Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  One leading New Dealer opposed to Pacific Northwest dams was the future Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas from Yakima, Washington. On the Columbia River, he complained, severe damage was being done to the populations of salmon and steelhead that migrated upriver to spawn. The fish ladders were frying the fish as they went through the turbines. “I was so concerned that I visited the dams to see how the fish ladders were working, and on seeing FDR after one of these visits, I asked him for the job of counting the fish at Bonneville, the only job I ever asked him to give me,” Douglas recalled. “He took it as a joke and roared with laughter saying ‘You’ve got yourself a new job.’”73

  Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir of the dam created in 1941 by the impoundment of the Columbia River, immediately became the largest lake in Washington state. But it also had many unintentionally deleterious effects as Douglas had warned. Most notably, while building the Grand Coulee may have brought electricity to the rural poor of Grant and Okanogan counties in Washington state, it also resulted in the destruction of eleven towns along the Columbia River. Several were Native American villages representing a way of life dating back more than ten thousand years. When the dam came, the river as they knew it vanished. Overall, three thousand people had to abandon their homes and businesses.74 And in coming decades man-made Lake Roosevelt would be mired in lawsuits related to pollution.

  Professor Aldo Leopold of the University of Wisconsin likewise roundly criticized the New Deal for allowing technical solutions to overwhelm cultural, economic, and ethical issues. The push for hydropower, Leopold argued, ignored the damage building colossal dams had caused to salmon runs and the Columbia River Valley ecosystem as a whole. In a 1938 essay, “Engineering and Conservation,” Leopold charged that Roosevelt’s penchant for building dams failed to resolve the “standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”75

  Concerned about complaints from conservationists like Leopold, who were usually allies of the administration, Ickes decided that Grand Coulee Dam needed some positive publicity. He at first relied on Look and Life to promote the recreational benefits of the proposed dam-reservoir, but ultimately hired Woody Guthrie to write songs celebrating the Bonneville Power Administration’s construction of Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River. While it’s not known whether FDR admired his music, Guthrie wrote twenty-six enduring songs for the Department of the Interior, including “Roll on Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Grand Coulee Dam.” This most unlikely New Deal propagandist fell in love with the Columbia River Valley. “I can’t believe it,” Guthrie wrote of the surrounding wilderness. “I’m in paradise.”76

  On October 3, heading eastward to Washington, D.C., Roosevelt arrived in eastern Montana to inspect Fort Peck Dam, just as he had promised to do in 1934. A large crowd gathered to hear him speak about the virtues of hydroelectric power. While it was wonderful that the construction project employed 10,500 people and spawned new communities, there was still something dreadful going on at the site. The dam had been clumsily constructed, and cracks appeared, resulting in an accident that killed eight workers and injured many more. The following year, an engineer would pinpoint the problem as an incorrectly elevated pipeline. Though the dam was not quite finished, one got the feeling that perhaps Douglas and Leopold had been right, that in the end man couldn’t—or shouldn’t—mess with nature on such a gargantuan scale.

  After extolling Fort Peck Dam, the president gave a gallant conservationist speech in Grand Forks, North Dakota, about bettering the abused land. He had seen firsthand how the Biological Survey had saved the regional type of wetlands known as prairie potholes. On October 4, Roosevelt brought his New Deal road show to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Lashing out at the Supreme Court for gutting his minimum wage and his eight-hour workday, Roosevelt sounded like a socialist. Claiming that Minnesotans weren’t “wild-eyed radicals” as Wall Street believed, Roosevelt championed the little guy, the working folks whom the Supreme Court was giving a raw deal.77

  As recently as August, Roosevelt had signed a bill to establish Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota. The significance of Pipestone (as noted in Chapter 10) had to do with the northern Great Plains Indians, who mined the soft red clay from the Minnesota quarry to make long, flutelike ceremonial peace pipes. To members of the Yankton and Lakota people of the Great Sioux Nation in South Dakota and Minnesota, the pipestone quarry was a holy place. Its soft clay so impressed western artist George Catlin in the 1830s that he painted a panoramic picture based on the religious ceremonies held there.

  Roosevelt was particularly elated about the work the Indian CCC had done in Minnesota. By 1937, the Consolidated Chippewa Indian Agency—headquartered at Cass Lake in Minnesota—used the CCC as a way to completely revamp six reservations: Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Nett Lake–Vermilion Lake, and White Earth. The Chippewa grew wild rice, dredged canals, and built roads. For the first time, hospitals and recreation centers were constructed on Minnesota reservations. A major feature of these reservation camps was night school. Courses were taught in conservation principles and biology. No other president had ever helped Native Americans prosper with the heartfelt conviction of FDR. The New Deal encouraged Indian self-rule, the restoration of tribal government, and the resuscitation of native culture and religion. But this wasn’t government paternalism or welfare. Native American CCCers were pulling themselves up by the bootstraps even while many of the sixty Indian languages spoken in the West, from Apache to Zuni, were going dormant or extinct due to homogenization. And for the most part, the CCC funded initiatives through which Native Americans would improve 52 million acres of Indian country agricultural lands. In the opinion of the historian Donald Parman, “probably at no time before or since the founding of the United States have Indian forests and lands been in better condition than in 1942.”78

  On October 5 in Chicago, the president spoke at the dedication of the Outer Drive link bridge and delivered his “quarantine speech,” outlining U.S. foreign policy measures in a troubled world. He decried the “epidemic of lawlessness” around the world yet never mentioned Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or fascist Italy by name. This foreign policy speech implied that potential external threats to America were brewing everywhere.79 Some reporters, however, were shocked that Roosevelt had spoken with more passion on the Olympic Peninsula about conservation than in Chicago about foreign affairs. Willing to publicly express his hope that despoilers of land were “roasting in hell,” he chose to stay largely mum about Hitler and Mussolini.80

  Roosevelt’s Western trip convinced him that more than ever the United States needed a National Highway system. Automobiles in the West should be able to drive safely and quickly across the Continental Divide in the Pacific Northwest or the Mojave Desert from Los Angeles to Phoenix. Just weeks after Roosevelt returned to Washington, he began consulting with highway engineers. When interstate road visionary Thomas N. MacDonald visited the White House, the president pulled out a map of America and proceeded to draw a grid of lines in blue pencil. Three went from coast to coast. Others followed the migratory bird routes from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Here was the birth of what in the 1950s became the Eisenhower system of Interstate and Defense Highways. At forty-seven thousand miles long and four lanes wide, Roosevelt’s public works roads project, which led to interstates such as 10, 40, and 75, forever changed America. That such super-roads were bad for wildlife wasn’t contemplated. “Franklin Roosevelt,” historian Earl Swift concluded in The Big Roads, “had a greater hand in its creation than Eisenhower did.”81

  V

  Back in Hyde Park in mid-October, Roosevelt attended the dedication of a new post office the WPA had designed using the Dutch-style architecture he so loved. Afterward, he held a press conference in whi
ch he expressed his delight at the various forests he had enjoyed in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. With great glee, he revealed how he had procured sugar pine, western cedar, sequoia, and lodgepole pine seeds to plant at Springwood. “We are having a planting ceremony tomorrow and we are also taking the cones apart and trying them in the greenhouse,” he said. “You remember in Yellowstone, those hillsides where there were those perfectly straight trees? They are lodgepole pines. They may not grow in this climate, for they came from a level where they have snow and ice, but we hope they will grow here.”82

  While Roosevelt turned his attention to pressing world affairs in late 1937, the indefatigable Brant lobbied Congress to pass legislation creating Olympic National Park. It was a tough sell. Sixty percent of the Olympic Peninsula’s population was directly connected to the logging and milling industries.83 But Brant was so dazzling on Capitol Hill that Roosevelt hired him away from the St. Louis Star-Times to become a White House speechwriter and consultant. FDR was frustrated that Congress wouldn’t allow the Hoh and Bogachiel valleys, which remained privately owned, to enter into the debate over the national parks. “I am disturbed,” Roosevelt said, “by three matters which we cannot accomplish under the recent Olympic National Park Bill. The first of these relates to the preservation of the Pacific Shoreline.” Another irritation for the president was that the forests of the Quinault Indian Reservation weren’t part of his new park. “I think,” he wrote, “we should have legislation for the preservation of all the remaining timber in the Quinault River Valley.”84 From an ecological perspective, Brant knew that the president was indeed correct. Emergency funds were needed for the government to make land purchases. In short order, $1.7 million was raised. The new boundaries made the proposed park one of the largest in the system and the crown jewel of the Pacific Northwest.

  “Big timber,” sensing that the 1938 midterms would be problematic for Roosevelt, continued to try to derail the national park. The complexity of land deeds in the Pacific Northwest was daunting and Congress moved glacially on the Olympic issue. But the bill managed to survive. Finally, in June, a compromise was reached. At 500,000 acres, the park’s boundaries would be smaller than environmentalists—and President Roosevelt—might have wished (300,000 acres drawn from the existing national monument and the rest from Olympic National Forest). According to the bill creating the park, though, the president had the authority to expand it by proclamation at a later date. The legislation was on FDR’s desk for signature on June 29, 1938. “It is the intention to keep this park, so far as possible, in a wilderness area,” Harold Ickes later wrote in his diary. “It is truly a wonderland of nature and it is more than I can understand how people who pretend to be interested could be opposed to its creation as a national park.”85

  Roosevelt was overjoyed on signing the authorizing legislation. “In the future the new Olympic National Park may be extended in area by adding lands acquired by gift or purchase of additional lands from the Olympic National Forest,” he said. “The establishment of this new national park will be of interest to everybody in the country. Its scenery and the remarkable tree growth are well worth seeing, and it is a worthy addition to the splendid national parks which have already been created in many parts of the country.”86

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “PERPETUATED FOR POSTERITY”

  I

  On January 3, 1938, Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address, linking conservation with economic recovery from the Great Depression. About two thirds of the economic gains achieved since March 1933 had vanished. The stock market had lost half its value. The unemployment rate hovered at 17.2 percent. Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau—Keynesians both—had warned Roosevelt that work-relief projects like the WPA and CCC weren’t enough, that the pump still needed priming. Aware that his New Deal recovery was losing steam, Roosevelt blamed the shrinking economy on America’s irresponsible corporations, which were slow to invest in new production and growth; and on the extremely wealthy, who were neglecting to participate in commerce in favor of stockpiling their fortunes. The president excoriated “economic royalists” and “selfish interests” and championed minimum wages and maximum work hours. A core premise of the State of the Union address was that the industrial order had been careless with America’s natural resources, and now the New Deal was rectifying the damage with creative conservation. “We went forward feverishly and thoughtlessly until nature rebelled,” Roosevelt said, “and we saw deserts encroach, floods destroy, trees disappear, and soil exhausted.”1

  Putting his words into action, the president spent 1938 signing executive orders and issuing presidential proclamations galore, establishing new National Wildlife Refuges (NWRs) from coast to coast. It was almost as if he were collecting wildlife sanctuaries as a hobby. In northern Montana there were Black Coulee NWR and Hewitt Lake NWR along the Canadian border where pronghorns (Antilocapra americana) ranged and waterfowl bred. Alabama got Wheeler NWR, the first federal refuge overlaid on a multipurpose reservoir (in this case formed by the TVA). No fewer than ten endangered species lived at Wheeler.

  The intensity of Roosevelt’s interest in wildlife protection became apparent on February 14, when he proclaimed that March 20 to 27 would be National Wild Life Week. Declaring all animals our “inarticulate friends”—even salamanders, tortoises, and gila monsters—Roosevelt argued that by saving species in peril, Americans were choosing life over death, beauty over destruction, God over the devil. “To this end I call upon all citizens in every community to give thought during this period to the needs of the denizens of field, forest, and water and intelligent consideration of the best means for translating good intentions into practical action in behalf of these invaluable but inarticulate friends,” Roosevelt said. “Only through the full cooperation of all can wild life be restored for the present generation and perpetuated for posterity.”2

  Buoyed by his successful NWRs in Montana and Alabama, Roosevelt moved decisively to protect numerous offshore islands in the lower Florida Keys, a marine ecosystem he considered worthy of being a national park. Looking beyond Fort Jefferson National Monument, Roosevelt selected other islands as federally protected sanctuaries for the great white heron (or great egret, Andea alba), which was, he said, an “almost extinct species that occurs only in southern Florida,” hunted by bird poachers for its feathers.3 After consulting with Ernest Coe, Florida’s most energetic environmentalist, the president signed Executive Order 7993 on October 27, establishing Great White Heron National Wildlife Refuge, protecting 117,683 acres of tidal flats, white-sand beaches, and turquoise water especially for this charismatic species.4 (In 1975, Great White Heron NWR, Key West NWR, and National Key Deer Refuge were combined under the National Wilderness Preservation System.)5

  Another marine ecosystem Roosevelt protected that spring of 1938 was the Channel Islands of California, known as the “Galápagos of North America” for its rare plants and wildlife—145 species found nowhere else. Roosevelt knew from friends at the Smithsonian Institution that these five unique islands just off the coast of Ventura County were a premier destination for whale watchers, birders, beachcombers, and fisherfolk like himself. The archipelago was the only place along the Pacific coasts of the Americas where warm and cold ocean currents commingled.6 Stephen Albright, the nephew of the former NPS director, had sent the president photographs of whales—humpbacks, grays, and blues—taken around the archipelago. Roosevelt thought that a Channel Islands marine sanctuary would be a wonderful national park, a place where West Coast residents could snorkel and scuba dive in offshore kelp forests and canoe along the gorgeous coastlines. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s favorite recent movie, Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, had been filmed, in part, in the Channel Islands, giving the location cachet with the Hollywood crowd.

  But a consortium of special interests rejected the preservation effort. California speculators saw the Channel Islands area as a promising offshore oil
field and led a campaign to quash the idea of a national park. The movement for a park was further damaged when H. C. Bryant, an assistant director at the NPS who had seen the islands only through binoculars from Ventura, on the mainland, decided that they didn’t meet NPS’s high aesthetic standards. Others dismissed the islands as desolate and too difficult for tourists to reach. Such anti-conservation sentiments made Ickes’s blood boil. Owing to “selfish oil interests,” as he put it, the southern California coast hadn’t been able “to keep conservation laws” on the statute books in Sacramento.7

  Coming to the rescue of the Channel Islands, however, was noted biologist, botanist, etymologist, and paleontologist T. D. A. (Theodore Dru Alison) Cockerell, who, since his retirement from the University of Colorado in 1934, had been spending winters in California studying the flora and fauna. In 1937 he published an article, “The Botany of the California Islands,” a scholarly natural history essay, that Ickes brought to the president’s attention.8 Other grassroots environmentalists wrote to the Department of the Interior about the huge harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardii) and sea lion (Zalophus californianus) populations of the Channel Islands.