The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [132]
If only in terms of grit, Edge became the most effective reformist champion of national parks and wildlife habitat preservation of her era. Biodiversity and ecology informed her public dissent. Reporters loved to interview Edge, whose candor had become legendary by the time Herbert Hoover was president. She was called the “Hawk of Mercy,” and her Pennsylvania sanctuary for birds of prey attracted visitors from all over the world. She became a celebrity. Always beautifully dressed, with a silver dragonfly brooch on her lapel, Edge became the conservationist darling of progressives and inspired an outpouring of concern for the survival of birds of prey.
According to the biographer Dyana Z. Furmansky, the pamphlets that Rosalie Edge published for the ECC had a profound effect on both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harold Ickes. Here was the old Bull Moose conservation spirit being dispensed by a deeply informed woman whose wit matched that of TR’s first child, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. By representing her crusade as David versus Goliath, Edge easily won public sympathy. Smitten with her pluck, Ickes regularly summoned Edge to the Department of the Interior for friendly chats. A friendship developed between Ickes and Edge. “Their relationship became as uniquely symbiotic as the one she had developed with scientists and bureaucrats reluctant to advocate publicly on behalf of their unpopular views, and sometimes as secretive,” Furmansky writes. “Edge understood that for conservation’s new breed of national policy makers to stem the tide of nature’s destruction, they needed help from the ECC. Its pamphlets built ‘public support in advance of action,’ so that leaders could point to how they were fulfilling the informed will of the people. The policy makers needed the fresh input from the policy shapers, and fresh input is what the ECC would give them repeatedly.”24
But for most Americans of the 1920s, Alaska’s declining bald eagle populations—Edge’s widely disseminated ECC pamphlets notwithstanding—seemed very remote, of interest only to the conservation cult. Hawk Mountain was near New York City whereas Haines, Alaska, where eagles roosted by the thousands, might as well have been Greenland or Timbuktu. Once the Klondike gold rush had faded from memory, Alaska wasn’t much in the news in the East, except for Warren Harding’s fatal junket. The first motion picture ever filmed in Alaska, The Cheechakos, released in 1924 by the Alaska Motion Picture Corporation, bankrupted the company. To tourists, visiting Yellowstone or Yosemite seemed possible on a week’s vacation. Going to Mount McKinley, by contrast, seemed to be a summer-long endeavor for which an outfitter was needed.
Yet, thanks to National Geographic magazine, there was a growing public fascination with Alaska’s polar bears and snowy owls. The far north had its fans and produced some fads. Santa Claus had reindeer. Salmon was a favored dish in New York restaurants. The Isaly Dairy Company of Youngstown, Ohio, was marketing a square of vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate and wrapped in icy-looking silver foil: the logo for these Klondike bars was a smiling polar bear, as cuddly as a teddy bear. Walt Disney, the great cartoonist, also had an eye on Alaska, gearing up to make the Academy Award–winning documentary Winter Wilderness, which starred polar bear cubs and wolf pups.
And Rockwell Kent, as irascible as ever, continued promoting the far north with his expressive Alaskan paintings. Always pushing nearer to the north pole, Kent eventually wrote three books about his adventures in Greenland: N by E, Salamina, and Greenland Journal. Perilous treks with dogsled teams in below-zero weather became his persistent theme. His strongest supporter was Marie Ahnighito Peary, daughter of the great explorer Robert Peary.