That October, Robert Underwood Johnson, former editor of Century and close friend of Muir (and ambassador to Italy for a short time), wrote FDR a six-point letter explaining why damming the Tuolumne River was a “backward step in conservation,” an “invasion of the national park system for commercial purposes.”40 Johnson fervently believed that America would be defined in later centuries not only by what engineers had built but also by what it had refused to destroy. Because he had persuaded TR to hold a conservation conference at the White House in 1908, Johnson hoped to persuade FDR to join his side in the Hetch Hetchy debate.41 Johnson told Roosevelt it made no sense to pull water from an arid part of California while ignoring the Sacramento River Valley, which had a “superlative abundance of good water.”42 As a lobbyist, he knew that convincing a Navy Department official, particularly one with the surname Roosevelt, would surely be a boon to the anti-dam cause.
However, Johnson harbored an uncomfortable suspicion that Pinchot, who was in favor of the dam, had tempered Franklin Roosevelt’s preservationist convictions with a “use it or lose it” mentality. There was truth in this. But more to the point, Roosevelt was a firm believer in public waterpower projects. Regardless of his personal beliefs, though, he wasn’t going to defy President Wilson over a dam project on the far-off Sierras. He opted to dodge the controversy by simply remaining silent. “I am very glad to hear from you about the Hetch Hetchy bill and it will stir me into going over the matter more carefully,” Roosevelt wrote to Johnson. “I had already noticed that the great majority of the important papers have opposed the bill, but, on the other hand, many prominent people, such as Gifford Pinchot, who have studied the matter, seem to have come to the conclusion that the bill in its present form is very different from the original and have given their support to it. I can assure you that I shall study the whole question with great care and do what I can to see that justice is done. I feel sure that when the bill comes to the president he will give it careful study before he passes it on.”43
Johnson replied quickly, warning FDR that Pinchot had made a “mistake in judgment” and that he believed the Wilson administration was wrong to let the bill come up for a vote in Congress.44 Johnson charged that the White House, by not opposing the bill, had become complicit in the destruction of Yosemite National Park.45 If Yosemite couldn’t be protected, Johnson wrote, it didn’t bode well for other national parks and monuments.46
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt spent time at a shooting range in Maryland in 1917. Taking aim at left is Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane. Roosevelt had handled guns since his boyhood, but had little enthusiasm for hunting animals as an adult. He only occasionally participated in hunts for ducks or opossums.
What Johnson most likely didn’t know was that FDR had become close friends with Secretary of the Interior Lane. Both were new to executive branch politics, they shared a jocular enthusiasm for cocktail hour, pranks, and the civil engineering “miracles” of hydroelectric power—in that order. In terms of national resource policy, “reclamation” and “irrigation” were favorite words of both men. They heartily approved of the attitude of chief engineer William Mulholland, who watched water flow from the newly built Los Angeles Aqueduct for the first time and declared, “There it is. Take it.”47
On December 19, 1913, Congress approved the Raker Act. It was a devastating blow to the Sierra Club, and John Muir’s heart was broken (he died only a few months later). Johnson was disappointed in FDR but he realized that it was difficult for any Navy Department official to publicly cross swords with the commander in chief. In spite of the Hetch Hetchy issue, Johnson and FDR’s friendship solidified. They found common ground in protecting the eastern forests of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. (In later years FDR would rationalize his silence on Hetch Hetchy in 1913 as a show of support for municipal ownership of public power utilities.)48
Roosevelt’s fraternal bond with Secretary Lane also grew weekly. As a joke, they founded the “Franklin Club”—an informal group of high-ranking Wilsonian Democrats who had in common a first name and an anti–Wall Street mind-set. The other prominent member was Secretary of Agriculture Franklin Houston. The three Franklins regularly played poker and pinochle over cocktails.49 Horace Albright, an employee at the Department of the Interior who worked closely with Lane and was in a position to know about the Franklin Club, once said that his primary recollection of FDR during those years was of his skirt-chasing. “He always escorted a beautiful woman, not his wife,” Albright recalled later in life. “She was never really identified. Seventy years later I read an article in American Heritage about the great love of his life, Lucy [Mercer] Rutherfurd. And sure enough, there was a picture of this lovely lady of long ago.”50
Despite their friendship, Roosevelt was mistaken in thinking that Lane was a genuine nature preservationist. Lane had a commercial developer’s mentality, and in his view, his department’s main function was to make money by leasing public lands to drilling, mining, and timbering interests. Overall, he felt that nature should be conquered by American engineering might. “A wilderness,” Lane wrote, “no matter how impressive and beautiful, does not satisfy this soul of mine (if I have that kind of thing). It is a challenge to man. It says, ‘Master me! Put me to use! Make me something more than I am!’”51
III
In the summer of 1914, Franklin and Eleanor—like most people—were transfixed by the events unfolding in Europe. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo that June. His assassination inflamed a long-simmering situation, and by the end of July, when Germany declared war on Russia, the World War I was under way. The turmoil in Europe accelerated the pace of Roosevelt’s work at the Navy Department. Daniels dispatched him for an inspection tour of the Pacific Northwest. This was the beginning of his lifelong love for the state of Washington. His three great passions—forestry, ships, and ornithology—all converged in Puget Sound.
With the war beginning, ensuring the strength of the two-ocean navy took precedence over all else, including the power of the Weeks Act to create more national forests in the American East. “[I] cannot devote as much time to forestry matters as I would like,” Roosevelt admitted. “However, I am able to go ahead with my own planting in Dutchess County, and succeed in interesting a good many people in that locality.”52
Roosevelt’s primary conservation goal during the war was to promote reforestation as a key means of curtailing floods in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. A devastating flood in southern Ohio in March 1913, right after Wilson was sworn in, had made an indelible impression on Roosevelt, who, with Secretary Daniels traveling abroad, was left in charge of the Navy Department’s relief efforts. More than 460 people died in the disaster, and there were indications that the Ohio River had risen twenty-one feet in a single day. “Suddenly called upon by the President to make all arrangements for sending surgeons, attendants, supplies, etc. out to the flood district in Ohio,” Franklin wrote to Eleanor. “I had a hectic time getting the machinery going.”53 In Roosevelt’s estimation, the violent flood in Ohio was caused, in part, by deforestation—a word not often found in Navy Department memos. George Perkins Marsh, however, had helped propagate this very theory in his groundbreaking Man and Nature.54 Another influential voice was that of Colonel Curtis Townsend, president of the Mississippi River Commission and District Engineer of the Army Corps of Engineers, based in St. Louis. In his speech “Flood Control of the Mississippi River” (1913), Townsend advocated for dependence on levees, dismissing reforestation, parallel channels, and other means of tempering water levels.55
Roosevelt tried to become a national voice in the reforestation movement. Traveling to New Orleans and Pensacola in conjunction with Navy Department work, he spoke with civil engineers about reforestation and confining rivers into single straight channels spread across floodplains. He hoped to have some effect on Townsend. “Personally,” Roosevelt wrote to Townsend, “I can
not help feeling that as the country develops more attention is going to be paid to reforestation everywhere and that with increased knowledge of the value of trees, not only to themselves but to agriculture in general, especially in hilly districts where streams originate, floods will be decreased to a certain extent, probably a comparatively small percentage by the absorption of rainfall at the source.”56
While living in Washington, D.C., in 1915, the Roosevelts took the opportunity to remodel Springwood. Sara and Franklin planned the renovation to accommodate the growing brood: Franklin and Eleanor’s fourth child, Franklin Jr., was born in August 1914, and Eleanor was soon expecting again. (John, the fifth child, was born in March 1916.) Franklin referred to them collectively as “the chicks” in letters to his wife. The west side of the estate’s main house, which offered sweeping Hudson River views, was barely changed.57 Two fieldstone wings, however, were added to the residence; Franklin gained an office, as well as a spectacular library (which eventually held around fourteen thousand volumes; more than two thousand naval paintings, prints, and lithographs; and 1.2 million stamps). Sara Delano Roosevelt displayed his fine collection of Dutchess County birds in glass cabinets in the front hall.58 The old porch was torn out in favor of a fieldstone terrace with a balustrade and columned portico that stretched around the entrance of the house. Everything Franklin’s uncle Frederic Delano had taught him about Downing-style landscape architecture was integrated to at least some degree at Springwood.
During World War I, anyone from upstate New York whom FDR met in official Washington was embraced as his “neighbor” and “friend”—no two words were more emblematic of his style of politicking. He eagerly gossiped about upstate happenings. In the coming decades, he would downplay his town house in Manhattan’s East Sixties and continue to present himself as a proud Hudson River Valley tree farmer. When the New York State Forestry Association had the temerity to print its letterhead with Manhattan listed as FDR’s primary place of residence, he squawked. “I wish you would change my address on the Association’s letter paper to Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York,” he wrote, “as I never have been and hope I never will be a resident of New York City.”59
Another way that Roosevelt stayed involved with New York affairs from official Washington was through the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). When he was in Manhattan, Roosevelt made a point of stopping by the BSA’s national office. FDR believed that elements of the BSA program—tree identification, bird and animal identification, woodcraft, astronomy, hiking rules, the ability to complete long walks, starting campfires, preventing forest fires, tracking animals, swimming, and lifesaving techniques—involved the same outdoors values he’d internalized as a boy. Learning to be land stewards and forest caretakers created a sense of virtue and public service in the youngsters.60
Much has been written about how FDR ably used his navy years as a stepping-stone to higher office, but his attempt to rush the process in wartime 1914 is often overlooked. Impetuously, FDR decided to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate that year, but Wilson didn’t back his action and Roosevelt lost the primary to the Tammany Hall candidate. Secretary Daniels didn’t hold his assistant’s ambition against him. The next year, he gave Roosevelt the honor of attending the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in California as the Navy Department’s representative. On the cross-country train ride, Roosevelt’s companion was Vice President Thomas Marshall, who simply did not romanticize the natural world. When FDR marveled at seeing the Front Range of the Rockies, Marshall puffed on a cigar and merely remarked, “I never did like scenery.”
IV
The establishment of the National Park Service (NPS) was secured in March 1915 at a conference at the University of California in Berkeley, led by two UC alumni: Stephen T. Mather (class of 1887) and Horace Albright (class of 1912). Mather was tall, athletic, and blessed with prodigious energy. A borax company executive, he could make even scorching Death Valley—where borax was mined—seem like paradise. Knowing the NPS was strapped for cash, Lane hired Mather, a millionaire, as its director at a token salary of $1 per year. Even though Lane hoped that Mather would reconcile the competing interests of the NPS, Mather’s sympathies lay with the conservationists—he was an early member of the Sierra Club. In a fortunate turn of events for the American conservation movement, Mather had the foresight to employ Albright as his personal assistant. Albright was only twenty-three. He would go on to serve as superintendent of Yellowstone National Park from 1919 to 1929 and then as NPS director from 1929 to 1933.
The tragedy of Hetch Hetchy had brought these smart conservation leaders together in Berkeley for a symposium on how best to protect America’s scenic wonders. The abuse of Yosemite National Park had galvanized the best and the brightest. Brought into the effort at Berkeley was Gilbert Grosvenor, the editor of the National Geographic Society magazine. During the summer of 1915 the “Mather mountain party” hiked two hundred miles of the Sierra to publicize the need for a meaningful National Park Service.61 The conference helped to establish the University of California as the unofficial partner of those overseeing the national parks, in the same way that Yale Forestry School became a think tank for the National Forest Service. The activities in and around Berkeley combined with Mather’s unceasing campaign to build a coalition around the country—and notably, in the national capital. At the same time, a grassroots movement was in motion, led by the Sierra Club, the American Civic Association, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. And their efforts were rewarded with a bill forming a new government agency to monitor and maintain parks on the federal level.
On August 25, 1916, President Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act into law. Mather was to head the new agency, with Horace Albright assisting him. Franklin Roosevelt was delighted that President Wilson—following in the footsteps of Republican presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—had taken this tremendous step forward for the conservation cause. “There is nothing so American as our national parks,” Roosevelt averred years later. “The scenery and wild life are native and the fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people; that what it is and what it is in the process of making is for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. Thus the parks stand as the outward symbol of this great human principle.”62
The outline of the purposes of the National Park Service (NPS) was, in FDR’s opinion, the most important part of the legislation. “To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for future generations.”63 Indeed, Roosevelt was glad that the Department of the Interior was in the business of both providing public recreation opportunities and preserving nature. He worried that if proper camping facilities, scenic roads, restrooms, and hiking trails weren’t built at all national parks, then their pristine features would eventually be destroyed by tourists.64 This was just one way in which the difficulties of the NPS’s dual mission—to prevent ecological injury to parks while simultaneously promoting tourism—manifested itself.
The trio of leaders at the Department of the Interior seemed ideal. Lane was the bureaucrat with Wilson’s ear, Mather the high conceptualizer, and Albright the workhorse who selected small towns to serve as “gateways” to national parks. They had a bevy of challenges. In 1916 the Department of the Interior—responsible for fourteen national parks and twenty-one national monuments—had no proper protocol from which to manage. The Army, for example, detailed troops to Yellowstone and Sequoia to police against hunting, grazing, timbering, and vandalism. Franklin Roosevelt was concerned that the new NPS had yet to establish a foothold in the American East. The timber lobby had effectively fought against protection for such sites as Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and New Hampshire’s White Mountains. No national park would be designated in the East until 1919, when Lafayette National Park was established in Maine. (It was
enlarged and renamed in 1929 to become Acadia National Park.)
In early 1917 Assistant Secretary Roosevelt undertook an inspection tour of Hispaniola in connection with the occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo by the U.S. Marine Corps. There is some evidence that he wanted to open a chain of grocery stores in Port-au-Prince as a business proposition. At one point Roosevelt decided to play a practical joke on a reporter assigned to cover the inspection tour in Haiti. It was bird-faking—lying about seeing a rare avian species—of the highest order. FDR wrote about his close encounter with the nonexistent “Haitian Shrink Bird” in his (unpublished) 1917 trip report: “As you know, there are various species of birds believed to be extinct—the Dodo and the Great Auk. The same thing was true of the great Haitian Shrink Bird. The last specimens were seen seventy or eighty years ago. This rare bird has the curious quality of shrinking away to nothing when shot.”65
In March 1917, while boarding the USS Hancock to return home from Hispaniola, Roosevelt was informed that Germany had issued a warning: any American vessels remaining in the waters off western Europe after twenty-four hours would be fired on “without further notice.” Roosevelt hustled his way out of the Caribbean tropics back to Washington. A few days later, Woodrow Wilson told Congress that diplomatic relations with Germany had been severed. On April 2 the president called Congress into a special session to request a declaration of war against Germany. “Everyone wanted to attend this historic address and it was with greatest difficulty that Franklin got me a seat,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled in This Is My Story. “I went and listened breathlessly.”66
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