The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  But in the event, his chairmanship was too friendly, and the effort to produce a pro-stockmen report boomeranged, partly because DeVoto and his conservationist allies kept the light turned brightly on the meetings. In Billings, several stockmen defended the Forest Service against their own associations. In Rawlins and Grand Junction, Congressman Barrett so far ignored the pretense of impartiality that newspapers, including the influential Denver Post, began to denounce the methods of “Congressman Barrett’s Wild West Show.” A hearing scheduled for Phoenix was hastily canceled, presumably because it appeared in advance that the opposition would make a strong showing. By the time of the last meeting, in Ely, Nevada, an aroused public and press had organized so effectively that the Barrett subcommittee went home in disarray.

  During the whole effort against Barrett and the stockmen, DeVoto was intensely busy, both in writing and in organizing the opposition. In the June Easy Chair he brought his public up to date on what he had warned it about in January and reminded readers that they, too, had representatives in the Congress and they, too, could afford a stamp. Once the hearings began in August, and he found himself unable to obtain transcripts from the unco-operative subcommittee, he enlisted western correspondents including Struthers Burt of Jackson Hole and Charles Moore of Dubois, both prominent in the Dude Ranchers’ Association and both anti-landgrab. In several of the hearings, especially the one at Rawlins, DeVoto and a Collier’s writer named Velie had been considerably vilified, probably because their articles unfriendly to the stockmen’s associations had appeared in magazines of large circulation and influence, and hence had been more damaging than those by Arthur Carhart, Kenneth Reid, and others, which had appeared in conservation journals for an audience of the already converted. Without a transcript, DeVoto had been unable to counter the slurs of the subcommittee or publicize its methods, but by the end of the year he had the published Report, eight volumes of it, and in the Easy Chair for January 1948 he could summarize the whole sorry spectacle, and with considerable satisfaction make it clear how thoroughly the subcommittee that had set out to discredit the Forest Service had discredited itself. None of the legislation designed to achieve the stockmen’s aims had passed; none now seemed likely to.

  A good year’s work, and one that DeVoto took pride in. All his talent for controversy, all his radical Populism, all his knowledge of the West, all his skill in the gathering of information, came to focus in it. Knight-errantry was congenial to him; and if, in this contest with the cowboys, he shows some resemblance to the Lone Ranger discomfiting the gang of the crooked sheriff, why, so be it. He was both a professional Westerner and a romantic, as a lot of the cowboys themselves were. But he demonstrated, as they did not, that the self-conscious western role is not incompatible with disinterested public spirit.

  Coming as it did in conjunction with the publication of Across the Wide Missouri, which appeared on October 27 to praise that was fervent and nearly unanimous, the landgrab fight gave DeVoto much publicity, and he was not averse to publicity. His career, in fact, was cresting. After much trial and error, he had found his proper functions in history and controversy, both focused on the West. In December he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and thus achieved certification among the literary, whom he had so consistently and compulsively disparaged and whose territory he had abandoned after the failure of Mountain Time. In January 1948, Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, impressed by his Fortune piece on the national parks and his stoutly conservationist campaign against the stockmen, appointed him to the Advisory Board for National Parks, Historical Sites, Buildings, and Monuments,14 a congressionally authorized civilian group charged with advising the Secretary on conservation matters. Membership on that board, with its twice-a-year meetings in Washington and its occasional inspection tours of national-park areas, gave DeVoto confidential contact with new sources of information and allied him with the National Park Service almost as firmly as he had always been allied with the Forest Service. He was not the paid mouthpiece of the federal bureaus that some stockmen charged him with being, but he was certainly of the federal bureaus’ party, and an insider at that.

  More recognition was to come: in May the Pulitzer prize for history, in June an honorary degree from the University of Colorado, which gratified him exceedingly, for it honored his conservation activities and it came from the West, where so many prominent people so prominently hated the sound of his name.15 In July he received the Bancroft prize, which with the Pulitzer gave Across the Wide Missouri a sweep. Whatever his pretenses, he valued these honors. “I find the indignity singularly easy to bear” was his standard response to congratulations. In the spring and summer of 1948, when praise and blame whirled around him like fighting birds, he was exhilarated by the sense of being the acknowledged champion of justice, sanity, conservation, and the public interest against the “Two-Gun Desmonds”; and the persistence and effectiveness of the stockmen, who were a long way from admitting defeat, stimulated all his capacities as a tactician and pamphleteer.

  He made Cambridge the center of an information network, with confidential informants in Washington and in the regional bureau offices, and with friends in the West such as A. B. Guthrie and Joseph Kinsey Howard in Montana, Struthers Burt and Charles Moore in Wyoming, Stewart Holbrook in Oregon, Frank Dobie in Texas, and Arthur Carhart in Denver. He worked closely with the Izaak Walton League and the Wilderness Society, and he could count on influential friends among the columnists—Elmer Davis, Marquis Childs, his old student Joe Alsop—to back up the Easy Chair or even front for it. By letter and by telephone he was in touch with nearly the entire conservation movement as it then existed, and he encouraged Carhart and Olaus Murie of the Wilderness Society to make an up-to-date list of “hot spots” that were likely to need concerted attention.16 He also knew an increasing number of senators and congressmen, whom he influenced both privately and through his writings.

  Harper’s was a most effective way of reaching Congress, but he wanted to reach a wide public, too, especially after the stockmen’s lobby began to plant articles of its own in the magazines. Unfortunately, most magazines of large circulation were wary of controversy, and all DeVoto’s vehemence and eloquence could not turn them into vehicles for his cause. He did write an article on the national forests for Collier’s, but it got sidetracked like his earlier articles for Life, probably because the editors felt he took too belligerent a stand. The same thing happened to an article he wrote for Look about the rehabilitation of watersheds in the Wasatch National Forest, Chet Olsen’s bailiwick, under the somewhat surprising leadership of the Kiwanis Club of Ogden. He succeeded in planting conservation articles by Arthur Carhart in the Atlantic and in the Pacific Spectator,17 the quarterly edited at Stanford by his friend Edith Mirrielees.

  Anticipating a Republican victory in the November elections, he kept his eye on Dewey, Stassen, and other potential candidates, and collected dossiers on people they were likely to appoint to the key secretaryships of Interior and Agriculture. The prospects were depressing; he tried in advance to build an organized opposition to the worst of them.18

  Like all who elect to be hammers, he found himself now and then an anvil. A small factual blunder in the Easy Chair for January 1948, in which he attributed to Congressman Barrett an Alaskan statehood bill authored by Congressman Bartlett, forced him to publish a correction in a letter to the editor. The opposition, which had been trying to discredit his facts for a long time, was pleased. It took a big man, the stockmen said, to admit an error like that. They looked forward to his admitting a lot more.19

  The spokesmen for the stockgrowers—Norman Winder, J. Elmer Brock, Farrington Carpenter, and others—were experienced lobbyists and public-relations men, and worthy antagonists. But it would have been discreet of them not to twist the mule’s tail, for DeVoto was a controversialist whose voltage increased when he was chastised or humiliated. In March 1948, more than a year after his first attack on the stockmen, he wrot
e to Struthers Burt, who was riding out the tail end of winter in the Wirt Hotel, in Jackson, Wyoming:

  If you listen late at night—in that springtime wonderland of yours where doubtless the cottonwoods are budding and you’ve cut your first alfalfa, whereas we are at this moment finishing our eleventh foot of snow of this winter—you will hear an odd, steady sound. That is me boiling. I don’t know when I came to a boil or just why but I suddenly realized that it had happened. I’ve just been knocking up practice flies in this game so far. Now I’m coming up to bat. Give me some offstage noises for I’m in the saddle again, off the reservation, and out for blood. Somehow I seem to have got mad.

  Having got mad, he stayed mad. Let the Cheyenne Eagle suggest that he had spoken untruths about Barrett’s subcommittee hearings, let Congressman Ellsworth of Oregon intimate that the Forest Service paid him to defend its policies, and he came back with bristling demands for retractions, and persisted till he got them. Let someone publish a book useful to the conservation movement and he reviewed it, bought copies for congressmen and columnists, plugged it in speeches, articles, and letters, and replied to anyone who reviewed it unfavorably. He was a one-man publicity department for Gifford Pinchot’s reissued autobiography, Breaking New Ground, for Richard Lillard’s book The Great Forest, and especially for William Vogt’s The Road to Survival. When he went to Boulder in June to receive his honorary degree from the University of Colorado, he turned his speech into an environmental warning, which Arthur Carhart promptly reproduced and distributed to schools, politicians, and organizations all over the state.20

  Let a politician make a speech adopting the stockmen’s line, as Harold Stassen did while wooing western support for his candidacy, and he was at once accosted, by letter and in the public prints, by this angry watchdog DeVoto. If there is such a disease as infectious high blood pressure, he had it, and communicated it. He had Avis lying awake nights over the sinking water table and prepared at any time to start saving nightsoil. On May 8 he wrote William Sloane that there were now only three kinds of Harvard professors: those who had enlisted in Avis’ conservation crusade, the dead, and those in headlong flight.

  In July he made a second demand on Harper’s for double space. In an article, “Sacred Cows and Public Lands,” and simultaneously in an Easy Chair, “Statesmen on the Lam,” he laid out in detail the continuing efforts of the landgrab forces and the fatal errors of Congressman Barrett’s Wild West Show. When the stockmen wrote Frederick Lewis Allen, the Harper’s editor, trying to close Harper’s to him, Allen rebuffed the demand. When they wanted space to answer DeVoto in, DeVoto pointed out in advance so many provable distortions of fact in their answer that Harper’s rejected it. When the stockmen did succeed in stating their position in Liberty, the Farm Journal, and even in Consumer’s Guide,21 which swallowed the line that Forest Service grazing restrictions were forcing up meat prices, DeVoto refuted the position point by point and cross-examined the editors, who, he told them bluntly, had been played for suckers.

  Shortly after July’s double-barreled blast, Allen somewhat wistfully suggested to DeVoto that Harper’s could not go on turning itself into an embattled propaganda sheet. DeVoto replied that the issue was of the first importance and insisted that at least the Easy Chair should be open to conservation whenever the occasion demanded. But he did not again ask for double space; he was in complete agreement with Allen that Harper’s held its position as the leading magazine of opinion precisely because it was independent of outside controls.22 And once, when the campaign against the stockmen had been devouring all his time and attention and Allen had to send back an Easy Chair as inadequate, DeVoto promptly and humbly accepted correction.23 That was the first and only Easy Chair that ever came back, and the rejection hurt his professional pride. He was like a sheep dog whistled back to his duties from a wild chase after a jack rabbit. He admitted the weakness of the piece and in twenty-four hours produced another: a piece on the Welsh Indians, cannibalized out of the Lewis and Clark research.

  In September, after a miserable Bread Loaf session complete with a Frost crisis, he went back out to Denver as an official delegate to the Denver Inter-American Conference on Conservation of Renewable Natural Resources. The chairman of the conference, his ally-by-mail William Vogt, he did not meet, because Vogt went to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy just before the meeting convened; but he spread the gospel and consolidated his influence among the delegates from the United States, who included the Secretary of State, the Undersecretary of the Interior, Senator Young of North Dakota, Congressman Hope of Iowa, the Chief of the Forest Service, and the Director of the National Park Service, Newton Drury.

  On October 11 the New York Herald Tribune published his Denver speech and a week later printed the extended statement on the public lands, prepared for the Herald Tribune’s annual forum, in which he debated with the stockmen’s public-relations man Farrington Carpenter. A fortnight after that, Truman’s unexpected victory over Dewey relieved for the time his fear of a Republican giveaway of the Public Domain, and as one of its side effects retired from office some of the more prominent stockmen, including Senator Robertson of Wyoming. DeVoto’s journalistic war against the landgrab could not be said to have had any substantial effect on the election, but it had played a large part in stalling the stockmen’s legislative program until other, larger events changed the political situation and reduced the danger.

  3 · Crusader

  Though 1948 ended with a victory, it did not bring demobilization. What had begun as pitched battle against the landgrab continued as public education. The Land reprinted DeVoto’s Herald Tribune Forum statement, along with Farrington Carpenter’s, in January 1949. In that same month DeVoto combined public education with gainful employment and told his housewife readers in Woman’s Day that “Water Runs Downhill,” a fact which has consequences in floods, erosion, and other matters ignored by people intent only on cutting off the timber and grazing off the grass. The Easy Chair for March turned from the public-lands controversy to another aspect of conservation and reported the perilous state of the National Park Service, underbudgeted, understaffed, its facilities run down from years of wartime neglect and its public pleasuring grounds exposed to a vastly increased postwar visitation that it had neither the men nor the means to cope with. The May Easy Chair stoutly rebuked Time for pooh-poohing the desert challenge and the Malthusian threat that were the theme of Vogt’s The Road to Survival. Time’s contemptuous advice to Americans to “eat hearty,” DeVoto said, was in the circumstances not only insanity, but criminal insanity, and ignorant besides. For months after that angry flurry against the American gospel of plenty he was advising correspondents to quit reading Time and take up Newsweek.

  Finally, having no more immediate dangers to publicize, he ended 1949 on a positive note, and a profitable one. Reader’s Digest had commissioned, and assigned for first publication to the Phi Beta Kappa magazine The American Scholar, an article on how the Forest Service, with CCC labor, had rehabilitated part of the Wasatch watershed.1 The summer cloudbursts of 1949 had made the rehabilitated slopes a bright demonstration of the effects of good range management, for during those cloudbursts the creeks from the rescued slopes had run barely turbid while all up and down the range the denuded and unreclaimed canyons had run mud, boulders, and destructive floods. The moral was very clear, and DeVoto made it: restrain the economics of raid and liquidation, and put the vital watersheds of the West into the hands of the bureau that knew how to protect them.

  He had been trying for a long time to get The Saturday Evening Post, with its large circulation and popular influence, to take a conservation piece. In the spring of 1950 he finally succeeded, and for the purpose of collecting information he allied himself with a flamboyant ex-Bread Loaf Fellow, Commander William Lederer, a Navy public-relations officer with ambitions to be a writer. At Bread Loaf the summer before, Lederer had met another Bread Loaf Fellow as flamboyant as himself, Eugene Burdick, and begu
n the friendship that would come to a sort of fizzing climax in The Ugly American some years later. In 1950 Bill Lederer was unknown as a writer but widely known in the Navy as the damnedest promoter alive—an engaging, fuzzy-haired, fast-talking con man with a genius for publicity and for getting others to co-operate in anything he wanted. It took him a good many weeks to bring off the informational trip West that he and DeVoto coveted, but when he finally brought it off he brought it off with class.

  On May 2, 1950, an Air Force plane with a pair of Air Force pilots picked up DeVoto and Lederer at Bolling Field, hopped them across country to Plattsmouth, where the Platte meets the Missouri, and then took them, low level, crisscrossing, and returning on their tracks, up the Platte Valley along the Oregon Trail. They crossed South Pass, which in 1946 DeVoto had been prevented from seeing by the rain, so low they could see the whites of the antelopes’ eyes. It was laid out there in relief, like a triumphant equation summing up the historical movement that so fascinated DeVoto. He got the pilots to turn around and fly over it again, just to imprint it on his mind, all that country from the last crossing of the Platte to the Green River, with the Wind Rivers to northward, the Uintas to the south and west, the characterless sagebrush pass bulging up from the Sweetwater toward the drainage of the Green. When he had it by heart, they turned northward and flew up along the Wind Rivers to where the Wind and the Popo Agie join to form the Bighorn, and then on to Great Falls, where they were met by A. B. “Bud” Guthrie, recently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a friend and intense admirer of DeVoto’s. In Great Falls the three, by prearrangement of Bill Lederer, put themselves into the hospitable hands of the Corps of Engineers, who were to display to them their plans for the controlling of the Missouri River.