Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  The president, following the attack on Goleta, ordered Los Padres closed to the public as a preventative measure against potential arsonists or even slovenly campers. An arsonist’s match could threaten the Los Angeles Basin or San Diego. Ironically, closing Los Padres would have a side benefit for an imperiled flock of sixty to eighty California condors (Gymnogyps californianus), a symbol of the state’s wilderness. This endangered species, which had telescopic vision and a wingspan of nearly ten feet, had been making a last stand along the forest’s boundaries. By closing Los Padres to protect it from arsonists, Roosevelt was also helping this charismatic species survive. He knew that the condor—especially when nesting—was easily disturbed by machinery, campfires, and other types of human interference. (He had previously curtailed logging in the forest so as not to frighten the condors.)47 Wildlife biologists had two unique difficulties in trying to protect the condors circa 1942: the species took five years to reach sexual maturity and females laid only one egg per nesting cycle. The condor—like the whooping cranes of Gulf Texas and trumpeter swans around Yellowstone—would survive only if the Roosevelt administration oversaw its protection in an unprecedented way.

  Reduced to begging for congressional appropriations from opponents of the New Deal, Roosevelt focused on the CCC and invited Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar of Tennessee, a Democrat, to the White House for lunch. McKellar had been friendly to the New Deal earlier in the 1930s, but he stiffened into an incorrigible obstacle to the continuance of its signature programs. His opposition to the CCC may have stemmed from a reasonable concern about expenditures in time of war, though it was also said that McKellar, and some of his colleagues, were racist segregationists who could not abide the inclusion of African Americans in the CCC. They were especially disgusted by the evidence that it—and other New Deal programs—helped to pull black workers into the mainstream of American employment. Turning on his famous charm, Roosevelt argued that the pending legislation to defund the CCC should be scrapped for the sake of national security. However, the threat of Japanese arsonists wasn’t strong enough to dissuade McKellar, whose bill (Senate Bill S. 2295, introduced February 23, 1942) gained momentum on Capitol Hill. Grasping at straws, FDR offered to integrate the National Youth Administration into the CCC as a sort of supra-National Guard. McKellar wasn’t biting. The advent of World War II, he argued, made New Deal conservation irrelevant.

  On May 4, 1942, Roosevelt made a last-ditch plea to retain at least a skeleton network of CCC camps through the fiscal year 1942–43. The House Committee on Appropriations denied his request. A few weeks later, FDR instructed his budget director, Harold Smith, to make clear to the Senate that defunding the CCC wouldn’t save taxpayers a nickel. According to Smith, the CCC currently had 158 camps on military reservations, 42 more camps doing similar work, and 150 camps tasked with protection against forest fires; the administration calculated that the CCC cost taxpayers $80 million annually. Abolishing it and hiring other laborers to do its work would cost $125 million, wasting $45 million of taxpayer revenue. “The elimination of the CCC will call for a wholly separate appropriation to take its place in two of the CCC activities,” a defiant Roosevelt explained in a letter to Smith. “The first is the need for forest fire protection, especially on the Pacific Coast and back as far as the Rockies, where we must guard against Japanese incendiary bombs and incendiary fires during the dry season. This is essential for our national future. The second is the building of roads and other facilities for [military] camps. These have to be built by someone and I shall have to ask for a special appropriation to let the work out by contract instead of having it done by the CCC.”48

  On June 5 the House voted to defund the CCC, but approved $500,000 to liquidate the program properly. The jig was up. Virginia’s Camp Roosevelt, the very first CCC camp in a national forest, began dismantling itself, trucking out iron beds, cooking utensils, encyclopedias, and Ping-Pong tables.49 Thousands of CCC boys, already comfortable in uniform, were encouraged to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces to help fight World War II. Only a few hundred CCCers found ways to continue working in national and state parks. Just two weeks after FDR’s final appeal to the federal budget director, the CCC had only 136 enrollees left.50

  Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas tried to rescue the president, suggesting that the West Coast develop “civilian irregulars” and “wilderness patrols” under federal military supervision to patrol forests to keep an eye out for wildfires.51 Douglas’s security-meets-conservation program, however, couldn’t get funded. But Roosevelt did launch an effective public awareness campaign against wildfires. The U.S. Forest Service adopted fire prevention slogans like “Don’t Aid the Enemy” and “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon.”52 The president soon brought his fire protection message to the nation in an impassioned radio address. “Uncontrolled fire, even in normal times, is a national menace,” he proclaimed. “Today, when every machine is being taxed to its fullest productive capacity . . . when agents of our enemies are seeking to hinder us by every possible means, it is essential that destructive fire be brought under stricter control in order that victory may be achieved at the earliest date.”53

  Never one to shy away from a new federal agency, FDR established the War Advertising Council (WAC) to muster the know-how of Madison Avenue firms for the war effort. Roosevelt cleverly enlisted the council to mount a nationwide fire prevention campaign, which would center on the slogan: “Careless Matches Aid the Axis—Prevent Forest Fires.” Not only did Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard take to the radio to publicize the slogan, but the phrase also appeared in twelve million mail inserts, two million leaflets, and more than fifteen thousand billboards. On a number of these ads a heinous (and racist) caricature of General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, could be seen with a match in hand, ready to burn a national forest to the ground. Another poster depicted Tojo and Hitler floating around a wind-whipped blaze under the banner: “Our Carelessness: Their Secret Weapon.”54

  On August 11, 1942, the last CCC boys, eighty-two members of Veterans’ Company 3822 in Goliad, Texas—a camp the first lady had once visited—were dismissed.55 A phenomenal era in conservation had ended. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC had enrolled more than 3.4 million men to work in thousands of camps across America. Roosevelt had used the CCC as an instrument for both environmentalism and economic revitalization. Its erosion-control programs alone benefited forty million acres of farmland. The success the agency had in building up American infrastructure is impossible to deny: forty-six thousand bridges; twenty-seven thousand miles of fencing; ten thousand miles of roads and trails; five thousand miles of water-supply lines; and three thousand fire-lookout towers. Credited with establishing 711 state parks, the CCC also restored close to four thousand historic structures and rehabilitated 3,400 beaches.56

  Nobody could deny the CCC’s enduring legacy from 1933 to 1942: combating deforestation, dust storms, overhunting, water pollution, and flooding. In this way, the New Deal conservation revolution had already made a difference. Even while American troops were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, back home American lands brimmed with native grasses and cottonwoods, desert oases and high-country evergreens. The American land was healing and, in some regions, thriving. Around three billion trees had been planted by “the boys.” The CCC was the single best land-rehabilitation idea ever adopted by a U.S. president and it rescued more than natural resources. As the Alaskan, a CCC publication in Juneau, praised the president’s conservation force for having taken “baffled, furtive, tough, city youngsters in and transforming them into bronzed, clear-eyed, well-muscled soldiers in waiting.”57

  In its nine years of existence, the CCC introduced young American men to the rigors of outdoors living. By and large they had comported themselves well. It wasn’t intended as a form of military preparation, as was the Hitler Youth in Germany, but a generation of toughened CCC enrollees indeed became a wave of GIs during the war. Pick any CCC company roster fr
om 1933 to 1942, and you will find alumni who went on to win Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, and Silver Stars during World War II. Approximately one out of every six men drafted to fight during World War II was an alumnus of the CCC.58 Sadly, there was also a long list of heroic CCC alumni who were killed in action at Midway, Okinawa, Normandy, and Luzon, among other far-flung locales. As Major General James A. Ulio later explained, “Hardly a large unit in the Army is without key men who owe their important assignments either in whole or in part to the training they had in the CCC.”59

  On disbandment, many CCCers joined the industrial mobilization effort at home in such cities as Detroit, New Orleans, and Norfolk. Take Ethric Brown of Iowa, who left the CCC to help build 1,500 B-26 bombers. Men like Brown who enlisted in the CCC were just as much a part of the “greatest generation” as the U.S. Army’s Second Rangers, who stormed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, and James Doolittle, who took the air war to the Japanese mainland.

  Once defunded, CCC camps closed with little fanfare. Equipment and facilities were used by the U.S. Army for maneuvers or special projects. Other camps were disassembled, leaving only foundations and forlorn remnants from their boom days. The temporary nature of camp structures such as barracks and mess halls meant that limited CCC camp “architecture” survived. Yet their infrastructure work in public forests and parklands remained as proud monuments to American can-doism, intrinsic parts of the U.S. national landscape heritage. A few CCC camps—including one in the Great Smokies—housed conscientious objectors in World War II. They engaged in a wide spectrum of conservation work.

  Strangely, a few of the shuttered CCC camps were repurposed as POW internment facilities, including those in Kennedy, Texas; Kooskia, Idaho; Fort Lincoln, North Dakota; Fort Missoula, Montana; and Fort Stanton, New Mexico. Instead of tree planting and fish stocking, Japanese and German prisoners worked in slaughterhouses, constructed highways, broke rock, and fought forest fires. No longer was conservation education the prevailing sentiment in these camps; all was drudgery.

  There was something heartbreaking about seeing CCC camps that were once on the cutting edge of a new environmentalism consigned to prisons encircled by barbed-wire fences.60 The Fort Hunt, Virginia, camp became a top-secret POW center known as P.O. Box 1142. A number of prominent members of the Third Reich were questioned there, including rocket-technology pioneer Wernher von Braun, engineer Heinz Schlicke, and intelligence officer Reinhard Gehlen. German scientists spilled secrets about rocket technology on the very same land that George Washington had once farmed and where FDR’s Tree Army had planted oaks.61

  The CCC wasn’t the only New Deal relief agency to lose its funding as a result of World War II. The WPA also folded in 1942 after having created 8.5 million jobs across nearly 1.4 million projects. The agency’s impressive list of accomplishments included building, repairing, or refurbishing more than 600,000 miles of roads and streets; more than 120,000 public buildings (including schools and courthouses); and about 80,000 recreational facilities (including parks, pools, playgrounds, gyms, golf courses, ski areas, and skating rinks). San Antonio’s River Walk and the presidential retreat Shangri-La (Camp David) also owe their existence to the WPA. The WPA’s contributions to the cultural infrastructure of America include putting on more than 200,000 concerts and producing approximately 475,000 works of art.62

  With the CCC and WPA gone, the president turned instinctively to the Boy Scouts of America, whose campaign “Every Scout to Save a Soldier” was in the midst of raising $355 million from bond sales for the war effort.63 Roosevelt anointed the Boy Scouts as “messengers of the United States Government” and had them distribute millions of educational posters in towns across America. The president also tasked the Scouts with collecting scrap metal and cans—409.3 million pounds—for recycling. On a smaller scale, the Scouts also picked up where the CCC left off in forestry. Between 1942 and 1945, the Scouts planted almost two million trees.64

  No one in Congress complained about Roosevelt’s leaning on the nonpartisan Boy Scouts to get vital conservation work done. When the USDA needed able bodies for the 1943 harvest season, more than 704,000 Boy Scouts volunteered to help keep American agriculture strong. The organization was also responsible for planting an impressive 204,000 victory gardens.65

  The victory gardens, or “food gardens for defense,” were a clever way for the White House to encourage backyard farming and ease the pain of rationing food. When it came to winning a war, food was just as important as planes, ammunition, and tanks. Transportation and labor shortages, as well as the need for food for the military, induced FDR to urge citizens to grow their own produce. Approximately 20 million Americans, many of whom had never farmed before, answered his call. World records for food production were set in 1940 (and then beaten in 1941, 1942, and again in 1943). Leaflets filled with helpful growing and canning tips were disseminated free of charge.66

  FDR wasn’t the first to advocate for planting victory gardens. During World War I, President Wilson had launched a small but similar agricultural initiative. But FDR was a far better salesman. Franklin and Eleanor planted victory gardens at the White House, Hyde Park, on a vacant lot in New York City’s Riverside Park, and in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Thrilled that America was breaking food-production records during his third term, the president called for the growing of corn on community plots. On a single-acre test plot, a family could produce more than a dozen bushels of corn by using two hundred pounds of superphosphate fertilizer. For city dwellers with few farming options, vacant industrial properties became fertile ground for tomato and lettuce patches. Using the slogan “Victory Gardens Are War Work,” FDR spoke regularly about what it meant to grow fruit at home, make pickles and relishes from homegrown produce, ward off insects, store food for winter, and discover disease-resistant vegetables. The Roosevelts even promoted rooftop vegetable gardens.67

  IV

  By 1942 Roosevelt no longer had the luxury of visiting far-flung places like Hawaii Volcanoes, Glacier, or even the Great Smokies. All he could do was approve the last round of WPA silk-screen promotional posters, which became iconic, extolling America’s national parks. His idea of a nature getaway during wartime was driving from Hyde Park to Red Hook on the Hudson, where he could look out with his binoculars at nearby Cruger Island, counting raptors. Driving his specially equipped automobiles, with hand controls instead of pedals, was liberating for him. Going down a steep embankment straight toward the Hudson like a daredevil gave him a vicarious thrill. One afternoon Franklin took Eleanor and Daisy to Red Hook to watch the bird life in memory of Maunsell Crosby. In a telling journal entry, Suckley reported that they “watched thousands of birds collecting for the night” along the railroad line. “The president is awfully interested, birds being one of his many hobbies,” Suckley wrote. “Mrs. Roosevelt was frankly not specially interested.”68

  Once during the war, FDR had a lengthy talk with William D. Hassett, his correspondence secretary, about his long-standing admiration of essayist John Burroughs. As a boy, Roosevelt had been enthralled with Burroughs’s book Wake-Robin. A winter walk across the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge brought him to the West Park front door of the “Sage of Slabsides.” But in the 1940s, with the world spinning out of control, Roosevelt noted that Burroughs’s “leisurely, discursive style” had seemingly fallen out of “taste.”69

  All three members of FDR’s 1934 Committee on Wildlife Restoration—Darling, Leopold, and Beck—fought to protect the natural world during World War II. In 1942, Darling began negotiations with the Fish and Wildlife Service to limit development on Sanibel Island (where Theodore Roosevelt liked to spearfish). This barrier island off the southwest coast of Florida was known for its white-sand beaches, hardwood hammocks, and estuarine bays. The shallow gulf waters around Sanibel, the “seashell capital of America,” made for excellent fishing and beachcombing. The island virtually screamed for federal protection. Fortunately, the Roosevelt administration had a vocal champ
ion in the retired Darling. He was not only the former head of the U.S. Biological Survey (reorganized as the Fish and Wildlife Service), but he also owned a winter home on Captiva Island, just north of Sanibel. Awed by the many bird species that visited the mudflats on the islands from mid-October to April, Darling sought a new wildlife refuge and increased FWS protection for an assortment of egrets, herons, storks, and roseate spoonbills.70

  By 1942, photographs replaced cartoons in the conservationists’ call for action, in part because Ansel Adams’s work during the Kings Canyon campaign had proved so vitally effective. Darling sent prints of Sanibel’s famed seashells and roseate spoonbills to Ickes and Gabrielson. These photographs did the trick. Thanks to Darling’s persistence, Sanibel National Wildlife Refuge (later enlarged and renamed the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge) was established in 1945 to protect one watery slice of Sanibel’s wetlands, beaches, shell, silt, dry ridges, sloughs, and mangrove trees. Approximately 2,800 acres of the subtropical refuge were later dedicated as a wilderness area by Congress.71

  During World War II, a consortium of farmers in the Midwest were bitter because federally protected ducks and geese had destroyed their crops. A sympathetic Roosevelt allowed Gabrielson to issue a slew of individual permits to help thin the flocks that were menacing crops. On the whole, the president viewed what he called “duck complaints” from midwesterners as a backhanded compliment; their gripes meant that his National Wildlife Refuge system had been successful in restoring populations. To the consternation of Rosalie Edge, he even took the woodcock (Scolopax minor) off the endangered species list.72 Stories of waterfowl abundance were always music to Roosevelt’s ears.