Hoover was born in 1874 to a Quaker family in rural Iowa. Orphaned at age nine, he worked hard in school and developed a keen interest in geology. After earning a degree at Stanford University, he spent his early adulthood traveling the world, working as a mining engineer and looking for mineral-rich lands. Hoover’s wife, Lou Henry, was the only female geology student at Stanford at the time and spoke eight languages. By 1914, Hoover was a millionaire with mining investments all over the globe.
Like FDR, Hoover spent World War I working for the federal government in Washington. As head of the U.S. Food Administration, Hoover was trusted by President Wilson to run numerous relief efforts during the war. To FDR’s chagrin, Wilson also selected Hoover to serve on the American delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference. Throughout the 1920s, Hoover’s star rose in the Republican Party. His tenure as secretary of commerce during the Harding and Coolidge administrations helped him win the Republican nomination for president in 1928. He ran on a platform that frowned on farm subsidies and TR-style national forests and supported Prohibition and lower taxes. Although Hoover was an enthusiastic fisherman with strong connections to the Izaak Walton League, he was personally in favor of allowing companies to self-regulate. As Hoover later explained in his book The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, Americans in the 1920s “were tired of the war, the economic controls, the debt, and the huge taxes they paid during and after the war.”77 Hoover had won the White House, but the Progressive conservation movement was still alive in Albany with FDR in the governor’s mansion.
It’s clear in hindsight that FDR’s 1928 gubernatorial victory allowed him to become the unofficial head of the national Democratic Party. Al Smith’s star had been eclipsed. Smith had bolstered Roosevelt’s presidential chances by helping to bring urban, blue-collar, and Catholic voters into his coalition. Roosevelt’s win, however, eventually caused Smith more grief than Herbert Hoover’s had. A feud was brewing between FDR and Smith over a very human conflict between two good friends. Smith thought he would control the new governor . . . and FDR was adamant that he had no need of advice from the old governor.
After taking office, Roosevelt regularly read reports from the Great Plains, where settlers had mistakenly tried to replace grass with crops more beneficial to their economic aspirations. These farmers and townspeople soon discovered that although the vast grasslands were productive in wet years, they were also subject to serious drought and bitter winters. The prairie earth was becoming dry as ashes. Eleanor Roosevelt correctly predicted that Franklin would make woodlands ecology and soil conservation the linchpins of his governorship immediately on assuming office.78 While other Democrats moped, Roosevelt, who knew Hoover from his World War I years in Washington, anticipated the president’s weakness as a leader: unlike Jefferson or TR, Hoover could focus on only a single big idea at a time with deep conviction. FDR believed that a successful U.S. president needed “versatility of mind” to “take up one subject after another during the day and find itself equally at home in all of them.”79
CHAPTER SIX
“A TWICE-BORN MAN”
I
The first thing Roosevelt did at the governor’s mansion in Albany was hang a U.S. Geological Survey map delineating the varied topography of New York state. As governor Roosevelt planned to develop an intimacy with every village from Niagara Falls to Long Island, the Wallkill River Valley to the Catskills, the Thousand Islands to Finger Lakes. Roosevelt knew that residents of the Empire State who didn’t live in New York City identified mightily with their hometown; the plowed fields, deep woods, mountain streams, and oyster harbors were a source of local pride. FDR’s modus operandi was to encourage rural and small-town citizens to measure tree diameters, learn soil types, protect drinking-water sources, and help wildlife prosper. He would prove a genius at making conservation a positive exercise of self-worth and skill, not simply a warning that abstinence and caution were needed.
When, on January 1, 1929, Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address before a huge mass of people, he claimed that scientific forestry, public hydropower, land rehabilitation, and pollution control were ways to truly honor the “gift of God.”1 These weren’t quite the fighting words of Theodore Roosevelt, but they indicated that the astute management of natural resources would be a major focus of FDR’s administration. The heart of Roosevelt’s land policy was anchored around crop restriction, by means of the retirement of marginal land. Instead of farmers abandoning tired soil, allowing erosion by water and wind to carry it away, the state of New York would purchase the marginal land, plant millions of seedlings, and establish well-maintained state forests. To procure the money needed for the ambitious program, Roosevelt wanted the legislature to issue bonds.2
Just a few weeks later, Governor Roosevelt spoke before the New York State Forestry Association, challenging citizens to plant thirty million trees on abandoned farmland the state would acquire—a clarion call by any standard.3 Reforestation would retain moisture in the soil, regulate the flow of streams, and set as an insurance policy against flooding and drought. “My own personal feeling,” Roosevelt told the annual meeting, “is that we ought, in going into the question, to take a leaf out of the notebook of European experience and get larger forest areas at work so that the state would not be impeded by multiplicity of detail and an awkward load.”4
Governor Roosevelt also proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would establish state-run tree nurseries—like the one he frequented in Saratoga Springs—in every New York county. Saplings would be handed out free of charge to farmers. The amendment was never ratified, but Roosevelt revitalized the state’s tree seedling program. He maintained that it wasn’t “a charity, but a financial investment in the future.”5 Under FDR’s leadership, New York’s nurseries soon distributed more than forty million trees—40 percent of all the trees planted in America from 1929 to 1931.6 Working in partnership with the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University (since renamed the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry), Roosevelt admonished that trees were a long-term investment; they didn’t offer immediate economic gain. “Of course, one thing that we have to face in this whole proposition,” Roosevelt said, “is that we people with grey hair who start in to plant trees now will be under the ground a good many years before those trees are grown to maturity or to marketable size.”7
His paralysis prevented Governor Roosevelt from hiking, but he regularly studied the natural world of New York through his car windshield, the next best thing. When asked how he acquired encyclopedic knowledge of the state’s creeks and woodlands, battlefields and historic buildings, Roosevelt had a ready answer: “You fellows with two good legs spend your spare time playing golf, or shooting ducks and such things, while I had to get all my exercise out of a book.”8 And by driving around the countryside, he should have added, studying scenic landscapes.
Although the southernmost section of the Taconic Parkway wasn’t completed until 1931, excellent reviews trickled in once Roosevelt took office in 1929. To Roosevelt’s delight, urban architect Lewis Mumford, a Dutchess County resident, normally a critic of highways, described the Taconic as a masterly combination of modern engineering and conservation, designed for high-speed travel.9 Mumford was awed by how engineers designed the parkway connecting the northern suburbs of New York City to the Hudson Valley without perpetrating “brutal assaults against the landscape.”10 As Roosevelt envisioned it, the Taconic would be a 110-mile postcard of handsome woodlands, haystacks, gardens, bird reservations, cultivated farmlands, picnic areas, mountainscapes, and expansive views.11 Although the Taconic Parkway wasn’t completed until 1963, the finished parkway followed the very route FDR laid out in 1929.
Over the summer of 1929 Governor Roosevelt, living with Eleanor and the children in the governor’s mansion in Albany, took the barge Inspector on a multi-stop voyage from Albany to Buffalo. Nostalgic for the past, they traveled on Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence River before taking the Huds
on to the Champlain Canal. In the time-honored tradition of politicians showcasing their family values, all five Roosevelt children went with their father on the excursion. FDR designed the Inspector trip to meet constituents, investigate forests, promote recreation, and scout for new state park sites. He went pole-fishing from the barge for brook trout and carp, and he wrote to a former colleague of the Navy Department that his vessel made him laugh whenever he stopped to “compare it with the old Navy days.”12 But the journey was illustrative of the intrepid Roosevelt’s penchant for learning by seeing things firsthand.
Roosevelt found himself in a scrap with the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks in early 1929. Assemblyman Fred Porter of Essex County, where Lake Placid is located, introduced a bill to construct a bobsled run on state lands in the forest preserve. The bill passed the legislature and Roosevelt signed it into law. His perception blurred the line between preservation and recreation. “In it [Adirondack Park] are approximately two million acres of State-owned land constituting the perpetual forest preserve for the protection of the mountain water sheds and the regulating of the stream flow out of that great area and also to protect it as a great recreation ground for all the people of the State,” Roosevelt said. “In truth, as a recreation ground, enjoyment of it is not by any means limited to the people of this State. Thousands come to it from all parts of the world, for it is one of the world’s great nature playgrounds and health resorts—larger indeed than the great Yellowstone Park itself.”13 But in the case of the bobsled run, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks screamed foul: the course would entail the removal of 2,500 trees and the law stated, clear as day, that “no cutting” was allowed. This was a worrisome precedent. Innocently, Roosevelt thought the bobsled course would help Lake Placid become a possible site for the Winter Olympics. The case went to New York’s highest court, which upheld the lower court’s rejection of Porter’s law. The bobsled run was built on private land—and the forest remained “forever wild.”14 Roosevelt—and the rest of the state—learned that a forest preserve didn’t need golf courses, baseball diamonds, or bobsled courses after all.15
The governor likewise got on the wrong side of the preservationist crowd by supporting a proposed highway from Wilmington, New York, to the top of Whiteface Mountain. To the purists, mountain roads, by definition, were unwelcome violations of the Adirondack wilderness. The construction work alone was construed as an act of violence against nature. While Governor Roosevelt had a measure of sympathy for that view, his main conservation goal was democratic in spirit: to allow all citizens, rich and poor, equal recreational access to the best of New York’s treasured landscapes. Again the ecological sanctity of Adirondack Park was at stake and Roosevelt sided with the developers. Catching it on both fronts, the governor decided to explain himself by giving a speech, high in the Adirondacks on conservation as recreation.16
On September 11, 1929, Governor Roosevelt braved heavy rain to drive into the heart of Adirondack Park to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for Whiteface Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway. By turning the road, slightly more than eight miles long, into a World War I memorial, he muted some criticism. This Adirondack project, like the Taconic Parkway, had been a dream of FDR’s since the early 1920s. Roosevelt bragged that, when completed, the Whiteface would be the only eastern road that snaked up a major mountain peak (though a similar one was being built on Mount Washington in New Hampshire). From the crest of Whiteface Mountain (elevation 4,871 feet), thirty to forty Adirondack hamlets could easily be seen on a clear day. Even the Green Mountains of Vermont could sometimes be savored from the top vantage point. The only hairpin road Roosevelt thought comparable in engineering ingenuity was the acclaimed nineteen-mile highway up Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs.
But the rain proved problematic that September. At the last moment, roads impassable, the event’s organizers switched the location of the formal ceremony from the peak of Whiteface to the valley village of Wilmington Notch. The very same two-lane scenic mountain road that Roosevelt wanted paved had been washed out, proving his point. Standing with assistance, shovel in hand, Roosevelt turned the first sod, praised veterans of the Great War, and then returned to Albany to put on dry clothes.17
Governor Roosevelt had only virtuous intentions in supporting the Whiteface highway, built to increase tourism in the Lake Placid area. The road was a godsend for out-of-towners and locals alike. Easy automobile access up Whiteface allowed citizens, even those who were handicapped, the opportunity to soak up a breathtaking panorama. The highway surpassed even some of the roadside lookouts Roosevelt enjoyed while traveling in Europe. When Roosevelt next returned to Whiteface Mountain, on September 14, 1935, he was president. During the dedication, Roosevelt made a rare public reference to his handicap. “I wish very much,” he told the crowd, “that it were possible for me to walk up the few remaining feet to the actual top of the mountain.”18
As a proud amateur ornithologist, Governor Roosevelt was pleased when Congress passed the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, sometimes referred to as the Norbeck-Anderson Act, in February 1929. The law directed the federal government to acquire land and establish a national system of wildlife sanctuaries for waterfowl and other migratory birds. FDR applauded the provision that gave the federal government the right “to lessen the dangers threatening migratory game birds from drainage and other causes, by the acquisition of areas of lands and of water to furnish in perpetuity reservations for the adequate protection of such birds.” Roosevelt noted that Norbeck-Anderson authorized appropriations over a period of ten years for the purchase, development, and maintenance of migratory bird refuges.19
The new law offered a mechanism for establishing a network of refuges not unlike the national forest system, which TR and Pinchot had made a reality in 1905, and the national park system, which Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Lane crafted in 1916. Unfortunately, President Hoover thought incrementally when it came to wildlife protection. While the Hoover administration did add bird refuges in Florida, California, North Carolina, and Nebraska to the national portfolio, Roosevelt bemoaned that it was done in a piecemeal, disorganized fashion.
Pet projects like the Taconic Parkway and Whiteface Mountain Veterans Memorial Highway, and the Norbeck-Anderson Act, took a lower position in Roosevelt’s agenda when, on October 29, 1929, a day remembered as “black Tuesday,” the stock market collapsed, and the American economy rapidly unspooled. Some twenty-seven thousand businesses collapsed, including 1,372 banks that took $3 billion in deposits down the tubes with them.20 Widespread homelessness and hunger became a national curse. Over one fifth of the nation was soon unemployed. Squatters’ camps lined the Hudson River in Manhattan. In Central Park and open spaces in other cities, indigent people erected settlements of makeshift lean-tos or shanties called Hoovervilles. Roosevelt was distraught by the squalor.21
As the decade drew to a close, Governor Roosevelt’s progressive instincts intensified. Proactive with regard to the needs of the poor, he pushed hard for the advancement of union rights, old-age pensions funded by employers’ and employees’ contributions, and an eight-hour workday for government personnel. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, New York state was first to provide meaningful relief to the unemployed. FDR’s liberal philosophy, based on activist government intervention, suddenly served as a beacon of hope for millions of down-and-out citizens in his state whose pro–big business stance of the 1920s shifted to pro–government intervention in the 1930s.
What differentiated Roosevelt from other eastern state governors was his pronounced concern for destitute farmers who had been fleeced by bankers and financiers at the time of the crash. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization in which Eleanor would soon become active, reported that about 90 percent of children in rural Kentucky and Virginia were malnourished and without medical care.22 Credit, the “lubricant of agricultural capitalism,” was no longer forthcoming. Beginning in 1929, Roosevelt delivered half-hour
radio addresses, forerunners of his presidential “fireside chats.” Hoover, by contrast, refused to use the radio to rally farmers to change their habitual ways of planting and plowing. “The spread of government,” Hoover trenchantly remarked, “destroys initiative and thus destroys character.”23
By contrast, Governor Roosevelt identified with American farmers who mistakenly planted more and more crops on their land, which inevitably pushed the exhausted soil beyond its capabilities. When the Mitchell (South Dakota) Republican mocked him as a city slicker intent on telling midwesterners how to farm their land, FDR fired back a rebuttal: “By the way I am not, as you say, an ‘urban leader.’ For I was born and brought up to have always made my home on a farm in Dutchess County.”24 Once again Roosevelt advised American farmers to plant fewer crops in order to boost prices, and to plant trees—part of God’s design—because of their abundance of practical uses. Roosevelt was in line with serious agronomists: the overused land needed rest and nourishment.25
Throughout his governorship, Roosevelt fervently promoted the development of hydroelectric power for the upstate counties along the Saint Lawrence River. Since 1921, when he dreamed of using the fierce tides of Passamaquoddy Bay, near Campobello, for cheap public power, Roosevelt had sought to bring hydraulic engineers into the main thrust of American politics. As governor, he fought for the Power Authority Act in 1931 in order to bring state money and leadership to hydrogeneration projects, including one planned for the Saint Lawrence River. Roosevelt also called for private utility companies to dramatically lower rates for consumers. Using Albany as his megaphone to speak to a national audience, he called for more public waterpower projects like the Saint Lawrence and Columbia rivers, Muscle Shoals, and Boulder Dam. Not only should the U.S. government build great dams, FDR maintained, but private utilities also had to be hyperregulated, or “attacks on other liberties will follow.”26
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 14