Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Usually willing to modify nature for the sake of civilization, Roosevelt envisioned the Catskills as a protected landscape where woodlands and residential villages could coexist while all obeyed conservation laws. In the end, park status was adopted. As of 1912, Catskill Park included 576,120 acres, including 92,000 acres of Forest Preserve. The blend of public and private acreage—untouched wilderness as well as small villages, scientifically managed forests, and small farms—would serve as FDR’s rural planning model in which a conservation ethic was prioritized.1

  Roosevelt, concerned that timber syndicates were felling trees at an unsustainable rate, believed, like Pinchot, that true forestry was the “art of using a forest without destroying it.”2

  At Springwood, FDR tried hard to put his conservation beliefs into practice. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White, in Life magazine, captured the essence of Springwood as an “old shoe of a place—worn, scuffed and scratched, polished into shape, fitting the owner well; but the woodlands were modernly managed.”3 William Plog continued to serve as groundskeeper of the estate, and had become part of the extended family. Trimming the hemlock and taking care of the rose garden were among his daily chores. He was paid $45 per month to oversee the property and keep the trees free of disease, fungi, and unwelcome insects. Plog improved the vegetable garden, tended the greenhouse, and helped maintain an irrigation pond. The unspoken promise was that with James deceased, Plog, as surrogate, would teach Franklin that soil was more than a jumble of clays, sands, and silts. Together they laid fieldstones and marked trees that needed to be thinned. In 1947, when asked in an interview for an oral history what Franklin most liked to do at Springwood, Plog immediately responded, “Trek around through the woods.”4

  Roosevelt’s neighbors feared that diseases and insects would destroy local woodlands. A devastating blight that struck American chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) in 1906 worried Dutchess County farmers. As they battled such attacks, rural farmers turned to professional foresters and so did FDR. Taking tips from Plog and Pinchot, he hoped to raise disease-resistant trees and then share his knowledge with the people he called “forest neighbors.”

  Determined to turn a modest profit from his Hyde Park forestry operations, he milled cut trees into wooden cross ties for sale to the New York Central Railroad. Excess timber planks were sold to furniture companies. Roosevelt also marketed Christmas trees to Dutchess County residents.5 A longtime professor at the New York State College of Forestry, Nelson C. Brown, wrote in the journal American Forests that FDR hoped to turn his primeval grove of Springwood hemlocks, whose “pristine beauty is unmarred by the ax,” into a “museum of what our original forests looked like when the sturdy Dutch forefathers first settled these shores.”6

  The expansion at Springwood—of the grounds, buildings, and tree plots—was partly a result of Franklin and Eleanor starting their family. In 1906, Eleanor gave birth to their first child, Anna, followed by son James in 1907. After a second son, Franklin, died in infancy in 1909, the next Roosevelt child, Elliott, was born in 1910 just as FDR was embarking on his first political campaign, for the state senate. Nevertheless, Anna, James, and Elliott all had childhood memories of hiking along nature trails with their father and embracing certain trees as places of respite.7 “He knew every tree, every rock and stream,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled, “and never forgot the people who had worked there when he was small.”8

  Between 1907 and 1910, however, Franklin and Eleanor lived mostly in Manhattan, in a town house on East Sixty-Fifth Street that Sara Roosevelt, who lived next door, had purchased for them. To Eleanor’s annoyance, Sara knocked out a wall and built a connecting hallway to have access to her beloved Franklin.9 Even though Franklin was in Manhattan for most of that period, taking classes at Columbia and then practicing law, his interest in conifers (particularly those that grew at the fortieth parallel, the Springwood latitude) intensified.

  Having passed the New York bar examination, Roosevelt joined Carter Ledyard & Milburn, a firm at 54 Wall Street, in 1907. However, for Roosevelt, with his many and varied interests, being a Manhattan lawyer was tedious—he admitted he simply “had no aptitude for law.”10 Resisting work he considered boring, Roosevelt, a pastoralist, was always yearning to go fishing, bird-watching, or golfing. His best legal work was assisting old friends from Harvard days beat back charges of public drunkenness. With his passion for naval history, he also occasionally dabbled in admiralty law, taking on a few ferryboat cases and disputes over port-of-entry fees.

  In the summer of 1907 Franklin Roosevelt took Eleanor and Anna, who had just turned one, to Campobello. Once again his letters to Sara were filled with reports of picnicking at Raccoon Beach, sailing the Bay of Fundy on “foggy” mornings, and exploring three nearby islands called “the Wolves,” collecting limpet shells and gull feathers.11 Feeling the high winds and strong currents made Roosevelt ponder whether the possibility of the “tidal power” from the Bay of Fundy, both the American and the Canadian sides, could produce electricity for New England. Seeing the double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) and the blue-winged teal (Anas discors) elated him. “He always said he was shortsighted when he passed people in the streets and didn’t recognize people,” Eleanor recalled, “but he could always point to a bird and tell me what it was.”12 Owen Winston, a friend of Roosevelt’s, came to visit at Campobello that summer, as did Eleanor’s brother, Hall, to bird-watch. “Franklin and I, and Hall Roosevelt, went off trying to find cormorants’ nests,” Winston recalled. “We were fairly successful and got ourselves fairly messed up.”13 Hall recalled that there wasn’t a shorebird from New Brunswick to New Jersey that FDR couldn’t identify at a glance.

  A year after their marriage, Franklin and Eleanor (seated on the ground, center) spent the summer at the Roosevelt home on Campobello Island, where they were photographed at a picnic. Sara is seated in a chair (right). Franklin’s parents had long enjoyed trips to the island, which lay in Canadian waters, taking full advantage of its unexcelled sailing. They built their own lodge there in 1885.

  Back in New York City, Roosevelt admitted to his friends at the firm that his goal was to be elected to the state legislature, then secure a high-profile job in the Navy Department, and eventually be elected governor of New York State. This desire for political power seemed to come out of nowhere. He felt strongly that the governorship was a springboard to the White House. It had, after all, been the key to the presidency for his father’s favorite Democratic politician, Grover Cleveland, and had also been integral to TR’s political ascendance. And just as TR had made a name for himself in conservation circles protecting endangered mammals like buffalo and elk in the American West, FDR hoped to make his conservation mark as a soil and forest protectionist in the Northeast.

  Hoping to raise his public profile in New York, FDR accepted an invitation to serve on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission, which was planning a tercentennial celebration in the fall of 1909 to commemorate Henry Hudson’s “discovery” of the Hudson River. Believing that the Hudson always sparkled, he helped organize the celebration’s maritime events, working closely with his uncle Frederic Delano; they focused on the building of accurate replicas of Hudson’s Half Moon and Robert Fulton’s Clermont. FDR saw the extravaganza as a way to highlight the conservation and preservation achievements of the Hudson Valley.14

  The previous summer, in June 1908, Roosevelt had embarked on a weeklong inspection of the coal holdings owned by his uncle Warren Delano III in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky. The poverty and needless environmental destruction he saw there sickened him; heavy logging had turned the forests into a degraded wasteland, and mining had scarred the land. It’s probable that FDR’s propensity for hydroelectric dams stemmed from this unsettling trip to rural Kentucky. There had to be other ways to generate energy that did not involve blowing up mountains or making workers gravely ill. With mounting admiration, Roosevelt viewed public waterpower and wind power as the future of generating ele
ctricity and raising the overall standard of living.15

  Just months before FDR was born in 1882, the world’s first hydroelectric power station had started operations along the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. By the time Franklin married Eleanor, he believed that hydroelectric power would soon be a vital energy source. Meanwhile, President Theodore Roosevelt had already promoted the construction of hydroelectric dams in the American West: Arizona’s Roosevelt Dam, named in his honor, would be completed in 1911, allowing Phoenix to grow. If dams could be built in the arid West, FDR believed, verdant farms could spring up all over, from eastern Washington to the Colorado Plateau. Roosevelt knew that the potential economic gains for the Yakima Valley in Washington, the Gallatin Valley in Montana, and the upper parts of Wyoming and Idaho—where water from the Shoshone project was already working agricultural miracles—were enormous. Although dam-crazed FDR, like most politicians of the William Howard Taft years, never questioned why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t also advance building sewage treatment facilities.16

  And then there was the question of clean air. To FDR’s dismay, Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian nation had been jettisoned to make way for smokestacks, cast-iron-framed buildings, and urban ghettos—what John Burroughs collectively called, after visiting Pittsburgh, “the devil’s laboratory.”17 The combined effect of factory and automobile exhaust was poisoning the air.

  Roosevelt loved cars, pollution aside. Cruising along unmarked rural roads in Dutchess County in his rented red Maxwell Touring Car became high sport. On these backcountry drives, Roosevelt contemplated the interconnectedness of soil, forests, and water. “As a whole,” Roosevelt said in 1912, “we are beginning to realize that it is necessary to the health and happiness of the whole people of the State that individuals and lumber companies should not go into wooded areas like the Adirondacks and the Catskills and cut them off root and branch for the benefit of their own pocket.”18

  Whenever Roosevelt sought solitude, away from life at Springwood, he would drive up Charlie Hill Road on Silver Mountain, near the town of Millerton. The summit view to the northwest overlooked the fertile farmlands of northern Dutchess County, Stissing Mountain, and the distant blue-mist Catskills. This was one of Roosevelt’s favorite meditative spots. His frequent companion on these jaunts was his friend Maunsell Crosby. In subsequent years Crosby, an accomplished birder, would go on collecting expeditions to Central and South America for the American Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt worked with Crosby on the annual Audubon-sponsored Christmas bird count in Dutchess County. A favorite outing for them each spring involved watching hawks and eagles congregate on Cruger’s Island (now part of a 1,600-acre preserve owned by New York State); only a few other places on the Atlantic Flyway hosted so many raptors at once.19

  II

  After much debate in early 1910, Franklin Roosevelt decided to run for the state senate in New York’s Twenty-Sixth District, an area that included Hyde Park. On the stump Roosevelt proved a mellifluous speaker, enunciating clearly and never groping for the correct word. Always in perpetual motion, he campaigned on anti-Tammany measures like eliminating graft and political patronage from government. In a relaxed, confident way, he enjoyed talking about forestry fundamentals with growers of trees, fruits, and vegetables in the Hudson Valley. At the drop of a hat, Roosevelt shared with fellow tree farmers logbooks about planting white pine on his western and northern slopes, and tulip poplar from stock held at a nursery. Part of his agronomist pitch to farmers in the district was that planting trees was, in essence, an insurance policy for the future of their families. A thriving hemlock, he asserted, was akin to “interest” accruing in the bank. Not only did trees stabilize stream banks and curb erosion, but within ten years’ time fortunes would be made from timber harvests. Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, FDR would say, “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”20

  With Congressman Richard Connell, an upstate Democrat, regularly at his side, Roosevelt campaigned from Cold Spring and Carmel (in Putnam County), through Fishkill Landing and Poughquag (in Dutchess County), and on to Germantown, Kinderhook, and Hudson (in Columbia County) to advocate economic justice for farmers. In every town where he stopped, he called everyone he met “friend.”21 Championing the “city beautiful” movement was part of his spiel. “Humboldt, the great traveler, once said: ‘You can tell the character of people in a house by looking at the outside,’” Roosevelt told a group of supporters at the Pleasant Valley Public Library. “This is even more true of a community. And I think I can truthfully say that of all the villages of Dutchess County—and I have been in pretty nearly every one—there are very few that appear as favorably as Pleasant Valley.”22

  While campaigning for the state senate, Roosevelt spoke regularly of the two different New Yorks: the city and upstate. Even though he enjoyed living on East Sixty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, he never failed to remind his potential constituents that city dwellers would not have potable water without the upstate forests.23 Whenever possible, he emphasized to rural audiences his kinship with ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, sometimes even using TR’s characteristic words—“delighted” and “bully”—during his speeches.24 At the same time, FDR was relieved when his distant cousin didn’t cite him by name on a campaign stop for the GOP in Dutchess County. TR’s main advice to Franklin about campaigning was simply to address head-on the economic problems farmers were experiencing.

  To better understand the struggles of rural voters, FDR began keeping a “farm journal,” essentially an agronomist’s forestry science log, of his plantings and land management accomplishments. Roosevelt’s farm journal was decidedly lacking in philosophizing, but one can still detect an undercurrent of Andrew Jackson Downing’s influence in its fact-filled pages. Pencil sketches of farm lots were entered. Every area of the Springwood grounds was given a name derived from some naturally occurring feature: River Wood Lot, Locust Pasture, Swamp Pasture, and the like. Roosevelt’s hand-drawn maps and detailed notes about everything from raking leaves to fertilizer make the journal an irreplaceable source for understanding how devoted he was to imbuing Springwood with a real land ethic.25

  FDR used a Dutchess County farmer, Moses Smith, as his political sounding board in the 1910s. Smith lived at Woodlawns, the first parcel of land Franklin owned independently of his mother. Of medium height, with a great blade of a nose and a tangle of jet-black hair hiding under an ever-present hat, Smith leased Springwood acreage from Roosevelt to grow crops—everything from corn to oats to pumpkins. Both men, according to Smith’s son, “loved to feel” that they were “using the land to good advantage.”26 Eleanor Roosevelt, in her memoir I Remember Hyde Park, recalled how Sara had wanted their meals at Springwood to be full of fresh produce, including “the earliest possible peas, picked when very young, and . . . chickens, eggs, butter, cream, milk.”27

  Roosevelt and Smith regularly talked shop about seeds, climate conditions, pitch pine, and the alluring camphor-like scent of Norway spruce when crushed between two fingers. Roosevelt came to believe that if stubborn Moses Smith, a yeoman farmer, could be persuaded on adopting a soil conservation protocol, then so could any farmer in his district. Smith would often scratch his head while philosophizing to Roosevelt—a quirk Roosevelt found endearing enough to imitate. No matter how famous FDR became, he treated Smith as a fellow farmer trundling crops to the city markets. Roosevelt was impressed with the way Smith bore down on the handles of a plow and drove the blade deep into the ground, as the horses pulled it.

  On November 8, 1910, all of Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign oratory, shoe-leather hustle, constant smiling, and farm-to-farm handshaking paid off. He defeated his Republican rival by a slim margin. Just days after the victory, the twenty-nine-year-old Roosevelt was asked to chair the senate’s Forest, Fish, and Game Committee. He accepted, later joking that the boys in Albany—because of his family name—“couldn’t think of anything el
se” for him to do.28

  To the general public, the name Roosevelt was already synonymous with making conservation a prominent issue in American politics. “It was a post that was supposed to be a sinecure, one of no importance, because in those days there was no such thing as the Conservation Department. . . . There was practically no interest in what you and I know today as conservation in its broadest sense,” Roosevelt would tell a West Virginia audience in 1944. “But . . . I was very keen . . . on getting the people of the kind State interested in preventing soil erosion in the Adirondacks.”29

  Franklin and Eleanor quickly rented two floors of the H. King Sturdee house at 248 State Street in Albany. But FDR returned to Hyde Park on weekends to perform constituent work. Although Roosevelt was director of the First National Bank of Poughkeepsie, the Eagle Engine Company, and the Rescue Hook and Ladder Company of Hyde Park, he was careful to avoid possible conflicts of interest: as an anti–Tammany Hall Democrat, he could not afford even the slightest intimation that he was a “bought man.” When G. O. Shields of the League of American Sportsmen for the Preservation of Wildlife prodded FDR to introduce an anti–automatic and pump gun bill in Albany, his friend bristled. “I am, I need not tell you, much interested in the preservation of wild life,” FDR telegraphed back, “but feel that as chairman of the Forest, Fish, and Game Committee in the Senate I should not be the one to introduce legislation of this kind.”30