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 to grant it plenary powers to enact its own regulations. Unlike wildlife agencies in many other states, the California Fish and Game Commission would not achieve this level of autonomy until the 1940s. In the years that followed the Flint-Cary debate, the chastened commission turned its efforts away from divisive political campaigns and refocused its work on education, propagation, and law enforcement. Commission officials, including some Berkeley circle alumni, talked less about conservation ethics and the threat of extinction and more about their efforts to supply fish and game for the hunting and fishing license holders who funded the commission’s work.56
By 1915, Grinnell’s first cohort of student assistants began to disperse. Joseph Dixon and Harold Bryant remained with the National Park Service. Harry Swarth accepted a curatorial position in Los Angeles and continued to act as the editor of the Condor. Tracy Storer served in World War I and later founded the Department of Zoology at the University of California, Davis. Loye Miller left for UCLA. And Walter P. Taylor accepted a position with the Bureau of Biological Survey in Arizona.
The second cohort of Berkeley circle students would adopt a different approach to conservation. They never embarked on a legislative campaign, instead focusing on the equally challenging but lower-profile work of bureaucratic reform. During the 1920s they worked for the reduction of predator elimination programs. They also began to think less about state hunting codes and more about federal land management. By 1930 a trio of former Grinnell students working at Yosemite had established the National Park Service’s first science-based wildlife conservation program. These shifts in the Berkeley circle’s focus—from legislative to bureaucratic politics, from state to federal programs, and from hunting regulations to habitat management—would shape wildlife conservation in California and the American West through the New Deal era and beyond.
| CHAPTER THREE | • | The Official Landscape |
In September of 1916, less than two years after the Flint-Cary referendum, Joseph Grinnell and his student Tracy Storer published an essay titled “Animal Life as an Asset of the National Parks” in the journal Science. Their paper served as a manifesto for the next generation of Berkeley circle conservationists. According to Grinnell and Storer, the national parks offered more than just sublime scenery, healthful recreation, and a chance to view big game. They were also some of the last sanctuaries where visitors could observe wild animals and ecological processes relatively free from human influence. They provided opportunities to preserve “natural conditions” for research and education. And they could serve as nurseries for wildlife populations that had become depleted through excessive hunting in adjacent “unprotected areas.” This would be possible only if the National Park Service—which Congress had created less than a month earlier—avoided overdevelopment and unnecessary artificial manipulation and launched a new program of scientific management.1
By suggesting that the national parks should be viewed as wildlife refuges, Grinnell and Storer helped initiate a new phase in American conservation history. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of great advancement in wildlife ecology and conservation, and Berkeley circle members played essential roles in this movement. During
