Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

5. Men As Trees Walking: Theodore Roosevelt and the Conservation of the Race

5 MEN AS TREES WALKING THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE CONSERVATION OF THE RACE Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future. theodore roosevelt, ‘‘Rural Life,’’ 1910 110 Men As Trees Walking The first National Conservation Congress in 1909 featured what in retrospect may seem like a surprising variety of papers on subjects ranging from conservation in lumber and electricity production to the conservation of child life and manhood. In addition to the expected papers on forestry , the public health and child labor e√orts undertaken by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Daughters of the American Revolution (dar) were both represented at the congress.∞ The dar speaker was Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, chair of the dar Committee on Child Labor. In her address on the conservation of child life, Foster argued that child-labor legislation was essential for the conservation of children as a national resource. In her words, ‘‘just as surely as a big tree is worth more than a growing slip, so a man is worth more than a child. . . . It is not only that we love the child and want him for ourselves, but it is because we know he is worth more to the country, if he is allowed to grow up. He makes a better tree out of which to cut lumber to build a house or a church or a school if he is allowed to grow up to full stature and to develop himself fully. He cannot do that if he is put in a factory at a too early age.’’≤ As the analogy between forests and children made clear, children were a natural resource that needed management as much as forests did to insure future prosperity. For Theodore Roosevelt, conserving the nation’s natural resources was integrally connected to the idea of conserving the ‘‘race.’’ As a proponent of irrigation and land reclamation, Roosevelt had championed putting homes on the land. As he moved to nationalize his conservation policies beginning in 1907, however, he articulated his agenda for conservation in tandem with his agenda regarding country life. The country life movement , which Roosevelt supported, was a modernist program to economically and socially improve rural life. Roosevelt presented his case for conservation and country life by appealing to a racialized agrarianism that argued for the superiority of the small rural farmer and his family. Invoking nostalgic ideals of the farmer and the rural family allowed Roosevelt and his compatriots to claim that both the conservation and country life movements were relevant to the future of the ‘‘American race.’’ The managing of natural resources were thus brought to bear on the management of the ‘‘race.’’ Men As Trees Walking 111 roosevelt’s racial agrarianism Born in 1858 to a wealthy New York family, Theodore Roosevelt developed his early interest in natural history into a real a≈nity for the countryside and the strenuous life he discovered there.≥ Roosevelt’s father encouraged his son, who was a√licted with asthma as a child, to improve his health and body, building a gymnasium on the second floor of their house. At Harvard in the late 1870s Roosevelt had his eye on a lightweight boxing championship, but he was soundly defeated. More successful at romance, Roosevelt met Alice Lee and married her soon after his graduation in 1880. Roosevelt was schooled in the exclusionary racial theories emerging in the social sciences following in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Through his Harvard professor Nathaniel Shaler, Roosevelt learned theories of the social evolution thought to produce an ‘‘American race.’’ The ‘‘old stocks’’ that made up this ‘‘race’’ constituted an ‘‘American type’’ whose character had been shaped by their experiences in the American environment.∂ Though he was not enrolled in Henry Adams’s famous 1873 seminar that rooted American democratic practices in the tribal practices of the Anglo-Saxons and their German ancestors, Roosevelt was exposed to Teutonist theories during his years at Harvard through political science professor John Burgess. Burgess argued that Teutonic germs brought from the Black Forest to Great Britain could also be traced to Puritan New England. In addition, Roosevelt ascribed to the romanticization of historical and literary Anglo-Saxon roots of...