He had never ceased to be a Populist radical, a small-d democrat of a recognizably western kind, but for a decade or more, during the 1930s, he had been moved (largely because of the extravagances of the literary Left) to damn all crusaders and reformers as the dupes of abstract thinking. By 1946 his Paretian skepticism and his nearly fatalistic acceptance of a marred world—an attitude probably borrowed from L. J. Henderson—had passed.9 He was ready to grant that a reformer could sometimes be as pragmatic as old Ad Hoc himself. His intensified, firsthand contact with the West and western problems in the 1940s, and his informed awareness of the more or less concerted campaign against the resources of the Public Domain, insured that during the rest of his life DeVoto would himself be a crusader, and not a tame one.
2 · A Function of Journalism
For years after he ceased to be an academic, DeVoto’s life ran by the academic calendar. About the time of the autumnal equinox, when the trees began to pull in their chlorophyll and the lilacs fattened their winter buds and the leaves changed, long habit told him it was time to return to town, tie up the loose ends of summer, renew acquaintance with friends and colleagues, listen to the latest gossip, visit the Harvard Coop in search of supplies, put a new ribbon in the typewriter and lay in a few of the ledgers in which he wrote his longhand first drafts, and dig in for the winter. That was his program when he got back from the West in September 1946, and he had his usual multiplicity of jobs to dig into.
In the Cambridge novel which was one of those jobs and which he kept on trying to write long after the reception of Mountain Time told him all over again that he was not a novelist, the principal male character is a compulsive worker. At one point in the narrative another character says of him, “… a necessity so powerful, a need to work so monstrous … must spring from something terrible within.”1 It is quite likely that DeVoto was commenting on himself, and yet one must be cautious in accepting the comment as an unqualified truth. For one thing, he was a most gregarious man outside of working hours. His friends knew him as a man who, in Ted Morrison’s words, “laughed his head off” about all sorts of things,2 who loved a drink and the gathering of friends in the “violet hour” after five or six o’clock, who loved Cambridge gossip and off-color stories, who would go to any length to help a friend in trouble. Maybe there was “something terrible” within him, but his daily life did not show it, and there is no evidence, from the word of his friends or from his letters, that he found his incessant work a burden.
As a matter of fact, he loved work; he could not have existed without it; and though he sometimes complained about it, that was standard bellyaching, part of the pleasure. “Go ahead and holler,” he advised the American people during the war, resisting the frequent and somewhat Calvinistic call for a sterner self-sacrifice.3 Hollering was healthy. So was work. Later on, in the 1950s, when he found himself unexpectedly with all his books written while his lifelong habit of work went on demanding exercise like a beaver’s growing teeth, he would discover that work without a believed-in objective could bring on both panic and depression. But it never became less than necessary to him, and so long as he had projects that absorbed him—and in 1946 he had several—he was a contented beaver with a dam to build, a lodge to make, and countless cottonwood trees to fell for bark. To say nothing of his need to gather each afternoon around six with other beavers and rechew the day’s chips.
There were all those articles to be put together out of his notes. There was the steady reading in sources, the steady correspondence with scholars, libraries, historical societies, newspaper morgues, and local enthusiasts in the long preparation for writing about Lewis and Clark. There was the continuing war over literary censorship; he was no sooner home than he was involved in another Massachusetts suppression, this time of Forever Amber, a book he called cheap and vulgar and privately thought obscene but insisted should be freely chosen or rejected by readers, not pulled off the shelves by censors.4
There was the frustrating relationship with the Mark Twain Estate, with which after more than eight years he was completely disgusted and which, if the truth were told, was not too delighted with him. On October 4 he told Chamberlain that he would stay on until he had finished the volume of letters, but no longer. Less than a week later, having tasted freedom in anticipation and found it good, he began to urge that Dixon Wecter, who was writing a biography of Mark Twain and had worked extensively with the papers, should be made the new curator and take over the volume of letters.5 The papers themselves, he said, ought to be moved to the Huntington Library, of which Wecter was then the head.
It took him some time to get the succession approved, not because Clara Samoussoud was unwilling to be rid of DeVoto but because the biography on which Wecter was working was committed to Houghton Mifflin, and Harper’s was reluctant to have a curator whose Mark Twain books would not be on its list. But by the end of November Wecter was approved, the Huntington was approved, and DeVoto had extracted a legal receipt and quitclaim, carefully prepared by Charles Curtis, to insure that he would retain the right to publish things from the papers and that he would not be subject to the niggling of Mr. Chamberlain.6 Before 1946 ended, he was free of the job he had been so eager to obtain in 1938, when he had lost both Harvard and the Saturday Review and needed the reassurance of a formal institutional place.
Characteristically, he had no sooner cut himself free of the Mark Twain affiliation than he undertook another. The two bad years after his resignation from Northwestern had taught him about the anxieties of total independence. He had come to realize, as he would write Mark Saxton the next summer, that “a man who is at once bright enough and ass enough to be a writer is also sensitive enough about his personal deficiencies to long for functional justification as part of an institution.” Northwestern, Harvard, the Easy Chair, Bread Loaf, the Saturday Review, and the Mark Twain papers had all provided him with corners into which he could back like a crab to protect his flanks and rear. Circumstances had forced him out of all of them except the Easy Chair. Now he gave up the Mark Twain papers without regret, because another institution was ready to make him a new place.
He had gone West in June half committed to the History Book Club, which was being organized by a group of businessmen with advice from the bookseller Charles Everitt, Raymond’s father. On October 1 there was a meeting in New York, from which DeVoto emerged as chairman of the book club’s panel of judges. These included, besides DeVoto, Randolph Adams, Frank Dobie, Stewart Holbrook, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Their duty was to select a monthly History Book Club choice and an occasional dividend book. More than the modest retaining fee motivated the judges. Their hope was that they might invigorate the writing of American history and widen its audience.7 Thanks in part to the influence of DeVoto and Everitt, the club, though a business venture, was also a campaign against the academic monographers. It promoted the kind of narrative history that the judges themselves, selves, especially DeVoto, wrote and admired. Like every other editorial venture with which DeVoto affiliated himself during his lifetime, the club took a position (his) and vigorously promoted it. As one of the earliest come-ons in the drive for members, DeVoto dug out of his file and turned over to the advertising director the letter he had written to Kitty Bowen: “Sure you’re romantic about American history. It’s the most romantic of all histories.…”
Being a history judge involved reading virtually every book in the field of American history that appeared. It also involved a constant correspondence with the club’s New York office as well as with the other judges, scattered from Cambridge to Chicago, Texas, and Oregon.8 But it still did not quite fill up the cracks in a workday that he seemed determined to make seamless and uninterrupted from breakfast time till bed. He still found time for the crusade he had brought back from the West.
He did not hurry; he preferred to pick his own time and occasion for battle. As early as August 3, from Bozeman, Montana, he had written Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that he intended to do someth
ing about the “western hogs” whose mentality was “straight out of the cabinet of Ulysses S. Grant,” but he indicated that he wanted to time his blow so as to do maximum harm to the legislative program that he and his Forest Service friends expected the stockmen to introduce. Throughout the fall, he quietly prepared and orchestrated his effects. He stated the theme, but obscurely and without specifics—a sort of brief horn solo—in “The Anxious West” in the December Harper’s, amplifying and updating the generalizations of the much earlier “Footnote on the West” and “The West: A Plundered Province.” Then, in the issue of January 1947, which appeared a couple of weeks before Congress reconvened, he let go with full brass and percussion. Having been for eleven years the magazine’s most dependable and provocative contributor, he demanded and got double space. He presented the case against the stockmen, and exposed their intentions, in “The West Against Itself,” a full-length article; and in the Easy Chair of the same issue he gave historical perspective to the stockmen by comparing them with the Mesta, whose grazing practices had turned Spain into a semi-desert, and in whose history he had been instructed by Garrett Mattingly.9
From a purely Populist recapitulation of the West’s economic history—the raids against furs, metals, timber, grass, gas, and oil—and the psychology and economics of liquidation that these raids had demonstrated, he went on to a discussion of the high interest rates, short-haul freight rates, and other methods by which eastern capital had kept the West an economic fief. He noted the federal reclamation and power projects and the war-stimulated industry that in recent years had given the West the beginning, or the hope, of a self-sufficient and home-owned economy. He paraphrased the curious response of western interests to the federal government: “Get out and give us more money.” He observed that many well-intentioned Westerners had been duped into taking the side of the resource raiders against themselves. And this brought him to the calculated attack that those interests were now preparing against the federal bureaus, especially against the Forest Service, whose management of western resources was the West’s best safeguard.
All the resource-liquidating interests were behind the moves that had been planned in Salt Lake City, he said, but the stockmen were for the moment carrying the ball. They were bent upon converting their privilege of cheap-permit grazing on Taylor Act and Forest Service lands into a vested right, and eventually into outright ownership. They wanted the Taylor Act grazing lands removed from the Bureau of Land Management and distributed to the states for next to nothing: the Salt Lake City meeting had suggested prices as low as ten cents an acre. They wanted Forest Service lands reclassified and all the grazing lands within them, which meant most of the endangered watersheds, transferred to the states along with the Taylor Act lands. They wanted these lands of both kinds, once transferred, sold into private ownership, which meant to the present permit holders; and they wanted the Forest Service deprived of its regulatory power over grazing and limited to the management of pure timberland. In other words, they wanted to liquidate the Bureau of Land Management and emasculate the Forest Service and gain ownership of a princely but fragile domain that now belonged to all Americans.
Having outlined the strategy, he outlined the bills, old and new, by which the stock interests had tried and would try to gain their ends. In particular, and in detail, he warned against the Robertson bill, S. 1945, introduced in the previous session and due to be reintroduced in the coming one. It would empower the transfer of all unappropriated and unreserved lands, including the minerals in them, to thirteen western states, with the right to dispose of them as they saw fit; and it would create a commission, easily packed by western politicians friendly to the stock interests, to re-examine all federal reservations with a view to transferring out of them such lands as were more useful for grazing than for other purposes. This commission, DeVoto said, would “re-think the justifications” of all federal reserves, with the transparent object of getting large parts of the Public Domain into state ownership so that timber, grazing, and mining interests, always able to dominate a state as they could not dominate a federal bureau, could open a new day in the economics of liquidation.
Landgrab, DeVoto called it, the biggest landgrab in our history if it realized its intentions. Passage of the legislation it proposed would bring enormous profits to a few, and return the West “to the processes of geology.”
There you have it. A few groups of Western interests, so small numerically as to constitute a minute fraction of the West, are hellbent on destroying the West. They are stronger than they would otherwise be because they are skillfully manipulating in their support sentiments that have always been powerful in the West—the home rule which means basically that we want federal help without federal regulation, the “individualism” that has always made the small Western operator a handy tool of the big one, and the wild myth that stockgrowers constitute an aristocracy in which all Westerners somehow share.… To a historian it has the beauty of any historical continuity.… But if it has this beauty it also has an almost cosmic irony, in that fulfillment of the great dream of the West, mature economic development and local ownership and control, has been made possible by the developments of our age at exactly the same time. That dream envisions the establishment of an economy on the natural resources of the West, developed and integrated to produce a steady, sustained, permanent yield. While the West moves to build that kind of economy, a part of the West is simultaneously moving to destroy the natural resources forever.
That was for openers, and it committed him. Between January 1947 and his death, nearly nine years later, DeVoto wrote more than forty more articles about the West. All but three or four of them are conservationist polemics, most of them aimed against the same interests and many of the same individuals that he named in “The West Against Itself.” They were the same interests that had almost got away with the Public Domain during the administration of Herbert Hoover and his Secretary of the Interior, Ray Lyman Wilbur, the same interests that Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot had fought in the early years of the century, the same that Major John Wesley Powell had challenged and lost out to in the 1890s.10 There are clarifications as well as discouragements in the study of history. It demonstrates with precision who the adversaries are. Always are.
DeVoto opened fire on them so unexpectedly—dry-gulched them, according to their way of thinking—that the stockmen were at first disorganized and could do no more than reply with some personal disparagements in The Stockman and other controlled papers. Conservationists and bureaucrats, on the other hand, were delighted. The conservation organizations, far weaker in 1946 than they were even a few years later, distributed offprints of his articles to every member of Congress and filled DeVoto’s mailbox with enthusiastic letters. At the end of March, when he suspended his other jobs long enough to go to Washington for more ammunition, he was assured by his Forest Service friend Walt Dutton and by Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson that he, a disinterested private citizen, had singlehandedly stopped the landgrab cold.11
Neither part of that judgment was quite sound. He had not done it alone: allies had been quick to rally around him, because they had been dug in and fighting all the time. And the landgrab was not quite stopped. The forces behind it had money, influence, organization, a potent lobby, and their own natural allies in the meat-packing industry and the United States Chamber of Commerce. Though discretion suggested to these forces that the Robertson bill should not be pushed, there were other ways. Congressman Barrett of Wyoming brought before the House his annual bill to turn over to the Forest Service (and hence expose to envelopment by the larger attack against that bureau) parts of the Jackson Hole National Monument, old ranching country which had been bought up a ranch at a time by the Rockefellers and presented to the National Parks system. The perennial effort to whittle away a portion of Olympic National Park so that its valuable timber could be logged was still being pressed. And on April 17, 1947, when the stockmen had had tune to regro
up, Congressman Barrett got through H.R. 93, authorizing the Subcommittee on Public Lands, of which he was chairman, to hold public hearings on the grazing policies of the Forest Service.
During the hearings on the Jackson Hole National Monument bill, the stockmen’s witnesses had found it expedient to praise the Forest Service to which they wanted parts of the Monument transferred, but their clear intention in the August-to-October hearings on Forest Service grazing practices was not praise of the Forest Service. They were going for the jugular.
In an effort to restore ranges damaged by years of overgrazing, the Forest Service had been making small reductions in the numbers of cattle and sheep permitted on specific National Forest ranges. Without any question, the reductions worked a hardship upon individual ranchers who held permits in the National Forests; equally without question, the reductions were essential for the health of the ranges. Stockmen to whom their permits had always seemed a right, and especially the organizations which represented the stockmen politically, were bent on eliminating the control exercised over the ranges by the Forest Service, and for that purpose they went to Washington, where the power resided.
In June, their political representatives proposed deep cuts in the budgets of both Agriculture and Interior, following a strategy of demolishment that Senator McCarran had used on the Taylor Grazing Service.12 The demand for slashes in the budget was an open invitation to the stockmen who would testify at Billings, Rawlins, Grand Junction, Salt Lake City, Redding, and Ely to destroy the credibility and morale of the Forest Service as a bureau. Congressman Barrett’s friendly chairmanship insured the advantage of the stockmen’s witnesses: he would systematically limit the time of anti-landgrab witnesses, keep their testimony off the record by setting it aside for the written report, encourage the airing of stockmen’s grievances, and permit stacked audiences to heckle and drown out witnesses friendly to the Forest Service.13
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 41
