RIGHTFUL HERITAGE
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America
Douglas Brinkley
Harper/HarperCollins Publishers
744 pages; $35
Franklin D Roosevelt was many great things: the US' greatest economic president, pulling the United States out of the Depression; greatest foreign policy president, leading the country to victory during World War II. But he was something else, too: the greatest environmental president, leaving a larger mark on the warp and weft of the American landscape, for good and ill, than any chief executive, before or since.
Consider: Roosevelt created 140 national wildlife refuges; established 29 national forests and 29 national parks and monuments; and enrolled 3.4 million men in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built 13,000 miles of trails, planted more than two billion trees and paved 125,000 miles of roads. Not all his achievements were so eco-friendly: He built dozens of hydroelectric dams and initiated what eventually became the national highway system, solidifying America's future as a suburban car culture.
This was no incidental resume, as the historian Douglas Brinkley makes clear in his exhaustive new biography Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America. Roosevelt thought deeply about the environment, more so than perhaps any other president save his distant relative and namesake, Theodore Roosevelt - as Brinkley well knows, having published a similarly extensive biography of Teddy Roosevelt as an environmentalist, The Wilderness Warrior, in 2009.
By the 1930s, Franklin understood, it was no longer enough to protect the natural resources America had left; after a century of industrialisation, the landscape was as bankrupt as the economy. And while Franklin was as great an orator as his cousin, he understood that florid speeches went only so far. In the vast federal government he was creating, mastery of the inner workings mattered much more. In fact, one of the virtues of Rightful Heritage is that it's not just about Roosevelt. Central to the story are two (of many) supporting characters: Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1946, and Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture who became vice president in 1941 (and who was booted from the ticket in 1944 in favour of Harry Truman).
Ickes spoke for the trees - he believed that the government had an obligation to protect the environment, even to the detriment of American business, even in a depression. Wallace fought Ickes in the name of the timber industry and large agribusinesses, which he believed were critical for putting the economy right.
In Mr Brinkley's telling, Roosevelt's heart was with Ickes, but in practice he tried to split the difference between the two men - to plot "a middle course between reckless exploitation and extreme environmentalism." In public, he argued that responsible environmental stewardship was critical to economic growth; that the country would never revive if it didn't rehabilitate its natural resources.
This philosophy drove almost everything Roosevelt did. He sold the Civilian Conservation Corps to Congress as a jobs programme. He laced the national parks with scenic drives and expansive infrastructure to promote tourism. His efforts to combat soil erosion in the Dust Bowl were also a way to save America's struggling farms.
But for this reason, Roosevelt often failed to appreciate environmental consequences of his economic agenda. A fan of hydropower, he placed dams across the South and Far West, destroying spawning routes for fish and inundating tens of thousands of acres of wildlife habitat. "A geographer would be hard-pressed to find a major western river that Roosevelt didn't want to dam," Mr Brinkley writes. Over time his farm subsidies became one of the largest corporate-welfare programmes in the government, while doing little to prevent overfarming and pesticide use.
The fact was, Ickes and Wallace were right: There was and remains a fundamental tension between economic growth and environmental stewardship. Which isn't to say Roosevelt was naïve, or ignorant of the challenges. He saw where society was headed if it did not learn to respect nature.
In a 1940 speech in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Roosevelt implored: "We slashed our forests, we used our soils, we encouraged floods ... all of this so greatly that we were brought rather suddenly to face the fact that unless we gave thought to the lives of our children and grandchildren, they would no longer be able to live and to improve upon our American way of life." Seventy-five years later, we are still living in the landscape Roosevelt shaped - and still struggling to heed his words.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
