The Beginning
The organization was formed in the wake of a 1977 ballot issue in Ohio that sought to ban trapping. Anti-hunters, led by the Fund for Animals, spent three years gathering signatures to send a proposed constitutional amendment to the voters that would have outlawed all trapping devices – leg-hold traps, body-gripping traps – even mouse and rat traps!
Jim Glass was the principal founder of the organization. He was an executive at Rockwell International, an aerospace firm, but was a sportsman-activist by avocation. For years, he had been involved with local sportsmen’s clubs, was past president of the state affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and was a board member of the NWF. He was not a trapper, but understood that the animal-rights groups operate just like every other social reform movement; they aim to knock down the wall one brick at a time. Since trapping was not widely practiced, and not fully understood by the public, particularly in an urban state like Ohio, i.e., 11 million people, 8 million of whom live in six cities, the anti-hunters thought they had a recipe for success.
Jim Glass and the Ohio Division of Wildlife worked hand in hand to build a sportsmen’s movement in Ohio. It took three years to do it – spending virtually every night at sportsmen’s club meetings throughout the state. At the end of the three years, they had built a network of clubs and sportsman-activists in every county and political jurisdiction of Ohio.
All of the pre-election surveys forecasted a loss for trapping. However, our own political polling revealed that we could motivate people to vote against the proposed trap ban if we gave them practical reasons to do so. Our campaign was conceived to provide those reasons; for instance, to give an inner city Cleveland mother a reason to vote against a trapping ban. Sportsmen won that issue by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent.
Many of the things learned in that early campaign still guide the way we do business today.
After the issue was settled at the polls, the people who managed the campaign closed up their office and returned to their careers.
Our Founding
In 1977, the people that managed the Ohio trapping voter issue were the only group in the country who had any on-the-ground experience in doing battle with the anti-hunting movement. It didn’t take long for the phone to ring.
The first call came from California, where it was rumored that anti-hunters were about to circulate petitions to send an anti-trapping issue to the voters. Our people, acting on their own time, traveled to Sacramento, consulted with the state wildlife agency, performed an assessment and ascertained that given California election law at the time it was unlikely that the anti’s could qualify an issue. They did not. Other calls came from Connecticut, New Jersey, Georgia and other states.
It occurred to the founders that a void existed in the conservation community. In those days, you had the NRA doing its good work on behalf of the right to keep and bear arms and The National Wildlife Federation, at the time the largest sportsmen’s group in the world, devoting itself exclusively to habitat issues. No organization existed for the purpose of combating the animal-rights movement as it impacted hunters, anglers and trappers. The Sportsmen’s Alliance was formed to fill that void.
Jim Glass made contact with three people who were instrumental in the Ohio trapping victory. They were Daniel Galbreath, the Columbus, Ohio,-based international real estate developer, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates and several Kentucky Derby winners; G. Ray Arnett, who was then president of the National Wildlife Federation and past director of the California Department of Fish and Game. Ray went on to be assistant secretary of the Interior Department under President Reagan’s first administration and later became head of the National Rifle Association. Finally, Dale Haney, who had been chief of the Ohio Wildlife Agency during the trapping campaign, and went on to be president of Woodstream 
Corporation, a major sporting goods firm. Together, they decided to found the organization.
They put together a staff and a 15-member board of directors and incorporated two entities in April 1978. We were originally called The Wildlife Legislative Fund of America and The Wildlife Conservation Fund of America. In 2002, the names were changed to better reflect our organizations’ missions. The Wildlife Legislative Fund of America became the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance (now Sportsmen’s Alliance) and the Wildlife Conservation Fund of America became the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation (now, the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation).
