Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  The Bonneville Project on the Columbia River, forty miles east of Portland, was nearing completion when it was photographed on October 24, 1936. Including dams, a powerhouse, spillway, and the largest single-lift lock then in existence, the project was started in 1933. The plan to harness the Columbia River was fully supported by Roosevelt before and after his first election. It was different from any dam that had been built before, though. The Bonneville Dam was among the first projects affected by the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1934, which forced hydroelectric construction to reduce the disruption of animal life.

  Within four hours of his return to the continental United States, the president spoke to five thousand people in Bonneville, Oregon, about installing new locks on the Columbia River that would allow barges from the Pacific Ocean to travel all the way to the wheat fields of Idaho. Before long, he promised, the Bonneville would produce ninety thousand kilowatts of electricity. There was no such thing “as too much power,” he said. “I regard, and have regarded, the Columbia River as one of the greatest assets not only of the Northwest,” Roosevelt declared from the palisades of the lower Columbia, “but of the whole United States.”84

  Moments after FDR spoke, the first couple was chauffeured to a special train, parked on a siding at Bonneville, to begin an overnight trip to Ephrata, Washington, to see another colossal dam. No matter how impressive Bonneville Dam was, Grand Coulee, to be completed in 1939, was an even greater engineering marvel. But, as with Bonneville, its construction posed serious environmental problems. Dozens of steam shovels and bulldozers uprooted everything in their paths. In fact, FDR was handed a piece of bad news on that score. Because of the dam’s colossal scale, building a fish ladder for spawning salmon was deemed impossible. This meant that salmon were denied access to essential streams. “It is pretty late for us to discover that the salmon ladders at Bonneville may not work,” Roosevelt fumed to Ickes after his Pacific Northwest trip. “It seems to me that all persons concerned should get together in a meeting and agree on something so that at least we can say to the country that we have done the best we could. Criticism and objections after the dam is half-built get us nowhere.”85 The thought that Grand Coulee was highly detrimental to Pacific Northwest fisheries prodded Roosevelt to build salmon hatcheries on numerous tributaries of the Columbia River downstream from the dam, including the Methow River, the Entiat River, and Icicle Creek. It was from these hatcheries that FDR’s National Hatchery Service would eventually grow.86

  VI

  From Spokane the Roosevelts headed for the “Big Sky” country of northwestern Montana. There they traveled through the vast Kootenai National Forest, which encompassed 2.2 million acres in Montana and 50,384 acres in northern Idaho. When Bob Marshall was roaming the West for the U.S. Forest Service in the 1920s, he was overwhelmed by the raw scenic beauty of the Kootenai River, the Yaak River, and the Purcell Mountains. Thanks to the New Deal, however, the raw wilderness was being encroached on by work-relief crews with construction blueprints and machinery. As Franklin and Eleanor headed to Glacier National Park, they were abuzz about all the great work the CCC was doing in the West. African American CCC companies from Fort Dix, New Jersey, for example, were operating outside of the all-white communities of Libby and Troy, Montana. They heroically fought fires, planted trees, designed recreation areas, laid roads, and even constructed a small airport.

  The assigning of African Americans to Montana was a New Deal experiment. Would the white residents in communities like Libby and Troy accept these black CCC workers from New Jersey? These black CCCers assigned to western Montana tried to use athletics to get along with the white population. The Colored Giants baseball team routinely played the all-white teams of Libby and Troy (one local headline read “Colored Giants Scalp Opponents in Sunday’s Game.”)87 A “Negro quartet” from Pipe Creek gained fame throughout western Montana and Idaho, singing old-time spirituals. Their concerts, to all-white audiences, were like a church revival. After Governor Ben C. Ross of Idaho heard them perform, he declared that the Negro quartet was “more in demand than [he] had been.”88

  But even with outreach activities like the Colored Giants and the Negro quartet, it was still tragically difficult for these African American CCCers not to feel ostracized, even hated, by the white communities in which they lived.

  On August 5, Franklin and Eleanor arrived at the western entrance to Glacier National Park. Boarding a chauffeured 1927 Cadillac touring phaeton they headed along fifty-one-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road, an engineering marvel carved out of the precipitous mountainside. Cutting through the middle of the “Crown of the Continent” top down, the Roosevelts followed the shores of Lake McDonald and Saint Mary Lake and then crossed over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, soaking in the grand vistas of alpine lakes, thick forests, and jagged mountain peaks that rose thousands of feet above the valley floor. As the roads ascended, Roosevelt went through the west tunnel and saw elegant stone-faced concrete bridges and culverts.

  Roosevelt was intrigued by the “international” aspect of the park, situated at the wild heart of North America. In 1932 Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada had been joined, establishing the 1,143,272-acre Waterton Lakes–Glacier International Peace Park to protect the jaw-droppingly beautiful wilderness. In four years, open red buses called “jammers” were introduced into the park, so tourists could experience the drive in the fresh air, as the Roosevelts did. The president told his staff that the views at Glacier easily beat the Swiss Alps and Norwegian fjords he had seen with his mother. If the park were located in Germany or France, he felt, enthralled Americans would have crossed the Atlantic Ocean to enjoy the picture-postcard glaciers, flowering alpine meadows, and pristine coniferous forests. The fact that tourists from the East could arrive at Glacier by the Grand Northern Pacific Railroad, disembarking at the Glacier Park Hotel (now Lodge), made this western Montana park less far-flung than it seemed.

  On entering the Blackfoot Reservation, adjacent to the park, the president was given a valuable peace pipe, made from Pipestone (Minnesota) clay—a relic from the 1855 treaty between the federal government and the Blackfoot Nation at Judith Basin, Montana.89 The historic relevance of the Minnesota quarry had to do with its being the source of the soft red stone that Great Plains Indians used in their handsome ceremonial peace pipes, and it was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.90 Three years later, on August 25, 1937, Roosevelt would sign a law making Pipestone a national monument.91 The Blackfeet were so enamored of Roosevelt that they adopted him into their tribe. The president was given a certificate framed by arrows, which symbolized, as tribal leader Richard Sanderville told him, the Blackfeet method of “showing friendship and gratification.”92

  Realizing that the Great Depression had been particularly brutal to Native Americans, Roosevelt sought to alleviate some of the suffering on reservations and to lessen some of the ethnic tension that had been building for centuries with white Americans. Among these efforts was the Wheeler-Howard (Indian Reorganization) Act of 1934, which established the “CCC Indian Division” (or CCC-ID, a branch of the Indian Emergency Conservation Work project) that employed Native Americans in seventy-two “forest work camps” on Indian reservations in fifteen states in the West and Southwest.93 That year, 14,400 Native Americans aged seventeen to thirty-five, living at the bottom of the economic ladder, were hired by the CCC in segregated Indian camps. Many of these young Native American men were itinerant, moving from tribal land to tribal land. Over 5,500 Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and Paiute were immediately tasked with fighting pine-blister rust and soil erosion throughout Arizona.94 In the early New Deal, half the male breadwinners living on the Sioux reservations of South Dakota worked for the CCC-ID. “No previous undertaking in Indian Service,” Collier asserted, “has so largely been the Indians’ own undertaking.”95

  To help promote solidarity among the Native American CCCers, of which there were twenty-seven thousand, the U.S. government began publishing a p
eriodical, Indians at Work. While its primary focus was the CCC Indian Division and related news, it had a mimeograph sheet featuring photographs and drawings of Indian life in general on reservations like the Blackfoot. That the Roosevelt administration was willing to pay to produce Indians at Work was remarkable for the time. Articles often criticized various reservation policies, but no one censored the content. When Fechner toured western Indian CCC camps, he was impressed. “I saw some wonderful water conservation work done by them [the Indians], soil erosion, cultural work in the forests, building of fire trails, etc.,” Fechner reported, “and their camps compare favorably in every way with those of the white boys.”96

  From the Blackfoot Reservation, the Roosevelts headed south to Two Medicine Chalet, toward the scenic eastern entrance to Glacier National Park. “Today, for the first time in my life, I have seen Glacier Park,” Roosevelt told the locals. “Perhaps I can best express to you my thrill and delight by saying that I wish every American, old and young, could have been with me today. The great mountains, the glaciers, the lakes and the trees make me long to stay here for all the rest of the summer.”97

  Franklin (in car) and Eleanor (right) visited Glacier National Park in Montana on August 5, 1934, only days after seeing the construction at the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams. As the first presidential couple to stop at the park, they were officially inducted into the Blackfoot tribe by an elder (center). In a radio address that same day, FDR expressed his “thrill and delight” with the experience of Glacier National Park.

  At Glacier National Park, the president reflected on the revolutionary concept of countries having porous borders as wildlife corridors—as at Waterton Lakes–Glacier International Peace Park. This idea came readily to Roosevelt because of Campobello Island, which, while technically in New Brunswick, Canada, operated in unison with Maine on fishing and hunting matters.

  Roosevelt’s speech at Glacier on August 5, broadcast nationwide on radio, would be historic. Never before had a U.S. president spoken so eloquently about the national park system. “There is nothing so American as our national parks,” Roosevelt declared. “The scenery and wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in the process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbol of this great human principle.”98

  The president told stories about how Yellowstone had become the first national park in 1872, and he praised President Ulysses S. Grant for signing the founding document. With Ickes by his side, he mentioned former secretary of the interior Franklin K. Lane for persuading President Wilson to establish the National Park Service in 1916, quoting Lane’s three broad principles for national parks: “First, that the national parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use of future generations as well as those of our own time; second, that they are set apart for the use, observation, health and pleasure of the people; and, third, that the national interest must dictate all decisions affecting public or private enterprise in the parks.”99

  Roosevelt reminded his listeners at Glacier that each existing national park had once been caught up in a political maelstrom. “We should remember that the development of our national park system over a period of many years has not been a simple bed of roses,” the president said. “As is the case in the long fight for the preservation of national forests and water power and mineral deposits and other national possessions, it has been a long and fierce fight against many private interests which were entrenched in political and economic power. So, too, it has been a constant struggle to continue to protect the public interest, once it was saved from private exploitation at the hands of the selfish few.”100

  Getting a chance to meet the president was a thrill for the CCCers present in Glacier National Park. Bill Briggs wrote about the experience in Happy Days. “I saw the President,” he boasted. “For eleven minutes he was with us; blue-eyed, genial, smiling . . . his keen eyes flashing over our camp and over us.” He added a physical description, more vivid than a movie. “I found him a giant with massive shoulders and powerful arms that belied the steel braces on his legs. His face was ruddy and deeply tanned, his blue eyes flashed vigor and good humor, and his shock of iron-gray hair tossed in the wind. . . . Even the surrounding mountains and green-clad pines must have sensed that a great man was in our midst. Never did they seem so majestic and grand. The air was electric with the sense of a great happening.”101

  VII

  After the speech at Glacier National Park, the Roosevelts traveled to Fort Peck Dam, a massive Public Works Administration project along the Missouri River in eastern Montana. Begun in 1933 and completed in 1940, Fort Peck would become the world’s largest earthen dam.102 Its construction led to the creation of Fort Peck Lake, the largest lake in the state and the fifth-largest man-made lake in America. Although the shore of the lake was to be longer than the coastline of California, there was something hideous about marring the unspoiled upper reaches of the scenic Missouri River. While Roosevelt boasted that Fort Peck Lake had a new bird reserve attached to it, in truth, the dredging took a hellacious toll on the landscape. In 1936, photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s black-and-white image of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine. Bourke-White presented the structure as a triumph for the Army Corps of Engineers, off in a lost corner of Montana. Deeming the Fort Peck dam a boon for the nation Roosevelt, sweating prodigously, promised to return to Valley County in a couple of years when the dam was finished.103

  The president next made the nearly four-hundred-mile journey across the North Dakota plains through the towns of Williston and Minot, arriving at Devils Lake. It jarred Roosevelt to see a once gorgeous lake—four hundred square miles in extent—become largely alkaline. The drought had taken its toll on the ecosystem. A vast “shelterbelt” reforestation effort was needed around Devils Lake. Barbed wire wasn’t stopping the wind. Appalled at the devastation from the drought, seeing how badly the land was stripped of vegetation, he promised that the New Deal would resuscitate the soil-sick area.

  That spring, Roosevelt had signed the landmark Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, which placed certain restrictions on banks seeking to repossess farms. The law prohibited banks from foreclosing on the property of bankrupt farmers for five years; it was, to a certain extent, FDR’s attempt to empower poor Great Plains farmers in the face of callous banking policies. Even after the Supreme Court ruled the Frazier-Lemke Act unconstitutional in 1935, the president worked to reimagine the landscapes of the Dakotas, to help farmers mitigate the effects of drought.

  While FDR was speaking to a crowd in North Dakota, one farmer joked, “You gave us beer”—a reference to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933—“now give us water!”104 Roosevelt laughed heartily. Lo and behold, only seven hours after Roosevelt departed North Dakota for Minnesota, rain cut a path one hundred miles wide through the region—with the heaviest fall coming in towns he had visited. Roosevelt was hailed as a magical rainmaker by newspapers in Bismarck and Fargo, and even the New York Times ran the story.105

  Roosevelt and Ickes inventoried what needed to be done for the national park system to flourish. Clearly, some locations needed more landscape and tourist facilities. Other areas needed to be left alone in a primitive or wilderness condition, with the possible exception of hiking trails. Yet, for all its heroics, by 1934 the New Deal was being sharply criticized by a number of smart and influential conservationists. Bob Marshall of the Forest Service complained that the NPS was guilty of “putting roads where there was no need for them and destroying wilderness areas.”106 Benton MacKaye, the “father of the Appalachian Trail,” declared that Roosevelt’s NPS was “a destroyer of the primeval.”107

  Taking notice, Ickes asked Marshall, MacKaye, and Appalachian expert Harvey Broome to report back to him about the impact New Deal road construction projects were having on the Great Smokies. That August, aft
er meeting in Knoxville, Broome’s hometown, the trio investigated the new national park, taking careful field notes. “I hiked to Clingmans Dome last Sunday, looking forward to the great joy of undisturbed nature for which this mountain has been famous,” Marshall wrote to Ickes. “Walking along the skyline trail, I heard instead the roar of machines on the newly constructed road just below me and saw the huge scars which this new highway is making on the mountain. Clingmans Dome and the primitive were simply ruined.”108

  Ickes, in fact, sympathized with efforts to reevaluate the NPS’s series of new road projects. It wasn’t hard to understand that “primitive” areas and “wilderness” began where the road ended. But Roosevelt, the politician-conservationist was not offended by roads, well designed and constructed, if they brought more people into his parks. With the Great Smokies and Everglades established in 1934, and his own speeches in Hawaii National Park and Glacier National Park huge hits with outdoor preservationists, the president decided to organize the NPS efficiently, keeping regional requirements in mind. His extensive trip convinced him that a centralized NPS operational program run from Washington didn’t make sense. Roosevelt saw to it that the Department of the Interior opened four regional headquarters: in Richmond, Virginia; Omaha, Nebraska; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and San Francisco, California. While the NPS director, Arno Cammerer, would remain in Washington, Ickes gave a great deal of autonomy to the superintendents’ four regional offices.109

  Another beneficiary of Roosevelt’s Year of the National Park was West Texas. As the decade reached its midpoint, FDR, under the sway of Ickes, took an intense interest in Big Bend country. Impressed with photographs of the Santiago and Chisos mountains, he sought to establish a vast park along the 118-mile boundary the Rio Grande carved between the United States and Mexico. Since the 1880s a campaign had been under way to protect the sublime beauty of this windswept borderland. Esteemed folklorist J. Frank Dobie had promoted the idea of a Big Bend National Park in Nature magazine.