The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [185]
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s adroit conservationism was not continued by his successor, Harry S. Truman. Truman was indifferent to forestry and to protecting predators. Regarding Alaska, Truman time and again sided with miners—not with conservationists; he liked working people, not endangered species. Within a year after becoming president, Truman criticized Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes for being too radical a conservationist. Ickes had claimed that a California oilman, Edwin Pauley, who was then treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, had tried to bribe him with $300,000 to allow offshore drilling near Santa Barbara in 1944. The payoff was to be a campaign contribution for Truman. Ickes wrote defiantly in his diary, “I don’t intend to smear my record with oil at this stage of the game even to help win the reelection of the President.”46
Ickes’s resignation on February 13, 1946—in protest against Truman’s appointment of Pauley as undersecretary of the navy—was a severe setback to the wilderness movement. The announcement took place in the auditorium and was at the Department of the Interior at the time the largest press conference in U.S. history. Ickes was loved and trusted by reporters; Truman was not. “I don’t care to stay in an administration,” Ickes wrote in his diary, “where I am expected to commit perjury for the sake of the party.”
President Truman had first offered the post of secretary of the interior to William O. Douglas. From a conservationist’s perspective, Douglas would have been an outstanding choice. Undoubtedly, he would have promoted wilderness in Alaska; he was firmly opposed to the U.S. government’s poisoning of wolves; and he was averse to allowing domesticated animals to graze on public lands around Mount McKinley. For Douglas, in fact, Alaska was America’s “last opportunity” to “preserve vast wilderness areas intact.”47
By the time Truman had become president in April 1945, Douglas was a significant political presence. He had the tight-lipped look of a naval officer; some people said he resembled the pugnacious James Forrestal, or James Cagney. He was physically fit and had appealing wrinkles around his eyes. Douglas was so progressive-minded, his critics said, that he would have liked to be martyred in the Haymarket Riot. “I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I.W.W.’s who I saw being shot at by the police,” Douglas said. “I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law.”48
Not known for either understatement or reserve in his personal life, Douglas was a force to be reckoned with in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. Waking up at the crack of dawn, Douglas, a prodigious worker, would leave his home—at 4852 Hutchins Place, in the Palisades neighborhood—for a walk along the C&O Canal. After feeding his border collie, Sandy, he would be off to Capitol Hill. Lawyers arguing cases at the Supreme Court dreaded his piercing blue eyes, which were as keen as those of a condor. Unlike most Supreme Court justices, Douglas kept his opinions short and readable by a layperson. He was proud of his northwestern upbringing, and socialites in Georgetown knew that he might very well wear hiking boots to a black-tie dinner. Given both his personal austerity and his judicial stature, it was quite a coup when The Wilderness Society recruited him to join the movement for roadless, primitive lands. Douglas, in fact, became a filter through which U.S. senators and congressmen first learned about the new idea of “leave it alone” conservation.
During the 1950s in Washington, D.C., a popular comment along the C&O Canal was “There goes Justice