Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Once the United States entered World War I, Roosevelt wasn’t able to contribute meaningfully to the conservation movement. In addition to his increased desk duties, he became a leading proponent of a 230-mile minefield between the Orkney Islands and Norway in order to bottle up the German U-boat fleet in the North Sea. His optimistic sense of America’s ultimate triumph was contagious and led to regular, glowing press coverage of his efforts. He also became very knowledgeable about how Wilson reshaped the federal government by creating numerous emergency agencies to seize the economy by the scruff of the neck by boosting war production, restraining home consumption, and managing inflation.67 Roosevelt regretted that he was never able to serve in combat during the war. But over the summer of 1918 he crossed the Atlantic on the destroyer Dyer, convoying troopships to Europe. His diary of the trip included elegant entries about “the good old ocean” and his experiences in the Azores.68

  When World War I ended on November 11, 1918, newspapers began quantifying the carnage. Over 16.5 million people, approximately one-third of whom were civilians, had perished in the war. Another 21 million had been wounded. While the Europeans bore the brunt of the war’s devastation, 116,000 Americans had died “over there.”69 Memorials honoring fallen doughboys sprang up in town squares across America. Three such remembrances were erected on the National Mall in Washington. Trees were planted as living memorials to the war dead. One idea that FDR and Frederic Delano supported never came to fruition—a “National Capital Forest.” Notes taken at the June 6, 1919, meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) suggest the vision that would have made greater Washington into a far greener place. According to the plan, a large tract near the city would be filled with trees to honor the war dead. The report promised that the National Capital Forest would be “an admirable and suitable memorial to those who have suffered and died in this great war of democracy against tyranny and to the great Service rendered to humanity by our Navy, our Armies, and the Nation and that reclamation of the lands under consideration and creating on them a great pleasure and demonstration forest and park would be [of] the greatest value [to] the Capital and the Nation and to future considerations.”70

  The CFA noted that the topography of suitable land around the District of Columbia was similar to that of the Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, and Verdun. At the CFA discussion were representatives of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service. But without a forceful personality such as Theodore Roosevelt, who died in January 1919, to lead the project, the dream of the National Capital Forest faded away.

  V

  After the war’s end, FDR became the most admired Democrat in New York aside from the popular governor, Alfred “Al” Smith. People could not resist his talent for projecting optimism. When pressure mounted for him to declare his candidacy for governor or senator over the 1919 holiday season—thereby getting a leg up on the competition for 1920—Roosevelt demurred. “Being early on the job is sometimes wise and sometimes not,” Roosevelt wrote to a booster. “I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird, and not the bad luck of the early worm.”71 With the progressive tide still strong, there were draft movements in 1919 in New York for “Roosevelt for U.S. senator” (if Al Smith chose to run for a second term as the state’s governor) and “Roosevelt for governor” (if Smith elected instead to seek a U.S. Senate seat).

  Smith, who would go on to serve four terms as governor of New York, was born on the East Side of Manhattan to Irish Catholic parents. He had a hardscrabble upbringing. He didn’t attend high school or college, instead developing his intuitions about people by observing their behavior at the Fulton fish market. Though beloved by Tammany, Smith was largely untainted by charges of corruption. A champion of labor, immigrants, and the downtrodden, the progressive Smith took up the cause of the “forgotten man” while serving in the New York state assembly. His rise was a godsend to those who felt economically marginalized, kicked to the curb of life. From his perch at the Navy Department in Washington, FDR kept a watchful eye on Smith, who was the competition—another progressive New York Democrat building a national reputation.

  Years later, an embattled Herbert Hoover quipped that Franklin Roosevelt was a chameleon on plaid, changing his colors depending on the hour and audience. This unflattering characterization rang true in 1920 when Roosevelt became the Democratic vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. On August 9, Roosevelt officially accepted the nomination from Hyde Park, delivering a seventeen-page speech from his porch at Springwood (it was not yet customary for candidates to appear at the party’s national convention, let alone accept the nomination during the event). In his address—his national political debut—he espoused some of his ideas about conservation through wise use. Noticeably, there was no talk of state parks or wildlife preservation or outdoor recreation. It was a boilerplate speech that Theodore Roosevelt, a wilderness romantic, probably wouldn’t have given (but Pinchot might have). “So with regard to the further development of our natural resources we offer a constructive and definite objective,” Roosevelt said. “We begin to appreciate that as a nation we have been wasteful of our opportunities.”72

  FDR resigned from the Navy Department on August 6 to campaign full-time. Thereafter, it didn’t take long for conservationists to feel betrayed by him. Whenever Roosevelt was in New England or upstate New York, he spoke like an apostle of George Perkins Marsh. However, in the American West, he lampooned Republicans for making the public domain off-limits (instead of opening it for settlement and development). Harper’s Weekly quoted Roosevelt spouting forth in Montana, saying that “what is needed is development rather than conservation.” Governor Thomas Riggs of the Alaska Territory was so elated that FDR had apparently joined forces with the extraction industries that he sent Roosevelt a telegram on August 16: “Bring out in Seattle speech that conservationists still want to bottle-up Alaska and you will influence Alaskans now residing in Washington to our side. All West rabid against Pinchotism.”73

  What Roosevelt keenly understood was that for Cox to defeat the Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding of Ohio—a long-shot victory at best—the Democrats had to curry favor with voters in the West, many of whom were dependent on “big timber” or “big oil.” A suspicion grew among conservationists that FDR wasn’t a chip off TR’s block. They had good cause for doubt. FDR refashioned himself in the West as a pro-extraction candidate and an advocate of public hydropower during the course of the campaign.74

  Franklin Roosevelt understood that conservation in the arid West focused on issues of water access. TR had given the American West—and the nation—both a policy and the authority under which public control of waterpower became operational: the Newlands Reclamation Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, and the Inland Waterways Commission. Therefore, to FDR, western conservation wasn’t just protecting national parks. It also meant pushing for expensive public works projects such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which had drawn water from the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada two hundred miles across deserts and mountains to southern California. While FDR was campaigning for the vice presidency, Congress passed the Federal Water Power Act of 1920, which established the Federal Power Commission and gave it extensive authority over waterways and the building and the use of waterpower projects. If FDR seemed like a hypocrite in 1920, it was because he saw two very different sets of needs for the East (forest preservation) and the West (securing water access to growing cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix).

  That year, during a journey around the Columbia River Basin in Washington State, FDR concluded that the future of the American West would depend on the manipulation of nature by engineering marvels. Huge dams would be required to trap water in reservoirs for use during drought seasons and to redirect it via aqueducts into cities. Washington and Oregon, he believed, could become a showcase for hydroelectric power and irrigation districts.

  After speaking in 1920 in Fargo, Sioux Falls, Tacoma, Portland, Baker
sfield, Salt Lake City, and Pueblo, Colorado, Roosevelt learned that some Americans in the West stubbornly maintained their belief that rain would always fall. Few in states such as Utah or New Mexico wanted to accept that a desert was a desert and that too much population growth in arid areas was unsustainable. Only the greening of valleys by public water projects seized the imagination of westerners. Roosevelt, hungry for votes, presented the West as a Garden of Eden waiting to bloom with the help of scientific experts and civil engineers.

  Even more disconcerting to die-hard conservationists was Roosevelt’s full support for the Mineral Leasing Act (which allowed mining on federal lands for nominal rental fees) and the Water Power Act (which authorized federal hydroelectric projects). It’s fair to charge that in 1920 FDR turned his back on conservation—at least in the West—for the sake of political expediency. It seemed that all of his new allies were engineers, miners, and industrial foresters. FDR didn’t utter anything on the campaign trail that contemporary historians could term “green” or “sustainable.” Decades later Roosevelt explained away this type of inconsistency as “juggling,” or never letting “my right hand know what my left hand does.”75 More simply put, he was a strategist who put his political future ahead of all else in those days. “He had, not a personality, but a ring of personalities,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. astutely wrote in The Coming of the New Deal, “each one dissolving on approach, always revealing still another beneath.”76

  Overall, Franklin Roosevelt was an asset for James Cox in the West, delivering a string of electrifying speeches and exuding an air of disciplined charisma. But Roosevelt’s equivocation about conservation during the 1920 campaign was derided by old Bull Moosers. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.—a decorated war hero and Eleanor’s first cousin—shadowed FDR throughout the West in order to rebut FDR’s pro-extraction message. He considered FDR not only a political enemy but also an embarrassment to the Roosevelt name. Speaking in Sheridan, Wyoming—not far from where TR established America’s first national monument at Devils Tower in 1906—Theodore Jr., the late president’s son, told the New York World that the squire of Hyde Park, when it came to conservation, did not have “the brand of our family.”77

  Political observers suggested that one reason FDR had been added to Cox’s ticket was the appeal that the handsome, personable young man might have with women, who had the right to vote as of 1920, after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. The number of potential voters suddenly doubled. FDR courted female audiences and cultivated a strong following in chapters of the Garden Club of America, whose members were mostly women interested in horticulture and other aspects of civic improvement. Pouring on the charm, FDR spoke to various Garden Clubs in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, each filled with women conversant in the beautification ideas of Olmsted and Downing that he himself held dear.

  The intrepid Roosevelt ended up delivering one thousand speeches during the three-month campaign. That year, as the Forest Service pondered creating the designation “primitive areas” to save primeval wilderness tracts, Roosevelt pushed hard for public dams.78 He concluded the 1920 campaign with a stem-winder at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Exhausted, he then retired to Hyde Park to wait for the election results. In the end, the Harding-Coolidge ticket triumphed over Cox-Roosevelt by seven million votes. Joseph P. Tumulty, Wilson’s private secretary, called it “not a landslide” but “an earthquake.” The Progressive movement was beaten and in retreat. The remaining question, which was not particularly pressing in the aftermath of the defeat, was what direction the post-Wilson Democratic Party would take—and who would step forward to lead it. To that end, the only sunny news at Springwood was the pundits’ consensus that Cox—not FDR—was the problem with the Democratic ticket.

  Chalking it all up as a learning experience, Roosevelt traveled to Louisiana around Thanksgiving for a binge of fishing and hunting. A little time in the outdoors, he told Eleanor, would redouble his spirits before he returned to practicing law. Accompanied by his brother-in-law, Hall Roosevelt, then an engineer for General Electric, FDR purchased ammunition and hunting attire appropriate for a bayou setting.79 At first, he stayed at the Hotel Grunewald in New Orleans, rendezvousing with M. L. Alexander, the Louisiana conservation commissioner, who acted as his hunting guide for a week. They were soon joined by Edward A. McIlhenny, who said that there were “millions of birds” along the Sabine River and Lake Arthur. The four outdoorsmen lived on a Sabine River houseboat for days, bagging mallards, wood ducks, and gadwalls in both Louisiana and East Texas.80

  Although Roosevelt occasionally shot waterfowl in Dutchess County after losing the 1920 election, the Louisiana trip was the last time he seriously hunted until 1932. Fishing with Harvard friends and birding with Maunsell Crosby became his primary forms of outdoor recreation. Once back in snowy Hyde Park, FDR followed his father’s tradition of sending Christmas trees grown at Springwood as presents to friends. His only complaint during that holiday season, it seemed, was that Theodore Roosevelt Jr.—a sharp thorn in his side during the 1920 campaign—had been named Warren Harding’s assistant secretary of the navy.81 Though FDR was happy personally, his public career had stalled, and he was uncertain about his next move.

  Sara Roosevelt wrote in her diary that Franklin was “rather relieved to not be elected Vice President.”82 It’s hard to believe that was true, but clinging to his Dutchess County “tree farmer” identity even more fiercely that year, FDR sold a hundred white and red oak for $8 each. Two years later, in Poughkeepsie, he sold $1,400 worth of timber to be used as railroad ties.83 FDR returned to private life at the new law firm of Emmet, Marvin & Roosevelt; he also took a part-time position running the New York office of the Fidelity Deposit Company of Maryland, the third-largest surety bonding firm in the country. While dividing his time between New York City and Hyde Park, FDR also became a national megaphone for the state park movement. There was a big opening for his advocacy: only New York, Indiana, Wisconsin, and California had organized a streamlined state park organization at that time.84

  Fascinated by social planning in rural areas, Roosevelt recognized that commodity prices were tumbling and land was suddenly quite affordable in upstate New York. In his mind, that presented an opportunity to expand the state park system. To FDR, the problem with outdoors recreation in the state was that citizens would readily rally to save specific places—e.g., Niagara Falls and Lake George—because they were so spectacular. But that was, in effect, a painfully incremental approach to building a world-class state park system. Instead, Roosevelt thought that New York state needed to evolve a more comprehensive system. With the growth of cities, the automobile revolution, and the rise of a middle class that had leisure time, Americans needed outdoor getaways to maintain healthy minds and fit bodies. The strain of urban existence with its hectic pace in business and social activities made escape into nature necessary for many Americans, and essential for their sanity. For easily accessible escapes, the answer may just have been state parks. Most were smaller than national parks, but there were two big exceptions: Adirondack Park in New York and Anza-Borrego Desert Park in southern California.

  Beginning in 1921, Roosevelt scouted for unspoiled New York woodlands, fast-flowing creeks, beaches, lakes, mountain peaks, and scenic vistas. He then urged the New York legislature to acquire such areas for recreational activities, the preservation of wildlife, and the study of natural history. He especially wanted public parks and preserves situated within a twenty- to fifty-mile drive of urban centers. In electoral defeat, Roosevelt had rediscovered his conservationist footing, only now with state parks instead of reforestation as his preferred mantra.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “NOTHING LIKE MOTHER NATURE”

  I

  A hot spell gripped New York City in mid-July 1921 as Franklin Roosevelt made his way to greet five thousand Boy Scouts assembled for a festival held at the Grant’s Tomb green space. The sweltering humidity, in an era bef
ore air-conditioning, had people woozy. The stench of garbage, sewage, and decay that hung in the city streets was almost unbearable. Roosevelt loathed the way New York City had turned the Hudson and East rivers into cesspools of sewage discharge, heavy metals, and soil runoff. Riverside Park, near Columbia University, could have been made into another well-planned Central Park; instead, the four-mile stretch of riverfront had the low-rent look of a dump or landfill.1

  Since the inception of the Boy Scouts in 1910, Roosevelt had been engaged as both leader and father.2 His eldest son, James, was a Scout and he planned on getting Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John involved in time. The young, city-bred Scouts with whom Roosevelt mingled at Grant’s Tomb had spent months perfecting woodcraft feats for the festival.3 Following a parade, Roosevelt boarded the Pocantico, a steam vessel owned by advertising mogul Baron Collier that was anchored in the Hudson. Self-assured and always hungering for a financial deal, Collier had amassed 1.2 million acres in southwestern Florida, which made him the largest landowner in that state. The building of the Tamiami Trail, which connected Tampa to Miami across the Everglades, was a project Collier intended to complete.

  A select group of hardworking Scouts had been rewarded with a free trip up the mile-wide Hudson River with Roosevelt, Collier, and a retinue of other wealthy benefactors. Their destination was Bear Mountain State Park, forty miles north of Manhattan: An additional 2,100 Boy Scouts had already set up eighteen campsites within the state park, offering respite from the heat, industrial angst, and automobile traffic for all in attendance.4

  With an elevation of 1,301 feet, the granite Bear Mountain was the highest point between Manhattan and West Point. The summit offered a sweeping vista of the surrounding Hudson Highlands on the western shore of the river. It belonged to the public thanks to the philanthropy of Mary Averell Harriman, widow of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman. The Harrimans were ardent conservationists and supporters of public recreation. Before his death in 1909, the railroad baron had taken naturalists John Muir and John Burroughs on a legendary “scientific” cruise to Alaska.5 Franklin Moon, a forestry professor who wrote several seminal textbooks, served as warden of the Highlands of Hudson Forest Reservation, one of the tracts that eventually made up Bear Mountain State Park. Professor Moon was convinced that the scenic grandeur warranted national park status.