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 number 8 of the interview with Bob Utley, September 26, 1985. Go ahead Bob.

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Many of the agencies, not least of them the Park Service, took refuge in the sophistry that because the Executive Order specified that these surveys would be completed by a certain deadline (a year or two I have forgotten), that it no longer applied because the deadline had come and gone. So it took the force of the law to make them start taking it seriously, and even then it was only half seriously. Even so, it represented quite a coup to get the President to sign an Executive Order that had to do with our business. That came about primarily through the collaboration of Bob Garvey and the Advisory Council and Jack McDermott, who was his only staff member at the time, with Bill Reilly, who was a staff official over in the Council on Environmental Quality, under Russell Train. (Reilly since has become President of the Nature Conservancy or one of those other big wilderness organizations.) Between them, though, they managed to get the Executive Order up through the CEQ hierarchy.

Melody: What does CEQ stand for?

Bob: Council on Environmental Quality.

Dick: Bob you mentioned that the National Register Criteria were sound. Were you and are you completely satisfied with the National Register criteria.

Bob: I don't know what the present wording is. They are basically the same. I think they have tinkered with them in a cosmetic sense over the years. I have always regarded them as sound, yes. They have periodically come under attack by people who wanted to make them so explicit that they could easily qualify or disqualify any given property. I think the merit of the criteria is that they establish general guidelines, understood by trained people in our profession, that allow for the exercise of professional judgment within broad parameters. That this is the only sound way that you can get to it. The Office of Management and Budget always wants to tighten them up and in fact return it all to the level of national significance. I know there have been periodic task forces that have sought to rewrite the National Register criteria, either to make them more specific or to tighten them up so that fewer properties slip through, but Melody says they are the same, and if they aren't they are basically the same as we started with, and as I mentioned the other day, these go back to the criteria that were being applied in the 30's.

Melody: The interpretation of those criteria, however, has changed considerably in the last 10 years.

Bob: I guess that's true.

Dick: Bob, what is your feeling about the 50-year criterion?

Bob: There is no 50-year criterion. Unfortunately, what was considered as a general guideline has been translated by either ignorant and well-meaning people, or by evil people with bad designs, into a criterion. It's become almost a cliche. The thinking was that in general you need a 50-year perspective to have a good professional judgment of whether a property qualifies or not. But it was never intended to be rigidly applied, and when the National Register criteria were written the wording in the original landmark criteria was retained in which, upon a showing of "transcendent" value, the general guideline of 50 years was to be ignored. When you are dealing with properties on the level of community significance, as you are in the National Register, it doesn't take much verbalization to make a case for transcendent significance in the local context. So the way that was intended to be applied was to use it in obvious cases where you needed to have a 50-year perspective. We used to accuse, only half jokingly, various Park Service superintendents of each spring systematically going around their parks and demolishing all 49-year old buildings. As a matter of fact, some superintendents were demolishing buildings that were approaching 50 years to avoid having to deal with them on the basis of that spurious 50-year rule.

Dick: Bob, would you discuss the background to the 1966 Act especially as it relates to landmarks or the landmark program?

Bob: The 66 act politically began in the broad historic preservation movement that was beginning to concentrate on urban problems, on the bulldozers that were taking out great swatches of both urban and rural America. What we called the "new preservation" focused on anonymous architecture or adaptive use in the urban context of historic districts. This was in contrast to the traditional associative type of preservation such as, for example, Gettysburg or Independence Hall, which we preserve because of association with people and events of the past. The movement for a law gathered momentum within that broader constituency, and so therefore in the Congress it found its way into the housing subcommittees, which dealt more with that aspect of preservation. What George Hartzog did was to grab the proposals and nail them to the existing Historic Sites Act and the existing landmark program. Thus he facilitated the capture of the legislation from the housing people and got it into the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, where it would be more of a Department of Interior thing. He was always insistent upon the point that the National Register already had authorization in the Historic Sites Act. In all of the documents we prepared—the procedures, guidelines, standards and so forth, he changed the language from creating a National Register of Historic Places to read "expand and maintain." That language got into the law itself empowering the Secretary of the Interior through the Park Service to "expand and maintain a National Register of Historic Places." That word "expand" relates back to the existing landmark program, and in all of his testimony George insisted that the National Register already existed, had existed since 1935, and had always been the responsibility of the National Park Service. All that was proposed in this new legislation, as he explained it, was to provide the means to broaden it to take in those places of state and local significance that were now suffering so badly from want of funding and the actions of Federal bulldozers in the housing and highway programs. It was this ploy, this tactical move, more than anything, I think, that captured the new program for the Park Service and away from the housing people. And so we always maintained the fiction that the new National Register was simply the old landmark list broadened.

Dick: Several times in this interview you've given Hartzog a great deal of credit for various things relating to historic preservation, and you seem to be giving him a great deal of personal credit in pulling these programs away from HUD.

Bob: That is my intent, yes. Not that he understood it all that well, not that he was all that personally committed to it, but he greatly enjoyed this kind of intellectual exercise, focusing on the tactics, whether it's historic preservation or recreation or getting money for the curation of objects or what have you. It was almost a game with him, a game at which he was very good. I was thinking over our interview of Tuesday and hoping that I didn't come across as too critical of George for my perception of his not being all that personally committed to historic preservation. I thought in terms of my own responsibility for the three disciplines, and the fact that I may not have had a great personal interest in or commitment to archeology, for example. But that didn't inhibit me from trying to understand it and advance its fortunes just as much as my job called for me to do. That's comparable to what we are talking about Hartzog doing. Historic preservation was part of his responsibility and he advanced its interest whether he was personally deeply committed to it or not in the same way that I worked, I think, for archeology.

Dick: It seems that the Hartzog administration comes across as the major turning point in recent cultural resource management development in the National Park Service.

Bob: That is true because of the 66 Act, which in terms of consequences, bureaucratic as well as professional, probably was a greater legislative landmark than the Historic Sites act, important as that was. You are correct that this was the period when historic preservation flourished as it never had before and never has since, but it was also a time when the Park Service as a whole flourished as it never had before and never has since. So in one sense we were a beneficiary of a dynamic and creative and energetic builder as Director of the National Park Service such as we had never had before and never have since.

Dick: I guess I stated this once before, the other day and again just now, what strikes me is the importance of what happened during Hartzog's era and the fact that the rank and file Park Service people have not really recognized his role in pulling historic preservation together, getting the policies written, getting the disciplines together under one roof, establishing OAHP, getting the 1966 Act passed. People usually go back to Albright, to the 1933 Executive Order, and they kind of move on through the 60's with only a nod to Hartzog. In fact, his tenure was more of a landmark in the development of CRM in the Park Service than I had realized.

Bob: That is true. There simply is no question about that. I think one reason for the lack of appreciation may be that our discipline tends to have a deeply ingrained distrust of politicians and bureaucrats, and Hartzog was the quintessential politician and bureaucrat. Those who want no part of the dirty life of Washington look back on him as a slippery operator. What they fail to appreciate is that it takes slippery operators to make a success of the leadership of a bureau. In fact, the reason that our disciplines have not exerted more influence than they have is simply because so many of them don't want to get their hands dirty with administration and politics.

Dick: What you need is a slippery operator with some degree of principle.

Bob: Absolutely, but the point I am making is that he is perceived, by those who never worked closely with him, as being without principles. I think it's worth comparing George Hartzog with Lyndon Johnson because those two had a lot in common. They were indeed both of them men of principle. Whatever you may think of Lyndon Johnson's involvement in the Vietnam War, he was a man of principle. But both were also slippery bureaucrats and politicians, very much so.

In fact, after Johnson stepped down from the Presidency, he went back to his ranch, and the rest of his life was greatly preoccupied with two things—putting together the LBJ park and the LBJ library. And so Hartzog had occasion to deal closely and on a continuing basis with ex-President Lyndon Johnson, and the two of them came very much to appreciate each other and to understand that they might well have been cut from the same block. As you know, Richard Nixon fired Hartzog after he was elected to his second term, and Hartzog had a hard time letting go of the Park Service. So periodically he used to call us from his law office and enlist us to do certain things for him. One night in January of 1973 he had Ernest Connally and me and Bill Everhart up to the Lawyers Club for dinner. Among other things, he wanted me to write him a speech on the Civil War. I've forgotten what he wanted the others to do. In the midst of dinner the television out in the lobby announced that Lyndon Johnson had died at his ranch in Texas. Hartzog was very visibly shaken by this, and it was obvious that there was a great bond between the two that had developed in the years after the presidency. Hartzog told us that evening that the last time he was down at the ranch he and the President were sitting on the front porch, and the President leaned over and he slapped George on the knee and said, "George, I wish to hell I had known you when I was President because between the two of us we could have remade the fucking world."

Dick: Would you comment on Section 106 and what you perceive to be its value to cultural resource management in the National Park Service since its implementation?

Bob: There's been a lot of criticism of Section 106 inside and outside the Park Service, most of it invalid. The Park Service from the very beginning had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Section 106 compliance. I am sure it never dawned on anyone in the Park Service when this law was being conceived, even George Hartzog, that Section 106 was going to protect properties under the jurisdiction of the Park Service just the same as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. But lo and behold it applies probably even more to the historic resources of the Park System because these are the cream of the crop. We encountered tremendous resistance from the field in the Park Service to any kind of scrutiny under Section 106. The Park Service was the expert in historic preservation. The Park Service had been the lead Federal agency in historic preservation from the beginning. Who presumes to tell the Park Service how it should be done? This was not just a sub-rosa attitude. It was openly articulated by park superintendents who wanted no interference with the way they ran things. Gradually over the years, the Park Service learned that it had to take Section 106 seriously, especially as other agencies found themselves dragged into court for procedural violations. Not substantive. Procedure is how you get people in court under this law. I believe there were some threats of litigation. I don't believe there was ever any actual litigation against the Park Service, but gradually it began to pay attention to Section 106, not on a systematic basis—some regions were better than other regions—and not very sincerely either. But I have always felt that finally, especially after the Advisory Council won its independence in 1976, it was the threat of policing and punishing from the outside that forced the Park Service to be more serious about its policies and standards. It still isn't very serious about them, but the extent to which it has a good body of policy and standards and the extent to which it applies them, I think, is largely a result of the threat of 106 and the consequent embarrassment to the Park Service of being exposed in improper care of historic resources.

Dick: Bob, day before yesterday we discussed how you came to Washington not really knowing a great deal about historic preservation philosophy and policy because it was apparently not your job here in Santa Fe. Let me ask you where policy was debated prior to your coming to Washington. Was it debated at all in the regions or was it all in Washington or in the parks?

Bob: Policy wasn't debated. Policy wasn't considered at all. I don't think that my experience in this Region was unusual. We all gave lip service to those Advisory Board principles, but superintendents and Regional Directors ran their historical areas much as they wanted, and I just don't believe that any Region had much of a debate over policy.

The first I can remember getting involved in it was when Hartzog had received the report of the Leopold committee saying we weren't doing enough research in the Park Service and System. That was directed almost exclusively at natural science research, but history and archeology got caught in the fallout. Just before I came to Washington, Hartzog reorganized the Washington Office under an Assistant Director for Resource Studies, and he looked upon it as being exclusively research. The Division of History had never done research. The Division of History had been concerned with policy, not in the formal sense of writing down policies, but of dealing with individual issues as they arose against the background of their experience and those Advisory Board principles. Suddenly to be looked on as dealing exclusively with research, and with none of what previously constituted 90% of the functions of the History Division, not only was traumatic but left a huge gap in Washington Office responsibility. So early in my tenure in Washington, we had some arguments with Hartzog over this and finally a conference in Philadelphia under the chairmanship of Ronnie Lee. He brought in Fran Ronalds from Morristown and other Superintendents who were known as experts in preservation. We went through this question of who was going to do this policy thing now. It was really more of a meeting on procedure than policy. I don't think anything ever came out of that except some good paper that stated the problem and how it ought to be handled. As a matter of default, however, we didn't do research. We went on doing management history like we had been doing for years. This issue got overtaken by the organization of that big research unit in Washington, so I was able to do research but also have the personnel to continue to take care of what I regarded as the most important function of that division. You asked me the other day what the Chief Historian should do. His first priority is management history.

Dick: i.e. policy.

Bob: Policy formulation, application, and monitoring.

Dick: Let me get this straight then. You said the Washington Office, Division of History, had prior to your coming been primarily involved in policy, so that's where policy would have been debated if anywhere.

Bob: Yes, but it wasn't called policy. So far as it was debated at all, it was debated in terms of specific issues. We've got Chalmette down here and they want to reconstruct the earth work. How should we handle this? There was a staff historian who was an expert on that period. Rogers Young had the early Federal and national period. So Chalmette was his park and he handled all issues relating to Chalmette, and when issues that we would now call policy arose he determined the ideal solution. The staff historians did this less on the basis of any written body of policy than on a philosophy that had developed through long experience. I think their judgments flowed from those Advisory Board principles, but the principles were not hauled out and looked at every time there was a policy question. Nobody questioned that Roy Appleman was the keeper of the ultimate wisdom on matters relating to western and frontier historic property. Or that Charlie Porter was on the colonial period.

Dick: I suppose one could look back and research that period from the mid-30's up to the mid-60's and by examining the decisions made determine that the Washington office had certain biases, but there was no fundamental policy document, it was just a matter of the chance of personalities and projects submitted.

Bob: That's the only way you could get at it, except by looking at the Advisory Board principles, which constituted the only charter. But it was more this personal philosophy developed through experience that determined what was and wasn't policy, and the only way you could get at it is by examining individual issues as you've indicated.

Dick: And Hartzog asked for written policies.

Bob: You bet. This was in connection with George's brilliant public relations ploy when, with great fanfare and approval by Jack Anderson and other columnists, he suddenly abolished the Administrative Manuals. Every park and every regional office had a bookshelf of about 25 manuals that governed everything that was done in the Park Service, including cultural resource management, and Hartzog threw them all out. He said they stifled creativity and he didn't want that kind of crutch on which everybody relied and in which they took refuge. And he got great approval in the press. When those got tossed out, however, there was nothing. Even he was not about to turn superintendents loose with nothing but their own judgment, and so it was against that background that the policies evolved. The theory was that we did not want detailed manuals to cover every possible contingency. We wanted to establish broad limits within which individual managers could exercise their creativity and imagination and initiative and not be hampered by detailed instructions. So the exercise in policy writing was definitely along those lines, not to list do's and dont's but to give superintendents some broad guidance and let them do as they wanted within that broad guidance.

Dick: Okay, perhaps we are looking for a shift in power from the parks to the regions and Washington in part through the development of written policies and the use of Section 106. Would you say that is true or not.

Bob: No, I can see how you might spot that as a trend, but Hartzog was definitely wedded to a decentralized organization that permitted the greatest possible latitude for individual initiative on the lower levels. Now that philosophy, which indeed was implanted in the Park Service, ran counter to his own management style. Hartzog was the leader, the monarch in all the plenitude of his power, a very personal leader, and you jolly well had best not cross him however much the latitude built into the policies.

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