American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  This was one of the great ironies of the postwar period. Though wood was no less important than it had been in earlier times, the average person hardly noticed. This was as true for consumer products as it was for home construction. The suburban world that Levitt helped to create betrayed scant evidence of its utter reliance upon trees—indeed, this dependence was one of the reasons that in Western Europe, where wood was a less available commodity, there arose almost no overnight subdivisions.

  By the late 1950s, the wooden wonderland of suburbia was being heralded as a symbol of the triumph of American capitalism. It became an instrumental tool in the ideological battle that the United States was waging against the Soviet Union. As Levitt famously declared, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.” Government officials even decided to use a typical suburban home as the centerpiece of the 1959 American exhibition in Moscow—Levitt was supposedly asked to provide one of his homes but demurred. The resulting wood-framed model home—which was bisected by a walkway and consequently dubbed “Splitnik,” a play on the Soviet satellite Sputnik—served as the site for one of the most famous exchanges of the entire Cold War. While standing near the home’s General Electric kitchen, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev got into a heated discussion, later dubbed the “Kitchen Debate,” over the merits of American capitalism. Khrushchev, who was skeptical that such a home could possibly be available to an average worker, questioned the value of all the modern appliances that lined the walls. Nixon, in response, issued the immortal line: “Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strengths of rockets?”

  The suburbs may have offered a projection of strength abroad, but they were increasingly coming under fire on the home front. Critics charged that they stunted social development, left women (few of whom belonged to the workforce) hopelessly isolated, and bred a dangerous degree of conformity. In 1956, John Keats marshaled these claims into a polemic titled The Crack in the Picture Window. The title was an allusion to an oversized living room window that the Levitts had begun including in nearly all units they built after 1949. According to Keats, “[I]f there was any cohesive force acting on typical development householders, it would be that of hatred.” This sentiment was echoed several years later in sociologist William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which focused on how the new suburban lifestyle inexorably sapped the spirit of its male inhabitants, who worked long days for large corporations in the city in order to earn enough income to support their suburban families, with which they hardly ever had a chance to spend any time. The subject of suburban alienation subsequently became a trope for a generation of writers, like Raymond Carver and John Updike.

  But discontentment was hardly the only problem. Perhaps even more troubling was the issue of race. Though subdivisions originated as a solution to a housing crisis, they quickly evolved into all-white enclaves. Partly this was the result of whites fleeing from cities in reaction to urban decline and the threat of school integration that emerged as a result of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation unconstitutional. But the lily-white nature of suburbs was also facilitated by the builders, who actively excluded African Americans (whether veterans or otherwise) from the communities they had planned. Levitt was no exception. In his words, “We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.” There was not a single black resident among the eighty-two thousand people who populated Levittown in its first decade. Civil rights activists repeatedly challenged Levitt’s policies, and by the late 1950s the federal courts declared that excluding blacks from planned communities was unconstitutional. Levitt nonetheless remained defiant, violating court pronouncements on the grounds that it was a market necessity.

  By the early 1960s, the man who helped introduce suburbia was no longer considered a national hero. His racial politics and an increasing dissatisfaction with the subdivisions that he had built or inspired turned him into something of a pariah. As Wetherell wrote in The Man Who Loved Levittown, “What has Levitt ever done? He built these places and never looked back. He made his pile, then didn’t want to know nothing.” The residents of the third Levittown, in New Jersey, even voted to have the town’s name returned to its original Willingboro in 1963. Circumstances quickly grew more difficult for Levitt—in a period of four years, from 1962 to 1966, his father, mother, and brother all passed away. By the end of the decade, Levitt was ready to exit the homebuilding business, and in 1968 sold his company to the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (ITT) for $92 million in stock. The transaction netted Levitt $62 million, but much of this evaporated when the share price of ITT later collapsed. He attempted to reenter the mass-housing industry several times during the 1980s, but the original magic was long gone, and those who prepurchased his homes found themselves with nothing but unbuilt promises. He died in early 1994, at the age of eighty-six, his legacy some 140,000 American homes.

  Levitt’s disappearance from the trade ultimately had little impact on the trend that he’d helped inaugurate. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, suburbs spread out all across America. As of 1980, some 100 million people, more than 40 percent of the nation, lived in suburbs, a higher proportion than lived in either rural or urban areas. As Kenneth Jackson observed, “By 1985 reasonable people could debate whether the United States was a racist nation, an imperialist nation, or a religious nation, but scarcely anyone could quarrel with its designation as a suburban nation.” The suburbs, taken as a whole, represented a dramatic population shift, as great as any in U.S. history. An entire generation moved out of cities and into the surrounding hinterlands.

  From the perspective of land use, the rise of suburbia turned millions of acres of farmland, often abandoned or failing, into an endless sea of grass, infinite swaths of green carpeting, broken up only by planted trees and wooden boxes. But the suburban revolution was far from the only significant land-use shift during the postwar period. Major change was also taking place in the nation’s private forests, which comprised over 350 million acres, an area more than twice the size of Texas.

  “Timber Is a Crop!”

  IN EARLY JUNE 1941—almost exactly six years before the Levitt family stepped onto a worn-out Long Island potato field to break ground on their famous subdivision—another group was gathering, shovels in hand, on the other side of the nation. The property upon which they stood—some 120,000 acres located on the western side of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State—had formerly been covered with Douglas firs, primeval giants whose evergreen tops seemed to scrape against the clouds. But now many of those trees were charred stumps, the casualties of the forest fires that followed on the heels of industrial logging. Lumber companies typically abandoned such holdings once the trees were ruined, but this day marked a new approach. The shovels were for planting new trees, and the land, which belonged to the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, would soon earn the official designation of “Tree Farm No. 1,” first in a movement that would spread across the nation.

  The idea that trees could be grown to produce lumber was not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. It was a tenet of European forestry and was something that Pinchot had been advocating throughout his entire career. In his autobiography, he declared, “Trees may be grown as a crop just as corn may be grown as a crop. The farmer gets crop after crop of corn, oats, wheat, cotton, tobacco, and hay from his farm. The forester gets crop after crop of logs, cordwood, shingles, poles, or railroad ties from his forest, and even some return from regulated grazing.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, Pinchot’s message had already resonated with numerous conservation-minded individuals. Most notable, perhaps, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  But the logging industry had largely avoided the practice. Though most lumbermen expressed support for forestry techniques, they chafed at the notion of act
ually planting trees or undertaking the serious labor required to implement sustainable forestry. It was costly and time-consuming, with the rewards unseen for a generation. And, as they frequently pointed out, the nation’s tax system made it more economical to exploit virgin lands and abandon them than to invest in long-term projects.

  By the 1930s, however, attitudes among lumbermen toward tree planting and sustainable forestry began to soften. One factor was the continued growth of a forestry consciousness among a generation of loggers. A second was the rise in stumpage prices. A third was growing talk at the state and federal level of alterations to the tax policy that would facilitate the rehabilitation of cut-over lands. And, perhaps most important, lumbermen started to worry that the government, which had largely left the industry-owned forests alone out of respect for private property rights, was finally going to insist on regulations if loggers didn’t take action. They had reason to fear this. In 1933, the Copeland Report, a Senate-sponsored study that provided the most comprehensive review of the country’s tree resources to date, concluded “that practically all of the major problems of American forestry center in, or have grown out of, private ownership.” It seemed only a matter of time before FDR’s administration did something in response.

  In the late 1930s the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, so often at the forefront of the lumber industry, instituted a number of policies designed to demonstrate a reformed attitude. It began by hiring a dedicated public relations executive, and one of his first initiatives was a 1937 advertising campaign built around Pinchot’s timeworn slogan “Timber is a crop!” But this was more rhetoric than policy. To show that the firm was serious, Weyerhaeuser executives soon started making plans for a public demonstration of what their sloganeering amounted to. The project, named “Operation Rehab,” would take 120,000 acres of burned-over land near Montesano, Washington, and turn it into a showpiece for forestry techniques, including extensive replanting and fire control. During the course of planning, it was suggested that the firm dub their project a “tree farm,” a catchy term that seemed likely to resonate with the media and the public. A local newspaper editor then proposed that this inaugural tree farm be named in honor of Charles H. Clemons, a pioneer logger in western Washington. Thus, the Clemons Tree Farm was born. The formal dedication took place on June 12, 1941, before an overflow crowd whose guests included Phil Weyerhaeuser, the grandson of the firm’s founder, and Arthur B. Langlie, the governor of Washington.

  At the dedication ceremony, Langlie prophesied that “[t]he Clemons Tree Farm . . . may set the pace for millions of acres of such lands throughout the state.” This was meant to be an optimistic assessment, but in truth the governor had greatly underestimated the potential scope of tree farms. Five months after the Montesano groundbreaking, the National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association resolved that a national tree farm system ought to be instituted. The NLMA’s educational arm then put together a loose set of criteria for inclusion in this American Tree Farm System. It would cover “privately owned forest-land dedicated to the growing of forest crops for commercial purposes, protected and managed for continuous production of forest products.” This marked the first time that a certification system was put in place to evaluate forest health. Lumbermen whose lands met this definition and who wanted to participate in the program received official signs emblazoned with the words “Tree Farm” in large green letters within a white diamond. These signs promised a degree of free publicity and goodwill from the local communities.

  Logging firms rushed to emulate the model that Weyerhaeuser had initiated. Within the first year, the total amount of land designated as tree farms grew from the initial 120,000 acres to more than 5 million. By mid-1942, the idea had expanded beyond the Pacific Northwest and into the South, turning the program into a truly national phenomenon. And it showed no signs of slowing down.

  Nonetheless, not everyone embraced tree farms as a sign of progress. Lyle Watts, the chief of the Forest Service, lamented that it amounted to little more than a fanciful public relations stunt designed to ward off government regulation. Speaking before a 1943 meeting of the Society of American Foresters, he said, “I cannot let the misleading publicity of the forest industries pass unchallenged.” While he acknowledged that the tree farm movement might represent a positive step forward if “high standards” were maintained, he cautioned, “Unfortunately, mediocre or lower performance has served to qualify some properties for the ‘Tree Farm’ designation.”

  Watts’s criticisms—more accurate than many of those involved might have publicly acknowledged—were aimed at the major industrial players who had been the earliest adopters of tree farms. But the movement was also rapidly growing beyond the titans of commercial logging. The same year that Watts voiced his concerns, the state of Alabama certified the first nonindustrial property as a tree farm, marking the start of a new era.

  Small landholders were a big issue in timber production. As a group, they controlled nearly 300 million acres of commercial forest, almost 60 percent of the total at midcentury (the rest was split between the government, which held nearly 150 million acres, and the forest products industry, which owned the remaining 60 million acres). Bernhard Fernow, the chief of the Division of Forestry before Pinchot, had recognized early on that it was among farmers that the practice of forestry could see the greatest gains. He considered them “the most desirable” candidates, “since they probably form the most stable class of our population, and can devote the most care and attention to the management of their wood lots.” But the nation’s farmers and small landholders had lagged behind in the implementation of management practices for their woodlands. The tree farm movement, first the province of the large logging firms, eventually developed into a helpful tool for encouraging better management of small timber tracts. It was free to join, it was simple to understand, and it offered additional revenue (as well as tax breaks).

  It was also especially well publicized. Throughout the postwar years, the NLMA and its affiliated lobbying arms devoted expansive resources to popularizing the tree farm concept. They retained writers like Stewart Holbrook, the great raconteur of the Pacific Northwest forests, to help sell the idea. They funded radio shows, such as The Adventures of Peter Pine, and films, such as Tomorrow’s Trees, to spread the message of the importance of conservation to a wide audience. And they even recruited celebrity endorsements. In the 1960s, Andy Griffith, perhaps the most recognized television personality of the age, served as an official spokesman for tree farms. In one of his recorded messages, he explained,

  See I’m a tree farmer myself. My tree farm in Dare County, North Carolina, is growing strong. We have 135 acres. . . . So I know what the American tree farm system is all about and I believe in it. . . . There are about 4 million of us private landowners in the United States, and altogether we own nearly sixty percent of this country’s commercial land. . . . Without your volunteer effort and help the tree farm program wouldn’t be where it is today.

  Fueled by such widespread publicity, the tree farm movement grew steadily. By 1959, there were more than 50 million acres nationally controlled by 15,798 participants, the great majority of whom were small landholders. There were tree farms in Maine, where the lumber industry began, in the Lake States, where Weyerhaeuser revolutionized the industry, in the South, where second-generation longleaf pines grew around abandoned lumber towns, and in the Pacific Northwest, where the largest lumber firms resided. Soon tree farms would appear in all fifty states. A 1964 opinion poll determined that 59 percent of Americans had heard of tree farms—remarkably, only 12 percent of them realized that it was an industry-sponsored program.

  The American Tree Farm System continued to expand into the early 1990s, when the total amount of certified land topped 90 million acres. In the years that followed, the gross acreage began to shrink, not from lack of interest, but because of the rise of rival certification programs. These included the Sustainable Forest Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Counci
l. Today, hundreds of millions of private forest acres are party to one of these certification programs. And the emphasis on renewable forests has helped allow new growth to continually exceed annual cuttings—a significant achievement in a nation where, in 1918, almost six trees had been harvested for every new one that appeared. The American Tree Farm System, meanwhile, continues into the present and boasts more than ninety thousand members, inheritors of a tradition that began with the Clemons Tree Farm.

  The postwar tree farm movement had given a name and purpose to the conservation-minded (and sometimes publicity-minded) owners of the country’s private forestland. But quite a different story was unfolding in the nation’s public forests during the same period. The issue there wasn’t only in producing timber sustainably, but in making room for a new role: recreation. America’s emergency reserve of public timberland had slowly evolved into the nation’s playground, a site for summer vacations, winter getaways, and weekend hunting trips. And the demand for these activities would increase exponentially in the years following World War II. As a result, private citizens and the government would be forced to reevaluate just what these forests and their trees were actually for.