When scholars write histories of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the duck stamp program is usually considered ingenious, and a high-water mark. The stamps became coveted collectors’ items. During Darling’s tenure revenues from the duck stamp were $635,001 in 1934 and $448,204 in 1935. In 1953, long after Darling had retired from government, he reflected on why the duck stamp program had worked. “Of course you understand that I am not nearly so much interested in the preservation of migratory waterfowl as I am in the management of water resources and the crucial effects of such management upon human sustenance,” he told Reader’s Digest. “Wild ducks and geese and teeter-assed shore birds are only the delicate indicators for the prognosis for human existence, just as sure as God made little green apples.”42
Despite the fact that the nation was at war between 1941 and 1945, Roosevelt did his best to protect the flyways and nesting areas of Darling’s beloved American birdlife. Glacier Bay was just one of a number of examples. Around the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, when America was focused on military preparedness, he received a blueprint for a major new U.S. Army artillery range to be constructed in Idaho. A lifelong bird-watcher, Roosevelt rejected it. He sided with the bird-watchers over the army. “Please tell Major General Adams or whoever is in charge of this business that Henry Lake, Idaho, must immediately be struck from the Army planning list for any purposes,” he wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. “The verdict is for the trumpeter swan and against the Army. The Army must find a different nesting place.”43
Groups like the National Audubon Society, Sierra Club, CFCA, and Izaak Walton League had an ally in Franklin Roosevelt. No longer was saving wild places considered fringe philanthropy. Also, John D. Rockefeller Jr. became the greatest conservationist capitalist of all time (only Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, comes close). Regularly, Rockefeller donated multimillion-dollar checks to help create Acadia National Park in Maine and the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. He considered this a Christian, gentlemanly thing to do. His family had taken something (oil) from mother Earth, and therefore he wanted to give something back to her.44 Working closely with Horace Albright of the National Park Service, Rockefeller would pay for cleaning up environmental eyesores and industrial blight. He wanted America’s special wilderness places to be roadless. “I never had any doubt about the existence of a divine being,” Rockefeller said. “To see a tree coming out in the spring was enough to impress me that the fact of God existed.”45
With impressive political acumen, FDR brought together Bob Marshall (a democratic socialist), Harold Ickes (a Bull Moose), Ira Gabrielson (a bird enthusiast), and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (a capitalist) to protect America despite the ordeals of the Great Depression and World War II. When Louis Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court in March 1939, Roosevelt appointed Douglas—the fierce environmentalist and opponent of Wall Street—to fill the seat. With Joseph Kennedy cheering him on, Douglas became the youngest justice in American history. When Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, Douglas was profoundly grieved. He believed that Roosevelt had struck the right notes of progressivism with the New Deal programs.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s adroit conservationism was not continued by his successor, Harry S. Truman. Truman was indifferent to forestry and to protecting predators. Regarding Alaska, Truman time and again sided with miners—not with conservationists; he liked working people, not endangered species. Within a year after becoming president, Truman criticized Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes for being too radical a conservationist. Ickes had claimed that a California oilman, Edwin Pauley, who was then treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, had tried to bribe him with $300,000 to allow offshore drilling near Santa Barbara in 1944. The payoff was to be a campaign contribution for Truman. Ickes wrote defiantly in his diary, “I don’t intend to smear my record with oil at this stage of the game even to help win the reelection of the President.”46
Ickes’s resignation on February 13, 1946—in protest against Truman’s appointment of Pauley as undersecretary of the navy—was a severe setback to the wilderness movement. The announcement took place in the auditorium and was at the Department of the Interior at the time the largest press conference in U.S. history. Ickes was loved and trusted by reporters; Truman was not. “I don’t care to stay in an administration,” Ickes wrote in his diary, “where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the party.”
President Truman had first offered the post of secretary of the interior to William O. Douglas. From a conservationist’s perspective, Douglas would have been an outstanding choice. Undoubtedly, he would have promoted wilderness in Alaska; he was firmly opposed to the U.S. government’s poisoning of wolves; and he was averse to allowing domesticated animals to graze on public lands around Mount McKinley. For Douglas, in fact, Alaska was America’s “last opportunity” to “preserve vast wilderness areas intact.”47
By the time Truman had become president in April 1945, Douglas was a significant political presence. He had the tight-lipped look of a naval officer; some people said he resembled the pugnacious James Forrestal, or James Cagney. He was physically fit and had appealing wrinkles around his eyes. Douglas was so progressive-minded, his critics said, that he would have liked to be martyred in the Haymarket Riot. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I.W.W.’s who I saw being shot at by the police,” Douglas said. “I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”48
Not known for either understatement or reserve in his personal life, Douglas was a force to be reckoned with in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. Waking up at the crack of dawn, Douglas, a prodigious worker, would leave his home—at 4852 Hutchins Place, in the Palisades neighborhood—for a walk along the C&O Canal. After feeding his border collie, Sandy, he would be off to Capitol Hill. Lawyers arguing cases at the Supreme Court dreaded his piercing blue eyes, which were as keen as those of a condor. Unlike most Supreme Court justices, Douglas kept his opinions short and readable by a layperson. He was proud of his northwestern upbringing, and socialites in Georgetown knew that he might very well wear hiking boots to a black-tie dinner. Given both his personal austerity and his judicial stature, it was quite a coup when The Wilderness Society recruited him to join the movement for roadless, primitive lands. Douglas, in fact, became a filter through which U.S. senators and congressmen first learned about the new idea of “leave it alone” conservation.
During the 1950s in Washington, D.C., a popular comment along the C&O Canal was “There goes Justice Douglas.” An article in the Living Wilderness called him “the most famous living American walker.”49 Wearing blue jeans and a work shirt, Douglas would walk along the canal daily, rain or shine, averaging ten to twenty miles a day, in protest against a motor parkway, which had been promoted by the Washington Post and the Times Herald. People would sometimes actually blink their eyes in disbelief: that was the nation’s most famous jurist over there, with a walking stick. The threat to the towpath had become for Douglas the symbol of what was wrong with American life, and the canal was being used for sewage. He challenged the editors of the Post and the Times Herald to come and see wild nature there with him, to simply say no to motorized traffic. When the Potomac River was filled by spring rains, and young trees were blooming along its banks and birdlife was all around, Douglas believed that hikers could be transported back to the 1850s when horses and mules towed barges. “The river must be cleaned up and made pure again,” Douglas wrote in the Living Wilderness. “Then campsites, fireplaces, pure drinking water, and sanitary facilities can be provided under the auspices of the National Park Service. That will be the best use of the Canal and the Potomac—far better than needless water storage of high-priced electric power.”50
Douglas understood from his earlier long hikes in the Cascades that the richest Americans were those who had learned to let the nation’s most treasured landscapes a
lone. Douglas believed that hard work was good for the soul but that no person should become a machine. Nonconformity, now and then, was a sign of a healthy mind. Loafing in nature made the senses keen. Why lead a life of quiet desperation when you could reel in salmon from Puget Sound or see an owl in The Dalles? Good behavior, to Douglas, was overrated. Exhilaration and voluntary poverty were far preferable to the gilded cage of a life of dull comfort. While he perhaps went a bit far with some of his judicial opinions regarding conservation, Douglas wasn’t very different from a lot of Pacific northwesterners or the Depression-era boys who had a penchant for the outdoors. Perhaps because his father had been a minister, Douglas was quick to see all of life’s blessings. As he aged his skin became weathered. There was nothing mystical about Douglas’s outdoors world; unlike the Comanche he did not pray to buffalo, and unlike the Buddhists he did not meditate on mountains. He was simply the most brilliant person Yakima ever produced, and he lived to walk thousands of miles. Like Thoreau in Walden, he believed the “swiftest traveler” was one who “goes afoot.”51
In 1946 that other great hiker and forest lover, Gifford Pinchot, died at age eighty-one at Grey Towers, his home in Pennsylvania. If Douglas had his way, Pinchot’s face (along with John Muir’s) would have been carved on Mount Rushmore, but others in Washington, D.C., had long considered Pinchot an irrelevant relic. At the funeral, Douglas reassured Cornelia Pinchot, the widow, that he would continue fighting for America’s forestlands. She uttered the truest line ever about her husband: “Conservation to Gifford Pinchot was never a vague, fuzzy aspiration; it was concrete, exact, dynamic.”52
Douglas, who felt he could be most useful to the burgeoning environmental movement in the Supreme Court, declined Truman’s offer to make him secretary of the interior. He wrote his outdoors memoir Of Men and Mountains in 1950—a must-read for those in the up-and-coming field of environmental law. Working his back channels, he pushed for the National Park Service to take over vast areas of the Washington coast. All wildlife legislation of the era would cross his desk. Meanwhile Julius A. Krug—a Democrat from Madison, Wisconsin—became secretary of the interior.53 Krug quietly went about slowing the rapid pace at which the department had operated under Harold Ickes. Krug’s philosophy was based on the fact that people voted in elections—not wolves, cougars, or foxes. During the Truman administration, in fact, not a single national park was authorized.54 Nor was there any expansion of the area of existing national monuments in Alaska. Truman didn’t give a damn about nature. Douglas was the torchbearer for the Rooseveltian cause throughout the big debates of the 1950s over the Alaskan wilderness. “I’m ready to bend the law in favor of the environment,” Douglas would later admit, “and against the corporations.”55
Like many conservationists in the Pacific Northwest, Douglas viewed Alaska as an extension of Washington state. The Tongass and Chugach were sacred national places, steeped in Teddy Roosevelt’s and Gifford Pinchot’s lore, which weren’t going to be destroyed for the benefit of the extraction industries. Douglas was never going to let them be ruined—any man who could overcome polio could surely square off against polluters. The fact that Douglas had refused the post of secretary of the interior didn’t mean that he had relinquished his Muirian duty to protect America’s natural heritage. Never would he let Alaska become Chicago.56
Chapter Fifteen - Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake, and the Lady Bush Pilots
I
Visitors to Alaska arrived by plane in record numbers in the early years of the cold war, some of them understandably apprehensive about flying over the seemingly endless procession of Alaskan mountain ridges. Lower Forty-Eighters felt minuscule at an altitude of 10,000 feet, peering through their little windows at clouds larger than lakes. Madcap turbulence often caused the planes to rattle and rumble like storm-tossed ships on a vertiginous sea. Then there was the memory of Will Rogers, who had been killed in a plane crash in Alaska. Although the photographer Ansel Adams didn’t care for aviation—having lost a few close friends to crashes—he wasn’t afflicted by acrophobia. Adams knew that flying was the only way to hopscotch around Alaska’s immense area and to be enlightened and awed by its extremes. Because Alaska’s road system in the late 1940s was confined to populated places, air travel was the only feasible mode of transportation. Adams wrote that while flying was an “unnatural environment for man,” it was, in truth, the only “practical way” to “visit many of the areas I wanted to photograph.”1
In 1942, Adams had traveled in the Pacific Northwest, photographing the rocky alpine slopes and glacier-capped summits of the Olympic Mountains towering upward from greater Seattle against the Pacific sky. This majestic panorama, fresh with the smell of rain, inspired some of Adams’s best photography. He shot ocean waves smashing into cliffsides and Piper’s bellflowers growing in the crevices of rock outcroppings. However, while Adams recognized the Hoh and Quinault rain forests of the Olympics as botanical wonders, he craved glaciers and taller peaks. His intuition told him that Glacier Bay and Mount McKinley were the places to be. He also craved the light of the far northern skies. The Olympics were too low—foothills, compared with the Alaska Range. None of the major peaks in the Olympics were higher than 8,000 feet. “Imaginatively inclined,” Adams recalled in An Autobiography, “I felt Alaska might be close to the wilderness perfection I continuously sought.”2
Sometimes dreams come true. Alaska exceeded all of Adams’s expectations. His excursions in 1947 and 1949 left him with cherished memories and enduring photographs (even though the weather had fluctuated between bad and awful). Building on the artistic photos Edward Curtis had taken of Alaskan landscapes during the Harriman Expedition of 1899, Adams used airplanes, helicopters, snowmobiles, jeeps, boats, canoes, and hiking boots as a means to a keeper shot; he was able to capture places like Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay in dramatic light.
Born in 1902 to upper-class parents in San Francisco, Adams became committed to photographing wild America after hiking in Yosemite National Park as a fourteen-year-old. Adams was flabbergasted to learn that tectonic plates had once pushed up piles of rocks that were now called the Sierra Nevada. “The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious,” Adams recalled of his trip of June 1916. “One wonder after another descended upon us. . . . There was light everywhere. . . . A new era began for me.” Adams’s father soon thereafter bought his son a Brownie camera. Young Ansel was off and running, constantly searching for the right natural scene. “I believe photography has both a challenge and an obligation,” he wrote of his own philosophy, “to help us see more clearly and more deeply, and to reveal to others the grandeur and potentials of the one and only world which we inhabit.”3
Much like John Muir, his hero, Adams started wandering in the Sierra Nevada looking for picture-perfect vistas. Anxious to help save the Yosemite wilderness, he joined the Sierra Club. Occasionally he wrote articles for the Sierra Club Bulletin. His art introduced Yosemite to the general public, increasing consciousness about the old-growth redwoods of Mariposa Grove and the priceless vistas from Glacier Point. Yosemite, it seems, had aroused all his subtle creative strains. In 1934 Adams, determined to protect Yosemite for perpetuity, joined the Sierra Club’s board of directors; he remained active there until 1971. Following the lead of Alfred Stieglitz, who believed photography should be as high an art as painting, Adams adopted a variety of new lenses, determined to reveal Yosemite profoundly. Mountain landscapes, captured by the wide-angle lens, enraptured him.4 Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken in 1927, was his first visualization—that is, he visualized the photo before it was shot, determining its essence in a quasi-scientific yet romantic way.5 “My photographs have now reached a stage when they are worthy of the world’s critical examination,” Adams declared in 1927. “I have suddenly come upon a new style which I believe will place my work equal to anything of its kind.”6
Starting in the early 1930s, Adams rejected the notion that his photographs were “pictorial”—a dreaded wor
d used in Henry Luce’s magazines Time and Life. Instead, Adams, with other West Coast photographers including Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, formed Group f/64, championing so-called “straight” realist photographs. The group’s name was derived from the smallest lens aperture on large-format cameras, which gives the greatest depth of field with maximum definition from foreground to background. They preferred pioneer western photographers like William Henry Jackson to New York’s avant-garde.7
The way Adams photographed the West—his spiritual command of the landscape—allowed Americans to better appreciate their wilderness heritage. Adams’s photograph of McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park, for example, helped increase the number of family visits to northwestern Montana. Starting with his first book, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, Adams regularly published his black-and-white landscapes of Yosemite in various popular formats including wall calendars. With a black beard and a broad-rimmed floppy hat, and dressed like the young Muir, Adams worked at his trade wherever high-country light met rock. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes read Adams’s Sierra Nevada and marveled at the exquisite photography, amazed that the young Californian had so elegantly captured the mountainous Kings River Canyon region, where giant sequoias were found along with ponderosa pine, incense, cedar, and white fir. Awestruck by the book’s nobility, feeling as if he were on a raft going down the Kings, Kaweah, and Kern rivers, Ickes brought Sierra Nevada to the White House to show to his boss. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn’t give it back. The New Dealers now considered Adams a favorite artist.8
Ickes wanted to make his mark at the Department of the Interior by creating a new kind of national park in the era of dust bowls, soil erosion, and wildlife depletion. Building on Bob Marshall’s ideas about wilderness and relishing Adams’s photos, he envisioned a vast John Muir–Kings Canyon Wilderness Park. When he went to Capitol Hill to take up the matter, he soon discovered that nothing had changed much since Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed in the 1920s. Developers in California still wanted concrete water reservoirs, open grazing, timber clear-cuts, and ski resorts. Ickes showed Adams’s book Sierra Nevada to congressmen and insisted that a roadless park was the “new way,” but he faced strenuous opposition from the Republican Party. The lengthy process of compromise that followed included a great to-do over the park’s name. Ickes was eventually forced to drop the name John Muir (California’s businessmen still considered Muir a rabble-rouser), and Republicans didn’t want the word wilderness on any piece of legislation.
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