What had caused Roosevelt to save the Dry Tortugas islands, besides the birdlife, were the six hundred varieties of fish in the blue-green waters. Between Garden Key and the Everglades, the president had saved one of the most beautiful marine gardens on the planet. Just looking into the clear waters from the Potomac, Roosevelt could see dolphins, sea turtles, devil rays, and colorful coral reefs. On a few of the Tortugas islands, noddy and sooty terns nested each year. By establishing Fort Jefferson National Monument, the president had once again increased America’s ocean heritage.
Calling themselves the “four horsemen,” Roosevelt, Ickes, Watson, and Jackson played poker, bet on fishing catches, cooked grouper, looked for shipwrecks, mixed martinis, discussed the Civil War, and did a little work related to the Federal Trade Commission. “Life had been most informal in dress and in conduct,” Jackson wrote in his diary. “[Roosevelt] was of course treated respectfully by all but with perfect informality. In fishing contests, playing cards, and conversation he was and wanted to be an equal. He asked no favors and granted none. He played the game on its merits. He was able to avoid all pose. He was away from curious eyes. We were completely isolated.”76
Roosevelt ended 1937—his year of oceanic adventure—in style. Once back from Florida in early December, he signed Executive Order 7780, establishing two migratory waterfowl refuges—Lacassine (31,858 acres) and Sabine (142,850 acres)—to protect southern Louisiana’s waterfowl.77 Then, on December 31, 1937, as a gift to himself, the president signed Executive Order 7784, establishing the 47,200-acre Aransas Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Texas. (It would become known as Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in 1940 and would eventually grow to encompass 115,000 preserved acres.)78 Roosevelt was starting the job of protecting Louisiana’s bayous and the Texas coastline. Not only were the geese and ducks protected on these southern marshes but so too were alligators, muskrats, raccoons, and deer.
Since the president’s spring visit to the Gulf of Mexico, the Biological Survey had snapped up tracts of land in parts of Aransas, Refugio, and Calhoun counties, using $463,500 in revenue from the sale of Duck Stamps. The creation of the Texas refuge was a blessing for the nation, as it ensured the survival of the whooping crane. No hunting was allowed in Aransas, and freshwater ponds were built by the CCC and stocked with food suitable for ducks, geese, and cranes. The new refuge manager, Charles A. Keefer, soon documented more than 250 species of birds in Roosevelt’s refuge, including the vermilion flycatcher and American bald eagle. No more reckless drainage, clearing fires, cattle grazing, plowing, or plume hunters would touch Aransas.
According to the Washington Post, FDR’s commitment to save coastal treasures like Port Aransas, Cape Hatteras, Bombay Hook, Moosehorn, and the Dry Tortugas was an unrivaled “object lesson” in what can be done for American conservation “under proper management.”79 FDR had done more to protect America’s coastlines, marine sanctuaries, and barrier islands than all of his White House predecessors combined.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I HOPE THE SON-OF-A-BITCH WHO LOGGED THAT IS ROASTING IN HELL”
I
Not all of Franklin Roosevelt’s American adventures in 1937 were on the open sea or in coastal areas. That summer, the president decided to build a new house at the easternmost end of his Springwood estate, on what Daisy Suckley had called “the nicest hill” in Dutchess County.1 He designed a Dutch colonial home, built of stone and surrounded by brush and briar. He dubbed it “Top Cottage.” From this wheelchair-friendly house, the president could take in views of three ranges: to the northwest, the Catskills; to the west, the Shawangunks; and to the southwest, the Hudson Highlands. Closer at hand, meadows and woodlands, which fanned out below the front veranda, would have pleased Andrew Jackson Downing and all the Delanos.
When FDR drove the three miles from the main house in Hyde Park to Top Cottage—his Val-Kill—he could “escape the mob.” Wooded, serene, and unmarred by the prefabricated clutter of the industrial mid-twentieth century, it was a place where the president could relax without disruption. In fact, Roosevelt hoped someday to write his political memoirs at Top Cottage. All of his personal papers would be safeguarded at Springwood, but transporting selections of them to Top Cottage would have been an easy enough task.
Because Daisy Suckley influenced the retreat’s location, some historians have speculated that Top Cottage was the place designed for trysts. However, the house primarily served as a safe-haven for FDR, away from the public gaze, somewhere he could gossip about Livingstons and Vanderbilts, make ham-and-cheese sandwiches for lunch, and mix martinis at sunset. At Top Cottage he never worried about facial stubble or a wrinkled shirt. He was secluded, and surrounded by the sanctified land that invariably gave him a sense of spiritual renewal. “I was driving through the middle part of [Dutchess County] the last time I was here in early August,” Roosevelt told his neighbors at a picnic, “and I was struck by the number of lovely streams we have in the county, not only the larger creeks, like the Wappinger, but also the Krum Elbow and a lot of the smaller creeks, and it occurred to me what a wonderful escape we had.”2
Throughout 1937, Roosevelt continued to plant trees at Springwood under the supervision of Syracuse-based forester Nelson Brown, who reported that he was introducing Asian chestnuts (Castanea crenata) on an experimental plot of Hyde Park.3 Silviculturists hoped this species of chestnut was blight-resistant. Although FDR had objected to the Asian variety being planted in the Okefenokee, he approved its addition to his personal estate; still, he instructed Brown to give the American chestnuts (Castanea dentata) priority. “When you next make a check on the woods I wish you could have someone from the college go through the woods, especially the woods around the oldest white pine grove back of the farm to see if there are many young chestnuts growing,” Roosevelt wrote to Brown. “I have seen a number of them—possibly forty or fifty—ranging from five feet to twenty feet in height. Back on the top of the hill at the extreme east end of the place I think there are some others.”4
Tracts slated for commercial harvest included thousands of Norway spruce, European larch, and red and white pine. Brown gave regular reports on the trees to FDR, who listened with delight. “With the recent heavy rains I am very much encouraged and believe that results of planting should be very successful,” Brown reported. “Even the trees stricken by the drought last year have shown excellent survival due to the emergency watering which we did during July.”5 Roosevelt, in turn, passed these reports along to the nation with the happy relish of a country farmer. At a spring 1937 press conference, the president boasted of his arborist ambitions:
THE PRESIDENT: I was just showing the Dean [longtime reporter John Russell Young] my bill which has just come in for 26,000 trees which are going to be planted next month.
Q: Spruce trees, aren’t they?
THE PRESIDENT: In others words, I am practicing what I preach.
Q: Are these the Christmas trees?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. 23,000 Norway spruce, 2,000 balsam firs and 1,000 Douglas firs. That is experimental. That is an awful lot of trees.
Q: Those are the ordinary Santa Claus trees?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. They are on another ten acres of waste land. That is stopping erosion.
Q: You did not tell us the amount of the bill.
THE PRESIDENT: $130.00.
Q: Did you say, sir, whether they are to be planted in Georgia or in New York.
THE PRESIDENT: At Hyde Park.
Q: $130.00 for all of them?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, $5.00 a thousand.
Q: Are they seedlings?
THE PRESIDENT: They call them three-year old transplants. In other words, they have been transplanted once already from the original bed.
Q: Do you get them from the State Conservation Department?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q: You had the others at Valkill?
THE PRESIDENT: In the back of the cottage, yes. Outside of that I don’t think there is any new
s at all.6
By bringing his own Hyde Park tree planting into a press conference, Roosevelt kept the spotlight on the New Deal’s reforestation programs. Roosevelt’s Forest Service, in fact, had established the four greatest tree nurseries in the world, headquartered in Michigan, Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Louisiana. From those and other facilities came the saplings the CCC “boys” planted across America.7 Because FDR had turned Hyde Park and Warm Springs into successful demonstration farms, he hoped rural folks might be more inclined to follow suit. Moreover, after his landslide reelection in 1936, an emboldened FDR planned on protecting a new set of landscapes. The more that extraction industries tried to block new national parks in the West, or new migratory bird refuges in the South, the more determined Roosevelt was to win. By 1937 state governments and private enterprises in the Far West were no longer hostile to the Forest Service overseeing huge tracts of public lands. Regulating commercial access to the national forests made sense even to timber barons. But the national park, as an idea, was loathed by Pacific Northwest businessmen, who derided it as aimed only to “please the women.”8
To the chagrin of Eleanor Roosevelt, Congress halted funding to all female-oriented, federally funded, work-relief programs in 1937. Adding insult to injury, no summary report of how the 8,500 women performed was written. “The CCC camps with their millions of dollars for wages, educational work, travel, and supervision constantly reminded me of what we might do for women,” Hilda Worthington Smith, pioneer social worker, complained to the first lady. “As is so often the case, the boys get the breaks, the girls are neglected.”9
At the heart of Roosevelt’s primary conservation confrontation in 1937 was the American Forestry Association (AFA), an industry group representing, in large part, lumber companies. Its board of directors was disenchanted with Roosevelt, a member of AFA, because he was adopting the NPS view of absolute preservation of forests instead of the “wise-use” Pinchotism of the Forest Service. The fight boiled down to the same old thing: turf. AFA president G. K. McClure, for example, complained directly to the White House about Ickes’s determination to protect the primeval wilderness of the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympics under the auspices of the National Park Service. McClure wondered how FDR, the proponent of Natchez Trace Parkway and Grand Coulee Dam, could suddenly oppose timbering in the national forests and parks. The AFA saw Roosevelt’s transformation as a “matter of deep concern.”10
Roosevelt nobly defended himself in a letter to McClure. Explaining his longtime disdain for clear-cut-lumbering, he admitted that his senses were assaulted every time he saw the remains of treetops or the massacre of an evergreen stand juxtaposed with the emerald green of an adjoining forest. The president matter-of-factly told McClure that great forests of “rare and exotic trees” were “desirable to preserve,” and that their natural splendor should be forever “classified among the wonders of nature.” The president announced that against the encroachments of the bulldozer, the federal government had an obligation to protect western forests. “I refer, for example, to the Giant Sequoias in Southern California, to the Sugar Pines in the same general area, to the Redwood Forests of the California Coast, and to the Douglas Fir of the Columbia River region,” Roosevelt wrote to McClure. “In the case of all these varieties, with the exception of the Douglas Fir, it is too much to expect that we can cut and renew these forests on a yield basis.” According to Roosevelt, “the only way” to preserve “these marvelous trees” was to offer federal or state preservation.11
FDR’s letter infuriated McClure. If farmers were allowed to harvest the biggest ear of corn or the largest pumpkin on their land, then why shouldn’t lumbermen be allowed to chop down the biggest trees—the ones worth the most money—with impunity? After all, the president himself had dabbled in commercial forestry, harvesting Norway spruce from his Springwood estate in the 1930s and 1940s and earning thousands of dollars.12
The American Forestry Association learned the hard way that Roosevelt could turn on a dime, transforming himself from a tree farmer to an incurable Hudson River romantic infatuated with the feel-good pastoralism of John Burroughs and the environmental idealism of Bob Marshall. Most troubling to the AFA was the way that Ickes, the most powerful secretary of the interior in American history, continued to grow in prominence—while the power and influence of the Forest Service had correspondingly declined—during Roosevelt’s first term. Between 1933 and 1947 the NPS doubled in size.13 This anti–Forest Service critique was overwrought. FDR remained a staunch champion of the Forest Service and its director, Frederick Silcox. In the western national forests, the president had the CCC boys reseed thousands of acres of grazing land and built truck roads to help loggers prosper. The New Deal had already seized twenty-two million acres of forested land for both outdoors recreation and harvestable groves.
By Roosevelt’s second term, he had to face head-on the escalating feud over public lands management between the Forest Service and the National Park Service; their long-standing rivalry had intensified into hatred. Each agency considered the other unrealistic. The Forest Service worked closely with the AFA and its member businesses. The National Park Service was the darling of New Deal preservationists. To the Forest Service, the smartest defense against Ickes’s takeovers was to argue that in national parks wilderness would be “desecrated” by overdevelopment and commercialization—due to a never-ending quest to attract hordes of tourists. Advocates of the NPS countered that the Forest Service’s primitive areas had no genuine security and could be abolished at the stroke of a pen by an unelected administrative officer. By contrast, national parks had federal protection (though not necessarily as wilderness).14 The burning question of 1937 was how far FDR would lean toward one or the other when pressured.
That summer, Nelson Brown traveled to Europe, where he would inspect a variety of managed forests. The president was envious: if his appointment calendar weren’t so full, he would have joined his personal forester. Roosevelt urged Brown to specifically visit the community-owned forests in France, Germany, and Austria. The president still fervently wished that American farmers could learn how European towns made admirable profits from selling lumber, so he suggested that Brown lend a hand. “If you could get up a little book in popular vein with photographs and a catchy title and cover, it would sell like hotcakes,” FDR said. “The important thing is to confine the story to small communities which have not got much capital to invest. I hope you have a wonderful time.”15
II
On September 22, 1937, President Roosevelt began a fifteen-day trip through the western states, ultimately to inspect the work being done at three dams in the northwest: Fort Peck (on the Missouri River in Montana); Bonneville (on the Columbia between Oregon and Washington); and Grand Coulee (on the Columbia in northeastern Washington).16 There was also a fierce turf struggle between the U.S. Forest Service and the NPS over forestland in the Olympics that he hoped to resolve. Leaving Hyde Park and traveling by train, with Eleanor coming along for the adventure, the president arrived in central Iowa and delivered a radio address from the village of Marshalltown about the stability of crops. A few days later, the Roosevelts arrived in Wyoming with a retinue of government clerks, stenographers, press handlers, and secretaries.
FDR gave speeches in Cheyenne and Casper about the nation’s public lands. Genuinely curious, he asked locals for updates on drought conditions and forest fires and was gratified to see that his first-term New Deal policies had helped the state cope with soil erosion. “The grass is better this year than it was last year,” Eleanor Roosevelt observed; “there has been a little more rain. In consequence the cattle and the sheep look better and the people themselves look more cheerful.”17
Moving north, the Roosevelts detrained at the Gardner entrance to Yellowstone National Park, for a stay of two days and nights. Immediately inquiring about a series of recent forest fires, FDR was impressed that two thirds of Yellowstone still had healthy lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta). The
historic Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel at Yellowstone was in the midst of remodeling, and Roosevelt chatted with workers about the architectural plans for a new lobby, recreational hall, barbershop, hair salon, and dining room.18 He was particularly delighted by a large wooden map of the United States he was shown; it had been carved from fifteen different types of local wood in preparation for his arrival.19
Rustic cabins were also under construction by CCC workers, and the president met with the CCC “boys” who were assigned to Yellowstone.20 The first family, of course, watched the famous geysers—Daisy and Old Faithful—erupt like clockwork. “I was not disappointed,” an enthralled Eleanor Roosevelt reported. “The water shooting up in the air, or in the case of the Daisy out sideways, was most graceful and the rainbows added to the beauty. I think the colors, looking down into some of the hot pools seemed more beautiful than almost anything else. Nature combines so many colors and has so much to teach us where this is concerned. If only we realized it, it is the shades that matter, almost any colors go well together.”21
Roosevelt stops at Artists’ Point in Yellowstone National Park in the back of a touring car in September 1937. With temperatures in the park at or near freezing, the president wrapped himself up in a robe, sitting in the open air. Roosevelt’s western tour was intended in part to inspire other Americans to visit their national parks, so he did as they might, using a car to travel from one destination to another.
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 43