Wildlife management

            This article examines the federal government’s steadily increasing role in wildlife management, which began with the creation of the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) in the 1920s and finally culminated in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973.  While the early refuge system focused on migratory bird species with economic and outdoor recreational values, it always included the protection of severely over-hunted species like the trumpeter swan and whooping crane, and Congress gradually expanded its purview to an ecology-based protection of other threatened and endangered species.  Thus, rather than being an exclusive creation of the U.S. environmental movement, the ESA reflected the steady build-up of popular interest and bureaucratic capital directed toward the protection of biological species since the Progressive Era.  By studying the evolution of the NWRS from 1920 to 1973, this article recognizes the significance of continual and increasing federal efforts on behalf of wildlife, whereas many environmental movement histories posit or imply a disconnect between the ESA and earlier legislative initiatives.

In the period examined by this article, changes in legislation and administrative practice transformed the NWRS from a manager of migratory waterfowl to protector of endangered species.  In broader terms, this evolution provides a case study for the shift in American natural resources policy from an anthropocentric concept of utilitarian conservation to an ecology-derived ethic of environmentalism.  While historians have repeatedly examined this important shift in ideological terms, this article will show how the NWRS’s changing emphasis from game management to the protection of biological diversity emerged from the American policy process. 

Created in the 1920s and 1930s to ensure a future for American waterfowl hunting, the NWRS began emphasizing the protection of threatened and endangered wildlife species at least as early as the 1950s.  A series of congressional acts refining the mission of the NWRS culminated in the ESA, now the best-known responsibility of the NWRS and its parent agency, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), Department of the Interior (DOI).  Today, the National Wildlife Refuge System consists of over five hundred administrative units and more than ninety-three million acres across all fifty states and several U.S. territories.  The NWRS is the federal government’s third largest system of conservation-managed lands, and it provides the core of federal efforts on behalf of both migratory birds and endangered species.^[1]  The FWS holds a legislative mandate for continued refuge land acquisition, while federal taxes on hunting and other outdoor recreation activities provide significant sources of annual, earmarked funding for the system.  The refuge system’s roots in game management have not been abandoned, but enveloped within the newer emphasis on the protection of endangered species.

            Historians, who have focused either on the conservation movement preceding it, or the environmental movement following it, have neglected the critical period of NWRS development covered by this article.  No previous historian has produced a sustained analysis of the NWRS, America’s key institution in the protection of wildlife, and arguably the federal government’s natural resources agency most transformed by the shift from conservation to environmentalism.  By examining the critical period of NWRS development from 1920 to 1973, this article fills a significant historiographical gap.  Following the outline of major legislative initiatives, this study traces the evolution of the system in both the legislative and policy-making arenas, examining the interplay of legislators and bureaucrats.  It also considers the roles of interest groups lobbying for and against refuge-related initiatives, including conservationists (National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, and Izaak Walton League of America), scientists (American Ornithologists’ Union), other government agencies (International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies), and business-affiliated groups (American Game Association and Wildlife Management Institute).  This article bridges the historical gap between the conservation and environmental movements, and shows the continuities and transformations of NWRS priorities across political eras from the Republican New Era of the 1920s to the Great Society of the 1960s and the environmental decade of the 1970s.

            The conservation movement is a well-known aspect American history and a staple of textbook accounts of the early twentieth century.  Personified by Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot, the typical account portrays the conservation movement as the progressive response to the closing of the American frontier and the waste of natural resources, particularly forestry products, associated with a fast-growing, urban-industrial economy.  Samuel Hays’ now-classic text on the era argued that American natural resource development became dominated by the “gospel of efficiency,” where scientific experts would rationally exploit the national wealth with a minimum of waste.  Focusing on the politics of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation, Hays paid little attention to the issue of wildlife protection during the conservation movement, and his only mention of migratory bird refuges inaccurately dated their authorization to 1913.[2] 

            While most historians have followed Hays’ lead by restricting conservation to debates over forestry, mining, and hydroelectricity, this article places wildlife squarely within the conservation movement, building on a largely separate literature of American wildlife conservation history.  The earliest histories of wildlife conservation efforts were written by participants, many of whom had been involved with wildlife conservation efforts since the late nineteenth century, when the near extinction of the American bison pointed up the fragility of wildlife populations under severe hunting pressure.  William T. Hornaday, long-time director of the Bronx Zoo and founder of both the American Bison Society and Permanent Fund for Wildlife Protection, wrote the most strident and voluminous accounts.  Hornaday urged his readers to recognize the urgent need for new limits on hunting, especially of migratory birds, and continuously predicted the imminent extinction of multiple bird species.[3]  In contrast, former senator and lobbyist Harry B. Hawes stressed the contributions of hunters and fishermen to conservation, while ranting against wildlife-loving “sentimentalists” and providing occasional glimpses at his own involvement in wildlife legislation, in Fish and Game: Now or Never.[4]  Two years later, T. Gilbert Pearson recounted his nearly thirty-year-leadership of the National Association of Audubon Societies, precursor to today’s National Audubon Society, in the informative and valuable, though largely anecdotal, Adventures in Bird Conservation.  Having been charged with over-closeness to arms and ammunition companies and recently forced out of the Audubon presidency, Pearson sometimes seemed more focused on defending his record rather than closely detailing long struggles for wildlife conservation legislation.[5]  Noted waterfowl expert and one-time chairman of the American Committee for International Wild Life Protection, John C. Phillips offered a briefer and alternative insider’s view of many events described by Pearson in his pamphlet history of federal wildlife conservation.[6]  A long-time officer of the American Game Protective Association, William S. Haskell wrote a short and celebratory history of that gun company-backed lobbying group and its causes.[7]  Though differing in viewpoint and possible solutions, all of these writers shared a deep concern with the sharply declining populations of American wildlife, especially migratory birds, in the first third of the twentieth century.

            Retrospective organizational and institutional histories make up the next significant category of work on wildlife conservation.  Usually sponsored by the subject organization, these histories range from self-congratulatory to well-considered scholarship.  James B. Trefethen’s Crusade for Wildlife, which chronicled the elite Boone and Crockett Club founded by Theodore Roosevelt, was one of the earliest examples of such books.[8]  Other examples include Thomas B. Allen’s Guardian of the Wild on the National Wildlife Federation and Frank Graham’s The Audubon Ark for the National Audubon Society.[9]  In A Passion for Birds, Mark V. Barrow, Jr. has centered an excellent account of American ornithology from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s on the history of their leading professional society, the American Ornithologists’ Union.[10]  By far, the best such work is Dian O. Belanger’s Managing American Wildlife, which examined the history of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, an umbrella organization of federal, state and Canadian wildlife agency officials.  Going well beyond a simple chronological narrative, Belanger produced a well-sourced account of the International Association within the context of the conservation and environmental movements from its founding in 1902 to the 1980s, a clear model for any administrative history.[11] 

            Like organizational histories, biographies have offered more or less limited perspectives on long-term legislative processes.  David L. Lendt’s Ding: The Life of Jay Norwood Darling devoted several chapters to the varied wildlife conservation interests of the nationally syndicated political cartoonist, who served a brief stint as chief of the Biological Survey in the 1930s.  But, much like Darling’s wavering and varied interest in conservation matters, Lendt provides little sustained focus on ongoing events or institutions.  To date, Darling and C. Hart Merriam, whose chieftainship of the Biological Survey and its forerunners (1886-1911) preceded the primary interests of this article, are the only Survey chiefs or Fish and Wildlife Service directors to receive in-depth biographical attention. [12]  Gilbert C. Fite’s biography of leading Senate wildlife conservationist Peter Norbeck (R-SD) devoted a chapter to his battles for conservation in the Senate, yet ignored the equally vital campaigns in the House.[13]  Unfortunately, biographies of other pivotal legislators, including Smith Brookhart (R-IA), Key Pittman (D-NV), and Charles McNary (R-OR), have failed even to mention their strong support of federal wildlife legislation.^[14]  Recently, in his wistful memoir, Henry Reuss, long-time U.S. Representative from Wisconsin, devoted one chapter to “The Environment,” included a very few lines on his role in authorizing the feeding waterfowl from Commodity Credit Corporation grain stocks and the prohibition of USDA drainage subsidies.[15]  Of course, many modern legislators key to wildlife conservation, including Sen. A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) and the two John Dingells (Democratic Representatives from Michigan) have yet to receive scholarly biographical attention.  Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior under FDR, has been the subject of several biographies, but T. H. Watkins’s Righteous Pilgrim provided the best account of Ickes’ several efforts to transform his agency into a Department of Conservation.  However, like all of the many accounts on this struggle, Watkins’s account is completely dominated by the failed effort to transfer the Forest Service to Interior, with only passing reference to the culminated transfers of the Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries.[16]  Recent articles on William T. Hornaday and sometime ally Rosalie Edge, chair of the Emergency Conservation Committee, have detailed the positions of these leading wildlife preservationists, stressing their many disagreements with leaders of the Biological Survey.[17]

            Outside of biographical accounts and organizational histories, the scholarly literature on American wildlife conservation is rather limited, especially for the period preceding the environmental movement.  First published in 1975, John F. Reiger’s American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation advanced the still-controversial idea that hunting sportsmen have been the overlooked but key actors in the history of wildlife conservation.  Building in part on Trefethen’s history of the Boone and Crockett Club, Reiger persuasively argued that concerned hunters provided the impetus and public support for the protection of American wildlife in the nineteenth century.  While Reiger carried his study only to 1900, his thesis is quite applicable to later developments regarding wildlife conservation.  In particular, the creation of the American Game Protective and Propagation Association in 1911 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936 centered on protecting the prerogatives of American sportsmen.  Unfortunately, neither Reiger nor subsequent historians have picked up the gauntlet laid down by American Sportsmen and formulated a sportsmen-centered narrative of wildlife conservation in the twentieth century.  While this article will not focus exclusively or even primarily on the conservation efforts of hunters and sportsmen’s organizations, it will try to highlight their contributions and efforts to a greater degree than previous histories.[18] 

Kurkpatrick Dorsey’s The Dawn of Conservation History detailed the negotiation of three wildlife conservation treaties between the United States and Canada, including the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, which together solidified federal government control over migratory birds in both countries.  In a twist on the usual separate treatment of conservation’s utilitarian and preservation components, Dorsey argued that the relative strength of each treaty and accompanying enabling legislation depended on proponents’ success in marshalling public sentiment for conservation behind scientific evidence for further harvest controls.[19]  Examining federal conservation policies and legislation in the Republican-dominated years between 1921 and 1933 and generally serving as a follow-up to Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, Donald C. Swain’s Federal Conservation Policy devoted a full chapter to wildlife conservation efforts.  While he argued that conservation generally strengthened in the 1920s, Swain found that wildlife conservation suffered from the institutional weakness of the Bureau of Biological Survey, predecessor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.[20]  While both Dorsey and Swain demonstrated thorough research and persuasive theses, neither devoted much discussion to the subsequent impact of discussed legislation.

A revision and expansion of his earlier work on the Boone and Crockett Club, James Trefethen’s An American Crusade for Wildlife represents the one attempt at a comprehensive history of American wildlife conservation, from the colonial era to the last third of the twentieth century.  However, because of the unforeseen developments and consequences of wildlife conservation since 1975, Trefethen’s analysis is now badly outdated.  Also, while Trefethen displayed more interest in the National Wildlife Refuge System and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service than most historians of conservation, he apparently did little primary research on the subject, relying on memoirs, press accounts, or secondary sources to create a largely anecdotal history of the refuge system’s creation and, to a lesser extent, its subsequent growth.  The details of the public policy process and its subsequent effects on the refuge system’s institutional development had little effect on Trefethen’s personality-driven narrative, while they will be important aspects of this article project.[21]

            A limited number of historical works have treated federal wildlife legislation as a vital part of connected narratives.  The complicated framework of Thomas R. Dunlap’s Saving America’s Wildlife allowed for some discussion of early federal wildlife legislation.  However, Dunlap’s primary interest was the philosophical shifts among wildlife management practices towards predators rather than the game bird protection emphasized by the federal legislation of the 1920s and 1930s.^[22]  Stephen Fox’s unconventional but substantive blend of a John Muir biography and narrative of American conservation has done the best job to date of integrating wildlife conservation with the broader history of American conservation.  In pointing up the cliquish but influential leadership of wildlife conservation from the 1920s through the 1950s, Fox identified how several limited membership, under-funded conservation groups gained approval for the significant federal wildlife legislation preceding the environmental movement.[23]  The several editions of Michael J. Bean’s The Evolution of National Wildlife Law provide a law school textbook on the legal framework of wildlife conservation, necessarily including the federal agencies that administer the law.  But, Bean’s work is much more concerned with courtroom applications of the law than the political and legislative processes that produced it, which limits its historical value.^[24]

            A pressing need in the historical literature on wildlife conservation is an in-depth treatment of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the preeminent federal agency in wildlife conservation and one of the four principal federal land management agencies.  Though published in 1929, Jenks Cameron’s Bureau of Biological Survey remains the only full-scale institutional history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s principal predecessor.  Examining the Biological Survey’s history from its beginnings as a division of economic ornithology in1885 to full-fledged bureau in the Department of Agriculture at the date of his publication in 1929, Cameron detected a steady shift in the agency’s work from investigative, biological research to applied fieldwork and administrative duties.  Though the Biological Survey’s work with wildlife refuges (then known as national bird reservations) was relatively limited in 1929, their later growth arguably fits within Cameron’s thesis of increasing administrative duties and declining scientific research.[25]

            Later works concerning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have addressed its responsibilities with the NWRS, but tend to provide only a specific policy snapshot rather than the historical account of institutional growth furnished by this article project.  Ira N. Gabrielson, the last chief of the Biological Survey and first director of the Fish & Wildlife Service (following the 1940 merger of the Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries), produced Wildlife Refuges during World War II.  Intended for a mass audience, this wide-ranging but intellectually shallow book examined the various types of wildlife refuges in the United States, but provided only anecdotal histories of individual areas.^[26]  Albert M. Day, Gabrielson’s successor as director of the FWS, first published North American Waterfowl in 1949, which provided another account of wildlife conservation intended for a popular audience.  Of greater interest to this article, Day’s revised edition of 1959 accused President Eisenhower of politicizing the Fish & Wildlife Service by replacing career civil servants with political appointees at its highest levels.^[27]  Nathaniel P. Reed and Dennis Drabelle, also former high-ranking FWS officials, produced The United States Fish and Wildlife Service, a readable policy study of the agency’s organization in the early 1980s containing very little historical analysis.[28]

            In contrast to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, its component National Parks and, to a lesser degree, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have been the subject of numerous historical accounts.  Since the 1970s, historians of the environmental movement have scrutinized the history of the National Park Service to explain its role in the recurrent dam-building controversies of the 1960s and 1970s.  Historians from across the ideological spectrum focused on the BLM’s history in the 1980s and 1990s to attack or justify the “sagebrush rebellion” of Western politics during the Reagan administration.[29]  The National Park Service has been particularly supportive of historical research, continually sponsoring administrative histories of individual park units by both agency historians and contractors.[30]  These largely institutional accounts often posit their subject as a significant source of continuity between the conservation movement of the Progressive Era and the environmental movement of the Cold War era.

            The current lack of historical monographs on the FWS has been reflected in its near total omission from recent historical overviews of American environmentalism.  For example, Hal Rothman’s recent and influential work, The Greening of a Nation?, devoted a full chapter to “Institutional Environmentalism: Federal Agencies and their Publics,” which reviewed the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Reclamation, but entirely omitted the Fish & Wildlife Service.  In fact, Rothman’s work did not discuss the FWS even during his consideration of the endangered species acts of 1966, 1969, and 1973 and failed to provide an index listing for it.^[31]  Similarly, the lack of monograph studies on refuges and the Fish & Wildlife Service allowed esteemed environmental historian Samuel P. Hays to mischaracterize appreciation of wetlands as a post-1960 phenomenon, rather than a value institutionalized in the refuge creations of the 1920s and 1930s.^[32]

            The absence of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is also glaring in general political histories and textbooks.  While the National Park Service and Forest Service are often mentioned, if only in passing, the absence of the Fish & Wildlife Service is nearly assured, despite its long-leading role in preserving the “charismatic mega-fauna” that so often symbolized the aims of conservationists and environmentalists.  Notably, even in Ted Steinberg’s new environment-centered and otherwise excellent, general text of American history, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service merited only two mentions.[33]

Clearly, a significant gap exists in the current historical literature in regards to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the important wildlife conservation role of its National Wildlife Refuge System.  While the federal government’s other land management agencies have been the subjects and/or sponsors of considerable scholarship, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has largely escaped scholarly attention.  Unlike the National Park System, the NWRS has also failed to garner significant study.  In turn, the lack of Fish and Wildlife Service-related monographs has meant the neglect of this subject in the syntheses of conservation and environmental history.

            The history of the National Wildlife Refuge System exists within a context of federal government efforts for conservation, and a larger community of interests that supported those efforts.  By 1920, when this article picks up the story, federal government involvement in wildlife conservation dated back about a generation.  In 1885, at the urging of the newly established American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), Congress created a new section devoted to ornithology within the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Entomology.  Continually prodded by the well-connected AOU, Congress raised the ornithology section to the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy in 1886, renamed it the Division of Biological Survey in 1896, and expanded it to full bureau status in 1905.  A small, scientific agency, the Biological Survey most visibly employed its ornithologists and mammalogists in expeditions to classify and map the life zones of western U.S. wildlife.[34]  Meanwhile, the destruction of the bison herds of the Great Plains and the passenger pigeon flocks of the Midwest alerted the American public to the dangers of unregulated hunting of wildlife, even while the feather fashions of the millinery industry wreaked havoc on bird species previously considered non-game birds.[35]

            In the opening years of the twentieth century, the federal government took its first steps to actively protect American wildlife, particularly migratory birds.  With the backing of the elite hunter-conservationists of the Boone & Crockett Club, Congress passed the Lacey Act, in 1900.  Named for Rep. John F. Lacey (R-IA), chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, this act applied the federal government’s commerce clause powers to transactions involving wildlife and required that wild game taken and shipped across state lines be legally taken and possessed in both the state of origin and state of destination.[36]  Directed primarily against plume and meat market hunters, the Lacey Act represented the first federal legislation on behalf of migratory birds.  The Secretary of Agriculture assigned Lacey Act administration to the Bureau of Biological Survey, beginning that agency’s transformation from a strictly scientific agency to a managerial one, though enforcement largely depended on cooperation with other federal and state agencies or the interest of Audubon society members.  Since wide disparities in state laws continued after 1900, the over-hunting of migratory animals greatly alarmed wildlife conservation activists and provoked calls for further federal government action.^[37]

On 14 March 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt created the Pelican Island National Bird Reservation, the first of today’s national wildlife refuges.  According to T. Gilbert Pearson, the Pelican Island reservation resulted from the efforts of several prominent Audubon Society members involved in the struggle to protect Florida’s birds from plume hunters.  When they learned that the federal government owned Pelican Island, they applied to TR for the reservation, which he promptly granted.  As with the Lacey Act, the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture received administrative responsibility for Pelican Island, furthering its transformation from a scientific agency to an administrative one.  The Committee on Bird Protection of the American Ornithologists’ Union already employed a warden, Paul Kroegel, for Pelican Island and soon after the refuge’s creation, committee chairman William T. Dutcher arranged for his designation as a federal game warden, although he continued to be paid by the AOU until 1905, when the new National Association of Audubon Societies assumed the cost.[38]  Congress belatedly and implicitly approved TR’s innovation by a law of 28 June 1906, which outlawed the disturbance of birds “on any United States lands which had been set apart as breeding-grounds for birds by law, proclamation, or executive order, except under regulation by the Secretary of Agriculture” [emphasis in original].  Importantly, as custodian of the national bird reservations, the Secretary of Agriculture had the discretion to allow scientific collecting (an important part of contemporary ornithology) or other hunting on the nascent wildlife refuges.  Ultimately, TR designated fifty-one bird reservations from the public domain before leaving office on 4 March 1909.[39]

            The unique problem of over-hunted migratory birds, which crossed multiple state and international lines, provided the opening wedge for a much larger federal role in American wildlife conservation.  Between 1904 and 1912, activists such as William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Society, and William Dutcher, first president of the National Association of Audubon Societies (precursor to today’s National Audubon Society), convinced sympathetic Congressmen to introduce legislation to give the federal government an active role in regulating and enforcing seasons and bag limits on migratory game.  A one-term congressman and noted wildlife photographer, George Shiras III (R-PA) presented the first legislation for federal control over migratory birds in 1904.  He introduced House bill 15601, “to protect the migratory game birds of the United States,” in the lame-duck session of the 58th Congress.^[40]  Rep. John Weeks of Massachusetts, Rep. Daniel Anthony of Kansas, and Sen. George McLean of Connecticut, all Republicans, later picked up the idea, resulting in various bills in the 61st and 62nd Congresses.  Fearing the disappearance of American hunting and its attendant sporting goods industry, gun and ammunition companies sponsored the American Game Protective Association (AGPA) to revive and lobby for an expanded version of the Shiras proposal in 1911.^[41]  In the same year the National Association of Audubon Societies (NAAS) significantly expanded its lobbying efforts with the hiring of T. Gilbert Pearson as full-time executive secretary.[42]  These efforts gained success in March 1913, at the end of the 62nd Congress, when McLean (whose state held the headquarters of the major arms and ammunition companies) appended his bill to a Department of Agriculture Appropriations bill and President Taft (not knowing of the “rider” legislation, a type he opposed on principle) signed it into law on his hectic last day in office.^[43]

            The new law, formally known as the Migratory Bird Act (MBA) but popularly referred to as the Weeks-McLean Act for its chief congressional sponsors, gave the Secretary of Agriculture significant new authority over the hunting of migratory birds.  In practice, the Secretary delegated his authority to the experts of the Biological Survey, again increasing its managerial responsibilities.  The Survey’s staff, particularly sometime Assistant Chief Theodore S. Palmer, had been compiling and publishing the various state hunting seasons for years as part of the USDA’s Farmers’ Bulletin series.  State regulations regarding migratory birds had varied wildly, and state governments often subscribed to the idea that the best hunting season allowed their residents to kill as many birds as possible before the game migrated to the next state.  Also, many states had allowed hunters to shoot birds in the spring, as they were migrating to their nesting areas, which biologists realized disrupted breeding by breaking up mated pairs of birds.  In national regulations ratified by the Secretary of Agriculture and the President, the Biological Survey proscribed spring hunting and limited the fall hunt to a maximum of three and a half months.  The Survey divided the continental United States into northern and southern zones, within which hunting seasons could be further reduced by state action, but not extended beyond the federal limits.^[44]

            However, the enforcement mechanisms of the Weeks-McLean Act quickly proved limited.  Strong congressional resistance to funding vigorous federal law enforcement of hunting regulations meant the Biological Survey could afford at most seventeen district inspectors, or federal game wardens, to enforce the law in the entire United States, although many States rendered valuable cooperative enforcement.[45]  Narrowly drafted, the MBA did not provide the power of arrest to the Biological Survey’s game wardens, nor did it outlaw the possession of birds during the closed season, thus making successful prosecutions of lawbreakers difficult.[46]  Additionally, MBA opponents raised questions of the act’s constitutionality in federal courts and sympathetic judges soon prevented its enforcement in several key areas of heavy migratory bird hunting.  A number of congressmen, particularly House Majority Leader Frank Mondell (R-WY), had opposed the Weeks-McLean Act on constitutional grounds during debate over its passage.[47]  Later, they provided scathing criticisms during debates over annual enforcement appropriations.[48]  Even those most sympathetic to the new migratory bird law, including Senator McLean and former Congressman Shiras, entertained some doubts as to the Weeks-McLean Act’s constitutionality.^[49]

            Although opponents challenged the MBA all the way to the Supreme Court, the Migratory Bird Treaty (MBT) deftly and preemptively girded the constitutionality of congressional action on behalf of migratory game by linking it to the U. S. Constitution’s treaty clause.[50]  Initiated in 1913 in response to a Senate resolution sponsored by Sen. McLean,[51] the United States and Great Britain, acting on behalf of Canada, ratified the treaty in 1916 despite the diplomatic strains of World War I.  The treaty committed both the United States and Canada to act through their federal governments to preserve the migratory bird species that crossed their border.  The treaty also placed numerous bird species classified as non-game and insectivorous under permanent no-hunting protection to maintain their benefits to agriculture.[52]
            Despite strident opposition by Sen. James Reed (D-MO) and Rep. Mondell, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) enacted the terms of the treaty in the United States in 1918.  The Migratory Bird Treaty and MBTA ensured firm federal control over migratory game seasons and bag limits, delegating their enforcement to the Secretary of Agriculture, and, following the earlier practice, to the Bureau of Biological Survey.  On 19 April 1920, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of both the MBT and MBTA in the case of Missouri v. Holland.  Writing for the 7-2 majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected Missouri’s argument that the MBT and MBTA unconstitutionally usurped that State’s exclusive rights to migratory birds: “Wild birds are not in the possession of anyone; and possession is the beginning of ownership.  The whole foundation of the State’s rights is the presence within their jurisdiction of birds that yesterday had not arrived, tomorrow may be in another State and in a week a thousand miles away.”  Holmes’s decision also noted that treaties had consistently been held to a different constitutional standard than acts of Congress and concluded with a ringing endorsement of the treaty’s pragmatism:

           Here a national interest of very nearly the first magnitude is involved.  It can be protected only by national action in concert with that of another power.  The subject matter is only transitorily within the State and has no permanent habitat therein.  But for the treaty and the statute there soon might be no birds for any powers to deal with.  We see nothing in the Constitution that compels the Government to sit by while a food supply is cut off and the protectors of our forest and our crops are destroyed.  It is not sufficient to rely upon the States.  The reliance is vain, and were it otherwise, the question is whether the United States is forbidden to act.  We are of opinion that the treaty and statute must be upheld.[53]

The Court thus affirmed the ability and responsibility of the federal government to protect the populations of migratory birds within the United States by regulations of the Department of Agriculture.

            Even before the Supreme Court decided Missouri v. Holland, wildlife conservationists began looking beyond hunting controls to ensure healthy future bird populations.  As early as 1916, the Biological Survey officially warned that drainage projects “in the vicinity of the Klamath and Malheur Reservations in Oregon and the Big Lake Reservation in Arkansas, as well as projects of similar kind for draining private lands in various parts of the country, emphasize the importance and necessity of retaining as breeding grounds for waterfowl and other birds tracts of land which are not especially valuable for agricultural purposes.  Only in this way can proper provision be made for the maintenance and increase of an adequate supply of waterfowl.”[54]  On 18 February 1919, in a speech to a conservation convention at Ottawa, Canada, Edward W. Nelson, chief of the Biological Survey from 1916 to 1927, raised an international alarm over the expansive drainage of the North American wetlands vital for waterfowl.  Noting that habitat loss already threatened the trumpeter swan and whooping crane with extinction, Nelson warned that “if the drainage and devotion to agriculture and other purposes of the marshy areas continue, migratory waterfowl will diminish despite every effort along other lines to conserve them.”  He urged Canada and the United States to cooperate in the establishment of sanctuaries on both sides of the border.[55]  Later that year, in his annual report to the Secretary of Agriculture, Nelson wrote: “Increased protected areas suitable for breeding places for the migratory wild geese, ducks, cranes, swans, curlew, and shore birds should be provided.  Additional wild-fowl refuges along the paths of migration are needed in order to secure improved and equalized opportunities for shooting wild fowl for food and for recreation, particularly in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois.”[56]  The disruption of European agriculture in the First World War had created a premium for U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Canadian, agricultural products, which financed a widespread effort to bring every possible acre under the plow.  By 1924 wildlife advocates asserted that, within the continental United States, Americans had drained an area of wetlands larger in total area than the Great Lakes, or twice the area of the New England states.^[57]

            Presciently recognizing this threat to migratory birds, Nelson called for an expansion of the bird reservation system pioneered by Theodore Roosevelt with Pelican Island in 1903.  By 1920, the Bureau of Biological Survey administered about 70 of these reservations, spread unevenly from the state of Florida to the territories of Alaska and Hawaii.  Created by presidential executive orders reserving them settlement claims on the public domain, these early refuges largely consisted of rocky, offshore islands or lands surrounding federal reclamation projects.  The Biological Survey held little legislative mandate for this seminal system, limited congressional funding allowed the Survey to provide full-time or part-time warden service for only about two dozen reservations, and a number of reservations had already been dissolved or significantly shrunken by subsequent executive orders.[58]  Still, by 1920, the Bureau of Biological Survey held a clear responsibility for regulating the hunting of migratory birds through the MBT and MBTA, and a possible means of protecting bird habitat through the idea of the national bird reservation.

LEGISLATIVE AUTHORIZATION FOR A REFUGE SYSTEM, 1921-1929

            To far-sighted biologists, conservationists, and legislators, the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916 created both the justification and obligation for a truly national system of bird reservations maintained by the federal government of the United States.  Although neither the treaty nor its enabling act of 1918 contained explicit provisions for such a federal refuge system, conservationists already recognized habitat preservation as a vital part of migratory bird conservation.  In particular, the NAAS and its early leaders had pioneered the creation and protection of both public and private bird sanctuaries, largely for the benefit of coastal rookeries of pelicans, egrets, and other colonial birds, but with equal protection for all bird species.[59]  As noted above, the Biological Survey officially noted its concern over the increased drainage of vital wetlands wildlife habitat in 1916, and called for an expanded refuge system for migratory game birds in 1919.  In July 1919, at the initiative of an officer formerly connected with the Biological Survey, the AGPA began openly appealing for a national system of publicly controlled marshlands to serve as both bird refuges and public shooting grounds.  On the request of Survey chief Edward W. Nelson, the IAGFCC appointed a committee to study the conditions of wetlands habitat at its annual meeting of October 1919.[60]  But the unsettled legal status of federal control over migratory birds meant that few resources could be devoted to such plans.

            With the Supreme Court decision of Holland v. Missouri confirming the Migratory Bird Treaty and the federal government’s responsibility for migratory birds in April 1920, wildlife conservationists began seriously considering plans to establish a national system of bird reservations.  At the urging of former Rep. George Shiras, then a member of its board of directors, the AGPA had already endorsed funding a system of refuges and public shooting grounds through a federal hunting license in January 1920.  The MBTA Advisory Board provided a similar endorsement in June 1920, joined by the IAGFCC in September 1920, and the National Game Conference of January 1921.[61]  Nelson directed United States Game Warden George A. Lawyer to prepare a legislative bill for a federal refuge system in consultation with AGPA President John Burnham.  Between October 1920 and April 1921, Lawyer, Nelson, and Burnham devised and revised multiple bill drafts.[62]  In the meantime, T. Gilbert Pearson, now president of the NAAS, presented an outline of the plan to the Agriculture Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations on 8 January 1921.  Although the reasons for Pearson rather than Burnham making this particular committee appearance remain unclear, the NAAS of this era enjoyed a very close relationship with the Biological Survey through overlapping personnel at the highest levels, making Pearson’s role as a spokesman not unusual.[63]  Pearson briefly described a national system of wildlife refuges, to be funded by a $1 federal license on migratory bird hunters.  In addition to land acquisition, the $1 license would fund the larger number of federal game wardens necessary to adequately enforce the MBTA regulations.^[64]  Although no legislation embodying the proposal was immediately introduced, Pearson’s short appearance before a committee of the lame duck session of the 66th Congress began the legislative struggle to establish a national wildlife refuge system.

            With fortified GOP majorities controlling the 67th Congress, friends of the migratory birds turned to a familiar congressional ally, Rep. Daniel Anthony (R-KS), for the needed legislation to authorize a federal refuge system.  First elected to the House in 1907, Anthony had played an important role in the 1913-1918 efforts for the MBA and MBTA, motivated by duck hunting experiences on his Kansas farm.[65]  While Anthony did not originate the refuge system idea, his strong identification with the proposal led to its widespread designation as the “Anthony bill” until his retirement from the House in March 1929.  In May 1921, Anthony and Sen. Harry New (R-IN), a prominent big-game hunter, introduced identical bills, H.R. 5823 and S. 1452, “providing for establishing shooting grounds for the public, for establishing game refuges and breeding grounds, for protecting migratory birds, and requiring a Federal license to hunt them.”^[66]  As suggested by their titles, the bills proposed a broad program of refuge establishment, with certain sections to be opened as public shooting grounds, overseen by a strong force of federal game wardens, and financed by the proceeds of a $1 federal hunting license.  Following the plan of the Weeks Act of 1911 for federal forest reservations, a commission composed of three Cabinet Secretaries, two Senators, and two Representatives would approve the refuge purchases recommended by the Bureau of Biological Survey.[67]

            The New-Anthony proposal, also referred to as the game refuge bill, contained no unprecedented features.  As with many reforms of the preceding Progressive Era, wildlife conservationists took state-level innovations and sought to apply them on a national scale.  In wide practice at all levels of government by 1921, creating refuges or sanctuaries for wildlife protection had nearly universal acceptance as a proper way to increase wildlife populations.  Hunting was widely, though far from universally, practiced on such preserves.  In particular, Pennsylvania had long gained praise for its system of state-owned wildlife preserves and public shooting grounds, widely credited with restoring game hunting in that state.[68]  Large-scale federal land acquisition, as opposed to reservations from the public domain, had a more recent history, but the Weeks Forestry Act of 1911 inaugurated a far larger program than that contemplated by the New-Anthony proposal.[69]  The federal hunting license presented the most innovative aspect of the legislation, although somewhat similar user fees had been implemented during the Progressive Era on the national forests.  Hunting licenses represented a widely accepted mechanism for state wildlife agencies by 1921, and the New-Anthony bill proposed their extension to the federal government’s chief wildlife agency, the Bureau of Biological Survey.[70]

            Historian Stephen Fox has argued that the game refuge bill’s provisions for public shooting grounds, in contrast to a prohibition on hunting in existing refuges, “redefined what a federal game refuge should be.”[71]  This is a clear misrepresentation of the legal status of the approximately seventy federal bird refuges that existed in 1921.  Under the operative reservations protection act of 1906, Congress forbid and set penalties for hunting and other disturbances of birds on reserved lands, except under permit from the Secretary of Agriculture.[72]  However, Congress placed no limit on the Secretary’s permit power, so in theory he might have opened all existing refuges to hunting at his discretion.  Of course such opportunities were limited by the fact that the majority of reservations created before 1920 protected non-game birds by design, and game birds such as waterfowl only incidentally.  Plume hunting, both legal and illegal, had been the impetus for the original bird reservation, Pelican Island, and remained the controlling interest for most refuges created after it.  Some exceptions, such as Oregon’s Klamath Lake, did host large numbers of migratory waterfowl, but the Biological Survey had little incentive to emphasize the creation of such areas until Missouri v. Holland confirmed the federal government’s controlling interest in migratory bird protection in 1920.

            The New-Anthony refuge proposal garnered significant support from the Harding administration and conservation organizations.  Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace endorsed the New-Anthony bill in June 1921.  In letters to the chairmen of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees (apparently ghostwritten by Biological Survey personnel), Wallace emphasized the many national benefits of the water, swamp, and marsh areas that would be preserved by congressional action.  Wallace’s arguments persuaded the Senate Committee on Public Land and Surveys to report out the measure even without hearings.^[73]  On 12 December 1921, the Eighth Annual National Game Conference, sponsored by the American Game Protective Association and attended by most of the prominent North American wildlife conservationists, formally endorsed the New-Anthony bill.[74]  When the House Committee on Agriculture held hearings in February 1922, they heard the bill endorsed by representatives of the Bureau of Biological Survey, American Game Protective Association, National Association of Audubon Societies, Campfire Club of America, Boone and Crockett Club, and a dozen state game commissions.  In addition, the committee received written statements from at least thirty-six state game commissions in support of the proposal.  Witnesses and statements alike emphasized the constructive conservation of wildlife habitat and migratory birds that would result from the passage of the bill.^[75]

            Unfortunately, the Anthony and New bills received a cooler reception on the floors of both houses of Congress.  As had been the case with the MBTA and Weeks-McLean Act several years earlier, a combination of western and southern congressmen opposed federal efforts on behalf of migratory birds.  In their opposition, Western congressmen had the backing of the Western Association of State Game Commissioners, which resolved to oppose the New-Anthony proposal’s license fund in favor of a direct congressional appropriation on 17 January 1922.[76]  Objections to New’s bill on the Senate unanimous consent calendar by southern and western Democrats blocked quick action on the bill and foreshadowed tough floor debates in the future.^[77]  Anthony’s bill fared no better in the House before the 1922 elections.  The February hearings before the House Committee on Agriculture had revealed considerable discontent with the bill among the southern Democratic members of the committee.  H. M. Jacoway of Arkansas, David Kincheloe of Kentucky, James Aswell of Louisiana and Marvin Jones of Texas sharply interrogated Anthony and the other witnesses appearing on behalf of the bill.  In what would become a familiar argument, these Democratic Congressmen objected to both the license provision of the bill and the promised expansion of the federal warden service.  Additionally, appearing as a witness, North Carolina Congressman Hallett S. Ward argued that the bill would aid only rich, leisured sportsmen, who would manipulate the refuge provisions to exclude local hunters from the public shooting grounds.^[78]

            After several months of delay, the Agriculture Committee submitted a favorable report on the Anthony bill in May 1922, but with amendments.  The most significant amendment excluded resident landowners from the license provision, thereby reducing the bill’s impact on farmers, the committee’s primary constituency.  Another amendment motioned towards states’ right concerns by providing that nothing in the proposed act should be taken to interfere with state laws not in conflict with federal laws or regulations.  The amendments apparently satisfied the committee’s previously skeptical southern Democrats, as the report noted, “it was the unanimous opinion of the committee that the bill be reported out.”[79]

            However, these changes did not satisfy Rep. Ward, who took the House floor to denounce the bill on 22 June 1922.  In an argument repeated over the next ten years, he raised the specter of a federal game warden arresting a boy on a federal bird reservation for possessing even a tiny bird’s egg, carrying him “across a dozen counties to a Federal commissioner, by this commissioner bound over to a Federal grand jury, and there indicted and put on trial, and the Federal judge must sign and enter a judicial decree determining the proper custody and possession and property of such bird’s egg.”  To Ward, such a possibility, however slight in a reality of prosecutorial discretion, demeaned the national government, tried the patience of the American people, and increased the possibility of “Bolshevism, socialism, and every form of public discontent all over the land.”  In closing, Ward renewed his claim, first raised in the February hearings, that rich, idle sportsmen were behind the bill in order to gain federal protection for their sporting grounds.  Although many of Ward’s claims seem patently preposterous, they tapped a broader discomfort among congressmen and even some conservationists with redefining the federal role in wildlife protection.  While historian Stephen Fox has noted that the game refuge bill redefined federal wildlife refuges by opening them to hunting, Ward and other opponents most strongly objected to the general expansion of the federal role in wildlife law, a domain previously accepted as a function of state governments.^[80]

            Fortunately, some Congressmen saw other values behind the game refuge proposal.  Simeon Fess of Ohio supported the refuge proposal to prevent all winged wildlife going the way of “the millions of migratory pigeons that clouded the sky” in his childhood.^[81]  In the short, post-election session of the 67th Congress, the advocates for migratory birds believed that Fess’ fears would be avoided by the passage of the New-Anthony bill.  In the Senate, New brought his refuge bill to the floor on 5 December 1922.  The Senate agreed to a series of amendments offered by New to meet objections to his bill.  These amendments created an exception to the license provision for resident landowners, clarified the force of state laws in regards to the proposed federal law, authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to call an annual conservation conference, and also perfected various technical aspects of the bill.  Still, as in the House, amendments did not satisfy all opponents of the bill.

            Strong partisan lines marked positions on the bill in the Senate, with southern and western Democrats opposed to it and Republicans largely supporting it.  Southerners Thaddeus Caraway (D-AR) and Nathaniel Dial (D-SC) took the lead in attacking the bill over two days of debate.  Like Rep. Ward, Caraway viewed the bill as an over-reaching federal police bill.  Dial and Caraway offered amendments to reduce the number of people liable to pay the federal license to an absolute minimum, effectively nullifying the bill by eliminating the requisite license funds to provide refuges.  Caraway asserted that he would not object to a direct appropriation to purchase bird reservations, but he sought to prevent a federal license for anyone who did not hunt on a federal reservation.  After considerable debate, the Senate defeated Caraway’s amendment, 18-32, with 45 senators not voting.  The bill, as previously amended, then passed the Senate by a similar vote of 36-17.  Of the 18 votes for Caraway’s amendment and 17 votes against the bill, all came from Democrats.  Conversely, of the 32 votes against Caraway’s amendment and the 36 votes for the bill, 31 and 33 came from Republicans, respectively.^[82]

            Meanwhile in the House, Majority Leader Frank Mondell promised his fellow Republican, Daniel Anthony, that his bill would be defeated.^[83]  After the passage of the Senate bill, the House Committee on Agriculture quickly filed a report on the bill, recommending the substitution of the previously reported Anthony bill.  Perilously close to the end of the 67th Congress, the Rules Committee brought a privileged report before the House.  Both the Majority and Minority Leaders opposed the Anthony bill in the debate over the rule.  Despite the leadership’s opposition, the House adopted the rule to consider the Anthony bill, 153-117.  Twenty-nine Republicans joined 87 Democrats and one Socialist in voting against the rule, while only 5 Democrats voted with 148 Republicans in favor of the rule.  However, the rule provided only for the consideration of the House bill, and not the refuge bill already passed by the Senate.  Unable to gain unanimous consent for the substitution of the Senate refuge bill, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole to consider Anthony’s bill, H.R. 5823.^[84]

            In the limited debate allowed under the rule, Anthony and other advocates of the game refuge bill remained clearly on the defensive.  Virginia’s Joseph Deal questioned the necessity of such an action if, as asserted by Anthony, the regulations of the MBTA continued to increase bird populations.  Both Jones of Texas and Ward of North Carolina denounced the leisured sportsmen they saw behind the proposal, while decrying the interference of the federal government with the hunting activities of poor farm boys and “one-gallus” men.  Jones replied that he was willing to see migratory birds protected, and offered an amendment to more completely protect them by removing the provisions for federal public shooting grounds from the bill.  This provoked some spirited debate over whether the federal government was the proper agency to provide public shooting opportunities.^[85]

            Before Jones’ proposal could be resolved, Allen Treadway of Massachusetts moved to strike out the enacting clause of the bill.  After a few minutes more debate, the Committee of the Whole voted 68-56 on a division, then 94-60 with tellers, to strike out the enacting clause of the bill.  After a quorum call demanded by Anthony, the full House voted to accept the Committee of the Whole report 154-135, killing the Anthony bill in the 67th Congress.  Fifty-nine Republicans joined 94 Democrats in voting to kill the migratory bird refuge bill.^[86]  Conservationists viewed this result as a favor to retiring Majority Leader Mondell, who was closing out his final days in Congress and had previously provided strenuous opposition to both the Weeks-McLean and Migratory Bird Treaty Acts.  Though no great public outcry against the proposal was alleged, the opponents of the Anthony bill rallied sufficient votes to defeat it on a combination of states’ rights, opposition to federal government growth and centralization, and discomfort with public shooting grounds.  In the journal of the Audubon Societies, T. Gilbert Pearson openly blamed the bill’s failure on Mondell’s machinations, invoked no less an authority than the late Theodore Roosevelt against Mondell’s record, and celebrated the end of the first modern Majority Leader’s political career.^[87]

            The first effort for a national refuge system brought out a number of continually contentious issues in opposition to the proposal.  First, a wide-scale federal purchase program of private lands for the benefit of wildlife and a federal hunting license would greatly expand the federal role in the domain of wildlife law, an area previously accepted to be a function of state governments.  Some congressmen, like Frank Mondell, flatly opposed the federal government’s exercise of any jurisdiction over migratory birds and sought to prevent any solidification of that power.  These opponents had to be outmaneuvered or outlasted, as with Mondell’s retirement.  Second, numerous senators and representatives questioned the legitimacy and/or wisdom of a national hunting license.  Some objected to the license simply as a further tax measure.  Others argued that the license would cause undue confusion or interference with state hunting license laws.  Third, though the federal government already operated seventy bird reservations withdrawn from the public domain, considerable opposition existed to buying private lands for federal refuges.  Fourth, some who accepted the idea of national refuges still objected to the use of any part of those lands as public shooting grounds.  While counter to the policy on most existing bird reservations, the game refuge bill’s advocates included the shooting grounds provision to gain public support for the proposal among landless hunters.  In an ironic twist, opponents condemned the proposed shooting grounds as a luxurious benefit for rich, idle sportsmen to the exclusion of the poor farmer, while advocates praised them as a benefit to the common man.  These enduring objections gradually forced changes to subsequent versions of the Anthony proposal to try and defuse opposition.

            At the beginning of the 68th Congress, Rep. Anthony quickly introduced a new game refuge bill, “for the establishment of migratory-bird refuges to furnish in perpetuity homes for migratory birds, the establishment of public shooting grounds to preserve the American system of free shooting, the provision of funds for establishing such areas, and the furnishing of adequate protection for migratory birds, and for other purposes.”^[88]  The American Game Protective Association continued its sponsorship, and the NAAS and other conservation organizations again endorsed it.  Despite the considerable opposition in the last Congress, the new Anthony bill retained the federal license feature, as well as the provisions for federal public shooting grounds.  However, a new organization and a new proposition soon injected itself into the congressional conservation debates, with potentially significant ramifications for the Anthony bill.

            In January 1922, a small group of midwestern outdoorsman formed the Izaak Walton League of America (IWLA), named for the seventeenth-century English outdoorsman.  Under the leadership of an energetic, former advertising man, Will H. Dilg, the IWLA quickly expanded to a national membership, began publishing Outdoor America, and agitated for a variety of conservation measures at all governmental levels.^[89]  Stephen Fox has strongly emphasized the IWLA’s importance as both the first truly national conservation group and the first mass membership group: “At a time when the Sierra Club, the AGPA, and the Audubon Association each had a membership of seven thousand or less, the Izaak Walton League had more than one hundred thousand members within three years of its founding.”[90]

            As its first foray into national wildlife conservation matters, the League sponsored the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge Act.  Sen. Joseph McCormick (R-IL) and Rep. Harry B. Hawes (D-MO) introduced the proposal into Congress on 20 December 1923.  The bill authorized the federal acquisition and preservation of flood-prone bottomlands along a three hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to Wabasha, Minnesota, much of it previously threatened by drainage projects.  The refuge would preserve the last great spawning grounds of the American black bass, a species highly prized by sport fisherman but increasingly threatened by habitat loss from man-made alterations to rivers and streams.  As a secondary effect, the refuge would provide a significant breeding, resting and feeding grounding for migratory wildfowl along the Mississippi migration flyway.  As with existing federal refuges, the Secretary of Agriculture could permit hunting on the proposed refuge at his discretion.  In the vital difference from the Anthony bill plan of refuge acquisition via dedicated license funds, the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge bills depended on direct appropriations from general Treasury receipts.^[91]

            On 11-13 February 1924, The House Committee on Agriculture held hearings in support of the Upper Mississippi River refuge idea, and the Senate Commerce Committee held a supplemental hearing on 15 February 1924.  Hawes and Dilg organized a significant parade of experts and conservationists before the committees.  Witnesses included T. Gilbert Pearson, President of the NAAS; Dr. Edward Nelson, Chief of the Biological Survey; Frances E. Whitley, Conservation Chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; various experts from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Fisheries; and members of several hunting and fishing clubs, including the prominent Boone & Crockett Club.  These witnesses variously emphasized the beauty of the area, the requirement of federal participation in the multi-state effort, the economic importance of fish and game in the region, and the danger to the area through ill-advised but imminent drainage efforts.^[92]

            While all the witnesses favored the Upper Mississippi refuge proposal, the exact meaning of its establishment somewhat divided them.  While some viewed the Upper Mississippi project as a complete goal in and of itself, not everyone at the hearings agreed.  Responding to questions from the committee, both Pearson and Nelson expressed the idea that the Mississippi River proposal would be complementary to the national system proposed by the Anthony bill.  Pearson reminded the committee that the Anthony bill previously reported by the Agriculture Committee had failed, and a new one would appear before them shortly.  Expressing what would become a rationale for future congressional actions, Nelson declared the separate act necessary as an emergency measure to preserve wetlands in imminent danger of destruction.^[93]

            Among other witnesses, Hawes and Dilg presented the measure as an action primarily on behalf of fish, rather than migratory birds.  A Commerce Department fish expert argued that an existing federal program, which saved millions of fish from receding flood waters each year, would be greatly aided by federal acquisition of the overflow lands, removing the need to cooperate voluntarily with hundreds of private landowners.  Though he acknowledged support from Pearson’s NAAS, Hawes claimed migratory bird production was incidental to the bill’s true purpose, the preservation of the black bass.^[94]  Interestingly, the clearly interrelated nature of fish and bird conservation in the bill provoked several committee members to presciently support the merger of the Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries.^[95]  Proponents of the Hawes bill built a powerful case for their proposals, including the necessity for federal action in this multi-state river basin.  However, the House Agriculture Committee, acting in the deliberate way that characterized the chairmanship of Gilbert Haugen (R-IA), declined to immediately report out the Hawes bill.

            Instead, the House Agriculture Committee held another hearing on wildlife issues on 29 March 1924, devoted to the Anthony bill.  Seeking constructive compromise, Anthony led off the hearing with several proposals to meet certain objections to his bill.  First, he asked that the committee consider ways to confer joint jurisdiction for the enforcement of the law upon state courts, which would largely eliminate the specter of overly aggressive federal police powers raised in the last Congress’s debates.  A second proposed amendment would have replaced federal court penalty provisions for hunting without a license with simple fines of $5 and $25.  Finally, Anthony suggested a change to the appropriations language to conform with recent changes to the congressional budget process.  The new bill had already incorporated changes urged by the Agriculture Committee the previous year, including exceptions to the license requirement for landowners and hunters under the age of 16.^[96]

            Despite the alterations in enforcement mechanisms, the license provision continued to provoke opposition among some members of the Agriculture Committee.  As in the previous Congress, Rep. Aswell objected to the license feature.  Supported by Marvin Jones (D-TX) and George Johnson (D-WV), Aswell argued that a direct appropriation would be a better solution than a license he feared would stir popular opposition.  In Aswell’s opinion, “it is morally wrong to make them [non-licensed hunters] let a duck go past without shooting it.”  Even Dr. Nelson’s explanation that the wetlands preservation made possible by the $1 license would secure migratory bird populations throughout the country failed to persuade Aswell of its value. ^[97]

            Although the Southern Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee had voiced strong opposition to the game refuge bill, the full committee favorably reported both it and the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge bill, but with committee amendments, on 14 May 1924.  The committee amendments to the Upper Mississippi River refuge bill significantly reduced any immediate impact the bill would have in the event of its passage.  To conform to fairly recent House rules changes, one amendment substituted a future authorization for $1.5 million for the $3 million direct appropriation.  Additionally, the committee added a complicated provision intended to limit the opportunities for land speculation at the expense of the government.  This required the Department of Agriculture to determine that the total refuge area was obtainable at the authorized amount, at an average price of $5 per acre or less, and not above the average local land prices.^[98]  The report on Anthony’s game refuge bill noted that it “differs from the bill reported last Congress, chiefly in that it is made less drastic in its penal provisions.”  A letter from Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace again endorsed the game refuge bill, reviewing the same arguments he previously made in its favor.  However, the Bureau of the Budget advised Congress that the concept of a license-derived fund in the U.S. Treasury conflicted with President Coolidge’s opposition to government revolving funds.^[99]  Ten days later, the Senate report from the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry contained the same notation regarding the license fund concept.^[100]

            The full House considered the less controversial Upper Mississippi Refuge bill first.  Taking it up via the consent calendar in the final days of the 68th Congress’ first session, the House approved the committee amendments and passed the entire bill without debate.  Acting on the somewhat surprising consent requests of James Reed of Missouri and Wesley Jones of Washington, the Senate discharged the House bill from committee consideration and also passed it without debate.  President Coolidge quickly signed the bill authorizing the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge into law on 7 June 1924, the final day of the 68th Congress’s first session.^[101] 

            Despite the easy passage of the initial authorization bill, the drawn-out struggle to gain the funds to actually buy the lands for the Upper Mississippi Wild Life and Fish Refuge demonstrated the drawbacks of the direct appropriations route for refuge purchases.  The appropriations process required that the Bureau of the Budget, House Subcommittee on Agricultural Appropriations, full House Appropriations Committee, Senate Subcommittee on Agricultural Appropriations, full Senate Appropriations Committee, and of course the Senate, House, and President, all annually approve an appropriation until the completion of the refuge.  As is evident from this list, a general appropriation left multiple places for refuge funds to be reduced or eliminated.  As late as 1937, the Upper Mississippi refuge was still in process of acquisition because of the drawn-out funding process.^[102]

            In addition to the normal appropriations hurdles, the complex language and restrictions of the Upper Mississippi refuge authorization act meant that supporters of the refuge had to continually seek amending legislation.  As soon as the second session of the 68th Congress, Upper Mississippi refuge advocates introduced several joint resolutions in each house to reduce purchasing restrictions.^[103]  At the same time, the Bureau of Biological Survey, responsible for the new refuge’s acquisition and administration, had to build and develop a land acquisition section from scratch.  While this development of “bureaucratic capital” clearly aided the Biological Survey in its later acquisitions, it initially produced yet another drag in the slowly paced Upper Mississippi refuge acquisition process.^[104]

            Meanwhile, the legislative struggle for the broader, self-sufficient game refuge bill continued in the House of Representatives.  Unanimous consent consideration having failed, Anthony appeared before the House Rules Committee to request a special rule for consideration of his bill on 6 February 1925.  Anthony informed the Rules Committee members of amendments planned to meet continuing opposition to the bill.  The most important change redistributed the percentages of expenditures from the migratory bird license fund.  Under the new proposal, law enforcement was to be reduced from forty-five to twenty-five percent, and land acquisition increased accordingly to sixty-five percent, with the remaining ten percent for administrative purposes.  Anthony hoped these changes would alleviate the fears of an overly large federal police force emerging from the license fund.^[105]

            The Rules Committee granted Anthony’s request for a special rule and reported House Resolution 438, for the consideration of House bill 745, in a privileged report on 19 February 1925.  Despite the opposition of Minority Leader Finis Garrett, the House agreed to the resolution, which provided for one hour of general debate and amendment under the five-minute rule in the Committee of the Whole House.  Over three days of debate, Anthony and other refuge supporters fended off a series of attacks on the bill.  As before, opposition centered on the federal law enforcement forces authorized, the allowance for shooting grounds, and the penalties provided for in the bill.  Despite a series of dilatory actions, without the help of former Majority Leader Mondell, the refuge bill opponents could not seriously amend or defeat the measure.  By a vote of 212-113, the House passed the Anthony bill with the license fee, shooting grounds, and game warden provisions intact.  In the closely divided House of the 68th Congress, Anthony and the refuge proponents assembled bipartisan support with 147 Republicans joined by 64 Democrats and one independent.  The Garrett-led opposition received 94 Democratic votes, with 18 Republicans and 1 Farmer-Laborer.^[106] 

            After the extensive debate and hard work of passing the Anthony bill in the House, an unfortunate lapse in Senate courtesy dashed its hopes of passage.  On 25 February 1925, the President pro tempore, Albert Cummins of Iowa, laid the Anthony bill before the Senate for a committee reference, noting that Missouri’s James Reed had requested a reference to the Judiciary Committee.  As Reed entered the chamber, Smith Brookhart (R-IA) moved that the bill be referred to the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, which had reported Brookhart’s companion bill almost a year earlier.  However, by making his motion under the rules of the “morning hour,” Brookhart prevented Reed from making any statement on the reference of the bill.  Clearly offended by this ill-advised action, Reed sharply rebuked Brookhart as follows:

            If the Senator from Iowa wants to take that advantage he may do so.  The bill     came from the House during his absence.  I asked to have it sent to the Committee         on the Judiciary and was informed that the Senator from Iowa, who was absent at       the time, wanted the bill to lie on the table until he could be here.  I accordingly had it laid on the table and held for him.  If he wants to cut me out of the right to         say anything about the reference of the bill, he is at perfect liberty to do so; but if          he does so, I promise him that his bill will not pass at this session.^[107]

Another opponent of the game refuge bill, Reed Smoot (R-UT), objected to a last-ditch unanimous consent proposal to hear Senator Reed and the Senate referred the Anthony bill to the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.  The committee quickly reported the bill back to the full Senate, but Reed kept his word and the game refuge bill did not receive Senate action in the few remaining days of the 68th Congress.^[108]

            With the end of the 68th Congress, the game refuge bill concept had passed both the Senate and the House of Representatives, though in different Congresses, thus failing to make it to the President for potential approval.  Still, advocates of the bill had plenty of reason to hope for success in the 69th Congress.  John P. Holman, lobbyist for the National Association of Audubon Societies, reported that only filibustering tactics in the Senate on other measures had prevented the refuge bill’s passage in the 68th Congress, and 72 of 96 Senators supported it.^[109]  As in the previous two Congresses, Republicans controlled both houses of the 69th Congress and refuge advocates had the advantage of working with Agriculture Committee chairmen familiar with, and willing to report, the game refuge bills.  Rep. Anthony remained a firm and influential supporter of the game refuge proposal in the House.  In the Senate, Smith Brookhart continued his sponsorship of the game refuge measure despite embroilment in an election recount controversy and estrangement from the Republican Party, which eventually resulted in his unseating.^[110]  However, Peter Norbeck, senator from South Dakota since 1921, more than compensated for Brookhart’s loss as Senate manager of the game refuge bill.  A well driller by trade, Norbeck knew the value of watered areas, and as a “Roosevelt Republican” he stood firmly in favor of conservation.^[111]  Holman seemed well founded in his prediction of speedy passage for the game refuge bill in the 69th Congress.

            Perhaps most importantly, in the 69th Congress, the game refuge bill finally enjoyed unanimous support from leading conservation groups.  At the annual meeting of the International Association of Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners, held 20-21 August 1925 at Denver, CO, NAAS president T. Gilbert Pearson engineered a compromise on the contentious issue of funding for the proposed federal game refuges.  The conference endorsed the proposal of Utah Game Commissioner David Madsen, to fund federal migratory bird operations with the existing excise tax on arms and ammunition and to add state representatives to the proposed Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, which would approve all refuge acquisitions.  The conference then appointed a committee of five to prepare a new bill embodying these features, consisting of representatives from the Western Association of State Game Commissioners (David H. Madsen), International Association of Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners (William C. Adams), AGPA (John Burnham), NAAS (T. Gilbert Pearson, chairman of the committee), and Izaak Walton League (George Selover, chairman, IWLA Bd. of Directors).  In the key feature of the compromise, the participating organizations also agreed to drop opposition to a federal hunting license if Congress could not be persuaded to devote the arms and ammunition excise tax to refuge acquisition and migratory bird protection.  Although Pearson received a hearing before House Committee on Ways and Means to present the proposal of the “Denver Committee,” the pending abolition of all “nuisance taxes” imposed during American participation in World War I, including the arms and ammunition excise tax, torpedoed the plan.  So, with the inauguration of the 69^th Congress, organized conservationists rallied behind the default federal license fund for refuge appropriations.[112]

            When Congress reconvened in December of 1925, Brookhart quickly re-introduced the earlier game refuge proposal, now numbered as Senate 1053.  Anthony waited until 12 January 1926 to introduce his revised game refuge bill, H.R 7479.  Soon after, Brookhart introduced S. 2607 as a companion to Anthony’s measure.^[113]  The new game refuge bill title, “for the purpose of more effectively meeting the obligations of the existing Migratory Bird Treaty with Great Britain by the establishment of migratory bird refuges,” emphasized the international implications of the proposal in an era when Congress took treaty obligations very seriously.  Despite the new title, the game refuge bills of the 69th Congress differed little from the earlier bills.  They again proposed a $1 federal hunting license, with receipts to “be reserved and set aside as a special fund in the Treasury ... as the migratory bird refuge and marsh land conservation fund, to be appropriated” by Congress.  The bill provided for the division of the license fund on a 60-40 basis, with the larger amount devoted to refuge acquisitions, and the smaller amount to law enforcement and administrative expenses, including the costs incurred by the Post Office Department for issuing the licenses.  Again following precedent, the bill provided for a special commission, consisting of three Cabinet (Secretaries of Agriculture and Commerce, and the Postmaster General) and four Congressional members (two Representatives, two Senators) to pass on refuge acquisitions.  Fulfilling the request of the Denver conference and as a further concession to previous states’ rights opposition, a new provision granted ex officio membership on the commission to the chief State conservation officer of a refuge acquisition site.  The proposal also granted the States concurrent authority to patrol and enforce regulations on the prospective federal refuges.  State legislatures continued to retain the power to block acquisitions by refusing to enact necessary enabling legislation to allow federal refuges in their state.  Redrafted penalty provisions attempted to avoid further burdening the federal District Courts, already straining under Prohibition violations.  The bill authorized United States commissioners to accept fines of $10 to $500 from violators who wished to avoid District Court appearances and any threat of imprisonment.^[114]

            The House Committee on Agriculture, still chaired by the venerable Gilbert N. Haugen (R-IA), granted a hearing to the new Anthony bill on 15 February 1926.  The witnesses for the hearing demonstrated the accord that the major conservation and sportsmen organizations had reached on behalf of the game refuge bill.  While committee members inserted a few statements against the bill into the record, no witnesses appeared in opposition.  AGPA president John Burnham explained the newfound unanimity among the major conservation organizations for the game refuge bill, thanks to the work of the Denver Committee.  The AGPA, previously the game refuge bill’s chief sponsor, now co-sponsored it in conjunction with the Izaak Walton League, National Association of Audubon Societies, Western Association of Game Commissioners, and the National Association of Fish, Game, and Conservation Commissioners.  Of these groups, only the AGPA and the Audubon Societies had consistently supported the game refuge bill in the previous two congresses.  Leaders of all the organizations represented by the Denver Committee testified on behalf of the latest game refuge bill, urging its passage as soon as possible, and noted that previous areas of discord had been largely resolved.  The most striking testimony came from David H. Madsen, representing the Western Association of Game Commissioners, who had previously strongly opposed the game refuge bills.  Madsen admitted that he still found the license provision objectionable, but due to the abolition of the federal excise tax on arms and ammunitions there was no viable alternative to the license feature to raise a reliable, annual fund for the much-needed project of wildlife conservation.  Madsen felt that additional urgency had been added to the bill by drought in the western states, which was estimated to have already destroyed sixty percent of the migratory birds’ feeding grounds in the West.^[115]   

            The united front presented by conservation organizations reduced criticism of the game refuge bill by committee members.  Southern Democrats on the committee still provided familiar opposition on the license provision.  But, the proponents of the bill effectively stressed the license as the best available funding method, countering arguments for direct appropriations or the recently abolished arms and ammunitions excise tax.  Still, some committee members remained discomforted by the allowance for public shooting grounds on the proposed refuges.  David Kincheloe (D-KY) succinctly summed up the general feeling of opponents of shooting grounds to Anthony:

            If you will set aside these breeding grounds and feeding grounds as sanctuaries,             where there will never be a gun fired, and let the overflow go to everybody, I will vote for your bill; but I know, and so do you, that whenever you have a shooting          ground part of the year these fellows who have the money and time and             transportation are the fellows who will get the benefit of that shooting.^[116]

But, on 27 February 1926, the Committee on Agriculture reported the bill with its provisions for shooting grounds and federal licenses intact, recommending only technical amendments.[117]  Meanwhile, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry reported out Brookhart’s companion bill on 17 February 1926, urging similar technical amendments suggested by the Department of Agriculture.^[118]

            Unfortunately, despite the accord that conservation organizations had reached on the game refuge bill, its opponents retained considerable congressional strength.  Several events warned of tough floor battles yet to come in both the House and Senate.  First, an objection made to consent calendar consideration on behalf of Sen. James Reed demonstrated that the unanimity of organized conservationists had not placated the bill’s most prominent Senate adversary.[119]  Then, Sen. King attempted to undermine the Biological Survey’s leadership on migratory bird protection by introducing resolutions demanding a USDA internal investigative report related to Biological Survey officials and the game refuge bill.[120]  In the House, Rep. LaGuardia utilized extended remarks to reemphasize his adamant opposition to the public shooting grounds provisions of the game refuge bill.  He attributed the contradictory situation of allowing hunting on bird sanctuaries to the underlying sponsorship of the bill and the AGPA by gun and ammunition companies more interested in sales than the conservation of wildlife.  In addition to omitting public shooting grounds, LaGuardia also advocated amending the game refuge bill to include the provisions of H.R. 10433, providing for stricter bag limits set by Congress rather than the Biological Survey.[121]  While the “bag limit bill” had the hearty endorsement of Dr. Hornaday, the Biological Survey and the Department of Agriculture adamantly opposed removal of their existing, discretionary regulatory authority over hunting bag limits.[122]  Clearly, the game refuge bill faced a tough floor fight in either house of Congress.

            Remembering the end of session tactics by Sen. Reed that defeated the game refuge bill in the 68th Congress, wildlife conservationists now sought action in the Senate first.  On 13 May 1926, Sen. Peter Norbeck moved that the Senate consider S. 2607 and immediately faced extensive debate regarding the wisdom of such a motion. 

   Despite Peter Norbeck’s persistence, the refuge bill could not make it past a determined opposition.  A triumvirate of James Reed, William King, and Clarence Dill steadfastly blocked floor action on the bill for close to three weeks.  With pension and farm relief bills pending, Reed and King belittled the significance of the protection of migratory birds.  Several other Democratic senators consumed vast amounts of time on unrelated debate.  Reed made perfectly clear that he intended to resist the game refuge bill as long as possible, on the grounds that it centralized too much power in the federal government and represented a possibly unconstitutional expansion of federal powers supported mainly by the Audubon Society, “the aristocracy of hunters.”^[123]  Though Minority Leader Joseph Robinson voiced support for the refuge proposal on several occasions, his Democratic colleagues could not be persuaded to allow a vote.  A series of states’ rights-oriented amendments from Robinson’s Arkansas colleague, Thaddeus Caraway, also failed to alleviate opposition.

            While the leading opponents of refuge bill focused on state prerogatives, Norbeck advanced a national view of conservation efforts.  He saw the national and modern necessity for the bill as follows:

While our commercial progress has been phenomenal, it has also been destructive of the beauties of nature, especially bird life.  Individuals can not prevent the disaster; the States are helpless; it is a national problem.  It is an all-important question, and I hope for favorable consideration of this legislation at this session.^[124] 

Yet, while some opponents conceded the general need for migratory bird refuges, they refused to back the Norbeck bill’s license and shooting grounds provisions.

            The continuing presence of the game refuge bill as the Senate’s unfinished business clearly exasperated a number of senators interested in other measures and provoked calls for an unusual limit on Senate debate.  On 28 May 1926, a clearly exasperated Kenneth McKellar (D-TN) raised the idea of invoking cloture on the bird bill.  Although Dill objected that only a limited amount of debate on the bird bill itself had occurred, McKellar informed Norbeck that he would head the petition for cloture.  Soon afterwards, the Senate reconsidered the game refuge bill just long enough for Norbeck to present a petition for cloture from 18 senators, headed as promised by McKellar.  Four other Democrats joined McKellar and 13 Republicans in calling for an end to debate on the refuge bill.  Under Senate rules, a vote for cloture was set for 1 June 1926.^[125]

            The unsuccessful drive for cloture ended any chances of the Senate agreeing to the game refuge bill in the 69th Congress.  On 1 June, Dill fruitlessly argued that only 10 hours of debate had been devoted to the bill since it had been made the unfinished business on 18 May.  But, Dill and Reed objected to a last attempt at reaching unanimous consent on limiting debate.  With eighty senators present for a preceding quorum call, the cloture petition failed on a vote of 46 to 33, not achieving the two-thirds majority required for passage.  While 10 Democrats joined 36 Republicans in voting for cloture, seven Republicans voted with 26 Democrats against the motion.  Taking the cloture vote as a sign of the impossibility of forcing a vote on the bill, Norbeck conceded defeat and asked that the game refuge proposal be returned to the Senate calendar.^[126]  After this ignominious ending to a promising beginning in the Senate, neither the House nor the Senate further considered the game refuge bill in the 69th Congress, marking the first time since the 67th Congress that neither house of Congress had passed a version of the bill.

            Despite extensive efforts, the 69th Congress also failed to produce any legislation for individual refuges equivalent to the Upper Mississippi Wild Life and Fish Refuge Act of 1924.  In hearings and debates on the game refuge bills, proponents frequently invoked the Bear River marshes bordering on Utah’s Great Salt Lake as a worthy project for funding.  Because the Bear River marshes offered both a breeding ground and migration concentration point for all manner of migratory birds, the Biological Survey had presented them as a potential refuge and public shooting ground site as early as 1921.[127]  Thanks to annual outbreaks of avian botulism, originally attributed to alkali poisoning, that killed millions of migratory birds beginning in the early 1910s, the area desperately required development and active management to preserve its benefits to bird life.[128]  During debate on the game refuge bill, Sen. King submitted a bill to establish a Bear River national refuge as a model of his plan for refuge purchases by direct appropriations.  However, the Senate Agriculture and Forestry Committee declined to act on King’s Bear River refuge bill, in part because Agriculture Secretary Jardine’s adverse departmental bill report noted the proposed direct appropriation could be avoided by passage of the game refuge bill.[129]

            In the second, short session of the 69th Congress, Sen. Lawrence C. Phipps (R-CO) introduced another bill, S. 5454, for the establishment of a federal refuge on the marshes of the Bear River.  Interested in the measure largely through his membership in the wealthy Bear River Hunting Club, where dike construction had already proven its utility in preventing “duck sickness,” Phipps gained a hearing and report for his bill on 15 February 1927.  However, with the end of the 69th Congress in sight on 4 March 1927, the time for action was limited.  As an alternative, Phipps submitted an amendment to the pending Second Deficiency Appropriation bill for $350,000 to create the Bear River refuge.  President Coolidge signaled his administration’s support of the Bear River refuge proposal by submitting an official appropriation estimate, but a Senate filibuster prevented the passage of the deficiency appropriation bill.  Finally, on 28 February 1927, the Senate did consider and pass the separate Bear River refuge bill.  But, although a companion bill had already been reported from the House Committee on Agriculture, the Phipps bill for a Bear River refuge failed to get through the House calendar on the hectic last days of the session, dying with the end of the 69th Congress.^[130]

            The Copeland-Merritt bill for establishing a lower federal daily bag limit was another failed, but instructive, initiative of the 69th Congress.  Famed conservationist William T. Hornaday originated this idea to set the federal bag limit in law at fifteen ducks and four geese per day, removing the regulatory freedom the Secretary of Agriculture and Bureau of Biological Survey held under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.  The reluctance of the Biological Survey to recommend lower bag limits in its annual preparation of federal regulations despite increasing evidence of falling waterfowl populations provoked Hornaday to seek congressionally mandated limits.  Hornaday revealed his personal animosities in a provision abolishing the Migratory Bird Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Agriculture, chaired by shooting grounds advocate John Burnham, which had scorned Hornaday’s pessimistic projections and drastic bag limit reduction proposals in 1923.  The bag limit bill cobbled together an odd coalition of conservative Democrats opposed to bureaucratic regulatory powers and progressives unhappy with the Department of Agriculture’s too limited use of its regulatory powers.  Although the bill failed to be reported in either house of Congress, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry granted it a hearing.^[131]  On the floor of Congress, figures as varied as South Carolina’s race-baiting Coleman Bleaseman and New York’s progressive Fiorello La Guardia made it the subject of substantial remarks.^[132] 

            Debate over the bag limit bill revealed a marked split in the opinion of wildlife conservationists.  Advocates, who generally opposed the Norbeck-Anthony game refuge bill on the basis of its shooting grounds provisions, felt that the current bag limit of 25 ducks per day, set by regulatory fiat of the Secretary of Agriculture with the advice of the Migratory Bird Advisory Committee, was so high as to be ineffective and unsporting.  Relying on anecdotal game population estimates, bag limit advocates insisted that further federal limits were required to protect multiple bird species from extinction.  Opponents of the measure argued that bag limits were best left flexible and in the hands of the scientists and state game commissioners represented by the Biological Survey and the Advisory Committee.  They pointed out that the aims of the bag limit bill had already been achieved by the further regulations imposed by the state governments, as allowed by the current law.  The leadership of the Biological Survey understandably opposed any threat to its regulatory powers, and certainly resented the personal attacks resorted to by proponents of the bag limit bill.  Thus, they moved to undercut the measure by subtly lowering bag limits on certain species of birds below the levels of the bill’s mandates, and then pointing to these regulations as the greater protections possible under a system of scientifically reviewed annual regulations.^[133]  Although both Copeland and Merritt reintroduced bag limit bills in the 70th Congress, these bills received no serious consideration.[134]

            Despite the lack of progress in refuge establishment, the rejection of the bag limit bill in committee was almost undoubtedly the wiser course of action.  Although 25 ducks a day did appear to be an unseemly high number, Hornaday and his allies refused to recognize the self-defeating features of the bag limit bill.  In the Prohibition era of increasing public resentment of federal law enforcement, Hornaday sought a more intrusive federal role in wildlife protection.  As opponents pointed out, with no increase of federal game wardens likely, enforcement of a lower bag limit would have been nearly impossible.  In many states a more aggressive federal stance could have jeopardized the cooperation of the game commissions that made enforcement of any federal rules plausible.  Many states had already reduced migratory bird bag limits on their own authority.  State game wardens were invested in the existing regulatory system through a large number of representatives on the Advisory Committee, who in turn reported and responded to the International Association of Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners.  Finally, with federal game law enforcement based primarily on the compliance of a public educated to the needs of wildlife, Hornaday risked a widespread backlash by backing his position with easily countered anecdotes of game scarcity.

            Despite the lack of tangible progress in legislation, the debates of the 69th Congress revealed a number of important contemporary ideas regarding the role of the federal government in wildlife conservation.  First, continuing and probably increasing support for refuge acquisitions via direct appropriation threatened to overwhelm sentiment for a federal license fee fund.  Even obstinate Senate opponents of the Norbeck-Anthony game refuge bill, William King and James Reed, followed through on promises to support direct appropriations by sponsoring the Bear River Refuge bill or amendments to the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge act.  Second, Caraway’s proposed amendments to the Norbeck bill introduced the idea of federal funding for states to establish and administer state government wildlife departments and refuges.  While heavily revised in particulars, this concept of federal funding for state government purposes provided the germ of the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937.  Third, increasingly strong sentiment against federal government shooting grounds raised the possibility that this aspect of the game refuge bill would never be embraced in federal law.  Influential spokesmen for wildlife issues, like Hornaday and William Bruette, editor of Forest and Stream magazine, denounced the proposed shooting grounds as game slaughterhouses or traps.  Hornaday especially espoused the ‘sentimentalist’ view that the proper federal government role was to restrict the killing of wildlife, never to encourage more killing.  Fourth, with the experiment of Prohibition collapsing under the weight of public indifference to federal law, the increase in federal game wardens projected under the license fund had fewer and fewer supporters.  Instead, the idea of further federal law enforcement drew increasingly shrill denunciations, supported with a ready fund of federal Prohibition enforcement anecdotes.

            Just weeks before the end of the 69th Congress, Agriculture Secretary William M. Jardine announced the replacement of Edward W. Nelson as chief of the Biological Survey.  The USDA press release of 12 February 1927 announced that Nelson, the oldest government bureau chief and already two years over the government retirement age, would return his focus to publications related to his fifty years of wildlife research.  Jardine named Paul G. Redington, assistant chief of the Forest Service in charge of public relations, as Nelson’s replacement, effective 9 May 1927.  In the interim, beginning 16 February 1927, Redington served as an assistant chief of the Biological Survey and familiarized himself with its work.  Although the department’s announcement made no connection between the game refuge bill’s repeated congressional defeats and Nelson’s replacement, a contemporary political science publication cited Nelson’s close association with the controversial measure as a probable contributing factor in naming a replacement from outside the ranks of the Biological Survey.  A Forest and Stream editorial lauded Nelson’s work as a naturalist and disclaimed any connection between a recent senatorial investigation of the Biological Survey and Nelson’s retirement, but it also condemned the Biological Survey’s preoccupation with the game refuge bill during his administration.[135]  With Nelson, an important advocate of the game refuge bill and opponent of the bag limit bill, replaced by an unknown quantity in Redington at the Biological Survey, perhaps constructive legislation now could be achieved.

            The chances for passage of the game refuge bill did not appear particularly auspicious at the start of the 70th Congress.  In the 69th Congress, the bill lost its previous, albeit limited, momentum, when it failed for the first time since its introduction in the 67th Congress to pass either house.  The GOP, which had offered the most, though not all, supporters of the bill, had lost significant seats in the 1926 elections.  The Senate was now closely divided between 49 Republicans and 46 Democrats, with the Republican caucus still divided between progressive and regular factions.  However, the strongest wildlife conservation advocate, Peter Norbeck, bucked the general trend of Republican losses and easily won reelection to a second term in the Senate.   When the 70th Congress convened in December 1927, he quickly introduced another game refuge bill, S. 1271.  In the House, Anthony introduced his fourth game refuge bill as H.R. 5467.^[136]

            However, the near success of the Bear River refuge proposal in the 69th Congress provoked a strong tide of similar, direct appropriations proposals in the 70th Congress that threatened to sweep aside the federal license fund proposals.  Early in the 70th Congress, Rep. Colton renewed his sponsorship of the Bear River refuge proposal in the House as H.R. 69, with Senators King and Phipps sponsoring similar bills, S. 703 and S. 1272 respectively, in the Senate. [137]  Just a few days later, Rep. Clifford Hope (R-KS) introduced H.R. 7361, to establish a migratory bird refuge in the Cheyenne Bottoms region of Kansas.[138]  A month later, Sen. Hiram Johnson and Rep. Richard J. Welch presented a proposal for a California migratory bird refuge, to be funded by a $1 million direct appropriation.[139]  On 3 February 1928, Rep. Colton introduced H.R. 10473, a revised version of his Bear River refuge proposal.[140]  Three days later, Rep. Hampton Fulmer (D-SC) proposed H.R. 10561, to establish a South Carolina migratory bird refuge.[141]  Much later in the session, Rep. James B. Aswell (D-LA) presented H.R. 12735, to establish the Northwest Louisiana Game and Fish Preserve, followed shortly by a Senate companion bill, S. 4149, from Edwin S. Broussard.[142]

            Congressional hearings reflected the serious interest in these proposals for refuge acquisition via direct appropriations.  The House Committee on Agriculture held a hearing on Rep. Hope’s proposal for a refuge in Cheyenne Bottoms, KS, on 3 February 1928.  As a member of the Agriculture committee, Hope managed the hearing on behalf of his proposal, which contemplated the federal purchase and development of 16,500 acres at the lowest levels of the 35,400-acre geological depression known as the Cheyenne Bottoms.  J. B. Doze, State Fish and Game Warden of Kansas, explained that the Kansas conservation commission strongly endorsed the preservation of the periodically inundated area encompassed by the proposal and promised state aid in the development of further water supplies to stabilize the naturally fluctuating lake levels.[143]  Hope later explained that the state’s engineering report contemplated a total project cost of $511,000, with the federal government share of $350,000 authorized by his bill, and state and local assistance providing the remainder.[144]  The Biological Survey’s new chief, Paul Redington, endorsed the Cheyenne Bottoms proposal, but expressed his preference for a general refuge program, while noting that the Department of Agriculture and Bureau of the Budget had yet to issue official opinions on Hope’s H.R. 7361.[145]  The Agriculture committee members present at the hearing generally expressed a strong interest in a Cheyenne Bottoms refuge, though some worried that the bill’s definition of a specific acquisition area opened the door to price gouging of the government by the existing landowners.

            The committee also rehearsed arguments regarding a general refuge bill.  Rep. Franklin W. Fort (R-NJ) urged the Biological Survey to present a program of potential refuges to the Agriculture committee in executive session.[146]  However, some committee members, including longtime game refuge bill opponents D. H. Kincheloe (D-KY) and Marvin Jones (D-TX), took the opportunity to express their continued antipathy toward a general refuge bill, so long as it still provided for a license fee and public shooting grounds.  Discussing the previous, failed refuge system proposals, Kincheloe noted: “There were objections we had in the Congress to the Anthony bill: One was the license feature, which was fatal, I think, to the bill; and the other was the Anthony bill had never sought to absolutely establish asylums and left it in the power of the Secretary of Agriculture so that he might open them at any time.” [147]  Comments from Redington and AGPA President John Burnham suggested refuge advocates might soon be willing to concede on these very points.  Responding to a question from Kincheloe, Redington stated: “I believe … that by far the greater proportion of the areas set aside should be kept forever inviolate as sanctuaries for the birds,” although in the interest of preventing waterfowl food shortages, “it may be necessary to consider the taking of the surplus by shooting.”[148]  Burnham, in a brief statement to the committee at the end of the hearing, noted the Anthony bill’s passage in the House of the 68th Congress, but expressed his sentiment for refuges “either by appropriation or any other method; the main thing is to get them.”[149]  Still, despite the committee’s favorable comments on the Cheyenne Bottoms refuge proposal, a negative report from the Bureau of the Budget effectively blocked further action in the 70th Congress.[150]  The Budget Bureau’s opposition similarly blocked consideration of the Johnson-Welch proposal for a California migratory bird refuge, the Fulmer bill for a South Carolina refuge, and the Aswell- Broussard plan for a northwestern Louisiana refuge.[151]

            However, the renewed proposals for a Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Utah, received more favorable action.  In the interim between the sessions of the 69th and 70th Congresses, western sportsmen had commissioned an engineering study of the Bear River marshes that showed the plausibility of large-scale, freshwater impoundments for the area.[152]  On 14 February 1928, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry held a brief open hearing on the Phipps and King proposals for a Bear River migratory bird refuge.  Though Senators Phipps and King sniped over the proposal’s proper sponsorship, the hearing’s participants all agreed on the importance of the Bear River marshes to the nation’s waterfowl.[153]  Directly following the hearing, King introduced a revised bill incorporating the USDA’s suggested changes as well as the Budget Bureau’s appropriation limitation of $350,000, which Agriculture and Forestry chairman Charles L. McNary reported the next day.[154] Although Sen. Wesley Jones (R-WA) objected to the bill’s consideration on 24 February 1928, the Senate passed it without debate on 6 March 1928.[155]

            The House of Representatives also moved the Bear River proposal expeditiously.  On 3 February 1928, Rep. Colton had introduced a revised bill following the suggestions of the Department of Agriculture.[156]  The House Committee on Agriculture considered the new Colton bill as one of numerous minor propositions on 27 February 1928.  Reflecting the committee’s exasperation with the slow and increasingly expensive progress of the Upper Mississippi River refuge project, the committee initially voted to report the Bear River bill only with a stringent limitation of $10,000 for land expenditures.  Rep. Kincheloe also proposed that the committee remove the Secretary of Agriculture’s discretion regarding hunting on the proposed refuge.[157]  After the Senate passage of the King bill, the House Committee on Agriculture reported it by substituting the text of the Colton bill, with committee amendments limiting land acquisitions to $50,000 rather than $10,000 and requiring that no less than sixty percent of the refuge’s area be maintained as an inviolate waterfowl sanctuary at all times.[158]  Before the full House, a brief floor fight to increase the inviolate sanctuary area to eighty percent failed, and the House adopted the committee report with only one minor amendment on 11 April 1928.[159]

            With a minimal explanation by Sen. King, the Senate accepted the House amendments, creating an important but little discussed precedent for opening a congressionally mandated, rather than administratively determined, percentage of refuge lands to public hunting.[160]  President Coolidge signed the authorization for the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge into law on 23 April 1928.[161]  Subsequently, Congress adopted President Coolidge’s supplemental estimate for the Bear River refuge and provided initial funding totaling $200,000 for fiscal years 1928 and 1929 in the second deficiency appropriation act for FY 1928.[162]  Appropriations of $75,000 in both FY 1930 and FY 1931 completed the authorized outlays in a timely manner.[163]

            The quick passage of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge Act suggested the stronger congressional feeling for a direct appropriations approach to funding wildlife refuges.  Undaunted, Sen. Peter Norbeck resumed the fight for the game refuge bill soon after Senate passage of the Bear River act.  The Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry had reported Norbeck’s bill favorably, with minor amendments, on 20 January 1928.  The 70th Congress bill retained all the major features of the previous game refuge bills.  As with the bill of the 69th Congress, the new Norbeck bill divided the funds derived from the $1 license fee on a 60-40 basis between land acquisition and law enforcement personnel.  The bill authorized United States commissioners to accept guilty pleas from violators of the act, in the hopes of heading off criticism of excessive penalties.  Notably, the Bureau of the Budget withdrew its previous objections to the migratory bird license fund as a revolving fund opposed by the President.^[164]

            At the request of opponents to the game refuge bill, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry held hearings on the proposal on 17-18 February 1928.  Marshaled by Senators King and Dill, the opponents of the game refuge bill presented the now predictable arguments against it.  They attacked it as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights, an undemocratic addition to federal regulatory power, and unnecessary bureaucracy building.  King and Dill subjected the proponents of the bill, including the new Chief of the Biological Survey, Paul G. Redington, to fierce cross-examinations.  Despite the evident frustration of Norbeck, and the open sympathy to the bill displayed by Agriculture committee chairman McNary, Dill and King could not be swayed from their opposition to the bill.^[165]

            With the license, shooting ground, and law enforcement provisions left intact after the hearings, Norbeck’s latest bill appeared headed for the same filibustered fate as the 1926 measure.  Starting on 19 March 1928, Norbeck struggled for a month just to bring his bill before the Senate.  Democrats Reed, Dill, and King, as well as Norbeck’s Republican colleague John Blaine of Wisconsin, provided fierce opposition.  With Senate consideration of the major issues of McNary-Haugen agricultural relief and Mississippi River flood control imminent, opponents found delaying the migratory bird bill easy.  Finally, on 12 April 1928, Norbeck made his bill the Senate’s unfinished business via a motion passed just before the Senate’s daily adjournment, ensuring that it would be recurred to regularly until the Senate disposed of it.^[166]

            In an attempt at compromise with the opposition, Norbeck offered a substitute bill on 17 April 1928.  The substitute retained the $1 license fund, but restricted the prospective game wardens to refuge patrols and removed the provisions for public shooting grounds.  However, these substantial concessions failed to placate opponents of the bill.  Senators Dill, Millard Tydings (D-MD), and Claude Swanson (D-VA) insisted on the removal of the license feature and the substitution of a direct appropriation on the model of the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge act of 1924 and the recently passed Bear River refuge bill.  On a close vote of 31-25, with 24 Democrats and 7 Republicans supporting and 21 Republicans and 4 Democrats opposing, the Senate backed an amendment by Dill that destroyed the license feature as a significant fundraiser.  Forced into a contingency plan, Norbeck gruffly presented a series of amendment designed to reconfigure his bill into a direct appropriations authorization, providing for annual funding of $1 million.  After some heated exchanges between Norbeck and Tydings, the Senate approved the direct appropriations amendments by voice vote.  Further amendments by Senators Blaine and Caraway were laid over until the next day.^[167] 

            On the resumption of the now significantly altered bill, Norbeck presented a short but prescient statement on the advantages of the license fee over the direct appropriation authorization.  Norbeck noted, “[A]fter a year or two it is going to be most difficult to continue these appropriations.”  Norbeck did convince Blaine to withdraw his further amendments to the bill.  However, the Senate approved Caraway’s amendment providing for state government takeover of the administration of the refuges on certification of the Secretary of Agriculture.  Although South Carolina’s Blease insisted on making a lengthy speech against the now truncated refuge bill, the full Senate approved the bill as amended and passed it on to the House at the end of the day.  After almost seven years, proponents of a federal refuge system had finally abandoned the fight for the license fund, increased game warden appropriations, and public shooting grounds.^[168]

            The consideration of the heavily amended Norbeck bill in the House proved anti-climactic.  Prodded by a request from NAAS president T. Gilbert Pearson, the House Committee on Agriculture held a hearing on Senate bill 1271 on 21 January 1929.^[169]  In the hearing, Biological Survey chief Paul Redington outlined the drastic changes made to the bill in the Senate.  The committee approved the excisions from the earlier game refuge bills, but Chairman Haugen emphasized the need for a definite purchase policy prior to the first appropriation.  Haugen pointed to the lengthy indirection of the Forest Service for eastern forest purchases under the Weeks law of 1911 as an example to be avoided in bird refuge purchases.  Redington explained that an initial appropriation under an Agriculture Department-prepared substitute bill would be used for a comprehensive survey of refuge sites.  A preliminary study by the Survey had suggested the need for refuges in perhaps 125 areas across the continental United States.  Still, Haugen requested more definite information for the committee regarding the division of funds between land purchases, improvements, refuge administration, and other expenses.^[170]

            The Biological Survey very quickly assembled an appropriations plan, which it presented to the committee on the following day, 22 January 1929.  Redington explained that the Department of Agriculture proposed appropriating $75,000 for the first year’s surveys, $200,000 for the second year’s land purchases, escalating to $600,000 the third year and $1 million to be appropriated thereafter until the completion of the refuge program.  Of these amounts, Redington and the Survey estimated that 15-20 percent of the appropriations after the second year would need to be devoted refuge administration and staffing.  For some members of the committee, including Chairman Haugen, the Survey had offered numbers too vague to be particularly meaningful.  Congressman John Ketcham (R-MI) suggested the committee restrict itself to reporting out an authorization for a detailed study, and then revisit the issue following the study.^[171]  Considering the eight years it had taken for the bill to get this close to passage, the adoption of Ketcham’s proposal might have prevented any further action for federal refuges.

            Fortunately for refuge advocates, the spending outline of the Biological Survey, sponsored in a new bill (H.R. 16525) by August Andresen (R-MN), won the approval of the committee.  To ease fiscal concerns, after the early escalating authorizations, Andresen limited the $1 million period to six years, with $200,000 to be provided thereafter for refuge administration.  Andresen also replaced an unworkable amendment by Sen. Caraway, providing for administrative takeovers of refuges by the states, with an innocuous provision providing for cooperation between the state and federal governments.  The House Agriculture Committee utilized the Andresen bill as a substitute, in the form of a committee amendment, when it reported out the Norbeck bill on 28 January 1929.^[172]

            With the Agriculture Committee satisfied as to the refuge acquisition program, the full House moved quickly to adopt the committee’s recommendations.  The Rules Committee formulated and reported out House Resolution 307, providing for the consideration of the Norbeck bill, on 5 February 1929.^[173]  Just 4 days later, the House debated and adopted the rule for consideration of S. 1271.  Under the parameters of the rule, the House also adopted the committee substitute for the Norbeck bill.  After Thomas S. Williams (R-IL) from the Rules Committee, Chairman Haugen from the Agriculture Committee, and Rep. Andresen explained the changes from previous refuge bills to the House, no serious opposition emerged to the bill.  Andresen particularly stressed the newfound unanimity of support from conservation organizations.  As marks of the unanimity achieved on the measure, game refuge bill opponents D. H. Kincheloe (D-KY), A. J. Montague (D-VA), and Marvin Jones (D-TX) spoke on the Norbeck-Andresen bill’s behalf, a telegram from the usually testy William Hornaday described the bill as “perfect,” and the final vote on the bill was 219-0.^[174]

            The Senate achieved similar harmony when the Norbeck bill returned for concurrence with the House amendments on 11 February 1929.  Norbeck asked the Senate to accede to the House amendments, which he regarded as perfecting his heavily amended bill.  After a brief layover for James Reed to examine the amended bill, Reed, Dill, King, and Blaine all informed the Senate of their support for the refuge acquisition program as then presented.  On a voice vote, the Senate voted to concur with the amendments of the House.^[175]  After conferring with a delegation supporting the Norbeck-Andresen bill, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Migratory Bird Conservation Act into law on 18 February 1929.^[176]

            After eight years of often-contentious congressional debate, the long-awaited legislative foundation for a national wildlife refuge system had finally become a reality.  Most importantly, the MBCA authorized a wide-scale federal purchase program of private lands for the benefit of wildlife, particularly migratory waterfowl.  Following the model of the Weeks Forest Purchase Act of 1911, the MBCA created the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission to evaluate and approve potential migratory bird reservations.  Congress promised to fund these acquisitions via direct appropriations, rejecting the continually controversial proposal for a $1 federal hunting license.  By eliminating the federal license, Congress ensured that refuge purchases would be kept under the watch of congressional appropriations committees and that federal game law enforcement could not expand without congressional approval.  This scheme fit well with the increased congressional oversight of executive branch activities deemed necessary after the scandals of the Harding administration and the conservative taxation philosophy of President Calvin Coolidge.  Of course, it also followed the precedents set by the Upper Mississippi River and Bear River refuge acts.  The MBCA also provided for consideration of state interests in the new refuge program by requiring the consent of state governments for federal land acquisitions and allowing for the ex officio seating on the MBCC of a state’s chief wildlife conservation officer whenever the MBCC considered acquisitions within that state.  Still, it remained to be seen whether Congress would prove as generous with MBCA appropriations in practice as it implied with the unanimous declarations of intent in the passage of the Norbeck-Andresen bill.  Without strong support for funding, the refuge acquisition program envisioned by the sponsors of the MBCA would not easily come to pass.

WILDLIFE REFUGES AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION, 1929-1933

            By 1929, American wildlife needed more than ever the refuges proposed by the Migratory Bird Conservation Act.  Decades of agricultural mechanization and the attendant expansion of cultivation across North America had resulted in the drainage of millions of acres of prime wetlands habitat for migratory waterfowl and other wildlife.  The beginnings of the prolonged drought that eventually created the Dust Bowl devastated the remaining waterfowl habitat throughout the United States and Canada. 

In addition, a near-total blight of Atlantic Coast aquatic grasses in the early 1930s severely damaged populations of a number of waterfowl species on the Atlantic flyway.  The new authority of the federal government to purchase private lands for bird refuges allowed the extension of the refuge idea, already in practice in the western United States on lands withdrawn from the public domain or flooded from large-scale reclamation projects, to the Midwestern, southern and eastern regions of the United States, where no public domain and few reclamation projects existed.

            The passage of the MBCA held out the promise of a well-planned, large-scale federal refuge program.  While previous wildlife refuges, numbering 82 with a total of approximately five million acres in 1929,[177] had been established in a piece-meal fashion, the MBCA established the legal framework for a comprehensive system.  The first order of business was the creation of the necessary bureaucracy to implement the MBCA.  The act’s provisions automatically named the incumbent Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior to the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission (MBCC), and Congress moved quickly to appoint its four requisite members.  The U.S. Senate appointed Peter Norbeck and Harry B. Hawes to its MBCC positions on 19 February 1929, just one day after President Coolidge’s approval of the MBCA.[178]  As leaders of the final, successful effort for the MBCA, Norbeck and Hawes were natural choices for the MBCC.  The House appointed Ernest R. Ackerman (R-NJ) and Samuel D. McReynolds (D-TN) to the MBCC on 3 March 1929.  McReynolds had served on the National Forest Reservation Commission, and he thus brought important institutional knowledge to the MBCC, which was modeled after the older forest acquisition body.[179]

            Congress also preserved momentum for the MBCA by quickly approving a last-minute supplemental funding request for the act’s operation.  On 25 February 1929, outgoing president Calvin Coolidge submitted a supplemental request for $80,000, providing $75,000 to fulfill the first fiscal year of the MBCA and $5,000 for the operations of the MBCC.[180]  With only a week left in the 70th Congress, the Senate Committee on Appropriations inserted the requested supplemental funding into a pending deficiency appropriation bill and reported it the next day.[181]  Working under the tight adjournment deadline, the Senate accepted the committee amendment without debate on 27 February 1929.[182]  With the MBCA funding apparently proving uncontroversial in conference, the House conferees accepted it with numerous other amendments in a report briefly debated and approved by the House on 1 March 1929.[183]  Senate approval of the conference report followed on 2 March 1929, and President Coolidge made the deficiency appropriation bill’s approval one of his final acts in office on 4 March 1929.[184]

            State governments moved to show their approval of the MBCA by providing the necessary consent for acquisitions within their states.  Kansas provided the first active consent to MBCA land acquisition with a legislative act approved 26 February 1929.  Not far behind, Montana approved similar provisions on 1 March 1929.  In addition, the solicitor’s office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture determined that existing, general legislation for federal land acquisition would prove adequate for MBCA action within the states of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.  Thus, refuge acquisitions under the MBCA could begin almost immediately in twenty-three states.[185]  By the end of FY 1931, forty states had provided the necessary consent for refuge acquisitions, with only Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Washington neglecting to act.[186]

            The change in presidential administrations with the inauguration of Herbert Hoover on 4 March 1929 did not perceivably slow the implementation of the MBCA.  With the aim of preparing itself for a national survey of suitable and available areas for refuges, the Bureau of Biological Survey created a Division of Land Acquisition, effective at the start of FY 1930 on 1 July 1929.  The new unit took control of efforts already underway under the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge and Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge Acts, while also assuming responsibility for the land valuation surveys needed for the establishment of new refuges.  The Survey turned to Rudolph Dieffenbach, leader of Biological Survey acquisition efforts under the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge Act, as head of the new division.[187]  Dieffenbach also served concurrently as the executive secretary of the MBCC.

            The Biological Survey quickly dispatched surveyors operating under two divisions across the United States to consider potential refuge sites.  Operating under the Division of Food Habits Research and the immediate supervision of senior biologist W. L. McAtee, Neil Hotchkiss, Fran Uhler, and Charles Sperry headed three regional survey teams responsible for evaluating the biological fitness of proposed refuge sites.  Traveling largely by train, the biologists of the survey teams depended on game wardens for local travel during the spring and summer when waterfowl food was at its most apparent.[188]  Upon its official inauguration on 1 July 1929, the new Division of Land Acquisition placed two parties, headed by veterans of the still-continuing Upper Mississippi River refuge acquisition program, in the field to make land valuation surveys of potential bird refuge sites, often drawing on suggestions solicited from the public since the MBCA’s passage.[189]  By November 1929, before the House Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee, Survey Chief Paul Redington could testify to the biological examination of over 1,350,000 acres in 150 separate areas and land valuation examination of 617,000 acres.  Redington also gave a “preliminary diagnosis” of need for about 125 refuges throughout the continental United States.[190]  At the end of FY 1930, the Biological Survey announced the completion of its initial round of surveys, having measured the “biological fitness” for waterfowl refuges of 189 units involving over 3.7 million acres and spanning all 48 states.  Land valuation surveys had then been completed on 40 units “in 24 States, involving approximately 1,225,000 acres.”[191]

            However, the congressional members of the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission had become impatient at their lack of information and input on the refuge acquisition program.  Despite the quick appointment of House and Senate MBCC members after the passage of the MBCA, the MBCC held no meetings in 1929.  On 27 January 1930, MBCC member and Rep. Sam D. McReynolds wrote to Secretary of Agriculture and MBCC chairman Arthur M. Hyde questioning the commission’s lack of activity and the lack of information made available to commission members.  In a reply of 3 February 1930, Acting Secretary of Agriculture R. W. Dunlap explained that the first MBCA appropriations had been fully devoted to an examination of potential refuge sites.  Dunlap promised that the Secretary of Agriculture would soon call an MBCC meeting for presentation of an acquisition program for FY 1931.[192]

            In the meantime, the Senate moved to institutionalize its interest in wildlife conservation through the establishment of a special investigative committee.  On 11 April 1930, Frederic Walcott (R-CT) and Harry Hawes (D-MO) introduced Senate Resolution 246, to appoint a five member special committee to investigate and report on the conservation of American wildlife.  Hawes, of course, had already displayed a marked interest in wildlife conservation through his sponsorship of the Upper Mississippi Fish and Wild Life Refuge Act in the House, and his support for the final version of the MBCA in the Senate.  An associate of noted conservationist William T. Hornaday, Walcott had served as president of the Connecticut Board of Fisheries and Game before his election to the U.S. Senate.[193]  In less than a week, the Senate received reports from both the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry and the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate approving the resolution.  The Senate passed S. Res. 246 on 17 April 1930, creating the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources (SSCCWR).  The Senate appointed Walcott, Hawes, Peter Norbeck (R-SD), Charles McNary (R-OR), and Key Pittman (D-NV) to serve on the first version of the committee in the 71st Congress.^[194]  With the exception of Pittman, all had been sponsors of important wildlife legislation in recent years.  Although less involved in earlier legislative efforts related to wildlife conservation, Pittman’s Senate seniority certainly brought additional prestige to the committee and his status as a foremost hunter-politician was affirmed when he became the first president of the exclusive Jefferson Islands hunting club.[195]  Notably, soon after its organization, the SSCCWR hired Carl Shoemaker, lawyer, former newspaper publisher, and former head of the Oregon state wildlife agency, first as special investigator and then as secretary, beginning a lengthy and prominent career in national wildlife conservation.[196]

            Just after the creation of the Senate wildlife committee and upon the completion of the initial potential refuge examinations by the Biological Survey, the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission held its first meeting.  On 15 May 1930 the commissioners received a report on “the field accomplishments of the Bureau of Biological Survey on the refuge program.”  Just eleven days later, the MBCC held a second meeting, during which it approved the first refuge acquisitions under the MBCA: San Luis Lake Refuge, CO and Cape Romain Refuge, SC.  Subsequently, on 18 December 1930, in its only meeting of FY 1931, the MBCC approved St. Marks Refuge, FL; Swanquarter Refuge, NC; Crescent Refuge, NE; and Salton Sea Refuge, CA.  Executive orders creating new refuges on federally owned lands found suitable for refuges by the Biological Survey’s examinations supplemented the MBCA acquisitions.[197]

            The early MBCA acquisition units generally conformed to the Survey’s stated preference for refuges of at least twenty thousand acres.  The original Cape Romain Refuge comprised 32,555 acres, a large portion being land between high and low tides ceded by the state government of South Carolina to the United States via special legislation.  Similarly, Swanquarter Refuge in tidewater NC included 11,778 acres of land intermingled with approximately 20,000 acres of water.  As contemplated in the MBCC approval of 1930, Salton Sea Refuge, CA, totaled 24,715 acres of reserved public lands and private lands to be purchased.  The St. Marks Refuge involved a purchase area of 21,076 acres, although the MBCC granted initial approval in 1930 for only the 13,983 acres for which negotiations had been completed.  Also approved in 1930, Crescent Lake Refuge in west-central Nebraska tallied 39,039 acres selected from over 200,000 acres examined by the government’s surveyors.  The Biological Survey and MBCC made something of an exception for the San Luis Lake Refuge in south-central Colorado, which contained only 5,500 acres of land and water, because it occupied a key place in the Central Flyway and consisted of exceptional habitat in an otherwise arid environment.[198]  The creation of units of considerable size helped justify the investment of limited Survey resources in refuge acquisition, administration and development, which, due to the lack of a federal license fund, also had to be gained from the congressional appropriations process.

            After its promising start, the direct appropriations plan for migratory bird refuges collapsed in tandem with the federal government’s revenues during the Great Depression.  The Hoover administration formulated the budgets for the first two years of the MBCA program, authorized for $75,000 in fiscal year 1930 and $200,000 for FY 1931, before the realization of the depression’s severest effects and with full funding.  Supplemental funding for the Cheyenne Bottoms Migratory Bird Refuge in Kansas, authorized under a separate congressional act of 12 June 1930, even appeared to augment appropriations under the MBCA.^[199]  Federal funds for unemployment relief passed by Congress late in FY 1931 also provided a small and temporary boon to the refuge program, “particularly on the big-game preserves, through the construction of buildings, fences, fire-protective and water systems, the surveying and posting of reservations, and other improvements.” [200]  The Survey’s Division of Game and Bird Conservation received $55,575 for construction on its five big-game refuges and two bird refuges, intended to employ 140 men for two months.  Meanwhile, the Division of Land Acquisition gained $34,180 to accelerate its boundary surveying program on three big-game and eighteen bird refuges.[201]

            However, with the economy still in depression in December 1930, the Biological Survey accepted a FY 1932 MBCA appropriation of $400,000, out of $600,000 authorized, as the price of the government’s fiscal emergency.  Still, Congress included legislative language in the appropriations act allowing the Biological Survey to contract for lands in the amount of $200,000 beyond its appropriation, essentially making available the full $600,000.  In its single meeting for FY 1932, held on 3 December 1931, the MBCC approved five new refuges (Blackwater, MD; Hempstead, NY; Long Lake, ND; Bamforth Lake, WY; and Hutton Lake, WY) and additions to five existing refuges (St. Marks, FL; Crescent Lake, NE; Fallon, NV; Swanquarter, NC; and Cape Romain, SC).  Also in FY 1932, President Hoover utilized executive orders to create the Locomotive Springs Refuge in Utah and to make additions of public domain to five existing refuges.  Additionally, the Biological Survey acquired the 2,033-acre Chinsegut Hill Refuge, FL by gift.  Notably, of the seven new refuges created in FY 1932, the largest, Blackwater, consisted initially of just 7,652 acres, suggesting the Survey’s difficulty in maintaining its ideal of 20,000+-acre refuges.  At the conclusion of the MBCA program’s third year, the MBCC had approved a total of 139,981 acres for purchase as refuges, supplemented by 110,265 acres designated as refuge areas by executive order, 2,033 acres acquired by gift, and 2,274 acres leased without the usual option to buy, for a grand total of 254,553 acres newly controlled by the Biological Survey since 1930.[202]

            The MBCA refuge acquisition program ground to a near-total halt in FY 1933.  By late 1931, the Hoover administration felt compelled to slash its budget requests in response to the still worsening American economy.  In the Agricultural Appropriations Act for FY 1933, the Biological Survey absorbed a budget cut of more than $470,000, declining from $2,229,170 to $1,756,177.[203]  This budget contained only $318,000 of the $1 million authorized under the MBCA.  Of this limited amount, Congress appropriated $200,000 to honor the government’s contract obligations authorized by the appropriations act of the previous year.  The Biological Survey devoted most of the remainder to the maintenance of recently acquired MBCA refuges, leaving only a small fraction for continued land acquisition.  The Survey and MBCC attempted to extend the very limited land acquisition fund by signing leases with options to buy in future years, but this stopgap arrangement proved unsatisfactory to most landowners.  Congress also cancelled the still largely unused Cheyenne Bottoms appropriation of $250,000 in FY 1933, due in part to difficult negotiations related to speculative oil leases with the 52 tract owners covering the area.[204]  Related to the appropriations cut for federal refuges, in the spring of 1932, the Biological Survey urged the alternative establishment of State and private “small marsh and water areas as resting, feeding, and breeding grounds for the birds.”  In this way, the Survey hoped to preserve an array of areas smaller than the federal refuge ideal of 20,000 acres, especially in the northwestern breeding areas where prairie potholes lay interspersed with prime farmland too expensive for refuge acquisition.[205]

            The budget for FY 1934, the last prepared by the Hoover administration, made further cuts to the Biological Survey and its refuge program.  The Survey absorbed another almost $400,000 cut in its overall appropriation, to $1,356,280, its lowest level since 1928.  From this already low level, the House appropriations committee reported administrative withholding plans reducing expenditures from appropriations by another 25 percent.[206]  For the MBCA refuge program, the Hoover Budget Bureau had approved $194,300, with the understanding that nearly $100,000 would be devoted to the acquisition of 5,600 acres in the Sacramento Valley of California.[207]  However, the House, narrowly controlled by Democrats intent on redeeming promises of further federal budget cuts made in November 1932, approved only $89,525 of the $1 million authorized by the MBCA for FY 1934.  At the urging of Senate wildlife committee members Peter Norbeck and Charles McNary, the Senate agreed to a floor amendment raising the MBCA appropriation to $194,300, the total approved by the Hoover Budget Bureau, but the conference committee struck out the increase.  The MBCA appropriation of $89,525 effectively halted the land acquisition program, as the Biological Survey directed these limited funds to refuge staffing and maintenance.  Although the advocates of the refuge program had hoped that the full MBCA authorizations of $2,875,000 would by appropriated and expended by the end of FY 1934, the President and Congress had approved only $1,082,525, or thirty-eight percent of the authorization, with actual expenditures even lower.^[208]

            The ecological crisis of the Great Plains in the 1930s greatly exacerbated the lack of waterfowl sanctuaries under the MBCA.  Beginning in 1929, a long-term drought in the prairie potholes region of North America dried up vital wetlands habitat not already drained for agricultural uses.  Ducks and geese surviving the gauntlet of American hunters found few suitable breeding places, greatly reducing their normal fecundity.  In the spring and summer of 1931, Survey biologist William B. Bell found virtually no young waterfowl on a vast swath of the normal north-central continental breeding grounds.  With the remaining waterfowl breeding stock clearly imperiled, the Biological Survey convinced President Hoover and Agriculture Secretary Arthur M. Hyde to cut the national hunting season from three months to one, while maintaining the fifteen ducks per day bag limit installed just two years earlier in the midst of the bag limit bill controversy.^[209]  Although a combination of somewhat improved water levels (and intense political lobbying by hunters) convinced the Survey to approve a two-month hunting season in 1932, the northern drought remained a severe threat to waterfowl populations.[210]

            The government’s fiscal straits and the desperate status of waterfowl in the central United States revived the idea of a dedicated funding source for federal wildlife conservation activities.  Unfortunately, wildlife conservationists remained deeply divided over the form of such a funding source.  Continuing its advocacy from the game refuge bills of the 1920s, the AGPA, now headed by Seth Gordon, still supported a $1 federal license on migratory bird hunting.  On the other hand, the More Game Birds in America Foundation, a predecessor of Ducks Unlimited sponsored by Collier’s publisher Joseph P. Knapp, favored a one-cent tax on shotgun shells.[211]  In December 1931, at the eighteenth annual American Game Conference, an event sponsored but not fully controlled by the AGPA, participants could not coalesce behind a single funding plan and, at the suggestion of Aldo Leopold, appointed a special committee to study and report on the two proposals.[212]  By an apparently 3-2 vote, the committee endorsed the proposal for a shotgun shell tax over a federal license for migratory bird hunting.[213]  Following the narrow decision of the American Game Conference committee, Rep. John W. McCormack (D-MA) advanced plans for financing wildlife refuges through a one-cent tax on each shotgun shell sold for hunting purposes.[214]  However, sport shooters across the country protested this plan to tax their non-hunting pursuits, and many of them expressed support for a federal migratory-bird hunting license as a fairer assessment of the needed funds.  Perhaps more importantly, the acting chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, Charles R. Crisp, also opposed a tax on shotgun shells.[215]  With this considerable opposition, McCormack’s bills languished in committee.

            Meanwhile, the Senate continued its investigative wildlife committee as a select committee in the 72nd Congress, giving it the power to receive and report out relevant bills.  Through extensive hearings and widespread consultation with wildlife conservationists, the bipartisan Senate Special Committee on the Conservation of Wild Life Resources became convinced of the necessity for the previously discarded federal hunting license to fund the acquisition and maintenance of federal wildlife refuges.^[216]  Although Sen. Hawes had warned attendees of the April 1932 hearings that constructive legislation could not be expected while Congress was raising taxes and cutting federal spending to try and balance the ballooning federal budget,^[217] on 21 May 1932, the five wildlife committee members jointly introduced Senate bill 4726, to create a federal hunting license for the creation and support of wildlife refuges.  That same day, the Bureau of Biological Survey announced its “emergency plan” urging the establishment of hundreds of small State and private migratory bird refuges until the end of depression-related fiscal limitations on the MBCA program.  Rep. Jacob Milligan (D-MO) introduced an identical companion bill, H.R. 12246, on 23 May 1932.  Despite the previous strong opposition to such features, the new license bills allowed the expenditure of thirty percent of the license funds on federal game law enforcement, sixty percent for refuge acquisition, and ten percent for administration and scientific research.  The Senate referred its bill to the wildlife committee, which quickly and predictably offered a report recommending its passage on 26 May 1932.^[218]  But, when the bill appeared on the Senate consent calendar on 8 June 1932, two senators rose to object.  Park Trammell (D-FL) objected to its new tax requirement while Clarence Dill (D-WA) declared his amazement that a license fee twice defeated by the Senate could return for its attention.  With the opposition of Trammell and Dill fulfilling Hawes’s prophecy, the duck stamp bill did not receive serious attention in the remainder of the 72nd Congress.^[219]

            The lack of a dedicated license fund and the vagaries of the annual appropriations process meant continuing administrative deficits for the refuge system under the early years of the MBCA.  Even the inadequate appropriations obtained by the Biological Survey required yearly battles to be fought with the Department of Agriculture, Bureau of the Budget, congressional appropriations subcommittees and committees, and the full House and Senate.  Inevitably, one or more of these protagonists proved hostile to increased refuge funding in any given year, fulfilling Peter Norbeck’s fears on enacting the MBCA with promises of direct appropriations.  The original sponsors of the MBCA intended the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission (MBCC), consisting of executive and legislative branch members, to provide a continuing constituency for the refuge system in these struggles for appropriations.  But in practice, the otherwise busy members of the MBCC took little interest in the growth of the refuge system, and often failed to attend the annual or semiannual meetings.  The commission’s rules of order, which allowed acquisition decisions to be made via circularized letters rather than requiring a live quorum, abetted such absenteeism.[220]  In 1935, an original commission member, former senator Harry Hawes, publicly opined that the commission met too infrequently and for too limited periods.^[221]

            The tight direct appropriation budgets and lack of a dedicated revenue stream from federal licenses created many interrelated obstacles for the administration of the refuge system in the Hoover years.  First, the limits on land acquisition discussed above sometimes created incomplete refuges with unwieldy boundaries difficult to administer efficiently.  The Survey’s experience with the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge foreshadowed such concerns.  Although originally authorized early in 1924, the ambitious project had not progressed far enough to be brought under even partial administration until June 1927.[222]  By the end of FY 1932, at the brink of a major Army Corps of Engineers navigation project planned to inundate large portions of the Survey’s land, the Upper Mississippi River Refuge still consisted of multiple unconnected tracts totaling 135,785 acres along 300 miles of the river, making effective administration difficult.[223]  Similar problems continued with refuges acquired under the MBCA.  When the Biological Survey contracted with the Delmarvia Fur Farms, Inc., for the initial lands of the Blackwater Migratory Bird Refuge, U.S. Game Protector Orin Steele, then stationed in nearby Cambridge, MD, objected that the project’s “crazy quilt patch pattern” boundaries, in tandem with law-breaking locals, made effective law enforcement impossible.[224]  At Cape Romain Refuge, SC, the original acquisition area, consisting almost entirely of coastal marshland, did not even include a suitable headquarters site, which later had to be purchased and developed separately on the mainland at McClellanville, SC.  While this meant a considerable expense to the meager refuge allocations, it also removed the staff a considerable distance from the bulk of the refuge.[225]

            Second, the budgetary constraints perpetuated a lack of refuge staffing dating from the creation of the earliest refuges.  Although a quarter century had passed since the designation of Pelican Island in 1903, the Biological Survey still had only a limited pool of experienced refuge personnel.  In July 1926, the Biological Survey published a staff directory showing twenty-two refuges with warden protection, with a total of thirty-nine refuge staff members.  However, twelve staff members, on nine refuges, comprised cooperative wardens, largely from the Bureau of Reclamation, rather than Survey employees.[226]  Despite the Biological Survey’s open advocacy for increased refuge warden service and infrastructure improvements in its annual reports for fiscal years 1927, 1928, and 1929, the Survey could provide warden protection of some type on only thirty of the eighty-two existing wildlife refuges at the latter date.  Of those thirty refuges, the Biological Survey itself provided full-time warden service on only eight, part-time service on an additional five, and depended on non-salaried, cooperative protectors for the remaining seventeen protected refuges.[227]  Although the MBCA seemed to offer a mandate for increased refuge protection, the situation did not immediately improve, with at least fifty-eight of ninety-two refuges remaining completely unprotected in FY 1931.[228]

            The few available refuge personnel engaged in their work with relatively undefined professional roles.  Refuge administrators, known as “Reservation Wardens” before 1 July 1928 and thereafter as “Reservation Protectors,”[229] came from a variety of backgrounds, including prior work as Audubon or State game wardens, U.S. Game Protectors, or as biological and administrative staff of the Biological Survey, but none had academic training in wildlife conservation.  Such training simply did not exist before 1933, when the University of Wisconsin hired Aldo Leopold as the nation’s first professor of wildlife management and thus created the first academic training program for wildlife conservation.[230]  Hence, early MBCA refuge managers conducted much of their work on an essentially ad hoc basis, dependent on their own experiences to maintain or improve wildlife habitat.

            Third, even staffed refuges often lacked resources for the development of basic infrastructure.  As with limited staffing, this also perpetuated past practices.  With some exceptions, the pre-MBCA refuges had their boundaries posted against trespassing hunters, but otherwise nature had been allowed to take its course.  Only on the Survey’s five big game refuges, devoted to protecting remnant herds of American bison, elk, pronghorn antelope, mountain sheep and mule deer, did protectors actively practice a primitive form of wildlife management.  The Survey constructed fences to keep the game on protected federal lands, corralled them to dispose of selected animals and keep herd numbers within the carrying capacity of the range, and fed and watered them in periods of scarcity.[231]  On the much more numerous migratory bird reservations, administration, when budgets allowed any at all, largely consisted of posting boundaries and warden patrols to protect the bird colonies still threatened by plume hunters and bird skin collectors.  The Survey’s very limited development funding for its early refuges allowed only a minimum of fencing required on big-game refuges, public picnic facilities provided on one of those same refuges, and Spartan housing for its resident personnel on manned refuges.[232]

            Limited budget allocations for refuge development and administration continued to be problematic for the refuges acquired under MBCA authorization.  Basic infrastructure, including equipment, office space, and employee housing, generally had to be built up from scratch.  At Cape Romain, one of the first orders of business was to hire a boat for refuge patrols, the Survey’s allocation being insufficient for a purchase.[233]  Also, although Blackwater Refuge had numerous farmhouses and outbuildings when taken under administration in 1932, tenant farmers occupied the most habitable ones through a long-term agricultural concession to the former owner, Delmarvia Fur Farms, Inc.  Refuge manager Van Huizen boarded with a local family for nearly the first year of his assignment, until he could make adequate repairs to a rundown plantation house on the refuge property for himself and his new bride.  Even then, he lacked sufficient heat, which provoked a string of correspondence before proper bids could be received and executed for a new wood stove.[234]

            Despite these obstacles, the refuge system began groping its way toward scientific wildlife management.  On the cusp of the MBCA program, the Biological Survey explained its administrative philosophy:

           Without proper administration, many of the sanctuary areas have no more value as wild-life refuges than have adjacent unprotected lands.  Under most conditions the successful administration of a refuge requires constant supervision.  Game and food species must be protected against encroachment by poachers and often against such destroyers as forest fires.  There are likely to be periods during which some predatory forms must be controlled.  On the other hand, overabundance of the species to be protected may become a serious menace to their welfare, and arrangements must then be made to dispose satisfactorily of the surplus.  On areas set aside as big-game preserves such surpluses result in overgrazing.  Death from starvation and permanent injury to the range may be expected where overgrazing becomes serious.[235]

The Biological Survey’s reservation protectors did their best to implement these basic management activities, still carried out on today’s National Wildlife Refuge System.  In conjunction with the surveyors of the Survey’s Division of Land Acquisition, the refuge staff posted and thereafter maintained the refuge boundary lines.  They initiated regular refuge patrols, focusing on fire control as well law enforcement.  In the course of such patrols and at other times, they initiated a public relations program with the surrounding local population, familiarizing them with the purposes of their particular refuge as well as the refuge system.  Perhaps most importantly for the young scientific field of wildlife management, refuge workers gathered baseline facts essential for future scientific work.  This included gathering and collating weather statistics and making daily observations of refuge wildlife populations.  Predator control, largely conducted through poisoning campaigns of sometimes questionable efficacy, composed perhaps the major management tool on the earliest MBCA refuges.  This drew on the lengthy involvement of the Biological Survey with predator and rodent control, the job that composed the largest single item in the Survey’s budget in the interwar years.[236]

            While most of the early refuge management activities occasioned little public notice, some interfered with the folkways and traditional practices of the local population.  For example, at Cape Romain, the Biological Survey ended the traditional gathering of sea turtle eggs for sale at market by Charleston’s black community.[237]  At Blackwater, refuge manager Van Huizen struggled to fulfill the Survey’s order to avoid fires, a direct challenge to the local practice of burning the marsh grass to ease the muskrat trapping still allowed under the continuing easement of the Delmarvia Fur Farms corporation.[238]  To avoid further local conflict, Van Huizen and the Survey explicitly refrained from requiring fishing permits or otherwise interfering with cross-refuge traffic related to the local fishing industry.[239]  Of course, under the “inviolate sanctuaries” clause of the MBCA, all the migratory bird refuges removed significant areas of traditional hunting grounds from public use.

            For the new MBCA refuges, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge provided a model for future development.  As discussed above, Congress authorized the Bear River refuge under specific legislation of 23 April 1928, preceding the MBCA by ten months.  The Survey hired the Utah state fish and game commissioner, David H. Madsen, as the first superintendent of the Bear River Refuge.  A former president of the Western Association of Game Commissioners and influential in the debates over the game refuge bills of the 1920s, Madsen now presided over an extraordinary habitat for migratory waterfowl.  Ducks banded in the vicinity of the Bear River refuge had been recovered – i.e. shot – across at least nine western states.  But, the Bear River marshes had also become a graveyard for an estimated seven million ducks since the early 1910s.[240]  Since 1914, the Biological Survey had investigated recurring outbreaks of “duck sickness” in the area of Bear River.  Poorly understood initially, the Survey originally attributed the waterfowl deaths to alkali poisoning, not recognizing the cause as avian botulism until 1930.[241]

            Notwithstanding the cause, advocates for the Bear River refuge promised to end the annual outbreaks of duck sickness through engineering.  Survey researchers had found that sick ducks placed in freshwater often recovered, so the Survey focused on increasing areas of freshwater marsh.  Although the Bear River marshes had not been subjected to organized drainage, sources of freshwater had been diverted for upstream irrigation, allowing for increased saltwater intrusion and accompanying damage to the freshwater marsh habitat in periods when the levels of the Great Salt Lake rose.  When the saltwater receded, the flow of freshwater often proved insufficient to flush the marshes of salt, leaving formerly vegetated areas dry and barren.  To both keep back the saltwater of the Great Salt Lake and impound the available freshwater flowage, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge Act authorized the erection of extensive levees in the Bear River marshes.[242]  In contrast to forgotten promises under the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge Act and the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, Congress provided full funding for the implementation of the Bear River Refuge Act.  By June 1931, the completed levee system comprised 35 miles of dikes and impounded an area of 45,000 acres.[243]

            The successful creation of artificial, freshwater impoundments at the Bear River refuge became a touchstone for the development of the MBCA refuges.  As with massive federal dam projects in the western U.S., Bear River Refuge promised that engineering could overcome the unpredictability of nature.  While reclamation boosters promised to make the deserts bloom, wildlife conservationists promised, given sufficient resources, to perpetuate American waterfowl hunting.  Although the Hoover administration had been unable to provide the resources necessary to fully implement the MBCA, it had laid down a skeletal framework for future advances in the national wildlife refuge program.

WILDLIFE REFUGES AND THE NEW DEAL

            At first glance, the ascension of Franklin D. Roosevelt after the election of 1932 did not seem likely to considerably brighten the fate of the MBCA refuge program.  Wildlife conservation had not played a part in the presidential campaign of 1932, dominated by the economic distress of the Great Depression.  Implicitly, the contest promised further cuts to an already beleaguered Biological Survey, thanks to Roosevelt’s denunciations of President Hoover’s unbalanced federal budget.  Following Roosevelt’s landslide presidential victory, wildlife conservationists, like the rest of the country, limped through the four-month interregnum with little indication of Roosevelt’s future plans.  In his address accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Roosevelt had expressed vague plans for a reforestation program similar to one he had instituted as governor of New York State, but the value of such a program to wildlife remained unclear.[244]  Thanks to the continuing drought on the northern Great Plains, migratory waterfowl in particular suffered from too little water rather than too few trees.

            As any textbook of American history will reveal, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first three months as president produced a whirlwind of legislation and executive orders aimed at reviving the American economy.  Among them, within weeks of Roosevelt’s inauguration, the vaguely described reforestation plan of the Democratic National Convention became the Emergency Conservation Work program, better known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of the signature programs of the New Deal.  Following an organizational chart personally approved by FDR, different federal departments handled discrete aspects of the CCC, overseen by CCC administrator Robert Fechner.  The Labor Department recruited hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men, along with smaller numbers of other eligible groups like World War I veterans and Native Americans, into companies of two hundred.  The War Department transported the men from recruitment areas to work sites, directed the construction of camps, and subsequently maintained physical and moral order in the camps.  The Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior shared responsibility for selecting the vast majority of work sites, while providing the immediate supervision for the on-site work programs.  By July 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps had formed 1,300 separate camps and enrolled over two hundred fifty thousand men.[245]

            The national wildlife refuges received a small role in the iconic CCC, but one that comprised a significant boost to a system still in process of acquisition.  On 29 May 1933, President Roosevelt approved the first allocation of CCC camps to wildlife refuges, ratifying the Biological Survey’s selection of St. Marks, FL; Swanquarter, NC; and Blackwater, MD.[246]  Although a tiny proportion of the total CCC program, these camps provided multiple benefits to the individual refuges and the Biological Survey.  While President Roosevelt and Congress slashed the federal budget as part of a government-wide economy drive, the Biological Survey transferred key personnel to supervisory positions on the CCC rolls.  In a practice continually replicated at other refuges with CCC camps, Blackwater’s refuge manager Peter Van Huizen became CCC Camp Superintendent, while Game Management Agents Albert Stadlmeir and Orin Steele, as well as Biological Survey muskrat researcher Frank Smith, received appointments as Camp Foremen.  Without the CCC, some or all of these experienced Survey personnel faced layoffs due to appropriation cuts.[247]  The refuges received unprecedented physical infrastructure and habitat improvements, drawing from the model of the Bear River refuge and years of Survey wish lists for refuge developments.  CCC-aided development included creation of freshwater impoundments, access roads and trails, ditching and canals, lookout towers, telephone lines, new buildings and renovations for existing buildings, and fire-prevention systems.[248]

            In addition to the CCC, refuge development received boosts from other relief programs of the early New Deal.  Over the critical winter of 1933-1934, the Civil Works Administration’s work relief program delegated some workers to labor-intensive refuge projects.  On the Sullys Hill Game Preserve, CWA workers thinned the refuge’s forestlands for firewood.[249]  At Blackwater refuge, a small delegation of CWA workers cleared an abandoned agricultural site in preparation for the relocation of the Survey’s nearby muskrat experiment station.[250]  Funds from the Public Works Administration also provided extensive refuge improvements, including fencing, observation towers, roads, trails, and dams.[251]

            Unfortunately, New Deal unemployment relief projects and related federal programs not controlled by the Biological Survey often proved damaging to wildlife.  Fire control projects too often stripped away forest understory vital for wildlife habitat.  Depending on the season and particular area, the very presence of hundreds of men working in usually undisturbed areas proved very disruptive to wildlife.  In particular, mosquito control efforts based on questionable public health grounds often caused severe damage to wetland habitat of waterfowl, muskrats, and other wildlife, while doing relatively little to eliminate mosquitoes.[252]  Of course, to the extent that relief labor was used on major dam projects, it also contributed to considerable wildlife habitat damage, though sometimes unrecognized at the time of construction.[253]  As his chief biographer noted, personal experience with the early CCC and other relief projects left wildlife conservationist Aldo Leopold lamenting the lack of coordination between avowedly conservation agencies.[254]  In its first report to Congress, the House Select Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources also decried the destruction of wildlife resources created by uncoordinated federal activities.[255]

            While the Civilian Conservation Corps and other relief agencies began providing short-term boosts to refuge system development, Congress began considering more permanent support for federal wildlife conservation.  Late in the frenetic, special first session of the 73rd Congress, the Senate found time to revitalize its Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources.[256]  On 31 May 1933, the Vice President appointed Joel Bennett Clark (D-MO) to fill the place of his Senate predecessor, Harry Hawes, on the wildlife committee.[257]  Because the three Republicans already on the wildlife committee had avoided the Democratic landslide of 1932, the Senate expanded the committee to seven to provide for a Democratic majority in June 1933.  The appointments of Harry F. Byrd (D-VA) and Josiah Bailey (D-NC), both prominent Southern conservatives, to the new Democratic seats, joining moderate conservatives Clark and Key Pittman (D-NV), resulted in the interesting but not uncommon New Deal era experience of the committee’s progressive Republicans being more in line with FDR administration policies than the committee’s Democrats.[258]

            Even before the wildlife committee’s reconfiguration, the four members remaining from the 72nd Congress had jointly reintroduced their federal hunting license bill.  Like previous proposals, the bill required migratory waterfowl hunters to purchase a $1, “Federal migratory-bird hunting stamp.”  The resulting monies would constitute the “migratory bird conservation fund,” with a permanent appropriation divided between refuge acquisition, administration, and development (not less then 75 percent), enforcement of the MBTA (not more than 20 percent), and administrative expenses for the duck stamps (remainder).[259]  The wildlife committee’s bill report strongly emphasized the self-supporting nature of the proposal, optimistically estimated annual sales of the $1 licenses at 1,250,000, and noted that appropriations for the MBCA had “fallen more than $1,750,000 below the authorizations provided in the bill.”^[260]

              The Senate wildlife committee also arranged for Rep. Richard Kleberg (D-TX) to introduce a companion bill in the House.[261]  An indifferent, ultra-conservative legislator who generally left his oversized district’s business to his indefatigable secretary, a young Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kleberg’s seat on the germane House Agriculture Committee provided his main qualification for the duck stamp bill’s sponsorship.  However, as a well-known outdoorsman, Kleberg did possess a genuine, personal interest in wildlife conservation, spurring unusual personal appearances at congressional hearings and conservation meetings.  Kleberg also might have perceived a financial interest, as the famous King Ranch of Texas, of which Kleberg owned twenty percent, possessed and protected significant waterfowl habitat in its coastal holdings along the Gulf of Mexico.  The ranch would conceivably benefit if duck stamps made possible the profitable sale of its property to the government, or if the creation of nearby inviolate refuges created a premium for King Ranch hunting expeditions.[262]

            Although neither the Senate nor the House acted on the duck stamp bill before the first session adjournment of the 73rd Congress, public and political support for a renewed program of “wildlife restoration” built substantially during the mid-term congressional adjournment, culminating in an unprecedented whirlwind on wildlife conservation activity in early 1934.  An October 1933 presentation to President Roosevelt by Thomas H. Beck, editor of Collier’s magazine and personal friend of FDR, spurred the New Deal program of wildlife restoration.  As chairman of the Connecticut State Board of Fisheries and Game, Beck had sponsored a six-year plan for statewide wildlife restoration.  He now sought similar action at the national level, particularly on behalf of migratory game birds.  Beck’s proposal spurred consultations amongst President Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, and the leaders of the Biological Survey, the latter of whom responded defensively in regards to their record on migratory bird conservation.  Survey chief Paul Redington argued that Beck’s proposal simply recycled a number of proposals already familiar to wildlife conservationists. Still, Beck’s proposal resulted in the appointment of a three-man committee, with Beck as chair, on 15 December 1933.  The President’s Committee on Wild Life Restoration would explore the implementation of a migratory waterfowl restoration program.  Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace appointed fellow Iowan Jay N. “Ding” Darling, nationally syndicated political cartoonist and noted conservationist, and Aldo Leopold, recently appointed as the nation’s first professor of wildlife management by the University of Wisconsin, as the other two members of the President’s Committee on Wild Life Restoration.[263]  Beck, Darling, and Leopold would consider the feasibility of an $18 million program expending $12 million for habitat restoration, predator control, and refuge development on behalf of migratory birds, with the remaining $6 million directed to the propagation of upland game birds.[264]

            Meanwhile, the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources continued its own advocacy.  On 20 December 1933, the President met with the full membership of the Senate wildlife committee, accompanied by their former colleague turned lobbyist, Harry B. Hawes.  The committee received Roosevelt’s endorsement of its $1 duck stamp bill, the first time that the nation’s chief executive had openly supported a federal hunting license proposal.  FDR also expressed support for a $1 million public works allocation to purchase waterfowl breeding grounds, with improvements to be made by the Civilian Conservation Corps.[265]  Apparently with Roosevelt’s blessing, the Senate committee also laid plans for a January conference of conservation leaders to endorse a national program of wildlife conservation[MSOffice1] .

            Although classroom commitments kept Leopold from personally attending many sessions, the Beck Committee began its work in Washington, DC, on 6 January 1934.  As an early order of business, Beck and Darling met at the U.S. Capitol with the Senate wildlife committee to coordinate activities.  Receiving assurances from Beck and Darling that they would not advocate the outright abolition of the Biological Survey, the senators approved a program of refuge selection and administrative advice for the Beck committee, while reserving to themselves any legislative agenda.  However, the senators ignored Beck’s appeal to avoid the submission of separate, perhaps conflicting, wildlife plans from the two committees.[266]  Soon after this meeting, the Beck Committee issued a request for information on possible breeding area acquisitions to all State wildlife commissioners, every chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America, the American Game Association, National Association of Audubon Societies, the Senate wildlife committee, and the Biological Survey.  The replies received would form the heart of the Beck Committee’s report to President Roosevelt.[267]

            However, due to vastly different conceptions of wildlife conservation among Beck, Darling, and Leopold, probably exacerbated by Leopold’s absences, formulating a formal report proved difficult.  As a founder and sponsor of the More Game Birds in America Foundation, Beck believed artificial stocking of game birds might play a large role in the proposed wildlife restoration program.  However, based on their lived experience with large-scale wetlands destruction for agricultural production, native Midwesterners Darling and Leopold instead emphasized habitat restoration to aid natural reproduction.  Darling and Leopold also sympathized with the plight of the Biological Survey in the budgetary straits of the Great Depression, while Beck blamed the Survey for the failure of the MBCA and urged its abolition.  In addition, Beck overestimated FDR’s funding commitment to a wildlife restoration program, apparently believing he had already secured a minimum of $25 million.[268]

            While the Beck Committee continued to work on its final report, the AGPA sponsored its twentieth annual American Game Conference, 22-24 January 1934, in New York City, followed by the Senate wildlife committee’s conference of conservationists in Washington, DC.  In New York, without providing details, Beck outlined his committee’s prospective four-part report.  It would consist of a plan for purchasing and restoring migratory waterfowl nesting areas, a national upland game restoration program, a federal plan for greater wildlife propagation “especially [for] those species which are or are becoming scarce,” and a proposal for a federal government reorganization related to wildlife conservation.[269]  Although Survey chief Redington also appeared before the conference, assuring the attendees of his agency’s readiness to carry out a new program of wildlife restoration while urging further bag limits to conserve remaining game stocks, the initiative had clearly moved out of his control.[270]

            In Washington, the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources presented a multi-part blueprint for reform and expansion of federal wildlife conservation.  The key provisions called for the creation of an Assistant Secretary for Conservation in the Department of Agriculture, the rechristening of the Biological Survey as the U.S. Wildlife Service, negotiation of a migratory bird treaty with Mexico, and congressional enactment of the duck stamp bill, conservation activities coordination bill, and wildlife sanctuaries in national forests bill.  Although no specific legislative proposal had yet been put forward, the plan also endorsed dedicating the recently revived ten percent excise tax on arms and ammunition to wildlife restoration.  The Senate committee’s proposal rather pointedly bypassed the Beck Committee, urging the use of the permanent Migratory Bird Conservation Commission to determine submarginal land purchases for wildlife conservation, and simply recommending the “careful consideration” of the Beck committee’s forthcoming plan.[271]  However, with representatives of at least thirty conservation organizations, as well as key U.S. Senators and Representatives in attendance, the full conference rejected the sidelining of the Beck Committee.  While the conference unanimously endorsed the proposed legislative agenda and Mexican treaty negotiations, it also unanimously endorsed the exact outline of wildlife restoration presented by Beck in New York, and agreed to leave the specifics to the Beck Committee’s report.[272]  Receiving a delegation from the conference the next day, President Roosevelt approved the conference’s report and, as one piece of the three-part legislative conservation program, again gave public support to the federal duck stamp proposal.[273]

            On the heels of the Senate wildlife committee’s conference, first-term Rep. A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) succeeded in creating an equivalent wildlife committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Formerly the chairman of the Virginia Commission on Game and Inland Fisheries and a prominent participant in the controversy between funding federal wildlife conservation with an excise tax on ammunition or a duck stamp, Robertson had proposed a permanent House Committee on Wildlife in 1933.[274]  After the House leadership proved unwilling to sanction a new permanent committee, Robertson supported a substitute proposal from the Committee on Rules for an investigative special committee of fifteen members.[275]  To quell concerns over the committee’s jurisdiction, the resolution mandated the appointment of the two House members of the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission and the chairmen of the Agriculture and Merchant Marine and Fisheries committees.  Unlike the Senate wildlife committee, the House version would have no powers to receive and report legislative bills.[276]  After a wide-ranging debate, the House passed the resolution on 29 January 1934, and the Speaker appointed the committee, with Robertson as chairman, the next day.[277]  For Robertson, the chairmanship marked his emergence as the foremost wildlife conservationist in the U.S. House of Representatives.

            Two weeks after the Senate wildlife committee’s conference, the Beck Committee delivered its report.  The Beck Committee report contained little unfamiliar to experienced wildlife conservationists, but, thanks to the presence of two press giants in Darling and Beck, it attracted unprecedented attention, including that of Agriculture Secretary Wallace and President Roosevelt.  Largely the work of Darling, who attempted to craft a compromise between Beck and Leopold’s divergent ideas,[278] the report outlined restoration programs for migratory game birds, upland game, non-game insectivorous and song birds, and mammals, while also offering a new federal government organization for wildlife administration.  It repeatedly stressed the consistency of wildlife restoration with the withdrawal of submarginal lands from agricultural production, including both federal land purchases and the termination of grazing rights on public domain.  For affected farmers, the Beck Committee urged a larger utilization of the alternative “crop” of wildlife and the accompanying, profitable hunting rights.  However, in a section probably most influenced by Leopold, the report also advocated, albeit generally at the state and local levels, the protection, preservation, and propagation of rare biological forms, later termed endangered species, simply for their aesthetic values.  The total program called for the purchase of twelve to seventeen million acres at a cost of $50.5 million, to be administered by a new “Wildlife Restoration Commissioner,” coordinating the wildlife activities of the Agriculture, Interior, and Commerce departments.  Although emergency relief appropriations would provide the major acquisition and development funding, maintenance funds would come from the proposed duck stamp, a dedication of the arms and ammunition excise tax, with additional regular appropriations.[279]

            The Beck committee found unsatisfactory the list of potential refuge areas compiled by the Survey in its MBCA surveys of 1929-1931.  As Beck had described in an earlier letter to Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace, of the 141 potential refuge projects compiled by the Survey, “none of them were yet in such shape as to justify their being recommended for purchase, because of the complete absence of topographical surveys, other engineering data such as reconstruction costs, etc.”[280]  Thus, as an unpublished appendix to their report, the Beck Committee compiled its own lists of potential waterfowl and upland game refuges, including areas in every state.  The “Summary of Tentative Projects: Migratory Waterfowl” listed 323 projects in 23 States (heavily concentrated in the upper Midwest breeding areas – 110 in North Dakota alone, with an additional 21 in South Dakota, 31 in Minnesota, 15 in Wisconsin, 27 in Montana, 12 in Nebraska and 12 in Utah), with approximate acreage of 3,891,550; land estimated to cost $25,157, 850, materials and equipment $2,162,700, labor $5,134,000, with grand total of $32,454,550; to be maintained by total of 762 “resident keepers.”  The summary for “Tentative Projects: Upland Game” did not list numbers of projects, but simply provided breakdowns for every State on desired acreage, estimated cost per acre, total estimated land cost, estimated labor and equipment costs, total cost, and resident keepers.  The grand total for all 48 States was 2,322,898 acres with an estimated land cost of $11,959,814, estimated labor and equipment cost of $2,227,000, for total of $14,186,814, to be maintained by 633 resident keepers.[281]  Considering wildlife’s previously limited place in the federal government, the Beck Committee set ambitious, even audacious, goals.

            Meanwhile, wildlife conservationists moved to implement the legislative agenda endorsed by President Roosevelt in his meeting with conservationists on 26 January 1934.  The duck stamp bill held particular importance as advocates argued that revenues from the proposed federal hunting license could fill the void left by the collapse of MBCA appropriations.  To emphasize that point, the Biological Survey budget proposed by the Roosevelt administration for FY 1935 included cuts of over $400,000, almost thirty-three percent of the FY 1934 budget.  This budget reflected severe, department-wide cuts to USDA research programs, but also cut the Survey’s various refuge activities from $246,225 to $163,901, a reduction proportional to the Survey’s overall budget reductions.[282]  Still, considerable congressional opposition existed to the license bill as reported by the Senate wildlife committee in June 1933.  Longtime federal license opponent Clarence Dill (D-WA) had objected to the bill’s consideration under the consent calendar on 23 January 1934.  In a short debate, Dill urged amendments to remove the provision for federal game wardens from duck stamp funds and to insure no public shooting grounds would be established.[283]

            Even with President Roosevelt’s open support at a zenith of the New Deal era, wildlife conservationists bowed to congressional opposition to expanding federal law enforcement through earmarked duck stamp funds.  On 5 February 1934, the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wild Life Resources introduced and reported a substitute bill embodying the amendments demanded by Dill.  The new bill devoted ninety percent of duck stamp funds to the purchase and maintenance of inviolate sanctuaries, reserving only ten percent for administrative expenses incurred by the Post Office Department and the Biological Survey, and omitting previous mentions of federal law enforcement.[284]  With these changes creating the needed unanimity, the Senate passed the substitute duck stamp bill, in tandem with the other administration-backed conservation measures, on the consent calendar the next day.[285]

            The House also moved expeditiously, but somewhat elliptically, on the now administration-backed wildlife legislation.  Having held a rather perfunctory hearing on the duck stamp proposal on 31 January 1934, the House Agriculture Committee reported a slightly amended version of the Kleberg bill, which preserved the original provisions for federal law enforcement funding but converted the bill from a continuing appropriation to a mere authorization, on 7 February 1934.[286]  Then, having officially received the trio of Senate-passed wildlife conservation bills on 8 February 1934,[287] a House Agriculture subcommittee revisited the subject in a brief hearing on 24 February 1934.  Former senator Harry B. Hawes (D-MO), Senate wildlife committee chairman Frederic C. Walcott (R-CT), and Rep. Kleberg emphasized the self-perpetuating funding for wildlife conservation created by the duck stamp bill, as well as the unanimous support of the interested public and Roosevelt administration.[288]  Immediately following this hearing, Rep. Kleberg reported the Senate bill from the Agriculture Committee with an amendment that substituted the text of his bill, as amended by the report of 7 February 1934.[289]  The new House wildlife committee also considered the duck stamp bill in its very first two meetings, with the members present agreeing to support the duck stamp bill with a clarifying amendment.[290]

            On 5 March 1934, the House of Representatives considered the trio of administration-backed wildlife bills, including the duck stamp proposal, under the consent calendar.  However, due to constitutional concerns over a revenue-producing act originating in the Senate, the House did not consider the Senate-passed duck stamp bill, but recurred to the Kleberg bill reported on 7 February 1934.  While several representatives questioned or voiced outright disagreement with the purpose of the duck stamp bill, they ultimately withheld their objections to the bill’s consideration.  Acting as floor manager, Rep. Kleberg agreed to an exemption to the duck stamp requirement for hunters under sixteen years old, but successfully parried a broader exemption suggested for all landowners, which would have severely limited the act’s fundraising capabilities.  Just before final House passage, Kleberg successfully offered his own amendment, substituting the Senate bill provisions for a continuing appropriation and the 90-10 division of duck stamp funds for “location, ascertainment, acquisition, administration, maintenance, and development of suitable areas for inviolate migratory-bird sanctuaries” and “administrative expenses,” respectively.^[291]

            The constitutional qualms over the duck stamp’s legislative origins required the Senate to again consider the duck stamp proposal.  In a brief report offered by Sen. Walcott, the Senate wildlife committee offered an unsurprising renewal of its support on 6 March 1934.[292]  At the end of the next day’s Senate session, Minority Leader McNary (R-OR) received unanimous consent to take up the House duck stamp bill.  Thanks to a deftly worded floor explanation by Walcott, the bill avoided a unanimous consent objection, and the Senate agreed to the duck stamp bill for a second time just before the day’s recess.  Finally, acting on his earlier expressions of support, President Roosevelt signed the Duck Stamp Act into law on 16 March 1934.^[293]

            After thirteen years of contentious and sometimes bitter debate, the relatively easy passage of the federal hunting license law in 1934 seems almost inexplicable.  Formerly inveterate opponents of the concept of a federal hunting license for migratory birds permitted passage of the duck stamp bill on the unanimous consent calendars of both houses of Congress.  Although Senators King and Dill still voiced skepticism about the license bill on the Senate floor, unlike previous sessions, they withheld their objections to unanimous consent consideration.  The reasons for their cooperation remain unclear, but may have stemmed from a combination of the clear failure of the direct appropriations process to meet refuge system needs and the open support of a Democratic presidential administration.  For Clarence Dill, a home state interest in presidential support for a proposed Columbia River basin development project might have affected his stand on the federal hunting license.^[294]  Although Jay “Ding” Darling has been closely associated with the duck stamp, there is no evidence that this well-known Republican influenced the largely Democratic prior opposition to a federal hunting license.[295]  While the longtime game refuge bill sponsor, Peter Norbeck (R-SD), did not participate in floor debate on the duck stamp bill, he must have been both gratified and somewhat perplexed at the easy passage of a concept he had struggled to achieve for years as a member of the GOP majority prior to 1933.

            The implementation of the federal duck stamp act marked the emergence of the modern framework for the National Wildlife Refuge System.  The federal government now possessed both the authority and a reliable means for refuge acquisitions.  As a continuing appropriation, the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Fund created by duck stamp sales kept available an annual revenue stream publicly acknowledged for refuges.  Although stringent restrictions on waterfowl hunting in the 1930s reduced early federal duck stamp sales, they totaled $1,676,787 for the first three years of the program.^[296]  However, the “duck stamp act” marked just a part of the New Deal jumpstart of the national wildlife refuge acquisition program.

            In the midst of the congressional debates on wildlife conservation, on 26 February 1934, Paul G. Redington, chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey since 1927, received a transfer back to the U.S. Forest Service, where he had begun his government career in 1904, effective 1 March 1934.  Although Redington had successfully guided the Survey out of the politically damaging and divisive debates on the game refuge bills of the 1920s and implemented the MBCA to the extent of his budget in the Hoover years, the Beck Committee and his own declining health apparently undercut Redington enough to spur his withdrawal.  Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace named the Survey’s associate chief, Walter C. Henderson, as a temporary replacement, but decided to look outside the ranks for a permanent replacement.  Considering previous events, Wallace and President Roosevelt rather naturally turned to a member of the Beck Committee for Redington’s successor.  While Jay N. “Ding” Darling possessed neither the administrative experience of big businessman Thomas Beck nor Aldo Leopold’s scientific knowledge of wildlife conservation, he did possess a working relationship with fellow Iowan Henry Wallace and the rather perverse qualification of national prominence as a critic of the New Deal.  Following a personal phone call from President Roosevelt, Darling accepted appointment as the next chief of the Biological Survey, which Wallace announced on 10 March 1934.[297]

            The appointment of Jay N. “Ding” Darling as chief of the Biological Survey proved a catalytic moment for the New Deal refuge system.  Although no official action had yet been taken on the Beck Committee’s report, Darling’s appointment appeared to provide a mandate for its implementation.  Darling’s status as a prominent outsider, who had forsaken a six-figure salary to join the Biological Survey at $8,000 per year, significantly elevated the stature of the Biological Survey in the federal bureaucracy.  Darling’s service also came at precipitous point for the Survey, when the retirement of its founding late nineteenth century cohort coincided with a burgeoning of administrative functions at the expense of the agency’s previous commitment to scientific research.[298]  The rapidly growing refuge system demanded land and wildlife managers rather than laboratory-oriented ornithologists and mammalogists.

            In testimony before the House Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife on 23 March 1934, just days after assuming the Biological Survey chieftainship, Darling laid out his ambitious vision for wildlife restoration in the United States: a vision similar in many respects, but not identical, with the report of the President’s Committee on Wild-Life Restoration on which he had served.  Noting that at least seventeen million acres of U.S. wetlands had been drained, Darling urged the re-flooding of at least five million acres.  He argued that marshland restoration would not only benefit wildlife, but also substantially aid the retirement of submarginal agricultural land, then a major concern of the New Deal’s agricultural recovery program.  To maintain the former farming population, Darling advocated the establishment of game management areas, modeled after an Iowa program, that could soon yield income from hunting fees and animal pelts greater than agriculture on the same area.[299]  Although his vision of game management areas never materialized, Darling’s expansive goals for migratory waterfowl habitat restoration, later set at 7.5 million acres, energized the national wildlife refuge program.

            With Darling in charge, the Biological Survey began adding wildlife refuges to its system at a hitherto unimagined pace.  Darling’s greatest strength proved to be his willingness and ability to engage in high-level bureaucratic battles for refuge acquisition and development funding he deemed necessary.  By the end of FY 1934, Darling had received commitments totaling $8.5 million to be expended on behalf of the refuge system, a total at once meeting the goal of the original MBCA program, though falling far short of the Beck Committee’s recommendations.  The first $1 million represented the sum FDR promised to the Senate wildlife committee in December 1933 for refuge land acquisition, reserved by executive order from Emergency Conservation Work, or CCC, funds.  The Survey drew $5 million from USDA land acquisition programs for the retirement of submarginal agricultural lands and drought-relief alleviation in the Great Plains.  The final $2.5 million consisted of development funds drawn from the Public Works Administration.  Although time limits placed on the funds prevented their complete utilization, the $8.5 million of emergency funds allocations represented an unprecedented expansion of refuge acquisitions.[300]  Darling tireless advocacy had resulted in significant aid from New Deal emergency relief programs for the refuge system, dwarfing the funds initially available under the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act.

            By the end of FY 1934, the Biological Survey had completed or had in progress land acquisition on 15 areas with an approximate total area of 526,800 acres, surpassing all previous refuge land acquisition totals.  Following the emphasis of the Beck Committee’s recommendations, the Survey largely concentrated its acquisitions in the waterfowl breeding areas of the upper Midwest, with areas in the Dakotas and Minnesota comprising 291,000 acres, or 55 percent of the total acreage.  Of course, the acquisition emphasis in that area dovetailed nicely with the New Deal’s larger attack on agricultural overproduction, submarginal land retirement program, and drought relief concerns.  Although it offered no comfort to the thousands of bankrupted farmers involved, the severe drought and attendant farm foreclosures in the Dakotas provided a chance for habitat restoration on a large scale. [301]

            Under a reorganization effected by Darling on 1 July 1934, J. Clark Salyer, II coordinated this work as head of the new Division of Migratory Waterfowl.  Initially responsible for just the new migratory waterfowl refuges, but soon supervising all the Survey’s refuges, Salyer devoted himself fully to Darling’s refuge program.  Afraid of flying, Salyer often embarked on multi-month automobile trips to personally inspect his scattered but growing number of charges.  Although such inspection trips had not been unusual during the Biological Survey’s earlier years, Salyer’s travels later became legendary as airplane travel largely replaced overland travel for distant journeys.[302]

            Drawing on the emergency fund allocations obtained during FY 1934, Darling, Salyer, and the Biological Survey continued the expansive refuge acquisition program begun in 1934.  By the end of FY 1935, acquisitions and options under emergency fund allocations had expanded to more than 840,000 acres comprising 31 refuges in 17 states.  To restore or mitigate previous drainage of migratory waterfowl habitat, the Survey contracted for water impoundment projects covering 653,000 acres of refuge lands.  The Survey also contracted for the construction of headquarters on 16 migratory waterfowl refuges, with planning completed for an additional 10 refuges.  Finally, the Survey made Talcot Lake, Minnesota, its first acquisition project under the duck stamp act.[303]

            Although outside the Survey’s primary acquisition area of the northern Great Plains, the purchase of Lake Mattamuskeet, in eastern North Carolina, represented the Survey’s longstanding interest in failed agricultural drainage projects.  A historic wintering ground for migratory waterfowl in the Atlantic Flyway, the 50,000-acre freshwater lake had been the target of a massive drainage project dubbed “New Holland” beginning in 1914.  After installation of a set of pumps capable of removing one million gallons of water per minute, between fifteen and twenty thousand acres of the lake bed had been exposed by early 1924.  But, the lakebed soil proved unsuitable for agriculture and the entire project fell into bankruptcy.[304]  A renewed drainage effort in 1925 succeeded in draining nearly the entire lake, but still failed to produce an agricultural profit.  The Biological Survey had attempted to negotiate a land donation with the lake’s owners in 1929, but the New Holland Company proved unwilling to part with its property until 1934, after a loss of more than $2.2 million.  It then agreed to sell to the Biological Survey for $315,000.[305]  Due to the area’s importance as a waterfowl hunting ground, plus the interest of the local congressman, the Biological Survey agreed to purchase the lake with a portion of its emergency allocations, allowing it to maintain a significant portion of the refuge as a public shooting area, administered by the state of North Carolina.[306]

            Darling also provided an enduring but elusive goal for the refuge system of 7.5 million acres of migratory waterfowl habitat in federal ownership.  Darling’s annual report for FY 1935 planned the “acquisition by the Bureau of a million acres in each of the fiscal years 1935-36 and 1936-37.”  When added to previous acquisitions, the Biological Survey’s refuge system would then consist of “more than 200 [refuges], involving 4,500,000 acres of wildlife-refuge land, more than 3,600,000 acres primarily of value to migratory waterfowl.”  Darling hoped to reach the full federal quota of refuge lands by 1940, emphasizing the restoration of drained or otherwise damaged waterfowl habitat rather than the simple purchase of remaining productive areas.[307]  With such restorations, Darling and the Biological Survey believed migratory waterfowl could be restored to at least a semblance of their previous abundance.

            Thanks to a timely Senate amendment from Peter Norbeck (R-SD), the accelerated refuge acquisition program continued in fiscal years 1936 and 1937.  Under the Norbeck amendment, Congress made approximately $6 million available for refuge acquisitions after 15 June 1935.  Norbeck’s amendment has since earned near legendary status among historians of wildlife conservation.  Accordingly, the eyewitness description of the Senate wildlife committee’s secretary, Carl Shoemaker, is worth quoting at length:

           One day early in June Peter Norbeck, a member of the Senate Committee on Wildlife Resources, called me to his office in the Senate Office Building.  Apparently he had been talking with Ding Darling though he did not tell me so.  …  There was a bill pending on the Senate Calendar that morning to which he wanted to attach an amendment providing funds for the duck refuge program.  He asked me to prepare that amendment and bring it to his office.  … I quickly wrote the few lines which would appropriate $6,000,000 out of the unexpended balances in various relief and rehabilitation agencies ….  The Senator had recently had all of his teeth extracted and his new dentures gave him great misery.  As we walked from the office building to the Capitol he took out his dentures and stuffed them in his vest pocket.  We … heard the clerk calling the bill for a vote.  Senator Norbeck walked quickly down the aisle, waving the amendment in his hand.  Senator Bennett Champ Clark, a member of the Wildlife Committee, happened to be presiding.  A page boy took the amendment to the rostrum and Senator Clark handed it to the Clerk to read.  Those who are familiar with reading clerks know that most of them drawl away and seldom can anyone understand more than a few of the words and then seldom get the drift.  …

           Senator Clark asked Norbeck to explain his amendment.  Well, he rose from his seat and opened his mouth but no intelligible words came forth.  It sounded like, “Glut, glut, oogle, glut…” and as he finished Senator Clark said, “All in favor of the amendment of the distinguished Senator from South Dakota say ‘aye.’”  Such was the stature of Senator Norbeck that no one questioned his integrity.  …  “Those opposed say ‘no.’  The ‘ayes’ have it,” and the gavel fell![308]

Despite an off-the-cuff nature suggested by the above and similar accounts, Norbeck had laid a careful groundwork for his successful amendment, introducing a joint resolution to effect continued funding for the Biological Survey’s wildlife restoration program on 4 June 1935.  The Senate’s Committee on Agriculture and Forestry had quickly reported this resolution on 7 June 1935.[309]  The committee’s prior approval of Norbeck’s joint resolution cleared the path for the floor amendment embodying its features on 10 June 1935.

            An important piece of conservation legislation in its own right, the bill amended by Norbeck originally contained six separate titles embodying important wildlife conservation measures, some sought by the Biological Survey for several years.  The first title corrected defects in the duck stamp act of 1934, limitations of which had effectively prevented stamp collectors and non-hunting wildlife conservationists from purchasing duck stamps.  The second title updated and greatly broadened the provisions of the Lacey Act of 1900, making it applicable to transportation of game animals by automobiles and airplanes and expanding the enforcement authority of the Department of Agriculture’s officers.  Another title revived a longstanding proposal to amend the MBCA of 1929 regarding the regulation of reservations made in the purchase of lands for refuges.  Title five authorized the President to allocate further funds for wildlife refuge acquisition and development from relief appropriations, while title six transferred the Wind Cave National Game Preserve, South Dakota, which the Biological Survey administered from within Wind Cave National Park, to the National Park Service, Department of the Interior.  Title four contained the bill’s most important and enduring provisions, providing for paying counties twenty-five percent of the revenues derived from wildlife refuges within their borders.  Although this initially represented a small amount, it promised to grow over time even while it alleviated concerns in some communities about extensive acreage removed from the tax rolls as wildlife refuges.[310]

            Richard Kleberg, the House sponsor of the duck stamp act a year earlier, had introduced the bill famously amended by Norbeck on 9 May 1935.  The Committee on Agriculture reported the measure without amendment on 13 May 1935.  Then, on the unanimous consent request of Rep. Kleberg, the House passed his bill on 5 June 1935.[311]  That same day, all seven members of the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources jointly introduced a companion bill, which the committee promptly reported without amendment on the next day, 6 June 1935.  With this action in hand, the Senate referred the House bill directly to its legislative calendar rather than to committee, setting the stage for Norbeck’s amendment.[312]  After the Senate approved Norbeck’s $6 million amendment and passed the House bill in lieu of the Senate companion, the bill returned to the House.  The House concurred in Norbeck’s amendment under unanimous consent, but a technical amendment required another return to the Senate before President Roosevelt signed it into law, apparently without knowledge of Norbeck’s $6 million amendment, on 15 June 1935.[313]

            With the $6 million of the Norbeck amendment in addition to the previous $6 million of executive allocations from emergency funds, the Biological Survey acquired approximately half of Darling’s goal of 7.5 million acres of federally restored migratory waterfowl habitat.  Building on the over 610,000 acres acquired by the Biological Survey since 1 July 1934, the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission approved Survey-recommended refuge acquisitions totaling 727,900 acres on 49 refuges at a cost of nearly $4 million in FY 1936.  With a renewed emphasis on southern and Atlantic coast refuges, major acquisitions included Okefenokee, Georgia (296,000 acres), Sabine, Louisiana (137,233 acres), Moosehorn, Maine (10,965 acres), Bombay Hook, Delaware (8,277 acres), Pea Island, North Carolina (7,206 acres), and Tamarac, Minnesota (21,100 acres).[314]  Still utilizing funds from the Norbeck amendment of 1935, the MBCC approved the acquisition of another 134,655 acres in 34 refuges at a cost of $1,408,737 in FY 1937.[315]  Thus, officially established national wildlife refuges increased from 104 units with 6,085,542 acres in 1934, 164 units with 9,943,023 acres in 1936, to 231 units totaling 11,482,374 acres in 1937.[316]

            Through funding from the Works Progress Administration, the Survey also initiated an innovative program of small wildlife refuges via conservation easements in the prairie potholes of the northern Great Plains.  Thanks to tax incentives created by the state of North Dakota, the Survey gained largely gratis water impoundment and development rights to 57,932 acres in 32 refuges in FY 1936.[317]  The program continued in North Dakota and expanded to Montana in FY 1937, reaching 118,777 acres on 75 refuges.[318]  The Survey established its first easement refuges in South Dakota in 1938, with the overall program adding another 6 units and 16,336 acres.[319]  In FY 1939, the creation of 3 additional refuges in South Dakota offset the dissolution or combination of 3 North Dakota projects, leaving a total of 81 projects on 135,378 acres.[320] Although the Biological Survey deemphasized the easement refuge program after 1939, it set important precedents for protecting relatively small areas of waterfowl habitat in a region of otherwise expensive and prime agricultural land.

            The refuge system also expanded via executive orders, particularly to the benefit of western big game.  Under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, Congress authorized the President to set aside historic game ranges for antelope and bighorn sheep, then suffering from overhunting and habitat degradation by domestic livestock.  Utilizing this power, President Roosevelt created three new game ranges on over 3 million acres of public domain in FY 1936.[321]  In FY 1937, President Roosevelt’s creation of the Fort Peck Game Range, Montana, plus refinements of previous executive order refuges, boosted the total acreage of such refuges to 4,037,470 acres since 1 July 1933.[322]  In FY 1939, the Biological Survey obtained the creation of two further major game ranges, totaling 1,520,000 acres, plus the transfer for wildlife conservation purposes of eight former Resettlement Administration projects aggregating about 300,000 acres.[323]  These reservations greatly expanded the Survey’s responsibilities on behalf of diminished populations of big game, in tandem with its expanded system of refuges on behalf of migratory waterfowl.

            Between 1 July 1934, near the beginning of Darling’s tenure, and 30 November 1939, soon after the exhaustion of the Norbeck amendment funds, the Survey’s system of national wildlife refuges grew from 104 units with 6,085,542 acres to 266 units totaling 13,619,121 acres.  Executive orders withdrawing game ranges or other areas from the public domain admittedly account for much of the system’s increased acreage total.  But, land acquisitions from the emergency funds initiated by Darling formed the heart of the Biological Survey’s waterfowl restoration efforts, providing for approximately 1,604,000 purchased acres.  Largely due to this aid, areas devoted primarily to migratory birds numbered 178 refuges comprising 3,415,542 acres in November 1939, reaching almost half the goal set by Darling in 1934.[324]

            Despite the unprecedented refuge system expansion he set in motion, the pace of acquisitions still proved a disappointment to Darling.  To Darling, the Norbeck amendment, and title five of the same law authorizing further presidential allocations from emergency funds, provided a clear congressional mandate for his refuge acquisition program.  “Ding” strongly urged President Roosevelt to exercise his allocations power to provide an additional $4 million for refuge acquisitions in FY 1936.  FDR’s repeated demurrals on this point, as well as pressure from his political cartoon syndication and recurrent ill health, helped lead to Darling’s resignation as chief of the Biological Survey in November 1935.[325]  Still, despite his repeated frustrations, Darling did not present the resignation as a protest in order to maintain maximum institutional support for the national conservation conference he planned for February 1936.[326]

            Held 3-7 February 1936 in a snowy Washington, DC, the first North American Wildlife Conference superseded the American Game Conferences previously sponsored by the AGPA.  The AGPA itself, long past the potency that achieved the Migratory Bird Act in 1913, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, and nearly passed the game refuge bill in the early 1920s, had effectively dissolved itself in the summer of 1935.  With the cooperation of the AGPA’s leadership and Darling’s support, Thomas Beck organized the American Wildlife Institute to replace it, with Beck as its first president.  The new institute assumed the responsibility of underwriting the North American Wildlife Conference.[327]  Although the conference devoted relatively little attention to the refuge system, it did result in the formation of the General Wildlife Federation, renamed the National Wildlife Federation in 1938, as a large, new constituent group for wildlife conservation.[328]

            Now headed by Darling’s handpicked successor, Ira N. Gabrielson, the Biological Survey largely focused on the consolidation and continued development of the expanded refuge system after 1936.  Further development of the nascent national wildlife refuge system depended on the New Deal’s labor relief programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.  The Biological Survey’s CCC camps slowly expanded from the original three discussed above in 1933, to just four in 1934, before jumping to twenty-two at the end of FY 1935.[329]  In fiscal year 1936, during which the CCC peaked nationally with 2,514 camps and 502,000 men in September 1935, the Biological Survey’s refuges averaged 28 camps with 5,600 men.  Although the Survey’s numbers represented a small percentage of the entire CCC program, in a refuge system that totaled only 106 units at the end of FY 1935 and 164 units at the end of FY 1936, such relatively small aggregate numbers still had an appreciable impact on refuge development.[330]  The Survey’s allotment of CCC camps fell to an average of 24 working on 27 different refuges in 1937, but increased to 35 full camps plus three side camps on 32 refuges in 1938.[331]  In FY 1939, the Survey continued development on 32 refuges with 32 full CCC camps and 1 side camp.[332]  Far more than just tree planters or brush clearers, a Survey chart listing 99 discrete categories of work by the CCC suggests its wide-ranging value to the refuge development program.[333]

            Although less remembered than the Civilian Conservation Corps, the refuge system also received significant aid from the Public Works Administration, Works Progress Administration and, to a lesser extent, the Civil Works Administration and National Youth Administration.  Excluding allocations for land acquisitions, between 1 July 1933 and 30 June 1941, the Survey received approximately $10.2 million in non-CCC emergency funds, versus $9.4 million in CCC allocations.  Although the Survey devoted some of these funds to rodent and predator control as well as administrative costs of the land acquisition program, refuge development consumed the vast majority.  The ability to hire local skilled labor with these funds proved particularly vital to the Survey’s refuge development program, which often involved detailed engineering projects.[334]

            Regardless of the funding source, the New Deal development projects produced a profound impact on the involved refuges.  At the Blackwater refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a series of three CCC camps supplemented by other emergency fund expenditures created a modern infrastructure almost from scratch.  In the summer and fall of 1933, the first CCC camp brought Blackwater into regular administrative contact with the Biological Survey by stringing over a mile of telephone wire to refuge headquarters, and relocated the bureau’s nearby fur research experiment station to the refuge grounds.  The construction of three observation towers and accompanying access roads, plus a systematic fire hazard reduction program in the refuge’s forests, greatly enhanced the law enforcement and fire prevention possibilities in an area well-known for illegal hunting and casually set marsh grass fires.[335]  A small CWA allotment furthered Blackwater’s development before the second CCC camp, operating from October 1934 to October 1935 took up many of the projects left incomplete by the first camp, including road improvement work, fire break clearings, and forest clean-up.  A third camp, working in the second half of 1936, completed an expansive program of freshwater impoundments, improved roads and trails, demolition of derelict pre-refuge buildings, and construction of a refuge office building, boathouse, and multiple storage buildings.^[336]

            After a checkered history as a drainage project and its purchase with emergency funds in 1934 (described above), the Mattamuskeet Refuge in eastern North Carolina also benefited from an extensive program of relief labor restoration.  Utilizing and later moving a CCC camp from the nearby Swanquarter Refuge, the Biological Survey focused on restoring the 50,000-acre lake at the heart of the failed drainage project.  To protect nearby farms from inundation and manage the lake’s waters for maximum waterfowl benefit, the CCC constructed or reconstructed an elaborate series of canals and water control structures that connected the freshwater lake to the Albemarle Sound.  The Survey also supervised the transplantation of desired aquatic vegetation to the revived lake.  To service the accompanying public shooting ground, the CCC converted the drainage project’s massive pumping plant into a combination headquarters and small hotel, complete with a spiral staircase leading up the industrial-sized chimney to an observation deck.[337]  Thus, Mattamuskeet Refuge became a prime resting area for both visiting migratory waterfowl and humans.

            New Deal employment programs also helped develop amenities for both wildlife and people at the Cape Romain Refuge along the Atlantic coast of South Carolina.  A CCC camp and WPA work crew labored simultaneously to create two new freshwater impoundments in the midst of Cape Romain’s tidal marshlands, while repairing several smaller impoundments created by the previous owner of Bulls Island, an addition to the refuge purchased with emergency funds.  Construction of jetties and sand fences attempted to halt coastal erosion on the refuge’s barriers islands.  The Survey developed a mainland headquarters for the offshore refuge with the help of CCC and emergency fund allocations.  Although the primary refuge could be accessed only by boat, the Survey converted the Dominick mansion on Bulls Island into a public lodging house for overnight visitors.  Wharves, boathouses, trails, and other facilities built by the CCC and WPA, in addition to the large variety of bird life, helped make Cape Romain refuge a popular destination for Audubon Society tours originating in nearby Charleston, South Carolina.  The habitat improvements also helped mitigate the extensive environmental damage created by the adjoining Santee-Cooper project, which destroyed a large swath of lowcountry cypress forest by diverting the freshwater flow of the Santee River into the Cooper River for hydroelectric purposes after 1941.[338]

            Utilizing allocations from the CCC and WPA, the Biological Survey’s refuge development program continued well after the exhaustion of the Norbeck amendment funds, which proved to be the last substantial refuge acquisition fund under the New Deal.  In fiscal year 1940, the Survey supervised CCC work by an average of 35 full-strength camps and 1 side camp on 41 different national wildlife refuges and 1 State refuge.  In the same year, WPA allocations made possible development work on 45 refuges in 16 states.  With work on some refuges overlapping, the Survey improved 72 separate refuges through one or both programs.[339]  The following year, even as the improving economy made recruitment and retention of CCC and WPA labor more difficult, the Survey utilized 36 CCC camps on 34 national wildlife refuges, as well as 1 state refuge, while employing WPA-funded workers on 21 refuges.[340]  The National Youth Administration continued to supplement the larger development programs, particularly on the easement refuges of the upper Midwest, where participants conducted wildlife surveys, constructed picnic tables and other small-scale recreation amenities, cleared fire hazards, and otherwise aided general refuge maintenance.[341]

            While New Deal relief programs provided extensive development for the refuges acquired after 1934, securing adequate funding for the regular administration of the growing refuge system proved an annual challenge.  As late as 1935, the Biological Survey’s refuge administration budget of approximately $126,000 provided for full or part-time staffing on only 29 of its 105 refuges.  Even more problematic, the Agriculture Department budget for fiscal year 1936 included no increases for the fifty-plus refuges acquired under the emergency acquisition program.  Appearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Darling noted that almost $500,000 would be required for the proper administration of the new refuges.  Although Darling admitted that funding could be drawn from the receipts of the new duck stamp fund, such usage would practically eliminate the possibility of major land acquisitions from duck stamps.[342]  Congress responded to Darling by appropriating approximately $150,000 for refuge administration in 1936, an increase of just $24,000 over the previous year.[343]  The lack of Budget Bureau and congressional support for refuge administration resulted in the use of all duck stamp funds for refuge administration and development activities in fiscal years 1935 and 1936, frustrating the fund’s supposedly primary purpose of land acquisition.[344]

            The remaining pre-World War II budgets contained increased but still inadequate budgets for refuge administration, leading the Biological Survey and then the Fish and Wildlife Service to annually utilize duck stamp receipts for basic administrative and maintenance purposes, rather than land acquisition.  For fiscal year 1937, when it anticipated the administrative addition of forty-three recently acquired refuges, the Survey won Budget Bureau approval for a $250,000 increase in administration, probably less than a third of the needed funds.  Cutting the budget estimates by $35,000, Congress appropriated approximately $360,000 for refuge administration in the 1937 budget and the Survey again diverted all duck stamp receipts to non-acquisition activities.[345]  The Budget Bureau and Congress both approved an increase of $115,000 for fiscal year 1938, when refuges from the Norbeck amendment appropriation became ready for administration, but the Survey still noted a funding shortfall for administration of $522,536, an amount approximately equal to their appropriation.[346]  As in previous years, the Biological Survey responded to this shortfall by allocating duck stamp funds for refuge administration and development, leaving only $75,000 of the $783,039 fund for land acquisition purposes in fiscal year 1938.[347]  By 30 June 1941, the national wildlife refuge system had an administrative and maintenance appropriation of $670,000, which it apparently equaled or somewhat exceeded with allocations from duck stamp funds.[348]  The total fund provided for 262 permanent and 37 part-time FWS employees operating 93 of the 267 national wildlife refuges (but accounting for 10,707,681 - or 78 percent - of the total system’s 13,740,304 acres).[349]  By the same date, only $828,093 of the duck stamp act’s total revenues of $5,325,708 had been allocated for land acquisition.[350]

            With the duck stamp funds largely diverted to maintenance and development, Congress eliminated another possible funding source for federal refuge acquisition by channeling the federal excise tax on guns and ammunition to the States via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937.[351]  As discussed above in relation to the game refuge bills, wildlife conservationists had long coveted the sporting arms and ammunition excise tax as a possible dedicated funding source for federal wildlife activities.  In 1925, the Denver Committee compromise unsuccessfully sought the redirection of the then-existing excise tax to the game refuge bill.  After the 69th Congress (1925-1927) eliminated the excise tax, the American Wild Fowlers and the succeeding More Game Birds in America Foundation had advocated the similar one-cent a shell tax, culminating in the unsuccessful McCormack bills of 1932.[352]  Following the reinstatement of the arms and ammunition excise tax as a general revenue measure in 1932, wildlife conservationists renewed their campaign for its dedication to conservationist purposes.  In 1935, while chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey, Jay Darling sponsored a proposal by arms manufacturers to establish a “wildlife endowment” by dedicating $10 million to a new fund in exchange for the removal of the excise tax.[353]  When this proposal gained little support, Darling alternately recommended dividing the excise tax receipts, then between $4 and $5 million and expected to increase soon to $6 million, between general revenues and wildlife conservation.  The wildlife funds would be further divided between the U.S. Biological Survey and a matching fund for State game management projects.[354]  Bill drafting led by Senate wildlife committee secretary Carl Shoemaker continued over the next two years, wherein the General Wildlife Federation organized by Darling assumed the primary sponsorship and provisions for substantial Biological Survey funding were dropped.  At Darling’s personal urging, Robertson’s House wildlife committee endorsed federal financial aid to State wildlife agencies on the model of federal aid to highway construction in its report of 6 January 1937, several months prior to the endorsement of the same concept by the General Wildlife Federation in March 1937 and the Izaak Walton League of America in May 1937.[355]

            The decades-long debate over the use of a federal ammunition tax for wildlife conservation culminated with rapid action in the 75th Congress.  Senate President Pro Tempore Key Pittman (D-NV), Minority Leader Charles McNary (R-OR) and three other members of the Senate Special Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources introduced a bill “to provide that the United States shall aid the States in wildlife-restoration projects” on 17 June 1937.  The wildlife committee reported the bill back to the Senate with amendments on 6 July 1937.[356]  In the interim, Rep. Robertson introduced a companion bill in the House on 28 June 1937.[357]  After a brief series of legislative maneuvers to bring the bill before the Senate, Pittman gained Senate passage on 10 August 1937.[358]  In the House, Robertson delivered a similarly speedy passage, although he could not prevent amendments in the Agriculture Committee converting the measure from a continuing appropriation to an authorization, albeit for a dedicated account in the U.S. Treasury.[359]  Facing a pending congressional adjournment, Sen. Pittman moved that the Senate accede to the House amendments, rather than fight for a continuing appropriation in a conference committee, likely delaying the legislation for another year.[360]  Despite strong opposition from the Budget Bureau and the Treasury Department, President Roosevelt approved the Federal Aid to Wildlife Restoration Act, better known as the Pittman-Robertson Act, on 2 September 1937.[361]

            After the Pittman-Robertson Act took effect on 1 July 1938, it directed increasingly large sums from the Federal Treasury to the States, reflecting the conservative Democratic philosophy of its primary sponsors.  Following the model of the federal highway act, the act allocated the funds raised by the excise tax to the States based on a combination of land area and hunting license sales.  To receive eligibility for these allocations, the States had to end all diversions of hunting license revenues to non-wildlife conservation purposes, a practice previously decried by the Model Game Law and Fish Committee (headed by Harry Hawes and Carl Shoemaker) of the International Association of Game, Fish, and Conservation Commissioners.  If a State did not comply with the act’s stipulations, the Biological Survey received its funds for the benefit of the federal refuge program, but in practice such reversions proved rare and limited.  The funds of the Pittman-Robertson Act financed state-level wildlife research programs, provided for federal financing of state-owned refuges and public shooting grounds, and other wildlife conservation activities, all subject to the supervisory approval of the U.S. Biological Survey.^[362]  In essence, the measure combined the proposals of Thaddeus Caraway for federal financing of state-run refuges and public shooting grounds with the excise tax proposal of the Denver Committee of 1925.  Thus, the proposals of the 68th, 69th, and 70th Congresses finally found fruition in the Pittman-Robertson Act of the 75th Congress.[363]

            With the federal arms and ammunition excise tax diverted to State wildlife conservation efforts, wildlife conservationists attempted to secure the admittedly much smaller amount of revenues derived from refuge activities for the Biological Survey.  Although the Act of 15 June 1935 earmarked twenty-five percent of refuge-derived revenues to the affected counties, the remaining funds reverted to the general U.S. Treasury.  The just over $60,000 deposited in the Treasury as late as 1938 promised to grow rapidly following the expiration of short-term reservations, granted to former owners to lower initial prices for refuge acquisitions, for agriculture, trapping, or timbering.[364]  Hoping to secure the expanded future revenues as a permanent or indefinite appropriation for the use of the refuge system, Key Pittman introduced a bill, presumably drafted by Carl Shoemaker (then secretary for both the Senate wildlife committee and the new General Wildlife Federation), in 1937 that failed to advance out of the Senate wildlife committee.[365]  In the following Congress, Pittman introduced a similar bill, which passed the Senate, but did not receive consideration in the House.[366]  Following Pittman’s death on 10 November 1940, the new chairman of the Senate wildlife committee, Joel Bennett Clark (D-MO) assumed sponsorship of the refuge revenues bill.[367]  Repeating the pattern of the previous congress, the Senate again passed the measure, but the House again failed to even move the bill out of committee.[368]  With this defeat, the idea effectively vanished “for the duration.”

            Reorganization constituted the final New Deal era contribution to wildlife conservation.  This process brought federal activities related to both terrestrial and aquatic animal life together, first by the transfer of the Bureau of Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries to the Department of the Interior in 1939, then combining them in a new agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940.  The reorganizations of 1939 and 1940 originated in the efforts of Harold L. Ickes to replace the Department of the Interior with a Department of Conservation and Public Works.  Ickes first backed a bill to transform his department in name and purpose in 1935.  Although the Senate passed Ickes’ bill in May 1936, President Roosevelt withheld open support, much to Ickes’ chagrin, and the House of Representatives subsequently refused to act on it.  When the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, or Brownlow Committee, report of January 1937 endorsed it, the proposed conservation department gained renewed strength.  However, strident congressional opposition to a potential transfer of the Forest Service from Agriculture to Interior, led by Sen. Key Pittman (D-NV), helped defeat a large-scale government reorganization proposal in the 75th Congress.  The next Congress accepted the less ambitious Reorganization Act of 1939, which forbid the creation or abolition of departments, but still allowed for the transfer of various agencies between departments upon the presentation of formal reorganization plans to Congress, which could exercise a legislative veto within thirty days.  Although the Reorganization Act of 1939 dashed Ickes’ dream of a Department of Conservation, he still urged Roosevelt to create such a department in substance by the transfer of key conservation activities to the Department of the Interior.[369]

            Ultimately, President Roosevelt’s exercise of his Reorganization Act powers proved rather unsatisfactory to Secretary Ickes.  Writing in his personal diary, Ickes asserted that Reorganization Plan I, submitted to Congress on 25 April 1939, “hit me harder than any other man in the Administration.  It took from me PWA, the National Resources Committee, the Office of Education, the management of Federal buildings in the District of Columbia and the United States Housing Authority, and it gave me nothing.”  In subsequent discussions with the President, Ickes found him completely unwilling to transfer the Forest Service to the Interior Department and worried that proposed transfers of the Bureau of Fisheries and the Biological Survey would provoke substantial congressional opposition.[370]  However, on 9 May 1939, President Roosevelt’s Reorganization Plan II transferred both the Bureau of Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries, though not the Forest Service, to the Department of the Interior.[371]  No substantial congressional opposition developed in regards to the Biological Survey, Fisheries, or any other transfers produced by the second reorganization plan, which the Senate confirmed with a minimal debate and voice vote on 12 May 1939.[372]  Although Ickes could not grasp his main prize, the National Forests, and additionally lost his position as Public Works Administrator, he accepted the still-growing National Wildlife Refuge System as something of a consolation gift.[373]

            With the major federal wildlife conservation agencies now under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior, Secretary Ickes sought to organize the government’s wildlife functions more efficiently.  On 1 January 1940, Interior Secretary Ickes transferred the Wildlife Division of the National Park Service to the Bureau of Biological Survey.  While this transfer of a small scientific staff had little effect on the Biological Survey or its still young refuge system, it further concentrated federal wildlife studies in a single agency.  As early as November 1940, Ickes also laid plans to combine the Bureaus of Biological Survey and Fisheries into a single “National Wildlife Service,” to be headed by Survey chief Ira N. Gabrielson.[374]  President Roosevelt fulfilled this plan under Reorganization Plan III, submitted 2 April 1940 and effective 30 June 1940, which merged the Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries to form the Fish and Wildlife Service.[375]

            From the outside, and the distance of time, this amalgamation could be perceived as a federal recognition of increased ecological understanding in the scientific community.  Unfortunately, the contemporary evidence does not support such a broad-minded conclusion.  The mechanics of government reorganization did not result in an immediate integration of former Biological Survey and Fisheries activities, which continued on largely parallel tracks well into the 1950s.  Reorganization occurred for largely administrative and fiscal reasons, plus a healthy dose of Harold Ickes’ empire building.  Although its migratory waterfowl component remained stuck at half the size projected by Jay N. Darling in 1934, the New Deal’s expansion of the National Wildlife Refuge System had pushed the Biological Survey ever further from its scientific roots towards resource management.  Meanwhile, the New Deal’s expansive agricultural support programs had also shifted the USDA from a department of scientific research to an active participant in controlling production and marketing.  Ickes hoped that the transfers of the Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries were just initial steps towards his Department of Conservation, though the Forest Service’s thwarting of that dream perpetuated a departmental division of federal land management that endures to the present day.

WILDLIFE REFUGES IN WORLD WAR II AND THE TRUMAN YEARS

            Beginning with preparations for national defense in 1939, the national wildlife refuge system gradually went into a wartime stasis.  As worldwide war finally pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression, full-scale economic mobilization diverted elsewhere the manpower of the CCC camps and WPA work crews responsible for nearly all refuge development since 1933.  Congress also diverted the already scarce funds for refuge land acquisition for the duration of the war.  The military utilized numerous refuges for a variety of training exercises, including aerial bombings and amphibious landings, and the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, became the scene of large-scale military combat against the Japanese.  Demands for wartime office space in Washington, DC, pushed the Fish and Wildlife Service west to Chicago in 1942, where it stayed until October 1947.  Then, when the dawn of peace unleashed a surge of pent-up consumer spending rather than the dreaded return of economic depression, the carefully prepared postwar refuge development plans remained largely on the shelf.  When the Truman administration finally began a more vigorous push for natural resources conservation, the Korean conflict again shelved plans.

            The Biological Survey quickly recognized that the eruption of European warfare on 1 September 1939 would provoke a substantial reconsideration of the role of wildlife conservation in an era emphasizing national defense.  In its report for fiscal year 1940, the Biological Survey argued for the intrinsic value of wildlife conservation “when nearly all undertakings are being judged in terms of defense against external aggression and internal subversion.”  Anticipating “Why We Fight”-type propaganda, the Survey wrote:

           Conservation—or prudent use—of wildlife is one way of making a country worth living in, a first essential in inspiring zealous defense.  An abundant wildlife, in other words, is an added attraction to the outdoors, and outdoor experiences foster the qualities of character that are reflected in the American way of living, a heritage that must be defended.  Thus wildlife conservation not only contributes toward defense against subversive tendencies but also develops a national morale that will withstand the stress of any emergency requiring action against forces from without.[376]

With such high values at stake, the Biological Survey, and the succeeding Fish and Wildlife Service, strove to maintain its program of wildlife conservation and refuges even in the face of impending world war.[377]

            Congress seemed convinced by these arguments, at least before Pearl Harbor.  Even as the overall federal government budget reoriented towards national defense, the budget for the national wildlife refuges continued to rise in fiscal years 1941 and 1942.  The refuge administration budget rose from just over $700,000 for the year ending on 30 June 1940, to approximately $750,000 in 1941, and to over $900,000 for the 1942 budget approved in the spring of 1941.  Although Congress provided no general appropriations for land acquisition, the Fish and Wildlife Service allocated $328,000 from duck stamp funds, while also receiving nearly $100,000 in Pittman-Robertson Act funds, for refuge acquisition in fiscal year 1941.[378]  Testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior Department, the Service’s director, Ira N. Gabrielson, intimated that rising duck stamp sales would allow for similar land acquisition expenditures in 1942.[379]  Refuge development by the Civilian Conservation Corps largely continued on the scale of previous years in most of fiscal year 1941, although the greatly improved employment situation had resulted in the halving of overall emergency relief act appropriations.[380]

            Still, preparations for national defense began to affect the refuge system before the active participation of the United States in World War II.  Increased employment from defense spending and the nation’s first peacetime draft, instituted in September 1940, quickly reduced the manpower available to the Civilian Conservation Corps, which declined from 1,500 camps with approximately 300,000 men in January 1941 to 900 camps with 160,000 men in October 1941.[381]  By November 1941, the Service’s allocation of CCC camps had dropped from 36 to 22, with an expectation of further reductions.[382]  Also, while remaining technically under the control of the Fish and Wildlife Service, some of the remaining camps shifted to defense preparedness programs on military bases.

            Military training also replaced wildlife enhancement efforts on some refuges.  The pre-Pearl Harbor FWS report for fiscal year 1941 noted that the “Service released to the War Department for bombing fields, gunnery ranges, emergency landing fields, and other defense purposes, tracts on several refuges where it was determined that such use would not unduly detract from the value of the refuges to wildlife.”[383]  Fortunately, the FWS and the military generally cooperated to prevent damage to the most important wildlife values.  For example, a liaison office established between the FWS and the military avoided the use of vital moose calving grounds on the Kenai Moose Range, Alaska, for military training.[384]  But, when the Army attempted to establish an artillery range between Yellowstone National Park and Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Montana, which protected the remnant population of trumpeter swans, the preservation of the area required the intercession of President Roosevelt himself.[385]

            After Pearl Harbor and the official entrance of the United States into World War II in December 1941, the war effort redirected even more resources.  Besides the wildlife refuges already in use by the military, the Service’s office space proved to be the agency’s first casualty.  On 19 December 1941, less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Budget Bureau announced the relocation of FWS headquarters to Chicago, IL, accompanied by similar dislocations of the Interior Department’s National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs.  As 145 of the 390 Washington employees indicated an unwillingness or inability to move to Chicago, the move promised severe disruptions to the Service’s work.  A FWS proposal to construct temporary headquarters at the Patuxent Research Refuge, Maryland, approximately twenty miles from Washington, DC, went nowhere.  Although Director Gabrielson, Interior Secretary Ickes, and some congressmen strenuously opposed moving the FWS, they proved unable to alter the decision.  In August 1942, the FWS moved to Chicago, losing approximately half of its experienced headquarters personnel in the process.  Testifying before the House wildlife committee on 19 November 1942, Gabrielson noted that the relocated Service had only just begun to normalize its operations.[386]

            FWS appropriations proved another victim of the post-Pearl Harbor mobilization.  With the appropriations process under way during the Pearl Harbor attack, the Budget Bureau and Congress combined to cut approximately one-third of both the overall Fish and Wildlife Service budget and the refuge system budget for FY 1943.  This reversed all the administration budget gains the refuge system had made since 1939.[387]  To hedge against further operational budget cuts, the FWS began building a reserve fund totaling one year’s duck stamp receipts in 1942.[388]  Cuts to the Service’s indirect appropriations proved even more severe.  Deemed unnecessary during wartime labor shortages, and already redirected from conservation projects to military preparedness, Congress abolished the Civilian Conservation Corps effective 30 June 1942.[389]  Similarly, citing the full employment created by the war, Congress abolished the Works Projects Administration and the National Youth Administration in 1943.[390]  During the war, the use of at least two small Civilian Public Service Camps of conscientious objectors by the FWS could not begin to compensate for the loss of the earlier programs.[391]  The abolition of the New Deal federal employment programs ended active development of the refuge system.

            Even as the war disrupted appropriations, the military increasingly controlled FWS personnel, both directly and indirectly.  A significant portion of the FWS staff entered active military duty, with seventeen percent in service by December 1943, and thirty-six percent by November 1944.[392]  Due to its recent recruitment during the period of rapid refuge acquisitions, and hence relative youthfulness, military service hit the Division of Wildlife Refuges even harder than the overall FWS.  The armed services enlisted up to two-thirds of refuge staff, leaving “hardly a skeleton organization” by the end of the war.[393]

            The military also requisitioned some of the Service’s remaining civilian personnel.  Alaskan experts like Olaus J. Murie and Ira N. Gabrielson were called upon to aid the military fortifications program in the north Pacific with reports on potential camouflage, seasonal changes, and local geography.[394]  In March 1942, the Navy commandeered most of the Division of Land Acquisition’s real estate appraisal staff, further limiting refuge acquisitions, already restricted to duck stamp allocations and Pittman-Robertson reversions.  As a corollary, the FWS halted further condemnation proceedings for refuge acquisition, temporarily tamping down the building public resentment toward this procedure.[395]  Thereafter, purchase acquisitions proceeded largely with willing sellers of private holdings within refuge boundaries.[396]

            As warfare continued, the military controlled a growing portion of the National Wildlife Refuge System.  Expanding from nearly 1 million of the system’s 17.6 million acres in 1942, the armed forces utilized nearly 1.85 million acres on 35 refuges by 1944.  Refuges served “as bombing ranges, artillery ranges, aerial gunnery ranges, training grounds, air bases, tank maneuvering areas, docking facilities, and as sites for chemical war munitions plants.”[397]  At Cape Romain refuge, SC, the creation of a Coast Guard station in an isolated portion of the refuge created unwelcome new messenger and transport duties for the refuge staff.  The Army’s indiscriminate dropping of practice bombs on that refuge’s Bulls Island created more serious concerns about the protection of refuge personnel and habitat, until the practice was discontinued in November 1945.[398]  At Blackwater Refuge, MD, a P-47 Thunderbolt inadvertently damaged the muskrat marshes when it crashed during a training exercise out of Camp Springs, MD.[399]  A number of refuges, including Patuxent, Maryland, and Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma, served as extensions of adjacent military artillery and aerial gunnery ranges.[400]  Although most refuges escaped military encroachment, or, like the above examples, felt only mild effects, a few units suffered extensive and enduring wartime damage.

            Probably the most severe wartime damage on a national wildlife refuge occurred on the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge.  This island group off the coast of Alaska extends over a thousand miles and covers almost three million acres.  Established as a refuge via executive order by President William H. Taft in 1913, the isolated islands sheltered a wide variety of bird life as well as a remnant population of once abundant sea otters.  In the succeeding decades, most Aleutian Islands felt limited human impact, though Taft’s order allowed for certain navigational and military uses subsequently established.  However, in June 1942, the Japanese military attacked American military installations in the island chain and occupied the western islands of Kiska and Attu, giving it a dubious distinction as the only national wildlife refuge to be occupied by enemy forces.  In the subsequent Aleutian Campaign, up to 83,000 American troops established a military presence on eighteen separate islands, while delivering merciless aerial and naval bombardments to the 10,000 Japanese occupation troops on Kiska and Attu.  On Amchitka Island, the most affected by the American build-up, the military constructed three airstrips, a large artificial port, and over 1,500 buildings and related support sites.  Although the Fish and Wildlife Service retained technical jurisdiction over the Aleutian Islands Refuge, the single on-site refuge employee remained practically powerless to prevent or mitigate the extensive military damage to the area’s wildlife values.[401]

            In the crisis of global warfare, the Fish and Wildlife Service and wildlife conservationists could offer little objection to the military’s refuge incursions.  In his congressional testimony of 1943, FWS Director Gabrielson brought attention to the military’s use of refuge lands as “part of our contribution to this war effort.”  Replying to a congressman’s query, Gabrielson downplayed the military’s impact on the refuges at its disposal and confidently asserted that all refuge lands would be returned after the war.[402]  The FWS also had some hope that portions of the more than 6.7 million acres acquired by the wartime military might be converted to postwar refuge uses.[403]  With such conversions, the Service hoped to compensate in some way for the slow pace of refuge acquisitions since 1939.

            To further aid the war effort, the FWS expanded economic uses of the refuge system.  Primarily, the Service increased agricultural uses of the refuge system, opening larger areas to grazing, hay cutting, and sharecropping.  Based on uses in 1940, cattle and sheep grazing on national wildlife refuges increased fifty and nearly five hundred percent, respectively, by 1943.  Grain crop production rose almost thirty percent, while game and fish meat removed from refuges also expanded.  Of course, as their primary purpose, most refuges aided migratory waterfowl, which produced approximately 400,000 pounds of meat via hunting each year.[404]  At Blackwater refuge, MD, the famed Dorchester County muskrat marshes offered an additional opportunity for the FWS to profit from high wartime demands for fur and non-rationed game meat.  In 1943, the Blackwater fur animal field station released a five-page pamphlet, “Recipes for Cooking Muskrat Meat,” to encourage muskrat consumption.[405]  As an indirect protection for the newly doubled acreage of rice fields in California, national wildlife refuges and newly leased FWS areas in that state served as concentration points for waterfowl displaced from their historic feeding grounds in Central Valley.  In cooperation with the local farmers, the FWS assisted in harassing birds out of the rice fields, via smoke and sound bombs, and into the refuges.[406]  Besides aiding the war effort, the system’s expanded economic uses also meant expanded refuge revenues, which rose from approximately $50,000 in FY 1941 to $350,000 by the end of the war.[407]  Under the refuge revenue-sharing act of 1935, a county containing a revenue-producing refuge received twenty-five percent of that refuge’s receipts.  Thus, rising wartime revenues provided a windfall to the affected counties, and undoubtedly salved previous concerns over local tax revenues lost to refuge acquisitions.

            The FWS continued to add to its refuge system during the war years, albeit on a modest scale.  At the end of FY 1941, the refuge system consisted of 267 units encompassing approximately 13.7 million acres.  The following year, the FWS added five units and almost four million acres, though two Alaskan game ranges accounted for the vast majority of the increased acreage.  The Service added two more units in 1943, and four more in 1944.  In fiscal year 1945, the last full year of warfare, the Service added an additional six refuges, for a total of 284 units on over 17.6 million acres.[408]  Meanwhile, by the end of the war, the military possessed at least seventy-nine areas considered valuable for wildlife conservation, a good portion of which the FWS hoped to secure for the refuge system following the postwar demobilization.[409]

            Rather fortuitously, despite the general curtailment of refuge development and administration, migratory waterfowl populations continued to rise in the early 1940s.  The decade-long drought on the Great Plains finally broke in the late 1930s, and water returned to the remaining prairie potholes and the refuge water impoundments constructed by the CCC and WPA.  The strict hunting regulations implemented by Jay Darling and continued by Ira Gabrielson in the mid-1930s also paid dividends, helping a larger percentage of the previously diminished waterfowl populations complete the annual migrations between breeding and wintering grounds.  In January 1942, migratory waterfowl populations reached an estimated one hundred million birds, which the Fish and Wildlife Service had considered the minimum objective of its wildlife restoration program.[410]  As favorable conditions continued, waterfowl numbers continued to rise, reaching a peak population of approximately 125 million in the spring of 1944.[411]

            The FWS and refuge system maintained important congressional allies during the war with the House Select Committee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources.  Although congressional investigative committees came under increasing attack as wartime junketing vehicles, the wildlife committee’s restriction to hearings in Washington, DC, and its limited appropriation helped A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) shepherd biennial continuances of his committee through the Rules Committee and House of Representatives.[412]  While the Senate wildlife committee largely lapsed into somnolence after 1942, Robertson’s committee continued to hold and publish hearings throughout the war years, tracking the war’s impact on the Fish & Wildlife Service, the refuge system, related federal programs, and, most importantly, America’s wildlife.[413]

            Chairman Robertson took a particular interest in civilian shortages of hunting ammunition during the war.  In the wildlife committee hearings of November 1942, FWS Director Gabrielson noted a complete shutdown of shotgun shell manufacturing for civilian use.  Although Gabrielson believed shells already in the hands of retailers and hunters were adequate for the 1942-1943 harvest, he noted that hunting in the fall of 1943 would be severely impacted without further manufacturing.[414]  In 1943, after vigorous lobbying by Robertson and the Fish and Wildlife Service for vital war-related materials, the War Production Board allowed an allocation of nearly 100 million shotgun shells for 1943, one-seventh of the normal prewar production of 700 million shells.  Predictably, widespread shortages and rumors of black marketeering resulted from the rationing.  However, aided by cancellations of military ammunition contracts, Robertson and the FWS secured 450-500 million shotgun shells from the War Production Board in 1944.[415]  With this successful lobbying, the refuge system’s natural constituents, the hunting sportsmen, remained in business for the remainder of the war and ensured a continued steady revenue stream from federal duck stamps.

            Robertson and his committee also offered encouragement to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s planning for postwar refuge system development.  On orders from Director Gabrielson, the Division of Wildlife Refuges had begun postwar planning as early as February 1943.  J. Clark Salyer II and his staff began updating existing six-year building plans, while compiling data on previously completed construction, work left unfinished by CCC camps, and potential refuge development projects.  Salyer intended to compile and transmit this data to the National Resources Planning Board for more prominent consideration, optimistically noting, “I feel sure that the above organization will be rescued from the present Congressional jeopardy.”[416]  Although Congress ultimately abolished the planning board in June 1943 by zeroing out its appropriation, President Roosevelt continued its planning functions at the departmental level via a request of 22 May 1943, subsequently expanded by secretarial and presidential orders.[417]

            In December 1943, the Fish & Wildlife Service submitted to the Budget Bureau a three-year plan of refuge acquisition and development within the continental United States, at an estimated cost of $16 million: $9.7 million for acquisition of 2 million acres at $4.84 per acre, $2.3 million in overhead costs, $3.5 million in development and construction, and $0.5 million for surveys, investigations, and planning.  Additionally, the Alaska Refuge Program proposed the establishment of at least 14 new national wildlife refuge areas in Alaska for various purposes by executive order or other withdrawal from the public domain and expenditure of approximately $1.1 million for construction and $0.5 million for examinations, investigations, surveys, and planning.[418]  By the end of fiscal year 1944, the FWS envisioned the refuge system expansion as part of an overall postwar wildlife conservation program, implemented over three years at a cost of $115 million.[419]  Interior Secretary Ickes endorsed the refuge program as part of a postwar reassessment of the nation’s natural resources.[420]

            When the war’s continuation necessitated the holdover of such projects, the FWS presented an even more extensive refuge program to the Budget Bureau in December 1944.  Acting Director Albert Day envisioned the completion of the national wildlife refuge system at an acquisition cost of $12 million.  The new refuges would be developed at a cost of $3.5 million, accompanied by a development program of $11.2 million on existing refuges.[421]  Although no more successful in being implemented than the previous year’s program, the plan pointed up the Fish and Wildlife Service’s continuing aspirations for the refuge system.

            Significant population changes among both waterfowl and Americans gave renewed importance to refuge system plans.  First, after reaching peak numbers in 1944, waterfowl populations began a precipitous fall.  Estimates of 125 million birds in January 1944 fell to 105 million in 1945, 80 million in 1946, and 54 million in 1947, dropping back well below the Service’s desired minimum.[422]  Second, the number of American hunters began to increase, even before the end of the war released the full cohort of weapons-trained ex-servicemen to recreational pursuits.  The primary indicator of waterfowl hunting levels, duck stamp sales surged from a wartime and ammunition-limited low of 1,169,352 in fiscal year 1944 (the 1943-1944 hunting season) to 1,487,029 in 1945, and 1,725,505 in 1946, even while millions of American were still in uniform during the fall hunting season of 1945.  Duck stamp sales in fiscal year 1946 represented a twenty percent increase over the previous peak of fiscal year 1942, when 1,439,967 ducks stamps had been purchased, very largely before Pearl Harbor.  Fiscal year 1947 witnessed yet another record, as Americans purchased 2,016,841 duck stamps, a forty percent increase over the 1942 total.[423]

            Based on the experience of World War I, when postwar hunters increased thirty percent, wildlife conservationists had consistently predicted just such a large increase in postwar hunters.[424]  More hunters promised significant stress on waterfowl and other wildlife populations, and emphasized the need for a renewed program of refuge acquisition and development.  In January 1945, A. Willis Robertson, himself a World War I veteran, emphasized postwar recreational needs as his wildlife committee’s “immediate objective” for American wildlife conservation.  As one means to that end, Robertson’s House wildlife committee endorsed the establishment of additional national wildlife refuges, though expressing a preference for a larger number of small refuges as opposed to fewer large refuges.  Like the Fish and Wildlife Service, Robertson assumed that refuge development could be included in a public works program for postwar reconversion.[425]

            In the FWS budget submitted to the first session of the Seventy-ninth Congress in 1945, the Budget Bureau had approved $103,000 for planning an extensive postwar refuge program.  However, with the United States still waging war in both Europe and the Pacific, the House of Representatives, following the recommendation of the Appropriations Committee and its Interior Department subcommittee, rejected nearly all postwar planning, while also cutting the budget for basic refuge operations.[426]  Following the end of warfare in Europe, the Senate Committee on Appropriations proved more amenable to postwar planning and refuge operations, restoring all the House cuts to the level of the Budget Bureau’s estimates.[427]  In a classic conference committee compromise, the final appropriation for refuge operations split the difference between the House and Senate passed bills, providing an increase over the previous year, though not to the extent allowed by the Budget Bureau.  But, the Senate acceded to House wishes in stripping out all funds for planning future refuge system expansion and development.[428]

            Congress repeated its House-Senate division over refuge system planning and expansion in 1946.  In the hearing before the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior Department, congressmen expressed considerable worry over postwar inflation, and decided concern over budget increases for the FWS.  This coolness extended to the proposed purchase of several areas in California to continue permanently the wartime protection of commercial rice and truck crops in the Great Valley.[429]  Despite issuing a public commendation for FWS Director Ira Gabrielson, who retired on 1 April 1946, the House Appropriations Committee cut almost $3 million from the FWS budget estimates for fiscal year 1947.  These cuts included all $750,000 for the acquisition of California wildlife management areas, $110,000 from refuge maintenance and fire protection, and $64,000 scheduled for refuge system planning.[430]  Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, the newly installed FWS director, Albert M. Day, made a timid and vacillating defense of refuge system planning.  But, the Senate Appropriations Committee restored all the refuge-related cuts made by the House, including the planning funding.[431]  However, the final appropriation, while splitting the difference between the House and Senate on general refuge operations, completely eliminated provisions for the California purchases and refuge planning for acquisitions and development.[432]  The complete rejection of even a planning fund for postwar refuge development made clear that Congress contemplated no revival of the prewar refuge development program.

            The congressional denial of even planning funds pointed up that preliminary postwar planning had rested on faulty premises, both political and economic.  The refuge system’s prewar development had depended largely on the New Deal unemployment relief programs that mitigated the effects of the Great Depression.  Politically, President Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Ickes, and other remaining New Dealers expected a revival of liberal government initiatives after the constraints necessitated by the war effort.[433]  When the postwar era witnessed unprecedented prosperity rather than the feared renewal of economic depression, the need for a renewed Civilian Conservation Corps or Works Progress Administration never materialized.  Instead, the Seventy-ninth Congress, controlled by the “conservative coalition” of southern Democrats and Republicans ascendant since the elections of 1938, resisted calls from Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, for increased spending on government, including the National Wildlife Refuge System.  Even more troubling, the FWS also faced a serious legislative effort to abolish the recently established Parker River NWR, located in eastern Massachusetts.

            From almost the beginning of the MBCA refuge program, the Biological Survey and the succeeding Fish and Wildlife Service had sought to locate a major refuge or refuges in Massachusetts, a pivotal part of the Atlantic coast flyway with no preexisting federal ownerships.  By 1940, besides considering small tracts on Martha’s Vineyard, the Fish and Wildlife Service had narrowed its primary acquisition focus to two areas: Monomoy Island off the south end of Cape Cod, and the Parker River region, near Newburyport, Massachusetts.[434]  Both cases presented complicated landownership patterns, titles dating to colonial grants, and vocal local and regional opposition to federal acquisition.

            The federal acquisition of Monomoy Island had been locally controversial since the Biological Survey’s earliest refuge site surveys following the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929.  Following efforts by the Survey to secure options on Monomoy lands in 1939, Rep. Charles L. Gifford (R-MA) attempted to strike such acquisition authority from the USDA appropriation bill for fiscal year 1940.[435]  Despite a sympathetic hearing for Gifford before the House wildlife committee, the FWS instituted condemnation proceedings in January 1941.  However, continuing local opposition and the subsequent wartime limits on such acquisitions effectively halted the condemnation proceedings until 1944, when the War Department urged that the acquisition be completed and then transferred for military purposes.  On 15 June 1944, the FWS officially acquired the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, though the Army immediately occupied it.[436]

            The Migratory Bird Conservation Commission first approved the acquisition of Parker River NWR at its meeting of 24 September 1940, but acquisitions proceeded slowly for several years.  As the nucleus of the new refuge, the Fish and Wildlife Service purchased a nearly 1,700-acre portion of Plum Island, also known as the Annie H. Brown Sanctuary, from the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1943.  As a condition of this sale, the Service, although resisting a formal commitment, informally promised to make Plum Island part of a 10,000+ acre refuge.[437]  Obtaining a refuge of that size required the acquisition to reach inland almost twelve miles from the coastal Plum Island, which totaled only 2,500 acres, to a minimally developed agricultural area comprising the low-lying swamp and pasturelands of the Parker River drainage.  Still, due to complicated and incomplete land titles for the nearly five hundred tracts involved, and a lack of willing sellers, acquisitions totaled only 2,757 acres by the end of 1943.  Thus, on 30 December 1944, the FWS instituted condemnation proceedings to gain title to the desired refuge of an estimated 12,367.47 acres.[438]

            The acquisitions of both Monomoy Island and Parker River via judicial condemnation proved extremely unpopular in Massachusetts.  However, in the case of Monomoy Island, several mitigating factors worked in favor of the Fish and Wildlife Service.  The coastal island’s shifting sands made building permanent housing impossible, greatly reducing the possible economic and commercial values.  A lack of natural fresh water limited the area’s use by most waterfowl, reducing the investment in the area by regional hunters, an often wealthy and vocal group in Massachusetts.  Also, the relative isolation of Monomoy Island and Cape Cod in the early 1940s limited the population easily mobilized in protest against the federal acquisition.  Finally, few people proved willing to criticize an acquisition avowedly made for military purposes in the midst of the global war effort.

            Lacking these mitigating factors while also following the unpopular Monomoy Island acquisition, the creation of Parker River NWR unleashed a full-scale attack by a coalition of affected landowners, waterfowl hunters, and clam diggers, who gained strong support from the local press and politicians.  After hearings before the Massachusetts legislature failed to persuade the Fish and Wildlife Service to abandon its Parker River plans, the opposition appealed to Ira Gabrielson’s superior, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes.[439]  Sufficiently alarmed by the protestors’ charges, on 12 June 1945, Ickes held an unprecedented formal hearing regarding the refuge’s establishment, receiving evidence and presentations from both the Fish and Wildlife Service and refuge opponents.[440]  When, three months later, Ickes ordered that the refuge be administered in accordance with former uses but refused to annul the entire refuge acquisition, the unsatisfied opposition took its case to Congress.[441]

            On 11 October 1945, Reps. George Bates (R-MA) and Thomas Lane (R-MA) introduced identical bills requiring the abolition of the Parker River Refuge.  A week later, the U.S. Senators from Massachusetts, Leverett Saltonstall (R) and David Walsh (D), sponsored a companion bill.[442]  The Parker River opposition and the Fish and Wildlife Service then presented their cases in a series of lengthy hearings before the House Committee on Agriculture.  The opponents stressed the unfair use of arbitrary condemnation proceedings to gain title, the disproportional size of the area taken in relation to local land uses, negative public health effects to be caused by the construction of refuge water impoundments, threats to the local seafood industry posed by waterfowl concentrations, and hardships created by the dismemberment of local farms, in addition to the generally arrogant attitude of Fish and Wildlife Service officials in connection with the Parker River controversy.  Drawing on widespread discontent with the wartime federal bureaucracy, the Massachusetts residents portrayed the Parker River Refuge as a final, unbearable indignity heaped onto them at the end of a lengthy period of wartime regimentation.

            In response, the Fish and Wildlife Service and a limited number of allies supported the Parker River refuge as a vital part of the national chain of Atlantic flyway refuges, debunked unscientific concern over mosquitoes in proposed refuge impoundments and waterfowl damage to the seafood industry, and emphasized the limited number of landowner residences (four) displaced by the refuge.  However, the Service had clearly underestimated, or perhaps willfully ignored, the multiple values of the low-priced Parker River lands, especially the recreational and potential commercial value of this low population area to its densely populated region.  Although Gabrielson conceded that, “I would not [have attempted the acquisition], if I had known when I started that most of [the area’s residents] were against it,” the Service argued that its investment was now too great to abandon the refuge.[443]

            With refuge opponents having clearly won the support of Agriculture chairman John W. Flannagan Jr. (D-VA), the House Committee on Agriculture reported the Parker River abolition bill favorably and without amendment on 12 February 1946.  The committee report indicated that the refuge’s opponents had proven far more persuasive than the government’s experts.  In approving the total abolition of the refuge, the committee cited the acquisition’s prevention of expanded housing in Essex County, MA, concerns over public health effects, threats to the local clam industry by waterfowl concentrations, and damage to local farming operations.  The committee deemed the existence of other national wildlife refuges in relative proximity to the Parker River area adequate for migratory waterfowl.  In a clear refutation of the FWS testimony, the committee closed by reprinting the full text of a pamphlet opposed to the refuge project, “Parker River National Wildlife Refuge—The Case for Revision of Plans.”[444]

            Thereafter, Congress proceeded haltingly but expediently to pass the abolition bill.  With only a technical amendment, the House passed the bill via the Consent Calendar on 1 April 1946.[445]  After a brief hearing on 19 June 1946, the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry reported the Parker River Refuge abolition bill without amendment a month later.[446]  Although the bill was twice objected to on the Senate’s unanimous consent calendar, on 2 August 1946, in the closing minutes of the session, Sen. Walsh received unanimous consent to consider and pass the bill.[447]  However, President Truman took advantage of the sine die congressional adjournment to pocket veto the abolition bill.  Although Truman’s veto preserved the Parker River Refuge, the refuge’s escape had been exceedingly narrow.

            More importantly, the Seventy-ninth Congress adjourned without any substantial progress towards the postwar refuge program envisioned by the Fish and Wildlife Service.  As discussed above, refuge appropriations increased over wartime lows but included no funds for planning an expanded program of refuge system expansion and development.  A proposal by Rep. Andrew J. Biemiller (D-WI) to increase the duck stamp fee from one dollar to two dollars and open up to fifty percent of new refuges as public shooting grounds failed to receive even serious committee consideration.[448]  Similarly, Rep. Clarence Lea’s (D-CA) bill to continue the wartime protection of irrigated California croplands via an explicit authorization for the acquisition of wildlife management areas also failed to get out of committee.[449]  Any postwar legislative action on similar initiatives would have to await the Eightieth Congress.

            Meanwhile, both the Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service experienced significant leadership changes in 1946.  Harold L. Ickes, the longest serving Interior Secretary in the nation’s history and a vocal advocate of wildlife conservation, resigned in February 1946 after publicly criticizing an appointment made by President Truman.  To replace Ickes, Truman appointed Julius A. Krug, chairman of the War Production Board, who was promptly sworn into office on 18 March 1946, in the midst of the annual appropriations process.[450]  Krug’s initial appearance before the House Appropriations Committee highlighted the Interior Department’s preoccupation with public power issues during his tenure, and an accompanying de-emphasis of wildlife conservation.[451]  Unlike with Ickes, the FWS could expect few curmudgeonly crusades on its behalf from Krug.

            Just two weeks before Krug’s confirmation, FWS Director Ira N. Gabrielson announced his retirement, effective 1 April 1946.  While “Gabe” had begun his Biological Survey career as a lowly “gopher choker” in the rodent control division, he had earned the full respect of the wildlife conservation community with his unflagging energy and strong grasp of the vast array of issues before the FWS.  Handpicked by Jay Darling to ascend to the chieftainship of the Biological Survey in 1935, Gabrielson’s strong work made him Harold Ickes’ choice to merge the Survey with the politically tainted Bureau of Fisheries to form the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940.  Although the Parker River controversy somewhat marred the end of his tenure, Gabrielson, a westerner who had carefully maintained his voting residence in Oregon, left the FWS with a fairly high store of goodwill for his new job at the head of a newly reorganized Wildlife Management Institute.[452]

            At first glance, Gabrielson’s successor as FWS Director, Albert M. Day, seemed to share favorable similarities with his predecessor and possessed a perhaps even wider range of preparatory experience.  Hired by the Biological Survey for rodent control work in 1919, Day served as the first administrator of the Pittman-Robertson Act in 1938, first FWS liaison officer with the military in 1941, and as Assistant Director of the FWS since late 1942.[453]  But, in a postwar period of increasingly bitter partisanship and open presidential-congressional splits on appropriations, Day was in a very difficult position.  The vitriolic struggle over Parker River NWR posed an immediate challenge.  Day held a weak position, first attempting to defend or excuse the poor public relations and overbearing stance of his predecessor, then forced to retreat to a compromise refuge when secretarial and congressional sentiment proved itself strongly and repeatedly in favor of a major policy adjustment in favor of local interests.

            While Harold Ickes had rejected any wholesale concessions over the size of Parker River Refuge, the new Interior Secretary, Julius Krug, quickly expressed his willingness to craft a compromise solution.  During congressional consideration of the Parker River abolition bill in 1946, Krug intimated his discomfort with establishing the refuge over strenuous local objections to Sens. Leverett Saltonstall (R-MA) and David Walsh (D-MA), and apparently proposed a compromise refuge of 6,500 acres as early as June 1946.[454]  Then, following the Truman veto of the Parker River abolition bill and an accompanying order to reexamine the refuge acquisition area, Krug ordered the administrative abandonment of the western half of the refuge in September 1946.  In the remaining refuge area, in an attempt to placate a major source of opposition, Krug stressed that the Department of the Interior and its Fish and Wildlife Service would not interfere with the local clamming industry.  Krug’s order left the FWS with an actively administered Parker River NWR of just over six thousand acres, but required congressional action to divest the federal government’s title to the abandoned area of just under six thousand acres.  This promised a new legislative struggle in the Eightieth Congress.[455]

            Wildlife conservation faced a drastically altered congressional landscape in 1947.  Thanks to widespread discontent with the pace of postwar conversion and lingering wartime controls, the elections of 1946 returned Republican majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration.  This promised even greater executive-legislative conflict over budgets and other policy priorities.  Additionally, the implementation of the Congressional Reorganization Act of 1946 dramatically revamped the congressional committee system.  Passed with bipartisan effort at the end of the Seventy-ninth Congress, the congressional reorganization eliminated numerous standing committees and reorganized and formalized the jurisdictions of the remaining committees.[456]  The new system of committee jurisdictions virtually eliminated the need for special and select committees, including the Senate and House wildlife committees.  Along with nearly all other Senate special and select committees, the Senate Special Committee on the Conservation of Wildlife Resources expired on 31 January 1947.[457]  After issuing a wide-ranging report on 2 January 1947 including an endorsement of its own continuance, the House wildlife committee officially expired according to its biennial resolution with the end of the Seventy-ninth Congress.[458]  An effort by Rep. August Andresen (R-MN) to renew the wildlife committee gained a favorable report from the House Committee on Rules, but it failed to receive approval from the full House.[459]  The era of independent congressional wildlife committees had come to an end.

            Under the new committee jurisdictions, both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees lost their longstanding legislative responsibility for National Wildlife Refuge System.  The Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, which had previously held authority over the Bureau of Fisheries and subsequent fisheries activities of the Fish and Wildlife Service, gained jurisdiction over the entire Service, including the national wildlife refuges, in the House.  A new Subcommittee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources, chaired in the Eightieth Congress by freshman Rep. Raymond H. Burke (R-OH), exercised most of the larger committee’s oversight responsibility.  In the Senate, a three-man subcommittee of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, chaired by Homer Ferguson (R-MI), but run in practice by now-Senator A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) continued the investigative work of Robertson’s former House committee on a smaller and more infrequent scale.  However, the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce gained primary legislative authority for the FWS and formed its own subcommittee regarding wildlife conservation.[460]

            The wildlife issues confronting the Eightieth Congress largely continued the concerns of the previous two postwar years.  The final disposition of the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge remained to be settled after President Truman’s pocket veto of the congressional abolition bill and the Secretary of the Interior’s administrative abandonment of half the refuge.  More constructively, the Fish and Wildlife Service sought clear congressional mandates for the acquisition of federal wildlife management areas in California and the transfer of the military’s wartime land acquisitions for wildlife conservation in Illinois and elsewhere.  But, with Republican congressional majorities, divided government exacerbated existing congressional and presidential priorities on the federal budget.  Constraints on the federal budget pushed wildlife conservationists to seek an increased fee for the federal duck stamp to alleviate some of the refuge system’s financial difficulties.

            Parker River continued to be a particularly contentious issue in the Eightieth Congress.  Continuing his advocacy from the previous congress, Rep. George J. Bates (R-MA) introduced three alternatives for the disposal of the controversial refuge.  His first bill provided for the complete abolition of the refuge, similar to the bill passed by the 79th Congress but vetoed by President Truman.  But, even with Republican congressional majorities, the apparent promise of another Truman veto prevented serious consideration of this alternative.[461]  Introduced by request, a second bill reflected the compromise proposed by the Department of the Interior, abolishing the three most inland sections of the refuge, where active wildlife management had already been abandoned by order of Interior Secretary Krug in 1946.[462]  Bates’ third bill left the FWS with only a rump refuge consisting of the former Audubon sanctuary of Plum Island and mandated the abolition of the refuge’s other five units.[463]  In 1947, the Massachusetts congressional delegation coalesced behind the third bill and received the consent of House Speaker Joseph Martin (R-MA) to try passing it under suspension of the rules.  However, Rep. Herbert Bonner (D-NC), who had opposed the bill in the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, galvanized sufficient opposition to prevent the necessary two-thirds vote to suspend the rules on 26 July 1947.[464]

            In 1948, focus shifted to the Interior-backed bill, which reflected on-the-ground refuge management by retaining three of the six refuge management areas.  In a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources on 16 March 1948, most witnesses, including Carl Shoemaker for the National Wildlife Federation and Clarence Cottam for the FWS, reluctantly accepted the compromise refuge represented by H.R. 3578.  Only C. R. Gutermuth, representing the Wildlife Management Institute (and former FWS Director Ira N. Gabrielson), appeared in unqualified opposition to the refuge’s evisceration.[465]  With the previous opposition now muted, the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries reported the bill without amendment on 14 April 1948, and the House passed it on 20 April 1948 without significant debate.[466]  Without further hearings, the Senate Commerce committee reported the House bill on 13 May 1948, and Senate passage shortly followed without debate on 24 May 1948.[467]  With this solution endorsed by Interior Secretary Krug, President Truman approved the Parker River reduction act on 3 June 1948.[468]

            Arising from the complicated land use and ownership of long-settled coastal New England, the Parker River dispute temporarily crippled the refuge program in Massachusetts and revealed several flaws in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s land acquisition program.  In contrast to earlier refuge acquisitions along the Atlantic Coast, such as Blackwater Refuge in Maryland, Mattamuskeet in North Carolina, and Cape Romain, South Caroline, the Fish and Wildlife Service had no preexisting, large-scale landowner to negotiate with at Parker River.  Instead, the variety of small-scale and tangled land titles led the Service to utilize a heavy-handed condemnation proceeding that unnecessarily antagonized the affected parties.  Additionally, although local opposition had been clear from an early point, the federal bureaucracy falsely assumed that the sparse resident population accurately measured the area’s human uses.  When the much larger regional population protested the prospective loss of the area’s clamming beds, shooting grounds, haying meadows, and summer campgrounds, the FWS failed to adequately replicate at Parker River the accommodations to local folkways it had made elsewhere, such as waterfowl hunting at Mattamuskeet, muskrat trapping at Blackwater, and shellfish harvests at Cape Romain.  Compounding these problems, when the intensity of local opposition to the Parker River project and the tenacity of its congressional representatives threatened to overturn the refuge altogether, the FWS leadership proved ill-prepared to respond or deflect the attacks on its acquisition prerogatives.  Fortunately, Parker River’s evisceration did not set the precedent that refuge advocates feared, as a later move to similarly limit Brigantine NWR in New Jersey fizzled out after a single hearing.[469]

            Even as it moved to limit the Parker River Refuge, the Eightieth Congress also considered a novel transfer of a former ordnance plant to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a national wildlife refuge.  On 15 April 1947, Rep. C. W. “Runt” Bishop (R-IL) introduced a bill to transfer the War Department’s Illinois Ordnance Plant and the adjacent Crab Orchard Creek Project of the Soil Conservation Service, Department of Agriculture, to the Department of the Interior as the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge.[470]  A former member of the House wildlife committee, Bishop had been interested in the potential wildlife utilization of this 43,000-acre area in his southern Illinois district since at least 1942.[471]  In a series of hearings before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources, Bishop and the Fish and Wildlife Service established the area’s large potential value to migratory waterfowl on the Mississippi Flyway and that use’s compatibility with continued industrial activity.[472]  After receiving favorable reports from the Merchant Marine and Rules Committees, the House passed Bishop’s Crab Orchard bill with committee amendments on 21 July 1947.[473]  Acceding to Rep. Bishop’s home district interest in the legislation, the Senate quickly reported and passed the bill without further amendment, and President Truman signed it into law on 5 August 1947.[474]

            The creation of the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge set a potential model for wildlife conservation uses of other extensive land areas acquired by the military during World War II, but presumably no longer needed in the postwar era.  The wildlife potential of such areas had been discussed in wartime hearings, but the initial legislation governing the disposition of surplus wartime property made no special dispensations for wildlife conservation.  Prodded by the interest of state wildlife agencies as much as the FWS, Sen. Kenneth Wherry (R-NE) and Rep. Raymond H. Burke (R-OH) introduced bills to provide a general authorization for transfers like the Crab Orchard project in the first session of the Eightieth Congress.[475]  The bills received sympathetic committee hearings in both congressional houses in July 1947, and the House of Representatives passed Burke’s bill, with committee amendments, on the same day as the Crab Orchard bill.[476]  Although the general transfer bill did not receive Senate consideration in the remainder of 1947, the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce held further hearings in April 1948.[477] The committee reported the House bill without further amendment on 30 April 1948, and the Senate passed the bill on 10 May 1948, with President Truman’s approval coming shortly thereafter.[478]  Unfortunately, the expansion of the Cold War military after 1948 limited the acreage of surplus lands available for wildlife conservation use and few transfers occurred.  As will be discussed below, too often a reverse pressure occurred, whereby military bases sought to absorb nearby refuge areas for defense purposes.

            However, during the Eightieth Congress, the Fish and Wildlife Service remained hopeful about a postwar period of expanded refuge system acquisitions.  A primary target remained the California wildlife management areas proposed in 1946, and Congress soon moved to provide an explicit authorization for that purpose.  Rep. Clarence Lea (D-CA) reintroduced his bill, “For the acquisition and maintenance of wildlife management and control areas in the State of California, and for other purposes,” at the beginning of the 80th Congress.[479]  At a hearing before the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Subcommittee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources, Lea emphasized the need to protect California agricultural lands from waterfowl depredations.  To that end, the State of California sought a federal matching fund for the purchase of permanent waterfowl feeding and hunting grounds, to be termed wildlife management areas rather than national wildlife refuges because hunting would be allowed on them.  FWS Director Al Day noted that federal reclamation efforts had intensified waterfowl depredations and necessitated an expanded federal program by destroying natural habitat.  But, without new legislation and appropriations, the FWS lacked adequate funds to complete the prospective acquisition program of 20,000 acres.[480]  These arguments proved convincing, and Burke reported the bill on 19 June 1947 with committee amendments requiring a State of California matching fund.[481]  Arousing no opposition in the full House, the bill passed via the Consent Calendar on 7 July 1947, but the Senate failed to act on the Lea bill before Congress adjourned for most of the remainder of 1947.[482]

            In the second session of the Eightieth Congress, a brief hearing before a Senate Commerce subcommittee demonstrated unanimous support among federal, State, and non-governmental officials for the Lea bill, with California having already enacted the necessary matching fund and authorization for federal land acquisitions.[483]  After this hearing, the bill received expedited action, receiving a favorable committee report on 30 April 1948, passing the Senate without debate on 10 May 1948, and receiving President Truman’s approval a week later.[484]  Of course, the Lea Act authorization for refuge acquisitions, as well as the Wherry-Burke Act for surplus military land transfers, meant little without adequate appropriations to pay for and properly administer the intended refuge areas.

            Appropriations for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Eightieth Congress reflected the continuing differences between Congress and the Truman administration over the proper funding level for federal wildlife conservation.  In January 1947, the Budget Bureau submitted FWS estimates for fiscal year 1948 slightly lower than those advanced a year earlier, but still substantially above the previous year’s congressional appropriation.  The House Appropriations Committee responded by cutting the FWS budget estimates by almost one quarter.  Faring somewhat better than the FWS average, the refuge system received only a fourteen percent cut, which still gave it a slight increase over the previous year’s budget.  The Senate restored some of the House cuts to the FWS, but left the refuge system’s funding level unchanged from the House total of $900,000.  In the final appropriation act, the slight increase for the refuge system appeared fortunate in a year when the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior received an overall appropriation cut.[485]

            As part of an ambitious election year Interior Department budget, the Truman administration put forward a substantially larger budget proposal for the Fish and Wildlife Service in January 1948.  The Budget Bureau proposed an overall FWS appropriation of nearly $11.6 million, an increase of just over $5 million from the appropriation for fiscal year 1948.  The prospective budget devoted fully three-quarters of the increases to the Service’s fisheries activities, an area where Northeastern and Pacific Coast Republicans had sought higher appropriations in recent years.  The budget also included an apparent increase of sixty percent for the refuge system, from $940,000 in fiscal year 1948 to $1,500,000 in 1949.  However, the maintenance and development of the extensive industrial buildings on the newly created Crab Orchard NWR accounted for $335,000, leaving considerably more modest increases of $75,000 for the administration of Alaskan refuges and $150,000 for urgent refuge repairs beyond existing obligations.[486]

            As in 1947, Congress responded by cutting the administration’s budget, but still increasing the appropriation over the previous year.  The House cut the proposed budget by over twenty percent, though the remainder still represented a forty percent increase over the fiscal year 1948 appropriation.[487]  The Senate and conference committee restored some of the House cuts, resulting in a FWS budget of almost $10 million, a one-year increase of fifty percent.  The refuge system almost matched that increase, with the fiscal year 1948 funding of $900,000 rising to $1,312,500 in 1949.  Plus, for the first time, Congress appropriated the revenues derived from refuges for the use of the NWRS, estimated at almost $300,000 after deducting the twenty-five percent payment to counties in lieu of taxes.[488]  Although the refuge revenues allocation had to be balanced against an estimated $200,000 decrease in duck stamp revenues, the net result was a substantial increase in NWRS funding for fiscal year 1949, probably exceeding the Budget Bureau estimates.

            Congress also made a start at funding the California wildlife management areas authorized by the Lea Act of 18 May 1948.  The Fish and Wildlife Service received Budget Bureau approval for a supplemental estimate of $500,000 just in time for consideration by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of the Interior for fiscal year 1949.  The estimate included personnel, engineering, and development costs of approximately $100,000, for the improvement of 7,000 acres to be purchased at a cost of nearly $400,000.  Although the subcommittee expressed considerable skepticism regarding the estimated land costs, the Senate ultimately approved a start-up appropriation of $300,000 for fiscal year 1949.  Although the House-Senate conference committee subsequently cut the funding down to $250,000, the Fish and Wildlife Service had finally secured funding for the expanded California wildlife program that it had sought since 1943.[489]

            Despite, or perhaps related to, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s relative success with refuge appropriations and various authorizations, a parallel effort to augment the National Wildlife Refuge System by raising the duck stamp fee failed in the Eightieth Congress.  After Congress declined to provide dramatically larger appropriations for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in fiscal year 1948, freshman Rep. Charles J. Kersten (R-WI) submitted a proposal to double the duck stamp fee in mid-1947. [490]  As the Fish and Wildlife Service later testified, the proposed increase of the duck stamp from $1 to $2 would offset inflationary losses since the creation of the federal license in 1934.  Based on recent duck stamp sales, the increase would increase the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund from around $2 million annually to nearly $4 million.  As with the original duck stamp of 1934, wildlife conservationists were turning to user fees in the face of budget limitations.

            However, for some conservationists, Kersten’s duck stamp bill contained “poison pill” provisions.  In a brief hearing before the MMF Subcommittee on Conservation of Wildlife Resources on 2 July 1947, John H. Baker, president of the National Audubon Society, supported the goal of raising more funds for the FWS by raising the duck stamp fee, but objected to the bill’s other amendments to existing statutes.  Beyond the fee increase, the bill amended the original duck stamp act to allow total discretion to the Fish and Wildlife Service in the disposition of duck stamp funds, removing the existing 90-10 division between land management/acquisition costs and administration/law enforcement.  Kersten’s proposal also eliminated the “inviolate sanctuary” status of the refuge system by allowing for the administration of twenty-five percent of acquired lands as public shooting grounds.  Such provisions would have created a refuge system quite similar to the vision of the original game refuge bills of the 1920s.  Although the Fish and Wildlife Service, International Association of Game, Fish, and Conservation Commissioners, and Izaak Walton League of America endorsed the bill, the House committee refused to report it.[491]

            In the Senate, the proposed duck stamp amendments received a considerable boost through the sponsorship of A. Willis Robertson (D-VA).  Although in a Democratic minority for the first time in his career and just a freshman senator, Robertson continued working effectively on behalf of wildlife conservation in the Senate.  On the recommendation of Minority Leader Alben Barkley (D-KY), the Senate President Pro Tempore, Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI), appointed Robertson to a Senate position on the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, which reviewed all prospective refuge purchases, on 7 May 1947.[492]  Assigned to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments (EED), Robertson personally convinced chairman George D. Aiken (R-VT) to appoint a Subcommittee to Investigate Wildlife Conservation to continue Robertson’s work from the House’s select committee on wildlife.  Although Robertson served as the only Democrat on the three-person subcommittee in the Eightieth Congress, by the second session he acted as the de facto chairman and revived his wide-ranging hearings on federal conservation activities.[493]

            Robertson offered his own duck stamp act amendments on 12 April 1948, in time for hearings before the EED wildlife subcommittee two weeks later.  Besides an additional section providing for American grants-in-aid to foreign countries on behalf of migratory bird management, Robertson’s bill was identical to Kersten’s earlier bill, providing for a two-dollar duck stamp, total discretion by the Secretary of the Interior as to use of funds, and opening up to twenty-five percent of refuges to public hunting.  Testimony before the wildlife subcommittee generally favored raising the duck stamp to two dollars to increase NWRS funding, but opinion varied widely over the best disposition of those funds and the other provisions of the bill.  Appearing on behalf of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, Nash Buckingham vehemently opposed opening any refuge areas to public hunting, while favoring a definite, earmarked increase for game law enforcement.  Representing the League of Maryland Sportsmen, aviation industrialist Glenn L. Martin instead advocated even greater discretion for the FWS and Secretary of the Interior in opening refuge lands to hunting.  Several witnesses favored the expenditure of duck stamp funds in Canada but questioned the efficacy of such an action in Mexico.  Still other witnesses, representing the American Waterfowl Committee, Ohio Division of Conservation and Natural Resources, Izaak Walton League of America, and National Wildlife Federation fully endorsed the bill, as did FWS Director Al Day.[494]

            As reported from the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, the bill reflected the disharmony of wildlife conservationists during the EED subcommittee hearings.  The amended bill provided for raising the duck stamp fee to two dollars, total discretion for the proportion of the fund used for various activities, and the purchase of new wildlife management areas open to public hunting as well as inviolate sanctuaries.  But, the report noted: “The bill as introduced contained some sections to which there was objection; however, those sections have been deleted and your committee believes that the bill as it now stands in noncontroversial.”  Thus, the committee had deleted provisions for international aid on behalf of migratory birds and hunting on twenty-five percent of existing refuges.  With the controversial features removed, the Senate passed Robertson’s bill via unanimous consent on 18 June 1948.[495]  But, with the Eightieth Congress spending very little time in session thereafter, the House failed to act on it, and it died with the final congressional adjournment on 31 December 1948.

            Despite its well-known dubbing as “do nothing” by President Truman in the 1948 campaign, the Eightieth Congress compiled a rather remarkable record on behalf of wildlife conservation in its 1947-1948 term.  In the Crab Orchard Act of 1947, the Lea Act of 1948, and the Wherry-Burke Act of 1948, the Fish and Wildlife Service secured several important authorizations on behalf of its National Wildlife Refuge System.  The first two acts led directly to important new refuges for migratory waterfowl in key points on the Mississippi and Pacific Flyways, respectively.  Although the emerging Cold War prevented the large-scale decommissioning of military bases envisioned in the Wherry-Burke Act, that fault can hardly be laid at the feet of the Eightieth Congress.  Beyond authorizations, in the equally important realm of appropriations, the refuge system fared at least as well as it had in the Democratic-controlled Seventy-ninth Congress, which had largely continued the stringent budgets of the war years.  Although the Eightieth Congress did pass the Parker River NWR reduction act in 1948, this represented a retreat from the intemperate abolition bill of 1946.  Of the major refuge-related initiatives advanced in the Eightieth Congress, only the duck stamp fee increase bill failed of passage.

            Still, Senate passage of a $2 duck stamp bill in 1948 left hope for further congressional action in the Eighty-first Congress, where both houses returned to Democratic control after two years of Republican majorities.  With the recent election results undoubtedly in mind, as well as waterfowl populations nearly as low as the Dust Bowl era, FWS Director Albert Day convened a meeting of leading conservation organizations in November 1948.  Day advocated and sought conservationist support for a three-dollar duck stamp, which would more than offset the fifty percent depreciation of a dollar’s value since 1934 and allow the FWS to increase its program of refuge acquisition and development.  The FWS also continued to seek greater administrative flexibility: both in the expenditure of duck stamp funds to increase law enforcement spending, and to open certain portions of national wildlife refuges to waterfowl hunting.  Although the National Audubon Society expressed continuing reservations regarding hunting on national wildlife refuges, the conference of leading wildlife conservationists otherwise endorsed the Service’s proposed duck stamp amendments.[496]

            A February 1949 hearing before the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Wildlife Conservation provided the first forum for debate on the duck stamp amendments in the Eighty-first Congress.  Although he no longer officially served on the committee, A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) nonetheless played an active role in the hearing, continuing the congressional role he had begun in 1934.  Robertson presented the results of a survey he had taken of state wildlife agencies on the proposed duck stamp amendments.  The survey revealed a very strong sentiment for a two-dollar duck stamp rather than the three-dollar stamp backed by the Fish and Wildlife Service.  For the strongly tax-averse congressmen of the late 1940s, including Robertson (who also gave especially heavy weight to the opinions of his former state wildlife agency colleagues), this sentiment largely concluded the pricing issue.  The FWS could expect nothing more than a two-dollar duck stamp in 1949.[497]

            A second issue, the proportion of the duck stamp fund to be devoted to law enforcement, raised relatively little division among wildlife conservationists after the initial Senate hearing of February 1949.  The Fish and Wildlife Service preferred the complete elimination of the old ninety-ten division between land acquisition/development and administration/law enforcement, leaving it free to spend the duck stamp fund however it saw fit, though they promised a large increase for enforcement of waterfowl regulations.  Very few other interested parties seemed interested in providing this total discretion to the Service, but a vocal group led by Nash Buckingham of the Outdoor Writers Association of America called for a large increase for law enforcement, up to twenty-five percent of the total duck stamp fund.[498]  Following the EED hearing, the bills introduced by Senate Commerce chairman Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO) and House Subcommittee on the Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation chairman Clark W. Thompson (D-TX) recognized the sentiment for increased law enforcement.  The Johnson-Thompson bill reduced the percentage of the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund dedicated to refuge purchase and development from ninety to seventy-five, increasing the corresponding amount available for duck stamp act administration, including law enforcement, from ten to twenty-five percent.[499]

            The third issue, whether to allow hunting on the NWRS, revived all the rhetoric associated with the public shooting grounds provisions of the game refuge bills in the 1920s.  The Fish and Wildlife Service backed provisions for the creation of wildlife management areas in the NWRS, where hunting would be allowed, to maximize their administrative powers over the refuge system.  Hunting proponents, particularly Carl Shoemaker of the National Wildlife Federation, stressed the minimal areas of refuges likely to be affected, while arguing that waterfowl represented a crop to be harvested, which simply was wasted if left unharvested.  They trusted the Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the harvest scientifically and without harm to the overall waterfowl populations.  On the other hand, representing the dominant sentiment in his organization, National Audubon Society president John H. Baker adamantly opposed this aspect of the proposal.  Baker felt that the refuge system, with most refuges established as inviolate sanctuaries under the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929, served as vital reservoirs for migratory birds and other wildlife and should not be tampered with.  The Audubon Society also believed that political pressure to open refuges to hunting would overcome reasoned, scientific wildlife management in the decision-making process.  Although the attending committee members appeared skeptical of the Audubon position, Baker pointed out that bills with similar provisions failed in both the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses, implying that Audubon could still mobilize effectively against this bill.[500]

            The Audubon Society’s objections produced significant changes in the bill reported from the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce on 14 June 1949.  The committee bill still raised the duck stamp from one dollar to two dollars and retained the increased percentage of funds for duck stamp act administration, including law enforcement.  However, on the subject of hunting, a clarifying amendment ensured that no existing refuge lands would be opened to hunting.  On new refuges, the Fish and Wildlife Service could administratively designate twenty-five percent of the area as wildlife management areas.  Additionally, a committee amendment forbid hunting before 1 July 1952, whenever waterfowl populations were in decline either nationally or locally, and before the development of the acquired area.[501]

            Rather unexpectedly, the bill underwent further change on the Senate floor.  Considered noncontroversial after its committee amendments, the Senate considered the duck stamp bill under the consent calendar on 21 June 1949.  However, Andrew F. Schoeppel (R-KS), a member of the Subcommittee to Investigate Wildlife Conservation, and John J. Williams (R-DE) objected to the proposed increase for law enforcement purposes.  To achieve Senate passage under the strictures of the consent calendar, Commerce chairman Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO) acceded to the reinstatement of the original 90-10 division of duck stamp funds, striking out the provisions for increased law enforcement.[502]

            Having already held hearings on the House companion bill, the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries largely accepted the Senate-passed bill, offering only a technical amendment in its prompt report of 29 June 1949.  However, like the Senate committee, the House committee emphasized its intention to preserve the inviolate status of the existing refuges.[503]  Although a pair of Republican congressmen objected to increasing a revolving fund outside the regular appropriations process and prevented the bill’s passage on the House Consent Calendar, it ultimately faced little opposition.  With an explanation by the subcommittee chairman, Clark W. Thompson (D-TX), the House, without a recorded vote, passed the duck stamp act amendments via suspension of the rules on 1 August 1949.[504]  Following the Senate’s acceptance of the House technical amendment, President Truman approved the Johnson-Thompson amendments to the Migratory Bird Hunting Act on 12 August 1949, ending almost four years of legislative effort to secure an increased duck stamp.[505]

            As with the original federal license proposals of the 1920s and the duck stamp act of 1934, postwar conservationists intended the duck stamp act amendments of 1949 to provide a reliable source of revenue for federal wildlife conservation in a period of pinched federal budgets.  Implemented in time for the 1949-1950 hunting season, the duck stamp act amendments of 1949 resulted in a near doubling of revenue for the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, from $2,185,864 in fiscal year 1949 to $3,959,225 in 1950 and $3,895,804 in 1951.  Because the FWS relied on the previous year’s revenues for budgeting purposes, expenditures from the fund grew more slowly, but expanded from $2,187,589 in 1949, to $2,263,664 in 1950, and $3,213,130 in 1951, as the FWS built a reserve fund of $5,283,068.[506]  The refuge system seemed primed for a period of expanded acquisition and development.

            In the meantime, the Fish and wildlife Service continued to seek a congressional mandate for expanded law enforcement efforts from duck stamp funds.  After the Senate floor defeat of an increased proportion of duck stamp funds for administration and law enforcement in 1949, Sen. Edwin C. Johnson (D-CO) agreed to sponsor another attempt in the Eighty-second Congress.[507]  Although the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce initially rejected the bill, a reconsideration orchestrated in part by A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) gained a favorable committee report for an amended bill increasing the administrative percentage from ten to fifteen percent.[508]  With the committee endorsement in place, the Senate approved the amended bill via the consent calendar on 23 July 1951.[509]  After a hearing before the wildlife subcommittee of the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, the House passed the law enforcement increase via unanimous consent on 15 October 1951, and President Truman signed it into law on 20 October 1951.[510]

            While providing a badly needed increase for federal enforcement of migratory waterfowl hunting regulations, the new duck stamp amendments also increased an undercurrent of conservationist grumbling regarding the lack of duck stamp funds spent on land acquisition.  As early as the hearings on the duck stamp act amendments of 1949, Carl Shoemaker had complained that increased law enforcement, while badly needed, would come at the expense of equally needed land acquisition funds.  While endorsing the proposed 1951 amendments before the September meeting of the International Association of Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners, Shoemaker noted “that up to June 30 of [1950] only 184,636 acres of refuge land had been purchased by duck stamp money, at a total cost of $1,970,604.”[511]  A year later, Shoemaker found the situation little improved.  Of $26,909,141 paid by hunters, conservationists, and stamp collectors between 1934 and 30 June 1951, expenditures for actual land acquisitions (excluding related administrative costs) tallied only $2,327,754 for 203,533 acres.[512]  Sportsmen would seek additional assurances dedicating duck stamp funds to refuge acquisitions before acceding to another increase in the federal hunting fee.

            The second Truman term also witnessed renewed agitation for significant changes in the organization and departmental placement of the Fish and Wildlife Service.  These perturbations largely emerged out of the larger government reorganization push orchestrated by the bipartisan Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch, better known as the Hoover Commission after its chairman, former president Herbert Hoover.[513]  However, the Hoover Commission’s recommendations regarding the Fish and Wildlife Service reflected the divided advice it received from its own task forces.  Headed by the renowned Robert Moses, the “Task Force on Public Works” recommended the placement of the FWS in a Division of Roads, Airports, Parks, and Indian Affairs, to be headed by a Commissioner of Parks, Fish, and Wildlife in a new Department of Works.  By retaining such a seemingly disparate grouping in the Department of Works, the Fish and Wildlife Service could continue its coordination work with the consolidated water control projects of the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers.[514]  In contrast, the “Task Force on Natural Resources,” chaired by former Wyoming governor Leslie A. Miller, advocated the Service’s division into a Fisheries Service and a Wildlife Service, although both would be included in a new Department of Natural Resources.  The task force argued that such a division would provide a needed boost in status for commercial fisheries resources.[515]

            In its final 1949 report on the Department of the Interior, a majority of the Hoover Commission rejected the recommendations of both Interior-related task forces.  Instead, they adopted a division of the Fish and Wildlife Service as advocated by the natural resources task force, but with the transfer of commercial fisheries functions to the Department of Commerce, from whence the Bureau of Fisheries had come to Interior in 1939.  The wildlife functions remaining in the Department of the Interior would then be combined with the National Park Service into a new Recreation Service.  Although this mirrored some enduring discontent in the fisheries industry and Congress with the creation of the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940,[516] it probably reflected Hoover’s affinity for his former department more than any real consensus or urgency among the commission members.  In fact, four of the twelve commissioners specifically dissented from the proposal to re-divide the Fish and Wildlife Service.[517]  Of course, FWS Director Al Day also opposed any division of his agency, arguing on behalf of its improved bureaucratic status and efficiencies before a key industry group in January 1950.[518]  Although commercial fisheries advocates remained displeased with their industry’s perceived subordination in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s organization, the controversial recommendations regarding the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior in general, resulted in a lack of decisive action before the eruption of the Korean War ensured the continuance of the status quo for the near future.[519]

            The “police action” on the Korean peninsula that began with the North’s invasion of the South in June 1950 dominated the closing years of the Truman administration and largely foreclosed any further wildlife conservation initiatives.  Although at first glance unrelated to the refuge system, the wartime emergency resulted in a budget reprogramming that indefinitely postponed the increased plan of refuge land acquisition intended by the duck stamp act amendments of 1949.  Although a change in budget procedures in fiscal year 1951 makes exact comparisons difficult, the refuge system seems to have enjoyed its peak Truman administration appropriation in 1950 at just over $2 million.  Thereafter, if one considers both the core refuge management budget and the wildlife facilities construction budget together, appropriated funds for the refuge system remained at approximately $2 million annually through fiscal year 1953, the last budget of the Truman administration.[520]  Meanwhile, the Service expanded its law enforcement activities with its increased duck stamp expenditures but land acquisition remained limited.[521]  As inflation eroded the value of appropriated funds, most of the remaining duck stamp monies were directed to maintenance funding to allow for a stable general budget in support of the war effort.

            The Korean War also reintroduced military uses to the national wildlife refuge system.  But, based in large part on the recent experience of World War II, the Fish and Wildlife Service expressed considerable reluctance to provide refuge lands to the armed services.  While noting that refuge lands had been approved for airfields, gunnery ranges, and bombing targets, particularly in the West, the Service duly reported that:

This Service has approved requests, particularly for gunnery ranges, where there is reasonable assurance that wildlife populations will be undisturbed and undamaged, where satisfactory arrangements are made for fire protection, and finally, where relinquishment of such use is specified.

            Military use of lands has been opposed when complete exclusion of refuge personnel is required for periods of several days.  The inability to maintain water-control structures, patrol against trespass, guard against fire, and control predators can offset refuge gains of several years.  The interruption of research may nullify studies undertaken over several seasons.[522]

By the end of fiscal year 1952, the military openly occupied or sought the use of portions of twenty national wildlife refuges totaling at least 1,372,040 acres.  Some military tenancies proceeded smoothly, but the Fish and Wildlife Service complained bitterly that:

In others, there have been high-handed trespass and complete disregard for the wise use of the affected natural resources.  In some instances installations have actually been completed before permission for use was requested.  Too often the belief is expressed that refuges are little different from unoccupied public lands; that use by the military must be on their own terms, without regard to other important uses, and often presupposing a transfer of jurisdiction.[523]

To mitigate such problems, the Service and Interior Department established a clear precedent of providing for military tenancy via Interior Department permits and secretarial-level memoranda of understanding, instead of outright transfers.[524]

            Besides military usages, the Fish and Wildlife Service struggled to reconcile other uses of the National Wildlife Refuge System with its primary mission of wildlife conservation.  Increasing public interest in the refuge system posed one, albeit an ambiguous, problem.  Negligible on all but a handful of refuges prior to and during World War II, public visitation to refuges surged in the postwar years.  In 1951, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that the refuge system received 3,442,917 visitor-days of public use.  The Service attributed nearly two-thirds of visitation to the rather general activities of picnicking, swimming, sightseeing, and bird watching, an additional third to fishing trips, and only 222,470 visitor-days to hunting.  Although two interior refuges with extensive recreational opportunities, Crab Orchard (IL) and Wichita Mountains (OK), represented over one million of the total visitations, the Service presciently noted the growing popularity of coastal refuges with the public.[525]  Continuing to grow quickly throughout the 1950s, visitation had already reached over five million by 1954.[526]  The national boom for outdoors recreation would soon encompass a growing number of national wildlife refuges, and increasingly drain sparse management resources as the Service struggled to determine the level of public use compatible with the primary NWRS mission of wildlife conservation.

            In the meantime, the Fish and Wildlife Service expressed a rising concern over encroachment on refuge lands by natural resources development incompatible with wildlife conservation, particularly oil and gas extraction.  In 1947, the Service had warned that, by destroying vital wetland areas, oil exploration and other industrial activities endangered the agency’s ability to acquire future refuges.[527]  By 1952, similar activities endangered existing refuges.  One Louisiana refuge became a significant oil producer, greatly increasing the refuge receipts now indefinitely earmarked for NWRS management, but adversely impacting the refuge’s primary purpose as a waterfowl sanctuary.  Drawing on this experience, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s report for fiscal year 1952 warned:

The exploitation of resources, particularly oil and gas, presents a constant threat to wildlife and its habitat and one that can be expected to increase rather than diminish.  This Service has taken the firm position that oil and gas operations must be excluded from refuge lands so far as possible.  Experience indicates conclusively the basic incompatibility of oil and gas operations and waterfowl management.  The intensive use and development which of necessity accompany oil and gas operations preclude the maintenance of marsh areas in a natural, balanced condition, thereby limiting if not destroying the value of such habitat for migratory waterfowl.[528]

Clearly, firm leadership from the Fish and Wildlife Service would be required to protect the existing NWRS from such threats, much less expand the system.

            Unfortunately, rather than rising to the challenge of the multiple threats to the refuge system’s core mission of wildlife conservation, the leadership of the Fish and Wildlife Service too often descended into bureaucratic infighting.  Trouble appeared to stem from the top, as Director Al Day continually antagonized his staff, most of whom he had inherited from Gabrielson in 1946.  Just two months after Gabrielson’s retirement, the Fish and Wildlife Service had announced a major organizational restructuring, with twelve divisions consolidated into four branches: administration, research, commercial fisheries, and management of fish and game resources.[529]  Although Day was not the sole originator of this plan, and it represented a logical strengthening of administrative controls over a previously unwieldy amalgam of two former bureaus, Day received the inevitable criticism and bitterness of those offended by the plan, especially from some former division chiefs who received de facto demotions through the new organizational chart.

            According to contemporary accounts received by Sen. A. Willis Robertson, Day did little to alleviate the continuing tensions among his staff.  Instead, he moved to embarrass and demote those officials, like FWS law enforcement chief Jesse Thompson and Assistant Director Clarence Cottam, who criticized or disagreed with him.  In 1951, when the political environment was highly attuned to the “mess in Washington,” Day also incurred a whiff of scandal with allegations that he enjoyed hunting over illegally baited waters with prominent conservationist and industrialist Glen C. Martin.  When another FWS reorganization appeared to threaten law enforcement prerogatives, A. Willis Robertson, Jay Darling, and other wildlife conservationists made a brief attempt to sidetrack Day.  However, after Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman offered his open support for the FWS Director, Darling and Robertson retreated to private grumbling over retirements and rumored departures of more favored FWS officials.[530]  New leadership for the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to await new leadership at the secretarial level.

            Renewed wide-scale expansion and development of the National Wildlife Refuge System would also have to await a new administration.  Paralleling many other domestic policy initiatives of the Fair Deal, the Truman years remained an era of unfulfilled expectations for the National Wildlife Refuge System.  At the end of fiscal year 1946, the system consisted of 291 units occupying over 17.8 million acres, nearly 10 million of which was in the continental United States.[531]  Yet, following its pre-WWII goals, the Fish and Wildlife Service still needed to acquire 3.5-4 million acres of wetlands to secure what it considered the minimum necessary habitat for migratory waterfowl.  The Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge Act of 1947, Lea Act of 1948 for California wildlife management areas, Wherry-Burke Act of 1948 authorizing surplus property transfers for wildlife conservation, and the Duck Stamp Act amendments of 1949 all seemed to promise an expanded refuge program.  But, thanks largely to the budgetary exigencies of the Korean War and America’s growing Cold War commitments, congressional appropriations for refuge maintenance and development remained inadequate, requiring the continued diversion of duck stamp funds from their avowed primary purpose of land acquisition.  By 1953, of $35,839,551 in duck stamp receipts since 1934, only $3,403,690 had been actually expended for the purchase of 218,016 acres, with an additional $1,963,435 utilized for related land acquisitions.  The vast majority of duck stamp funds had been expended on law enforcement, waterfowl research, and development and maintenance of existing refuges.[532]  Finding sufficient funds for the purchase of remaining needed acreage would be left to the incoming Eisenhower administration.