Tugwell, prone to overanalyzing situations, always needed empirical answers. He saw Roosevelt as an enigma, a juggler with “an extraordinary ability to leave things in flux and to prevent their taking concrete and final shape before the time is ripe.”57 He was perplexed as to whether Roosevelt really thought waterfowl habitat, state parks, and RDAs should have a high priority in a nation crippled by an economic collapse, or whether the president was merely pandering to old friends and conservationists. In truth, Roosevelt, unlike Tugwell, didn’t consider Beck a peripheral player. His Collier’s Weekly was a truly influential magazine. And Roosevelt, the tree farmer and stamp collector, wasn’t one to hold a passionate hobby like waterfowling against an entrepreneur who fought for New Deal progressive principles. As it turned out, the president shared Beck’s fundamental view that waterfowl, by way of the government’s habitat purchase, could be instrumental in stabilizing water levels for the farmers in all non-desert regions, especially the West.58
IV
Another waterfowl area that President Roosevelt was deeply committed to saving in the early New Deal was the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia. Dr. Francis Harper and Jean Harper had lost no time in plotting to inspire their friend from Hyde Park to help them rescue the Okefenokee. Throughout the Okefenokee for two generations, there had been the morning shouts of the timber bosses, “Daylight in the swamp!” signaling it was time to cut millions of feet of virgin cypress, yellow pine, bay, and gum.59 Generations of loggers had hewed what was called the “Big Clearing” of Georgia. Now with “dear Franklin” in the White House, the Okefenokee had some hope of being rescued permanently. “There is a matter that needs your immediate attention—the preservation of the Okefenokee Swamp,” Jean Harper wrote to Roosevelt in late 1933. “For twenty odd years the naturalists and nature lovers have been working for the preservation of this marvelous wilderness; unique in its nature not only in the country but the world. The character of its fauna, its flora, and its human life is unsurpassed.”60 A sympathetic Roosevelt responded gracefully to Jean Harper: “I too would hate to see the Okefenokee destroyed.”61
Georgia was Roosevelt’s demonstration plot in the American South. If Georgia could be saved from ecological ruin, he believed, so, too, could Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and the rest. As president, Roosevelt made sixteen trips to his “Little White House” in Warm Springs in the rust-clay hills of Georgia, where he practiced scientific forestry, raised cattle, and helped create a meaningful state park system.62 From his study at the Little White House, Roosevelt designed trails and cottages around Georgia’s 1,293-foot Pine Mountain State Park to be built by the local CCC. Georgia’s state parks grew from five hundred acres to five thousand acres by 1935. Park revenues increased by over 300 percent in those years.63 And the longleaf pine ecosystems started slowly regenerating under his New Deal leadership.
Running the nearby CCC’s District F out of Fort Screven, Georgia, was General George C. Marshall of Virginia. Roosevelt marveled at how, under Marshall’s leadership, the CCC boys brought water systems to Georgia towns such as Hinesville and Homerville. Marshall, FDR came to believe, was a born leader, a genius logistician and surveyor, and the best U.S. Army general of his generation.64 Marshall was vocal about the “inestimable benefit” of the CCC to the armed forces’ “noncombatant needs.” Having city dwellers work hard at home in the great American outdoors, dressed in army garb, waking at dawn, learning all about their homeland—this was public service at its finest. Not only did CCC enrollees plant trees and help wildlife prosper, but they also cleared land for rifle ranges and improved the grounds of military bases. While recruits didn’t receive actual military training, they did learn the intrinsic value of good citizenship.65 Always sympathetic to the men, Marshall saw to it that the army provided a part-time doctor and dentist for every CCC camp.66
That many southern Democrats thought of FDR as one of their own was no trivial feat. Always calling Georgia his “other” state or referring to himself as an “adopted” son of Dixie, Roosevelt assumed the posture of a true native. The way Georgians had welcomed him, arms wide open, in 1924 had left an indelible impression on him. Two years after arriving in Warm Springs to receive treatment for his polio, Roosevelt had invested two thirds of his fortune in rehabilitating the run-down spa town.67 Cruising around Meriwether County in his specially built roadster, top down, waving to locals, Roosevelt was in his element. In a speech in 1927 at the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta, Roosevelt touted Warm Springs as his “garden spot” where the finest food in the land—Brunswick stew, County Captain (a curried chicken dish), fried chicken, corn bread, hush puppies, turnip greens, black-eyed peas, and crackling bread—was served in generous portions. So at home was FDR in Warm Springs, away from the imperious Sara and the serious-minded Eleanor, that he claimed all Georgians as his “kinfolk.”68
All Roosevelt could do in 1933 to repay rural Georgians for their kindness was to wean them from cotton as a single crop. By planting loblolly pine and trying his hand at raising cattle in Warm Springs, he hoped to convince Meriwether County farmers that exhausted soil was a curse. Wherever Roosevelt traveled, from Okefenokee Swamp to Pine Mountain to Flint River basin, he bragged about Georgia’s amazing national heritage. “Some day you must see that spot,” Roosevelt told his distant cousin Daisy Suckley, about Meriwether County. “You would like the great pines and red earth.”69 Enraptured by Warm Springs, Roosevelt made a tradition of spending Thanksgiving there as president. “Now let me tell you something cheerful,” he wrote to a friend from the Little White House. “This Southland has a smile on its face. Ten-cent cotton has stopped foreclosures, saved banks, and started people definitively on the upgrade. That means all the way from Virginia to Texas. Sears-Roebuck sales in Georgia are 110 percent above 1932. . . . I am having a grand rest and am catching up on much needed sleep.”70
By the mid-1930s, there were fifty-eight CCC camps operating in Georgia under the authority of the U.S. Forest Service. Roosevelt inspected the two camps tasked with rehabilitating central Georgia.71 Exhausted national forests in the region—Cherokee (Tennessee), the Nantahala (North Carolina), and the Chattahoochee (Georgia)—were overrun with CCC boys climbing trees to snatch pinecones to provide the Forest Service with seeds for new forests in other areas. Using tarpaulins they gathered nuts from hardwoods, built staircases to freshwater springs, cut trails, and erected dozens of forest towers. With the devastating Okefenokee wildfires of 1932 on everybody’s mind, Roosevelt swore to Georgians, “Never again!” Fire towers were erected all over the swamp.
The CCC was responsible for three other outstanding national forests in Georgia (with miles of trails); two national battlefields (Kennesaw and Chickamauga-Chattanooga); Ocmulgee National Monument; Fort Pulaski National Monument; and sections of Okefenokee Swamp.72 “If the C.C.C. does nothing more than impress upon us the love for nature, it will be a success,” one ecologist was quoted as saying in the 1935 booklet We Can Take It. “When we better realize and understand nature, the world will be a better place to live in, and war will be but a dream.”73
FDR credited Warm Springs with redoubling his commitment to one of his most far-reaching ideas. Continuing to balance the need for beneficial infrastructure with nature preservation, he habitually guaranteed that every hydropower project his administration launched in the South had a corresponding “conservation gift.” Working with engineer Morris L. Cooke during his first term, FDR created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to provide farmers with cheaper power.74 The idea for the REA came to him unexpectedly one afternoon, he sometimes said, while he was daydreaming on the porch in pine-scented Warm Springs. At other times, Roosevelt claimed to have thought of it when he saw his first electric bill for the Little White House there. In truth, he had already been a proponent of rural electrification during his time as governor of New York; nonetheless, his time in Georgia no doubt kept him mindful of the problem.
Even though Roosevelt led the campaign to p
rotect Georgia’s forests, much of what he accomplished in the name of applied science in the Deep South was, in hindsight, environmental folly. Ecosystems could survive drought, lightning bolts, bug infestations, hurricanes, disease, earthquakes, and fluctuating water levels, but not the hyperindustrialization offered by the Corps of Engineers. In an understandable effort to start a mechanized agricultural revolution, fertile southern lands were segregated from the Mississippi River by New Deal land improvers. Many southerners, untouched by the ecological thinking of George Perkins Marsh and John Muir, contaminated their beloved land, denuding landscapes and poisoning waterways.
Not that Roosevelt was wrong to hope that his crop diversification and his waterpower projects would lift the southern poor out of their economic straits. Like the needy tenant farmers portrayed in the photographic essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the “swampers” whom the Harpers were chronicling for an American folklore project were the kind of southern farmers Roosevelt cared deeply about. Trying to assist rural folks who were struggling, the USDA exterminated hordes of cotton lice, worms, and boll weevils by spraying pesticides throughout the South. The unintended result was the contamination of such rivers as the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Sunflower, and the Atchafalaya. This, in turn, compromised the health of Americans residing in nearby farm communities. The waterways of the Deep South—which had already been degraded by fertilizers, industrial sludge, dredging, chemicals, and sewage—were, ecologically speaking, made worse by the New Deal.
The Harpers were relentless in their efforts on behalf of the Okefenokee. There was, however, a powerful lobby of Georgians anxious to restart construction on the Suwannee Canal, which had been abandoned in the 1920s; this new waterway would use existing rivers and a channel through the Okefenokee to give ships an east-west route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. It would require draining significant parts of the Okefenokee. By the 1930s, new land-moving vehicles had been invented that could cut through the swamp with relative ease. Roosevelt, feeling pressured by the existence of technology that could finish the canal, and aware that doing so would lead to a slew of jobs for unemployed Georgians, ordered a preliminary survey of the Okefenokee.
Other obstacles loomed in the path toward preserving it. The White House learned that private sector money had been raised to complete the Suwannee Canal through the swamp. If the trans-Florida shipping canal were to be operable, it would scar the swamp ecosystem beyond recognition. No one knew which option the president would support: the canal, with its economic benefits (not just short-term jobs, but also long-term ones, resulting from efficient transportation) or the federal wildlife sanctuary that the Harpers were pushing for. “You well know what this [canal] would mean to the beauty of the area and to the wildlife,” Jean Harper reminded FDR near the end of 1933. “The destruction that would thus be brought on is unthinkable. Our hope lies in you, to stop the project before it goes farther, and spend the money in the purchase of the swamp for the reservation, where beauty and scientific interest may be preserved for all time. The Okefinokee is regarded by naturalists all over the country as one of the very finest of all our natural areas, and I sincerely hope you will not bring disappointment and bitterness to them by permitting its destruction.”75 Roosevelt responded to Harper, “I think there is much more chance of a ship canal going the southern way than through Georgia. I hope all goes well with you and the family.”76
A few months later, Francis Harper pressed his case in an article, “The Okefinokee Wilderness,” in National Geographic. Harper warned that, owing to drainage projects throughout the Deep South, the Okefenokee’s ivory-billed woodpecker would join the passenger pigeon as an extinct species.77 These woodpeckers needed large stretches of hardwood forests to survive, but about 90 percent of the swamp’s 400,000 acres had already been logged.78 While the Biological Survey—with the help of the More Game Birds in America Foundation—had initiated efforts to increase the waterfowl populations of North America, there was no similar conservation effort being made in 1933 and 1934 for owls, hawks, eagles, or woodpeckers.
In a victory for the preservationists, the White House soon publicly abandoned the plan for the Sewannee ship canal. The only remaining question was what kind of site the Okefenokee would become. Logging companies were still encroaching on the heart of the swamp. Quick executive action was needed to save it, but Roosevelt stalled. An impatient Jean Harper prodded him relentlessly: “Every day’s delay means more lumbering carried on and more of the swamp lost forever in its primeval state.”79
Jean Harper’s intensified appeal helped spur Roosevelt to act. The president told his staff that he wanted the Okefenokee saved as either a national monument (which would fall under the Department of the Interior) or a national wildlife refuge (under the Department of Agriculture). To ruin the swamp would be the equivalent of clear-cutting the trees in Sequoia National Park for railroad ties. Roosevelt needed a few senators—including both of Georgia’s, John S. Cohen and Richard Russell Jr.—to give his plan for an Okefenokee park southern political cover. Resistance from timber and shipping interests didn’t worry Roosevelt, but he always preferred to have the local politicians on his side when saving wild places. Ultimately, Roosevelt had no appetite for a protracted fight with a hostile Congress over the Okefenokee. If push came to shove, he would apply the Antiquities Act of 1906; he told Jean Harper that he was “entirely willing to have it made a national monument.”80
Because Roosevelt was getting razzed by farmers for his penchant for wildlife preserves like the Okefenokee, he decided, as a spoof, to establish the mythical Marvin McIntyre Memorial Possum Reserve. According to Roosevelt, the “magnificent Reserve,” named after his appointments secretary, would “do so much to prevent the extinction of that glorious symbol of our freedom—the American possum.”81
One New Deal project Roosevelt certainly wasn’t joking about was the huge new headquarters of the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. In late 1933, Roosevelt, influenced by Ickes, approved what became the New Deal’s signature architectural statement there. The old Interior Building between E and F streets was a shambles. Space for employees was at such a premium that Interior was leasing offices in fifteen different buildings. From the start, Roosevelt, Delano, and Ickes agreed that classical Greek columns weren’t architecturally appropriate for the building that would house such government departments as the National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. At Delano’s suggestion the architect Waddy Butler Wood, a well-known Washington society figure, received the commission with a mandate of “utility and economy” of style. In coming years regionalist painter John Steuart Curry installed a series of commissioned murals for the new building, including The Homestead (honoring the Homestead Acts), and The Oklahoma Land Rush (1889).
A new, two-block Interior headquarters was soon under construction southwest of the White House, extending from C to E streets. It boasted three miles of hallways, central air-conditioning, a basketball court, escalators, a radio station, and even an ice cream shop. The Washington Daily News noted that the real “father” of the building was Harold Ickes. Every free moment Ickes had, from late 1933 until the day when the edifice officially opened in 1936, was dedicated to making the new Interior building a monument for the ages.82
CHAPTER TEN
“THE YEAR OF THE NATIONAL PARK”
I
Looking out of train and automobile windows, seeing one rural hamlet after another, smelling the air scented by agriculture and nature was President Roosevelt’s idea of outdoor recreation. A keen observer of nuance, he picked up on the subtle regional differences between grain silos and wooden barns, pine trees, and wildflowers. “There was no more excellent custom,” Roosevelt would say, “than getting acquainted with the United States.”1
Hoping to encourage automobile tourism in America’s natural wonderlands and antiquities sites, FDR declared 1934 the Year of the National Park.2 That March, as p
art of a public relations effort, he hosted a Grand Canyon National Park slide show at the White House.3 One hundred guests oohed and aahed over pictures of what John Burroughs once memorably called the “divine abyss” of northern Arizona.4 As a forest conservationist, Roosevelt was concerned that all around the Grand Canyon ponderosa pine were being logged, causing erosion, threatening wildlife diversity, and marring the tourist experience.
At the White House dinner, the journalist Robert Sterling Yard, who was a cofounder of the National Parks Association, spoke encouragingly about a new national park that FDR would soon be opening in the Great Smoky Mountains (North Carolina and Tennessee).5 Roosevelt considered his longtime friend the most effective publicist for protecting America’s parklands.6 What perplexed Roosevelt was that Yard, a purist with regard to preservation, was opposed to the proposed Everglades National Park. Yard argued that there were already man-made structures in the swamp. He was also against the enlargement of Grand Teton National Park, because the town of Jackson Hole had buildings.7
Roosevelt, breaking with Yard, envisioned Everglades National Park as 2,500 square miles of sawgrass and shallow freshwater. Twice the size of Rhode Island, it would encompass much of Dade, Monroe, and Collier counties. The idea of establishing the first national park preserve to protect plants and wildlife rather than gorgeous scenery was garnering considerable support on Capitol Hill. Roosevelt was ahead of his own Department of the Interior in this matter. “I understand that you have already expressed interest in the bill now pending before Congress for the creation of a national park in the Everglades of Florida,” Ickes wrote to Roosevelt a few days after the slide show. “If you would be willing to make Speaker [Henry] Rainey and other leaders in both the House of Representatives and the Senate aware of your interest, it would be very much appreciated by the advocates of the bill, which include this Department.”8
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