Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  IV

  With soil-expert Hugh Bennett as evangelist, most residents in the American West supported the president’s New Deal measures aimed at helping struggling farmers improve their soil conservation. But the heroic efforts of the federal government—planting trees, rehabilitating grasslands, closing the open range—paled in the face of Mother Nature. That spring of 1935, galloping dust clouds swept through Oklahoma and Texas. “All day it’s been quite hot and a queer haze is in the sky,” CCCer Belden W. Lewis wrote in the diary he kept while working at Zion National Park in Utah. “I suppose this haze is dust from that dust storm reported last night to have been in Kansas City and Texas.”49

  On April 14, which was Palm Sunday but would henceforth be known as Black Sunday, a huge “black blizzard” blew south from the Dakotas, picking up speed and wiping out topsoil. Fear so engulfed the Texas Panhandle that residents received last rites and prayed for salvation. No amount of Shelterbelt plantings or national grassland designations could have prevented this environmental catastrophe, which destroyed over fifty million acres across the Panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska; western Kansas; southeastern Colorado; and northeastern New Mexico—the area known in 1935 as the Dust Bowl.

  A Denver-based Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, journeyed through the areas of Oklahoma and Texas most affected by the Black Sunday dust storm. In a dispatch of April 15 to the Washington Evening Star, Geiger inadvertently gave a name to the prolonged drought that caused the worst agricultural crisis in U.S. history. “Three little words,” the article began, “achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—‘if it rains.’” Almost overnight “Dust Bowl” entered the American vernacular. Probably, the label caught on because it was a play on college football: California’s Rose Bowl, Florida’s Orange Bowl, and the Southern Plains’ Dust Bowl. Once Roosevelt’s Soil Conservation Service set up a special office in the “Dust Bowl” and had the label printed on maps, it became part of the grim history of the Great Depression.50

  The fog-like dusters went from bad to worse during the summer of 1935. Children suffered from “dust pneumonia,” a respiratory illness that plagued the western Plains and the Southwest. The winds had sucked up millions of bushels of topsoil, and the prolonged drought devastated agriculture in the lowlands. Despite the good soils of the Texas Panhandle—dark brown to reddish-brown sandy loams and clay loams, good for farming—crops there were mortally vulnerable to the whipping winds and dust clouds. Folk singer and activist Woody Guthrie was holed up in the Texas panhandle. The deforestation he saw inspired him to write a pamphlet called $30 Wood Help, in which he complained about lumber barons stripping the land bare.

  Representing marginalized western farmers, Guthrie hammered away at the extraction industries for causing the Dust Bowl. He blamed greedy agricultural and corporate oil interests for the chronic land abuse of the Plains. He also wrote a song about it:

  If I was President Roosevelt

  I’d make groceries free—

  I’d give away new Stetson hats

  And let the whiskey be.

  I’d pass out new suits of clothing

  At least three times a week—

  And shoot the first big oil man

  That killed the fishing creek.51

  The Roosevelt administration grew desperate to reverse the damage caused by the drought and erosion in the Great Plains and Southwest. Once the grasses were destroyed or removed, submarginal soil would blow away just as troubadour Woody Guthrie described in his folk songs. Throughout 1935 Roosevelt had promoted federal land reclamation. Planting grass and trees to stabilize ecosystems like the Dakota prairie, Cimarron in southwestern Kansas, and the Comanche lands of Colorado became a major New Deal priority. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), sought to bring stability and a reasonable measure of prosperity to a segment of the economy that had been troubled even before the Depression. In addition to widespread measures to repair farm-commodity pricing and to educate farmers about soil maintenance, the AAA also addressed severely distressed land, including the Dust Bowl, permitting the federal government to buy and restore damaged acreage and relocate hard-luck families.52

  Roosevelt wisely asked Chester C. Davis, the Iowa-born Grinnell College graduate who was administrator of the AAA, to create a Program Planning Division that would give government experts the chance to execute a national land-use program. After much deliberation, Roosevelt decided that in some situations, notably the Dust Bowl, education wasn’t enough. The U.S. government needed to acquire submarginal lands, consolidate farms, relocate inhabitants, restore land, and return the reclaimed land for “commercial use” under “the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.” This tall order was intended to ecologically restore cropland to grass and thus halt the dusters and revitalize agriculture. Here was an unexpected foray by Roosevelt into government planning and soil conservation on a very large scale.

  By 1935, the AAA had three projects running in the Southwest—one in wind-eroded New Mexico, and two in dust-laden Colorado, respectively known as the Mills and the Southern Otero and Southeastern Colorado Land Utilization Projects.

  When Woody Guthrie sang about the West, it wasn’t just the fields and creeks of the Dust Bowl that he wanted saved. He was enraptured by the rugged mountain grandeur and Chihuahuan Desert flora around the Big Bend of the Rio Grande in southern Texas. To Guthrie the purple Chisos Mountains, where the summits and drifting clouds seemed otherworldly, were a land of deep mystery. “Sandy cactus of every kind, slim and long, fat and thick, wide and low, high and skinny, curly, twisty, knotty, sticker, thorny, daggery-knifed, razor sharp; hot darts, burning needles, fuzzy needles, cutting edges, stinging leaves, and blistering stems,” Guthrie wrote in his memoir Seeds of Man, about his youthful days wandering around Big Bend country. “I saw a whole world of sword and dagger weed and limb—a new world to my eyes. The feel and the breath of the air was all different, new, high, clear, clean and light.”53

  Another writer FDR admired who pushed hard for a Big Bend National Park in the mid-1930s was folklorist J. Frank Dobie from Live Oak County, Texas. In 1910, Dobie had gotten a job teaching high school English at Alpine, a gateway town to Big Bend. Inspired by the “big sky” landscape, he began writing a string of marvelous books—starting with A Vaquero of the Brush Country—that documented Texas life. Once the CCC built roads in the Chisos Basin, Dobie lived in the New Deal camp while he collected cowboy stories for his classic book The Longhorns. By day, Dobie compiled information about the Big Bend region, and by night he sat with the CCCers to eat chili con carne, frijoles, and fried potatoes and then smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, holding forth until midnight on perpetual drought, rattlesnakes, scorpions, javelinas, and that Texas icon, the longhorn. The Big Bend National Park movement had in Dobie an able promoter almost comparable to John Muir, with access to big-time editors in New York.54

  On June 20, 1935, to the delight of Dobie, Congress authorized the creation of Big Bend National Park. There was, however, a catch: the Big Bend Act (49 Stat. 393) stipulated that Texas had to give the federal government title to the acreage before the park could be established officially. This provision was inconvenient because the Texas state legislature, which met biannually, had adjourned before the law passed Congress.55 In fact, it would take years to secure the park, once and for all. Roosevelt spent considerable time trying to persuade Texans to allow the federal government to save the rugged wilderness. “I have heard so much of the wilderness and the beauty of this still inaccessible corner of the United States and also, of its important archeological remains that I very much hope that some day I shall be able to travel through it myself,” Roosevelt wrote to a Texas congressman. “I feel sure that [Big Bend] will do much to strengthen the friendship and good neighborliness of the people of Mexico and the people of the United States.”56

  Many West Texas ranchers loathed the Bi
g Bend National Park idea. Such a federal wilderness refuge, they complained, would be a “predator incubator,” providing a sanctuary to which mountain lions and coyotes could sneak off after preying on sheep and cattle. Big Bend cowboys fretted that the national park was a seizure by the federal government of the Chisos range. The arduous task for the state of Texas of procuring title to over 200,000 acres portended county courthouse disputes. The fact that Roosevelt wanted Big Bend to be administered in some fashion by both the United States and Mexico raised xenophobic fears in West Texas border towns.57

  Soon after Big Bend was (tentatively) established, Ickes started lobbying to change its name to Jane Addams International Park, after the social worker and women’s suffrage leader from Chicago, who had been the driving force behind the secular Hull-House settlement and had won the 1930 Nobel Peace Prize (the first American woman to do so). That May, the seventy-four-year-old Addams had died. Ickes had greatly admired Addams and felt that an “International Park” in West Texas, with corresponding land across the Rio Grande, would be the perfect way to honor her. Roosevelt, when approached by Ickes, was “enthusiastically in favor of the proposition.”58 But Senator Tom Connally of Texas nixed the idea. There was no way his good old boy West Texas constituents were going to tolerate Big Bend country being renamed after a female Chicago social worker.

  On September 6, 1935, Roosevelt established Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon, which saved 422 square miles as a permanent range for herds of pronghorns. Able to run at sixty miles an hour, pronghorns are considered the fastest mammals in North America; as they ran away their large rump patches of long white hairs could be seen for miles. All over the West this unique animal was being hunted toward extinction. Roosevelt, in touch with William Finley, the great Auduboner and wildlife conservationist of Oregon, boldly deeded the entire Hart Mountain ecosystem to wildlife—notably, pronghorns.

  Finley had been trying to improve the plight of the pronghorns since 1924. The only complaint Finley had with Roosevelt’s September executive order was that it specified that four thousand antelope be maintained by the Biological Survey at Hart Mountain; he wanted eight thousand. “I know you do not have time to go into the details of the matter of this kind,” he wrote to FDR, “but I hope you will call in some federal experts who have a heart for your wildlife interests.”59

  Unfortunately, the chances for a herd count of eight thousand pronghorns were nonexistent at the time. Although Hart Mountain was designated as a refuge, two-thirds of its total 278,000 acres were still leased for grazing by sheep and cattle. It would be fifty years before the livestock was banished and the Oregon refuge was finally restricted to wildlife. All the while, pronghorn herds averaged a few thousand, at best. Roosevelt had the correct impulse, but Hart Mountain demonstrated that he could not fully resuscitate threatened species with a sweep of his pen on an executive order. The commitment had to be widespread and it had to last generations. Nevertheless, he was rightly proud of the start he made on behalf of antelope.60 In numerous letters he promoted Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge as the New Deal model for protecting endangered mammals—give them a huge habitat reserve in which to prosper. “This refuge will leave our grandsons and granddaughters an inheritance of the wilderness that no dollars could recreate,” William O. Douglas wrote after visiting the expansive Hart Mountain sanctuary. “Here they will find life teeming throughout all the life zones that lead from the desert to alpine meadows.”61

  V

  On September 14, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt arrived in Lake Placid, New York—a resort town that had hosted the 1932 Winter Olympic Games—to speak about conservation. He stressed that the CCC was a triumph, even though, during the 1932 presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover had scorned the “tree army” as a “crazy dream” and merely a “political gesture.” In 1935, Business Week backed the president’s assertion, reporting that “hundreds of communities have discovered since the CCC was organized two years ago that the neighboring camp is the bright spot on their business map.”62 Surrounded by about two hundred uniformed CCC enrollees, the president spoke about the Adirondacks and Catskills, his enduring friendship with Gifford Pinchot, and the art of planting trees. Referring to himself as a “very old conservationist,” he told his listeners that “the spreading of the gospel of conservation was God-ordained work.”63

  Later that day, FDR was driven to the summit of Whiteface Mountain to dedicate the Memorial Highway he had supported since the late 1920s. Sensitive to charges that his highway had marred the Adirondacks, he ably defended himself by explaining that the scenic road would allow the elderly, infirm, poor, and busy to see the beauty of the place. “You and I know that it is only a comparatively small proportion of our population that can indulge in the luxury of camping and hiking,” Roosevelt explained to the crowd. “Even those [citizens] who engage in it are going to get to the age of life, some day, when they will no longer be able to climb on their own two feet to the tops of mountains.”64

  It is fair to interpret Roosevelt’s Whiteface Mountain address as a defense of all of the New Deal parkways he had authorized. Top wilderness conservationists criticized Roosevelt for floating proposals to build scenic drives atop the summits of the Presidential and Green mountain ranges in New Hampshire and Vermont; along three hundred miles of the Blue Ridge Mountains running from Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains; and in the High Sierras of California. The hardest-hitting criticism came from the 1934 article “Flankline vs. Skyline” by Benton MacKaye—father of the Appalachian Trail—who was decidedly aghast at the very ridgetop roadways the president loved.65 Even within the Roosevelt administration, Bob Marshall became a one-man Paul Revere, warning whenever he could that the roads are coming. “The Bulldozers are already rumbling up into the mountains,” Marshall wrote U.S. Forest Service chief Ferdinand Silcox weeks after FDR delivered his Whiteface Mountain address. “Unless you act very soon on the seven primitive area projects I presented to you a month ago, eager CCC boys will have demolished the greatest wildernesses which remain in the United States.”66

  A few weeks after the dedication at Whiteface, Roosevelt, preparing to doff his jacket for a Hawaiian shirt, asked Ickes to join him on a Pacific Coast fishing trip. While casting line after line, the two men discussed the creation of Big Bend National Park in Texas, and what executive orders could be drafted to save Utah’s slickrock canyons along the Colorado River. Neither Wallace nor Darling had been invited. Ickes, who was amazed at Roosevelt’s “wide information” on the natural world, had clearly become the president’s indispensable man on everything related to public lands and conservation of natural resources.67 Ickes pressed his position, cajoling Roosevelt to strip the Forest Service and Biological Survey from the USDA, give them to Interior, and then rename it the Department of Conservation overseeing all of America’s public lands. Roosevelt liked the idea, but had other fish to fry for the time being.

  On November 15, 1935, Darling resigned from the Biological Survey after eighteen months in office, blaming his deteriorating health. His worried doctors at the Mayo Clinic had urged him to slow down or risk dying. “My engine got overheated and my valves began to leak,” Darling lamented to Salyer. “Anyway it’s been a great war. I’ve done the best I know how and had it not been for you I could not have done it at all.”68

  Conservationists lamented Darling’s departure from Washington in late 1935 but were grateful for his efforts in elevating the importance of such treasured landscapes as Red Rock Lakes in Montana and White River in Arkansas. “I don’t like it at all,” Ickes complained to Darling about his retirement. “I feel a distinct loss in your going. You had been doing a fine job, and now that you are no longer head of the Survey, I haven’t nearly the interest that I did have in attaching it to the Interior Department.”69

  Although much has been written about the friction between Roosevelt and Darling, in truth, they got along just fine. With Roosevelt injec
ting $14 million into the Biological Survey’s habitat purchasing program, Darling was able to start building a meaningful wildlife refuge program. Roosevelt regularly laughed at Darling’s pro-conservation cartoons, of which he was sometimes the butt. Once when a Darling cartoon did not amuse, however, Roosevelt sent it back with a note saying, “Some day, Ding, you’ll go too damn far.”70

  Dr. Ira Gabrielson was photographed releasing a duck at a sanctuary near Washington on March 8, 1940. Gabrielson joined the U.S. Biological Survey in 1915. Succeeding Darling as its head in 1935, he remained at the renamed Fish and Wildlife Service until 1946. Engaging and well informed, Gabrielson was one of Washington’s preeminent champions for conservation.

  As a final gesture Darling fought for Ira N. Gabrielson to be his replacement. Gabrielson’s boyhood and youth were spent in the “duck country” of northern Iowa. Transfixed by the V’s of geese in autumn, he had developed a boyhood penchant for wildlife photography.71 His childhood hero was Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History—the same ornithologist who had mentored young FDR. The editor of the Wilson Bulletin, an ornithological journal, published Gabrielson’s drawings of wild turkeys and ruddy ducks. This encouraged Gabrielson—stocky, with long arms and lumberjack shoulders—to become a wildlife biologist.72

  On his graduation from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1912, Gabrielson joined the Bull Moose Party. Deeply proud of his Scandinavian heritage, he was an expert in both Great Plains wildlife and pioneer life in Iowa. Hired by the Biological Survey, Gabrielson moved to Washington, D.C., to oversee the bird food habits laboratory. He earned national recognition for his research on rodent control. An extremely modest, humble, and self-sacrificing devotee of Aldo Leopold, Gabrielson spoke in a deliberate, focused way, as he canvassed America from 1915 to 1931, teaching farmers how to properly poison rats and attract birds to irrigation ponds.73