The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  Distrustful of the timbering promoted by Weyerhaeuser Lumber and worried about becoming an obsolete teacher in the Rattlesnake Hills range, Douglas found liberation from Washington’s provincialism at Columbia University Law School. He was imbued with a Pacific Northwest belief in the power of mountains, stone, and rivers, and his train journey to New York City sounds like a drifter’s ballad. In the summer of 1922, Douglas signed up to escort 2,000 sheep by rail from Wenatchee, Washington, to Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Of Men and Mountains, he told of sleeping in a dirty caboose, meeting rascals in boxcars, rattling along with Montana’s fields and peaks flashing by outside the open train door. In Idaho he encountered a railroad strike. He feared the billy clubs of yard bulls, who were always trying to shake down the transients. Douglas had a vivid way of telling anecdotes about life along the train tracks and in the hobo jungles. “I needed a bath,” he matter-of-factly wrote of the adventure, “and a shave and food; above all else I needed sleep. Even flophouses cost money. And the oatmeal, hot cakes, ham and eggs and coffee—which I wanted desperately—would cost fifty or seventy-five cents.”20

  Douglas unloaded the sheep from the railcars in the Minneapolis railroad yard, then bummed a train ride to Chicago, wanting to see Lake Michigan, He was appalled by the industrialization that had polluted the Illinois air. Chicago wasn’t the “City of the Big Shoulders” that the poet Carl Sandburg had described, but an urban cesspool: dilapidated buildings, noise, broken glass, and “dingy factories with chimneys pouring out a thick haze over the landscape.” Loneliness engulfed Douglas in sooty Chicago, where the decibel level was too high, transforming him overnight into an environmentalist. Hungry, exhausted, homesick, bruised, frightened, and confused, he now placed a higher value on Yakima and Walla Walla than ever before. “Never had I missed a snowcapped peak as much,” he recalled. “Never had I longed more to see a mountain meadow filled with heather and lupine and paintbrush.”21

  Eventually Douglas made his way to New York and enrolled at Columbia, working at odd jobs to pay the big-city bills. After his first year at Columbia, he was appointed to the staff of the law review. Nobody else attacked the law books with the same fervent hunger as Douglas. Harlan Fiske Stone, a dean of Columbia University who would later serve with Douglas on the Supreme Court, recognized that Douglas was a nonstop worker. Imbued with a libertarian spirit and deeply committed to the Bill of Rights, Douglas staked his reputation at Columbia on defending misfits, outcasts, drifters, migrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and tramps. Lonesome, forsaken people had a special place in Douglas’s heart. What’s more, his experiences in Chicago and New York led him to conclude that country folk needed legal protection from city slickers. Douglas was an anomaly at Columbia because he was already claiming that clean air and clean water were a constitutional right. What right did Chicago have to despoil Lake Michigan? What right did General Motors have to pollute the Detroit River?

  “It seemed that man had built a place of desolation and had corrupted the earth in doing so,” Douglas wrote of his arrival in New York City. “In corrupting the earth he had corrupted himself also, and built out of soot and dirt a malodorous place of foul air and grimy landscape in which to live and work and die. Here there were no green meadows wet with morning dew to examine for tracks of deer, no forest that a boy could explore to discover for himself the various species of wild flowers, shrubs, and trees; no shoulder of granite pushing against fleecy clouds and standing as a reminder to man of his puny character, of his inadequacies; no trace of the odor of pine or fir in the air.”22

  Douglas, determined to succeed and always in need of cash, spent three years as a tutor at Columbia, helping high school students prepare for the Ivy League. According to the historian James O’Fallon, editor of Nature’s Justice, Douglas had “two criteria” for his ambitious pupils—that the “student be rich and stupid.”23 Regularly, when he was broke, he would borrow $10 or $20 dollars from friends; he never welched. Eventually Douglas, with only one year in law school remaining, had saved enough money—$1,000—to return to the Pacific Northwest. He needed the mountains and his mother needed him. Over the summer of 1923, he married Mildred Riddle in her hometown, La Grande, Oregon. For their honeymoon, the Douglases roughed it outdoors in the Wallowa range, catching trout, eating wild berries, horseback riding, and making love under the stars. And they went broke. “We blew,” Douglas boasted, “my thousand bucks.”24

  One of Douglas’s abiding traits was his recklessness with money. Even as Supreme Court justice he often had a gritty hand-to-mouth lifestyle. His cupboards were often bare. Never did Douglas trust the New York Stock Exchange: investment banking was, to his mind, legalized gambling. Washingtonians never knew whether Douglas could afford to buy a restaurant dinner in Chevy Chase or take a weekend trip to Virginia. Impending bankruptcy was a condition he actually embraced, if it meant freedom to think, hike, and have fun. Poverty never made him sullen. No business venture appealed to him except writing books. “Douglas preferred to invest in only one stock,” his biographer James F. Simon wrote in Independent Journey: “William O. Douglas.”25

  Back at Columbia, Douglas was on fire. All his professors—Underhill Moore chief among them—were astounded at his intelligence. You could see it in his eyes. He could revise commercial law casebooks or explain the Pleistocene epoch with equal ease. Douglas worked hardest when taking on a big company, defending the people against a fat cat. Mischievously Moore unleashed Douglas against a Portland cement company that had supposedly cooked its books. But Douglas’s belligerent attitude worried Dean Stone, who had just been confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court. The new justice selected Albert McCormack, a fine choice, to be his clerk, rather than the brilliant but wild Douglas. “The world was black,” Douglas said of this snub. “I was unspeakably depressed that for all those years and all that work, I had so little to show for it. The one opportunity I wanted had passed me by.”26

  Douglas had a choice after graduating from Columbia: go back to Yakima to practice law or join a Wall Street firm. He did the latter. But Douglas was arrogant—and his voice was strained and defiant—when he was interviewing at New York firms. Famously, he was interviewed by John Foster Dulles, who would go on to become Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Dulles, who tended to be pompous, was condescending. So Douglas turned the tables on Dulles: the interviewee started interviewing the eminent establishment lawyer. According to Douglas, to irritate Dulles even more, on his way out of the interview he tipped Dulles a quarter for helping him on with his coat. The job went to somebody else. But Douglas was hired by the prestigious firm Cravath DeGersdoff, Swaine, and Wood (later Cravath, Swaine, and Moore).

  After only four months at Cravath, confused, like an athlete with a mild concussion, Douglas left New York and moved back to Yakima. “The only bird I ever saw was a pigeon,” he complained of New York. “I longed for the call of the meadowlark, the noisy drilling of the pileated woodpecker, the drumming of the ruffed grouse.”27 He soon regretted the decision, however. Working his New York connections, he found a job teaching at Columbia. Douglas’s legal career now soared. Yale University Law School wisely poached him. He became an expert on commercial litigation and bankruptcy. By the time Douglas was forty-one, he was an associate justice on the Supreme Court. From 1929 to 1934 he wrote five legal casebooks and almost twenty articles. What gave Douglas such authority was his wizard-like expertise on corporate reorganization and bankruptcy law. If a U.S. corporation got too big, Douglas always prepared to break it down to size. Working on Wall Street had made Douglas feel that some investment bankers were truly pathetic, preferring money to “love, compassion, hiking, or sunsets.”28

  With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Douglas had an opening to positively affect the consciousness of his time. Main Street’s anger at Wall Street had deepened since the stock market crash of 1929. At Yale University, where Douglas was the distinguished Sterling Professor of Law, he had already earned a
reputation for his no-nonsense approach and for insisting that the federal government regulate big business to achieve transparency. When Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1933, granting the Federal Trade Commission regulatory power over security sales, Douglas was tapped by the Roosevelt administration to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had few ties with the WASP establishment, but he formed an alliance with the Catholic tycoon Joseph P. Kennedy.29 The entire Kennedy family liked the cut of Douglas’s jib. At long last he had a sponsor. Other New Dealers also took a shine to Douglas; they included Abe Fortas, Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, and Lyndon Johnson.

  Insiders in Washington, D.C., were soon astounded by Douglas’s love of the wilderness. Like a sudden storm, Douglas could take over a Georgetown cocktail party with his tales of the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the only Washingtonian whom Douglas truly revered was the aging Gifford Pinchot. The new secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, and Pinchot were warring over policy for the national forests. Ickes was, in Douglas’s words, a “bulldog battler” who was “hungry for bureaucratic power.”30 By 1939, Ickes had brought into the Department of the Interior the Bituminous Coal Commission, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Fisheries, Bureau of Biological Survey, and Mount Rushmore Commission. Ickes now wanted to take control of the U.S. Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot objected, so Ickes went after him.

  Years later, in his autobiography Go East, Young Man, Douglas attacked Ickes for reopening the feud between Ballinger and Pinchot of 1909–1910. It pained Douglas to think that Ickes had acted like a man motivated by envy and pettiness. “Ickes wrote that Ballinger had not been involved in a corrupt practice,” Douglas fumed. “That was never the issue. The issue was whether private interest through subterfuge could defeat the public land policy. Bulldog Ickes would have been the first to attack any Ballinger of his day. In 1940 he was defending Ballinger only to attack Pinchot.”31

  III

  The Alaskan wilderness movement thrived while Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House from 1933 to 1945. When the president toured Washington’s Olympics, in 1937, feasting on trout at the lodge and saying he never saw such grand trees in his life, he upgraded the designation from national monument to national park. FDR understood more keenly than ever before Douglas’s pleas for stricter wildlife protections in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Conservation wasn’t a mere slogan during FDR’s visionary presidency—it was a crucial part of the New Deal. Under FDR’s leadership the conservation movement was appropriated from the Republican Party, and its tenets became central to New Deal liberalism.32 From the outset the Roosevelt administration’s natural resource team was impressive. How could anyone be better than Harold Ickes as Secretary of the Interior or Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling as director of the Bureau of Biological Survey? The 2.5 million workers at the CCC planted more than 2 billion trees during its decade of existence.33 They also erected 3,470 fire towers and built 42,000 miles of fire roads. Roosevelt also helped individual farmers reclaim eroded land. Working with Roosevelt, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 (shutting down the public domain and putting grasslands under sound management); the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 (initially a nationwide program of soil and moisture conservation); and the Act of July 22, 1937 (providing administration of the National Grasslands).34

  Another aspect of the New Deal was the WPA’s sponsorship of painters to capture wild America on canvas. Edwin Boyd Johnson, an Alaskan designer and muralist originally from Tennessee, was one of these painters. He soon learned that painting wild Alaska was a daunting task. Mount Kimball, the highest mountain in the eastern Alaska Range between Isabel Pass and Mentasta, became for him what Mount McKinley had been to the artist Sydney Laurence. Johnson’s images of the bright orange-yellow Mount Kimball closely resembled the work of Marsden Hartley. By having the WPA pay Johnson to paint wild Alaska, the Roosevelt administration ingeniously promoted the protection of places like Mount Kimball.35 The WPA also worked to establish a hotel at Mount McKinley National Park. And grants were given to Skagway to help clean up the water system polluted by mining.36

  Another important program by the Roosevelt administration in Alaska was having Charles Flory, a forester, restore totem poles in the Inside Passage. Flory had CCC workers begin an interpretive initiative on behalf of Tlingit art near Juneau, Ketchikan, and Sitka. Negotiations were made to have poles shipped to the restoration facility and then returned to the appropriate Alaskan communities (sometimes as new features to attract tourism). Indian villages such as New Kasaan, Hydaburg, and Klawock participated. Roosevelt also allocated funds for a totem pole in Tongass National Forest.37

  Roosevelt’s concern for Alaskan wildlife—particularly marine species—was sincere. On April 18, 1939, the president had more than doubled the size of Glacier Bay National Monument, a tribute to John Muir. Professor William Skinner Cooper, one of the nation’s most eminent ecologists, was teaching at the University of Minnesota when he heard this news. Marine areas teeming with Dungeness, king, and Tanner crabs were finally made off-limits to fishermen. Whole subtidal benthic communities, along with schools of Pacific halibut, rockfish, lingcod, Pacific cod, sablefish, and pollock now had protected Alaskan nurseries (although a limited amount of fishing was allowed until the 1970s).38 Muir’s glaciers may have been receding, but federal protection was intensifying.

  For Cooper, the doubling of Glacier Bay National Monument meant that the complexes of plant life thriving around the terminal of receding glaciers could be properly analyzed by biologists. Because Glacier Bay had more than 220 bird species—half of all American birds—the National Audubon Society considered Executive Proclamation 2330 Roosevelt’s grandest conservation effort yet. For the Sierra Club, it was the fulfillment of John Muir’s vision. The Alaskan communities of Haines and Gustavus now prospered as gateways to glaciers and wildlife. (People in Haines started boasting that their town—the Chilkat Indian community Muir wrote about in Travels to Alaska—was founded by the great naturalist.) All of Glacier Bay’s geographic provinces would remain protected, owing to Muir’s early advocacy and Cooper’s dogged lobbying.39 (But there was no guarantee that the glaciers wouldn’t melt.)

  During the 1930s, while pushing for the Lake Clark region to become a national park or wilderness reserve, Frederick Vreeland, through the Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA), promoted the idea of allowing Native Alaskans exclusive reindeer breeding rights. Even since the missionary Sheldon Jackson imported a herd from Siberia to Amaknak Island, domesticated reindeer had been raised in Alaska to pull sleds and serve as a high-protein food source. By the 1930s they were a big business for Alaska (there were an estimated 640,000 reindeer in the territory). Vreeland hoped that if Alaskan Natives ate reindeer, as ranchers ate cattle in the Lower Forty-Eight, then the big game wouldn’t be shot out. On September 1, 1937, Congress, with the approval of the CFCA, passed the Reindeer Act. Not only were Natives given exclusive reindeer breeding rights, but in the future they would earn concession rights. The interbreeding of caribou (wild) and reindeer (domestic) sometimes caused disease, but Vreeland had succeeded in protecting the Lake Clark caribou from overhunting.40

  One New Deal conservation program that significantly affected Alaska was the Duck Stamp Act (its official title was the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934). Ding Darling was a Republican, but his commitment to the biological conservation movement was not inhibited by his party affiliation. A Bull Moose at heart, Darling was brought into FDR’s administration to serve on the President’s Committee for Wild Life Restoration (along with Thomas Beck and Aldo Leopold). By 1935, Darling, a cartoonist who had won two Pulitzer Prizes, took over as head of the Biological Survey. Although he served for only eighteen months in this post, Darling was deemed the best friend that Alaskan ducks ever had.

  With the Great Depression persisting, and with no signs of recovery on the horizon, Darling had to find creative ways to promote the protection of migrat
ory birds. Putting aside his usual satirical wit, he designed an elegant blue-and-white duck stamp.41 Anybody age sixteen or older who wanted to legally hunt a duck was required to purchase a stamp. The stamps raised a lot of money, and just in the nick of time. In 1934, migratory waterfowl had reached a low of about 27 million. Alaska was a huge part of this problem. Market hunters were devastating Alaska’s largest migrant birds. Throughout the territory the prevalent attitude was “If it moves, shoot it.” Two-thirds of all trumpeter swans—the largest waterfowl in the world—nested in Alaska. In all the Lower Forty-Eight, only the Yellowstone ecosystem was a stronghold for swans. For hundreds of years trumpeter swans had been slaughtered for their feathers, which made the best quill pens in the world. The British royal crown, for instance, signed every document with a trumpeter swan pen.

  To the surprise of President Roosevelt, the duck stamps designed by Darling were a hit with Congress and the private sector. Capitalizing on his celebrity as a cartoonist, Darling raised millions to help protect migratory birds. The term “duck stamp,” however, was misleading: Darling’s program also printed stamps of geese and swans. Although Darling designed the first stamps, an annual art contest was soon instituted. Every year new winners were chosen.