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 them out unfairly and would fail to restore wildlife 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,
