Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  To compensate for such institutionalized racism, the Roosevelt administration taught African American history in the camps, with Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass honored as sustainable heroes. African American supervisors were placed in the chain of command on Roosevelt’s orders. “In the CCC camps,” Roosevelt wrote to Fechner, “where the boys are colored in the Park Service work, please try to put in colored foremen, not of course, in technical work but in the ordinary manual work.”102

  Three all-black CCC companies in Missouri worked in the loamy soil and pine forests with dedication. In Missouri, CCC Company 1743 left behind a stunning legacy of rustic stone architecture. Indeed, Company 1743, based near Stoutville and nicknamed the “Thunderbirds,” became legendary for its work in Tom Sawyer State Park. But, for the most part, these African American companies were assigned to the more menial duties, such as digging ditches and planting trees, and did not build the handsome stone bridges and picnic areas that were the CCC’s high-profile projects in the state.

  Each Missouri camp had a company commander, a project superintendent, and an educational adviser. There were also chaplains, doctors, silviculturists, agronomists, and engineers. At bugle call, the enrollees made their beds and scrubbed the barracks under the watchful eye of an army foreman. Because the CCC had certain practices in common with the U.S. Army, it isn’t surprising that many military leaders, after initial skepticism, appreciated the CCC. Reserve officers were often in charge of a camp’s transportation needs, day-to-day management, and operational regulations. Part of the attraction of the CCC for many men was the seductive promise of three meals a day. Once the orange juice was downed and plates of eggs and sausage were consumed, the shovel-ax brigade climbed into the pickup trucks that drove them to work sites. At some sites CCCers drove giant bulldozers and concrete mixers and wielded hydraulic rock-busters and electric saws. It’s been said that the CCC recruits in Missouri were more likely to stink of gasoline than smell of pine.

  Although the Missouri CCC camps varied in layout, depending on topography, each camp was equipped with barracks, a mess hall, bathhouses, latrines, quarters for the officers, and a water storage tank. Photographs of Missouri camps show long, narrow barracks with a row of bunks on either side. A woodstove was usually installed in the center of the barracks, and men would fight for the privilege of sleeping nearest to the stove during the bleak winter months. As if in a Jack London story, the pecking order at CCC camps was sometimes determined by boxing matches. Conversely, what went on behind the barracks, away from the eyes of the camp directors—like fisticuffs and cursing—doesn’t often appear in letters to mom and dad. Boxing, authorized or not, wasn’t the only popular sport at the Missouri camps. Intercamp leagues were formed for baseball, softball, and basketball.

  Not long after the CCC was established, the mushrooming camps each launched their own newspapers or mimeographed newsletters to chronicle daily life. Collectively, these publications represent a trove of Great Depression journalism, regional lore, and conservation accomplishment. Roosevelt asked Melvin Ryder—who had served on the staff of Stars and Stripes during World War I—to publish from Washington a nationally distributed weekly newspaper, Happy Days, which would feature propagandistic pieces on life in the CCC camps, sporting events, entertainment, and developments in conservation education.103 Happy Days sometimes printed entries for the best CCC motto. Many were funny, such as “They Came, They Saw(ed), They Conquered,” or bittersweet: “Farewell to Alms.”104 The New York Daily News approvingly quoted from Happy Days that the CCC motto was “They’ve Made the Good Earth Better.”105

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “HE DID NOT WAIT TO ASK QUESTIONS, BUT SIMPLY SAID THAT IT SHOULD BE DONE”

  I

  Shenandoah National Park is an area of lofty peaks, continuous ridges, peaceful valleys, gentle forests, and far-reaching vistas. In the full flush of springtime, all 180,000 acres—from Front Royal to the southern boundary at Jarman Gap—lived up to their reputation as the ethereal backbone of the famous Blue Ridge Mountains. Although Roosevelt had been in Washington for only a month, he wanted a short vacation, a day trip, in Virginia’s radiant greenery. And Shenandoah was the ideal place in the mid-Atlantic to meander on the kind of drawn-out country drive Roosevelt loved.

  Another reason Roosevelt wanted to explore Shenandoah National Park that April of 1933 was to inspect Herbert Hoover’s fishing camp along Rapidan River. Toying with the idea of a presidential retreat, where he could escape from the heat, Roosevelt wanted to find out whether Hoover’s camp fitted the bill.1

  Back in 1931, Hoover had started building the ninety-seven-mile Skyline Drive, the only public road that ran through Shenandoah National Park, a long, narrow, north-to-south scenic road through the Appalachians of Virginia. In addition to visiting the Rapidan camp, Roosevelt would also inspect Skyline Drive, meet with work-relief crews, and enjoy a few scenic Virginia overviews.2

  At the last minute, Roosevelt asked Horace Albright, the prime advocate of Shenandoah National Park in the Hoover years, to accompany him on the much-anticipated drive. Flattered by the invitation, Albright quickly accepted. Most NPS directors got to meet the president for only stray minutes at an occasional ceremony. Albright, by contrast, would have uninterrupted hours with FDR early in his administration enjoying together the Virginia roadsides blooming with wildflowers.

  Albright, who had succeeded Stephen Mather in January 1929, had been at the acme of the NPS since it was established in 1916. Genial, reliable, and good with numbers, he got along well with the succession of secretaries of the interior—Franklin K. Lane, Albert B. Fall, Herbert Work, and Ray Wilbur—before Ickes. Following the “Mather tradition” of selling the NPS to the American people as the surest way to win congressional appropriations, Albright developed into a master publicist for wild places. Roosevelt knew that by asking him to take a country drive on April 9 he’d learn how NPS units were faring in the Great Depression.3

  Albright, taking advantage of his seniority, also had a hidden agenda: he planned to lobby the president to transfer America’s military-historical areas and national monuments (those in the Department of Agriculture and the War Department), to the NPS bureau within the Department of the Interior. And he wanted Roosevelt to establish a protocol of uniform administration for the national parks and to create a Branch of Education and Research (staffed with naturalists and historians). On a smaller scale he wanted Roosevelt to authorize the Colonial National Monument to manage historic Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, in Virginia.4 Doors had closed on Albright’s grand idea for reorganization in the 1920s—though Hoover had been sympathetic. With FDR in the White House, anything was possible.

  Roosevelt was excited to be playing hooky from Washington, hungry for good-natured banter and fun, as he climbed into the open-roof touring car. It was a beautiful day. Once the motorcade arrived at Hoover’s fishing camp, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a picnic lunch was served, at which there was “much informal conversation and laughter among members of the party.”5 But Roosevelt quickly determined that Hoover’s fishing camp wasn’t for him. After lunch, FDR told Albright he wanted to cruise the central portion of the Skyline Drive, set to open in September. The fact that 101 miles of the Appalachian Trail ran parallel to Skyline Drive, impressed Roosevelt, as did the beauty of flowering azaleas and mountain laurels. “From the Hoover camp, we were driven up an old wagon road to the partially finished highway, later to be named the Skyline Drive, in what was to be the Shenandoah National Park,” Albright recalled. “The President first asked questions about the establishment of the Park Service and its policies relative to new national parks in the East, among them Shenandoah, and about the new road over which we were traveling.”6

  Experiencing the Skyline Drive was exhilarating for FDR. The parkway’s macadamized and hand-built rock embankments, guard walls, and easy gradients; a seven-hundred-foot tunnel; the wide sweeping curves; the pull-offs for panoramic views; and th
e absence of billboards and tacky commercial enterprises were worthy of Switzerland or Austria.7 No construction detail around Thornton Gap was too small to escape Roosevelt’s eagle eye. Even though rock retaining walls were being built, he instructed Albright that the speed limit on the federal road shouldn’t be any higher than forty-five miles per hour.

  Although Albright was a strong-minded, even dictatorial NPS administrator, one-on-one he was very personable, an unquenchable conversationalist. Delighting in Albright’s Civil War stories about Bull Run and Appomattox Court House, Roosevelt pushed back his return to the White House. Mustering his courage, Albright raised the transfer to the National Park Service of all sixty-four of the historical sites then administered by the War and Agriculture Departments. If Albright had his way, Interior would absorb such heritage sites as the Statue of Liberty (New York), Kings Mountain (the Carolinas), Gettysburg (Pennsylvania), Vicksburg (Mississippi), Shiloh (Tennessee), Fort McHenry (Maryland), Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace (Kentucky), and Chalmette Monument Grounds (Louisiana).8

  Roosevelt was very enthusiastic.9 “He did not wait to ask questions but simply said that it should be done,” Albright recalled, “and told me to take up the plan with his office and find out where to submit our papers at the proper time.”10 Under the expansive authority granted him by Congress, Roosevelt quickly moved to consolidate all federal park business under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. The time was opportune for fast action. All sixty-four national sites could be suddenly transferred to NPS by executive order.

  The Forest Service was angry about Roosevelt’s abrupt embrace of the NPS. But Roosevelt had long thought that a single system of federal parklands was needed: genuinely national in scope and embracing historic as well as natural places. That he chose the NPS over the Forest Service made sense. As of 1933, the Park Service was already managing twenty archaeological and historic places including Bandelier (New Mexico), Scott’s Bluff (Nebraska), and Siskia (Alaskan Territory).11 Although the big wilderness parks would be the heart and soul of the National Park Service, historic sites were taking on new importance.12

  Never before or since had an American president made so many pilgrimages to national and state historic sites. Wherever the president traveled in 1933 and 1934, his staffers assured him that historical sites would be added to his itinerary: he visited James Monroe’s office in Fredericksburg, Virginia; dedicated a national monument to Samuel Gompers of the AFL in Washington, D.C.; delivered a Memorial Day address at the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania; journeyed to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, to commemorate the Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark; bowed his head at James Polk’s grave in Tennessee; explored the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke in North Carolina; toured the sixteenth-century Castillo, San Felipe del Moro citadel in Puerto Rico; inspected Blue Beard’s castle in the Virgin Islands; and dedicated Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg.

  Enthralled by these secular shrines, Roosevelt set into bureaucratic motion what became the Historic Sites Act of 1935. This act made the conservation of historical sites a National Park Service obligation (something that had been only implied in the Antiquities Act of 1906). Section 462 of the Historic Sites Act also granted the NPS a wide range of enhanced powers, including the authority to oversee preservation work and the legal rights to survey and select sites and buildings of national significance (this provision eventually evolved into the National Historic Landmarks Program).13 To Roosevelt, the preservation of historic places was fundamental for building a deep sense of citizenship.

  Eleanor Roosevelt once remarked that her husband “never liked to dwell on the past” and “always wanted to go forward.”14 That was certainly his personal outlook. But as a national planner, FDR fervently believed that National Historic Sites and state parks (with interpretive nature museums) instilled in citizens a sense of pride in, and ownership of, the United States. As a corollary, Roosevelt instructed that all the New Deal’s state park and national park structures draw on indigenous local styles and materials. Local historians and landscape architects clearly never had a stauncher ally than Roosevelt, who ordered the completion of such dormant projects as Frederick Law Olmsted’s Aquatic Park in San Francisco and Metropolitan Park District in Cleveland.15 Albright was stunned by FDR’s “intense interest in American history and his memory of men and events.”16

  One historic spot that Roosevelt wanted to bring under immediate NPS control that spring of 1933 was the Saratoga Battlefield in Stillwater, New York. On the drive around northern Virginia he brought the matter up with Albright. Without missing a beat, Albright informed Roosevelt that a bill had been introduced in Congress in 1930 but hadn’t made it out of committee. After a few moments of reflection, Roosevelt said, “Suppose you do something tomorrow about this?”17 To Roosevelt’s consternation, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover hadn’t acted to protect Revolutionary War sites like Saratoga Battlefield from encroaching commercial development. It bothered him that, if it weren’t for the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, numerous Revolutionary War–era historic landmarks in Virginia would have been lost to commercial development. It was the work of such private associations that had preserved Williamsburg, Kenmore, the Monroe Law Office at Fredericksburg, Gadsby’s Tavern, Pohick, Christ Church, Mount Vernon, and Hanover Court House. The nonprofit preservationists had done their part. Now, under Roosevelt’s leadership, the federal government would accept long-term responsibility.

  That April of 1933, the president put the reorganization of America’s heritage sites into motion at the White House. After further reflection, he decided that all the public federal buildings—not just parks and monuments—located inside the District of Columbia should be transferred to Interior. On June 10, 1933, he signed Executive Order 6166, consolidating all national parks, national monuments, and batttlefields into the National Park Service. Transferred to Interior from the Office of Public Buildings and Parks were the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. FDR simultaneously abolished the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission and the Public Buildings Commission, among similar overly specialized government offices.18 Under FDR’s prodding, the NPS soon assumed one more task: the Historic American Buildings Survey, to protect from the wrecking ball the nation’s most precious architectural gems.19

  When EO 6166 went into effect on August 10, the modern-day National Park Service (NPS) was born. “It effectively made the Park Service a very strong agency with such a distinctive and independent field of service as to end its possible eligibility for merger,” Albright wrote, “or consolidation with another bureau.”20

  Once Roosevelt signed the NPS consolidation documents, the forty-three-year-old Albright, on July 17, tendered his resignation. After four years as director of the National Park Service he wanted to make money in the private sector. He joined the boards of both the U.S. Potash Corporation and the U.S. Borax and Chemical Corporation. On Albright’s recommendation, the president chose Arno B. Cammerer, from Arapahoe, Nebraska, to be the new NPS director.21

  Cammerer was a Washington “cave dweller,” having worked since 1919 in various offices at the Treasury and at Interior. Ickes had preferred Newton B. Drury of the Save-the-Redwoods League, believing that the NPS needed “outside blood” from California. But in the end Cammerer—an associate director of the NPS—won out by virtue of seniority. Ickes soon developed an antagonistic relationship with “Cam,” considering him an ingratiating and downright annoying man, lacking imagination, and afraid of special interests. In his Secret Diary, Ickes carped about Cammerer’s habit of “vigorously chewing gum in an openmouthed manner.”22

  As Roosevelt hoped, Executive Order 6166 brought the National Park Service into urban areas for the first time. In Greater Washington, NPS park rangers now ran Ford’s Theatre, the Curtis-Lee Mansion, and Rock Creek Park. Before the grand reorganization of June 10, 1933, the NPS had sixty-seven units; after Roosevelt si
gned the transfer documents, it boasted 137. Roosevelt hoped all Americans would visit far-flung heritage sites run by Interior. And they could. After all, when TR was president there were only nine thousand cars registered in the United States. By 1933, despite the Great Depression, that number had risen to twenty-three million. And the consolidation of parks and monuments under the NPS helped centralize conservation efforts. With the NPS serving as the supervisory agency for infrastructure improvement (roads, restrooms, campgrounds) in federal, state, and local parks, Roosevelt had turned the bureau into something extraordinary.

  Roosevelt’s predilection for historical preservation emanated from his uncle Frederic Delano, who helped him craft the executive orders for the reorganization. During the early New Deal, many people in the Eastern Establishment thought Delano—clean shaven, well dressed, mannerly, and refined—was the best channel to get an idea about policy directly to FDR’s attention. Delano was a personification of the old boy network of the Northeast; serving as chairman of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, he was also a powerful Washington insider. Many senators, cabinet officers, and Supreme Court justices learned the value of a quiet word with Delano. As the Washington Evening Star noted, Delano’s gravitas was never built on claiming “personal credit for anything.”23 Wary of charges of nepotism, Delano, a cohesive force in the early New Deal, didn’t leave much of a paper trail. But it is doubtful that EO 6166 could have happened without his sage and persistent advocacy.24