We're not going back. But maybe we should.

Thoughts on Bob Marshall, public lands, fascism, and the New Deal.

Published in conjunction with Torrey House Press’ The Thing With Feathers blog.

Bob Marshall was stranded in the rain 108 miles from the nearest settlement when his name appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Marshall and several companions had spent the six previous days dragging and motoring a 1,200-pound wooden tub up the Koyukuk River in Alaska, which they planned to use as a raft after they summited a peak in the Brooks Range. 

At 37 years old, Marshall had already held multiple high-ranking posts in the Department of Interior, and he’d recently taken a position as chief of the Department of Agriculture’s Public Lands Service. 

In their rainbound camp in remotest Alaska, Marshall and his friends discussed the economic pain being endured by most Americans, the growing fascist movements around the world, and why nations had succumbed to the scapegoating siren songs of dictators. The campers discussed looming environmental crises. The wild landscapes on public land that were being auctioned to private oil and mining interests. The eroded farmlands, the poisoned rivers, the Indigenous people who’d seen their land stolen, and the reservations where poverty was even more prevalent than in the struggling country as a whole. The inner cities where immigrants and the descendants of slaves were drowning in despair. And they again talked about the right-wing: how it was seeking to exploit all of the above to turn the poor against themselves for the benefit of the rich.

Yet their conversations betrayed an almost bottomless sense of optimism as the river swelled with the raw power of an August flood. Marshall argued, as he had argued for years, that several trends needed to continue to defeat the fascists and curb environmental devastation: public lands should be expanded and protected from corporate greed; millions of federally funded jobs should be created to build public works and conserve natural resources; and the workers—as many workers as possible—should be democratically organized to fight together for a common cause.

The year was 1938, and it was those very beliefs that had made Marshall’s name front-page news. The Times report was not favorable to Marshall, although he had no idea it existed. Marshall, along with seven other federal officials, had been accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a communist. The chief charge against him was that he’d made considerable contributions to the Workers Alliance of America, a group that was organizing the unemployed along with government workers for New Deal programs, especially in the Works Progress Administration. 

Marshall had inherited a considerable fortune that insulated him from the Great Depression, and he made large donations each year to the Wilderness Society, which he’d founded in 1935, and to the Workers Alliance. He saw the protection of workers and the protection of the natural world as two banks of the same democratic stream. Without economic security for the masses, he believed, xenophobia would rise along with temptation to further open the commons to corporate exploitation. But by putting people to work to respond to crises like the Dust Bowl, the commons could be expanded and democracy protected. To do this, he knew, platitudes about the “American spirit” and the coddling of the elites would not work. An enemy had to be named and singled out. For the New Dealers, it was oligarchy, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the “Government by organized money.” 

“They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred,” FDR famously said of the oligarchs during his second presidential campaign.

In 1938 the New Deal was promising a real path out of the Depression and the gambit, as we now know, worked. Workers organized themselves into strong unions, the government created jobs and enshrined worker protections at a rate never before seen, and fascism was defeated in Europe before it could take hold in the United States.

Today, we face not just a Dust Bowl but a global climate and extinction crisis. Working people are abandoning the Democratic Party and the wealthy are fleeing to it, finally breaking the New Deal order. The wholesale giveaway of public lands to private oil and gas interests is bipartisan policy. Legal constraints on necessary medical care are killing women, even as conservative states vote to protect abortion rights. There is no FDR in the White House supporting a working class movement in the name of democracy. The hundreds of thousands of nodes in the nonprofit industrial complex, most funded by businesses and the well-to-do, push for their own narrow issues. Few environmental groups that grew powerful in the wake of Marshall’s founding of the Wilderness Society see workforce development, rural coalition building, or the union movement as integral to their agenda. Meanwhile the commons crumble like the topsoil of an Oklahoma farm in the 1936 drought. 

But Marshall’s twin interests of worker power and environmental conservation are more necessary than ever. And it remains just as true today that pursuing one while ignoring the other only fans the fascist flames. Collective action is the only real check we’ve ever had on corporate rule and the only real defense against reactionary attacks on the vulnerable. 

If you work for a wage, Bob Marshall would say, organize your workplace. If you value public lands, don’t ignore the economic suffering of rural communities. If you’re blessed with a personal fortune as Marshall was, use it to support the material well being and collective power of those who are not. 

We are on our own now, and there are millions of us. We need not only a resistance that marches, but a resistance that builds.

— Learn more about Zak’s latest book, Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, at ZakPodmore.com