Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Before leaving for Crimea in the Soviet Union to meet with Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, the president used the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. Forest Service to promote his global conservation crusade. Roosevelt also wanted a Tree Farm System for private forests, supported by the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, to take root across America. The first Tree Farm was designated in Montesano in Washington State. The Texas Forest Service, in conjunction with the Texas Long Leaf Lumber Company, helped the federal government inaugurate Tree Farms in that state. Sixty-five tree farmers were certified, tending a combined 846,000 acres. Three national forests that Roosevelt had established—Davy Crockett, Sabine, and Sam Houston—were also succeeding beyond the president’s wildest dreams.65

  Eleanor Roosevelt also commemorated the Forest Service anniversary. “When we think what the Forestry Service has accomplished in the last 40 years, we should all be celebrating,” she wrote in “My Day” that February, “because their work is helping to preserve one of our great national assets. We do not begin to reforest sufficiently anywhere in our country, but year by year we are learning more about trees, their care and their value, and eventually we may discover that each one of us owning any land has a responsibility to the nation to keep some of it in trees. Perhaps I am particularly conscious of this because so much of my husband’s land at Hyde Park is tree land.”66

  Although Roosevelt was an ecologically minded president, his conservation legacy is marred by a few major blind spots. One major concern of the employees of Roosevelt’s Fish and Wildlife Service during World War II was the increased use of pesticides. The widespread use of the most pervasive toxin—a molecule of chlorinated hydrocarbon called dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT)—became a cause for concern throughout the scientific conservation community. DDT had first been synthesized in 1874, but it wasn’t until 1939 that it was found to have a practical use: killing insects. It had been sprayed directly on troops because the chemical controlled mosquitoes, lice, and ticks. As a delousing agent, DDT worked wonders.67

  As a field experiment, Dr. Gabrielson of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center ordered a FWS plane to spray DDT on 117 acres of Maryland marsh and woodlands. The result was horrifying. Just ten hours after the spraying, fish in the Patuxent River died off in large numbers. More tests were conducted in Patuxent’s artificial ponds, where the outcome was even more grim. Two of Gabrielson’s top scientists, Joseph Linduska and Clarence Cottam, fed different animals food laced with DDT. All of the test subjects demonstrated “excessive nervousness, loss of appetite, tremors, muscular twitching, and persistent rigidity of the leg muscles, the last continuing through death.”68

  It is unreasonable to criticize Roosevelt for allowing DDT to be used during World War II. To GIs, it was understandably preferable to be hosed down with the chemical than to catch tropical diseases such as malaria. Luckily, the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center was equipped to look into the effects of such synthetic chemicals. Rachel Carson, of FWS, wrote an alarming article about the deleterious effects of DDT on wildlife. “We have heard a lot about what DDT will soon do for us by wiping out insect pests,” she said. “The experiments at Patuxent have been planned to show what other effects DDT may have if applied to wide areas; what it will do to insects that are beneficial or even essential; how it may affect waterfowl, or birds that depend on insect food; whether it may upset the whole delicate balance of nature if unwisely used.”69

  In early 1945, Roosevelt was also overseeing the Manhattan Project, based in New Mexico, the effort led by Major General Leslie Groves to build an atomic bomb. The radioactivity released from the bombs, when detonated, would make DDT poisoning seem mild in comparison. Both DDT and nuclear proliferation were scourges of the early Cold War era, and in both cases Roosevelt received both credit and blame.70

  Roosevelt’s penchant for creating dams was yet another area where he fell short as a conservationist president. Public power projects such as the TVA and Grand Coulee were holy causes to the president. Determined to undermine the greed of private power companies, he took every opportunity to champion public power projects. History proved Roosevelt was shortsighted about the ecological damage these dams caused. No matter how Roosevelt spun a dam project, building a reservoir like Lake Mead for recreation wasn’t the same as protecting the finest salmon and trout runs in America. Overly impressed with engineering and experts, Roosevelt did not consider that the loss of a river bottom was not “progress” at all. While FDR deserves high marks for forestry, wildlife protection, state and national parks management, and soil conservation, his dams in the name of the “public interest” devastated numerous riverine ecosystems.

  VI

  Roosevelt’s fourth inaugural took place on January 20, 1945, on the South Portico of the White House. Haggard, with black circles ringing his eyes, he was too weary to be sworn in at the Capitol as tradition dictated. A huge throng of spectators, most with black umbrellas, braved a cold, steady rain to witness the quickest inauguration in American history. Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot were among those shivering nearby to cheer him on. “We have learned that we must live as men and not as ostriches,” Roosevelt said that day. “We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust—or with fear.”71

  After the ceremony, FDR briefly mingled with family and friends at a reception before excusing himself to go to bed. The next afternoon, under a veil of secrecy, he left Washington for Newport News to board the USS Quincy. His companions and confidants for the trip to Malta, and then Yalta, were Pa Watson and FDR’s daughter Anna, who marveled at her father’s knowledge of Virginia’s shorebirds.72 He had asked Pinchot, Ickes, and Brant to work on the global conservation initiative while he was away. The president’s major stipulation for the conservation conference was that each participating nation should receive a seat for only a single, top-flight representative, ideally, the head of state.

  Four strategic imperatives dominated the agenda at Yalta: the voting rules and membership criteria for the United Nations; the future of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland; the disposition of a defeated Germany; and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in the Pacific. “If Tehran was in many ways a rehearsal for Yalta,” David M. Kennedy wrote in Freedom from Fear, “then Yalta in turn set the stage for the dawning international regime that became known as the Cold War.”73

  Because Roosevelt kept no formal notes from his meetings at Yalta, it’s impossible to ascertain how forcefully he pressed for global conservation. Churchill and Stalin weren’t likely to be enthusiastic about his global conservation push, however; both men had more desperate matters on their minds. What was decided at Yalta was the partitioning of postwar Europe, with guidelines for the governance of Germany after its inevitable surrender, and an agreement that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan once Hitler had lost.

  King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and President Roosevelt (right) met on board the USS Quincy in Great Bitter Lake in Egypt on February 14, 1945. Colonel William Eddy (kneeling) served as translator, while Admiral Wiliam D. Leahy looked on (at left). Roosevelt, who was on the way home from the Yalta Conference, charmed the king, while laying serious groundwork for the postwar relationship between the two nations. “Every now and then,” Eddy later recalled, “I could catch him off guard and see his face in repose. It was ashen in color; the lines were deep; the eyes would fade in helpless fatigue. He was living on his nerve.”

  On February 11, Roosevelt left Yalta for the Quincy, which had been moored in Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal. To the surprise of Churchill, FDR held secret talks with three prominent African and Middle Eastern leaders: King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Farouk I of Egypt, and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Global conservation and the plight of Jewish refugees from Europe were both discussed. FDR then finally boarded the USS Quincy for the trip home. On February 23, he held a press conference on the ship. Connecting the nascent United Nations with global conserva
tion, Roosevelt drove home the point that “reforestation is the best hope” for the prosperity of civilization:

  “Wouldn’t that be a long-time proposition?” one reporter asked.

  “Growing trees is a long-time proposition,” Roosevelt retorted.

  “Do you mean that the conference looked ahead a great many years?” another reporter wanted to know.

  “Sure,” Roosevelt agreed, “we are looking at the human race, which we hope won’t end in fifty years.”74

  A few days later, while crossing the Atlantic, Pa Watson suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. “One moment he was breathing,” Anna Roosevelt Boettiger recorded in her diary, “and the next his pulse had stopped.”75 Roosevelt was beside himself with grief. Losing Pa was a terrible blow to him. Although Watson had spent his adult life in the U.S. Army, it was the navy that honored him when the Quincy finally docked in Newport News. Days later, Watson’s remains were interred at Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the grave of General John Joseph “Blackjack” Pershing. For the burial Roosevelt, his face anguished and drawn, had his limousine park a few feet from the open grave. His relationship with Watson far transcended official interactions; he was perhaps his closest male friend. Now, the grim reality of his own human mortality—along with numerous other worries and cares—hung over the president like a dark cloud that wouldn’t lift.

  On March 28, 1945, Pinchot wrote to the president about his “rough plan” for the grandiose conservation summit. Not an inkling of the strategy was shared with Stettinius. “Here it is,” he wrote, “T. R. introduced conservation to America. Nothing could be more fitting than that you, who have already done so much for conservation on this continent, should crown your good work by rendering the same great service to the rest of mankind.”76 Drained from the combination of the Yalta Conference and Pa Watson’s death and suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, Roosevelt never had a chance to respond to Pinchot’s letter. But he did see William O. Douglas to talk about conservation and was very alert, remembering out of thin air the names of Justice Douglas’s two horses, Thunder and Lightning.77

  In late March, Roosevelt returned to Warm Springs, his face looking like something death brought with it in a suitcase. Joining him in the Georgia countryside were his daughter, Anna; Daisy Suckley; Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd; and other relatives and colleagues. Swimming in the thermal pools, going for country drives, and resting among the pines trees allowed his overworked analytical powers to resuscitate themselves. On April 11, Henry Morgenthau arrived in Warm Springs and dined with the president, discussing methods for the re-pastoralization of postwar Germany, still eager to transform the war-torn country into Europe’s breadbasket. Morgenthau later noted that though FDR seemed to have lost some of his coordination, the president seemed “happy and enjoying himself.”78 Roosevelt planned to work on his opening speech for the United Nations organizational conference on April 25.

  On the morning of April 12, Roosevelt dressed smartly. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a friend of Rutherfurd, was to paint a portrait of the president that day. As Roosevelt posed for the portrait, a sharp pain seized him, and his eyes rolled back in his head. A terrified Shoumatoff called out, “Lucy, something has happened!” Roosevelt had suffered a major cerebral hemorrhage. A few hours later, he died at the Little White House. Word spread rapidly across the land. It seemed impossible that the fearless commander in chief, was among the American war dead.79 The last presidential order Roosevelt signed directed the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp celebrating the United Nations to coincide with the global summit in San Francisco later that month.80

  Americans were stunned by the news of FDR’s death. Declaring the “story is over,” Eleanor Roosevelt tried to help the nation heal, putting her husband’s personality in perspective. For public consumption she spoke of recently listening to Franklin hold forth at dinner about helping Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Africa jumpstart a postwar reforestation project. She scolded him, saying that once Hitler and Tojo were defeated, he needed to let other people solve the world’s problems. “With very characteristic emphasis,” she recalled, “he turned to me and said, ‘I like to be where things are growing.’”81

  For Harry Truman, sworn in as America’s thirty-third president less than four hours later in the White House, the moment felt as though a whole galaxy had crashed down on top of him. Pinchot was also in Washington, D.C., trying to organize the global conservation summit when his wife called him with the grim news. “At first I couldn’t understand what she said,” Pinchot wrote in his diary. “Then came the dreadful news of the president’s death. At first I didn’t believe it. But it was true.”82

  Ralph McGill, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, was abroad when he heard the news of Roosevelt’s passing. “To a Georgian far from home there was a sudden and bitter nostalgia for home at the news of the President’s passing in Warm Springs,” he wrote. “I could see the dogwood in bloom and the green of the trees. I knew that the peach blossoms were out and that the warm Georgia sun had been like a benediction to the tired body of the ailing president. And I wanted to be home with my own fellow Georgians as they mourned him. It was said of Abraham Lincoln when death claimed him that a tree is measured best when it is down. So it will be with Franklin D. Roosevelt. The tree is down and the historians will begin to measure and will find what the hearts of millions of Americans and peoples of the world already knew, that here was the tallest man America has ever given the world.”83

  EPILOGUE

  “WHERE THE SUNDIAL STANDS”

  I

  On Friday morning, April 13, 1945, a throng of Georgian farmers and townspeople crowded the Warm Springs depot to see Franklin D. Roosevelt’s flag-draped coffin carried on the Ferdinand Magellan to begin an eight-hundred-mile journey to Union Station in Washington, D.C. Eleanor Roosevelt had wisely tapped George Marshall, the master logician of both the CCC and the U.S. Army, to oversee the transport arrangements. As the eleven-car funeral train headed northward, with the first lady aboard, over two million citizens stood along the tracks in fields, hamlets, towns, and cities in five states to bid farewell to their leader. “The President would have enjoyed the ride,” wrote Merriman Smith in the New York Herald Tribune. “He loved to sit beside the broad window of his private car and comment on the condition of the soil and forests.”1

  On Saturday, April 14, at 4 p.m., a funeral service was held for Roosevelt at the White House. Some two hundred family members and friends joined together in the East Room to pay their respects. Even though Eleanor Roosevelt had requested no flowers, the White House was overflowing with fragrant bouquets from thousands of mourners. Pinchot and Ickes stood next to each other, a New Deal united front at the dawn of the age of Truman. After the ceremony, Roosevelt’s casket was placed on a caisson drawn by six white horses, accompanied by battalions of blue jackets, field artillery, air forces, and women’s auxiliary forces, to the railroad depot filled with mourners. Not since 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, had such collective shock and grief engulfed the nation’s capital.

  Once the tributes in Washington were over, Roosevelt’s casket traveled north by train, along the Atlantic line through Baltimore and Philadelphia, and passed New York City and eventually Poughkeepsie, until verdant Hyde Park revealed itself in springtime glory. All five of Roosevelt’s children, as well as Eleanor, were aboard. Apple trees and lilacs were happily in bloom. The April sky was cerulean blue. As Ickes reported in his diary, “The air was clear and cool. Everything was dignified and in good taste.”2 As a cannon fired twenty-one times, the coffin was moved from the railcar to a caisson drawn by six handsome horses. A seventh horse, hooded, was brought into the procession symbolizing a lost warrior, boots reversed in the stirrups. Drummers played a dirge as the mourners climbed up the steep hill toward the house, and FDR’s gravesite nearby. Five years earlier Roosevelt had shown his longtime estate superintendent William Plog his chosen burial site (“whe
re the sundial stands in the garden”).3 In coming months, a simple marble monument marking the burial site of Franklin and Eleanor was crafted to FDR’s exact specifications and placed on the grave.

  The funeral for Franklin Roosevelt took place on April 15, 1945, in the rose garden at Springwood in Hyde Park. Three days before, the president had died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his “Little White House” at Warm Springs, Georgia. The news was a shock like few that America has ever had.

  President Truman and hundreds of cadets from West Point were gathered at the rose garden of the Springwood estate. Many top echelon New Dealers weren’t quite convinced that Truman would be up to the job as president. Ickes feared that Truman would be too easily intimidated by stockmen associations, the oil lobby, and timber corporations and would fail to establish new national monuments (or enlarge existing ones) in the Colorado Plateau or wildlife refuges in the Gulf South. As Ickes would sneer in 1948, Truman was the kind of pro-business leader who allowed “the oil companies to get away with murder.”4 Ickes, who left office in 1946, was right. The only national monument that Truman established was Effigy Mounds in Iowa. But in 1947 Truman did bring Roosevelt’s beloved Everglades fully into the National Park Service.5