Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  A major part of the appeal of Joshua Tree National Monument for Roosevelt was the protection its designation would afford numerous species of wildlife, especially desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni). On October 25, 1933, three months after Hoyt’s visit to the White House, President Roosevelt set aside 1.1 million acres of federal land in Riverside and San Bernardino counties for the protection of the Joshua tree; this was the first crucial step toward the eventual designation of Joshua Tree National Monument.92 (By contrast, Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah was only 6,711 acres.) But Hoyt didn’t celebrate too quickly. She knew that Interior still needed to rectify legalities before the executive order was officially signed. For all of the quickness of the New Deal, withdrawal of public acreage was, almost invariably, a time-consuming affair.93

  Around Thanksgiving of 1933, W. A. Simpson, the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, wrote to Ickes, asking him to name the Joshua Tree monument after the Apostle of Cacti. “I agree with you that Mrs. Minerva Hoyt is entitled to much credit for her conservation work,” Ickes replied, “but it is the established policy of the Department of the Interior to refrain from naming national parks and monuments after people. Our leading conservationists are of the spirit that it is far more fitting to choose a name that bears a direct relation to the area’s natural features or early history.”94 Ickes also cautioned both Roosevelt and Hoyt that finalizing all the necessary land deeds for Joshua Tree National Monument would take time—not until August 16, 1936, was it established.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “ROOSEVELT IS MY SHEPHERD”

  I

  Frederic Delano, circa 1905. Delano was FDR’s uncle, and Sara’s brother. A railroad executive and financier, he developed influential opinions about land use and especially the value of long-range, public planning. He was regarded by Roosevelt as an unbiased adviser.

  In mid-June 1933, President Roosevelt visited the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and Groton School before traveling to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to enjoy the Delano family’s “Homestead.” Uncle Frederic Delano, FDR’s confidential adviser on all things related to conservation and preservation, met him at the town fishing port with a kiss on the head. The president wanted his uncle to be the new chairman of the National Planning Board (which was re-formed with alternate names three times, including its final iteration in 1939 as the National Resources Planning Board). Delano, then seventy, agreed to start in July. The board and its staff made or commissioned reports on matters of economic capacity, highlighting potential efficiencies. One arm, the Land Planning Committee, made a study of the nation’s needs, circa 1934, with projections to 1960. “What was remarkable in the report dealing with land requirements,” wrote Marion Clawson, an Agriculture Department official during the New Deal, “was its extended treatment of the need for forestland, recreation land, land for wildlife purposes, and land for other purposes.”1 The report advised that the government purchase 75 million acres in farmland, 244 million acres in timberland, and 114 million acres for recreation/conservation.2 FDR would act on this advice.

  In addition to Delano and several cabinet members, including Perkins, Ickes, and Wallace, the board was composed of private citizens. The vice chair was Charles Merriam, of the political science department at the University of Chicago. Another recruit was Charles W. Eliot II, a town planner originally from Boston whose most recent accomplishment had been a parkway granting automobile access to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. In coming years, Delano would staff the NRPB with academic and bureaucratic experts adept at multiuse water planning, woodlands ecology, sewage treatment, and population problems.3 Such future star American economists as Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Wassily Leontief, and Paul Samuelson would cut their teeth in Delano’s planning shop.4

  Careful to avoid charges of nepotism, Delano operated quietly, never using his relationship with FDR to gain power for the board. In fact, some observers felt that another chairperson would have been more pushy with FDR, and therefore more effective. But Delano did have influence. Much of FDR’s sense of “thinking big” about conservation was learned from Delano, who long sought a “new bill of rights” for America that would guarantee adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, and the “right to rest, recreation, and adventure,” for all citizens.5 Whenever Delano discussed historic preservation or state parks issues, the president would invariably smile, his eyes twinkling, nodding knowingly, “Yes, yes.”

  After chatting with Uncle Frederic at Fairhaven, the president took the forty-five-foot schooner Amberjack II on an eleven-day cruise along the Atlantic coast to Campobello Island. After the frenetic pace of his “Hundred Days,” Roosevelt craved the tang of sea air, the ebb and flow of the tides, the splendid isolation. His son James joined him on the Atlantic voyage. It was Roosevelt’s first visit to Campobello since the onset of polio in 1921. After a couple of months in the White House, the president realized that periodically escaping from the confines of official Washington by sailing was essential to maintaining good health. There was plenty of precedent for these extended getaways. Thomas Jefferson, for one, hid regularly in the blue mist of the Virginia hills when he needed solitude. Theodore Roosevelt kept a little rustic cabin—“Pine Knot”—on the woody outskirts of Charlottesville. And Herbert Hoover, the gifted fly fisherman, often retreated to his 164-acre rustic camp along the Rapidan River.6

  What made FDR different from other U.S. presidents was how much time he spent at sea. When pundits weren’t paying attention during the “Hundred Days,” he transferred the Sequoia from the Commerce Department to the U.S. Navy to become his official presidential yacht. Roosevelt loved the name Sequoia because it linked his passion for forestry with his love of seafaring. When an irate midwesterner complained that it was wrong for FDR to have a yacht when millions were unemployed, Louis Howe wrote back that the Sequoia would give the president “a source of relaxation and a haven of quiet where he might thoroughly go over problems of National import without interruptions.”7

  In coming years, Roosevelt switched from the Sequoia to the larger, safer Potomac. On either vessel he would flee Washington, D.C., on Fridays and cruise the Potomac to Chesapeake Bay for fishing. Whenever a longer offshore ocean voyage was in order, Roosevelt had his choice from the U.S. naval fleet. Cruisers named after American cities—Houston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Tuscaloosa, and Augusta—became his favorites.8 Navy admirals were amazed at the commander in chief’s first-rate navigation skills, especially his ability to avoid lockage into a single course in open water, and his knowledge of where sandbars, reefs, and other underwater dangers lay.9

  On June 16, en route to Campobello, Roosevelt, under the authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act, approved the Public Works Administration (PWA) to “encourage national industrial recovery” by means of large-scale public works projects.10 Harold Ickes was asked to run it. With a first-year budget of $3.3 billion, the PWA organized and funded approximately twenty-six thousand large-scale state-sponsored capital investment projects. Bridges, trestles, pipelines, dams, water and sewage treatment systems, stadiums, tunnels, and low-income housing—to name just a few—were all PWA infrastructure projects. Over nine thousand highways and streets would be built by PWA work-relief crews between 1933 and 1943.

  Within a few years the handiwork of the PWA could be seen in eight hundred health care structures, six hundred city halls and courthouses, 350 airports, and fifty housing projects. Signature American structures such as the Conservatory Garden and Zoo in New York’s Central Park, Chicago’s Outer Drive Bridge, and San Francisco’s Bay Bridge were constructed by PWA, as were thousands of public schools. From an engineering perspective, however, no bridge or road matched the PWA’s colossal dams, such as Grand Coulee (Washington), Bonneville (Oregon), and Fort Peck (Montana). Yet Ickes rejected numerous other dam projects—for example, in the Oklahoma panhandle in November 1933—because he thought them a waste of money. Instead, in th
e case of Oklahoma, the Roosevelt administration saw federal grassland parks. “We’ll have to move [the people] out of there,” Ickes said, “and turn the land back to the public domain.”11 Over forty thousand western Oklahomans complained bitterly to the White House about the snub. As the Boise City News wrote, Ickes was “entirely ignorant” of the panhandle’s virtues.12

  Many PWA projects were, by definition, the antithesis of conservation-mindedness. Because Secretary of War Dern was a staunch backer of the CCC, Ickes unfortunately didn’t challenge his order to the Army Corps of Engineers, under the aegis of the PWA, to dredge the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. He probably couldn’t have stopped it anyway; the transformation of the rivers into deepwater shipping channels had been a fervent dream in the region for thirty years. But Ickes, determined to uphold an environmental ethos, did direct PWA work-relief crews to improve dozens of state park systems by reforestation, restoration, and reproduction of historic landmarks, and by enhancing pristine wilderness areas, not overrunning them with roadways. Shrewdly, Ickes placed the brilliant young landscape architect Conrad Wirth in charge of the NPS’s state park improvement program. Also brought into the fold was workhorse Herb Evison of the National Conference on State Parks (NCSP), who, in the early New Deal, helped establish 239 CCC camps in state parks across thirty-two states.13

  Although this is often overlooked by scholars, Roosevelt put America’s state parks at the forefront of the New Deal in 1933. To the delight of members of the NCSP, the president no longer made conservationists go around state capitals with tin cups looking for alms. The New Deal poured money into states like Texas, California, and Florida that were willing to establish meaningful recreation systems. By 1935 there would be a CCC force of over ninety thousand men working in the state parks and national parks of America, championing Roosevelt’s recreation philosophy for the twentieth century.14

  Roosevelt purposefully rewarded Iowa for cutting-edge wildlife management programs already in place. “Give Iowa,” he instructed both Ickes and Wallace, “all it wants.”15 This wasn’t because Roosevelt was smitten with Iowa’s loess hills or the Mississippi River bluffs near Dubuque. Instead, Roosevelt, like any shrewd politician, wanted to receive credit for helping Iowa develop a showcase state park system. After all, it had been the epochal 1921 meeting at Des Moines, with twenty-five states represented, which gave birth to the National Conference on State Parks. Many of the smartest conservationists, Roosevelt knew of—Aldo Leopold, Ira B. Gabrielson, William Temple Hornaday, and Irving Brant—had Iowa roots. Because Iowa had pioneered standardized conservation initiatives, positive political results would come sooner there than in other states.16

  Encouraged by the availability of CCC labor and funds, eleven states acquired their first parks because of Roosevelt’s commitment to the cause. In a masterstroke, Roosevelt, by having the National Park Service oversee the development of the state park movement, ushered in one of the most successful programs in U.S. environmental history.17 The architectural style known as “government rustic” was applied to build picnic areas, log and adobe lodges, cabin clusters, and nature interpretive centers. As historian Phoebe Cutler wrote in The Public Landscape of the New Deal, “a pattern of rough-cut stone, crude timbers, and wooded demesne made it simple to identify almost all of Roosevelt’s state parks.”18 This “pioneer design” of stone, wood, and other natural materials might be called the Downing-Olmstead-Delano-Roosevelt recreational aesthetic look.

  Despite the uniform look of these parks, every Depression-era state park was different in presentation, depending on the local artists, craftsmen, engineers, and conservationists. Some—like Oak Openings in northwestern Ohio—were simple picnic areas with bird-watching platforms. In California, a number of state parks—such as Armstrong Woods and Humboldt-Redwoods—were destinations as impressive as national parks, with idyllic campsites that rivaled any in the world. Some state parks—like Daingerfield in East Texas—were nothing more than a little man-made lake; in neighboring Louisiana, at Chicot State Park, by contrast, CCC crews excavated a two-thousand-acre water hole. Oklahoma used the New Deal work-relief expertise to build six elaborate state parks with gorgeous cabins and fish-stocked lakes. The interiors of some Roosevelt-era state park lodges were lovingly detailed. Bastrop State Park near Austin, Texas, surrounded by Lost Pines Forest, for example, had a lodge adorned with a cowboy bas-relief, a suspended wagon wheel, and elegant handcrafted furniture that gave the structure a regional swagger. For those Americans looking for a more solitary state park experience, there were little overnight cabins built in Idaho, Pennsylvania, and New York.19

  Roosevelt’s state park aesthetic extended to national parks as well. In 1933, the PWA made financial allotments to Yosemite National Park, which Roosevelt considered the “showcase for national park values.” Most of the outstanding buildings in Yosemite—like the Sentinel and Wawona hotels—were Adirondack-style rustic lodges built using local Sierra Nevada stone and rock materials. Yosemite became a benchmark for eastern national park projects, such as Great Smoky Mountain and Shenandoah.20 As when FDR led the Taconic Parkway Commission in the 1920s, he believed that the artistic CCC workmanship and building materials themselves embodied American values worth preserving.21

  A wonderful example of New Deal rustic architecture can still be observed in Sequoia National Park. CCC labor and PWA expertise built model patrol cabins, ranger stations, and lookout towers. Local granite and thick redwood logs gave the wooden structures in Sequoia much-needed protection from fierce winter snowstorms. The CCC and PWA continued to design and build national park structures there until 1942. An informed, modern-day visitor could easily discern which national park edifices the Roosevelt administration was responsible for building—usually the most organic, yet sturdiest; the simplest, yet most remarkable.

  While heading north to Campobello that June, enjoying the Maine coast, Roosevelt wrote to Wallace about the devastated southern forests. Congress, as part of the July 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, with a portion of its $3.3 billion budget earmarked to purchase forestland for conservation work.22 “I am inclined to believe that a certain portion of the $20,000,000 should be spent in areas not exclusively within the forty-two existing national forest purchase areas,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace. “My reason for this is that as a matter of public policy the wider the distribution of federally owned and developed forests the wider will be the public interest and education in regard to the importance of organized forestry. For example, in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana there are practically no mature forests and the inhabitants of those states take little or no interest in forestry.”23

  What concerned Roosevelt was that the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forests of the southeastern United States were disappearing at an alarming rate. Owing to greed and mismanagement, 98 percent of longleaf pines had been lost to cut-and-run loggers. There were scattered stands along the Gulf Coast, the Piedmont, and the southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains that Roosevelt wanted saved from industrial turpentiners and paper companies. To Roosevelt, the destruction of the longleaf pine forests of the South constituted a dastardly crime.24

  Roosevelt campaigned for president in southern Georgia on October 23, 1932, by chatting about forestry with a farmer he met along the way. FDR was on his way for a one-day visit to Warm Springs, in between two official appearances in Atlanta, where hundreds of thousands turned out to greet him. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him “a modern Moses, who is to lead a darkened America out of a wilderness of depression.”

  Roosevelt pushed Wallace’s USDA to start educating southerners living in the land of longleaf pine about the perils of reckless timbering. At the very least, a scientific replanting strategy for longleaf pine was necessary.25 More knowledge was also needed in relation to other types of farming. If the planting of rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco continued without regard for crop rotation and soil renewal, the South would become an agricult
ural dead zone. From his time with farmers at Warm Springs, Roosevelt knew that many rural southerners misunderstood the precise soil composition needed to grow robust orchards, vineyards, and pineries. They were too haphazard about planting protocol. Dumping out seed from a gunnysack while praying for rain was unscientific and inefficient.

  II

  When President Roosevelt finally arrived at Campobello, he was greeted enthusiastically by Mainers and New Brunswickers alike. “It seems to me that memory is a very wonderful thing, because this morning when we were beginning to come out of the fog off Quoddy Head, the boys on the lookout in the bow called out ‘land ahead,’” Roosevelt told the crowd. “Memory kept me going full speed ahead because I knew the place was Lubec Narrows. . . . I was thinking also, as I came through the Narrows and saw the line of fishing boats and the people on the wharves, both here and at Welch Pool and also in Eastpond, that this reception here is probably the finest example of friendship between Nations—permanent friendship between Nations—that we can possibly have.”26

  Roosevelt’s Campobello holiday perhaps marked the pivot to his less celebrated “second hundred days,” during which restoring wildlife populations—particularly migratory waterfowl—also became a New Deal priority.