by Eric Rutkow
With so many men suddenly in the forests, it was possible to implement forestry on a scale never before seen. The totals after the first year told much of the story. CCC workers built enough forest protection roads and trails that, according to American Forests, if these had been “placed end to end [they] would more than reach around the world.” Similarly, the number of firebreaks “if stretched in a continuous line, would twice encircle the boundaries of the United States.” Then there were the several hundred million trees planted to rehabilitate overworked lands, a reforestation effort unlike anything the nation or world had known. But this hardly captured the full scope of the CCC’s activities. In total, there were more than three hundred distinct tasks. CCC recruits built dams, erected fire towers, collected seeds, improved streams, combated erosion, controlled floods, and constructed recreational campsites. They also fought against tree diseases and pests—their labor was central in the doomed fight against Dutch elm disease. For all their efforts, the men of the CCC soon earned the nickname “Roosevelt’s Tree Army.”
The original authorization for the CCC had funded only a two-year period, which was set to end in April 1935. But the work of the organization—in improving the forests, in planting trees, in relieving unemployment, in building the character of young and otherwise idle men—seemed far from finished as this deadline began to approach. In October 1934, Roosevelt wrote the CCC’s director to say: “This kind of work must go on. I believe that the nation feels that the work of these young men is so thoroughly justified and, in addition, the benefits to the men themselves are so clear that the actual annual cost will be met without much opposition or complaint.”
His prediction proved correct. When time came to reauthorize the CCC’s funding, Congress not only pushed an extension through with broad bipartisan support, it also increased funding to some $600 million. As a result, hundreds of new CCC camps opened. And by the fall of 1935 the total number of men in the forests had ballooned to over half a million.
The CCC’s success soon persuaded Roosevelt to try to expand his vision even further. Several months after the congressional extension, he told a sympathetic audience: “Some of you who are here remember the ribald laughter about planting trees, this ‘crazy dream,’ this ‘political gesture.’ Well, . . . I see no reason why I should not tell you that these Camps, in my judgment, are going to be a permanent part of the policy of the United States Government.” Roosevelt was proposing to transform a relief organization, one designed to address an acute economic crisis, into a perpetual federal program. If he had his way, it would turn the government into the nation’s employer of last resort—a huge expansion of the social welfare state. It would also be a chance for Roosevelt to extend his passion for trees to future generations of young Americans.
The issue reached Congress in the spring of 1937, when the second round of CCC authorizations were set to expire. Roosevelt, at this point, seemed to be at the peak of his powers, having recently won a second term in a landslide election. It thus came as something of a shock when the House, which was majority Democratic, refused to grant him the permanent organization he sought. The New York Times called it “the largest Democratic defection in years.” The Chicago Tribune went even further: “The defeat of the President’s proposal was by far the most drastic he has received since he took office.”
Some had opposed the plan on the grounds that permanence signaled defeat in the fight against the Depression. Others feared that Roosevelt’s proposal, which would have required a reduction in the number of CCC participants for budgeting reasons, might remove camps from their districts, something that no representative wanted to explain to his constituents. Furthermore, the resistance might have been tied to congressional fears about unchecked presidential power on the heels of Roosevelt’s controversial plan to pack the Supreme Court with sympathetic justices. As historian John Salmond suggested, “There could hardly be a better way of protesting against what was considered to be a dangerous accretion of power . . . than to refuse to go along . . . on this issue,” which House leadership considered “Roosevelt’s ‘pet.’”
Nevertheless, House opposition to Roosevelt was not meant as a referendum against the CCC itself, which remained incontrovertibly popular. The final legislation, passed in June, extended the program for three more years. It seemed that the CCC might continue on a temporary basis well into the future.
But, in truth, the end was already in sight, even if few realized it. It began in September 1939, when Europe descended once more into total war. America’s political leadership, remembering the mistakes of the last war, soon began to advocate increased militarization in anticipation of potential involvement. In July 1940, the head of the CCC declared: “The Civilian Conservation Corps has a new objective as it marches forward in its eighth year. It is national defense.” This, however, was never the program’s intended purpose.
Over the next eighteen months, the CCC’s numbers began to dwindle as young men left for jobs in war industries and overall unemployment fell to 2 percent. A congressional committee then issued a call for the program’s termination in late December 1941, several weeks after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor that precipitated America’s entrance into the war. Roosevelt fought to save his creation, but it was too late. In the minds of Congress, the CCC was a relief organization, and once war arrived there was no longer any need. The most ambitious government employment program in American history—and one that had put trees at the center of the fight to save the nation’s economy—finally met its end in June 1942.
It was a remarkable near-decade-long run. In total, the CCC employed 2.5 million men, who put forth roughly 730,000 man-years of labor. They collectively planted over 3 billion trees, maintained or constructed more than 100,000 miles of trails, developed thousands of new campgrounds, rehabilitated hundreds of millions of acres of state and national forests, and assisted with projects, large and small, that affected the life of nearly every American. It was far and away the most well-regarded New Deal program, one Rex Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” called “too popular for criticism.”
There were, nonetheless, some shortcomings: The organization was plagued by charges of militarism; desertion rates were sometimes high; the quality of its conservation work was sometimes questioned; and its record on race relations was spotty—CCC camps were segregated (though, as a point of reference, the army did not formally desegregate until after World War II). But these failings were relatively minor issues in the broader story. Roosevelt had turned his fascination with trees and forestry into a program that fundamentally changed the nation, temporarily relieving unemployment, providing purpose to a generation of young men, implementing forestry on a scale never witnessed before or since, and planting roughly twenty-five trees for every person then living in the country.
The CCC, however, was not actually the most ambitious tree-planting scheme that Roosevelt proposed during his presidency. There was another project, one that sounded almost fantastical. An Iowa congressman would call it “one of the most ridiculous and silly proposals that was ever submitted to the American people.” But such criticism wouldn’t deter Roosevelt. Trees, he believed, held the key to solving the worst environmental catastrophe of his generation.
The Shelterbelt
WHEN ROOSEVELT FIRST ASSUMED the presidency in 1933, the nation was in the throes of not only an economic crisis but an ecological one as well. Starting around 1930, a severe drought struck the high plains, the region once known as the “Great American Desert.” This might not have been an issue of national importance had the region been uninhabited or kept as grasslands, but such was not the case. During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the high plains had been populated by several waves of settlers. These pioneers had unknowingly arrived during a period of above-average rainfall, which made the land appear amenable to agriculture. Millions of acres were transformed into farms, the rough sods broken by the plow. But when drought stru
ck, this cropland quickly dried out, and the winds that swept across the area soon stripped off the desiccated topsoil. This created something known colloquially as “black blizzards,” dust storms so severe that they could reach the Atlantic Ocean, some two thousand miles away, raining prairie soil all along their path. And the once-fertile farms of the high plains were suddenly left with worthless land, plunging millions into poverty.
One potential solution to this catastrophe, which became known as the “Dust Bowl,” first occurred to Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. It was during a day of blistering heat, when his touring train was detained outside Butte, Montana. Roosevelt exited his car and gazed upon a region denuded of trees and other vegetation, the result of noxious fumes from a nearby copper-smelting plant. Though this scene was actually several hundred miles to the west of the Dust Bowl, it nonetheless reminded the future president of the situation unfolding all across the high plains. Roosevelt, who had spent a career using forestry techniques to improve his home at Hyde Park and who had just announced to the country his plans to create the CCC, then had an epiphany: What if the answer to the Dust Bowl also rested with trees?
The concept of using trees to improve the conditions of the Great American Desert was certainly not new. It traced back to the earliest settlements of the mid-nineteenth century. J. Sterling Morton had argued that because “the shade and beauty of trees was everywhere absent . . . our conditions impelled us to plant trees.” Then, of course, there was the ill-fated, but powerful, movement claiming that trees would bring the rains, which had resulted in the disastrous Timber Culture Act of 1873. The belief that forests brought the rains, however, had been largely discredited by the end of the nineteenth century, particularly following a period of severe drought across the Great Plains in the 1890s (the last major drought before the Dust Bowl).
Roosevelt, however, wasn’t suggesting that tree planting might change the region’s climate. Rather, he was considering the possibility that a sufficient quantity of trees might protect the topsoil by creating a shield against the brutal winds that whipped across the region.
This idea was rooted in a principle that farmers had been aware of for eons: By blocking the wind, trees could protect crops and the soil. Examples of trees being used as windbreaks abounded. For instance, California citrus growers routinely planted stands of fast-growing, imported eucalyptus trees to shield their precious orange trees from gusts coming off the Pacific Ocean. As a 1908 pamphlet on eucalyptus explained, “In unprotected orchards, nearly the entire crop is frequently blown from the trees, or so scarred and bruised that the grade and market value are much reduced.”
Roosevelt was far from the first to see the potential for windbreaks in the Great American Desert. Many prairie farmers planted trees for this purpose, and Roosevelt’s own cousin Teddy had beaten him to the punch by nearly thirty years. At the 1905 American Forestry Congress—the meeting that famously led to the creation of the U.S. Forest Service—the elder Roosevelt had stated, “The use of forests as windbreaks out on the plains, where the tree does not grow unless men help it, is of enormous importance.”
What made Roosevelt’s 1932 Montana epiphany remarkable, then, was not its originality, but its scale. Roosevelt never hesitated to dream big. The CCC, for example, would become the biggest nonmilitary workforce in U.S. history. Several of his New Deal programs—such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Central Valley Project—sought to transform tens of millions of acres at once. The Great Plains windbreak would be no different. Roosevelt wanted to build a forest, several miles wide, from the Canadian border straight down into Texas, a giant barrier that would arrest the wind and mitigate the worst consequences of the drought. It would be the ultimate expression of the power of tree planting.
But this wasn’t something Roosevelt could undertake immediately upon entering office. There were too many questions to be answered first. Unlike the case of the CCC, where Roosevelt had a clear vision that grew from his experience as governor, the high plains windbreak was far outside his field of knowledge. He may have known plenty about planting trees in the well-watered soils of Hyde Park, but that meant little when dealing with the arid climate of the Great American Desert. Thus, shortly after his inauguration, Roosevelt reached out to the head of the Forest Service for advice.
The chief forester provided a thorough response in August 1933. His memorandum agreed with the president that a windbreak might improve the situation, but argued that a solid forest was impractical and “would take a large area of farmland out of cultivation.” A better solution would be to plant hundred-foot-wide strips of trees, spaced apart in intervals, along a belt that ran the length of the United States and occupied roughly one hundred miles.
This new proposal met with the president’s approval, and he encouraged its further development. The Forest Service, in response, began to prepare a full report analyzing the many technical, logistical, and political challenges involved. It was a remarkable amount of background research, especially for an administration that tended to implement interesting ideas long before the minutiae were sorted out. But there was reason to proceed cautiously; a project of this magnitude, in a region where tree culture had never thrived, was likely to garner its fair share of hostility.
In the late spring of 1934, the completed Forest Service report reached Roosevelt, and the timing couldn’t have been more appropriate. The drought, at this point, seemed to be spiraling out of control. Black blizzards were sweeping across the country. It was raining dust in New York City, Washington, D.C., and even on ships cruising the Atlantic. Those living on the Great Plains were suffering unbearable hardship. To address the worsening situation, Congress announced in June that it was making $525 million available for immediate drought relief efforts.
With the nation abuzz about dust storms, Roosevelt finally announced the proposal that he had been contemplating for nearly two years. On July 11, while on vacation aboard the USS Houston, he issued an executive order calling “for the planting of forest protection strips in the Plains Region as a means of ameliorating drought conditions.” The proclamation authorized $15 million to be taken from the drought relief funds for this purpose. This would be the first installment of a projected $75 million necessary to construct the world’s largest windbreak. The project quickly came to be known as the Shelterbelt.
As Roosevelt anticipated, the July 11 announcement unleashed a storm of controversy. Some of the harshest debates took place within the forestry profession itself. Those who advocated the plan described it as “the most unique and daring forestry undertaking in the history of the country.” These proponents believed that forestry had advanced enough since the late nineteenth century to successfully bring trees to the high plains, at least “on the favorable sites.” But others worried that the Shelterbelt risked compromising all the work that foresters had done to establish the field as a credible, scientific profession.
The nation’s newspaper editors seemed to side mostly with the opposition. One writer artfully summed up their sentiments by quoting the closing line of Kilmer’s famed poem: “They pointed out that only God can make a tree . . . that if He had wanted a forest on the wind-scoured prairies of Nebraska and Kansas, He would have put it there . . . and that for FDR to rush in where The Almighty had feared to tread was not only silly, but possibly blasphemous.” And piling on to this mountain of naysaying was a strong majority of Congress. According to historian Wilmon Droze, “To many politicos, the idea of spending $75,000,000 in an area where few voters lived and for a project of uncertain merits was politically unwise, grossly unfair, and hardly in keeping with the promises to balance the budget.”
None of this vitriol should have much mattered. The funds, after all, had already been allocated by Congress through the June relief measure. But then Roosevelt’s plan hit an unforeseen snag. The nation’s comptroller, a Harding appointee who seemed to take joy in holding up monies for some New Deal programs, determined that the president’s r
equested $15 million did not constitute “immediate drought relief” as dictated by the June legislation; the rationale was that tree planting only paid dividends years later.
There was little that Roosevelt could do to circumvent the comptroller. The president may have been the most powerful man in the country, but occasionally the subtle inner workings of the federal bureaucracy proved more powerful still. In the end, Roosevelt was forced to reduce his request to $1 million, simply to fund preliminary work.
It was a trifling amount—especially compared to the $600 million that Congress would soon grant for the CCC—but it was nonetheless a start. The Forest Service used the funds to begin surveying the lands, arrange seedling suppliers, and reach out to farmers whose land they would need to lease for planting. Roosevelt did his part behind the scenes as well to ensure the viability of a program that he had described to Charles Lathrop Pack as “my baby.” Ultimately, Shelterbelt work would be able to commence the following growing season, even if the scale was reduced by an amount that must have struck Roosevelt as tragic.
Planting finally began in March 1935. The first tree was put in place at a farm near Mangum, Oklahoma. There was a small ceremony, though it didn’t receive much attention. Plantings continued throughout the spring growing season, not only in Oklahoma, but also Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. In total, Forest Service and federal relief workers managed to establish 125 miles of Shelterbelt, covering some twenty-five hundred acres.
Tree strips in the Shelterbelt typically included ten rows of vegetation. The outer rows contained small trees or shrubs, most commonly chokecherry, lilac, mulberry, Russian olive, and wild plum. The inner rows featured quick-growing, long-lived, taller trees that had been selected for their tolerance of the unwelcoming climate. Some tree varieties were native, while others had been discovered abroad, often the result of research first conducted by plant explorers from David Fairchild’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction. The most widely planted species were cottonwood, green ash, and Chinese elm, which each appeared in all six participating states. Other tree types that were popular in specific portions of the Shelterbelt included bur oak, hackberry, honey locust, ponderosa pine, post oak, red cedar, and willow.
