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C h a p t e r 5 Wildlife Protection and the Development of Centralized Governance in the Progressive Era Ann-Marie Szymanski As scholars such as Elisabeth Clemens have demonstrated, statebuilding in the United States has never been a purely linear process. Over time, there has been no wholesale, systematic progression, culminating in the centralization of power in autonomous national agencies. Instead, political entrepreneurs and public officials have ultimately fashioned a muddled, fragmented government that mixes national efforts with those of state, local, and private actors to create a bewildering array of governing structures—in short, Clemens’s “Rube Goldberg state.”1 However, wildlife protection is one policy area where the march from provincial to centralized governance proceeded in a relatively linear fashion. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, sportsmen, naturalists, and progressive women increasingly lobbied state governments for laws that reduced the length of fishing and hunting seasons; they also sought to regulate the sale and transportation of wildlife out of state, to restrict the use of hunting and fishing techniques that often produced mass slaughter, and to set limits on the number of animals an individual was allowed to take. Though they initially targeted state governments, these reformers could claim remarkable success at the national level during the Progressive Era. Indeed, by 1920 they could point to the congressional enactment of the Lacey Act (1900), the WeeksMcLean Act (1913), and, most significantly, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918)—upheld by Missouri v. Holland (1920). Under this federal regime, the Wildlife Protection and Centralized Governance 141 Department of the Agriculture (and later the Department of Interior) gained new regulatory authority and the power to impose uniformity on the states in the area of wildlife protection. In the process, reformers helped expand federal police power and established a lasting pattern of federal-state cooperation in administration. In fact, to this day the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) is considered a “model and pacesetter in federal wildlife law.” Designed to protect migratory birds from unrestrained killing, the act implemented a bilateral treaty with Great Britain (on Canada’s behalf) that led to the adoption of stringent bans on the take, capture, and killing of protected birds. In subsequent years, the MBTA was amended to incorporate similar agreements with Mexico (1936), Japan (1972), and the USSR (1976). Though overshadowed in recent years by newer laws such as the Endangered Species Act, the MBTA affects more species than any other federal wildlife statute, it applies regardless of the population levels of protected birds, and it is not riddled with a myriad of exceptions. Hence, this regulatory regime continues to serve as one of the cornerstones of national wildlife protection in the United States.2 The federal government’s adoption of the MBTA was particularly impressive because it occurred during the Progressive Era, a period in which many campaigns for national regulation faltered. Why were wildlife protection reformers so successful at scaling the walls of federalism? Many students of their efforts suggest that the shift from local-to-state-to-federal action was the inevitable by-product of the mobility of wildlife and the inconsistent protection offered by state policies. As Marge Davis notes, state laws did not generally “apply to migratory wildfowl, since ducks, geese and many insect-eating songbirds regularly crossed state boundaries in their annual migrations.” Moreover, the uneven quality of state laws allowed market hunters to tailor their operations to take advantage of more lenient regulatory regimes. In short, Davis contends that most conservationists concluded that “some sort of uniform control was needed that would override the differences of individual states. Such regulation would have to be federally mandated, they said, for voluntary compliance would probably not work.”3 While Davis is correct to note that wildlife (and especially birds) recognized no jurisdictional boundaries and that the states had widely varying policies, she fails to acknowledge that wildlife defenders were in an unusually strong position to make claims on the federal government during the Progressive Era. Other reformers also grappled with regulating mobile phenomena and encountered a range of local policies but were not as fortunate during 79.88] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01:34 GMT) 142 Ann-Marie Szymanski these years. For example, neither opponents of air pollution nor advocates of a comprehensive national waterways policy secured the degree of policy centralization achieved by wildlife conservationists during the Progressive Era.4 While recognizing that advocates of federal wildlife management could make some convincing arguments for the necessity...

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