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 6 of the interview with Bob Utley and this is September 26 now. Two days since the earlier interview. Go ahead Bob.

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Bob: We were talking the other day about when George Hartzog may have come to trust me, and I was indicating that the process at least started in the early months of 1967, when I was named Acting Chief of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation for about 6 months until Connally came in to assume his new responsibilities. We had a task force that was assembled from various field units of the National Park Service as well as Washington to draw up the procedures and guidelines and criteria and so forth for all of these new programs that we had been authorized in the 66 Act. My organization had recently moved over to Roslyn in northern Virginia, and we occupied an office building that had two or three empty floors. So we stuck the task force down on the fourth floor, one floor below me, and simply turned them loose on this problem. I was the Chairman of the Task Force, but I did not meet with them except when there were drafts to be considered and disputes to be resolved. I believe we had Jerry Rogers in by that time—a very junior GS-7 from out in Texas. Zorro Bradley represented Archeology, and Russell Keune, later of the National Trust, represented Architecture, and on my urging the Chairman was Murray Nelligan. He had been Regional Historian in Philadelphia. Murray was a big talker who created lots of words very emotionally, and he had got himself crosswise with the organization. I had recommended Murray because I didn't believe that we ought to lose his long experience and expertise in park history because of personal characteristics that offended people. That was probably not good grounds on which to select a Chairman. As it turned out, Murray was quite a disruptive element, and the task force rocked from one controversy to another, but finally came up with the necessary paper. That groundwork then was the platform (to mix metaphors) on which the new programs were launched. And I believe that by the time Ernest Connally came in the summer of 1967, I had perhaps rehabilitated myself enough in Hartzog's estimate that I was not seriously endangered after that.

Dick: This was a task force that dealt both with internal and external aspects?

Bob: No, it was strictly external. We drew up the guidelines for the operation of the grant-in-aid program. That was a first task. We rewrote the National Landmark criteria to constitute criteria for the National Register down to the level of community significance. And we conceived an administrative mechanism by which all this would be carried out. Most of this mechanism was modeled after the already existing and successful recreational programs of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. We early on decided that the programs could not be carried out by Park Service personnel, that we would have to rely on the states. So the system of what we now call State Historic Preservation Officers evolved out of that task force. It drafted a letter for Secretary Udall to send to all of the State governors inviting them to name someone to work with us in developing a State-Federal partnership as the basic working approach to these new programs.

I think it fair to say that OAHP as it was conceived in those first months, and I think as Ernest Connally may have conceived it, was more concerned with the external programs than with the internal. In the perception of most of us, the internal was rocking along with fair satisfaction. But here in the external we were building something new to tackle the so-called "new preservation" that came out of the creative thinking of the middle 60's in the preservation of historic districts and architecture to an extent that had never been done and that the Park Service was not well equipped to do.

Dick: But nevertheless the internal programs were under OAHP.

Bob: Yes. We had two previously existing professional divisions—History and Archeology. We created a third, Architecture, and each of these three had both what we then called inhouse and outhouse components. History had a park research outfit and the Historic Sites Survey—in and out. Likewise Archeology had the Interagency Archeological Services program, which had been around for a long time and which was external, and also had people dealing with internal. We set up historic architecture on the same model. Then the fourth division was National Register, which was totally external and responsible for the grant-in-aid and National Register programs. But each of the professional divisions had a significant role to play in the operation of that new external division.

Dick: Do you think that this was an effective organizational arrangement, where internal and external units were locked together?

Bob: Yes I do. I think it would have worked well if George had left it alone and not dismantled it three years later.

Dick: Bob, we've discussed some how Hartzog came to trust you in the early months of 1967. Would you in turn discuss why he distrusted you in the first place?

Bob: In all of my bureaucratic innocence I succeeded in getting myself crosswise not only with him but with the whole power structure in the Interior Department. Shortly after I went there, in 1964, the Pennsylvania Avenue plan was getting a great deal of publicity. You recall that President Kennedy lamented the shoddy appearance of Pennsylvania Avenue during his inaugural parade, and this translated into a mandate for Secretary Udall to do something about dressing up Pennsylvania Avenue. He turned to Nat Owings, the prominent architect associated with Owings, Skidmore and Merrill who did a lot of projects for Interior in the middle 60's. There was formed a Pennsylvania Avenue planning group, maybe even a commission that early, but it was basically Nat Owings' plan. Nat Owings was a very difficult man to deal with: mercurial, excitable, absolutely convinced of the correctness and the rectitude of what he was proposing, and impatient of any opposition. Nat and I later became good friends and worked closely together. But his Pennsylvania Avenue plan, which was unveiled with great ceremony shortly after I came to Washington, contemplated a totally new creation along Pennsylvania Avenue. In other words, we'd tear down everything there and build a monumental national avenue framed with new monumental structures. That would have been all right, except to promote it they had hung it on history, and unfortunately they said that they wanted to create a Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site based on the Historic Sites Act of 1935. They discovered that to do that they had to have some historical studies to establish the significance for consideration of the Advisory Board and the Congress of the proposed area. This is where I got dragged into it—to come up with the historical significance. I was pulled upstairs to be interviewed by high officials—I only later came to know how high they were—and I immediately took the stand that it was inappropriate to use the Historic Sites Act to justify a project that contemplated the destruction of historic properties. This scrambled up the intent, and from on high down to my level there were vibrations that I was interfering with what the Secretary wanted done. What happened, as I later learned, was that Owings and Udall got down on the floor of his office with the big map spread out before them and drew boundaries around the National Historic Site to conform to what Nat Owings' plan called to be done. When it got to me I delicately suggested that it should be the other way around. The historians make the study and decide what is historic, then you draw the boundaries.

Dick: Did they?

Bob: No, no it was done their way. A memorandum came from the Solicitor down to the Assistant Secretary for Public Land Management, Stanley Cain, that said that Chief Historian Utley was resisting what Secretary Udall wanted done. When that hit Hartzog's desk, of course he just went into orbit, and that was the beginning and almost the end of me in his estimation.

One of the central controversies was the Willard Hotel. And I told them at that time, if you create a national historic site here, in part based upon the historicity of the Willard Hotel, and then undertake to tear it down, you are going to run into problems. I reiterated this a year later, after the 66 Act passed, because that national historic site would go on the National Register, and if you're going to tear down the Willard Hotel, you are tearing down a National Register property, and so you've got a Section 106 case on your hands. Of course, as we know, the Willard Hotel encountered exactly that scenario and constituted a 10-year battle before it was finally resolved to keep the Willard Hotel.

But as it turned out I was ordered to take the boundaries they had drawn, constitute a task force to study what happened within them, and saturate that area with history. Which is what we did. We saturated it with historical events and significance, nailing all kinds of important people and all kinds of important events to specific locations on the ground. But little was left in the way of illustrative structures or settings. But it was on the basis of our study, saturating that with history, that they went forward and created the national historic site. So my only complicity in it was to give them the study they asked for. They took it from there and thenceforth until I got back into Hartzog's good graces I was bypassed, as we've seen on the unfolding of the 66 Act.

Dick: So you were seen I suppose by Hartzog as more or less of a troublemaker?

Bob: A troublemaker, an obstructionist, one who resorted to legal technicalities, probably excessively professional. We were both learning then. I learned an awful lot out of that experience about how to comport myself in a bureaucratic sense on that level. I think he may have learned a good deal at the same time about how to comport himself with regard to his professional staff, because he began to adopt different techniques than he had demonstrated as superintendent of Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. So it was a mutual learning process.

Melody: I think in large part your reputation is based on stands that you have taken of a professional nature such as the Pennsylvania Avenue issues. There are probably others in your career that would give us insight into the formation of the policy of historic preservation as we now it.

Bob: I don't recall any suicidal stands that I took on subsequent issues. One thing I learned from Pennsylvania Avenue is some of the ways to prevent bad things from happening and to promote good things without alienating those on whom you depend. For example, Congressman Charlie Bennett's proposal for the "Southmost Battlefield of the American Revolution National Historic Site." This was the scene of an encounter which indeed was the southmost, but as John Luzader used to say, its only other significance was that two equally incompetent commanders blundered into each other in the Florida swamps. Instead of standing up and saying this is unacceptable, which it was, and thereby alienating one of the most powerful members of Congress, who fancied himself a historian, and thereby also getting my boss George Hartzog into hot water, what we did was look for something bigger in which to bury the unacceptable. We stalled with one study after another so that the issue was never truly joined in ways that would leave blood on the floor. There were various other bureaucratic techniques like that, that were designed to avoid confronting the problem headon.

We did the same thing with Congressman Joe Skubitz when he was ranking minority member of our House legislative committee. He urged one project after another to put substandard properties from his Kansas district into the National Park System. We did the same thing with him, so that most of them never came to pass. One did, but I think it has since fallen by the wayside. Do you have in mind any particular issue that I am forgetting?

Melody: Well, of course, there is your experience with Frank Masland, Julia Butler Hansen, and what was going up at Fort Vancouver.

Bob: Frank Masland was part of the learning experience that occurred at the same time as the Pennsylvania Avenue mess and reinforced the conclusions Hartzog was already drawing. At my first Advisory Board meeting, at Great Smokies, this greatly venerated and highly significant member of the Secretary's Advisory Board took vigorous exception to a proposal to put the Washita Battlefield in Oklahoma into the National Park System, and he rose to make an impassioned speech about how this was a massacre of helpless women and children by bloodthirsty soldiers. I got up and said that Frank Masland didn't know what he was talking about, and Frank in great indignation stormed out, read the study, came back in, made an impassioned defense of his stand, and cast aspersions upon the person who had attacked him. When we got back to Washington, Hartzog sent down a note by way of my boss saying tell Utley to get straight with Frank Masland. So I wrote a letter of apology to Frank Masland, not for disagreeing with him but for the manner in which it was done. He responded handsomely, and to this day we are close friends and allies.

Dick: Bob, as an aside, why wasn't Washita Battlefield ever brought into the System. Did it have anything to do with Masland's feelings?

Bob: No, I believe the Advisory Board endorsed it. It never had the political steam behind it. It was a state historical park and the new Congressman from that district, I believe his name was Jed Johnson, a young fellow, embraced the cause. He fell casualty to the next election, and so the political support for it collapsed.

I guess there are other episodes that I might mention. The Historic Sites Survey and the National Landmark program were under my supervision, and this always involved delicate or politically loaded questions of what should or should not be national landmarks. One of the early incidents that brought me under Hartzog's critical notice had to do with the proposed McGuffey Birthplace Landmark in Ohio. McGuffey's Readers, you know, were a significant part of our educational history, and McGuffey was well worth commemorating in our National Landmark Program. The fact of the matter is, we already had McGuffey's home over in western Ohio, where he wrote all of these McGuffey's Readers, and it was already a National Historic Landmark, when Mike Kirwin came in with a proposal to put McGuffey's birthplace up as a National Landmark. Mike was the chairman of our appropriations subcommittee who controlled all of the money flow to the National Park Service. So Hartzog said yes, we'd take a look at it. We took a look at it. Mike Kirwin represented a district that consisted almost exclusively of Youngstown, Ohio, and not much more. Youngstown was a pretty grim industrial innercity, and there is not much history there. We had in fact combed his district from one end to another looking for landmarks and couldn't find anything. So we looked at the McGuffey Birthplace, and it turned out to be a hunk of real estate with nothing left on it that would even suggest a connection with anything historic. It was just a farm on the outskirts of Youngstown, with no structures surviving from McGuffey's time, so the answer was, this won't get it. For one thing, we've got a criterion which discourages birthplaces. For another, we've got the place most directly associated with McGuffey on the other side of the state, unfortunately not in Mike Kirwin's district. And so George went over and conveyed the unhappy tidings to Mike and came back with the word, apocryphal or no, that Mike says if he didn't get a landmark there ain't going to be no landmark program because he will cut off the money for it.

So, George then wrote to Mike and said we had this conversation the other day about McGuffey, and this is a very important matter, so important that I am asking Assistant Director Howard Stagner to go up and personally make the study that we have promised you. Well, Stagner was my boss and he was a naturalist. He had no background in history. So Howard Stagner went up and made the study, and it was then to be presented to the Advisory Board. We met up at Harpers Ferry. The chairman of the History Committee at that time was a witty and erudite former president of the University of Colorado, Robert Stearns. My custom was to present each study to the History Committee, and then they would deliberate, and then I would present the next one, and so forth. When they came to McGuffey, I turned it over to Howard Stagner and he presented it to the History Committee, which was by and large one of considerable integrity. Joe Brew said, you know, we've got to do this for Mike. Hartzog's got to do it for Mike. We owe a lot to Mike, and I believe that we should suppress our professional dictates in this one instance and give Mike his landmark.

So the record clearly showed that Howard Stagner presented the study without any participation whatever, either in the study or the presentation, by me or any other professional historian. I made sure that got in the record. Mike Kirwin got his landmark. The history people remained pure and unsullied by the prostitution of their profession, and a very sticky situation was bypassed. This I think represented my first memory of Hartzog religiously—maybe not religiously—but conscientiously not requiring his professionals to prostitute themselves.

Dick: In this case he chose a professional from another discipline to go up there and I suppose essentially prostitute himself.

Bob: What he did was to choose my boss, who happened to be of another discipline, but also he went in his capacity of Assistant Director. Yes, I think he prostituted himself, but I don't know what I would have done under similar conditions. I don't think he felt very comfortable doing it. But I think it was pretty widely recognized, when you can even get people like Joe Brew and Bob Stearns to prostitute themselves, that there was a powerful justification for rationalizing what they were doing in this one instance for expedient purposes, because Mike Kirwin had been one of the most influential supporters of the National Park Service through a long career in the Congress. He had done the Park Service many favors he didn't have to. And Mike Kirwin I suppose was more responsible than anyone else for insuring the continued flow of Mission 66 money. So everyone felt greatly indebted to him.

We have mentioned the reconstruction of Fort Vancouver. This is another instance involving powerful member of Congress. In fact it was Mike Kirwin's successor as chairman of the appropriations subcommittee for the Park Service, Julia Butler Hanson. She represented a district in the State of Washington that included Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. And whether on her initiative or what, she and Hartzog cooked up a deal to reconstruct the palisade of the old fur trading post of Fort Vancouver. Incrementally this cost over the years about 8 million dollars. It began to take shape just at the time that our thinking was beginning to harden against such reconstructions because the money was drying up for other things. We were never consulted on whether my organization approved of this or not. It was simply a fait accompli by Julia and George, with most of the staff support being done out of the park and the Western Region in San Francisco. We have since held it up as a prime example of the sort of thing that ought to be resisted.

I think it fair to say that at that time, just to digress a bit, my own philosophy had not hardened as it did later on the question of reconstruction. This was around the beginning of the 70's. I had actively supported the reconstruction of Bent's Fort. I guess as a measure of the influence of Roy Appleman on me I was all for interpreting the story, with preservation a secondary consideration. So I did not oppose Fort Vancouver. But that, along with what happened to Bent's Fort, became a study in excessive funding and in the inappropriate handling of historic fabric. You know, they just threw up these big palisade walls, and these walls didn't say much about Fort Vancouver, they really didn't rest on thorough research, and all in all it was a boondoggle that we shouldn't have done on any other grounds than political expediency.

Dick: Do you think that had you had the chance as a professional historian to discuss these directly with the Congresswoman or with the Congressman from Ohio in either case, the McGuffy case or the Fort Vancouver instance, that you as a historian could have persuaded them of the logic that went against their case or not?

Bob: That would differ from member to member. Julia Hansen was a very forthright woman. Very much determined to get her own way.

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