About the Interviewee

<< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >>

To fully appreciate the career and contributions of George B. Hartzog, Jr., it is important to understand something of his early life. His character and beliefs were shaped to a great extent by his mother, his Southern upbringing, the Great Depression, and the New Deal programs of the 1930s. George Hartzog, Jr., was born in 1920 in a rural community in South Carolina. His father, George, Sr., farmed roughly 150 acres in the Edisto River section of Colleton County, South Carolina, off State Highway 61, five miles from the village of Smoaks. George, his parents, and two younger sisters lived in a modest frame house, near a larger family home occupied by his grandparents. He began his education in a nearby one-room schoolhouse. The following year he began attending a school in Smoaks. George helped his father grow cantaloupes, cucumbers, watermelon, corn, green vegetables, and cotton.

The economic bust of the Great Depression forced the family to sell their farm to pay the mortgage and move into the home of George’s grandfather. When fire later consumed that household, Hartzog writes in his autobiography, the family lost everything “but faith in God and my mother’s determination.”2 The situation grew worse for the Hartzog family when George’s father developed chronic asthma that prevented him from working; his mother struggled with rheumatoid arthritis. The family survived these years, Hartzog later recalled, through the charity of neighbors and the welfare programs of the New Deal. The personal experience of the Great Depression and New Deal programs left a deep imprint on the young Hartzog and no doubt shaped his devotion to the values of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program decades later. Growing up in a rural South Carolina community and watching the daily struggles of women and African Americans also planted the seeds of his deep personal commitment to advancing opportunities for women and minorities in the national parks and in the National Park Service.

In 1933, the Hartzog family moved to Walterboro, the Colleton County seat, so George’s mother could find work. A talented seamstress, she quickly found work as the county supervisor of WPA sewing rooms, while George Hartzog, who had absorbed her strong work ethic, took on a series of part-time jobs to supplement the family income: mowing lawns, pumping gas, store clerk, busboy, dishwasher, and cook. In 1936, at age sixteen, Hartzog left school in order to work full-time, pumping gas during the day and operating as a hotel clerk at night.

Hearing that George had dropped out of school, Col. James F. Risher, headmaster of the Carlisle Military School, a high school in Bamberg, South Carolina, visited the Hartzog family at Walterboro. The colonel, a childhood friend of George’s mother, told the family that “to amount to anything, George must finish high school.” There were only six weeks left of the school year, but the colonel took George back with him, agreeing that if George passed the final exam, he could graduate. George did. In the summer of 1937, he was licensed by the Methodist Church as a local preacher, the youngest licensed preacher in the state at the time. An anonymous group of local businessmen provided funds to send the seventeen-year-old preacher to Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to study Methodist theology, but when the funds ran out at the end of the first semester, George returned to Walterboro, where he worked for a year and a half as a stenographer and interviewer for the Colleton County Department of Public Welfare.

In 1939 Hartzog went to work as a law clerk and legal secretary for Joe [Joseph M.] Moorer, a partner in the Walterboro law firm of Padgett and Moorer. There he read and studied law at night under Moorer’s supervision following the prescribed three-year curriculum. To augment his modest income, Hartzog joined a local National Guard unit. In September 1940 his unit was called into federal service and sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. After his return, Hartzog continued his studies back in Walterboro, passed the South Carolina bar exam, and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of South Carolina on December 17, 1942, remarkably without completing college or ever attending a law school. He then went into private law practice. In March 1943 he was inducted into the army, where he first served in the judge advocate’s office of the 75th Infantry Division at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and later was assigned to the military police.

After his discharge from active duty in 1946, he began work as an adjudicator for the General Land Office (now the Bureau of Land Management). Six months later, he left the federal government to join a private law firm. Soon after, he accepted a position as an attorney for the National Park Service in its Chicago headquarters. When the Park Service headquarters moved back to Washington, D.C., in 1947, Hartzog and his new bride, Helen, moved there as well. He was subsequently transferred to Lake Texoma National Recreation Area in Denison, Texas, to administer the program for leasing land and in 1948 was reassigned to the chief counsel’s office back in Washington, D.C. The self-taught lawyer was admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States in October 1949.

Hartzog was promoted to assistant chief of concessions management in 1951. Over the next few years he continued his education at American University, where he received a bachelor of science degree in business administration. In 1955 he became assistant superintendent of Rocky Mountain National Park and two years later was transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park as assistant superintendent. He became superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1959. There he successfully initiated the construction of the historic Gateway Arch. With construction underway, Hartzog left the Service in July 1962 to become the executive director and secretary of Downtown St. Louis, Inc., a position he would not hold for long.

In 1962 Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall approached Hartzog about becoming the next director of the National Park Service. Udall had been favorably impressed when the two men met in 1961 during Udall’s visit to the Ozarks in southeast Missouri to review a proposal for a national monument. During a two-day float trip on the Current River, Udall quickly came to admire Hartzog’s enthusiasm, drive, and leadership qualities. They agreed that Hartzog would serve as an associate director under the current director, Conrad L. Wirth, and then step into the director’s position when Wirth retired. Hartzog became associate director in February 1963 and succeeded Wirth in January 1964, early in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Udall had found what he was looking for in a National Park Service director—a forceful leader who would help implement President Johnson’s Great Society program. Hartzog approached his directorship with vision, passion, and energy, often working fourteen hour days and devoting many weekends to meeting with park superintendents. His was a very personal and dynamic style of leadership. He wielded power forcefully and effectively. As we see in this interview, Hartzog took personal control of the budget, personnel issues, and legislation, delegating everything else to his staff. Early on he decided to appoint each park superintendent personally.

George Hartzog was one of the most influential and effective directors that the National Park Service has ever had. It can be argued that Hartzog ranked with the Park Service’s founders and first two directors, Stephen T. Mather and Horace M. Albright, in his political acumen and effectiveness. He fully understood and appreciated the important role of Congress in shaping public-land policy and had a deep respect for the legislative process. He was a skilled lobbyist and even today recalls with some satisfaction that he wore out three pairs of shoes a year making office visits on Capitol Hill. He was extremely successful shepherding new legislation through Congress. No doubt the strong support from Secretary Udall and their shared vision contributed greatly to Hartzog’s effectiveness.

During Hartzog’s nine years as director, the National Park System underwent its greatest period of expansion since the 1930s. Roughly seventy units came into the system, nearly three-quarters as many as in the preceding thirty years. His tenure not only marked a period of great expansion and growth, but also it was in many ways a period of transition for the Service. Under Hartzog’s skilled leadership, Park Service managers and professionals expanded their operations and activities in new directions. The director greatly enlarged the Service’s role in urban education, historic preservation, interpretation, and environmental education.

Secretary Stewart Udall looks on in his office in Washington as George B. Hartzog, Jr., (right) is sworn in as director of the National Park Service and A. Clark Stratton (second from right) as associate director, 1964. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.)

A remarkable array of new types of units came into the National Park System during the Hartzog years. Ozark National Scenic Riverways in Missouri, authorized by Congress in 1964, foreshadowed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of October 2, 1968, which led to the incorporation of other free-flowing rivers into the park system. Pictured Rocks and Indiana Dunes on the Great Lakes became the first national lakeshores in 1966. The National Trails System Act of 1968 made the Service responsible for the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, both established in 1972, would lead to similar units serving other urban areas. The director advanced the concept of national cultural parks with the establishment of Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts (now Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts) in Virginia.

The Hartzog years marked a transition from the era of Mission 66, the ten-year billion dollar program launched in 1956 by Director Wirth to upgrade and modernize facilities, staff, and resource management throughout the National Park System, to the environmental era. Hartzog was the first director to serve at a time when the environmental movement had to be addressed. During his tenure Congress passed a series of laws reflecting the new emphasis on the environment, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, National Trails System Act, and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which helped transform the National Park System. There was a new emphasis on science, and natural resource management was restructured along ecological lines following a 1963 report on the condition of natural resources in the parks by a committee of scientists chaired by A. Starker Leopold. Environmental interpretation that emphasized ecological relationships and special environmental education programs for school children reflected and promoted the growing national environmental movement.

As noted, Director Hartzog had a strong personal interest in the values of the Great Society program. He viewed national parks much like other Great Society measures, as an investment in improving the way people lived, and was deeply and passionately committed to making parks more relevant to an increasingly urbanized American society. Under his skilled leadership, the Service reached out as never before to underrepresented and underserved groups, particularly urban populations, minorities, and young people, with urban parks and programs such as Summer in the Parks. Living History programs were introduced at many historical parks, ranging from frontier military demonstrations at Fort Davis National Historic Site, Texas, to period farming at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, Indiana. Hartzog worked to expand diversity by expanding the management role for women and minorities within the Service. He appointed the first African American to head the U.S. Park Police (Grant Wright) and was the first to promote women, African Americans, and Native Americans from within the Service into park superintendent positions.

The Hartzog administration marked the greatest advances in historic preservation since the 1930s. Responding to the destructive effects of urban renewal, highway construction, and other federal projects after World War II , the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 authorized the Service to maintain a comprehensive National Register of Historic Places. The listed properties, whether nationally or locally significant, would receive special consideration in federal project planning and federal grants along with technical assistance to encourage their preservation. Thus the Service’s historical activities moved beyond park boundaries. During this interview Hartzog observed that his proudest accomplishments were twofold: his role in ensuring that large areas in Alaska were set aside (under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act), and his role in the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. He was quick to point out that he did not initiate either of these measures, but accepted some credit for pushing the legislation through.

Under Hartzog, the National Park Service developed and instituted new management policies to address a greatly expanded and increasingly complex park system. On July 10, 1964, Secretary Udall signed a management policy memorandum that the Park Service director and his staff had prepared. It identified three categories for units in the National Park System: natural, historical, and educational. A separate set of management principles were devised for each; Service leaders distilled dozens of handbooks that governed how parks were managed down to just three. Hartzog launched a number of reorganizations within the Park Service, not all of which were popular or successful. For example, he consolidated professionals at the Denver Service Center and at the newly established Harpers Ferry Center in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He created an associate director for resource studies and created the new Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation to oversee and implement the Service’s greatly expanded historic preservation responsibilities.

As part of Hartzog’s effort to build support for the parks outside the National Park Service, he played a key role in securing the 1967 legislation creating the National Park Foundation. The legislation authorized this private, non-profit foundation to encourage, accept, and administer private gifts for the benefit of the Service and to support and assist the Service in other ways in conserving the National Park System’s natural, scenic, historic, and recreational resources. The foundation would fund many significant projects for which congressional funding was not available. He also secured congressional authorization for the Volunteers in Parks program to encourage the public to volunteer their time and talents in the parks. Hartzog successfully organized the National Parks Centennial Celebration and the Second World Conference on National Parks held at Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in 1972.

George Hartzog was one of the last directors to span both Democratic and Republican administrations and work for Department of the Interior secretaries from both parties. He remained as director until January 1973 when President Richard M. Nixon replaced him. In this interview the former director stated that he had three major objectives during his tenure: to expand the National Park System, to make the National Park Service more relevant to the American people, and to incorporate more women and minorities into the management structure. By any measure he succeeded. With his vision, political skill, and dynamic leadership, he left behind a greatly expanded and invigorated agency. His rich legacy and contributions continue to be felt throughout the National Park Service and the National Park System today.

<< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >>