Yosemite [Valley] is so wonderful that we are

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1 tll:!.. ;''",. T.." Part II: The Progressive Era, organized parties. To get results, one vote is absurd. An effectual vote means organization; and organization means primaries and conventions, and caucuses and office-holding, and work, and work, and more work. A ballot dropped in a box is not government, or power. This is what men are fighting out in politics, and we women ought to understand their problem. One reason that I, personally, do not want the ballot is that I have been brought up, in the middle of politics in a state that is full of them, and I know the labor they entail on public-spirited men. Politics, to me, does not mean unearned power, or the registering of one's opinion on public affairs-it means hard work, incessant organization and combination, continual perseverance against disappointment and betrayal, steadfast effort for small and hard-fought advance. I have seen too many friends and relatives in that battle to want to push any woman into it. And unless one goes into the battle the ballot is of no force. The suffragists do not expect to. They expect and urge that all that will be necessary will be for each woman to "register her opinion" and cast her ballot and go home. Where would the state be then-with an indifferent vote, a corrupt vote, and a helpless, unorganized vote, loaded on to its present political difficulties? Where would the state be with a douhled negro vote in the Black Belt? Where would New York and Chicago be with a doubled immigrant vote? I have two friends, sisters, one of them living in Utah, the other in Colorado-both suffrage states. The one in Colorado belongs to the indifferent vote. She is too busy to vote, and doesn't believe in it anyhow. The one in Utah goes to the polls regularly, not because she wants to vote, but because as she says 'The Mormons vote all their women solidly, and we Gentiles have to vote as a duty-and how we wish we were back again under manhood suffrage." Is the state benefited by an unwilling electorate such as that? For Further Reading Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women: American Anti- Suffragism, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Mary H. Grant, Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement. New York: Arno Press, Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party: Female Anti-Suffragists in the United States, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, Sheila M. Rothman, Womans Proper Place: A History ofchanging Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present. ew York: Basic Books, Anne Firor Scott and Andrew MacKay Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage. Philadelphia: Lippincott, A Hetch Hetchy Valley Should Be Preserved (1912) John Muir ( ) John Muir was an explorer and naturalist who played a leading role in starting the conservation movement in the United States. The founder of the Sierra Club, a conservation and environmental organization, Muir's writings and campaigns led to the establishment in 1890 of Yosemite ational Park (an area in California he had explored years earlier), and his contacts with President Theodore Roosevelt helped persuade the president to set aside millions of acres of other federal lands as parks and forest preserves. The following viewpoint is taken from a chapter in Muir's 1912 book, The Yosemite, describing the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The valley became the subject of an intense national debate when the city of San Francisco in 1890 and again in 1907 proposed to dam it to create a water supply for the city. Muir was the leading advocate of the "preservationist" camp that argued for maintaining the valley and other wilderness areas in their natural states. How does Muir characterize proponents of the dam? Are his views fundamentally opposed to the conservation beliefs of Gifford Pinchot, author of the opposing viewpoint? What does the national controversy over the project reveal about changing American values in the early twentieth century? Yosemite [Valley] is so wonderful that we are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, the only valley of its kind in the world; but ature is not so poor as to have only one of anything. Several other yosemites have been discovered in the Sierra that occupy the same relative positions on the [Sierra evada] Range and were formed by the same forces in the same kind of granite. One of these, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, is in the Yosemite National Park about twenty miles from Yosemite and is easily accessible to all sorts of travelers by a road and trail that leaves the Big Oak Flat road at Bronson Meadows a few miles below Crane Flat, and to mountaineers by way of Yosemite Creek basin and the head of the middle fork of the Tuolumne [River]. It is said to have been discovered by Joseph Screech, a hunter, in 1850, a year before the discovery of the great Yosemite. After my first visit to it in the autumn of 1871, I have always called it the "Tuolumne Yosemite," for it is a wonderfully exact From John Muir, The Yosemite ( ew York: Century, 1912).

2 Social Issues of the Progressioe Era 123 counterpart of the [famous] Merced Yosemite, not only in its sublime rocks and waterfalls but in the gardens, groves and meadows of its flowery park-like floor. The floor of Yosemite is about 4000 feet above the sea; the Retch Retchy floor about 3700 feet. And as the Merced River flows through Yosemite, so does the Tuolumne through Retch Hetchy The walls of both are of gray granite, rise abruptly from the floor, are sculptured in the same style and in both every rock is a glacier monument. Standing boldly out from the south wall is a strikingly picturesque rock called by the Indians, Kolana, the outermost of a group 2300 feet high, corresponding with the Cathedral Rocks of Yosemite both in relative position and form. On the opposite side of the Valley, facing Kolana, there is a counterpart of the EI Capitan that rises sheer and plain to a height of 1800 feet, and over its massive brow flows a stream which makes the most graceful fall I have ever seen. From the edge of the cliff to the top of an earthquake talus it is perfectly free in the air for a thousand feet before it is broken into cascades among talus boulders... "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike." The floor of the Valley is about three and a half miles long, and from a fourth to half a mile wide. The lower portion is mostly a level meadow about a mile long, with the trees restricted to the sides and the river banks, and partially separated from the main, upper, forested portion. by a low bar of glacierpolished granite across which the river breaks in rapids. The principal trees are the yellow and sugar pines, digger pine, incense cedar, Douglas spruce, silver fir, the California and golden-cup oaks, balsam cottonwood, uttall's flowering dogwood, alder, maple, laurel, tumion, etc. The most abundant and influential are the great yellow or silver pines like those of Yosemite, the tallest over two hundred feet in height, and the oaks assembled in magnificent groves with massive rugged trunks four to six feet in diameter, and broad, shady, wide-spreading heads. The shrubs forming conspicuous flowery clumps and tangles are manzanita, azalea, spiraea, brier-rose, several species of ceanothus, calycanthus, philadelphus, wild cherry, etc., with abundance of showy and fragrant herbaceous plants growing about them or out in the open in beds by themselves-lilies, Mariposa tulips, brodiaeas, orchids, iris, sprague a, draperia, collomia, collinsia, castilleja, nemophila, larkspur, columbine, goldenrods, sunflowers, mints of many species, honeysuckle, etc. Many fine ferns dwell here also, especially the beautiful and interesting rockferns-pellaea, and cheilanthes of several species-fringing and rosetting dry rock-piles and ledges; woodwardia and asplenium on damp spots with fronds six or seven feet high; the delicate maidenhair in mossy nooks by the falls, and the sturdy, broad-shouldered pteris covering nearly all the dry ground beneath the oaks and pines. It appears, therefore, that Retch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of ature's rarest and most precious mountain temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, their brows in the sky, their feet set in the groves and gay flowery meadows, while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to stir all the air into music--things frail and fleeting and types of permanence meeting here and blending, just as they do in Yosemite, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her. The Valley in Danger Sad to say, this most precious and sublime feature of the Yosemite ational Park, one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people, is in danger of being dammed and made into a reservoir to help supply San Francisco with water and light, thus flooding it from wall to wall and burying its gardens and groves one or two hundred feet deep. This grossly destructive commercial scheme has long been planned and urged (though water as pure and abundant can be got from sources outside of the people's park, in a dozen different places), because of the comparative cheapness of the dam and of the territory which it is sought to divert from the great uses to which it was dedicated in the Act of 1890 establishing the Yosemite ational Park The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized, Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where ature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little windowsill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands

3 .0. 0",,\ of." 124 Part II: The Progressive Era, of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent ational parks-the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc.-nature's subhme wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world. evertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, "Conservation, conservation, panutilization," that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was hkewise despoiled. Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed. The first application to the Government by the San Francisco Supervisors for the commercial use of Lake Eleanor and the Hetch Hetchy Valley was made in 1903, and on December 22nd of that year it was denied by the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. [Ethan A.] Hitchcock, who truthfully said: Presumably the Yosemite ational Park was created such by law because of the natural objects of varying degrees of scenic importance located within its boundaries, inclusive alike of its beautiful small lakes, like Eleanor, and its majestic wonders, like Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite Valley. It is the aggregation of such natural scenic features that makes the Yosemite Park a wonderland which the Congress of the United States sought by law to reserve for all coming time as nearly as practicable in the condition fashioned by the hand of the Creator-a worthy object of National pride and a source of healthful pleasure and rest for the thousands of people who may annually sojourn there during the heated months. In 1907 when Mr. [James R.] Garfield became Secretary of the Interior the application was renewed and granted; but under his successor, Mr. [Walter L.] Fisher, the matter has been referred to a Commission, which as this volume goes to press still has it under consideration... One of my later visits to the Valley was made in the autumn of 1907 with the late William Keith, the artist. The leaf-colors were then ripe, and the great godhke rocks in repose seemed to glow with life. The artist, under their spell, wandered day after day along the river and through the groves and gardens, studying the wonderful scenery; and, after making about forty sketches, declared with enthusiasm that although its walls were less sublime in height, in picturesque beauty and charm Hetch Hetchy surpassed even Yosemite. Misleading Arguments That anyone would try to destroy such a place seems incredible; but sad experience shows that there are people good enough and bad enough for anything. The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people's parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able. Their arguments are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden-so much of the very best Eden fruit goi.ng to waste; so much of the best Tuolumne water and Tuolumne scenery going to waste. Few of their statements are even partly true, and all are misleading. Thus, Hetch Hetchy, they say, is a "low-lying meadow." On the contrary, it is a high-lying natural landscape garden... "It is a common minor feature, like thousands of others." On the contrary it is a very uncommon feature; after Yosemite, the rarest and in many ways the most important in the ational Park. "Damming and submerging it 175 feet deep would enhance its beauty by forming a crystal-clear lake." Landscape gardens, places of recreation and worship, are never made beautiful by destroying and burying them. The beautiful sham lake, forsooth, would be only an eyesore, a dismal blot on the landscape, like many others to be seen in the Sierra. For, instead of keeping it at the same level all the year, allowing ature centuries of time to make new shores, it would, of course, be full only a month or two in the spring, when the snow is melting fast; then it would be gradually drained, exposing the slimy sides of the basin and shallower parts of the bottom, with the gathered drift and waste, death and decay of the upper basins, caught here instead of being swept on to decent natural burial along the banks of the river or in the sea. Thus the Hetch Hetchy dam-lake would be only a rough imitation of a natural lake for a few of the spring months, an open sepulcher for the others. "Retch Hetchy water is the purest of all to be found in the Sierra, unpolluted, and forever unpol- Iutable." On the contrary, excepting that of the Merced below Yosemite, it is less pure than that of most of the other Sierra streams, because of the sewerage of camp grounds draining into it, especially of the Big Tuolumne Meadows camp ground, occupied by hundreds of tourists and mountaineers, with their animals, for months every summer, soon to be followed by thousands from all the world.

4 Social Issues of the Progressive Era 125 A Contempt for Nature These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. 15B Hetch Hetchy Valley Should Be Dammed (1913) Gifford Pinchot ( ) Gifford Pinchot was director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry from 1898 to 1910 (the division was reorganized and renamed the U.S. Forest Service in 1905). His position and his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt (U.S. president from 1901 to 1909) made Pinchot one of America's leading conservationists. Roosevelt and Pinchot placed millions of acres of forests off-limits to logging and private development. Pinchot advocated a multi-use approach to utilizing the nation's natural resources-a position that sometimes placed him at odds with "preservationists" such as Sierra Club founder John Muir who called for the setting aside of lands for the sole purpose of wilderness protection. Pinchot's differences with preservationists were evident in the national debate over whether to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite ational Park to provide water for San Francisco--a development bitterly opposed by Muir and other environmentalists. In the following viewpoint, taken from testimony given before Congress in 1913, Pinchot defends his support of the dam as part of his general philosophy of favoring the utilization of America's natural resources for the greatest good of the people. Pineliot's testimony helped persuade Congress to pass a bill authorizing the Hetch Hetchy dam. What does Pinchot stress as the fundamental goal of conservation? Judging from arguments presented in viewpoint 15A, how might John Muir respond to Pinchot's fundamental principle? How does Pinchot describe his differences with Muir? We come now face to face with the perfectly ~lean 9uestion of what is the best use to which this water that flows out of the Sier- From Gifford Pinchot, testimony on the Hetcb Hetcby Dam site, Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 1st sess., June 25, ras can be put. As we all know, there is no use of water that is higher than the domestic use. Then, if there is, as the engineers tell us, no other source of supply that is anything like so reasonably available as this one; if this is the best, and within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water, we come straight to the question of whether 0e advantage ofleaving this valley in a state of nature IS greater than the advantage of using it for the benefit of the city of San Francisco. ow, the fundamental principle of the whole conservation policy is that of use, to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will best serve the most people, and I think there can be no question at all but that in this case we have an instance in which all weighty considerations demand the passage of the bill. There are, of course: a ~ery large number of incidental changes that will anse after the passage of the bill. The construction of roads, trails, and telephone systems which will follow the passage of this bill will be a very important help in the park and forest reserves. The national forest telephone system and the roads and trails to which this bill will lead will form an important additional help in fighting fire in the forest reserves... The presence of these additional means of communication will mean that the national forest and the national park will be visited by very large numbers of people who cannot visit them now. I think that the men who assert that it is better to leave a piece of natural scenery in its natural condition have rather the better of the argument, and I believe if we had nothing else to consider than the delight of the few men and women who would yearly go into the Hetch Hetchy Valley, then it should be left in its natural condition. But the considerations on the other side of the question to my mind are simply overwhelming, and so much so that I have never been able to see that there was any reasonable argument against the use of this water supply by the city of San Francisco... The Greatest Good Mr: {John E.] Raker [U.S. Congressman from California]. Taking the scenic beauty of the park as it now stands, and the fact that the valley is sometimes swamped along in June and July, is it not a fact that if a beautiful dam is put there, as is contemplated, and as the picture is given by the engineers, with the roads contemplated around the reservoir and with other trails, it will be more beautiful than it is now and give more opportunity for the use of the park? ' Mr. Pinchot. Whether it will be more beautiful I doubt, but the use of the park will be enormously increased. I think there is no doubt about that. Mr: Raker: In other words, to put it a different way,

5 126 Part II: The Progressive Era, there will be more beauty accessible than there is now? Mr. Pinchot. Much more beauty will be accessible than now. Mr. Raker. And by putting in roads and trails the Government, as well as the citizens of the Government, will get more pleasure out of it than at the present time? Mr. Pinchot. You might say from the standpoint of enjoyment of beauty and the greatest good to the greatest number, they will be conserved by the passage of this bill, and there will be a great deal more use of the beauty of the park than there is now. "The fundamental principle of the whole conservation policy is that of use, to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will best serve the most people. " Mr. Raker. Have you seen Mr. John Muir's criticism of the bill? You know him? Mr. Pinchot. Yes, sir; I know him very well. He is an old and very good friend of mine. I have never been able to agree with him in his attitude toward the Sierras for the reason that my point of view has never appealed to him at all. When I became Forester and denied the right to exclude sheep and cows from the Sierras, Mr. Muir thought I had made a great mistake, because I allowed the use by an acquired right of a large number of people to interfere with what would have been the utmost beauty of the forest. In this case I think he has unduly given away to beauty as against use. For Further Reading Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conseroation Movement, ew York: Atheneum, M. Nelson McGeary, Gifford Pinchot, Forester-Politician. Princeton, J: Princeton University Press, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, A Immigrants Harm American Society (1914) Edward Alsworth Ross ( ) Between 1880 and 1920 almost twenty-four nullion immigrants entered the United States. Many of them came from ethnic and religious backgrounds that put them at odds with America's white Protestant majority. Both the quantity and the ethnicity of the newcomers created much fear among Americans over immigration and its perceived threat to the American way of life. A good summary of the arguments made against immigration comes from the following viewpoint, excerpted from a book by Edward Alsworth Ross, a noted professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. What does Ross believe to be the main problem immigrants bring to America? How do immigrants affect the American system of education, according to Ross? Do his arguments reveal racial, religious, or other prejudices? Use examples from the viewpoint to support your answer. There is a certain anthracite town of 26,000 inhabitants in which are writ large the moral and social consequences of injecting 10,000 sixteenth-century people into a twentieth-century community. By their presence the foreigners necessarily lower the general plane of intelligence, selfrestraint, refinement, orderliness, and efficiency. With them, of course, comes an increase of drink and of the crimes from drink. The great excess of men among them leads to sexual immorality and the diffusion of private diseases. A primitive midwifery is practised, and the ignorance of the poor mothers fills the cemetery with tiny graves. The women go about their homes barefoot, and their rooms and clothing reek with the odors of cooking and uncleanliness. The standards of modesty are Elizabethan. The miners bathe in the kitchen before the females and children of the household, and women soon to become mothers appear in public unconcerned. The foreigners attend church regularly, but their noisy amusements banish the quiet Sunday. The foreign men, three-eighths of whom are illiterate, pride themselves on their physical strength rather than on their skill, and are willing to take jobs requiring nothing but brawn. Barriers of speech, education, and religious faith From Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Post and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914).