Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

9. Canadian Spy

Relying on fifteen-cent admission fees to the Lookout and small contributions, the sanctuary took hold. Hawk Mountain became the platform on which Rosalie Edge stood to deliver her blistering conservation messages and was the place that best represented what an amateur nature lover could do. The David-andGoliath story of Hawk Mountain inspired a generation. Curious to see what a hawk migration looked like, many sanctuary visitors might not have considered themselves conservationists when they arrived. But most left the Lookout having been awakened to the problems they posed for nature and inspired to do something about them. Edge urged Maurice Broun to talk to visitors about more than hawk migration; people ought to make the preservation of watersheds, forests, soil, and all living species their personal responsibility, she insisted, because all led to “the mother of every living thing,” the earth. Maurice’s Lookout tutorials to the public became known as “the school in the clouds.” Within a few years students of personal conservation gathered on the Lookout by the dozens, then by the hundreds, and eventually by the thousands. The people exhausted the Brouns, but each fall the sight of the hawk migration renewed them. Word of Hawk Mountain’s autumnal spectacle was spread not only by those who witnessed it but also by its connection to the ecc, which played an increasingly visible role in important conservation issues in the country. Edge’s ability to arouse the [ chapter nine Canadian Spy 188 ] chapter nine public to more than one conservation emergency at a time was particularly impressive in 1934—the year it seemed Hawk Mountain would go under and take her with it. But Edge did not require much to survive or to prevail. “Apart from the personality of Mrs. Edge, the small size of the Emergency Conservation Committee was its greatest asset,” Irving Brant wrote glowingly years later. The ecc could strike hard on any issue without being toned down by the conflicting interests of a large board of directors or a diverse membership. That was particularly valuable at a time when almost every nationally organized conservation body was in the paralyzing grip of wealthy sportsmen, gun companies, or lumbermen who were devastating whole states with their “cut and run” methods of operations. Usually there was a potential for actual conflict in such organizations between a deluded or dissatisfied membership and subversive directorates. Some avoided controversies to preserve income tax exemptions. Edge was amazed at how often ecc pamphlets were used in high school civics classes not to teach about conservation but “to show students how democracy works, to encourage them to interest themselves in public affairs , to show them how they may participate in government, and not be helpless bystanders.” Being “small” meant that Edge could offer the following evasive response to a dubious congressman who during a hearing inquired about the unpredictability of ecc campaigns: “We cannot announce our campaigns of the future,” she said in what may have been an arrogant tone. “Our committee is organized to meet emergencies.” The intentional vagueness of the pronoun we allowed Edge to shift the ecc’s composition as needed from the sturdy troika consisting of herself, Irving Brant, and Willard Van Name in the shadowy background, to herself, Brant—and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in the darkest shadows. The secretary remained, as she proclaimed when he took office, “with” her, and she with him. She was present—“of course”—at one meeting Ickes called to discuss an irrigation tunnel proposed for Rocky Mountain National Park. It was another holdover from the Hoover era that Ickes opposed . “Who of you will be crucified with me, if I try to reopen this subject ?” he asked at the meeting to discuss the issue. “I immediately raised my hand,” Edge wrote. “The Secretary saw me. ‘Oh, you, of course, you would,’ and a faint smile lightened the secretary’s usual grimace.” canadian spy [ 189 “we appeared in the ’30s to be in the business of defending and creating National Parks,” Edge noted breezily when she looked back on that decade in her memoirs. This time the plural pronoun very pointedly included the secretary of the interior. In 1934 Edge published what could be considered the committee’s most influential pamphlet, The Proposed Olympic National Park: The Last Chance for a Magnificent and Unique National Park, covertly written by Van Name but attributed to Edge. In...