Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America

By Ian Tyrrell

Long before people were “going green” and toting reusable bags, the Progressive generation of the early 1900s was calling for the conservation of resources, sustainable foresting practices, and restrictions on hunting. Industrial commodities such as wood, water, soil, coal, and oil, as well as improvements in human health and the protection of “nature” in an aesthetic sense, were collectively seen for the first time as central to the country’s economic well-being, moral integrity, and international power. One of the key drivers in the rise of the conservation movement was Theodore Roosevelt, who, even as he slaughtered animals as a hunter, fought to protect the country’s natural resources.

In Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, Ian Tyrrell gives us a cohesive picture of Roosevelt’s engagement with the natural world along with a compelling portrait of how Americans used, wasted, and worried about natural resources in a time of burgeoning empire. Countering traditional narratives that cast conservation as a purely domestic issue, Tyrrell shows that the movement had global significance, playing a key role in domestic security and in defining American interests around the world. Tyrrell goes beyond Roosevelt to encompass other conservation advocates and policy makers, particularly those engaged with shaping the nation’s economic and social policies—policies built on an understanding of the importance of crucial natural resources. Crisis of the Wasteful Nation is a sweeping transnational work that blends environmental, economic, and imperial history into a cohesive tale of America’s fraught relationships with raw materials, other countries, and the animal kingdom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226197937

Ian Tyrrell

Ian Tyrrell is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of The Absent Marx: Class Analysis and Liberal History in Twentieth Century America (1986), and Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (1991).

Book preview

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation

Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America

IAN TYRELL

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Ian Tyrrell was the Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, until his retirement in 2012. He is the author of nine books, including True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 and Historians in Public, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19776-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19793-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226197937.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tyrrell, Ian R., author.

Crisis of the wasteful nation : empire and conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America / Ian Tyrrell.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-19776-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-19776-X (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-19793-7 (e-book) 1. Conservation of natural resources—United States—History. 2. Conservation of natural resources—Government policy—United States. 3. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919—Knowledge—Conservation of natural resources. I. Title.

S930.T97 2015

333.72—dc23

2014023240

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my conservation-minded daughters, Jessica and Ellen. May there still be a livable future world for you and your generation’s descendants.

CONTENTS

Preface

Abbreviations

PART I: THE ORIGINS OF ALARM

ONE / Alarmism and the Wasteful Nation

TWO / American Conservation and the World Movement: Networks, Personnel, and the International Context

PART II: THE NEW EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF CONSERVATION

THREE / Colonies, Natural Resources, and Geopolitical Thought in the New Empire

FOUR / Encountering the Tropical World: The Impact of Empire

FIVE / Energy and Empire: Shadows of the Fossil Fuel Revolution

SIX / Dynamic Geography: Irrigation, Waterways, and the Inland Empire

SEVEN / The Problem of the Soils and the Problem of the Toilers

EIGHT / Conservation, Scenery, and the Sustainability of Nature

NINE / Lessons for Living: Irving Fisher, National Vitality, and Human Conservation

PART III: THE GLOBAL VISION OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND ITS FATE

TEN / To the Halls of Europe: The African Safari and Roosevelt’s Campaign to Conserve Nature (While Killing It)

ELEVEN / Something Big: Theodore Roosevelt and Global Conservation

TWELVE / A Senseless and Mischievous Fad? From Alarm to Sobriety as a Nation Takes Stock

EPILOGUE / The Present, the Future, and the Power of Contingency in Human Life

Notes

Index

PREFACE

Crisis of the Wasteful Nation brings to a close a series of five works that I have written on the transnational relationships of the United States and on aspects of American empire. This final installment is not a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, though he is necessarily the central figure in the story. Nor is it political history, straight environmental history, or even the history of environmental diplomacy, though all these are part of the analysis. I focus on the hopes and fears for the future of the United States and the world that Roosevelt and other key conservationists around him expressed, and I trace how their ideas fared politically and economically. I am interested in the vicissitudes of conservation reform in action and in traditions established and paths not taken. The actors in this drama did not operate alone, and I do not wish to slight the role of the many, many thousands of Americans and other nationals who worked for conservation in that era. The movement they created did not represent a cohesive economic class in the classic sense of political economy. It encompassed cross-class coalitions over particular issues and exhibited intraclass conflict. It is useful to think of its leadership as part of overlapping professional, political, intellectual, and economic elites, for want of a better word. There were divisions among these, and fractious conflicts with business, even as sections of business supported conservationists’ attempts to regulate the American economy’s resource base.

Readers should also note that I use both transnational and international as terms for aspects of the relations between the United States and the wider world. Though there is no completely adequate single term to cover the whole gamut of American cross-national relations, these two are the best for modern America, where the nation-state is inescapably a central fact. I prefer international for official, governmental interactions of nation-states, and transnational to refer to the broader currents and contexts crossing national boundaries, where non-state actors are involved. A great deal has now been written on the theory and practice of transnational methodology (see the notes) and on the related but distinct idea of comparative history. All these concepts are important and may be used in a complementary fashion.

In the course of writing I have had opportunities to present my ideas to audiences at the University of Houston, Texas, where I gave a Tenneco Lecture (2009); Oxford University (2010); Cambridge University (2011); the University of Nottingham (2011); the European University Institute in Florence (2011); the University of Leipzig (2012); and McMaster University (2012), as part of the Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor program. Other related presentations were made at the Australian Historical Association Conference in Perth, Western Australia (July 2010); the School of Humanities Seminar, University of New South Wales (2010 and 2012); Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association biennial conferences in Adelaide (July 2010) and Brisbane (July 2012); and the Australian Studies Group in Sydney (2013).

I have learned from conversations with Martin Melosi and Kathleen Brosnan (University of Houston); Andrew Preston and John Thompson (Cambridge University); Mary Dudziak (then at the University of Southern California); Bevan Sewell (University of Nottingham); Mario Del Pero (University of Bologna); Kiran Klaus Patel (then at the European University Institute); Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann (University of Leipzig); Marilyn Blatt Young (New York University); H. V. Nelles and John Weaver (McMaster University); and Thomas Adam (University of Texas, Arlington). Students at the University of New South Wales, Oxford University (2010–11), and UCLA (2009) have listened to my ideas on transnational history, as did students and faculty I spoke to at the University of Texas, Arlington, in October 2012.

I am deeply indebted to the anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press and especially to David Wrobel of the University of Oklahoma for an insightful reading of the manuscript. Others who have helped include Emily Wakild (Boise State University); James Beattie (University of Waikato, New Zealand); Michael Ondaatje (University of Newcastle, Australia); Edith Ziegler (Sydney); and Shane White, Iain McCalman, and Richard White (University of Sydney).

Jay Sexton, Stephen Tuck, and Gareth Davies, my colleagues at Oxford, provided much support in the year that I occupied the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Chair of American History, as did the Rothermere American Institute and its director, Nigel Bowles. The fellows at the Queens College lived up to the reputation of Oxford for brilliance and collegiality. Thanks especially to the provost, Professor Paul Madden. William Beinart of St. Antony’s College offered suggestions and delivered a perceptive formal response to my Harmsworth Inaugural Lecture, as did Gareth Davies of St. Anne’s. At UCLA, while occupying the Joyce Appleby Chair as a visiting professor, I was assisted in various ways by Caroline Ford, Joyce Appleby, and Ellen DuBois.

My friends Keith and Linda Sipe generously supplied short-term accommodation and camaraderie in Durham, North Carolina; and I received great hospitality from friends John and Joan Weaver of Hamilton, Ontario, and the entire history faculty at McMaster University during my all-too-short Canadian stay in 2012.

Archivists and librarians at the following institutions were most helpful: Library of Congress Manuscripts Division; National Archives and Records Administration II (College Park, Maryland); Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Fisher Library, University of Sydney; University of New South Wales Library; Australian Archives, Canberra; Australian National Library; Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa; Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University; Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Water Resources Library and Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Plunkett Foundation library, Oxford; New York Public Library; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; and Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The digital resources of the Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center were also very helpful, as were those of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard University.

Tim Mennel and Doug Mitchell of the University of Chicago Press have been exemplary in helping this manuscript along, and especially I owe a debt of gratitude to Tim for his astute reading and helpful advice. Pamela Bruton has once again proven herself to be an outstanding copy editor. From the Australian Research Council I received the Discovery Grant (DP0558136) that enabled me to travel overseas and to obtain sufficient research help. Marie McKenzie served as an able research assistant in 2009 and 2010. Nadine Kavanagh kindly translated German documents.

To Diane Collins I can only express admiration at the superior quality of her prose and thank her for reading drafts of several chapters of the manuscript. To Ellen Tyrrell, Jessica Tyrrell, and Diane, many thanks for love and support over the years, without which I could never have completed this work.

Parts of chapter 8 appeared in modified form in America’s National Parks: The Transnational Creation of National Space in the Progressive Era, Journal of American Studies 46 (January 2012): 1–21; and an earlier version of chapter 10 appeared in the Australasian Journal of Eco-criticism 2 (2013): 5–16.

ABBREVIATIONS

PART ONE

The Origins of Alarm

ONE

Alarmism and the Wasteful Nation

German American journalist and artist Rudolf Cronau loved the land of his adoption. Traveling far and wide as a foreign correspondent for the Cologne Gazette, he had observed over many years the grandeur of American scenery and the richness of the nation’s wildlife. Yet he was often pained by what he witnessed in the European settlement of the continent, and his anger burst forth clearly in his writings. A key complaint was the thoughtless destruction of forests, which would, he argued, produce a timber famine in the not-too-distant future and steadily rising prices. His indictment was stark on this score: As man made himself master over everything on the earth, so he won his battle against the forest. The settlers felled it, smashed it, burned it, till they got all the room they wanted. Their children followed this example and destroyed the forest with the same recklessness they would have used against their worst enemy. Surely, he concluded in 1908, it is a reminiscence of those hard pioneer days, that so many Americans neither love nor respect trees, but have only one thought about them, and that is to cut them down.¹

Not unique in his observations, Cronau played a bit part within a larger drama of lamentations over natural resource waste. He could easily cite others who anticipated his jeremiad, including Emerson Hough. A journalist for Forest and Stream and an outdoorsman, Hough wrote The Slaughter of the Trees for Everybody’s Magazine in 1908. There, for more than half a million readers, was a clear message of what would follow if the warnings went unheeded. In fifty years we will have the whole states as bare as China. . . . The Canadian forests north of the great lakes will be swept away, and the alluvial plain of the Yazoo Delta of the Mississippi ripped apart by floods. We shall shiver in a cold and burn in a heat never before felt, he warned. Like Chinamen our children will rake the soil for fuel or forage or food.² For Hough, and for Cronau, the collapse of American civilization was at hand.

Cronau entitled his 1908 book on the subject of conservation Our Wasteful Nation and thus aptly captured the changing mood. Critics noted that Cronau’s indictment covered the whole range of resources, not just forests, which were only one form of the nation’s profligacy.³ The German American fed off a growing sense of alarm at this apparently wasteful republic in the years after 1900, particularly from 1906 to 1910. A New York Times headline proclaimed America’s Profligacy with Her Heritage.⁴ A Nation’s Prodigal Waste, replied the Washington Post.⁵ The Chicago Tribune called Cronau’s work an appallingly truthful statement of facts.⁶ A Continent Despoiled was the headline for Cronau’s work in McClure’s Magazine. Volumes such as Mary H. Gregory’s Checking the Waste added further publicity.⁷

This was not merely the rhetoric of scribes. It was a movement with genuine grassroots—if middle-class—support articulated through some of the key social institutions of the day. Schools, Chautauqua assemblies, churches, the Daughters of the American Revolution, women’s clubs, and debating groups joined in.⁸ Businessmen voted with their wallets and, on the contagious assumption of an impending timber shortage, invested in tree planting. The years 1907–10 witnessed an Australian eucalyptus boom in California. The fast-growing trees would, speculators hoped, fill gaps in the timber supply after the rape of the land. At the same time, American companies began buying up forests in Mexico, fearful that domestic supplies would vanish anyway. Clearly, the alarm over wasted resources was not limited to journalists or a political elite. It could not simply be orchestrated from the top, even as federal government officials worked tirelessly and cleverly to do so by priming prominent figures with facts and, on occasion, even speeches to deliver.⁹ Whatever the true state of forest shortage, businessmen and many others made calculations that factored in a jeremiad about resource destruction.

Encouraging Cronau was the work of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president (1901–9), and Gifford Pinchot, chief of the Division of Forestry (later designated as chief of the Forest Service; 1898–1910). The precocious son of a New York philanthropist and merchant, Roosevelt is well known as an advocate of the masculine and strenuous life, a nationalist, an instigator of American empire, a lover of nature and the American West, a hunter, and yet a conservationist without par among American presidents.¹⁰ Deeply controversial and intellectually complex, many adored him, others loathed him, but his high-octane personality,¹¹ ample ego, and far-reaching agenda for conservation were impossible to ignore. By inheritance a wealthy man with a fortune derived in part from his father’s wallpaper business, Pinchot is scarcely less famous in conservation circles than the wellborn Roosevelt. He served the president as de facto second-in-command for domestic affairs. Although receiving only one reference in Cronau’s book, his work was vital to understanding the alarm over wasted resources. Roosevelt and Pinchot constituted, with Secretary of the Interior James Garfield and others documented in the pages that follow, a band of brothers (the term is appropriate) who exuded a peculiar intimacy and noblesse oblige in the service of the nation. Roosevelt himself has been authoritatively described as a reforming member of the old New York social elite. He was a card-carrying Knickerbocker aristocrat fashioning a modern public policy response to the obscenely wealthy parvenus of the new Industrial Revolution.¹² In May 1908, the president called a widely reported Conference of Governors to dramatize the problem of resource waste and destruction and to push the existing anxiety in the direction of structural reform and national planning. From the governors’ conference came the creation of the National Conservation Commission (NCC), to carry out an intellectual stocktaking with a broad interdisciplinary sweep across the Washington bureaucracy. Its research produced a hefty three-volume government report covering all aspects of conservation, the first such inventory in American history, and further meetings ensued. A Joint Conservation Conference in December 1908 considered the draft report of the NCC, established a committee with federal and state representatives to propose reforms, and endorsed conservationist objectives to continue the work beyond Roosevelt’s term. These objectives were expressed in the Conference of Governors Declaration of Principles, a far-reaching statement intended to guide the committee. Then a North American Conservation Conference called by Roosevelt met in February 1909 and initiated continental cooperation on resource allocation. As a parting gesture, Roosevelt also proposed an ambitious World Congress on Conservation to be held at The Hague, and the diplomatic machinery was creaking into motion to advance the idea before he departed the White House on 4 March.¹³

By that time, conservation had come almost to define Progressivism, that broad and sometimes woolly term used to describe reform movements seeking to adjust the United States to the pressures of a newly industrialized society, with all of its corporate power and labor strife. To be sure, generations of historians have defined and debated different strands of Progressivism, so much so that some would abandon the term entirely.¹⁴ A work constantly in the process of becoming, Progressivism was made as a concept and a movement in this period—and by the actors in this story. Conservation became quite central to their hopes and fears, as apprehension over resource depletion peaked from 1906 to 1910. Ultimately, conservation was enshrined in the Progressive Party platform for the 1912 presidential election.

A striking near consensus emerged on the need for conservation as a key Progressive reform in these years, as attested by the statements of the three leading contenders for the presidency in that election. Yet opinions differed over the degree of reform needed. Not everybody agreed with Cronau or like-minded Jeremiahs.¹⁵ The Literary Digest asked, Are We Conservation-Crazy?, while the Los Angeles Times recalled the miser who said he was saving for a rainy day but died before that came, thus missing out on all the comforts and good things of life. The paper openly championed the oil industry, just then developing in Southern California.¹⁶ Many opponents of conservation represented such obvious economic interests and reflected sectional tensions. In the western states, certain grazing, mining, and other groups did not want federal interference in their arrangements to use public lands. They resented what they regarded as collective eastern hand-wringing, particularly when the advocates of conservation called upon the federal government to withdraw those lands from sale, thus locking up resources in developing states. Governor Edwin Norris of Montana said of easterners, They have eaten their cake, now they want some of ours. Journalist George Knapp of Saint Louis targeted federal control over public lands as the worst of all despotisms, one suffused with the arbitrary authority of petty officials telling the common people whether or not they could farm or mine at all. In practice, many conflicting interests fragmented grassroots opposition in the American West, with larger-scale lumber and cattlemen’s operations often supporting federal programs that could stabilize their businesses. Yet Knapp’s case expressed the immediate experience of many other farmers, ranchers, and small-scale lumber millers. Opposition grew in strength during Roosevelt’s presidency, precisely because of the widening scope of federal intervention.¹⁷

Underlying and augmenting regionalist responses was legal opinion. For some state governors, conservation within the states was not the business of the federal government, although they acknowledged the need for reform. They cited constitutional arguments that federal power did not extend to nonnavigable rivers, control of waterpower, and related matters.¹⁸ Just as clearly, these constitutional points were aligned with business interests that, Progressive conservationists charged, spearheaded the opposition. The most outspoken champion of untrammeled corporate development was Knapp, writing in the North American Review: That the modern Jeremiahs are as sincere as was the older one, I do not question. But I count their prophecies to be baseless vaporings, and their vaunted remedy worse than the fancied disease. I am one who can see no warrant of law, of justice, nor of necessity for that wholesale reversal of our traditional policy which the advocates of ‘conservation’ demand. I am one who does not shiver for the future at the sight of a load of coal, nor view a steel mill as the arch robber of posterity.¹⁹ According to Knapp, the entire Washington press had been enchanted by a diametrically opposed position emanating from a federal juggernaut of bureaucrats. The finest press bureau in the world, he charged, had labored with a zeal quite unhampered by any considerations of fact or logic. It pandered not to popular reason, but to popular fears.²⁰

Opponents of conservation made a deeper, philosophical case about development as well. Here, nature was malleable. Humans had altered it in ways that embodied value through capital, thus improving the prospects of future generations. This position rested on the antebellum Whig political economy of Henry Carey, stated in The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign (1853): "The earth is a great machine given to man to be fashioned to his purpose. The more he works it, the better it feeds him, because each step is but preparatory to a new one more productive than the last—requiring less labour [sic] and yielding larger return."²¹ This argument was inherently hostile to alarmism. For example, by building railways, humans increased the comfort of future generations, albeit at the cost of destroying forests to lay railroad ties. Though the implication was rarely stated, nature had actually become incarnate in capital. A New York Times reviewer of Cronau wrote: If we have hewn the forests, we have invented steam. If we have exhausted the mines, we have developed electricity. Assuredly our followers are better off with the reduction of natural resources, accompanied by the inventions which recent generations proffer as a recompense. This critic also rejected guilt over the legacy to future generations by pointing to material progress already achieved: what right has posterity to expect so much from us? Our ancestors did not do so much for us.²² And yet the current generation had a higher standard of living than ever before in human history, the disbelievers chanted.

That said, even those who praised the transformation of nature into productive capital still conceded, under a de facto precautionary principle, that conservation should be attempted. When the New York Times denied recourse to intergenerational equity, it agreed that there was need for prudence, but not cause for fright.²³ Careless and unnecessary waste the paper accepted as a sin. Though the Wall Street Journal likewise scoffed at apocalyptic conclusions, it stressed that the country was living off its capital by destroying raw materials. Reliance on the free market was too much like locking the stable after the theft of the horse fully to meet the case. Perhaps the answer was not to stop resource use but to engage in technical and scientific research.²⁴ That was, most scholars would argue, a very American response that flowed from the key role of technology in the nation’s culture.²⁵ Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal conceded that technological growth would not simply happen on its own. Government, business, or university research was needed to promote more efficient use and to discover substitutes. The paper praised the prudent policy of resource conservation already applied to forests by Pinchot.

A surprising number of opinion makers across the political spectrum agreed that government needed to do something serious about natural resource waste. Four-fifths of the states created conservation commissions, illustrating in the process the breadth of concern. Manifestly, the enthusiasm for conservation went far beyond partisanship, loyalty to Roosevelt, or purely national action. The acquiescence of so many political figures and media outlets in some degree of conservation sentiment indicated that alarmism had partially won the debate by pushing many of the unconvinced to favor some—though not all—of the action that enthusiasts of conservation advocated.

Previously little used, the term conservation became ubiquitous and closely identified with the team of Roosevelt and Pinchot. In fact, Pinchot claimed to have hit upon it while riding in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, DC, one day in 1907,²⁶ but conservation as a concept was used by George Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream, as early as 1884.²⁷ Grinnell had written of both preservation and conservation, meaning the careful use of resources in the latter instance and the prevention of development of resources in the former, but for forestry, the practice of conservation had already begun in British India, Germany, and other places well before that.

To be sure, the jeremiad on forest depletion was neither new nor exclusively American. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated that concerns for the disappearing forests in Europe’s colonies run back to the late seventeenth century. The German explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt expressed a similar alarm regarding Spanish Venezuela in 1800.²⁸ The United States was not directly affected by such soul-searching, as it lacked overseas colonies—but it did have the West, which served a parallel, quasi-colonial function. In the mid-nineteenth century, Americans already worried about the future of a wantonly destructive nation as the West was rapidly won. Though prophecies of shortage for other resources were made in that era, the forests were by far the chief worry. In these years Americans articulated ideas of preserving nature, spurred especially by George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, the first major American account of the damage humans had done to natural environments. In this 1864 book and later editions, Marsh emphasized lost forest cover that led to soil erosion and floods, and he investigated the impact of deforestation on climate. A quarter of the nation’s landmass must be kept in woodland, he argued, to prevent serious problems. Social scientists took up the cause in the 1880s and 1890s, with Richard T. Ely of the University of Wisconsin urging a greater role for the federal government in creating public forests, since only public action could command the vast scale needed, as well as comply with the necessity of thinking long term to make forestry profitable.²⁹ The eminent geologist Nathaniel Shaler of Harvard greatly valued Marsh’s work and by the 1890s broached the subject of depleted oil stocks, though his comprehensive indictment of resource misuse was not published until 1905, when he blamed Americans for the very worst of the "sinful wastes [sic] of man’s inheritance in the earth." The book’s arrival was splendidly timed to reinforce as well as reflect upon the growing sense of alarm.³⁰

Until 1900, little concrete action occurred. The earliest legislative response to the intellectual agitation was the Timber Culture Act of 1873. Ineffective in practice and beset with legal loopholes, the act had been intended to encourage tree planting on the barren plains of the West in the hope that the climate would improve with enhanced vegetation. In another sign of things to come, the US government appointed its first chief of the Division of Forestry, Franklin Hough, in 1881. Concern over the protection of the watersheds in Southern California and elsewhere contributed in 1891–92 to the creation of the nation’s first forest reserves, and the Organic Act of 1897 registered the first attempt at administration of such forests.³¹ These incremental achievements reveal legal and administrative precedents for Progressive Era action, in which new jeremiads about the environmental failings of the American Republic began to flourish. The survival of forests came to be seen as essential to republican civilization’s health.³² Nevertheless, the scope and content of the response would be startlingly novel after 1900. Professor Ely called the earlier efforts merely petty measures that will never accomplish anything of economic significance.³³

What appeared fresh in the new century was the breadth of issues discussed, the global scope of concern, the vigorous involvement of the federal government in developing a countervailing conservation policy, and the articulation of intergenerational equity as a serious issue for debate. Within the government and without, conservationists began to assert a crisis with respect to, not merely US forests, but all American resources. Moreover, it came increasingly to notice that other nations were running short of raw materials and that the United States could not necessarily look abroad for these resources essential to power economic growth. The call to action and the ensuing campaigns covered all aspects of conservation, including minerals, water, soils, forests, and crops. By 1909, even human health was added. Embracing both preservation of resources and their wise use, conservation came to be an all-encompassing enthusiasm.

Matching the rapidly expanding discourse over wasted resources was its obverse: the idea of efficiency as the basis of conservation policy. In part, efficiency revealed an urge for a stronger state to compete on the international stage. Undertaken by a president highly conscious of America’s developing role in world history, efficiency included far-reaching attempts at administrative reforms to strengthen the American state, such as military reorganization. This drive was also manifest in conservation policy, particularly as pioneered in forestry.³⁴ But this was no dry-as-dust bureaucratic process. A gospel of efficiency and the accompanying jeremiad galvanized Progressive intellectuals and the populace alike as if Armageddon itself was at hand.

This great change from 1900 to 1910 has been portrayed in terms of the passion, enthusiasm, and intellectual force of Roosevelt and those he inspired.³⁵ Complementing the focus on the president were the intellectual implications of the disappearing frontier. The idea of a fin-de-siècle crisis that Roosevelt and Pinchot tapped into almost coincided with historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s announcement of the end of free land at the frontier’s official closing in 1890. Few Americans of the time read Turner’s essay, but many opinion makers absorbed his and similar ideas welling up from popular culture.³⁶ To Turner’s followers, this momentous change made the American experience unique.

The struggle over the future use of the US public lands of the West broadly correlates with this interpretation. Arable land was becoming scarcer, and this circumstance imposed constraints absent from earlier land-grant policies. Roosevelt created a Public Lands Commission in 1903, tasked to recommend reclassification of land according to its best uses. Thereby he hoped that a rational and planned allocation of land would be undertaken. On the one hand, that suitable for actual settlement needed to be maximized to allow homesteads to be built in the yeoman farmer tradition. On the other, crop farming would no longer be allowed where pastoral leasing met the environmental conditions more precisely. This potentially contradictory and politically controversial policy was not successfully implemented. The federal government was unable to introduce general land reform during the Roosevelt years due chiefly to western opposition to interference in the economic affairs of the affected states. But piecemeal reforms were achieved. Roosevelt resorted to executive action, withdrawing, for example, sixty-six thousand acres of suspected coal lands in 1906 from public entry in the General Land Office for sale to private interests, and he recommended separating mineral rights from surface rights, as in Australia.³⁷ Subsequently, the Coal Lands Act of 1909 started the process of implementing this suggestion. Further, the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 provided for farming allotments of 320, instead of 160, acres to take account of semiarid conditions, which required larger blocks for fallowing and rotation of crops. Other federal policy areas, such as irrigation, national forests and parks, and restoration of the economic and social viability of rural life, were also consistent with the belief that free land, or at least good land, was no longer abundant.³⁸

Roosevelt himself chose to identify, at least in part, with the effort to protect a wilderness that was receding. He was an advocate of pioneering values and strove to safeguard the nation’s natural heritage through the creation of parks, monuments, and wildlife reserves at the very time that the influence of the Turner thesis on the end of the frontier was spreading.³⁹ Douglas Brinkley documents this achievement amply in his book Wilderness Warrior.⁴⁰

Roosevelt did hold the issue of wildlife and its habitat in wild places close to his heart, but he believed that, for political as well as social reasons, a balance must be kept with conservation as efficient use. He cautioned his friend William T. Hornaday, a fellow naturalist, that preservation of wild life had to be combined with forest or other preservation. Moreover, grand schemes for saving wildlife must always be kept as a mere incident of the utilitarian movement, for our success in achieving either movement depends upon our convincing people of the practical beneficial side. Protection of wild places and things needed to be toned down so that an appeal could be made primarily to the practical business common sense of our people.⁴¹

Even granting the complete sincerity of Roosevelt’s objectives, and even though the frontier’s ending contributed to a sense of shrinking resources that combined both land and wildlife, this internally oriented interpretation of American conservation is not entirely satisfying. The ill ease was not purely American but extended to many nations, some facing conditions very different, and others very similar. Newspapers far away quoted Hough and Cronau and took the stirring calls to action from American conservationists seriously.⁴² The foreign response encompassed expanding imperial frontiers of European settlement rather than contracting or ending ones and promoted conservation on a self-consciously international level. When Roosevelt counseled Hornaday to be cautious, he was in the middle of discussing international, not national, conservation politics.⁴³ The rise to prominence of national conservation capped a decade or more of international debate over efficiency in national life, a debate as prominent in Britain as in the United States.⁴⁴ The transnational nature of the Progressive discourse of waste and efficiency has been apparent to scholars for at least four decades, though its implications for Progressive Era historiography and the birth of the conservation movement have been largely ignored. Samuel Hays’s Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency long dominated the field, but he neglected this international context in which parallel trends existed in other industrializing countries.⁴⁵

1.1. Roosevelt at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, 1903. Stereograph, LCPP.

The book that follows begins from the knowledge that the creation of a proconservationist sentiment was not the product of purely American conditions. Historians are familiar with the transatlantic exchanges of Progressive reform, but little has been done to apply this approach to conservation.⁴⁶ More important, the transnational context of American conservation was not European or Atlantic but global. The beginnings of conservation diplomacy can be detected, and the Roosevelt and succeeding administrations conducted bilateral negotiations with Canada and Britain over boundary waters and inland fishing, and multilateral ones with Canada, Japan, Russia, and Britain over fur sealing. The Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918 with Canada capped this trend.⁴⁷ Yet under Roosevelt the ambitions went beyond these specific items to involve comprehensive hemispheric and global conservation.

To understand this new American engagement in all of its depth and span we must connect the conservation debates to another neglected theme in US history. American empire and imperialism are slippery terms, and a great deal of printer’s ink has been spilt upon them. Nonetheless, a consensus is growing that the United States has indeed been an empire with both formal colonies and informal spheres of economic and political control. The boundaries between the two were fuzzy, and it is necessary to specify clearly the changing historical character of that empire at every point. From the 1890s to the 1910s, it was an empire that altered rapidly in response to global circumstances.⁴⁸

More than acquisition of territory, trade expansion backed by financial power and, where necessary, military intervention in other nation-states was important as far as the United States was concerned. Much attention has been paid to exports as a stimulus to this American economic imperialism—but almost none to the issue of a growing American need for certain imports.⁴⁹ That reflects the common image of a United States so abundant in resources that it was largely self-sufficient. The evidence is otherwise in two respects. Perceptions of resource shortages grew after 1898, while consumer demand for products that could not be obtained within the continental United States expanded rapidly. The source of those fears of scarcity amid abundance was changing, as tropical areas became more important to American thinking, and as American attention turned to East Asia and Latin America. The growing need for raw materials and the new geographical orientation were linked circumstances. East Asian commercial exchanges with the United States surged ahead in the late nineteenth century, including consumer goods such as silk, tea, and porcelain china. Latin America similarly provided an increasing range and volume of goods. Among the natural resources imported was a surprising variety of tropical forest products. Coffee and rubber from Brazil were already important consumer and industrial items. Fine furniture required wood such as the tropical mahoganies from Central America, and so too did the interior fittings of the homes of the well-to-do. The landmark Arts and Crafts structure of the Gamble House, designed by the firm of Greene and Greene in Pasadena, for example, would have been unthinkable without its extensive embellishment with Central American mahogany, a timber in declining availability. More prosaically, the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company needed chicle from Guatemala as the basis of its masticating products, said to be a necessity for the girls of America.⁵⁰ As the United States began to seek enhanced trade in Latin America and East Asia, it also sought secure sources of supply for raw materials from these places. After 1900, oil in Mexico and later Venezuela joined the list.

While concern for the natural resources of the wider world can be detected in American activities of the 1890s, both alarm and action intensified after 1898, with the coming of the formal, or island, empire. In that year the United States acquired its own colonies: the insular possessions of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the same year came Hawaii as a territory and, soon after, Samoa and the Panama Canal Zone. Though not a consideration in these acquisitions, once the deed was done the US government deemed tropical forests useful in helping to fund colonial rule and in developing export markets for the insular possessions.

A cautionary note is needed here. The rise of conservation to national prominence cannot be explained purely by the seizure of a few overseas colonies. Rather, 1898 gave shape and spur to an already-evident American concern with the nation’s international connections and its place as a newly important world power. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment certainly restrained subsequent American actions, but many Americans were proud of the colonies that the United States had acquired and hopeful about the resources they might contain. These Americans saw the colonies as the site of what commentators called a Greater America, and this term entered common parlance. Rising to the full splendor of its responsibilities was a formal empire supplemented by the growing informal empire of American political and economic influence in the Caribbean region and across the Pacific. All this was unintelligible without 1898. Its cultural impact at home has been woefully neglected in the historiography.⁵¹

Yet the American interest in overseas territory and economic influence was to become more complex still. The availability of resources abroad in the shape of colonies or zones of political and economic influence was not the only source of power for a self-conscious empire. Equally important was the idea of an explicit inland empire to complement the external one. This internal strengthening of American power was more easily acceptable to—and often advocated by—anti-imperialists but was nevertheless transnationally produced in the geopolitical system of high imperialism and shared by pro- and anti-imperialists. Because the United States was a latecomer to the worldwide scramble for colonies, both preservation and wise use of internal resources through conservation policies became doubly important. In this respect the United States was less comparable to Britain than to Germany, which had also come late to feast at the colonial table, and which picked up the scraps of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region that other powers initially did not want. Germany had to rely, as Britain did not, on itself and its immediate neighbors for many raw materials and, as a result, cultivated influence before World War I in southeastern Europe and in the decaying Ottoman Empire. Control of Mitteleuropa was to be an important German war aim in 1914, if not the main war aim.⁵²

In a geopolitical sense, this German bid for continental hegemony was similar to nineteenth-century American efforts to build a continental empire. Both powers were industrializing rapidly by 1900, and both required raw materials from an expanding hinterland, linked by railroads and canals. For the American political elite of the period 1900–1917, the distribution of resources within this inland empire was just as important as, if not more important than, access to foreign raw materials. In the world system of high or Victorian imperialism from 1870 to 1914, all the European empires and the United States understood the importance of a neomercantilist hoarding of key resources for the coming industrial struggle, and many applied discriminatory tariffs or other trade practices in their jurisdictions.⁵³ Because American leaders swam in the same intellectual sea, conservation became inseparable from geopolitical competition in an imperial world. As much as when considering the colonial territories and the informally dominated Caribbean states, the continental United States itself was conceived of as an empire in this geopolitical sense in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

The neomercantilist streak in American conservation policy will be illustrated in the following chapters, but it is worth noting that such a policy fits nicely with a historiographical critique of the American empire as an Open Door empire of free trade.⁵⁴ The assumption of an Open Door–controlled American foreign policy has always sat uneasily with the strongly protectionist nature of American trade policy under Republican congresses from the 1890s to 1913 and in the 1920s. Reciprocity deals were certainly negotiated, but these were used to modify protectionism where American resource and export interests were particularly strong. Despite reciprocity policies, American trade was geared toward the creation of surpluses, and it favored internal strategic and economic priorities rather than international commercial exchange under the invisible-hand principle.⁵⁵

The inland-empire idea also helps us to understand how Americans tried to distinguish their own place within the international state system from European colonialism.⁵⁶ Certainly, Americans came to argue that their empire abroad was forward-looking rule, one that worked not for imperial overlords but in a modernizing and democratizing way for colonial peoples. Roosevelt formed this view, a stance particularly visible during his visit to Africa and