Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Darling’s hard-won money went toward buying a list of 323 potential waterfowl and upland game refuge sites from the Beck Report’s “Summary of Tentative Projects: Migratory Waterfowl.” Upper Midwest and northern Great Plains states—North Dakota (110 projects); Minnesota (thirty-one); Montana (twenty-seven); and South Dakota (twenty-one)—became the starting places for FDR’s new waterfowl rescue efforts, which worked in harmony with the New Deal’s larger assault on drought relief through rural-land management. By late 1935, protection was ensured for White River (Arkansas), Sacramento (California), Mud and Rice lakes (Minnesota), Medicine and Red Rock lakes (Montana), Valentine (Nebraska), Mattemuskeet (North Carolina), and Turnbull (Washington). All fell into place on the national map. The bugling of cranes and nesting of eagles and egrets holding clamorous convention were going to remain, with CCC help, American birthrights.58

  IV

  As the drought in the Great Plains worsened, plows turned up dust as dry as gunpowder, while the nearly constant winds blew across the prairie. In the spring of 1934 Roosevelt sought large-scale federal solutions to the disaster, which had been caused in large part by human ignorance. Over seventeen million acres of U.S. wetlands had been drained; the president wanted at least five million brought back. Trees and other plants also had to be reintroduced. “The [wind] storms are mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation to such an extent that there was no defense against the dry winds,” Donald Worster explained, “no sod to hold the sandy or powdery dirt. The sod had been destroyed to make farms grow wheat to get cash.”59

  Giant dust clouds, tar black at the base, rose from the Great Plains fields and traveled with the prevailing winds, rolling and turbulent. According to historian Tim Egan, the “soil was like fine-sifted flour, and the heat made it a danger to go outside many days.”60 Farmers thought the apocalypse was upon them. When dust storms came through a town, they blotted out light from the prairie sky. Wildlife and livestock choked to death. Lung disease was epidemic. In the summer of 1934, the Great Plains baked in a heat wave, with temperatures reaching 118 degrees in Nebraska and 115 in Iowa. In Illinois, temperatures of over a hundred degrees resulted in the death of 370 people. And the East was not spared. That May, a western dust storm actually blew soot all the way to the East Coast, causing great consternation in the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Nothing could stop these heartland dusters. “Farmers watched their fields disappear before their eyes,” Ian Frazier wrote in his 1989 book Great Plains. “Tumbleweeds blew up against fences, caught the dust, and were buried.”61

  Roosevelt was faced with the formidable challenge of developing a grasslands strategy for America to help combat erosion, develop a reliable water-supply system, and cultivate more vegetation. The destruction of millions of acres of prairie grasses, especially those crucial to holding soil down on marginal lands, and the widespread erosion gave rise to the Dust Bowl.62 The Roosevelt administration, using funds from the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935, purchased 11.3 million acres of fallow or worn-out land for an average price of $4.40 per acre for grassland restoration; the best hope for the revival of the Great Plains and the Midwest would be to bring back the prairie ecosystems.63

  A dust storm sweeps across Baca County, Colorado, in the mid-1930s. In some parts of the country, such occurrences were natural, but by the 1930s, overcutting made dust a destructive force in places that had formerly been green, carrying good soil away and leaving the land parched.

  Convinced that reforestation and reflooding were ways to restore the natural resilience of the land, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6793 on July 11, 1934, establishing the Prairie States Forestry Project. Better known as the Shelterbelt, the program entailed the planting of trees and shrubs as windbreaks along the borders of croplands and pastures to reduce wind speeds and decrease the evaporation of moisture from the soil. Running along a carefully configured patchwork from the Canadian border to Abilene, Texas, this great American wall of trees would protect crops and livestock and even contain the huge dust clouds.64 The CCC was directed to establish a “transition zone” between the tallgrass prairies and shortgrass prairies.65

  Roosevelt touted the Shelterbelt as a way to anchor the soil to the earth.66 Its boldness and scope were breathtaking. “This will be,” Forest Service Chief Ferdinand A. Silcox accurately predicted that July about the Shelterbelt, “the largest project ever undertaken in the country to modify climate and agricultural conditions in an area that is now consistently harassed by winds and drought.”67

  Roosevelt had appointed Silcox—a stalwart of the Boone and Crockett Club and the American Forestry Association—as the fifth chief of the U.S. Forest Service. A native of Georgia, Silcox brilliantly utilized the CCC and WPA in forest improvement projects until his sudden death in 1939. Under his leadership, the Forest Service provided space for more than eight thousand CCC camps, which would employ approximately two million men during the nine-year existence of the CCC. Soon after taking office in 1933, Roosevelt had been persuaded by Silcox to organize two national forests in northern Wisconsin by presidential proclamation.68 The resulting Chequamegon and Nicolet national forests were commensurate with FDR’s idea of a permanently protected upper Midwest tapestry of pine savanna: white, red, and black oaks; aspens; beeches; basswoods; sumacs; and paper, yellow, and river birches. Coniferous trees in the forests included the balsam fir and eastern hemlock.

  Like the CCC itself, the Shelterbelt was essentially FDR’s “own idea.”69 Under his direct order, the USDA planted six to twelve rows of trees and shrubs around farm structures; grew trees specifically for posts, piles, and wildlife cover; block-planted trees on enormous swaths of public lands; and, most commonly, created farm strips along fields, constituted of ten rows of trees spaced ten feet apart.70 Scoffing at skeptical soil scientists, state foresters, and state extension services, the president was confident that the federal government could even alter the climate of the sunbaked Great Plains. Not only would the windbreaks reduce evaporation and therefore curtail the loss of moisture from soil, but in winter they would serve as snow traps and shield living quarters and barns from the greatest danger in blizzards.71

  Roosevelt’s Shelterbelt was the most ambitious afforestation program in world history. Unfortunately, it was also certain to offend Great Plains farmers and ranchers who didn’t like the federal government interfering with their land.72 Roosevelt marketed the Shelterbelt to them on the firm promise that this tree-planting extravaganza, administered by the U.S. Forest Service, would at least provide decent jobs in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle. When critics of the Shelterbelt protested against the federal government’s overreach, Roosevelt had a ready answer. “The Nation that destroys its soil,” he reminded Governor James V. Allred of Texas, “destroys itself.”73

  Cynics said Roosevelt’s Shelterbelt was socialistic and a pseudo-scientific experiment. Conservative farmers and real estate profiteers demanded that the experimental program be abolished before it became an embarrassment to the United States, or a cataclysm. Many of FDR’s trees, the rap went, brought with them insects and diseases. Wild cherry encouraged tent caterpillars. Elms were breeding quarters for canker worms. Red cedar brought rust disease. Republican-owned newspapers in the Great Plains ran vicious opinion pieces designed to derail or suppress the innovative New Deal project. “Only God can make a tree,” an editorial in the Amarillo Globe argued. “If he had wanted a forest on the wind scoured prairies of Nebraska and Kansas, he would have put it there . . . and . . . for FDR to rush in where the Almighty had feared to tread was not only silly, but possibly blasphemous!”74

  From the air, the Shelterbelt looked like a dense zigzag of forests draped across the flatlands. Working around prairie potholes in such places as North Dakota, sand hills in Nebraska, and the Llano Estacado in Texas, the planting crews placed seedlings of species that grew quickly and didn’t
require much water—because the soil was so dry. Most government foresters agreed that conifers were the best wind deflectors, but cottonwoods—regardless of their unusual bent and shape—were a more reliable option. “In the long run, overreliance on cottonwoods and under-utilization of conifers meant less effective shelterbelts,” Joe Orth explained in Agricultural History, “but in the short term their choices helped get more trees in the ground and increased popular support.”75

  After some deliberation, Roosevelt chose cottonwoods over conifers for the Shelterbelt because they grew rapidly, almost like weeds, even in inhospitable conditions.76 This meant Great Plains farmers who were dubious about the New Deal project would soon see sprouting cottonwoods blocking heavy winds all around their neighbors’ homesteads and perhaps participate in the Shelterbelt program. In that regard, the president’s choice worked. An increasing number of Great Plains farmers approved the planting of cottonwoods on their farm acreage, making sure they grew beyond the weed and grass inhibitions.77

  However, Roosevelt didn’t want cottonwood catkins to become the Shelterbelt’s enduring symbol; they were too gauzy and flimsy. For that honor, he chose the hardy, rugged Austrian pine—a superior tree for windbreak situations. Roosevelt had first been struck by Pinus nigra when traveling around Europe as a boy. It was the darkest shade of pine he’d ever seen. Although it easily grew to 150 feet in height, it was of minimal value as a timber tree because the wood was rough, knobby, and gnarled. But Roosevelt knew from his discussions with Gifford Pinchot that these pines could grow on the poorest of American soils. It was therefore the ideal tree for Dust Bowl farms in the New Deal afforestation program.78

  Tweaking and burnishing USDA directives, the president numbered tree-planting locations like CCC camps. It all started with the “Number One Shelterbelt” in Greer County, Oklahoma. The state forester, George Phillips, had the honor of planting the first tree (an Austrian pine) on the homestead of farmer H. E. Curtis near Willow, Oklahoma. The government paid Curtis for the right to plant rows of pines on his property. At the time, Roosevelt stressed that for the black blizzards to be fully curtailed the Shelterbelt wouldn’t be enough. A comprehensive soil conservation program also had to be undertaken by Great Plains farmers.79

  Critics couldn’t dent FDR’s confidence in the Shelterbelt. There was a credible body of agricultural science from the 1920s and early 1930s to back up FDR’s ambitious antidote to desertification. Indeed, in the long run the Shelterbelt lived up to its bold promise to stabilize soil, reduce dust, ward off winter injury, provide shade for livestock, and restore habitat for wildlife.80 Embattled Great Plains farmers, struggling with the hand of drought, came to see that. In the meantime, the program injected fresh money into the plains, through jobs for local men.

  Disdainful of incrementalism and almost pathologically impatient, Roosevelt prodded Wallace for raw data and monthly updates about the Shelterbelt project. After he read a two-hundred-page technical guide, The Possibilities of Shelterbelt Planting in the Plains Region, issued by the Forest Service Lake States Experiment Station (based in Saint Paul, Minnesota), he demanded that the USDA plant whole forests in the plains states, not just clusters of blue spruce, red cedar, ponderosa pine, cottonwood, and Austrian pine.81

  “I wish the Department would study and give me a report on this whole subject from a large acreage point of view,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace. “In the State of New York alone, for example, over forty million trees a year are produced by the State and planted either on State-owned land or on privately owned land. This means a total of forty thousand acres a year planted to trees. If the State of New York can do this for a very small annual cost, it is time that the Federal Government did it, especially on the vast public domain the title of which is still in the Federal Government.”82

  Roosevelt hired Paul H. Roberts of Nebraska to direct the project.83 Roberts knew the soil of the Great Plains better than anyone else in government. After earning a BS in forestry from the University of Nebraska in 1915, he was hired by the U.S. Forest Service to combat drought in the West. Well educated and arrow straight, he started off as a forest ranger and eventually rose to become the supervisor of Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1934, as chief of the Shelterbelt project, Roberts hired first-rate field directors and capable local staffers in each Dust Bowl state. To Roberts, it was imperative that the Shelterbelt should not seem to be forced on farmers by the Roosevelt administration—even though it was.

  Following Roosevelt’s directive, Roberts started tree nurseries like those in Saratoga, dedicated to producing the planting stock. Farmers were encouraged to grab free seeds and saplings. Federal nurseries were quickly founded in Ames, Iowa; Mandan, North Dakota; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and Pullman, Washington.84 Men with shovels planted more than 220 million trees and shrubs on thirty thousand farms. Often these tree belts were the only green living things on the exhausted prairie. Roosevelt had found at Hyde Park and Warm Springs that wildlife flourished when the soil and woodlands were healthy. This basic ecological principle was nevertheless ignored by millions of American farmers. The Roosevelt-Roberts team promoted hedgerows, to be planted on western ranches instead of barbed wire; hedgerows were better for wildlife.85

  Some scientific foresters dismissed FDR’s wind-reducing hedgerows plans as opposed to real forestry, mere busywork for gullible farmers. To counter detractors the White House cooperated with Life magazine and the Christian Science Monitor in a Shelterbelt propaganda campaign. Inspirational WPA posters were printed by the Roosevelt administration showing heroic, muscular work-relief farmers joining the Shelterbelt effort. The ad campaign claimed those men weren’t just planting trees; they were learning about cooperative conservation and national planning. The teachers were, for the most part, Forest Service technicians from land-grant universities in the Midwest and Great Plains. Operating under the aegis of the Forestry Service in 1934–35, the Shelterbelt project won over many farmers, but powerful members of Congress, in league with respected foresters, continued a stubborn opposition. The congressmen dug deep into their bag of tricks to kill the Shelterbelt, but Roosevelt proved that he had a bag of tricks, too—and it was even deeper. With the Shelterbelt on the verge of being struck from the budget, Roosevelt deftly moved it over to the WPA, in which the executive branch held control of disbursements. It lasted there through the early 1940s.

  V

  At the president’s urging, Ding Darling began forming partnerships with state conservation commissioners in the West and Midwest. He continually battled for increased federal appropriations for duck habitat. Scrounging for operational funds was a constant frustration for him. In the spring of 1935, a frustrated Darling would tell the Associated Press that he was “ready to quit” because of Congress’s failure to include wildlife restoration in the major work-relief bill and because other agencies in the Roosevelt administration had treated the Biological Survey poorly.86 Persevering, he called for the Biological Survey to hire land negotiators, surveyors, engineers, draftsmen, and biologists. Darling’s most inspired move was his hiring of thirty-two-year-old John Clark Salyer II to identify tracts of land for the government to purchase. He had first encountered Salyer, a redheaded biologist, in 1932 while working with the Iowa Fish and Game Commission. Originally from Higginsville, Missouri, Salyer had an exhaustive knowledge of North American birds. He was pursuing a PhD in ornithology when Darling offered him a crucial post at the Biological Survey.

  Once Salyer moved to Washington, D.C., he set about finding 600,000 acres of suitable migratory waterfowl habitat for federal purchase using money from the Duck Stamps. He first made recommendations about which existing federal migratory bird refuges—including Mattamuskeet in North Carolina and Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin—were in urgent need of rehabilitation.87 There were around 150 species of ducks, geese, and swans, all belonging to the biological order Anseriformes, that would benefit from the land purchases. Ducks were the largest o
f the three groups and could be divided into at least two subsets: dabbling ducks and diving ducks. It was a dream job for any intrepid wildlife biologist, but there was a hitch: Salyer, though able-bodied, was afraid to fly. So Darling, not wanting to lose talent, offered to lend him a federally owned Oldsmobile sedan to conduct a six-week inspection tour of far-flung waterfowl habitats west of the Mississippi River.

  In late 1934 and early 1935, Salyer traveled twenty thousand miles looking for breeding grounds in Montana and the upper Midwest. Speed was very essential: if the Biological Survey didn’t buy land by March 31, 1935, then the money would revert back to the WPA. Salyer worked like a fiend, living on pocket money, hopping out of his car at regular intervals to identify bird species and scribble notes. “Salyer wore out government cars at a great rate,” George Laycock recalled in The Sign of the Flying Goose. “He drove with his mind on wildlife, and the list of government workers who refused to ride with him grew rapidly. In those months he only saw his wife and infant son on rare occasions.”88

  John Clark Salyer II, photographed in the field during the 1930s. Salyer was appointed by Darling to develop the Division of Wildlife Refuges along the unbending rules of Leopold. Salyer was well matched to the position, spending much of his time inspecting refuges in person. When he arrived in his job in December 1934, the nation counted 1.5 million acres in refuges; by the time he retired twenty-seven years later, there were more than twenty-eight million acres under protection.