This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild
Wednesday, January 17 | 4:30pm | Auditorium
Nate Schweber Award-Winning Journalist
In the middle of the 20th century, a stylish, literary, martini-drinking couple from Cambridge, Massachusetts, rallied an eclectic group to the aid of America’s national lands. Bernard and Avis DeVoto learned that corrupt U.S. Senators Joe McCarthy and Pat McCarran were bent on selling more than 200 million acres of public lands far below their value to a coterie of ranchers in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Julia and Paul Child, Ansel Adams, Adlai Stevenson, Wallace Stegner, and a few dedicated national park rangers threw themselves into the fight that the Devotos led against some of the most powerful men in America. It was a no-holds political battle that in the end led to the DeVotos being censored by McCarthy and his attorney Roy Cohn and to their blacklisting by FBI chief Herbert Hoover. Without the DeVotos’ passionate dedication to America’s public lands, cattlemen in the West and politicians in Washington would have won a monetary victory, and the American people would have lost an essential part of the nation’s heritage. Nate Schweber tells this swashbuckling storv in This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild. He’ll also be telling it at the Community Center as part of the American Presidents and Politics Series. Once you meet the Devotos, you’ll never forget them or what you owe them.
About the Speaker
Nate Schweber is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Anthony Bourdain’s Explore Parts Unknown, and others. His conservation articles won awards from the Outdoor Writers Association of America in 2015 and 2018. In 2020, a ProPublica series he contributed to won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. A Montana native, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Buy In-Person TicketsBuy Livestream Tickets
Ticket Pricing
Sponsorship
$190
per lecture
($150 Charitable/$40 ticket)
Reserved Seating
$70
per lecture
General Admission
$40
per lecture
Livestream
$40
per lecture
Grande Sponsors: Please call the office for ticket purchase.
Our lectures have been generously sponsored by:
