Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Roosevelt also knew from Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, the first female governor of Texas, that the CCC had been doing tremendous work in Texas Canyons State Park, which the NPS had helped establish in 1933 (it was renamed Big Bend State Park). That summer of 1934, two hundred CCC boys, 80 percent Hispanic, were constructing all-weather access roads and cutting hiking trails in the Chisos Mountains of West Texas. Living in a tent city eighty-five miles from the nearest town, these CCCers, professional transients, facing prejudice in Alpine and Fort Davis, proceeded onward undaunted. This mostly Hispanic corps dug and blasted ten thousand truckloads of earth and rock in the state park. Facing unbelievable summer heat, they also developed a reliable water supply, which made living in the desert furnace bearable.

  What Roosevelt envisioned in 1934 for Big Bend was an “international park,” comanaged by the United States and Mexico (and modeled on Waterton Lakes–Glacier International Peace Park). Ickes had the NPS write reports about Big Bend that were as rich in “old West” lore as in data about the populations of deer, javelina, and fox. The proposed park FDR supported would consist of 700,000 acres. From hot springs to mile-high peaks, from the arid grandeur of the Chihuahuan Desert to the Rio Grande, Big Bend country was a special place to find peace and solitude, away from the hubbub of modernity. The two main roads entering Big Bend from the north—number 385 from Marathon (thirty-nine miles distant) and number 118 from Alpine (eighty-one miles distant)—converged in the proposed park at Panther Junction, where the future NPS headquarters was built. In November the New York Times ran a story about Roosevelt’s Big Bend National Park plan, claiming that the semiarid wilderness was “virtually uninhabited by people.”110

  The Times was essentially right. Forlorn Big Bend—with no electricity or graded roads—was among the most primitive of America’s would-be national parks. It was an ecological island dominated by the spectacularly eroded Chisos Mountains, teeming with desert wildlife, and the Rio Grande River. Turning the remote wilderness into a national park, with help from his Fort Worth millionaire friend Amon Carter, would take a Herculean, Texas-sized effort on Capitol Hill. Roosevelt was undaunted about getting the Big Bend Park job done soon.111

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “A DUCK FOR EVERY PUDDLE”

  I

  Not all of Franklin Roosevelt’s conservation work in 1934 was related to the National Park Service. In early January, he appointed three respected conservationists for a blue-ribbon Committee on Wildlife Restoration: chairman Thomas Beck, the influential publisher of Collier’s Weekly; Jay “Ding” Darling, syndicated cartoonist for the Des Moines Register; and Aldo Leopold, the wildlife management professor from the University of Wisconsin who had once worked for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico.1 Roosevelt was eager to have the Biological Survey develop a coherent national wildlife refuge system.2 By appointing his Connecticut friend Beck as chair, the president could, without fanfare, stay abreast of the direction the committee was taking. In naming Darling (a Hoover Republican) and Leopold (a brilliant midwestern academic) to the committee, Roosevelt hoped to diminish any criticism of liberal partisanship.3

  What all three conservationists shared was a certainty that the Biological Survey under Hoover had lacked vision, and that a comprehensive $18 million New Deal program to save dwindling North American migratory birds was urgently needed. Of the 120 million acres of marsh and wetlands originally found in the United States, only a rapidly dwindling 30 million acres of waterfowl habitat remained. “I get from a good many sources suggestions that the Biological Survey spends too much time on scientific experimentalism,” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Wallace, “and that we ought to have a more practical spirit.”4

  Roosevelt couldn’t have chosen three better stewards to make North American wildlife a New Deal priority. Ding Darling was born in Norwood, Michigan, on October 21, 1876. As a child, he moved to Sioux City, Iowa, then still the Wild West to many people back east. Growing up along the Missouri River, traipsing in the vast prairie-scapes of Nebraska and South Dakota, Darling became a self-taught naturalist in the Meriwether Lewis tradition.5 Irreverent, whip smart, and known for his prankish schoolyard escapades, Darling found an outlet for his imaginative mind as a satirical cartoonist. He took the pen name “Ding”—a contraction of “Darling”—while at the Sioux City Journal. By 1917 his satirical cartoons in the Des Moines Register were syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune, and by the 1920s more than two hundred newspapers carried his drawings. In a career that extended from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy, Darling was beloved for lampooning self-important politicians and promoting environmental conservation.

  While Darling’s income came from cartooning, his consuming passion was to protect the upper Mississippi River ecosystem from wanton destruction. He credited his Uncle John—who owned a Michigan hay-wheat farm—with teaching him hunting etiquette, proper land management techniques, and the importance of stocking freshwater ponds with fish. Having seen great flocks of golden plovers move across South Dakota during his boyhood, Ding, like his uncle, was alarmed at the prospect of their demise. “It was the disappearance of all that wonderful endowment of wildlife,” Darling later recalled, “which stirred the first instincts I can remember of conservation.”6

  After Uncle John died, the Michigan farm deteriorated, eventually looking as if a cyclone had sucked up all the rich black loam soil that had once yielded an easy fifty bushels of wheat per acre. Darling witnessed how quickly rich pastures could become scorched earth, cracked open. “This was my first conscious realization of what could happen to the land,” Darling later explained, “what could happen to clear running streams, what could happen to bird life and human life when the common laws of Mother Nature were disregarded.”7

  During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, Darling lobbied for the creation of the U.S. Forest Service and worked to transform America’s slapdash network of federal bird preserves into a scientifically managed, coherent system. When his beloved TR died in 1919, Darling put aside his acid pen and drew his most popular cartoon ever: “The Long Trail Ride,” which depicted the Rough Rider on horseback proudly riding off into a Grand Canyon sunset. In the 1920s, Darling became a leader in the Izaak Walton League in Iowa, advocating for wildlife protection.8 In this capacity he became close friends with Herbert Hoover. Darling, in fact, won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes in 1924 for his caricatures of Hoover—no mean feat, because, as Darling noted, the thirty-first president “had the most average-looking face.”9

  Once Hoover became president, Darling visited the White House twice, holding forth about bass and walleye in Iowa, the upper Mississippi, and the Great Lakes.10 On one occasion, Hoover and Darling, evading the Secret Service, sneaked off to the Great Smokies for horseback riding, fishing, and hiking. Always a conservation activist, Darling helped organize the Men’s Garden Clubs of America and served as its first president. Agitating during the Hoover years for more trained foresters and wildlife specialists in state government, Darling initiated an enterprising partnership with Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, and established the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit in Ames, Iowa. The research laboratory soon grew in academic prominence because of its great surf of cutting-edge field research on behalf of midwestern game animals. And thanks to Darling’s intense lobbying, the Iowa general assembly created a progressive five-member State Fish and Game Commission; Darling, at the behest of Iowa’s governor Daniel Webster Turner, served as the staggeringly high-profile chair of this commission from 1931 to 1934.11

  Because of his exalted gift for public relations, Darling’s reputation soared in North American conservationist circles. Raising the ante for the wildlife protection crusade, Darling was perceived as the “boondocker” who knew more about ducks and geese than most game wardens. Newspaper readers were riveted by his reflections—in the style of Will Rogers—on shooting duck, fishing for black bass, ornithology, gardening, and even eating Roquefort c
heese.12 When, in 1931, the seventy-six-year-old William Temple Hornaday published Thirty Years War for Wild Life—lambasting the U.S. government for issuing over six million hunting licenses and thereby causing the “progressive extinction of wildlife”—Darling backed up his reform message. Both Hornaday and Darling knew that the era of commercial hunting had to end. “For most of us—and I speak as a man who has lived in Iowa—the passing of various species of game has been a tragedy,” Darling told the American Game Conference. “It has hurt us to the heart. I am not a great shooter, a very frequent shooter, but just the same the passing of the birds has made a deep impression on me. It has filled my soul with the thought that something could be done about it.”13

  Darling served as a delegate to the 1932 Republican National Convention, wanting to see Hoover reelected to a second term. The GOP conservatives in Chicago urgently lobbied Darling—Iowa’s most revered celebrity—to run for an open U.S. Senate seat. Darling, though flattered, rejected these overtures with a gruff “Get lost.” Such directness was Darling’s most elemental asset as an antipolitician who nevertheless engaged in GOP politics. When FDR defeated Hoover in 1932, a disappointed Darling joked that the New Deal was actually going to be more of a Raw Deal.

  It is therefore a testament to Roosevelt’s cunning that he selected Darling for the Committee on Wild Life Restoration. Darling had ridiculed Roosevelt from 1928 to 1932, portraying him in cartoons as a Hudson Valley patrician detached from everyday life. Though dismissive of the Roosevelt administration’s belief in “big government” as the solution to the Great Plains drought of the early 1930s, Darling did hope the comatose Biological Survey could be resuscitated by Roosevelt. Roosevelt cultivated other Republicans, who agreed with him on the need for conservation measures, even or especially in the midst of a human crisis, such as the Great Depression. Another was Peter Norbeck, a senator from South Dakota. A potent supporter of the sculpture then in process at Mount Rushmore, Norbeck fought for parks and preservation measures. “Senator Norbeck is tremendously interested in game preservation,” FDR wrote to Darling. “He can be counted on to help in every way.”14 The ardent Republican cartoonist made a deal with the Democratic devil—Roosevelt—for the sake of helping migratory birds thrive in a federal system of prairie-pothole ponds, grasslands, and marshes by means of an innovative natural wildlife refuge system. The ecological damage to the land had to be reversed, and Roosevelt had the mettle to be innovative and to experiment.

  Aldo Leopold examined the skin of a Hungarian gray partridge chick in 1943. Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was a committed conservationist, who wrote in the early 1940s that “there is a basic antagonism between the philosophy of the industrial age and the philosophy of the conservationist.” FDR’s philosophy, however, was that the two had to coexist, and his job was to prove that they could.

  The third member of the FDR’s committee, Aldo Leopold, was also an Iowan, born on January 11, 1887, in Burlington. Leopold recalled that his businessman father, a partner in what became the Leopold Desk Company, was a utilitarian conservationist like Pinchot. The family lived in a well-built home on a scenic bluff in Burlington that overlooked the broad Mississippi River. Summers were spent at Marquette Island, Michigan, at the northern end of Lake Huron. When Aldo turned eleven, he wrote in a school notebook, “I like to study birds,” inventorying thirty-nine Mississippi River Valley species. But it was family trips to Estes Rock, Colorado, and Yellowstone that led Leopold into game management as a profession.

  In 1906, Leopold entered the Yale Forestry School, cofounded by Pinchot; there, books like Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms and Theodore Roosevelt’s The Deer Family enthralled him. On earning his master of science in forestry, he joined District 3 of the U.S. Forest Service in July 1909. Insatiably curious about the natural world, he moved to Springerville, Arizona, to become forest assistant in Apache National Forest. That August, Leopold led a reconnaissance crew in mapping land and surveying timber. The following month he shot into a pack of Mexican gray wolves (Canis lupus baileyi) and killed the mother. The death caused Leopold to slowly reform his ethical promises. “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch,” Leopold wrote in his seminal essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” later published in his collection A Sand County Almanac.15 “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire [in the wolf’s eyes] die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”16 Like Hornaday and Darling, he would come to believe that even North American predators like wolves and mountain lions needed federal protection.17

  Mediating his commitments between the Forest Service and academia, Leopold developed a devoted following among sportsmen and conservationists alike. The New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University tried to recruit him to run the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station; he declined. From 1911 to 1915, he printed his own practical newsletter, The Carson Pine Cone, in Tres Piedras, New Mexico. Many of Leopold’s articles emphasized that wilderness could be saved if only a new ecological consciousness emerged, and his arguments galvanized a new movement to preserve “roadless” public lands in the Southwest and beyond.

  Leopold was a scientific forester who thought about landscapes poetically, like Henry David Thoreau.18 In 1922, he inspected Gila National Forest in New Mexico and recommended that a 755,000-acre portion be designated a “wilderness” area. Two years later, after traveling around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota with his brothers and son, Leopold fought to have it protected from encroaching industrialization. “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” Leopold wrote of his career. “Much of the damage inflicted on the land is quite invisible to laymen . . . in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”19

  If any individual deserved the designation “father of marsh conservation,” it was Aldo Leopold. Besides understanding that America’s wetlands supported large duck and geese populations, he knew these ecosystems also acted as filters, cleaning water of impurities before it flowed into rivers and oceans. Wetlands and marshes acted as spongy buffers between land and large bodies of water, absorbing excess water from storms and floods—and often protecting towns and cities.20

  In 1933 Leopold was appointed professor of game management in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Wisconsin. That May he published his magnum opus, Game Management.21 This book revolutionized wildlife management in New Deal America. While some chapters of Game Management may have seemed professorial or overly technical, many passages were literary art. The Boone and Crockett Club, whose members were aristocratic hunters, endorsed Game Management enthusiastically; the Biological Survey used the text to help the new Roosevelt administration scientifically address wildlife management on public lands. According to Leopold, “that land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is a basic extension of ethics”—a creed echoing FDR’s own.22

  Not only was Leopold a gifted teacher, but his prodigious mind was virtually a bank of facts and figures. “In a field where myth, generalization, and enthusiasm were often liable to outweigh results,” biographer Curt Meine wrote, “he was constantly pushing himself and others to examine and reexamine their aims, means, and results.”23 His informal, inquiry-driven style of teaching, which he often mixed with hands-on outdoors experience, allowed his theories of “game management” and a “land ethic” to be pragmatically tested in field laboratories.24 These field assignments, including a stint with the CCC in the Southwest in 1933, epitomized what decades later would be termed “experiential learning.” Unlike many academics, Leopold was not tendentious or conceited. His generosity of spirit was legendary in Wisconsin. Not only did he believe hunting was a noble pastime, but he also
vigorously argued that the “fair chase” of game connected a man to the outdoors in a healthy way. Buttoned-down, precise, and a stickler for scientific exactitude, Leopold was the sage the U.S. conservation movement needed as species came under pressure or even went extinct.

  It was important to Roosevelt, Leopold, Darling, and Beck that the scope and character of wildlife management broaden—from the meager measures of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations to Hornaday’s more comprehensive approach. Hunting in flyways and rookeries had to be curtailed. Milliners had to turn to bows and ribbons instead of feathers. Meatpackers had to focus almost exclusively on farm-produced poultry (like chicken or turkey), not on wildfowl. Taking a cue from Game Management, the Roosevelt administration, under the banner of a “New Deal for wildlife,” wasn’t going to tolerate the destruction or fundamental alteration of any more wetlands. Not all of the damage to habitat was immediately apparent. In the 1920s, someone introduced the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) to Malheur Lake in southeastern Oregon. It may have been a well-meaning gesture, since the carp is edible, but it transformed the lake, which stretched for ten miles or more as a clear, plant-filled paradise for birds in need of a stop on the Pacific Flyway. Over the course of decades, the carp proliferated in Malheur Lake, ultimately eradicating the plants and turning the water cloudy with mud. The carp that were released so innocently into Malheur Lake in the 1920s destroyed it as a feeding ground for fowl. Ignorance was as dangerous as violence when it came to conserving bird species.

  To meet the increasing needs of waterfowl populations, Biological Survey refuge management adopted scientific measures. Recreational hunting, though allowed on public lands, had to be strictly regulated by “closed seasons, bag limits, and license requirements.”25 In bayous and swamps, water levels had to be manipulated to ensure that plants would thrive. Invasive species—responsible for changing habitats essential to the survival of ducks—had to be identified and prohibited. The CCC needed to train recruits in digging ponds, killing weeds, and rehabilitating wildlife. The backlog of deferred maintenance projects at federal wildlife refuges was criminally long. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the CCC worked in thirty-six National Wildlife Refuges between 1934 and 1943.26