Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  But in 1934, Isle Royale National Park was in limbo. The state of Michigan was broke and weary of the Depression, and over 50 percent of the island was still owned by copper and timber interests. There were also Michiganers and Minnesotans with second homes on the island who were in no mood to be booted out by the Department of the Interior. Determined to break the impasse, the president allocated $350,000 to buy parcels of land on the island. It bothered him that the National Park Service didn’t have major Great Lakes property in its portfolio. Because Lake Superior was the largest freshwater body in the world by surface (five thousand square miles larger than Victoria Nyanza in Africa), Roosevelt thought it should have a major national park. The New York Times joined forces with the president in championing the “primeval charms” of Isle Royale, including the hundreds of rocky islets surrounding the main island. “Lonely Isle Royale, pushing its lovely shores up through the green cold waters of Lake Superior off the Michigan mainland here,” the New York Times wrote, “may soon become the first national park of the Central ‘Western States.’”48

  On June 15, 1934, President Roosevelt brought the Great Smoky Mountains into the portfolio of the National Park Service on a “limited park status.” What that meant was that money was still needed before Tennessee and North Carolina could finish the required land purchases. A succession of political squabbles involving the state commissions seriously delayed the completion of the park project. But FDR had made it clear that the Great Smokies would indeed become a unit of the NPS very soon. To show his administration’s investment in the idea of a national park in the Great Smokies, the CCC set up seventeen camps in the area and immediately began structural improvements, including the restoration of three gristmills and the building of two stone visitor centers (one at each state’s main gateway to the park).49 In 1933 and 1934 alone, 4,350 CCCers worked in the Smokies ecosystem.50 The four-arch Elkmont Bridge they constructed remains one of the CCC’s most aesthetically pleasing accomplishments.51

  Roosevelt recognized that tourists wanted to see live animals in the national parks. This issue had caused a deep rift in the national park movement during the 1920s. Tourists came to see bear-feeding shows in Yosemite and Yellowstone, and Yard was among many who objected to this (“swell swill dumped from the platforms of trucks”). By contrast, Stephen Mather encouraged such attractions in order to boost the number of tourists. Either way, nobody doubted that the star of the Everglades would be the American alligator, and the star of the Great Smokies would be the black bear.52 Roosevelt leaned more toward Yard than toward Mather in this debate.

  The president was opposed to guns and hunting in national parks and monuments. When a disconsolate David Wagstaff of Tuxedo Park, New York, wrote the White House a grim letter about the overhunting of bears in Alaska—a direct result of lax hunting laws—Roosevelt was appalled. “The enclosed speaks for itself,” Wagstaff wrote to Roosevelt; “I only hope that something can be done to limit the slaughter of these great bears so that they will not follow the pigeon and the bison through our own lack of interest.”53 Wagstaff lobbied the White House to establish a sanctuary for the bears on Admiralty Island. At that point, bears were considered predatory menaces and therefore weren’t protected on public lands in Alaska. Roosevelt forwarded Wagstaff’s worrisome letter to Harold Ickes, with a cover note: “This horrifies me as much as it does my friend David Wagstaff. If these bears come under your jurisdiction will you please have the matter checked up? It seems to me that that kind of slaughter ought to be stopped.”54

  Ickes, in addition to running the National Park Service and PWA, administered the General Land Office, the U.S. Geological Survey, and all of the lands in the territories including Alaska (he worked closely with Roosevelt to design a stamp series featuring the American territories). So Alaska—including the protection of bears, harbor seals, northern fur seals, sea otters, harbor porpoises, Dall’s porpoises, and Steller’s sea lions—was his beat. Therefore, with Roosevelt’s blessing, Ickes sent a stern letter to the Alaska Game Commission about the mass slaughter of wildlife. In a stealthy move essentially unnoticed by the East Coast press, FDR had agreed to enlarge Katmai National Monument in southeastern Alaska—established by President Hoover in 1931—by more than 1,609,000 acres. Likewise, starting in 1934, FDR sought to double the size of Glacier Bay National Monument. In the Katmai and the Glacier Bay national monuments, the Department of the Interior worked to protect black and brown bears, known for hunting salmon along the Bartlett River and the Beardslee Islands. “Already there is in Alaska a total of over 6 million acres in parks and monuments under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service where bears are given total protection,” Ickes reassured Roosevelt. “The Alaska Game Commission has afforded brown bears additional protection of late and has established several refuges for bears.”55

  Roosevelt was adamant that the New Deal teach Americans how to properly treat wildlife habitats. The CCC boys were taught to respect the habitat of the wildlife in areas where they worked. John B. Adams, working in Utah’s Zion National Park, is an example of Roosevelt’s idea of how the CCC boys could play a meaningful role as teachers. Raised by foster parents until he was fourteen, Adams then became a hungry hobo on the prowl in rail yards for odd jobs. When he turned nineteen, he abandoned the footloose life and joined CCC Camp PE-222. Outfitted in his jodhpurs, work boots, and CCC batwing pins, Adams became apprenticed to Zion’s chief naturalist at its museum. Transfixed by the four life zones of Zion—desert, riparian area, woodland, and coniferous forest—he helped national park visitors properly interpret geographical features like the Checkerboard Mesa (an orange-, brown-, and white-textured mountain peak) and the Three Patriarchs (three peaks of Navajo sandstone).56

  Believing reptiles should be undisturbed in their ecosystem, Adams studied how snakes and lizards ate, digested their food, and reproduced. Most tourists in Zion were understandably terrified by the rattlesnakes they occasionally encountered on hiking trails. Whenever a rattler was spotted Adams, the amateur herpetologist, rushed in to capture it for study and relocation. Before long, he was holding snake-handling demonstrations for tourists with two species of poisonous snake—the rattlesnake (Crotalus cerastes) and the ring-necked snake (Diadophis punctatus). “They have fangs, but their poison is about like a bee sting,” Adams explained of the ring-necked snake. “Maybe a little worse, but very few people would die from it, no more than a person would from a bee sting. But after a while [I got] used to it, just like picking up a piece of candy or something.”57

  III

  On July 2, 1934, President Roosevelt boarded USS Houston in Annapolis to begin a long journey to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and then the Hawaiian Territory to see the Kilauea volcano, on which he had written a childhood essay. The director of Kilauea Volcano Observatory, Dr. Thomas Jaggar, a friend of FDR’s from Harvard, had been engaged in advance to serve as the president’s guide around the majestic landscape, with its fields of lava.58 His sons, Franklin Jr. and John, would accompany him on the sun-drenched trip. The U.S. Navy did a marvelous job of transforming the admiral’s portside quarters on the Houston into a handsome presidential suite. Roosevelt, as was his wont, filled it with books about natural history and detective stories. The kitchen staff was brought over from the presidential yacht Sequoia to cook the president three square meals each day.59

  Roosevelt’s plan for the voyage was to make a fast run from Annapolis to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, where he wanted to spend the Fourth of July with Franklin Jr. and John. Like the Bay of Fundy, the whitecap swells off Cape Hatteras were tricky for ships to navigate; this was a sailor’s graveyard of sorts, steeped in nautical lore. The president logged, “The sea was choppy on rounding Hatteras and the destroyers took some punishment.”60 Taking in the cape’s bird-filled marshes, Roosevelt understood that Hatteras—like the Everglades, Great Smokies, Isle Royale, the C&O Canal, and Quetico-Superior—was another precious American landscape that belonged in the NPS portfolio.
61

  From the Carolina coastline, the Houston cruised southward to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands before visiting Cartagena, Colombia; this was the first time an incumbent U.S. president had traveled to South America. The meeting with President Enrique Olaya Herrara on Colombian soil was an early example of FDR’s “good neighbor” policy regarding Latin America.62 Once the Houston was through the Panama Canal, in the waters off Clipperton Island, fishing was the main event.63

  On July 24 the president got his first glimpse of the Hawaiian Territory on the western side of Hawaii (the Big Island). At the anchorage in Hilo, his cruiser was greeted by a huge crowd of admirers. There were flowers everywhere. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the arriving commander in chief. Schoolchildren, wearing bright clothes, waved American flags and chanted “F.D.R.,” lining the thirty-mile road to the Kilauea volcano.64 No president had ever visited the Hawaii Territory before, so FDR, leis around his neck, was feted like a hero come home.

  Roosevelt, sitting in an open car climbing uphill through Hawaii’s vivid scenery, was fulfilling his boyhood dream of seeing Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. (In 1961, Hawaii National Park was divided into two discrete units: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and Haleakala National Park.) At the park’s entrance Roosevelt rendezvoused with “America’s volcano man,” Dr. Jaggar. Jaggar pointed out Kilauea Iji (a small, dormant crater) to his old school chum and then took him to inspect a blazing green fern forest. Over two hundred CCC enrollees, in uniform, presented themselves to the president and talked to him about the forest improvement work under way there. They told funny tales of working to mitigate the damage wild pigs visited on the lush ecosystem.65

  President Roosevelt shoveled dirt onto a newly planted tree during a visit to Hilo, Hawaii, on July 28, 1934. As the first sitting president to visit the Hawaiian Islands, he mixed military meetings at the Pacific outpost with a colorful four-day vacation in the company of two of his sons. Just moments before leaving, Roosevelt helped to plant the kukui tree next to the Iolani Palace.

  Jaggar, explaining heat changes, lava flows, and the region’s weather, led Roosevelt to the lip of Kilauea.66 In a scripted event, a Hawaiian farmer appeared during Dr. Jaggar’s discussion of the volcano’s origins with a basket of chelo berries. According to Jaggar, it was an old Hawaiian custom for visitors to throw a few of the berries into the lava floor. Roosevelt relished such ceremonies and gleefully flung a few into the five-hundred-foot abyss. “Moving on again through the steaming crater countryside to the observatory high on a bluff above the pit,” the New York Times reported, “the President listened to a lecture on bird life in the park and signed the observatory register.”67

  A highlight for Roosevelt was dining in Volcano House, a glass building with jade floors and a lava fireplace that had been built in 1846 on the rim of Kilauea Crater and was praised by such illustrious visitors as Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Louis Pasteur.68 Another thrill for Roosevelt was fishing off the Houston with the giant volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in the distant background. Franklin Jr. hooked a mighty swordfish that, after a spectacular fight, slipped off the hook. Compensating for his son’s misfortune, FDR reeled in three skipjack tuna and one kawakawa. When asked about the swordfish that got away, the president joked that it didn’t matter—the fish had “spoiled” while jumping into the air.69

  Once the Houston docked in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, FDR dedicated Moana Park (now called Ala Moana Beach Park), financed by the Federal Emergency Relief Act. At an afternoon rally in Honolulu, more than sixty thousand people came to hear the president speak. It was a touching affair, with floral leis and a luau for which a pig was prepared in a traditional imu (an underground pit oven). Roosevelt also made a trip to Schofield Barracks and Pearl Harbor Naval Station, where he inspected the submarine base’s giant machine shops, warehouses, and oil tanks filled with crude from Teapot Dome, Wyoming.70 Basking in the sunny hospitality and wishing he could stay another week, the president thanked Hawaiians on his departure for “your flowers, your scenery, your hospitality. . . . Aloha from the bottom of my heart.”71

  IV

  From Hawaii, the Houston cruised back to the continental United States, dropping anchor at Desdemona Sands, three miles from Astoria, Oregon. Sporting his Hawaiian tan, looking fit and happy, Roosevelt was still in a mood to fish. Using a smaller boat, he trolled for salmon along the foggy mouth of the Columbia River. Eleanor Roosevelt and their eldest son, James, both arrived in Astoria from California just in time for a Pacific Northwest salmon bake.72

  While FDR was in Hawaii, the first lady had spent five days in Yosemite National Park, accompanied by her friend Lorena Hickok, a reporter who wrote about the Dust Bowl in North Dakota. In Washington, Eleanor consistently promoted campground development so that families who couldn’t afford to stay in hotels could still camp out in the beauty of the Adirondacks and Sierra Nevada. She wrote in her weekly column for Women’s Home Companion about the spiritual uplift she herself found in nature. While she warned that women might find their “first day or two a little difficult,” she assured them that when they became “accustomed to camp life,” they would “look back even on the rainy days, when you had to eat under the flap of your tent and devote your time to reading or writing, a very pleasant experience.”73

  They were escorted around Yosemite by Superintendent C. G. Thompson. Before taking the Tioga Road through Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass, Eleanor Roosevelt met up with Ickes. Together they hiked in Mariposa Grove, where the redwoods were two thousand years old and had been protected since 1864.

  Before arriving in Yosemite, the first lady had led a White House Conference on Camps for Unemployed Women. This conference led to the establishment, by FERA, of twenty experimental schools and camps for out-of-work women. The forest camps were run by the National Youth Administration (NYA), the New Deal agency tasked with providing work and education for Americans aged sixteen to twenty-five.74 After talking with Ickes at Yosemite, Eleanor pushed for ninety female camps to be run by NYA. But the program was defunded in 1937. In the end, only 8,500 women benefited from these camps, whereas 3.5 million men had their lives upgraded by the CCC.75

  Eleanor Roosevelt was still dissatisfied because the CCC was for men only. The only unemployed women given work through the CCC program were the so-called female campers, who did the housekeeping for the men at various barracks. Whereas men were recruited for a half year of service in the CCC, women could stay for only a few months. Women were also paid far less. While men received $30 per month, women workers were given an “allowance” of 50 cents per week.76 Only 8,500 women participated in this experimental “female camper” program from 1933 to 1942, compared with the three million men who were recruited for FDR’s CCC tree army.

  Eleanor Roosevelt continued to push hard for more opportunities for women in the CCC but was brushed off by Robert Fechner, who didn’t want any “She She She” camps distracting the all-male outfits.77 Eleanor persisted and, with the help of Frances Perkins, eventually managed to have several camps for women opened on the outskirts of Elmira, New York.78 Eleanor herself set up Camp Tera on Lake Tiorati in Bear Mountain State Park, funded by FERA and the Welfare Council of New York City. At Camp Tera women taught sewing but weren’t paid.79

  That the CCC discriminated against women was undeniable. But the rationale was that it had been established as a sort of Boy Scouts for young men—an organization in which they could strengthen their bodies and minds in the midst of the Depression. The image of the typical CCC recruit wasn’t very different from the masculine images celebrated in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia: muscular men, tan from reforestation work, who were pillars of virility and strength. “The greatest achievement of the CCC,” one government bureaucrat said, “has not been the preservation of material things such as forests, timber-lands, etc., but the preservation of American manhood.”80

  With Ickes, Eleanor received great press in California for
promoting the Year of the National Park in the shadow of El Capitan.81 After leaving Yosemite, still ruddy-cheeked from hiking through Yosemite, Eleanor traveled to San Francisco to rest. With Hickok as companion, she crossed the Golden Gate Channel to Sausalito and then headed north to see more redwoods in Sonoma and Humboldt counties.82

  V

  After reuniting with Franklin along the Oregon coast, Eleanor prepared to tour two of the New Deal’s biggest public works projects in the West, both part of the Columbia River Basin initiative. If the 1920s had been the decade of skycrapers that served as monuments to American private sector can-doism then the New Deal era was characterized by colossal federal dams best exemplified by the TVA. At Bonneville (Oregon), in the TVA spirit, a concrete dam was being built 140 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean to provide cheap power to the region.83 At Grand Coulee (Washington), an even bigger dam was under construction; it would regulate the flow of the upper Columbia River, generate hydroelectric power, and open up a large tract of previously parched land for the benefit of future generations. Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams were Roosevelt’s engineering masterpieces.