Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America
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No sooner did he arrive at Springwood than he had to repack his bags for a trip to Canada. On August 18, 1938, the president traveled to Kingston, Ontario, to receive an honorary degree from Queen’s College and dedicate the Thousand Islands Bridge, connecting New York and Canada. This was a dream come true for Roosevelt, who had supported such a bridge since 1911 and long been enamored of the Saint Lawrence River. In honor of FDR’s visit, Canadian and American young people planted white birch trees on Hill Island and Wellesley Island, respectively, and a flotilla of yachts planned to pass under the American side of the bridge.62
The president delivered his dedication address in front of a six-acre knoll that formed a natural amphitheater. Praising Canada as a great democracy, Roosevelt, to the surprise of many, spoke more about the grandeur of the Saint Lawrence River than the engineering marvel that had been built above it.63 “The St. Lawrence River is more than a cartographic line between our two countries,” he said. “God so formed North America that the waters of an inland empire drain into the Great Lakes Basin. The rain that falls in this vast area finds outlet through this single natural funnel, close to which we now stand.”64
That fall, the president threw a lighthearted dinner at the White House for his Houston crewmates. At the reunion, crewmembers recounted their discoveries on shores, on reefs, and in tide pools. Schmitt also lunched privately with FDR to discuss the future of the world’s saltwater fisheries. At an impromptu press event, Roosevelt said that pretending to be a marine biologist was a “source of great satisfaction” for him. Suggesting that there would be future collaborations between the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian, Roosevelt bragged about his discoveries of the burrowing shrimp, gobies, and rare palms.65 “We cannot know too much about this natural world of ours,” Roosevelt wrote. “We should not be satisfied merely with what we do know.”66
Schmitt also compiled an inventory of what Roosevelt’s expedition had accomplished in marine biology. Having surpassed their wildest expectations, he told the Washington Post that the trip “couldn’t be beaten” and that “scientist” Roosevelt had helped the museum tremendously.67 “I got an awful lot of specimens out of that cruise,” Schmitt told reporters. “I didn’t go fishing with the President but would talk about the fishing spots with him. Then I was free to go on a launch with five men and do a lot of collecting with a small boat dredge.” The Washington Post praised FDR for being a “benefactor of science.”68 The statistics were impressive: eighty-three different species of fish were hooked, gaffed, iced, photographed, and shipped back to the Smithsonian. “The fish were unpacked there still frozen hard,” Schmitt recalled. “When thawed out in tanks of water, they returned to practically the identical fresh condition in which they had been placed in Cold Storage. Many of the fish still retained much of their original coloration, having apparently undergone little or no change from the time they were brought aboard ship.”69
To Roosevelt’s great delight, the Smithsonian planned to mount a golden grouper (Mycteroperca rosacea) he had caught in the Pacific. Reports about the echinoderms, sponges, annelids, and plants the team collected during the expedition reached the president’s desk. Routinely he showed off photographs to White House visitors of him playing Darwin. “I’m about halfway through with the collection of crustaceans,” Schmitt wrote to Roosevelt. “Among the starfishes and their relatives five new species have been discovered. The manuscript describing the new genus and species of palm will soon be finished, together with a number of interesting illustrations. In the collection of shells fifteen new species or varieties have been noted.”70
FDR hoped to write a magazine article about the Galápagos, as Theodore Roosevelt would have done, but the troubled world required too much of his attention that fall. There was a midterm election on the horizon; there was a crisis in Czechoslovakia; and there were ongoing atrocities against Jews in the Third Reich, including Kristallnacht.
The next time FDR had an extended stay at Hyde Park, he regaled his Home Club with wild fishing tales from the far-flung Galápagos. In a rare unguarded moment, however, Roosevelt told his friends and neighbors that the real motivation for visiting the Galápagos was indeed to inspect America’s naval defense in the Pacific. “I was very happy to note that the American defenses of the Canal had improved since I was there three years before,” Roosevelt said. “We are getting airplanes, and submarines, and anti-aircraft guns, and various other things, to try to make reasonably certain that in case of war—which we are trying to avoid in every possible way—we shall still be able to maintain the link of the Panama Canal between the Atlantic and Pacific.”71
IV
A lot of wildlife habitat Roosevelt and his administration had saved between 1933 and 1938 was still involved in controversy. After the Okefenokee swamp received federal protection, the Biological Survey started haphazardly planting Asian chestnut trees there. A little detective work by Francis and Jean Harper led to a troubling revelation: the Biological Survey was disregarding its pledge to preserve the “pristine quality” of the swamp for pond lilies, bladderworts, and hardhead grass. Jean Harper, testing friendship, bitterly complained to Eleanor Roosevelt about this gross betrayal of the USDA’s commitment to preservation. “We have just received word of another and far greater project of insane vandalism—to cut down all the big pine trees on Chesser Island,” she wrote to the first lady. “This is one of the very few islands in the swamp where the timber has remained largely untouched, and we and other naturalists have made very special efforts to keep it so.”72
Jean Harper was what the 1960s generation would have called an “eco-warrior.” Enclosed in her letter to Eleanor were damning reports of the Biological Survey’s malfeasance in south Georgia. She complained that a federal road was being planned for Chesser Island—a road which would ruin the wilderness value of the Okefenokee. The worst accusation in her commentary was that with regard to deforestation the president’s own CCC boys were the chief culprits. “The Biological Survey, as presently organized, is a thoroughly unfit guardian of our wilderness areas and wildlife,” Harper wrote. “And no CCC camp should be tolerated in a place like the Okefenokee. May I implore you to do whatever you can to preserve natural conditions in the Okefenokee from this new and senseless attack?”73
Harper’s allegations about Chesser Island, while true, were somewhat misleading: the CCC was doing valuable work elsewhere along the Atlantic seaboard during FDR’s second term. CCC crews had eradicated undesirable plants like cattails and diligently spread seed to attract migratory waterfowl at refuges such as Blackwater (Maryland), Swanquarter (North Carolina), and Saint Marks (Florida).74 Small islands resembling muskrat lodges were built in shallow ponds to create nesting and preening areas for waterfowl.75 In Georgia the CCC cut firebreaks throughout the Okefenokee wilderness, preventing a repeat of the disastrous 1932 conflagration.76
But the CCC did make one undeniable mistake in Georgia, apparent to anyone who drove around the back roads. The CCC boys were responsible for planting kudzu (Pueraria lobata), a Japanese climbing vine first introduced to America at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Among those boys was Lee Brown of Bainbridge, Georgia, who joined the CCC as a sixteen-year-old to help his grandmother survive the Depression. At an all-black camp in Sumter County, he worked as a surveyor’s helper, rock man, and meteorological data keeper (measuring rainfall). “Our goal,” Brown recalled, “was to plant as much kudzu as possible. We were like the Johnny Appleseeds of kudzu.”77 But in planting kudzu the CCC inadvertently wreaked havoc on the Georgia landscape. Although it was good feed for livestock, kudzu caused what botanists call “interference competition”: it suffocated native plants by blocking their access to sunshine. Kudzu was therefore a plant-killing menace—and the CCC was largely responsible for its proliferation.
Whenever Roosevelt visited Warm Springs in the late 1930s he made an effort to hang out with CCC Company 4462 in Chipley and Company 1429 in Pine Mountain. One afternoon the preside
nt gave an impromptu exclusive interview to Donald Burns, the editor of the newspaper at the latter camp, Pine Mountain Progress. “I used to be an editor myself—of my college paper,” Roosevelt told Burns. When asked about the future of the CCC as a nonemergency relief agency, Roosevelt answered, “As long as there are men and boys whose people need relief, they will be given first consideration.” As the president and Burns good-naturedly discussed the merits of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, press secretary Marvin McIntyre grew nervous. Roosevelt let his guard drop when he got comfortable with a CCC boy. “The President shouldn’t have done this,” McIntyre told Burns. “He doesn’t normally give exclusive interviews. . . . Every camp and college paper in the country would be waiting for one.”78
In the decades before federal acquisition, the Okefenokee had been depleted of its abundant fish, but by late 1938 the jackfish and gars were back. One Georgia farmer who took advantage of the Okefenokee’s bounteous wildlife was a future president of the United States: Jimmy Carter. His father, James Earl Carter—a conservative Democrat, land conservationist, and peanut farmer—resented bossy New Dealers in Washington, D.C., who told him what to do on his Sumter County acreage. But he loved the fact that the Roosevelt administration had protected the Okefenokee and he took his ten-year-old son there for the fishing expedition of a lifetime. Using long cane poles, the Carters caught large bream, redbreast, warmouth, and bluegills (which Carter called “copperheads” because of the hue generated by tannins in the water). The future president not only saw alligators, but also caught a baby gator and kept it as a pet.79 “The Okefenokee stands out as perhaps the best time I had with my father,” Carter later recalled. “We bonded in the swamp like never before.”80
Roosevelt had adopted Georgia as his second home. His sense of the state’s geography was astounding. Only nine days after Jean Harper’s appeal about Chesser Island was mailed to Eleanor Roosevelt, the president threatened to put Henry Wallace’s head on the chopping block. He was angered that the USDA had reneged on its agreement to be a wilderness custodian of the swamp. Roosevelt had wanted the Okefenokee to remain pristine, i.e., roadless. Travel would be done via existing canals and runs, and push boats were Roosevelt’s vessels of choice. And logging was to be prohibited on the island; in fact, the president had the CCC replant stands of pine and add gum trees. “I am told that the Biological Survey is ‘at it again’ in the Okefenokee Swamp—and that this time they are about to cut down the big pine trees on Chesser Island,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace. “I hope the report is not true for, as you know, you and I have agreed that the Swamp is to be kept definitely in its untouched pristine condition. Will you let me have a report? I do not want any trees cut down anywhere in the Swamp.”81
It was a disquieting experience for Henry Wallace to be reprimanded. But he soon found out that the president’s sources were correct. The USDA, it seemed, was leasing woodlands on Chesser Island and getting rid of rotting trees throughout Okefenokee Swamp. Wallace lamely explained to Roosevelt that the Chesser Island pines had been cut to build USDA administrative headquarters around Camp Cornelia. While Wallace acknowledged that “interested conservationists” were indeed up in arms, he reassured the president that the USDA had the situation under control. To further ease Roosevelt’s mind, Wallace dispatched Dr. Ira Gabrielson of the Biological Survey to conduct a personal inspection of the Okefenokee and then draft a plan for managing the 438,000-acre swamp. Roosevelt’s reply was that he wanted to be kept informed of all “proposed plans” related to the refuge going forward.82
Just two days later, Roosevelt again chided Wallace, insinuating that USDA game wardens had turned a blind eye when the War Department disregarded U.S. waterfowl protection laws. Roosevelt railed against the army and navy brass for ignoring his conservationist rules on military bases and gun ranges. Soldiers didn’t get an exemption. The shooting of migratory birds on federal bases was a punishable offense, and Roosevelt wanted Wallace to investigate abuses. If the sanctuaries for migratory waterfowl had been violated by the War Department—as Roosevelt’s conservationist spies intimated—then there would be consequences. “The fact that the canvasback duck and indeed other ducks have so diminished in numbers that we have had to prohibit all hunting on them,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace, “and the fact that the Government is engaged in bringing back the numbers of migratory birds to a point well above the danger of extinction lead me to believe that . . . all government owned or controlled areas should be closed to hunting where such closing would benefit the general policy.”83
At one point in 1938 the president demanded information from Wallace about the situation of canvasback ducks in Maryland’s Susquehanna flats. An exasperated Wallace assured FDR that the flats were being adequately protected by the Biological Survey, but Roosevelt wanted more details. He had heard that the crucial Garrett Island stopover was vulnerable to industrial development. (In 1942, FDR established the Susquehanna Flats National Wildlife Refuge by Executive Order 9185.)84 Wallace was alternately amused, perplexed, and annoyed by—and curious about—the president’s insatiable interest in lesser-known reaches of the country.
With midterm elections looming in November 1938, the president knew he would have to give stump speeches for Democratic candidates. He managed to knit in a conservation message. Earlier in the year he had visited the Texas Panhandle to sell soil conservation to farmers. Now, campaigning around the East, he spoke against the evils of water pollution. At a press conference at Hyde Park on October 7, FDR recounted how PWA loans had built some five hundred sewage disposal plants, at a total construction cost of more than $1.25 billion. But not in his backyard. He accused residents of New York of dumping raw sewage into the Hudson River and polluting streams to the point where the water was unsafe to drink. When asked point-blank whether he would drink water in his beloved Dutchess County, the president snapped, “I would not drink water in Poughkeepsie.”85
There were a number of reasons why correspondent Arthur Krock held that the New Deal had ground to a “halt” as the midterm elections approached in 1938.86 The “court packing” scheme of 1937 had led many to question whether Roosevelt should be reined in. The 1937–1938 economic downturn, which pushed unemployment to perilously high levels, caused voters to reconsider the amount of power they had entrusted to the federal government. A series of strikes by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were blamed on the New Deal’s empowerment of unions through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. While Roosevelt was capturing crustaceans that summer with Schmitt, a Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Americans wanted him to be more conservative.
On Election Day, November 8, the Democrats lost six Senate seats, seventy-one House seats, and a dozen governorships. Political pundits declared that the New Deal had sputtered to a halt. Nevertheless, nonprofits such as the Sierra Club, Garden Clubs of America, and Audubon Society trusted that 1939 would be another banner year for conservation, with the potential for a lot of new NWRs, and national parks.87
Another crisis, on a smaller scale, hit FDR right where he lived, as a proud arborist. In fact, nothing pleased Roosevelt more than to hear about the life stories of trees. At the White House he adopted a magnolia planted by Andrew Jackson as his good-luck totem. Given his devotion to trees, it pained the president to be criticized by a group of activists, led by Cissy Patterson—owner of the Washington Times-Herald—for the plan to remove eighty-eight cherry trees from the Tidal Basin in order to complete the Jefferson Memorial. Also coming under fire was his uncle Frederic Delano, for having green-lighted the tree removal; that was ironic, because Delano’s life had been devoted to planting trees in urban settings. At a press conference that November 8, Roosevelt fielded questions from reporters about the impending removal by the CCC of the cherry trees: “Well, I don’t suppose there is anybody in the world who loves trees quite as much as I do, but I recognize that a cherry does not live forever. It is what is called a short-lived tree; and there are forty
or fifty cherry trees that die, or fall down, or get flooded out, or have to be replaced [each year]. It is a short-lived tree and we ought to have, in addition to the 1,700 trees we have today, I think another thousand trees. Let us plant 2,700 trees instead of 1,700. . . . That net loss will be made up, not only those eighty-eight, as I hope, but 912 others.”88
It was a brilliant answer and a solution to the controversy at the Tidal Basin, but it did not assuage Cissy Patterson, who called the Jefferson Memorial a “meaningless, useless, hideous scramble of cold marble and bronze.”89 With a groundswell of support, she threatened to chain herself to one of the cherry trees marked for removal. Patterson had sixty thousand signatures on a petition to leave the trees alone. A reporter asked FDR what he would do if she executed her plan. “If anybody wants to chain herself to the tree,” Roosevelt said, “and the tree is in the way, we will move the tree and the lady and the chains, and transplant them to some other place.”90 The reporters roared with laughter. But Eleanor Roosevelt later confirmed that her husband was quite distraught about the entire incident: part of him sided with Cissy Patterson.
As a young man, FDR would probably have chained himself to Newburgh’s Balmville tree, the old cottonwood favored by George Washington, if someone had dared try to remove it. Huddling with Delano and Ickes about the impending act of disobedience, FDR decided to offer free coffee and doughnuts to Patterson and her fellow protesters. And a trap was set. On November 18, the day the trees were to be removed, when the tree rebellion women needed to use a restroom, FDR guaranteed they would be shuttled to use one at a nearby hotel. As a result, no unfortunate photographs were snapped (or arrests made).91 Roosevelt had outfoxed Patterson. “It is beginning to look very beautiful,” Eleanor Roosevelt would later write about the dedication of the memorial; “and some day when the cherry trees around it bloom in great profusion, people will forget that we were afraid of spoiling the landscape around the Basin.”92