After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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it created a context for further federal involvement in wildlife conservation. The Lacey Act not only increased cooperation among the states and the federal government, but also set an important precedent for the application of the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause as a rationale for federal environmental policies.
Intrastate cooperation also posed a challenge. Counties and municipalities passed ordinances that contradicted state laws and conflicted with those of neighboring jurisdictions. Different state agencies pursued their own agendas and even struggled to coordinate their internal programs. The California Division of Fish and Game had the responsibility of administering conservation laws in a state twice the size of New England. It attempted to do so by forging partnerships with other agencies, organizing the state into districts, and soliciting support among its diverse and divided constituents. “We recognize,” the Board of Fish and Game Commissioners wrote in 1913, “that we are administering a public trust, that to us has been assigned the duty of protecting and conserving the fish and game interests of the State for the benefit of all the people, and that to be successful we must have their active coöperation.”41
The board’s call for cooperation was both a plea and a threat. The Fish and Game Commission had adopted the motto “conservation through education,” but each year it dedicated more of its resources to law enforcement. Enforcement of fish and game codes was weak or nonexistent in most states until the twentieth century. Between 1902 and 1915, however, California established one of the country’s most aggressive fish and game law enforcement programs. It dispatched wardens to every corner of the state, deputized more than three hundred U.S. Forest Service rangers, and prosecuted about ten thousand cases of fish and game code violations. Fines collected from the convictions went back into the Fish and Game Commission’s coffers. Along with fees from hunting and fishing licenses—which favored and legitimized those who had the money to purchase them—these funds enabled the commission to hire 120 employees, based at offices in Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno, and Los Angeles.42
Despite these efforts, law enforcement remained a major challenge. Game wardens could not detect more than a small fraction of the violations. According to Ernest Schaeffle, the commission’s executive officer, conservationists were “compelled to realize that laws are being violated every day and that the fish and game supply is suffering correspondingly.” Hunters ignored new laws, landowners refused to allow officials to work on their property, and sympathetic judges declined to hear game cases. “He has read history to very little purpose,” wrote one such California judge, who was unaware that game codes were a “fruitful source of oppression of the masses of the people. . . . It was better to exterminate the game at once than to preserve it for the special benefit of a favored few.”43
People violated the new fish and game codes for many reasons. In some cases, these laws reversed older statutes that many people thought still made sense. For example, proposals for new regulations to ban the sale of wild-caught game reversed previous laws in many states that had required hunters to bring their excess catch to market. The rationale behind the earlier laws was that demand, not supply, should dictate the size of the commercial harvest. In other cases, people violated the new codes, such as closed seasons, to feed their families or because they were following cultural traditions from their homelands. Sometimes people were simply not aware of the new codes, but they also broke the law to protest regulations that appeared to single them out for discrimination.44
Racism and xenophobia were rife in California, as in other parts of the country, and on full display in fish and game debates. Wealthy white sportsmen championed legislation that prevented nonwhite immigrants from owning property and firearms. The California Fish and Game Commission studied instances of lawbreaking and concluded that most fish and game code violators were aliens and other immigrants from southern Europe. Schaeffle blamed poaching on the “irrepressible mountaineer or the unschooled immigrant.”45 Conservationism, like other Progressive Era political movements, included elements of what today seem like both liberal reform and reactionary conservatism—often represented in the same policies and embodied in the same individuals.
By 1912 many California conservationists had decided it was impossible to prevent fish and game code violations by patrolling the state’s vast mountains, deserts, forests, and waterways. So they adopted a strategy that had worked in other states: they turned their attention from the vast rural places where wild animals were hunted to the dense urban spaces where animals were sold. The nonsale of game campaign shifted the focus of law enforcement from market hunters to game dealers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers who sold wild animals for profit in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Concentrating on the site of sale rearranged the spatial organization of police power and made law enforcement more feasible. It also stirred opposition among some wealthy and powerful businessmen who banded together with hunters and game dealers and resolved to fight against this new form of government incursion into the free market.
THE FLINT-CARY DEBATE
In the summer of 1912, less than a year after Monarch’s death, Joseph Grinnell recruited another one of his students, Walter P. Taylor, to lead the Berkeley circle’s legislative campaign. Taylor worked to mobilize scientific societies, reform state agencies, lobby politicians, disseminate the results of scientific research, coordinate outreach programs, and establish new wildlife refuges. Under Grinnell’s direction, he also founded a new activist organization, the California Associated Societies for the Conservation of Wild Life, staffed by volunteers from the Berkeley circle. The Associated Societies advocated a platform of conservation laws, but by the end of its first year it was focusing on getting a law enacted that would ban the sale of wild-caught game. The following winter, Taylor published the first issue of the group’s newsletter, the Western Wild Life Call, which became the voice of the campaign. “It is a fixed principle that every wild species of mammal, bird, or reptile that is pursued for money-making purposes eventually is wiped out of existence,” he wrote. “Even the whales of the sea are no exception.”46
By the time Taylor began this campaign, thirty-one states had passed laws prohibiting the commercial sale of ducks and other wild-caught game.47 Legislation had stalled elsewhere due to opposition from hunters and businesses that depended on the trade. It also met with resistance from people who believed that such laws were unconstitutional or saw wild-caught game as an essential source of income or food for the poor. Yet by 1912, California was the largest and most progressive state that had not yet banned the sale of these animals. In the absence of national legislation, which seemed out of the question, a nonsale law in California represented the biggest prize for wildlife conservationists in the United States.
The Associated Societies campaign for a California nonsale of game law lasted about a year. In April of 1913, Taylor took a leave from the MVZ and moved to Sacramento, where he stayed for two months to lobby for a collection of fish and game bills. The work was exhausting and frustrating but also exhilarating, and Taylor seemed to thrive on the politics. He wrote letters to Grinnell almost daily, and his boss in Berkeley encouraged him to work “energetically and judiciously until all the legislation pertaining to our field is ‘finished business.’”48 The result was an impressive, if temporary, success. In May of 1914, a little more than a year after the campaign began, the state legislature passed the Flint-Cary Act, which banned the sale of most wild-caught game, and California’s Republican governor, Hiram W. Johnson, signed it into law.
But the battle was far from over. Johnson had swept into office in 1910 with the promise that he would reform the state’s government, control monopolies such as the Southern Pacific Railroad, and hand political power back to the citizenry. The following year, his progressive majority amended the state constitution to include three new mechanisms of direct democracy: the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. Opponents of the Flint-Cary Act seized this opportunity. A coalition of market hunters, game dealers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers formed the People’s Fish and Game Protective Association and began to mobilize support. The Protective Association was not antiprogressive or even anticonservation. The group proposed new fish and game laws that its members believed would improve wild stocks without damaging their businesses or constraining the free market. Its members did, however, believe that the Flint-Cary Act singled