V
The president left for a Caribbean fishing trip aboard the USS Tuscaloosa to celebrate his reelection. Of his key advisers, only Harry Hopkins was invited along. Roosevelt doodled sailfish and swordfish he dreamed of catching, and novelist Ernest Hemingway tried to help in the effort, radioing Roosevelt on the Tuscaloosa from his home outside Havana with tips about where the best fish could be found. While baiting rod-and-reel, FDR received an urgent letter from Churchill requesting American aid—in the form of war materiel—for British forces around the world.69 The answer Roosevelt formulated would soon become the Lend-Lease Act.
Relieved that the campaign was over, Eleanor Roosevelt allied herself with the National Audubon Society to ban the use of feathers in fashion and to expose the millinery industry as a kind of mafia.70 “More than thirty years before, they led the fight to stop the slaughter of wild birds for their plumage,” Eleanor wrote in praise of the Audubon Society’s efforts. “It appears, we ladies in those days used too many pretty feathers from wild birds on our hats and in other decorative ways. Now the National Audubon Society has conducted an investigation and finds that they must start a new campaign. They ask the women of the United States to help them. We ladies are guilty, of course. If we realized that we were stamping out so many beautiful wild birds and destroying the species for all time, we would not be very happy, no matter how becoming our headdress might be. But most of us buy such things with little thought as to what lies behind the product.” She continued, “I hope, therefore, that the Audubon Society’s crusade will be very successful, and that all of us who like to think we are well dressed, will shun the use of feathers obtained by killing wild birds. We should look askance at anyone who cannot say: ‘I bought this before 1940,’ and hope that if such a lady buys feathers of the banned variety we can at least say of her that fashions are against her.”71
At the end of 1940, in mid-December, Roosevelt spoke glowingly about his impressive year in conservation and historic preservation. Approximately 750,000 acres were added to the National Park Service system including the 454,000-acre Kings Canyon National Park (California); Isle Royale National Park (Michigan); and over 200,000 acres of forestlands, hot springs, and waterfalls were added to Olympic National Park (Washington).72 Mammoth Cave and Big Bend were pending. In terms of historical sites, Roosevelt protected Arizona’s Tuzigoot archaeological site; the McLean House, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia; and the Custer Battlefield Cemetery in Montana, to name a few.
On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address, recommending lend-lease aid for Great Britain and enumerating the famous “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech and worship, from want and fear). Not included on the list was Frederic Delano’s “freedom to enjoy outdoors recreation,” which Delano believed should be an American birthright. Because of New Dealers like Delano, Wirth, and Ickes, Americans had grown accustomed to having state parks and national parks available to enjoy—no matter where they lived.
On January 20, Roosevelt, happy and relaxed, delivered his third inaugural address with his eighty-six-year-old mother, Sara, in attendance. “Perhaps she moved a bit more slowly than she did in 1933,” the Washington Star reported, “perhaps she relied a little more on her polished cane as she passed from room to room in the White House. However, she’d had a grand time throughout the inaugural weekend, and hers was an honor that had come to no other American mother.”73
As CCC boys from the West proudly marched in the Inauguration Day parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a very different event was unfolding for CCCers far to the West. At a camp near Morrison, Colorado, corpsmen had built the most wondrous open-air amphitheater in North America: Red Rocks. Located fifteen miles from Denver and six thousand feet above sea level in the Rockies, it was originally known as the Garden of the Gods (because of its otherworldly formations, which were embedded with dinosaur fossils from the Jurassic period). The amphitheater is surrounded by sandstone rocks taller than Niagara Falls. A kaleidoscope of different rust-red colors appeared in the rocks, depending on the weather. Working in tandem with the WPA, which built the parking lots, CCC crews blasted away tons of rock, fought off rattlesnakes, and succeeded in constructing the 9,525-seat theater.
The Red Rocks Amphitheater near Denver under construction in the late 1930s. A natural stage seemed to grow there from the outcropping of sandstone and conglomerate imbued with iron oxide. It looked more natural than it was, however, requiring six years of hard work by CCC workers to create Red Rocks as a viable open-air theater. Owned by the city of Denver, it opened on June 15, 1941.
Red Rocks Amphitheater is a monument to careful planning and high-quality construction, and the architecture blends elegantly into the natural environment. The master architect was Burnham Hoyt, who participated in the design of Radio City Music Hall and also designed many prominent public buildings in Denver.74 The Red Rocks Amphitheater would officially open on June 15, 1941. At the dedication concert, all of the CCC boys reunited to take a bow at one of the greatest public works projects of the era. The Morrison CCC camp in Colorado was preserved intact to serve as a historical reminder of the rustic craftsmanship of the New Deal.
Another CCC unit that Roosevelt admired was CCC Company 1837 of Phoenix, Arizona. These CCCers, devoted to Roosevelt’s conservation vision, planted more than 7.4 million trees and built 512,093 erosion-control check dams (low ridge, made of gravel to slow runoff). In Phoenix, the CCC helped create South Mountain Park, the world’s largest city park, at 16,000 acres. Thousands of CCC enrollees constructed more than forty miles of hiking and equestrian trails, eighteen buildings, 734 fire pits, thirty water faucets, an erosion-control structure, several lookout shelters, and other outdoor recreation features.75
At the time of Roosevelt’s third inaugural, 5 percent of America’s total male population was then serving or had participated in the CCC nationwide. In Arizona, that number reached 20 percent: every month, it seemed, a new CCC camp opened there. Senator Carl Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, thought the agency was so beneficial that he arduously lobbied for it to become permanent.76
Even with the CCC successes in the Grand Canyon and Colorado Rockies, FDR knew that securing congressional appropriations for his pet project for a ninth year would be difficult.77 After all, Congress was already pressuring him to abolish the Farm Security Administration (it would be officially closed in 1942). Making adjustments, Roosevelt had CCC companies working on military installations around America, building roads, clearing U.S. Army maneuvering areas, grading and draining landing fields, and constructing rifle ranges.78 He was focusing on the war in a far grander way, as well, working on “lend-lease” as a means of sending supplies and materials to Britain. Congress passed FDR’s Lend-Lease Bill and, starting March 11, 1941, the Arsenal of Democracy was officially in business.79
Ominous reports from Europe and the Pacific didn’t diminish FDR’s appetite for new national parks. On July 1, 1941, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system in the world, entered the NPS portfolio. The behemoth cave’s stalactites, stalagmites, gypsum flowers, and ribbonlike flowstone had been a top-draw tourist attraction for years. After the CCC built comfortable trails for tourists, attendance rose. With more than 390 miles of passages—and such features as Grand Avenue, Frozen Niagara, Jennie Lind’s Armchair, and Fat Man’s Misery—there was much for curiosity seekers, spelunkers, and amateur adventurers alike to explore. An Echo River tour gave visitors a boat ride along an underground river. It was mindboggling to contemplate that hundreds of miles of subterranean passageways had never even been explored. The provision for the park was authorized by Congress in 1926 on the understanding that 45,306 acres had to be secured—most from a private landowner—before development could begin. With the goal finally met, Mammoth Cave National Park opened on July 1. As a lagniappe, National Park status meant that the cave system’s rare bats, northern cavefish, and albino shrimp would recei
ve federal protection.80
Another place in Kentucky that President Roosevelt helped preserve was ornithologist John James Audubon’s former home in Henderson, Kentucky. Built in the Norman style reminiscent of the great painter’s childhood home in France, the Audubon Museum linked natural history to national history. In 1933, Roosevelt had encouraged Emma Guy Cromwell, president of Kentucky’s burgeoning state park system, to build a museum to honor the life and legacy of Audubon, who had lived in Henderson for several years, starting in 1810. Kentucky soon acquired three hundred acres in the Wolf Hills, east of Henderson, for John James Audubon State Park. The widow of Audubon’s great-grandson donated a trove of memorabilia to the New Deal–inspired project, including an original four-volume set of The Birds of America. By 1941 not only had the house been turned into the museum, but the CCC and WPA also erected stone picnic shelters and dug scenic Wilderness Lake. Roosevelt was proud that the CCC had likewise built museums at other state parks to help tell the history—human, geological, and biological—of countless areas around the United States.
In August 1941, six weeks after Mammoth Cave had been dedicated, Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill at the Atlantic Conference in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay. The Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union in June, and America was clearly heading toward war. Because the summit meeting was top secret, Roosevelt spent a day fishing in Nonquitt, Massachusetts, in full view of the press and then, undetected, boarded the USS Augusta for the cold waters off Newfoundland for the conference. After arriving at Placentia Bay, Roosevelt fished for halibut until Churchill arrived. “It is a really beautiful harbor,” he wrote Daisy Suckley, “high mountains, deep water, & fjord-like arms of the sea.”81
Winston Churchill had traveled to Newfoundland to convince Roosevelt to bring the United States actively into the war as an ally against Germany. Britain had been at war for two torturous years and was running out of steam. A sympathetic Roosevelt, however, wasn’t prepared to make such a great leap, not with the isolationists in Congress threatening impeachment if he dared. And a minor dispute occurred with Churchill over Britain’s colonial policy.82 The postwar world Roosevelt envisioned was anti-colonial, one where big countries didn’t use the war to grasp new territory and strip developing countries of their natural resources. Eventually Roosevelt and Churchill cobbled together a joint declaration, issued on August 14, promoting the ideal goals of winning World War II: no territorial aggrandizement; self-determination for all the people; and freedom of the seas. The Atlantic Charter—a declaration in the noble tradition of the U.S. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing the rights of all nations—was also a step in positioning America to join Great Britain in fighting the tyranny of Germany’s Third Reich.
When Ding Darling heard about the Atlantic Charter—and the secretive circumstances in which the visionary document had been drafted—he drew a cartoon that perfectly encapsulated the modus operandi of America’s angler in chief. It showed a huge shark (Germany) that had been hung upside down with a rope as Roosevelt and Churchill, smoking away, stood nearby with their fishing rods in hand.83 With America still hobbled by isolationists hoping to avoid war with Hitler, the president, living up to his 1940 campaign pledge of neutrality, wasn’t tickled by the cartoon.
The Atlantic Charter meeting had been conducted in such strict confidentiality that FDR sailed right past Campobello without stopping to see his ailing mother, who was summering on the island.84 Early in September, feeling listless, Sara Roosevelt returned to Springwood. Startled by her mother-in-law’s declining health, Eleanor called Franklin at the White House to urge him to come home; he did. Sara, unable to greet her son on the Springwood portico as she had planned, instead tied a blue ribbon in her hair and reclined on a chaise longue, waiting for her only child to arrive. When FDR entered the room, the president and his mother gossiped about the Hudson River valley and the world at large.
That evening, September 7, Sara slipped into a coma and died in the same bed in which she had given birth to Franklin. What happened next might have been a scene from a Hollywood movie: just moments after Sara stopped breathing, a thunderous boom swept across Springwood. The Secret Service thought a bomb had exploded. Quickly investigating, they discovered that the tallest deciduous tree at Springwood, an oak, had fallen. “Although geologists would later say that it was not unheard of, that the Hudson Valley had only a shallow layer of earth to support heavy trees, no one on the estate that afternoon doubted that the tumbling oak was a sign,” historian Jan Pottker wrote. “Franklin left his mother’s still body and went out to where the tree had fallen. He sat there staring at the roots torn from the earth and thick trunk heavy on the ground.”85
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“THE ARMY MUST FIND A DIFFERENT NESTING PLACE!”
I
Trumpeter swans, native to North America, are the largest species of waterfowl in the world, and President Roosevelt wanted them permanently protected. With blinding white plumage and a vocalization like a French horn, trumpeters are the royalty of the wetlands. Five feet long, weighing twenty to thirty pounds, graceful in manner and majestic in flight, Cygnus buccinator were huge creatures with a wingspan averaging eight feet. Their sheer magnificence, sadly, worked against them. For trumpeters, easy to spot, were hunted for their meat and feathers, and annihilated to the brink of extinction. During the early Dust Bowl, ornithologists counted fewer than seventy trumpeters alive in all of North America.
Addressing the tragic situation, Roosevelt, like the good American Ornithological Union member he was, established Red Rocks Lake National Wildlife Refuge (in eastern Montana’s Centennial Valley), as a trumpeter swan safe haven. Almost half of the world’s trumpeters lived here because the hot springs provided year-round open waters. As a public service, Roosevelt also had the USDA distribute posters of trumpeters throughout the intermountain West with the government warning “EXTINCTION? THINK Before You Shoot!”1 At the historic North American Wildlife Conference in 1936, an entire session had been devoted to trumpeter restoration.2 Due to the Roosevelt administration’s diligence, the number of wild trumpeters rose to over two hundred by 1941. The species had a fighting chance, but it was still a slim one, as biologists ramped up relocation and protection efforts in Ruby Lake, Nevada, and Malheur, Oregon.
In late November 1941, with World War II engulfing Europe, a bureaucratic tussle ensued between the U.S. Army and the Department of the Interior over the fate of a trumpeter wintering ground at Henry’s Lake, Idaho. The president was predisposed to align himself with the conservationists. The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division had been conducting military exercises around Henry’s Lake, only fifteen miles from Yellowstone. Secretary of War Stimson had ordered soldiers to train at the high-altitude base there, ideal terrain for ski jumps, cross-country runs, downhill skiing maneuvers, and slaloming in winter snowpack. The $20 million facility, on which construction started that October, would soon accommodate thirty-five thousand soldiers and encompass one hundred thousand acres of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.
Enter the indomitable Rosalie Edge of the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), who insisted in a letter that the War Department relocate the entire army base at Henry’s Lake.3 She was outraged that the military facility, only a few miles east of the Red Rocks NWR, and in close proximity to Yellowstone Park, was on the swans’ migration route between the two winter havens. If the 10th Mountain Division activated the proposed artillery range, the trumpeters would disappear. Nothing came of her dissent letters except a couple disheartening War Department courtesy replies. Instead of giving up, Edge lobbied higher up the food chain, reaching out directly to Ickes through Irving Brant. Once aware of the situation in Idaho, Ickes was fully on board with Edge to save the swans.
Word leaked out that the army might be on course to inadvertently exterminate the species. Spurred on by Ickes and Edge, the entire eastern establishment conservationist community grew outraged that the trumpeters were being disturbed by the army. W
ith public relations in his favor, Ickes hit hard. “I beg of you that this Department be at least consulted before the Army takes unto itself anymore lands within the jurisdiction of this Department, especially if they are lands within national parks, national monuments, or wildlife refuges,” Ickes wrote Roosevelt in late November. “It is utterly discouraging to have a body of men who don’t care about the sort of thing that this Department is charged with fostering and protecting, who are marching in and taking possession just as Hitler marched in and took possession of the small democracies of Europe.”4
Comparing anyone, let alone the Army’s ski troopers, to Adolf Hitler was shocking. There was no worse epithet to hurl at a fellow American in late 1941, but Ickes was furious about the impending desecration of Henry’s Lake. He demanded a War Department investigation aimed at halting the construction of the 10th Mountain base.5 Irving Brant, meanwhile, explained to Stimson and General Emory S. Adams, adjutant general of the army, that Henry’s Lake was “the solitary unprotected point” on the short flyway of the trumpeters between Yellowstone and Red Rock Lakes and therefore a key habitat for survival of the species.6
With militaristic Germany and Japan constantly in his sights, Roosevelt nevertheless found time to weigh in on the matter, decisively, and with humor. “Considering the size of the United States, I think that Irving Brant is correct,” Roosevelt wrote to Stimson. “Please tell Major General Adams or whoever is in charge of this business that Henry Lake, Utah [sic], must be struck from the Army planning list for any purposes. The verdict is for the Trumpeter swan and against the Army. The Army must find a different nesting place!”7
Stimson didn’t want the army’s ski troopers to abandon Henry’s Lake. Nor did he respect Ickes’s penchant for igniting interdepartmental squabbles. That the relocation directive came from the commander in chief by way of a re-nesting joke probably didn’t sit well with him, either. Nonetheless, Stimson followed orders, and found a suitable location for the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale in Colorado.8 Gracefully conceding defeat over Henry’s Lake, Major General Adams wrote to Edge that “appropriate steps [were] being taken to discontinue all planning activities in connection with that site.”9
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 56