Delano’s experience in city and regional planning was significant. As chairman of the Committee on the Basis of a Sound Land Policy, he had engineered an influential report on how America should manage its land. What made him unique was the importance he placed on beautification in the building of modern America. His Jeffersonian agrarianism had a tinge of the romantic, and as a reformer, Delano wanted nothing less than for all American roads to have a scenic quality. Even in front of the Ford Rouge factory in Dearborn and the United Steel furnaces in Pittsburgh, Delano wanted to see islands of well-maintained trees specially planted to “green” industrial zones. In urban areas Delano insisted on water treatment plants, daily garbage pickups, sanitation laws, and some added appeal for every sidewalk. “Few Americans had had more impressive experience in city and regional planning than Delano,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. attested. “Chicago, New York, and Washington all bore his mark in their programs for urban development.”25
Delano encouraged his nephew to build the Blue Ridge Parkway—an extension of the Skyline Drive that would connect Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smokies. Money for the project was found through the National Industrial Recovery Act. With Congress’s authorization, the Blue Ridge Parkway was entrusted to the National Park Service and Bureau of Public Roads. A strategy was formed to develop the Natchez Trace Parkway (to run along an ancient Indian trail connecting Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi).26 Meanwhile Eleanor Roosevelt became the first woman to drive up Whiteface Memorial Highway in the Adirondacks, the road that her husband had promoted as governor.27 “We are definitely in an era of building,” Roosevelt said of the early New Deal, “the best kind of building—the building of great public projects for the benefit of the public and with the definite objective of building human happiness.”28
II
Some in the War Department felt great anguish after hearing of the President’s abrupt decision of June to transfer military cemeteries—including Arlington National Cemetery—out of their jurisdiction to Interior. But George Dern, the secretary of war, wasn’t among them. Born in Dodge County, Nebraska, Dern moved to Utah in 1894 to make money in mining. By coinventing the Hoyt-Dern ore-roasting process (for tracking silver from low-grade ores), he made a fortune. As governor of Utah from 1925 to 1933, Dern had been lukewarm about the Interior Department. When Albright tried to establish a Kolob National Park in 1931—near Zion and Bryce Canyon—Dern shot down the proposal.29 When Roosevelt was governor of New York, he met Dern at a governors’ conference, and they hit it off immediately. Both were ardent Wilsonian Democrats with an abiding love of the great American outdoors. Dern was, as the New York Times put it, “especially active” in all things related to conservation.30 Just a few weeks before the 1932 election, Roosevelt had spent two days consulting with Dern in Salt Lake City.31
Roosevelt’s choice of Dern to head the War Department was unexpected. But Roosevelt knew that nobody in the leadership of the Democratic Party was more inclined to promote his CCC project than Dern. Outdoors recreation was a promising new route for Utah’s economic prosperity, the troubled state had a whopping 36 percent unemployment rate. Dern, a miner and the most pacifist secretary of war in American history, understood that the Colorado Plateau needed roads, and Roosevelt was the man to build then. When asked how a secretary of war could advocate a tree-planting corps, Dern spoke about the many amazing experiences U.S. Army reserve officers would have through the CCC. “They have had to learn to govern men by leadership, explanation, and diplomacy rather than discipline,” Dern said. “That knowledge is priceless to the American Army.”32
On August 22, 1933, Roosevelt signed a presidential proclamation under the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to save a 6,155-acre site of rugged Utah wilderness as Cedar Breaks National Monument; the 6,711 acres were taken from Dixie National Forest.33 The president’s action set an important New Deal environmental precedent: pulling “natural wonders” away from the Forest Service (a component of the Department of Agriculture) for Interior to manage. Ever since the Utah Parks Company (a part of the Union Pacific Railroad) built a handsome lodge at high-altitude Cedar Breaks—a half-mile-deep natural amphitheater carved by wind, water uplift, and erosion—it had drawn tourists. Iron oxides in the limestone made the cliffs shine with continually changing tints as new angles of the sun’s rays were reflected.
With great determination, Roosevelt further expanded the portfolio of the National Park Service in southern Utah. Here he had the help of Ephraim Portman Pectol, who was a bishop in the Church of Latter Day Saints, a scrupulous businessman in the town of Torrey, a supporter of the New Deal, and a hiking enthusiast. Pectol had been enchanted with a hundred-mile stretch of gorgeous canyons, ridges, buttes, and monoliths in Wayne County. The official name of this sixty-five-million-year-old steep depression in the earth’s crust was Waterpocket Fold, but in the 1920s Pectol and other local boosters dubbed it Wayne Wonderland.34
Pectol was elected to Utah’s legislature in 1933. With FDR in the White House, he was not inclined to wait patiently for Congress to approve a national park—a process that often took ten years. Instead, he lobbied the White House directly, extolling the rugged beauty of the area and enclosing photos of the canyonlands. Roosevelt wanted Wayne Wonderland to be brought into the NPS. A number of CCC reports had agreed that this largely inaccessible part of wild Utah was nearly as breathtaking in terms of scenery as the famous Zion National Park. Ickes asked Pectol to take Interior officials on an inspection tour of the wilderness. These officials quickly determined that the area would make an ideal national monument.
All of Pectol’s boosterism finally seemed to be paying off, as a federal border survey team was dispatched to Utah to draw up boundaries for the prospective monument. However, Ickes didn’t love the name “Wayne Wonderland.” Two words describing this hauntingly beautiful part of Utah jumped out at him: reef (for the ridges of sharply jutting rock that interrupted the land) and capitol (for the white-domed peaks of sandstone that dominated the reef’s high horizon).35 Ickes, perhaps unilaterally, directed lawyers at Interior to draft an executive action for FDR to sign establishing Capitol Reef National Monument. Unlike Cedar Breaks, which became a national monument quickly, Capitol Reef languished for four years. But on August 2, 1937, Roosevelt signed a presidential proclamation creating Capitol Reef National Monument (it became a national park in 1971).36 And that same year, Roosevelt signed Proclamation 2221 establishing Zion National Monument: 49,150 pristine acres in the Kolob region of Washington County, Utah.37 (It was incorporated into Zion National Park in 1956.)38
Utah was getting so much work-relief help from Roosevelt that a field representative from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration dubbed it “the prize ‘gimme’ State of the Union.”39 An astounding 116 CCC camps were run by the Forest Service in Utah. Two visionary Roosevelt administration experiments were also set up in Utah—the Widstoe Project (located in the Sevier River drainage near the Escalante Mountains) and the Central Utah Project (later to become the Intermountain Station’s Benmore Experimental Range)—aimed to irrigate arid valleys to help communities thrive.40 Because Utah became a “red state” in the twenty-first century, reliably Republican, the fact that FDR did more to help Utah prosper than all other presidents combined has been largely overlooked.
III
Luckily, Southern Utah University in Cedar City had the foresight to establish a CCC oral history program for southeastern Utah. Collectively, these New Deal oral histories illuminated how aimless young Utah men, ages eighteen to twenty-three, including many Mormons from impoverished families, worked in the canyonlands. “On the trail we saw Echo Canyon, a deep narrow gulley cut in the rock by stream,” Belden W. Lewis wrote in an unpublished diary of his CCC experiences in Zion. “From observation point we could see the Great White Thrones to the south. We could look down on top of it. The rest was a God-damned trail and a Son-of-a-bitch climb. The scenery was swell, though.”41
To bolster Utah’s agriculture, CCC projects included improving grazing conditions on rangelands, conserving water, controlling rodents and predatory animals, and constructing hundreds of miles of fences and guardrails (many along large water diversion dams). Roosevelt’s tree army built service roads, sewers, water and electrical systems, bridges, footpaths, restrooms, gas stations, and new campgrounds.42 Seemingly overnight, CCC trucks loaded with gravel could be seen chugging around Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks, determined to turn the dirt roads into tourist-friendly ribbons of asphalt. (The Union Pacific Railroad, which had built a lodge in Zion, didn’t like the New Deal’s promotion of automobile tourism one bit.) Enrollee Tony Melessa was already working for the CCC in Ohio when unconfirmed rumors spread about assignments opening up in Utah. “I heard there was a troop train going to Utah, to the West,” he recalled. “Everyone back there said, ‘Go west, young man. Go west.’”43
Many CCCers working in the Utah wilderness became lifelong ecology enthusiasts because of their experiences in the Zion backcountry. Hiking in the cliffs and mountains, while tiring, offered them a sense of the serene immensity of the Colorado Plateau. While members of the U.S. Army were known to carve their initials into trees and rocks, this type of defilement was forbidden in the CCC. “I never marked a tree in my whole life,” one CCC worker in Zion, Quince Alvey, recalled. “I didn’t put my name on anything because I also adhere to the old saying ‘Fools’ names and fools’ faces are always found in public places.’”44
William C. Dalton, born in 1916, grew up in a left-wing Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) household in Salt Lake City, where his father instilled anti-Mormon sentiments in him. When the Great Depression hit, the Daltons lost their home and found themselves running low on both food and money. So William went to work for the CCC in 1934 to help feed his two younger brothers. “My father might have been headed for college and a career in law if his family had kept their money,” his daughter Kathleen Dalton, author of Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, recalled, “but in the CCC he learned surveying, drainage, and building culverts, and he gained a variety of construction skills he used for the rest of his life.”45
William Dalton did a lot of tree planting, well digging, trail cutting, and survey crew work in the canyonland ecosystems of Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks, and Zion. It was tough work in the boiling sun. He slashed his leg in a construction accident, was struck by lightning in one of the makeshift shower stalls, and was hit by a wedge when quarrying stone (one of his eyes was permanently damaged). All the deprivations and mishaps were worth that $30 per month. By 1938 Dalton had enough civil engineering skill that he was hired to work on major infrastructure projects like the Alcan Highway in Alberta and the Panama Canal Zone Isthmian Highway. Just as FDR had foreseen, once World War II broke out Dalton—like numerous other former CCCers—served in the Seabees, building bridges, storage tanks for gas, Quonset huts, landing strips, and other types of combat infrastructure in both theaters. “The CCC was the basis for his family’s semi-upward mobility,” Kathleen Dalton said. “The CCC saved his family’s lives, really.”46
Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace wasn’t keen on Roosevelt’s trying to turn Utah (and other western states) into National Park Service fiefdoms. In fact, Executive Order 6166 had put Wallace in an uncomfortable position.47 It stripped the Agriculture Department’s portfolio, wholesale. Albright, refusing to be embroiled in an interagency fight between Wallace and Ickes, had resigned.48 Instead Wallace aimed his ire over EO 6166 directly at Ickes.
Henry Wallace, circa 1939. Wallace, a wealthy Iowan, served as FDR’s secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940 and was one of the most effective of all New Dealers. The plight of the American farmer turned around with his help, and FDR rewarded him with the second spot on the 1940 presidential ticket.
Henry Wallace was born in Adair County, Iowa, on October 8, 1888. His grandfather was a beloved Presbyterian minister and founder of Wallaces’ Farmer, an agronomist magazine whose slogan was “Good Farming, Clear Thinking, and Right Living.”49 His father had served as secretary of agriculture under presidents Harding and Coolidge. The eldest of six, Henry studied animal husbandry at Iowa State College in Ames, graduating in 1910. He served on the editorial staff of Wallaces’ Farmer from 1910 to 1924. Intelligent, and proud of his farming heritage, Wallace mocked Iowa officials who favored corn that looked handsome over corn that grew properly. Wallace’s Hi-Bred Corn Company raised hybrid, high-yield strains that he had personally developed; they made him a millionaire.
While Wallace was a Republican, he had grown disappointed with the way the GOP leadership prioritized big business over the nation’s farmers. This discontent led him to vote for Al Smith for president in 1928 and to support FDR in 1932. This was a happy moment for FDR, as he was a great admirer of Wallace, the genius Iowa corn-grower whose ideas about elevating farming interests mirrored his own beliefs and those of Henry Morgenthau. The president appointed Morgenthau to serve as the chairman of the Federal Farm Board and Wallace as secretary of agriculture to implement an unprecedented New Deal farming strategy. It included price supports, production adjustments, insurance for crops, resettlement programs for impoverished farmers, soil conservation, a tenant purchase initiative, farm credit, rural electrification, and food distribution. Many of the innovative partnerships Wallace built between farmers and the government were based on conservation.
Like Roosevelt, Wallace hoped the New Deal’s conservationist agricultural projects could “leave something that contributes toward giving life meaning, joy, and beauty for generations to come.”50 During the “Hundred Days,” however, Wallace was a leading skeptic in the administration with regard to the CCC. Unlike Ickes and Dern, Wallace thought it outrageous that Roosevelt would pay men a measly dollar a day for hard labor. It also seemed to Wallace an impossibility for 250,000 formerly idle men to engage in meaningful work.51 And Wallace was frustrated with FDR’s method of appropriations: his avoidance of lump-sum budget payments and his shifting of funds from agency to agency.
While the New Deal generated optimism in rural America, much of Europe remained paralyzed by the Depression. In several nations, democracy was at a crossroads. Totalitarianism and racism had taken on new dimensions. In German cities, such as Berlin and Munich, Nazis burned books in public bonfires. Japan was in the middle of a campaign of ruthless aggression against the Chinese, especially in Manchuria. Militaristic fascism was rising throughout Europe and Asia. Anxiety had replaced the hope offered by the League of Nations. But Roosevelt focused on America’s sick economy. Rehabilitating abused land and saving ecosystems was prioritized over foreign policy.
“The plain truth is that Americans as people,” Hugh Bennett would write, “have never learned to love the land and to regard it as an enduring resource. They have seen it only as a field for exploitation and a source of immediate financial return.”52 Bennett had been a passionate crusader for the very soil that constituted American lands, but his speeches, articles, and studies meant little in Washington until Franklin Roosevelt arrived there as president. Determined to revive exhausted American land, Roosevelt launched the Soil Erosion Service (SES) in September 1933, with Bennett as director, and with $5 million provided under the authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The agency would be part of the Department of the Interior.
Bennett, a North Carolinian, raised in the cotton fields, had worked for the federal government in soil research since the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. “Big Hugh,” as he was called, preached in a scientific style—which FDR enthusiastically embraced—against the denudation of soils.53 Armed with reams of data, Bennett asked struggling farmers to reduce crop production on highly eroded land. In coming years, Bennett became FDR’s guru on all things related to soil, particularly on establishing a planned and permanent federal agricultural system.54 “He could talk cotton in the South, wheat in Kansas, oranges in California,” historian Tim Egan w
rote of Bennett. “He loved nothing more than digging with his hands in the earth that was the greatest of American endowments.”55
Given a free hand by the Department of the Interior, Bennett ordered the directors of soil experiment stations, twenty-three all across America, to tailor a set of conservation methods that could be easily taught to local farmers and field-tested on their farms.56 Millions of acres of wonderful farmland had been destroyed by primitive farming practices. The Soil Erosion Service (SES) provided equipment, seeds, and advice to farmers. Employees of the CCC, CWA, and PWA were lent to Bennett’s agency to help with demonstration projects. Bennett’s philosophy was that there was no single best method of soil conservation; it required a recipe of interlocking techniques. A typical team consisted of a soil scientist, a forester, and a field biologist working closely with local agricultural interests and landowners. Appreciative farmers soon deluged the Department of the Interior with requests for Hugh Bennett to open more agricultural field stations in their backyards. Many scientists, however, thought Bennett’s evangelism was rather overwrought.57 The problem in the Great Plains, these critics argued, was weather, not farming abuse. “Millions of acres of our land are ruined, other millions of acres already have been harmed,” Bennett wrote in Soil Conservation. “And not mere soil is going down the slopes, down the rivers, down the wastes of the oceans. Opportunity, security, the chance for a man to make a living from the land—these are going too. It is to preserve them—to sustain a rewarding rural life as a bulwark of this nation, that we must defend the soil.”58
As the SES grew in stature, Henry Wallace took notice and began insisting that its work be overseen by the Department of Agriculture. Yet another interagency feud soon erupted between Ickes and Wallace. Overnight the status of SES changed: having started as a temporary first-year New Deal agency, one of Roosevelt’s many ideas, it became a permanent influence on land management. By mid-1935, when SES changed its name to the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, becoming the biggest division there. The SCS oversaw 147 demonstration projects, forty-eight tree nurseries, 454 CCC camps, and numerous federally paid workers in the fight to stop soil erosion.59 Always on the move, Bennett, a showman, mingled with farmers, dined with college presidents, chatted with county agents—whatever it took to save the land from sick soil. For the land to be reborn, Bennett argued, farmers needed to return to the years before “the plow broke the prairie.”60
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 22
