Once settled at his Campobello cottage, doing a little bird-watching and fishing, Roosevelt wrote an open letter that appeared in the July 8, 1933, edition of Happy Days, the national CCC newspaper: “I welcome the opportunity to extend, through the medium of the columns of Happy Days, a greeting to the men who constitute the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Roosevelt wrote, congratulating his cabinet secretaries—Ickes, Dern, Perkins, and Wallace—for the expediency with which they brought his pet New Deal program to life. “It is my belief,” Roosevelt asserted, “that what is being accomplished will conserve our natural resources, create future national wealth and prove of moral and spiritual value not only to those of you who are taking part, but to the rest of the country as well.”27
An ingenious aspect of the CCC during its second phase was Roosevelt’s decision to enroll veterans of the Spanish American War and World War I. Back in July 1932, a “Bonus Army” of forty-three thousand veterans had marched on Washington demanding back pay for their retirement bonuses, setting up camp on the lawn of the Capitol. The Hoover administration had these veterans forcibly evicted; their demands were summarily dismissed. Two veterans were shot dead in an altercation. On May 10, 1933, a second Bonus Army congregated at Fort Hunt, Virginia. Others bivouacked at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate.
The Roosevelts, determined not to repeat Hoover’s mistake, sprang to action. Not only did Eleanor Roosevelt visit the veterans on a soggy field, sharing coffee and singing folk songs; she soon persuaded her husband to allow the veterans to join the CCC. The Washington Post reported on May 20, “Half of Bonus Army Ready to Work in Woods.”28 After extensive negotiations, the Bonus Army broke up, with around 1,800 men headed to reforestation training at Langley Field and Fort Humphries, not far from Bonus Army encampments in Virginia. The rest of the protesters were shipped home at government expense. Once trained, these veterans were sent to CCC camps in New England.29 By bringing the Bonus Army into the CCC, and by paying veterans early bonuses, Roosevelt became a hero to them and others who had formerly felt forgotten.
Another idea, coming from the same impulse to remember the downtrodden, was providing “quality outdoor recreation facilities” at the “lowest cost for the benefit of people of lower and middle incomes.”30 Millions of Americans simply didn’t have the wherewithal—money, transportation, or initiative—to visit far-flung state parks, much less national ones. Roosevelt wanted such people to be able to visit nature or relax outdoors in an easy daytrip. The effort was spearheaded by Conrad Wirth, assistant director of the NPS, as well as director of the State Park Emergency Conservation Program. Using $5 million from the FERA billions, the new plan called for the purchase of dilapidated farmland within fifty miles of an urban area. The tracts also had to encompass between two and ten thousand acres. They did not necessarily have to be gorgeous; the New Dealers would make them attractive.
Once Roosevelt green-lighted purchases at four hundred sites around the country, he ordered the NPS, CCC, and PWA to reforest the blighted areas. Campsites with the capacity to accommodate individuals or large civic groups were built by the CCC and WPA. Water-based recreation (either natural or man-made) was given top priority. Roosevelt thought that no state park should be without a swimming pool or lake. Once rehabilitated by the CCC, these landscapes could be given to state park systems.31
By 1934, Roosevelt had approved forty-six areas in twenty-four states for what he called Recreational Demonstration Areas (RDAs). These lands allowed Roosevelt to help alleviate overcrowding in America’s national parks. The RDAs were to be within fifty miles of an urban center. At many RDAs day-use picnic grounds and bathing beaches were established for urbanites to get a quick dose of nature. Of all the states, Pennsylvania had the most RDAs, five: Raccoon Creek (near Pittsburgh); Laurel Hill (near Johnstown); Blue Knob (near Altoona); Hickory Run (near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre); and French Creek (between Philadelphia and Reading).32
Roosevelt pushed for (and helped plan and design) Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park RDA. The idea was to help Washington, D.C.-Baltimore residents have a convenient destination for outdoors getaways. FDR had been impressed with the beautiful mountain topography of northern Maryland, and sickened at the sight of blighted hillsides that had been recklessly timbered. The park was built exclusively on worn-out uneconomical farmlands, and the president hoped to prove the potential of eroded lands plus the possibility for recreational opportunities.33 He ordered the U.S. government to purchase thousands of acres and declare them an RDA. Work-relief crews laid out Roosevelt’s dream RDA park—Catoctin Mountain Park—to his minute specifications, with group camping facilities (fire rings, water systems, restrooms) like those at Bear Mountain State Park. Rustic cabins, hiking trails, scenic lookouts, filling station areas, stone amphitheaters, and picnic centers were erected, with Maryland’s natural heritage kept in mind. Picturesque snags, six per acre, were left to please the eye. The CCC also built Appalachian Trail shelters west of the park. Other popular RDAs that Roosevelt’s crews created include Custer (South Dakota), and Mendocino (California).
Taking advice from Roosevelt, Ickes bought Head Waters, an estate in the town of Olney, Maryland, not far from Catoctin Mountain Park. And during World War II, in 1942, Roosevelt claimed one of these Catoctin Mountain cabin camp centers, built in 1939, as his own retreat away from Washington’s hot, humid summers. Originally dubbed “Shangri-La,” the president’s retreat was renamed Camp David in 1953 by President Eisenhower (after his grandson).34
Roosevelt also established the greenbelt town of Greenbelt, Maryland, with funds from the Resettlement Administration (later reorganized as the Farm Security Administration). The administration acquired two thousand acres of Maryland countryside a dozen miles from downtown Washington, D.C. The area was protected on the north by an additional five thousand acres procured for a Beltsville National Agricultural Research Center, to be built as a model suburban community. Around the developed 225-acre Greenbelt commercial district was a “permanent protective belt of fields and forests.” Here was Roosevelt’s ideal “garden city” sprung to life, a planned community where nature received care as surely as the townspeople did.35
Another spirited CCC outfit that wrote to FDR about its successes and high jinks was Camp Cabeza de Vaca (Company 843) in Magdalena, New Mexico.36 Perched high in the Magdalena Mountains, the camp was named after the Spanish explorer who led a group of the first Europeans to see the Mississippi River. Cabeza de Vaca had written exaggerated tales of his travels in the fantastical New World, about the resplendent (and fictional) “Seven Cities of Gold.” Now in 1933, under the humorous leadership of Edward Smith, an aspiring writer, Camp Cabeza de Vaca started publishing its own newspaper—the Woodpecker—filled with satirical squibs.37 The CCC enrollees all took a facetious oath, printed in the Woodpecker that summer, to worship Roosevelt as if he were a biblical patriarch:
Roosevelt is my shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me lie down on straw mattresses, he leadeth me
inside a mess hall, he restoreth to me a job.
He leadeth me in the paths of reforestation for his country’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poison oak and ivy,
I will fear no evil, for he is for me.
His blankets and uniforms, they comfort me.
He prepareth a saw and ax before me in the presence of my
commanding officer, my shoes runneth over.
Surely beans and employment will follow me all the days of
Roosevelt’s administration and I shall dwell in a tent
forever.38
III
During FDR’s “second hundred days,” with the CCC thriving and banking reforms in place, the New Deal turned to wildlife protection. Shortly after the 1932 election, Roosevelt had arranged a duck hunt in Dutchess County. Struggling with his heavy leg braces, he had hidden himself in a Hudson River blind to wait for waterfowl to arrive in the cold sunshin
e. The blind was built of local vegetation and blended well with the placid marshland so as not to frighten waterfowl. Decoys were placed around the structure by the small hunting party to lure a flock within the range of FDR’s shotgun. The president-elect was more used to fishing—in saltwater, following the menhaden toward trophy fish—but now he listened for the discordant, ethereal sound of ducks that had inspired hunters for millennia. Instead, five Canada geese (Branta canadensis)—black-beaked, with brown bodies and long necks—headed directly toward the blind. He took aim and fired. “I hit the leading goose, swung left to try to get another with my left barrel,” he wrote to Senator Harry Hawes of Missouri, “and at that moment the first goose hit me a glancing blow on my right shoulder.”39
Hawes had served in Congress since 1926, but chose not to seek reelection in 1932 and retired from the U.S. Senate early in 1933 to become a lobbyist for wildlife protection. Enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s conservation reforms, Hawes, author of Fish and Game: Now or Never, goaded Congress throughout the 1930s into prioritizing the restoration of essential wildfowl nesting areas in the North, and vast marsh areas along the age-old flyways and wintering resorts in the South. Unencumbered by the pressures of reelection, he offered Roosevelt counsel on ways to rescue North American wildlife from the vicious ravages of the Dust Bowl and from overhunting. For the first time since Theodore Roosevelt, two powerful politicians—FDR and Harry Hawes—had adopted nonvoting North American wildlife as a constituency.40 “To fight and conserve our big outdoors and its wildlife,” Hawes wrote, “is a patriotic duty. Increasing its area is an achievement for health and better citizenship.”41
To secure $14.5 million in emergency congressional appropriations so that the Biological Survey could purchase waterfowl habitat throughout America, Roosevelt and Hawes sought the active support of sportsmen’s clubs of the same vintage as the Izaak Walton League; their members tended to be Republican. FDR and Hawes also looked to the American Legion, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the 4-H Clubs, land-grant colleges, bait-casting clubs, railroad companies, and even automobile clubs. Believing that bird-watching could bring considerable tourist dollars to the Atlantic Flyway states, Roosevelt ordered all federal refuges in the East to begin ecological restoration work to attract avians over the summer of 1933.42 This wasn’t easy to do. During the Hoover years, Congress had slashed the Biological Survey’s budget to bare bones. Refusing to be stymied, Roosevelt, like a street hustler playing three-card monte, transferred top-salaried Biological Survey employees to the CCC’s emergency financial sheet. Blaming human encroachment for at least part of the precipitous decline of North American waterfowl populations, Roosevelt proposed that the preservation of grasslands and wetlands offered many environmental benefits, including aquifer recharge, flood control, fisheries, water quality protection, soil maintenance, and carbon storage.43
In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt, who was then the president, established America’s first federal bird reservation in Florida.44 At that time, there were 120 million waterfowl in North America. By 1933, when FDR was in the White House, that number had shrunk to 30 million. The legal precedent FDR invoked in 1933 was the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929, authorizing the federal government to establish inviolate sanctuaries for waterfowl and other migratory birds. This national system was in its embryonic stages when the crash of 1929 froze funding for the habitat purchase program. Appropriations shriveled. Understandably, Hoover was forced to put American citizens ahead of North American wildlife, and the waterfowl crisis kept getting worse. Owing to the drought, great duck hatcheries—like Lake Malheur and Klamath Basin of Oregon—were, as one biologist put it, “dry as a bone.” The burden was on the New Dealers to halt this trend.45
Roosevelt downplayed the launch of his visionary waterfowl restoration program in 1933. After all, Congress wouldn’t easily direct funds to help Chesapeake Bay’s threatened wood ducks (Aix sponsa) when 90 percent of Virginia’s schoolchildren were ill clad and malnourished.46 Nevertheless, throughout the year Roosevelt badgered Biological Survey director Paul Redington, an unimaginative holdover from the Hoover administration, to order emergency measures for the preservation of North America’s wildfowl. The president had even established CCC camps at three key Biological Survey refuges along the Atlantic Flyway—Saint Marks (Florida), Swanquarter (North Carolina), and Blackwater (Maryland)—to start his waterfowl rescue plan by means of feed stations.47
The Biological Survey hired university-trained biologists to collaborate with the CCC to band birds, build freshwater impoundments, cut trails, and erect fire towers.48 Saint Marks, the most celebrated of the New Deal congeries, teemed with glorious waterfowl, including red-throated loons (Gavia stellata), yellow-crowned night herons (Nyctanassa violacea), and the anhinga (or “snakebird,” Anhinga anhinga). Blackwater, known as the “Everglades of the North,” hosted upwards of thirty-five thousand geese and fifteen thousand ducks, which used the brackish Maryland marsh and forested wetlands during the winter migration.49
Roosevelt shrewdly put wildlife restoration under the banner of retiring submarginal land and relieving drought, thus procuring for wildlife a modest portion of the federal moneys that were being spent to alleviate human distress. Under Roosevelt’s “New Deal for Wildlife” program, the iron gates at these federal wildlife refuges were unlocked to encourage public and educational recreational use. Bird-watching was also encouraged. Informational leaflets (including lists of the species that lived within refuge boundaries) were disseminated free to the public. At Swanquarter, a stopover on the Atlantic Flyway, hunting guides were replaced with “guide yourself” trail maps. Federal manuals were printed on how to stabilize the level of shallow, freshwater areas in which to foster the growth of aquatic vegetation that would furnish food for birds. “It is difficult to overrate the economic importance of ducks,” one USDA pamphlet read, “and undoubtedly their esthetic and recreational worth is fully as great.”50
Roosevelt’s wildlife restoration program had for its first-term objectives the redemption of breeding stocks (remnants of the great pre-Columbian flocks and herds) and the federal rehabilitation and restoration of available lands that were suitable for the proliferation of wildlife. Roosevelt wanted to withdraw these lands generally classified as submarginal; areas that, under cultivation, had never produced crops comparable in value to the fish, game, furbearers, songbirds, and insectivorous birds that inhabited them before they were wholly or partially destroyed by rashly attempted agricultural operations and drainage projects.
On these lands, Roosevelt wanted to erect green, living, organic sanctuaries to protect the fertile areas against soil erosion and against damage by drought and flood. Under a dozen or more New Deal land administration agencies, CCC boys worked to help wildlife rebound in all forty-eight states and the territories. The CCCers built fish hatcheries and wildlife shelters; seeded and planted food and cover; developed springs, lakes, ponds, and streams; and carried on a variety of other wildlife protection activities. Roosevelt had the CCC cooperate in a quantitative way with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, in developing, among others, York Pond fish hatchery in the White Mountains National Forest, which generated nearly twenty million eggs annually.51 With native wild trout disappearing, Roosevelt hoped that nonnative hatchery fish, reared at state and federal fisheries, could make the difference.52
Encouraged by the CCC’s revamping of Saint Marks, Swanquarter, and Blackwater, Thomas H. Beck, pro–New Deal editor in chief of Collier’s Weekly, wrote to his friend the president that August about the chronic depletion of North American waterfowl. Beck was the head of the More Game Birds in America Foundation (a respected nonprofit founded in 1930 with financial backing from financier J. P. Morgan; it was later renamed Ducks Unlimited).53
A Connecticut duck hunter, Beck now had devised a waterfowl rescue scheme for the president’s consideration. Among his recommendations were an international agency to help waterfowl prosper; wild ducks and geese breeding facilitie
s (for eventual release); raising private-sector revenue from sportsmen’s clubs; restoring traditional breeding grounds in the upper Midwest; establishing a string of new federal refuges along the main flyways; and purchasing habitat for refuges in such winter migratory states as Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas.54 Roosevelt eventually incorporated all of Beck’s reforms into the Biological Survey’s overall migratory bird recovery strategy, except the idea of breeding wildfowl in captivity.
When FDR was a boy, there was an almost unbroken series of Great Plains nesting areas for ducks stretching from the sand-hill lakes of Nebraska north to the Canadian line and as far west as Montana. It was prosperous-looking country. The upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region had once been rich with flocks of ducks, but no longer. The president hoped that Beck, along with Hawes, could become USDA’s conduit to influential sportsmen’s clubs to bring the great flocks back to their historical size. “I think it is very important to keep the good will of the fish and game clubs and associations,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace from Hyde Park as a cover note to Beck’s memo, “and the chief point is the necessity of giving them a chance to be heard before promulgating orders changing the dates of open seasons.”55
Wallace was irritated at Beck for sending his restoration plan directly to the White House instead of going through proper USDA bureaucratic channels. For all of his New Deal progressivism, Wallace was thoroughly old school when it came to respecting the chain of command. Furthermore, with unemployment at 25 percent, tougher restrictions on open seasons and bag limits seemed premature and elitist to Wallace. His concerns were immediate and practical—he ordered six million pigs slaughtered that September to stabilize and regulate prices—and he thought that waterfowl habitat purchases and breeding factories should have a low priority.
Nevertheless, Wallace dutifully passed Beck’s letter to Rexford G. Tugwell, his assistant secretary. Tugwell, an agricultural economist who had taught at Columbia University, murmured that Beck was a well-meaning eccentric, naive about budgets and national priorities. There simply weren’t any USDA funds available to create dozens of new federal refuges in places like South Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas. While sympathetic to the president’s enthusiasm for wildlife conservation, Tugwell sided with Wallace and didn’t want to be at loggerheads with the farm bloc in Congress over wood ducks and trumpeter swans. Tugwell, in fact, reported back to Roosevelt that Beck’s recommendations weren’t feasible from a budgetary standpoint. Quite simply, struggling farmers had to be supported first, far ahead of wild ducks.56
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