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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This is Tape 17

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Bob: Of course, back in the 70's we were in an expansionist era. We were adding a lot of new parks, so there was a lot of park planning going on out of the Denver Service Center. In my judgment, historians have a great role to play bringing their particular backgrounds to bear on park planning. But do you think we could get that stable of historians interested in actively participating in the planning process and ensuring that the resources that led to the establishment of the park were properly protected in planning and development? No. All they wanted to do was research and write history. As a result, we abdicated to landscape architects and interpreters the basic planning decisions on the preservation and care of cultural resources. It was an abdication. I used to go out there and hold pep sessions with those people periodically. Nobody ever disagreed with me, but in practice it just didn't happen.

Dick: Why?

Bob: I think, Number 1, the historians wanted to do their own thing, which was research and writing, and they weren't interested in park planning. Number 2, the landscape architects, who constituted the bulk of the planners, were just as happy to do it all themselves and not have to bother with the historians. The historians didn't want to put the road where, from the landscape architecture point of view, it ought to go. It was just easier to deal the historians out. Well they dealt themselves out. And the planners accepted it.

Dick: What was Merrill Mattes' role in this.

Bob: You can't put Merrill in that category. I don't think that Merrill and his successor, John Luzader, did their job by forcing the historians to play the role they should have played. Merrill knew perfectly well what the role of the historian was supposed to be because he had played it in Omaha as Regional Historian. He was management- and planning-oriented as well as research. But he should have forced the research historians to take a much greater role in park planning.

Dick: Bob, why were there never as many archeologists in the Denver Service Center? Also, they seem to have played a different role than historians.

Bob: I suppose part of it is the parochialism of archeology. But the Denver Service Center did have archeologists. In my time I don't remember anyone other than Will Logan. Will did play principally a management and planning role similar to what I have been saying the historians should have played. I think the explanation is to be found in the rise, contemporaneously, of the archeological centers. Archeological research and the related professional services to management came out of the archeological centers. I always felt strongly that the park planning services ought to come from archeologists in the Denver Service Center, but that was a hard case to make when archeological centers already existed. They existed because this got to be a political thing with Hartzog. He saw political advantages in having archeological centers tied in with universities. This was a Connally ideal also. I think he may have sold it to Hartzog. Archeological centers in the universities not only achieved certain benefits for academia, they gave the universities a vested interest in the National Park Service. In turn this had a fallout in Washington with the Members of Congress in whose districts these centers existed. So we formed a center at the University of Arizona that gave Emil Haury and Ray Thompson a vested interest in Park Service appropriations. We formed one at the University of Nebraska. Hartzog conspired with the widow of Senator Bartlett of Alaska to set up one at the University of Alaska. That was the pretext under which Zorro Bradley was sent to Fairbanks. So the rise of the archeological centers prevented archeology from being folded in to the Denver Service Center in an interdisciplinary way. There was a time when we said, okay, the archeological centers do in fact have a lot of payoff to the Park Service, not only professionally but politically. Let's take all of the professional disciplines in cultural resource management out of DSC and make these archeological centers cultural resource management centers by giving them historians and architects. That made a lot of sense, but of course it ran into the territoriality of DSC, which did not want to lose historians. And it ran into the parochialism of the archeologists, who didn't want them in the archeological centers because almost certainly some other discipline would have wound up providing managers of the Service Centers. So it never got of the ground.

Dick: Ideally where do you think research historians should be located?

Bob: Right now?

Dick: Yes.

Bob: Right now there is little justification for the Denver Service Center beyond the unsettling consequences of trying to dismantle it. There is need for such a center in a time of expansion and budgetary optimism. Now is a time of geardown for the indefinite future. You will not have many new parks. You will not have much new development in existing parks. Therefore, you have fewer and fewer projects, which is where the money comes from for the Denver Center, resulting in higher and higher overhead. That makes the Denver Service Center unaffordable to the clients, which are the parks and the Regions. So I think in a climate such as this, a budgetary prospect such as this, the thing to do is dismantle the Denver Service Center and scatter it among the regions. Let the Regions take care of their parks and provide all the services that Denver is now.

Dick: Including historical research?

Bob: Absolutely! It couldn't be any more inefficient than now, when you have a team trying to satisfy the research needs of three Regional Directors and mediate among them as to who gets what services when.

Dick: When you were in Washington did you promote the idea of pulling the historians out of Denver and into cultural resource centers?

Bob: Absolutely!

Dick: Do you want to elaborate on that?

Bob: Well, it just never got off the ground for the reason that I mentioned—the resistance of the archeologists and the resistance of the Denver Service Center.

Melody: Why did it get started in the Southwest Region as the Southwest Cultural Resources Center?

Bob: I think that just slipped in when everybody was looking the other way. This goes back to the early 70's. My memory may be wrong, but it may have been in large part a product of the aggressiveness of Cal Cummings.

Melody: But he was an archeologist.

Bob: That's right, he was, but he was running the show too. He's one of the few archeologists who seems to be comfortable in an interdisciplinary setting. It started from slim pickings, too, so that it was not a great new institution unveiled with fanfare, like Tucson and Lincoln.

Dick: It also had the support of Bob Lister, who spoke with a great deal of authority.

Bob: That's true.

Dick: And it had the support of Joe Rumberg, who was the Regional Director. What do you feel about such centers? Do you think they are a good idea?

Bob: Oh absolutely. But as we've discussed, I still think that the Park Service needs an organization in which the Regions mirror the Washington Office. If this is the direction to go, every Region ought to have a cultural resource center. This ties in with what I said a moment ago about abolishing the Denver Service Center. Probably you could not make a good justification for such a center in every Region so long as the Denver Service Center is in existence. I am not sure that you can justify it in this Region now. It has grown, and of course nobody is suggesting that it be dismantled. But if you were starting from scratch, I doubt that you could put together a prospectus that could convince everyone that this Region needed what you've got now.

Dick: Do you think cultural resources centers would be effective as bi-regional centers?

Bob: I am opposed to bi-regional anything. I don't think that a professional service center, no matter what it is, ought to serve more than one master, and that is what you have now.

Dick: On the whole, do you think archeological centers are a good idea and have been effective?

Bob: It is a mixed bag. I would prefer to wipe the slate clean and merge them into cultural resource centers in each Region. No matter what the testimonials of the respective Regional Directors, you have an untenable situation in Lincoln, where the Midwest Archeological Center tries to satisfy two Regional Directors. In the Southwest, I am not aware that the center at the University of Arizona supplies any of the needs of the Southwest Region. It is an arm of the Western Regional Office.

Dick: A little storage.

Bob: Storage doesn't complicate matters.

Dick: On the whole, how successful and how effective do you think our ties with the universities have been with these archeological centers?

Bob: Initially they held great promise. It was a principal goal of Ernest Connally. He foresaw great benefits flowing from the marriage of the Park Service with academia. Hartzog saw great benefits politically flowing from his institutions in another congressional jurisdiction. So they seemed to promise a lot. With the removal of the thrust that Hartzog and Connally provided, they have been a disappointment. The Park Service has not come up with the money that would have made the universities interested. The personnel in the universities may have tended to look down on their Park Service brothers and to see the whole thing primarily in terms of prospective dollars. So I don't think the marriage has been happy and effective. Even more serious, the divorce of these Park Service professionals from the rest of the Park Service has been detrimental. These people are off in a university setting where they cannot interact on a daily basis with Park Service management. That probably is the biggest liability. Again, I would like to do away with Denver Service Center, do away with all the archeological centers, and put everything into Regional cultural resource centers. This is an important point to make. It has to be organized as an interdisciplinary office on the regional level. You can't scatter it out, which is what Park Service management always wants to do. They want to split them up so they can't be too powerful.

Dick: You said that Connally felt there were great benefits to be derived from the contacts with the universities. The connections to be established. What do you think these great benefits were in his mind?

Bob: He saw it as an opportunity for Park Service people to imbide the academic atmosphere and perhaps work toward advanced degrees, to impart Park Service philosophies through teaching assignments. He saw it as an opportunity for storage of these huge collections of Park Service artifacts and for their utilization by the academic community as study collections. He saw it as an opportunity to get free research from graduate students on topics that the Park Service needed to have researched. He saw it as lending prestige and academic respectability to Park Service professionals who did not in the past enjoy it.

Dick: Did you agree with Connally at that time?

Bob: It never occurred to me to question him. It was just another of those innovations that Connally was promoting that I uncritically accepted and furthered.

Dick: You thought it might work.

Bob: I don't know that I thought of it in any other terms than a Connally initiative that, as his deputy, it was up to me to promote.

Dick: What do you think of the cooperative park studies units, CPSU's?

Bob: Except in Alaska, these are primarily natural science institutions. They probably offer greater flexibility, and greater opportunity for achieving Park Service goals with minimal expenditure of funds than the archeological centers, which were big, heavy-handed things. The only CPSU unit that I had experience with was the one in Alaska, when we were putting into effect the cultural resource aspects of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. That was run by a Park Service official, Zorro Bradley, and his deputy Melody Webb, and it was very effective. It accomplished a lot with a minimum of Park Service personnel, and principally through academic people. I suspect that in other universities, where it is not presided over by someone from the Park Service, it would tend to serve private research interest more than Park Service interest.

Dick: Would you discuss the interest that developed in CCC buildings in the National Park Service?

Bob: This is the rustic architecture study. That was an initiative that came out of the Western Region. It was advanced and promoted by Gordon Chappell and happened to come along at an appropriate time. Half a century had passed since this form of architecture had been introduced to the parks, and in our perception it was suddenly taking on historical and architectural value. Gordon and the people who worked with him defined the initiative and carried on. My role was confined to saying, "Gee that's a good idea, let's go with it," and giving the Western Region all the support it needed to go with it. With our blessing, the Western Region went with it and I think the outcome has been beneficial. It's greatly to Gordon's credit that he came up with this kind of creativity.

Dick: I think that I recall very clearly your memorandum to the field regarding CCC structures, that we should take a look at them. With the passing of time, their significance is becoming more clear.

Bob: That's true. Nobody in Washington thought of this. That memorandum was drafted by somebody on my staff, but the thought came from San Francisco.

Dick: Gordon makes a point that the rustic architecture interest is parallel to the CCC interest. In some cases you have rustic buildings that are not CCC, but they are part of that rustic trend. And in other cases you have buildings that have dual significance in the sense of they are good examples of rustic architecture and also CCC.

Bob: I guess that's true. The rustic architecture as we know it goes back to the 20's, before the CCC. But it was the CCC that democratized it and spread it all over the Park System.

Dick: What was the original concept and purpose of the List of Classified Structures?

Bob: It was strictly a budgetary tool. It was a tool for demonstrating to the Congress that we knew what resources we had and that we knew what ought to be done to them, that we knew how much it would cost to do what ought to be done, and that we had a priority ranking that would utilize whatever funds we could make a case for each year. It had no other purpose. It was not an honors list like the National Register. It never had any purpose beyond the budgetary.

Dick: In your opinion should the LCS be identical with the National Register?

Bob: The definition of the National Register was everything in this country worthy of preservation—not that is going to be preserved, but worthy of preservation according to the National Register criteria. Therefore, if the Park Service was requesting funds for preservation of any structure, that in itself testified to its worthiness for preservation. Therefore, it didn't make sense for it not to be in the National Register, individually or as part of a historic district. So I insisted that nothing be in the List of Classified Structures that we weren't prepared to put in the National Register. I ran into all kinds of flack from my own staff and from the field of the National Park Service and I simply lost the battle. I conceded that there were some things, such as cemeteries, that would not get into the National Register even though for one reason or another the Park Service would wish to preserve. Therefore, we would put them into the List of Classified Structures but not the National Register. I believe there were some archeological remains that the archeologists didn't know enough about to put in the National Register, but wanted money to find out more. There were a few little esoteric categories like that. That's about the time I left the Park Service and I believe they just opened the flood gates and now you've got all kinds of things in the List of Classified Structures that aren't in the National Register. I suppose part of that is that the people who are applying the National Register criteria have become very precious and prissy about what they accept. While I suppose that they wouldn't disagree with my generality that the definition of the Register is what's worthy of preservation, their definition of what's worthy of preservation would be different than mine.

Dick: So the LCS has become something other than what you thought it would be?

Bob: That's my impression. Maybe that's been forced by the people administering the National Register narrowing what they will allow into the Register and increasing the bureaucratic requirements. People just throw up their hands and don't want to execute the paperwork. So more and more these two instruments are diverging because a lot of what probably is eligible for the National Register in the List of Classified Structures can't make it through these obstacles that the National Register staff is erecting.

Dick: The archeologists have always felt left out of the LCS . Were they involved in the planning for the LCS?

Bob: Oh they definitely were. Doug Scovill as Chief Archeologist was in on everything because, of all of the top professional people there, he was the best bureaucrat. He was the one who had the best handle on budgeting and programming and the political aspects. So the List of Classified Structures was to include all archeology for which the Park Service intended to request funding. Subsurface archeology not fully identified presented problems for entry into the List of Classified Structures that standing structures or ruins did not present. At the time this instrument was conceived, the pressing problems, professionally and on the Hill, were historic structures. We were beginning to count the number of historic structures that we had in the Park System. We were beginning to admit to the Congress that we didn't even know what structures we were responsible for, much less how much it would cost to take care of them. Politically, the whole thrust of the List of Classified Structures was on standing structures. The intent, when we finally got on top of structures, was to fold archeology in. But all of the principles were defined right at the beginning.

Dick: The rank and file archeologists, though, seem to have felt that the LCS is mostly an architectural document or listing. They somehow or another feel left out of that.

Bob: Well this is their own fault. It comes from the feeling of archeologists that historic preservation is a historical and architectural thing. It is the same mindset that produced the bureaucratic battles in the creation of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation. They would rather go and do their own thing, uncomplicated by history and architecture. But if we conceive of this as principally a budgetary instrument, and if we define historic structures as all fabric made by human hands, then obviously archeology is part of it and ought to be. My sense is that over the years archeology fell behind and really hasn't been incorporated into the List of Classified Structures. So they are probably correct in saying that it is an architectural and historical document. But probably they would just as soon that it was and that they had their own instrument to serve the same purpose.

Dick: What do you think of the Cultural Resource Management Guideline, NPS-28?

Bob: It's probably too fat for one thing. As these documents get bigger and bigger, fewer and fewer people master them. So far as I am familiar with the content, I think it represents the natural and logical and admirable evolution from the basic policies that we first laid out in the late 60's, which in turn grew out of the Advisory Board's principles of 1936. But again, as I've said so often, your policies are great, it's the implementation that stinks.

Dick: Would you comment on any improvements that you might see in historic preservation management between the earlier years, let's say before and after World War II and the present?

Bob: I think there hasn't been much change in what is regarded as good policy. There has been an elaboration of various elements of the policy. So it's clearer what is acceptable and what isn't. We have had an increasing emphasis on architecture that was not present in the 30's. I think the principal improvement lies in the growing sensitivity in Park Service management ranks to the concerns of professional cultural resource management. There is still a distressing inclination to disregard the policies when it is convenient, but there is a growing sensitivity to these policies and to the concerns of the professional cadre of the Park Service.

Dick: You think that has improved?

Bob: I think that has improved. It has been slow and gradual.

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Last Modified: Mon, Mar 22 2004 10:00:00 pm PDT
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