Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Disingenuousness aside, Landon wasn’t wrong to advocate for more CCC camps in Kansas. As the Topeka Daily Capital noted, the CCC was orchestrating superb reforestation efforts at Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley. And there were also successful Soil Conservation Service (SCS) camps in Kansas, many on private land. The CCC’s Company 788 in Kansas was nicknamed the Fire Devils because of its success in extinguishing prairie wildfires. Likewise, Kansas’s CCC–Indian Division helped the Iowa, Sac (Sauk), Fox, and Kickapoo tribes combat typhoid fever and tuberculosis, as well as optical and respiratory damage from dust storms.5 Landon’s criticism of big government under FDR fell flat in 1936 with most Kansans, who knew that the president had come to the aid of struggling farmers—more so than Hoover Republicans ever had. Further flummoxing Landon in July were newspaper headlines claiming that the drought was worse than expected. Around one thousand American counties—one third of the United States—had been agriculturally devastated by dry weather that year.6

  The same year, 1936, a group of New Dealers released a report, “The Future of the Great Plains,” which championed Roosevelt’s Shelterbelt effort.

  The headquarters of the two-year-old Shelterbelt project were in Lincoln, Nebraska. Not only were farmers in towns from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, to Childress, Texas, pleased with the program, but state colleges embraced it because it provided jobs for graduates. While some ecologists worried that planting trees where they didn’t naturally grow led to unwelcome competition for water with native species, they had to admit that the trees chosen for the project grew quickly.7 If Roosevelt got the Shelterbelt right, then he missed the need to promote intentional burning of the Kansas prairie and pasture, which would have improved conditions on the grasslands. The report, which found favor with Roosevelt, mistakenly assumed that controlled burns damaged grass and killed mulch that protected the soil.8

  For Landonites the real cause of the Dust Bowl wasn’t deforestation or prairie fires, but the black-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus californicus). A publicity film issued by Kansas Emergency Relief noted, “It is estimated that a single jackrabbit will do $10 worth of damage in a normal year” (nearly $175 in 2015 currency).9 To kill the pest, huge drives were undertaken at county or state expense. V-shaped fences were erected to corner rabbits, herded by club-wielding citizens. Western Kansas towns had competitions for the most kills. Around Garden City in 1935, one rabbit drive had massacred six thousand animals. In Dighton, Kansas, ten thousand citizens slaughtered forty thousand rabbits. “Old and young men, women, and children had lots of fun on these drives,” a Kansas reporter wrote. “They carried sacks and were armed with clubs of various sorts and sizes, which were swung madly and at times hurled at the rabbits. The war whoops and yelling would increase when a rabbit tried to break the line.”10 In total, two million jackrabbits were killed in thirteen counties in western Kansas during these drives.11 For all of the Soil Conservation and Forest services grasslands strategies, the Great Plains had regional customs of their own, ones that the Ivy Leaguers back east couldn’t get their heads around.

  II

  In late March 1936 Roosevelt headed to Florida for rest and relaxation. With him on the excursion were his twenty-eight-year-old son James, Ross T. McIntire (his personal physician), Frederick Delano, Pa Watson, and Captain Wilson Brown (his military aide). After receiving an honorary doctorate from Rollins College in Winter Park, the president journeyed to Islamorada, where, over Labor Day weekend the previous year, 259 World War I veterans had been killed by a fierce hurricane while rebuilding a road for the WPA that connected Florida’s upper keys to Key West.12 Some people wondered why more hadn’t been done to protect those in the government camps from the storm—the strongest ever recorded on American territory.

  Visiting the memorial designed by the Florida division of the Federal Art Project, Roosevelt was solemn. During this trip he spoke informally with Audubon Society leaders about establishing a network of birding trails, and he fished around Boca Grande and Useppa Island. Unfortunately, because of time constraints Roosevelt could not visit Fort Jefferson National Monument, established in the Dry Tortugas island chain by a 1935 executive order, but he vowed to explore the combination old fort–marine sanctuary soon.13

  After President Roosevelt started collecting exotic fish as trophies, a special room next to the Oval Office was designated to hold them. Filled with mounted fish, mementos, books, tackle boxes, and other paraphernalia, the space was dubbed the Fish Room (it was later renamed, by Richard Nixon, the Roosevelt Room).14 Roosevelt also had a large aquarium installed to enhance the aura he was trying to achieve: that of a Florida rod-and-reel club. Starting in 1936, FDR began studying the life histories of cartilaginous fishes like sharks and rays (each of those two categories consisted of approximately four hundred species). In the frontispiece of a ship’s log, Roosevelt scrawled an old sportsman’s saying: “Allah does not deduct from the allotted time of man those hours spent fishing.”15

  The president wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm: in 1937 Marineland, an oceanarium in Saint Augustine, Florida, opened to great fanfare. Giant tanks and pools filled with sharks, rays, and dolphins attracted a huge influx of tourists. The success of Marineland made FDR hope that every American city would develop its own aquarium, in order to educate the public about marine ecosystems and increase support for ocean conservation efforts.16 Ding Darling, who wintered on Florida’s Gulf Coast, started a campaign to save marine ecosystems around Sanibel Island as a living oceanic parkland. They were waters FDR knew well. “My husband,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her column “My Day,” “likes the ocean from the deck of a ship, even when the vessel rolls and pitches so much that most people retire to bed. My own appreciation of the ocean is always enhanced by being on dry land. I have a thrill when I drive up the coast of Maine and the road runs close to the beach, or high above it, with a view of the bays and tree covered lands, or limitless stretches of waters.”17

  Once back at the White House, FDR dispatched Ickes to Florida, to further propel the Everglades toward becoming a national park. However, Ickes found that a new obstacle had cropped up: several greedy landowners in the Everglades had raised the price of their land to $5 per acre once the idea of a national park took hold. Ickes made a public statement in response, saying that the value was $1 per acre and accusing these owners of holding the land for ransom. Ickes worked with the New York Times to run a profile—accompanied by stunning photos—about Florida’s great watery wilderness.18

  Determined to keep up the momentum for Everglades National Park, Roosevelt had the Biological Survey consult with Audubon official Dr. Cushman Murphy and John Baker, as well as Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Percy Morris of Yale University, about making a documentary film of Everglades wildlife. He also asked the Soil Conservation Service and the Florida Fire District to sponsor a joint study on the water quality there. When legislators in Tallahassee blocked the study, Roosevelt chastised Democratic governor Fred P. Cone for managing natural resources recklessly in the state. Meanwhile, the Audubon Society’s John Baker was successful in cajoling a few additional congressmen to support the acquisition the land deeds required for Everglades National Park.19 “I agree with you as to the urgency of action in this matter,” Roosevelt wrote to Baker, “and I will cooperate so far as possible in expediting this joint study.”20

  As Roosevelt campaigned around America for reelection in 1936, it became clear that the New Deal was especially popular in the counties hardest hit by dust storms. As a follower of Hugh Bennett, Roosevelt learned that the blowing topsoil from Oklahoma was red; from western Kansas, brown; and from Texas, a strange yellow haze. At a conference in Des Moines, FDR doubled down on the Shelterbelt as a revolutionary “break” for high winds and a protective measure against the crippling dust storms. Continuing to the Missouri River Valley, he wore his water conservation accomplishments proudly. When he spoke of the New Deal having built “literally thousands of ponds or small reservoirs” in the upper Midwes
t along with community lakes and new wells, he wasn’t exaggerating. Public lands, Roosevelt knew, were the source of most of the water in the eleven coterminous western states, providing over 60 percent of the natural runoff in the region. His policies were helping to contain the menace of floods in the central Mississippi states, including the Ozark region of Arkansas and Missouri. Rivers—such as the Ohio, Arkansas, Red, White, Ouachita, and Mississippi—were being bolstered by Roosevelt’s national forests and the CCC’s levees. “We are going to conserve soil,” FDR promised Americans in a fireside chat that September, “conserve water, and conserve life.”21

  Because Japan occupied Korea, Manchuria, and parts of China, it had access to the natural resources needed to build an industrial base adequate to gain control of the entire Far East. Foreign policy in the Pacific sphere was a major concern for Roosevelt and Landon throughout 1936. Nevertheless, at campaign rallies that fall, the president elevated conservation as a defining election-year issue. Using the slogan “Green Pastures!” Roosevelt pleaded guilty to Landon’s charges that he had become a broken record with regard to wise-use conservation of natural resources. In Charlotte, North Carolina, he dubbed himself the heavyweight champion of protecting America’s natural heritage.22

  On April 16 the new Interior Department Building in Washington officially opened. It had been financed largely by the PWA, and most of its innovative special features were the handiwork of Ickes. To propagandize New Deal conservation, Ickes even convinced FDR to green-light a radio studio.23 “I think every American who loves this country ought to take heart in the earnest and sensible pleas of the Secretary of Interior for a vigorous, continuing national policy of conservation,” Roosevelt said at the dedication. “As for myself, I am dedicated to the Cause. And the Department of the Interior, as now constituted, was fully alive to the imperative necessity of protecting and preserving all of our natural resources. Without a national policy of conservation, a Nation less bountifully endowed than ours would have ceased to exist long ago. The remarkable thing was that the people of the United States were so complacent for so long in the face of exploitation, waste and mismanagement, yes, and even larceny of the natural wealth that belongs to all the people.”24

  That mid-April afternoon, with the cherry blossoms in bloom and the Potomac River looking glorious—even though the temperature had been unseasonably warm (eighty-six degrees) the day before—FDR connected the dots of his conservationist thinking. Praising activists in the Thoreauvian tradition whose cries from the wilderness warned about the “ravaging of our forests, the waste of our topsoil and our water supplies,” the president credited his distant cousin with starting the modern-day conservation movement. “Theodore Roosevelt, for one, when I was a very young man, rose up and battled against this squandering of our patrimony,” FDR said. “He, for the first time, made the people as a whole conscious that the vast national domain and the natural resources of the country were the property of the Nation itself and not the property of any class, regardless of its privileged status.” Declaring national parks “birthrights,” the president promised to forge forward with the New Deal to conserve America’s “God-given wealth” of nature.25

  That same April, the president attended the semiannual Gridiron Dinner at the Willard Hotel in Washington.26 Because the humongous new Interior Department Building—a seven-story complex covering a two-block area of Foggy Bottom of Washington near the State Department—had been dedicated two days earlier, poking fun at FDR’s mania for conservation was part of the roast. At one point the press corps sang Irving Berlin’s “We Saw the Sea” with altered lyrics:

  We joined the New Deal

  To see the world

  But what did we see—the CCC.27

  That spring, Roosevelt signed into law the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, which, in accordance with the AAA, authorized the federal government to pay farmers to shift production from soil-depleting crops such as cotton, wheat, and tobacco to erosion-arresting crops like grasses and legumes. As part of this New Deal “sound farming” strategy, grantees would have to adopt proper “soil conservation” stewardship protocols. “The recurring dust storms and rivers yellow with silt are a warning that Nature’s resources will not indefinitely withstand exploitation or negligence,” Roosevelt said. “The only permanent protection which can be given consumers must come from conservation practiced by farmers.”28 Farmers willing to shift away from the production of “unneeded” surpluses of soil-depleting crops to the production of “needed” soil-building ones would be given federal subsidies. “Every farmer takes pride in the productivity of his soil,” Roosevelt said in promoting the act. “Every farmer wants to hand on his farm to his children in better shape than he found it. The conservation payments offered by the Government in accordance with the Act will help him to do this.”29

  Roosevelt’s travels in 1936 confirmed his impression that the CCC must become a “permanent institution.”30 Eleanor Roosevelt, doing her part for the campaign, toured nearly every state in the nation, speaking about conservation at CCC camps in Grayville (Illinois) and Cheyenne (Wyoming).31 Seeing the farmlands of the Midwest stricken by drought made her heart break. Blaming “Big Agriculture” for the crisis, she offered a green vision for the Dust Bowl region. “Now we are faced with lands that must be returned to buffalo grass or trees in order to prevent the suffering which many of our people are enduring today,” she wrote. “All of us will gladly help in the emergency but I hope we will do more than that, and set ourselves to studying things which have caused these conditions and never rest until our government remedies them.”32 And the first lady laid down a challenge to the CCC: “There is a plan afoot for every girl to plant two trees and if she not only plants but cares for them,” she said, “our state governments may find in the Camp Fire Girls, rivals of the CCC in conservation work.”33

  At the dedication of a memorial to the war hero and pioneer George Rogers Clark in Vincennes, Indiana, the president lamented the loss of primeval forests and untilled prairielands throughout the Midwest. Nature had blessed the region with “bounteous gifts,” he said, but the waves of pioneer settlers had thoughtlessly stripped the land bare. He considered the “tragic extermination” of buffalo and deer a historical abomination. “Yes, my friends,” Roosevelt said, “because man did not have our knowledge in those older days, he wounded Nature and Nature has taken offense. It is the task of us, the living, to restore to Nature many of the riches we have taken from her in order that she may smile once more upon those who follow after us.”34

  Roosevelt delivered a speech dedicating the Shenandoah National Park on July 3, 1936. Before a crowd of fifty thousand people, he said, “In bygone years we have seen the terrible tragedy of the age—the tragedy of waste. Waste of our people, waste of our land. . . . This park, together with its many sisters which are coming to completion in every part of our land, is in the largest sense a work of conservation.” He then described the effect of national parks in reclaiming the land, the ethic of the local workers, and the spirit of people all over the nation.

  In early July, after wrapping up his tour of the Great Plains and the Midwest, the president returned east, stopping at Shenandoah National Park for its official dedication. Three years earlier, he had visited the park to mingle with CCC boys; now he wanted to inspect their craftsmanship. What Roosevelt admired was the durability of their best work. The stone bridges, chiseled and fitted with perfection, would still be around decades after the New Deal faded, when the entire Great Depression was finally long gone. It was touching to Roosevelt. With promise in their hearts, unemployed youngsters left a mark of betterment on their land with the only things they had to offer: hard work and pride in a job well done. “The drive is a beautiful drive, most of the way it was familiar to me, but the actual Skyline Drive is new,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about her trip to Shenandoah National Park. “The CCC boys have done a wonderful piece of work; at the top of the hill there is a delightful pi
cnic grounds where we all ate our luncheon. The view on both sides is perfectly gorgeous over miles and miles of forest and farm country in the valley.”35

  When Roosevelt had spoken at Glacier National Park in 1934, he hoped to boost tourism. Now, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he stressed, with dramatic flair, the patriotic connection between the CCC and environmental protection. “Our country is going to need many other young men as they come to manhood,” he said, “need them for work like this—for other Shenandoahs.”36 Hardworking Americans, Roosevelt said, could find spiritual renewal and solitude in America’s national and state parks. The CCC boys weren’t merely relief workers; they were an army of land healers; a national poll gave the corps an 80 percent public approval rating.37 He implored all Americans to explore America’s national parks. “Those people will put up at roadside camps or pitch their tents under the stars, with an open fire to cook by, with the smell of the woods, and the wind in the trees,” Roosevelt said. “They will forget the rush and the strain of all the other long weeks of the year, and for a short time at least, the days will be good for their bodies and good for their souls. Once more they will lay hold of the perspective that comes to men and women who every morning and every night can lift up their eyes to Mother Nature.”38

  The scuttlebutt in Washington during the campaign was that FDR was far more dependent on his inner circle of advisers, especially Harry Hopkins, than on his cabinet. The loyal Ickes was the exception to this rule. Photographs of Roosevelt and Ickes on fishing trips showed them as conservationist compadres, bonded by a guiding ethic, smoking the same brand of cigarettes, wearing similar Tilly hats, and each playing the bon vivant for a few rum-filled days in the sun. The intellectual shorthand and the comfort level between them were natural. Ickes was able to persuade the president to beautify Chicago by erecting lily ponds and rock gardens in Lincoln Park and to plant trees along Lake Shore Drive. And at long last their joint determination to establish Joshua Tree National Monument came to fruition.