After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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populations. The association began collecting signatures, and by the spring of 1914, it became clear that a referendum to overturn Flint-Cary would appear on the November ballot.
Now on the defensive, Grinnell directed Taylor to shift his efforts from lobbying in Sacramento to spearheading California’s first grassroots wildlife conservation campaign. The Associated Societies produced twenty thousand copies of the Western Wild Life Call, ninety-five thousand informational pamphlets, sixty thousand letters, one hundred public lectures, and three press releases for each of the state’s 825 newspapers. Advertisements appeared on streetcars in San Francisco, Sacramento, and the Napa Valley. A separate but coordinated effort took place in Southern California. Taylor estimated that the campaign’s literature had reached at least a million Californians, or about a third of the state’s population. The Associated Societies also received support from prominent national activists. By September it had a council of officers and advisers that reads like an honor roll of Progressive Era reformers, including American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, National Consumers’ League president Frederick Nathan, American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn, and National American Woman Suffrage Association president Anna Howard Shaw—not to mention William T. Hornaday, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Muir. (This would be Muir’s last campaign endorsement before his death that Christmas Eve.)49
With such a formidable roster of backers and the support of state lawmakers who had voted for the Flint-Cary Act, the nonsale of game seemed like a tough cause to defeat. In the words of one noted Progressive Era historian, market hunters and game dealers posed “no match for the politically powerful and wealthy people who supported conservationism.”50 But the situation in California was more complicated than that. Both sides of the Flint-Cary debate spanned the socioeconomic spectrum and drew supporters from urban and rural settings around the state. Each side accused the other of speaking on behalf of society’s most privileged people and charged that its opponents were dominating resources at the expense of the majority. Both sides claimed the mantle of Progressivism and argued that they spoke for the true conservationists. Both wielded considerable political power and labeled the other as undemocratic. The opponents were well matched, and the outcome was impossible to predict.
The campaign started out relatively tame. The Western Wild Life Call listed nineteen reasons to uphold the Flint-Cary Act, most of which focused on its general benefits to society. Proponents of the act argued that fish and game codes prevented private control and established equal ownership of public goods. Unlike the commercialization of game, which benefited a minority of the population, Taylor argued, regulations benefited everyone, without exception or prejudice. By maintaining a strong nonsale of game law, California would remain in the ranks of progressive states and become a leader not only in conservation but also in national politics.51
The People’s Fish and Game Protective Association portrayed the situation differently. Its members argued that onerous regulations already delayed the delivery of lawfully killed game, so meat spoiled before it reached the market. Nonsale of game laws deprived the populace of cheap food, granted “special privilege to so-called sportsmen,” and allowed rich hunters to monopolize public goods. Under the guise of conservation, such laws represented an exercise of power by the rich over the poor. According to the Protective Association, a more equitable game law would cancel these special privileges. It would repeal hunting and fishing license fees, levy a special tax on private preserves, and transfer law enforcement powers from the state Fish and Game Commission to the county boards of supervisors.52
After a few months of this back and forth, things started to get ugly. The Western Wild Life Call argued that the Protective Association’s referendum petition contained thousands of false signatures. Most of these, Taylor claimed, had come from San Francisco or Oakland, where wealthy French restaurants charged exorbitant prices for the privilege of overfeeding on fancy meat; poor San Franciscans and Oaklanders had been deceived into signing a petition that would benefit only the gluttonous and corpulent few. The newsletter asserted that those behind the referendum had committed fraud, forgery, and perjury and had attempted to incite class conflict. It even claimed that the Protective Association was a front for Chinese mobsters who, when they were not lobbying against wildlife conservation, “engaged in the sale and traffic of women and the protection of murderers.”53
In a survey of California’s newspapers conducted just days before the election, Taylor found that fourteen publications, with a combined circulation of 214,442, opposed the Flint-Cary Act, while 170 publications, with a combined circulation of 617,416, favored it. On November 1, however, the San Francisco Examiner, the same Hearst newspaper that had sponsored Allan Kelly’s expedition to capture a California grizzly twenty-five years earlier, published a front-page lead story titled “180—and More—Reasons for Voting for Sale of Game to People.” This article accused Fish and Game Commission president Frank Newbert of breaking his own laws by exceeding the bag limit for mallards. It was a short article, but it was printed on the front page and included a large photograph that showed Newbert and six of his hunting partners standing behind a row of 180 dead ducks strung on a line. For years conservationists had published photographs they said illustrated the wastefulness of “game hogs” who hunted for profit. The Examiner showed that this allegation could go both ways.
The following day, Californians overturned the Flint-Cary Act by popular vote. Voters in Southern California supported the act by a margin of two to one, but the larger population in Northern California overwhelmingly rejected it. Opposition was particularly strong in the urban centers of San Francisco and Oakland. Some urban elites supported the Flint-Cary Act, but a significant fraction opposed it. The Protective Association also convinced many working-class urban and rural residents that the act would allow the rich to restrict access to the state’s resources. This was a humbling defeat for the Berkeley circle conservationists in a battle they had initially won and certainly not expected to lose. A week after the election, Grinnell had to write to Harry Swarth, his former student and now the editor of the Condor, to retract an article Grinnell had submitted before the election claiming a premature victory.54
The state and federal governments eventually managed to curtail the sale of wild-caught game. Not long after the Flint-Cary debate, the California legislature passed a law that fixed the number of game birds any person could posses in a single day to the normal recreational bag limit, which made the sale of wild-caught game unprofitable without actually outlawing it. Resistance emerged once again, but in 1918 Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which outlawed the sale of most avian species nationwide. This act met with well-organized opposition, including not only individuals and organizations involved in the wildlife trade but also state governments that viewed it as a violation of their property rights as defined in Geer vs. Connecticut. Two years later, however, this conflict led to another landmark legal case, Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution enabled the federal government to enact treaties that superseded the rights of the individual states. The treaty power thus joined the commerce clause as a legal justification for federal involvement in wildlife conservation.
The nonsale of game debate left an important legacy for wildlife conservation in California. Before 1915, East Coast conservationists viewed their colleagues there as little more than an eccentric, provincial West Coast subculture. During the Flint-Cary debate, however, California moved from the periphery to the center of national wildlife politics. The nation’s most famous wildlife conservationist, William T. Hornaday, even singled out the work of the Berkeley circle as a national model. He pointed to the University of California as the first educational institution to actively engage in wildlife conservation, and he called the California Associated Societies for the Conservation of Wild Life the finest organization of its kind in the country. No other state, Hornaday noted, had such a combination of forces working for wildlife conservation.55
Despite this praise, the controversies of the early 1910s took a toll on the California Fish and Game Commission, which had opened itself to criticism by assuming a prominent role in political advocacy. It had developed an impressive bureaucratic infrastructure for coordination and enforcement, but it lacked both widespread public support and the confidence of the state legislature, which refused