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 18

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Bob: There seems to be a contradiction between my saying implementation of policy stinks while there is an improving sensitivity on the part of park management to cultural resource management concerns. I think what you have is the rise in the Park Service of younger people who have been brought up in a climate of repeated stress on cultural resources and repeated imprecations to consult the specialists in the Regional Office before moving. That is a trend that I see. On the other hand, I continue to believe that the management—the formal organization for the management of the resources of the Park System—is such that those managers who don't want to conform are not confronted with any particular penalty. Especially among the older superintendents, I still see the tendency to do whatever they jolly well please in their parks regardless of policies that are as clear as day, and about which there could be no logical dispute. Your management system does not pinpoint those deviations and does not assess any penalties for the deviation. In this region you've got half or less of the superintendents who come from the old school, and they do whatever they please, and if their deviance is spotlighted there is no reprimand for it. You folks in the Southwest Cultural Resource Center may get upset, but I doubt that the Regional Director descends very hard on such a superintendent. You may not have half of them who come out of that tradition. More than half of them may come from the younger tradition. But I know you have a few who certainly fit into that category, and I have the strong feeling that other Regions have more.

Dick: Bob, when you were in Washington, which Regions in the Service did you feel were the strongest in historic preservation management?

Bob: That would be hard to say. We always had trouble with the Philadelphia Office, which has the most historic resources. More than any other Region, they tended to go their own way in belligerent defiance of anything said in Washington. Southeast Region has a lot of historic resources, and they tended also to go their own way. Maybe it is partiality that leads me to say that Southwest Region was the most responsive to Washington Office leadership and the most conscientious about following good practice and the policies. I attribute that to the strong professional cadre here, first with Bill Brown and Dave Battle, and then you came in. Cal Cummings was here in archeology. And finally Melody Webb. This professionalism asserted itself despite a regional management that didn't tend to be sympathetic, with the exception of the period when Joe Rumburg was Regional Director. Frank Kowski was not sympathetic. Monte Fitch, his hatchet man, was most certainly not sympathetic. John Cook was very supportive except when it suited his convenience not to be.

Dick: We were having serious problems with John and usually he'd listen to us directly.

Bob: I would hate to single out any other Region as second because I consider all equally reprehensible in their handling of cultural resource management. Maybe that is because the function of my office was to look over the performance, and what we tended to see was what was being done badly rather than well. And so what we remember is the bad performance.

Dick: Recalling the circumstances of the Park Service's acquisition of Castle Clinton and Ellis Island in New York, what really happened to bring the Service into control of these two properties?

Bob: Castle Clinton goes back to before my time. That was Ronnie Lee's operation and I don't know any of the circumstances. Ellis Island was tied in with the American Museum of Immigration at the Statue of Liberty. It was a highly political thing in which all of the immigrant groups in this country, working through their vocal representatives in the Congress, went to work on the Park Service. I was not at the center of these things. I can only confirm that it was highly political, that the Park Service had nightmares over what it would do if it had Ellis Island thrust upon it, but in which the political returns for cooperating in the acquisition of Ellis Island were great, because of all of those immigrants or immigrants' heirs out there in the country. Of course, Ellis Island has turned out to be a nightmare. I don't know that the Park Service, despite all of the progress, is yet on top of what is going to be done there and how much it will cost. The

American Museum of Immigration was an unmitigated disaster. It was highly political, and it was coming to fruition at the very time that we were changing our attitudes from the melting pot to the plural society. The exhibits that had been planned to emphasize the melting pot offended people who wanted to retain and display the cultural identity of their homeland, and that was simply no win. This was during the Udall years. I have some memories of these problems, but they are not clear enough or specific enough to say more.

Dick: What do you think of the historic leasing program in the National Park Service?

Bob: Something long overdue that offers the only real hope for the utilization of historic buildings where they exist in such numbers as to prohibit the Park Service funding their preservation or restoration from traditional budgetary sources. It's something that I think was floated into the Park Service with the advent of Ernest Connally and the mindset that he brought with him. It was bitterly resisted by traditional National Park Service managers who did not want any foreign elements within their boundaries, and of course you can't lease a building unless you have someone in your boundaries. The issue came to a climax at Delaware Water Gap, where the Park Service acquired dozens of historic farmsteads from the 18th and early 19th century, dispossessed the owners who were preserving and using them, and boarded them up. They became subject to vandalism and deterioration and became a scandal that the Park Service couldn't get on top of, because now the price tag was too great. We attempted to inaugurate leasing then, or sell-back or lease-back, but not only was there the resistance from the traditional park manager, there were some legal questions. The latter probably could have been overcome if there had been a disposition to overcome them. George Hartzog was in favor of any of these devices that would allow for continued use because that allowed him options other than fee acquisition. He promoted the lease-back, sell-back device at Minute Man, where we were trying to recreate the historic scene along the retreat route of the British from Lexington and Concord. It worked to some extent there but I think was never really realized. When we were promoting the same thing at Golden Gate a decade and a half later, we were still running into resistance from park superintendents. When we tried to plan the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston, the obvious thing to do with those big warehouses was some kind of a lease program. The superintendent, however, was not going to have any foreign traffic in his park. So I guess it's only with Hot Springs that it has really been accepted.

Melody: Fort Mason at Golden Gate.

Bob: They finally did cave in up there, but as late as 1975 the Superintendent was not going to have any part of it.

Dick: So Hartzog was in support of this?

Bob: Absolutely!

Dick: Old line management resisted and Hartzog really in many ways was ahead of his time in that regard.

Bob: I think so, but old line management was able to point to some provisions of law that seem to support their position. I guess George didn't want to fight it until he got more legislation, although I've heard him say many a time that you don't need a new law, you need new lawyers to interpret the law you've got. He was a lawyer himself, and he could take any law and interpret it to do anything he wanted to. You remember he used the Historic Sites Act to justify the Natural Landmark Program, and of course the Historic Sites Act had nothing to do with natural areas.

Dick: Did Connally propose or support a Servicewide program of historic building leasing?

Bob: I don't know. I know that he felt strongly, in contradiction to Regional Director Frank Kowski, that those bathhouses at Hot Springs had to be saved, that their demolition would subject us to worldwide criticism. He felt strongly on this, and my recollection is that a leasing program was his solution. Kowski wouldn't buy that. Kowski was an old-line park manager and he didn't want anybody in his park. There was a standoff then, because Kowski wanted into tear them down. So it has got to have been after Connally's time that leasing came to its own. I don't recall any major proposal of his for Servicewide leasing. There may have been.

Dick: Would you discuss your opinion of tax incentives for historic preservation and the effects of this in the Service and outside the Service?

Bob: In the middle 70's we all enthusiastically favored tax incentives as a major aid to historic preservation, and such they have proved in terms of preservation payoff. It's amounted to many times the payoff that you get from a matching grant-in-aid program. We have a tradition in this country of promoting social purposes through the manipulation of the tax code. So long as we do this, then I think tax incentives and disincentives are a legitimate and desirable tool for historic preservation. If we are now entering a time of tax reform, in which any significant number of social causes are to be sacrificed, I am prepared to sacrifice historic preservation as one of them. I would like to see tax simplification and tax reform. Historic preservation is one complicating factor of many in the present tax code. Nor am I sure that the tax incentive program is being administered as professionally as it should be.

Dick: So far as preservation itself goes?

Bob: Yes, there have been many compromises with preservation in the interest of financial and economic development rather than the resource. High-powered developers have done a lot of things that could not be professionally justified.

Dick: But in the long run, the alternatives were a lot worse when alternatives meant abandoned buildings that were eventually torn down.

Bob: Yes, but I have seen instances of tax incentive projects in which what was there before had been so totally buried that it for all practical purposes was lost.

Dick: And yet, this would supposedly conform to the Secretary's Standards?

Bob: That's right. The Secretary's Standards depend on interpretation just as the National Register criteria do, and it depends on who's doing the interpreting.

Melody: What do you think about facade preservation?

Bob: Facade preservation is fine up to a point, but if it becomes simply a scrap thrown to the preservationists in order to get a hugh tax benefit, I don't think it is justifiable. When I was in Washington two weeks ago I saw a whole street that my office used to look out on from the 801 Building, where George Washington University has built new buildings behind the street front. They preserved the facade of that whole block, along with the first room or two, and it looks quite good. I think it retains the historic scale and visual aspect of that part of Washington, which otherwise would have been overwhelmed by more glass boxes. I suppose that was a tax incentive proposition. All I know is that project appealed to me.

Dick: Bob at one time you compiled a list of horror stories in the National Park Service. Would you elaborate on this please?

Bob: When Ron Walker became Director and we persuaded him that there was insufficient sensitivity in the Park Service ranks to the proper care of cultural resources, he turned us loose to go around and attempt to develop that sensitivity. In order to dramatize the point to the field, we collected a list of horrors that had been perpetrated on cultural resources in violation of policy and good practice. We put together a list of five or six pages of true horror stories, such as the Park Service deliberately bulldozing buildings that were of National Register quality and all kinds of other horrors that lent themselves to making the point. Under previous regimes of the Park Service, we could not have compiled such a list, except surreptitiously, and most certainly could not have made public use of it. But we took this list around and publicized it quite broadly, and used it as the basis for attempting to get Park Service management sensitive to policy and their responsibility to apply the policy. After Walker went under, Gary Everhardt embraced this too, and in fact he took it over and placed it in the record of the Congressional oversight committee as a basis for his point that we needed to upgrade our cultural resources management. Of course, he didn't deliver on it then. But the Park Service really has been guilty of an incredible number of horrors and we should put that list into the record of these interviews.

Melody: Attach the transcript.

Dick: The list is entitled "Examples of NPS deficiencies in Historic Preservation," and dates from about 1974.

Bob: For example, demolishing ruins at Fort Laramie for riprapping in the Laramie River. Many of the historic buildings at Big Bend National Park were systematically bulldozed because it is a natural park. Here's one on the C&O Canal, where there was a towpath routed around a sheer cliff and cut right out of the cliff, and the Park Service went in and blasted it out so it would accommodate two-way vehicular traffic.

Dick: We talked earlier about possible improvements in cultural resources management over the years. Do you know of current examples or examples from the mid-70's or later?

Bob: The C&O Canal horror would not be possible today. At Castillo de San Marcos, during my tenure in Washington, the leaking terraplain was covered over with a chemical mixture that produced a glaring white in contrast to the historic appearance. I remember the argument we had with the Mid-Atlantic Region over the painting of Thomas Edison's home, which the superintendent wanted to paint grey even though it had been maroon throughout its historic period. And the superintendent painted it grey. That is a horror. I don't think you have so many now.

Dick: Bob, do you think that this list of horror stories that you prepared had any effect?

Bob: Yes, I think it did. We took it around to every superintendents' and Regional Directors' conference that we could get billing on. Some of the horrors were so outrageous that it did make park management think about the record of the Park Service and the need, in this day of great visibility, to have a little better record.

Dick: Bob, have you ever been involved with carrying capacity concerns for historic property?

Bob: We discussed it at length when the carrying capacity for natural areas was under discussion, without ever reaching any definitive conclusion. I believe that the naturalists were able to come up with criteria and standards, but the best we could do was say that we must be prepared to limit use of the resource when in the judgment of the professional staff it was producing irrevocable damage.

Dick: What about effects on the visitors, in a sense of crowding and the rendering them unable to enjoy?

Bob: I don't recall that we ever discussed it from that point of view. What I remember most clearly is the Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois, as an example. The mobs going through there each year are wearing away the fabric, and if the day ever comes when the structure is imperiled, then the resource comes first. This was in relation to the message we were trying to put over during the Walker initiative, that preservation must always come first. Therefore, if the Lincoln Home is imperiled by too many people, you close the Lincoln Home and let people look at it from the outside, or take whatever limiting measure in the judgment of the professionals is necessary, in order to insure that the resource will be passed on unimpaired for future generations. But in the scientific sense of carrying capacity we never approached that kind of sophistication.

Dick: It seems as though in historical areas the Park Service is inconsistent. For example, at Adams House in Quincy there is a very strict limit. At the Hubbell Home and at Scotty's Castle there is. But at a place like Independence Hall they flood through there. It does not appear to me there is any consistent policy.

Bob: No, and it probably has never even been approached with a view to adopting a consistent policy. I suspect it is all a product of local park management or regional consideration.

Dick: This kind of thing has never come into the compliance process has it?

Bob: No, I cannot recall of any instance where it has, other than in the context of Section 106. As an illustration, that could conceivably become a 106 case. By its actions the Park Service was adversely affecting a National Register property. By its failure to take limiting action it was affecting a National Register property.

Dick: Have you ever been involved in discussions over fees at historical areas, and if so what were the issues that surfaced, and philosophically and professionally how do you view increasing fees at historic areas of the National Park Service?

Bob: I have never been involved in any discussion over fees. That would have been considered a management matter that the historians were never consulted on, so I can't remember a single session in which I was involved. As for the second part of your question, philosophically and professionally, I have always bitterly opposed charging any fees for entry into any national park area anywhere. I believe that this is a responsibility of the national government and that parks ought to be totally funded by the national government.

Dick: Bob, there are a number of efforts these days to have the homes of presidents and former presidents commemorated in one fashion or another. What do you feel the Park Service's role should be in all of this?

Bob: Back in the middle 60's the Congress developed a tremendous interest in presidential homes and historic properties to illustrate and commemorate presidents. There arose, both in the Congress and responsively in the Park Service, the feeling that every president ought to be commemorated in the National Park System, or that every president not otherwise well commemorated ought to be commemorated in the National Park System. This tied into the Landmark program and the orders from the Advisory Board to study every president as soon as he was elected. I think all presidents, save maybe one, are commemorated either in the Park System or by a good National Historic Landmark. I think the only one we couldn't find something for was Franklin Pierce or Millard Filmore, one of the two. But in general I agree that every president ought to have a unit of the National Park System if there is a good property by which to interpret him. I don't think we ought to drag the bottom of the barrel for it. I'd rather see San Clemente illustrate Richard Nixon than his birthplace. And I am not crazy about John F. Kennedy's birthplace, although that seems to be popular. But we know that every president is going to constitute a significant portion of our history, every president. And a presidential site offers a good window for viewing. I would not feel as strongly about a Presidential Library for every President because I generally oppose dispersing archival treasures all over the country. But that is something different than a presidential historic property.

Dick: When should the Park Service make the evaluation of these sites? While the President is still alive, or after 25-50 years?

Bob: I think it is a good thing to make the studies while the president is still alive, and I don't really have any problem making landmarks while presidents are still alive. But I don't agree with putting them into the Park system until the presidents are dead.

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