American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  For his efforts, Disque might have been remembered as a war hero. But such was not to be his fate. While the SPD had achieved its mission of supplying spruce, the nation’s broader aircraft production program had developed into a costly disaster. No U.S.-manufactured aircraft ever saw action at the front, and politicians wanted to find someone accountable. Eventually, a congressional spotlight landed on Disque.

  In hearings before the House Subcommittee on Aviation, his activities were picked apart for days on end. Many voices sought to defend Disque—George Long, for instance, noted in a telegram “that without [Disque’s] efforts the entire problem of getting out lumber would not have been solved” and that he believed “in the former chief’s ability and integrity.” But the congressional committee’s chairman would have little of it. He and other hostile congressmen (mostly Republicans looking to capitalize on a weakening Democratic Party) forced Disque to justify every decision he’d made: Who had given him the authority to declare an eight-hour workday, a power that typically rested with Congress? What had made him think that the army’s mandate included the creation of a paramilitary unit? Why had he built such elaborate sawmills? The more Disque tried to explain, the sterner the chairman seemed to become. “Don’t make any attempt to philosophize,” the chairman scolded. At one point, Disque grew so frustrated that he responded to the chairman, “Don’t waive [sic] your fingers at me.” And then added, “I want the record to clearly indicate the attitude of the chairman.”

  The endless testimony took its toll on Disque. As a man who had sacrificed his future army career to help serve his country in the forests, he felt it absurd to reevaluate reasonable military decisions in the cold light of peace. The hearings turned Disque’s tendencies to assertiveness and self-assuredness into liabilities. Moreover, the constant questioning brought to the surface a latent paranoia—Disque became convinced that the enemies he had made during the war were out for retribution; near the top of his list was Gompers, who had continued to clash with Disque over the creation of the 4L.

  Ultimately, the congressional panel found Disque innocent of any malfeasance, but the process had left Disque wholly disillusioned and had smeared his reputation. He retreated to a career in the private sector. In the end, his willingness to tackle the spruce production problem, as he initially feared, had cost him a postwar military career, even if it might have saved the war effort.

  The termination of Disque’s army career, it should be noted, did not mark the end of the paramilitary labor organization he had created and overseen. Following the armistice, members of the 4L voted overwhelmingly to continue the organization as a peacetime labor body. In Disque’s estimation, “After a taste of better living nobody wanted to go back to the old ways.” The 4L’s continued presence kept the wobblies from regaining their footing, and, in consequence, the IWW would never again play a major role in the Pacific Northwest forests. But the 4L was not an infallible substitute for a peacetime labor union, wobbly or otherwise. The absence of SPD soldiers and of Disque left the organization vulnerable to abuse. Over time, the owners turned it into a promanagement organization and membership dropped accordingly. It finally died in the 1930s during the New Deal. Interestingly, this was roughly the same moment that the airplane industry began shifting from wooden to aluminum construction. Thus, in a fitting twist of fate, the 4L disappeared just as the Sitka spruce trees that had helped lead to its creation ceased being the key to military air power.

  SITKA SPRUCE, of course, was not the only American tree recruited into the war effort. The nation’s military operation required an incredible amount of wood, billions of board feet in total. And such immense needs affected commercial forests from coast to coast.

  Some of the heaviest use of wood concerned the effort simply to prepare the nation to enter the fight. Almost no facilities existed to house or train troops when America declared war, a result of Wilson’s long-standing insistence on formal neutrality. Once war was announced, the army immediately initiated an ambitious program to build temporary wooden shelters, known as cantonments, for the millions of soldiers it anticipated. This approach differed notably from that of earlier wars; as a 1918 article from American Forestry noted: “Housing of armies is no longer in tents, but in wooden cities.”

  Once soldiers arrived at these wooden cities, they discovered that the products from trees would be essential to many aspects of military life. Nearly all supplies arrived in wooden crates and containers; heat was frequently generated using wood fires; standard-issue rifles featured wooden stocks; troops and supplies traveled in wooden railway cars, many of which were hastily constructed in the spring of 1917. The list was seemingly endless, though not surprising. The military was simply transferring many of the conventions of civilian life—where wood remained a ubiquitous, relatively inexpensive option for countless tasks—to wartime needs.

  Within the European theater of combat, timber and other forest products were perhaps even more essential than on the home front. The Allied nations had needed to raid their forests to acquire sufficient wood for bridges, rail ties, telegraph poles, hospitals, cantonments, and innumerable other parts of the wartime infrastructure. Additionally, the trench system—a 350-mile-long network of interconnected dugouts that ran along the front from the North Sea to the Swiss border—consumed remarkable quantities of wood: To minimize the standing water that bred disease and wreaked havoc on soldiers’ feet, the trench floors were lined with wooden planks, known as “duckboards,” which needed to be frequently replaced. Soldiers at the front thus spent significant amounts of time using wood to repair their trenches, not only the floors but also the sides, the parapets, and the wooden platforms where they placed artillery. And should a soldier bravely attempt to cross the barbed-wire-filled no-man’s-land, he would pass by countless wooden stakes, millions of which supported the deadly wire matrix all along the front.

  For the American army, getting the timber needed to support combat operations in this European theater created a unique challenge. Raw lumber was an especially bulky commodity. Transporting it across the Atlantic was expensive and took up limited shipping space (airplane spruce being a notable exception). Thus, no matter how much wood the United States could produce, there was no simple way to bring sufficient quantities to the front.

  Shortly after the nation entered the war, commanders from the United States and the Allies met to find a solution to this dilemma. French representatives noted that their nation, even after three years of fighting, possessed plenty of standing commercial timber. That country’s professionally managed forests—the same ones that Gifford Pinchot had so admired as a young man—had withstood the assaults of war. As one French logger quipped, “Our forests have fought several wars before this one.” But France’s forests were in better shape than their foresters, whose ranks had been decimated during the war. An agreement was soon reached wherein France agreed to provide the U.S. military with trees if the American Expeditionary Force supplied the manpower.

  In the spring of 1917, the army put out a call for foresters and loggers to serve as specialized soldiers in the forests of Europe. This request was soon answered by the nation’s growing cadre of foresters, whose ranks had swelled dramatically since Pinchot’s days as head of the Forest Service. These volunteers, some ten thousand in total, then formed the Tenth Engineers (Forestry), part of the American Expeditionary Force. They headed to France in June 1917.

  The need for lumber at the front, however, quickly grew so great that this initial group proved incapable of meeting the American force’s demands, which had spiraled to 73 million board feet per month. To remedy this shortage, another unit of equal size headed over in early 1918. This brought the total number of Americans working in the French forests to twenty thousand. Over the course of the war, they produced more than 200 million feet of lumber, half a million cords of fuelwood, and millions more rail ties, barbed-wire stakes, and duckboards. Colonel James Woodruff, the forest unit’s commander, proudly to
ld his troops after the armistice: “Your part in winning the war has been as important as that of any other troops in the AEF.” And, indeed, this was so, for without sufficient wood supplies, the entire AEF operation would have been compromised.

  THE JOY OF the victory over Germany did not last long before the nation began to reflect on what it had cost. Though America had not endured casualties anywhere near the scale of its European allies, the country had still lost more than 117,000 of its sons and fathers. It was the largest loss of life in a military conflict since the Civil War, and communities across the nation sought ways to pay tribute to the men who had bravely sacrificed their lives for their country.

  The traditional approach was to construct monuments of bronze, marble, or stone, symbols meant to endure for centuries as testament to the cost of war. But some now turned to trees, which could stand as living memorials for the fallen.

  At first, this idea caused a degree of controversy. An editorial in the New York Times from early December 1918 stated, “A memorial of soldiers should have more enduring form.” It considered tablets placed on trees “a memorial in too petty and uncertain a style,” whereas a planned memorial arch would be “a dignified and enduring monument.”

  But the movement for memorial trees soon gained a major boost. On Christmas 1918, the American Forestry Association, the nation’s most powerful tree advocacy organization, issued a call for a nationwide effort to plant trees in honor of fallen soldiers.

  Once the AFA put out its challenge, the response was overwhelming. Periodicals around the country endorsed it through editorials. The New York Times described it as “one of the most comprehensive plans of forestration [sic] ever undertaken”—no mention was made of the paper’s earlier dismissiveness. Civic and church groups banded together to plant memorial trees in groves and along highways, including the recently completed Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental road. General Pershing, upon returning from Europe, made one of his initial acts the planting of memorial trees in Independence Square, Philadelphia, and in Central Park, New York—much of the famous stand of American elms in the Central Park Mall, which has largely survived into the present, actually began as a memorial to honor soldiers from Manhattan. President Warren G. Harding, who served after Wilson, once declared,

  I find myself altogether responsive to [the AFA’s] request for an appeal to the people to plant memorial trees. . . . I can hardly think of a more fitting testimonial of our gratitude and affection than this. It would be not only the testimony of our sentiments, but a means to beautify the country which these heroes have so well served.

  To support the memorial tree campaign, the AFA issued large amounts of literature, and most of it contained a short poem called “Trees.” The author was Joyce Kilmer, a New Jersey–born poet and editor at the New York Times, who had enlisted in 1917 and was killed on the battlefield in France. Before his death, his poem “Trees” had achieved some prominence, but the AFA campaign helped to spread the work’s fame much further. Eventually, it would become one of the most famous works of American verse, and millions of schoolchildren would learn its opening stanza, beloved by some, loathed by others: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”

  Memorial plantings, meanwhile, were not the only way that the AFA used trees to help heal the scars of warfare. The organization also looked to provide assistance in Europe. There, years of battle had extinguished not only millions of lives but millions of acres of forests. Where once there had stood healthy stands of trees, there was now tattered wasteland. According to a report that the AFA sponsored, the war had destroyed nearly all of Belgium’s forests and more than one and a half million acres in France. This information deeply troubled AFA president Charles Lathrop Pack, a wealthy businessman who would soon found the American Tree Association and author a number of popular books, including Trees as Good Citizens.

  Pack determined to organize and finance a project to deliver American tree seeds to the war-ravaged regions of Europe. The collection effort, possibly the largest seed gathering in history to that point, involved more than one thousand people and took several years. Pack arranged for the seeds to be delivered on the five-year anniversary of America’s entry into the war. In total, 100 million Douglas fir seeds were shipped off to Europe to help rehabilitate the decimated forests. An article in Outlook magazine noted, “[T]he trees planted from these seeds will serve not only as a memorial to American soldiers who fell beside their British and French comrades, but will reforest great areas devastated in a cause that was American as truly as it was British or French.”

  Interestingly, this was not the first time that America had sent trees to France as a sign of friendship. Some of the Douglas firs that Pack had financed would likely have been repopulating American trees that had been sent over 125 years earlier. Recall that in the 1780s the federal government had authorized the famed French botanist André Michaux to send tens of thousands of American trees to his home country, largely as a show of gratitude for that nation’s support of America during the Revolutionary War.

  Roosevelt’s Tree Army

  WORLD WAR I, among its other effects, had strengthened America’s global economic position. For the better part of ten years, growth and output increased steadily. This helped the postwar decade earn the designation the “Roaring Twenties.” However, much of this new wealth was tied up in speculation schemes and was increasingly concentrated at the very top of the social ladder. By the late 1920s, the rising economic instability and inequality was beginning to threaten the integrity of the entire financial system.

  The façade of sound money finally shattered in late October 1929. Over the course of barely a week, the New York Stock Exchange, the nation’s largest trading market, lost an unprecedented 30 percent of its value. This fantastic crash marked the start of the worst sustained economic collapse the country had ever experienced. The intricate web of relationships that composed the modern economy quickly unwound beneath a rush of bankruptcies and bad deals.

  The Great Depression, as this twelve-year period would soon be known as, wiped out millions of people’s life savings overnight. Unemployment skyrocketed. Countless Americans were turned into beggars and vagrants. Millions simply abandoned their homes, turning into a shiftless army of the hopeless. In the cities, many of those who had lost their jobs and homes clustered together in hastily built shantytowns. These destitute communities soon gained the name Hoovervilles, a knock at Republican president Herbert Hoover, who was occupying the Oval Office at the time the crisis began. Nearly every major city featured one or more of these Hoovervilles. There was even one in Central Park, known as “Hoover Valley”—the New York Times noted that “the name is officially recognized by Park Department heads.” Hoover Valley was located on the site of the present-day Great Lawn, not terribly far from the American elms that had been planted to honor those lost in the war.

  As president, Hoover hadn’t been able to do much to disconnect his name from the unendurable poverty that wracked the nation. For the most part, he favored the continuation of the same economic policies that had been in place before the crisis. His faith, like that of many Republicans, was that private markets would self-correct if the government got out of their way. But by 1932, three years into the crisis, the economy was reeling and unemployment had reached a dizzying 25 percent. These were not good figures for a president in an election year. And Hoover’s chances to retain power grew even dimmer with the emergence of his Democratic challenger, fifty-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt—handsome, ambitious, and preternaturally gifted.

  From his birth in 1882, Roosevelt had been bred to be a politician and leader. His mother, Sara, a strong, if not controlling, influence in his life, had worked assiduously during her son’s formative years in New York State to ensure that he developed these capacities. And, of course, it helped that the young man possessed the proper pedigree. He was not only from a wealthy family, but related to the inimitable bu
ll moose Teddy Roosevelt, both by blood (as fifth cousins) and by marriage (his wife, Eleanor, whom he married in 1905, was Teddy’s niece).

  With such credentials it was no surprise that Franklin’s political career had begun early. At the age of twenty-eight, after several years working as an attorney, he won election to the New York state senate. Soon his talent and ambition pushed him onto the national radar. In 1920, the Democratic Party named him as its vice presidential candidate; his ticket, however, lost to a Republican one led by the photogenic and otherwise feckless Warren G. Harding. Following the loss, Roosevelt’s career took a tragic turn; he contracted polio, which cost him the use of his legs. Such a personal catastrophe might have doomed the future of any politician—especially in an era when disabilities were seen as near-insurmountable political liabilities—but Roosevelt was not broken. He worked tirelessly to adapt to a radically altered existence and devised a series of complicated work-arounds to hide the fact that he was crippled. By the time that the Depression arrived in 1929, he had returned to public office as the governor of New York, where he was wildly popular.

  This, then, was the opponent who was campaigning against the fast-fading Hoover. But there was another side to Roosevelt, the man who would soon steer the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. Politics was only a portion of his persona. He was also, by all accounts, a tree lover of the highest order, a man who spent his free time, in his own words, “driving around planting lots of trees.”

  This often overlooked aspect of Roosevelt’s nature would profoundly effect his presidency and the nation.

  THE TREES WERE THERE for Roosevelt from the very start. He was born and raised in Hyde Park, New York, at an estate named Springwood, one of those grand landscaped properties that once populated the Hudson River Valley. At Springwood, there were numerous aging specimen trees to admire as well as an adjoining forest of more than four hundred acres. And this served as the young Roosevelt’s playground. Eleanor noted that he “knew every tree” on the place. Roosevelt, in reflecting on his youth, described himself as “a small boy [who] took especial delight in climbing an old tree, now unhappily gone, to pick and eat ripe sickle pears.”