The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [206]
Hoping to arouse the Arctic preservation movement, Justice Douglas jumped at the opportunity to review Alaska Wilderness in The Wilderness Society’s periodical Living Wilderness. “This is America’s last frontier, as yet untouched by man,” Douglas wrote. “Bob Marshall saw them by plane, by foot, by dogsled. His account is an enduring one. It tells why this great area should be preserved in perpetuity as a wilderness area.”35
Alaska Wilderness particularly advocated roadless areas, and Douglas absolutely agreed. “This is a book for every man and woman who loves the wilderness,” Douglas said. “While it will bring back some echoes of one’s own experiences, it will remind even the expert that he yet has much to learn about the wilderness on our frontier. And it will help marshal public opinion to preserve the Brooks Range as a Wilderness, keeping it forever free of roads, lodges, and filling stations.”36
Disney’s movie Winter Wilderness, based on the Crislers’ experiences in the Arctic, wouldn’t come out until 1958. But before even a single frame was seen, conservationists knew it would put the Frank Glasers out of business. Bambi and Seal Island had already convinced conservationists that Walt Disney was the best publicist the wildlife protection movement had had since Theodore Roosevelt. Having Justice William O. Douglas as an advocate for the wilderness, ready to protect Arctic Alaska, was also good, with Robert Marshall gone. Help for wild Alaska also came from the pioneer Arctic archaeologist J. Louis Giddings, whose forte was the prehistory of northwestern Alaska. For the first time First Nation tribal history was being treated seriously: Giddings’s research made the notion of populations crossing the Bering Land Bridge respectable.37
Throughout the 1950s Disney was a die-hard supporter of both President Eisenhower and the wildlife protection movement. While America was going through the processes of suburbanization, bureaucratization, and the emergence of what William Whyte called the “organization man,” Disney’s Alaskan adventures were a journey back to the frontier. Eisenhower, for his part, considered himself a “Disney man,” and with good reason—Disney solicited campaign contributions and held fund-raisers for the Republican Party. According to his biographer Neal Gabler, the conservative Disney also put bumper stickers on the car he used on his Hollywood lot, endorsing Richard M. Nixon for president in 1960 over John F. Kennedy.38 It might very well be that Disney’s steadfast support of Arctic preservation and the Pribilofs influenced President Eisenhower’s Alaskan land policies. If the extremely popular Walt Disney thought that families might someday want to see polar bears and seal herds in Alaska, then who was Eisenhower to question his intuition?
Chapter Seventeen - The Arctic Range and Aldo Leopold
I
The Wilderness Society’s cofounder Aldo Leopold set the tone for saving Arctic Alaska. When Leopold died in 1948 while fighting a wildfire, A Sand County Almanac, his poetic meditation on protecting and renewing land, was not yet published; the typed manuscript remained on his desktop at his home in central Wisconsin. Luckily for the conservation movement, his son Luna, recognizing the importance of this work, had it published by Oxford University Press the following year. Sales were minimal, but conservationists immediately grasped that Leopold had written a tour de force. Rooting through his father’s file cabinets, Luna organized another volume of Aldo Leopold essays and journal entries as Round River. It was published in 1953. For conservationists during Eisenhower’s two-term presidency, these two texts were gems to be cherished. Leopold’s words were quoted throughout that decade to protest against the construction of unnecessary dams in the Pacific Basin region. Regarding Alaska, Leopold