This Day in Environmental History (Birth of Harold L. Ickes, Combative New Deal Interior Secretary)

Mar. 15, 1874— Harold L. Ickes, a pugnacious former Republican Progressive for Theodore Roosevelt who became a stalwart Democratic New Dealer as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, was born in rural Hollidaysburg, Penn.

Assuming control of a department rife with corruption in the past, Ickes kept it remarkably free of graft and mismanagement even as he expanded its reach and influence through countless bureaucratic battles. Under his direction, the Interior Department:

* oversaw the construction of quite nearly 20,000 projects in a six-year period, including hospitals, bridges, the Key West Highway, the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, and Hoover Dam in in the newly formed Public Work Administration;

*supervised the creation of the innovative Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility corporation that provided low-cost electricity in seven southeastern states, as well as flood control, navigation, and land management;

*expanded the number and size of units in the National Park Service;

* was one of four department heads involved with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Glorying in his reputation for abrasiveness, Ickes even titled his 1943 memoir The Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. 

When he wasn’t expressing irritation to subordinates, fellow Cabinet members, and even FDR (who regularly refused his periodic offers of resignation), he unleashed biting public comments about administration opponents. 

When GOP Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, for instance, spoke of his rise from poverty to success, Ickes mocked him as a “simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer."

Though he belittled Willkie’s Horatio Alger tale, his own was similar. A miserable childhood (grinding poverty, a philandering, alcoholic father, and a strict Presbyterian mother) spurred his ambition to escape—which finally came to pass when he became a journalist, then a lawyer with a thriving practice.

An advantageous marriage to the wealthy Anna Wilmarth lifted his status further, but at the price of deep unhappiness. He felt little compunction, then, even when he joined the Roosevelt administration, about spending countless hours at the office and pursuing extramarital affairs with younger women that could have caused scandal if exposed.

A 1916 tour of Glacier National Park on horseback intensified Ickes’ love of nature. Subsequently he found one of the few balms for his suspicious, self-righteous nature and chronic insomnia in the gardens of his Winnetka, Ill., home.

It surprised me to learn that it wasn’t Ickes’ passion for conservation but his advocacy for Native American rights that led him to seek a job with FDR in 1933. 

Lamenting that several others had an inside track with the new administration for the post of commissioner of Indian affairs, Ickes was alerted by a longtime Progressive Republican ally, Senator Hiram Johnson, that an even bigger prize was available: Secretary of the Interior.

A few potential candidates had already turned down FDR’s offer of the post. The incoming President had never even met Ickes before their interview.

But Roosevelt could sound a bipartisan note by selecting this onetime Bull Mooser, and someone with knowledge of the West appealed to him. 

Moreover, if FDR had any private reservations about Ickes’ bluntness, they were soothed over by the notion that, after all, this was a relatively minor Cabinet post compared with Justice, State, War, or the Treasury departments.

The new appointee was determined to make his department anything but minor. Given the interest that drew him to government service in the first place, it was natural that he would reverse the policies of prior administrations by employing more Native Americans in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and encouraging tribal religion and culture.

But he also set about on the accomplishments I listed at the start of this post—and, more controversially, clashing with other Cabinet members about their prerogatives, including, most prominently:

*Henry Wallace, another former Republican termed Democratic liberal, who successfully fought off Ickes’ attempt to move the Forestry Service from the Department of Agriculture to Interior;

*Harry Hopkins, a Roosevelt intimate who tangled repeatedly with Ickes over federal allocations for his own programs (the Civil Works Administration and Works Progress Administration) in the Commerce Department versus Ickes’ PWA; and

*Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, whose longtime friendship with and easy access to FDR provoked a sexist private observation of Ickes (“There is something to the old adage, ‘a woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they’ll be'”).

No fair judgment of Ickes’ career and character can be made without noting his commitment to civil rights and liberties for all. 

Heading the Chicago branch of the NAACP in the 1920s, he would, a decade later, offer Marian Anderson the use of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the acclaimed African-American contralto from singing in their auditorium.

Then, during WWII, when the Work Relocation Authority (WRA) was transferred to the Interior Department, Ickes, a staunch opponent of Japanese-American internment, endured hate mail and threats when he moved to roll back the agency’s discriminatory policy.

Along with Perkins, Ickes was the only Cabinet member to serve throughout FDR’s 12 years in office. But he did not survive long under Harry Truman. 

After disagreeing with Roosevelt’s successor over an appointment in the Navy Department, Ickes submitted another of his letters of resignation—except that this time, his boss accepted it.

Each day, Ickes dictated first drafts of diary entries based on hastily scrawled notes in meetings. Within two years of his death in 1952, his second wife and widow, Jane Dahlman, had published three volumes she had edited up to the start of FDR’s third term in 1941.

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes represents an as-it-happened insider’s account of policymaking through the first two terms of a President who delighted in keeping advisers guessing about his intentions. This dyspeptic American Pepys who recorded his impressions gave future biographers a chronicle that, these days, seems ever less likely to be repeated.

(The Whitewater scandal left Clinton administration officials, for instance, hesitant about putting to paper their impressions, particularly after the young Treasury Department aide Josh Steiner gulped and disavowed in congressional testimony diary entries on pressure from the White House. 

Investigations making use of contemporaneous notes also briefly involved—are you ready for this?—Ickes’ son, Harold McEwen Ickes, a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose handwritten memo on large donors led him to testify on Capitol Hill on financing for the 1996 Presidential campaign, according to this July 1997 article for the (Mass.) Standard-Times.)

Like another New Dealer, William O. Douglas (elevated from chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission to Associate Justice of the Supreme Court), Ickes presents historians with a conundrum: how to assess a public official’s accomplishments and idealism with prickly personalities that may limited their effectiveness and fulfillment of their highest ambitions. 

(Both men, at different times, seethed over failing to be selected as FDR’s Vice-Presidential running mate.)

Moreover, historians also must keep these same private failings as they assess these New Deal chroniclers for their biases and even basic reliability.

Photo of the Day: ‘Eighth Wonder’ Sculpture, Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA

The town of Stockbridge, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, has long been a magnet for artists, including Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial. The tradition continues today at Chesterwood, French’s summer home and studio, now preserved as a museum. In particular, the museum, as it has done for 39 years, has presented exhibitions of contemporary large-scale artworks.

The exhibit that was up there when I visited two weeks ago, and which will continue until Oct. 9, is “Out of Site: Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood.” It contains works by 14 artists, asked by guest curator Sharon Bates to develop new projects or to adapt existing works that directly respond to the environmental, cultural, and aesthetic attributes of the landscape at Chesterwood.

One in particular struck me, which is why I took this photo: The Eighth Wonder, by Brian Kane and Michael Oatman. Instead of “Wonder,” a more accurate term for the subject matter of this inflatable sculpture would be “Monster.” I say that in a descriptive, rather than pejorative, sense. This piece, created from 2014 to 2017 and designed for Toronto’s Union Station, was inspired by eyewitness accounts of sea monsters, as well as images from 1950s sci-fi movies.

How, you might ask, does this sculpture “respond to…attributes of the landscape at Chesterwood”? There’s not much in the way of water around the property, but there is something of the same size as this figure. It’s a small-scale version of an item that is itself an early approach to French’s most famous work: Abraham Lincoln, in the great secular temple created for him by a grateful republic in Washington, DC. Kane and Oatman figure that their monster would be the same as Mr. Lincoln, were he to stand up.

Photo of the Day: Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC

While vacationing in Washington in November 2013, I took this photograph of the Lincoln Memorial. Behind the famous sculpture of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French is the inscription: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The two key words, aside from Lincoln’s proper name, in that sentence are “temple” and “Union.” Although for much of his life Lincoln was not a conventional religious believer, he had come, as he struggled with the greatest crisis faced by the United States since its founding, to affirm more strongly in a divine Providence guiding his actions throughout the war. In a way, then, it’s, as he might put it, “fitting and proper” that this secular temple of freedom be erected in his memory.

I discussed, in a prior post, why, at the time of the memorial’s construction between 1914 and 1922, the concept of union, rather than emancipation, became the governing theme of this shrine. It is absolutely true—and to the credit of this country—that the memorial, like the Civil War itself, has become more associated with an expanded understanding of freedom than with strictly an association among states.

But, in another sense, “Union” cannot be forgotten in our understanding of Lincoln and the war he was prepared to undertake for its preservation. When Fort Sumter was attacked, the split of this country in two was desired by more than just the Confederacy. The presence of this large North American country—the world’s only significant republic at the time—posed a mortal threat to nations in which unquestioned rulers, or others holding to established hierarchies, held sway.

That is why Great Britain, for instance, though it had abolished slavery throughout its empire three decades before, was ready to recognize, hypocritically, a Confederacy whose own hierarchy was an aristocracy founded on bondage. Lord Palmerston, that nation’s Prime Minister, snorted that the North’s reverses early in the war showed that “Power in the Hands of the Masses throws the Scum of the Community to the surface.”

Palmerston was refuted not just by the progress of Federal arms, but also by changing sentiment in his own country. Even while the upper classes continued to identify more with the genteel manners of Southern aristocrats, mill workers in the British cotton trade mobilized in support of the Emancipation Proclamation. The latter cause carried the day. 

In London’s Parliament Square today, Palmerston has a statue erected in his memory, but so does the Rail Splitter of humble American origins who, by saving republican government, assisted at “a new birth of freedom.”

Photo of the Day: Washington Monument, Viewed From the Lincoln Memorial

To me, this sight in Washington, DC, never grows tired—looking out from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, with tributes to our two greatest Presidents tied together in a common vision. I saw this again last month, on my brief vacation in the nation’s capital.

The Lincoln Memorial: Two Men Behind Freedom’s Shrine

In 1939, when the democratic experiment seemed even more endangered from within and without than it is now, two figures—one fictional, the other real—came to the Lincoln Memorial in moments of high drama that transfixed America.

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film that made numerous congressmen and at least ambassador (Joseph P. Kennedy) apoplectic with its seriocomic depiction of corruption in the Capitol, young Senator Jefferson Smith comes to the memorial late at night, just after a day in which he feels his cause is hopelessly lost. There, under the watchful eyes of Honest Abe, he has an encounter that renews his resolve to battle his state’s all-powerful political machine again.

The same year Frank Capra’s classic premiered, Marian Anderson gave a stirring concert at the same spot, invited there by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the African-American contralto sing in their hall. Many people felt, then and now, that no venue could compare in majesty and historical significance to the nation’s monument to the Great Emancipator.

Those not too busy going to malls on President’s Day might have come across—or at least thought about—the great Washington shrine to Abraham Lincoln. Somewhat fewer people might have thought about how the message and image of that immensely powerful shrine were shaped. In particular, two men played crucial roles in the words and shapes carved in that neoclassical temple to liberty and union.

Royal Cortissoz: Summoning Lincoln’s Commitment to Union, Through Words

The first was Royal Cortissoz, who, though not exactly a household name today, was influential enough in his time, as lecturer and art critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, to make the cover of Time Magazine in 1930. Chances are, you won’t know him by anything he wrote over his long career, but rather because of the inscription he wrote for this nation’s tribute to Lincoln that millions of tourists in Washington have seen: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

In “An Epitaph for Mr. Lincoln,” in the February/March 1987 issue of American Heritage, H. Wayne Morgan related the story behind this inscription. It seems that Cortissoz became enraged at some ham-handed editing of the inscription suggested by President Warren Harding, insisting that it be used as is or not at all. Luckily, he induced architect Henry Bacon to intercede with Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who had it carved, unchanged, ASAP.

Interesting, this involvement of President Harding, who still fancied that he knew a thing or two about stringing words together, not merely as what passed in those days as an orator (H. L. Mencken, dissenting memorably, called the style “Gamalielese,” after the President’s middle name) but because of his past as an Ohio publisher. The President wanted to tinker with the rhythm of the sentence, but he had the background—and the genuine passion—to insist on something more radical in its sentiment.

In his contrarian short bio, Warren G. Harding, John W. Dean (yes, of Watergate fame!) includes a fascinating short section on “the most daring and controversial speech of Harding’s political career”: his address to a segregated audience of white Southerners in Birmingham, Ala., in 1921. The President flummoxed his audience by coming out four-square for economic and political equality for African-Americans: “Whether you like it or not, unless our democracy is a lie you must stand for that equality.”

Cortissoz’s inscription, on the other hand, beautifully paced as it is—and certainly true, so far as it goes—ended up sidestepping the challenge that Harding flung down to Southern audiences—the same kind of challenge that Lincoln ended up posing by the end of his life. Sixty-one years after Fort Sumter, when the Lincoln Memorial opened, the one thing that the North and South could still agree on was that Lincoln stood for the Union, and that was a good thing.

There is a powerful and important way to think of the Union as the fulfillment of the hopes of liberty—i.e., as assurance that the republic would stand for majority rule, and not collapse into anarchy through the machinations of a minority.

But Lincoln—as John Wilkes Booth certainly came to realize—had come to advocate far more than that. As historians—and especially revisionist ones—never fail to point out, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave in the North, only those in the South, in territories the North had not yet controlled. Moreover, the President did not come out for universal suffrage for all African-Americans.

But the Thirteenth Amendment, supported by the President, ended slavery, and just before he was murdered, Lincoln suggested that African-American soldiers—as well as “more intelligent” blacks and those who had supported the Union during the war—should be given the right to vote.

The latter might not sound like much, but remember this: In a profoundly racist society, no American President had even advocated that much. Booth knew how radical it was, and as soon as he heard it, he was hell-bent on his assassination scheme.

The America of 1922 retained a nervous, still-pinched vision of what support for the Union meant. But the notion of Union could also be thought of in the terms that Daniel Webster—and Lincoln—believed: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

Daniel Chester French: The Image of Lincoln

So, there you have the words (aside from the immortal words of Lincoln himself, carved on the walls). But there’s also the image, the great and mighty statue of the seated, somber, impossibly wise President.

For an understanding of that, I suggest you journey up through the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, to the town of Stockbridge. While you’re there visiting a museum dedicated to another artist indelibly associated with Americana, Norman Rockwell, you can stop, as I did some years ago, at Chesterwood, the home, studio and gardens of Daniel Chester French, the great sculptor who specialized in larger-than-life figures who flourished in extraordinary circumstances, such as The Minuteman Monument; the mounted George Washington in Paris; and the Lincoln Memorial.

The emotions French evoked—heroism, patriotism, sentimentality—often appear to be relics of a bygone era. Yet the sight of these works summon forth more than a glimmer of recognition; they also induce stabs of wistful nostalgia and dreams of a more innocent, more reverend time. “I fear my inclination,” French confessed to a friend in 1919, “is to ignore too much the gloom and emphasize the beauty and joy of life—leaving out the snake which alas! was devised with Paradise.”

French and Rockwell shared several common traits, besides their unabashed attachment to America and to Stockbridge. Both were born in New York City but came to Stockbridge in middle age when they were already well established in their careers. Both became famous while still only in their 20s and remained famous and productive into their 70s. Both achieved their enormous success through a fierce work ethic and a Yankee sense of thrift.

Standing in the studio of Daniel Chester French, your eyes taking in the numerous models and casts he created, you sense more than simply his talent and self-discipline. No, you realize, gazing up through the skylight, that French’s spirit was likewise sunny—an ideal medium to express the optimism of a nation finally united after the Civil War and coming into its own as a world power.

By the time he bought the Marshall Warner farm in Stockbridge in 1896, French was already in the third decade of a public career that had begun spectacularly with The MinuteMan Monument (commissioned 1871). The property captured his heart for much the same reason that artists were drawn to the Berkshires before and since: for the landscape. The view of Monument Mountain, he claimed, was the best “dry view” (i.e., view without water) he had ever seen.

Besides the skylight, the most striking aspect of French’s studio is the truncated railroad track running 50 feet from a tree outside to inside the studio. With so many of his commissions involving outside statues, French needed not just the natural light that streamed from above, but a total exterior environment. The railroad handcar enabled him to put his creations out in the open to test how they looked.

The studio’s examples of models in succeeding stages of development enable you to see how French settled on his overarching conceptions before fleshing out the details of his works. First, he presented clients with a “maquette,” a plaster cast of a of a simple clay “sketch” in three-dimensional form. Once the client approved French’s concept, the sculptor progressed to larger models, each time adding subtle details. In models for the Lincoln Memorial that are on display in the studio, for instance, French added a chair, then drapery.

French, along with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was the sculptor of choice for his time. More than 100 commissions came his way during his career. The Boston-to-Washington corridor is filled with his work.

The Boston-Cambridge area contained his statues of the Irish-American editor John Boyle O’Reilly; historian Francis Parkman; John Harvard, founder of perhaps America’s most famous school of higher learning; and the allegorical figures of Truth, Romance, Music and Poetry on the doors of the Boston Public Library. Alma Mater holds a commanding view of the quadrangle at the center of Columbia University in New York City.

Washington, of course, holds his magisterial seated figure of the 16th President in the Lincoln Memorial. (Chesterwood visitors can see a unique counterpart to this in a garden in back, which contains French’s models for a standing Lincoln that was placed in Lincoln, Nebraska.)

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Marian Anderson)

“She [Marian Anderson] sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.”-- Martin Luther King Jr., “The Negro and the Constitution,” quoted in Alex Ross, “A Critic at Large: Voice of the Century—Celebrating Marian Anderson,” The New Yorker, April 13, 2009

Ross, of The Rest Is Noise blog, might be the most consistently excellent New Yorker contributor, now that John Updike has passed on. Seventy years to the day that Marian Anderson gave her spellbinding Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial after being rejected by the Daughters of the American Revolution, his article on the pathbreaking soprano makes for must reading.

The quote from Dr. King comes from an oration that the 15-year-old gave five years after the concert. You can’t read it, of course, without thinking of how, 25 years after the event, he would perform his own “baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity” in the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on the same spot.

Ross reminds us of the racial divide that still exists not just in America at large but even in the classical music world (only two percent of orchestra players are black), but also of the calm self-possession that led Anderson to make one precedent after another, even when she felt the instinct not to make a scene. (In WWII Birmingham, Ala., she had to wait outside a segregated train station while her accompanist went to get her a sandwich—all the while as a group of German POWs sat in comfort inside.)

Above all, Ross explains the nature of her immense gift, the voice that led Arturo Toscanini to praise her as the type of singer who comes along once every hundred years. Here’s how Ross analyzes her performance of Schubert’s “Erlkonig”:

“You seem to be hearing three singers, yet there are no obvious vocal breaks between them. She is fastidious but seldom stiff; caressing little slides from note to note and a delicately trembling tone warm up what might have been an excessively studious approach. The incalculable element is the air of spiritual elevation that dwells behind the technique.”