Another aspect of Warm Springs that attracted Roosevelt was the town’s warm-water fish hatchery. Established in 1899 to replenish stocks of striped bass, sturgeon, robust redhorse, and paddlefish in the Southeast and on the Atlantic coast, the Warm Springs National Fish Hatchery was just a few miles away from Roosevelt’s cottage. There were about forty ponds at the hatchery. Roosevelt’s beloved sturgeon—both the Atlantic and the lake sturgeon—spawned at the station. Their eggs were allowed to hatch and then the fry were introduced into the upper Tennessee River (in Tennessee), and the Coosa River (in Georgia). This hatchery was exactly the kind of laboratory Robert Barnwell Roosevelt had spent his life promoting after the Civil War.
From his initial trip to Warm Springs in 1924 until his election as governor of New York in 1928, FDR made thirteen separate visits to the therapeutic waters.54 After Franklin purchased his house there in 1927, it was administered by the Warm Springs Foundation, a nonprofit that he established (and funded in its first years). Biographers usually note what a shrewd political move it was for FDR to make rural Georgia his second home. His choice was indeed politically convenient. The South was Democratic territory, but with a pre–Civil War conservative streak. Many southerners distrusted Yankees—even Yankee Democrats. Roosevelt, however, was able to create a true bond with people he was happy to call his “neighbors” and “friends.” This is not to say that Roosevelt put down roots in Warm Springs as part of a Machiavellian campaign plan. FDR was first and foremost an obsessive rural improver. He felt needed, as well as needful, when he spent time in Warm Springs. “Distinct progress has been made in regard to the fishing lake,” Roosevelt wrote to his friend Herman Swift, a lawyer from Columbus, Georgia, in October 1926 about improvements to Warm Springs. “Can’t you run down here any day that suits you so we can talk things over? I may go to Atlanta the 19th or 20th to address the Appalachian Trail Association, but the rest of the time will be here.”55
VI
During the Harding-Coolidge years, the state park movement took hold in America. In 1921, when Roosevelt contracted polio, only nineteen states had even a primitive state park system. Four years later, forty-eight states had park systems.56 New York was in the forefront, with the legislature soon appropriating $1 million for the development of a first-class state park system. In 1927, George Foster Peabody donated to the state a pristine tract of Prospect Mountain, which overlooked Lake George. It became a “recreation destination,” operated by the state. Roosevelt fought for the permanent protection of other such unique sites.57
There were a number of reasons why FDR considered the state park movement essential. The automobile was making Americans more mobile than ever. Taking a drive took on a whole new meaning in the early 1920s. A tank of gasoline could easily take a family to the nearest picnic area or fishing hole, and the family road vacation was fast becoming an American tradition. No longer were places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon primarily for the elite; nature was being democratized. In New York State, there was a boom in outdoor recreation opportunities.58
Yet the state of New York, headquarters of many great railroad companies, lagged behind in the construction of paved roads. The leading advocate of the new automobile recreation movement was Robert Moses, executive secretary of the New York State Association. If Franklin Roosevelt had an archenemy in the 1920s, it was Moses, the master builder. Six years younger than Roosevelt, Moses grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, just a few blocks away from Yale University. His parents were German Jews who fervently believed education was the surest path to successful assimilation. Brilliant, hardworking, and blessed with the ability to cut easily through red tape, Moses excelled first at Yale and then at Oxford in England. After earning a PhD in political science from Columbia University, he plunged headfirst into the reform politics of New York City.
Spurred on by the impulse to “do good,” Robert Moses hitched his wagon to Alfred Smith’s star and became a key adviser to Smith, the state’s leading Democrat. Once Smith, a hero to his fellow Catholics and “wets” during Prohibition, was elected to the governorship in 1922, Moses started his lifelong crusade to turn New York City into the greatest metropolis in the world. Like Roosevelt, Smith was intensely interested in large-scale public works. Both of them believed that state governments and the federal government functioned best when centralized, and both promoted parks. But there were geographic and practical sticking points between them. Moses, thought to be the smartest bill-drafter in Albany, wanted to develop parks and roads on Long Island first rather than in the Hudson River Valley or further upstate.
By contrast, Roosevelt wanted to preserve Country Living throughout New York State as a counterbalance to unchecked urbanization. He genuinely believed that the upstate farmers were better-adjusted citizens than the lucre-driven citizenry of New York City. “If Moses knew Long Island as few men knew it,” historian Robert Caro ventured in The Power Broker, “Roosevelt could, in the days when he could walk, say the same thing about Dutchess County and the three other counties—Putnam, Columbia, and Rensselaer—whose gently rolling hills made with Dutchess a continuous soft green border, broken only by the patchwork of cultivated fields, all along the east bank of the Hudson from Westchester to Albany.”59
Moses, by contrast, thought that New York City residents—the ambitious mob who built the Ritz Tower, Chrysler Building, and Empire State Building in the 1920s and 1930s—were the best America had to offer.60 In his mind, “country living” was old-fashioned claptrap served up by the Crowell-Collier publishing empire in magazines like Collier’s Weekly, Woman’s Home Companion, and Country Home. Moses’s pet state park projects—such as Jones Beach on Long Island—would be a respite for city dwellers in desperate need of relaxation. Moses wanted to build parkways as a means to transport New York City residents conveniently and quickly to the parks and beaches. Moses, more pragmatic than FDR, placed a higher premium on efficient transportation than on beauty when it came to parkways. Unlike Moses, FDR thought that a balanced “regional city”—such as Poughkeepsie—which included villages and hinterland, was the American ideal, not a metropolis like New York City or Buffalo. In spite of their downstate-upstate rivalry, Roosevelt did admire Moses’s quest to open the beaches of Long Island to average citizens. Coastal areas, Moses believed, shouldn’t belong only to the wealthy. Roosevelt agreed.
Because FDR so loved the Hudson River Valley, Governor Al Smith appointed him the first chairman of the Taconic State Park (TSP) Commission in 1925.61 A restless Roosevelt drove all over the mid-Hudson region scouting for natural areas worthy of “state park” designation. One place Roosevelt fell in love with was Lake Charlotte, just a short drive from Springwood. It took him a few years, but he eventually persuaded the Livingston family to donate the lake (and uplands) to the state of New York in 1929. Livingston, however, set one condition: the name of the lake and park would have to be changed to Lake Taghkanic. At Roosevelt’s urging, the state of New York stocked the lake with brown bullhead, white perch, rock bass, and chain pickerel.
While working with the TSP Commission, Roosevelt promoted the idea of a Taconic State Parkway. Roosevelt’s intention was to present the three upstate New York counties to the traveling public with their natural features preserved.62 He took up the task of routing the Taconic Parkway with zeal. No detail was beneath his notice, and the project afforded him the opportunity to enjoy the natural world. On his scouting trips, Roosevelt determined locations for exits, overlooks, rest stops, and recreation areas. Villages along the proposed parkway—including Chatham, Millwood, and Hopewell Junction—would economically benefit from the increased automobile traffic.
As Country Living planner, Roosevelt hoped that someday New York would have between 200 and 250 state parks, with bridle trails, stocked lakes, sanitation facilities, tent sites, and handsome rustic cabins, thereby offering affordable outdoors recreation opportunities to everybody—just as Bear Mountain did. His park philosophy was based on the altered contempora
ry American landscape, including urbanization, demographic shifts, increased leisure time, and the proliferation of inexpensive cars. As cities grew in population, automobile congestion would become unbearable. Escape from the mayhem could be found on day trips or weekend trips to one of the state’s eleven park regions: Allegheny, Niagara, Genesee, Finger Lakes, Central, Thousand Island, Saratoga–Capital District, Taconic, Palisades, New York City, and Long Island. Recreational facilities would take advantage of scenic and underused lands; historic locations that FDR fervently championed included Lake George Battleground Park (the location of a skirmish between colonial troops and an allied group of French soldiers and Native Americans in 1755), and Sackets Harbor Battlefield (the center of American naval and military activity following the War of 1812). Championing regional vernacular, insisting on recycled stone from old buildings in recreational structures, Roosevelt was an avatar of the rustic movement. For these structures he preferred “cozy places back from the highway . . . far from a neighbor.”63
On July 21, 1928, Roosevelt hosted the State Parks Council at Springwood. High on his agenda was the opening of new campgrounds in Westchester, Rensselaer, Putnam, Dutchess, and Columbia counties.64 Land within a day’s drive of the metropolis was going to get more expensive. To Roosevelt, this meant that the state park movement had to stop foot-dragging before land prices, particularly in the mid-Hudson, hit prohibitively high levels. Affluent New Yorkers, he believed, needed to snap up large parcels of woodlands to deed to the state for perpetual protection (as the Rockefellers and Harrimans had done). In this enterprising spirit, Roosevelt also suggested that the State Parks Council buy large tracts of land—or solicit their donation—in southern Columbia County and northern Dutchess County, in order to establish a sizable wildlife preserve. “I am personally familiar with both sections, having hunted and collected birds all through these counties,” Roosevelt wrote to Charles Adams, the director of the New York State Museum in Albany, “and southern Columbia County has far more natural wild life than Putnam.”65 The response was favorable.
VII
Franklin Roosevelt was in Warm Springs, Georgia, on October 2, 1928, when Al Smith, the Democratic nominee for president, reached him by telephone. He wanted FDR to run for the New York governorship, but Roosevelt was reluctant to do so. His goal for the late 1920s had been to continue his physical rehabilitation, often in Warm Springs, and strategize with Howe about a possible gubernatorial run in 1930 or 1932. But Smith laid it on thick, refusing to take no for an answer. Roosevelt finally agreed to seek the office. “I’ll be back in Warm Springs—win, lose, or draw—two days after the election,” Roosevelt insisted. “My health has greatly improved since first coming to Georgia and I intend to take every possible advantage of the benefits I obtain here, regardless of everything else.”66
Once FDR arrived back in New York, he preached the gospel of state parks, soil conservation, public utilities, and scientific forestry and took a stand against corruption. While campaigning for the governorship that October, Roosevelt specifically referred to the previous year’s devastating Mississippi River flood. All of his warnings about deforestration—warnings that had begun in 1911—had been tragically borne out in the Mississippi Delta. Levees had failed in 120 places along the Mississippi, flooding more than 165 million acres. Six hundred thousand people were left homeless. At least 246 people died. Many more were simply listed as missing. The 1927 flood, in Roosevelt’s mind, was a wake-up call for all Americans to take reforestation seriously. Roosevelt insisted that the Army Corps of Engineers needed a comprehensive national plan to improve levees, replant forests, and construct reservoirs to divert floodwaters, but he also thought some kind of state “tree corps” was needed to help prevent flooding in New York’s Mohawk and Black River valleys.
When speaking to farmers in New York state, the gubernatorial candidate sounded, overall, like an authority on agriculture, offering tips about how to scrape out a living from soil-depleted land. Wherever Roosevelt traveled in upstate New York, he struck up conversations about the weather and crop cultivation. With iron determination to heal the land, Roosevelt sounded almost biblical, speaking of rains, floods, pestilence, and human error that all had the power to decrease the land’s crucial topsoil. No one could doubt his heartfelt commitment to rural development and his own accomplishments at Springwood. “If you run into troubles,” he was fond of saying, “bring them to me; my shoulders are broad.”67
Roosevelt was a loyal reader of the American Agriculturist, published weekly by Henry Morgenthau Jr. Born in 1891 to a respected Jewish family in New York City, Morgenthau grew up preferring the countryside to the city. His father, Henry Morgenthau Sr.—or Uncle Henry, as FDR affectionately called him—was a deep-pockets Democrat who had an affinity for Al Smith. In 1910, after contracting typhoid fever, Morgenthau Jr. was sent to West Texas by his father to recuperate. Amazed by the beauty of the Davis Mountains, he fell in love with such rivers as the Rio Grande and Pecos. His letters home intimated that rural life was a higher form of existence than life in the city. “Although I have only been here two days,” Morgenthau wrote, “I begin to feel at home. This country and the life is wonderful to me, who has always lived in the City.”68 In 1913, soon after graduating from Cornell University, where he had majored in architecture and agriculture, the owlish Morgenthau Jr. bought a farm ten miles from Springwood that he called Fishkill Farms. He skillfully grew tomatoes and peppers, kept a chicken coop and an apple orchard, and maintained pastureland on which his horses could roam.
FDR first met Morgenthau in 1915 at a luncheon in Hyde Park. Their wives, Elinor Morgenthau and Eleanor Roosevelt, took a shine to each other, becoming almost like sisters. Keeping his eye on Dutchess County affairs from the Navy Department, Roosevelt urged Morgenthau to run for sheriff as a Democrat; the answer was a firm no. Morgenthau and FDR nevertheless grew close, bonding over Democratic politics, Hudson River folkways, rural life, and the landscape architecture of the Olmsteds. As historian Kenneth Davis wrote, Roosevelt and Morgenthau both had “a profound commitment to natural-resource conservation.”69 A myth circulated in Hopewell Junction that Morgenthau was profitably growing corn, hay, and trees. In truth, the farm was at best breaking even. His American Agriculturist, however, offered information on advanced farming techniques and about such topics as soil conservation, normal versus abnormal erosion, tree planting, and terracing.70
Morgenthau once asked FDR, whose opinions he highly valued, to judge a contest to select the most “outstanding farmer” in the state of New York. Roosevelt accepted but raised an unusual question. “May I ask whether forestry has any place in the questionnaire which is sent to farmers?” Roosevelt asked Morgenthau. “It seems to me that in view of the fact that the farm wood lot is or should be a very important producing portion of the average farm area, this phase should be considered.”71
When FDR was chairman of the TSP Commission, Morgenthau became his loyal sidekick on inspection and mapping trips. Sometimes, they picnicked or did a little fishing on these excursions. Morgenthau was one of the few people other than relatives and staffers whom Roosevelt would allow to lift him out of cars or help him with any aspects of his handicap. Just as important, Morgenthau had a swimming pool at Fishkill Farms, and Roosevelt routinely sneaked over from nearby Springwood to take a dip. Morgenthau’s farm had mature maple trees and ancient oaks that Roosevelt greatly admired. The two would sometimes spend hours reveling in the joys of country living or debating the prices of produce.72
What seized the attention of both Roosevelt and Morgenthau in 1928 was a report of the Joint Committee on Recreational Survey of Federal Lands that called for large natural areas near big cities to be converted and protected as “green” recreation zones. The report complained that America’s existing state parks were located too far away from population centers. What Roosevelt and Morgenthau took from the report was the “urgent need” for state parks with lots of good water and camping facilities located
within a fifty-mile radius of cities. If the federal government could purchase lands considered “submarginal” for agriculture, have relief workers make them green oases, then turn them over to state and local park systems, a true beautification of America would occur.73
Henry Morgenthau Jr. (right) with Roosevelt at a conference in Ithaca, New York, in 1931. The two men, residents of Dutchess County, shared an interest in responsible farming and land management. As governor, FDR appointed Morgenthau to the state’s Conservation Commission.
Furthermore, new national parks such as Glacier and the Grand Canyon had become icons of the American West. Roosevelt recognized that the Appalachian Trail offered easterners a landmark conservation project of their own making. Excitement over the “super trail” had caused a movement to designate Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains as national parks for the East to gift to the country.74
VIII
On November 6, 1928, Roosevelt defeated his Republican opponent by a slim 25,000-vote margin. All of his outreach to upstate rural districts had paid off. Without farmers, riverkeepers, and conservation-minded voters pushing Roosevelt’s candidacy forward, he probably wouldn’t have been elected governor.75
On the stump in rural districts, Roosevelt’s most effective speech had been aimed at folks trying to produce a few dollars from worn-out farms.76 Most of the farmers’ problems stemmed from overproduction, which led to lower crop prices. He claimed that Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, who’d resigned as secretary of commerce to be the Republican nominee to succeed the president, either didn’t care or didn’t have enough information to ameliorate the situation. When FDR spoke to New York farmers, it became clear how different he was from either Republican president. FDR was a rare Democratic success story in an election year when the Republicans won big. Al Smith, attacked by anti-Catholic bigots in the South and Midwest, ended up losing to Hoover by a wide margin.
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 13