Presidents and the American Environment

Otis Graham

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700620982, 9780700620982
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620999
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn’t take long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside federal timberland. But from such small moments great social movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans’ relationship to the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of both “green” and “brown” policy directions over more than a century.

While the history of conservation generally focuses on the work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties and fifties, from the emergence of “environmentalism” to recent presidential detractors of the cause.

From Harrison’s act, which established the American system of National Forests, to Barack Obama’s efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between “browns” and “greens” over those 22 administrations, the role of president has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in this important contribution to American environmental history.

THE NEW NATION’S PUBLIC LANDS A FIRST CENTURY WITHOUT A NATIONAL VISION

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If we ask when conservation—the original name for the broad concern to protect the US natural environment from damage and depletion—arrived on the agenda of the federal government, and thus of presidents, we discover a surprise. It took a century after the founding of the nation. Sustained presidential engagement came not with George Washington, nor with the Thomas Jefferson who sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to map the resources of the West, nor with Abraham Lincoln, who mobilized the nation for the Civil War. The environmental protection enterprise in our national life and politics came to the president’s desk in the administration of a much smaller figure, Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888. It was still there, and growing, for all his successors.

It takes only a little knowledge of US history to generate an immediate objection to this. Although history texts and college classes are typically built around a narrative constructed out of the dominating issues posed in our early national life—slavery, the tariff, a national bank—historians know that few matters attracted more congressional attention in the republic’s first century than the disposition of one natural resource—the public domain, or public lands. At one time or another 78 percent of the 2.3 billion acres now constituting the United States was in federal hands. The original thirteen states, after much quarreling, ceded to the federal government 233 million acres in the decade after the union was formed. The government leaders in Washington, D.C., no matter which political party dominated at the time, pursued the general objective of acquiring more public lands by war or treaty or purchase, confident that they could figure out later how to pass them on to users, which the federal government was not and did not intend to be. An additional 523 million acres (MA) came with the Louisiana Purchase in 1903. Florida (43 MA) and much of the Pacific Northwest (180 MA) were added by treaty. The nation gained 334 MA from Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War and 365 million with the purchase of Alaska in 1867.

Thus the fledgling federal government owned a huge part of the US environment, which land-hungry citizens wanted transferred to them as farmers, miners, loggers, livestock herders. Inevitably, then, the public lands acquired by the new federal government as a sort of splendid dowry concerned the Continental Congress and every federal Congress from the first. There was general agreement that the government should transfer—a word that could mean lease, sell, give—to citizens use of this dowry of land mostly west of the first thirteen states. In its highest-minded form the impulse to privatize public lands would turn landless and unskilled laborers into Jefferson’s “sturdy yeoman farmers,” who were the necessary core, in a broadly held view, of republican democracy. Beyond this, the national government had no long-term goals of its own with respect to the public lands other than to strike some political balance between contending goods, such as fostering development, pleasing constituents, and raising revenue.

Striking that balance was the source of endless partisan and regional political infighting. Congress, as well as state legislatures hoping to influence Capitol Hill, wrangled incessantly about the best ways to transfer the lands to land-hungry citizens and the corporations they were forming. Federal land was used to pay soldiers for their service; to provide a source of revenue from sales; to help found land-grant, state-run universities and other educational institutions; to help the states with a variety of development projects; to aid railroad expansion westward. Conflict came not just from infighting over these competing uses but also from sectional divisions. Some in the East wanted high fees from land sales in order to discourage the drain of coastal labor westward. Others in the East and Midwest, moved by mounting antislavery sentiment, argued for essentially free land for homesteaders, who would carry those sentiments into the new territories and states. Southerners supported land sales priced for maximum revenue so that the tariff, the main source of federal revenue, could be cut.

Public land law was thus in a constant state of dispute and satisfied no one, given especially the fraudulent manipulation of those laws by speculators, corporations, fence-erecting squatters, grazing outfits, and illegal timber cutters. These issues gave many Congresses much to orate about—what was on and under public land and how to give it away or sell it. These were not environmental matters as we use the term, and there was no backdrop of actual or impending scarcity. President John Quincy Adams in 1828 set aside almost 1,500 acres of oaks on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola Bay for future naval masts and spars and was harshly criticized for it in the next election.

The disposal of public lands would seem an easy assignment but was not. It came in fits and starts, influenced by economic conditions and wars with Indian nations, and it sometimes came in large hunks. Several (mostly southern) states were given millions of acres of what were regarded as useless marshlands in 1850. By the end of the Civil War, the Homestead Act of 1862 had begun its distribution of 288 million acres in 160-acre parcels. Grants to states peeled off 328 million acres; to railroads went 94 million. By 1867, with the purchase of Alaska, almost 1.5 billion acres were still in federal hands, but the acquisition phase was over, and “disposal,” the unanimously agreed-upon goal of national land policy, began to relentlessly shrink the nation’s immense land dowry.

From time to time presidents became involved with the public land issue through territorial acquisition. Think of Jefferson buying the Louisiana Territory, or James Polk making war on Mexico and annexing much of its northern acreage. This was nation building and was occasionally presidential business. Yet the disposal of public lands was the messy job of the General Land Office in the executive branch, working under an immense tangle of laws annually piled one on the other by Congress. In Paul Gates’s magisterial history of public land law, he estimated that Congress had passed 3,500 separate land laws (when he counted them in the 1960s) with no overall coherence, provoking a cascade of disputes.

This arena of national policy was usually beneath presidential notice. One turns to the many biographies of US presidents from Washington to Harrison and finds in the indexes of these books virtually no entries under “public lands.” Notable exceptions would be Andrew Jackson’s unpopular efforts to keep white settlers from stealing Indian lands and Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act of 1862, the Republican Party’s effort to expand the number of farmers in the West by offering 160 acres to individual settlers upon five years of cultivation of the land. Millard Fillmore in 1851 became one of several pre–Civil War presidents to recommend sale or lease of mining claims, an idea with little traction. Congressional attention to the public land law of mining accelerated contentiously in the l870s, notably crippled by the almost total absence in US government of either the will or the regulatory capacity for establishing a government-regulated or -owned mining industry.

This mostly forgotten and contentious history of public land disposal can by no stretch be called “natural resource management.” It was certainly not environmental protection as we understand it. Presidents—and Congresses—were not in that business yet, in the century between Washington and Harrison.

Thus nature’s abundance was still evident. Historian William Cronon tells of New England colonists who saw spawning alewives, smelt, and sturgeon so thick they fancied they might walk across the water on the fishes’ backs; waterfowl so dense at migrating time that “some have killed a hundred geese in a week, fifty ducks at a shot, forty teals at another”; and “millions of millions of passenger pigeons so thick that I could see no sun.”¹ It was there in inexhaustible bounty to be used, most assumed, and any needed replenishing spoken of in the Book of Genesis would come from the land and the creatures themselves. Any changes made by humans represented progress, as the US wildlands were turned into cities, farms, gardens.

Armed with this basic exploitative outlook, the US population expanded westward. A population of 4 million at the founding grew to 23 million by 1850, then tripled to 76 million by 1900, expanding to the Pacific and settling even the remote, inhospitable sectors of the national territory sufficiently so that the Census Bureau declared in 1890 that the frontier, in the sense of a line of settlement moving westward, could no longer be said to exist. This growing population daily enhanced its technical capabilities to clear land; dam and divert rivers; drain swamps; plow; reap; mine; manufacture goods; build expanding cities. Expansionists, as their bible instructed them, were being fruitful, multiplying, and subduing the continent (and the original inhabitants), while leaving the replenishing to nature itself.

DEFORESTATION IN AMERICA

A billion acres of forest covered the part of the continent that was to become the United States, three-quarters of it east of the Mississippi. The forest cover of New England—vast stands of maple, birch, and hemlock only slightly modified by Indian ground-clearing fires—was the first to give way to plowed fields and the search for timber for home heating and other energy uses, fencing, railroad ties, housing, naval stores, and household products. By the mid-nineteenth century household timber cutting was augmented by mechanized crews in the expanding mobile lumbering industry as it spread into the Ohio Valley and then to the states on the western shores of the Great Lakes—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—leveling forests of white pine, maple, oak, hemlock, cedar to feed into the steam-powered circular and band saws of portable mills following the tree-topplers. A growing country demanded more wood products, and industrial lumbering veered southward, responding to boosters such as William H. Harrison of Chicago, whose How to Get Rich in the South (1888) promised the “supply of timber is inexhaustible.”

It may have seemed so in the 1880s, when the Appalachian forests had been severely thinned by individual settler/farmers and the appetite for naval stores had drawn small timber outfits and sawmills into only the easily reached virgin forests of loblolly pines and hill-country hardwoods of the Carolinas. South and west of that, most of the South’s original forest cover was intact. One writer remembers the forests along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi:

It was the Garden of Eden had the people only known it. The finest hardwood forest that ever grew out of the ground covered . . . this great State of Mississippi and it was fine. . . . The massive yellow poplar . . . the red gum, . . . its texture as fine as mahogany. . . . Then the ash, hickory, beech and white maple. . . . This greatest of all forests was a haven for the deer, wild turkey, wild hog, grey fox.²

Historian Tom Clark, in his lyrical The Greening of the South (1984), writes of a vast 147 million acres of longleaf pine that “hovered around the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts,” stretching from southern Virginia to eastern Texas, and of a larger area of cypress hardwoods in river bottoms and adjacent highlands, “400,000 square miles lying silently and awesomely in virgin woods.”³

Down from the exhausted virgin forestlands of the Great Lakes region came the “timber carpetbaggers,” in Clark’s phrase—lumber companies from New York, Michigan, and Illinois—joining the undercapitalized southern outfits, buying private lands or access to them, claiming public lands when possible, cutting illegally as well as legally. There was virtually no reforestation and no forest research. Industrial lumbering companies moved on to the next stand. Clark renders a harsh verdict on the lumbering industry “that seemed destined for oblivion and left more than 150 million acres of forest lands [in the South] an economic shambles.”⁴

AWAKENING TO WILDLIFE DEPLETION

To those felling timber in and across seemingly endless forests, destiny commanded those doing the work—westering, nation building, economically developing. Worriers about the permanence of North America’s vast forests were eventually heard, but the first doubts about the new nation’s conquering and settling style came from the hunters. The deer were deemed “overhunted” in New England, reflected by a closed season in Massachusetts as early as 1696 and intermittently across New England thereafter. Elk were thinning out east of the Appalachians as the nineteenth century began, and the last bison on that side of the range was reported killed in 1801. By midcentury the 60 million beaver estimated in North America when Columbus landed were gone but for patches retreating from the pelt gatherers into the high country of the West.

Most game hunters were subsistence and market hunters, but some were sportsmen, ranging on weekends out from New York and Boston into the Adirondacks or northern Maine, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., into the watery edges of the Chesapeake Bay. They were often keenly aware of the dwindling numbers of waterfowl, turkey, deer. As early as 1844 the secretary of the New York Sporting Club informed a local newspaper that “the objects and pursuits of the club . . . are confined solely to the protection and preservation of game.” It may have been the first private conservation organization in the United States, but in the 1850s such groups formed in other states.⁵

The sweeping habitat alteration brought by deforestation and expanded farm acreage in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth combined with aggressive hunting and improved firearms to reduce wildlife numbers. Then the unimagined began to happen. Astonishingly dense and vast flocks of passenger pigeons were commonplace in the early days of the nation. One ornithologist saw a flock in Kentucky in 1806 he estimated as a mile wide and forty miles long, and John James Audubon reported a flight of the birds in Ohio that blotted out the noonday sun as in a solar eclipse. The Carolina parakeet seemed equally numerous in the Carolinas and Florida. Without qualm, hunters knocked or netted them out of the air for meat, decorative feathers, or mere sport. Incas, the last parakeet, and Martha, the last pigeon, died in zoos in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Equally sudden and astonishing was the diminishment of the vast herds of buffalo (bison) stretching from the East Coast to the immense migrating herds on the Great Plains, perhaps 60–100 million animals. After the Civil War the railroad carved up their habitat, and there began a great slaughter for hides or tongues or Indian impoverishment or sport, the annual kill estimated at 5 million in the early 1870s. By the mid-1880s only remnants of buffalo adding up perhaps to one thousand in all remained in pieces of Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas, and along the Yellowstone River. This storied animal’s complete extinction was glumly predicted.

These dramatic modifications of the US environment brought by population growth, dispersion of that population across the continent, and the relentless pace of industrialization generated a slowly building literature characterized by expressions of alarm. Complaints about wildlife depletion had been heard for generations, but in the 1870s there was an astounding increase in national and local groups of sportsmen and their national magazines. American Sportsman, Forest and Stream, and Field and Stream were founded and gained wide readership in that decade, and historian John Reiger has counted 308 hunting and 34 fishing groups active not only in comradeship and storytelling but in pressing local and state governments to enforce game protection laws (some of which dated back to colonial times), establish game preserves, plant trees to restore habitat, and establish fish and wildlife commissions (with little power and low budgets).⁶ This little-noticed ferment over wildlife depletion, although it had little impact on the slaughter of beaver, buffalo, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and other once-abundant game, would flow into the public land controversies of the 1890s.

Seen in the centennial year of 1876, just to choose a vantage point, the impressively growing country was racing through its resources of timber, soil, and wildlife with only scattered complaints from naturalists and nature writers and spasmodic attention by local governments. Presidents and Congress were occupied with the really important national issues of slavery and secession, tariffs, the money supply. Then, in the last three decades of the century, the foremost (and essentially the only) natural resource policy issue facing the federal government on an ongoing basis—public land disposal—took a remarkable new turn.

RETHINKING NATURE AND THUS THE PUBLIC LANDS

An essential part of the context for that change of mind about the public domain to the west was the dramatic clear-cutting of US forests by industrial lumbering companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. The production of lumber increased eightfold from 1850 to 1910, more than double the rate of population growth, which tripled in that period, Douglas MacCleery tells us in American Forests (1992). At the start of the twentieth century US timber was being cut much faster than the rate of growth, and forest cover was shrinking while demand for timber continued to increase. Fire destroyed 20–50 million acres ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The New Nation’s Public Lands: A First Century without a National Vision
• 2 Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley: The Idea of Preserving the Public Lands Finds Cautious Presidential Sponsors, 1891–1901
• 3 Theodore Roosevelt: The Conservation Crusade Welcomes a Presidential Leader, 1901–1909
• 4 William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover: The Conservation Agenda, 1910s–1920s
• 5 Franklin D. Roosevelt: Conservation Foundations of New Deal Leadership, 1930s–1940s
• 6 Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy: Growing and Polluting in Boom Times, 1940s–1950s
• 7 Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter: Environmentalism Arrives, 1960s–1970s
• 8 Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton: Presidents Brown and Pale Green, 1980s–1990s
• 9 George W. Bush and Barack Obama: Wobbly Leaders, 2000–
• 10. Trying Again for Greener Presidents
• Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• Back Cover