Stewart Udall was embroiled in a controversy over Utah’s Rainbow Bridge in 1961. Photo © University of Arizona Library, Special Collections, papers of Stewart L. Udall
If the polls of July prevail, the U.S. Senate in January will include among its members two first cousins named Udall: Tom from New Mexico and Mark from Colorado. Both are Democrats, and like their fathers before them, both are likely to be major voices in years ahead as the nation debates conservation, energy and public land issues.
“I think they will have a lot of influence from the start,” says Steve Smith, a former congressional staffer who is now an assistant regional director with the Wilderness Society. The Udall cousins “bring a family tradition and family style of being able to bring people together who might not otherwise think they have much in common or reason to work together,” he says. “They are real coalition builders.”
Tim Wirth, a former U.S. senator from Colorado who now heads Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation, says the Udalls would bring an uncommon understanding of public lands to the Senate. “They grew up among the public lands, and they understand them better than anybody in the Senate has for a long, long time,” he says. If elected, “these two guys will become Mr. and Mr. Public Lands.”
By carrying the name Udall, the cousins shoulder a hefty conservation lineage. Tom Udall is the son of Stewart Udall, who was Interior secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Stewart Udall made protecting the environment and preserving lands for the public’s benefit the cornerstones of his political identity at a time when few politicians understood the need for resource protection. Mark Udall is the son of Stewart’s younger brother Morris, whose environmental protectionism and pragmatism marked his three decades in the House.
Both younger Udalls have carried on the family conservation legacy in their respective states. But political observers say the newbie senators, if elected, won’t have an easy time sticking to their positions at a time when gas prices are topping $4 a gallon and the clamor is growing louder to expand drilling for oil and gas in coastal areas, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and even the Rocky Mountains. The Udalls will also have to grapple with increasing demand for the West’s mineral resources—New Mexico, for instance, has the nation’s second largest uranium deposits—plus efforts to build wind and solar facilities on public lands and to string power lines to distant cities.
“There will be much more reality pumped into the issue” of energy extraction from public lands, says former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson.
DEEP ROOTS
The Udall lineage has made its mark on the West since 1848. The familial antecedent for the cousins Mark and Tom—and also a second cousin already in the Senate, Oregon Republican Gordon Smith—was David King Udall. Originally from Utah, Udall was sent by the Mormon Church in 1880 to establish a settlement among the Hispanics at Saint Johns in northeastern Arizona.
In that difficult agricultural frontier, the Udalls survived and even prospered, with family members becoming prominent in Arizona politics. But arguably none have left such a strong legacy as two of David King’s grandsons, Stewart and Morris.
Stewart Udall represented Arizona’s Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1955 to 1961. During his tenure he supported the creation of the interstate highway system and the expansion of reclamation projects in the West. At one time, he favored damming the Grand Canyon, one of several positions he later recanted.
His passion for conservation came to the fore when he served as secretary of the Interior in the 1960s. The Quiet Crisis, his 1963 history of the American conservation movement, was also a call for restraint during a time when the United States had become enamored with its new technological prowess. As Interior secretary he championed the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and was formative in developing the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. He helped establish four national parks, six national monuments, nine national recreation areas, twenty national historic sites and nine national lakeshores and seashores.
After leaving office, Stewart Udall wrote books and worked as a lawyer, often representing Navajos and other former uranium miners who suffered from radiation poisoning. Now eighty-eight, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A 2005 story in the Los Angeles Times described the iconic Udall as “perhaps the politician most responsible for the public lands you hike, the rivers you kayak, the mountains you climb and the wilderness you contemplate.”
Stewart’s younger brother Morris, who was commonly called “Mo,” assumed his older brother’s congressional seat in 1961 and kept it for thirty years. During his tenure as chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, he sponsored a massive water development project called the Central Arizona Project. He was also a key figure in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which designated almost 80 million acres as public lands, a third of which was set aside as wilderness. Mo Udall also helped ensure that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be barred to oil and gas exploration unless specifically opened by Congress.
Mo Udall ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, losing to Jimmy Carter.
But his most enduring legacy is his skill in compromise and consensus building, which brought him friends and supporters in Congress. Among them is the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain. Udall left Congress in 1991 and died from Parkinson’s disease in 1998.
THE NEXT GENERATION
The younger Udalls both entered politics in their forties. Tom, now sixty, was elected to Congress in 1998 after serving as New Mexico’s attorney general. Mark, fifty-eight, emerged as a political player after a twenty-year career with Colorado Outward Bound. After serving in the state legislature, he also assumed his congressional seat in 1998, representing the university town of Boulder.
Both cousins like to sweat. Mark has climbed often in Asia’s Himalaya Mountains. He summited Kanchenjunga, the world’s third tallest peak, and tried to climb the highest, Everest. The two cousins once met by accident while one was ascending and the other descending Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, located on the Argentina-Chile border. Last year, they climbed Culebra, near the New Mexico-Colorado border. It was the only 14,000-foot peak among Colorado’s fifty-three that Mark had not yet climbed.
This boot-leather time is evident in the legislative agenda of both Udalls. Both have worked to protect and maintain access to public lands. In New Mexico, Tom succeeded in getting 102,000 acres of the Carson National Forest, called the Valle Vidal, removed from oil exploration. Mark brokered a compromise that created the James Peak Wilderness Area that straddles the Continental Divide, allowing snowmobiles and mountain bikes on the west side but none on the east side, both in accordance with local wishes.
If elected, bearing the name Udall may attract a measure of attention to the Senate newcomers, but both will have to make their own way. What mattered to Mo Udall’s success, says former Senator Simpson, was that “he dealt with things issue by issue. He was a pretty practical guy.”
Practicality for Mark Udall, like his father, has meant compromise. He is no ideologue. He looks for areas of agreement with fellow legislators. With anti-gay crusader Marilyn Musgrave, for example, he has co-sponsored line-item veto legislation. With immigration warrior Tom Tancredo, he worked for mass transit. With state water rights defender Scott McInnis, he found a compromise that created a national recreation area along the Colorado River. He voted against declaring war on Iraq, but has aroused the ire of leftist demonstrators for his stance that the United States, having created a mess, cannot preemptively leave.
Also the Udalls will likely take heat from their supporters in the environmental community for not doing enough to further conservation causes. Smith, of the Wilderness Society, says he and others were not entirely satisfied with what the Udall cousins authored when it came to designating wilderness. However, Smith adds, the cousins, like their fathers before them, have demonstrated the ability to keep their sights on the big picture. “That seems to be how their thinking works, to consider everybody involved and keep the broadest coalition going, rather than picking one side,” he says.
That ability to build coalitions, says Oscar Simpson III, a public lands organizer for the National Wildlife Federation, was demonstrated by Tom Udall in New Mexico at the Valle Vidal, the giant chunk of land in the Sangre de Cristo Range, just east of Ted Turner’s ranch. “He is a good spokesman for the Forest Service,” says Simpson, who calls himself a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican.”
Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says Mark Udall is a “fine example of generational continuity of thinking.” He trims his sails when he needs to, strikes compromises and revises his goals to fit new situations, she says.
Limerick believes the Udalls could fit in the national energy debate by connecting the dots between consumption and impacts to the landscape. “It seems the West is a place where articulate, effective and thoughtful political figures could bring us back to our senses, and to a connection with our actions and their impacts on particular places.”
What has set both of these Udalls apart, observers say, has been their ability to balance today’s needs and those of tomorrow, as their fathers did before them.
“They’re acting today and thinking in terms of long-term consequences, and that’s the best kind of decision making” says Jim Spehar, a former mayor of Grand Junction, Colorado. “In public policy, you don’t see that nearly enough.”