By Dean Poling
VALDOSTA — Historian Douglas Brinkley isn’t one to place a historical figure into a contemporary context. Still, asked how he thought Theodore Roosevelt would have responded to the climate-change debate, Brinkley says he believes the 26th President would have been on the side of science.
“He would have been on top of the latest science,” Brinkley said in a recent phone interview with The Valdosta Daily Times. “He was always up with that crowd. He’d be looking at the reports today. He would have championed the ‘let it be’ philosophy in Alaska. With ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), he would have likely said, leave it all alone.”
Brinkley makes this estimation based on his extensive research into the green side of Theodore Roosevelt. Brinkley is the author of the 2009 national bestseller “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”
This week, Brinkley is scheduled to speak on Roosevelt’s life and environmentalism at Valdosta State University.
Booking Brinkley is a coup for VSU’s English department.
He speaks in a forum open to the public Wednesday and meets with students and others in a question-and-answer forum Thursday, says Mark Smith, head of VSU’s English department.
In addition to “The Wilderness Warrior,” Brinkley has penned, edited and compiled several history books on a variety of subjects. His titles include “Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years,” “Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal,” “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House,” “Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress,” “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” “The Reagan Diaries,” “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War,” and several other books. He wrote books with the late, popular historian Stephen E. Ambrose.
His books have won numerous awards and honors. He teaches. He’s a regular on television news as a presidential expert, commenting most recently on the historical aspects of the State of the Union speech. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed Brinkley as “America’s new past master.” His next book is scheduled to be a biography of newsman Walter Cronkite.
Publicly, he is still regularly discussing Theodore Roosevelt as the “naturalist president.” All Roosevelt biographies delve into, mention, explore TR’s love for the outdoors and his commitment as president to preserve America’s wilderness. Brinkley’s “Wilderness Warrior” is devoted extensively to this facet of Roosevelt’s life.
Roosevelt grew up a child of privilege in New York, but he made the most of his forays into the woods. Brinkley finds the outdoor adventures books which inspired Roosevelt as a boy.
A sickly youngster, “Teedie,” not Teddy, managed to teach himself taxidermy, stuffing and mounting the animals he shot and killed. He preserved these specimens with an eye toward the scientific. He created a childhood natural museum in his parents’ home that eventually became part of real museum collections.
A love for the outdoors and for scientific inquiry remained an integral component of Theodore Roosevelt’s character even as he traded the goal of becoming a scientist for that of author, legislator, rancher, police commissioner, assistant naval secretary, war-hero Rough Rider, New York governor, vice president and President of the United States.
During his presidency from 1901-1909, Roosevelt preserved 230 million acres of American wilderness. His work created the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His preservationist pen saved the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Devils Tower.
Many TR biographies will comparatively gloss over TR as a preservationist and outdoorsman while meticulously exploring his brokering of the peace between Japan and Russia, his trust-busting, his build-up of the Navy.
Brinkley turns the table on this view. In “The Wilderness Warrior,” readers spend more time with TR on the hunt than behind closed doors. TR confidant Henry Cabot Lodge is present in this book, but Brinkley’s book is more interested in TR’s relationship with naturalist John Muir, for example.
Born in Atlanta and raised in Georgia and Florida, Brinkley’s interest in this aspect of Theodore Roosevelt developed as he traveled and became aware of how many TR “fingerprints” remain on the nation.
“I am a big lover of the national parks and monuments,” Brinkley said, and, if not for Roosevelt’s early 20th century endeavors, these are regions which may have succumbed to commercial/industrial interests during the past century.
Brinkley lists additional TR achievements. Roosevelt led the country in its first gifting of land to the preservation of an animal. He was a lifelong devotee of bird study, with an ear for recognizing a multitude of bird calls in the wild.
The complexity of Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” makes its entirety, or some aspect of it, the topic for a diverse number of books. Volumes focus on TR’s Rough Rider days, his political rise, his post-presidential expedition along a South American river, his childhood and early years, his unsuccessful third-party run as president, his life as an author, as a father, as a ranchman.
In the wake of Brinkley’s “The Wilderness Warrior,” another bestseller by another author, James Bradley’s “Imperial Cruise,” suggests Roosevelt as outdoorsman is pose more than reality. He implies that Theodore Roosevelt was a real author but an outdoors imposter.
Brinkley says he hasn’t read that book and refuses to comment on another author’s work. Asked, however, if he believes TR was a faker in his outdoor life, Brinkley responds no. Theodore Roosevelt was the real deal.
Douglas Brinkley on Theodore Roosevelt
Historian Douglas Brinkley visits Valdosta State University, with a free, public presentation, 8 p.m. Wednesday, Whitehead Auditorium, VSU Fine Arts Building, corner of Oak and Brookwood. Brinkley participates in a question-and-answer session, 10 a.m. Thursday, Magnolia Room, VSU University Center, North Patterson Street. More information: (229) 333-5946.
