Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  A week passed and then another and another. As Salyer’s deadline approached, he began scrambling. A few choice lands still had to be appraised in the Dakotas’ prairie pothole regions. It was a do-or-lose situation. He had long passed the point where he felt that sleeping in his car was undignified. After a mad race back to Washington, D.C., Salyer holed up in his Biological Survey office with his secretary and rushed to get the paperwork finished by the deadline. But an unexpected obstacle nearly derailed Salyer’s hard work. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, who had to give final approval for Salyer’s proposed habitat purchases in the Dakotas, was out of town. After a few hours of weekend fretting and pacing about the corridors of the USDA, Salyer grabbed a fountain pen and forged Wallace’s authorizations. “I could have gone to prison,” Salyer later recalled. “That was the longest weekend I ever spent.”

  Filled with fear and guilt, Salyer paced outside Henry Wallace’s door on Monday morning, steeling himself to confess his forgery. When Wallace finally arrived Salyer came clean. As Wallace listened to Salyer’s audacious story, there wasn’t the barest hint of a smile on his face—but no reprimand was forthcoming either. Instead, Wallace instructed his underling to get back to his desk and keep working.89

  Salyer’s forgery had paid off. At Wallace’s behest, Salyer ironed out USDA purchase agreements, making sure all of the boundaries were legally exact. Wallace had only one order: no lawsuits. Darling was also fully supportive, as the dream of the Beck Report finally began to be realized. Quite taken with the Souris River Basin in northern North Dakota, Salyer selected three potential refuges in the region; the area was a critical breeding ground along the Central Flyway. The Souris River crossed the border from Saskatchewan, following a pronounced horseshoe curve through North Dakota for three hundred miles, before running back into Canada. Two of Salyer’s sites would be wildlife refuges, while the third would be a wildlife management district. Between August 22 and September 4, 1935, President Roosevelt signed executive orders establishing all three.90 At the smaller of the two refuges, Upper Souris, CCC crews built dams primarily to create a healthy environment for birds . . . and fish, frogs, and other animals. The lakes that those dams created, including one named after Ding Darling, were also engineered to relieve droughts downriver, if necessary. An unplanned benefit was the ability of the improved river basin to reduce flooding downstream as well. The complex of preserves saved breeding grounds just as migratory bird populations were in crisis.

  Determined to save all North American birdlife from extinction, Salyer became indispensable at the Biological Survey during the Roosevelt years. Whenever a refuge manager learned that Salyer was coming for an inspection, everyone on the staff would jump to get things right (employees even baked pies for their boss to enjoy). One former Survey employee called him the General George C. Patton of wildlife protection. Salyer always knew the needs of each refuge and easily bonded with fellow biologists. Denny Holland, who worked at Santee National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina, remembered that, in a fitting tribute to their boss, the employees there named the biggest red oak tree on the grounds the Salyer Tree. “Whenever he came for a visit,” Holland recalled, “he’d say ‘Let’s go see my tree.’”91

  Besides acquiring land for refuges, a major priority for Darling and Salyer in the mid-1930s was the enforcement of antihunting laws in federal refuges. Many of the Biological Survey’s field wardens had grown lax about busting poachers, to avoid the rigmarole associated with long-drawn-out court hearings. When Darling became chief, the Biological Survey had fewer than thirty wardens for the entire nation. The first place Darling sought to reverse the backslide was along Maryland’s waterfowl-rich eastern shore. Poachers there had been slaughtering canvasback and redhead ducks for ornamental display in nightclubs, restaurants, and bars. It was standard practice. Arrests were ordered. Within a year, the Biological Survey busted forty-nine illegal duck shooters in the mid-Atlantic states. “It became suddenly apparent that the Biological Survey was under new management,” David L. Lendt noted in Ding, “and that the new boss meant business.”92

  FDR knew from living in Hyde Park, where he often participated in Audubon’s Christmas bird count in Dutchess County, that establishing federal migratory waterfowl refuges was only a small piece of a much larger conservation effort. During his formative years, FDR had been taught by Dr. Frank Chapman about the “citizen bird” movement, which attempted to get millions of Americans involved in putting out birdseed and birdbaths at their homes. The New Deal picked up on this backyard approach to bird stewardship, directing the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture to issue “bulletins” about how to build birdhouses, dig duck ponds, establish bird-feeding stations, and eradicate feral cats. These bulletins also suggested ways to transform picnic areas, cemeteries, sylvan school lots, and the acreage surrounding reservoirs into prime habitat for birds.93

  The Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act also passed Congress in 1934, allowing certain lands and waterways under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, and what would eventually be known as the Bureau of Land Management to become migratory bird refuges. There was, however, an important caveat: the main economic engine (mining, fishing, logging, grazing, etc.) of a given area couldn’t be interfered with or curbed.94

  Because of the Beck Report, the Duck Stamp, and the president’s policies of habitat acquisition and refuge management, fueled by congressional appropriations and the USDA-Interior public awareness campaign, migratory waterfowl would increase in numbers from thirty million in 1933 to more than a hundred million by the onset of World War II.

  After three years in office, Roosevelt had done more for wildlife conservation than all of his White House predecessors, including Theodore Roosevelt, establishing forty-five new wildlife refuges.95 By the end of fiscal year 1935, the Biological Survey had acquired 1,513,477 acres—surpassing all prior Biological Survey refuge land acquisitions—especially in the upper Midwest. “Our restoration efforts,” Salyer said, “have been felt in almost every State of the Union.”96

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “SOONER OR LATER, YOU ARE LIKELY TO MEET THE SIGN OF THE FLYING GOOSE”

  I

  After designing the first Duck Stamp, Ding Darling was still bursting with creativity. In another indelible image for use by the U.S. government he drew a flying blue goose (Chen caerulescens), with a feathered back as flat as an ironing board. Beginning in 1935, this logo, with its stylish elegance, welcomed visitors to federal wildlife sanctuaries throughout America.1 Of all the New Deal emblems, the “Blue Goose,” was the most aesthetically well conceived. “If you travel much in the wilder sections of our country, sooner or later, you are likely to meet the sign of the flying goose—the emblem of the National Wildlife Refuges,” biologist Rachel Carson later wrote. “You may meet it by the side of a road crossing miles of flat prairie in the West, or in the hot deserts of the Southwest. You may meet it by some mountain lake, or as you push your boat through the winding salty creeks of a coastal marsh.”2

  There were several reasons Darling chose the mysterious blue goose, which became the official symbol of national wildlife refuges in 1940. It was a variant species, a dark color form (or “morph”), of the snow goose (Chen caerulescens). Since 1916, North American hunters were banned from killing snow geese, which wintered primarily in Louisiana and Texas, because of dwindling populations. The blue goose was even scarcer, a truly endangered creature. E. A. McIlhenny, the Tabasco heir, wrote movingly about the blue goose in The Auk, warning that the species was in danger of extinction.3 Another reason Darling chose the blue goose was that it migrated along four North American flyways in small armadas, stopping in lakes, farm fields, brackish marshes, and sandbars.

  Workers installed signage designating the border of a national refuge, circa 1938. Darling designed the “Blue Goose” insignia still found on all National Wildlife Refuge Service signs.

  The first official Blue Goose sign—a da
rk blue bird against a white background—was ordered by John Clark Salyer for the Upper Souris Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in North Dakota in 1935. The upper Souris River Valley became a living laboratory for FDR’s waterfowl revivification strategy. Reporters were driven to the Souris Valley to see the Biological Survey and CCC hard at work on behalf of migratory birds. In all, eighty thousand acres were reclaimed as waterfowl habitat. “It is a magnificent thing,” Dr. Ira Gabrielson, head of the Biological Survey’s Division of Wildlife Research, said to the press, about the Souris River Basin refuges, “and will be a better nesting area than it ever was in its native condition.”4

  Most of FDR’s so-called Blue Goose refuges of 1935 were in North Dakota. Salyer had wisely bought prime bird breeding grounds for the Biological Survey on the cheap. On August 22, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7154-A establishing Des Lacs NWR (from the French Rivière-des-Lacs, “River of the Lakes”), located on the Canadian border near the town of Kenmore, North Dakota. The picturesque 19,500 acres were designed for migratory birds, but buffalo, antelope, and elk also found safe pasture there. Building on the North Dakota model, Salyer did the same along the Atlantic Flyway, posting Blue Goose signs in FDR’s latest refuges, such as Pea Island (North Carolina), and Carolina Sandhills (South Carolina). Phenomenal aerial cascades of ducks, along Coheknig’s Central Valley and up the Mississippi River into the Chesapeake Bay, would return under this initiative. “Whenever you meet this sign, respect it,” Rachel Carson soon wrote. “It means that the land behind the sign has been dedicated by the American people to preserving, for themselves and their children, as much of our native wildlife as can be retained along with modern civilization.”5

  Symbols like the Blue Goose were personally important to Franklin Roosevelt. As a collector of naval prints and postage stamps, he responded to illustrated posters and strong graphic designs. Cognizant of this, Darling drew a cartoon of FDR as “Doc Duck,” a mallard wearing a white top hat and flashing a sign that read “Duck Restoration.” Metal signs featuring Doc Duck were prominently posted by the CCC on trees and fence posts all over the Midwest and Great Plains.6 Children seemed to particularly enjoy the cartoon. It was a fun-loving way to say “Keep Out!” And the CCC often employed local women’s garden clubs to post the Doc Duck sign in federal bird sanctuaries. In the spirit of using birds to promote the New Deal, Roosevelt personally designed a red-and-blue stamp featuring an American bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) used to distinguish between airmail and regular mail.7

  Salyer, the primary architect for Roosevelt’s waterfowl restoration program, pushed for the U.S. Biological Survey to break ranks with the CCC and allow women to work at federal wildlife refuges. Eleanor Roosevelt agreed. But Henry Wallace never moved on this matter. It wasn’t until 1946, with Wallace out of the picture, that Salyer was able to employ (under the reorganized U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) his first female research biologist: Elizabeth Beard Losey, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who had recently graduated from the University of Michigan and was an expert in waterfowl and marsh management.8 Losey later recalled, “Mr. Salyer . . . stuck his neck out” by hiring her, a woman, for the position.9 Her first assignment for the survey was to document the importance of beavers in waterfowl management at Seney Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, a huge, 95,238-acre tract established by FDR in 1935 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.10

  Seney National Wildlife Refuge was also an important spot for the recovery of the Canada goose (Branta canadensis), then a threatened species. Instead of simply saving habitat at Seney, biologists had built a fenced-in pond area to contain a crop of goslings and then trained them to establish a migratory pattern. If one were to place a historical marker on a single location where the Canada goose made its remarkable comeback from a threatened to a ubiquitous species, Seney was the spot.11

  Each NWR established in 1935 saved entire ecosystems from corruption by humans. Most had a particular species of waterfowl as a focus. The reason that Rice Lake NWR was situated in a bog area of northern Minnesota was to help ring-necked ducks (Aythya collaris) hatch. Then there was Medicine Lake NWR in Montana, where the white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) nested. In Arkansas, mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) wintering in the Mississippi Flyway had a 160,756-acre home at the White River NWR. All of these landscapes would have been doomed to exploitation if the U.S. Department of Agriculture hadn’t acted decisively in 1935.

  II

  Even though Roosevelt was in the middle of crafting his Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, which created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), he wrote to Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes early that year about “a deficiency” in feed hay and cottonseed cake for the elk in Jackson Hole and the grizzlies in Alaska.12 Roosevelt also instructed Robert Fechner to make sure the CCC boys were planting trees with the specific goal of helping wildlife prosper in the Midwest. “What would you think of a conference, starting under my auspices, between Biological Survey, Forestry Bureau, Reclamation Service, to try to work out a definite plan between these and possible other Bureaus?” FDR wrote to Wallace that February. “If you think it wise let me know who should be at such a conference.”13

  At the beginning of 1935, Roosevelt sent a message to Congress on the topic of New Deal conservationism. It was as clear an expression as he ever made of his environmentalist ideals. “During the three or four centuries of white man on the American Continent, we find a continuous striving of civilization against Nature,” Roosevelt said. “It is only in recent years that we have learned how greatly by these processes we have harmed Nature and Nature in turn has harmed us.” Scolding fellow Americans for violating “nature’s immutable laws,” Roosevelt praised conservationists who fought to keep the North American forests alive with wildlife and the shorelines clear of industrial detritus. “In recent years little groups of earnest men and women have told us of this havoc of the cutting of our last stands of virgin timber; of the increasing floods, of the washing away of millions of acres of our top soils, of the lowering of our water-tables, of the dangers of one-crop farming, of the depletion of our minerals,” Roosevelt said, “in short the evils that we have brought upon ourselves today and the even greater evils that will attend our children unless we act.”14

  Five days later, the Society of American Foresters (SAF) presented President Roosevelt with the Sir William Schlich Memorial Medal for his efforts with the CCC. He was the first recipient of the award. In accepting the honor, Roosevelt took the opportunity to warn that forests had to be “lifted above mere dollars and cents” and the “selfish gain” of industrialists. Americans, Roosevelt charged, have “often heedlessly tipped the scales so that nature’s balance has been destroyed.”15

  The president didn’t mention the CCC or tell any stories about the Shelterbelt, as the SAF members might have expected. Instead he spoke of trees, which brought beauty to the American landscape and controlled the flow of water in scenic rivers. “The forests are the ‘lungs’ of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people,” Roosevelt said. “Truly, they make the country more livable. There is a new awakening to the importance of the forests to the country, and if you foresters remain true to your ideals, the country may confidently trust its most precious heritage to your safekeeping.”16

  In early February 1935, Ding Darling urged the president to regulate hunters so that wildlife could recover in the public domain. In the American West, families hunted on public lands; by contrast, the majority of hunting in the eastern United States took place on private property. In a confidential memorandum to the president, Darling made an impassioned plea for fish and game reform: “Game has been the orphan child without asylum in the conservation world. No provision has been made for its permanent home,” he wrote. “There has been no Government agency entrusted with its custodianship. It has subsisted on the crumbs dropped from the table of forestry, parks, reclamation and advancing civilization. That it has escaped total extinction is through no foresight or com
prehensive plan.”17

  Determined to institute real reform, Darling urged the president to reduce the hunting season for waterfowl to thirty days, prohibit baiting, limit automatic and repeater shotguns to three shells (at one loading), ban all sink box and sneak boat hunting, and abolish (essentially) the use of live decoys. Roosevelt agreed, and new restrictions were announced on August 1. Certain avians were given outright protection—it became illegal to shoot bufflehead (Bucephala albeola), ruddy (Oxyura jamaicensis), brant geese (Branta bernicla), or wood ducks (Aix sponsa). The greater and lesser scaup (Aythya marila, Aythya affinis, respectively) were also given increased federal protection—only eight of each per hunter were allowed—with a ban on shooting the species at all to become law in 1937.18

  Both Roosevelt and Darling thought that states shouldn’t determine “shooting seasons.” Instead the U.S. government, amending the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1929, now dictated the precise dates for specific birds and regions. Most sportsmen were expecting strict rules and understood that the need to save species was urgent. A few, of course, bitterly complained. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, objected to the administration’s proposed hunting regulations—particularly the one prohibiting the shooting of ducks from baited water—in an editorial that caught the president’s attention. “I am forced to the conclusion that some sacrifice by the hunters will have to be made which will reduce the number of ducks killed this season,” Roosevelt wrote to Pulitzer after reading the editorial, “and that such restrictions must continue until such time as natural conditions with the aid of our restoration program may allow a liberalization of the regulations.”19