Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  While Leopold had constructively criticized the CCC at its weak spots, he recognized the value of many of the New Deal’s land rehabilitation projects executed by the Forest Service, including the initiative in the Ozarks. During FDR’s first term, the Forest Service purchased more than 3.3 million acres of fallow farmlands and clear-cut woodlands in southern Missouri. In this spirit, the president wanted to turn the area, blessed with numerous “first magnitude” natural springs and hundreds of caves for exploration, into a bustling recreational hub. (It didn’t hurt that the scenic Eleven Point River ran through the region.) CCCers helped reforest the acreage, which had been stripped for timber. After the Ozarks were rehabilitated, FDR, on September 11, 1939, only ten days after Germany invaded Poland, established two huge national forests in Missouri: Mark Twain and Clark.73 Leopold might not have liked the picnic tables and boating facilities erected by the CCC, but then, he himself sought solace—and prime hunting—in a refuge he called “the shack” along the Wisconsin River. FDR only wanted the same privilege for all Americans. Designating the acreage in Missouri as national forestland would at least keep the extraction industries at bay.

  On November 19, 1939, President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in Hyde Park for his presidential library—the first in American history. Two bills the president had signed during his first term—the Reorganization Act of 1933 and the Historic Sites Act of 1935—enabled the National Park Service to preserve the heritage of American presidents. FDR would later donate most of the Springwood estate’s forests, hills, gardens, and spectacular views of the Hudson River to the Department of the Interior.74 Under the watchful eye of Harold Ickes, this first presidential library, a repository for FDR’s public and private papers, was soon completed on the Springwood grounds.

  At the press event that November at Springwood, FDR was the beneficiary of his own invention. He spoke of his lifelong kinship with Dutchess County. Members of his Hyde Park Home Club told the press that Franklin hadn’t changed much since his first run for public office in 1910; his blue eyes hadn’t lost any of their trademark brightness. And his penchant for forestry was stronger than ever. Years and decades would pass, the president told the assembled people, while his sycamores, maples, poplars, and white pines continued to grow. Speaking in the third person about his own past, he said, “Half a century ago a small boy took especial delight in climbing an old tree, now unhappily gone, to pick and eat ripe sickle pears. That was just about one hundred feet to the west of where I am standing now. And just to the north he used to lie flat between the strawberry rows and eat sun-warmed strawberries—the best in the world.” Roosevelt went on to explain how he used to dig into woodchuck holes with his dogs. “Some of you are standing on top of those holes at this minute. Indeed, the descendants of those same woodchucks still inhabit this field and I hope that, under the auspices of the national archivist, they will continue to do so for all time.”75

  Roosevelt’s Springwood had gone through many renovations since he was a bird-obsessed boy during the Gilded Age. Seen across a broad green, the flat rooflines of the estate’s main house were bracketed by wings, and the long facade was lined with a covered veranda. When FDR returned to the estate as an adult, he seemed most proud of the mounted birds he had collected in his adolescent years, which Sara had long since placed in the front hall cabinets for all to see. This bird collection was a happy reminder of his cherished youth, when he had traipsed all over Dutchess County looking for new entries to record in his American Ornithologists’ Union diaries.

  Because the president was always eager to escape the nerve-taxing confines of the White House, Springwood had become, as Eleanor Roosevelt recalled, more of an “official residence.” As president, FDR made two hundred trips to Hyde Park. At times the “first couple” had to bring in extra help to assist “his mother’s employees because of the large number of guests who followed the president and the extra staff that must come with him; but the manner of life changed very little.”76 All sorts of structural accommodations, including the construction of a tiny elevator, were made to allow the president’s wheelchair access to every room. Whenever suggestions were made that perhaps the first-floor library should be transformed into a bedroom, FDR brushed them aside. A phone next to his bed, wired directly to the White House, allowed him to conduct official business while at Hyde Park. But true privacy was hard to come by at Springwood, so he frequently disappeared to Top Cottage.

  “I found that on my trips to Hyde Park from Washington it was almost impossible to have any time to myself in the big house,” Roosevelt lamented. “The trips were intended primarily for a holiday—a chance to read, to sort my books, and to make plans for roads, tree plantings, etc. This was seemingly impossible because of (a) visitors in the house; (b) telephone calls; (c) visits from Dutchess County neighbors; (d) visits from various people who, knowing I was going to be in Hyde Park, thought it an opportune time to seek some interview.”77

  During the Christmas season of 1939, FDR took stock of his presidency. Since late 1937 the economy had hit the road bump known as the “Roosevelt recession.” Blaming “economic royalists” who hoarded fortunes but refused to invest in the stock market or expand businesses, Roosevelt began downsizing the Public Works Administration. The projects in North Dakota were some of the PWA’s last hurrahs.

  But the president reflected with pride on the PWA’s accomplishments. It had financed nine thousand highways and streets; seven thousand educational buildings; eight hundred health care facilities; six hundred city halls and courthouses; 350 airports; and fifty housing projects.78 And those statistics do not include the thousands of public playgrounds the PWA built using discretionary funds. Among FDR’s favorite PWA projects was the Central Park Zoo. Ickes, who had grown up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, was himself proud that the New Deal had electrified the train line of the Pennsylvania Railroad into New York and Washington, D.C. Always thinking about how PWA construction work would hold up a century later, Ickes was described by historian William E. Leuchtenberg as “a builder to rival Cheops.”79 And he was also a preservationist to rival John Muir. “Ickes,” biographer Jeanne Nienaber Clarke wrote, “saw potential national parks almost everywhere he looked.”80

  Though Ickes’s leadership of the PWA was considerably less problematic than Harry Hopkins’s of the Works Progress Administration (which revolved around smaller projects and employed unskilled laborers), the agency was disbanded by Congress in 1939. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the New Deal continued to prioritize affordable public housing for the poor, but with the looming threat of Nazi expansionism on the horizon, FDR knew the economy had to shift toward war production in 1940. By the end, more than ten million Americans had benefited from the PWA’s public works as an alternative to direct relief.81 “What the PWA sought to do,” Ickes wrote in his book Back to Work, “was to get honest work at honest wages on honest projects, which was a great deal more difficult a task than giving away money.”82

  But a telltale sign that the PWA had run its course in 1939 was that Roosevelt no longer ballyhooed new hydroelectric dams or public transmission systems. That July, PWA counsel Ben Cohen told the president that Congressman Lyndon Johnson was proving to be a master of Texas’s version of the TVA: the Colorado River Authority. An appreciative Roosevelt brought LBJ officially into the New Deal family, asking him to serve as director of the Rural Electrification Administration. Johnson declined the offer, telling Roosevelt—one of his heroes—that his job wasn’t promoting “big Washington” projects, but developing a stronger “contract with the people of Texas.”83 The president would have to do the same with citizens in the entire country in 1940 if he wanted to win a third term in the White House.

  As 1939 came to a close, a tragedy struck the New Deal conservation movement: Bob Marshall, the Forest Service’s chief of recreation and one of the country’s greatest wilderness advocates, died on a nighttime train ride from New York to Washington. He was only thirty
-eight years old. As a mountaineer, adventurer, and writer, Marshall was the closest thing the Great Depression generation had to the long-gone John Muir.84 It was Marshall who had led the Wilderness Society; called for the nationalization of 80 percent of American forests; and overtly opposed racial discrimination in the Department of Agriculture. It’s been argued that Marshall, unencumbered by ego, was “personally responsible” for preserving more wilderness than any other non-president in U.S. history.85 “He brought with him a real appreciation of the problems of the underprivileged and fought their battles so that they might share in the recreational and spiritual benefits of our land and our resources,” Ickes said. “His conception of conservation made him a leader among conservationists. The wilderness areas he worked so hard to perpetuate remain as his monuments.” (The Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana and Mount Marshall in the Adirondacks were named in his honor.)86

  That same year the conservation movement had taken another blow: Fechner, director of the CCC, died. He was only sixty-three years old. During Fechner’s last days, Roosevelt sat at his bedside at Walter Reed Hospital, cheering him on, but both Fechner’s heart and lungs collapsed. At Fechner’s instructions, six CCC boys from Rock Creek Park and Fort Dupont Park camps served as his pallbearers. Because Fechner was a Spanish-American War veteran, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.87 All over America at CCC camps, flags were flown at half-mast in honor of the symbol of both human and land reclamation. To lead the corps, Roosevelt hired James McEntee, a close friend of Fechner’s, and for three decades his loyal assistant director.88

  PART FOUR

  WORLD WAR II AND GLOBAL CONSERVATION, 1940–1945

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “AN ABUNDANCE OF WILD THINGS”

  I

  One evening in early 1940, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins escorted Daniel Tobin, president of the Teamsters union, to the Oval Office for a meal with Roosevelt. “Mr. President, you have to run for a third term,” Tobin implored. “Don’t talk to me about your fishing trips next winter—you are going to be right here in the White House.” “No, Dan,” Roosevelt replied, “I just can’t do it. I have been here for a long time. . . . I want to go home to Hyde Park to take care of my trees. I have a big planting there, Dan.”1

  Tobin was stunned. That spring he followed European affairs closely and grew ever more adamantly opposed to the aggressive spread of fascism there. He felt that the world situation demanded strong leadership. Was Roosevelt really going to slide off the world stage—with Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italian empire, and Hirohito’s imperial Japan threatening global democracy—to become a tree farmer?

  In early 1940, speculation was rampant over whether or not Roosevelt would defy the two-term tradition to make an unprecedented third play for the White House. The president’s private remarks about retiring to Dutchess County, and his agreement to write articles for Collier’s, with editor Thomas Beck purportedly paying him $75,000 per year for his post-presidential thoughts, indicated to many that indeed FDR was ready to retire.2 Even Eleanor Roosevelt was initially opposed to the idea of a third term, as was labor leader John Lewis. And so was his vice president, John Nance Garner of Texas. Many Southern Democrats thought that “Cactus Jack,” having dutifully served for two terms, deserved the Oval Office in his own right. Other potential Democratic Party replacements for FDR included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Agriculture’s Henry Wallace, and Postmaster General James Farley. Ickes, however, felt, as Tobin had, that a third FDR term was essential, endorsing his boss in a July 1939 article titled “Why I Want Roosevelt to Run Again.” According to Ickes, to deny the president was to “deny democracy itself.”3

  In the midst of the overall political swirl, a freighted rumor circulated that FDR, in his last year, would transfer the U.S. Forest Service from USDA to Interior, thereby recasting it as the “Department of Conservation,” something Ickes had long coveted. Senator John H. Bankhead of Alabama was disturbed by a report in Forestry venturing that FDR was indeed poised for the controversial transfer. Bankhead, a Democrat who loathed Ickes, threatened that if the transfer occurred, then all of FDR’s favored agriculture bills would stall out in Congress.4

  Gifford Pinchot also implored Roosevelt to keep the Forest Service out of Interior’s ever-expanding portfolio. Pinchot’s public thrust at the time was his belief that “permanent peace” relied directly on international cooperation in conservation and on the equitable distribution of natural resources. Since he believed firmly that resources, meaning “forests, waters, lands, and minerals,” were for only one thing, “the lasting good of men,” he trusted that fight with the Forest Service. Angry with Ickes, Pinchot sent a disapproving letter to the White House on January 13, and he took the unusual step of including 139 letters of complaint signed by prominent academics at American forestry colleges.5

  Pinchot’s power play backfired. Roosevelt began his reply by taking his former mentor to the woodshed, comparing this “group drive” tactic to that of “Father Coughlin or the United States Chamber of Commerce or the cattlemen’s associations, or, for that matter, horrid things like the K.K.K. itself.”6 That Pinchot, a longtime friend, was trying to strong-arm him was outrageous. FDR then sidestepped the issue of transferring the Forest Service in favor of a friendly, but not inconsequential discussion of the two departments in question. “And incidentally,” he ended his letter to Pinchot, “the days have passed when any human being can say that the Department of Agriculture is wholly pure and honest and the Department of the Interior is utterly black and crooked.”7 Pinchot immediately shot back another letter, squarely on topic, insisting, “To uproot the Service from its lifelong surroundings would do great injury.”8

  Pinchot’s and Bankhead’s railing against the reorganization scheme may have hit a nerve with the president, but the knockout blow came from George W. Norris of Nebraska, one of Roosevelt’s favorite senators, the impresario of the TVA. Over lunch at the White House, Norris told the president that transferring the Forest Service to Interior would be detrimental politically and a disastrous blow to New Deal conservationism. Norris well understood the rising backlash against progressivism; he had switched party affiliation from Republican to Independent in 1936 and had concerns with his own political future. According to Norris, the transfer of the Forest Service would be likely to split conservationist friends into two bitter factions.9 Furthermore, Norris expressed his thoughtful concern that Ickes, who was known as a curmudgeon, had certain “peculiar qualities” that hampered his ability to properly lead Interior. Too often Ickes sided with ECC activists Rosalie Edge and Irving Brant. Cognizant that Ickes was personally very close to the President, Norris made the offbeat suggestion that “Honest Harold” was suited to spur the War Department forward. “I appreciate the fact that Mr. Ickes’ real interest is in conservation,” Norris wrote to FDR after their lunch. “In the War Department he would have the opportunity to do a real service in carrying out ideas in conservation.”10 Later in the month, Bankhead informed the president that the plan to transfer the Forest Service had almost no chance of approval in the Senate. Pushing the reorganization plan, doomed to fail, simply wouldn’t be worth the fight.

  The Pinchot-Bankhead-Norris “group drive” had effectively quashed Ickes’s dream of a Department of Conservation. The outlook for a transfer of the Forest Service in 1940 looked remote. Lobbying on his own behalf, Ickes met privately with Norris, to no avail. Norris backpedaled a little, telling Ickes that he didn’t object to the transfer per se; instead, his primary concern was with its timing during a presidential election year. If FDR had done it in 1939, Norris said, he wouldn’t have squawked. But to Norris an open fight over the transfer in the spring of 1940 would adversely affect FDR’s chances for reelection come fall in the South and West.

  Irritated, sensing defeat, a fuming Ickes offered Roosevelt his resignation in early February. “Forestry has become a symbol to me,” Ickes dejectedly explained to the president. “
I have had one consistent ambition since I have been Secretary of Interior, and that has been to be head of a Department of Conservation, of which, necessarily, Forestry would be the keystone. I have not wanted merely to be a Secretary of the Interior. I have wanted to leave office with the satisfaction that I had accomplished something real and fundamental. I have told you frankly that, as this Department is now set up, it does not interest me. So I have come to the reluctant conclusion that, as matters now stand, I cannot be true to myself nor measure up to the high standards you have a right to expect of a man whom you have honored by making him a member of your Cabinet. Accordingly, I am resigning as Secretary of Interior and, at your pleasure, I would like my resignation to take effect not later than the 29th of February.”11 When Harry Hopkins heard that Ickes had submitted a letter of resignation, he rolled his eyes. “He is stubborn and righteous which is a hard combination,” Hopkins wrote in his diary. “He is the ‘great resigner’—anything that doesn’t go his way, he threatens to quit. He bores me.”12

  Ickes wasn’t merely grandstanding. He was sickened to see the Forest Service allowing the overcutting of woodlands in the North Cascades, the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan, and the North Woods of Maine for short-term gains. Speaking for many, Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce once caustically remarked that Ickes had “the soul of a meat axe and the mind of a commissar.”13 Perhaps there was truth in her barb, but America’s national parks and national monuments had no more steadfast friend than Ickes. It was he, more so than FDR, who moved beyond the wise-use confines of conservation and became a genuine environmental warrior in the tradition of John Muir. Roosevelt leaned away from commercial interests more than other presidents, before or since, but he was indeed a tree farmer and saw some room for compromise. Ickes didn’t. Like FDR, he hoped future generations would be able to wander among the New England hills, Utah canyonlands, Missouri bottoms, Georgia pine woods, and Dakota grasslands and see stretches of America just as it had been when the Mayflower arrived in the New World. That was part of Ickes’s soul that gave a reason to the meat ax.