Born With Fists Doubled:
Defending Outdoor America
Chapter 1 – Time to Call a Halt
One thing alone linked 54 men at a luncheon table in Chicago on a winter day in 1922. All were angry because of what was being done to mess up their fishing pleasure. Waters were polluted. Once perennial streams were going dry in summer. Or something else under man's control was going awry - and they were ready to listen to anything positive that somebody, even they, should do about it. Perhaps none for saw the gathering as the birth of a nationwide resources conservation organization that in the waning years of the century would still be standing guard against any and all who would further damage or destroy.
How that meeting came about is made uncertain by contradictory recollections, some not put on paper until years afterward. This one said the idea came from Dan Starkey, publisher of Outers-Recreation magazine, soon to be merged with Outdoor Life. Others had it that it was the brainchild of Will H. Dilg, A publicist and advertising salesman then writing articles for Starkey about fish and fishing, which were almost an obsession with him. Doubtless it was part happenstance, something that just grew out of conversations when angling friends chance to be together. Both men could have a part in it. However, that may be, it is certain that Dilg signed an invitation to meet at the Chicago Athletic Club at noon on January 14.
They'd be a “company of anglers,” and the object was to discuss forming a “Walton Club” in Chicago. All “fished as gentlemen”, which was the common bond. Initials at the bottom, and evidence in the scanty “Annals” that survivors of the 54 accumulated overtime, indicate the letter was drafted by L. J. Boughner, outdoor writer for the Chicago Daily News. They were a desperate assemblage. Several were prominent in sport casting circles. Four were outdoor writers. Among the rest were a fishing tackle manufacturer, several salesmen, a stage Carpenter, a jeweler, a commercial artist, a city official, a laundry owner, and two lawyers. One was a preacher.
After eating broiled Lake Superior whitefish, the group got down to business. A list of possible goals for an organization had been put at each place. The topics are still relevant in fishing matters. If formed, the club would seek to in calculate high ideals of angling, sportsmanship, and ethical conduct. Light fishing tackle should be used, no derricks and ropes, please. And the club could work in a number of ways to restore better fishing, such as:
· Have biological experiment stations established, to help assure that stocked fish did not die prematurely and be a waste.
· Campaign for more hatcheries, and see that fish larger than newly hatched fry, with better chances of survival, were stocked.
· Browse the public against the “ruthless ways of the fish hog. “
· Put the “general government” in charge of pollution abatement and control.
· Outlaw shooting or dynamiting of fish.
All of these have come about since then, as will be told as we go along. After lunch dill grows and talked about each topic. The text of his speech has been found in Cliff Netherton's History of Sport Casting (Library of Congress No. 83-72846) and it reads well. Some later question his effectiveness, but there is no doubt that the preacher, Dr. Preston Bradley of Chicago's independent peoples church, was stirred. He too spoke and fired the group to action. His tongue always seemed to be at his peak of eloquence when he spoke of fishing. The “Walton” Club? Not good enough. He had fished Walton's favorite Dove River in England, had preached at the Winchester Cathedral where Walton was buried. No, not just the Walton Club. Give it the full name of the patron Saint of anglers everywhere and call it the Izaak Walton club. Then go forth and smite the living daylights out of the polluters and the dynamiters and all of the other miscreants demanding and diminishing the peerless sport they embraced, and which had come to such dire straits. Angling was but a shadow of its once magnificent self but, God willing, it could be redeemed and made whole again.
When Bradley spoke there would be no turning back, and the preliminaries were quickly approved. Then came the bricks and mortar of constructing the organization. A steering committee was chosen, to meet in three days, and it met often thereafter. Officers were picked, with Dilg as the president, and an executive committee to take interim action. Soon the name became the Izaak Walton League of America. A constitution and bylaws were drafted, and the state granted a corporate charter. Dilg had no nine to five job; He lent office furniture from his home, set up shop in one room of a loop building, and took charge as the working executive. Collections taken up kept the office open and paid for leaflets and Flyers that, along with membership application blanks and such, Dilg was having printed. He got no salary but had an expense account.
At the start the fledgling organization took steps that made it unique in its field, and that would give it strength and influence beyond paid up membership numbers. Its not-for-profit charter let it organize subsidiary units at local and state level. These would try to cope with resources problems in their respective areas. The whole, then, constituted a parent organization to tackle broad regional and national conservation matters. The tri-level pattern doubtless was born of the local-state-federal government of the country itself, but until then no other resources group had used it.
Leading outdoor magazines - Field & Stream and Outdoor Life - offered to publicize the League, even to provide financial help. They already were so assisting the American Game Protective Association and saw a need for a virile fishery organization. Dilg was alert to the fact that in the League lay the markings of a national effort that not only could bring good to sport fisherman the prestige to those who let it - including himself.
Once broadly chartered, Dilg & Company would enlist whoever’d join the crusade for their beloved out-of-doors, wherever they might be. People could come in singly, or in existing groups wishing to be chartered as chapters. Whoever subscribed to the Creed could join. The organizational structure proved sound. Conservation intelligence could and did flow between local chapters and state divisions, and between these and the national office. However, the organization was not rigid, and no member needed to feel regimented. The three-tiered organization and two-way information flow showed its value from the start.
Even as Chicago Chapter No. 1 got underway, Dilg began reaching out. He took to the road, talking to audiences and growing numbers in geographical area. The one-room office soon was too small. Dilg’s promotional activity brought results in more than a dozen states in the first few months. Through stories published in newspapers and outdoor journals, the once all but unknown Dilg became celebrated as the leader of a group that promised much. The one-time press agent and freelance writer speaking invitations began arriving in bunches. And as he talked with people between speeches new and different resource problem surface to broaden the league's concerns and goals.
Bradley left churchly chores to travel for the League, always speaking, as Dilg wrote, “with a Clarion note in his matchless voice”. Preston Bradley did indeed have the gift of eloquence and used it freely on behalf of resource conservation goals until he was in his 80s. When Dr. Bradley dedicated a memorial to Will Dilg in 1952 near Winona, Minnesota, on a bluff overlooking the Winneshiek Bottoms of the Mississippi River, he said of Dr. Henry Van Dyke that “he wrote with eternity in his ink.” If it is hero worship to say that Bradley was Van Dyke's equal, so be it. I have no doubt Dilg was helped toward improvement of his own platform technique by the consummate craftsmanship as well as the flow of exquisitely chosen words that poured from Bradley in his conservation sermons, for sermons they were.
Physically, Dilg was not impressive. He was of medium height and his frame was so slight as to seem emaciated. He usually weighed about 140 pounds, but in 1922 was 20 pounds lighter. His face was angular, his nose and chin prominent, his eyes brown, his dark hair receded. He was in his 50s. His voice has not come down to us, but if it was not then hoarse it would soon be, either from strain of his incessant speech-making or an evolving throat cancer that would do him in five years later.
In those formative months - indeed, for his duration as a participant - Dilg performed with unrestrained zeal. At meetings where he spoke the climax always was to call to the masses out front to come forward, even as sinners were summoned down the sawdust trail by tent evangelist of old. All, of course, should have membership applications and money in their hands. The dues were a dollar a year, changed to $2 in January 1923. This included a year subscription to the Izaak Walton League Monthly that Dilg would start on its way in August 1922. But let one who was there on so many occasions tell it. Dr. Bradley was speaking at the 1947 convention. The subject was raising funds for a Dilg memorial.
“I was captivated, “said Bradley, “by his ardor by the enthusiasm, the frankness -sometimes a brutal frankness -of will Dilg… His belief in what he was saying and doing bordered on fanaticism.”
“He had a pocket full of applications on one side and he'd grab a handful of money and put in a pocket on the other side. He'd get back to the office and never know who had paid and who had not. He didn't have one single solitary faculty for efficiency. He despised and hated details. He had all the vices of his greatness ….”
After an evening of conservation evangelism, Dilg would go to a hotel, exhausted, to sleep until time to catch a train for the next day's performance. As likely as not he paid for the ticket with dollars thrust at him by joiners the evening before. At the office, the memberships staff despaired of making heads or tails of what Dilg reported to them. He didn't choose to be bothered with bookkeeping. And as fast as possible he'd be off to more meetings or to his typewriter to bang out another fiery call to all red blooded and patriotic Americans to join his army.
Letters and leaflets were fine, but could have only limited circulation an effect, so Dilg determined the League should have its own publication. It would not then be dependent on the generosity of others to spread its word. A magazine could serve purposes Dilg found ever more attractive as the 1922 winter gave way to spring. It could inform and inspire every member. Advertising revenue could make the League financially independent.
He put the proposition to the director's an in June they approved publication. In July they had second thoughts, but by then Dilg had moved fast. He solicited ads and got them. He approached some of the nation's best-known writers and found them willing to provide articles and editorials as donations to a worthy cause. By July Dilg was taken by an editorial submitted by Emerson ho author of an immensely popular novel, The Covered Wagon, and many outdoorsy writings. So even though the board told him there wasn't enough money to finance a publishing venture --in fact, had ordered him to cut costs to the bone - Dilg was confident the Chicago chapter would give enough for a start, and it did pledge close to 8000 dollars. The board's final decision was that Dilg could publish in the league's name but must himself assume financial responsibility.
That was fine with Dilg. Supreme confidence was becoming a part of his nature. He was convinced the revenue generated would soon make the League wealthy, able to carry out far flung conservation campaigns. As for himself he apparently had little to lose; nothing found indicates he owned property of consequence. Where money was concerned, he seemed to know more about spending than accumulating.
When Volume I, Number 1 of the Izaak Walton League Monthly appeared in August 1922, it did so with explosive force to Starkey and the publishers of the other outdoor magazines as well as its League in casual newsstand readers. The front cover was a shocker. Below the bold title block was Emerson Hough’s fireball editorial. There was nothing timid about it.
It was “TIME TO CALL A HALT”, cried the headline. If we didn't mend our ways, outdoor sport as Americans had known it would be a thing of the past. Of federal officialdom he wrote that there was “not left one honest, disinterested, unselfish agency devoted to the preservation of outdoor America”. The National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the biological survey, he said, had proved to be agencies of “destruction and not preservation”. With them, “always the record shows the Bureau first, America last”.
Of the “alleged protective leagues” that abounded, local rod and gun clubs, all had “personal gain or aggrandizement” as their “real basis”, and not “ten percent” of those who called themselves sportsmen “practiced the creed which hypocritically they profess”.
Modern transportation, the ubiquitous automobile, and improved roads, were letting thoughtless, careless, greedy people gut what remained of wilderness.
The other outdoor magazines, Hough wrote, were interested only in profit, cared nothing for the future.
Surely, he thundered, it was “time to call a halt”, and he pinned his hope that it could be done on “this week, knew little journal, openly established as a pulpit of heresy to the orthodox selfishness and commercialism” he saw on every side. If it should fail, then “all hope of outdoor America also has failed …forever”.
From that Journal and the League, he drew faith that the course of destruction could be reversed. But the Journal and those who published it as well as the membership behind it, must keep hands and motives clean. Only if they did so would he lend his influence to the cause freely, willingly, “after fifty years of love and labor in and for outdoor America”, with a “hope not yet faltering that the needed miracle even yet may come”. It was an eye popper, one calculated to jerk thinking outdoorsman upright and send them forthwith to join the battle. And the inside pages were little less astounding. There was the byline of Dr. James A. Henshall, author of the established Book of the Black Bass, over an article full of denunciation of industrial polluters, the failure of state legislatures to pass the right kinds of Game and Fish laws, “wasteful and improvident” commercial fishing practices on the Great Lakes, lack of screens at western irrigation ditches which led to thousands of fine fish flopping to their deaths in farmers’ fields, and more. Further on was the first of what would be a series of anti-pollution diatribes which he would write and edit until his death in 1925. Water pollution, Dr. Henshall thundered, was “The most important problem the I.W.L.A. will have to solve”.
And then there was Zane Grey, he of the rousing stories of a once untamed West, who'd “monthly right, edit, and direct the Sea Angling Department” of the new publication. Fishing, chiefly saltwater for big gamesters, had become a primary interest to Grey.
A double-page spread continued Robert H. Davis’s, “Rape of the River”, a biting poetic story of what happened to a stream he knew and loved.
The final stanza:
All the tears that one could shed were useless
In that hollowed glen
Now null and void.
the crystal stream had ceased to flow:
The valley lay stricken and athirst
The moss had hardened on the granite stone,
The birds had flown,
The trout had passed into the dust,
Their gleaming jewels turned to rust.
A vast and terrible silence lay brooding
And the pool where I was a boy
Once came upon a herd of deer drinking,
Was now putrid, and loathsome -and stinking.
Dilg would reprint, “Rape of the River”, in the magazine and as a pamphlet and he and local leaders would use it widely to try to shame legislators into corrective action with mixed results.
Dilg’s wife, Marguerite Ives, sent forth a “rallying call” to outdoor women to let men know they had no monopoly on devotion to field in stream. Ives likely was the first woman to join the League, but was to be followed by thousands in auxiliaries, in all-feminine chapters, and is equals in coed chapters; to this point women have held the most elective League offices.
Dilg spread his call to the colors over the mid-section of the Monthly's first number, and printed inserts of supporting statements from secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief Forester of the United States who would be a two term Pennsylvania governor.
The secret of the League certain success, dilled told the world, lay in the fact that it would consist of people “nationally organized”, and he stressed the importance of its triple tiered structure. On January 14 he wrote, there had been “planted a seed which is now being watered and tended by a nation”.
And, astoundingly, over time he brought in other noted authors and artists to donate their articles and illustrations to the Monthly. Popular writers many now only dimly remembered names to older members - included Dr. Henry Van Dyke, Gene Stratton-Porter, Irvine S. Cobb, Theodore Dreiser, MacKinlay Kantor, Harold Bell Wright, James Oliver Cutwood, Struthers Burt, Archibald Rutledge, Mary Roberts, Albert Bigelow Paine, Richard Le Gallienne, Stewart Edward White, Robert Page Lincoln, Robert W. Chambers, Ben Ames Williams, Charles Hanson Towne, Hal G. Evarts, Dr. David Starr Jordan, George Parker Holden, and Thornton W. Burgess. All were approached and agreed to give. Among the artists were Frank Stick, Everette E. Lowry (one of the founders), Iowa’s famed Jay N. (Ding) Darling, and John Held Jr. whose cartoons celebrated the “flapper” era. Some of the contributions illustrate this narrative.
That first issue planted other seeds, even as the Founding 54 had planted that of which Dilg wrote. The Hough editorial sowed some. Its language brought protest, though, from Dr. Van Dyke, who thought Hough’s zeal outstripped the “potency of his proof”. Dilg published the Van Dyke letter but retracted nothing. One issue later, Van Dyke pleaded editorially for building good will and using common sense, which he said should come ahead of new laws.
My view is the Hughes editorial had considerable influence in leading Dilg to his personal mountaintop to look about for what might be in prospect. The scope of the editorial was breathtaking. Hough had nodded respectively to angling and what was happening to it but showed clearly that this was but one part of a vastly enlarged arena which was no less than the totality of “outdoor America”. That encompassed nature's entire spectrum all her riches all the waters, fresh and salt, flowing or still, and their denizens; all the lands of earth what remained of wild places even than endangered by human invasion; natural beauty being destroyed needlessly in the holy name of “progress”.
As a leader of the army of conservationists being in listed, Dilg could change the course of history; his fame would be great, he'd be glorified wherever his word was heard or read. His name appeared ten times in the 36 pages of that first number, and equally as many in the next. The self-serving component in Dilg marched in step with the evangelist, so much so that at this late date it is at times difficult to determine which was which.