The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [146]
“Half a century ago a small boy took especial delight in climbing an old tree, now unhappily gone, to pick and eat ripe seckel pears,” he said. “That was about one hundred feet to the west of where I am standing now. And just to the north he used to lie flat between the strawberries—the best in the world. In the spring of the year, in hip rubber boots, he sailed his first toy boat in the surface water formed by the melting snow. In the summer with his dogs he dug into woodchuck holes in this same field, and some of you are standing on top of those holes at this minute. Indeed, the descendents of those same woodchucks still inhabit this field and I hope that, under the auspices of the National Archivist, they will continue to do so for all time.”36
By the time FDR went to Harvard University in 1900 he presented himself as a tree farmer. In 1912 he started planting Norway spruce and Douglas fir all over Dutchess County as any good Bull Moose conservationist would do. Roosevelt, in fact, became chairman of the Forestry Committee of the New York state senate, personally planting 2,000 or 3,000 trees a year. As a hobby FDR would purchase land adjacent to his Hyde Park estate and play at being Gifford Pinchot. In 1929 he hired Nelson Brown, a professor at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, a program funded by Louis Marshall, to help transform Hyde Park into an arboretum. For his entire life, the deep glades of his hemlock woods were among his favorite places to contemplate political issues.
As governor of New York from January 1, 1929, to December 31, 1932, FDR put more than 10,000 unemployed men to work planting trees, managing forests, and stopping erosion. When Roosevelt won the presidential election in 1932, he asked Brown to create the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Roosevelt’s hobby was going to be an impetus for some elements of the New Deal. “F.D.R. saw the restoration of the land—the prevention of dust bowls and floods through soil conservation practices, the rotation of crops, the planting of trees,” the historian John Sears wrote, “as intimately bound up with restoring the livelihoods of the people living on the land.”37
When Roosevelt created the CCC on March 31, 1933, Bob Marshall celebrated. FDR had once told his aide Harry Hopkins that every boy should work for at least half a year in forestry; to Marshall, this was a very wise statement indeed. Within a few months 1,000 CCC camps were operational, offering employment to nearly 300,000 young men. A few weeks later FDR established the first CCC marine station in the southern Tongass National Forest; at long last TR’s greatest accomplishment in Alaska received ranger boats and increased protection by wardens.38
Marshall—who never looked for financial opportunities beyond the strictures of a government salary—was thrilled by all the New Deal efforts made in Alaska toward parks, wildlife management, rangeland, and soil and water conservation, but he was distressed that the reclamation of wilderness didn’t grab the president’s attention. The Forest Service did continue to preserve “primitive areas” as stipulated in the L-20 regulations of 1929, but it wasn’t ardent about enforcing the laws or actually prohibiting development.39
Harold L. Ickes, however, feisty and belligerent, was drawn to the wilderness movement. He was, politically, a Bull Moose conservationist, a throwback to the turn of the century when TR claimed that the vast open spaces were the great incubator of American democracy. “We ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country as we can,” Ickes told a convention of CCC workers. “I am not in favor of building any more roads in the National Parks than we have to build. I am not in favor of doing anything along the line of so-called improvements that we do not have to do.”40
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