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considered the very existence of dirty and polluted water barbaric. Pushing forward tough antipollution laws with the zeal of Gifford Pinchot, he had called for the Bureau of Fisheries to end the “steady degeneration” in “commercial fisheries in the Northwest of Alaska.” Speaking to the U.S. Fisheries Association in September 1924, Hoover said that he wanted to “cultivate a sense of national responsibility toward the fisheries and their maintenance . . . to make a vigorous attempt to restore the . . . littoral fisheries on the Atlantic Coast; to secure the prevention of pollution from sources other than ships both in coastal and inland waters; to undertake the reinforcement of stocks of game fish throughout the United States.”16

Sadly, as U.S. president, Hoover refused to put his idea of “fish reserves” forward in a meaningful way. The Republican Party had become a hostage to corporate interests. Looking for a way to promote his big business agenda in Alaska, Hoover focused on reindeer farming, believing that the territory needed more slaughterhouses and packing plants to compete with the cattle stockyards of Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City.

IV

If there was a symbol of Alaska’s vanishing wildlife in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the bald eagle. When the Pilgrims first arrived on the curled toe of Cape Cod, 500,000 eagles soared in the American sky. But colonists blamed these raptors for disturbing livestock, and an open season commenced. “For my part,” Benjamin Franklin had stated, “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character; he doesn’t get his living honestly. . . . Besides, he is a rank coward.”17 This anti-eagle attitude spread to Alaska, where half of America’s eagles lived. In 1917, the territorial legislature enacted a bounty on eagles in support of fishermen and fox farmers who claimed that the raptors were snatching their livelihood from streams, rivers, and lakes. “Our national symbol, sad to say,” Peter Matthiessen wrote in Wildlife in America, “subsists largely upon carrion; its alleged depredations on the salmon of Alaska, like its other crimes, have been grossly exaggerated.”18

From 1920 to 1940, the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Alaska was intensely promoting the shooting of eagles. Aldo Leopold, who was conducting game surveys of midwestern states as a private consultant, later took the matter up with the NRA’s president, Karl T. Frederick. “We gun enthusiasts are constantly complaining of restrictive legislation on firearms,” Leopold wrote. “Is it likely that the public is going to accord us any more respect and consideration than we earn by our actions and attitudes? . . . I would infinitely rather shoot the vases off my mantelpiece than the eagles out of my Alaska. I have a part ownership in both. That the Alaska Game Commission elects to put a bounty on the eagle, and not on the vase, has nothing to do with the sportsmanship of either action.”19

In July 1933, Leopold accepted a new chair of game management in the Department of Agriculture and Economics at the University of Wisconsin. As the desolate news of eagle loss continued unabated, Leopold tried to stir public consciousness against bounty hunting of birds of prey in Alaska. Besides being glorious to look at, eagles were part of the web of life in Alaska. But those who considered eagles a nuisance continued slaughtering tens of thousands of these birds. To counter Benjamin Franklin’s negative view of eagles, Leopold quoted Ezekiel 17, telling how one of the raptors broke off the top of a cedar “and planted it high on another mountain, and it brought forth boughs, and bare fruit, and was a godly tree.” Although skeptical about Hebrew silviculture, Leopold used the Old Testament, when it was convenient, to give eagles a better image in the public mind.20

Coming to the rescue of the American bald eagles was the veteran women’s suffragist and raptor conservationist Rosalie Edge. Long before Rachel Carson described the dangers of DDT in Silent Spring, her environmental