Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Until that day in Albany, FDR was merely an admirer of Pinchot—not an actual disciple. But Roosevelt experienced an epiphany when he watched Pinchot—meticulously dressed in a handsome suit, watch-chain across his vest pocket—tell the New York legislators about his Camp-Fire Club survey in the Adirondacks the previous summer.6 “Forestry in New York is flourishing everywhere except in the woods,” Pinchot said. “It is time to make it flourish there.”7

  Striding around for theatrical effect, Pinchot displayed on a screen two lantern slides of the same north China landscape from drastically different eras. The first was an ancient painting (circa 1510) bursting with the vibrant greenery of trees. The other was a photo, taken around 1900, of exactly the same vista, reduced to an ecological dead zone.8 Pinchot, a devout Christian who attended church every Sunday, dramatized his history lesson with a warning in the style of Revelation: deforestation was the devil’s work. “One need not be an alarmist,” Roosevelt said of Pinchot’s bravura performance, “to foresee that, without intelligent conservation measures, long before half a millennium passes some such contrasting pictures might be possible in our own United States.”9

  Roosevelt, decades later, told Yale University students that Pinchot’s 1912 lecture in Albany, especially the contrasting pictures from China, had affected him like smelling salts. Pinchot had convinced him that deforestation had ruined Mayan, Mediterranean, and Chinese civilizations. “I discovered immediately that one of the problems before us was the denudation of the Adirondacks,” Roosevelt explained. “Timber had been cut there without rhyme or reason or thought and many of the upper slopes were being washed away until only the bare rock appeared. . . . Well, that picture sold conservation and forestry to the Legislature of the State of New York.”10 And, as a result of Pinchot’s plea, FDR was enabled to “get through the first important legislation for conservation.”11

  That reform legislation was the Roosevelt-Jones Bill, but it was controversial. The very notion of state control of lumbering on private lands (Section 88 of Roosevelt-Jones) struck some legislators as grotesque government overreach, more like Karl Marx than like the founding fathers. A huge debate over conservation was under way, with FDR fanning the flame. At a People’s Forum in Troy, New York, in March 1912—not long after Pinchot’s talk—Roosevelt, promoting the Roosevelt-Jones Bill, chastised greedy New Yorkers who, “for the sake of lining their own pockets during their own lifetime,” plundered the Adirondacks. “They care not what happens after they are gone,” he lamented, “and I will go further and say that they care not what happens even to their neighbors, to the community as a whole, during their own lifetime. They will argue that even though they do exhaust all the natural resources, the inventiveness of man, and the progress of civilization, . . . they will supply a substitute when the crisis comes. When the crisis came to that prosperous province of China the progress of civilization and inventiveness of man did not find a substitute. Why will we assume that we can do it while the Chinese failed?”12

  The fight over the Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Bill was fierce. At issue was how much “police power” New York State would have to regulate activities on privately held lands. Roosevelt saw the bill as a codification of all laws pertaining to lands and forests. Opponents rose to fight it on grounds of government overreach. Members of the Empire Forest Products Association alleged that Roosevelt, a mid-Hudson dandy, aimed to get reelected to the state senate by preaching his “tree sermon.” Robert Parker, a major Adirondack landowner with a “mountain man” attitude, was trotted out to testify before the Forest, Fish, and Game Committee. Parker chided Roosevelt for trying to cripple free market capitalism through overregulation of privately owned forests. FDR’s name had become inextricably linked to Gifford Pinchot’s in timber and mining industry circles. Disappointed that wealthy men like Parker had no long-term land ethic, Roosevelt knew that conservation education had to take root with rural Americans. “Mr. Parker is without a doubt,” Roosevelt wrote to Dexter Blagden, “a gentleman of the highest standing, but from all the evidence that the Committee has before it the [timber] concern which he happens to be connected with has done about as much as any other to destroy the Adirondacks without giving back a quarter of what they have taken. This, of course, is entirely between ourselves, but the same old fight is going on up here between the people who see that the Adirondacks are being denuded of trees and water power and those who, in the early days, when grants of timber and water were given for a song, succeeded in getting for nothing what they would have to pay well for today.”13

  After rounds of negotiation, a compromise deal was finally struck. Clear-cutting on private lands, to a large degree, became regulated by the state. Further environmental safeguards were put in place by New York’s legislature, including a new forest fire prevention strategy and the implementation of scientific forestry principles by private sector logging operations. Only Roosevelt’s no-cut rule for large trees was discarded in order for the bill to get passed. The Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Act was a pioneering and trendsetting piece of Progressive-era legislation that further safeguarded the Adirondacks.14 “I have taken the conservation of our natural resources,” he said, “as the first lesson that points to the necessity for seeking community freedom.”15

  Franklin Roosevelt was on a roll. Identifying with the Dutchess County farmers who planted, plowed, cleared, irrigated, and harvested—they were his core constituency, after all—Roosevelt eloquently championed using public lands for outdoors recreation and public health purposes; at the redbrick river town of Troy, he rallied his listeners to the struggle for “liberty of the community” rather than “liberty of the individual.”16 Driving all over upstate counties, inspecting the foundations of farmhouses and tall silos and huge barns and cow stables, Roosevelt was sometimes misidentified as a state agricultural inspector. Although cynics asserted that Roosevelt praised farm life largely for political gain, there was more to it than that; Roosevelt, at heart, was truly a Jeffersonian agrarian in outlook and conviction. Even if he had the luxury of delegating the more brutal chores at Springwood to hired help and experienced the sunup-to-sundown pressures of farm life from a certain aristocratic remove, he had still grown up in a hay-strewn world. Republicans later accused Roosevelt of being a “traitor to his class,” attacking business interests, a populist in the mold of William Jennings Bryan who aimed at easing the burden of debt for farmers at the expense of bankers. But Roosevelt interpreted this intended put-down as a badge of honor.

  For his reelection campaign for the New York state senate in 1912, FDR wrapped himself in the flag of Wilson’s “new freedom” movement; he emphasized Democratic issues such as education reform, sewage treatment, and taxation. In the spirit of the Roosevelt-Jones Bill, he argued that in modern industrial society actions taken by private individuals could harm the health of an essential public resource like the Adirondacks, proudly calling his conservation philosophy the “liberty of the community.”17 Championing public commons came easily to Roosevelt. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in The Crisis of the Old Order, postulated that TR’s “power” in 1912 emanated from “what he did” while Wilson’s came from “what he held in reserve.”18 It seemed that FDR was a hybrid of both progressive leaders. While FDR was intellectually more in sync with TR (especially in conservation), cultivating a more “reserved” legislative persona was the safer road to follow in the largely Tammany-controlled Democratic Party.

  That summer, just as the 1912 election campaign started sizzling, both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt contracted typhoid fever (probably after brushing their teeth with contaminated water en route from Campobello).19 With two rivals—a Republican and a Bull Moose—jockeying for his seat, FDR could hardly afford to be sidelined. However, bedridden, he had no choice but to convalesce in his Manhattan apartment during the early fall. FDR turned to Louis Howe, his clever campaign manager, to pick up the slack; Howe, a former newsman, launched an effective mail campaign.20 “I found m
yself a campaign manager with a candidate who could not lift a finger to win votes for himself,” Howe recalled. “The doctors wouldn’t even let him speak to me over the telephone.”21

  Come November 5, 1912, Wilson trounced Theodore Roosevelt and Taft to become America’s twenty-eighth president. FDR was pleased that Theodore had bested Taft, winning 88 electoral votes to finish second. In the state senate race, FDR himself won handily, by twenty-six thousand votes. It was a stunning political achievement on Howe’s part, and until he died in 1936 he would remain Roosevelt’s indispensable adviser.

  Just how beloved Roosevelt had become with New York farmers became self-evident when he was named chairperson of the New York State Senate’s Agricultural Committee. But as fate would have it, after the election, Wilson invited FDR to the resort town of Sea Girt, New Jersey, to discuss employment in the new administration. Roosevelt came away from the Atlantic beachside meeting thinking the position of assistant secretary of the navy—held by TR from 1897 to 1898—might soon be his. He undertook a crash course, reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, among other works. The official offer came on the eve of Wilson’s inauguration, in the lobby of Washington’s Willard Hotel. Josephus Daniels of North Carolina, the incoming secretary of the navy, approached FDR and asked, “How would you like to serve as assistant secretary of the navy?” “How would I like it?” Roosevelt replied. “I’d like it bully well.”

  Once again following TR’s career path, Franklin prepared to move from Albany to Washington for duty at the Navy Department. The outcry from New York conservationists on losing FDR to the Wilson administration was heartfelt. The movement needed him in Albany. “I am not in the slightest danger of losing my interest in nature,” Roosevelt reassured Ottomar H. Van Norden, who was the president of the Long Island Game Protective Association and a prominent leader in the Camp-Fire Club, “either in conservation or in any other of the big issues of our state.” Just before resigning from the state senate, Roosevelt lobbied for stronger protection laws for upland game and migratory birds. As Van Norden noted, Roosevelt had done “splendid work” on behalf of the forests, rivers, and wildlife of New York.22

  Roosevelt also oversaw the publication and distribution of Woodlot Forestry (Bulletin 9) by forester Robert Rosenbluth. This pamphlet, funded by the New York Conservation Commission, became FDR’s manual for the transformation of Springwood into a productive tree farm. Rosenbluth, the state director of forest investigations, complained that “the farms and country estates of New York” had been “treated with mistreatment!”23 He charged that even progressive farmers like Roosevelt irresponsibly culled their acreage. Farmers could no longer afford to think solely in terms of the end product: board feet, ties, poles, posts, and firewood. They needed to consider planting woodlots to act as shelterbelts and bird sanctuaries, to generate fresh water, and to combat soil erosion.

  Implicit in Woodlot Forestry was a theme that later became manifest in New Deal programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, Shelterbelt Project, and Soil Conservation Service. Government had an obligation to teach farmers things like how to grow mixed hardwoods (oak, chestnut, beech, birch, hickory, and maple) on good land and white pine and black ash in swampy areas.24 Putting an amalgamation of Pinchot’s and Rosenbluth’s teachings to practical use, Roosevelt constructed a checkerboard of wood roads, or “fire lanes,” at Springwood. This endeavor proved valuable in preventing forest fires from rushing uncontrolled through the trees and in chopping winter-stripped trees for surplus firewood. Decades later, when FDR took Winston Churchill and King George VI down those unpaved roads at Springwood, the British leaders mistakenly thought their host wanted to show off his trees. But Roosevelt’s real pride on these sightseeing tours was his system of Rosenbluth-inspired “wood roads.”25

  During Roosevelt’s tenure in the Navy Department—from March 18, 1913, to August 26, 1920—naval strategy necessarily trumped forestry concerns. Yet, he nevertheless remained active in the conservation movement during his off-duty hours at home, at 1733 N Street.26 Refusing to abandon New York State entirely, Roosevelt worked tirelessly from Washington to cast the town of Plattsburgh as a vibrant recreational hub in the Adirondacks–Lake Champlain region and helped search for sites in Dutchess, Putnam, and Columbia counties for potential state parks.27 Forging an alliance with A. S. Houghton of the Camp-Fire Club of America, Roosevelt continued to oppose the overhunting of birds and advocated bird protection measures.28

  Roosevelt’s official duties in Washington began on St. Patrick’s Day of 1913, his eighth wedding anniversary. Boxes of nautical paraphernalia—including model ships, elegant prints, and antiquarian books—were moved from Springwood to adorn his office at the Navy Department. Although the American fleet was the third-largest in the world (after the British Royal Navy and the imperial German navy), the Navy Department’s annual budget was only around $60 million—and the department didn’t even rate its own building. Much of FDR’s work dealt with procurement, supply, and compensating civil personnel. It was crucial work, but tedious. Fortunately his assistant at the department was Louis Howe, who proved to be as indispensable as ever.29

  Secretary Daniels, the former publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer, took a shine to the young Roosevelt. Daniels was not nautically inclined and knew practically nothing about maritime geography, while FDR was a gifted and experienced sailor. An odd pair, they worked fairly well together despite rocky moments. Unfortunately, Roosevelt couldn’t resist taking advantage of the perks his new position offered; he had the audacity to arrange for the battleship North Dakota to cruise to Campobello for Independence Day in 1913 so it could fire a seventeen-gun salute just for his children. Such “flummery,” as Daniels called the ceremonial side of the navy, was always present in FDR’s wheelhouse.30 When there was a war scare with Japan in 1913, FDR sought counsel from TR. “We shall be in an unpardonable position if we permit ourselves to be caught with our fleet separated,” TR advised him. “There ought not be a battleship or any formidable fighting craft in the Pacific unless our entire fleet is in the Pacific.”31

  Washington, D.C., was a confining place for a gregarious person like Roosevelt. Despite his occasional inspection trips for the Navy Department, he was usually consumed by a daunting pile of paperwork in his office. He yearned for seagoing escapes from his bureaucratic position. When he heard that Gifford Pinchot was cruising to the Dry Tortugas islands off Florida, he burned with envy. Roosevelt pledged that someday, after he got a firm grasp on his Navy Department workload, he’d sail to the Tortugas himself to catch snapper, eat crab, and tour Fort Jefferson, an unfinished brick fort seventy miles from Key West that had been used as a military prison during the Civil War.32 In the meantime, in the fall of 1913, FDR embarked on an official seven-week cruise of the Mediterranean aboard the Dolphin, a yacht on loan to the Navy Department.33 The top priority for the secretary and his assistant after World War I began in Europe in 1914 was the creation of a reserve component for the U.S. Navy. (Daniels and Roosevelt were ultimately successful in this goal; legislation was passed in March 1915 making the Naval Reserve a reality.)

  II

  President Wilson had chosen Franklin K. Lane of California, an ardent outdoors enthusiast, to be his secretary of the interior. At first it seemed like an inspired choice. Raised around the San Francisco Bay Area, Lane entered the University of California at Berkeley but dropped out to work as the New York correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. After moving home to run his own newspaper, he’d hike on Mount Tamalpais and fish in the Russian River. In 1898 he became the city attorney of San Francisco, casting himself as an anticorruption crusader. Lane had been selected to head the Department of the Interior by President Wilson because of his understanding of western water rights and timber issues; the president also admired Lane because he was one of the few California Democrats who fought rail tycoons and the conservative Hearst newspaper syndicate. And Lane had distinguished hims
elf in California’s conservation circles by becoming the first president of the Save-the-Redwoods League.34 “He loves the forest,” one of Lane’s friends explained, “living every moment that a busy life could spare in the shadows of the trees.”35

  Some preservationists, however, had problems with Wilson’s choice. In particular, the Sierra Club, cofounded in 1892 by John Muir to protect the natural features of the Sierra Nevada, took exception to the appointment.36 As San Francisco’s city attorney, Lane had helped launch a campaign to build a dam on the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. In the aftermath of the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906, Lane wanted to guarantee that the rebuilt city had access to a reliable supply of fresh water.37 The proposal to build a dam in Hetch Hetchy to accomplish this goal faced a firestorm of protest, and the controversy dogged Lane’s footsteps when he moved to Washington, D.C.

  In 1913, when Congressman John E. Raker of California introduced legislation to authorize the Hetch Hetchy dam, Lane cheered him on. The ensuing battle was the most bitterly contested environmental showdown yet seen in American politics. The Sierra Club launched a campaign to save the gorgeous valley. Americans outside the Bay Area were largely opposed to building the dam and reservoir in the national park.38 Ruining a sacred part of Yosemite, to Muir, would be no less a crime than firebombing the Sistine Chapel. “Dam Hetch Hetchy!” Muir exclaimed. “As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”39 The Congressional Record printed 380 pages of heated debate on the issue, which culminated with the fifth and final version of Raker’s bill.