Since October 1933, when President Roosevelt made his land withdrawal in southern California, the Office of National Parks, Buildings, and Reservations had struggled to iron out the details of the monument’s final boundary and obtain land from myriad private owners. Warding off the land claims of the Southern Pacific Railroad and established miners was “a tortured process,” according to NPS historian Lary M. Dilsaver.39 It had been a long waiting period for grassroots activist Minerva Hamilton Hoyt of the International Deserts Conservation League. But once the Desert Game Range was added to the Biological Survey’s portfolio in May 1936, she prodded Ickes to finish tying up the loose ends for the designation of her long-hoped-for Joshua tree sanctuary. On August 10, 1936, Roosevelt signed Presidential Proclamation 2193, establishing a 825,340-acre national monument.40 Though this was less acreage than Hoyt had originally wanted, Joshua Tree National Monument was proof that Roosevelt had made good on his promise to her. His executive action was yet another demonstration of his unshakable faith in his (and Ickes’s) ability to accomplish the near-impossible; at the time, there was more privately owned land in Joshua Tree National Monument than in the rest of the NPS holdings combined (excluding Boulder Dam).
Together Ickes and Roosevelt evoked a new consciousness in the United States that desert ecosystems mattered—the Sonoran, Great Basin, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Colorado, among others. The record was not quite as pure in the case of New Deal dam programs that proved to be destructive to western rivers. However, Roosevelt was able to stop the unregulated mining and grazing in the Southwest that the chief forester of the U.S. Forest Service, Ferdinand Silcox, called a “cancer-like growth.”41
While Ickes argued against turning national parks into overly accommodating tourist mills, his high-mindedness had no relevance in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum had been chiseling away to form colossal sixty-foot-high carvings of U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Under FDR’s orders the National Park Service took Mount Rushmore into its family of heritage sites in late 1933. The memorial, representing 130 years of American greatness, was exactly the kind of project that captured Roosevelt’s optimistic belief in the can-do spirit of America. All four presidents’ faces were completed while FDR was in the White House. When visiting Mount Rushmore in August 1936, Roosevelt first spoke about both Borglum’s patriotic work and the importance of protecting the surrounding Black Hills ecosystem. “I am very glad to have come here today informally,” Roosevelt remarked. “It is right and proper that I should have come informally, because we do not want formalities where Nature is concerned. What we have done so far exemplifies what I have been talking about in the last few days—cooperation with Nature and not fighting against Nature.”42
While FDR and Ickes were on a roll, Roosevelt struggled with placating Wallace. Gutsy, methodical, and shrewd, Wallace continued to find FDR’s circuitous, intuitive, and unpredictable style irritating. His frustration with FDR’s “kill them with kindness” attitude sometimes caused him to condescend to Roosevelt. “Now in this letter I would like to write you as frankly,” he wrote to FDR, “as though I were speaking to you face to face.”43 Wallace never seemed to understand that a cabinet secretary should always speak frankly to the president. By contrast, a chief executive seldom needed to speak frankly to his underlings. Wallace also grew frustrated that the president was easily swayed by ethereal photographs of America’s treasured landscapes; if the president got a handsome print of a pristine forest or an alpine lake, then he would inevitably want it to be preserved like Adirondack Park. That ardent environmental activists like William Finley and Irving Brant had direct access to Roosevelt, thanks to Harold Ickes, infuriated Wallace. And leaving pockets of America as wilderness zones left him cold. “Why oh why,” an exasperated FDR once chided Wallace, “can’t we let original nature remain original nature?!”44
In 1936, Roosevelt went to Dallas to urge Texans to get behind Big Bend National Park. Because Theodore Roosevelt remained widely popular in the Lone Star State, having adopted its cowboy customs as his own and famously registering volunteers from San Antonio for the Rough Riders, to fight in the Spanish-American War, FDR told the audience in Dallas a story about TR. It could be construed as a threat of what might happen if the land deeds to Big Bend weren’t soon acquired by the state of Texas to donate to Uncle Sam. “A young lady that I was engaged to, also a member of the family, and I were stopping in the White House, and the then President Theodore Roosevelt—this was after supper—was visibly perturbed and was stamping up and down in front of the fireplace in the Oval Room upstairs,” FDR told the luncheon. “The various members of the family did not know what was the matter with T.R., and finally somebody said, ‘What is the trouble tonight? . . . Oh,’ he said, ‘you know that bill for the creation of a large number of national parks? I am not going to be able to get it through this session because there are a lot of people up there that cannot think beyond the borders of their own States.’ And then he clenched his fist and said, ‘Sometimes I wish I could be President and Congress too.’”
When asked to explain what he would do with that much power, TR, according to FDR, said, “I would pass a law or a Constitutional Amendment . . . something making it obligatory for every member of the House, candidate for the House, candidate for the Senate . . . to file a certificate before they can be elected, certifying that they had visited in every State of the Union.”45
The Texas trip, and every trip in 1936, was part of the reelection campaign for the intrepid FDR. In Pennsylvania, Pinchot predicted a landslide for FDR that fall. While Pinchot confided to his diary that the USDA wasn’t keeping “a growing forest on the land always,” he esteemed FDR’s conservation-mindedness. On November 3, Roosevelt did crush Landon, 523 electoral votes to 8. Even Kansas voters rejected Landon in favor of FDR. The Democrats also increased their majorities in both houses of Congress. “FDR wins by ten million,” Pinchot gloated in his diary. “I take it as a tremendous defeat for concentrated wealth and for States Rights big fellows. It means more and better national security legislation, conservation, labor, and corporation control.”46
And it meant more National Wildlife Refuges comparable to the Hart Mountain Antelope Reserve. On December 11, 1936, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7509, establishing the Fort Peck Game Range (renamed the Charles M. Russell NWR by President John F. Kennedy in 1963) in eastern Montana. At nearly one million acres, it fulfilled Roosevelt’s promise to protect wildlife around Fort Peck Dam. FDR was fascinated that the Lewis and Clark expedition had named many of the features in the refuge. Ding Darling, who had gone back to cartooning, was thrilled beyond words that Roosevelt was protecting a vast Missouri River ecosystem (although he was disappointed that livestock would be allowed to graze in some sections). The real reason that Roosevelt established the refuge was to protect the largest population of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) outside the Rockies. And William L. Finley had written to the president about the few thousand prairie elks (“Roosevelt elk,” Cervus canadensis roosevelti), the largest herd in America, which desperately needed protection from overhunting around Fort Peck.
The establishment of wildlife refuges and game ranges in the West—such as Fort Peck Game Range and the Sacramento Migratory Waterfowl Refuge (established February 27, 1937, via EO 7562)—caused wildlife conservationists to start comparing FDR to TR.47 On a number of occasions he dismissed the comparison, saying he was just a concerned citizen.48 Early in 1937, upon accepting an award from the New York Rod and Gun Editors Association for the greatest individual contribution to the U.S. conservation movement, Roosevelt explained his New Deal environmental philosophy. “Long ago, I pledged myself to a policy of conservation which would guard against the ravaging of our forests, the waste of our good earth and water supplies, the squandering of irreplaceable oil and mineral deposits, the preservation of our wildlife and the protection of our streams,�
� he said. “We must all dedicate ourselves for our own self-protection to the cause of true conservation.”49
There was a side of FDR in early 1937 that surprised even his friends. When Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch historian and journalist, suggested on WFAF-Radio in New York City in early 1937 that the United States could feed three billion hungry people, the president disagreed; America could feed only 300 million citizens. Sounding like an agronomist, Roosevelt said he believed that van Loon hadn’t factored in the deleterious effects of large-scale wildfires in the West, deforestation in the South, climatic violence in the Rocky Mountains, and soil blown bare in the sun-beaten Great Plains. “For century after century your Netherlandish ancestors and mine, whether they lived near the mouth of the Rhine or further up the river or still further east, could count on an almost complete lack of erosion for the very simple reason that the European rains drop constantly but gently from Heaven and the wash of top soil from the cultivated land which replaced the forest has been on the whole negligible,” Roosevelt replied to van Loon. “In almost every part of the United States, on the other hand, an equal amount of rain comes from the heavens in vast torrents and has taken away in three hundred years on this East Coast, about half of the original topsoil. I forget my figures, but I think that I am approximately correct in saying that it takes one hundred years to restore one inch of topsoil through reforestation. Perhaps that is over optimistic.”50
III
Throngs of spectators descended on Washington, D.C., on January 20, 1937, for Roosevelt’s second inauguration. Standing at the East Portico of the Capitol, Roosevelt promised to “solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization.” The president didn’t speak that day about saving wilderness or establishing national parks, but did lament the grim fact that millions of his fellow citizens were being denied education and opportunities for recreation. Ickes thought that FDR that day “delivered his message as well as I ever heard him speak.”51 The crowd cheered Roosevelt’s castigation of “blindly selfish men,” even though he admitted that the “happy valley” hadn’t quite been found in his first term. In words borrowed from the British poet and herpetologist Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Roosevelt told his assembled supporters, “‘Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.’”52
During his first term, the president, out of respect, had made sure that William Temple Hornaday, the first director of the Bronx Zoo, was regularly briefed on New Deal conservation efforts. At eighty-three, Hornaday had just published Migratory Waterfowl Abandoned to Their Fate. Bedridden with neuritis that made his legs nearly useless and very painful, he wrote a letter in January to the president. He was in so much discomfort that he had to dictate it to a secretary sitting by the bed. Hornaday asked the president to effect a three-year ban on all hunting of waterfowl and described the urgent situation facing other species. What he wanted, too, was the chance, despite his infirmities, to travel to Washington to speak directly to Roosevelt. Even he knew that was impossible, though.
After reading Hornaday’s ten-page letter of despair, Roosevelt felt an upsurge of affection for the grand old man of the wildlife protection movement. No one at the previous winter’s North American Wildlife conference had offered any ideas that Hornaday hadn’t already advocated for decades. In fact, it annoyed the president to realize how Hornaday’s heroic defense of northern fur seals and bison in the 1910s had been minimized in recent years. “My dear Dr. Hornaday,” the president replied, “it is with feelings of great regret that I read the note accompanying your letter of January fourth and learn of your suffering. I hope it may afford you some consolation to know that I have the greatest admiration for your courage and for your continued devotion in the presence of physical pain and weariness to that cause to which you have devoted your years.”53
Hornaday was elated by the president’s kindheartedness, telling his grandson it was “one of the most charming and sympathetic letters” that a president could send to “an old broken campaigner” who wished to “score once more in a public cause” of wildlife protection “before closing his account.”54 Hornaday died that March. Roosevelt, unable to attend the funeral in Connecticut, nevertheless wanted to properly memorialize Hornaday.55 After long reflection, he prodded the Boy Scouts of America to rename their annual Wildlife Protection Medal the William T. Hornaday Award. In another deeply thoughtful gesture, Roosevelt also had a beautiful peak in Yellowstone National Park’s northeastern section, overlooking the Lamar River Valley, renamed Mount Hornaday.56
Most conservationists were ecstatic that Roosevelt had won reelection in a landslide. This boded well for scenic landscapes such as Big Bend, Isle Royale, and Jackson Hole. But then, on February 5, 1937, just two weeks after his second inauguration, Roosevelt shocked the nation by sending a bill for the “reorganization of the judiciary” to Congress. Boldly unwary of GOP blowback, the president called for the legal ability to appoint up to six additional justices to the United States Supreme Court (one for each justice then on the bench who was over seventy years and six months of age). The four septuagenarian justices he most wanted to replace on the bench—George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Willis Van Devanter, and James McReynolds—were antiregulation, anti–Social Security and lackluster on conservation. Always game for a bureaucratic reorganization scheme and tired of gridlock, Roosevelt insisted—somewhat speciously—that having the option of adding up to six justices to the Court would improve the efficiency of the judicial branch and reduce the (alleged) backlog of cases from the “nine old men.”57 An uproar ensued. Critics, including many Democrats, lashed out at FDR, calling his brazen attempt “court packing,” dictatorial in intent. An unrepentant Roosevelt locked horns with Republicans trying to derail his second-term New Deal agenda. The Supreme Court, he argued, had willfully derailed his New Deal policies.
The battle of 1937 was under way. No matter how brazenly Roosevelt was acting, no matter how excessive his use of executive authority was, his plan to enlarge the Court wasn’t unconstitutional; the number of Supreme Court justices wasn’t specified in the Constitution and had fluctuated several times in early U.S. history. Congress had determined the current number of justices—nine—by default.58 But when Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes delivered a rare public statement that the Court wasn’t behind in its docket, the Roosevelt administration (if not the president himself) was forced to admit its “mistake” and abandon its fabricated ageist argument. No matter how decisive Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 had been, Americans—including many Democrats—weren’t eager to give the White House uncontested authority to meddle with the Supreme Court, and clamorous opposition to his “court packing” plan intensified. It was a bridge too far for moderate southerners and fiscal conservatives exhausted by the hectic pace of the New Deal in the previous four years.
Grassroots conservationists, by and large, stuck by the president during the judicial brouhaha. The Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), for example, operating out of New York City, under the leadership of Willard Van Name, Rosalie Edge, and Irving Brant, saw Roosevelt as a gutsy hero for trying to safeguard the New Deal from a Court that had consistently sided with “big industry” on environmental protection issues. Therefore, if public lands were to be protected from private interests, environmentalists argued, fresh blood had to be added to the Supreme Court—preferably in the form of liberals from the American West who had a heightened sensibility regarding public lands.
Enter William O. Douglas, who loyally backed Roosevelt’s “court packing” plan from his perch at the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York. Douglas, a committed environmentalist, once boasted that he had seen firsthand the Civilian Conservation Corps “work miracles with men” in his home state, Washington. Douglas, like many westerners in the 1930s, thought one of the greatest accomplishments of the CCC was connecting pauperized urbanites to the public lands of the American West, teaching self-sufficiency like Daniel Boone’s in the motorized age
of Henry Ford. In his memoir Of Men and Mountains, Douglas credited the CCC with instilling a strong work ethic in its recruits. He recounted befriending a CCC corpsman from Brooklyn, New York, in the heavily forested backcountry of the Walla-Wallas. According to Douglas, this tough-talking young Brooklynite had been reborn on joining the CCC. Although at first the greenhorn recruit struggled with the bugle-call discipline—the playing of reveille at sunrise, the calisthenics before breakfast, and so on—he was now a proud public servant and outdoorsman devoted heart and soul to improving the land of America.
“It was two years in the woods that changed his character,” Douglas wrote. “He poured out his story. . . . Things were different in the woods: ‘No use getting sore at a tree.’ He had found how great and good his country was. He was going to try and repair it for what it had done for him. The CCC had paid great dividends in citizenship of that character. He was not an isolated case. I heard the same story repeated again and again by supervisors of CCC camps.”59
Douglas was first introduced to the president in 1935 by the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph Kennedy. Scrappy, industrious, and with burning, messianic blue eyes, Douglas had overcome a hardscrabble youth and a bout with polio early in life, managing to work his way through Columbia Law School with flying colors. With Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot as his principal heroes, Douglas saw life as an adventure in slaying dragons. A prodigy of judicial prudence, he taught at Yale Law School until 1934, when Kennedy hired him to regulate financial markets at the SEC.60 Douglas, an ardent New Dealer and a champion of the underdog, believed that many large corporations were “a menace to the ideals of democracy.”61
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