The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [180]
Eventually Douglas made his way to New York and enrolled at Columbia, working at odd jobs to pay the big-city bills. After his first year at Columbia, he was appointed to the staff of the law review. Nobody else attacked the law books with the same fervent hunger as Douglas. Harlan Fiske Stone, a dean of Columbia University who would later serve with Douglas on the Supreme Court, recognized that Douglas was a nonstop worker. Imbued with a libertarian spirit and deeply committed to the Bill of Rights, Douglas staked his reputation at Columbia on defending misfits, outcasts, drifters, migrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and tramps. Lonesome, forsaken people had a special place in Douglas’s heart. What’s more, his experiences in Chicago and New York led him to conclude that country folk needed legal protection from city slickers. Douglas was an anomaly at Columbia because he was already claiming that clean air and clean water were a constitutional right. What right did Chicago have to despoil Lake Michigan? What right did General Motors have to pollute the Detroit River?
“It seemed that man had built a place of desolation and had corrupted the earth in doing so,” Douglas wrote of his arrival in New York City. “In corrupting the earth he had corrupted himself also, and built out of soot and dirt a malodorous place of foul air and grimy landscape in which to live and work and die. Here there were no green meadows wet with morning dew to examine for tracks of deer, no forest that a boy could explore to discover for himself the various species of wild flowers, shrubs, and trees; no shoulder of granite pushing against fleecy clouds and standing as a reminder to man of his puny character, of his inadequacies; no trace of the odor of pine or fir in the air.”22
Douglas, determined to succeed and always in need of cash, spent three years as a tutor at Columbia, helping high school students prepare for the Ivy League. According to the historian James O’Fallon, editor of Nature’s Justice, Douglas had “two criteria” for his ambitious pupils—that the “student be rich and stupid.”23 Regularly, when he was broke, he would borrow $10 or $20 dollars from friends; he never welched. Eventually Douglas, with only one year in law school remaining, had saved enough money—$1,000—to return to the Pacific Northwest. He needed the mountains and his mother needed him. Over the summer of 1923, he married Mildred Riddle in her hometown, La Grande, Oregon. For their honeymoon, the Douglases roughed it outdoors in the Wallowa range, catching trout, eating wild berries, horseback riding, and making love under the stars. And they went broke. “We blew,” Douglas boasted, “my thousand bucks.”24
One of Douglas’s abiding traits was his recklessness with money. Even as Supreme Court justice he often had a gritty hand-to-mouth lifestyle. His cupboards were often bare. Never did Douglas trust the New York Stock Exchange: investment banking was, to his mind, legalized gambling. Washingtonians never knew whether Douglas could afford to buy a restaurant dinner in Chevy Chase or take a weekend trip to Virginia. Impending bankruptcy was a condition he actually embraced, if it meant freedom to think, hike, and have fun. Poverty never made him sullen. No business venture appealed to him except writing books. “Douglas