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 16

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Dick: Bob let's discuss the archeologists in the Park Service just a bit. They seem to have been kind of a breed apart from the historians. Not in power, as far as Washington goes, and yet independent and sort of carrying on their own programs. Would you discuss archeology in the Service?

Bob: You have accurately defined the status that they occupied for a number of years. I suspect you have two separate archeological traditions growing up in the Park Service. The one that we all think of is the big southwestern Anasazi ruins complexes which fostered a generation of National Park Service archeologists. This is the group that we mostly think of. There was a second tradition, though, that grew up in the East. The historic sites archeologists are exemplified by people like Pinkie Herrington and John Cotter. They were more closely identified with the historians and aren't subject to the generalization that you just made, which I think applies largely to that southwestern tradition. They've joked over the years about the adobe wall behind which Southwest Region has always done its own thing no matter what the leadership in Washington. And that adobe wall is principally a creation of the archeologists. John Corbett, who was for many years the Chief Archeologist of the Park Service, came out of that southwestern tradition, and his alliances were mainly with those people—people like Erik Reed and Charlie Steen and Al Schroeder. I believe that the archeological profession, in this prehistoric complexion, has been almost entirely uninterested in anything but their own archeological concerns, so they have not tended to rise to any positions of responsibility beyond the discipline of archeology simply because they have not cared for what was going on elsewhere in the Park Service if it did not affect them. What Connally was trying to do when he came in 1967 was to build a truly interdisciplinary monument service in which history, architecture, and archeology would combine to do their separate things together so that they produced a unified program in which all three were represented. When you have a historic structures project, whether it is prehistory or history, whether it is inside the Park System or outside the Park System,you need all three disciplines. You need the historians to mine the documents, the archeologists to dig under the ground, and the architects to take apart the structure and put it back together. It was Connally's dream to fold all three of those together. This ran counter to the habits of the archeologists, and they did not loyally cooperate. That led to stress on the Washington level, where John Corbett was by seniority supposed to be Connally's chief deputy. But Corbett could not comfortably or loyally or sincerely cooperate in what Connally had been brought in to do. Zorro Bradley, who was Corbett's deputy, could not do so either. And they kept the field archeologists stirred up in opposition, if not hostility, to Connally. So defacto, if not dejure, I was Connally's deputy. Hartzog insisted on the organization chart showing Corbett as the deputy, but acquiesced in my functioning that way. It was subsequently ratified as Corbett fell by the wayside. Finally, after a number of years of considerable stress, Corbett was retired. Zorro, because he couldn't participate loyally, was sent off to Alaska, where he made a great name for himself. Rex Wilson was brought in because he was a person with the requisite grade who unquestionably was loyal to Connally and his goals.

Dick: Why couldn't Bradley and Corbett participate loyally? What was the real problem there?

Bob: I don't think it was anything diabolical or sinister. I think it was a product of their upbringing in the Park Service, a product of the traditions that archeology had enjoyed in the Park Service of doing their own thing without major interference from management or anyone else. In fact, about 1971 or 72, at the time that Corbett was being retired, Charles McGimsey of the University of Arkansas, who was a big name in the archeological profession, launched a major effort in the archeological fraternity to break archeology off from the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation and set it up as a parallel office on the same level as Connally, with, you guessed it, McGimsey as the chief of the office. Because of all of the fuss and hassle that Hartzog had to endure from archeologists, he was at least intrigued by this proposition, because bear in mind that whatever you might say about the archeologists, for many years they had been organized in a politically effective way and could mount a significant voice in the Congress when it came time to pass out the money. Joe Brew had connections with the committee chiefs and knew how to testify. The man in Seattle, Dick Daugherty, he was even a member of the Advisory Council, he was tied closely to Scoop Jackson. And so the archeologists could deliver the money and the political influence, and that appealed greatly to Hartzog. The architects couldn't. No one could have been more innocent than architectural historians and historical architects when it came to manipulating the forces on Capitol Hill. And historians, of course, were not much ahead of the architects. So the archeologists could deliver on the Hill. And they therefore constituted a force within the Park Service far beyond what they should have. The motivations of the archeologists did not have predominately to do with the cultural resources of the National Park System. The origins of their political influence were external to the Park System. They went back to the formation of the Committee for the Recovery of Archeological Remains in the late 1940's, when the Missouri Basin Dam building program got underway, and proliferated with the Reservoir Salvage Act of 1961, and then of course you had the highway program and all these pipelines that were multiplying across the country, and what the archeologists were primarily concerned with was what was then called salvage—getting the Feds to put up the money to salvage the archeology before they built the dams and highways. These were big bucks, and since the Park Service was the agency primarily concerned with administering these programs, even though they were for the Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation, the archeological lobby had a very close connection with the National Park Service, because it was through the Park Service that they worked on the Hill to realize their aims. But this activity led logically, when we began to undergo the tensions attendant on the Historic Preservation Act of 66, to a concern with what happened inside the Park System as well as outside.

Dick: Okay, the archeologists or archeology in the Park Service today seems to me to be more integrated with cultural resource management activities. Do you think it is?

Bob: Yes, I think it is. I think this had come about in the last 15 years after the principal naysayers were sent their way on the Washington level and archeology became truly integrated on the Washington level. I think that has carried down the chain of command through the Regions and the parks. I wouldn't say the integration is complete or ideal. I wouldn't say it is nearly so effective as the unity between architects and historians because it still seems to be a feature of the archeological mindset that they are not even today particularly interested in things going on outside their profession. So more than architects and historians they tend, if one can generalize, to be parochial, professionally parochial. But organizationally they are integrated, and to a large extent they work together well in pursuing projects where all three are concerned.

Bob: On page 26 of your interview with Herb Evison you say that research had been a pretty much catch-as-catch can proposition on the park level and the Washington Office had never been concerned with the research program. This was up to about the Hartzog era. Would you comment on the implications of this regarding the resource management up to that time?

Bob: It would be a mixed bag. In those parks where the park historian was a good researcher as well as a good interpreter and resource manager (although that term was not coined at that time), and where the superintendent permitted the historian to engage in this research, the implication for resource management was positive, because you had a good park historian doing all of the things that park historians should do. In parks that had less competent historians, less competent superintendents, or did not have historians at all because of their size, they suffered. What happened with the Hartzog era was systematization of research in the Park Service. It was taken away almost altogether from the park level, so that you instantly lost the benefit in those parks where it was having a benefit. But now the research was spread around the Park System wherever it was needed, and performed by professional research historians. For resource management, beginning with the Hartzog era, you tended to have a more even distribution of the benefits of research than previously and so therefore a more even distribution of resource management capabilities, which is to say that all parks were getting about the same thing.

Dick: Historical research was taken from the Washington Office, Division of History in 1970 and placed in what ultimately became the Denver Service Center. Did you support or oppose this move and why?

Bob: Well, we discussed this before. All of us in Connally's office opposed it as vigorously as we knew how. That had no effect. The decision had been made. Ernest may have had the opportunity to argue against it, but I am sure that it had no effect whatever on the decision. I think Hartzog had made up his mind, and as I have indicated, it was primarily because Hartzog saw Connally as getting too much power, and this was one way of cutting it down. But in my judgment it was a major breaking of faith with Connally from what he had been promised when he was brought into this job, and it was a severe setback for Hartzog's own goals of building up a monument service that he could point to with pride from anywhere in the world. Once he began that erosion it was no longer possible to realize the goal that he had set for himself in 1966. There is a certain tragedy in that because I believe that historic preservation was probably Hartzog's biggest opportunity to leave his distinctive stamp on the National Park Service and Park System. Had he been able to go the full distance that he originally intended, he would be remembered today as an even greater Director than we do remember him.

Dick: In a sense perhaps his goals changed as he saw Connally's office becoming more powerful and perhaps more independent and perhaps he had personal goals that simply wouldn't allow these organizational goals to come to fruition.

Bob: I don't think goals is the right word. I think it was his management style and instincts that dictated never to let any of your subordinates get too powerful or too visible to the outside world in ways that might detract from you. This is something that he was well accomplished in himself, of appearing before the world prominently and visibly, and to have any of his people competing was simply unacceptable. I am sure Ernest was not consciously competing, but that was the effect. The competition was there because he was having more and more visibility in the professional world. At the same time, some of the old-line ranger types in the directorate were probably leaning on Hartzog to cut Connally down to size, and whatever Hartzog's instincts at the moment, I think he had to balance the competing demands and influences of his directorate to keep everybody as happy as possible.

Dick: Bob, we talked about the external people during Connally's time being a kind of a breed apart. Do you feel that this is the case today?

Bob: For one thing, today you don't have the compartmentalized organization between inhouse and outhouse that we had then. They are mixed up and concerned both with the external and internal programs. I think the problem still exists today. It exists because you have people who came out of that external tradition placed in high-level jobs with internal affairs responsibilities, and I don't think you will ever have acceptance by the rank and file of people who have never served in a park or a Region. Jerry Rogers served as a seasonal at Fort Davis, but his whole experience has been external. This will always be a strike against him. Larry Aten is having a lot to do with internal directions these days. He may have once been on the park level. If so, he's lost it pretty much. I think that tensions still exist, but I don't think it's as bad as it was when you had two large organizations.

Dick: You know, cultural resource people often feel excluded from power and the external people are not fully accepted by the old line management. So if you are cultural resources and external, which all the external programs are, you sort of have two strikes against you.

Bob: It works both ways, I don't blame the external people solely. I think the internal people, the green-blooded people, can be just as exclusive and just as patronizing as these people from academia that they hold in contempt. This is what John Carver was laying onto the National Park Service back in 1963 when Connie Wirth got fired. You guys in the Park Service think you are a breed apart, and you're not willing to be responsive to anybody's concerns but your own.

Dick: Do you see the Park Service as a very special agency governmentwide?

Bob: Yes, and maybe that is an index of my association with the grey and the green more than with the external people, because the external people don't see the Park Service that way. It's only the people who come out of the park tradition that see themselves as a special family: Steve Mather's family of professionals engaged in an idealistic undertaking for the benefit of the world. This is to the good up to a point. But there was a certain validity to what John Carver was saying in his Yosemite speech. All of this tradition, just as with the Marine Corps and the FBI, is fine up to a point, but you have to learn to be responsive to the public, be responsive to your political oversight, and of course this is why Wirth went out and Hartzog came in. Hartzog was sensitive and responsive to Stewart Udall and the Congress and the President and the administration's agenda, which wasn't the same as the Eisenhower agenda.

Dick: Wirth is fairly defensive in his book about his relationship with Udall. Have you read that?

Bob: Yes. In a review of his book I criticized Wirth for not telling the whole story, and he got indignant, and in fact angry. It was a minor criticism and the only one in the review, but he professed to have told the whole story, and that simply is not true.

Dick: While the Connally people might have been a breed apart, the effects of the 1966 Act included bringing more women into the Service as historians. Is this correct?

Bob: That's absolutely true, and I think that might have been the beginning in the Park Service of the emergence of women to a place in the sun. The professional buildup that Connally presided over drew heavily upon architectural and art history, and these are fields in which women, by the middle 60's, had begun to make their numbers felt. There were a lot of candidates in those fields who were women. We never practiced any sexual discrimination in that office, so they were hired simply on their merits. Many offices, especially the National Register, may have had more women than men on the professional level. Connally's office may have come to have a 50-50 split. And not considering clericals, but on the professional level. There was a big infusion of women over a short period of time that probably is an element in this equation we were discussing of a breed apart, because it had to be unsettling to an organization that had been traditionally dominated by males, macho males who wore ranger hats. They didn't carry guns at that time, but nonetheless this was an outdoor profession that was exclusively men, and we still remember the great debates that occurred when they put Stetson hats on women. It wasn't the 66 Act that did it. It was Ernest Connally's creation of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation. Shortly thereafter, the emphasis grew on women doing what they could do, I mean women coming to function the same as men. Hartzog encouraged this, whether from a genuine conviction or because he saw it as a sign of the times I don't know. But he was always favorable to bringing in women in an affirmative action sense. It was around the early 70's that you started getting women rangers. But the women in OAHP led the way and penetrated this previously all-male bastion.

Dick: You speak of the women in OAHP. Before all this came to pass, can you think of any women who were in historic preservation in the Service?

Bob: The one that comes immediately to mind is Boss Pinkley's daughter, who did a lot of archeological work at Mesa Verda. She also discovered the church at Pecos that was covered up. Pinkie Herrington's wife, Virginia, was also an archeologist. There have to have been others, but I guess the fact that I cannot remember them is some index of how very few there were.

Dick: What about Penney Bachelor?

Bob: I guess she was in before Connally came but can't have been very long. She did not occupy all that significant position. She was associated with the Independence Hall project with Lee Nelson.

Melody: Who was she?

Bob: She was an architect, a historical architect.

Dick: At Independence?

Bob: Yes.

Dick: Was Coxy Toogood the first female research historian, do you know?

Bob: Yes, in my office she was, but on a low level. I don't think she had a graduate degree. We must have hired her at a GS-5. She came with two other women who were architectural historians. The three of them roomed together over in Georgetown and Russell Keune hired both of them in HABS and married one of them. The other one, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, subsequently became director of the New York City Landmarks Commission.

Dick: In the 1970's the historic preservation unit in the Denver Service Center was dissolved and those professionals were scattered to the various teams. Would you comment on this. What were consequences?

Bob: It was one more step in the organizational descent of the Denver Service Center to the very pits of organization, or disorganization. Over the years I fought step after step to prevent this dispersion of the professionals into the teams, and I still regard it as absolutely the wrong way to go. The Denver Service Center was set up to be a bureaucratic counterpart of the traditional private A/E firm, architectural and engineering firm. Most of those are organized along disciplinary lines. The engineers are all in one pot, and the landscape architects are all in another pot, and the historians and the architects and so forth. The professionals all report to a professional head. When you've got a task you form a task force from these various organizations shaped to carry out the particular purpose of the task. It seems to me to this day that's the way the Denver Service Center ought to be organized. For a little task you can have a little task force with the appropriate mix of disciplines. For a big task you can have a big task force with the appropriate mix of disciplines. Instead, they keep tying the operation to these teams, which under the latest organization are reporting to about three or four Regional Directors each. That seems to me a management nightmare. There is no way that it can be made to work effectively. So far as historic preservation goes, it simply has bad consequences because it does not focus the professional competence of people in our disciplines in the way that would be most effective. Unfortunately, we in our disciplines tend to play into the hands of these so-called management experts by considering ourselves exclusively researchers, and we resist soiling our hands with policy and other management matters. The historians in the Service Center ought to be not solely researchers but also to bring their historical backgrounds to bear upon planning.

Dick: Do you think that was a problem with historians in the Denver Service Center?

Bob: Absolutely, from the very beginning they didn't want to mess around with planning.

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