6 Main Lines of Thought and Action 



there are values and a type of greatness which a scholarly icicle can 

 never know; there is a type of leadership which a detached positivist 

 can altogether miss. The greatness of Theodore Roosevelt lay, not in 

 a list of specific administrative acts, or a catalogue of laws enacted 

 under his sponsorship, substantial though both of these were. His 

 greatness was a kind of sursum corda, the activating of a nation's 

 conscience, the dramatizing of a nation's unfinished business, the 

 energizing of much of the moral public leadership of his day — and 

 of the next fifty years — by the impact of his personality. Harold Ickes, 

 Henry Stimson, Charles Evans Hughes, yes, even Franklin Roose- 

 velt, have given generous credit to this dynamic of their formative 

 years. 



In no field was this more true than in that of conservation. The 

 drama of the rape of the forest; the epic of our waterways; the devel- 

 opment for all our people, and not the favored few, of a new empire 

 of land and minerals; the saga of the strenuous outdoor life — these 

 entered into the consciousness and conscience of our people in The- 

 odore Roosevelt's stirring years. I remember these years vividly, and 

 what they meant to those of us who were looking for idealism in 

 public life. From others, above all from Gifford Pinchot, came the 

 necessary expertise, then and later; to others was left the task of de- 

 velopment, the detail of administration. Theodore Roosevelt's role 

 was largely of another kind — the impress once and for all on our 

 literature, our press, our public platform, our study, our mores, of 

 certain values in land, water, forest, wildlife, never again to be lost. 



Taft did not so much falter as pause — pausing better to under- 

 stand, more adequately to appraise, what steps should next be taken. 

 The temper and tempo of Taft were not for Pinchot, and the latter 

 had to go. But the circumstances of his going were not the least of the 

 factors in keeping alive the intent of Roosevelt, and alerting President 

 Taft himself to the dangers and intrigues of special interests. Consti- 

 tutional questions of the spirit and the letter remained to be clarified, 

 for many years to come. The forests which Roosevelt had reserved 

 against those whom he saw as predators stalking behind the Agricul- 

 tural Bill of 1907, these had to be developed — but with a wider clien- 

 tele and a far longer time dimension. 



It was now the turn of Congress and the states to move into the 



