Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America
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Using Iowa State’s Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit as a model, the Roosevelt administration recruited nine land-grant colleges to collaborate with Uncle Sam to help restore waterfowl populations in the Mississippi Flyway. Darling, putting his celebrity to good use, was masterly at inspiring state conservation divisions to work closely with the USDA. “The correctives for these [land abuse] evils include measures to fasten the loose soil in place by planting trees, shrubs, grasses, and other suitable vegetation to nullify wind-action, conserve moisture, and reduce the runoff of water from rainfall and melting snow,” Darling wrote. “These are wildlife conservation measures, too!”20
Throughout 1935, Darling sought to develop public-private partnerships to rescue North American wildlife by habitat restoration. To this end, he served as impresario for a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria that April, attended by leading industrialists and munitions makers. Darling hoped companies that benefited from the hunting culture would join in common cause with the Biological Survey. Reminding corporate leaders of their happy boyhoods spent hunting in the great American outdoors, Darling made his pitch: he wanted the CEOs of such corporations as DuPont, the Hercules Power Company, and the Remington Arms Company (the venerable gun manufacturer based in Ilion, New York) to hold a nationwide conference on wildlife (cosponsored with sportsmen’s clubs). Indeed, C. K. Davis, president of Remington, decided to contribute to the Biological Survey’s wetlands restoration efforts after attending the dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Davis, an avid duck hunter, didn’t like the New Deal’s “unreasonable” seasonal restrictions on hunting, but he sympathized, in general terms, with the waterfowl conservation cause. The event at the Waldorf-Astoria also led to some new nonprofits, organized for the long fight ahead.21 “Out of this single meeting,” Darling said, “there emerged, either directly or indirectly, the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit Program, the American Wildlife Institute, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), and the North American Wildlife Conference—a rather productive three hours of dinner conversation.”22
During his first two years in office, Roosevelt had walked point on purchases of waterfowl habitat. By 1935, however, his efforts had expanded to include the protection of other wildlife: bison, antelope, grizzly bear, Kodiak bear, elk, moose, caribou, sage grouse, and wild turkey. These species were all fighting for the freedom to roam unmolested by hunters, cars, canals, railroads, and factories. Of particular interest to FDR was the desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni) making a heroic comeback. “Thirty years ago, Theodore Roosevelt established a permanent government policy for forests,” Darling wrote to FDR. “A like permanent policy on wildlife is long overdue. It looks to me like an opportunity.”23
FDR appreciated the analogy with TR. His New Deal conservation program aimed especially to save big mammals living on public lands in the American West. On March 20, 1935, with the president’s full support, the New Deal’s first grazing district opened in Rawlins, Wyoming. Those with livestock could use federal land within the districts and in addition, reserves for wild animals would be established.
Anti–New Dealers initially derided FDR’s grazing district as the “closing of the West,” but the president knew that the reseeding would rehabilitate abused grassland and burned-out rangeland. The U.S. government now forbade free grazing access to the public range. At a Salt Lake City conference, Roosevelt defended the grazing districts as a “new conservation movement” for the American West that “promises historic significance.”24
Secretary of the Interior Ickes appointed a Colorado rancher, Farrington Carpenter, to head the newly established Grazing Service and to persuade farm communities that the regulation of grazing of federal lands was a good thing. A full-time cattleman with degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law School, Carpenter tried assiduously to bridge the gulf between freedom-loving westerners and the New Deal Washingtonians who were trying to regulate the range. He was a sensitive conservationist who recognized that the land had to be shared with other species—and that westerners had overgrazed the open land to the extent that livestock ranching was barely viable. Through an unending schedule of local meetings, he brought the majority of cattlemen into compliance with the new grazing law, but Ickes didn’t like his ameliorative style. In fact Ickes didn’t like Carpenter, and vice versa. On the day after the midterm election in 1938, Ickes fired him. (This sent a broad message throughout the Roosevelt administration not to mess with Ickes.) While Carpenter returned to ranching, the value of his work can be seen in the fact that the grazing districts he designated in cooperation with locals in the 1930s are still recognized today. Carpenter’s replacement was Richard H. Rutledge of Utah. Rutledge (who would serve until 1944) placed an even greater emphasis on wildlife conservation than did Carpenter.
The implementation of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1935—the closing of the public domain from further entry via an FDR executive order—helped restore fragile grassland and prevent soil deterioration. Within a couple of years, FDR’s fifty-nine grazing districts encompassed 168 million acres of federal land and an additional 97 million acres of private or state-owned land. Like the New Deal system of migratory bird refuges, protected grazing districts in the West had become a permanent part of American life.
The Taylor Grazing Act notwithstanding, no federal program had been specifically devised for what Carl D. Shoemaker, an investigator with the Senate Special Committee on the Conservation of Wildlife Resources, called the “perpetual preservation of [America’s] national wildlife assets.” In a letter of March 1935 to Roosevelt, Shoemaker pointed out that while the public domain was in the process of being apportioned to the grazing districts some acreage should also be set aside by executive orders for the desert bighorns. “The important item for consideration,” Shoemaker wrote, “is that the game areas be withdrawn before and not after the last of the Federal domain is given away.”25 Roosevelt agreed.
Darling and Shoemaker weren’t the only advocates of huge wildlife reserves whom the president consulted in 1935. When FDR took a cruise to Florida that May—his springtime ritual—he noticed that a palmetto thicket normally twenty feet from shore had been replaced by concrete. Jungle had been uprooted, wetlands had been filled, and the fishing was poor. So concerned was Roosevelt about the coastal environment of Florida that he asked John Baker of the National Audubon Society to investigate the seemingly diminished brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) population from Jacksonville to Key West. FDR was sentimental about these comical birds. After investigating the situation, Baker told him that a large pelican colony was thriving in Brevard County on the eastern coast of Florida. “Many thanks for that interesting letter about the Brown Pelicans,” Roosevelt responded. “I am happy to know that they are apparently not decreasing in recent years. I became somewhat worried because on our recent trip through the Bahamas we saw practically no Pelicans at all.”26
The theme of “management efficiency” with regard to natural resources dominated Roosevelt’s thinking about the public lands of Florida. Encouraged by Baker, the president determined that relevant government agencies (the Biological Survey, National Park Service, Forest Service, and so on) needed to work in partnership with wildlife conservation nonprofits such as National Audubon and the Izaak Walton League to launch effective wildlife protection efforts. It was Darling’s dream that Roosevelt might host a huge “Wildlife in Peril” conference in Washington. “Do you think you could get the President to call a Natl. Congress for Conservation next January,” Darling prodded Wallace, “if I’d do all the work and see it properly financed and managed?”27 An agreeable Roosevelt seized on the idea. “Tell Mr. Darling,” Roosevelt wrote back to Wallace, “that I think a National Conference for Conservation would be excellent and that I heartily approve.”28
III
On May 9, 1935, Roosevelt established the WPA by Executive Order 7034. The guiding spirit of the WPA was Harry Hopkins, supervisor of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Civil Wor
ks Administration (CWA). Hopkins would hold the purse strings of an initial government appropriation of $4.88 billion, or nearly 7 percent of the nation’s GDP in 1935. With the exception of six “federal” projects run in Washington, D.C., the WPA’s unemployment relief initiatives began at a grassroots level all across America. Along with Ickes, the president had no closer adviser than Hopkins. In fact, Roosevelt was fond of pitting the two against each other as a way to milk the best out of both. In fact, Ickes was convinced that Hopkins had chosen the acronym WPA to create public confusion with Ickes’s own PWA, a view he held until the end of his life.29
Although the WPA had a more urban focus than the CCC—New York City claimed one seventh of all WPA expenditures—Hopkins also sent workers to assist in public lands projects.30 While Harold Ickes and Robert Fechner were building state parks with CCC boys, Hopkins’s WPA directed relief workers to construct and improve roads leading to woodsy campsites and swimming lakes. Hopkins also served on Roosevelt’s first-term Great Plains Drought Area Committee in 1936. Between 1935 and 1943, over $10 billion came through WPA coffers to stimulate the economy and provide jobs to more than thirteen million Americans. At national parks, the WPA was tasked with installing sewage systems and water tanks, as well as reinforcing riverbeds. Working with the Biological Survey, the WPA began correcting the harm caused by the high number of marshland drainage projects in the 1920s.31 And the WPA constructed seventeen new zoos—most with outdoor pavilions instead of cages—while brilliantly redeveloping the existing zoos in Central Park, San Diego, Dallas, and Buffalo.
Knowing that the CCC, PWA, and WPA were all ready to help improve federal wildlife refuges—as they were doing in state parks—Darling sought more federal funds. Vast parcels of mainly tax-delinquent land were being acquired by the U.S. government at an astonishing rate and Darling hungered to get in on the action. By late 1935, the U.S. government under FDR had acquired more than twice as much acreage in forestlands as had been bought in the prior history of the national forests.32 Why not do the same for the federal wildlife refuges? Therefore, Darling wrote to the president in July 1935 to ask for another $4 million to purchase waterfowl habitat, arguing that the Biological Survey did more than the Forest Service or National Park Service. “Others just grow grass and trees on it,” Darling told Roosevelt. “We grow grass, trees, marshes, lakes, ducks, geese, furbearers, impounded water and recreation.”33
In this letter, Darling explained to the president that most of the Biological Survey’s earlier appropriation had gone toward buying lands in the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia and acquiring ranchlands near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Another million or two had been spent on habitat for pronghorn antelope and elk around Oregon’s Hart Mountain. “I need $4,000,000 for duck lands this year and the same bill which gave us the $6,000,000 specifically stated that at your discretion you could allocate from the $4,800,000 money for migratory waterfowl restoration,” he pleaded. “We did a good job last year. Why cut us off now?”34
Roosevelt was amused by these pleas. He admired Darling’s audacity in trying to shake the money tree. But he also thought Darling, always rattling the tin cup for more, was too zealous. “As I was saying to the Acting Director of the Budget the other day—‘this fellow Darling is the only man in history who got an appropriation through Congress, past the Budget, and signed by the President without anybody realizing that the Treasury had been raided,’” Roosevelt wrote to Darling. “You hold an all-time record. In addition to the six million ($6,000,000) you got, the Federal Courts say that the United States Government has a perfect constitutional right to condemn millions of acres for the welfare, health, and happiness of ducks, geese, sandpipers, owls, and wrens, but has no constitutional right to condemn a few old tenements in the slums for the health and happiness of the little boys and girls who will be our citizens of the next generation! Nevertheless, more power to your arm! Go ahead with the six million dollars ($6,000,000) and talk with me about a month hence in regard to additional lands, if I have more money left.”35
While Darling didn’t get an extra $4 million, Roosevelt did instruct Ickes to transfer $2.5 million from the Public Works Administration to the Biological Survey.36 A pleased Darling purchased another 526,800 acres of migratory waterfowl breeding areas in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Roosevelt justified the money under the authority of the 1934 Coordination Act, which provided, “Whenever the Federal Government, through the Bureau of Reclamation or otherwise, impounds water for any use, opportunity shall be given the Bureau of Fisheries and/or the Bureau of Biological Survey to make such uses of the impounded waters for fish-culture stations and migratory bird resting and nesting areas as are not inconsistent with the primary use of the waters and/or the constitutional rights of the States.”37
Throughout 1935, Darling paid keen attention to Aldo Leopold’s writings in periodicals such as American Game, American Forests, Living Wilderness, and Wilson Bulletin. Both Darling and Leopold understood that no longer could American conservation be only about “monumentalism,” that is, saving the largest mountains, sequoias, or rock formations. A new caretaking ethic for all land—like Roosevelt’s ethic at Hyde Park—had to be the ecological basis of the future.
To Roosevelt, the reclamation of rural lands was the heart and soul of the environmental New Deal. If one were to choose Roosevelt’s three overarching priorities for land policy in 1935, they were stopping the American farmers’ landslide, keeping cattle out of federal grasslands, and helping waterfowl and big mammals rebound. However, when Ickes argued that the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, devastated by drought, shouldn’t be resuscitated for agriculture—that instead, the land should be allowed to “re-wild”—Roosevelt shrugged him off. Where Ickes wanted the return of tall grass and buffalo, Roosevelt imagined a brave new era of agriculture in Texas by way of water power and massive irrigation projects. As Rexford Tugwell observed, FDR “always did, and always would, think people better off in the country and would regard the cities as rather hopeless.”38 It sickened Roosevelt that Big Agriculture capitalists had slashed and burned their way across the continent with no regard for the ecological balance between “men and nature.”39
Whenever possible, President Roosevelt returned to Springwood to inspect his tree farm and to start broadcasting hemlock seed in Tamarack Swamp. He had a hunch that hemlock would grow tall in the moist soil. “I have long been interested in comparing the results from acorns gathered from trees of different ages,” Roosevelt wrote to a forester in Syracuse. “Would it be worthwhile to gather acorns from three age types—one lot, say, from a tree or trees about eighty years old, another lot from a tree or trees about one hundred and fifty years old? We have all of these trees, both red oak and white oak, on our place and the experiments could be tried with species of oak.”40
Whenever Roosevelt felt trapped in the White House, he dreamed of the Hudson River Valley. The yesteryears that had passed hadn’t dimmed his fond memories of childhood, when his legs were strong and the scooting summer clouds were dreamy and the autumnal colors fired in the woods. Roosevelt’s assistant, Bernard Asbell, recalled how excited his boss was about all things related to Dutchess County. Whenever Roosevelt was at Springwood, he would interrupt Asbell with comments like, “You see that knoll over there? That’s where I did this-or-that.”41
Always trying to save Dutchess County’s historic sites, Roosevelt sought to persuade the Norrie family to donate their tree-rich grounds along the Hudson River in Staatsburg to the New York State park system.42 Roosevelt worried that the bacteria-laden Hudson, thick with algae and pathogens, was being polluted beyond redemption. In the West, rivers were often part of the public domain, but the Hudson was the responsibility of the New Yorkers living along its course. “When I was living in Albany I spent many hours trying to persuade municipalities to put in sewage disposal plants,” Roosevelt wrote to Scott Lord Smith of Poughkeepsie. “As a matter of state government policy we undertook .
. . to eliminate all sewage running from State institutions into the Hudson River. . . . The problem is, of course, wholly one for the municipalities and not for the Federal Government.”43
This yearning for the Hudson Valley was most apparent in letters written to his distant cousin and confidante, Daisy Suckley, a sounding board whom he routinely took on drives to his favorite scenic spots. “Why is it,” Roosevelt once asked her, “that our River and our countryside seem to be part of us?”44 The intimate Roosevelt-Suckley letters are filled with pastoral references to soft summer grasses and the dancing snowflakes of winter. It was almost as if Suckley believed her job was to report all of nature’s happenings along the Hudson to the overworked president, who was starved for details about his home. “Would you like some news,” Suckley wrote in August 1935, in a teasing update, “It’s raining! And rumbling in the distance—that bowling alley in the Catskills seems to be open 24 hours of the day—and practically every day.”45
In the mid-1930s, Roosevelt and Suckley took on several silviculture projects in Hyde Park and Rhinebeck. The quirkiest was a scheme to grow California redwoods along the Hudson River, in an experimental forest plot of one hundred trees. Having seen this tree, the king of flora, on the West Coast—some individual redwoods had been alive when Christ walked in Galilee—FDR hoped to establish a grove in his own backyard. “The Redwoods have come!” Suckley wrote to Roosevelt at the White House. “But in the form of an envelope full of seeds! With instructions as to their care! They should appear above the ground within 17–20 days! I’ll start them right off.”46
Through her new syndicated “My Day” column, that appeared daily from 1935 to 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt also wrote about idyllic Dutchess County with noticeable regularity. Pastoralism was the most consistently pronounced sentiment in her writing, even more so than feminism and Democratic liberalism. “We entered our cottage at Hyde Park on Friday night,” she mused in typical fascination, “sat on our porch, looked at the reflection of the sunset on the water and basked in a feeling of complete peace and quiet.”47 At Val-Kill, the First Lady hosted picnics, bird-watched, swam, and hiked. “The peace,” she wrote Franklin, “is divine.”48