Three weeks after D-Day, President Roosevelt met with Gifford Pinchot at the White House to discuss holding a global conservation conference at the war’s end. The best hope of the postwar world, Pinchot believed, lay in the care and restoration of the world’s forests, deserts, wildlife, and waterways ravaged by years of bombings and misuse. “Roosevelt,” Pinchot wrote, “unlike Taft, Wilson, and Hoover, grasped the full implications of the idea at once, received it with immense enthusiasm, and expressed the desire for rapid action, even to the possibility of launching the movement in the autumn.”33
During World War II, Pinchot, a survivor of three heart attacks, remained indefatigable in his conservation efforts, sitting on various commissions charged with boosting civilian morale. Although he had officially retired from government in 1935 and spent his free time fishing in Pennsylvania’s streams, he was still a vocal advocate for conservation reforms, vehemently opposing any hint of a transfer of the Forest Service to the Department of the Interior. Congressmen consulted him on conservation-related issues. Agreeing that “all Americans must do their part,” Pinchot invented fishing tackle that could be used by U.S. military personnel who found themselves marooned on lifeboats. Likewise he developed a “water substitute” derived from the juices of raw fish.34 And his speech delivered at the Eighth Pan American Scientific Conference, held in early May 1940, motivated the president to look seriously at holding an international conservation conference. Pinchot argued forcefully that “conserving, utilizing, and distributing natural resources to the mutual advantage of all nations might well remove one of the most dangerous of all obstacles to a just and permanent world peace.” Pinchot’s clarion call for global environmental standards evolved with Roosevelt’s help throughout the early 1940s before being distilled into a single phrase: “Conservation is a basis of permanent peace.”35
With this enduring slogan, Roosevelt asked his White House staff to help Pinchot draft a working proposal for a summit in just three weeks’ time.36 As Election Day drew closer, Roosevelt sent Pinchot an encouraging note about the finished proposal. “Remember that I have not forgotten that conservation is a basis of permanent peace, and I have sent the enclosed to Cordell Hull,” he wrote on October 24. “I think something will happen soon. You must, of course, be on the American Delegation!”37 If Theodore Roosevelt brought the conservationist revolution to America, FDR, in the fall of 1944, was going to bring it to the wider world. At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, held in Washington, D.C., from August 21 to October 2, 1944, the United States and its allies outlined the contours of a new postwar international organization: the United Nations.38 In addition to all else, this new organization would be the appropriate body to establish international ground rules for timbering, mining, and drilling.
The courtly, white-haired Hull, the longest-serving secretary of state in U.S. history, had worked doggedly at Dumbarton Oaks to establish the United Nations. With the outline in place, he retired from public life. But before he did, FDR had ordered him explicitly to ensure that global conservation was a top priority in any postwar diplomatic organization:
In our meetings with other nations I have a feeling that too little attention is being paid to the subject of the conservation and use of natural resources.
I am surprised that the world knows so little about itself.
Conservation is the basis of permanent peace. Many different kinds of natural resources are being wasted; other kinds are being ignored; still other kinds can be put to more practical use for humanity if more is known about them. Some nations are deeply interested in the subject of conservation and use and other nations are not at all interested.
It occurs to me, therefore, that even before the United Nations meet for the comprehensive program which has been proposed, it could do no harm—and it might do much good—for us to hold a meeting in the United States of all of the united and associated nations for what is really the first step toward gathering for the purpose of a world-wide study of the whole subject.
The machinery could at least be put into effect to carry it through.
I repeat again that I am more and more convinced that conservation is a basis of permanent peace.
Will you let me have your thoughts on this?
I think the time is ripe.39
III
The Republicans chose as their nominee Thomas E. Dewey, a former Manhattan prosecutor who had been elected governor of New York in 1942. A national hero as a crime-buster, Dewey struggled to find a meaningful wedge issue for the GOP. Realizing that it would be undignified to question Roosevelt’s health, Dewey attempted, particularly in the West, to use the president’s enthusiasm for the Antiquities Act against him. Insinuating that the Roosevelt administration was filled with communist sympathizers, Dewey focused his disapproval on FDR’s controversial presidential proclamation 2578 of 1943, which had designated Jackson Hole a national monument. It was in the news, because incensed lawmakers from Wyoming had introduced congressional legislation to rescind it.
As a counterattack, Roosevelt asked Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas to kill any such bill. “Jackson Hole is one of the most scenic areas in the country and a wintering ground for the southern Yellowstone elk herd, the largest elk herd in the United States,” Roosevelt wrote to Rayburn. “Last year to avoid losing Mr. Rockefeller’s gift to carry out the commitment, made during the administrations of Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, I established Jackson Hole National Monument, under the authority of . . . the Antiquities Act. This Act had been used for this purpose many times before. Five Republican Presidents and one Democratic President before me have established a total of seventy-one national monuments under the authority of this Act, many of them larger than the Jackson Hole NM.”40 In the end, Rayburn couldn’t stop the bill, which made it through both houses of Congress; Roosevelt exercised a pocket veto.41
The battle over Jackson Hole National Monument intensified during the 1944 presidential election. Dewey delivered blistering speeches about New Deal “land grabs” that made westerners “wards” of Uncle Sam; case in point, 51 percent of Wyoming had been given over to public lands. In Sheridan, from a rostrum at the historic Sheridan Inn, a favorite haunt of Buffalo Bill, Dewey argued that designating Jackson Hole as a national monument had deprived Teton County communities of tax revenue for its public schools and had shown a complete “lack of respect for the rights and opinions of the people affected.”42 The designation, the GOP nominee asserted, was anti-American collectivism; the president simply didn’t understand rugged western frontier values. After the speech at the Sheridan Inn, Roosevelt’s so-called land grabs became a prominent talking point for Dewey at nationwide campaign stops as Election Day approached. “The Government takes the land under various guises,” Dewey charged in one stump speech. “Sometimes in the guise of conservation, sometimes under the guise of monuments, thousands of acres for a monument. The amount taken (in the West) for military purposes is infinitesimal.”43
Charges that Roosevelt was “land grabbing” in Wyoming were ludicrous; accepting Rockefeller’s generous gift of 33,000 acres only made sense. Roosevelt was rather cautious in accepting lands under other conditions. As a case in point, there were more than 400,000 acres of land that the federal government rehabilitated during the New Deal as Recreation Demonstration Areas. The NPS could have seized these RDAs, but Roosevelt sought Congressional authorization in 1942 to deed twenty-six of them back to the states.44
To counter Dewey, Roosevelt unleashed Ickes, who charged that Dewey, “in his beagle-like snuffing about for votes,” had maligned the three Republicans most responsible for establishing Jackson Hole: Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. After ticking off a few sizable western national monuments Hoover had established by executive orders, Ickes reminded Dewey (and the electorate) that “no ranch owner or cattleman lost a thing” as a result of FDR’s decision to designate Jackson Hole as a national monument: “We have not even interfered with th
e trespassers who have grazed their cattle on the public domain without paying the customary fee,” he said. “All that this Administration did was to carry out, in good faith, the obligation entered into by Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.”45 Congress agreed with Dewey, passing H.B. 2241, abolishing Jackson Hole National Monument. Roosevelt promptly vetoed it, to the surprise of no one.46 “It is disturbing,” Eleanor Roosevelt would later write about the Jackson Hole fight of the 1940s, “to find how little real enthusiasm there seems to be among our people for the preservation of our national parks.”47
Throughout the 1944 campaign, Roosevelt proudly invoked the conservation accomplishments of the New Deal. One-third of America was covered in forestlands. Over 180 million acres of woodlands in forty states were part of the national forest system: enough commercial forests left to maintain maximum sustained yield to win World War II. Furthermore, in 1935, there had been fewer than 30 million waterfowl in America; now there were over 140 million from the Cascades to the Cumberland Plateau, to the Pennsylvania Wilds. In this spirit of accomplishment, on October 29, ten days before the election, Roosevelt delivered a spellbinding speech in Clarksburg, West Virginia, centered on the theme “only God can make a tree.”
In 1933, Roosevelt had been rocked by the sight of clear-cut hilltops in West Virginia. Now, more than a decade later, he returned to praise West Virginians for reforestation efforts, though he criticized them for not doing enough: “It doesn’t amount to very much, this cost of planting trees,” he told Clarksburg residents, “and yet the hillsides of West Virginia of our grandparents’ day were much more wonderful than they are now. It’s largely a deforested State. And I believe that from the point of view of the beauties of nature, from the point of view of all that trees can be, and from the point of view of your own grandchildren’s pocketbooks, the small number of cents, the small number of dollars that go into a reforestation, are going to come back a thousandfold.”48
Around the same time that the president was delivering his West Virginia tree sermon, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Audubon Nature Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she expressed the conviction that young people needed education about the natural world to better understand the “interdependence of human kind—the animals, the oceans, the Earth, and human beings.” In her “My Day” column, she described how hundreds of acres of Connecticut woodlands had become an outdoor learning center. “The whole thing, of course, is ‘conservation,’ but it is so easy to understand because it is done so simply,” she wrote. “It shows clearly the whole set-up of nature, going from the underlying rock, through plant and animal life, to human beings at the peak.”49 At the White House, noticing that the squirrels on the ground looked scrawny, she called the National Zoological Park to have them caught, put on a special diet, and rereleased.50
Beginning in mid-1944, FDR had several visits with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a former social secretary to Eleanor Roosevelt with whom he’d had an affair in the late 1910s. They hadn’t seen each other, as far as is known, since the mid-1920s, and Roosevelt’s daughter Anna arranged their rendezvous that summer. When Anna saw how these meetings lifted her father’s spirits, she continued setting them up behind her mother’s back. At the end of the year, Rutherfurd came to Warm Springs to see FDR, and he took her on a sightseeing tour of Meriwether County. Later, Lucy told Anna Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, about his unquenchable enthusiasm for nature. Even when discussing Hitler and Hirohito during a private picnic at Dowdell’s Knob, the president would stop and talk about the land: “I just couldn’t get over thinking of what I was listening to,” Rutherfurd told Anna, “and then he would stop and say, ‘You see that knoll over there? That’s where I did this-or-that’ or ‘you see that bunch of trees?’”51
IV
On November 7, 1944, Roosevelt trounced Thomas Dewey by 432 electoral votes to 99. Harry Truman was the new vice president. Although FDR had met Truman only a handful of times, he knew Truman was a hawk on waste and government inefficiency, and that the Truman Committee of 1941 had saved the U.S. government $10 billion to $15 billion in military spending, as well as countless American lives.52 But Truman had evinced no serious interest in conservation.
Roosevelt appointed Edward Stettinius to succeed Cordell Hull as Secretary of State. Handsome, silver-haired with a perpetual tan, Stettinius, had been an executive at U.S. Steel before entering public service, was also a former head of the War Resources Board, and had worked at the Office of Lend-Lease Administration. Distrustful of ecology, he thought that natural resources were to be used. Even though the president—working in conjunction with Pinchot—had decided that the global conservation of natural resources would be a major component of postwar diplomacy, Stettinius wasn’t convinced. In the meantime, war diplomacy and relationships with America’s allies—most notably Stalin’s Soviet Union—ate up Stettinius’s working days.
Exhausted from the 1944 campaign, looking forward to reviving his spirits in Warm Springs, Roosevelt grew frustrated with bureaucratic inaction on the UN conservation conference. The problem was that the State Department despised Ickes and Pinchot and felt that the president was thinking too much about forestry and irrigation. Stettinius had the audacity to distribute a State Department memo proposing to delay the conference.53 “I am not satisfied with the Department’s attitude on a Conservation Conference,” an irritated Roosevelt wrote to Stettinius around Thanksgiving. “Whoever wrote the memorandum for you has failed to grasp the real need of finding out more about the world’s resources and what we can do to improve them.”54
Roosevelt knew that the postwar world would be beset by ecological devastation and lack of clean water. Because the United States would be the world’s premier exporter, the nation’s future would be melded with that of the rest of the world. Global environmental standards would be a prerequisite for democracies to flourish and for developing countries to avoid a Dust Bowl of their own. In Roosevelt’s mind, this task belonged to the State Department, not to the Departments of Interior or Agriculture. “Just for example, take the case of Persia [Iran],” he continued. “The greater part of it, i.e., the North, used to be a forested country. Today it is utterly bare with a few cattle and a few very poor crops in the small valleys. The people are destitute. Anyone who knows forestry would say that an immediate program of tree planting is the only hope for the Persia of the future.”55 Stettinius was learning the hard way that FDR didn’t take global conservation lightly.56
After the Christmas holiday Stettinius worked to get back into Roosevelt’s good graces, writing to him about a sudden desire on the part of the State Department to establish a “national tribute grove” honoring the U.S. armed forces fighting in World War II. The secretary of state wanted the president’s advice about whether Joseph Grew—who had been a staunch advocate for protecting and preserving California’s redwoods and had been ambassador to Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor—would be an appropriate choice as chairman of the committee to establish the grove. Roosevelt used the overture to prod Stettinius to prioritize global conservation. “It is perfectly all right for Joe Grew to act as President of ‘The Save-the-Redwoods League’ but I think it is important to get the idea abroad that some long-time conservationists are interested [in the UN conference],” Roosevelt brusquely replied. “For example, Gifford Pinchot, who is undoubtedly our No. 1 conservationist, should be in this thing.”57
Even though Japan was losing the war, Roosevelt continued worrying about protecting the forests of the West Coast. As the president had predicted, the Japanese military employed a wildfire strategy against the United States, launching approximately six thousand paper hydrogen balloons carrying thirty thousand incendiary devices into the jet stream. The first balloon had been launched on November 3, 1944, and approximately three hundred of those bombs actually reached American soil, but the vast majority of them hadn’t detonated properly.58 In early May 1945, one such firebomb landed at the Fremont National Forest near Bly, Oregon, killing scho
olteacher Elsye Mitchell and wounding five Sunday school students—the only American casualties on continental U.S. soil.59
The first appearance of Smokey the Bear was on a poster drawn by Albert Staehle in August 1944. Before Smokey, Walt Disney lent rights to his character Bambi, the deer fawn, to the U.S. Forest Service in its effort to stop man-made wildfires. After the term of the loan was over, the Forest Service sought its own spokes-animal, and Staehle, working with the Ad Council, introduced Smokey to the world.
Around this time the U.S. Ad Council began using a cartoon bear named “Smokey” in its posters as part of a larger fire prevention campaign. Artist Albert Staehle drew the first image of Smokey, outfitted in a park ranger’s hat, pouring a bucket of water on a campfire; it carried the caption “Smokey says—Care will prevent 9 out of 10 forest fires!” While Roosevelt remained concerned that Japanese arsonists might succeed in burning down the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest, he knew that the cause of accidental forest fires was most likely to be careless citizens (generally by leaving a campfire lit, tossing matches, or operating machinery in arid counties).60 It wasn’t long before Smokey the Bear began appearing in brochures on forest fire prevention, teaching Americans about proper forest stewardship. It was yet another example of the administration trying to educate young people about how to be good stewards of the great American outdoors.61
V
As Roosevelt worked on his fourth inaugural address in January 1945, he kept in regular touch with Pinchot about their United Nations conservation summit.62 Whatever animus Ickes had once felt toward Pinchot had dissipated; among other things, they commiserated with each other about surviving their heart attacks. “Glad to be on friendly terms with him again,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “I have always liked him very much indeed in spite of our temporary breaking away from each other.”63 Both Ickes and Pinchot now consolidated their influence to push forward the dream of global conservation. “When you told me at luncheon on [the day before his inauguration] that you are going to take up the proposed conference on conservation as a basis of permanent peace with Churchill and Stalin,” Pinchot wrote to Roosevelt that January, “I saw great things ahead and was more delighted than I can easily say.”64
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