Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Treated as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, Roosevelt nevertheless impressed colleagues in Albany with his wide knowledge of conservation, dendrology, and silviculture. Within days, he had befriended Forest, Fish, and Game Commissioner Thomas Mott Osborne, who was likewise an opponent of Tammany and of its boss, Charles F. Murphy. Determined to make conservation his strong suit, Roosevelt made speeches about reforestation, liberally borrowing ideas and syntax from Gifford Pinchot.31 “When at Hyde Park tomorrow,” Franklin wrote to Eleanor, whom he addressed affectionately as “Lamb” or “Babs,” “I will go over the locations for planting the 8,000 trees and also see how they are getting on with the clearing of the new pasture.”32

  As chair of the Forest, Fish, and Game Committee, Senator Roosevelt trod carefully when choosing sides on controversial issues. He did heartily defend the Shea-White Plumage Act. The bill, passed the year before he took office, was an extension of the Audubon plumage laws that outlawed the sale of feathers from many bird species. Shea-White further prohibited the importation of feathers, skins, or carcasses of protected bird species.33 And when a consortium of New York City grocers—eager to secure reliable sources of duck—lobbied mightily for a longer hunting season, Senator Roosevelt countered by sponsoring a bill aimed at reducing bag limits to reverse the diminishment of waterfowl. Backed by the New York Zoological Society and the Audubon Society, Roosevelt argued forcefully that the struggling waterfowl population needed increased protection—not a longer open season. Nevertheless, Roosevelt didn’t persuade enough fellow senators to take his pro–duck protection position. “I regret to say,” he wrote to an ally, “that Senate Bill No. 9, permitting duck shooting on Long Island, has passed the Senate in spite of much opposition on my part and that of others, by just the necessary number of votes.”34 Roosevelt’s efforts weren’t entirely in vain, however: the bill failed in the state assembly, and so did not become law.

  Roosevelt’s commitment to bird protection laws is abundantly clear in letters he wrote to fellow New Yorkers. Showing off, he often brought up his longtime association with the AOU, and his ornithological bona fides in general, when arguing for the protection of small shorebirds and for a moratorium on shooting wood ducks. “I am sorry that I cannot agree with you about the wood duck,” Roosevelt wrote to Egbert Bagg of Utica, New York. “It may be true that a man who jumps ducks from a boat cannot tell a wood duck but you must realize that the duck is a species in danger of extermination today. The prohibition against shooting them nevertheless saves many birds every year.”35

  That year, the New York State College of Forestry was reestablished at Syracuse University. Situated on twelve acres near a hill known as Mount Olympus, the College of Forestry afforded visitors exquisite views of the Onondaga Valley. FDR maintained a lifetime attachment to the school, often consulting with its top-flight silviculture experts. Conservation had finally earned a language of its own, a lingua franca that centered on plumage laws, wildfire control, bag limits, and scientific forestry, in which FDR had unusual fluency for a Democratic politician. Roosevelt accepted as his own the definition of conservation offered by the Camp-Fire Club of America—founded in 1904 by William Temple Hornaday to promote big-game management, commonsense hunting laws, habitat restoration efforts, and conservation education—“To protect and use wisely our natural resources, while assuring their preservation.”36

  FDR’s interest in American trees also had a historical component. Somewhere, Roosevelt had read that George Washington planted poplars and oaks all over northern Virginia. Washington’s diaries and letters from Mount Vernon indeed reveal that the first president was a gifted arborist, and in 1932 an article in American Forests noted that Washington tended to his trees “as if they were almost human.” This impressed FDR mightily. On more than one occasion, Washington’s storied career was linked to trees: like when he famously took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, under a towering elm tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Writing to a cousin in 1782, Washington speculated about how “the change of environment”—that is, the replanting of a tree from forest to field—affected the health of a locust or pine. Under the code that George Washington lived by, a planter should be judged, for better or worse, on the health of his woodlands. Washington personally planted at least thirty-seven species of trees on his Virginia acreage. In many ways, Washington was America’s first high-profile forestry conservationist.37

  Roosevelt saw a link between history tourism, recreation, and country planning. He hoped that New York City residents, for example, would take weekend pilgrimages to Saratoga, Fort Ticonderoga, and West Point as a means of connecting with their past. All three of these historical sites had marvelous green spaces. Revolutionary War battlefields and burial grounds were sacred, deeply pastoral landscapes. Roosevelt thought these sanctified historic park sites needed to be managed with a long-term preservationist ethic. Historic Saratoga Springs, he argued, would collapse if its famous spa waters (thought to ease dyspepsia, jaundice, rheumatism, and gout) were ever contaminated. For the tourist economy of upstate New York to prosper, the region’s assets—historical and natural—needed stringent preservationist standards. Millions of Americans would be able to ponder the Battle of Saratoga better if the greensward transported visitors back to the glorious days of 1776. In Roosevelt’s mind, historical preservation in New York was tied in with woodlands ecology.38

  Meanwhile, in 1911, Congress had swung around and passed the Weeks Act, a carefully constructed federal conservation law that authorized interstate compacts for water and forest conservation. The act encouraged the federal acquisition of land in the eastern United States to protect forests and watersheds.39 Recognizing that forests were not an inexhaustible resource, the Weeks Act created the eastern section of what would eventually be the National Forest System. In the East, over the course of American history, most land had been disbursed by the government to private citizens, and this legislation provided funds to buy large expanses of canopy—particularly in New Hampshire and Vermont’s White Mountains—as national forests. The federal government eventually acquired more than twenty million acres of eastern forests under the authority of the Weeks Act.40 These acquisitions led to the establishment of forty-one national forests, including White Mountain (New Hampshire and Maine); Green Mountain (Vermont); Finger Lakes (New York); Allegheny (Pennsylvania); and George Washington and Jefferson (Virginia).

  In the West (unlike the East), 300 million acres (about one-sixth of America) that were “vacant” or “unappropriated” were owned by the U.S. government. Nobody was sure what to do with the acreage. What was the federal government to do with the cactus lands of the Sonoran Desert, the Painted Hills of eastern Oregon, the West Texas plains, the rolling Palouse country of eastern Washington, or the badlands of North Dakota? Much of the land could be used for mining or grazing, but to progressive conservationists, short-term blind profit was not an appropriate priority for a long-range government land-management ethic.

  Roosevelt grew very interested in western topography. Almost as if he were collecting stamps, he learned about the types of western flats—creosote, gumbo, antelope, tidal—that needed to heal. When Roosevelt visited eastern Kansas he saw fertile farmlands that made the Great Plains the “breadbasket of America.” But the western counties of that open-range state was suffering from chronic drought and nearly bone-dry reservoirs. Roosevelt knew there was no magic that could make these deserts bloom without irrigation projects and dependable forests to produce dependable quantities of rainfall. A single mature tree issued 1,000 liters of water daily into the atmosphere.41 Cattle herds, he understood, had made the open-range ecosystem worse and worse. Sheepmen and cattlemen clashed over water rights and grass on the public lands.

  As a New York state legislator, FDR didn’t have ready answers for the problems in the West. His conservation concerns were focused on establishing national forests in the East where the waterfalls cascaded and the hardwoods were glorious. But the word h
e used—like a magic wand for the West—was reclamation, by which he meant that plenty of public domain land would be irrigable to grow food for a few million people. That meant dams. Roosevelt knew as an amateur silviculturist that the success of hydroelectric dams depended on federal protection of the forests at the headwaters of rivers. In New York, without the Adirondack Preserve to help regulate the flow of the Hudson and to keep the waters fresh, there could have been flooding. To Roosevelt the three major tasks for the federal government in managing the public domain were wisely using and protecting forests (increasing the national forest acreage); building public dams (irrigating arid and semiarid land); and establishing recreation areas (national and state parks to attract tourists). Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, young FDR didn’t find cowboys romantic figures. They were, as a whole, prone to abuse the land by overgrazing cattle.

  III

  In 1912 Franklin Roosevelt’s interest in conservation, which had been focused on New York, broadened; he aligned himself with groups like the Camp-Fire Club of America and the National Audubon Society. It was a presidential election year, with Woodrow Wilson winning the Democratic nomination and speaking out on conservation—a term usually circulated only in Republican circles. Roosevelt always felt there was more to be done on behalf of forest protection in the American East. “The destruction of the forests,” he lamented, “is proceeding today unchecked on many private holdings.” He was right to worry. State oversight was desperately needed because deforestation on private acreage too often led to soil erosion. “It is an extraordinary thing to me,” FDR wrote to Dexter Blagden, who was a Wall Street broker and a fellow Harvard man, “that people who are financially interested should not be able to see more than six inches in front of their noses.”42

  Senator Roosevelt promoted a slate of bills in 1912—five concerned with forestry and four with hunting and fishing regulations. His signature piece of legislation was written in cooperation with the Camp-Fire Club of America. The Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Bill aimed to ban the felling of trees, even on private lands, below a certain girth.43 Gifford Pinchot, an active Camp-Fire Club member, surveyed the immense Adirondack wilderness and wrote a powerful pro-preservation report, which echoed some of the concerns that had been raised in the Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Bill—most notably, that large trees on private property were in need of protection to ensure continuous seed supplies. The Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Act, backed by Pinchot, also made it illegal for timber companies to clear-cut even on private lands. The act further mandated the hiring of additional fire wardens and forest rangers and the building of new fire lookout stations.

  Roosevelt shakes hands with a prospective voter in Dutchess County during his run for the state senate in 1910. After a brief career as a lawyer in New York City, he returned home and allowed himself to be recruited into an uphill campaign, as a Democrat running in the Republican stronghold of the Hudson Valley. His career was launched when he beat the predictions and won.

  As Senator Franklin Roosevelt was gearing up his reelection campaign in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was running again for president, this time as a third-party candidate against incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Even though FDR was a stout supporter of Wilson in 1912, he was firmly in TR’s camp. He happily adopted his illustrious cousin’s clique of outdoor-life friends—forester Gifford Pinchot, scout extraordinaire Buffalo Jones, naturalist John Burroughs, editor Robert Underwood Johnson, and zoologist William Temple Hornaday among them.

  After overseeing a day of tree planting at Springwood, Roosevelt went on a whirlwind trip to Jamaica and Panama that April. The largely Caribbean jaunt provided an added bonus of witnessing the Panama Canal’s construction firsthand. “I had forgotten how magnificent the cliffs and defiles are, covered with great creepers and clinging crooked trunks of trees,” Roosevelt wrote about Panama. “At Rio Cobre we decided to go on and see the Natural Bridge, a very curious formation where the stream has broken through a cliff.”44

  On returning home, FDR rendezvoused with Eleanor in New Orleans. After a scrumptious Cajun meal, they stole off on a train through the Louisiana bayous to the Rio Grande Valley and the Guadalupe Mountains before slipping into Silver City, New Mexico. A close friend of FDR—Robert Munro Ferguson, a former Rough Rider—was fighting tuberculosis and hoped the desert air of Cat Cañon, near Silver City, would revitalize his ailing lungs. At that time, many medium-sized towns in the arid West had a facility offering relief from respiratory illness, and Ferguson owned the high-end convalescent clinic in Silver City.45 His wife, Isabella, an old friend of Eleanor’s, knew that Franklin, the tree aficionado, would enjoy seeing the hills dotted with “scrubby dwarf evergreens.”46

  In 1912, TR’s Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party, was drawing thirty-eight-year-old Harold Ickes into the national debate over conservation. Ickes was born on March 15, 1874, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, a picturesque landscape of rolling hills, bosky dells, pristine brooks, and abundant wildlife just south of Altoona. “We were of the soil,” he recalled, “and proud of it.”47 But when Ickes was sixteen years old, the family moved to Chicago, which struck him as an alien steel-and-soot jungle; he hungered for the fresh air of the Pennsylvania outdoors.

  Determined to lift himself out of hard-bitten poverty, Ickes worked his way through the University of Chicago, graduating in 1897. The more he read, the more reform-minded he became. A distrust of “concentrated wealth” came naturally to him, and he put his faith instead in such reformers as Jane Addams of Hull-House and John Muir of the Sierra Club. Ickes started writing for the Chicago Record and later wrote for the Chicago Tribune. In Theodore Roosevelt he found a leader to trust and joined the Progressive Party. One of the greatest moments in Ickes’s life was hearing TR accept the Bull Moose nomination at the party’s convention in Chicago. All across America a new breed of conservation-minded Democrats and Republicans were rushing to join the Progressive fight, just as Ickes had done, with intensifying resolve. The party’s supporters included such illustrious (or soon to be illustrious) names as Gifford Pinchot, William Allen White, Alfred Landon, George W. Norris, Robert M. La Follette, Frank Knox, Henry A. Wallace, Felix Frankfurter, Norman Thomas, Francis Biddle, and Dean Acheson.48

  During the Wilson years, Ickes developed a reputation in Chicago as a champion of civil rights for African Americans and Native Americans. Because Ickes hated the detrimental role of special interests in politics, he made himself a nuisance and sassed the rich. Ickes believed that environmental conservation, in the spirit of Muir, was a righteous and noble calling. A two-week horseback trip he took through Glacier National Park turned him into an ardent advocate of wilderness protection. “I love nature,” Ickes said. “I love it in practically every form—flowers, birds, wild animals, running streams, gem-like lakes, and towering, snow-clad mountains.”49

  Another Bull Mooser and Camp-Fire Club impresario was William Temple Hornaday, the first curator of the New York Zoological Society (the Bronx Zoo). Born in 1854 in Avon, Indiana, Hornaday had drawn a link between Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the need to save certain animal species.50 His 1913 book Our Vanishing Wild Life launched the modern endangered species movement. He also fought fiercely against the clear-cutting of forests, gouging mountains for coal and gold, and treating the Hudson River like an open sewer.

  Roosevelt would soon fall under the profound influence of Ickes and Hornaday, but in 1912, his primary contact in conservation was Pinchot. In 1910 Pinchot published The Fight for Conservation, which defined the burgeoning field of natural resource management in layman’s terms.51 FDR regularly conferred with him about how to protect forests from the grave perils of fire, unsustainable cuts, insects, and disease. Cognizant that lumber companies such as Reynolds Brothers Mill and Logging were heedlessly annihilating the upper Hudson forests for profit, Roosevelt hoped the second-growth techniques advocated by Pinchot and others could be implemented in upstate New York’s
already heavily cut-over lands (and that tougher forestry laws would be enacted in Albany). Roosevelt’s overarching concern was the International Paper Company, which, in monopolistic fashion, had linked twenty sawmills in New York and New England into a giant corporation.52

  To fight the big boys, Roosevelt brought in the conservation giant of America. He invited Pinchot to speak to the legislature in Albany on the damaging effects unregulated laissez-faire economics had on global woodlands ecology.53

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “WISE USE”

  I

  Roosevelt (left) chatted with Gifford Pinchot at a governors’ conference in 1931. By then, the two conservationists had known each other for more than twenty-five years. They were serving as governors of New York and Pennsylvania, respectively.

  Over the summer of 1911, Gifford Pinchot, at the behest of the Camp-Fire Club of America, conducted an in-depth scientific study of the Adirondack forests in twelve counties.1 He was accompanied by William T. Hornaday and Overton Price (editor of Conservation and author of The Land We Live In: The Book of Conservation). After inspecting 3.3 million acres—of which the state owned 1.5 million, the rest belonging to timber companies, private associations, individuals, and clubs—Pinchot recommended increasing the number of fire wardens, forest rangers, and fire lookout stations. Taking aim at private landowners, Pinchot called for state control and regulation of their properties. Most dramatically, he called for a constitutional amendment allowing the management of the public Adirondack forests in uncompromised adherence to the Yale University doctrine of scientific forestry.2

  Senator Franklin Roosevelt, in full agreement with the Camp-Fire Club, invited Pinchot to address the Joint Legislative Committee on Forest, Fish, and Game in Albany about the coming Adirondack report. Even though Pinchot had been dismissed as chief forester by President Taft in 1910, his unshakable belief in “wise use” of forest resources still cast a mighty spell on Progressives.3 “Mr. Pinchot was waging a rather lonely fight then,” Eleanor Roosevelt later recalled, “and few people paid much attention to his warnings.”4 The term environment, in fact, was hardly used at all in the early twentieth century. But Pinchot, owing to his deep learning, implicitly understood the concept of the “web of life.” Although the conservation of forests and water was his bread-and-butter issue, he was expanding his ecological expertise to include soils and wildlife.5