historia usa

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John Muir, William Kent,
and the Conservation
Schism

RODERICK NASH

The author is assistant professor of history in the
University of California, Santa Barbara.


IN MARCH, 1868, a self-styled "poetico-trampo-
geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc!-!-!-!" named John Muir arrived
in San Francisco and, allegedly, immediately asked to be shown "any
place that is wild." His search took him into the Sierra, and in the
following decades Muir became the leading interpreter of these
mountains as well as America's foremost publ i c i z e r of wilderness
values in general.
3
Three years after Muir came West, another young
man, fleeing the great Chicago fire, arrived in California. William Kent
also sought the wilderness-to such an extent that he could state
without much exaggeration: "My life has been largely spent
outdoors." Independently wealthy and of a reforming temperament,
Kent pursued a political career in which conservation played a major
part.
5
Inevitably his trail crossed Muir's. Indeed in 1908 Kent insisted
that the tract of virgin redwood forest he gave to the public be called the
Muir Woods National Monument. But in the next five years San
Francisco's attempt to secure the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite
National Park as a reservoir site created an issue that caused a major
schism among conservationists. The friendship of John and William
Kent was one of the casualties of the Hetch Hetchy fight. Faced with
the need to choose between different definitions of "conservation,"
they ended in opposing camps, learning that in regard to conservation
the most intense conflicts are often family affairs.
Rising north of the Golden Gate in Marin County, Mt. Tamalpais
dominates San Francisco Bay, and its western slope affords a
favorable environment for the towering coast redwood and a lush
understory of alder, laurel, and fern. William Kent ’ s home was near
Tamalpais, and in 1903 it came to his attention that one of its last
unlogged canyons was for sale. Kent knew the area and confessed that
"the beauty of the place attracted me, and got on my mind, and I
could not forget the situation."
6
But the $45,000 asking price was
formidable even for Kent. Still, when his wife protested, he simply
asked: "If we lost all the money we have and saved those trees it
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would be worthwhile, wouldn't it?"
7
The purchase of almost three
hundred acres in Redwood Canyon followed. Kent had hopes of "a
wilderness park for San Francisco and the Bay Cities."
Commenting in September, 1903, on the plan, he explained that
"whatever occupation man may follow, there is planted within him a
need of nature, calling ... to him at times to come and ... seek
recuperation and strength." Crowded cities, he added, produced
"physical, moral, and civic degradation" and, at the same time, the
need to escape to wilder environments.
With this attitude John Muir was in full sympathy. "Civilized man
chokes his soul," he noted in 1871, "as the heathen Chinese their feet."
He believed that centuries of primitive existence had implanted in human
nature a yearning for adventure, freedom, and contact with nature
which city life could not satisfy. Deny this urge and the thwarted
longings produced tension and despair; indulge it periodically in the
wilderness, and there was both mental and physical reinvigoration.
Steeped as he was in Transcendentalism, Muir never doubted that
nature was a "window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the
Creator." And wild nature, he believed, pro- vided the best
"conductor of divinity" because it was least associated with man's
artificial constructs.

Summing up his philosophy, Muir declared: "In
God's wildness lies the hope of the world-the great fresh,
unblighted, unredeemed wilderness."
Like Kent, Muir recognized the necessity of the formal preservation
of wild country if future generations were to have any left. In
1890 he was a prime mover in the establishment of Yosemite National
Park. Two years later he became president of the Sierra Club, an
organization dedicated to wilderness enjoyment and preservation. After
the turn of the century Muir emerged as a major figure in both the
nature-writing genre and the conservation movement.
In 1907 William Kent returned to Marin County from a Hawaiian
vacation to find that the North Coast Water Company was beginning
condemnation proceedings against his land in Redwood Canyon for
the purpose of creating a reservoir. Convinced that wilderness
preservation took precedence over private development of water re-
sources, Kent searched for a way of obtaining permanent
protection for the area. When the Antiquities Act of 1906 came to
his attention, he recognized its possibilities at once. The statute
enabled the president to issue executive orders designating tracts of
land in the public domain with exceptional historical or natural
interest as national monuments. The f eder al government mi g h t
also accept gifts of private land for this purpose. Taking the act at
its word, in December, 1907, Kent informed Chief Forester Gifford
Pinchot and Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield that he
wished to give Redwood Canyon to the government. Photographs
and descriptions of the trees, some of the latter by John Muir,
accompanied the application. Kent himself described the area as "the
most attractive bit of wilderness I have ever seen."
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A final draft of the deed went to Secretary Garfield on December
26, and on January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed
the land a national monument . Naming t he monument proved more
complicated. Although he did not know Muir personally, Kent had long
admired him as an interpreter of wilderness values and determined to
name the reserve in his honor. But late in January he received a
letter from the president asking permission to use "Kent" in its title.
Kent responded on January 30, thanking Roosevelt for the
proclamation and encouragement in saving "more of the precious
and vanishing glories of nature for a people too slow of perception."
But Kent refused to accept the change in name. If his sons could not
keep the family name alive, he was willing it should be forgotten. When
Roosevelt conceded “By George” You are right," the designation Muir
Woods National Monument was con- firmed.
The wide publicity Kent received for his philanthropy pleased him
on several counts. In the first place the land involved was still subject
to condemnation; Kent wanted an aroused public opinion on his side.
Second, his political ambitions, which carried him to the House of
Representatives in 1910, were beginning to stir, and "conservation"
was a potent, if vaguely defined, word in the Progressive vocabulary.
The attention accorded Kent the donor of Muir Woods could not fail
to help Kent the candidate. And praise poured in from all sides.
Sunset, Collier’s, and the Sierra Club Bulletin ran illustrated articles
on the new national monument while newspapers throughout the
country picked up the story. The Sierra Club made Kent an honorary
member, and in June, 1908, Yale awarded him an honorary Master of
Arts. Meanwhile, Kent received numerous congratulatory letters
applauding him for upholding esthetic and spiritual qualities in a
materialistic age.
Kent's gift and personal tribute deeply touched John Muir. On the
day Roosevelt created the monument, Muir wrote that in view of the
"multitude of dull money hunters" usually associated with un-
developed land, it was "refreshing" to find someone like Kent. Five
days later he wrote Kent personally, calling Muir Woods "the finest
forest and park thing done in California in many a day." "How it
shines," Muir enthused, "amid the mean commercialism and apathy so
destructively prevalent these days." Early in February he again thanked
Kent for "the best tree-lover's monument that could be found in all the
forests of the world." Protecting the redwoods, in Muir's view, was "a
much needed lesson to saint and sinner alike, and a credit and
encouragement to God." It astonished Muir that "so fine divine a thing
should have come out of money-mad Chicago" and he ended by
wishing Kent "immortal Sequoia life."
The three years following the establishment of Muir Woods National
Monument marked the zenith in the relationship of Kent and
Muir. They even discussed the possibility of collaborating in "the
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general cause of nature preservation." But friction was already
mounting within the conservation movement. Those who would
preserve undeveloped land for its esthetic, spiritual, and
recreational values as wilderness found themselves opposed to
resource managers with plans for efficiently harvesting nature's
bounties. In the fall of
1897 Muir abandoned his efforts to support professional forestry and,
as a consequence, feuded with Gifford Pinchot, the leading exponent
of the "wise use" school.

Thereafter Muir poured all his energies into
the cause of preservation, particularly the national park movement.
Yet Pinchot, WJ McGee, Frederick H. Newell, Francis G. Newlands,
and James R. Garfield among others were directing federal resource
policy toward utilitarianism and even succeeded in appropriating the
term "conservation" for their viewpoint. The Pinchot-dominated
governors' conference on the conservation of natural resources held at
the White House in 1908 revealed the depth of the schism. Spokesmen
for the protection and preservation of nature, including John Muir, were
kept off the guest lists in favor of practical men who interpreted
conservation to mean the maintenance of an abundance of important
raw materials.

The frustrated advocates of wilderness preservation had
no choice but to call Pinchot a "de-conservationist." 23
Meanwhile William Kent was construing conservation in his own
way. For him the central issue was the future of republicanism. If
private interests took precedence over the people's voice in regard to
natural resources, democracy was endangered as well as the land. Kent
became concerned about t hi s possibility in 1909 and campaigned
vigorously against what he conceived to be the attempt of the Truckee
River Power Company to obtain rights to Lake Tahoe detrimental to
the public interest.

The following year the controversy over a private
company's rights to Alaskan coal lands brought Kent to Pinchot's side
in opposition to Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger. In
Kent's mind it was the archetype Progressive cause with "predatory
interests" standing against "the birthright of Americans."

Indeed, he
conceived of conservation as the people's best weapon against
concentrated wealth. If the conservationists and the democratic
impulse they expressed did not prevail, Kent believed "there is
nothing ahead of us but a trend toward peonage."

Understandably,
Kent could encourage Pinchot in January, 1910, that his battle with
Ballinger was "a crisis in the history of the country which, if settled one
way, will lead to progress along democratic lines, and if settled the other
way will be a harbinger of revolution."

In this frame of mind Kent
welcomed the idea of public control of natural resources as a panacea
for land policy as well as for American government. And most
importantly for his relationship to Muir, Kent's conception of
conservation accorded greater value to democratic development of
natural resources than to wilderness preservation.
Shortly after the Ballinger-Pinchot dispute, the Hetch Hetchy
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controversy moved into the conservation spotlight, deepening the rift
in conservation ranks and bringing the friendship of John Muir and
William Kent to an abrupt end. Situated on a dry, sandy peninsula,
the city of San Francisco faced a chronic fresh-water shortage. In
the Sierra, about one hundred and fifty miles distant, the erosive
action of glaciers and the Tuolumne River had scooped the
spectacular, high-walled Hetch Hetchy Valley. Engineers had long
recognized its suitability as a reservoir and source of hydro-electric
power, but in 1890 the act creating Yosemite National Park
designated the valley and its environs a wilderness preserve.
Undaunted, San Francisco applied for Hetch Hetchy shortly after the
turn of the century, and, riding a wave of public sympathy generated
by the disastrous earthquake of 1906, obtained preliminary federal
approval of its plans.
John Muir, however, determined to arouse a nation-wide protest
over what he conceived to be a needless sacrifice of wilderness values
and a betrayal of the whole idea of national parks. In the five years
after 1908, while the Hetch Hetchy question was before Congress, Muir
labored to convince his countrymen that wild parks were essential,
"for everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and
pray in where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and
soul alike."

As such a statement implied, nature, for Muir, was steeped
in spiritual truth. Its desecration for material reasons was sacrilege. He
had no doubt that he was doing the Lord's battle in resisting the
reservoir. San Francisco became "the Prince of the powers of Darkness"
and "Satan and Co." This conviction that he was engaged in a battle
between right and wrong prompted Muir and his school of
conservationists to issue vituperative outbursts against the opposition.
In a popular book of 1912 Muir labeled them "temple destroyers" who
scorned the "God of the Mountains" in pursuit of the "Almighty
Dollar." Using such arguments, and playing upon the growing American
enthusiasm for wildness in both man and nature, Muir succeeded in
stimulating a remarkable amount of public concern for Hetch Hetchy.
As a California congressman and we l l -known conservationist, William
Kent could not ignore the Hetch Hetchy question. On March 31,
1911, a few weeks after he arrived in Washington to be- gin his
first term, Kent received a personal letter from John Muir. Assuming
that Kent, the donor of Muir Woods, would champion the cause of
wilderness preservation, Muir simply encouraged him to watch
developments concerning Hetch Hetchy closely and "do lots of good
work." But for Kent the matter was not so simple. He realized Hetch
Hetchy was an extraordinary wilderness area and part of a national
park. But he also knew that the powerful Pacific Gas and Electric
Company wanted Hetch Hetchy as a step toward tightening its hold on
California hydro-electric resources. Municipal control of Hetch
Hetchy's water would block this plan and at the same time be a
significant victory for the ideal of public ownership. The sacrifice of
wilderness qualities, Kent concluded, was regrettable but in this case
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necessary for a greater good. Making this point in a letter to Muir's
colleague, Robert Underwood Johnson, Kent stated his conviction
that conservation could best be served by granting the valley to San
Francisco.
In 1913 the Hetch Hetchy struggle entered its climactic phase, and
as a second-term congressman and key member of the house committee
on the public lands, Kent was in a position to exert considerable
influence. He began by helping draft a bill granting the valley to San
Francisco and insuring that the resulting electricity would be publicly
controlled; then he opened his home to the city's supporters as a
campaign headquarters. The fact that Kent was known as the donor of
Muir Woods lent extra weight to his opinions. Certainly he would not
dismiss the claims of wilderness preservation lightly. Kent exploited
this advantage fully. When the Hetch He t chy bill was under
consideration in the house, he rose to answer the preservationists'
arguments: "I can lay claim to being a nature lover myself. I think that is
a matter of record." He then proceeded to defend the reservoir plans as
"the highest and best type of conservation." The same technique
appeared in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson where Kent asserted
that in the cause of protecting nature he had "spent more time and effort
... than any of the men who are opposing this bill."
37
And there was, in
fact, much truth in this claim.
The final stages of the Retch Retchy controversy revealed just how
far apart Muir and Kent had drawn. "Dam Retch Retchy!" cried Muir,
"as well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for
no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."

Mustering the Sierra Cl ub and wi l derness advocates throughout the
country, the elderly Californian threw his remaining energy into what he
regarded as the most crucial conservation struggle of his lifetime. Kent's
emphasis, on the other hand, was all on the beneficence of public
ownership. Speaking in the house, he declared that "the ideal
conservation is public social use of resources of our country without
waste." Non-use, Kent explained, which the preservation of wilderness
entailed, was waste. Searching for a dramatic illustration, he declared
it his sentiment that if Niagara Falls could be totally used up in
providing for humanity's need for water, he would be "glad to sacrifice
that scenic wonder."
39
According to Kent, "all things are relative," and
the benefits of having a wild Hetch Retchy must yield to the greater
advantages involved in producing hydropower and creating a water
supply "upon which not a cent of private profit shall ever be made."
40
He
had made up his mind that "real conservation meant proper use and not
locking up of natural resources" and the furtherance of democracy
through their public development.
It remained for Kent, as an acknowledged admirer of Muir t o
provide public explanation for their divergence over Hetch Retchy. He
did so in the summer of 1913 in a series of letters to his congressional
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colleagues. To Representative Sydney Anderson of Minnesota he
wrote:

I hope you will not take my friend, Muir, seriously, for he is a man
entirely without social sense. With him, it is me and God and the rock
where God put it and that is the end of the story. I know him well and as
far as this proposition is concerned, he is mistaken.

Similarly he wired Pinchot that the Hetch Hetchy protest was the work of
private power interests using "misinformed nature lovers" as their
spokesmen.
42
In October Kent told a public gathering in California that
because Muir had spent so much time in the wilderness he had not
acquired the social instincts of the average man.
The nearest Kent came to accounting directly to Muir was an undated
memorandum to the Society for the Preservation of National Parks, of
which Muir was a director. After commending the group for its
statement on Hetch Hetchy, Kent reiterated his conviction that the
"highest form of conservation" called for a reservoir that would
provide Californians with an abundant supply of cheap water. "I
make these comments," Kent concluded, "with the utmost regard for
your sincerity of purpose, and with a full understanding of your point
of view."
Muir never responded directly to these remarks, but in the year of his
life that remained after the reservoir plan · received federal approval in
December, 1913, he must have felt betrayed. The man who had done
him his greatest honor in creating Muir Woods became an influential
opponent in the Hetch Hetchy fight. But it was not that Kent changed
his mind about wilderness after 1908. At the very time he was helping
draft the bill authorizing a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy, he asked Gifford
Pinchot for a statement in support of a state park on Mount
Tamalpais. Specifically, Kent wanted Pinchot to show "the advantage
of such a wilderness, particularly near San Francisco."
And after Hetch Hetchy, Kent went on to author the bill establishing
the National Park Service (1916), participate in the founding of the
Save-the-Redwoods League ( 1918), and add more land to Woods
National Monument (1920). At his memorial service in 1928 one of the
chief speakers was William E. Colby, president of the Sierra Club.
Kent's problem was that the necessity to decide about Hetch Hetchy left
no room for an expression of his ambivalence. The valley could not
simultaneously be a wilderness and a publicly owned, power-producing
reservoir.
In spite of their common interest in wilderness, Kent and Muir
ultimately gave it a different priority. The result was a bitter
conflict. Yet both men were sincere and energetic proponents of
conservation. Indeed, few Americans after their generation openly
opposed it. But that hardly ended the controversy over the value and
uses of nature in America. One man's conservation was frequently
another's exploitation,

which is another way of neither saying that
conservationists neither were nor are a homogeneous interest group
or political bloc. As the relationship of Kent and Muir revealed, the
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dynamics of the history of the American landscape in the twentieth
century comes not so much from "conservationists" embattled against
greedy, wasteful exploiters, but from the conflict of diverse
interpretations of the meaning of conserving natural resources.