Micah Meadowcroft charts the long history of environmentalism on the right from the Ash memo to Trump’s EPA
There was a point, or rather a month, when Theodore Roosevelt became the specimen we know him to be. At the prompting of his father, as every American child should recall, he had spent his youth building the body nature had not given him, a body worthy of his mind and vaulting aspirations. Still, TR had never cut an imposing figure. He was wiry, his learned athleticism and inborn energy wound into a slender frame. His voice squeaked. One noticed his glasses, whiskers, and teeth before anything else.
But as Edmund Morris explains in his celebrated Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the West changed all that. “Some extraordinary physical and spiritual transformation occurred” when Roosevelt rode nearly a thousand miles over 32 days with a cattle roundup across the Badlands in 1885. “The anemic, high-pitched youth who had left New York only five weeks before was now able to return to it ‘rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health,’ to quote a newspaperman who met him en route.”
The open range of the Dakotas awoke something in TR. The weak flesh finally had the strength to reflect the willing spirit. Bill Sewall, one of his hunting guides and manager of his cattle ranch, reported that Roosevelt had become “as husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for his livelihood.” TR’s Harvard classmate and fellow historian William Roscoe Thayer, upon seeing him after a separation of years, confessed surprise “to find him with the neck of a Titan and with broad shoulders and stalwart chest.” The man with the near-superhuman tolerance for pain at last looked like it.
[Read the full piece at The American Conservative!]
