• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3017 0

North Carolina, in You Can’t Go Home Again, Marshall wrote—uncensored—throughout 1932 about adultery, casual gossip, and random quarrels in Wiseman. When Marshall’s lawyer read an early draft of Arctic Village, the first word that came to his mind was libel. This clearly wasn’t a travelogue. To avoid lawsuits, pseudonyms were quickly assigned to a few of the residents, who were also slightly disguised. And, feeling somewhat guilty, Marshall gave $3,609—half of his royalties—to the residents of Wiseman. By the time Marshall wrote a check for $18 to every adult in the village upon publication—even the dissolute idlers and wastrels—all was forgiven. The predictable upshot was that the dollar talked, even in the Brooks Range.

Marshall had started writing Arctic Village in earnest in a Baltimore apartment during the fall of 1931. Early drafts of chapters with titles like “Wilderness of the Koyukuk” and “The Wilderness at Home” were delivered as papers to the Society of American Foresters; these weren’t vetted or bowdlerized by the U.S. Forest Service. Simultaneously, he continued to urge the U.S. Forest Service to understand that sport fishing, bird-watching, and hiking would, in the long run, bring in more money to local economies than manufacturing plywood or grazing Herefords. The U.S. government needed a long-term vision. With a first draft of Arctic Village completed, Marshall rented a room on C Street in Washington, D.C., and began writing a “recreation” report for the Forest Service. “One of the first things he did,” his biographer James M. Glover wrote, “was compile a list of roadless areas remaining in the United States.”32 Vision was never in short supply for Bob Marshall.

When Arctic Village was published in 1932, it received positive reviews: all 399 pages were considered a testimony to the power of ahimsa, the concept of honoring all living entities. Rockwell Kent said, in the New York Herald Tribune, that the intimate portrait of Wiseman was “a classic of our native literature.” In the American Mercury H. L. Mencken deemed the folks of the Koyukuk truly blessed because no theologians resided within 100 miles of the town center. Ruth Benedict of the Nation said that Marshall, in a low-key way, had written an “Arctic Middletown.” Meanwhile, academics praised the new statistical information about the central Brooks Range that Marshall had interspersed throughout the text.

V

When the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election, Marshall believed his ideas about wilderness and forestry might actually be taken seriously by the Department of the Interior. The election was a milestone in U.S. conservationist history. Wild Alaska had its best friend in the White House since 1909. FDR, in fact, was such a forestry buff that he called himself a “tree farmer.”33 A master talent scout, Roosevelt was open to all sorts of new conservationist ideas percolating up from the U.S. Forest Service. Philosophically, FDR wanted corporations regulated and natural resources protected. Wisely, he chose Gifford Pinchot—who in 1934 ran an unsuccessful campaign to be a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania—to become his forestry adviser. Having an acknowledged arbiter of issues regarding public versus private lands on the New Deal team boded well for wild Alaska. Immediately, Pinchot asked Marshall to write a memo on the state of national forestry policy.34 Predictably, Marshall recommended a huge program to protect public lands in Alaska. In the controversial report Marshall stated flatly that private forestry had “failed the world over.”35

Although Franklin D. Roosevelt was only a distant cousin of TR’s, they shared a belief that conservation of natural resources was essential if America was to remain a great nation. Whereas TR’s primary interest was wildlife, the young FDR defined himself as a forester. Born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York, along the banks of the Hudson River, Franklin was enamored of all aspects of bucolic Dutchess County at a very young age. His 1,200 acres of green