The Rooseveltian Moment

Abstract

On February 18, 1909, just weeks before he left office, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted the North American Conservation Conference. In addition to fostering cooperation with Canada and Mexico on a range of resource issues, Roosevelt hoped the gathering would provide a springboard for a subsequent World Congress at The Hague, which would place the conservation discussion on the global stage. Despite support from dozens of nations, The Hague gathering never occurred, due largely to the dawdling of William Howard Taft. Yet Roosevelt’s vision for a World Congress underscores the link between conservationism and the quest for global power that many scholars of the Progressive Era have missed. We suffer from no shortage of books on Teddy Roosevelt and his times. It is a mark of the interest that this first “modern” president still generates that scholars and journalists continue to churn out new volumes year after year. It is also an indication of Roosevelt’s complexity that groups as different as the American Legion and the Sierra Club can look to him for inspiration. Although most observers have depicted these two aspects of his presidency—aggressive foreign policy and domestic conservation—as separate, even irreconcilable, components of his legacy, Ian Tyrrell disagrees. In his ambitious and sweeping Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, Tyrrell makes a powerful case that Roosevelt’s conservationism had global origins and implications. “Because American leaders swam in the same intellectual sea,” Tyrrell asserts, “conservation became inseparable from geopolitical competition in an imperial world” (p. 15).