| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Green Republican: John Saylor and the Preservation of America's Wilderness. By Thomas G. Smith. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. x + 404 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $40.00.

This biography of John Saylor highlights the unexpected ways in which conservation politics mapped onto party and regional politics in the postwar era. Saylor was the most effective environmental legislator in the House of Representatives between 1949 and 1973. He was also a fierce patriot, supporter of gun rights, a champion of labor, defender of the coal industry, and a Republican. Although, as one of his colleagues remarked upon his death, "Where conservation was at stake ... John Saylor was neither Republican nor Democrat—he was an American" (p. 318). But as Thomas Smith argues, for Saylor, being a conservationist and a Republican were compatible commitments. Smith's biography offers a lucid and detailed account of Saylor's career, drawn from extensive archival research that gives primary attention to Saylor's role in national conservation politics. The central question that drives this biography is an important one: Why would a Republican from rural Pennsylvania have played such a leading role in national environmental debates?

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