Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  During the summer of 1901 Franklin, accompanied by his mother, crossed the Atlantic for England and Norway, where he marveled at the beautiful fjords. While in Paris, they learned that President William McKinley had been shot in Buffalo by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, but had initially survived the assassination attempt. His vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, rushed to Buffalo from the Adirondacks, where he had been hiking in the deep woods. By the time Sara and Franklin returned, docking in Hoboken, New Jersey, Theodore had been sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president.

  From the “bully pulpit,” Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that natural resource management was his primary public policy concern; under his aegis, conservation—of forests, soil, waterways, and wildlife—became the new watchword. The chief of the new U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, defined TR’s expansive progressive philosophy: “The conservation of natural resources is the key to the future. It is the key to the safety and prosperity of the American people, and of the people of the world, for all time to come. The very existence of our Nation, and of all the rest, depends on conserving the resources which are the foundation of its life. This is why conservation is the greatest material question of all.”33

  Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, in Simsbury, Connecticut. His father, James W. Pinchot, was a wealthy dry goods merchant who owned a large, forested estate near Milford, Pennsylvania. Like the Roosevelts, Gifford toured Europe frequently, admiring the Continent’s well-managed woodlands. Enamored of forest ecology, Pinchot, on graduating from Yale University in 1889, completed postgraduate work at the French National School of Forestry in Nancy. Pinchot returned to Pennsylvania in 1890 with a missionary zeal to start a forestry management revolution throughout the United States. Thanks to family connections, he was hired by railroad tycoon George Vanderbilt to manage Biltmore, his twenty-thousand-acre estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Pinchot’s restoration work at Biltmore proved that a forest could be maintained as cropland and be properly preserved while yielding an annual profit.34

  The well-traveled Pinchot transformed Biltmore into the “cradle of American forestry” and gave a public face to the honorable calling of silviculture, the study of trees (“what they are and how they grow and how they are protected, handled, harvested, and reproduced”).35

  Just before leaving office early in 1897, President Grover Cleveland acted on Pinchot’s recommendation that new forest preserves be established in the West, designating twenty-one million acres for the cause. Westerners with an eye on timbering those public lands, blamed Pinchot for Cleveland’s “locking up” of timber resources, and the term Pinchotism became synonymous with the land-grabbing policies of the “feds.” Yet dozens of private timber companies and tree growers wanted to consult with Pinchot about their milling operations. Alongside fellow silviculturist Henry S. Graves, Pinchot was a driving force behind the establishment of the Yale School of Forestry in 1900.36 His books The White Pine (1896) and The Adirondack Spruce (1898) became essential texts on how to manage North America’s eastern forests.

  Theodore Roosevelt treated Gifford Pinchot like a son. Both men believed that trees growing above a certain elevation—around 2,500 feet—shouldn’t be felled, because they were critical to watersheds. Together they wrestled, bird-watched, hiked the Adirondacks, and scorned lumber interests that plundered forests. Four years into TR’s presidency, Pinchot was hired as the chief of the revamped U.S. Forest Service, a post he held from 1905 to 1910.37 They aggressively established more than one hundred national forests, saving huge tracts of woodlands in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountain states. On a single day in 1908 TR, on Pinchot’s recommendation, established forty-five new national forests in eleven western states. But in 1910, Pinchot would be forced out of the Forest Service—for insubordination—by President William Howard Taft.

  FDR’s ever-increasing enthusiasm for proper forestry was stoked by his admiration for Pinchot. While at Harvard, FDR marveled at how Pinchot turned Grey Towers, his family home overlooking the Delaware River in Milford, Pennsylvania, into a world-class “tree nursery.” (In the twenty-first century, the town of Milford billed itself as the “Birthplace of the American Conservation Movement” because of the connection with Pinchot.) Although they were members of different political parties, FDR always credited Pinchot with setting him “on the conservation road.”38

  Three busy and fun years at Harvard had passed by quickly for FDR. His classmates thought he was a “good fellow” and a regular sport, neither petty nor pompous, yet he was known for his aristocratic air. While he was excluded from the elite Porcellian Club—a huge slight because his father and TR had both been members—his magical surname marked him as someone to watch. The way he signed his letters—F. D. R.—made peers think he was already an accomplished businessman and power player.39

  Of all the term papers FDR wrote at Harvard, “The Roosevelt Family,” for History 101, is the most historically revealing, particularly because of Franklin’s exaggerated insistence that his Dutch ancestors were, in fact, egalitarian. “One reason—perhaps the chief—of the virility of the Roosevelts is this very democratic spirit,” Roosevelt wrote. “They have never felt that because they were born in good position they could put their hands in their pockets and succeed. They have felt, rather, that being born in a good position, there was no excuse for them if they did not do their duty by the community, and it is because this idea was instilled in them from their birth that they have in nearly every case proved good citizens.”40

  Roosevelt graduated in June 1903, earning an AB in history. He had not blossomed into an intellectual at Harvard; the activity that affected him most from his college days onward was his obsessive stamp collecting.41 This was no mere hobby: Roosevelt gained vast knowledge about American history and the world at large from stamps. “One thing I have always specialized in ever since I started collecting postage stamps at the age of ten years is geography,” Roosevelt said, “and especially the geography of the United States.”42 Rarely a day passed at Harvard when he didn’t fiddle around with his stamp books. In the coming years Roosevelt would accept honorary memberships in a host of philately clubs including the Masonic Stamp Club, Washington Philatelic Society, Fort Orange Stamp Club of Albany, and Empire State Philatelic Association. And his passion for forest conservation also grew. In 1929 the Harvard alumni association sent FDR a questionnaire for the twenty-fifth reunion of his graduating class. Bragging about his silviculture prowess, the squire of Hyde Park explained that he’d “rather plant trees than cut them down.”43

  After graduation, Franklin went to Europe for the summer. On returning to New York City, he lived in a well-furnished apartment his mother had rented for him and prepared to study at Columbia Law School. Legal studies in general bored him, but the grind of law was preferable to being a ne’er-do-well living off his monthly trust fund stipend of $1,000. Although most of his new friends in New York were from the privileged classes of the Main Line in Philadelphia, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and Back Bay in Boston, he was more socially comfortable with people who had grown up in the scenic Hudson River Valley.

  III

  LEFT TO RIGHT: Franklin, Sara, and Eleanor Roosevelt at Algonac, Sara’s girlhood home, which overlooked the Hudson River from the west. The picture was taken on May 7, 1905, five years after the death of James Roosevelt. Franklin and Eleanor had been married six weeks previously and were soon to leave on a three-month honeymoon in Europe.

  In the summer of 1902, on a train from Manhattan to Rhinebeck, Franklin Roosevelt bumped into Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed. Within eighteen months, Franklin and Eleanor were engaged. The widowed Sara thought that it was wrongheaded for two Roosevelts to get married—no matter how distant their relation. She didn’t want to lose Franklin and thought them both too young to wed. Her attempts to derail the relationship—she even took FDR on a Caribbean vacation to distract him—proved futile. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1905, Frank
lin and Eleanor were married in New York by Reverend Endicott Peabody. The twenty-year-old bride’s “Uncle Ted,” President Theodore Roosevelt—who had trounced his Democratic rival Alton B. Parker in the 1904 presidential election—was supportive of the union. “I am fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter; and I like you, and trust you, and believe in you,” TR wrote to Franklin just before the wedding. “No other success in life—not the Presidency, or anything else—begins to compare with the joy and happiness that come in and from the love of the true man and the true woman. . . . Golden years open before you.”44

  Franklin and Eleanor made an exceedingly good match. Born on October 11, 1884, in New York City, Eleanor Roosevelt spent much of her girlhood upriver from Hyde Park in Tivoli, at her grandmother’s mansion. The Catskills were her favored range. Sometimes when Eleanor was a child she visited Springwood for picnics or afternoon tea. Her father, Elliott Roosevelt—Theodore’s brother—was a great outdoorsman, world traveler, and big-game hunter. Elliott was afflicted with depression and alcoholism; he was always on the run, getting into trouble with booze, drugs, and women. When Elliott got one of the family’s servants pregnant, TR cursed his wayward brother as a “flagrant man swine.”45

  Eleanor never held her father’s considerable faults against him. She thought when he rhapsodized about the changing seasons on Slide Mountain or the wild turkeys in the Berkshires, it was pure poetry. In 1932 she would edit a selection of his letters about wilderness adventures in a volume called Hunting Big Game in the Eighties. Eleanor’s father had passed on to his daughter an appreciation for rural living. “The quiet of the night in the country was such a contrast [to] the continuing sounds of any city, that just the opening of the windows, and listening to the occasional creaking of a branch or the distant cracking of the ice in the brook, was restful in itself,” Eleanor wrote in 1936. “Those who never sink into this peace of nature lose a tremendous well of strength, for there is something healing and life-giving in the mere atmosphere surrounding a country house.”46

  Although Eleanor Roosevelt grew up in privileged surroundings, embraced by New York high society, she endured a tragic childhood. Her mother, Anna Rebecca Hall, died of diphtheria on December 7, 1892. Her father committed suicide two years later. Eleanor had every right to hate her disappointing father, but she did not. “With my father I was perfectly happy,” she wrote in her autobiography This Is My Story. “I loved his voice. . . . Above all I loved the way he treated me.”47 Eleanor, alert and curious, was cared for by her maternal grandmother, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, in the river town of Tivoli. Feeling abandoned and depressed, judging herself an “ugly duckling,” Eleanor found solace in learning.48 At age fifteen, Eleanor was sent to Allenswood Academy in London, England. The headmistress, Marie Souvestre, taught her to be intellectually brave and to challenge the status quo when necessary.

  Unsympathetic observers of the Roosevelts’ marriage have tended to note that they had little in common, which simply was not the case. Both were proud of their bucolic Hudson River Valley roots. Eleanor was Franklin’s steadfast companion, sharing a love for the flora and fauna of New York. Added to that foundation was a shared affection for the blue-green rippling ridges of the Catskills and the Shawangunks, a group of mountains just to their south. Decades later, when Eleanor traveled to southern California in 1942 to bask in the Los Angeles sunshine, she noted that while she enjoyed Malibu and Beverly Hills, the great clay banks of the Hudson River were still first in her heart. “Nature is not so kind [in the Hudson Valley], winters are hard, summers are sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, the lot of the farmer and gardener is always a gamble, and yet I like the change of the seasons,” she wrote. “I would miss never having a landscape covered by snow. The coming of spring seems to be more wonderful because of the extremes that lie before it and beyond it. No coloring in the world seems to me more brilliant than an autumn hillside, with scarlet and gold maple and russet oak leaves mixed in with the evergreen of pine and hemlocks.”49

  Franklin and Eleanor’s first honeymoon was spent at Hyde Park. In June, the newlyweds sailed across the Atlantic for a three-month honeymoon around Europe, starting and ending in England. In the Swiss Alps Franklin snapped photographs of peaks sheathed in ice and enormous skies, as if on assignment for National Geographic. Franklin and Eleanor dutifully wrote to Sara with updates on the Dolomites, Tyrol, and the Black Forest. Franklin rhapsodized about the mountaintop panoramas and the treeless meadows dotted with edelweiss. Eleanor didn’t share her husband’s constant pursuit of outdoor activities in all kinds of strange weather. A slight tension developed between them in the Alps. Franklin abandoned Eleanor for a day to go hiking with Kitty Gandy, who owned a hat shop in New York City. “I got up at the UnChristian hour of 7 and started at 8 with Miss Gandy to climb the Faloria, about 4,000 feet above Cortina,” Franklin wrote to his mother. “It took us nearly four hours up but the view was well worth the pull, and gave an idea of the wonderful colors of the Dolomites—pink, and yellow rocks, and white slopes of pure limestone—and the clouds were magnificent.”50 Eleanor understandably felt left out, but the hurt was fleeting on the dream holiday.

  A highlight of Franklin and Eleanor’s European trip—at least for Franklin—was a return visit to Nottinghamshire to see the mounted exotic birds owned by Cecil Foljambe. For her part, Eleanor was charmed by both her husband’s strange obsession with avian taxidermy and Foljambe’s ancient oak trees. FDR also hiked in Sherwood Forest during his trip to England, imagining he could hear the twang of Robin Hood’s bow. In Germany, he marveled anew at the well-managed national woodlands.51 He wrote enthusiastically to Sara about the German forests, how the “mist rising after the soaking of the last few days . . . was lovely and showed most of the Black Forest. . . . The moisture of all the trees and undergrowth and the bright sun made it very picturesque.”52

  Roosevelt intuitively surmised that forests were a sentimental matter for Germans. The Germans hadn’t reclaimed land from the sea on a huge scale like the Dutch, or erected cities in swamps as the Russians and Italians had done in Saint Petersburg and Venice, respectively, but they took marvelous care of their beloved forestlands. Germany was the landscape that most influenced FDR’s views on land improvement in the United States. The German people grappled effectively with the inherent tension between industrial progress and land conservation. The Germans were determined to improve soil, cultivate burned-out land, drain swamps, and take care of their impressive woodlands. Much later in the century, ecologists would deem that draining wetlands wasn’t usually a good idea, but the Germans’ efforts were impressive for the time.53

  It can be argued that Roosevelt’s ascent into the world of practical politics was presaged by his studies of German forestry and reclamation practices.54 The whole German “community forest” tradition seemed like an inspired public policy for America to adopt. “Today, [a German] must cut only in the manner scientifically worked out which is calculated to serve the ends of the community and not his ends,” Roosevelt enthusiastically explained to a friend. “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it was necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people.”55

  Franklin marveled that German citizens could be issued tree licenses and receive tax incentives for maintaining community forests.56 By contrast, it was nearly impossible to establish large community reserves in the American East because so many of his home region’s forests were on private land.57 Convinced that New York state had something to learn from Germany about community forestry, Franklin, on returning home, lobbied family friends to place cut-over lands under state guardianship so that they could be replanted to encourage the renewal of trees. Early in 1906, with the help of Charles Mitchell of Poughkeepsie, FDR began transforming Springwood into a model tree farm.58 Franklin, as Eleanor put it, assumed responsibility “over the wooded part of the place.”59

  Conservation had becom
e a crusade for young progressives like FDR. On June 8, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt famously signed the Antiquities Act into law. This audacious piece of legislation allowed a president to declare federal protection for landscapes with archaeological, scientific, and environmental value. In the last three years of his White House tenure, TR would wield this privilege and bypass Congress to save such wonders as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Muir Woods in California, Devils Tower in Wyoming, and Mount Olympus in Washington (from lands within the boundaries of Olympic National Forest).

  Seeing, meeting, and networking around New York, FDR, conversant in forestry science, talked enthusiastically with farmers about the Adirondack Preserve, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the Black Forest of Germany during TR’s White House years. These three protected landscapes informed his views of what constituted smart conservation. Roosevelt warned friends that the destruction of forests directly contributed to the poisoning of water supplies—and no large city could afford to sully its safe, reliable supply of water. Not only did trees provide fruit, sap, nuts, firewood, shade, and a weapon against erosion, but their roots tapped into underground water and brought it to the surface—revitalizing the surrounding environment. Trees were more than just aesthetically pleasing to Franklin Roosevelt, they were God’s greatest utilitarian invention.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “HE KNEW EVERY TREE, EVERY ROCK, AND EVERY STREAM”

  I

  In 1904, in the public debate over whether the Catskill Forest Preserve should be extended into a Park (like that in the Adirondacks) or include only land owned by the state, Franklin Roosevelt argued for the park. Families with deeds dating back to the seventeenth century still lived in Catskills villages like Woodstock and Tannersville. The private land in the affected counties provided residents and idlers with quaint villages surrounded by scenic mountains, verdant forests, and idyllic brooks. FDR wanted to allow private land ownership in Catskill Park and then to enact tough timber laws that would regulate limited cuts.