by Eric Rutkow
In his love of sickle pears, a variety first cultivated in America, the young Roosevelt shared something in common with Thomas Jefferson, who once described this fruit as “exceed[ing] anything I have tasted since I left France, & equal[ing] any pear I had seen there.” But the parallel stretched further than just pears. Roosevelt’s appreciation for trees aligned him with many who had occupied the White House before him, men like Jefferson and Washington, who lived on great estates and developed an interest in trees. And like these men, Roosevelt grew to respect the pastoral life, praising a form of existence that bore much in common with Jefferson’s bucolic sensibility of the yeoman farmer supporting democracy.
However, with respect to trees, Roosevelt differed from his predecessors on two levels. First, he showed less interest in horticulture, which by the early twentieth century was no longer the upper-class pursuit it had earlier been. And second, Roosevelt would develop a keen interest in forestry, a field that had arrived in America at roughly the same time as his birth.
He was only a child when he first discovered the value of professional forestry. In 1891, during a family vacation to Europe, the nine-year-old Roosevelt came upon a municipal forest near Bad Nauheim, Germany, where careful management practices had been in place for two hundred years and ensured a constant supply of timber. As Roosevelt later noted, “[T]he interesting thing to me, as a boy even, was that the people in that town didn’t have to pay taxes. They were supported by their own forest.” This youthful encounter provided a foundation for Roosevelt’s conviction that forestry and tree planting justified themselves not only for conservation reasons but for their long-term economic returns. In believing this, Roosevelt was unknowingly aligning himself with Pinchot, who spent his career advocating for forestry on conservation as well as economic grounds.
Early experiences aside, it was politics, in many respects, that turned Roosevelt toward forestry. His formal interest in the subject, by his own account, began only in 1911, following his election to the New York state senate and a sudden appointment as chair of the Forest, Fish, and Game Committee. As Roosevelt wryly observed, “The fact that this baby senator was made chairman of this particular committee meant that forestry had not progressed far in the State.” The chairman’s position may not have been a desirable one, but Roosevelt nonetheless felt obliged to educate himself on the areas he now controlled. He turned for advice to none other than Pinchot, the closest confidant of his beloved cousin Teddy.
What happened next would leave an impression on Roosevelt for the rest of his life. At the young senator’s request, Pinchot traveled to Albany in order to give a public talk on the value of forestry and the importance of trees. During the talk, the chief forester warned of a potential timber famine and corresponding environmental degradation. To illustrate his point, he projected two slides onto a screen. The first, a Chinese painting from 1510, depicted a lush landscape with abundant water; but in the corner was an ominous sign: a logging chute. Pinchot then flashed the second slide, a photograph of the same landscape in 1900, completely stripped of trees, dry and barren. For Roosevelt, this was a revelatory moment. As he noted, “One need not be an alarmist to foresee that, without intelligent conservation measures, long before half a millennium passes some such contrasting pictures might be possible in our own United States.” Roosevelt had come to realize the same principle that George Perkins Marsh had articulated so brilliantly in his 1864 book Man and Nature: “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.”
Inspired by Pinchot’s slides and constructive recommendations, Roosevelt determined to address the issue before it was too late. Shortly after hearing the talk, he sponsored one of his earliest pieces of legislation, the Roosevelt-Jones Bill. It sought broadly to expand fire protection and tree-planting facilities across the state. The heart of the legislation was a provision regulating logging on the millions of acres of private lands located within the Adirondack State Park. With this move, Roosevelt joined the continuing campaign to improve protections for the park, a cause that reached back into the nineteenth century and had benefited from the earlier efforts of men like Charles Sprague Sargent and Morris Jesup. But Roosevelt had underestimated the strength of the logging lobby, and his language covering the Adirondack park’s privately held lands was removed from the final version of his bill.
Roosevelt’s interest in forestry did not stop with advocacy. The same year he ascended to the state senate he had also assumed control over his family’s Springwood estate, more than one thousand acres in total. Much of the soil, Roosevelt soon discovered, had been degraded from years of improper management. He saw potential to restore the land by implementing some of the ideas that Pinchot had championed, specifically tree planting. As Roosevelt observed of his family’s property, “I can lime it, cross-plough it, manure it and treat it with every art known to science but it has just plain run out—and now I am putting it into trees in the hope that my great-grandchildren will be able to try raising corn again—just one century from now.”
Once Roosevelt began planting trees, he was hooked. His youthful enthusiasm for trees converged with his interest in forestry. The first year of his program, 1912, Roosevelt planted an impressive one thousand seedlings—many by his own hand—and this amount would be equaled or exceeded every year thereafter; in fact, for the last fifteen years of his life, he oversaw the planting of at least twenty thousand trees annually. Nelson Brown, dean of the New York State College of Forestry, who was contracted by Roosevelt to help coordinate the expanding forestry activities in Springwood, estimated that his client planted in total more than half a million trees, which covered over 550 acres, nearly half the Springwood estate. There were countless varieties involved, though Roosevelt had his favorites, including Douglas fir and Norway spruce.
Tree planting wasn’t just an activity for Roosevelt; it provided something of an identity as well. For many years, when voting in Hyde Park, he listed his profession as “tree-grower” instead of “politician” or “lawyer.” And Roosevelt took great pleasure in referring to himself in this fashion, for trees were one of his favorite topics of discussion. As one of his neighbor’s sons noted, “FDR used to come over to talk about his tree farm. . . . [H]e and my father would talk about seeds; and thinning, and commiserate on good years and bad. He loved to feel he was using the land to good advantage.”
Roosevelt had been a confirmed tree planter for nearly a decade when, in 1921, polio cost him the use of his legs. The days of walking among his acres of planted trees were suddenly gone, but Roosevelt took measures to find other solutions. In particular, he instructed his grounds crew to carve new paths through his forests so that he could drive along them in a specially equipped vehicle. This became one of his favorite activities during the period of convalescence and reflection that followed his illness.
For much of the 1920s, Roosevelt’s forestry activities had been confined to his personal properties and various private associations, but that changed in the fall of 1928, following his victory in the New York State governor’s race. Back in the public eye, Roosevelt was ready to once more push for tree-based solutions to environmental challenges. This time, the central issue was the state’s abandoned or degraded farmlands. Such properties were beginning to pile up. Over the course of several decades, countless farm families had either moved west in search of richer soils or headed into the cities to find work—according to the Journal of Forestry, “Between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 acres [were] now lying idle as a result.” Roosevelt sought to use tree planting to renew these overworked soils, just as he had done at Springwood.
The political battle centered on the Hewitt Amendment, a proposed change to the New York Constitution that the state’s Reforestation Commission had suggested. It would grant the state authority to purchase lands outside of the Adirondack park—primarily, degraded farms—for the purposes of reforestation and rehabilitation. Roosevelt
threw all of his weight as governor behind this amendment, traveling the state to give speeches, pressing his friends to lend their support, rebuffing the protests of the various groups who opposed the measure. His efforts helped to convince the electorate, and in 1931 the Hewitt Amendment became a part of the state constitution.
In the wake of the victory, the Journal of Forestry declared, “The present governor, so definitely a believer in forestry as to spend his own money in its practice on his personal estate, enthusiastically supported the measure. . . . As the Nation’s largest reforestation project, larger even than that of the federal government, much interest will be shown in its progress. . . . [I]t is now a matter requiring only technical accomplishment.” And, of course, Roosevelt was there to ensure the realization of the “technical” side of the measure. Relying on the authority of the Hewitt Amendment as well as Depression-related emergency funding, he instituted a massive program that, among other things, took some ten thousand unemployed men and set them to work reforesting state lands.
Thus, by the time that the 1932 presidential election arrived, Roosevelt possessed more forestry experience than almost any politician in the country. He had been the force behind the most ambitious state reforestation effort in the nation. He had worked through two major political battles over forestry, coming up short with the Roosevelt-Jones Bill of 1912 before triumphing with the Hewitt Amendment. His home at Springwood was a working tree farm, he was a self-proclaimed tree grower by profession, and everyone in Hyde Park knew that trees were among Roosevelt’s favorite conversation topics. Now was finally the time for the governor of New York to take the ideas he’d worked out in Hyde Park and Albany to the entire nation.
ON JULY 2, 1932, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Roosevelt became his party’s official nominee for president. It was a grand event, one covered by media outlets across the country, and Roosevelt used this moment to inform the public that he saw trees as the way forward, a panacea to relieve unemployment and combat the Depression. He declared: “We know that a very hopeful and immediate means of relief, both for the unemployed and for agriculture will come from a wide plan of the converting of many millions of acres of marginal and unused land into timberland through reforestation.” This was the same argument he had used when pushing the Hewitt Amendment, only now he was applying it to the entire nation. And the scale of his proposal increased accordingly. Whereas in New York he had provided reforestation jobs for ten thousand men, he now asserted that “employment can be given to a million men” and that the project would be self-financed through the sale of the resulting timber.
For Americans used to a federal government hesitant to intervene in the economy, this proposal sounded somewhat absurd. A million unemployed men recruited by the government solely to plant trees? How would they be trained and housed? Could tree planting possibly produce enough revenue to cover the cost of the program? Would this be on private land or public land? Who would organize everything? Were there enough trained foresters to oversee the work? These were just a few of the concerns.
Even people who should have been sympathetic to Roosevelt’s idea chimed in to voice their discomfort. Charles Lathrop Pack, the man behind the World War I memorial and battlefield trees, wrote Roosevelt on behalf of the American Forestry Association to express his reservations: “Shall we, as foresters and conservation leaders, shut our eyes to the facts?” As Pack saw it, the obstacles to success were too daunting; tree planting simply couldn’t accomplish all that Roosevelt imagined.
But Roosevelt remained undeterred. He explained to Pack that his program was, in fact, much broader than his acceptance speech had suggested. “Reforestation” was simply shorthand. He wanted men employed not just in tree planting, but in “all forestry activities which would tend to restore the true forest lands of the United States to normal productiveness.” The recruits would work in small camps spread out across the entire nation, wherever local needs existed. The obstacles that had concerned Pack, Roosevelt promised, would be easily overcome.
Over the course of the next few months, the presidential candidate continued to refine his program and to build support, among both the public and the forestry community. The more that people came to appreciate Roosevelt’s doggedness and tenacity, the more they came to accept that he might be able to realize his vision. It didn’t hurt that he rolled to victory over Hoover with nearly all of the electoral votes (472 to 59), giving him an ironclad mandate.
In January, after Roosevelt had won the election but before his inauguration (then held in March), Gifford Pinchot, who was still one of the most influential conservation voices in the nation, wrote him to say: “[A]s I see it there is no single domestic step that can be taken that will mean so much to the future of the United States as this one, and at the same time none that will meet with such universal approval.” Few people’s endorsement might have meant more to the president-elect. This was, after all, the very man who had first opened Roosevelt’s eyes to the importance of forestry and trees.
Once Roosevelt became president, he wasted little time turning talk into action. On March 9, five days after his swearing-in, with the cheers from the crowds still echoing in his head, he sat down to map out his plan in detail for what he had started to call the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The outline of his proposal by this point went roughly as follows: Approximately 250,000 unemployed young men would be hired by the federal government, using emergency relief funds, to work temporarily in the nation’s forests; they would be paid thirty dollars a month, and all but five dollars would be sent automatically to their families; the men would live together in camps, have all their meals provided, and would have access to educational materials (Roosevelt wanted to make sure that his recruits left the CCC feeling mentally and physically rehabilitated, ready to return as productive members of society); the projects would be numerous, but primarily of a simple nature, the sort of work that required energy over experience; the program’s administration would be divided between the Forest Service, which would provide expertise, the Department of Labor, which would recruit the workforce, and the army, which would handle transportation and the running of the camps.
On March 21, Roosevelt presented his full vision to Congress. “I propose to create a civilian conservation corps,” he declared. This was the start of his domestic agenda, the initial push for social legislation, the first piece in a complicated puzzle of ambitious programs that would soon be known as the New Deal. And time was of the essence. Roosevelt felt that the problems that the Depression presented were too great to allow for further dillydallying: “I estimate that 250,000 men can be given temporary employment by early summer if you give me authority to proceed within the next two weeks.”
Roosevelt had issued the challenge. The decision now rested with Congress. It was a seminal moment for his presidency: Would the legislators endorse his agenda or attempt to frustrate it? The New York Times suggested that it might be a tough fight: “It must be doubted . . . if his plan will be received with zealous approval in Congress.” Some conservatives opposed the plan on principle, as an unwarranted expansion of government and a misuse of relief funds. Left-leaning union groups voiced displeasure as well. The head of the AFL—in a statement that echoed the concerns Gompers had expressed during World War I regarding the 4L—predicted: “The regimentation of labor through enlistment in the Civilian Conservation Corps, under military discipline and military control, will, in my judgment, awaken feelings of grave apprehension in the hearts and minds of labor.”
But, in the end, these protests fell flat. Republicans were the minority in both houses, and the labor issue was not enough to dissuade Democrats. On March 31, several days shy of Roosevelt’s two-week deadline, Congress passed a law granting him the authority he sought. The following week, on April 5, Roosevelt issued an executive order that formally created the CCC. Eleanor later described this moment as “the one in which my husband took the greatest pleasure” during his fi
rst year.
Upon signing the order, Roosevelt put forth another challenge: He wanted the first camp up and running within two weeks.
In an effort to meet this demand, a model camp—little more than a handful of tents in a clearing—was hastily constructed in Virginia’s George Washington National Forest. (Though all the original national forests were carved from the western public domain, the government had gained authority in 1911 to purchase eastern lands and convert them into national forests as well.) The army christened this test site “Camp Roosevelt” to honor the man who was the program’s driving force. The first recruits, some two hundred young men, arrived on April 17, a few days short of Roosevelt’s deadline. They soon found themselves the center of national attention. As explained by an article in American Forests, “Hardly a day passed but came photographers, reporters, writers and an endless stream of officials to inspect them, to photograph them, and to write about their work and their lives.” Most of the reports were positive. The CCC seemed off to a strong start.
However, progressing from 200 men to 250,000 men was no simple feat. Thousands of camps needed to be constructed, recruitment offices had to be set up around the nation, projects sufficient for a quarter million men needed to be identified and coordinated. The challenges were immense.
Nonetheless, when Roosevelt’s deadline arrived, there were, remarkably, more than a quarter million young men enrolled, the largest peacetime government labor force ever assembled. According to the Atlantic Monthly, General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the effort, boasted that “in the ninety days after the CCC was authorized, the army enrolled 270,000 boys and transported 55,000 of them to camps across the continent, while, in the ninety days after the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, only 181,000 men were mobilized, and only 16,000 were embarked for France.”