Refusing to be deskbound in an election year, Governor Roosevelt traveled around New York throughout 1930, taking the pulse of the people. With upthrusted head, with a confident look in his eyes, belittling the malefactors of wealth, FDR often reminded Democrats of a rich man’s William Jennings Bryan. Talking about God came easily for him. At town halls and community forums, he stuck to talking points about helping farmers survive the economic downturn through tax relief. While socialists shouted for a social revolution and hard-line conservatives clamored for more laissez-faire capitalism, Roosevelt espoused a slate of economic policies, but he never forgot his emphasis on reforestation, pollution control, soil conservation, waterpower, and crop restoration as the best solutions to combat the Depression in rural areas.27 And, on a national level, he pushed for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service to protect old-growth forests before the declining economy forced timber concerns into overdrive. “I am doing everything possible to help the saving of the Yosemite and other trees,” FDR wrote from Albany to Nicholas Roosevelt, a distant cousin who was a member of the New York Times editorial board, “and am writing at once to [Senator Robert] Wagner and [Senator Royal] Copeland as you suggest.”28
Roosevelt religiously read the monthly magazine American Forests, edited by his conservationist ally Ovid Butler. Very few of its stories were, strictly speaking, about scientific forestry. There were articles about pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana), nature preserves in California, and John James Audubon’s artist studio in New York; how-to designs for building a mountain cabin; and triumphalist celebrations of the Oregon Trail. There remains no better way to understand Roosevelt’s land ethic and historical preservation instincts than by reading copies of this Depression-era magazine, published in Washington, D.C., by the American Forestry Association. Though it didn’t have the benefit of peer review, its thoughtful viewpoint had a huge impact on Roosevelt’s understanding of modern conservation and historical preservation.
II
Governor Roosevelt asked Irving Isenberg, a graduate of the New York State College of Forestry, to draft a forest management plan for all of the Roosevelt family’s holdings in Dutchess County. FDR had come to believe that the Kromelbooge Woods, on his Hyde Park property between the Big House and the river, were virgin forest. Isenberg concurred with FDR’s assessment, deeming the hemlock stands to be old-growth. “The stand should remain untouched,” Roosevelt wrote to Isenberg. “Do not remove even the dead trees. Do not build new roads. Thus it will be preserved just as nature has treated it.”29
Furthermore, in 1930 Governor Roosevelt hired Nelson C. Brown to manage his old-growth Springwood forests. Impressed by Brown’s expertise, as reflected in his books, Elements of Forestry (1914), Forest Products and Their Manufacture (1919), and America’s Lumber Industry (1923), Roosevelt came to rely on Brown for counsel about lumber production and pine, fir, arborvitae, and other conifers. Roosevelt also used Brown as his conduit to the American Green Cross, the New York State Conservation Commission, and the National Committee on Wood Utilization.30 “He told me of his interest in taking care of his native woods,” Brown recalled of their conversation, “and in planting trees in some of the worn-out old pastures and fields that had once been cultivated.”31 Brown, a New Jersey native three years younger than FDR, was inspired by Pinchot’s utilitarian conservation. Born in 1885 in South Orange, New Jersey, he graduated from Yale University with a degree in forestry in 1908. For the next few years, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South, hungry for hands-on silviculture experience.
During World War I, Brown was a professor at the New York State College of Forestry in Syracuse and then worked briefly at the Federal Trade Commission in Europe. He became the top forest products adviser to the American Expeditionary Force. In August 1921 he was reappointed to NYSCF to teach forest utilization. When Roosevelt’s friend Franklin Moon was appointed dean of the school, Brown became his loyal second in command and served as acting dean for three brief stints. He also oversaw FDR’s trees. “The Governor’s most impressive and stately stand of timber . . . is the white and red oak forest lying to the east of the [Albany] Post Road,” Brown wrote in American Forests. “By judicious and careful cutting, the beauty and capital growing stock have been preserved. It has yielded valuable products and is today a living example of successful American forest management. . . . The most impressive plantation is one of white pine—now fifteen years old. This has been thinned and pruned by the most acceptable forestry methods. It is very similar to the American white pine stands in the Rhine Valley or the Weymouth pine plantations as they are called on the British Islands.”32
While this was not obvious to the press, Roosevelt was bringing together a brain trust of agronomists and forestry experts (both professionals and amateurs) in his inner circle. FDR, in particular, was smitten with his gentleman farmer friend Henry Morgenthau Jr., who had hired unemployed men to chop firewood, collect kindling, and plant trees on his rolling thousand-acre estate in East Fishkill, New York. He asked Morgenthau about how many of these day laborers it would take to transform a one-hundred-acre plot of worn-out land into a profitable vegetable garden or woodlot. Recognizing that Morgenthau understood how forestry could supplement a farmer’s earnings, Roosevelt asked him to chair the New York State Agricultural Advisory Committee. Together they discussed whether New York could hire thousands of unemployed workers to reforest abandoned farms on a wide scale. In Roosevelt’s and Morgenthau’s combined thinking about unemployment and deforestation lay the seeds of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps.
Eleanor Roosevelt believed her husband thought of Morgenthau as a “younger brother,” part of his official family.33 Both men loved dairymen’s cooperatives and the local Grange, state parks, and county fairs. FDR also appointed Morgenthau commissioner of the Conservation Department overseeing New York’s state parks, rivers, forests, seashores, and lakes. Pastoral nationalism ran in both men’s blood. A year or so later, their friendship had strengthened immeasurably, thanks to Morgenthau’s sharp intellect and willingness to experiment. Improving rural life was their shared public policy passion. “Henry always goes about his work with a real feeling of consecration,” Morgenthau’s wife Elinor wrote to FDR, “but the fact that he is working under you and for you, fills him with . . . enthusiasm. . . . The part which pleases me most is that while you are moving on in your work . . . it gives Henry a chance to grow.”34
A favorite topic of conversation between Roosevelt and Morgenthau was Dutchess County’s crops. They formed a partnership called Squashco to see if gourds could become a new cash crop. “I have written Moses Smith on my farm to get four or five acres ready for squash to seed,” Governor Roosevelt wrote to Morgenthau. “I told him to plow the land now and harrow it twice before the seed is put in about July 1st, and to put about six or eight loads of manure to the acre, harrowing it in.”35
Roosevelt and Morgenthau shared a philosophy of “country living” and a determination to teach hard-luck urban youngsters about the wonders of New York’s natural world. Street kids from Hell’s Kitchen and the Bronx and Harlem suddenly found themselves in the Catskills and Hudson Highlands, along Lake Erie and the Finger Lakes, digging and planting and irrigating in a kind of work-relief Boy Scouts program. “We took the gas house gang, the bad boys who were loafing on the streets and getting into trouble, and we put them on the 4 a.m. train that ran up to the Bear Mountain area where they worked all day,” Morgenthau proudly recalled. “Then because there was no housing for them we took them back at night. FDR was much interested in this conservation of human resources, as in all conservation work.”36
Long before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 in hopes of removing billboards from scenic areas, Governor Roosevelt, the tireless automobile traveler, had led the way in New York. In March 1930 he asked the New York state legislature to have the Department of Public Works team up with
the Conservation Department to carry out a herculean tree-planting effort in each of the state’s ten highway districts. “These plantings would be in part of an experimental nature but primarily for the purpose of demonstration to the people of the state that the highways could and should be more sightly,” Roosevelt explained. “An increasing large body of public opinion recognizes the beauty of tree-lined highways as well as their economic value. If the state itself sets the example, even in a small way, I am certain that communities and individuals will follow it in a large way. Perhaps, too, a greater realization of beauty by those who use our highways may lead us some day to the elimination of those excrescences on the landscape known as advertising signs.”37
Roosevelt used all available media—newspaper, radio, pamphlets—to arouse public consciousness regarding conservation. The June 1930 issue of the journal Country Home, for example, had an article called “A Debt We Owe,” written by Governor Roosevelt, about the importance of forest resources. He was deeply concerned that Americans consumed five times more timber than was being planted, and he feared that if habits weren’t changed ecological disaster was imminent. Roosevelt admitted that a “certain amount of sentiment” clouded his unwavering love of the scenic Hudson’s glorious hills and bird-rich woodlands, but he wanted to put aesthetic considerations aside in favor of an economic argument for large-scale reforestation. “As a people we need wood for innumerable purposes, from ball bats and rocking horses to shingles, print paper and artificial silk,” Roosevelt wrote. “For the conservation of our soil resources we need the forests to break the force of rainfall to delay the melting of snows, to sponge up the moisture that would otherwise pour down the slopes and grades, carrying with it invaluable fertility and creating floods that destroy. Much of the water that falls in forested land never needs to be carried away, for it is said that one average white oak tree will give off by evaporation one hundred and fifty gallons of water on a hot day.”38
During the spring and summer of 1930, a severe drought affected twenty-seven states.39 Scant rain fell in the eastern United States. Only the Pacific Northwest escaped the ongoing drought between 1930 and 1936. Groundwater in the eastern two-thirds of the nation disappeared. Crops withered. Seventeen million people were directly affected by the drought while Roosevelt was governor. Along the Mississippi River—scene of the great flood of 1927—water was so low that barges were grounded. In some counties in Arkansas, the temperature remained over one hundred degrees for forty-three days. With no moisture on forest floors, wildfires raged throughout Missouri’s Ozarks. Many trees that managed to survive the drought of 1930 looked skeletal and malnourished. Florida was not spared; the dry spell lowered its water tables, and there was a threat that huge amounts of seawater would enter the municipal wells of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and other coastal cities.40
Starting in 1931, the “persistent center” of the drought, as the environmental historian Donald Worster has explained, shifted from the East to the Great Plains, turning large swaths of Montana and the Dakotas into a region “as arid as the Sonoran Desert.”41 Banks foreclosed on thousands of family farms across the affected areas. The Hoover administration seemed to be paralyzed, barely shrugging in response, and believing the cyclical economy and Mother Nature would both eventually right themselves. By and large, the White House stuck to the laissez-faire economic view that the market would eventually correct itself. But how could “the market” fix conditions in states dying from the “great plow-up” in the 1930s? Hoover offered only piecemeal grants, loans, and relief programs—nothing substantial enough to make a difference in the human suffering throughout those twenty-seven states in ecological crisis.
In approaching conservation issues, Hoover wanted to transfer some public lands back to the states instead of increasing federal control over land and wildlife management—as Roosevelt desired. While Hoover deserved credit for establishing Arches National Monument (Utah) and signing the legislation that created Carlsbad Caverns National Park (New Mexico), he scoffed at progressive conservationists’ notion that preserving America’s treasured landscapes would also act as an economic salve. “On the whole, Hoover’s attempts to set conservation policy on an entirely new course did not succeed,” historian Kendrick Clements observed in Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism. “It was almost as if there were two governments in the field of conservation—one, led by Hoover, trying to divest Washington of responsibility and preaching volunteerism and localism; and another, led by established federal agencies, quietly carrying on and even expanding traditional programs.”42
Throughout the early 1930s, Governor Roosevelt bemoaned Hoover’s failure to push forward on the report of the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission to establish Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave as new national parks. Hoover seemed interested in Shenandoah only because he had a fishing camp along the Rapidan River there. The fact that Hoover wanted to slash the annual budget of the Department of the Interior from $311 million to $58 million by fiscal year 1934 incensed Roosevelt. If anything, its budget and that of the Biological Survey (then under USDA control), needed to be increased.
A major accomplishment of Roosevelt’s second term as governor was an innovative program that placed unemployed men on farms to work. On August 28, 1931, at a special session of the state legislature, Roosevelt recommended the creation of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). It had an array of facets, designed to put money in the hands of New Yorkers who were destitute. As often as possible, that involved work of some kind. Modeled after FDR’s effective Boy Scout conservation camp initiative, one TERA program provided work relief to young men who planted trees throughout New York. The first year, TERA would have $20 million in funds, and it wasn’t enough. Major tax increases followed, but TERA staved off the worst of the Depression for many New Yorkers. With the formation of TERA, the governor established in New York the first comprehensive state relief program. Isador Straus, president of the R. H. Macy department store, was appointed chair of the new agency.43 Frances Perkins, the state labor commissioner, a social welfare activist from Massachusetts with degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Columbia University, had recommended to the governor that public works projects like TERA would be the “greatest source of hope for the future.”44 FDR also put men to work harnessing the state’s water resources, which he felt nature had “supplied us through a gift of God” to produce electricity.45
Roosevelt entrusted the daily operation of TERA to the feisty Harry Hopkins, whom he considered thereafter to be one of his closest advisers. Hopkins was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on August 17, 1890. Deeply interested in social work, on graduating from Grinnell College, he started working in the slums of New York City’s Lower East Side. Skinny and frequently ill, he instinctively pulled for the underdog. A true-blue reformer, Hopkins helped found the American Association of Social Workers in the early 1920s. Under Hopkins’s direction, TERA functioned as a disciplined program that helped the state’s poor to survive the Depression. A marvelous tactician, Hopkins had the mathematical and technical skills that Roosevelt lacked. Unafraid of donnybrooks, Hopkins defended progressive liberalism throughout the 1930s and 1940s and, along with Morgenthau, promoted FDR’s conviction that government spending would lift America out of the Depression and into economic prosperity.
Most New Yorkers admired the optimistic Governor Roosevelt. Whether or not they were aware of the extent of his paralysis—and most were not, due to FDR’s efforts to be as mobile as possible—people naturally perceived the governor’s story as a noble fight against adversity. As a politician, Roosevelt was unique, empathizing with everyone he spoke with, feeling others’ joys and woes profoundly. Certainly none of his detractors dared intimate that his polio affected his daily performance or impaired his ability to tackle his workload. Always in motion, he lived up to his pledge to visit New York villages that had never hosted a governor before. “His severest test was the ‘polio,’” his uncle Frederic
Delano wrote, “and to my mind, that is what really made him what he is—a twice-born man.”46
In 1930, when he ran for reelection, Roosevelt did not just beat his Republican opponent; he trounced him, winning by 725,107 votes. The victory positioned FDR as the party’s presidential front-runner in 1932.47
Judge Irving Lehman (center) administered the oath of office to Roosevelt, after his reelection to the governorship in 1930. Looking on, at left, is the judge’s brother, Lieutenant Governor Herbert Lehman. At right is Eleanor Roosevelt and behind her, Sara. FDR’s strong, progressive governorship included models for the New Deal in many areas, including farmland reclamation, reforestation, and parkland for the public.
A tragedy cast a pall over the beginning of Governor Roosevelt’s second term. On February 12, 1931, Roosevelt received news that Maunsell Crosby, only forty-four years old, had died following a botched appendectomy. One of the nation’s best ornithologists, who discovered new species in Central and South America, Crosby was perhaps the friend with whom Roosevelt was most relaxed. During the mid-1920s he had been Franklin’s legs in Florida, the friend who lifted him to enjoy beach picnics and long swims. In coming years Roosevelt would have a mural panel painted at the Rhinebeck post office showing the planting of locust seeds at Grasmere as a tribute to Crosby.48 But the fact that his dear friend was gone made Roosevelt feel that he himself was living on borrowed time.49
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 15
