Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  The efforts by the Roosevelt administration to preserve the Florida Everglades were largely influenced by FDR’s “map mind”—his knowledge of the subtropical geography of southeast Florida. Any population increase in Miami, he knew, would inevitably put pressure on the Everglades, which had already been compromised by the encroachment of real estate developers.9 That spring, Roosevelt alerted congressional Democrats that he supported a bill introduced by Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida to establish Everglades National Park and was sure it would be a huge tourist draw for south Florida.10

  Fletcher’s bill, however, was a tough sell on Capitol Hill. Many southern Floridians saw the Everglades, with its vast timber and wildlife resources, as a fetid swamp in need of drainage—not a great marsh that was, as Marjory Stoneman Douglas later wrote, south Florida’s “rain machine,” which created mangrove-lined estuaries.11 It wasn’t just Miami-area real estate developers and Robert Sterling Yard who raised objections to what the Roosevelt administration proposed. The Izaak Walton League, surprisingly, wanted the Everglades acreage proposed by the National Park Service to be cut by two thirds; “Ikes,” as the league’s members were called, were unhappy with the “no hunting” provision that would come with national park status. And, regardless of the Indian New Deal, many Seminoles were understandably suspicious about having traditional homelands taken by the untrustworthy federal government.

  Around this time, Roosevelt consulted Ernest Coe about getting affluent Floridians involved in protecting the Everglades from commercial and agricultural development. Coe, a Yale-educated landscape architect, had moved to Coconut Grove in 1927, and designed green spaces for hotels and private homes around Miami, but he spent his weekends happily exploring the swamp’s “great empire of solitude” and was a cofounder of the Tropical Everglades National Park Association.12 Traveling from Pensacola to Miami Beach, Coe lobbied for the upper section of Key Largo and part of the Big Cypress to be included within the national park. And he called for a federal ban on any dumping of fertilizers, waste, and chemicals in the Everglades. “It is my hope,” Roosevelt told Coe, “that the State of Florida will take the necessary steps to make the State-owned lands within the proposed park area available for the project at an early date.”13

  On March 27, six days after the White House slide show, the president traveled to south Florida for a fishing holiday that would also serve as a promotional tour of the Everglades, Biscayne Bay, the Florida Keys, and the Dry Tortugas.14 For security reasons, the islets that Roosevelt planned to explore, and his other stopovers, weren’t made public. Very little advance information about the expedition was given to the press. Makeshift executive offices were established in Miami’s Biltmore Hotel under the expert direction of FDR’s traveling secretary Marvin McIntyre.15 Living aboard Vincent Astor’s three-thousand-ton yacht Nourmahal—and escorted by the naval destroyer Ellis for twelve days—Roosevelt gleefully fished for marlin and barracuda and signed major bills including a widening of the Agricultural Adjustment Act.16 One of FDR’s companions on the trip was Kermit Roosevelt, the most conservation-minded of TR’s children, who helped the president discover and collect unusual species of fish and crustaceans. Two of FDR’s sons—twenty-six-year-old James and twenty-three-year-old Elliott—became crewmates for the Bahamian segment of the cruise.17 The president’s guests in Florida included Joseph Kennedy, the chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission; and George Hearst, son of press mogul William Randolph Hearst.18

  Roosevelt, seated, posed with a 190-pound sailfish that he reeled in while on a fishing boat in the Caribbean. The fish put up a fight. According to the log, “the boat was towed about five miles in heavy seas during the strugle [sic].” The Smithsonian Institution accepted the fish, preserved it taxidermically, and displayed it as the largest of its species in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History.

  Charles W. Hurd of the New York Times reported that in addition to fishing for trophies, Roosevelt was collecting marine specimens for the huge saltwater fish tanks on the Nourmahal, including queen triggerfish, blue parrotfish, sandfish, grunts, jacks, snails, and numerous turtles. Just before the cruise ended, the president allowed himself to be photographed in his stained fishing clothes, holding Astor’s pet dachshund instead of a prized marlin.19 When Roosevelt returned to Washington, over two hundred congressmen and thirty senators greeted his train as a band played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The New York Times noted that such a welcome was “unprecedented” in American history.20

  In mid-April, the president invited the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.—a fierce advocate for national parks—to a private meeting in the Oval Office. Olmsted had been dispatched to the Everglades by the National Park Association in 1932 to evaluate an ecosystem so unique that it was the only place in the world that had both alligators and crocodiles. The president read Olmsted’s comprehensive report, which offered stories about sixteen species of wading birds in the Everglades. “After dusk, flock after flock came in from their feeding grounds . . . and settled in the thickets close at hand,” Olmsted wrote. “It was an unforgettable sight . . . [that] ranks high among the natural spectacles of America and can be perpetuated most effectively by the creation of a National Park in the region.”21

  On May 30, 1934, just six weeks after his meeting with Olmsted, the president happily signed the act authorizing the Everglades National Park, America’s first “tropical” park.22 The law stipulated that the Everglades would be “permanently reserved as a wilderness” and barred any development for the benefit of visitors that would disturb the “unique flora and fauna” and the “essential primitive natural conditions” in the area.23 Although the parakeets and the ivory-billed woodpeckers had long since been exterminated, the habitat of the white ibis (Eudocimus albus), roseate spoonbill (Platalea ajaja), and Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) were to be saved in the nick of time. “It was,” environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote, “like the small beginning of a new hope.”24

  There was, however, a sticking point in the Everglades deal. The state of Florida would have to donate the land for the Everglades to become a national park—the federal government could not use taxpayer dollars to buy acreage. A contingent of Florida legislators, worried about lost revenue, immediately derided the Everglades law as a federal boondoggle, Roosevelt’s “gator nursery.” But the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs quickly donated four thousand acres to start the national park. It seemed at times as though the Everglades National Park was snakebitten. The project was slowed down by wildfires in the swamp, by land speculators, and by oil prospectors who believed that there was “black gold” in the Everglades. “I am about to die,” park advocate William Sherman Jennings moaned, “waiting until this thing is ready.”25 In the long run, it took the Roosevelt and Truman administrations thirteen years of lawsuits and injunctions, grandfather clauses, and buyouts to procure the required land and determine the final boundaries of the Everglades park.

  When Everglades National Park was initially established in 1934, forty-nine thousand CCCers, based in more than twenty camps, were already working throughout Florida.26 These CCC “boys” had a heavy burden. The soil was naturally sandy; its nutrients were easily depleted by poor farming techniques. Because Florida was one of only four states with an unemployment rate of over 20 percent during the Great Depression, Governor David Sholtz, a Democrat, pleaded with the president to make it a laboratory for New Deal conservation efforts. Roosevelt happily obliged.

  An unsung part of FDR’s New Deal environmental legacy was his farsighted personal intervention in the formation of the Florida Park Service (FPS), modeled directly after the National Park Service. Assuming the role of planner, Roosevelt ordered the CCC to work in tandem with the FPS to create eleven state parks, including the popular Gold Head Branch, Hillsborough River, Myakka River, Florida Caverns, and Fort Clinch. Unemployed Floridians rushed to join the CCC—if only to gain access to
the agency’s steady supply of high-quality food. Just reading the menu for CCC Company 262 of Sebring, Florida—home of Highlands Hammock State Park—made the mouth water: breakfasts of eggs, oatmeal, fruit, bread and butter, and cereal; lunches of baked beans, potatoes, pork, beets, salads, sandwiches, sides of beef, and gravy; and dinners of roast chicken, beef stew, cabbage, sweet potatoes, peppers, beef liver, roast veal, mashed potatoes, spaghetti, fish, cauliflower, peaches, salad, and bread and butter. Courtesy of the New Deal, enrollees were being paid to eat such hearty fare in exchange for cutting hiking trails, planting trees, and creating botanical gardens.27

  In an important conservation effort in north Florida, Company 4453C did wonders in helping to save the rare torreya tree (Torreya taxifolia). These evergreens were found near the town of Bristol on the bluffs overlooking the Apalachicola River. Colloquially called “stinking cedars” because of their acrid-smelling resin, they had short leaves, a dark green aril, and little yellowish branches; and they were a less endangered species once the CCC helped save the stands in Torreya State Park.28

  Even though the CCC was a boys’ club, with women excluded, one of the supervisors at the Highlands Hammock camp was Clara Thomas. Long a vocal environmental activist, Thomas rose to prominence in the corps thanks to her sheer talent and her enthusiasm for the newly created Florida Park Service. She was determined to save the wildlife around the town of Sebring. Under her guidance, water catchments were instituted for demonstration forests on the banks of Tiger Branch Creek and an herbarium was erected, along with a greenhouse and garden plots containing palms, conifers, and bamboo.29 These were the bold years of conservation, and thousands of women, like Thomas, inspired by the New Deal and Eleanor Roosevelt, led campaigns to protest the destruction of American wilderness areas.

  II

  The Year of the National Park brought Roosevelt and Ickes closer together; they got along like old school chums—trading stamps, dabbling in horticulture, mocking Republicans, drinking whiskey, and plotting conservation strategy. To Roosevelt, the square-jawed “Honest Harold,” was a profoundly loyal New Dealer.30 They plotted to save the Everglades, Dry Tortugas, Sonoran Desert, and Cascades. “Roosevelt had a real grasp of Interior Department matters and policies from the very beginning,” Ickes recalled. “We understood each other and, generally speaking, we were in accord on policies even though we did differ in some particulars when it came to the organizational setup.”31

  Friction never developed between these two progressives. Roosevelt tolerated Ickes’s sudden “Donald Duck” tantrums and periodic resignations (which were rejected) because Ickes had a unique understanding of the intricacies of public lands policy and the ins and outs of the hydropower revolution.32 Ickes was Roosevelt’s environmental conscience, the cabinet member who regularly reminded Roosevelt that sometimes New Deal work-relief projects like Skyline Drive and the TVA had to make provisions sensitive to primitive wilderness areas. “I think we ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country as we can,” Ickes said on a weekly NBC radio broadcast promoting national parks. “It is easy to destroy a wilderness; it can be done very quickly, but it takes nature a long time, even if we let nature alone, to restore for our children what we have ruthlessly destroyed.”33

  To commemorate 1934 as the Year of the National Park, Roosevelt and Ickes, both avid philatelists, collaborated on a series of stamps showing America’s outdoors sites, including Mirror Lake at Mount Rainier, Great White Throne in Zion, and Two Medicine Lake in Glacier. The president offered a few aesthetic alterations. For the one-cent Yosemite stamp, Roosevelt suggested that the artist “try a flatter arch above Yosemite at the bottom of the stamp.” When asked to approve the seven-cent Acadia stamp, he scrawled, “Okay, but put a ship on the horizon.”34

  Thousands of stamp hobbyists from all over the world sent the White House rare or obscure stamps. Under Roosevelt’s leadership Postmaster General James A. Farley opened a new philatelic museum in Washington, D.C. In fact, Roosevelt’s first two years in the White House, 1933 and 1934, are “fondly remembered by philatelists” as the “pastime’s ‘Golden Age.’” When FDR was elected president in 1932, stamp collectors in America had numbered two million; by 1938 there were more than nine million.35 The president hoped his stamp issues would not only promote the national parks but also help youngsters learn about American history. Just five days after his inauguration, in fact, he had asked Farley to issue a Newburgh Peace Stamp. Roosevelt personally chose the die proofs, which, as he instructed, elegantly depicted the stone Dutch farmhouse that served as George Washington’s headquarters at the end of the Revolutionary War, with an idyllic Hudson River Valley background.36

  What most concerned Roosevelt about the NPS in 1934 was that New England was underrepresented. Therefore, he decided to move forward on a proposal from Colonel William J. Wilgus to create in Vermont a Green Mountains National Park, which would also serve to commemorate Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen.37 “The continuous reservation area from Maine to Georgia along the line of the Appalachians is rapidly taking form,” Roosevelt wrote to author and conservationist Robert Underwood Johnson. “You will be pleased to know that this year we are buying twenty million dollars worth of additional land—a large part of it being in the Eastern area.”38

  Roosevelt also wrote to Governor Stanley C. Wilson of Vermont about the project in the Green Mountains, suggesting that a parkway could be built in his state (which would provide desperately needed infrastructure jobs). In Johnson’s conservationist circle, however, suggesting that the government build a parkway through the Vermont wilderness was a faux pas, and a rift opened up between FDR and the preservationists. When a coalition of Republicans and environmentally concerned liberal Vermonters rejected a proposed bond issue to purchase land for the parkway, the idea of a national park lost steam in the state, and with President Roosevelt as well.39

  Regardless of the parkway, Roosevelt was bullish on the idea that Vermont could turn ski tourism into big dollars. Cross-country skiing wasn’t yet a hugely popular sport in America, but the CCC cut trails for it nevertheless. Downhill skiing areas in the state were built by the CCC at East Corinth, Killington, Shrewsbury Peak, and Stowe. The CCC essentially transformed Vermont into the “ski capital of the East.”40

  Throughout 1934 Roosevelt built the case on Capitol Hill for a national landmarks program, promoting the conservation of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which stretched for 185 miles from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. The canal had been proposed by George Washington in the 1780s, and the first spadeful of dirt had been turned in 1828 by John Quincy Adams. It operated until 1924, but then the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad made the canal “obsolete and profitless.”41 Frederic Delano, head of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, thought—like FDR—that the lowland between the C&O Canal and the Potomac River should be a European-type towpath for recreation and hiking. At Uncle Frederic’s instruction, Roosevelt told Ickes to apply $2 million from the Interior budget to get the C&O canal restoration project operational within five years.42 He then dispatched the CCC to reconstruct the canal’s locks and bridges; the CCCers eventually transformed it into a kind of Appalachian Trail for greater Washington to enjoy.43 “For large numbers of people it would have the greatest all-around recreational value to be obtained in one unit,” Frederic Delano said to the president about the canal, “providing ideal facilities for boating, canoeing, cycling, hiking, picnicking, and even swimming at certain points. It traverses a river valley of the greatest scenic interest and variety, and represents an age and advance in American civilization of permanent historic value.”44

  Roosevelt and Ickes also sought to establish a Quetico-Superior “wilderness sanctuary” in a fourteen-thousand-square-mile region of boreal and temperate forests straddling the Minnesota-Ontario border. In 1909, the Canadian government had set aside more than one million acres northwest of Lake Superior as Quetico Forest Preserve. Around the same time, the USDA establ
ished Superior National Forest in Minnesota. Now, FDR was willing to fund the Superior Roadless Primitive Area (which had been designated by the U.S. Forest Service in 1926 to eliminate the private development that had been allowed under old homesteading and mining laws). This part of northern Minnesota became a battleground for the movement to save wilderness areas from human encroachment.

  Wilderness protectionist Ernest Oberholtzer of Minnesota led a noble grassroots movement against damming the Rainy Lake Watershed to produce electricity, lumber, and paper. His friendship with Ickes, who vacationed in the area, proved helpful to the protection cause. In June 1934, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6783, establishing the Quetico-Superior Committee to study the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.45 This became the first step in creating Voyageurs National Park (which was eventually signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975). Before the area received national park designation, however, EO 6783 and the Quetico-Superior Committee banned new homesteading, prevented the alteration of water levels, barred the sale of lands, and prohibited logging within four hundred feet of Lake Superior’s shore.46

  While environmental historians haven’t given Roosevelt enough credit for intervening favorably in the disputes over the C&O and Quetico-Superior, they do recognize his effort to add Isle Royale—a 207-square-mile island in Lake Superior—to the roster of national parks. On the enthusiastic recommendation of Stephen Mather, Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover advanced the notion of Michigan’s Isle Royale becoming a major midwestern national park. Tourists, it was thought, would come by boat to the wilderness to see the dense forests, crystal lakes, high cliffs, herds of rather tame moose, and four hundred woodland caribou. Swayed by Mather’s boosterism, Hoover authorized Isle Royale National Park in 1931 “to conserve a prime example of North Woods Wilderness.”47 The Michigan legislature was responsible for acquiring the privately owned property on the island and then donating it to the federal government.