Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America
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Roosevelt took a shine to Edward S. Morse, a visiting professor at Groton who taught him about ants, butterflies, and other insects. Morse was one of the founders and the curator of the esteemed Peabody Academy of Science in Groton, as well as editor of American Naturalist. With the rector’s permission, Morse led students on a trip to a Middlesex County forest to learn how to collect field specimens using brooms, vials, cheesecloth, nets, and glass jars. This romp led Franklin to engage even more with the Natural History Society. “It will be most interesting as well as instructive, and we are all enthusiastic,” Roosevelt wrote to his parents. “Our idea is not to let everyone into the Society but only those who care for natural history and who will take an interest and really work.”8
Morse took Roosevelt and his birder friends at Groton on another outing, this time to collect insects, leaves, and soil samples. Franklin learned about the Native American tribes—the Nashua and Wachuset—that had lived along the Nashua River, hunting, fishing, and growing crops on small plots along the river. They were the original custodians of wild New England. “Professor Morse started by turning over old logs and stones, etc.,” Roosevelt wrote to his parents. “He also gave us a good idea about what to collect, how to preserve and label it and other things about the new museum.”9
While at Groton, FDR heard about a lecture that Dr. Chapman had given at the Linnaean Society of New York in which he argued that the newest generation of bird enthusiasts—which included Franklin Roosevelt and Maunsell Crosby—should retire their guns and taxidermy kits in favor of the camera.10 The “Chapman doctrine” made a deep impression on FDR, and he mostly stopped shooting birds in order to study them; however, he did occasionally continue to hunt ducks and geese from blinds.
Because Franklin so enjoyed Groton’s Natural History Society, he agreed to manage the school’s summer camp on Squam Lake in New Hampshire.11 Serving as part of the faculty, Roosevelt was to teach poor boys from urban areas, aged ten to fourteen, about forestry, bird-watching, camping, swimming, and canoeing. According to a pamphlet published by the Groton School, the camp’s purpose was to teach the poor city lads “the differences of environment” in New England.12 Franklin quickly formed a kinship with many of the first-time campers, taking them out to explore the lake’s thirty named islands (and numerous unnamed islets) and watch the common loons (Gavia immer) dive underwater for fish. This first visit to Squam Lake also inaugurated his lifelong interest in protecting the rugged White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine. The most famous peak, 6,288-foot Mount Washington—part of a line of summits known as the Presidential Range—seemed to Roosevelt to be the Mount Rainier of New England. During his time at Squam Lake, Roosevelt pondered why the forest-lush East Coast didn’t have large national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite where American young people could camp in the pristine wilderness.
While Franklin was at Groton, public health became inextricably linked to environmental degradation. Giant oil storage tanks, chemical plants, factory smokestacks, and power lines were at war with the natural world. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie shocked a meeting of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce by pleading for someone to get rid of the “smoke nuisance” that was causing citizens to flee from western Pennsylvania in search of fresh air. Carnegie, an industrialist-conservationist, was asking the federal government to establish antipollution laws. During Franklin’s junior year, Congress passed the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, which aimed to preserve navigable waters by outlawing dumping or dredging without permission from the Army Corps of Engineers. Around the same time, the Missouri supreme court ruled in Missouri v. Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago that Chicago had to maintain a proper drainage canal for sewage: “It is a question of the first magnitude whether the destiny of the great rivers is to be the sewers of the cities along their banks or to be protected against everything which threatens their purity.”13
The highlight of FDR’s time at boarding school came when thirty-eight-year-old Theodore Roosevelt visited Groton in June 1897. TR, who had served as superintendent of the New York City police commission until earlier that year, regaled the Groton boys with law-and-order stories from the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen.
Having just finished his four-volume The Winning of the West (1889–1896), TR had adopted wilderness conservation as another of his favored public policy causes. With vivid and commanding personalities, only the two “Johns of the Mountains”—John Muir and John Burroughs—embodied the spirit of the great American outdoors more vividly than TR. Shortly after FDR was born, TR, determined to save North American hoofed mammals from extinction, had cofounded both the Boone and Crockett Club and the American Bison Society. That afternoon at Groton, TR invited Franklin to spend Independence Day picnicking with his family at Sagamore Hill, his estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island; an appreciative FDR accepted the offer without hesitation. That long July weekend with his hero at Sagamore Hill, chatting nonstop about North American plants and animals, proved eye opening for FDR.
In 1887, when Franklin was five years old, TR had published a chapbook, or booklet, called Summer Birds of the Adirondacks. Following the picnic, inspired by “Uncle Ted,” FDR started collecting texts about North American birds as if they were postage stamps. “I have not got [Edgar Alexander] Mearns’ Birds of the Hudson Highlands but for several years have tried to get it, as it is very good,” Franklin wrote to his parents after talking with Theodore. “In fact, I wrote to Dr. Mearns myself but he could not let me have a copy. He was I believe a great friend of Mr. Arthur Pell as he mentions Mr. P in another pamphlet I have of his, The Vertebrate Fauna of the Highlands.”14
As part of a TR ritual, all of the children were told to scurry down a sand dune to Oyster Bay. “It was awful steep,” FDR recalled. “The sand went down with you and you were darned lucky if you didn’t end [up] halfway down going head over heels.” Climbing back up was even harder. For every two steps upward there would be a step backward. But the kids kept at it. The lesson: never give up.15
The weekend at Oyster Bay encouraged FDR to emulate his distant cousin’s ardent conservation stance. Once TR became a folkloric Spanish-American War hero in July 1898, FDR took to wearing gold-rimmed pince-nez just like his Uncle Ted’s.16 Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook noted that this affectation made Franklin “look a wee bit silly.”17 Nevertheless, being related to the famous Rough Rider was a boon for Franklin at Groton, a “mark of distinction,” a one-up on peers.18
For all of their shared passion for the natural world, TR and FDR had noteworthy differences in their respective conservation philosophies. Young FDR preferred soaking up pastoral settings, like those Frederic Church painted, while TR wanted to get lost in the wilderness like Natty Bumppo. TR enjoyed bivouacking in the untamed Rocky Mountains and Dakota Badlands; FDR, by contrast, wanted to take daylong hikes along the Hudson and absorb the biological essence of all he encountered. TR had a bloodlust for big-game trophies, while Franklin largely wanted to protect animals, even hedgehogs and chipmunks, from human-inflicted harm. TR liked having dozens of exotic pets, including a badger and macaw; FDR preferred a dog. TR got terribly seasick; FDR was a first-class salt. Overall, however, FDR’s conservation convictions—big forests and wildlife protection—followed the pattern laid out by his illustrious relative.
In the spring of 1900, during Franklin’s final semester at Groton, Congressman John Lacey of Iowa introduced America’s first serious wildlife protection bill. The Lacey Act would prohibit the interstate transportation of unlawfully killed game animals. Worried that the once ubiquitous passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was on the verge of extinction, Lacey took to the House floor to protest the “slaughter and destruction” of wild creatures. That year, with progressivism cresting, Congress passed the Lacey Act to sponsor wildlife protection efforts.19 That same year Theodore Roosevelt, who was now governor of New York (he served in the years 1899 and 1900), signed the Davis Palisades Act, which established Palisades Interstate Park in New Yor
k and New Jersey.
The Palisades are the majestic cliffs that stretch along the west side of the lower Hudson River. Under pressure from quarrying operations, they had already been clear-cut of trees and seemed doomed to end up in rubble supporting Manhattan’s new skyscrapers. The Roosevelts were among the many New Yorkers who supported the fight to save the Palisades, an effort that finally succeeded during TR’s governorship. During his term, short as it was, Roosevelt was also a cheerleader for the continuing effort to maintain New York’s mountain regions through public-private parks. Speaking before the state legislature, Governor Roosevelt argued strongly that the Adirondacks and Catskills “should be great parks kept in perpetuity for the benefit and enjoyment of our people.”20
During Franklin’s Groton years, some girls from nearby Boston-area finishing schools joked that the F.D. in his name stood for “feather duster,” an insult for a boy whom they considered soft and pampered. In his final term of Groton, when other boys were writing home about friends or the girls they had met, Franklin waxed poetic when he wrote to his mother about red-winged blackbirds and robins. “I had a most delightful experience yesterday,” he wrote about his visit to the Cambridge home museum of William Brewster, president of the AOU and owner of “the finest private collection of American birds in the world.”21
After FDR graduated from Groton in 1900, college was the obvious next step in his life. James Roosevelt was opposed to Franklin’s wish to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. An enthusiasm for sailing at Campobello, he reasoned, didn’t translate into spending one’s whole life in a naval officer’s uniform. Following his family’s wish, Franklin attended Harvard to pursue a career in business or law, even though his primary interests were in naval history and natural history. For all of his love of forestry, FDR never considered a career in the field. The U.S. Bureau of Forestry hadn’t even been created until 1898. As FDR applied for college in 1900, though, Yale was launching a strong new school of forestry and the Society of American Foresters was formed. Change was coming, but meanwhile, the nation faced rampant deforestation, soil erosion, and waterway pollution.
II
Franklin Roosevelt adjusted well to life at Harvard. His awkward years at Groton behind him, he was ever more social. Curious by nature, he made friends easily and applied himself fairly well to his classes. Because of his aristocratic upbringing and friendly countenance, no one yet realized he was a master at reading people. Just as his first semester was winding down in early December 1900, Franklin had written to his seventy-two-year-old “Papa” about perhaps getting a “change of air” in South Carolina to help restore his deteriorating health.22 But James died a few days later, of endocarditis, in New York City.23 A bereft FDR honored his father as the most honest, decent person to ever grace the Hudson River Valley.
The will left Springwood to Sara, a widow at forty-six, but it was understood that the responsibility of managing the lands fell to Franklin. “I am grateful to have had Franklin here these first dreadful days,” she wrote. “I try to keep busy, but it is all hard. . . . I had all of F’s birds out to dust and air.”24 Not long after James Roosevelt died, Sara read her old diaries to conjure up fond memories of her esteemed husband. The effect was to remind her of the joy James had gotten from the Hudson River, the Adirondacks, and Campobello. “I remember what a delight all the beauty of nature was to him,” Sara wrote to Franklin, “and how he could enjoy it even when he fell ill.”25
While on break from Harvard that Christmas season of 1900, Franklin carefully inspected the Springwood grounds with his mother. With James gone, the obligation of maintaining the estate seemed daunting. The Main House, solid with its thick walls of stone, was in relatively good shape; there were just a few rotted beams and exasperating leaks. Franklin was thus able to focus elsewhere, learning what he could about soil management, in hopes of arresting erosion and planting trees at Springwood.
Turning on the green shaded lamp on his desk, he pored over agronomist journals and almanacs in search of cogent information about property maintenance. It sickened him to learn about how virgin stands of hemlock, birch, and spruce trees in Dutchess County had been heavily logged and then burned, leaving the landscape strewn with slash (even though there were laws against it).
If FDR had a quasi–father figure after James’s death, it was Uncle Frederic Delano, his mother’s brother. After graduating from Harvard in 1885, Frederic began a career as an apprentice machinist with the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy (CBQ) railroad. But city planning was his passion. Intellectually, he was a child of the Downing and Olmsted school and the burgeoning “city beautiful” movement. While living in Chicago, he served on the Chicago Planning Commission and became famous for his highly publicized efforts to plant trees around every building and keep the shoreline of Lake Michigan as pristine as possible. Young Franklin, whose own favorite president was Thomas Jefferson, relished the fact that Uncle Frederic was a patron of all things having to do with George Washington. As a historical preservationist, Delano helped conserve three sites associated with Washington: Morristown, New Jersey; Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and Newburgh, New York. And he worked with landscape experts Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the landmark McMillan Plan of 1902 for The Improvement of the Park Systems of the District of Columbia.
Trees were to Delano the great givers of life. A large eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) growing in the hamlet of Balmville (in the town of Newburgh) was to Delano a “living witness” to the Hudson River Valley’s glorious past. Whenever young Franklin visited his uncle at the Delano family estate (Algonac), they would pause at the historic tree. The Balmville tree, in fact, was the oldest example of this species on record in the United States, probably dating from 1699. According to a nineteenth-century fable, it sprang from the riding crop of George Washington during his encampment in Newburgh in the early 1780s. But dendrologists, immune to folklore, knew that the gnarled tree began life decades before Washington was born. Situated in a glen at what had once been a Native American thoroughfare and a colonial-era crossroads, the Balmville tree—eighty-five feet tall, with a circumference of approximately twenty-five feet—was beloved by George Washington, Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederic Delano, and FDR. What they all admired was the tree’s indefatigable will to survive.26
As an adult, FDR would often drive around Newburgh, shut off the engine, and ponder life at the Balmville tree. It became a shrine for him.27 (The record-setting tree at last came down in August 2015.)
It was also Uncle Frederic who nurtured FDR’s passion for planting violets at Springwood. Throughout the mid-Hudson, a consortium of violet growers maintained greenhouses, work sheds, and tank houses outfitted with windmills (to guarantee the water supply). Just off the Albany Post Road in Hyde Park, seasonal laborers could be seen picking violets, bunching them into bouquets of one hundred, and wrapping them in wax paper before dropping them into corrugated boxes for shipment. Violets were a huge cash crop in the Hudson River Valley, much as tulips had been in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.28
With help from Uncle Fred, FDR learned how to transplant trees in May if the earth was loose and the best ways to ensure that soil retained its moisture. He learned the agricultural arts of pruning, mulching, spacing, watering, and harvesting from his loyal groundskeeper, William Plog. While about 90 percent of Dutchess County had been logged, the regular rainfall granted the mid-Hudson wonderful recuperative powers. Taking charge of the acreage at Springwood, Roosevelt adopted five rules to prevent the gullying of plowland: (1) create terraced slopes with rock walls and embankments; (2) refrain from removing natural brush or sod from the Hudson’s watercourse; (3) plow on contours (not up and down slopes); (4) nurture fallow land vigilantly; and (5) while irrigating, guarantee that water will not drain to form unwelcome gullies. In the process, FDR developed a keen understanding of such soil conservation practices as crop rotation and cover cropping.29
E
ven back at Harvard, FDR was becoming something of an apprentice farmer in order to fill his father’s shoes. From one of his science books, he learned that all natural resources, except subterranean minerals, were soil-based; therefore, the destruction of soil could lead only to human despair and environmental degradation. All land needed to be managed carefully so that its soil could stay healthy. With patience and financial investment, Franklin came to believe, abused land could be brought back from ruin. Devastated forests could thrive again as second or third growth after extensive replanting efforts—and a few years’ wait—were undertaken. “I just wish I could be at home,” he lamented to his mother in early 1901, “to help mark the trees.”30
Just as James Roosevelt had wanted, Franklin prepared to become a lawyer or an investment banker. A compulsive joiner, FDR took to the Dickey, the Fly Club, the Hasty Pudding, the Memorial Society, the Political Club, the Signet Society, the Social Service Society, the St. Paul’s Society, and the Yacht Club. He had helped found Harvard’s Political Society, and had been elected secretary of the university Glee Club. But FDR’s great distinction at Harvard was working his way up the ranks of the newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, from assistant managing editor to managing editor to president.31 “I must say frankly that I remember my own adventures as an editor,” he later recalled, “rather more clearly than I do my routine work as a student.”32