Chapter 11:
Ideals and Controversies of Expansion
The main flaw in the performance of many existing
conservation associations is that most concentrate on a chosen holy
grail, and too few organizations have entered the fight for the total
environment.
Stewart L. Udall, 1963
A park, however splendid, has little appeal to a
family that cannot reach it. . . . The new conservation is built on a
new promiseto bring parks closer to the people.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968
If you keep standing for perfection, you won't get
anything.
Phillip Burton, 1979
Initially hailed as a milestone of environmental
insight, the Leopold Committee Report of 1963 more accurately reawakened
and redirected concerns about the biological health of the national
parks evident since the late 1920s. In a similar vein, the rapid
expansion of the national park system during the 1960s and 1970s merely
intensified the long debate over Congress's responsibility to protect
so-called national park standards. Again the issue pitted traditional
perceptions of the national parks against the growing determination to
protect all kinds of landscapes, not just those blessed with outstanding
geological wonders. Monumentalism was so fixed in the American mind,
however, that its persuasiveness indicating the establishment of new
national parks was not to be easily dislodged. "Our National Parks are
much more than recreational resorts and museums of unaltered nature,"
wrote Robert Sterling Yard in 1923, defending the national park
standards of his own generation; "they are also the Exposition of the
Scenic Supremacy of the United States." The nation's reputation as the
leader in world conservation would only be threatened by expansion of
the national park system for expansion's sake. "No other trade-mark," he
concluded, "has cost so much to establish and pays such dividends of
business, national prestige, and patriotism." Nevertheless, he warned,
his concerns now fully obvious, "it is proposed to destroy it." [1]
Especially in the East, calls for "inferior" national
parks threatened to distract attention from the world-class landscapes
already included in the national park system. Public recreation, Yard
charged, not scenic preservation, was the true motivation behind these
newer parks. He did not consider recreation unimportant; similarly, he
had earlier admitted that a limited number of areas might qualify for
national park status on the basis of their plants, animals, or
wilderness alone. [2] In the absence of
monumental scenery, however, the need to protect nondescript resources
in national parks must be indisputable. The protection of pretty, yet
uninspiring landscapes was itself secondary to the promotion of scenic
wonders whose uniqueness required no further justification for national
park status. "When Zion National Park was created in 1919," he wrote,
offering a recent example, "the whole world knew from the simple
announcement of the fact that another stupendous scenic wonderland had
been discovered. But when pleasant wooded summits, limestone caves,
pretty local ravines, local mountains and gaps between mountains become
National Parks, the name 'Zion National Park' will mean nothing at home
or abroad to those who have not already seen it." Demeaning the scenic
standards of the national parks merely invited "local competition not
only for national parks but for national appropriations. If one
Congressional District secures its own National Park, why not every
other Congressional District in the State, or in many States? . . . What
are Congressmen for if not to look out for their districts?" The
"increasing dozens of little parks" would undermine the financial
support of the larger, spectacular, and clearly legitimate reserves. "A
National Park Pork Barrel," he bitterly concluded, "would be the final
degradation!" [3]
For the next half century, Yard and other purists
fought against the use of the term "national park" to describe
battlefields, historic sites, parkways, recreation areas, and other
federal preserves of limited scenic impressiveness. [4] Dr. John C. Merriam, president of the
Carnegie Institution, defended Yard's objections to park expansion in
this vein, writing in 1926 "the power and order behind nature." National
Parks represent opportunities for worship in which one comes to
understand more fully certain of the attributes of nature and its
Creator, Merriam said, elaborating on his definition. "They are not
objects to be worshipped, but they are altars over which we may
worship." [5] Reverence for nature, as
exemplified by public respect for the sanctity of the existing national
parks, would only be eroded by heedless expansion of the system into
areas of commonplace topography. At stake, in other words, was the
nineteenth century's sense of "pilgrimage," the feeling that only by
journeying west did one come face to face with nature in its most
majestic, pristine, and symbolic setting. [6]
In contrast to Yard and Merriam, most
preservationists of the succeeding generationgrappling with the
deterioration of the environment as a wholesimply had far less in
common with the image of national park as evidence of the country's
spiritual evolution and cultural superiority. Certainly by the 1960s,
that image had been tempered by the belief that nature as a whole was
important. National parks, in addition to protecting the "museum pieces"
of the American landscape, might also afford protection to land
threatened by housing developments, shopping centers, expressways, and
similar forms of urban encroachment. Stemming the tide of urban
development in the future hinged on educating Americans in the cities
and suburbs to appreciate the significance of the natural world being
sacrificed in their own backyards. Indeed, the loss of more than a
million acres of open space annually throughout the United States of the
1960s and 1970s greatly alarmed preservation interests. [7] Increasingly they understood the irony of
protecting Yellowstone's two million acres, for example, all the while
losing half as much land every year to housing, highways, parking lots,
and other types of urban sprawl.
Equity of access to the national parks was yet
another pressing issue for modern preservationists. By virtue of their
remoteness, the great western national parks excluded as many Americans
as they accommodated. Even in the East, the largest natural areas were
too far distant, especially for the urban poor. [8] For Robert Sterling Yard's generation, the
quality of park landscapes rather than equity of access to the parks had
been preservationists' major concern. Ignoring the fact that states
outside the Far West might deserve national parks, few other regions of
the country possessed comparable scenic distinctiveness. Whatever course
the United States chose to follow in meeting the everyday needs of its
citizens for outdoor recreation, the distinction between national parks
and purely recreational areas should never be compromised. "None but the
noblest" national parks, Yard pleaded again, "painstakingly chosen, must
be admitted" to the system. [9]
By the early 1960s, Yard's brand of purism had been
questioned by all but the most tradition-bound preservationists. Most
still clung to monumentalism emotionally; politically and socially,
however, they realized their movement was changing. For example, if
preservationists were to acknowledge the legitimacy of civil rights, it
seemed advisable to create more national parks closer to where all
Americans lived and worked year-round, not merely where only the middle
and upper classes could afford to spend their summer vacations. [10] Even more to the point, only the federal
government seemed powerful and wealthy enough to forestall the
degradation of natural environments across the country. What Yard had
labeled "pork barrel politics," in other words, struck preservationists
as perhaps their only hope of providing the environment as a whole with
at least minimal protection. [11]
Inevitably, Yard's insistence that recreational needs
be addressed apart from scenic preservation was tempered by political
realities. So, too, did preservationists ignore his warning that
bureaucrats and politicians would be tempted to label any area a
"national park," thereby diluting the original significance of the term.
As opportunities for preservation dwindled with each passing year, these
seemed to be the concerns of a previous generation. What mattered most
to preservationists of the 1960s and 1970s was not what the parks were
called, or even how they might be used, but whether parksany
parkswould be established in the first place.
Across the United States, preservationists championed
dozens of new parks under a wide variety of categories, from seashores
and lakeshores to urban recreation areas. The impetus for park expansion
reached its peak in 1977 with the appointment of Representative Phillip
Burton of California to chair the House Subcommittee on National Parks
and Insular Affairs. By the end of the following year, Burton, a strong
promoter of local, regional, and urban national parks, had pushed
through Congress the largest single legislative package in national park
history. [12]
Although opponents in Congress, the Park Service, and
the mediaechoing Robert Sterling Yardlabeled it the "Parks
Barrel Bill," its passage was never seriously in doubt. To the contrary,
most preservationists endorsed the legislation as an important milestone
in making national parks relevant to an urban-based, industrialized
society. [13] Granted, the simultaneous
campaign for huge wilderness parks in Alaska indicated that traditional
values of landscape protection were also very much alive in the United
States. Among individuals and organizations equally committed to the
establishment of national parks outside the scenic public lands of the
West, however, passage of the Omnibus Bill of 1978 heralded a new era of
legitimacyand successfor their cause.
First applied to Yellowstone, the term "national
park" inevitably fixed an indelible image of grandeur and mystery in the
public mind. It followed that any national park established subsequently
would be measured against Yellowstone, not only because it was the first
to be called a national park but because the region held such deep
significance as a symbol for American culture. In that vein, in 1961 the
historian John Ise addressed the issue of national park standards:
"There were in 1902 six national parks of superlative magnificence; but
between 1902 and 1906 three new parks were set asideWind Cave,
Sullys Hill, and Plattwhich did not measure up to this high
standard." Ise concluded the problem was the absence of a "Congressional
policy governing the establishment of national parks," coupled with the
lack of a "Park Service to screen park proposals." As a result, these
three "inferior" national parks "just happened to be established." [14]
In fact, preservation of the three areas marked a
subtle rather than accidental shift in national park policy. By the
early twentieth century, the perception of national parks as the
embodiment of American romanticism and cultural achievement had been
joined by the identification of their value for promoting public health
and physical fitness. Invariably, interest groups advocating hiking,
horseback riding, and other forms of outdoor recreation asked: Why
should only states in the Far West have national parks? Wind Cave,
Sullys Hill, and Platt were but the first examples of the political
response to this latent desire for all states in the union to share in
the national park experiment.
The problem of compensating for the geological
limitations of park projects outside the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada,
and desert Southwest compounded the dilemma of trying to justify each
proposal on traditional grounds. The term "national park," after all,
was first applied to the incomparable wonders of Yellowstone. Where
equivalent natural features were lacking, other compensatory values had
to be found. In this vein, John F. Lacey of Iowa introduced the proposed
Wind Cave national park in South Dakota to the House of Representatives
as "substantially what the Yellowstone country would be if the geysers
should die. It has been excavated by hot water in the same manner that
the geyser land is now being excavated in the Yellowstone." Wind Cave's
dramatic past, however, was obviously not the geological equal of
Yellowstone's exciting present. "The active forces are no longer in
operation there," Lacey admitted; "there is no hot water, and the
conditions that formerly prevailed there have ceased." Still, he argued,
finally abandoning his extravagant comparison, "a series of very
wonderful caves remain, and the Land Department has withdrawn this tract
from settlement." The "few claims" of settlers in the area amounted to
but "a few hundred acres" of the nine thousand proposed for park status;
"I think it is a very meritorious proposition," he therefore concluded,
"and that this tract of land ought to be reserved to the American
people." [15]
Wind Cave's projected territory of only nine thousand
acres, in comparison to Yellowstone's 2.2 million, also foreshadowed the
fate of most parklands to be created outside the mountain and desert
West. With the exception of national parks equally restricted to either
rugged or undesirable terrain, new reserves in the East, Middle West,
and South would likewise be significantly limited in scope. This factor,
too, posed a dilemma for activists seeking to justify the fact that
areas outside the West still qualified for national park status. Most
simply lacked the diversity of natural features one expected to find as
a matter of course in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and the Grand
Canyon. Anticipating the problem, proponents of the so-called lesser
parks could not help but inflate their descriptions, arguing in effect
that the quantity of one type of feature was enough compensation for the
absence of several points of interest. Binger Hermann, the commissioner
of the General Land Office, thus quoted extensively from the reports of
his surveyor, who found Wind Cave literally filled with "subterranean
wonders." Examples included great caverns and grotesque-looking
rooms,"large grottoes," and "tons of specimens." "Those who visited the
Yellowstone National Park and the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky," the
description concluded, "will all accord the Wind Cave only a second
place to the Yellowstone Canyon and the geysers of the former and
declare the Wind Cave superior, in point of attractiveness, to the
Mammoth Cave." [16]
In the final analysis, those and similar linkages to
Yellowstone National Park proved decisive in winning park status for
Wind Cave. Supporters of the park effectively if excessively argued that
Wind Cave, like Yellowstone, was a monumental "wonder." One simply had
to go underground to appreciate the resemblance. The names of Wind
Cave's features further betokened its uniqueness and worthiness for
national park status"Pearly Gates,"Fair Grounds," "Garden of
Eden," "Castle Garden," and "Blue Grotto," to name but a few. [17] Besides, Congress could hardly find
economic reasons to object to the protection of only nine thousand
acres, but a minute fraction of one of the larger existing parks.
Indeed, opposition in both the House and Senate was negligible. On
January 8, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Wind Cave
National Park Act into law. [18]
In retrospect, if critics of Wind Cave found little
to justify its designation as a national park, Congress in 1902 clearly
felt otherwise. Right from the outset, Wind Cave was introduced and
discussed as a national park project. Sullys Hill National Park,
established by presidential proclamation on June 2, 1904, obviously was
not intended to be a national park in the traditional sense of the term.
In April of 1904, Congress authorized the president to establish "park"
at Sullys Hill in North Dakota; the authorization was actually an
addition to a bill adjusting a previous agreement with the Indians of
the Devils Lake Reservation. Never one to forego an opportunity to
exercise his discretion, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside 960
acres embracing Sullys Hill on the edge of Devils Lake as "Sullys Hill
Park." [19]
Neither Congress's authorization nor Roosevelt's
proclamation established a national park at Sullys Hill;
nevertheless, the area was eventually referred to by that term. Lacking
any monumental significance and barely one and a half square miles in
area, Sullys Hill later struck its critics as a perfect example of the
depreciation of national park standards. Not until 1914 did Congress
appropriate $5,000 to manage the reserve; even then, the money was not
used to operate Sullys Hill as a national park but as a game preserve
under the direct supervision of the U.S. Biological Survey. [20]
The establishment in 1906 of Platt National Park in
Oklahoma seemed to invite further abuse of national park standards. In
1902 Congress purchased 640 acres of spring-fed, low rolling hills near
the town of Sulphur from the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, designating
it the Sulphur Springs Reservation. Four years later, its ordinary
topography in no way deterred members of the Connecticut delegation in
Congress from seeking the preserve as a memorial to the late senator
from their state, Orville Hitchcock Platt. A resolution to that effect
cleared both the House and Senate in late June of 1906; afterward, the
Sulphur Springs Reservation was known officially as "Platt National
Park." [21]
Among Platt, Sullys Hill, and Wind Cave only the
latter, eventually enlarged to twenty-eight thousand acres, survived as
a national park. Yet the precedent of awarding national park status to
only the most inspiring western landscapes had clearly been broken.
Gradually, proposals for national parks outside the scenic West were
introduced into Congress with a frequency their detractors considered
alarming. Stephen T. Mather, as first director of the National Park
Service, defended the scenic reputation of the existing parks by
channeling this enthusiasm for preserves outside the West into the
emerging state parks movement. Under Mather's direction, for example,
the Park Service was instrumental in the formation of the National
Conference on State Parks, which held its first meeting in Des Moines,
Iowa, in 1921. Time and again throughout the coming decade, Mather
enlisted the support of the organization to disarm proponents of
so-called unworthy national park projects. In each instance he suggested
that state ownership and control were probably more appropriate for
areas whose natural features were renowned only among residents of the
neighboring region or locality. [22]
Mather's initial problems with the preservation
community were due in large part to his obvious reluctance to apply any
such assessment universally. The Hot Springs Reservation, Arkansas,
given national park status in 1921, and the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky,
authorized five years later, were two early examples of his own
concession to the fact that not every national park could possess
outstanding national significance on a par with Yellowstone, Yosemite,
and the Grand Canyon. [23] Mammoth Cave,
like Wind Cave, was a subterranean wonder at the very least; in
contrast, the Hot Springs Reservation was clearly a resort and little
more. The National Parks Association further objected to the lack of
study prior to determining that Mammoth Cave itself deserved national
park status. Instead, Robert Sterling Yard charged the Park Service with
playing "national politics." "A graver situation cannot be imagined," he
concluded, "at a time when a number of southern states are clamoring for
National Parks to bring them the tourist business which the fame of the
title is supposed to guarantee." [24]
As a purist, Yard would have Americans go west to
visit the national parks. As a government official, on the other hand,
Mather could not be so politically insensitive to the call for landscape
protection in the eastern half of the United States, regardless of its
topographical shortcomings. Initially, concessions to monumentalism
could be made by supporting parks with at least some semblance of
dramatic uplift. Acadia National Park, established in 1919 along the
rugged seacoast of Mount Desert Island, Maine, was the first example.
The park's highest point is Cadillac Mountain, but 1,530 feet above sea
level. Yet the standard description of Mount Desert Island as simply
"beautiful," the naturalist Freeman Tilden later wrote, "utterly fails
to do justice to this rock-built natural fortress which thrusts forward
into the Atlantic and challenges its power." Where else, Tilden asked,
"can you find anything in our country to match these mountains that come
down to the ocean, . . . altogether such a sweep of rugged coastline as
has no parallel from Florida to the Canadian provinces?" Even Robert
Sterling Yard, as self-appointed protector of national park standards,
defined Acadia in 1923 as "our standard bearer for National Park making
in the East." It was "only twenty-seven square miles in area," he
conceded; "nevertheless" he agreed, "it includes National Park
essentials in full measure." [25]
Of course rugged scenery was the most important
"essential." Next in consideration came uniqueness. Acadia was one of a
kind, the highest and most rugged portion of the Atlantic coast
between Maine and Florida. In contrast, the Shenandoah national park
project, authorized in 1926, did not win the universal endorsement of
preservation interests. Granted, the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah
National Park are far higher than Cadillac Mountain in Acadia; they were
not recognized in 1926, however, as the highest mountains of
their type. Only "the impressive massing of lofty mountains," Yard
argued, "still covered with primitive forest, in the Great Smoky
Mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina," not "the much lesser
Shenandoah location," met every existing national park standard of
sublime scenery and "primitive quality." To recognize Shenandoah as a
national park, its value for outdoor recreation aside, would be, in
effect, to condone "the fatal belief that different standards can be
maintained in the same system without the destruction of all standards."
[26]
Among preservationists as a whole, growing
recognition of the importance of biological conservation steadily
undermined support for Yard's rigid point of view. The National Park
Service itself had begun to look beyond its traditional role as steward
of the great "primeval" parkswhere opportunities for further
expansion were limitedby actively promoting additions to the
system whose significance was distinctly historical or archeological
rather than scenic. [27] With the
retirement of Stephen Mather as director of the Park Service in January
1929, Horace M. Albright campaigned for recognition of the agency as the
appropriate custodian of all federal historic and archeological sites.
Among those areas were the great battlefields of the Civil War,
established by Congress beginning in 1890 and placed under direction of
the War Department. [28] To Albright's good
fortune, he met personally in April of 1933 with the new president,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and presented his case for Park Service
administration of the historic and archeological properties managed by
other federal agencies. Roosevelt's own enthusiasm for the proposal
surfaced on June 10, 1933, when he signed an executive order more than
doubling the size of the national park system with the transfer of
sixty-four national monuments, military parks, battlefield sites,
cemeteries, and memorials from the War Department, Forest Service, and
District of Columbia to the National Park Service. [29]
Albright hailed the executive order as a personal
victory and an agency milestone, noting that the nation's historic as
well as scenic heritage was now under the direction of a single
government agency. [30] Robert Sterling
Yard and his supporters were nonetheless incensed by the transfers,
which, in their view, only seemed to demean national park standards even
further. "Self-seeking localities," wrote Ovid Butler, editor of
American Forests, "whose past attempts to obtain national parks
in their own interests have been stopped by public opinion, are
unquestionably awake to the confused situation and the opportunities it
offers for political park making." [31]
As Albright later confessed, political considerations
had in fact influenced his position on the transfers. The survival of
the Park Service, not the issue of national park standards, had been
uppermost on his mind in 1933. "The order of June 10," he wrote,
elaborating on this point, "effectively made the Park Service a very
strong agency with such a distinctive and independent field of service
as to end its possible eligibility for merger or consolidation with
another bureau." That "bureau," he maintained, was none other than the
U.S. Forest Service, the Park Service's perennial nemesis since Gifford
Pinchot had helped instigate opposition to its formation. "His
associates had opposed the creation of the National Park Service in 1915
and 1916," Albright noted, "and there was rumor current in 1933 that Mr.
Pinchot sought to use his influence with President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to effect such a transfer." The future integrity of the Park Service as
an independent agency, in other words, hinged on its gaining
exclusive control over the nation's historical, archeological,
and geological heritage. [32]
Pinchot's successor, Henry S. Graves, had indeed
given the Park Service good reason to be alarmed. Publicly he claimed to
support the establishment of the National Park Service; in truth,
however, he qualified his endorsement repeatedly by insisting not only
that the Park Service, like the Forest Service, should be placed in the
Department of Agriculture but that the new agency should have no
jurisdiction whatsoever over forested lands. [33]
The sacrifice of the Park Service's autonomy under
such an arrangement was not lost on Stephen Mather, Horace Albright, and
their friends in Congress. Equally distressing, the emerging debate
about national park standards inevitably played directly into the hands
of Park Service critics, especially administrators and supporters of the
Forest Service. In February 1927, for example, Henry Graves, now dean of
forestry at Yale University, wrote menacingly about "the problem of the
National Parks." The "problem," he remarked, "arose when with the
extension of the system the original standards were departed from when
areas of mediocre character were incorporated in the Park system."
Specifically, he objected to the apparent inclusion within national
parks of commercial stands of timber, not simply geological wonders of
"special," "unusual," or "exceptional" interest. In other words, he
still opposed the protection of other than worthless lands in the
national parks. "There is," he wrote, underscoring this bias, "the
serious problem of including in their boundaries natural resources of
great economic value." Any deviation from protecting only commercially
valueless lands in the parks, he elaborated, only invited threats to
their integrity. "The presence of extensive natural resources in the
Parks will constitute a standing menace to the system," he warned:
"Economic pressure will force the restriction of the boundaries, . . .
or will jeopardize the very existence of the Parks." [34]
Graves's ominous assessment, bordering on outright
intimidation of preservation interests, was in keeping with the strong
convictions of resource managers who believed the national parks should
be confined strictly to rugged and inaccessible scenery, areas where
their permanence did no possible harm to extractive industries, "If I am
right in the views set forth in the first part of this paper," Graves
wrote, continuing his argument, "it will be the character of the
natural features only [italics added] that should determine the
location of National Parks, and there should not be an effort to develop
a chain of National Parks primarily to secure a distribution of them in
all sections of the country or in the majority of the states." National
Parks, he concluded, invoking the familiar argument of Robert Sterling
Yard and other purists within the preservation movement itself,
"designed to preserve certain extraordinary features of national as
distinguished from local interest, regardless of where they may be
located." [35]
Unlike Robert Sterling Yard, who seemed willing to
accept Graves's assessment as support for his own point of view, Horace
Albright shrewdly recognized the forester's appeal for park standards as
self-serving. Graves was not in fact committed to the scenic integrity
of the parks; rather he was more concerned that they not infringe on
stands of commercial timber or mineral deposits. Restricting the parks
to rugged scenery, however beautiful or inspiring the landscapes might
appear to preservationists, was also the best insurance against losing
valuable resources to the nation's economy.
In the long run, Albright further realized, by
restricting the national parks to world-class, monumental scenery, only
the Far West would have federal preserves within convenient access of
its resident population. The problem with that limitation was its
obvious failure to enhance either public or political support for the
national park system. However much Robert Sterling Yard and his
associates decried the thought, outdoor recreation was not in fact a
by-product of the national park experience. All Americans did not, in
John C. Merriam's words, seek out the national parks for an opportunity
to "worship" nature. Of course, the forms of recreation appropriate to a
national park setting were still open to debate. The American political
system, however, with its emphasis on the ideal of distributing
government services evenly among the states, spelled inevitable changes
for the national park idea once other regions of the country voiced
strong objections to their own lack of sites for outdoor recreation.
The population growth of the United States alone made
the call for new parklands outside the West inevitable. By 1920 the
population of the country had surpassed 100 million, two and a half
times the figure when Yellowstone became the first national park in
1872. Moreover, half the population in 1920 lived in cities and towns
with 2,500 or more residents, up from only one in four Americans living
in urban areas in 1870. [36]
The formation of the National Conference on Outdoor
Recreation, which held its first meeting in Washington, D.C., in May
1924, formally recognized the significance of that trend. The
composition of the conference was equally revealing. No fewer than 128
separate organizations with interests in outdoor recreation sent
delegates. The influence of the National Parks Association and its
executive secretary, Robert Sterling Yard, surfaced in the summary of
resolutions, which endorsed the platform that national parks, as
distinct from local, state, and city parks, "should represent features
of national importance as distinguished from sectional or local
significance." [37] Nevertheless,
additional reports by the conferees suggested that other regions besides
the Far West deserved national parks. Among the natural features
recommended to the federal government for study were the White Mountains
in New Hampshire, the Appalachian highlands, and the headwaters of the
Mississippi River. [38]
Although lack of funding contributed in 1929 to the
dissolution of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation, the needs
it had addressed continued to provoke discussion and study throughout
the 1930s and early 1940s. In 1936, for example, Congress and the
president approved the Park, Parkway, and Recreational Area Study Act,
charging the Park Service with planning and coordinating all federal
activities in outdoor recreation. The Park Service responded in 1941
with the publication of A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem in
the United States, which, among other contributions, contained an
extensive inventory of recreation sites throughout the country. [39]
The intervention of World War II, coupled with the
determination of other federal agencies to protect their own
prerogatives in providing outdoor recreation, effectively undermined
Park Service coordination of the movement. By the middle of the 1950s,
however, the surge in visitation to the national parks provided an
important catalyst for further expansion of the system itself. No less
influential was growing pressure on Congress to address, once and for
all, the imbalance between federal parks in the West and other regions
of the country. As in the case of Everglades National Park, greater
concern about the biological resources of the United States also lay
behind calls for tipping the scales of preservation farther eastward.
Preservationists, increasingly referred to as "environmentalists,"
annually viewed with alarm the loss of fields, woodlands, and marshes
surrounding the burgeoning cities of the nation. Unfortunately, most
state and local governments seemed to lack either the will or the money
to protect some of those lands on their own. Only the federal
government, many preservationists concluded, had both the tax base and
expertise to tackle the problem.
The major stumbling block to the purchase of
threatened areas by the federal government was its traditional
frugality, specifically, its fundamental policy of carving national
parks only from western lands already in the public domain, or from
properties donated to the government by certain states and individuals.
Spurred by mounting losses of open space on the urban fringe, however,
preservationists at last became intolerant of that policy. Certainly by
the 1960s, their environmental concerns forced Congress to reevaluate
the Park Service's customary role as custodian of the masterpieces of
nature and, since the 1930s, the country's public monuments and
historical shrines.
Much as Everglades National Park symbolized the
emergence of the biological perspective in the national park idea, so
Cape Cod National Seashore, authorized in 1961, set many of the
important precedents for the establishment of nontraditional parks in
the 1960s and 1970s. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was not the first national
seashore; that honor went in 1937 to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina.
Yet Cape Hatteras was authorized on the express condition that the state
and private donors would actually purchase the land, which only then
could be turned over to the National Park Service for administration.
[40] At Cape Cod, the federal government
recognized, literally for the first time, the importance of not only
authorizing parks or providing limited amounts of money for their
completion but of actually committing the United States to the purchase
of an entire park project from the outset.
In the West, with its broad expanses of public
domain, some parks might still be established simply by transferring
territory from the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management to
the Park Service. Cape Cod foretold the problems of carving larger
national parks from any area outside the public domain. Of greatest
significance, the national seashore had to be fashioned from lands not
only previously owned but actually occupied. Homes, businesses, and
cottages dotted the Cape; six separate towns were within or adjacent to
the park project. Considering the numbers of people involved, outright
condemnation of all the land needed for the seashore was not a viable
option, either politically or socially. [41] Outside the public domain, the National
Park Service would have to learn new ways of accommodating the concerns
of its neighbors and inholders. [42]
The other problem raised by Cape Cod and its
counterparts was not administrative but philosophical. Simply, precisely
for what reasons did they qualify as national parks, or,
conceding the fact that most were not actually referred to by that term,
why should they still be managed by the National Park Service? In the
Everglades, where similar questions had arisen among preservationists in
the 1930s, its unquestionable uniqueness had saved the park project.
Even its detractors had to admit that the Everglades was the nation's
only subtropical wilderness. Cape Hatteras, Cape Cod, and others
to follow clearly were not one-of-a-kind parks; the United States had
more than 1,500 miles of coastline along the Atlantic seaboard alone.
Besides, Cape Cod National Seashore was not to be carved from pristine
lands but from a combination of open spaces and properties already
claimed for recreation and development.
As in the case of Everglades National Park, a
redefinition of the term "significance" proved to be the key to winning
passage of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The rarity of Cape Cod lay
not in its false identity as the only seashore in the United States but
in its threatened status as one of the few remaining seacoasts whose
features were yet unspoiled by unrestrained and intensive development.
In that vein, Senator Alan Bible of Nevada, as chairman of the Senate
Subcommittee on the Public Lands, asked his colleagues to consider the
bill authorizing the park as a measure "of tremendous importance."
During "the last 15 years," he noted, "there has been a great impetus to
buy seashore property for commercial and private uses. Extensive and
costly developments now line mile after mile of seashore which before
World War II was uninhabited." As a result, more and more Americans,
especially in the most populated regions of the country, were being
denied unrestricted access to coastal beaches. [43]
Indeed the bill was "unique," Bible remarked, "in
that it is the first attempt to develop a unit of the national park
system in an area which is highly urbanized, by comparison with other
areas of the country in which substantial acreage has been set aside for
national park purposes." Truly, Cape Cod would be a park for all
Americans, one third of whom lived "within a day's drive of the area."
"Cape Cod as a national seashore," Senator Leverett Saltonstall of
Massachusetts agreed, would be "dedicated to the spiritual replenishment
of American families increasingly locked in by urbanization and
commercialization who seek the refreshing beauty and natural grandeur of
the clean, open spaces." In this respect, Cape Cod became a precedent.
"Favorable action by Congress on this proposal," Saltonstall said,
concluding with this line of reasoning, "would give encouragement to
other efforts to preserve our rapidly vanishing natural shoreline in
such areas as Padre Island, Texas, the Oregon Dunes, and Point Reyes,
California." [44]
Cape Cod National Seashore, signed into law by
President John F. Kennedy on August 7, 1961, was indeed an important
step leading to the establishment of eight additional seashores over the
next fifteen years. In another major series of parks, the United States
further recognized the desirability of protecting the shorelines of the
Great Lakes. The first of four national lakeshoresPictured Rocks,
Michigan, along the southeastern edge of Lake Superiorwas
authorized on October 15, 1966. Close behind came Indiana Dunes, where
the movement for the preservation of the Great Lakes had in fact
originated a half century before. [45] As
early as 1916, Stephen T. Mather had suggested that "monumental"
grandeur of the great dunes between Chicago, Illinois, and Gary,
Indiana, warranted their possible inclusion in a dunelands national
park. Simultaneously, pioneer ecologists such as John Merle Coulter and
Henry Chandler Cowles drew attention to the Indiana Dunes as a heartland
of biological uniqueness, one worthy of protection exclusive of its
scenic qualities alone. By 1927 a state park of approximately 2,000
acres realized those early ambitions for the region. Finally, following
another forty years of intensive industrial development and urban
encroachment, on November 5, 1966, the federal government authorized the
protection of roughly 6,500 acres of windswept sand, prairie, woodlands,
and marsh as the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. [46]
Yet another major crusade among preservation groups
was the campaign to protect vestiges of America's wild and scenic
rivers. Like seacoasts and lakeshores, riverfront parks also might be
located close to urban centers. Still another advantage was the
self-contained, generally linear nature of river valleys, which required
the acquisition of only limited amounts of adjacent lands. For the cost
of buying several hundred yards of territory on either side of the
streambed, river enthusiasts could enjoy boating, swimming, or walking
beside the waterway without being reminded that civilization lay just
beyond the park boundary.
Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Missouri, authorized
in 1964, disclosed the growing strength of the movement for wild and
scenic rivers in the United States. [47]
The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, approved by Congress four years later,
formally established an entire system of national riverways through the
designation of eight additional streams in that category. [48] Management by the National Park Service,
however, was at first limited to the Ozark National Scenic Riverways and
the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Both
the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management had successfully
defended their right to administer major riverways designated from their
respective holdings. [49] Future
acquisitions consisting largely of private lands, such as the park
bordering the St. Croix River, would customarily be deeded to the Park
Service for maintenance and protection.
Whatever their lack of monumental significance,
national seashores, lakeshores, and riverways could be justified before
Congress on the basis of their rarity in a pristine condition. Time and
again supporters of those parks noted the loss of coastlines and wild
rivers to all forms of commercial, industrial, and residential
development. Most of America's great rivers had been dammed; most of its
seacoasts and lakeshores forever altered by roads, vacation homesites,
diking, and dredging. Unless the federal government intervened to
preserve these threatened environments, it seemed reasonable to conclude
that few of the nation's free-flowing rivers or unmarred shorelines
outside existing parks would survive into the twenty-first century.
The same could be said of the few extensive tracts of
open space remaining in the urban centers of the nation, such as New
York, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Here again, the argument
that parks must be closer to where people actually lived was crucial to
overcoming standard forms of opposition. Opponents nonetheless insisted
that urban recreation areas, like other nontraditional parks, would
strain Park Service budgets and thus dilute the agency's effectiveness
in managing its wilderness preserves. [50]
Gateway National Recreation Area, on the outskirts of New York City, and
its counterpart across the continent, Golden Gate in San Francisco,
proved these objections could be overcome, as their establishment
simultaneously on October 27, 1972, demonstrated. [51] National recreation areas previously
authorized had been confined almost exclusively to the sites of large
reservoirs in the West and South. [52]
Accordingly, those parks, too, exacerbated the long-recognized problem
of restricting access to the national parks only to more affluent
Americans. With the creation of Gateway and Golden Gate national
recreation areas, the National Park Service had literally been charged
with the responsibility of bringing parks within a bus or subway ride of
both the nation's poor and well-to-do.
Inevitably, such rapid expansion of the national park
system only begged again the question of national park standards.
Already geologically deficient, most of the new parks further suffered
from the absence of biological resources of pristine quality. Everglades
National Park, a model for biological management since the 1930s, itself
was hamstrung with artificial rather than natural boundaries. At least
the Everglades appeared to be an integral block of land, a park with a
core large enough to provide plants and animals with a semblance of
sanctuary. In contrast, most seashores, lakeshores, and riverways were
literally pockmarked with residential and industrial developments. And
so the question remained. Should parks so remote from the geological
uniqueness, territorial integrity, and natural qualities of their
predecessors have been authorized by Congress in the first place?
The other major issue was funding. Obviously, the
National Park Service alone could not meet the purchasing requirements
of so much private land on its own limited budget. Initially,
preservationists saw a solution in the Land and Water Conservation Fund
Act of 1964. The act provided that entrance and user fees from federal
recreation sites, coupled with monies obtained from the sale of surplus
federal properties and the federal tax on motor fuel, could be applied
to the purchase of parklands by agencies such as the National Park
Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A later amendment allowed
revenues from the sale of oil and gas leases on the continental shelf to
be added to the fund. [53]
By the late 1960s, however, even its limitations in
dealing with the pace of park expansion were apparent. The hundreds of
millions of dollars the Land and Water Conservation Fund eventually
generated still could not keep up with the cost of acquiring so many new
parks, especially the most fragile and expansive. As purchasing fell
farther behind, speculation in many areas already designated for park
status but still unacquired steadily mounted. The added emphasis of the
fund on recreation, as opposed to the purchase of lands purely
biological in character, further compromised the success of the largest
and most ambitious park projects. [54]
The problem of funding the expansion of the national
park system only seemed to confirm the common charge that the new parks
were simply diverting support from the original, clearly legitimate
preserves. In either case, preservationists themselves felt bound by
precedent to justify their case for expansion by demonstrating that each
of the recent parks did, in fact, measure up to the standards of
national parks in the past. The result was an unmistakable tendency to
inflate both the range and quality of the natural features present in
each region. The strategy was not deliberately dishonest; the problem
was that preservationists were trying to bring a certain portion of
commonplace topography under the umbrella of protection in
national parks.
The insistence that the national park system should
encompass landscapes at large led to special reliance on the biological
perspective. Crucial to expansion was the ability to show that each new
park contained a multiplicity of biological resources, especially
wildlife and plant life, commingling in combinations found nowhere else
in the United States. Thus Stewart Udall, as secretary of the interior,
testified in 1961 before Congress that the proposed Cape Cod national
seashore contained "not only the most extensive natural seashore area in
New England but also one of the finest on the North American coast." In
acknowledgment of the standards of the western parks, Udall reassured
Congress that the Cape Cod region also possessed evidence of
"continental glaciation," "erosion," and "deposition," all providing
"important opportunities for geologic study." Still, the biota of the
park was unquestionably its greatest natural resource. "The plants and
wildlife that mingle on Cape Cod in unusual variety give the area
outstanding biological significance," he remarked. Indeed, the features
of the proposed seashore should be considered in their totality rather
than separately or region by region. "From the highland on Griffin
Island," he stated, beginning his elaboration on this point, "one can
get magnificent views of scenic upland and marsh typical of the cape."
Similarly, scientists had noted that each of the "four general types" of
"glacial kettle hole ponds" displayed "a distinct association of plant
and animal life." And Morris Island contained not only "a rare white
cedar bog and a stand of beech forest, but also, . . . one of the most
important bird resting and feeding grounds, acre for acre, in New
Englandand one of the two or three most important such habitats on
the entire Atlantic seaboard." [55]
Supporters of other nontraditional parks throughout
the 1960s found similar ammunition for their causes in statements to the
effect that each of their own areas was also "biological crossroads," as
distinct from a region of purely geological significance. In 1963, for
example, Leonard Hall, a self-described "farmer, writer, naturalist,"
and director of the Ozark National Rivers Association, argued before the
House Subcommittee on Public Lands that the proposed national riverway
in Missouri possessed "one of the richest floras of any area of its size
on this continent. We have Kansas plants there. We have Michigan plants.
We have plants from the South and others which have developed there."
Later in 1963, James Carver, Jr., assistant secretary of the interior,
likewise endorsed the proposed Indiana Dunes national lakeshore on the
basis of its "outstanding" flora. Carver's objective, like Hall's, was
again to demonstrate both the diversity and commingling of the species
present in the Indiana Dunes. "Following the slow retreat of the
Wisconsin ice," he wrote, briefly tracing the impact of the Ice Age on
the region, "the plants which are now characteristic of the northern
forests moved through the dunes area northward." Where soil, moisture,
and temperatures were favorable, however, "isolated colonies of northern
species held on." For example, cool "moderating breezes" off Lake
Michigan allowed both "jack pine and white pine . . . to hang on south
of their normal range." In low swamps and bogs, more northern plants lay
"cloistered within the larger world of central forest and prairie
species. Tamarack, buckthorn, leather leaf, checkerberry, orchids, and
other unusual plants characterize these special environments," he added,
Elsewhere the botanical mosaic included plants of the "central forests
and there are occurrences of flora of both the Prairie Peninsula and the
Atlantic Coastal Plain species." "The result," he concluded, "is a
natural scientific and scenic asset so diverse that it is difficult to
equal anywhere in this country." [56]
Of course, only those preservationists seeking the
protection of the Indiana Dunes could afford to take Carver's closing
remarks at face value. For the rest of the movement there remained the
problem of linking other nontraditional parks with the unquestionable
uniqueness found in the original preserves of the West. Nor were the
national recreation areas immune from the requirement that precedent, at
the very least, ought to be acknowledged. In 1972, for instance,
Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton noted that the proposed
Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City "would contain ten
miles of ocean beach and natural and historic features of great
significance." Granted, portions of the Jamaica Bay Unit, with "14,000
acres of land and water," had been previously developed. "Despite the
inroads of civilization," Morton still argued, "Jamaica Bay remains an
ecological treasure." Twenty-nine species of waterfowl and seventy of
wading, shore, and marsh birds still used the area for nesting, feeding,
and refuge. In a similar vein, Representative John F. Seiberling of Ohio
defined the proposed Cuyahoga River national recreation area between
Cleveland and Akron as "a pastoral wonder, a quiet haven away from the
nearby bustling cities." Yet beyond its obvious potential for outdoor
recreation, the region had great value as a "unique meeting ground for
plant life." A single one-hundred-acre tract in the valley, Seiberling
elaborated, had been found to contain "over 400 species of plants,
including some usually found only in the far West, some only in the deep
South, and some only at higher altitudes or northern latitudes." Surely,
he therefore concluded, the Cuyahoga Valley ought to be recognized as a
potential park "for the people of the entire country, not just residents
of the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area." [57]
The presence of historic sites and structures,
archeological evidence, and other elements of human history comprised
the final assemblage of resources offered as justification for awarding
seashores, lakeshores, riverways, and open spaces standing as units of
the national park system. Like overtures to the parks' biological
uniqueness, most of the historic arguments were further listings, each
an inventory of the number of pioneer cabins, old farmhouses, and Indian
burial sites found in a particular region. Few of the inventories, as a
result, did much to dispel the notion that most of the urban-oriented
parks, whatever their ecological or historical assets, still were not
intended for mass recreation, [58]
The alternative to compromise, preservationists
conceded, would be fewer parks. Besides, few supported the viewpoint of
Robert Sterling Yard, an opinion more than a half century old, that
parks other than primeval wilderness were either pointless or
inappropriate. Just as repugnant was the realization that parks in the
remote corners of the nation were open only to more affluent Americans.
Thus Senator Alan Cranston of California, speaking on behalf of his
disadvantaged constituency, noted that "only a relatively small number
of Americans have the opportunity to enjoy the wide range of natural
wonders [the national park system] protects and preserves. Those
fortunate enough to visit distant units of the National Park System," he
declared, "are most likely white, educated, relatively well-off
economically, young, and suburban. More than 90 percent of the National
Park visitors in 1968 were white." "Therefore," he concluded, "I believe
that we have a responsibility to 'bring the parks to the people,'
especially to the residents of the inner-city who have had virtually no
opportunity to enjoy the marvelous and varied recreation benefits of our
national parks." [59]
It remained for Phillip Burton, a crusading
representative to Congress from San Francisco, California, to
orchestrate the grand finale to nearly two decades of park making along
the seacoasts, lakeshores, and riverways of urban America. As chairman
of the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Insular Affairs, Burton
was instrumental in winning passage of the National Parks and Recreation
Act of 1978. In essence, the bill combined under one piece of
legislation a host of national park projects of special concern to many
members of Congress, including increased appropriations and acquisition
ceilings for existing parks, boundary changes, wilderness designations,
and final authorization for new parks, historic sites, and wild and
scenic rivers. Benchmark additions to the national park system included
authorization of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area
near Los Angeles and the New River Gorge National River in West
Virginia. All told, the bill added fifteen units to the national park
system, appropriated $725 million over five years to renovate
recreational facilities in urban areas, created eight new wild and
scenic rivers, and designated seventeen additional rivers for study and
possible inclusion in the wild and scenic rivers system. [60]
The bill further established a system of national
historic trails, designating fourthe Oregon Trail, Mormon Pioneer
Trail, Lewis and Clark Trail, and Iditarod Trail (Alaska)as
initial components. Similarly, Congress authorized another addition to
the national system of scenic trails already in existence, the
Continental Divide Trail, to span the length of the Rocky Mountains
between the Canadian border in Montana and the Mexican border in New
Mexico. [61] With few exceptions, in other
words, the new parks were basically linear preserves, slices of
landscape rather than major blocks of territory whose management might
come in conflict with neighboring development.
Seen in terms of the number of areas affected,
however, the legislation was both impressive and unprecedented. Higher
development ceilings were authorized for no fewer than thirty-four
existing units of the national park system; similarly, thirty-nine units
received boundary adjustments ranging from a few acres to several
thousand acres of land. [62] Even
supporters of the bill, as a result, occasionally joined its skeptics in
labeling it the "parks barrel bill." Critics were in the distinct
minority, however, especially in Congress, since the legislation had
such a positive financial impact on so many separate states and on more
than two hundred congressional districts. [63]
For a different set of reasons, most preservationists
themselves hailed rather than questioned the Omnibus Parks Bill of 1978.
Over the past two decades they had spoken out against the loss of
millions of acres of land to highways, airports, shopping centers, and
similar forms of urban encroachment on open space. Land afforded
protection under the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978, whatever
the scenic limitations of those properties, was land at least
temporarily saved from the threat of urbanization and industrial
development. It remained to be seen whether or not Robert Sterling Yard
had been correct. Perhaps national parks largely historic or urban in
emphasis would in fact dilute both the financial base as well as the
international fame of the original park system. In the meantime,
however, preservationists were not willing to risk the alternative, the
chance of saving the great parks at the expense of compromising the
integrity of the American land as a whole.
Nor did preservationists have any intention of
abandoning the tradition of national parks as broad, monumental expanses
of pristine territory. The problem in the continental United States was
that most opportunities for such parklands had either been lost or
already exercised. Only Alaska, with its vast forests, tundra, and
mountain ranges, still offered the hope of establishing great national
parks with natural as opposed to political boundaries. Indeed, long
before the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978 itself had been
passed by Congress, preservationists had recognized that its provisions
would not go far enough. From the environmental as distinct from the
recreational perspective, Alaska was the greatest challenge for
preservation of them all. How national parks were established in the
forty-ninth state might well determine, once and for all, whether or not
Americans could truly coexist with their natural surroundings as its
custodians rather than as its conquerors.
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