As governor of New York from January 1, 1929, to December 31, 1932, FDR put more than 10,000 unemployed men to work planting trees, managing forests, and stopping erosion. When Roosevelt won the presidential election in 1932, he asked Brown to create the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Roosevelt’s hobby was going to be an impetus for some elements of the New Deal. “F.D.R. saw the restoration of the land—the prevention of dust bowls and floods through soil conservation practices, the rotation of crops, the planting of trees,” the historian John Sears wrote, “as intimately bound up with restoring the livelihoods of the people living on the land.”37
When Roosevelt created the CCC on March 31, 1933, Bob Marshall celebrated. FDR had once told his aide Harry Hopkins that every boy should work for at least half a year in forestry; to Marshall, this was a very wise statement indeed. Within a few months 1,000 CCC camps were operational, offering employment to nearly 300,000 young men. A few weeks later FDR established the first CCC marine station in the southern Tongass National Forest; at long last TR’s greatest accomplishment in Alaska received ranger boats and increased protection by wardens.38
Marshall—who never looked for financial opportunities beyond the strictures of a government salary—was thrilled by all the New Deal efforts made in Alaska toward parks, wildlife management, rangeland, and soil and water conservation, but he was distressed that the reclamation of wilderness didn’t grab the president’s attention. The Forest Service did continue to preserve “primitive areas” as stipulated in the L-20 regulations of 1929, but it wasn’t ardent about enforcing the laws or actually prohibiting development.39
Harold L. Ickes, however, feisty and belligerent, was drawn to the wilderness movement. He was, politically, a Bull Moose conservationist, a throwback to the turn of the century when TR claimed that the vast open spaces were the great incubator of American democracy. “We ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country as we can,” Ickes told a convention of CCC workers. “I am not in favor of building any more roads in the National Parks than we have to build. I am not in favor of doing anything along the line of so-called improvements that we do not have to do.”40
President Roosevelt also established the Kenai National Moose Range in Alaska with Executive Order No. 8979 (just a few days after Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941).41 An editorial in Seward Gateway had called for a moose reserve on the Kenai Peninsula a decade earlier. And, in 1932, thirty-seven conservation-minded citizens from the village of Ninilchik petitioned Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde to create a new refuge like the one on Fire Island. In addition to lobbying to create a Kenai National Moose Range, the Alaska Game Commission had issued a number of new hunting regulations throughout the territory. But boomers in mining towns like Hope and Sunrise objected strongly to the federal government’s protection of moose. Moose was Alaska’s regional meat, prepared marinated, used in casseroles or stews, and eaten in burger buns.
From 1932 to 1941 boomers fought against the Biological Survey, opposing an executive order to save Alaska’s moose population. But when the Biological Survey was transferred from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior on July 1, 1939, the idea of a moose refuge gathered momentum. Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order the U.S. government started constructing military installations on Kodiak Island and at Dutch Harbor. As a trade-off, Ira N. Gabrielson, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, was able to persuade FDR to establish Kenai National Moose Range, encompassing 2 million acres. Furthermore, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to allow limited hunting and land leasing in the refuge—leading important “hook and bullet” nonprofits to support the moose sanctuary. With World War II dominating all aspects of American life, the Kenai National Moose Range seemed like a fine way to protect wildlife. But life isn’t that simple. Richfield discovered oil on the Kenai Moose Range in the early 1950s and began demanding immediate exploitation of the field to obtain petroleum. A showdown over Alaskan moose was looming.42
Marshall continued to worry that the New Deal wasn’t socialist. He was opposed, for example, to the federal government’s building dams in wilderness areas of immense value as natural resources. But he cheered the Department of the Interior for saving such treasured landscapes as the Sonora Desert of Arizona, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Big Bend in Texas. Other national monuments—Zion, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and Capitol Reef—were either expanded or upgraded to national park status later.43 Besides the CCC, Marshall approved heartily of the Soil Conservation Service, whose aim was to stop erosion. Feeling that “big timber” was waning in the Pacific Northwest, Marshall tried to persuade his publisher to change the title of Arctic Village to Those Bastards, the Lumbermen (possibly he was joking). But his dedication never changed, from the first draft to the final proof. It read: “To the people of the Koyukuk who have made for themselves the happiest civilization of which I have knowledge.”
Arctic Village greatly enhanced Marshall’s career. Appointed by President Roosevelt as director of the Indian Forest Service, Marshall would travel around the country for about six months a year inspecting forests from Minnesota’s Lake Superior to Arizona’s Gila National Forest. Visiting reservations where pent-up frustration was increasing, he also helped Native American tribes reacquire forests stolen from them in the nineteenth century when treaties were broken. When presented with discrepancies in land title cases, he usually sided with the Indians. But he wasn’t helping all the Native tribes. Marshall confronted the Navajo over their overgrazing of stock on the Arizona range. Wearing an old cotton workshirt, faded dungarees, and a straw hat, he didn’t seem like a USDA Forest Service officer. Returning to his old hobby of collecting unique American place-names, the ever-studious Marshall learned fascinating words from various tribes. He marveled that the Chippewa in Minnesota, for example, had a particularly long word for cranberry pie: muskegmeenanboskominnasiganeetibasijigunbadingwaybaquazyshegun.44
Although Arctic Village sold only 3,000 copies, many people interested in Alaskan conservation read it, including the twenty-nine-year-old Mardy Murie. Olaus Murie, the husband of the buoyant, clear-minded Mardy, was considered the world’s leading biological expert on Arctic caribou, and she had been assisting him to better understand the 11,000-year relationship between people and caribou in northern Alaska. A careful, college-educated note-taker, Mardy eventually wrote an elegant memoir, Two in the Far North, as a tribute to Arctic Alaska and the frontier spirit of its people. Marshall, while staying at a hotel in Chicago, received a warmhearted fan letter from her. “Of course I heard of you often and your fame still lingers in the Koyukuk as the most beautiful woman who ever came to that region,” Marshall replied. “Jack Hood, Cone Frank, Pass Postlethwaite and Verne Watts each told me so, and they’ve seen them all come and go from Dirty Maude to Clara Carpenter. . . . Mr. Murie’s fame also lingers in the Koyukuk.”45
This exchange of letters was the beginning of a united front to preserve what would become the Gates of the Arctic National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As part of the New Deal conservationist program, Marshall soon held highly significant meetings with the Muries in Washington, D.C., and Moose, Wyoming. Following the death of Charles Sheldon, Olaus Murie—taking some time from the caribou—had also become the Biological Survey’s leading expert on the Jackson Hole elk herd. Mardy Murie continued assisting her husband with his study of the caribou herds of Alaska and the Yukon. The three conservationists believed in one crucial point: that in the aftermath of Hetch Hetchy, wild Alaska was now the environmental battleground.
Pleased with the success of Arctic Village, Marshall began working on a follow-up, The People’s Forest. Published in 1933, it was crammed with scientific data, and it charged that the reckless clear-cutting strategy of “big timber” was destroying American landscapes. The U.S. government’s halfway policies were failing to arrest this destruction. No longer, Marshall argued, should Americans tolerate tracts
of tree stumps in their communities. Private companies, he feared, were bent on ruining landscapes for quick profit and were unconcerned about the environmental devastation they casually left behind. From Marshall’s perspective, it behooved the Roosevelt administration to acquire about 200 million additional acres of land. That would bring America’s public forestlands to well over 500 million acres. According to Marshall it was time to “discard the unsocial view” that our woods belonged to lumbermen. “Every acre of woodland in the country,” he insisted, “is rightly a part of the people’s forest.”46
As the historian James M. Glover noted, the publication of The People’s Forest had the unfortunate effect of leaving Marshall somewhat marginalized as a utopian socialist.47 There was a strain in the book that could be read as hostile to the whole capitalistic notion of land acquisition. Owners of large ranches in Wyoming and Texas considered Marshall as communistic as Leon Trotsky and as eccentric as Rockwell Kent. Bureaucrats didn’t respect his clarion calls or his pejorative language. Franklin Reed, editor of the Journal of Forestry, said The People’s Forest was “dangerous,” an irresponsible plea for huge U.S. government reserves with virtually no concern about how such a preservationist policy would affect jobs in depressed areas.48 Marshall then started a well-organized campaign to have Reed fired. In any case, by 1935 FDR started speaking in extremely eco-friendly terms. “It is an error to say we have ‘conquered Nature,’ ” Roosevelt told Congress. “We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with Nature.”49 In Vermont’s Winoski River valley alone, more than 3,000 CCC workers were encamped for a “green” reforestation campaign.
Marshall proved to be a good bureaucrat, accounting for every penny spent; but his memorandums were often filled with belittling sarcasm and ridicule. Allan Harper, head of the Indian Bureau’s Organization Division, warned Marshall that if he didn’t want to be fired, he’d better consult a censor who would have the power to omit some particularly brutal phrases. What saved Marshall was the fact that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes admired his vision and boldness. Cantankerous, judgmental, and deeply devoted to conservation, Ickes was nicknamed Donald Duck by FDR because of his cartoonish temper tantrums. Horace Albright, head of the National Park Service, said that Ickes was “the meanest man who ever sat in a Cabinet office in Washington” but also “the best Secretary of Interior we ever had.”50 Ickes shared Marshall’s foresight when it came to increasing primitive areas within America’s national forests. “I think we ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country of ours as we can,” Ickes told CCC workers. “I do not happen to favor the scarring of a wonderful mountainside just so we can have a skyline drive. It sounds poetical, but it may be an atrocity.”51
In the summer of 1934 Marshall was appointed by Ickes to represent the Department of the Interior in creating an international wilderness sanctuary with Canada along the Minnesota-Ontario border. Marshall hoped for a roadless national park. Visitors would instead paddle canoes like the voyageurs of old to get around the “land of 10,000 lakes.” Deeply disturbed because the National Park Service had been building turnpikes inside wonders like the Shenandoah Valley, Marshall worked overtime to develop a new roadless policy. From his perspective, the skyline drives built through the scenic center of Shenandoah National Park were a betrayal of the law of 1916 saying that both wildlife and scenery should remain “unimpaired.” Plans for concrete thoroughfares through Great Smoky Mountains National Park also incensed Marshall. Roads would facilitate logging, mining, dam construction, and oil drilling. By focusing on roadlessness Marshall knew he could eventually win the battle to preserve wilderness.52
Ickes dispatched Marshall to Tennessee to recommend routes for a proposed new highway from Shenandoah to the Smokies. Cleverly, Marshall wrote an urgent missive asking Benton MacKaye, the father of the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail, to meet with him in Knoxville. Meanwhile, Mackaye had asked Harold C. Anderson, secretary of the Potomac Appalachian Trail, to come with him to Tennessee. Meeting at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Knoxville, the three conservationists, recognizing that there was no lobbying group aimed at keeping public lands roadless, started an open-ended dialogue. They wanted to found a new nonprofit group like the Izaak Walton League or the Sierra Club. To these men the idea of a highway in the Smokies reeked of “bad planning.” Marshall’s vocal dissent, however, was construed by some members of the National Park Service as an “improper and ungracious attack.”53
A few months later, in 1935, Marshall met in Washington, D.C., with Robert Sterling Yard (a creator of the National Park Service) and Mackaye to officially announce the founding of The Wilderness Society.
The nature photographer Ansel Adams once wrote that certain “noble areas” of the world should be left in as “close-to-primal condition” as possible.54 That was what Marshall wanted to happen in America. “All we desire to save from invasion,” he declared, “is that extremely minor fraction of outdoor America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smell.”55 Aldo Leopold, the most eminent wildlife biologist of the twentieth century, was brought in to become a cofounder of The Wilderness Society.56 “It will be no longer a case of a few individuals fighting,” Marshall declared, “but a well organized and thoroughly earnest mass of wilderness lovers.”57
The Wilderness Society was officially created at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 1935. Professional, self-assured, and devoted to nature, these high priests of the wilderness planned to challenge huge corporations that were hungry for public lands to be opened up for lumbering, mining, and grazing. The Wilderness Society saw itself as focused on results. Saving roadless land areas was the binding motivation of this new nonprofit. The first paragraph of its four-page mission statement read as follows:
Primitive America is vanishing with appalling rapidity. Scarcely a month passes in which some highway does not invade an area which since the beginning of time had known only natural modes of travel; or some last remaining virgin timber tract is not shattered by the construction of an irrigation project into an expanding and contracting mud flat; or some quiet glade hitherto disturbed only by birds and insects and wind in the trees, does not bark out the merits of “Crazy Water Crystals” and the mushiness of “Cocktails for Two.”58
Under the enterprising leadership of Marshall and Yard, The Wilderness Society deliberately limited its membership. Approximately 500 dedicated fighters seemed about right. Compromisers weren’t welcomed. “We want no straddlers,” Marshall said. “For in the past they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval forest which should never have been lost.”59 The headquarters for The Wilderness Society was Yard’s apartment at 1840 Mintwood Place in Washington, D.C. An advertisement-free magazine, the Living Wilderness, was issued; its main feature was an attempt to stop road construction in Idaho’s Selway-Salmon river region and Washington’s North Cascades and Olympic Mountains. By October 1935 Marshall was in southeast Utah fighting to maintain 1 million acres of roadless wilderness. A movement had begun.
Marshall was wise to cofound The Wilderness Society with seventy-four-year-old Robert “Bob” Sterling Yard. Born during the Civil War in Haverstraw, New York, Yard was an old-style gentleman, the kind of man who tipped his hat and never swore. He had graduated from Princeton University and become a leading journalist and editor in New York City. One of his closest friends had been Stephen Mather, a fine reporter who went on to become the founding director of the National Park Service. Yard quit his career as a journalist to become the vital advocate of protecting wild and scenic America. Unlike Marshall, he had a calming personality that never grated on anyone.
A ferocious worker, Yard started a letter-writing campaign on behalf of The Wilderness Society that was stunningly impressive. Membership drives, public photographs, and lyceums were all part of Yard’s programming agenda, based on the gospel of “wilderness salvation.” He became the first editor of the Living Wilderness, perhaps the mos
t important circular promoting Alaska’s nature heritage in the Tongass and Chugach. “The spirit of the forest is American,” he wrote in 1936. “It moves indomitably against all obstructions.”60
With The Wilderness Society up and running, and Yard handling the daily logistics, Marshall advocated on behalf of Arctic Alaska. Capitalizing on his appointment as director of forestry for the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1937, and later as head of recreation management for the U.S. Forest Service, Marshall kept asking this question: Why not have Alaska’s North Slope designated a wilderness area? In a report he wrote for the U.S. government in 1937, building on The Wilderness Society’s mandate, Marshall called for “all of Alaska north of the Yukon River” (minus a small area around Nome) to be officially declared wilderness. There should be no roads or congestion, just wilderness with caribou herds roaming free and birdlife thriving as if industrialization had never happened. It would be a sublime place with brilliant patches of tundra and wildflowers. An Arctic refuge would be cathartic for city dwellers, a vast treeless landscape uncompromised by jackhammers, smog, or bulldozers. In the future, someone like Thoreau could wander on snowshoes to the northernmost Arctic, camping along the Hulahula or Kongakut river in June, and warding off mosquitoes by a dwindling campfire as he witnessed the surreal spectacle of the aurora borealis. Such tramping was a wonderful part of the American intellectual tradition.
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