Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Bear Mountain and the adjacent Harriman State Park were essentially the first modern state parks in America. In 1912, Major William A. Welch, whom the New York Times considered the true leader of New York’s state park movement, was hired as chief engineer for both parks. While FDR was in the state senate and at the Navy Department, both Bear Mountain and Harriman had been vastly improved by work crews under Welch’s direction. The laborers dammed streams to make lakes and built picnic pavilions, campgrounds, boat docks, icehouses, and a vast network of trails and roads; sixteen permanent campsites were also erected, for the summer, around three handsome man-made lakes. “Then crowds of New Yorkers came,” historian James Tobin writes, “and by 1920 the park’s boosters were calling it ‘the greatest playground in the world’ with more visitors annually than all the national parks combined.”6 During World War I, Bear Mountain drew one million visitors each year.

  When the Pocantico docked at Bear Mountain, Roosevelt was in an effervescent mood. Buses drove the Roosevelt-Collier group from the dock over mountain roads to the camp where the other Boy Scouts had convened. The campsite, surrounded by ancient stands of oak and hemlock, was reminiscent of the forests around Hyde Park. That afternoon, the Scouts demonstrated firefighting, compass reading, tent pitching, and outdoor cooking. Although saddened that the hard-luck kids had been raised mostly on city streets, Roosevelt was enthusiastic and spoke with them about learning the joys of nature along the Appalachian Trail.7 In an eventful day of speeches, parades, and a fried chicken feast, Roosevelt “led his guests around the camp, hiking through campsites, talking about their scouting activities, and showing off the numerous teepee tents resting on built-up wooden platforms.”8

  Two of Roosevelt’s most cherished ideas for societal improvement—the Boy Scouts and the state park movement—converged at the Bear Mountain jamboree. But there was also a political motivation for Roosevelt’s participation: after eight years in Washington, he was recasting himself as a spokesperson for New York conservationism. Therefore, his personal involvement in the Boy Scouts and the state park movement was politically advantageous. “What do the boys learn?” Roosevelt asked in an article he wrote for the New York Times, extolling the Scouts. “Under the guidance of voluntary leaders, they become acquainted with the subjects into which the outdoors is scientifically divided. They learn the rudiments of botany, biology, forestry, and astronomy. They learn about mapping, surveying, signaling, living in the open, fire-making without the aid of matches, compass reading, first aid, tower and bridge building, and a great many other things as well.”9

  From a distance Bear Mountain was idyllic, but on a more minute scale there was a hazard. In the fall of 1920, New York’s Public Health Council dispatched water-quality expert Earl Devendorf, a civil engineer, to inspect the sanitary conditions at both Bear Mountain and Harriman state parks. His findings were startling. The drinking water at the parks was compromised by human waste. The pit privies were in an “insanitary condition,” and the newly installed chemical toilets weren’t flushing properly. Devendorf reported that the well water and groundwater had a high probability of contamination because so many potentially dangerous “carriers” were present. Almost all of the water samples Devendorf collected contained specimens of coliform bacteria.10 Evidence suggests that when Roosevelt went for a swim at Bear Mountain, he contracted the poliovirus that would soon fell him. The lake had been contaminated by human waste.11

  After serving as toastmaster that evening, Roosevelt returned to New York City, bringing along with him the dangerous virus quickly multiplying in his bloodstream. He then left for his summer vacation, with the fresh sea air to replace the city smoke. A couple of days later Roosevelt arrived at Campobello, planning a full slate of outdoors activities, including a three-day fishing trip up the Saint Croix River. After lunch on August 10, with the help of his eldest son, James, FDR readied the Vireo—his twenty-one-foot boat, named after a favorite songbird. With Eleanor and two of his children as companions, he set a course for a whole day of blue-water sailing.

  After only ninety minutes on the Bay of Passamaquoddy, the Roosevelts spotted smoke rising from a wooded islet. Franklin, a pyrophobe since childhood, anchored the Vireo off the island and instructed his family to join him in extinguishing the blaze, flailing out the rising flames with boughs.12 It was rigorous work. Smoke burned their eyes, and sparks swirled around like fireflies. Years later, Anna Roosevelt recalled watching a towering spruce crackle with fire, followed by the “awful roar of the flames as they quickly enveloped the whole tree.”13

  The Roosevelts left the islet covered in ash, grime, and dust. FDR guided the Vireo back home. Once ashore, he decided that they should walk to Lake Glen Severn for a cleansing swim instead of taking baths at the cottage. Gleefully, his family leaped into the frigid waters, swam across the pond, and then dried off with towels. Franklin, however, felt listless. Neither the laps nor the beating sun invigorated him. Flushed and despondent, he had to accept the fact that “the glows” (his term for the rewards of outdoor recreation) weren’t coming easily that day.14

  Back at the cottage Franklin, exhausted, put on a sweater and tried to warm up. But shivers soon took hold. He retired early, turning out the light without reading. After tossing and turning in a delirious state that night, he woke to find he could barely move. He was also running a dangerously high temperature. Eleanor rushed in a doctor from nearby Maine as quickly as possible for an emergency diagnosis. The preliminary determination was that Franklin had a very severe summer cold. The possibility that he had contracted polio while swimming with the Boy Scouts at Bear Mountain, however, was raised.15

  With Eleanor and Louis Howe, who was vacationing at the cottage, unable to massage any kind of feeling into his body, the situation was dire. Within days, FDR regained the use of his upper body but nothing else. His legs were paralyzed. Eleanor was stoic throughout the entire ordeal, calming Franklin’s fears, squeezing his hands, scrambling to find the best local physicians to diagnose his ailment. In a moment fraught with emotion, she helped her husband onto a canvas stretcher; his legs were completely useless. Out of public sight, clutching Duffy, his beloved Scottish terrier, he was hoisted through the open window of a train in Maine, looking utterly helpless. Uncle Frederic Delano, taking charge of the crisis, helped rush his nephew to Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. It was there that FDR was officially diagnosed with polio and told that he was unlikely to walk ever again. “No playacting, no bluster, no promises to be good if given just one more chance,” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote of FDR’s diagnosis, “could make this obstacle go away.”16

  The strain of the summer of 1921 didn’t end once Roosevelt returned to the family’s town house. His normal life came to a halt, as he worked full-time on restoring strength to his legs, with extremely limited results. Refusing to be a weakling, Roosevelt did chin-ups, worked out on parallel bars, and lifted weights. Determined to have a productive life, he told his friends and family that he was in training. In the spring of 1922, FDR, fighting depression, moved to Springwood. His progress was measured in feet and pain. Struggling to regain feeling in his legs, he would strap fourteen pounds of metal to his legs most days and set out alone, trying by sheer grit to drag them down a tree-covered lane. When not adhering to his own physical therapy regimen, he read, bird-watched, collected stamps, took long country drives, and supervised tree plantings at the property. Slowly his shattered psyche mended. With Louis Howe he launched, in the Hudson River, a model sailboat they built and designed together.17 His enthusiasm for nature actually seemed to grow after he contracted polio. With time to spare, watching the Hudson thaw and the migratory birds return was a salve for his low morale. “The only thing that stands out in my mind of evidence of how he suffered when he finally knew he would never walk again was the fact that I never heard him mention golf from the day he was taken ill until the end of his life,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “That game epitomized to him the ability to be out of door
s and to enjoy the use of his body.”18

  Sara Delano Roosevelt was terribly concerned about Franklin. Her son’s friends were no longer stopping by Springwood to chat with him about crop rotation, international affairs, retail politics, or forest conservation. She tried cheering him up but needed the help of others. Howe persuaded Eleanor, always shy in public, to become more vocal in the Democratic Party so that the Roosevelt name wouldn’t be forgotten. But when she traveled to make political speeches and official appearances at “big labor” events, Eleanor left Franklin without a sympathetic companion for days at a time. In the spring of 1922 Sara invited a distant cousin, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (pronounced Sook-lee) of neighboring Rhinebeck, for tea with Franklin. Suckley chatted easily and was content to watch Franklin perform exercises aimed at regaining the use of his legs. A deep and enduring friendship developed between them.

  Suckley was born on December 20, 1891, at her family’s estate, Wilderstein. While Rhinebeck was Daisy’s home, she spent much of her youth in New York City and Switzerland. After attending Bryn Mawr College for two years, she dropped out and returned home to care for her ailing mother. During World War I she sold war bonds door-to-door in Rhinebeck. A string of tragedies then befell Suckley, beginning when her oldest brother, Henry, was killed in a Red Cross ambulance in Greece. Her father died not long after that, of a heart attack. Sara Delano Roosevelt was wise to bring Daisy and Franklin together, as they were both lonely in their own ways.19 It wasn’t until 1933, however, that Franklin and Daisy became intimate friends, collaborating to build a Dutchess County dream home at a spot they called “Our Hill.”20 It would be the site where FDR built Top Cottage.

  II

  The 1920s were a decade of materialistic excess and the mass production of consumer products, from canned soup to ready-to-wear clothing. Thousands of Americans moved to cities to work in factories, establishing a new middle class with disposable income. America’s net wealth almost doubled between 1920 and 1929. It was an era of flappers and jazz, Prohibition and speakeasies—none of which FDR found attractive. As industrialization swept America, Roosevelt turned to rustic writers like Gilbert White and John Burroughs who celebrated tidy farms, harvest moons, uncharted forests, and county fairs. He wasn’t alone: thousands of Americans worried that the country’s natural resources were being squandered, that wilderness was disappearing, that Jefferson’s agrarian dream was gone.

  While Roosevelt tried to confront the problem by joining the state park movement, a group of midwesterners led by an advertising executive, Will Dilg, founded the Izaak Walton League in Chicago. Its conservationist mission could be distilled into three W’s: woods, water, and wildlife. Starting with only fifty-four founding members in 1922, the league expanded to a deep bench of 100,000 members within three years. What caught FDR’s attention was its pioneering work, through its Pollution Bureau, toward restoring America’s streams. Roosevelt worked behind the scenes with Dilg to expose the fact that 7.5 million people in New York were dumping untreated sewage into interstate waterways.21

  By the fall of 1922, FDR felt well enough to resume work at the Fidelity and Deposit Company. Determined to stay connected to the great outdoors in spite of his paralyzed legs, he agreed to become president of the Boy Scout Foundation of Greater New York City, a leadership role held until 1937. He worked closely with George Dupont Pratt—the son of an oil magnate. Pratt sponsored the Boy Scouts, was a big-game hunter, and served as conservation commissioner of New York from 1915 to 1921. With him, Roosevelt promised to “do everything possible” to better the “understanding of nature by these city-bred boys.”22

  Roosevelt’s great hope was that Boy Scouts would begin learning the dual arts of forest conservation and wildlife management. To this end, he started Franklin D. Roosevelt Conservation Camps for Boy Scouts in Palisades Interstate Park. Each camp was attended by sixty boys aged fifteen or older. He was particularly committed to helping children from poor urban families who were unable to find work during the summers. Four skills were taught at these camps: how to plant trees, cut firebreaks, control wildfires, and protect wildlife. The program was so successful that in the late 1920s FDR led an expansion at a new 10,600-acre compound in Sullivan County, New York.23 FDR was so excited by the conservation work at Bear Mountain, Harriman, and Palisades that he proposed forming a syndicate to buy even more upstate woodlands. The acreage, an hour north of New York City, would then be designated as a large public forest managed with “private interests” in mind. FDR, in this regard, was more in line with wealthy business magnates like the Rockefellers and Harrimans, who at least professed to understand European forestry traditions, than with Harding Republicans who were tied to “big timber” interests in New York.

  Another manifestation of Roosevelt’s recreation philosophy was his becoming a founding board member of the Adirondack Mountain Club, known as the ADK Club.24 This mountaineering fraternity promoted the use of the State Forest Preserve in the Adirondack Park according to the “forever wild” provisions of the New York state constitution.25 While FDR could no longer hope to scale an Adirondack peak, he could still enjoy views of unbroken forests from rough-hewn-log lodges and read High Spots, the ADK newsletter. And when in 1922 Governor Al Smith sought legislative approval for A State Plan for New York, a comprehensive statewide system of parks and parkways. Roosevelt enthusiastically lent his support. He adamantly believed in connecting New York City residents to upstate forests by means of the automobile.

  FDR kept a close eye on the 1922 gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania. The bright, willful Gifford Pinchot was running for the office, and had adopted conservation reform and the regulation of financial practices as his bread-and-butter issues.26 With his boundless capacity for moral indignation, Pinchot had recently become the president of the National Coast Anti-Pollution League, an advocacy group determined to stop the dumping of oil into harbors. Supported by farmers, conservationists, and former suffragists, Pinchot ran a campaign against private utility companies like Pennsylvania Power and Light and General Electric. His own ancestry and outlook caused Pinchot to scold these companies for monopolizing and exploiting natural resources in Pennsylvania. When the Republican Pinchot was assailed as a “multimillionaire with socialistic ideas” and a “communistic conservationist” who would “Sovietize” Pennsylvania, the same fiery darts could have been thrown at Franklin Roosevelt. Pinchot’s spirited campaign captured Roosevelt’s attention. That November, holed up in Hyde Park, he was elated to hear that Pinchot had beaten Democrat John A. McSparran.

  Despite his return to work, albeit on a limited basis, and his many honorary posts, FDR spent most of 1922 to 1924 waging a battle against his paralysis. Learning to walk again or, barring that, recovering some limited use of his legs was his priority. Neither goal was ever really achieved, but FDR did develop muscular shoulders and forearms, thanks to his intense weight lifting. He followed a daily exercise routine that involved toning his shoulders and torso on parallel bars. He strapped fourteen-pound steel braces onto his legs, under his pants. Demonstrating infinite patience and persistence, he evolved a method of walking, with crutches or help or both. Once Roosevelt became mobile, he took on the equally difficult task of being relevant again.

  During the mid-1920s, Roosevelt tried mightily to persuade Pratt, who had become president of the American Forestry Association, to join forces with him in raising funds and developing a system of public and privately owned forests—like those in Germany and Austria. Roosevelt wanted to transform the mid-Hudson region into the Black Forest of America: large, dividend-paying woodlands that could sustain “wise management” timber production for years to come. “In this country no such forest exists,” Roosevelt wrote to Pratt. “The federal government and various states own large forest areas. Much planting has been done but most of it has been for the purpose of reclamation of barren or denuded lands. As far as I know, no forest in this country is run on a strictly business basis.”27

 
Pratt flatly rejected Roosevelt’s idea of community-based forestry as unrealistic. If the lumber industry steered clear of the concept of German-style forests, then investors wouldn’t be likely to “take it up.” It was easy for Pratt to brush FDR aside in 1922; many New York financiers assumed that, because of his polio, FDR wasn’t a major political player anymore. “I do not want to appear like a wet blanket,” Pratt wrote to Roosevelt in early December, “but I do think you would have difficulty in finding people who would be willing to go into a proposition to raise $500,000 with no prospect of a dividend for at least 25 years.”28

  III

  In early February 1923 Roosevelt, feeling hemmed in, decided that the blue-green waters off Florida would fortify his health. “I am going to Florida to let nature take its course,” he wrote to his doctor; “[there’s] nothing like Mother Nature anyway.”29 Referring to the fresh air and sunshine as “therapy,” he lived happily on the rented houseboat Weona II and sent family members letters that were joyous in tone. The fact that so much of Florida was still “wild and tropical” appealed mightily to FDR.30 Eleanor spent a few days with him exploring the Everglades, but ultimately judged the swamp “eerie and menacing.”31 In a small johnboat, in the company of friends, Roosevelt casually traveled around the fringes of the storied swamp, casting into sloughs so densely covered by mangroves that they were nearly impenetrable.