American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  The planting of trees was only the first step in a successful Shelterbelt. Once a given tree strip was fully installed, workers needed to construct a fence around the entire area, to protect the seedlings from cattle. They also treated the young growth with poison, which deterred insects and rodents. Finally, they had to return several times to cull any undergrowth that might be sucking moisture from the soil and outcompeting the young trees. When all this was done, a given acre of Shelterbelt was expected to provide protection for about twenty acres of farmland. An article in American Forests estimated, somewhat optimistically, “On a fifty-year basis, the cost to the government of an acre protected a year is estimated at four cents.”

  Once the program had gotten under way, many careworn farmers on the Great Plains embraced it enthusiastically, but in Washington, D.C., it was a different story altogether. Congressmen remained skeptical of the Shelterbelt’s merits, convinced that it was a costly boondoggle, a political stunt by Roosevelt to capture the farm vote. In 1936, Congress even allocated $170,000 specifically for the purposes of liquidating the program. But Roosevelt fought back, acquiring several million dollars from the recently created Works Project Administration (WPA), which was another massive relief initiative that contained hundreds of millions of dollars in undesignated funds. The availability of WPA funds allowed Roosevelt to repeatedly counter congressional efforts to defund the Shelterbelt throughout the 1930s.

  As the political battle over the Shelterbelt raged in Washington, the Forest Service quietly continued to plant their trees. The secretary of agriculture noted in 1937, “Over 32,000 acres have been planted in two years with emergency funds in spite of limitations by the constant questioning of legal and fiscal authority.” By 1938, more than 34.5 million trees had been planted across 107,000 acres. To facilitate the work, a special mechanized tree planter was invented, capable of setting down eight thousand trees during an eight-hour day. The scope of the Shelterbelt program even turned the Forest Service into the largest builder of fences in the world. The endless horizons of the high plains, at least near the ninety-ninth meridian, were beginning to be broken up by the silhouettes of forests in the distance.

  But ultimately, the political opposition proved too powerful for the Shelterbelt to survive. By the early 1940s, Roosevelt, the program’s creator and staunchest defender, was in poor health and was preoccupied with America’s likely entry into World War II. Moreover, two key pieces of federal legislation had been passed during the 1930s that provided alternative approaches to the Shelterbelt. The first, the Soil Conservation Act of 1935, created a new agency, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), which was authorized to pay farmers for keeping their land uncultivated with the hope that native grasses would return to stabilize the soil. The second, the Norris-Doxey Farm Forestry Act of 1937, allowed the government to devote funds to work cooperatively with farmers looking to improve their woodlots.

  In late October 1941, the secretary of agriculture suggested to Roosevelt that the Shelterbelt project ought to be folded into the increasingly popular SCS. Roosevelt, who had been struggling to keep the program alive over congressional hostility for nearly a decade, finally agreed. And in July 1942, after eight years and a total cost of $14 million, the Shelterbelt as an independent program officially came to an end. Many involved, especially foresters who had been impressed by the program’s relative success, feared that Roosevelt’s willingness to fold the Shelterbelt into the SCS spelled the end of serious tree planting on the high plains. And these concerns were largely borne out in the years that followed. The SCS, populated by agronomists more than foresters, quickly deprioritized the use of tree strips as a soil conservation measure. Plantings dropped from 1,750 miles in 1942 to 65 miles in 1943.

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt, the consummate tree planter, soon came to lament the death of the Shelterbelt. At a 1943 White House dinner to honor the king of Saudi Arabia, the topic arose when the president was comparing the Arabian Desert to the Great American Desert. He explained to the audience, “[S]ome years ago we had undertaken a certain project known as Shelter Belt. . . . And I might just as well tell the Congress of the United States now that I am going to revive it, if I live long enough. It’s a very excellent thing.”

  But Roosevelt’s days were fast running out. On April 12, 1945, less than a month before America gained victory over the Nazis, the nation’s longest-serving president died of a cerebral hemorrhage. An editorial that ran in the New York Times the following day summed up the national mood:

  Men will thank God on their knees, a hundred years from now, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, in a position to give leadership to the thought of the American people and direction to the activities of their Government, in that dark hour when a powerful and ruthless barbarism threatened to overrun the civilization of the Western World and to destroy the work of centuries of progress.

  Though many of Roosevelt’s final days were indeed spent buried in affairs of state and the emergencies of war, he was still thinking about his beloved and beleaguered Shelterbelt right up to the ultimate moments. Three days before his death, he had reviewed a new memorandum on the program and sent a letter to its author asking for “a little more material on what tree planting is doing to enable families to improve their yield in crops.”

  In the end, Roosevelt’s grand vision to transform the Great Plains into a forest fell short, but the project nonetheless left its mark on the region. A 1954 evaluation of the Shelterbelt determined that over 220 million trees had been planted on thirty thousand farms. The Forest Service had laid down in total more than 18,600 linear miles of tree strips—and a majority of these, more than 70 percent, survived for decades. During the 1950s and 1960s many of the original Shelterbelt plantings were reinforced or expanded through the private actions of farmers who had come to appreciate the value of tree windbreaks. And today, among the fields and farms of the high plains, some aging stands of cottonwood, green ash, and Chinese elm still attest to the existence of a program initially planned as “the biggest technical job the Forest Service has yet undertaken” but one that became, in the eyes of many, “the most ridiculed project of the New Deal.”

  “Careless Matches Aid the Axis”

  IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, there are few dates more prominent than December 7, 1941. On that morning, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack against a U.S. naval installation at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was the deadliest strike on U.S. soil until September 11, 2001. Roosevelt famously labeled it “a date which will live in infamy.” The events at Pearl Harbor not only pushed the nation to enter World War II but also shattered a long-held illusion that American territory, far removed from the theaters of combat in Europe and the Pacific, was safe from military attack.

  The Japanese confirmed this fear three months after Pearl Harbor with a second strike against the United States. This time the assault was less spectacular, but perhaps more audacious, an attack not on one of the nation’s outlying territorial possessions, but the mainland itself. It took place during an evening in late February. Most Americans were huddled around their radio sets, listening to an address that Roosevelt was giving on the war effort. But in Goleta, California (a town adjacent to Santa Barbara), the president’s words were suddenly interrupted by the sound of artillery shells exploding. Locals described themselves as being “almost scared to death.” The culprit, as newspapers reported the next morning, was a Japanese submarine that had penetrated to within a mile of shore and launched more than a dozen rounds at a local oil refinery. The harm, to everyone’s relief, was minimal: a damaged oil well and a small brush fire that started after several orange trees in a nearby grove went up in flames.

  But the attack raised concerns that went far beyond the immediate damage. And one of the most serious points of anxiety related to the nation’s trees.

  Only a few miles inland from the site of this second attack was located the San Padre National Forest. The proximity of this forest to the impact zone
highlighted a vulnerability that some in the army, the Forest Service, and other branches of government had been worrying about since before the war began: If Japan could attack the West Coast, then it could potentially set fire to the grand forests that ranged from Washington to Southern California. One month after the submarine attack at Goleta, Roosevelt wrote in a letter: “You are dead right about the danger of forest fires on the Pacific Coast. It is obvious that many of them will be deliberately set on fire if the Japs attack there.” In correspondence the following month, the president urged, “[W]e must guard against Japanese incendiary bombs and incendiary fires during the dry season. This is essential for our national future.”

  It was no exaggeration for Roosevelt to link the safety of the forests with “our national future.” World War II had once again turned the nation’s trees into a resource of paramount military importance. As in World War I, tree products could be found in nearly all elements of military life: housing, transport, weaponry, containers, fuel. The nation’s armed forces would require more than 6 billion board feet for the first year of combat operations alone. As an army major explained to a reporter, “If you could see us use every available piece [of wood] over and over, until nothing is left but slivers, you’d know just how important it is.” There would, quite simply, be no way to conduct an effective military campaign without drawing heavily on the country’s tree resources and keeping them safe from Japanese attacks.

  But the Japanese were not the only threat. In many foresters’ estimations, an equal, if not more pressing, concern was the carelessness of the average American. Reports at the time claimed that recklessness with cigarette butts, campfires, and matches caused nine out of ten wildfires, totaling more than a hundred thousand incidents annually. In bad years, this was destroying some 31 million acres, an area larger than the state of Pennsylvania. The danger that individuals posed had also grown more noticeable, to a certain extent, as industrial logging practices and train technology improved in ways that reduced their likelihood of starting fires. The question now had become: How could foresters get the message out to the citizenry and change the way that people thought about their tree resources?

  In the spring of 1942, shortly after the Goleta attack, a Southern California forest ranger suggested a potential solution. What if advertising agencies designed a public awareness campaign? It was a novel idea, but one in keeping with the times. The federal government had recently created the War Advertising Council (WAC), an agency tasked with marshaling the resources of private advertising firms in support of the war effort. The same techniques that were used to create demand for products, it was thought, could also drum up support for the war effort.

  The suggestion to mount an advertising campaign around fire prevention quickly rose through the bureaucratic channels. Soon representatives of the Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters were meeting with the WAC. And these conversations led to the creation of a home-front propaganda effort: the Wartime Forest Fire Prevention Campaign.

  In late July 1942, the campaign kicked off with a nationally broadcast radio address from the secretary of agriculture. He introduced the campaign’s theme, which was summed up in a catchy slogan: “Careless Matches Aid the Axis—Prevent Forest Fires.” In the months that followed, this message and others like it blanketed the country. They appeared in 12 million mail inserts, 2 million leaflets, and fifteen thousand billboards. In one campaign poster, a burning match was shown in the hand of a giddy, and grossly caricatured, General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister. In another image, the heads of Tojo and Hitler floated about a burning forest; beneath them read the words, “Our Carelessness: Their Secret Weapon.” Everywhere that people turned they were suddenly being told that their thoughtlessness around forests was tantamount to a direct attack against the country.

  Roosevelt, unsurprisingly, threw his weight as chief executive behind the effort. Two weeks after the launching of the campaign, he declared the first week of October to be Fire Protection Week, reviving an idea that had been launched in the 1920s but since fallen out of favor. His official proclamation noted,

  Uncontrolled fire, even in normal times, is a national menace. . . . Today, when every machine is being taxed to its fullest productive capacity, . . . when agents of our enemies are seeking to hinder us by every possible means, it is essential that destructive fire be brought under stricter control in order that victory may be achieved at the earliest date. Nothing less than the united vigilance and effort of all the people will suffice to break the grip of this menace.

  Up to this point in the war, the Japanese threat against the forests—which in many respects was the initial impetus for the newfound emphasis on forest fire prevention—had remained theoretical. But soon the situation changed. On the morning of September 9, a forest ranger working a patrol in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest spotted what appeared to be a Japanese aircraft. A few minutes later he noticed a plume of smoke rising from among the trees. Forest Service agents rushed to the site to combat the flames. While there, they discovered fragments of what seemed to be an incendiary bomb.

  It turned out that Japan had indeed recognized the strategic importance of the Pacific Northwest forests. Its military had launched a floatplane from a submarine stationed offshore to fly over the woods and dump a cargo of two eighty-kilogram explosives. The morning after the attack, a headline in the Los Angeles Times announced, “Jap Incendiary Sets Forest Fire!”

  The surprise air raid—one of two that Japan attempted—only reinforced the idea that all Americans needed to do their part to protect the forests. Shortly after the incident, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times cautioned:

  Fires started by carelessness burn just as hotly and destructively as any that might be caused by enemy incendiary bombs. While we are preparing to deal with those the Japs may try to start, we should resolve that preventable fires of domestic origin are not to be tolerated. It may help us in steeling our determination to get into the spirit of “Fire Protection Week.”

  The campaign against carelessness continued to build as the nation geared up for October’s Fire Protection Week.

  During this period, a new ally in the fight arrived from, of all places, Disney Studios. In August it had released its fifth animated feature film, the story of Bambi, a fawn who must learn to survive in the forests after his mother is shot by a hunter. It was an immediate hit, filling theaters and garnering three Academy Award nominations. In the film’s final act, Bambi’s father, the Great Prince, warns his son that the threat to the forest has returned: “It is man. He is here again. . . . We must go deep into the forest. Hurry, follow me!” Suddenly, a forest fire, one presumably started by the action of these hunters, breaks out. Bambi and his friends barely escape from danger, before reuniting on an island in the middle of a river.

  While the Disney film hadn’t been designed as war propaganda, it still packed a powerful message. And after its release, members of the WAC entered into talks about using Bambi as part of the fire prevention campaign. Walt Disney agreed to loan the image to the federal government for a year, and soon Bambi starred in an official war poster, staring out with big doe eyes, his friends Thumper and Flower by his side. The accompanying message read: “Please, Mister, Don’t Be Careless. Prevent Forest Fires. Greater Danger Than Ever!”

  The Bambi poster was a hit with the public. And the Advertising Council and Forest Service quickly determined that once the Disney contract ran out, they would need to replace the iconic deer with a new animal advocate, this time something original. During the course of 1944, several ideas were proposed and debated. By summertime, the campaign leadership had settled on a bear, the king of the North American forests. One of those involved suggested in a letter that it was to have a “nose short (Panda type), color black or brown; expression appealing, knowledgeable, quizzical; perhaps wearing a campaign (or Boy Scout) hat that typifies the outdoors and the woods.” To realize this vision, the campaign called u
pon Albert Staehle, an animal illustrator whose work routinely appeared on national magazine covers. Staehle then submitted a drawing of a brown bear wearing blue jeans and a forest ranger hat. The image met with general approval and it was quickly decided to name the character Smokey, supposedly in honor of “Smoky Joe” Martin, the recently deceased assistant chief of the New York Fire Department, whose bravery was legendary. The cause of forest protection suddenly had a new mascot; it was Smokey Bear.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese military remained intent on wreaking havoc against the nation’s trees. It had recently developed a new technology known as a fire balloon. They were unmanned weapons, filled with highly flammable hydrogen. These balloons were designed to be released in Japan, traveling high in the atmosphere along the newly discovered jet stream, crossing the Pacific Ocean, and finally descending onto America, where the entire hydrogen-filled contraption would explode. In late 1944, at the same moment that Smokey Bear was being born, Japan began launching thousands of these balloons. They threatened to become a plague upon the western forests and potentially cause massive losses of life.

  While the danger seemed all too real, technical problems and wet weather prevented nearly all of the balloons from succeeding in starting fires. The Japanese nonetheless proclaimed the operation a success. According to John McPhee, who wrote about this little-remembered episode in The New Yorker, “Japanese propaganda broadcasts mentioned great fires and an American populace in panic.”