Green Republican

For almost twenty-five years, from 1949 to 1973, John Saylor represented a western Pennsylvania coal-mining district in Congress. Serving on the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, he developed an impressive record battling for national parks, monuments, and wilderness areas. His accomplishments include the monumental Land and Water Conservation Act. With this text, Nichols College historian Thomas G. Smith does a fine job arguing for the importance of Saylor in the dawn of the environmental age. As much a history of major conservation events as a pure biography, the book provides sufficient context to see Saylor as the maverick he was. Saylor emerges a man who genuinely cared for nature, before it was popular politically, someone strong enough to stand up to powerful interests and smart enough to emerge victorious. Smith does not paint too simplistic a portrait of Saylor. His love of nature was embedded in his religion and patriotism, but Saylor also had less altruistic motives; opposing hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants helped his district's coal-based economy. A man of his generation, he did not perceive utilization and preservation of natural resources as mutually exclusive. A large and imposing figure, he could be blunt but was bright enough to work across the political aisle. His efforts as an easterner on a committee dominated by westerners was only one example of his political mastery. He was friends with environmentalists such as the Sierra Club's David Brower but still got along well with one of Brower's principle adversaries, Congressman Wayne Aspinall

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