In 1936, Congress held acrimonious hearings over Kings Canyon. The Sierra Club, sensibly, had asked photographer Ansel Adams to serve as its key lobbyist promoting national park status. Wearing a Stetson hat, armed with his gorgeous photos of Kings Canyon’s mountains, lakes, and waterfalls, Adams persuaded many in Congress to join the preservation cause.36 Two years later, Ansel Adams published his second book of photography, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, limited to only five hundred copies. His ethereal images of Kings River Canyon area were masterpieces of landscape photography; clearly Adams’s deeply held Muirian conservationism was the wellspring of his timeless art.
At a time when the Forest Service and National Park Service were fiercely squabbling over the Kings Canyon region, the power and irrigation interests in the San Joaquin Valley united in an attempt to end any chance of national park designation. In this situation, Adams—having no real money for lobbying—sent a copy of his book as a gift to Harold Ickes, whom he had once met at a conference on the future of state and national parks. Ickes, impressed with its artistry, showed the book to FDR on January 8, 1939, at a private lunch.37 Mesmerized, Roosevelt seized the handsome book and kept it for himself. “Dad had to then send Ickes another copy,” Michael Adams, the son of the photographer, recalled. “Getting the Kings Canyon fight front and center of Roosevelt was an important step.”38
Once Adams’s Sierra Nevada had ensnared FDR’s imagination, the Sierra Club redoubled its efforts for Kings Canyon. “While Ansel would have been quick to protest that he was only one of many advocates on Kings Canyon’s behalf,” biographer Mary Street Alinder wrote, “it would not likely have become a national park when it did were it not for his visual testament and his tenacity.”39
With the John Muir Trail—a hiking path along the crest of the Sierra Nevada through General Grant National Park—completed, the Sierra Club led burro and knapsack outings in the high country to generate publicity. Once again Irving Brant acted as the unofficial troubleshooter for Roosevelt and Ickes. In this campaign, Brant exploited the divisions within the Forest Service to help move Kings Canyon National Park forward. Ferdinand Silcox, director of the Forest Service, despised Brant as an environmental radical and was reluctant to cede control of Kings Canyon’s ancient sequoia groves to Interior. Dan Bell, acting director of the Bureau of the Budget, concurred with Brant that 415,000 acres of the “most scenic and inspirational portion” of the Kings River Canyon ecosystem deserved to be a national park.
Entering the fight was Bob Marshall, the rangy and athletic Forest Service preservation purist. Breaking with his own agency over Kings Canyon, Marshall, collaborating with Ickes, thought the Forest Service lacked a solid preservation plan for Kings Canyon. A step ahead of Pinchot and Silcox in terms of vision, Marshall emerged in the mid-1930s as the boldest forester America ever produced. He was an old-style explorer like Jim Bridger—with rugby shoulders, muscular legs, electrifying brown eyes, and sometimes an unkempt beard—and his belief that Interior, under Ickes, would best preserve the Kings Canyon ecosystem as a primeval wilderness carried some weight. “If I was outside the government, and was shown this plan of the Forest Service, I would swallow all my prejudices against the Park Service and root for Kings River National Park merely to keep out these commercial desecrations and the roads which will go with them from as glorious a wilderness as remains in the United States,” Marshall wrote in an official comment. “If the Forest Service was to keep the Kings River country as a National Forest, I think it should burn the Kings River report and write a radically new one.”40
III
Having worked tirelessly that June of 1939 to establish the Federal Works Agency (which merged the PWA, WPA, and other New Deal agencies) and promote New Deal environmentalism, the president was ready to go to Hyde Park for a reprieve from the Washington shuffle. On July 1, Roosevelt announced plans for a Presidential Library at Hyde Park, which would serve as the repository for all his papers and memorabilia. This caused many in the White House press corps to mistakenly speculate that Roosevelt wouldn’t be running for reelection in 1940.41 With almost childlike excitement, he directed his friends in the press corps to “Dutchess Hill,” five miles from Springwood, so they could see Top Cottage, claiming he was its chief architect. (In reality, Henry Toombs of Georgia, who had also built Val-Kill, acted as Roosevelt’s “ghostdrafter.”)
With construction on Top Cottage well under way, Roosevelt was planning to embark on an excursion to the Galápagos Islands to study marine biology, with the Smithsonian Institution as sponsor. The voyage would cover almost five thousand miles in about twenty-four days. Between July 16, when he’d leave for the island chain from San Diego, and August 9, when he’d arrive back in Florida, FDR would be at sea for most of a month.42 (He would also check the suitability of Cocos Island, off Costa Rica, as a site for a new U.S. naval base.) Intensely proud of his seafaring ancestor, Captain Amasa Delano of Massachusetts—who had written a captivating account of the Galápagos Islands before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species—Roosevelt planned to approximate Delano’s voyage.
As Roosevelt prepared for his seafaring trip, Ickes raised the idea of a park jointly administered by the United States and Ecuador with his boss. Secretary of State Cordell Hull opposed the idea, but Gifford Pinchot, who had headed a 1929 expedition to the Galápagos for the Smithsonian, discovering a giant “sea bat” of the genus Manta, continued to promote the bilateral policy. He believed that the Galápagos should be permanently protected as a World Heritage site (that designation, however, did not come until 1978). A collaborative wildlife protection project between the United States and Ecuador would be conservationist diplomacy at its finest. Kermit Roosevelt, TR’s second son, had also led a scientific delegation to the Galápagos (for the American Museum of Natural History in 1930) and wanted the chain biologically preserved. It was rare to find Ickes, Pinchot, and Kermit Roosevelt all in step on a conservation issue. Hull nevertheless continued to be a spoiler: “This whole matter [is] so delicate,” he confided to Ickes, “that I should hesitate very much to take it up even informally with the Ecuadorian authorities.”43
Dr. Waldo Schmitt, a zoologist attached to the Smithsonian, holds an iguana while visiting the Galápagos Islands. As a curator of the Department of Marine Invertebrates, he made frequent trips to the waters of South America, and was chosen to accompany Roosevelt on a 1938 fishing trip to the eastern Pacific islands of Clipperton, Cocos, and Galápagos.
Excited about the expedition, Roosevelt tapped Professor Waldo L. Schmitt of the Smithsonian to serve as the primary marine biologist. The president unexpectedly called Schmitt at the Smithsonian one afternoon, telling him, as if it were an order, “I know we’ll have a good time.”44 Schmitt was obsessed with marine life. Born in 1887 in Washington, D.C., he received his PhD from George Washington University in 1922, then worked for the federal government as a fisheries expert. His studies on the spiny lobster and king crab were groundbreaking. While working at the Carnegie Institution’s marine laboratory in the Florida Keys, Schmitt received acclaim for identifying an unknown subspecies of crustacean in the stomach of a fish. He had already visited the Galápagos three times; on one of these trips he drew widespread media attention after stumbling on a group of utopian colonists living on Floreana Island.45
The Roosevelt-Schmitt expedition departed from San Diego on July 16 on USS Houston, the heavy cruiser that had taken the president to Hawaii in 1934. Captain G. N. Barker commanded a crew of six hundred. Schmitt had brought along seines, bottom samplers, traps, and hand nets to obtain all sorts of exotic marine animals. FDR reassured the press that White House business would be conducted from the Houston even on the open sea. Roosevelt’s seafaring party included press secretary Stephen Early, marine photographer Frederick Allen, and “Pa” Watson—all of whom happen to have been good card players. A few of his shipmates recalled the president saying that he was finally living his childhood fantasy of visiting the Galápag
os. The chief objective of the trip was marine biology. “Throughout the cruise,” Schmitt recalled, “the President took an active part and a live interest in all our collecting.”46
The Houston dropped anchor at Clipperton Island, nearly a thousand miles south of the tip of the Baja peninsula. Much to Schmitt’s surprise, the President demanded to be briefed about the island’s unusual tree species. At Clipperton the Smithsonian procured numerous flowers, ripe seeds, and seedling plants of great rarity for to use in propagation experiments back in Washington.47 A rare palm tree—“not only a new species, but also a new genus”—was also found.48 Throughout the expedition, the Roosevelt party had ideal weather for collecting.49
On such oceangoing voyages Roosevelt, a celestial navigator, was aglow with what psychologist Wallace Nichols has termed “blue mind”: the power of seas, oceans, lakes, and rivers to rid the mind and spirit of anxiety. Dismissive of landlubbers, often studying maps and charts, blessed with an intuitive feel for favorable currents and perfect fishing grounds, FDR was in top form out in the blue-green waters of the Pacific. Relishing the fact that nobody in the press knew his exact location, he deemed his time on the ocean helpful in making momentous decisions about the fate of America.50 There’s a marvelous photograph showing Roosevelt in his element, sitting comfortably on a deck stool with a tiger shark, hooked in Sullivan Bay, hanging from a rope in front of him. Flashing a cocky smile, floppy white hat in place, his cabana shirt half open, Roosevelt looks in ruddy good health.51
Once the Houston anchored in the Galápagos FDR, in private conversation, cracked jokes about Theodore Roosevelt hunting for grizzlies in the Bighorns of Wyoming while he himself was seeking out tiny crustaceans. When he wasn’t dealing with government matters or helping Schmitt collect specimens, Roosevelt delved into William K. Vanderbilt’s travel book To Galápagos on the Ara, 1926. Vanderbilt and his party had discovered two new species of shark on their voyage.52 Early in the trip, Schmitt and Roosevelt lightheartedly discussed what they were hoping to accomplish for the Smithsonian.
“Is there any particular thing or animal that you would like to find?” Roosevelt asked.
“Oh yes,” Schmitt replied, “I have been on it two years, and the one thing I am searching for in these waters of Mexico and the islands of the Pacific [is] a burrowing shrimp.”
“Well Dr. Schmitt, why leave Washington?” Roosevelt chuckled, “Washington is overrun with them. I know that after five years!”53
In the bright Pacific wind, Roosevelt and Schmitt’s team made fourteen stops to collect specimens in and around the Galápagos, in hopes of finding unusual crustaceans to bring back to Washington. To FDR’s delight, they did locate a rare burrowing shrimp along Isla Socorro, a hundred miles or so off the coast of Mexico. The president immediately renamed Neotrypaea californiensis the “Schmitty Shrimp” and joked that he would issue an executive order changing the name of the Smithsonian Institution to the “Schmittsonian.”54
By the time the Houston dropped anchor along San Salvador Island, Pa Watson was worried that Roosevelt was getting sunburned; he saw to it that canvas was spread above the Houston’s deck to protect the president’s skin. Key areas of the Galápagos—Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, Isabela, and Floreana—were explored by Roosevelt’s group. Schmitt filled his packing boxes not only with exotic fish, but also with specimens of plants, birds, snakes, and even a few fossils. The president, who normally bragged about big catches, was now keenly invested in small ones. To be searching for eight-inch white salema instead of eight-foot tarpon was, to put it mildly, a change of pace for Roosevelt. Schmitt named one of the two new species of tiny gobies caught after the president: Pycnomma roosevelti.55
Roosevelt joined the crew most evenings to feast on fresh seafood. He also performed the time-honored ceremony when the Houston crossed the equator. With theatrical aplomb, the president inducted new staffers and crewmen who had never before crossed the equator (“pollywogs”) into the Ancient and Honorable Order of Shell Backs. He found time to write a series of letters to Eleanor detailing his marine antics and bird-watching. In return, she reported to him her own tale of witnessing “a bird sweep down this morning and apparently grab a fish under the surface of the water . . . but I am afraid it was only a common swallow catching a gnat.”56
The temperature stayed steady, between sixty-five and seventy-five degrees, but when the skies were overcast, everyone wrapped up like a mummy to ward off the cutting winds.57 FDR was normally a dry correspondent, but his letters to Eleanor from the Galápagos were full of joy. “I have had good weather, excellent fishing on the Mexican Coast & Socorro Island. And at Clipperton Island we were fortunate enough to have a smooth sea and Dr. Schmitt the Smithsonian scientist whom I brought along was able to land with a picked crew and collect many fine specimens of marine and plant life and birds—and to shoot a wild pig which we duly ate!” He even found time to mention the topography of the Galápagos Islands. “The two we saw today are very barren but full of color, for they are all volcanic and there are lava flows and all kinds of weird twisted rocks.”58
While Schmitt hunted for smaller species of fish, the president cast off the ship for whoppers, reeling in thirty- to forty-five-pound tuna that were cooked for supper. One afternoon, he hauled in five sharks, some of them quite large. Other species he caught included California yellowfin, black sea bass, broomtail grouper, bluestripe snapper, Pacific sierra, and barred sand bass. “It is always cool though directly on the Equator, for the Humboldt Current from the Antarctic passes through the Islands,” FDR wrote to his wife. “The water is cold too, so the fish are excellent eating!”59
Roosevelt aboard the USS Houston with a sixty-pound shark that he had caught in Sullivan Bay, Galápagos, in July 1938. Roosevelt’s twenty-four-day ocean voyage, from San Diego to the Galápagos, and then through the Panama Canal to Florida, gave him a chance to relax with the sailors of the Houston, some of whom may be seen in the background.
Days passed with welcome serenity. The hot topic of conversation aboard the Houston was Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle in 1835. Unlike Darwin, however, the president was unable to ride one of the two-hundred-pound Galápagos tortoises, because of his paralysis. Taking advantage of the scientists on board, he inquired about all the driftwood, bamboo, and other South American debris on the islands. He was astonished that so much had washed up when they were six hundred miles away from the mainland. The power of the tides never ceased to amaze him. “A very successful week in the Galápagos from every aspect—good fishing, many specimens of all kinds for the Nat. Museum, and my only complaint is that the weather here on the Equator has been too cool,” FDR wrote to Eleanor on July 31. “Also one has no feeling of the tropics—no lush vegetation—it might be Nantucket Island—only not so green. Still it is all interesting and colorful—especially remembering that the tortoises, iguanas, etc. are the oldest living form of the animals of 15,000,000 years ago!”60
Unself-consciously, Roosevelt would point to seabirds, a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. He used them to study a huge (and famous) albatross colony from the safety of the Houston during a period of rough seas. After a large number of strange crustaceans were netted in Magdalena Bay, no one wanted the trip to end, but Roosevelt needed to return to the White House. The president’s final treat was getting to inspect the Panama Canal. In 1912 FDR, then a state senator, had visited the canal before the water had been let into Gatun Lake (the largest man-made reservoir in the world). Back then, he had been able to climb to a high vantage point and observe steam shovels and railcars in the middle of the great “cut.” Now, in 1938, the Panama Canal was fully operational, and the enormous effort involved its construction was fading into history.
Touring the Panama Canal in 1938 wasn’t merely a lark for the president. His visit had implications for national security. He knew that the U.S. Navy would have to defend the canal at all costs from enemy sabotage if another world war erupted. Nothing would disrupt A
merican commerce more, Roosevelt believed, than letting the Panama Canal be blown up or decommissioned.61
During his trip there were no press reports about President Roosevelt’s scouting of Cocos Island, off the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, as a site for potential American naval bases—only puff pieces about the fish FDR had caught. However, there is ample historical documentation to prove that the U.S. Navy was stockpiling war materials in the Canal Zone to eventually use to build bases in the Galápagos and Cocos chains. Roosevelt saw numerous signs that war might be imminent. Italy and Germany had already made aggressive moves in Europe. The Third Reich had annexed Austria and was making claims on territory belonging to Czechoslovakia. The situation was likewise looking grim in Asia: Japan had invaded China the previous year. While FDR was aboard the Houston, Chiang Kai-shek, in the face of daunting military pressure from the Japanese, moved his government farther inland. When the Houston finally dropped anchor in Pensacola, Florida, ending the expedition, Roosevelt headed to Dutchess County, full of worry for the world.
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