That spring of 1931, Governor Roosevelt asked Conservation Commissioner Morgenthau to scout for soil-depleted land and clear-cut acreage across New York for the state to purchase. The Great Depression had driven real estate prices down to pathetically low levels. Buying otherwise worthless land not only put cash in the pockets of distressed farmers but also gave Roosevelt and Morgenthau’s youth corps tracts on which to plant millions of seedlings. What was unacceptable to Roosevelt and Morgenthau was that annually 250,000 acres of poor crop land in New York were abandoned.50 It was Roosevelt’s idea that the state would restore forests and, in some cases, even create new state parks and camping areas—the Springwood model writ large. To pay for this plan, Roosevelt lobbied for an amendment to the state constitution that would make $19 million available for reforestation over an eleven-year period. The amendment’s goal—supported vigorously by the Adirondack Mountain Club, of which Roosevelt was a board member—was for the state to buy abandoned farmland, plant trees on it, and appoint scientific experts to manage its productivity as woodlands.
The Hewitt Reforestation Amendment (named for Senator Charles Hewitt, the Republican who introduced it) was cheered by most conservation groups in New York. If the Hewitt Amendment passed, the state would be able to buy property for reforestation outside the so-called blue lines that marked off Adirondack Park and Catskill Park. The difference between the amendment and previous laws promoting reforestation was that it provided for the eventual harvesting of the trees, in order to pay for further land purchases and planting. The Hewitt Amendment was, in effect, Roosevelt’s homage to the German state forests he’d so admired all his life. Gifford Pinchot, who was elected to a second (nonconsecutive) term as governor of Pennsylvania in 1930, backed FDR’s action with gusto from Harrisburg and Milford. Morgenthau, in a series of columns in American Agriculturalist, lobbied frantically for upstate backing of the amendment.
What Governor Roosevelt was proposing had precedent. In the 1890s, the silviculturist Charles Bessey was determined to replant a treeless area of northwestern Nebraska to serve as an experimental tree nursery. The Department of Agriculture acted on this idea, eventually overseeing the largest human-planted forest in North America. In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt established two national forests: Dismal River and Niobrara River (they were consolidated in 1908 to form Nebraska National Forest). “In a great many states farmers may obtain desirable seedling trees for a nominal cost from state nurseries,” FDR wrote in an article in the Country Home. “Nebraska, for instance, the home of Arbor Day, charges a cent apiece. During 1928 Nebraska distributed 682,000 trees to 2,600 farmers. Many of these were for windbreaks, a most useful purpose in the Plains country.”51 Governor Roosevelt reasoned that if the USDA did it in the sand hills of Nebraska, then Henry Morgenthau could do the same in deforested upstate New York counties.52
Throughout 1931 Roosevelt contended that large-scale reforestation efforts in New York would help the soil retain moisture and thereby protect land against future droughts and floods. “Heretofore our conservation policy has been merely to preserve as much as possible of the existing forests,” Governor Roosevelt declared on the radio. “Our new policy goes a step further. It will not only preserve the existing forests, but create new ones.”53
To help pass the amendment, Roosevelt brought Pinchot into the fight—the idea being that Pinchot would pull in Republican votes. But the effort by Hewitt, Roosevelt, and Pinchot faced an unexpected stumbling block, former governor Al Smith.54 As governor, Roosevelt had learned from his predecessor’s example that conservation could also be good politics. But the men had their differences as they presented voters with starkly opposing views on the Hewitt Amendment. Smith—then chairman of the New York Fish, Game, and Forest League, a consortium of hundreds of sporting clubs—turned outdoors enthusiasts against the amendment, claiming that it would “carve up the great potential that was the Adirondack Park.” He argued that by allowing logging operations on forestlands just outside the blue lines, the amendment would kill forever the chances of expanding the park. Conceding the point, FDR nevertheless insisted that the amendment would prohibit logging within the park’s boundaries and put people to work planting renewable forests; he saw the Hewitt Amendment as a win for everyone.55 Smith, however, was perhaps the purer preservationist. FDR considered the Catskills Park the best model.
On Election Day 1931 the Hewitt Reforestation Amendment was ratified by a vote ratio of 3 to 2, thanks to Roosevelt, who had mobilized voters to follow the commerce-conservation partnership embodied in Pinchotism.56 “What a queer thing that was for Al to fight so bitterly on No. 3,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend shortly after Election Day. “I cannot help remembering the fact that while he was Governor I agreed with almost all the policies he recommended but I was against one or two during those eight years. However for the sake of party solidarity I kept my mouth shut.”57
Whether or not the passage of the Hewitt Amendment was the birth of New Deal conservation, the New York Times interpreted it as the start of FDR’s 1932 campaign for the presidency. He was catapulted overnight to the position of “leading Democratic aspirant” while Smith was downgraded to the status of “the loser in the presidential sweepstakes.”58 Dodging questions about his prospective candidacy, Roosevelt was nonetheless considered the voice of struggling farmers everywhere. The Times ran an article about how Democrats from all over America called to congratulate him. Governor George H. Dern of Utah spoke for many when he wrote to FDR that “this is my first opportunity to say to you after the election, Hurrah for Trees!”59 The Sentinel—a little newspaper in Shenandoah, Iowa—was prescient when it wrote that FDR’s “advocacy of reforestation, the planting of trees in the waste places of New York” might make a grand national policy.60
In 1931 New York’s Bank of the United States lost $200 million; this loss resulted in the largest single bank failure in the nation’s history up to that point. In the face of the economic crisis, state funds were strained and the land purchases got off to a very slow start in 1932. In response, Governor Roosevelt tackled tree planting on a county-by-county basis and encouraged forestry experimentation. Tasking the Cornell Department of Agriculture to oversee Tompkins County as a pilot project, Roosevelt argued that soil conservation studies could lead to the “efficient planning of farm-to-market roads, rural electrification, and the scientific allocation of school facilities.”61
Whenever possible FDR promoted the four major waterpower projects in the country: Boulder Dam, Saint Lawrence River, Muscle Shoals, and Columbia River. As a proud member of the Marine Research Society and Adirondack Mountain Club, he took stands on other national issues in conservation, as well.
Governor Roosevelt started working closely with Senator Harry B. Hawes of Missouri, a fellow Democrat, to bring national attention to the dwindling waterfowl populations west of the Mississippi River. The two could talk for hours about the preferred food of geese and the causes behind the mysterious woodland glow known as fox fire. Born in Covington, Kentucky, in 1869, Hawes grew up with the Ohio River as his backyard. His paternal grandfather was a Confederate governor of Kentucky during the Civil War, and Hawes became a believer in big government. Educated at Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis, he became the preeminent expert in issues pertaining to U.S. statehood and territory requirements at the turn of the twentieth century. He pushed hard for Hawaii to become an American territory, but conversely, he proposed granting the Philippines independence.
Global-minded, and able to see a connection between conservation of natural resources and America’s economic future, Hawes was respected throughout the Midwest for organizing the Lakes to the Gulf Deep Waterway Association, whose mission was to construct a network of dams and locks along the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri rivers. After serving in the army during World War I, Hawes was elected to Congress from Missouri’s Eleventh District. In 1926, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. A proud outdoorsman, capable of identifying most Nor
th American birds by their song, he was the mover and shaker behind the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission of 1929. Concerned that ducks and geese were dying off in large numbers, he partnered with Frederic C. Walcott, founder of the American Game Protective and Propagation Association, to establish a special committee in the Senate devoted to wildlife issues.62 Not long after the crash of 1929, Hawes announced that as of 1933 he would quit the Senate to become a lobbyist for wildlife protection. To start spreading the gospel of recreation in 1930, Hawes published My Friend, the Black Bass: With Strategy, Mechanics and Fair Play.63
Roosevelt and Hawes were allied in blaming the drought, deforestation, and soil erosion on bad-faith capitalist agriculture. They criticized Great Plains and Southwest cowboys for overgrazing livestock in the range to meet consumer demand for beef. As a result, grass disappeared. Drought, soil erosion, and high winds led to crop losses and rising unemployment. Huge swaths of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas became deserts where fierce winds sucked up swirling dust clouds of topsoil. Water became scarce. In the plains and throughout the West, with lakes, marshes, and ponds drying up rapidly, migratory game birds—which relied on these waterways for resting, nesting, and feeding—were dying off. Waterfowl populations plummeted to the lowest numbers in recorded history. This loss also stripped away a primary high-protein food source from rural folks scraping out a subsistence living.
It was the nationwide drought that impelled Governor Roosevelt to embrace Hugh Bennett, the “father of soil conservation,” who worked at the Bureau of Soils in the USDA. Bennett had scored a major discovery with his observation that in clear-cut lands, soil eroded at an alarming rate. Cheered on by Gifford Pinchot, Bennett sampled soils from all over the world. After visiting Alaska, he suggested that the Forest Service prohibit farming and other activities in the Chugach National Forest there. Regarding the Dust Bowl, he predicted its onset in a number of periodicals, including North American Review, Country Gentleman, and Scientific Monthly.
Always seeking a larger compass for his ideas, in 1928 Bennett was a coauthor of a USDA bulletin that Roosevelt deemed mandatory reading: Soil Erosion: A National Menace. “The writer, after 24 years studying the soils of the United States,” Bennett stated, “is of the opinion that soil erosion is the biggest problem confronting the farmers of the Nation over a tremendous part of its agricultural lands.”64 FDR himself considered this booklet not only a manual describing how to stop soil erosion but also a moral call to action that drew attention to “the evils of the process of land wastage.”
Luckily for America, Roosevelt wasn’t the only one jarred into awareness by Bennett’s cogent analysis and relentless concentration on soil erosion. Congressman James Buchanan of Texas secured appropriations during the Hoover years to establish soil experiment stations throughout the South. Stations popped up in the cotton fields of central Alabama and peanut plantations of Georgia. George Washington Carver, the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” pointed to these experiment stations as one of the best things that ever happened to America’s rural poor. But funding for agriculture projects became scarce in the Hoover administration, after the onset of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt had come to learn from his demonstration plots at Hyde Park and Warm Springs that commercial fertilizers in the soil—such as phosphates, nitrates, and potash—had mixed results. Some compounds made the soil too sterile for yearly cultivation. It was the job of Hugh Bennett’s Soil Conservation Service to determine the correct formulations to help farmers excel. The SCS also sprayed acreage with different chemicals, in an effort to protect against insects. Farmers applauded the use of pesticides during the New Deal. Only later, during the cold war, were the harmful health consequences of such spraying properly understood by agronomists and biologists.
III
Even when FDR was in the midst of battling the effects of the Great Depression, the daily cocktail hour remained a sacred ritual to him. Nothing controversial was discussed while Roosevelt had the cocktail shaker in his hand, and whoever was in his orbit around twilight generally joined him in two or three cocktails. At one after-work affair, Roosevelt pressed Samuel Rosenman, one of his appointed legal advisers, to refill his glass. Rosenman disliked the taste of alcohol. He barely finished his first drink, and the thought of a second made him queasy. But the governor took over, pouring him a refill. Rosenman, when no one was looking, poured it into a nearby flowerpot.
A week later Governor Roosevelt, in front of friends, called Rosenman out. “You know, Sam,” Roosevelt said, his lips twisted into a sarcastic smile, “a peculiar thing has been happening to the plants in the Executive Mansion. Some time ago, the leaves of some of them began to change their color. Whitehead [the steward] got worried about them and asked one of the experts from the Department of Agriculture to come over and take a look at them. The expert said he had never seen such a strange condition before, and would like to take the plants over to his laboratory for analysis of the soil. The report has just come back, and what do you think they found? They found that the soil was filled with a large percentage of alcohol. Whitehead is thoroughly mystified as to where we ever got that kind of soil.” Everyone laughed heartily as Rosenman admitted culpability. “Well, Governor,” he said, “if you don’t want to lose all your plants, you’d better pass me up on seconds.”65
While America was in crisis FDR’s political future looked brighter than ever. Louis Howe, his chief adviser since 1912, thought the time was right for the governor to seize the White House. Howe, who had been raised in the spa town of Saratoga Springs, was perennially sick, and gnome-like in appearance, with pockmarked skin resulting from a freak accident. Therefore, even though he was a genius as a political tactician, his trajectory in New York electoral politics was limited. His appeal was cerebral, not personal. Howe soon quit journalism to run FDR’s state senate reelection campaign in 1912; it was a lucky break for Roosevelt.66 They became inseparable.
Howe believed in 1932 that Roosevelt had sufficiently overcome his polio. But certain rules were to be abided by: Roosevelt would be lifted in public only when absolutely necessary; he was not to be photographed in a wheelchair; he had to “walk” at most events without using crutches (he would instead receive help from an aide or one of his sons); and he needed to swim laps regularly.
IV
In January 1932, a week before his fiftieth birthday, Roosevelt declared his candidacy for U.S. president. He assembled an excellent team to help with his campaign: politicians such as senators Cordell Hull of Tennessee and Alben Barkley of Kentucky as well as trusted advisers like Howe, Morgenthau, Hopkins, and New York politico James Farley. Southern Bourbons, Grange farmers, western radicals, and anti-Hoover conservatives were brought into the coalition. Roosevelt’s campaign kept conservative Democrats in his camp by staying mum on Jim Crow segregation laws and seldom criticizing business and industry.
By the spring, millions of worried Americans jumped onto FDR’s bandwagon. Momentum built daily. In a landmark speech in May 1932 at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, about eighty miles from Warm Springs, Roosevelt declared that the country needed “bold, persistent experimentation” in order to survive.67
Unusually for a New York governor, Roosevelt urged Easterners to start protecting their treasured landscapes. The Great Smoky Mountains, for example, were under consideration for national park status, with its towering two-hundred-foot pine trees and poplars of twenty-five-foot circumference. Roosevelt, an enthusiast for automobile tourism, was excited that he could see more species of trees on a thirty-mile drive through the Smokies than if he drove diagonally across Europe from Calais to Vienna. The University of Tennessee had launched a “tree count” in the Smokies—modeled after the AOU and Audubon Society bird counts—that documented over 550 species of flowering trees, shrubs, and plants within the proposed national park boundaries. And the Appalachian Trail hit its peak elevation (6,643 feet) in the Smokies, at the summit of Clingman’s Dome.
What int
erested Governor Roosevelt politically was that citizens of Tennessee and North Carolina, with the help of their respective state governments, had raised more than $5 million to establish Great Smoky Mountains National Park. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was eight years Roosevelt’s senior and an advocate of forest health, matched this amount. Rockefeller, son of the founder of Standard Oil, likewise helped finance other national parks, such as Shenandoah, Grand Teton, and Acadia (where Rockefeller kept a summer house).68 To Roosevelt, this tapping of wealthy patrons to invest in helping to protect America’s landscapes held great promise for enlarging the National Park Service in the future.
Another natural feature that Roosevelt wanted to save was the Potomac River. Untreated waste from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area (population 575,000) had made the Potomac unfit for recreational activities. Dead fish floated on the surface. Bacterial contamination forced the closing of the river for swimming from Three Sisters Island to Fort Washington. Fisheries were endangered. Roosevelt vowed, if elected, to help establish a waste treatment plant. (In 1938 Blue Plains was indeed completed and the Potomac slowly began to recover.)69 Trying to purify the Potomac all the way from its source to its mouth was a lifelong ambition for Roosevelt.
Governor Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the Okefenokee Swamp equaled his advocacy for the Great Smokies and the Potomac River. The Okefenokee (a Seminole word meaning “Land of Trembling Earth”) was a sprawling, tangled wetland, covering approximately seven hundred square miles, populated by alligators, bobcats, raccoons, and waterbirds. Most of the Okefenokee was in southern Georgia, though parts of it spread into Florida along the Suwannee River. The slow-moving swamp was a biologically rich region of pure and mixed cypress forests, bogs, swamp islands, black gum and bay forests, live-oak woodlands, and pine savannas that, taken together, defied easy ecological classification.70 For any devoted forester, the centuries-old bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) soaring out of the wild watery loneliness on arching roots, some 130 feet tall with gnarled branches draped with shawls of Spanish moss, were something to behold.
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