The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
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Olaus knew that Douglas, who had hiked in the Cascades and the Olympics, disdained being pampered on the trail. The primitive conditions on the expedition—no pavement, no roads of any kind—would appeal to his desire to escape from the nation’s congested capital during the humid summer months. The unanswered question was whether the justice’s wife (his third) would be able to tolerate the backcountry conditions. Friends of Douglas had a theory that if a wife couldn’t handle his arduous campouts in the Pacific Northwest, then he’d dump her.7 “Trim, petite, blond, every hair in place, chic gray flannel suit, nylon hose, brown calf loafers,” Mardy wrote, describing Mrs. Douglas. “But I needn’t have worried! The first thing she said to me was ‘I’ve got my blue jeans and rubber pacs just like you said, as soon as I can get into our duffel.’ ”8
For too long, William O. Douglas’s judicial brilliance, intense manner, poetic demeanor, outdoors heartiness, uncluttered mind, environmental prescience, and landmark legal decisions have been neglected by historians. Because Douglas had a rather unconventional personal life, including numerous wives and numerous affairs with Supreme Court interns, gossip has often prevailed. But Douglas represented much that was good, true, and durable in America. Never did he fritter a day away with nothing accomplished. Hikes, to Douglas, were a productive time for thinking. During the cold war, nobody else fought to protect the Bill of Rights with the same ardor as Douglas. During his thirty-six years on the Supreme Court, Douglas—misleadingly pigeonholed as a New Deal liberal—was the truest western libertarian of his era. Time and again he was the best friend working people had on the Supreme Court. Douglas always defended the unemployed, the homeless, the freakish, and the contrarian against the abuses of both big corporations and big government. Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison surely would have understood his feisty unorthodoxy. Nobody would have been a better guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition than Douglas. The U.S. Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch eventually embarrassed Joe McCarthy in 1954 by asking whether McCarthy had “no shame” in pursuing supposed communists; but Douglas had attacked McCarthy from the outset, accusing him of trampling on both procedural rights and the First Amendment. “The great danger of this period is not inflation, nor the national debt nor automatic warfare,” Douglas wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “The great, critical danger is that we will so limit or narrow the range of permissible discussion and permissible thought that we will become victims of the orthodox school.”9
Douglas had appropriately titled this article “The Black Silence of Fear.” The narrow thinking of the Republican right annoyed him to no end. Luckily for America, by the early 1950s Douglas’s shoot-from-the-hip voice had become unrestrained. While Douglas held no brief for Marxist-Leninist philosophy, he understood how essential it was for the Supreme Court to defend freedom of thought at all costs. Douglas predicted an Orwellian nightmare if American teachers, for example, were silenced and forced to adhere to official dogma. Yet Douglas, for all his virtues, made a series of bad choices regarding whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg should be executed—as they were on June 17, 1953. He refused to fight for their lives: in the end, he had no tolerance for spies.
On the other hand, Douglas got the disaster in Vietnam right from start to finish. His 1953 book North from Malaya warned the Eisenhower administration not to get bogged down in Southeast Asia along with the French at Dien Bien Phu. North from Malaya was Douglas’s third book on his “traveling social conscience” (as his biographer James F. Simon put it). Douglas was prophetic about the limits of U.S. intervention in the third world. He would have made a terrific secretary of state. All of his “magic carpet” trips took place while he was on the Supreme Court. Friends used to joke that there must be five William O. Douglas look-alikes because he seemed to be everywhere at once. Journalists and book reviewers often praised Douglas for being the most literary Supreme Court justice since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “The eye-to-ear witness reporting,” the chief White House correspondent for CBS, Eric Sevareid, wrote of Douglas in the Saturday Review, “is magnificent.”
Douglas brought along to the Arctic all his acuity, and his global perspective. While the Muries didn’t know much about the Rosenbergs or Vietnam in 1956, they were keenly aware that Douglas might hold the key to persuading President Eisenhower to sign an executive order creating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When Douglas asked, “You want to go for a walk?” power brokers quickly grabbed their hats. Only Woody Guthrie was a more celebrated tramper than Douglas in 1956. Bringing his tackle box with him, using mostly a light rod and dry fly, Douglas had fished Silver Creek in Idaho and the Rio Grande in Texas and everywhere in between. “I would rather hook a one-pound rainbow with a dry fly on a 3½-ounce rod,” Douglas wrote, “than a four-pounder with bait or hardware.”10
Douglas was a crusader for protecting treasured landscapes. Using the New York Times and the Washington Post as his forum, Douglas argued wholeheartedly that conservationists had to battle to save forests, lakes, canyons, and rivers from industrialization. For a CEO, dealing with Douglas on environmental protection laws had all the appeal of shaving with a blowtorch. Scolding, steely-eyed, and intolerant toward polluters, Douglas was always willing to be a lone vote on the Supreme Court when a case involved protecting America’s natural heritage.11 For a long time he dreamed about exploring the tussock tundra, which swept across Arctic Alaska and which reminded him of the Scottish moors. “I had seen this tundra on an earlier trip stretching from the north side of the Brooks Range to the Arctic Ocean,” Douglas wrote. “That tundra, though differing in botanical detail from the tundra of the Sheenjek, has the same general appearance. It is in the main a dwarf-shrub heath marked by tussocks, and it runs for miles and miles.”12
Prior to the Sheenjek Expedition, Douglas had been in fairly regular touch with Olaus Murie about finding new energy sources for America before all the rivers were dammed and the glaciers melted. This was another one of his hobbyhorses. No matter how long he lived in Washington, D.C., he remained a western individualist more comfortable in Goose Prairie, Washington, at the Double K Ranch than in the “marble palace” (as he called the Supreme Court). “We pay farmers not to produce certain crops,” Douglas asked Murie. “Why not pay the Army Engineers not to build dams?”13
Olaus concurred with this idea, because he believed that hydroelectric power would become obsolete in the coming decades. As Douglas had made clear in My Wilderness, he wanted America to shake off its addiction to fossil fuels. “We are, indeed, on the edge of new breakthroughs that will open up sources of power that will make it unnecessary, and indeed foolhardy, to build more dams across our rivers to produce power. Hydrogen fusion, with an energy potential that is astronomical, has not yet been mastered. But it certainly will be. Solar energy, though not yet available by commercial standards, is in the offing. Nuclear fission already exists and promises energy supplies.”14
Seldom has America produced a man more unnervingly prescient than Douglas. While the politicians of the cold war era were counting nuclear stockpiles and the agriculturalists were spraying crops with DDT, Douglas was envisioning a future in which U.S. citizens would find themselves estranged from the land, sadly living in what Michael Frome called “a shell of artificial, mechanical insulation.” The great tragedy of postmodern America, Douglas believed, was that our children had lost contact with the environment. “We allow engineers and scientists to convert nature into dollars and into goodies,” he said. “A river is a thing to be exploited, not treasured. A lake is better as a repository of sewage than a fishery or canoeway. We are replacing a natural environment with a synthetic one.”15
Few American politicians look out for the long-term public welfare anymore—Douglas did. In the herd of sheep in Washington, D.C., Douglas was an iconoclastic visionary who never had a dull thought. The gossips of Georgetown tried to attack his character, mocking him for his divorces, scoffing at his promotion of Arctic Alaska, belittling him for including a long riff about the
rattlesnakes of eastern Washington in his memoir. Conventional wisdom was tough on Douglas. But in the end he was one of the great men of the twentieth century, a champion of individual rights and of freedom of speech in a world dominated by corporate thinking. Fearless in his appraisals and always aware of the big picture, he asked the key questions about the arrogance of the industrial-military complex, angry that technocrats, in defiance of God, thought they could conquer nature with concrete monstrosities. Douglas believed that being outdoors in clean air reduced eye irritation, helped the respiratory system, and kept the blood pressure down. Even plants in offices, he said, reduced human stress.
“We have no conservation ethic,” Douglas wrote in dismay of the U.S. government’s refusal to rein in corporate abuse of landscapes and waterways. “Individuals in the bureaucracy understand it; but few bureaus practice it. America is dedicated to the dollar sign and the pressure of the Establishment on any of these bureaus is overwhelming. We get our oxygen for breathing from the green plants. Who is the guardian of the rate of combustion versus the rate of photosynthesis? Certainly no one in Washington, D.C.”16
Some other Supreme Court justices have seemed to become parched, dull husks, but Douglas was always alive to the wind, sky, and grass. Donning a Stetson hat and western-style coat, insisting on going without a necktie, Douglas looked like a frontier character. “Bill was a genius and a visionary,” Charles Reich, a law clerk to Justice Hugo Black, said. “He had the ability to take you to the top of the mountain and show you the entire vista of future issues, but then you would come down from the mountain, and lose sight of what you had seen. He never did.”17 Some critics tried to impeach Douglas because he wrote a controversial piece for the journal Evergreen (which published the work of rebels like Jack Kerouac and Terry Southern) or gave too many public speeches for compensation. But no matter how hard his opponents tried, they never did remove Douglas from the bench. Senator William Langer of North Dakota, late in life, came up to Douglas and wrapped an arm around him. “Douglas, they have thrown several buckets of shit over you,” Langer said. “But by God, none of it stuck. And I am proud.”18
II
Outdoors excursions, especially in the expansive North, are usually jolly when the weather cooperates and people share an interest in the ecosystem. The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956 was one of those trips on which people consider even cones of dried mud and cotton grass worth discussing. Hiking across the tundra was like walking on a sponge—it was hard to get into a rhythm because of ground squirrel holes or clumps of lichen. For once, in the roadless Arctic Range, afforestation was discussed instead of deforestation. Everybody was measuring everyone else’s depth of spirit—not the accoutrements of success. Justice Douglas had no higher rank than tin plate cleaner after supper. Regularly Douglas deferred to Schaller on talus slopes; to Krear on the grizzly’s hunting habits; to the Muries on caribou calving; and to Kessel on ring-billed gulls. There was never a pecking order when Douglas was in the wilderness. Also, to Douglas complaints were a tedious nuisance for everyone and undermined the serenity essential to endurance while camping. Decades of hiking had taught Douglas a basic lesson about the outdoors: be humble and do your proper chores. “I heard horrible stories of the mosquitoes of Alaska and went prepared with head nets,” Douglas recalled. “But I never used them. There are mosquitoes—many of them. Even after a frost—one of which we experienced—new crops of mosquitoes are born. They swarm up out of the marshland and tundra. They are not too bothersome when the wind blows.”19
Early on the expedition Mardy Murie, wanting to be gracious, said, “Justice Douglas, will you have some soup?” Furrow-browed, he glowered at Mardy, as if insulted, and said coldly, “Bill.” A little while later Mardy innocently said, in her cheeriest voice, “Justice Douglas, can I make you a cup of cocoa?” Clearly perturbed that she hadn’t gotten the message the first time, he gave her his blue gaze treatment and a single syllable: “Bill.” Some evenings Douglas would pour a little bourbon into his hot chocolate to help him stay warm.
Meals on the Sheenjek Expedition weren’t fancy, but the party ate like kings: caribou steaks, cheese rice, and corned beef, with blueberries, Fig Newtons, Jell-O, and angel food cake for dessert. Douglas was particularly interested in hiking to wherever ice presented itself. With field glasses he also scoured the Arctic landscape looking for the great bull caribou, which Bob Marshall had described. Up close—down on his hands and knees—Douglas examined lily plants, buffalo bush berries, and poppies. With field glasses he watched a fox eating blueberries. Douglas found bog cranberries—a tiny creeping plant with thin stems that threaded its way over sphagnum moss and was ideal for making jam. The fields shimmered in the fresh Arctic air. “What impressed me most,” Murie recalled in Two in the Far North, “was the far-ranging interest of this man of the law. What a divine thing curiosity is!”20
The Muries had timed the expedition perfectly until about the second or third week in June. The rivers in the Brooks Range were snow-fed for part of the year, but then, about the time of the Douglases’ arrival, the waterways of summer would be fed either by springs or by rain runoff. The largest river in the Brooks Range—the Colville—was far to the northwest of the Last Lake camp. The Sheenjek was a south-side river that drained south into the mighty Yukon River. It was lined with black spruce, birch, and alder brush (as thick as bamboo). When Douglas caught grayling along the Sheenjek, he’d cook them at night with alder wood, perfect for smoking fish. “These grayling, which run up to three pounds or more, are not prospering,” he wrote. “Their small heads and broad-beamed bodies make them seem a bit awkward compared to our streamlined rainbows. But whatever they lack in grace they make up for in food. Their flesh is white and their thick steaks cook up into a sweeter and more delicious dish than any trout I have sampled.”21
Douglas understood that there was a thread that began with Theodore Roosevelt and ran to Charles Sheldon and the Muries in Alaska. Saving the Brooks Range and the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea aroused a kind of tribal passion in serious outdoors enthusiasts. They believed that this part of Alaska was the biological heart of North America. Although George L. Collins liked to use the term recreation, the word was inadequate to describe the hardiness and intensity of the Sheenjek expedition. All day long, well into the evening, the members kept busy identifying birds and wildflowers. Each party member believed deeply that Arctic Alaska belonged to the wildlife. Philosophically, the members were all aligned with the Gwich’in elders. As the Muries and the others set up base camps and collected bones and antlers among the caribou calves, the Arctic made them feel like little cogs in the huge machine of the modern world. The humbling effect of feeling small helped to develop character. Forget the judge’s black robe: Douglas was nothing more than a grain of sand or a falling leaf.
There is no transcript of the conversations that took place between Justice Douglas and the Muries when they camped together in the Arctic Range. But since everybody in the Sheenjek River party considered himself or herself a New Deal liberal, any banter about President Eisenhower couldn’t have been complimentary. After all, Eisenhower had meant it when he said on the campaign trail in 1952 that he planned to restore the Republican Party’s land policy in the West to help business. As president he had cleaned house, removing New Deal conservationists from the Department of the Interior. Without much concern about pension plans, he retired longtime employees of the National Park Service early. Friends of “big oil” and “big timber” were brought into the Forest Service. The attitude at both Interior and Agriculture favored leasing public lands. But new U.S. senators—like Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota—stepped into the picture, promising to give new lands protected status. Congressmen were defending wild places against an administration bent on helping the extraction industries in the West. Crunching across the tundra, putting on rubber boots to cross creeks, Douglas embodied the ethos of A Sand County Almanac. Getting an Arctic tan—neck-up, elbows-down—Douglas would tal
k, while hiking, about “man’s responsibility to the earth.”22 At least, the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs—influenced by Bob Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness—urged Congress to create a “National Wilderness Preservation System.”23
Justice Douglas and the Muries were particularly disturbed that Douglas McKay, a Chevrolet dealer from Oregon, had been confirmed as secretary of the interior. He was called “Giveaway McKay.” In Alaska alone he had opened up the Tongass, the Chugach, and even TR’s federal bird reservations to oil and gas leasing. The Arctic, to McKay, was worthless except as an oil field. McKay had learned to be genial from selling Chevys to customers; but his undersecretary, Ralph Tudor, was ruthless and enamored of Joe McCarthy—a narrow-minded conservative who wanted to purge the Department of the Interior of “wilderness screwballs” and “rabid New Dealers.” When Justice Douglas and the Muries, along with numerous conservation groups, vociferously disapproved of desecrating Dinosaur National Monument by building a dam at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers, McKay retorted that wilderness “punks,” communist types, cared more about Colorado’s rivers than they did about hardworking people. David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, testified before Congress against McKay, showing photos of what had happened to Hetch Hetchy. “If we heed the lesson learned from the tragedy of the misplaced dam in Hetch Hetchy,” Brower argued, “we can prevent a far more disastrous struggle in Dinosaur National Monument.”24