The Shade Swamp Sanctuary had connections to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. This section will discuss how historians looked at the New Deal and its legacy.
The CCC and WPA were participants in its creation. Neil Maher’s book The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, is the key in the history of understanding the New Deal in general and the CCC legacy in particular.[12] He stated the CCC“…cast a long shadow across the political and natural landscapes of the post-war era.”[13]
Professor Maher said “…thousands of actual landscapes left behind by the CCC, which are scattered across the nation’s forests, farms, and parks.”[14] The Shade Swamp Sanctuary was a way of experiencing FDR’s New Deal through its work in the forests. Politics had a prominent place in the New Deal projects and that aspect will be brought into this study. Maher believed the CCC was a link, a connection, with its projects and the nature they were part of during the years of the Great Depression.
Robert Leighninger’s history, Long-Range Public Investment: the Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal wrote of the New Deal as a Greek tragedy. He described the New Deal as having a dual personality, made up of conservation and relief. While President Roosevelt felt a personal bond with the ideas of CCC, he did have to deal with legislators. Leighninger did not believed that the President understood the situation.[15] William S. Collins, in his review of the Leighninger book, believed people during the New Deal would create debate, a debate that he found still around with no answers and would be “provocative.”[16]
Historian Patrick D. Reagan stated that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up the first and only national planning agency in U.S. history in 1933. For ten years, Roosevelt’s planners created public works programs that confronted the economic crisis in the country. Reagan proposed the country faced with a conflict between the President and the conservative members of Congress. The battle had conservatives representing a Jeffersonian fear of the New Deal centralized state power. One could mix in the skepticism fear for the New Deal planners using Hamiltonian methods with economic and political aid from the executive branch.[17]
John Alexander Salmond, New Zealand born historian, did his doctoral study on the CCC in his study THE CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS, 1933-1942: a New Deal Case Study, he stated the issues with the CCC. Salmond saw that the New York Times as the only major paper in the United States commenting favorably on Roosevelt’s creation the CCC. The majority of the nation’s newspapers had at most “muted” comments about the CCC. He, as did Leighninger, discussed the problems the President had with the congress and his projects.[18]
[12] Neil Maher, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2009), 15.
[13] Maher, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, 15.
[14] Maher, The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, 15.
[15] William S. Collins, Review of Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943,” by Robert Leighninger, The Journal of Arizona History, October 26, 2019,
[16] Leighninger, Robert D. Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal. Columbia, S.C. University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
[17] Patrick D. Regan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. 1 – 27.
[18] John Alexander Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study. Durham, North Caroline: Duke University Press, 1967. 13 -14.
