In “This America of Ours,” public lands and McCarthyism take center stage
What do public lands, communism, cooking, Las Vegas, Boston and the longest-running magazine column in history have in common? They’re all in Nate Schewber’s 2022 biography of Bernard and Avis DeVoto, who arguably did as much for conservation as John Muir and Aldo Leopold.
Schweber packs all of the above into “This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Fight to Save the Wild,” which Terry Tempest Williams, author of “Refuge,” called “deeply subversive and patriotic,” and Michael Punke, who wrote “The Revenant,” called a “razor’s-edge drama about a critical fight to preserve … the wild places that define our nation’s soul.”
Think of it as part love story, part ecological thriller with some film noir suspense and a heavy dose of special interest groups influencing politicians thrown in. It ranges from cattle ranches in Utah to casinos in Las Vegas to the halls of Congress and the publishing world of New York City, where in 1935 Bernard DeVoto began writing the Easy Chair column in Harper’s Magazine.
And the reason it’s timely now is because it offers historical perspective into the politics of American exceptionalism and its strange bedfellow (in this case), public lands.
So we asked Schweber a few questions we thought he might have insight into after researching and writing his epic biography. And his answers, like his book, offer a timely perspective.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Colorado Sun: What’s the elevator pitch for “This America of Ours”?
Nate Schweber: It’s about an incredible literary conservationist couple who waged a couple of crucial environmental battles to stop hundreds of millions of America’s public lands from being privatized and sold off in the 1940s. That evolved in the 1950s into a fight to keep dams out of national parks, starting with the proposed Echo Park Dam that was going to be constructed on the Green River in what’s now Dinosaur National Monument. The DeVotos were targeted for this work by Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, the chief demagogue of that era. But in their crusade to fight for public lands, they also became friends with a then-unknown, aspiring cookbook author named Julia Child. So it’s the untold true story about how Bernard and Avis DeVoto teamed up with their new friend Julia Child to fight McCarthy to save America’s national parks.
Sun: That’s absurd.
Schweber: True story.
Sun: Why were you drawn to this topic?
Schweber: I was born in Missoula, Montana, and moved to New York City in 2001. I’m a freelance journalist, I’m interested in conservation and national parks, and when I discovered Bernard DeVoto, I felt like I’d been underwater and had surfaced and was able to take a breath of air. It was the way he was able to explain conservation and public lands and put it in the context of history. I mean, I’m probably not being too hyperbolic by saying it was really life changing for me. Stanford University has a great Bernard DeVoto archive. But the Avis DeVoto archive is with the Julia Child papers at Harvard and that’s what really hooked me.
Sun: Lucky you.
Schweber: Tell me about it.
Sun: A lot was already written about Bernard before you dove in, including a biography by Wallace Stegner, the dean of Western writers. How dare you?
Schweber: Ha-ha. That wasn’t lost on me. I’m not insane. Stegner’s book was about DeVoto’s life and I was most interested in his conservation work. The other thing that fascinated me was his relationship to Avis and no one had written about her. She struck me as so forceful, witty, loyal, passionate and fun. She ended up being the center of gravity for the whole book.
Sun: Can we talk about the prologue? It’s not what I might have expected in a book about public lands. It involves a young woman trying to mail a packet of spices to Avis and it being intercepted by the FBI. I thought starting there was brilliant, but can you walk us through your why?
Schweber: Well, the book deals with conservation and the Red Scare. But as we’ve noted, it’s also about Avis and her relationship with cooking. In 1949 the FBI started going to the DeVotos’ house because they suspected Bernard of (communist activity). And there was this white powder scheme the FBI was aware of, so when they saw these cooking spices going to the DeVotos’ address, they intercepted the envelope they were in. I learned about it in a piece a New York Times writer did that was in the archives.
Sun: Your book also kind of flips the tired narrative of white guy comes West, experiences grandeur and is called to save it on its head.
Schweber: Yeah. Having an amazing woman as one of the protagonists I thought was cool and interesting and unique. And then Bernard, he’s not so much coming into the West and having a revelation; he’s from the West (Ogden, Utah).
Sun: You’ve said jokingly that it would have been nice if Barack Obama, or Reese Witherspoon, or Jenna Bush had promoted your book. And having read it, I honestly wonder, what the (expletive), Jenna, Reese and Barack?
Schweber: I can’t speak for them. But, you know, both Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner had produced unmatched bodies of work by the end of their lives — both had won Pulitzer Prizes! Yet I think maybe The New York Times didn’t even review “Angle of Repose” when it came out, and I have to speculate that the East still misunderstands the West. I think to the East, sometimes the West is still kind of a cowboy story. So maybe it’s not that big of a surprise that they wouldn’t understand a book like mine, either.
Sun: Did you learn anything from your research that you’re applying to what’s going on now with public lands?
Schweber: We have all of these wonderful environmental groups right now, but when DeVoto was fighting he was the lone journalist in the U.S. with a national platform caring about public lands. But by being informed and curious and hypervigilant, he was able to find out this terrible threat and bring it to national attention. So the lesson from that is just, stay informed and be vigilant. If Bernard could mobilize enough people to stop the creation of Echo Dam, we can mobilize enough people to protect our public lands.