To kill President Obama's health care reform plan, opponents have resorted to calling it "socialist." Some have even criticized his speech to schoolkids, urging them to stay in school and study, as "socialist."
To progressives, this line of attack might seem silly, or even absurd, but the truth is that this calumny has a long disreputable history. In the U.S. of A. Evidently it's more effective politically to attack opponents as socialist, regardless of the facts, than it is to thoughtfully consider the issues.
Once, ironically, this form of demonizing helped preserve the great California sequoias.
It's an interesting story.
In the 1880s, loggers were freely able to take enormous, ancient trees from the great groves in the Southern Sierra, despite the best efforts of the likes of conservationist John Muir, newspaper editor George Stewart, and scientist Gustav Eisen. The Western Mono Indians, to whom the sequoia was sacred, also begged lumberman to spare the colossal "wawona," warning that they would be cursed by bad luck, but the lumberman ignored them, using dynamite to blast the trees when they could not cut them down.
As Verna Johnston writes in her excellent book Sierra Nevada: A Naturalist's Companion:
It was probably the Kaweah Cooperative Colony, a group of about fifty-five socialists who set up a utopia near the Giant Forest in 1885-1886. that ignited the fuse of events leading to federal action on the southern big trees. The colonists, some half of them from San Francisco, planned an economy based on timber sales. After applying for quarter-sections of land in the area surrounding the Giant Forest, they built an eighteen-mile road into their timber stands. They renamed the largest local sequoia (General Sherman) the Karl Marx tree and other big trees for their various heroes. In the office of the Visalia Weekly Delta, thirty miles away, [newspapermen] George W. Stewart and Frank Walker shifted into high gear to get the trees into a national park. Said Stewart later: "We wrote letters to every person in the United States, in and out of Congress, whom we knew to be in favor of forest conservation and to every magazine and newspaper we knew to favor the idea. Their name was not legion in those days. The response, with few exceptions, was cordial."
The movement to save the big trees spread across the country. Washington was listening. In 1890, in two bills, Congress created the Sequoia National Park to perserve thirty-two groves of big trees and General Grant National Park to save the General Grant Grove…The Giant Forest became a part of the park, along with extensive high-Sierran wilderness. A year later hte Giant FGorest's socialist colony crumbled in dissension.
So heaping calumny on the socialists was actually a good thing?
According to the well-known historian Carey McWilliams, the truth is that the socialists were a convenient scapegoat, when in fact conventional lumbermen with no ideals but plenty of saws, steam engines, and dynamite were the real tree killers. McWilliams writes in Factories in the Fields that the Kaweah socialists had no intention of destroying the forests or the sequoias, and he quotes a U.S. Commissioner who was sent out from Washington to investigate the claim in 1891:
"The purpose of these [Kaweah] colonists," he wrote, "is of a lawful and laudatory nature; and that instead of damaging the lands or destroying the giant trees thereon, they have expended about $100,000 in improving the lands and adding to their value, and have guarded and protected the giant trees for over five years, saving them from damage and forest fires on many occasions."
Nonetheless the law was passed in Congress creating Sequoia National Park. The Kaweah settlers evicted, even from their holdings on private land, in one case by the U.S. Cavalry. But although they were unfairly targeted, the passage of the law ultimately did protect the giant trees from the more conventional and dangerous loggers.
It's an ill wind that blows no good, they say; well, here's some of the good left behind by this particular ill wind in American history…Crescent Meadow, in the Southern Sierra, via Jerry Ting.
Kit Stolz 