Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

Archived at the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, is a fascinating “Christmas tree” folder with letters Roosevelt wrote to his friends to accompany a gift of a Christmas tree. In October 1943, he instructed Springwood’s groundskeeper, William Plog, to give away evergreens on his behalf: “One tree to be delivered to Miss Suckley at the Library; one to be delivered to Miss Delano; one to be shipped to the Crown Princess of Norway at Bethesda, Maryland; and one for Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on which I will give you shipping directions.”4 Roosevelt’s private secretary, Grace Tully, devised an elaborate method to deliver a tree to Churchill at 10 Downing Street: Plog wrapped it in burlap, crated it, and had it personally delivered by the army to Churchill. It was a touching gift.5 “I frequently visited the President at Hyde Park, and was with him there when he completed the plans for the Roosevelt Library,” William O. Douglas recalled. “I would tour the estate with him, and he would show me his latest project—the young Christmas trees which were turning into a good business venture for him.”6 Roosevelt was still running his forest plantations at Hyde Park and Warm Springs, carefully and purposefully selecting species, pruning the lower limbs of growing trees, making scientific soil preparations, overseeing weed and fungal control, and experimenting with seed enhancement by herbicide use.

  Because the U.S. Navy needed redwood boards—which resisted warp and rot—Roosevelt suggested timbering species in Latin America so that America’s giants could be left alone. When the navy told him it had located some albarco, a wood found along the Magdalena River in Colombia, he was ecstatic. It was even tougher than mahogany. The President even looked into establishing an agency called the Forest Products Service to help oversee the output of lumber for the war, without gouging public lands, but he was never able to get it up and running.7

  Redwood lumber was in high demand during the war because it not only did not warp but also had insulation properties, soundproofing capabilities, and resistance to fire; so Roosevelt and Nelson Brown experimented with growing redwoods and sequoias on the East Coast. Throughout the war years, Roosevelt raised both species of these trees with Daisy Suckley at Wilderstein in Rhinebeck, New York. After trial and error, the president determined that neither species would ever grow in Dutchess County. So his hopes turned toward Tennessee and North Carolina. “I do not think it is possible to make them grow in the East—with one possible exception,” Roosevelt wrote to Vice President Henry Wallace. “As you know, the rainfall in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or a little south thereof, is the highest in the East and I am going to get the Park Service to try planting them there in several correct locations.”8

  Ickes had grown accustomed to Roosevelt’s quirky silviculture needs and meteorological concerns. Why not let the president continue his forestry whims in the Great Smokies as a fun release from the wartime White House pressure cooker? “The location should be protected from winds and, at the same time, the soil should be as rich and deep as possible,” FDR wrote Ickes that March. “There are many such places in the Smokies.”9 The redwoods and sequoias didn’t grow in the Smokies as Roosevelt had hoped, and although a couple took root at the White House and the Washington institution, Dumbarton Oaks, they eventually died. But Roosevelt was successful in saving the Calaveras Sequoia Grove in Northern California (the largest and finest grove remaining outside of a national or state park).10

  By the fall of 1943, the Secret Service had grown fearful that the president was vulnerable to attack at Shangri-La. While the wooded buildings of the Maryland compound could hardly be seen by air, single-engine pilots were occasionally spotted flying over the camp. False rumors were planted with the press that Roosevelt’s new secret retreat was Hoover’s old camp on the Rapidan River (the one he had rejected in favor of the Catoctin Mountains). About 130 Marines kept around-the-clock watch over Shangri-La. Still, the Secret Service worried that too many reporters knew that Roosevelt’s weekend White House was in the Catoctins. On the recommendation of the Secret Service, he chose as his new Shangri-La financier Bernard Baruch’s plantation “Hobcaw Barony,” near Georgetown, South Carolina. “Moss waves from the branches of the trees,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about Baruch’s plantations. “Those through which we approached the house and immediately around it, are some of the most beautiful old trees I have seen. Even though we drove through some swampy land, this place seems to me a friendly cheerful place, lacking that eerie quality which I find often prevalent in Southern landscape.”11

  Even though the president’s health was problematic, with high blood pressure, migraines, and trembling hands, he kept a rigorous traveling schedule. On November 27, Roosevelt met with Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo to discuss postwar Pacific strategy. Then he traveled to Tehran for a summit with Churchill and Stalin to decide on the timing of a cross-channel invasion of France.12 Flying at low altitude over the arid Iranian countryside, a hazardous enterprise, in December 1943, President Roosevelt—en route to Tehran for a much-anticipated tripartite summit with British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin—saw the telltale signs of widespread soil erosion and deforestation.13 During World War II, Roosevelt had made seven foreign trips, traveling 306,265 miles, but never before had seen such poor land stewardship as in Egypt and Iran. Grass and trees were as scarce as bodies of water; there weren’t even clumps of bushes along the dry riverbeds. No one had thought to construct modern aqueducts and reservoirs. Aware that Iran was not a naturally harsh desert, he was appalled by the ecological abuse, envisioning a Shelterbelt for the Middle East.

  “Of course, I do not pretend to know Iran well on account of the shortness of my visit, but may I write you about one of the impressions which I received on my air trip to Tehran?” Roosevelt wrote to twenty-four-year-old Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the conference’s host, from the White House. “It relates to the lack of trees on the mountain slopes and the general aridity of the country which lies above the plains. All my life I have been very much interested in reforestation and the increase of the water supply that goes with it. May I express a hope that your Government will set aside a small amount for a few years to test out the possibility of growing trees or even shrubs on a few selected areas [and] to test out the possibility of trees which would hold the soil with their roots and, at the same time, hold back floods? We are doing something along this line in our western dry areas and, though it is a new experiment, it seems to be going well. It is my thought that if your Government would try similar small experiments along this line it would be worthwhile for the future of Iran.”14

  The shah was touched that Roosevelt, in the midst of war, cared about Iranian conservation (or the lack thereof). Convinced that the landscape of any country was the people’s portrait of themselves and that love of nature was universal, Roosevelt likewise wrote to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in February 1944 on the same topic. Having formed an alliance with Saudi Arabia that was anchored on petroleum strategy, he hoped to convince the Saudi leaders to think and act more sensitively toward the land, embracing their responsibility as environmental stewards. “My avocation, as you probably know, is the increase in water supply and in reforesting vacant land,” Roosevelt wrote to Ibn Saud. “I feel sure that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a great future before it if more agriculture land can be provided through irrigation and through the growing of trees to hold the soil and increase the water supply.”15 Ibn Saud’s reply—a polite invitation for FDR to visit Saudi Arabia—contained no mention of forest conservation.16

  In the spring of 1944, with D-Day approaching, Roosevelt spent occasional afternoons at Top Cottage with Daisy Suckley, marveling at the rhododendrons and azaleas and the springtime birdlife, feeling that this green patch of Dutchess County was his own self-expression. At Top Cottage, he kept over one hundred natural history books, his most dog-eared being Chief of Forestry N. H. Egleston’s Handbook of Tree Plants.17 On May 19, Suckley wrote in her diary that the president “just talked quietly about the
view, the dogwood, a little about the coming invasion of Europe.” That D-Day, in other words, received equal billing with dogwoods was typical of both Roosevelt (the arborist) and Daisy Suckley (the pastoralist). The Hudson River Valley helped the president put world events in perspective that May. In stressful times, he turned to Ray Bergman’s Trout and J. Fletcher Street’s Brief Bird Biographies as forms of diversion and relaxation.18

  Early in June, just days before the planned invasion, the president made a short trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, to stay at Kenwood, the secluded seventy-eight-acre home of Pa Watson. Although there was a guest cottage at Kenwood, Roosevelt preferred to sleep in the main house’s front bedroom, where he could better hear the birds chatter. Escaping from the Washington pressure-cooker and playing cards with Pa Watson helped Roosevelt recharge his strength.19

  On June 5, 1944, after four days in Charlottesville, Roosevelt returned to the White House. To deflect reporters’ questions about the war, he bantered amiably about forestry and the pink tulips blooming at the White House, never hinting that an English cross-channel invasion was imminent. Just after midnight on June 6, the president retired to the Lincoln Bedroom. Within the hour the first Allied troops would be landing on the beaches at Normandy. He knew the day was going to be long, no matter the outcome. The First Lady, who suffered bouts of insomnia, was too anxious to even try to sleep. She paced around the White House, awaiting General George C. Marshall’s report. While the lights stayed on in the White House, Allied forces were storming the five battlefield beaches of Normandy: Omaha and Utah (Americans), Gold and Sword (British), and Juno (Canadians). At 3 a.m., Eleanor woke up Franklin, who put on his favorite gray sweater and sipped coffee before starting a round of telephone calls, which lasted over five hours.

  That afternoon FDR visisted Andrew Jackson’s magnolia on the White House grounds, planted in 1835, for a moment of respite. Later, in an Oval Office press conference, he described the transformative events of D-Day. The armada that had crossed the turbulent waters of the English Channel from Dover that morning was the largest in the history of the world—the ships carried approximately fifty-five thousand American, British, and Canadian soldiers. On the radio later that evening he offered a prayer: “With thy blessing we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.”20

  Roosevelt didn’t forget about America’s national parks, even on such a red-letter day. Bills establishing national parks had taken, on average, anywhere from six to nine years to get through Congress. Big Bend National Park in Texas, in purgatory since 1935, was finalized on arguably the most momentous day of the twentieth century. Just before 1 p.m. on June 6, 1944, the president met briefly with four steadfast Texan promoters of Big Bend: Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Senator Tom Connally, Congressman R. Ewing Thomason, and Fort Worth businessman Amon Carter. A White House photographer captured Carter handing FDR the deed to the 708,000-acre Big Bend, a cross-section of geological eras.21 (A blown-up photograph of the handoff adorns the wall of the Panther Junction visitor center at Big Bend National Park, attesting to the act of D-Day preservationism.)

  On June 6, 1944, newspaper publisher Amon Carter (standing) presented FDR with the deed for a 708,000-acre tract that would form the basis of Big Bend National Park in south Texas. Carter, who started out in poverty, became the owner of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, as well as the city’s first radio station, a stake in American Airlines, and many other ventures, mostly within the state he loved. Carter was one of several undauntable Texans who confronted ranching interests in order to preserve the Big Bend region.

  Big Bend had been a Roosevelt priority for years. Whole mountain ranges, hundreds of square miles of Chihuahua Desert, and a complex of largely undisturbed canyons made by the Rio Grande River were now preserved for the ages. Five separate life zones were found in the region that was home to over 450 bird species. “I have heard so much of the wildness and the beauty of this still inaccessible corner of the United States and also of its important archeological remains that I very much hope that some day I shall be able to travel through it myself,” Roosevelt had once written Congressman Thomason. “Furthermore, I feel sure that it will do much to strengthen the friendship and good neighborliness of the people of Mexico and the people of the United States.”22

  Just six days later, on June 12, with America in a celebratory mood over the offensive in France, the NPS took over Big Bend National Park. Because the United States and Mexico shared watersheds and ecosystems around the Rio Grande canyons of Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas, Roosevelt thought that Big Bend—which William O. Douglas described as a “geological potpourri” of “painted skylines, painted cliffs, painted alcoves”—could demonstrate how critical joint conservation was in maintaining future world peace.23 To Roosevelt, Big Bend wouldn’t be complete until both sides of the Rio Grande ecosystem were off limits to developers. No longer would forests be cut for timber to fuel the quicksilver mines of Terlingua and Study Butte, two mining camps turned into ghost towns.24 Later that year, Roosevelt appealed directly to his Mexican counterpart to help usher in a new era of environmental diplomacy along the Rio Grande. “In the United States we think of the Big Bend region in terms of its international significance and hope that the Mexican people look forward in the same spirit to the establishment of an adjoining national park in the States of Chihuahua and Coahuila,” Roosevelt wrote to President Manuel Ávila Camacho. “These adjoining parks would form an area which would be a meeting ground for the people of both countries, exemplifying their cultural resources and advancement, and inspiring further mutually beneficial progress in recreation and science and the industries related thereto.”25 That international park has yet to be completed, although Barack Obama signed a statement with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, in 2012, expressing interest in realizing FDR’s dream.

  II

  In July 1944, not without some reservations, the president accepted the Democratic nomination for a fourth term. In good times Roosevelt heartily enjoyed delivering stump speeches and shaking hands, but in 1944, the thought of campaigning against Thomas Dewey of New York bored him. Also, consumed with fatigue, Roosevelt yearned for Springwood and Top Cottage. He even nursed a dream that the United Nations—his grand plan for a body of global governance—might be headquartered in Dutchess County.26 “All that is within me,” the president wrote just before accepting the nomination, “cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River, to avoid public responsibilities, and to avoid the publicity which in our democracy follows every step of the Nation’s Chief Executive.”27 But Roosevelt, knowing his work wasn’t finished, that his voice resonated democracy, allowed the nomination to proceed. Although he didn’t officially commit to running for reelection until mid-summer, he played no cat-and-mouse games. “If the convention should nominate me, I shall accept,” Roosevelt said. “If the people elect me, I will serve.”28

  The controversy at the convention pertained to FDR’s vice-presidential running mate for the November election. The problem for Roosevelt was that he liked Wallace and admired his work ethic, as did most Americans. Wallace’s problem, however, was that he was a liberal and several powerful Democratic bosses—who had already seen the party move to the left under FDR—wanted him off the ticket. Although one would think that FDR could have designated his dog, Fala, as the vice-presidential candidate and still won the election in 1944, he bowed to the bosses. For the sake of party unity, he dismissed Wallace and opened the question of a replacement. But if Wallace was purged, who would be number two? It was not a slight question with Roosevelt’s health rapidly deteriorating. The man FDR wanted to be his running mate was Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. Of the leading vice-presidential candidates, only Douglas, the leading high-profile preservationist for the Cascades of Washington and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, shared Roosevelt’s deep love of conservation. For this reason alone, Ickes thought there was no smarter New Dealer alive in America from a political and
legalistic perspective than Douglas.

  One the eve of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the president had dictated to Grace Tully that he would be happy to run “with either Bill Douglas or Harry Truman” on the ticket; Douglas’s name was put before Truman’s. But the Democratic National Committee chairman, Robert E. Hannegan of Missouri, made a switch, putting Truman first. Whether Roosevelt was party to this remains open to debate. Truman was nominated, while Douglas remained on the Supreme Court, and remained a vociferous champion of the environment well into the 1970s.

  “We have lost much with our environment,” Douglas would bemoan in coming years. “We allow engineers and scientists to convert nature into dollars and into goodies. A river is a thing to be exploited, not treasured. A lake is better as a repository of sewage than as a fishery or canoe-way. We are replacing a natural environment with a symbolic one.”29

  On the campaign trail in 1944, Roosevelt would excitedly tell rural voters that yields could increase exponentially by dutifully regulating the timing of harvest. He’d talk about the benefits of healthy forests at every stop, how they absorbed rainfall, refilled groundwater aquifers, and slowed runoff from storms—the same gospel he’d been preaching since 1910. A favorite biblical verse of FDR’s—“When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shall not destroy the trees thereof by forking an axe against them” (Deuteronomy 20:19)—became a maxim for him.30 At one whistle stop, a voter remarked to Roosevelt that he spoke about trees, soil, and water more than the war in Europe and the Pacific. “I fear,” FDR replied, “that I must plead guilty to that charge.”31

  It seemed to George C. Marshall that the president saw the world in terms of seaports, rivers, and forests rather than cities. Even during military strategy meetings in the White House’s map room, Roosevelt invoked postwar conservation of natural resources. War consumed the president’s every waking hour. But his interest in geography and conservation aided his strategic thinking in dozens of ways. With U.S. forces moving deliberately across France, marching to Berlin, Roosevelt started planning the global peace. His grand hope was to succeed where Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations had foundered—world peace forever.32