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. 62 Beyondfilling his social calendar, Marshall became actively involved in reformcauses and civil liberties.He associated himself, often through financialTHE FOREST AND THE TREES 123support, with the American Association for Old Age Security, the ACLU, theJohns Hopkins Liberal Club, the American Birth Control League, and De-wey s League for Industrial Democracy.63 Marshall s earlier appreciationfor the plight of firefighters and timber workers was given free rein todevelop, and the political ferment of the late 1920s encouraged his supportfor civil liberties.At Johns Hopkins, Marshall s ever-expanding concern for social justiceengaged the main problem of the age: how to balance individual rights withthe common good in a capitalistic state.Family lessons in minority rightsand Forest Service contact with labor contributed to his growing disaffec-tion with the nation s unbounded capitalism.When the stock marketcrashed in October of 1929, Marshall s deepest fears about America s eco-nomic system were realized.Of the collapse, he wrote,The whole business makes me completely furious at the present economicorder which permits poor, hardworking people, who have small savingsas a result of a lifetime of hard work, to lose it all because some privateindividuals who have the privilege of handling their money and gamblingrecklessly with it, and making a splendid fortune for themselves haveultimately ended up by losing everything for the person with whosemoney they made their fortune.64Marshall s language is convoluted, but his argument is clear: America seconomy was dangerous to social health.This political position was muchinformed by his understanding of nature.Marshall s first lessons aboutfreedom and individual opportunity came from childhood hikes and ex-plorations in wild nature, and even as his outlook grew more sophisticated,the influence of nature remained critical to his politics.Here, his reading ofDewey and Ethical Culture background combined.Dewey identified theparadox of the American economy: concentrations of capital were oftenthe result of a commitment to preserve individual opportunity.Dewey ssolution was to keep individual freedoms separate from economic impera-tives.It was an effort to create a kind of utilitarian socialism with beingtyrannical.65 Marshall realized that reaching this goal was unlikely; asmuch as he supported the collective ownership of forests and naturalresources, he never abandoned his commitment to individual opportunity.He continually fell back on his experiences in nature to transform thepersonal liberation found only in nature into a political philosophy capableof success on a national stage.Marshall was particularly concerned about the role of forestry in thenational economic malaise.Millions of acres of denuded forests and thousandsof exploited timber workers stood as testament to the problems inherent inAmerican forestry, yet few foresters supported the necessary measures to124 ROBERT MARSHALL AND THE REDEFINITION OF PROGRESSreform their science.Marshall launched a crusade to illustrate how economicjustice and natural preservation were enmeshed in forestry science.In a 1929article for The Nation, Marshall portrayed American forestry as a field withouta moral anchor, but it wasn t always so.Early-twentieth-century foresterswere crusaders who  girded their armor on and set forth to battle withthe infidels who were rapidly destroying our forests. They denounced the private greed which was laying desolate millions of acres of the most magnif-icent woods on earth. In contrast, contemporary foresters stood silent ascooperation between federal and private foresters led to a  deforested Ameri-ca and a  timber famine.  Virgin forests, he warned, are about to  becomea pleasant myth of an unessential Eden. The solution to this crisis, hebelieved, was simple: end private forestry.In forceful terms, he recommendedthe federal purchase and management of America s forested resources.For-estry needed  government compulsion to resume its work on behalf of publicwelfare rather than for  immediate profits. 66The following year, 1930, Marshall wrote a more directed article on thesame theme for the Journal of Forestry [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]