Letter from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Jay N. “Ding” Darling, July 29, 1935. Presidential Letters Collection, Special Collections and Archives.
After Ding Darling became head of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, his frustration with the lack of funding increased. Darling hatched a plan with friends in Washington, D.C., including respected South Dakota senator Peter Norbeck. With Norbeck’s help, Darling wrote a line into the new Duck Stamp Act that added extra funding for the Bureau of Biological Survey. They knew that line would be thrown out by Congress if anyone paid enough attention to it. To help get it passed, Norbeck read the act to the Senate without his false teeth so that no one could understand him.
President Roosevelt was planning to leave on a fishing trip, so he hastily signed the act into law without reading it. By doing so, he unwittingly gave the million dollars that he had kept promising Darling. He later sent a letter to Darling congratulating him for pulling the largest “heist” on the U.S. Treasury in history.
Letter transcript:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 29, 1935.
Dear Jay:—
As I was saying to the Acting Director of the Budget the other day—”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.”
You hold an all-time record. In addition to the six million dollars ($6,000,000) you got, the Federal Courts say that the United States Government has a perfect constitutional right to condemn millions of acres for the welfare, health and happiness of ducks, geese, sandpipers, owls and wrens, but has no constitutional right to condemn a few old tenaments [sic] in the slums for the health and happiness of the little boys and girls who will be our citizens of the next generation!
Nevertheless, more power to your arm! Go ahead with the six million dollars ($6,000,000) and talk with me about a month hence in regard to additional lands, if I have any more money left.
As ever yours,
President Roosevelt
Honorable J.N. Darling,
Bureau of Biological Survey,
South Building,
Washington, D.C.