Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform 9780226454245

Citation preview

Nat u r a l V i sion s

f i n i s d u n away

nat u r a l v i s ion s The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform

the university of chicago press • chicago and london



The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2005 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2005 Paperback edition 2008 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-17325-2 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-17326-9 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-17325-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-17326-7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunaway, Finis. Natural visions : the power of images in American environmental reform / Finis Dunaway. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-17325-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Environmentalism--United States--Pictorial works. 2. Nature conservation--United States--Pictorial works. 3. Environmental protection in art. 4. Natural areas--United States--Pictorial works. 5. Nature photography--United States--20th century. 6. Wildlife photographers--United States. I. Title. GE197.D86 2005 333.72’0973--dc22 2005008461 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For Dana

Conte nts

list of illustr ations  ix acknowledgments  xi introduction  x v list of abbr eviations  x xiii

Part 1 Transcendental Vision chapter one  gleason’s tr ansparent eyeball  3 Part 2 The Nature of the New Deal chapter t wo  the decline to dust  33 chapter thr ee  the river of time  60 chapter four  a flicker of permanence  87 Part 3 Picturing the American Earth chapter five  nature on the coffee table  117 chapter six  thoreau with a camer a  148 chapter seven  american elegy, american renewal  170 epilogue  the ecological sublime  194 notes  213 index  243

i l lust r at ion s

1.1. Herbert W. Gleason, H. W. Gleason at Thoreau’s cairn, Walden Pond  12 1.2. Herbert W. Gleason, fog from Nawshawtuct, Concord, Massachusetts  14 1.3. Herbert W. Gleason, Mazamas climbing snow slope, Mount Rainier  19 1.4. Herbert W. Gleason, large sequoia, Sequoia National Park  26 1.5. Herbert W. Gleason, rainbow, Bryce Canyon  27 2.1. Grant Wood, Fall Plowing  44 2.2. Panoramic view of grasslands, frame enlargement from The Plow That Broke the Plains  48 2.3. Alexandre Hogue, Erosion No. 2: Mother Earth Laid Bare  48 2.4. “Settler, Plow at Your Peril,” still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains  49 2.5. Dust and devastation, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains  50 2.6. Dorothea Lange, photograph of poster outside Belasco Theater  53 2.7. Arthur Rothstein, “The Plow That Broke the Plains: Look at It Now”  57 2.8. Baby with plow, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains  58 3.1. Panoramic view of river and forests, frame enlargement from The River  68 3.2. Tree stumps, still photograph from The River  69 3.3. Aerial view of flood, frame enlargement from The River  71 3.4. Panoramic view of soil erosion, still photograph from The River  72 3.5. Charles Child, illustration, Walt Whitman and the Mississippi River  75

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3.6. Norris Dam, still photograph from The River  79 3.7. Planting trees, frame enlargement from The River  80 3.8. The River, poster  84 4.1. “Insecure Tenure,” illustration  94 4.2. “Secure Tenure,” illustration  95 4.3. Farm family in Pennsylvania, still photograph from The Land  100 4.4. Plantation home with eroded field, still photograph from The Land  102 4.5. Aerial view of the Arkansas River, frame enlargement from The Land  103 4.6. Aerial view of contour plowing, still photograph from The Land  106 4.7. Aerial view of soil conservation, still photograph from The Land  107 5.1. Joe Munroe, David Brower  118 5.2. Philip Hyde, Steamboat Rock  125 5.3. William Garnett, cleared landscape  134 5.4. William Garnett, slabs and foundations  137 5.5. William Garnett, rows of completed houses  136 5.6. William Garnett, aerial view of Los Angeles  136 5.7. Ferenc Berko, bathers on the Ganges  140 5.8. Ansel Adams, clearing winter storm, Yosemite Valley  141 6.1. Eliot Porter, barn swallow  163 7.1. Renny Russell, Pacific Coast near San Simeon  186 8.1. Charles Pratt, ferny glade in woods  199 8.2. Charles Pratt, woman and flowering tree  200 8.3. Charles Pratt, white feather on kelp  201 8.4. Charles Pratt, Ruppert Brewery  204 8.5. Charles Pratt, black cow  205 8.6. Terry Evans, ammunition storage bunkers and hay bales  210 Plates following page 120 1. Eliot Porter, pool in brook 2. Eliot Porter, Hudson River 3. Eliot Porter, spruce trees in fog 4. Eliot Porter, maple leaves and pine needles 5. Eliot Porter, ovenbird 6. Eliot Porter, green reflections in stream 7. Eliot Porter, sunrise 8. Eliot Porter, Twilight Canyon

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

On any given day, writing a book can involve considerable pleasure and excitement, along with feelings of frustration and uncertainty. I want to thank everyone who supported me along the way and provided reassurance even when I gave them reason to doubt me. As every writer knows, it can be difficult explaining to friends and family why it takes so long to finish a project like this. So I want to begin by honoring the memory of my wife’s late grandfather, Max Feldman, who provided a response that any author would dream of hearing. After listening to me describe the long process of research, writing, and revision, Max replied, “It’s good that it takes that long. It shows you care.” Lucky for me, I was not the only one who cared. At Rutgers University, where this book began as a dissertation, I found a wonderful group of friends and colleagues who responded to incipient ideas, suggested new directions and approaches, and inspired me by the examples of their own exciting scholarship. Although many people deserve to be mentioned, I want to thank in particular Matthew Guterl, Lucia McMahon, Peter Mickulas, Neil Brody Miller, Todd Uhlman, and Serena Zabin. Matthew Guterl deserves special thanks for reading every word of an early draft of this book, carefully scrutinizing the arguments and prose, and providing always helpful (not to mention almost instantaneous) feedback on each chapter. I could not have asked for a better dissertation committee, composed of xi

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scholars who range widely in their approaches to studying the past. Miles Orvell, from the English and American studies departments at Temple University, was my “outside” reader, but you certainly would not know it from the enthusiasm, criticism, and good ideas he offered at every stage of the project. Matt Matsuda befriended me soon after I arrived at Rutgers and has consistently provided guidance on the methods of cultural history and the confusing world of academia. He knows that many of the ideas for this book were first hatched in his basement office many years ago. Susan Schrepfer helped introduce me to the exciting field of environmental history and has enlightened me on countless issues relating to the history and meanings of American conservation. James Goodman joined my committee at the perfect moment: just before I began writing. By encouraging me to tell stories, he influenced this book immeasurably. Jackson Lears, my advisor, expressed enthusiasm for this project when it was only a vague idea and continually encouraged me to embrace the interdisciplinary possibilities of the topic. Anyone familiar with his work will recognize his imprint on my thinking. I thank him not only for his careful readings of my prose but also for his friendship, sense of humor, and way of being in the world. He is a true role model. Many other scholars offered advice and comments on portions of this work. At Rutgers, John Chambers, John Gillis, and Eviatar Zerubavel all offered constructive criticism on my early forays into New Deal film. John Rohrbach at the Amon Carter Museum carefully read the Sierra Club chapters and made many thoughtful suggestions. At Cornell, Michael Kammen read an early draft in its entirety and shared with me some of his breathtaking knowledge of American cultural history. I have never met John Meyer, a political theorist at Humboldt State University, but I want to thank him for his insightful criticism that improved the book enormously. Others who have helped me along the way include Marguerite Shaffer and Jeffrey Stine. Finally, I owe a hearty thanks to the Chapter House Beer and History Workshop in Ithaca, New York, whose members included Jeff Cowie, Joel Dinerstein, Caroline Merithew, Michael Smith, Michael Trotti, and Rob Vanderlan, for teaching me many lessons about historical scholarship, intellectual comradeship, and the venerable tradition of buying rounds. This project was sustained by generous funding from several institutions. I wish to thank the Smithsonian Institution, the American Historical Association, the history department and the Graduate School at Rutgers University, and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture for supporting my dissertation work. Since leaving graduate school, I benefited greatly from a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. I wish to thank many people there, including Tim Borstelmann, Maria Cristina Garcia, Mi-

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chael Kammen, Mary Beth Norton, and Richard Polenberg for making me feel welcome. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress provided a postdoctoral fellowship and a wonderful environment as I neared completion. Many thanks to Les Vogel and Prosser Gifford, among others, for creating a scholar’s paradise. An Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography allowed me to spend two weeks in the collections of the best modern photography archive in the United States. Finally, a publication grant from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists provided the funding for the book’s color insert. Librarians and archivists at a number of institutions provided invaluable assistance as I tracked down sources for this project. I am grateful to Leslie Perrin Wilson at the Concord Free Public Library, John Rohrbach and the staff at the Amon Carter Museum, Amy Rule, Leslie Calmes, and other staff members at the Center for Creative Photography, Bernard Crystal at Columbia University’s Butler Library, the amazing staff at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as countless staff members at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Cornell University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University. I want to thank my new colleagues at Trent University, where I completed the book, for welcoming me to Canada, and inspiring me with their commitment to creative scholarship and innovative teaching. I particularly want to express my gratitude to the members of the history department, including the chair, Olga Andriewsky, for allowing me to defer my appointment so that I could accept a fellowship at the Library of Congress. I also wish to thank the Dean’s Office for the generous start-up package that helped cover the permission fees to reproduce many of the images in this book. I feel incredibly fortunate that this manuscript found its way to Robert Devens and the University of Chicago Press. I know very little about the publishing business, but something tells me that there are few editors as talented, perceptive, and supportive as Robert. He has patiently guided me through the publishing process, offering countless suggestions along with intelligent judgment at critical moments. Elizabeth Branch Dyson fielded a barrage of questions about copyright matters and always offered friendly and expert advice. Maia Rigas made numerous suggestions that greatly improved the final draft. Paul Boyer and Gregg Mitman began as anonymous readers but, after providing me with some of the best feedback I have ever received, decided to reveal their identities. I am glad they did, so that I can have the opportunity to thank them both for careful readings and detailed comments that played a major role in the revision process.

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I thank my parents, Donna and Mike Dunaway, for their support over many years and for their steadfast belief that I would indeed complete my career as a student. My wife’s family, especially her parents, Linda and Peter Capell, and grandparents, Ruth and Moses Capell and Yetta Feldman, have generously provided their kindness and support since I first met them. I also wish to thank cherished friends, especially Chris Baumann and Michele Collins, for enlivening my spirits time and again. When I think of everything that Dana Capell has given to me, I am left wondering whether any of these pages could have been written without her. She offered unwavering support on days when I felt nothing but doubt about myself and despair about the project; she celebrated moments of excitement, always reminding me to recognize and appreciate even the smallest accomplishments. She read every draft, many of them more than once, and invariably offered comments that sharpened my prose. Through it all, she provided loving friendship and unyielding commitment. For these reasons and many more, I dedicate this book to her.

In t r o d u c t i o n

When Americans want to understand their relationship to the natural world, they often turn to images. Consider a membership appeal made in the late 1990s by the Wilderness Society, one of the nation’s leading conservation groups. Mailed to individuals throughout the country, the appeal included several items: a letter detailing the commercial and political threats to the national forests; a petition directed to then-president Clinton, requesting that he take steps to counter the “destruction” and “mismanagement” of wild places; and—as an added enticement to new members—a “FREE Gift Offer” of Celebrating the American Earth, a portfolio of photographs by Ansel Adams. “For many,” the brochure explains, “these photographs have answered more eloquently than any written statement the question, ‘Why wilderness?’” Celebrating the American Earth presents scenes of Yosemite and other national parks as part of the group’s campaign to protect the wilderness. “By sending it to you,” the brochure concludes, “the Wilderness Society will fulfill Ansel Adams’ wish that through his photography all people might celebrate the American earth, and learn that preserving the land enriches the human spirit.” Merging art with politics, fusing national identity with the human spirit, the Wilderness Society offered Ansel Adams’s photographs as a way to preserve the American landscape and save the American soul.1 xv

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With this membership appeal, the Wilderness Society joined a long cultural tradition of linking visual images to environmental reform. Since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, the conservation movement has pushed for broad changes in American society. Through the creation of national parks and the founding of government agencies, the movement has been a voice for wild animals and natural scenery, for fragile ecosystems and finite resources of soil, water, and forests. Yet the history of environmental reform is more than the passage of a series of laws; it is also the story of images representing and defining the natural world, of the camera shaping politics and public attitudes. From magazines and documentary films to membership appeals and coffee table books, the conservation movement has relied on images more than any other American reform movement. Natural Visions seeks to understand why the camera has played such a crucial role in American environmental politics and how it has shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. Beginning in 1900 and ending with the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970, I profile a group of artists and activists who used the camera in the service of politics hoping that images could galvanize concern for their reform efforts at the national level. I focus on photographs and films produced within a cluster of three periods of reform: the Progressive era, the New Deal era, and the 1960s. My protagonists include Herbert Gleason, a Congregationalist minister who became a landscape photographer, traveling lecturer, and national parks advocate during the early twentieth century. Moving to the 1930s, I write about Pare Lorentz and other New Deal artists who responded to the decade’s environmental crises by imagining nature casting judgment, taking its revenge upon a careless society. In the postwar period, I consider the careers of Sierra Club leaders and photographers—including David Brower, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter—who believed that coffee table books offered the most effective way to promote the cause of wilderness preservation. Taken together, the chapters that follow comprise a cultural history of environmental reform that explores the connections between aesthetics, politics, and religion across much of the twentieth century. Placing photographs and films at the intersection of individual experience and cultural context, this book shows how different reformers in different eras all shared a similar faith in the camera as a tool of conservation. Before 1900, Americans had also looked to images to understand the meanings of their landscape. From Thomas Cole’s Hudson River school paintings to Albert Bierstadt’s monumental portrayals of the West, nineteenth-century artists celebrated the scenic wonders and spiritual possibilities of the American earth. Swirling in the romantic currents of the age, they tried to commune with

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nature by putting brush to canvas to present the landscape as resplendent with God’s glory. After the Civil War, photographers like William Henry Jackson extended this tradition. They promised to use the mechanical vision of the camera to document the land with topographical precision. In these ways, nineteenth-century visual culture provided Americans with the opportunity to glimpse the vast spaces of the West, to contemplate the significance of the frontier, and to ponder their relationship to the natural world.2 This study takes 1900 as its starting point because although twentieth-century artists borrowed earlier styles and conventions, they also used the camera to stake out new cultural terrain, to represent conservation sentiment through images. To be sure, landscape paintings and photographs had encouraged nineteenth-century policymakers to preserve Yellowstone National Park and other sites. Writers like George Perkins Marsh and Henry David Thoreau had published foundational works in environmental thought. At the local and state level, Americans had approved the first conservation measures and had started to recognize the problems of pollution in urban areas. Yet conservation did not coalesce into a national movement until the turn of the twentieth century. Following the U.S. Census Bureau’s announcement of a “closed” frontier in 1890, more Americans became worried about the loss of wilderness and the scarcity of resources. As Progressive reform gathered steam, the conservation movement became an important player in national politics, leading to the establishment of such agencies as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service. Meanwhile, prominent environmental reformers—including John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt—began to applaud the representational power of the camera and recognize its potential as an instrument of persuasion. From the Progressive era through Earth Day, the camera would provide reformers with a way to link politics to visual culture, to turn environmental debates into questions of seeing.3 Natural Visions advances arguments and themes that develop as the chapters unfold. First, I ask why American environmental reformers have felt an enduring attraction to the camera. As they witnessed the alteration and loss of particular places, many artists and activists expressed ambivalence or even outright hostility toward technology, blaming it for the destruction of the American landscape. Yet they continued to rely on the camera—a technology of representation—to convey their ideas about the natural world. I argue that they viewed the camera as a machine with unique powers: a device that could capture reality and remember nature. With a sometimes naive belief in the camera’s mechanical, objective vision, they hoped that photographs and films could record the reality of nature and bring Americans closer to the nonhuman world. They also

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regarded the camera as a technology of memory, a machine that could preserve threatened landscapes on film. Worrying about the loss of nature, they tried to create visual monuments to vanishing places.4 More important, environmental reformers believed that the camera could help them bring aesthetics and emotions into politics. This theme echoes throughout the book, forming one of my major claims about the cultural implications of conservation. In these different eras of reform, artists and activists tried to challenge the utilitarian calculus of American politics by infusing public debate with beauty and passion. They turned to the camera out of faith that it could endow the landscape with sacred meaning and transcendent significance. While modern cultural critics fretted over the reproduction of reality, wondering if images estranged viewers from the physical world, environmental reformers expressed little anxiety over the status of nature in an age of mechanical reproduction. Their enthusiasm for the camera rested on the belief that it could elicit an emotional response in spectators, awakening them to the beauty of nature and arousing their concern for its protection.5 This book, then, presents the history of environmental reform as a history of the emotions. It also adds to the work of other scholars who have explored the religious roots of conservation. While others have considered the links between spirituality and environmentalism, Natural Visions places images and image makers at the center of the story, thus analyzing a group of people and type of sources often neglected by environmental historians. The protagonists of this study fused religious concepts with scientific knowledge to present conservation as a secular movement enlivened by sacred purpose. Through their embrace of the camera, they tried to unite the technological and the spiritual, to link religious feeling and human emotion to the machine.6 Natural Visions also considers the continuities and changes in environmental image making. While the subjects of this book are not usually considered in relation to one another, I have found that environmental artists employed similar strategies to mobilize public sentiment. Even as they celebrated the power of the camera, they did not assume that images could speak for themselves. Instead of displaying pictures in isolation, where they could evoke many possible meanings, artists and activists paired images with texts to lead viewers to particular interpretations. They formed stories about the human place in nature, narratives that reveal a striking continuity across the twentieth century. Casting their work in a religious framework of redemption, photographers and filmmakers urged Americans to express penitence for their sins, to change their ways, and to find salvation in nature. Throughout these different eras, they drew on deep wellsprings of American culture, including Puritan sermons and

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transcendentalist thought, to criticize modern society and convey their desire for cultural and political change.7 Environmental artists also relied on similar aesthetic modes—especially the sublime tradition—to represent the American landscape. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, theorists of the sublime have associated it with particular sites—such as powerful waterfalls or majestic mountains—that evoke awe and wonder in spectators. The sublime, according to these writers, provokes intense, religious emotion and allows people to feel the presence of the deity. Originating in Europe, the sublime aesthetic profoundly shaped American attitudes toward the natural world, as reflected in the writings of John Muir, the photographs of Ansel Adams, and the decision to set aside dramatic places—Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon—as national parks. In the United States, sublime landscapes have long been the most sacred landscapes. Yet, as this book argues, the sublime needs to be understood in historical terms, as a dynamic and changing aesthetic that is adapted to suit the concerns of particular people at particular moments in time. By examining the political uses of the sublime, I have found that environmental reformers reworked this tradition in a variety of ways during the twentieth century. While the Progressive-era photographer Herbert Gleason adhered to the romantic sublime of monumental peaks and towering trees, New Deal filmmakers emphasized the sublimity of nature as a violent, destructive force. Finding a moral message in the ecological calamities of the thirties, they combined this catastrophic sublime with a celebration of New Deal technology, encouraging audiences to feel a sense of power in the presence of human engineering and machines. In the postwar period, Ansel Adams became legendary for his dramatic portrayal of Yosemite, yet other Sierra Club photographers—particularly Eliot Porter—departed from this style by trying to create a sense of surprise and wonder in response to more modest settings. By revising the sublime, Porter’s photography anticipated the new directions and concerns of contemporary environmentalism. Many writers have argued that to feel intense emotion, to be astonished and overwhelmed, requires one to visit sites like the Grand Canyon or the Hoover Dam, to come in close contact with the thing itself. Yet Natural Visions suggests another way environmental reformers adapted the sublime. Investing great hopes in the camera, they believed that this machine could express their feelings to a mass audience. They encouraged spectators to feel awe-inspired not in the presence of actual landscapes but in response to visual images. Rather than witnessing the magnificence of Yosemite’s Half Dome in person, Ansel Adams’s photographs offered a facsimile of the real thing, reproducing on film

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the wondrous scenery. In twentieth-century America, environmental artists and their audiences found sublime experience—most easily and sometimes most powerfully—through the mediating lens of the camera.8 In my effort to understand the role of the camera in environmental reform, I found that my questions were best explored through a focus on key figures and their negotiations with the larger culture. As the historian David Brion Davis once noted, a biographical approach to the past can create “a synthesis of culture and history” by showing “how cultural tensions and contradictions may be internalized, struggled with, and resolved within actual individuals.”9 The chapters that follow place individual actors on a larger stage of cultural and political debate, identifying their personal fears and motivations, pondering their idiosyncratic interests, and relating their use of the camera to broader patterns of change. Through a narrative style, I have sought to capture how these different people came to see, understand, and represent nature in the ways that they did.10 The opening chapter—a prologue to the whole—focuses on the littleknown career of Herbert Gleason, an ordained minister who found his true calling as a landscape photographer and environmental advocate. After leaving the ministry in 1899, Gleason developed a thriving career as a lecturer, traveling around the nation to deliver visual sermons about the American landscape. His photographs focused on two regions of the United States. In New England, he tried to retrace Thoreau’s journeys and to recast transcendentalism for the modern age. In the West, he celebrated the sublimity of mountains and canyons and promoted the concept of national parks. Active in the Sierra Club, the National Park Service, and other organizations, Gleason helped make the camera central to the cultural politics of environmental reform. Parts 2 and 3—the core of the book—closely examine images sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s and by the Sierra Club in the 1960s. Part 2 considers a series of New Deal documentary films made in response to the ecological disasters of the decade. From the Great Plains to the Mississippi River, nature erupted in a fury of dust and deluge. The filmmakers Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty recreated the sublime power of the natural world, providing spectators with a vicarious experience of disaster. Lorentz and Flaherty portrayed the landscape as an interdependent community, a place of ecological harmony destroyed by human carelessness. Drawing on the Puritan legacy of the jeremiad sermon, they combined moving images with the voice of a narrator to condemn the nation’s abuse of its natural endowment. They converted the threatening power of nature into the technological power of the New Deal,

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presenting government efforts to control and manage the environment as a form of secular salvation. Part 3 explores the curious phenomenon of the environmental coffee table book in postwar America. Led by David Brower, the Sierra Club published a series of large-format books featuring photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and other artists. Produced in conjunction with the wilderness campaigns of the period, the books encouraged Americans to seek individual salvation through contact with nature. While New Deal filmmakers emphasized the links between soil and society, the Sierra Club celebrated a landscape devoid of people, a pure space apart from civilization. Photographers, writers, and Sierra Club leaders adapted the jeremiad sermon and the transcendentalist tradition to critique technological hubris and the destruction of wilderness. The books triggered debates over the meanings of conservation and offered different, sometimes contradictory ways of viewing the natural world. Following this section, the epilogue explores the emergence of a new form of the sublime through a look at two examples: the little-known collaboration between the writer Rachel Carson and the photographer Charles Pratt; and the widely circulated images associated with Earth Day 1970. Today environmental images continue to abound in American culture and to frame perceptions of the natural world. As the Wilderness Society’s membership appeal and offer of an Ansel Adams portfolio suggest, many Americans still look at images for answers, at times in response to the question, why wilderness? but also in response to broader questions like, why nature? or even, what is nature? In forming answers to these questions, artists and their audiences have grappled with fundamental themes in American thought: with Puritan ideas of apocalypse and damnation, with romantic notions of the sublime, with concepts of abundance and scarcity on the frontier, with fantasies of the American earth as paradise. Such dreams and fears have often been expressed through images, in visions that imagine nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

A b b r e v i at ion s

AAP

Ansel Adams Papers Sierra Club Members Papers Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley

BMP

Bell Museum of Natural History Papers University of Minnesota Archives

CPP

Charles Pratt Papers Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

DBP

David Brower Papers Sierra Club Members Papers Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley

EPP

Eliot Porter Papers Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth

FDRPP

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Papers Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York

HMCA

Houghton Mifflin Company Archives Houghton Library, Harvard University

HWGP-CFPL Herbert W. Gleason Papers Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts

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HWGP-SC

Herbert W. Gleason Papers Sierra Club Members Papers Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley

JMP

John Muir Papers University of the Pacific Microfilm Edition

JWKP

Joseph Wood Krutch Papers Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

NACP

National Archives at College Park, Maryland

NNC

Nancy Newhall Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

NPSR

National Park Service, Records Record Group 79, National Archives at College Park, Maryland

OGRR

Office of Government Reports, Records Record Group 44, National Archives at College Park, Maryland

OSAR

Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, Records Record Group 16, National Archives at College Park, Maryland

PLP-BL

Pare Lorentz Papers Butler Library, Columbia University

PLP-FDRL

Pare Lorentz Papers Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York

RFP

Robert Flaherty Papers Butler Library, Columbia University Microfilm Edition, Reel 21

SCR

Sierra Club Records Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley

SCB

Sierra Club Bulletin

UNC

Universal Newsreel Catalog Record Group 200 UN, Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch, National Archives at College Park, Maryland

UWOA

University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, University Archives Polk Library

1 Gle a son’s T r a n sp a r ent Eyeba l l

While riding in a train through southern Utah in 1919, Herbert Gleason wrote a letter to his friend Stephen Mather, director of the National Park Service. Gleason had already wired him a telegram earlier that day, praising the scenes he had observed in Bryce Canyon. But the limited space of the telegram only allowed for terse phrases—“most beautiful sight i ever saw would be gem of all national parks”—which could not adequately convey the emotions and sense of excitement provoked by the landscape. Penning a lengthy letter to Mather, Gleason summarized his recent travels through Utah and then described the spectacle of Bryce Canyon. “Suddenly, without the slightest warning,” he wrote, “our auto was brought up sharply on the very brink of a tremendous amphitheatre, three miles in diameter and a thousand feet deep, and we just screamed at the sight below us.”1 At the time, Gleason was employed by the Department of the Interior as an inspector. His position involved a range of duties—visiting national parks and monuments; surveying other sites to determine whether they should become part of the national park system; and most important, taking photographs that could be used by Interior officials in publications, lectures, and exhibits. As he described what he had seen, Gleason recommended that Bryce join the national park system, claiming that the area was a “diamond . . . of untold value.” Feeling jubilant, he laced his letter with superlatives. Indeed, he could 3

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hardly contain himself. “During the three hours that we spent there,” he wrote to Mather, “I was filled with the deepest emotion. Never before had I seen or even imagined such a sight. It was the climax, not merely of this summer’s wonderful trip, but the climax of my entire out-door life. You may think me over-enthusiastic. But wait ’til you see my photographs. If they do not, even in plain black and white, excite your enthusiasm I will smash my camera and never take another picture.”2 Twenty years earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, Gleason had abandoned his career to become a landscape photographer and traveling lecturer. Trained and ordained as a Congregationalist minister, Gleason had served in two churches in Minnesota and then worked as the editor of a major Congregationalist journal for over a decade. But in 1899, at the age of forty-four, he decided to pursue photography as a career. Inspired and deeply influenced by the transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau, he returned to his home state of Massachusetts to take pictures of the places that Thoreau had described in his writings. A member of several conservation organizations, Gleason supported himself through his illustrated lectures about American landscapes, national parks, and conservation issues. He traveled extensively throughout the West, corresponded with John Muir and other nature writers, and took photographs of Hetch Hetchy—a valley inside Yosemite National Park that was deliberately flooded by a dam following the most famous conservation debate of the early twentieth century. Employed for a while by the Department of the Interior, he photographed many places—including Bryce—that eventually became part of the national park system.3 Gleason’s biography captures issues central to the history of environmental image making in modern America. His life and career reflect the legacy of romanticism and transcendentalism to the environmental imagination; the relation of religion and spirituality to American ideas about nature; and the effort to link aesthetics and politics through the camera’s lens. Gleason sought to merge words with images, to combine the texts of nature writers with his photographs of American landscapes. He anticipated a pattern that other artists would later adopt: an attempt to fuse language and vision into a powerful framework for environmental perception. He also used the camera as a technology of memory: returning to Walden Pond, he searched for a link to a place and a person associated with the emergence of environmental concern; traveling to Hetch Hetchy Valley, he documented a landscape that would soon vanish. Gleason put his faith in the camera, believing that it could act as a spiritual device. In these ways, his life story introduces the major themes of this book and provides an overview of the concerns and issues that would

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grip other image makers who sought to use the camera to save the American landscape. Gleason’s photographic career stood at the convergence of two important streams in modern American history: a growing fascination with the natural world and the expanding role of visual images. At the turn of the twentieth century, a back-to-nature movement flourished, an effort—primarily on the part of middle- and upper-class city dwellers—to find renewal in wild places. Americans expressed their desire to connect with nature by visiting national parks, reading books by John Muir and other nature writers, and founding environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society. The gathering concern for nature triggered a political movement to preserve wild landscapes and conserve natural resources. In its cultural and political manifestations, the back-to-nature movement contributed to the popularity of Gleason’s photography and shaped the politics of his images.4 Gleason’s career was also influenced by changes in American visual culture, particularly the increasing prominence of the camera as an instrument of reform. For Progressive-era reformers, the camera became a machine that could expose the realities of poverty by delivering objective portraits of urban life. In the hands of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and other photographers, the camera acted as a weapon of Progressive politics, presenting Americans with images of deprivation and calls for reform. Although Gleason did not focus on urban issues, his photography was shaped by these developments. When he first turned to the camera, Gleason sought to capture the reality of nature and visualize the ideas and feelings of Thoreau. Over time, he tried to invest his work with explicit political purpose, hoping that his images would act as vehicles of reform and visions of conservation.5 During this period, President Theodore Roosevelt—Progressive reformer, hunter, and conservationist—expressed enthusiasm not for Gleason’s images but rather for the photographs of wild animals that began to appear in magazines like Forest and Stream and National Geographic. Roosevelt believed that wildlife photographers used the camera to promote rugged adventure—intense experience that he claimed would revitalize the strength of American men. Roosevelt pushed for conservation measures, but (unlike Gleason) he was no fan of transcendentalism. Indeed, he considered Thoreau to be “slightly anemic,” someone who lacked “the beat of hardy life in his veins.” For Roosevelt, hunting, conservation, and wildlife photography all contributed to the regeneration of manhood and the pursuit of what he called the “strenuous life.”6 Rooseveltian bellicosity certainly inflected Progressive-era visual culture,

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but it did not prevent other views of nature from emerging. Gleason’s images provide a different perspective on early twentieth-century conservation by pointing to the intersection of three key themes: a therapeutic, secular understanding of religion; a commitment to a more powerful role for the state; and an effort to market natural beauty as a consumer item. In Gleason’s career, religion, politics, and consumer culture all came together, mediated through the lens of the camera. Following his flight from the ministry, Gleason practiced a form of religion consistent with the definition offered by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Rather than confining religion within the walls of a church or limiting it to a particular doctrine or creed, James offered a more capacious sense of what constitutes spiritual faith, describing religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude . . . in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” This conception of religion downplayed theology by emphasizing the individual, therapeutic value of spiritual sentiment. In an age of fading religious faith, Gleason—along with many other American Protestants—projected religious feeling onto the natural world, viewing it as a place to seek the divine.7 Gleason channeled his personal desire for contact with nature into a broader institutional context. From delivering lectures to reform organizations to participating in the activities of the National Park Service, he hoped to create a moral community, a congregation of believers who worshipped at the altar of nature. Emptied of theological content, set adrift from churches, Gleason’s religion of nature reflected the secularizing trends of modern society and helped legitimize the cultural authority of Progressive reformers. He linked the quest for transcendent meaning in nature to the centralization and growth of the federal government. A more activist government, he believed, could preserve the natural world for the spiritual benefit of American society. For Gleason, the camera made it possible to convey the sublimity of the American landscape. At the same time, he wanted to produce images that could be easily comprehended by lecture audiences and readers of nature books and magazines. In Gleason’s hands, the camera heightened the spirituality of the natural world while also bringing it down to size, presenting it as both a source of salvation and an item for consumption. John Muir, the renowned nature writer and cofounder of the Sierra Club, expressed a similar desire to domesticate the wilderness by creating pictures. “Pursuing my lonely way down the valley,” he wrote in The Mountains of California (1894), “I turned again and again to gaze on the glorious picture, throwing up my arms to inclose it as in a frame.” Not long after, Gleason would literally frame the Sierra Nevada and

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other places, allowing audiences from Massachusetts to California the opportunity to gaze and consume his images of nature.8 Through his photography, Gleason conveyed his commitment to landscape preservation and his passion for the environmental imagination. For almost twenty years, as a minister and editor of a religious publication, Gleason had glorified the kingdom of God; for the remainder of his life, as a photographer and lecturer, he gloried in the kingdom of nature. The Kingdom

Gleason’s path from the kingdom of God to the kingdom of nature followed a similar journey traversed by the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the biographies of Emerson and Gleason reveal some striking similarities. Born in Boston in 1803, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was ordained as a Unitarian minister. Yet he found the ministry to be constricting and unfulfilling; formal religion seemed disconnected from the passions and concerns of human experience. Unitarianism, the religion institutionalized at the Harvard Divinity School, represented a liberal reaction to the Calvinism practiced by the Puritans and their descendants. Unitarians revolted against the orthodox Calvinist stress on predestination and the innate depravity of mankind. But to Emerson and many of his contemporaries, Unitarianism seemed devoid of emotion and intense feeling. The movement known as transcendentalism thus became a kind of spiritual revival—not a return to dogmatic Puritanism but a philosophical and literary attempt to rekindle religious feeling. In his controversial Harvard Divinity School address delivered in 1838, Emerson contrasted the pulsating, palpable reality of nature to the barren, soulless practice of religion. He illustrated his argument by recalling a service in which the world outside the church beckoned, while the minister inside offered nothing but religious doctrine: “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more. . . . A snowstorm was falling around us. The snowstorm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.” To Emerson, the snowstorm seemed more meaningful and more alluring than the hollow words of the minister. Claiming that church leaders were not speaking to the emotional needs of their congregations, he indicted the poverty of religious practice and upheld nature as the true home of the spirit.9 Although Gleason never denounced organized religion in a public forum,

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his life followed a course similar to Emerson’s. Born in Massachusetts in 1855, he attended Williams College, studied theology at Union and Andover theological seminaries, and received his divinity degree from Andover in 1877. During this time, Union and Andover were major strongholds of liberal Protestantism, a set of ideas that predominated in many northern churches. Liberal ministers rejected the Calvinist concept of original sin and instead presented an optimistic vision of human nature. Like the Unitarians of Emerson’s day, they emphasized the power of moral education and the capacity of people to change their ways. After receiving his divinity degree, Gleason headed to Minnesota where he became the pastor of two successive churches in the Minneapolis area. In 1888, he began editing the Northwestern Congregationalist, a weekly magazine that was succeeded by the Kingdom, a journal (also edited by Gleason) that moved beyond the concerns of the Congregationalist church to embrace a broad set of social issues.10 The Kingdom was closely tied to the Social Gospel, a reform movement that emerged out of the culture of late-nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. Leaders of the Social Gospel responded to the conditions of industrial America by trying to inject moral values into public debate. They worried about urban poverty, criticized the brutal consequences of competitive capitalism, and called for government regulation of business. The Kingdom became a major organ promulgating the message of these reformers. Indeed, the list of contributors to the Kingdom reads like a who’s who of the Social Gospel: John R. Commons, Washington Gladden, George Herron, and Josiah Strong, among others, all published pieces in the journal.11 As editor, Gleason contributed numerous articles to the Kingdom. In an 1896 editorial, he lambasted the lifestyle of many elite Americans and suggested that Gilded Age America was plagued by moral corruption; the unequal distribution of wealth reflected the ethical failings of modern capitalism. “Luxury and the love of God are absolutely incompatible,” he wrote. Maintaining a stark division between God and mammon, Gleason argued that luxury “blunts the spiritual vision.” Condemning “corporate greed” and the worship of the “almighty dollar,” he warned that America might be on the brink of decline: “When there are such awful contrasts as are to be found in this country—masses of people living in misery while the few possess the wealth—we cannot boast of a high type of civilization or one which possesses any sure basis of stability. The story of Rome is a lesson for the ages.” Gleason protested a widespread pattern of thought: the belief that moral progress accompanied material progress. In late nineteenth-century America, the chorus of praise for capitalist growth could

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be heard in pulpits and banquet halls, encountered in popular magazines and political speeches. Many middle- and upper-class Americans engaged in the fantasy that Gleason rejected: the idea that industrial capitalism led to moral improvement.12 Fearing American decline and questioning the values of Gilded Age capitalism, Gleason found solace not only in religion but also in the natural world. An avid hiker and camper, he regularly included articles in the Kingdom about national parks, nature study, and America’s wild landscapes. He viewed Congregationalism, the Social Gospel, and nature as an interwoven pattern, each strand revealing the glory and splendor of God, each representing divine purpose in the world. As he incorporated nature study into the Kingdom, Gleason did not shy away from the question of evolution. The publication of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection in 1859 had met with considerable anxiety and even animosity on the part of American Protestants. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, many leaders of mainline denominations attempted to reconcile the perspectives of science and religion. The story of evolution, they believed, confirmed the power and wisdom of the deity, offering visible evidence of God’s directing force in the world. During its first year of publication, the Kingdom featured several articles about evolution, including two by Gleason. “The God of Nature and the God of the Bible are one and the same,” he announced. In future articles, Gleason would develop this idea, suggesting that evolution affirmed the grand design of the creator. Invoking the directional view of evolution, he claimed that nature revealed the unfolding of a divine plan. “Surely the nature-student, if he is simply reasonable,” Gleason argued, “must believe in the Divine Mind. There is such overwhelming evidence of Supreme Power, of Directing Intelligence, in the realm of nature that no honest man can escape the conviction.”13 Gleason’s vision of the natural world followed the Emersonian tradition, the belief that “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” According to Emerson, the natural world was a holy text, offering the observer spiritual enlightenment and a pathway to the deity. As Emerson famously declared in Nature: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Although the Darwinian revolution revealed a nature indifferent to human desires and meanings, an amoral realm driven by conflict, Gleason and other liberal Protestants viewed evolution as another example of God’s design for the world. They melded the Emersonian

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tradition with evolutionary thought to maintain the spiritual significance of nature. Gleason’s ideas were fundamentally anthropocentric: the true value of the nonhuman world lay in its capacity to act as a mirror for human desires.14 To heighten their appreciation of nature, Gleason encouraged subscribers of the Kingdom to read books about the outdoors. He also expressed his interest in the visual representation of nature, routinely commenting on photographs that appeared in these publications. In one review, he commended Clifton Johnson’s A Book of Clouds and Sunshine, a work filled with “sumptuous” illustrations, for capturing “the real spirit of New England life.” Gleason drew particular attention to Johnson’s photographs and urged readers to study these images closely. “[The reader] will wish,” Gleason explained, “to linger long on many scenes of hill and meadow . . . for they have a meaning to him which he cannot describe but which takes hold of his very soul.” By emphasizing the emotive power of images, Gleason suggested that the camera could capture the spirituality of nature and bring viewers closer to God.15 After discovering the pleasures and possibilities of photography, Gleason began to illustrate his Kingdom essays with his own photographs of birds and other scenes from nature. In his first illustrated article, he used the language of hunting to describe the practice of photography. “Our armament,” he wrote, “was limited to a 4 x 5 camera, with which . . . we did some very effective ‘shooting.’” Nature photographers at the turn of the twentieth century often employed similar metaphors of the hunt; many of them referred to their pursuit of wild animals as “hunting with the camera.” Yet these photographers—particularly a group of elite men associated with Theodore Roosevelt—tended to view their image taking as a form of manly expression consistent with the actual hunting and killing of game. Gleason did not share their enthusiasm for the gun and boasted about how rarely he had hunted during his outdoor adventures. He recalled an experience of hiking to the “top of a high knoll” where he could gain “an extended view” over the woods. “It was a place for tabernaclebuilding,” he wrote. “I sat there a long time and had visions, both actual and ideal, which I would not exchange for a dozen brace of partridges.” In contrast to many nature photographers, Gleason did not view the natural world as a setting for masculine testing and regenerative violence. Rather, nature appeared as a house of worship and a setting for spiritual redemption.16 Gleason never explained why he abandoned the ministry in 1899 and moved from the Congregationalist church to the tabernacle of nature. Yet his flight from organized religion to landscape photography can be understood as part of a larger cultural development. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans began to feel that modern life had become strangely “unreal,” dis-

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connected from nature and devoid of meaning. They feared that liberal Protestantism was emptied of substance, a creed that no longer addressed matters of the spirit. They questioned the Gilded Age faith in economic growth and the banal platitudes that equated moral and material progress. Their sense of unease prompted longings for intense experience; they desperately wanted to regain contact with reality. Their quest took many forms: from the arts and crafts movement to the back-to-nature movement, Americans expressed their cravings for authentic experience. Gleason’s fascination with landscape photography reflected this widespread hunger for meaning in a culture that seemed increasingly adrift from real life. Through the camera’s lens, he wanted to represent the physical actuality of the natural world.17 Gleason was not alone in viewing the camera as a technology to capture reality. As Jane Addams and other contemporaries founded settlement houses to address the needs of immigrants and the poor, photographers such as Lewis Hine began to document the conditions of urban life. “The picture,” Hine wrote, “is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality.” With its basis in objective reality, the photograph could “educate and direct public opinion.” “The dictum . . . of the social worker,” Hine explained, “is ‘Let there be light’; and in this campaign for light we have for our advance agent the light writer—the photograph.” Illuminating the dark corners of urban life, the camera allowed viewers to glimpse authentic experience, to recognize the harsh realities of industrial America. Longings for reality led Hine to photograph the plight of slum dwellers and child laborers; similar impulses led Gleason to record the life-giving presence of nature. In 1899, Gleason returned to Massachusetts to pursue photography, hoping “to interpret to men the handiwork of God.”18 The Photography of Pilgrimage

For Gleason, the return to Massachusetts was a homecoming but also something more: he would describe it as the beginning of a spiritual quest and a pilgrimage to a sacred place. While living in Minnesota, Gleason had carefully read seasonal excerpts of Thoreau’s Journal, which had been edited and published as a four-volume compilation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Even more than in Walden and other works, Thoreau revealed in his journal his passion for the detailed study of natural phenomena. “The reading of these [selections],” Gleason recalled, “with their vivid delineation of characteristic New England scenes, sacredly cherished in memory, aroused a passionate longing to visit the region so intimately described by Thoreau and

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1.1. Herbert W. Gleason, H. W. Gleason at Thoreau’s cairn, Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts, May 19, 1908. Used by permission of the Concord Free Public Library Trustees.

enjoy a ramble among his beloved haunts.” Gleason called his memory of the landscape “sacredly cherished,” reflecting his religious understanding of the natural world. He also described his photographic visits to Concord, trips he made regularly from 1899 until shortly before his death in 1937, as “pilgrimages.” Invoking Concord as a site of pilgrimage, Gleason enveloped his excur-

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sions with sacred purpose: a visit to Walden Pond and a retracing of Thoreau’s steps represented a journey to hallowed ground.19 In a photograph taken in 1908, Gleason pictured himself resting against Thoreau’s cairn, the pyramid-shaped pile of stones marking the location of the writer’s cabin (fig. 1.1). Fans of Thoreau began bringing stones to this area in 1872; they wanted to create a memorial near the edge of Walden Pond that would signify the sacredness of the site. Dressed in a suit and tie, Gleason portrayed himself as a respectful pilgrim; perched on the side of the cairn, he strikes a contemplative pose, suggesting solemn admiration and quiet devotion. The towering trees and placid pond accentuate the holy symbolism of the image. Framed by the natural environment of Walden, the photograph records a visitor meditating at a shrine, paying homage to a saint.20 Perhaps even more than other Thoreau devotees, Gleason felt the need to sanctify Thoreau. He wanted to envision his engagement with the writer and with nature as a spiritual activity—not just metaphorically, but literally, a form of religious practice. Having abandoned the ministry and turned to photography, Gleason described his interest in the natural world as an extension of his former career rather than as a radical departure. To see landscape photography as a type of religious observance, Gleason needed to view Thoreau not only as his beacon and hero but also as a holy figure, someone canonized as an environmental saint. The religious qualities of Thoreau’s work would become a recurring theme in Gleason’s lectures and publications. “Nothing more deeply impresses itself upon the mind of one who reads Thoreau’s Journal sympathetically,” he argued, “than the conviction that Thoreau possessed a profoundly religious nature. He would not have chosen the adjective, but it is abundantly evident that his walks afield were to him religious excursions,—seasons of communion with the Unseen.”21 Through his photography, Gleason delivered visual sermons on the aesthetic power of nature. In a photograph taken in the summer of 1900, less than a year after his return to Massachusetts, he captured an enchanting view of the fog from Nawshawtuct Hill in Concord (fig. 1.2). The darkness of the trees in the foreground contrasts with the airy, luminous fog in the distance. Standing on the hilltop, Gleason pointed his camera down toward the fog, revealing its serene presence and its gentle obscuring of the land below. Gleason’s picturing of what Thoreau described as a “sea of fog” resembles the style of luminism, a genre of landscape painting that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Luminist painters such as Sanford Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and John Frederick Kensett emphasized the pervasiveness of light in the landscape. For these painters, the light offered a vision of spiritual harmony and expressed

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1.2. Herbert W. Gleason, fog from Nawshawtuct, Concord, Massachusetts, August 23, 1900. Used by permission of the Concord Free Public Library Trustees.

divine immanence in the natural world. Similarly, Gleason’s photograph focuses on the intense light permeating the fog, casting a spiritual glow over the landscape. Suspended over the land, illuminated by the rising sun, the floating fog embodies the religiosity of the scene.22 As Gleason amassed a large collection of Thoreau-related photographs, he considered publishing these images as “a picture book, with a few brief notes.” Casting about for a publisher, he attracted the attention of Houghton Mifflin and Company, the nation’s leading publisher of nature writing and outdoor books. By 1903, the publishing firm had decided to use Gleason’s photographs to illustrate a twenty-volume edition of Thoreau’s writings. Known as the Walden edition, The Writings of Thoreau appeared in 1906 and featured a reprinting of Thoreau’s major works along with the first-time publication of the corpus of his Journal. Hoping to capitalize on the “back-to-nature” sentiment in America, Houghton Mifflin presented Thoreau as the progenitor of the nature writing tradition.23 In marketing the Walden edition, Houghton Mifflin emphasized the historic significance of the publishing venture, describing the publication of Thoreau’s Journal as “one of the most remarkable literary events of many years.” Houghton Mifflin sought to bring Thoreau into the American canon, to make him a member of the authorial pantheon inhabited by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In bestowing this badge of legitimacy on Thoreau, the publisher chose to celebrate not only the literary merits of his prose but also the primary subject of his writings—the close observation of nature.24 Indeed, Houghton Mifflin singled out Thoreau’s vision, his power to see and observe the natural world, as his most impressive quality. Thoreau’s optical imagination, joined with his poetic sensibility, defined his collection of writings, making him a shining star in the national literary firmament. In a promotional brochure, Houghton Mifflin drew on comments by several writers who emphasized the visual qualities of Thoreau’s prose. The quotations used optical phrases—explaining that Thoreau possessed “the eye of the naturalist,” that he presented “pictures . . . true to life,” and that he left readers with “sweet and pleasant images”—to praise his ability to convey scenes with graphic accuracy and vivid detail.25 In addition to presenting Thoreau as the quintessential observer of nature, Houghton Mifflin incorporated over one hundred photographs by Gleason into the Walden edition. Gleason’s images, carefully displayed throughout the edition, furnish the texts with visual records of places and scenes described by Thoreau. Houghton Mifflin praised the photographs, attributing their power to Gleason’s knowledge of Thoreau and his passion for the natural world. The edition featured “photographs from Nature,” the company explained, taken by “Mr. Herbert W. Gleason, a photographer who . . . is himself an ardent lover of Nature. He has . . . explored with equal thoroughness the woods and fields about Concord . . . and [secured] photographs . . . in the very spots where Thoreau observed them.”26 When Houghton Mifflin published the Walden edition of Thoreau’s writings, the company wanted to forestall criticism of Gleason’s photographs. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrations had become increasingly common in American books and periodicals. While many readers greeted the images with enthusiasm, some observers warned of the perils of pictures, claiming that the new iconography represented a disturbing cultural development. To these critics, the use of photographs and other images raised serious questions about the status of literature, the veracity of illustrations, and the influence of visual media in modern society. Writing in prominent journals and magazines, these critics argued that the public fascination with visual images pointed to the triumph of seeing over thinking, of the image over the idea, and would eventually lead to the substitution of pictures for words. “We can scarce get the sense of what we read for the pictures,” an editorialist in Harper’s Weekly complained in 1911. “We can’t see the ideas for the illustrations. Our world is simply flooded with them. They lurk in almost every form of printed matter.”

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Houghton Mifflin’s description of Gleason helped to confirm the truthfulness of his images. By calling him “an ardent lover of Nature,” someone who had visited the “very spots” described by Thoreau, the publisher suggested that Gleason had captured the same scenes and phenomena Thoreau had witnessed decades earlier, and for this reason, the words and pictures worked in harmony, producing a truthful and accurate representation of nature.27 Reviewers agreed with Houghton Mifflin. They did not excoriate the publisher for augmenting the verbal insight of Thoreau with the visual insight of Gleason; they did not charge the company with debasing the American mind and corrupting the nation’s literary tradition. Instead, many reviewers made a point of discussing how the photographs contributed to the overall value of the collection. Reviewing the Walden edition for the Dial, a literary journal founded by nineteenth-century transcendentalists, F. B. Sanborn praised Gleason’s images for being “wonderfully true to the nature amid which Thoreau was most serenely at home.”28 As Gleason contributed photographs to books and other publications, he also developed a thriving career as a lecturer. He would dazzle audiences with tales of outdoor adventure, stories of scaling mountain peaks and venturing into the vastness of the West. He would captivate them with photographs of distant places and wide vistas. Finally, he would warn them of the threats to American landscapes and urge them to embrace the cause of environmental preservation. For the former minister, it would be a familiar role: rather than delivering sermons on the teachings of Congregationalism, Gleason would preach the religion of nature. A Pulpit for Nature

Gleason began his lecturing career soon after his flight from the ministry and his return to Massachusetts. Once again, his biography retraced the path of Emerson, who became a noted lecturer following his resignation from the church. Gleason’s lectures amalgamated two genres of popular entertainment, both based upon the visual appeal of images and the verbal appeal of a narrator: the illustrated travel lecture and the illustrated reform lecture. The travel lecture, popularized by John L. Stoddard and E. Burton Holmes, provided audiences with a vicarious way to experience foreign lands. Interweaving tales of adventure with slides of exotic places, these lectures offered visual delectation and narrative drama to audiences composed primarily of middle- and upper-class Americans. On occasion, Stoddard and Holmes delivered lectures concerning American places, such as Yellowstone National Park and the Grand

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Canyon, but the vast majority of their talks focused on foreign sites. Meanwhile, Jacob Riis used similar techniques in his reform lectures about the plight of immigrants and slum dwellers in New York City. Just as the travel lecturer addressed affluent Americans, Riis spoke to audiences who did not live in tenements. He wanted them to witness, as he titled his 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, and to persuade them, through moral appeals, to push for reform. Gleason combined the adventure and excitement of the travel lecture with the political message of the reform lecture. Amalgamating these two genres, he focused almost exclusively on American places, matching his enthusiasm for the scenery with his concern for its preservation.29 From all accounts, Gleason was a popular and entertaining lecturer. He frequently filled large auditoriums in Boston and New York City and also attracted crowds in places farther away, from Buffalo and Chicago to Portland and San Francisco. Across the nation, wherever he lectured, Gleason met with praise from reviewers. “He is a remarkable combination,” the Boston Transcript noted, “of the indefatigable mountaineer and explorer, the scientific observer, the photographer of rare artistic discrimination and technical skill and a brilliantly entertaining lecturer.” Reviewers routinely echoed these themes, reporting that Gleason’s knowledge and storytelling, together with his breathtaking photographs, made for an impressive evening of entertainment. Many reviewers believed that Gleason’s slides were the most beautiful they had ever seen. “The photographs were, so far as is remembered,” a reporter in Keene, New Hampshire, wrote, “the finest ever exhibited in Keene, the colored views being remarkably vivid and rich in scope and detail.”30 As this last review suggests, Gleason’s lectures typically featured “colored views” of the natural world. Although the technology of the time did not allow Gleason to take color photographs, his wife, Lulu Rounds Gleason, would hand-color many of his black-and-white slides. She would often accompany Gleason on his photographic excursions, taking detailed notes on the scenery so that she could render, as precisely as possible, the colors of nature. In the 1890s, while he was still an amateur photographer and the editor of the Kingdom, Gleason had expressed his hope that the technology for color photography would be developed in the near future. “The marvelous flood of invention during the past few years,” he wrote, “has failed to bring us one thing for which the world is waiting: color photography. . . . What a great day that will be when one can take his kodak under his arm and stroll off through the woods in October, bringing back with him imperishable reproductions of their glory!” Through a painstaking process, Lulu Gleason tinted her husband’s slides and accomplished what the camera alone could not produce;

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combining naturalistic detail with artistic sensibility, she contributed greatly to the appeal of his lectures.31 Gleason’s willingness to manipulate the photographic image, to use handcolored slides to achieve a desired effect, set him apart in the early twentiethcentury art community. During this period, more and more photographers eschewed such techniques; they embraced the camera as a machine that offered unprecedented power to record reality. Although nineteenth-century artists routinely doctored prints, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and other photographers dismissed these methods as violating the true spirit of photography, an art form that relied on the individual’s ability to control the camera. Gleason’s black-and-white prints often adhered to a similar aesthetic doctrine in which he tried to replicate details from the natural world. Yet his desire to include color in his lectures, while looking toward the future, also hearkened back to an earlier view of the camera that accepted the blatant alteration of images.32 From Gleason’s perspective, color was not merely an aesthetic gloss, an attempt to cover nature with a more attractive garb. Rather, the tinted slides enabled him to present viewers with a more accurate portrayal of the details of a scene. Reviewers often commented on his use of color, describing it not as an artificial addition or a phony embellishment but instead as a means to represent the authentic appearance of the natural world. Phrases like “realistically reproduced” were often used to commend his presentation of colored slides. A leader of the Appalachian Mountain Club, Cora Stanwood Cobb, emphasized how the slides that were “naturally and delicately colored by Mrs. Gleason” contributed to the overall effect of the lecture delivered to club members. Rather than questioning the veracity of the images, reviewers like Cobb praised their verisimilitude, their ability to mimic the appearance of nature.33 When Gleason lectured about the American West, he emphasized the vast mountain peaks and the thunderous waterfalls, the unusual rock formations and the august forests—all features associated with the sublime. In the summer of 1905, as a member of a climbing group, he took a dramatic photograph of the party ascending Mount Rainier in Washington (fig. 1.3). The snow-capped mountain dwarfs the human figures. Walking single-file, the thirty-nine climbers appear puny, a miniscule, almost insignificant, line overwhelmed by the jagged mass of rock. The presence of people provides a sense of scale to the image, underscoring the mammoth size and immense power of the mountain. For Gleason, as for other celebrants of the sublime, the majestic qualities of the landscape contained spiritual meaning. The face of a mountain offered a glimpse of the face of God; the overwhelming force of nature diminished human significance and suggested divine presence in the world. Yet Gleason

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1.3. Herbert W. Gleason, Mazamas climbing snow slope (distant line), Mount Rainier, Paradise Park, July 25, 1905. Used by permission of the Concord Free Public Library Trustees.

did not portray nature as a threatening arena, as a place where people were not welcome. Like other artists and intellectuals of his time, he offered a domesticated vision of the sublime. Describing Lake Saint Mary in Montana’s Glacier National Park, Gleason explained that the lake “is always beautiful, even when the storm clouds gather and the thunder rolls and the winds lash its surface in fury. One may spend many days of unalloyed delight by its shores.” Even in moments of “fury,” with lashing winds and rolling thunder, the natural world offered a safe haven, a place where human visitors could experience “unalloyed delight.” This softened sublime dovetailed with the version of Darwinism embraced by Gleason and other Protestant intellectuals. Just as he linked evolution to the idea of beneficent design, Gleason presented the sublime as another indication of the inherent order of the universe, another sign that nature existed to satisfy human longings.34 The subject matter and style of Gleason’s lectures appealed to many different organizations, from conservation and outdoors groups—including the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club—to art and camera clubs, natural history museums, and an array of church societies. Gleason made a special appeal to women’s clubs, organizations of middle- and upper-class women that formed in numerous cities and towns at the turn of the

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twentieth century. These groups provided women a space to pursue education and “self-improvement” while also offering them a vehicle through which to engage in politics and reform activities. Nature study and conservation were high on the agenda of women’s clubs, and Gleason became a frequent speaker at their meetings. On a regular basis, he addressed, among others, the Friday Morning Club in Los Angeles, the Women’s Education Union in Toledo, and a battery of clubs throughout New England. In a pamphlet distributed to women’s clubs nationally, Gleason explained that his lectures would appeal to their desire for knowledge and uplift, offering “subjects of educational value, artistic in presentation and furnishing a high order of entertainment.” Regaling his audiences with tales of adventure and thrilling them with colorful slides, Gleason tried to provide both edification and amusement.35 As Gleason began mixing politics and photography, he found common cause with the Sierra Club, an organization cofounded by John Muir in 1892. Like Gleason, Muir viewed nature through a spiritual lens and frequently used religious language to describe his responses to the landscape. In a 1912 review published in the Literary Digest, the nature writer John Burroughs criticized this dimension of Muir’s writings. Although Burroughs admired the work of the “Sierra-smitten Scot,” he thought that Muir overused words such as “glorious” and cautioned him against cluttering his prose with spiritual rhetoric. “Whatever else wild nature is, she is certainly not pious, and has never been trained in the Sunday-school,” Burroughs wrote. “But, as reflected in Mr. Muir’s pages, she very often seems on her way to or from the kirk. All his streams and waterfalls and avalanches and storm-buffeted trees sing songs, or hymns, or psalms, or rejoice in some other proper Presbyterian manner. One would hardly be surprised to hear his avalanches break out with the Doxology.” After reading this review, Gleason quickly fired off a letter to Muir, offering a spirited defense of Muir’s prose style and praising his religious evocations of the natural world. “I hope you will go on with your glorious writing, describing the glorious scenes of California’s glorious mountains and glorious parks and glorious water-falls, just as long and just as gloriously as you can!” he exclaimed. “And don’t forget,” Gleason continued, “to tell us all about the ‘psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’ which you hear in the aforesaid mountains, water-falls, etc. J. B., coldblooded agnostic that he is, may not like it, but it appeals immensely to the people who read your books.”36 Gleason met Muir soon after Houghton Mifflin published the Walden edition of Thoreau’s writings in 1906. At Muir’s request, the publisher sent him the complete set so he could study Thoreau’s writings and Gleason’s photographs. Over the next several years, Gleason illustrated Muir’s books, corresponded

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with him concerning politics and conservation issues, and earned the writer’s praise for his images. Upon receiving the page proofs for the 1911 publication of My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir commended the accuracy and artistry of Gleason’s photographs. “I am glad to see,” he wrote to Gleason, “that you are to furnish the photographs since you know and love the region so well and have so good an eye for what is most telling.” Muir’s comment echoed an idea voiced by Houghton Mifflin in its marketing of the Walden edition. The publishing company described Gleason as “an ardent lover of Nature,” while Muir claimed that the power of Gleason’s Sierra photographs emanated from his love of the region. Both implied that to take meaningful pictures a landscape photographer needed to love the natural world. Like the editors at Houghton Mifflin, Muir believed that Gleason’s photographs recorded not only the “reality” of nature but also his emotional response to a place. By filtering his feelings through the camera, Gleason mixed his emotions with the machine to produce spiritual visions of the landscape.37 Hoping that his photographs could mobilize public sentiment, Gleason became involved in the most significant environmental controversy of the era: he joined a campaign led by Muir and other activists to prevent a dam from being built inside Yosemite National Park. In 1901, the City of San Francisco, searching for a new source of water, requested a reservoir site at Hetch Hetchy Valley. The proposal called for damming the Tuolumne River and turning the valley, located about one hundred and fifty miles from the city, into a reservoir and hydroelectric power plant. At the time, the valley was considered remote, visited by far fewer people than the renowned Yosemite Valley. Nevertheless, Hetch Hetchy was situated within the boundaries of the national park and was described by those who had seen it as a place even more beautiful and impressive than Yosemite. Over the next several years, the fate of the valley became the subject of a national debate, an issue that gripped Americans from California to New York and that split the fledgling conservation movement into two groups: on one side, reformers like John Muir who wanted to preserve the beauty of nature and save Hetch Hetchy for its spiritual value; on the other, reformers like Gifford Pinchot who emphasized the efficient management of resources and supported the reservoir as a source of water and power for human use.38 In 1909, as the debate over Hetch Hetchy intensified, Gleason sided with Muir and the Sierra Club in their struggle against the dam. He visited Yosemite National Park that summer and hiked through the twenty-mile canyon leading to Hetch Hetchy, where he spent several days and took many photographs. Gleason found that these images appealed to large audiences in the

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East, where the Hetch Hetchy battle excited much interest and passion. In a crowded hall in Boston the following winter, at an event sponsored by the Appalachian Mountain Club, Gleason addressed over one thousand people concerned with the future of the valley. He described his summer adventures in the park and then focused on the threat to Hetch Hetchy. “These pictures,” he announced, “are presented with the hope that by this means a suggestion, at least, might be given of the exceeding beauty and grandeur of this portion of the Yosemite National Park. Scenes of such stupendous majesty, awful sublimity and fascinating charm are not easily paralleled anywhere in this country, or even the world.” Gleason questioned the arguments of dam proponents and claimed that the valley would offer more benefits to the “public welfare” as a place of natural sublimity than as a water supply. He showed slides of Hetch Hetchy and ended the lecture with what one reporter described as an “impassioned appeal” for the preservation of wild places. The national parks, Gleason claimed, were resources for the spirit, catering to “man’s higher motives and sentiments,” places “which furnish limitless food for his intellectual growth, which inevitably incite to moral betterment.”39 Gleason’s photographs became a centerpiece of the campaign, not only in his popular lectures but also in a pamphlet distributed nationally by the Sierra Club, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and other reform organizations. Let Everyone Help to Save the Famous Hetch-Hetchy Valley, the pamphlet announced. Appearing at the end of the pamphlet, the photographs authenticated Hetch Hetchy’s aesthetic value and testified to the sacredness of the site. Out of the nine photographs featured in the pamphlet, Gleason contributed six. Each photograph is matched with a quotation—usually by John Muir—that provides a verbal counterpoint to the image. Both the texts and the photographs present Hetch Hetchy in similar terms: the landscape appears powerful and awe-inspiring but also peaceful and welcoming; the setting combines the rugged qualities of mountains and gorges with the reassuring features of a meadow or park. Viewers glimpse steep rock formations and vigorous waterfalls; they also see grassy, open spaces bathed in sunlight. In one photograph, Gleason portrayed a scene that perfectly captures these twin facets of Hetch Hetchy. The image shows two waterfalls—one flowing with great force, the other gliding with grace—extending downward from a towering rock wall above the valley. Below the photograph, a quotation by Muir contrasts the two waterfalls: “No two falls could be more unlike—Tueeulala out in the open sunshine descending like thistledown, chanting soft and low like a summer breeze in the pines; Wapama in a jagged, shadowy gorge roaring and thundering, pounding its way with the weight and energy of an ava-

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lanche.” According to Muir, nature’s calm and nature’s power are represented by the two falls. The photograph records these differences and also provides viewers with an imaginary place to stand, a gentle foreground where they can stare at the rock wall reaching toward the sky. Gleason presented Hetch Hetchy as a garden and a wilderness, simultaneously a tract of tranquility and a shrine of sublimity.40 In combining Muir’s words with Gleason’s images, the Sierra Club and other organizations hoped to convince Americans that Hetch Hetchy was a holy place, a landscape that would be profaned by the intrusion of a dam. The public embraced their message. In the months that followed, mail poured into Congress overwhelmingly against the dam. Nevertheless, in 1913, the Senate approved San Francisco’s request for the reservoir. A saddened Muir searched for hope in the aftermath of defeat. As he explained to Gleason, “the long-drawnout battles we have fought for the people’s parks are not lost. The conscience of the whole country has been aroused, and compensating good for the Hetch Hetchy sin must surely come.” Longing for redemption, Muir believed that the nation would atone for “Hetch Hetchy sin” by preserving the sanctity of other wild places. Gleason offered a similar message in his lectures, continuing to show the photographs of Hetch Hetchy that he had taken in 1909. Following the Senate vote and the flooding of Hetch Hetchy, his images became emblems of loss, reminders of a sacred space desecrated by a dam.41 Enchanted Enclaves

With passage of the National Park Service Act of 1916, Muir’s prophecy came true: many viewed the legislation as atonement for the nation’s sin at Hetch Hetchy. The law established the National Park Service as an agency within the Department of the Interior charged with managing the national parks and monuments. The agency celebrated the parks as landscapes of leisure and encouraged tourists to visit these sites as a ritual of national pilgrimage.42 Gleason sought a role for himself in the National Park Service. In 1918, he wrote to the agency’s director Stephen Mather, proposing to sell his negatives to the Park Service for use in its “publicity work.” He emphasized to Mather the high quality of his photographs and called special attention to his images of Hetch Hetchy. “Many of the subjects are unique,” he explained, “and some of them, such as I took in Hetch Hetchy, can never be taken again.”43 The years surrounding World War I marked a crescendo of scenic patriotism centered on the national parks. Government officials placed articles about the parks in leading magazines, including the National Geographic and the Satur-

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day Evening Post. They published and distributed a picture book and an illustrated pamphlet celebrating the unique wonders of the national parks. Stephen Mather, a former borax manufacturer and skilled advertiser, spearheaded many of these publicity efforts. Like other park officials, Mather admired Gleason’s talents as an artist and lecturer. Rather than purchase Gleason’s negatives, Mather decided to hire the photographer to take pictures of existing parks and monuments and to record other places being considered for inclusion in the national park system. In December 1918, four weeks after Armistice Day in Europe, Gleason began his appointment as an inspector for the Department of the Interior, a federal employee responsible for securing photographs of the nation’s scenic beauty.44 Gleason held this position for about a year until funding cutbacks in the Department of the Interior ended his appointment. The position paid for extended trips to places like Yosemite, Mount Rainier, and Bryce Canyon—a terrific gig for a photographer who thrived on travel and adventure in the West. The Department of the Interior arranged for his photographs to appear in major magazines and newspapers; Mather and other officials frequently used Gleason’s images in their lectures. Gleason’s association with the federal government allowed him to continue connecting photography to politics, to use the camera to support the mission of the National Park Service. The federal government had employed photographers in the nineteenth century, but Gleason’s appointment with the Department of the Interior represented a departure from this tradition. Under the aegis of the U.S. Geological Survey, photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson had explored and recorded the previously unmapped lands of the American West. Casting themselves as pioneers on the frontier, surveyors evoked the West as a landscape awaiting discovery and development. The camera played a crucial role in these surveys, helping to verify the presence of minerals and other natural resources; the photographs taken by Jackson and O’Sullivan preceded the exploitation of the region’s riches. By visualizing an unknown land, photographers helped map the future of the nation’s growth and imperial power. In contrast, Gleason’s photography celebrated nature as a space of leisure and called for the protection of scenic beauty. His photographs still suggested that wild places should be brought under the control of the state, but they reflected the concerns of Americans contemplating a postfrontier landscape. Rather than offering a prophecy of industrial progress, the photographs were used to preserve the American wilderness, to create a sense of permanence in the natural world.45 As they touted the virtues of tourism, Gleason and other park promoters in-

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voked frontier rhetoric to celebrate Western places as sites recently “discovered” and made accessible to tourists. In adopting the language of the frontier, they suggested that the automobile could allow Americans to feel like pioneers exploring wild nature. Muir and Gleason had opposed the dam at Hetch Hetchy as a technology befitting the devil; yet, during the same campaign, they had suggested that the automobile offered a means to commune with nature and attain grace. Gleason’s lectures about the landscapes of the West presented a similar message. An advertisement for his lecture “In Rainbow-Land,” which introduced audiences to the scenery of southern Utah, emphasized how the building of roads enabled Americans to experience the wild. “This region is comparatively a new discovery,” the advertisement announced. “Only within the past three or four years has it been made accessible to the traveling public, through the construction of suitable motor roads, and already it is hailed as . . . the supreme climax of colorful scenery in America.”46 In some of his images, Gleason directly positioned an automobile within a scene of natural beauty—not to make it seem like an artificial intrusion or an aggressive invader but rather to present it in harmony with the wild. Visiting Sequoia National Park in California in 1919, he took several photographs of ancient trees towering over gentle meadows. Muir had once rhapsodized about taking a sacrament with “Sequoia wine,” wishing he could become a modern “John [the] Baptist” who preached to the nation: “Repent for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand.” Gleason similarly felt that the sequoia grove represented sacred space, a living testament to the wonders of creation. In one photograph, he portrayed several smaller trees overshadowed by a sylvan skyscraper, a giant sequoia that could barely be contained within the frame of the image (fig. 1.4). Rising upward, the massive column lacks branches—except near the top—allowing the sunlight to penetrate the scene, casting brightness on the meadow below. The enormous tree trunk adjoins two parked cars, vehicles that have brought people into contact with the sublime.47 While working for the Department of the Interior, Gleason visited Bryce Canyon, the experience he vividly described to Stephen Mather as the “climax of my entire out-door life.” He also contributed an illustrated article to Motor Life magazine in which he praised the work of the Utah State Automobile Association for transforming the region from a “terra incognita” into “the most fascinating region for motoring in all the Great West.” His photographs emphasized the awe-inspiring scenery of the area, places he described as “exquisitely beautiful products of Nature’s genius.” In a photograph taken on a subsequent trip, Gleason captured the holy bands of a rainbow hovering above the fantastically shaped pillars of rock (fig. 1.5)48

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1.4. Herbert W. Gleason, large sequoia by meadow in Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California, July 13, 1919. Used by permission of the Concord Free Public Library Trustees.

Gleason’s protest against the iron cage of rationality and the obsession with mammon led him to trumpet the sacred qualities of nature, to present places like Bryce Canyon as enchanted enclaves offering spiritual sustenance. Yet his embrace of the automobile conjured up a larger network of consumer culture:

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1.5. Herbert W. Gleason, rainbow, Bryce Canyon, Utah, August 31, 1921. Used by permission of the Concord Free Public Library Trustees.

the creation of a national market, the construction of state and national transportation systems, the entire infrastructure that made it possible for him to travel through southern Utah. His revolt against dominant values unwittingly reaffirmed the larger trends of consumer society, suggesting that adventure in the West provided a therapeutic retreat from the problems and pressures of modern America. Gleason sought to build a beloved community devoted to the American landscape, but his crusade obscured larger conflicts within American society—divisions that were often exacerbated by environmental reform. Throughout his career, he preached the religion of beauty to affluent Americans who could afford to purchase the Walden edition of Thoreau’s writings, to attend one of his lecture courses, or to visit the monumental parks of the American West. Although Gleason did not disparage the working class or direct his ire at poorer groups, his call for protecting nature in the public interest concealed the conflicts generated by this reform agenda. As a number of historians have shown, the creation of national parks went hand in hand with the removal of Native Americans from many of these sites. Park policies also criminalized hunting and other subsistence-oriented activities by poor and working-class Americans, groups that had previously depended upon these landscapes for their livelihood. Too often, the religion of nature became the province of the

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elite, an ideological smokescreen hiding the inequalities and injustices produced by conservation reform. By ignoring the experience of poor and rural Americans, Gleason’s photography offered a consumerist vision of nature as a spectacle for the eye.49 Gleason’s path from the Social Gospel to the National Park Service also raises larger questions about the relationship between self and society, between the individual and the state in modern America. As a proponent of the Social Gospel, Gleason called for individuals to contribute to the needs of the many. His embrace of transcendentalism suggested a reversal of this outlook, a turn toward the inner needs of the spirit, an attempt to address personal, psychological concerns while escaping from the problems of modern society. Nevertheless, as he became involved with political matters and policy debates, Gleason argued that the needs of the individual could only be guaranteed by the growing power of the state. Rejecting Emerson’s characterization of society as “a joint-stock company” that robs its members of liberty, Gleason suggested that the transcendental self could be inscribed within a larger moral community; the fate of the individual could be secured through social cohesion and political consolidation.50 Along with leaders of the National Park Service, Gleason articulated a political vision that dovetailed with the Progressive ideology of Herbert Croly, a founding editor of the New Republic. In his influential book, The Promise of American Life (1909), Croly considered the meanings of individualism within the context of modern society. He argued that contemporary conditions demanded a redefinition of individualism, one dependent upon the expanding power of the national government. “The individual American,” Croly explained, “will never obtain a sufficiently complete chance of self-expression, until the American nation has earnestly undertaken and measurably achieved the realization of its collective purpose. . . . [T]he achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the liberation of the individual.” Croly connected his analysis to the larger sweep of American political thought, paying particular attention to the early national debates between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over the question of government power. He famously suggested that modern Americans needed to apply “Hamiltonian means” (a strong central government) to attain “Jeffersonian ends” (individual autonomy). Gleason and national park advocates tweaked this formulation, recasting it to suit the claims of transcendentalism. To paraphrase Croly, they wanted to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Emersonian ends.51 Gleason fused antimodern anxiety with Progressive optimism to create a new secular vocation: an environmental image maker, a reformer who used

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the camera to search for redemptive hope and preach the gospel of seeing. Drawing on the Emersonian tradition, he incorporated the camera into this secularized religion of nature. Images of the natural world, Gleason believed, could become symbols of the spirit and offer the means to achieve an “original relationship to the universe.” A modern version of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” the camera could provide a path connecting the exterior and the interior, could forge a link between concrete facts and human desires, could record the reality of Bryce Canyon as well as the deep emotion Gleason experienced there. More than any other Progressive-era environmental advocate, Gleason recognized the spiritual and political possibilities of the camera, a technology that could transform seeing into a type of religious ritual and vision into a form of political persuasion.52 Just before Gleason died in 1937, at the age of eighty-two, he was still obsessed with Thoreau, the environmental saint who had led him away from the flock of liberal Protestantism. Although the Great Depression and New Deal dominated the economic and political landscapes of America, Gleason’s thoughts were consumed by the landscapes of Concord. Even in the last year of his life, he imagined a variety of Thoreau-related photographic projects. “A whimsical idea has just struck me,” he wrote to a friend in 1936, discussing one such project. “Frank Allen is about to publish a book on ‘The Men of Concord,’ describing some of Thoreau’s associates and cronies. I should like to follow it with a brochure on ‘The Swamps of Concord!’ I have an awful lot of material, both literary and illustrative. Is such an idea wholly whimsical, after all?”53 While Gleason never completed this swamp project, his career anticipated the work of later environmental image makers. Through his illustrations of writings by Thoreau and Muir, through his lecturing career, and through his involvement with the Hetch Hetchy campaign, he established a stylistic precedent for American environmental politics. The fusion of words and images would become the standard form of visual advocacy adopted by the conservation movement. Gleason conjoined spirituality and sight, linking both to a new politics of reform based on religious feeling and visual culture. He defined the destruction of American landscapes as a form of sin, an act of defiance against the laws of God and nature. He presented aesthetics as a form of salvation and believed that the protection of natural beauty could restore a sense of transcendence, that nature showed a way to recapture religious emotions in a secularizing culture. His career helped initiate a fundamental goal for environmental reformers: to bring aesthetics and spirituality into American politics. Since Gleason’s time, environmental image makers have used a similar language of sin and loss, beauty and salvation. Indeed, as Gleason contemplated

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his study of Thoreauvian swamps, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had already launched a new phase of environmental reform. Responding to the economic disaster of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration also confronted the ecological disasters of the 1930s: dust storms on the Great Plains, recurrent floods in the Mississippi Valley, and soil erosion on farms throughout the country. These failings of American agriculture became the focal point for the government’s conservation efforts. Historians generally describe New Deal environmental policy as economic and utilitarian, representing a practical strain of conservation that emphasized the rational use of natural resources. This assessment provides some valuable insight into the period, but it ignores the religious and visual dimensions of 1930s conservation. The New Deal not only called for a reform of land use practices, it also sponsored visual artists who wanted to document the crises of rural America. As the nation worried about the future of farming and agricultural landscapes, documentary artists produced visions of apocalypse along with images of transcendence. Like Herbert Gleason, they invested great hopes in the camera, a technology that promised to remember what their eyes could merely see.

2 T he D ecl i ne to D u st

In May 1936, Representative Maury Maverick, a Democrat from Texas, stood on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to rave about The Plow That Broke the Plains, a documentary film he had recently seen. Directed by Pare Lorentz and sponsored by the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, The Plow explained the causes of the dust storms that were darkening the skies of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl—the name given to describe both the disaster and the region where it struck—was already a focus of national concern. But Maverick believed there was something different, perhaps even momentous, about The Plow: “While criticisms may be made of the Resettlement film because it shows the horrible waste of our natural resources, I think that films of that character must by all means be shown to awaken our citizens to the necessity for immediate steps in conservation.” Excited by Lorentz’s film, Maverick imagined a whole series of movies about the American earth, “a picturization of our forests, lands, waters—everything we have which is natural.” In his call for more films like The Plow, Maverick suggested that the New Deal should present new stories about the landscape—narratives that would reveal the significance of nature to American history and portray conservation as a way to regenerate the nation. With its visual power, film seemed the ideal medium for telling these stories.1 Many commentators joined Maverick in claiming that the crisis of the Dust Bowl generated a crisis of storytelling. The clouds of dust, the abandoned fields, 33

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the desolate earth: these looked like signs of the end, the culmination of a tragic story that began in a pure wilderness, an untouched land of abundance. “North America before the coming of the white man was rich with growing things,” Stuart Chase wrote in Harper’s magazine, “incredibly beautiful to look upon . . . and perhaps the most bountifully endowed by nature of all the world’s continents. Today, after three centuries of occupation, . . . the old grass lands have almost completely disappeared. . . . A dust desert is forming . . . on the Great Plains where firm grass once stood.” From this perfect world of beauty and promise, the story of America was the story of decline, of ruining the land and falling into the darkness of the Dust Bowl.2 Beyond the Great Plains, other ecological disasters beset the American landscape during the 1930s. In many places, nature appeared to rebel: floods raged in the Mississippi Valley and soil erosion sapped the vitality of farms throughout the nation. Each catastrophe contributed a fear that America was headed toward its end. “Nature has again been good enough to warn us,” the ecologist Paul Sears explained, “by a perfectly synchronized drama of dust-storms in the West and disastrous floods in the East, of the wrath that is brewing against our western civilization unless we mend our ways.”3 For many New Dealers, conservation became a moral crusade, an attempt to reform the basic values and assumptions of American culture. Through the creation of several agencies—including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority—the federal government sought to reconcile technology with the environment, to achieve a balance between soil and society. What lay behind the particular pieces of legislation was a drive to create new stories of the American encounter with nature. As Representative Maverick suggested, environmental storytelling would find its fullest, most dramatic expression in documentary films sponsored by government agricultural agencies. Three films in particular—The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), both made by Pare Lorentz, and The Land (1942), made by Robert Flaherty—powerfully conveyed the political imagination and ecological aesthetics of the New Deal. Long recognized as classic documentaries, these films can also help us rethink some familiar interpretations of the politics and culture of the 1930s. When historians discuss the New Deal, they typically portray its leaders as hardheaded realists who shunned the moral and spiritual rhetoric of Progressive-era reformers. This contrast accounts for some of the key differences between the periods: while many Progressives called for Prohibition as a way to end the “vice” of consuming alcohol, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported the legalization of beer. Nevertheless, if the New Deal rarely concerned

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itself with questions of personal morality, it continued the Social Gospel tradition of bringing moral and ethical claims into political life. The bureaucratic reforms of the New Deal often intersected with moralizing pronouncements about the problems of selfish individualism and the need to create communal structures to nurture the American people and their environment.4 The sermonizing, Social Gospel impulse of the New Deal became particularly apparent among a group of agricultural reformers who sought to attach public values to private lands. This group of intellectuals—which included Hugh Hammond Bennett of the Soil Conservation Service, Rexford Tugwell of the Resettlement Administration, and Russell Lord, an adviser to several agricultural agencies—rejected the frontier legacy of individualism, hoping to replace the wasteful practices of the pioneer with the scientific knowledge of ecology. Although Progressive-era conservationists emphasized the need to protect and manage the nation’s public lands, New Deal agricultural reformers concentrated on the problems associated with privately owned lands. Despite this difference, New Dealers continued the Progressive tradition of delivering sermons about the nation’s corrupt relationship with the natural world. From the Dust Bowl to the crises of floods and soil erosion, they castigated Americans for their mismanagement of resources and called for the moral uplift of the nation’s farmers and the ecological improvement of the nation’s soil. These reformers framed practical matters, such as farming techniques and flood control, within a religious narrative of decline and redemption, revealing the spiritual fervor that enlivened New Deal conservation.5 Through the medium of documentary film, the concerns of agricultural reformers reached a wide audience. Like Herbert Gleason before them, the filmmakers Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty placed their faith in the camera, fusing words and images to shape public attitudes and to bring aesthetics and spirituality into politics. In movie theaters around the nation, the New Deal used the technology of motion pictures and recorded sound to preach environmental sermons to the American people. These documentaries found their aesthetic perspective in the science of ecology. During the Great Depression, leading ecologists developed a broad vision of nature that emphasized the interrelationships among different organisms. Pointing to the links between soil and society, they attributed the Dust Bowl to the reckless behavior of farmers who destroyed the delicate web of life on the Great Plains. Likewise, New Deal filmmakers wanted Americans to gain a comprehensive view of the land, one that incorporated people into the biotic community. By using a wide-angle lens, Lorentz and Flaherty encouraged spectators to consider not just the isolated parts of a landscape but its entire ecological fabric.

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Their panoramic perspective created a new aesthetic for environmental reform, an ecological vision that stressed the interdependence of people and nature.6 While Gleason had emphasized the sublimity of mountains and forests, Lorentz and Flaherty offered ecological catastrophe as a new expression of the sublime. To be sure, natural disasters had traditionally been associated with sublime experience. Floods, hurricanes, and volcanoes revealed nature’s force and power, its ability to overwhelm, threaten, and disorient human observers. For this reason, simulated disasters had become part of American mass culture, particularly at the amusement parks of Coney Island, where visitors could witness such events as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the Galveston flood of 1900. Safe from any actual danger, audiences delighted in these experiences, finding “a kind of transcendent meaning” in the scenes of destruction. New Deal filmmakers reworked this tradition to introduce the concept of an ecological catastrophe into American culture. Rather than presenting the Dust Bowl and other calamities as natural disasters, Lorentz and Flaherty portrayed these events as human-created tragedies. Like the displays at Coney Island, the films provided Americans with both entertainment and transcendence, except now the images suggested a sublime of their own making.7 Beginning with The Plow That Broke the Plains, Lorentz creatively synthesized ecological history, religious rhetoric, and the sublime tradition to find emotional meaning in the American soil. In contrast to Herbert Gleason’s photographs of monumental spectacles and isolated scenes of beauty, Lorentz viewed the landscape as an interdependent whole. Representing the Great Plains in terms of an ecological aesthetic, he emphasized the intertwined histories of people and soil to trace the environmental changes in the region. Lorentz combined this ecological vision with the Puritan tradition of the jeremiad sermon, a ritualized form of address that he used to lament the decline of American society and the destruction of the American landscape. Greeted with praise by Representative Maury Maverick, The Plow also became the subject of vitriolic debate, criticized by those on the radical left as well as the conservative right, embraced by some residents of the Great Plains and scorned by many others. The film triggered one of the most significant controversies in public art during the thirties, indicating the difficulty faced by New Dealers who sought to unify the nation through environmental reform. Pare Lorentz

Pare Lorentz was born in 1905 and grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small, conservative town that was home to West Virginia Wesleyan College. The Methodist values of the school shaped the politics of the town, where

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drinking, card playing, and public dancing were prohibited. Raised by devout Methodists, Lorentz attended the local college for a year and then transferred to West Virginia University. With a budding interest in writing and journalism, he became editor of the school’s humor magazine, a position he held until the end of his junior year, when he withdrew from the university and moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer. After a brief stint as editor of a corporate journal (the Edison Lamp Sales Builder), he became a film critic for Judge magazine and later reviewed movies for several leading publications, including Vanity Fair, Town & Country, and McCall’s. Lorentz quickly established himself as an opinionated, even contentious, voice in film criticism. His reviews were not mere summaries of plot, but rather offered judgments about the methods and techniques employed by directors.8 Lorentz also began to publish essays expressing his criticism of large corporations and his increasing disillusionment with the dominant myths of America. In 1931, recalling his own experience at a corporate journal, Lorentz used metaphors of the frontier to describe the expectations that he and his colleagues carried with them: “We still thought we were two-gun men pushing back the frontiers of the world and we serenely wrote advertisements telling the public how our company was pioneering for humanity.” Instead of “an open wilderness,” however, they found “a world of highly geared machines,” a corporate structure that crushed their dreams of frontier independence. Americans, he suggested, needed to distinguish between the myth of the frontier and the reality of the corporate economy. Lorentz wanted filmmakers to reject the outdated legends and platitudes, to help awaken the public to the true conditions of American society. Yet Hollywood evaded the new reality. All it produced, he complained, was “vacuous, cheap, and banal entertainment.”9 The Great Depression furthered Lorentz’s desire to see the realities of American life portrayed in visual culture. He admired the use of photographs in magazines like Vanity Fair but worried that the images rarely captured the suffering and misfortunes of the Depression. “I never saw anything,” he recalled, “of the main streets of little towns with big signs, ‘Store for Rent,’ and no shots of rusting coal cars and idle tipples and smokeless smokestacks along the roads I drove on my way back to West Virginia to visit my people.” Although he did not mention the work of Jacob Riis or Lewis Hine, Lorentz expressed a similar documentary impulse, a belief that by providing glimpses of poverty and hardship the camera could act as a device to improve the condition of downtrodden Americans. His interest in the “reality” of American life and his faith in the power of the camera encouraged him to try his hand at filmmaking.10 With the dawning of the New Deal, Lorentz found the story he wanted

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to tell. Lorentz became mesmerized by the sweeping initiatives of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration. “It was a revelation,” he remembered, “the extraordinary excitement of the coming of the New Deal. The whole country came to Washington. They came with poems. They came with ideas.” Enthralled by Roosevelt’s reforms, he wanted to convey the feelings of possibility in the form of a film. His idea was simple: a one-hour movie that would document the major events of 1933, Roosevelt’s first year as president.11 Lorentz was unable to gain funding for the film project, so he applied the idea to a book. Published in 1934, The Roosevelt Year: A Photographic Record features large photographs reproduced primarily from the press and government agencies. Across the top of each two-page spread, a phrase or short sentence, printed in boldface letters, acts as a running story line, a summary of the headline-making events represented in the pictures. Every four to six pages, a few paragraphs of text explain in more detail the conflicts and personalities that shaped 1933. The book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the long winter between Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration in March—the most severe months of the Depression. The opening pages show unemployed people sleeping in boxes or shacks, suggesting the level of despair that afflicted the nation. The heading reads: “We were waiting . . . for March.” Along with the book’s title, these words point to the centrality of President Roosevelt and the federal government to Lorentz’s narrative. National purpose is portrayed as the product of Roosevelt and his policies; the country seems bound together by the bold reforms and energized by the sense of hope swelling in Washington, D.C. The Roosevelt Year presents the New Deal as not merely a political movement but also a cultural movement that promises to unify the nation.12 Reviewers were impressed by The Roosevelt Year. Writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, Mark Sullivan described it as only the third pictorial book ever published to express “the spirit of historical composition.” Other photographic books had attempted to represent historical events, but their captions merely identified the photographs. In contrast, The Roosevelt Year matched words with images in an innovative way. “Mr. Lorentz’s captions, read in connection with the photographs,” Sullivan explained, “really achieve, through some exceptional talent, the continuity, the accuracy, and some of the other qualities of true history.”13 In May 1934, a month after his book appeared, Lorentz witnessed an eerie sight. As he walked toward Times Square in Manhattan, he looked up and noticed a cloud of dust darkening the sky. The dust had blown all the way from the Great Plains, fifteen hundred miles away. “Heavy” and “slow-moving,” it seemed to settle “like an old blanket” over the buildings. At the time, Lorentz

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worked as a reporter for Newsweek magazine and wrote a couple articles about the Dust Bowl. He drew on biblical analogies to analyze the crisis, comparing the farmers of the Plains to “Israel’s eleven sons” who wandered “somberly through parched lands.” Glimpsing a story of epic proportions, finding a moral, even religious message in the scenes of blowing dust, Lorentz began to consider making a movie about the disaster.14 During the next year, Lorentz would finally get his chance to become a filmmaker. He would try to understand why he saw a cloud of dust in Manhattan; he would try to visualize the causes of the Dust Bowl. In making the film, he would join scientists, government officials, and the mass media in a debate over the origins and meanings of the catastrophe. Defining Disaster

To New Deal conservationists, the Dust Bowl represented the most severe example of the soil crisis that afflicted 1930s America. When these reformers looked at the Great Plains, they saw tragedy etched across the land. They looked to the past, to examples from world history; they compared the future of America to the collapse of other civilizations, to places where ecological ruin was accompanied by social and political decline. According to Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement Administration, the “fertility of the soil is the ultimate source of wealth. When that is gone, the civilization built upon it soon decays.” Without conservation, without the reforms envisioned by the New Deal, Tugwell prophesied doom. “We shall go the way of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, and part with our collective birthright for a mess of individualistic pottage.” Similarly, Hugh Hammond Bennett, the director of the Soil Erosion Service, cited the lessons of history: “Magnificent temples are being dug from beneath the products of erosion in regions where the land is all desert.”15 Tugwell, Bennett, and other officials comprised a group of reformers committed to the idea of permanent agriculture, of adopting ecological principles and long-term planning to achieve a balance between soil and society. They rejected the idea that America was unique, that its landscape possessed eternal innocence and boundless abundance. By invoking fallen empires and wasted lands, they used history as a form of moral critique. Drawing on lessons of the past, they condemned the sin of erosion and preached the gospel of conservation.16 Advocates of permanent agriculture refused to accept the idea that the dust storms and floods of the 1930s were “natural” disasters. Instead, they viewed these events as human-created calamities, legacies of a myopic, exploitative re-

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lationship with the earth. Tugwell’s comment about the “mess of individualistic pottage” illustrates the target of their critique. They blamed the Dust Bowl not on the drought but on the individualism of Americans, on the careless ways that the nation used the land. According to these officials, the ecological problems of the 1930s suggested an inversion of the familiar narrative of frontier progress: rather than civilizing a wilderness, Americans had created chaos, turning the grasslands into a barren desert and the rivers into angry, destructive waters.17 While government officials emphasized human culpability, visual imagery—particularly the newsreels—portrayed the dust storms as entirely natural in origin. Newsreels frequently included stories of natural disasters—from typhoons in Japan to hurricanes in Texas. When they began to cover the environmental destruction on the Great Plains, the newsreels made the Dust Bowl appear equivalent to these events. Like a cyclone or a tidal wave, dust storms resulted from the capricious behavior of nature. Newsreels blamed the weather—especially the long drought of the 1930s— for all that was wrong on the Plains. An issue of Universal Newsreels released in June 1934 features images of a deserted home in South Dakota—a farm where a tractor has been left behind, where an orchard has been ruined by the lashings of sand and wind. “The prolonged drought in the middle west,” the narrator explains, “has brought another great catastrophe with it—dust and sand storms—blistering, withering, wind-swept clouds of finely powdered dirt that is suffocating to man and beast and that covers all vegetation, transforming farms into barren dust piles and sand dunes.” Like New Deal rhetoric, this newsreel presents nature as a sublime force that dominates and overpowers human society. Yet it does not suggest a larger context, a sense of the history that lay behind the current crisis. It describes the “prolonged drought” as the sole cause of the “great catastrophe.” And if the weather was to blame, then perhaps the end was not imminent. After all, the weather is fickle; it could change at anytime.18 Several weeks later, an issue of Universal Newsreels made this exact argument. After rain fell one night throughout Oklahoma, a cameraman based there received instructions to film “any possible celebrations or enthusiastic activity” that followed the downpour. More important, he was to document the “agricultural sections that have been saved thru heavy rains.” He filmed boys jumping into their “old swimming hole,” a creek that was filled with water once again. Along with this footage, he sent front-page stories from Oklahoma newspapers to the Universal headquarters. The local headlines proclaimed the end of the drought and predicted bountiful harvests for the fall. The narration for the newsreel would pick up this theme and announce

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that the crisis was over, that “the drought’s death toll will end” as “parched cornfields and other crops . . . [begin] to appear normal again.”19 The crisis on the Plains did not go away for a long time. Even so, newsreels still portrayed the situation as a temporary struggle between people and “the might of the elements.” Although newsreels were filled with bleak images of the Great Plains, the sense of absolute doom was defused by the focus on immediate, particular conditions—rain moistens and rehabilitates the fields one day, while on another, grasshoppers and cinch bugs devour the withering corn. There was no larger pattern or order in nature; everything appeared random.20 For New Dealers, the Dust Bowl was no mere momentary problem caused by fluctuations in the weather. They argued that the dust storms could indeed represent the end—unless Americans learned to change their ways. In their minds, past history and future doom were linked together in one narrative: their fear of endings was rooted in their perception of beginnings, in the way they viewed the original condition of the Great Plains environment. The Dust Bowl acquired apocalyptic significance, not only because nature ran amok, but because in the beginning things had been so different, because the Plains, at one time, had been a peaceful, beautiful place. New Deal conservationists found support for their perspective in the science of ecology. During the 1930s, prominent ecologists focused their attention on the history of the Great Plains, describing the grasslands that once filled the region as a “climax community”—a community of plants ideally suited to its climatic zone. Frederic Clements, the leading proponent of this theory, argued that a group of plants acted together as a community, or complex organism, that evolved through a series of stages. Responding to the conditions of its regional climate, this organism slowly adapted and eventually produced the climax community. The developmental process took a long time, perhaps thousands of years, but the result was a community of plants in perfect balance with the surrounding environment.21 Clements and other ecologists argued that the natural equilibrium of the grasslands was destroyed by the invasion of American pioneers armed with their steel plows. In this semiarid region, the tightly knit sod and grasses acted as a buffer against the wind and periodic drought. By overturning the balance of nature, the pioneers initiated a process of destruction that culminated in the dust storms. From the perspective of ecology, the story of frontier settlement was not heroic or progressive. Rather than propelling American destiny, the pioneers had created a wasteland.22 Inspired by these ideas of ecology, the liberal poet Archibald MacLeish eloquently invoked the beginnings and endings of nature on the Plains. Writing

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for Fortune in 1935, he argued that the “thunderheads” of dust could only be understood within a larger chronology. “Back of the whole history of the dust storms,” he wrote, “is the story of the grass.” MacLeish called for a new interpretation of the frontier, one that recognized the ecological context of westward expansion. “For more than three centuries,” he continued, “men have moved across this continent from east to west. For some years now, increasingly in the last two or three, dust has blown back across the land from west to east. The movement of men, long understood, is taken for granted. The blowing of dust, little understood, has filled the newspapers and rolled across the newsreel screens. And yet the two are linked together like the throwing and the rebound of a ball. The two are chapters from the same book.” “The book,” MacLeish concluded, “is a book which has never been written.”23 Putting Ecological History on Film

In 1936, Pare Lorentz answered Archibald MacLeish’s call for a new history of the Plains. But instead of writing a book, he tried to represent this past on film. Reviewers had compared Lorentz’s The Roosevelt Year with a work of true history, and his first documentary film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, would be praised in similar terms. Lorentz arranged sequences of images into a compelling visual history that stretched from the primordial grassland to the contemporary dust storms. Lorentz joined other New Deal artists in trying to understand the American landscape. Through the sponsorship of painters and photographers, government agencies presented Americans with multiple visions of history and with conflicting portrayals of agriculture. Consider two prominent examples: the photography project of the Resettlement Administration (later known as the Farm Security Administration), and the murals sponsored by the Department of the Treasury and the Works Progress Administration. The location of the photography project—housed in the Historical Division of the Resettlement Administration—provides a semantic clue to the purpose of the photographs. Directed by Roy Stryker, the Historical Division employed leading photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to take pictures for the agency. Initially concentrating on the dispossessed and impoverished in rural areas, they produced a massive collection of images documenting the problems of the Depression. To these photographers, “history” signified an effort to record the hard times of the present, to tell a story of the contemporary moment emphasizing the plight and anguish of suffering people, particularly rural Americans. By producing a history of the present, the photographs of the

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Historical Division suggested the need for government assistance while also implying that the American people, maintaining their strength and dignity, could survive the poverty and dislocation of the thirties.24 While photographers focused on the problems of the present, mural artists emphasized the prosperity of the past. In post offices around the nation, they painted scenes of pioneers traveling west, planting crops, and establishing new communities, images that suggested a tradition of progress and virtue that would enable Americans to persevere in a time of crisis. Locating the basis of national identity in a harmonious past, mural artists participated in a larger aesthetic movement of the period, often termed regionalism or American scene painting. Artists of the American scene, such as Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, tended to portray the history of agriculture in a positive fashion, suggesting that it offered a usable past to Depression-era Americans. As Wood explained in 1935, “the Great Depression has taught us many things, and not the least of them is self-reliance. . . . [I]t has caused us to rediscover some of the old frontier virtues. . . . [I]t has thrown us back upon certain true and fundamental things which are distinctively ours to use and to exploit.” Wood’s painting Fall Plowing (1931) embodied this optimistic spirit, offering a vision of order and abundance, a farmstead of rolling hills and fertile fields (fig. 2.1). Like Wood, mural artists presented the settled landscapes of agriculture as reflecting the self-reliance of Americans, from the pioneers into the present.25 These two examples suggest the multiple conceptions of history and agriculture in New Deal visual culture: mural artists created scenes of a hopeful past, while photographers produced images of a benighted present. In both cases, visual artists celebrated the strength of the American people and extolled the ennobling virtue of life on the land. The Plow That Broke the Plains provided yet another way for Americans to grapple with these issues. Like the Historical Division photographs, the film offered bleak images of the contemporary Plains, portraying the desperation of Dust Bowl migrants and the devastation of agriculture. At the same time, Lorentz challenged the optimistic narratives of mural art by rooting the crises of the present in frontier history; he castigated the pioneer values that were celebrated and sanctified in mural paintings, suggesting that these attitudes and beliefs were the causes of the Dust Bowl. Rather than viewing the frontier tradition as a usable past, a reservoir of strength in hard times, Lorentz presented the pioneer experience as a useless past that needed to be rejected before a better America could be created.26 In 1935, after gaining the support of the Resettlement Administration for his film project, Lorentz began to read the reports of agricultural agencies and the writings of leading ecologists. His understanding of the Dust Bowl deepened

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2.1. Grant Wood, Fall Plowing, 1931. Courtesy of the John Deere Art Collection. Deere & Company, Moline, Illinois.

as he learned more about the human role in causing the disaster. After reading these studies, Lorentz embraced the ideology of the “erosion apostles” of the New Deal, those officials who emphasized the need for planning and conservation. In making his documentary, Lorentz sought to blend scientific thought with cultural critique to present an ecological history of the Great Plains that would explain in visual form why Americans should replace the reckless behavior of the pioneer with the rational planning of the New Deal.27 As he worked on an outline for the movie, Lorentz decided not to develop his story around a small group of people. “The natural audience reaction,” he explained, “would have been one of sympathy for this limited group, and, as is always true of human distress: they would have personalized the people and never visualized the huge extent of the Great Plains and the damage that has been wrought in them.” Rather than identifying with specific victims of the Dust Bowl, he wanted spectators to witness the broader history of the Great Plains. Like other documentary artists in the 1930s, Lorentz hoped that Americans would be moved by his work. Yet instead of capturing the feelings of individual people, he tried to infuse The Plow with “an emotion that springs out of the soil itself.”28

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For Lorentz, the challenge was to find a way to emphasize the wide scope of the catastrophe, to make the audience understand the history of ecological change. Newsreels had provided vivid images of the disaster, but they tended to rely on close-up and medium shots; they showed particular people on particular farms during particular storms. They did not give viewers a feeling for the geography of the Plains or for the widespread impact of the dust storms. Lorentz wanted his film to incorporate a wider view of the landscape. “We had a special lens made to get the largest possible spread,” he recalled. “The motion in our motion picture was going to be architectural, the ominous changes in the land itself.”29 Lorentz adopted this wide-angle perspective to portray the land as an interdependent system. A panoramic view of the Great Plains would encompass the larger community of life, thus introducing audiences to a key tenet of ecological thought. Rather than focus on the experience of individual Americans, Lorentz wanted to create a holistic vision of people and soil. He wanted to emphasize the role of humans as biological agents capable of transforming and even destroying the balance of nature. Through a panoramic frame, he wanted to narrate an ecological history of the Great Plains. When filmmakers attempt to interpret the past, they almost always portray history as the story of individuals. Downplaying the role of the economy, social structure, or broader cultural forces, they construct a world in which heroes make history. Lorentz’s decision to view the past in an ecological context pushed him away from the conventions of Hollywood and toward a different strategy of representation, one where individuals act as a mere backdrop to the historical process. He found inspiration not only in ecological theory, but also in the cinematic techniques of Sergei Eisenstein, the legendary Soviet director. “We decided,” Lorentz explained, “to use a very difficult and dangerous movie technique, seldom employed in this country, and in fact, successfully used only in Russian movie productions—that is, we decided to use people as symbols and background for land, and try to design a story that would make land itself emotional and dramatic.”30 Before making The Plow, Lorentz had favorably reviewed some of Eisenstein’s films. Writing in 1930 about the film Old and New, he observed, “It is admittedly propaganda, a lecture to the slow-witted habitants of the steppes on the blessings of cooperative farming. Eisenstein makes it as palatable as possible by grouping faces and figures against setting suns and decayed hovels . . . His method is simple: his characters are used as dummies, pigments in his color scheme.” It should be emphasized that this was Lorentz’s own interpretation of Eisenstein. A liberal New Dealer with little sympathy for radical protest,

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Lorentz had no interest in the revolutionary aims of Soviet film. Eisenstein himself described his films differently, as “discarding the individualist conception of the bourgeois hero” to portray “the masses as hero.” Eisenstein extolled the collective hero, the masses in action. Lorentz wanted to remove the individual hero from the screen, but he had no desire to glorify mass action. He wanted to use people as symbols, as pigments in his color scheme. In his translation of Soviet film, aesthetics trumped politics.31 But his camera crew had other ideas. Lorentz wanted to work with the best cameramen available, and the best, he believed, were Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, and Paul Strand. Members of Nykino, a leftist film group, these three had made several documentaries. Like Lorentz, they were inspired by Eisenstein, but they shared the latter’s interest in collective action. Hired in September 1935, they spent a month traveling from Montana to Texas, filming shots of grass, cattle, and dust storms. Along the way, they became incensed with Lorentz.32 As they journeyed through the Great Plains, Hurwitz, Steiner, and Strand felt confused about what Lorentz wanted them to film. So they asked him for a detailed shooting script. Eventually, he sent one, but they found its politics mild and reformist rather than biting and revolutionary. Hurwitz and Strand put together their own script, one that emphasized “capitalism’s anarchic rape of the land.” When Lorentz joined the crew in Dalhart, Texas, they presented him with a copy. “Pare just out and threw [the script] away or tore it up,” Steiner recalled, “and he was absolutely furious, insanely furious at them.” After a series of arguments, Lorentz held firmly to his script. The Nykino trio agreed to shoot more dust storm footage for Lorentz. After that, they refused any further association with the project.33 During the winter, Lorentz edited the footage, wrote the narration, and hired Virgil Thomson to compose the musical score. Lorentz wanted to make these three elements—images, words, and music—work together so that each sequence moved with a balanced intensity, fusing sight and sound, emotion and argument.34 In March 1936, the film debuted at the White House, where President Roosevelt offered his praise and congratulations to Lorentz. The official premiere followed in May, when a “tail-coated and formally gowned audience,” including Representative Maury Maverick of Texas, filed into the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. “Before the final fadeout,” one journalist observed, “[The Plow] had diplomats, congressmen and New Dealers holding to the edge of their gilt chairs.” After the film ended, according to the same report, the audience gathered around Rexford Tugwell, who said, “There’s nothing more to tell . . . The film has told it all.”35

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A Secular Prayer

The opening scenes of The Plow show broad vistas of grass peacefully waving in the wind. The camera presents the grasslands through a wide-angle lens, suggesting the larger community of life that evolved over time (fig. 2.2). There are no boundaries, no fences, no sense that the grass ever ends. Lorentz explained how he hoped spectators would respond to these images. “The panoramic motion pictures,” he noted, should make “the audience . . . feel the endless horizon of grass . . . the solitude, the slow effortless existence of Nature minding its own knitting.” Although he did not use the term, Lorentz viewed the grasslands as an example of what New Deal conservationists and ecologists called a “climax community,” a pristine, timeless realm where “Nature” is “minding its own knitting.” Lorentz’s use of a domestic metaphor suggested a safe, maternal image, a vision of the landscape as embodying a female form. This perspective anticipated the paintings of Alexandre Hogue, whose 1936 Erosion Number 2: Mother Earth Laid Bare portrayed erosion on the Great Plains as a willful violation of the female body (fig. 2.3). In the painting, an abandoned farm appears parched and ravaged, a bare hillside drained of its fertility. Stripped of grasses and vegetation, the field assumes a feminine form, a body without a face. In the foreground, a rusted, broken plow remains as a reminder of masculine power, the machine that ruined the Plains. For Hogue and Lorentz, the untouched grasslands represented not only female space but also hallowed ground—a place untainted by human history yet destined for destruction.36 By sanctifying the grasslands, Lorentz followed Herbert Gleason’s emphasis on the spiritual qualities of the American landscape. Yet unlike Gleason he did not evoke the wilderness as a place for individual renewal or an escape from the troubles of modern life. Rather, Lorentz focused on the interaction between humans and the natural world, tracing the fall from grace initiated by the pioneers. Lorentz’s panoramic images of the Great Plains established the ecological vision of the film by suggesting that the grasslands were ideally suited to the climate of the region. Following these scenes, The Plow then portrays human characters ignoring, over and over again, these ecological realities. In a key moment, a man leans against the handles of a plow, as the narrator issues a stern warning, “Settler, plow at your peril!” (fig. 2.4). By directly addressing the character on screen, the narrator becomes an angry preacher delivering a sermon, castigating the settler for his sins against nature. Throughout the film, Lorentz merged ecological aesthetics with a voice-over sermon to make sin a crucial dimension of Great Plains history. Yet his concep-

2.2. Panoramic view of grasslands, frame enlargement from The Plow That Broke the Plains.

2.3. Erosion No. 2: Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936. Alexandre Hogue, American, 1898–1994. Oil on canvas. Museum purchase. The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1946.4. Used by permission.

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2.4. “Settler, Plow at Your Peril,” still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

tion of sin remained diffuse and disembodied, tied not to specific human actors and tangible choices, but rather to the amorphous presence of pioneer attitudes and the pernicious intrusion of technology. Unlike his leftist camera crew, he did not want to blame specific people for causing the Dust Bowl, but he did identify a particular period—World I and the 1920s—as the moment when the seeds of disaster were sown. Following a dramatic montage on the war years, the film portrays the frenzied production of 1920s agriculture. The editing becomes more rapid; machines appear on the screen at an escalating pace. Embracing a freewheeling, unregulated form of capitalism, Americans in the 1920s put their faith in the fortunes of the stock market and sought pleasure in the propulsive sounds of jazz. Through a montage of images, Lorentz visualized these connections: ticker tape flutters, wheat pours from a tube, a drummer plays a driving beat. Significantly, the drummer is African American; employing the racial stereotypes of the time, the shots connote the unrestrained passion of Harlem. As the beat becomes more frantic, the ticker tape machine begins to flutter. Finally, it falls and shatters on the ground. Linking the 1929 stock market crash to both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, this montage indicts an entire culture of greed and overindulgence, a society that has lost its moral bearings. Although Lorentz rejected the more radical message of his film crew, these visuals denounce the sins of unbridled capitalism.

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2.5. Dust and devastation, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

Having destroyed the grasslands, farmers must face the fury of nature. The film portrays the dust storms as triumphing over human technology, mocking the efforts of settlers to control the environment. Ecological catastrophe takes on the qualities of the sublime, overpowering and threatening, turning people into desperate figures who try to flee the storms, turning human artifacts— fields, homes, and buildings—into piles of dust, symbolizing the revenge of the natural world (fig. 2.5). The camera shows dust blowing through the cracks of a window, drifting into a home, and covering the hearth of a fireplace. These scenes offered spectators the opportunity to witness the overwhelming power of nature. According to one reviewer, “the film almost choked the throats of the audience when a violent swirling dust storm raged over dry, sun-baked soil even filtering through small cracks in farm shanties.” Making viewers feel as if they were on the Great Plains living through the terror of a dust storm, these images reproduced ecological catastrophe on screen, evoking devastation as a source of the sublime.37 As these visuals appear, an organ plays a religious hymn. “Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow,” the tune cries out. In the midst of devastation, the soundtrack delivers a song of praise; through ironic comment, the hymn condemns the sins of settlers—their actions that precipitated the decline to dust. Lorentz had encouraged the composer Virgil Thomson to include organ music during this scene, to make audience members feel like they were witnessing a

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“church service heard over wind.” The hymn accentuates the spiritual qualities of the film, making this New Deal documentary take on the aura of a Sunday service.38 In its narrative progression, The Plow borrows from the classic structure of the Puritan jeremiad. A form of political sermon, the jeremiad laments the decline of American society; it warns of divine retribution, of God’s vengeance directed against a sinful, backsliding people. The beginning of the film is like the beginning of the world: the grasslands are the ideal state of nature, the hallowed perfection of the ecological past. Like the jeremiad sermon, The Plow deplores the fall from paradise. It makes the errand into the wilderness resemble an errand into the abyss.39 Lorentz’s use of the jeremiad sermon revealed the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and spirituality in New Deal conservation. The film turned a story of environmental ruin into an aesthetic project, providing viewers with vicarious experience of the disaster while reminding them of the original beauty of the grasslands. By casting this story in the form of a sermon, the film confirmed the observation of the literary critic Kenneth Burke, who argued in the 1930s that culture could act as a type of “secular prayer.” A key artifact of New Deal culture, The Plow offered a secular prayer for a new form of pioneering, a move away from the tradition of geographic expansion toward a spiritual plane where Americans could seek harmony between soil and society. The film placed art in the service of politics to imagine ecology as a new type of civic religion, a natural theology for a culture estranged from the nonhuman world.40 The Plow condemns the failure of pioneers to adapt to the Great Plains, but it does not offer an emotionally compelling solution to the soil crisis. In an early version of the film, a short epilogue portrays the work of the Resettlement Administration in relocating families from drought-stricken areas and trying to repair the damaged soil. Yet it is a hesitant glimpse into the future. As the camera cuts to images of grass, the narrator utters his final line, “Another decade of reckless use, and the grasslands will truly be the great American desert.” He offers a warning of what could happen if the nation does not change its ways. “A hopeful but sad ending,” Lorentz noted, “there is no great promise of glory shown in the reconstruction scenes.”41 The despair of Lorentz’s film differed greatly from representations of natural disasters found in other forms of 1930s culture, especially Hollywood films, which tended to find a message of hope and perseverance in times of distress. As the historian Lawrence Levine has observed: “In the culture of the 1930s, the calamites of the past could become didactic mechanisms for illustrating the ways in which people might triumph over adversity, rediscovering in the

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process those enduring values they had lost sight of in better times.” To take a prime example, the fictional film San Francisco, released the same year as The Plow That Broke the Plains, portrayed the citizens of San Francisco responding to the 1906 earthquake in heroic fashion, rebuilding the city while singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Americans appear to “rise above disaster,” Levine explains, “in pursuit of redemption, a theme that penetrated much of Depression culture.” Lorentz refused to give Americans the satisfaction of seeing themselves overcome the Dust Bowl. Rather than calling for a return to traditional values, he suggested that American attitudes toward nature had set the stage for ecological catastrophe.42 For reasons that remain unclear, The Plow’s epilogue—with its tentative portrayal of restoration on the Plains—was soon removed from the film. Without the epilogue, the film concludes with shots of a dead tree, offering viewers a sense of utter desolation. Such an ending might seem surprising for a film designed to promote New Deal reform efforts. For Lorentz, though, the epilogue was not crucial to the film’s message. He believed that the film’s power came from its interpretation of history. The story it told—of the decline from grass to dust—suggested the necessity for major changes in the Great Plains. Presenting the frontier story as a history of chaos, he implied that only a new set of actors—enlightened government officials versed in the language of science and skilled in the techniques of management—could author a more hopeful future in which planning and control would finally replace the misguided path of the pioneer.43 Sowing Controversy

The Plow captured the imagination of prominent New Dealers, who were eager to see the film distributed to theaters around the nation. Following the White House screening in March, President Roosevelt, “brimming with enthusiasm” (according to Time magazine), made an unusual proposal: he wanted every member of Congress to view the film at a joint session. The president’s plan was not realized, but The Plow would soon receive an unexpected boon. On the morning after the official premiere at the Mayflower Hotel, readers of over twenty American newspapers found a glowing review of the film not in the movie or entertainment section, but on the front page, providing The Plow with a flurry of publicity. No doubt thrilled by the attention, Lorentz soon found himself facing a difficult, perhaps insurmountable hurdle: leaders of the film industry—objecting to “government propaganda” and “competition” with Hollywood productions—attempted to block commercial distribution of The Plow.44 After the major booking firms refused to distribute the film, Lorentz con-

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2.6. Dorothea Lange, photograph of poster outside Belasco Theater, Washington, D.C., June 1936. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

tacted individual theater owners. He took the film with him to several cities, where he arranged screenings for reporters and critics. His big coup was getting the film shown in New York City. Arthur Mayer, owner of the Rialto Theater on Times Square, not only booked the film but also developed a creative publicity campaign. In newspaper advertisements, he attacked the film industry: “The New York Times said: ‘It is unusual, timely, entertaining.’ . . . Yet Hol-

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lywood has turned its manicured thumb down!” In defiance, Mayer described The Plow as “The picture they dared us to show!”45 The strategy worked. Not only did large crowds turn up at the Rialto, but newspaper reports described the enthusiastic response of audiences to the film. Encouraged by their success in New York, the Resettlement Administration staff worked on distributing The Plow throughout the country. From Pennsylvania to California, from Tennessee to Texas, they met with theater owners and promoted the film in local newspapers. By the end of the summer, over 3,000 theaters had shown The Plow (fig. 2.6). Considering the obstacles Hollywood had placed in their way, it was a huge achievement. In 1936, out of the approximately 14,000 movie theaters in America, over 20 percent showed this film sponsored by the government, directed by a first-time filmmaker, and completed for less than $20,000 in public funds. According to government reports, about ten million Americans saw The Plow between 1936 and 1939.46 But this success did not come without controversy. Among many viewers, especially in the Great Plains, The Plow generated feelings of contempt and expressions of scorn, becoming, in the minds of its critics, the most reviled artifact of New Deal culture. A few weeks after the film’s official premiere, a state legislator from Texas said that if “Tugwell doesn’t destroy the film, I’m liable to punch him in the nose.” “That picture,” he exclaimed, “is a libel on the greatest section in the United States. The camera man selected isolated spots.” Anger toward the film often stemmed from the belief that Lorentz—and, by extension, Eastern bureaucrats associated with the New Deal—had exaggerated the damage of the Dust Bowl, had vilified an entire region in order to score political points for the Roosevelt administration. Throughout the Great Plains, editorials in local newspapers lambasted the film. One writer called Lorentz and his film crew the “hell-hounds of publicity.” Harboring sinister motives, they sought “freakish” images to “blazon . . . on their yellow sheets,” hoping “to horrify a nation and stick the poisoned arrow of devilish propaganda deep into the heart of the reputation of a great population in distress.” The Plow may have delivered a sermon about conservation, but the film’s critics punctured its spiritual pretensions, blasting Lorentz as a minion of the devil rather than a prophet of ecological grace. Driven by evil intent, Lorentz compiled falsehood upon falsehood, a South Dakota newspaper publisher charged, creating a movie that presented “the most malignant maligning of a lot of states, . . . that human hellishness could contrive by camera camouflage in studio production.”47 As a documentary filmmaker, Lorentz had staked a claim to the truthfulness of The Plow, asserting that the film offered viewers a record of the reality of the Dust Bowl. Hoping to undermine the myth of the frontier, he wanted to

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remove the patina of progress associated with the pioneer, to force Americans to glimpse the actual conditions of the landscape and to grapple with the legacy of destruction. His critics, on the other hand, questioned the veracity of the film, claiming that it relied on the deceptions of yellow journalism rather than the sturdy foundations of fact. Impugning his methods and his motives, critics objected not only to what they viewed as Lorentz’s fabrications but also to his effort to dislodge the pioneer from a place of honor in American mythology. “The picture is propaganda,” one writer explained, “which tells the people that these hardy pioneers who came west and broke up the prairies were fools and their efforts were worse than wasted because they spoiled the country.”48 This comment points to the deeper anxieties unleashed by The Plow, the sense of outrage felt by those who could not accept the film’s flagrant rejection of frontier progress, its refusal to celebrate, even to acknowledge, the achievements of pioneers. Other New Deal documentary projects, especially Arthur Rothstein’s series of photographs of a steer skull in South Dakota, would ignite controversy and be accused of “fakery” (Rothstein used the skull as a movable prop, violating, his critics charged, his claims of offering a factual record of the landscape.) Yet the controversy over The Plow lingered on for many years, suggesting the depth of anger it provoked—not only for its fabrications and exaggerations but also for its willful betrayal of frontier myth.49 In 1939, three years after The Plow’s release, Representative Karl Mundt of South Dakota used the occasion of his first speech in the House to condemn the film as “the most dastardly, and disgraceful attempt to besmirch a fair section of the country that has ever been conceived by any nation anywhere.” Describing the film as a “drama of delusion,” Mundt criticized the “mournful voice” of the narrator and objected to the film’s interpretation of history. “This is the story,” he said, summarizing the narration, “of how a people have ruined the great cattle country and made it a wasted wilderness of disappointment, despair, and distress.” Bristling at this negative portrayal of Plains history, Mundt demanded that The Plow be withdrawn from government circulation. Following a series of meetings and negotiations with various officials, Mundt soon got his wish, as federal agencies were prevented from distributing the film. The next year, in his reelection campaign, Mundt boasted of his success in banning government circulation of The Plow, describing it as the most important reason why voters should return him to the House.50 Controversy over the film subsided for a while, but it resurfaced in the postwar period. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the noted historian James Malin rejected the New Deal’s ecological storytelling and its reliance on the state to solve environmental problems. Labeling New Deal scientists and policymakers

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as “evangelical conservationists,” he worried that ecology had become a form of secular faith, an alternative belief system that posed a threat to freedom, individualism, and abundance—the traditional values linked to the frontier. Alluding to Lorentz’s film, Malin sought to discredit New Deal faith in ecology and government planning. “No more brazen falsehood was ever perpetrated upon a gullible public,” he wrote, “than the allegation that the dust storms of the 1930’s were caused by the ‘plow that broke the Plains.’”51 While most of Lorentz’s critics occupied the laissez-faire right—conservative opponents of the New Deal along with aggrieved residents of the Plains— radicals on the left also objected to the politics of the film. The conflict between Lorentz and his camera crew—the radical filmmakers Hurwitz, Steiner, and Strand—became a staple of left-wing criticism, an indication of the limits of the New Deal. Radicals pointed out, with considerable justification, that The Plow ignored the social and economic cleavages on the Great Plains, particularly the role of landlords in evicting tenant farmers from their fields. Although the film condemns the destructive, irresponsible legacies of the “American character,” it never blames any particular class or group. It never details the power relations between the rich and the poor, between landlords and tenants. After seeing The Plow, Strand himself told Lorentz that “it was a pretty picture, but . . . the guts had been taken out of it.” Employing the characteristic Depression framework of cultural nationalism, the film presents an abstract vision of American society, suggesting that the crisis will not be resolved through social struggle or conflict but rather through the benign, managerial hand of government.52 From opposite ends of the political spectrum, detractors assailed The Plow, but for the most part the film met with widespread praise in magazines and newspapers. Mark Van Doren, reviewing the film for the Nation, applauded Lorentz’s ability to fuse aesthetics and politics. Describing the film as “unforgettable,” Van Doren marveled that this “work of art” could also reveal “its practical purpose at every moment of its flight across the screen.” To the Esquire critic Meyer Levin, the significance of the movie lay in its dramatic interpretation of history. “I can remember no simple cause-and-effect explanation of the drought, in writing or in pictures, before The Plow,” Levin observed. “Then the gigantic crime that had been committed became clear even to the city dweller. The grazing lands had been forced to grow grain, quick war crops had sapped the earth of moisture; then dust.”53 The Plow offers an interpretation of Great Plains history and the emergence of the dust storms, but it does much more: Lorentz used the motion picture camera to reveal the presence of the past in the American landscape. The medium of documentary film telescoped long periods of natural and human history,

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2.7. Arthur Rothstein, “The Plow That Broke the Plains”: Look at It Now (1936), Collection of the Library of Congress.

dissolving the boundaries between the distant, harmonious past of nature and the present moment of devastation and despair. By capturing and collapsing time, Lorentz used the camera as a mechanical scribe that told of the limits of nature. The film restored and projected the ecological history of the Plains and suggested, to paraphrase the novelist William Faulkner, that the past was not really past: it was written in the dark clouds of dust, scrawled across the seared land, and scattered in the rich soil blowing toward the Atlantic. The Plow exerted a powerful influence on documentary expression in the 1930s. Like Lorentz’s book The Roosevelt Year, the film’s experiment in combining words with images helped create a new genre of visual narratives—a form in which pictures told the story and the text amplified the message of the pictures. In a key example, Archibald MacLeish described his Land of the Free, published in 1938, as “the opposite of a book of poems illustrated by photographs. It is a book of photographs illustrated by a poem.”54

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2.8. Baby with plow, still photograph from The Plow That Broke the Plains. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

The film’s portrayal of environmental ruin influenced the work of several New Deal photographers, particularly Arthur Rothstein. Just before Lorentz finished the final editing of the film, Rothstein traveled to the Great Plains to get photographic stills for the movie. He visited many of the places where Lorentz’s crew had filmed and took pictures of similar scenes and objects. Directly referring to Lorentz’s film, he entitled his photograph of an abandoned plow lying in the dust “The Plow That Broke the Plains: Look at It Now” (fig. 2.7). He aimed to tell stories with his photographs, to present narratives of ecological despair. For Rothstein, as for Lorentz, the image of a plow surrounded by dust ascribed tragic meaning to the American conquest of the Plains.55 These are important legacies, but they should not overshadow what was distinctive about Lorentz’s film. Photographers recorded the devastation of drought, erosion, and dust storms; they imagined doom and implied that the story of America had reached its end point. Yet they did not try to represent the beginning. They did not link the story of grass to the story of the Dust Bowl. The fixed records generated by the still camera revealed a vanishing world, a disappearing past witnessed and simultaneously distanced by the immobilizing gaze of the camera. In contrast, Lorentz’s motion pictures evoked the connections between then and now; rather than freezing moments of time, they made

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the distant past of nature, the orderly world of the climax community, seem palpable and alive in the present. By combining the ecological perspective of the panorama with religious rhetoric and the sublime tradition, Lorentz found emotional meaning in the history of the soil.56 The Plow proclaimed its vision of history most emphatically through a few moments in the first half of the film: in the midst of a drought, a baby plays in a dust-covered field (fig. 2.8). The child’s tiny fingers fondle the handle of an idle plow, suggesting the inability of farmers to conquer the landscape, to protect their crops against the periodic drought. The image implies an uncertain future: will this child inherit nothing more than blasted dreams and barren soil? Most of all, the image reveals the way New Deal agricultural reformers understood pioneer history: as a useless past that needed to be rejected before the nation could enter a more mature stage of history. The pioneers were like children playing with tools, like the baby clutching the plow, crawling around in a sandbox of their own creation, not knowing how to use technology in a productive, sustainable manner. Irresponsible and immature, cursed with original sin, the pioneers had wasted the soil. “The reckless individualistic expansion of the nineteenth century is a closed era,” Rexford Tugwell announced in 1933. “We have come to the end of a prodigal childhood.” Admonishing the useless legacy of the pioneer, Lorentz heralded ecology as a useful past, a moral compass that could guide Americans into the future. He placed the nation on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, believing that the New Deal could navigate the transition to a higher stage. In his next film, The River, released in 1937, Lorentz would try to visualize this passage, to chant a secular prayer to the possibilities of New Deal reform.57

3 T he R iver of T i me

On a hot day in July 1936, two months after The Plow That Broke the Plains had its official premiere, Pare Lorentz arrived in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was nearing the end of his journey down the Mississippi River, a research trip in which he was formulating ideas for a new documentary about the history and ecology of the Mississippi Valley. In Vicksburg, the Army Corps of Engineers had established a hydraulic laboratory system, a one-acre facility that featured, in miniature form, all the rivers of the lower Mississippi Valley and simulated all the floods that had happened since the time of Hernando de Soto. Wearing a battered straw hat and an old seersucker suit, Lorentz took a tour of the lab. Afterward, he met with General Ferguson, head of the corps’s Lower River Commission. The Mississippi River had flooded its banks many times, including earlier that year. But General Ferguson assured Lorentz that it would not happen again. “It’s all fixed,” he said, “and there will never be another flood on the Mississippi River.”1 Despite the general’s confidence, Lorentz was not convinced. In his briefcase, he carried a copy of Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain’s 1883 account of his experiences as a river pilot. Lorentz had been reading the book during his trip, and he recalled Twain’s remarks about the futile efforts of engineers to control the river. “One who knows the Mississippi,” Twain wrote, “will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with 60

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the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.” Lorentz trusted Twain over the general.2 Mark Twain proved to be the more accurate prophet. In January 1937, six months after Lorentz arrived in Vicksburg, the Mississippi flooded again. From the Ohio Valley all the way to the lower Mississippi, the water rose higher and higher until it covered roads and highways, ruined homes and businesses, and left about one million people homeless and stranded. The river rose so high that the Beale Street Gauge in Memphis recorded water levels of over 50 feet, almost five feet higher than the record-breaking levels observed during the terrible flood of 1927. All the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, all the levees built along the river, all the reports by government agencies—all seemed mocked by the river. As the press ran stories about the catastrophe, perhaps many Americans began to share Twain’s belief, expressed over a half-century earlier, that engineers “might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.”3 The Mississippi had long held an important place in the American imagination. National destiny and historical mission seemed to flow with its current. Stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, the Mississippi and its tributaries seemed to unite the nation. In Mark Twain’s time, steamboats transported goods along the river and represented the commercial progress of America. As the epigraph for Life on the Mississippi, Twain selected a quotation from Harper’s magazine: “The basin of the Mississippi is the Body of the Nation. . . . . Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi . . . . As a dwellingplace for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.” As the “Body of the Nation,” as a valley that dwarfed European river basins, the Mississippi seemed not only the conduit, but even the essence of American civilization.4 These ideas captured Lorentz’s imagination; he believed that the Mississippi evoked American majesty and optimism. Yet, in making his documentary, he also responded to the terrifying power of the river—its capacity to inundate and destroy the homes, farms, and communities lying near its banks. For Lorentz, as for other New Dealers, the floods testified not to the erratic behavior of nature but to the careless behavior of Americans. The floods represented the day of reckoning, the time for Americans to atone for their ecological sins. Released in 1937, Lorentz’s The River reiterated some of The Plow’s major

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themes—about the waste of natural resources and the wrath of nature—but it also tried to envision a solution, to portray the emergence of a new moral community devoted to environmental restoration. Like The Plow, The River used a panoramic perspective to represent the landscape in terms of an ecological aesthetic. The wide-angle view incorporated soil, water, and people into its frame, reinforcing the ecological idea of the interdependence of humans and nature. Lorentz appropriated the progressive narrative of community ecology—which culminated in the equilibrium of the climax community—and applied it to human society to argue that the federal government could restore harmony in the American landscape. His narrative moved from a comprehensive portrayal of floods, deforestation, and soil erosion to a broad vision of the New Deal using science and technology to engineer a new equilibrium. By presenting the land as an interdependent system, Lorentz provided the visual context for Americans to understand the integrated management of natural resources. He combined this ecological vision with the emotional and political possibilities of the sublime: the film shifted from the sublime terror of floods overwhelming human communities to the sublime power of the New Deal controlling the unruly forces of nature. The River embodied the hopes and dreams of American regionalists—a group of writers, conservationists, and planners who believed that the region offered the basis for a permanent reconstruction of the American landscape. As Lewis Mumford explained, regionalism represented a cultural vision “more imaginative than the dreams of the transcendentalist,” committed to engaging with the practical realities of modern life and “reformulating a more vital tissue of ideas and symbols.” While Herbert Gleason adapted transcendentalism to the twentieth century, suggesting that the state could guarantee the possibility of individual renewal, regionalists tried, in Mumford’s words, “to conceive a new world,” to imagine the federal government fusing nature with technology, merging the American people with their land. In the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other agencies, Lorentz glimpsed the regeneration of American society. With the motion picture camera, he produced a secular prayer for national baptism.5 In contrast to The Plow, which met with considerable resistance, particularly from residents of the Great Plains, The River enjoyed almost unanimous acclaim, praised throughout the nation, nowhere more loudly and more passionately than in communities along the Mississippi River, from New Orleans and Memphis to St. Louis and St. Paul. According to audiences and critics alike, the film seemed to unify America, providing viewers with an inspiring look into the future, into the new world being constructed by the federal

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government. The technology of moving pictures and recorded sound enabled Lorentz to portray the ecological ruin of the Mississippi Valley and to envision its transformation—all in a thirty-minute narrative projected to a mass audience. Sitting in a darkened theater, glimpsing the scenes of destruction and renewal, hearing the narrator preach and prophesize, audiences found themselves swept away by the driving force of the story, eagerly identifying with the crisis and anxiously hoping for its resolution. The closing images of government dam-building projects offered a captivating vision of technology controlling and repairing the American landscape. The technological sublime of the dam produced feelings of awe and wonder among spectators, making them feel connected to the environmental reforms of the New Deal. Yet Lorentz’s effort to forge national unity revealed a striking blind spot, an unwillingness to consider the racial divisions in the Mississippi Valley. By only representing white people and only sympathizing with their experience of the flood, he created a bleached vision of American society, a culture united not only by its landscape but also by its whiteness, by its desire to deny the troubling problems and inequalities of race. Standing at the hydraulics lab in Vicksburg, drenched with sweat, Lorentz could not accept the hubris of General Ferguson, could not agree that the river’s problems had been solved. Yet at the same time he believed that the New Deal offered redemption, that it could “fix” the Mississippi River. Through a set of proposals—from fighting soil erosion to building monumental dams—New Deal conservationists wanted to control floods and do much more: they wanted to engineer a new beginning for the Mississippi and its tributaries. Lorentz wanted to tell this story—of the river’s beauty and timeless flow; of the reckless behavior of Americans; of the hope that the river would again become, in Twain’s words, “the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.”6 The Biggest Story in the World

Beset by frequent flooding, the Mississippi River was on the minds of many New Dealers. In the fall of 1933, President Roosevelt appointed Morris Cooke to head the Mississippi Valley Committee, a group of engineers and scientists charged with coordinating plans for the entire river basin. The committee’s aims reflected the New Deal’s emphasis on the region as an integrated unit, a laboratory of social and ecological problems that could serve as a model for national regeneration. An engineer and progressive reformer, Morris Cooke was the perfect embodiment of 1930s environmental reform, combining faith

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in technology with fears of the end. “Cooke is a paradox,” one journalist observed, “an optimistic Jeremiah, a prophet of doom unless—The unless is the way out. If you want the country to be saved, you have to preach a little hellfire and brimstone, to portray floods and dust storms, and eroded hillsides, and the constant waste of irreplaceable resources, as object lessons in unwitting or avaricious sin.” Cooke believed the New Deal could act as a secular revival, preaching sermons about waste and destruction while planning for a new millennium, a rebirth of nature and society.7 Fusing a moral language of ecology with a rational language of planning, Cooke and the Mississippi Valley Committee produced an important document. Submitted in October 1934, their report began with a call for stewardship of the land: “We are but tenants and transients on the earth. Let us hand down our heritage not only unimpaired but enriched to those who come after us.” To guarantee the future of American civilization, the committee members urged readers to consider all resources as interrelated. “When one strand in the interwoven web of our national fabric is touched,” they wrote, “every other strand vibrates. Land, water, and people go together.” They adopted the web metaphor, commonly used by ecologists to suggest the interconnectedness of life, to describe not only the natural world but also the American nation. Invoking an image of “our national fabric,” they viewed land, water, and people as bound together, as composing the basic elements of American civilization.8 By focusing on this nexus, the report called for major changes in flood control policy. The Corps of Engineers had always responded to the periodic floods on the Mississippi in the same way: by constructing the levees higher and higher. Rather than continuing to build larger embankments, the committee members argued for a policy of flood prevention. They made soil conservation the centerpiece of this plan. By holding water onto the land, keeping it from rushing so quickly to streams and rivers, they wanted to fight the menace of erosion and forestall future disasters.9 The report was visionary. Guided by their motto—“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s souls.”—the committee members outlined a comprehensive plan for the basins of the Mississippi and its tributaries. Besides flood prevention and soil conservation, they discussed changes in forestry, navigation, irrigation, and hydroelectric power. They ended the report with a description of “The Mississippi Valley of the Future,” which suggested two possible futures for the valley. “If certain present-day trends were to be projected unaltered into the future,” they wrote, describing the first scenario, “we would be compelled to show increasingly large stretches of once fertile lands stripped of their life-giving humus, rivers breaking forth in floods of increasing sever-

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ity as the denuded slopes permitted an ever-swifter run-off.” The committee members echoed other warnings made by New Dealers and compared this pessimistic future with the decline of other civilizations. Yet the committee members also envisioned an optimistic future for the Mississippi. “It need not,” they wrote, “go the way of the valley of the Nile, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, where sands have drifted into old irrigation ditches.” Modern America possessed “knowledge that the older civilizations lacked,” the report explained. “If we synthesize that knowledge . . . , if we put a common purpose above local jealousies and conflicts of interest, the future is in our own hands.”10 Pare Lorentz came across the committee’s report while he worked on The Plow That Broke the Plains. As he leafed through its pages, he thought that the Mississippi River would be the perfect subject for his next documentary film. He was intrigued by the history of the Mississippi and impressed by the far-reaching proposals of the report. After completing The Plow, he met with Rexford Tugwell. Lorentz pointed to a map of the Mississippi and said, “There, you guys are missing the biggest story in the world—the Mississippi River!” Tugwell agreed, and helped secure funds for this new project.11 Lorentz imagined the story of the Mississippi River as the story of America. He closely studied the committee’s report and later referred to it as his “bible.” His film would try to give the committee’s ideas poetic resonance. It would try to make the work of government planning appear as a work of art.12 The Flow of Water

Lorentz wanted to float down the river, from its source all the way to its mouth. “My proposal was simple,” he recalled, “to take an engineer’s boat, put a couple of pick-up trucks on it, and start at Minneapolis and go clear to the Gulf.” The Mississippi seemed inherently majestic and magnificent. Snaking through the valley, stretching the length of the continent, the river evoked sinuous wonder. Sometimes lazy and slow, sometimes powerful and threatening, the river had captured the imagination of Mark Twain and other writers. A great subject for literature, the river would be perfect for cinema. Floating down the Mississippi, using a camera instead of a pen, Lorentz would tell the biggest story in the world, the story of the river in the past, present, and future.13 A drop of water, he would start with that. He would follow the drop, from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, follow it through the heartland, through the Delta, and on to the Gulf of Mexico. In the summer of 1936, after drafting an outline, Lorentz traveled to the Mississippi Valley, on the trip that would lead him to the hydraulics lab in Vicksburg. He had visited the river thirteen years before,

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when he was seventeen. He was excited to return, excited to see and study the river again.14 Soon after arriving, though, he discovered that there was a problem with his idea for the film. The river was boring. Sure, it was magnificent and majestic; it was romantic and poetic. But it was boring—dull to look at, even more dull to film. As he stood in Cairo, Illinois, staring at the river, Lorentz feared that his documentary would not be able to grab and hold the attention of an audience. “You can’t take a thousand feet of nothing,” he recalled. Compared with the dust storms on the Great Plains, the Mississippi River seemed to offer less drama and visual excitement.15 Lorentz wanted the film to be powerful and exciting, so he had to rethink his original plan. To generate visual drama, he decided to portray the different forms of work that connected people to the river. He realized that these activities—from raising cotton in the South to harvesting lumber in the Midwest—would provide compelling visuals. The nexus of land, water, and people: this not only followed New Deal conservation, it also presented Lorentz with more cinematic possibilities. Compared with the listless flow of the river, the human interaction with nature seemed engaging and captivating. Lorentz decided to alternate between panoramas of the landscape and detailed scenes of agriculture and industry in the Mississippi Valley. By moving back and forth between wide views and close shots, he wanted Americans to appreciate how different streams of human activity fed into the larger story of the Mississippi. Panoramic vision allowed him to subsume these separate settings—the Deep South, the forests of Minnesota, the coal region of the Alleghenies—into a broader narrative of ecological change. The wide-angle perspective suggested a vast web of life connecting all the lands touched by the Mississippi and its tributaries. In addition to integrating land, water, and people into an ecological aesthetic, Lorentz tried to capture the temporality of the river. “I have tried,” he wrote, “to let the river, rather than time, flow through the picture.” He explained in his research notes how he wanted the film to project the constant movement of water: “We keep water moving before the audience,” he wrote. “We make them understand that, no matter how rich and powerful we grew through the years, the water still flowed to the sea, ripping off topsoil and scarring the denuded mountains.” The movement of water implied continuity, the endurance of natural patterns. No matter how much Americans changed the land, the water kept flowing into the Mississippi and on to the Gulf. The river of time represented a world without end, a sacred space that followed its own rhythms, its own pace. In contrast, modern society was marked by disruption

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and change. Technology, industrialization, and the intensification of agriculture all evoked a sense of discontinuity. By keeping water moving before the audience, Lorentz wanted viewers to become aware of the profound differences between the time of nature and the time of modernity.16 Initially, Lorentz was going to call the film The Highway to the Sea, but he changed the title to The River. His decision may reflect more than a matter of diction. The metaphor of a highway implies the linear, irreversible course of history, yet water circulates, moving from rivers to the sea and from the sea back to rivers. Through the processes of evaporation and precipitation, the circulation of water suggests that time is a cycle. This explanation of water circulation, known as the hydrologic cycle, has deep roots in Western culture. Indeed, one can find inklings of the concept in the Bible, particularly in the book of Ecclesiastes: “All rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place from which they flow, the rivers flow back again.” The hydrologic cycle suggests timeless immanence; it evokes the idea of balance and the inherent harmony of nature.17 Lorentz found a moral message in the flow of water. In The Plow, he portrayed the conflict between linear-minded settlers and natural cycles as a cause of the Dust Bowl; their unwillingness to adapt themselves to the region’s ecology resulted in disaster. As punishment for their sins, nature judged, condemned, and avenged. Similarly, Lorentz imagined the Mississippi River as casting judgment, its floods and erosion signs of divine retribution. Because Americans developed the valley so carelessly, the river became a destructive force, tearing away the topsoil and scarring the denuded mountains. Linear time may appear to conquer cyclical time, but the cycles of nature returned with a vengeance. Remembering Abundance

The River begins by imagining the natural origins of the Mississippi. The camera portrays drops of water sliding down riverbanks, streams rushing over rocks, and rivers tumbling and cascading, then flowing together to form the mighty Mississippi. Like the opening grassland sequence in The Plow, these scenes use panoramic motion pictures to encompass a broad ecological vision. Viewers glimpse not only the river itself but also the forests and other landscapes surrounding it (fig. 3.1). As water flows across the screen, the narrator describes the Mississippi. In a proud voice, he emphasizes how the river gathers waters that flow from many different places: “Carrying every drop of water that flows down two-thirds the continent, Carrying every brook and rill, rivulet and creek, Carrying all the

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3.1. Panoramic view of river and forests, frame enlargement from The River.

rivers that run down two-thirds the continent, The Mississippi runs to the Gulf of Mexico.” Following the initial scenes of the river, the film journeys through the development of three regional economies: the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, the forests of the upper Midwest, and the iron and coal of the Allegheny Mountains. For the most part, these sequences evoke an exuberant mood; they seem to celebrate the spirited pace of economic growth. Yet in the sequences that follow, the plot line reverses itself. Rather than continuing its upward path, the story turns toward decline and devastation. By wasting resources quickly and carelessly, Americans did not respect the temporality of nature, the ecological past that preceded their settlement and transformation of the land. A key sequence of The River presents this idea, as it portrays the wreckage and ruins left by a heedless civilization. Charred tree stumps, burned-out hills, and lifeless landscapes flicker across the screen (fig. 3.2). Panoramic shots of wasted landscapes suggest the interrelationships among land, water, and people. The narrator ruefully surveys the damage: “We cut the top off Wisconsin and sent it down the river. We left the mountains and hills slashed and burned, And moved on.” The film suggests that the ecological devastation resulted from Americans developing a transient re-

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3.2. Tree stumps, still photograph from The River. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

lationship to the land. Focusing only on the present moment, American culture lost sight of the history embedded in a place, of the delicate balance that nature constructed over the ages. Disregarding natural limits, the culture did not encourage a sense of belonging to the landscape. Instead, American society extracted the wealth from one place and then imagined an infinite supply of resources stored, somewhere, beyond the next frontier. This boundless conception of space promoted not only the forgetting of the ecological past, but also the inability to take stock of the future, to feel a sense of obligation to the generations that follow. It created a perception of space that is blind to time. “We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns,” the narrator continues, “but at what a cost!” His words invoke the cliché that progress has its price. Yet the film raises deeper issues, suggesting that the idea of progress itself rests upon a profound amnesia, a fiction that we live in a society of our own creation—a wholly human world. As Lorentz realized, industrial society encourages people to forget their ultimate dependence upon nature; it obscures the ties between cities and the ecosystems that sustain them. While Gleason used the camera to record the imminent loss of Hetch Hetchy, Lorentz evoked memory in a different fashion. He tried to remind viewers of what had been forgotten in the rush to modernity, to make them recognize the earthly roots of the nation’s material success, to remember the wealth nature had stored

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in the valley. When The River portrays the forests of the Midwest, it shows images of trees that fill the screen. The narrator lists the names of the different species: “Black spruce and Norway pine, Douglas fir and Red cedar, Scarlet oak and Shagbark hickory.” The sounds suggest the rugged beauty of the trees. When the film returns to show the destruction of the forests, the narrator repeats these words. Rather than seeing majestic trees, viewers gaze at wastelands—the ghostly remains of the Scarlet oak and Shagbark hickory. The scene speaks of memory: it urges viewers to recall the natural sources of abundance and mourns the loss of the original continent, the landscapes that made progress possible.18 The camera cuts again to water. No longer flowing through a virgin land, the water moves through a continent of cut-over mountains and plowed-off slopes. The trees are gone; the vegetation is stripped away. With nothing left to hold the water or to slow its course, the river rushes out of control. It takes revenge upon an unnatural civilization. Catastrophe follows. The raging river turns into a flood. The water covers homes and buildings, cities and towns. In late January 1937, when the most devastating floods of the decade began, Lorentz and his crew traveled to the affected areas. In airplanes and Coast Guard boats, they filmed the waters rising, people leaving their homes and arriving in refugee camps, and men stacking sand bags to hold back the river. The aerial perspective allowed Lorentz and his crew to glimpse the wide scope of flooding and to emphasize the sublime fury of nature. In the film, people appear as victims, helpless and defenseless against the overwhelming power of the river. Lorentz told his crew to portray refugees looking “frozen” and “sitting immobile, dazed.” The sequence closes with shots of a town that is completely submerged (fig. 3.3). The narrator adopts the panoramic, aerial vision of the camera. Speaking as if he were God looking down from above, he says again: “We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns, but at what a cost!”19 The flood sequence suggests a biblical deluge; it seems to represent the fate of sinners in the hands of an angry continent. For Lorentz, though, floods provided only the most visible, most dramatic examples of the ecological crisis. As he did in The Plow, Lorentz again aimed to complicate the idea of natural disaster. Floods are not presented as random, inexplicable events. They occur because the soil, water, and people are out of balance; they occur because the nation turned harmony into disharmony, order into chaos. This explanation differed from the way newsreels portrayed the floods of 1937. During the weeks of flooding, newsreels made the crisis along the Ohio

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3.3. Aerial view of flood, frame enlargement from The River.

and Mississippi Rivers the focus of their coverage, telling a story of one of the “most staggering blows ever struck at our great country by the grim forces of Nature!” Besides a few aerial views, the newsreels only featured close shots of the wreckage. They concentrated on the immediate crisis faced by particular communities. They did not connect the story of water with the story of soil. They did not provide viewers with a sense of the broader context, of the history and ecology that lay behind the disaster. By only using close-ups, the newsreels visually reinforced the message that floods are products of the freakish, often violent, behavior of nature. Lorentz knew that viewers of The River had seen these reports, but he wanted to tell a larger story. He accomplished this goal by using footage of the various ecosystems that surround the river, by offering a panoramic vision that encompassed the entire environment.20 He also carried the narrative further. Despite the sudden destruction caused by floods, the film finds a deeper tragedy in the story of erosion. It portrays the steady scarring of the land as another sign of the end. The film shifts from flood imagery to shots of sand dunes, gullies, and bare trees (fig. 3.4). Lorentz’s panoramic perspective again emphasized the interdependence of people and nature, helping viewers to understand the ecological history that led to this catastrophe. The editors of the Magazine of Art suggested that this scene of erosion

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3.4. Panoramic view of soil erosion, still photograph from The River. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

resembled a female body, much like Alexandre Hogue’s painting Mother Earth Laid Bare (fig. 2.3 above). “Many people,” they explained, “are deeply concerned these days about erosion and soil conservation. . . . It may be a strange coincidence that led Mr. Hogue and the photographers of ‘The River’ to see the desolate, stripped earth in such similar terms.” While the Magazine of Art praised both Hogue and Lorentz, the editors believed that the film surpassed the painting in its visual and emotive power. “We cannot help noting,” they concluded, “that there are some things a movie camera can do more forcefully than a paint brush.” Through a wide-angle lens, Lorentz used the mechanical vision of the camera to capture the reality of soil erosion and to portray the ecological fabric of the Mississippi Valley.21 Moving from the loss of natural resources, The River then considers another tragedy—the impoverishment of sharecroppers and tenants living in the valley. The camera enters a family’s home. Suffused with pathos, these scenes make the people appear plaintive and spiritless. Unlike Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, who tried to capture the dignity and perseverance of poor Americans, Lorentz emphasized the melancholy, resigned expressions of the family members. They do not smile or talk to one another. They seem debased and without hope. They are also white. Like many other documentary artists in the thirties,

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Lorentz chose to focus on the suffering of white people. Despite the large number of African American sharecroppers and tenants in the South, The River does not show their faces. Instead, the film laments the decline of white farm workers to a state of desperation and dependence. Throughout the film, the narrator uses the pronoun “we” to describe the ways that Americans changed the land. “We cut the top off Wisconsin, and sent it down the river.” “We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns, but at what a cost!” What is missing from the constant invocation of how “we” abused the land is the question of social and power relations. The film obscures the conflicts between different groups in American society; it focuses instead on the clash between culture and nature, between American civilization and the American earth. By ignoring issues of class interest, The River equates the impoverishment of land with the impoverishment of people; it presents them both as the result of uncontrolled economic growth. The narrator offers a circular explanation: “And poor land makes poor people. Poor people make poor land.” The narrator’s mantra of “we” reflects a widespread tendency in 1930s culture: the rhetoric promotes the idea of a mythic, unified America, a people connected by a common past and emboldened by a common will in the present. The film extends this vision of America as a collective whole to the nation’s landscape. By telling a story of decline, the film tries to induce a longing to belong, a desire to live in harmony with the American earth.22 As he did in The Plow, Lorentz again borrowed from the jeremiad sermon to warn of nature’s vengeance directed against a sinful nation. The film begins with the origins of the river—with scenes that suggest the beginning of the world, the ideal state of nature. From there, it follows the downward spiral that leads to the devastation of the thirties. In order to avoid the impending end, Lorentz called for ecological reform through national cohesion. The Ghost of Walt Whitman

When The River was released in 1937, critics compared it to great works of literature. According to one, “It sounds like a combination of Stephen Vincent Benét, Sidney Lanier, and ‘Hiawatha,’ and has all the power of a tribal saga, delivered to spellbound Greeks by a blind Homer.” Another explained: “Like every outstanding work of art, The River advances the form in which it is made. Ulysses appeared to be a new kind of novel; The Wasteland a new kind of poem; Lorentz’s documents appear to be a new kind of film.”23 But the comparison made most often was to Walt Whitman. “The words

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are so rare, so fine, so superb, they suggest comparison with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in their eloquence,” a reviewer for Current History explained. “Pare Lorentz has caught in those words something of the driving force of the continent. . . . Whitman himself would have been proud to have written these words.” Lewis Mumford echoed these claims, finding in Lorentz’s narration “the first evocation since Whitman that gives one a sense of the length and the breadth of the continent, of the realities of every day life, of the good fortunes and mischances of our people.”24 During the Depression, a wide range of American writers and artists cited the example and authority of Walt Whitman. Through his poetry and his persona, Whitman had celebrated the country’s democratic spirit and expansiveness; with radiant confidence, he had predicted that all of history would culminate in America. Living through the crisis of the 1930s, writers and artists—including Lorentz—looked back to Whitman and wondered what had gone wrong. Disillusioned and fearful, they wanted to tap into his legacy and recover the promise of his words.25 No text expresses this idea more clearly than “Ode to Walt Whitman,” a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét. Published in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1935, the poem tells of a conversation between contemporary Americans and the ghost of Walt Whitman. Benét imagines a visit to the hillside in Camden, New Jersey, where Whitman is buried. He speaks to the poet, not as an individual, but using the collective “we.” Whitman asks, “Is it well with these States?” At first, Benét offers a positive response, but then, in midsentence, interrupts himself and begins to describe the Great Depression. He describes the spread of poverty and comments on the sad irony of want amid plenty. Whitman asks about the land, and Benét tells him about the Dust Bowl. “Over the plains of the buffalo-land,/ The dust-storm blows, the choking, sifting, small dust.”26 After this litany of distress, the poem ends by identifying Whitman himself as a reserve of hope. “You’re still the giant lode we quarry / . . . / Still the trailbreaker, still the rolling river.” Benét suggests that the spirit of Whitman endures in the Mississippi, that the meaning of America’s great poet can be found in the flow of America’s great river. He imagines streams flowing into rivers, rivers rushing onwards, “Rolling and shouting: / Till, at last, it is Mississippi.” The river’s constant movement evokes the continual promise of America. “And always the water flowing, earthy, majestic / . . . / Always, forever, Mississippi, the god.”27 Accompanying the poem, an illustration by Charles Child captured the idea of Whitman and the Mississippi as the enduring symbols of America

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3.5. Charles Child, illustration, Walt Whitman and the Mississippi River, The Saturday Review of Literature 12 (4 May 1935). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

(fig. 3.5). On the left side, it portrays the aging poet’s face, with deep wrinkles, wind-blown hair, and a look of concern in his eyes. He seems to worry about the future, to hope that his nation will resolve the problems of the thirties. On the right, a panorama shows the river curving along hills and valleys, cutting through the land, always flowing. The dead prophet and the majestic river become the symbols of national affirmation; in a time of crisis and uncertainty, they represent the expansive promise of America. The parallels between Benét’s poem and Lorentz’s film are striking. Both lament the ecological calamities of the 1930s. Both praise the Mississippi River for its vastness and eternal flow. Benét explicitly identifies Whitman with the Mississippi; Lorentz does this implicitly—not by mentioning the poet’s name, but instead by using his poetic style to tell the story of the Mississippi. Called the free-verse catalog, Whitman’s innovative form of poetry consisted of unrhymed lines, sometimes hundreds of them, each evoking a concrete image. One line, one image spilled over to the next, flowing with an unusual exuberance, connecting seemingly disparate things. Whitman responded to the diverse sensations and spectacles of the modern city. Through the rapid accumulation of images, he tried to capture a new perception of time and space, a sense of simultaneity in the experience of urban life. By using catalogs, he wanted to absorb all life, to incorporate the experience of other selves and things into his enormous project of self making. His poetry continually used the pronoun “I”; he was the voracious poet, the ever-expanding self, the “I” wh0 contained multitudes. Whitman’s project of self making fueled his project of nation making, of celebrating the ever-expanding promise of America. The poet’s ability to incorporate so much was a product of the nation’s growth and

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optimism; the vastness of Whitman’s self was mirrored in the wide spaces and material wealth of the country.28 The cadences of Whitman resound in The River. Much of the film’s narration features the uttering of American place names and the rhythmic chanting of mountains, cities, and rivers. In one passage, the narrator intones, “Down the Miami, the Wabash, the Licking and the Green, the Cumberland, the Kentucky, and the Tennessee.” Lorentz used catalogs to celebrate the sounds of these names and to marvel at the vastness of the land. For Lorentz, the free verse form also held ecological meaning. Lorentz wanted to reveal the unity in diversity, the often unrecognized connections between different parts of nature and different regions of America. He had learned much from the Report of the Mississippi Valley Committee. He had learned that land, water, and people form an interwoven web; he had learned that the various areas of the Mississippi Valley needed to be thought about and planned together. For Whitman, the free verse catalog expressed the simultaneity of urban experience. Lorentz used the catalog to represent the unity of places and the interconnections of nature. It was not the simultaneity of the street, but the simultaneity of ecology that he wanted to capture. Lorentz used Whitman’s technique to evoke a central idea of New Deal reform: American places and regions, American landscapes and waterscapes are tightly interwoven, inextricably connected by the intermeshing of species and ecological systems. Through a catalog of place names, Lorentz portrayed the path of the Mississippi. One line, one place name spilled into the next, flowing like the river, connecting places that seemed unaffected by one another. Blending aesthetics and politics, Lorentz adopted a poetic form to convey the principles of New Deal conservation. The distance between Whitman’s era and the 1930s, between a time of seemingly endless progress and a time of economic crisis, was reflected in Lorentz’s choice of the pronoun “we” rather than the Whitmanesque celebration of “I.” Individualism, the touchstone of national identity for Whitman, was anathema to many New Dealers. They saw nation making as a collective endeavor, one guided by the rational, intelligent leadership of the federal government. In Lorentz’s narration for The River, there is no mention of individual self making, no use of the pronoun “I.” The film looks to New Deal conservation as the basis for a new national identity, one in which the American people will find a way to belong to the American landscape. The poetry and example of Walt Whitman, so important to artists and writers in the 1930s, offered inspiration to Lorentz as he composed the script for The River. Yet the influence of Whitman extended beyond the style of narration; it

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can be found in the images, the ideas, even the feeling of the film itself. “The River is poetically intimate,” one reviewer observed. “The camera seems to enter the very drops of water . . . with the same hunger for nearness, the same lust for completeness, that causes a Whitman to touch, enumerate, and sing.” More important, in the closing scenes of the film, Lorentz incorporated technology into his aesthetic vision. Like Whitman, the first poet of American modernity, Lorentz aimed to reconcile the practical with the poetic, the spiritual with the utilitarian. By portraying the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), he tried to imagine a history of the future. He tried to make the machine seem beautiful.29 A New Beginning

Conceived as a bold experiment in regional planning, the TVA was established in the spring of 1933—one of the fifteen measures adopted by Congress during Roosevelt’s first hundred days. The TVA aimed to provide flood control, erosion control, and hydroelectric power to the entire valley. Rather than trying to solve problems in a piecemeal fashion, it viewed the valley as an integrated system. In his “bible,” the Report of the Mississippi Valley Committee, Lorentz had read that the TVA “demonstrated the interlocking character of all human activities that are dependent on water.” For someone like Lorentz, inspired by the New Deal and committed to the ideals of planning and conservation, the TVA must have seemed magnetic, impossible to resist.30 The TVA embodied the utopian hopes of many New Dealers; politicians and journalists often described it as a new beginning. In Rich, Poor Land, the liberal writer Stuart Chase documented the enormous waste of natural resources throughout America. As Chase worked on this book, one question absorbed his attention: “Can we find a new ecology which respects nature and still permits technological progress?” His answer was yes, and his evidence was the TVA. Chase visited the Tennessee Valley, an experience he called “spiritually refreshing.” To see the TVA at work, Chase believed, was to witness the creation of a new world. “To look,” he wrote, “at the clean, strong walls of Norris Dam between the hills of pine . . . to realize that resources are building rather than declining and that the continent is being refreshed; to know that, over this whole great valley from the Smokies to the Ohio, men’s faces turn to a common purpose and a common goal—intoxicates the imagination. Here, struggling in embryo, is perhaps the promise of what all America will some day be.”31 The TVA represented a tangible, visible example of the regionalist movement, a concrete expression of the hope that the region offered the basic unit for

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reviving American civilization. Lewis Mumford, whose 1938 regionalist manifesto The Culture of Cities featured images of dams, power lines, and other TVA projects, considered regionalism the “grand task of politics for the opening generation,” a task he defined as the “re-animation and re-building of regions, as deliberate works of collective art.” Mumford emphasized the links between aesthetics and politics. “What is needed for political life,” he continued, “is not mere factual knowledge: for this by itself is inert: what is needed are those esthetic and mythic impulses which open up new activities and carve out new forms for construction and contemplation.” Mumford would offer high praise for The River, and for good reason. In the film, Lorentz portrayed the TVA as something more than the realization of public policy; he suffused it in spiritual light, made it appear the fulfillment of aesthetic and mythic impulses, a government project that could arouse the emotions.32 The TVA seemed so important to Lorentz, so crucial to the story he wanted to tell, that he sent his camera crew to the Tennessee Valley first, before sending them to the Mississippi River. In Tennessee and northern Alabama they filmed shots of eroded hillsides and cotton fields; they filmed Civilian Conservation Corps members planting trees. But most of the time, they filmed dams, dams that were under construction and dams that were already built.33 In both The Plow and The River, Lorentz had portrayed technology as reckless and ruinous, as the unbridled force that broke the Plains and eroded the valley. Yet in the final sequence of The River, technology becomes the instrument of renewal. The dam appears as an object of sublime wonder; it appears to arise out of nature itself, to suture the deep wounds of the American landscape. The River converts the sublime terror of ecological catastrophe into the sublime power of the New Deal to use technology to control the natural world. “We had the power to take the Valley apart,” the narrator says. “We have the power to put it together again.” The power of the nation to annihilate forests, to ruin the soil, to turn a pristine river into an angry foe—this same power could now be redirected, channeled into a wise course by the federal government. The camera cuts to shots of a dam being built in the Tennessee Valley. The images suggest a sense of passage, of crossing from one phase of history to another. The time for destruction is over; the time for reconstruction begins. The film begins with water, and with water it also ends. No longer flowing freely, no longer wild and uncontrolled, the river has been tamed. The images suggest the marriage of technology and the environment. The monumentalism of the dam merges with the kinetic qualities of the river (fig. 3.6). Solid and powerful, the dam controls nature; fluid and musical, the water continues to flow. Because of the New Deal, the circulation of water achieves a linear pur-

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3.6. Norris Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority, February 1937, still photograph from The River. Pare Lorentz Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

pose and direction. The water will continue to course and cycle; but now, managed by conservation, controlled by the dam, and used to generate hydroelectric power, the water will contribute to the upward advance of society, to the sacred mission of progress. As the water cycles, history moves forward. Lorentz used aerial shots of the Tennessee Valley to situate the dams within their larger ecological context. He incorporated the broad agenda of the New Deal—soil conservation, flood control, hydroelectric power—into a series of images that begin and end with the massive dams. The camera alternates between close shots of specific activities, such as tree planting by the Civilian Conservation Corps (fig. 3.7), to panoramic scenes of regenerated fields and tamed waters. The view from above allowed spectators to gain a managerial perspective on the environment as a whole, to see the dams in relation to the river and the surrounding landscape. This perspective reflected the New Deal’s effort to understand the connections between different parts of the environment. By using panoramic vision, Lorentz encouraged audiences to see government planning as a sublime spectacle of power and control leading to the landscape’s orderly perfection.34

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3.7. Civilian Conservation Corps members planting trees, frame enlargement from The River.

With these images, Lorentz evoked another strand of the Emersonian tradition. While Herbert Gleason emphasized the spiritual meaning of nature itself, Lorentz and the New Deal found religiosity in what Emerson had described as the power of technology “to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water,” to put nature to work to benefit human society. Lorentz used the motion picture camera to place the dam in a long narrative of creation, a story of the federal government rebuilding the natural world.35 The River’s greatest aesthetic achievement lay in its ability to efface any difference between the organic past of nature and the engineered world of tomorrow. As the following excerpt from a review by the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes suggests, the film presents technology as a force of nature, as something that the land and water themselves demand in order to repair the ecological damages of history. “You see gullies like cuts through the earth,” Seldes observed, “and scenes of desolation, and you feel that generations have lived since the earlier pictures which seemed so rich and fruitful. And so, without your knowing it, you arrive at the Tennessee Valley—and if this is propaganda, make the most of it, because it is masterly. It is as if the pictures which Mr. Lorentz took arranged themselves in such an order that they supplied their own argument, not as if an argument conceived in advance dictated the order of the pictures.”36

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Seldes’s comment not only reflects faith in the camera’s mechanical, objective vision, but also points to the apparent naturalness of Lorentz’s narrative. The film begins with the river being made by drops of water and confluent streams and ends with the river being remade by the federal government and modern technology. Through its unified vision of past and future, the film imagines America starting over. The ending becomes a new beginning. Exuberant and confident, the closing scenes of The River allowed viewers to feel a sense of rejuvenation, a glimpse of the New Deal refreshing the continent through its transformation of the landscape. Lorentz linked aesthetics with technology to envision a purification of the nation, a washing away of ecological sin in the waters of the Tennessee Valley. He presented the dam as an artifact of the technological sublime, a device that could overwhelm spectators with its monumental magnificence. The motion picture camera made it possible for millions of Americans to experience the power of TVA dams. As a technology of representation, the camera framed the dam as a masterpiece of engineering, made it appear as an aesthetic wonder of the modern age. The context of viewing The River—inside a theater surrounded by other people—provided audiences with a collective experience of the sublime, joined them together to witness scenes of transcendence.37 The Nature of Nationalism

Lorentz worried about how Americans would respond to The River. The criticisms leveled at The Plow still stung. Many Plains residents could not accept the story that Lorentz told, and he feared that Southerners, particularly influential white Southerners, would react negatively to his new film. To forestall Southern criticism, he made a curious decision: he included a scene about the Civil War that emphasized the Confederate experience. In his research for the film, Lorentz found a letter that General Robert E. Lee read to his troops the day before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. For many white Southerners, the surrender remained a symbol of pride and honor; although it meant the defeat of the Confederacy, the surrender also revealed the chivalrous qualities of Lee and, by extension, the South itself. In the film, Lee’s letter scrolls across the screen, while trumpets play the tune “Retreat.” Lorentz hoped that Southerners would appreciate this gesture.38 The surrender scene in The River departed from the widespread celebration of Abraham Lincoln during the 1930s. In a slew of popular biographies, plays, and feature films, Depression-era Americans looked back to Lincoln as the savior of the Union, as the leader who restored national unity. Lorentz evoked

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the Civil War but made no mention of Lincoln, choosing instead to focus on the figure of Robert E. Lee and the fate of the Confederacy.39 This emphasis on Confederate memory points to the racial politics at the core of The River—its refusal to portray the crushing poverty of African Americans, its avoidance of the problems of segregation and racial injustice, and finally, its implicit appeal to America as a unified white nation, a country linked not only by New Deal reforms but also by a shared desire to ignore the stark divisions of race. Depicting the end of the Old South in tragic terms, The River paralleled the story told by Margaret Mitchell in her novel Gone with the Wind, published in 1936 and later turned into a popular movie. Like Gone with the Wind, The River mourned the passing of the Confederacy and evaded the racial turmoil of the 1930s. Early in The River, scenes of slaves loading cotton on ships suggest a time of economic expansion, a period when King Cotton came to dominate the Deep South. Yet even as Lorentz staged the past, he failed to grapple with the legacies of slavery, to consider the horrors of lynching, to portray the displacement of countless black sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Like the New Deal more generally, he couched his appeal for liberal reform in a language that would not threaten the authority of elite planters. He presented the Great Depression as a story of a nation—inhabited only by whites—suffering, struggling, and eventually coming together to triumph over adversity.40 As part of his effort to stave off Southern criticism, Lorentz planned for The River to premiere in New Orleans. According to the manager of the Strand Theater, where the film debuted in October 1937, a few hundred “leading people” of New Orleans attended the event. When Lee’s letter appeared on the screen, they all stood up and applauded.41 Faced with another crisis, not of civil war, but of economic depression and ecological blight, The River suggests that America will again piece itself back together. United by the symbol of the dam, by the promise of nature subdued and a valley restored, the nation could overcome the current catastrophe. It was a compelling vision. Fusing history with prophecy, it was charged with emotion and power. When the film ended, the New Orleans audience again stood up and cheered. Newspapers in New Orleans published glowing reviews along with editorials that waxed patriotic about the meaning and message of The River. An editorial in the New Orleans Tribune noted, with apparent pride, that the film was greeted so enthusiastically in their city, particularly in light of the criticism hurled at The Plow by Plains residents. The paper also claimed that both The Plow and The River allowed Americans to transcend the boundaries of state and region, to glimpse the problems faced by people throughout the nation, and to imagine

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themselves as united in a common purpose. Audiences at Lorentz’s films, the editorial explained, “stop thinking of themselves as Mississippians, Louisianans, and Iowans while they watch these factual dramas of soil and water . . . mount to climax. They think, for an hour or so, as Americans. They grasp what Iowa means to Louisiana, what Louisiana means to Oregon.” An editorial in the New Orleans Times Picayune made a similar point. “In New Orleans, where we know the Mississippi so well—so favorably and so unfavorably—we can find in such a picture a feeling that integrates the South and the rest of the valley with the nation—a hint of unity in an America where we sometimes suspect too much individualism of sections as well as persons.” Although Lorentz catered to Confederate memory, New Orleans editorialists emphasized the film’s transcendence of region and its power to inspire national unity.42 The River allowed viewers to feel part of a larger national landscape, to feel connected to an imagined community. The experience of sitting together in a movie theater, seeing the images of disaster and identifying with the tragedy of others, provided audiences with a shared sense of time and space, enabled them to imagine the simultaneity and linked destiny of national life. Ironically, even as they considered the unity of the nation, many of these audiences—at least in the segregated theaters of the South—watched The River in settings that divided Americans by race, reinforcing the exclusionary vision of the film itself.43 Buoyed by the response in New Orleans, Lorentz sent the film to other river cities—Memphis, St. Louis, and St. Paul. Again and again, audiences received the film with great enthusiasm; journalists and theater owners described loud applause after every showing. Following extensive runs in Chicago and Washington, D.C., where attendance figures surpassed all expectations, Paramount Pictures offered to distribute the film nationally (fig. 3.8). Walt Disney encouraged theater owners to show The River on the same program with his first feature-length cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.44 A strange billing, it would seem: a documentary about floods and the TVA paired with an animated cartoon about singing dwarfs. And yet, in the context of the 1930s, the two films worked well together. Despite their fantastic settings and fairy-tale plots, Disney cartoons presented Americans with reassuring lessons; amid the strife and uncertainties of the Depression, his cartoons suggested that the nation would overcome any crisis. Similarly, The River offered the hope of order being restored, of the New Deal taming rivers, conserving natural resources, and improving the condition of the poorest Americans. By placing the federal government at the center of this vision, Lorentz made nationalism seem natural and nature seem nationalistic.45

3.8. Paramount Poster for The River, collection of the National Archives.

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The River’s panoramic vision crystallized the New Deal’s effort to find spiritual meaning in technology and government planning. David Lilienthal, who served as chairman of the TVA for many years, would adopt this aerial perspective in his book TVA: Democracy on the March (1944). “You can see the change best of all,” Lilienthal wrote, “if you have flown down the valley from time to time, as I have done so frequently during these past ten years. From five thousand feet the great change is unmistakable. There it is, stretching out before your eyes, a moving and exciting picture. You can see the undulation of neatly terraced hillsides . . . you can see the grey bulk of the dams, stout marks across the river now deep blue, no longer red and murky with its hoard of soil washed from the eroding land.” The master perspective from above revealed the orderly arrangement of the natural world, the ability of the federal government to perfect the Tennessee Valley. For Lilienthal, as for Lorentz and other New Dealers, the TVA represented an act of faith, a secular project infused with moral and spiritual purpose. “Faith is the greatest power in the world of men,” Lilienthal explained, “the most ‘practical’ force of all. How is faith sustained and built stronger? By the redemption of faith through works.” The aerial perspective vindicated his statement of faith, provided visual evidence that “men may work in harmony with the forces of nature, neither despoiling what God has given nor helpless to put them to use.”46 Combining ecology with aesthetics, The River and other New Deal documentary films served as a meeting ground between science and sentiment, reason and emotion. The ecologist Paul Sears, author of Deserts on the March (1935), a popular study of how the destruction of the grasslands led to the Dust Bowl, argued in 1939 that ecology needed to define its aesthetic vision. “The scientist must be aware of the relation of his task to the field of aesthetics,” he announced in Harper’s magazine. Sears believed that New Deal conservation—blending science with beauty—offered an inspiring way to redesign the landscape. He described a government conservation program in the Texas Panhandle, an area ravaged by dust storms earlier in the decade, as representing this new vision. “One gets an impression of a landscape under control—which is the only kind of a landscape, aside from one in its untouched natural beauty, that is fit to look upon.” This aesthetic of control, Sears explained, was grounded in the central insight of ecology: “Man himself is not a watcher, but like other living things, is a part of the landscape in which he abides. This landscape, including its living constituents, is an integrated whole.” Appearing two years before Sears’s article, The River anticipated and synthesized his major claims, providing mass audiences with the opportunity to see the landscape as an integrated whole and glimpse the beauty of government planning.47

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Lorentz encouraged a sense of audience participation in the remaking of the nation’s landscape. The River provided spectators with an immediate experience of history and made them feel emotionally connected to the New Deal. “It is, in a true sense,” one reviewer observed, “the history of the TVA program; when one sees it in this perspective, that history becomes an integral part of one’s own life; every spectator must really feel affected by the previous acts of his countrymen and joined to them. He becomes a participant in the film’s action for he cannot help feeling that this is all part of his own life-struggle, in the largest sense.” The film pulled spectators into the river of time known as American history, a great flowing body that connected them to the struggles and dreams of the past, while it carried them toward a different future, a technological utopia, a landscape where they would truly belong. Lorentz merged narratives of decline and recovery into a seamless vision of America as an organic machine, a nation that could avoid catastrophe by engineering a new world of abundance.48

4 A F l icker of Per m a nence

In the summer of 1935, as Pare Lorentz began work on The Plow That Broke the Plains, Robert Flaherty traveled through India, directing a film called Elephant Boy. Based on a fable from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, the film tells the story of an Indian boy who overcomes the taunts of older men and becomes “Toomai of the Elephants,” a brave and respected hunter. As Lorentz thought about dust storms and drought, Flaherty tried to capture the affection a young boy felt for an aging elephant, the way the moon cast its light on the Indian jungle, and the dramatic, headlong rush of an elephant stampede.1 Since the release of Nanook of the North in 1922, Robert Flaherty had helped establish the genre of documentary film. Flaherty’s films combined realism with romanticism. From the Arctic to the South Pacific, he sought to record the essential purity and simplicity of “primitive” cultures. Like the photographer Edward Curtis, he wanted to document the traditions and rituals of peoples he believed were doomed to extinction. “What I want to show,” Flaherty explained, “is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible—before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.” For Flaherty, the camera provided the means to save vanishing cultures on film.2 Although Elephant Boy earned Flaherty the best director award at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, he was not pleased with the film. Flaherty believed 87

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that Alexander Korda, the powerful British producer who controlled the final production of the film, had compromised artistic integrity for the sake of box office success. When the film received mixed reviews from the critics, Flaherty thought of leaving Britain, where he had been living for several years, and returning to the United States.3 Meanwhile, Pare Lorentz was enjoying The River’s critical acclaim. Amid the chorus of praise, though, some critics charged Lorentz with focusing too much on nature and ignoring the plight of human beings. In a generally enthusiastic review, one critic encouraged Lorentz to pay more attention to people in his next film. “As The Plow told about the land and the dust storms, The River tells about the water and the floods. The third part of a natural trilogy would be about the people.” Invoking “the people” as the embodiment of American virtue, the reviewer employed a key idiom of 1930s culture and wondered if Lorentz could weave the dreams and aspirations of the folk into his vision of environmental reform.4 Several months later, Lorentz made some remarkably similar comments about Archibald MacLeish’s new book of photographs and poetry, Land of the Free. Although he commended the “lucid narrative poem,” Lorentz took issue with MacLeish’s portrayal of the American people. “While the land is vivid and lyrical in your imagery, the people are not flesh and blood, but an intellectual question mark: ‘We don’t know.’” In contrast, the photographs, borrowed from the Farm Security Administration, captured what the poem failed to convey. “As Dorothea Lange contributed thirty-one of the eighty-eight photographs in the book,” Lorentz explained, “I give her chief credit for putting on celluloid what Mr. MacLeish failed to put in words: the sorrow, and the dignity, and the blood of the people.”5 The review reads like a mea culpa. In criticizing MacLeish, Lorentz implicitly acknowledged his own failure to represent the folk. Indeed, while most documentary art in the 1930s tried to convey the experience of people, particularly the dispossessed and downtrodden, Lorentz departed from this trend. He presented people as symbols, as pigments in his color scheme; he portrayed the natural world—the grass and the dust, the flow of water and the devastating floods—as the central actor in his films. Lorentz’s review of Land of the Free suggested a new direction: a desire to capture more fully the lives of people and the cycles of nature, to represent flesh-and-blood Americans along with the vivid and lyrical American landscape. Impressed by the critical and popular success of The River, President Roosevelt wanted the federal government to continue making movies. So in August 1938, he established the U.S. Film Service, an agency to produce and distrib-

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ute government documentaries, and appointed Lorentz as its director. Lorentz spent much of the following year working on The Fight for Life, a film that focused on poverty, public health, and the high mortality rate of women in childbirth in America. It was definitely a film about the sorrow of the people.6 But Lorentz continued to think about the other questions—about conservation and agriculture, about how to reconcile the American people with their land. In May 1939, officials at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) commissioned the U.S. Film Service to make a movie about their vision of “balanced abundance.” Having witnessed the power of Lorentz’s documentaries, they imagined a film that would educate and captivate large audiences around the country. They wanted the film to explain the need “to provide adequate conservation of our soil resources and more income, and better living for farm families.” To save and nurture the soil, to improve the link between people and nature, while generating more income, more production, more for the farmer and more for the nation: this was the dream of AAA officials, the story they wanted to tell.7 Lorentz seemed the perfect person for the job, and the AAA officials hoped he would direct the movie. For Lorentz, the new film would have provided an opportunity to complete his trilogy, to combine the sensitive rendering of people, in the manner of Dorothea Lange, with his own style of environmental representation. Yet he was in the middle of filming The Fight for Life and had to find another director for the AAA project. He selected Robert Flaherty, the filmmaker who had traveled around the world but had never made a movie about America. In the summer of 1939, Flaherty found himself in the midst of Iowa cornfields. Rather than the elephants and jungles of India, he saw eroded fields and tenant farmers, powerful machines and desperate migrants. Rather than offering a romantic view of primitive life, Flaherty grappled with the immediate crisis of American agriculture. Over the next several months, he filmed gullies carved into Southern fields, dust blowing in the Great Plains, and migrants journeying out West. As he documented the social and ecological problems, Flaherty struggled with the contradictions of New Deal policy. Like Lorentz, he wanted to portray the federal government using technology and planning to regenerate the national landscape. Flaherty celebrated the potential of technology, but he also felt compelled to record the experience of migrants, some of whom were displaced by New Deal reforms. As he stared at their faces, Flaherty wondered if he were glimpsing another vanishing culture—the pure, virtuous, and disappearing American farmer. In the end, Flaherty attempted the impossible: he tried to use his camera to resolve the tensions of New Deal agricultural policy.

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He made a documentary called The Land, a film that mingled pessimism with optimism, the sense of an ending with the hope of rebirth. The Land would be the final documentary sponsored by agricultural agencies; in its own way, the film marked the end of the New Deal. Robert Flaherty’s Return to America

A government job was a strange development for Robert Flaherty. Born in Michigan in 1884, he spent much of his youth accompanying his father, a mining engineer, on explorations in search of iron ore. Flaherty later led mining expeditions to the Hudson Bay and the sub-Arctic. In 1913, at the request of his employer, he brought along a motion picture camera—an experience that would spark his interest in film, particularly in recording the habits and customs of Arctic peoples. Years later, Flaherty explained his beginnings as a filmmaker: “Odysseus made his journeys and then Homer wrote about them. To discover and to reveal—that is the way every artist sets about his business. . . . I was an explorer first and a filmmaker a long way after.”8 The artist as explorer, the explorer as artist: all the elements of the Flaherty mystique emanated from this basic idea. From his early forays into filmmaking, reviewers—taking a cue from Flaherty himself—described him as a romantic genius, as the artist who discovered and revealed, as the adventurer who carried a motion picture camera. “Non-preconception is the pre-condition to discovery,” Frances Flaherty wrote, explaining her husband’s methods. “When you do not preconceive, then you go about finding out. . . . You begin to explore.” In faraway places unencumbered by a script and unburdened by preconceptions, Flaherty roamed around, observing, filming, hunting for the truth. Blessed with a keen, intuitive sense, he discovered the authentic essence of other places; with his camera, he revealed the real meaning of other cultures—or so held the rhetoric of romantic genius.9 Yet this image of Flaherty obscured the ways that his vision was shaped by larger trends in American culture. Although described as the expressions of his individual consciousness, Flaherty’s films reflected the growing fascination with the “primitive.” They shared the widespread perception that indigenous, non-Western peoples not only inhabited remote places but also lived in an earlier, less developed stage of human history. Despite his claims of artistic independence and his persona as the heroic explorer, Flaherty’s films were the products of a culturally patterned way of seeing. Rooted in the objective, scientific discourse of ethnography, they claimed to offer, in about an hour, a truthful, accurate, and complete representation of another culture.10

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In many ways, Flaherty’s films differed from the eminently practical concerns of the AAA. Flaherty focused on universal themes: the struggle between people and nature, the persistence of tradition and custom, the need for family and community. He tried to document that most elusive of subjects, the meaning of human nature. For top New Deal officials, steeped in a culture of government reports, special committees, and alphabet agencies, the selection of Flaherty as the director of a government movie may have seemed odd. Yet Flaherty’s acceptance of the Film Service offer excited agricultural officials, film critics, and journalists around the country. Flaherty was known as the father of documentary film. He had journeyed to the frozen lands of the Arctic, the luxuriant islands of the South Seas, and the rocky edges of Ireland. He had filmed an Inuit man named Nanook spear a walrus; he had recorded an ancient tattooing ritual in Samoa; he had witnessed the people of Aran struggle against the surrounding sea. After years spent in exotic locales, Flaherty would now turn his camera on Americans and their land. As Flaherty and his crew traveled through Tennessee in mid-October 1939, a Memphis reporter considered the importance of Flaherty’s return. “No South Sea Island sirens,” he began, “no taciturn igloo-dwellers of the Far North, no bright-eyed brave young mahout of India on his elephant charge, but something more challenging because it is of his native land is falling before the focus of Robert J. Flaherty’s camera today.” Writing in the New York Times, the film critic Richard Griffith predicted a milestone in American film history. “Flaherty has dealt with the far places of the earth; Lorentz has made films about our lives here and now. The result of their joint work may well be the mature film of American life for which many of us have been waiting.”11 Flaherty’s return represented more than just the homecoming of a native son. The sense of anticipation felt by many observers reflected a widespread cultural hunger, a yearning to glimpse the very meaning of America. During the 1930s, a broad range of Americans expressed a longing to belong, a collective desire to define their way of life. They turned inward, applying the anthropological concept of culture, formerly used to explain the traditions of non-Western peoples, to their own nation. From the publication of such works as Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study in National Character (1931) to the documentary projects of the New Deal, writers and artists sought to understand the characteristic patterns and features of American life. Flaherty’s return was part of this larger trend. Before 1939, his films had emphasized the exotic nature of foreign peoples; they had defined and documented the essence of indigenous cultures. His films focused on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, on the ways that primitive people adapted themselves

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to their environment. Russell Lord, the agricultural writer who wrote the script for The Land, described Flaherty’s films this way. “Here, they say, is a place on earth. This is the weather which hammers it bare or caresses it and makes it fruitful. These are the growths of the earth here, and these are the people. This is how they make a living, mate, rear young and die.” “Always,” Lord continued, “the story moves with a sense of timelessness, relating universal experience with the directness and simplicity of a tale as old as the race. Flaherty pictures do not date.”12 The universalism of Flaherty’s films stood in contrast to much of the nationalism characterizing the search for American culture during the thirties. A Flaherty film would allow Americans to see their own experience in a larger, more universal context; it would allow them to see the nation in balance with the natural world, existing in harmony with eternal cycles. Fearing the menace of erosion and the failure of agriculture, New Dealers hoped that Flaherty’s documentary could make the American soil seem permanent and make American agriculture seem timeless. Erosion of Soil, Erosion of Society

Americans had long believed that their soil would last forever. In 1909, the Bureau of Soils, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had proclaimed: “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” During the 1930s, agricultural officials rejected this idea; they viewed erosion as a threat not only to the nation’s farms but also to the future of America itself. “The history of every Nation,” President Roosevelt declared in 1936, “is eventually written in the way in which it cares for its soil.”13 For many years, Hugh Hammond Bennett, the nation’s leading advocate of soil conservation, had challenged the prevailing attitude toward erosion. At first, few were willing to accept his message. But when the dust storms began in the 1930s, Bennett found a more receptive audience. In 1933, he became chief of the newly established Soil Erosion Service. After the dust storms became more severe in 1935, Congress considered a bill that would create a permanent soil conservation agency. On April 2, as winds carried dust from the Great Plains toward the Atlantic seaboard, Bennett testified before a Senate committee. He knew that dust was blowing toward Washington. He wanted to convince the senators of the need for soil conservation, to show them powerful evidence of what happens to a nation that does not care for its soil. So he stalled and delayed; he gave long, drawn-out answers to their questions; he belabored points.

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Eventually, the sky began to darken. Many senators left their chairs and walked over to the windows, where they watched a cloud of dust settle over the capital city. Bennett’s dramatic effect worked. Later that month, Congress established the Soil Conservation Service, and Bennett became its first director.14 Although Bennett worked to make soil conservation a national priority, the major aim of New Deal agricultural policy was to restore farm income. By curbing production, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) sought to raise prices and guarantee higher income for farmers. The AAA became most famous for its actions in the summer of 1933, when it paid farmers to plow up ten million acres of cotton in the South and slaughter six million pigs in the Midwest. After the Supreme Court declared the AAA unconstitutional in 1936, Congress passed two acts—the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, followed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938—that allowed the government to continue curbing surpluses and bolstering farm income (the latter act also reinstated the AAA). These two laws explicitly tied soil conservation to price supports by ensuring farmers more income if they practiced erosion control. New Dealers often linked the problem of soil erosion to the increased presence of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Government officials argued that tenant farmers were poor stewards of the soil; moving frequently from farm to farm, without any security or sense of attachment to the land, they were itinerant and often impoverished. Merely renting the fields they farmed, they had no interest in protecting the long-term health of the soil. Together, the images of tenant farmers and eroded soil merged into a disturbing picture of American agriculture, a picture that contradicted in every possible way the Jeffersonian ideal. “Those who labor in the earth,” Jefferson had written, “are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breast he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” To New Dealers, tenant farmers presented an inverted image of Jefferson’s hopes: they lived in a state of dependence and uncertainty, disconnected from the fabric of society; they seemed unable and unwilling to protect the land, let alone the future of the republic.15 These ideas were most clearly expressed in Farm Tenancy, a government report released in February 1937. Prepared by the President’s Special Committee on Farm Tenancy, the study included two sections entitled “erosion of our soil” and “erosion of our society.” “Erosion of our soil,” the report explains, “has its counterpart in erosion of our society. The one wastes natural resources; the other, human resources. Instability and insecurity of farm families leach the binding elements of rural community life.”16

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4.1. “Insecure Tenure,” illustration, Special Committee on Farm Tenancy, Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee (1937), 9. Coutesy of the Library of Congress.

Farm Tenancy features two illustrations that reinforce the committee’s findings. One illustration (fig. 4.1), labeled “insecure tenure,” portrays the sorry state of American agriculture, a world made up of “bad living conditions,” “soil depletion,” and “no community contacts.” Children sit idle on the front porch of a dilapidated house, where shutters are either missing or falling off windows. A farmer stands in a field, where corn appears to wither on stalks. The outside community seems remote, only a crude outline of buildings in the distance.17 In contrast, the second illustration (fig. 4.2), labeled “secure tenure,” presents a scene of “good living conditions,” “soil conservation,” and “community contacts.” The house seems solid and secure, with new shutters adorning the windows. As children walk to school, the farmer works in

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4.2. “Secure Tenure,” illustration, Special Committee on Farm Tenancy, Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee (1937), 10. Coutesy of the Library of Congress.

a restored field. The community appears as a vibrant image of small-town America, complete with a schoolhouse and church steeple. “With a prospect of reasonably permanent occupancy,” the caption explains, “[the farmer] can afford to repair the house, purchase needed machinery, and plant trees. The effort and expense of terracing land, improving pasture, and ploughing along contours becomes worth while.” The farmer has become a good steward of the soil; he has reclaimed Jeffersonian virtue.18 Another difference appears in the lefthand corner of the two illustrations: a horse-drawn cart filled with belongings in the first image is replaced in the second by a tractor, while power lines now connect to the house. The family members, no longer insecure and transient, have brought their possessions into the house; they do not expect to leave on a moment’s notice. The newly pur-

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chased tractor and newly strung power lines suggest the importance of technology to the New Deal’s vision of agricultural renewal. New Dealers often described technology as both a curse and a blessing. Lorentz’s films highlighted this tension: from the Great Plains to the Mississippi Valley, machines cause chaos and destruction; yet they also regenerate the Tennessee Valley, restoring the ecology and stimulating hope throughout the region. For New Dealers, technology was not inherently harmful or evil. Applied toward social purposes, technology offered redemption. In the Farm Tenancy illustration, the tractor signifies not only “needed machinery” but also security, permanence, and a greater sense of attachment to the soil.19 New Deal perceptions of tenant farmers—as wasteful of soil, insecure and transient, barely surviving in a failed agricultural system—contributed to the making of government policy. Although New Deal rhetoric emphasized the need to replace individualism with a new social ethic, New Deal policy retained a traditional commitment to the virtues of property ownership. According to many agricultural officials, farm ownership seemed the ideal solution to the problems of tenancy and erosion. By bolstering farm income and turning farm tenants into farm owners, New Dealers hoped to solve the crisis in American agriculture. Yet New Deal agricultural policy tended to benefit wealthy landowners at the expense of tenant farmers. Government payments and loans helped farm owners purchase new equipment, especially tractors. As their farms became more mechanized, farm owners no longer needed as many tenants and sharecroppers to work in their fields. The economist Paul Taylor monitored the negative effects of mechanization. After traveling around the country with his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange, Taylor described what he had seen to a Congressional committee. “A planter in the Mississippi Delta, to cite an outstanding example,” Taylor said, “purchased 22 tractors and 13 four-row cultivators, let go 130 of his 160 cropper families, and retained only 30 for day labor.” In this context, the tractor in the Farm Tenancy illustration carries an unintended meaning: it signals more security and income for farm owners, but displacement and further insecurity for farm tenants.20 The contradictions of technology remained an important theme for writers and documentary artists throughout the decade. In 1939, Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor published An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, a book based on their travels together. Combining photographs with text, the book examines the problems of American agriculture by charting a geographic narrative from the Deep South to California. Lange and Taylor focused on the impact of mechanization, particularly in uprooting people from the land. Like

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the authors of the Farm Tenancy report, they linked the erosion of soil to the erosion of society. Describing the Dust Bowl, they wrote, “The winds churned the soil. . . . They loosened the hold of settlers on the land, and like particles of dust drove them rolling down ribbons of highway.” Lange and Taylor revealed the suffering and dislocation caused by machines, but like other New Dealers they believed that mechanization was inevitable. They called for large-scale government projects—including dam building and reclamation—to realize the progressive potential of technology.21 In 1939, as the AAA made plans for its documentary, all of these issues and contradictions—the meanings of technology, the goals and consequences of government policy, the plight of tenants and migrants, the fate of the soil— were being discussed by New Dealers, journalists, and others concerned with the future of American agriculture. Many of these themes came together in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Published in April 1939, the novel described the impact of drought, mechanization, and corporate farming through the fictional story of the Joad family. Tractored off their land, the Joads migrated to California in search of new opportunity. Resilient, heroic, thoroughly American, the Joads represented the quintessential victims of the Depression. That fall, the director John Ford began shooting the film version of Steinbeck’s novel. As Ford translated fiction into cinema, Robert Flaherty worked on a parallel project. Traveling around America, he tried to document the erosion of soil and society and to make sense of the problems and possibilities of his native land.22 Russell Lord Beholds the Land

Before Flaherty had returned to the United States, Russell Lord was hired to write the film script and consult with Flaherty about agricultural issues. Both Lord and his wife Kate had grown up in rural Maryland, but their adult lives were metropolitan—they had lived in San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C. After years of covering agriculture for a number of magazines, Lord took a job with the Department of Agriculture during the heady first year of the New Deal. Writing speeches and articles that were delivered or signed by figures like Roosevelt and Rexford Tugwell, Lord began as just “one of a battery of ghosts, with typewriters lined up” in the Department of Agriculture. Lord supported many New Deal agricultural policies, but he chafed at the bureaucratic restrictions permeating the capital. So he and his wife bought an abandoned, twenty-two-acre farm in Maryland, “seventy miles out of the Washington atmosphere,” and moved there in 1934.23

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A year later, Lord received a phone call from Bennett, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, asking him to prepare a report on soil erosion. While Bennett explained the project to him, Lord looked over his desk and gazed at the rolling fields and slopes out his window. The soil was still there, he thought to himself, secure on land that had been settled and farmed for over two hundred years. Lord knew about the Dust Bowl, but he did not believe that erosion was widespread or worthy of serious concern.24 Despite his doubts, Lord agreed to write the report. Over the next three years, he traveled throughout the United States on what he called a “journey of rediscovery,” learning how to see and understand erosion, talking with farmers and government scientists, witnessing the work of the Soil Conservation Service. He learned that dust storms were only the most visible, most dramatic examples of a problem that plagued farms all over the nation. He learned that the steady loss of topsoil caused by water runoff—the almost imperceptible washing away of land—accounted for most of the nation’s erosion. The journey alerted him to the dire need for more conservation measures and for the development of a new ethic toward the soil. “I believe in the menace of erosion now,” he would write in 1938. “I am afraid of it.”25 After completing the government report, Lord expanded the text and turned it into a book. Published in 1938, Behold Our Land implored Americans to look at the earth more closely, to observe the patterns of land use that were steadily destroying the soil. Lord argued that American attitudes toward the land were formed in the crucible of the frontier, in the landscapes of natural abundance where the pioneers had settled. With the frontier closed, the nation needed to develop a new, more responsible set of values toward the land. Lord imagined the narrative of American history moving from its early, pioneer stage to a modern, mature phase characterized by an ethic of stewardship. “This may sound abrupt,” he wrote, “but Americans are old enough to be told about the soil.”26 And Lord told Americans about the soil. He told them about the process of soil formation, the number of centuries that it took to make an inch of topsoil, and the contrast between the eons of geologic time and the rapid rate of soil destruction. He told them about the lessons of world history, the nations and empires that had destroyed the soil. He told them about the future, about planning and conservation, about what the New Deal was doing to save the soil. During his visit to a Soil Conservation Service demonstration area in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, Lord got to fly in a plane over the land. The bird’s-eye view enabled him to appreciate the overall design, the “marbled” appearance of the fields below. “It is exciting and beautiful,” he wrote, describing the scene, “and it looks right the way those crescent rows take endlessly varying form from

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the long slow slopes; the way those new-formed fields . . . and pasture interlock, hug that soil, protect it, and support each other. Each embracing strip is a rotated garment, cut to the lay of the land.”27 Like Pare Lorentz and David Lilienthal, who used panoramic, aerial perspective to promote New Deal conservation, Lord celebrated the ability of the federal government to bring the land under its beneficent gaze. He saw a new design, an aesthetic pattern emerging out of the technological manipulation of nature. The alternating bands of crops and the orderly, rounded shape of the fields revealed a work of art, a beautiful way to restore the balance between humans and the nonhuman world. The aerial view showed him garments cut to the lay of the land, fields that promised a new world. Flying up in the clouds, looking down on Muskogee County, Lord could see America reborn, could see the pioneer spirit replaced by a rational, managerial vision. He beheld the land and imagined the future. In his book, Lord included pictures of a Soil Conservation Service demonstration area, but he felt dissatisfied with the images. He complained that still photographs could not adequately capture what he had seen. “Photographs help,” he wrote, “yet even the best air-shots lack in color, life, and movement. The actual picture swings, shines, and lives as the old plane banks, whirls, and sideslips.” The frozen images could not represent the “living picture below.” Lord wanted his readers to imagine the pictures in motion, to experience a cinematic vision of the land. The next summer, after Flaherty returned to America, it seemed that Lord would get his wish.28 To Conquer the Machine

The initial plans for The Land were drawn up inside the Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Film Service would execute these plans. With care, the Film Service officials would help Flaherty produce the documentary. With efficiency, they would prepare the research, organize the production crew, make the travel arrangements, and assist in the editing process. The Land, they assured the officials over at the AAA, would most certainly be distributed to theaters by the end of 1939. Yet the making of the film became a story of delays and confusion, of deadlines being pushed back, of officials wondering if Flaherty would ever complete the film. Flaherty’s working methods clashed with the AAA’s hope of a speedy production. He was the artist who explored. To gather enough material, he traveled through the grain fields of the Midwest, the cotton fields of the South, and the vast factory farms of the West. He traveled over 20,000 miles and

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4.3. Farm family in Pennsylvania, still photograph from The Land. Used by permission of The Robert and Frances Flaherty Study Center, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

shot over 75,000 feet of film. He was still filming in early 1940, after the first deadline had passed. Then there were bureaucratic troubles. Republicans in Congress threatened to slash funding for many New Deal programs, including the U.S. Film Service. In an effort to protect the film’s future, Lorentz and Flaherty shifted control of production to the AAA, which proved to be a wise move, because in April 1940, despite the pleas of President Roosevelt, Congress voted to discontinue funds for the Film Service.29 Flaherty was given an office inside the Department of Agriculture. For the next year, he worked with his editor, Helen van Dongen, on turning all the footage into a coherent film. They wandered through what van Dongen described as the “miles of somber corridors” in the department building. They screened, they cut, and they reassembled. Flaherty worked with Lord on the narration; and van Dongen convinced Flaherty to speak the words himself. Instead of the authoritative voice typically found in government documentaries, Flaherty’s untrained voice made the film sound more personal, more emotional. Finally, in April 1942, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Land had its official premiere, where an audience of museum officials, representatives from the AAA, and documentary artists viewed the film with great anticipation.30

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Like The Plow and The River, The Land visualizes an ideal past, a beginning that establishes the setting for the tale of decline that follows. Yet it is not a virgin wilderness, but instead a family farm in Pennsylvania—a landscape already shaped by human contact—that provides the starting point for the film. Following shots of a stone farmhouse and fertile fields, the narration begins: “It takes good land to raise a house like this. It takes good farming to have full barns, full bins.” The camera focuses on a farmer and his wife, who is holding their child as they stand in front of their house (fig. 4.3). “Good people,” Flaherty says, “of the solid old stock that settled in this country three hundred years ago. They built their houses to last forever.” A white family of “solid old stock” lives in apparent harmony with the surroundings. A draft of the script refers to the European backgrounds of the settlers: “They came here—The English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Irish, the Scotch-Irish—Three hundred years ago.” The explicit racial commentary foreshadows the later scenes, which portray the tragic decline of white farmers, the descendants of pioneers, to the status of Mexicans, Filipinos, and other nonwhite immigrant farm workers.31 All was good in Pennsylvania—the land and the architecture, the orderly arrangement of crops and fields, the harmony between people and nature. The stone farmhouse conveys a sense of rugged endurance; its functional beauty suggests the tranquil interaction of human society with the natural world. Yet “even here,” Flaherty says, as images of crumbling homes and desolate fields appear, “trouble has crept in.” The trouble emerged gradually, almost imperceptibly, like the imagery of water that flickers on the screen—the water trickles across a field, gathering strength and force until the trickle turns into a destructive rush, carrying soil along with it. “It is amazing what the wash of rain can do,” Flaherty observes. The film cuts to Tennessee, where it shows the visible effects of erosion—deep gullies, barren hills, and other signs of decay. Unlike The Plow and The River, The Land does not present an interpretation of history; it does not narrate the decline from grass to dust or show a beautiful river turning into an angry foe. Instead, the film assumes this historical background. Besides the opening shots of the Pennsylvania farm, the film focuses on the present, on the tragic conditions that plague America. As narrator, Flaherty acts as a guide through the wasteland. Like Lange and Taylor in An American Exodus, he follows a geographic narrative, moving from the Deep South to the Great Plains and then to the far West. In the South, the camera offers panoramic views of eroded fields, as Flaherty explains how tobacco and cotton—“two great soil-wasting crops”—robbed the land of its original vigor. “When soil fails,” Flaherty says, “life fails.” The film echoes the Farm Tenancy report by linking soil erosion to social erosion. The

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4.4. Plantation home with eroded field, still photograph from The Land. Used by permission of The Robert and Frances Flaherty Study Center, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

camera pans upward to reveal an empty, windowless plantation home (fig. 4.4). Adjoined by two tall trees, the bedraggled home sits atop a landscape scarred by erosion. Flaherty used panoramic, ecological vision to situate the home within a wider setting, suggesting the failure of this society to accommodate itself to the soil. After leaving the South, Flaherty travels to the Great Plains to witness the effects of “millions of tons of topsoil . . . washed into our great rivers.” Aerial shots of the Arkansas River portray its feeble flow (fig. 4.5). A once majestic river appears parched and weary, its path hindered and obscured by the tons of topsoil it must now carry. “Boats steamed up and down this river seventy years ago,” Flaherty explains. “You can almost walk across it now.” The aerial perspective revealed a fundamental imbalance between land, water, and people and pointed to the ecological chaos created by the menace of erosion. More panoramic scenes follow—of dust blowing across eroded fields. To comprehend the Dust Bowl, Flaherty turns to the Bible, quoting the words of Job: “If my land cry out against me, or that the furrows likewise thereof complain, . . . let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley.” Job, an innocent man, suffers for no apparent reason, loses his family and home, and cries out in despair, asking why so much misery should be visited upon

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4.5. Aerial view of the Arkansas River, frame enlargement from The Land. Used by permission of The Robert and Frances Flaherty Study Center, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

someone so virtuous. Like Lord, who quoted these same verses in Behold Our Land, Flaherty made Job’s story analogous to Depression-era Americans, yet he also wanted to cast a general sense of blame, of national guilt for squandering the soil. His appeal to the Bible coincided with the proposal of Walter Lowdermilk, a Soil Conservation Service official, to update the Ten Commandments by adding the “The Eleventh Commandment”: a call for stewardship of the earth. “Thou shalt inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward,” Lowdermilk wrote in his proposed commandment, “conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from soil erosion. . . . If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land thy fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground.” For Flaherty, Lord, and many New Deal officials, catastrophes such as the Dust Bowl represented divine punishment for the ecological sin of failing to act as stewards of the soil.32 Leaving the Great Plains, Flaherty follows white migrants journeying to Arizona. “And what do they find?” he asks. “Filipinos and Mexicans do the work.” The camera cuts to the Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border, where it shows Mexicans picking carrots and beans in large fields. The film portrays these nonwhite immigrants as gladly doing the work, as accepting a

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low wage, for they believe that it is “good pay.” While immigrants find new opportunity in America, the descendants of “pioneers” have lost their land and their homes; they have been reduced to the level of Filipinos and Mexicans. The film uses ideas of race to generate sympathy for the white migrants. It is not only that they are poor; they are also white. They are “real” Americans, but they have become dispossessed in their own land. Unlike the radical writer Carey McWilliams, whose Factories in the Field (1939) documented the exploitation and resistance of all farm workers, including Mexicans and Filipinos, Flaherty followed Steinbeck’s emphasis on the plight of white migrants, treating their story as the greatest tragedy of the Great Depression.33 In The Land, technology appears as a menacing force, a destructive, but inevitable, feature of modern society. It appears out of control, moving with its own momentum, tearing up the land, displacing people from their jobs, causing misery and confusion. It appears, like the shots of a bulldozer filmed in Minnesota, as a machine “crashing through the timber like a pre-historic monster on a rampage.” The machine pushes boulders out of its way and crunches the defenseless trees. Filmed from a low angle, the machine seems overpowering and threatening. The camera cuts to other machines—cotton pickers, corn huskers, wheat harvesters. The images become more eerie, as machines dominate the space of the screen, leaving little room for human beings. “You don’t see many people in these fields any more, even at harvest time,” Flaherty comments. “Out in these fields farther west,” as shots of the Plains appear, “you don’t see many people either.” The vision seems dystopic—the land denatured, farms overrun by machines, people ousted from their fields. While making the film, Flaherty often felt confused about how to balance the themes of mechanization, migration, and conservation. He tried to grapple with the contradictions of the New Deal—with the Jeffersonian rhetoric versus the policies that seemed to further the industrialization of agriculture and the displacement of people from the land. At one point, he asked Lorentz for advice. Passionate about the New Deal, Lorentz had always celebrated the Roosevelt administration, yet even he expressed momentary doubt and confusion. In search of an answer, he typed a memo to his assistant Arch Mercey. “Please set down in one sentence,” Lorentz wrote, “a description of everything the Department of Agriculture is doing besides Soil Conservation about the farm problem. In other words, it has a tenancy program and this and that, but, in words of one syllable, what is it doing to conserve human beings?”34 Flaherty’s film provided answers to the problem posed by Lorentz by looking backward to the past and forward to an optimistic vision of the future. Flaherty must have recognized that the Jeffersonian dream was unattainable for many

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farmers, so he tried to salvage that ideal through cinematic nostalgia. In the film, one scene portrays a migrant man, who, according to Flaherty, previously owned a farm in the Cumberland Mountains. Pastoral images flicker across the screen—rolling hills and lush fields—as Flaherty, who claims to repeat the man’s words, describes his fantasy of returning to this lost utopia. Before making The Land, Flaherty had sought to preserve images of the primeval past, to record “disappearing” peoples on film. Worrying about the fate of the American farmer, he again tried to arrest the passage of time, to salvage a vanishing culture, to return to a virtuous past when the American people felt connected to their land. Flaherty combined this salvage project with a confident glimpse into the technological future. “It is incredible,” Flaherty explained, in an interview with the New York Times. “With one foot in Utopia, where the machine can free us all, we have yet to dominate it. That is the problem of our time—to conquer the machine.” Reifying “the machine,” Flaherty told the ambivalent stories of technology, the stories told often by New Dealers. The first was the story of decline, the story of machines dominating society and outstripping the human imagination. For the dislocation, for the poverty, for the ecological disasters, the machine could be blamed. This was followed by the story of rebirth in which the federal government used machines to rescue American society. To conquer the machine would mean starting over, establishing a moral framework for technology and shaping modern civilization into a utopia for all. “Today we stand at the threshold of a great calamity or a great new era,” Flaherty continued. “The decision is ours.”35 The ending of The Land imagines a way to establish a balance between American society, technology, and the natural world. The closing shots feature aerial shots of a Soil Conservation Service demonstration area (figs. 4.6 and 4.7). Just as Lord had described in his book, Flaherty flew in a plane and filmed the curves and contours, the bands and terraces that marked the new landscape. The aerial view presented a world in miniature, a place regulated and controlled by the federal government. A microcosm of order, the scene below suggested the New Deal’s faith in progress and its confidence in the future. “The face of the land made over,” Flaherty says, “made strong again, made strong forever. We are saving the soil. With our fabulous machines, we can make every last acre of this country strong again.” These scenes marked a partial return to the optimistic vision of Grant Wood’s painting Fall Plowing (fig. 2.1 above). But while Wood had celebrated the pioneer spirit for creating fertile, productive fields, Flaherty found order and abundance generated by government planning and management of natural resources.36

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4.6. Aerial view of contour plowing, still photograph from The Land. Used by permission of The Robert and Frances Flaherty Study Center, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

Flaherty’s aerial perspective also evoked the technological sublime of the airplane, the power of humans to defy gravity through flight. His enthusiasm for this perspective followed the representational strategies of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where many exhibits offered spectators the illusion of flight, the experience of looking down to see the world of tomorrow. Hovering above the exhibits, staring at the miniature models below, audiences at the fair glimpsed a corporate-inspired technological utopia, a society where manufacturers and scientific experts guaranteed happiness for all. Like the World’s Fair exhibits, Flaherty’s view from the airplane turned the landscape into a kind of canvas, a place where scientists and planners could paint their dreams of order and control.37 This solution helped to resolve—at least in the context of a film narrative— some of the contradictions of New Deal agricultural policy. By absorbing the machine into an aesthetic vision, Flaherty’s imagery obscured the negative effects of New Deal policy, particularly the displacement of people from the land. The film showed the miserable effects of mechanization, only to end with a call for further mechanization. His modernist embrace of technology turned attention away from the faces of the migrants and toward the engineered utopia, the landscape of beauty and abundance promised by New Deal conservation. The Land shows the federal government using science and technology to

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4.7. Aerial view of soil conservation, still photograph from The Land. Used by permission of The Robert and Frances Flaherty Study Center, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California.

solve the nation’s problems. Just as the New Deal tried to shape the land into a new design, Flaherty used his camera to redeem the machine. With his ability to control the camera—a technology of representation—he wanted to rein in Frankenstein; he wanted to conquer the machine and will a better world. Like government officials, Flaherty used technology to imagine the future. He presented viewers with a flicker of permanence, a vision of America enduring and prevailing. After seeing the film, Janet Flanner of the New Yorker told Flaherty that his documentary expressed a new conception of history and captured—even defined—the spirit of the age. Several days later she wrote him a letter, explaining her thoughts further. Flanner claimed that the word “democracy” had, at one time, given a “temporary title” to history. “Now there is a new type of history,” she wrote, “history apperceived through materialism, lifted almost to a spiritual slant. . . . Well, THAT historical apperception you have photographed, as if it were a fertile facet of nature’s own face, in your film of the land.” Flanner believed that Flaherty had given a spiritual meaning to the machine age. With his camera, he had merged politics with art, nature with humanity. “The land will be our salvation, politically, in many ways,” Flanner continued, “and you have seen that, felt it in your artist’s heart, cranked it with your fine lov-

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ing camera eye. That’s why I think millions of people should see this film.” She closed by writing, “I was brought up in Indiana amidst grain and farmers’ woes, and the beauty of the fields. Contour farming came after my time. But it is as beautiful as a Cézanne lithograph, the way you show it.” By presenting this aesthetic vision of soil conservation, Flaherty had reconciled the bureaucratic rationality of the New Deal with the inherent beauty of the American landscape. He had given history its new title.38 The Dustbin of History

Flanner hoped that millions of Americans would see The Land. So did the writers, the anonymous “battery of ghosts,” at the Department of Agriculture. As the film neared completion, they prepared numerous publicity materials. “Into a world torn by war and uncertainty,” they wrote, “when civilization again doubts that the marvels of modern progress make sense, comes a motion picture with a new grasp on fundamental values.” They extolled the methods and talent of Flaherty, who, by traveling “from ocean to ocean” and filming “from border to border,” had “performed a feat unparalleled in the history of documentary pictures.” Viewers would see “farm people, just as the camera found them,” and they would learn how, “through the greatest soil conservation effort in history,” the government was “moving toward the goal of permanent security for the people on the land and abundance for everybody.”39 The AAA writers thought of many ways for movie theaters and local agricultural officials to promote the film. “As soon as ‘The Land’ is booked,” a letter to theater managers explained, “it is suggested that you get in touch with [local] officials and work out with them a program of publicity and promotion. It is their film and they want the public to see it—they stand ready to help in any way they can.” Their suggestions included mailing letters to “all farmers of the surrounding area” and arranging for announcements and interviews on radio stations. Together, the movie theaters and AAA officials could sponsor writing contests and “offer prizes to school boys and girls” for the best essays on issues raised by the film. In communities all over America, special events would accompany the showing of The Land. The oldest farmers in each area would receive free tickets, counties would proclaim the opening day of the film as Farmer’s Day, and the local chambers of commerce would sponsor window displays about agriculture, land use, and conservation.40 If theater managers decided to schedule radio interviews, they would have a script waiting for them, because the AAA writers, in their earnest preparations, had drafted the script for a model interview. The radio announcer, according

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to the script, would begin by musing about the symbolism of the soil, about what it meant when a farmer held “a handful of dirt from his field and let it slowly trickle through his fingers.” He would then welcome “Mr. _______,” a local agricultural official, who would announce when The Land would begin playing in their community. After the official described the film as a “part of our nation-wide soil conservation program,” the radio announcer would suggest that “the land itself is the central character of the story.” “That’s right,” Mr. ________ would respond, “but the story is much more than a story. It’s actually American life.” At the end of the interview, the announcer would tell listeners, “It won’t be long until [you] have an opportunity to see the picture.”41 Yet few Americans would ever see the film. By 1942, American image making had embarked on a new course. The United States had entered World War II, and government propagandists called for reassuring, hopeful imagery. Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration sent memos to his photographers demanding pictures of happy, well-fed, and energetic men and women. The government no longer wanted to show images of Americans suffering. Fearing that The Land might be suppressed, one agricultural official wrote to his director, “To me it is a social document that belongs to all the people. . . . Somehow, I don’t feel that we could call ourselves Americans if we took an indifferent stand on distribution of this picture.”42 But amidst the changed climate, The Land seemed doomed. Russell Lord attempted to rescue the film from its imminent suppression. He suggested that The Land be shown along with Tanks, a government documentary about the defense buildup. He helped draft an introduction—to be read by Vice President Henry Wallace—that would explain the common links between the two films. Wallace would tell viewers that both films portray how technology could act as a servant to American society. Lord reported to Flaherty “that Wallace is very keen about the idea.” “I believe,” Lord continued, “that this is going to come out alright and that the picture will be a smash sensation.” But the introduction was never filmed, and The Land was soon withdrawn from government circulation.43 Despite its optimistic ending, the film seemed a relic of the Depression; it was an unwelcome reminder of the nation’s darkest hour. Janet Flanner believed that the film presented an eloquent statement of the new vision of history. Nevertheless, days after its premiere, The Land was cast away, relegated to history’s dustbin. The fate of The Land mirrored large shifts in American politics, reflecting not just the outbreak of World War II but also the changing ideology of American liberalism. Beginning in the late 1930s, but particularly in the war years,

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liberals became less hostile toward capitalism and more willing to accept a less interventionist role for the federal government in the economy. Meanwhile, during World War II, agricultural policy abandoned its concern for soil conservation and encouraged full-scale production. By the time Flaherty completed the film, the New Deal had already ended. As an ephemeral artifact of the time, The Land also suggests the ephemeral quality of New Deal conservation.44 After World War II, leaders of government and industry continued to link American nationalism to the mastery of nature; they saw technological power as integral to creating the American century. But they rejected the conservation ethic promoted by New Deal policy. The Soil Conservation Service, the TVA, and other agencies were shorn of their more far-reaching plans to protect natural resources. The drive for American unity also underwrote the growth of militarism and its devastation of the environment. During the cold war, over half of the TVA’s power output was used by Atomic Energy Commission plants. The power of the river became the power that helped propel the atomic age. New Dealers hoped that technology could cure social and ecological problems; in the postwar period, this hope transformed into the steadfast faith that technology was society’s panacea.45 Aldo Leopold, the prescient environmental writer, feared that conservation would follow this path. Initially, Leopold had high hopes for the New Deal. In 1933, after accepting a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin, he encouraged Hugh Bennett to establish the nation’s first soil conservation demonstration area in Coon Valley, Wisconsin. Once rich and fertile, the valley had suffered from years of mistreatment. “Coon Valley, in short,” Leopold explained “is one of the thousand farm communities which, through the abuse of its originally rich soil, has not only filled the national dinner pail, but has created the Mississippi flood problem, the navigation problem, the overproduction problem, and the problem of its own future continuity.” By 1935, Leopold was heartened by the changes he observed in Coon Valley. He applauded the work of soil conservationists and glimpsed what he believed was a new set of attitudes developing among the local farmers. In particular, he cited their newfound concern for planting trees. “American lumbermen may have become so steeped in economic determinism as actually to lack the personal desire to grow trees, but not Coon Valley farmers!” he reported. “Their solicitude for the little evergreens is sometimes almost touching.”46 Yet Leopold became disillusioned with New Deal conservation. He felt that it did not go far enough, that it appealed only to the economic interest of farmers in maintaining the fertility of their soil. “We asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save his soil, and he has done just that, and only that,”

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Leopold wrote in 1947. Until conservationists challenged the notion that property owners could do whatever they wished with their land, true conservation would never happen. Upholding the ideal of the public good, Leopold challenged a central idea embedded in economic liberalism and American constitutional history. “The land-relation,” he continued, “is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” The soil conservation districts established in Coon Valley and other places did not encourage the development of what Leopold called the “land ethic.” The New Deal’s experiment failed to create a feeling of self-restraint among farmers, a sense of obligation toward the land. “The District is a beautiful piece of social machinery,” Leopold concluded, “but it is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and too anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of his obligations. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land.”47 Leopold believed that Americans wanted to apply technical solutions to cultural problems. Rather than questioning the values that cause ecological destruction, they put their faith in engineering; rather than pushing for ethical reform, they hoped that technology, that bigger and better machines would save the land. As early as 1938, Leopold commented on the technological penchant of New Dealers. In their rush to build huge dams, they ignored the ecological costs involved, such as the destruction of salmon populations in the Columbia River, an area where the federal government constructed many dams during this period. Commenting on the fate of the salmon, Leopold argued: “By an axiom long in the making, the man-made resource must be superior to the natural one. I do not know whether the engineers built the axiom or the axiom built the engineers. The result is the same.” Ultimately, Leopold believed that New Deal conservation failed to resolve “the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”48 As Leopold developed his ethical approach to conservation, the New Deal order began to dissolve. For conservationists, this dissolution meant that the federal government became less concerned with the protection of natural resources. For documentary artists, it meant that the government became less interested in sponsoring their work. Meanwhile, major corporations, especially Standard Oil of New Jersey, began to commission documentary art. After leaving the government in 1943, Roy Stryker, former director of the Farm Security Administration photography project, went to work for Standard Oil to direct

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its public relations photography. Standard Oil also hired Robert Flaherty to make Louisiana Story, a documentary film about oil exploration. Released in 1949, the film presented a benign view of the oil industry. Set in an isolated Cajun area of Louisiana, the film portrayed, in the words of one reviewer, “the impact of a vital modern industry on a simple and even backward people.” Like The Land, but in a smoother, more confident fashion, the film imagined a reconciliation between technology and the environment. Equating corporate interests with American interests, it made progress appear not only inevitable but also magical and beautiful.49 For other documentary artists, though, the postwar period generated considerable doubt; they began to see technology as an engine of destruction. In 1957, Life magazine wanted Dorothea Lange to produce a photo essay on the building of the Monticello Dam in California. When constructed, the dam would flood the Berryessa Valley, turning it into a reservoir for the state’s expanding suburbs. Working with the photographer Pirkle Jones, Lange chose to focus on the agricultural community that was about to be lost and to document its destruction. Lange and Jones took photographs of farmhouses demolished, of trees uprooted by bulldozers, of human bodies disinterred from graveyards. They recorded the water rising, flooding the land. The images seemed too disturbing to Life’s editors, who decided to reject the photo essay. In 1960 it was published by the photography magazine Aperture. Entitled Death of a Valley, the piece began with an introduction by the photographer Minor White, who drew this message from the photographs: “Bulldozers are only slightly slower than atomic bombs . . . [and] the nature of destruction is not altered by calling it the price of progress.”50 Pare Lorentz also worried about the direction America was heading. He became particularly concerned about the hazards of radiation and the ecological consequences of the arms race. Believing that Americans did not understand the dangers of the bomb, he bought the motion picture rights to David Bradley’s No Place to Hide (1948), a book that recorded the damages caused by atomic bomb testing at the Bikini Atoll. According to Bradley, the Bikini tests represented an ominous sign of things to come: “Hastily planned and hastily carried out, they may have only sketched in the gross outlines of the real problem; nevertheless, those outlines show pretty clearly the shadow of the colossus which looms behind tomorrow.” After writing a script and assembling a cast, Lorentz spent four years trying to gain financial backing for the documentary. But his quest for funds was unsuccessful, and he never made the film.51 In the years that followed, Lorentz became involved in other projects. He helped Rachel Carson write the environmental plank for the Democratic Party

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platform in 1960. He consulted with young filmmakers and gave lectures at universities. And he thought a lot about the New Deal. Beginning in 1947, Lorentz devoted many years to a monumental project called The Days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Initially, he was asked by a publisher to put together a photographic biography of Roosevelt. He abandoned this book because he wanted “to take the time to do a chronicle, not of photographs, but of facts.” As Lorentz explained to Eleanor Roosevelt, he wanted to document her husband’s entire life, “recording where he was, what he did, whom he saw and indicating what he said each day of life.”52 Troubled by the threats of radiation and pollution, Lorentz must have found solace in this project. It allowed him to remember the optimism generated by Roosevelt and the New Deal. He could lose himself in the spirit of the thirties. It was a time when America faced an enormous crisis. Yet it was also a time when many Americans imagined a better world being created; they imagined the nation creating harmony between technology and the environment. Thinking about those days, Lorentz must have found some comfort. Thinking about the future, he may have wondered if conservationists would ever dream like that again.

5 Natu r e on the C of fee Table

David Brower decorated his office with many posters, all images of wild nature. He worked on the tenth floor of the Mills Tower in downtown San Francisco, and the images provided a feeling of calm, a kind of sanctuary in a place otherwise defined by the sound of the phone ringing and the sight of papers accumulating on his desk. He wore a suit and tie to work, but the images reminded him of places where he had hiked and climbed, places in Hawaii, along the Colorado River, and in the Cascade Mountains, all places he desperately wanted to protect (fig. 5.1). In 1969, after serving as executive director of the Sierra Club for seventeen years, Brower could look back on many accomplishments. During his tenure, the Sierra Club had grown rapidly, from 7,000 members in 1952 to over 70,000 by 1969. The club had played a crucial role in saving some of America’s forests, mountains, and rivers from threatened development and had helped push legislation through Congress that preserved nine million acres of wilderness. For Brower, the images—all selected from Sierra Club books—reflected one of his proudest achievements. Under Brower’s leadership, the club launched the Exhibit Format series, coffee table books featuring photographs by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and other artists, along with texts by Henry David Thoreau, Wallace Stegner, and other American nature writers. The books generated much publicity for the club, garnered many awards, and helped bring Brower 117

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5.1. Joe Munroe, David Brower in Sierra Club Office, 1968, © Joe Munroe, used by permission of the artist.

into the national spotlight. They were large, heavy books, measuring over ten inches wide by over a foot long. As the name of the series suggests, each book was designed to simulate the experience of a photography exhibit. Brower wanted “a page size big enough to carry a given image’s dynamic. The eye,” he explained, “must be required to move about within the boundaries of the image, not encompass it all in one glance.” Between 1960, when the first book in the series appeared, and 1969, when Brower resigned from his position as executive director, the club published almost twenty Exhibit Format titles. During these years, Brower spent much of his time planning, designing, and editing books. He became more and more convinced that the coffee table book was the most effective way to promote the cause of wilderness preservation.1 The environmental coffee table book emerged as part of a campaign to persuade Congress to enact the Wilderness Bill, legislation that would guarantee the permanence of the nation’s wild places. First introduced in 1956, the Wilderness Bill crawled through the House and Senate for almost a decade, where it was amended and diluted, revised and reintroduced, passed and repassed, and finally signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson—who viewed it as an element of the Great Society—on September 4, 1964. A milestone in American environmental policy, the Wilderness Act of 1964 established a national wilderness system on federal lands and provided for the statutory protection of

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wild places. It also offered a definition of wilderness “as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Likewise, Sierra Club artists used the camera to present nature as sacred and sublime; their photographs encouraged audiences to view wilderness as a place where people are visitors who do not remain.2 During the 1930s, documentary films had portrayed environmental reforms to mass audiences, uniting spectators through sublime images of disaster and transcendent scenes of technology restoring the landscape. In contrast to these collective experiences of nature, the Sierra Club appealed to Americans as individuals, as solitary readers and viewers of coffee table books. The Exhibit Format series continued the environmental jeremiad tradition, fusing words and images to judge and condemn American society. Yet Sierra Club books placed less emphasis on the interdependence of humans and the environment, focusing instead on the therapeutic meanings of wilderness to postwar Americans. Worried about the arms race and the destructive potential of technology, wilderness advocates celebrated a world without machines, a space apart from the problems of modern civilization. In marketing the wilderness to the American public, the Sierra Club engaged with two key themes of postwar history: the politics of liberalism and the culture of conformity. Wilderness advocates followed postwar liberals in asserting that the state could provide for the public good. They pointed to the contradiction between private wealth and public poverty, to the growing affluence of American society in contrast to the failure of the government to meet basic needs of the citizenry. Sierra Club leaders also joined cultural critics in arguing that postwar society was bland and conformist, that it subjugated the individual and weakened personal autonomy. Wilderness advocates viewed psychic health as a public good; they claimed that subjective needs and spiritual longings could be addressed by the state. The federal government, they believed, could protect individual autonomy through the preservation of wild places. By linking ideology to personal identity, the Sierra Club tried to inject passion into politics and to present environmental reform as a type of secular salvation. Although David Brower experimented with other kinds of images, including motion pictures, he believed that the coffee table book offered the most powerful medium to present the Sierra Club’s message. “It has long been recognized,” he explained, “that the book, for all that TV, radio, and periodicals may do, still has a status of its own in influencing thought. It lasts. It is kept and referred to. It is quoted. This is particularly true of the exhibit-format books.” The book, with its weightiness and materiality, was something that

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would be around, long after a decision was made or a vote was cast. Motion pictures and other media—as Robert Flaherty had discovered with the fate of The Land in 1942—could easily be discarded and forgotten. The book, Brower believed, would endure. It would always be there, serving as a reminder of wild places preserved or wild places destroyed, weighing on the conscience of those who voted against the wilderness. For a campaign committed to permanence, to ensuring that nature would be protected and honored for years to come, the coffee table book seemed the ideal means of expression.3 The Exhibit Format series emerged at a time when more Americans were consuming images of the natural world. From the wildlife documentaries of Walt Disney and Marlin Perkins to the popular tourist magazine Arizona Highways, the camera presented and circulated visions of wild nature. The Sierra Club, in establishing its series of expensive coffee table books, sought a particular niche in this larger market. According to Brower, the books would appeal to “leaders in industry and government” and would “reach the most urbane people of all,” people who had the power to shape national policy. He wanted the books to become subjects of public debate, generating discussions among “the contemporary press, plus the letter-writing public, the law-passing legislators, and the law-administering managers who are determining right now the irrevocable fate of our land.” He believed that the exceptional design and reproduction quality of the photographs would capture the imagination of influential Americans, people looking for something other than the standard fare of nature imagery appearing on television or in magazines. Targeting affluent Americans, the Sierra Club presented consumption as a form of politics: by buying the books, consumers could express their concern for nature and join a movement devoted to its protection.4 The Exhibit Format series not only mirrored the values of the wilderness campaign; it also became a major site for making and contesting the definition of environmental reform. As Brower had hoped, Sierra Club books received considerable attention in magazines and newspapers. Reviewers praised the artistry of the photographs and the message of the texts, linking the books to ongoing debates about wilderness policy and the future of the American landscape. Yet audiences also argued about the meanings of the books, particularly their conflicting and contradictory visions of environmental reform. From newspaper editors and letter writers to Sierra Club leaders and prominent politicians, Americans found internal tensions in the books and grappled with their implications for the conservation movement. Over time, the books themselves would change—moving beyond static definitions of wilderness to ecological conceptions of the landscape. They also began to appear in a cheaper paperback

1. Eliot Porter, pool in brook, Brook Pond, New Hampshire, October 4, 1953, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.60.51.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

2. Eliot Porter, Hudson River, frozen, Adirondacks, New York, 1958, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.4309.1.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

3. Eliot Porter, spruce trees in fog, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, August 20, 1954, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.3026.3.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

4. Eliot Porter, maple leaves and pine needles, Tamworth, New Hampshire, October 3, 1956, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.4068.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

5. Eliot Porter, ovenbird, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.52.471.2.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

6. Eliot Porter, green reflections in stream, Moki Canyon Creek, Glen Canyon, Utah, September 2, 1962, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.5127.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

7. Eliot Porter, Sunrise, clay gulch, San Juan River, Utah, 1962, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.5093.1.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

8. Eliot Porter, twilight canyon, Glen Canyon, Utah, May 26, 1962, dye imbibition (Kodak dye transfer), P1990.51.5103.  1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

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edition as part of an effort to widen the organization’s base by appealing to the youth movement and the counterculture. In the late 1960s, the club published a book featuring a student strumming an acoustic guitar while gazing out at the ocean. Long before the emergence of the counterculture, though, Brower and the Sierra Club had already made individual expression central to social change. Through the Exhibit Format series, they had shown that the personal could be political. David Brower and the Sierra Club

In the summer of 1933, David Brower, who had recently withdrawn from the University of California at Berkeley, backpacked through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. One morning on the trail, he recalled seeing “this bearded type, camera and tripod over his shoulder, coming up through the timberline forest. ‘You must be Ansel Adams,’” Brower said to him. They exchanged a few words; Brower told the photographer how much he admired his work, while Adams complained that the cumulus clouds “were still too fuzzy to photograph.”5 Two years before this encounter, Brower had first seen Adams’s photographs gracing the Sierra Club Bulletin. Appearing as the frontispieces of several issues, the images caught Brower’s eye. “Although the Bulletin’s words would get to me later,” he recalled, “Ansel’s photographs got to me immediately.” Brower became a frequent visitor to the club office in downtown San Francisco, where he would peruse and sometimes purchase back issues of the Bulletin. In the years to come, Brower and Adams would become close friends. They would climb mountains together; they would talk about photography and politics; working together as leaders of the Sierra Club, they would develop new ways to use the camera as an instrument of conservation.6 Brower joined the club soon after returning from his backpacking trip in 1933. At the time, he had a purely recreational interest in the natural world. He wanted to admire the scenery and “to enjoy wilderness,” he said, “without being particularly concerned about what was happening to it.” “I was not,” he continued, “‘saved’ as a Sierra Club preservationist.” For Brower, the club seemed a congenial group that would nurture his talents as a mountain climber. Reading the old issues of the Bulletin, though, he learned that the club had once been a different kind of organization, one that had engaged in major battles to protect wild places.7 Founded in 1892 by a group of Californians, the Sierra Club maintained a geographical focus on the Sierra Nevada region. Members participated in the outings program and initiated an annual series of “high trips,” allowing them to

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hike and camp together in the California mountains. On occasion, club leaders launched campaigns to defend wilderness areas; none was more dramatic or more noteworthy than the failed effort—led by John Muir along with Herbert Gleason—to prevent a dam from being built in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. In the years that followed, however, the club became a minor factor in American society, a local hiking group that periodically entered the political realm.8 Brower learned this history by reading back issues of the Bulletin, cover to cover, “the way,” he explained, “one would read the Bible.” He became “‘saved’” as a preservationist a few years later. Brower’s use of evangelical language to describe his involvement in the Sierra Club could be read as something more than metaphorical. He was christened as a Presbyterian, the religion of his mother, but his Baptist grandmother felt that this form of baptism, “a few drops of water on the head,” was not effective. So she made sure that the young boy also took “the Baptist dunking.” Baptized twice, exposed to two varieties of Protestantism by two fervent believers in his family, Brower found as he grew up that neither religion “stuck that well.” Yet he often referred to conservation in religious terms, calling it “an ethic and conscience in everything we do, whatever our field of endeavor.” “We are,” he believed, “in a kind of religion, an ethic with regard to terrain.”9 As he became more committed to the ideas of conservation, Brower also became more involved in the Sierra Club, editing the Bulletin, leading club outings, and serving on the board of directors. In 1952, he became the club’s first executive director, a full-time paid position that he held for seventeen years. Brower helped turn the Sierra Club into a national organization that focused on issues beyond California, shaped federal policy, and used innovative methods—including coffee table books—to arouse an unprecedented level of concern for the American wilderness. Brower combined charisma with creativity, boldness with moral passion; he had an unblinking devotion to the cause of conservation.10 Brower became a spiritual defender of the landscape at the same time that Americans were visiting national parks in record-setting numbers. As the United States economy surged during the postwar boom, many Americans enjoyed higher wages, allowing more people to vacation in the national parks and monuments. By 1955, Yosemite and Yellowstone recorded over one million visitors each, while attendance soared to nineteen million in the park system as a whole. For many Americans, a vacation to the parks resembled a secular pilgrimage, a visit to places that survived, in the words of one conservationist, as “samples of the original America.”11 The growing popularity of national parks coincided with a new threat to

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the park system: in 1950, the writer Bernard DeVoto revealed that the Bureau of Reclamation planned to build a dam at Echo Park inside Dinosaur National Monument. DeVoto, who had grown up in Utah and traveled extensively in the West, was angered by this proposal. “Echo Park Dam,” he explained in the Saturday Evening Post, “would back water so far that throughout the whole extent of Lodore Canyon the Green River, the tempestuous, pulse-stirring river of John Wesley Powell, would become a mere millpond. . . . Echo Park and its magnificent rock formations would be submerged. Dinosaur National Monument as a scenic spectacle would cease to exist.”12 Using apocalyptic language, DeVoto indicted the Bureau of Reclamation, a powerful federal agency that played a significant role in shaping the modern West. During the Depression, the bureau gained much renown for its work on the Hoover Dam, the dam that controlled the raging Colorado and became a symbol of technological progress. After World War II, the bureau set its sights on the entire upper Colorado region. Citing the need for irrigation and hydroelectric power, the bureau developed the Colorado River Storage Project. This plan called for a series of dams on the Colorado and its tributaries, including the one on the Green River at Echo Park.13 Like DeVoto, Brower did not want to see the national parks ruined. Spearheading the club’s campaign to block the Echo Park Dam, he wrote articles in the Bulletin, testified in Congress, and challenged the Bureau of Reclamation. He also encouraged the club to put together a book featuring essays and images of Dinosaur National Monument. Published in 1955, five years before Brower launched the Exhibit Format series of coffee table books, this book would contribute to the campaign, receive attention from the press, and publicize the club’s message. Most of all, the book would provide Brower and other club leaders with a new tool of propaganda, a concept they would refine in the years to come. The book was called This Is Dinosaur, and with this title, the Sierra Club announced not only a place but also gave notice that it had arrived as a national organization. This Is Dinosaur

Spanning the border of Utah and Colorado, Dinosaur National Monument was a relatively unknown place. Named for the quarry of dinosaur fossils found there in the early twentieth century, Dinosaur was designated a national monument by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and enlarged by President Roosevelt in 1938 to encompass several canyon and mountain areas along the Green and Yampa rivers. This expansion transformed the monument into one of the

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largest sites in the national park system. No longer just a repository of dinosaur bones, the monument became an enormous wilderness area, containing over 200,000 acres. Yet despite the postwar surge of travel to the national parks, few Americans visited Dinosaur or knew anything about it. For conservationists who opposed the Echo Park Dam, the challenge was to inform Americans about what would be lost at Dinosaur.14 In the 1950s, some Sierra Club members began to take river-rafting trips through the monument. Even more read articles in the Bulletin describing the landscape that would be destroyed if the dam were built. “You come off that trip convinced,” Brower argued, “that a dam would be the tragedy of our generation.” But Brower wanted to capture the imagination of many more Americans, not just members of the Sierra Club. He wanted to stir people into action, to show them that Dinosaur, like the rest of the park system, was “dedicated country, hallowed ground to leave as beautiful as we have found it.” Brower believed that an illustrated book could reach a large audience, and in 1955 he asked the novelist and historian Wallace Stegner to serve as editor for the project.15 Over the next several years, Stegner would play an important role in the Sierra Club, contributing articles to the Bulletin, participating in policy debates, and acting as a literary advisor to the Exhibit Format series. By editing This Is Dinosaur, Stegner found a place for himself in the wilderness movement. This Is Dinosaur had slightly larger dimensions than the average hardback book, but not nearly as large as the Exhibit Format books that would follow. Nevertheless, Stegner grasped the symbolic significance of This Is Dinosaur as a book—as a tangible artifact and a lasting statement about conservation. “The mere weight of a book,” he wrote, “does some good; anything worth making a book about should be worth saving.”16 This Is Dinosaur features a visual gallery—consisting of images and lengthy captions—followed by seven essays. Assembled by David Brower, the gallery aimed to make readers feel like armchair adventurers, imaginary visitors at Dinosaur National Monument. Philip Hyde, a photographer who had studied with Ansel Adams, contributed almost half of the photographs in the gallery. Many of his pictures offer wide, expansive views suggesting the vastness of land and sky. In one photograph, an image that appeared not only in This Is Dinosaur but also in issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin and other conservation magazines, Hyde introduced viewers to Steamboat Rock, the eight-hundredfoot sandstone wall that juts into the sky (fig. 5.2). Massive and rising upward, with light reflecting off one side, the rock dominates the scene. Yet Hyde’s point of perspective also provides viewers with the feeling of standing at the

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5.2. Philip Hyde, Steamboat Rock, Dinosaur National Monument, used by permission of the artist. Courtesy of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

place where the photograph was taken. Hyde revealed the massive verticality of Steamboat Rock, but he also presented an up-close view of the foreground that made the grasses and plants seem so near, so close. He encouraged viewers to imagine themselves at the edge of the photograph, about to set foot on the stage prepared for their arrival.17 The last caption in This Is Dinosaur’s gallery uses a style of direct address, referring to the reader as “you,” the person who has completed this journey and discovered “the infinite peace” that lies in Dinosaur. “This, you know now,” the caption affirms, “is a country as grand and beautiful as any America can boast; and if the dams are built . . . almost all of what you have seen . . . will be wiped out.” The final sentence instructs the reader to “take away a question from your trip,” a large, even philosophical question about the direction America was heading, a question about the relationship between technology and the environment, a question about “whether, in the end, we may not be in danger of engineering out of existence some of the things that make existence precious.”18 Stegner echoed this warning about the dangers of technology in his essay that followed the gallery. He praised Dinosaur as a “sanctuary from a world paved with concrete, jet-propelled, smog-blanketed, sterilized, over-insured, aseptic; a world mass-produced with interchangeable parts, and with every natural beautiful thing endangered by the raw engineering power of the twen-

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tieth century.” Obsessed with technology, proud of their ability to rearrange the planet, Americans, Stegner believed, were turning their “bulldozers and earth-movers loose” just because they could. The unbounded hubris of modern society meant that “every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.”19 Stegner called for a more chastened attitude toward technology and human power, but he also celebrated the wild in purely human terms, as a place to satisfy personal desires and longings. “A place is nothing in itself,” he wrote. “It has no meaning, it can hardly be said to exist, except in terms of human perception, use, and response. . . . [N]atural beauty is nothing until it comes to the eye of the beholder.” Following the Emersonian tradition, Stegner embraced an anthropocentric definition of wilderness as a place where people could not only recreate, but also re-create their own identity. “The natural world,” Stegner explained, “is the test by which each man proves himself: I see, I feel, I love, I use . . . I appropriate, therefore I am.” Stegner believed that wilderness promised to soothe and refresh the psyche; it provided sanctuary from an overly engineered world.20 Wilderness in an Age of Conformity

Stegner’s comments about a “sterilized, aseptic” world, one “mass-produced by interchangeable parts,” suggested how wilderness advocates viewed American culture in the 1950s. They worried about identity and claimed that modern society threatened to submerge the individual; they were not alone in these fears. Leading intellectuals argued that a culture of conformity was emerging in the United States. Major works of the period, such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), described America as plagued by homogeneity and standardization, providing few opportunities for individual self-fulfillment. A nation committed to autonomy was becoming a nation of automatons, a society filled with organization men wearing gray flannel suits.21 In the 1930s, intellectuals had described America as a unified, collective whole; seeking security in a time of economic collapse, they used cultural nationalism to create a reassuring vision, a sense that America could survive the cataclysms of the Depression. By promoting New Deal programs, they called for a vital engagement in public life and affirmed their belief that government was a positive agent of change. Their dreams became a kind of nightmare for postwar intellectuals who feared the growth of large organizations, who glimpsed mushrooming bureaucracies and spreading conformity. Rather than

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a sense of belonging, postwar intellectuals searched for inner satisfaction, for private fulfillment in a society that seemed to overwhelm the individual. Like Riesman and Whyte, wilderness advocates were preoccupied with personal identity. In a speech reprinted in the Sierra Club Bulletin, Howard Zahniser, the executive secretary of the Wilderness Society, claimed that people could regain a “needed personal independence” by visiting the wilderness. In nature, Zahniser argued, “modern man” could rediscover “an ability to care for himself, to carry his burdens, to prepare his own food, furnish his own shelter.” Zahniser voiced a fear of crushed individualism and lost independence; he wanted to restore a sense of personal freedom to “modern man.” Similarly, Brower described the wild as a place for Americans “to leaven their otherwise ersatz world.” Worrying about the conformist trends of 1950s culture, wilderness advocates defined American society as artificial and constrictive, as something that suffocated the individual. Without wilderness, they feared that there would be no antidote, no place for renewal. Without wilderness, Brower explained, “the world’s a cage.”22 Wilderness advocates worried about private experience and individual identity, but in contrast to many intellectuals they did not withdraw from public life. Instead, they believed that the state could help restore a sense of purpose to American culture; through the protection of wilderness and national parks, the federal government could secure meaning and autonomy for the individual self. As part of their quest for psychic health, conservationists engaged in public debate and tried to shape government policy.23 And they had some success. Published in April 1955, This Is Dinosaur was praised by reviewers. A copy of the book was sent to each member of the U.S. Congress, and a few months later, plans for the Echo Park Dam were scrapped. Wilderness advocates enjoyed this victory but also formulated a new strategy. Rather than acting on the defensive, trying to protect a particular wilderness area from a dam or some other threat, they would take the offensive. They would encourage Congress to adopt a Wilderness Bill, legislation that would enable the wilderness to live on and on.24 As their campaign progressed, many wilderness advocates encouraged Americans to respond to nature with their emotions. In 1954, the writer Joseph Wood Krutch, who later became involved in the Sierra Club, called for an aesthetic, spiritual approach to nature, arguing that it was essential to the conservation movement. Without it, he claimed, conservation would remain “unrealizable.” Without it, there would always be something missing, something that would hinder law and public policy, something that would prevent Americans from improving their relationship with the natural world. “And the

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thing which is missing,” Krutch concluded, “is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals.”25 Krutch worried not only about the threats to scenic beauty and the sanctity of wilderness. He also voiced a fear of psychic scarcity—a lack of resources for the human spirit. In his defense of spiritual and emotional values, Krutch challenged a prevailing trend in American culture—the worship of economic abundance, the unreflective faith in productivity, material expansion, and the ever-increasing purchasing power of Americans. Implicitly, he challenged the definition of abundance offered by David Potter in his influential book, People of Plenty (1954). In this text, Potter argued that the American character was shaped by the “historical force” of “economic abundance.” From the enormous riches of the frontier to the mass-produced goods of the industrial age, Potter defined abundance solely in economic, quantitative terms. Abundance was something that could be calculated, measured, and then displayed in graphs and charts. “The compilation of statistics might be extended endlessly,” Potter wrote, “but it would only prove repetitively that in every aspect of material plenty America possesses unprecedented riches. . . . [E]veryone knows that we have, per capita, more automobiles, more telephones, more radios, more vacuum cleaners, more electric lights, more bathtubs, more supermarkets . . . than any other nation.” As evidence of the nation’s abundance, Potter listed the cornucopia of consumer goods available to Americans.26 To wilderness advocates, this definition of abundance seemed narrow and reductive; it left out a whole range of human desires and longings. Tied to quantitative measurements, it disregarded feelings and emotions; it said nothing of aesthetics and spirituality. Speaking at the Sierra Club’s Wilderness Conference in 1961, Krutch emphasized the importance of the nonhuman world to people: “It is by contact with nature,” he said, “that we begin to get . . . a sense of the mystery, the independence, the unpredictableness of the living as opposed to the mechanical, and it is upon the recognition of that element in man which he shares with all living creatures that any recognition of his dignity has to be based.” The worship of technology, the reliance on statistics and numbers, the celebration of mass-produced commodities: all of these seemed to create a world of mechanical artifice and to place more barriers between people and the reality of nature. While Potter relied on a quantitative definition of abundance, Krutch and other wilderness advocates worried about the problem of psychic scarcity; they wondered what it would mean to be human in a world without wilderness.27 Krutch’s critique of the quantitative measure of human happiness added a

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psychological and spiritual dimension to postwar liberalism. In The Affluent Society (1958), the economist John Kenneth Galbraith helped redefine liberal thought and political strategy by pointing to the great irony of the postwar boom: even as the American economy surged, American society suffered, as the public sector failed to provide adequate education, parks, and health care. The quality of life, Galbraith and other liberals argued, consisted of more than economic productivity; it also included the provision of public goods and services. As Galbraith emphasized the contrast between private wealth and public impoverishment, Krutch emphasized the contrast between economic progress and spiritual atrophy, between outward growth and inner deprivation. While Galbraith called for a revitalized public sector to improve hospitals, roads, and schools, Krutch wanted the federal government to save the American wilderness as a way to shelter and sustain the American soul.28 Ansel Adams applied similar ideas to photography. In his early work, dating from the 1920s and 1930s, Adams adhered to the modernist aesthetic developed by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. He tended to focus on small fragments of the natural world, taking close shots of flowers, cliffs, and lakes. Striving for precision and directness, he found the quintessence of nature in its concrete details. During the 1940s and 1950s, Adams shifted to a panoramic style. Evoking the nineteenth-century landscape paintings of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, his photographs presented expansive, romantic views of the landscape. Taken primarily in Yosemite and other national parks, these photographs of the sublime West became his most widely recognized images. As his aesthetic style shifted, Adams also began to emphasize the political possibilities of photography. Like other image makers, he tapped into the sublime tradition to galvanize concern for environmental reform.29 In a speech delivered at the 1961 Wilderness Conference, Adams argued that photographers had a special role to play in environmental reform. Like Krutch, he linked the aesthetic to the spiritual and called for an emotional awakening, a transformation in the way Americans viewed their landscape. “I feel,” Adams explained, “that . . . unless some great spiritual experience is evoked, some deep excitement and sense of purpose is stimulated within our people, our cause is lost. . . . Development will reign supreme until nothing else remains to develop.” To counter the menace of “development,” Adams urged artists to engage in a cultural mission that would kindle new interest and new excitement in the wilderness. For Adams, photographs of wild nature carried religious meaning; indeed, he wanted to restore an older, more spiritual conception of art. “PreRenaissance and Renaissance art,” he explained, “was almost entirely based on religious motivation. . . . Art was dedicated to the Glory of God.” “I think it is

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time,” Adams declared, “that the Glory of God be revived; only now, instead of saints and angels, myths and legends, rituals and dogma, we have the vast and luminous evidences of God in the realities of the cosmos in which we live.” As he recast religious art in secular form, Adams also called for a secularized religion of nature. “We are on the threshold,” he concluded, “of a new revelation, a new awakening. . . . Man must affirm his spiritual kinship with the eternity of Nature.” Adams, like other wilderness advocates, wanted to redefine the language of political debate. To challenge the quantitative claims of developers, he wanted to create a legitimate space for the emotions. He believed that the camera could revive religious feeling by portraying the vast and luminous evidence of God in the cosmos—or at least in the American West.30 For Sierra Club leaders, the coffee table book emerged as the primary medium to express their emotions. It conveyed their concern with vision, with perception as a form of politics. It suggested their faith in the camera, in photography as a carrier of spiritual values. And finally, as a consumer item, it suggested that wilderness advocates, like other critics of conformity, were preoccupied with taste, that they considered aesthetics to be a form of dissent. Although Sierra Club leaders questioned the idea of quantitative abundance, they relied on a lavish consumer object to carry their message. The books were produced with exacting standards, printed on expensive paper and designed with exceptional care; the photographs exceeded the reproduction quality found in other books; even the typography, Brower explained, “required a matching elegance.” The books carried a high price tag and were clearly aimed at an affluent audience— consumers who desired, in Brower’s words, a “prestige item,” something they could “display” in their homes. In an age of conformity, the Sierra Club marketed the reality of wilderness, a reality captured by the camera and presented in the elegant style of the Exhibit Format series. Each book tried to replicate the experience of an art show, and This Is the American Earth, the book that launched the series, began as an exhibit of photographs in 1955.31 The American Earth

Besides the spectacular scenery at Yosemite Falls and Half Dome, visitors to Yosemite National Park in the summer of 1955 enjoyed an additional visual treat. If they wandered over to LeConte Memorial Lodge, a rustic, stone building owned and managed by the Sierra Club, they would see This Is the American Earth, a photography exhibit that featured the work of Ansel Adams and almost forty other photographers, along with a verse text by Nancy Newhall. Visitors would follow the circular layout leading to the center of the room and gaze at

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some of Adams’s most famous photographs, including his pictures of Yosemite that had probably encouraged many of them to visit the park in the first place. According to Modern Photography magazine, visitors could expect to be “informed, delighted and inspired” by “one of the most beautiful and remarkable photographic exhibitions ever put together.”32 Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, the designers of the exhibit, had already collaborated on various projects, including a series of articles in the magazine Arizona Highways. Their creative fusion of words and pictures—combining Adams’s photographs with Newhall’s writing—provided a precedent for the LeConte Lodge exhibit and also established the model for the Sierra Club’s series of coffee table books. “The Exhibit Format Series,” Brower would later observe, “owes much of its success to the kind of counterpoint built between text and illustration.”33 Newhall deserves most of the credit for experimenting with this interplay between text and illustration. In 1952, she wrote an article for the inaugural issue of the photography journal Aperture, explaining the role of captions in relation to photographs. She described four different kinds of captions but focused on the additive caption, the one she considered most important. “The additive caption appears to be the newest form,” she wrote, “risen into prominence to answer a new need. . . . It combines its own connotations with those in the photograph to produce a new image in the mind of the spectator . . . which exists in neither words nor photographs but only in their juxtaposition.” For examples of this approach, Newhall cited her own work in editing Time in New England (1950), a book that paired photographs by Paul Strand with New England poetry and political tracts. She also referred to some of the key documentary texts of the 1930s, including Land of the Free (1938) by Archibald MacLeish and An American Exodus (1939) by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, as works that relied on “the additive principle.” “In the Additive Caption,” Newhall continued, “the basic principle is the independence—and interdependence—of the two mediums. The words,” she wrote, echoing what MacLeish had said about Land of the Free, “do not parrot what the photographs say, the photographs are not illustrations.”34 In their exhibit This Is the American Earth, Newhall and Adams juxtaposed text and image to celebrate America as a land of exceptional beauty. They invoked the uniqueness of the “American” earth at a time when other artists and intellectuals were drawn to ideas of internationalism. As they put together the exhibit, Edward Steichen was completing The Family of Man, a photography show that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Selecting over five hundred images by photographers from almost seventy countries, Steichen aimed to portray the unity of all people. He attempted, in his words,

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to “mirror . . . the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” According to the poet Carl Sandburg, the exhibit presented “People! flung wide and far . . . one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.” A resounding success, attended by more people than any other show ever held at the Museum of Modern Art, The Family of Man was published as a coffee table book later that year. The show was circulated internationally by the United States Information Agency (USIA) as part of its effort to wage a cultural cold war. Under these auspices, The Family of Man became a propaganda show for capitalist democracy, suggesting that the “free world,” especially the United States, could protect the “one big family” on Earth from the perils of war, poverty, and nuclear annihilation.35 This Is the American Earth also reflected the cultural rivalry of the cold war. Adams believed that conservation could help the United States prove its superiority over the Soviet Union. He wanted to “establish a public attitude towards Parks and Wilderness which will partake of a religious intensity and devotion,” an attitude, he believed, that stood in opposition to the Soviet view of nature. “Wilderness,” Adams explained, “must no longer be thought of as something to be tolerated until a ‘real need’ comes along and violates it. . . . It might be well to impress on our public that the Russian concept of a National Park is . . . an area . . . set aside for relaxation and recreation until the timber is ready to cut!” For many political and religious leaders during the 1950s, the Soviet Union was a godless society based on the atheistic philosophy of communism; America was a better nation, they argued, because it was a religious nation, a place where people believed and trusted in God. As a secular conservationist, Adams may not have cared whether the Russians had religious faith, but he did consider their attitude toward nature to be excessively utilitarian, too focused on economic value, unaware of the aesthetic and sacred meanings of wilderness. Similarly, as Brower later explained to Edward Murrow, director of the USIA, Adams and Newhall’s portrayal of national parks would promote American superiority, revealing how the United States had “exerted world leadership in [the] preservation of intangible values.” After leaving Yosemite, This Is the American Earth joined The Family of Man as another exhibit in the USIA’s traveling repertoire. Displayed in foreign countries, the show presented America as a nation that could inspire religious devotion to the land and that could teach the world how to save wild nature.36 As This Is the American Earth circulated throughout the United States and other parts of the globe, Newhall and Adams turned the exhibit into a book. They selected new images, expanded the text, and rearranged the structure. Brower recommended several titles for Newhall to read, particularly Galbraith’s

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The Affluent Society. According to Brower, Galbraith’s book showed how the quest for “the ever more Gross National Product” threatened to destroy the remaining “fragments” of nature. In her text, Newhall would indeed draw on Galbraith’s critique of the American “preoccupation with production,” identifying it as the root cause of environmental devastation.37 To Newhall and Adams, the obsession with economic growth illustrated a larger cultural problem: a tendency to elevate techniques over values, to emphasize technological progress at the expense of human safety and even global survival. The atomic bomb, they believed, represented the frightening result of this tendency. “The world is in a state of horror or sublimity,” Adams wrote to Newhall. “Frankly, the fireball can do away with thee and me at any moment. . . . [A]ll that ages have accomplished may melt in a millionth of a second.” Adams wanted to present the wilderness as a soothing refuge from atomic terror. “I feel that it is more important than ever now to make beautiful things, put words into beautiful meanings.” Replying to Adams, Newhall’s husband Beaumont agreed that the atomic age necessitated a spiritual response from artists. He encouraged Adams to continue using the grand, reverential style of the romantic sublime rather than the abstract approach of his earlier photography. “The days of f/64 are gone,” Newhall wrote, referring to a photography group that specialized in close studies and abstraction. “These are days when eloquent statements are needed!”38 For David Brower, publication of This Is the American Earth in January 1960 came at just the right moment. Quoting a young conservationist, he proclaimed, “‘What we save in the next few years is all that will ever be saved.’” He hoped the club’s book could play a significant role in the new decade, awakening the public and influencing government policy. “It stands a chance,” he predicted, “of achieving more for conservation than anything else we’ve done.”39 The subject of the book is the “American earth,” but most of the photographs were taken in the West, suggesting that the real American landscape lies not in the East or the South or the Midwest, but in the far West, particularly in the region’s national parks and wilderness areas, the remnants of the frontier. In his foreword, Brower placed the book squarely within the American frontier tradition. Recalling his young son’s excitement at seeing moose inside the Grand Tetons National Park, Brower described the area as “a place just about as . . . it was when trappers first saw it.” He imagined the Western landscape as the original America—a place newly discovered, looking as it must have looked to trappers long ago. For Brower, the wilderness signified a place of “wide spacious freedom,” a place he hoped would always “remain in the midst of the American earth.”40

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5.3. William Garnett, cleared landscape, Lakewood Housing Development, © William Garnett, used by permission of the artist.

Divided into six chapters, This Is the American Earth follows a chronological narrative, from Creation to contemporary America. It repeats the biblical story: the genesis of human beings occurred in paradise. “Ah,” Newhall announced, “we remember Eden!—the radiant vernal earth to which we waked as king!” But sin led to the expulsion from Eden. Cast from paradise, humans wandered through the wasteland, hoping to reinvent the original garden. Following the fall from Eden, a single page of Newhall’s text covers thousands of years of human history, culminating with the emergence of ancient civilizations. But all of these societies—Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome—eventually disintegrated. From the loss of Eden to the decline of civilizations, Western culture appears as a story of fall and recovery, of trying to recuperate paradise.41 The North American continent, according to Newhall and Adams, represented a return to paradise. “Here still was Eden” the text declares, eliding the presence of indigenous inhabitants, reinforcing the myth of pure wilderness. Like the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Newhall viewed the frontier as a landscape of freedom. “Here in this rich continent,” she wrote, “we found no man need serve another.” Newhall described American history as a succession of frontiers, a story of continual expansion westward. Like Pare Lorentz in The River, though, she criticized the idea of boundlessness, the belief that America contained infinite resources. Her text suggests that ecological irresponsibility

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went hand in hand with the transience of American settlers: “When settlement came too close, . . . we moved on West, again to fell, burn, plow, kill.”42 In contrast to their articles in Arizona Highways, which merely celebrated the scenic wonders of the West, Newhall and Adams fashioned This Is the American Earth as a kind of secular sermon. Following the style of New Deal documentaries, they borrowed from the jeremiad tradition to judge and condemn American culture. Throughout the book, Newhall used the pronoun “we” to narrate the nation’s history. “We found no man need serve another.” “We moved on West, again to fell, burn, plow, kill.” American history appears as a story of carelessness, a story of people turning a rich continent into a wasteland. Like other works in the American apocalyptic tradition, the book suggests the rapidity of change, the brief period in which the nation destroyed its natural abundance. “Moving from a paradise lost in the old World,” an advertisement for the book explained, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent not only a new nation, but also an ability to change, at an ever-increasing rate, the face of the earth.”43 Moving into the contemporary moment, into the America of 1960, the book takes an apocalyptic turn, comparable—the text claims—to the writings of Dante and Milton. A series of photographs by William Garnett portray the landscapes of contemporary Los Angeles. The first image shows smog covering the city. Then aerial views record the building of Lakewood, a new housing development. Flying in an airplane, Garnett looked down upon a vast area where beets had once grown. Three of his photographs—arranged vertically on the same page of This Is the American Earth—record particular stages of the development, beginning with an image of cleared land, a place left vacant and lifeless by a bulldozer (fig. 5.3). The next shot portrays several rows of slabs and foundations (fig. 5.4). Garnett’s aerial perspective allowed him to reveal the stark similarity of the development, as the linear pattern of slabs and foundations extends beyond the edges of the frame. The last image captures the shadows that mark the spaces of a treeless landscape composed of identical-looking homes (fig. 5.5). “Hell we are building here on earth,” the text bewails. In the Sierra Club imagination, hell is a thick layer of smog and an endless row of tract houses; hell, it would seem, is Los Angeles.44 As the historian Adam Rome has shown, Garnett’s photographs were initially commissioned in 1950 by real estate developers to document their building project. Like William Levitt, who used mass production techniques to construct Levittown on Long Island, the California developers rapidly created a subdivision. Appearing in a promotional book and in Business Week, Garnett’s images confirmed their skill and speed in constructing new homes. Yet

5.4. William Garnett, slabs and foundations, Lakewood Housing Development, © William Garnett, used by permission of the artist.

5.5. William Garnett, rows of completed houses, Lakewood Housing Development, © William Garnett, used by permission of the artist.

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over time, as Americans began to recognize the environmental costs of suburban sprawl, the photographs acquired different meanings, becoming symbols of the relentless destruction of the postwar landscape. The images would appear in several publications—such as Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard (1964)—as icons of disaster, visible evidence of the loss of open space. Critics of suburban sprawl used the photographs as part of their campaign to regulate land use and control development. Yet before these critics offered these readings of Garnett’s images, Newhall and Adams were the first to present them in a new context, making them central to their environmental jeremiad. This Is the American Earth tapped into anxieties and concerns about suburban sprawl not to call for new homebuilding methods but rather to push for wilderness preservation.45 While most of the book’s photographs take up less than a page, two images stand out—each filling an entire two-page spread—suggesting their importance to the larger narrative. The first is another Garnett photograph. Appearing in the very center of the book, it offers a wider view of Los Angeles. Suburbs bleed into more suburbs; row after row of houses extend throughout the image, gorging on miles and miles of space (fig. 5.6). Garnett’s aerial, panoramic vision—a perspective used frequently by New Deal filmmakers to call for government planning and management of resources—provided a broad overview of the landscape and suggested that a lack of urban planning led to the sprawl of Los Angeles. A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune found the picture to be “a shocking revelation of a prison city, every tree bulldozed away, with tens of thousands of gritty, little houses heaped together in a featureless mass.” Following the photograph, Newhall decried the spread of suburbs and the building of “highways hypnotic in their monotony.” Together, the image and text point not only to environmental ruin but also to the ruin of American individualism, to the conformity forged in the suburbs. A reviewer for the Salt Lake Tribune believed Garnett’s photograph revealed “that monstrosity that is Los Angeles.” In response, Brower wrote a letter to the editor, amplifying the reviewer’s comment. He noted that a quotation from the Bible “should have preceded the chilling photograph by Garnett.” “We left out, through a production error,” Brower explained, “the most important bit of propaganda, a quotation from Isaiah that is almost the basic theme of the book: ‘Woe unto them that build house to house and lay field to field, till there be no place that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.’”46 A place to be alone in the midst of the earth: wanting to protect such places, Adams and Newhall worried that the world was becoming a place of teeming humanity, a world that allowed no escape for the individual. Another two-page

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5.6. William Garnett, aerial view of Los Angeles, © William Garnett, used by permission of the artist.

spread follows: Ferenc Berko’s portrait of bathers on the Ganges, an aerial photograph of a landscape filled with people (fig. 5.7). Crowds of people, people sitting and standing, people bathing in the narrow band of water at the top of the image—people, like the houses of Los Angeles, covering the land, leaving no room, no place to be alone. Taken at the Ganges River, a Hindu holy site, the image—one of many Berko photographs to express his appreciation

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of Indian culture—portrays bathers who have made a pilgrimage in search of redemption. Yet Newhall and Adams failed to mention the photograph’s religious implications. In a book about the “American earth,” a book that includes only a few pictures from other countries, this photograph of India is not meant as an expression of common humanity. Instead, using ideas of race and otherness, Newhall and Adams presented this image to convey feelings of fear. An overcrowded India signifies what happens when people continue, in Newhall’s words, “to breed recklessly, until every day hundreds of thousands, millions more crowd in among our already crowded billions.”47 Together with the image, Newhall’s comment may have reminded readers of William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948), a bestseller that stridently warned of the dangers of overpopulation. With venomous language, Vogt described Indians as “breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish” and living in a culture “steeped in superstition, ignorance, poverty, and disease.” Condemning their “untrammeled copulation,” Vogt showed no sympathy for the “backward billion of Asia.” While Newhall and Adams did not use such blatant language, they projected their own fears about the loss of American wilderness onto brown-skinned people living in a foreign land. Drained of its spiritual significance and coded with racial meanings, the scene suggests a nightmarish vision of the future, an image of what all the world, even America, may soon be. It is a warning about the future, but also a reminder, according to Newhall and Adams, of what makes America exceptional, a reminder that the nation still contains spacious freedom and vast wilderness.48 This Is the American Earth journeys from Creation to Apocalypse, but its final chapters focus on salvation rather than damnation. “The wilderness,” Newhall wrote, “holds answers to more questions than we yet know how to ask.” Evoking this idea, the book closes with a series of photographs by Adams. Together with the text, these images present wilderness as a place of purity and innocence, a place where one can “walk where only the wind has walked before.” As these words suggest, Newhall and Adams concluded with a fantasy of discovery; they portrayed the wilderness as an untouched area, a place not defiled by a corrupt society, a place where one can still glimpse Eden.49 A photograph of Yosemite perfectly captures Adams’s emphasis on the sublimity of the American West (fig. 5.8). The foreground is filled with numerous trees enveloped by gray tones. Blurring into a larger whole, the trees stretch back to distant cliffs that gesture to billowy clouds. The clouds slide on the surface of walls, enshroud parts of the cliffs, and float in the sky above. Throughout the photograph, light acts as a vital agent, dancing through the clouds and along the rock walls as it illuminates elements of the landscape.

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5.7. Ferenc Berko, bathers on the Ganges. Used by permission of the Estate of Ferenc Berko.

The whiteness of the snow in the foreground begins a crescendo of light that culminates with the combination of the waterfall, the snowy peak of the cliff, and the luminous clouds. This effect of light is magnified by the shades of gray and black that surround the glowing center. The clouds appear to break apart, allowing the light to offer viewers a warm welcome. A scene of spectral serenity, the image suggests the intersection of religion and aesthetics in Adams’s

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5.8. Ansel Adams, Winter Storm Clearing at Yosemite, 1944, © Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust/CORBIS, used by permission.

photography. By drawing on the sublime tradition, he sought to emphasize the emotional power of nature and to glorify the divinity of wilderness. Next to this photograph, Newhall placed the following lines: “You shall face immortal challenges; . . . . You shall live lifted up in light; you shall move among clouds.” Newhall switched from the pronoun “we” to the pronoun “you,” speaking not to Americans as a collective whole, but to the individual reader. This form of address introduces the idea of personal experience in the wilderness. The text moves from inducing a sense of collective guilt to emphasizing the theme of personal renewal. While the New Deal jeremiad ended with a vision of human society engineering a balance with the natural world, the Sierra Club jeremiad closed with a vision of individual redemption. After cataloging the ecological crises, after condemning the nation for its sins, Newhall and Adams presented Yosemite as a place of grace.50 The last photograph in the book portrays a group of aspens in New Mexico. The metallic gray of the older trees contrasts with the white leaves beginning to grow on the smaller aspens. The photograph expresses the promise of rejuvenation, the rebirth of nature signaled by the younger trees. “Tenderly now,”

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Newhall wrote, “let all men turn to the earth.” She linked personal renewal to natural renewal, suggesting that the cultural crisis of modern America could be resolved if people would turn to the earth. This image also appeared on the cover of the book and became David Brower’s favorite photograph, later reproduced on his Sierra Club stationery. For Vance Packard, the best-selling author of The Waste Makers, a devastating critique of consumer culture, the photograph conveyed both compassion and anger, the key emotions he felt while reading the book. Packard viewed the wilderness campaign in relation to the problem of suburban sprawl and the loss of open space. As he looked at this photograph, Packard thought about bulldozers tearing through the American countryside, flattening the landscape to make way for new housing developments. This Is the American Earth, he wrote in a postcard to Brower, “is one of the most eloquent and beautiful books of our time. Its message is desperately needed. And its final, touching photograph leaves one aching to smash every bulldozer in the land.”51 Space, Sacred and Profane

This Is the American Earth was packaged and presented as a book primarily concerned with the wilderness. Its dust jacket included a statement, titled “An informal opinion,” from the Supreme Court Justice and avid conservationist William O. Douglas, who described the book as “one of the great statements in the history of conservation.” Bemoaning the “White Man’s” destruction of the land, Douglas believed that the present moment demanded action, demanded efforts to protect places that were “essentially as God created [them].” “We are today,” he explained, “face to face with our last chance to preserve the tiny islands of wilderness that are left.” Douglas made no mention of smog or pollution; he did not address the question of crowding and overpopulation; he did not refer to the spread of suburbs or what Newhall described as the use of “killing chemicals” in agriculture. Instead, he described the book as a plea for wilderness preservation, as a call to protect those tiny islands that were still untouched by industrial society. “Some of the unmarked face of America’s wilderness,” Douglas concluded, “must be left as a refuge for man—as a place where he can escape the roar of machines and once more get on understanding terms with the universe.”52 For the most part, reviews of the book emphasized this theme of wilderness preservation. Like Douglas, they defined conservation as a movement to protect the nation’s sacred space. But not everyone agreed with this reading of the book. Some believed that it contained a different vision of conservation, a concern with all places—urban and rural, suburban and wild. The conflicting

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responses to the book suggested a sense of confusion over the meanings of environmental reform, an uncertainty voiced not only by reviewers but also by some leaders of the Sierra Club. A few weeks after This Is the American Earth appeared, the Wichita Beacon devoted almost its entire editorial page to the book. “This book,” the editors announced, “delivers the most important message of this century.” The editors supported this claim by contrasting conservation with the cold war, arguing that communism may have been the “most dramatic challenge” faced by America, but it was “not the most important.” “Indeed,” they explained, “as history goes, the contemporary anxiety concerning sputniks and spaceships and ICBMs may be an ephemeral matter. ‘What were they so worried about?’ our great grandchildren may wonder as they study the annals of our times.” Compared to the “ephemeral” threat of the Russians, the abuse of America’s natural heritage seemed the more troubling problem. “The great challenge to America,” the editors continued, “is not what Russia will do, but what Americans will do for themselves.”53 The Wichita Beacon encouraged its readers to see conservation as a more pressing concern than communism; it also proposed a broad definition of environmental reform as something more than the protection of natural scenery. “The Sierra Club,” the editors observed, “devotes itself largely to defending America’s wilderness from those who would loot and destroy it. And yet, as their book makes clear, that is only part of the total problem.” The editors explained the “total challenge” of conservation, ranging from the problems of soil erosion and pollution to the ecological damage caused by the expansion of cities, suburbs, and industry. “It is impossible to think of conservation apart from the spread of growing cities,” they wrote. “Each year, huge areas of farm land are swallowed up by factories and subdivisions. . . . Arrogant industrialists fill the air with poisonous smog, pollute the rivers with vile wastes. . . . Urban life,” they concluded, “should not be hell on earth.” From the text and images of This Is the American Earth, the editors found a vision of conservation as a movement committed to changing all aspects of the human-nature relationship: not just in the national parks, not just in the pure, untouched wilderness, but in the farms and cities, in the factories and suburbs.54 Brower encouraged this kind of response to the book. In a letter to newspaper and magazine editors, he claimed that the book would help “each reader get his feet firmly on the earth . . . in an age where too many people seem to think that milk (or whisky) comes from a bottle, water from a faucet, and gasoline from a throttle. Resources come from the earth itself,” Brower continued, “from the only planet we are likely to live on comfortably.” Like Pare Lorentz’s

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The River, which tried to remind viewers of the earthly roots of American abundance, Brower suggested that people ignored the natural origins of the resources that sustained them. Even if they lived in cities, they were still connected to ecosystems, still dependent upon the natural world. Brower hoped that readers would become more aware of their connections to the earth and more concerned with conservation in its broadest sense.55 While the Wichita Beacon followed Brower’s cue, Edward S. Deevey, an ecologist at Yale University, took a different view, as he explained in Science magazine. According to Deevey, the book offered “a fitting celebration of the glories of our national parks,” but it seemed too narrow in focus, only calling for the protection of “scenery.” In protest, Brower wrote a letter to the editor. “There is abundant evidence of skimming in the review,” Brower charged, “patent in the fact that a man as brilliant as Deevey missed the point of the book as no other reviewer has. In implying that Nancy Newhall’s text is concerned only with scenic resources and not with broad conservation, he misses her thesis by a mile.” Despite Brower’s claim, most reviewers described the book as a plea for the protection of scenic resources, not as a vision of broad conservation. They may have commented on Newhall’s declension narrative, on her description of America’s reckless abuse of nature in various settings, but they focused on the book’s evocation of wilderness as a sanctuary for the human spirit, as a place apart from industrial society.56 Commentary about This Is the American Earth appeared not only in the book review sections of newspapers but also in the editorial pages, where editors described the book as part of the campaign to pass the Wilderness Bill. “We do not customarily review books in our editorial columns,” a review in the Brooklyn Daily began. “However, a new book has caught our eye and we should like to bring it to our readers’ attention.” After praising the book for its “superb images” and “poetically expressed” text, the editors argued that the Wilderness Bill was “a wise and necessary bill,” one that would protect “the vistas of God’s world as He originally made it and meant it to be!” Newspapers in several other cities featured reviews of the book in their editorial pages; in all of these columns, the editors described This Is the American Earth as a powerful argument for wilderness legislation. “If any final thrust is needed to push the Wilderness Bill through to final passage,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, “a book just published by the Sierra Club should provide it. . . . In the interval before they next take up the Wilderness Bill, Senators should study This Is the American Earth, the handsome volume of the California conservation organization.”57 Political leaders received an opportunity to study This Is the American Earth

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when a wealthy Sierra Club member sent a complimentary copy to each member of the House and Senate, to the president and his cabinet, and to the governor of each state. In August 1960, Utah senator Frank Moss, who found the book “particularly moving,” delivered a lengthy speech on conservation that closed with several passages from Newhall’s text. Three days later, a California representative announced that the words and images of This Is the American Earth “warrant the attention of us all.” Excited by the book’s ability to delight and inspire elected officials, Brower wrote to the entire Sierra Club membership, claiming that the book’s emotional and aesthetic message would continue to convert many Americans to “conservation thinking.”58 Yet the book’s internal tensions raised many questions about the meanings of environmental reform, even among Sierra Club leaders. For Thomas Jukes, a chemist and a founder of the club’s Atlantic chapter, the book seemed lurid and disturbing; he complained to Brower that it was misguided, overly pessimistic, and filled with scientific inaccuracies. “The photographs . . . are very beautiful,” Jukes wrote to Brower, “but I am quite disappointed in the text.” Jukes spent much of his career developing pesticides, so he found Newhall’s description of the “killing chemicals” used in agriculture particularly objectionable. “Chemicals are essential to agricultural production,” he explained to Brower. “It is directly against the Sierra Club’s purposes to interfere with scientific agriculture. Our farmlands must produce high yields, or the pressure to gobble up the wilderness for agriculture use will become irresistible.” But Jukes was bothered by more than just Newhall’s criticism of industrial agriculture. The dystopic tone, the sense of anxiety toward technology and progress, the negative portrayal of cities, suburbs, and highways, the inclusion of topics other than wilderness preservation—he wondered why the Sierra Club would identify itself with these issues and these ideas. “The book conveys the impression,” Jukes concluded, “that the authors (and the Club?) are filled with general indignation against too many people (including you and me?), automobiles (do some of us drive them?), highways, smog, cities, nuclear fission, and Los Angeles.”59 Jukes believed in progress; he believed in science, technology, and industry. The Sierra Club, he thought, should work to protect wilderness, not issue jeremiads about pollution and smog or criticize scientific agriculture and urban sprawl. Jukes wanted to preserve the integrity of wilderness, the sacred spaces of America, and he could not understand why the Sierra Club would speak about the profane spaces where people lived and worked. Brower’s comments about “broad conservation” suggested an interest in confronting problems within the space of human society, not just in the separate realm of wilderness. Nevertheless, his comments were less a reflection of Sierra Club policy and more a

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harbinger of things to come: for the next several years, the club would focus its energies almost entirely on the campaign for wilderness legislation; only later would it turn to a broader politics of environmentalism. Wilderness as Amnesia

When the This Is the American Earth exhibit opened in Yosemite National Park in 1955, it included three panels not produced by Adams and Newhall. One focused on contemporary problems in Yosemite. The other two panels suggested, in the words of one commentator, “that the white man’s wilderness was actually the product of the red man’s conservation.” Designed by the geographer Richard Reynolds and his wife, the artist Frann Spencer Reynolds, the panels explored how Native Americans used fire to shape the landscape. For Alfred Frankenstein, the distinguished art historian and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, these panels seemed even more impressive than the work of Adams and Newhall. Frankenstein called the show “an esthetic masterpiece,” and believed that the “whole exhibition, text and illustrations together, ought to be issued as a book.” He praised Adams and Newhall, but he devoted most of his review to a description of the supplementary panels prepared by Richard and Frann Reynolds. Fascinated by their portrayal of Indians acting on the land, Frankenstein wondered if American conceptions of wilderness as a place removed from history were misguided. In particular, he questioned the policy of fire suppression in public lands, a policy rooted in the idea that the wilderness was an unchanging environment. “In our efforts to prevent the balance of nature from being thrown out of kilter, especially by stamping out forest fires,” he observed, “we have actually created a new kind of imbalance, and our protected forests are taking on a new character, quite different from what they were before the white man took them over.” From the panels, Frankenstein concluded that “the Indians were much more active and abler foresters than we give them credit for being, and that we have much to learn from their methods.”60 The idea that Indians were active foresters, people who consciously altered the land, was denied by This Is the American Earth, a work that described the wilderness as a place where one could walk “where only the wind has walked before.” After leaving Yosemite, the exhibit did not include the panels designed by the Reynolds, and the Sierra Club’s coffee table book excluded them as well. The first book in the Exhibit Format series, This Is the American Earth set the tone for many of the works that followed. It erased the history embedded in the natural world, even in the most remote places, and contrasted this static wilderness to the fallen world of humanity. Trying to recover Eden, Newhall

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and Adams used photographs as emblems of memory, as reminders of primordial nature. Trying to remember, they also forgot; through words and images, they evoked the idea of a peopleless wilderness, an idea grounded in amnesia, in the forgetting of human interaction with the land. Beginning with This Is the American Earth, the Sierra Club sold coffee table books to Americans who longed for contact with the wild, who lived in cities or suburbs but dreamed of Yosemite, who, like David Brower, worked in office buildings but yearned for the soothing presence of nature. An advertisement for the book proclaimed, “To own this book, to know it, to display it, to give it—this in itself is conservation.” Framing consumption as a form of politics, the advertisement suggested that by buying the book Americans could find not only solace but also a feeling of involvement in conservation. The book aimed to represent reality, to reveal an authentic world of wilderness. Displayed on coffee tables around the nation, it promised subversive elegance, tasteful dissent from a culture of artifice.61

6 T hor e au w ith a C a mer a

On Sunday, May 6, 1962, the hundredth anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s death, a bronze bust of the writer was unveiled at the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York City. Members of the Thoreau Society attended the dedication ceremony and witnessed Thoreau’s figure join the pantheon of sculptures overlooking the Hudson River. For Thoreau Society members, the ceremony marked the culmination of a weekend of activities in New York. On Saturday, after discussing Thoreau’s writings, they attended a luncheon that featured some appropriately named dishes—Walden Beans, Emersonian Popped Corn, and an Apple Pan Dowdy made from Louisa May Alcott’s recipe. The next morning, they sat together at the Community Church and listened to the Reverend Donald Harrington, who claimed that Thoreau would be “appalled at the mechanized and dehumanized life of man, and nauseated at what man will do to earn a living.”1 A few days later, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, together with the Wilderness Society, sponsored a commemorative ceremony at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Following a stroll along a birch-shaded path, the poet Robert Frost praised Walden as a book that “has everything.” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, dubbed by the Washington Post as “another Thoreauvian,” addressed the writer’s critique of society and asserted that Thoreau would be “alarmed at America’s present trend toward conformity.”2 148

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Throughout 1962, this idea of Thoreau as something more than a writer, of Thoreau as a living presence and a voice in contemporary society, was often expressed. In the New York Times Magazine, the poet Winfield Townley Scott grappled with Thoreau’s legacy in the nuclear age. “Now, after a century he is more alive than ever,” Scott observed, “and if we juxtapose him with our modern society he rebukes us sharply still.” In a special issue devoted to the Thoreau centenary, the Massachusetts Review featured contributions from more than twenty people, including the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who cited the ongoing bus boycotts, sit-ins, and freedom rides in the South as evidence “that the teachings of Thoreau . . . are more alive today than ever before.”3 For Americans in 1962, Thoreau held what one observer described as a “multifaceted appeal.” He was celebrated as a talented writer and a theorist of civil disobedience; he was considered a rebel and a role model, a true individual who stood apart from the conformity and mediocrity of society. At the Thoreau centennial meetings in New York, Raymond Adams, an English professor from North Carolina, listed many reasons for Thoreau’s “claim to greatness,” including his literary skill and his call for resistance to injustice. But Adams believed that Thoreau’s immersion in the natural world provided his most important legacy to modern Americans. “His going to the wild speaks especially to our time,” Adams affirmed, “when the growth of cities and suburbs and the crowding of the earth everywhere threatens to take wildness from us and has made the little of it we can keep precious.”4 Conservationists agreed. They saw Thoreau as a sage of the wild and a prophet of preservation. In 1962, a spate of books concerning Thoreau appeared, but none received more attention or more acclaim than a book published by the Sierra Club. Entitled “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” the book combined quotations from Thoreau’s writings with color photographs by Eliot Porter. Organized around the four seasons, the book traced the passage of time in the New England forest. Reviewers lauded the book, claiming that Porter had not only taken superb photographs but had even recovered the vision of Thoreau. “Here,” one reviewer wrote, “Thoreau’s unrivalled eye and comprehension of nature join photography in the hands of a master, and the two together harmonize so perfectly that it is with a chill that we realize the two collaborators are a hundred years apart in time.”5 Like the gatherings in New York and Washington, In Wildness commemorated and paid homage to Thoreau. It also galvanized support for the wilderness movement. The first printing sold out before the book was even available. Bookstores reported high sales and kept ordering more copies. Reviewed in

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newspapers and magazines around the country, In Wildness generated tremendous publicity for the Sierra Club and its campaigns. The title of the book became one of the leading slogans of the conservation movement, still appearing today on bumper stickers, posters, and T-shirts. In its structure and design, its use of words and images, and its recording of seasonal change, the book suggested the importance of Thoreau to conservationists in the 1960s. It revealed the possibilities of the camera as a device to induce wonder and alter perception. Received with enthusiasm by Americans, it expressed a widespread longing for contact with wildness, a hunger for authentic experience in nature. While This Is the American Earth provoked considerable confusion over the meanings of environmental reform—with some commentators emphasizing the notion of broad conservation, and many more focusing on the campaign for wilderness preservation—In Wildness prompted similar questions, but in a subtler manner. The Sierra Club explicitly linked the book to the wilderness movement, touting Thoreau as a spiritual seer and a political prophet, someone who viewed pristine nature as his holy text. Yet Porter’s photography ventured beyond the usual bounds of the sublime, looking not to monumental scenes, not to places like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but rather to modest settings, to gentle brooks and autumnal leaves. In contrast to Ansel Adams’s emphasis on the sublimity of national parks, Porter used color photography to redeem nature’s fragments, to find awe and wonder in seasonal change. Like This Is the American Earth, Porter’s photography promoted the cause of wilderness preservation, while also anticipating new issues and concerns, new aesthetics and politics. In Wildness combined ecology with abstraction to study patterns of relationship in the natural world, to gesture toward an ecological version of the sublime. Porter’s aesthetic vision was intimately connected to major developments in scientific thought, particularly in evolutionary theory. While Herbert Gleason had embraced the idea of design and direction in nature, Porter aligned himself with a view often termed the “modern synthesis.” During the mid-twentieth century, influential scientists combined Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics to reach a consensus on evolution. The modern synthesis—with its acknowledgement of random changes or “drift” within populations—thus incorporated chance and randomness into theories of evolutionary change. In accepting the modern synthesis, Porter and other Sierra Club activists broke from a long tradition among environmental reformers of seeing evolution as guided by God. Although many worried that this perspective suggested a universe without purpose and seemed to empty the world of spiritual meaning, Porter and the Sierra Club still professed their faith in nature. In Galapagos: The

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Flow of Wildness, an Exhibit Format book featuring Porter’s photographs of the islands that inspired Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the text linked evolution to spirituality by presenting the Galapagos as sacred space: “If we are to sanctify the desert mountains where Semitic prophets received their messages, then we should these desert islands where Darwin first heard his whisperings. What could be more mysterious and worthy of wonder than the lava hills on which man learned to see . . . a God of a different face?”6 Porter tried to infuse his photographs with this religious feeling. By using the camera, he sought to mix his emotions with the machine to express his belief in the spiritual possibilities of the nonhuman world. “The camera is an instrument for immediate results,” he wrote, describing his interest in bird photography, “and by focusing my attention on the subject it offers a way of sublimating the indefinable longing that is aroused in me by close association with birds.” Not just birds, but many features of the natural world would incite Porter’s feelings and inspire him to represent his “love” and “emotional response” on film.7 In addition to breaking from the directional view of evolution, Porter’s photography also conveyed a different sense of history than the ecological thought associated with the New Deal. The community ecology of Frederic Clements and others who wrote about the Great Plains emphasized the idea of progressive evolution culminating in the perfect world of the climax community. Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty adapted this notion of progress to see New Deal conservation as representing the next step in an evolutionary scheme that merged technology with the environment to restore the ecological balance. In contrast, Porter’s embrace of chance rejected progressive narratives of ecology and evolution. While Lorentz and Flaherty promoted a managerial vision of the land and looked for the sublime in the technological triumphs of the New Deal, Porter found the sublime in the “intimate relationships” and “continuing processes of change in the living world.” In books like In Wildness, he sought to evoke the intimacy and fragility of life by portraying the relationships and processes that composed nature’s “endless web.”8 Through its striking use of color photography, In Wildness transformed the visual language of environmental politics. Before it appeared, the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format series featured only black-and-white images; following its publication, almost every subsequent title contained at least some color, and many of the books dispensed with black and white altogether. Other conservation groups, inspired by the success of In Wildness, also began to embrace the representational power of color. With the important exception of Ansel Adams, who occasionally worked in color, but remained critical of the medium throughout

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his career, most environmental photographers began to use a full palette to portray the brilliant hues and subtle tones of the American earth.9 Eliot Porter and the Colors of Nature

For the photographer Eliot Porter, the publication of In Wildness fulfilled a longtime dream. Born in 1901, Porter grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, in a house that overlooked Lake Michigan. His father, who had studied biology at Harvard, took Eliot and his siblings on Sunday walks along the lakeshore, where he would identify geologic features of the landscape and tell his children about the forces of evolutionary change. These lessons continued in a different setting during the summers, when the family vacationed on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. On most days, Eliot would swim in the bay during high tide and explore the beach, gathering shells, starfish, and sand dollars, during low tide. “A deep feeling for nature began to grow in me,” Porter recalled, “a feeling that was to affect the whole future course of my life.”10 Porter’s father had grown up in a religious home. The son of an Episcopal minister, he nevertheless became disenchanted with formal religion and “pronounced his disbelief in a god or the need for a supernatural explanation of existence.” Long before the modern synthesis, he found in evolutionary theory the basis for a “fierce rejection of purpose as a driving force in the universe.” Porter would learn to accept his father’s faith in science and see the world as lacking an overall design. Like his father, he would also question “theological dogmas” that placed humans at the pinnacle of all life.11 Porter studied chemistry at Harvard and then entered Harvard Medical School, not with the intention of becoming a physician, but instead aiming for a career in scientific research. In 1929, he graduated from medical school and then stayed on at Harvard, taking on teaching and research appointments in bacteriology and biochemistry. Over the next ten years, he worked diligently in the laboratory but did not find the research rewarding. As he grew dissatisfied with his work, Porter turned to photography as a hobby. Periodically, he would show his work to the prominent photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who, after studying Porter’s most recent prints in the fall of 1938, said to him, “You have arrived, I want to show these.” Stieglitz planned a solo exhibit of Porter’s work at An American Place, his prestigious gallery in New York. For three weeks, visitors gazed at twenty-nine of Porter’s photographs, all in black and white, mostly landscapes and nature studies. Critics praised the exhibit. “Mr. Porter,” one reviewer observed, “is unquestionably an artist who looks upon nature with the

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appreciative eye of a painter yet gets his effects through straight photography. . . . [He] gains a rank at once among our serious photographers.”12 Emboldened by his success at An American Place, Porter resigned from Harvard and became a full-time photographer. During the next several years, he primarily took pictures of birds. Porter wanted to expand the aesthetic possibilities of bird photography, a genre he felt suffered from an emphasis on extreme close-ups of the birds themselves—a perspective that detached the creatures from their natural surroundings. With attention to balance and composition, he showed birds perched at their nests, surrounded by leaves and branches; he showed them flying away from trees, as their wings unfurled with supple grace. Less than a year after his debut at An American Place, Porter submitted a set of bird portraits as a book idea. The editor liked his work, but rejected the proposal, explaining that viewers would be able to identify the birds more easily if the images were in color. So he encouraged Porter to experiment with color photography.13 That advice changed Porter’s approach. After trying different methods of printing color film, he began to photograph mostly in color, and remained committed to it throughout his career. In 1941, he received a coveted award from the Guggenheim Foundation; two years later, the Museum of Modern Art organized and circulated Birds in Color, a solo exhibition of his work.14 As Porter garnered praise for his innovations in bird photography, he also began to take color photographs of botanical subjects, including flowers, leaves, and berries. Sometime in the late 1940s, his wife, the painter Aline Porter, commented that these images reminded her of Thoreau’s writings. Intrigued by this statement, he began to carry Thoreau’s works with him on birding trips. Bird photography involved hours of waiting, so Porter would pass the time by reading Thoreau. He started with Walden and then proceeded to read the rest of his published works, including all fourteen volumes of his Journal. Porter found much inspiration in Thoreau’s prose and conceived of a project that would pair his nature photographs with passages from Thoreau. He believed that color photography would be the ideal medium for this project, expressing in images what Thoreau had described in words. “Thoreau,” Porter later explained, “was acutely aware of the color in nature.”15 For more than a decade, Porter devoted a few months of each year to the Thoreau project, visiting New England during all four seasons to record the changing appearance of the landscape. Thoreau proved to be the consummate guide for Porter as he studied the seasons. In Thoreau’s writings, Porter found the voice of someone who had struggled to chart the minute variations of natural phenomena, who had tried to understand the moment when one season

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would shade into another, who had appreciated and celebrated the constant flux that marked the time of nature. In many of his works, Thoreau revealed a deep awareness of seasonal change, but he focused most thoroughly on this issue in his Journal. Kept over a period of twenty-four years, the Journal is a record of Thoreau’s attempt to observe, with ever-increasing precision, the always-changing details of biological life.16 Thoreau’s Journal was first published in its entirety in the 1906 Walden edition illustrated by Herbert Gleason. While Porter never acknowledged Gleason’s influence or commented on his photographs, the two engaged in a remarkably similar project: to use the camera to visualize transcendentalist thought. Yet the half century that separated them brought tremendous advances in photographic technology. Gleason had once expressed his desire for color photography, calling it the “one thing for which the world is waiting,” but he had to rely on hand-painted slides to represent nature’s colors. Fifty years later, Porter could use color film and new printing techniques to offer mechanically reproduced images of seasonal change. Emersonian and Thoreauvian vision could now be represented in color.17 As Porter worked on this project, he sought the advice of the writer and Thoreau biographer Joseph Wood Krutch, asking him to recommend particular quotations from Thoreau. He wanted Krutch to list specific details that he could portray with his camera, such as the appearance of hoar frost in the fall. But Porter wanted to do more than merely reproduce scenes described by Thoreau. “The passages about specific subjects will be the easiest to illustrate,” he explained to Krutch. “It will be the more general and perhaps key passages that will present the greatest difficulties and be the most fun too to find photographs for. In these passages Thoreau’s thought and spirit and philosophy are the qualities that I had originally imagined could be illustrated.” Porter aimed at something more than a documentary record of seasonal change. “The photograph,” he wrote, “cannot be a literal representation of anything in the text but must be the essence of the whole.” The camera provided Porter with the opportunity to distill Thoreau’s ideas in images, to convey the essence of his thought in pictures.18 Real Time

Porter’s newfound interest in Thoreau coincided with a broader reappraisal of the writer as a prophet of American conservation. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans, including Herbert Gleason, had lauded Thoreau for his detailed observations of nature, viewing him as a precursor of John

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Muir and other popular nature writers. Yet after this period, commentators on Thoreau tended to downplay or even ignore his intense involvement with the natural world; they viewed his study of nature as quaint or quirky, not worthy of serious intellectual concern.19 But as Porter began reading Thoreau in the late 1940s, the literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch began to challenge the prevailing wisdom, claiming that Thoreau’s empirical study of nature was both his driving passion and his greatest achievement as a writer. An English professor at Columbia University, Krutch had published The Modern Temper in 1929. This book expressed a sense of disillusionment with Western civilization, an uncertainty about how to find meaning in a world where science had not only replaced religion but even, Krutch feared, reduced people to creatures of instinct and impulse, devoid of will, judgment, and soul. Searching for answers to this spiritual and existential crisis, Krutch read Walden in 1930. From there, he moved on to other works by Thoreau and eventually became fascinated not just with the writer but also with Thoreau’s primary activity—the close observation of nature. A few years later, Krutch bought a house in rural Connecticut, fifty miles from Manhattan. Wandering through the nearby forests and fields, he became absorbed with his surroundings and began to study the details of biological life.20 Krutch found a moral message in Thoreau’s writings, an outlook that challenged the idea of human dominance and self-importance. “Thoreau,” Krutch explained, “had none of that sense of superiority or even of separateness which is the inevitable result of any philosophy or any religion which attributes to man any qualitative uniqueness and inevitably suggests that all other creatures exist primarily for him.” According to Krutch, Thoreau’s thought provided a much-needed antidote to the hubris of modern society. “Here, if you like,” he concluded, “is the full antithesis of teleology, of the assumption that the meaning, obvious or hidden, of every item in the universe is some known or unknown usefulness to man.”21 After reading numerous works from the American nature-writing tradition, Krutch became a nature writer himself. In 1949, he published The Twelve Seasons, a collection of twelve essays, one for each month—beginning with April and ending with March. Set in rural Connecticut, the book not only describes the plants, animals, and landscapes of the area but also ponders the meaning of time. Soon after it was published, Eliot Porter would read The Twelve Seasons and find much resonance between Krutch’s work and his own. In important ways, this book would inspire and influence the photographer; it would both anticipate and shape his project on Thoreau. In this book, Krutch explored many of the ideas that Porter wanted to represent with his camera.

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The Twelve Seasons contrasts the abstract time of the calendar with the concrete time of nature. The book begins with the month of April and the call of the spring peeper, a tree frog whose piercing song signified, for Krutch at least, the true beginning of spring. Compared with Easter, a religious event, or the equinox, an astronomical event, Krutch found more meaning in a biological event—in the shrill notes uttered by a tiny frog. Shunning the calendar, he located the beginning of spring in the world of living creatures, on the day when the peeper “inflates the little bubble in his throat and sends out the clear note audible for half a mile. On that day,” Krutch continued, “something older than the Christian God has risen. The earth is alive again.” Krutch wanted people to celebrate this day, the “Day of the Peepers,” not a day inscribed on the calendar, not a day determined by astronomy or religious tradition, but a day that corresponded to something that “actually happened,” something that people could witness in the reality of nature.22 From his heightened awareness of nature and from his keen attention to seasonal change, Krutch drew some moral lessons. “From Nature,” he argued, “we gain a perspective on ourselves which serves, not to set us aside from, but to put us in relation with, a complex scheme.” Krutch began to see himself and all people as part of a vast world of pulsating life. If Americans paid more attention to the natural world, Krutch believed, they would learn the most important lesson of all: they would learn to question whether human beings were the apex of evolution, the inevitable result of a process that moved upward, from the “lower” forms of life to the “higher.” Like Krutch, they would learn to reject the directional view of evolution. “If each of [Nature’s] manifestations exhibits excellencies of its own,” he wrote, “then why should man regard everything that came before him as a step—often a false step—on the road up to him?” In these comments, Krutch anticipated a major shift in conservation thought during the postwar period: influenced by the work of leading researchers in genetics and paleontology, many conservationists embraced chance as a factor in evolution. In contrast to earlier Protestant intellectuals such as Herbert Gleason, they denounced the idea of direction and design in nature. They believed that randomness could explain much of the earth’s history, and they questioned the anthropocentric notion that humans stood at the summit of all life.23 Yet Krutch—along with Eliot Porter—still believed that humans could extract spiritual meaning and moral lessons from nature. Rather than subscribing to the notion of a purposeless universe, they sought emotional reassurance and ethical guidance in the cycle of the seasons. Although they embraced evolutionary chaos and rejected progressive time schemes, Krutch and Porter continued

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to imbue the natural world with spiritual sentiment. Seasonal time, they believed, taught people to respect the otherness of nature and encouraged them to safeguard the integrity of threatened ecosystems. After reading The Twelve Seasons, Porter began to correspond with Krutch and seek his advice on selecting quotations from Thoreau. During the 1950s, the two men collaborated on a magazine article, tossed around different book ideas, and prepared a portfolio, a combination of Porter’s photographs and Krutch’s prose, for presentation to Congress in support of the Wilderness Bill. The same feelings that Krutch described in words—a hunger for contact with reality, for unmediated experience in the wild—Porter expressed in images. Through color photographs, Porter used the camera to capture the cycle of the seasons, the real time of nature.24 Sierra Club Religion

As he worked on the Thoreau project, Porter began to consider photography as a vehicle for conservation, as something that carried not only aesthetic value but political value as well. “I saw that the camera,” he wrote, “could be a powerful instrument for persuasion for other than exclusively aesthetic and creative purposes. . . . I became convinced, also, that photography’s persuasiveness was greater the higher the aesthetic quality of the photograph.” The more beautiful the photograph, Porter believed, the more persuasive it would be, the more it would “open the eyes of people . . . to the continuing processes of growth and death and transformation.” Like Pare Lorentz, who once claimed that “Good art is good propaganda,” Porter found that perception and politics were becoming one. After fifteen years of reading Thoreau, taking pictures, and arranging and rearranging text and images, Porter was ready to show Americans how to look at nature, ready to turn them into conservationists. There was only one thing missing: an audience.25 In the summer of 1960, Porter wanted an audience, and David Brower wanted another book to publish. Buoyed by the success of This Is the American Earth, Brower hoped to expand the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format series. In mid-August, while working at his office, he received a phone call from Nancy Newhall. Newhall had just finished helping Porter organize his Thoreau project into an exhibit, entitled The Seasons, on display at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. At the exhibit’s opening, Porter told Newhall of the many rejections he had received from publishers and despaired that he might never see the project appear as a book. Thinking that Brower would be excited by Porter’s work, she called him in San Francisco. Brower “expressed

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immediate interest” in the project and asked Porter to send him a sample of what he had in mind.26 Soon after, a package containing two albums of photographs arrived in the mail for Brower. “The juxtaposition of Thoreau and Porter produced an impact that had great power,” he recalled. “Several of the spreads hit me very hard, so often and so tellingly that I knew there must be a book. Since the book was concerned with the very elements of Sierra Club religion, who else should publish it?” For Brower, it seemed natural for the club to publish the book. Like This Is the American Earth, the book would not be a “battle” book; it would not try to “fight off” a particular threat to a particular place. “It is not trying to protect any specific thing,” Brower later explained. “It is trying to build an attitude; it is trying to help the individual reader arrive at the point where we’d like him to be in his thinking.”27 In Wildness would be the first Sierra Club publication not to focus on the American West. Some leaders feared that the club would lose its moorings and abandon its traditional concern with the Sierra Nevada. They wanted the organization to speak for the Sierra, not for places across the continent. Among others who objected to the book, Brower recalled that Francis Farquhar, a member of the Publications Committee, “thought we had no business publishing on the subject of New England wildness. . . . He liked our special role of keeping to the West, and, particularly, to the Sierra.” Despite this opposition, Brower’s opinion prevailed. He believed the book would be propaganda for the Wilderness Bill, that it would awaken the public and convert more Americans to Sierra Club religion.28 In Wildness would be the fourth book in the club’s Exhibit Format series and the first to feature color images. Color photography presented a new challenge: to achieve the high reproduction quality demanded by both Brower and Porter, the Sierra Club would have to spend a considerable amount in printing costs. Brower secured $50,000 in outside funds, assuring the benefactors that they were making an investment in conservation. After examining the work of several different printers, Brower and Porter selected Barnes Press in New York City, because, Brower explained, the company used “the best paper” and was “willing to respect the artist.” They trusted Barnes Press, but Brower and Porter wanted to be there during the printing, so they could make sure that the book lived up to their expectations.29 Brower and Porter spent three full days at the press, including some all-night sessions, inspecting the quality of the prints and marveling at the mechanical speed of the process. They watched the large sheets of paper, each containing sixteen exhibit-format size prints, “spewing out of the press at speeds up to

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4,800 sheets per hour.” They examined the sheets with a magnifying glass to see if they met “the high standard of excellence set for the book.” “Right at the start something significant happened,” Brower recalled. “The sheets looked good, but not superb.” Hugh Barnes, the president of Barnes Press, suggested that they “throw out the first 2500 sheets,” and asked Brower to split the cost of the wasted paper. It would be about two hundred dollars, “a lot of money— the dues from 25 members,” Brower wrote. “The sheets he was willing to toss were beautiful—the best I had seen and all we could reasonably expect. They just weren’t superbly beautiful.” Wanting nothing less than superbly beautiful prints, Brower said to Barnes, “Throw them out.”30 Without commenting on the environmental implications of discarding so much paper, Brower reported to Sierra Club members that their fastidiousness was worth it—after throwing out the proofs and correcting the plates, they watched as blank sheets of paper were fed into the press, printed with four colors of ink, and then “floated” over to illuminated tables to be studied and scrutinized. The proofs seemed precise, every dot of color in the right place. By the end of third day, 10,000 copies were printed, ready to be bound. According to Brower, the book represented the club’s “most ambitious publishing effort.” With pride, he noted that several “bookwise men”—publishers, printers, and booksellers—examined sample copies and described it as “the most beautiful book of its kind ever produced.”31 Porter had titled his project The Seasons, but Brower suggested the new title: “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” This quotation was taken from Thoreau’s “Walking,” an essay that celebrated the “absolute freedom and wildness” of “Nature.” In the middle of the piece, Thoreau declared: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Thoreau’s quote seemed to announce more explicitly than the title The Seasons that the project had a conservation message. Indeed, this passage was a favorite of both John Muir and Aldo Leopold, and as Porter noted in the book’s preface, was “long used almost as a motto” by the Wilderness Society. “Its eight words,” Porter explained, “express the theme of the book and tell what Thoreau discovered one hundred years ago, that a leaven of wildness is necessary for the health of the human spirit, a truth we seem to have forgotten in our headlong rush to control all nature.” Extracting these eight words from Thoreau’s essay, the Sierra Club packaged the writer as the first proponent of wilderness preservation. Thoreau himself had celebrated wildness, not the wilderness, a quality, not a place, something found in a variety of landscapes, including rural, domesticated environments, places of work as well as leisure.

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Reading and appropriating Thoreau in this way, perhaps Sierra Club leaders secretly enjoyed seeing some reviewers change the second word of the title, mistakenly referring to the book as “In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World.”32 Revising the Sublime

For the cover of In Wildness, Brower and Porter selected an abstract photograph: water in a New Hampshire brook appears as a spectrum, its color shading from bright orange to dark blue; yellow leaves float across the surface while white light glistens and radiates from the center (plate 1). This image also appears in the autumn section of the book, next to a quote from Thoreau’s Journal. “I saw, by a peculiar intention or dividing of the eye,” Thoreau wrote, “a very striking . . . rainbow-like phenomenon. . . . It was just as if you were to . . . brush a fresh line of paint of various colors.” This passage describes nature as a canvas; the colors that ripple across water seem like paint brushed across the surface of a pond. Together, the image and text suggest a central theme of the book: an effort to reconcile art with nature, to see the natural world as a palette for the imagination, a place to glimpse the colors of wildness.33 Joseph Wood Krutch, in his introduction to the book, described Thoreau and Porter as reinterpreters of the sublime tradition. According to theorists of the sublime, humans could glimpse the divine in nature but only in particular settings, in landscapes that overwhelmed the spectator, landscapes that made one feel puny and insignificant. “Other writers and photographers,” Krutch explained, summarizing this tradition, “are prone to seek out the unusual, the grandiose, and the far away. . . . When they are successful in their attempt they inspire in us that special sense of surprise, wonder, and a kind of pleasing terror . . . defined as ‘awe.’”34 But Krutch believed that this perspective, this search for beauty only in the most dramatic, overpowering landscapes was too limited; it encouraged people to ignore the beauty that lay everywhere in the natural world. “Thoreau’s theme is not the remote and stupendous,” Krutch continued, “but the daily and hourly miracle of the usually unnoticed beauty that is close at hand. What we need is, he felt, not the unfamiliar but the power to realize that the familiar becomes unfamiliar once we really look at it, and that every aspect of the natural world is in its own way ‘awful.’” In Thoreau’s writings and in Porter’s photographs, Krutch found a new form of the sublime—an ecological sublime—that made the familiar seem unfamiliar, that paid attention to the hidden wonders of nature. Like Thoreau, Porter focused not on the stupendous and the spectacu-

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lar but instead on the modest landscapes where beauty was often overlooked. “What one will find in Porter’s pictures,” Krutch explained, “is the world of calm beauty at which one must look twice to find the awesomeness which is, nevertheless, there.” According to Krutch, Porter used the camera and color photography to revise the sublime.35 For Porter, the true beauty of nature lay not in what he described as its “most obvious and superficial aspects,” not in the grand vistas and stirring sunsets, but in the constant changes, in the “subtle fleeting moods” of the seasons. The most casual observer, the observer “with half an eye,” Porter wrote, could notice the beauty in the “peaks and summits of nature’s greatest displays.” But this perspective neglected the full range of nature’s aesthetics: “Underlying and supporting these brilliant displays, are slow, quiet processes that pass almost unnoticed from season to season, unnoticed, that is, by those who think that the beauty in nature is all in its gaudy displays.” Rather than a static vision of wilderness, Porter wanted to record motion. Through color photographs, he wanted to represent nature as a circle of time, as a place where order and harmony sprang from the unending cycle of change. Even as he accepted ideas of chance and randomness, Porter found a certain degree of stability in the natural world. The enduring cycle of the seasons signified a sense of order amidst the flux of time.36 In Wildness contains seventy-two photographs, each one appearing on the right-hand page, paired with Thoreau quotations on the left. The first photograph portrays the beginning of spring: dark water passes by white snow; it gurgles around rocks and patches of ice; it flows along frozen banks (plate 2). In a passage from the Journal, Thoreau described the appearance of “dark-eyed water” as the “first sign” of the new season: “How its darkness contrasts with the general lightness of the winter! It has more life in it than any part of the earth’s surface.” Porter’s photograph captures this sense of life—ice melting, water moving, winter thawing into spring.37 Like Thoreau’s Walden and Krutch’s The Twelve Seasons, Porter’s book charts a seasonal narrative, a journey through the year that follows nature’s time rather than the abstract time of the calendar. But unlike these writers, Porter did not end his book in spring, the season of renewal. Instead, he ended in winter, the season often associated with decay, darkness, and death. Yet Porter did not portray winter as gloomy or tragic; it is not some kind of dismal climax to his narrative. Quite the contrary: Porter applied the theme of renewal to winter, portraying nature as regenerating itself during all seasons. The last photograph in the book, a photograph reproduced in the San Francisco Chronicle and many other newspapers and magazines, shows a group

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of dark, bare trees, including one in the foreground with a broken branch, a branch that seems ready to snap and fall to the ground (plate 3). The forest is draped with fog, but light pierces through the background and illuminates the entire scene, turning the image into an optimistic vision, a promise of future hope and renewal.38 In contrast to Ansel Adams and most other landscape photographers who specialized in the sublime, Porter rarely focused his camera on the sky. Of all the photographs that appear in the book, the sky is visible in only ten, usually as streaks of blue between trees; it is the dominant subject of only one image. Porter tended to look down rather than up, tilting his camera toward the ground and focusing on fragments of the landscape. Rather than the wide, comprehensive view, Porter concentrated on the minute details and the subtle fleeting moods that most people overlook. Porter wanted to enlarge the typical notion of beauty in nature. To be sure, In Wildness includes photographs of flowers in bloom, lush green plants, and leaves ablaze in autumn colors. But it also shows ferns withering and turning brown, trees stripped of their leaves, flowers losing their petals. “How much beauty in decay!” Thoreau once declared. Inspired by this statement, Porter tried to make art out of decay, to make, he explained, “the sere, brown leaves of winter” seem “as beautiful as the fresh green of spring.”39 A photograph of maple leaves on the ground, included in the autumn section of the book, best illustrates this emphasis (plate 4). Resting on what Thoreau called a carpet of pine needles, the leaves are similar in design and shape, as if they are from the same tree. Yet their colors differ, ranging from a greenish-yellow to a rusty brown. The leaves are in different stages of decay. The photograph provides a glimpse of one particular moment, but it also suggests the direction of change. Soon the yellow leaves will turn brown. Soon all of the leaves will decompose. Next to this image, a passage from the Journal describes decay. Focusing on pine needles instead of leaves, Thoreau evoked the idea that death generates life. “How beautifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil! They fall to rise again. . . . They live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it.” Porter’s photograph seems to arrest change, giving permanent form to particular leaves that have particular colors; yet the image, like the quotation, points toward imminent change, toward motion that never ceases.40 Porter tried to induce surprise, to make viewers look more closely not only at nature itself, but also at the nature recorded by his camera. The summer section of the book includes a photograph of a bird standing on a small branch (plate 5). At first glance, the picture seems straightforward: surrounded by green plants

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6.1. Eliot Porter, barn swallow, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, August 21, 1954, dye imbibition (Kodak Dye Transfer), P1990.60.34, © 1990 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist.

and dry grasses, a brown bird, with stripes running down its belly, is perched just above the ground. But the Thoreau quotations encourage us to take another look at the image. “Who taught the oven-bird to conceal her nest?” Thoreau asked. “It is on the ground, yet out of sight.” This passage provides the clue: there is a nest visible in Porter’s photograph, a dome-shaped nest, to the left of the oven-bird, where baby birds appear to chirp. “What cunning there is in nature!” Thoreau continued. “No man could have arranged it more artfully for the purpose of concealment.” What cunning there is in photography, we might want to say. No photographer could have arranged it more artfully for the purpose of concealment.41 In Wildness encourages readers to see beauty in places other than Yellowstone or Yosemite, to find aesthetic value in “ordinary” landscapes. Nevertheless, the book reinforces the idea of a peopleless wilderness, of nature as a realm separate from society. Only one of the book’s seventy-two photographs provides any evidence of human presence: a picture of birds in a nest, sitting not on the branch of a tree, but instead on a wooden beam (fig. 6.1). Other than this one image, the book contains no sign of human habitation. There are no houses, no roads, no artifacts of any kind. There are rivers and waterfalls, but no locks or channels,

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no dams or mills. There are many stones, but no stone fences. There is not even a single trail through the woods. Porter chose to exclude all the human history embedded in the New England landscape; he chose to frame the environment as untouched and unspoiled, as a place uncorrupted by the intrusion of people. Through these aesthetic choices, Porter presented nature as a place where one should look but not touch, as a place that one should admire, even worship, but not change. The book imagines the natural world as a space of leisure, not of labor. Porter used a quotation from Thoreau’s Journal to stress this point. “Is it the lumberman,” Thoreau asked, “who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best?” “No, no,” he answered, “it is the poet who makes the truest use of the pine, who does not fondle it with an axe, or tickle it with a saw, or stroke it with a plane. It is the poet who loves it as his own shadow in the air, and lets it stand.” The book suggests that those who handle nature, those who make a living from it, those who change or commodify it in any way, cannot appreciate the natural world. The only way to know nature is through the eyes of a poet.42 This emphasis on defining nature as a repository of aesthetic value denies the ways that work connects people to the natural world. It suggests that any use of nature is not merely a mistake but a profound moral failing. It makes all human-constructed spaces—farms, factories, cities—seem tainted, far removed from the pristine world of wilderness. Thoreau’s writings, it is important to stress, did not embrace this dualistic vision; describing the springtime thaw in a nearby railroad “cut,” he famously wrote in Walden: “There is nothing inorganic.” But Porter chose not to include scenes of work or evidence of how people had altered the land because he wanted to represent nature as pure and sacred. A fable of origins, a fantasy of return, the book imagines nature as a space that lies outside the fell clutch of humanity, a space where the poet will always be the friend and lover of the pine.43 Not only the poet, but also the photographer: according to many commentators—book reviewers and Sierra Club leaders alike—Porter seemed to have recovered Thoreau’s vision, to have recaptured his way of seeing the world. “Porter,” David Brower wrote, “has in effect found and photographed beautifully what Thoreau must have been thinking of when he wrote particular passages.” “What Porter has done,” a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle explained, “is to take an excerpt from Thoreau and then with his camera go out and capture the spirit of the scene described. And at times, he has come so close that you would think Thoreau was along with him to say that this scene is what I saw.”44

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A Market for the Natural

Reviewers described In Wildness as revelatory, as a book that could teach people how to see. “Eliot Porter,” a writer for the National Review commented, “[has] made a book of such beauty that we wonder, upon being able to put it down, if we’ve ever seen a photograph, or the world, before.” “The intermingling of text and photography,” the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in another review, “is a series of miracles.” “Here,” Scott wrote, “is what all art accomplishes: to make us see better than we saw, remember better than we knew, and be moved again to love.” A contributor to the Living Wilderness, the magazine published by the Wilderness Society, reviewed both This Is the American Earth and In Wildness in the same article. He described the books as “stirring sermons,” as religious evocations of nature: “The message and the import that these rich volumes convey—perhaps best epitomized by the Scriptural apostrophe ‘Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty’—strike home from every page.”45 Out of all the reviews that appeared in newspapers and magazines around the country, only one expressed feelings of hesitance toward Porter’s book. This review appeared in the Los Angeles–based Manas, a weekly “journal of independent inquiry” whose name, derived from a Sanskrit root, suggested “‘man’ or ‘the thinker.’” The editors waited a few months to compose their review of the book, because they wanted to come to terms with “the curious ambivalence it seemed to provoke.” As they turned the pages of In Wildness, the editors found much to admire; they praised Porter for his “sensitive eye” and his “sumptuous” photographs. “We may have tramped the same woods many a time,” they wrote, “but Eliot Porter easily shows us that we may also have trampled right over some hidden wonder.” They found the book to be a “luxurious specimen,” but they worried that it contradicted or even profaned Thoreau’s message; they worried that it revealed artifice instead of reality, that it reflected the power of machines rather than the beauty of nature. “The book,” they explained, “brought a scurrying doubt as to how Thoreau himself might have reacted to all this technological grandeur. Things were simpler in his time. You had to experience nature firsthand, not through some artifice such as photography.” As the editors suggested, the book was created by an elaborate process of mechanical reproduction and circulation—beginning with the moment Porter used the camera, a technology of representation, followed by the printing of color plates, the use of coated paper, and the transport of books from New York to bookstores across the nation. They worried that “all this technological grandeur” might alienate people further from the natural world, that it might distance them even more from reality.46 Although they worried about the artifice of images, the editors concluded

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that photography was necessary; they believed it provided a valuable substitute for contact with the actual wilderness. “We have come to depend upon the Eliot Porters to show us what goes on outside our limited bailiwicks,” they continued. “Mechanization and progress have removed man long strides from the intimate first-hand experience of many things, but especially from that soul-refreshing experience with nature which Thoreau so much esteemed.” In Wildness seemed both a symptom and a cure; it reflected the unnatural conditions of modern life, but it also promised to alleviate those conditions, to refresh people’s souls by returning them to the reality of nature. “Appropriately ensconced on many a middle-class coffee table,” the editors concluded, “[the book] may quietly stir long dormant longings for a life that springs from deeper roots, has more meaning, and gives greater beauty.”47 The editors of Manas raised a question that no one else thought to ask. They wondered what happened when the wilderness became just another commodity, another item bought and sold in the marketplace. Was something being lost as nature became a consumer product, something manufactured and packaged, with all its substance and meaning turned into mere representation, a facsimile of the real world? In the end, like everyone else, they praised In Wildness; overcoming their ambivalence, they described the book as a therapeutic dose of reality for an increasingly artificial society.48 Porter received numerous letters from people commending and thanking him for his work on In Wildness. Although most of the letters merely offer words of praise, a few letter writers expressed their emotional reactions to the book. “We feel in it, supreme reality, moving through you,” a married couple wrote to Porter. “You reaffirm our feeling that man is most perfect when most obedient.” For this couple, the book seemed to capture reality and to provide an antidote to human arrogance—to suggest the need for limits to industrial growth.49 Another letter writer believed that modern culture had no respect for limits and feared that all wilderness would soon be destroyed. “Perhaps in this age which is upon Man,” he wrote to Porter, “my sons might never have the opportunity to see Nature in Her simplicity, power and balance.” He thanked the photographer “for caring enough about the inexpressible beauty of Nature to have taken the pains to present Her as you have.” Seeking “a greater harmony in the lives of my own family,” this fan explained that he had “recently moved from Los Angeles to New Mexico.” For him, Los Angeles represented all that was wrong with modern America; it was a place where people valued the artificial over the natural, where they craved the imitation rather than the real thing. “It is a perverse irony,” he continued, “that the florist shops of my old love, California—are primarily sustained by being the best places in town

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to buy artfully wrought plastic flowers! There is, in Los Angeles today, a more enduring market for the artificial than for the natural.”50 Yet the success of In Wildness suggested that there was a growing market for the natural, that more and more Americans were eager to consume the wild. The Sierra Club worked to expand this market. “Clear a place in your house now!” Brower wrote to club members in September 1962, a month before the book appeared. In the Bulletin, he listed the different forms of “advance notice” the book would receive. Bookstores would send out 150,000 brochures featuring a photograph from In Wildness. The Sierra Club would distribute 75,000 winter catalogs promoting the book as a holiday gift. The December issue of American Heritage, a magazine with over 340,000 subscribers, would include a portfolio of Porter photographs, along with passages from Thoreau. The book was released in October, and many bookstores displayed it in their windows, often with leaves and other emblems of the season. “It’s out,” a friend wrote to Porter, after seeing the book in a New York City store. “I was so excited I wanted to break in at 10 p.m. They have a whole corner reserved for it with your prints and a lot of real fall leaves strewn about.”51 In Wildness presented a vision of reality, and the “real” fall leaves must have reinforced this message to customers. But its authenticity had a price. The book sold for twenty-five dollars—ten dollars more than the price of the previous books in the Exhibit Format series—a figure in 1962 that would be equivalent to about $150 today. Even Brower worried that the price might be too high. “When you price a book at twenty-five dollars,” he recalled, “you take a deep breath, cross your fingers, pray, hope, and prepare yourself to be considered insane.” According to Publishers’ Weekly, In Wildness was a “lavish gift” book. Brower encouraged Sierra Club members to buy the book and display it in their homes before the “Christmas rush” began, so they could provide “advance notice” to people who were not involved in the club. But despite Brower’s worries, In Wildness became a popular gift item that holiday season, with sales exceeding all expectations. The book went through several reprintings; five years later, it became the first book in the Exhibit Format series to be released in a paperback edition.52 By 1967, Brower wanted to attract a larger audience, to market the wild to people who could not afford the high price of the Exhibit Format books. He believed there were “two distinct markets” for Sierra Club books. “The full-size exhibit-format books,” he wrote, “would appeal to the people who could afford expensive art books . . . to reflect their taste.” The smaller, mass-market paperbacks, priced at $3.95, would appeal to Americans who were sympathetic to the club’s mission, but not able to purchase the lavish coffee table books.53

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Released in 1967, the softcover version of In Wildness was hailed by reviewers as “the most beautiful paperback book in the world.” The Sierra Club was applauded for adapting its “hard-back luxury volume” without sacrificing quality. “Here,” one reviewer observed, “is a highly commendable project to bring the delicate nuances of esthetic and visual pleasure to the general public without financial pain. It carries its own proof that modern expertise is bringing cultural benefits to us all.” Several reviews commented on the technology that lay behind the new book; they echoed the idea that “modern expertise” dispersed benefits to everyone. They discussed the “new photo screening process,” a method that produced “74,000 dots per square inch per color on vertical pictures and 129,000 for horizontals,” a method that ensured “nothing” would be “lost—not the thinnest blade of grass in the farthest distance, not the tiniest bump on a bud.” Like Joseph Wood Krutch and Sierra Club leaders, reviewers suggested that the camera, along with the new technologies of printing and reproduction, helped bring more Americans closer to the reality of nature.54 The paperback version of In Wildness would reach a broader audience, not only in terms of income but also age. The book would appeal to a younger generation—to members of the counterculture and to others who wanted to “get back to nature.” Thoreau’s words and Porter’s photographs would capture the imagination of many young Americans who desired a sense of connection to the natural world. The environmental historian William Cronon, thirteen years old in 1967, recalls that In Wildness “became very nearly a Bible for those young people like myself who came to see the defense of wilderness as a compelling moral mission.” In 1974, a contributor to Smithsonian magazine wrote that In Wildness “wasn’t really a book,” but instead “a pamphlet in the tradition of Tom Paine and other propagandists.” It was, he continued, “the set piece of what is almost certainly the most successful pamphleteering effort of recent history.”55 Throughout the 1960s, Thoreau was invoked as a cultural icon by many Americans. His words, like words from a Bible, seemed to represent ultimate truth. His spirit of rebellion, his escape from society, his questioning of dominant values—all contributed to his symbolic importance. Thoreau became a hero to Americans who were concerned about conformity and disillusioned with the consumer ethos of modern society. He seemed a prophet of the simple life spent close to nature, away from the hollow materialism of American culture, away from a world obsessed with technology and industrial output. According to one writer, Thoreau’s “central point” was “‘Simplify! Simplify!’”56 The Sierra Club contributed to Thoreau’s popularity, but In Wildness was hardly a token of the simple life. Intended as a prestige item, the Exhibit Format edition was the product of considerable technology, of Kodachrome film

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and dye-transfer prints, a product of Barnes Press, where 4,800 sheets were printed an hour, a product of Brower’s desire for perfection, of his decision to throw out the less-than-superbly-beautiful proofs. Priced to reflect the “taste” of affluent consumers, the book would be displayed on coffee tables, where it would become a status symbol for those who could afford it. The mass-marketed paperback, cheaper in price, would seem more like a pamphlet or political manifesto than an extravagant item of consumption. But it was a pamphlet produced with the latest technology, inscribed with over 100,000 dots of color per square inch; like the Exhibit Format book, it was a pamphlet that depended upon the camera, a machine that seemed to offer the most natural way of looking at nature. With In Wildness, the Sierra Club celebrated the idea of pure nature and presented Thoreau as the precursor to the wilderness movement. Yet Porter’s photographs, in enlarging traditional notions of natural beauty, also pointed toward a revised notion of the sublime and provided the glimmerings of an ecological consciousness. The Sierra Club intended for the book to be a subtle form of propaganda for the wilderness campaign. All those Americans who bought and stared at In Wildness may have indeed become more committed to the protection of wilderness; but they also may have begun to value more deeply and passionately the landscapes closer to home, the places containing the kind of quiet beauty Porter had captured with his camera. The worship of wildness may have encouraged a sense of awe and respect for places other than the wilderness.

7 A mer ic a n E le g y, A mer ic a n R enew a l

In the fall of 1960, Eliot Porter floated down the Colorado River. It was a new experience for the fifty-nine-year-old photographer, an opportunity to study the great Western river and the canyons it had carved. Joined by several friends, he floated in a rubber raft for a week, slept at night along the riverbank, and journeyed over one hundred miles, primarily through Glen Canyon in southern Utah. Along the way, he had the chance to photograph some spectacular scenery. For Porter, the trip turned out to be both a revelation and a failure. “From the very first day,” he recalled, “I was overwhelmed by the scenery—both in prospect and in description grossly underrated. The monumental structure of the towering walls in variety and color defied comprehension. So powerful was the impression, I didn’t know where to look, what to focus on; and in my confusion, photographic opportunities slipped by.” He would describe the trip as a “failure photographically,” but he was determined to learn how to see and photograph the canyons, places that seemed strange and wondrous, places he “could not emotionally ignore.”1 Porter felt drawn to the Colorado for the aesthetic possibilities it held. But there was another, more pressing reason for him to take pictures of the canyon country. In 1960, when he first visited the region, the Bureau of Reclamation had already spent four years building a dam just across the Arizona border, near 170

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the endpoint of Porter’s trip. The dam would stop the flow of the Colorado and then flood Glen Canyon, along with its maze of side canyons—Anasazi and Bridge, Cathedral and Forbidding, Labyrinth, Mystery, and Twilight. The dam would create a reservoir, 186 miles in length, drowning the tapestries and the amphitheaters, the plunge pools and the shaded grottoes. As water backed up behind the dam, it would inundate almost everything Porter had seen.2 The next year Porter returned twice to Glen Canyon to take color photographs of the area. While working on “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” he showed David Brower some of his Glen Canyon prints. Brower already felt guilty about the impending loss of the canyon. In the mid-1950s, as the Sierra Club battled to protect Dinosaur National Monument, the organization had decided not to challenge the dam at Glen Canyon, a decision Brower would regret for years to come. As he looked at Porter’s photographs, he was struck immediately by their emotive power and believed that the prints should appear in a coffee table book. He convinced the club’s Publications Committee to approve The Place No One Knew, a book that would act as a testament to a lost world.3 In May 1963, four months after the Glen Canyon Dam was completed and its steel gate was closed, four months after the water began to rise and the river began to turn into a lake, the Sierra Club published Porter’s book. The Place No One Knew presented the dammed canyon as an image of environmental loss and a symbol of technological hubris. Depicting the dam as a profound mistake, a sacrilege against the land, the book affixed Glen Canyon to the environmental imagination, establishing it as an icon of lost beauty, a place where the nation, or at least its bureaucratic elites, had sinned against the American landscape. To this day, Glen Canyon Dam continues to provoke feelings of anger and sadness. From Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), which describes a group of environmental renegades who plot to destroy the dam, to the current campaign to have the dam dismantled, many environmentalists have dreamed of the Colorado River flowing wild and free through southern Utah again.4 Porter’s camera produced an elegy to the submerged canyon, but Sierra Club leaders also sought redemption. Having mourned Glen Canyon, they looked farther down the Colorado, to where the river runs through the Grand Canyon, a national park adored by many Americans, but another place where the Bureau of Reclamation planned to build dams. In 1964, as part of its campaign against the proposed dams, the Sierra Club published another coffee table book, Time and the River Flowing. The book evoked the motion of water as the defining feature of the canyon, claiming that as long as the Colorado ran free through

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the Grand Canyon, the park would remain a sacred space. From Glen Canyon to the Grand Canyon, Sierra Club leaders could see despair and atonement, loss and rebirth; they could see it all in the flow of the Colorado, a red river winding through an arid land.5 As the Sierra Club publicized its Colorado River books, the group explicitly stated a larger purpose of the Exhibit Format series: an effort to use the camera, a technology of representation, to struggle against the triumph of a technocratic culture. “Each of [the books],” one advertisement explained, “details the fight against a contemporary mentality, obsessed by technology, which in the name of commerce would destroy the forces that made us.” Describing technology as the villain, the Sierra Club tapped into a growing anxiety over the dangers posed by the atomic bomb and the threats to nature embodied by large dams in the West. Like other environmental reformers in the twentieth century, Sierra Club leaders suggested that the camera could elevate moral character and inspire a new set of attitudes toward the American earth. “[The books],” the advertisement continued, “are celebrations of nature by Man, using his tools of camera, and words, and the best devices of the very technology that may still perhaps be prevented from gaining the ultimate control.” The club’s celebration of wildness and its critique of technology coincided with the emergence of the counterculture and its rejection of technological hubris. In different ways, wilderness advocates and youthful rebels challenged the dominance of managerial values and urged that some portions of the natural world be left alone, unregulated by technology. During the late 1960s, the Sierra Club began to court the counterculture by publishing paperback books and by printing posters with photographs from the Exhibit Format series. It became clear that some wilderness advocates were voicing similar sentiments as the youth movement; indeed, all along, they had represented an elder version of the counterculture.6 The Death of a Canyon

The Colorado River runs from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, a distance of over 1,400 miles through some of the driest parts of the North American continent. Dropping almost 14,000 feet in elevation, more than any other American river, the Colorado has carried almost as much silt as the much larger Mississippi. For several million years, it has moved with great force, washing away rock and gravel, sculpting the scenic canyons of the West. A powerful river, one that has flowed through the epochs of geologic time, the Colorado entered the twentieth century—an era of government engineers

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and technical expertise—to become one of the most regulated rivers in the world, supplying water to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson. Beginning in the 1950s, the river became the battleground for a series of debates over the building of large dams. The Sierra Club, along with the Wilderness Society and other groups, challenged the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that upheld the idea of conservation as the “wise use” of resources, the control of nature for the benefit of society. Wilderness advocates won a major battle in 1955—a few months after the publication of This Is Dinosaur—when Congress rejected plans for a dam inside Dinosaur National Monument. Yet wilderness advocates, at least initially, did not question the need for a series of other dams proposed by the Bureau of Reclamation as part of its Colorado River Storage Project. For the Sierra Club and other groups, protecting Dinosaur meant protecting the integrity of the national park system; the other dams, including the one slated for Glen Canyon, would not violate a monument or park and therefore would not threaten the sanctity of the national park idea. In linking their concerns so tightly to the safeguarding of national parks, the club and other groups missed an opportunity to push for the protection of another wild place, a place of luminous cliffs and colorful walls, a place, they would later claim, that no one knew.7 Yet Glen Canyon actually had a long history of human settlement and exploration. Hunting-and-gathering peoples lived there for approximately nine thousand years. For about four centuries, Glen Canyon was home to hundreds of Anasazi people, who developed a trail system and subsisted on maize, squash, and beans. Spanish explorers “discovered” the canyon in 1776, while John Wesley Powell became the first Anglo to see it in 1869. Powell called the canyon “glen,” suggesting the seclusion and serenity he found there. Compared with the harsh and arid conditions of the desert Southwest, it must have seemed like a remote and shady valley, filled with lush ferns and soothing waterfalls.8 Sierra Club leaders, particularly Brower, would lament the loss of Glen Canyon for a long time to come; they would describe the dammed canyon as a reprise of Hetch Hetchy, another pristine place destroyed by technology. In 1958, the Sierra Club Bulletin published a series of photographs by Philip Hyde—who had contributed many of the photographs to This Is Dinosaur—along with a text by Brower. Like Herbert Gleason at Hetch Hetchy, Hyde used his camera to anticipate loss and to remember a landscape in its last days. Similarly, part of Brower’s text used the past tense, suggesting that the canyon was already submerged: “For a replaceable commodity we spent this irreplaceable grandeur.” The images and words predicted the canyon’s imminent death, initiating a

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process of mourning that would culminate, but not end, five years later with the publication of The Place No One Knew.9 Four months before the release of Porter’s book, the Sierra Club Bulletin included a photograph of two staff members studying its images and layout. The caption reads: “We want [the book] to be as ageless as the canyon should have been.” Through the solid form of the coffee table book, The Place No One Knew would produce the memory of Glen Canyon. Like other titles in the Exhibit Format series, it aimed to create a sense of permanence, to make the wilderness appear everlasting.10 A Magical Place

In his introduction to The Place No One Knew, Eliot Porter described his attempts to photograph the canyons. “For all the serenity, the first canyon experience is too overwhelming to let you take in more than the broadest features and boldest strokes,” he wrote, summarizing his first response to Glen Canyon in 1960. “The eye is numbed by vastness and magnificence, and passes over the fine details, ignoring them in a defense against surfeit. The big features, the massive walls and towers, the shimmering vistas, the enveloping light, are all hypnotizing, shutting out awareness of the particular.” As a photographer of the particular, someone who had spent the past fifteen years observing seasonal change in New England, Porter wanted to concentrate on details and fragments; he wanted to produce minute studies of the canyon environment and record the quiet beauty he found in “the smaller, more familiar, more comprehensible objects.”11 Porter applied the techniques of photographic modernism to the canyon country. He used close-ups and abstracts to reveal the view from inside the canyon—the view from the river below, not from the rim above. “It is an intimate canyon,” he explained. “The feeling of intimacy comes partly from your being able to travel through it by boat—from a close association unknown in a canyon seen only from above or dipped into at only a few places.” Porter attempted to convey this sense of intimacy, of being close to the canyon’s narrow walls, and staring at the shallow pools and maidenhair fern. Rather than employing the easy readability of the panorama, he adapted modernist aesthetics to the technology of color film. Following the style of In Wildness, Porter again tried to reimagine the sublime, to encourage a sense of awe and wonder in the presence of nature’s fragments.12 The Place No One Knew celebrated not only the canyon’s sculptured features but also the flow of water. “The architect, the life-giver, and the moderator of

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Glen Canyon,” Porter wrote, “is the Colorado River.” The book evoked water as a metaphor for life; it celebrated the Colorado as a symbol of wonder, a reminder that the natural world can lead people to enchantment and ecstasy. “If there is magic on this planet,” Loren Eiseley observed, “it is contained in water.” Next to this quotation, readers see a photograph of Moqui Creek (plate 6). The image portrays willows reflected in the creek, their colors skimming across the ripples of water. The creek mirrors the inflorescent plants growing along its banks, absorbing and carrying their vibrant colors, suggesting the larger ecological community of the canyon. The creek moves along, echoing the sense of life all around. Like all still images, the photograph offers a moment frozen in time, but it also suggests the endless movement of water. The image reveals the magic of water everywhere, even a remote creek riffling along the rocky earth.13 Porter described the Colorado River as the life giver of the canyon, but he took more photographs of the river’s tributaries—such as Moqui Creek and Escalante River, as well as several unnamed streams and miniature pools— than he did of the actual Colorado. He found more aesthetic possibility in the streams and creeks, springs and waterfalls than he did in the wider and deeper river. The many varieties of water found in many different places suggested the energy and life that lay behind the canyon; moving with grace and fluidity, the waters suggested how much magic the dam would destroy, how much life it would submerge. Although Porter took more pictures of the tributaries and streams, the book included a few photographs of the Colorado itself. For the most part, these pictures portray the river in fragments. But there are two photographs in which Porter captured a wider view of the river—from one bank to the other—a perspective that incorporated not only the canyon walls but even the sky. Porter believed that one of these photographs should not be in the book (plate 7). He argued with Brower several times about the image, explaining that if the photograph were included, then he wanted it cropped so that the sky would be removed. “He protested vigorously,” Brower recalled, arguing that the photograph was “too postcardy.” According to Brower, Porter felt that “everyone knows [the sky] is blue, so we might as well take it for granted and omit it, concentrating instead upon its indirect effect.” For Porter, photographic modernism challenged the conventions of touristic imagery and offered a way to grasp something more profound than a “postcardy” view of the region.14 Brower was not convinced by Porter’s argument, and the uncropped image was included in the book. Even with this photograph, some readers believed the book suffered from its emphasis on close-ups and fragments; they wanted

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to see more panoramas of earth and sky; they wanted to glimpse the expansiveness of the canyon country. “There are too many close ups of desert varnish and cracked and tangled canyon walls,” one Sierra Club member wrote to Brower. “The book cries out for a few more ‘big’ views of the canyon.” Another reader explained that he “was disappointed in the fact that . . . you have lost the feeling of the Glen Canyon—the magnificent broad sweep of the river and the spacious sky with the tremendous coral sandstone cliffs.”15 Brower responded to these criticisms by explaining and justifying Porter’s aesthetic choices; he even suggested that he should have followed the photographer’s advice and removed the “postcardy” image. “What happens,” Brower asked, “when you let the sky into the photograph in any substantial area or when you lift your eye to the broad, big picture, the comprehensive view? Don’t you remove much of the mystery and some of the charm?” Through Porter’s emphasis on details and “masses of color,” the images offered the reader “a do-it-yourself book in which his own imagination is not circumscribed by the photographer but stirred instead,” Brower continued. “Eliot could have given us a whole series of photographs bounded by sky, clouds, and distant cliffs and we might have had the overall scale of the place. I think, however, we would have lost its meaning.”16 Rather than focusing on the sky, Porter studied the movement of light through the canyon. He tried to capture the contrast between stark shadows and streaks of light, to study the patterns of darkness and illumination. “Of all the phenomena of the side canyons,” he observed, “it is the light, even in the farthest depths of the narrowest canyon, that evokes the ultimate in awe.” A photograph of Twilight Canyon best illustrates Porter’s effort to record the play of light (plate 8). The foreground and a large portion of the vertical walls appear dark, while a large band of light radiates from the right side of the image. Viewers cannot see the sun but can sense its presence in the canyon, casting brightness on a place that seems otherwise devoid of light. The canyon seems detached from the sky and sun, forming a separate space. The image suggests a feeling of isolation and solitude, of being in a magical place, a place where light glows and shines amidst a cloistered surround.17 The Idea of Wilderness

The Place No One Knew encouraged readers to feel astonished by the canyon’s beauty, but it also presented an intellectual argument. Assembling passages by leading nature writers and environmental thinkers, Brower and Porter contrasted the canyon’s vast history of geologic change to the evanescent dreams

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of engineers. They criticized the triumph of a managerial culture—particularly its obsession with progress and productivity and its faith in technology as a means to subdue and control nature. They celebrated the idea of leaving things to chance, of letting nature remain wild and untouched by machines. Brower and Porter rejected faith in progress, but they filled the book with rather bland and sweeping comments about “man,” “society,” and “modern culture” as the enemies of nature. They tended not to distinguish between these abstract categories and the managerial elites who demanded more resources and possessed the power to set policy.18 Brower and Porter wanted readers to contemplate time, to appreciate the geologic history that lay behind the canyon’s unique aesthetics. They selected a passage by John Burroughs, the early twentieth-century naturalist, who marveled at the earth’s deep past, a history etched in rocks. “Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape,” Burroughs wrote. “Geologic time! How the striking of the great clock, whose hours are millions of years, reverberates out of the abyss of the past!” Porter believed that his attention to details and close-ups enabled him to capture this deep past. “The big view,” he observed, “expresses less adequately . . . the evidence for the powerful forces that combined in [the canyon’s] creation, than does closer focusing on cliffs and seeps and alcoves.” Porter’s focus on fragments, then, was not only an aesthetic choice; it was also part of his attempt to reveal the canyon’s history, to help viewers glimpse the past inscribed on sandstone walls. Next to the Burroughs quotation, a detailed photograph of a canyon wall focuses on its cracks and curves, its crevices and cuts. The image shows jagged edges and sculptured notches; it reveals the wall’s dark coating of desert varnish, a color created by oxides of manganese and iron. The wall reflects a history of geologic movements and chemical processes, an immense past that produced the forms and colors captured by Porter’s camera. Not just a pretty picture, the image is meant to help viewers recognize, as Burroughs put it, that “rocks have a history.”19 The Place No One Knew presented geologic history as the timescale with which to measure human actions in the canyon. The aims of the Bureau of Reclamation—to control the river, divert water, and generate hydroelectricity—seem shallow compared with the depths of time and history witnessed by the canyons. The bureau often referred to its dams as emblems of permanence, as monumental artifacts of the machine age. Yet Sierra Club leaders believed that real permanence lay not in the structures of concrete and steel, but in the solid and sculptured walls of Glen Canyon. The book developed a critique of technology placed within the context of the earth’s history.

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A passage by Lewis Mumford, selected from a piece he contributed to the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1962, questioned technological hubris and urged Americans “to overthrow the myth of the machine.” In the 1930s, Mumford had celebrated the utopian possibilities of dams; his writings from that period reflected New Deal enthusiasm for planning and technology, a vision represented by Pare Lorentz’s The River. Yet by the 1960s, Mumford had become more critical of technocratic ideas; in particular, he bemoaned the growth of the militaryindustrial complex and the patterns of thought associated with what he termed, in one of his last books, The Pentagon of Power. Like Sierra Club leaders, he believed that machines were desacralizing American nature and dehumanizing American society. “To put all our hope,” Mumford explained, “in the improvement of machines is the characteristic inversion and perversion of values of the present age; and that is the reason that our machines threaten us with extinction, since they are now in the hands of deplorably unimproved men.”20 While some books in the Exhibit Format series relied on the words of one writer, such as Newhall or Thoreau, The Place No One Knew culled from a wide variety of sources. Even so, there was one person who was quoted more than anyone else, whose words captured and synthesized the book’s major ideas. In the writings of the archaeologist and paleontologist Loren Eiseley, Brower and Porter found someone who decried an overly managed society and imagined the earth’s history as a tale of accident and chance, signifying the open possibility of nature.21 Eiseley’s critique of progress and managerial control was intertwined with his celebration of randomness in nature. According to Eiseley, too many people were unwilling to accept the role of chance in natural history, to recognize that human beings were not the predestined rulers of the cosmos but instead the products of a long process that lacked direction and design. Evolutionary theory, he argued, revealed to “the human ego . . . that the world, supposedly made for its enjoyment [had] existed for untold eons entirely indifferent to its coming.” By embracing chance, Eiseley and the Sierra Club—like Joseph Wood Krutch in The Twelve Seasons—rejected the directional view of evolution. This perspective placed the club in conflict not only with Herbert Gleason and earlier intellectuals but also with nature films of the postwar period, particularly those by Walt Disney, which tended to endorse the idea of divine intervention in the world. For Eiseley, geologic time and evolutionary thought provided a way to move beyond human self-absorption and acknowledge the otherness of nature. Stretching back for untold eons, the earth’s history suggested even more: perhaps the nonhuman world was an independent and intractable realm, a place impervious to human desires.22

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Eiseley wanted to diminish the sense of human importance, but he was no misanthrope. At times, he described the natural world as a place that resisted human meaning, but he also believed that nature could redeem human life. He suggested that the wilderness offered a retreat from the confining pressures of modern society, a place apart from the enervating, soul-deadening culture of control, a landscape still governed by chance, filled with spiritual possibility. “One must seek,” he explained, “what only the solitary approach can give—a natural revelation.”23 Eiseley’s comment about solitude in nature dovetailed with the Sierra Club’s emphasis on wilderness as a spiritual and psychological resource. In The Place No One Knew, this passage anticipates a shift in the book from a critique of anthropocentricism to a description of nature as therapy. Passages by Wallace Stegner suggested that wilderness preservation could ensure the psychological health of individuals. “Without any remaining wilderness,” Stegner predicted, “we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.” Without wilderness, the natural world would be entirely regulated and controlled, robbed of its power to rejuvenate human life. “We simply need that wild country available to us,” Stegner explained, “even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”24 Consuming Memory

Sierra Club leaders hoped that The Place No One Knew would provide readers with a chance for reflection and rest. “We hope many . . . readers,” the Bulletin announced, “can be persuaded to go off somewhere and work their way through the book for two hours—just about the minimum careful skimming time.” The coffee table book allowed the audience to imagine solitude; it simulated the ideal wilderness experience, the sense of being alone in nature, gaining a feeling of individual renewal. “If you do this,” the Bulletin continued, “we think you will perceive your own role in awakening your friends and neighbors, your local editors, your representatives in Congress, . . . before our land gets any further clobbering.”25 According to Brower, The Place No One Knew aimed to use nostalgia as a political weapon. “Anyone who knows Glen Canyon unspoiled, or who discovers it in its final year,” he observed in 1961, just over a year before the dam was finished, “is to be allowed whatever relief tears may bring. If they are derived

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from nostalgia, we will be the last to underestimate what may be a deep-down, absolutely essential role in survival itself that is played by nostalgic attraction to the natural world.” Brower believed that cultural memory of the canyon would inspire people to act in the present and to defend other wild places. He invoked the term “nostalgia” in a way that both echoed and departed from its classic definition, formed by eighteenth-century physicians, as a state of homesickness. For Brower and other wilderness advocates, Glen Canyon was not home; it was not a landscape remembered from childhood. Yet it signified a place with a deep history. Whether or not people had actually visited Glen Canyon, they could still imagine it as a home of the human spirit. Against the bromides of progress, Brower urged readers to embrace nostalgia, to feel a sense of attachment to the vanishing canyon. “You owe it to yourself and to the future,” he implored Sierra Club members, “to know and to remember these things lost.”26 Brower viewed The Place No One Knew as a “requiem” to Glen Canyon, a monument to environmental loss. Porter’s images provided visual reminders of the canyon, but the book produced memory in other ways, including through an appendix, entitled “The Glen Canyon Community,” listing the species of flora and fauna the new dam would harm. “‘The Glen Canyon Community’ is only a partial list,” Brower explained, “but nonetheless an imposing one, of the living things—plants, birds, mammals—that developed in the canyon country . . . and could have persisted there had man—some men—not thought that kilowatts were more important.”27 Brower’s comment about “man” and “some men” hinted that specific individuals and institutions were to blame for the loss of Glen Canyon. Rather than reifying concepts such as “modern culture” and “American society,” this remark implied a more nuanced understanding of the interests at stake. But Brower and Porter did not develop this kind of critique in the book. The Place No One Knew instead presented a vague and muffled protest against “technology” and “modern culture.” It tended to target “man” instead of “some men” as the despoiler of nature. Like other Exhibit Format titles, The Place No One Knew promised to present an image of reality, to help Americans see the authentic world of wilderness. Edward Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly believed that Porter’s use of color allowed him to portray the essence of Glen Canyon: “Photography, when in the hands of a colorist as perceptive as Mr. Porter, achieves, . . . the height, the power, the contrast, and the secrecy of the rock world.” Weeks suggested that color photography could capture not only the appearance of the canyon country but also its “secrecy,” its mystery, its sublime wonder.28 Critics noted that The Place No One Knew cut across different genres of

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artistic expression. By displaying abstract views of the landscape, the book resembled nonrepresentational art. “Except for the documentation of camera and color film,” one reviewer commented, “this sequence of strange and vivid rock formations in bizarre colors would seem incredible. Nature has anticipated modern art extravagantly.” Porter had used the camera to produce modernist interpretations of nature, but he had also used it as a truth-telling device, as a technology to verify the distinctive features of Glen Canyon. “This is a documentary,” another critic remarked, “on . . . one of the world’s scenic marvels.” Like New Deal film and photography, the book expressed a documentary sensibility, an effort to vivify the real thing; like modern painting, it exhibited abstraction, an effort to challenge conventional perception. Blurring the line between artifice and authenticity, the book combined evolutionary theory with aesthetic wonder, geologic knowledge with respect for the unexplainable.29 A few months before its publication, an advertisement for the book linked consumption with memory, suggesting that by purchasing the book, people could memorialize the canyon: “For those who did not know the place—and those who did—this book will be a monument.” Like In Wildness, The Place No One Knew was priced at twenty-five dollars. A reviewer for Natural History claimed that a book about Glen Canyon needed to cost this much: “Even those buyers who look askance at the waxing number of books of large format and high prices will admit . . . that in this instance the photographs of such a master as Eliot Porter, supported by a sensitive and almost devotional text, and given final integrity through the craftsmanship of typographer and lithographer, may be an exception. It had to be done that way, if at all.” According to this review, the book needed to be so large and to contain such high-quality prints and exquisite typography. By buying the book, particularly given its expensive price, Americans could gain atonement; through consumption, they could help pay for the sins of the nation.30 The title, The Place No One Knew, can easily be criticized for denying the long history of human interaction with the canyon landscape. Yet the title also reveals the larger motivation behind the book’s publication, an effort to invent a public memory of Glen Canyon. In his essay “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner observed: “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.” With The Place No One Knew, Sierra Club leaders aimed to produce a visual monument to Glen Canyon, to create a sense of place through the process of mourning and memorializing its loss.31

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An Art of Redemption

In August 1963, a few months after The Place No One Knew appeared, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall unveiled a Bureau of Reclamation plan to build two dams inside the Grand Canyon itself, although outside the protected areas of the national park and the national monument. Udall and Bureau officials claimed that the dams would not intrude upon the park system and therefore posed no threat to the nation’s sacred space.32 The Sierra Club immediately launched a campaign against the dams. The October issue of the Bulletin featured a photograph of Marble Gorge, one of the proposed dam sites, along with a quotation from Joseph Wood Krutch’s Grand Canyon (1958): “Our civilization,” Krutch wrote, “is rapidly becoming one in which only two values are recognized: power and amusement. It would be a pity if the last refuges where man can enter into another kind of relation with the natural world should be improved out of existence.”33 Linking “power” and “amusement,” Krutch’s words pointed toward the key terms in the debate. The Sierra Club described the Bureau of Reclamation as a power-hungry agency committed to growth and mechanized amusement at the expense of natural beauty. Floyd Dominy, the head of the bureau, countered that the Sierra Club represented an aesthetic elite, a group devoted to saving pristine beauty for the few at the expense of development and recreation for the public at large. Dominy appealed to this “public” in Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado, a pamphlet produced in 1965 by the bureau to celebrate the new lake created by Glen Canyon Dam and to push for more dams on the Colorado. Dominy praised Lake Powell as a place where a dam had “tamed the wild river—made it a servant to man’s will.” The dam generated a space of scenic beauty accessible “by boat for the millions” rather than merely the “rugged few.” Adopting the religious language normally used by wilderness advocates, the pamphlet’s epigraph asked: “Dear God, did you cast down/ Two hundred miles of canyon/ And mark: ‘For poets only’?/ Multitudes hunger/ For a lake in the sun.” The closing section of Lake Powell applied the Glen Canyon example to the Grand Canyon, claiming that the new dams would benefit “millions of Americans who would see—for the first time—a new part of their heritage of natural beauty.”34 To make their case, Sierra Club leaders aimed to focus public attention on the “living” Colorado, arguing that dams would destroy the wild river and that only a free-flowing Colorado could preserve the authentic Grand Canyon. Brower proposed a coffee table book entitled Time and the River Flowing and asked the journalist François Leydet to write the text. In the book,

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Leydet wanted to reintroduce a familiar national icon, to reorient the way people looked at the canyon. Rather than viewing it from the rim, he wanted Americans to see the canyon from below, from the perspective provided by the Colorado River. “Only by stepping off the rim and descending toward the river can you identify, if only temporarily, with the Canyon world,” Leydet argued. “And only by journeying all the way to the river, where it swirls and tumbles and still carves its way through some of the oldest rocks on earth, can you fully appreciate the work of the two great architects of the Grand Canyon, time and the flowing river.”35 To celebrate and defend the wild Colorado, Time and the River Flowing merged two arguments. It described the canyon landscape as a vast community of life, an interconnected web of species and organisms. But it also referred to the living river as a therapeutic resource, a place for individual self-fulfillment. Combining the recreational and the ecological, the book warned that a dead Colorado would limit the possibilities for human pleasure on the river and destroy the balance of nonhuman life along it. Reviewers praised the book, suggesting that its “plea for preservation” was nothing less than patriotic. Brooks Atkinson, a critic for the New York Times, called it “a stunningly beautiful book” filled with “brilliantly reproduced” photographs. More than a collection of beautiful images, the book also presented a timely message. “The text,” Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times noted, “as in most Sierra Club publications, is not only eloquent and poetic, it has purpose. In this case, the most important purpose of all. To save the Grand Canyon as we have known it.”36 But not everyone who read the book agreed with its message. Representative Morris Udall of Arizona, a proponent of the Grand Canyon dams (and brother of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall), prepared a scathing evaluation of Time and the River Flowing. He analyzed the photographs in a literal-minded fashion, asserting that the club intended for each image to represent a scene that would be flooded by the dams. All seventy-nine pictures in the book, Udall explained, “purport to show scenes in the Grand Canyon which will be altered or destroyed.” After reviewing all the images, however, he concluded that “in this entire volume one finds only 12 pictures of areas which would be inundated by these new lakes.”37 Always eager to defend the Sierra Club, Brower, along with Publications Manager Hugh Nash, fired off a letter to Udall. They began by questioning his fundamental assumption about the book. “Your statement,” they wrote, “that the book is misleading because it describes and pictures portions of the Grand Canyon that would not be directly affected by construction of Bridge Canyon

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and Marble Gorge dams reflects misunderstanding of the book’s purpose. That purpose is to show that Canyon as a whole and as it is, and to make people want to keep it—all of it—as it is.” Disputing Udall’s interpretation of several photographs, Brower and Nash pointed to the “rim-versus-river bias” that underlay much of his discussion; they amplified the book’s argument about protecting the living river for recreational and ecological reasons.38 Udall may have condemned the Sierra Club, but the organization was vindicated in the court of public opinion. In the summer of 1966, Brower and the club placed a series of full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major newspapers. The advertisements portrayed the Bureau of Reclamation as an un-American bureaucracy that threatened to destroy the quintessential symbol of American wildness. With sarcasm, one advertisement aimed to rebuff the bureau’s argument that dams would “improve” the canyon by asking: “should we also flood the sistine chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Letters poured into Congressional offices that were overwhelmingly opposed to the Grand Canyon dams. By 1968, even Morris Udall would concede, “no bill providing for a so-called ‘Grand Canyon Dam’ can pass the Congress.” Inside the Grand Canyon, the Colorado would continue flowing.39 For the Sierra Club, the Grand Canyon battle was both a political victory and a publishing success. Six months after Time and the River Flowing appeared, the book was reprinted and featured as an alternate selection of the Book-ofthe-Month Club. For the most part, the Book-of-the-Month Club’s editors selected works of fiction, biography, and history, so their choice of a coffee table book filled with photographs warranted justification. Paul Brooks, a publisher and conservationist, explained to book club members that Time and the River Flowing provided pedagogical value. “Today our photographers, more perhaps than any others,” Brooks wrote, “are teaching us the art of seeing nature, are training our landscape eye to perceive beauty in the rock pool as well as in the cataract, in the pattern of a lichen no less than in the splendor of a canyon wall. Now the heart of the Grand Canyon, the river itself, is threatened. The latest Sierra Club book . . . helps us to understand exactly what is at stake.” Brooks stressed the importance of the modernist aesthetic to 1960s environmental reform, suggesting that the close attention to details and fragments helped to broaden the idea of beauty in nature. He also hinted at the key perceptual lesson of the book: the significance of a wild and free-flowing river.40 The Book-of-the-Month Club’s selection of Time and the River Flowing, along with its endorsement of the Sierra Club’s aesthetic perspective, pointed toward the larger cultural meanings of the Exhibit Format series. As the most

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prominent organization of middlebrow culture, the Book-of-the-Month Club sought to create a cultural space between the perceived excesses that plagued both consumer society and the avant-garde. Mediating between the low and the high, the book club presented reading not only as a path to knowledge but also as a marker of culture and taste, a sign of distinction and expertise. Like wilderness advocates, book club leaders appealed to American concerns over personal identity in an era of mass culture. Although it relied on the techniques of industrial production, marketing, and distribution, the book club tried to distance itself from the standardization and uniformity of consumer culture. For Americans worried about conformity, both the Sierra Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club promised individual therapy through tasteful consumption.41 Seeing the Grand Canyon from the perspective of the Colorado implied a matter of taste, a sense of aesthetic judgment and refinement; it suggested that the view from the rim was somehow inauthentic and clichéd, the stuff of tourist postcards, not the true reality of the canyon. Time and the River Flowing merged nature and culture to produce an art of redemption; the book found personal rejuvenation and national renewal in the Colorado River, purification and rebirth in the flow of water. Courting the Counterculture

Even as the Sierra Club found common ground with the Book-of-the-Month Club, the organization also moved in a different cultural direction, away from the claims of the middlebrow and toward the youthful exuberance of the counterculture. The Place No One Knew had contrasted the stultifying power of technology with the scintillating beauty of Glen Canyon. Rejecting the iron cage for the open wilderness, the book anticipated the insights of Theodore Roszak, whose The Making of a Counter Culture (1968) argued against the hegemony of “technical experts” and the unquestioned faith in “scientific forms of knowledge.” The Sierra Club also intersected with the youth movement by making personal identity central to its politics, calling for the preservation of wilderness to ensure the psychological health of modern Americans. In these ways, wilderness advocates and countercultural rebels inhabited a similar rhetorical space, each hoping that a political movement could break the grip of the technocracy.42 Through its photography and publishing program, the Sierra Club began to make direct appeals to students and youth. In 1965, two young men, Terry and Renny Russell, visited David Brower at his home in Berkeley to show him

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7.1. Renny Russell, Pacific Coast near San Simeon, 1964, used by permission of the artist.

On the Loose, their illustrated manuscript about the meaning of the American wilderness. The two brothers had recently traveled through the West and had put together a handwritten text consisting of personal reflections and several quotations along with over sixty photographs of the region. Published in 1967, On the Loose was not part of the Exhibit Format series. Indeed, although its message espoused similar values as other Sierra Club titles, its form represented a patently anti–Exhibit Format spirit. “The photographs in this book are of the lowest fidelity obtainable,” the Russells announced. “They are as far from the photographer’s vision as cheap cameras, mediocre film, and drugstore processing could make them.”43 Rejecting the studied seriousness of modernism, the brothers Russell used color photography to evoke the playful stance of what Jack Kerouac had called the “rucksack revolution.” They celebrated their aimless wanderings through the West and boasted of their ability to withstand the discomfort of going “to sleep on a beach and [waking] up in water.” Most of their photographs portrayed nature as an untouched realm, but the Russells occasionally included such items as a backpack or a pot of soup cooking over an open fire. Like other wilderness advocates, the brothers suggested that the experience of taking care of themselves in nature—surviving only with basic tools—could strengthen their sense of individual identity. Some images featured a key accoutrement of the counterculture: an acoustic guitar, which they strummed with reckless

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abandon. The cover photograph portrayed one brother on the rocky coast of the Pacific, looking out at the water, serenading the sea (fig. 7.1). A maestro of the wild, he stands at the edge of the continent, reveling in freedom, rejoicing in song.44 While the book’s photographs consciously departed from the artistry of Adams and Porter, the text contained a mélange of familiar environmental passages (drawn mainly from Thoreau and Aldo Leopold), along with a sprinkling of youth culture (including a quotation by the actor Steve McQueen). Most of the text consisted of verse and prose by the Russells in which they emphasized their desire for wilderness preservation. Like the Sierra Club, they mourned the loss of Glen Canyon, devoting almost one-quarter of the book to their feelings of anger and outrage at the sight of Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. Like Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, they compared the destruction of wilderness with the fall from Eden; they wondered if original sin could be glimpsed in the mechanical structures of a large dam. “Maybe the first diversion tunnel closed an eternity ago,” they wrote, “when the continents were all underdeveloped areas and the Tree of Life grew underutilized and the mother of us all took the first bite/ In another Eden.”45 Brower lived in Berkeley and commuted daily to San Francisco—two hotbeds of student and countercultural protest—and desperately wanted to connect with the energy and dynamism of the nation’s youth. While not everyone would agree with his description of Terry Russell (who wrote most of the text) as “a present-day Thoreau,” Brower believed that On the Loose would allow the Sierra Club to reach a new audience by capturing and circulating countercultural meanings of wilderness. His interest in the book coincided with the club’s entry into the paperback market, a move designed in large part to appeal to young consumers. Brower negotiated an arrangement with Ballantine Books to publish cheaper, paperback versions of Exhibit Format titles, beginning with “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” in 1967. On the Loose, also published by Ballantine, appeared a few months after the paperback edition of In Wildness and was marketed as a perfect item for older Americans to give to younger Americans. In a New York Times advertisement, Brower invoked a common conceit of the counterculture: the idea of young people leading the way, pointing their elders toward enlightenment and truth. “This is a book you will be pleased to give to the young who will understand,” he explained, “and to their elders who will always be trying to.” The Sierra Club and Ballantine Books enjoyed impressive sales of On the Loose, and the cheaper editions of Exhibit Format titles exceeded their expectations—In Wildness, for example, became the best-selling trade paperback of 1967.46

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As the Sierra Club broke new ground in its publishing program, the organization also began to produce posters, an increasingly popular form of visual culture, particularly among youth and students. “Enough collegians and hippies agree with teen-agers to make posters the hottest new display objects since antiwar buttons,” Newsweek observed in 1967. From personality posters featuring celebrities like Steve McQueen to psychedelic posters displaying fluorescent colors and announcing “be-ins” and other “happenings,” poster art captured the attention of many journalists and critics. Life magazine devoted a cover story to “The Great Poster Wave,” while Hilton Kramer of the New York Times dubbed it “Postermania.” Although posters had existed before, Kramer argued that the 1960s mania “reversed their traditional function.” “Whereas in the past,” he wrote, “the poster was mainly a medium of decorative and sometimes demagogic publicity, it is now eagerly collected as a private esthetic and extraesthetic enthusiasm. It is not only, or even primarily, in public places that the new appetite for posters manifests itself most emphatically. People now want posters in their private lives—to a degree that is unprecedented—and a new industry has sprung up virtually overnight to satisfy them.”47 Kramer’s emphasis on the private display of poster art suggested why the medium would appeal to Sierra Club leaders. The Exhibit Format series encouraged individual Americans to enjoy wilderness in the privacy of their homes by putting nature on the coffee table. Likewise, when the club introduced its posters in 1967, an advertisement described the images as “a new way to bring the beauty of wilderness into your home.” The initial line of thirteen posters featured only color images, continuing the trend of relying on color photography for environmental expression. The photographs were selected from Sierra Club publications, primarily Exhibit Format titles such as In Wildness, but one image was taken from On the Loose—the guitar player serenading the sea. Inspired by the poster fad, the club again linked its cause to youth culture. “Since we borrowed the poster idea from the ‘younger generation,’” the advertisement continued, “[the posters] are ideal for the student’s room, either at home or at school.” From college dorm rooms to the cluttered office of David Brower, Sierra Club posters began to appear, full-color images of majestic trees and autumnal leaves, tacked to walls like so many emblems of personal identity.48 The Sierra Club attempted to court the counterculture, but the two groups already expressed tacit agreement on certain issues. Youthful rebels and wilderness advocates shared a sense of disaffection with postwar America. Both groups bemoaned the problem of conformity. Both believed that nature could offer a meaningful dose of reality for a nation beset with artifice. Both insisted that politics could become a means for exploring and improving the quality

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of emotional life and individual experience. Yet despite these similarities, the Sierra Club failed to embrace the full critique of technocracy launched by the most thoughtful members of the counterculture and the New Left. Just as the organization tended to blame American society in general for the destruction of American wilderness, thus ignoring questions of class and power, Sierra Club leaders refrained, until 1969, from offering any kind of statement on the Vietnam War. As violence and herbicides rained down upon Vietnam, as young Americans faced the draft and engaged in combat, as the student movement marched and protested, cited Thoreau while committing acts of civil disobedience, the Sierra Club remained reticent, hawking images of nature while turning away from the unrest in the streets and the killing in southeast Asia.49 The Politics of Romanticism

A resolute proselytizer, Brower believed that Exhibit Format books would convert more and more Americans to Sierra Club religion. Back in 1931, when Brower was nineteen years old, the photographs of Ansel Adams had drawn him into the Sierra Club. As executive director, Brower guided the club through a period of enormous growth, helping turn it into a national organization; he would attribute most of this expansion to the club’s use of images, especially the Exhibit Format series. But not every book was a financial success. As expenses began to outpace returns, many club leaders began to see Brower as reckless and irresponsible; even before the club’s deficit began to spiral, some leaders wondered whether the organization should put so much emphasis on publishing Exhibit Format books. A few months after The Place No One Knew appeared, August Frugé, a member of the Sierra Club’s Publications Committee, wrote a five-page memorandum detailing his objections to coffee table books. The memo became a kind of opening salvo in the club’s debate over Brower and publications. Framing the debate as a conflict between romantics and pragmatists, Frugé claimed that romantics like Brower were obsessed with aesthetics and emotions. True conservationists, he argued, were more practical and strategic, more attuned to the realities of politics.50 A long-time director of the University of California Press, Frugé worried about the economic viability of the publications program; he linked this concern over financial matters to a more general objection to the Exhibit Format series. “A few years ago,” Frugé wrote, “publishing was clearly the servant of conservation and of other Club purposes. Since then it has grown enormously to the point where it takes up a major share of our energies and resources. Some

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of us wonder whether the tail is beginning to wag the dog.” In particular, Frugé rejected the idea that the club should sponsor “general nature propaganda,” such as Porter’s In Wildness. The publication of this type of book, he believed, was based on the erroneous assumption that “the best thing we can do for conservation is to embark on a long term campaign to sell the appreciation of outdoor values to the public.” “We had better not wonder,” Frugé commented sardonically, “whether our opponents are secretly happy to have us blow off steam by selling pretty books to each other while they are busy damming the canyons and cutting the trees.” Fearing that the Sierra Club would become a “smaller and less commercial version of American Heritage,” Frugé argued that each club book should be tied to a specific campaign for protecting a particular wild place. “We don’t have time,” he concluded, “for anything else.”51 Brower and his allies remained unapologetic romantics. Ansel Adams responded to Frugé’s five-page memorandum by writing a ten-page letter that attacked, paragraph by paragraph, many of Frugé’s contentions. Adams defended the aesthetic as an essential part of the conservation movement, not as something separate or ancillary, but as the moral and emotional basis of environmental politics. He believed the publishing program, particularly the Exhibit Format series, offered the best way to “propagate the faith” of conservation, to awaken the public to the message of the Sierra Club. Similarly, Brower argued against the notion that “we must either be for publishing or for conservation.” “Publishing,” he explained to Frugé, “is our best conservation tool.”52 Brower suggested that the Sierra Club’s coffee table books enlarged the traditional concept of politics. Feeling discontented with modernity, questioning the devotion to progress, he wanted to create a space for the emotions in political debate, to integrate aesthetics and spirituality into the practical world of policymaking. “I wouldn’t want to live,” he once wrote, “in a world that wasn’t loaded with [emotion], where men weren’t moved by it. . . . Let’s vote for emotion!” For Brower, aesthetic experience provoked emotion, and emotion was vital to politics.53 Beginning in 1964, as Brower pressed ahead with the publishing program, the Sierra Club became saddled with debt. Books appeared on topics ranging from Mount Everest and the Big Sur Coast to Glacier Bay, the Galapagos, and the island of Kauai. As the club’s deficits began to mount, Brower met with increasing resistance from the board of directors. When the directors questioned his judgment and tried to restrict his actions, Brower spurned their advice, putting more money into the publishing program, convinced that wild places would soon be lost unless the club produced more books. Brower’s disregard of the board, his careless attitude toward budgetary matters, his refusal to com-

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promise either on conservation battles or publishing plans—all contributed to an impending backlash against him. Critics of the publishing program tended to disagree with the cluster of ideas that would become known as environmentalism. Rejecting many of the claims made by Rachel Carson in her influential book Silent Spring (1962), they believed Brower was trying to push the Sierra Club to adopt Carson’s critique of pesticides and pollution. In 1960, Thomas Jukes, a chemist and club member, had denounced Nancy Newhall for her discussion of urban sprawl and pesticide use in This Is the American Earth. In 1967, he cataloged his objections to Brower’s beliefs and policies. Jukes argued that Brower was engaged in “an uncompromising attack on technology,” that he viewed science as “intrinsically evil,” and that he was driven by apocalyptic fears. Jukes suggested that Brower’s romanticism led him to publish more coffee table books and push the club toward bankruptcy; it also led him to embrace Carson’s “purple prose” and animus toward technology as part of the “official Sierra Club religion.”54 The more conservative Sierra Club leaders viewed the publishing program as another example of Brower’s extremism, of his willingness to risk everything—even the financial health of the organization—for the sake of his purist commitment to protecting wilderness. More willing to compromise on conservation battles, these leaders felt that Brower was becoming increasingly shrill in his rhetoric and increasingly intemperate in his negotiations with government and corporate officials. They worried about his gradual turn toward environmentalism, his attempt to broaden the club’s traditional emphasis on wilderness preservation. According to his critics, Brower’s romantic vision not only fueled his uncompromising stance toward saving wild lands but also inspired his growing interest with nature as a force intricately connected to human life. Through many of the Exhibit Format titles, Brower presented the natural world as a sacred place separate from the profane world of society. Yet his passion for the aesthetic experience of nature seemed to lead him toward a wider view of conservation, toward a sense of the dynamic connection between human society and the natural world. The critics were on to something. Brower’s worship of the natural world and his commitment to wilderness preservation stimulated, rather than stymied, his interest in environmentalism. Valuing the beauty of wild places, Brower began to gain more appreciation for the presence of nature everywhere. Although the wilderness ideal, in upholding the myth of pure, sacred nature, can distract people from the problems of urban and rural landscapes, Brower’s experience suggested something else: the love of wilderness can also encourage people to extend their concern for the natural world to other, less “wild” settings.

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Brower’s passion for protecting wilderness and his desire to perpetuate natural beauty eventually led him to affirm the interdependence between humans and nature, to adopt an ecological perspective and a sense of responsibility for places other than the wilderness.55 The evolution of the Exhibit Format series suggested, at least in part, this transition to environmental consciousness. While Brower had tried to extract an ecological message from This Is the American Earth, the book itself adhered to the idea of wilderness as a static domain, untouched and unchanging, a place of divine perfection. Porter’s photography, in books like In Wildness and The Place No One Knew, marked a shift from the monumental to the fragment. His images revised the traditional notion of the sublime and pointed toward an ecological vision of the landscape. Yet like Adams, Porter tended to exclude signs of human presence and to portray the American earth as pristine. In 1968, Central Park Country—one of the last books published in the Exhibit Format series—strikingly brought people and the urban landscape into the picture. Illustrated with color photographs by Nancy and Retta Johnston, the book celebrated Central Park as the meeting ground of the urban and the natural, a human-constructed space offering New Yorkers the opportunity “to feel the touch of the earth.” The images, a reviewer for Newsweek observed, “go even a step further than the club’s usual excellence in nature photography by catching the city’s multifarious population at ease among its rocks and greenery.” Brower began to ponder other book ideas, telling reporters that he would like to see the Sierra Club consider not just Central Park—an oasis within New York—but also the ecological and social fabric of the city, including its poorest neighborhoods.56 As Brower published more books and became more confrontational, feelings of animosity toward him gathered momentum. By 1967, it was not just pragmatists like Frugé and Jukes who questioned Brower’s leadership. Even Ansel Adams began to join the opposition, believing that Brower’s obsessive devotion to publishing endangered the future of the Sierra Club. Brower would always credit Adams for helping him understand the power of images, for teaching him how the camera could act as a tool of conservation. But in 1969, during a hotly contested board of directors election, one that would determine whether Brower would remain executive director, Adams allowed his photographs to appear on brochures for candidates who wanted Brower to leave the club. Although Brower still had many defenders, including the photographer Eliot Porter, a majority of the membership was convinced that he had, as Wallace Stegner described it, “been bitten by some worm of power.” Brower’s supporters lost the 1969 election, and he resigned from his position on May 3.57

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That same night, Brower announced plans to form an environmental group called Friends of the Earth. “We cannot go on fiddling,” he explained, “while the earth wild’s places burn in the fires of our undisciplined technology.” Less than two weeks later, he joined other environmental leaders in condemning the Vietnam War as “an ecological disaster that ultimately destroys both the land and the people it purports to protect.” As president of Friends of the Earth, Brower became involved in a wide range of issues—fighting pollution and nuclear power, helping start the League of Conservation Voters, and forging ties with conservationists around the globe. He also helped publish more coffee table books through the Earth’s Wild Places series. Adopting the Exhibit Format style of photographs and text, he expected to produce one hundred books in the series, “all of them concerning Earth’s still untouched places.” The books would embrace an international vision, ranging from the mountains of Alaska and the Alps to the islands of Maui and Micronesia. Fearing the loss of wilderness, dreaming of worldwide conservation, Brower continued to believe that the camera could preserve the fragile beauty on planet Earth.58

E pilogue

T he E colo g ic a l Subl i me

In December 1965, as the Sierra Club continued to publish coffee table books, the Cober Gallery in New York City opened an exhibition of photographs by Charles Pratt. Coinciding with the release of The Sense of Wonder, a collection of Pratt’s photographs matched with an essay by Rachel Carson, the show featured black-and-white and color prints of the natural world, along with several images of the urban landscape. “Charles Pratt has the eye of wonder,” the curator announced. “To him, as to the true artist, there is revelation in the smallest lichen as in the wildest wave; in light-filled drops on leaves as in the desert of city borders; in a child lost in grass as in a bird hung in space.” Critics for the New York Times and other publications praised the exhibit, claiming that it marked a new sophistication in landscape photography. Meanwhile, The Sense of Wonder reached the bestseller list in many cities, as Publishers’ Weekly reported that bookstores could not stock their shelves with enough copies. For Pratt, the attention and acclaim signaled a breakthrough in his career, perhaps even the prospect of great popularity.1 At the time of his death at the age of fifty in 1976, Pratt enjoyed a small following among critics of photography. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to claim, as his mentor David Vestal once wrote, that Pratt remains “an unknown master.” Unlike Ansel Adams, Charles Pratt never became a household name. Nevertheless, his images and writings about the medium address fundamen194

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tal issues concerning perceptions of the landscape, issues that resonate with contemporary debates over the meanings of nature and wilderness in modern America.2 Indeed, Pratt’s career can be understood in light of debates that began in the 1990s, when photographers, art critics, and historians all challenged the wilderness ideal—the notion of pure, pristine nature separate from civilization. In 1990, for example, the photography journal Aperture devoted a special issue to the theme “Beyond Wilderness,” which encouraged readers to think critically about the idea of wilderness “as a place out there, where people have no right to be.” “‘Beyond Wilderness,’” the editors continued, “attempts to direct public debate away from questions of preserving an artificial wilderness and toward a new and enlightened stewardship of the earth—our only earth, where we and our children live.” Inverting the typical description of wilderness as natural and society as artificial, the editors suggested that the camera could bring Americans closer to the real world where they live, instead of the “artificial” world of wilderness. The writer Barry Lopez, in his contribution to the issue, explored the moral implications of this effort to revalue all landscapes, to move beyond the focus on wilderness preservation. “If we have a decision to ponder now, it is how to (re)incorporate the lands we occupy, after millennia of neglect, into our moral universe,” Lopez wrote. “We must incorporate not only our farmsteads and the retreats of the wolverine but the land upon which our houses, our stores, and our buildings stand.”3 Although he did not mention Rachel Carson, Lopez’s remarks reflected the long-term impact of her Silent Spring (1962) on American environmental thought—especially her insistence on the interdependence of human beings and nature. Some of her ideas were anticipated in the New Deal documentaries by Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty, films that portrayed the links between American society and the American earth. Carson herself admired Lorentz’s documentaries and even considered making a movie about the sea and marine life featuring what she described as a “Pare Lorentz-ish narration.” Yet Carson’s writings also departed from the technological enthusiasm of the New Deal. Aware of the ecological threats posed by the arms race and the proliferation of synthetic chemicals, she called for a chastened skepticism toward the idea of human dominance over the natural world. “The ‘control of nature,’” she famously declared, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”4 Carson’s influence eased the shift from wilderness preservation to a broader environmentalist stance. Lopez and other contributors to Aperture adopted

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that stance to critique the representational practices of major conservation organizations, including the Sierra Club. They argued that these groups relied on “‘pinup’” nature photography, images by artists such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, that maintained “a misleading and artificial distinction between ‘holy’ and ‘profane’ lands.” Despite efforts to bring human beings into the picture, the Sierra Club and other mainstream conservation groups maintained their focus on wilderness preservation. “The dominant style of depicting the land,” Charles Hagen explained in Aperture, “remains the beautiful, fully detailed large-format style of Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and their artistic descendants.”5 As critics cast about for a new environmental aesthetic, they might want to consider the neglected career of Charles Pratt. Inspired by the writings of Rachel Carson and Marcel Proust, Pratt produced photographs that respected the continuum of American landscapes—from the wild, to the rural, and even the urban. His work pointed toward a new conception of the sublime, what could be described as an ecological sublime—an effort to find awe and wonder in natural processes, to respect the integrity and otherness of nature without denying the connections between human society and the natural world. For Pratt, the ecological sublime never emerged as a clearly articulated agenda; it can be pieced together through his writings and images, caught in the shadows of a career that stretched from the coastline of Maine and the countryside of Connecticut to the dense urban world of his native Manhattan. In 1962, with the publication of “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” Eliot Porter had made an initial gesture toward the ecological sublime. Through his detailed rendering of fragments in nature, he had encouraged viewers to see sublimity in quiet, modest landscapes. Nevertheless, he had also adhered to the notion of pristine wilderness as a space apart from human society. Like Porter, Pratt sought to defamiliarize the familiar, to find awe in natural processes and ecological communities. Rather than searching for the hallowed perfection of distant places, he tried to turn the simple into the astonishing. Yet he also wanted to view the landscape as something other than a space of leisure; he wanted to understand the ways that labor brought people into contact with the natural world. Instead of maintaining the boundaries between pure nature and corrupt society, he recorded mixed and hybrid worlds, landscapes mediated by humans and technology, flawed, imperfect worlds that still offered the possibility of sublime wonder. While the collaboration between Carson and Pratt has virtually been forgotten, a more popular expression of the ecological sublime also emerged in the late 1960s—a color photograph of the earth viewed from outer space, an image that would

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inspire many environmentalists who participated in the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970.

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orn into a wealthy New York family, Charles Pratt graduated from Yale and worked as a stage manager on Broadway before becoming a fulltime photographer in 1958. Influenced by Sid Grossman and other members of the Photo League, a leftist group based in New York, Pratt initially concentrated on the photography of urban life. “It’s hard for me to characterize my work,” he explained in 1960, “but in general I suppose that I’m most interested photographically in the relationship of people to their urban environment.” Throughout his career, Pratt pursued this interest in everyday city life, but he was equally fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities of rural Connecticut or the coast of Maine. Starting out in the 1950s, he enjoyed taking pictures of coastal settings, yet he lacked an intellectual or scientific understanding of marine life. Then he encountered the writings of Rachel Carson.6 As he read Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (1955), Pratt began to understand the complex ecological relationships formed by seashore animals and plants. Carson’s book marked a radical departure from the traditional taxonomy of the nature guide. Rather than listing each plant and animal separately, Carson stressed the interdependence of all creatures. She refused to isolate the life forms and elements of the sea into compartments; she wanted readers to grasp the ties that bound barnacles and seaweed, starfish and mussels, to one another and to the breaking waves of the sea.7 Soon after reading Carson’s book, Pratt wrote to her, proposing a collaborative project that would pair his images with her words. Pratt visited Carson at her summer cottage on Southport Island, Maine, and showed her some of his best work, particularly his photographs of the nearby intertidal area, an ecosystem that Carson had long studied and admired. “Apologizing for her lack of critical vocabulary in photography,” Pratt recalled, “she said about them that ‘this is the way it really looks.’ I thought she said it with surprise that a picture could touch the actuality of her own experience rather than just be admired on aesthetic grounds. It remains the greatest compliment my pictures have ever received.”8 Carson encouraged Pratt to work on the project, but she was preoccupied with completing Silent Spring. Its indictment of the pesticide industry angered many chemists and corporate officials, who immediately dismissed Carson’s findings, suggesting that as a female scientist Carson could not understand the complexity of chemistry. Even Carson’s defenders were surprised that this poetic observer of nature could produce such a forceful environmental polemic.

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Yet one can find a continuous thread in Carson’s writings; from the apparently apolitical books about the sea to the overtly political Silent Spring, she always focused on the ecological relationships that characterized varying landscapes. Carson completed Silent Spring and then faced the controversy it provoked, all while suffering from breast cancer. She died in 1964.9 Following her death, Pratt worked with Carson’s literary agent to publish The Sense of Wonder, featuring his photographs along with an essay Carson had written for Woman’s Home Companion in 1956. Entitled “Help Your Child to Wonder,” Carson’s article described childhood in Wordsworthian terms, as a time of openness to the mysteries of the universe. Carson encouraged adults to rekindle this feeling of excitement, to look through childhood eyes and return to a world where all is “fresh and new and beautiful.”10 Published in 1965, The Sense of Wonder contained a mix of color and blackand-white photographs, mostly focused on small fragments of nature. These close-up studies encouraged viewers to ponder the details of biological life and to find beauty in the particular—the spray of surf, the cottony fibers of a milkweed pod, or a patch of Queen Anne’s lace glistening with water. The book generates a pattern of relationships, moving from the precise detail to the wider view, creating a sense of correspondence between the landscape and its constituent parts. One series of images portrays the dense forest near Carson’s cottage, beginning with minute features—fungi and mosses, clumps of berries, a tiny seedling of spruce—and then expanding outward to encompass a broader perspective, including one photograph of a ferny glade in the woods (fig. 8.1). The darkness of the image suggests the canopy of branches and leaves overhead, a dense layer that allows only a portion of the sun’s light to illuminate the forest floor. Framed by the tall trees, a silver stretch of lichen garments the ground, its lightness echoed in the ferns and other small plants that fill the open space in the center. The sight of lichen delighted Carson, who believed it evoked “a quality of fairyland—silver rings on a stone.” Covering the hard surface of rock, the lichen grew as a symbiosis between an algae and a fungus—a living example of the ecological vision conveyed in the photograph. By focusing his camera on the undergrowth, on the vibrant community of life near the ground, Pratt attempted to reveal the relationships between organisms that constitute the ecology of the woods.11 Most of the book’s photographs concentrate on scenes that bear little sign of human modification. Although people (especially children) are often portrayed in the images, they tend to visit “natural” spaces, such as the forest, the beach, and the sea. Yet the photographs—like Eliot Porter’s work—depart from the typical portrayal of sublime landscapes. Rather than focusing on sweeping vis-

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8.1. Charles Pratt, ferny glade in woods, Maine, 1963, used by permission of Julie Pratt. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

tas or monumental sites, they reveal beauty in the quotidian, in the ordinary aesthetics of lichen and ferns, shells and tide pools. Matched with Carson’s text, the photographs offer a vision of the ecological sublime: a sense of awe and respect not for the overwhelming and the majestic, but instead for the bonds of exchange that link and sustain communities in nature. Carson’s essay and Pratt’s photography focused primarily on scenes of “nature”—from waves crashing and leaves changing to birds in flight and flowers in bloom—but they made a point of insisting that cities were not “unnatural” places, disconnected from the forces and rhythms of the nonhuman world. “You can listen to the wind,” Carson explained, “whether it blows with majestic voice through a forest or sings a many-voiced chorus around the eaves of your house or the corners of your apartment building, and in the listening, you can gain magical release for your thoughts. You can still feel the rain on your face and think of its long journey, its many transmutations from sea to air to earth.”12 After this passage, Pratt included photographs of nature in the city: houseplants in a windowsill, bathed by sunlight; children running along a sidewalk during a rainstorm; a flock of birds flying over an illuminated skyline. In one

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8.2. Charles Pratt, woman and flowering tree, Hoboken, New Jersey, ca. 1963, used by permission of Julie Pratt. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

photograph, taken in Hoboken, New Jersey, Pratt portrayed a woman leaning out the window of her apartment and staring at a flowering tree (fig. 8.2). The image creates formal resonance between the verticality of the buildings and the tree, as the walls and branches extend into the space overhead. The horizontal layering of bricks, echoed by the slats of window blinds, provides a counterpoint to the verticals, creating an overall symmetry in the photograph. Meanwhile, the branches on the right side of the tree reach toward the building, almost merging with the vine that crawls up the wall, suggesting the play between the natural and the artifactual. While the edge of a building occupies the physical center of the image, the interaction between the woman and the tree—reinforced by their placement on opposite sides of the photograph—provides its thematic center. The tree, most likely an ornamental pear, appears in full bloom; its blossoms affirm the idea that natural beauty is available to all, that even the “city dweller” can find nature’s solace nearby. “The most urban of us,” a book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune observed, “has some points of contact with stars and green things and living creatures, with grains of sand or flakes of snow. If an individual’s sense of wonder at the world has once been awakened, it need never starve, anywhere.”13 Following The Sense of Wonder, Pratt continued to explore the possibilities of coastal photography, concentrating on the shoreline and islands of Maine. In 1969, readers of Audubon magazine glimpsed some of these images, including

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8.3. Charles Pratt, white feather on kelp, n.d., used by permission of Julie Pratt. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

the cover photograph of a rumpled gull’s feather submerged in the water (fig. 8.3). The whiteness of the feather offers a vivid contrast to the gray and black tones of the surrounding seaweed. On one level, the photograph is a compelling study of the aesthetics of the seascape, revealing the sheer, accidental beauty of a lone feather perched on a bed of seaweed. Yet it also presents a detailed portrait of the numerous life forms that depend upon the common rockweed of the Atlantic Coast. As the caption explains, the seaweed “hold[s] moisture at low tide for the inhabitants of its fronds, the barnacles and periwinkles and minute, white Spirobis which can be found on close examination of Charles Pratt’s picture.” By visualizing the interdependence of living things, Pratt expressed the ecological thought that underlay the new environmentalism.14 In addition to his photography of marine life, Pratt continued to grapple with the relationships between people and the places where they lived and worked. He rejected the tendency of landscape photographers to imagine nature as a paradise devoid of human labor. In Here On the Island (1974), a photographic study of Isle au Haut, a remote island off the coast of Maine, Pratt reflected on the different ways people perceive and come to know the natural world. He contrasted his own perspective—as an observer and interpreter of aesthetic forms—with that

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of one of the fishermen he met on the island. Pratt knew nature as a landscape of leisure, but the fisherman had a different, more intimate understanding of place and ecological limits, a knowledge gained through his physical connection with the natural world. The fisherman knew nature through labor. “He believes,” Pratt wrote, “that we don’t understand nature, and that things are being used up. I agree with him, but I know about the arrogance of man in the face of nature mainly through a kind of political consciousness, whereas I think he knows it by waiting patiently by the weir for his share of the natural mysteries.” By recognizing that all people, not only those who identify themselves as conservationists, could form attachments to place—and sometimes in a more profound way than recreational users of nature—Pratt suggested the need to broaden the conservation movement beyond its elite base.15 Pratt’s comments recalled earlier ideas of nature developed by such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson. Employing a variant of the pastoral idiom, Pratt suggested that what linked humans to the natural world was not an ineffable spiritual bond but the daily experience of work. While pastoral sentiments are often dismissed as an elite affectation of leisure, Pratt made human labor central to his vision. In doing so, he challenged a key component of the wilderness ideal—the view of nature as leisure, a place where workers can only be intruders, defilers of holy land. Instead, Pratt emphasized how labor could draw people closer to the nonhuman world. Describing Phil, one of the fishermen he met in Maine, Pratt commented: “I think Phil is a very religious man . . . because he has a deep belief in the natural order of things and in the rhythms of nature and is constantly amazed at his fellow creatures in whatever size or shape they come.” Work in nature, Pratt suggested, did not necessarily destroy or corrupt the nonhuman world; instead, it could dignify people and ennoble nature, providing a deeper sense of connection and a bond of mutual reciprocity. Residents of the island reveal “a real love for the place as it is,” Pratt explained. “They are still there as the true caretakers of an environment where man is not excluded but where nature—a hard manifestation of nature—dominates.” Pratt recognized that nature could be a destroyer as well as a creator, overwhelming and overpowering, revealing its sublimity to people at work or play.16

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ather than celebrating nature as something embodied in the distant world of wilderness, Pratt wanted to contemplate the more familiar points of contact between people and place. As he pursued this interest, he also began to see his photography as a memory project, a notion that linked him to a long tradition in American environmental image making. Many landscape photographers—from Herbert Gleason in the Progressive Era to Eliot Porter in

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the 1960s—viewed the camera as a technology of memory, as a device that could preserve threatened landscapes on film. Gleason’s photographs of Hetch Hetchy and Porter’s images of Glen Canyon were paeans to purity, reminders of a time before the wilderness was besieged by civilization. Pratt’s conception of memory was different. Rather than imagining a pristine past and bemoaning the expulsion from Eden, he sought transcendent meaning in the blurred boundaries of everyday life, in the mixed, hybrid universe of the urban landscape. For Pratt, remembering nature did not mean trying to locate a pristine moment in the past. Like Marcel Proust, Pratt used memory not as a withdrawal from the spaces of modernity but as an active and creative force, allowing him to link past with present, to meld nature with human experience, and to glimpse the marvelous in the commonplace. He used the camera as a technology of memory not only to preserve “vanishing” nature but also to record the redemptive possibility of landscapes in the present. As he read Proust’s monumental work, Remembrance of Things Past, Pratt detected parallels between the narrator’s account and his own photographic practice. Both men recognized how seemingly simple objects and places—such as a madeleine the narrator dips in tea—could produce a powerful flood of memories. In the early 1970s, after carefully studying Proust’s novel, Pratt filled several notebooks with his thoughts about Proust and photography. The key for Pratt, as it was for Proust, was not to focus on loss, not to express regret over the inevitable passage of time and the changes that marked so many landscapes. Rather, Pratt wandered around, carrying his camera, hoping to experience what the critic Roger Shattuck called moments of “reminiscence-resurrection”—perceptions of objects or places in the present that conjured up echoes of the past. Pratt described Proustian moments of involuntary memory, chance recollections of the past, as feelings of “sublime happiness,” experiences that provided him with the “hope of salvation.”17 Pratt often studied the effect of light on various objects and places; he believed that the “quality of light,” even when observed in different landscapes, could reveal “evidences of the past,” surprising reminders of experiences in other places. In one photograph, Pratt captured the dramatic action of light along the brick wall of a brewery in New York City (fig. 8.4). The sharp contrast between light and shadow reminded Pratt of the “dividing line” between forest and meadow he had encountered in western Connecticut. He felt a sense of “overpowering” surprise that this scene in New York could spark reminiscence of another place. In this photograph, the sheer size and verticality of the building seem to overwhelm the small human figures walking along the sidewalk. Yet the people are moving toward the radiant light that illuminates the right

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8.4. Charles Pratt, Ruppert Brewery, New York City, 1964, used by permission of Julie Pratt. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

side of the image; the glow lends a feeling of hope, as natural beauty embraces a mechanized structure. For many artists in the sublime tradition, light signals the divine, the lustrous presence of God in the landscape. Like these artists, Pratt used the metaphor of the sun, but in this image he portrayed the luminary moment in an urban setting, as the rays of light meet a mediated landscape clearly marked by the presence of people.18 Although Pratt relished his personal recollections of place, he did not believe that the landscape should be seen only as a container of human meanings and emotions; he suggested that the natural world could remain indifferent to the fantasies and perceptions of people. “A photograph is a celebration of a momentary experience of something,” he wrote. “The moment passes, and the image remains on the film, but what we have visited, seen and photographed remains for all the moments of its existence, and we are nothing to it.” Pratt appreciated both the otherness of nature and its dynamic connections to society. He celebrated the autonomy of the nonhuman world as well as the subtle interweaving of people and place.19 Consider his photograph of a Holstein milking cow in Roxbury, Connecticut, included in his book The Garden and the Wilderness (fig. 8.5). The cow, named Wow, rests in a field of grass. Framing the animal within the context of its surroundings, Pratt produced an image that raises questions about the lines separating the domestic from the wild, the human from the natural. The pho-

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8.5. Charles Pratt, black cow, Roxbury, Connecticut, 1964, used by permission of Julie Pratt. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

tograph portrays a domesticated creature (who even has a name) situated within a tamed landscape, a setting that nevertheless suggests something that cannot be understood solely in terms of human meanings and values. The photograph respects the integrity and separateness of the animal, revealing its substance and materiality, offering a close study of its bone structure and facial features. The image reveals a landscape shaped by people but not ultimately created by them, a place altered by human labor but still tied to natural cycles and governed by forces beyond human control. By detaching the cow from this larger landscape, a setting that most likely contains fields and fences, the photograph encourages viewers to contemplate the cow itself and to study its details. Presented as the Critic’s Choice in a 1966 issue of Popular Photography magazine, the image was praised for rendering the cow “with its intense and total cowness.” Similarly, the photographer Lisette Model commented: “I have never seen anybody photographing Nature with the sensitivity and purity that Charles Pratt’s photographs have. He never becomes abstract, in the sense of giving the form of something the whole importance, and ignoring the life of it. . . . I have never seen a cow photographed that way. . . . The most elegant cow I have ever seen and there is a tremendous connection.” By trying to capture “the life” of the cow, Pratt practiced an aesthetic of authenticity in which he documented concrete, empirical details and pondered the irreducible, biological realities of nature. In this photograph, the cow represents both the garden and the wilderness.20

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Pratt’s notebooks contain several references to Emerson and Thoreau, who found sacred meaning in the natural world. Many heirs to this tradition—such as John Muir and Ansel Adams—sought spiritual significance in the sanctuary of wilderness, but Pratt wanted to reenchant the sphere of everyday life. He felt particularly drawn to the borderline where the city shaded into something else, where it turned into marshland, countryside, highway, or harbor. “The environs of airports, railroad yards, bridge piers, highway cloverleaves and areas beneath elevated highways are exciting,” Pratt wrote in his posthumously published The Edge of the City (1998). “These are the places where the necessities of transportation have introduced strangely massive structures and strangely open spaces into the gridded regularity of the city.” Pratt noted, with irony and a sense of paradox, that such areas represented more than just the technological manipulation and bureaucratic control of nature. They were places that reminded him of the continued presence of the nonhuman world: bright light shimmering on the New York Harbor, the graceful sway of marsh juxtaposed to the sleek geometry of a freeway, or a bird in flight, seeking refuge under the West Side Highway. For Pratt, edges signified places where “accident can still occur,” places that provided gifts of hope, glimpses of chaos amidst an engineered and managed environment.21 Pratt linked accident to beauty, celebrating the chance experience of wonder in the industrial landscape. His allusion to accident dovetailed with his emphasis on involuntary memory, on Proustian random recollections of the past. Pratt believed that surprise encounters with natural beauty—standing in the presence of something mysterious, unpredictable, and outside rational schemes of progress—provoked feelings of humility. These experiences made him feel a renewed sense of awe and wonder for the natural world. In such moments, he recognized that nature was “impervious (resistant) to my emotional containment of it.” His photography represented a paradoxical pursuit: recording the accidental, documenting surprise, producing images that could act as madeleines of place.22

B

y the late 1960s, many Americans—even if they had not read Silent Spring —began to heed Carson’s ecological message. A series of disasters—from a dramatic fire along the Cuyahoga River to a massive oil spill off the coast of California—demonstrated how human society could destroy the web of life. On television screens and in popular magazines, audiences encountered disturbing images of ecological catastrophe. In some ways, these scenes echoed the portrayals of Depression-era disasters by Lorentz and Flaherty, who had emphasized the links between people and the natural world. Yet New

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Deal conservation was a government-initiated and government-run affair. The new environmentalism would spring from more popular sources and generate a plethora of citizen organizations, groups that would depart from the Sierra Club and other traditional organizations’ focus on wilderness preservation. In January 1969, an oil well ruptured off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, spewing thousands of gallons of petroleum into the ocean. After rising to the surface, the black liquid formed an immense slick that darkened the sandy beaches and threatened countless birds and other animals. Americans soon encountered images of oil-drenched seabirds—loons and grebes, cormorants and ruddy ducks—struggling for life, choking, suffocating, and dying. The grisly spectacle contributed to the growing environmental consciousness and sparked the formation of GOO, Get Oil Out, a group of activists who fought against offshore oil drilling.23 In the aftermath of the disaster, Roderick Nash, an environmental historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, composed the “Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights.” The text followed the narrative pattern so often used in American environmental politics. Like Pare Lorentz and Nancy Newhall, Nash employed the collective “we” to condemn the abuse of the American landscape: “We have stripped the forest and the grasses and reduced the soil to fruitless dust. We have contaminated the air we breathe for life. We have befouled the lakes and rivers and oceans along with their shorelines. . . . We have made much of the physical world ugly and loud, depriving man of the beauty and quiet that feeds his spirit.” Nash’s secular jeremiad moved from judgment to the possibility of renewal: “We, therefore, resolve to act. We propose a revolution in conduct toward an environment which is rising in revolt against us. . . . We will begin anew.”24 As Americans witnessed scenes of disaster, they also began to glimpse images of the Earth taken by astronauts in outer space, pictures that seemed to encapsulate ecological sentiment and to enliven their quest for renewal. In late December 1968, as Apollo VIII astronauts circled the moon, Ansel Adams waxed ecological. Writing a letter from Yosemite National Park, the place he had long celebrated as pure and pristine, separate and sublime, Adams grappled with the idea of the Earth as an interconnected system. “As I write this,” he explained, “three men are nearly 200,000 miles from the Earth (which, for once, is scaled down to size). What is important is . . . that every bit of beauty on the face of the earth . . . is extremely precious—and extremely vulnerable. . . . I think it is time that we all considered ecology as the dominant theme.” Adams suggested the importance of ecological vision, of seeing every piece of beauty as fragile and precious. He also emphasized the role of the camera in

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scaling the Earth down to size, making it possible for viewers to observe the entire planet in one glance. Throughout the twentieth century, environmental photographers—from Herbert Gleason to Ansel Adams himself—had turned monumental sites like Yosemite into items easily consumed and comprehended. Now Adams believed that astronauts were achieving the same goal for the whole Earth by producing images that would shape public consciousness.25 The poet Archibald MacLeish, who had inspired Lorentz’s portrayal of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, shared Adams’s reaction to the Apollo VIII mission. On the Christmas Day front page of the New York Times, he argued that the image of the Earth would transform human perception: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.” While there was a certain irony in linking the space program—a profligate consumer of natural resources—to enlightened concern for the environment, many activists would latch onto the image as a symbol of their movement. In their eyes, the image signified the frailty, uniqueness, and interdependence of life on this planet. “Apollo 8 . . . reminds us,” a letter writer to the New York Times explained, “that the rivers, the seas, the forests, the creatures, the air of this beautiful life-giving planet, exist nowhere else in the emptiness of the universe we know.”26 A little over a year after Ansel Adams’s ecological epiphany in Yosemite, the nation commemorated the first Earth Day. Even the name of the event—not “Arbor Day” or “Nature Day” or “Environment Day,” but “Earth Day”—suggested the popular impact of images from outer space. Indeed, a few days before the celebration on April 22, 1970, the New York Times claimed the day should be considered “Space Day as well as Earth Day.” “It is no mere coincidence,” the editors explained, “that the great recent upsurge in ecology has coincided with the historic space triumphs at the end of the 1960s. An easily comprehended visual perspective on the earth’s place in the universe was unobtainable until craft were available that could take cameras thousands of miles into deep space.” The Times may have engaged in journalistic hyperbole, but many participants reiterated this idea. The distinguished anthropologist Margaret Mead, speaking to a crowd at Bryant Park in New York City, suggested that Earth Day represented an effort to overcome “the unforgivable sin” of people “having separated” themselves from nature by forming a “religious phrasing of [their] relationship to the environment.” “We have today,” she continued, “the knowledge and the tools to look at the whole earth, . . . I think that the tenderness that lies in seeing the earth as small and lonely and blue is probably one of the most valuable things that we have now.” Mead found spiritual and political

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meaning in photographs of the Earth, images that conveyed the possibility of personal, national, and even global renewal.27 Appearing on posters, flags, and other popular forms of visual culture, Earth images signified the camera’s power to capture the sublime. Astronauts relied on 70-millimeter Hasselblad cameras and color film—not to mention tremendous advances in rocket technology and tremendous amounts of fuel—to reveal the blue and green Earth shimmering amidst the vast loneliness of space. While thousands would travel to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to witness the liftoff of spacecraft, many millions would glimpse images of the Earth mediated through the camera’s lens. James Lovelock, a scientist and founder of Gaia philosophy (which holds that the Earth functions as a single organism), claimed that the images confirmed the oneness of “Mother Earth.” “Ancient belief and modern knowledge,” he explained, “have fused emotionally in the awe with which astronauts with their own eyes and we by indirect vision have seen the Earth revealed in all its shining beauty against the deep darkness of space.” Lovelock described the experience of seeing the Earth as emotionally powerful, constituting a sense of “awe.” He emphasized that although astronauts saw the planet “with their own eyes,” everyone else could share in the experience through the “indirect vision” of the camera. Technologies of mechanical reproduction made it possible for people to imagine themselves in outer space looking back on their terrestrial home. For a generation of environmentalists, Earth images would also provide a way to popularize the notion of the ecological sublime, to encourage viewers to feel awe and respect for the beauty and frailty of life, to respond with wonder to the interdependence of nature.28

I

n recent years, a number of landscape photographers have studied the connections between people and place. Although their approaches have differed, they have shared a desire to contemplate ecological relationships— not from the distant perspective of outer space, where the Earth appears as a tiny orb, making actual life on the planet impossible to see, but from the vantage point of particular locations and ecosystems. Rather than turning their eyes toward pure wilderness, they have looked directly at evidence of human intervention, creating images of strip malls and tract housing, industrial parks and nuclear wastelands. Like Charles Pratt, many of these photographers have called for the appreciation of beauty in the contemporary landscape—not in an uncritical fashion, without recognizing environmental devastation, but with the hope of restoring and reenchanting places inhabited and modified by people.29

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8.6. Terry Evans, ammunition storage bunkers and hay bales, former Joliet Arsenal, now Midewin Prairie, September 9, 1995, used by permission of the artist.

Terry Evans is one of the most creative and thoughtful of this group. A native of Kansas, Evans has photographed the prairie landscape in all its guises—from a relatively pristine condition, patterned in perennial flowers and grasses, to the fields of monoculture, composed of wheat farms and rectangular grids, to the industrialized and militarized prairie, containing oil pumps, missile silos, and bombing targets. In a recent project, Disarming the Prairie, she documented a landscape on the brink of transition: the Joliet Army Arsenal, forty miles outside Chicago, a former military base and producer of TNT that was re-christened in 1997 as the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Park. Local environmental organizations, including Openlands in Chicago, had encouraged the federal government to convert the site into a park, a place that people had changed into farms and factories, but would now work to restore. No longer an arsenal, the landscape offers—in an America consumed by

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suburban sprawl—an enormous territory of open space, an ecological reserve that provides crucial habitat to animals and plants displaced by metropolitan growth.30 Roaming through the arsenal landscape, Evans recorded scenes of emptiness: abandoned bunkers and buildings, a file cabinet coated with rust, a motionless train surrounded by a cornfield. Her images tap into the romantic aesthetic of ruins; they portray decay and desolation, suggesting the evanescence of human actions within the enduring timescale of nature. Evans also juxtaposed picturesque beauty with military artifacts. One image offers an aerial view of ammunition storage bunkers—squat, concrete structures dotting the land, their presence echoed by the round hay bales below (fig. 8.6). The agricultural field contains criss-cross lines, traces of human labor replicated by the rows of bunkers and by the railroad tracks that divide the picture. The photograph suggests the environmental history of the region: a tallgrass prairie that became farmland, a place of fields linked to distant markets; farmland that later became a bomb factory, its products linked to the military-industrial complex. Yet, as Evans recognized, despite these changes, some of the prairie remains—a sublime reminder of nature’s distant past. With human involvement, through the work of volunteers and government employees who collect and plant native seeds, the old prairie may return, not as something separate from society, but as a place where people act as caretakers, devoted to healing and restoring the land. Emphasizing human connection to nature and placing history in an environmental context, Evans evoked the ecological sublime as a quest for reconciliation, an effort to redeem the prairie through stewardship. As the writer Tony Hiss explained, the story of this place challenges “the notion that all changes to the land—those one embraces, those one loathes—are irreversible.” “Midewin,” he continued, “proclaims the polar opposite—it asserts that local initiative can reverse the seemingly irreversible. Making no distinction between the deep past and the long-term future, it reconsecrates a landscape continuity that’s stronger than even generations of upheaval and forgetfulness.” Rather than pining for a lost Eden, Evans called for reciprocity and restoration; she found the possibility of transcendence in the actions of people working, in her words, to “serve this land,” mixing their labor with the grasses, forming new stories of partnership with the natural world.31

T

he sublime has often been associated with the sacred, with the experience of stepping outside of historical time, of fleeing the ordinary to find the extraordinary. As an aesthetic category, it is usually juxtaposed to the beautiful, described as awe-inspiring and powerful, occupying a higher realm

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than the inferior domain of beauty, the mountains rather than the meadows, the magnificent trees rather than the gentle flowers. “The sublime occasioned the demotion of the beautiful,” Elaine Scarry notes, “because it ensured that the meadow flowers, rather than being perceived in their continuity with the august silence of ancient groves . . . , were now seen instead as a counterpoint to that grove. Formerly capable of charming or astonishing, now beauty was the not-astonishing.” The ecological sublime provides a way to rejoin beauty and sublimity, to turn the ordinary into the astonishing, to find awe in the diminutive, to seek wonder in the everyday. By refusing the flight from history and rejecting the appeal to purity, it offers a way to recognize the ties between people and place.32 The implications of the ecological sublime extend beyond questions of beauty and into the domain of politics. As Rachel Carson observed, in the entangled, hybrid world we inhabit, the poisoning of birds and the proliferation of toxic chemicals ultimately threaten human life. Her central insight can be linked to the aesthetic vision of Pratt, Evans, and others, who have encouraged a more capacious respect for the natural world and a sense of awe for its persistence in unexpected places. The ecological sublime celebrates the beauty of ancient groves and meadow flowers; it affirms the interdependence between humans and nature; it calls for a sense of stewardship not just for those fragments of beauty outside of historical time but also for the ordinary and the everyday, for those flawed, imperfect worlds where we live, work, and play.33

N OTES

Introduction

1. Wilderness Society membership appeal, in author’s possession. 2. Important works on these topics include Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); and Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 3. Classic works on the emergence of the conservation movement include Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (1981; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 4. On the camera as a technology to capture reality, see also Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5. My use of the phrase “age of mechanical reproduction” invokes Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51. For a provocative critique of images in modern society, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; New York: Doubleday, 1989).

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6. Other works that consider the connections between religion and the environment in American culture include Catharine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). See also my review essay on Dunlap, “The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism,” Reviews in American History 32 (Sept. 2004): 380–87. 7. On the importance of texts in framing the meanings of images, see, for example, Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 25–41. 8. On the need to experience sublime objects in person, see, for example, David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 9 and passim. Nye’s book is a masterful history of the relationship between technology and the sublime in American culture. 9. David Brion Davis, “Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History,” American Historical Review 73 (Feb. 1968): 705. 10. On narrative history, I have been influenced by William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–76; and James Goodman, “For the Love of Stories,” Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998): 255–74. Chapter 1

1. Herbert W. Gleason to Stephen Mather, telegram dated 7 Oct. 1919; Gleason to Mather, telegram dated 7 Oct. 1919; General-Pictures/Gleason, Natural Resources/Picture Correspondence, Central files, 1907–39, General Records, Records of the National Park Service (hereafter NPSR), record group 97, National Archives at College Park (hereafter NACP), College Park, MD. 2. Gleason to Mather, letter dated 7 Oct. 1919. 3. Historians have yet to explore Gleason’s life and career. For a biographical overview, see Dale R. Schwie, “Herbert W. Gleason: A Photographer’s Journey to Thoreau’s World,” Concord Saunterer n.s. 7 (1999): 151–65. 4. Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 5. On the camera as an instrument of reform, see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6. Theodore Roosevelt, Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905; Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1990), 322. On Roosevelt and wildlife images, see Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908– 1936,” Social Text 11 (1984–85): 20–64; Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 1; and Finis Dunaway, “Hunting with the Camera: Nature Photography, Manliness, and Modern Memory, 1890–1930,” Journal of American Studies 34 (Aug. 2000): 207–30. 7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902; New York: Modern Library, 1994), 36. 8. John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,

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1961), 40. On this theme in Muir’s writings, see also Robert L. Dorman, A Word for Nature: Four Pioneering Environmental Advocates, 1845–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 141–43. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 84–85. 10. See Schwie, “Herbert W. Gleason,” 152–54. 11. The literature on liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel is immense. For interpretive overviews, see Jean B. Quandt, “Religion and Social Thought: The Secularization of Postmillennialism,” American Quarterly 25 (Oct. 1973): 390–409; and Richard Wightman Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (winter 1993): 639–60. 12. Gleason, “Luxury and the Love of God,” Kingdom 8 (6 March 1896): 747. On the equation of moral and material progress, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7–26. 13. Gleason, “The Further Evolution,” Kingdom 7 (28 Sept. 1894): 377; Gleason, “The Moral Value of Nature Study,” Kingdom 10 (19 May 1898): 601. On the Protestant reaction to Darwinism, see Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, 20, 10. 15. Gleason, review of A Book of Clouds and Sunshine by Clifton Johnson, Kingdom 9 (19 March 1897): 789. 16. Gleason, “A Cruise in Mud Lake,” Kingdom 10 (30 June 1898): 732–33; Gleason, “A Hunter’s Confession,” Kingdom 10 (15 Sept. 1898): 912–13. On the overlapping idioms of gun and camera, see Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy”; Mitman, Reel Nature, chap. 1; and Dunaway, “Hunting with the Camera.” 17. On these issues, see Lears, No Place of Grace. 18. Lewis Hine, “Social Photography,” in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 111, 110, 112; and Gleason, “A Prophet of Nature,” Kingdom 10 (3 Feb. 1898): 326. 19. Gleason, Through the Year with Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), xxviii. 20. On Walden as a site of pilgrimage and Thoreau as an environmental saint, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 316–32. 21. Gleason, Through the Year, xxxiii–xxxiv, emphasis in the original. 22. On luminism, see John Wilmerding, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875: Paintings, Drawings, and Photographs (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 23. Gleason to Thomas Sandler Roberts, 27 Oct. 1900, Bell Museum of Natural History Papers (hereafter BMP), University of Minnesota Archives. On Houghton Mifflin and the 1906 edition, see also Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 340–49. 24. “Henry David Thoreau,” Houghton Mifflin brochure, scrapbook 246, Houghton Mifflin Company Archives (hereafter HMCA), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 25. Ibid.

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26. “Walden Edition: The Complete Writings of Henry David Thoreau,” Houghton Mifflin brochure, scrapbook 246, HMCA. 27. See Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect” and “Pictorial Perils: The Rise of American Illustration,” in his Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Harper’s Weekly 55 (29 July 1911): 6, as quoted in Harris, “Iconography,” 313. 28. F. B. Sanborn, “Thoreau in Twenty Volumes,” Dial 41 (16 Oct. 1906): 235. 29. X. Theodore Barber, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Travel Lecture,” Film History 5 (1993): 68–84; and Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, chap. 1. See also Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). 30. Boston Transcript, 15 Feb. 1910. Quotation from Keene Sentinel (not dated) taken from Gleason, “El Camino Real,” brochure, container 56, folder 32, Herbert W. Gleason Papers, Sierra Club Members Papers (hereafter HWGP-SC), Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. 31. Gleason, “Editorial Jottings,” Kingdom 9 (25 Sept. 1896): 376. 32. See Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), esp. 77, 95, and 202. 33. Cora Stanwood Cobb, “Reports of the Councillors for the Autumn of 1908: Art,” Appalachia 12 (July 1909): 80. 34. Gleason, National Parks and Monuments (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 4. 35. Gleason, “To Women’s Clubs,” brochure, container 56, folder 32, HWGP-SC. On women’s clubs and the conservation movement, see Carolyn Merchant, “Women of the Progressive Conservation Movement, 1900–1916,” Environmental Review 8 (spring 1984): 57–85; and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), chap. 2. 36. John Burroughs, “John Muir’s Yosemite,” Literary Digest 44 (1 June 1912): 1165; Gleason to John Muir, 20 June 1912, reel 20, John Muir Papers (hereafter JMP), University of the Pacific, microfilm edition. 37. John Muir to Gleason, 27 Jan. 1911, reel 20, JMP. 38. Many historians have treated the Hetch Hetchy debate, although none have made more than passing mention of the use of photography by opponents of the dam. For one account, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chap. 10. 39. Boston Transcript, 17 Feb. 1910. 40. The image and quotation appeared in the section of photographic plates in Let Everyone Help to Save the Famous Hetch-Hetchy Valley and Stop the Commercial Destruction Which Threatens Our National Parks (n.p., 1909). 41. Muir to Gleason, 1 Jan. 1914, reel 22, JMP; Boston Transcript, 15 Feb. 1910. 42. See Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 3d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 43. Gleason to Stephen Mather, 29 Aug. 1918, NPSR.

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44. On World War I and scenic patriotism, see Shaffer, See America First, chap. 3. 45. On photography and westward expansion, see Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History; Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), chap. 3. 46. Advertisement for “In Rainbow-Land” (1922), BMP. On the automobile and national parks, see David Louter, “Glaciers and Gasoline: The Making of a Windshield Wilderness, 1900–1915,” in Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, ed. David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, 248–70 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). The presence of roads and automobiles in national parks and other “wild” areas would soon provoke a vigorous critique by wilderness advocates. See Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 47. Muir to Jeanne Carr, 1870, quoted in Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 123. 48. Gleason, “Where the Automobile Pioneered,” Motor Life (May 1920): 42. 49. On these issues, see Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 50. On the issues explored here and in the following paragraph, my interpretation has been influenced by Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). The Emerson quotation is from “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, 261. 51. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 409. 52. The phrase “original relation to the universe” is from Emerson, Nature, 7. 53. Herbert W. Gleason to Percy Brown, 21 Oct. 1936, Herbert W. Gleason Papers, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass. Chapter 2

1. Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 2d sess., 6882–83. On the origin of the term “Dust Bowl,” see Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 28–29. 2. Stuart Chase, “When the Crop Lands Go,” Harper’s Magazine 173 (Aug. 1936): 225. For a provocative discussion of environmental storytelling about the Great Plains and the Dust Bowl, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347–76. 3. Paul B. Sears, “Floods and Dust Storms,” Science 83 (27 March 1936): supplement, Science News, 9. 4. For the secular qualities of the New Deal, see, for example, Paul Boyer, “The Chameleon with Nine Lives: American Religion in the Twentieth Century,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 260. For a contrasting view, see James A.

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Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 12. 5. See Tim Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). 6. My understanding of the links between ecological thought and panoramic motion pictures has been enriched by Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 3 and 4. 7. The quotation is from John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 72. On natural disasters and the sublime, see also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), esp. 120. 8. See Pare Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 3–38; and Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (1968; Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994), 14–20. 9. Pare Lorentz, “A Young Man Goes to Work,” Scribner’s 89 (Feb. 1931): 206, 207; Lorentz, “Peroration No. 2: Moral Racketeering in the Movies,” reprinted in Pare Lorentz, Lorentz on Film: Movies, 1927 to 1941 (1975; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 61. 10. Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 28. 11. Pare Lorentz, interview by Alan Fern, 17 and 20 March 1976, 14, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 28–29. 12. Pare Lorentz, The Roosevelt Year: A Photographic Record (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1934), 2–3. 13. Mark Sullivan, “Our Times in Pictures,” Saturday Review of Literature 10 (21 April 1934): 646. 14. Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 37; Lorentz, interview, 21; Pare Lorentz, “Agriculture: Mother Nature Lays Down a Withering, Calamitous New Deal, Reducing More Crops Than AAA Decreed,” Newsweek 3 (9 June 1934): 4. 15. Rexford G. Tugwell, The Battle for Democracy (1935; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 238–39; Tugwell, “Our New National Domain,” Scribner’s 99 (March 1936): 168; and H. H. Bennett, “A Major Effort at Erosion Control,” The Land, Today and Tomorrow 1 (Oct. 1934): 20. 16. See Beeman and Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land, 13–18. 17. On the more general rejection of frontier values in the New Deal, see David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 122–42; and Steven Kesselman, “The Frontier Thesis and the Great Depression,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (April 1968): 253–68. 18. For the frequent coverage of natural disasters, see the Universal Newsreels summary sheets in the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch of the National Archives. This discussion is based on a screening of episode 257 (11 June 1934). The sound is no longer available for this film, so I consulted the narration script available in UNC. Universal Newsreel Catalog (hereafter UNC), record group 200 UN, Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch, NACP.

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19. Universal Newsreel form wired to Ennis C. Helm, 22 Aug. 1934; narration script for episode 279 (27 Aug. 1934); cameraman’s caption sheet for episode 279, all in UNC. The newspapers included were the Oklahoma News and the Oklahoma City Times (both 22 Aug. 1934). 20. The phrase “the might of the elements” is taken from the summary of an episode concerning a hurricane, but the same idea influenced the portrayal of all disasters, including the dust storms. See the summary sheet for episode 80 (29 Sept. 1932) in UNC. 21. On Clements and the climax community, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205– 53. See also Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 22. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 218–20. 23. Archibald MacLeish, “The Grasslands,” Fortune 12 (Nov. 1935): 59, 63, 59. 24. See, among others, James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 89–131; and James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 99–148. 25. Grant Wood, “Revolt against the City,” pamphlet (1935), reprinted in James Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 229–35, quotation from 231. See also Karal Ann Marling, “A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth,” Prospects 4 (1979): 421–40; and Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 26. In rejecting the positive symbolic value of the pioneer, Lorentz was also influenced by 1920s cultural criticism, such as Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 80–81. See also Warren I. Susman, “The Frontier Thesis and the American Intellectual,” in his Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 27–38. 27. I borrow the term “erosion apostles” from Beeman and Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land, 13. 28. Pare Lorentz, “Confidential Report,” box entitled The Plow That Broke the Plains, 2-1, Pare Lorentz Papers, Butler Library (hereafter PLP-BL), Columbia University. The second quotation is from Pare Lorentz, “The Plow That Broke the Plains,” reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 135–36. On the importance of the emotions to documentary art, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 8–9. 29. Lorentz as quoted in Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 63. 30. Lorentz, “Confidential Report.” On film and the interpretation of history, see Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in his Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 45–79. 31. Pare Lorentz, “Old and New,” reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 45–46. Eisenstein

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quoted in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 181. 32. For a thorough study of Nykino, see William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 33. Irving Lerner, “The Plow That Broke the Plains,” reprinted in New Theatre and Film 1934 to 1937: An Anthology, ed. Herbert Kline (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 313; Steiner quoted in Alexander, Film on the Left, 100. 34. MacCann, The People’s Films, 68–69; Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 31–36. 35. Frederick C. Othman, Washington Daily News, 11 May 1936, 5. 36. Lorentz, “Shooting Script,” box entitled The Plow, 2-1, PLP-BL. On Hogue’s career, see Lea Rosson DeLong, Nature’s Forms/Nature’s Forces: The Art of Alexandre Hogue (Tulsa: Philbrook and University of Oklahoma Press, 1984). 37. Review from Hollywood Citizen News, as quoted in “The Plow That Broke the Plains: A Documentary Musical Movie,” United States Film Service Pamphlet (Washington, D.C.: GPO, n.d.), PLP-BL. 38. Lorentz, “Shooting Script.” This hymn is often known as the doxology. 39. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 280–308. 40. On Kenneth Burke and “secular prayer,” see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso: 1996), 439 and passim. 41. “The Plow That Broke the Plains,” synopsis for United States Copyright Office (2 April 1936), Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. The last quotation is from Lorentz, “Shooting Script.” 42. Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” in his The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 218–19. 43. On the removal of the epilogue, see also John O’Connor, “Case Study: The Plow That Broke the Plains,” in Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television, ed. John O’Connor (Malabar, Fl: Kreiger, 1990), 286–88, 292–93. 44. Time 27 (25 May 1936): 47. The last quotations are from “Federal Film Hit,” Business Week (19 Feb. 1938): 36. 45. See Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 46; New York Times, 28 May 1936. 46. On these statistics, see Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 37 and 47; and MacCann, The People’s Films, 70–71. 47. On the legislator from Texas, see New York Times, 10 June 1936. Newspaper reviews quoted in John E. Miller, “Two Visions of the Great Plains: The Plow That Broke the Plains and South Dakotans’ Reactions to It,” Upper Midwest History 2 (1982): 3, 4. 48. Review quoted in Miller, “Two Visions,” 3. 49. On Rothstein, see Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 69–89. 50. Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1524, 1523, and 1522. See also Miller, “Two Visions,” 10. 51. James C. Malin, “The Grassland of North America: Its Occupance and the Challenge of Continuous Reappraisals,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the

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Earth, ed. William L. Thomas, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 356. See also Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History with Addenda and Postscript (1947; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967), 134–36. The phrase “evangelical conservationists” is quoted in Brad D. Lookingbill, Dust Bowl, USA: Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929–1941 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 3. 52. See Willard Van Dyke, “Letters from ‘The River,’” Film Comment 3 (March– April 1965): 46; Lerner, “The Plow That Broke the Plains.” 53. Mark Van Doren, Nation 142 (10 June 1936): 753; Meyer Levin, “The Candid Cameraman,” Esquire 9 (Jan. 1938): 107. 54. Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 89. 55. For more on how The Plow influenced Rothstein, see Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 76–89. 56. On the ways that New Deal photography distanced the past, see Alan Trachtenberg, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleishhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 43–73; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 283–350; and Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 89–131. 57. Rexford G. Tugwell, “The Ideas behind the New Deal,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (16 July 1933): 1, as quoted in Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism, 135.

Chapter 3

1. On Lorentz’s visit to Vicksburg, I consulted Pare Lorentz, lecture at Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh, 5 May 1966, audiotape in University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, University Archives (hereafter UWOA), Polk Library. 2. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York: Penguin, 1984), 205. 3. Ibid. I found information on the Beale Street Gauge in United States Film Service, Study Guide: The River; U.S. Documentary Film [1938], 36. A copy of this guide is available in box entitled The River, 5-1, PLP-BL. 4. I have excerpted the quotation from Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 30. It is worth noting that Lorentz also chose this quotation as the epigraph to his book The River, which featured the narration and selected images from the documentary. See Lorentz, The River (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1938). 5. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 282–83. On the regionalist movement, see Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 6. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 64. 7. Victor Weybright, “The Valleys and the Plains: Floods, Droughts and Morris L. Cooke,” Survey Graphic 26 (March 1937): 145. See also Jean Christie, Morris Llewellyn Cooke: Progressive Engineer (New York: Garland Publishing, 1983). 8. Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, Mississippi Valley Com-

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mittee, Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1934), n.p., 3, hereafter referred to as MVC Report. 9. See Jean Christie, “The Mississippi Valley Committee: Conservation and Planning in the Early New Deal,” Historian 32 (May 1970): 454. 10. The motto appears in MVC Report, 3; the committee attributed its motto to Charles D. Norton, but the passage was most likely a paraphrasing of the Chicago city planner Daniel H. Burnham, who once said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” The other quotations are from MVC Report, 230–31. 11. W. L. White, “Pare Lorentz,” Scribner’s 105 (Jan. 1939): 10. 12. See Pare Lorentz to Stephen B. Early, 2 Sept. 1937, official file 73, box 3, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Papers (hereafter FDRPP), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. Referring to The River, Lorentz wrote, “I took as my bible the Mississippi Valley Committee Report and I know that we have from it created an emotional piece of work.” 13. Pare Lorentz to Robert L. Snyder, 5 April 1962, quoted in Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (1968; Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994), 52. 14. See Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 53; and Pare Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 51. 15. Lorentz, lecture at Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh. 16. Pare Lorentz, “Dramatic Structures,” box entitled The River, 4-5, PLP-BL. 17. On the meanings of rivers and the hydrologic cycle in Western culture, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995), 245–382; and Yi-Fu Tuan, The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God: A Theme in Geoteleology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). On the working title of the film, see Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 72. The quote is from Ecclesiastes 1:7. 18. On the ways that modern culture forgets its ties to nature, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 19. Pare Lorentz, “Ohio-Mississippi Flood Expedition,” 7 Feb. 1937, production notes sent to Floyd Crosby and William Van Dyke, box entitled The River, 4-5 PLPBL. 20. Narration script for Universal Newsreels, episode 532 (27 Jan. 1937), UNC. My comments are also based on screenings of Universal Newsreels, episodes 531–533 at NACP. 21. “A Strange Coincidence,” Magazine of Art 32 (Aug. 1939): 484. 22. See Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 150–210. 23. Christian Science Monitor review, as quoted in “The River: A United States Government Film,” Farm Security Administration pamphlet (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, n.d.), copy in PLP-BL; Meyer Levin, “The Candid Cameraman,” Esquire 9 (Jan. 1938): 177. 24. V. F. Calverton, “Cultural Barometer,” Current History (May 1938): 46. Mumford’s comments appeared on the dust jacket of Lorentz’s book The River. See box entitled The River, 4-1, PLP-BL. 25. On these themes, see also Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation

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of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), esp. 476–77 and 503. 26. Stephen Vincent Benét, “Ode to Walt Whitman,” Saturday Review of Literature 12 (4 May 1935): 7–10, quotations from 8. 27. Ibid., 9–10. 28. On Whitman’s poetry and the catalog form, see Lawrence Buell, “Transcendentalist Catalogue Rhetoric: Vision Versus Form,” American Literature 40 (Nov. 1968): 325–39; and Michael D. Reed, “First Person Persona and the Catalogue in ‘Song of Myself,’” Walt Whitman Review 23 (Dec. 1977): 147–55. 29. Levin, “Candid Cameraman,” 107. For more on Whitman, technology, and American modernism, see Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 3–29; and Orvell, After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995). 30. MVC Report, 231. For an insightful treatment of the TVA in relation to environmental history and aesthetics, see Brian Black, “Organic Planning: Ecology and Design in the Landscape of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–45,” in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 71–95. 31. Stuart Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America (New York: Whittlesey House, 1936), 55, 286–87. On the utopian meanings of dams in the 1930s, see also Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 55–70. 32. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 348, 385. 33. For information on the various dams visited by the camera crew, I consulted John S. Bridgeman, untitled report, box entitled The River, 4-3, PLP-BL; and Willard Van Dyke, “Letters from ‘The River,’” Film Comment 3 (spring 1965): 40–44. 34. On the links between aerial/panoramic vision and ecological management, see also Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 3 and 4; and Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 82–85. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 213. On Emerson’s attitudes toward technology, see also the discussions in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and White, The Organic Machine. On technology and creation narratives, see David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). 36. Gilbert Seldes, “The River,” Scribner’s 104 (Jan. 1938): 67. 37. On collective experience and the technological sublime, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 38. Lorentz, lecture at Wisconsin State University-Oshkosh. On his research and decision to include Lee’s letter, see Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 58–59. 39. On the fascination with Lincoln, see Alfred Haworth Jones, “The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 723–24.

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40. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1936). On Southern politics and the New Deal, see Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). 41. The manager of the Strand Theater sent a telegram to Lorentz, which is reprinted in MacCann, 76–77; Snyder, 65; and Lorentz, FDR’s Moviemaker, 57–58. Snyder and Lorentz also note the audience’s reaction to Lee’s letter. 42. New Orleans Tribune, 1 Nov. 1937; New Orleans Times Picayune, 1 Nov. 1937. 43. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). 44. On audience reactions, see the reviews quoted in Snyder, 65. On Walt Disney’s interest in the film, see Walt Disney, postcard to Pare Lorentz, 16 Dec. 1937, box entitled The River, 4-3, PLP-BL. 45. On documentary images and cultural nationalism in the thirties, see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 89–131; James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 99–148; and Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 283–350. My comments on Disney films follow Susman, 196–97; and Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” in his The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 220–21. 46. David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 8, 222, xii. 47. Paul B. Sears, “Science and the New Landscape,” Harper’s 179 (July 1939): 216, 214, 207. 48. Levin, “The Candid Cameraman,” 177. I borrow the phrase “organic machine” from White, The Organic Machine. Chapter 4

1. See Richard Barsam, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 72–83. 2. Robert Flaherty quoted in Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 45. 3. See Barsam, The Vision of Robert Flaherty, 83. 4. James Shelley Hamilton, “The River,” National Board of Review (May 1937): 11. 5. Pare Lorentz, “We Don’t Know,” Saturday Review 17 (2 April 1938): 6. 6. See Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (1968; Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994), 79–95, 102–20; and Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 87–99. 7. W. H. Lamphere to Wayne Darrow, memorandum dated 27 April 1939, U.S. Film Service and AAA; Records of the Motion Picture Division; Records of the Office of Information; Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture (hereafter OSAR), record group 16, NACP. 8. Robert Flaherty quoted in Paul Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 7. 9. Barsam titles chapter 1 of The Vision of Robert Flaherty, “The Explorer as Artist.”

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Frances Hubbard Flaherty, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker: Robert Flaherty’s Story (Urbana, Ill.: Beta Phi Mu, 1960), 10. 10. For a critical perspective on Flaherty’s ethnography, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 99–126. 11. Memphis Press-Scimitar, 16 Oct. 1939; Richard Griffith, New York Times, 17 Sept. 1939. 12. Russell Lord, “Robert Flaherty Rediscovers America: Editorial Notes on a Forthcoming Motion Picture,” The Land 1 (winter 1941): 67. On the “longing to belong” and the concept of culture in thirties America, see Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 150–210. 13. The Bureau of Soils passage is quoted in Donald Worster, “A Sense of Soil,” in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Presidential Statement on Signing the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act” (1 March 1936) in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel Rosenman, 13 vols. (New York: Random House, 1938), 5: 97. 14. On soil conservation during the New Deal, see Worster, “A Sense of Soil,” 71–83; Chris Rasmussen, “‘Never a Landlord for the Good of the Land’: Farm Tenancy, Soil Conservation, and the New Deal in Iowa,” Agricultural History 73 (winter 1999): 70–95; and Douglas Helms, “Conserving the Plains: The Soil Conservation Service in the Great Plains,” Agricultural History 64 (spring 1990): 58–73. 15. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; New York: Penguin, 1999), 170. On the New Deal linkage of tenancy and erosion, see Rasmussen, “‘Never a Landlord for the Good of the Land.’” The agricultural historian William H. Harbaugh persuasively argues that this linkage was based more on bias and preconceived notions than on empirical evidence. See “Twentieth-Century Tenancy and Soil Conservation: Some Comparisons and Questions,” Agricultural History 66 (spring 1992): 95–119. 16. Special Committee on Farm Tenancy, Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1937), 6. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. On technology and the New Deal, see Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., “Government and Technology in the Great Depression,” Technology and Culture 20 (Jan. 1979): 162–74. 20. Paul S. Taylor quoted in Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 181. For more on the mechanization of Southern agriculture, see Daniel, 155–83 and passim. 21. Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), 102; emphasis added. See also the discussions of this book in Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 38, 47–50; and Judith Freyer Davidov, Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 252–71. 22. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking, 1939).

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23. Russell and Kate Lord, eds., Forever the Land: A Country Chronicle and Anthology (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 8, 11. 24. Russell Lord, Behold Our Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 305. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 1–2. 27. Ibid., 226–27. 28. Ibid., 226. 29. On these developments, see Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 139–76; and MacCann, The People’s Films, 104–17. 30. Helen van Dongen, “Robert J. Flaherty, 1884–1951,” reprinted in Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Meran Barsam (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 215. For a detailed visual analysis of The Land, see also Mike Weaver, Robert Flaherty’s “The Land” (Exeter: American Arts Documentation Centre, University of Exeter, 1979). 31. For one draft of the script, see “Scenario: The Land,” The Land 1 (spring 1941): 144–59, quotation on 145. 32. He quotes Job 33:38, 40. Walter C. Lowdermilk, “The Eleventh Commandment,” American Forests 46 (Jan. 1940): 12. For Russell Lord’s references to Job, see Behold, 58–59. 33. For more on race and agricultural work during this period, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 163–201. On the career of Carey McWilliams, see Aaron Sachs, “Civil Rights in the Field: Carey McWilliams as a Public-Interest Historian and Social Ecologist,” Pacific Historical Review 73 (May 2004): 215–48. On the emphasis Steinbeck and others placed on Dust Bowl migrants rather than minority farm workers, see Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants, 12. 34. Pare Lorentz to Arch Mercey, 20 Nov. 1939; Lorentz—AAM, General no. 2, Records of the Assistant Director, U.S. Film Service, 1937–40; Office of Government Reports (hereafter OGRR), record group 44, NACP. 35. New York Times, 12 Oct. 1941. 36. On the importance of the aesthetic of miniaturization to the modern state, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 257–58. On aerial vision and ecological management, see also Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 3 and 4; and Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 82–85. 37. My discussion of the 1939 World’s Fair is indebted to David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), chap. 8. 38. Janet Flanner to Robert Flaherty, 4 Dec. 1941, Robert Flaherty Papers, microfilm edition, reel 21 (hereafter RFP), Butler Library, Columbia University. 39. “‘The Land’ Courageously Documents American Agriculture,” undated publicity document, RFP. 40. “Tips on How to Cooperate with AAA Officials,” undated publicity document, RFP. I also gleaned information from the following undated documents: “Displays,” “Mailing Lists Available,” “How to Handle Stories for Press and Radio,” and “‘The Land’ actively supported by Employees and Committeemen of U.S. Department of Agriculture in More than 3,000 Counties,” all in RFP. 41. “The Land (Radio Interview),” undated publicity document, RFP.

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42. Van Rensselaer Sill to Wayne H. Darrow, 11 June 1941, RFP. On this shift in government image making, see James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 136–40. 43. Russell Lord to Robert Flaherty, 13 Jan. 1942, RFP. 44. On the changes in American liberalism, see Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85–121; and Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995). 45. See Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 77–82; Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (New York: Viking, 1989), 379–83. 46. Aldo Leopold, “Coon Valley: An Adventure in Cooperative Conservation” in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, ed. Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 220, 222. 47. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949; New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 209, 203, 209. 48. Aldo Leopold, “Engineering and Conservation,” in Flader and Callicott, The River of the Mother of God, 250, 254. 49. Quotation from Mary Losey, “More Seeing, Less Selling,” Saturday Review 31 (9 Oct. 1948): 61. On Louisiana Story, see also Barsam, Robert Flaherty, 99–112. On documentary image making and corporate advertising strategies, see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 133–48; and Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 247–58. 50. Minor White, introduction to Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones, Death of a Valley, Aperture 8, no. 3 (1960), n.p. For a perceptive reading, see Davidov, Women’s Camera Work, 369–75. 51. David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 165–66. On the significance of this book, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 91–92. On Lorentz’s concerns about radiation, see Pare Lorentz, “The Fight for Survival,” McCall’s 84 (Jan. 1957): 28–29, 73–74. His plans for making a documentary based on Bradley’s book are described in Pare Lorentz to Eleanor Roosevelt, 17 March 1950, box 18, Pare Lorentz Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 52. Pare Lorentz oral history, tape no. 7, interview conducted by Robert L. Snyder; deposited at UWOA; and Pare Lorentz to Eleanor Roosevelt, 14 Nov. 1952, box 11, PLP-FDRL.

Chapter 5

1. David R. Brower, Work in Progress (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1991), 13. 2. See Michael McCloskey, “The Wilderness Act of 1964: Its Background and Meaning,” Oregon Law Review 45 (June 1966): 288–314. The text of the act is reprinted as the appendix to idem, 315–21 (quotation from 315). 3. David Brower, “About the special help the Sierra Club needs for its role in saving Grand Canyon” (1964), carton 30, folder 39, David Brower Papers (hereafter DBP),

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Sierra Club Members Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. On Brower’s use of motion pictures, see Brower, Work in Progress, 43–64. Roderick Nash described the wilderness campaigns of this period as seeking “Decisions for Permanence,” the title of chapter 12 of his Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 4. David Brower to Nancy Newhall (form letter to Sierra Club membership), 11 Oct. 1960; David Brower to Nancy Newhall, 29 Nov. 1958; David Brower to Zach Stewart, 19 Feb. 1958, all in box 10, Nancy Newhall Collection (hereafter NNC), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. On wildlife documentaries in the postwar period, see Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 109–56. 5. David R. Brower, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1990), 29. 6. Ibid., 187. 7. David R. Brower, “Environmental Activist, Publicist, and Prophet,” interview conducted by Susan R. Schrepfer, Sierra Club Oral History Series (Berkeley: University of California, Bancroft Library, Regional Oral History Office, 1978), 17. 8. See Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 1–100. 9. Brower, “Environmental Activist,” 12, 17, 13; John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 83, 84. 10. On the transformation of the Sierra Club, see Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), chaps. 7 and 9; and Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, passim. 11. See Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 3d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 171. The quotation is from Olaus Murie to Oscar Chapman, as quoted in Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 60. 12. Bernard DeVoto, “Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?” Saturday Evening Post 223 (22 July 1950): 42. On DeVoto’s contribution to postwar conservation, see John L. Thomas, A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land (New York: Routledge, 2000). 13. See, for example, Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986). 14. See Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness. 15. David R. Brower, “Preserving Dinosaur Unimpaired,” Sierra Club Bulletin (hereafter SCB) 39 (June 1954): 7, 9. 16. Quotation from Wallace Stegner to Harry Robinson, as quoted in Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness, 257. On Stegner’s role in the conservation movement, see Thomas, A Country in the Mind. 17. Wallace Stegner, ed., This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers (New York: Knopf, 1955). See also Philip Hyde, “Nature’s Climax at Dinosaur,” Living Wilderness 17 (fall 1952): 7–14. 18. All quotations taken from the gallery, which is unpaginated.

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19. Wallace Stegner, “The Marks of Human Passage,” in Stegner, This Is Dinosaur, 14, 16, 17. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (1950; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); and William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). See also Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955). For perceptive treatments of these issues, see Jackson Lears, “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumption Society,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 38–57; and Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2d. ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), chap. 4. 22. Howard Zahniser, “What’s Behind the Wilderness Idea?” SCB 41 (Jan. 1956): 32; David R. Brower, “Wilderness—Conflict and Conscience,” SCB 42 (June 1957): 6, 11. See also Mitman, Reel Nature, 115–18, for a discussion of conformity and individualism in the context of postwar nature films. 23. In contrast to wilderness advocates, the focus on psychological experience led many intellectuals to disregard political concerns. See Pells, Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, chap. 4. 24. On the shift from a defensive to an offensive strategy, see Michael McCloskey, “Wilderness Movement at the Crossroads, 1945–1970,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (Aug. 1972): 346–61. For reviews of This Is Dinosaur, see San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 1955 and 8 May 1955; and New York Times, 15 May 1955. 25. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Conservation Is Not Enough” (1954), reprinted in his The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist’s Interpretation (New York: Sloane, 1955), 199, 193. 26. David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 83–84. On Potter and abundance, see also Jackson Lears, “Reconsidering Abundance: A Plea for Ambiguity,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 449–66. 27. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Human Life in the Context of Nature,” in Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage, ed. David Brower (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1961), 73. 28. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). On the relationship between postwar liberalism and environmentalism, see Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90 (Sept. 2003): 525–54, esp. 527–34. 29. For more on this shift, see Jonathan Spaulding, “The Natural Scene and the Social Good: The Artistic Education of Ansel Adams,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (Feb. 1991): 15–42. For biographical studies of Adams, see Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and David P. Peeler, The Illuminating Mind in American Photography: Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Adams (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 275–343. 30. Ansel Adams, “The Artist and the Ideals of Wilderness,” in Brower, Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage, 58–59.

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31. David Brower to Nancy Newhall, 29 Nov. 1958, reprinted in Brower, Work in Progress, 18–19. See also Lears, “A Matter of Taste.” 32. “Close-Up on Nature,” Modern Photography 19 (Nov. 1955): 124, 87. Nancy Newhall’s text for the exhibit is excerpted in “This Is the American Earth,” Aperture 3 (1955): 28–34 33. David Brower to Eliot Porter, 27 Nov. 1967, box 2, folder “Brower, David R.: Correspondence, 1963–1969,” Eliot Porter Papers (hereafter EPP), Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. 34. Nancy Newhall, “The Caption: The Mutual Relation of Words and Photographs,” Aperture 1 (1952): 19, 28. See also Malin Wilson, “Walking on the Desert in the Sky: Nancy Newhall’s Words and Images,” in The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (1987; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 47–61. 35. Edward Steichen, introduction to The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 4; Carl Sandburg, prologue to The Family of Man, 2. See also Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). An international vision would also emerge in wildlife films made by the Conservation Foundation during this period. See Mitman, Reel Nature, chap. 8. 36. Ansel Adams to Harold Bradley, 18 Jan. 1958, box 10, folder 1, Ansel Adams Papers (hereafter AAP), Sierra Club Members Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; and David Brower to Edward Murrow, 10 May 1961, box 1, NNC. 37. David Brower to Nancy Newhall, 29 Nov. 1958, box 10, NNC. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 283. 38. Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, 30 April 1954; Ansel Adams to Nancy Newhall, 19 Sept. 1954; and Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, 3 May 1954, all in box 3, NNC. 39. David Brower, “A New Decade and a Last Chance: How Bold Shall We Be?” SCB 45 (Jan. 1960): 3–4; and Brower, “American Earth Doing Well,” SCB 45 (Jan. 1960): 19. 40. David Brower, foreword to Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, This Is the American Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1960), xiii–xv. 41. Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 2. On the recurrence of this theme in Western thought, see Carolyn Merchant, “Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 132–59. 42. Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 11, 12, 16. 43. Advertisement for This Is the American Earth, SCB 44 (Oct. 1959): n.p. 44. Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 36. 45. Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–2. 46. New York Herald Tribune, 3 July 1960; Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 40; Salt Lake Tribune, 20 June 1960; and Salt Lake Tribune, 22 June 1960. 47. Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 44. Some of Berko’s sensitive

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portraits of Indian life are gathered in Ferenc Berko, Ferenc Berko: 60 Jahre Fotografie, “The Discovering Eye” (Schaffhausen: Edition Stemmle, 1991), 51–61. 48. William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: Sloane, 1948), 227, 228. On population growth and American conservation thought, see also Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (1981; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 306–13. 49. Adams and Newhall, This Is the American Earth, 62, 80. 50. Ibid., 84. 51. Ibid., 88; Vance Packard to David Brower, undated postcard, box 309, folder 9, DBP. On the bulldozer as a symbol of environmental destruction, see Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, esp. 150–52. On Vance Packard and environmentalism, see Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance,’” 531. 52. Justice William O. Douglas, “An informal opinion,” This Is the American Earth, jacket. 53. Wichita Beacon, 19 Feb. 1960. 54. Ibid. For a critique of the wilderness ideal, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 69–90. 55. David Brower, letter excerpted in Wichita Beacon, 19 Feb. 1960. 56. Edward S. Deevey, review of This Is the American Earth, Science 132 (9 Dec. 1960): 1759. David Brower, letter, Science 133 (24 March 1961): 844; see also Deevey’s response in the same issue, 844, 922–23. 57. Brooklyn Daily, 24 Feb. 1960; Hartford Courant, 21 March 1960; Salt Lake Tribune, 20 June 1960; Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, 26 Feb. 1960; Los Angeles Evening Mirror News, 1 March 1960; San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 27 Feb. 1960; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 March 1960. 58. Congressional Record, 86th Cong., 2d sess., 16864, A6179. David Brower to Nancy Newhall (form letter to Sierra Club membership), 11 Oct. 1960, box 10, NNC. 59. Thomas H. Jukes to David Brower, 8 Jan. 1960, box 309, folder 9, DBP. 60. Alfred Frankenstein, review of This Is the American Earth in San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted in Aperture 3 (1955): 33–34. The other quotation is taken from the same issue of Aperture, 28. On Indian removal and national parks, see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 61. Advertisement for This Is the American Earth, SCB 44 (Oct. 1959): n.p.

Chapter 6

1. New York Times, 7 May 1962, reprinted in Thoreau Society Bulletin 79 (spring 1962): 1–2; and Walter Harding, “The Centennial of Thoreau’s Death,” Thoreau Society Bulletin 79 (spring 1962): 1. See also Walter Harding, ed., The Thoreau Centennial (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1964). 2. Washington Post, 12 May 1962, reprinted in Thoreau Society Bulletin 79 (spring 1962): 2–3. 3. Winfield Townley Scott, “Walden Pond in the Nuclear Age,” New York Times

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Magazine (6 May 1962): 84. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Legacy of Creative Protest,” Massachusetts Review 4 (fall 1962): 43. 4. Harding, introduction to Harding, The Thoreau Centennial, 1; Raymond Adams, “Thoreau’s Claim to Greatness,” in Harding, The Thoreau Centennial, 111. 5. “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World”: Selections and Photographs by Eliot Porter (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1962); Guy Davenport, “A Masterpiece and Some Christmas Books,” National Review 13 (18 Dec. 1962): 480. See also “Thoreau’s Year,” Washington Post, 9 Dec. 1962. Eliot Porter has received little attention from scholars. For two recent and perceptive essays, see John Rohrbach, “Envisioning the World in Color,” and Rebecca Solnit, “Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist,” both in Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness (New York: Aperture, in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 2001). 6. Eliot Porter and Kenneth Brower, Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness (1968; New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), vol. 1, 100. A classic account of the modern synthesis is Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). On ecology and evolution as secular faith, see also Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). 7. Eliot Porter, Birds of North America: A Personal Selection (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 17; and Eliot Porter, Eliot Porter (Boston: New York Graphic Society, in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 1987), 86. 8. Porter, Eliot Porter, 46, 44. Donald Worster has eloquently argued that the focus on chance and chaos in ecological theory from the 1970s and 1980s tends to rob the science of its moral and political power. Yet the experience of Eliot Porter and other Sierra Club activists suggests that randomness can also be linked to religious feeling for nature. See Worster, “The Ecology of Order and Chaos,” in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 156–70. It is also worth noting that Porter later used his photographs in conjunction with a text on chaos theory by the noted writer James Gleick. See Porter and Gleick, Nature’s Chaos (New York: Viking, 1990). 9. Indeed, by 1969, the editors of Audubon magazine felt compelled to justify their decision to devote one issue solely to black-and-white pictures. See “Why Black-andWhite?” Audubon 71 (May 1969): 65. Not all conservation groups would turn to color during the 1960s. For example, the Wilderness Society’s magazine Living Wilderness would continue to rely on black-and-white until the next decade. 10. See Porter, Eliot Porter, 11–15, quotation from 15. 11. The first two quotations are from ibid., 12; the third is from Eliot Porter, Summer Island: Penobscot Country, ed. David Brower (1966; New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 48. 12. Alfred Stieglitz quotation and New York Sun, 31 Dec. 1938, both in Porter, Eliot Porter, 29, 30. 13. See ibid., 39, 32; and John B. Rohrbach, A Passion for Birds: Eliot Porter’s Photography (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1997), 15–18. 14. Porter, Eliot Porter, 32–33. On the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, see Nancy Newhall, “Eliot Porter: Birds in Color,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 11 (April 1943): 6.

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15. Eliot Porter, “Nature Photography,” Bulletin of the New England Camera Council (fall 1977): 16. See also Patricia Caulfield, “The Art and Technique of Eliot Porter: An Interview,” Natural History 76 (Dec. 1967): 26; and Porter, Eliot Porter, 45. 16. For literary studies of the Journal, see Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 17. The only reviewer who cited Gleason as an antecedent of Porter was Guy Davenport, who called Gleason “a forgotten genius who ought to rank high among American artists.” See “A Masterpiece and Some Christmas Books,” 480. 18. Eliot Porter to Joseph Wood Krutch, June 1954 (date unclear); see also Porter to Krutch, 20 Feb. 1954, both in box 5, folder 55, Joseph Wood Krutch Papers (hereafter JWKP), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 19. On the changing meanings and interpretations of Thoreau, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 349–69. 20. See John D. Margolis, Joseph Wood Krutch: A Writer’s Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980); and Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (1981; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 229–33. 21. Joseph Wood Krutch, “A Little Fishy Friend,” Nation 169 (8 Oct. 1949): 350. See also Krutch, “A Kind of Pantheism,” Saturday Review 33 (10 June 1950): 7–8, 30–34. 22. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons (New York: Sloane, 1949), 7, 9. 23. Ibid., 125, 124. On the importance of this shift in postwar conservation, see Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), chap. 6. 24. For brief discussions of their portfolio in support of the Wilderness Bill, see Porter to Krutch, letters dated 25 Nov. 1958 and 28 March 1959, both in box 5, folder 55, JWKP. 25. Porter, Eliot Porter, 46. Pare Lorentz, “Good Art, Good Propaganda,” reprinted in Pare Lorentz, Lorentz on Film: Movies, 1927 to 1941 (1975; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 191. On Porter and politics, see also Solnit, “Every Corner Is Alive.” 26. Porter, Eliot Porter, 45. 27. David Brower, “The Story Behind It: ‘The most beautiful book of its kind ever produced,’” SCB 47 (Oct. 1962): 6; Joe Munroe, interview with David Brower, “For All the Generations,” Infinity 16 (Sept. 1967): 17. 28. Brower, interview, 210. On conflicts in the club over the publications program, see also Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 291–99. 29. Brower, “The Story Behind It,” 6–7. 30. Ibid. 31. David Brower, “. . . And Previews,” SCB 47 (Sept. 1962): 17; Brower, “The Story Behind It,” 6–7. 32. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 61. Lawrence Buell has noted that both Muir and Leo-

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pold were drawn to this passage; see The Environmental Imagination, 544, n. 65; and Eliot Porter, preface to In Wildness, 12. 33. Thoreau, journal entry for 7 Oct. 1857, quoted in In Wildness (the body of the book is not paginated). 34. Joseph Wood Krutch, introduction to In Wildness, 13. 35. Ibid. 36. Porter, Eliot Porter, 44, 46, 44. 37. Thoreau, journal entry for 12 Feb. 1860, quoted in In Wildness. 38. On the seasons as an organizing device in environmental literature, see Buell, The Environmental Imagination, chap. 7. For a broad study of the four seasons in American cultural history, see Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 39. Porter, Eliot Porter, 45. 40. Thoreau, journal entry for 16 Oct. 1857, quoted in In Wildness. 41. Thoreau, journal entry for 9 June 1850, quoted in In Wildness. 42. Thoreau, journal entry for 1 Nov. 1853, quoted in In Wildness. For a critique of the ways that American conservationists privilege leisure over labor, see Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 171–85; and White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 43. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism, ed. William Rossi, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 206. For an important discussion of this theme in Walden, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 260–65. 44. David Brower to Kenneth Bechtel, 8 May 1961, box 45, folder entitled “In Wildness . . . 1961–1980,” EPP; and San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Nov. 1962. 45. Davenport, “A Masterpiece and Some Christmas Books,” 480; Winfield Townley Scott, “Color for Thoreau,” New Mexican, 28 Oct. 1962; and Paul H. Oesher, “The Future of the World,” Living Wilderness 82 (winter–spring 1962–63): 19, 18. 46. “On Nature: No Humble Tract,” Manas 16 (24 April 1963): 3. On the tensions between artifice and authenticity during this period, see Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Twayne, 1998), chap. 4. 47. “On Nature: No Humble Tract,” 3. 48. On nature as an object of consumption, see also Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 49. Judith and Ralph Guertin, 6 Nov. 1962, box 45, folder entitled “In Wildness Fan Mail (Part 1) 1962–1971,” EPP. 50. Ron Ross to Eliot Porter, 7 Jan. 1963, box 45, folder entitled “In Wildness Fan Mail (Part 1) 1962–1971,” EPP. 51. Brower, “. . . And Previews,” 17; Ellen Auerbach to Eliot Porter, 21 Oct. 1962, box 45, folder entitled “In Wildness Fan Mail (Part 1) 1962–1971,” EPP. 52. David R. Brower, Work in Progress (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1991), 23; “Sierra Club’s Thoreau Book Marks Expanding Program,” Publishers’ Weekly 182 (1 Oct. 1962): 78; Brower, “. . . And Previews,” 17. According to the Inflation Calculator maintained by S. Morgan Friedman, twenty-five dollars in 1962 would be equivalent to $146.94 in

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2003. Fifteen dollars in 1960 (the year This Is the American Earth was published) would be equivalent to $90.47. See http://www.westegg.com/inflation. 53. Brower, Work in Progress, 24. 54. Charleston Gazette, 8 Oct. 1967; Los Angeles Free Press, 15 Sept. 1967. On the making of the book, see also “‘In Wildness’ in Paperback Follows Sierra Standards,” Publishers’ Weekly 192 (7 Aug. 1967): 84. 55. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response,” Environmental History 1 (Jan. 1996): 49; and James K. Page, Jr., “Phenomena, Comment and Notes,” Smithsonian 5 (Oct. 1974): 122, 123. 56. Winfield Townley Scott, “Walden Pond in the Nuclear Age,” New York Times Magazine (6 May 1962): 90. On Thoreau and the 1960s counterculture, see Cecelia Tichi, Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 2.

Chapter 7

1. Eliot Porter, “The Exploration of Glen Canyon,” new introduction to Porter, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (reprint; Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1988), 6, 7. 2. See Russell Martin, A Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); and Jared Farmer, Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999). 3. David R. Brower, For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1990), 346; and Eliot Porter, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1963). 4. Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (New York: Avon, 1975). 5. François Leydet, Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1964). 6. “Primeval Landscapes; A Catalogue,” Sierra Club Advertisement in Audubon 69 (March–April 1967): back cover. 7. See Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); and Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), chap. 4. 8. On this history, see Jared Farmer, “An Outline History of Glen Canyon before the Dam,” in Glen Canyon Dammed, 213–22. 9. David Brower and Philip Hyde, “The Last Days of Glen Canyon,” SCB 46 (Oct. 1961) (this portfolio follows page 20). 10. Caption next to photograph by David Brower, SCB 48 (Jan. 1963): 17. 11. Eliot Porter, “The Living Canyon,” introduction to The Place No One Knew, 13. 12. Ibid. 13. Porter, “The Living Canyon,” 13; Loren Eiseley, quoted in The Place No One Knew, 44. 14. David Brower to Henry Mayer, 23 May 1963, box 47, folder entitled “The Place No One Knew—Glen Canyon, 1963–1973,” EPP. 15. Charles Eggert to David Brower, 27 April 1963, box 10, folder 34, DBP; Henry

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Mayer to David Brower, letter dated 28 April 1963, box 47, folder entitled “The Place No One Knew—Glen Canyon/Fan Mail, 1963–1990,” EPP. 16. Brower to Mayer, 23 May 1963. 17. Porter, “The Living Canyon,” 14. 18. On chance and managerial culture, see Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003); and Jackson Lears, “The Iron Cage and Its Alternatives in Twentieth-Century American Thought,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 296–313. 19. John Burroughs, quoted in The Place No One Knew, 48; Eliot Porter, “Nature Photography,” Bulletin of the New England Camera Council (fall 1977): 13. 20. Lewis Mumford, “California and the Human Prospect,” SCB 47 (Dec. 1962): 42–59. The passage is from 58–59 and appeared in The Place No One Knew, 116. On the changes in Mumford’s attitude toward technology, see also Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 55–56, 108–11; and Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). 21. On the importance of Eiseley’s writings to Sierra Club leaders, see Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 90–91, 100, 166–67. 22. Loren Eiseley, quoted in The Place No One Knew, 136. On Disney films and the idea of divine intervention, see Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 127–28. 23. Eiseley, quoted in The Place No One Knew, 142. 24. The Stegner passages were excerpted from his “The Wilderness Idea,” in Wilderness: America’s Living Heritage, ed. David Brower (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1961), 97–102. They appeared in The Place No One Knew, 152 and 162. 25. “Footnote on The Place No One Knew,” SCB 48 (April–May 1963): 7. 26. David Brower, “Wilderness River Betrayal,” SCB 46 (Oct. 1961): 19; and David Brower, “Glen Canyon: The Year of the Last Look,” SCB 47 (June 1962): 7. On nostalgia, see also Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (summer 1966): 81– 103; and Jackson Lears, “Looking Backward: In Defense of Nostalgia,” Lingua Franca 7 (Dec.–Jan. 1998): 59–66. 27. David Brower, The Place No One Knew, plan for book, box 30, folder 28, DBP. 28. Advertisement in SCB 48 (Feb. 1963): 13; Edward Weeks, “The Peripatetic Reviewer,” Atlantic Monthly 213 (May 1964): 134. 29. New York Times, 11 June 1963; San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 1963. 30. Advertisement in SCB 48 (Feb. 1963): 13; Freeman Tilden, Natural History 73 (Feb. 1964): 7. 31. Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place,” in his Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992; New York: Penguin, 1993), 202. 32. See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 227–37. For a close study of the politics surrounding the Grand Canyon dams, see Byron E. Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 33. Joseph Wood Krutch, quoted in SCB 48 (Oct. 1963): front cover.

no t e s t o pa g e s 1 82 – 1 8 9

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34. Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1965), 9, 24, 28. The poem by Gordon Michelle appeared as the epigraph. 35. Leydet, Time and the River Flowing, 86. On the importance of the “living” Colorado in the 1960s, see also Stephen J. Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 139–58. 36. Reviews of Time and the River Flowing, quoted in SCB 49 (Dec. 1964): back cover. 37. Representative Morris K. Udall, “Time and the River Flowing,” in U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation, Hearing, Lower Colorado River Basin Project, 89th Cong., 1st sess. (23–27, 30, 31 Aug./1 Sept. 1965), 803–07. 38. David Brower and Hugh Nash, letter to Morris Udall, 13 Sept. 1965, reprinted in “Grand Canyon: Department of Amplification,” SCB 50 (Dec. 1965): 14–15. 39. Advertisements reprinted in Roderick Nash, ed., Grand Canyon of the Living Colorado (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 132–41. Representative Udall quoted in Nash, Grand Canyon, 105. 40. Paul Brooks, “The Sierra Club,” Book-of-the-Month Club News (May 1965): 31. 41. See Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). On the categories high, low, and middle, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999). 42. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 8. On the links between the counterculture and the environmental cause, see also Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90 (Sept. 2003): 525–54, esp. 541–52. 43. Terry Russell and Renny Russell, On the Loose (San Francisco: Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, 1967), 4. 44. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Viking, 1958), 97–98; Russell and Russell, On the Loose, 7. 45. Russell and Russell, On the Loose, 97. 46. Brower, Work in Progress, 25. The second Brower quotation is from an advertisement in the New York Times Book Review (2 June 1968): 25. 47. “‘The Coolest Things’,” Newsweek 69 (6 March 1967): 87; Jon Borgzinner, “The Great Poster Wave,” Life 63 (1 Sept. 1967): 36–43; and Hilton Kramer, “Postermania,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (11 Feb. 1968): 28–31, quotations from 29. 48. “Giant Full Color Wilderness Posters,” advertisement in mailing attached to SCB 52 (Sept. 1967): n.p. 49. See Friends of the Earth, Advertisement/Ecology and War Petition (14 May 1969), reprinted as appendix B in Brower, interview, 324–27. The petition was signed by a large number of environmental leaders, including several Sierra Club officials.

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50. August Frugé, memorandum dated 9 Aug. 1963, box 32, folder 1, DBP. 51. Ibid. 52. Ansel Adams to president and Publications Committee, Sierra Club, 16 Aug. 1963; and David Brower to August Frugé, 23 Aug. 1963, both in box 32, folder 1, DBP. 53. David Brower to C. Edward Graves, 13 Dec. 1956, box 10, folder 34, DBP. 54. Thomas H. Jukes to Dr. Edgar Wayburn, 16 May 1967, box 1, folder 49, AAP; and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). For more on Jukes’s reaction to Silent Spring, see Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 433–34. On the Sierra Club’s debate over the book, see Maril Hazlett, “‘Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs’: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring,” Environmental History 9 (Oct. 2004): 701–29, esp. 717–18. 55. Elaine Scarry argues that the recognition of beauty promotes “an inclusive affirmation of the ongoingness of existence, and of one’s own responsibility for the continuity of existence.” Brower’s embrace of both wilderness preservation and environmentalism can be used to illustrate her claim. See Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 92. For an important critique of the wilderness ideal, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90. 56. David Brower, foreword to Nancy Johnston, Central Park Country: A Tune within Us (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1968), 17; Newsweek 72 (16 Dec. 1968): 98; and Lewis Nichols, “Sierra Club Books,” New York Times, 8 Dec. 1968. 57. Ansel Adams to Eliot Porter, 24 Jan. 1967, box 1, folder 49, AAP. For thorough coverage of the Brower controversy, see Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 395–434. Wallace Stegner’s comments appeared in a letter to the Palo Alto Times, 11 Feb. 1969, as quoted in Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 426 58. The first quote appeared in the New York Times, 4 May 1969, as quoted in Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (1981; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 322. The second quote is from Friends of the Earth, Ecology and War Petition (14 May 1969). The third quote is taken from an advertisement Brower ran in the New York Times, 14 Jan. 1969, a few months before his resignation from the Sierra Club. On Brower and Friends of the Earth, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 143–48. Epilogue

1. Marya Mannes, Cober Gallery catalog Charles Pratt exhibition, Dec. 1965–Jan. 1966, box 1, folder 16, Charles Pratt Papers (hereafter CPP), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; “Show By Pratt,” New York Times, 19 Dec. 1965; “Christmas 1965: Record Sales Were Achieved By Retail Bookstores,” Publishers’ Weekly 189 (17 Jan. 1966): 122. 2. David Vestal quoted in Charles Pratt, Charles Pratt: Photographs (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1982), back cover. 3. “Beyond Wilderness,” special edition of Aperture 120 (late summer 1990). The quotations are from the editors’ introduction, 1; and Barry Lopez, “Unbounded Wilderness,” 14. See also the controversial essay by the environmental historian William

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Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90. 4. Rachel Carson to Marie Rodell, 30 Jan. 1951, quoted in Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 190; and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 297. 5. Charles Hagen, “Land and Landscape,” Aperture 120 (late summer 1990): 20. 6. Charles Pratt to Henry Holmes Smith, 27 May 1960, box 1, folder 2, CPP. 7. Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955). For more on how the book departed from the conventions of the nature guide, see Cheryll Glotfelty, “Rachel Carson,” in American Nature Writers, ed. John Elder (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996), 1: 157–58; and Mary A. McCay, Rachel Carson (New York: Twayne, 1993), 5–59 8. Charles Pratt to Rachel Carson, 4 May 1961, box 4, folder 6, CPP; Charles Pratt, “A Note from the Photographer,” in Rachel Carson, The Rocky Coast (New York: McCall Publishing Company, 1971), x. 9. On the controversy surrounding Silent Spring, see Lear, Rachel Carson, chaps. 17 and 18; and Maril Hazlett, “‘Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs’: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring,” Environmental History 9 (Oct. 2004): 701–29. 10. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 42. 11. Ibid., 39. 12. Ibid., 49. 13. Alfred C. Ames, “In Communion with Nature,” Chicago Tribune, 10 Oct. 1965. 14. Audubon 71 (May 1969): 3. 15. Charles Pratt, Here on the Island (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 138. On knowing nature through labor, see Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground, 171–85; and Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995) 16. Pratt, Here on the Island, 137, 178. 17. Charles Pratt, The Garden and the Wilderness, ed. William Maxwell (New York: Horizon Press, 1980), 26, 40. Roger Shattuck, quoted in Pratt, The Garden and the Wilderness, 36. 18. Pratt, The Garden and the Wilderness, 29; Pratt, draft of “Garden and Wilderness,” 17, 72, box 3, folders 18-20, CPP. 19. Pratt, “On Photographing,” in The Garden and the Wilderness, 157. 20. David Vestal, “Critic’s Choice,” Popular Photography 59 (Dec. 1966): 101; Lisette Model, untitled essay, in Pratt, Charles Pratt: Photographs, 11. 21. Pratt’s notebooks can be found in Pratt, book project: “The Garden and the Wilderness,” notebook, box 3, folder 16, CPP. See also Charles Pratt, The Edge of the City, ed. Julie Pratt Shattuck and John Gossage (New York: Nazraeli Press, 1998), 9; and Pratt, lecture notes, box 4, folder 12, CPP. 22. Pratt, book project: “The Garden and the Wilderness,” notebook, 2, box 3, folder 16, CPP. On the significance of accident and chance in modern American art, see Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), chap. 7. 23. See Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford Uni-

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versity Press, 1995), 347; and Hal K. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998), 101–5. 24. “Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights,” reprinted in Congressional Record, 91st Cong., 2d sess., 498–99, quotation from 499. While the Congressional Record does not cite an author, Roderick Nash claims authorship of the declaration in his The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 217, n. 3. Paul Boyer also credits Nash with authorship in his foreword to The Rights of Nature, ix. 25. Ansel Adams to Lewis Nichols, 23 Dec. 1968, box 2, folder 25, AAP. On the meanings of Apollo images, see Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 257–67. On the changes in Earth images produced between 1968 and 1972, see also Neil Maher, “Neil Maher on Shooting the Moon,” Environmental History 9 (July 2004): 526–31. 26. Archibald MacLeish, “A Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,” New York Times, 25 Dec. 1968, 1; and Walter A. Kleinschrod, “Conservation’s Value,” New York Times, 5 Jan. 1969, E13. 27. “Earth Day and Space Day,” New York Times, 19 April 1970, 174; and Margaret Mead, “Earth People,” address given at Bryant Park, New York City, 22 April 1970, reprinted in Environmental Action, Earth Day—The Beginning: A Guide for Survival (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 223. 28. J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), vii. On spectators at spacecraft launches, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 237–52. 29. On these developments in landscape photography, see Merry A. Foresta, ed., Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art and Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992). 30. Terry Evans, Disarming the Prairie (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 31. Tony Hiss, “Turning Bullets into Birds,” in Evans, Disarming the Prairie, 14; Evans, Disarming the Prairie, viii. 32. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 84. 33. My last line paraphrases comments made by the environmental justice activist Dana Alston at the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 in Washington, D.C. Alston defined the environment as “where we live, where we work, and where we play.” See Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 5. Gottlieb also titles the introduction to his book, “Where We Live, Work, and Play.”

index

Abbey, Edward, 171 Adams, Ansel, xv–xvi, xxi, 117, 121, 132–33, 187, 192–94, 196, 206; attitude toward photography, xv, 129–30, 151, 190, 208; and pictures of Earth from space, 207–8; and sublime, xix, 129, 139–41, 150. See also This Is the American Earth (Adams and Newhall) Addams, Jane, 11 aerial perspective. See panoramic vision Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 129, 133 Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 89, 93, 97, 100, 108 American Exodus, An (Lange and Taylor), 96–97, 101, 131 American Humor (Rourke), 91 Aperture, 131, 195–96 Appalachian Mountain Club, 18, 19 Arizona Highways, 120, 131, 135 Army Corps of Engineers, U.S., 60, 61, 64 Atomic Energy Commission, 110 Audubon Society, 5, 19 authenticity. See reality back-to-nature movement, 5, 11, 14 Behold Our Land (Lord), 98, 103 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 73–75

Bennett, Hugh Hammond, 35, 39, 92, 98, 110 Berko, Ferenc, 138–39 Blake, Peter, 137 Book-of-the-Month Club, 184–85 Bradley, David, 112 Brooks, Paul, 184 Brower, David, xvi, xxi; and counterculture, 185–89; and environmentalism, 143–44, 191–93; and Glen Canyon Dam, 171, 173; production of “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” 157–59; production of This Is the American Earth, 133, 137; and Sierra Club, 117–18, 121–22, 189–93; views of coffee table books, 117–21, 130, 133, 145, 157–58, 189–91; views of photography, 121, 124, 142, 176, 190, 193. See also Sierra Club, and conflict over David Brower Bryce Canyon, 3–4, 24–25, 29 Bureau of Reclamation, 123, 170–71, 173, 177, 182, 184 Burke, Kenneth, 51 Burroughs, John, 20, 177 Carson, Rachel, xxi, 112, 191, 194–98, 206, 212. See also Sense of Wonder, The (Carson and Pratt) Central Park Country (Johnston), 192

241

242

i n de x

Chase, Stuart, 34, 77 Child, Charles, 74–75 Civilian Conservation Corps, 34, 78, 79 Clements, Frederic, 41, 151 coffee table books. See Exhibit Format series cold war, 110, 132, 143 Colorado River, 117, 123, 170–73, 175, 182–84 consumer culture, 6–7, 26–27, 120, 128, 130, 147, 166–69, 181, 184–85, 188–89 Cooke, Morris, 63–64 counterculture, 121, 168, 172, 185–89 Croly, Herbert, 28 Cronon, William, 168 Culture of Cities, The (Mumford), 78 Darwin, Charles, 9, 19, 151 Davis, David Brion, xx Death of a Valley (Lange and Jones), 112 Deevey, Edward S., 144 Department of Agriculture, U.S., 92, 97, 99–100, 104, 108 Department of the Interior, U.S., 23–25. See also Bureau of Reclamation Deserts on the March (Sears), 85 DeVoto, Bernard, 123 Dinosaur National Monument, 123–24, 171. See also This Is Dinosaur Disarming the Prairie (Evans), 210–11 Disney, Walt, 83, 120, 178 Dominy, Floyd, 182 Dongen, Helen van, 100 Douglas, William O., 142, 148 Dust Bowl, 33–34, 38–44, 49–51, 58–59, 85, 92, 97, 98, 102–3 Earth Day, xvi, xvii, xxi, 197, 208 Earth, images from space of, 196, 207–9 ecology: aesthetics and, 35–36, 45, 47, 59, 62, 66, 68, 72, 79, 85, 101–2, 105–6, 150, 160, 174–75, 192, 196, 198, 201, 209–12; and the New Deal, 35–36, 39–42, 47, 58–59, 62, 64, 66, 76, 85, 151; and the Sierra Club, 120, 142–46, 169, 175, 183, 191–92 Edge of the City, The (Pratt), 206 Edge of the Sea, The (Carson), 197 Eiseley, Loren, 175, 178–79 Eisenstein, Sergei, 45–46 Elephant Boy, 87 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 9, 16, 28, 29, 80, 126, 154, 206 emotions, and environmental images, xviii, xix, 3–4, 7, 10, 21, 29, 36, 44–45, 59, 62– 63, 72–73, 78, 81, 83, 86, 127–30, 139–42,

151, 152, 165, 166, 170–71, 176, 179–80, 190–91, 198–200, 203–4 environmental movement, 206–9 Evans, Terry, 209–11, 212 evolution, 9, 19, 150–51, 156, 178, 181 Exhibit Format Series, xvi, xxi, 117–21, 123, 124, 127, 131, 157–58, 160, 172, 174, 180; conflicts over, 145, 158, 189–93, as consumer items, 120–21, 130, 147, 166–69, 181, 184–85, 188. See also Brower, David; and specific titles Factories in the Field (McWilliams), 104 Family of Man, The, 131–32 Farm Security Administration, 42, 88, 109, 111 Farm Tenancy, 93–97, 101 Farquhar, Francis, 158 Flaherty, Robert, xx, 34–36, 120, 151, 206–7; early career of, 90–92; Elephant Boy and, 87–88; ideas of the primitive, 87, 91–92; Nanook of the North and, 87; panoramic vision and, 101–2, 105–6; and views of technology, 89, 105; and work with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 89–91, 97, 99–100. See also Land, The Flanner, Janet, 107–9 Frankenstein, Alfred, 146 Friends of the Earth, 193 frontier myth, xvii, 24–25, 41, 43, 54–56, 59, 69, 98, 133–34 Frost, Robert, 148 Frugé, August, 189–90, 193 Gaia, philosophy of, 209 Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness (Porter and Brower, Kenneth), 150–51 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 129, 132–33 Ganges River, 138–39 Garden and the Wilderness, The (Pratt), 204 Garnett, William, 135–37 Gleason, Herbert, xvi, xxi, 3, 62, 122, 173; as lecturer, 4, 16–23, 25; as minister and editor, 4, 8–11; and the sublime, xix, 6, 18–19, 22–23, 25; use of color, 17–18, 154; views on the camera, 6–7, 10–11, 20–22, 24, 28–29, 35, 69, 203, 208; views on evolution, 9, 19, 178; views on nature, 6, 9–11, 13, 22, 26–27, 29, 80; work with John Muir, 20–23, 29; work with National Park Service, 3–4, 23–28; work on Thoreau, 4, 11–13, 20, 29, 154 Gleason, Lulu Rounds, 17–18

i n de x Glen Canyon, 170–74, 179–82, 187, 203 God’s Own Junkyard (Blake), 137 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 82 Grand Canyon, xix, 171–72, 182. See also Time and the River Flowing Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 97 Great Depression, culture of, 43, 51–52, 73– 75, 81–83, 88, 91–92, 97, 126 Hagen, Charles, 196 Here on the Island (Pratt), 201–2 Hetch Hetchy, 4, 21–23, 25, 29, 122, 173, 203 Hine, Lewis, 5, 11, 37 Hiss, Tony, 211 Hogue, Alexandre, 47, 72 Holmes, E. Burton, 16–17 Houghton Mifflin and Company, 14–16, 20–21 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 17 Hurwitz, Leo, 46, 56 Hyde, Philip, 124–25, 173 individualism, 28, 40–41, 43, 76, 96, 119, 126–27, 137–41, 185, 187–89 “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World” (Porter), 149–52, 158–64, 171, 187, 196; reception of 149–50, 164–69, 190 Jackson, William Henry, xvii, 24 James, William, 6 Jefferson, Thomas, 93, 95, 104, 202 jeremiad sermon, xviii, xx–xxi, 36, 51, 64, 73, 119, 135, 141, 207 Johnson, Clifton, 10 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 118 Johnston, Nancy and Retta, 192 Jones, Pirkle, 112 Journal, The (Thoreau), 11, 13, 14, 153–54, 160, 161, 162, 164 Jukes, Thomas, 145, 191, 193 Kerouac, Jack, 187 Kingdom, 8–10 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 149 Kramer, Hilton, 188 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 127–29, 154–57, 160– 61, 168, 178, 182 Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado, 182 Land, The, 34, 90, 92, 99–108, 112; promotion of, 108–9; withdrawal of, 109–10, 120 Land of the Free (MacLeish), 57, 88, 131

243

Lange, Dorothea, 42, 72, 88, 89, 96–97, 101, 112, 131 Lee, Robert E., 81–82 Leopold, Aldo, 110–11, 159, 187 Levine, Lawrence, 51–52 Levitt, William, 135 Leydet, François, 182–83. See also Time and the River Flowing liberalism, 109–10, 119, 129 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 60–61, 63 Lilienthal, David, 85, 99 Lincoln, Abraham, 81–82 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 126 Lopez, Barry, 195–96 Lord, Russell, 35, 92, 97, 103, 105, 109. See also The Land Lorentz, Pare, xvi, xx, 33–36, 60, 77, 87–88, 100, 104, 195, 206–8; biography of, 36–39, 89, 112–13; and panoramic vision, 35–36, 45, 47, 59, 66–68, 70–72, 85, 99; and the sublime, 36, 50, 62–63, 70, 78–79, 81; views of the camera, 37, 57, 80, 157. See also The Plow That Broke the Plains; The River Louisiana Story, 112 Lovelock, James, 209 Lowdermilk, Walter, 103 luminism, 13–14 MacLeish, Archibald, 41–42, 57, 88, 131, 208 Making of a Counter Culture, The (Roszak), 185 Malin, James, 55–56 Manas, 165–66 Mather, Stephen, 3–4, 23–25 Maverick, Maury, 33, 36, 46 McQueen, Steve, 187, 188 McWilliams, Carey, 104 Mead, Margaret, 208–9 memory and environmental images, xviii, 4, 23, 56–57, 58–59, 69–70, 81–82, 86, 104–5, 120, 146–47, 171, 173–74, 179–81, 202–4, 206, 211 Mercey, Arch, 104 Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Park, 210–11 Mississippi River, 34, 60–61, 63–67, 70–71, 74–75, 172. See also The River Mississippi Valley Committee, 63–65, 76, 77 Mitchell, Margaret, 82 Model, Lisette, 205 Modern Temper, The (Krutch), 155 modernism, 129, 174, 184

244

i n de x

Monkey Wrench Gang, The (Abbey), 171 Mountains of California, The (Muir), 6 Muir, John, xvii, xix, 4–6, 20–23, 25, 29, 122, 155, 159, 206 Mumford, Lewis, 62, 74, 78, 178 Mundt, Karl, 55 My First Summer in the Sierra (Muir), 21 Nanook of the North, 87 Nash, Roderick, 207 nationalism, 23–25, 33, 56, 64, 73, 75–76, 82– 83, 86, 92, 110, 122, 126, 131, 139, 183–84 national parks, 19, 23–25, 27–28, 122, 173, 182. See also individual parks National Park Service, xvii, 3, 23, 28 Native Americans, 27, 146, 173 Nature (Emerson), 9 New Deal, xvi, xix, xx, 29, 37–38, 151; criticism of conservation policy of, 55–56, 110– 11; end of, 90, 109–11; and flood control, 63–65, 77–79; importance of religion to, 30, 34–35, 85, 102–3; and natural disasters, 36, 39–41, 103, 206–7; visual culture of, 30, 42–43, 88, 181 Newhall, Beaumont, 133 Newhall, Nancy, 130–33, 157, 178, 187, 207. See also This Is the American Earth newsreels, 40–42, 45, 70–71 New York World’s Fair (1939), 106 No Place to Hide (Bradley), 112 Old and New, 45 On the Loose (Russell and Russell), 186–89 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 126 Packard, Vance, 142 panoramic vision, 35–36, 45, 47, 59, 66–68, 70–72, 79, 98–99, 101–2, 105–6, 129, 135–37, 211 People of Plenty (Potter), 128 Pinchot, Gifford, 21 Place No One Knew, The (Porter), 171, 174–80, 182, 189, 192; memory and, 171, 179–81; reception of, 179–81 Plow That Broke the Plains, The, 33–34, 36, 42–52, 58–62, 65, 67, 70, 73, 78, 87, 101; reception of, 52–58, 62, 81–82 Porter, Aline, 153 Porter, Eliot, xvi, xxi, 117, 149, 170–71, 193, 196; biography of, 152–53; and emphasis on fragments, 150, 160–62, 174–77, 192; interest in the seasons, 155–57; interest in

Thoreau, 153–54; and the sublime, xix, 150–51, 160–63, 169, 174, 192, 196, 198; use of color by, 150–54, 157, 160–62, 175, 177, 180; views on the camera, 151–52, 154, 157, 203. See also “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World”; The Place No One Knew Potter, David, 128 Powell, John Wesley, 123, 173 Pratt, Charles, xxi, 194–96, 201, 205, 209; collaboration with Rachel Carson, 196–98; and ideas about memory, 202–4, 206; and the sublime, 196, 198–99, 203–4, 212. See also The Sense of Wonder Progressive Era, culture of, 5, 8, 10–11, 16–17, 18, 28 Promise of American Life, The (Croly), 28 Proust, Marcel, 196, 203, 206 Puritanism, 7. See also jeremiad sermon race, 63, 72–73, 82–83, 101, 103–4, 139 Rainier, Mount, 18, 24 Reality, and environmental images, xvii, 5, 11, 15–16, 18, 37, 54–55, 72, 108–9, 147, 165–68, 180–81, 185, 197, 205 regionalism, 62–63, 77–78 religion, and views of nature, xviii, xix, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 11–14, 18–19, 20, 23, 25–30, 34–36, 39, 47, 50–51, 56, 59, 62, 64, 67, 70, 73, 80, 85, 102–3, 119, 122, 127–30, 132, 135, 137–41, 150–51, 152, 156, 165, 202, 206, 208–9 Resettlement Administration, 33, 35, 42, 43, 51, 54 Reynolds, Frann Spencer, 146 Reynolds, Richard, 146 Rich Land, Poor Land (Chase), 77 Riesman, David, 126–27 Riis, Jacob, 5, 17, 37 River, The, 34, 59, 61–63, 65–73, 78–82, 101, 134, 144, 178; as compared to Walt Whitman, 73–77, reception of, 62, 73, 80, 82–86, 88 Road to Survival (Vogt), 139 romanticism, xvi–xvii, 129 Rome, Adam, 135 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 113 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 30, 34, 38, 46, 52, 63, 88, 92, 97, 100, 113, 123 Roosevelt, Theodore, xvii, 5, 10 Roosevelt Year, The (Lorentz), 38, 42, 57 Roszak, Theodore, 185

i n de x Rothstein, Arthur, 55, 58 Rourke, Constance, 91 Russell, Renny, 185–87 Russell, Terry, 185–87 Sandburg, Carl, 132 San Francisco, 52 Santa Barbara oil spill, 207 Scarry, Elaine, 212 Scott, Winfield Townley, 149, 165 Sears, Paul, 34, 85 Seldes, Gilbert, 80–81 Sense of Wonder, The (Carson and Pratt), 194, 198–200 Sequoia National Park, 25 Shattuck, Roger, 203 Sierra Club, xvi, xix, xxi, 19–23, 117, 119, 127–30, 158, 177–79, 194, 196, 207; and conflict over David Brower, 189–93; and debate over wilderness preservation versus environmentalism, 120, 143–46, 150, 169, 191–92, 196; history of, 121–22; opposition to dams by, 21–22, 123–24, 171–73, 182– 84; and posters, 188–89. See also Exhibit Format series Silent Spring (Carson), 191, 195, 197–98, 206 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 83 Social Gospel, 8, 28, 35 Soil Conservation Service, 34, 35, 92–93, 98, 99 103, 105, 110 soil erosion, 34, 62, 71–72, 92–98. See also The Land Soil Erosion Service, 39, 92 spirituality. See religion Standard Oil of New Jersey, 111–12 Stegner, Wallace, 117, 124–26, 179, 181, 193 Steichen, Edward, 131–32 Steinbeck, John, 97, 104 Steiner, Ralph, 46, 56 Stieglitz, Alfred, 18, 129, 152 Stoddard, John L., 16–17 Strand, Paul, 18, 46, 56, 129, 131 Stryker, Roy, 42, 109, 111 sublime, the, xix–xx; ecological vision of, 150, 160–63, 169, 174, 192, 196–99, 201, 202, 204, 209, 211–12; natural disasters and, 36, 40, 50, 62, 70, 119; romantic vision of, 6, 18–19, 22–23, 119, 139–41; technological vision of, 62–63, 78–79, 81, 106, 119 suburban sprawl, 112, 135, 137, 142, 143, 210 Taylor, Paul, 96–97, 101

245

Tennessee Valley Authority, 34, 62, 77–81, 83, 85–86, 110 This Is Dinosaur (Stegner), 123–25, 127, 173 This Is the American Earth (Adams and Newhall), 132–42, 146–47, 157–58, 191, 192; reception of, 142–46, 150 This Is the American Earth (exhibit), 130–32, 146 Thomson, Virgil, 46, 50 Thoreau, Henry David, xvii, 117, 148–50, 159, 160, 168, 178, 187, 189, 206; as inspiration to Gleason, 4, 11–13, 29; as inspiration to Porter, 153–54; Journal, 11, 13, 153–54, 160–62; as quoted in “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” 161–64; Walden edition, The Writings of Thoreau, 14–16, 27, 154 Time and the River Flowing (Leydet), 171, 182–85 transcendentalism, 4, 5, 7, 9, 28–29, 62, 154 Tugwell, Rexford, 35, 39, 46, 59, 65, 97 TVA: Democracy on the March (Lilienthal), 85 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 60–61, 63, 65 Twelve Seasons, The (Krutch), 155–57, 161, 178 Udall, Morris, 183–84 Udall, Stewart, 148, 182–83 United States Film Service, 88–89, 91, 99–100 United States Information Agency, 132 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (James), 6 Vestal, David, 194 Vietnam War, 189, 193 Vogt, William, 139 Walden (Thoreau), 11, 148, 153, 155, 161, 164 Wallace, Henry, 109 White, Minor, 112 Whitman, Walt, 73–77 Whyte, William, 126–27 wilderness: ideal of, xxi, 23, 34, 119, 133, 134, 139, 142–47, 163–64, 169, 192, 195–96; as therapy, xv, 27, 119, 126–29, 159, 166, 179, 183, 185 Wilderness Act of 1964. See Wilderness Bill (Wilderness Act of 1964) Wilderness Bill (Wilderness Act of 1964), 118–19, 127, 144, 157, 158 Wilderness Society, xv, xvi, xxi, 127, 148, 159, 165, 173 women’s clubs, 19–20, 22

246

i n de x

Wood, Grant, 43, 105 World War I, 23–24 World War II, 109–10

Yosemite National Park, xv, xix, 21–24, 122, 129, 130–31, 139–41, 146, 147, 150, 163, 207, 208

Yellowstone National Park, xix, 122, 150, 163

Zahniser, Howard, 127