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Book Review
| Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. By Larry Anderson. Creating the North American Landscape series. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xi + 452 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $45.00.
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| As an attempted encapsulation of Benton MacKaye's varied life and work, the subtitle of Larry Anderson's fascinating biography might be extended almost indefinitely: forester, socialist, journalist, ecologist, radical, visionary ... Unfortunately, a more judgmental historian might with some justification end the list with yet another word: "Failure." Virtually none of MacKaye's numerous plans and projects came to fruition; he achieved no institutional prominence, published no writing of continuing influence, left no clear historical mark or legacy. Even the project with which his name is now most closely associated, the Appalachian Trail, was successful only after it was divested of much of MacKaye's original vision. And yet, as a person and as a thinker, MacKaye indisputably was one of the leading intellectual sources and stimulants in a variety of environmentally related fields throughout the twentieth century. As one colleague from the Tennessee Valley Authority, Earle Draper, said, "I can't put my fingers on anything definite that he accomplished in the planning, but I know he had an effect. ... You might say he was a contributing influence to the thinking of people in my division" (p. 257). |
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Benton MacKaye (the name rhymes with "high") was born in 1879 to a creative and sociable family—his father a playwright and theatrical producer, his mother an astute business partner and occasional literary critic, his four brothers and one sister active in artistic and intellectual circles. Initially based in New York City, the family moved around often during Benton's childhood (often as a result of mixed economic circumstances), but found an emotional center in a second home in rural Shirley, Massachusetts, which various members (especially Benton) would make their primary home at different periods of their lives. This stimulating and flexible family context was replicated throughout MacKaye's life in the various groupings of intellectuals, writers, radicals, government connections, artists, and fun-loving youth that surrounded him wherever he went, like the smoke from his omnipresent pipe. |
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