John Saylor, an influential U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania during the 1950s and 1960s, was in many respects a typical Republican of his time. He was “a vicious anti-communist,” as one Saylor expert put it. He lent tacit support to the communist witch-hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And he was hawkish in the extreme when it came to the Soviet Union and China.

But Saylor had another side that was decidedly unusual for a politician in those days—not just for a Republican, but also for a Democrat. He was a fervent environmentalist. He belonged to the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. He enjoyed warm relationships with leading conservationists. And he was the major driving force behind what were probably the two most important pieces of environmental legislation passed by Congress in that era: the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1968.

“He was the most forceful and influential Republican in Congress in the postÐWorld War II era” on conservation issues, said historian Thomas G. Smith, a leading authority on Saylor.

Saylor, who died in 1973 after a twenty-four-year career in the House of Representatives, is receiving renewed attention of late. Smith, a professor at Nichols College in Massachusetts, is working on a biography of him. And Phil Zorich of the John P. Saylor Congressional Collection at Indiana University of Pennsylvania said more researchers have shown an interest in Saylor’s career lately. Saylor is important and interesting in his own right, but in the present political climate, Saylor represents a rare bird indeed: a truly green Republican.

Senator James Jeffords of Vermont was described that way—before he left the GOP in May, claiming that the Bush administration’s conservative agenda had turned its back on Republican moderates. The late Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, who chaired the powerful Environment and Public Works Committee in the 1990s, was also considered a strong environmentalist.

But according to Smith, “Saylor was much more preservation-minded” than any Republican politician today. “I can’t think of a single time when Saylor backed down” when it came to preserving wilderness or creating parks, Smith said. He noted that Saylor played a key role in establishing Canyonlands National Park in Utah, Redwood National Park in California, North Cascades National Park in Washington, Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts, Padre Island National Seashore in Texas and Point Reyes National Seashore in California. In addition, Saylor—who possessed a booming voice to go along with his six-foot-four-inch, 240-pound stature—was a leading opponent of a Bureau of Reclamation proposal to build a dam inside Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border. The project, the first major confrontation between dam builders and environmentalists in the postÐWorld War II era, was eventually withdrawn.

The source of Saylor’s environmentalism is not entirely clear. Smith said a major influence was his father, Tillman Saylor, a small-town politician and lawyer who introduced his son to the outdoors. Religion may also have had something to do with it. “Even though he drank and swore like a trooper, he was a strong Protestant,” Smith said. “I think he saw nature as God’s handiwork, as something that was kind of sacrosanct.” Not only was Saylor an environmentalist, he was a John MuirÐstyle environmentalist.

A GREEN TRADITION

In the view of Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a grassroots organization, Saylor is not an anomaly but part of a long line of conservation-minded Republican politicians stretching all the way back to Abraham Lincoln.

“Conservation is a Republican tradition,” said DiPeso, a journalist and the author of a Republicans for Environmental Protection booklet called Conservation Is Conservative, which details the history of Republican environmentalism. The history is extensive. Consider the following:

• In 1864, Abraham Lincoln took time from the Civil War to give Yosemite Valley to the state of California. The valley was later deeded to the federal government to become a national park.

• In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant, another Republican, signed the bill creating Yellowstone National Park.

• From 1901 to 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt—by far the best-known Republican environmentalist—compiled a record of presidential preservation that has never been equaled (although three Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, came close). Roosevelt greatly expanded the national forest system. He established eighteen national monuments and more than fifty federal wildlife refuges. Among the areas he declared off-limits to development was the Grand Canyon, saying in a speech, “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” In all, Roosevelt protected 230 million acres of land.

• In the 1920s and early 1930s, Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover protected sizable tracts of land. Coolidge, for example, set aside 1.4 million acres of Alaska’s fabulous Glacier Bay.

• In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower set aside what is today called the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

• In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon signed two of the nation’s best-known environmental protection measures, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

• In the mid-1970s, Gerald Ford—during an energy shortage—signed legislation authorizing fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles.

A BUSINESS TRADITION

The Republican Party’s environmental reputation changed dramatically with the coming to power of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan’s Interior secretary, James Watt, who was openly hostile to protecting the environment, had much to do with the switch. So did Anne Gorsuch Burford, Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency chief who was famous for smoking cigarettes during a public hearing on carcinogens.

DiPeso explains the GOP’s tilt toward anti-environmentalism under Reagan as one of the legacies of the cultural divide that first opened up in American society during the turbulent sixties. “There was an element within the party that got the notion that protecting the environment was part of the liberal agenda for America, akin to welfare and busing,” DiPeso said.

Char Miller, an environmental historian with Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, said that Reagan was hardly an anomaly in the history of the GOP: he was a good old-fashioned, pro-business Republican. “Reagan was no different than our most reviled Republican president on conservation matters,” Warren G. Harding. Harding attempted to sell off vast federal holdings to industry in the early 1920s. Harding even had his own James Watt—Interior Secretary Albert Fall of New Mexico.

Miller said that although the GOP started off as a progressive party (it grew out of the abolitionist movement of the 1850s), it reconstituted itself as a pro-business party after Roosevelt—the party’s leading progressive—failed to gain the presidential nomination in 1912.

“Roosevelt bolted and formed the progressive Bull Moose Party,” said Miller, who’s writing a biography of another famous Republican of that era, Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the U.S. Forest Service. When that party failed, he said, “progressives came back [to the GOP] with their tails between their legs.”

Either that or they became Democrats. That’s what Harold Ickes did. Ickes, “a Theodore Roosevelt progressive,” in the words of University of Wisconsin historian John Cooper, switched his party allegiance and, under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, went on to become one of the most conservation-minded Interior secretaries in U.S. history. “FDR was the real heir to Theodore Roosevelt in terms of conservation policy,” Cooper said. Smith, the Saylor expert, agreed, adding that the Republican Party “became more conservative in the 1930s in response to FDR.

“Republicans were always more proÐeconomic development than they were pro-environment,” Smith added. Cooper agreed with that, saying, “I’m not sure Republicans were ever that environmental. [Theodore] Roosevelt and Pinchot [the Republican governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s] are the two great icons, but two people do not a party position make. Neither really converted the party.”

THE LOSS OF JEFFORDS

Against this historical backdrop stand George W. Bush and Jeffords, the once obscure Vermont senator who is now a household name thanks to his decision to leave the Republican Party and become an independent—a decision that handed the Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.

Following the announcement, Bush officials, in an obvious attempt at damage control, tried to paint the Jeffords defection as nothing more than the act of a disgruntled maverick. “He’s basically a Democrat” is how one administration higher-up described it. Bush himself said he “respectfully” disagreed with Jeffords’s assertion that moderates were no longer welcome in the party.

But it’s clear from the history of the GOP that Jeffords’s abandonment of his party—while it resulted in a shift in the balance of power—is more than an anomalous development: it revealed the long-standing tension between the party’s right and left wings—between, one could say, the party of Theodore Roosevelt and the party of Ronald Reagan.

“What could be starting to develop here is an insurgent movement within the Republican Party,” said Miller. Added Cooper, “Good old-fashioned insurgency could be coming back with a vengeance.”

Speaking in the days immediately following Jeffords’s announcement, both historians said that it will be interesting to see whether other Republican moderates—in particular, John McCain of Arizona and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island—follow Jeffords’s example.

If the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats, Cooper said he thinks Bush is in deep trouble. “Who will believe him when he starts talking sweetness and light and tries to convince everyone he’s bipartisan? When he had his way, he governed from the right. He tried to roll the Democrats.”

Miller said that with a Democratic Senate, the hard line Bush has taken on many environmental issues—drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rolling back President Clinton’s roadless initiative—could end up backfiring.

“This has remarkable implications for environmental policy,” Miller said. “The things he targeted are now going to come under considerable review” in the Senate.

“SAINT JOHN”

In today’s political climate, it’s hard to imagine John Saylor being a Republican—at least not the John Saylor who was a hardcore environmentalist. Yet the man who was called “Mr. Conservation” by colleagues and “Saint John” by environmentalists was a clear political descendant of Theodore Roosevelt when it came to conservation matters. Whether the Grand Old Party can accommodate future John Saylors—or whether it continues to push away conservation-minded politicians like Jeffords—remains to be seen.