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CHAPTER TWO

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A New Movement

Monarch’s arrival in San Francisco in 1889 captivated the city, but his death in 1911 went almost unnoticed. If his story had ended there, this would have been an anticlimactic conclusion to the life of a California icon, but the great bear’s journey was far from complete. During the preceding decades, popular enthusiasm for recreational hunting and natural history museums had fostered advances in the art and science of taxidermy, and by the time of Monarch’s death, expert technicians were capable of preserving animal remains almost in perpetuity. A local purveyor named Vernon Shephard accepted the job. He used part of the bear’s skull to mount its hide but discarded the rest of its massive skeleton. The specimen first went on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and later moved down the street to the California Academy of Sciences, where curators placed it on a pedestal adorned with an image of the California flag. It appeared that Monarch would have two final resting places: his skin would occupy a station of honor at one of the state’s oldest cultural institutions while his bones rotted at the bottom of a ditch in some weedy corner of Golden Gate Park.¹

News of Monarch’s unceremonious burial soon reached Joseph Grinnell, a young zoologist who in 1908 became the founding director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, in Berkeley. Grinnell set out to establish the West Coast’s premier institution for research in zoology and evolutionary biology. His work used comparative morphology to illuminate patterns of evolution in the state’s diverse fauna and thus required a large collection of biological specimens. By the time he accepted his position, however, the populations of many of California’s most charismatic and sought-after wild animal species—from marine mammals to terrestrial fur bearers, large carnivores, ungulates, raptors, shorebirds, and waterfowl—had reached historic lows, and opportunities to acquire additional specimens were diminishing with each passing year.² Specimens of any vertebrate species could contribute to Grinnell’s research, but none was more important for the museum than the state’s mascot, the California grizzly. So six months after Monarch’s death, Grinnell sent his assistant, Joseph Dixon, to San Francisco with a map and a shovel. Dixon located Monarch’s grave, exhumed the skeleton, and brought it back to Berkeley, where he disinfected it and prepared it for storage.

Soon after Monarch’s death, Grinnell and his “Berkeley circle” of students and colleagues decided that museum conservation, of the kind they had undertaken for Monarch’s remains, was not enough—they needed to do more to save California’s dwindling fauna. Grinnell was by no means the state’s first wildlife conservationist, but he proposed an ambitious plan to launch a new political movement that would inform “the public of the great depletion of the supply of game in the state” and generate support for a comprehensive program of research, education, regulation, and enforcement. By 1914 the campaign had expanded from its initial focus on game animals to include all of California’s native fauna.³

The Berkeley circle’s campaign sparked the first major political debate about the conservation of terrestrial wildlife in California. Grinnell carefully guarded his reputation as a nonpartisan scientific expert, and he remained mostly in the background during the controversies that ensued, but from his office at the museum he dispatched a small army of emissaries, including several students who took classes and worked as research assistants at the university. Between 1912 and 1914 they raised money, founded activist groups, developed public relations campaigns, and lobbied politicians in Sacramento. Their campaign had several legislative goals, but the most important was an effort to pass a state law that would ban the commercial sale of wild-caught game.⁴

Grinnell and his allies focused on the sale of wild-caught game for two main reasons. The first and most obvious was that at the time, many conservationists believed that market hunting was the main cause of wildlife declines. A second but equally important reason was that state-level hunting and fishing regulations were already well established and widely accepted, whereas other options, such as habitat protection, had little if any legal or political precedent.

Despite longstanding legal precedents for state-level hunting and fishing codes, the Berkeley circle’s campaign sparked a vigorous political debate that soon grew to encompass a variety of much broader issues. A debate about wildlife soon became a debate about the public good versus private interests, government regulation in a market economy, the role of bureaucratic versus democratic decision making, and the importance of race, class, gender, and citizenship in shaping access to and control over lands and natural resources. This debate began later in California than in other states with Progressive political majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. It also took a different course and came to a different conclusion, at least for a time. Yet by 1915, conservationists across the country were looking to California and the work of the Berkeley circle as a model for what had gone right and what had gone wrong in the Progressive Era wildlife movement. The insights they gained would shape subsequent conservation efforts into the New Deal era of the 1930s and beyond.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the Berkeley circle’s work during the Progressive Era is how much it anticipated future developments in conservation science and environmental ethics. This is not to say that the group’s members were somehow ahead of their time—they were very much creatures of it. Yet their story challenges, or at least complicates, the widespread belief that many features of contemporary conservation, including concern for nongame and uncharismatic endangered species, did not emerge until the second half of the twentieth century. By 1915 the Berkeley circle’s members had developed an intellectual foundation for what, over the next two decades, with the addition of a strong focus on habitat management, would develop into a comprehensive vision for wildlife science and conservation backed by almost every major ethical rationale that supports the work of conservation biologists today.⁵

The Progressive Era wildlife debates in California are important to the story of American endangered species conservation for another reason. Scientists and legal scholars who write about the Endangered Species Act often cite its widespread popularity at the time of its passage, in 1973, as evidence that conflicts about species conservation emerged only later, in response to the act’s unintended consequences. It would be unwise to underestimate the ESA’s capacity to provoke controversy, but this version of the story tends to truncate the history of endangered species debates. Controversies that have surrounded the ESA since the late 1970s are part of a much longer legacy of disputes about species loss and conservation that began more than a century ago, have waxed and waned, and continue in modified forms today. To understand the origins of these struggles, there is nowhere better to start than with the life and work of the Berkeley circle’s leader, Joseph Grinnell.

THE HOUSE GRINNELL BUILT

Joseph Grinnell was born in 1877 on the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Indian Agency near Fort Sill in Indian Territory. His Quaker family traced its ancestry New England’s earliest French Huguenot colonists, and his father worked as a physician on the reservation. They soon moved to the Pine Ridge Agency, in Dakota Territory, where Joseph spent his early childhood with the Oglala Sioux. During their time at Pine Ridge, Joseph and his father earned the friendship of a local patriarch, Chief Red Cloud. In 1885 the Grinnells moved to California and settled in Pasadena, then a small town surrounded by remote mountains and wild animals. Joseph spent the rest of his childhood and young adulthood hunting, fishing, and studying natural history near his home. One summer, he even found grizzly tracks in the lower Arroyo Seco. In 1898 he left for his first expedition, a voyage to Alaska, where he collected some fourteen hundred birds and eggs. He returned to California the following year and began his graduate work in zoology under the direction of Charles H. Gilbert and David Starr Jordan at Stanford University. In 1901 he became the youngest fellow in the history of the American Ornithologists’ Union (see figure 7).⁶

Grinnell was still pursuing his doctorate and teaching part time at the Throop Polytechnic Institute, the future California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, when he met Annie Alexander. Alexander was a remarkable woman. Born in 1867 in Honolulu, she was an heir to the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company fortune. Her father, Samuel, introduced her to natural history at a young age, and in 1904 he took her on a trip to hunt big game in Africa. The two were setting up for a photograph on a ledge overlooking Victoria Falls when construction workers, building the now-famous bridge on the cliffs above, dislodged a boulder. The rock ricocheted off the canyon wall and struck Samuel. Doctors amputated his leg that night, but he died of his injuries the following morning. It was a disastrous end to what had begun as an exuberant expedition.

Undeterred, Alexander decided that her father would have wanted her to pursue her passions, and upon her return from Africa she enrolled in natural history courses at the University of California. She soon became one of the most accomplished female hunters and collectors of her time. Over the next four decades Alexander and her longtime partner, Louise Kellogg, took dozens of expeditions throughout the North American West. They collected tens of thousands of plant, animal, and fossil specimens, and they explored remote corners of the continent at a time when few women participated in scientific research or traveled alone. In 1947, at the ages of eighty and sixty-eight, Alexander and Kellogg set off with the botanist Annetta Carter for a three-month plant-collecting expedition in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The trip would be Alexander’s last. Yet when asked if she or her companions had ever been frightened, as elderly women traveling without an escort in a foreign country, Alexander replied, “Somos tres mujeres sin miedo”: we are three women without fear.⁷

FIGURE 7. Joseph Grinnell at work in the field. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

In 1906 Alexander contacted Grinnell to ask for advice in preparation for her first collecting trip to Alaska. The Berkeley paleontologist Jon C. Merriam and the first chief of the federal government’s Bureau of Biological Survey, C. Hart Merriam (no relation), had both recommended Grinnell to Alexander as an expert on Alaskan fauna. Grinnell impressed Alexander, and she soon approached the young scientist with a proposition. She wanted to use her inheritance in a way that would honor her father’s memory, and she had decided to donate a portion of her money to the University of California for the establishment of a zoology museum. She hoped that Grinnell would accept a position as its first director, an unusual opportunity for a young man who was still pursuing his doctorate. Grinnell agreed, and Alexander spent the next year negotiating with the university for space, resources, and administrative autonomy. It was the beginning of a collaboration that would last for more than three decades.⁸

When the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology opened, in 1908, it joined the larger movement to establish natural history museums throughout the United States. Many of these museums began as “cabinets of curiosities”—the personal collections of specimens and artifacts that wealthy patrons donated for public education and entertainment. The contributors and board members of these institutions were among the country’s richest and most powerful people. They represented a political elite that included politicians, leaders of industry, and prominent activists behind a variety of Progressive Era causes, from child welfare to occupational safety, public education, women’s suffrage, and conservation. Some also participated in anti-immigration groups, and many supported efforts to “improve society” through eugenics.⁹

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology grew in scope and influence. They mounted ambitious expeditions to remote lands, assembled catalogues of specimens from around the world, constructed ornate Victorian buildings to house their collections, and produced elaborate public displays to represent the diversity of life. These were scientific institutions in the sense that they hosted research and promoted public education. But like zoos, they also promoted themselves as sites for leisure and entertainment. To attract patrons, they often emphasized the exotic: African mammals arranged in dramatic dioramas, reconstructed skeletons of immense blue whales, life-size models of snarling tyrannosaurs, and the obligatory aquatic scenes of quizzical duck-billed platypuses.¹⁰

The MVZ would develop a different approach. It would forego international expeditions and the collection of exotic specimens, and it would delegate the task of staging public exhibitions to other institutions, such as the California Academy of Sciences. Grinnell wanted to establish the West Coast’s first major center for biological research, and like the generation of California naturalists who came before him, he focused his work on the region where he lived. Under Grinnell, the MVZ accrued a small staff of skilled researchers and collectors dedicated to the study of native fauna in and around California. The state became not only a study site but also an organizing framework and common bond for the museum’s researchers, students, patrons, and network of local informants.¹¹

Grinnell welcomed specimens from other areas of the North American West, especially those adjacent to California, but as early as 1907 he wrote to Alexander to protest her planned acquisition of specimens from more-distant regions. Alexander had proposed to purchase a large collection from the Galápagos Islands, which to many observers would have seemed like a coup for a small, upstart museum. Yet Grinnell argued that the Galápagos had been “worked over again and again, better than any area of similar extent in California.” Unlike these islands, which had been popular with naturalists since Charles Darwin’s time, California was “in the newest part of the new world” and still offered a fresh field for research. The state, Grinnell concluded a few years later, “is practically inexhaustible, is naturally of easiest access and should be of greatest interest to this institution.”¹²

Grinnell viewed the physical collections of the MVZ not only as an important contribution to future generations of natural historians but also as the foundation of a comprehensive methodology that would foster his ambitious research program. Throughout his life, he focused on three interrelated areas of theoretical inquiry: the classification of biophysical environments, the spatial distribution of vertebrate species, and the ways that organism-environment interactions shaped animal evolution. These interests inspired one of the most innovative and energetic careers in the history of biology. Between 1893 and 1939, Grinnell published 554 books and articles. He extended C. Hart Merriam’s life zone concept, developed the idea of the niche, and provided a basis for the competitive exclusion principle. He also popularized the use of trinomial taxonomic classification, the division of distinct species into less-distinct subspecies defined by their morphological differences and geographic ranges. Grinnell viewed these fine distinctions, identifiable only through close observation and laborious mapping, as essential for understanding the evolutionary processes that led to the emergence of new species.¹³

Some of Grinnell’s most significant contributions involved his biogeographical research, which refined, revised, and extended Darwin’s theories about speciation, including the role of physical geography in the processes of adaptation and radiation. As early as 1904, Grinnell’s work on the chestnut-backed chickadee signaled his intent to develop the role of geography in evolutionary theory. A decade later he published two landmark works about the Colorado River, the first of which explored it as a pathway of species dispersal and the second of which considered it as a barrier. His nuanced thinking about the complexity of physical space and its importance in evolution provided a basis for countless future studies. Grinnell’s many protégés built on his work and amplified its influence even further. In 1941, for example, his former student Alden Miller published a classic study on speciation in the avian genus Junco, which Ernst Mayr later cited as a crucial contribution to the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology.¹⁴

Several influences shaped Grinnell’s work on spatial processes. At Stanford he studied among a group of naturalists who were developing theories of speciation based on geographical distribution. He arrived in Berkeley at a time when researchers in North America and Britain were beginning to think more rigorously about wildlife-habitat relationships, and the influences of a number of those individuals appear throughout his work.¹⁵ By the 1930s and 1940s, members of this loosely knit community included such key figures in the history of ecology as Charles Elton, Paul Errington, Herbert Stoddard, Aldo Leopold, and David Lack.

Grinnell’s most important influences, however, were the places where he conducted his research. In California’s mountains and rivers, he found evidence for the importance of migratory corridors and impediments to animal movement. In its valleys, he saw isolated centers of evolution that contained large numbers of endemic species. And in its fires and floods, he witnessed the unpredictable forces of landscape change that altered the availability of resources and rearranged animal populations. California was Grinnell’s mentor as well as his laboratory. Decades of fieldwork there taught him that one could not understand ecology and evolution without history and geography.

Building the kind of collection necessary to conduct this research required Grinnell to become an effective administrator. He maintained Alexander’s crucial support, secured funds for expeditions, established survey priorities, sought the advice of distant colleagues, and served as a mentor, counselor, disciplinarian, cheerleader, and occasional therapist to his assistants in the field. He could be pedantic and demanding, but he earned the universal admiration of his students and colleagues. He also became a scrupulous curator who spent much of his time on technical details. Which caliber gun should fieldworkers use to collect songbirds? Should museum staff skin bats or preserve them in formaldehyde? How much cornstarch would protect a badger skull from damage during shipment? Which brand of India ink was best for labeling specimens? What color paint should coat the walls of the MVZ? These questions may seem trivial, but Grinnell regarded every detail of museum administration as essential to his vision of a comprehensive research methodology.¹⁶

His primary goal was to develop a collection of biological specimens that would represent California’s diverse native fauna and enable researchers to answer basic biological questions about the evolutionary relationships between organisms and their environments. Yet by the time he began his work, hunting and habitat loss had already decimated many of the species he aimed to study. “Many species of vertebrate animals are disappearing; some are gone already,” he wrote. “All that the investigator of the future will have . . . will be the remains of these species preserved more or less faithfully, along with the data accompanying them, in the museums of the country.”¹⁷ Museum work was not only part of a research methodology but also a form of conservation. The two were inextricably linked.

Collecting specimens in California required Grinnell and his assistants to stay one step ahead of the forces of land use and environmental change. They scrambled to survey aquatic environments before the dredgers, dikers, dynamiters, and dam builders arrived. They raced to collect in undeveloped valleys just days before farmers cleared the vegetation and leveled the soil. They spent weeks searching remote mountains for once-common game birds and fur-bearing mammals that had been driven to the far corners of their ranges. And they mapped the spread of exotic species, such as the European starling and the English sparrow, that had colonized the landscape and were expanding their ranges.¹⁸

Grinnell and Alexander discussed these problems as early as 1907, and they based the MVZ’s early surveying priorities on the assumption that many native species would soon disappear. Before the museum even opened, Grinnell suggested to Alexander that its first official expedition should visit the Imperial Valley, in the flat, hot, low-elevation desert of southeastern California. The Imperial Valley had several endemic species, and Grinnell worried that some were about to go extinct. Water diversion from the Colorado River had enabled farmers to develop the valley for intensive agriculture. In 1905 one of the new irrigation canals ruptured, and for the next two years the Colorado River poured into the desiccated bed of an ancient lake. This deluge created California’s largest body of water, the Salton Sea, and produced a new landscape populated by new plants and new animals. Grinnell later wrote that he found “nothing attractive about collecting in a settled-up, level country,” such as the Imperial Valley. But he knew that “it ought to be done, and the longer we wait, the fewer ‘waste lots’ there will be” in which to find remaining populations of native species.¹⁹

Finding specimens of rare or recently eradicated species required careful detective work. It also required the museum’s staff to cultivate a network of supporters and informants. Fieldworkers conducted oral histories, inquired about taxidermied trophies kept in private homes, and relied on locals for advice about when and where to search. In 1916, for example, Joseph Dixon issued a plea on behalf of the museum for information from “anyone who knows of the whereabouts of any parts of wolves killed in California, or who is conversant with facts relating to the past or present occurrence of the species within the state.” The MVZ finally acquired a California wolf specimen in 1922. Such efforts involved a sizable commitment of the museum’s limited resources, costly searches often failed to produce results, and the fieldworker might not even live to see the payoff. The value of these specimens “might not be realized,” Grinnell wrote, “until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved.” Yet he believed such work was crucial so that “the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west.”²⁰

Preserving this record played a central role in Grinnell’s vision for the MVZ. But why would he—a man who had grown up with Indians, knew about California’s long human history, and studied the role of landscape change in vertebrate evolution—invoke a concept so apparently static and ahistorical as “original conditions”? Grinnell was not ignorant about history. He understood that no single date in the past represented the original state of nature in California and that the early twentieth century was an arbitrary moment at which to create an archive of the state’s fauna. But he was also typical of naturalists of his time in the way he interpreted environmental history. He believed that, with the exception of their use of fire, Indians had lived lightly on the land; it was the Europeans, particularly those who came after 1849, who made the most significant impacts. These ideas informed generations of thinking in American ecology and environmentalism even as scholars in other fields realized that they had drastically underestimated the importance of indigenous societies in shaping North American landscapes and ecosystems.

Despite these shortcomings, Grinnell’s approach had a remarkably contemporary objective. He knew that development would continue to transform California’s fauna, and he based his plan for the museum on the premise that future researchers would want to understand those transformations. He viewed the MVZ’s collections as baseline data for measuring change over time. This view has proved prescient. As part of the MVZ’s centenary celebration, in 2008, researchers began resurveying sites that Grinnell and his assistants had visited a hundred years earlier. Their goal was to use the museum’s data to track changes in the state’s ecosystems. The team’s first study, published in the journal Science, documented a five-hundred-meter average upward shift in the elevation ranges of fourteen small mammal species in and around Yosemite National Park.²¹ Over the course of a century, climate and environmental change had rearranged the Sierra Nevada’s biogeography and reshuffled its ecological communities. Grinnell studied change over time, and in his evolutionary research he explored the deep past. But when it came to baseline data, his interest was primarily in the history of the future—one that California’s human and nonhuman residents are experiencing today.

The MVZ flourished under Grinnell’s leadership. It developed special strengths in birds and mammals, and its geographic focus allowed it to achieve an unparalleled degree of detail in its collections. During its first five years, the museum catalogued nearly fifty thousand specimens. By 1937 C. Hart Merriam could praise it for having produced “a vastly more complete” record of fur-bearing mammals in California than existed for any other part of the world. Grinnell departed in 1939, but the museum’s collections developed further under the direction of his successors. By 1955 it had accumulated the third-largest collection of mammals in the country, even though most of its specimens came from a single state, and it had begun building large collections in new taxonomic areas, such as herpetology. By the 1980s, the MVZ’s collections, along with those of the state’s other major natural history museums, had established California’s status as a hot spot of global biological diversity.²²

CONSERVATION ETHICS

Historians have often suggested that ethical arguments for wildlife conservation in the United States developed in a clear pattern. During the nineteenth century, people considered fish and game valuable only to the extent that they served human economic, recreational, or aesthetic interests. Pests that detracted from these interests were to be controlled or eradicated. During the first half of the twentieth century, scientists and conservationists gradually regarded increasing numbers of species as beneficial and called for more protection. After World War II, the range of their concern grew even further, to include all native species and ecosystems. The process by which human societies extend moral standing to animals and other things is called ethical extensionism and is often associated with the work of the famed philosopher-conservationist Aldo Leopold.²³

Though attractive, the story of ethical extensionism suffers from several problems, not least of which is its teleological portrayal of American environmental history as an inevitable march toward increasingly enlightened ideas. The actual story is much messier, fraught with political contestation, social conflict, and the complexities and contingencies that define the past. Ethical disputes about wild nature did reach a wider audience over time, but almost all of the major arguments for wildlife and endangered species conservation that exist today emerged within the first two decades of the twentieth century. What followed was not a slow expansion or adoption of new ideas but rather a series of struggles that redistributed political power and elevated old ideas to new positions in science, politics, and the law.²⁴

No group was more active in forging these ideas during the Progressive Era than the Berkeley circle. As with its scientific work, the group’s contributions to conservation ethics resulted from the productive, although at times tense, partnerships between Grinnell and his protégés at the MVZ. Harold C. Bryant was one of Grinnell’s first students, and he specialized in natural history education. Grinnell and Bryant borrowed arguments for conservation that other scientists, government officials, wilderness preservationists, and animal welfare advocates had developed in previous decades. They expanded these from fish and game to encompass the more general category of wildlife. To appeal to diverse constituencies, they adapted and sharpened their arguments and used different approaches with different audiences to achieve the greatest political results. By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated and employed almost all of the major ethical arguments for wildlife conservation that exist today.

Like many Progressive Era naturalists and educators, Grinnell asserted that natural history study promoted healthful recreation and an informed citizenry. He joined with activists who called for more nature study in the public schools and more educational programs from state and federal agencies. One of the best ways to achieve these objectives was to install his students in influential positions. In 1914 Grinnell helped Bryant find two part-time jobs, one as the first director of education for the California Fish and Game Commission and another as a member of Yosemite National Park’s first cohort of interpretive naturalists, who gave campfire talks. These were new positions, but they came with considerable opportunities and support. Bryant soon emerged as the most prominent natural history educator not only in California but also, after 1916, in the new National Park Service. His career in the service continued until 1954, when he retired as the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, one of the organization’s most prestigious positions. NPS historians today remember Bryant as the founder of the service’s interpretive programs.²⁵

To understand Grinnell and Bryant’s approach to ethics, it is necessary to understand their approach to politics. When they spoke and wrote about conservation, they often stressed the pragmatic utilitarian justification that had already gained widespread general support among conservationists and that they thought would persuade the largest number of people: wild animals should be conserved to promote the country’s economic well-being. This argument had two components. The first involved the animals’ monetary value. Hunters, trappers, traders, and merchants—including those who sold supplies to recreational sportsmen and tourists—lost future profits when they squandered resources in the short term that could have remained viable for the foreseeable future. Grinnell and Bryant argued for stronger regulation of animal harvests, as well as the creation of game farms that could produce waterfowl and fur-bearing mammals as crops while allowing wild populations to recover from overhunting.²⁶ Both thus supported the regulated use of wildlife as an important aspect of utilitarian conservation.

The second component of the economic argument was the protection of “beneficial species” for pest control. The question of whether certain species were beneficial or injurious had particular salience during a time before modern chemical pesticides when many scientists believed that reckless agricultural development had disturbed the balance of nature. At the time, the federal government’s first fish and game agency, the Bureau of Biological Survey, was sponsoring research on the economic value of various species. Foster E.L. Beal, an economic ornithologist from the bureau, visited California three times between 1901 and 1906 and conducted studies on the agricultural relations of seventy bird species. He concluded that only four of these—the house finch, the scrub jay, Stellar’s jay, and the red-breasted sapsucker—were of “doubtful utility.” All of the state’s other common bird species benefited agriculture. “A reasonable way of viewing the relation of birds to the farmer,” Beal wrote, “is to consider birds as servants, employed to destroy weeds and insects. In return for this service they should be protected.”²⁷

Grinnell and Bryant took Beal’s argument and ran with it. They soon began to see economic benefits in almost every normal function of almost every native species. According to Grinnell, more than 90 percent of California’s bird species qualified as “community assets.” Bats were “desirable citizens” for consuming insects, gophers tilled and fertilized the soil, and beavers created habitats for juvenile fish by plumbing rivers.²⁸ As early as 1912, members of the Berkeley circle used the beneficial species argument to lobby for state protection of carnivorous mammals, which most people still considered pests. According to Grinnell and Bryant, predators helped to control undesirable rodent species and improve populations of game animals, such as deer, by culling the weakest members. By the 1920s, the Berkeley circle had emerged as a leading force in the nationwide effort to curtail predator control programs.

Grinnell and Bryant insisted that their arguments were utilitarian, not sentimental, but they viewed economic rationales at least in part as means to an end and sought to expand these arguments to incorporate noneconomic concerns. By 1913 Bryant was including not only fish and game but also nongame vertebrate species and even insects in his list of beneficial creatures. “Doubtless if our knowledge were not so limited,” he wrote, “we would be able to see a use for every living thing. As it is, we brand life as useful, neutral, or injurious because of its effect on ourselves or our environment.” According to him, this parsing of species had appreciable, damaging consequences: “Anything known to be useful is always assured protection, anything considered of no use is assured of speedy destruction. Hence, viewed from a utilitarian standpoint, there is a certain value in classifying life as injurious or beneficial.” When addressing friendly audiences, he often returned to the example of birds, which had a large constituency of advocates and a long tradition of aesthetic appreciation: “Somehow at this day and age the convincing value of a bird lies in its usefulness. . . . This point of view is exaggerated and the other real value,—the esthetic,—is left in the background; but we must meet the demands of the times.” Bryant understood the political value of a utilitarian argument, but his real convictions lay elsewhere.²⁹

FIGURE 8. The “Monument to Game Conservation” appeared on the cover of the first issue of Western Wild Life Call, in 1913, to draw attention to extinct and endangered species.

If all wild animals had aesthetic value or even pure intrinsic value, then human-induced extinctions posed a special problem that transcended mere economics (see figure 8). Indeed, extinction was one area in which Grinnell and Bryant wrote about conservation issues as explicitly ethical challenges. “It is now generally recognized as ethically wrong,” Grinnell wrote in 1914, “to jeopardize the existence of any animal species.” Bryant tied together economic and ethical arguments about extinction the following year when he wrote, “An extinct form of life can never be restored. In this ethical viewpoint we perhaps find the strongest argument of all. But add to this the economic viewpoint and we have an argument in favor of wild life conservation that defies every assailant.”³⁰

Grinnell’s commitment to the aesthetic and intrinsic values of wild animals did not prevent him from killing them in large numbers. He was a prodigious collector who bagged thousands of animals during his lifetime and facilitated the slaughter of tens of thousands more. He offered his motives, his credentials, and the uses to which he put the remains as justification for this carnage. According to him, animals that were killed for food or profit only benefited a few people for a few days, but animals preserved in a museum would benefit society for centuries. He encouraged amateur naturalists to avoid collecting eggs and to watch birds with opera glasses instead of killing them. But he chastised professional naturalists who shot pictures when they should have been shooting guns and argued with animal welfare advocates who called hunting inhumane or questioned the need for further scientific collecting of rare species. In 1915 he published a manifesto on the subject, “Conserve the Collector,” which argued that future biological research would depend on scientists having open access to vertebrate specimens, even in protected parks and reserves.³¹

Grinnell also lectured Bryant on the subject. As part of his job at the California Division of Fish and Game, Bryant handled requests for permits to collect specimens of protected species. He balked when his friend and fellow Grinnell protégé, Loye Miller, requested a permit to collect a white-tailed kite. Miller was a respected young researcher who would go on to found the Department of Life Sciences at UCLA. When Grinnell heard about the delay, he intervened on Miller’s behalf. “I do not believe that the species is anywhere near the point of extermination,” he wrote in a letter to Bryant. “There cannot be less than 100 of the birds alive in the State. . . . Specimens of the species should be preserved for science; and they can be without, I believe, jeopardizing the existence of the species.”³²

If the population of a charismatic raptor such as the white-tailed kite dropped to one hundred individuals in California today, scientists would consider it on the brink of a regional extinction and would call for a major mobilization of conservation resources. Yet Grinnell seemed almost blasé about the bird’s small population. The white-tailed kite has since rebounded in California, and today it is fairly common, but that outcome was by no means assured in 1915. Grinnell was correct in arguing that sport, market, and subsistence hunting, predator control, and habitat destruction were more important than scientific collecting in driving the decline of such species. Yet he must have known that with so few individuals the loss of even one could alter a population’s demographic trajectory and that small populations were especially at risk from scientific collecting. Grinnell was overconfident about the white-tailed kite’s status, but his mistake did not result from indifference to the species’s plight. Instead it stemmed from his stubborn support for science and his attribution of blame. “This wastage is not to be debited to the collector,” he insisted, “but to the average and very ignorant and numerous hunter.”³³

By 1916 Grinnell and Bryant had articulated a multifaceted argument for the conservation of California’s native fauna. It combined economics with ethics, utilitarianism with aesthetics, and instrumentalism with a concept of intrinsic value. They argued that wildlife was important for science, education, recreation, tourism, agriculture, natural resources, and even something akin to our contemporary notion of ecological services—the idea that wild species and healthy ecosystems perform essential functions for society that would be costly and difficult to replace by artificial means. Grinnell and Bryant were not alone in developing these ideas; they were part of a large network of conservationists throughout the United States and beyond. Yet these conservationists were not all of the same mind regarding the vital issues of the day. Three key groups shaped wildlife conservation during the Progressive Era, and each had a distinctive view on the contentious topic of hunting regulation.

HUNTING AND THE POLITICS OF CONSERVATION

Debates about fish and game regulation involved a variety of economic, political, and ethical issues, as well as basic conceptions of social status and identity. Groups on all sides claimed to have the support of moderate political majorities that advocated the most equitable and democratic solutions. But to gain such support, they portrayed social and economic differences as antagonistic dichotomies: rich versus poor, citizen versus alien, white versus nonwhite, rural versus urban, masculine versus feminine, ethical versus unethical, honorable versus dishonorable, public versus private, occupied with leisure versus consumed by work. The struggle over hunting regulation and its enforcement in California, as in other parts of the country, thus grew to encompass issues far beyond the conservation of wildlife and became a surrogate for much larger conversations about the social and moral order.

The three main groups of conservationists that debated these issues in California were the same as those that participated in fish and game controversies in other parts of the country. Among the advocates for additional regulations were the professional and amateur naturalists, such as the members of the Berkeley circle, who advocated for measures to conserve wildlife as a public good. Then there were the humanitarians—Protestant clergy, women’s club members, and temperance unions—who worried that cruelty toward animals, including unnecessary hunting, damaged the moral fiber of society. And finally there were the sportsmen, a group mostly made up of wealthy, white, urban men who wanted to secure a privileged place for recreational hunting and fishing as a way to maintain what they considered the rough, masculine virtues of the fading frontier and to combat the feminizing aspects of Victorian culture. They also tended to view working-class men, immigrants, and anyone who relied on fish and game to make ends meet as illegitimate users of these resources.³⁴

In practice these three groups overlapped, but rhetorically they often worked to maintain their boundaries. Sportsmen indulged in bird watching with female companions and sought to mobilize women’s groups for conservation campaigns, but they disregarded, and even belittled, sentimental arguments for animal welfare. Women’s groups played outsize roles in many conservation efforts, including the establishment of some of the country’s first environmental organizations, but they railed against the corrosive moral influence of bloodsports and were often excluded from the grounds of private sporting clubs. Individual women who crossed gendered boundaries or controlled significant financial resources, such as Annie Alexander, who did both, wielded considerable political influence, but they were few in number.

As for the naturalists, many amateurs were women, but most professionals were men who were also accomplished hunters. Naturalists often required sportsmen’s support to fund their projects and organizations. But a large fraction were middle-class academics and professionals who avoided identifying with sportsmen’s groups, which seemed to constitute a kind of New World aristocracy. In public, for example, Joseph Grinnell distanced himself from the sportsmen’s clubs, but in private he worked with them and courted their support. He or his assistants submitted anonymous dispatches, under the pseudonym Golden Gate, to the country’s preeminent sporting magazine, Forest and Stream, updating its subscribers on the California conservation campaign. Grinnell worked to retain the sportsmen’s financial support, including a $4,500 donation in 1914 on behalf of the Berkeley circle’s conservation efforts. And throughout his career he remained a member of the Boone and Crocket Club, a famous cabal of prominent sportsmen that included the former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and the club’s founder, Theodore Roosevelt.³⁵

It is impossible to say exactly how different groups of hunters and different forms of hunting contributed to the game declines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Market hunting must have made a significant impact. In 1895 and 1896, markets in Los Angeles and San Francisco alone sold 501,171 game birds, and this was only a fraction of the statewide total.³⁶ In a biological sense, however, market hunting was no different than subsistence or recreational hunting conducted lawfully under the same seasons and bag limits. The class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, rationale, fashion, style, and intention of the shooter mattered less than the number of animals taken, where, and when. What is clear is that hunting of all types—for sport, sale, science, and subsistence—rearranged wildlife populations, decimating some and creating new opportunities for others.

Hunting was, of course, not the only problem facing fish and game in the early twentieth century. Astute conservationists realized that complex factors—such as pollution, disease, exotic species, and habitat loss—all contributed to the decline of native fauna. No one knew this better than Grinnell, who had spent his early career watching the transformation of California’s wildlife habitats. At the time, however, conservationists had few policy or management tools available to address larger issues related to land use and environmental change. So most wildlife conservation efforts focused on hunting: who should be allowed to do it and for what purpose, how it should be conducted, and where and when it should be done. By the 1910s, many conservationists had come to believe that the only way to restore depleted wildlife populations was to turn hunting into a purely recreational endeavor by banning the sale of wild-caught game.³⁷

STATE REGULATION

During the Progressive Era, the states retained almost all of the legal authority over the fish and game within their boundaries, with the exception of a few areas such as Indian reservations. This authority derived from a series of court rulings in the nineteenth century that named the states as the lawful successors of the British crown and the colonies under common law. In the case of Martin v. Waddell (1842), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that after the American Revolution, the states became sovereigns with a general police power and the jurisdiction to maintain navigable waters, soils, and other natural resources in public trust for the common use of their citizens. The public trust doctrine remains a cornerstone of state wildlife and natural resources law.

Half a century later, in 1896’s Geer v. Connecticut, the court went even further when it ruled that the states owned the fish and game within their boundaries. This decision drew criticism for its flawed conception of property, and in 1979 the court overturned Geer when it ruled that Congress had the authority to govern wildlife on federal lands within state boundaries under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Yet Geer was only one of many court decisions that empowered the states to take the lead in most areas of fish and game conservation—a role they continue to play today.³⁸

By 1910, most states, including California, had extensive catalogues of fish and game codes. Yet these regulations remained limited to the harvest and sale of wild animals acquired through hunting, gathering, trapping, or fishing and did not include other measures such as habitat protection. There was little legal precedent for habitat protection, and few politicians believed state governments should own or manage nonessential properties. Instead of acquiring land or restricting its use, states sought to strengthen the rights of private landowners through measures such as increasing the scope and power of trespass and nuisance laws.³⁹

Conservationists advocated for new regulations on take and sale, but they encountered two main problems: cooperation and enforcement. The first was the lack of cooperation among the various agencies involved—within a state, among the states, and between the states and the federal government. Many conservationists regarded this as the single most important problem for fish and game. As early as the 1870s, government officials began to call for uniformity of closed seasons and bag limits so that hunters in one state could not monopolize the fish and game that the citizens of a neighboring state were attempting to protect. One vocal advocate for state cooperation was the activist, photographer, and Oregon state game warden William Finley. In 1913 he complained that sportsmen in Oregon had grown “tired of keeping seasons closed on certain birds for the sole purpose of allowing the California hunters to kill without regard to the breeding season.” The band-tailed pigeon, he wrote, was disappearing for exactly this reason “and may become extinct before many years.”⁴⁰

The federal government’s first two national wildlife laws both aimed to increase cooperation. The Lacey Act of 1900 made it a federal crime to engage in interstate commerce with wild animals that had been taken in violation of state laws. It also allowed the federal government to regulate the import of exotic species into the United States and authorized federal programs to restore native species in areas where they had declined. The purpose of the act, which came just four years after the Supreme Court’s Geer decision, was to strengthen the states by buttressing their laws with federal enforcement. Yet as the first national wildlife law, 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 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, 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 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.