The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [231]
Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa’s Sixth District did more to protect migratory birds than any other politician in American history besides Theodore Roosevelt.
Congressman John F. Lacey. (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Special Collections)
Under consideration since 1897, the Lacey Act finally passed the House on April 18, 1900, and then, three weeks later, on May 25, passed the Senate. President McKinley signed the Lacey Act into law with no regrets.82 A new conservationism had arrived in America. No longer could you kill a snowy white heron along the Indian River, for example, and sell the feathers to Macy’s department store in New York. As Governor Roosevelt saw it, as a consequence of this federal legislation (plus the Hallock Bird Protection law), Dutcher could now make a citizen’s arrest if he saw somebody illegally shoot a bird.83 The landmark legislation, however, didn’t accomplish its immediate goal, for the financially stingy President McKinley initially employed very few game wardens. Worse yet, the state game laws weren’t really enforced. Still, the law of the land was now on the side of the conservation movement.84 It would be up to the Audubon societies and AOU to figure out how to raise funds for wardens.
High-minded speeches like Roosevelt’s second annual message and legislation like the Hallock Bill and the Lacey Act were, of course, only the first steps in this reformist movement. Enforcing change—in this case, closing up the millenary industry’s loopholes and confronting market hunters and fishermen bent on exterminating pelicans—proved to be difficult. Suddenly, the heavily armed plume hunters in Florida were pitted against newly organized conservationist groups like the FAS and AOU in a what were known as the “feather wars.” This protracted feud flared up and became deadly between 1900 and 1920. Under the Lacey Act, however, a poacher could no longer bribe or intimidate a local judge to turn a blind eye toward the slaughtering of birds. Now, for the first time, accused poachers operating in Florida would have to go before a federal judge, who would be fully cognizant that the federal government wanted the act vigorously enforced.
Refusing to capitulate, and antagonistic toward what they perceived as Yankee hunting restrictions, the plumers in Florida stood their ground and defied the law. It was reminiscent the blowback in response to the Washington’s Birthday Reserves or Cleveland Reserves. Abetted by the millinary industry, many intransigent Florida market hunters simply refused to pay the new laws any mind. They believed in their God-given right to exterminate species; Washington, D.C., could shove its bird laws as far as they were concerned: the Second Amendment gave them the right to shoot whatever they damn well pleased. Roosevelt—the “born bird-lover” 85—scoffed at such backward, neo-Confederate thinking. Some plumers, however, decided that it was legally safer to hunt in the North, in the “prairie potholes” of Canada and the upper Midwest, rather than in the southern states, which encompassed the cross-continental bird migration route known as the Mississippi Flyway; in Minnesota and Wisconsin, unlike Florida, wardens weren’t patrolling the “Father of Waters.”
Nevertheless, a huge pro-Audubon Society change had occurred. And to the consternation of the millinary industry, its worst enemy—Theodore Roosevelt—seemed to be a short-fused time bomb. Within four months after the legislation in Tallahassee, he would be president of the United States.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE ADVOCATE OF THE STRENUOUS LIFE
I
By the time the Lacey Act had passed in 1900 Governor Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs had solidified the friendship that began at their first meeting at the Fellowcraft Club. Burroughs now had a face full of hard-earned wrinkles, and he had grown a long,