When Roosevelt received Ickes’s resignation letter, however, he grew discomfited. He hated to lose such an able cabinet officer, one who stood up to special interests. Three FDR loyalists—William O. Douglas, Pa Watson, and Dr. McIntire—advised the president to disregard Pinchot and the others, listen to Ickes, and strip the Forest Service away from the USDA. But Roosevelt knew that Bankhead had been right: the political timing was off. Picking up the telephone, he vented his frustration on Ickes. “I could tell from his voice that he was highly excited and troubled,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He shouted at me that I was making life miserable for him. I told him that this was not my desire at all but that I had no option since it was now too late to transfer Forestry, in view of the time that had been given to the opposition to be built up.”14 Once calmed down, FDR asked Ickes to meet in the Oval Office in two days’ time to discuss the matter.
For two days Ickes was full of hope and the foolish optimism that headway was being made. Roosevelt, he imagined, had come to his senses, realizing that national forests would receive stronger protections under Interior leadership. When the meeting occurred, Roosevelt, as if a therapist, listened attentively to everything Ickes said about the public lands. There was a lot of general agreement. As Ickes was leaving the Oval Office, however, the president handed him a sealed envelope. Inside was a handwritten note:
We—you and I—were married, “for better, for worse”—and it’s too late to get a divorce and too late for you to walk out of the home—anyway. I need you! Nuff said.
Affec. FDR.15
Ickes was crestfallen. With every fiber he believed a Department of Conservation would have been a great boon for wild America. But in the end, he was compelled to rescind his resignation. “It is pretty difficult to do anything with a man who can write such a letter,” Ickes wrote of FDR in his diary. “It really left me no option except to go along.”16
II
On April 3, 1940, the dream of Roosevelt and Ickes for Isle Royale National Park became a reality. The war raged across the oceans and FDR wrestled with his own political future, but for the distant northern preserve, events already in motion finally came to fruition. Five years earlier, Roosevelt had signed an executive order allocating federal funds for the northern Lake Superior archipelago, which belonged to the state of Michigan and was located fifteen miles from the Minnesota-Canadian border. The new national park and its accompanying islands amounted to forty square miles of primeval forests and lakes. Roosevelt and Ickes had been opposed to a luxury hotel being built on Isle Royale or any attempt to turn it into “the Bermuda of the North” for the Great Lakes cruise industry.17 Determined to keep Isle Royale roadless, Roosevelt asked the CCC to establish camps at Senter Point on the western tip to clear the debris left behind by shuttered lumbering operations. The NPS designation ensured that industry would never return. Because of the intense snowy conditions in Michigan, Isle Royale was the only national park that Roosevelt would order closed during the winter months. During the summer, though, outdoor aficionados could hike the white spruce and balsam fir forests or canoe around the inland lakes, enjoying the abundance of wildlife. “Isle Royale,” the New York Times reported, “is of much interest to the nature lover, sportsman, geologist, and archaeologist.”18
The idea for Isle Royale National Park had been in the works since 1931, when Congress passed the authorizing legislation, but it took the New Deal to prompt the federal government into purchasing necessary private acreage and allocating government subsidies to the effort. The CCC prepared the island for National Park designation, replanting the forests and building structures. In 1936, after a wildfire burned through a quarter of the Isle Royale forestlands, the CCC restored lost habitats. After the disaster, Roosevelt lobbied Congress again for national park status.19
People of Michigan had mixed feelings about the park. The Detroit News promoted the Isle Royale with editorial vigor while the Detroit Free Press countered that the Roosevelt ecology project was a boondoggle comparable to a “railway to the moon.”20 The copper lobby of the Keweenaw region derided Roosevelt’s Lake Superior wilderness park as an absurd waste of taxpayers’ money ($700,000 had already been allocated during FDR’s first term). But Roosevelt, who had a powerful ally in Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, remained stalwart. Critics groused that there was no single defining feature that Isle Royale was, so to speak, just a wilderness. But that was exactly the point. Wildlife expert Adolph Murie, who had studied the populations of moose and wolves on the main island, wrote the definitive report on the “worthiness” of the national park in 1929, delineating the archipelago’s breathtaking shoreline, high interior ridges, inland lakes, and ancient beaches. “True wilderness,” Murie asserted, “is more marvelous (and harder to retain) than the grandiose spectacular features of our outstanding parks.”21
Ickes was gratified that the Roosevelt administration had forbidden any new roads or automobile tourism in Isle Royale. “I am not in favor of building any more roads in the National Parks,” Ickes declared. “This is an automobile age, but I do not have much patience with people whose idea of enjoying nature is dashing along a hard road at fifty or sixty miles an hour. I am not willing that our beautiful areas ought to be opened up to people who are either too old to walk, as I am, or too lazy to walk, as a great many young people are who ought to be ashamed of themselves. I do not happen to favor the scarring of a wonderful mountainside just so that we can say that we have a skyline drive. It sounds poetical, but it may be an atrocity.”22 Deeming developers “parasites,” Ickes also lectured his NPS superintendents to save other primeval spots in the existing national parks from pandering. “I do not want any Coney Island,” Ickes said. “I want as much wilderness, as much nature preserved and maintained as possible. . . . I think parks ought to be for people who love to camp and love to hike and who . . . [want] a renewed communion with Nature.”23
While “wilderness” was Ickes’s personal mandate, the president kept promoting the NPS’s historic site initiatives in 1940. During his second term, Roosevelt had added numerous heritage landmarks to the National Park Service through the authority of the National Historic Sites Act of 1935. Among them were Fort Laramie (Wyoming), an essential nineteenth-century trading post located in the Platte River Valley; Hopewell Furnace (Pennsylvania), an “iron plantation” complete with blast furnaces, the ironmaster’s house, and a company store; the Old Customs House (Pennsylvania); the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis (where the Gateway Arch would be completed in 1965); Cumberland Gap (Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia), the key pioneer passageway through the lower central Appalachians; and Federal Hall Memorial (New York), the first capitol building of the United States under the Constitution and the site of George Washington’s first inauguration. Having brought Mount Rushmore into the National Park Service portfolio in 1933, when only Washington’s face existed there, the Roosevelt administration subsequently oversaw the dedication of the faces of Jefferson (1936), Lincoln (1937), and TR (1939).24
Eleanor Roosevelt brought attention to a site important in Hispanic history, and one that reflected FDR’s far-reaching ambitions for the National Park Service. Whenever he could, he encouraged states to develop their own parks, and so it was that NPS architects supported Texas in its challenging attempt to re-create the 1749 Mission Nuestra Señora Espiritu Santo de Zuniga in southeast Texas. The mission had largely disappeared by 1820, but CCC workers rebuilt it under the auspices of the NPS, with its meticulous historical research. Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting the region in 1940, enthusiastically took a side trip to the site. “Even the administration building is in keeping with everything else,” she marveled, “hand hewn beams, hand wrought nails, all made on the spot. I do not think this could have been accomplished unless the director had been an artist with a real feeling for the work he is doing.”25
The team of Franklin and Eleanor intervened to ensure that the National Park Service acquired the 211-acre Vanderbilt Mansion,
just a few miles north of Hyde Park. The federal acquisition of the estate was proof that the Gilded Age of his youth had passed into history. Built in the 1890s, the estate was willed by Frederick Vanderbilt to his niece, Margaret Van Alen. She received it on his passing in 1938. After trying to sell it, she was glad to take FDR’s friendly suggestion that she donate the treasure house to the nation. In doing so, she expressed her wish to “keep my place as it is—a memorial to Uncle Fred and a national monument.”26 FDR gladly accepted the gift on behalf of the Department of the Interior. To help improve the property, the president instructed the CCC to spruce up the grounds. Eleanor Roosevelt became personally involved in the Vanderbilt Mansion preservation effort. “When these places are taken over by the Park Service, it takes some time to put them in order,” she explained in a “My Day” column from August 1940. “In the case of this estate, no one has lived there for the past few years and the gardens and greenhouses which require constant keeping up had, of course, greatly deteriorated. I imagine that gradually they will come back to their former beauty. Then visitors will not only see the house itself, surrounded by a collection of variegated trees which cannot be equaled anywhere else up or down the Hudson River Valley, but they will enjoy the beautiful gardens which have been developed by three different generations of owners.”27 Years later, the National Park Service decided to manage the Vanderbilt Mansion, Springwood, and Val-Kill jointly, referring to the three Hyde Park locations simply as the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites.28 The Roosevelts were probably aware of that possibility when their neighbor’s home was opened to the public.
Meanwhile, Pinchot, pleased that Roosevelt had heeded his advice about keeping the Forest Service in the Agriculture Department, announced that he would “actively support” the president’s reelection in 1940 as a “nonpartisan.”29 To placate Ickes, Roosevelt, without much media fanfare, would soon consolidate the Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries—arms of the USDA and Department of Commerce, respectively—to form the new Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).30 He then placed it in the Department of the Interior. The FWS reorganization during the summer of 1940 was interpreted by Washington insiders as a ringing endorsement of Ickes as the central intelligence behind America’s natural resources management policies.31 It very nearly transformed Interior into the Department of Conservation that Ickes coveted (the only major public land agency missing from his control was the Forest Service).
As mid-1940 drew near, the nation was still uncertain about FDR’s personal plans. The women in Roosevelt’s life all insisted that he shouldn’t run for a third term. They felt that, having worked under pressure for eight years, having suffered a slight heart attack in February, and having been savaged with sinus infections, he needed to rest. The president stayed elusive on the subject of a third term in early 1940, keeping people guessing. But by May, with Hitler having invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway, Roosevelt, as his speechwriter Sam Rosenman noted, “became determined to stay in the White House until the Nazis were defeated.”32 And so he did. Once France and Norway fell to the Nazis in June, Hitler’s spring offensive reached a pinnacle of success. Roosevelt delivered fireside radio chats denouncing isolationists and unveiling new plans for building up American defenses. His hat was in the ring.
The German blitzkrieg in Europe meant that American conservation became a lesser concern for the president. The 1940 presidential election, like the one in 1916, played out against the backdrop of the European war. With Garner tacitly running against the president, the choice of Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1940 election was a major topic for discussion in his inner circle. A leading contender was Henry Wallace. Four of FDR’s closest associates on public lands issues—Ickes, Brant, Morgenthau, and Delano—thought that Wallace was a brilliant bureaucrat but a boor. Frances Perkins, among others, urged the president to select Wallace. Determined to spike Wallace, Ickes worked back channels to get William O. Douglas the VP nod.
As the year wore on, the presidential election continued to play out in a climate of global crisis. Even though Japanese troops had captured vast territory in China, and European democracies across the Continent had fallen to Hitler—with Britain being pummeled by German bombing—the GOP isolationist wing urged neutrality. Politicians from both parties, though, relentlessly spoke of “war preparedness” and “industrial mobilization.” Factories were beginning to ramp up the effort to manufacture ships, planes, and munitions at a rate that could help rebuild America’s military.33 In July, Roosevelt, in a bipartisan gesture, appointed Republicans Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox as the heads of the War and Navy Departments, respectively.
During the summer of 1940, Roosevelt reconfigured the CCC as a national defense measure. Young men would be trained in operating and repairing mechanized equipment on behalf of the armed forces. This modification was a far cry from reforestation and wildlife rehabilitation, but it was intended to help extend the life of the corps. It didn’t mean the CCC was giving up its ecological mission entirely, however. “The work projects proposed for our fields, forests, wildlife refuges, and parks,” the new CCC director James J. McEntee wrote in American Forestry, “would keep the Corps of the present size occupied to from thirty to fifty years. . . . Until such time as these youths can be absorbed in private industry, business and agriculture, I believe there is justification for continuance of the CCC. I believe it should be made permanent.”34
In late June, after supervising the planting of ten sequoia seedlings that had been shipped to Springwood from the High Sierra, FDR left Hyde Park for the White House, ready for the grueling campaign. The Democrats were gathering in Chicago for their convention. Eleanor Roosevelt—having spent much of the year traveling—stayed behind in Dutchess County. Every morning the New York Times carried grim headlines about European refugees and wartime taxes being imposed around the globe, while the sunshine danced on the rippling Hudson River. This juxtaposition of American pastoral light and European darkness made the first lady ponder the fairness of life. “I drove through the woods just as the sun was setting last night, a most mysterious magic hour,” she wrote. “There was a little soft light on the deep green leaves. A fat woodchuck scuttled across the road ahead of me. A little white-tailed rabbit ran along the road, too frightened to get out of the way, until I stopped the car and let him run to cover. How can one think of these woods converted into a battlefield? Peace seems to be in the heart of them and yet, I remember some just like them outside of Paris and in the forests of Germany and England.”35
On July 19, the first lady listened by radio from Val-Kill as her husband accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for a third time. The convention in Chicago had chosen Roosevelt without hesitation. Once off the airwaves, Franklin telephoned his wife with a request: Could she fly to Chicago as his surrogate? “I think he hoped I might be able to give the delegates a personal sense of the appreciation he feels for their confidence in him,” ER surmised, “even though the service required is such a heavy responsibility.”36
The big speculation in Washington was over who would be Roosevelt’s vice-presidential running mate. In a last-ditch effort, Ickes, Delano, and Watson pleaded with Roosevelt again not to choose Wallace, but Roosevelt rejected their belief that Wallace was weird, especially in his spiritual inquiry.37 Postmaster General James Farley cast aspersions on Wallace as a mystic; FDR lit into him. “He’s not a mystic, he’s a philosopher,” he scolded him. “He’s got ideas. He thinks right. He’ll help people think.”38
Southern Democrats also had doubts about Wallace. When Governor Eurith D. Rivers of Georgia asked Governor Leon C. Phillips of Oklahoma what he made of the push for Wallace as vice president, the latter said, “Henry’s my second choice.” “Who’s your first choice?” asked Rivers. “Any son of a bitch,” replied Phillips, “red, white, black, or yellow, that can get the nomination.”39
Roosevelt knew Wallace was the most accomplished Agricu
lture secretary in American history. During his nearly eight years as secretary, he turned the department into an effective engine for agricultural betterment, by removing acreage from production, paying farmers not to produce, and bringing the federal government into the lives of farmers across America. When Wallace first came to work for Roosevelt, the USDA had 40,000 employees; he left that summer of 1940 with 146,000 workers. USDA’s expenditures more than quadrupled from $280 million in 1932 to $1.5 billion in 1940. Wallace deserved credit for co-creating the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Farm Security Administration and for waging noble fights against diseases that devastated plants and animals alike, from locust plagues to bark beetles to brucellosis to Dutch elm disease. “For Wallace there was no such thing as too much science,” biographers John C. Culver and John Hyde concluded, “nor could there ever be an end to it.”40
And so FDR went with Wallace. It was the first time that a candidate took the prerogative of choosing his own vice president; before 1940, conventions made the selection. Ickes’s consolation with FDR’s choice was that the obstinate Agriculture secretary would no longer run the Forest Service.41
That July, Roosevelt acted to organize America’s protected ecosystems into a durable and comprehensive system of sanctuaries called the National Wildlife Refuge System.42 No fireworks or front-page newspaper stories accompanied the system’s birth—there was just a taut 255-word policy statement followed by a list of the refuges, called NWRs, which were being grouped within the Interior bureaucracy, while they received new names. For example, under the presidential proclamation, the Pelican Island Bird Refuge in Florida, the first federal bird preserve (established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903) officially became Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge.43 Over ten million acres of wildlife habitat, formerly in USDA, were moved into the Department of the Interior’s portfolio.44
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