Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  In February 1936, Roosevelt summoned influential leaders of state wildlife agencies, conservation organizations, and sportsmen’s groups to a symposium in Washington, D.C. It was the meeting Darling had suggested the previous June, but as it came to fruition, Gabrielson helped FDR in the planning. The North American Wildlife Conference aimed to educate the public about the relationship between forestry management and wildlife rehabilitation. Ghosts of extinct passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) and great auks (Pinguinus impennis) in mind, Roosevelt especially wanted the attendees to protect imperiled species—the trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinator), whooping crane (Grus americana), pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)—with coordinated policy initiatives. The White House was frustrated at the piecemeal way in which the thousands of existing conservation clubs and federations approached urgent problems. “Our President’s call was, then, a national one and international one,” the chief of the Forest Service, F. A. Silcox, told the attendees as he opened the conference as its official chairman. “It recognized the broad wildlife plight, and the urgency of it. Through the medium of this conference and the open covenants which he hopes it may bring forth, his call provides an opportunity to remedy that plight.”74

  Because 1936 was an election year, Roosevelt also wanted the disparate groups to organize into a voting bloc in support of the New Deal. “It has long been my feeling that there has been a lack of full and complete realization on the part of the public of our wildlife plight, or the urgency of it, and of the many social and economic values that wildlife has for our people,” President Roosevelt told conference attendees in a written message on February 3. “This, and the firm belief in the ability of the American people to face facts to analyze problems and to work out a program which might remedy the situation, impelled me to call the North American Wildlife Conference.”75

  To Roosevelt’s surprise, and pleasure, the event ballooned to include all sorts of ardent ecologists, fishermen, able-bodied hikers, gardeners, nature photographers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, 4-H Clubs, Audubon societies, and wildlife enthusiasts of all stripes—around one thousand attendees in all.76 Exhibition space was provided for vendors at the Mayflower Hotel, with gun manufacturers, aquarium dealers, and nature photographers showing off their wares. Delegations from Canada and Mexico justified the title of the conference. A roll call of kindred New Deal spirits who spoke from the rostrums included Arno B. Cammerer of the National Park Service, Kermit Roosevelt of New York, William L. Finley of Oregon, Harold Ickes of the Department of the Interior, and Henry A. Wallace of the USDA.

  For five days, wildlife—and its symbiotic relationship with public and private lands—was analyzed with an unprecedented degree of sophistication. All participants acknowledged that the primary culprit in wildlife extinction in North America was predatory man. The Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius), heath hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), Eskimo curlew (Numenius borealis), and Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) had already vanished forever thanks to human recklessness. Canvasback and redhead ducks would be doomed to extinction if the Roosevelt administration didn’t create even more bird refuges, and stop the CCC from using poison in their predator and rodent control program; it too often killed birds.

  At the conference, Henry Wallace, with misplaced archness, publicly belittled Darling: “I mean there are some folks who think that human beings are just as important as ducks,” Wallace said, looking mockingly at Darling. “I have trouble with that, because I have a boy of some 17 years of age who thinks that wildlife is absolutely the most important thing in the world, and I have spent two years trying to convince him that the habits of human beings were just as interesting as the habits of wildlife with absolutely no success. . . . [Ding] comes round with all kinds of absurd ideas as to how you can raise a thousand dollars’ worth of muskrat fur off an acre, and things like that. I take all these figures of [his] with a grain of salt. I think he is an awfully good cartoonist. I don’t think much of him as an economist.”77

  The New York Times reported that Wallace’s insults “created a tense atmosphere” at the event. Darling, defending himself admirably, argued for even more federal and state wetlands acreage; new measures, undertaken with Mexico and Canada, to protect migratory birds; and increasing law enforcement efforts in existing refuges.78 He complained that the U.S. government, while owning 400 million acres of public land, had no authorized jurisdiction over wildlife resources and no legalized custody of the species roaming within its borders. He was making an important point. If a buffalo or trumpeter swan went outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park, for example, hunters could shoot it with impunity. “And you folks worry,” Darling sarcastically scolded, “about your little fish pond and your little river!”79

  Harold Ickes stole the show at the summit. Clearly influenced by the Wilderness Society, he declared that conservation was “the most vital” function of government and dramatically vowed to resist all further road projects in national parks. Ickes proclaimed that FDR was the most environmentally conscious president in American history. “We have in the White House today a President who is practical as well as a theoretical conservationist,” Ickes said. “His stand is far in advance of any of his predecessors. What other President in our history has done so much to reclaim our forests, to reclaim submarginal lands, to harness our floods and purify our streams, to call a halt to the sinful waste of our oil resources? In his conservation program he ought to have the enthusiastic assistance of every true conservationist.”80

  Another star at the conference was John Clark Salyer, who warned about a “perilous gap” between endangered birds and tougher hunting regulations. Having bought land for forty-five migratory bird refuges, an energetic Salyer boasted that the Biological Survey, once primarily interested in coastal marshlands, had saved the interior wetlands of America—namely the middle portion of the Mississippi River Valley; the Illinois Valley; the Ohio River Valley; and the valleys of the Platte, Arkansas, Pecos, Rio Grande, Colorado, and Sacramento rivers.81 And even with that impressive list, Salyer’s government career was only beginning. He would go on to serve as chief of the Branch of Wildlife Refuges for twenty-seven years. When he died in 1966, newspapers described him—not Darling or Gabrielson—as the “father of the wildlife refuges.”82 In truth, the refuges were a New Deal group effort. “With almost 200 refuges now established in the United States along every flyway and at every concentration point for waterfowl, the Bureau of Biological Survey will soon be in a position to have the most comprehensive waterfowl-counting or inventory system obtainable,” Salyer reassured the audience, “and we will soon eliminate the guesswork of waterfowl numbers and utilization at least within the border of the United States.”83

  One message the White House pushed at the wildlife conference was that conservation education should begin in primary school. A favorite quip of FDR’s was that there was no such thing as an “ex”-conservationist. Once an appreciation of nature was instilled in children, and woodcraft was learned, no bulldozer, snake-oil salesman, or commercial developer could shake their faith. The wildlife that the federal government was rehabilitating as part of the New Deal belonged to all Americans for all time. Fish released in public streams from federal facilities like Ennis National Fish Hatchery (Montana) and Dexter National Fish Hatchery (New Mexico) were public property whether they were found in streams running through private lands or public lands.

  The Washington wildlife conference was a victory for New Deal conservationism. Out of its minutes the National Wildlife Federation was born. An argument can even be made that the modern-day concept of “conservation reliance”—coined by U.S. government biologist J. Michael Scott in 2005—was really born at the North American Wildlife Conference.84 The doctrine of conservation reliance stipulated that for species to come back, they would have to be bred by biologists, protected by wardens, and constantly “rejiggered” to establish an “asym
metrical balance” that would prevent extinction. From approximately the time of the conference onward, the federal government was in the business of “gardening the wilderness,” and the line between conservation and domestication was “blurred.”85

  Back in the Theodore Roosevelt era, bison were saved as a species by breeding a herd at the Bronx Zoo and then transferring it to the newly established Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, Oklahoma. They bred successfully, and before long southwestern Oklahoma was exporting bison far and wide. But in 1936 FDR’s Biological Survey applied numerous methods to keep the bison free of brucellosis, a disease that affected milk production and fertility. Other large mammals—including the desert bighorn sheep and the pronghorns at Hart Mountain—were also facing extinction and in desperate need of federal intervention.

  VI

  The Southwest had never been the president’s favorite part of the United States. America’s five great deserts didn’t afford much in the way of recreation for a wheelchair-bound fisherman who loved forests. Primitive conditions, scorching heat, and lizards of all kinds scurrying across the baking wastes made him thirst for the Hudson River Valley. In his mind, the mesas and slickrock canyons of the Colorado Plateau could never hope to compare to the forest-studded beauty of the Adirondacks or Great Smokies. Eleanor Roosevelt comically recalled traveling with her husband to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. Holding hands on the South Rim, they peered across the ten-mile-wide abyss. “I thought it the most beautiful, and majestic sight I had ever seen,” she wrote. “But my husband said: ‘No, it looks dead. I like my green trees at Hyde Park better. They are alive and growing.’”86

  Even though FDR, the Dutchess County provincial, wasn’t overwhelmed by the majesty of the Grand Canyon, he launched a New Deal environmental revolution in the way the U.S. government protected ecosystems in the arid Southwest. It had started with Utah’s Cedar Breaks National Monument back in 1933 and moved forward with the authorization of Big Bend National Park on June 20, 1935. Roosevelt in 1936 turned to the crisis of the desert bighorn sheep, a species struggling to survive in the deserts stretching from West Texas and Mexico to California, Nevada, and Utah.

  Admired by Native Americans and lovers of nature alike throughout the West, desert bighorns ranged in color from chocolate brown to tan to beige. Only the males, however, boasted the magnificently curled horns. As “charismatic” North American species went, these sheep were in the same league as grizzlies, manatees, and mountain lions. The cliff-dwelling sheep had long managed to survive in the remote landscapes of the Southwest after arriving via the Bering Land Bridge about 300,000 years ago. When Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, there were around two million bighorns in North America. But a ruinous combination of factors—diseases introduced by domestic livestock, habitat loss to agricultural concerns, the fouling of water sources by humans, and excessive hunting—had caused their numbers to decrease to a mere seven hundred animals.87 Of the four recognized varieties of North American sheep, the desert bighorn was in the greatest peril. Two of the Roosevelt family’s favorite wildlife conservationists—William Temple Hornaday and Charles Sheldon—had each written convincingly about the need to save the desert bighorn sheep.88

  Harold Ickes informed the president in 1936 that these wild sheep had vanished from Washington, Oregon, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Mexico; their only remaining strongholds were in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. The desert bighorns’ dwindling numbers had also led to social disruption and aberrant behavior within those herds that managed to survive.89 Queried about what to do, Ickes warned that if the Southwest’s desert bighorns weren’t given huge reserves, they would perish as a North American species.

  Taking a cue from Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationism, FDR wanted to establish a large-acreage desert bighorn preserve in the Southwest. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada—a leader at the recent Washington wildlife conference—believed that an isolated swath of desert wilderness, just twenty miles north of Las Vegas, would make a mighty preserve for these keen-eyed, surefooted big-game animals. The rugged mountains of the Desert Game Range, as it would eventually be designated, were characterized by red rocks, steep cliffs, canyons, mesas, natural arches, and bottomlands. In autumn, rams often engaged in dramatic confrontations, facing each other, charging at full speed, and then slamming together.

  Most Americans at the time viewed southern Nevada, where the Desert Game Range was located, as an arid ecosystem largely uninhabitable for humans. A small number of homesteaders, cowpokes, rogue miners, gold prospectors, and horse wranglers were able to withstand the blistering summer heat in hopes of striking it rich. It was common in mid-1930s Nevada to see road signs announcing city populations of 7 or 18 or 39. But Ralph and Florence Welles, a married couple employed by the Park Service, were environmentalists completely at home in the wild tangle of desert ridges and canyons. Together they wandered the loose-rock gulches, rust-tinged mesas, and canyonlands of Nevada to study desert bighorn sheep. The Welleses gathered a wealth of information about the sheep, publishing articles about springtime lambing seasons, horn-locking duels, and foraging habits.90 They helped convince Harold Ickes and Ira Gabrielson that the ledge-loving animal embodied the “wild spirit” of the American West and needed federal protection from overhunting and reckless ranching activities.91

  Because of Nevada’s powerful Senate delegation—Key Pittman and Pat McCarran—federal appropriations poured into the state. More than thirty-one thousand young men, many from Arkansas and Missouri, were assigned to CCC camps in Nevada. While most of the serious work was aimed at devising flood control strategies or establishing military outposts, Roosevelt wanted Nevada’s state parks and wildlife refuges to flourish as well. Working in conjunction with the Division of Grazing, the CCC developed mountain springs with underground storage tanks and troughs. While they were sold to Nevadans as a way to help ranchers tend cattle, these water facilities also doubled as key measures in the saving of desert bighorn sheep.92

  On May 20, 1936, the president established a Desert Game Range of more than 1.5 million acres by Executive Order 7373.93 This act protected not only desert bighorns but also vast swaths of the Mojave and Great Basin ecosystems.94 A few years later, Roosevelt added a 320-acre parcel at Corn Creek to serve as the range’s administrative headquarters.95 (Eighty years after its creation, the Desert National Wildlife Refuge would remain the largest refuge in the “lower forty-eight.”) The range was to be jointly run by Interior and Agriculture. Pack mules were used by biologists to spread feed for the bighorns during drought. When FDR acted with foresight in 1936, there were only three hundred bighorn sheep left in Nevada; thanks to this executive action, they numbered 1,700 by 1939.96

  Six years after Desert National Range was established a passenger plane carrying Hollywood star Carole Lombard crashed into mountains at the refuge. The Biological Survey’s best, most surefooted mule, “Madam Sweeney,” was pressed into service to find the wreckage. Lombard was found dead. “Madam Sweeney” brought the body down to an overwrought Clark Gable, the late actress’s husband. Visitors to the Desert National Range immediately made the mule a celebrity and a tourist attraction equal to the rams.97

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WE ARE GOING TO CONSERVE SOIL, CONSERVE WATER, AND CONSERVE LIFE”

  I

  A common way for Franklin Roosevelt to organize his mind was to grab a scratch pad and do a little math. On January 30, 1936, thinking about his chances for reelection, he calculated that the Democrats could secure 325 electoral votes, with the Republicans getting 206. It wasn’t going to be easy. “We are facing a very formidable opposition on the part of a very powerful group among the extremely wealthy and the centralized industries,” he wrote to an acquaintance. “Ours must be a truth-telling and falsehood exposing campaign that will get into every home.”1

  President Roosevelt, pruning a tree in Warm Springs during one of his 1936 getawa
ys to Georgia. Up for election that year, Roosevelt traveled the nation, preaching the gospel of forestry. On the preservation front in 1936 he established the Okefenokee NWR (Georgia) and Joshua Tree National Monument (California).

  FDR was lowering expectations. Although Alf Landon of Kansas was intellectually impressive, wealthy, and a twice-elected governor, he didn’t have enough populist appeal to thwart Roosevelt’s bid for reelection. While Landon, a GOP moderate, approved of certain New Deal programs—those that provided a safety net for the elderly and poor—he was opposed to excess wildlife refuges, national monuments, shelterbelts, and grazing districts. Believing FDR was “park drunk,” and reckless in his insistence on establishing one federal migratory waterfowl refuge per month, Landon championed rights-of-way for utility transmission lines and permit rights for operation of service facilities on public lands. A large complaint of Landon’s was that U.S. government spending had risen from $697 million in 1916 to $9 billion by 1936; he considered this an outrage. “National economic planning—the term used by this Administration to describe its policy—violates the basic ideals of the American system,” Landon charged. “The price of economic planning is the loss of economic freedom.”2

  Governor Landon’s attack on New Deal planning and conservation of public lands was surprising, coming from a Kansan. Between 1930 and 1932, eighty-seven banks had failed in that state alone. Compounding the economic problem, the state’s farmers had grossly overharvested the land. As a result of all this, and the historic drought, Kansas was in bad shape. In 1930, a bushel of wheat sold for 63 cents; a year later, a struggling farmer would be lucky to receive 33 cents per bushel.3 For Landon to run against federal planning efforts was patently hypocritical; in 1935 he had complained to Robert Fechner, director of the CCC, that Kansas wasn’t getting its fair “quota of CCC camps.” This surprised Fechner, for Kansas had twenty-seven CCC camps at that time, while neighboring Nebraska had only nineteen.4 New Deal work-relief was the best thing to happen to Kansas in the thirties.