An Interview with Robert M. Utley on the History of Historic Preservation in the National Park Service—1947-1980

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT M. UTLEY ON THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE—1947-1980
by Richard W. Sellars and Melody Webb
September 24, 1985 - December 27, 1985

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Tape 15 December 27, 1985

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Bob: One further thought about to the abolition of the Regional Historian. Shortly after Hartzog became Director, there was big emphasis on research, and there was a committee headed by Starker Leopold that said research in the Park System was grossly inadequate and there ought to be much more. That had to do principally with the natural sciences, but the Washington Office was reorganized in response to the Leopold report. An Assistant Director for Resource Studies was created, and history and archeology were both put under that assistant directorate with natural sciences. In the perception of Hartzog, history came to be identified exclusively with research, a research need that had been born of a big emphasis on the natural sciences. Much wasn't wrong with historical research. The consequence of this was not only that history got stirred up with the natural sciences, with all of the evil results of that, but also that in Hartzog's mind history and research got equated, so that in his early years he could never understand that historians had responsibility beyond research, that historians were responsible for advising the Director and the Regional Directors on acceptable practices and techniques, that historians were supposed to look over the shoulders of management to insure that policies and standards were properly applied. In his mind, then, this whole realm of what we might call management history, which is all the Washington historical division ever did, went over the side. And it was only after a series of blunders got bad publicity and got him in trouble that historians had responsibility beyond research. Only then did we begin to come to a proper assignment of responsibilities to professional historians.

Dick: Do you feel that in Hartzog's later years as Director, he understood the role of historians?

Bob: I think he understood it clearly because I personally saved him a lot of grief. I pointed out things that ought not to be done and things that ought to be done from the standpoint of professional history. He could see the direct application in both the management and political sense. Yes, he became aware of this.

Dick: Bob you mentioned the evil results of mixing historical research with natural science research. What do you mean by that?

Bob: These are two separate kettles of fish. The natural scientists define their research in terms of problem resolution. They have a problem, which they then devise a research project to solve. Historical research is a different thing. You set out to find all you can about a given subject, for interpretation or other purposes. We have some problem-oriented research, but it isn't all that way. When you attempt to administer historical research the same as natural research, you get into that problem. Another problem you get into is the tendency of management to want to throw the two sources of funding together into a single pot and administer it according to one set of priorities. When that happens, the natural scientists almost always occupy the upper end of the priority list and history the lower end. A third evil consequence is that, given the nature of the National Park Service, a natural scientist usually controls or heavily influences the program. All of these factors indicate that it is a mistake to try to mix, in a management, administrative, and budgetary sense, the two kinds of research.

Dick: Okay you said there was an Assistant Director for Research.

Bob: Assistant Director for Resource Studies. This was a time, in 1965 and 1966, when research was a bad word. Resource study was the euphemism. Ben Thompson, who had been the golden boy of the Wirth administration, was now made the scapegoat for many things in the Udall-Hartzog administration. So Ben, who had at one time virtually dictated the directions of the Park Service, now was squirreled away as Assistant Director for Resource Studies. He shortly retired and Howard Stagner, a natural scientist, took his place.

Dick: Was there one pot of money for natural science and history research.

Bob: There really wasn't any money for history. Historical research was done on the park level and absorbed in the park base. So all the projects were in the natural sciences. One result, though, was that history's management responsibilities and power were eroded very rapidly while we had little to do with research except create a lot of paper.

Dick: How do you mean?

Bob: Hartzog tended to look at the Division of History as concerned only with research when we had been doing all these other things. We managed to hang on to those other things almost subrosa mainly because Ronnie Lee understood the need and from his base as Regional Director in Philadelphia managed help us to hold on to those things.

Dick: Was Lee influential with Hartzog?

Bob: Lee was very influential with Hartzog. In the realm of history and historic preservation, Lee's word was gospel, and if it was not embraced and put into place it was for political reasons.

Dick: When Ernest Allen Connally came on board, did he and Lee see eye to eye?

Bob: They got along very well. In fact, if it had not been for Ronnie Lee, Ernest Connally would not have been brought in. There was the famous Lee-Brew-Connally Committee, which Ronnie Lee set up at the behest of George Hartzog in 1965 to advise him on how to gear up to handle this new law, the 1966 Act that Hartzog saw coming down the pike. Ronnie and Joe Brew brought in Ernest Connally, who was unknown to Hartzog and most everybody else in the Park Service except through some early HABS projects. So we got the law and the committee remained in place. It was apparent to everyone that, given the emphasis on architecture in the new law, and in anonymous kinds of resources, Connally was the man to run the program. And Lee said so. After Ronnie retired as Regional Director, Hartzog appointed him a special assistant to the Director based in Philadelphia, and so Ronnie continued to have great influence with Hartzog right up to the day of his death—great influence incidentally, that often constituted a short circuit around me, the official and formal head of the history program.

Dick: What problems did he cause you?

Bob: The principal problem was that I remained in ignorance of major issues, of the direction they were taking, until the decision was made, and then it was handed over to me, the formal chief, to implement.

Dick: Two questions. Did you generally agree with Lee's policies and did you and Lee work together well?

Bob: Yes, I was not all of that informed and assured a person. Ronnie Lee was the exalted veteran that nobody thought to challenge.

Dick: He was the Bob Utley of the........

Bob: Well, I suppose you could put it that way. Ronnie's judgments were generally sound when it came to preservation policy and technique. Ronnie's problem was that he was an idea man. He spun off ideas at such a rate that nobody could keep up with him, and he was not of a temperament to follow up on them himself. When I was appointed Chief Historian, I think Ronnie had grave reservations about me. He was very cool to me for several years—formally courteous but not much more. Enjoying a direct pipeline to Hartzog, the two just froze me out for a long time on major issues. But by the time we got the 66 act, Ronnie had come to believe that I probably could follow in his footsteps. He and Herb Kahler insisted that I be the one to carry out the responsibilities under the Act in history. I learned subsequently that Hartzog had no intention of appointing me Chief Historian in the new organization. I did not know this at the time. I did not realize my position was imperiled at all.

Dick: Excuse me, even before you came on board you're saying, your position was imperiled.......

Bob: No I was appointed Chief Historian in 1964. We got the '66 act two years later. Hartzog had in mind a high-powered management team with academic credentials that nobody could quarrel with. Of the three—Ernest Connally, John Corbett, and myself—I was the only one who did not have a Ph.D and Hartzog regarded a Ph.D as essential in all three of those top positions. He felt a tremendous competition with Dillon Ripley and the Smithsonian Institution, and all of those people over there had Ph.D's. Ronnie Lee, backed by Herb Kahler, Joe Brew, and Ernest Connally, went to Hartzog and said that while I might not have a Ph.D, I had a stature in the professional world that was as good as a Ph.D and that therefore I ought to get the job that I already held. And so I am sure that by 1967 Ronnie Lee had come around. But there were many straws in the wind both at the time and later that left no question in my mind that I was not originally his candidate. I don't think he had a candidate. There weren't very many.

Dick: No one ever hears anything about Hartzog's Deputy Director. Did you have much of a relationship with these people, and were they interested in cultural resource?

Bob: Let's see, the first Deputy Director (he was called Associate Director when I came on board) was Clark Stratton. His background was design and construction and he was an old line Park Service builder and a really first-class person. Everybody loved Clark Stratton. His place was taken by Spud Bill, whom I had worked with here in Southwest Region when he was the No. 2 man. Then he was followed by Tom Flynn, who held the post for many years. Tom was originally a political appointee in the Department under the Eisenhower Administration who took refuge in a career job in the Park Service when the Democrats came in 1961. All three of these men were very good Deputy Directors. But I think one would have to say that all three functioned more as technicians, as doers and gofers, than as people with philosophical approaches that might be different from George Hartzog's. I am sure Spud Bill had different ideas than George, but it would never have occurred to him to dispute George. I am sure Tom Flynn didn't because he was a mechanic, a political mechanic from on high, and so he probably was the one who served Hartzog most effectively simply because he had no judgments, other than tactical, independent from Hartzog. I worked well with all three of these men and respected and was friendly with them. Howard Baker was up there on the corridor for a time too, and while he and I differed philosophically and in many other ways, Howard was an old veteran that another veteran could appreciate. He was not Deputy Director, he was Assistant Director for Operations. Then of course Russ Dickensen served as Deputy Director after Flynn and Hartzog left. He was a good one, and I got along well with him. As for philosophical beliefs, I don't think that any of them had empathy or sensitivity to cultural resources. Their interest in it, as I have indicated, was a tactical interest and derived from whatever interest George Hartzog had at the time.

Dick: Bob, in your career in Washington at what point was there the strongest interest in cultural resources by the Directorate?

Bob: Unquestionably the period after the enactment of the 1966 law, roughly from 1967 through 1969. Interest was at an all-time high. Ernest Connally was flying high and had been brought in with the mandate to give the United States a program fully as good as that of France or other European countries. After that, probably beginning about the time that Hartzog sent all of our research personnel from Connally's office up to the new service center on Wisconsin Avenue, there tended to be a countervailing trend of mixing it back up again. I think this began as a deliberate move to prevent Ernest Connally from becoming too independently powerful of the Director. This was the first move not only toward heading off the growth of the organization Connally had been promised but actually a retrogression from the levels we had achieved by 1969.

Dick: Bob, Hartzog was a difficult person to take on if he opposed you. Do you recall any particular incidents where you and he were at loggerheads on issues?

Bob: Not after the first collision that we mentioned over the Pennsylvania Avenue Plan of Nat Owings and most particularly the Willard Hotel. That represented a headon collision that could and should have been avoided if I had had a little better sense of how one operates on the Washington level. After that I had many disagreements with Hartzog but never a collision in which I came away all bashed up like I did in that first one. Subsequently, where there were differences of approach, of course he was the Director, and if I or we couldn't persuade him to do otherwise, we did what he said to do. Frequently you find compromises, and in fact this was a principal role I played the last few years—finding that narrow pathway on which he and I could walk comfortably.

Dick: Did Hartzog want to hear your opinion on most issues?

Bob: Yes. When you say me, I think we need to think about that more generically as the professionals in history, architecture, and archeology. Yes. He wanted to know the professional evaluation before he did whatever he had to do. If consistent with his political responsibilities and his managerial instincts, he could do what the professionals said he ought to do, and that was great. If not, he had no compunctions about going forth in direct contradiction to what the professionals said, and of course, this is what management is all about.

Dick: Bob, can you say when or where the positions of Regional Historian, Regional Archeologist, Regional Historical Architect and Regional Curator were first established?

Bob: Regional Historian and Regional Archeologist go back to the Historic Sites Act and were well-established parts of the organization from the beginning of the Regional structure in 1939. Regional Historical Architect dates from after the 1966 Act. The idea under Connally's leadership was that we had three principal disciplines—history, architecture, and archeology—each of which needed to be represented by a Regional professional. Regional Architect had been a position from the beginning, but it was not concerned, except marginally, with historic preservation. Regional Curator does not come into the picture until much later, probably the middle 70's. No, I take that back there were Regional Curators in the Division of Interpretation concerned with museum objects. Frank Smith was Regional Curator here when I was Regional Historian, but that was a position in the Division of Interpretation and it was not tied in to cultural resource management as we know it today. Organizationally, that came only in the mid-70's, with the creation of the post of Chief Curator in Washington. I'll have to back up again, because Harold Peterson was Chief Curator for many years, but again it was in the Division of Interpretation. What we know today dates from the middle 70's with a Chief Curator under the Associate Director for Cultural Resource Management and Regional Curators in the same sort of organization.

Dick: The Regional Archeologists were not removed by Hartzog as were the Regional Historians.

Bob: I don't believe they were. And the Regional Historians weren't just demolished all of a sudden. It happened through attrition. When John Hussey retired in San Francisco, I don't believe they replaced him. When Frank Barnes retired in Philadelphia, Jim Holland, and so forth, they were not replaced. Merrill Mattes was demolished. He was taken out of Omaha and sent to San Francisco in the Design and Construction Office. In Hartzog's mind, Regional Archeologists may have been ticketed for extinction also, but John Cotter certainly remained until his retirement in Philadelphia. So did Pinkie Herrington in Richmond. Southwest, Charlie Steen remained. So they did not disappear before the Regional Historians came back. I suspect it was principally historians who were under Hartzog's skin. They were the ones who suffered.

Dick: Did Mattes and Hartzog not get along?

Bob: Not at all.

Dick: What were the problems?

Bob: Merrill Mattes took seriously his responsibility of making sure that proper care was taken of the historic resources of the parks and he didn't hesitate to express his opinion to the superintendent and to come back and put it down in a memorandum to the Regional Director. Whether the recommendation was accepted or not, a record existed against future consequences. George did not like this interference in his park when he had his own historian. So it was definitely a matter of personality conflict, among other things.

Dick: Bob, it's been said that Ernest Connally and the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation were considered a breed apart from the old line organization. To what extent do you think this is true?

Bob: It's absolutely true. Most of the buildup of that organization came from right off the street, from academia—the buildup, that is, to take care of the new external historic preservation programs authorized by the 66 Act. Many of these people tended to be pedantic and perhaps excessively imbued with their academic credentials, and in any case temperamentally separated from the old-line ranger tradition. It worked both ways, because these people tended to look condescendingly on the old-line rangers. Some of this was personalized in Ernest Connally vis-a-vis, say, Frank Kowski. That personalized the issue you are talking about. They came from different traditions, and while they could josh and exchange banter it was an uncomfortable sort of thing, and when it came to professional concerns, neither meshed with the other at all. This existed all the way down the two chains of command—the chain descending from Connally and that descending from Hartzog. It was not a problem I ever had because I came out of the grey-and-the-green, but I was still accepted by the people who came in when Connally came in. So I was a bridge between the two. John Corbett and Zorro Bradley could have been similar bridges, but they weren't because they could not adjust to the new dispensation under Connally and persisted in working against him and exclusively for the cause of archeology. So I was about the only high-ranking bridge between the two organizations. And I may add that I consider it still a serious problem for the Park Service. It is now more serious because you are mingling in the same organization the external and internal programs, and you have people who came out of the external tradition, who've had little park experience, in positions of high responsibility for park cultural resources. It is not working well.

Dick: Bob to what extent did Connally and his staff foster and/or seek to dispel this dichotomy, if it existed?

Bob: The dichotomy existed. Ernest never did anything about it, deliberately and consciously, to my knowledge, because I think he closed his eyes to its existence. Ernest would go to the Regional Directors' meetings and come away with a different perception than I as to his acceptance by the Regional Directors. He believed that by sitting around and drinking and bantering in the evening, this signified acceptance. It did not. But I don't think he ever realized that, because he would come back and tell me how well he got along with good old Frank Kowski and Len Volz. My sources of information had them making fun of him behind his back, because he was a man of cultured ways and affected gestures and a vocabulary and manner of speech that made them feel inferior. Nothing was ever done, but so far as it was done I guess you'd have to say I did it. And in the later years, when I was Assistant Director for the inpark stuff, he left all of that to me, so that I was the one visible and appearing out with the Regional Directors and the superintendents while he concerned himself with the external programs.

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