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Chapter Eleven - Bob Marshall and the Gates of the Arctic

I

When it came to translating conservationist ideas into preservationist action, spreading the idea of wilderness across the North American continent, Robert Marshall had no peers. Born in New York City the year Theodore Roosevelt became president—1901—Marshall became the first university-trained forester to promote the urgent need to save Alaska’s Brooks Range and Arctic tundra from commercial despoliation. Marshall’s father, Louis, was a high-priced constitutional lawyer, regularly dining with the Manhattan social set, but young Bob became infatuated with “Knollwood,” the family’s summer camp at Lower Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondacks. During his childhood, his first heroes were Lewis and Clark, whose brave exploration into an “unbroken wilderness” he wanted to imitate in Arctic Alaska.1 Marshall’s boyhood hikes in the Adirondacks and his hero worship of James Fenimore Cooper’s buckskin-clad pathfinders were the genesis of what would eventually become the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And in 1935, four years before his death, Marshall cofounded with Aldo Leopold and six others The Wilderness Society, a nonprofit organization that has led the conservation movement in “battling uncompromisingly” for wilderness protection, helping to save 56 million acres from commercial development in Alaska alone.2

Committed philanthropy came naturally to Bob Marshall, who was raised in Manhattan’s upper-class world of comfort and ease. His father had routinely doled out five-digit checks to New York–based nonprofits defending minority rights, including the American Jewish Committee. Infuriated by anti-Semitism, Louis Marshall led ferocious civil rights campaigns. With the U.S. Constitution as his sword, Marshall regularly sued institutions that barred Jews, in particular, from membership. He believed American Jews had an ancestral obligation to end their silence and confront anti-Semitism head-on. His most famous showdown against the WASP establishment was fought over the Adirondacks’ Lake Placid Club, founded by Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey decimal system and state librarian of New York). The club’s wealthy patrons had waged a surprisingly fierce campaign to bar Jews from membership in their exclusive 9,600-acre resort. After a bitter stalemate and under extreme legal pressure from Marshall, Dewey was eventually forced to capitulate. Dewey, in the end, admitted that in the United States exclusion of Jews from private clubs should always be forbidden. “I have succeeded in getting Dewey’s scalp,” Marshall bragged to a friend. “The result is most gratifying.”3

Impressed by Marshall’s legal prowess, the Jewish Tribune soon described him as the fourth most influential Jew in the world, after Albert Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, and Israel Zangwill; Marshall was the only American among the top five.4 Like most Jews during the progressive era, Louis Marshall saw Theodore Roosevelt as a stalwart champion of their cause. In 1906 Roosevelt had become the first U.S. president to appoint a Jew to a cabinet position: Oscar S. Straus, as secretary of labor and commerce. Unusually for a politician of his era, Roosevelt supported a Zionist state around Jerusalem.5 Furthermore, when Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating in the Russo-Japanese War, he donated part of his cash award to the National Jewish Welfare Board. For his part, Louis Marshall backed many of Roosevelt’s conservation initiatives to protect state-owned forestlands in upstate New York. According to Marshall’s well-constructed argument, the cutting of oak, elm, and spruce to get logs for sawmills should be balanced by the formation of permanent wilderness reserves. “Blister, rust, canker, and insects are infinitely less dangerous than Homo sapiens,” Marshall declared, “who, whether he takes the form of a lumberman, or a tax title exploiter, a vandal, or a commercial hotelkeeper, is the real enemy of the forest.”6

Young Bob Marshall—pleasant-mannered,