The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilder ...

that his strength under fire made him “deserving of the Carnegie Medal, the Garter, the Cross, and every other mark and symbol of unusual and remarkable personal bravery.”³⁸

Meanwhile, many editors continued to see Roosevelt's entry into the nature faker controversy as unbecoming—an unfair fight—especially so for a President of the famous big stick. An editorial in the Pittsburg Press captured the views of many, declaring, “It seems that there are many strange things going on in the woods of which the ordinary person had no idea; but the same ordinary person prefers to see the President of the United States keep out of these personal controversies.”³⁹ Contrary to the Press rhetoric and in Roosevelt's defense, the nature faker debate transcended personality and profession. In an era when mass extinction of wildlife, the closing of the American frontier, and the dawn of the conservation movement challenged the utility, relevance, and wisdom of the rugged, self-interested American, such seemingly abstract notions as authenticity and verisimilitude assumed even greater importance. No surprise, then, that Roosevelt, the man who sought the strenuous life—a man of high ideals, rhetoric, and moral prescription—choose the nature faker debacle as his Waterloo. Roosevelt himself embodied many of the contradictory aspects of the American identity—as Burroughs put its, TR represented “good-fellowship joined to austerity…moral courage to such physical courage…prodigious powers of memory united with…power of original thought. He could face a charging lion, or a grizzly bear as coolly as he could an angry politician.”⁴⁰ In short, Roosevelt's sometimes maddeningly paradoxical leadership style likewise found analog in the natural world; his foibles in the nature faker controversy proving, by extension of the metaphor, the taking of a too-easy bait.

Theodore Roosevelt, Writer

Author of more than thirty-five books, many of them concerning wildlife, wild animals and wild places, Roosevelt earns special consideration as a writer. In fact, even in the wake of McKinley's assassination, as Americans decided just what to make of the forty-two-year-old, former governor of