Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  74.Proceedings of the North American Wildlife Conference Called by Franklin D. Roosevelt (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), p. 4.

  75.FDR, “Greeting to the North American Wildlife Conference,” February 3, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15195.

  76.“1,000 Meet Today to Save Wild Life,” New York Times, February 3, 1936.

  77.Henry Wallace, Address to North American Wildlife Conference, February 3–7, 1936, Washington, DC.

  78.“Wild Life Groups United in One Body,” New York Times, February 6, 1936.

  79.Jay N. Darling, Address to North American Wildlife Conference, February 3–7, 1936, Washington, DC.

  80.Harold Ickes, Address to North American Wildlife Conference, February 3–7, 1936, Washington, DC.

  81.“Refuge System Celebrates Anniversary: 75 Years and Going Strong,” Fish and Wildlife News (December 1976–January 1979), pp. 14–15.

  82.George Laycock, Wild Refuge (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969), pp. 9–11.

  83.J. C. Salyer, “Practical Waterfowl Management,” Proceedings of the North American Wildlife Conference: February 3–7, 1936 (Washington, DC: Senate Committee Printing, 1936), pp. 584–98.

  84.J. Michael Scott, “Recovery of Imperiled Species Under the Endangered Species Act: The Need for a New Approach,” Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, Vol. 3 (2005).

  85.Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. 3–4.

  86.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” April 20, 1945.

  87.“Bighorn History” (Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society, 2012), accessed March 20, 2013, at http://www.adbss.org/bighorn_history.html.

  88.William T. Hornaday, Campfires on Desert and Lava (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985, reprint); Charles Sheldon, The Wilderness of Desert Bighorns and Seri Indians from the Southwestern Journals of Charles Sheldon (Tucson: American Desert Sheep Society, 1979).

  89.James K. Morgan, “Slamming the Ram into Oblivion,” Audubon (November 1975), pp. 17–19.

  90.See Ralph E. Welles and Florence B. Welles, The Bighorn of Death Valley (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961); and The Status of Feral Burros and Wildlife Water Sources in Death Valley National Monument (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1967).

  91.Giese, “A Federal Foundation for Wildlife Conservation,” pp. 150–51. See also Laycock, The Sign of the Flying Goose, pp. 210–14.

  92.Renée Corona Kolvet and Victoria Ford, The Civilian Conservation Corps in Nevada: From Boys to Men (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006), pp. 93–95.

  93.FDR, Executive Order 7373, Establishing the Desert Game Range in Nevada, May 20, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=61181.

  94.Laycock, Sign of the Flying Goose, pp. 211–12.

  95.U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Comprehensive Conservation Plan: Desert National Wildlife Refuge Complex,” August 2009, p. S-10, http://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/CCP%20Summary.pdf.

  96.Laycock, Sign of the Flying Goose, p. 217.

  97.Mark Madison, “Shaping the NWRs: 100 Years of History,” Fish and Wildlife News (Spring 2003).

  CHAPTER 13: “WE ARE GOING TO CONSERVE SOIL, CONSERVE WATER, AND CONSERVE LIFE”

  1.FDR quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 571–72.

  2.“Text of Gov. Landon’s Address Declaring Constitution in Peril,” Milwaukee Journal, October 14, 1936.

  3.Zachary Wimmer, “Out of the Dust: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Kansas,” MA thesis, Emporia State University, 2012, pp. 3–14.

  4.R. Alton Lee, “The Civilian Conservation Corps in Kansas,” Journal of the West, Vol. 44 (2005), pp. 69–73.

  5.Wimmer, “Out of the Dust,” pp. 43–46.

  6.Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, p. 278.

  7.Raymond G. Carroll, “Shelterbelt,” Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 208, no. 23 (October 5, 1935), pp. 23, 81–83, 85–86.

  8.Julie Courtwright, Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), pp. 173–75.

  9.“Rabbit Drives, 1934: Kansas Emergency Relief Committee,” Kansas Memory Project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxvc-BuS5A.

  10.Craig Maier, Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 274.

  11.“Rabbit Drives, 1934.”

  12.Charles W. Hurd, “President Catches a Supper of Fish,” New York Times, March 25, 1936, p. 23; Phil Scott, Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935 (Camden, ME: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2006), pp. 187–88; Galusha, Another Day, Another Dollar, p. 42.

  13.Les Dropkin, “Cruising with the President: An Annotated Chronology of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Cruises During the Potomac Years” (Potomac Association, March 2001), pp. 4–5, http://www.usspotomac.org/education/documents/cruising_with_the_president.pdf.

  14.William Seale, The President’s House: A History (Washington, DC: White House Historical Association, 1986), p. 984.

  15.Captain Wilson Brown, USN, Log of the President’s Cruise: Bahamas Waters, March 26, 1935.

  16.Bernd Brunner, The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), p. 131.

  17.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” February 21, 1940.

  18.“1,200 Acres of Primeval Florida to Be Preserved as National Park,” New York Times, April 25, 1937.

  19.John D. Stinson, “Historical Note,” National Audubon Society Records 1883–1991, New York Public Library, March 1994.

  20.FDR to John H. Baker, August 12, 1939, FDRL.

  21.FDR, radio address, September 6, 1936.

  22.FDR, campaign speech, September 10, 1936, Charlotte, NC.

  23.Look and Perrault, The Interior Building, pp. 11–18.

  24.FDR, Address at Dedication of the New Department of the Interior Building, Washington, DC, April 16, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15281.

  25.Ibid.

  26.“New Deal Friends and Foes Satirized at Gridiron Dinner,” Washington Post, April 19, 1936, p. M1.

  27.Associated Press, “New Deal Burlesqued by Gridiron Club,” April 19, 1936, quoted in Fenster, FDR’s Shadow: Louis Howe, p. 10.

  28.FDR, “Statement on Signing the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act,” March 1, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15254.

  29.“The President Suggests Cooperation by Farmers in the Soil Conservation Program in Their Individual and National Interest. Presidential Statement. March 19, 1936,” in Sam Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 5, “The People Approve,” 1936 (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 136.

  30.FDR to Elbert D. Thomas, March 20, 1936, FDRL.

  31.Kenneth T. Walsh, Prisoners of the White House: The Isolation of America’s Presidents and the Crisis of Leadership (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013), p. 84. See also Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” June 15, 1936, and October 13, 1936.

  32.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” July 10, 1936.

  33.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” December 11, 1936.

  34.FDR, speech at George Rogers Clark Memorial, June 14, 1936, in Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 1, p. 53.

  35.Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” July 4, 1936.

  36.FDR, Address at Dedication of Shenandoah National Park, July 3, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15316.

  37.John C. Paige, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933–1942 (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1985).

  38.FDR, Address at the Dedication of Shenandoah National Park, July 3, 1936. />
  39.Lary M. Dilsaver, Joshua Tree National Park: A History of Preserving the Desert (Twentynine Palms, CA: NPS, 2015), p. 77.

  40.FDR, Presidential Proclamation 2193 (50 Stat. 1760), August 10, 1936, in Thomas Alan Sullivan, comp., Proclamations and Orders Relating to the National Park Service Up to January 1, 1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), pp. 218–19.

  41.Christopher Ketcham, “The Great Republican Land Heist,” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 330, no. 1977 (February 2015), p. 25.

  42.FDR, “Remarks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial,” August 30, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15109.

  43.Henry A. Wallace to FDR, May 11, 1937, in Nixon, Franklin Roosevelt and Conservation, Vol. 2, pp. 57–58.

  44.FDR to Henry A. Wallace, June 2, 1937, FDRL.

  45.FDR, “Remarks at a Luncheon in Dallas, Texas,” June 12, 1936. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15304.

  46.Harold K. Steen, ed., The Conservation Diaries of Gifford Pinchot (Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 2001), entry from November 5, 1936, p. 169.

  47.See United States Bureau of Land Management, Montana State Office, “Management Development Plan for Fort Peck Game Range,” https://archive.org/details/managementdevelo29unit; and FDR, Executive Order 7562, Establishing Sacramento Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, February 27, 1937. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=61215.

  48.FDR to Hendrik Willem van Loon, February 2, 1937, FDRL.

  49.FDR to New York Rod and Gun Editors Association, January 25, 1937, FDRL.

  50.FDR to Hendrik Willem van Loon, February 7, 1937, FDRL.

  51.Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior, p. 215.

  52.FDR, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.

  53.FDR quoted in Stefan Bechtel, Mr. Hornaday’s War (Boston: Beacon, 2012), p. 216.

  54.Hornaday quoted ibid., p. 216.

  55.“Funeral Tomorrow for Dr. Hornday,” New York Times, March 8, 1937.

  56.Lee Whittlesey, Yellowstone Place Names (Helena, MT: Historical Society Press, 1988), p. 105.

  57.Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior, p. 237.

  58.Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 22.

  59.William O. Douglas, Of Men and Mountains (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 16–17.

  60.Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (New York: Twelve, 2010), pp. 60–65.

  61.Jordan A. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 173.

  62.Ibid., p. 174.

  63.Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, p. 150.

  64.William O. Douglas, “Termites of High Finance,” Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. 3 (November 15, 1936), pp. 186–93.

  65.James F. Simon, Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 192–94.

  66.Ickes, The Secret Diary, Vol. 2, p. 34.

  67.J. Joseph Huthmacher, Trial by War and Depression: 1917–1941 (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973), p. 153.

  68.Roosevelt quoted in Neil Maher, New Deal, p. 201.

  69.Quoted in Clarke, Roosevelt’s Warrior, p. 232.

  70.Douglas quoted in James M. O’Fallon, Nature’s Justice: Writings of William O. Douglas (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), p. 175.

  71.Robert D. Brown, “The History of Wildlife Conservation and Research in the United States—and Implications for Its Future.” In H. Li, ed., Proceedings of the Taiwan Wildlife Association (Taipei: Taiwan National University, 2007).

  72.Ecological Society of America, “About the Ecological Society of America,” accessed May 1, 2013, http://www.esa.org/esa/?page_id=91aboutesa/.

  73.FDR to Henry Wallace and Harold L. Ickes, February 18, 1936.

  74.Edward Hoagland, Hoagland on Nature: Essays (Guilford, CT: Lyon, 2003), p. 295.

  75.Harold Ickes to FDR, February 21, 1936, FDRL.

  76.Laycock, The Sign of the Flying Goose, p. 35.

  77.FDR to Francis and Jean Harper, September 14, 1944, FDRL.

  78.FDR to Rebe E. Healtey, May 15, 1936, FDRL.

  79.Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 172–73.

  80.“History of Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge,” Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge Profile, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, last updated March 23, 2010, accessed January 24, 2012, at http://www.fws.gov/piedmont/history.html.

  81.FDR to Harold Ickes, April 5, 1937, FDRL.

  82.FDR, Presidential Proclamation 2232, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, April 13, 1937. Online at American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=76672. See also Natt N. Dodge, National Park Service Natural History Handbook No. 6: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/natural/6/index.htm.

  83.FDR, Proclamation 2232; also see Dodge, National Park Service Natural History Handbook, No. 6.

  84.Fitzhugh L. Minnigerode, “Park Named for Cactus,” New York Times, May 1, 1938.

  85.FDR, Proclamation 2232; also see Dodge, National Park Service Natural History Handbook, No. 6.

  86.Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1996), pp. 127–29.

  87.Edward Abbey, Abbey’s Road (New York: Plume, 1991), pp. 154–55.

  88.Lynn J. Rogers, “Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Attracts Interest of Tourists,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1938.

  89.Doris Evans, Saguaro National Park (Tucson, AZ: Western National Parks Association, 2006), pp. 12–13. A spring 2011 issue of Park Science, the quarterly journal of the National Park Service, ran a photo from 1935 showing a spectacular field of saguaros beside a 1998 photo of the same area. The difference was shocking, and the culprit was climate change.

  90.Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, pp. 136–37.

  CHAPTER 14: “WHILE YOU’RE GITTIN’, GIT-A-PLENTY”

  1.FDR to Henry A. Wallace, April 20, 1937, FDRL.

  2.“New Orleans Hails Roosevelt Again,” New York Times, April 30, 1937, p. 3.

  3.Louisiana Federal Writers’ Project, Louisiana: A Guide to the State (New York: Hastings House), p. 335.

  4.Paul A. Keddy, Water, Earth, Fire: Louisiana’s National Heritage (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 2008), p. 159.

  5.David Welky, The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 243–46.

  6.Anna C. Burns, A History of the Louisiana Forestry Commission, Louisiana Studies Institute Monograph Series no. 1 (1968); “Henry E. Hardtner: Louisiana’s First Conservationist,” Journal of Forest History, Vol. 22 (April 1978), pp. 78–85; “Frank B. Williams, Cypress Lumber King,” Journal of Forest History, Vol. 24 (July 1980), pp. 127–33; “Golden Anniversary Forest Edition,” Forest and People, Vol. 13 (First Quarter, 1963).

  7.Richard C. Davis, ed., Encyclopedia of American Forest and Conservation History (New York: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 363–66.

  8.Thanks to the New Deal, Kisatchie National Forest roared back to life. By the time Jimmy Carter was president, the Kisatchie, under proper federal regulation, generated the most revenue per acre of all the forests in the South.

  9.Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002), p. 22.

  10.Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician (New York: Putnam, 1946).

  11.“William Delano, Architect, Dead,” New York Times, January 13, 1960.

  12.Matthiessen, Wildlife in America, p. 261.

  13.Aldo Leopold, “Marshland Elegy,” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 96.

  14.Log of Official Trips of the President, entry for May 1, 1937, F
DRL.

  15.Schwartz, The New Dealers, p. 270.

  16.Bill Mares, Fishing with the Presidents: An Anecdotal History (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1999), p. 176.

  17.Paulette Langguth, “Happy 75th Birthday to USS Potomac,” Currents (Fall 2011), pp. 1–2.

  18.“May 4, 1937,” Franklin D. Roosevelt: Day by Day, Pare Lorentz Center, FDRL. Online at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/daylog/may-4th-1937/.

  19.Mike Holmes, Fishing the Texas Gulf Coast (Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2009), pp. 11–12.

  20.Log of Official Trips of the President, entry for May 7, 1937, FDRL.

  21.William O. Douglas, Farewell to Texas: A Vanishing Wilderness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 224.

  22.John F. Reiger, Escaping into Nature: The Making of a Sportsman-Conservationist and Environmental Historian (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), p. 80.

  23.Steve Harrington, “The Silver Kings,” Texas Monthly (May 2013), pp. 118–19.

  24.“President Roosevelt Lands a Tarpon in the Gulf of Mexico,” Life, May 24, 1937, pp. 30–31.

  25.Don Farley, “President Roosevelt as I Knew Him,” undated typed manuscript, FDRL.

  26.Log of Official Trips of the President, entry for May 10, 1937, FDRL.

  27.“Texas Acclaims Roosevelt with 21-Gun Salute,” Washington Post, May 12, 1937, p. 2.

  28.Log of Official Trips of the President, entry for May 12, 1937.

  29.Carter P. Smith, Foreword, in Cynthia Brandimarte, Texas State Parks and the CCC (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2013), p. x.

  30.Brian Cervantez, “Lone Star Booster: The Life of Amon Carter,” MA thesis, University of North Texas, Denton, December 2011, pp. 97–135.

  31.Clay Reynolds, A Hundred Years of Heroes: A History of the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1995), p. 177.

  32.Brandimarte, Texas State Parks and the CCC, pp. 3–11.

  33.Cornebise, The CCC Chronicles, p. 36.

  34.Ibid., p. 206.

  35.Dan K. Utley and James Wright Steely, Guided with a Steady Hand: The Cultural Landscape of a Rural Texas Park (Waco: Baylor University Press, 1998), p. 68.

  36.Jerry Beth Shannon, Archivist of Ropesville Farm Project, to Douglas Brinkley, February 19, 2014. See also Pam Murtha, “Growing a Community: The Ropesville Resettlement Project,” Heritage, Vol. 2 (2007), pp. 20–23.