Wildlife Society, 352
Wilkie, Wendell, 498–99, 505–6
Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 60, 61, 69, 70, 365, 530, 560, 580; conservation and, 81, 648n46; FDR as assistant navy secretary, 70, 72–73; “Franklin Club” and, 77; Hoover and, 120; national parks, 406; National Park Service Organic Act, 81, 263; “new freedom” movement, 69; presidency of, 63; reshaping the federal government, 84; secretary of the interior for, 73–74; timber industry and, 648n46; World War I and, 83
Winning of the West, The (TR), 31
Wirth, Conrad, 217, 222, 378, 379, 521, 534
Wisconsin, 293
Wisconsin River, 477
Woodlawns estate, 132
Works Progress Administration (WPA), 169, 177, 284, 301, 420, 428, 451; accomplishments of, 528–29; American Guide Series, 400, 696n26; budget cuts, 351; Cape Hatteras and, 377; defunding of, 528; ER and, 428, 428, 429, 697n26; establishment of, 307; FDR and Hudson Valley post offices, 427; Federal Art Project, 333, 402, 428, 697n26; Federal Music Project, 428; Federal Project Number One, 428, 429; Federal Theater Project, 382, 428; Federal Writers’ Project, 400, 428, 697n26; flood control, 363; Florida hurricane fatalities, 333; funds for, 308; Historical Records Project, 428; historic sites and, 510; Hopkins and, 307–8, 480; infrastructure projects, 308; jobs created by, 529; local history education, 428; NARA headquarters built, 374; in North Dakota, 470; Patuxent and, 462; posters, 530; recreation areas and, 222; Red Rocks Amphitheater and, 508; Shelterbelt Project posters, 292; Timberline Lodge, 402; zoos and, 284
World War I, 77–78, 83–84; Bonus Army, 221; Brown and, 130–31; Hoover and, 120; idea for a National Capital Forest as memorial, 84; Pa Watson in, 365; veterans enrolled in the CCC, 221; veterans on conservation, 500–501
World War II: American isolationism and, 505, 511; Atlantic Charter, 510–11; Boy Scouts and, 529; Cairo summit, 553; CCCers in the military, 199, 525, 527; citizens and domestic war effort, 542–43; conservation efforts during, 531–33; D-Day and, 554–56; “duck complaints,” 531–32; Dumbarton Oaks Conference, 561; FDR and prelude to, 440–41, 442–43; FDR conservation policies during, 517–18, 543; FDR’s secret talks, 573; FDR’s talking in code, 536; FDR’s third term and, 494; FDR’s view on postwar problems, 566–67, 569, 572, 573, 575; globes made for FDR, Eisenhower, and Churchill, 549, 549; industrial dumping in waterways and, 515–16; internment of Japanese Americans, 523; Japanese attack on California, 523, 524; Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 516–17; Japanese balloon attack on Oregon forest, 568; Lend-Lease Act, 506, 507, 509; Morgenthau Plan, 550–51; Nazi expansionism, 480, 494, 510; in 1942, 538; peacetime draft (1940), 504; POW camps in the U.S., 528; protected public lands and species and, 515; Quebec Conference, 549–50; Tehran summit, 553; threats to West Coast forests, 525–26, 567–68, 568; timber industry and, 519, 551–52; Tokyo bombed, 534; U.S. declares war, 517; U.S. war preparedness and industrial mobilization, 494, 527–28; U.S. war production, 480, 518; U.S. wartime resources and public lands, 518–19; victory gardens, 529–30; Yalta Conference, 569, 572–74
Wright Brothers National Memorial, 378
Wyoming: backlash against federal land, 547–48; elk in, 301; FDR tour (1937), 395; national historic sites, 492; national monuments, 544–58; percentage of as public lands, 563; Rawlins grazing district, 305; Shelterbelt Project in, 292; wildlife refuges, 310
Yakima, Washington, 349–50, 414
Yale School of Forestry, 39, 81, 273
Yard, Robert Sterling, 104–7, 238–39, 249
Year of American Seashores, 382
Yellowstone National Park, 81, 82, 249, 263, 408, 429, 514, 545; Artists’ Point, 396; CCC and, 395; elk in, 396–97; FDR tour (1937), 395–97, 396; Fishing Bridge, 396; Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, 395; Mount Hornaday, 346
Yosemite National Park, 104, 113, 129, 249; buildings of, 218; ER and, 254–55, 256; Hetch Hetchy dam, 74–77, 81; stamp issued, 245; sugar pine in, 409;
Zion National Park, 196, 197, 198, 250–51, 313; Kolob region added to, 196
zoos, 63, 216, 284, 308, 326, 345, 479, 715n61
PHOTOS SECTION
Roosevelt visited the Everglades in the 1920s and was awed by the experience. As president, he signed the enabling legislation to establish the swamp as a national park. This photograph of the Everglades was taken in 1937 by George A. Grant, the first chief photographer for the National Park Service.
Roosevelt declared 1934 the “Year of the National Park.” On his visit to Yellowstone in September 1937 he enthused about seeing the Old Faithful geyser. Photographer Ansel Adams took this landscape shot while working for the Interior Department during the Great Depression.
The grandest of Roosevelt’s 1943 national wildlife refuges was Chincoteague NWR, on the Virginia side of Assateague Island. The president’s principal rationale for saving Chincoteague was that the greater snow goose (Chen caerulescens) needed a sanctuary in the mid-Atlantic. This refuge was the setting for Marguerite Henry’s 1947 children’s book Misty of Chincoteague, which made the island’s wild ponies its most famous residents.
With Eleanor Roosevelt at his side, FDR traveled the famed Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. He soaked up thick forests and jagged mountain peaks that rose thousands of feet above the valley floor, declaring, “There is nothing so American as our national parks.”
When FDR visited the Grand Canyon, he wasn’t awestruck. “I like my green trees at Hyde Park better,” he told his wife when standing on the South Rim. “They are alive and growing.” Nevertheless, as president, Roosevelt had the CCC turn the great chasm into a world-class tourist destination.
A longtime lover of rustic architecture, Roosevelt had the WPA build the wonderful Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood National Forest using native rock, hewn timber, and rough-sawn siding, with heavy roof shakes. At the lodge’s dedication ceremony on September 28, 1937, Roosevelt predicted tourists would soon flock to Mount Hood to ski.
On August 2, 1937, Roosevelt signed Presidential Proclamation 2246, which established Capitol Reef National Monument (upgraded to national park status in December 1971), thereby saving a Utah wonderland of slickrock canyons, buttes, and ridges.
In the spring of 1937, Roosevelt went fishing in the Gulf of Mexico with an eye to find acreage to save as waterfowl habitat. After anchoring near Port Aransas, Texas, and catching tarpon, Roosevelt decided that 47,261 acres of the Gulf Texas habitat, where whooping cranes wintered, should become a federal preserve. On December 31, 1937, he signed Executive Order 7784 to establish Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. At present, the 115,670-acre NWR contains five management units: Blackjack Peninsula, Lamar, Matagorda Island, Myrtle-Foester Whitmire, and Tatton.
After serving as president for only six months, Roosevelt, encouraged by Secretary of War George Dern, signed Presidential Proclamation 2054 on August 22, 1933, establishing Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah.
Spurred on by environmental activists Rosalie Edge and Irving Brant, President Roosevelt toured Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in 1937 to decide how best to preserve the forest-clad mountains. While on an automobile tour of the region, he spotted a blighted swath of timbered land and blurted out, “I hope the son-of-a-bitch who logged that is roasting in hell.”
In 1937, Roosevelt opened Patuxent National Wildlife Research Center in Maryland to study how the feeding habits of mammals, the migratory patterns of birds, and pollution impacted nature. A sophisticated bird-banding program ensued from Roosevelt’s cutting-edge outdoors laboratory. Here an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea) is being appropriately tagged.
In order to save trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinator) populations, Roosevelt established Red Rock Lakes NWR in 1935. This Montana refuge was one of dozens that Roosevelt created in the American West. Just before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Roosevelt kicked the 10th Mountain Division out of Henry’s Lake, Idaho, because the artillery at ski maneuvers were disturbing the small congregation of trumpeters. “The verdict is for the Trumpeter swan and against th
e Army,” Roosevelt wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. “The Army must find a different nesting place!”
An often-overlooked aspect of Roosevelt’s leadership was his saving of Alaska’s wilderness. On December 16, 1941, he signed Executive Order 8979, establishing 1.1 million pristine acres as the Kenai National Moose Range. Here is a cow moose on the range with her calves.
Even though Congress refused to fund any more waterfowl refuges during World War II, President Roosevelt found ways to circumvent their desires. Determined to protect coastal areas along the Atlantic coast, the president saved this Massachusetts barrier beach and dune habitat by establishing Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge on June 1, 1944.
Around Christmas 1938, Roosevelt, with the help of photographer Ansel Adams and conservation activist David Brower of the Sierra Club, accelerated the Kings Canyon National Park legislation in Congress. Undaunted and determined in spite of entrenched opposition by the Forest Service, the effort by FDR and the Sierra Club gained momentum on Capitol Hill. “Reverting to the subject of Kings Canyon,” Roosevelt wrote to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.
Roosevelt saved this spectacular wilderness in Nevada on May 20, 1936, when he signed Executive Order 7373, establishing the 1.5 million–acre Desert National Wildlife Refuge. By doing so, Roosevelt helped desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) rebound from the brink of extinction.
After a fierce fight, Roosevelt established Jackson Hole National Monument in Wyoming in 1943 with Presidential Proclamation 2578. Republicans accused Roosevelt of behaving like Adolf Hitler by using the authority granted him under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
During his second White House term, Roosevelt grew determined to enact stringent federal regulations to protect the American bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). When Roosevelt read the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) pamphlet Save the Eagle: Shall We Allow Our National Emblem to Become Extinct?, he endorsed its “convincing and persuasive” recommendations. At various national wildlife refuges that Roosevelt established—such as this photo from Seney NWR in Michigan—bald eagle protection was mandated. Seney was also an important spot for the recovery of the Canada goose (Branta canadensis), then a threatened species. Instead of simply saving habitat and impounding water at Seney, biologists built a fenced-in pond area to get a crop of goslings and then train them to establish a migratory pattern that would conduce to survival.
Roosevelt grew personally interested in the botany of America’s deserts. Thousands of saguaros (Carnegiea gigantea) in southwestern Arizona were brought back from the brink of disease, thanks to the CCC.
On April 26 1938, Roosevelt signed Presidential Proclamation 2281, establishing the Channel Islands National Monument (it became a national park in 1980). Roosevelt knew from friends at the Smithsonian Institution that the Channel Islands, known as the “Galápagos of North America” for their diversity of rare plants and wildlife, would become a premier destination for whale watchers, birders, beachcombers, and fisherfolk. The archipelago was the only place along the Pacific coast where warm and cold ocean currents commingled.
Roosevelt promoted “greater Cape Hatteras” as an American historic zone due to the adventures of Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the aviation experiments of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk; the legends of lighthouses and shipwrecks; and the famous exploits of the U.S. Life-Saving Service (the precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard). The New York Times lauded FDR’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore as “one of the most important conservation measures of all time.” It was, in fact, the opening salvo of Roosevelt’s second-term battle to save extensive ocean frontage. By protecting about a hundred square miles of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Roosevelt had set into motion a new protocol: federal marine conservation.
In August 1937, Roosevelt signed Proclamation 2221, establishing Zion National Monument, 49,150 pristine acres in the Kolob region of Washington County, Utah. (It was incorporated into Zion National Park on July 11, 1956.) Utah was getting so much work-relief help from Roosevelt that a field representative from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration dubbed it “the prize ‘gimme’ State of the Union.” An astounding 116 CCC camps were run by the Forest Service in Utah. Two visionary Roosevelt administration experiments in Utah—the Widstoe Project (located in the Sevier River drainage near the Escalante Mountains) and the Central Utah Project (later to become the Intermountain Station’s Benmore Experimental Range)—aimed to irrigate arid valleys to help communities thrive.
Roosevelt deserved credit for trying to save treasured landscapes in the Southwest with his four national monuments of 1936–1939: Joshua Tree (California), Capitol Reef (Utah), Organ Pipe Cactus (Arizona), and Tuzigoot (Arizona). During the New Deal years, protecting Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia), pictured above, became an Interior Department priority.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, with (left to right) Robert Fechner, Henry Wallace, and the men of Civilian Conservation Corps Company 350 (in background) at CCC Camp Big Meadows in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, August 12, 1933. The CCC was the greatest peacetime mobilization ever of American youth.
Eleanor Roosevelt at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Yosemite, California, 1941. In her “My Day” columns she regularly wrote about the wonders of the natural world.
Men from the Civilian Conservation Corps clearing land for soil conservation, 1934. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC had enrolled more than 3.4 million men to work in thousands of camps across America.
Interior of the bunkhouse at Long Lake CCC Camp F in Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest. Roosevelt hoped to restore the great North Woods of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. “The forests,” he said, “are the ‘lungs’ of our land.”
Every morning, at CCC camps, Old Glory was raised in a military-style ceremony. Instilling patriotism and national service in recruits was a central FDR policy mission.
CCC Mobile Unit at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon National Monument, 1938. Roosevelt had the CCC fruitfully collaborate to stabilize pre-Columbian ruins in the Southwest, such as Chaco Canyon, Navajo, Tonto, and Montezuma Castle.
CCC workers clear snow at Rocky Mountain National Park. Roosevelt was a huge booster of winter recreation. The New Deal sought to promote skiing in Colorado, Idaho, and Vermont.
Queen Elizabeth of England looking at the Civilian Conservation Corps exhibit at Fort Hunt, Virginia. Left to right: Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada, Queen Elizabeth, and Eleanor Roosevelt, June 9, 1939.
The CCC camp located in the Chisos Mountains of Texas, November 26, 1937. Stationed at the camp was Company 1855, under the command of Lieutenant William L. Hagman and Lieutenant Archie L. Murray, second in command. Roosevelt established Big Bend National Park, thereby protecting the Chihuahuan Desert.
The CCC camp from Trail Ridge Road, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. It took six CCC companies to build FDR’s “top of the world” road in the Rockies.
A primitive CCC washroom at Camp Rock Creek, California. The CCC was crucial in establishing the first state parks for Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
Civilian Conservation Corps, States, Indiana, Jackson Camp 558, Brownstown, Indiana. Note the portrait of FDR looming over the CCC worker’s shoulder. To the CCCers, the president was an icon. The Woodpecker, a CCC newspaper in Magdalena, New Mexico, created an oath: “Roosevelt is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
CCC Company 1394, Camp S-68, Weikert, Pennsylvania. After work hours, men were encouraged to read in the camp library. As actor Humphrey Bogart put it, the CCC was “a 14-karat opportunity for young men” to receive an education.
Civilian Conservation Corps, Third Corps Area (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia), plant nursery, Company 5445, Camp A-4, Beltsville, Maryland, 1933.
CCC boys at work on a project at the experimental farm of the Department of Agriculture at Beltsville, Maryland, 1933. Between the dual plagues of soil
erosion and foolish farming, one half of the upper Midwest’s topsoil was deleted or lost.
Civilian Conservation Corps, Third Corps Area (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia), cabinetmaking shop, Company 1351 C-V, Yorktown, Virginia, 1933. African American corpsmen at this segregated camp made beautiful furniture.
Civilian Conservation Corps, California, March Field District, 1933. White, black, and Hispanic men stand in boxing trunks. Two are wearing boxing gloves. Although the CCC was segregated, athletic competitions between camps were often integrated.
Civilian Conservation Corps, California, March Field District, 1933. Men splitting firewood. The values learned in the Boy Scouts—self-reliance, piety, woodcraft, conservation—were all values of the CCC.
K.P.’s Rock Creek CCC Camp, California, June 21, 1933. The work relief agency’s erosion-control programs alone benefited forty million acres of farmland.
CCC “boys” from Camp F-167, Salmon National Forest, Idaho, ready to transplant beaver from a ranch location where they had been damaging crops to a forest watershed where they would help conserve water supply. All these men are from Brooklyn and the New York City area. Wildlife rehabilitation was a major component of the CCC.
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 85