UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

The Depression, the New Deal, and

America's New Environmental Ethic,

1933-1938

by

Michael Roger Whitaker

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JULY, 2011

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled "The Depression, the New Deal, and America's New Environmental Ethic, 1933-1938" submitted by Michael Roger Whitaker in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

Supervisor, Dr. Jewel Spanger, Department of History

Dr. George Colpitts, Department of History

Dr. David Monteyne, Faculty of Environmental Design

Date 2

Abstract

This dissertation examines and analyzes changes in the American

understanding of the environment beginning in the New Deal era, and considers the

role of the federal government, the President, and the public in effecting these

changes. It begins by surveying a diverse set of attitudes and activities in the

nineteenth century and identifying a versatile and resilient anthropocentric

environmental ethic as a common thread in each of them. It then moves on to the

administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and demonstrates the ways in which

New Deal agencies and programs such as the CCC, AAA, TVA, and Shelterbelt

embodied a fundamentally different environmental ethic. It concludes by gauging

the enthusiasm of the public and the role it played in supporting and expanding the

new ethic. The changes that occurred in the New Deal period thus inaugurated a

permanent shift in environmental values and discourse in American history. 3

Contents

Abstract 2 Contents 3 Introduction The American Environment 4 Chapter 1 A Landscape Out of Balance 26 Chapter 2 A New Deal for the Environment 60 Chapter 3 The Public and the Environment 97 Conclusion The New Environment 128 Bibliography 137 4

INTRODUCTION The American Environment

On April 22, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, after having burned for 36 hours, succumbed to its wounds and sank into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to mark what was surely the saddest Earth Day since the celebration began in 1970. Five months later when the leak was finally capped, almost five million barrels of oil had escaped into the Gulf, making it quantitatively the worst spill in American history. Yet to label this disaster as unprecedented would be overhasty. Though it is not always appreciated, the natural environment has played an enormous role in shaping American history—especially so when crises come into play. In the 1930s, the United States suffered from both prolonged economic downturn and highly-visible environmental crises related to excessive commercial demands on the land, an arrangement with clear parallels in 2011. As I shall argue, this situation spurred on a dramatic and significant change in how many Americans thought of and interacted with the environment around them, culminating in a permanent shift in the national environmental ethic.

The year 1933 is a crucial one in this project. The year Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his first oath of office, the United States found itself in the fourth year of the most severe economic downturn in its history. The freewheeling good times of the 1920s had come to a crashing halt on Black Thursday and, contrary to the expectations of many economists and politicians, virtually all indicators of economic well-being had been in steady decline since: 15 million Americans—nearly a quarter of the labour force—were out 5 of work, with millions more underemployed, while the gross national product had plummeted to half its value in 1929. Herbert Hoover's recovery efforts were largely hamstrung by his steadfast refusal to offer direct relief to the public or undertake anything that might dampen individual initiative, and succeeded only in frustrating Americans and dispossessing them of their confidence in the received economic system.

For many American farmers in the South and the Great Plains, however, the economic misery was nothing new. Agricultural prices had been desperately low for the latter three quarters of the 1920s. But in the early 1930s, environmental disaster joined their list of woes. The spring and summer of 1930 brought scorching drought to the Upper

South, Great Plains, and the Western states up to the Rocky Mountains. The fields that had been plowed up with such vigor to meet the food demands of the First World War dried up, leaving a layer of loose, desiccated soil on the surface: the dust bowl. Farmers' fields, prairie towns, and major cities alike experienced the havoc of rolling dust storms, mile- high clouds of swirling earth that buried crops, infiltrated homes, and turned day into night.

Donald Worster's famous treatment characterizes the episode as the predictable outcome of

American capitalism's contact with a "volatile, marginal land" where "the elements of risk were higher than they were anywhere else in the country."1 In other words, the market system of the United States dictated a maximized short-term yield approach to agriculture that perilously ignored the environment's ecological balance.

But 1933 was also a year of change. The newly inaugurated President immediately put into place a slate of programs that tapped virtually every administrative resource in the federal government's power, as well as inventing several new ones of its own. The so-

1 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 5-6 6 called "New Deal" was at once ambitious, controversial, and ambiguous. One thing most agreed on was that it was something very new. From employment programs, to monumental construction projects, to federal home and bank deposit insurance, to employment and production codes, to rural electrification, to sponsorships for artists and writers, the points of contact between government and public increased quantitatively and qualitatively. At the same time, political opponents—and there were many, on both ends of the political spectrum—characterized it as fascist, communist, or tyrannical, or perhaps all three at once. Further adding to the enigma, few could agree as to what the ultimate goal of the New Deal was: perhaps it was curtailing unemployment, or advancing economic equality, or merely restoring faith in the basic apparatus of the government when public confidence was worryingly low. Then again, maybe there was no goal, and the whole thing was a mosaic of stopgaps, experiments, and ad hoc measures. For his part, FDR played coy on the subject when asked about his motivations. However, this essay argues that an environmental interpretation of the New Deal is both illuminating and timely.

Environmental history is a relative newcomer in the historiography of the United

States, yet it is a rich field with much relevance for the twenty-first century. This thesis taps into the collective knowledge of the field while remaining cognizant of, and attempting to shed new light on some of the important open questions in the scholarship. First and foremost in this list is the question of periodization: that is, how should the New Deal fit into the story of environmentalism in the United States? Did it represent a genuine turning point, or was it essentially continuous with the patterns of the previous years and decades?2

Searching for historians who do not demarcate a new era of environmentalism with the

2 The historiographical debate surrounding the New Deal, of course, runs even deeper than this; whether or not the essence of the New Deal really was something new, or whether it was a repackaging of older ideas, is among the most hotly contested points of American history of the 1930s. 7

New Deal, one finds no shortage of material. Paul Sutter, in his 2001 literature review essay "Terra Incognita: The Neglected History of Interwar Environmental Thought and

Politics" reasons that many postwar historians saw a continuity of trajectory in conservationism when comparing the progressive era's zeal for rational development of resources3 (such as the Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric project) and the "Cold War fit of timber liquidation and dam building," and were content to assume a smooth connecting line between them through a subconscious connect-the-dots.4

But this is not to say that the argument was merely a relic of an incomplete historiographical picture; subsequent historians have renewed the idea in their own terms.

Ted Steinberg, in his long-view assessment of the role of nature in American history Down to Earth, insists that "the United States has been off-kilter with ecology since the nineteenth century," at which time the rise of corporations and consumerism subordinated the natural world to the demands of economic efficiency, both in law and in received understanding—an arrangement, that, in his view, has not substantially changed since.5 In

Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard's A Green and Permanent Land, the authors argue that a "permanent agriculture" movement which flourished in the 1930s began in the

1920s and subsequently formed the keystone of the environmental movement in the United

States in the broadest sense. "As a central activity in American life," they wrote,

3Progressivism, a significant force in American politics between 1890 and 1920, was an ideology that advocated partnership between government and technical experts in order to steer the nation towards efficiency and democracy. Other tenets included positive government action in nominal support of economic and political equality (though this often did not extend to subaltern groups such as African Americans), and antipathy towards trusts, political machines, and other structures of disproportionately concentrated power. Samuel P. Hays' Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890- 1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) is a classic treatment of the era in relation to natural resource development. He argues that of the progressivist goals, only scientific efficiency was a significant impetus behind the era's conservation movement. (Psychologists might call this a "gestalt" effect.) Paul S. Sutter, "Terra Incognita: The Neglected History of Interwar Environmental Thought and Politics," Reviews in American History, 29 (Jun. 2001): 290 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History, 2nd ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), x 8

"agriculture provided an outlet for ecological thought, with the result that ecological ideals—the basis of postwar environmentalism—escaped the confines of academia and wildlife management." Indeed, they go so far as to characterize Aldo Leopold's land ethic as a derivative of the kind of progressive conservation espoused by Gifford Pinchot in the

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1920s (and even earlier.) Chris Rasmussen also views environmentalism in the '30s through the lens of agriculture (and capitalist critique) and concludes that the farm reforms enacted as a part of the New Deal revitalized, rather than overturned, the fundamental relationship to the land Americans had practiced in the 1920s. "New Dealers, like their

Progressive predecessors, did not assail capitalism, but sought to 'conserve' it by regulating its excesses... The depression had tested, even shaken, but not undone most Americans'

adherence to capitalism or to private ownership of productive resources, including farmland," Rasmussen has observed, adding that the agricultural reforms that did come

about were ideologically of a kind with those pioneered in the progressive era.8 Taking on a

different subject matter—construction of highways and rest areas in depression era Texas,

Gregory T. Cushman arrives at a similar result. In his view, the seemingly new

construction methods in which roadways were integrated into the landscape actually

Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 82-83 7 Write Beeman and Pritchard: "The permanent agriculture episode helps explain the shift from conservation to environmentalism. Permanent agriculture was an idea conceived by individuals born in the Progressive Era, when conservation was generally viewed as the managing of resources for human use and a task to be pursued mainly by extractive technocrats... Although Aldo Leopold, himself a preacher of permanent agriculture, is often cited as a John the Baptist figure in the rise of environmentalism, Leopold's ideas were standard concepts in the call for the new ecological farming" Green and Permanent Land, 82 (emphasis added.) Rasmussen, quoting from Aldo Leopold, notes: "As environmentalist Aldo Leopold, a trenchant critic of New Deal farm policy, observed, New Deal conservation was 'born' when 'the pent-up desires and frustrated dreams of two generations of conservationists, passed near the national money-bags whilst opened wide for post-depression relief,'" Chris Rasmussen, '"Never a Landlord for the Good of the Land': Farm Tenancy, Soil Conservation, and the New Deal in Iowa," Agricultural History 73 (Winter 1999): 78, 86, 92 9 harkened to a traditional pioneer mentality, and consciously eschewed radical change.9 In sum, historians have identified continuity in New Deal ideas and policies by putting the magnifying glass on economics, agriculture, and what might be called "retrospectivism" in highway design.

Yet by contrast, many environmental historians see the New Deal as inaugurating a legitimately new moment in environmentalism. An obvious example, attested by its very title, is Neil Maher's Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, in which Maher argues that the CCC, by its work projects, educational programs, and mass enrolment, popularized environmentalism, transforming it from a top-down cause celebre of the socio-economic elite to a true grassroots movement. Similarly, a number of historians have identified a different New

Deal project, the TVA, as the herald of a new era in environmentalism. Among these are

Brian Black who argues in "Organic Planning: Ecology and Design in the Landscape of the

Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-45" that the TVA, in both purpose and design, prefigured the concept Aldo Leopold would call "unity of resources" in the 1940s.10

Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway's history of the influence of photography and motion

"Texas highway builders carried plans into practice that were designed to root modern, high-speed roadways in an agrarian vernacular landscape and to encourage both rural stability and progress. Their designs accomplished this seeming contradiction by pointing back to the wholesome relationship between Texas pioneers and nature and forward toward widespread employment and renewed prosperity while rejecting radical change." Gregory T. Cushman, "Environmental Therapy for Soil and Social Erosion: Landscape Architecture and Depression-Era Highway Construction in Texas," in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 47 10 Writes Black: "The New Deal offered the forum through which such ideas could be put into practice, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) may have offered the single most sustained experiment in the federal application of a conservation ethic... More important, the practices and products of TVA acted as concrete symbols or archetypes to help the American public understand conservation as a concept," Brian Black, "Organic Planning: Ecology and Design in the Landscape of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-45," in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan, 71. The essays "TVA Graphics: A Language of Power," by Steven Heller and "Almost Fully Modern: The TVA's Visual Art Campaign," by Todd Smith—both in The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, ed. Tim Culvahouse (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)—focus their attention on particular aspects of the TVA but reach the same conclusion. 10 pictures in shaping American attitudes towards the environment (and as windows themselves on these attitudes), comes to a very similar conclusion, identifying Pare

Lorentz's 1937 film The River (of which the TVA was the centerpiece) as a popular and persuasive embodiment of the spirit of the New Deal's new environmental sensibilities.

Edward Shapiro demonstrates in "The Southern Agrarians and the Tennessee Valley

Authority" that the Vanderbilt-based circle was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the TVA because it dovetailed well with their conceptions of Southern problems and their diagnosis of the causes of the depression, and seemed to promise to reverse the trend of land tenancy while enabling and encouraging agricultural freeholdership.1 Norman Wengert notes the importance of the TVA in his 1951 essay "TVA—Symbol and Reality" as a visible and concretized reification of regionalist thought. Furthermore, he argues that while many of the impetuses behind it originated in earlier conservation movements, never before had they all come together in a single project as they did in the 1930s, which did a great deal to reshape the meaning of conservation in the American public; in other words, the power of the TVA as a symbol was such that sustainable agriculture, flood control, reforestation, prevention of soil erosion, and other such undertakings came to be understood to be part of the umbrella of "conservation."12 Walter L. Creese claims much the same in TVA's Public

Planning: The Vision, The Reality, giving a comprehensive catalogue of the TVA's progressive-era forebears, but concluding that the union of such ideas in a single entity, as well as the scale of the project and the degree of leadership and initiative of the federal

11 Shapiro notes "This support for the TVA grew logically out of the Agrarians' social and political thought and their analysis of the causes of the 1929 depression. The essence of Agrarian social thought was their belief that a society, if it was to be free and prosperous, must have a majority of its people owning productive property." Edward Shapiro, "The Southern Agrarians and the Tennessee Valley Authority," American Quarterly 22 (Winter 1970): 792 12 Norman Wengert, "TVA—Symbol and Reality," The Journal of Politics 13 (Aug. 1951): 372-76 11 government was both new and nontrivial: "The idea of accommodating people of a seven- state scale," he writes "was decidedly innovative and was a notion not characteristic of any previous land-reserve policy."

Historians have also perceived a new environmental moment with its centre of gravity not in the invention of the ultramodern TVA in the South, but in the efforts to ameliorate the age-old and quintessentially American practice of agriculture on the Great

Plains. Sarah Phillips takes this position in This Land, This Nation, characterizing the

Roosevelt administration's agricultural reforms as embodying a step forward in national conservation, by which conservation became a purposeful, concerted agenda, rather than a mosaic of independent, piecemeal efforts. "For the first time," she writes, "national administrators linked conservation with agricultural programs, and considered environmental planning vital to the nation's economic renewal and long-term vitality."14

Furthermore, the "New Conservation" (as she calls it) differed from the traditional notion in that it sought to address natural and human resources at once. Neil Maher essentially concurs (though he wrote from a bottom-up perspective, where Phillips wrote top-down) in his article '"Crazy-Quilt Farming on Round Land,'" in which he explains the abrupt reorientation of Plains communities in the depression era from anti-modern, insular, community-centric hamlets that were generally distrustful of Washington (an outgrowth of

Walter L. Creese, TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 342 (emphasis added.) Gordon R. Clapp, chairman of the TVA board of directors, offers a divergent interpretation in The TVA: An Approach to the Development of a Region (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), arguing that "The TVA is the product of a long, consistent line in the history of this country's internal argument about the conservation and use of our natural resources," viii. While historical precursors to the TVA are many and quite real, Clapp overlooks or ignores the novelty of combining them in a single federal project. This probably owes to the fact that the book, by his own admission, was written to defend the TVA against charges of "creeping socialism" that had been leveled against it beginning around the time of the 1952 election, in consequence of which Clapp had good reason to overstate the Authority as an essentially conservative, non-radical undertaking. Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3 12 the federal 1785 Ordinance plan, in his judgment) to a new arrangement in which they welcomed the guidance of Washington and largely embraced non-traditional, less erosive farming techniques. Maher posits that the simultaneous impact of depression and soil erosion opened fatal cracks in the older system, opening a space for the federal government to overhaul the received socio-economic arrangement and environmental ethic. In its place rose a new understanding and methodology in which the contours of the land—both figuratively and literally—would play a part in determining how the land could and would be cultivated.15 Geoffrey Cunfer ingeniously employs a geographic information systems

(GIS) approach to Plains survey data in On the Great Plains to conclude that the early

1930s saw a shift from one "temporary equilibrium" state to another (in his terms, a

"pioneer period" to a "transitional period,") the latter system involving de-intensification of agriculture.

Still another category of historians that see the New Deal as a moment of a significant shift in American environmentalism find this change not in federal mega- projects nor in Washington's efforts to transform the temper of agriculture on private lands,

15 Neil Maher, '"Crazy Quilt Farming on Round Land': The Great Depression, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Politics of Landscape Change on the Great Plains during the New Deal Era," The Western Historical Quarterly 31 (Autumn 2000): 320. Maher relates in his essay a particularly poignant episode that nicely illustrated the changing perspective of the land brought about under FDR's presidency: "One of the first signs that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had arrived in Jewell [County, Kansas] was an airplane that buzzed back and forth over the western half of the county on a clear Saturday afternoon in December 1933. After considerable speculation, local residents learned that the Soil Conservation Service had hired the plane to take aerial photographs of what was soon to become the Limestone Creek Demonstration Area. As the Western Advocate explained to its readers, 'instead of having a flat appearance, as one would expect in a photo taken looking straight down, the maps show clearly every gully and slope, even small rises showing up like mountains.' A new community map, one that took into account the curvature of the earth, was being prepared by the federal government for superimposition atop Jewell County's rectilinear and locally oriented grid," 332 16 Geoff Cunfer puts the beginning of the transition in the mid-1920s, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 27. While he is correct that such a change took place, his problematic conceptual framework of temporary equilibriums makes the transition seem evolutionarily and endogenous, and allows little room for the influence of outside forces, such as federal intervention. Furthermore, to characterize the agriculture of the pioneer era as an equilibrium because of its reliable crop output—while deliberately disregarding ecological consequences—seems to me a strange assessment. 13 but rather in changes in the ideation and administration of National Parks, National Forests, and other public lands. Some see the signs of change in the administrative battles fought at a federal level within and around the agencies, as does Barry Mackintosh in his 1985 article

"Harold L. Ickes and the National Park Service." Mackintosh takes note of the Interior

Secretary's dogged attempts to outmanoeuvre reactionary elements within the Park Service leadership and steer it away from Jazz Age promotionalism and in a direction more in line with the New Deal era's emphasis on relatively harmonious relations with the

i n environment. Richard Polenberg also keys in on Ickes, characterizing his attempts to annex the Forest Service, the TVA and several other agencies into the Interior Department

(while simultaneously shedding some unwanted responsibilities) as part of a pattern of unification and "broadening of [federal] conservation programs during the 1930s, especially with respect to forests, parks, and grazing." In fact, Polenberg takes note of

Ickes' not inconsiderable efforts to have the Interior become the "Department of

Conservation" in both name and function.18 Donald C. Swain similarly documents Ickes' rapid embrace of the cause of preservationism early in the New Deal in "Harold Ickes,

Horace Albright, and the Hundred Days," going on to trace the methods by which the

Secretary accordingly realigned the Interior Department and the Park Service's priorities— this included blocking excessive recreational development and progressive-style engineering projects that sought to commodify nature—and expanded their authority to match.1 Swain also authored a subsequent paper continuing on the same theme but moving

17 Barry Mackintosh, "Harold L. Ickes and the National Park Service," Journal of Forest History 29 (Apr. 1985): 79-80 18 Ickes told FDR in 1940: "I have had one consistent ambition since I have been Secretary of the Interior, and that has been to be the head of a Department of Conservation, of which, necessarily, Forestry would be the keystone," Richard Polenberg, "The Great Conservation Contest," Forest History 10 (Jan. 1967): 14 19 In Swain's words, Ickes "had decided [by the end of the First Hundred Days] upon a concerted effort to make the Interior Department into a department of conservation. By thoroughly espousing the cause of the 14 forward in time, this time exploring less what Ickes did change and more what Park Service head Arno Cammerer did not. Specifically, Swain paints Cammerer as a singular yet powerful holdout against an ongoing tide of change, who resisted considerable pressure from Ickes and public park advocacy groups to abandon the administration style of his

1920s predecessors; these pent-up reforms rapidly came into place under Cammerer's successor in 1941.

Also taking notice of the stubborn, conservative, and often petty leadership of the public lands services, Hal K. Rothman takes the opposite position in his article '"A Regular

Ding-Dong Fight': Agency Culture and Evolution in the NPS-USFS Dispute, 1916-1937," estimating that in the 1930s, both agencies' leaders were financially paralyzed by the depression, preoccupied with territorial squabbles, and lacked the initiative to break the mould of their predecessors and therefore dared not attempt any serious reforms. For this reason, he argues, both agencies failed to be swept up in the changing environmental tides of the era (exemplified by massive development projects such as the Reclamation Bureau or TV A) and lost any claim to leadership in federal conservation they ever might have

preservationists and aesthetic conservationists, he had begun to move toward an open break with his old friend, Gifford Pinchot. And he had unequivocally pledged himself to the protection of the national parks," Donald C. Swain, "Harold Ickes, Horace Albright, and the Hundred Days: A Study in Conservation," Pacific Historical Review 34 (Nov. 1965): 465 20 Donald C. Swain, "The National Park Service and the New Deal, 1933-1940," Pacific Historical Review 41 (Aug. 1972): 331 21 Rothman notes that from 1933, onwards, "the sum of the leadership of both agencies [the Park Service and Forest Service] was minimal. The second generation clearly could not match its predecessors in style, verve, and technique. The problems [Park Service director Arno] Cammerer and [Chief Forester Robert] Stuart shared were many: although the cosmologies they inherited were as different as those of Pinchot and Mather, neither outlook functioned particularly well without modifications during the economic distress of the 1930s. Because they were not responsible for the strategy they implemented, neither Cammerer nor Stuart could adapt it to the conditions they faced. What was actually policy took on the status of dogma, and as a result, both agencies lost the control over their destinies that was the clearest legacy of the first generation of leaders of both... As a result of these new emphases, after the New Deal, neither the Park Service nor the Forest Service could legitimately claim the role of lead federal conservation agency," Hal K. Rothman '"A Regular 15

But while the public lands services were the battlegrounds for bureaucratic and administrative values at the federal level, some historians have taken note that another battle over the so-called "wilderness ideal" was also being fought in the National Parks and

Forests. In their estimation, wilderness advocacy became a significant and permanent force in the discussion of public lands beginning in the 1930s, and as such represented the most significant change in environmentalism in the New Deal era. (New Deal development projects, in this view, are not seen as historically significant, and are folded into the

99 progressive tradition. ) Stephen Fox, for example, writes in The American Conservation

Movement: John Muir and His Legacy that the propagation of Muir's wilderness ideal by

"amateur radicals" and "noncommercial elements within the Forest Service lobby" was the

"most striking new direction in conservation" of the interwar years.23 Richard West Sellars finds forces working towards the same ideal within the Park Service's ranks in his institutional history Preserving Nature in the National Parks, taking note in particular the role of scientists and of the "landmark" 1933 publication of Fauna of the National Parks of the United States by NPS biologists George M. Wright, Joseph S. Dixon, and Ben H.

Thompson. In Sellars' view, the document was "a truly radical departure from earlier

Ding-Dong Fight': Agency Culture and Evolution in the NPS-USFS Dispute, 1916-1937," The Western Historical Quarterly 20 (May 1989): 160-61 221 take issue with this on several counts: first, to characterize the TVA or other such projects as continuous with progressive-era analogues overlooks the fact that the New Deal projects very deliberately sought to integrate with the natural systems in their surroundings, where the progressive projects attempted to overwrite these systems. Second, the wilderness ideal, though important, was always spatially delimited in scope (specifically, confined to national parks and forests) and for this reason could not—nor was ever intended to—serve as a universal guideline or template for land use in the same way that the naturally-harmonized New Deal projects could. A third difficulty would be that then, as now, what constituted "wilderness" was hardly a settled matter. Wilderness advocates of the New Deal disagreed as to what extent pristine nature existed at all, and to what extent it should be left to develop naturally. Therefore it is perhaps overhasty to describe a "wilderness ideal" as if it laid down a new and complete cosmology, or had been a unanimous fact. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981), 203. Important though the establishment of the wilderness ideal was, I wonder whether it was more "striking" than the New Deal mega-projects such as TVA and Shelterbelt, which would have been more visible and had louder publicity, and at any rate represented an idea with unlimited territoriality (where the wilderness ideal only applied to federal public lands.) 16 practices" in that it "proposed to perpetuate existing natural conditions and, where necessary and feasible, to restore park fauna to a 'pristine state."'24 Furthermore, it typified a contemporaneous movement, led by scientists, of deepening and broadening appreciation for ecology that looked beneath scenery to appreciate the significance of complex ecosystems.25 In sum, historians have found the public lands, as a nexus of wilderness and civilization, where utility did battle with aesthetics, to be fertile ground for scholarship, opening a window on environmental ideals (and the political strength thereof) in the 1930s.

For historians who aver a transformation in environmentalism in the New Deal era, there is much discussion of not only what the symbol of this change was, but who was responsible for the changes. Retreading some examples from above, Mackintosh, Swain, and Polenberg all identify Harold Ickes as a key player for his determined efforts to shake up the Interior Department and dislodge an incumbent culture of conservatism and progressive conservationism. A convincing case can also be made for Ickes' boss being the true leader behind the changes—a thesis shared by several historians including John F.

Sears, Brian Black, Neil Maher, Paul Sutter, Sarah Phillips, and A. Dan Tarlock in Henry

L. Henderson and David B. Woolner's essay collection FDR and the Environment.

Moving outside the government, Ben Minteer argues in The Landscape of Reform for the importance of "civic pragmatist" thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye,

Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, 2" ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 96 (original emphasis.) Underscoring the point, Sellars calls Fauna of the National Parks "unprecedented in the history of national parks, and in all likelihood in the history of American public land management," and notes its authors' formal establishment of the Park Service's Wildlife Division that same year, 98-99. Sellars leveraged his position as the Park Service's historian in researching his book, thus offering readers a tantalizing insider's view of the agency. 25 Sellars observes that this idea largely failed to influence policy in the 1930s only because it lacked the support of a public constituency. But, he argues, the idea was a sound one and had taken root, and so was able to take off in the 1960s and '70s when public support materialized, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 148. 26 Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds. FDR and the Environment (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), passim. 17 and Aldo Leopold, as the originators of a persistent and important current of environmentalism that took root in the 1930s. This philosophy was "politically grounded and civic-spirited," advocated "the ideal of a 'balanced' or 'healthy' landscape" and thus informed a number of New Deal undertakings such as the TVA.27 And though Stephen Fox characterizes the New Deal era's environmental shift as taking place within the wilderness ethic as it applied to public lands, he likewise sees the leadership emanating from public

"amateur radicals" such as "Ding" Darling, (founder of the National Wildlife Federation, and Robert Marshall, forester, founder of the Wilderness Society, and author of 1933's The

People's Forests. Meanwhile, Sellars gives his nod to scientists—Park Service biologists, in particular—as the leaders of environmental change in the depression era.

A major problem with which environmental historians have grappled is understanding the precise nature of nature. On one level, there is the question of the historical influence of the environment in particular events and time periods, such as the depression era. While some historians assign the landscape a great deal of determinative power (such as Maher's Nature's New Deal and Phillips' This Land, This Nation, both previously mentioned), others have taken a different perspective in which nature itself becomes the dependent variable. For example, Dust Bowl, USA, Brad Lookingbill's cross- sectional and longitudinal study of the narratives and metanarratives of the dust bowl,

Ben A. Minteer, The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 4-5. Minteer opines that "a strong current of what might be called civic pragmatism (marked by an emphasis on instrumental action and experience, a recognition of value pluralism, and a focus on revitalizing community and cultural affairs) runs through the American environmental tradition," 9 Some other candidates for leadership: Dunaway gives dual credit to the federal government for undertaking projects such as the TVA, and filmmakers (Pare Lorentz in particular) for selling the "idea" behind them to the public; see Finis Dunaway Natural Visions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Jean Christie gives Morris Cooke credit in "New Deal Resources Planning: The Proposals of Morris L. Cooke" Agricultural History 53 (Jul. 1979). Cushman ("Environmental Therapy") argues the case for private landscape architects under contract from the federal government to carry out New Deal construction projects. 18 thoroughly explores the environment on the Great Plains in terms of evolving cultural representations, without the slightest recourse to meteorology, climatology, or geography.29

Lookingbill's approach, it should be noted, hints at a deeper question within the field, which is whether or not wilderness exists at all—that is, as a real thing "out there" or

whether it is a mere cultural construction. Most historians, of course, come down

somewhere in the spectrum between the two absolute positions. A good example of a middle ground position can be found in Mark Fiege's Irrigated Eden: The Making of an

Agricultural Landscape in the American West, in which he uses the topic of water development projects of the western United States to argue that the environment is versatile

and resilient enough to—and inevitably does—equilibrate with human development upon it. In this way, he argues for an "ambiguous entangling of artifice and nature" (a concept he

sums up in the term "hybrid landscape") in which "a belief in the garden [of Eden] myth

and acknowledgement of environmental problems existed side by side."30 Perhaps the most

notable works to tackle the question head on are Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott's

recent edited collections The Great New Wilderness Debate and its sequel The Wilderness

Debate Rages On, which offer an excellent overview of the range of opinions available.31

Lookingbill describes his intellectual stance and methodology in his introduction: "Because no historian has analyzed its ethnography, the story of the dust bowl needs retelling. Using deconstructive methods to analyze the nature of dystopia, the chapters that follow consider the variations on distinct yet related themes of cultural narratives. The themes thread the discourses on both the power and the presence of the frontier as metanarrative, the grandest mythopoetic song of American history," Brad D. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 4-5. Kevin DeLuca+ and Anne Demo deconstruct wilderness in terms of race and class in their essay "Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness," Environmental History 6 (Oct 2001). The opposite position—that is, one averring an objective and deterministic environment—is taken by Cunfer, who leaves little room for cultural or social influences in the aforementioned On the Great Plains. 30 Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 6, 9, 207 31 Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott, eds. The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), passim; Nelson and Callicott, eds. The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), passim. See also, for example, William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Out of the 19

The "environmental ethic" is a useful analytical tool for describing and analyzing the connections between a society and its environment. An environmental ethic, as I employ the term in this project, is a set of beliefs that explains a society's relationship to its natural surroundings—its land, rivers, forests, soil, farmlands, parks, deserts, topography, etc.—and accordingly proscribes ideological and behavioral norms as to how that society should interact with the environment. It also includes conceptualizations of nature and attitudes towards the environment, and may include (but also goes beyond) dictating notions of "right" and "wrong." Environmental ethics do not always come together as such, nor need they be recognized as such in their own time; environmental historians have employed the term to encapsulate aggregate notions that have influenced or dictated how land has been used at various points in history.32

In this thesis, I suggest a periodization of environmentalism in American history in which 1933 represents a transition point from a predominant "anthropocentric environmental ethic" (predicated upon contemporary political, economic, and military understandings) to the opening of a "New Deal era environmental ethic" in which cooperation dethroned conquest as the major leitmotif of relations with the environment.33

Woods: Essays in Environmental History, eds. Char Miller and Hal Rothman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 28-50 Aldo Leopold popularized the term "land ethic" in A Sand County Almanac. His land ethic related exclusively to nature: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community," he wrote "It is wrong when it tends otherwise," A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 262. Historians who have employed the term in a general sense to mean any ethic relating to the land include Jared Orsi in "From Horicon to Hamburgers and Back Again: Ecology, Ideology, and Wildfowl Management, 1917-1935," Environmental History Review 18 (Winter 1994), Chris Rasmussen in "Farm Tenancy, Soil Conservation, and the New Deal in Iowa," and Char Miller in "The Greening of Gifford Pinchot," Environmental History Review 16 (Autumn 1992). I have altered the term slightly to "environmental ethic" in order to make clear the distinction from Leopold's specific belief set, as well as to underscore that water, animal, and plant systems—in addition to land—figure in as well. As far as the question of nature as a construction, it should be noted that this is not a major thrust of my essay, but I adopt a middle-ground position: in my first chapter, I explain how the nineteenth century landscape was rarely more than a spillover space for political and economic discussions. However, moving 20

The new ethic was self-consciously modern,34 forward looking, and deeply critical of the received American land relationship. The leadership of this change, I argue, radiated from

the President, who ascribed a great deal of importance to the environment and vigorously

exercised his executive power to circulate the new environmental ethic down through the

various arteries and veins of government—an undertaking made easier by a general

receptiveness of the administration and public to the overall message. The purpose of my

thesis is to demonstrate that, in an atmosphere of environmental and economic crises, the

federal government has a rare opportunity to inaugurate a new environmental ethic, and to

win significant public support in the process, and that is precisely what happened under

FDR in the 1930s.

My first chapter begins by describing, revealing the sources, following the

outcomes, and surveying the faults of the older environmental ethic up to the beginning of

the 1930s. In my first chapter I review a broad range of beliefs and practices in American

history (with particular attention on water use in the mid-to-late nineteenth century as a

case study) from agriculture, farming methods, and forestry to meteorological and

climatological folk wisdom, and show how an anthropocentric environmental ethic ran

through each of them as a single thread of continuity. I analyze this range of

philosophies—none of which had the environment in mind as their focus—to demonstrate

that when specifically applied to the landscape, they engendered an environmental ethic in

which interactions with the environment were unilaterally slanted in favor of anthropic

ends; that is, outcomes that were of economic, political, or social benefit to human beings.

into the New Deal era, my arguments with regards to projects harmonizing with in-place natural systems tacitly assumes that a "real" nature exists separate from human contact. 34 "Modern" in this case meaning something like: rooted in the present, celebrating newness and discontinuity with the past, and repudiating nostalgia and traditionalism. 21

Though it changed forms and outward appearances at times, this environmental ethic proved resilient against historical change, maintaining the same essential values at its core throughout its lengthy existence. I argue that by the end of the Hoover administration, however, there was widespread sentiment among the government and public that the previous century's relationship with the land had long outlasted its expiry date, by both ideological and more tangible measures, and that a rare opportunity existed for a new environmental ethic to establish itself.

The fault lines of the old environmental ethic had realist dimensions as well, as the inadequacies—some might say eventualities—became apparent in a number of ways.

National Park planners in the early 1930s were faced with the dilemma of accommodating the legions of middle-class urban motorists who choked the roadways to enjoy some temporary escapism in the great outdoors. The problem lay in deciding how much recreational development was permissible before the notion of the National Park lost all meaning; for example, how was one to deal with the scores of tourists who wanted to experience nature from the comfort of their caravans? Where to draw the line between providing adequate road access and remaking Yosemite into a superhighway interchange?

But while Parks Service administrators pondered these questions, more urgent problems stemming from environmental sources loomed. In 1927, the Mississippi river rose up to drench the landscape, transforming the stretch of land from southern Illinois to the Gulf of

Mexico into an inland reservoir to rival the Great Lakes. The concrete levees along the riverbanks, designed to prevent overflow, were in essence more of a workaround than a genuine precaution, which unfortunately had masked the all too predictable danger of the river. Not dissimilarly, agriculture on the Great Plains, often considered an index of 22 national welfare, had been in doldrums for some time. The raucous din of the roaring twenties had been more of a quiet drone for much of the United States' farming population, who suffered depressed agricultural prices throughout the decade. This situation became especially dire after the crash of 1929, which combined with searing drought in the early

1930s in many cases proved more than the traditional community based socio-economic support systems could handle.

The "dust bowl" of the southern Great Plains in the early 1930s provided the government and public a spectacular example of the power of nature as it ruined farms and brought a sandstorm to the nation's major cities in the East. Newspapers and other media clamored to find a scapegoat, rarely being satisfied that the ongoing phenomenon was a chance occurrence; more often than not they were willing to point an accusatory finger at careless land use by the settlers who had bought the promise of fertile land and independence. And almost needless to say, dust bowl homesteaders had ideas of their own on the causes of their misfortune. In sum, in the early years of the 1930s there were a number of open questions, each demanding an answer, all relating to the relationship between American society and the landscape upon which it was built.

From this understanding it seems natural that the beginning of Franklin Delano

Roosevelt's presidency in 1933, charged with promise and optimism, and washing away a decade of Republican rule, would bring about a New Deal not just for society, but perhaps for the landscape as well. My second chapter will examine the changes and reforms in conservation brought about during FDR's first two terms of office, and in particular attempt to identify projects and policies that represent the beginnings of a new post- progressive environmental ethic. In order to keep this chapter within a reasonable length, it 23 will focus on a limited number of federal agencies, including new bodies that sprang forth during the First Hundred Days such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),35 and pre-existing ones with direct interface with the environment such as the Parks Service and the Forest Service. Although some historians have singled out particular projects or directions within agencies of this time as leading the charge of the new environmental ethic

(as noted above) I shall argue that a single idea ran through and informed each simultaneously, and that privileging any single one as a leader underestimates the commonalities between them. This idea was that the environment was not a passive, blank space which could accept any physical changes imposed on it by settlers without consequence; on the contrary, it came to be understood as a system with properties and characteristics all its own, with a reciprocal impact on the people living in it.

Among the changes that could be observed as early as the First Hundred Days was the President's own insistence that the national economic and environmental crises were two aspects of the same problem; that human resources and natural resources were inextricably linked and were in need of better management. This "single disease, single cure" outlook was epitomized in the CCC, which sought to rehabilitate distressed land and unemployed enrollees. Yet another theme consistent to many FDR programs was an effort to craft a more nuanced conception of nature, in which integration and cooperation replaced exploitation and competition with natural processes and equilibriums. Programs of this type included the AAA, which offered cash bonuses to farmers who agreed to take land out of production (which, it was hoped, would have the double effect of conserving the soil

35 That each of these materialized so early in the new presidency illustrates that they were a very high priority for the Roosevelt administration. 24 and boosting agricultural prices); erosion control programs that, contrary to prior efforts at the same, dared to cross county lines in order to encompass natural drainage areas; and the construction of spillways along the Mississippi to channel the river overflow away from populated areas. Several of these goals, and several more, were writ large in the Tennessee

Valley Authority, which ranked among the New Deal's biggest and most ambitious programs. Recognizing the Tennessee River as the centerpiece of both a society and a natural region, TVA planners attempted to work with the river to accomplish a number of goals which had rarely before been linked together in concept, much less in execution. As with other New Deal land programs, the TVA equated environmental and economic disaster and hoped that a twofold solution might be found in re-equilibrating a lopsided urban-rural imbalance. The Authority followed the Tennessee across state lines, recognizing that river management that arbitrarily halted at political borders would severely hamper the project's overall intent. Likewise did it cut through traditional divisions between federal agencies to provide rural electrification, afford recreational space, check flooding, stop soil erosion, and reforest dewooded areas. Roosevelt's presidency also saw some important changes on the federally owned and administered land in the parks and forests system. After 1933, the Park Service enjoyed an ever-enlarging budget, a growing roll of personnel, and not least of all a rapid multiplication of the areas under its purview.

My third and final chapter investigates the extent to which the public shared this new vision of the environment and where it located the locus of leadership in the new environmental ethic, and explores areas where it branched out in support of causes not explicitly endorsed in the New Deal, most notably including the "wilderness ideal." I find 25 limited but distinct and enthusiastic public support for the major tenets of the New Deal's conception of the proper relationship between the American people and the land, with many authors, journalists, and organizations recognizing the vital role of the federal government and the President as sounding the keynote for the new mode of thinking about the landscape. The wilderness ideal, on the other hand, I argue to be a creation of public activists, but ultimately derivative of the broader movement of the time rather than a unique movement of its own.

In sum, this thesis argues that the federal government in the New Deal era succeeded in winning a large portion of the public over to a new environmental ethic because it consistently and assertively wove that ethic into both rhetoric and action at a moment when economic and environmental disasters caused the public to question the received wisdom, and opened them to consider new possibilities. In an era when it is desperately important that the public take seriously the threat of diminishing natural resources, climate change, pollution, and other environmental threats, the instructive value of this example can hardly be overstated. 26

CHAPTER 1 A Landscape Out of Balance

Time built a pioneer and set him down Upon the grayest waste of Idaho. He clubbed the desert and made it grow In broad and undulating fields of brown. He laid his might upon it, stripped its frown Of drought and thistles; till by sweat and glow He left the aged and barren hills aglow With color—and its flame was his renown...

Vardis Fisher, "Joe Hunter" (1928)36

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and even into the early decades of the twentieth, there was no single environmental movement as it exists today. Certainly the

American people lived on the land, made use of it, interfaced with it, and most importantly to this chapter, formed attitudes about what the landscape was and what the proper relationship between man and landscape ought to be. But these attitudes in general were mere stepping stones to some other cause, perhaps political, scientific, or economic.

Furthermore, they were nearly always provincial in scope, applying only to local conditions or specific plant or animal species, but rarely pronouncing a universal set of values or a guide to day-to-day life. To this we might add that there seems to be little evidence that these ideologies were in dialogue with each other. Nevertheless, detailed analysis of several such attitudes (varied, parochial, and isolated as they may have been) reveals some

36 Qtd. in Fiege, Irrigated Eden, 174 27 nontrivial common elements which might be collectively regarded as a "virtual" environmental ethic. In other words, while no individual or organization was articulating precisely this environmental ethic, in toto, if we look at a key set of elements—of which they all have at least one—it is as if they were acting according to that set as an environmental ethic. These common elements, as we shall see, included: marginalization of plants, animals, and ecosystems in favour of anthropic utility; a positive belief in the nonexistence of environmental limits of any kind;37 and a primary characterization of the human-landscape interaction as being a unilateral conqueror-conquered relationship. For sake of shorthand, this virtual collection shall be referred to throughout this essay as the

"anthropocentric environmental ethic."

In spite of the fact that it was rooted in tangential political, economic, and social ideologies, or rather because it was, the anthropocentric environmental ethic was neither fragile nor a mere flashbulb phenomenon. On the contrary, Americans continually renewed and reinforced its terms, and evolved social and cultural formations around it. When confronted with possibly fatal contradictions, it proved malleable and versatile enough to accommodate corrective modifications without compromising its central tenets. This source of strength, however, meant that the continuing existence of the environmental ethic was ultimately predicated upon the security of its exogenous ideological sources.

This chapter argues that the anthropocentric environmental ethic than ran through a number of diverse movements was a major animating force that guided the ways in which

Americans interacted with their environment from the 1780s to the 1920s. I begin by

37 As this chapter will demonstrate, by "positive" I mean to convey that: it's not the case that Americans did not know whether or not there were limits to the environment and chose to assume there weren't because it was the happier option; rather, they had positive arguments—scientific and otherwise—that there definitely were not any such limits. 28 outlining how this pattern originated in the early years of the Republic with an Ordinance for parceling out to private citizens the windfall of new territories that accompanied the end of the American Revolution. Next, I explain how the Ordinance evolved in the mid- nineteenth century into the doctrine of manifest destiny, and how that sentiment's inherent understandings of politics, economics, and race transformed the concept of the American environment into a spillover space for militarism, masculinity, and class and race privilege.

Having thus deconstructed the anthropocentric environment into its cultural building blocks, I take as a case study several unsuccessful attempts to bring moisture to dry lands in the late-nineteenth century to demonstrate how the ethic was able to withstand the contradictions that stemmed from its essential disharmony with nature. Moving forward, I highlight the continuity of the anthropocentric environmental ethic in the progressive era and describe how it again managed to withstand yet more challenges to its hegemony.

Finally, I conclude the chapter by illustrating the extraordinary stresses placed on the environmental ethic in the early 1930s, and explore how this situation opened a space for a new environmental ethic to possibly take root, thereby teeing up my second chapter.

The die for the spatial organization and economic use of the American environment was cast in the earliest days of the Republic, in large part by the hand of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson's affinity for agriculture is no secret: his vision of America was a nation of small independent farmers toiling on their own land. This arrangement, he felt certain, would

yield an abundance of benefits for the nation, including a loyal and patriotic citizenry, a perpetually stocked national larder, and a check against social stratification. "It is not too

soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land," he wrote in 1784, and the same year drafted an Ordinance at the behest of 29 the Continental Congress to organize the lands acquired in the Treaty of Paris into several new states with borders defined by lines of longitude and latitude. The following year it was superseded by the Land Ordinance of 1785, which scuttled Jefferson's new states but retained the rectangular survey, and divided the land east of the Mississippi according to a rigid gridiron pattern of equal sized lots available for private purchase. New legislation such as the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act, and the 1916 Stock-

Raising Homestead Act essentially renewed this pattern and expanded it into new territories beyond its original jurisdiction.38 Accordingly, it surged westward with the frontier and eventually came to embrace over three quarters of the territory of the continental United States. The purpose of the rectilinear land allocation system was to ensure equal, democratic ownership for all, for which reason it deliberately ignored the geography of the areas it mapped out. Furthermore, the plan dictated that schools, churches, courthouses, and municipal government structures were to be clustered in the centre squares of each "township" unit.40 In more abstract terms, the Ordinance encouraged

Americans to think of the landscape as a blank sheet of paper, ready to be imprinted upon by the hand of civilization, its natural forms and systems flattened and bleached out.

As Jefferson's great checkerboard swept across the continent throughout the nineteenth century, political realities in the form of territorial rivalry became increasingly important. Who should prevail when Americans wanted the same piece of land as Native

Americans, Mexicans, or British colonists? In response, manifest destiny entered the national lexicon as the watchword of westerly expansion in the mid-to-late 1800s, bringing

38 Stuart Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936), 106 39 Vernon Carstensen, "Patterns on the American Land," Publius 18 (Autumn 1988): 31 40 Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 322-24 30 with it further understandings of the relationship between Americans and their land which reinforced and added flexibility to the "flattened terrain" tradition originating with the 1785

Ordinance. The famous credo, which first appeared in print in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845, came from the pen of John O'Sullivan, who encouraged his countrymen to "overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." The phrase itself, and the sentiment behind it (which is detectable as early as the 1830s), struck a chord in the national consciousness, which historians have explained in terms its appeal to nationalistic, racial, religious, and economic chauvinism.41 Yet the "continent allotted by Providence" should not be overlooked as a part of the complete historical explanation of manifest destiny. It is true that the American settlers forging westward across the continent wished to assimilate, sweep aside, or conquer the peoples they encountered, but the landscape, as both arena of conflict and spoil of war, was always the ultimate prize. In this respect, it is clear that manifest destiny must be understood to encapsulate an environmental ethic in addition to its bellicose territoriality.

But what relationship to the land did manifest destiny encourage? It seems reasonable to assume that the same colonialist attitude that prevailed towards natives,

Mexicans, and rival territorial claimants would apply to the land as well: we are coming to spread the beneficence of American democracy and economics; stop us if you dare. In other words, the landscape, if found not to be welcoming, would be forcibly pacified and subjugated. This position is supported by other statements of manifest destiny which appeared around the same time as O'Sullivan's original publication. As the Oregon

41 Qtd. in Julius W. Pratt, "The Origin of 'Manifest Destiny,'" The American Historical Review 32 (Jul. 1927): 798 31 question occupied public interest in late 1845, an editorial in the New York Morning News insisted that the American claim to the Territory rested on the firm foundation that "the

God of nature and of nations has marked it for our own."42 In other words, Americans had rightful title to the Oregon country not simply on the basis of political considerations; the invocation of the "God of nature" hinted that usage of the land was equally important, if not more so, and that Americans were the most worthy inheritors of the land by divine favour. Further evidence for this idea can be found in an 1839 essay appearing in the

Democratic Review, in which nationalism and religious themes meshed with a between- the-lines statement of the manifest destiny environmental ethic. In settling the continent, opined the author, the United States was destined to become a temple to God of unmatched grandeur and unlimited dimensions; "Its floor shall be a hemisphere—its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens,"43 wrote the author, whose extended metaphor gave no mention whatsoever of walls. Artists frequently conveyed this same trope in their illustrations of the settlement of the West, depicting trains steaming off along linear railroad tracks towards an infinite horizon.44 The sentiment, though subtle, implied an essentially unbounded United States in which every square foot was to be open to development. More straightforward in his assessment was Robert Winthrop, a

Massachusetts Whig and opponent of manifest destiny, who mocked the expansionists' oversimplification of the continent and unflappable optimism:

It is not a little amusing to observe what different views are taken as to the indication of "the hand of nature" and the pointings of "the finger of God," by the same gentlemen, under different circumstances and upon different subjects. In one quarter of the compass they can descry the hand of nature in a level desert and a

42 Qtd. in Pratt, "The Origin of 'Manifest Destiny,'" 796 43 Qtd. in Pratt, "The Origin of 'Manifest Destiny,'" 797 44 Roger Cushing Aikin, "Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation," American Art 14 (Autumn 2000): 85 32

second-rate river, beckoning us impatiently to march up to them. But when they turn their eyes to another part of the horizon the loftiest mountains in the universe are quite lost upon their gaze. There is no hand of nature there. The configuration of the earth has no longer any significance. The Rocky Mountains are mere molehills. Our destiny is onward.45

In other words, through the binoculars of manifest destiny, everything looked like a welcoming landscape.4 In sum, the rhetoric of manifest destiny reminded Americans that the landscape itself was an uncomplicated thing—as was the relationship of Americans to it. It was spatially limitless, universally cultivable, and the rightful property of the

American people, who would unilaterally dictate the terms of occupation. Accordingly, it was expected that the land be topographically simple, or if not, at least capable of being tamed and simplified.

Yet the realities of the geography of North America were not always as accommodating as was hoped. For example, settlers who ventured across the Mississippi in the middle decades of nineteenth century—seeking cheap farmland or to add a new free or slave state to the Union—were understandably disappointed by the marginal land they found. Since the early decades of the nineteenth century, documentation of the terrain

Qtd. in Norman Graebner, ed. Manifest Destiny (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), xxvi 46 A note on a backbeat to the story here: the early and middle years of the nineteenth century saw the rise of romanticism and transcendentalism in the United States as reactions against the kind rationalism and hyper- rationalism of the Enlightenment that certainly informed the 1785 Ordinance grid. Roderick Nash gives an excellent overview of these groups' environmental ethics, and observes that Romantic reverence for nature hardly ever existed on its own and much more often was outweighed in the American mind by the pioneer's antipathy for nature. "While appreciation of the wild country existed," he remarks, "it was seldom unqualified. Romanticism [permitted] a favorable attitude toward wilderness without entirely eliminating the instinctive fear and hostility a wilderness condition had produced," Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 66. For transcendentalists, nature was a space to get close to a higher spiritual world, but nature in this sense was often construed as a symbolic covering for one's own mind. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau enjoined the reader to "be... the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes." (Qtd. in Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 89). His invocation and valorization of Lewis and Clark—a duo epitomizing the conquering pioneer— signified Thoreau's ambivalence about nature, and typified the contradiction that often cropped up when transcendentalist encountered real wilderness. Nathaniel Hawthorne similarly found his exposure to nature on the transcendentalist Utopian experiment at Brook Farm disappointing, as recounted in his 1852 Blithedale Romance. In sum, the positive assessments of nature of the romantics and transcendentals existed in a state of equilibrium with a critical view that was fully consistent with anthropocentric environmental ethics. 33 between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, as yet mostly unsettled by

European-Americans, had commonly referred to the region as the "Great American

Desert." Zebulon Pike, surveying the newly-acquired Louisiana territory in 1806, had not minced words, writing "these vast plains of the western hemisphere, may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa."47 Geographer Edwin James gave an equally gloomy assessment, characterizing the land as "almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course, uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence... the scarcity of wood and water, almost uniformly prevalent, will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling this country."48

This assessment ran into a troublesome philosophical difficulty in the height of the craze for manifest destiny in the 1840s and '50s: if God had set aside the continent, from sea to shining sea, for American settlement, why blemish it with a sprawling expanse of arid, inhospitable terrain? It was Charles Dana Wilber, a Nebraska land speculator, who best (and most articulately) managed to resolve the contradiction by tacking on a proviso that introduced a new way of thinking about ostensible natural obstacles. "To those who possess the divine faculty of hope—the optimists of our times," he wrote in 1881, "It will always be a source of pleasure to understand that the Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth, but, on the contrary, has so endowed it that man, by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas." In other words, with faith in God and hard work, the Plains would surely rearrange itself into a paradise on earth. What at first blush

47 Chris J. Magoc, Environmental Issues in American History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006) 188; Worster, Dust Bowl, 81 48 Qtd. in D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, V. 2 Continental America 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 76 49 Qtd. in Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1977), 227 34

seemed to be a barrier was in reality an opportunity. It was the duty and the destiny of the

settler to ignore the warning signs of the landscape and confidently turn over the soil for cultivation.50 The plow was "the instrument which separates civilization from savagery;

and converts a desert into a farm or garden" Wilber wrote, building a framework for his central thesis: "To be more precise, Rain follows the plow."51

Thus, Wilber introduced a crucial augmentation to the manifest destiny environmental ethic of the nineteenth century. Though the phrase was structurally similar to the phrase "God helps those who help themselves," it actually combined an exhortation to positive thinking with a shorthand statement of climatological "fact"—albeit one now known to be patently false. At any rate, Wilber and his followers assured would-be settlers that the very act of plowing and planting on the earth released the trapped moisture into the

air, at which point it would ascend into the upper atmosphere and accumulate into

rainclouds. Ferdinand V. Hayden, a scientist employed as Director of the Geological and

Geographical survey of the Territories for the Interior Department, for example,

hypothesized that "the planting of ten or fifteen acres of forest-trees on each quarter-section

will have a most important effect on the climate, equalizing and increasing the moisture

and adding greatly to the fertility of the soil."52 The significance of "rain follows the plow"

is that it put a band-aid over a troublesome crack in the simplified environmental ethic of

manifest destiny and the Land Ordinance. Rather than offer a new interpretation of the

proper relationship to the land—which might have been appropriate in light of the glaring

anomaly that was the Great American Desert—it made use of imaginative science to

50 Worster, Dust Bowl, 82 Qtd. in Magoc, Environmental Issues in American History, 187 (emphasis added.) 5 Qtd. in Magoc, Environmental Issues in American History, 193. Wilber was not a scientist nor did he claim to have originated the idea he encapsulated in his 1881 settlement-friendly slogan. Hayden's quotation, dated to 1867, shows that the "science" behind the sentiment existed decades before. 35 preserve the notion that the landscape would not dictate terms to its settlers, nor did it possess any physical limitations. The old environmental ethic, it seems, was sufficiently entrenched in the national consciousness that Americans were willing to attach an unwieldy caveat to the existing paradigm in order to circumvent its contradictions.53 But for all the ballyhoo of Wilber's proclamation and all the bullish settlers who took the plow to the

Plains, precipitation remained elusive. The 1880s were dismally dry, bringing extended droughts and frustration.54 Once again, Americans predominantly brushed away these difficulties and looked for other methods to bring water to the arid territories beyond the

100th meridian.

In 1876, John Wesley Powell, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, authored for

Congress a document titled Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States.

The Report drew on ten years' experience studying the Colorado River and its surrounding landscape, and argued that natural watersheds, rather than arbitrary straight lines oriented to the compass points, ought to form the basis of the organization of land in the West.

Powell's critique, however, in fact had a great deal in common with Jefferson and Wilber.

Powell couched his arguments in favour of more topographically-sensitive agriculture in terms of economic equality and democratization, rather than total farm output or long-term sustainability. Thus, Powell's vision of agriculture was not so different from Jefferson's, though the former believed the rectilinear organization of land was the wrong way to achieve it. Furthermore, like Wilber, Powell was not averse to tailoring the landscape to

53 The situation, I think, has much in common with the process by which medieval astronomers continually added epicycles and deferents to Ptolemy's geocentric cosmology in order to account for its mounting discrepancies with astronomical observations. While these additions preserved the old system, for a time, they demanded increasingly complex mathematics to explain the motions of the planets; Copernicus' heliocentric model did the same in much simpler terms, yet it took considerable time to dethrone the older paradigm. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 54 Clark C. Spence, "The Dyrenforth Rainmaking Experiments: A Government Venture in 'Pluviculture,'" Arizona and the West 3 (Autumn 1961): 211 36 suit anthropic needs when necessary. Rather than a great plow-up, the Survey director insisted in his report that the arid West could be effectively watered via massive irrigation projects.55 "It may be anticipated that all the lands redeemed by irrigation in the Arid

Region will be highly cultivated and abundantly productive," the Report boasted, "and agriculture will be but slightly subject to the vicissitudes of scant and excessive rainfall."56

Theodore Roosevelt agreed, and in true-to-form progressive fashion created the

Reclamation Bureau in 1902 to facilitate efficient settlement and assist with irrigation of the Southwest.57 The Bureau proceeded on the faulty assumption that sufficient watering could make any terrain, no matter how arid, suitable for agriculture.58 Through the Bureau, settlers could purchase the public lands at a bargain rate and have free access to the government irrigation system on the understanding that they pay back the expenses for the latter within ten years. But a decade after the initiation of the Bureau, settlement of the

West had not proceeded as hoped. The great majority of settlers had had difficulty growing,

In Irrigated Eden, Mark Fiege takes the landscape of Idaho as a case study of Western irrigation, and argues that projects of this kind were not so unnatural as might be assumed at first blush, as the redirected water often seeped into creases in the earth that had probably at one time been natural waterways themselves, and that over time they form what he calls "hybrid landscapes" with the surrounding ecosystems (for example, a swarm of mayflies that make their home above an artificial pond). The former point holds true in the case of the geography of Idaho, but is difficult to translate to the arid deserts of the Southwest or the tabletop terrain of the Great Plains; in these areas irrigation would have few, if any, natural channels to stream into—in other words, we must consider the difference between a region that did not support watering, and one that could not and never had. His latter point is well taken, but speaks more to present conditions as a result of long-term developments, that would have been incidental to irrigation design processes. Historically speaking, the more relevant issue is whether or not such natural equilibration would have been intended or even relied upon by geo-engineers, which appears, from Fiege's work, not to have been the case. Furthermore, Fiege oversimplifies in regarding all such natural reactions as positive, thus overlooking the distinct possibility of calamitous blowback effects such as the dust bowl. See Irrigated Eden, 6-9 56 Qtd. in Magoc, 114 Roosevelt's other great engineering project, the Panama Canal, applied the same ethos to its namesake isthmus. Powerful interests wanted to put ships through Central America, and not be dissuaded by the lack of a natural waterway to do so, built their own. 58 This sentiment, it should be noted, was not confined to the West. In the antebellum South, planters experimented with various chemical means of increasing natural yields and reversing erosion on overtaxed lands. For example, an Alabama planter writing in an 1852 agricultural journal claimed to have discovered a proverbial fountain of youth in liquefied guano, which if applied in quantities of 200 pounds per acre would unfailingly revitalize even the most "mangled" fields. See David W. Francis, "Antebellum Agricultural Reform in DeBow's Review," Louisiana History 14 (Spring 1973): 167 37 and instead abandoned their land in frustration long before the ten year deadline.

Nevertheless, Bureau chief Frederick Newell refused to contemplate the notion that it was the impossibility of desert irrigation that was to blame—in other words, that nature might resist human designs upon it. On the contrary, Newell reaffirmed his commitment to the anthropocentric environmental ethic, declaring that the fault rested with the settlers themselves for lacking the hardiness of the pioneers. "The characteristics of present settlers are in many respects entirely different from those of the older pioneer communities," he grumbled, "There is not the spirit of cooperation which ruled the early pioneers."

Reflecting on the episode in 1922, his attitude was much the same: "The reasons for success or failure lie not so much in climate, soil, or markets," he wrote "but rather in the character of the landowner, his experience, strength, health, and especially the 'will to win,' or possession of qualities which distinguish the pioneer."59 Yet difficult thought it may be to believe, irrigating the deserts of the Southwest was probably the second most improbable scheme of the era for summoning moisture to a naturally arid environment.

That honour belonged to a pseudoscientific craze known as "concussive pluviculture."

In 1891, the federal government appointed retired general Robert Dyrenforth, to conduct an unusual experiment. In August of that year, he assembled on the west Texas plain a formidable battery of makeshift mortars, from which he unleashed a roaring salvo of explosives at the sky. The purpose of this curious spectacle was to test an old bit of folk knowledge that had recently received the tentative backing of a scientific hypothesis. It had long been known great deluges of rain often followed great military battles; seeking a connection, scientists in the 1870s began to theorize that the detonation of explosives was

59 Qtd. in Donald J. Pisani, "Federal Reclamation and the American West in the Twentieth Century" Agricultural History 11 (Summer, 2003): 393-99 38 sufficiently disruptive of natural air currents to cause precipitation. This somewhat esoteric theory became a national sensation in 1890: that year, civil engineer Edward Powers, republished his book War and the Weather—in which he asserted that the effect could be put to use in ending droughts—to capitalize on the disappointingly dry decade that had just concluded on the Great Plains. Newspapers across the nation hotly debated the idea: those in the East tended to scoff at the notion, quickly dismissing it as wishful thinking, while optimistic Western sources insisted that the theory be tested without hesitation. This was by no means an obscure chapter in American history. The extent of penetration of the

"concussive" theory into the remotest of areas, and of the sincere hopefulness of Western farmers in it, is found in an 1891 letter to Agriculture Secretary Jeremiah Rusk from Henry

Holdes, a self-described "poor farmer" from the remote frontier hamlet of Yuma, Colorado.

Holdes earnestly offered use of his land at no charge for any experiments that take place,

and thoughtfully included a hand-drawn map of his community and a table of

meteorological observations. °

Crucially, a handful of important figures in the government fell under the spell of

the "concussionist" position. Most significant in this regard was B.E. Fernow, chief of the

Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, who convinced Congress in 1891 to

authorize an outlay of $9,000 of federal monies towards the research.61 Railroad companies

offered the General free shipping on his supplies while local businesses donated explosives

and other supplies, so much of this funding went into covering the various expenses of

Dyrenforth's "pluvicultural" trial, which by all accounts was heavy on pageantry.

60 Henry Holdes to J.M. Rusk, undated but probably early 1891, RG 95 (Records of the Forest Service), entry 123, box 1. 61 J.W. Gregory to B.E. Fernow, March 14, 1891, RG 95 (Records of the Forest Service), entry 123, box 1; Spence, "The Dyrenforth Experiments," 216 39

Frustrated scientists, invited along as observers but allowed no input into the goings-on, later grumbled that what the former general had conducted was as much a military set piece as a genuine experiment. One witness noted that Dyrenforth sported a pair of cavalry boots throughout.62 Yet all the pomp could do little to obscure the fact that general's experiments were, at best, inconclusive: rain sometimes followed the thunder of his guns, but how long after, where exactly, or in what volume or duration was anyone's guess. From a practical standpoint, nothing much ever came of the theory. Further trials under more rigorous scientific conditions in 1892 convinced all but the most diehard concussionists in

Washington that the principle was utter bunk. Federal funding dried up altogether, and the relevant bureaux did all they could to bury their involvement in the embarrassing and costly fiasco.

But far from closing the chapter on the theory, the federal government's sudden disavowal could do nothing to dispossess the public of centuries of folk knowledge on the putative connection between precipitation and explosions. For decades to come, groups of concerned citizens would gather in times of drought or forest fire to exercise their Second

Amendment right to blast away at the sky in the hopes of conjuring rainfall.63 In 1910— twenty years after Dyrenforth's humiliating undertaking—cereal magnate-cum-social engineer Charles W. Post felt secure in informing the managers of his Texas proving ground that "It has been demonstrated many times that such agitation by explosion does precipitate moisture and produce rain." 4 At no small expense in time or money, Post conducted dozens of experiments—he called them "battles," preserving the military

62 Spence, "The Dyrenforth Experiments," 217. Further undermining the legitimacy of the experiment was the bias of the principal investigator: i.e., the fact that Dyrenforth himself was an avowed concussionist. 63 Spence, "The Dyrenforth Experiments," 230-31. 64 Qtd. in Charles Dudley Eaves, "Charles William Post, the Rainmaker," The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 43 (Apr. 1940): 426 40 character of the trials previously seen in General Dyrenforth's experiments—but met with no more success than his pluvicultural predecessor.65 Yet Post's patience for failure was virtually unlimited: after each unsuccessful effort, Post would simply fine tune some variable or other and perhaps increase the tonnage of explosives, (and on one occasion, blame his supplier for faulty dynamite) as if the outcome of the experiment had been a tantalizing near miss. The key to this conviction can be found in a letter he wrote to his managers, castigating them for a perceived lack of interest in the project: "I want extraordinary attention given to this subject," he insisted, "for it means a very great deal to the country at large, and all of us are included."66 For Post, then, the "battles" for rain were no less than battles for the fate of the nation, the outcomes of which depended upon on man's ability to master the environment. Though Post was far too young to have fought in the Civil War, he made frequent reference to downpours that had supposedly followed

Shiloh, Gettysburg, and other momentous clashes from that conflict, and probably imagined that just as in those battles, unwavering determination would be necessary for victory.

It behoves use to consider the significance of the fact that, even after the failure of rain to follow the plow, Americans were still receptive to efforts to bully the environment into compliance. In fact, their appetite for such methods seems to have increased since

Wilber's proclamation in 1881, when their primary weapon had been the plow; when they made their second attempt to wring out the clouds ten years later, they had upgraded their

ordnance significantly. Even the simultaneous loss of scientific credibility and federal

65 Eaves calculates that Post expended a formidable sum of $50,000 over three years (at about $2,500 per experiment). Furthermore, Eaves shows that Post would have been prepared to continue spending but for his death by suicide in 1914. "Charles Post, Rainmaker," 436. 66 Qtd. in Eaves, "Charles Post, Rainmaker," 428 41 backing was insufficient to dampen the deep public commitment to the theory of concussionism, because the underlying environmental ethic remained operational, and continued to dictate a unilateral relationship to the landscape.

The progressive era of American government brought a new host of pressures to bear on the anthropocentric environmental ethic. It was under this era that the ideologies of conservationism and preservationism stirred up amongst the public, and that the federal government inaugurated the Forest Service and the Park Service. All of this seemed to betoken a new appreciation for nature of different character as compared to the previous decades. But scratching beneath the surface of these movements and agencies, one detects significant influence of anthropocentric ideals at work.

The 1890s saw the rise of both conservationism and preservationism in the United

States, a pair of land-oriented ideologies that framed much of the discussion of the environment. While these ideologies were often at odds with one another—most prominently in the Hetch Hetchy dispute—recent historiography has demonstrated that the differences between the two positions were not so great as were once thought. Furthermore, we shall see that both were substantially evolutions of the anthropocentric environmental ethic as it attempted to come to terms with the end of the frontier and the possibility of overtaxed natural resources. Very briefly stated, preservationism grew out of the ideology of John Muir and believed that protecting pristine wilderness should take priority over economic development of natural resources. Conservationists more often aligned with

Gifford Pinchot, and sought ways to regulate or improve natural resource use so as to guarantee a perpetual and abundant supply. The two outlooks were not necessarily ideological opposites, but their disagreements were many. The tooth-and-nail controversy 42 over Hetch Hetchy Valley was the largest and most public confrontation between supporters of conservation and those of preservation; the rhetoric reached a fever pitch and the heavy hitters on both sides went to bat for their respective causes. Consequently, the episode gives a clear window on the real nature of both sides, and casts doubt on the white hat-black hat terms in which older historiography framed the dispute. The dispute hinged on the fate of a California valley. In 1906, the municipal government of San Francisco had planned a dam that would supply the city with fresh water, but in the process would flood the picturesque valley, which happened to be within the confines of Yosemite National

Park. Conservationists called attention to the benefits for the metropolitan population, while preservation supporters balked at the idea of submerging an area of federal public lands for the benefit of a single city.

However, newer scholarship has recognized that conservationists and preservationists were, ultimately, both interested in developing the Hetch Hetchy Valley in their own way. Conservationists were prepared to sacrifice the landscape to meet the material needs of the people of San Francisco. The preservationists who opposed the flooding, however, were almost universally in favour of developing the valley with a suite of tourist amenities such as hotels, camp grounds, and hiking trails. "The idea that nature might be saved for its own sake," notes Wellock, "occurred to very few." In fact, that it did not may have played a large part in the fact that the conservationists eventually won the

day: dam supporters could argue that the resulting lake would be just as aesthetically pleasing and accessible to tourists as the valley, if not more so. The preservationists had little ground on which to rebut such a claim since they themselves were in favour of much

7 Thomas R. Wellock, Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870-2000 (Wheeling, 111.: Harlan Davidson, 2007), 62 43 the same goal. Had they instead held a hard line against development of any kind, the

(TO conservationists could have made no such rejoinder. Ultimately Hetch Hetchy demonstrates that as far as environmental ethics went, the difference between conservation and preservation was often one of degree, rather than kind.

A third new attitude which gained momentum in the progressive era and seemingly represented a reverence for nature was the so-called "wilderness cult," which swept white, urban America in the early twentieth century. But if a cult this was, its deity was Ares, rather than Gaia; that is, white masculinity and militarism, rather than nature. This was spurred on by the progressive era's paranoia of white middle-class masculinity, which they feared, was atrophying away as males lost contact with their primal nature; meanwhile,

"non-white" immigrants were thought to be immigrating and reproducing at an alarming rate. Consequently, a number of sources sought to reinvigorate white masculinity through contact with nature, thus framing the environment as a battleground for the future of the nation.

Youth organizations such as the Woodcraft Indians (founded 1901) and the Boy

Scouts of America (1910) which sought to instil the virtues of rugged self-reliance and masculinity in their young troopers (with no-so-subtle military undertones in the case of the latter) saw their ranks swell with enthusiastic youngsters.69 Meanwhile, private organizations such as California's Save-the-Redwoods League often predicated their conservationist agenda upon direct analogy to scientific racism. Madison Grant, one of the

League's co-founders, though better known as the author of the sensationally racist The

Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 170 Wellock, Preserving the Nation, 49. The Woodcraft Indians are interesting and instructive as to the racial anxieties of the era in that they allowed white, urban males to "play Indian" by hygienically appropriating the positive aspects of the "noble savage" trope. 44

Passing of the Great Race, saw the crowding out of the mighty redwood by lesser species of trees as the perfect metaphor for the plight of the Anglo-Saxon American male.70 And

Gifford Pinchot, in addition to his interest in forestry, was a charter member of the Race

Betterment Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan. That these nominally conservation- oriented organizations had, in truth, little interest in the environment on its own terms is most clearly in evidence in the case of the Boone and Crockett Club, an organization that sought to promote "manly sport with the rifle" and could count among its prominent and well-heeled members the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Henry Cabot

Lodge, Elihu Root, and Henry Stimson. In the 1890s, the organization which apparently saw no irony in lobbying Congress to pass game laws to protect the nation's rapidly diminishing bison population. The impetus for the laws, of course, had nothing to do with biodiversity, ecosystems, sympathy with the animals, or ethical opposition to hunting, and everything to do with asserting class and racial privilege. The Boone and Crocketts—and other sportsmen's hunting clubs of the era, of which there was no shortage—resented the idea of sharing their quarry with lower class rural trappers and "market shooters," who depended upon bird and beast for their livelihood and thus took the sport out of hunting (or more likely: never put the "sport" in to begin with).72

The federal government in the progressive era brought changes too. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the federal government created the United States Forest

Service and the National Park Service to administer two categories of public lands.

National Forests and National Parks were landscapes over which Washington exerted

Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 124 Wellock, Preserving the Nation, 59 72 Wellock, Preserving the Nation, Al 45 direct authority, and thus open a window on the federal government's attitudes towards the environment. Like preservation and conservation, however, both had very economic goals close to their hearts, and substantially failed to demonstrate a new environmental ethic.

Federally operated projects need not be self-liquidating so long as they provide a valuable public service. It is telling, then, that neither the Forest Service nor the Parks service felt secure enough in the public services they rendered to dispense with the account books altogether. On the contrary, the history of the two federal organizations from their founding until the beginning of the New Deal reveals that each took great pains to ensure that their annual budgets came out in the black. The roots of the United States Forest

Service stretch back to the foundation of a Division of Forestry within the Department of

Agriculture in 1881. For the first two decades of its existence, the Division concerned itself in the main with investigation of forest conditions; applied forestry was left to the initiative of private citizens. Exemplifying American commercial silviculture in this time was

Gifford Pinchot's appointment to manage the timber at "Biltmore," George Vanderbilt's personal estate, in 1892. At the end of his engagement in 1894, Pinchot found that the enterprise had been an unqualified financial flop, and it was only through the use of some very creative accounting that he was able to avoid total embarrassment by claiming to have turned a modest profit.73 What this episode reveals is that in 1894, even Gifford Pinchot,

America's first forester, felt that the non-monetary merits of silviculture were not sufficient to justify their expenses, and by the same token, that George Vanderbilt reckoned the undertaking at Biltmore to be an investment, and not an act of philanthropy. Nevertheless,

73 Writes Balogh: "It was at Biltmore that Pinchot learned the value of framing publicity to demonstrate that scientific forestry met market tests... he found the rhetoric of the market garnered support from a majority of Americans." Brian Balogh, "Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot's Path to Progressive Reform," Environmental History 7 (Apr. 2002): 200, 214-15 46 in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt felt that the federal government needed a stronger presence in the realm of forestry, and the Forest Service was born. That it was from the beginning an organ of the Agriculture Department, and that Gifford Pinchot was tapped as its first Chief Forester, may suggest to modern readers a profit-centered mandate behind the organization; this impression is not wrong. The nascent department shortly issued the Use

Book, a pocket-sized pamphlet outlining its goals and policies. "In the administration of the forest reserves," it read in part,

it must be clearly borne in mind that all land is to be devoted to its most productive use for the permanent good of the whole people, and not for the temporary benefit of individuals or companies. All the resources of the forest reserves are for use, and this use must be brought about in a thoroughly prompt and businesslike manner, under such restrictions only as will insure the permanence of these resources.74

Furthermore, historian Brian Balogh has noted that the Service's period of most rapid expansion occurred after Pinchot had assured Congress that he could do for national forests what he had ostensibly done at Biltmore, but before he was compelled to make good on the promise.75 Clearly, maintaining steady production and a sound bottom line were of paramount importance to the Forest Service itself, to the Department of Agriculture, and to those holding the purse strings in the Executive.

The Parks Service, established in 1916 as part of the Interior Department, might have taken a different path than its elder cousin in Agriculture. The National Park Service

Organic Act, its founding document, famously included a twofold mandate that seemed to grant some value to the natural landscape, in and of itself, quite apart from human utility.

The purpose of the Act, read the preamble, was "to conserve the scenery and the natural

74 United States Forest Service, The Use of the National Forest Reserves, 11. Like Mao's Little Red Book, Service employees were encouraged to keep a copy on their person at all times. See also Rothman, "Ding- Dong Fight," 144 75 Balogh, "Scientific Forestry and the Modern American State," 215 47 and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

However, the possibility that the preservationist half of the mandate might dominate—or at least exist in roughly equal balance—the anthropocentric requirement was effectively quashed with the appointment of Park Service's first director, Stephen T.

Mather. Mather, though politically active, was a businessman trained in cutting-edge

77

Madison Avenue-style marketing, an expertise he brought to bear in his new office. With his assistant Horace Albright, the headstrong Mather inundated Washington lawmakers and the American public with reams of promotional material for the new Service, in the hopes of establishing a foundation of political backers and public support. The Park Service took out ads in popular magazines and distributed complimentary pamphlets, fliers, and motion pictures to anyone who would take them, and cultivated partnerships with the national railroads to carry passengers out of the cities and into the parks. Like a good advertiser,

Mather had an eye for opportunity and saw the enormous potential that could be reaped by successfully capitalizing on the booming automobile culture in the years following the First

World War. Accordingly, the Park Service courted the motor-tourist market with complimentary auto maps. And like a great advertiser, Mather looked to alter the status quo in order to shorten the distance between customer and market. To this end, he did all he could to promote the construction of new highways to and between the National Parks, to provide on-site facilities for those guests who came with their motor vehicles, and to

76 The National Park Service Organic Act (16 U.S.C. 1, 2, 3, and 4); for a thorough analysis of the meaning and implications of the double mandate, see Robin Winks, "The National Park Service Act of 1916: 'A Contradictory Mandate'?" 77 Historians have subsequently characterized Mather as a "promotional wizard" (Rothman, "Ding-Dong Fight," 148) and a "master salesman" (Swain, "National Park Service and the New Deal," 313) 48 have roads paved across the face of the parks so visitors could experience the great outdoors without leaving the comfort of their cars. Mather's "weakness for plush accommodations and city comforts" also fostered his decision to privatize park concessions.79 In all, Mather came down decidedly on the side of use, rather than preservation, in his interpretation of the double mandate, a position he maintained until the end of his directorship in 1929. A visitor to Yosemite could take in an extravagant evening show featuring jazz music, acrobatics, and dancers under the megawatt glare of a halo of electric lights. "If only the Yosemite Night could be transferred to an environ of New York

City it would make the promoter a millionaire," grumbled Robert Yard of the National

Parks Association.80 The extent to which Mather's preference for use over preservation, commercialization of park tourism, and overtures to the driving public had taken hold nationally is evident in a November 1929 cartoon published in an Oakland newspaper titled

"Yosemite Leads." The illustration depicts a six-lane highway carrying throngs of visitors to see the nation's parks, while the caption "2,680,597 visitors to National Parks in 1929" appears overtop of a snarl of traffic. To the side of the road stands a billboard entreating passers-by to "SEE AMERICA FIRST."81

s Rothman, "Ding-Dong Fight," 149-50 Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 204 0 Qtd. in Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 204 1 "Yosemite Leads," November 2, 1929, RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 10, box 104 49

#"' '' " YOSEMtTE LEADST3 ' : «** p"^

In 1929, it seems, traffic jams and superhighways could be taken as tokens of a healthy parks system. Mather's vision of National Parks as spaces to be tailored for human use, for the moment, dominated all other considerations. Yet, on the surface, this arrangement had not been inevitable; another director might have taken the National Parks

Act's double mandate the other way and titled the balance towards preservation. On the other hand, Mather's use-based conception clearly struck a chord with the American public in the 1910s and '20s. True, the slick promotional campaign may have played a factor in this, but more important was that the message it propagated harmonized with an 50

anthropocentric environmental ethic, just as the public proved eager to embrace the possibility of concussive pluviculture in the 1880s because it confirmed what they already

suspected about the relationship between man and landscape. Likewise did the Forest

Service serve to remind Americans that forests were, at bottom, akin to any other crop, in

that they could be scientifically harvested and made a source of income.

Of course, to reduce the Forest Service and the Parks Service to mere businesses

seeking to maximize revenue would be a gross oversimplification. They did attempt to

render public services as well, which, at least nominally, were related to the environment.

However, few if any of these projects really dealt with the environment on its own terms—

rather, they might be more meaningfully regarded as projections of social, cultural, and

economic values and anxieties onto federal lands. To begin, we might note the legendary

rivalry between the Forest Service and the Park Service that informed much of their early

history. The so-called "ding-dong fight" between the two organizations was marked by "a

degree of territoriality rivalled only by medieval despots," to use one historian's words, and

at bottom stemmed from the coexistence of two agencies with similar jurisdictions

representing two different federal departments. Thus, after 1916, each was keenly aware

that it needed to prove its value in juxtaposition with the other and eagerly sought out

opportunities to distinguish itself. In 1916, the newborn Park Service, in need of a

readymade political constituency to counterbalance the Forest Service's conservationist

following, styled itself as an ally of the preservationists, a decision which substantially

contributed to the preservationist ethos enshrined in the double mandate of the National

Park Service Organic Act. However, as noted above, Mather paid little heed to that side of

the equation throughout the 1920s as he built up a different support base in middle-class

82 Rothman, "Ding-Dong Fight," 142 51 urban tourists and allowed the preservationist support base to wither away in neglect.83 The

Forest Service, which by the late 1920s had seen its rival rise from start-up to the more popular of the two, recognized an opportunity to boost its own popularity and now came out in favour of preservationist ideals, hoping to win over the bloc recently alienated from the Park Service.84 Thus, major decisions regarding organizational direction in the Forest

Service and the Park Service were partly dictated by inter-agency manoeuvring and expedients designed to build political capital.

The progressive era brought notable changes to the ways the federal government worked with the landscape and the ideological lenses through which the public came to see their place in the environment. Yet digging down to the roots of the Forest Service, the

Park Service, conservationism, and preservationism, one finds that they all drew to some extent from the same wellsprings that watered the rectilinear land Ordinance, manifest destiny, and General Dyrenforth's experiments on the plains. The landscape was, in each case, a malleable space to be manipulated in order to reinforce national, racial, and class hierarchies, and to build a society that was economically and politically healthy. When individuals spoke of morality in regards to the landscape, most often they expressed their concerns in terms of economic equality, democracy, or cultural antagonism. The essence of the progressive environmental ethic, in other words, continued the spirit of the Ordinance and manifest destiny in attempting to build a healthy society and assert white Anglo-

American hegemony.

Rothman, "Ding-Dong Fight," 151. Notes Rothman: "Steve Mather's Park Service was of a piece with the commercial aspirations of the decade. The agency gave up any remaining vestiges of the legacy of John Muir and sold Americans leisure and grandeur in the same fashion as its director had previously marketed borax." 84 Rothman, "Ding-Dong Fight," 155 52

The influence of progressivism waned over the course of the 1920s, but over the course of the decade, new pressures—both endogenous and exogenous—began to again expose the inherent weaknesses. Well into the 1920s, the survey lines of the 1785

Ordinance remained in place as the major organizing system on the Great Plains. Over the century and a half since the plan's implementation, generations of farmers had settled onto

their respective lots, adapting their communities and farming techniques to the great grid

system upon which they found themselves. In many Ordinance townships, the municipal core became the community nexus, spatially, economically, and socially. Small local banks, mutual aid societies, and church groups provided credit and fairly comprehensive

economic security for the townsfolk. Consequently, each township enjoyed the

independence and insular existence afforded by a tight-knit socio-economic network

shielded—to an extent—from outside shocks.

This system came under pressure, however as European agricultural output

recovered from the devastation of the First World War, thereby drying up a huge overseas

market for American farm output. Beginning in 1921, domestic agricultural prices sank and

remained depressed for the remainder of the decade.85 In farming communities across the

country, the community-centered support system strained to its bursting point under the

weight of the prolonged economic hardship.86

Equally perplexing—and probably more so for those who professed their faith in

the wisdom of the Jeffersonian agricultural republic—was the mutated form which the

agricultural economic pyramid had assumed. At the outset of the 1785 Ordinance,

Jeffersonians had hoped for a paradise of hardworking independent yeoman tilling their

85 Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 324 86 Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 324 53 own land and upholding civic virtue. By the 1920s, the reality was a very different picture: like a grotesque tumor, farm tenancy had swelled to comprise a large and growing segment of the total farming population from the South to the Great Plains.87 It should be noted that different mechanisms had already contributed to tenancy in these regions for some time. In the South, Emancipation and Reconstruction compelled landowners to subdivide their holdings, once worked by slaves, into small plots employing sharecroppers and tenants.

These factors of course were not significant in the West: in that region, large landowners and landowning syndicates had purchased huge tracts of land and squeezed out small owners. Both regions, however, experienced economic downturn during the depression, which worsened the already worrying situation. Price fluctuations were a fact of life that could equally well put a farmer in the black or the red, but the numerousness and persistence of the agricultural underclass suggested a more systematic, structural problem.

When 25 percent of all American farmers had been tenants in 1880, it was seen as problematic. By 1930 that figure had climbed to 42 percent. At Oklahoma's statehood in

1907, more than half of its farms were operated by tenants; in 1935 that figure had increased to over 60 percent. In comparison to their land-owning counterparts, tenant farmers carried a heavy assortment of malicious stereotypes: they were rootless vagabonds with minimal interest in long-term husbandry, and even less in civic virtue.

As if this sour cocktail of troubles was not enough as it was, the beginning of the

1930s added two further ingredients to the mix: depression and drought. Following the crash of 1929, urban centres found themselves in the same economic dire straits that their

87 Rasmussen, "Never a Landlord for the Good of the Land," 73 88 "Address of Mr. Wallace Richards," National Park Service Conference of State Park Authorities, Feb. 25, 1935 RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 90, box 1 Worster, Nature's Economy, 224 54 country cousins had endured for nearly a decade. Just as the European markets had done in

1921, the demand from domestic markets plummeted, further diminishing the already

meager farm income. Farming community banks across the country, which had struggled to remain solvent through the turbulent twenties, collapsed outright. Similarly, local welfare

organizations could not keep pace with the overwhelming demand for aid.90 At the same time, a scorching drought that parched much of the South and the Great Plains beginning in

1930 highlighted the intrinsic incompatibility of the rectilinear parceling system with the

natural landscape. As noted above, the grid pattern deliberately ignored the realities of

topography and encouraged linear furrowing, a method which proved especially poor in

drought conditions. "On those rare occasions when it did rain," Neil Maher has noted

"farmers were forced to watch helplessly as their straight crop rows channeled much

needed water quickly off their fields, washing valuable topsoil along with it."91

Of course, the most visible symbol of the failure of civilization to tame the

landscape was the dust bowl on the southern Great Plains. If the public's attention was not

captured by the shocking photos of tractors half-buried in sand and the sun-bleached

skeletons of perished livestock, the apocalyptic dust storms known as "black blizzards"

which blew as far as the Atlantic coast surely did the trick. On May 10, 1934, the

Washington Post front page reported that dust clouds more than two miles tall had rolled

through Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, with an article appearing the same day in

the New York Times explaining that the swirling duster extended as far south as Texas.

Visibility dipped to less than a mile in Chicago, with the shroud of airborne dirt rendering

yu Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 330-31 91 Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 329 55 the city's proud skyscrapers into "hazy, unnatural shapes" at only a block's distance.92 A similar scene played out the following day in New York and Washington as the storm reached the east coast. A front page write-up in the Post described the miserable scene in the capital, with a pallid yellow haze blotting out the sun and benighting the usually pleasant vistas of the National Mall. The Times, meanwhile, estimated that as much as 300 million tons of dust had passed through Gotham, draping the city in a somber gray fog for upwards of five hours and leaving behind a generous dusting of silt as an unwanted parting gift.93

Less than a year later, the Northeast again played reluctant host to a great torrent of displaced Great Plains topsoil. In Washington, a "misty, yellow haze" extended upwards of

8,000 feet enveloped the city and muddied the rainwater as it fell to the earth. "Dust Storm

Descends Like Dusk Upon City" announced the front page headline in the following day's

Washington Post. A few days the paper published an essay by Hugh Hammond Bennett.

"The significance of this second visitation from the west cannot be overstated," the Soil

Conservation chief wrote. "With dust storms increasing in frequency and intensity, the situation with respect to the future of our agricultural lands in the great belt just east of the

Rockies has become exceedingly acute."

As noted above, the endurance and versatility of the anthropomorphic environmental ethic can be put down to the fact that it was in large part a projection of exogenous political, economic, and social ideas upon the landscape. As long as those sources remained in place, there was little chance that the environmental ethic would be shaken, no matter what obstacles it encountered. This is particularly in evidence in the

92 "Dust Storms Add New Crop Menace," New York Times, May 11, 1934, 38; "Central States Under Blanket of Dust; Two Lives Lost," Washington Post, May 11, 1934, 1 93 "Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours," New York Times, May 12, 1934, 1 56 succession of ultimately unsuccessful efforts to reconcile manifest destiny with the dry climate of the Great Plains. Rain failed to follow the plow, yet rather than dismiss the idea of manufacturing precipitation, Americans made other efforts at the same goal, with cannons in one case standing in for the plows. The ideas at the root of these efforts—that the landscape could be tailored to suit Americans' needs, and that the proper relationship with it was an adversarial one—were quite evidently still intact.

The 1785 Ordinance, with its imperious gridiron pattern, which began with so much promise, was ultimately out of step with the natural topography of the landscape. After all, the purpose of the grid in simplifying and ostensibly democratizing land ownership was better served by marginalizing natural features. Nevertheless, it set the tone for American relations with the environment for down to the 1930s in both ideal and reality. Ideally speaking, the grid which covered the whole nation with no regard for ecosystems or topography symbolized an analogous attitude, which conceived of the landscape as flat, blank, and subservient. In real terms, it literally shaped farm plots and communities and dictated the plowing practices and community organization, and would renew and expand itself in the Homestead Act and other such legislation until the twentieth century, at which point it embraced three quarters of the United States' contiguous area.

Into the 1840s, the anthropocentric environmental ethic reflected and partially inspired the attitude of manifest destiny. In analogue with manifest destiny's chauvinistic attitude towards Native Americans and other territorial rivals, it tacitly assumed the inherent superiority of white American settlement, politics, and economics. The contradiction of the arid grasslands of the Plains that did not match expectations of abundance was settled by Wilber's workaround shibboleth, assured Americans that honest 57 labour would make the landscape over into something more hospitable. It was also during this time that it most clearly incorporated the element of militarism that was so apparent in the pluvicultural "battles" of the late nineteenth century, and more subtly in the army- inspired uniforms of Parks and Forest Service personnel in the progressive era.

The pipe dreams of agricultural reformers and artillery fanciers in our water case study offer an excellent perspective on the range of the environmental discourse and the continuity from the mid-nineteenth century into the progressive era and the early twentieth century. In both cases, the prevailing environmental ethic assumed that the land could and should be worked into compliance or altered to suit the needs of agriculture. Both experiments failed to do this, but did not dampen hopes that a solution was at hand. The persistence of Newell's belief in the feasibility of desert irrigation in spite of evidence to the contrary exactly mirrors Dyrenforth and Post's tireless enthusiasm for their "battles," and in each case speaks to the fact that the anthropocentric environmental ethic strongly denied the possibility of the environment having a reciprocal effect on its human users. In short, it was almost unthinkable that the environment would not cooperate with human will. Rather than seeing the Reclamation plan as an early token of twentieth century modernization, Donald Pisani is quite right in proclaiming that one should regard the Act and subsequent the irrigation plans "as evidence of the persistence of 'frontier America'... the nineteenth century vision of America built on the striving of autonomous individuals, the agricultural model of 1800 or 1850."94

Attempts to bombard the clouds, to plow, or to irrigate all recognized a mismatch between land-hungry anthropic needs and a landscape unwilling to give up its moisture

Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xi 58 naturally; the solution was to forcibly wring moisture out of the environment like a sponge.

Wilber's maxim assured farmers that the very same farming methods used in wetter climates should be replicated on the semi-arid plains, in spite of the apparent climatological differences; that the entire continent should be painted with the same proverbial brush.

Indeed, application of the plow to the earth promised to transform the landscape itself into

something more hospitable. The concussionism crazes of the 1890s and 1900s gives an even clearer picture of the environmental ethic of the time. That Powers, Dyrenforth, Post and others believed that volleys of explosives might be an effective means of coaxing rain out of the sky seems especially appropriate: literally the very same weapons that the army would use to vanquish its military foes would now be brought to bear against the environment. Furthermore, that the major experiments were done under the supervision of

a Civil War general garbed in his army regalia, marshalling his mortars in imitation of an

artillery formation, further underscores the notion that, through and through, the concussive pluviculture idea had a distinctly military character. It insisted that nature was something

which could be strong-armed into submission, and made to obey the will of those who lived upon it. From this evidence it is abundantly clear that the landscape was equivocated

with an enemy that could be beaten into submission. Americans possessed of this

understanding could not possibly have accepted an unwelcoming landscape as an

immutable fact of life

The new developments of the progressive era failed to overturn the patterns

established before. The Homestead Act (and hence, the 1785 Ordinance and grid) was reaffirmed and extended twice in this period. The wilderness cult, preservation, and conservation all turned landscape into commodity to some extent. Furthermore, all three 59 concealed tacit beliefs in white, upper-middle class priority in land use. The wilderness cult carried too on the militarist tradition of concussive pluviculture and manifest destiny.

Up to the late 1920s, conversations about the environment were not really about the environment. They were in reality discussions of economics, politics, and nationalism, projected on the national landscape and played out accordingly. The anthropocentric environmental ethic's relationship to the actual landscape was a secondary consideration.

Thus, a panoply of divergent forces—military, social, literary, political or philosophical— moved in different directions at different times in the nineteenth century, but we can pick up traces of a common thread in the modes of thinking and doing with respect to the environment they dictated. From this, we can more easily understand how it persisted through decades of broken promises, contradictions, and failed experiments.

In the early 1930s, the multiple visible failings of the anthropocentric seemed to demand a new direction the relationship with the environment, and hinted that such a change might just be possible. Then again, as this chapter has shown, the anthropocentric environmental ethic had been challenged by failures time and time again, and in each instance managed to reinvent itself and escape essentially unscathed. It was at this time that

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was beginning his first term of office. Chapter 2, then, explores how the new President seized this opportunity and exercised his executive power to attempt to inaugurate a New Deal environmental ethic. 60

CHAPTER 2 A New Deal for the Environment

Men and Nature must work hand in hand The throwing out of balance of the resources of Nature throws out of balance also the lives of men. We find millions of our citizens stranded in village and on farm—stranded there because Nature cannot support them in the livelihood they had sought to gain through her. We find other millions gravitated to centers of population so vast that the laws of natural economics have broken down... It is an error to say we have "conquered Nature." We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with Nature.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message to the Congress on the Use of Our National Resources January 24, 1935

A curious pattern emerges when one examines Americans' reflections on the environment from the New Deal era in comparison with analogous reflections from earlier times. A documentary film financed by the federal government warned farmers that disaster, not rain, would follow the plow. A federal power project matched its jurisdiction, objectives, and even architecture to weave into the natural shape of a river system, largely indifferent to county or state borders. A youth employment army went to war, not against nature, but as its ally. As we shall see in this chapter, propositions, ideas, policies, and programs with similar origins or purposes often took very different directions after 1933 than they would have—or did—before. The key change was the opening of a space for dialogue with the environment in federal government planning and a transformation of the 61 concept of conservation from a unilateral philosophy of manipulating nature in favor of efficient use of resources towards something resembling a bilateral partnership.

Before 1933, conservation (and preservation) efforts were not only motivated by anthropocentric goals, but as we have seen in the previous chapter, they can be substantially deconstructed in terms of fulfilling these goals. Put another way, interactions with the landscape were in fact little more than manifestations of broad political, social, economic, and cultural trends applied to nature. Even ostensibly environmental developments, such as the beginning of the Park Service or the preservationist movement, were frequently animated by middle-class white supremacy, nationalism, and an "evolved" form of Jeffersonian republicanism—the same forces behind the Northwest Ordinance, manifest destiny, and the variegated pseudo-scientific attempts to bring water to the arid

West. At the end of the day, conservation under Franklin Delano Roosevelt had many of these goals in mind too—both the noble and ignoble. By no means did the New Deal initiate a totally new set of positive values, nor did it exorcise racism, classism, nor any of the odious demons of American history. Nor, of course, did it do away with the basic need to use the land, for agriculture, power, commerce, recreation, or other such indispensible elements of a society. But a crucial shift in the conversation had taken place under FDR's presidency. The simultaneous onset of socio-economic and environmental crises in the early 1930s gave many Americans serious cause to believe that their own welfare depended on the welfare of the land on which they lived and worked—perhaps none more so than

Roosevelt himself, whose administration rarely wasted an opportunity to communicate this connection to the public. Where unilateralism had formerly reigned as the hegemonic mode of interaction with the land, bilateralism entered the conversation as well. In other words, 62

when speaking about subjects ranging from soil erosion, forestry, and agriculture to

electrification and rural economic equilibration, the reciprocal relationship between

environment and people became a normal and significant part of the discourse. Rather than

conquering nature, Americans began to reinterpret the meaning of conservation to mean

acknowledging, working with, and augmenting natural processes, and of recognizing that

natural limits might, at least partially, dictate the terms of its use.

President Roosevelt is a major player in this process: his speeches and

correspondence indicate that the new environmental ethic of the New Deal era was close to

his heart. "A recent writer has suggested that the present President of the United States...

inevitably reverts to terms of land and water in his approach to any great problem," he told

his audience at the 1936 Green Pastures Rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, followed by the

confession: "I fear I must plead guilty to that charge." The famously folksy and silver-

tongued President quite possibly delivered the line with an air of jocularity; but if so, he

was more right than he knew. Often against the grain of precedent, he took deliberate

action to position the ethic as the centerpiece of New Deal projects.96 Furthermore, he

personally made extensive use of his executive authority to weave the theory behind the

new ethic into the federal government's programs and policies, and to steer others in the

government in this direction too.

"Speech by Roosevelt at the Green Pastures Rally," September 10, 1936, qtd. in Edgar B. Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, 1911-1945 V.l (Hyde Park: National Archives and Records Service, 1957), 571-72; Roosevelt had made clear his commitment to environmental issues much earlier. For example, his plan for the CCC featured prominently in his presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1932. Wellock makes a similar, though less forceful, argument: "in 1933... conservation was transformed into a jobs program to aid economic recovery." Preserving the Nation, 81 (Emphasis added.) The difference between his assessment and mine is that Wellock constructs FDR's conservation as a tool of—and separate from—economic recovery, where I see the two as inseparable. 63

This chapter relies upon the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Tennessee Valley

Authority (TVA), Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and Shelterbelt project as the primary body of evidence. Each of these projects dealt directly with the environment, and each was new the New Deal, and therefore relatively unburdened by historical baggage.97 In this sense they open an especially clear window on what the New Deal's environmental ethic was. From this body of evidence, I identify six key themes of the new environmental ethic that ran through the New Deal. These are: (1) "regionalism," or the use of natural regions to determine the boundaries and objectives of government projects; (2) recognizing and understanding the limits of natural systems, such as forests, in terms of yield, soil chemistry, ability to support certain plant species, etc.; (3) a fundamentally bilateral relationship with the landscape, in which human needs do not exceed the tolerance of the environment; (4) implicit or explicit ideological repudiation of the older environmental ethic and its tenets, such as conquest and command of the landscape; (5) understanding of a profound link between environment and economy and the consequent need to address both simultaneously for meaningful change; and (6) the existence of a nationwide web linking together ecosystems and economies such that localized events have a national impact. Altogether, these represented a distinct shift from the steady anthropocentrism of the previous chapter and a permanent alteration to the terms of the conversation on the environment within the federal government.

Not everything in the federal government was in such near lockstep: expanding the frame of view to include pre-New Deal agencies yields uneven results. Older agencies often remained tethered to the traditions of the previous century, which left them in the uncomfortable position of straddling two environmental ethics at once. The Bureau of Reclamation was typical of the pattern, and in the 1930s found itself scrambling to find a mandate and secure a constituent base. In Pisani's words, it was "the pawn of history than its maker," "Federal Reclamation and the American West," 419 64

That economic welfare and land welfare were inextricably linked was, apparently, an idea that Roosevelt felt he could not emphasize enough. For example, on every scale from local to regional to national, the condition of the soil dictated the prosperity of those who inhabited it. This, perhaps, was evident enough in the suffering of the dust bowl homesteaders. But Roosevelt believed that the impact of such crises was not confined to a limited region. On the contrary, he saw the economy as a tightly-knit, nationwide web which conducted and amplified shocks from particular regions to the whole. The effect held true as well when the trigger was environmental in origin. Soil conservation,

Roosevelt told an audience in Fremont, Nebraska was "of equal interest in Pennsylvania and in Nebraska, in Maine and in Georgia." In this understanding, the dusting of Great

Plains soil that rode the jet stream through Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City in 1935 served as an ideal symbol of this knock-on phenomenon: here was an environmental crisis, begun in a delimited, distant region, brining pandemonium across the country. "The dust storms that a few months ago drifted from the western plains to the

Atlantic Ocean" FDR cautioned his Nebraskan audience, "were a warning to the whole

Nation of what will happen if we waste our heritage of soil fertility, the ultimate source of our wealth and of life itself."98 That Roosevelt invoked soil as the source of life and wealth underscored the connection between the two, as well as the significant point that the widespread economic consequences of environmental crises, though not as visible as the famous duster that darkened New York, were no less real. In other words, the dust bowl was not only blowing dust to the farthest reaches of the Republic, it was also depositing sand in the gears of the national economy.

98 "Speech by Roosevelt," September 28, 1935, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V. 1,438 65

The reverse held true as well: the economic well being of the people, especially in rural areas, betokened the health of the soil. Roosevelt reasoned that Americans eking out a hardscrabble hand-to-mouth existence would be inclined to work their environment to the point of ruin and beyond in a desperate effort to chase the wolf from the door. The unfortunate outcome of this, of course, was a vicious cycle in which the already impoverished users then left themselves with drier soil or barer timberlands, worse economic prospects, more desperation, and so on. By contrast, Americans who were comfortably able to make ends meet could afford to reduce their short-term production through practices such as contour plowing to insure themselves against long-term environmental degradation. "The long road that leads to green pastures and still waters had to begin somewhere," FDR told a Southern audience in 1936:

It seemed axiomatic to me that a cotton farmer who could get only five cents a pound for his crop could not be in a position to properly fertilize his land, or to terrace it, or to plant a little orchard, or to cultivate a garden—in other words, to work out for himself and his family a well-rounded, reasonably secure life that would tide him over a lean year of drought... We could not go ahead to the next step of prevention of soil erosion throughout the South and indeed throughout the Nation... until and unless the farmers of the Southland were able to make a reasonably decent living out of their farms.

Thus Roosevelt summed up in a single passage his vision of a great symbiosis of environment and people and his notion of a national economy that transcended traditional regional boundaries.

"There was nothing sound in the situation in the past when, spurred by ruinously low prices, farmers have been compelled to mine their soil of its fertility by over-intensive cultivation in a race to make up in volume of units what they had lost in unit price," said Roosevelt in a statement on the AAA on October 25, 1935 "Statement by Roosevelt on the Agricultural Adjustment Program," October 25, 1935, qtd in Nixon, ed Franklin D Roosevelt & Conservation, V 1, 445 That the President used the verb "mine" pejoratively is significant The actual practice of mining brought short-term gain but cared little for long-term consequences, sometimes leaving its source bankrupted and irreparable Under the anthropocentnc environmental ethic, with its denial of natural limits and belief in unlimited resources, this consequence was not seen as especially problematic, extracting and moving on to the next mine was the norm Roosevelt's derisive use of the word speaks to the fact that he had a very different outlook on natural resource extraction practices 100 "Speech by Roosevelt at the Green Pastures Rally," September 10, 1936, qtd in Nixon, ed Franklin D Roosevelt & Conservation, V 1, 573 66

From this understanding, then, it seemed that a single program that dealt with both employment and landscape—such as the CCC—might embody the solution to the country's ecological and economic difficulties. Indeed, FDR proposed just this in his second Fireside Chat in May 1933. "In creating this Civilian Conservation Corps," he told listeners, "we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress."101 In this way, the CCC epitomized the New Deal environmental ethic's vision of economy and environment as inseparable and mutually entangled; that injury to one would inevitably wound the other as well.

The Civilian Conservation Corps came into being on March 31, 1933—the very same month that FDR had assumed the Presidency. Before its termination in 1942, the

Corps would enroll more than 3 million unemployed urban young men, barrack them in army-style campgrounds in parks, forests, and various other rural settings, and put them to work on tree planting, soil conservation, park maintenance, firefighting, and scores of other projects in every state in the Union. Altogether the CCC planted 2.3 billion trees—fully half of the trees ever planted in the history of the nation—combated erosion on 40 million acres of farmland, developed 800 new state parks, and altogether worked on more than 118 million acres of land.102 Rarely were these projects expected to self-liquidate. For example, it was completely within the purview of the Corps to purchase and rehabilitate a totally eroded farm or clear-cut forest which had been abandoned by its owner because it had been worked to its breaking point. There was no profit to be had in these endeavors; the more

"Outlining the New Deal Program," May 7, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/050733.html 102 Maher, Nature's New Deal, 43, 54 67 important point was reversing the environmental damage and working with nature to rebuild a healthy ecosystem.

The Corps came into being with Congress' passage of An Act for the Relief of

Unemployment.103 The title of the act, to be sure, gave some indication that the new agency would be a temporary one with an ad hoc objective. So too did the opening paragraph, which began by stating the purpose of the legislation as "for the purpose of relieving the acute condition of widespread distress and unemployment now existing in the United

States," while the final section set an expiry date of two years from signing.104 But such an impression is deceiving: even from the first, textual and contextual evidence shows that

FDR intended the CCC, from the beginning to become a permanent part of the federal apparatus of government, which would, after completing its short term goals, contribute to a systematic reform of the public landscape and its use. Expanding one's field of view to include other New Deal Conservation agencies such as the AAA and the TVA, we see similar trends: that FDR's goal was not to knock out short term problems with temporary emergency agencies, but instead to effect long-term, systematic reform.

What evidence is there that FDR and others had long-term goals for the CCC from the outset? An early clue appears in the Act itself. The opening shot stated that the one of the purposes of the CCC was to relieve "the acute condition of widespread distress and unemployment," but, significantly, more objectives followed, including "to provide for the restoration of the country's depleted natural resources."105 As compared to the first, the

Full title: An Act for the Relief of Unemployment Through the Performance of Useful Public Work, and for Other Purposes. 104 "An Act for the Relief of Unemployment Through the Performance of Useful Public Work," March 31, 1933, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 147-48 105 "An Act for the Relief of Unemployment," March 31, 1933, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 146-47 68 latter goal was more subjective in interpretation and seemed to demand a longer-term

solution. Roosevelt's correspondence and speeches are more explicit as to aspirations of establishing the Corps as an institution of the government. In January 1934, only nine months after the birth of the CCC and less than halfway through its two-year mandate, a

member of the New Jersey State Board of Conservation wrote to the President expressing his hope that the CCC be made permanent "both for the good of our natural resources and the youth of our country"; Roosevelt made clear in his reply that he shared the same

sentiment.10 And FDR was no less optimistic when on the public record. In September

1935, he embarked on a whirlwind speaking tour that took him through New York,

Pennsylvania, and Virginia, during which he several times expressed a desire to make the

CCC a fixture of the government. In fact, at Lake Placid, "should" gave way to "would," as

the President confidently told five thousand assembled spectators, including the state

governor and a number of Corps enrollees, that "these Camps, in my judgment, are going

to be a permanent part of the policy of the United States government." In April 1937,

Roosevelt spoke to Congress in support of a bill that would have done just that. The

legislation never quite materialized as hoped, though Congress did agree to renew the

1OR Corps for an additional three years.

"Roosevelt to Owen Winston," January 25, 1934, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 247 107 Charles W. Hurd, "Roosevelt Takes 'It Can Be Done' As Today's Motto," New York Times, Sept. 15, 1935, 15; "Speech by Roosevelt," September 14, 1935, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 431 1 8 The CCC came to an end in August 1942. Without question the major factor that spelled its end was the entry of the United States into World War II, at which point the CCC's usual enrolment demographic (men in their late teens and twenties) put it in direct competition with the various armed forces for recruits. However, had it not been for the war, it is entirely possible that the Corps could have continued indefinitely or been made permanent—albeit on a diminished scale in reflection of the nationwide decline in unemployment. Maher, Nature's New Deal, 212 69

The CCC did much more than put a monthly paycheque in the hands of its legions of enrollees. In his authoritative study of the Corps, Neil Maher notes that the CCC was almost single-handedly responsible for expanding the support base of the conservation movement. Before the 1930s, conservation had been mainly the province of the social- economic-political elite—the Boone and Crockett Club and the Save-the-Redwoods

League stand as excellent examples. However, the CCC introduced the concepts of conservation to some 3 million enrollees, most of them urban working- and middle-class, from 1933 to 1942, through field work and education.109 A public less receptive to ideas like reforestation and contour plowing could easily have tuned out the pedagogical aspects and simply collected their stipends at the end of each month. But in 1933, the foot soldiers of Roosevelt's Tree Army proved especially eager students. In what must have been an encouraging sign to New Dealers, the majority of Corpsmen enthusiastically embraced conservation. More than 90 percent chose to attend after-work classes, with forestry one of the top choices. Significantly, forestry class was not a lesson in progressive economic efficiency. A memo circulated by the Forest Service on recommended topics remarked that enrolled would be best served if they acquired:

a grasp of the simple natural laws governing these things [soil, water systems, and woodlands]... There should be understanding of the forest, including all life in the forest—flowers, birds, game, insects—as a coherent organism, the product of natural conditions. There should be some understanding also as to what happens and why, when these conditions are disturbed... In general, the objective should be to teach natural laws rather than current facts. The number of acres and the value of

The CCC educational program offered vocational training, academic courses, and skills and trades, usually in partnership with colleges and other institutions located nearby to project camps. Extra emphasis was given to conservation courses, which can in large part be put down to the President's personal direction. In 1933, FDR scribbled a notation on an outline of the CCC educational program in which he insisted that the education program "stress forestry, agriculture, etc., with object of transferring of life work of as many boys as possible from cities to country or small communities." The message made its way through Interior Secretary Ickes to CCC head Fechner. Ickes memorandum to Fechner, November 8, 1933, RG 35 (Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps), entry 63, box 14 110 Maher, Nature's New Deal, 90 70

forests has and will change but the laws of growth and plant succession remain unchanged. The ecological idea of a forest as a plant society will probably be of more interest and value than the facts of ownership, which is rapidly changing.'!'

This program, privileging an understanding of forests essentially in their own terms, rather than as timber factories, clearly reflected a new ordering of environmental priorities and values. That the CCC enrollees took to it so willingly further underscores the momentum of the change.

Interestingly, in using the CCC as a comparison point for environmental ethics before and after 1933, we see that the militarist element of interactions with nature that largely characterized the anthropocentric environmental ethic did not vanish altogether under the New Deal. Public relations material for conservation causes frequently employed the language of battles, soldiers, and armies in furtherance of their goals, a trend exemplified nowhere better than in the CCC. The CCC itself was a "Corps," a slightly unusual nomenclature given the New Deal's proclivity for "Administrations" and

"Agencies," that must have meant to establish a parallelism with fighting bodies such as the Marine Corps.112 The Corps soon earned the popular nickname "Roosevelt's Tree

Army," a sure sign that the public had received the message loud and clear.113 A 1934 CCC promotional film, titled "CCC Fights Erosion" typified the kind of military rhetoric often used and drove the point home even further. Over a scene of Corps enrollees laboring at a gully in Mississippi, the narrator announced "These well seasoned boys, 'rolling 'er down,' with bar and shovel, present a striking battle scene. With the spirit of 'crusaders for

111 "Training in Forestry in Emergency Conservation Work Camps," June 13, 1933, RG 35 (Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps), entry 63, box 14 112 The name probably also had something to do with the fact that the Corps enrolled only draft-age young men. 113 James R. Lyons, "FDR and Environmental Leadership," in FDR and the Environment, eds. Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 205; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks, 126; Neil Maher, Planting More Than Trees: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of The American Environmental Movement, 1929-1942, (PhD diss., New York University, 2001), 1 71 conservation' these boys are slowly healing the scars caused by years of carelessness."114

But did this emphasis on bellicose bravado mean that the CCC was akin to General

Dyrenforth's and C.W. Post's rainmaking "battles"? The answer must be an emphatic no:

Where Dyrenforth and Post essentially sought to make war on nature, and fought to compel the environment to acquiesce to the demands of society, the CCC identified the enemy as poor land husbandry, and instead enlisted nature an ally of the fighting men.

On this same subject, keen-eyed historians have observed that a precursor to the idea of the CCC can be found in the first decade of the twentieth century, in William

James' 1906 essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" which outlined a quasi-military organization which appears to have much in common with the Corps.115 To call James' idea an embryo, however, would be too much, as the infant CCC that emerged in 1933 shared some anatomical features with the subject of James' essay but was a distinctly different species. Significantly, the differences between James' army and the CCC attest to a change in attitudes towards nature that had taken place in the interim. In "The Moral

Equivalent of War" James worried that belligerence and pugnacity had been bred into the bones of the human race since the beginning of civilization, for which reason human beings were born with a proverbial itchy trigger finger, all too ready to go to war at any given moment. Though he loathed bloodshed, he also recognized that a state of perpetual and universal militarism also fostered certain positive individual traits such as decisiveness, initiative, bravery, manliness, and perfectionism, to name a few. Thus James' hypothesis: by channeling the natural inclination for warfare into less sanguinary pursuits, he argued,

114 "CCC Fights Erosion" script, November 11, 1935, RG 95 (Records of the Forest Service), entry 53, box 2 (Emphasis added.) 115 Neil Maher, '"A Conflux of Desire and Need': Trees, Boy Scouts, and the Roots of Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps," in FDR and the Environment, Henderson and Woolner, eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 50 72 the "higher ranges of man's spiritual energy" formerly associated with war could be preserved while eliminating the need for death and conflict. As to what the outlet for these energies might be, James had a ready suggestion: "instead of military conscription," he wrote, there could be "a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature." Recruits in this great crusade would dig in coal mines, build roads, blast tunnels, and erect skyscrapers, and in this way do their part in "the immemorial warfare against nature."116 In 1906, war against nature seemed obvious, logical, natural, sensible, immutable, even timeless. Yet when the Civilian

Conservation Corps came into being in 1933, sharing the many of the same goals and an almost identical methodology to James' proposed army, it sought to make an ally of nature, rather than an enemy.117 Reforestation, soil conservation, restoring ruined lands, and reclaiming acreage from overzealous agriculture and all ranked among the CCC's highest priorities. By that time, what was "obvious" was the "obvious conflux of the desire for conservation and the need for finding useful work for unemployed young men," or so said

President Roosevelt's secretary Marguerite LeHand, assessing the origins of the CCC.

The bookkeeping of the CCC attests to a new valuation of forestry work under the

New Deal. When Gifford Pinchot concluded his appointment as forester to George

Vanderbilt's Biltmore estate in 1894, he cooked the books to indicate a profit. A decade later, when he became Chief Forester of the new Forest Service, Congress expected him to do the same (which is to say: show a profit, not commit fraud). But in 1934, FDR had no

116 William James, "The Moral Equivalent ofWar," in The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays, ed. John Roth. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 13-14 117 Many historians, including Neil Maher, have pointed out the intellectual possible connection between James' essay and the CCC. See Maher, '"A Conflux of Desire and Need,'" in FDR and the Environment, Henderson and Woolner, eds., 50 118 Qtd. in Maher, Nature's New Deal, 19 73 such expectation for the work of the CCC. "I believe that the nation feels that the work of these young men is so thoroughly justified," the President wrote CCC head Robert

Fechner, "that the actual annual cost will be met without much opposition or much complaint."119 Thus, for the President (and in his view, the American public as well) the social value of the work done was well worth the outlay. Complete self-liquidation was no longer a prerequisite for forest work.

Like the CCC, the AAA sought to, in part, address immediate problems in depressed farm prices and soil erosion and other land issues, but also had a long-term agenda involving broad reform of national agricultural patterns. Signed into law in May

1933 under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture, one of its aims was to drive up agricultural prices by paying subsidies to farmers to take land out of cultivation and reduce their livestock holdings. In this regard it had continuity with some earlier agriculture plans that were purely economic in goals, such as the McNary-Haugen bill which had been twice vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge. Roosevelt, however, thought differently. For one thing he was not so squeamish about putting the government's hand into the economy now and then. But as mentioned above, he also felt that economy and environment were inseparable, especially in the realm of agriculture. Thus, the AAA added a second goal of rehabilitating soil and establishing a more harmonious and building a new and more sustainable pattern of national agriculture. In October 1935, Roosevelt reflected on the short history of the agency and made the long-term outlook for the AAA abundantly clear:

It was never the idea of the men who framed the [Agricultural Adjustment] Act, of those in Congress who revised it, nor of [Agriculture Secretary] Henry Wallace nor [AAA Administrator] Chester Davis that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration should be either a mere emergency operation or a static agency. It

119 "Roosevelt to Robert Fechner," October 6, 1934, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 329 74

was their intention—as it is mine—to pass from the purely emergency phases necessitated by a grave national crisis to a long time, more permanent plan for American agriculture.

The President went on to explain some of the systematic reforms that he believed a permanent AAA would be able to bring about. On an individual level, it would allow farmers to maintain sustainable land use methods—such as crop rotation and pasturing— even in short-term slumps, while on a nationwide scale, it could steer regional production to better harmonize with the particularities of local soil conditions. Furthermore, if continued indefinitely, the AAA could guard against a backslide into the destructive practices that occasioned its creation in the first place.121 Roosevelt even envisioned hypothetical future situations in which the same AAA mechanisms that sought to eliminate surpluses could be reversed to combat national shortages.

Much of the conservation wisdom underlying the AAA was actually fairly old.

Crop rotation, pasturing, foddering, and taking land out of cultivation (practices carried over from English agriculture) had all been in practice before 1650 in colonial New

England.122 In the 1850s the Tennessee state agricultural bureau had warned farmers that single-crop monoculture, renewed year after year without break, could only result in ruin for the soil. Yet the sanctity of private property and the right of yeoman farmers to determine their own course of action—animated by faith in capitalism and hope for agricultural republic—was such that warn was all the government could, or was willing, to do.123 By 1933, however, Roosevelt was determined that the federal government no longer

120 "Statement by Roosevelt on the Agricultural Adjustment Program," October 25, 1935, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 444 121 "Statement by Roosevelt on the Soil Conservation Program," March 19, 1936, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 469 122 Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 70 123 Creese, TVA's Public Planning, 86 75 play the part of agricultural Cassandra—forever predicting disaster, yet heeded by none.

With this in mind, the first hundred days saw a number of developments that sought to involve the government in improving the national relationship to the land in a far more proactive way than ever before.

At the forefront of this effort, the AAA developed rural demonstration areas to entice farmers to take up more sustainable, less destructive agricultural practices. Across the country, CCC labourers prepared sample plots to demonstrate contour plowing, terracing, fallowing, crop rotation, and other such methods that promised to allow steady productivity while maintaining the health of the soil. Initial trepidation based in part on the fear that farmers would be too proud, or stubborn, or both, to change their ways, proved almost completely unfounded. The improvements to the soil on the demonstration areas proved alluring enough to convince many farmers to permanently shake off their old farming habits. Maher cites a 1940 survey of upper Mississippi Valley farmers that revealed the shocking success of the demonstration areas: "98 percent said they now believed that conservation was solving the erosion problem on their farms, and 99 percent stated their intention to continue practicing conservation indefinitely."124 In a similar vein,

New Deal agricultural reformers attempted to communicate with farmers in their own language by sponsoring plowing contests. Plowing contests had been a tradition on the

Great Plains for decades, at which farmers could test their tractoring skills against one another, while the community gathered to enjoy the spectacle. Before the New Deal, the winner had been the man who could plough the straightest lines on the field, but the AAA- sponsored events instead awarded prizes to those who ploughed best on the contour.125 The

124 Maher, Nature's New Deal, 124-30; see also Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 334-35 125 Maher, "Crazy Quilt Farming," 319-20 76 genius of the idea was that it promised positive publicity for the new farming technique by organically infusing it into a traditional Great Plains custom. Furthermore, it framed contour plowing as something the local community could enjoy, embrace, and make their own, rather than something imposed from far away by heavy-handed Washington bureaucrats.

These kinds of demonstrative efforts were new enough, but were by no means the limit of the New Deal's presence in agricultural reform. The Roosevelt administration was not content to leave matters up to voluntary associationalism, and sought to add some teeth to the effort to reform farming practices. This was done by offering financial incentives to farmers to reduce acreage, reduce output of surplus crops, and increase cultivation of soil- restoring crops in line with federal recommendations. "The new farm act provides for financial assistance by the government to those farmers who, heeding the warnings contained in the intentions-to-plant reports, wish to shift from the production of unneeded surpluses of soil depleting crops to the production of needed soil-building crops,"126

Roosevelt would explain in 1936. As noted above, the government had provided advice for farmers since the previous century, but could do little more for fear of trampling the economic liberties of freeholding land-users. FDR's government, clearly, was not so utterly dedicated to the freedom of the market. And while the program certainly had economic goals at heart, Roosevelt never intended that the financial assistance be a mere stopgap.

From the beginning the vision behind the AAA was to found a permanent body to reshape agriculture on a national scale so as to prevent future slumps and incentivize agriculture that was probably less profitable in the short-run, but more sustainable and cognizant of the

1 "Statement by Roosevelt on the Soil Conservation Program," March 19, 1936, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 497 77 limits of the environment.127 At bottom, the AAA resonated with an understanding that agriculture could not be a one-way street: rather, planting of any kind had to abide by the practical limits of the soil. This meant, for example, subsides for reducing crop acreage to allow the soil to recharge its nutrients, or augmenting this process through crop rotation, pasturing, or the cultivation of fodder plants such as clover and alfalfa. Practices such as these were not in the tradition of the progressive "gospel of efficiency." On the contrary, they quite likely reduced per area or per season yields. But sheer efficiency was not the point: striking a bilateral balance with what the landscape could tolerate was the new goal.

Furthermore, the use of subsidies stemmed from a repudiation of the laissez faire belief that the free market might provide sufficient incentive for farmers to do this on their own.

Demonstration areas and plowing contests gave the example but left the initiative for change with the farmer. AAA incentive programs significantly strengthened the incentive for reform by adding direct financial motivation to the mix. A third undertaking, however, required the least cooperation from farmers and represented the federal government acting most directly to restore a natural balance to the Plains. This was the

Shelterbelt project, an idea Roosevelt had apparently pondered as early as August 1933, at which time he asked Chief Robert Stuart of the Forest Service to make a feasibility study and estimate the associated costs. The Shelterbelt was the New Deal's most ambitious, novel, and momentous effort to restore the nation's soil: it was to be joint venture of Forest

Service planning and Works Progress Administration labour to plant a 100-mile wide belt of wooded areas along the 99th meridian from the Canadian border down to eastern Texas.

127 "Statement by Roosevelt on the Agricultural Adjustment Program," October 25, 1935, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 444 128 "Roosevelt to Robert Y. Stuart, Forest, Forest Service," August 19, 1933, in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 198 78

Agricultural lands to the west of this line were subject to harsh easterly winds which blew away topsoil and moisture. The planting of the Shelterbelt, federal foresters believed, would significantly dampen wind speeds, reduce evaporation of soil moisture and enrich the soil, moderate temperatures, encourage the habitation of wildlife, and in turn protect farms, facilitate diversified growing, and increase yields. The benefits of shelterbelting, it should be noted, had been known for some time. Chief Forester Robert Stuart noted that

Plains settlers dating back to the first decade of the nineteenth century had known that stands of osage orange trees could protect single farms from harsh winter conditions. But the required investment of acreage, labour, and money in growing such barriers had meant that only a tiny fraction of settlers could afford to undertake such methods, and those that could rarely did, preferring to use their free capital to expand their acreage rather than improve that which they did have.129 The federal Shelterbelt project, then, sought to extend these benefits to all by constructing a north-south tree line on a national scale—a plan that, conveniently, provided a great deal of work for Works Progress Administration and CCC enrollees.

It should be noted that the "belt" followed a slightly more organic planting pattern than its purpose might let on. Rather than rudely plugging a column of trees along some arbitrary line of longitude, the Shelterbelters had a more sophisticated methodology by which Forest Service experts vetted each potential planting site for suitability, "rejecting those where soil or other conditions were obviously unsatisfactory for tree growth."130 A bird's eye view of the project, in other words, would have revealed an irregular band of

129 "Robert Y. Stuart to Henry A. Wallace: Forest Planting Possibilities in the Prairie Region," August 15, 1933, in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 200-02 130 L.S. Gross to George A. Duthie, "Memorandum for Mr. Duthie [re: Trees to Tame the Wind motion picture script]," October 29, 1937. RG 95 (Records of the Forest Service), entry 53, box 2 79 greenery, rather than a tightly regimented column of trees in the style of the Garden of

Versailles. Furthermore, Forest Service silviculturalists also selected only trees that were hardy enough to withstand the relatively dry and windy prairie climate, and had a root system compatible with the soil chemistry. In this way, the Shelterbelt, a project in which the federal government brought to bear a great deal of executive power, nevertheless yielded a large measure of authority to the environment. Forestry experts were also in agreement that the trees planted would be totally unsuitable for profitable timbering, and had no expectation whatsoever that the project would self-liquidate. Yet so great were the benefits that in 1939, Agriculture Secretary Wallace described the program to the President as an "outstanding success" and recommended that it be made permanent with financing

111 through Congress or emergency conservation funds, as necessary.

Incidentally, it should be noted that the desperate dryness of the Dust Bowl engendered a renewed (if decidedly diminished) call for concussive pluviculture. In 1935, a concerned Texan fired a letter to the President, asking Mr. Roosevelt if he might use his executive power to declare a national "Explosion Day," upon which residents of each county in the United States would simultaneously open fire on the heavens in the hopes of inducing some relief. The following year, Benjamin M. Powers—incidentally, the son of

Edward Powers, whose 1890 re-publication of War and the Weather touched off the first national mania for concussionism—made a similar request of Secretary Wallace, apparently thinking the matter better suited to the Department of Agriculture than the Oval

Office. That Powers the Younger shared a military bent with his father and General

Dyrenforth is attested by his suggestion that the explosions be performed as "army

131 "Roosevelt to Nelson C. Brown, New York State College of Forestry," November 27, 1934, in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 335 80 exercises." Yet neither inquiry could scrounge even a modicum of support in the new administration. Touring the Dakotas in the midst of drought in 1934, FDR told an audience at Devils Lake that he wished he could bring rain as easily as he had repealed Prohibition, but frankly conceded that rainmaking was beyond human capability. "When you come to this water problem," he lamented, "you are up against two things. In the first place you are up against the forces of nature, and, secondly, you are up against the fact that man in his present stage of development cannot definitely control these forces."133 Even amateur concussionism had lost whatever magnetism it once held for the public—reports of rainmaking militias from this era are incredibly scarce. The fundaments of the old paradigm which had once made rainmaking experiments of the sort seem so promising had, by the time of the New Deal, evaporated, taking with them the devoted backing that pluviculture had once enjoyed.134

The Tennessee Valley Authority was another of many ambitious New Deal programs to come roaring out of the furious First Hundred Days. Most simply stated, the

TVA Act called for the construction of a large-scale, coordinated dam system along the

namesake river, and the creation of a federal corporation to operate the dams. The goals of the Authority, however, were famously manifold: in a single project, Roosevelt sought to

Spence, "The Dyrenforth Experiments," 231-32. How the Texan's Explosion Day would have differed from the Fourth of July (if at all), or if he even made such a connection, is not known. 1 The Plains farmers for the most part agreed. News coverage from the drought area reports the locals' deep suspicion of salesman hawking rainmaking devices. Instead, Plainspeople turned to a higher power for relief, with several communities organizing mass prayers for rain. John R. Wunder, Frances W. Kaye, and Vernon Carstensen, eds. Americans View Their Dust Bowl Experience (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 115-19 134 There is a temptation to put this down to the progression of science rather than shifts in social and cultural forces as I have done. That is to say, one might argue that while concussionism seemed plausible in the 1890s, by 1930 it was, at last, known to have no scientific merit, and this alone explains why support dried up. This assessment does not hold up under historical critique. Spence has shown that, as early as 1890, while mainstream media were somewhat sympathetic to the cause, virtually all serious scientific periodicals gave the idea a critical mauling. (See Spence, "The Dyrenforth Experiments," 212, nl8.) From this we can conclude that concussionism was about as scientifically credible in 1933 as it had been in 1890, and we may dismiss the progression towards enlightenment as the reason for the evaporation of concussionism. 81 rehabilitate an entire region's economy, provide inexpensive hydroelectric power, encourage the growth of local light industry, control floods, encourage independent agriculture, create park space, and several other ends as well. In pursuing these goals, it partnered with other New Deal agencies: for example, with the Rural Electrification

Administration in stringing up power lines to deliver current to the Valley population; the

CCC in reforesting or afforesting eroded lands on the river banks; and the AAA in encouraging reformed agricultural practices. Accordingly, summing up the purpose of the

TVA in a single sentence is a tricky, though not impossible undertaking. In TVA's Public

Planning: The Vision, the Reality Walter L. Creese offers a good jumping off point for discussion with is assertion that "TVA's ambition was to embody a new message on a vast scale."135 This message, in large part, was a frank acknowledgement of the passing of the old environmental ethic and the beginning of a new one. The pattern of this message, like a fractal, repeated and manifested itself on a number of scales within the architecture—both figurative and literal—of the TVA.

Exemplary of the smallest scale at which the pattern was perceptible comes in an interior mural at the TVA's Boone Dam. As one might expect, its namesake Daniel Boone figured prominently in the painting, but his posture and positioning conveyed something quite different than the usual manifest destiny mythos associated with the man. Indeed, a dam named after the famous frontiersman would seem to indicate a spirit of wistful retrospectivism.

Creese, TVA's Public Planning, 2 82

Detail from Daniel Boone mural at Boone Dam In this case, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The Boone mural, in fact, directly repudiates and even subverts many of the motifs of the art of manifest destiny, in order to pick up and then draw a clear line under the narrative of old environmental ethic and reposition another in its place. Significantly, the mural depicts Boone at the extreme left of the canvas standing bolt-upright, surveying the wilderness to his (and the viewer's) right. Clearly he is not an active agent in the composition: he observes, but in no way drives the action of the scene. The mural's message becomes clearer still when considered in contrast to several persistent tropes of manifest destiny painting. To begin, such art almost invariably depicted personifications of progress—either real, such as Boone, or imagined, such as "Liberty"—centered in the painting, framed by the wild country,

Smith, "Almost Fully Modern," in The Tennessee Valley Authority Design and Persuasion, ed Tim Culvahouse, 118 83 confidently striding across the canvas from right to left, in deliberate imitation of movement across the continent from east to west, often carrying with them tools representing progress such as rifles, shovels, ploughs, pickaxes, or even spools of telegraph wire.137 For the Boone mural, then, to place Boone himself at the left, looking rightwards, in a decidedly passive pose, can only have represented a clear attempt to acknowledge and break with the environmental ethic he represented. For someone reading the painting from right to left, as was the norm in the art of manifest destiny, Boone marks the end of the story, looking backward contemplatively. However, if one read the depiction from left to right, taking a new viewpoint to go with the new environmental ethic, one sees Boone, his movement now at an end, looking forward to a future in which nature takes a far more prominent place.

At the middle of the scale, we might look at the example of Norris Village, a planned town built to accommodate the displaced population from the vicinity of the namesake dam and house construction workers. An original plan called for a temporary settlement made from cheap materials to be torn down after three years. Arthur Morgan balked at the wastefulness of the proposition and fought to have permanent, high-quality homes built instead.138 When this came to pass, the village was designed from bottom to top to be half-rural, half-urban. "Everywhere in it," Creese wrote, "we can perceive an assumption that the town was primarily a place of a final gesture: the bucolic, removed isthmus of the Land Between the Lakes, terminus of the whole TVA endeavor came again embodying the principle—whether religious, romantic, ecological, or technological—of

Aikin, "Paintings of Manifest Destiny," passim Arthur E. Morgan, The Making of the TVA (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1974), 88-89 84 escape into nature."139 Integration into the natural landscape even informed the architecture of the TV A dams. Though power generation was their primary purpose, architects used the edifices to act as functional symbols the TVA's overarching goal of augmenting the landscape and blending into the region. Stylistically speaking this was a significant change of pace from the deliberately stark, monolithic, and surrealist art deco design of the Hoover

Dam, set out only a few years before under its namesake President.1 Indeed, Oskar J.W.

Hansen, a sculptor hired to add some artistic touches to the project, likened the Dam to the

Great Pyramid at Giza, announcing itself proudly against the plainness of the surrounding landscape, and calling attention to the unnaturalness of the water reservoir in the middle of the desert.141 Curiously, architecture critic Lewis Mumford would invoke the Pyramid a few years later, contrasting it against the modesty of the TVA dams. "Both pyramid and dam represent an architecture of power," Mumford remarked, "But the difference is notable, too, and should make one prouder of being an American. The first grew out of slavery and celebrated death. Ours was produced by free labor to create energy and life for the people of the United States."142 And describing the architecture of the TVA dams, one historian noted "By knitting together the structures within the landscape designs, planners remained faithful to the original intention behind TVA's systematic restructuring of the regional watershed. In other words, no single dam was constructed to show TVA's authority over the mighty Tennessee; instead, the dams blended into the rest of the valley

Creese, TVA's Public Planning, 6 140 Richard Guy Wilson, "Machine-Age Iconography in the American West: The Design of Hoover Dam," Pacific Historical Review 54 (Nov. 1985): 489 141 "Story of Hoover Dam: Artwork," Bureau of Reclamation, last modified Sep. 10, 2001, http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/artwork.html 142 Qtd. in Smith, "Almost Fully Modern," in The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, ed. Tim Culvahouse, 109-110 85 as a more complicated symbol of efficiency and technical management." Thus, the architecture of the TVA dams set them apart from progressive era analogues that boasted of their unnaturalness and their conquest of the landscape. Like the environmental ethic behind them, the TVA designs attempted to form a balance with the surroundings and integrate into the geography of the region.

Moving up to the scale of the TVA as a whole, the pattern continues. On April 10,

1933, FDR spoke to Congress in support of his proposed TVA, making sure to underscore the importance of conservation to the project, emphasizing that its benefits would accrue to

Americans beyond the Tennessee Valley region, and giving indication that natural boundaries, in the form of the river's watershed—not state borders—would demarcate the project's area of jurisdiction.144 "It should be charged with the broadest duty of planning," said Roosevelt, "for the proper use, conservation, and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory for the general social and economic welfare of the nation."145 The speech was a short one, coming in at only five paragraphs, but interestingly it made no mention of electrification, fertilizer manufacture, or river navigation, three of the more anthropic goals of the Authority. Regionalism, it seems, was a high priority, as was advancing the idea of the United States as a great interconnected web in which local happenings had national consequences, and saw natural

1 j Black, "Organic Planning," 73 144 Mark Fiege has argued in Irrigated Eden that damming and irrigation projects in Idaho, perhaps as early as the 1860s, achieved something similar: that they "altered but did not 'conquer' the complex, erratic hydrology of the streams... dams instead became part of the river system itself," 205. However, there is a crucial difference between these projects and the TVA: the former merely became part of the river system through long-term, incidental equilibration, whereas the Tennessee Valley project was designed from the ground up to be part of the river system. The difference, of course, suggests a significant change of outlook in the development of dams and other such undertakings. 145 "Roosevelt to the Congress," April 10, 1933, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 151. Roosevelt articulated a similar idea in his second Fireside Chat, May 7, 1933, announcing that the TVA would "add to the comfort and happiness of hundreds of thousands of people and the incident benefits will reach the entire nation." 86 regions, such as the Tennessee Valley, as logical bases for societal planning and organization. In this way regionalism dovetailed nicely with the new environmental ethic which posited a landscape that was vulnerable, reactive, and continuous: injuries or benefits anywhere would eventually be felt everywhere. It recognized river systems and other natural formations as being real and meaningful geographies that were of no less importance than political borders. Indeed, Gordon R. Clapp, chairman of the Authority's board of directors, subtitled his 1955 TVA history An Approach the Development of a

Region, and argued that "With each year of work the people on the land are a little less at odds with the working cycles of nature, a little more sure of the future of their families...

What is going on in the Tennessee Valley is in essence an adventure in faith—faith in man's ability to achieve harmony between human pursuits in making a living and nature's fruitful habits of growth and production."146 Arthur E. Morgan, TVA chairman, concurred, and ascribed the Authority's regional focus to the wishes of the President:

It was common for public works to be undertaken on limited projects of definite scope, such as highways, water control, electric power, and building construction, and the TVA included such programs. However, the President had a more inclusive vision in mind for the Tennessee Valley. To his mind, it should be concerned with every aspect of the region's well-being... Because of FDR's vision it [regionalism] became a major consideration in the TVA.147

Dust from the disaster on the Great Plains had darkened the East, but the brains behind the TVA hoped that this effect could cut both ways: that the benefits brought to the

Tennessee Valley would also accrue to the entire nation. Yet in spite of the President's wishes, it is somewhat surprising that the TVA managed to organize on the regional scale so successfully as it did. The TVA had an unusual leadership structure, headed by a triumvirate of three strong-minded individuals (Arthur Morgan, Harcourt Morgan, no

Clapp, The TVA: An Approach to the Development of a Region, vii 147 Morgan, The Making of the TVA, 54-55 (emphasis added) 87 relation, and David Lilienthal), with little oversight from the President, each of whom had very different ideas about how the Authority should be run. Arthur Morgan's hopes were the most abstract: he desired that "it might create a new spirit and attitude in public service." The other two were more concrete in their objectives: Harcourt Morgan favored fertilizer production and agricultural reform, while Lilienthal's major concern was electrification and rural equilibration. The atmosphere in the TVA leadership was tense, acrimonious, and sometimes outwardly hostile, but all three men were firm believers in regionalism, and indeed, regionalism was a major animating feature of the TVA. What this suggests is that even in the discordant TVA boardroom, regionalism was beyond reproach.

And further beyond this, the TVA was, at least in theory, only a stepping stone to something larger. After a certain tradition, the TVA itself was already a systematic implementation of a smaller idea. Specifically, one might think of the TVA as Muscle

Shoals149—which operated only within Alabama's borders—writ large, on the scale of an entire river valley and spanning seven Southern states. But as early as April 1933, there was serious thought that the TVA might be merely the first of a system of national river valley Authorities.150 Roosevelt spoke to Congress on April 10 in favor of the TVA, concluding with the thought "If we are successful here we can march on, step by step, in a

148 Morgan, The Making of the TVA, 55 14 Muscle Shoals is the name of a section of rapids (and an adjacent township) on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the site for the construction of a federal facility to produce domestic nitrates for the war effort and a hydroelectric dam to power the enterprise. The conclusion of the war, however, left the project in limbo, since it had never been conceived of as anything more than an exigency of the conflict. Over the course of the 1920s its fate was the subject of much- Congressional debate but no resolution. The TVA Act solved the matter by incorporating it into the new Authority. See Norman Wengert, "Antecedents of TVA: The Legislative History of Muscle Shoals," Agricultural History 26 (Oct. 1952): 144-45 15 William E. Leuchtenburg, "Roosevelt, Norris, and the 'Seven Little TVAs,'" Journal of Politics 14 (Aug. 1952): 418 88 like development of other great natural territorial units within our borders."151 Within a week—and before both Houses had even approved the TVA bill—Senator Clarence C. Dill of Washington state wrote the President wondering if a similar project might be possible on the Columbia River, to which FDR could see no objection. By December of the same year,

Roosevelt was again in correspondence with Dill. The Chief Executive expressed interest in advancing the idea of a Columbia River Authority and instructed the Senator to assemble representatives from the states on the Columbia's basin to meet on the subject. Just as with the Tennessee, the river, not state borders, would dictate the project's boundaries. In the

same letter, Roosevelt also noted two other River Authorities on the drawing board—the

Missouri and the Arkansas—and suggested that representatives of each potential project

meet in Washington, D.C.: "I think we must have a uniform policy for all three areas,"

wrote Roosevelt.152 Only two years later, Valley Authority fever had taken hold: in that

month, the Bureau of the Budget reported that over twenty bills had been introduced in the

hopes of establishing Authorities on 11 rivers across the country.

How then did the TVA connect to the New Deal's environmental ethic? To begin,

its consistent commitment to regionalism reflected an appreciation for natural systems as a

suitable basis for federal projects. In other words, the geography of the Tennessee Valley

partially dictated what the shape of the TVA would be. Part of working with the region also

151 "Roosevelt to the Congress," April 10, 1933, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 152 152 "Roosevelt to Senator Clarence C. Dill of Washington," December 19, 1933, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 227. Roosevelt quite consistently responded to such inquiries by demanding that representatives of all states be in agreement on development. In response to a proposed Connecticut Valley Authority, he noted that it would require support from the Governors of the eponymous state, as well as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. See ibid., 368. 153 These were: the Upper Mississippi, Columbia, Missouri, Arkansas, Sacramento-San Joaquin, Cumberland, Wabash-White, Kanawha-Monongahela, Brazos, Connecticut, and Merrimac. Note that virtually every region of the nation was represented on this formidable list (Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, Southwest, and Northwest). "Daniel W. Bell, Acting Director, Bureau of the Budget, to Roosevelt," March 5, 1935, in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 360 89 entailed understanding that the river was not naturally compartmentalized according to its various uses. While it might have been easier, administratively, to put irrigation, electrification, reforestation, soil conservation, navigation, economic amelioration, and all the TVA's other jobs under separate agencies, having them all under the single banner of the Authority more faithfully mirrored the multivalent nature of the river. Finally, the architecture and interior mural art expressed a desire to conclude an older chapter of environmental ethics in which command of the landscape was the highest ideal, and open a new one in which the region had a voice in how it would be used.

As noted above in regards to the TVA mural at Boone Dam, New Deal-era visual arts betokened the stark changes in environmental ethics that had taken place since the late

1920s. For example, a pair of images, each touting government projects at the interface of development and nature, provides further evidence that the view of the relationship to nature had changed significantly.

image (ca 1933) 90

Crucially, both draw on raw masculine strength as a common stylistic element, but in very different ways. The first, produced around 1927 to celebrate the completion of the

American Falls Dam on the Snake River in Idaho, personifies the project as a muscled giant pressing with all his might to hold back the flow of the river.154 His heels dug into the riverbed, he leans forward, using his mighty shoulder to support the dam before him. The function of American Falls Dam, we may infer, existed in the public imagination as something as fundamentally struggling against the river on which it was built. In a sense, then, the American Falls Dam propagated the age-old trope of wilderness as a chaotic and frightening place which could only be subdued and tamed by a steady and masculine hand.

Yet in a CCC promotional image, produced some time after 1933, masculine strength no longer opposes nature but rather assists it, as two brawny young Corpsmen put their muscles to work planting a sapling in the earth.155 The tree itself stands proudly in the centre of the image, backgrounded by a fluttering American flag. As with many such CCC promotional images, the subtle implication was that enrollees could expect to build their bodies (perhaps made frail through unemployment and the relative ease of urban living) through similar contact with the environment. Nature, then, had become a wholesome, welcoming space worthy of protection, in which to build body and nation. Thus, in both the

1920s and '30s, the space where nature and American society intersected was a place for rugged manliness. But where the imagination of the earlier decade saw a contest of will, with man locked in a struggle against the forces of nature, the New Deal's nature was an ally and source of strength.

Mark Fiege's caption astutely observes that "To some Idahoans, the control of the Snake required masculine, brute force," Irrigated Eden, image and caption appear between pages 64 and 65. 1 Maher, Nature's New Deal, front cover image 91

Other media, too, advanced similar notions, and the New Deal's environmental ethic gained a potent and persuasive voice in 1936. In that year, a film produced by the

Resettlement Administration screened at 3,000 cinemas across the country, bearing a powerful narrative of the landscape. The film was Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the

Plains, which broadcast a searing indictment of the dry farming on the Great Plains that, in the filmmaker's view, was at the root of the dust bowl. "Settler, plow at your peril!" boomed the stern narrator in one scene—a warning that could hardly be more different from "rain follows the plow." In three years, an estimated 10 million Americans beheld the scenes of ruined soil, abandoned homesteads, and of course, the menacing dust.

Controversy followed, with the strongest opposition originating from dust bowl inhabitants who felt they had been unfairly vilified. South Dakota Representative Karl Mundt, for example branded The Plow "the most dastardly and disgraceful attempt to besmirch a fair section of the country that has ever been conceived by any nation anywhere."156 But the film could count a few staunch supporters even among the people of the Great Plains.

Maury Maverick, a Democratic Representative from Texas, insisted that films like The

Plow "must by all means be shown to awaken our citizens to the necessity for immediate steps in conservation."157 The majority of Americans, it seems, were with Maverick. Wrote one reviewer: "the film almost choked the throats of the audience when a violent swirling dust storm raged over dry, sun-baked soil," while Meyer Levin, writing for Esquire, commented:

I can remember no simple cause-and-effect explanation of the drought, in writing or in pictures, before The Plow. Then the gigantic crime that had been committed

Dunaway, Natural Visions, 55 Dunaway, Natural Visions, 33 92

became clear even to the city dweller. The grazing lands had been forced to grow grain, quick war crops had sapped the earth of moisture; then dust.

Levin's observation sheds light on two important facets of Lorentz's film: first, that it successfully connected dust storms with Great Plains agriculture; and second, that The

Plow succeeded at least as well as any publication or New Deal agency in communicating the connection to the public. Lorentz also believed, like Roosevelt, that the simultaneous economic and environmental disasters were no coincidence. Borrowing a technique from

Sergei Eisenstein, Lorentz set up a bold visual juxtaposition as a stream of wheat pouring from a spout slowed to a trickle, and a reel of tape spilled from a ticker machine on to the floor below.

For Lorentz, the dust bowl was neither a fluke nor an isolated incident. Instead, he saw it as part of a bigger pattern by which Americans had, historically and up to the present, ignored or overlooked the limits of the natural environment. The Plow documented the culmination of this process in the ecological crisis of the Great Plains; the follow-up outing 1937's, The River, changed the setting to the Mississippi which had flooded with devastating effect consequences in 1927 and again in January of the year of the film's release. Lorentz, like many Americans before him, recognized the Mississippi as more than a river, but instead something like a national jugular vein: a living symbol of the health, unity, and progress of the United States. In 1888, Mark Twain had reflected on the wild nature of the river and the futility of trying to control it through engineering: "[one] might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct," he wrote.159 For the moment, however,

Twain's measure of the Mississippi's pulse held little political sway: the federal

158 Dunaway, Natural Visions, 50 and 56 159 Qtd. in Dunaway, Natural Visions, 61 93 government felt quite sure that the Army Corps of Engineers' system of levees could sufficiently contain the river's fury in any foreseeable situation. Even when raging flood of

1927—the New York Times dubbed it "the greatest flood in history"160—made a mockery of the government's control system, the Engineers, somehow, remained confident that their system was sound. Indeed, in July 1936, only six months before the Mississippi was to burst its banks again, an Army Corps of Engineers general bragged to Pare Lorentz as the two toured a hydraulic systems laboratory that "It's all fixed. There will never be another flood on the Mississippi River." Lorentz was skeptical of the general's boast, and when his new film premiered in the wake of yet another flood, the public was also ready to take a fresh look at the relationship of the nation to its favorite river.

Like The Plow, The River reminded audiences that economic welfare was intimately tied to environmental welfare. Above a scene of a destitute sharecropper family, the narrator intoned a simple explanation: "Poor land makes poor people. Poor people make poor land." As well, Lorentz offered a new perspective on flood control. In previous decades, the solution to flooding had been the construction of taller levees.163 The

River argued that this methodology blocked the symptoms of floods, but did nothing to address the root cause, which was disruption of the environmental balance of the river system through development of urban centres at the expense of native flora. Lorentz's audiences saw denuded river banks and clear-cut forests juxtaposed with scenes of the recent flood. "We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns, but at what a cost!" chided

160 Perhaps a bit exaggerated, but the flood was mighty indeed, submerging 25,000 square miles of land, and spilling 40 miles outwards from the riverbanks everywhere between Cairo, Illinois, and the Gulf of Mexico. "Fight Great Flood in Mississippi Area," New York Times, April 16, 1927, 4 1 ' Qtd. in Dunaway, Natural Visions, 60 162 Qtd. in Dunaway, Natural Visions, 73 1 Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An Environmental History (University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 145 94 the unseen narrator.1 4 Manifest destiny and the anthropocentric environmental ethic had told Americans that stripping riverbanks of their tree cover as a way of "taming" the wilderness was bringing order to chaos. Lorentz's film cleverly reversed the notion, countering that in so doing, Americans had in fact disrupted a natural order and brought chaos. But The River was by no means a philippic against progress: on the contrary, the film's final act was a celebration of the TVA as the epitome of harmonious balance between technology and nature. The power of the Tennessee River, Lorentz told audiences, if understood on its own terms and made to act in concert with technology, could be a powerful force for progress and renewal. In celebrating the TVA, the film also gave a tacit nod of approval to regionalism as a sensible basis for national organization.165 The public response to The River was overwhelmingly favorable. Critics and audiences alike heaped praise upon the film.

Interestingly, in 1937 the Mississippi was still a prime location to take the pulse of the nation in regards to the environment. In the 1880s, Mark Twain's view that the river was untamable could find little support—at that time, the anthropocentric environmental ethic dictated control and order of the environment as unqualified virtues. Lorentz's The

River resurrected the spirit of Twain's assessment of the Mississippi for a new generation—one more attuned to a biocentric environmental ethic, and thus more inclined to accept that the river might, partly, dictate the terms of its use—and scored a direct hit.

Few of the ideas Lorentz articulated were new, but in the medium of film they reached a wide and enthusiastic audience—one that was ready to receive its critique of the old

Dunaway, Natural Visions, 69-70 Dunaway, Natural Visions, 62 95 environmental ethic and its celebration of partnership with the environment in the TV A— as never before.

In the 1930s, as the nation battled depression and environmental disaster, FDR chose not to invoke his country's noble roots—the spirit of the pioneer, he apparently felt, would have been out of place. Instead, he articulated a belief that a new environmental ethic was underway. "For the first time in the history of the Nation," he said, "we have begun to understand that we must harness nature in accordance with nature's laws, instead of despoiling nature in violation of nature's laws."166 Intellectually, many New Deal initiatives self-consciously demarcated, then drew a line under, the old terms of the anthropocentric environmental ethic, and subsequently sought to define a new environmental ethic. A slate of New Deal programs embodied this understanding, seeking to inaugurate a more sophisticated and sympathetic relationship with the landscape. This included recognition of a connection between environmental and economic welfare, and attempts to repair the damage to both through programs such as the CCC. Americans also began to appreciate the importance of natural systems, cycles, communities, and limitations, and the wisdom of working together with them. The TVA's regionalist scope and concerted, multi-layered efforts to harmonize with the Tennessee Valley, the

Shelterbelt's efforts to match its tree line to the climate and soil, as well as the AAA's goal of reducing acreage land that probably ought not to have been cultivated to begin with, certainly attest to this. Few if any of these programs were cut entirely from new cloth.

Clear predecessors to the TVA and CCC certainly existed long before the beginning of the

New Deal. But the New Deal programs differed from their forebears in their orientation to

"Speech by Roosevelt," September 28, 1935, qtd. in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.1,438 96 the landscape: where the latter group constructed the environment as a blank space awaiting conquest, settlement, and subjugation, the former saw an ally with which they shared a common welfare.

This much was the work of the federal government. The question now remaining is what the public's response was to be. 97

CHAPTER 3 The Public and the Environment

One of our early tourists, a man called Daniel Boone, traveled into dark and bloody lands. When they became too crowded for him, he left and went into the seclusion of the Ozarks Today the problem is just the opposite In Daniel Boone's day scenery had absolutely no value, because everything was scenery

Colonel Richard Lieber, Remarks to the Conference of State Park Authorities February 25,1935

As we have seen in the first two chapters, a persistent and deep-rooted anthropocentric environmental ethic which predominated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century began to break down in the early 1930s as its foundational assumptions fell out of favour or became obsolete. Beginning in 1933, a new ethic informing and permeating many of the key New Deal programs swept into play. This new environmental ethic embraced a constellation of related ideas: regionalism as a sound basis for planning and development, recognition of natural limits, bilateral rather than unilateral interaction as the model of land use, denunciation of traditional environmental ethics and continuity therewith, emphasis on modernism and recognition of a clean break from the past, belief that the welfare of the environment and the economy were deeply and inseparably linked, and the use of "organic development" as a means of sustainably building natural and human resources. There can be little doubt that the aggressive, experimental, and seemingly fearless administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt played a huge part in 98 broadcasting these values to the nation. For example, three marquee New Deal agencies— the AAA, CCC, and TV A—all related directly to land use. But the public side of the equation begs examination as well. Did Americans "buy" the new environmental ethic streaming from the White House, or were they skeptical about such a strong change? To what extent was the public itself responsible for propagating the new ethic, and where did it attribute leadership in effecting the change? Did the public add elements to the mix which the administration did not? Last of all, gauging the public response gives some insight as to whether or not the ethic was merely a Democratic Party article of faith or whether it extended outside the Party; in other words, does moving the viewpoint from outside the top echelons of the Democratic Party to a more politically divisive atmosphere alter the reception of the New Deal's re-envisioning of the environment?

Of course, Americans claimed a range of visions at this time, but this chapter argues that significant segments of the public recognized and actively supported the very same ideas that animated the New Deal's environmental programs. Primary evidence demonstrates that before the end of the decade, the ideas had permeated popular understanding and defined the terms of discourse to the point that they were often beyond critique, partisan or otherwise. The federal government, and FDR in particular, received much credit for originating this change. But there is considerable evidence to indicate that sectors of the public took positive action in the same direction: publishing books, building organizations, mounting grassroots actions to defend New Deal-era environmental values,

and, significantly, substantially initiating and supporting a closely related movement. This was the "wilderness ideal," a notion which had been articulated before 1933 but greatly 99 expanded its following during the FDR administration in the absence of any strong support from the government.

Like the federal "organic development" projects such as the TVA and the

Shelterbelt, the wilderness ideal rejected a unilateral relationship with the environment—in fact, it almost reversed the proposition, with members insisting, with a few exceptions, that natural processes ought to completely dictate the terms of land use and be left as close to their primeval condition as possible. The leadership of this movement did not originate in the federal government, but largely stemmed from the grassroots efforts of private individuals and organizations. However, as this chapter will show, individuals who supported the wilderness ideal never envisioned it as a universal or absolute worldview.

First, as suggested by its pairing with the term "ideal," there was much uncertainty about the possibility and desirability of absolute wilderness. And where much of the New Deal era environmental ethic attempted to weave together a territorially unlimited philosophy of land use, proponents of the wilderness ideal almost unfailingly limited their battles to the

National Parks and Forests; outside these areas, however, wilderness advocates rarely voiced any objection to development. Supporters of the notion were also frequently supporters of New Deal projects such as the Shelterbelt and the TVA. In fact, rather than a distinct and discrete philosophy-in-itself, the 1930s wilderness ideal might be thought of as coexisting with organic development projects as part of a single environmental ethic that envisioned a more bilateral relationship with the landscape with a view to the relief of

socioeconomic inequality.

This chapter concludes that in terms of coming to a new understanding of the meaning of the environment, Americans were not strong-armed by government pressure or 100 simply swept up by a change induced from above. The understanding had genuine support in substantial segments of the public, within and without the Democratic Party, and contributed to a permanent shift in the discourse of the environment.

As the space where many Americans came into closest contact with nature, the national park system was a key battleground in the conflicts of environmental ideologies of the 1930s. In fact, preservationists and resource developers had skirmished over parks for some time, most notably squaring off over the controversial 1906 plan to dam Hetch

Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Such conflicts, Hetch Hetchy included, predictably ended unfavorably for the preservationists, yet in the New Deal years both the discourse of the conflicts and the outcomes began tipping in favor of the park lobby. Many public activists echoed the federal government's repudiation of the old environmental ethic and in large numbers joined with the idea that a new historical chapter of environmental conduct was underway. In 1933, old and new ethic came into a conflict that illustrated the growing strength of the latter. That year a group of Idaho landowners lobbied Congress to authorize the construction of a channel from a large mountain lake to feed a large irrigation system. No Congressional intercession would have been necessary except for the fact that the lake was Yellowstone Lake, which lay within the boundaries of the national park of the same name. In stating their case, the irrigationists evoked the historical trope of the rugged homesteader conquering and remaking the landscape around him to suit his needs. "A little more tolerance and understanding of the problems of the western pioneers striving to make homes on the land would avoid some of the ill feeling which is felt locally toward parks," asserted Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Elwood Mead. The anthropocentric ethic of the pioneers, the channel lobby urged, ought to continue on in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the 101 proposal stirred up a whirlwind of public opposition, including the organization of an ad hoc association called the Emergency Conservation Committee167 (ECC) by park supporter

Rosalie Edge. In launching her rhetorical counterattack, Edge echoed FDR, Harold Ickes, and other New Deal environmental ethic supporters in formulating a very different story, in which a distinct break existed between past and present: "the preservation of our National

Parks today," she remarked "is not forwarded by sentimental references to bygone times but by squarely facing the hard facts of the present."168 A New York Times editorialist agreed, and inveighed against the Idaho developers for somehow imagining that they were entitled to siphon water from the public domain in order to feed more crops than their acreage already supported. "It does not follow," the article read, coming down firmly against the once-popular notion that any landscape could and should be transformed to meet its settlers' needs, "that landowners in arid regions have a right to overexpand their watered acreage in wet years and then impair property belonging to all the people in order to carry them through dry years."169 Abandoned by its original backers, by 1939 the plan was effectively dead.

The episode is particularly illuminating as to the shifting environmental metanarrative of the era. The Idaho irrigation concern's proposal to tap Yellowstone Lake for irrigation in the 1930s pinned its hopes to the nostalgia of Americans for the environmental ethic of the frontiersman. Those opposed, such as Rosalie Edge, argued on substantially different terms, fiercely repudiating the ethic of those who had settled the land

167 The full name and three-letter acronym of this organization suggest that it was part of Roosevelt's "alphabet soup" of programs. It was not, though the similarity of nomenclature may have been deliberate. Fox notes that its founders Rosalie Edge and Irving Brant were "ardent New Dealers" and that the organization was a reliable ally to the Park Service. Nevertheless, Edge remained "the most radical of amateurs." John Muir and His Legacy, 193, 202-03 168 Qtd. in Swain, "The National Park Service and the New Deal," 321 169 "No Trespassing," New York Times, May 12, 1938, 22 102 before in earlier age. Irrigationists wanted Americans to think of the pioneers as their proverbial grandparents, and to think fondly of their common descent; Edge and her cohorts would probably have denied any relation and instead characterized the pioneers as merely previous tenants in the same apartment (and not very good tenants at that.)

Tellingly, the irrigation plan proved a flop, failing to muster much support from anyone besides those who personally stood to gain, and collapsed before the decade's end. Even the Reclamation Bureau, which in previous decades had been tasked with facilitating this very kind of project, would not get behind what it saw as a politically poisonous undertaking—on the contrary, in 1938 the commissioner wrote to the Park Service to unequivocally disavow any connection to the Bureau.170 This, of course, was not the last time that developers would attempt to break into the wealth locked up in the National

Parks. Around the same time, for example, a similar scheme put forward by agriculturalists in the Rocky Mountains proposed to channel water from the range's western slope to its drier but more populated eastern slope through an underground tunnel that was to run underneath Rocky Mountain National Park. The forces of preservation and development again went toe-to-toe, but this time, crucially, the development boosters opted not to frame pioneer nostalgia as the thematic centerpiece of their proposal, perhaps having learned from the mistake of Idaho lobby.171 Alva B. Adams, a Colorado senator and project supporter, wrote in defense of the plan in the New York Times in 1937, declaring that nearly

700 thousand Americans could expect direct or indirect benefits in irrigation and inexpensive hydro power. In previous decades this probably would have been justification enough, yet he also took pains to assure the public that the sanctity of the National Park

170 Swain, "National Park Service and the New Deal," 321-22 171 Swain, "National Park Service and the New Deal," 322 103 would not be tarnished even momentarily, and to distance the proposal from the

Yellowstone Lake fiasco—"there is no parallel whatever in these instances," he wrote.172

This time the project supporters carried the day. The tunnel went ahead as scheduled, but now the development lobby dared not appear to be encroaching into national park space, even when substantial material benefits were to be had. And, curiously, the once- ubiquitous trope of the pioneer was almost nowhere to be found in the discourse.

Other clues point to similar conclusions, while underscoring a distinct public sentiment that FDR was a vital leader in the ongoing changes. A 1938 Newark News forestry article declared that "President Roosevelt deserves credit for calling the attention of the Congress to a growingly serious situation in which all consideration of the future is subordinated to desire for 'liquidating' forests," concluding that a new plan for the federal government to take increased control in ensuring sustainable forestry was "an aspiration to which the nation can and should give an unqualified approval."173 And when two hundred

Corps enrolees voted on a name for the nation's first CCC camp in Virginia's George

Washington National Forest in April 1933, they agreed that the current President deserved recognition, and christened their base "Camp Roosevelt."174 However, there was nothing inevitable in their choice, when we consider a few plausible alternatives that did not come out on top. Chief Forester Silcox, Agriculture Secretary Wallace, or CCC head Robert

"Senator Adams Dissents; Denies that Colorado-Big Thompson Project is 'A Bad Precedent,'" New York Times, August 1, 1937, 60. Adams further declared: "This project will not use one inch of the surface of the Rocky Mountain National Park, nor will it take one drop of water from the park. The only way in which the park enters the project is that the tunnel passes under the park to carry water from one side of the Continental Divide to the other. Neither portal of the tunnel is within the park, nor will it be necessary to enter the park for construction of the tunnel... This situation cannot in any way constitute a precedent for invasion or injury of other national parks." 173 "Timber as a Constant," NewarkNews, March 17, 1938, in RG 95 (Records of the Forest Service), entry 53, box 2 174 Neil Maher, "A Conflux of Desire and Need" in FDR and the Environment, eds. Henderson and Woolner, 49 104

Fechner each had a political role in founding the camp, and might have had a few

supporters. Gifford Pinchot was not directly connected, but the Corpsmen might have

recognized his importance as America's first forester. Or what about a working class hero

like Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers, or Lou Gehrig? Roosevelt's strongest competitors for

camp namesake would most likely have been George Washington (a favourite son of

Virginia, father of his country, and as it happens, already namesake of the National Forest

they happened to be in) and Meriwether Lewis (another Virginian, best remembered for braving the wilderness in his famous expedition). Both had reputations as soldiers and

wilderness tamers—credentials that would have made them ideal candidates for camp

namesake under the anthropocentric environmental ethic. Then we might consider other

celebrated historical Virginians such as Thomas Jefferson or Robert E. Lee. All this

assumes the camp was to be named after a person; it could just as easily have been "Camp

Appalachia" or "Camp Liberty." In voting for "Camp Roosevelt," however, the CCC boys

elected their President again against a list of formidable contenders (many of whom

epitomized the spirit of the old environmental ethic) and made a clear statement that the

inspiration for their work in the woods originated with the current Commander-in-Chief.

A huge portion of the Roosevelt administration's Emergency Conservation Work

(ECW, the umbrella term for the New Deal's various employment programs, including the

CCC, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration) also took

place in federal and state park areas. The volume of work undertaken, however, frequently

necessitated the contracting of outside landscape engineers and architects to manage the

supervision and direction of the work. Among their many duties, the architects spent much

time dashing between parks in order to survey the goings-on and ensure that the work was 105 proceeding according to plan, all the while compiling their findings in monthly reports submitted to a regional manager in the Park Service. These architects were private practitioners working on contracts, rather than salaried federal employees, and they were not shy with criticism when they felt it warranted; indeed, sniffing out and rectifying work that was not up to par was among their foremost duties. At the same time, their managerial role meant that they were privy to behind-the-scenes information that the general park- going public was not, such as the Park Service's long-term, overall goals and directions.

For these reasons, the architects' monthly reports afford a unique perspective on the extent to which the environmental ethic embodied in the CCC and the TVA had won the acceptance of the public.

Landscape engineer J.H. Glander spent the month of August, 1936 barnstorming around Alabama, inspecting the state park system. Like many others of his profession across the country, he had found work under the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) program, which, among scores of projects, contracted private architects to review ongoing and recently completed conservation work on public lands, dander's report for that month was forthright and direct, with passages that would hardly have looked out of place in an engineering textbook: "A problem which gives much thought at this Park" he wrote in reference to the state park at Cheaha, "is the obtaining of a sufficient water supply for the cabin group and custodian's house."175 But Glander was not the only park inspector on the

ECW's rolls: that same month, William Cook, a landscape architect, toured the very same parks and submitted an account of his own—one that clearly expounded several elements

"Monthly Report of J.H. Glander, Associate Engineer, Alabama," August 3, 1936, RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 78, box 1 106 of the new environmental ethic coming into play, while lamenting the persistence of incompatible older modes of thinking.

"There is a very definite lack of understanding on the part of superintendants and personnel in the camps as to what the State and National Park movement is 'all about,'" ran the opening volley to Cook's report, "and the seeming lack of agreement on the part of the inspection service and in the information which percolates down from 'higher up' naturally aggravates this." What the parks movement was "all about," according to Cook, essentially came down to a degree of conciliation to nature, in terms of ecology and aesthetics.

Ecologically, Cook felt that all park flora and fauna were worthy of protection—regardless of whether or not they appealed to tourists—and expressed considerable frustration at an incident he experienced firsthand involving the needless destruction of wildlife:

One superintendant who has been in the service since the inception of ECW was driving me around the area when he suddenly stopped the car, jumped out, seized a heavy stick, and started to kill a large but harmless snake stretched out in the road. I called out that it was harmless but he answered: "Oh, I kill them all—they're all snakes and look alike to me." With somewhat vigorous persuasion I got him to desist, and I tried to show him something of the wild life idea—but he persisted that they were all snakes to him regardless—and I feel sure, knowing the man, that he is stubbornly persisting in killing all he comes across.

Cook was no less interested in protecting the natural beauty of Alabama's state parks against heedless development. The very same superintendant, he claimed, had recently gone ahead with a cleanup project in a wooded area that rendered it "completely devastated and left like a swept ballroom floor." At Gulf State Park, Cook came across a similarly ham-fisted development project. A new roadway, still under construction, was to

Cook's eye too much like a highway, plunging straight through the scenery rather than working with the landscape's natural contours in any kind of harmonic way; the work, he

176 "August Report of Inspector William A. Cooke," August 1936, RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 78, box 1 107 wrote, was "quite unnecessary to me and entirely alien to the spirit of the landscape and the state park idea." Because the project was still in progress, Cook seized the opportunity to act on his principles, and immediately halted any further work, noting that he would personally plan a redesign that considered the park's natural topography.177 This was not the end of his complaints: in his next paragraph, he groused about the whitewash finish on some lakeshore structures, grumbling "it would appear that we are building beach resorts, not state parks." He lobbed a similar criticism at a boat house which he called "not in keeping with the [wildlife] idea, though a serviceable structure. It too should be toned down both with painting and planning." As for a road in Cedar Creek State Park, Cook opined that it "was of no value to the park" and suggested it would be "advantageous to obliterate the road entirely."178

When Cook wrote that "the best superintendants from the construction viewpoint are hopeless from the landscape angle," he expressed what he saw as the fundamental problem before him: that individuals within the system had failed to recognize that parks were now to be a space where landscape and development would coexist in a mutually tolerable compromise. As dander's report demonstrates, Cook was under no obligation to blow the whistle on the condition of the Alabama state park system. That he did not only tells us what his complaints were, but also evidences his commitment to rectifying the issues. Making his employers aware of the situation was clearly part of his response, and in this regard he succeeded: a circulation sheet stapled to the cover indicates that it passed through the hands of no fewer than ten Park Service higher-ups. Furthermore, a handwritten annotation beside the opening paragraph on the original report reads

"August Report of Inspector William A. Cooke" "August Report of Inspector William A. Cooke" 108

"Endersbee,179 this is similar in tone to your recent thoughts on the matter," suggesting that

Cook had hit on a point of view voiced by at least one Park Service official as well.180 B.P.

Maloney—assistant to the supervisor (state parks)—and a Mr. Kennedy, both of whose names also appear on the circulation sheet, used their comments spaces to indicate their satisfaction with the report: Maloney has "constructive info," and Kennedy "quite enlightening."181 As far as a long- term solution to the perceived problem, Cook mused that the situation could be rectified through education by "wildlife and landscape technicians," augmented by "direct and vigorous instructions from headquarters." In other words, making sure that the parks idea—in particular, the new deference to the needs of the landscape—was being effectively propagated down the chain of command and had bureaucratic muscle to back it up. Thus,

Cook's sharp rebuke of the serpent-slaying superintendant and his critique of the roadway and in-progress buildings gives a fairly good idea of what, in his mind, the parks movement was "all about." Development projects to facilitate public access and enjoyment were not forbidden altogether, but needed be designed to harmonize with the surrounding landscape both aesthetically and ecologically. When they did not meet this minimum requisite, it was quite appropriate that they be halted or even rolled back.

Two months after Cook submitted his report, Frank E. Mattson, another landscape architect under contract to the Park Service, turned in his statement for October 1936 for

Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mattson notes that he had had a

179 W.J. Endersbee was the Park Service's associate supervisor for eastern national parks and monuments. His name appears on the circulation list, along with his initials and the date (January 14, 1937) on which he read the report. Which of the other reviewers penned the note to him is unknown. 180 "August Report of Inspector William A. Cooke" 181 Significantly, all three men were part of the Park Service's ECW liaison top brass. See John C. Paige, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service, 1933-1942: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1985), accessed May 21, 2011, http://www.nps.gov/history/historv/online books/ccc/cccab.htm Appendix B 182 "August Report of Inspector William A. Cooke" 109 section of trees thinned out at Little River Gorge to afford visitors a superior view of the stream. However, he carefully notes that he went forward with this only after having consulted Mr. Stupka, the park's naturalist, and an advisor from Branch of Wildlife.

"Although no one had criticized the proposal as it affects the roadside wildlife," Mattson added, "we do not believe it will change it materially."183 Though Mattson seems to have been rather more development-minded than his colleague Mr. Cook in Alabama, he nevertheless felt it prudent to seek the counsel of specialists whose sole function was to look out for the welfare of the landscape, and obtain their blessing on the project.

Yet another landscape architect's report demonstrates the surprising extent to which individuals in the profession had embraced the concept of yielding anthropic utility to the well-being of nature in the park system. In September 1936, California landscape architect

Emerson Knight completed "A Report to Serve as Basis for a Master Plan for the North

Grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park." Like Cook, Knight worried that the welfare of the landscape had not received due consideration in the past. "Many of the [park's] developments were badly planned and have since been poorly maintained," he wrote, the consequence of which was that "man has left unfortunate blemishes upon the landscape, some being difficult to heal." Knight's solution was radical, to say the least. To begin, it sought a decidedly long-term change: "by means of earnest, sympathetic work," Knight suggested, "it is hoped that we can arrive at... a master plan... that might serve for a period of one hundred years."184 Furthermore, its commitment to protecting the park's wilderness is unmistakable. Indeed, one gets the impression that Knight's method was to begin at

183 "Monthly Report to Thos. C. Vint, Chief Architect, for the Period September 25 to October 25, 1936," October 26, 1936, RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 78, box 1 184 "A Report to Serve as Basis for a Master Plan for the North Grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park," September 22, 1936, RG 79 (Records of the National Park Service), entry 78, box 3 (emphasis added) 110 pristine wilderness, and then inch backwards until he reached a point that would be tolerable to visitors. For example, he expressed frustration that the park's pathways, which at the time were "[not] happily or logically routed in relation to the best welfare of the trees" because they allowed guests to trample the natural undergrowth and get near enough to the trees to peel off the bark and carve their initials. In order to better accommodate the

"best welfare of the trees," Knight suggested that the paths be moved further away from the trees and that a barrier system be put up to keep visitors from crushing the park's vegetation underfoot. Considering that the very name of the park announced the "big trees" as its main attraction, the gravity of Knight's suggestion becomes even greater. In fact, the report gave several other proposals that likewise sought to restore the park's primeval condition by scaling back amenities and cosmetic work. Among these, the most striking was surely his proposition that the park's engraved stone monuments be removed (in spite of their informative value as signposts) because they "disagreeably [detract] from the otherwise exalted mood of the forest." That many of them also featured memorial plaques for deceased park patrons was no object to Knight. For his own part, however, Knight saw nothing particularly iconoclastic about his proposal for the state park's next century—on the contrary, he saw it as following from the arc of history. "It is... our feeling that human progress toward unselfishness and self effacement should naturally effect a restoration of the trees to the status of a sacred and unsullied grove." In fact, he hoped that the California

State Park commission would follow his recommendations and thereby establish a national precedent for parks that might "win the gratitude of all thoughtful and discriminating persons."185

"Master Plan for the North Grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park" Ill

There can be no doubt that Knight assigned more importance to wilderness in parks than did his colleague Mattson, or probably even Cook. But the difference between the three was one of degree, rather than kind. Short of walling off the park to visitors altogether, Knight could scarcely have done more to preserve the majesty of what he saw as a "tree temple."186 Cook made the most of his operational authority to ensure that construction projects were at least aesthetically blended in with their natural surroundings.

Even Mattson, seemingly the least in tune with the environment's needs, took positive and meaningful action by deferring to the expertise of the park's naturalist on his landscaping project. Thus, each man sought to find a balanced equilibrium point between their parks' primeval condition and the need for public enjoyment and comfort. Furthermore, it bears mentioning that as a profession, landscape architecture is not necessarily attuned to environmental ethics. For example, we can discern no evidence that Glander followed the

New Deal-era environmental ethic. The reports of Cook, Mattson, and Knight, however, reveal their authors' environmental principles at work. Focusing on Cook in particular, it is instructive that he used his monthly report—a medium which does not seem to invite comment on the state of the parks system, critique of coworkers, or pontificating on what the parks idea is "all about." Yet Cook did just this, giving us some idea of his passion for protecting nature—snakes included—and how important he felt this was. Altogether,

Cook's, Mattson's, and Knight's reports bespeak the change in the environmental ethic that had taken place within the Park Service since the promotional frenzy of the Roaring

Twenties, when park authorities never met a development they didn't like. By 1936, a new leitmotif for the planning and use of the nation's parks had established a strong beachhead

"Master Plan for the North Grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park" 112 of support. Ecosystem and environment would not be ignored: landscape architects now afforded them definite, if varying, input, into the planning and use of the nation's parks.

Artistic representations of the land also shed some light on shifting attitudes. As noted in the first chapter, the art of the manifest destiny era had been a powerful tool of propaganda and an effective means of visually transmitting the anthropocentric environmental ethic. By the 1930s, painting was perhaps not as influential a medium as photography or film, but it too reflected a changing understanding of the American relationship with the landscape. A pair of paintings, composed only seven years apart, gives a sense of the tremendous shift that had taken place between 1931 and 1938, at least in the imaginations of two artists. Interestingly, Grant Wood's 1931 "Fall Plow" and

Alexandre Hogue's 1938 "Mother Earth Laid Bare," are nearly identical in pictorial elements and composition. Both purport to depict a scene of American agriculture, and both feature a distinct foreground-middle-background arrangement, with a plow prominently posed in the foreground, behind which the viewer sees a plowed field, with farm buildings small but noticeable in the background. But this description fails utterly to convey the stark contrast between the paintings that makes a mockery of their seeming commonalities and yet offers an excellent glimpse of the drastic change in the public discourse of the land that had taken place between 1931 and 1938. 113

(Left) Grant Wood's "Fall Plow" (1931) and (right) Alexandre Hogue's "Mother Earth Laid Bare" (1938)

Wood's composition is idyllic, peaceful, and bucolic. The terrain is lush and verdant, coloured with comforting pastel tones, while orderly rows of wheat bales promise a prosperous harvest to come. Recalling the importance of orientation in pioneer art,

Wood's plow points to the left of the canvas, the direction traditionally associated with westward progress across the continent.187 Altogether, Wood's scene conveys an orderly landscape, in no sign of distress, all too happy to yield under the plow, which carves straight lines across its curved surface: in other words, a superb visual representation of the anthropocentric environment.

To this we compare "Mother Earth Laid Bare." Hogue's striking composition depicts no less than the aftermath of a scene of sexual violence,188 with the gullies of a parched and lifeless landscape taking on the form of a supine female body, her head uncomfortably twisted to the side. By personifying the land as Mother Earth, Hogue communicated a number of messages simultaneously. First, the characterization of the

If, indeed, the left of canvas represents the west, the elongated shadows cast by the wheat bales implies that the sun is in the east, the dawn of course symbolizing hope, optimism, and beginnings 188 Lookingbill concurs "The pale colors and plumes of sand marked the vignette as characteristic of the anguish, but a stray clump of grass and clear stream of water suggested more than an act of wind erosion Erect nearby, an agent for destruction—the plow—evoked the power of the phallus, and so a fallen landscape was assaulted by technology and laid bare "Dust Bowl, USA, 40. See also Emily F. Cutrer, review of Nature's Forms/Nature's Forces. The Art of Alexandre Hogue, by Lea Rosson DeLong, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (Oct 1985) 227-28, and of course the reviewed work in question 114 earth as a mother figure framed it a giver of life, a caretaker, and something requiring loyalty, protection, and genuine concern.189 As well, the hybrid entity tied together land and people in a single form, reminding Americans of the continuity and interdependence of the two. In this context, plowing was not a benign act of fulfilling the soil's destiny, but rather an unnatural and painful attack against a defenseless victim. At Mother Earth's legs rests a plow, seemingly the perpetrator of the act. Its chisel covered in rust—suggesting obsolescence—it is oriented to the right of the canvas, flouting the American artistic convention of leftward progress. It has, perhaps literally, turned a corner, having run its course across the field; it looks back on the aftermath of what it has done. The background is no less grim. A cover of ominous gray clouds overhang a dilapidated farmhouse, a dead tree, and a line of barbed wire strung along a crooked row of fence posts. Here then, in this nightmarish scene, was Hogue's blistering indictment of anthropocentric environmental ethics. In comparing "Fall Plow" with "Mother Earth Laid Bare," it is almost as if Wood and Hogue set up their easels in the very same spot, separated by a duration of seven years, and painted the scene before them—the former working through the lens of the anthropocentric environmental ethic, the latter through the historically critical lens of the

New Deal era.

Another artistic form, the motion picture, seemed to be on the same page as the administration. In 1937, Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox studios, contacted President Roosevelt with a proposal to produce a Forest Service motion picture.

The President in turn solicited the advice of Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace. "Think of the valuable message it [the film] might carry if it were to show the close relationship

189 Hogue traced the idea for his work to an episode in his youth when his mother told him a fable of mother earth. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA, 40 115 between forest exploitation and rural distressed regions!" Wallace noted, probably recalling the enormous success of Lorentz' The River, released that same year. "I think Mr. Zanuck has hit upon a mighty good idea," the Secretary wrote, adding "the Department of

Agriculture will be glad to cooperate in every possible way with him."190 Zanuck, it should be noted, was not a liberal, but evidently had no compunction against producing a Forest

Service picture.191 Wallace, by contrast, was among the most liberal individuals in FDR's cabinet, but seems to have been satisfied that Zanuck's production would be friendly to the administration. That the Secretary was prepared to give the studio kingpin such unqualified • support—that liberal and conservative would so faithfully come together on a single project—suggests that the subject matter was substantially not a partisan issue for either.

The older environmental ethic faced repudiation from other public commentators too. For example, in 1935's Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in

American History, historian Albert K. Weinberg challenged Charles Wilber's "rain follows the plow" credo, reversing the proposition in much the same vein that Lorentz's narrator would later declare in The Plow. The utilitarian doctrine of land use of the manifest destiny era, Weinberg insisted, "should now [in 1935], it would seem, be radically amended—at least for the duration of the depression. Unless it is only the perversity of fantasy which prompts us, its amended form should proclaim that Providence has destined virgin soil not to be cultivated."192 Setting its sights on more recent history, an article in the November

1935 issue of Fortune sketched a profile of agriculturalist Tom Campbell, "the most

Wallace to Roosevelt, December 7, 1937, RG 95, (Records of the Forest Service), entry 53, box 2 191 Larry Ceplair, "Julian Blaustein: An Unusual Movie Producer in Cold War Hollywood," Film History 21 (2009): 261 192 Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1935), 96 (original emphasis) 116 portentous plower of plains in the history of the world."193 Campbell had agreed to grow wheat for Herbert Hoover's European food relief mission in 1918, and, sensing a profitable opportunity, continued growing after the war's conclusion, bringing over 150,000 acres of

Great Plains sod under cultivation by 1923. The 1920s brought steady annual rainfall and adequate harvests, but the years after 1929, of course, brought little but drought and the catastrophic dust storms. Yet Fortune saw the problem in the man, not the weather, and characterized Campbell himself as "a major disaster—even if he can produce eight times as much food in wet years as grazing can."

Other authors took on the issue of the environment head on as well. Economist

Stuart Chase, a well-known writer who had penned two bestselling popular economics books in the 1920s,195 did just this in his popular 1936 book Rich Land, Poor Land. "I want

Americans to believe in their grand, broad, beautiful continent," wrote Chase, explaining the purpose of his book. To Chase, the continent was one of finite resources, spatial limitations, and "boomerang" consequences; "at long last its [the continent's] patience is exhausted" he warned, "and it turns on its tormentors."19 Surveying the continent around him, he saw the nation's environmental ethic in a state of flux, the outcome of which was

still uncertain. As we have seen in the previous chapter, not a few New Deal projects implicitly or obliquely informed the public that a sea change was underway in the nation's relationship to the land, while FDR pronounced the same quite forthrightly. Chase, too,

saw the United States at a turning point. Until recently, he argued, most Americans had

Stuart Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936), 108 194 Qtd. in Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 110 (original emphasis) 195 William Alan Hodson and John Carfora, "Stuart Chase, Brief Life of a Public Thinker: 1888-1985," Harvard Magazine September-October, 2004, 38 196 Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 5, 340 117 sincerely believed that their environment would endlessly and obediently provide for their needs, and indeed had built their society upon this belief. This arrogant haughtiness, he suggested, was nowhere better exemplified than in the Southern Plains rainmaking experiments of the 1880s and 1890s: here was man attempting to summon rainclouds, all natural climatology and meteorology notwithstanding. In fact, Chase expressed deep scepticism at the idea of outmanoeuvring nature through science. In reality, any such effort was little more than an illusion, seemingly taking the environment out of the equation but actually just hiding its input behind a curtain. Dependence on the earth for energy, material, and food was always inescapable. And while Chase expressed appreciation for the environmental reforms enacted by the first President Roosevelt,197 it was FDR's administration that seemed poised to bring genuine transformation. The Tennessee Valley

Authority, in particular, received especially high praise. Unlike projects of the nineteenth century or even Theodore Roosevelt's era, it acknowledged, rather than denied, its links to its surrounding landscape, and sought to harmonize with the complex natural systems around it. Furthermore, for Valley farmers, it promised to facilitate a shift away from traditional monoculture to diversified planting, a change that Chase believed would benefit both planter and soil. "Here, struggling in embryo," he claimed, "is perhaps the promise of what all America will some day be."198 The Appalachian Trail, built on a similar ideological basis, also won high acclaim, as did the work of the Soil Conservation Service, the National Resources Board, the AAA, the Resettlement Administration, the Forest

The conservation movement under TR "undoubtedly lessened the rate of decline of certain resources, such as lumber, but it did not halt the decline. The concept of infinity was still strong in men's minds. The grass of the Great Plains remained to be put to the plow... The solid citizenry now crossed itself when the word conservation was mentioned, but still repaired to the woodlot, axe in hand," (original emphasis) Rich Land, Poor Land, 300 198 Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 287 118

Service, the Biological Survey, the Reclamation Service, and several other federal agencies that Chase saw as working together towards an admirable common goal in rehabilitating the land and winning the hearts and minds of the public.

But, interestingly, it was the environmentalism of the New Deal, rather than the

New Deal itself, that was the object of Chase's admiration. Indeed, even more than the

TVA, Chase expressed a profound approval for the Soviet Union's ongoing irrigation and hydroelectric projects on the Volga and the Don. The project boasted an astonishingly inventive and comprehensive water management system, designed by hundreds of experts to seamlessly integrate all imaginable variables, the sophistication of which was such that

Chase was moved to remark that it "makes the Tennessee Valley Authority look like a kindergarten exercise."199 Clearly it was the idea behind the TVA—an idea realized better in the Soviet Union—that Chase found so appealing. Indeed, that he would express such effusive praise for a Soviet program in 1936 (a potentially dangerous undertaking) speaks to the fact that politics did not substantially enter into his thesis.

Within the context of the United States, Chase gave credit to the President for having the vision and determination to lead the charge. This could not have been easy,

Chase noted, since constitutional, judicial, and congressional precedent each essentially forbade projects such as the TVA. Summing up these formidable barriers, Chase observed:

The Constitution of the United States knows nothing of regional planning, for the conception would have been fantastic in 1787... The Supreme Court knows nothing

199 Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 68. Long after Chase's publication, the Soviet Union undertook a singularly catastrophic irrigation program on the two rivers that flow into the Aral Sea, which as a result is now not much more than a salty depression littered with rusted-out hulks on the Central Asian steppe. The momentous decline in project execution from what were two situations which were essentially analogous, I think, demands explanation. Two possibilities come to mind: first, the Aral Sea disaster only began in the 1960s, by which time the environmental values, economics, and politics of the USSR could have changed considerably. It could also be that Chase's source on the Volga project (he does not indicate where he received his information) was a Soviet propaganda outlet (such as Radio Moscow), or some other unreliable source, which he swallowed at face value. 119

of regional planning except in the negative sense that a river basin comprising portions of seven states is suspect in the light of the commerce clause, and probably unlawful. Congress has never heard of regional planning officially, and would be seriously confused as to the patronage involved if it had. The President had a definite idea as to the functions and score of the TVA. °

Projects of this nature were not only wise, but utterly necessary, declared Chase.

Citing the nation's 1936 population (while perhaps taking a jab at the wilderness ideal), he noted "130 million human beings could not possibly exist in America while scrupulously respecting the primeval equilibrium." In order to support such a population, sensible use of technology in a new equilibrium with nature would be essential—a process that would demand both strong leadership and broad popular support.201 If FDR was providing the leadership, Chase must have hoped that Rich Land, Poor Land would win over the public, and make them believe that "dollars spent for saving soil, grass and forest are good dollars."202

Rich Land, Poor Land, it should be stated, was a bona fide hit. A month before Rich

Land, Poor Land even hit bookshelves, publisher Whittlesey House ordered a second printing to match higher than expected presales, spurred on in large part by surprisingly strong demand from book merchants in flood and drought areas who usually had little taste for nonfiction. °3 Its release in September 1936 was accompanied by prominent quarter- sheet advertisements in the New York Times and a very favourable full-page review

Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 269 201 Further underscoring the limitations of the wilderness ideal, Chase added: "The ecology of 1630 is flatly impossible today. Can we find a new ecology which respects nature and still permits technological progress? I believe we can. I know that we must, or face the choice between abandoning our machines and abandoning the continent. An equilibrium must be determined and it must be planned. The first step is to understand what nature demands as a minimum; the next step is to calculate the highest possible living standards consistent therewith; the third step is to arouse the American people to bring the two together," Rich Land, Poor Land, 55 202 Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 340 203 "Book Notes," New York Times, August 12, 1936, 17, and October 15, 1936, 25 120 featured on the cover of the Book Review. By October, the University of North Carolina had even adopted it as a text for soil erosion courses, and it had appeared on the bestseller lists in both Atlanta and New Orleans.205

Another landmark publication of the decade was 1933's The People's Forests by

Robert Marshall. Marshall was a lifelong outdoorsman, a devoted forester, and beginning in the 1920s, a fierce critic of conservative, business-friendly forestry—a sentiment that only grew stronger after the 1929 crash. In the early 1930s, Marshall established himself as a fearless champion of the liberal wing of American forestry, a faction that believed that the recreational and aesthetic value of a forest was far more important than its lumber yield.

In 1931, for example, he entered a bitter public feud with the conservative editorial staff of

American Forests—then the profession's mouthpiece publication—when his statistical analysis of their articles over the previous two year period revealed that fewer than ten percent contained any discussion whatsoever of forestry or forestry-related topics. Not coincidentally, Marshall also identified as a political liberal, standing up for causes including the civil rights movement. Both strands of liberalism informed the thesis of

The People's Forests. On the one hand, Marshall's liberal forestry: he expressed great concern that the nation's sprawling and verdant woodlands were being irreparably scarred by excessive commercialization. On the other hand, an unmistakably liberal political- economic solution: no less than 562 million of the United States' 670 million acres of

204 Francis Brown, "The Fight to Save the Land: Stuart Chase's Vivid Study of Waste and America's Resources," New York Times, September 13, 1936, BR1 205 "Book Notes," and "Best Sellers Here and Elsewhere," New York Times, October 23, 1936, 21, and September 21, 1936,21 206 For example, when appointed to the Forest Service by Chief Silcox in 1937, Marshall attempted to use his position to end the practice of segregation in recreational areas of National Forests, either by federal employees or any public permittees on the land. Sadly, the following year, both he and Silcox were dragged before the Dies Committee and branded communist sympathizers on the basis of their support of civil liberties organizations. See James M. Glover and Regina B. Glover, "Robert Marshall: Portrait of a Liberal Forester," Journal of Forest History 30 (Jul. 1986): 118 121 private timberland—fully 84 percent—should be nationalized immediately. Recognizing the legal impossibility of taking the land without recompense, he conceded that immediate purchase (the costs, however great, could easily be tolerated) was the next best alternative.

"The time has come when we must discard the unsocial view that our woods are the lumbermen's and substitute the broader ideal that every acre of woodland in the country is rightly a part of the people's forests," Marshall declared, fusing together liberal forestry and economics in a rhetoric equal parts Marx and Muir.

Marshall's work, it should be noted, was somewhat narrower in territoriality than

Chase: while Rich Land, Poor Land set out a program with no specific jurisdiction in mind,

The People's Forests dealt with the country's wooded areas. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that Marshall believed in the wilderness ideal. In 1934 he joined forces with a number of other wilderness enthusiasts, including Benton MacKaye, Robert Sterling Yard, and Aldo Leopold, to found the Wilderness Society; its founding document expressed its mandate to defend "those wilderness characteristics which make undisturbed nature the most glorious experience in the world to so many people."208 And among the listed benefits that public ownership would bring to America's forests, Marshall was clear that

"safeguarding of recreational values from commercial exploitation" would figure prominently.209 Yet even in the narrowed contexts of publicly-owned forests, Marshall still saw a definite place for timber production and other forms of material utilization. The people's forests, in other words, were never to be holy grounds on which commerce of any kind was to be forbidden. On the contrary, Marshall, the socioeconomic liberal,

7 Qtd. in Carolyn Merchant, ed. Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2" ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 325-27 208 Qtd. in Douglas K. Midgett, "Bob Marshall: The Call to Activism," in Robert Marshall, The People's Forests, Revised ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), xxx 209 Qtd. in Merchant, ed. American Environmental History, 326 122 substantially shared FDR's vision of careful land management as a means of relieving unemployment, advancing economic equality, and addressing regional imbalances. Indeed,

Marshall composed a forestry policy at the behest of Gifford Pinchot for the President-elect in January 1933, in which Marshall suggested that aggressive nationalization of the country's woodlands (paired with an employment program that described to a T what would be the CCC) would yield

An immense increase in the safety of our country from threatened disaster from the lack of wood, from floods and erosion, and from the destruction of our greatest field for recreation, while furnishing at the same time an unequalled opportunity for work relief for the unemployed.210

The same sentiment appeared again in The People's Forests, in which Marshall explained that publicly-owned woodlands would entail "careful land planning, protection of the rights of those who labour on the forests, reorganization of rural government and redistribution of rural population."211

The Wilderness Society, too, showed some sympathy for the usefulness of developing forests. Writing in the maiden issue of organization's newsletter, charter member Robert Sterling Yard distinguished between primitive and nonprimitive forests— only the former was necessarily entitled to preservation—thereby leaving open a conceptual space in which the wilderness ideal apparently did not apply. And in spite of the

Society's commitment to maintaining a small, devoted membership core (Marshall declared "we want no straddlers," while MacKaye insisted "we want those who already

2!0 "Governor Gifford Pinchot to Roosevelt," January 20, 1933, in Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt & Conservation, V.l, 131 Qtd. in Merchant, ed. American Environmental History, 326 123 think as we do; not those who have to be shown"), the organization inducted no less than

TVA chairman Arthur Morgan into its exclusive ranks.212

In sum, Robert Marshall's writings and associations illustrate a crucial point about public environmentalism and the wilderness ideal in the 1930s, which is that it was patently not a totalizing worldview. Marshall himself surely loved wilderness as much as anyone;

Midgett suggests that Marshall may have even written the Wilderness Society's 1934 mission statement—a statement that condemned highways and irrigation projects as

"invasions." Yet he was equally passionate about advancing socioeconomic equality— and in furtherance of this latter goal, virtually all traces of the wilderness ideal vanished, and were replaced by an advocacy for wide-ranging yet ecologically-sensitive management of the land.214 The only way to reconcile these two positions, it seems, is to accept that the wilderness ideal did not represent a complete cosmology. Instead, it existed alongside other

(sometimes competing) considerations in the environmental ethic of the New Deal era.215

In conclusion, there can be little doubt that the guiding principles and methodologies of the New Deal's environmental ethic were not merely bullet points on the

President's personal agenda, but enjoyed widespread, proactive support from significant portions of the public. Rosalie Edge's fiery rejoinder against what she considered to be misplaced nostalgia of the Idaho irrigation project evinced a popular acceptance of a new

Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 211 213 Midgett, "Bob Marshall The Call to Activism," in The People's Forests, xxx-xxxi In his January 1933 letter to President-elect Roosevelt, Marshall suggested that some major fields of work could including "planting, thinning, release cuttings, the removal of highly inflammable snags and windfalls, a large scale attack on serious insect epidemics, the control of erosion, the construction of roads, trails, and telephone lines, and the development of camp sites and other recreational facilities," "Governor Gifford Pinchot to Roosevelt," in Nixon, ed Franklin D Roosevelt & Conservation, V 1, 131 215 Midgett writes that Marshall's legacy to the wilderness ideal was "in convincing others that the movement had to be comprehensive—that the scope ol the enterprise had to be the whole country, not just some regional or local focus," "Bob Marshall The Call to Activism," in The People's Forests, xxxi In light of my argument as to the relative gravity of the wilderness ideal, Midgett's statement must be understood to mean that the wilderness ideal ceased to be a provincial idea and became a national, though not omnipresent In other words, wilderness could be anywhere, but not everywhere 124

environmental ethic, as did the utter defeat of the Yellowstone Lake irrigation proposal. So

too did Albert Weinberg's unsympathetic critique of manifest destiny and its confidence in

the benefits of unrestricted and unlimited settlement. The same attitude informed Fortune's

unflattering portrait of Tom Campbell, who little more than a decade before had been

celebrated for assisting Herbert Hoover's European relief campaign and doing as much as

any individual to "tame" the Plains. Alexandre Hogue's unflinching depiction of the

consequences of ignoring the limits of the land followed suit as well: by giving human

form to the ravaged landscape, he made clear the heinousness of the crimes that had been

committed against Mother Earth. Much of the public, it seems, agreed with the idea behind

the AAA, the CCC, the TVA; the idea that FDR had in mind when he told Americans "It is

an error to say we have 'conquered Nature.'" For this group, a distinct break with the ways

of the pioneers had taken place. A significant number of Americans, apparently, did not believe that the landscape was a blank sheet of paper to be imprinted upon or transformed.

Instead, they were ready to accept that nature might sometimes have a say in the way that

society interacted with it.

Indeed, landscape architects Mattson, Cook, and Knight were ready to put this idea

into practice by 1936. Mattson thought it sensible to have his development plans vetted by

two naturalists before sending them along to the CCC for completion. Cook, meanwhile,

took pains to ensure that the development projects under his supervision did not

compromise the integrity of the parks, snakes and all; when they did not, he used his

authority to halt their construction or even have them removed. In essence, then, Cook's

methodology in the Alabama state parks paralleled the thinking behind the TVA or the 125

AAA, seeking to allow human use of the land while harmonizing with the environment's natural limits and systems.

Furthermore, as we have seen, many diverse groups in the public recognized the role of the federal government as a leader. Newspapers hailed FDR's forestry plans, CCC enroUees put his name on their camp, and Stuart Chase and Robert Marshall endorsed organic development as well. Chase's Rich Land, Poor Land at times read like a paean to the TV A: its strategic harnessing of the river-basin and regional outlook, its multiple use goals, and its efforts to integrate into the geography and society of the Tennessee Valley.

Marshall made clear in his letter to Roosevelt and The People's Forests that sustainable forestry could be a powerful tool for socioeconomic engineering; like FDR, he believed that the urban-rural imbalance was a problem of both human and natural resources, the solution to which required a new model of land use and ownership.

Many historians have observed that the 1930s also witnessed the crystallization of the wilderness ideal by public activists as a distinct element of environmentalism. Fox calls this "the most striking new direction in conservation"216 while Midgett posits that the greatest success of the Wilderness Society came in "convincing others that the movement had to be comprehensive—that the scope of the enterprise had to be the whole country, not just some regional or local focus."217 True, the decade seems to have been the period during which the ideal transformed from what almost might be called a fringe belief with little to no organizational backing to a relatively mainstream movement, and became a permanent part of the environmentalist platform. But careful examination of the nascent movement in its infancy shows that a part of a larger movement is all it was. In other

216 Fox, John Muir and His Legacy, 203 217 Midgett, "Bob Marshall: The Call to Activism," in Marshall, The People's Forests, xxxi 126 words, the wilderness ideal must be presented in its proper context: first, many public activists indicated no preference for the wilderness ideal, but strongly supported sustainable development projects such as the TVA. Meanwhile, even for individuals such as Robert

Marshall, the wilderness ideal seems not to have been a complete cosmology. Primeval wilderness was vital, to be sure, but was only ever spoken of as one possible destiny for forests, rivers, and other landscapes. This is evident in the Wilderness Society's classification of forests, and Marshall's advocacy of CCC-style work as a fit medicine for the nation's socioeconomic and environmental illnesses. In sum, the wilderness ideal was thoroughly consistent with the essence of the AAA and the Shelterbelt, which was developing land in a way that was consistent with the natural surroundings. Contrary to

Fox's claim, it seems more accurate to classify the wilderness ideal as adjunct to the larger change in environmentalism being advanced by many projects of the New Deal.

The New Deal, of course, was (and continues to be) a lightning rod for criticism.

However, the environmental ethic it advanced seemed to be one issue on which both liberals and conservatives could support. Neither Darryl Zanuck nor Stuart Chase were

New Deal apologists. Zanuck was not especially sympathetic to liberal causes, though he was more interested in box office revenues than politics. Stuart Chase, on the other hand, leaned to the left, but had no special loyalty to FDR's administration; he felt that much of what was being done well in the United States was being done better in the Soviet Union.

However, both found something they liked in the brand of environmentalism emerging under the New Deal: Zanuck tapped his political connections to get the administration's support for a Forest Service film, while Chase declared that the promise of the TVA 127

"intoxicates the imagination." We may conclude from this that only a few years into the

New Deal, the environmental ethic it had inaugurated was not in the main a partisan issue.

Card-carrying allegiance to the Democratic Party was not a prerequisite of acceptance; the simultaneous socioeconomic and environmental crises discussed in the previous two chapters were so evident and significant that one could hardly help but believe that a new model was necessary. The Roosevelt administration provided that model at exactly the right moment, and it sunk in immediately. In other words, it shifted and redefined the vocabulary of discussion such that the discourse took place within its terms.

Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 287 128

CONCLUSION The New Environment

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. Ogden Nash, "Song of the Open Road" (1941)219

From the early days of the Republic down to the early 1930s, a set of related values and attitudes significantly informed American interactions with the environment on a massive scale. The collective set of these values, which I have referred to as the anthropocentric environmental ethic, did not regard the environment as something worthy of consideration on its own terms; rather, it regarded the environment as a neutral space onto which cultural values could be projected, and which could be infinitely and endlessly manipulated for material gains. Natural ecosystems, if they were recognized at all, carried little importance, and those who worked the land attempted to find ways to imprint their expectations upon it. In short, the relationship with the environment was a unilateral one, and this pattern was nowhere better exemplified than in the rectilinear survey lines of the

1785 Ordinance, which attempted to "rationalize" the frontier by mapping it as an enormous checkerboard grid. Because the purpose of this system was to facilitate private purchase and settlement of the frontier lands, topography and natural systems were

219 Ogden Nash, "Song of the Open Road," The Face is Familiar: The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), 21 129 flattened and whited out. Thus, the Ordinance had a twofold impact on the American relationship to the land. In a symbolic sense, it affirmed the notion of natural space as blank space, on which anything could be imprinted. It also seemed to demonstrate the possibility of utterly rationalizing natural space itself, bringing it under complete control of the

American people.

The Ordinance grid system inspired identical acts which extended its boundaries

(for example the 1862 Homestead Act, which spread the grid to the west bank of the

Mississippi) as Americans made their way across the continent in the nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, manifest destiny, a doctrine of political, economic, and racial entitlement to dispossess non-Americans of the lands west of the Mississippi added its assumptions of white supremacy and divine providence to the anthropocentric environmental ethic, adding further reason for subordinating the landscape to the pioneers' will. Yet it was around this same time that vulnerabilities of the environmental ethic first became widely apparent. Manifest destiny seemed to promise that God wanted Americans to "overspread the continent," yet much of the lands on the Plains and elsewhere were found to be of marginal value to the settlers. This contradiction was momentarily solved by the addition of the caveat that rain and prosperity would follow settlement, not precede it.

This response would be a typical pattern in the anthropocentric environmental ethic's contact with nature: whenever an apparent paradox came to light, rather than reassess the wisdom of the environmental paradigm, Americans would instead invent a workaround, excuse, or intellectual epicycle to account for the anomaly.

Indeed, in the late 1800s, Americans tired of waiting for rain to follow their plows turned to alternatives in the same vein. Refusing to recognize that the arid deserts of the 130

Southwest or the tabletop prairies of the Southern Plains might not be capable of supporting agriculture, scientists and engineers attempted to find make a technical end-run around climatological realities. Like a meteorological Don Quixote, retired general Robert

Dyrenforth bombarded the skies over the Llano Estacado of northwest Texas in the 1890s with cannon fire, hoping to goad the atmosphere into giving up its moisture. His trials proved fruitless, but scarcely diminished the mania for the flimflam science of

"concussionism," as amateur experimenters took up Dyrenforth's quest anew and "rain posses" continued blasting away at the heavens. The use of heavy artillery in these undertakings is of no small significance: that the very same weapons and methods used by

Americans to vanquish human enemies were turned against nature can only lead to the conclusion that nature, this time, was thought of not as something on its own terms, but more like an analogue to an enemy army. Around the same time in the Southwest, Teddy

Roosevelt, operating under the belief that sufficient water could make any land grow, established the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 to carry out a large-scale project to irrigate the desert. When this scheme sputtered in the first decade of the twentieth century, it

actually strengthened Bureau chief Frederick Newell's commitment to the anthropocentric environmental ethic, as he fumed that the project had only failed because the settlers lacked the will power of the nation's pioneers of yesteryear.

The progressive era was notable for the beginnings of preservationism,

conservationism, the "cult of wilderness," and the best-known public lands agencies in the

Forest Service and Park Service. None of these creations, however, staked out a

significantly new attitude in regard to the American environment. The dual ideologies of preservation and conservation were not so diametrically opposed as may have been thought 131 by their adherents at the time. In the Hetch Hetchy controversy, which raged from 1906 to

1913, both sides exposed their true colours: neither really valued the nature in the Valley.

On the contrary, both wanted to open it up for public use, albeit to different constituencies.

The conservationists, oriented to the West and local usage, thought of the people of San

Francisco and the water basin they stood to gain. The preservationists, oriented to the East and national usage, wanted a public holiday space for hikers and tourists from across the country. The wilderness cult, a movement in the first decade of the twentieth century which gave birth to the Woodcraft Indians and the American Scouting movement, was friendly to nature only so far as it could serve as a whetstone for white masculinity; in fact, it depended on wilderness as a hostile place, in conflict with man, to achieve this. The Forest

Service and the Park Service, meanwhile, preoccupied themselves with territorial squabbles, pandering to visitors, and keeping their ledger books in the black.

In the 1920s and '30s, the anthropocentric environmental ethic still predominated interactions with the landscape, but came under greater pressure both quantitatively and qualitatively. Slumping agricultural prices throughout the '20s strained the local economic networks of communities based on Ordinance lines on the Great Plains. Farm tenancy was at an all-time high. Environmental disasters in the form of the Mississippi flood of 1927 and a prolonged drought beginning in 1930 that reached across the upper South added more woes. The onset of the depression in 1929, of course, increased economic stress on agriculture considerably, and dragged urban America into financial calamity as well. City- dwellers in the East also got a taste of an environmental disaster when the dust bowl that had been wracking the Southern Plains for years stormed through Chicago, New York, and

Washington, D.C. in 1934. The environmental crises, in particular, seemed to suggest 132 profound defects with the anthropocentric, unilateral attitude that had largely dictated land use in American history. Yet a long list of historical precedents proved that the environmental ethic was resilient enough to overcome virtually any shortcomings.

Thus, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his presidency in 1933, the anthropocentric environmental ethic was in a momentary state of flux. The pattern of history suggests that all other things being equal, it would have once again plastered over its shortcomings and reestablished itself as the dominant paradigm. However, Roosevelt like no other President before him set out to wield his executive power to advance a new environmental ethic. This new ethic replaced unilateralism with bilateralism as the watchword of relations with the landscape. More specifically, the new ethic manifested itself in a commitment to regionalism as a basis for planning; recognition of natural limits; identification and rhetorical repudiation of the older environmental ethic and its destructive consequences; and enactment of policy predicated on a reciprocal relationship between the economy and the environment. Roosevelt's determination to advance this new ethic is evident in the fact that he infused its values into several of the most prominent of his New

Deal agencies. That this was an urgent matter, and that change was to be immediate rather than gradual is attested by the fact Roosevelt launched these new ethic agencies out of the gates in his First Hundred Days. And though some of them would not outlast FDR's presidency, it was his intention that they become permanent parts of the federal government, or at least effect a permanent change in the practices of land use that had led to the depression in the first place.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, which combined employment relief with restoration of damaged landscapes embraced many of these values. By putting unemployed 133

Americans to work in reforestation, afforestation, terracing, and the like, it halted soil erosion, protected rivers against flooding and restored damaged ecosystems, and crucially, did not obsess over the dollars and cents expended. In a broader sense, it identified the fact that recovery from the depression depended on environmental improvement as much as economics. Lastly, the CCC also integrated an education program that further communicated its ideals to its 3 million enrollees, most of whom took the message to heart, and, after their enrollment period, imported it back to urban America. Meanwhile in the rural United States, the AAA used demonstration areas, plowing contests, and cash incentives to convince farmers to bring their production in line with their land's natural tolerance, and to practice plowing methods such as contour plowing that were less vulnerable to water runoff and soil erosion. Another rural America project, the Shelterbelt did not rely on cooperation from the public, and made use of Emergency Conservation

Work labour to plant millions of trees along the 99th meridian in a bid to make use of a natural method of checking wind erosion. Forest Service silvicultural experts assisted on the project in selecting suitable planting sites and trees that were suited to the climate.

Lastly, the Tennessee Valley Authority epitomized planning on a regional scale. This single agency attempted to integrate with the multivalent nature of the Tennessee Valley region, tackling flood control, irrigation, navigability, hydroelectricity and electrification, and many other functions depended upon by the local population. Yet in both its operation and its understated architecture, it sought to blend into the river's natural processes. The

TVA was famously celebrated in the federal-government sponsored films of Pare Lorentz, which, though not traditionally included in the New Deal nevertheless carried through its 134 message of bilateral use and condemnation of the wastefulness and destruction of previous decades to a wide and mostly appreciative audience.

Together, the New Deal programs and Lorentz's films had an immediate and significant effect on the public. Large numbers of Americans began thinking bilaterally in regards to the environment, taking up the message propagated in the New Deal, and in the case of the new wilderness ideal, putting their own spin on it. Activists including Rosalie

Edge of the Emergency Conservation Committee found success in the fight against development projects inside the National Park system using rhetoric that renounced the pioneer ideal of taming the landscape as the ideal. Federally-contracted landscape architects worked hard to balance guest comfort with the aesthetics and well-being of national and state parks, often corresponding with naturalists to vet their proposals before having them initiated. When older or ongoing work that did not meet these expectations, they used their power of oversight to block or reverse developments. Individual authors and activists outside the government in different regions and of different political affiliations wrote, agitated, and lobbied against anthropocentric land use and in favor of sustainability in agriculture, forestry, and development projects such as irrigation and dams. Publications of the era which mirrored the elements of the New Deal environmental ethic include Albert

K. Weinberg's 1935 history of manifest destiny, which inveighed against the reckless land bonanza of the 1800s and advised that land not be cultivated unless it was certain that it could be done within the limits of the soil. Stuart Chase's 1936 bestseller Rich Land, Poor

Land warned of the "boomerang" consequences the environment would eventually return against those who mistakenly settled the land expecting to dictate the terms of settlement, and celebrated the new era of neighborly relations it saw betokened in the TVA. Robert 135

Marshall's The People's Forests took the radical step of suggesting complete public ownership of the nation's entire forested area. Marshall also articulated his fondness for the wilderness ideal, which sought to set aside parcels of primeval wilderness for protection from commercial development of any kind. This ideal was not absolute however, as it allowed and sometimes encouraged development of forests, such as was done in the CCC, so long as the methodology was understanding and aiding nature, rather than grooming it or priming it for resource extraction.

In conclusion, the harsh lessons of the depression and the dust bowl opened a space for Americans to initiate a fresh dialogue on the received environmental ethic. All evidence suggests that the space would have closed up again as the resilient and malleable anthropomorphic environmental ethic reasserted its hegemony. FDR's aggressive New

Deal, however, seized the opportunity and inaugurated a new environmental ethic. True, he did not bring about a universal revolution of consciousness in regards to the environment; such a task is probably impossible for any political leader now matter how powerful. But he did succeed where scores of challengers to the anthropocentric environmental ethic had failed, in effecting a lasting shift in the terms of discussion. Thus, it was in the New Deal era that a bilateral attitude which today seems a relatively mainstream position toppled the unilateral, anthropocentric view of nature from its position of domination.

In 2011, a similar situation presents itself again. Environmental and economic crises coincide, priming Americans to reconsider the way they interact with the earth. If the

New Deal holds a lesson here, it is that an especially strong government program that reaches out to the public through action, rhetoric, art, and education, and embraces a consistent set of environmental values has a rare opportunity to win over a significant 136 segment of the public to bring about another permanent shift in discourse, values, and understanding. 137

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