Mariner Books
Hardcover
Sale price $23.19
Growing up in Salt Lake City, I remember my Dad coming home from work talking about strange conspiracies about cattlemen and the land. I never paid much attention, but after reading This America of Ours, I can see that maybe my Dad was right. No other book that I have read has painted a more vivid picture of our country in the ’30s through the ’50s.
Reading this book will change the way you see how our country has been plundered and the ways unscrupulous politicians and land grabbers have threatened our country’s most fundamental ideals. It’s the story of a unique couple that, though opposites in many ways, stuck to each through thick and thin: Bernard and Avis DeVoto.
Bernard was born in Ogden; his father was a land title abstractor for the Union Pacific Railroad, “a Byzantine puzzle on a rugged frontier rife with fraud.” Schweber writes that through this upbringing, “Bernard learned public lands law by apprenticing for his father, one of the few people he ever called ‘genius.’ With a stunning mind he grew from reciting nursery rhymes to Homer and by the time he was a teen he found solace up in the mountains above Ogden, sleeping alone and reading philosophy, poems, history, religion and American History.” These activities “planted the seeds of his life’s focus—to explain America.”
Helen Avis MacVicar grew up around Houghton, Michigan on the heavily forested Keweenaw Peninsula by the icy waters of Lake Superior. She was opinionated and very observant from the time she was very young. She was fascinated by the people around Houghton and connected to them through her favorite passion, cooking. She wrote in a teenage essay “about her favorite youthful indulgences: ‘Next in order to sleep in my category of the delights of life, comes food, food!’”
They met while Bernard was teaching at Northwestern and fell deeply in love. They married and each visited the country where they grew up and found both lands devastated by the plunder of lumbering, mining and cattle overgrazing. They made their home in Massachusetts where Bernard taught at Harvard and wrote. He tried his hand at fiction, but soon realized that nonfiction was what he was best at.
As the country grew up through the thirties, the effects of the plundering of the land came into stark reality as the winds blew the soil into great dust storms and as water flooded down canyons unchecked. It was also during this time that other winds were blowing, weakening and replacing the agencies put in place to protect our lands and resources. Corrupt politicians seeking wealth and fame let those who supported them be heard and silenced those who opposed them.
A leading figure in the land grab was Pat McCarran, Senator from Nevada. He worked the political and private channels to his favor and was a powerful force on the Appropriations Committee. He would give money to self-serving interests and take funds from the agencies who opposed him.
Bernard DeVoto saw what was happening to the country, and, by traveling through the country and getting personal views from those being effected, used his pen to make public what was passing in secret. This not only won him friends and support, but angered those whose secrets were revealed.
So much of what I didn’t know about DeVoto is skillfully brought to light by Nate Schweber’s research and excellent prose. This is an engaging and revealing story that has so much to offer us in the times we are living. Through his writing, Bernard DeVoto helped keep the conservation movement going, stopping some of the projects that would have even weakened out National Parks.
Schweber adds human interest to his narrative by highlighting the harsh effects of the opposition Bernard faced and the loving support and help he got from Avis, who edited his writing, answered his mail, and generally gave him direction. Her later life brought to the spotlight a dear friend, Julia Child, of Mastering the Art of French Cooking fame.
This is a book for readers interested in the conservation movement, the lives of writers, and the underside of our political system. Well-told and researched, it moves along at a fair pace and involves the reader with the personal lives of those involved.
