Was Teddy Roosevelt the First Green President?

Teddy Roosevelt was renowned for his hunting and enthusiasm for the outdoors, but he was also very concerned with conservation. Discover why he tops the list of "Green" presidents in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kendith Kenner, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert Candice.
Hey there, Katie. I have to tell all of you,

(00:20):
Katie is so nice in Tan from a weekend in Destin,
and I was just remarking that I could also use
a vacation. And in the summertime, I love going to Washington,
d C. I don't think there's anything more fun than
being in that part of the country, especially around the
fourth of July. And the last time I was in
d C, I visited a site that I hadn't before.
And I wouldn't exactly call it off the beaten path,

(00:43):
because it's not. It's off the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
But if you've never been to Teddy Roosevelt Island, you've
got to go. It's this wonderful monument to his conservationist ideals.
And there's a swamp and forest and a boardwalk and
best of all, I can take Jupiter because pets are allowed.
And I mean, what more could a girl ask for?

(01:04):
Not a whole lot? Not a whole lot. And the
greatest thing about Teddy Roosevelt, I think is that he
was so forward thinking and in a time when industry
was king and loggers and miners and many other industry
men have bounded, he had the foresight to plan for
our country's natural resources to be protected and saved. And

(01:27):
that brings me to the question, was Teddy Roosevelt our
first real green president? I've heard of some other candidates
actually for green presidents. I was talking to our Green
editor Sarah Dowdy before this podcast, and she was saying
that Nixon was actually responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency
and for the Clean Air Act, but we don't think

(01:48):
of someone like Richard Nixon as being particularly green. Well,
I think that the word green has such a modern
and contemporary resonance. How long ago did we really start
throwing the word around, well exactly, And I think the
meaning of being green has changed throughout the decades, Like
right now you're thinking global warming precisely. And I think

(02:09):
when you when you hear the word green, you also
think of sort of a touchy feely person, someone who's
in touch with the people, someone who's really making effort
to care about the earth and presenter a good image
of stewardship to the people. And maybe that's why Nickson
comes to such a surprise, because that's not exactly the
legacy that he left behind. But a few other candidates

(02:30):
whose names have come up are people like Jimmy Carter,
who helped to found the Department of Energy back in
Thomas Jefferson, who had ideas of an agrarian paradise taking
hold in the United States, with everyone farming and doing
their part to help cultivate the land um and of course,
not to mention the Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana purchased to

(02:50):
add that much more land to state. I'll stop now,
get off my my Jefferson sitbox FDR who set up
the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was a major contributor to
helping UH bolster awareness of different trucks of wilderness and
also to cultivate the land. To and even Lincoln who

(03:13):
created the United States Department of Agriculture. And I have
to give credit to these rankings and to these accomplishments,
to the Daily Green and Tree Hugger as well as
ms N who developed lists of the greenest Presidents and
on the Daily Green, Teddy Roosevelt ranked number one, and
on the MSN list he was number five. But if

(03:36):
you're going to, I guess, quantify someone's greenness, you have
to really look at his accomplishments as a president. And
Teddy Roosevelt has a whole list of things that he accomplished,
starting with one hundred and fifty national forests, fifty one
bird reservations, four national game preserves, five national parks, eight
ten national monuments. The list just goes on and on,

(03:58):
and according to the Teddy Roosevelt Association, he expanded forest
reserves by four I mean, if it weren't for Teddy Roosevelt,
we would not have the Grand Canyon as it is,
would we not? Truly, we really wouldn't. And that's another
facet to his ideals of conservationism, the idea that the
United States, being a new country, doesn't have that sort

(04:21):
of rich cultural heritage and types of monuments the places
like Europe. Do you know what we have to offer,
you know, to show ourselves to the world are these
beautiful tracts of wilderness and interesting and unique formations in
the earth itself. And we need to be proud of that.
And that's why we need to preserve landmarks like the
Grand Canyon exactly. We don't have the Colosseum, but we

(04:42):
do have yuse somebody so beat that exactly. So we've
listed a bunch of his accomplishments. But I think that
to really prove how green he is, since that onus
is on us, since we've posited that he's the greenest
guy around, or at least the first green president, we
should delve into his history and his career. He came
into the White House back in nineteen o one, and

(05:03):
he was there until nineteen o nine, and he was
only forty three years old when he assumed the presidency
of the United States, and he leveraged the Antiquities Act
of nineteen o six in order to protect different sites
around the country as well as give future presidents the
license to declare different areas that could be considered of

(05:24):
scientific or historic interest as national monuments. And one example
of how he exercised the Antiquities Act was when he
declared the Petrified Forest in Arizona a national monument. He
was pretty captivated with Arizona in general. I think, well,
he was really fascinated by the West, and an important
thing to notice that while he was born to a

(05:45):
wealthy family on the East Coast. There were a couple
of events that happened in his life that inspired him
to go west. Back in the eighteen eighties. Actually was
when he headed out there, and this was around the
time that his mother and his first wife had died.
Tragedy really struck him. On a personal note. He'd been
reading in New York Magazine about Howard Eaton's Custer Trail

(06:06):
ranch in the Dakota bad Lands, and he was fascinated
by the idea of really getting in touch with his
masculine side, which is something we'll bring up again later,
and hunting and fishing and riding horses. So he went
out west, and he actually took down an outlaw while
he was out there, in addition to the hunting and
fishing aspect of being in the wild West. And he

(06:27):
became the owner of the Maltese Cross Ranch, and he
wrote home and encouraged his fellow Easterners to come out
west and see what it had to offer. And dude
ranches really became popular by virtue of Teddy Roosevelt and
his his inspirational actions and drawing people out to this
type of lifestyle. And if you're wondering about the word

(06:47):
dude sort of a funny term. Uh. In New York
it was used to reference the city slicker, someone who
was really well groomed and put together, roughing it in
the conditions of the West. Was he actually a good rancher.
I don't know if he was a good ranger. Maybe
one of our our listeners can weigh in via email
or on the blog. But something he was very good

(07:08):
at was establishing reverence toward nature. And he did some
sort of contradictory things to the idea of being a
good steward of nature, which you were asking me about
earlier and really put me in a tough spot to answer.
He was big into hunting, wasn't he. And when you
think of someone being green, you normally think, you know,

(07:29):
a little touchy feely. You don't picture them going out
and shooting grizzly bears, especially since he lived his life
by the understanding that stuff runs out. To put it crudely,
he was very much into conservationism and he knew that
stuff right out. So why would he go and hunt
big game with such wild abandon Well, and I think
part of it he actually went to go hunt bison,

(07:51):
and there were no bison to hunt, because that particular
stock of animal had in fact been exhausted in that
part of the country. And this is a topic on
which he clashed with one of his most influential sources.
As you were mentioning, oh, John Moore, Yes, who was
one of the core founders of the Sierra Club, and
he took a life changing trip to Yosemite and the

(08:13):
Grand Canyon um in the West with John Moore, and
they I think bickered quite a bit actually about that,
because Teddy was concerned with things like sustainable forestry, whereas
John Moore was saying that, no, we shouldn't be cutting
down the trees period, we should be preserving what we have.
And Teddy would have butted heads on that point and

(08:35):
would have defined sustainable forestry by explaining that you can
use the land in a democratic way or you can
use it in a very privatized way. And he foresaw
using the land for all strata of society. And until
then many people conceived of the wealthy classes being able

(08:56):
to use the land as freely as they wanted for recreation,
for hunting, and he wanted to make it available for everyone.
And in reference to his hunting with wild Abandon, I
wanted to refer to Daniel Filler, who wrote an essay
called Theodore Roosevelt Conservation is the Guardian of democracy. And
he explained that Roosevelt equated land and natural resources with

(09:20):
economic and political success. And again we'll we'll broach the
idea of conservationism is the key to the country's future
in just a minute. But something that Filler pose that
was so interesting to me was the idea of hunting
is a way to create a code of ethics toward nature.
And Roosevelt based this idea on the type of aristocratic

(09:44):
hunting traditions that were very much alive in Europe. They
established a type of manliness. They made a man very
virile and and hardy and full of life. The fact
that he could go out there and and hunt with
the band, and yes, but also with restraint. You know,
you hunt for for them. I guess the joint satisfaction

(10:06):
of taking down an animal you assert your manliness on
the land. And he saw in the United States that
is urbanization was growing, America was becoming very emasculated in
a sense. He was very worried that men would would
lose the ideals on which the country was founded, and
he saw this emasculation of man as the death of democracy. Well,

(10:29):
and being a rough rider, cowboy type of guy, I
don't think he was very fond of that particular deterioration exactly.
That's an excellent point drawing another aspect of his career.
There he was very much ahead of his time with
some of the ideas that he uh. He advocated in
nine eight he said, our position in the world has

(10:50):
been attained by the extent and thoroughness of the control
we have achieved over nature. But we are more and
not less dependent upon what she America furnishes then at
any previous time of history. And what do you think
that means? Well, Like I was explaining earlier, equitting landed
natural resources with economic and political success, Roosevelt saw the

(11:13):
abundance of America the timber and the mind and dairy, say,
the clean air, and the abundance of birds and wildlife
as America's key to success on the global stage. We
have an abundance, and that's what would guarantee our success
among other countries with other resources at their disposal, but

(11:33):
perhaps too many Americans at this time, we're using them carelessly,
and he wanted to preserve them for future generations. And
he even said and his seventh Annual Message to Congress,
that there's no such thing as an inexhaustible resource. And
I quite teddy. Optimism is a good characteristic, but if
carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness. We are prone

(11:56):
to speak of the resources of this country is inexhaustible.
This is not so. He has some great quotes on conservation.
I was reading another one where he goes specifically through
everything and what will happen when we run into the
forest when the coal is gone, the iron it's gone,
the oil is gone, the gas is gone, and that
it's time to start thinking about these things. And the
fact that he was posing these ideas in a time

(12:18):
when it was incredibly unpopular to talk about tapering off
one's use of the land, I think is what really
asserts his place as as the nation's first and if
not greenest president. And very much are progressive, along with
the other ideals of his party. Definitely, and of course
we remain to see what our current president and future presidents.

(12:39):
You're on out due to exemplify greenness in the White House,
and we are positive that many of you are are
itching with things to uh to say about Teddy Burgeveld
and other presidents who you might think you're even greener
that we invite you to email us at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com and to comment on

(13:00):
our blog, and we very much look forward to your
having a good green debate with you. And for more
on Teddy Roosevelt and other green ideas and conservationist principles,
be sure to visit the website at how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
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(13:20):
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