Jean and Francis Harper paused at a campsite on Chesser Island in the Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia, in a picture taken May 29, 1930. Francis first visited Okefenokee as a Cornell student in 1912. His wife, Jean, a former tutor for the Roosevelt children, was instrumental in drawing FDR into their lifelong fight to save the magnificent swamp.
Roosevelt grew determined to save the Okefenokee from Georgia’s lumbering and tanning businesses after listening to two friends rave about its surreal beauty. Because of aggressive extraction practices, more than 1.9 million board feet of lumber had been harvested from the swamp by the time Roosevelt became governor. No subsequent replanting efforts were made. Dr. Francis Harper of Cornell University was a specialist in vertebrate fauna who had made the Okefenokee watershed his living laboratory. His wife, Jean Sherwood Harper, was a Vassar alumna who tutored Anna and Elliott Roosevelt at Springwood during 1920 and 1921. Even from afar, the Okefenokee sprang to life in Roosevelt’s mind as he heard the Harpers describe the calls of cranes “taking wing from the piney woods” of Honey Island and the “demonical guffaws of courting barred owls during winter nights on Floyd Island.”71
Between 1912 and 1951, Francis Harper, who sometimes visited the Okefenokee in company with a Cornell University survey team, filled thirty-eight volumes with firsthand observations and swamp lore.72 As a field naturalist, Harper wrote up his biological reconnaissance in numerous articles, monographs, and a fine posthumously published book, The Okefinokee Album.73 “The denser cypress bays are places of deep shade and at times oppressive gloom,” he observed, “but there is somber beauty here.”74
While running for president in 1932, Roosevelt heard grisly reports about an uncontrollable wildfire, set off by the drought, destroying the few remaining Okefenokee pine, gum, and cypress forests that the lumber companies hadn’t clear-cut. Foresters considered naturally occurring fire a natural, sometimes desirable event in the Okefenokee. The 1932 blaze, however, was not such a burn. A wicked combination of drought and careless timber practices—in particular, leaving flammable debris behind at job sites—had sparked an untamable inferno.75 Roosevelt knew Georgia timber outfits were also responsible for damaging the Okefenokee by overworking the vast pine groves in search of turpentine. The fire had already endangered the swamp’s struggling populations of Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) and ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). As president, Roosevelt hoped to rehabilitate the Okefenokee ecosystem and maybe even secure national park designation for it—as he intended to do for the Everglades.
If Roosevelt had a special weapon, it was his fine radio voice. Voters were spellbound by his clear articulation of hope and change. While much has been made of Roosevelt’s instantly recognizable tenor, it was his sterling enunciation that made him so successful. There was something about his delivery that made him believable—the ultimate gift for a politician. If anything, Roosevelt’s polio helped him hone his genius for communication.76 He sounded like strength personified on the campaign trail. This didn’t hurt when it came to persuading voters that he had a hearty attitude and a natural, easy charm. He called himself “Old Doc Roosevelt,” giving the impression that he could make the ailing nation feel better, even if he could not prescribe a cure.
And then there was Roosevelt’s infectious smile; Hoover’s countenance, by contrast, was typically fixed in a grimace. America desperately needed to be lifted out of its economic turbulence and governmental stupor. While the Republican incumbent clung to the bunker mentality, FDR believed he could thaw a nation, as he put it, “frozen by fatalistic terror.”77
V
The 1932 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago from June 27 to July 2. The competition for the nomination came down to FDR, Al Smith, and Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas. Each man represented a different Democratic faction. Roosevelt had the support of farmers, conservationists, western progressives, and women. Smith had strong support among city dwellers, intellectuals, minorities and regionally, the New England states. Garner had a few key senators and California newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in his corner. FDR clinched the nomination after Garner, a distant, but potent, third on the first ballot, joined his ranks. Roosevelt, in turn, offered Garner the nomination as vice president. “All you have to do,” Garner told Roosevelt at a meeting in Hyde Park, “is stay alive until election day. The people are going to vote against the depression.”78
Born during the Reconstruction era in Red River County, Texas, Garner was proud of his Confederate lineage. He had served in Congress since 1903. His hometown was Uvalde, where TR had once hunted for javelina. Garner was nicknamed “Cactus Jack” because of his (failed) effort to make the prickly pear the state flower of Texas.79 Roosevelt initially liked Garner, calling him “Mr. Common Sense.” But over the course of two terms the two men were divided on so many policy issues that Garner would essentially be ostracized from FDR’s inner circle. Disgruntled, he immortalized himself in the annals of U.S. political history by deeming the vice presidency not worth “a bucket of warm piss.”80
While Roosevelt wasn’t personally close to him, he learned from Garner about the damage in Texas to natural soil resources from unabated cultivation of unproductive farms, which were then frequently abandoned. In West Texas, as well as the semiarid portions of the western Great Plains, wind erosion devastated not only plowed land but also the adjacent overgrazed pastures and rangelands. Garner told of soil particles in the guise of dust and sand blown from cultivated fields, fallow acreage, and overgrazed range. Roosevelt knew that the next U.S. president would have a serious drought on his hands.
It had become clear to the nation that Governor Roosevelt was decent, energetic, kindhearted, and open to trying new remedies for the economic crisis. His public “walking” and standing were a painful balancing act, but many people had no idea he was paralyzed.81 Full of sunshine, with even mundane chores bringing him bliss, he regularly smashed precedent, believing that only dramatic gestures would grab the public’s attention. A perfect example occurred when he learned that, after four hotly contested votes, he would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency. On July 2, Roosevelt flew from Albany to Chicago unannounced to accept the nomination. “You have nominated me and I know it,” he told the delegates, “and I am here to thank you for the honor. Let it . . . be symbolic that in so doing I broke traditions.” With oratorical verve, he went on to promise “a new deal for all the people.”82 And by persuading Speaker of the House Garner to be his running mate, Roosevelt turned the Democratic Party into a united front against Hoover.
Not only did Roosevelt’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination introduce the term “new deal,” but it was also a triumph for the conservation movement. He proposed the creation of a national conservation corps to combat unemployment while improving America’s protection of its national resources and scenic beauty. That so much of his Chicago convention speech was about conservation would have pleased Theodore Roosevelt. “We know that a very hopeful and immediate means of relief, both for the unemployed and for agriculture, will come,” FDR declared, “from a wide plan of the converting of many millions [of acres] of marginal and unused land into timberland through reforestation.”83 At heart this was the Hewitt Reforestation Amendment being applied to America.84
“There are tens of millions of acres east of the Mississippi River alone in abandoned farms, in cut-over land, now growing up in worthless brush,” Roosevelt went on. “Why, every European Nation has a definite land policy, and has had one for generations. We have none. Having none, we face a future of soil erosion and timber famine. It is clear that economic foresight and immediate employment march hand in hand in the call for the reforestation of these vast areas. In so doing, employment can be given to a million men. That is the kind of public work that is self-sustaining, and therefore capable of being financed by the issuance of bonds which are made secure by the fact that the growth of tremendous crops will
provide adequate security for the investment.”85
A federally funded workforce dedicated to the environment struck critics as more notional than realistic. Ever since the fall of 1929, when Roosevelt asked New York state for additional funds to support conservation projects, he had touted reforestation as the key to putting unemployed men back to work. Others before him had envisioned soldiers working as the caretakers of America’s natural resources. Benton MacKaye, champion of the Appalachian Trail idea, had suggested a large conservation corps back in 1917. Ideas about such an entity appeared in newspaper op-eds from time to time.86 But, in the main, FDR’s conservation corps came from an amalgam of influences, the most important being his forestry experiments on his own land (both in Hyde Park and in Warm Springs), his fondness for German forests, the TERA work with Henry Morgenthau, his erudite conversations with Pinchot, his activism with the Boy Scouts of America, and his relationship with British silviculturist Richard St. Barbe Baker (with whom FDR had dined in Albany before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago).87
Nevertheless, a Democratic delegate could have been forgiven for thinking that Governor Roosevelt had misspoken when he mentioned a million jobs. Just in case the audience thought the nominee was exaggerating, he reiterated his conservation strategy: “Yes, I have a very definite program for providing employment by that means. I have done it! And I am doing it today in the state of New York. I know that the Democratic Party can do it successfully in the nation. That will put men to work and that is an example of the action that we are going to have.”88
With millions of Americans out of work and no sign that the country was climbing out of the Depression, economic issues clearly were paramount during the 1932 presidential campaign; nevertheless, it is striking how conservation issues were presented to the voters. The Republicans predictably pounced on Roosevelt for offering ill-conceived blue-sky oratory. If the public actually believed that one million unemployed men could suddenly find work reforesting millions of acres of submarginal land, then President Hoover was doomed to be a one-term president. But if FDR’s idea of a forestry corps took hold, then unemployment, erosion, and the nationwide timber famine would all be addressed in short order. The GOP needed to counter Roosevelt. The distinguished forester Charles Lathrop Pack, on behalf of the American Forestry Association, wrote to FDR that his proposal was poppycock. “Shall we, as foresters and conservation leaders,” Pack asked, “shut our eyes to facts?”89 From Pack’s perspective, Roosevelt was exaggerating the policy implications of mass reforestation.
The meanest challenge Roosevelt faced was from Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde. Deeming the New Deal un-American, he publicly ridiculed FDR’s views on forestry, arguing that the number of tree planters the federal government could actually hire in 1933 would be “inconsequential.”90 Hyde asserted that a million men could presumably plant “1,000,000,000 trees in a day,” but America’s nurseries simply didn’t “possess 1,000,000,000 seedlings.” Therefore, as president, Roosevelt—God forbid—would be able to provide jobs for only 27,900 men; so the candidate’s rhetoric was therefore disingenuous and misleading.
The attack by the Hoover campaign didn’t work. Roosevelt cleverly dispatched Congressman Marvin Jones of Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, to counter Hyde’s arguments. Jones alleged that Hyde failed to understand that “reforestation required labor-intensive soil preparation and erosion and flood control, not just sticking seedlings in the ground.”91 Ovid Butler, executive secretary of the American Forestry Association, defended FDR’s bold work-relief plan, noting that a national conservation corps would also protect against fire, insect invasions, and fungi—all the while helping to build roads, trails, and telephone lines.92
The Hoover campaign, in turn, enlisted Charles L. Pack to counter Butler’s enthusiastic endorsement. In a lengthy manifesto, Pack criticized Roosevelt’s reforestation plan as an unrealistic pledge based on “shibboleths and dangerous generalizations.” Roosevelt next assigned James O. Hazard, the state forester of Tennessee, to knock Pack down a peg. “I hope,” Roosevelt wrote to Hazard, “Mr. Pack will receive such discouragement that he will be induced to abandon his apparent intention to oppose the early adoption of a comprehensive national plan of reforestation as a means of combating unemployment.”93
An unexpected consequence of Hoover’s derision toward the idea of forestry as work-relief was the defection of Republicans like Senators George Norris of Nebraska and Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin. Pinchot was particularly angry at Pack, a forester he respected, for acting as Hoover’s hit man. It sickened him that Hoover had seemingly become a rubber stamp for the “economic royalists” who were eager to extract every dollar possible from public lands. Pinchot was instructing all of his Republican conservationist friends to vote against Hoover.94 “Roosevelt believes as I do,” Pinchot wrote in an unpublished statement, “that the good of the People comes first. Hoover is and always has been the errand boy of the private utilities.”95
With the Democratic nomination in hand and Progressive Republicans like Pinchot backing most of his policies, Howe persuaded Roosevelt to travel through the Southwest and West to learn more about the percussive heat waves, which had developed into a permanent drought, and rustle up votes. His first speech was in Topeka on the grim farm conditions.96 Kansas was plagued by sudden floods, vanishing topsoil, and, on occasion, invasions of locusts. The number of dust storms was steadily increasing throughout the Great Plains and at the Southwest.97 Great rivers like the Cimarron and Canada were becoming mudflats.98 Corn and grain refused to sprout. People were desperate to pay their mortgages. Loose dust accumulated on country roads. At some spots dust drifts were as high as haystacks. America’s breadbasket was becoming the Sahara. “In a rising sand storm,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White, “cattle quickly became blinded. They run around in circles until they fall, and breathe so much dust they die. Autopsies show their lungs caked with dust and mud.”99 Governor Ross S. Sterling of Texas declared a “grave” ecological crisis in his state.100 Perhaps the only good news from the West about the land was that the drought killed invasive weeds and grasses, giving the pampa and buffalo grasses a chance to gain ground for the first time in generations.
Many struggling Great Plains families just picked up and left but wildlife didn’t necessarily have that option. The drought was lethal to prairie chickens, antelope, woodcock, and deer. Severe bag limits were ordered by the Hoover administration, but controlling the number of duck and geese killed was far from an effective solution to the basic problem of birds’ lack of suitable nesting cover, food, and protection.
Throughout the southern plains, Roosevelt assured windblown farmers that the drought of 1931 and 1932 could be combatted with proper soil conservation measures. Farming didn’t have to be a speculative venture. Green could replace brown on the land again. Dust storms didn’t have to be so frequent. Plagues of grasshoppers and swarms of rabbits could be managed with federal pest control measures. But a new land ethic was needed on western homesteads. If Roosevelt went to the White House he would have the U.S. Department of Agriculture dig wells and establish grazing districts and restore grasslands. “He had an extraordinarily acute power of observation and could judge conditions in any section from the looks of the countryside as he traveled through,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “From him I learned how to observe from train windows; he would watch the crops, notice how people dressed, how many cars there were and in what condition, and even look at the washing on the clotheslines.”101
Governor Roosevelt’s campaign was cresting while President Hoover’s circled the drain. Through a combination of charisma, indomitable will, and bold policy, FDR persuaded the economically devastated American people to trust him. President Hoover also made the strategic mistake of refusing at least publicly, to acknowledge that in the Great Plains, the Depression was a crisis of the ecology, rather than Wall Street. He chose to stick with the message that “tim
e will heal,” as if the perils of soil erosion and deforestation didn’t worry him. By contrast, Roosevelt insisted that the government needed to immediately take a dynamic role in managing the natural resources of the public domain, and he thought the number of national forests and wildlife refuges should be doubled. Eleanor Roosevelt explained her husband’s conservation philosophy succinctly: “Where land is wastefully used and becomes unprofitable, the people go to waste too. Good land and good people go hand in hand.”102
As Election Day neared, Hoover grew desperate to counter Roosevelt’s New Deal conservationist vision. He seized on an informal letter FDR had written to Lowe Shearon of New York City. The GOP reprinted Roosevelt’s reply to Shearon and circulated it far and wide. “I believe in the inherent right of every citizen to employment at a living wage and pledge my support to whatever measures I may deem necessary for inaugurating self-liquidating public works,” Roosevelt wrote, “such as utilization of our water resources, flood control and land reclamation, to provide employment for all surplus labor at all times.’”103
President Hoover, supported by the National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association, mocked the letter at a rally in Detroit. “There can only be one conclusion from this statement,” Hoover charged. “It is a hope held out to the 10,000,000 men and women now unemployed that they will be given jobs by the government. It is a promise no government could fulfill. It is utterly wrong to delude suffering men and women with such assurances. . . . There are a score of reasons why this whole plan is fantastic. These 10,000,000 men, nor any appreciable fraction of them, cannot be provided with jobs in this fashion. The only way is by healing the wounds of the economic system to restore them to their normal jobs. . . . But above all I ask you whether or not such frivolous promises and dreams should be held out to suffering unemployed people. Is this the new deal?”104
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