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

New York who, by Constitutional dictate, would now assume the presidency, Roosevelt's reputation as a writer, perhaps even more than rough-rider, preceded him. In his essay “Theodore Roosevelt in Retrospect” newspaperman-diplomat Maurice Francis Eagan offers one of the most intimate, and revealing firsthand accounts of the anticipatory conversations whispered throughout Washington DC as the power of the presidency passed. When asked by Thomas Gilder what he thought of the new “accidental” president, Egan recalls responding, “He [Roosevelt] is a man of letters in love with life.” To which Gilder replied, “He is more than that. He is about to make an epoch and he wants to talk literature with you by the way.”⁴¹ English writer-statesmen John Morley put a still finer point on it, observing “Roosevelt was a man of letters temporarily assigned to other duty.”⁴² For TR, literature and writing consistently called even as more conventionally weighty matters of ship of state demanded his steerage.

Of all the many things Roosevelt was and would yet become to America, he was, fundamentally, a prolific and gifted writer, one particularly enamored of the natural world. Paul Schullery, for instance, finds in TR a pleasing middle ground between, for instance, the “fiery prose sermons of John Muir” and the “timid meditations” of John Burroughs, adding “as a writer, he had Muir's gift for well-aimed polemic and Burroughs's eye for fine detail. In his knowledge of birds and mammals he surpassed them both.”⁴³ Roosevelt left multiple calling cards as a writer of woods and wilds—among them his impressionistic, childlike zeal for wilderness, and, contrastingly, what Burroughs describes as his “technical knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wildlife.”⁴⁴ More recently, Lutts argues that TR set “a new standard for the genre, and some of his extended descriptions of the natural history and behavior of specific species outclassed earlier attempts.”⁴⁵ Roosevelt met and exceeded what Lutts describes as a “requirement” for literary-naturalists, namely that the writer “combine and be faithful to both the scientist's and the poet's visions of nature.”⁴⁶

Oddly, especially given his exuberance, Roosevelt's restraint as a writer of the natural world may well have been his greatest virtue. In his nature-interested essays and travelogues, he assiduously differentiates