Nature Fakers

Conviction is a trait that’s rarely used sparingly, and as a man of Faith, Reverend William J. Long felt as strongly as he did uncomfortably about what he was writing. He looked up at his small office in the basement of his town’s church. He looked past the rows of books and out the window facing the forest. He fumbled with the pages and reread what he had wrote. Finally resigning himself to send it off, he signed his name with a sense of pride. He sealed the envelope before placing it on top of his otherwise empty desk. The stoic wood desk bore signs of use; it had become worn and uneven from the sweat and oil of hands poring through books. If you looked closely at just the right angle the light would show the distortions from the faint nicks in the grains of the wood where the Reverend had zealously scraped together speeches and correspondences with business and church associates. Though he enjoyed the responsibility that came with being a Reverend he was most comfortable alone in the woods with nothing but time and his writing supplies. Leaning over the desk and using it to prop himself up, it served dutifully.

As he paced, the Reverend winced. He could still hear the crack of the ruler crashing down on his hand; the sound of indignation he felt towards those who used their positions of authority as indications of intellectual or moral high ground. After a few laps he sat back down, wishing to himself that he hadn’t sealed the envelope so he could read through the letter once more before sending it off. But the point of no return had come weeks ago. He hoped to himself that his invitation would go unanswered and the two men would go their separate ways.

At his own desk in the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt had just returned from another long sit down with the Congressmen and their aides. Roosevelt had never truly felt at ease amongst so many other people, especially for long periods of time. A man who had from his youth been prone to fits of solitude, often excised himself from the roar of the needs of his countrymen and into the predictable sounds of the outdoors. After settling his average frame into an appropriately regal chair he picked up a stack of paper that had been set down on his desk hours before. Thumbing through the variety of newspaper clippings, memorandums, and assorted personal requests was the correspondence he had been waiting on. Finally, he thought to himself. His back straightened as his fingers moved intentionally. His eyes flitted through the lines of the open letter, ultimately alternating between the name of the author and the last few lines toward the end.

When a man’s livelihood, especially one earned in good faith, is being delegitimized, there’s no telling what that man would do, even a Reverend. What had begun as a meditative and spiritual passion, had become a considerable source of income. The Reverend collected scribbles in bands of notebooks while resting motionless in the backwoods. When partnered with his longtime illustrator’s depictions, they became part of a portfolio of naturalist writings that quickly ascended into the mainstream reader’s consciousness. The writings, scrawled in the backwoods of Maine and refined in his little church office in rural Stamford, Connecticut, became the “Wood Folk Series.” The books became popular and eventually found their way into school houses across the United States. They were filled with the Reverend’s personal anecdotes from his observations in nature. Unbeknownst to him, the United States was undergoing dramatic cultural changes. At the time the impact of these forces was unknowable. Sitting alone in the woods there was no way the Reverend could have known that his writings would lead him into a war of words, battled on the front pages of the country’s national newspapers, with the 21st President of the United States.

Like many boys of his age, Teddy Roosevelt had always been drawn outdoors. Unlike many boys his age he suffered from asthma. His disease was under treated and he often fell victim to incapacitating coughing seizures. This meant a young Roosevelt was often isolated. Not for want of energy, or perhaps due to his isolation, his imagination spurred him into the woods. From there he would watch and document birds, an avid and amateur naturalist himself. Later in life, the bespeckled rotund man believed that a hardy attitude in the face of adversity was the surest personal philosophy, and fortunately he took his word seriously. As a college student he intended on becoming a biologist, but abandoned that pursuit when it became clear that he couldn't restrict himself to the hours needed indoors in a lab. He embodied this hardiness and ultimately become the President of the United States.

The early 1900s were a different time. Presidents were part of the cultural zeitgeist. In those years America was a smaller country. It was coalescing around a new national identity aided by a decrease in the cost of travel and an improved national newspaper system. Like the rest of the country President Roosevelt, or Teddy as he was loathe to be called, loved nature and spent many elongated stretches outdoors and in the wild. In shepherding the country through the post industrial revolution and the enlightened era at the outset of the 20th century, he would come to be known as the country’s father of conservation, using his newly codified power through the 1906 Antiquities Act to enshrine hundreds of thousands of acres of the American West as protected monuments of cultural and scientific import. He helped shepherd the country’s shared reverence of the land into political action, enshrining federally protected national parks. As he himself was an outdoorsman, he would often find refuge from the day to day pulls of Washington in the cathedral walls of the greatest Western landscapes. He often filled his days hiking and hunting through the unrelenting American West.

The wild has a way of calling on the curious. Roosevelt didn’t restrict his intrigue to the outdoors. He explored the human condition by regularly corresponding with poets and contributing to the Atlantic Monthly (the Atlantic’s archive’s are a fun Rabbit Hole). Though a deep thinker he was highly active. His habitual hunting excursions exemplify the type of relationship he shared with the outdoors. He enjoyed being in nature, and had great reverence to nature itself; however, he used these excursions as a businessman of today might use the golf course and was not concerned with the wants or needs of the animals he was hunting. As vanguard of the country’s natural land, supported by his insistence on being outside, he earned a reputation of a man’s man of the time. On the other hand the shame of his childhood asthma had imbued him with a touch of diplomatic sense. This would come in handy as he engaged in an impassioned public debate with a citizen, a Reverend no less.

Putting the letter down amongst the Roosevelt put the letter down and leaned back into his chair. He felt the tension in his shoulders release and he thought about how the two naturalists differed, and how in which ways they might be the same. Looking back down at the letter he could hear one of his aides calling from the other room as he finished reading what Rev. Long had wrote; “While obviously we cannot settle this through the media,” Rev. Long noted, “I invite President Roosevelt anytime to Stamford to settle this like men.” Both men, proud and resilient, felt silly just the same.

The disaster in Lisbon roughly a century and a half earlier had set off worldwide tectonic cultural forces. From across the Atlantic in Europe to the makeshift gold rush towns in Western California, society was transforming from a merely civilized one to an even more evolved culture with an enhanced understanding of all things, including the natural environment. The 1800’s was a century of learning. By 1859 Darwin had cut through the brush and collected enough notes to publish On the Origin of Species. The American Dream was living out its Manifest Destiny and expanding westward; rendering what was once considered an unruly and dangerous wild into a tamed and managed natural resource. The invention of bikes and binoculars, the consistent decline in the cost of transportation aided by the beginnings of a public roads system and railway, brought citizens not only a sense of control over their natural environment but the opportunity to see it by way of it’s beauty as opposed to its danger. Professional tradesmen and socioeconomic classes gave many, well actually just the rich few, but nonetheless more than before, the opportunity to indulge in recreation in the natural landscape.

One peculiar emergent phenomenon was a subset of literature that wrote about nature as if it were participatory theatre. Many impassioned naturalists infatuated with the machinations of their natural landscapes parked themselves in nature and took notes. This tradition of reporting bore us the aforementioned Darwin, as well as branch of writing that had a more literary perspective. The traditional naturalist like Darwin and the more literary sort were both the product of a long overdue reawakening of the American consciousness towards the sublimity of nature. A relationship that had been lost and forgotten with the Natives.

Reverend William J. Long was a family man, well known around his hometown of Stamford Connecticut and himself enamored with the natural beauty all around him. Connecticut was rural. As the Reverend of the town’s Congregationalist church he was both well liked and well respected. Like the intentional and long term trips of Thoreau and Emerson before him, the Reverend devoted the Spring, Summer, and Fall seasons towards an annual retreat in the wilderness in Maine. Bringing his children, a son and two daughters, he would remain there until the first snows of October fell. It was in those woods that he would spend hours on end, alone, letting nature and its inhabitants include him in their drama. For Long, the solitude was necessary. Eventually even the wilderness of Maine would have to be substituted for an even more remote location. His annual trips would eventually migrate from Maine to Nova Scotia because, as he put it, “the wilderness was getting too crowded.” His fanciful and sensational books enamored readers to the wild. Building on the work of Darwin before him, Rev. Long’s writing was considered naturalist- realists, a literary genre. While Darwin and his type, in documenting with zealous journalistic integrity, were considered purely naturalists.

Unlike our forefathers, today’s American children spend their early years ingratiating themselves with what’s left of the American wild. This country is big. How you interact with nature and the type of natural environment you’re interacting with varies by region, but we’re unified around our goal of ensuring we pass on a sense of reverence for the land. Hopefully this indoctrination will ensure that the cultural gift of cherishing and revering nature will continue to be passed on; its aesthetic and its practical values intact. This was only made possible once we began to build on our understanding of the natural processes in the climate and the animal’s that depends on them.

You already know the story Charles Darwin and the naturalist movement. This is the story of the writers who came to be called “Sham Naturalists” like Reverend Long. These were writers who, on top of their primary vocation, spent hours meditating about the land and were compelled to share their experience. For Darwin, fighting through the jungle to document facts, observing animals in the natural landscape, was a calling like no other. For Long, it was the drama of the experience of immersing himself in the natural world that he felt required sharing.

Reverend Long was a well educated man who wrote prolifically. He graduated Harvard and the Andover Theological Seminary, and held a Masters of Arts and Doctorate of Philosophy from Heidelberg. The post Lisbon renaissance, and the western literary proletariat in the late 19th century, had given credence to a version of literature that called attention to the way things actually were as opposed to the more fanciful dramas and theatrical frame of reference of previous writings. This was called Realism. Ironically when this form of literature took hold among the naturalists, the new crop of authors, viewing themselves as contributing to the literary canon, nonetheless were accused by their naturalist peers of sensationalism and romanticism of nature. They told stories of animals learning, family cohorts exhibiting human-like interactions, and further anthropomorphizing animals in ways both subtle and unbelieveable. The American people, curious about the workings of the natural real estate around them, were ripe for this contribution. As the books gained popularity around the country an unwelcoming response from a cohort of traditional naturalists was brewing.

One popular series was Rev. Long’s writings collected and distributed and called “The Wood Folk Series,” a collection of personal anecdotes that often bucked the prevailing wisdom of the day. Long documented and interpreted the animal behavior at a time when it was believed that animals were merely instinctive living things. Though it was understood that they deserved their own kind of respect, they were nonetheless less than humans and had at best, a reductive version of any human capacity. By the time Roosevelt heard Long’s stories became part of children's curriculums, they had already become popular around the rest of the country. Roosevelt believed this emergent school of thought undermined Darwinian dogma.

Long before there were public, impassioned, and often bitter debates on the hard to follow comment threads of Facebook posts, there were public spats between intellectuals in the orderly columns of the newspaper. Not unlike academic discourse of today, but with wholly different terms of engagement, thought leaders of the time waged war over the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens in the country’s newly established national newspaper readership. This was the era of mass newspaper markets in cities, yellow journalism, and muckraking. The folds of the country’s newspapers drove as much of the public conversation, and often behind the same force of personality, as today’s prime time cable news hosts.

The esteemed pages of the Atlantic Monthly were not different. In the first of two issues published in 1903; specifically Volume 91, page 298, John Burroughs published a scathing takedown of writers like like Rev. Long. In a piece called “Real and Sham Natural History” he differentiated between Naturalists, those who contributed to real natural history, and Shams, those he considered opportunistic sensationalists preying on a naive and susceptible public readership. Burroughs recognized literary value and had no concerns with fairy tales set in nature. He even appreciated some sprucing up of the traditional naturalist lexicon; with that said, he couldn’t let the more popular, claimed as true, but believed to be impossible, cater to the fanciful popular zeitgeist. He believed the Shams to be “sensational and improbable” and a disservice to readers. In Burroughs’ mind it was Thompson Seton’s “Wild Animals I have known” to be the progenitor of this unworthy ephemera. He mocked Seton and and his chosen title by editing it so it read as “Wild Animals I Alone Have Known.” He didn’t let much other writers escape his contempt either.

For Burroughs the problem with this type of writing was that it was “Too much sentiment, too much literature.” Burroughs took affront that the nature that he had come to know and love was being reduced to theatre. He believed the Shams catered to our most basic literary impulses. From my perspective it seemed clear to me that both the Real and Sham naturalists wished to facilitate an accessibility and reverence towards the outdoors, but had different approaches. For Burroughs it was the true naturalists that deserved commendation and consideration as a Real Naturalist. In the article he commends the rules rather than the motives of the real naturalists. Of Gilbert While, a poplar naturalist of the time, he writes, “He tells the things for what it is. He is entirely serious. He reports directly upon what he sees and known without any other motive than telling the truth.” He goes to note, that as opposed to the Sham naturalists, in White's writings “there is never more than a twinkle of humor in his pages, and never one word of style for its own sake.” While for both types of writing, truth is of utmost concern, of what truth was the concern. For Burroughs the only worthy truths were the facts. On the Sham Naturalists he demurs, “[their writings are] True as romance, true in their artistic effects, true in their power to entertain the young reader, they certainly are;” he go on, “but true as natural history they as certainly are not.” These are fair assessments, and even worthwhile critiques. But I wonder if the Sham Naturalists deserve credit for forging a connection with our natural kin. By removing the distance between us and the things in nature, the literature made us more empathetic towards nature, destabilizing the foundation of human exceptionalism.

All naturalists got outside and documented what they saw. Given similar methods, what drove the different writing styles? For Darwin a traditional Teutonic based understanding of the facts was required. For the Shams their intuitive perceptions couldn’t be ignored. In fact even Burroughs acknowledged some underlying truths in the Shams pursuit. “That they [animal's] experience many of our emotions there can be no doubt,” Burroughs offered. The Shams, in looking for what they wanted to find, stumbled onto a truth of their own.

When reading the attack in the Atlantic, Rev. Long was a 40 year old man, tall, at least six feet, with an engaging manner and well liked in his community. Teddy Roosevelt was the 21st President of the United States. Burroughs, the author of the scornful Atlantic article, was none other than Roosevelt’s longtime friend and official nature advisor. A storm of conflicting ideas about how best to appraise the outdoors was brewing, and by the time the dust began to settle a Reverend with a distaste for authority would be inviting a President of the United States to his hometown to settle their dispute like men.

Remember Teddy Bears? The innocent looking bear was originally marketed as “Teddy’s Bear.” The backstory is equal parts sportsmanship, civility, hypocrisy, and conservancy. At the time Brown and Black bears were dangerous monsters and symbols of the merciless wilderness. Roosevelt, undeterred by their reputation invited the Governor Andrew H. Longino for a bear hunt in the Fall of 1902. On the hunt, the President wasn’t having any luck. Eventually an industrious aide in the caravan chased down and clubbed a small bear. He corralled the injured bear and tied him to a tree, still alive, but barely so. He offered the catch to the President to shoot so the President wouldn't come home empty handed. Roosevelt abstained from shooting the incapacitated bear out of deference to sportsmanship but had the bear killed with a knife. Soonafter the story leaked to a cartoonist with the Washington Post, a national newspaper of record. The cartoonist depicted an innocent bear who ended up looking particularly endearing. A toy manufacturer saw the image and thought that it could be repurposed as a more innocent and vulnerable looking children’s toy. It’s only appropriate in the naturalist golden era, and due to the father of conservation, that the bear had been transmuted from a symbol of the savages of the wild to a subject of human influence.

Being the President was, and likely still is, a difficult job. A strong central government was still in its infancy. States, relatively under regulated, exerted regional power. In the more remote parts of the country local politics was law of the land. On the other hand the beginnings of the formation of cities, or cultural centers, were spreading West. A collective national identity was beginning to take shape. Managing these issues was made difficult by the eclectic variety of challenges. Luckily, Roosevelt was the man for the job. If it wasn’t clear yet, this was a man of vigor who bettered himself by being unafraid to give himself to interests even when he could consider himself nothing more than an amateur. Fellow esteemed writer Lawrence F. Abbot, a Roosevelt confidant, said of him; “He was more kinds of a man than biographical literature has heretofore attempted to embody in one man.” It would seem inevitable that Roosevelt would feel both passionate about any heresy being preached about his beloved outdoors and that he was going to involve himself in the national debate.

While the Burroughs piece became national news, it wasn’t news to Roosevelt. He had been ruing the development of the Sham naturalists movement. When dealing with the natural sciences Roosevelt was a serious man, literal, and dedicated to the prevailing Western Enlightenment heritage. In initiating this spat Burroughs could count on Roosevelt as an ally; but hadn’t fully considered the possibility of Roosevelt including himself in the debate. Roosevelt would later admit that he felt petty engaging with Rev. Long, his countrymen, in a public discourse of the sort. Though conflicted Roosevelt was resolute. The children need not be corrupted by Sham naturalism. For the President the feud between the two men wasn’t personal, but the mission was.

Roosevelt condescended those who believed they could understand the will of natural elements. Attacking writers for taking leaps in their writing he protested, “I don’t believe for a minute, that some of these men who are writing nature stories and putting the word ‘truth’ prominently in their prefaces know the heart of the wild things.” Roosevelt believed Rev. Long and the Sham Naturalists had no right to imbue nature with intentionality, for him what they were seeing was merely the mechanical unfolding of natural instinct.

For his part, Rev. Long believed Roosevelt’s condemnation came from a place of ignorance. In response, instead of bringing further support for his own observations, Rev. Long differentiated between the discipline of their methods. For Long, to understand nature you had to allow for nature to conduct itself naturally, from a perch unvarnished by the influence of human artifice. His testimony was based on seasoned and intimate observation. He believed the president was projecting his arm’s length relationship with nature onto the natural elements themselves. Rev. Long’s counter; “You cannot understand nature when you have a gun on your hip, ride on the top of wagon or horseback, and have a crowd of 20 with you.” Long’s latent disregard for authority flared and he wondered aloud if Roosevelt realized that the only hearts he could have come to know are the ones that he had put a bullet through.

The Nature Fakers Controversy warred on the pages of the newspapers for weeks and months. The New York Times declared that the Burroughs’ blow had initiated the “War of the Naturalists.” The Naturalist Realists, or Sham Naturalists, were being labeled Yellow Journalists; liars who wrote only that which served their goals, whether what they purported was fact or not. Readers throughout the country would have to come to their own opinion. Some had no problem with either type of writing, others condemned both. More could care less about the folds of the dispute. The most important result of this controversy was an increased attention towards nature, and more specifically, how best to appreciate nature. By the middle of the first decade of the 20th century these questions arrived at the forefront of the national consciousness.

Plenty of ink was spilled recording this profound, albeit brief, shift in collective consciousness. In the next three years Roosevelt was signing the Antiquities Act of 1906 into la. Monumental legislation that ensured the power to protect cherished land would be inculcated from the debilitating partisan squabbling in the House. The law gave the president the unilateral authority to establish any natural element of scientific of cultural import a protected national monument. It was only recently that President Obama eclipsed Roosevelt’s record for protecting the most public lands. On top of monuments, America enshrined national parks and created the boy scout movement. An entire literary genre, unprecedented legislation, and a mainstream cultural movement all demarcated the crescendo of American nature phillia. For nature to be a national priority is rare. The pendulum forces of the industrial revolution reversed course and swung towards conservation. It was the combination of these forces and timely technological and cultural advancements that drew American’s interest outdoors.

The debate raged until the scientists came out in support of Roosevelt and the real naturalists. Just as quickly as the Shams became popular did their interest fade. For his part Roosevelt leaned on his his diplomatic sensibility and ended the Controversy with a more conciliatory tone. He urged for a continuation in the pursuit of understanding of our natural counterparts. He called for, “[a] real knowledge and appreciation of wild things, of trees, flowers, birds, and of the grim and crafty creatures of the wilderness which give us added beauty and health to life.” For the Shams, it was too much ‘Meerkat Manor’ and not enough ‘Planet Earth.’ On the other hand, some inferences the Sham’s made about the nature of the wild were true. By bucking the prevailing wisdom and intuiting elevated faculties in nature they allowed for the future understanding of living things. Perhaps more important they made them easier to empathize with and therefore easier to appreciate. Merely tolerating nature as a reductive entity leaves something to be desired. Once you’ve come to revere nature you’re more awakened to the reality that by looking into nature you can understand more about us. Whether you consider yourself to be a Real or Sham Naturalist, this Yellow Journalist can agree with that.