Still prominent on the brick building downtown, the big painted sign hints at the story of a pioneering family that has left its lasting mark on this cowboy-turned-tourist town: “Babbitt Bros., Ranchers, Merchants & Indian Traders.”
It was 1886 when David, George, Billy, C.J. and Edward Babbitt stepped off the train from Ohio and saw the promise of a fortune in the open range. They turned 864 head of cattle loose on the public pastures north of town, and opened a series of trading posts across northern Arizona.
Now the family name is reaching even further across the American West, as a prominent family scion challenges the old take-from-the-land ethic that allowed pioneering clans to prosper.
Bruce Babbitt, C.J.’s grandson, is billed by some as the region’s new sheriff, staring down outlaws who dare to scar the land. Others compare him to the new owner of the local saloon, brusquely informing the rowdy cowhands at the bar that there’s no free lunch on the range anymore.
As the new secretary of the interior, Babbitt has stirred up the West with a call for revolutionizing the way the federal government, the region’s biggest landlord, manages its 500 million acres. He wants ranchers, farmers and miners to pay more for resources, and he wants every bird, rodent and tortoise treated with greater care.
A former Arizona governor, Ivy League lawyer, trained geologist and avid backpacker who freely cites obscure history and complex scientific principles, Babbitt is a far cry from the cowboy his grandfather was-and that has many Westerners worried.
So does the new mindset he has brought to his job, a theme that has become his mantra: “We are set,” says Babbitt, “on creating a new American land ethic.”
The nation first took note of Babbitt during his short-lived Democratic campaign for president in 1988. He came out blazing with ideas, and a penchant for startling candor, that enraptured reporters, but his message and bland persona never caught on with voters.
Now Babbitt, 54, is back in the national spotlight, this time in the Clinton administration, where already he has taken his lumps and responded in kind.
An environmentalist, he was president of the League of Conservation Voters the last two years. One of the most visible members of the Clinton Cabinet so far, he bears little resemblance to the many forgotten, would-be frontiersmen and assorted nondescripts who have headed Interior and thus overseen the country’s national parks, natural resources and Indian affairs.
Those who support Babbitt’s vision of a government more sensitive to the land than most of his predecessors have been believe he has the public support and political experience to leave a legacy that will outlast this administration.
Supporters believe he can find success comparable to that of predecessors Harold Ickes, who instilled the Interior Department with a concern for conservation in the 1930s, and Stuart Udall, another Arizona Democrat, who set aside a string of wilderness areas in the 1960s.
But as he heads to Bozeman, Mont., to begin hearings Friday on his potentially far-reaching land reform proposals, Babbitt is licking wounds from his first skirmish with Western business interests long accustomed to having their way with the land.
In a major embarrassment for Babbitt, President Clinton last month caved in to Western senators seeking to block an initiative to raise access fees to public grazing pastures and gold and silver mines. The reversal by Clinton left some environmentalists unsure of the clout the interior secretary and his comrade-in-green, Vice President Al Gore, enjoy within the administration.
Sitting on the edge of his chair in his wood-paneled Washington office recently, Babbitt insisted that the movement for reform of abusive land practices already has gained too much momentum to be turned back, and predicts ultimate victory.
“If I were to spend the next nine months in Guam, there would still be mining reform. If I never said the word grazing once, there would still be a change in grazing practices,” Babbitt said. “It’s going to happen this year, but the details count, and there’s going to be process until everybody’s exhausted.” Besides, Babbitt said, he’s not the first to have faced such a predicament. Not surprisingly, he reaches back to the War of 1812.
“I think it’s like Andrew Jackson at New Orleans,” he suggested. “The Battle of New Orleans was taking place, but in fact the peace treaty is being negotiated in London a week before the battle takes place.”
During his tenure as Arizona’s governor from 1978 to 1987, Babbitt was known to lock opponents in a room together until they collapsed in agreement. But he is playing in a bigger league now and, despite his early prominence in the administration, he is not the man in charge.
In contrast to the wild, open territories his grandfather and great-uncles helped settle, Babbitt oversees a New West that is as heady and complex as he is, a region where investment analysts, backpackers and sun-loving retirees crowd land barons and cowpokes.
He speaks for a West that increasingly is concentrated in urban centers like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver, and for an America that more and more treasures its beautiful vistas for relaxation and escape, rather than prospecting and a paycheck.
Since January, Babbitt has been stumping for the expansion and improvement of the country’s national park system, speaking to whoever will listen, from the Southwest’s deserts to Tufts University outside Boston. He believes the parks were neglected in the hands of hostile and passive interior secretaries under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Babbitt also has been promoting a radical shift in public land management that would emphasize maintaining healthy wildlife networks as much as land for human recreational and commercial activities. He has announced several attempts to make the problematic Endangered Species Act work in a way that complements business activity.
Babbitt’s vision of a sensitive stewardship of the land is more than just political expedience at a time when the spotted owl and its ilk again are fashionable in the circles of power.
Praise from a predecessor
After leaving the governorship in Arizona, he told environmental groups he was ready any time they needed someone to stand up in favor of preserving the Grand Canyon from commercial encroachment. And he was the outspoken representative for the League of Conservation Voters at an annual salary of $1 the first year, $2 the second.
“I’m going to be very disappointed if he’s not a great secretary of interior. He knows the outdoors. He’s got the temperament and the convictions,” said former secretary Udall, brother of former U.S. Rep. Morris “Mo” Udall of Arizona.
“I had to build a constituency. He’s already got one. Now he’s just got to use it,” Udall said of Babbitt.
When he was tapped by Clinton as interior secretary in January, many observers said it was a perfect choice, that Babbitt seemingly had been preparing for the job over his entire career. Babbitt, typically off on his own path, had his sights set on the post of U.S. special trade representative, which went to Clinton campaign honcho Mickey Kantor.
Babbitt’s wife, Hattie, a lawyer whom Babbitt met while she was a flight attendant, is the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the Organization of American States. They have two teenage sons.
Born in Los Angeles, Babbitt grew up here in Grand Canyon country, family seat of a ranching and trading-post empire that once stretched from Kansas to California. But even as a youth, Babbitt made it clear he wasn’t much interested in punching cows.
Instead, he sneaked off every chance he could to the back country around his family’s ranch outside Flagstaff. He skied through the Ponderosa pines on the nearby 12,000-foot San Francisco Peaks, and hiked deep into the Grand Canyon.
It was in that back country that he first started talking about the value of each and every creature, and the need to “live lightly on the land,” now a common theme in his stump speech.
“When I was growing up on the land and in a ranching environment, we shot everything that moved that wasn’t a cow,” Babbitt told senators at his confirmation hearing in January. “I mean, that was just sort of, kind of the ethic of the place. It was best dead, whether it was on wings, whether it was a rattlesnake on the ground, whether it was a predator.
“I think properly we’ve moved a long ways away from that and have begun to understand that . . . the ecological web on the land is very important.”
The accidental governor
Even if a good shot, Babbitt never was much of a horseman. A high school chum, Richard Anderson, recalls being envious of all the chances Babbitt had to ride horses on the family ranch-opportunities Babbitt seldom took.
“I have never seen Bruce in a pair of Western boots,” said a friend, Don Moon, who owns land near Flagstaff with Babbitt. “I think he would look kind of silly.”
Professing an interest in politics as early as high school, Babbitt won a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, where it’s rumored he never saw a football game. He followed that by earning a master’s degree in geophysics at the University of Newcastle in England in 1962.
He spent the summer of 1959 exploring and “plain-table mapping” the forests of Oregon, and the summer of 1962 working on a geological project in the Andes Mountains in Bolivia.
Moved by South America’s abject poverty, he returned home to earn a law degree at Harvard in 1965. He enlisted in the “War on Poverty,” assigned to the Austin, Texas, office of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. Later that year he went to Selma, Ala., for Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights march.
In 1974, in the wake of Watergate, Babbitt surprised the conservative state of Arizona by winning the state attorney general’s seat after years as a private attorney in Phoenix. But a bizarre sequence of events, not his aggressive prosecution of land fraud and organized crime, put Babbitt in the governor’s office three years later.
In 1977, Gov. Raoul Castro resigned to become a diplomat. Within five months, his successor died of a heart attack. Next in line, Babbitt received a call at 7:45 one morning to find out he was governor. He won re-election twice.
Looking back on his tenure in Arizona for clues to how he will perform in his new job, supporters and critics alike take heart at Babbitt’s style. Among his greatest achievements, they agree, was a landmark groundwater compromise that he maneuvered through copper companies, farmers and city officials who previously had sought only to spit in each other’s eyes.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
“He takes great joy in solving problems that others can’t solve,” said Ron Warnicke, a Harvard classmate and chief of staff for Babbitt when he was Arizona attorney general. “He just devours problems.”
Ironically, Babbitt’s first move as interior secretary, to raise grazing fees, might have raised the rent on his own family’s ranching operation had Clinton not backed away.
The assault on ranchers’ way of doing business might have surprised Babbitt’s grandfather and great uncles. But the interior secretary says he hasn’t had time to ponder what his forebears, the five pioneer brothers, might have thought.
Then again, they might not recognize any of the West these days, a place that now sports trendy stores such as The Edge, the Babbitt family outlet that sells fancy camping and fly-fishing equipment from the brick building downtown that has served as family headquarters for most of this century.
“I often wonder what my living relatives are thinking about all this,” Babbitt says. “Now, they fortunately are gracious people and they basically decline press interviews, so it hasn’t been too bad. We’re as diverse as a cross section of Westerners on this.”
His younger brother, James, said family members overseeing the ranch operation are taking in stride the long-term prospect of higher grazing fees. The brothers may be close, but it is little surprise that Bruce Babbitt still goes in his own direction.
“Clearly,” said James, “he had his own agenda.”
