Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  In October 1942, 700,000 mallards congregated in northeastern Colorado, devouring unharvested grain due to a wartime shortage of farm labor, principally in the cornfields bordering the Platte River. Due to the skyrocketing number of ducks, FDR instructed Secretary of Agriculture Wickard to issue a “community permit” authorizing any properly licensed hunter living along the Platte River to shoot mallards in the fields at all hours of the day during the period of enforcement. “This first community permit seemed to work quite well,” Assistant Director of Fish and Wildlife Albert Day recalled. “At the time few birds per hunter were killed and the dispersal caused by the taking of a hunting sabbatical afforded considerable relief from damage.”73

  Roosevelt took a risk, amending his strict waterfowl protection policy of 1934 to suit particular circumstances in the Midwest and Colorado in 1942. Creating exceptions to the rules agonized FWS biologists. And watering down the law didn’t make game wardens’ jobs any easier. The FWS scientists had a point; Coloradans living along the Platte River soon begged for yet another round of special permits because the mallard population had swollen from 700,000 to 815,000. Unable to find migrant labor to harvest their crops, 1,140 Colorado farmers were provided exemption permits. The USDA allowed each farmer to kill nine ducks. There is no documentary evidence that anyone tried to exceed the bag limit. Word of FDR’s generous “community permits” quickly spread throughout the West. Citizens in Washington State soon demanded special permits to shoot widgeons that were causing damage to the vegetable seed industry of the Skagit Flats near Puget Sound; Roosevelt allowed the permits to be issued.

  Yet hunting and fishing licenses fell off in the seasons of 1942 and 1943 due to shortages of ammunition and tackle. Restrictions on gas and tires made it more difficult for sportsmen to visit remote places. But due to Duck Stamp and Pittman-Robertson revenues, New Deal fishing hatcheries and wildlife preserves flourished during World War II.

  V

  Throughout World War II, President Roosevelt’s whereabouts were often shrouded in secrecy. A sizable security detail accompanied him everywhere. Members of the press who were assigned to the FDR beat filed their stories under a voluntary censorship agreement. The hideaway that Roosevelt frequented most was the former Recreation Demonstration Area (RDA) in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, named “Shangri-La” by Roosevelt—an allusion to the fictional monastery in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. It is known today as Camp David (after Dwight Eisenhower’s grandson).

  Roosevelt (right) took Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain on a fishing foray during their wartime conference at Shangri-La (since then renamed Camp David) in the Maryland mountains in May 1943. As Churchill wrote of FDR and their outing in his memoirs, “No fish were caught, but he seemed to enjoy it very much, and was in great spirits for the rest of the day.”

  How the president settled on the name Shangri-La is part of wartime lore. On April 21, 1942, Roosevelt was aglow with good news for the press. Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, a former stunt flier with a science degree from MIT, had led a bombing raid on Tokyo. The invasion was of questionable strategic importance, but it boosted morale. When asked from where Doolittle’s planes had originated, a smiling FDR answered, “Yes, I think the time has come now to tell you. They came from our secret base at Shangri-La.” (Actually, Doolittle and his fellow pilots took off from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.)

  The next day, escaping the notice of the press, the president slipped out of Washington to his mountain retreat at Shangri-La.74 The Secret Service refused to let Roosevelt unwind at sea any longer (Germany sank more than 130 ships in the Atlantic during the first months of the war). In fact, his agents didn’t want him on any boat. Roosevelt pleaded to take the presidential yacht on the Potomac River for starlight cruises past Mount Vernon, but the Secret Service remained firm. So Roosevelt opted for a secret retreat, sixty miles north of Washington in the hills of Maryland, as his weekend White House.

  Ever since Ickes purchased his Head Waters farm in Olney, Maryland, Roosevelt thought about carving out a retreat of his own in the Old Line State. With a flash of enthusiasm he directed aides to scout the Catoctins in Frederick County for available land. Ickes thought that the president would particularly enjoy a CCC-improved RDA lot then known as Camp Hi-Catoctin, which was at an elevation of 1,800 feet. When FDR arrived at the site, a workman named William Renner helped him out of the car. Roosevelt took in the twilight vista, smiled, and pronounced to Renner, “This is a Shangri-La!”75

  Roosevelt had looked for—and found—secluded sites before, like the Little White House in Warm Springs and Top Cottage in Hyde Park. Ever an eager rustic architect, FDR penciled designs on the NPS’s cost estimate sheet. As was Roosevelt’s wont, to construct the “Bear’s Den”—large quarters with four bedrooms and two bathrooms—he specified local stone and timber be used as the primary building materials. One afternoon, Roosevelt told Conrad Wirth that he wanted a screened porch and terrace added to the “Bear’s Den.”76 Walkways through the forest were also established. FDR demanded that the dogwood trees, azaleas, spicewood, hazelnut, witch hazel, and other wild shrubs remain, “just as God made them.”77

  Reshaping the old camp was great fun to Roosevelt. Within the old CCC barracks on the property, which he renamed “221B Baker Street” after the address of Sherlock Holmes, Roosevelt joked that the Shangri-La compound was his newfangled, land-locked yacht. In early July, the renovated buildings, including guest quarters, were completed at a cost of $130,000. Theatrically, Roosevelt inspected Shangri-La as if he were a naval officer christening a new ship. His first journal entry revealed his puckish humor; he wrote on the thick, cream-colored entry book for the compound, “U.S.S. Shangri-La—Launched at Catoctin July 5, 1942” before signing his name.78

  Roosevelt’s “trial run” at Shangri-La lasted from July 18 to 20. Enjoying the cool morning air, he worked on his stamp collection, did a little reading, and made some pressing phone calls. Early overnight guests included “Wild Bill” Donovan and Jim Byrnes of the Supreme Court. Although Roosevelt was disappointed not to be in Hyde Park or on the Potomac, he took quite nicely to this woodsy Maryland retreat, far removed from Washington. Top-secret intelligence reports were often read here. It wasn’t a coincidence that the Office of Strategic Services was running a counterintelligence training center just down the road from the president’s wartime retreat at Chopawamsic RDA (now Prince William Forest Park). For all of Roosevelt’s humor, his hidden mountain camp was the backdrop for major decisions throughout the remainder of Roosevelt’s administration.

  Social life at Shangri-La was enlivened by guests such as Archibald and Ada MacLeish, Sam Rosenman, and Daisy Suckley.79 The ineffable Winston Churchill considered Shangri-La “in principle a log cabin, with all modern improvements.”80 William O. Douglas remembered that his Catoctin visits to Shangri-La were always accompanied by the ritualistic shaking of dry martinis. “I had a rather lonely time at Shangri-La because FDR was holed up doing homework on endless problems—he would read, then doze, then dictate, then read, then doze,” Douglas recalled. “I was company-in-waiting, ready to mix his favorite cocktail or to join him in idle chitchat.”81

  Everything at the mountain hideaway bore evidence of the president’s distinctive personal touch. There was even a dress code: casual, no ties. Knowing that his secretary, Grace Tully, enjoyed a nightcap and card games, the president had a sign posted that read, visitors will beware of gamblers (especially female) on this ship.82 Also on the walls were some of his favorite nautical prints. A telescope on a tripod was installed so that the president could gaze at constellations when the sky was clear. Guidebooks about the birds of Maryland were always within easy reach. Fireplaces were added to each bedroom, as the lodge proved itself and remained in use, even during the cold winter months. A chef was brought in to prepare popular Maryland dishes such as blue crab cakes, she-crab soup, and peach cobbler.

  While the president didn’t li
ke being trailed by the Secret Service, he enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger procedures required to maintain secrecy. Throughout World War II Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins learned to talk in code in case their conversations were bugged. So at Shangri-La, Roosevelt spoke in a cryptic code that was nearly indecipherable. At the president’s request, key people were assigned code names derived from figures at Hyde Park. Winston Churchill was referred to as “Moses Smith”; George Marshall as “Plog” (the longtime Springwood groundskeeper); Dwight Eisenhower as “Kueren” (a worker on the estate under Plog); Sir Stafford Cripps as “Mrs. Johannesen” (a weaver at Val-Kill); General Carl Spaatz as “Depew” (Sara Roosevelt’s chauffeur); General Mark Clark as “Robert” (after Robert McGaughey, the Springwood butler); and so on. Interestingly, FDR chose code names from only people on his payroll, not from any of his Hyde Park neighbors.83

  VI

  Bird-watching remained a Roosevelt hobby during World War II. Daisy Suckley had been a member of the Rhinebeck Bird Club during her formative years living on the Wildenstein estate. In that spring of 1942, Suckley asked the president to participate in the Dutchess County May Census of birds. Since Maunsell Crosby conducted the first one in 1919, FDR had retained a “keen interest” in the annual bird-counting tradition.84 Many species of birds FDR shot in the 1890s for his Springwood collection—sparrows, hawks, jays—were still thriving at Thompson Pond, only twenty miles from Hyde Park. FDR decided that the pond, which had a higher concentration of bird species in its seventy-five acres than could be found in some of the larger western national parks, would be the perfect locale for a bird-counting collaborative. He and Suckley were accompanied by ornithologist Ludlow Griscom, the research curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, who had traveled with Crosby on an ornithological expedition to Panama in 1927.85

  On May 10, 1942, an eager Roosevelt awoke at 3 a.m. for his outing with Griscom, Suckley, and a few others. After a quick breakfast at Springwood, the president grabbed his “bins”—birder lingo for binoculars—and ordered the top of his navy-blue phaeton rolled down for the predawn drive to Thompson Pond. Secret Service agents assigned to the president weren’t happy about the outing but didn’t dare complain aloud. Although the agents liked the president immensely, they were often exasperated by his childish antics, especially his fondness for playing “vehicular hide-and-seek” with his security detail. Time after time when driving around Hyde Park, he often took abrupt U-turns, demonstrating the distinct advantage of a light car and longtime knowledge of rural Dutchess County. On a number of occasions, Roosevelt successfully slipped away from the agents for hours-long spells to get lost in rural New York.86

  FDR left his house in Hyde Park before dawn on the morning of May 10, 1942, for a “birding party.” Those in the group were old friends and fellow bird-lovers. Left to right: Raymond Guernsey, Allen Frost, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, and Ludlow Griscom.

  As Griscom sat in the backseat of the phaeton, the windshield splattered with crushed bugs that formed starburst patterns, the president held court on warblers, wrens, and Dutchess County history. “We call this car,” Roosevelt joked to Griscom, “the Queen Mary.”87 When Griscom learned there were grenades on the floor of the car, fear washed over him. While Roosevelt happily chain-smoked, Griscom, quite sensibly, worried about an explosion. The president, utterly unfazed, acted as though it were the most normal thing in the world to have explosives rolling around on the floor of a fast-moving vehicle. That wasn’t all. Griscom remembered thinking that such a noisy, crowded automobile convoy was no way to attract the American wigeon (Anas americana) and the black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) in the solitude of Thompson Pond.

  Worried the outing might be a bust, Griscom asked Roosevelt to order the Secret Service agents to turn off their searchlights. “There is one person that the president of the United States can not tell what to do and that is a Secret Service man,” Roosevelt told Griscom. “If you want to go back and plead with them, go ahead.”88 To the ornithologist’s happy surprise, they obliged. In the hush of dawn, Roosevelt’s party then patiently waited without speaking, hearing only the marginal sounds of insects and the “plop” of a turtle. Once Griscom began his series of birdcalls, marsh birds—Virginia rails, soras, and bitterns—began appearing. Dozens of avian species were observed that morning. “One incident included my father standing beside the car doing his usual chirping to call the birds in close,” Andrew Griscom recalled. “At that moment a chickadee landed on his hat and explored it for a few seconds to the president’s delight.”89

  To FDR, patiently looking for birds and planting trees were the God-ordained practices of a civilized democracy at its best. The Germans were bombing Britain, American soldiers were dying on flyspeck islands in the Pacific Ocean, and factories in Detroit and Pittsburgh were pumping out munitions to satisfy the demand for war material. But the sun kept rising and setting, and Roosevelt thought it was important to tend his pines and continue the traditional bird counts. The president often attended St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park when he was in town. But whatever spiritual solace he found during the services was sometimes marred by the pressing demand for handshakes, backslaps, and autographs afterward. Therefore, Roosevelt’s nature-infused getaways to Top Cottage, Thompson Pond, and Shangri-La, away from the prying eyes of neighbors, helped him escape the ungodly pressures of being commander in chief.90

  When Winston Churchill visited Hyde Park on June 19 and 20, 1942, Roosevelt treated him to a guided tour of Springwood’s wooded roads and the best vantage points along the river. He was sharing one of his own deep-felt requirements. “I love this country of ours—every inch of it,” Roosevelt told a B&O train official during the war. “And I want to take the time to really see it.”91 With his “map mind” at work, studying the waters and forests of America—from the Hudson River valley to the Olympic Peninsula—was Roosevelt’s lifeblood. “The president drove me all over the estate, showing me its splendid views,” Churchill warmly wrote in The Hinge of Fate. “I confess that when on several occasions the car poised and backed on the grass verges of the precipices of the Hudson I hoped the mechanical devices and brakes would show no defects. All the time we talked business, and though I was careful not to take his attention off the driving we made more progress than we might have done in formal conference.”92

  VII

  In September 1942 the Army Corps of Engineers put the recently established Manhattan Project under the command of General Leslie R. Groves, tasking him with building the industrial capacity to process plutonium and uranium. A few months later, Hanford, Washington—located at the confluence of the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia rivers—was deemed the perfect site. Grand Coulee Dam generated electricity for Hanford’s “Site W,” acquired by the federal government through eminent domain. Even though FDR had saved the Olympics, the one-two punch of the Grand Coulee and Site W has prevented many from ever venerating him as a true environmental hero.93 This is unfortunate, for when Congress denied appropriations for new national wildlife refuges in 1943, the president nevertheless used his executive authority to establish a long list of them. It included Chassahowitzka in Florida; Great Meadows and Parker River in Massachusetts; Mingo in Missouri; Hailstone, Halfbreed Lake, and Lamesteer in Montana; the Missisquoi River Delta in Vermont; Slade in North Dakota; and Columbia in Washington State. Unfortunately, these new wartime refuges lacked congressional funding and illegal poaching persisted. Nevertheless, Roosevelt believed that in a postwar world they would receive proper maintenance.

  The grandest of Roosevelt’s unfunded 1943 NWRs was Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, on the Virginia end of Assateague Island. Thanks to field reports written by John Clark Salyer, Roosevelt understood that this vital saltwater marsh was a premier nesting and feeding spot for migratory birds on the Atlantic Flyway. The president’s principal rationale for saving Chincoteague was that the greater snow goose (Chen caerulescens atlanticus) needed a sanctuary in the Mid-At
lantic. The refuge was the setting for Marguerite Henry’s 1947 children’s book Misty of Chincoteague, which made the island’s wild ponies its most famous residents. The fourteen thousand acres of Chincoteague NWR, which the government purchased from the S. B. Fields family, were only a short drive from major metropolitan areas like Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Rachel Carson would write her first “Conservation in Action” booklet about this wildlife-rich ecosystem.94

  Another wartime sanctuary created by the Roosevelt administration was the Susquehanna River NWR in northeast Maryland. For years FDR had asked the Department of Agriculture for reports on the canvasback and redhead duck situation along the river. He worried about the 250,000 American wigeon (Anas americana) that were feeding on wild celery, weeds, and grasses around the Susquehanna flats. His intervention blocked hunting and other activities across some thirteen thousand acres on the water and a small island. The survival of the upper Chesapeake islands, around Blackwater NWR, was essential for the health of migratory birds, including the wigeon. (Due to broad changes in the river, the Susquehanna NWR was reduced in size thirty-five years after its inception.)

  From his years of sailing the North Atlantic, the president knew that migratory birds nested and fed in huge numbers on Monomoy Island, located eight miles off the southeastern tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during their epic journeys from the Arctic and eastern Canada to Florida. Furthermore, Monomoy, unlike Martha’s Vineyard, had almost no residents. There were only a couple of shacks and a smattering of cabins situated along the marsh ponds. In 1944, Roosevelt established a 7,604-acre NWR at Monomoy to protect the island’s sandy beaches, shoal waters, migratory birds, and gray seals.95 An abandoned Coast Guard station was repurposed as the new refuge’s headquarters. With only 1 percent of the Atlantic coastline owned by the government, Roosevelt saw his protection of Chincoteague and Monomoy as critical acquisitions.