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Mission 66 and the Environmental Era, 1952 to 1972 When Conrad L. Wirth took over as National Park Service director in December 1951, he inherited a National Park System besieged by its admiring public. Increasing personal incomes, leisure time, and automobile ownership fueled a postwar travel boom for families young and old, and the national parks, it seemed, bore the brunt of it. Visits to the parks mounted from the six million of 1942 to 33 million in 1950 en route to 72 million in 1960. With few improvements since the CCC era and park appropriations again cut during the Korean War, obsolete and deteriorating park roads, campgrounds, employee housing, sanitary systems, and other facilities were overwhelmed. Wirth's response was Mission 66, a 10-year program to upgrade facilities, staffing, and resource management throughout the system by the 50th anniversary of the NPS in 1966. President Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed the program after Wirth gave a slide presentation of park conditions at a January 1956 Cabinet meeting. Congress proved equally receptive, appropriating more than a billion dollars over the 10-year period for Mission 66 improvements. Dozens of park visitor centers, hundreds of employee residences, and the Mather and Albright employee training centers at Harpers Ferry and the Grand Canyon are among the program's enduring legacies. Mission 66 covered an array of other activities that the NPS had foregone during its lean years, including resumption of the National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings to aid in planning for the system's orderly expansion. Beginning in 1960, most historic properties surveyed and found nationally significant were designated national historic landmarks by secretaries of the interior. In 1962 the NPS launched a similar program for natural lands, resulting in the designation of national natural landmarks. Although these programs continued to help identify areas meriting inclusion in the system, their larger function was to officially recognize outstanding places not proposed as parks and encourage their preservation by others. By 1999 some 2,300 historic properties and nearly 600 natural areas had received landmark designation. George B. Hartzog, Jr., succeeded Wirth in January 1964. A hard-driving lawyer and administrator, Hartzog had made his mark as superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, where he laid the foundation for the Gateway Arch. Stewart L. Udall, interior secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, found Hartzog a willing ally in advancing an activist park policy for Johnson's Great Society. During Hartzog's nine-year tenure, 68 of today's park units were added to the systemnearly three-quarters as many as had been added in the preceding 30 years. There were new kinds of parksrivers, trails, performance facilities, urban recreation areasand new directions for NPS managers and professionals. Ecology received more emphasis in natural resource management following a 1963 report by a committee of distinguished scientists chaired by A. Starker Leopold. "As a primary goal, we would recommend that the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man," the Leopold Report declared. "A national park should represent a vignette of primitive America." The natural roles of predators, once routinely killed, and wildfire, customarily suppressed, received special attention. In the field of interpretation, "living history" programs ranging from military demonstrations to farming became popular attractions at many areas. Environmental interpretation, emphasizing ecological relationships, and special environmental education programs for school classes reflected and promoted the nation's growing environmental awareness. The Service's historic preservation activities expanded further beyond the parks. Responding to the destructive effects of urban renewal, highway construction, and other federal projects during the postwar era, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 authorized the NPS to maintain a comprehensive National Register of Historic Places. National Register propertieslocally significant places as well as national historic landmarks in both public and private ownershipwould receive special consideration in federal project planning and various forms of preservation assistance. On July 10, 1964, Secretary Udall signed a management policy memorandum prepared by Hartzog and his staff. "In looking back at the legislative enactments that have shaped the National Park System, it is clear that the Congress has included within the growing System three different categories of areasnatural, historical, and recreational," it said. "Each of these categories requires a separate management concept and a separate set of management principles coordinated to form one organic management plan for the entire System." Natural areas were to be managed for perpetuation and restoration of their natural values, although significant historic features present should be maintained "to the extent compatible with the primary purpose for which the area was established." In historical areas these emphases were reversed. In recreational areas, natural and historic resource preservation would be subordinate to public use; the primary objective was to foster "active participation in outdoor recreation in a pleasing environment." Previously, a 1953 act of Congress had legally defined the National Park System to exclude most areas in the recreational category. That law had reflected concern that if reservoirs, hunting, and other such developments and uses were allowed anywhere in the system, they might spread to the more traditional areas as well. Udall's memorandum seemingly violated the 1953 act by granting system membership to all recreational areas, but it allayed the underlying concern by placing them in a distinct subclass with distinct management policies. The NPS developed separate policy manuals for the three area categories and published them in 1968. Two years later law caught up with administrative initiative: the General Authorities Act of August 18, 1970, redefined the system to include all areas managed "for park, monument, historic, parkway, recreational, or other purposes" by the NPS. Udall's memorandum also called for continued expansion of the system "through inclusion of additional areas of scenic, scientific, historical and recreational value to the Nation." This perennial objective was reiterated in another policy memorandum signed June 18, 1969, by President Richard Nixon's first interior secretary, Walter J. Hickel. "The National Park System should protect and exhibit the best examples of our great national landscapes, riverscapes and shores and undersea environments; the processes which formed them; the life communities that grow and dwell therein; and the important landmarks of our history," it said. "There are serious gaps and inadequacies which must be remedied while opportunities still exist if the System is to fulfill the people's need always to see and understand their heritage of history and the natural world. "You should continue your studies to identify gaps in the System and recommend to me areas that would fill them. It is my hope that we can make a significant contribution to rounding out more of the National Park System in these next few years." With this charge in hand, Hartzog ordered preparation of a National Park System Plan, published in 1972. Its history component divided American history into thematic categories like those used in national historic landmark studies. Existing historical parks were assigned to the categories, revealing gaps wherever the categories were unrepresented. By maximizing the number of categories and allowing each park to represent only one of them, the plan determined that at least 196 new parks were needed to treat all major aspects of American history. The plan's natural history component, taking a similar approach, identified more than 300 aspects of natural history requiring initial or greater representation. Although recreational areas did not lend themselves to the same kind of thematic analysis and were not addressed in the plan, they now composed the fastest growing category of parks. Of the 98 permanent additions to the system from 1952 through 1972, 28 fell in the recreational categorymore than triple the number added during the 193351 period. Historical additions continued to lead, totaling 58. Only 12 additions were classed as natural. This modest increase in traditional national parks and natural monuments reflected the reduced availability of lands meeting traditional natural park standards and capable of management under traditional park policies. In fact, however, many of the recreational areas were as much natural in character as recreational in use. Additions in all categories were aided by the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965. As amended in 1968, the act earmarked revenues from visitor fees, surplus property sales, motorboat fuel taxes, and offshore oil and gas leasing for federal and state parkland acquisition. The fund was administered by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a new Interior Department bureau established in 1962 on the recommendation of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, chaired by Laurance S. Rockefeller. Wirth opposed creation of the new bureau, which took away the Service's responsibilities for recreation planning and assistance along with some of its staff and funds. Ultimately the NPS regained these functions when BOR, reconstituted in 1978 as the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service, expired in 1981.
Of the 12 permanent additions in the natural area category, seven were national parks and five were national monuments. A thirteenth addition, Marble Canyon National Monument, was later incorporated in Grand Canyon National Park. Congress authorized Virgin Islands National Park, the first natural addition of the period, in 1956 to protect nearly two-thirds of the land mass and most of the colorful offshore waters of St. John Island. The park owes its existence to the contributions of Laurance Rockefeller's Jackson Hole Preserve, Inc. Buck Island Reef, also in the Virgin Islands, was the first natural monument of the period in 1961.
Canyonlands National Park was established in 1964 to protect a remote region of exceptional scenic quality and archeological and scientific importance at the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers in southeastern Utah. A 1971 addition brought the park's total area to more than 337,000 acres.
The act defined wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." For designation as wilderness an area was to be without permanent improvements or human habitation, to retain its "primeval character and influence," and generally to contain at least 5,000 acres. Among other provisions, the act directed the secretary of the interior to review within 10 years all roadless areas of 5,000 acres or more in the National Park System and to report to the president on their suitability for wilderness designation. The president was then to report his recommendations to Congress for action. Wirth had opposed application of the wilderness legislation to the park system, believing that the NPS recognized and managed wilderness sufficiently without it. Because Congress declined to exempt the system, the act forced a careful examination of all potentially qualifying parklands and consideration as to which should be perpetuated without roads, use of motorized equipment, structures, or other developments incompatible with formal wilderness designation. By 1999 the NPS had studied many potential wilderness areas and Congress had confirmed parts of 45 parks as wilderness.
Sixty-one historical areas joined the system from the beginning of 1952 to the end of 1972. Three of themSt. Thomas and Mar-A-Lago national historic sites and the National Visitor Centerwere later dropped, leaving 58 still present.
With enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, all historical parks were entered in the National Register of Historic Places. This made NPS and other federal agency actions affecting them subject to review by state historic preservation officers and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a new federal agency established by the act. A 1971 presidential order required the NPS to nominate to the National Register all qualifying historic features in its natural and recreational areas as well. These resources, most of local or regional significance, were now entitled to the same consideration as the historical parks when faced with potentially harmful actions. The increased attention to historic resources outside parks categorized as historical tended to blur the distinctions among the area categories, contributing to the Service's decision to terminate their official status in 1977.
As noted above, 28 permanent additions to the National Park System from 1952 through 1972 fell in the recreational category. More than half were seashores and reservoir-related areas along with another parkway. The others were new kinds of areas: lakeshores, rivers, a performing arts facility, a trail, and two major urban recreation complexes. In 1963 the recently formed Recreation Advisory Council, composed of six Cabinet-level officials, proposed a system of national recreation areas and set criteria for them. They were to be spacious, generally including at least 20,000 acres of land and water. They were to be within 250 miles of urban centers and accommodate heavy, multi-state patronage. Their natural endowments would need to be "well above the ordinary in quality and recreation appeal, being of lesser significance than the unique scenic and historic elements of the National Park System, but affording a quality of recreation experience which transcends that normally associated with areas provided by State and local governments." The scale of investment and development was to be high enough to warrant federal involvement. Cooperative management arrangements involving the Forest Service, the Corps of Engineers, and possibly other federal bureaus besides the NPS were expected. The recreational area category formally adopted by the NPS in 1964 reflected the Recreation Advisory Council's criteria, although not all units that the NPS assigned to the category were of the type envisioned by the council. Several areas were categorized as recreational largely by default, because they did not fully meet the Service's criteria and policies for natural or historical areas. The NPS resumed shoreline studies in the mid-1950s with generous support from the Mellon family foundations. Their results were published in Our Vanishing Shoreline (1955), A Report on the Seashore Recreation Survey of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (1955), Our Fourth Shore: Great Lakes Shoreline Recreation Area Survey (1959), and Pacific Coast Recreation Area Survey (1959). The NPS also prepared detailed studies of individual projects. The fruits of this program included eight more national seashores and four national lakeshores during the period. Most of them forestalled residential, commercial, and highway development and protected natural and historic features.
The 1966 act authorizing Cape Lookout National Seashore, extending southwest from Cape Hatteras National Seashore on North Carolina's Outer Banks, also subordinated natural conservation to recreation. Like Assateague, however, Cape Lookout has been lightly developed for recreational use.
The final national seashore of the period, Cumberland Island, Georgia, was least consistent with the recreational area concept. Its 1972 legislation included stringent development restrictions: with certain exceptions, "the seashore shall be permanently preserved in its primitive state, and no development of the project or plan for the convenience of visitors shall be undertaken which would be incompatible with the preservation of the unique flora and fauna . . . , nor shall any road or causeway connecting Cumberland Island to the mainland be constructed." It remains among the most "natural" of the seashores.
The NPS became involved at 12 existing or proposed reservoirs during the 195272 period. Ten of these national recreation areas are still in the park system, two having been transferred to Forest Service administration. As with their predecessors, NPS responsibilities at most were set by cooperative agreements, although several were authorized by specific acts of Congress. Four deserve special mention. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, inaugurated in 1958, encompasses Lake Powell, formed by Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona and extending into southeastern Utah. The 186-mile-long impoundment was the price environmentalists paid for their defeat of the Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument earlier that decade. An arm of the reservoir provides boat access to Rainbow Bridge National Monument, formerly remote and difficult to reach.
The Ozark authorization foreshadowed the comprehensive Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of October 2, 1968. The act "declared to be the policy of the United States that certain selected rivers of the Nation, which, with their immediate environments, possess outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, cultural, or other similar values, shall be preserved in free-flowing condition, and that they and their immediate environments shall be protected for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations." The act identified eight rivers and adjacent lands in nine states as initial components of a national wild and scenic rivers system, to be administered variously by the secretaries of agriculture and the interior. Only one of them, Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway in Minnesota and Wisconsin, became a unit of the National Park System. Ideal for canoeing, it contains some 230 miles of the Saint Croix River and its Namekagon tributary noted for clear flowing water and abundant wildlife.
On the same day that President Johnson approved the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, North Cascades and Redwood national parks, and Lake Chelan and Ross Lake national recreation areas, he also signed the National Trails System Act. The act provided for national recreation trails accessible to urban areas, to be designated by the secretary of the interior or the secretary of agriculture according to specified criteria; and national scenic trails, generally longer and more remote, to be established by Congress. It designated two national scenic trails as initial components of the trails system: the Appalachian Trail, extending 2,100 miles from Mount Katahdin, Maine, to Springer Mountain, Georgia; and the Pacific Crest Trail, running 2,600 miles from Canada to Mexico along the Cascades, Sierras, and other ranges. The Pacific Crest Trail would be administered by the secretary of agriculture and the Appalachian Trail by the secretary of the interior. The Appalachian Trail was thus brought into the National Park System. Conceived in 1921 by Benton MacKaye, forester and philosopher, it was largely completed by 1937. With its inclusion in the park system, the NPS became responsible for its protection and maintenance within federally administered areas; states were encouraged to care for other portions. An advisory council appointed by the secretary of the interior under the act includes representatives of the 14 states through which the trail passes, the Appalachian Trail Conference, other private organizations, and involved federal agencies. The National Trails System Act ordered 14 other routes to be studied for possible national scenic trail designation. Four of them later received the designation, two becoming units of the park system in 1983: Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, paralleling the Natchez Trace Parkway; and Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail, running from the mouth of the Potomac River to Conemaugh Gorge in Pennsylvania partly along the C&O Canal towpath. Congress designated two more as national scenic trails and five more as national historic trails between 1978 and 1987; the NPS gained coordinating roles for all but two of them, but not administrative responsibilities sufficient to list them as park system units. Congress authorized the last of the four parkways now classed as system units in 1972. The John D. Rockefeller, Junior, Memorial Parkway is an 82-mile scenic corridor linking West Thumb in Yellowstone and the south entrance of Grand Teton National Park. The only national parkway west of the Mississippi, it commemorates Rockefeller's generous contributions to several parks, including Grand Teton. The NPS became involved with another new kind of park in 1966, when department store heiress Catherine Filene Shouse donated part of her Wolf Trap Farm in Fairfax County, Virginia, to the United States for a performing arts center. The Filene Center, an open-sided auditorium, was completed for its first summer season in 1971. Performances at Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts are arranged by the private but well-subsidized Wolf Trap Foundation. The NPS also had custody of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., from 1972 to 1994, when Congress gave its board of trustees full responsibility for it. Performing arts assumed major roles at two other park units during the period, Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas, and Ford's Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. To further its theme of international amity, Chamizal accommodates performing groups from Mexico and the United States. The NPS restored Ford's Theatre, which it had acquired in the 1933 reorganization and maintained as the Lincoln Museum, as an operating theater in 1965-68. Because both places had historical commemoration and interpretation as their primary purposes, they were classed as historical rather than recreational areas.
Gateway encompasses four major units totaling more than 26,500 acres. In Jamaica Bay, the primary aim is conservation of bird life and other natural resources. At Breezy Point, Staten Island, and Sandy Hook, recreational beach use predominates, although the legislation made special provision for preserving and using the historic structures on Sandy Hook and Staten Island. The secretary of the interior designated Sandy Hook's Fort Hancock and the Sandy Hook Proving Grounds a national historic landmark in 1982.
Before Gateway and Golden Gate, nearly all the Service's holdings in major urban areas outside the national capital region had been small historic sites, where the primary concerns were historic preservation and interpretation. These two acquisitions placed the NPS squarely in the business of urban mass recreation for essentially local populationsnot previously a federal responsibility. Like earlier departures into historic sites, parkways, and reservoir areas, this move stirred controversy about the bureau's proper role. Attendant burdens of funding, staffing, and management refocus would prove significant challenges for years to come. |
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