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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.
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| 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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As Smith explains, Saylor grew up in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania near the small industrial city of Johnstown, which was powered by the region's coal mines and its steel industry. This was the district he represented in Congress. Saylor was an outdoorsman who valued public lands for fishing and hunting. He was religious and viewed the outdoors as God's creation. He was a patriot who considered the wilderness America's heritage. The key to Saylor's long political career, however, was his success in aligning his national role as a conservationist with the political interests of his home district. His fights to protect the nation's rivers and parks were also fights to limit the size of the federal government, rein in government spending, and keep the government out of the public hydroelectric business. All of those concerns, especially those that protected the coal industry and its labor force, played well in western Pennsylvania. |
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Saylor's political success at home, his ranking minority position on the House Interior Committee, and his personal commitment to the outdoors made him a powerful ally to the Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, and other national conservation organizations. Together, emphasizing recreation, aesthetics, and moderate policy goals, they laid the groundwork for much of the major conservation legislation of the 1960s and 1970s. His major achievements included protecting Echo Park, the Wilderness Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the establishment of Redwoods National Park. Often those achievements came after long negotiations with Democrat Wayne Aspinall, a westerner and foe of conservationists who chaired the House Interior Committee. In detailing Saylor's political career, this biography considers two areas of environmental history that have often been considered distinct: the history of the reclamation projects in the West and the history of efforts to protect the nation's public lands. In many respects, Saylor occupied a unique moment in the history of American environmental politics. As Smith's biography suggests, when Saylor died unexpectedly in 1973, so too did an important era in the history of environmental politics in Congress. |
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Jay Turner teaches environmental history and politics in the Environmental Studies Program at Wellesley College. He is finishing a book on wilderness and the history of American environmental politics. |
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