Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Eleanor Roosevelt believed that the surest way for environmental activists to persuade her husband to federally protect a marsh, or seashore, or woodlands was to schedule a one-on-one meeting with him, but the big challenge was finding a way to chat with a president consumed by global war. After being shown a map or series of photos of the ecosystem in question, FDR would as often as not be moved to action. Harold Ickes, Ira Gabrielson, Irving Brant, William Finley, Frances and Jean Harper, and Minerva Hamilton Hoyt had all seen this technique bear fruit. It was a photo album containing images of white pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus) colonies in eastern Montana that persuaded FDR to establish the Lamesteer NWR.96

  Recognizing that the Pacific Flyway also needed federal help—even during a war—Roosevelt established Colusa NWR and Sutter NWR in California. These sites became essential migratory bird havens within the large Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge complex pieced together by conservationists in the 1940s. In Texas, more than two thousand acres along the Rio Grande River were designated as Santa Ana NWR. Located in the southeast corner of Texas, it is also at the northern range of many Central American birds. As a naturally occurring tropical habitat, Santa Ana is a concentration zone for the black-bellied whistling duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis), fulvous whistling duck (Dendrocygna bicolor), mottled duck (Anas fulvigula), blue-winged teal (Anas discors), green-winged teal (Anas carolinensis), cinnamon teal (Anas cyanoptera), least grebe (Tachybaptus dominicus), anhinga (Anhinga anhinga), tricolored heron (Egretta tricolor), and other species. In Roosevelt’s mind, Santa Ana NWR was the perfect complement to Big Bend National Park.

  Even as Roosevelt established new NWRs, some that were already in existence deteriorated, owing to inadequate maintenance budgets and poaching. Dikes, water controls, roads, buildings, and other facilities were moved into the “deferred maintenance” category. Without the CCC, invasive species like the pinewood nematode (Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) and sickleweed (Falcaria vulgaris) spread far and wide in federal marshlands. Many NWR headquarters had no paid employees left. Local “friends” groups kept many NWRs in reasonably good shape with volunteer programs. But the very fact that the NWRs weren’t targeted for dissolution during World War II gave Roosevelt’s system historical permanence.97

  If sacrifices were made on preserved lands, they were a constant part of life for citizens, too—though on a minuscule scale compared to the lot of those in the war zone. Americans were being asked to observe blackout drills; recycle metals, oil, and paper; and use ration cards to purchase commodities such as sugar, coffee, meat, and gasoline. FWS augmented the domestic war effort by promoting sources of protein other than the usual favorites of beef, lamb, and pork. The FWS, through its Wildlife Leaflet series offered wild game recipes, which encouraged the use of muskrat, turtle, and rabbit as main courses in rural areas. Wildlife Leaflet 218, “Domestic Rabbits in the Food for Freedom Purchases,” the authors offered techniques for killing, dressing, and broiling domestic rabbits. In Wildlife Leaflet 229, muskrat was promoted as more delicious than traditional hamburger meat; recipes were included for muskrat à la terrapin, wine-fried muskrat, and muskrat salads.

  During World War II, the Forest Service posted signs at the entrances of national forests and parks which read, “Land of Many Uses.” This notion, the heart of Pinchot’s conservation philosophy, was that recreation, wildlife, timbering and mining could all coexist. But Roosevelt knew that not all “uses” could work together in harmony. Cecil Andrus, a longtime governor of Idaho who served as secretary of the interior under Jimmy Carter, described the tension: “I’ve never seen people enjoying a picnic in an open-pit mine.”98 It’s hard to allot credit in history for preventing something, but Roosevelt’s insistence that national forests and national wildlife refuges not be pillaged for natural resources during the war was indeed proof of a brave conservation policy.

  Refusing to be put on the defensive by the timber lobby, Roosevelt asked Nelson Brown, whom he had earlier asked to oversee lumber production in the Northeast, to describe in the Journal of Forestry his family’s longtime commitment to responsible timbering. Brown’s February 1943 article, “The President Practices Forestry,” related how, for three hundred years, the Roosevelts had been pioneers in wise-use forestry. As president, Brown argued, FDR had made forest conservation a national undertaking. “His leadership in planting trees and in selectively cutting his woods has had an important influence on many other private timberland owners to ‘Go thou and do likewise,’” Brown wrote. “The resulting examples of forest management are landmarks in the progress of forestry and are doing their part to offset the wolf cries of a long-heralded timber famine and the much publicized stories of denudation and depletion of our forest resources.”99

  Brown wanted other American tree farmers to understand that the president viewed his Hyde Park estate as living proof of his personal commitment to forestry. He wove statistics about FDR’s silviculture successes into his Journal of Forestry article. The average number of trees Roosevelt cut per acre was still 16.7, which equaled 11 percent of the total number at Hyde Park that were ten inches or more in diameter. Brown noted that the volume of timber removed varied from 23 to 60 percent of the stand and averaged 3,588 board feet per acre (or 43 percent of the “merchantable stand”). What made these facts intriguing was that FDR kept his own detailed records about forestry on his farm—there were no corresponding financial records, for example. The commander in chief who didn’t keep a diary of his historic meetings with Winston Churchill in Newfoundland or at the Casablanca Conference in Morocco documented the growth patterns of trees at Hyde Park and Warm Springs with amazing exactitude. According to Brown, only in late 1941, after Pearl Harbor, did FDR feel the need to fell a few overmature oaks on the Springwood grounds to contribute to the war effort against Germany and Japan. A naval vessel somewhere in the Atlantic or Pacific had received FDR’s Dutchess County board feet, proving that the president was both a forester and a patriot.

  VIII

  On March 12, 1943, Harold Ickes lunched with FDR at the White House and discussed the proposed Jackson Hole National Monument.100 (In this case, “hole” referred to a big valley ringed by high peaks.) The debate over whether this beautiful part of western Wyoming should be incorporated into Grand Teton National Park or left in the hands of ranchers and developers had been raging since the early 1920s. Residents of the Jackson Hole settlements—Jackson, Wilson, Kelly, and Moran—wanted the region free for cattle ranching. A smaller group favored a national monument designation for the valley, believing the protected land would encourage the creation of “dude ranches” for East Coasters or Europeans hungering for a fanciful taste of the cowboy experience portrayed in Hollywood movies.

  Undeterred by the ranchers, Horace Albright, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park from 1919 to 1929, began an effort to bring Jackson Hole under the purview of the National Park Service. Albright covertly arranged to take philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. on a guided tour of the Tetons. Rockefeller was overwhelmed. In his estimation, it was perhaps the “most majestic” mountain vista in America. Collaborating with Albright, Rockefeller started quietly buying up all the ranchlands in the region in order to protect them from cattle. There was one imperative: the real estate had to be purchased quietly. If Wyoming ranchers heard that “a Rockefeller was on the loose,” they would instantly increase the prices of their land fivefold.101

  John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife, Abby, surveyed the Grand Teton Mountains during a boat ride on Jenny Lake, Wyoming, in 1931. Without the stealthy intervention of the powerful couple, the glories of the range might have been lost. Quietly buying land amid the chaotic development that prevailed there, they were eventually able to donate to the nation thirty-five thousand acres, crucial in the creation of the Grand Teton National Park, including the former Jackson Hole National Monument.

  After about thirty-five thousand acres had been purchased from ranchers for approximately $1 million, Rockefelle
r attempted to deed the land over to the federal government for the expansion of Grand Teton National Park.102 But with Albright having retired from the Department of the Interior in 1933, the movement to enlarge Grand Teton National Park hit a sizable roadblock. A consortium of Rocky Mountain stockmen and miners successfully lobbied Congress to refuse Rockefeller’s generous land gift to the federal government.

  Rockefeller had paid taxes on the Jackson Hole land for fifteen years, awaiting the moment when the political tensions would cool down enough to allow Congress to accept his donation. But with the onset of World War II Rockefeller, worried about losing momentum, began to play hardball. Late in 1942, he told his friend Harold Ickes that the government needed to make a decision about his gift one way or another. On February 10, 1943, Rockefeller wrote a strongly worded letter to FDR, which carried a backhanded compliment combined with an ultimatum. “I have now determined to dispose of the property, selling it, if necessary, in the market to any satisfactory buyer,” Rockefeller wrote. “Because of your interest in the national parks and in the conservation of great areas for public use, I have preferred to advise you in advance of my intention, rather than to have you hear of it first as an established fact.”103

  Determined to bring Jackson Hole under Interior’s purview, Ickes had an executive order drafted and began testing the waters for national monument designation at the White House. “My own view is that the President ought to set up a national monument before we lose an offer that will never be made again,” Ickes wrote on February 27, 1943, to Pa Watson (with the intention that the back-channel message would be forwarded to FDR). “We need this land, not only to round out our park holdings in the Grand Teton area, including Jackson Lake, but also because much of this land would afford winter feed for elk and deer, thousands of which are without sufficient forage during the winter.”104 Hence Ickes’s March 12 luncheon with Roosevelt.

  Not long after that lunch, Roosevelt cheerfully agreed to use the Antiquities Act to bring 222,000 acres of Jackson Hole land, including the Rockefeller tract, under the National Park Service as a national monument. Presidential Proclamation No. 2578 saved Jackson Hole from ecological harm. An elated Rockefeller congratulated the president, telling him that his executive action had “made possible the preservation for all time of the most uniquely beautiful and dramatic of all the areas set aside for national park purposes.”105

  New Deal conservationists were also ecstatic about FDR’s decision, but there was backlash from westerners who believed the federal government already owned too much of their region. Wyoming’s sole representative in the House, Republican Frank Barrett, cited FDR’s decree as proof that Hitler’s fascist tactics had taken root in American soil, introducing a bill to immediately rescind the action. It passed both houses but Roosevelt remained firm, vetoing the measure. (Barnett would introduce this same bill every legislative session from 1943 until he left Congress in 1959, aside from when he served as Wyoming’s governor from 1951 to 1953.)106

  GOP senators were likewise angry. Milward Simpson of Wyoming led the charge against Roosevelt’s proclamation, arguing that it was a federal land grab, that it would destroy the economy of Jackson Hole, and that it would cost ranchers their livelihoods. Roosevelt wasn’t going to be flummoxed by anti-conservationists who mocked the New Deal for putting nature ahead of Stetson-hatted cowboys. Moreover, he loved the scenic Yellowstone-Tetons area, and relished the fact that the blowhards had been fooled by Rockefeller’s dummy corporation.

  There was, however, a last card to be played against the national monument. On May 2, 1943, the Jackson Hole controversy took an odd turn. A group of heavily armed Wyoming ranchers, led by Hollywood actor Wallace Beery, drove 550 calves across the national monument to a summer grazing range without securing the proper federal permit. This stunt was essentially a challenge to Charles Smith, the monument’s superintendent, to arrest them. Instead of giving Beery free press, Smith treated him and his gang like gum on the bottom of a boot, sticky but not threatening to the designation of the national monument. From his Washington office, Ickes had a field day lampooning Beery’s “mock heroics” and “mail-order regalia” as a pathetic cry for attention from a Hollywood has-been. And the Department of the Interior reported to the press that Beery, a Californian, hardly qualified as a Wyoming rancher. He had a Forest Service permit for only a tiny cabin on a half acre of land bordering Jackson Lake and a “milk cow that had recently died.”107

  Beery nevertheless found a few gullible reporters willing to cover his cattle drive as a news story. Both Time and the Saturday Evening Post printed reports, while syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler compared FDR’s executive order to Adolf Hitler’s absorption of Austria. “They anschlussed a tract of 221,610 acres,” Pegler fumed about the national monument, as “Ickes’s domain.”108 (On September 14, 1950, the bulk of Jackson Hole National Monument finally would be incorporated into a greatly expanded Grand Teton National Park.)

  One downside of the Jackson Hole battle was that future administrations were hesitant to use the Antiquities Act to acquire land for the Interior Department; it wasn’t until the 1970s that any further national monuments of significant size would be established.109 But Roosevelt did use his executive privilege to name two other historic national monuments after Jackson Hole. In 1943, he designated George Washington Carver (Missouri), to honor the great Tuskegee agronomist; and in 1944 he established Harpers Ferry (West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia), to protect the site along the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers where John Brown was captured in 1859.110

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “CONSERVATION IS A BASIS OF PERMANENT PEACE”

  I

  Roosevelt studies a newly received globe in December 1942. After America’s entry into World War II, two American generals steeped in planning noticed that it was somewhat difficult for the two key Allied leaders to communicate accurately on geographical matters. General Dwight Eisenhower suggested to General George C. Marshall that Roosevelt and Churchill should have identical globes. In December 1942, after intensive work by a team of cartographers and a Chicago globe-maker, Marshall was able to present Roosevelt with his massive globe. An identical one was shipped to Churchill.

  Pastoralizing postwar Germany in the names of denazification and demilitarization was very much on President Roosevelt’s mind even before World War II ended. It was on his own agenda at the Quebec Conference with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, held in mid-September 1944. Prodded by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt sought to turn postwar Germany into a land of yeoman farmers. The Morgenthau Plan was immediately ridiculed by the State and War departments as global Jeffersonian agrarianism run amok. Changing an industrial powerhouse like Germany into a farm economy might take away the factories, but not necessarily the “innate Hun” militarism. It was assumed that because Morgenthau was Jewish, this thinking was guided by his hunger to punish the Germans for their Holocaust sins. There was truth in that assessment, but something else was at play. Morgenthau rightly claimed that his pastoralizing plan was similar to the New Deal’s Rural Resettlement and Farm Security Administration programs. “The Morgenthau Plan for Germany assumed that the Germans deserved harsh punishment,” historian Warren F. Kimball wrote, “but its ultimate thrust was an extension of the New Deal.”1

  Due to State and War Department blowback, Roosevelt repudiated his own Morgenthau Plan shortly after the Quebec Conference. Many critics of the plan—including top U.S. government strategists—mistakenly thought Roosevelt wanted to ban only heavy industry in the Ruhr Valley of Germany to prohibit the armament industry. Developing a new Germany where the population partook in small-scale farming, getting intimately acquainted with the land and forests, was Roosevelt’s idea of the ideal peaceful European country. Fearful that the Nazi mentality had been inculcated into the mentality of the German people, Roosevelt intimated that after the war some members of the Third Reich should be transplanted to Central Africa to
partake in TVA-style conservation work.2

  Always the grand experimenter, still impressed with Germany’s forestry program, Roosevelt thought that postwar Germany could join Norway and Denmark as model conservation-minded nations. To Roosevelt, pastoralism—“ploughshares over swords”—wasn’t a punishment, but a way to bring Germany back to the cultured humanity of Goethe, Bach, and the Brothers Grimm. But in agriculture, Germany had long relied on huge estates led by a conservative aristocracy; this led, in his mind, to a dangerous consolidation of power. Breaking up these huge entities into small farms would prevent Germany from rearmament. However, with the Morgenthau Plan spiked, he looked for another course.

  Throughout World War II Roosevelt continued raising trees at Hyde Park and Warm Springs. Using his own funds, he bought advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post to help him sell “fine fresh cut trees” for the Christmas holiday. These ads announced that the seedlings he had planted in 1938 were now, in 1943, ready to be harvested. A seven-foot tree grown by the president cost $1.75, while fifteen-foot-high trees sold for $1.95, an “exceptional holiday bargain,” the ads stated. The trees—sold at three Manhattan locations—came with Roosevelt’s guarantee as well: it was “A NEW DEAL in Christmas Trees.” They each carried a Roosevelt Val-Kill Farms tag that read, “NOT CUT BEFORE DECEMBER 1st.”3