| Chapter : | Introducing the Green Roosevelt |
and unknown…portions of the country” as well as “inquiry into…the habits and natural history of various wild animals.”21
Predictably lost in sexier debates over TR's early penchant for hunting is his reputation as a naturalist par excellence. Admittedly, it proves difficult to differentiate purely deferential rhetoric from bona fide professional endorsement among Roosevelt colleagues, because to come under TR's peculiar charm was also to fall under his spell. As nature writer John Burroughs put it: “When he came into the room it was as if a strong wind had blown the door open. You felt his radiant energy before he got halfway up the stairs.”22
Almost without exception, the most prominent naturalists and nature writers of the era lauded Roosevelt's all-around knowledge of the natural world. Burroughs called his compatriot “a naturalist on the broadest grounds,” adding that he “probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who preceded him.”23 Cornell University botany professor Liberty Hyde Bailey, widely regarded as the early twentieth-century inheritor of the Thoreau/Burroughs/Emerson mantle, offers unsolicited endorsement for Roosevelt in his eco-theological manifesto, The Holy Earth, wherein he praises TR's sensitivity to the “small and defenseless and fragile animal life.”24 Indeed, the Smithsonian's Edmund Heller, who accompanied Roosevelt on his zoological expedition to Africa, considered Roosevelt the foremost authority on large mammals.25
Even proto-preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, who differed strenuously with the President's brand of utilitarian conservation, found himself mightily impressed on first meeting. Though Muir's accounts of a camping trip with the President in 1903 have been lost, his affection for the Bull Moose survives in a letter Muir wrote to his wife, in which he enthuses, “I had a perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains. I never before had a more interesting, hearty, and manly companion.” In another letter, this to Muir's friend Merriam, he writes: “Camping with the President was a memorable experience. I fairly fell in love with him.”26
Among scientists, Roosevelt's reputation as a naturalist was almost as well established as among nature writers, the most prominent of whom