Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Superintendent Edmund B. Rogers escorted the Roosevelts, who continually turned their heads to see wilderness scenes from their open-air automobile—for instance, a herd of buffalo grazing on grass, sedge, and forb. No speeches were given; they were just sightseeing. A picnic lunch was held at Fishing Bridge, where supposedly more fish were caught each year than in any other landlocked spot in America.22 Later in the tour, they enjoyed the spectacle of a great elk with huge antlers tending his harem; only a few months earlier, Ickes had inaugurated an intensive program in Yellowstone aimed at permanently protecting the elk population. “A number of deer and antelopes came quite near us and three bears were fed on the trip into the park by the President,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “One of them became a little too friendly and put his paws up on the side of the car right next to my husband and immediately the superintendent of the park, Mr. Rogers, ordered the car to move on. The thought of a nice tear from his claw on the President’s coat was too great an anxiety to allow us to loiter any longer, but the bear held up all the other cars by standing in the middle of the road.”23

  But Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t pleased with the overcommercialization in Yellowstone. The hotel’s curio shop, to her chagrin, sold wooden bear statuettes made by Swiss wood-carvers. “I can’t help feeling we might encourage some of our North Carolina mountain carvers to do a number of the park animals,” Eleanor wrote, “as they would be more interesting as souvenirs if done by American talent.”24 And the first lady was appalled at the way tourists had vandalized Yellowstone’s natural features, tossing garbage into the thermal pools, chiseling off chunks of rock, and carving initials in lodgepole pines. “I suppose it’s all a matter of education and self-control,” she concluded, “and older people are just as guilty as young people, so we will just have to wait until the nation grows up and in the meantime we will have to guard our beauty spots the best we can.”25

  Leaving Yellowstone, the Roosevelts headed southwest by train into Idaho, passing Henrys Lake in Caribou-Targhee National Forest, where the trumpeter swans wintered. Turning westward, they rode through Idaho Falls and Pocatello, before crossing the Owyhee desert to the capital city, Boise. Traditionally a Republican state, Idaho had voted for FDR in 1932 and 1936, largely owing to his personal appeal and to federal irrigation programs that drew a large bloc of farmers into the New Deal.

  By the time Roosevelt visited Boise via Pocatello on September 27, the Department of Agriculture oversaw fifteen national forests entirely or partly in Idaho, totaling more than twenty million acres—the largest area in any state. Within the national forests, vast swaths of land that had formerly been logged had been reclaimed and were covered with second growth. As admirable as the progress in forestry was, Idahoans still distrusted governmental intervention in anything related to business. A number of anti-New Deal Republicans were angry that FDR’s protection of forests along the Elk River had caused the Potlatch Lumber Company to downsize, damaging local communities. Now, on his tour, Roosevelt promoted tourism—hunting, fishing, skiing, and white-water rafting—as the best available economic measure for Idaho. To that end, its great pine and fir forests should be protected as wilderness zones. That year Bob Marshall, always bursting with ideas, pushed for two new forest regulations (U1 and U2) that were aimed at prohibiting roads, logging, and mining in designated “wilderness areas” in the West. In accordance with Marshall’s vision, the Forest Service soon established the Selway-Bitterroot Primitive Area, a 1.3 million-acre wilderness.26

  The Roosevelt administration also oversaw, in Idaho, five Native American reservations run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs: Kootenai, Duck Valley (Shoshone-Paiute), Coeur D’Alene, Nez Percé, and Fort Hall (Shoshone-Bannock). The five tribes were strongly pro-Roosevelt because of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which helped to modernize reservations and return some disputed land to Native Americans. Thanks to the Indian Division of the CCC, which employed seventy-seven thousand Native Americans during its first six years of existence, reservations soon had additional homes, schoolhouses, sewage treatment facilities, telephone lines, reservoirs, firebreaks, and truck trails. Life on these reservations had improved dramatically thanks, in part, to the Indian New Deal.27

  In Boise, the president spoke extemporaneously about the glories of Idaho after motoring around the North and East Ends and downtown. After visiting WPA sites and irrigation projects sponsored by the Bureau of Reclamation—Idaho ranked fifth in New Deal expenditures per capita from 1933 to 1939—Roosevelt basked in optimism.28 “When I look back on today’s visit to Boise I shall think chiefly of two things: first your beautiful, tree-lined streets and, secondly, your children,” he said before a rally of fifteen thousand. “And I take it, being a Roosevelt, that you are following the Rooseveltian creed, and that the population is not going to die out. There is something about children and trees that makes me think of permanence and the future. It is not by any means the sole task of the Presidency to think about the present. One of the chief obligations of the Presidency is to think about the future. We have been, in one-hundred-and-fifty years of constitutional existence, a wasteful nation, a nation that has wasted its natural resources and, very often, wasted its human resources.”29

  A slogan for Idaho during the Great Depression could have been “Great Heart of the CCC.” There were 163 CCC camps in the state—more than in any other state except California.30 Over thirty thousand unemployed Idahoans were receiving CCC paychecks for improving the state’s mountain scenery. Another sixty thousand CCCers had come from such places as New York and the Midwest to help transform Idaho.31

  Because many Idaho boys had grown up in the outdoors, they proved to be ideal CCCers. As children, they had learned how to ski cross-country, fish, and hunt for wild game. Now many of them had the opportunity to help bring recreational opportunities to the Idaho wilderness. In western Idaho, the CCC built roads in the primary drainage areas like the middle and south forks of the Boise River, the south fork of the Payette, and the south fork of the Salmon.32 In Boise National Forest and Heyburn State Park, recreation rooms were built and equipped with pool tables and freestanding weights. Mess halls in Idaho CCC camps served up fresh trout and venison for lunch and dinner. Little cabin libraries were established in even remote counties. Personal disagreements between CCC recruits in Idaho were often settled in the boxing ring. “When the fight ended,” Kenneth Hart of Company 195 recalled, “that was the end of it. Everything was settled.”33

  The CCC’s accomplishments in Idaho were impressive: 236 forest lookout houses or towers built; ninety-one diversion dams constructed; 3,034 miles of telephone lines strung; twenty-eight million trees planted; and many historical sites restored. White pine blister rust and gypsy moths were finally brought under control, and lakes and numerous streams were stocked with fish. In Owyhee County, as Roosevelt proudly pointed out, the CCC had made the largest contiguous irrigated area in America even bigger. And Idaho was the very first volume in the WPA American Guide Series, complied by novelist Vardis Fisher, state director of the Idaho Federal Writers’ Project and author of the well-received Dark Bridwell.34

  Sometimes the CCC and the WPA took away from the wilderness more beauty than they brought to it. Elers Koch, who had been a forester since the early days of the national forest program in 1903, worked at Lolo National Forest in Idaho and was a progressive, enlightened conservationist. At first, he welcomed the CCC, but he soon regarded it as the “hammer” of bad forest policy. In the February 1935 issue of Journal of Forestry, Koch wrote a scathing “memorial” for his beloved region. “The Lolo Trail is no more,” Koch began. “The bulldozer blade has ripped out the hoof tracks of Chief Joseph’s ponies. The trail was worn deep by centuries of Nez Percé and Blackfeet Indians, by Lewis and Clark, by companies of Northwest Company fur traders, by General Howard’s cavalry horses, by Captain Mullan, the engineer, and by the early day forest ranger. It is gone, and in its place there is only the print of the automobile tires in the du
st.”35

  But Roosevelt was in Idaho to take credit for the CCC’s and WPA’s successful work-relief programs. Warmly greeting Boise residents with his usual “Hello, neighbor”—just as he would greet his friends in Dutchess County—and declaring that he felt like Antaeus (a figure in Greek myth whose strength doubled whenever his foot touched the ground), Roosevelt reminded the enthusiastic crowd that “the saving of our timber” was one of the most significant public works of the New Deal.36

  The president sampled many local foods on his western trip in 1937. The White House chef, Henrietta Nesbitt, had learned before that the president was interested in the provenance of his food. Such culinary details mattered mightily to Roosevelt, who had developed pet theories about the best soil for various food crops. His favorite dish was salmon (another attraction of the Pacific Northwest), and Nesbitt recorded how he liked it prepared: cleaned expertly, wrapped in a cloth tied with string, and boiled for forty minutes in a kettle of water to which half a cup of vinegar and two tablespoons of salt had been added.37

  The question for Roosevelt and millions of other people who enjoyed salmon was whether the species could survive overfishing along the Pacific coast. Large-scale fishing traps, normally set up in the shallows of the sea, utilized an extensive system of nets arranged in a V-pattern to collect live salmon. The fishermen took advantage of the salmon’s instinct to head inwards toward the rivers to spawn. So huge and effective were these traps that a single one could snare hundreds of thousands of salmon, or sometimes a million salmon, in a four-month season. Theodore Roosevelt had highlighted the problem with the traps and their hyperefficiency in his 1908 State of the Union address. Oregon and Washington had subsequently banned the traps, but serious problems with the salmon population still remained in those states and especially in the U.S. territory of Alaska, where the traps were still legal. The outlook for the species—which now numbered only a tiny fraction of the salmon that were present when Lewis and Clark visited the Pacific Northwest in 1805—was a serious issue when the Roosevelts arrived in Idaho.

  Alaskan tribes such as the Snoqualmie and Skokomish couldn’t compete with huge conglomerates from Seattle that used traps. Native Americans depended on the traditional method of using seine nets, which stretched from one side of the bank to the other. A delegation of two tribal fishermen from Alaska had come to visit Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House the year before, hoping she might persuade her husband to use his executive authority to save their food source. In her newspaper column, she sided with the Native Americans in the dispute: “In a few years, history will say that there were once salmon along these coasts and in these rivers but fish traps destroyed them all.”38

  During this western trip, the president got personally involved in the dire salmon situation. Once he was back at the White House, he coaxed the Biological Survey into increasing the number of fish ladders at Grand Coulee, but that was only a short-term remedy. Within months, Roosevelt would allocate money to protect Alaskan coastal areas from overfishing. He didn’t stop there. “It occurs to me,” Roosevelt wrote to R. Walton Moore, a State Department official who was a staunch defender of fisheries, “that a Presidential Proclamation closing the sea along the Alaskan coast to all fishing—Japanese, Canadian, and American—a kind of marine refuge essential to end the depletion. I do not know what Japan could well say in the event of such a proclamation and I am reasonably certain that the Canadian Government would approve and do the same thing along their British Columbia coastline.”39

  The following day, Roosevelt drafted a memorandum for Secretary of State Cordell Hull aimed at saving the great salmon runs and preserving the pristine coastline of southeastern Alaska as a federal marine preserve. While Harold Ickes thought it a grand idea, the State Department worried that it would unnecessarily antagonize the Japanese. Recognizing that the world’s main supply of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) came from the Bristol Bay area, FDR pestered Hull for more information about how Alaska’s fish population could best be protected from irreparable damage. He asked for “a map showing the depth contours of the Alaskan Coast” and “an estimate from the experts as to which contour depth could be chosen as affording complete protection.” He agreed with Hull’s assertion that “far more than the Bristol Bay area is involved” and argued in favor of safeguarding “the entire shore line of the whole of Alaska.” Roosevelt suggested to the State Department that any efforts to save salmon fisheries for the future could be sold to the public by stressing “not only the investment in this American industry but also its relationship as a large factor in the American food supply.”40

  From Idaho, the Roosevelts traveled to eastern Oregon to the region of the Owyhee Dam, dedicated by President Hoover on July 16, 1932. This concrete arch-gravity dam, once the tallest in the world, had served as the prototype for Boulder Dam and others. Its reservoir held water for an elaborate system that provided irrigation to parched farmland throughout the region. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her column “My Day,” “If someone had said to me that I would see a desert one minute with sagebrush the only visible vegetation, and the next minute some of the best farming land that I have seen anywhere, I would have thought they were telling me a tale! As I looked more carefully I saw the irrigation ditches with their companion drainage ditches.”41 She scoffed at the New Deal’s detractors who claimed that the chief beneficiaries of dams like Owyhee were the “sage brush and jackrabbits.”42

  After the Owyhee Dam region, the Roosevelts made their way to Portland. On September 28, they drove to Mount Hood to see Timberline Lodge, built the year before by the WPA at an elevation of 5,960 feet within Mount Hood National Forest. The Adirondacks-style lodge was made of local timber and stone and had intricately carved decorative elements courtesy of the Federal Art Project.43 It received rave reviews from architects across the nation.

  When Roosevelt dedicated the lodge, he explained his vision of a “Magic Mile” ski lift that would surpass anything similar in the Swiss Alps and a ski season that would be longer than any in the Colorado Rockies. “This Timberline Lodge marks a venture that was made possible by WPA emergency relief work, in order that we may test the workability of recreational facilities installed by the Government itself and operated under its complete control,” Roosevelt told the enthusiastic audience. “Here, to Mount Hood, will come thousands and thousands of visitors in the coming years. Looking east toward eastern Oregon with its great livestock raising areas, these visitors are going to visualize the relationship between the cattle ranches and the summer ranges in the forests. . . . Those who will follow us to Timberline Lodge on their holidays and vacations will represent the enjoyment of new opportunities for play in every season of the year.”44

  The president gazed at the varied topographical features of Mount Hood, including vast evergreen forests, the Columbia River Gorge, and the hot springs (which would have made fine retreats for polio patients) of Multnomah Falls. Fascinated by Pony Express history, Roosevelt commissioned a stamp to honor the legendary mail-delivery speedsters and directed the CCC to reconstruct a section of the old Barlow Road in Oregon as the Pioneer Bridle Trail.45 There was something uplifting and American and musical about the names of CCC camps assigned to the Mount Hood area—Wyeth, Cascade, Locks, Parkdale, Friend, Bear Springs, Zigzag, Summit Meadows, Oak Grove, and High Rock, to name a few. They would have delighted novelist Thomas Wolfe, who would embark on a grand tour of the West’s national parks in 1938. There was even a guard station called the “Little White House,” named after the president’s retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.46

  III

  While Roosevelt’s dams and the CCC were popular in the Pacific Northwest, the National Park Service, which had expanded rapidly over the first five years of the New Deal, wasn’t—at least not with the lumber companies.47 The timber lobby was preparing for a battle royal over the Olympic Peninsula of Washington to determine the fate of this beautiful ecosystem. In 1897, President Grover Cleveland designated 2.
2 million woodlands acres on the peninsula as a forest reserve, closed to logging, mining, and ranching. In the ensuing years, that designation evolved and the extent of the preserve shrank. In 1908, the area around 7,969-foot Mount Olympus became a national monument, bordering Olympic National Forest, which was administered by the USDA Forest Service. In the 1930s a movement grew to consolidate the government’s Olympic holdings, add more acreage, and emerge with one of the most ecologically rich national parks in America.

  The impetus for establishing the Olympics region as a national park resulted from a hike made through the peninsula by Dr. Willard Van Name, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. He had heard that the Forest Service was allowing extensive commercial use of the national monument, including logging. In 1934 Van Name wrote a call to arms in the form of a booklet, The Proposed Olympic National Park: The Last Chance for a Magnificent and Unique National Park. Because Van Name’s employment contract with the museum discouraged his activist writings on conservation, the booklet carried the byline of his colleague on the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), a society of New York City natural scientists and park advocates organized in 1930 to reform the Audubon Society. The booklet was distributed widely in Seattle and Washington, D.C., making a mark in both places. Before long it inspired a campaign to transfer the lands from the Forest Service to the National Park Service. An enthusiastic set of Puget Sound residents supported the ECC’s plan for Olympic National Park. Representative Monrad Wallgren, of Everett, introduced a bill in Congress calling for a 728,860-acre park. The lumber industry, outraged at Wallgren’s bill, forced a second congressional bill that significantly reduced Wallgren’s proposal.

  The fight over the Olympics triggered yet another turf battle between the USDA’s Forest Service and Interior’s National Park Service.48 Ickes went on the warpath against the Forest Service and its relationship to the pulpwood industry, charging that it was protecting far too few acres as wilderness areas across America. Ickes determined that national environmental needs trumped the local economic argument on the peninsula. To bolster his case, he directed his staff to draft a bill that would give FDR the authority to designate wilderness areas within both national parks and national forests. The proposed legislation stipulated that once such an area had been designated, it could be modified only by an act of Congress. After the bill was introduced and Ickes’s team mustered congressional support for it, the House scheduled a hearing.