Abstract
As Leopold was piecing together the erosion story in the Southwest and beginning his professional game protection work—between 1914 and the mid-1920s—the world was changing rapidly around him. Millions died in the Great War and from an influenza pandemic, and political boundaries in Europe were redrawn. On the American plains farmers plowed millions of acres of land, transforming much of the vast, fertile American prairie. In the fall of 1917, 42,170,000 acres were planted in wheat, 1 million more than in any preceding year and 7 million more than the preceding five-year average. Meanwhile, agricultural prices fluctuated widely. Wheat, corn, and livestock prices nearly doubled between 1914 and 1919, only to drop precipitously after the war. As prices fell, hundreds of thousands of struggling farmers lost their farms—450,000 farmers in 1920 and 1921 alone went bankrupt. By 1920 more than half the land area of the United States was taken up by farms, yet rural people increasingly were moving into cities—by that year half the country’s roughly 100 million people were urban dwellers. Meanwhile, millions of automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and to carry these cars, hundreds of thousands of miles of public roads were transecting the country. Trade unions formed and fractured, labor riots erupted, and the population became increasingly diverse in ethnic background as nearly 3 million immigrants entered the country between 1914 and 1920. For many it became ever harder to make sense of the world. The 1914 comments of Walter Lippman, essayist and editor of the New Republic, seemed even more apt after the war: “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being.” A social radical, John Reed, summed up the postwar times similarly, from the view of a man turning thirty:
Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. Do they want to draw sustenance for the future?… Now is the day when Americans must become fully self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life.
D.H. Lawrence, December 15, 1920
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Notes
- 1.
W. Wilson, “The Farmers’ Patriotism,” 31 January 1918, in Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, edited by A. B. Hart (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), p. 254.
- 2.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921),pp. 146-180; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1930 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), pp. 675-730. In 1875 close to 58 million acres were planted in wheat and corn, the two top staple crops. That figure had jumped to nearly 158 million acres by 1915 and 168 million by 1921, dropping back down a bit by 1929 to around 159 million. Farmers were not merely plowing more land but were pushing it for productivity, too. In 1914 land was producing on average 16.6 bushels per acre of wheat and 25.8 bushels per acre of corn. By 1920 productivity had risen to 18.8 and 30.9 bushels for wheat and corn, respectively. By 1929 productivity had dropped to near or below 1914 levels, at 13.2 bushels per acre of wheat and 26.8 for corn.
- 3.
In D. Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), p. 264.
- 4.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 142.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 53.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 349.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 103.
- 8.
Quoted in W. E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 6.
- 9.
J. Reed, “Almost Thirty,” in “Fortieth Anniversary Issue: 1914-1954,” New Republic (22 November 1954): 34. Originally published in the issues of 15 and 29 April 1936.
- 10.
H. D. Croly, The Promise of American Life, edited by A. M. Schlesinger Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1965), pp. 3, 6. The war raised questions about how much control people had whether they planned or not.
- 11.
Quoted in Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 268.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 13.
Quoted in Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 376.
- 14.
AL, “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit,” RMG, p. 105.
- 15.
AL, “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding,” RMG, pp. 49–50.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 52.
- 18.
J. F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (New York: Winchester Press, 1975), pp. 44, 53.
- 19.
“The Fate of Our Waterfowl,” The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (Christmas 1915), LP 10–6, 1.
- 20.
AL, “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding,” RMG, pp. 49–50.
- 21.
C. D. Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 19–20.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 37.
- 23.
AL, letter to Clara Leopold, 21 March 1904, LP 10-8, 4. See also ibid., p. 38.
- 24.
Quoted in S. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 13. (From “For the 1908S. Class Record, Yale University,” holograph, ca. 1916, 5 pp., Aldo Leopold folder, Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University.)
- 25.
Quoted in Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 158. T. Roosevelt, letter to AL, 18 January 1917, copy in LP 10-8, 2.
- 26.
AL, “Address before the Albuquerque Rotary Club on Presentation of the Gold Medal of the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund,” 1–2 July 1917, LP 10-8, 8.
- 27.
AL, “Forestry and Game Conservation,” Journal of Forestry 16 (April 1918): 404–411; also in ALSW, p. 83.
- 28.
AL, “Wild Lifers vs. Game Farmers: A Plea for Democracy in Sport,” The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association 8, no. 2 (April 1919): 6–7; also in RMG, pp. 62–67 and ALSW, pp. 54–62.
- 29.
AL, “Wild Lifers vs. Game Farmers: A Plea for Democracy in Sport,” ALSW, p. 56.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 31.
W. T. Hornaday, Thirty Years War for Wild Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), p. 3. According to Hornaday, there were 1,486,228 licensed hunters in 1911; 4,495,007 in 1922; and 6,493,454 in 1929.
- 32.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 149.
- 33.
W. T. Hornaday, Wild Life Conservation in Theory and Practice: Lectures Delivered before the Forest School of Yale University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), pp. 2–3.
- 34.
W. T. Hornaday, “The Seamy Side of the Protection of Wild Game,” New York Times, 8 March 1914, p. SM3 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times, 1857–current file).
- 35.
Hornaday, Wild Life Conservation, pp. 40–43; W. T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: New York Zoological Society, 1913), p. 267.
- 36.
Hornaday, Wild Life Conservation, p. 179.
- 37.
W. T. Hornaday, The Extermination of the American Bison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1889, 2002), pp. 492–498.
- 38.
G. J. Dehler, “An American Crusader: William Temple Hornaday and Wildlife Protection in America: 1840–1940,” PhD diss., Lehigh University, 2001, p. 66.
- 39.
One professional market hunter, who kept exceptionally good records over his forty years of late nineteenth-century business, had killed 6,250 game birds in a three-month’s shoot in Iowa and Minnesota and 4,450 ducks in one winter’s hunting in the South. His forty-year total was 139,628 game birds representing twenty-nine species. Highlights included 61,752 ducks, 5,291 prairie chickens, 8,117 blackbirds, 5,291 quail, 5,066 snipe, and 4,948 plovers. The first state to ban market hunting was New York, which in 1911 led the way to reform with the Bayne law, which Hornaday helped push through. See Hornaday, Wild Life Conservation, pp. 32–33.
- 40.
Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life.
- 41.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 128.
- 42.
Along with Hornaday’s later Wild Life Conservation in Theory and Practice, GPA members were urged to buy discounted copies for themselves and as Christmas gifts for their friends. “A Christmas Suggestion,” The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (Christmas 1915), LP 10-6, 1.
- 43.
Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life, p. x.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 2.
- 45.
O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929).
- 46.
Ibid., p. 112.
- 47.
AL, personal journal, pp. 72–73, LP 10-7, 1 (15).
- 48.
AL, “Address before the Albuquerque Rotary Club,” p. 6.
- 49.
AL, “Game Conservation: A Warning, Also an Opportunity,” ALSW, p. 20.
- 50.
Leopold’s hope was to encourage all forest officers to keep good game records. He also kept records of prosecutions for the breaking of game laws initiated by forest officers and of fish requisitions throughout his district. AL, Game and Fish Handbook (Albuquerque, NM: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, District 3, 15 September 1915), UWDWE.
- 51.
C. Richter, The Trees (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 3.
- 52.
H. Garland, ed., A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).
- 53.
Ibid., p. 117.
- 54.
Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life, pp. 10–16.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 393.
- 58.
From AL, Game and Fish Handbook, p. 9, UWDWE. Chap. 3 of Hornaday’s Vanishing Wild Life is titled “The Next Candidates for Oblivion.”
- 59.
Hornaday, Vanishing Wild Life, p. x.
- 60.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 260.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 154; Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, p. 61. Refuge legislation failed repeatedly, though Congress did establish a number of large game sanctuaries, among them the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve in 1906, which included the Kaibab Plateau. In any event, Leopold forged ahead in planning a refuge system for his own forest district. To his dismay, after the failure of the Chamberlain-Hayden Bill, which incorporated the “Hornaday Plan,” Arizona established several large state sanctuaries on national forest lands. Hunting was restricted on some entire mountain ranges there, including on the Blue Range—his old stomping grounds. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, p. 63.
- 62.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 154. AL, “Wanted—National Forest Game Refuges,” The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association 9, no. 1 (1920): 8–10, 22.
- 63.
AL, “The Essentials of the Game Refuge,” Literary Digest (15 January 1921): 14, LP 10-6, 1.
- 64.
AL, “Stinking Lake,” The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (Christmas 1915): 1, LP 10-6, 1.
- 65.
AL, “The Why and How of Game Refuges” (cartoon), The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (July 1920), LP 10-6, 1.
- 66.
AL, “The National Forests: The Last Free Hunting Grounds of the Nation,” Journal of Forestry 17, no. 2 (1919).
- 67.
AL, “Forestry and Game Conservation,” pp. 404–411; also in RMG, pp. 53–59.
- 68.
RMG, p. 54.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 55.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 74.
AL, “Determining the Kill Factor for Blacktail Deer in the Southwest,” Journal of Forestry 18, no. 2 (February 1920): 131–134; also in ALSW, pp. 87–91.
- 75.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 224.
- 76.
A. Leopold, J. S. Ligon, and R. F. Pettit, “Southwestern Game Fields,” unpublished draft, 1927–1929, LP 10-6, 10.
- 77.
Ibid., chap.1, 5 May 1927, p. 46.
- 78.
Ibid., chap. 2, 10 April 1927, p. 28.
- 79.
Ibid., chap. 3, n.d., p. 4. The authors’ intent was to include sections on a number of game species. The ambitious nature of this project may have been one reason why it was never completed.
- 80.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 81.
Ibid., pp. 9–10.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 10. In his 1933 Game Management (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 388, Leopold put the process of conservation science this way: “To see merely what a range is or has is to see nothing. To see why it is, how it became, and the direction and velocity of its changes—this is the great drama of the land, to which ‘educated’ people too often turn an unseeing eye and a deaf ear. The stumps in a woodlot, the species age and form of fencerow trees, the plow-furrows in a reverted field, the location and age of an old orchard, the height of the bank of an irrigation ditch, the age of the trees or bushes in a gully, the fire scars on a sawlog—these and a thousand other roadside objects spell out words of history ... of the recent past and the trend of the immediate future.”
- 83.
Leopold, Ligon, and Pettit addressed this issue in “Southwestern Game Fields,” chap. 4, “Normal Deer Stocking and Productivity,” n.d.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Ibid., chap. 1, p. 15.
- 87.
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
- 88.
Ibid., chap. 4, p. 2.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 91.
Ibid., chap. 5, n.d., p. 11.
- 92.
Ibid., chap. 8, n.d. (signed “by Ligon”), p. 1.
- 93.
Greeley had offered Leopold a position at the Forest Products Laboratory three years earlier, in 1921, and Leopold had then turned it down. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 191.
- 94.
W. B. Greeley, Forests and Men (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 144–145; Greeley, letter to Frank Pooler, 18 March 1924, in Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 225.
- 95.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 225.
- 96.
Ibid.
- 97.
The Forest Products Laboratory experimented with different preservative solutions for railroad ties.
- 98.
F. J. Turner, “The Problem of the West,” Atlantic Monthly 78, no. 467 (1896): 296–297.
- 99.
Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, p. 355.
- 100.
W. T. Hornaday, “Hunters Menace All Birds,” New York Times, 29 March 1925, p. XX11.
- 101.
G. Bennett, “Our Game Protectors at War,” New York Times, 18 October 1925, p. X14.
- 102.
AL, “The Varmint Question,” RMG, p. 47.
- 103.
AL, “The Popular Wilderness Fallacy: An Idea That Is Fast Exploding,” RMG, p. 49.
- 104.
AL, “Forestry and Game Conservation,” RMG, p. 53.
- 105.
AL, “‘Piute Forestry’ vs. Forest Fire Prevention,” RMG, p. 68.
- 106.
AL, “Wild Followers of the Forest: The Effect of Forest Fires on Game and Fish—the Relation of Forests to Game Conservation,” American Forestry (September 1923): 518.
- 107.
Ibid., p. 568.
- 108.
Ibid.
- 109.
Ibid.; see also AL, “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit,” RMG, p. 103.
- 110.
Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, p. 188.
- 111.
D. P. Thelen, Robert La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 181.
- 112.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 239.
- 113.
Thelen, La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit, p. 81.
- 114.
AL, “The Posting Problem,” Outdoor Life 49, no. 3 (March 1922): 187.
- 115.
AL, “Natural Reproduction of Forests,” Parks and Recreation 9, no. 2 (1925): 366–372; AL, “The Utilization Conference,” Journal of Forestry 23, no. 1 (1925): 98–100; AL, “Wastes in Forest Utilization—What Can Be Done to Prevent Them,” address abstracted in Southern Lumberman 121 (1925): 1574; AL, “Short Lengths for Farm Buildings,” United States Forest Products Laboratory Report (8 November 1926); AL, “Wood Preservation and Forestry,” Railway Engineering and Maintenance 22, no. 2 (1926): 60–61, and a shorter version in Railway Age 80, no. 5 (1926): 346; AL, “Forest Products Research and Profitable Forestry,” Journal of Forestry 25, no. 5 (1927): 524–548 (in this article Leopold complained that “President Coolidge’s famous aphorism: ‘Reduce wood waste—a tree saved is a tree grown,’“ missed important facets of promising research objectives); AL, “The Home Builder Conserves,” American Forests and Forest Life 34, no. 413 (1928): 267–278, 297, also in RMG, pp. 143–147; AL, “Glues for Wood in Archery,” United States Forest Products Laboratory Technical Note, no. 226 (1929): 4; AL, “Some Thoughts onForest Genetics,” Journal of Forestry 27, no. 6 (1929): 708–713.
- 116.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 256.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 118.
Anonymous, “Forestry Worker Retires,” New York Times, 8 July 1928, p. 38 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times, 1857–current file).
- 119.
AL, “Game Survey, Report No. 1, Covering Preliminary Trip, June 4–5, 1928,” LP 10-6, 11. See Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 261–262.
- 120.
Hornaday, “Hunters Menace All Birds”; W. T. Hornaday, “Game Protection,” letter to the editor, New York Times, 18 December 1927, p. E5 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times, 1857–current file).
- 121.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, pp. 262, 279.
- 122.
AL, “Fires and Game,” Journal of Forestry 24, no. 6 (1926): 727.
- 123.
AL, “Quail Production: A Remedy for the ‘Song Bird List,’” Outdoor America 3, no. 4 (1924): 42; AL, “Posting Problem,” p. 187; AL, “Report of the Quail Committee,” ALSW; The Pine Cone: Official Bulletin of the Albuquerque Game Protective Association (March 1924).
- 124.
Transactions of the 15th National Game Conference (3–4 December 1928), pp. 128–132. The report was later reprinted in American Game 18 (April–May 1929): 45–47.
- 125.
Ibid., p. 129.
- 126.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 265.
- 127.
AL, “Progress of the Game Survey,” Transactions of the 16th American Game Conference (2–3 December 1929), pp. 64–71; see Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 266.
- 128.
AL, “Progress of the Game Survey,” p. 64.
- 129.
Ibid., p. 65. Earlier writings by Leopold had already connected overgrazing with game losses. AL, “Report of the Quail Committee,” ALSW, p. 109; AL, “Pineries and Deer on the Gila,” New Mexico Conservationist (March 1928), p. 3.
- 130.
AL, “Progress of the Game Survey,” p. 69; AL et al., “Report to the American Game Conference on an American Game Policy,” Transactions of the 17th American Game Conference (1–2 December 1930): 303, also in RMG, pp. 150–155. Leopold believed similarly in terms of a preference for native fish species. See AL, “Mixing Trout in Western Waters,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 47 No. 3 (June 1918), pp. 101–102.
- 131.
AL, “Environmental Controls: The Forester’s Contribution to Game Conservation,” The Ames Forester 17 (1929): 25–26.
- 132.
AL, “Progress of the Game Survey,” pp. 64–65.
- 133.
AL et al., “Report to the American Game Conference,” pp. 284–309.
- 134.
AL, “The American Game Policy in a Nutshell,” Transactions of the 17th American Game Conference (1–2 December 1930): 281–282.
- 135.
Editor, “American Game Policy, Discussion,” Transactions of the 17th American Game Conference (1–2 December 1930): 143-145.
- 136.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 278. See D. Allen et al., “Report on the Committee on North American Wildlife Policy,” Transactions of the 38th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, 18–21 March 1973, Washington, DC.
- 137.
AL et al., “Report to the American Game Conference,” p. 288.
- 138.
Ibid., pp. 143–145; pp. 288–289.
- 139.
AL, “American Game Policy in a Nutshell,” p. 281.
- 140.
AL, Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company for the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, 1931). Made available by the American Game Association for one dollar.
- 141.
AL, “A History of Ideas in Game Management,” Outdoor America 9, no. 9 (April 1931): 22–24, 38–39, 47.
- 142.
Through 1931 Leopold submitted Game Management to various publishers, who were reluctant to take on the manuscript because of the hard economic times. Finally, in December 1931, Charles Scribner’s Sons offered to publish it if Leopold would help reduce costs and contribute $500 himself. Leopold signed to their terms on 11 January 1932—his forty-fifth birthday. Meine, Aldo Leopold, p. 285.
- 143.
AL, “American Game Policy in a Nutshell,” p. 283.
- 144.
AL, Report on a Game Survey, p. 5. In 1930, 986,771,000 acres of U.S. land area, or 51.8 percent of the country’s 1,903,217,000 acres of land area, was in farms. Statistical Abstract: 1940, p. 634.
- 145.
AL, “Progress of the Game Survey,” p. 65; AL et al., “Report to the American Game Conference,” p. 284.
- 146.
AL, “The River of the Mother of God,” RMG, p. 125.
- 147.
AL et al., “Report to the American Game Conference,” p. 284; also in RMG, p. 150.
- 148.
AL, Report on a Game Survey, p. 268.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Julianne Lutz Warren
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Warren, J.L. (2016). The Middle Border. In: Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-754-4_4
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Print ISBN: 978-1-61091-568-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-754-4
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)