Publisher's Weekly Review
Brinkley (The Quiet World), a professor of history at Rice University, succeeds in showing that F.D.R. should be remembered for his extraordinary, often unsung role as a great conservationist, particularly of public lands. From childhood, Roosevelt was taken by the natural surroundings of his Hudson River home, and as he emerged to greatness he never lost his interest in preserving natural habitats as state and national parks, wildlife refuges, monuments, and forests-especially those lands near American cities. Brinkley, who in Wilderness Warrior wrote about Theodore Roosevelt's outdoorsmanship, makes a solid, if mostly unstated, case that F.D.R.'s conservationist record is as important as his cousin's. Brinkley also addresses the many people who joined F.D.R. in his environmental passions as he covers the lands the president and his administration set aside. He also shows how F.D.R., in his wartime presidency, was moving toward what Brinkley terms "global conservation." The book's detail can be overwhelming and, as with many works of modern American history, it's mostly narrative without a strong point of view, save for Brinkley's evident and justifiable admiration for F.D.R.'s achievements. But Brinkley's book adds significantly to knowledge of F.D.R. as both man and president, and ranks among the best books on this major historical figure. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As he did for Theodore Roosevelt in The Wilderness Warrior (2009), fluent and perceptive historian Brinkley tells the full story of Franklin Roosevelt's grand and profound conservation efforts. FDR grew up in a verdant, rolling paradise on his family's Hudson River estate, a precocious only child enthralled by the living world and possessed of a scientist's ardor for fact and documentation. He never lost his passion for nature as he rose through the political ranks, and he was always happiest outdoors, even after polio stole his ability to walk. As president, Roosevelt zestfully traveled all over the country, keenly observing the land's glory and abuses. He believed fervently in the value of state and national parks and revitalized and established many, along with wilderness and wildlife preserves protecting giant sequoias, organ-pipe cactus, birds, fish, and bighorn sheep. Recognizing, during the Great Depression, the connection between conservation of natural resources and America's economic future, FDR put the unemployed to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps preserving habitats, making public lands more accessible, and improving the nation's infrastructure. Brinkley vividly tracks Roosevelt's political know-how, legislative muscle, and fearlessness from a unique and important perspective in this engrossing and richly illuminating portrait of one of the American environment's most ardent and effective champions.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was many great things: our greatest economic president, pulling the United States out of the Depression; our greatest foreign policy president, leading the country to victory during World War II. But he was something else, too: our 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 habitat-destroying hydroelectric dams and initiated what eventually became the national highway system, solidifying America's future as a suburban car culture. This was no incidental résumé, as the historian Douglas Brinkley makes clear in his enjoyably 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. The Roosevelt cousins make for a satisfying historical diptych. Both came from wealth, and as children were exposed to the best that the American outdoors had to offer. Relatively early in their careers, they came to believe that capitalism had been allowed to run roughshod over much of America's natural beauty, and that it was the government's duty to set things right. There were differences between them, starting with their personalities: Teddy, who as governor of New York had a boxing ring set up in his .Albany mansion and was often accused of preserving land so he could have more animals to kill, versus Franklin, who preferred leisurely fishing to backcountry hunting and, in his free time, could often be found doting on the trees at his Hyde Park estate. And yet "Rightful Heritage" is in several ways a more engrossing book than "Wilderness Warrior." Many of Teddy's environmental achievements remain in place today, but his perspective, for all its forward-looking rhetoric, was focused on pulling back from the excesses of the Gilded Age. And his accomplishments, impressive as they were, were possible only because the rest of the country had yet to catch up with him ; one gets the sense that corporations, Congress and the public often simply watched in awe as his pen strokes created vast stretches of publicly protected wilderness. But that was the easy part. By the 1930s, Franklin understood, it was no longer enough to protect the natural resources America had left; after a century of industrialization, the landscape was as bankrupt as the economy. "Heretofore our conservation policy has been merely to preserve as much as possible of the existing forests," he said in a 1931 radio address, while still governor of New York. "Our new policy goes a step further. It will not only preserve the existing forests, but create new ones." That meant not just territorial set-asides, but complex, politically expensive measures like environmental regulations, farmer education and labor-intensive replanting and ecological research. 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 - the back rooms, the legislative line items - mattered much more. In "Wilderness Warrior," Brinkley's best set pieces involve bear-hunting trips and battles in Cuba; in "Rightful Heritage," they feature epic fights with Congress, and within Roosevelt's own administration. 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, the 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 favor of Harry Truman). Like Dr. Seuss' Lorax, 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 the large agribusinesses, which he believed were critical for putting the economy right (surprising, given that he was the most left-wing politician ever to hold a high federal office). In 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 program. 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 same reason, Roosevelt often failed to appreciate the 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 hardpressed to find a major western river that Roosevelt didn't want to dam," Brinkley writes. Over time his farm subsidies became one of the largest corporate-welfare programs 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. As Aldo Leopold, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin and a critic of Roosevelt, said, the president failed to resolve the "standard paradox of the 20th century: Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do." 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. He fought for clean air and water regulations and for continuing to fund the C.C.C., as a way of instilling a sense of ecological responsibility. And he envisioned global environmental stewardship as a core mission of the United Nations he was putting in place at the time of his death - an amazingly prescient vision for an ailing president in the midst of a world war. 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. In his free time, Roosevelt often doted on the trees at his Hyde Park estate. CLAY RISEN is an Op-Ed editor for The Times. He is writing a book about Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
Kirkus Review
Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; Cronkite, 2012, etc.) returns with the provocative argument that Theodore Roosevelt was not the only environmentalist in the Roosevelt clanfar from it. "There was never a eureka moment that transformed Franklin D. Roosevelt into a dyed-in-the-wool forest conservationist," writes the author at the opening of this book. If there were, perhaps it would be at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, when the 11-year-old boy studied the thousands of specimens of flora and fauna on display, ardently taking in "the nucleus of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History." Having grown up with an interest in nature, and especially in birds, FDR took time as an officeholder in New York to preserve state lands and create parks; among his campaigns was one to convert the entire Catskills Mountains region into a protected conservation district, if not a state park, that mixed private and public ownership. As governor of New York, he assembled his first "brain trusts," and among the first of these was one devoted to forestry and agronomy. As president, he famously initiated such environmental programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps, using an earlier idea of "forestry as work-relief" to gain bipartisan support for other planks of the New Deal. In his biography of the secretary, T.H. Watkins gave Interior Secretary Harold Ickes most of the credit for the principal environmental accomplishments of the FDR administrations, but Brinkley makes clear that Roosevelt was there at the creation and took a personal interest and lobbied hard for his proposals. Not all of them succeeded, notes the author: of a proposed "national shoreline parks" measure, for instance, only one of a dozen sites, Cape Hatteras, came under national protection. Even so, dozens of grasslands, game refuges, forests, and other conservation units came into the commonweal thanks to FDR's work. Overlong, as are so many of Brinkley's books, but a brightly written, highly useful argument, especially in a time when the public domain is under siege. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Renowned presidential historian and television commentator Brinkley (history, Rice Univ.) is author of innumerable books including The Wilderness Warrior, that recount Theodore Roosevelt's role in environmental preservation. Here he focuses on the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which restored and reforested the land and established dozens of park systems and scenic roadways. FDR was motivated by both his congenital love for nature and his acute political instincts to alleviate unemployment during the Great Depression, combining conservation policy with his overall economic strategy. He also benefited from the advice of his wife, Eleanor, politicians Harold Ickes and Gifford Pinchot, and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. Brinkley further studies less-examined figures such as the influential Rosalie Edge, a New York socialite and suffragist who lobbied the Audubon Society and managed the Emergency Conservation Committee. As with Theodore, FDR's policies navigated between practical uses of land and pristine protection. VERDICT With an accessible writing style, Brinkley crafts a detailed study that will attract legions of faithful readers. Scholars will savor the author's meticulous annotations in addition to endnotes highlighting a lesser-studied aspect of Franklin's legacy of governmental action, which is also briefly addressed in FDR and the Environment, edited by D. Woolner and H. Henderson. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
