Why did your grandfather turn down the offer to be one of Wilderness Society’s founders? What was his attitude toward the concept of wilderness?
First of all, I think he would have seen wilderness as a natural thing. In those days, there was a lot more undeveloped country than there is now. To my knowledge he wasn’t a rigorous hiker or a masochist of the type that Bob Marshall was, or even John Muir. He did do hard hikes in his early years in places like the John Day country and the valleys in Nevada. He would probably would have seen things a little different than Marshall or Muir. I think he would have been more apt to see it in terms of the way you could get the public to go along with the ideas you had. I think his ideas about national parks would be viewed as moderate today.
As for the Wilderness Society, I didn’t learn too much about this until just recently. So I can only speculate on why he didn’t become a founder. My suspicion is that grandfather was pretty conservative and he also played his political cards pretty carefully. In the 1930’s, Marshall was a person that would have been good to write to, but not the kind of a person that grandfather would want to be perceived as being close to. What I am referring to is the impression of Marshall being what we’d call today a super liberal.
People like Robert Sterling Yard did not seem to have this problem.
Yes, because they were in similar organizations. Madison Grant, one of the founders of the Redwood League, was another person that grandfather had to be really careful with. I’m not sorry about getting this on paper, because I found some material in the files in the Library of Congress where Madison Grant tried to get grandfather involved in one of his white supremist schemes and grandfather stayed completely clear of it. So this suggests to me that he wasn’t interested in anything that would compromise his position as President of the Carnegie Institution. This is to his credit because it would affect the Carnegie family as well as himself. The other thing which factored in here was that he was just too busy to be involved, as you see from his letters. He was always going a million miles a minute. He did that right up until the time he died. From my knowledge, grandfather was on friendly terms with Robert Sterling Yard. I think there are a lot of views about Yard and, as you know, I was a trustee of the Parks Association, so I knew about him. Yard had some very difficult times financially with that organization. Grandfather was one of the people who, along with Herbert Hoover (who was once president of it, as a matter of fact), bolstered it up occasionally. I think grandfather supported a lot of Yard’s ideas, but sometimes Yard went quite a ways out on a limb on controversies involving concessionaires and Park Service leadership.
