Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch: The Lives of Naturalists Frederick and Francis Hamerstrom

5 Conservation Beginnings in a Midwestern Appalachia

Before Roosevelt, the Federal Government hardly touched your life. . . . Now . . . it came right down to Main Street. Half of them loved it, half of them hated it. . . . But they were delighted to have those green relief checks cashed in their cash registers. They’d have been out of business if it had not been for them. They were cursing Roosevelt for the intrusion into their lives. At the same time, they were living off it. Main Street still has this fix. —Ed Paulsen, speaking in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times 67 On a brilliant early autumn day in 1935, loiterers on the unpaved streets of the shabby village of Necedah, Wisconsin suddenly came to attention.1 A jaunty tan Essex roadster was moving slowly down the somnolent street, its open rumble seat piled high with boxes topped by a roped-in plant press and a classic Windsor chair. Behind it, the car pulled a small trailer, also well loaded. Lanky men, their eyes shaded under battered caps and fedoras, watched the vehicle pull over. The driver, a tall, immaculately dressed young man with dark hair and a pleasant smile, opened his door and asked a bystander for directions to the Resettlement Administration office. The loiterer scratched his head and allowed as how he had never heard of it. Hammy explained that people there were studying muskrats , beaver, and ducks in the area. “That’ll be the relief office. Go on down a block or two and you’ll see it; on the right. Used to be the bank.” Heads swiveling, the onlookers watched the driver park, get out, 5 Conservation Beginnings in a Midwestern Appalachia and open the door for a young woman in heels and a tweed suit. Holding her arm, he escorted her into the office. The diagnosis was immediate and lasting. “City folks.” Thus the elegant young Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom were branded in a drought-plagued pocket of the Midwest. Ironically, these blue bloods were as much children of the Great Depression as the impoverished people they had come to live among. They were prime examples of the wide disparity of Depression effects in the regionally and ethnically varied, class-conscious America of the 1930s. They chose, as did later rebels—the children of privilege in the 1960s—to reject many of their parents’ values. But unlike many of those later counterparts, they still believed in the worth of an aristocratic breeding and the value of the social graces. Farm folk, by contrast, had experienced the Depression years as a time of unrelieved deprivation, hardship, and fear. Their hard times started earlier and, in the sand counties of central Wisconsin, lasted longer. A nationwide agricultural depression had begun in the early 1920s and had deepened distressingly by the time of Roosevelt’s election . By then, with credit dried up and debt loads already high, farmers were vulnerable—not only to the normal ups-and-downs of markets and the weather but also to larger problems: drought, crop failure related to depleted soil, and takeover by the new large-scale enterprises able to buy the machinery that permitted economies of scale. Five million farm folk—roughly one million families—were on relief in 1933; and many of the slightly more successful still lived in desperate poverty.2 The various states did what they could with loans of livestock, improved seed, and fertilizer for those able to follow the recommendations that would rebuild soil and increase yields. It worked for some. Others received sickly stock, late seed, or inefficient treatment by government agents.3 Those unfortunates now owed money on the unfulfilled promise of the efforts to aid them. In some places, a long cycle of farm depletion had come to a point of no return. For them, Roosevelt’s New Deal developed a bolder program. It aimed to do away with intractable rural poverty by moving farmers from unsuitable land to more promising situations. Biologists would study acres thus emptied; if they proved suitable, they Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch 68 would become flourishing reserves, teeming with game. This was the ambitious task of the Resettlement Administration,4 established by Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 7027 of 30 April 1935, with the visionary Rexford G. Tugwell as the first administrator. The 164 projects it funded nationwide were a small part of a wider effort: the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Civilian Conservation...