Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  On November 8, 1932, the Democrats scored a landslide victory, with Roosevelt-Garner winning 472 electoral votes to Hoover-Curtis’s 59. The Democrats also won large congressional majorities (310–117 in the House, and 60–35 in the Senate). Roosevelt won every Western state—his strongest regional showing. So lopsided was the outcome that the Democrats successfully ran against “Hooverism” for the next decade. When Americans were offered a choice between Roosevelt’s new deal and Hoover’s old deal, they picked change.

  Given the president-elect’s clear mandate, Congress planned on allowing FDR wide latitude for jump-starting the woeful economy. With approximately one third of Great Plains farms facing foreclosure, the banking system essentially ceasing to function, and unemployment at 25 percent, Roosevelt had a Herculean task before him.105 But he was ready. Everybody sensed that his March 4, 1933, inauguration would be a turning point in American history. “If Roosevelt burned down the Capitol,” humorist Will Rogers declared, “we would cheer and say, ‘Well we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”106

  PART TWO

  NEW DEAL CONSERVATION, 1933–1936

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “THEY’VE MADE THE GOOD EARTH BETTER”

  I

  Having won in a landslide, Franklin Roosevelt quickly brought conservationists of all stripes into the New Deal fold. On January 8, Governor Pinchot, a moderate Republican, drove from Pennsylvania to New York at the president-elect’s behest to strategize about how best to implement a national forestry strategy. Pinchot had been focused on deforestation in the Appalachians since 1930, so his expertise was rusty with regard to public lands in the drought-plagued western Great Plains; still, he agreed to help FDR address the ecological crisis. The following day, Pinchot enlisted Robert Marshall—one of America’s greatest foresters and wilderness activists—to help launch the New Deal conservation movement.

  Bob Marshall, born on January 2, 1901, was from a prominent family of New York social progressives. His father, Louis, was a top-drawer constitutional lawyer who, as president of the American Jewish Committee from 1912 to 1929, fought against anti-Semitism in all of its ugly forms. Louis helped establish the New York State College of Forestry in Syracuse. All three of his sons followed his lead in protecting the natural world. As an impressionable youth who summered at the family’s estate on Lower Saranac Lake, Bob devoured books about the Maine woods of Thoreau, the Colorado River of Powell, and the upper Missouri of Catlin. Adopting the preservationist precepts of Muir and TR, the young Marshall was determined to fight for government protection of what remained of the American wilderness. Exploring the Adirondacks—with backpack, a down sleeping bag, rainproof clothing, and leather boots—became his fixation. As a teenager Marshall protested against the urban-industrial sprawl of New York City and joined the cult of the “primitive,” mourning the disappearing western frontier. “My ideology,” he once said, “was definitely formed on a Lewis and Clark pattern.”1

  Bob Marshall, pictured at home in a forest, circa 1935. Marshall, an independently wealthy Manhattanite, was a passionate naturalist. With Roosevelt among his admirers, he was appointed head of the Forestry Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933. Two years later, Marshall helped found the Wilderness Society, underwriting it in its fledgling years.

  Marshall earned a BS degree at the State College of Forestry at Syracuse, a master’s degree in forestry from Harvard, and a doctorate from Johns Hopkins. His first book, High Peaks of the Adirondacks, was published in 1922. After working for the U.S. Forest Service at the Northern Rocky Mountain Experiment Station in Missoula, Montana, he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1931. Camping in the wilderness was for Marshall, who had spent fifteen months in Arctic Alaska, an American birthright.2 “There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of Civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth,” Marshall wrote in the Scientific Monthly in February 1930. “That hope is the organization of a spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.”3 In 1929 and 1930 Marshall wrote other impassioned articles, including “Forest Devastation Must Stop” (The Nation), and “A Proposed Remedy for Our Forestry Illness,” in (Journal of Forestry)—must-reads for progressive conservationists.4

  In 1932 Marshall, working for the Forest Service, was asked to contribute several sections to a monumental report prepared at the request of the U.S. Senate: A National Plan for American Forestry: Report on Senate Resolution 175, known as the Copeland Report.5 Marshall was responsible for the recreation portion of the appraisal; he recommended putting 10 percent of all U.S. forestlands into recreational zones, ranging from big parks to wilderness areas to roadside campsites.6 The report, completed at the beginning of 1933, would stretch to 1,677 pages. Pinchot and Roosevelt wanted a sneak preview; they also wanted it boiled down to a manageable memo. Pinchot tasked Marshall with the latter. “He limited me to six double-spaced pages,” Marshall recalled. “I stressed two things: a huge public [land] acquisition program; and the use of the unemployed in an immense way for fire protection, fire-proofing, improvement cuttings, planting, erosion control, improvements (roads, trails, fire towers, etc.), and recreation developments.”7

  The Copeland Report specifically recommended that the U.S. government purchase approximately 240 million acres of privately owned woodlands—an extremely ambitious emergency conservation measure regarded as imperative by the authors.8 The seeds of the New Deal’s Emergency Conservation Work—soon known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—are also, in part, suggested in the Copeland Report. “Private forestry in America, as a solution of the problem, is no longer a hope,” Pinchot reminded the president-elect in late January. “Neither the crutch of subsidy nor the whip of regulation can restore it. The solution of the private forest problem lies chiefly in large scale public acquisition of private lands.”9

  The idea of a CCC readily solidified in Roosevelt’s mind. As governor of New York, Roosevelt had proved the value of a similar, though less ambitious, reforestation corps. On three occasions during the 1932 presidential campaign—the acceptance speech in Chicago, a press event in Atlanta, and a give-and-take in Boston about work-relief—Roosevelt had called for a national conservation corps.10 If the primary selling point to Congress was work relief, the long-term vision was nothing less than to heal the wounded American earth.

  Pinchot wanted the U.S. government to purchase clear-cut forestlands for bottom-dollar prices to be replanted and then turned into federal forests. The time was ripe for action. Because the Great Depression had lowered property values, abandoned farmland was inexpensive. Moreover, lumber companies were financially stressed; purchasing their tracts would save them—and their land. The Forest Service could purchase acreage from all sources very cheaply. “By utilizing the unemployed, highly necessary and productive improvements could be made in the forests thus acquired at substantially no cost to the public,” Pinchot explained. “The major fields of work include planting, thinning, release cuttings, the removal of highly inflammable shags and windfalls, a large scale attack on serious insect epidemics, the control of erosion, the construction of roads, trails, and telephone lines, and the development of campsites and other recreational facilities. All this would supply large numbers of men with highly useful work.”11

  Roosevelt met with Pinchot again on February 1 to discuss the CCC. Inevitably Congress would need to appropriate a large amount of money to create such an agency. Roosevelt was undaunted, however. Owing to his definitive victory and the urgent economic problems that had precipitated the Great Depression, he had the prerogative to spend federal money as needed. He felt that, with a two-year grant of emergency powers tacitly granted by Congress, he could immediately hire many unemployed men for Pinchot’s scientifically managed forest, as well as for his own special concern with creating a more recreation-friendly atmosphere in state and national parks.12 If CCC labor could become operational during his first months in the White House, Roosevelt could, at last, prioritize “
localized recreational opportunities” in all forty-eight states. It was his dream to initiate meaningful state park systems throughout America.

  Wintering that February in south Florida, bone-fishing in Biscayne Bay, Roosevelt lived on philanthropist Vincent Astor’s 264-foot yacht Nourmahal. Wearing a linen Palm Beach suit, he discussed policy imperatives with Morgenthau and Hopkins, and considered various potential New Deal unemployment relief initiatives while basking in the Florida sunshine. Buoyed by the victory in November, feeling oddly carefree, Roosevelt was downright jovial. The problems of the Great Depression seemed far away. “And I didn’t even open a briefcase,” he bragged.13

  Roosevelt’s vacation, however, turned grim on February 15 when the president-elect spoke before some twenty thousand American Legionnaires at Miami’s palm-tree-lined Bayfront Park.14 Sitting on the back of a Buick convertible, FDR delivered a friendly talk of less than one minute describing his twelve-day holiday. Afterward, still in the car and surrounded by reporters, he spotted the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, and good-naturedly waved him over for a chat. Just as they finished talking, a deranged Italian-born anarchist, Giuseppe Zangara, sprayed the gathering with gunfire. Plagued by severe stomach problems, Zangara believed that killing a “capitalist” would alleviate his chronic pain, so he had been aiming for Roosevelt, but he missed. One of the bullets struck Mayor Cermak, who slumped to the ground.15 Millions of Americans credited FDR’s escape to “divine intervention.”16

  Bystanders and police officers apprehended Zangara while FDR ordered the Secret Service to lift Cermak into the car and race him to the nearest hospital. On the ride to the hospital, Roosevelt held Cermak’s hand and told him to remain calm. At Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, short of breath, Cermak bravely whispered to Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me, instead of you.” The mayor lived for a few weeks, long enough to hear FDR’s famous inaugural address on the radio. But, afflicted with pneumonia and gangrene, he died on March 6. Roosevelt’s grace under pressure in Miami, and his compassion for the wounded Cermak, instilled in the American people an unshakable confidence that the right leader was headed to the White House.17

  II

  In late February 1933, another Chicagoan entered—and transformed—Roosevelt’s life. Harold Ickes, an enthusiastic supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s run for the presidency as a Bull Moose in 1912, had long been active in Chicago politics. As a Republican crossing the aisle, Ickes had helped FDR win the presidential election by wrangling the midwestern Independent Republican vote for the Democratic standard-bearer (to the dismay of Ickes’s wife Anna, who was running for the state legislature as a Republican that same year).18 As a reward, in early 1933, the Republican Ickes was being promoted by New Dealers as a serious contender for the job of secretary of the interior.

  The Department of the Interior, formed in 1849, had faced more than its share of scandals through the years, largely because it oversaw vulnerable groups, including Native Americans and indigenous Hawaiians, as well as the vast resources in land and minerals owned by the federal government. The most recent disgrace, as of 1933, was the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s involving bribes for oil leases on public lands in Wyoming by Harding administration officials. A former secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, went to jail for complicity in that scheme. Roosevelt needed someone to clean up Interior and its image. He was looking to replace Hoover’s outgoing secretary of the interior, Ray F. Wilbur, with a progressive dynamo. To show that the New Deal was a bipartisan effort, he and his advisers had designated the appointment for a Republican. Roosevelt had already offered the position to two well-liked U.S. senators—Hiram Johnson of California and Bronson Cutting of New Mexico—but they had rejected it.19 Johnson did, however, tout a progressive Republican politician active in local politics in Chicago: Harold Ickes.

  While Ickes’s name wasn’t a household word in 1933, conservationists in the know cheered the appointment. Ickes, nicknamed “Honest Harold” by progressives, was a dependable crusader for the middle class and the poor, like his Chicago-based hero, social activist Jane Addams. Rotund, bespectacled, a bullish writer and scholar, Ickes considered the wise management of America’s natural resources the number one policy objective for a president. Emulating the great John Muir, Ickes had earned a celebrated reputation in the Middle West for lashing out against entrenched interests and exploiters of nature, fearlessly taking on Chicago bullies and power brokers such as Samuel Insull and Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson. Rapacious industrialists who ran roughshod over Illinois’s scenic landscapes often met Ickes’s acid-tongued ire.20 “In my own city of Chicago we generously handed over to the railroads miles of the wonderful shore-line of Lake Michigan,” Ickes said in an essay published in the American Civic Annual. “For more than a generation now, the people of Chicago have been taxing themselves for millions upon millions of dollars to recapture their shore-line. The total cost to Chicago for its great generosity, without taking into account those aesthetic values which cannot be measured in money, has already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with additional hundreds of millions to come before the shoreline can be completely reclaimed.”21

  Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (right) met with delegates from the Confederated Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in 1935. The three tribes received the first constitution ratified under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ceded cultural and economic autonomy back to Native Americans.

  Ickes and his wife, Anna, had also been longtime crusaders for Native American rights. Harold had founded the Indian Rights Association of Chicago, and Anna served on the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ Indian Welfare Committee in the early 1920s.22 Because Anna had asthma, they’d escape the intolerable humidity of Chicago’s summer for an adobe home near the Navajo reservation at Gallup, New Mexico. In 1933, Anna, who had learned Navajo, published Mesa Land, about her love of the Four Corners region. Both Harold and Anna knew that the United States’ history of stripping lands from Native American tribes was deplorable; by 1933, these tribes had lost two thirds of the 138 million acres allotted to them by government treaties in 1871; the remaining fifty million acres were designated as “reservation” lands, most located in the West.23 (Once in Roosevelt’s cabinet, Ickes urged the president to hire John Collier, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive reformer, as commissioner of Indian affairs in 1933, and Bob Marshall as chief forester of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.)24

  That February, FDR, a genius as a talent scout, invited Ickes to his posh double town house on East Sixty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, which served as his pre-White House headquarters, to discuss the failing economy with a small cadre of policy wonks. During the meeting the Roosevelt kept looking at Ickes, sizing him up as if buying a horse or a house, trying to read his body language. Journalist Walter Lippmann homed in on the paradoxical essence of Ickes by characterizing him as “violently virtuous” and “angrily unbigoted.”25 Intuiting that Ickes’s hard-nosed, even caustic, exterior was a facade for an inner sincerity, when the meeting ended Roosevelt requested a private word with Ickes in his library. Roosevelt told Ickes that regarding the stewardship of public lands they were indeed brothers in arms. Both men were particularly enthusiastic about having the National Park Service help build multiple-unit state park systems. Ickes took the job offer. Many of Roosevelt’s “country beautiful” ideas, as manifested in national and state parks, would be made realities through the hard work of the policy pugilist Ickes. He and FDR shared a fervor for saving what Muir called “pieces of extraordinary nature for the national trust.”26

  III

  On March 2, 1933, Franklin and Eleanor left New York City for Washington, D.C. Holed up in room 776 of the Mayflower Hotel, the president-elect tweaked and rehearsed his inaugural address.27 With the stock market down 89 percent from 1929 and a quarter of American adults (nearly sixteen million citizens) out of work, many questioned whether capitalism could survive. Too many good people
had hit rock bottom, roaming by highways and railroads looking for a square meal, squatting in shantytowns that mushroomed in urban slums. Diminished expectations were threatening to obliterate the American dream. How could words move a nation in utter despair? While conservation wasn’t a central part of Roosevelt’s inaugural speech per se, the CCC work-relief program was already planted firmly in his mind as part of his overall job recovery program. The moment was propitious for the renewal of America. Countrymen knew that in many regions—particularly the South, Midwest, and Great Plains—the abused land needed to be repaired for the sake of the future.

  Expectations were high on March 4, when Roosevelt, standing at a lectern in front of the Capitol, placed his hand on his family’s Bible and took the Oath of Office. The sun peeked through, as if signaling Roosevelt’s message to the country. Movie star Lillian Gish, seeing him in person that day, said that FDR glowed brightly, as if he had “been dipped in phosphorous.”28 There was an almost palpable current of anticipation zipping through the land, where millions of Americans were listening to the president over the radio. On that red-letter day, over six hundred stations broadcast the moment of national uplift.29

  Roosevelt’s first inaugural address was a heartfelt clarion call for New Deal reform and marked a rare moment in history when the hopes and aspirations of a world power depended on a single leader. Roosevelt’s radical decision to declare a four-day national bank holiday proved to be the headline news from the historic day. Great attention was also given to his call for a special session of Congress within four days. “Whatever laws the President thinks he may need to end the Depression,” Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, an early backer of FDR, predicted that day, “Congress will jump through a hoop to put them through.”30