Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  About two thousand pairs of brown pelicans—favorites of Roosevelt—nested on the islands.9 Reports that San Miguel Island had the finest assemblages of seals and sea lions in California was enough to cause FDR to act decisively. Cleverly bypassing Congress, Ickes drew up a presidential proclamation for Roosevelt to sign, establishing Channel Islands National Monument with archaeological research as a prime justification. On April 26, Roosevelt, in signing it, proclaimed that the islands contained certain “fossils of Pleistocene elephants and ancient trees, and furnish noteworthy examples of ancient volcanism, deposition, and active sea erosion, and have situated thereon various other objects of geological and scientific interest.”10 This was more in line with the traditional use of the Antiquities Act for archaeology. To circumvent potential congressional inquiries over funding the new national monument, Roosevelt had the superintendent of Sequoia National Park also manage the productive and diverse Channel Islands marine sanctuary.

  Once the national monument was a fait accompli, Roosevelt had the Department of the Interior inventory the rare species of the ecosystem for the Smithsonian Institution. Roosevelt’s instinctive notion that the Channel Islands were indeed North America’s Galápagos was vindicated a few years later when a field naturalist with the Department of the Interior wrote that he never had seen so much teeming wildlife in a single day. “Boy,” he wrote in an official report, “we’ve got something out there in the Channel Islands.”11 (Two future presidents—Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter—enlarged the monument by adding islands.12 In 1980 Congress voted to upgrade Roosevelt’s “Galápagos” to national park status.)13

  After the hassles over Key West, Channel Islands, and Cape Hatteras, Roosevelt decided it was easier to save America’s coastal areas by executive orders establishing national wildlife refuges.14 Because of his exhaustive naval and nautical expertise, Roosevelt didn’t need advice from Ickes or Brant on the choice of coastal locations. With Congress ignorant of his intentions, Roosevelt went on a spree. Among the coastal marine ecosystems Roosevelt saved in 1938 was the gorgeous Cape Meares along the Oregon coast, which formed a high, steep bluff on the south end of Tillamook Bay. Ornithologist William Finley had sent photographs of the vertical coastal cliffs and rock outcroppings to FDR, including images of a remnant of coastal old-growth forest. The Oregon Coast Trail passed through the rolling Cape Meares headlands and the Audubon Society had documented thousands of brants, pelagic cormorants, common murres, tufted puffins, western gulls, and black oystercatchers populating the cape’s dramatic landscape. If all that wasn’t enough to make Roosevelt pick up his pen, the nineteenth-century Cape Meares lighthouse was a famous reference point for Pacific Ocean sailors. Executive Order 7957 on August 19, 1938, brought the president as much joy as establishing Great White Heron in Florida and the Channel Islands in California.

  Another natural feature that Camp Meares offered, one that surely appealed to Roosevelt, was the “Octopus Tree,” a giant old Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), which hadn’t developed a massive single trunk like most of its kind along the Oregon Coast. Because of its candelabra branching and large six-foot base, this spruce was revered by Native Americans as the “Council Tree.” It was possibly two thousand years old, and Roosevelt, with his executive order, saved it from becoming lumber.15

  On the Atlantic coast the president created Tybee National Wildlife Refuge at the mouth of the Savannah River in South Carolina, signing Executive Order 7882 on May 9, 1938. While this island was only a dollop of land, just a hundred acres, it was the home of piping plovers (Charadrius melodus) and wood storks (Mycteria americana). Manatee (Trichechus) swam up the coast to Tybee in the summer months. When Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” in 1961, this was essentially the romantic Atlantic landscape he was celebrating.16

  II

  River conservation was very much on Roosevelt’s mind in 1938. Utility companies and coal suppliers sought congressional investigations into the legality of the TVA, while environmentalists from the Pacific Northwest complained that Grand Coulee Dam, due to open in 1941, was devastating riverine and riparian wildlife. Even with fish ladders, the “tamed” Columbia aborted the spawning runs of salmon and steelhead. A geographer would be hard-pressed to find a major western river that Roosevelt didn’t want to dam. And FDR wanted not the small earthen plugs that the CCC built across streams to stock water or raise bass but colossal dams to steal the power of the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Sacramento, the Snake, the Red, and the Colorado.17

  In his defense, Roosevelt saw that remaking rivers by means of dams was a middle course between reckless exploitation and extreme environmentalism. As a corollary of this principle, he also wanted to keep America’s rivers and reservoirs from biological wreckage. Waste treatment plants, he said, were needed all across America. Tough laws to protect salmon, trout, bass, and pike were encouraged. “As you know,” Roosevelt wrote to Kenneth Reid of the Izaak Walton League, “I am vitally interested in the protection of our streams.” At the president’s prodding, the PWA started purifying the Potomac River. All towns and cities along the river would get sewage treatment plants. Ickes called the PWA program the “freeing of the Potomac.”18 Roosevelt especially wanted Rock Creek and the Anacostia River cleaned up in a grand effort to beautify Greater Washington.19

  Indeed, Roosevelt fancied himself America’s caring riverkeeper. To Roosevelt, “water conservation” in the East meant protecting rivers like the Hudson and Delaware from overdevelopment. For the West it meant constructing dams with reservoirs, thereby guaranteeing year-round water resources. One such project was the Grand River Dam in Oklahoma City, authorized in 1935. At a large rally there, Roosevelt said, “The Grand River Project is a good illustration of the national aspect of water control, because it is a vital link in the still larger problem of the whole valley of the Arkansas—a planning task that starts far west in the Rocky Mountains, west of the Royal Gorge, and runs on down through Colorado and Kansas and Oklahoma and Arkansas to the Mississippi River itself and thence to the sea. The day will come, I hope, when every drop of water that flows into that great watershed, through all those states, will be controlled for the benefit of mankind, controlled for the growing of forests, for the prevention of soil erosion, for the irrigation of land, for the development of water power, for the ending of floods and for the improvement of navigation.”20

  What infuriated Roosevelt most was the stream pollution from mines; he considered this the primary source of noxious pollution in America. Discharge from metal, clay, and coal mines were devastating fish in streams, large and small. In the Susquehanna and Delaware river watersheds, the mining of anthracite coal was poisoning and blackening streams. Pulp and paper mills were almost as bad, coughing out acidic washes. Because rivers and streams were by nature part of an interstate system, they needed federal regulation. The problem, as Roosevelt saw it, was that federal jurisdiction over water pollution was almost solely investigatory. The White House had the power to order abatement of discharge of solids into navigable waters where such refuse interacted with navigation. There was also some power to control discharge of oil in waters where the tide ebbed and flowed. But, by and large, the federal government was impotent in matters related to the pollution crisis. Fourteen states had no pollution control laws whatsoever. Twenty-six offered only partial or ineffective control. Recreation, public health, the development of fish life, and shellfish culture were all suffering because of untreated waste. Even on the Potomac River watershed, two factories were discharging industrial waste greater than the sewage flow of the District of Columbia. Working closely with Ickes, FDR started a long push for a Clean Rivers Act, which, at last, came to fruition in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson got Congress to pass the Water Quality Act.

  Yet, for all Roosevelt’s good intentions, the New Deal often ecologically damaged America’s rivers. The Army Corps of Engineers, for example, turned the Mississippi River into one necklace of dams and l
evees. Likewise, for nearly one thousand miles, the Ohio River became a series of impoundments. Almost all of California’s rivers were plugged in hundreds of spots to fuel the giant boom of agricultural and urban sprawl. In the Tennessee Valley, the New Deal was building dams—Norris (1934), Pickwick Landing (1935), Chickamauga (1936), Kentucky (1938)—at an astonishing rate. For all the public electricity generated, the once-bucolic landscape was marred beyond recognition.

  That spring of 1938, Franklin Roosevelt invited Carl Carmer, a thirty-five-year-old writer from Cortland, New York, to discuss Hudson River history with him in Washington. Refreshingly, Carmer, whose best-selling 1934 book Stars Fell over Alabama was seen by Roosevelt as a gift to America in spirit with WPA guides, wasn’t interested in New Deal politics or the rise of Hitler; he merely wanted to interview FDR about New York history for a book he was writing, The Hudson, in the new “Rivers of America” series.21 Taking off his glasses, his blue eyes peering at Carmer, Roosevelt told colorful anecdotes about Dutch immigrants in Dutchess County; his grandfather, who sang him the nursery rhyme “Trip-a-trop-a-tronjes”; his ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War; and the life-affirming beauty of the mystical Catskills.22 Carmer divined that, gifted as Roosevelt was at politics, if the burden of the Great Depression wasn’t on his shoulders the president would have retired to the Hudson River Valley to spend what the Hindu sages call the “forest years,” reflecting on New York history.

  Roosevelt and Carmer were likewise kindred spirits when it came to promoting Dutch architecture in upstate New York. Both men sought to restore buildings from the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in the Hudson River Valley style. And by insisting that citizens deserved “a river of clean water,”23 both men were really progenitors of what became the “Scenic Hudson” movement of the 1960s.

  Although Roosevelt had far more English blood in his veins than Dutch, he preferred being seen as a Dutch American. Proud of his family’s genealogical ties to the Netherlands, he oversaw the construction of five Dutch-style post offices in the mid-Hudson, taking a direct role in determining the architecture, layout, materials, and artwork. Sketching building designs on White House stationery, he communicated his preferences for the craft- and stonework and the layout of the interior, complete with local history murals painted by Olin Dows and others. Not even the minutest detail of his WPA post offices in Rhinebeck, Wappingers Falls, Beacon, Hyde Park, and Poughkeepsie escaped his attention.24 Not only did Roosevelt choose an artist for the post office’s interior murals, but he also shaped the patriotic language chiseled on its walls and engraved on bells. “Instead of poetry on the Poughkeepsie Post Office bell,” the President wrote to the project’s supervisor.“I suggest the following: ‘Ring the Perpetuation of American Freedom.’”25

  By 1938, the Works Progress Administration (reorganized as the Work Projects Administration the following year) had done much to educate Americans about their local history and geographic points of interest. The agency installed new parks, bridges, roads, and schools, all built by unemployed men and women—around three million in 1938 alone—who were paid for this work-relief. Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged her husband to extend the benefits of the WPA to unemployed artists, actors, writers, and musicians in America. Federal Project Number One was the result of Eleanor’s lobbying. Its five branches—the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project (the first lady’s favorite), the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Historical Records Project—employed more than forty thousand people from 1935 to 1938.26

  Eleanor Roosevelt toured a Works Progress Administration worksite in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 8, 1936. She was in the city to deliver the commencement address at Drake University, but made time, as usual, to see what local people were doing and how they were faring. Mrs. Roosevelt visited three WPA sites that day, including a sewing room for unemployed women and the Negro Community Center. At the third, shown in the picture, WPA crews were employed turning a former city dump into a park along the Des Moines River.

  In 1938, in the aftermath of the “court packing” scandal, the “Roosevelt recession,” and the “Clean Potomac” campaign, there was increased blowback against New Deal conservationism from the extraction industries. Quietly circumventing Congress, however, Roosevelt increased the boundaries of several existing national forests, such as Ottawa (Michigan); Green Mountain (Vermont); Tongass (Alaska); Columbia and Snoqualmie (Washington); and Ouachita (Arkansas). Roosevelt stressed that national forests should have names evoking Americana or Native Americans, such as Apalachicola in Florida, Cumberland (later Daniel Boone) in Kentucky, and Chattahoochee in Georgia.27 While the first lady rallied behind Federal Project 1, the president kept pushing forward on forests, rivers, shorelines, and wilderness.

  With the bill for the proposed Olympic National Park in Congress that spring, Roosevelt maneuvered to get Mammoth Cave (Kentucky) and Isle Royale (Michigan) into the National Park Service. Large national parks, he believed, were desperately needed in the eastern states as a cushion against overurbanization. “There is no national park in New England except Mount Desert [Maine], which should be called a ‘monument’ rather than a park,” Roosevelt wrote to Daniel Bell, the acting director of the Bureau of the Budget, “because it is used by very few people each year and benefits principally the rich summer residents.”28 Using surrogates, the president thwarted the passage of two pieces of legislation before Congress that would have violated the ecological sanctity of Yellowstone National Park. “I learned something of the plans of the Snake River Valley water-users which are now reflected in this proposed legislation,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend in New York City. “I am opposed to any measure affecting the national park and monument system which would modify this vital and inviolable principle.”29

  That summer of 1938, Ickes spoke to the Northwest Conservation League at an event in Seattle. He said that once the new Olympic National Park was “rounded out by proclamation under the power given to the President to add additional territory,” it would “take its place with the greatest parks.” Ickes promised to keep much of the Olympics in wilderness condition. “When a national park is established, the insistent demand is to build roads everywhere, to build broad trails, to build air fields, to make it possible for everybody to . . . go everywhere—without effort,” Ickes lamented. “These last two words are what cause the trouble. It is characteristic of the American people that they want everything to be attainable without effort. Too many of us want a predigested breakfast food for our stomachs and a previewed national park for our eyes. Nine people out of ten, visiting our national parks, stay within a half a mile of the motor roads and the hotels. [Many] feel that they are roughing it if they twist their necks in a sightseeing bus, or expose their adenoids to the crispy air while gazing through field glasses at some distant scene.”30

  Never before—or since—did a secretary of the interior speak out so forcefully for primeval zones in national parks. As if Bob Marshall were whispering in his ear, Ickes’s voice was almost completely in unison with the Wilderness Society. Nevertheless, possibly with FDR in mind, Ickes talked about the need for “physically handicapped” people to have access to visitor centers and scenic lookouts in parks. They, too, had a birthright to escape noisy civilization to get lost or inhale solitude in America’s remaining wildlands. “Limit the roads,” Ickes said. “Make the trails safe but not too easy, and you will preserve the beauty of the parks for untold generations. Yield to the thoughtless demand for easy travel and in time the few wilderness areas that are left to us will be nothing but the back yards of filling stations.”31

  Buoyed by the creation of Olympic National Park, Ickes pushed for a new California “wilderness” (roadless) park south of Yosemite and high in the Sierra Nevada. The battle to establish Kings Canyon National Park was nearly sixty years old when Ickes took up the crusade.32 The Forest Service oversaw the controversial Kings Canyon lands, insisting it was a more reliable caretaker t
han the National Park Service. All Roosevelt cared about was enlarging General Grant National Park to prevent the logging of sequoia trees in the Kings Canyon area. Long fascinated with Sequoia sempervirens—which could survive wind and fire, had heartwood and bark infused with tannic acids to protect against fungal rot, and warded off wood-boring beetles—Roosevelt deemed it a moral crime to cut ancient sequoias down for the sake of grape stakes, shingles, and fence posts. From Irving Brant he learned that the U-shaped canyon carved by the two principal forks of Kings River was clearly in need of federal protection. The wild, free-flowing Kings River rushed and sparkled as it coursed between the high walls of this magnificent canyon. In Kings Canyon the president had a perfect showcase for the New Deal’s forest preservation and riverkeeping, and for the noble growth of NPS.

  In the 1880s, miners, loggers, and ranchers had prevented a national park at Kings Canyon. During Calvin Coolidge’s presidency there was serious interest in a national park, but the movement stalled when advocates of “pure wilderness” clashed with irrigation and hydropower interests, which wanted to build a dam like Hetch Hetchy. Nine years later, in 1935, Ickes had involved himself in the fate of Kings Canyon. He decided to be a maverick and blindsided both supporters and adversaries of the park with regard to his plans. Consequently, the bill he drafted was met with strong resistance in California, particularly from residents of the San Joaquin Valley. Even the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the National Parks Association couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for Ickes’s proposal; these nonprofits preferred that Kings Canyon be a wilderness area within the Forest Service instead of in Ickes’s NPS portfolio.

  In need of a high-profile ally, Ickes traveled to San Francisco to secure the Sierra Club’s endorsement. This was quite an amazing moment in U.S. environmental history; a secretary of the interior was pleading with the esteemed Sierra Club to back a national park in the California high country—not the other way around. At a Bohemian Club luncheon in San Francisco on October 21, Ickes, in an hour-long speech, explained to Sierra Club leaders that the Roosevelt administration wanted to designate Kings Canyon National Park a roadless primitive area. This was important to Ickes because neither the Wilderness Society nor the National Parks Association wanted Kings Canyon National Park.33 The Sierra Club, impressed by Ickes’s sales pitch for wilderness, agreed to change course, abandoning the Forest Service and supporting the national park if—and only if—it would be “devoted to roadless wilderness.” The club’s president, Joel H. Hildebrand, also procured a guarantee from Ickes barring all “roads or hotels like those in Yosemite.”34 Kings Canyon had to be free of commercialization. Hildebrand would soon write to Ickes that the Bohemian Club appeal was “a grand triumph.”35