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.

This Day in Conservation History (Nation Experiences Dust Bowl)

May 9, 1934—Starting over the northern plains of Montana and the Dakotas, an ominous cloud drifted to Chicago by night, then reached New York and Boston by the next morning. The meteorological event was part of the “Dirty Thirties,” or “Dust Bowl” decade.

Before it was all over, this larger weather pattern would pose a radical threat to the natural ecology of the country; spark a mass migration of “Dust Bowl” refugees; inspire sweeping, if belated, legislation; and leave a lasting legacy of protest and concern for the underprivileged in American culture.

The “black blizzard” that kicked up on this date and throughout the rest of the decade was the kind of environmental catastrophe that God had used to punish the ancient Egyptians for their mistreatment of the Israelites in the age of Moses. Just think of it—the average American had to cope with three tons of dust.

By the time the dirty stuff had reached the Northeast, streetlights were coming on at midday and cars were using their headlights to navigate the roads. That is, if you could still move—because the static electricity could get so bad that cars could short out, leaving you in the thick of it all without protection.

And, despite what I wrote about Dust Bowl “refugees,” in another sense you couldn’t escape from these storms—the horror was that they found you inside as well as outside. Dust particles would seap through doors and windows. When you had ingested enough of it, you’d contract dust pneumonia, which was similar to the respiratory disease silicosis.

A severe drought in the Great Plains was the immediate precipitating event of the Dust Bowl. But, like Hurricane Katrina, this was a disaster in the making for decades, exacerbated by government inaction.

Ranchers and farmers had pushed into the 150,000-sq.-ft. region—including the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and the neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with little understanding of the consequences.

First came livestock grazing, then mechanization, along with high prices that farmers earned during World War I, encouraged farmers to plow up the native buffalo grass that had been there for centuries in order to plant wheat.

Then came a record wheat harvest in 1931 that drove down wheat prices at the worst possible time—in the midst of the Great Depression. Now farmers, despite warnings from Native Americans and oldtime cattle ranchers, desperately resorted to plow up even more native grasses.

The following year was the tip-off that something was the matter: 14 severe dust storms. Thirty-eight were reported in 1933. Four years later, 134 would drive people to desperation.

Most Americans know about the movement caused by this ecological event because of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and John Ford’s powerful 1940 adaptation of it.

But if you want a forceful evocation of what forced these people to go on the road in the first place, I recommend that you rent a DVD of the 1978 mini-series adaptation of James Michener’s Centennial, and focus especially on the 11th episode, “The Winds of Death,” which shows in harrowing detail the extremes—including madness and death—to which more than a few families were driven during this time.

Whenever a crisis hits, such as Katrina or the subprime meltdown, the media invariably hunt down a Cassandra who warned about it early on. In the case of the Dust Bowl, one of these early-warning messengers—and, eventually, the man appointed to extricate the nation from it—was Hugh Hammond Bennett, “the father of soil conservation.”

From the early 1900s, Bennett had been testing soil at home and abroad, becoming alarmed enough to co-author a U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletin in 1928 with the prophetic title, Soil Erosion: A National Menace. He became director of the Soil Erosion Service in the Department of the Interior in September 1933.

Unique to his field, Bennett was as much a great communicator and showman as great scientist. He was given not only to writing innumerable articles but demonstrating soil-conservation practices to skeptical farmers.

People also chuckled at his flair for the dramatic, too, perhaps best demonstrated on April 19, 1935. Knowing that the worst dust storm of all, which had started the prior Sunday (so bad that it created, for the first time in print, the term “Dust Bowl”), was coming east, Bennett chose that date to testify before a Senate committee on the desperate state of the Great Plains.

Some of the legislators on hand were looking bored until they looked out the window and saw the sun disappear behind a cloud of dust. Suddenly they were paying very close attention to Bennett—and passed his bill in a heartbeat, too.

John Steinbeck was not the only significant figure in American culture to be caught up in the plight of those dispossessed by the Dust Bowl. Dorothea Lange left a visual chronicle of the human misery in her photographs; the documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains, produced by the government, was eventually deemed classic enough to be worthy of preservation; and Woody Guthrie gave voice to the suffering with “Dust Pneumonia Blues” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya.”

This Day in Literary History (Treehugger Thoreau Accidentally Sets Forest Fire)

April 30, 1844—His early dreams of literary success in New York City dashed, forced to return home to his family, needing to establish himself financially, Henry David Thoreau watched his self-esteem disintegrate further, along with 300 acres of woods in his hometown of Concord, Mass., that he and a companion had accidentally set on fire.

The incident confirmed his reputation in town as a fool, drove him to the periphery of his community—and led to the writing of his classic memoir about living in close harmony with nature, Walden.

I have issues with Susan Cheever’s chronicle of Thoreau, Emerson and the rest of the Transcendentalists, American Bloomsbury. The descriptions of the Concord landscape will make you want to visit posthaste, as I did last fall. But her hints of affairs among the local legends don’t hold up to scrutiny. Even longtime residents—a very liberal lot, with maybe only one John McCain sign out in the front lawn compared with hundreds for Barack Obama—rolled their eyes at mention of the book's unsupported speculation.

But Cheever reminded me, by process of association, of someone who could shed better light on Thoreau: oddly enough, not a biographer such as herself, but a fiction writer—none other than her own father. Geoffrey Woolf’s perceptive review of Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever in The New York Times Book Review illuminated one of the high points in the great short-story master’s work: “Goodbye, My Brother.” The story, Woolf pointed out, makes brilliant use of an unreliable narrator.

You remember the concept from English 101, right? It’s a first-person narrative in the voice of someone who is misleading, unable to make connections between his views of a situation or reality, or both. Think of Ring Lardner’s “Haircut,” J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

So how does “Goodbye, My Brother” relate to the unfortunate fire in the Concord woods, as retold in Thoreau’s journal? The events in both are narrated by someone who is telling things at variance with the facts. Moreover, by the nature of how much and what they’re telling, they end up revealing much more of themselves than they ever intended.

Setting a forest fire was the last thing on Thoreau’s mind in 1844: he prided himself on his knowledge of the woods. That’s why, when he did so while on an outing with friend Edward Hoar, he had a tough time facing himself, let alone the citizens of Concord.

Cheever’s narrator writes, “I don’t think about the family much,” then contradicts that in practically the same breath by dwelling on his ancestry at great length. Similarly, in his journal account of the fire—written six years after the event—Thoreau rationalized his behavior when, unable to do anything to stop the blaze, he instead stopped and watched it continue:

“I had felt like a guilty person—nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: ‘Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein.'”

Of course, Thoreau had not “settled the matter with myself shortly.” After all, it took six years for him to consider the incident—and even then, he confined his thoughts entirely to himself, in the journal.

Second, it was not true that he had “done no wrong therein.” Thoreau stated, incorrectly, in his journal that he and Hoar had burnt only 100 acres. In actuality, as the Concord Freeman indicated four days after the event, he had burnt three times that number, causing $2,000 in damages to the properties of A.H. Wheeler, Cyrus Hubbard, and Darius Hubbard.

Hoar’s father, Samuel—the judge who was the most prominent citizen of the town—is believed by Thoreau biographers to have soothed things over by reimbursing the aggrieved property owners. But that didn’t stop other townspeople from coming to their own conclusions about responsibility for the event.

Yes, it was an accident, they conceded, but Thoreau and Hoar were dunderheads who should have known better. They had borrowed a match to cook fish they had caught, but the match, falling on ground uncommonly dry for that time of year, quickly raged out of control of the two young men.

While Hoar sought help by boat, Thoreau had done so on foot. The exertions of sprinting two miles for help had so worn him out that he sat down on a rock and watched the flames and the townspeople who tried to put them out.

Calling the fire a “glorious spectacle” is an attempt at flippancy toward a reaction by the townspeople that wounded Thoreau in his amour proper. By the time he set down his retrospective thoughts on this curious incident, many townspeople had gradually come to appreciate his knowledge of all matter of plants and wildlife that Ralph Waldo Emerson had suggested that he be named “town naturalist.”

But generations later, just as large a group in town remained annoyed with him. One of the Wheeler girls, still alive in the Roaring Twenties, said angrily, “Don’t talk to me about Henry Thoreau. Didn’t I all that winter have to go to school with a smoothed apron or dress because I had to pitch in and help fill the wood box with partly charred wood?”

Thoreau’s ears must have burned when he heard “Woods-burner” behind his back. While living in Staten Island, Thoreau was deeply homesick for his hometown. The barely concealed resentment of him, however, undoubtedly inclined him to go to a spot where he was less and less bothered: Walden Pond.

This Day in Southern History (Tupelo, MS Becomes “First TVA City”)

February 7, 1934—Four months after entering into a contract for the purchase of power generated by Wilson Dam, Tupelo, Miss., became the first city to receive electrical service from one of the signature New Deal programs: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

As my other post from today notes, President Obama is being labeled “socialist” for an extremely mild cap on the compensation of any banker accepting government largesse. TVA was a far riskier proposition: in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise.” Private companies complained that the project constituted unfair competition.

Though Sen. George Norris pressed two fellow Republicans, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, to implement his idea of developing the Tennessee River Valley, it took a Democrat, FDR, to put it into action. In Muscle Shoals, Ala., land belonging to Wilson Dam—a project built in WWI meant to produce nitrates for munitions—was transferred over to TVA.

TVA achieved its great purpose: to provide abundant cheap electricity to people who didn’t have it before. Lorena Hickok, a journalist who became a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, reported on a fact-finding trip in the South only four months after the beginning of service to Tupelo the following as one telling example of the change being wrought: “One thing they are doing is to cut down greatly the cost of wiring a house. For instance, in Tupelo it used to cost as high as $60 to have an electric stove installed in your house. It now costs $5.” Moreover, she reported, industries attracted by cheap power were inquiring about coming to the area.

Over that first year, energy consumption grew 114% for residential consumers in Tupelo and 77% for commercial users.

Throughout the 41,000 sq. miles in seven states covered by the valley, TVA would accomplish the following:

* its electricity would supply homes;
* locks were built to permit more and larger barges to carry goods;
* reforestation and soil-retention projects were begun;
* fertilizer was produced for sale to farmers;
* floods from the Tennessee River--a source of potential danger--came under control;
* reservoirs and lands surrounding them provided for considerable recreational development, including water skiing, canoeing, sailing, windsurfing, fishing, swimming, hiking, nature photography, picnicking, birdwatching, and camping.
* conservation was upgraded through control of forest fires and improved habitats for wildlife and fish.

Due to fierce domestic opposition, the TVA turned out to be a one-of-a-kind project rather than a blueprint for similar enterprises elsewhere. But perhaps no other New Deal program better illustrate FDR’s penchant for bold experimentation and desire to boost the economy, nor his longtime interests in aiding farmers and improving conservation.

And Tupelo still prides itself as the “First TVA City.”

This Day in Conservation History (TR Appoints National Conservation Commission)

June 8, 1908 – Nearly a month after calling together a conference of the nation's governors that focused on the environment, Theodore Roosevelt appointed members of a National Conservation Commission to prepare America's first inventory of natural resources.

Traditionally, Americans have judged Presidents on two major criteria: national security and the economy. What has gone unnoticed—even during the last 35 years, which have been dominated, at one time or another, by energy crises—is the environmental component of these two issues.

In a prior post, I discussed how Franklin D. Roosevelt came to conceive of the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the proudest achievements of the New Deal. But the first President to make environmentalism part of the President's agenda—indeed, central to it--was his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. "The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our National life," he told Congress in his Seventh Annual Message.

T.R.'s longstanding fascination with nature, dating back to his taxidermy hobby and continuing with his adult days ranching in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory, have been much discussed by his major biographers. Less well-known is the parlous state of the nation's natural resources at the time he became President; how he used the "bully pulpit" of the Presidency—not just publicity, but also the more controversial use of executive orders—to advance the movement; and how chosen successor's William Howard Taft firing of Roosevelt's friend, Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot led to the split between the liberal and conservative wings of the GOP that, to one degree or another, endures to this day.

By the time Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated William McKinley in the Oval Office, the frontier had been declared officially closed. The nation was simultaneously facing an exploding population – an increase of one-fifth in ten years—and, in the West, the catastrophic inability of farmers and ranchers to scratch out a living from the inhospitable soil. Congress' solution to the latter problem—public land laws—ended up establishing a de facto "water monopoly."

Roosevelt's proposals in his First Annual Message to Congress, for irrigation projects, resulted in the National Reclamation Act, which funded a civil-engineering force within the National Geological Survey and began the process of constructing dams and aqueducts for the nation's arid land—one-third of the total area of the U.S. at the time.

The President did not frame the issue in aesthetic terms, much as he appreciated the beauty of nature, but in terms of utility and morality. (Restricting grazing and logging, he argued, protected watersheds, a necessity for a growing population that needed drinking and irrigation water and flood control.)

Executive orders represented T.R.'s primary means of moving his conservation agenda. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, only 158 executive orders were issued during the terms of the 10 Presidents running from Abraham Lincoln to William McKinley. During Roosevelt's seven and one-half years as President, he issued 1,006 such orders. Collectively, they embodied his notion of what he thought of as the Jackson-Lincoln model of the strong President, and of the notion of the Chief Executive as "the steward of the public welfare."

This broad use of Presidential authority caused a ruckus during T.R.'s tenure, when Congressmen began to squawk about what was being done to their lands. It remains a major bone of contention today, largely because subsequent US. Presidents followed Roosevelt's lead in using this mechanism. In the 20th century, nine (counting T.R.) issued at least 450 executive orders each.

From May 13 to 15, 1908, TR acted as host for the National Governors Conference—not only the first time that organization met, but also the first and last time that members of the three federal branches of government got to together for purposes of "common good."

One outgrowth of this conference was T.R.'s appointment, on June 8, of members of the National Conservation Commission. Four areas were covered in this inventory of resources—water, forests, lands, and minerals—with each section headed by a chairman and with Pinchot overseeing the executive committee.

The rationale for the inventory was simple: before the government could act, it needed to know the extent of the problem—what resources it had and what it didn't. Six months later, the commission's work was done, as they presented a three-volume report. Pinchot's concepts of resource management—many looking to the latest European techniques—were included in the report.

At the conclusion of his second term, Roosevelt had:

* created the national wildlife refuge;
* quadrupled the number of acres in national forests; and
* preserved eighteen areas as national monuments, including the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest.

Pinchot did not stay on long with the Taft administration when Roosevelt stepped down. The forestry chief clash with Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger over the disposition of land. Taft, more inclined than T.R. to let states or private individuals control these lands, sided with his cabinet secretary and dismissed Pinchot. The news disturbed Roosevelt profoundly. From that point on, he became ever more inclined to take on his chosen successor – which eventually came to pass when he ran as the Progressive candidate for President in the election of 1912, thus splitting the GOP vote and smoothing the way for Woodrow Wilson’s victory.

Roosevelt had managed to placate the party regulars in office while enacting much Progressive legislation, but his electoral apostasy lost him and the liberal wing much influence for the next decade, thereby paving the way for Harding and Coolidge in the 1920s. Other issues have come to the fore in the years since—notably intervention abroad and the agenda of the Religious Right—but, in one way or another, they are reenacting the battle waged by T.R. and Taft early in the 20th century.