The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of the Environmental Reform, 1917–1978

5. Progressive Opposition to the New Deal: 1930-1949

5 Progressive Opposition to the New Deal: 1930-1949 THERE ARE obvious continuities between the reforms of the progressive period and the New Deal, yet most of those who had considered themselves progressives and who lived into the 1930s opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt.I The men of the league were no exception. Their 1938 vote against a redwood national park reflected differences over park administration, but it also indicated alienation from the New Deal. They repeatedly complained that the New Dealers ignored their years of experience as preservationists. This sense of political isolation was partly a result of party differences, but the rapid centralization of public power also threatened traditional elites. For the monied and the independent businessmen, philanthropy had long provided a voice in public policy, which federal initiative now appeared to be choking off. Similarly, the growth of public expertise promised independent professionals a decreasing role as government consultants. The influence of these early reformers had been rooted in geographic communities or in professional contacts across the nation. Their anti-New Deal rhetoric expressed a search for community, as they looked from private city clubs to the state to defend their power against federal bureaucratization. It is a credit to the political sagacity of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that to achieve goals he crossed party lines into the power base of nonbureaucratic elites-for instance, personally asking the Sierra Club to support Kings Canyon National Park and twice offering Newton Drury the directorship of the Park Service. Drury's appointment also showed that the isolation of which these 65 66 THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE REDWOODS progressives complained was somewhat exaggerated and self-imposed. Their disagreements with the New Deal were partly ideological and were consistent with their earlier positions. Their opposition indicates the entrepreneurial character of their reform efforts. Their paternalistic assumptions that people must earn social amenities warred with the New Deal premise that social services were the public's right. They had pioneered public land management, but many never fully accepted bureaucracies. They preferred administrative expertise balanced by advisory boards or appointive committees. The tragedy of the Depression left them remarkably unaffected; they thought reform amid social unrest dangerous. The pragmatism of the New Deal shocked them. Their determination to make state reform work despite the evils of California politics in the 1930s indicates their distaste for Washington. Year after year Drury and Merriam exchanged bitter reflections on local and national politics. Shortly after Frank Merriam's gubernatorial victory over Upton Sinclair in late 1934, Drury wrote Merriam that members of the California State Park Commission had been "summoned to Sacramento and presented with the implied alternative of their resignation and dismemberment of the park organization or the resignation of Colonel Wing," chief of the State Division of Beaches and Parks. Wing was in fact sacrificed and replaced with a former commissary contractor, James Snook of Oakland. In rapid succession, the assistant chief, commission secretary, and one of the commissioners also received dismissal notices. The governor then fired the long-time superintendent of the northern redwood park district, Enoch French, and replaced him with, in Drury's words, "a cheap politician with no park training."2 The league's executive secretary hurried to meet with the new appointee, whom he found playing poker with "three cronies," giving the fellow, Drury later commented, "all the advantage of being 'warmed up.''' After the cronies had departed, the two "sparred verbally for some time." According to the executive secretary, the appointee was "far too smart to say that he would not take the position, as he obviously saw its 'trading' possibilities. . . . Sure enough ... he was a road contractor" and wanted "to furnish gravel to the highways." French's position was saved through this intervention. "Politicians of the cheapest sort" and a desperate lack of funds, however, would dog the state park effort throughout the rest of the Depression.3 In the 1920s the league had established the California state park system and arranged $380,932 in state funding, which together with private monies had saved 6,514 acres of redwoods.' In the following decade Drury's group discovered that the administrative structure it had championed concentrated power in the state's chief executive. PROGRESSIVE OPPOSITION TO THE NEW DEAL 67 Unable to prevent appointment of Chief Snook, Drury at first consoled himself with the fact that the chief's authority was small in relation...