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 Environmental History (Flood Control Act of 1938)

June 28, 1938—Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1938, authorizing civil engineering projects such as dams, levees, dikes and other flood control measures. 

The bill also gave the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) the authority to acquire land for flood control, while stipulating that the ACE limit construction. 

Other, more significant events occurred on June 28 in American history, notably the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision. But given the enormous tragedy that has occurred recently with Midwest flooding, I thought that flood control seemed like an unusually timely topic—not to mention one that’s little understood. 

The first fact that took me by surprise in researching this subject was that, unlike other pieces of legislation—Social Security, say—no one date stands out from any other in this area. In fact, the Flood Control Act needed a specific year attached to its name because at one point, one act of this type was being passed annually or biannually from 1917 through the next 25 years. 

Congress was first prompted to act concerning flooding in 1874, with an act providing for relief work after a severe flood along the Mississippi. Even the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which claimed more than 2,200 lives, did not prompt federal intervention in this area. Whatever legislation could be produced had to be justified as improving navigation rather than enhancing flood control, because of the constitutional scruples of a number of Congressmen. (What? Constitutional scruples? Congress? Did I hear you correctly?)

But floods along the Mississippi in 1912 and 1913 exposed the fallacy of the belief that the states were the best actors to handle this. In March 1917, partly as a result, Congress passed the first federal flood control legislation. It took the great Mississippi flood of 1927, however—a disaster which saw the Red Cross caring for almost 600,000 at one point—for the ACE to become convinced that levees alone would not prevent these disasters, but rather levees, floodways and spillways working together. 

With its belief in government and major projects, such as TVA—and particularly with the President’s interest in all matters environmental—the Roosevelt administration made flood control an even more urgent part of its overall program. The 1936 Flood Control Act, the real beginning of comprehensive federal flood control work, now stated explicitly that flood control was a "proper activity of the Federal Government in cooperation with States, their political subdivisions, and localities thereof." 

And, giving a further jab at those who wanted to limit federal interference in what had once been a state prerogative, the 1938 act listed recreation as one of the areas that the ACE should consider in planning these projects. Among the major projects shepherded into existence by this law was Center Hill in Tennessee, Mud Mountain Dam near Seattle, and Deer Creek Lake in Ohio (pictured). 

Disaster relief has become one of the areas most affected by federal government policy and administration. Because of the large numbers of people affected by Hurricane Katrina and the more recent flooding, I’m sure that, no matter which party wins this November, we’re likely to see greater federal supervision in this area. It’s likely to affect even more aspects of how people live—from insurance they get for their properties all the way to whether they will even be allowed to build in flood-prone areas.

This Day in Environmental History (Earth Day Marks Zenith of Gaylord Nelson's Vision)

April 22, 1970—The American environmental movement may have reached its apex in this first celebration of Earth Day.

Though the calendar and a more conservative President (Nixon) seemingly indicated that a new era had begun, the nation, plagued by the Vietnam War, operated under the assumption that it was still the 1960s, so the environmental observance was marked by one of the typical occurrences of that decade—teach-ins on pollution and environmental issues at 1,500 college and 10,000 high-school campuses.

Four decades of fascination with history have only hardened my Catholic belief in the notion that even the best of us are deeply fallible. One instance of this lies in the life and legacy of the founder of Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005), the late Wisconsin governor and senator and, in his later years, head of the Wilderness Society.

In a time of cynicism, when politicians spend more time appearing on CNN or Fox preaching to their partisan choirs or picking up so much PAC money that they’ve developed permanent stoops, I should want to honor an elected official like Nelson who investigated conditions affecting the lives of Americans and worked tirelessly and effectively on legislation that would change them for the better. But, for reasons that I’ll explain in a minute, I find that I can only manage two cheers for him.

First, though, what remains honorable and enduring in his record:

As governor of Wisconsin in 1961, Nelson pushed through the legislature an Outdoor Resources Action Program financed by a one-cent-per-pack cigarette tax to fund the state acquisition of parks and wetlands.

Two years later, his maiden speech in the Senate advocated a bill banning detergents from water supplies, calling on the country to awake to its environmental danger: "We cannot be blind to the growing crisis of our environment. Our soil, our water, and our air are becoming more polluted every day. Our most priceless natural resources—trees, lakes, rivers, wildlife habitats, scenic landscapes—are being destroyed."

Later in 1963, Nelson convinced President Kennedy to embark on a tour that would spotlight the environmental problem. Unfortunately, the media’s attention centered on another matter taking place the same day that JFK’s tour began: the Senate vote on his limited nuclear test-ban treaty with the U.S.S.R.

For the next half-dozen years, the senator cast about for another way to shine a spotlight on his biggest issue. In the summer of 1969, as protests against Vietnam heated up, he had a brainstorm: why not use teach-ins as a method of protesting environmental degradation?

Subsequently, Nelson wrote letters to all 50 of the nation’s governors and the mayors of its largest cities, asking them to issue Earth Day proclamations. The result was wildly successful, drawing 20 million participants that first year. Nearly a quarter century after the event, American Heritage Magazine described Earth Day as "one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy."

Earth Day took off because of a grand convergence of events and attitudes: the growth of ecology as a rigorous scientific study; photos taken during the space program that underscored Earth’s fragility; the counterculture-led interest in health and returning to nature; and, I would argue, the Santa Barbara oil spill of January 1969, in which 200,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the channel from a disabled oil rig, killing off birds and marine life.

Environmentalism had gone from the nation’s laboratories and aquariums to the American mainstream. President Nixon was only recognizing political reality when, in the same year as Earth Day, he signed the National Environmental Policy Act and set up the Environmental Protection Agency.

One legislative triumph after another followed for Sen. Nelson, as he introduced bills that became part of the Clean Air Act, the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Water Quality Act, and the National Lakes Preservation Act.

By almost any measure, those measures improved the quality of American life. I saw its impact, in a microcosmic way, when I took a boat tour on the Chicago River several years ago. Our guide noted that many buildings along the route were turned, oddly enough, away from the river, while others faced toward it. The reason was simple, he explained: Those buildings facing away from the waterway had been constructed before the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, while those looking on the river had been built afterward. In fact, the stench from the river was so bad 40 years ago that the tour would not have even been possible then.

Over the past several years, I have wondered why the environmental movement lost so much of its impetus by the 1980s. If you’re a liberal, the explanation is clear: Ronald Reagan. 

To be sure, the environmental movement was hamstrung by such egregious administration appointees as James G. Watt, Rita Lavelle and Anne Gorsuch Burford, and some of Reagan’s decisions appear petulant slaps at Jimmy Carter’s environmental efforts, such as the 1986 removal of solar panels that Carter had ordered installed in the White House during the energy crisis of 1979.

But I’m afraid that at least some of the blame for the stalling of modern environmentalism should be directed to some of its founders.

It strikes me sometimes that nearly every reform movement attempts a metaphorical “bridge too far”—a moment when it makes a serious mistake and alienates those it is trying to help. In the case of environmentalism, that critical point was reached in the case of the Chicken Little calls for zero population growth.

In 1968, for instance, Paul Ehrlich forecast, in The Population Bomb, that the oceans would die by 1979. It didn’t come to pass, mostly because of Nobel Prize laureate Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which has kept starvation in check for millions in Third World countries for the last 40 years.What did come to pass, however, was predictable.

By the late ‘70s, contraceptives had managed to drive the American fertility rates down barely to replacement levels, from 3.5 children per women to 1.7, but the country was still experiencing growth. There was one major cause of this, several prominent environmentalists believed: immigration. Something, they thought, needed to be done to regulate it.

I’m afraid that Senator Nelson was one of those people. Early in his career, he had identified population control as one of the goals of the environmental movement. Years after he went down to defeat in the crushing Reagan landslide of 1980, he had become blunter in his message, dismissing charges that immigration controls represented “racism” or “nativism” in his book Beyond Earth Day:

“Never has an issue with such major consequences for this country been so ignored. Never before has there been such a significant failure by the president, Congress, and the political infrastructure to address such an important issue. We are faced with the most important challenge of our time -- the challenge of sustainability -- and we refuse to confront it. It is the biggest default in our history."

Not only could Nelson not be described as a fringe player in this portion of the environmental movement, but he was hardly alone. In 2003, a particularly cogent analysis of this segment of the movement appeared: Betsy Hartmann’s “Conserving Hatred: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad.” She pointed out that three members of the Sierra Club’s board of directors were key players in the anti-immigration lobby, and that John Tanton, a major organizer and funder of the anti-immigrant movement, has close ties to a number of racist hate groups. Christopher Hayes has outlined how Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the nation’s oldest and most influential immigration restriction group, in 1979.

As the son and grandson of immigrants, I can’t view such developments without extreme dismay. The environmental movement cannot expect to make life better for all Americans if people such as Nelson continue to lend credibility and talking points to zenophobes like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh. It’s an especially ironic outcome that dims the legacy of Nelson, an otherwise proud exponent of Midwestern liberalism.