Dan Flores

For guidance in that endeavor, they looked to the new U.S.

Biological Survey headed up by another Ivy Leaguer, C. Hart Merriam.

In 1901, when an assassin's bullet cut down President William McKinley early in his second term, his vice president was a 42-year-old former New York congressman and city mayor who Republican Party operatives referred to as that damn cowboy.

Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest man ever to serve as president with a prodigious manic depressive personality, had the chance to transform America fall into his lap.

Here was a stunning opportunity to take on the issues that had dominated his life since childhood.

If celebrated individual freedom was the very cause of the destruction of America's animals, not to mention its forests, its grasslands, its fisheries, its archaeological sites, then expanding government power to regulate such freedom was the only course that could preserve the country.

What he and his policymakers called conservation became his personal campaign to save the animals and landscapes he believed had created Homo Americanus in the first place.

The whole standpoint of the people toward the proper aim of government, Roosevelt would write, were brought out first by this conservation work.

The proper aim of government, he was now convinced, was to moderate the selfishness and thoughtlessness inherent in human nature.

What conservation and progressivism would do was set America on a different path, a sharp detour from the three-century attempt to make the U.S.

a clone of the countries of Western Europe.

The idea was to create a nation that stood separate and new,

Nothing in Roosevelt's programs said that quite like his enthusiastic endorsement once he became president of the existing public land system.

Roosevelt's massive additions to this distinctly American form of land ownership and public access in the form of new national parks, national forests, wildlife and bird refuges, and national monuments amounted to a wholesale reset.

I'll have more to say in the next episode about the origins and direction of America's public lands, one of our very best contributions to world ideas and policy.

But it was Teddy Roosevelt who took that embryonic system and made it a badge of American uniqueness.

Histories of the presidency tend to label Roosevelt's conservation programs as one of the nation's grand transformative policy triumphs, and that claim is no exaggeration.

Conservation's successes were breathtaking.

To begin, Roosevelt oversaw the creation of six new national parks, a form of preserved wildlands America had invented with Yellowstone and Yosemite three decades earlier.

starting with Pelican Island in Florida, which he designated by executive order in 1903 as a reserve and breeding ground for native birds, and continuing with a pair of national bison ranges in Oklahoma and Montana to rescue our iconic mammal, then on through his lame duck period when new bird reservations, a total of 51 of them, seemed to precipitate like rain from the heavens.