Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  19.Ruth Valenti, “Algonac Estate, Home for Delano Family,” Evening News (Newburgh), May 15, 1987.

  20.Catherine Sedgwick quoted in David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 106.

  21.Clara Steeholm and Hardy Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park (New York: Viking, 1950), p. 10.

  22.Andrew Jackson Downing, “On the Moral Influence of Good Houses,” in Robert Twombly, ed., Andrew Jackson Downing: Essential Texts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 117.

  23.Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Reforestation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13.

  24.Steeholm and Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park, p. 10.

  25.Sara Delano Roosevelt Diary, November 11, 1882, FDRL.

  26.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 121.

  27.Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933 (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 5.

  28.Pottker, Sara and Eleanor, pp. 25–26.

  29.Ibid., p. 63.

  30.Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Early Years (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), p. 39.

  31.Pottker, Sara and Eleanor, p. 12.

  32.Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 22.

  33.Steeholm and Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park, p. 6.

  34.James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), p. 7.

  35.Sara Roosevelt, “Foreword,” Crum Elbow Folks (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1938).

  36.“Next Week,” Collier’s, June 18, 1932.

  37.Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 91.

  38.Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Game Fish of the Northern States of America and British Provinces (New York: Carleton, 1862); The Game-Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America: A Full Account of the Sporting Along Our Sea-Shores and Inland Waters, with a Comparison of the Merits of Breech-Loaders and Muzzle-Loaders. (New York: Carleton, 1866); and Superior Fishing; Or, The Striped Bass, Trout, Black Bass, and Blue-Fish of the Northern States. Embracing Full Directions for Dressing Artificial Flies with the Feathers of American Birds; An Account of a Sporting Visit to Lake Superior, Etc., Etc. (New York: Orange Judd, 1884).

  39.Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1196.

  40.“An Engineering Marvel: An Urgent Need for Water,” Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.aqueduct.org/content/engineering-marvel.

  41.Frances F. Dunwell, The Hudson: America’s River (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 274.

  42.James Tobin, The Man He Became: How FDR Defeated Polio to Win the Presidency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 41.

  43.Stanley Weintraub, Young Mr. Roosevelt: FDR’s Introduction to War, Politics, and Life (New York: Da Capo, 2013), p. 11.

  44.Tobin, The Man He Became, p. 41.

  45.Steeholm and Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park, pp. 85–86.

  46.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 160.

  47.Ibid., p. 121; and Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Washington, DC: PublicAffairs, 2003), p. 15.

  48.Elliott Roosevelt, F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Early Years, p. 293.

  49.Stephen Cernek, “From Picturesque to Profane: A Cultural History of the Hudson River, Palmer Falls,” Hudson River Valley Review (Spring 2013), pp. 52–70.

  50.Six of FDR’s first seven trips to Europe are recorded in the Sara Delano Roosevelt Diary, Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.

  51.FDR, address at Clarksburg, West Virginia, October 29, 1944 (transcript), FDRL.

  52.Geoffrey C. Ward, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Birdwatcher,” Audubon (January 1990).

  53.FDR, “Birds of the Hudson River Valley,” 1894, FDRL.

  54.Geoffrey C. Ward, American Originals: The Private Worlds of Some Singular Men and Women (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 245.

  55.Mark V. Barrow Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology After Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 118.

  56.Oliver H. Orr Jr., Saving American Birds (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 206–18.

  57.Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady: The Life of Sara Delano Roosevelt (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), p. 174.

  58.FDR, “Bird Diary,” April 16, 1896, FDRL.

  59.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 164.

  60.Mrs. James Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin (New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1933), p. 15.

  61.Ibid., p. 16.

  62.Bridge, “Sea Attractive to Roosevelt.”

  63.Gilbert Schrank, Professor Emeritus at Nassau Community College, to Douglas Brinkley, October 26, 2013. Schrank spent a summer cataloging the papers of the Linnaean Society.

  64.FDR, “Hawaii, the Paradise of the Pacific,” February 1895, Linnaean Society of New York Archive, American Museum of Natural History; also Gilbert Schrank to Douglas Brinkley, November 5, 2013. This essay was discovered by Dr. Gilbert Schrank while I was writing this book. It’s an exciting new document quoted here for the first time.

  65.FDR, “Bird Diary,” February 8, 1896, through February 11, 1896, FDRL.

  66.William King Gregory, Biographical Memoir of Frank Michler Chapman, 1864–1945 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1947).

  67.“Uniting the Ornithologists,” New York Times, September 27, 1883.

  68.Robert B. Fisher, “Biological Survey Unit, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center” (Washington, DC: USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, National Museum of Natural History, 2011).

  69.Edward H. Graham, The Land and Wildlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 32.

  70.Gregory, Biographical Memoir of Frank Michler Chapman.

  71.“Dr. Chapman Dies; Ornithologist, 81,” New York Times, November 17, 1945.

  72.“Big Old Houses: A Dutchess County Dowager,” August 19, 2012, http://bigoldhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-dutchess-county-dowager.html.

  73.FDR, “Bird Diary,” February 18, 1896, FDRL.

  74.FDR, to Thomas M. Upp, July 16, 1913, in Edgar B. Nixon, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation 1911–1945, Vol. 1 (Hyde Park, NY: General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, FDRL, 1957).

  75.FDR, “Spring Song,” Foursome (May 11, 1896), FDRL.

  76.FDR, “Bird Diary,” February 19, 1896, FDRL.

  77.Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), p. 33.

  78.New York at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1894), p. 8.

  79.Reading (Pennsylvania) Times, November 11, 1932, p. 3, quoted in Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931), p. 48.

  80.Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings at the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 199.

  81.David Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 3.

  82.Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 74.

  CHAPTER 2: “I JUST WISH I COULD BE AT HOME TO HELP MARK THE TREES”

  1.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 163.

  2.Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1, 1884–1933 (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 148.

  3.Classmate quoted in Freidel, Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship, p. 50.

  4.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, March 13, 1898, FDRL.

  5.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, February 1, 1898, FDRL.

  6.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, November 30, 1898, FDRL.

  7.FDR to James and Sara
Roosevelt, May 14, 1899, FDRL.

  8.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, May 12, 1899, FDRL.

  9.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, May 16, 1899, FDRL.

  10.“Birds Seen with Camera,” New York Times, October 14, 1900.

  11.Kenneth Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny (New York: Putnam, 1972), p. 121.

  12.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 192.

  13.Missouri v. Illinois, 26 Supreme Court Reporter (Eagan, MN: West, 1906), Google Books edition.

  14.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, October 28, 1898, FDRL.

  15.Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (New York: Knopf, 2014), p. 477.

  16.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 195.

  17.Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1, p. 148.

  18.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 195.

  19.Barry Yeoman, “From Billions to None,” Audubon (May–June 2014), p. 32.

  20.Diane Galusha, Another Day, Another Dollar: The Civilian Conservation Corps in the Catskills (Hendersonville, NY: Black Dome, 2008), pp. 6–7.

  21.Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), Vol. 1, p. 370.

  22.FDR to James and Sara Roosevelt, December 3, 1900, FDRL.

  23.“Death List of a Day: James Roosevelt,” New York Times, December 9, 1900, p. 7.

  24.Kleeman, Gracious Lady, p. 213.

  25.Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 226.

  26.Lou Sebesta, “Balmville Tree—Living Landmark,” New York State Conservationist, Vol. 53, no. 5 (April 1999), pp. 20–21.

  27.Joseph Berger, “A Tree Survives; Foes Do Not; After 3 Centuries, a Town Shores Up a Symbol of Its Heart.” New York Times, September 27, 1995, p. B7.

  28.Margaret Logan Marquez, Hyde Park on the Hudson (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 1996), p. 44.

  29.Fred W. Herbert, Careers in Natural Resource Conservation (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1965), p. 22.

  30.FDR to Sara Roosevelt, January 12, 1901, FDRL.

  31.Philip M. Boffey, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Harvard,” Harvard Crimson, December 13, 1957, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1957/12/13/franklin-delano-roosevelt-at-harvard-phistorians/.

  32.Friedel, The Apprenticeship, pp. 56–65.

  33.Gifford Pinchot, “The Birth of Conservation,” in Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), p. 324.

  34.Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern American Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island, 2004), p. 117.

  35.Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, p. 10.

  36.“History: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies,” https://environment.yale.edu/about/history/.

  37.Kim Heacox, An American Idea: The Making of the National Parks (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009), p. 146; David Stradling, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of the Empire State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 103.

  38.FDR, Speech to the Yale University School of Forestry, June 20, 1934, FDRL.

  39.“What Is to Become of Us?” Fortune (December 19, 1933).

  40.FDR, “The Roosevelt Family,” Roosevelt Family, Business, and Personal Papers, Box 36, FDRL.

  41.Davis, The Beckoning of Destiny, p. 165.

  42.FDR, “Remarks at Fort Peck Dam, Montana,” August 6, 1934. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14735.

  43.Jonathan Worth Daniels, Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 229.

  44.Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, November 29, 1904, FDRL.

  45.Theodore Roosevelt quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 440.

  46.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (column), January 14, 1936. Source of “My Day” citations is Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, George Washington University, Washington, DC, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/.

  47.Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), p. 6.

  48.Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 105–6.

  49.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” March 24, 1942.

  50.FDR to Sara Roosevelt, July 15, 1905, FDRL.

  51.Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 23.

  52.FDR to Sara Roosevelt, August 7, 1905, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., Personal Letters of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 2 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1971), p. 50.

  53.“German Water Power,” Economist (February 18, 2006).

  54.David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

  55.FDR quoted in Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 1, p. 18.

  56.David Brower, Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 72–74.

  57.Gifford Pinchot, The Adirondack Spruce (New York: Critic, 1898).

  58.National Park Service, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form: Home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Historic Site,” May 1979, pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/66000056.pdf.

  59.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” April 26, 1945.

  CHAPTER 3: “HE KNEW EVERY TREE, EVERY ROCK, AND EVERY STREAM”

  1.Norman J. Van Valkenburgh and Christopher W. Olney, The Catskill Park: Inside the Blue Line (Hendersonville, NY: Black Dome, 2004), p. 21.

  2.J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 617.

  3.“Hyde Park: The President’s Estate,” Life, Vol. 6, no. 22 (May 29, 1939), p. 61.

  4.William Plog oral history interview with George A. Palmer, November 13, 1947, FDRL. Given to author by Anne E. Jordan of the National Park Service.

  5.Having read so much Dutchess County lore, FDR tried to rechristen Springwood as “Crum Elbow,” which is what his historic river bend was called when Henry Hudson traded with members of the Wappinger tribe in 1609. To back up his case, he pointed to old nautical maps showing the Roosevelt estate at the Crum Elbow bend in the Hudson River. However, the new designation failed to stick.

  6.Nelson C. Brown, “Governor Roosevelt’s Forest,” American Forests, Vol. 37, no. 5 (May 1931), p. 273.

  7.Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 4 vols. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948); James Roosevelt, Affectionately, FDR: A Son’s Story of a Lonely Man (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), p. 47.

  8.Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hyde Park, p. 8.

  9.Christopher Gray, “For Eleanor and Franklin, a Built-In Mother-in-Law,” New York Times, June 8, 1997. The house was sold to Hunter College in the early 1940s and renamed “Sara Roosevelt Memorial House.”

  10.Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, p. 50.

  11.Burns, The Lion and the Fox, p. 15.

  12.Doris Greenberg, “Shah Lays Wreath at Roosevelt Tomb; Ruler of Iran Tours Hyde Park, Eats Turkey with Widow of President and Son Elliott,” New York Times, November 25, 1949, p. 16.

  13.Burns, The Lion and the Fox, p. 4.

  14.Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission, Official Program of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration (New York: Redfield Brothers, Authorized Publishers, 1909), https://archive.org/details/officialprogramh00huds.

  15.FDR, Press Conference at the President’s Cottage, November 23, 1932, Warm Springs, GA.

  16.William O. Douglas, A Wilderness Bill of Rights (New York: Little, Brown, 1965), p. 168.

  17.John Burroughs, Under the Maples (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), p. 111. Google Books.

  18.FDR, speech before Troy, NY, People’s Forum, March 3, 1912, FDRL.

  19.Wint Aldrich to Douglas Brinkley, December 16, 2013. See also FDR to Maunsell Crosby, March 12, 1913, FDRL.

  20.C. Stuart Gager, ed., Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record (Lancaster, PA: Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Scie
nces), p. 111.

  21.F. Kennon Moody, FDR and His Hudson Valley Neighbors (Poughkeepsie, NY: Hudson House Publishing, 2013), p. 4.

  22.Elliott Roosevelt, FDR: His Personal Letters, Vol. 2, p. 154.

  23.John Solan, “Nursing Forests Back to Health,” Conservationist (February 2003).

  24.Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, p. 53.

  25.Brian Black, “The Complex Environmentalist: Franklin Roosevelt and the Ethos of New Deal Conservation,” in Harry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 30.

  26.Quoted in Helen Meserve, “The House That Became a Second Home to FDR,” Hyde Park Townsman, September 7–8, 1983.

  27.Eleanor Roosevelt, I Remember Hyde Park, p. 72.

  28.Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 1, p. 4.

  29.FDR, “Remarks at Clarksburg, West Virginia,” October 29, 1944.

  30.FDR to G. O. Shields, February 20, 1911, FDRL.

  31.Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 288–89.

  32.FDR to Eleanor Roosevelt, March 17, 1912, FDRL.

  33.Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 1, pp. 6–7.

  34.FDR to William K. Draper, March 21, 1911, FDRL.

  35.FDR to Egbert Bagg, January 31, 1912, FDRL.

  36.Charles Banks Belt, “History of the Committee on Conservation of Forests and Wildlife of the Camp Fire Club of America,” 1989, Camp Fire Club of America Archive, Chappaqua, NY; and Jeffrey A. Gonauer, “The Camp Fire Club of America,” Fair Chase (Fall 2011), p. 15.

  37.John Hay Jr., “George Washington, Lover of Trees,” American Forests, Vol. 38, no. 2 (February 1932), pp. 67–75.

  38.Stradling, The Nature of New York, pp. 76–105.

  39.Frank Graham Jr., Man’s Dominion: The Story of Conservation in America (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1971), pp. 252–53.

  40.Char Miller, “Neither Crooked nor Shady: The Weeks Act, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Virtue of Eastern National Forests, 1899–1911,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Vol. 4, no. 33 (Fall 2012), pp. 15–23.

  41.Jim Robbins, “Deforestation and Drought,” New York Times, October 11, 2015, p. 7.

  42.FDR to Dexter Blagden, February 21, 1912, FDRL.

  43.Timothy W. Kneeland, “Pre-Presidential Career,” in William D. Pederson, ed., A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 40–41. See also “A Statement on the Roosevelt-Jones Conservation Bill by the Camp-Fire Club of America,” in Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 1, pp. 12–13.