American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  The early results of everyone’s combined effort to combat DED seemed promising. Elms in the cities remained under constant surveillance, while those in the deepest parts of the forests had little time to develop an infection before emergency workers reacted. By December 1937, over five thousand workers had eradicated more than four million trees, and the disease was spreading more slowly than some initial models had predicted. A pamphlet from the AFA declared, “Federal and state officials believe that if $15,000,000 is forthcoming during the next five year period this infection can be cleared up.” This sounded like a large sum of money, but was comparable to the almost $11 million that had already been expended or pledged. The campaign seemed to be working. It was hoped that the USDA could contain the disease in the Northeast, just as it had done in Ohio. It would be an incredible triumph for the federal government and for plant pathologists, retribution for the failures of the American chestnut campaign.

  But not everyone shared this confidence. For some, the lesson of the chestnut blight was that control efforts were futile against such a powerful pathogen. In early 1936, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Agricultural Appropriations had gone on record to declare, “We have been told that there was no hope of eradicating this disease.” Part of the skepticism related to the deteriorating situation in Europe, where all initiatives to counter DED had failed utterly. In 1937, the USDA’s representative in England explained: “After eighteen years of unsuccessful efforts to fight the disease which threatened her elms, Europe has decided to give it up as an aggressive campaign as far as eradication is concerned. . . . It can be only a few years until all the elms of England and the Continent are gone.” If the disease had so thoroughly conquered Europe, the skeptics asked, what hope was there for America?

  The answer to this question was demoralizing, but for reasons that no one could have foreseen. In the summer of 1938, a devastating storm struck the Northeast with a fury unknown before or since. Known as the Great Hurricane, it made landfall in New Haven, the Elm City, then on the outer edge of the infected zone. The powerful winds of the Great Hurricane tore down more than one million large shade trees, and the most affected species was, unsurprisingly, the American elm. When the storm receded, millions of board feet of downed elm wood were transported to junkyards and woodlots, creating ideal breeding grounds for the elm-bark beetle. The pest population subsequently swelled, accelerating the pace of DED transmission—the infected region, which had expanded roughly 47 percent in the four years preceding the storm, would balloon 258 percent in the four years that followed. As historian Thomas Campanella observed, “Dutch elm disease and the Great Hurricane converged with remarkable precision, as if an unseen hand had guided each to a fateful rendezvous.”

  The hurricane meant that more eradication agents were needed, but the political will was not where it had been previously. Congress began to curtail funding, partly out of defeatism and partly out of necessity—the concern for many was the increasing likelihood of America’s entry into World War II. Resources would be needed to contain the spread of Nazism and the Axis powers. This trumped the need to contain the spread of DED. By 1940, the flow of federal dollars was essentially stopped. An exasperated AFA railed against this shift:

  It is true that in the light of national defense needs, there are many federal activities that can and should be set aside for the time being, but stopping the elm disease is not one of them. . . . Abandon the battle for even one season and most certainly all will be lost. . . . [A]ll the money spent to date—some $25,000,000—will have been spent in vain, the American elm will be marked for death.

  But these protests fell on deaf ears. The needs of total war were simply too great, the odds of containing DED too long.

  As America geared up to enter the conflict, DED inched ever deeper into New England, center of elm culture. In 1941, it appeared in Massachusetts for the first time. The state was blanketed during the course of the war. Elms that had stood for hundreds of years, mighty giants that dated back to the days of the first colonists, now started to fall. Soon DED swarmed across the rest of the Yankee districts: Vermont in 1945; Rhode Island the following year; New Hampshire and Maine shortly thereafter. As the AFA feared, the restriction of funds had opened the door for much more aggressive expansion. The elms of New England, subjects of so much poetry, ended up indirect casualties of the nation’s effort to defeat the Axis powers.

  World War II, nonetheless, introduced a promising new tool to help save the millions of American elms that remained: dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, also known as DDT. In 1939, scientists had discovered that this chemical compound, first synthesized in 1874, possessed potent insecticidal properties. During the latter half of the war, DDT was employed to great effect in combating malaria and typhus. Researchers soon realized that it might also be employed to kill the elm-bark beetle that spread the deadly elm fungus. The first official experiment, which used a high-powered spray to coat elms in the compound, took place at Englewood, New Jersey, in May 1947. According to the New York Times, a local official assured that “the spray would be of minimum danger to bird and animal life.” The practice of treating elms with DDT quickly spread to other cities and townships, especially in the Midwest, where DED had not yet made serious inroads. In the years that followed, more than a billion pounds of the supposedly safe chemical were dispersed. No one could state definitively that the spraying impeded the spread of DED, but it appeared to be the best tactic available.

  As time wore on, however, the claims that DDT was benign received increasing scrutiny. In 1958, a scientific study alleged that the spraying of elms directly led to bird deaths across the Midwest—the theory was that DDT remained on the leaves, which were eaten by earthworms, which were in turn eaten by birds. This study attracted relatively little attention until 1962, when it was referenced in a series of New Yorker articles written by Rachel Carson, a well-regarded environmentalist and author. She inveighed against pesticides, particularly DDT, and used elm spraying as one of her core examples. Her article argued that DDT was not only responsible for killing birds and poisoning the environment, but that its benefits against Dutch elm disease had been largely exaggerated. As she explained: “To the public, the choice may easily appear to be one of stark simplicity: Shall we have birds or shall we have elms? But it is not as simple as that. . . . Spraying is killing the birds but is not saving the elms. The theory that the survival of the elms lies in spraying is a dangerous illusion.” Carson soon turned her articles into a book, Silent Spring, which almost single-handedly revolutionized the way that Americans thought about pesticides. The American elm had found itself at the center of a new national campaign against toxic chemicals, one of the most swift and powerful social movements of the 1960s. By 1972, the practice of DDT spraying was banned. This was, in some respects, the final blow—symbolically if not actually—to the long-standing fight to neutralize the impact of Dutch elm disease.

  Attitudes over time shifted to what one forest pathologist called “learning to live with the disease.” As Europe had accepted in 1937, there was no possibility of containing the fungus. It was better simply to focus on preserving the elms that remained. Thanks to advances in arboriculture, parks and cities across the country have managed to preserve some of their elm specimens, at least for the time being. Of course, part of the reason these trees survive is the high percentage of elms that have already succumbed, reducing the potential number of host sites for the elm-bark beetle. By the 1980s, DED had claimed the lives of more than 77 million trees.

  As with the death of the American chestnut, the decline of the American elm forced society to adapt. No tree could match its unique aesthetic appeal. Even if such a tree existed, it is unlikely that it would ever be planted so expansively out of fear of another plague. The culture that once defined New England and many cities simply disappeared. But it wasn’t all bad news: The DED catastrophe led to a strengthening of the urban forestry movement, stimulated new education and r
esearch, and promoted tree-planting initiatives.

  The decline of two beloved tree species and the rise of a new federal plant control apparatus were far from the only forces affecting the nation’s relationship to its trees during the first half of the twentieth century. World War I, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II all influenced the way that Americans understood and interacted with their woody resources. It was an era of ambitious government programs, of wartime sacrifice, of economic necessity. The efforts made to save the American elm and American chestnut, expansive as they were, paled in comparison to some of the other initiatives that would emerge around trees during this time.

  8

  Trees as Good Soldiers and Citizens

  The Wooden Wings of War

  ON MAY 7, I9I7, Brice Disque, a thirty-eight-year-old retired army captain, received an urgent telegram demanding his presence at the War Department in Washington, D.C. America had declared war on Germany the month before, and the nation was scrambling to institute the largest overseas military mobilization in its history. At the head of this chaotic and disorganized effort sat General John J. Pershing, known to his men as “Black Jack.” And it was Pershing’s chief of staff who had sent the telegram to Disque.

  Disque hurried over to the War Department, assuming that the telegram was a response to his recent offer to reenlist. Perhaps, Disque thought, he was being considered for a coveted position to serve directly alongside Pershing.

  But when Disque arrived, he learned that the general had other plans for him. Pershing explained that he wanted Disque to remain a civilian but needed him to carry out a secret mission, one too delicate for official army involvement. “Black Jack” needed a military man he could depend on, and Disque was someone whom he knew and held in high regard. The task was simple: Keep an eye on the situation in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry.

  This request struck Disque as odd. In his own words, he knew “not the slightest” thing about logging. He was certainly no forester. He was, rather, a soldier through and through, the sort of man who seemed born to wear a military uniform. As one newspaper report described him, “Equipped with a splendid physique and a fine personality he has been a student of military science to such good effect that few officers of his years can equal him.”

  His career had been spent almost entirely in the service of his country, much of it in the Philippines, a territory that the United States had acquired during the Spanish-American War (1898). There, he had participated in efforts to suppress the Filipino insurrection, and in that campaign his path had first intersected with Pershing, who was then a fast-rising general. Disque earned praise for his administrative leadership in turning around an underperforming U.S. Army logistics unit in the Philippines. His reputation was that of a man who got things done that others couldn’t, even if it cost him friends along the way. Since resigning from the military in late 1916—a decision that had been made largely out of consideration for the needs of his growing family but one that Disque immediately regretted—he had been working as the warden of a state penitentiary in Michigan. It had been a life, in sum, that hardly seemed to qualify him to secretly report on trees for the army.

  But Pershing was adamant. He insisted that this covert assignment was far more important than overseas service with the American Expeditionary Force that was then being assembled. The nation’s trees, quite possibly, held the key to winning the war.

  Pershing’s pronouncement was curious, to say the least. But over the course of their meeting, Disque would come to understand the complicated chain of logic that underlay much of the general’s concern.

  It was, in the most basic strategic terms, a question of air supremacy. Though the war had arrived barely a decade after the Wright brothers’ first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, the airplane was quickly developing into a military tool of almost unlimited potential. It allowed for overhead spying; it made possible bomb deployments from outside the range of artillery fire; and, of course, there was the new class of flying aces, like Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, the lethal Red Baron, or America’s Eddie Rickenbacker, whose exploits would capture the imagination of a generation of young boys. Whoever controlled the skies, many felt, could dictate the terms of ground combat. The need for air supremacy was so essential to U.S. strategic planners that Congress was already in the process of allocating $1 billion toward a wartime airplane program, the largest single government expenditure in American history to that point.

  To a remarkable extent, this all-important military technology depended on trees. The most popular aircraft construction material from the outset had been wood, which was plentiful, easy to work, and in possession of a high strength-to-weight ratio. Aviation pioneers, in consequence, had designed planes that depended on wood’s unique properties. Most notably, they had exploited the capacity of wooden structures to flex—the first successful airplanes, including those of the Wright brothers, had controls that literally twisted the spars (the wooden beams that supported the wings); this technique, known as “wing warping,” allowed for lateral control, a key to the success of early aircraft.

  Of course, not just any wood would do. Most hardwoods (such as oak or maple) were simply too heavy, while most softwoods (such as pine or cedar) were too weak. Through trial and error, aviation pioneers had determined that spruce lumber—often disfavored in construction for its susceptibility to decay and insect damage—possessed an ideal combination of lightness, strength, and durability. An article in American Forests noted that spruce was “stronger ounce for ounce than high-tensile steel.” According to Wilbur Wright, the plane that he and his brother used in 1903 for their first successful flight was constructed primarily from “the very best straight-grained spruce.” This type of wood quickly became the standard for almost all early models, including military ones.

  But airplane-quality spruce wood was difficult to find. Timber that was warped or knotty or that contained twisted grain was often too weak to survive the strains of a rocky landing or the pressures of takeoff. And short timbers were equally problematic: Much like the ship masts of an earlier era, airplane spars—the all-important backbones in the wings—were strongest when hewn from a single length of lumber.

  The northeastern forests, though they supplied some 70 percent of the nation’s commercial spruce at the time, were incapable of meeting aircraft demand. The region’s dominant spruce species, commonly known as red spruce, typically did not grow large enough to satisfy the construction requirements. Moreover, by the turn of the century, papermakers had already chopped down many of the old-growth spruce stands in the race to acquire pulpwood. The Wright brothers, based in Dayton, Ohio, often butted up against this eastern supply problem. In a 1904 letter, they complained, “We have found it impossible to obtain [spruce] lumber in our local yards.”

  The answer to this dilemma lay out West. The far corner of the nation was home to the Sitka spruce, the world’s largest species of spruce. It was one of the western giants, taller than all but the coastal redwoods and the Douglas fir, its height sometimes exceeding three hundred feet. John Muir described it as “a very beautiful and majestic tree,” adding, “I have seen logs of this species a hundred feet long and two feet in diameter at the upper end.”

  The newly important species grew all along the West’s coastal forests, from southern Oregon straight through to Alaska. From the perspective of airplane construction, however, the best stands, in terms of both quality and accessibility, resided exclusively within the Pacific Northwest. As historian Harold Hyman noted, “the Northwest had a virtual monopoly of the world’s remaining supply of this suddenly invaluable resource.” There were some 11 billion board feet in total, enough to meet the wartime needs of both the United States and the Allies, who were equally dependent on the nation’s Sitka spruce trees. One of the representatives of the French Aviation Service observed, “Your spruce will prove the decisive factor in the big European conflict.”


  The problem—and this explained Pershing’s urgent telegram to Disque—was the labor situation in the region. A combination of miserable work conditions, a young, rootless labor force, and intransigent management had turned the forests of the Pacific Northwest into a breeding ground for the radical, syndicalist union known as the Industrial Workers of the World. Conflicts were growing increasingly frequent and violent between IWW members, known as “wobblies,” and lumbermen (a broad term that could include the mill owners, timberland speculators, management, and foremen). In the most serious incident up to that point, which occurred in the fall of 1916 at Everett, Washington, some thirty-one wobblies were gunned down by special deputies in an event known as “Bloody Sunday.” If the situation continued to worsen, it threatened to shut down lumber production across the region, which would, among other things, cripple airplane production and, consequently, the war effort.

  Pershing explained to Disque that he had discussed these concerns earlier with Secretary of War Newton Baker. The two men had agreed that Pershing ought to have someone with a military outlook monitoring the situation, but Baker had insisted that the individual remain unofficial and civilian. Organized labor was a powerful force at that time in America and one that had helped reelect President Woodrow Wilson. If news leaked out of Pershing’s interest in the labor situation of the Pacific Northwest forests—and its implication of direct army involvement—it might set off a storm of protest in the nation’s reform and labor press, further inflaming the already precarious situation in the forests. Disque, who was technically a civilian, offered a way around this dilemma for the moment.