Whtie Sands Administrative History

The year 1937 marked a turning point for White Sands and its benefactor, the Roosevelt administration. Because 1936 had been an election year, FDR's staff had released large sums of money for public works projects to attract voters' attention. This strategy thus increased White Sands' emergency relief monies by a factor of 39, from $2,400 in fiscal year 1936 to $78,161 in the following year. For the next three years White Sands received smaller, though still substantial grants for construction work, so that by 1940 the federal government's relief investment topped $256,000. Completion of highway paving and the visitors center-headquarters complex owed much to this generosity. In addition, the NPS could mount a serious campaign to identify a stable source of water for the expanding visitation base (108,000 in 1937, a figure not to be matched until after World War II). [50]

The infusion of such federal capital made Tom Charles' role at the monument less critical than when he served as the only park service representative at the dunes. WPA construction of employee residences brought more staff, which in turn changed the strategy for counting visitors. Early in 1937 Frank Pinkley asked Charles to adjust his numbers for variations in weekday and weekend usage. To do so, Charles and a " Barry Mohun (the son of a wealthy eastern family who paid his salary at White Sands for six months), counted cars for 59 days, compared these to the written registrations, and calculated that 14 percent of all visitors signed the log book at the dunes entrance. Then in November, Pinkley sent Jim Felton to White Sands for the express purpose of greeting all patrons at the newly opened visitors center. A discrepancy occurred immediately in December, as Felton's daily eight-hour count of 1,830 visitors clashed with Charles' formulaic estimate of 4,742. [51]

By whatever numbers one cited, White Sands' popularity grew dramatically as facilities and transportation access increased. In July the SWNM reported visitation at the dunes had exceeded 12,400. More intriguing were comparisons of attendance for all SWNM units since 1935. That year White Sands contributed one-sixth of all visits to the region's monuments; in 1936 this grew to forty percent, and 35 percent in 1937. To make the point more clear, SWNM contrasted White Sands with Capulin Mountain National Monument, a dormant volcano crater along U.S. Highway 87 in far northeastern New Mexico. In July 1935, Capulin had outdrawn White Sands (5,000 visitors to 4,755); yet within two years the dunes had doubled the visitation of the New Mexican volcano (12,421-6,000). One reason for this surge was the inclusion of Independence Day as a major feature of the White Sands' calendar. Charles counted an astonishing 1,877 vehicles in the dunes that day. Then Isabelle Story of the NPS public affairs office wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled, "Oases for Tourists." Featuring Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, and White Sands, the October 17 feature coincided with dedication ceremonies for the headquarters' parking lot, where 1,200 guests listened to the 100-member Alamogordo High School band. [52]

The pride of the monument was the ambitious design for its museum. First attempted three years earlier by Robert Rose, planning for the White Sands story devolved upon Charlie R. Steen, the young archeologist who operated out of Santa Fe. Steen believed that the sequence of museum cases at White Sands should tell three stories. The first would be the origins of the dunes in the gypsum deposits of the San Andres mountains. Following this should be the ecology of the White Sands. Finally, the museum cases needed to tell the ethnology of the Mescaleros and the early Spanish exploration of the Tularosa basin. All of the design, felt Steen, should be tasteful and simple, as the museum occupied a structure built in the highly popular regional style of "Spanish colonial," or "adobe" architecture. This distinctive form, made prominent in Santa Fe in the 1920s and 1930s by architect John Gaw Meem, would be more renowned in northern New Mexico, where descendants of the seventeenth-century Spanish colonists resided. Thus the White Sands compound reflected the broader view of the park service, whose regional headquarters in Santa Fe (also done in adobe style) was under construction that same year. [53]

Structural work at White Sands took a precarious turn in the summer of 1937, as the now-familiar "change orders" coming from New Deal officials jeopardized production schedules and funding. The debate over location and extent of the picnic area persisted throughout the year, as Thomas C. Vint, chief NPS architect, argued for its placement on the edge of the dunes. Charles Richey claimed that Vint's idea had been scuttled (despite its inclusion in the master plan) because "Custodian Charles will arouse much local opposition to a permanent picnic site out of the better sands area." C.H. Gerner of the Washington NPS office had to remind his colleagues that disagreements over the picnic area endangered the substantial sums of New Deal money authorized for White Sands. [54]

Further complicating construction at the dunes in 1937 were charges that political appointee John Happer had mismanaged contracts for the RDP facilities. In Happer's defense, NPS officials realized in March that pressure to liquidate all WPA accounts by June 30 (the close of the fiscal year) meant acceleration of work, while new regulations demanded that 95 percent of all labor be from the unemployment rolls. The NPS regional office offered Happer the logic that haunted all New Deal programs: "If there is such balance of funds [on June 30] it will be a definite reflection upon the sincerity of our request for funds and on our ability to administer the project." Happer responded by asking permission to hire 100-110 workers to make adobe bricks for the pueblo-style architecture, and to send "a crew to the [Sacramento] mountains to cut vigos [sic], savinos [sic] and canales" for the roofing. Then in June, Happer received word that relief projects would be reduced 35 percent nationally, with White Sands to have only 70 workers for fiscal year 1938. [55]

For reasons of fiscal and managerial reform, the NPS moved in July to replace Happer temporarily with John H. Veale of the western office in San Francisco. Happer had not been a park service hire, and replacing him fit the NPS strategy to assume control of all work within its units. "I find that conditions are rather more serious than we anticipated," Veale wrote to the regional office in Oklahoma City. He blamed Happer not for his "carelessness" but for his "lack of appreciation of accurate and proper job records, and insufficient administrative inspection." Happer would spend payroll sums for labor in the wrong categories, causing both shortfalls and excess balances. Worse was the failure to maintain proper inventories of materials, with no balances whatsoever. Given the increased volume of construction work on site, the NPS could no longer afford such employees as the politically connected Happer, replacing him permanently with the well-respected John Stephens. [56]

Figure 11. Nineteenth-Century Spanish carreta and replica in Visitors Center Courtyard (1930s).
(Courtesy White Sands National Monument)