Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Among those testifying was Bob Marshall. Ever since he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the chief forester, Marshall had been friendly with Ickes, but now he was running the Forest Service Division of Recreation and Lands. Marshall was also the founder, leader, and chief benefactor of the nonprofit Wilderness Society, and he had directed it to send to relevant personnel at both the Forest Service and the National Park Service a questionnaire about how they would protect the areas surrounding Mount Olympus. On the basis of the responses, Marshall testified on Capitol Hill that he was in favor of the National Park Service taking control of the Olympics. The Forest Service, he concluded, was protecting far too little acreage as “pristine” wilderness, and the primeval groves could be logged with the “stroke of a pen” by a future U.S. president. By contrast, logging wasn’t permitted by Congress in any National Park. This took courage, as Marshall’s boss at the Forest Service was now Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. Marshall’s testimony caught the president’s attention. FDR knew that since Ickes had been able to recruit Marshall to his side, then national park designation for the Olympics really was the best route. Sensing victory, Ickes and the House committee chair promised to drop the bill if Congress would establish a large national park on the Olympic Peninsula. “Secretary Ickes sought to deflect the ‘parks-will-be-overdeveloped’ Forest Service defense by announcing his policy that the wilderness of the new parks would not be developed,” historian Doug Scott explained, “while he lambasted the weakness of the Forest Service’s wilderness efforts.”49

  The Emergency Conservation Committee, consisting of Rosalie Edge, Irving Brant, and Van Name, was a key ally for Ickes in securing Olympic National Park.50 At the urging of Ickes, the ECC lobbied for the trees below the timberline on the Olympic Peninsula—stands of Douglas fir, western hemlock, red cedar, and Sitka spruce—to be saved in perpetuity. As the timber companies vociferously objected, the ECC argued that the point of establishing Olympic National Park was not only to protect nearly treeless mountain peaks but also to save the rain forests at their bases.51 “The development of our national parks,” Brant had written to Roosevelt in 1932, “at the expense of the national forests is demanded by the more fundamental needs of our country—permanent preservation of magnificent primeval forests which cannot be replaced for centuries if once cut down as the Forest Service intends they should be, and preservation of wildlife through large, permanent sanctuaries.”52

  While Van Name and Edge were New Yorkers, Brant was a seasoned journalist from the Midwest. Born on January 17, 1885, in Walker, Iowa, Brant worked as a reporter or editor for various regional newspapers including the Iowa City Republican, Clinton Herald, Des Moines Register and Tribune, and St. Louis Star-Times.53 His heroes were the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and writer Henry David Thoreau.54 In 1918, Brant, as an editorial writer and military analyst for the St. Louis Star, hired his wife, Hazeldean Toof, to write book reviews. Whenever they had a free moment, the Brants spent time with “books and birds, birds and books”; they were especially enthralled by Enos Mills’s 1920 classic, The Adventures of a Nature Guide.55 Mills, a disciple of John Muir, was credited with convincing the Wilson administration to establish Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado in 1915. After reading Toof’s glowing review of his book, Mills invited the Brants to spend a week at Long’s Peak Inn, the hotel he had built near the national park. This trip spurred Irving Brant into becoming a full-time activist for the National Park Service. In particular, he hoped to establish an Ozark River National Park, even writing a “folk drama” about the region to create public interest. Meanwhile, Brant was also researching a historical novel about the maritime fur trade; over the seven years it took him to complete his novel, he visited the forests of the Olympics a half dozen times.56

  Irving Brant, assistant to Harold Ickes, was traveling with Roosevelt on his western tour when he snapped a photograph of fishermen in the Queets River in northwest Washington State in 1937. Roosevelt’s tour of the Olympic Mountains changed the future of the region, giving him a firsthand understanding of the abuse wrought on the rain forest there and a resolve to stop it.

  During a winter in the Olympics, Brant snowshoed along Hurricane Ridge, hiked in the moss-covered forests, and watched whales at scenic Pacific beaches. With great freneticism, he drove around the American West, reporting on the public lands for newspapers. The shabby conditions of the Petrified Forest National Monument in Arizona in particular enraged him. “Day by day, month by month,” Brant charged in a Saturday Evening Post article, “the Petrified Forest of America is being looted and smashed to pieces by the motoring public of America.”57

  By 1927, the Brants had settled in Berkeley, California, where Brant wrote conservation articles drawn from his experiences on America’s public lands. In Scientific American, he covered the plight of some forest rangers who had been struck by lightning; in the New York Times he advocated for national parks to include more swaths of wilderness. He also wrote about how tourists were feeding Yellowstone’s bears and elks, effectively taming them (FDR was later guilty of that temptation); it sickened him that the “welfare of the concessionaire” had become the “prime consideration of the National Park Service.” But it was Brant’s fiery article “What Ails the Audubon Society” that seized Ickes’s attention. Brant ably exposed the extent to which Audubon had become entangled with ammunition manufacturers. Brant’s piece also outraged Rosalie Edge, a venerated World War I–era suffragist. Her nonprofit organization, ECC, went on the warpath against the Audubon Society.58

  Along with FDR’s son-in-law John Boettiger and uncle Frederic Delano, Brant became the president’s eyes and ears on public land and wildlife protection issues. Starting in the mid-1930s, often writing in the New Republic, Brant sounded the New Deal alarm about lumber and power interests in the Pacific Northwest region that were ignoring federal laws. Brant soon became the preeminent champion of expanding Mount Olympus National Monument to become Olympic National Park by incorporating 400,000 acres of adjacent national forest—plus the addition of a sizable eastern unit along the coast of Washington state.

  In 1934 Van Name’s pamphlet The Proposed Olympics National Park caught Roosevelt’s close attention. Van Name believed that the Olympics were on par with Yellowstone or Yosemite for grandeur. Spurred on by Van Name, Roosevelt wrote to his friend Albert Z. Gray in 1935 that he was mulling over an Olympics National Park. “There has been no official proposal by the Secretary of the Interior to establish this area as a national park,” Roosevelt wrote to Gray. “However, if such a recommendation is made, I shall be glad to give the matter every consideration.”59 Less than a year later, the president had asked Attorney General Homer Cummings whether he could create this national park by presidential proclamation. Could he cite the Antiquities Act as his authority to seize lands from Olympic National Forest, join them to Olympic National Monument (where logging was prohibited), and make the giant national park Ickes envisioned?

  The entire Olympic Peninsula was a tree lover’s paradise. These thick woods often received 160 inches of rainfall per year. Some fifty glaciers existed in these mountains, including the Ice River, Blue, Humes, and University glaciers. These glaciers formed the headwaters of long streams—including the Hoh, Quinault, Queets, and Bogachiel rivers—that flowed westward toward the Pacific.60 Their water was as pure and clean as the rain and snow that fed them. Salmon and steelhead ran these pristine rivers in the fall and winter, cutthroat trout in the summer. The peninsula was also home to an unmanaged herd of Roosevelt elk (Cervus canadensis roosevelti), which too often were being slaughtered by rogue hunters. Nevertheless, after careful investigation, Cummings determined that Roosevelt’s plan to combine Olympic National Forest and Olympic National Monument was an overreach of executive power.61

  In February 1936, Brant, then editor of the St. Louis Star-Times, talked with the president at the White House about how to stop the conflict between the National Park Service and the
Forest Service. Brant reported to Ickes, “The matters about which I spoke to the President were the preservation of the virgin forests around the present Mount Olympus National Monument and the sugar pine grove near Carl Inn, on the edge of Yosemite Park.” On the subject of logging that continually threatened the Olympic region, Brant argued that sacrificing irreplaceable trees, which might be a millennium old, was shortsighted. At best, it would keep sawmills running for another few years.

  Five days later, in a memorandum with “Mt. Olympus National Monument” printed in bold lettering, Roosevelt wrote to Wallace (and copied Ickes): “I understand that there is a forest area immediately adjacent to the national monument. Why should two Departments run this acreage? If the forest portion is not to be used for eventual commercial forestation and cutting, why not include the forest area in the national monument?”62 Later that same afternoon FDR, still under the influence of Brant, pestered Wallace about federal protection for Yosemite’s sugar pine groves. “Can this land be saved,” the president asked Wallace, “by a trade of lands?”63 Wallace was greatly annoyed by Ickes’s and Brant’s attempts to bring both the Olympics and Yosemite under the Department of the Interior, as timbering there would bring revenue to the USDA. He wrote disingenuously to the president that the sugar pines were not worthy of preservation.64

  The fate of federal lands on the Olympic Peninsula remained unclear. Wallace had jumped into the fray in July 1937, claiming that a “primitive area” of 238,930 acres of Olympic National Forest would be established to help the Roosevelt elk prosper. Ickes was still hoping that FDR would transfer much of the national forest into a new Olympic National Park. Meanwhile, Brant was dazzling the president with photos of the last virgin forests in the Northwest. Wallace angrily realized that the Forest Service was being outfoxed in the Pacific Northwest by Ickes and the ECC activists Brant, Edge, and Van Name, who had direct access to the president. It seemed to Delano and Ickes, along with the ECC, that the sensible solution would be to combine both federal sites and enlarge the acreage under the aegis of the National Park Service. But the Olympic Peninsula was a prime lumbering region, and timber businesses and ranchers on the peninsula had formed an immovable alliance against national park designation. That was the cacophonous situation that stayed in FDR’s mind, as he approached the lands over which so many were willing to fight.

  On September 30, 1937, Roosevelt left Seattle on the destroyer USS Phelps, bound for Victoria, British Columbia, to speak with Canadian officials about forestry.65 Heading south again that afternoon, battling stormy weather, with gulls circling and gliding above the deck, Phelps crossed the Strait of Juan de Fuca, rounding Ediz Hook Spit, and was greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute, fired by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Samuel P. Ingham, on approaching Port Angeles, Washington. A huge delegation of local dignitaries gathered at the pier to greet the president, who was accompanied by his daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger of Seattle and her family.

  The week before, when Roosevelt was in Yellowstone, he had claimed he was “not sure” about the idea of an Olympic National Park. Now, in Port Angeles, he seemed to have fully endorsed it. As the Roosevelt caravan crept slowly up Lincoln Street, pausing periodically for the president to wave at the starstruck crowd, the cheers and chants grew. “Babies and toddlers were held aloft for the president to see,” Mary Lou Hanify—who, as a teenager, had been among the spectators—later recalled. “Most people felt sure that they had been individually singled out for the famous Roosevelt smile.”66 As the convoy crawled slowly to the courthouse, where thousands of schoolchildren had congregated on the lawn, the anticipation grew. A huge banner was draped across the face of the courthouse, reading, “Mr. President, we children need your help. Give us Olympic National Park.”

  As the clock struck 6 p.m. Mayor Ralph Davis of Port Angeles introduced Roosevelt to the cheering throng, and the Theodore Roosevelt High School band played a rousing Sousa-like version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A hush fell over the gathering as Roosevelt began to speak. Here, in person, was the uplifting voice that had transfixed them through many dozens of fireside chats. “That sign is the appealingest appeal I have ever seen in my travels,” Roosevelt declared. “I am inclined to think that it counts more to have the children want that park than all the rest of us put together. So, you boys and girls, I think you can count on my help in getting that national park, not only because we need it for old people and you young people, but for a whole lot of young people who are going to come along in the next hundred years of America.”67

  From Port Angeles, Roosevelt drove to Lake Crescent Tavern (now Lake Crescent Lodge), where he hashed out the bedeviling issues of jurisdiction, size, and loopholes for a new national park with representatives of both the Forest Service and the NPS. “The Olympic Peninsula will in the future be as popular as Yellowstone is now and we must provide for future generations to come,” Roosevelt told the group. “The western hemlock is a beautiful tree and eastern people want to see it.” Reflecting on the school banner he saw earlier that day, he added, “Why not call it ‘The Olympic National Park?’ This would tie in with the Olympic Peninsula and mean something. Mount Olympus is too hard to say.”68

  Usually, FDR’s approach to conservation valued getting negotiations started rather than holding an all-or-nothing line. But the Olympics were different. The fight had gone on far too long. Building on the momentum of his 1936 reelection, Roosevelt made clear at Lake Crescent Tavern that the time was right for the proposed Olympic National Park. If Roosevelt could sell Congress on it, he would be responsible for having created the third-largest national park in the country. Tomlinson wrote to his superior, National Park Service director Arno B. Cammerer, about FDR’s commitment to a major Yellowstone-style national park on the Olympic Peninsula: “During the entire discussion, the President left no doubt in the mind of anyone present that he favored a large national park and that he especially desires the preservation of typical stands of timber,” Tomlinson reported to Cammerer. “He emphasized the need to save the western hemlock.”69

  Overnight the word traveled far and wide that Roosevelt was going to fight for Olympic National Park. In the excitement of the moment, a Port Angeles schoolboy, Willis Welsh, had caught a trout in Barnes Creek especially for the president to eat in celebration. Once again delighting in a regional cuisine, Roosevelt dined on Olympic blackberry jam, Olympia oyster cocktails, Dungeness crab, young Puget Sound turkey, and prime rib of Washington beef, and capped off the dinner with Grays Harbor cranberry sherbet and wild blackberry pie.

  At 9:15 a.m. on October 1, Roosevelt drove the 105-mile scenic road that skirted Lake Crescent and Lake Quinault to inspect the Olympic Peninsula’s Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), and western red cedar (Thuja plicata); some of these giants reached 250 feet in height. The awesome beauty of the multilayered canopies, standing snags, and fallen trunks astonished him. In every direction was a satisfying picture. The president’s visit around the disputed area was overseen by the Forest Service and its allies in the lumber and pulp mill industries, all of whom were intent on convincing him that a national park, especially an extensive one, would devastate the already struggling economy. The Forest Service excluded all National Park Service officials from the invitation list. Timber lobbyists kept telling Roosevelt about the need for industrial development in the region. They even moved a sign marking the national forest boundaries, giving the impression that a heavily logged area—several square miles of burned stumps, a picture of voracious commercial logging—wasn’t on federal land. An acute sadness fell over the president as his motorcade passed miles of overlogged hillsides. He blurted out, “I hope the son-of-a-bitch who logged that is roasting in hell.”70

  All afternoon, Roosevelt met with people from towns west of the Olympic Mountains, under gray sky drizzling moisture. Special demonstrations, such as tree plantings and ax throwing, were held in his honor. At Snider Ranger Station, Roosevelt watched a simul
ated forest fire and a demonstration of emergency firefighting. The Indian CCC erected a pair of huge totem poles on the northern boundary of the Quinault Reservation to honor FDR. Schoolchildren from the Taholah Indian Agency held canoe maneuvers at great speed, to the president’s delight. The boats were hewn by hand out of cedar logs. Salmon were toted from the river for lunch. Governor Clarence D. Martin of Washington talked with Roosevelt about how best to establish the national park. Those two days proved to be the turning point.

  As Irving Brant wrote to the National Park Service’s associate director A. E. Demaray four days later, “With President Roosevelt publicly advocating the park, there no longer seems to be any danger of being confronted with a ‘this or nothing’ choice dictated by the Forest Service and lumber interests.”71 Negotiations over the details of Olympic National Park—including the fate of the largest old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest—continued for the next several months.

  IV

  From Lake Quinault, the Roosevelts headed to Tacoma and then Grand Coulee Dam. On this return visit Roosevelt studied the Columbia River on topographical maps. He felt confident about Grand Coulee—a town ninety miles west of Spokane—where the New Deal worksites were a beehive of activity. Roosevelt kept promising that expansive farmlands in the area would soon be irrigated by the dam. He spoke publicly about all the recreational opportunities Grand Coulee was creating. “When the dam is completed and the pool is filled, we shall have a lake 155 miles long running all the way to Canada,” Roosevelt remarked at the dam on October 2. “You young people especially are going to live to see the day, when thousands and thousands of people are going to use this great lake both for transportation purposes and for pleasure purposes. There will be sailboats and motor boats and steamship lines running from here to the northern border of the United States into Canada.”72