The Uneasy Chair

by Wallace Stegner

  The Engineers, as DeVoto said in several places, were “not simple virgins.” They knew who their guest was and what his opinions were likely to be. Also they understood how to put on a PR tour, and they were excellent company, most especially Brigadier General S. G. Sturgis, who acknowledged DeVoto’s potency as a publicist by personally directing their three-week inspection. He showed them the Missouri from headwaters to mouth, by air, by boat, and by car, and he even acceded to their Tom Sawyer side by turning them loose on the river for three days in a small boat. General Sturgis understood early that he and DeVoto had a fundamental disagreement on the subject of main-stem dams, but he remained affable to the end and sent them home unpersuaded about the control of the Missouri but personally very friendly. On their way back, there was a “carefully unrehearsed moment” when DeVoto and Guthrie threw the publicity-conscious Lederer into the Platte for the benefit of some opportune photographers, and then they flew back to Boston to find their moment made immortal in the Boston Globe—another authentic Lederer miracle.

  DeVoto was never quite sure how Bill Lederer had managed to hit the Boston papers so fast, from so far out in the sticks, but Lederer’s next move made his previous accomplishments look like child’s play. During their trip he had heard a good deal about the Nieman Fellowships from Bud Guthrie and had decided he would like one. Upon inquiry he found that, not being a working newspaperman, he was not eligible; but Louis Lyons, the Nieman Foundation director, finally agreed that he might participate as an auditor, without stipend. Then Lederer applied to the Navy and got himself assigned for duty to Harvard, at commanders’ pay. Filled with admiration, DeVoto remembered the time he and Guthrie had ducked Lederer in the Platte, and wished that they had done it from an airplane.2

  Out of the Missouri junket came more than the unlikely friendship with General Sturgis, an improved notion of the South Pass section of the Oregon Trail, an enhanced appreciation of what Lewis and Clark had seen while moving steadily upriver through the greening bottoms, and an admiration for Bill Lederer’s promotional talents. The principal conviction that DeVoto brought back with him was an opposition to the Pick-Sloan Plan for the Missouri, and indeed for any variety of Missouri Valley Authority. He expressed his opposition in the Easy Chairs for July and August, and in the Saturday Evening Post for July 223 he challenged the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, both dam-building bureaus and both politically potent, as the greatest enemies of the National Parks.

  The National Park Act of 1916 specified that the park areas were to be set aside in perpetuity for “use without impairment.” But the Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation had on their drawing boards plans for dams in Glacier, in Grand Canyon, in Dinosaur National Monument, in Yellowstone. He accused them of deliberately trying to get one such dam built in order to set a precedent that would open the way to others. Once the protection of the National Park Act was proved ineffective, the parks would be exposed to flooding whenever one of the dam-building bureaus found a canyon it wanted to plug and a local citizenry that was interested in a boondoggle. He challenged the cost-benefit figures of the bureaus, which he said were always deceptive; he disputed the rosy expectation of many Westerners that dams would actually create water. His principal target was the Colorado River Storage Project of the Bureau of Reclamation, his bull’s-eye the Echo Park dam proposed at the junction of the Green and the Yampa, in the heart of Dinosaur National Monument. That is to say, he made public, very public, the anxieties that had been troubling the meetings of the National Parks Advisory Board for more than a year. When the Reader’s Digest reprinted the Post article in November, many million people were made aware of a threat to something most of them instinctively or out of personal experience valued highly.

  Several consequences ensued from DeVoto’s attack on the dam builders. For one thing, Ben Hibbs, the Post’s editor, got so much pressure from western lobbies and from the bureaus themselves that he closed the door to DeVoto’s pamphleteering and never reopened it. For another, the public controversy over the Dinosaur dams, a controversy that would give conservationists one of their most complete victories, was opened with the precise arguments that would finally win it: that dams within a national park area would constitute an “impairment” of the kind specifically forbidden by the National Park Act, and that the cost-benefit figures of the bureaus, the economic justifications of main-stem dams, were open to the gravest doubt. The Sierra Club and other conservation organizations would finally bring those arguments home to the public, and thence to Congress, five years after DeVoto aired them in the Post.4 And for still another, that article made the name DeVoto more hated than ever in Utah, which had counted on the boondoggle of the Echo Park dam and had generated a good deal of unrealistic expectation with regard to new water on its dry eastern edge. First, said apoplectic Utahns, this fellow smears his home state with a lot of lies, now he tries to prevent the building of Utah’s last water hole. In their rage, they demonstrated the truth of some of the things he had said in “The West Against Itself.”

  It did not surprise him that he made enemies of many people in the West that he kept trying to rescue from its own folly. He had elected them enemies before they elected him. The stockmen and lumbermen exerted their steady political influence against both Forest Service and National Park Service; the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, each in its own behalf, leaned against the Washington structure of power with the force of a prevailing wind; and the West, with the shortsightedness that DeVoto had more than once noted, took up arms against itself, and hence against him.

  His inclination to fight them was hampered by the long, drawn-out labor on Lewis and Clark, or what had started out to be Lewis and Clark, as well as by a growing anxiety about his health and an increasing need for money as his historical research dragged on and on. His last institutional affiliation, together with its small stipend, had gone when he resigned from the History Book Club, after a year and a half of trying, in March 1948.5 This time, he had not hastened to replace that small security with another, and he suffered psychologically from the lack. Moreover, he found it increasingly difficult to combine money-making with propaganda for conservation. Magazines began to steer clear of him, because his articles were so often polemics. Both Fred Allen and John Fischer of Harper’s had indicated a wish that he wouldn’t harp on the same old issue all the time.6 But that, DeVoto told them, was exactly the point. You didn’t mount the barricades until noon and then go out for a three-hour lunch.

  The intensely concentrated job of writing The Course of Empire occupied the whole of 1951. He found time for only one more warning against the renewed activity of the stockmen’s lobby, in the Easy Chair for March. There was no Bread Loaf for him that year—had not been since 1949 and would never be again—but something like nostalgia for the good old summers, some need to feel again the reassurance of working with friends in a joint effort, led him to accept an invitation to Joseph Kinsey Howard’s writing conference at the University of Montana. There, besides Howard, he was working with Helen Everitt and A. B. Guthrie. They turned the Missoula meetings into a “Bread Loaf, Montana,” and, like Syracusans writing back to Corinth or Athens, sent long messages of report and humorous adjuration to their mother institution in Vermont. Discreet parts of those letters were read aloud in Treman Cottage,7 and those of us who heard them read found in them, despite the confident assertion of western superiorities, a note of homesickness for the place he could now neither stand nor stand to miss.

  In Missoula his friends from the Region One office of the Forest Service put a parachute on him and sent him out with their firefighting crews to a number of forest fires. He loved it; it satisfied a desire for danger and adventure that had lain in him ever since the anticlimactic ending of his Army service. Characteristically, he turned it at once into words, and wrote for the November Harper’s an article, “The Smoke Jumpers,” that managed to speak to the conservation issue without giving Fred Allen a chance
to complain. Ostensibly a journalistic report on an exciting and dangerous job, “The Smoke Jumpers” was in fact a shrewd defense of the Forest Service against its enemies, for in the course of dramatizing the techniques of fire fighting by air, DeVoto resurrected most of the general article on the national forests that Collier’s had commissioned and then killed in 1948. With that article he ended five years of service in the conservation wars. To that point, he had acted as a private citizen and as a journalist. With the beginning of 1952, his Lewis and Clark book at last off his back and his temporarily unfocused energies in need of new occupation, he would take the action onto the center court and go political.

  From the beginning, the Easy Chair had been the expression of a political independent. DeVoto had given it his highly personal coloration, and though essentially a New Dealer, had attacked some New Deal measures and deplored the New Deal’s political slipperiness and its suppression of war information. For the previous five years, DeVoto had used the Easy Chair to fight the land bills of the western lobby. He described himself to his public as one of the few surviving Populists and only a “55% or 60% New Dealer”—which meant a mugwump. In Massachusetts he usually but not always voted Republican, in national elections Democrat. He had never voted a straight ticket in his life, and though he said he was the only member of his generation who had never cast a vote for Eugene V. Debs, he had on many occasions come close to the position of Mattingly, who was a Norman Thomas socialist. After Wendell Willkie withdrew from the presidential primary race, in 1944, DeVoto declared that he would never have voted for him; yet he had enthusiastically helped Willkie’s attempt to smoke out better war information, and by 1944 he was sufficiently jaundiced with some of Roosevelt’s actions that he might in the pinch have gone for a Republican whom, like Willkie, he personally admired.

  It was conservation, along with his rediscovery of the physical West, that returned him to his natural condition as a radical Populist in 1946, and it was conservation that made a thoroughgoing Democrat of him in 1952.

  Early in that year, in late February or early March, he had a telephone call from his former Northwestern student George Ball, now a lawyer in the firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Friendly & Ball, with offices in New York and Washington. Harry Truman had indicated his intention not to accept renomination by the Democratic Party, and Ball, a close friend of Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, was quietly organizing a cabal to persuade Stevenson to run. He had heard from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that DeVoto might be willing to help, and he suggested a meeting in New York to talk the possibility over.8

  In enlisting DeVoto’s help, Ball was probably moved by several considerations, not least of which was DeVoto’s influence, through his writings, and especially through the Easy Chair, upon liberal and independent voters. Another was his firsthand, intimate, and fighting knowledge of the conversation and public-lands problems that would surely be an issue in the campaign. But also, he says, he remembered his old Freshman English instructor as an “exciting and glamorous figure” with a gift for words and for friendship, even friendship with sixteen-year-old freshmen. Personal liking as well as political considerations led him to make his call, and he was not disappointed when DeVoto came down and met him for a long talking lunch at the Harvard Club. It seemed to George Ball a classical illustration of how minds that truly met could continue almost in midsentence a conversation interrupted years before. Though he was a little puzzled about how he might help, DeVoto was sympathetic to what Ball told him about Stevenson, and he agreed to go out to Springfield with Ball to spend a few days with the Governor. It might be he would be called on to draft speeches, it might be he could help most with an article or articles introducing Stevenson to a national audience that had barely heard his name.

  They went to Springfield together, and Ball left DeVoto there for several days. From Ball’s account, it seems that Stevenson himself was somewhat puzzled about why DeVoto was there. But he liked him instantly, and was flattered by the attention and respect of a writer whom he had long admired. As for DeVoto, he returned home convinced that Stevenson was not only a superb candidate, but that Ball and others would be successful in persuading him to run. He had the word long before other journalists were as sure as he, and he loved a scoop—it was not often that the Easy Chair, which was written six weeks before publication, got a chance to scoop the dailies. His April Easy Chair, “Stevenson and the Independent Voter,” made DeVoto an instant prophet. It also had a large influence in firming up Stevenson’s emerging public image, and it succeeded in making him look, all at the same time, like a white hope, a dark horse, and a front-runner.

  Like thousands who worked for Adlai Stevenson, DeVoto gave him support that was close to idolatry. “Use me,” he said after the Democratic National Convention. He offered to write a brief for the conservation and public-lands planks in the platform, he offered to write speeches, he expected to travel as a sort of reporter/adviser with the candidate’s campaign train.9 It was a crush, like his crushes on Henderson, Zinsser, and Frost. In his enthusiasm he predicted that Stevenson would win in a walk.

  It is not clear whether he did or did not write a brief for the conservation plank, though he must surely have influenced Steven-son’s and hence the party’s position. He did supply some speech material, not too much of which remained in the speeches as finally delivered. Once, he reported that “the first third of the St. Louis speech” was his, and he would obviously have been gratified if more had been used. But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said,10 DeVoto was too good a writer to be a good speech writer, and Stevenson himself once told me the same thing. The same inability that hampered him in fiction hampered him in political oratory: he could not sound like anyone but himself.

  By September, though his enthusiasm for Stevenson was as great as ever, he had become somewhat frustrated in his desire to be of use, and his optimism had waned. He expected a Democratic defeat. The campaign train he was looking forward to, the personal participation in the greatest American game, kept being postponed and never did come off. And the willing suspension of his private concerns had kept him from putting money in his purse. At the end of September he grumbled to Mattingly that he had gone broke writing The Course of Empire and desperately needed to write something for money instead of warming the bench as a political relief pitcher.11

  Despite Ball’s hopes, and his own, and Stevenson’s, he made relatively minor contributions, after that first introductory Easy Chair, to Stevenson’s 1952 campaign. There was an August Easy Chair in which he discussed Utah’s eroded watersheds and the need for rehabilitation efforts that were much more likely to be made by the Democrats than the Republicans, and an October Easy Chair in which he attacked General Pat Hurley’s land-use plank in the Republican platform. Hurley, advocating a return to the “traditional Republican lands policy,” sounded ominous indeed to DeVoto, for he did not suppose General Hurley meant a return to the traditional public-lands policy of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and W J McGee, the creators of the twentieth-century conservation movement now taken over by the Democrats. He supposed Hurley meant the traditional Republican land policy of Secretary of the Interior Ballinger, who had collaborated in the stealing of a lot of America’s forests, or of Albert Fall, who had given us Teapot Dome, or of Herbert Hoover and Ray Lyman Wilbur, who had wanted to give away the Public Domain to the states in ways that would have pleased the Two-Gun Desmonds. If that was indeed what General Hurley’s plank meant, DeVoto said, then the Desmonds had put one over on General Eisenhower, and what Eisenhower had innocently accepted was going to cost him votes.

  Though he was frequently moved to prophecy, DeVoto was not a prophet with a high batting average. What Eisenhower had innocently accepted might have cost him votes, but not enough votes to affect his landslide victory, and that landslide brought the landgrab forces back into power precisely as Truman’s 1948 victory had put them out. Congressman Barrett rode the Republican wave into the Senate. Soon it became clea
r that Eisenhower’s choice as Secretary of the Interior would be Douglas McKay, an Oregon automobile dealer, and as Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, an apostle of the Mormon Church. DeVoto threw up his hands: he was scared to death of them both.

  But he did not subside in defeat. He and his allies were very busy, immediately after the election, in lining up opposition to expected land bills. His files are full of the letters he wrote to Senator Aiken of Vermont, Senator Metcalf of Montana, and many congressmen including Dodd of Connecticut, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, John Saylor of Pennsylvania, and John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. He thought the Forest Service had some protection in the fact that the agriculture committees of both houses were made up mainly of Easterners and would not be susceptible to the western chant of “Get out and give us more money.” But Interior, and especially the National Park Service, was wide open, for the public-lands subcommittees of the insular-and-interior-affairs committees of both houses were stacked with the cowboy clique, and the Bureau of Reclamation, by reason of its empire-building ambitions that fitted well with western inclinations toward the boondoggle and the economics of liquidation, was among the enemy. It was not clear how the Eisenhower administration would treat either the Bureau of Reclamation or the Corps of Engineers, since both were associated with public power, and public power was not a Republican pet. But it did not seem likely that either bureau would be controlled in the ways and for the reasons that DeVoto would have liked. After November 1952 he expected a bad time for conservation, and got what he expected.

  Dead journalism, like dead Congressional battles, makes fairly dull reading. DeVoto’s conservation journalism can still be read, precisely because it isn’t dead. The policy disagreement that it reflects is as unresolved in 1973 as it was in 1952, and this despite an exponential increase in the strength of the conservation movement. When he put together a group of his conservation essays and published them in his last book, The Easy Chair, under the title “Treatise on a Function of Journalism,” DeVoto was in a sense justifying, on more than temporary grounds, his sortie into conservation politics. He was also writing a chapter of the history of conservation, a subject that grows ominously in importance as the twentieth century grinds and clanks on, and what he wrote could well be instructive to people involved in succeeding chapters of the same story.