Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  The expansion of the NWR system remains Franklin Roosevelt’s most enduring accomplishment in environmental conservation. In 1933, Roosevelt had inherited sixty-seven loosely affiliated holdings with an array of confusing names; over time he had streamlined them into a coherent system of marshes, prairie potholes, deserts, mountains, and coastal areas that numbered 252 units by the summer of 1940. Prodded and challenged by Ickes, Roosevelt willed the system into existence. His executive orders and presidential proclamations protected 700 species of birds, 220 species of mammals, 250 varieties of reptiles and amphibians, more than 1,000 types of fish, and an uncounted number of invertebrates and plants.45 “Nobody, it seems,” Irving Brant correctly asserted in his 1989 memoir Adventures in Conservation with Franklin D. Roosevelt, “thought to congratulate Franklin Roosevelt, who took time out from a herculean economic recovery task to grasp and perform a job in conservation by action that antagonized most of his friends and enemies.”46

  At the same time, Roosevelt’s new Fish and Wildlife Service was emerging with its own identity. Dr. Gabrielson, known for his sustained concentration on species survival, was appointed by Roosevelt as the first head of the newly configured FWS. One of Gabrielson’s initial actions was to fly to Alaska to inspect the primary nesting colonies of seabirds; he later wrote about this trip in his 1959 book The Birds of Alaska.47 That October, Gabrielson reached a worldwide milestone in conservation: the Inter-American Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation (signed by thirteen North American, Central American, and South American nations at the Pan-American Building in Washington, D.C.). This was a major step forward in protecting migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere.48 And under Gabrielson’s brilliant leadership FWS would “plant” approximately 200 million game fish—salmon, trout, steelhead, bass, pike, catfish, and perch—annually in federal refuge waters.49

  Looking for an issue to distinguish itself, the FWS immediately sought scientific and political ways to protect the American bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in 1940. That June, after a long fight on Capitol Hill, the president had finally secured the passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act. Unfortunately, the Territory of Alaska was exempt from the new law.50 Emboldened by Ickes, FSW agents now traveled to southeastern Alaska to collect bald eagle carcasses and transport them to Patuxent Wildlife Research Center or Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory, where the contents of their stomachs could be examined in order to determine what the species ate in the wild. Ickes had also directed Dr. Ira Gabrielson to make an inventory of bald eagles on the thirty-seven NWRs in the lower forty-eight. FWS biologists, reporting to Gabrielson, expected the numbers to be robust in the Pacific Northwest and along the Mississippi River, but the big surprise was that St. Marks NWR in Florida—a sanctuary created by Herbert Hoover, which the CCC had restored starting in March 1933—had seen the largest increase of bald eagles.51

  III

  In June, at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Wendell Willkie, a whipsmart New York lawyer and businessman who had been critical of the TVA, PWA, WPA, and CCC, emerged as the party’s presidential nominee. The fact that the Indiana-raised Willkie had never been elected to public office of any kind before was anomalous—and a sign of how desperate the GOP was for a fresh face. So unknown was Willkie in GOP circles outside of New York and Washington that in May 1940 a Gallup poll placed him far behind Thomas Dewey, Arthur Vandenberg, and Robert Taft as the likely nominee. Willkie had risen from modest circumstances to great success as chief of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, the country’s largest electric utility. As a former Democrat—and a delegate for FDR in 1932—Willkie had never liked Roosevelt’s extension of government into areas served by private business, particularly those regarding the Taylor Grazing Act and TVA. In the realm of foreign policy, Willkie was a levelheaded interventionist who constantly warned the public that the American “way of life” was in competition with “Hitler’s sway.”52 Deriding Roosevelt as “the third-term candidate,” Willkie traveled over 34,000 miles and visited thirty-four states, hoping to gain momentum.

  That both Roosevelt and Willkie were internationalists was indisputable. Both favored Great Britain over Germany, bringing an almost bipartisan cast to the election. Sculptor Albert Christensen, influenced by Gutzon Borglum, decided to carve the faces of Roosevelt and Willkie into a sandstone wall outside Moab, Utah, as a tribute to American exceptionalism. Called Unity, the public sculpture demonstrated that Republicans and Democrats were of one mind about defeating Hitler. But, according to the federal government, Christensen had committed an act of vandalism. To his chagrin, U.S. federal agents soon chiseled down the faces. Christensen, who lived in a series of unusual cave-like rooms called Hole N” the Rock, which he had carved out of solid rock near Unity, wasn’t beaten, though. He decided to create another memorial on his own property. On his second attempt, he honored only Roosevelt. (This kitschy version can still be seen today near Moab.)53

  On the campaign trail, the president painted Willkie as just another mouthpiece for special interests. Roosevelt proudly showcased his own New Deal record with its impressive roster of work-relief, public power, and conservation accomplishments. Ohio, for example, had been tragically deforested by the time FDR moved into the White House. When Ohio was first opened for settlement, in 1783, about 95 percent of its more than 26 million acres were blanketed with forests. As Roosevelt took to the platform to speak at the Cleveland Public Auditorium in early November 1940, only three million forested acres remained. The CCC reforested hilly sections of the Cuyahoga Valley, built bridges, and dammed Salt Run to create Kendall Lake (all or part of what became Cuyahoga National Park in 1974). But even with the CCC’s intense efforts, Ohio’s existing forests were being cut over at a rate three times higher than the rate at which they were growing. “I see an America,” Roosevelt told a cheering crowd in Cleveland just before Election Day, “whose rivers and valleys and lakes—hills and streams and plains—the mountains over our land and nature’s wealth deep under the earth—are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.”54

  In 1940, one particularly onerous problem the CCC faced in Ohio was trying to save the Cuyahoga River, which had caught fire multiple times. The hundred-mile-long river, which flows through Akron and Cleveland before emptying into Lake Erie, had long since been ruined by industry. Ohioans had dumped so much effluent and debris into the Cuyahoga that the river emanated a rank odor even when it was frozen in the winter. Roosevelt might have preferred the passage of the Lonergan-Mundt-Clark bill, which would have made clean streams a public right “in the name of sound economics, health, recreation, and common decency,” according to conservationist Philip G. Platt, former president of the Pennsylvania Division of the Izaak Walton League of America.55 The President ultimately backed instead Senator Alben Barkley’s somewhat similar bill, giving business more leeway. The time seemed ripe for legislation on water pollution, but in the end neither bill was enacted; the Barkley bill passed both houses of Congress, but stalled in conference.56

  Courting sportsmen was a Roosevelt political tactic in 1940. His new National Park Service director, Newton E. Drury, who replaced Cammerer in August, was a genius at connecting conservation to American values. World War I veterans were trotted out to talk about how the very thought of America’s pristine wilderness had helped fortify them in battle overseas. Ready to reenlist in the army, one Great War veteran sought guarantees that the Blue Ridge Mountains wouldn’t be timbered while he was fighting overseas. Ickes circulated his testimony all around Interior. “Loving the outdoors,” the veteran was quoted as saying in Virginia Wildlife magazine, “I should hate to find that our conservation program had been junked—not only because we should conserve the resources which have made America great, but because I want again to fish clear streams and tramp through unspoiled fields and forests with a dog and a gun. I want to come back to the America I have always known—an America of freedom, of opportunity, and of hap
py living. . . . Clear waters, green fields and forests, fertile soils, an abundance of wild things, and freedom to use and enjoy these resources properly—these I hope America will always have.”57

  The new boss at Agriculture, as of early September, was Wallace’s former undersecretary, Claude R. Wickard. An Indianan, Wickard was a graduate of Purdue and had been a farmer before entering government service. Sympathetic to conservationist issues, he was expert in the area most needed during the war years: food production. Ickes, watching his old nemesis Wallace on the campaign trail with FDR, staked out territory with his new nemesis, Wickard. After reading a Mining World article in the summer of 1940 called “Conservation—Should It Serve—or Only Save?” Ickes turned troublemaker. Deeming the essay an “obvious biased attack” against the National Park Service, he fired off a letter to Mining World and accused the Forest Service (and the extraction industries) of turning a blind eye to destructive logging operations in the Pacific Northwest. Convinced that treasured ecosystems such as the North Cascades and the Olympics—government-owned tracts in the region of Olympic National Park—should be stripped from Forest Service jurisdiction and given over to Interior, Ickes lambasted Gifford Pinchot’s long-standing “wise-use” philosophy as rank philistinism. Some priceless American forestlands, such as California’s redwood kingdom and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Ickes argued, needed to be left in “pristine condition” without human interference. “If you had taken the trouble to analyze for your readers the meaning of the term ‘multiple use,’ you would have found that it is a meaningless expression,” Ickes wrote to Miller Freeman, publisher of Mining World. “It is definitive of nothing. Its conflicting premises are as subject to question as are the promises of patent medicine that claims to cure all ills.”58

  Offended by Ickes’s ill-tempered letter, a scripture-toting Freeman fired back that Jesus Christ had been against “hoarding” (Interior) and for “utilization” (Agriculture). It was an ineffective riposte. Freeman then accused Ickes of hurling “Chicagoanese” invective at his detractors and resorting to “roguery” against those “who have the temerity to honestly disagree with you.”59 For Ickes, Freeman’s squawk offered even greater incentive to make sure the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes “timber swine” were stopped dead in their tracks. But while rapacious timbermen and mine-owners were the enemy for Ickes, it was Secretary Wickard who had the national forests he wanted. Considering Wickard a political novice, Ickes sought creative ways to undermine the Forest Service every chance he got.

  IV

  On September 2, 1940, FDR delivered a speech in perhaps the most majestic setting of his career: the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial in Newfound Gap at the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The effort to create the park had spanned decades. “We are at last definitely engaged in the task of conserving the bounties of nature,” FDR said that day, “thinking in the terms of the whole of nature.”

  In early September 1940, Franklin and Eleanor journeyed to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. In a formal dedication ceremony, Roosevelt claimed both the park and the trans-mountain road—an excellent paved highway—as New Deal success stories. The park, created in a partial way in 1930, was finally completed after being twice postponed. “The drive goes through the most beautiful scenery,” Eleanor wrote. “Once in the park, I think you are impressed by the wonderful care which is being given the area. I saw no signs of forest fires, or of blights which have killed so many of our trees in other parts of the country. There is much virgin timber in these woods, but you have to go a little off the main road to see it. A policy of careful wildlife conservation will probably bring back much of the game which has disappeared.”60

  Flanked by three southern governors, the president delivered an impassioned defense of public lands. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, chartered in 1926, was the first to have its land and building costs subsidized with federal funds; previous parks had been carved out of existing government property or had been purchased with private donations. The park, a hiking enthusiast’s wonderland, ran along seventy-one miles of the Great Smoky Mountains, the highest of the Appalachian Mountains, clad in autumnal foliage and dotted with creeks plunging over falls, pristine lakes, open meadows, and forested peaks. It didn’t escape Roosevelt’s notice that more than 150 species of trees grew in the Smokies. He was particularly proud of his administration’s role in saving 200,000 acres of primeval forest, the largest contiguous tracts of virgin red spruce and unspoiled hardwoods to be found in the United States. “Around us here, there are trees, trees that stood before our forefathers ever came to this continent; there are brooks that still run as clear as on the day the first pioneer cupped his hand and drank from them,” Roosevelt declared. “In this Park, we shall conserve these trees, the pine, the red-bud, the dogwood, the azalea, and the rhododendron, we shall conserve the trout and the thrush for the happiness of the American people.”

  Most American presidents would have simply dedicated the Great Smokies delineating the region’s wonderful features, letting it go at that. But Roosevelt had come to preach the old-time gospel of conservation. His words aimed to undercut reckless exploiters of natural resources: “We used up or destroyed much of our natural heritage just because that heritage was so bountiful,” he sermonized. “We slashed our forests, we used our soils, we encouraged floods . . . all of this so greatly that we were brought rather suddenly to face the fact that unless we gave thought to the lives of our children and grandchildren, they would no longer be able to live and to improve upon our American way of life.”61

  Following the Great Smokies ceremony, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled all over New York State, celebrating the glories of the Taconic State Parkway and the beauty of the Adirondacks countryside. While Eleanor worked the eastern states, the president headed west. It was partly a campaign trip and partly a victory lap. From 1933 to 1940 the West beat out all other regions in America for per capita New Deal payments for work relief and loans. According to historian Richard White, the Rocky Mountain states received $716 per capita and the Pacific Coast states $424. For midwesterners, by comparison, the amount was $380. Roosevelt garnered 20 percent more votes in 1932 and 1936 in the West than other statewide Democrats up for election during the Great Depression. The president brought the West into modern America with a combination of federal exemptions, executive orders, public power enterprises, legislation, and conservation. The new West routinely sought federal assistance, and the WPA, PWA, CCC, and SCS were only too glad to oblige. New Deal bureaucracies modernized the region for better and worse. “When compared to the West a half-century before,” White wrote, “the scope of the changes was staggering.”62

  Continuing to use Idaho as a model for New Deal work-relief projects, Roosevelt had CCC Company 297 at Priest River institute training programs in radio operation and FBI-style fingerprinting skills that the U.S. military anticipated for entry into World War II.63 In October, the United States initiated a peacetime draft, in which Secretary of War Stimson drew the first number out of a bowl containing 7,836 numbers to decide which young men would be called first into military training. Before long, approximately 800,000 men were drafted, most as enlisted men or NCOs.64

  Realizing that millions of voters didn’t want U.S. intervention in World War II, Roosevelt professed a measure of neutrality. At a speech in Boston on October 30, he reassured Americans that he wasn’t going to involve their nation in the European war. “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again,” Roosevelt insisted. “You boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”65

  Those who considered themselves environmentalists or ecologists in 1940, and the numbers were cultish, voted for FDR. Some bemoaned Roosevelt’s damming of the Columbia River but applauded his heroic rescue of the Olympic Forest. When a reporter asked Rosalie Edge of the ECC to name a Republican whom Wendell Willkie should tap as Interior secretary if he were
to win in November, she went blank. When Irving Brant was asked the same question, he too drew a blank: “I don’t know anybody in that damn party to which I once belonged who would do it.” These remarks by Edge and Brant reflected how completely FDR had brought the TR-Pinchot Bull Moose wing of the Republican Party into the Democratic fold, and for many, conservation was the draw.66

  On November 5, 1940, election day, Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara Roosevelt all voted together in Hyde Park’s quaint town hall. Because Dutchess County was so staunchly Republican, an old joke was that only “the trees” considered him a great president. After casting his ballot, FDR was wheeled outside, where he heard a photographer shout, “Will you wave to the trees, Mr. President?” Roosevelt good-naturedly shot back, “Go climb a tree!” before waving at the stately oaks and elms. Having voted against Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, the county was about to do so again in 1940. Only the trees of Hyde Park thought FDR was a great president.67

  Roosevelt had nothing to worry about. He crushed Willkie by a margin of 449 electoral votes to 82, which amounted to 85 percent of the electoral votes, while also winning 55 percent of the popular vote. Voters evidently felt that, with World War II threatening to involve the United States, changing presidents in favor of a novice like Willkie was too risky. Although Willkie had many attributes, including foreign affairs acumen, it is unlikely that any Republican could have unseated Roosevelt.68