Roosevelt had allowed a reporter and a photographer from Life magazine to document his Gulf holiday and, he hoped, catch him reeling in a tarpon. To guarantee a catch for the cameras, fishing guide Don Farley, a boatbuilder from Port Aransas, told the president they should fish from the small launch—Hangover II—and use live mullet as bait. On May 10, after casting overboard with a sinker, they drifted with the tide. Then the president, from his “fighting chair,” hooked a seventy-seven-pound tarpon; any fish weighing more than fifty pounds was classified as a “giant.”22 Because this silver king wasn’t fully mature, FDR was able to handle his rod without assistance.23 After an hour-long fight, Roosevelt, sweating profusely, reeled in the fish. Life ran a ten-photograph sequence of FDR in the May 24 issue, documenting his triumph. In one of the photos, Farley can be seen wielding a gaff in an attempt to haul the tarpon into the launch. The last photo shows a tanned and invigorated Roosevelt smugly smoking a cigarette, clearly proud of his conquest.24 “I knew him as Mr. Roosevelt, the fisherman in khaki clothes, relaxed, happy, eager, enthusiastic, knowing he was among people who loved him,” Farley recalled. “He put himself on the same level as others, desirous of learning things he didn’t know, willing to share his wonderful personality with everyone. He was an attentive listener when others were talking. He was a considerate, thoughtful, and compassionate man.”25
One afternoon, Roosevelt fished from the banks of the Brazos River. He was impressed by the open oak savannas and low sandy prairie openings.26 As his fishing holiday wound down, the president spoke in Galveston, Houston, and College Station (before fifteen thousand at Texas A & M). The mayor of Galveston presented FDR with an expensive rod and reel. “The fish have been as good to me as the people of Texas,” he said as he accepted them. To the roar of laughter he told how Pa Watson caught a twenty-four-inch amberjack, which was “now weighing thirty-five pounds.”27
From the Gulf South, the president traveled by train to Fort Worth for a barbecue with Elliott at the ranch of Amon Carter, a lifelong Democrat who was the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.28 Roosevelt admired the fifty-seven-year-old Carter for championing the Big Bend National Park project. For Texas’s centennial in 1936, Carter also helped to arrange for the CCC to construct replica buildings at three state parks: Fort Parker, Fort Griffin, and Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga at Goliad State Park. Bubbling over with fellowship, he and FDR got along famously, chatting about politics, the recent death of Carter’s good friend, humorist Will Rogers (who was killed in a plane crash), and how the CCC was faring in the twenty-nine state parks it was building in Texas.29 Carter disliked FDR’s pro–labor union policies, but felt that the New Deal’s land rehabilitation in Texas was brave and righteous.30 And the PWA granted Carter $888,000 for Fort Worth’s Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show buildings, which Jim Farley dubbed “Amon’s cowshed.”31
Guided by the professional architects of the National Park Service, the Roosevelt administration dispatched more than fifty thousand CCC recruits to Texas to build trails, campgrounds, cabins, dance pavilions, and even an adobe hotel and motor court. When Herbert Hoover was president, Texas had only eight hundred acres of state parks, but by 1942, thanks to the efforts of FDR, that number had soared to sixty thousand acres. Outdoor recreation in Texas—from camping in Palo Duro Canyon and swimming in the spring-fed pool at Balmorhea to fishing among the cypress knobs on Caddo Lake—was economically viable. The CCC was responsible for helping bolster Texas tourist revenue and received high marks by politicos in Austin for its use of native stone, rocks, logs, and timber in the construction efforts. Because Texas was like a sovereign nation, with many different regions, local vernacular was adhered to. In Bastrop State Park, buildings were made of stone and timber; in Corpus Christi they were made of sand and oyster shell.32 At Buescher State Park in Smithville, a red sandstone pumphouse was built.
Texas, more than any other state, saw the CCC as advance agents tied to local economic revitalization. Company 817 in Stephenville, Texas was embraced fully by the Chamber of Commerce, which disseminated copies of the CCC camp’s Blue Eagle News throughout the city. Denison, Texas Company 857 had local merchants purchase advertisements in their camp newspaper 857 Log.33 These camp newspapers in Texas stood out from other states’ by the raw humor presented—as in Bastrop’s The Pine Box (Companies 1805 and 1811), which ran the risqué joke, “A pal of ours landed a soft job. He’s in a bloomer factory now pulling down a couple thousand a year.”34 Only Roosevelt’s attempt to teach “progressive” conservation classes at CCC camps was met with derision in Texas. “I have constantly fought the attempts of long-haired men and short-haired women to get in our camps,” Colonel Duncan Major said. “We’re going to be hounded to death by all sorts of educators.”35
The long reach of the New Deal in Texas could also be found in projects other than the CCC’s. In 1936 and 1937, the Roosevelt administration oversaw three experimental farm projects in Texas—Ropesville (near Lubbock), Sabine Farms (near Marshall), and Dalworthington Gardens (in east central Tarrant County)—that provided small agricultural plots to people who were employed but still had trouble feeding their families. These projects were hugely successful. Although Republicans called them a “socialistic collective,” FDR thought they represented community-level Americanism at its best. Much of the Ropesville Farms acreage—around fourteen thousand acres total—remained in cultivation well into the twenty-first century.36
Before returning to Washington, D.C., by train, Roosevelt explained to reporters in Fort Worth how his fishing vacations helped him remove clutter from his mind. Many of his best ideas were hatched at sea. Because Roosevelt regularly went on outdoor vacations, he understood the importance of bays, marshlands, cays, lagoons, and swamps. Getting out of official Washington allowed him to consider wildlife conservation and forestry in more tangible ways. From this trip he learned that if the wetlands were healthy, two million ducks and 750,000 geese would spend the winter in the midcoast Texas region.37 “The objective of these trips, you know, is not fishing,” he told the press. “You probably discovered that by this time. I don’t give a continental damn whether I catch fish or not. The chief objective is to get a perspective on the scene which I cannot get in Washington anymore than you boys can. . . . You have to go a long ways off so as to see things in their true perspective.”38
What the president left behind in Texas—besides a signed fish scale for the Tarpon Inn at Port Aransas—was a rumor that proved true. All the old-timers who gathered at Cap Daniel’s store in Austwell, Texas, gossiped about what FDR was really doing in their wildlife-rich backyard. “I hear the government is buying up ‘the Blackjacks’ for a pile of money just to protect a couple of them squeaking cranes,” Audubon magazine reported the old men saying. “They tell me they ain’t bad eating but there’s no open season on them.” To which another man said, “If you can’t shoot them, what the blankety-blank good are they?”39
The squeaking birds were whooping cranes (Grus americana), the tallest birds in North America, which frequented the east shore flats of Aransas and Refugio from November to May. As a result of unregulated hunting, wetlands drainage, habitat loss, and bobcat attacks, these statuesque waders—pure white with black-tipped wings and a seven-foot wingspan—were at the brink of extinction. Rice farmers hated them. The only remaining wild populations bred in Wood Buffalo National Park of Canada (on the border of the Northwest Territories and Alberta) and wintered along the Gulf coast of Texas. With only around fifteen or twenty of these cranes remaining in the wild (and two in captivity), quick action was needed to save them.40 If possible, Roosevelt wasn’t going to let the whooping crane be “doomed to extinction” while he occupied the White House.41 The laborious process of establishing what is known today as Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was begun by Roosevelt that spring. His order to Wallace was that the principal wintering grounds of the whooping cranes in Gulf Texas should be run by the Biological Surve
y. He wanted an executive order ready for him to sign by the year’s end.
III
Sitting behind a large flat-topped desk in mid-June 1937, still tan from his trip to Texas, President Roosevelt eagerly studied naval logs from the War of 1812 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. He rested his elbows on the desktop and read historical documents for a couple of hours, head tilted eagerly forward. An electric fan was plugged in nearby to keep him cool and blow away the heavy cigarette smoke he exhaled. Amid the turmoil and tumult of the Great Depression, the president had overseen the construction of the National Archives building in 1934 as America’s temple of history, referring to it as “my baby.” Roosevelt regarded microfilming as the best way to save storage space. And he took a special interest in the methods by which film footage was being preserved. His eyes, calm and self-possessed, settled most frequently on the logbooks of famous U.S. naval vessels. When amiably chatting with archivists, Roosevelt said with a certain earnestness, “When my term is up, I’m coming here to work.”42
Helping the National Archives prosper was part and parcel of President Roosevelt’s almost touching belief that the federal government had a sacred obligation to save treasures for future generations of Americans: crucial documents, whooping cranes, rare artifacts, bighorn sheep. In 1926, Congress had authorized the construction of a national archive, but funds for the project dried up during the Depression. A groundbreaking did occur in September 1931, with Herbert Hoover laying the cornerstone, but it wasn’t until FDR became president that the project received the funding it required.
As Roosevelt envisioned it, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was necessary for the centralization of public and government documents. Working with Congress, he got NARA established in 1934. Its District of Columbia holdings were classified into “record groups.” Roosevelt appointed Robert Digges Wimberly Connor as the first archivist of the United States. And it was Roosevelt who told Connor that the three “charters of freedom”—the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—would permanently reside, with free public viewing, in the National Archives rotunda. The president appointed WPA workers to build NARA’s regal headquarters north of the National Mall on Constitution Avenue. In later years, NARA would set up regional offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Kansas City, Riverside, and Seattle. But the grand “temple of history” was in the nation’s capital.
True to form, the president couldn’t refrain from discussing landscape planning with the National Archives employees he met that June afternoon. At one point, he surprised the archivists by saying that, after his death, he wanted a simple marker erected on their grounds: a rectangular block of marble resting in a grassy triangle and engraved only, “In Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The inscription would face Pennsylvania Avenue. He didn’t want anything as grand as the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, or the Jefferson Memorial (the construction of which he was then sponsoring). “I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this (putting his hand on his desk),” he later told Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. “I don’t care what it is made of . . . whether limestone or granite or whatnot.”43 (On April 12, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of FDR’s death, Frankfurter and other veteran New Dealers would unveil a seven-and-a-half-ton Vermont marble monument at the National Archives building.)44
That summer of 1937, energized by his trip to the Gulf South, Roosevelt was eager to establish a series of national seashores (a designation partially of his invention), still “searching out” as he put it “bits of original wilderness.”45 One afternoon FDR invited a conservation-obsessed friend, the reporter Irving Brant, who had recently published Storm over the Constitution, to the White House to discuss possible marine sanctuary sites in Back Bay (Virginia), Cape Meares (Oregon), and Morro Beach (California). Brant, then moonlighting as the publicist for the Emergency Conservation Committee in New York, was lobbying for national seashores in the mid-Atlantic and in Gulf Texas. He believed that increased federal protection for coastal areas would go a long way toward permanently helping threatened shorebirds. If the White House didn’t act fast, commercial and private residential development would erase marine ecosystems such as Cape Hatteras (North Carolina) and Matagorda Bay (Texas). In his 1988 memoir Adventures in Conservation with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Brant claimed that he had plotted with the president to have “the entire front of the Gulf of Mexico, from Avery Island 350 miles westerly . . . owned by the government.”46 FDR’s commitment to protecting America’s coastlines stunned Brant. “I don’t know what the New Deal will do for the nation generally,” he wrote to a friend, “but in conservation it is certainly time to apply the motto of the Indiana lady ‘While you’re gittin’, git a-plenty.’”47
The idea of protecting American seascapes entered Roosevelt’s consciousness with a report on “potential shoreline parks” commissioned by NPS Director Cammerer and authorized by Harold Ickes in 1934. The survey, released in 1935, recommended twelve undeveloped coastal sites to become National Seashores.
Roosevelt’s spokesman for selling an American national seashore system to the general public was the indefatigable Ickes, who went on a barnstorming tour throughout 1937. Echoing the president, he declared that beaches and shores belonged to all Americans to enjoy. “When we look up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fences of private ownership,” Ickes said, on behalf of Roosevelt. “The people no longer get to the ocean. When we have reached the point that a nation of 125 million people cannot set foot upon the thousands of miles of beaches that border the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, except by permission from those who monopolize the ocean front, then I say it is the prerogative and the duty of the Federal and State governments to step in and acquire, not a swimming beach here and there, but solid blocks of ocean front hundreds of miles in length. Call this ocean front a national park, or a national seashore, or a state park or anything else you please—I say the people have a right to a fair share of it.”48
Despite Ickes’s best intentions and the strongest possible commitment from FDR, the initial seashore effort yielded depressing results. Of the original twelve recommended sites, ten were subsequently developed commercially. Only one was saved by FDR as a National Seashore: Cape Hatteras.
Roosevelt had come to know North Carolina’s spit and barrier islands well on his Atlantic cruises. The salt marsh ecosystems were rich with eelgrass (which the Canada goose ate) and widgeongrass (preferred by black ducks). Many man-made features of Cape Hatteras that FDR had once seen while sailing—like the Bodie Island Coast Guard Station—had been destroyed by hurricanes. One of the great symbols of the Atlantic seaboard in Roosevelt’s estimation had been the black-and-white-striped Cape Hatteras lighthouse, 208 feet tall, half a mile from the Atlantic coast. After the horrific hurricane season of 1933, the lighthouse was so close to the ocean (thanks to weather-driven erosion) that waves were crashing on the tower’s foundation. The United States Lighthouse Service was forced to close the beloved marine beacon after the beach erosion became crippling.49
The plight of Cape Hatteras lighthouse moved Frank Stick—a popular commercial artist whose illustrations appeared in Sports Afield, Field and Stream, and the Saturday Evening Post—to write an article in the Elizabeth City Independence promoting his “dream” of a national seashore park along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Besides being an artist, Stick was a wealthy real estate salesman, who prized the seventy-mile stretch from Bodie Island to Ocracoke Island for having the most “beautiful beaches in the world.” He owned several of them. A bona fide New Dealer, with Cape Hatteras his sanctified place, Stick went on the warpath to protect the coast from erosion of its sand dunes, hurricane damage, and misguided private development.
As a first step, instigated by the efforts of Stick, the CCC was dispatched to help tackle the problem of shoreline erosion. Instead of constructing beach gro
ins and jetties, which naturalists considered eyesores, these CCCers erected sand barrier dunes on the beaches. WPA workers joined the cause, planting six hundred miles of brush fences to arrest beach erosion.50 From his sailing experience, Roosevelt knew that the sand dunes of the cape—known in the seafaring world as the “graveyard of America” for its vicious currents and shoals—offered the best frontline protection against hurricanes. The presence of the CCC and WPA workers led New Deal administrators to visit Cape Hatteras, in order to survey the ongoing work. While they were there, they couldn’t help but be awestruck by the beautiful and delicate shoreline. One of those New Dealers was Roger Wolcott Toll, the NPS administrator who had filed influential reports leading to the creation of Joshua Tree National Monument. In November 1934 he was visiting potential parkland around the country and gave a positive assessment of Cape Hatteras, noting that “the area is primitive in character. There are no summer homes nor public resort development in the area.”51 Sadly, in February 1936 Toll died in an automobile wreck in Arizona while looking over the Ajo Mountains. Another New Dealer who advocated for a Cape Hatteras park was Conrad Wirth, assistant director of land planning for the National Park Service. He became a convert after traveling to Cape Hatteras to see the work of the CCC boys.
Wirth was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1899. He became a top-tier horticulturist, park planner, and accomplished government administrator; during the Hoover years he fell into line with Frederic Delano on the National Capital Park Planning Commission. Once Roosevelt became president, Horace Albright tasked Wirth with having the National Park Service help develop federal, state, and local parks.52 A devotee of Alexander Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted, Wirth often bucked bureaucratic protocol while trying to put across his new conservation ideas. In North Carolina, Wirth allied himself with Stick, despite the fact that the two did not get along, but they were intent on saving Cape Hatteras as a seashore park, including a hundred miles of the state’s barrier islands. Roosevelt believed the area’s historical importance was another justification for national seashore status. After all, the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk was already contributing to a vibrant tourism trade.
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 41