Loving Nature, Fearing the State

Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan

Brian Allen Drake

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780295992990
• eBook ISBN: 9780295804859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A "conservative environmental tradition" in America may sound like a contradiction in terms, but as Brian Allen Drake shows in Loving Nature, Fearing the State, right-leaning politicians and activists have shaped American environmental consciousness since the environmental movement's beginnings. In this wide-ranging history, Drake explores the tensions inherent in balancing an ideology dedicated to limiting the power of government with a commitment to protecting treasured landscapes and ecological health. Drake argues that "antistatist" beliefs--an individualist ethos and a mistrust of government--have colored the American passion for wilderness but also complicated environmental protection efforts. While most of the successes of the environmental movement have been enacted through the federal government, conservative and libertarian critiques of big-government environmentalism have increasingly resisted the idea that strengthening state power is the only way to protect the environment. Loving Nature, Fearing the State traces the influence of conservative environmental thought through the stories of important actors in postwar environmental movements. The book follows small-government pioneer Barry Goldwater as he tries to establish federally protected wilderness lands in the Arizona desert and shows how Goldwater's intellectual and ideological struggles with this effort provide a framework for understanding the dilemmas of an antistatist environmentalism. It links antigovernment activism with environmental public health concerns by analyzing opposition to government fluoridation campaigns and investigates environmentalism from a libertarian economic perspective through the work of free-market environmentalists. Drake also sees in the work of Edward Abbey an argument that reverence for nature can form the basis for resistance to state power. Each chapter highlights debates and tensions that are important to understanding environmental history and the challenges that face environmental protection efforts today.

1

ARIZONA PORTRAITS

The Natural World of Barry Goldwater, Part I

I like to think that all human effort takes place within the context of something permanent, like that river and its canyons.

—Barry Goldwater on the Colorado River, 1970

THEY CALLED HIM “MR. CONSERVATIVE.” TO HIS SUPPORTERS, BARRY Goldwater was the personification of everything they held dear: a crusader against big government, an unblinking foe of the global Communist peril, a defender of states' rights, free enterprise, right-to-work laws, and old-fashioned individual initiative. He was a man's man to boot, with rugged good looks, a sense of humor, and a no-nonsense disposition that complemented his success as a Phoenix businessman, military pilot, and eventual five-term U.S. senator from Arizona. He was also their white knight.

The 1950s through the early 1970s, the years of Goldwater's prominence, were not the best ones for the American Right. It was an age of liberal centrism and consensus, at least on the surface, with both Republicans and Democrats working in the long shadow of the New Deal and an ever-expanding federal government. Rock-ribbed conservatives had few champions to whom they could turn, but when Goldwater, seemingly against the odds and certainly against conventional wisdom, captured the 1964 Republican nomination for president, it was as if a prophet had emerged from the desert Southwest to lead them home. “In your heart,” went their hagiographic campaign motto, “you know he's right.”¹

To his opponents, he was a menace. Goldwater's rejection of social welfare legislation, they said, revealed a hatred of the poor and the working classes, and his support for states' rights and his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 suggested common cause with white Southern racists. His trigger-finger approach to the Cold War, they charged, was just plain dangerous in a nuclear-tipped world. After all, hadn't he been an enduring supporter of Joseph McCarthy when others had long since come to their senses? Didn't he enjoy the support of the crackpot John Birch Society? Had he not urged an invasion of Cuba during the tense days of October 1962 and pushed for the military liberation of rebellious Soviet Bloc nations like Hungary? To his critics, a vote for Goldwater in 1964 would be a vote for World War III, an idea captured famously in opponent Lyndon Johnson's TV ads that same year. “In your guts,” ran a Democratic parody of the Goldwaterite motto, “you know he's nuts.” Johnson's drubbing of Goldwater in November confirmed to liberal critics that the Right was going the way of the dodo, an obituary that proved to be rather premature.

Goldwater's ascent rested on one of the most important political transformations of the postwar years—the rise of the Republican Party's conservative wing. The GOP was deeply fractured in the 1950s and early 1960s. Conservatives bemoaned what they saw as its wishy-washy quasi-liberalism and eastern elitism. “Establishment” Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, they said, had turned the party from its core conservatism into an imitation of the Democrats, complete with eastern-style patrician attitudes, New Dealish welfare plans, social and racial liberalism, and a dangerous tendency to coddle the Reds. The GOP was sorely in need of ideological purification, a return to its proper role as champion of small government, states' rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and private property. It needed to reassert its anticommunism and be willing to back up those sentiments with military action, to leave issues like civil rights to local and state authorities who “understood” such things, and to abandon its tacit acceptance of regulation and the welfare state. The modern party offered only an echo of Democratic ideals, conservatives complained, and, to make things even worse, the Establishment prevented them from fixing it. Their champion, Robert A. Taft, had been denied the Republican candidacy for president in 1952 by the Eisenhower mainstream, and twelve years later they still flinched at the memory.

To “establishment” Republicans, the conservatives were hopeless extremists. The political future ran toward the political center, said Eisenhower and others. Like it or not, social welfare, civil rights, and activist government were here to stay, and right-wing dogma would only drive ordinary Republicans into Democrats' hands. The conservatives would have none of it. They itched for a showdown, and in Barry Goldwater they found not only a man sympathetic to their ideals but also a charismatic leader who could rally the troops. Combining their ideological passion with superb grassroots organizing and skillful use of party rules, they secured Goldwater's nomination in 1964 and took control of the party by the late 1960s. By 1980 the second generation of GOP conservatives would finally place another of their heroes, Ronald Reagan, in the White House.²

Barry Goldwater's own political beliefs were like a hundred-proof shot of conservative antistatism. For him, the federal government was a barely necessary evil, limited by the Constitution to a handful of activities, and its growth in the twentieth century suggested a national slide toward socialism. As a businessman, he loathed the New Deal's legacy and preached the gospel of individual initiative while damning unions, government regulations, and welfare programs. His mistrust of communism was total; when it came to national defense, he urged Americans to resist, by force if necessary, the totalitarian designs of the Soviet Union and its (supposedly) obedient client states. No compromise was possible, and victory the only road to peace; talk of peaceful coexistence was treason born of “a craven fear of death.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes made many people nervous and sometimes angry.³

This side of Goldwater has often hidden the rest of the man, for he was never the cardboard figure constructed by worshippers and detractors alike. His sanity was never in question, of course, notwithstanding the Democrats' “nuts” comments. He was not an ideological saint or a political visionary sui generis. Nor was he a segregationist, a hater of the poor, a Bircher, or a warmonger, even if his ideas heartened those who were. It is certainly true that he leaned well to the right, and he ranks as one of the most significant political figures in postwar American conservatism. Despite that, however, it was not always easy to pigeonhole Goldwater on a particular issue, for he had a fierce libertarian independence that could push him offscript and frustrate even his most loyal followers. He disappointed gay-rights opponents in the 1990s, for example, by supporting homosexuals' right to enlist in the armed services and arguing for their legal protection from discrimination. He was a lifelong advocate of Planned Parenthood and once declared that the conservative Christian activist and staunch Republican Reverend Jerry Falwell needed “a swift kick in the ass” for meddling in Americans' personal lives. To the horror of his conservative fans, in 1992 he even supported a Democrat's bid for Congress. No one could tell Barry Goldwater what to think and expect full compliance.⁴

That independence extended to environmentalism and the natural world. In the wake of Reagan's war on the Greens, one might expect that the uberconservative Goldwater, godfather of the postwar Right and icon of the libertarian West, would have had no use for environmentalism. It would be easy to assume that he saw the natural world as nothing more than a collection of resources in the raw and environmentalists as just another group on a long list of regulation-happy eastern liberals bent on using the federal government to hamstring capitalism and create a socialistic welfare state. But such a view would be an oversimplification. A closer look at his life, both the political and the personal, unveils a man with a complicated relationship to the postwar environmental movement in general and the role of government in environmental protection in particular. It reveals one of America's consummate conservative antistatists thinking about nature, and humans' place in it, in ways more sophisticated than mere “antienvironmentalism.” Goldwater came of age in a region of tremendous natural beauty, which inspired in him a lifelong passion for it. Later, after World War II, like so many middle-class, urban- and suburban-dwelling Americans, he longed for beauty, health, and permanence and had serious concerns about the central environmental issues of the time: wilderness preservation, pollution, sustainable energy, overpopulation, and the general ecological quality of life. In short, nature mattered to Barry Goldwater.

But his passion for the natural world often clashed with his ideology, waxing and waning with particular issues and the broader environmental and political context in which they arose. There was constant tension between Goldwater's environmental values on the one hand and his antistatism on the other, especially his support for unfettered capitalism and his fears of federal power. He believed wholeheartedly in laissez-faire economic growth, yet he embraced federally sponsored conservation and reclamation projects to achieve it and later came to regret the environmental damages wrought by some of the very projects he had so enthusiastically supported. He celebrated Arizona's phenomenal postwar economic expansion and the associated population and construction booms, yet fretted over the rampant suburban sprawl and the air and water pollution that came with them, all the while grumbling about the excesses of doom-and-gloom environmental “radicals.” Influenced by the climate of the first Earth Day, he claimed in 1970 that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency were necessary exercises of federal power and then went on to complain about their excessive regulations. He loved national parks and wilderness, even as he voted against the Wilderness Act of 1964 and later expressed his sympathy with the Wise Use and Sagebrush Rebellion movements.

In the end, Barry Goldwater as environmentalist emerges as a man trying to serve two masters, pulled by loyalties and sentiments that did not always complement each other. Contradictions abounded in his thinking, and it was seldom clear if he was aware of them or fully cognizant of their significance. He recognized that economic growth could have its downside and that the resulting environmental problems might require more than a simple reiteration of the joys of small government, but there was always the other side, the antistatist, market-worshipping, growth-loving, boosterish Barry Goldwater, for whom federal regulation was Hell's tenth level. Even when he was aware of his competing values and views, he could not get fully past them.

Goldwater's bifurcated response to postwar environmentalism might be seen as a kind of symbolic transition between an older eastern-oriented Republican tradition of federally centered environmental and resource management and a newer, less government-friendly, more western one represented by Reagan's antienvironmental crusade. Until 1980, support for federally enforced environmental protection was largely a bipartisan issue, as Republicans wrestled with Democrats to seize the mantle of leadership. In fact, before that year, as the historian William Cronon has noted, Republicans “could claim with considerable justification that their party's environmental record was no less distinguished that that of the Democrats,” despite their ideological discomfort with excessive government power. This was especially true of northeastern Republicans, who could trace their concerns about the environment and their support for government action to the federal activism of Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and beyond to the reformist traditions of antebellum New England. Despite Goldwater's western roots, his reputation as the New Right's godfather, and his mistrust of the GOP's eastern-elite old guard, his environmental sympathies reflected this older Republican tradition. But he was also in the vanguard of a changing party, one moving away from its already limited embrace of government regulation as well as shifting in its geographical orientation. In his environmental thinking, one can see the GOP's antienvironmental future as well as its Progressive Era past.⁵

It would have suited the Goldwater mystique if he had been born in a log cabin, but Barry Morris Goldwater was a city boy and a child of privilege, at least by territorial Arizona standards. He came into the world on January 1, 1909, in the small but growing capitol city of Phoenix. His father, Baron, was the highly successful proprietor of Goldwater's, one of the few department stores in Arizona that specialized in high-end fashion goods. Its motto was “The Best, Always,” and it was in that spirit that Barry, along with brother, Bob, and sister, Carolyn, came of age in a two-story Victorian house at 710 North Central Avenue, complete with a maid, a nurse, and a chauffeur.⁶

Baron Goldwater had little use for the outdoors. His father, Michel “Big Mike” Goldwasser, had emigrated from Poland in the 1850s, anglicized his name, and bounced around California before settling in Arizona. Like others who sought wealth in the West, Big Mike struck gold in the form of merchandising and established the store in the 1870s. Mike's wife, Sarah, longed for a life less rustic than that of a frontier merchant family, however, and spent much of her time in San Francisco with their children. Baron was thus no hardscrabble son of a pioneer, and it showed. His wife, Josephine, recalled him as a “Beau Brummel” who tipped well, dressed with flair, and parted his hair stylishly down the middle. He enjoyed a good drink, a good card game, and good conversation, and the idea of physical hardship and outdoor work didn't appeal to him in the slightest. “My father couldn't drive a car or a nail and never shot a gun,” Barry Goldwater remembered later. “He had a motto: never do anything you can pay someone else to do.” An emotionally distant father, not one to enjoy the exuberance of his children, Baron spent much of his time absorbed in his own affairs. It fell to Barry's mother to raise the couple's children, foster their values, and introduce them to Arizona.⁷

Josephine Williams Goldwater was a far more important influence on Barry than his father, and Barry was deeply attached to her. She was fiercely independent and adventurous, and he credited her strength of character for his life's successes. In the early 1900s Josephine Williams left her native Nebraska and came alone to Arizona for the desert air, seeking a cure for a case of tuberculosis. Missing a connecting train to Prescott, she stalked down the tracks on heels, suitcase in hand, until a passing locomotive picked her up. Josephine had feared that her health made death imminent, but she survived and went on to marry Baron Goldwater in 1907. She would live another six decades.⁸

Barry Goldwater's conservatism had its roots in his mother's beliefs. “She was always a very patriotic woman,” he wrote in 1985, and one of his first memories was of her sewing two stars onto the family flag when Arizona and New Mexico joined the Union. Jo Goldwater regularly dragged Barry and his siblings to the nearby Indian school, where they watched the nightly lowering of the flag while she instructed them to stand and salute. She was a strict disciplinarian, who never punished her children physically but instead forced them to stare at the family's grandfather clock for hours (sixty years later Barry still remembered how much he had dreaded it). Though the proper moral instruction and conduct of her children was her supreme goal as a mother, Jo tempered her corrections with kindness and affection. “I loved her smile,” Barry once wrote, in a revealing metaphor. “It was big, like sunrise over the Grand Canyon.” Above all, she demanded honesty, integrity, patriotism, and self-reliance from her children, lessons that would not go unlearned by her eldest son.⁹

Goldwater's mother had an irrepressible love of the outdoors, and it was she who first acquainted him with the desert. “A convert to the beauty of Arizona,” writes historian Peter Iverson, Jo “made sure that her children…appreciated its unique grandeur.” This involved more than mere aesthetics, for to her the natural world was also an important source of spiritual inspiration. A member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Phoenix, she was sincerely if not deeply religious, and she instilled in her children a strong faith in God and a sense of Christian morality. She was firm in the conviction, however, that religious faith need not be cultivated only within the walls of a church, for God also dwelt in His Creation. “She always said,” Barry Goldwater once observed, “that you can find God [by] walking through the desert, or walking through the forest, or climbing the mountains just as easily as you can find God in a church.” As an adult, Goldwater would never be much of a churchgoer, his religion more of a vague “ethical commitment,” as historian Robert Goldberg has written, than anything else, but the idea of nature as sacred space, especially the wild nature of his home state, would stay with him.¹⁰

Following her convictions, Jo Goldwater made certain that her children spent time in the bosom of God's nature. She was good with a rifle, and she took Barry, Bob, and Carolyn on hunting trips throughout the state (even into her eighties she was still hunting dove and bagging the limit). More often, she would throw the children into her automobile and set off to camp under the stars. Usually their final destination was the California coast, where they would rent a house and spend a few weeks enjoying the beach. Sometimes they rolled across the desert to Prescott, Flagstaff, Sedona, Oak Creek Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt Dam, or to Blue Point on the Salt River for some fishing. When they stopped for the night, the children gathered firewood and washed the dishes. Jo “did the driving and the bossing,” Goldwater remembered, and also lectured the children on local history, taught them to identify the desert vegetation, and read to them about Arizona's geology.¹¹

The trips made a big impression on young Barry, for car camping could be a serious undertaking in early twentieth-century Arizona. Dressed for adventure in rolled leggings and a World War I–style campaign hat, Jo would pack the car with gear—spare tires hanging from the rear, bedrolls, canteens, pots and pans stashed inside and in boxes slung on the running boards—and they would rattle off, windshield open to relieve the heat. The roads were terrible and very hard on the tires (Barry later recalled changing thirteen flats during one trip to Prescott), and it would be many hours before they would stop, camping out among the yipping coyotes and the craggy, saguaro-studded mountains. One can imagine how it all must have felt to an impressionable young man eager for fun and physical challenge.¹²

These trips exemplified a rapidly growing national trend. The 1920s saw an explosion in car-camping, an outgrowth of that decade's emerging consumerism. Nature travel had once been the domain of upper-class tourists, pricey rail excursions, and grand hotels, but those were giving way to middle-class automobiles, “improved” roads, and campgrounds. Americans seized on the chance to escape their crowded cities and seek temporary solace in nature. “Roughing it” became a national pastime, and in this way large numbers of Americans came to appreciate nature as more than a place to be conquered by an ever-advancing civilization. Ironically, “escaping civilization” by “roughing it” in the “wild” relied heavily on technology, economic growth, and consumerist urges, and Goldwater would later struggle to reconcile wilderness preservation with his support for the economic growth that both threatened the wild and provided the financial and technological means for its enjoyment.¹³

Whatever the contradictions, in the course of these youthful ramblings with his mother and siblings, Barry Goldwater ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Nature's Strange Bedfellows
• Chapter 1. Arizona Portraits: The Natural World of Barry Goldwater, Part I
• Chapter 2. Precious Bodily Fluids: Fluoridation, Environmentalism, and Antistatism
• Chapter 3. The Environmental Conscience of a Conservative: The Natural World of Barry Goldwater, Part II
• Chapter 4. Tending Nature with the Invisible Hand: The Free-Market Environmentalists
• Chapter 5. Like a Scarlet Thread: Into the Political Wilderness with Edward Abbey
• Epilogue: The Fading Green Elephant; or, the Decline of Antistatist Environmentalism
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index