Roosevelt’s verdict sent a broad message: protected public lands and species weren’t open to the military, not even in the time of national emergency. In early December 1941, Roosevelt worried that munitions companies, gearing up for the onrush of wartime production, were using America’s waterways for industrial dumping. FDR’s instinct was to push for tighter regulation of extraction industries and chemical companies. To accomplish this, the president partnered with the Izaak Walton League—which had fought for a uniform national pollution policy since 1934. The League’s goal was to prevent industrial waste and untreated sewage from indiscriminately being dumped into American waterways.10
This was no slight issue. The presence of raw sewage, toxic chemicals, oil, hospital refuse, acids from mines, cyanide, animal waste, and agricultural runoff was all too common in major rivers such as the Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, and Missouri. Along the Colorado River, uranium was being mined haphazardly in late 1941 without proper federal oversight—although this was an activity that demanded careful regulation. The last of the Hudson River’s famous oyster beds were dying. Boston Harbor, Newport News, and San Diego Bay stank of gasoline, fertilizer, and industrial by-products. Concerned about polluted waterways, Roosevelt wanted to establish an oversight authority for every principal watershed in the country, one that would have the power to fully enforce federal anti-pollution regulations. FDR felt strongly that Congress needed to appropriate funds for such an agency so that sewage-treatment facilities could be built in municipalities that were unable to finance construction on their own.
“I am sure you are aware of my continued interest in the protection of our streams and lakes from the harmful effects of undue amounts of polluting materials,” Roosevelt wrote Kenneth Reid of the Izaak Walton League’s Chicago chapter on December 3. “I appreciate the need for the application of corrective measures and to this end Federal assistance is being given to the construction of sewage treatment plants where added contributions of polluting material are resulting from the defense program.”11
Four days later, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii. By the time the bombardment ended, after two hours and twenty minutes, more than 2,400 Americans were dead and 1,200 wounded. Nearly two hundred American aircraft were destroyed, and all eight of the Pacific Fleet’s battleships were damaged or sunk. “They caught our ships like lame ducks!” Roosevelt fumed to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, chief of U.S. foreign intelligence. “Lame ducks, Bill.”12
Speaking to Congress the following day, peering into the crowded chamber, Roosevelt explained, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked” by Japan on the Hawaiian Islands and Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway Island.13 A few sentences later he asked Congress to declare war so that “this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” The president received a standing ovation. Both the House and Senate immediately voted in favor of war.14
When Hitler declared war on the United States four days later, Roosevelt was suddenly engaged in a two-theater conflagration: one against Japan (in the Pacific) and one against Germany and Italy (across Europe). Nevertheless, even after the Pearl Harbor attack, Roosevelt, battening down the hatches, remained vigilant about protecting America’s forests, public lands, and wildlife.
One key Roosevelt land-conservation project, long in the bureaucratic pipeline, came to fruition only nine days after Pearl Harbor. On December 16, 1941, FDR issued Executive Order 8979, designating 1.92 million acres on the Kenai Peninsula—including the twenty-five-mile-long, six-mile-wide Tustumena Lake—as the Kenai National Moose Range.15 Roosevelt’s grand Alaska Territory sanctuary, similar in size to the Desert Game Range in Nevada, would protect “the natural breeding and feeding range of the giant Kenai moose (Alces gigas).”16 The Kenai Peninsula, a biological crossroads, was teeming with bald eagles, elk, loons, and warblers, and more than twenty species of fish, including chinook, coho, sockeye, and pink salmon.17 Roosevelt’s order wasn’t very popular in Alaska. “Get out! We don’t allow any game wardens around here,” became a popular anti–federal government refrain in the territory.18 (In August 1944 a war-weary FDR would go fishing in Alaskan waters.)
In some ways, Roosevelt’s conservation policies were deprioritized with America at war. National parks—like Olympic—would be used as a staging area for U.S. troops. Nevertheless, regulations in some situations may have been eased, but FDR’s historic conservation gains weren’t forsaken during the war years. And that was itself an accomplishment. To keep an eye on land gougers and petroleum profiteers, Roosevelt appointed Ickes petroleum coordinator for National Defense in late May 1941 to lord over the production and distribution of oil reserves during World War II. This guaranteed that America’s public lands wouldn’t be assaulted by extraction companies; Ickes loved being the watchdog and prosecutor of despoilers.19
II
After a recuperative Christmas at Hyde Park, Franklin and Eleanor returned to the White House in early January 1942 for what they knew would be a difficult year. ER managed to retain her characteristic equanimity by taking solitary walks along the Tidal Basin and reflecting on America’s storied past. “The longer I live here, the more the Washington Monument grows on me,” the First Lady wrote after a walk in the rain. “It changes in color with the atmosphere and it is beautiful at all times. Yesterday evening, the tracery of the bare trees near it stood out against its white background. It had a misty soft outline, which was entirely different than the clear-cut look it had against a blue sky.”20
On January 6, 1942, President Roosevelt delivered his first wartime State of the Union address, calling for national unity in the face of global fascism and for the mass mobilization of manufacturing to ensure the Allies’ victory. He pushed for the production of sixty thousand planes, forty-five thousand tanks, twenty thousand antiaircraft guns, and six million deadweight tons of merchant ships. A War Production Board was founded later that month to supervise the distribution of critical wartime resources such as timber, ore, copper, tin, zinc, and gasoline. The pressure to open up public lands to satisfy war demand was intense. Roosevelt and Ickes were determined to continue their emphasis on long-term environmental stewardship, but Americans were thinking in terms of board feet, not new national parks.
In early 1942, victory over Germany and Japan seemed far away. But Roosevelt, unlike Churchill, had determined that global conservation was a casus belli of winning the war, an integral part of his Four Freedoms. Just days after Pearl Harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt had tried to remind Americans that long-term conservation values were part and parcel of democratic thinking. “I wish I could say that whenever I see magnificent trees cut down, I could also see plantations of new trees, but I have not noticed that as yet,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. “One important lesson we still must learn is that we cannot ask anything which comes from our soil and not return something to the soil for the use of generations to come.”21
Of particular concern to Ickes were the vulnerable forests of northern Michigan. In the war frenzy for airplanes, jeeps, tanks, and myriad other pieces of military equipment for the U.S. government, Detroit-based companies like Ford Motor and General Motors, he feared, would pillage the pristine Porcupine Mountains. The “Porkies” contained one of the last stands of virgin hardwoods in North America and were on the docket for national park designation as a kind of Great Lakes bookend with Isle Royale. The forests of the Porcupine Mountains—so named by the Ojibwa because the tree line resembled the quilled rodent—were replete with sugar maple (Acer saccharum), American basswood (Tilia americana), eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), and yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis). The ecosystem was also thought to be rich in copper. It was a cornucopia of natural wonders and resources. And Ickes knew it was under attack by industrialists. By 1942, trees there were being lumbered at the staggering rate of 100,000 board feet per day. The increase in logging product
ion was facilitated by the completion of a railroad line through the most densely forested section of the Porcupines.
Because Ickes considered Chicago his hometown, protecting Great Lakes ecosystems was of keen interest. Reporting to him was Dr. John Van Oosten, the director of the Great Lakes Biological Laboratory and a preeminent fishery scientist.22 Having persuaded Congress in 1940 to designate Isle Royale as a “biologically intact” national park, Ickes pined for another, in spite of the outbreak of war. Struck by the fierce beauty of the Porcupine Mountains, whose long basalt and conglomerate escarpments ran parallel to Lake Superior, he began to prepare for the fight over federal designation. “In these times few people have the vision to think of the future even if a small effort will result in mighty gains for latter generations,” Ickes wrote to Roosevelt. “You have the vision . . . you are the only one who can do anything to save the wonderful Porcupine Mountain area.”23 With that, he recommended a new report from Brant, who had recently traveled to Michigan to gather information. “The lumbering railroad, just built, runs directly into the most beautiful area which will therefore be almost the first cut,” Brant wrote Ickes. “In this region as a whole, the nature of the soil, loose sand, means that this kind of lumbering will produce a desert.”24
Determined to save the primeval forest, Brant cleverly suggested that General Motors, which owned about one-fourth of the forestland in the Porkies, donate it to the federal government. “I think General Motors should be asked by the president to give this land to the government for a national park,” Brant wrote to Ickes, “as a goodwill token return for what it is getting out of the government in defense contracts. It is valuable land. When a stand of hardwoods is so fine that it is worth being made into a national park it has high commercial value. But it is an invisible drop in the bucket of General Motors’ war supply profits.”25 Although Roosevelt allowed Ickes to float the Porkies proposal with General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the company, claiming that it did not want to set a precedent, declined to cede the acreage.
Meanwhile, another strategy reflected by a bill in Congress, involved having the Reconstruction Finance Corporation lend $30 million to the USDA to make the Porcupine Mountains a national forest. It stalled, in part, because conservationists weren’t comfortable with a provision calling for the loan to be repaid through revenues derived from lumber contracts. Eventually the president found a solution that was more than acceptable: working with the Michigan legislature in Lansing to establish the Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park. Thanks to FDR’s intervention, the “last area of virgin northern hardwoods in the country” was saved for posterity. Just as Ickes and Brant had predicted, the Porcupine Mountains became a popular postwar tourist destination, visited by outdoors enthusiasts hoping to encounter and photograph gray wolves, wolverines, and peregrine falcons.26
Conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress tried in 1942 to “frustrate” what remained of Roosevelt’s conservation agenda and “even dismantle earlier achievements.”27 Legislators defunded the National Resources Planning Board, whose chair had been Frederic Delano, and moved headstrong to abolish both the CCC and the National Youth Administration because of the war. The two programs together cost $400 million per year. It no longer made sense, to many on Capitol Hill, with global democracy on the line, to have CCC men in fighting trim build a giant red rock amphitheater in Colorado, dig a reservoir in North Dakota, or save a manatee herd in Florida. Roosevelt tried to remind Congress that his work-relief agencies did more than just plant trees and save wildlife; they had trained over two million young men to become effective soldiers. “I cannot agree with those who take the position that these agencies should be terminated,” Roosevelt said in March. “I feel the youth agencies have a definite place in the all-out war effort.”28
Determined to keep the CCC funded, Roosevelt had his U.S. Army generals defend the work-relief achievements in national parks and monument areas. Douglas MacArthur, in his annual report to the secretary of war in 1933, had argued that the army’s involvement in the CCC provided “renewed evidence of the value of systematic preparation for emergency, including the maintenance of trained personnel and suitable supplies and the development of plans and policies applicable to a mobilization.”29 Omar Bradley soon declared that if not for the CCC boys, the army would have been critically short of cooks, truck drivers, and machine operators after Pearl Harbor. Bradley was grateful for the training those thousands and thousands of former CCCers had received prior to enlistment—it prepared them with the discipline needed to fight Hitler and Tojo.30 Time magazine declared that “more continuously” than any other New Deal project, the CCC had “respect of the foes as well as friends of Franklin Roosevelt.”31 Humphrey Bogart, the actor, was even enlisted to praise Roosevelt’s pet program, describing the agency as “a 14-karat opportunity for young men.”32
Nevertheless, Congress wanted to defund FDR’s Tree Army. With America at war, there really was no choice.33 Roosevelt didn’t have the votes to stop it. “There was no doubt then that we were through with the CCC,” Conrad Wirth of the Department of the Interior remembered of the days following Pearl Harbor, “it was no longer a question of reorganizing it, but rather of disbanding it.”34 In late March 1942 the Washington Post reported that the total number of CCC camps would be reduced from fifteen hundred the previous year to only six hundred. And most non-defense work by the CCC was ordered ended.35 A few New Dealers kept up the fight, though. Out of desperation, James J. McEntee, director of the CCC, tried to persuade the public that his agency was a “physical conditioner for youths.”36 Likewise, Ickes claimed that the CCC had directly assisted the U.S. military by helping build convalescence centers for soldiers on army reservations and erecting communication lines essential for military operations.37 The cause was slipping, though.
To justify keeping the CCC alive, Roosevelt needed a dramatic alibi to shop on Capitol Hill. Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah, a sympathizer, had written the White House a cogent letter about his fear that Japanese arsonists would torch the West Coast’s wild forests. The threat of sabotage, Thomas believed, was FDR’s best gambit. “You are dead right about the danger of forest fires on the Pacific Coast,” the president replied to Thomas. “It is obvious that many of them will be deliberately set on fire if the Japs attack there—and even if they do not there I don’t think people realize that both the CCC and NYA are doing essential war work and that if they are abolished some machinery will have to be started to take their places—and probably at a net increased cost.”38
Longtime enemies of the New Deal jumped at the opportunity to publicly ridicule the CCC. Governor Leon Phillips of Oklahoma, a Democrat, testified before the Senate Labor Committee that the CCC was “poison to our boys,” teaching the art of laziness. No wording was too strong for Phillips, who charged that a “great majority” of first-time prisoners at Oklahoma’s state reformatory were ex-CCCers. McEntee quickly pounced on Phillips’s “dastardly insult to the young people of Oklahoma” as libelous.39
The Washington Post reported that Roosevelt was furious because his CCC boys were being defamed.40 After years of amazing press, his domestic pet project was now taking hits. A common refrain in Washington was that the CCC was now a waste of money and manpower. Bad press ensued. One story told of a fictitious “ghost” CCC camp that a clerk from the Department of the Interior had kept “running” for four years with bogus records he “kept in perfect order,” faking promotions, sick leaves, and disciplinary orders.41 Another unpleasant story was that CCC officials burned equipment because of vermin infestations in the camps. Representative Edward Creal, a Democrat from Kentucky, defended the CCC in this case, stating, “There is a lot of vermin in this war program, and a lot in the departments, and there is a lot of vermin in the arguments on this floor, and if you would strike out all the vermin that is in the Congressional Record here, then, instead of looking like a Sears, Roebuck catalog, the Congressional Record would look like a postcard, a
nd we would be able to effect a good deal of economy.”42
III
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were American born. Ickes was outraged by Roosevelt’s incarceration of his fellow citizens, calling it un-American. To drive his dissent home, Ickes had four Japanese men and three women transferred from a relocation camp in Arizona to his home in Olney, Maryland, to help raise chickens. (It was legal for Japanese Americans to live at liberty outside of designated military areas.) “I do not like the idea of loyal citizens,” Ickes told the New York Times, “whatever their race or color being kept in relocation centers.”43 The government also herded up German and Italian nationals, though that was to be expected in time of war. It didn’t put German Americans or Italian Americans behind fences, except in a very few cases. By contrast, Japanese Americans were deemed “dangerous” to the public peace and safety of the United States.44
Roosevelt’s decision to round up American citizens was a flagrant violation of human rights and morally reprehensible: a product of American prejudice toward the Japanese following Pearl Harbor. The fear of Japanese sabotage on American soil was widespread. Four days after Roosevelt issued EO 9066, however, the Japanese navy indeed bombed the town of Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara, firing on the Ellwood Oil Field from a submarine in the Pacific. While little damage was inflicted—an oil well was temporarily decommissioned and only an orange grove caught fire—the attack raised alarms throughout the West.45 If Japan could shell Goleta, then wasn’t the entire Pacific Coast at risk? The Los Padres National Forest, approximately one hundred miles from Los Angeles, seemed especially vulnerable to a similar attack. “[We] must guard against Japanese incendiary bombs and incendiary fires during the dry season,” the president wrote to the head of the Bureau of the Budget. “This is essential for our national future.”46
Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America Page 57
