The Big Burn by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

Mount Tahawus when a guide approached him in the fading light with an urgent telegram: McKinley had taken a turn for the worse. Roosevelt raced downhill, reaching his base cabin in the dark. After changing horses three times in a charge over primitive mountain roads, Roosevelt made it to a train station by dawn. There, he heard the news: McKinley was dead. That afternoon, eight days after the gunman fired at McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath in Buffalo; at forty-two, he was the youngest president, and the only native New Yorker to hold the highest office.
    "It is a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way," Roosevelt told a friend, "but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it."
    Though he said publicly that little would change, in private Roosevelt wanted to steer the Republican Party away from big business and toward becoming "a fairly radical progressive party," as he wrote in his memoir. To do that, he would need Gifford Pinchot. A week before Roosevelt moved into the White House, he huddled with Pinchot, telling him to stay on as forester—and as a presidential adviser. Pinchot could be his voice on many things. He could write his speeches, help him with hostile senators. And in turn Roosevelt would try to get Pinchot oversight of the reserves, some real land, and a corps of foresters to protect it. Roosevelt urged him to be expansive, idealistic, not some spectral bureaucrat in a back office. The world was open to them. Everything they had talked about in the past — keeping the public domain out of the hands of the trusts, a model for the world—was within their reach and their power. Think of it: he could be a forester
with
a forest—the chief
forester at that, in charge of the world's largest public forest. It was vaporous talk in 1901, but enough to win Pinchot, just thirty-six years old.
    "We dream the same dreams," Roosevelt later wrote to Pinchot; more than that, he added, they shared "a peculiar intimacy."

2. Roost of the Robber Barons
    I F WILLIAM A. CLARK was not the meanest man in Montana, he was certainly the richest and the most hated. He was also a United States senator from the Big Sky State, a position he had initially purchased with bundles of crisp $100 bills handed out to legislators in monogrammed envelopes— W.A.C. stamped on the fold, $10,000 per vote. Clark was a sunken-faced gnomish man with a paintbrush beard and eyes that cut with a slicing stare. He had set out to corner the copper market at a time when the world most needed that commodity for two of the biggest advances in civilization: the telephone and harnessed electricity. Clark purchased cops and courts, newspaper editors and ministers, grand juries—any source of opposition or fair play. Because senators were then chosen by state legislatures, he didn't have to pretend to care about average citizens. He was above the law, because the law was easily bought, a commodity cheaper than the source of his wealth. Mark Twain hated Clark, even losing his trademark sarcasm when trying to describe him.
    "To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time," Twain said of Clark. "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag." None of this made Senator Clark blush. Who was Mark Twain but a
bankrupt has-been, now in his dotage? Clark judged a man's worth by the base measurement of material accumulation. And by his value system, everyone in the Senate, and of course every writer, was beneath him: he was worth at least $200 million at a time when there were barely 4,000 millionaires in the country. As for these moralists in the Roosevelt administration with their progressive agenda, who were they fooling? Wake up and smell the new century!
    "I never bought a man who was not for sale," said Clark, shrugging off the high-minded.
    The soul-darkened senator sat a few feet away from President Roosevelt at a dinner party in Butte,