Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  That very year, Florida began abolishing all state income and inheritance taxes. As a result, land speculation was an extremely lucrative business in America’s so-called New Eden. A couple of Roosevelt’s Groton and Harvard friends had already invested heavily in Florida real estate. Towns like Fort Lauderdale and Miami were booming and in need of hired hands for construction projects. But Roosevelt also learned about the impoverished conditions in much of hurricane-plagued Florida. Tenant farmers in Dade County lived in lean-tos without electricity or running water. Hookworm, pellagra, typhoid fever, and malaria were common. Soil depletion was crippling the state’s agricultural sector.32

  The passengers of the Larooco celebrate the landing of a trophy fish in 1924. Roosevelt is seated at right. The Larooco was a secondhand houseboat, owned by Roosevelt and his friend, John Lawrence. Sailing out of Miami (or “My-am-eye,” as FDR spelled it in his journal), the Larooco not only gave Roosevelt a place to relax with a measure of privacy, it introduced him firsthand to Florida’s varied coastal habitats.

  With John S. Lawrence, a friend from his Harvard days, Roosevelt purchased the Larooco (a portmanteau for Lawrence, Roosevelt, and Company) and planned—along with Maunsell Crosby of Rhinebeck—a grand trip to Florida for early 1924.33 Not long after his birthday in January, Roosevelt found himself in Jacksonville, ready to explore a multitude of Florida towns. “Went fishing in the inlet,” Roosevelt recorded in the Larooco log on the first day with Lawrence and Crosby. “Caught one sea trout. [Crosby] identified 33 different species of birds, including a very large flock of black skimmers. Also a flock of Greater Snow Goose.”34

  Liberated from the New York cold and in the easy company of friends, Roosevelt thrived in the Florida sunshine. All his troubles seemed to dissolve when he was surrounded by dolphins and shorebirds. Roosevelt and Crosby, now a professional ornithologist, compiled an AOU checklist of the various Florida birds they encountered; it was just like old times, but it was an unfair competition because Franklin, unable to walk, was usually confined to using his binoculars from the Larooco’s deck.35 On most days he, Lawrence, and Crosby goofed around in their bathing suits, went for lazy swims, discussed flora and fauna, picnicked on sandy beaches, and tried to catch perch on a hardline for their supper. “I know [the recreation] is doing the legs good, and though I have worn the braces hardly at all, I get lots of exercise crawling around, and I know the muscles are better than ever before,” Roosevelt wrote to Sara from Miami. “Maunsell has been a delightful companion and we have any number of tastes in common from birds and forestry to collecting stamps!”36

  With the Larooco moored in the background, Roosevelt (center) and friends Maunsell Crosby (left) and Sir Oswald Mosley (right) played statues in shallow water off Florida in 1926. Crosby, an influential ornithologist, lived near the Roosevelts in Dutchess County and was a longtime adviser to FDR. Sir Oswald, a British politician and socialite, was lively company, but he lost his standing with Roosevelt and many others when he founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932.

  On the trip, Roosevelt learned a lot about the Everglades firsthand, sometimes nosing the Larooco into its waters. The expedition saw so much marine wilderness—so many coral reefs, tangled mangrove swamps, pods of dolphins, and herds of manatees—that Roosevelt couldn’t help being affected. To him and Crosby, the Everglades were a wilderness that needed to be properly cared for by scientific experts. Biological studies were being made only spottily in Florida. Roosevelt, who had interacted with many local farmers, worried that the drainage, drying, and oxidation of the Lake Okeechobee–Everglades ecosystem had led to the rapid depletion of peat soils. Stephen Mather, director of the National Park Service, would soon propose that the Everglades be considered for national park status. Roosevelt, having finally experienced the swamp’s majesty firsthand, was strongly in favor of the idea. But Roosevelt also backed Collier’s successful effort to finish the Tamiami Trail. This was an example of the trade-offs—preservation versus development—for which FDR became famous as president: ambitious infrastructure construction followed by the creation of a new park.

  Convinced, along with many Floridians, that protection of the Everglades should be a priority, FDR collaborated with Robert Sterling Yard, executive secretary of the National Parks Association. Yard was one of the most respected authorities on national parks. A journalist who became an ardent supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade, Yard acted as the unofficial publicist for the national parks movement—for instance, as the editor of Century magazine during the early Wilson years, Yard promoted John Muir’s work on behalf of Yosemite National Park.37 Yard’s 1919 Book of the National Parks became very popular with members of the half dozen outdoors organizations to which Roosevelt belonged. Yard told Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida, a Democrat, that FDR had become “one of our valued coworkers” in the crusade to make the Everglades a national park. Yard encouraged Roosevelt to lobby against sugar growers of Dade County, home to one section of the slow-flowing wetlands. “If we wait until these lands show commercial values,” Yard wrote to FDR, “we’ll never get our park.”38

  For birders like Roosevelt and Yard, 1924 was a banner year. In June, Congress at long last, authorized the appropriation of $1.5 million for the acquisition of bottomlands along the upper Mississippi River to establish what would become a seminal migratory bird refuge. Roosevelt, still a card-carrying AOU member, became interested in the idea of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Biological Survey’s purchasing habitat in Florida to save the great white heron (great egret, Ardea alba) and the roseate spoonbill (Platalea ajaja). Heartsick from reports that some of America’s famed marshes—Montezuma (New York); Lower Klamath Lake (California); Malheur Lake (Oregon); Kankakee (Indiana); Horicon (Wisconsin); and the Souris river bottoms (North Dakota)—were shrinking away, Roosevelt dreamed of a national refuge system from Washington to Florida and from Louisiana to the Canadian border to dramatically increase the dwindling population of waterfowl.

  In October 1924, working as an AOU advance man, Roosevelt was plotting to take the Larooco on more Florida cruises during the coming winters. “The Larooco’s engines are going in,” Roosevelt wrote to Crosby, “and I shall join her about February 1st and am keen to have you with me.”39 Crosby, who was compiling a guidebook titled Birds of Dutchess County, signed up for the adventure, hoping to identify suitable habitat for federal purchase.

  “I wish that Pearson [president of National Audubon] would get busy and accomplish something along the line of creating a bird refuge, national, state, or by private enterprise all through the southern end of Florida,” Roosevelt wrote to Crosby on October 13, 1924. “To do so now is practicable; to wait another 10 years would be to lose the whole project. The protected area should include practically all the land south of a line drawn from Florida City on the East Coast to the Everglades or Chokoloskee on the West Coast. This would include all of the so-called Shark River, or Ten Thousand Islands Country. I have been there now for 2 years and there is no question that it is an ideal reservation for the protection of an enormous amount of bird life.”40

  After his first Florida outdoors adventure in 1923, Roosevelt wrote out his own conservation manifesto. Deforestation and “game hogs” hell-bent on slaughtering an unsustainable number of forest animals were at the top of his list of concerns. He hoped to help “charismatic” species like the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) rebound. His wish list was the following:

  (1) The creation of additional game refuges on public lands and certain areas owned by private individuals or associations, and along certain portions of our seacoast and streams.

  (2) The gradual elimination of “special” laws affecting open season in individual localities, i.e., making the existing federal laws more general in their enforcement throughout the nation.

  (3) Educating the public that songbirds, rodents, etc. are not game.

  (4) The furthe
r elimination of the hunter.

  (5) A standardization of the license system and an improvement of morale among so-called sportsmen.41

  Encouraged by Crosby, who would soon be in Central and South America to collect specimens of wild birds for the American Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt stepped up his conservation efforts and participation in nonprofits. He became an active fund-raiser for the American Museum of Natural History (to further honor Theodore Roosevelt) and oversaw the enlargement of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station at Syracuse University.42 He pushed to have California’s Sequoia National Park renamed Theodore Roosevelt National Park, as well as for its boundaries to be enlarged to include pristine Kings Canyon.

  The magnificent sequoias reminded Roosevelt of the gnarled, weathered, though beautiful Balmville tree near Algonac. Roosevelt believed the sequoias, the grandest of living things, king of conifers, were priceless. California’s other “giants”—the colossal sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce, and silver firs—should be likewise cherished as heirlooms. But preserving the noble forest trees in California in the age of Harding and Coolidge was an uphill battle. “The Roosevelt sequoia project looks discouraging,” Yard wrote to Roosevelt in 1924. “We could have got everything six or seven years ago, but now I’m afraid that the water-power interests have made up their minds that the canyons shall never enter a completely conserved reservation.”43

  After a few years of fighting, FDR and Yard lost the Sierra battle. On April 3, 1926, Congress decided not to change the name of Sequoia National Park, nor to enlarge it to include Kings Canyon. Later, as president, FDR would revisit the preservation of Kings Canyon and the majestic trackless forests of the High Sierra.44

  IV

  The year 1924 was important for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Governor Al Smith of New York, who was running to be the Democratic nominee for president, asked FDR to deliver his nominating speech that June at Madison Square Garden. It was a high-risk venture for Smith. What if Roosevelt could not stand without assistance at the rostrum or fainted from exertion? But Roosevelt knew that hopping onto Smith’s bandwagon was the best way to reinsert himself into American politics. Spurred on by Louis Howe, FDR tirelessly rehearsed his walk to the dais. Howe, seeing that FDR was straining from the effort, decided that he would walk in on one crutch and lean on his son James with his other arm. This made Franklin seem more human and less mechanical. “I was afraid, and I know he was too,” James Roosevelt later wrote. “As we walked—struggled really—down the aisle to the rear of the platform, he leaned heavily on my arm, gripping me so hard it hurt.”45

  What happened that day at Madison Square Garden has become the stuff of American legend. Reporters swooned over his bravery. There are stories about Roosevelt being swathed in an unusual light—like a halo—during his speech. He spoke with poetic flourishes lifted from Wordsworth, calling Al Smith “the Happy Warrior.” When Roosevelt finished his speech, he received a thunderous seventy-three-minute ovation. The speech thrust FDR back onto the front page of the New York Times. Here was a stricken man, unable to walk, exuding vibrancy and moral strength.46 Al Smith joked that the squire of Hyde Park had stolen the show at Madison Square Garden. Speculation grew that FDR would be running for governor or for the U.S. Senate in a few years. James Roosevelt poignantly called his father’s oration an “hour or so stolen from his illness.”47

  Late that summer, after the confetti was swept away, Franklin again escaped into the natural world of Springwood to continue his convalescence. Meanwhile, he had suggested to Eleanor that she (and her new friends Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook) build a retreat on 180 acres he owned just two miles from Springwood along Fall Kill Creek. Recognizing that Eleanor needed a place to escape from the domineering Sara Delano Roosevelt from time to time, he drafted a lease for them, offering the women lifetime use of the property. He also assumed the role of general contractor for the project. Roosevelt visited John Burroughs’s log cabin, known as Slabsides, on the west bank of the Hudson, for inspiration but deemed its aesthetic too rustic for Dutchess County. He commissioned architect Henry Toombs of Poughkeepsie to design a fieldstone Dutch colonial house for his wife’s home away from home. Roosevelt wanted it to blend in with the natural surroundings.

  Named Val-Kill, the home became more than just a quaint holiday sanctuary. Marion and Nancy, who were activists and educators, moved into the cottage immediately, making it their permanent residence until 1941. Eleanor joined them for weekends and holidays during the summers. In 1926 the three women oversaw the construction of a larger building on the site to house their experimental business, Val-Kill Industries. They were distraught by the exodus of rural New Yorkers to the cities in search of jobs, and believed that if these farmworkers learned manufacturing skills to supplement their agricultural knowledge, then they would have an alternative source of income if farming became unprofitable. For a decade, men and women were employed making replicas of Early American furniture, pewter pieces, and weavings at Val-Kill. Although it produced finely crafted products, the furniture factory folded in 1936, like so many others a casualty of the Great Depression.

  V

  On October 3, 1924, just a month after construction began on Val-Kill, FDR discovered the town of Warm Springs, then a dilapidated resort, in Georgia. Investment banker George Foster Peabody of Saratoga Springs, New York, had grown up in Georgia and it was he who introduced FDR to Warm Springs. When FDR first arrived, he immediately felt at home amid the sprawling pine forests, clean air, and thermal pools. Eleanor had escorted him there, set him up in his own cottage, and then left. Those first nights in woodsy Georgia, a restless Franklin listened to squirrels make a nocturnal racket and felt oddly tranquil. Shortly after dawn, he got up to swim; it became a daily habit. Never before had he experienced such magical water. “We are here safely and I think Eleanor has written you this morning,” Franklin wrote to his mother. “I spent over an hour in the pool this a.m. and it is really wonderful and will I think do great good, though the Dr. says it takes three weeks to show the effects.”48

  Whether the eighty-eight-degree water at Warm Springs healed Roosevelt in any medically tangible way is debatable. But, after a few arduous swims, he was indeed able to stand in four feet of water—a feat unrealized in New York or Florida. “The legs are really improving a great deal,” he wrote to Eleanor. “The walking and general exercising in the water is fine and I have worked out some special exercises also. This is really a discovery of a place and there is no doubt that I’ve got to do it some more.”49

  The Warm Springs cure catapulted FDR back to his childhood, when James Roosevelt had brought his family to the spa in Bad Nauheim, Germany. And he had heard stories from Louis Howe about similar therapeutic treatments at Saratoga Springs. Roosevelt embraced holistic ideas of healing. Unhappy in New York City hospitals—his father had died in one—he believed that nature afforded a cure for him. But something else also drove Roosevelt to adopt Warm Springs. The scenic promontories, blue hills, inviting water, and the scent of the high forests enhanced his overall pattern of thought. “Some day you must see that spot,” FDR wrote to Margaret Suckley from Warm Springs later in life. “You would like the great pines and red earth—but it’s very different and can never take the place of our River.”50

  On motor trips around Pine Mountain—a nearby ridge with a peak exceeding 1,300 feet—he inspected pear orchards, pine groves, rivulets, and neglected Georgia farms. It was a relief for FDR to be far away from the pitch and whine of New York politics, to get the newspaper two or three days late, and to enjoy the rural provincialism of Meriwether County. Discovering the Georgia hills had been providential for him and for others, as he tirelessly changed the village of Warm Springs into a thriving haven for other victims of paralysis.

  Encouraged by the effects of the hydrotherapy there, Roosevelt arranged to have the main pool to himself for two hours each day. Before long, though, he found that he enjoyed swimming with others in need
of therapy. There are home movies of him at Warm Springs, happily exercising in the therapy pool. “He swims, dives, uses the swinging rings, and horizontal bar over the water, and finally crawls out on the concrete pier for a sun bath that lasts another hour,” the Atlanta Journal revealed in a special Sunday Magazine profile. “Then he dresses, has lunch, rests a bit on a delightfully shady porch, and spends the afternoon driving over the surrounding country, in which he is intensely interested.”51

  Much as when he was in New York, Roosevelt drove himself around the country roads of Georgia for hours on end, using a hand-controlled car. He presented himself as a farmer. Often when he saw someone working in a field, he’d pull up for an informal chat about crops, wildlife, and the weather. On a parcel of pastureland on Pine Mountain, he experimented with agricultural alternatives to planting cotton. Rejecting peanuts and soybeans, he decided that the depleted Meriwether County soil was best suited for raising cattle. Reading about animal husbandry, he purchased purebred bulls and bred them with scrub cattle belonging to local farmers. His operation was working proof that beef cattle could be reared successfully on otherwise exhausted lands.52 Perhaps because, to be a viable national political candidate, he needed southern Democratic voters, he never rocked the boat about Jim Crow segregation when he was in Georgia. Instead he acted like a social worker, peering into tar-paper shacks and around broken-down farming villages.

  Roosevelt jubilantly took a swim in one of the pools at Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1930. Six years earlier, he had discovered the town’s waters, always a soothing 88 degrees, and developed the area as a spa—not for the wealthy, but for anyone suffering from paralysis.

  Just as soothing to Roosevelt as the thermal waters was the southern hospitality he received in Warm Springs. After Eleanor left, locals looked in on FDR regularly to make sure he wasn’t in need of eggs, kindling, or other sundries. Later in life, reflecting on his early visits to Warm Springs, Roosevelt realized his attachment to the place stemmed more from the generosity of the people he met there than from the soothing waters of the pools.53