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Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt Jr.
"I wish very much that
the wrong people could be prevented entirely
from breeding; and when the
evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done.
Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave
offspring behind them. The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people
to breed."- Theodore Roosevelt, "Twisted Eugenics," The Works of
Theodore Roosevelt
As a former great chief at Washington
I was admitted to the sacred room, or one-roomed house, the kiva, in
which the chosen snake
priests had for a fortnight
been getting ready for the sacred
dance. Very few white men
have been thus admitted, and never unless it is known that they will treat with
courtesy and respect what the Indians
revere.
Entrance to the house, which was sunk in the
rock, was through a hole in the roof,
down a ladder across whose top hung a
cord from which fluttered three eagle plumes
and dangled three small animal skins. Below was a room perhaps fifteen feet by
twenty-five.
One end of it, perhaps a third of its length, was raised a
foot above the rest, and the ladder led down to this raised part. Against the
rear wall of this raised part or dais lay thirty odd
rattlesnakes, most of them in a twined heap in
one corner, but a dozen by
themselves scattered along the wall.
There was also a pot containing
several striped ribbon-snakes, too lively to be
left at large. Eight or ten priests, some old, some young,
sat on the floor in the lower and larger two-thirds of the room, and greeted
me with grave courtesy; they spread a blanket on the edge
of the dais, and I sat down, with my
back to the snakes and about eight feet
from them; a little behind and to one side of me sat a
priest with a
category of fan or brush made of
two or three wing-plumes of an eagle, who kept
quiet guard over his
serpent wards.
At the farther end
of the room was the altar; the crude image
of a coyote was painted on the floor, and on
the four sides of this coyote picture were
paintings of snakes; on three sides it
was hemmed in by lightning sticks, or
thunder sticks,
standing upright in little
clay cups, and on the fourth side by
eagle plumes held similarly erect.
Some
of the priests were
smoking—for pleasure, not ceremonially—and they were working at parts
of the ceremonial dress. One had a cast rattlesnake skin which he was chewing, to limber
it up, just as Sioux squaws used to chew buckskin. Another was fixing a leather
apron with pendent thongs; he stood up and tried it on. All were scantily clad,
in breech-clouts or short kilts or loin flaps; their naked, copper-red bodies,
lithe and sinewy, shone, and each had been splashed in two or three places with
a blotch or streak of white paint.
One spoke English and
translated freely;
I was careful not to betray too much
curiosity or
touch on any matter which they might
be reluctant to discuss. The snakes
behind me never rattled or showed any signs of
anger; the translator volunteered the
remark that they were peaceable because they had been given
medicine—whatever that might mean, supposing the statement to be true
according to the sense in which the words are accepted by plains men. But
several of them were active in the sluggish rattlesnake fashion.
One glided sinuously
toward me; when he was a yard away, I pointed him out to
the watcher with the eagle feathers; the
watcher quietly extended the feathers and stroked and pushed the
snake's head back, until it finally
turned and crawled back to the wall. Half a dozen times different
snakes thus crawled out toward me and
were turned back, without their ever displaying a symptom of irritation. One
snake got past the watcher and moved
slowly past me about six inches away, whereupon the
priest on my left leaned
across me and checked its advance by throwing pinches of dust in its face until
the watcher turned round with his feather sceptre.
Every move was made
without hurry and with quiet unconcern; neither
snake nor man, at any time, showed a
trace of worry or
anger; all, human beings and
reptiles, were in an
atmosphere of quiet
peacefulness. When I rose to say good-by, I thanked
my hosts for their courtesy; they were pleased, and two or
three shook hands with me.
On the afternoon of the following
day the antelope
priests—the men of the
antelope clan—held their
dance. The
snake
priests took part. It was held
in the middle of Walpi village,
round a big, rugged column of rock, a
dozen feet high, which juts out of the smooth surface. The
antelope-dancers came in first, clad in
kilts, with fox skins behind; otherwise naked,
painted with white splashes and streaks, and their hair washed with the juice
of the yucca root. Their leader's kilt was
white; he wore a garland and anklets of cottonwood leaves, and sprinkled
water from a
sacred vessel to the four corners of
heaven.
Another leader carried the
sacred bow and a bull-roarer, and they
moved to its loud moaning sound. The snake
priests were similarly clad,
but their kirtles were of leather; eagle plumes
were in their long hair, and under their knees they carried rattles made of
tortoise-shell. In two lines they
danced
opposite each other, keeping time to
the rhythm of their monotonous chanting.
The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still
exists. Even though there is as yet no real knowledge of their extent and
condition. The relation of the
conservation of
natural resources to the
problems of American welfare and
American efficiency had not yet dawned on
the public mind. The reclamation of arid
public lands in the West was still a matter
for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb
possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the American government
not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel
problems, whose only real interest was
in their effect on the reelection or defeat of a Congressman here and
there—a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.
The idea that the president
is the steward of the public welfare was first formulated and given practical
effect in the Forest Service by its law officer, George Woodruff. The laws were
often insufficient, and it became well-nigh impossible to get them amended in
the public interest when once the
representatives of
privilege in Congress grasped the fact that I would
sign no amendment that contained anything not in the public interest. It was
necessary to use what law was already in existence, and then further to
supplement it by presidential action. The practice
of examining every claim to public
land before passing it into private
ownership offers a good example of the policy in
question. This practice, which has
since become general, was first applied in the American Forests. Enormous areas
of valuable public timberland were thereby saved from
fraudulent
acquisition; more than 250,000
acres were thus saved in a single case.
Even more important was the
taking of steps to preserve from destruction
beautiful and wonderful
wild creatures whose existence
was threatened by greed and
wantonness. During the
seven and a half years closing on March 4,
1909, more was accomplished for the protection of
wild life in
America than during all the previous
years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park. The record
includes the creation of five National Parks—Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Platt, Oklahoma;
Sully Hill, North Dakota, and
Mesa Verde, Colorado; four big animal refuges in
Oklahoma, Arizona, Montana, and Washington; fifty-one
bird reservations; and the enactment of laws
for the protection of
wild life in Alaska, the
District of Columbia, and on National bird
reserves.
These measures may be briefly enumerated as follows:
The enactment of the first game laws for the
Territory of Alaska in 1902 and 1908, resulting in the
regulation of the export of
heads and trophies of big animals and putting an end to the slaughter of
deer for hides along the southern
coast of the Territory.
1902 Appropriation for the preservation of
buffalo and the
establishment in the
Yellowstone National Park.
1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine states that
the US will intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the
Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and
did not violate the rights of the US or invite “foreign aggression to the
detriment of the entire body of American nations.”
1905 Wichita Game Preserves created, the first of the National
animal preserve.
Roosevelt cuts all relations with
Korea, turns the
American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military, deletes the word
"Korea" from the State Department Record of Foreign Relations and places it
under the heading of "Japan." During the forty year occupation Koreans are
forbidden to speak their language. This is in exchange for Japanese acceptance
of the continuing US occupation of the Philippines.
1906 Grand Canyon
Game Preserve of Arizona comprising 1,492,928 acres
established.
National Monuments Act passes to preserve a number of
objects of
scientific interest, and be
wildlife refuges, for all time include: Muir Woods, Pinnacles National Monument
in California, and the Mount Olympus National Monument, Washington, which also
form important refuges for
animals.
1907 12,000 acres of Wichita Game
Preserves are enclosed with a woven wire fence for the reception of the herd of
fifteen buffalo donated by the New York
Zoological Society.
The
passage of the Act of May 23, 1908, providing for the
establishment of the National
Bison Range in Montana. This
range comprises about 18,000 acres of
land formerly in the Flathead Indian
Reservation, on which is now established a herd of eighty
buffalo, a nucleus of which was donated to America by the
American Bison Society.
The issue of the Order
protecting birds on the Niobrara
Military Reservation, Nebraska, in 1908, making this entire reservation in
effect a bird reservation.
The
establishment by
Executive Order between March 14,
1903, and March 4, 1909, of fifty-one National Bird Reservations distributed in seventeen States
and Territories from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska. The creation of these
reservations at once placed American in the front rank in the world work of
bird protection. Among these reservations are
the celebrated Pelican Island rookery in
Indian River, Florida; the Mosquito Inlet Reservation, Florida, the
northernmost home of the
manatee; the extensive
marshes bordering Klamath and Malhuer Lakes in Oregon, formerly the
scene of slaughter of ducks for
market and ruthless
destruction of plume birds for
the millinery trade; the Tortugas Key, Florida,
where, in connection with the Carnegie Institute,
experiments have been made
on the homing instinct of birds; and
the great bird colonies on Laysan and
sister islets in Hawaii, some of the
greatest colonies of sea birds on
Earth.
"To announce that there must
be no criticism of the
president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or
wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally
treasonable to the American
people."
"The nation behaves well if it treats
the natural resources as assets which it
must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in
value.""It is not the critic who counts, not the man
who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could
have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena;
whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who
errs and comes short again and again; who
desire the great enthusiasms, the
great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, desire
in the end the triumph of
high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place
shall never be with those cold and timid
souls who know neither victory
or defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt observed that American
democracy is too sturdy to be destroyed by a foreign enemy.
Teddy warned, it could easily be destroyed by
"malefactors of great
wealth" who would subvert American political
institutions from
within.'
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