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Show 530. and robbers of every degree from Satan to senators, supervisors, lumbermen, cattlemen, farmers, etc., eagerly trying to make everything dollerable, often thinly disguised in smiling philanthropy, calling pocket-filling plunder "Utilization of beneficent natural resources, that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation grow great." Buried in this harangue was the anti-anthropocentric speaker of "Wild Wool," but buried he was. And perhaps Muir did not want to examine his opposition to the face of smiling philanthropy too closely. For Harriman had presented himself to Muir as precisely that face. In 1911, Muir wrote a small book as a memorial to Herriman, in spite of the protests of many friends - friends, one can guess, like Edward Taylor, a poet whom Muir had known for years who followed Phelan as mayor of San Francisco in 1902. Muir's friends - perhaps Taylor - worried that he had "gone capitalistic." In this book, Muir documented his gradual but complete conversion to Harriman's point of view. "No enterprise calculated to advance humanity failed to interest him," Muir asserted. And for Harriman, Muir tried to explain, money was not an end but only "a tool like a locomotive or ship." But most interesting is the philosophy of philanthropy which Muir claimed Harriman expressed during the Alaska Expedition in 1899, "helping to feed man and beast, and making everybody and everything a little better and happier." This echoed the very philosophy expressed by the gain-seekers whom Muir attacked in his 1909 Pamphlet on Hetch Hetchy. How was one to know that Harriman's |
