Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  Well into the twenty-first century, Springwood remained the only place in the United States where a president had been born, grown up, and laid to rest. In a very specific provision in his will, Roosevelt had requested that the over half million trees he planted between 1912 and 1945 be protected in perpetuity. If one of his trees died, then another was to be planted in its place. The National Park Service was tasked with overseeing this program. The pond where Roosevelt swam in his efforts to recover from polio and the hemlock hedge were also carefully preserved. Even the river bluffs across the Hudson would be preserved as a memorial. “My husband’s spirit will live in this house, in the library, and in the quiet garden where he wished his body to lie,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “It is his life and his character and his personality which will live with us and which will endure and be imparted to those who come to see the surroundings in which he grew. . . . He would want them to enjoy themselves in these surroundings and to draw from them rest and peace and strength as he did all the days of his life.”6

  The state of Georgia designated the Little White House and its grounds a state historic site. Most of the trees Roosevelt had planted in Warm Springs were protected, and an elegant walkway—now known as the Walk of Flags and Stones—was erected as a memorial. Eventually each of the states donated its own block of indigenous stone to the historic site. Gifts from states where the CCC had excelled were especially innovative. Arizona donated a cross section of richly colored petrified logs from its Petrified Forest National Monument. The Iowa State Conservation Commission provided a rough piece of Sioux County quartzite from Welch Lake. William D. Hassett, Roosevelt’s correspondence secretary, presented the Little White House memorial with a slab of blue granite from Vermont.

  Immediately after the funeral, FDR’s associates and friends boarded the train back to Washington. Everybody was glum—except Ickes. Roosevelt usually had a stiff drink after a funeral, so Ickes, in the same spirit, went hunting for whiskey, and procured a flask. He tossed back a drink and passed the bottle around. Within a few moments the mood of the mourners—including Postmaster General Frank Walker (the supplier of the hooch); Labor Secretary Frances Perkins; and Press Secretary Jonathan Daniels and his father, Josephus Daniels, the former naval secretary to Woodrow Wilson—turned giddy with nostalgia. Ickes’s wife, Jane, insisted that her husband be a gentleman and wander to the president’s private Pullman car to wish Truman good luck. A somewhat reluctant Ickes obliged.

  That’s when the trouble occurred. Ickes encountered Democratic National Committee chairman Edwin Pauley, acting as gatekeeper to the president. Pauley, who had made a vast fortune as a California oilman, nonchalantly asked Ickes if the Departments of Justice and Interior could make sure that the California tidelands could be opened to the private sector for drilling. To Ickes, these tidelands belonged to the American people to be collectively enjoyed in perpetuity. Back in 1938, the Roosevelt administration had established the Channel Islands National Monument off the coast of Santa Barbara, home to the largest seal and sea lion breeding colonies in America.7 At that time Ickes had wanted the entire coast of California, from Camp Pendleton to the Oregon line, protected as a public trust. So he was deeply offended when Pauley intimated that he would donate $300,000 to $400,000 to the California Democratic Party if Ickes would cooperate. Deeming this overture a “treacherous” bribe, a frosty exchange ensued between Ickes and Pauley. Luckily Truman woke before Ickes got too heated. But the matter would come to a boil in 1946, when Ickes was fired as secretary of the interior by Truman. He died in 1952, leaving behind an eighty-thousand-word diary, deposited at the Library of Congress, which constitutes a primary-source treasure trove of conservation ideas and policy initiatives in the age of FDR.8

  Ickes wasn’t the only New Deal conservationist to leave the new administration. With his dear friend gone, Henry Morgenthau resigned to promote Christmas tree farms, pastoral living, and the new nation of Israel. (After Morgenthau died in 1967, all 840 volumes of his diary were donated to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York.) Gifford Pinchot died in October 1946, shortly before his autobiography, Breaking New Ground, was published; a national forest was named after him in Washington State. Suffering with bad health, Ding Darling stopped drawing cartoons in the late 1940s, spending his remaining years creating what would become the J. N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. And Frederic Delano died in 1953, working behind the scenes for the beautification of America until his last breath.

  As historians look back over the twentieth century, they discover that it was the Roosevelt-Ickes united front that turned the National Park Service into perhaps the most beloved agency in the U.S. government. The key moment was in 1933, when Roosevelt, under the authority of the Reorganization Act approved by Congress, transferred America’s national military parks and other areas of military importance previously administered by the War Department, and the national monuments lying within the national forests, which had been in the portfolio of the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture, to the jurisdiction of the NPS. Roosevelt’s “master plan” made it clear that he wanted the NPS to represent both America’s historical and natural history and heritage. These Roosevelt transfers, early in the New Deal, as well as the dozens of new sites established during his long presidency, gave the NPS more than five times as many areas as on August 25, 1916, when the Organic Act was signed by President Wilson.9

  Roosevelt’s legacy in conservation was large and contained multitudes. Between 1932 and 1945, the president had also established numerous national forests, many through the acquisition of abandoned or cut-over land. All of these native forests, as Pinchot believed, were living testimonials to Roosevelt’s unshakable conviction that no landscape, not even the Mojave Desert, should be bereft of robust trees. “It is an error to say that we have ‘conquered Nature,’” Roosevelt told Congress more than a decade earlier. “We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with Nature. This is a milestone in our progress toward that end. The future of every American family everywhere will be affected by the action we take.”10

  Just how important all the New Deal wildlife refuges were became abundantly clear after World War II. With soldiers coming home, trained to shoot guns, there was a marked increase in hunting and fishing. Many veterans wanted to take a well-earned month or two for recreation. In 1945, eight million hunting licenses were issued, an increase of one million licenses since the start of the war. That same year the issuance of fishing licenses rose by a half million. But because of Roosevelt’s new National Wildlife Refuges, the increased hunting was absorbed without depleting wildlife populations.

  Even though the CCC had been dissolved in 1942, the work of the “boys” remained visible from coast to coast. Durable structures ran the gamut from rustic Bascom Lodge near the summit of Mount Greylock in Massachusetts to the stonework observation tower atop Mount Tamalpais in California; from the Art Moderne visitor center at Ocmulgee National Monument in Georgia to the handsome picnic enclosures in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.11 Over the course of its nine-year existence, the CCC conserved more than 118 million acres of national resources throughout America, more acreage than all of California.12 During the Cold War, statewide conservation corps continued to involve young people in their late teens and early twenties—though these organizations never caught the public’s imagination as Roosevelt’s Tree Army did. Beginning in the 1960s, women were recruited for such programs. In the twenty-first century, projects in California, Colorado, and Missouri similar to those of the CCC have become unqualified successes.

  In 2007, two national CCC alumni groups merged to form the CCC Legacy Foundation, setting up headquarters in St. Louis and Edinburg, Virginia. Although the organization collected oral histories and helped museums acquire memorabilia, perhaps its greatest achievement was the unveiling of sixty-two bronze statues honoring CCC veterans in state and federal parks. The first statue was placed
in North Higgins Lake State Park in Roscommon, Michigan. The most moving, however, can be found in Highlands Hammock State Park in Sebring, Florida. The artwork was dedicated to Emil Billitz, who was paralyzed as a result of a truck accident that occurred during his CCC service. Some of the statues have plaques accompanying them. The plaque on the statue at the School of Conservation in Branchville, New Jersey, reads, “These men participated in the world’s most famous conservation program. America will never be able to repay them. All that is great and good about conservation we owe to the CCC.”13

  Perpetuating a permanent CCC might have been the best tribute to FDR’s visionary commitment to the environment. Veteran environmentalists—including Eleanor Roosevelt—were disappointed by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Following Franklin’s death, Eleanor retired to her serene Val-Kill cottage, doting on her children and grandchildren more than ever before. In 1946, however, President Truman asked her to be a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. In this role she became the most respected human rights activist in the world. Upon resigning in 1952, Eleanor traveled the world, sometimes promoting global reforestation projects, assuming the role of elder stateswoman of the Democratic Party. She died on November 7, 1962.

  During the 1960s, the CCC reentered the public discourse when President John F. Kennedy urged Congress to establish the Peace Corps, and President Lyndon B. Johnson incorporated the Job Corps and his domestic answer to the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) as part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. But LBJ wasn’t happy with these programs. One can hear LBJ on a tape (August 7, 1964) complaining to White House aide Bill Moyers about the administration’s poverty programs. “I thought,” he says, “we were going to have CCC camps.”14

  On May 30, 1959, Lyndon B. Johnson symbolically turned a shovel on a recently planted tree in front of the Franklin Roosevelt Library on the Springwood grounds. Mrs. Roosevelt looked on approvingly. Johnson, then a Senate majority leader with his eye on a run for the White House, regarded Roosevelt as his political hero.

  President Kennedy, impressed with FDR’s work-relief conservation record and national seashore push, identified his own “New Frontier” within the legacy of the New Deal. His secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, of Arizona, was as brilliantly effective in the role as his hero Ickes had been. Justice William O. Douglas—the direct link between the New Deal and the Great Society in the conservation realm—argued that the “preservation of values technology will destroy . . . is indeed the New Frontier.”15 Running for president in 1960, Kennedy advocated using Roosevelt’s Cape Hatteras model for saving seashores as wildlife refuges and recreational areas. During his brief presidency, he established three national seashores: Cape Cod, Massachusetts; South Padre Island, Texas; and Point Reyes, California. In 1961, speaking at the dedication of Gifford Pinchot’s home, Grey Towers, to the National Park Service, JFK sounded like an echo of FDR. “In the field of [natural] resources,” he warned, “the opportunities which are lost now can never be won back.”16

  By the time U.S. Fish and Wildlife alumna Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962—the turning point in American environmentalism—FDR was widely praised for having saved such landscapes as the Kenai Peninsula, the Okefenokee, the Olympics, the Great Smokies, Isle Royale, Joshua Tree, Capitol Reef, Jackson Hole, Mammoth Cave, Kings Canyon, the Everglades, Big Bend, and the Desert Game Range of Nevada. Irving Brant, the activist of the Emergency Conservation Committee, once finished with his multivolume James Madison biography project, published Adventures in Conservation with FDR, in 1988, giving Roosevelt vast credit for championing the ecological well-being of American landscapes. Justice Douglas, in two My Wilderness books, also enshrined the New Deal as being the incubator for the environmental justice movement of the 1960s and beyond.17 Through political know-how, legislative muscle, and fearlessness in using executive authority, FDR had crafted a conservation legacy to match or even surpass that of Theodore Roosevelt.

  How shortsighted Congress had been for not making the CCC a permanent government agency became glaringly apparent during the Cold War and beyond. Once World War II got the American economy over the hump of the Great Depression, his Tree Army was seen as a relic of a bygone era. Many CCC records were merely thrown out. The closest the nation got to resuscitating the CCC was with President Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps), a full-time, team-based residential program for men and women ages eighteen to twenty-four. As in the CCC, these AmeriCorps volunteers were assigned for ten months to one of five campuses located in Denver; Sacramento; Perry Point, Maryland; Vicksburg, Mississippi; and Vinton, Iowa. AmericaCorps, in its mission to complete “service projects” throughout the United States, as director Kate Raftery explained, “was truly based on the CCC model even in terms of the military aspects that the CCC had.”18 A big difference was that whereas the CCC had approximately 250,000 young men working on reforestation projects, AmeriCorps averaged around 1,200 men and women annually. During the mid-1990s a marvelous Environmental Corps (E-Corps) program took root in Texas aimed at restoring the state park system FDR helped to build.

  President Barack Obama, working with his secretaries of Interior, Ken Salazar and Sally Jewell, sought to bring back Roosevelt’s idea of the CCC by establishing a national council, among eight federal departments, to put America’s youth and returning veterans to work protecting and restoring the great American outdoors. The 21st Century Conservation Service Corps (21CSC), built on the legacy of the CCC, aimed to train a new generation of what Salazar called “environmental stewards” committed to improving the conditions of America’s public lands.19 The 21CSC program absorbed the Texas corps and other state versions of a youth-oriented conservation effort.

  Once the fear of climate change became a twenty-first-century reality, there were calls from Al Gore to Pope Francis to start weaning humans off fossil fuels, replacing the natural resources with renewable sources of energy. Some environmentalists called for a huge federal undertaking on the scale of the Apollo space program or the Marshall Plan to discover new energy technologies. But Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, a cutting-edge environmental nonprofit, thought a new CCC-inspired tree-planting army was what was needed. “The CCC planted 3 billion trees (which would be no small help with global warming),” wrote McKibben. “Imagine an army of similar size trained to insulate American homes and stick solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs. They could achieve, within a year or two, easily noticeable effects on our energy consumption; our output of carbon dioxide might actually begin to level off. And imagine them laying trolley lines back down in our main cities or helping erect windmills across the plains. All this work would have real payoff—and none of it can be outsourced.”20

  II

  Back at the Department of the Interior, following the FDR’s funeral, Ickes brainstormed about how to properly honor his late boss. A number of options were considered, including planting a grove of tulip poplars at Springwood; establishing an FDR monument on the National Mall in Washington D.C.; carving his face on Mount Rushmore; and renaming Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in his honor. Brazil’s foreign minister, Pedro Leão Velloso, suggested that a memorial service be held for FDR in Muir Woods National Monument during the upcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco. Logistically this made sense to Ickes because delegates from forty-six nations would be in attendance. Owen A. Tomlinson, regional director of the National Park Service, wrote the custodian of Muir Woods in early May informing him the FDR memorial service would be held in Cathedral Grove as a “tribute to the late President Roosevelt’s leadership in conservation.”21

  On May 19, 1945, five hundred delegates helping to organize the United Nations attended a memorial service for the late president at the Muir Woods National Monument north of San Francisco. In humble tribute, they sat among the towering trees, listening to a navy band and eloquent speeches. Even in death, Roosevelt brought attention to tr
ees and the beauty they bring to even the saddest of days.

  The National Park Service issued a press release on May 12 declaring Muir Woods the most fitting location for honoring the late president. “The site in the monument chosen for the meeting is aptly named—Cathedral Grove, it was pointed out. In this quiet grove is the impressiveness of a temple. Massive fluted columns, the trunks of the great coast redwoods, support a ceiling of green and the sunlight filters in as through a church window. It is a place designed by nature to engender a feeling of peace and reverence, in keeping with the humanitarian ideals responsible for the United Nations conference.”22

  In the late afternoon of May 19, 1945, United Nations delegates boarded buses at the Fairmont Hotel to trek the sixteen miles across the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods National Monument for the 5 p.m. service at “Cathedral Grove,” on the western slope of Mount Tamalpais. What the delegates didn’t realize while driving on Highway 101 was that outside their bus windows was the handiwork of Roosevelt’s CCC, including the Mountain Theatre at Mount Tamalpais (a natural amphitheater with stone seating for four thousand).23

  At Cathedral Grove the combination of the majestic trees and the solemnity of the occasion caused the congregation of five hundred to speak in hushed, reverential tones. That serenity was shattered when the U.S. Navy band struck up “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” behind a makeshift stage. Four wounded veterans of World War II formed an honor guard.24 Tomlinson of the National Park Service spoke first. He recounted how President Roosevelt believed that the redwood groves, painted deserts, rain forests, and bird-breeding grounds were all part of the rightful heritage of the American people. To Roosevelt, public lands were the heart and soul of the nation. That he wanted to bring his New Deal beautification revolution to the rest of the world—“Conservation Is a Basis of Permanent Peace”—was at the center of the memorial ceremony at Muir Woods.