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6. The Freedom of the Wilderness: Bob Marshall
- University of Washington Press
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CHAPTER 6 The Freedom of the Wilderness: Bob Marshall Each of the four founders of the Wilderness Society discussed in this study brought unique concerns and strengths to wilderness advocacy. Aldo Leopold brought an impressive and rounded conservation career— an accretion of experience molded into a profound environmental philosophy . Robert Sterling Yard brought the preservationist values of an older generation retrofitted to match the forces that shaped interwar American culture. Benton MacKaye brought his creative thinking on the spatial role of wilderness and its relationship to the modern urban form. Bob Marshall’s contributions were both more and less obvious. For those who have written about Marshall, the force of his personality and his voracious appetite for traversing wild spaces have seemed his defining qualities.1 Marshall was energy and enthusiasm personified, an achiever who quickly grew restless when snared in the organizational webs of early twentieth-century America. While other founders theorized about the threats to and importance of wilderness, Marshall’s impulse was to explore, chart, and preserve. Indeed, for Marshall more than any of the other founders, wilderness was a place of masculine physicality , of direct bodily engagement with the natural world.2 As a result, he knew the nation’s remaining wild lands better than anyone of his generation . He also had the luxury of wealth, which allowed him to dictate the trajectory of his career and to support the Wilderness Society’s activities , even after his premature death in 1939 at the age of thirty-eight. Together, Marshall’s practical knowledge, wealth, and charisma made him the most politically effective of the Wilderness Society’s founders. There were other important facets of Marshall’s wilderness advocacy that have garnered less attention. Although his writing was neither as compelling as Leopold’s nor as original as MacKaye’s, his arguments for 194 the freedom of wilderness and wilderness as a minority right were vital to interwar advocacy. And they reflected his broader political agenda: along with his wilderness advocacy, he was a strong supporter of socialism and civil liberties. While scholars have tended to downplay the interconnection of these political commitments, they were, in fact, quite strong. Marshall’s wilderness advocacy must be understood in the context of these two other commitments, and within the broader matrix of interwar political and social thought.3 That said, there are some good reasons why Marshall’s radical politics have seemed separate from his wilderness advocacy. He devoted most of his working career to conservation, whereas his advocacy for socialism and civil liberties was largely extracurricular. Thus the records he left are tilted toward conservation. There was also more at stake in vocally supporting these other two causes. Marshall’s involvement in organized socialism eventually landed him on the enemy list of Martin Dies, the early ringleader of the House Un-American Activities Committee and a leading voice in the backlash against New Deal liberalism.4 Although outwardly cavalier about public charges of “un-Americanness,” Marshall was guarded about airing his radical views. As a member of a prominent Jewish family, he also was a natural target for the strong nativism of the era, and, although he recorded few incidents in which anti-Semitism affected him, his Jewish identity was central to his commitment to civil liberties. There are also historiographical reasons why Marshall’s integrated political commitments have been perceived as separate. Historians of U.S. environmental thought have tended to see a dichotomy between utilitarian conservationists and preservationists. Because Marshall was such a high-profile wilderness advocate, most scholars have portrayed him as a preservationist hero.5 Yet throughout his career, even as his commitment to wilderness grew, he remained wedded to utilitarian public resource stewardship. Indeed, like Benton MacKaye, he attempted to radicalize utilitarian conservation. To fully understand Marshall’s wilderness advocacy, then, we need to buck the logic of this dichotomy and appreciate how he integrated the two commitments. Understanding the full scope of Marshall’s wilderness advocacy also involves reexamining his place in the history of American preservationist sentiment. This has become tricky terrain as recent scholarship has revealed the mixed motives and results of some preservationist activities. Marshall’s example suggests the need for caution in caricaturing wilder195 The Freedom of the Wilderness: Bob Marshall ness advocates. Like his Wilderness Society colleagues, he was less interested in saving pristine and unworked nature than in protecting large areas from road building, automobiles, and the various forms of modernization that characterized the interwar period. Sensitive...