The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 012

Episode Date: June 25, 2015

Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella talks with guests Andrew Radzialowski, Janis Putelis, and environmental historian Randall Williams. Subjects discussed: how hunters have identified over the course of 50 years in relation to one another and to the non hunting public; historian Dan Flores; Plains Indians and bison herd equilibrium, or the lack thereof; changing perspectives of hunters and their guns; hide hunters and the burden of guilt for animal extermination; a roadkill recipe for hogs stuffed with whitetail deer from Steve's college years; William Temple Hornaday; the closing of the American frontier; whether the American West should be regarded as a place or a process; the historic emergence of anti-hunting groups; a different kind of group that Steve founded in high school; the semantics of the words conservationist and environmentalist; and the changing culture of wild game consumption from the mid 1940's to the present. Guest info: Randall Williams In May of 2015, Randall completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of Montana, where his graduate studies concentrated on Western U.S. and environmental history. His dissertation, "Green Voters, Gun Voters: Hunting and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States," explores the changing ways in which American sportsmen imagined, articulated, debated, and pursued their policy interests from the end of the World War II up until the mid-1990s. Among the various developments examined by the study are the rise of popular environmental concern, the emergence of organized anti-hunting activism, the eruption of the modern Second Amendment controversy, and the continued debate over public lands in the American West. Janis Putelis hunttoeat.com Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're recording in Seattle, Washington, not far from my house, in a rental house that the t-shirt magnate, Giannis Patelis, rented for a shoot.

Have you ever bought one of Giannis' t-shirts? I have not. That's Randall, our guest, Randall Williams. Williams. Williams. Admitting to having not bought one of Giannis' Hunt to Eat t-shirts. Andy? I'm interested in these t-shirts he's got for sale. I just made a sale for you, Giannis.

Thank you. That's my very old... Andy, how long have we been friends? Probably goes back to mid-90s, maybe. We've been friends almost half the time that I've been alive. Just about dead nuts half the time I've been alive. Andy, you were still becoming one, but you were the first chef I ever actually met. Besides a dude

who cooks fried food in a bar yeah yeah actually when we when we're training to be a chef when our paths crossed yeah i was just starting culinary school oh yeah that was probably 96 right in there where was that ferris state uh in grand rapids michigan So just down the road from Ferris. Yeah, I was at GV. I went to, like, I graduated from the third college that I enrolled in. But you were at the culinary arts program. Yeah, I was at Grand Valley for a little bit and then switched gears and ended up

at the culinary program right there in downtown Grand Rapids. That was a fun time. We did the first meal thing we ever did, besides cooking steelhead or something, was when we cooked, we had a pig with a roadkill deer. We did. And we sowed the, I believe we sowed the roadkill deer inside of a pig. Yeah.

And had a party. Big old party yeah wild game party big pig small deer or what no we were coming back me and my brother matt were coming back from fishing in the pm remember the pm from michigan we were coming back from fishing salmon must have been late summer coming back from fishing salmon on the pm guy in front of us hit a deer with his car he didn't want it we called the cops cops gave us no we never even got i i could i'm sure the statute of limitations is worn out by now did not get a permit for the deer drove the deer from baldwin down to grand rapids and hung it in a garage at a house we were renting and this was a full-on flop house.

I mean, none of the dudes that lived in that house were on that lease. Probably. Well, a funny side note about that story is me and Mark Schmidt were up in that same neck of the woods the same time you guys were, and we were coming home the day, the morning after that,

and saw that gut pile on the side of the road and made mention of it and then got all the way back to our house opened the garage door and there was that deer hanging and i think we put that together we pieced it together because you knew we were up there yeah um that's a great recipe to put a deer cut up in a pig and i think we sold it with bailing wire guys It was 20 years ago, though. Anyhow, that's not what we were talking about. So, Janice, tell us

of... Plug your t-shirts, Janie. Janice is the only compensation. Janice gets so little. So little out of this. Let's talk. Tell them about your t-shirts. No, this has really helped our t-shirt business.

And by the time you guys listen to this, we're going to have Texas t-shirts and Montana t-shirts. So Gianni makes t-shirts on to eat. And he had an original one that wasn't state specific. Then to Colorado, because that's his roots are in Colorado. Then now you're doing Texas. It's got a big fence on it. It's got an eight-foot fence and a corn feeder.

No, I'm joking. It's made to look like the Texas flag, Texas license plate. He's coming out with Montana, doing alaska we've been trying to talk him into doing jersey she hasn't gotten around to yet so yeah hunty.com go buy one of yanni's t-shirts the reason we're here to talk though randall williams now when i was in, after regular college, I went to graduate school. When I was in graduate school, I took a class with an environmental historian by the name of Dan Flores. And if you ever want to read great history stuff, go check out Dan's books.

But Dan writes a lot of, I mean, some of his most, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's one of the most cited. Like when an academic does a paper one way to gauge like writes an article they'll call it a paper right and they'll publish it a way to gauge a paper's success is how many times it's cited right right and his thing bison ecology bison diplomacy yeah that's cited and anthologized and it's just like uh that has to be like a hugely successful paper, right? Yeah, no, that's from the Journal of American History, which is a really prestigious journal.

And I think that was from 94 maybe. And it's been reproduced in countless anthologies. You see it everywhere. Yeah, yeah. And in it, Dan Flores argues quite beautifully that the Plains Indians had never reached equilibrium with the bison herds and that had correct me if i'm wrong i'm sure you know this way better than i do randall

and he argues had you just introduced the firearm and the horse you'd'd have eventually had the same outcome. Yeah, I mean, the larger argument is essentially that there are so many variables that go into determining what the bison population on the plains would be that you can't simply blame this mass extinction on market hunters at the end of the 19th century because that's always been what most historians have done, is to blame white market hunters, the industrial hide hunt for the extinction of, or the near extinction of the bison. And so Dan is arguing that there are larger climactic patterns, periods of drought on the plains that, you know, affect bison populations. Native hunters, they had, you know, their longstanding traditions and practices changed wholesale with the introduction of the horse and the firearm. And the opening of markets, probably.

Yeah, the opening of markets. And Indians participated in the market hunting as well um and so essentially what his article does is it takes this story that had really been rendered into something of morality play um and and makes it uh much more complex and i think ultimately much more interesting yeah um so yeah that's that's sort of the gist of the bison piece yeah i don't want to dwell on that. I'm just getting to Dan. I met you through Dan. Sure. But the reason, like I wrote about that animal, not from an academic standpoint, but more from a popular standpoint. But I became, like I tried to become versed in these various arguments. I think that a thing about like why the hide hunter thing was so dramatic is it was so complete and final

that even though those guys were coming in and whittling away at what was maybe just a fraction of the animals, the fashionable number for bison in the U.S., the fashionable number, buffalo bison is the same damn thing, the fashionable number used to be like 60 million and that came from some really strange calculations by a guy named ernest seaton right he like read about a big herd that colonel dodge who's who dodge is gave the name dot to dodge city colonel dodge was like i saw a big ass herd of buffalo it took this many days to pass it was this many miles wide so seaton went and said wow there must have been x number in that herd he's like there must have been i don't know whatever million animals in that herd and they lived here and so there's probably like six or seven or eight other areas that are that big and so each of those

areas has that many. And that became how you always heard that there were 60 million of these animals at the time of European colonization. Now the fashionable figure is you see often, maybe it's changed because it's been a few years since I've been in the game. The fashionable figure is 28 to 32 million, you know, but the thing that's weird about it is you get where, by the time the hide hunters, by the time Euro-American hide hunters came on the scene

and were shooting them to put on rail cars, to send the hides on rail cars to the east to have them tanned, there were way fewer. Yeah, and it was already a vulnerable population. Yeah, because by the end of the Civil War that number again this is debatable but but a reasonable guess or a reasonable theory would be that by the end of the civil war you had maybe 15 million maybe 10 million so they've already been whacked down by a half two-thirds and you wound up having these pretty big substantial herds left a couple you know you'd

have these eight herds of like a couple million a million and so to our eyes today it would seem like unfathomable amounts of animals in a herd and the hide hunters would roll in and they would kill thousands you know so it'd be like right now we don't have nearly as many uh take your pick i don't name something name an equivalent we don't have nearly as many what as we did at the time of european contact bighorn sheep okay you so if a bunch of guys went out right now and made did their best to shoot every bighorn sheep, and they shot them pretty much all, would you later say, you know what happened to the bighorn sheep?

These one assholes in 2015 shot them all. Then someone else would be like, oh no, because they were way down from all these other factors that have been playing out for the last 200 years. It wasn't really that much of a sin because they're they were already missing from 90 of their range from the from 1900 when these dudes in 2015 went and shot the rest does that make the sin less or more so the high owners shot a lot of shit maybe they didn't shoot 32 million but they mopped up what was left of like some big herds that sure were a fraction of the original but it's still kind of like catastrophic. Yeah. And Dan's article basically highlights a whole host of factors that sort of set the stage

for hide hunters to come in and just deliver the death blow. Yeah. Right. And so that's, I think it was a pretty, pretty significant intervention and sort of a controversial one too because it it disrupts um you know a lot of people like to make the past into simple morality plays and the bison was always this example of uh just naked exploitation greed native americans used every part of the animal right never wasted anything right complete sanctimon you know, and then evil guys came in to starve the Indians. Yeah, and to...

Which is just, I'm sorry, it's just not true. Right, and to acknowledge all these other factors that led to this catastrophe isn't to absolve hide hunters of any blame, right? It's not to sort of wipe the slate. They had no idea, dude. They were uneducated guys. They were uneducated guys who were 19 20 years old yeah and even though i would have been a hide hunter right like there's no way just the same way like when i was in my early 20s

i moved out to montana because i wanted to hunt and fish remove any aspect of of any any uh idea about history any idea about education, and I just grew up on a farm in Michigan with no phone, no internet, no nothing, turned 20 years old, you can make money hunting buffalo, you go out and hunt buffalo, you have no idea what you're engaged in. Right. You might get it on some like, it wasn't like an evil thing.

This is the last thing I'm going to say about it, but later Hornaday, who collected specimens for the Smithsonian, later he went to Miles City trying to find, he wanted to shoot a couple buffalo for the Smithsonian. They knew they were going to be gone. No, the Museum of Natural History, sorry. I can't remember which one it was. Anyways, they wanted some collections. They wanted some pristine mounts before the animals were completely gone.

He went out to Miles City. It was in the late 1880s, I think. And he commented that in Miles City, the ranchers around there mostly came to that area because they were hide hunters. And they stuck around because they were convinced after they'd shot them all that there must be more somewhere

and they're just going to hang tight till they show up. And then a few years went by and they all got into cattle ranching. They didn't even know what they had done. There was rumors about a bunch in Canada. Millions would come from Canada. They weren't like, we got them all. Good job, boys. Right.

Yeah, I mean, it's just the scale that that destruction is sort of unimaginable to us today but and so how could we even expect any of these guys running around uh to have any idea what they're doing i bet you illiteracy illiteracy and i'm not saying like it's a slam illiteracy was probably rampant among the hide. And there was probably very little education. Among the hide hunters. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS

with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three

months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. They were, if you factor in where those guys are mostly from and where they wound up and you do some kind of calculation in your head about communication and stuff it would be like if you sent kids from here from current day rural america to kazakhstan and told them that shoot that thing and we will pay you to shoot it.

Yeah. I mean, and then to them be like, Oh dude, you didn't realize that the populations in Kazakhstan, it's like, it would mean nothing to them. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean the, and so it was a lucrative business, you know, you could make a lot of money just running around, rolling over bison, skinning them out, hire skinners. Three, four, five bucks a piece.

Yeah, throw them on a train. And then even still, it's not as if they're just doing this in a vacuum. The leather from these hides are going onto factory belts in Chicago and New York. It's fueling the industrial revolution to some degree. So yeah, I mean, they're cogs in a much larger process. And to place some sort of burden of guilt on them is, I don't know, it's not a very intellectually serious exercise. They were filthy.

They were filthy. They were filthy. No, but I only bring up the historian Dan Flores because Dan Flores contacted me and said that I should speak to you about your dissertation, which I'm going to have you explain. But first, explain for the listeners, what is a dissertation you just

finished your phd i did yeah i just my brother has one of those he says he says he has two and one of them stands for pretty huge uh-huh um fill in the blank but okay explain what a dissertation is like like, how that whole thing plays out. Yeah, so the dissertation is the final step on the road to a doctoral degree. And you did your doctoral work under Dan Flores. Yeah, so Dan was my doctoral advisor, and I studied history at the University of Montana, environmental history. Explain that real quick. Environmental history? Yeah, it's like in a nutshell.

Yeah, environmental historians are interested in questions pertaining to how humans in the past have interacted with the environment and how human behavior has shaped the environment. And also, in turn, how the environment has shaped human behavior. And so it's a pretty, it's a relatively recent subfield, and it really came about in the 70s. Dan was one of the, I mean, there have always been intellectuals concerned with these questions, but in terms of sort of a professional subfield within history, environmental history came about really in the 70s as environmental concern became a a large part

of american life and some heavy hitters in the field would be like cronin right cronin yeah cronin is a he's got a couple classic works um who's the guy that did the thing about the death of the frontier um like who wrote the thing declaring the frontier was dead in whatever year turner turner yeah but turner wasn't an environmental historian no no turner turner Um, like who wrote the thing declaring the frontier was dead in whatever year? Turner. Turner. Yeah. But Turner wasn't an environmental historian. No, no. Turner, Turner was a Western historian.

Frederick Jackson. Frederick Jackson Turner. Yeah. Yeah. Turner had this idea that he would look at the census data, right? Right. And one day found out that on the census report, things were in the U.S. were so lowly or so unpopulated that they would be called the

frontier and then one day a census came in and they realized there is no frontier anymore right and he had this and then was it cronin that then kind of interpreted that later well yeah i mean almost all of western history it said is is sort of produced in conversation with turner um is that right yeah i mean history of the american west history of the american west and and there's this long-standing debate about whether the west is a process or a place um and so turner is really arguing that the western the west is a process right it's a process of frontier settlement it's a process of sort of rendering wilderness into civilization. And that's sort of Turner's thesis.

And he's writing at the turn of the 20th century. And he's looking at this census data and saying, well, once we as Americans run out of trees to cut down or sort of bison to shoot, right? Native peoples to fight. What effect is that going to have on the American people? Because he is really attributing a lot of the distinctive characteristics

of American civilization to this process of West of Westering or of, of sort of frontier settlement. And so he's tracing, you know, the, the Democrat, the origins of Americans of America's democratic political culture to all of this available, quote unquote, available land. Right. Yeah. And so Western historians of the American West or Western historians sort of interchangeable there throughout the 20th century have been trying to write because Turner was so influential. Western historians have been wrestling with this question of is the West a process? Is it a place? I think environmental historians would argue that the West is a place and that it's defined by aridity. There are certain key characteristics, environmental characteristics, and also characteristics related to its political organization.

The federal government is really inescapable in the West, whereas in the East, a lot of issues of governance are resolved at a municipal or a state level. Whereas you look at land ownership rates in the West. You can live in a state that's 79%, 80% federally owned land. Yeah, so this is, not to get into the minutiae of the historiography in Western history, but basically there's this longstanding debate, place, process. How do we define the West? If you say that you're interested in the American West and that's what you study how do you define that yeah um is alaska part of the west is hawaii part of the west yes no yeah am i right well it's it's you know this is this is what academics do

is you just come up with new and inventive questions to all these i already answered it yes no well yeah um i just got back from hawaii yeah i don't want to get into that but i'd love to hear someone tell me what would tell me like the pros and cons of calling it the west so now you did your dissertation which is like your final the final like it's it's the final i want to take i want to go way back for people who have who haven't dabbled around in college that much sure like when you go to college you go go to regular college, right? You get your four years. Then you probably did some kind of graduate degree, which took you two or three years.

Well, I went straight from, so I did my undergraduate degree in Chicago. And then I came out to the University of Montana. I was admitted directly into the doctoral program. And how many years did that take you? Five years. And how many years did you spend working on what would become your dissertation the whole time? The whole time, yeah. I sort of, it began, I mean, it's evolved over time, but it began in that first semester of graduate school.

So it's like it turned into a five-year project. Yeah, essentially. So I did two years of coursework, seminars, this and that. And then the next step is your comprehensive exam. So you come up with a list of the essential books in a number of fields. So I did four fields. And each of those lists is about 100 books.

So you read, I read about 400 books and sit down and have a conversation with your advisors. Or you'll hear the call. You read 400 books? More or less, yeah. Skimmed quite a few of them. But read strategically. You got kids?

I don't. Man, that shit goes down the tube when you have kids, man. I used to read like, I don't even want to start talking about that. I love them. I love them. Yeah. But the first thing that goes is the ability to read books. Yeah. them yeah but the first thing that goes is the ability to read books yeah i mean that's that's uh there's not a whole lot of glamour to uh graduate school or uh you know graduate studies

in the humanities but the the sort of the undeniable luxury of it all is that you know people expect you to read a lot and uh if that's something that that you like doing which is what drawn what drew me to it um you're expected to read a lot and you have that time available so when i went to graduate school all we did was read man yeah yeah so uh that's all i did yeah um the amount of work you had to do for that especially i was in fine arts yeah like writing it's like basically basically it was like you could have summed it up by saying just go read for two years yeah and then if you can if you you've got time, write something. Yeah, no, so that's what, yeah, I mean, I did reading. The first two years are reading seminars and writing seminars.

So in a reading seminar, you might read 10 books a term. And then in a writing seminar, you're expected to produce an article-length paper. And then after two years of that, you're sort of sent off to prepare for your exams and essentially master these fields. And then once you pass your exams, then you move on to the dissertation phase where you actually write. And what a dissertation is, is it's a book-length piece of writing that is expected or must make an original contribution to the literature. So you have to either engage with a new body of sources or engage with new questions

or apply a new line of thinking to an old question, something along those lines. So you have to do something original. And basically it's sort of, can you, do you have the talent do you have the requisite knowledge to be a practicing historian and so it's a it's a process of professionalization essentially now because there's probably some dudes sitting out there feeling like they tuned into the wrong thing because they're trying to listen to a haunted fishing podcast reveal for me

what's the name of your dissertation so the name of my dissertation is green voters gun voters hunting and politics in modern america oh man that's rich um that's what i want to talk about but before we get into that uh give me a quick if you had to do what's your hunting and fishing background? My hunting and fishing background. I grew up in outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, uh, grew up fishing and a group of friends and I in high school decided we want to get into hunting. And, uh, none of our, none of our dads hunted. Well, one of, one of our friends, they just didn't grow up in a hunting family. So sort of so you're like a self-taught guy essentially I mean we we read a lot of magazines we watched a lot of shows one of my buddies my

best friend uh his dad did hunt but he you know his dad didn't take us all out hunting right so we sort of figured it out on our own and it's you, you know, it's a different ball game outside of Cincinnati because you're sort of setting up a tree. We got into whitetail hunting. So it's find a game trail, set up a tree stand, sit, wait, sit, wait. You guys didn't throw down a sack of carrots or anything? No, we couldn't in Ohio.

Oh, really? But yeah, no. So we got into it in high school. And we, you know, growing up, we lived by the little Miami River and would run around setting trot lines and fishing all summer. And that was our, I mean, that was our big thing. And so we're thinking, yeah, you know, we should become hunters.

And so we, so that's, I mean, that sort of led me to the project in some respects is these, what my source base for this project is pretty much just field and stream outdoor life uh local hunting and fishing columns um and and so that's that's sort of how I was introduced to the sport primarily um and we did a lot of figuring out on our own but um these magazines have always been sort of a source of fascination for me and also coming from a non-hunting family um you know in some respects you feel like an observer right um and so so anyway that's that's sort of my background and now I'm out in Montana and uh I've the past I just finished the doctorate but uh past six years you know I was out I was in Alaska prior to going to Montana and so I was split my time between guiding fishing in Alaska prior to going to Montana. So I split my time between guiding, fishing in Alaska in the summer,

and then run back to Montana for the academic calendar. So it's been a pretty good life so far. Where were you guiding up there? South Central Alaska, about 90, 100 miles northwest of Anchorage, an area called Lake Creek. Doing it for what? Salmon and trout. And it's just people come out out do fly out trips for the week

or for the day you're floating uh out of lodge so we're just running jet sleds around and good times nice yeah all right so break break down break down your research like how what'd you look at so i look primarily at um like i said, Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, nationally circulated hunting magazines. Fur Fishing Game? I didn't do Fur Fishing Game. I know, I know, Fur Fishing Game. At some point, you have to put the blinders on and just say,

I think I've got what I need here. And you can always bring in- So the big venerables, though, like Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Sports Field. Sports Field, the big three, yeah. And I didn't do so much with Sports Field. But I also, what I'm looking at in the dissertation is hunting's transforming or evolving or changing public culture from the end of World War II up until about the 1990s. And so I looked for any place where hunters are sort of publicly celebrating or articulating, rationalizing, explaining what they do, what it means to them, how they see themselves as hunters, how they identify and understand themselves and what they're doing.

And also where they sort of butt up against the non-hunting public and how they define themselves in relation to non-hunters anti-hunters etc and so so focusing on the friction not internal friction but the friction between the friction or lubrication or whatever yeah between people who hunt and people who don't or like the broader culture yeah not like conflict within the hunting world about where do we feel what how do we feel about no and i do look at i do look at that as well um i look at you know how you know you see it you know you see it in today's you know letters to the editor this and that you know somebody says we as sportsmen should do this we as sportsmen should uh be on this page yeah um and and there is conflict within these ranks.

So what I'm looking at is how hunters have identified over the course of about 50 years, how they've identified in relation to one another and in relation to the non-hunting public. And it's sort of a mutually constitutive process in that they're not in a vacuum. They're, they're defining themselves in relation to a changing world around them. And they're, but, but they're not just sort of blank slates either. Right. If that makes sense.

So some of the, some of the changing public culture comes from within and some of it is in, in response to outside forces as well so tell me like you guys hate generalizations and stuff like that i know tell me something like tell me something that was tell me something that would surprise me i found out right what what in the end want to be like what's the what right well so there there there are five chapters to the thing. There are five chapters in an epilogue. And they all sort of track a different story throughout about a 50-year span.

So it's not written chronologically. I got you. And what might interest you the most, one of the chapters is- No, right now what interests me the most is what are the five chapters oh so the first one so the first chapter looks at um hunters and environmental politics from about 1945 to the mid-1970s and what i do in that is there's there's sort of this old uh paradigm of you know we have conservationists from turn of the century and we have, and this is what a sort of an academic historian would tell you, there are conservationists and there are properly modern environmentalists. And there's this moment of rupture, whereas, you know, at the

turn of the century, you have guys like Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, all these, you know, stalwart heroes of conservation and they are really dominating environmental policy making in this period and then in the post war period a new set of actors steps in with a new set of values and they are the driving force behind

some of the landmark legislation in the 60s and 70s and so what I try to do in that first chapter is basically say that there's much more continuity than that. And that it makes for an easy story to tell if you say, you know, hunters did, had did this at the turn of the century and then non-hunters had their, their moment in the 60s and 70s. And I'm saying, no, look, if you look through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, hunters remain a powerful, engaged political block

that are really driving policymaking at a local and federal level throughout this period. So I'm looking at the ways in which these magazines are. So it wasn't like the counterculture spawned this sudden group of environmentalists who went out and rewrote the books. Yeah, and I think, I mean, if I were to sort of oversimplify what most historians... I'm not asking you to do that.

But I think that's a good way of sort of summing up or simplifying what a lot of historians who haven't looked at this stuff would tell you, is that there's sort of a counterculture, a new set of values in the 60s and 70s that's really responsible for the environmental legislation and policies that have given us the world that we live in today essentially and that their values and their issues and issues of concern supplanted these older issues of concern that guys like roosevelt are concerned what caused that viewpoint in the among historians yeah like why do people think

that that happened well i think that i mean i think that in part it it comes from in a lot of environment a lot of historians a lot of academics in general um study things that they're interested in and concerned concerned with or concerned about. And so a lot of the initial scholarship on this subject was written by people who came of age in the 60s and 70s. So, I mean, that's sort of how Dan got into environmental history. But that's the criticism of that generation is how egocentric that generation was. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's so, but this is how history is written is that you know uh there's there's there's sort of a thesis one group puts out a thesis they put out an argument and then other people come revisit that and say you know things might have been oversimplified here they might have been overlooked and sort of the initial group that makes sense of things and periodizes things and says this is is, you know, modern, quote unquote, modern environmentalists are this, they're X, Y, and Z, they believe A, B, and C. That's how they is say, you've overlooked a much more complex reality. You've overlooked stories that might make it a little more difficult to make sense of what happened in the 60s and 70s, where we get the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, things like that, the National Environmental Protection Act,

the Endangered Species Act. So that's sort of what my projects is. So that's the first chapter is trying to write sort of a counter narrative of the 20th century environmental movement through the eyes of field and stream readers, outdoor life readers. What's chapter two?

Chapter two. Chapter two looks at the emergence of anti-hunting sentiment in the 1970s and the ways in which anti-hunting advocates try to harness their own agenda to some of these powerful new environmental laws and how this dynamic reshapes the way that a lot of hunters perceive these laws um let me back up for a minute what what did an ant what when did the word were there anti-hunters in 1940 i mean of course they were but what were they like bambi

bambi's 1942 really right so um but bambi isn't yeah I mean Bambi is 1942 one of the things that I that I do with this is and and opposition to hunting goes back further than that um yeah I mean you ever read the old testament yeah Jacob and Esau right yeah and and so this is I mean there there's a huge literature out here, but there's an interesting book. I don't know if you've read it, Daniel Justin Herman's Hunting in the American Imagination. No, no, no. And one of his arguments is that

sort of the early Puritans actually, if they knew that what would become, who would become Americans were people that prided themselves on their hunting culture, the Puritans would have been really dismayed by that because hunting is something that you do when you're not working and you should always be working.

And it's something, yeah. And so, yeah. And so one of his arguments is that sort of early, that hunting occupied a different place in the American imagination in colonial times. And what his book does is sort of trace that through. Once the United States is created, then you need some American heroes and heroes that differentiate your culture from

that of Europe. And so Americans embrace sort of the Daniel Boone types, right? And so that's a really interesting book. You'd really enjoy that one. But anyway, there's always been sort of, you know, hunting has occupied different places in the American imagination over time. And what my project does is sort of track that through the 20th century. So to get back to the question of anti-hunting sentiment, there's opposition to hunting that arises in the 19th century. The SPCA and some of these anti-animal cruelty groups. Or they were organized then. Yeah, and their primary consideration in the 19th century was really sort of cruelty to horses

because they're urban-based reformers who are looking at these horses out in New York City, in London, getting whipped, getting knocked around in the street, underfed horses just being put to work, right? And so that's really where this idea of animal cruelty um comes comes into uh more widespread i guess uh um it carries it carries more cloud among a wider public um and so really in the in the late 60s and early 70s is when this stuff comes to a

head when you when you when there became like an anti-hunting movement yeah 1960s 1970s yeah a movement yeah um there there are a number of groups founded in the mid 60s um and and one of the reasons for this and this is what i look at in in this chapter is that um some of these laws that are created in the 60s and 70s to for purposes unrelated to the anti-hunting agenda are very quickly embraced by anti-hunting advocates in order to secure their own desired outcomes right and so give me an example ESA protection ESA protection yeah that's that's one. I mean, the one that I really focus on in this, uh, in this chapter is the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969, um, which is signed into law in 1970.

And people know, uh, NEPA as it's known because it requires environmental impact statements, right? And so if, if the federal government is going to do something or fund something, it requires that experts come in and assess what impact this action is going to have on the environment, right? And this is something that if you look back at the pages of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, one of the more interesting things that I found was that in 1944 or 45, the editor of, I believe it was Arthur Graham, who was the editor of Outdoor Life at the time is calling for this almost this exact law

but he's worried about channelization and the construction of huge dams in the post-war era you're kidding me what year? this is like in 1944-45 prophetic man this is what really fascinates me you can go back into these magazines

and this is an issue that's still selling war bonds, right? And he's calling for a law and he, I mean, he uses the words, you know, we need a coordinating law with sharp teeth that will hold government officials accountable for what they do to the natural world. Did he lose his job no was like a big someone trying to start a big boycott people were on board with this stuff and what i think is i mean what i think is interesting is if you look at these magazines through the through the 40s 50s 60s into the 70s a lot of the a lot of the things that they're

calling for you would associate with sort of cutting edge, avant-garde environmentalism, if you consider them in context. Yeah, no, for sure, man. The fact that someone would have been talking about that then. Yeah, and he's writing in 44, 45, this law isn't signed. It's signed by President Nixon in 1970. And it's still, at the time of its signing,

it's still held at the time of its signing, it's still hailed as the largest achievement or the crowning achievement of the environmental movement. And if you think about what environmental impact statements require, it's sort of incorporating a new set of values into the policymaking process. It's a big deal. And he's going for it in 44, 45. And when it came around, the anti-hunters and the hunters saw some gain

or had the hunters lost interest in it by the 70s? No, they were still using it and using targeted litigation to pursue their own ends, right? To pursue, they used it a lot. Different sportsman's groups used environmental impact statements to challenge resource extraction, channelization of waterways, things like that. And it's very much celebrated in the pages of these magazines when this law is enacted.

But very quickly what you see are that anti-hunting groups are using lawsuits and making claims under NEPA. They're saying the environmental impact statement for this hunting season didn't consider this alternative. And essentially what an environmental impact statement does is it asks that somebody sit down and say, if we do A, you know, one, two, three will happen. If we do B, four, five, six will happen. And so it's sort of this systematic accounting

of what might happen through these various policies. So they run an environmental impact statement on a proposed hunting season? Well, that's what the anti-hunting activists demanded that they do in the 1970s. And they start challenging- Just try to make it onerous. Try to make it difficult toous yeah yeah difficult so you slow

things down right you slow things down and um and sort of the the real fear and you see this in the magazine some of these some of these writers are saying well if they challenge pitman robertson uh with the pitman robertson act of 1937 which is the act that places an excise tax on firearms and sporting equipment, et cetera, et cetera, that funds much of the wildlife management in this country. The fear is that- Research, habitat improvement. Yeah, all that stuff, right? I mean, it's responsible for the sort of miraculous recovery

of all the wild game species in this country between 1930 and 1970 when we're talking about it. I mean, in 1930, there's like half a million deer. In 1970, there's 14 million. In 1930, there's just a handful of antelope. Two turkeys, one pregnant. Turkey, turkeys are a great example. Antelope populations increased like something like 14 times

in this period of 40 years. So it's really Pittman Robertson and these funding structures that are built around this model of consumptive use and hunting. That's sort of the backbone of wildlife management in this country. And hunters today will tell you that with great pride, right? You see that all the time. And actually, the fear among a lot of these riders in the 70s is that Pittman Robertson will be challenged under NEPA. And it actually is. There are lawsuits filed, and there's a lot of sort of behind-the-scenes wrangling. But there are wildlife officials, government administrators.

Hold on. They're saying you should do an environmental impact statement on the Pittman-Robertson Act. And what they're asking for is that there have to be an accounting for every single thing that Pittman-Robertson dollars do, which is just totally unmanageable. So you want to put in like a water tank somewhere and you'd have to- Right, exactly. You'd have to, exactly. And so this is really a moment of crisis.

And you'll see, if you go back and read through these magazines, you can see this all unfolding. And so in this chapter, I look at the way, when anti-hunters harness environmental laws to their own agenda, it changes the ways in which hunters perceive environmental laws. And so this is one of the questions that I...

Why so many hunters now seem like burdened or annoyed by the Endangered Species Act? Yeah, and they're all... The Endangered Species act is used um a lot by anti-hunters as sort of a marketing tool essentially i mean has great cultural cachet in the 1970s um you know people have lunch boxes and stuff with charismatic megafauna and and politicians are going out waving you know i when the Endangered Species Act is passed, it's wildly popular. It's a wildly popular piece of legislation at a moment in which faith in government is declining precipitously, right, in the early, mid-1970s.

And so this is one that lawmakers really hang their hat on. We're doing what the people want. But very quickly, anti-hunting advocates use claims revolving, using this language, they're deploying this language of endangered species to target hunters and blame hunters for environmental degradation. Gotcha. And so, again, the concept of endangered species is sort of weaponized. And in a large part, what this chapter does is explores the polarization that we see between people who identify as environmentalists

and people who identify as hunters. And I know this is a gross oversimplification of who hunters are today, right? But I think if you talk to a lot of people the words environmentalists and hunters they're not often used no but that's why we use the word that's why that's why i say i'm a conservationist exactly which is a loaded term you don't want the i use it too i always say conservationists but now and then i just also say i'll just say like well no i no, I'm an environmentalist. You know? Yeah. So up until some point in the 70s, homeowners said, I'm an environmentalist.

But they weren't using, when did people start using that term? They were using, a lot of them were using the terms interchangeably. Right? It's not as if the term conservationist all of a sudden supplanted the term environmentalist in these magazines in the 1970s. But one of the interesting things that you'll see is in the 60s and 70s,

you'll see articles saying, covering the development of outdoor education programs at colleges and taking sort of these long-haired hippie types into the woods and teaching them about, you know, camping and hiking and this and that. And the readers of these magazines are saying, this is great.

We need these people on our side. Was that right? Oh, yeah. God, that rings a bell. Just republish all those articles now. Yeah. No, and so this is, I mean, it sort of echoes, you know, contemporary development sort of echo

what I see in these sources from 40 years ago. That's amazing. All right, three, chapter three. Chapter three, chapter three. Are we cool to leave chapter two for a minute? Yeah, absolutely. Unless you feel like we missed the point. No, no, I mean, that's sort of what I'm doing.

That's sort of what I look at is this polarization and the changing politics of the word sort of environmentalism in the hunting community. Now, if you really want to act like you're pissed off at someone, like you'd be like a tree hugger. Right. You know,

dude, I'm prone to hug a tree now and then man. Yeah. Especially if I'm trying to climb it. But I want to tell you something real quick. The one note I had ahead of talking to you is to tell you this story. When I was in high school, I graduated from high school in 1992. I grew up in Western Michigan.

In 1991 or 1992, I can't remember, me and the guys i hung out with largely as a joke but kind of not we started a group called hate hunters against teenage environmentalists and we had t-shirts and wild game dinners and we did like a fundraiser a canned goods drive uh-huh as a fundraiser yeah because we had never even heard the word environmentalist then all of a sudden it was there and we thought that like we were under the impression that an environmentalist that that meant anti-hunter yeah and because there was a school group these kids in school who were into charismatic megafauna dolphins and stuff who had a very strong anti-hunting bent started like an environmental group but all they talked about was anti-hunting like as in their mind that's what the debate was right their mind was

like pitted a bit like oh yeah you're an environmentalist oh i hate hunting too right was their tone right many years ago so we started hate we had t- that said hate, and off it was hunters against teenage environmentalists. Like I said, it's a joke. We'd have wild game dinners. And it was only years later that I realized that that's not what that meant. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty common misconception. I think a lot of people associate the term environmentalist with the politics of anti-hunting.

One of my buddies from hate just got hold of me and sent me i'd lost my t-shirt he sent me his old t-shirt nice which i hung in my closet in a safe place my wife's like best not to share that one on social media yeah but anyhow explain chapter three to me um chapter three looks at- They don't get less interesting, do they? No. That's a writer's mistake, man, to put all the good stuff in the front, you know? Yeah, no, I wrote it backwards.

So I wrote the first chapter last. Okay. And it was a sprint to the finish, so I was just kind of hammering it out. But yeah, chapter three looks at gun control and the politics of gun control on the pages of these magazines and how that conversation changes over time.

When did the conversation start? In a way that we'd recognize it today. Yeah. I think the origins of the modern Second Amendment debate are in the 1960s. And, and 1968 is, is the gun control act of 1968 is sort of the, the,

the foundational piece of the modern regulatory framework. Gotcha. Right. And, and that's when the debate that we would recognize now. Well, the debate changes in the seventies. And, and this is what that chapter looks at now. Well, the debate changes in the 70s. And this is what that chapter looks at.

And it really looks at it. I don't do a really detailed analysis of this proposed bill did this, this proposed bill did that. I look at more popular perception of this debate. And in the pages of these magazines, when hunters say, we as hunters have a stake in this question, where do we fall? On what side are we? The answer to that is in this sort of constant negotiation through the 70s. and this conversation is also unfolding in relation to questions about environmental protection. Really?

Yeah, well, I mean, by the 80s, you see guys writing into these magazines saying, and this will sound familiar to a lot of your listeners today, you know, we vote Democratic and we lose our guns to hunt with or we vote republican and we lose our lands to hunt on dude i would say the same thing this is something this is something that that you i mean there's a there's a letter to the editor um that that says that exact uh that has that exact phrase in it from uh i think it's 1980 or 1984 i think it's probably the in in in the lead up to the 84 election

after the initial sagebrush rebellion has fizzled out. But this is one of sort of the central assumptions of this project is that it's very hard for people to think about one question at a time, right? As sort of political animals, all of these things are constantly in flux in relation to one another. And so political behavior isn't just, you're not presented with sort of an ideal ticket.

And these tickets change over time. And as a result, people have to ask themselves questions. What do I believe in at this moment? Where do my loyalties lie, et cetera, et cetera. And so that chapter three looks at the emergence of the modern Second Amendment debate, how it changes in the 70s, and ultimately how sportsmen react

to this new point of fracture in American political life. And how did they react? I think without getting too detailed here, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was far more common to see sportsmen say, we occupy a position of influence in this debate because we have a legitimate purpose. And these are the words that they're using, they're not mine, but we have a legitimate purpose. And these are the words that they're using. They're not mine, but we have a legitimate purpose for these firearms. And so we should use our position of influence in order to come up with

reasonable solutions. And it's in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you see sort of the larger and, and there's obviously exceptions to this, it's very much in debate, but there's a large element calling for a position of moderation on these issues. The debate becomes much more polarized in the mid 70s, 1974, 1975 in particular. And there are some, you know, there are a number of other developments, but increasingly the position of sort of uncompromising hardline opposition to new firearm regulation becomes a more popular opinion

as expressed in these magazines. Well, there had to be new firearms. Like when I look at firearm issues now, it so much has to do with, you don't hear the word very often, but a lot of it has to do new firearms. When I look at firearm issues now, it so much has to do with you don't hear the word very often, but a lot of it has to do with technology. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in

Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K

topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without

cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and

more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all we're always grappling with when i say us the american public whatever side of this issue you're on we're always grappling with well what are we going to do about what you might consider to be emerging technologies right you know right um availability on the marketplace of things that weren't available on the marketplace before so is what you're talking about was that driven by availability of new weapons classes

or was it just like well the in the in the mid-1970s the concern uh is pistols that are called quote-unquote saturday night specials oh right and it's and the debate just stuff you don't even think about now the debate sort of echoes what you hear about, quote unquote, assault rifles today, right? People are arguing this is an arbitrary categorization that, you know, one, a gun of another type could do, could be equally as harmful or injurious, whatever. Yeah, I was thinking about that, like, just like snub nose pistols. Yeah, but it's, but it's a big, I mean, and when you think about it, it's actually a pretty mainstream debate. I mean, there's a cover of Field and Stream called Saturday Night, the title of the feature piece is Saturday Night Special,

the real issue. And it's got this big smoking handgun on the cover. It's this illustration. And the author of the piece, Bob Brister, and the um the author of the piece bob bob brister i believe is the author of the piece he essentially writes um we have no use for these and as gun owners we shouldn't be lumped in with um you know street thugs and this and that and these criminals and what that was the editorial stance of the magazine so there was a big blowback to that. Oh, yeah. And this is part of what I look at is the politics of, you know, there's this larger suspicion at the time, too.

CBS owns Field and Stream. And CBS puts out. At the time. At the time, yeah. And they put out some really sort of nasty anti-hunting hit pieces as documentaries on TV. The Guns of Autumn is one. And so readers, there are a lot of letters to the editor. And I also looked at the personal papers of writers and editors for these magazines. And you'll see that they're getting mail saying, are you guys in control of your magazine? is is it the the guys up at cbs

and so there's and so so field and stream has to sort of uh steal its resolve essentially and really come out as you know we are on the sportsman side in this one and they adopt a more hardline position editorially is that right oh yeah and and i mean there's this is this is at the time when suspicion of the media um becomes more uh popular uh in american life you're familiar with the story of jim zumbo oh yeah yeah yeah no it's very very very exactly it's very similar to that it's very similar to that and so this is what i'm not familiar okay you're not no so oh my god i mean it's such a handy no you know the name of jim zumbo sure okay venerable long time hunt done a lot for hunting long time gun writer long time hunting writer he

right when blogging kind of started he'd done a blog entry where he had come from he was blogging i believe from wyoming had been out hunting coyotes and mentions in his blog let me back up and say this guy had been i think he'd been a staffer at Outdoor Life for 25 years. Was sponsored by all the big players. Had his own jerky, his own everything. He was like the name. He was like the Bill Dance of hunting. And shared with his blog readers his opinion that, or he relates a story how he was hunting coyotes with some guys who were telling him how guys have started hunting coyotes with ARs.

And he says, hunters have no business using these terrorist guns. I say ban them from the woods right now now immediately i mean his show all the sponsorships his position at the bank like everything was immediately stripped through public outrage and he later attempted a redact like how do you say that word redact redacted he later tried to redact and he said that he had been out in the wind all day and it had been a long day

and was very tired and didn't meant what he said and that didn't work and later he went through a he went through a very public sort of

he like enlisted himself sort of in a re-education camp you know in a very public way and went hunting with the guns that he had said he was opposed to and did a lot of steps to try to you know

recuperate and it was like everything about it was sad everything about it was sad everything about it was sad um clearly you know it was kind of in one way it was kind of the beginning of uh of just like that like here's a guy who'd always gone through an editorial process. And it always, you write something, you write another draft. And that kind of stuff gives you time to sort of filter out what you're thinking and what you're saying. What do you really believe? Everyone has written a really nasty email at 11 at night right to and then if you have the wherewithal to not hit send

at eight in the morning you'd be like well you know i'm not gonna quite put it that way i'm gonna put a different way but he didn't he just he just put this out there like ban them you know and people took him very literally like so it was never really clear like what he i mean it was clear like he said what he said right but you don't know like had he gone through his normal thinking on it you know and talked to his buddies right and he's basically said well you don't think about this way jimmy not looking at this way or whatever and you think about the ramifications what you're saying any but it was just like it was it was it was just like, it was just painful. I mean, this guy had really in many ways devoted his life to the promotion of hunting. You know, and it was just, I mean, just eviscerated. And just like people who never heard a Jim Zumbo on whatever morning that was.

On Tuesday, we're feigning just the biggest disappointment. You know what I mean? It was quick. He became famous in a crowd that he would have never been famous with. You know? That was sad. It was sad watching him have to sort of like do. I always thought of when the communists like rolled into

saigon and put millions of people in re-education camps it was like it was like him having to go to re-education camps he's just like an like an old guy and then out of that came the term like a fud right a fud have you done a fud is a dude i get i've been accused of being a FUD a FUD is a guy who looks at firearm issues through the lens of a hunter yeah cause like Elmer Fudd I guess he's got a shitty gun I don't know so I'll be like you're like a FUD if you view because in all

honesty the second amendment has no mention of hunting like I'll always have people say like oh yeah you should be able to have guns cause you hunt I'm like wow you know you know in some respect maybe I'm glad you feel that way cause at least you allow that there is a reason to have guns because you hunt. I'm like, well, you know, in some respect, maybe I'm glad you feel that way because at least you allow that there is a reason to have guns in your mind.

It's not like a dead-end deal. But the framers of the Constitution, the Second Amendment, were not thinking about a guy's right to go out and shoot squirrels. It wasn't what they were trying to protect. If it was, they would have said something like that. It was not on their mind. So that's not like a plausible argument but the whole thing was

sad the whole thing was sad read up on i wrote a thing in salon about jim zombo um when it was just like i just wish he had sat on what he said and thought about it for a couple days because i feel having never met the guy um i feel that he would have like whatever a couple days later he'd be like well you know i don't like it like there's what like let's think about the message we're sending he would have like he wouldn't have went out and said like let's ban him now i think it was just i don't think it's what he would have i don't think it's what he meant or I don't think it's what he meant. Or I don't think it's what he would have said had he thought about it longer. And I think that he got so just like, it was just watching a nice old man just get beat to death on the curb.

But a lot of people look at it like a great victory. Great victory. And it kind of sent a message like a great victory, great victory. And it kind of sent a message like, don't mess with us, you know? And I think that, that, you know, the message resonated,

but anyhow, it's just funny. Like when you talk about that story, it's like you, that story plays out now and then. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what I see in these magazines,

30, 40, 50 years ago, um, they, they 30, 40, 50 years ago, they echo events and developments that I remember from my own time in my lifetime reading these magazines as a reader, right, and not as a researcher. So that was really interesting to see. I mean, the blowback from that wasn't, you know,

it wasn't this swift, and I think technology tightens that feedback loop. People were falling in love with the web, man. But you absolutely would see letters to the editor from the mid-1970s saying, who's in control of the editorial position of this magazine? Is it you guys, or can we trust you, or is CBS dictating the content here did another editor recently publish a anti-gun letter to the editor and lost his job

i'm not sure i can't remember where yeah i think he published just telling you listeners i could be messing this up i don't think i am if i'm if i'm messing it up i'm not messing up the main gist i'm messing up a detail a an editor i believe published a anti-gun like a gun editor at a gun magazine published an anti-gun letter to the editor was in losses loss of, which is like, which, which is weirder than the Zumbo thing. Weirder because it's sort of like, you know, it was almost like he was sort of using the magazine as sort of like a place

for debate in a place that were debate. Wasn't welcome. And it is, it's like, you know, that's a tricky thing. I would never do like an episode of my show. Well,

I remember like this week on meat eater, we're not going hunting. We're going to an anti-hunting convention. You know I mean it would be like uh it'd be weird well that's I mean what's funny though and this is one of the larger takeaways from the project that I see over in terms of measuring sort of the larger change over time is that hunting's public culture I feel in the 1950s and 1960s, before you have these, these, uh, larger public challenges to hunting, it's a, it's a, it's a public culture that's much more open to debate. I mean, in, in outdoor life publishes and, and, uh, Oh, 54 maybe, um, or maybe this is 48. They publish an article called why I

gave up hunting. And they say, this guy makes it, you know, we're not saying we're on board with this, but he makes a compelling case and we thought that this voice should be heard. Had he seen something he didn't want to see? I mean, he basically just described this as a, he sort of woke up one day, the author of the piece, I'm not sure I'm going to remember the author's name, but basically says, I woke up one day and sort of realized that um what i was doing uh was sort of indulging a more primitive uh side of me that that's right yeah yeah and and they publish it right and and you can't imagine that you get that story you could get it published but it

won't be published in field and Stream or Outdoor Life. Yeah, right, right, exactly. And so the question, I mean, and you can sort of be skeptical and say they're just, you know, publishing that piece, they're fanning the flames and sort of, you know, drawing lines in the sand. But I really do, you know, you look at, there's debate about the morality of hunting in the 40s and 50s and early 60s before the anti-hunting movement really gains traction.

But the debate is much more, I don't know what the right word to use. I mean, there's a spirit of sort of honest consideration of other viewpoints that you don't see as much in contemporary culture. Well, I would argue that, I'm going to say we, and I mean like the hunting community who feels the compulsion to engage in the debate about hunting, right? A lot of people just hunt, right?

Right. Like my brothers, they just hunt. My brothers, they hunt. When you talk about hunting, yeah. It's just not what they're doing right. They're not like sitting talking to someone about it right now they're all the damn time but they're talking about something else right so anyways those of us who you're right grapple with this stuff verbally with other people um we're not like talking right now the broader hunting community isn't talking right now about like

so much like to hunt or not to hunt, but we are having very spirited, very divisive debates about high fence, right? Yeah. About long range shooting, long range technologies. Yeah. The drone thing,

I thought was going to become big, but so many states are getting out ahead of it so quickly that it might not become an issue. Laser rangeers right souped up compound bows it's like we're always sort of um there is still that debate because I can't think of a hunting writer or a shooting magazine editor who hasn't weighed in on what's too far of a shot but I think too that there's another side to these conversations. There's a very vocal element of the hunting public today that says hunters shouldn't be criticizing other hunters.

Yeah. Right? I get it all the time, man. And I think that's a product of this cultural shift that I track in the dissertation of the the seven 60s 70s primarily the 70s is sort of my big pivotal decade but i think this you know us hunters have our backs to the wall we don't need to be debating the ethics of what the guy next to you is doing and and i think that is an unhealthy i think that's that's yeah well if that guy's pulling the plug

if that guy's pulling the plug on the boat yeah like i know we're all in this boat together but yeah but that's some bitch just cut a hole to the bottom of it yeah and and there's there's all kinds of questions before but like if you got any concluding thoughts about three later on i want to make sure to cover your whole deal all right yeah chapter four chapter four was the one i was going to begin with because chapter four tracks the changing culture of wild game consumption from 1945 to 1990 and that's pretty interesting the way in which the changing sort of sort of how the changing ways in which hunters use the meat that they that they they kill, that they harvest, whatever,

um, the, how that changes, how they imagine what they're doing. Right. So if you can't fill the freezer for the winter to feed your family all year, cause you don't own a freezer cause it's 1945, 1946,

what are you doing? Right. The ice box. And yeah. And, and I mean, refrigerators, refrigerators are far more widespread in the immediate post-war period but freezer ownership is it doesn't really take off

until the mid-60s i've never thought about that i mean you know what occurred to me recently that's similar to that yeah yeah daniel boone okay on up jim brid, Jed Smith. They did all that shit without flashlights, man. When it got dark, it was dark. You could do some shit with a candle or a fire, but they did it without flashlights. Now, you go out and spend a couple weeks in the woods with no flashlight. And I'm not talking about Alaska in July. But spend a couple weeks and realize how much stuff you get done under artificial illumination and how much like really important stuff happens under artificial

illumination. Imagine like, it's like one day I was occurring like, wow, man, when it got dark, it was dark. But you know, no refrigeration. Like what were they, what did they say when they had no fridge or no freezer? Well, it's hard to, I mean, it's hard to generalize, right? But one of the things that, so what struck, and this wasn't initially a chapter in the project, but as I'm reading through these magazines, and especially local newspaper columns, I kept running into these anecdotes about, you know,

people only eat things they shoot because they want an excuse to shoot another something like that whereas I think that the ethics and obviously there are exceptions but I think that for the most part what I saw over this several decade long period is a changing, a much more widespread adoption

of the ethics of consuming what you kill, right? And obviously people have consumed what they kill since the dawn of time, right? But there are certain- It's why people got into hunting, you know. Yeah, it is, right? But if you look at like the late 1940s and early 1950s, I mean, one of the things that I never one of the things that I never really thought about before I got into the project is hunting became much more popular in the immediate post-war decade.

We often think about hunting as sort of this declension, you know, at one point in history, all people hunted to live and that number has just been steadily declining. But hunting, sort of like religiosity, there were moments of revival, right? Oh yeah, it got huge, man. Yeah, this whole generation, that number has just been steadily declining but hunting um sort of like religiosity there are moments of revival right oh yeah it got huge makes yeah this whole generation like that's what my dad started my dad started getting serious about big game hunting immediately after world

war ii and he's like there was a lot of guys around who used to travel around used to hang out with other guys having a good time they were stir crazy right like they didn't want to get into the thing the hell's angels came out at the same time. My dad like cruised around with buddies of his and they hunted because they were out of their mind. I mean, it's a phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, it's a post-war phenomenon.

So in 1940, there's like 7 million something hunting licenses sold. And by 1950, it's like 14 million. It nearly doubles in a day. but think how old those guys were too right it's like now the average hunter is what like in his late 40s or 50s or something like that i mean these guys are 21 22 years old and so and and it's funny i mean the way that you phrase that there's a an editorial in outdoor life before the end of the war and and the i'm the author is escaping me at the moment, but he writes,

you can't introduce millions of young men to the joys of firearms and living in the woods and expect them to just give it up at the drop of a hat, right? I remember a neighbor down the road of ours who was a pilot, like flew a plane in World War II. And he later talked about getting home from World War II

and asked him kind of like the things he did for a while and he said i enrolled like he had the gi bill i enrolled in school sat there for a couple days and just realized after what i just did for two years you've got to be kidding me that i'm gonna sit in this chair yeah there's just no way and and so this is i mean it's it's a new passion for a lot of a lot of young men in this chair. There's just no way. And so this is, I mean, it's a new passion for a lot of young men in this period. And if you think about the numbers of wildlife that existed in the 1930s,

or prior to Pittman Robertson, prior to this sort of rebounding of all these wild game populations, you think about how that changed sort of the culture of hunting, right? If there aren't any deer in your backyard to shoot, sort of what it means to drive to the Northwoods, get your deer and come back home. You're not taking your little kid out on the weekend and going hunting with them, right? It's your war

buddies, you're taking off. Yeah, you get your red and black checkered outfit on and go to the Northwoods, man. But with the novelty of this behavior for a lot of these guys um there are some complications rates of accidental shooting skyrocket in the late 1940s and early 1950s that's when my dad got shot oh yeah yeah hunting accident yeah i mean this is this is a huge the sports illustrated i think in like the 1951 or 1952 predicted that more hunters would get shot that year than like moose bighorn wild goat and they list you know basically everything other than deer they said more you know more american men are going to get shot in this hunting season than all these species of big game combined my old man loved the irony of the fact that he had was on the

anzio beachhead invasion okay fought all through the italian peninsula marched all the way to france and was injured but never by a bullet never scratched by a bullet and came home and they were hunting rabbits and a guy shot him in the foot with a 12 gauge shotgun at point blank range you know yeah it's just like he's like how could that be i mean it was a common experience relatively speaking but get but get me into the like so okay how would they deal what what before when these guys all start hunting deer they don't have freezers they're not like seasoned woodsmen yeah who know how to smoke hams and know how to do like primitive old school meat preservation techniques.

What, did you just get a deer and party with it and eat it in a week? Well, I found a lot of references to guys running around town trying to hand meat off to neighbors and this and that, trying to get rid of the thing before it's spoiled. And you could rent freezer space. And sportsmen were earlier adopters of this technology, freezers, than other Americans. And freezer companies actually, you'll see these advertisements in the late 1940s, early 1950s, when these freezer manufacturers are starting to

really push this technology. They're saying, hey, imagine eating year round what you kill this fall. Oh, they're right. Yeah. And there are actually laws on the books in the late 1940s. One of the ways in which some of the early wildlife regulations intended to curtail poaching was by criminalizing possession of wild game within X number of days after the end of the season. And in some States, I think it was like five or six States. When the season ended, you can't have any, any wild game in your house. Is that right? Yeah. And so, and so there,

cause the assumption was if you have it, you probably shot it last week. You just shot it. Yeah. You know, why would you, why would you have a tenderloin from whitetail you shot, you know, six months ago, something like that, as so many people do today? Oh, man, that's interesting. In these magazines, if you look at these magazines in the late 1940s, some of these editors are saying, we need to reinvent these laws because as more and more sportsmen buy freezers and have the means to preserve while gaming around, these laws are actually going to penalize

law-abiding sportsmen. Or they're going to penalize sportsmen who want to conserve this meat and use it to feed their family. And so, I mean, another side story, or another sort of thing that you'll see in these magazines again and again, and also in newspapers,

these accounts, people sort of a thing that you'll see in these magazines again and again, and also in newspapers, these accounts, people sort of openly acknowledging that most, and you'll see these words, and so it's not my sort of me poking at people in the past, but you'll see these words again and again. Most of the wild game in this country is wasted. You'll see that. I mean, you'll see it in anywhere from ladies home journal to field and stream to Outdoor Life.

It's sort of this open, ugly secret. Well, yeah. And it's not so much of a secret. I wouldn't say most, but a hell of a lot of it is today. Yeah, I mean, but I think back then, the difference is back then, there wasn't a sort of the ethical consideration of wasting what you kill wasn't nearly as prominent on the page of these magazines um and that really is it because they didn't have

an awareness of finiteness or or is it something different it's a point of concern i think for a lot of wildlife officials and administrators who are tasked with conserving this resource and those are sort of the terms that they view it in. And so in the 1960s, you see state fish and game departments putting out cookbooks and putting out guides on how to, and this is something that Agricultural Extension Services throughout the country had been doing piecemeal. But it really takes off in the 60s,

especially as freezers become more available. And then especially once hunting comes under pressure from anti-hunting activists who are saying, you're doing this to serve some kind of bloodlust or this or that. It's a wasteful, destructive practice. Increasingly, hunters are defending their pastime by highlighting that they're using this as a means to feed their family. And there's a huge social scientific literature from the 1970s where there are public opinion polls of the general public, not just hunters and anti-hunters, but of the non-hunting sort of disinterested public, right? And the approval figures of hunting are much, much higher as they are today when you emphasize the eating, the consumptive aspect of it, right?

Eating what you kill. And so that in the 70s, this really takes off. And it also, I also tie it in or dovetail it with the economic misfortune of a lot of the country during this period. If you think about Michigan, deindustrialization, economic stagnation, you see in the sources, you'll see in magazine articles that, you know, verbatim, deer hunting in the Northwoods this year took on a new level of significance. Is that right? As out of work, yeah, as laid off auto workers are trying to figure out a way to provide for their families. You know, we had that a few years ago. It was announced to much fanfare that there had been a slight uptick in license sales

you know people were very excited about it and um many people interpreted those numbers and one interpretation you kept seeing again and again was it was contemporaneous with economic crash and you had a lot of dudes who had a lot of time on their hands and did a lot of hunting those couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and the people that are, that really, some of the people that were hit the hardest

by the economic stagnation in the 1970s were blue collar middle-class breadwinners in, you know, the upper Rust Belt, Michigan. You think about the strong deer hunting culture, right? And so in that context, this behavior, this practice takes on a new significance. This is how, and this is, you'll see this again and again, if you look at local newspapers and like Youngstown, Ohio, places like that, there's a story, you story, a local interest story come Christmas time about an out-of-work guy who went out and fed his family for the winter with a deer or two.

Bill Deal for easy. And it becomes sort of this trope that you just don't really see. And it's not to say that people didn't consume what they killed in the 40s and 50s, but it just takes, it resonates in new ways in the imagination in these other contexts. Yeah. Okay, hit me with chapter five.

Chapter five. Chapter five. Where are we at with time, Yanni? How long have we been talking? Probably overboard. We're getting there. But no, I think we can finish up chapter five. Chapter five is quick.

And then give some final thoughts. Sure. Yeah, chapter five. Chapter five is quick. And then give some final thoughts. Sure. Yeah, chapter five looks at the ways in which the hunting in American life is increasingly debated with rights-based claims in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. People claiming, I have a right to hunt. Oh, okay. 70s 1980s and 1990s you know people claiming i have a right to hunt oh okay and and and conversely i also look at the politics of of tribal hunting and fishing rights because the two unfold simultaneously yeah um and and i i really sort of tell the story of um obviously people have

claimed that their rights to hunt dating back um much longer right further back than this period that i'm considering but yeah daniel boone had no right to be doing what he was doing much what he was doing was on land claimed by the british clown crown and he was like trespassing not only on a native american land he was trespassing on the land claimed by another country yeah so so one of the interesting things that I discovered in my research was this article from like a law review in the 1930s. And this guy's making mention of the fact that Pennsylvania at the time of the Constitutional Convention

had a pretty radical democratic, small d, democratic political culture. And in Pennsylvania, I'm 90% certain that it's Pennsylvania. And I'm also 90% certain that nobody else is going to call me out on this one. But I think Pennsylvania suggested incorporating into the Bill of Rights a right to hunt on all unoccupied lands within the new nation. Man. And it was jettisoned. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Man, that would have been nice. Yeah, so that was so that was a uh dude i'd be hitting yellowstone hard this fall man but uh yeah so this this guy like in the 1930s apparently had dug up some old transcript of a of uh the the philadelphia delegation or something like that when they're meeting to debate the the ratification of the constitution uh anyway um so i look at i look at the ways in which and and part of it stems from the rise of new anti-hunting strategies like um

you know folks showing up in the woods trying to disrupt hunts and um hunters making claims i have a right to be here this is a well now it's like a lot of states have ratified hunter harassment yeah this is the sort of the origins of the modern debate over hunter harassment laws which is what i look at i have a right to hunt i'm doing something lawful authorized by the state um and and my rights are being infringed upon by yeah it's kind of you probably know better but it's like an implied right be like to say like because you know people always talk about the right to privacy the constitution right you know there is no about the right to privacy the constitution right you know there is no it's an interpretation right there's no one yeah because you have the

right to privacy right which is like a thing where like we accept that that's and that that's implied this sort of idea that right to privacy so people talk about you have a right to hunt it kind of winds up it's like um yeah you have like an implied right. There's like a hereditary cultural thing enabling you to hunt. Yeah. And then it's interesting to see like the hunter harassment stuff was almost kind of a step in the direction of saying activists, advocates, whatever you want to call them, argue that these laws are infring by the arena in which it's taking place or the language in which it's taking place of rights claims, rights-based claims, which are pretty powerful claims in American political culture, especially in the second half of the 20th century, following all of the big social movements, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, whatever. So the fact that this is a language that's being adopted and appropriated in order to engage in this contest over the ethics of hunting, the morality of hunting, heightens the sort of emotional stakes that people have in it. And so that's that chapter.

And then that blog looks at, and just really briefly, looks at this debate over public lands that is around the late 19th century, early 20th century, rears its head again in the 80s and seems to be rearing its head again oh my god i hope just like and so yeah so that's that chapter sort of sketches out the role that the hunting public has played in this debate and uh as it's a pretty powerful role dude man i hope that in 20 years you can write another dissertation about how this whole anti public land thing got just squashed by hunters in the 2016 2015 era well if i'm writing another dissertation in 20 years i've made a

series of terrible mistakes oh which leads me to the last thing i wanted to ask you this isn't my concluding thought uh what do you got to do now you get the thing published in like a major uh yeah so i mean what do you got to do i'm sort of catching my breath. And it was, like I said, it was kind of a sprint to the finish there to get wrapped up. And I'm sort of thinking about publication options and thinking about publishers and- Like academic type publishers.

Well, I think there's a popular audience for it. So at the moment, I submit it. I'd say so. No, I'm not saying it needs to be academic. I mean, to make it be a dissertation. Let's say Scribner publishes it. Does that still count? Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay. I don't know if it had to go through the academic review process. Ideally, Scribner publishes it. So it doesn't have to go through the peer review process. No. So what happens is after you write the dissertation you submit it to a committee of examiners and they read it and they're ultimately the arbiters of whether or not this constitutes a an original uh valuable uh contribution to the literature and so dan was as my advisor was the head of that committee. And then I had five other professors of history

and a professor of environmental studies who read the thing. And we sat down. And you defend. It's a defense. So they sit down and ask you, why did you do it this way? What are you missing here? As I read this, I would have done this this way. And you answer and address their concerns as best you can.

And then you're asked to leave the room. And they ultimately ultimately come back and say you either passed it or you didn't so what happened well i passed that's why i'm sitting here so now now that you've done that you can take any publication venue you want yeah it's mine um it it you submit it to a an online database okay but you can put a hold on it for several years as you're working out how exactly you want to publish it. Gotcha. And ideally, you publish it with a press that'll give you the widest audience possible.

Yeah, of course, yeah. So you don't want to send it to someone. Dude, I don't even want you to kind of think I was suggesting that it wasn't for that. I just thought that because you're involved in this process that you have to stay within that world no no once you once so people will publish a dissertation as a popular book typically typically not because most dissertations are written in a uh like heavily footnoted in a way that's never gonna they're not written in a in a

literary style that people are gonna they're not accessible because they're written for an academic audience to sort of show your chops test your you know show it show your metal to an academic audience but you'd have to go and induce it up right and take out all like de-footnote it and in citations and present all that in a different way. Yeah. I mean, it's up to the publisher. It's up to the press how they want to do it. I mean, I wrote it in such a way that, I mean, a lot of people, they write thousand page dissertations and they have to chop it down to like a 200 page book manuscript. Yeah, that's what I'm wondering.

And so I approached it. I tried to save myself some work on the back end by keeping it as tight as I could as I wrote it. So my concluding thought is, I don't want to ask you, there's a lot of unknowns. My concluding thought is I hope that this work becomes available for people to look at. And I don't mean them them going in, you know, like I hope it's like published. Yeah, no, that's- Or they're not going on a J store trying to buy,

like trying to buy your dissertation for 20 bucks. Yeah, no, that's the hope. That's the goal. And yeah, I finished, I just finished about a month or so ago and I got a lot of balls in the air right now. Are you going to go work at a university? At the moment I'm teaching online for a university

and sort of figuring out the next step. I mean, I'm interested in teaching. I love teaching. I'm not sure if I want to necessarily go through the academic tenure track job market. I'm interested in also finding employment and conservation and sort of working towards bringing groups together, resolving some of the issues that have tracked

as they emerged in the 1960s, 1970s. Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Call this man up and give him a job. How much money do you make? No, I'm joking. Oh, yeah. I just came off a salary as a teaching assistant. So anything seems like riches. Listen, you're going to get get this guy cheap anything sounds good to this guy yeah yanni yanni concluding

thoughts too many really for the time i have um congratulations first off for getting that done thank you it's quite the project let's go feel good yeah it's quite the dragon to slay as you like to say um yeah man i hope that your work opens uh opens up some discussion i think it's important to know for everybody it's important to know your history and where you come from and not only your family history but now us as hunters and some interesting stuff that you've looked at and shared. So yeah, hopefully it opened up a discussion. Everybody out there, you can label me as a tree hugger environmentalist that likes to shoot stuff. That's my concluding thought.

Like shoot trees. Andy, you didn't say oh hell a lot. Yeah. This is the first time you ever said it in one of these conversations. Yeah, yeah. And thanks for the opportunity to let me sit in. It's interesting stuff. I learned quite a bit.

Do you have any concluding thoughts? You're probably thinking about that big lean cod you got to flay. Andy's got a cooler to a lean cod on ice that won't fit in the fridge. Well, like Randall, I came from a non-hunting family. So this is all good knowledge. It's stuff that I didn't grow up thinking about, so this is good to hear. Yeah, congratulations on getting through it.

Thank you. Sounds like a pretty interesting piece. I can't tell if you're allowed to have concluding thoughts or not. What do you think? Is Randall good at concluding thoughts? Yeah, I think so. They don't want to hear me. No, what's your concluding thought? It's just a little tradition of having concluding thoughts? Yeah. They don't want to hear me. No, what's your concluding thought?

It's just a little tradition of having concluding thoughts. I'm just happy and honored to be here. It's been a good time. Come on, dude. Don't start. Don't give me the old look. All right, well, then visit your local bookseller in about two years once we get this thing on the shelf and pick it up.

We'll get it put up. When your book comes out. We'll get it put up. When your book comes out, we'll get it put up on our website. And maybe we'll get a deal where you buy 100 t-shirts, you get a copy for free. There you go. How about 100 books and get a t-shirt for free? Slap it in. Package.

All right. Man, now I feel guilty to the listeners that we've been discussing because usually a book will get published and you go and do you talk about it you know

because now I'm like stay tuned because someday you'll be able to read this book when do you think it'll be available? There's no way known. It's hard to say. Yeah, it's hard to say. Once you start setting out queries to presses,

you never know what the timeline is. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, we got the basic idea. It was fascinating, man. Thank you. I'm glad you're able to come and talk about this. I mean, definitely stuff I never thought about.

And some stuff I had thought about, but I thought about it wrong. Yeah, I mean, it was a different, you know, when I set out to write the thing, I thought I was going to tell one story, and I realized that there are so many more stories out there. And I guess, you know, if you're interested in this, if the listeners are interested in this stuff, Outdoor Life just recently digitized their whole back catalog to like 1887, 88, something like that.

Is that right? You can buy a monthly. Yeah, and so this saved me because prior to that, I was carrying home these huge bound volumes that weighed like 20 pounds a piece, and it was like 10 issues of Outdoor Life. And I was just hauling them back from the library in my backpack. And then in January, I'm cranking through this thing

and you can go online now and get a subscription. It's like five bucks a month or something. Is that right? And they have full page scans. So you can go, you can look at the advertisements, all that stuff. And then Field and Stream too is available on Google Books digitally from like 1968

to the early 2000s so if you know if you want to go back listeners can go out and write your own damn dissertation yeah go out and i'd be curious to have someone go do a dissertation on uh the changing nature of chewing tobacco ads yeah in field streaming outdoor life yeah there's there's a rich history there all right thanks for listening. We'll keep making them. Keep listening. Take care.