The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [230]
The AOU’s victory in New York was just the beginning. The indefatigable Dutcher (a devout Episcopalian) traveled up and down the Atlantic Coast like an itinerant preacher offering revival meetings on behalf of birds. Promoting the gospel of birds, actively selling what he called the AOU model law (or Audubon law), Dutcher scored legislative victories in Boston, Trenton, Hartford, and Augusta, Maine. But those were all Yankee capitals, the home turf of legislators who were apt to accept the conservationist arguments of the day. As Governor Roosevelt understood, with characteristic realism, his real challenge would be in Florida, part of the old Confederacy, where the avian slaughter had become big business. What good would it do to protect birds in New York, only to have them slaughtered when they migrated to Florida? To truly protect the sheer diversity of shorebirds, he would have to lobby successfully in Tallahassee.
On March 2, 1900, at the L. F. Dommerich estate in Maitland, Florida—an elegant resort town where presidents Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur had both wintered—an inaugural meeting of the Florida Audubon Society (FAS) was held. The participants were largely central Floridians, but the new governor of New York—Theodore Roosevelt—was asked be an officer. (This meeting took place two months before the Hallock Bird Protection Bill was passed in New York.) Concerned about “citizen bird,” and eager to save Florida’s wildlife from human predators, Roosevelt gladly accepted. Most of the other founders, by contrast, lived in Florida, including Governor W. D. Bloxham and G. M. Ward, the president of Rollins College. Recognizing that Governor Roosevelt was the single most popular advocate for birds’ rights in the nation, a friend of pelicans (both brown and white), Dutcher embraced him, you might say, as a parvenu embraces an heiress. Even though the relationship was initially based on Roosevelt’s providing political muscle for Dutcher’s cause, an abiding affection developed between these two bird lovers.78
That afternoon in Maitland, when the FAS joined the existing twenty-four state chapters of the Audubon Society, was the day of salvation for Florida’s wildlife. The creation of FAS meant that bird lovers no longer felt discouraged or inept. In unity there was power. And with the popular Governor Roosevelt on board, it was harder for the opposition to dismiss the protectors of pelicans and terns as cranks holding conch shells to their ears to hear plumers’ distant gunfire. Unfortunately, Clara Dommerich, a fan of T.R.’s who was known for her bullish stubbornness and was the real driving force of FAS, became ill and died just eight months later. Her funeral, however, was the occasion of a rallying cry for birds. Women in Florida not only started boycotting plumers but created Audubon clubs in town after town to keep Dommerich’s and Roosevelt’s message alive. Of FAS’s founders, ten were women and five were men. Katherine Tippetts, for example, opened a branch office in Saint Petersburg and ran it for thirty-three years, going on to serve as statewide president from 1920 to 1924. During the progressive era she became known in conservation circles as the “Florida bird woman.”79 (Her lobbying led to the creation of the entire state park system.)
Besides the FAS and Governor Roosevelt, Dutcher now had the U.S. government on his side. And once again, the “velvet hammer” of the U.S. conservation movement, John F. Lacey, congressman from Iowa’s Sixth District, entered the drama. Lacey was committed to the fate of avian species in his home state, such as blue-gray gnatcatchers and Henslow’s sparrows. The Lacey Act of 1900—which he sponsored six years after the Yellowstone Protection Act—made it illegal to transport protected birds across state lines. It was the first federal law protecting game.80 According to the Federal Wildlife Laws Handbook, the Lacey Act authorized the secretary of the