The conservatives on the US Supreme Court are considered by many to be ardent activists. And yet, truth be told, there has never been a more activist justice than William O. Douglas. Appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas was a committed conservationist, vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, best-selling author, would-be candidate for president, and, at 36-plus years, the longest-serving high court justice in American history. With all the current hand-wringing about the politicization of the judiciary, Douglas was Exhibit A in pushing his own political agenda—as a liberal, libertarian, and crusading environmentalist.
By 1954, Douglas had been on the Court for 15 years. A native of Minnesota and Washington State, he pursued his passion for nature—and for protecting the American outdoors. Between cases, he plotted campaigns to preserve Washington’s North Cascades, Alaska’s Arctic, Wyoming’s Wind River region, and Maine’s Allagash River watershed. His criticism of the government’s nuclear testing in the Nevada desert was unrelenting. From his chambers, he investigated the howling range of coyotes and the mysteries of the ruffed grouse. He liked to quip that he would have gladly traded the honor of being on the Court for that of having collected ferns for Lewis and Clark.
The justice sometimes wore his lug-soled hiking boots on the bench. On weekends, armed with a backpack, binoculars, and floppy hat, Douglas, compact and trim with fierce blue eyes, would explore the backcountry of Virginia or Maryland, sometimes with his longtime protégé Robert F. Kennedy as his trail mate.
In the ’50s, as the postwar car boom surged, an environmental crisis loomed: the vexing threat to air quality posed by leaded gas. Douglas was alarmed by the smog-shrouded dome that hung over cities like Los Angeles and New York. Decrying consumer consumption run amok, he blasted the Army for selling surplus jeeps in the arid West, which, when driven off-road on public lands, damaged soil, streams, plants, and habitats. He encouraged fellow proto-environmentalists to use lawsuits as a weapon against the Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and brutish extraction companies. Furious at the reckless wounding of the earth by philistines, he would help the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society—he was a member of both—acquire pro bono attorneys for their preservationist pursuits.
En route to the Court, Douglas would sometimes ask his chauffeur to drive along the Potomac so he could check for traces of manganese, a heavy metal used in industrial processes that can cause neurological damage to humans and wildlife. Richard Schwartz, a Yale law professor, recalled that his friend Douglas was distraught over the way the Department of Agriculture and the Corps of Engineers operated without accountability. Douglas carped that the Forest Service was a faceless organization full of “modern Ahabs” hungry for money and power as the agency opened wild areas to roads, mineral extraction, and timber cutting. “I’m ready to bend the law,” he said, “in favor of the environment and against the corporations.”
Spending long stretches in the North Cascades and fly-fishing in Oregon brought equilibrium to Douglas’s pressured life. And when his close friend in the Senate John F. Kennedy had a question about nesting plovers or pollution abatement, he looked to Douglas, who often teased, “The trouble is, Jack, that you’ve never slept on the ground.” Unafraid of conflict-of-interest charges, Douglas turned his Supreme Court office into a way station for elite conservation groups.
Douglas had grown incensed about a proposed Virginia-Maryland motorway along the bed of the abandoned Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. He charged that a paved road would create abominable traffic and ruin the towpath. The noise, he fumed, would destroy the tranquility of a hike along the old canal, a project first championed by George Washington. The National Park Service was in favor of the parkway but wanted to ban commercial activity along the route. Douglas envisioned a meandering national parkland at the back door of the nation’s capital.
The opening salvo of the battle over the C&O Canal began in January 1954 with a Washington Post editorial by associate editor Merlo Pusey supporting the motorway. Douglas wrote the Post that a multiple-lane road would destroy the scenic Potomac Valley; the keynotes of the wood thrush would be drowned out by a cacophony of roaring wheels and blaring horns. Soon, an anti-construction sign was posted by preservationists at Shepherdstown, West Virginia: “Justice Douglas, keep to the right. Booby traps to the left are for the Post editors.”
Douglas decided to throw down a gauntlet. He challenged the Post editorial board to hike the towpath with him, to experience firsthand the beauty of Great Falls and Mather Gorge, which the parkway would ostensibly destroy. “One who walked the canal its full length,” Douglas wrote, “would get to know muskrats, badgers, and fox…. The whistling wings of ducks would make silence have new values for him…. He could never acquire that understanding going 60, or even 25, miles an hour.”
To their credit, Robert Estabrook, the Post’s editorial page editor, and his associate editor Pusey accepted the challenge to make the eight-day, 184-mile hike. On March 20, a party of 37 joined the justice. Among their number was Sigurd Olson, the director of the National Parks Association and a legendary advocate of the outdoors who had a degree in a new field: ecology. Also on hand was Olaus Murie of the Wilderness Society. A renowned conservationist, Murie would regularly correspond with Douglas about an initiative he had undertaken to stop hydroelectric dams.
Reporters from Time, Life, and CBS Radio followed the delegation along the Potomac. The Washington Post covered the outing daily. The nightly news ran favorable segments. The Potomac Appalachian Trail Club of Washington supplied the team with food. Enjoying the blush of buds blooming in late winter, the group followed Douglas’s pace of 112 steps per minute, marching 22 miles the first day. The New York Times dubbed them the “blister brigade.”
Driving downpours and frigid wind didn’t hamper the nature lovers, who encouraged gaggles of Boy Scouts, fishermen, and nearby equestrians to join their cause. Douglas’s merry band encountered raccoons, woodchucks, and hawks circling for prey. Otter prints were discovered along the riverbank. One evening, some of the hikers decided to play a joke on Murie, considered the country’s expert on animal tracks. Clandestinely, a Mexican burro was brought to the trail to leave telltale hoofprints. Early the following morning, Murie, upon seeing the tracks, was taken aback. Then, to the stunned group, he nailed it, saying, “If it weren’t for the fact that there aren’t any for hundreds of miles, I’d say it was a Mexican burro.”
Near journey’s end, Estabrook and Pusey quit the march, exhausted. But Douglas, despite a rending cough, forged onward with eight others in scudding rain. Once back in Georgetown, his “blister brigade” told a welcome-home party of 50,000 about eating buffalo steak and sleeping in frost-caked tents.
Editors Estabrook and Pusey had a change of heart. The Post retracted its editorial, suggesting that parts of the canal should be saved as a federal park. Soon, the Park Service withdrew its support as well. Douglas’s odyssey had helped derail the motorway, and in the months to follow, his widely publicized style of direct action was adopted in local battles around the country. Protest hikes were organized. Anti-dam rallies were held. Citizens and politicians were on the march.
Just days before leaving office in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who quietly admired Douglas’s feistiness, surprised conservationists by designating the C&O Canal a national monument, a stepping stone to its becoming a National Historical Park. And in 1975, Douglas retired from the bench at age 77, having written 30 books on travel and the environment, all published while he generated more opinions and dissents than any other justice in the history of the Court.
With hardly a murmur of criticism in the national press, Douglas’s sustained policy activism outside his chambers is without precedent. By “hiking and hollering,” as he put it, his “Gandhian protest”—and other demonstrations that followed—had helped establish greenbelts, nature preserves, and open spaces across the land. This latter-day Gandhi, of course, wore not a white dhoti and shawl; he preferred black robes—and hiking boots.
Excerpted from SILENT SPRING REVOLUTION: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley, to be published on November 15, 2022, by HarperCollins. Copyright © 2022 by Douglas Brinkley.
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