Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  As a talent scout, Roosevelt admired the legal wizard from Yakima whose skin was thick as rawhide. Like many of the President’s intimate circle, the craggy Douglas was deeply interested in the outdoor life. Working with Finley, he had played an important auxiliary role in getting Hart Mountain National Antelope Range established. If he seemed too ambitious or too calculating, that was all right by Roosevelt. He was a young chip off the old block. Whenever FDR raised a concern about a powerful financier or GOP obstructionist, Douglas would say, “Piss on ’em.”62

  On evenings when Roosevelt needed a diversion from work, he would sometimes slip out of the White House to the home of Morgenthau to play poker and mix rum cocktails. Douglas, a master card bluffer bursting with gossip about Wall Street and the Supreme Court, became a popular fixture at these games.63 The swing and sway of lively conversation on these evenings impressed Douglas. The president learned that the sandy-haired Douglas felt as attached to his hometown—Yakima, Washington—as he himself was to Hyde Park. Even when dealing cards Douglas, an encyclopedia of ecological information, regaled the president with stories about hiking in the Cascades and Bitterroots, or the need for an Olympic National Park, or horseback adventures in counties around Coulee Dam. The acuteness of his geographic knowledge of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Wyoming was undeniably impressive. If FDR mentioned a particular species of fish or bird, Douglas could respond in kind. In addition, because Douglas returned to Yakima every summer, he became a valuable source of information regarding the CCC’s performance in southern Washington.64

  William O. Douglas was recruited to Washington in 1934 to work at the Securities and Exchange Commission. When Roosevelt named him to the Supreme Court in 1939, Douglas was only forty. In his work and personal life, Douglas was a fanatic for wild America, writing extensively about his experiences.

  As noted, Douglas stood by FDR in the spring of 1937 during the “court packing” debacle. That loyalty was rewarded two years later, in 1939, when Justice Louis Brandeis announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court. Ickes, determined to get an environmentalist on the bench, led a silent campaign to have Douglas fill the vacancy. FDR initially favored Lewis Schwellenbach, an easterner, but eventually warmed toward the idea of Douglas. Not only had he run the SEC effectively since being appointed chairman in 1937, but because he was from the Pacific Northwest, he would give the Supreme Court some geographic diversity. Roosevelt summoned Douglas to the White House for a private chat. Douglas was dreading the prospect that FDR would offer him the opportunity to head the Federal Communications Commission. “I have a new job for you,” Roosevelt told Douglas. “It’s a mean job, a dirty job, a thankless job.” Douglas, heart sinking, waited for the president to give him the FCC post. After the tease went on for a while, the president at last said, “Tomorrow I am sending your name to the Senate as Louis Brandeis’s successor.”65

  Douglas was floored with joy. As a justice, he remained loyal to FDR’s New Deal conservation initiatives, especially the establishment of Olympic National Park, but opposed the damming of western rivers. In the coming years, Douglas would also become a strong voice in the conservation movement, playing a crucial role in the establishment of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1960, the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 (a hallmark of the roadless movement), and the rapid development of environmental law. From the bench, Douglas fought for roadless wilderness protection—like Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall—until his retirement in 1975.

  Recognizing that the president was under assault, Ickes and Hopkins put aside their differences and joined forces as the progressive defenders of the New Deal. As White House counsel Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran put it, Ickes and Hopkins found they had to “stand in a circle with tails touching and horns facing the common enemy.”66 Together they backed Roosevelt’s attempt to reorganize the judiciary branch. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, under pressure from Congress, ordered sweeping cuts to Hopkins’s WPA and virtually halted all PWA construction activities. The president’s actions were, as historian J. Joseph Huthmacher notes, “the first steps in a concerted drive to make good his often-repeated promise to bring the budget into balance.”67 The year 1937 had been a difficult one for Ickes—he had a heart attack in May and was still grieving for his wife, who had died in a car crash in New Mexico in the summer of 1935 (he remarried in 1938). Nevertheless he worked with Frederic Delano excitedly drawing nearer to his long-held dream of transferring the Forest Service to Interior. FDR made it clear that he wanted a Department of Conservation to avoid “ridiculous interlocking and overlapping jurisdiction” among New Deal conservation projects.68 When Ickes tried to organize a Governors’ Conference on Conservation, Wallace went nuts. “He insisted that conservation had passed the propaganda stage,” Ickes wrote, “and if there was to be a conference on anything, it ought to be on the constitutional situation or the international situation.”69

  Douglas spoke for many New Dealers when he observed that Wallace was never a hail-fellow, nor much of a mixer. “By and large, he stayed aloof and remote,” Douglas wrote. “While he had a popular following in the country, he had few political friends in Washington.”70 Notwithstanding that unhappy trait, Wallace, to be fair, was more concerned about how the “three bandit nations”—Germany, Italy, and Japan—were turning into belligerent global menaces than whether Isle Royale, Big Bend, and Mammoth Cave should be national parks. Ickes, of course, also had foreign policy concerns. But he didn’t think New Deal conservation should retreat because of the rise of global fascism.

  After the success of the CCC, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Duck Stamps, a host of New Deal environmental nonprofits had formed. The Wildlife Society, an organization of professional wildlife biologists, was founded in late 1936. Other nonprofits, like the American Fisheries Society, the Society for Range Management, and the American Society of Mammalogists, started by publishing scientific journals.71 The influential Ecological Society of America continued its mission of studying “organisms” in relation to their “environmental conditions.”72 None of these groups, however, had as much political muscle with the Roosevelt administration as the small and relentless Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) did.

  Dr. Francis Harper and his wife, Jean, also had a direct influence on FDR. Their years of lobbying paid off when, on March 30, 1937, the president created the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge by Executive Order 7593. It was by far the largest wildlife refuge in the eastern United States. Although Roosevelt personally preferred the national monument designation, the Biological Survey came up with the cash first, paying $1.50 per acre, so Wallace’s USDA took charge of the Georgia swamp.73 After decades of ecological damage, the draining, plowing, and subdividing of the wild wetlands would stop. All told, according to the essayist Edward Hoagland, there were forty kinds of mammals and fish, thirty-five species of snake, fourteen types of turtles, eleven varieties of lizards, and twenty-two kinds of frogs and toads protected by Roosevelt’s action.74

  Although Ickes was perturbed—he believed that only the National Park Service could oversee the Okefenokee’s “inviolability”—the good news was that, with the swamp firmly under the jurisdiction of the Biological Survey, federal wardens were able to ban most hunting, trespassing, and timbering there.75 Two “swampers,” Sam Mizell and Jesse Gay, were asked to stay as wildlife wardens. Under their watchful eye, the plants and animals in the swamp were allowed to thrive.76 Roosevelt would remain vigilant about the Okefenokee, insisting during the remainder of his presidency that it should be left in “pristine condition.”77

  The Okefenokee wasn’t the only Georgia landscape that had captured Roosevelt’s attention. A week later he signed another Executive Order, this one creating the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge. The Piedmont, an upland forest in central Georgia, had once been dense with loblolly pine and hardwoods but was devastated after decades of bad timber-cutting practices by farmers, tenants, and laborers. It may have seemed an unlike
ly candidate for NWR designation, but Roosevelt, whose Little White House was only an hour’s drive away, saw the abused region as rich with possibility. After all, at Warm Springs he had purchased a thousand acres of second-growth-timber mountain land—valued at $3 an acre—so as to dabble in forestry and cattle ranching.78

  The Piedmont Forest project was actually selected for its abused condition.79 It was an experiment: if the USDA and the Department of the Interior could repair exhausted and eroded soil and promote thoughtful conservation practices in the blighted Piedmont landscape, then wildlife, the president predicted, would return. Indeed, the red-cockaded woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis) rebounded after the forest was fully rehabilitated.80

  Throughout 1937 Roosevelt remained frustrated that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, officially organized in 1934, was still not officially opened to the public. FDR insisted that its boundaries be settled so that tourists could enjoy the parkland the CCC had been readying. In a conversation with William P. Wharton, a respected naturalist who had surveyed the Everglades in 1932 with Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Roosevelt intimated that he didn’t want his plans for the Great Smoky Mountains to devolve—like those for the Everglades—into a prolonged standoff, trying everybody’s patience. “In regard to the Great Smoky Park, I understand that North Carolina has made all of its necessary land purchases and that we are held up by Tennessee’s failure to complete its acreage,” Roosevelt wrote to Ickes. “Would it be possible, under the law, to open the North Carolina side of the park? Perhaps this would encourage Tennessee to complete their purchases as agreed on.”81

  IV

  The story of how FDR rescued Arizona’s organ-pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi) in the spring of 1937 remains a marvelous example of New Deal desert protection during the second White House term.

  It was E. D. McKee, a naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park, who had first come up with the idea of an Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwestern Arizona, on its border with the Mexican state of Sonora. McKee was awestruck by the leafless organ-pipe cactus, with stems ranging from five to twenty feet high, which was found in abundance there. He wrote a series of reports advocating the creation of a monument that would focus on the beauty of organ-pipe cacti. Every spring, they bloomed in a dazzling burst of brownish-green or pinkish-lavender flowers, and around midsummer, spherical fruits appeared on them. They were surrounded by a breathtaking array of purple escobita, blue lupines, and Mexican gold poppies.

  McKee’s plan gained steam throughout the 1930s. The Tucson Natural History Association led a local movement to push the preservation plan onto Roosevelt’s desk. Emphasizing the plant’s range around the Sonoyta Valley, the association’s board pressured the Department of the Interior into moving quickly to save the rare cactus. Meanwhile, Roosevelt himself had heard about the organ-pipe cactus from Ickes, who was quite bullish on a vast Arizona desert park. As projected, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument would encompass more than five hundred square miles of poor-growth mesquite and prickly pear west of the Tohono O’odham (Pagano) Indian Reservation. Although Tucson residents hoped that the national monument would draw tourists from California, the Roosevelt administration envisioned a wilderness zone—a vast borderland that resembled a desolate moonscape more so than a tourist attraction. There one could find exotic plant species—the Mexican jumping bean (Sebastiania bilocularis), the pudgy elephant tree (Bursera microphylla), the Mexican nettlespurge (Jatropha cinerea), and the Senita “old man” cactus (Lophocereus schottii)—not on view anywhere else in the United States. The organ-pipe cactus, for which the proposed monument was named, provided the necessary impetus for the administration to begin the arduous paperwork involved in protecting the vast acreage.82 Ickes dispatched National Park Service officials, based in Ajo, Arizona, to carry out a survey of the entire Sonoran Desert. These biologists were astonished at the scenic wilderness, rugged mountains, cactus-studded slopes, and desert flats. There were hedgehog cacti (Echinocereus triglochidiatus) and brittlebushes (Encelia farinosa) in bloom everywhere. A pair of natural arches resembled formations in Utah canyonland. A true desert paradise had been found.

  A car driving through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona in 1944. The original newswire caption read: “Penetrating deep into the desert, this car appears lost in a huge growth of Sinitas. The plant at the extreme left is an Organ Pipe [cactus].” FDR used his prerogative through the Antiquities Act to create the monument in 1937, balancing the dramatic scenery of many other national parks with the more subtle ecology of the Sonoran Desert.

  After ironing out a few legal issues, FDR issued Presidential Proclamation 2332 on April 13, 1937, establishing Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It was created out of 330,000 acres owned by the federal government, according to the law of public domain. The president’s action saved this large tract of exquisite Sonoran Desert landscape.83 The Department of the Interior tried to make this new national monument sound mystical, going so far to bill it as a lusty land somewhere between “the habitable and uninhabitable world.” The very strangeness of the organ-pipe cactus was marketed by the state of Arizona as the monument’s primary attraction.84 Although these cacti were protected species, Ickes made sure to reserve the right of the Indians of the Papago Reservation to pick the fruits of the organ-pipe and other cacti.85 And organ-pipes weren’t the only plants to benefit from the new federal designation. The sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), part of the sunflower family, grew in abundance within the boundaries, as did rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus paniculatus) and four-wing saltbrush (Atriplex canescens).86 A 1.5-acre pond in the national monument alone attracted twenty-two different species of birds, including five kinds of sandpipers.

  Gateway towns to the new monument—such as Why (at the monument’s north entrance) and Lukeville (a town on the Arizona-Mexico border)—became hubs for desert scientists, wanderlusters, and stargazers from all over the world. The largely inaccessible land reminded visitors of Palm Springs country (near Los Angeles) without the movie stars. “I spent three winters as a ranger in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwestern Arizona,” environmental activist and writer Edward Abbey would recall decades later in Abbey’s Road, “a lovely place swarming with rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, scorpions, wild pigs, and illegal Mexicans. The only useful work I did there was rescuing rattlesnakes discovered in the campground, catching them alive with my wooden Kleenex-picker before some tourist could cause them harm, dumping them in a garbage can and relocating them by stuffing them down a gopher hole six miles out of the desert.”87

  In 1938 Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument received helpful national attention when a Los Angeles Times reporter, Lynn Rogers, wrote a rapturous piece about the desert wilderness and the odd organ-pipe cactus that “never-failingly delighted the eye.”88

  The organ-pipe wasn’t the only species of cactus the National Park Service rescued during Roosevelt’s second term. The saguaros (Carnegiea gigantea) in Saguaro National Monument east of Tucson were in similar peril, after a particularly vicious cold spell hit the region, with temperatures falling below twenty-five degrees. Founded in 1933, Saguaro (later designated a national park) was beloved by Arizona residents as an iconic landscape of the frontier West. But the soft rot that invaded the cactus forest following a winter cold snap reached epidemic proportions in the mid-1930s, despite an attempt by Interior to arrest the spread of the blight by removing and burying the afflicted portions of the plants. Scientists determined that some of the large columnar cacti, which generally lived for more than two hundred years, had bacterial infections. Luckily, Interior biologists knew how to differentiate between plants with bacterial rot and those damaged by climate conditions. This distinction helped federal botanists figure out which plants could be saved. Thousands of saguaros were brought back from the brink, while CCC boys removed those dying of disease.89 (In 2009, Saguaro was declared one of America’s most “imperiled” national parks, due to climate change.)r />
  For Roosevelt, to save treasured Southwest landscapes like Cedar Breaks, Big Bend, Joshua Tree, and Organ Pipe Cactus was to protect some of God’s best work—a religious obligation. To thoughtlessly destroy the Mojave of California or the Great Basin of Nevada and to reject proper land stewardship was both un-American and heretical. “To him,” Frances Perkins wrote in The Roosevelt I Knew, “man’s relationship to God seemed based on nature.”90

  PART THREE

  CONSERVATION EXPANSION, 1937–1939

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “WHILE YOU’RE GITTIN’, GIT A-PLENTY”

  I

  The Louisiana delegates at the North American Wildlife Conference of 1936 boasted that because of their state’s geographic position on the Gulf of Mexico its wetlands were the winter home of giant flocks of migratory birds. The very name Louisiana was evocative of mighty bayous and cypress hung with Spanish moss. Many wealthy New Yorkers—including John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Russell Sage—recognized this and donated world-class bird refuges to the state of Louisiana. Furthermore, Louisiana had long produced more fur pelts (muskrat, otter, mink, raccoon) than Canada and Alaska combined. But its wildlife populations were being depleted. While the state of Louisiana had a decent conservation department, the wicked combination of drought, floods, disease, pollution, soil erosion, and deforestation was turning parishes into ecological disaster zones. Just as Roosevelt tried to help Florida save the Everglades and Georgia preserve the Okefenokee, he hoped to have the Biological Survey establish migratory waterfowl refuges in southern Louisiana; these refuges would also help furbearers and fish stocks repopulate and would make the Pelican State a “sportsman’s paradise.”