How ‘Ding’ Darling Hoodwinked FDR Into Funding the Migratory Bird Program
Sometimes it’s not what you know, or even who you know, that counts.
Sometimes getting the job done requires a little good old-fashioned chicanery.
The story of how Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling raided the treasury when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was off on a fishing trip has been told before, but it’s worth repeating.
FDR’s appointment of a political cartoonist to head the Bureau of Biological Survey seemed an odd choice even to Darling, who initially rejected the offer. A Republican and persistent critic of the wildlife programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Darling’s most obvious qualification for the job was that he was more useful to the administration drawing a salary inside the Beltway than he was drawing newspaper cartoons back in Des Moines, Iowa.
Roosevelt had promised Darling a million dollars for waterfowl habitat, but this was the Great Depression, and despite FDR’s claims to the contrary, ducks weren’t utmost on the president’s list of priorities.
When Darling would ask for money, Roosevelt would laugh and scribble out an IOU for a million dollars. But FDR’s chits couldn’t restore wetlands, and duck populations were crashing.
Darling dug deep into his bag of tricks and came up with Sen. Peter Norbeck, a popular lawmaker from South Dakota who insiders knew was dying of cancer. When the duck stamp appropriation was being debated, Norbeck rose to ask unanimous consent for a Senate resolution giving the Bureau of Biological Survey $1 million in unexpended relief funds from the Survey’s restoration program.
At least, that’s what his fellow Senators believed. Norbeck, who spoke with a heavy Scandinavian accent, had removed his false teeth, rendering his comments, as Darling later described them, “…totally void of understandable articulation.”
Only later was it learned that Norbeck had actually introduced an 11th-hour rider allocating $6 million for habitat restoration. Partly because of Norbeck’s popularity with his colleagues and partly because it was well-known he was ill, the Senate approved the bill and the rider with a unanimous voice vote.
Roosevelt was preparing to leave on a fishing trip when the bill crossed his desk. Darling had asked him to watch for it so the provisions of the bill could be implemented in time for the coming hunting season. The president signed it without reading the fine print.
Roosevelt later wrote, “This fellow Darling is the only man in history who got an appropriation through Congress, past the Budget and signed by the President without anybody realizing that the Treasury had been raided.
“Nevertheless, more power to your arm! Go ahead with the six million dollars and talk with me about a month hence in regard to additional lands, if I have any money left.”