Like a football coach recruiting star talent, the charismatic Bennett cast wide, enlisting the best agronomists to halt erosion, restore soil, and improve the rural environment for farmers and wildlife alike after fifteen decades of abuse. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier asked Bennett to study the soil of the Navajo reservation in Arizona in mid-1933. Tribal leaders soon adopted Bennett’s comprehensive recommendations for soil conservation. This boded well for the New Deal’s Native American policies and conservation. “[Bennett] sees the matter steadily and whole,” Collier wrote to Ickes, “and is not an engineering fanatic nor reseeding and ecological fanatic nor an animal husbandry fanatic.”61 Great men are usually honored in marble or bronze, but the earth within America’s borders was the lasting memorial for Hugh Bennett, the “Father of Soil Conservation.”62
IV
On May 18, 1933, Congress, at Roosevelt’s urging, passed the legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to address a wide range of waterpower needs in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and small sections of other southern states. Illiterate croppers, tenant farmers, day laborers, and backwoods squatters were ravaged by the Depression. Seeing that the neglected Tennessee Valley region had desperate needs, Roosevelt brought a massive solution: the TVA, a thoroughly considered approach to a region in crisis. The population overall was poor, unhealthy, and tired—and therefore it was no coincidence that the land was likewise ruined. The TVA, an enormous hydroelectric project, included intensive and extensive agricultural programs, habitat restoration, and educational efforts aimed at people who were often isolated from mainstream avenues of information. In addition, the TVA provided inexpensive electricity.
A headline in the New York Times noted, correctly, that Roosevelt saw the Tennessee Valley as the “laboratory” for all of America.63 The first meeting of the TVA board was held in June 1933. A few months later, a colossal dam project, under the able leadership of David Lilienthal (“Mr. TVA”), was under construction. Within three years of the TVA’s creation, two new dams—Norris and Wheeler, each with a capacity of over 200,000 horsepower—were operational and making the Tennessee River “continuously navigable.” Meanwhile, the CCC set up camp in the Tennessee Valley to help fight chronic erosion along the Clinch River. Roosevelt aimed to heal the abused southern landscape. All of it was managed through a new type of entity: the public corporation. Altogether, the TVA was an unusual, almost socialist entrance of the U.S. government into the private sector.64
As a bold experiment, promising improvements in river navigation, flood control, and electrical power,65 the TVA was primarily opposed by private utility companies and their political surrogates.66 FDR selected David Lilienthal to oversee the TVA, but first, New Dealers had to get it out of Congress.
A map of the Tennessee Valley Authority reflects its scope across six southern states. Established in May 1933, at the outset of the New Deal, the TVA addressed the stifling poverty of the region through power generation and reclamation of abused lands, among other programs. The TVA was also a Roosevelt invention in government itself, as the first public corporation.
Roosevelt had a shrewd political ally in Senator George Norris of Nebraska (for whom the first TVA dam would be named). Roosevelt considered the seventy-one-year-old Norris, the noble agrarian Republican from the heartland, the bravest senator of his lifetime. Norris thought the 1902 Reclamation Act—which brought irrigation projects to western states—was the greatest thing Theodore Roosevelt ever accomplished.67 Having backed the construction of Boulder (Hoover) Dam of Nevada, Senator Norris threw his full support behind the TVA. FDR and Norris shared an unwavering belief that ensuring the basic welfare of the American public was the great duty of the federal government. Roosevelt came to believe that the TVA, which Norris had helped create “with body and soul,” was the legislator’s gift to American betterment.68
The TVA eventually flooded 153,000 acres of land in the Tennessee Valley region, creating huge reservoirs for outdoor recreation while providing cheap electricity to the rural poor. By 1934 more than nine thousand workers were building not just Norris Dam but Wheeler Dam in Alabama. One of FDR’s TVA commissioners said, bragging without hyperbole, that thirty-five Boulder Dams could have been constructed out of the materials allotted to the TVA site.69 The work went far beyond pouring concrete, however. As an auxiliary to the TVA, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted three million trees and 2.6 million square yards of brush to keep soil from washing away.
Roosevelt, like Norris, was very bullish on the theory behind TR’s Reclamation Service (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923). But he thought it had been poorly managed under the preceding Republican administrations, which favored private utilities over federal irrigation projects. One notable exception was Boulder (or Hoover) Dam, which the Republicans initiated. Built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Arizona and Nevada, Hoover Dam, at over seven hundred feet tall, would dwarf the Aswan Low Dam on the Nile in Egypt. Hoover Dam changed the torrent-like river forever; more than 1.7 million horsepower of hydroelectricity could be produced, allowing cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas to grow. As a side effect of the dam, beautiful Lake Mead, the world’s largest man-made reservoir (110 miles long), was formed—holding enough water to flood all of Pennsylvania. This was hydroelectric power on an unprecedented scale. While Herbert Hoover deserved credit (or contempt, if you’re an environmentalist) for damming the wild Colorado River, it was FDR who fast-tracked this engineering project during his first term as president.
Roosevelt approved the construction of other multipurpose dams in the West, including the Shasta on California’s Sacramento River and Montana’s Fort Peck on the upper Missouri River.70 From an environmental perspective, however, dams withheld water and disturbed river ecology; they eliminated highly variable flows, which a healthy native ecosystem required.
V
On August 12, 1933, Roosevelt invited AFL president William Green—a critic of the CCC—on a picnic in Shenandoah National Park’s Big Meadows, a grassy tableland high on a bucolic ridge. It was quite an outing. Roosevelt left from Washington; traveled to Harrisonburg, Virginia; and met up with Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. and Representative A. Willis Robertson—both Democrats from Virginia—and members of his cabinet, including Ickes, Wallace, and Dern. After inspecting a few CCC camps and meeting with “the boys,” the visitors participated in the huge picnic at Big Meadows. A series of group photo opportunities were staged, but they could not capture the festive atmosphere that actually prevailed that day.
Franklin Roosevelt (right) and Harold Ickes were served lunch by a CCC enrollee during their spotlight visit to the Big Meadows camp in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in August 1933.
Roosevelt and other dignitaries ate from the regulation mess kit, comprising a plate, a tin cup, and silverware. Reporters never saw Roosevelt so happy, eating fried beefsteak, smoking cigarettes, laughing with CCCers the ages of his sons. Everybody was excited about how the CCC was building Virginia’s state park system from scratch. “It was a thoroughly democratic function,” the Page News and Courier wrote, “for eight of the rank-and-file members of the camp were honored with a seat at the President’s table, which was set on the blue-grass on the edge of the camp while the remainder of the visitors and camp personnel were eating in the mess hall.”71
Reporters were astonished at how loose and relaxed the president was with the CCC boys of Company 350 in Skyland, Virginia, discussing baseball and how Dutch elm fungus could be controlled by burning infested trees. “I wish I could spend a couple of months here myself,” he told the men at the Big Meadow picnic. “The only difference between us is that I am told you men have put on an average of 12 pounds each,” Roosevelt joked. “I am trying to lose 12 pounds.” Visiting Camp Nira in Shenandoah National Park, where CCC company 1316 was based, Roosevelt watched a play depicting the defeat of “Old Man Depression.” Two actors—one labeled CCC,
the other labeled NIRA—chased away the demons of the Great Depression to the enthusiastic approval of the president.72
There were many comical moments at Big Meadows that afternoon. Roosevelt got a huge kick out of listening to a U.S. Army general boast that his work-relief boys could compete with Ivy Leaguers. “He told how someone was teaching trigonometry to one of the boys, how another was learning French,” Ickes recorded in his diary, “and he concluded with this gem: ‘There won’t none of these boys leave these camps illiterate.’”73 After the Shenandoah outing William Green, president of the AFL-CIO, did an about-face. He became a booster for the CCC, admitting that he “could not help but view the whole project in a most sympathetic way.” He told the president that picnicking in Shenandoah was “one of the most pleasing experiences” of his life.74
VI
As America’s landscape planner, Roosevelt paid attention to municipalities that had no proper park system, especially Oklahoma City and Tulsa. If Olmsted gets credit for designing Central Park, then Roosevelt certainly deserves recognition for helping to establish a system of New Deal beaux arts parks in Dallas, as well as the River Walk canal system in San Antonio. Places that many elite easterners thought of as no-man’s-land, such as Texas’s Permian Basin and Nevada’s Great Basin, were—for the president—worth beautifying. “I love maps,” Roosevelt declared. “I have a map mind and I can explain things.”75
Recognizing that many in Oklahoma lived in rural poverty, especially in the drought-stricken region in the western part of the state, Roosevelt wanted forested eastern Oklahoma to be refashioned into a giant recreation hub, where people could fish, hike, and picnic. It would be called the Chickasaw National Recreation Area (NRA).
Early in 1933 he tasked the NPS to help grow and administer Oklahoma’s state park system. On unproductive land the CCC built dams that formed lakes, planted trees and wildflowers, and quarried stone. While Texans during the New Deal bragged that they had “a state park every hundred miles,” Oklahomans adopted the New Deal motto “a state park wherever nature smiles.” Roosevelt’s CCC “boys” did truly impressive recreation infrastructure work in what became the Chickasaw NRA. This green oasis—in the shadow of the Arbuckle Mountains in south-central Oklahoma—offered a reprieve from the stultifying heat of Oklahoma City and Tulsa during the summer months. It had a lovely assemblage of CCC-built mineral spring pavilions, examples of “government rustic” architecture.
By taking an “eroded resort landscape” and transforming it into a “holistic place of great beauty,” Roosevelt made Chickasaw NRA (which in 1976 incorporated Platt National Park) into southeastern Oklahoma’s very own version of Warm Springs. The gateway town of Sulphur boomed as tourists discovered the outdoor health and recreational benefits of the numerous mineral springs.76 None of Sulphur’s residents wanted the beloved Company 808 to close shop. When the CCC left Sulphur in 1942, one historian recalled that a sense of permanent loss fell on the community. “This New Deal legacy is still enjoyed in the twenty-first century by millions of Oklahomans who swim, boat, camp, and hike in the parks across the state,” Suzanne H. Schrems explained.77 By bringing artists, craftsmen, and conservationists into southeastern Oklahoma, Roosevelt showed he cared deeply about the Sooner State.78
VII
By the summer of 1933 a grassroots movement to protect 1.5 million Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) in southern California caught FDR’s attention. Centuries ago Native Americans recognized the spiky Joshua trees for their useful properties: strong leaves were worked into baskets, and the flower buds and raw seeds made healthful additions to the diet. Joshuas bristled with strange dagger-shaped leaves and had upraised branches gnarled by wind and heat. When explorer John C. Frémont first laid eyes on Joshua trees in the 1840s, he derided them as “the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.”79 Mormon pioneers of the 1850s, however, trekking across the Mojave Desert, thought the somber trees resembled the Old Testament prophet Joshua, arms uplifted, beckoning the faithful to the promised land of California.80 The Mormons’ name stuck.
With a discontinuous distribution in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, these strange trees grew at elevations between three thousand and five thousand feet. Very few Angelenos thought these spine-studded yuccas were worth saving; but the International Deserts Conservation League (IDCL) of Los Angeles did.81 The founder of the league was Pasadena socialite Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, who, in the early 1930s, devised a far-reaching, unprecedented conservation proposal to designate a Joshua Tree National Monument (not far from Palm Springs) to protect Yucca brevifolia so that the federal government paid attention to the importance of these trees.82
Hoyt, a popular leader with the Garden Clubs of America, was also the founder of the IDCL, serving as the group’s president until her death in 1945.83
Minerva Hoyt was a genteel daughter of the American South and an ardent New Dealer. Her parents owned a thriving plantation in Mississippi, and her father, Joel George Hamilton, had served in the Mississippi state senate and was a delegate at the 1872 Democratic National Convention. Minerva Hamilton was a debutante and attended Ward’s Seminary in Nashville before enrolling at music conservatories in Cincinnati and Boston. She married Dr. A. Sherman Hoyt of New York City—a physician and financier—and they moved to Denver, New York City, and Baltimore before establishing a permanent home in South Pasadena. The elaborate Hoyt mansion on Buena Vista Street was admired by the Los Angeles Times for its five acres of manicured gardens and showcase ponds filled with alligators.84 As a leading socialite in the Valley Hunt Club, Minerva organized the annual Rose Parade on New Year’s Day and also served as president of the local chapter of the Boys and Girls Aid Society.
Hoyt’s life changed, however, in the 1910s when she visited Palm Springs, a tiny but growing California resort community frequented by such Hollywood luminaries as Theda Bara and Cecil B. DeMille.85 During the 1920s, the population of Los Angeles doubled, reaching two million. To help beautify the oceanside city, Los Angeles commercial developers stripped the Palm Springs area of Joshua trees, fan palms, and cacti of all kinds for ornamental planting. Another modern problem was that the proliferation of motorcycles and automobiles in southern California was turning the land of the Joshua trees into a motorized playground without the benefit of speed restrictions. The entire Mojave was treated as a lawless wasteland. To many Californians, H. L. Mencken’s definition of nature as “a place to throw beer cans on Sunday” was especially applicable to the land of Joshua trees.86
Minerva Hoyt was photographed in the desert of the American West, probably in the mid-1930s. Born in Mississippi, Mrs. Hoyt was living the pleasant life of a socialite in Pasadena in the 1910s, when she discovered the overlooked beauty of the California desert. Finding an ally in Ickes, she was instrumental in the establishment of the Joshua Tree National Monument (now Park) in 1936.
Not to Minerva Hamilton Hoyt. “This desert [the Mojave],” she said, “with its elusive beauty . . . possessed me and I constantly wished that I might find some way to preserve its natural beauty.”87 During the springtime Hoyt would backpack in California’s deserts, choosing blossoms from among seventy different species of wildflowers for her vasculum. Among the mundane and strange varieties of plants in the desert, the exotic Joshuas always stood apart. Disdainful of the swelling tide of cars swallowing up Los Angeles, insulted by the noise, she founded the IDCL solely to protect arid landscapes such as Antelope Valley, Coachella Valley, Death Valley, the Amargosa Desert, and the Sonoran Desert.88 In 1931, Hoyt joined an expedition into Mexico to study rare desert plants and animals; this expedition earned her an honorary doctorate and the title Professor Extraordinary of Botany from the National University of Mexico. At the ceremony President Pascual Ortiz Rubio of Mexico praised Hoyt as the “Apostle of the Cacti.”
During the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Hoyt had made a point of calling the Joshua trees “sentinels” of the desert.89 “I fear,” she told the British press, “we cut
our trees down in rows sometimes forgetting that town and country must have a personality, so to speak, and tradition born of time.”90
Hoyt’s dream of Joshua Tree National Monument became more realistic with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. Aware of her preservationist work with the IDCL, Ickes encouraged Hoyt to visit him in Washington. In person, Hoyt recommended to Ickes that a large federal park or monument be established in the California desert between Palm Springs and Twentynine Palms. But Hoyt’s Joshua Tree project was strewn with bureaucratic roadblocks. The Southern Pacific Railroad, for example, had claims that no local politician could afford to challenge.
In late June 1933, Ickes arranged a private audience for Hoyt with the president. Roosevelt was impressed to learn that Hoyt had introduced the Joshua tree to the public in botanical exhibitions in New York, Boston, and London. Taking one sharp, practiced glance at the desert preservationist, Roosevelt endorsed the movement to protect the Joshua tree forests. When Hoyt warned about potential obstructionism from the Southern Pacific Railroad, homesteaders, miners, and private ranchers, Roosevelt brushed her concerns aside. Lawyers at Interior, he told Hoyt, would take care of any obstacles. “It is of great satisfaction to me to know that both the President and Ickes want the Monument,” an elated Hoyt soon wrote to a National Park Service official. “Secretary Ickes said to me after I had seen the President, ‘The President is for it, I am for it.’ And now that the withdrawal is technically on its way, can you not devise some clear plan by which the area can be protected as soon as possible as it now stands in all its natural beauty?”91
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