'The Wilderness Warrior'

Mark Hanna, the Republican Party operative responsible for William McKinley's election to the presidency in 1896, did not like Theodore Roosevelt. Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, famously dismissed Roosevelt as a "cowboy." "The reality, in fact, was far worse than Hanna contemplated," Douglas Brinkley writes in "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America." "Roosevelt was a pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist who had been trained at Harvard as a Darwinian-Huxleyite zoologist and now believed that the moral implications of 'On the Origin of Species' needed to be embraced by public policy." Much is known about him, but as Candice Millard showed in "The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Last Journey," and as Brinkley proves in his massive, fascinating study of Roosevelt's successful efforts to preserve more than 200million acres of America's forests and natural wonders, much remains to be learned. Roosevelt's obsession with wildlife and wild places began as a child (he collected mice and made accurate sketches of them, by subspecies) and continued throughout his life. He seriously considered a career as a biologist or naturalist before entering politics and was an authority on bears, deer and many varieties of birds. He was deeply in love with the American West and made trips into the backcountry as president, most memorably at Yosemite, where, in 1903, he camped in a snowstorm with John Muir. The image of Roosevelt and Muir dancing around a campfire is unforgettable; it is impossible to imagine any other president taking such joy in the outdoors. Roosevelt used every tool at his disposal to protect wild areas from development. He and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, created 16 million acres of new national forests in 1907 in a daring move against a congressional deadline. Roosevelt also passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 and used it to create 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon (which later became a national park.)...read more