping
, 33; TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 429–30.
40
“Every man who”
TR,
Works
, vol. 3, 267–68. See also TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 324–28.
41
Roosevelt expressed
Ibid.
42
Only once did he
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 463.
43
BACK IN GARDINER
New York
Sun
and New York
World
, 19 Apr. 1903.
44
Finally, on 24 April
Lindsay Denison in New York
Sun
, 29 Apr. 1903. “It was
rather a sad interview,” Roosevelt wrote afterward. “The old fellow had gone to pieces, and soon after I left he got lost in a blizzard and was dead when they found him.” TR,
Autobiography
, 117.
45
Before leaving
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 324.
The Washington Post
, 25 Apr. 1903, remarked that TR’s Yellowstone speech showed a new governmental attitude, “after more than thirty years of passive attention to the park.”
46
Then, with a
Except where otherwise cited, the following four paragraphs are based on stereopticon photographs by Underwood & Underwood preserved at SH; Lindsay Denison reports in “Comment” scrapbook; Addison C. Thomas,
Roosevelt Among the People: Being an Account of the 14,000 Mile Journey from Ocean to Ocean of Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States
(Chicago, 1910), copy in NYPL; and William Allen White’s account of a Kansas whistle-stop in
Saturday Evening Post
, 27 June 1903.
47
On the flatland
Burroughs,
Camping and Tramping
, 12.
48
At whistle-stops
“Comment” scrapbook.
49
(“If I might”)
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 333; TR qu. in Joseph Bucklin Bishop,
Notes and Anecdotes of Many Years
(New York, 1925), 117.
50
Indistinguishable as
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 554.
51
THE “ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY”
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 328; TR,
Works
, vol. 4, 228–29. For TR’s formal visit to the site of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis, see, e.g.,
Collier’s Weekly
, 16 May 1903, and Jusserand,
What Me Befell
, 231ff.
52
(“Three cheers for”)
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 425; Robbins,
Our Landed Heritage
, 333.
53
In Iowa’s fecund
New York
Sun
, 29 Apr. 1903; Des Moines
Register and Leader
, 29 Apr. 1903.
54
“There were two”
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 554–55. In exchange for the badger, TR gave the little girls a silver-and-gold medal he had been presented in Chicago. Lindsay Denison in New York
Sun
, 4 May 1903; Des Moines
Register and Leader
, 8 June 1903.
55
The baby badger
TR,
Works
, vol. 3, 325–6; as the journey proceeded, Josiah was joined by two bears, a lizard, a horned toad, and a horse. TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 555.
56
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY
Lindsay Denison in New York
Sun
, 6 May 1903.
57
“Why don’t the”
New York
World
, 7 May 1903; Jules Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 16 June 1903 (JJ).
58
“his ancestors”
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 557.
59
In the plaza
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 366; “Comment” scrapbook; photographs in
Leslie’s Weekly
, 28 May 1903.
Chronological Note:
TR had touched on the subject of conservation before, as Governor of New York and in his First Annual Message as President. Just before leaving Washington on 1 Apr., he had made a private speech to the Society of American Foresters at Gifford Pinchot’s house (TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 249–57). But his post-Yellowstone utterances at Grand Canyon on 5 May 1903 marked the first time he pronounced the gospel in plain language to the people. As will be seen, TR became increasingly obsessed with the theme of conservation as he traveled through the Southwest and California.
60
“I don’t exactly”
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 557. The Grand Canyon was not yet a national park in 1903. Technically a “forest reserve,” it was threatened by mining and real-estate interests.
61
“Leave it as”
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 370. For the aesthetic reaction of a later President to the Grand Canyon, see Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“It looks dead. I like my green trees at Hyde Park better.” Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
, 199.
62
“I felt as”
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 557–58; TR,
Letters to Kermit
, 38.
63
Fifteen hundred children
Jules Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 16 June 1903 (JJ); Thomas, “Roosevelt Among the People,” 212–13. All TR’s speeches in California have been published in
California Addresses by President Roosevelt
(San Francisco, 1903).
64
“this plain tilled”
California Addresses
, 24. Later, at Santa Barbara, TR exclaimed, “I do not know that I ever before so thoroughly understood the phrase, ‘A garden of the Lord.’ ” Ibid., 36.
65
Amid all the
TR wrote that he liked to see California girls and women riding unself-consciously astride (Kerr,
Bully Father
, 116). Every speech he made through 12 May exulted in irrigation, fertility, and beauty.
66
For four hours
Ironically, for all this hydrological and horticultural display, Los Angeles was just beginning to realize that its swelling population and falling aquifer were incompatible. See Reisner,
Cadillac Desert
, 65ff., for how this realization led to the construction of the Owens River Aqueduct, endorsed by TR.
67
THE SIGHT OF
California Addresses
, 54; New York
Sun
, 12 May 1903.
68
“There is nothing”
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 384. For the popular “California-as-Mediterranean” conceit of TR and his generation, see Kevin Starr,
Americans and the Californian Dream
(New York, 1973), chap. 12.
69
In a major
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 383–90; Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
, 124;
The Washington Post
, 9 Mar. 1903. For a case study of the largest (and most legally audacious) of TR’s 1902 executive orders, see David E. Conrad, “Creating the Nation’s Largest Forest Reserve: Roosevelt, Emmons, and the Tongass National Forest,”
Pacific History Review
, Feb. 1977. In 1902, TR also enacted the first game laws of Alaska Territory, preventing the commercialization of deer hunting, and got an appropriation to preserve and maintain the first federal buffalo herd in Yosemite National Park. TR,
Autobiography
, 435.
70
CONCERN MOUNTED
H. W. Taft to William H. Taft, 2 Mar. 1903 (WHT); TR’s arrival in San Francisco after his Stanford address coincided with a guilty plea by the Federal Salt Company in another antitrust suit filed by Knox.
San Francisco Chronicle
, 13 May 1903; Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 427–28.
71
A group of financiers
Chicago
Record-Herald
, 31 May 1903; speech transcript (TRB).
72
“Before I came”
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 390–91. Elsewhere in San Francisco, he noted that the city stood “in the exact center” of the United States sphere of influence.
73
“In the South Seas”
Ibid., 391–93.
74
The audience
“The Manchurian War Scare,”
Harper’s Weekly
, 23 May 1903; A. Lincoln, “Theodore Roosevelt and the First Russian-American Crisis,”
Southern California Quarterly
, Dec. 1963; Zabriskie,
American-Russian Rivalry
, 87; Beale,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 193; “Comment” scrapbook.
75
In other disturbing
Kishinev is modern Chişinau, Moldavia. There were to be three hundred more pogroms over the next three years. Stuart E. Knee, “The Diplomacy of Neutrality: Theodore Roosevelt and the Russian Pogroms of 1903–1906,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
, winter 1989.
76
Casualty figures
Harper’s Weekly
, 6 June 1903;
Foreign Relations 1903
, 712–15. Although Nicholas II disciplined the Governor of Bessarabia for permitting the massacre, he privately remarked, “Jews themselves … are to blame.” Knee, “Diplomacy of Neutrality.”
77
For the first
Taylor Stults, “Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews, and American Public Opinion,”
Jewish Social Studies
33.1 (1971); Philip E. Schoenberg,
“The American Reaction to the Kishinev Pogrom of
1903,”
American Jewish Historical Quarterly
, Mar. 1974; John Hay to TR, 28 Apr. and 12 May 1903 (TRP); Raymond A. Esthus,
Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries
(Waltham, Mass.,
1970), 26
.
78
Roosevelt was constrained
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 474. In April alone, TR had received nearly five hundred communications, endorsed with many thousands of signatures, calling upon the Tsar to stop the persecution of Jews in Russia. Knee, “Diplomacy of Neutrality.”
79
“The inevitable march”
TR,
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
, vol. 1, 394. For an analysis of the formation of TR’s Far Eastern thinking, see Beale,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 253–63.
80
“Our place as”
Ibid., 396. Russia, preoccupied with her own problems, took little notice of TR’s speech. But considerable nervousness about it was expressed in Europe, particularly in Germany
(Public Opinion
, 21 May 1903).
81
two evenings later
New York
Tribune
, 16 May 1903; TR,
Works
, vol. 3, 291–92.
82
His companion was
William F. Kimes, “With Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir in Yosemite,” in Westerners Los Angeles Corral,
Brand Book Fourteen
(Los Angeles,
1974), 192.
This is the most detailed account of TR’s visit to Yosemite. See also Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
, 3–26.