Roosevelt’s thoughts were starting to cohere. With his uncanny sense of timing, FDR knew that if a few more hurricane seasons passed without heavy storm damage, then the “trauma factor” would dissipate. Developers would start building stilt houses along Cape Hatteras, and the chance of creating a national seashore in this area would be considerably diminished. The intrepid work of the CCC and WPA workers only increased the probability of development, since the shore was more fully protected than ever from Atlantic storms. Reasonable residents in the Outer Banks concluded that increased tourism was indeed the best economic solution to the problems the Great Depression had brought them.
That presented a problem that delayed NPS designation for Cape Hatteras. A national seashore, as it was conceptualized, welcomed the fact that a seashore could also be a beach—a recreational area open to humans just for pleasure and complete with beach balls, suntan lotion, picnic food, restrooms, and roads. To many conservation purists, that was unacceptable. They had always been uncomfortable with the line between total preservation and the accommodation of humans, but eventually, they made their peace with the fact the respectful visitors were all right (just barely). Hedonistic tourists were anathema. The plan for the national seashore, however, invited the tourists: people interested in nothing more than soaking up the sun and having a splash in the water. In addition to the philosophic debates that swirled around the status of the cape, FDR had to consider that bitter squabbling would occur between Agriculture and Interior about which department would oversee Cape Hatteras. In the meantime, Republican opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal spending hardened in his second term, in part because Supreme Court rulings against programs such as NIRA (and its more visible arm, the NRA) inspired his opponents to question his every White House initiative. Funding for new land acquisition was problematic, but fortunately Stick had been able to convince many landowners within the proposed national seashore to donate their land. In terms of the operating expenses, Republicans gearing up to stop the NPS from controlling the Outer Banks were too late; FDR had already turned over all administrative duties in the area to the NPS. The New York Times reported that FDR had even given the NPS its first airplane, specifically in order to check daily on the erosion control work being done along the North Carolina shore.53
In spring 1937 Wirth circulated a bill creating the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Just reaching that point was a tribute to FDR’s vision and the stubborn efforts of Stick, Wirth, and several North Carolina politicians who found an answer to every objection. At the president’s insistence, the lighthouse was part of the proposed national seashore. Even though the economy slumped alarmingly in the spring of 1937—an event that led to a thirteen-month recession—Roosevelt kept pushing for more land to be set aside for recreation. When Congress rejected his bid to make the CCC a permanent agency that May, the president responded by having the existing CCC camps work even harder to protect his favorite spots, including Cape Hatteras, from private developers.54
Meanwhile, as the last-minute legalities regarding Cape Hatteras were being dealt with in the spring of 1937, Roosevelt quietly established Bombay Hook Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Delaware. Until this action, Delaware had no large federal land holdings. The conservation movement there had been spearheaded by Coleman DuPont, a businessman and politician who was a disciple of Gifford Pinchot. DuPont almost single-handedly forced the creation of a State Forestry Commission, and then jump-started it with donations of good land. Unfortunately he died in 1930, and with no one of similar passion to take his place, Delaware’s reclamation and preservation efforts slowed to a snail’s pace.55
So it was doubly significant that FDR instructed the federal government to purchase the 14,850 acres of Bombay Hook in order to designate them as a sanctuary for greater snow geese (Chen caerulescens atlantica), American black ducks (Anas rubripes), blue-winged teal (Anas discors), and various shorebirds. Having passed “the Hook” numerous times as a seafarer, FDR knew that protecting this salt marsh was essential for the continued prosperity of the Atlantic Flyway. “The most substantial dividends of the refuge investment come after a period of five to ten years has passed,” biologist Rachel Carson wrote. “The Bombay Hook Sanctuary in Delaware is a good example. Here the number of waterfowl using the area increased more than 400 percent since the refuge was established in 1937. Official reports show that it was used by 30,000 wild fowl in the fall of 1937, by 60,000 in 1942, and by 137,000 in 1945.”56
On July 1, 1937, with the Senate nearing a vote on the “court packing” scheme, Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing Moosehorn Migratory Bird Refuge in Maine. Eventually, the National Audubon Society would record 218 species of birds in the refuge. Rachel Carson (who would later become famous as the author of Silent Spring) considered Moosehorn one of the most intact marine habitats on the entire Atlantic seaboard. These 22,565 acres of wetlands at the eastern tip of Maine were as isolated as Campobello Island, but without anchorage for large vessels. More than forty square miles of forest were interspersed with lakes, streams, fields, and marshes. There were also a few miles of rugged seacoast. Birders were overjoyed that the refuge would provide protection for the famous courting performance of the male woodcock, which was known to take place there.
At the end of July, the Senate voted against FDR’s plan to revolutionize the Supreme Court, a tactical defeat for Roosevelt. He’d seemed invincible until then. Nonetheless, Roosevelt refused to have his conservation effort derailed. On August 17, 1937, Roosevelt established Cape Hatteras National Seashore. There were congressional stipulations on the new entity that deviated from the Organic Act of 1916: national seashores weren’t as well protected as national parks. But they were, in spirit, biologically intact recreation areas.57
Because Roosevelt was scheduled to visit North Carolina on August 18, the timing of his signature on the seventeenth was either very lucky or very cunning. It may have been the former. The president made the announcement quietly, even though he was touring coastal sites, including Roanoke Island. “The issue was of less interest to reporters than the President’s visit,” noted NPS historian Cameron Binkley, “which was probably the biggest event to take place on the small island since the Civil War.”
Roosevelt arrived at Roanoke Island with panache. Dressed in a white linen suit and sporting a colorful paisley handkerchief in his pocket, he was a larger-than-life figure. That beautiful day, even his hat was bright white. At Fort Raleigh, FDR stood on a podium with Senator Josiah Bailey, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, and mentioned the new designation before reverting to his prepared remarks. Roosevelt was no doubt proud, though, that as of that day, American coastal areas would begin to enjoy protection from private developers. “Realizing that the priceless asset of the ocean shore on both the Atlantic and Pacific was rapidly being appropriated for private use and for public exploitation, the National Park Service recently completed an exhaustive survey to determine what remaining unspoiled area was most suitable for preservation as a national seashore,” the New York Times reported. “It was found that the remote reefs and islands off the North Carolina coast presented the best opportunity, with their immense stretches of the fine ocean beach, untouched by modern development.”58
Seemingly unconcerned with the lingering controversy over his “court packing” plan, Roosevelt watched The Lost Colony, a new play by Pulitzer Prize–winner Paul Green about the vanished Roanoke Colony of the sixteenth century. His excitement began with the rise of the curtain. The Wayside Theater, where the performance took place, had been built with WPA money from the Federal Theater Project, and the actors were on the WPA payroll. Meanwhile, the CCC was encamped all around the island, fighting beach erosion.59
Two weeks later, the New York Times ballyhooed Cape Hatteras as “one of the most important conservation measures of all time.” It was, in fact, the opening salvo of Roosevelt’s second-term battle to save extensive ocean frontage.60 By protecting the Outer Banks, Roosevelt
had set into motion a new protocol: federal marine conservation. Building on his success with Cape Hatteras, Roosevelt also established the Salem Maritime National Historic Site in Massachusetts, which consisted of a dozen historic waterfront sites—including Derby Wharf Light Station and the Custom House.61
Ickes, to personally celebrate 1937 as the Year of American Seashores, spent late August and early September at Homans House in Acadia National Park. The coast of Maine, known for its rocky beaches, was one of Ickes’s favorite natural places. The house was park property, and Ickes worked there on his political autobiography. The Atlantic made its presence felt, by sight, sound, and smell, every second of every day. “The Homans House is beautifully located, well above the water and at the foot of a high, rugged and partially wooded ridge,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “It has a wonderful outlook. Directly across the bay is Schoodic Mountain and the bay itself is dotted with rockbounded islands.”62
IV
Another of Roosevelt’s historic conservation initiatives became public law over the summer of 1937. The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act directed the secretary of agriculture to launch a program of “land conservation and land utilization” on submarginal acreage unsuited for cultivation.63 The northern plains, Southwest, and Deep South were the principal beneficiaries of the act. Here was legal justification for Roosevelt to replant cut-over areas from Virginia to Arkansas to Louisiana; establish wildlife refuges in the Dakotas and Montana; and rehabilitate grasslands by means of the Mills project in New Mexico; the Morton County project in Kansas; the Cimarron project in Oklahoma; the Dallam County project in Texas; and the southeastern and southern Otero projects in Colorado (in 1960, these became the Kiowa, Cimarron, Rita Blanca, and Comanche National Grasslands).64 Title III of Bankhead-Jones established national grasslands in a manner almost identical to the establishment of national forests. In these protected federal preserves, hunting, grazing, mineral extraction, and recreation were all allowed, but under strict government environmental oversight.
Following the Bankhead-Jones Act, which helped wildlife prosper, Roosevelt scored big for the conservation movement. After eighteen months of arduous negotiations, the president successfully pushed a hunting tax through Congress. His chief political allies and principal sponsors were Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and Representative A. Willis Robertson of Virginia. Both Democrats chaired their chamber’s committees on wildlife conservation. Pittman, in particular, was invaluable to Roosevelt in the fight to get the act passed. A senator since 1913, Pittman was generally opposed to letting the Department of the Interior treat western public lands as one gigantic national park; however, in spite of his disagreements with Interior, he wanted to preserve the wilderness character of his state. This meant securing protection for Nevada’s desert bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and pronghorn antelopes.65
At the president’s insistence, the revenue raised by what was popularly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act would be allotted by the Treasury Department to aid states in funding wildlife restoration programs. To rectify the disparity among the states in land areas and population density, a protocol would be established. Each state would make a calculation of how much money it should receive, taking into account the size of the state and the number of licensed hunters registered there. States were eligible to receive up to 75 percent of total project costs from the Pittman-Robertson fund, with the expectation that they would provide the remaining 25 percent themselves.66
On September 2, 1937, President Roosevelt signed the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act—the actual name of the Pittman-Robertson Act. This major legislation had grown out of the North American Wildlife Conference. The act levied a 10 percent excise tax on guns and ammunition specifically used for hunting. All revenue would provide federal financing of state-owned refuges and public shooting grounds and state-run wildlife-restoration projects subject to approval by the Biological Survey.67 As conservationists had noted at the wildlife conference, sportsmen would eagerly pay a gun and ammo tax if it meant that robust numbers of game animals were available to hunt. Pittman-Robertson would bring back white-tailed deer to New England, Pennsylvania, and New York; and elk to the Rocky Mountains; and beavers and wild turkeys south of the Canadian border.
The fountain pen Roosevelt used to sign Pittman-Robertson became a museum attraction at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The pen was displayed, alongside the typewriter Rachel Carson used while working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as an artifact of importance in environmental history.
President Roosevelt realized, with considerable pride, that he had achieved a legislative miracle with Pittman-Robertson. It was one of the New Deal’s finest moments. And the tax yielded results: thanks to Pittman-Robertson, the American deer population swelled from fewer than one million animals to almost thirty million by the twenty-first century. People cursing deer for eating their backyard flowerbeds or running in front of their automobiles had Roosevelt to blame. And between 1938 and 1948 twenty-eight states, spurred on by Pittman-Robertson, acquired nearly 900,000 acres of refuges and wildlife management areas where dams, dikes, and water diversion projects were built that helped the larger hoofed species by offering reliable water sources.68
Just how did Roosevelt, under fire from Republicans, pull off a hunting tax in the fall of 1937? Frederic C. Walcott, the former senator from Connecticut who became president of the American Wild Life Institute, thought that the 1936 wildlife conference was the turning point. Hours after Pittman-Robertson was signed, Walcott wrote Roosevelt a note full of appreciation for the “outstanding boosts” he had given wildlife.69 “Naturally I was all for the objectives of the Wild Life Bill,” Roosevelt replied. “There were strenuous objections to it from the Treasury and Budget, however, because it set up what amounts to a continuing appropriation and this is contrary to the laws of the Medes and Persians among the experts! However, the pros outweighed the cons.”70
Pittman-Robertson became law on July 1, 1938. Within two years, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, and wood ducks all started to make startling comebacks. That year, almost $3 million in Pittman-Robertson revenue was allocated by the federal government to the states—real money during the Great Depression. A catastrophic situation had been reversed by Roosevelt’s environmental activism and, in fact, the law proved so successful that, in the 1950s, similar legislation was enacted for fish populations.71
Congressman Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia, a Democrat, soon complained to Roosevelt about new USDA restrictions on the hunting of sora (Porzana carolina), the small, secretive rail bird of freshwater marshes. Robertson, chairman of the House Select Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources, considered these small waterbirds as delicious as Cornish hens or wild turkey. Why rob Americans of a fine country meal? Most important, Robertson’s constituents in the Seventh District wanted the hunting regulations for all game birds reduced.
Roosevelt was fond of sora, but not as a meal. Their call—a slow whining ker-whee—was a soothing sound of summer in Campobello. And the game birds were damn good eating. But Roosevelt ultimately chose the survival of the sora over Robertson’s palate. “I have reason to know that such sportsmen, well known to you, as former Senator F. C. Walcott, Dr. George Bird Grinnell, and Mr. Thomas H. Beck share the Department’s apprehension for the future sport of sora shooting,” Roosevelt replied. “The Federal bag limits are as liberal on all species of migratory game birds as their present status will admit and I feel, in view of the widespread sentiment throughout the country that shooting of all migratory game birds should be prohibited, at least for a year or so, that the real sportsmen should be willing to accept with good grace reasonable limitations on their hunting.”72
V
Suffering from an abscess in his mouth, his temperature sometimes running up to 103 degrees, FDR was bedridden for some of the fall of 1937. Once he recovered, he asked Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson to
join him, Ickes, and Pa Watson on an excursion to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas island chain. Jackson, a fellow upstate New Yorker, though a much younger man, had caught FDR’s attention and would be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941. On November 29, the Roosevelt party left Miami in high spirits for a 165-mile run on the Potomac through the waters off southern Florida.
One of the highlights was inspecting Fort Jefferson National Monument on the island of Garden Key. Roosevelt had designated the crumbling hexagonal ex-military prison a national monument on January 4, 1935, as a way to protect portions of the Dry Tortugas ecosystem of precious coral reefs. (The monument was expanded in 1983 and redesignated as Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992.) Somewhere along the line Roosevelt had learned the history of the fort. When the Union Army ran it as a prison for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, the moat around it was stocked with sharks to prevent inmates from escaping. Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of President Lincoln, was sent to Fort Jefferson in 1867; there, he treated fellow prisoners who had contracted yellow fever.73 Just as he had when visiting Beauvoir, Roosevelt enjoyed holding forth about this kind of Civil War lore.
Ickes was proud that Fort Jefferson was in his Interior portfolio, wishing the entire Dry Tortugas chain was designated either a national park or a national seashore. “This fine old historic fort,” Ickes had written in his diary, “ought to be maintained for all time.”74 FDR had known about the Dry Tortugas since childhood because of the account of the islands given by the character Billy Bones in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. With a twinkle in his eye, the president told Watson that he would have to report to the army brass at Fort Jefferson on arrival. Watson, not realizing Roosevelt was playing a joke on him, rowed to shore. There wasn’t a single person there to greet him. “Ickes, thereupon, charged Watson with trespassing upon his grounds and we held a mock trial at which the President, of course, presided and I was appointed to defend Watson,” Jackson wrote in his diary. “The President, of course, found him guilty.”75
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