Roosevelt???s Conservation and Consumer Protection Essay

President Theodore Roosevelt and the progressives made their greatest

success in the fields of conservation and consumer protection.   Not many

people would stand against them, making them successful.   Roosevelt stood

against greater opposition on the other progressive issues that could have

been more prosperous, yet were not so widely accepted.

Conservation did have problems, for Roosevelt and Pinchot both

believed that the resources of the nation should be used wisely.   Pinchot

believed that wilderness was waste.   However Theodore Roosevelt realized

that one of the nations resources that had to be saved for posterity was

wilderness.   He helped organize national parks that still exist today, such as

Yosemite National Park.   Muir of the Sierra Club believed in this in a

“spare-that-tree” way and stood against the Hetch Hetchy dam affair that

Pinchot supported.   This controversy is still debatable to this date.

After loosing his stomach for sausage due to reading Upton Sinclair’s

The Jungle, Theodore Roosevelt helped to spur the National Food and Drug

Association, and meat packing inspection.   Relatively few people would

argue with meat packing inspection regulations after being introduced to

conditions described by Sinclair’s muckraking.   Muckraking helped to alert

the people of the country of corruption all around them.   Although its content

would be treated like the scandal reveling investigative reporting seen today,

it played a crucial role in the safety of many people.   Theodore Roosevelt

read The Jungle proving its value for all meat consumers to read and soon

find meat unpalatable.