Driven Wild

How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement

Paul S. Sutter

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989907
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Forestry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places while accommodating, and often encouraging, automobile-based tourism. By 1935, the founders of the Wilderness Society had become convinced of the impossibility of doing both. In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders--Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country's wild places. As Sutter discovered, the founders of the Wilderness Society were "driven wild"--pushed by a rapidly changing country to construct a new preservationist ideal. Sutter demonstrates that the birth of the movement to protect wilderness areas reflected a growing belief among an important group of conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well.

CHAPTER 1
The Problem of the Wilderness

In October 1934, the American Forestry Association (AFA) held its annual meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. Among those on the program was a young forester, then working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), named Bob Marshall. Marshall had distinguished himself as a strident critic of the timber industry and federal forestry policy. His 1933 book, The People's Forests, made a forceful case for socializing the nation's industrial timberlands. Yet among certain attendees of the AFA conference, Marshall was better known for a 1930 article, “The Problem of the Wilderness,” in which he called for the “organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.”¹

Benton MacKaye, a forester and regional planner who was living in Knoxville and working for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at the time of the AFA meeting, had read and been moved by Marshall's plea. Indeed, MacKaye was confronting his own problem of the wilderness. In 1921, he had proposed a visionary plan for “an Appalachian Trail.” Although his trail was nearing completion by 1934, it was threatened by a series of federally funded skyline drives being planned for and built along the Appalachian ridgeline.² MacKaye and a number of his supporters were busy organizing a protest against these incursions, and they were eager to talk with Marshall about their efforts.

They had their opportunity when, on October 19, Marshall joined MacKaye, Harvey Broome, and Bernard and Miriam Frank for an all-day field trip to a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp outside of Knoxville. The AFA had arranged the trip to give conference-goers a sense of the profound changes occurring in the upper Tennessee Valley. Broome knew the region well. He was a Knoxville lawyer and a leading member of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, one of the groups most important to the construction of the Appalachian Trail (AT) in the South. Bernard Frank, newer to the region, was a watershed management expert on the TVA's forestry staff and, as Broome would later recall, “a genius at reading the landscape.”³ As the group drove north toward Norris Dam in the Franks' car, they discussed forming the sort of organization that Marshall had proposed in 1930. In fact, they had broached the idea during a brief visit Marshall had made to Knoxville two months earlier, and in the interim someone—probably MacKaye—had drafted a constitution that became the focus of discussion during the drive. As the conversation became more animated, the group decided to pull over and get out of the car. They clambered up an embankment by the side of the road—“between Knoxville and Lafollette somewhere near Coal Creek,” Broome would later remember—and there they agreed upon the principles of what was to become the Wilderness Society, the first national organization dedicated solely to the preservation of wilderness. It was in just such a setting that the founders felt most keenly what Marshall had called “the problem of the wilderness.”⁴

The Wilderness Society's roadside creation was rich with symbols of the founders' motivating concerns. Foremost among those concerns were the road and the car. The group had come together to define a new preservationist ideal because of a common feeling that the automobile and road building threatened what was left of wild America. Wilderness, as they defined it, would keep large portions of the landscape free of these forces. And yet, despite their flight from the Franks' car, a gesture evocative of their agenda, they could not escape the fact that, literally as well as figuratively, the automobile and improved roads had brought them together that day. The very conditions that had prompted their collective concern for protecting wilderness had also enabled their concern. That paradox gave wilderness its modern meaning.

The larger setting was also of symbolic import: the roadside caucus occurred in a region being transformed by New Deal capital and labor. The unprecedented federal mobilization of resources in the name of conservation was a promising development to these advocates, most of whom had long argued for a greater (and often more radical) federal commitment to environmental protection. Yet New Deal conservation work projects, particularly by emphasizing road building and recreational development, threatened wilderness as these activists defined it. Indeed, the New Deal represented the climax of a two-decade-long effort to modernize the public lands for motorized recreation. These New Deal developments precipitated the founding of the Wilderness Society.

As the rest of the AFA caravan whirred by, the roadside conspirators proceeded to draft a letter of invitation to join the Wilderness Society, which they agreed should go to six other potential founders: Harold Anderson, Robert Sterling Yard, Aldo Leopold, Ernest Oberholtzer, John Collier, and John Campbell Merriam. Their aim was to keep the group small and focused on defending an ideal that they feared might be compromised or misconstrued. “We want no straddlers,” Marshall succinctly insisted in a note attached to each invitation, and they got none.⁵ What they did get was a group of advocates whose varied backgrounds revealed the modern wilderness idea's complex pedigree.

Both Harold Anderson and Robert Sterling Yard had been privy to organizational conversations prior to the AFA meeting, and their inclusion among the founders was thus assumed. Anderson was a Washington, D.C., accountant, a prominent member of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, and a friend and supporter of MacKaye's. Some months earlier, he had urged the formation of an organization to fight skyline drives along the AT, and to counter the failure of the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC), the confederation of hiking clubs responsible for the trail's completion, to take action to oppose such schemes. Anderson wanted an organization composed of ATC malcontents who would fight for the integrity of the AT, but Marshall convinced him of the need for a group with an expanded scope.⁶ Yard was a national parks watchdog who, as the motive force behind the National Parks Association (NPA) since its inception in 1919, had fought for the maintenance of park standards. He had entered park politics in the mid-teens as the publicity man for his friend Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, but he soon soured on the Service and its developmentalist tendencies. He was being squeezed out of the NPA for his public criticisms of the Park Service and was more than happy to devote his energies to a new organization.

To give the organization a stronger national standing, the group also invited Aldo Leopold and Ernest Oberholtzer to join as founding members. Leopold was, in 1934, a newly appointed professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin. In the early 1920s, while working for the Forest Service in the Southwest, he had been the first to push for wilderness protection within the national forests, and during the mid-1920s he wrote extensively about the wilderness idea. While Leopold had not been as active a voice in wilderness debates in the years leading up to the 1934 AFA meeting, Marshall still thought of him as “the Commanding General of the Wilderness Battle.”⁷ Although not entirely comfortable with this sobriquet, Leopold was eager to serve as a foot soldier. Oberholtzer was an advocate for the preservation of the Quetico-Superior lake country in northern Minnesota and southwestern Ontario. During the previous decade, he had done battle against various schemes to develop the region for both its natural resources and its tourist amenities. He headed the Quetico-Superior Council, a group that worked to protect the unique wilderness of water that became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and Franklin Roosevelt had just appointed him to chair the Quetico-Superior Committee, a body charged with creating a transnational preserve in the region.⁸ After some initial hesitation, Oberholtzer signed on with the Wilderness Society as well.

Only two of the proposed founders declined. One was John Collier, a long-time advocate for Native American rights recently named by Franklin Roosevelt to head the BIA. Collier, who was in the midst of orchestrating what would become known as the Indian New Deal, was Marshall's boss at the time. Although he expressed enthusiasm, he decided not to join the Wilderness Society as a founder. It is not clear why he declined, though he was burdened with other responsibilities and may have worried about mixing such advocacy with high-level government service.⁹ Nonetheless, the decision to invite Collier, and Collier's serious interest in the group, hint at the complex relationship between the modern wilderness idea and interwar Native American policy. The other refusal came from John C. Merriam, a paleontologist, head of the Carnegie Institution and an expert on the aesthetics of “primitive” nature. Merriam was an active member of the NPA whose advocacy, like Yard's, was informed by an older tradition of scenic preservation most at home in the national parks lobby. Indeed, it was likely Yard who, much impressed by the way Merriam had brought science to bear on explanations of scenic magnificence, urged that Merriam be included. Merriam was enthusiastic about the group's aims, but he begged off because of too many claims on his time.¹⁰

Five of the eight founding members—Anderson, Broome, MacKaye, Marshall, and Yard—met again on January 20 and 21, 1935, at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., to formally organize the Wilderness Society and to give definition to the modern wilderness idea: the notion that the federal government ought to preserve large expanses of roadless and otherwise undeveloped nature in a system of designated wilderness areas.¹¹ This gathering heralded the beginning of a long political fight for federal wilderness legislation, a fight that climaxed with the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. But the meeting was also the culmination of individual efforts over the previous quarter century to make sense of what preserving nature meant in an automotive era. Historians have long seen the founding of the Wilderness Society as a watershed event, but few have recognized the origins of modern wilderness sentiment. This book is about those origins—the various streams of thought that came together to launch a new idea and, equally important, the context in which that confluence occurred.

During the last decade or so, no concept has been more hotly contested within the American environmental community than wilderness. Although my major goal in this study is a historical one—to explain the interwar rise of modern wilderness advocacy on its own terms, not through a presentist lens—this book, itself almost a decade in the making, has become inextricably linked to this contest over wilderness. The current debate has changed this study in dramatic ways, as I explain below, and I would be lying if I said that I had no ambition to shape the debate in turn. Nonetheless, to the extent that I have an agenda, it is less to argue for or against wilderness (though my sympathies are fairly transparent) than it is to suggest that scholars and activists have ignored or misconstrued a foundational chapter in the history of the wilderness idea—a chapter that has tremendous relevance for contemporary environmental politics. Much of the wilderness debate now being played out has its roots in interwar wilderness advocacy, though those roots have gone unrecognized.

When I began my inquiry into the origins of modern wilderness, the wilderness debate was in its infancy, and there were only faint glimmerings of the new wilderness historiography that has been so important to that debate. As a result, my initial approach was fairly traditional. Historians had long studied the centrality of the wilderness idea in American history, from its importation as a filter for viewing the colonial landscape to its role as a shibboleth of the postwar environmental movement, and I was fascinated by the same questions that preoccupied many of these scholars: How was it that a nation founded upon an antipathy for the wilderness had come to cherish and protect it? What had produced this intellectual and cultural sea change?

There were already some good answers to this particular problem of the wilderness when I began my research. Some suggested that the change was simply a matter of abundance and scarcity. Early American settlers had been too close to the wilderness to appreciate it. Overwhelmed by wild nature and its great power over their lives, they sought its transformation. But by the time Americans had successfully subdued a large part of the continent, they began to feel the absence of wilderness as a physical and cultural loss. As wilderness became scarce, its value shot up.¹² Other scholars, less keen on this model of supply and demand, thought that the attitudinal transformation had more to do with an increasingly sophisticated ethical approach to the natural world. Where we once had treated nature as a mere instrument, we came in time to appreciate that the nonhuman world was worthy of moral consideration. The appearance of wilderness advocacy, in this interpretation, signaled an appreciation of the rights of nature, the rise of a biocentric ethic, and a foreshadowing of deep ecology.¹³ Still other scholars suggested that the change was the political product of major demographic shifts. As Americans became affluent and educated consumers whose urban and suburban lives were disconnected from a direct economic relationship with the land, they pined for the sorts of recreational and aesthetic amenities that wild nature provided.¹⁴

All of these interpretations struck me—and continue to strike me—as sound but limited. The abundance and scarcity argument is true enough but not particularly sensitive to shifting meanings. The ethical argument, though edifying, is too beholden to a neat idealism that conforms more to the logic of philosophy than the messiness of history. And while the demographic argument does a satisfying job explaining the growth of political support for wilderness preservation, it is too faceless and deterministic to explain the intellectual development of the modern wilderness idea.

Sensing these inadequacies, I decided to pursue a closer reading of America's historical reassessment of wilderness. Doing so required chronological focus, and so I set out to find a crucial moment in this transition, a fulcrum upon which the balance seemed to tip in favor of wilderness preservation. The founding of the Wilderness Society fit the bill. Although preservationist groups such as the Sierra Club predated the Wilderness Society, their efforts focused on national parks and scenic preservation. While making a case for the value of parks and natural scenery was crucial to later arguments for wilderness, national parks and wilderness areas were not one and the same thing—politically or aesthetically. Modern wilderness politics began with the founding of the Wilderness Society, and I expected that the key aesthetic distinctions that allowed preservationists to move beyond the scenic would be located there as well. Moreover, while there was some excellent scholarship on a number of the Wilderness Society's founders—Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall in particular—no one had yet provided a detailed look at the Society's origins. Indeed, this specific hole in the scholarship was a manifestation of a general neglect of interwar environmental thought and politics.

Finding the pivotal moment that I was after amid relatively unexplored terrain, I set out to add my own piece of the wilderness puzzle. I began with a couple of basic hypotheses that conformed to conventional wisdom. First, I anticipated that I would find in modern wilderness advocacy a set of strong arguments against resource exploitation. Wilderness, I assumed, was an idea defined in opposition to the forces of production, and to a brand of utilitarian conservation that sought to make those forces more efficient. More specifically, I expected to discover that the wilderness idea was the result of an aesthetic shift within the preservationist community, with the insights of the young discipline of ecology playing a starring role. I would explain in detail how a group of important preservationists rejected the static and human-centered aesthetic of scenic beauty—an esthetic that defined the park-making process but failed to provide a preservationist impetus in the absence of spectacular scenery—for a dynamic and nature-centered wilderness ideal that proved more powerful in opposing resource development.

The sources told a different story. While I did find some evidence to support my initial hypotheses, it was mere background noise compared with the decibel level of another set of concerns voiced in the first issue of The Living Wilderness, the Wilderness Society's magazine. In a cover article describing their mission, the founders proclaimed:

Ten years of warfare in Congress have saved the National Park System from water power and irrigation, but left the primitive decimated elsewhere. What little of it is left is passing before a popular craze and an administrative fashion. The craze is to build all of the highways possible everywhere while billions may yet be borrowed from the unlucky future. The fashion is to barber and manicure wild America as smartly as the modern girl. Our duty is clear.¹⁵

This call to arms seemed odd. Where were the denunciations of industrial offenders? Where was the repudiation of the instrumental utilitarian worldview? Where was ecology's influence? Such concerns were barely visible. Instead, the founders collectively bemoaned the “craze” for road building that was swiftly opening up the nation's few remaining wild landscapes, and they criticized emergency conservation initiatives that prioritized the recreational development and beautification of the public domain, largely for recreational motorists, at the expense of wilderness conditions. Almost every contribution to that first issue of The Living Wilderness was about the automobile, roads, and the federal government's willingness to countenance, even encourage, the modernization and mechanization of roadless areas. The founders of the Wilderness Society, I realized, had been driven wild.

There were two important implications to this realization, one substantive and the other methodological. First, I recognized the causative importance of road building and the nascent American car culture to the emergence of modern wilderness advocacy. This relationship between the automobile and the making of modern wilderness is my overarching theme and thesis. Methodologically, accepting that the founders were driven wild meant embracing an approach to the intellectual history of the wilderness idea that emphasizes material and cultural context over detached idealism. Context drove the creation of modern wilderness.

Such a contextualist approach challenges a notion often at the core of traditional wilderness narratives: that the history of preservationist sentiment in the United States has evolved from lower to higher forms of appreciation. Rather than assuming that our ideas about how to preserve nature simply become more refined over time, I suggest that each era reworks its ideas to fit and reflect contemporary circumstances. The modern wilderness idea was the product of such a process. It was not the result of enlightened minds decoding an idea's internal logic; wilderness was not a pure, platonic form that had flickered away for eons, waiting to be correctly deciphered and appreciated. It was a product of intellectual engagement with specific circumstances.

The founding of the Wilderness Society was a crucial moment in the history of American environmental thought and politics not because it embodied a collective epiphany that wilderness was the ultimate expression of preservationist sentiment, but because it involved the pragmatic act of giving a name to certain qualities that were disappearing from the landscape because of road building a...