 |
| George B. Hartzog, Jr., at the National Park
Foundation Board meeting, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia, 1972.
Cecil W. Stoughton, photographer. (National Park Service Historic Photograph
Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
Contents
Cover
Message From the Director
Foreword
Preface
About the Interviewee
About the Consultant
INTERVIEW
Early Years with the Park Service
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
Management Policies and Administration
Vision
Historic Preservation
Revitalizing the Service
Political Appointees and Careerists
Relationship with the White House
Legislative Achievements
Organizational Change
Advisory Board on National Parks
National Historic Preservation Act
Law Enforcement
National Park Foundation
Conclusion
Endnotes
Complete Interview (HTML)
Complete Interview (PDF)
 |
ORAL HISTORY
INTERVIEW
with
GEORGE B. HARTZOG, JR.
Director | National Park Service | 1964-1972
William C. Everhart, Consultant
September 21, 2005
October 5, 2005
November 3, 2005
Foreword by Robert M. Utley
|
 |
Conducted By
JANET A. MCDONNELL
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
2007 |
|
 |
| William C. Everhart, before 1977. (National Park Service Historic Photograph
Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
Foreword
George
B. Hartzog, Jr., served as seventh director of the National Park Service for
nine years, 1964 to 1972. This oral history, the third in a series of interviews
with former directors by Park Service bureau historian Janet McDonnell, records
Hartzog’s commentary and judgments on the events of his tenure. It is a valuable
contribution to the history of the national parks and the National Park Service.
I approach this foreword as both participant
and historian. As participant, I served as chief historian of the National Park
Service through the entire directorate of George Hartzog. As historian, I have
had more than three decades to study and reflect on those frantic, momentous
years, with the added perspective afforded by the passage of time.
As participant, I remember George Hartzog as an
administrator of rare ability. He was a workaholic who drove his staff at his
pace. He not only managed, he ruled. He could be deeply caring, friendly, and
sentimental with everyone in the Service. He could also be nearly tyrannical in
his demands for superior performance. He entertained a broad vision of what the
national parks should be and should mean to the American people, and he pursued
his vision relentlessly. Above all, both with the Executive Branch and the
Congress, he possessed political cunning, insight, and mastery almost
nonexistent among federal agency heads, and he employed these talents to the
great benefit of the National Park Service and the environmental movement
launched by his chief, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.
I have been privileged to call George Hartzog
friend in all the years since my experience as participant.
Casting myself now as historian rather than
participant and friend, I stand back as far as possible to appraise the Hartzog
directorate. In the interview, he deals with the events of his administration
with all the charm, wit, candor, verbal facility, and articulation for which he
has always been known. Here I place these events in more orderly form as
background to his commentary.
Most important, he led the largest expansion of
the National Park System in history. During his nine-year tenure, the system
grew by seventy-two units totaling 2.7 million acres–not just national parks,
but historical and archeological monuments and sites, recreation areas,
seashores, riverways, memorials, and cultural units celebrating minority
experiences in America.
Working closely with subcommittee chairman
Senator Alan Bible in 1971, he laid the legislative basis for the expansion of
the National Park System in Alaska. When the Congress in 1980 finally acted on
this provision of law, it doubled the acreage of the National Park System.
Determined that the National Park Service
reflect the growing national concern for minorities, Hartzog developed programs
that gave the Service a different complexion. He named the first black park
superintendent, the first career woman superintendent, the first American Indian
superintendent, and the first black chief of a major U.S. police department. The
promotion of women and minorities has steadily expanded over the years since.
Hartzog persuaded Congress to authorize a
program for citizens to volunteer their time and talents to the needs of both
park resources and park visitors. The Volunteers in Parks program (VIP) has
flourished as budgetary shortfalls increasingly stressed permanent employees.
Beyond the parks themselves, Hartzog pursued
outreach programs. Examples are the first environmental education curriculum in
kindergarten through the twelfth grade. Complementing this initiative, he
inaugurated study areas in a system of National Education and Development
Landmarks, christened NEED. He also put into effect programs to make national
parks relevant to an urban society, such as Summer in the Parks, Parks for all
Seasons, and Living History. He obtained legislation creating the
congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, which funded many worthy
projects for which appropriations were unavailable.
Many other achievements and issues could be
cited, but as a historian I want to give special emphasis to historic
preservation. This is especially timely because in November 2006 Hartzog
received the prestigious Crowninshield Award of the National Trust for Historic
Preservation. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 broadened the
concept of historic preservation from individual landmarks of significance to
all survivors from the past that citizens thought worth saving as part of their
local environment. Interstate highways and urban renewal had wiped out much of
local value to citizens, not only individual structures, but entire districts
and even treasured landscapes. The new act created a National Register of
Historic Places, led to a network of State Historic Preservation Officers
charged with nominating such local places to the Register, established a program
of grants-in-aid to the states, and authorized an Advisory Council on Historic
Preservation to advise the president and federal agency heads as well as enforce
protective safeguards for registered properties.
The National Historic Preservation Act would
not have passed, at least in 1966, but for George Hartzog. Many people worked
hard on this initiative, but without Hartzog’s largely hidden political labors
on Capitol Hill, with congressional staff as well as members, the law would not
have been enacted. He not only brought his legendary political skills to bear,
but ensured that the entire program would rest with the National Park Service.
This I know because I witnessed it as participant.
The programs spawned by the National Historic
Preservation Act have spread across the nation, onto the state and local levels
and into the private sector. For people concerned with the quality of their
local environment, the results of the act have proved one of the great success
stories of the late twentieth century.
George Hartzog made great things happen. He
benefited from a rare combination of circumstances that favored his vision. It
fit neatly into President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and into Secretary of
the Interior Stewart Udall’s robust environmentalism. The secretary, moreover,
not only had selected George Hartzog for the directorship but gave him full rein
and support in pursuing his vision. A Democratic Congress receptive to the
“Great Society” proved receptive to the measures Hartzog promoted. And the
Democratic Congress also discovered that voters concerned for their national
parks and the environment in which they lived were ready for the laws he sought.
Well versed in the history of the National Park
Service, I am familiar with the record of every director since the creation of
the agency in 1916. Excepting the co-founders of the Service, Stephen Mather and
Horace Albright, I have no hesitation in pronouncing George Hartzog the greatest
director in the entire history of the Service.
History will benefit from his own view of his
legacy as set down in this interview with Janet McDonnell.
Robert M. Utley*
*Before his retirement from federal service in
1980, Robert M. Utley served not only as chief historian of the National Park
Service but as director of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation,
assistant director of the Service for Park Historic Preservation, and deputy
director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He is the author of
sixteen books on the history of the American West.
 |
| George Hartzog enjoys a fishing expedition,
after 1972. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry
Center.) |
Preface
This
oral history is the product of three interview sessions conducted with George B.
Hartzog, Jr., seventh director of the National Park Service, at his home in
McLean, Virginia, in 2005. This oral history provides but a small glimpse of
Hartzog’s Southern charm, warmth, and candor—and his great gift as a
storyteller. He remains a commanding and inspirational figure. As no doubt with
every task he has taken on, Hartzog approached this project with his
characteristic enthusiasm—and some degree of humility. He insisted that the oral
history focus on the Service’s accomplishments, rather than on his own, and was
particularly intent that current and future Service employees benefit from his
interview. Though George Hartzog retired from the Park Service decades ago, his
passion for the parks and for the National Park Service remains evident. I have
heard no one speak more eloquently or forcefully about the importance of
national parks to our nation and the role of national parks in defining us as a
people.
William C. Everhart graciously agreed to join
us for the first and last interview sessions. The close friendship and mutual
respect between the two interviewees were readily apparent. Everhart started his
distinguished career with the National Park Service as a historian at Gettysburg
National Military Park in 1951. His friendship and professional partnership with
Hartzog began soon after Hartzog became superintendent at Jefferson National
Expansion Memorial. As the result of a search for the best candidate to plan and
develop the memorial’s museum, he invited Everhart to join him in St. Louis.
When Hartzog became director of the Service, he selected Everhart as assistant
director for interpretation, and Everhart played a key role in the Hartzog
administration. Later Everhart served Directors Ronald H. Walker and Gary
Everhardt as special assistant for policy before his retirement from the Service
in 1977.
This oral history is not intended to serve as a
detailed account of George Hartzog’s extraordinary career. For a more complete
picture, one should look at Hartzog’s own published account, Battling for the
National Parks, at a well written portrait in The New Yorker,1 and at several
other oral history interviews conducted with him over the past few decades.
Kathy Mengak produced a doctoral dissertation about Hartzog in 2002 as a Ph.D.
candidate at Clemson University. I saw no need to duplicate the historical
record already available to researchers. Rather, this interview attempts to
focus on the Hartzog era as one of transition. Its goal is to add personal
insight and depth to the historical record of what was a period of phenomenal
expansion in the National Park System and significant change in the National
Park Service. This oral history focuses on Hartzog’s career with the National
Park Service, primarily on his tenure as director.
After the first interview session, Mr. Hartzog
provided me with written comments to expand on some of the subjects we had
covered. I have integrated short excerpts from his written statement into the
transcript where appropriate and have in a few instances inserted additional
detail. These additions are set in italic type. In addition, occasionally words
or phrases are added in brackets for greater clarity.
In the course of the interview, Hartzog spoke
eloquently and fervidly about why parks are important to the American people,
how parks help define us a people and foster a common identity. Parks, he said,
challenge us with the fundamental questions, “Why?” and “Who am I?” Throughout
his career, the question “Why” remained critically important to Hartzog. It was
not only a question he asked himself, but a question he encouraged others to
ask. It is a question that remains relevant for us today. As a final note,
spending time with Mr. Hartzog and his wife, Helen, was a rare treat—a privilege
and a pleasure. I am deeply grateful for their warm hospitality and for the long
chats about what was, by any measure, one of the most remarkable periods in Park
Service history.
I am very grateful to Mary Ann Greenwood for
carefully transcribing the original interview tapes and to Lise Sajewski for her
great skill in editing the transcript. Tom DuRant at Harpers Ferry Center
generously gave his time to locate many of the photographs. Kerry Skarda and her
team at [B] Creative Group deserve much credit for their high quality design
work. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Martin Perschler, acting manager of the
NPS Park History program, for his expertise and diligence in seeing this oral
history through to publication.
Janet A. McDonnell
National Park Service
About the Interviewee
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.
About the
Consultant
 |
| William C. Everhart, before 1977. (National Park Service Historic Photograph
Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
William
C. Everhart, a veteran of twenty-six years with the National Park Service,
participated in two of the three oral history interview sessions. Everhart grew
up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree from Gettysburg
College. During World War II , he enlisted in the army infantry, participating
in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he continued his education. He
received a master’s degree in history from Penn State and then enrolled in a
doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. While pursuing
his doctoral studies, he accepted a summer job as a ranger historian at
Gettysburg National Military Park. During Everhart’s second year at the
university, the battlefield historian, Fred Tilberg, hired him on a permanent
basis as his assistant in 1951.
Everhart would have six different positions in
his first six years with the National Park Service. After a year at Gettysburg,
Everhart accepted a position as park historian at Vicksburg National Military
Park in Mississippi, where he managed the interpretive program. He later became
project historian with the Atlantic and Gulf Coast seashore survey and then went
on to Philadelphia to supervise historians and curators in the restoration of
Independence Hall. The Park Service transferred him to San Francisco in the mid
1950s to participate in a national survey of historic sites and buildings.
Toward the end of his second year in San Francisco, Everhart was invited by
George Hartzog to join him in St. Louis to research and plan the Museum of
Westward Expansion underneath the Gateway Arch.
Everhart preceded Hartzog to Park Service
headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1962 he was assigned to serve on a task
force preparing long-range plans for the Service. When Hartzog later became
National Park Service director, he offered Everhart the position of assistant
director for interpretation. Everhart became the first director of the Park
Service’s interpretive design center opened in 1970 at Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia, to house graphic designers, editors, curators, photographers, and
other professionals who developed interpretative displays and performed other
tasks in support of the parks. After his work at Harpers Ferry Center, he served
Park Service directors Ronald H. Walker and Gary Everhardt as special assistant
for policy. Everhart retired from the Service in 1977. Following retirement he
spent time as a visiting professor at Clemson University and published two
classic Park Service histories: The National Park Service in 1972 (rev. ed.,
1983) and Take Down Flag & Feed Horses in 1998.
Early Years With the Park Service
You came to the Park Service,
as I understand, in 1946 to the Chicago office. Would you describe what it was
like to work in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago in 1946? 3
Well, it was really a great experience. And as
a matter of fact, I think the commercial culture of the Merchandise Mart spilled
into the government operations of the Park Service, not to affect its process or
procedures, but to make it conscious of a larger world that you were a part of
rather than just being a government employee. So I enjoyed my time in the
Merchandise Mart very much indeed.
What are your recollections of
the National Park Service director at the time, Newton Drury? Any thoughts on
his leadership, his personality?
Newton Drury was a shy, introverted man, but a
brilliant man and a deep thinker, who had tremendous visions and hopes, many of
which, through his tenacity and his assembly of friends, he was able to
implement successfully, such as the Save the Redwoods League in California. Most
of the Redwood National Park, state parks, and national parks in California,
owed their being to Newton Drury and his commitment to saving those redwoods. He
was a very even-tempered man. I found him a delight to work with and as a young
lawyer I was always awed when I was called into his presence and he frequently
did that. He would have subordinate staff come into his office to discuss things
with him, always in the company, of course, of Jack [Jackson E.] Price, the
chief counsel, who was a great friend of Drury’s. They had a great rapport. I
thought that Drury had a great commitment to the National Park Service.
I [will] tell the story about a leaning redwood
in Giant Forest [in Sequoia National Park]. The owner of the concession [in the
park] was Howard Hayes, a great figure in the history of parks, who owned the
Riverside Press, the morning and afternoon newspaper in Riverside, California.
He built the first cabins in Yellowstone National Park as a young man and then
headed the See America First campaign during World War I. And then he got what
the doctors considered to be terminal tuberculosis. He had to sell out his
Yellowstone operation and went to California presumably to die, and he was
bedridden for a year in California. And when they took him back in the hospital
they could find no evidence of tuberculosis at all, so he began his life again
as an entrepreneur. He started, at Stephen Mather’s suggestion, with a
concession in Sequoia National Park, and then went on later to own the
transportation concession at Glacier National Park. He was a wonderful person. I
considered him to be one of my mentors, because he was of that breadth of
influence and personality.
This tree was leaning over about seven or
eight of Howard Hayes’s cabins. And Eivind Scoyen, who later became associate
director, a legendary figure in the Park Service, was the superintendent at
Sequoia and nobody could cut a redwood tree without the director’s concurrence.
We were having this superintendents’ conference in Yosemite. This would have
been in 1950. After that conference this team of Drury and Howard Hayes and
Eivind Scoyen were to go back and look at this redwood tree.
Because of a great tragedy in the Park
Service—the chief of concessions, Oliver G. Taylor, had climbed a tree in his
backyard to trim a limb, had a heart attack, and fell out of the tree dead—I had
just been detailed over to concessions as a young lawyer to help out. The
director designated me as acting chief of concessions, so that’s why I was at
the superintendents’ conference, to represent the concessions program in the
Park Service. Mr. Drury said to me, “Why don’t you come down to Sequoia with me
and look at this redwood tree?”
I had the experience of looking at three men
whom I greatly admired in a very difficult situation. To see their interaction
was an experience I can never forget, because the four of us assembled at this
redwood tree. Those redwoods historically can lean for years without falling,
but also they can in one storm topple, even if they’re standing straight,
because they have a shallow root system. That tree was leaning in such a way
that if it fell it was going to take out eight cabins, and if they were
occupied, it was going to be a catastrophic loss of life. If they were not
occupied, it was going to be nothing but eight wooden cabins destroyed in Giant
Forest; … from the conservation standpoint it would have been the right thing to
… get rid of them.
So round and round this redwood tree the four
of us walked. Nobody said a word. And you cannot imagine the tension that built
every time this group of four circled this tree. And why they kept circling the
tree instead of stopping and talking was something I never did understand. But
they continued to circle this tree and finally Newton Drury stopped and turned
to them and he said, “Howard, my first responsibility is to the tree.” With that
Howard Hayes exploded. He said, “My first responsibility is to the occupants of
eight cabins, and if that tree were to fall on them, I would plaster this
meeting across the front page of my newspaper.” This was the most absurd thing.
Two guys I had the utmost respect and admiration and esteem for were really
going at each other. Well, Eivind Scoyen spoke up and he said, “Mr. Director,
why don’t you let me talk with Howard about this matter?” Drury turned and he
said, “I think that is a great idea.” With that, the group dispersed and Mr.
Drury and I came back to Washington. Of course, we cut the tree down. And that
was a remarkable experience that I had.
W.E.– My definition of the Park Service is an
organization in which, if a name is mentioned, a story is bound to follow and
it’s often long. But it’s full of interesting characters who have stories to
tell.
Would the same be true today,
do you think?
W.E.– That’s a good point and it is not as
true. I don’t think there are as many characters as there used to be, because
it’s a bureaucracy now, I guess it has to be, and so individuals don’t play such
an important role as they used to.
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
Let’s move on to your tenure as
director, Mr. Hartzog. When you became director what in your previous background
and experience did you find most useful, maybe something out of your experience
at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Are there things you could point to
when you became director and say, “Well, I know this, because of my past
[experience],” that kind of thing?
Well, I was very fortunate. [In 1955] when I
was the assistant superintendent at Rocky Mountain National Park, the government
didn’t have any training for senior-level managers. The American Management
Association gave the government eight scholarships to the managers program
taught by the American Management Association at the old Hotel Astor in New
York. I received one of those scholarships. Of course, the program was heavily
supported by industry. Characters in my particular class came from Hughes, or
from AT &T, Libby [Corporation]. All of those big-name companies had their
mid-level managers at this program.
It was chaired by Laurence Appley, the
chairman of the American Management Association, who had been the vice president
of an international oil company and his domain was the eastern part of Asia. As
he related to us, in his office there were two people, himself and his
secretary. He pointed out that the reason was, “My managers in the field, when
they had a problem, wanted to discuss it with me and not an assistant to me. And
therefore I didn’t need any staff.” It was that tenor of the responsibility of a
leader that I developed through that management program. I have a concept of
management which I felt was pretty well grounded and was unique in terms of
government service, because I never encountered that in the government.
I mean, the government was looked on as
something different. I think one of the problems with government [work] today is
[that] it is looked on as something different and something anybody can do. As
long as it is politically acceptable, [you will have the attitude that] anybody
can do government work, at any level. And that’s not true. Some of the most
difficult, sophisticated management responsibilities in the world are done by
government employees. I now have spent about half of my life in government and
about half of my life as a private practicing attorney, and I would say between
the two I have met more talented people in government than I have in private
enterprise. There are a lot of advantages in private enterprise that don’t work
in government, such as [family wealth] inheritance, that give people prominence
and position and authority. They don’t get that advantage in government.
So you had a concept of
management in mind.
That was different than anything.… Then I went
to St. Louis, and when I got [there] I discovered that I was not the first
choice for St. Louis. I got the position because I was the last guy who would
agree to go. They had offered the job to any number of more senior people who
turned it down. They didn’t want any part of it. And as one of my friends wrote
to me, “What in the hell did you do now that got you to St. Louis?”
Why did you want it then?
Because I wanted an opportunity in any shape,
manner, or form. I was on the make. I think that’s a modest way of putting it,
don’t you, Bill?
W.E.– Accurate.
G.H.– I thought it was an opportunity. When I
got there I had a fantastic surprise, because the mayor of the city of St.
Louis, Raymond R. Tucker, who turned out to be a mentor and a friend beyond
compare, had issued an ultimatum to the director that if the project wasn’t
under contract by July 1, he was going to make arrangements for somebody else to
take it over, because he had been waiting for four years after the money had
been appropriated for the Park Service to do something. I was unaware of that
when I was appointed in December 1958 to report for duty in February.
The first thing I learned when I got there was
that the relocation of the railroad tracks contract was to be under way by July
1, and they hadn’t even finished preparing the plan yet. There were fifteen
organizations that had to review and concur on those plans, from labor unions,
to railroads, to the city. So I was involved in a project for which I was only
technically the final decision-maker. But to make that decision stick, I had to
have the support and agreement of all of these people, any one of whom could
bomb the project.
I learned a lesson in how to challenge people
to something bigger than themselves, because when we got the plans for the
railroad relocation from Eero Saarinen’s 4 office it was May. This was the first
time anybody had seen those plans. And they had to be reviewed and approved by
all of these agencies, including the state corporation commission, which
controlled all corporations in the state of Missouri. I had tried to explain to
my superiors in the Park Service that the normal Park Service review was never
going to cut July 1, because you had to send those plans to the regional office.
That became a month-long process and we didn’t have a month. We had less than
two months left to get it [the railroad track relocation project] under
contract.
I prevailed upon my regional director, Howard
Baker. He was a remarkably fine man, whom, when I became the director, I made my
associate director for operations. I said, “Howard, we’ve got to get everybody
in a room, and we’ve got to let Saarinen’s people explain these plans, and
they’ve got to sign off. We’ve got to go to contracting on a unit-cost basis, so
much for a yard of excavation, so much for a yard of concrete, so much for a
cross tie, so much for a foot of steel track, a unit-cost basis for everything,
and we’re not going to know how much it costs until we’re finished. All we can
have is an engineer’s estimate against which to open for bids. The bids have to
be evaluated on the unit cost, who is offering us concrete the cheapest, and
what is the aggregate sum of that.” “Absolutely no way can it be done that way.
It has to be a lump-sum contract,” my superiors contended. Well, fortunately for
me he [Baker] came to the plan review meeting. And when he saw the condition and
the issue laid out in front of him, he immediately agreed we would be able to go
to bid on a unit-price basis. The result was that we had the groundbreaking
ceremony for the railroad relocation project on June 23. We made it by seven
days. That was one of my first projects.
 |
| Left to right: St. Louis Mayor Ray Tucker, Vice
President Richard M. Nixon, Congressman Tom Curtis, George B. Hartzog, Jr.,
Morton D. “Buster” May, Chair of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
Association. Superintendent Hartzog points out proposed features of the
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, c. 1960. Harold Ferman, photographer.
(National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
The second project was getting Bill [Everhart],
because nobody had yet decided what the story was, what the story of expansion
was. We were going to build the largest museum in the history of the National Park
Service on the largest subject (westward expansion) that the National Park
Service had ever been charged with interpreting and [we] hadn’t written the
first chapter yet. I had a park historian who was more interested in being a
superintendent than he was in being a historian. So I arranged for him to become
a superintendent. Then I had to find a historian, and that’s how I found Bill,
from the first promotion list.
That’s how you met Mr.
Everhart?
And that was another thing about park
management I found out. The first list they sent me, the guy at the top of it
was a guy they were trying to get rid of at the park he was in.
So he was recommended superlatively. Everything
was superlative. I didn’t call the regional director in whose region he served.
I called his friends, because we shared some mutual friends. I knew who he was.
I didn’t know his competence. I called them and they were the ones who said to
me, “They’re trying to get rid of him. They’re trying to unload him. He’s
incompetent. He’s a nice guy, but he’s over his head.”
I took that list and I got on a railroad train
from St. Louis to Omaha, Nebraska, and I walked into [Regional Director] Howard
Baker’s office and I handed him the list and I said, “You can have them. I don’t
want them. The one I want I found from these many telephone calls, a guy named
Bill Everhart, who’s working for the [historic sites] survey team in San
Francisco.” Howard said to me, “Hell, he’ll never go to St. Louis.” I said,
“Have you asked him?” He said, “No, I just know he won’t come.” I said, “Well, I
want him on the list, number one, and you can put anybody else you want on it.
But you put Bill Everhart on the list first and give it to me, and I’ll go back
to St. Louis, and then I’ll tell you whether he’ll come or not.” So I called him
[Bill Everhart], and, of course, Howard was right. Bill wanted to know who this
idiot was on the phone talking with him, [asking him] to leave San Francisco to
come to St. Louis in the first place, in the second place, to undertake a
project which nobody had even started, let alone described the dimensions of it,
and he didn’t have anybody to help.
So what convinced you to go,
Mr. Everhart?
W.E.– Let me tell you why I was available.
About two months before that I had gotten a call from Omaha. They had an opening
for a person who would be in charge of exploring new areas in the Rocky
Mountains. Wonderful. So I came back to my wife, who was from Canada, and I
mentioned the possibility of going there. In all my married life I’ve never
heard her use a four-letter word before, but what she said was, “Where in the
hell is Omaha?” It suggested to me something, so I turned the job down and was
available [for another assignment].
Of course, being in the Park Service, I did
the same thing on [George] that he did on me. I hadn’t heard much about him, so
I started checking around and seeing what kind of job, what kind of program he
had. It just seemed a fantastic opportunity so I took it. But I was called up
for jury duty in San Francisco and I went to report that I was going to be
moving out. The judge said, “Where are you moving to?” “St. Louis.” The judge
said, “My goodness, from San Francisco?” We both sort of felt the same way. What
a great town San Francisco is—but it worked out.
As George was saying, both he and I were
working with Eero Saarinen. I mean working with the guy meant you in turn
brought in the best possible people that you could get and those people changed
our minds about design, all kinds of design, and so forth. Yes, I started work.
Management Policies and Administration
You both shared a history with
the Park Service and worked together from that point on. Mr. Hartzog, I’d like
to talk about your vision for the Park Service when you became director. The two
of you must have had a shared vision. I’d like to hear both of you talk about
your vision of what the Park Service could be, what it should be, how it should
define itself.
I think that’s a very germane question and I’m
so happy you ask it that way, because that’s exactly the way I approached my
notes to talk with you. I think that is the heart of my nine years as director,
because I think we did, and I think we shared the same vision, because we had
talked about it for a long, long time. So there was not much new in terms of
what he and I thought about the operation. There was a heck of a lot new in what
we did about it when we got here, because, of course, Bill beat me to
Washington. He left me [in St. Louis] and came to Washington for a promotion. So
he was in Washington when I came as director. And one of the first things I did
was to promote him and make him my assistant director for interpretation,
because he had the vision for a new emphasis on interpretation and what it could
mean. He can tell you about that. That’s one of the reasons I wanted him here
[for this interview], because he was an integral part of what we tried to do.
I want to make one other point: when I came
here I was aware of the fact that the opportunity for achieving your ambition is
greatly enhanced with allies. That’s how we were able to build that project in
St. Louis—with our allies. I learned the importance of legislators in a
project’s success, such as the St. Louis City Council, Missouri State
Legislature, and Missouri Congressional delegation.5 Success breeds success.
When we were able to get that contract under way, we created more interest from
more people than you can ever imagine in the city of St. Louis, because it had
been there so long with nothing. We took a lot of ridicule, of course,
[references to the proposed Gateway Arch as] the “wicket” and all of that, but
we never let that depress us. It kind of excited us, because we were going to
build the biggest “wicket” in the world, and we did. So the fact that you had to
involve other people, and the ability and the recognition of the need to work
with other people in achieving your objective was very much a part of my
philosophy when I came here.
Now, with that in mind, what were the
motivations that drove me to change things? Well, when I was in the field I had
spent my time in Washington as a lawyer and as assistant chief of the
concessions division, for a short while as the acting chief of the division when
the old gentleman as I mentioned earlier, Mr. Oliver G. Taylor, passed away. And
then I went [back] to the field but during that Washington experience I wrote
three administrative manuals: land acquisition, concessions, and law
enforcement. I got out to Rocky Mountain [National Park] and I had just finished
the concessions manual, the last one of the three before I got there. We had the
forms in the back that were acceptable for use in authorizing concessions. The
form I had used for a saddle horse permit was the best one I had seen up to that
point. I put it in the manual, but when I got to Rocky Mountain, I found one
that was much superior.
So when it came time to issue those permits the
next year, I said to the superintendent, “You know, this is a better form than
the one in the book. Let’s use this.” He agreed and so we authorized our saddle
horse operators under this park form. At that time you had to send a copy to the
region. So the region got my copy. In two or three weeks, maybe a month or so,
we got a memorandum back from the regional director wanting to know why we had
used this form instead of the one prescribed in the manual. So the
superintendent came in and he said, “What’s this all about?” I said, “Well, it’s
better than the one in the manual. I wrote the manual so, I mean, I know what
they are talking about. If I had had this form, it would have been in the manual
instead of the one that’s in there. So I recommend you put that memo in the
trash,” and that’s what he did while he was standing there. We heard nothing
further of the matter.
But that fixed my view about administrative
manuals. So when I came here as director in 1964, there were several things I
was intent on doing. One of them was that the last time a secretary and the
director had agreed on how they were going to run the park system was when
Secretary [of the Interior] Franklin Lane and later Secretary [Hubert] Work both
did memos for Horace Albright and Mather.6 Since then, no one had written a
memorandum that set out how they wanted the Park Service run and who was going
to run it. So the first thing that Bill Everhart and I started working on was a
memorandum to me for the secretary to sign saying what the policies of the Park
Service were going to be and what its modus operandi was going to be.
After reviewing the draft I had prepared,
the secretary signed the memorandum on July 10, 1964, establishing six policy
objectives: to provide for the highest quality use and enjoyment of the parks;
to conserve and manage the parks responsibly; to expand the National Park
System; to cooperate with other conservation organizations; to communicate the
significance of the American heritage through the National Park System; and to
increase the effectiveness of the National Park Service. In 1964, we had to
change attitudes and motivate people to respond to the emerging needs of an
urban America. That was a secretarial objective; therefore, it became my
imperative.7
That was the beginning. The second thing I did
was—after I got that [memorandum]—I then gave it to the legislative committees
of Congress. Secretary Udall’s memo recognized the three categories of areas in
the National Park System: natural, historical, and recreation. I wanted that
defined by statute so that both the administration and the Congress were in
agreement as to what’s in the park system…. Then we wrote these three management
handbooks, [which] compiled for the first time in one place the individual
policies that applied to natural areas, historical areas, and recreation areas.
 |
| George B. Hartzog, Jr., as assistant
superintendent of Rocky Mountain National Park, 1956. R. Taylor, photographer.
(National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
Then another thing that we did was—we didn’t
have any agreed-upon mission statement for the Park Service—so we developed what
we called the Pledge of Public Service [card]. I’ll give you that if you don’t
have one.8
W.E.– I haven’t seen one for a long time.
G.H.– That was our mission statement. You turn
that over on the other side, and there were goals, our goals in personnel
management, because, you see, at that time if you left the Park Service, you
were gone forever. They didn’t want you back. My experience was that I would
welcome you back with the added experience and learning that you’d acquired.
That’s one of the goals you see listed on the card. We [encouraged] you to go
out and get additional experience.
This is the step of taking that
vision toward actual implementation?
Absolutely—and changing a structure that’s
based on books to a structure that’s based on people. That concept of [having a]
mission statement and the secretary’s memorandum saying what his objectives for
the Park Service were, and we then developed those individual administrative
policies that codified these sections. Then we developed program goals each year
to tie it to the budget and that I meant to have mentioned that earlier, but
I’ll mention it now.
The first thing I did when I came to
Washington was I took control of the budget, personnel, and legislation with the
explanation that I didn’t care who approved the master plan. Nobody was getting
any people or money until I approved the budget and made the personnel
appointment. So the critical juncture of management is people and money, and
then legislation, the foundation for both of them. You can’t operate without
money, and you can’t achieve your objective of expanding the system without the
Congress, because they set the public-land policy of America—you don’t. So
you’ve got to involve them. I took legislation, budget, and personnel; they were
my province. Then I delegated the rest of the operation to the deputy,
associate, and assistant directors in the Park Service. Now about that there are
a lot of questions. Some of them say it was a good job, and some of them say
that it was not done very well. But that’s why I’ve got Bill, and he’ll fill you
in on that.
The other thing I did is that I wanted to know
what my customer thought about my operation. What are the visitors getting, and
what do the visitors have a right to get? So I set up an operations evaluation
team.
I wanted to know that internal controls were
in place as required by the laws enacted by Congress and the regulations
promulgated by the General Accounting Office [now the Government Accountability
Office], the Office of Management and Budget, and the secretary for
accountability for money and property. I had an assistant director for
administration who oversaw these functions, but I wanted to know more.
The Park Service is in the
park-resource-preservation and people-serving business. You can have a clean
bill of health from the auditors that tells you no one went south with anything
of value. But it does not tell you how well you accomplished the mission. I
established an operations evaluation unit to answer that question. The unit was
small with two clerical workers and three senior executives who had experience
in legislation and regulations, budget and appropriations, personnel management,
and field operations.9
There were three people of senior rank on the
team. One of them had been my previous personnel officer. One of them had been
my previous chief of legislation and congressional affairs, and one of them had
been a previous regional director: Hank [Henry G.] Schmidt, Frank Harrison, Jack
Pound. They traveled. That’s all they did. No audit. They were forbidden to go
into the back office and look at the books. Their view was the visitor’s view in
the park. What do the signs look like? What is the condition of the roads? What
do the buildings look like? What is the condition
of interpretation? Does it have a story that the visitor understands and is
interested in? Is it communicated well? Or does he [the ranger] have on a dirty
uniform and not know what he’s talking about? What does the visitor see? That’s
what I wanted to know.
 |
| Left to right: A. Clark and Alma Stratton with
their son; George Hartzog, III, Nancy Hartzog, Conrad L.Wirth, and Helen and
George B. Hartzog, Jr., at Hartzog’s swearing in ceremony, 1964. (National Park
Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
They went from area to area and what they
found to be excellent or very good in one area they shared with another, so in
that way what was innovative and creative was quickly spread to the field where
it counted. What was a real problem they sent to me in a blue envelope,10 a
lousy park operation or a superintendent not on top of the job. I sent a copy
[of the report] to the regional director with a note that I wanted to see him
and the superintendent in my office in thirty days to discuss this.
The first one that went out happened to be
involving one of my favorite people, Fred Fagergren, who had been superintendent
of Grand Teton and whom I had just promoted to be regional director in Omaha. He
got that memorandum, and he just came apart. You couldn’t imagine this wonderful
man using such language to describe the inspector who wrote that report. What
did he know about park operations? “Well,” I said, “Fred, he doesn’t know
anything about them, but I had the doctor certify that he has very good vision.
He can see. He’s not blind and that’s all that is—a report on what he saw. The
signs are not maintained. The road has potholes in it. The ranger had a dirty
uniform on. The other thing that he [the inspector] went on about involved an
interpretive program in which the person stood in front of him and read half of
it instead of having memorized the exercise. That’s what the visitor saw and it
was a lousy visitor experience, and that’s what I want to talk about.” “Well, I
know that’s not the way it is,” [Fagergren retorted]. I said, “Well, why don’t
you do this. Why don’t you just cool off and go to the park and see what’s
happening. Maybe it’s not the same park that you left.” Well, he quieted down.
Three or four weeks went by and it was time
for my meeting. Helen Johnson, my secretary, called Fred to set up the meeting.
One afternoon, late, I got a call from Fred and he said, “We don’t need that
meeting.” I said, “Oh, yes, we need that meeting, because I want to find out
what’s at the bottom of all of this.” He said, “I’ve already done it [identified
the problem] and it won’t happen again.” So the reports had the added incentive
of giving the regional directors insight into how their parks were being run.
Often they get involved in paperwork, just as the director does, and do not see
park operations often enough.
Vision
Mr. Everhart, I’d like to hear
your thoughts on the vision that you shared. In my reading, a theme of that
vision that really stood out was relevancy, and maybe if you could talk about
that, too.
W.E.– When the Park Service was formed back in
1916, there were maybe fifteen national parks. Within a couple of years,
interestingly enough, the leaders of the Park Service decided one of the major
objectives of the values of the park was education. The Park Service was
established in 1916 and by 1920 in some of the major national parks they were
trying out evening campfire programs. If you’ve ever gone to a national park
they’re still doing that to tell people about things. Horace Albright, one of
the founders in Yellowstone, was hiring naturalists. And they used to give
walks, and in the evening put on slide shows. Well, they called it initially
“education.” Then they thought that sounded more like lectures and so forth, but
what they were doing was telling people stories about the animals, and the
flowers, the trees, … “interpreting” wildlife management, biology, geology, and
so forth. Essentially, they were translating a foreign language. So
interpretation became one of the four important park activities, along with
ranger activities, administration, and maintenance.
At the time I joined the Park Service, I was a
historian at the University of Pennsylvania working on a Ph.D. I came back to
Gettysburg, my hometown, over a weekend and ran into the park historian at
Gettysburg, who offered me a job as a seasonal. So I worked one summer and then
went back to school until the Park Service invited me to come back and be a
permanent employee. Well, at that time I didn’t think that much of the Park
Service and I thought it over. But I did figure here I was, nearing 30. I didn’t
even own an automobile. I needed the money. So I joined, intending to finish up
the Ph.D. soon.
In the first six years I was in the Park
Service, I had six different jobs. What I realized is that the archeologists,
the architects, and the historians and so forth were doing programs in the park
which should be of a value and an excellence comparable to the park itself. When
you’re doing things in Yellowstone, whether you’re doing the visitor center, or
whether you’re doing the exhibits in the museum, they ought to be on the same
level of [quality] and interest as the park itself. This is no place to do
sloppy work.
Underneath the Gateway Arch, the Park Service
planned to develop the largest museum it had ever undertaken. That’s what George
called me to do. But as we made visits to Eero Saarinen’s office and saw the
quality of the work being done, we got the idea of why not hire Saarinen to do
the museum? We would do all of the historical research and have him design the
museum.
So I went up a couple of times to his office—
so we decided to ask Saarinen to do the museum. He agreed and invited Eames to
help. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Charles Eames,11 the chair maker and
designer and so forth— Well, to make a long story short, they made their pitch
to the director. He told them, “No, we already have the best museum designers in
the country.” But later on, the museum was designed by a former Saarinen
architect.
G.H.– That’s the vision we brought back here.
And that caused a lot of consternation, because it had been an organization that
was run by personalities and by administrative manuals. We had fifty-six of
those books, and I was convinced that that was the bottom line of why we
couldn’t bring about any change. So I asked the regional directors about that,
because we had to not only develop our program standards but also develop
personal performance standards. These standards told the employee the conditions
that exist when the job’s done satisfactorily. I was convinced from what I was
hearing that always we went back to those cotton-picking manuals.
So I asked the regional directors to look at
the manuals. They agreed that many of them were out of date but said we should
keep them because it insured uniformity, and that’s when I came unhinged. I
said, “You know, that happens to be the last thing I’m looking for. I want
creativity, and innovation, and we’ll get it my way, if we abolish them.” And I
abolished every one of them, thinking that never again would the Park Service be
able to put them together, because they wouldn’t have that many people. Well, I
wasn’t gone five years before they’d rewritten up to seventy volumes of them. Do
you want to know the difference in the Park Service then and now? That’s it! Now
you’re using a book to run the place, and back then we used people to run the
place. I’m perfectly happy to have the record compared when we used people as
opposed to when you use books.
I guess part of that emphasis
on people was, again, with this idea of relevancy, looking for ways to reach out
to a broader American public, a more diverse American public, and attract them
to the parks.
We were already excluding from our management
over half of our population, because no woman except one and no minority had any
management job in the uniform service of the National Park Service. We had one
woman who was a park superintendent. She [Wilhelmina S. Harris] was Mr. [Brooks]
Adams’s secretary when the Adams [Memorial Foundation] gave the Adams Mansion to
the National Park Service, and the requirement in the transition was that she be
retained as the manager of the estate. I like to tell the story that the only
woman superintendent we had was a gift. And that was it.12
That was the situation when we opened the system up to women
and minorities. We also opened up the Park Police. I appointed the first
minority chief of any major police department in the United States. You know,
here we are—and we’re saying that crime is rampant and that most of it is in the
center [inner] cities. Most of it is generated by impoverished minority groups,
and yet who is running the place? We have nobody who can speak their language.
We’ve got nobody who is empathetic to them. And I learned from my experience in
St. Louis where our guard force was African Americans. They were some of the
most competent people I had there. I don’t think there was any one of them whom
we had who didn’t have the respect of every professional we had on the staff
there.
Can you put that in the context
of President Johnson’s Great Society program? It seems like what you were trying
to accomplish also fit into the broader goals of the administration.
I don’t think there’s any question but that the
success of it depended upon the fact that it was consistent with what he and the
secretary were trying to do. But I think that my explanation is: Why was I so
committed to that? Because my experience from my youth said to me that women are
the most competent people. Our family was saved by my mother, not by my father,
because the Great Depression had made an invalid out of him. Our family was
saved by her. So I knew what women could do.
Of course, I had the same experience with the
blacks in the South. I knew that some of the most talented people in our town,
our little rural country town, were the black people. An electrician who was a
black man was one of the most competent people in town, but he had to come into
your house by the back door. That was repulsive to me. Those were the motivating
factors that said, you can’t exclude such people from management and have a
successful team. But certainly it would never have succeeded without being
consistent with what the secretary and the president wanted. And President
Johnson’s experience was very much like mine. We both were raised in the South.
It sounds like you’re
describing a very personal commitment to the goals of the Great Society. Is that
accurate? Do you want to elaborate on that?
Absolutely. I don’t have any problem with that
[the goals of the Great Society]. I believed [in] that and I believe it still to
this day. Yes, I do. I believe that and I think that we are leaving behind a
great segment of our population, which is a tragic failure of government. But
that’s not because the government employees are incompetent. That’s because
we’ve got an administration that doesn’t share those objectives.
A common Southern reason for believing black
people are poor is because they’re lazy. Well, it’s just a falsehood, that’s
all. They have had no opportunity. When they have opportunity they’re as
successful as anybody else.
Certainly the Park Service has
begun in the last ten years to incorporate sites into the National Park System
that reflect a more diverse history. Is that a trend that you’ve also seen?
Absolutely.
W.E.– Women’s Rights National Historical Park,
speaking of the way in which that [trend is exemplified]—and another one, we can
talk about how Wolf Trap came about.13
G.H.– You know, Bill Everhart and I believed
that our historical cultural parks were mostly birthplaces and battlefields.
That was what we were commemorating. The military started it by saving
battlefields, which ultimately in the 1930s were transferred to the Park Service
and became the core of our historical parks in the system today. Birthplaces and
battlefields, but nothing in between about what the creative people who came to
this country accomplished. Every politician is anxious to jump out and proclaim
[these sites as symbols of] the American way of life. When I became director, we
hadn’t commemorated any of that. We started that [effort] when Bill and I were
in the Park Service, and Wolf Trap is one of them. We had a whole list of
cultural park proposals.
I even had a cultural park on the boards to
interpret the cultural heritage of the Zuni Tribe…. It would have been a
“counterpart proposal.” We would interpret the Zuni history and we would put in
a Park Service career organization, and the chairman of the Zunis would appoint
a counterpart. NPS and American Indian staff would work side by side. We agreed
that when the Zuni had reached a level of competence that he could handle the
job, we’d take our career employee out. [Eventually] that cultural park would be
staffed entirely by Zuni Indians. Just think what a marvelous experience that
would be today for somebody from New York being able to walk into a great
cultural park in the Southwest and all they meet are Indians, Native Americans.
Well, that went by the boards because one of the [Nixon administration’s]
objectives in getting rid of me was to stop that legislative flow of new areas
into the park system. The administration … operated under the slogan of
“thinning of the blood.”14 I’m sure you’ve run into that.
If you would, talk about your
concept of the system: how you would define it and whether it’s a finite thing
or whether it should continue to grow; just your concept of parks as a system
and how to determine what should come into the National Park System.
I saw a television program last night on this
fantastic formation in the state of Washington. Did you happen to see that?
Well, I forget what the title of the program was but it was about Missoula Lake.
Have you ever heard of Missoula Lake?
No.
I never had either. But there was a glacier
independent of the Canadian glaciers that came down in the Ice Age that formed,
that blocked the river that goes through Missoula, Montana, and created a
500-mile lake, 1,000 feet deep. And when the water broke the dam of the glacier
from the Washington State side, that water washed across the state of Washington
and into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s a formation
that we don’t yet have in the National Park System. I think it should be in the
National Park System. I think the natural areas have not had nearly the
opportunity for expansion.
We still lack a good hardwood national forest
park in the Northeast. We were going to do one in Pennsylvania. That was when
the concept of national preserves came about. I told Joe [Rep. Joseph M.] McDade
[of Scranton, Pennsylvania], the senior minority member on the House
Appropriations Committee, that Pennsylvania had a large area of land that had
been polluted with tailings from mining. This land could be set aside as a
preserve. We were going to set it up as a preserve for thirty years with no
visitation, use it for the Job Corps boys and girls to go in and restore the
natural environment. The restoration could take decades but the result would be
a great natural park. This is much like what the CCC [Civilian Conservation
Corps] boys did in Shenandoah [National Park]. Shenandoah was all farmed over,
cut over, burned over, and today we argue about the size of the wilderness.
That’s what we could have if we used those preserves in that way in the
Northeast [and took] over this mined out, depleted land, which often is a burden
to the communities where which it exists. McDade could not get enough support
and never introduced legislation. Instead he focused on Scranton, Pennsylvania,
and railroads. He wanted the Park Service to look at Scranton as a site to
interpret railroads. The Park Service was not interested in doing this. When
McDade secured an appropriation for a railroad historic site, the Service had no
choice. Steamtown [National Historic Site] was not the best national park but it
is the only one that reflects the history of the railroads. We’re creating
history everyday, so there will never be an end to historical areas.
We haven’t nearly finished commemorating the
cultural achievements and the achievements of the Industrial Revolution in
America and the contributions that … enrich our lives everyday. Those things
ought to be in the National Park System. We’re building the park system for
eternity, not for tomorrow. So you can talk away the relevance of it: “We got
one that looks like that so we don’t need another one.” But we don’t have that
one that talks about the Industrial Revolution. We have the Saugus Iron Works
[National Historic Site], but the Saugus Iron Works to represent the Industrial
Revolution is like a pimple on an elephant. I mean, there is so much more to the
Industrial Revolution that is not commemorated. They got a little bit of the
Ford family money in the museum to Henry Ford in the Detroit area. But heavens,
that’s just a miniscule part of the whole story of transportation [as it evolved
through the Industrial Revolution and afterward] in this country, none of which
is in the National Park System. And all of which ought to be.
You mention the term “thinning
of the blood,” which former director James Ridenour coined. How do you feel
about that concept? Do you think that the process of deciding what sites come
into the system has become too politicized?
Let me tell you. You can’t get it too
politicized. You know why? Because the framers of the foundation of this
government said politicians are the ones who are going to establish the
public-land policy of America. That’s why you find that my term as director was
so much different than those of my predecessors. Mather and Albright believed
very much, as I did, in the role of the Congress. That’s why Mather spent
thousands of dollars personally taking congressmen out to the parks.
I had a “show me” trip every year, in which I
invited the Congress to go see the parks in the National Capital Region. The
idea came from Horace Albright who said that the National Capital Parks was a
microcosm of all of the natural areas and cultural areas that we had in the
National Park System outside of Washington. And that’s true. We’ve got the
monuments as cultural, historical areas; we’ve got Rock Creek Park, one of the
first natural areas saved in the National Park System. We’ve got them all. So I
ran that “show me” trip every year financed by a donation from Laurance S.
Rockefeller, which Horace Albright arranged. Those members of Congress, the
politicians, are the ones who make the policies so you’ll never get me to say
that there is a “thinning of the blood” of any congressionally approved area,
because that is the policy-making body of all public lands in America, not the
bureaucrats in the National Park Service.
Now the historians, they have their criteria.
Chickamauga [and Chattanooga National Military Park] may not be as historically
significant as Gettysburg, but the Congress established them both. Who is to say
which one shouldn’t be there? And certainly I can agree that Gettysburg was more
influential in the course of [the Civil] War than perhaps Chickamauga. But I
don’t know that I would exclude Chickamauga to have Gettysburg. I don’t think
you can get too much politics in it [the selection of sites], that’s all I’m
trying to say.
Related to that, in a 1981
interview you indicated that during your administration the Park Service
witnessed what you called “the largest legislative explosion in its history.” I
would love to hear you talk about how you account for that explosion. It sounds
like recognizing the important role of Congress was part of that.
Absolutely. I wore out three pairs of shoes a
year walking the halls of Congress to make it happen. Yes. Absolutely. That was
it. That was my commitment. I never once missed a congressional hearing in which
I was asked to testify. Not once, because that’s the body that sets the
public-land policy of America. The president is important, because he represents
one-third in the legislative process. He can veto it, and then it takes
two-thirds plus one to overrule him. So he represents one-third minus one. But
he’s not the maker of public-land policy, and neither is the director of the
National Park Service. That’s why I was very careful to get my directive from
the secretary confirmed by the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and a
piece of legislation saying the National Park System consisted of natural,
cultural, and recreational areas as the foundation for my management policies.
I’ll say this without any sense of criticism,
but when the [presidential] administration decides in public-land matters that
Congress doesn’t count, they’re absolutely totally mistaken, because that’s a
constitutional responsibility of the Congress. It’s nothing dreamed up by one
politician or one political party that has a minority or a majority of the
voters at any time. That is a mandate given the Congress by the founders of the
Constitution to set the public-land policy of America. So I never felt they were
meddling. I did my damnedest, and I make no apologies, to engage them and
cultivate them, and to take them fishing if that’s what it took to get the bill
through. Or to take them hiking if that’s what it took to get the bill, whatever
it took to get the bill through, I was for doing it.
You have also spoken over the
years about the distinction between congressional authorization and
appropriations, and how important getting the money was. Would you like to
elaborate on that for a minute?
You better believe it. That was, so far as I
know, the first time ever that I got the authorization committee [the House
Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs] to go sit down and talk with the
Appropriations Subcommittee [the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior
and Related Agencies]. But I was able to do that because of my total commitment
to the fact that not only the authority that I had, but the money that I needed,
had to come out of the Congress, because I can’t spend a nickel unless they give
it to me. I’ve got to first get it authorized, and then I’ve got to get it
appropriated. If there is a difference between the two committees, I can have
all the authorization in the world, but if I can’t get the chairman of the
Appropriations Committee to appropriate the money, it’s useless. That was when I
was able to get congressmen and the leadership of my subcommittees [House
Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and House Appropriations Subcommittee
on Interior and Related Agencies] to sit down across the table from each other
and talk about my budget. I don’t apologize for that. I think that is what has
to be done if you’re going to get your money.
Historic Preservation
Let’s talk about cultural
resources and historic preservation. Would you put your initiatives in the area
of historic preservation in the broader context of the historic preservation
movement at that time, and maybe talk a little bit about the National Historic
Preservation Act of 1966 and what that meant for the Park Service?
Well, I looked on the Historic Preservation Act
of 1966 as being the mechanism for the Park Service to extend its influence [in
historic preservation], which began with the Antiquities Act of 1906 and
increased with the 1935 Historic Sites Act.15 The 1935 legislation was the first
time that the Congress assigned the Park Service responsibility for the
preservation of our national history. Prior to that, the president was
authorized to establish national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906.
The president established national monuments by presidential proclamation. But
in 1935 this young bunch of creative people came in the government as a result
of the federal [New Deal] programs to put people back to work. I forget all
their names, but it started with Ronnie Lee and Herb Kahler.16
The 1935 act was the one that authorized
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to recognize historic sites. That was the
basis for St. Louis JNEM [Jefferson National Expansion Memorial]. JNEM was the
first area established under the Historic Sites Act of 1935.17 The legislation
gave us a broad charter, but it didn’t provide any money. By the time the 1960s
came around, there were a lot of areas and program activities and other
departments that were eroding the responsibilities in the areas of the National
Park System (both the natural areas and especially our historic and cultural
areas) [like] tearing down historic buildings, putting roads through the center
city, knocking down historic districts.
Urban renewal?
Yes. The whole works.
Could you tell me a little more
about your role in securing passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of
1966?
In 1964, Rep. Albert M. Rains, chairman of
the House Subcommittee on Housing, indicated to Laurance G. Henderson that he
would be interested in pursuing a project of public interest after retirement.
Henderson and Carl Feiss, a trustee of the National Trust for Historic
Preservation, decided that the former congressman should lead a special
committee that would examine preservation activities in Europe and prepare a
report detailing the need for preservation in the United States.18
[There was] a young man, Larry Henderson, who
was an assistant to Senator [John J.] Sparkman of Alabama, and Casey Ireland,
assistant to Bill [William B.] Widnall. Bill Widnall was a Republican
congressman from New Jersey on the House Subcommittee on Housing. Larry and
Casey persuaded these legislators of the need to have a look at what was
happening. They persuaded them to look at historic preservation in America using
the insights that could be garnered from the restoration of the face of Europe
after World War II . They19 went to the Ford Foundation and got financing for a
grant from the Ford people to do this.
Gordon Gray, former secretary of the army in
the Truman administration and former president of the University of North
Carolina, was then the chairman of the National Trust for Historic Preservation,
which was an organization [that had grown] out of the 1935 Historic Sites Act.
The Trust was established in 1949. The Park Service had played a key role in
that with Ronnie Lee and Herb Kahler and others. I was an ex officio member of
the board of directors of the National Trust. But the moving force in it was
Gordon Gray. They [the board of directors] had enticed Gordon Gray to take over
the leadership of that organization. Gordon Gray gave political muscle and
enlarged the perspective of the Trust.
Henderson, Feiss, and Rains recruited members
for the special committee. They invited heads of federal agencies involved in
financing public construction projects or pursuing preservation activities to
serve as ex officio members. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was one,
and [Secretary Robert C.] Weaver of Housing and Urban Development was one, and
the [secretary of the] Department of Commerce was one.20
It was [urban renewal] programs that impacted
the core of the cities, which is where you find most of the cultural resources
in America. And the highways were just busting right through cities, destroying
neighborhoods and historic heritage right and left. The money the Ford
Foundation put up enabled them [Henderson and Feiss] to involve the Governors
Association, and the League of Cities, and the [U.S.] Conference of Mayors, all
of which were very potent political organizations. And in the league there were
prominent preservationists.
Henderson served as the committee’s director
and made the trip arrangements, assisted by Casey Ireland. The special
committee, which became known as the Rains Committee, visited eight European
countries with notable records in preservation.21
They went to Europe to discuss [restoration],
and to discover, and evaluate what had happened on that continent after the
devastation of World War II. The secretary designated me as his representative
on that task force. That’s where my involvement started. So it was there that I
made all of my contacts, with Phillip Hoff, governor of Vermont and a very
prominent Democrat in the establishment, and Gordon Gray, whom I got to know
very personally, and Casey Ireland and Larry Henderson.
Several weeks after returning from Europe, the
Rains Committee met in New York City and approved recommendations that Feiss and
Ireland had drafted for a new national historic preservation program in the
United States.22
It just kind of evolved that we wrote a
report. With Heritage So Rich [Random House, 1966] was the name of the final
publication that included the report we wrote. One of the recommendations of the
report was that [the federal government take an active role in historic
preservation]. We took the position that the most important thing we needed was
money to support state and local and private historic preservation efforts,
which was a key to the success in Europe with the local government and private
enterprise.
That [financial imperative] was
something that the trip highlighted?
That trip brought all of this together. I
reckon [the reason I was included] was primarily because I was an ex officio
member of the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but also
because I was director of the Park Service, and the fact that I was a damned
good lobbyist. I got a note from a guy that I have a great deal of respect for,
Carl Hummelsine, who used to be the chief lobbyist for the State Department
before he went to Williamsburg, as the president of Williamsburg, for the
Rockefellers, and developed that. He wrote me one day a note [calling me] “the
second best lobbyist in Washington.” Then he put, “P.S. I’m the first.” And he
was, because he was there with John Foster Dulles, and he was the face of the
State Department on the Hill. I don’t think there was a more prominently
associated politician in Washington. He [later] went to Williamsburg.
Out of that Rains Committee came this proposal
for legislation that would not only set the dimensions and create a National
Register of historic sites and structures, which we found to be of special
significance, especially in France, but would also provide money to match state
and private money to give spirit and body to the historic preservation effort in
America. It was left to Gordon Gray and me to get that legislation through the
Congress.
As I understand, it wasn’t easy
initially to get the draft legislation through Congress.
It wasn’t. I’ll tell you about it. Nobody paid
much attention to the legislation until I got it to the Hill. And then when I
got it to the Hill, then the HUD [Housing and Urban Development] people decided,
“Oh, there’s money here.” Then all of a sudden Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian
discovered, “My goodness, there’s international representation here.” And this
gives the Smithsonian a chance to branch out. Both of those [groups] tried to
raid that legislation. I don’t take any credit for writing the bill, because
that was done in the committee. But I was the principal [person] who got the
[National] Historic Preservation Act of 1966 [passed]. And I’m the guy who saved
those provisions of the international representation, the IUCN [The World
Conservation Union]. The matching grants program which HUD wanted is in the Park
Service today as a result of what I did in getting that bill through.
As you say, it wasn’t easy. But I had the
confidence of Casey Ireland and Larry Henderson, a Republican and a Democrat,
both of whom were most intelligent, articulate guys, who believed in me as an
individual and who believed in what I was trying to do. They, too, believed in
the concept of keeping the various historic preservation responsibilities
together under one agency because of the close coordination required, rather
than spreading it all over hell’s half acre. So yes, with Gordon Gray I take
credit for having passed the Historic Preservation Act of 1966. There were many
hands on the tiller getting to that point, but when it came down to the bottom
line, it was Gordon Gray and I who got that bill through.
Revitalizing The Service
Your administration marked a
transition in so many ways. The National Historic Preservation Act, as you
mentioned, extended the Park Service’s preservation responsibilities outside
park boundaries. We talked only briefly about the explosion of new legislation
during your tenure, such as the National Trails System Act. Mr. Everhart, you
wrote that Mr. Hartzog “might be termed the last director of the old Park
Service.” I’d love to hear both of you comment on the idea that this was a
transition period. Would you like to go first, Mr. Everhart?
W.E.– I think that with the coming together of
President Johnson, Stewart Udall, and Hartzog for the Great Society, there was
really sort of a revolution. I’m a historian. I know the people who live through
a revolution never realize it. It’s the next generation who has to realize it.
So that was the time, and the great tragedy for the country was that LBJ got
caught up in the Vietnam War. And that is where all of the money went.
But during that time, all things were possible
and the Park Service started looking where it had never looked before for parks
and for activities. Like Wolf Trap, Stewart Udall and George, engaged in a
little conversation, mainly, “Is culture a part of history?” And when they
decided that it was, then many others expanded it [the number of cultural
sites]. At the same time with the victory [for historic preservation, the
Service started] getting involved in so many things that the organization itself
got to be—I think in our time 7,000 employees; now it’s up to 15,000
employees—now it’s probably a bureaucracy. We always tried. At the same time we
[the Service] are doing things that George and I would be astonished to even
find out we’re doing. But once it started up it hasn’t stopped. The Park System
has expanded, but I think it was during those days that it took off for the big
revolution.
Do you see your tenure as a
transitional period, Mr. Hartzog?
I suppose in looking back you would have
thought it was a transition. I never really looked on it as a transition. I
thought of it as a revitalization, and I still look on it as that. You look back
at Steve Mather and Horace Albright, and I put them together, because of the
great difficulty Mr. Mather had with two or more years of his administration.23
It was really Horace Albright’s administration. They were interchangeable in the
years from when Mather was director through Albright’s term; it was really one.…
That was a period in which the Service set its bounds, branched out into new
areas. It had no historic areas. Horace Albright brought them in, in that one
fortuitous trip that he made as a passenger with the secretary and President
Roosevelt to Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Parkway. That’s where Horace Albright
got the historical areas in that few minutes that he talked with the president
about it.24
So I looked on it as a revitalization of that
era in which there were no limits. There was a great rapport between the Service
and the Department [of the Interior]. The secretary was involved and gave me
free rein to go and do. I always kept him fully informed. He knew everything I
was doing.
This was Secretary Udall?
Udall. I had the same kind of relationship with
Secretaries [Rogers] Morton and [Walter] Hickel. They didn’t circumscribe me.
That’s one of the reasons that they give for President [Richard] Nixon’s quote
in [H. R.] Haldeman’s book: “Rogers Morton won’t get rid of the son-of-a-bitch.
But he’s got to go.” Nixon meant “Morton wouldn’t contain him, so I’m going to
contain him. I’m going to get rid of him,” you know. But they [administration
officials] were a part of it, because I always kept the secretary advised of my
activities and pending legislation. The White House wanted to stop the expansion
of the National Park System.
Be that as it may, if people want to look on it
as a transition, then it was a transition, because I’m sure we came out of it a
different organization than we went in. The Park Service had become a
bureaucratic organization hidebound by its books and its rules and regulations.
I think Bill Everhart and Ted Swem and Howard Baker and Ed [Edward A.] Hummel,
and those of us who had a new vision about what created the Park Service, could
bring it [the organization] back to the [original mandate for the] Park Service.
And we restored it by abolishing handbooks, making superintendents responsible
for management, saying to the employees what a satisfactory level of performance
is, what the policies are and they decide how to run the park on a day-to-day
basis without having somebody in Washington write a book answering all of their
unasked questions.
In that 1981 interview, you
indicated that you had: “A freedom of movement which none of my successors have
ever had, and which I doubt if any of them will ever have again.” It sounds like
that’s what you were talking about with the support from the department.
Absolutely. Yes. I don’t know if any of them
have had that liberty since, do you?
W.E.– Well, it’s gotten so big, but one thing
is that George initially went in and got the approval from Udall that he
[Hartzog] would appoint every superintendent in the park system. Well, that was
a clever way to do it, because every park superintendent in the system was
looking forward to moving upward, and he knew that he would have to impress
George. So by doing that George was able to get the support he wanted. I guess,
as I recall George’s conversation with me one time, he was pointing out that he
gave the superintendents his authority, because they had to do things and make
decisions and so forth. But he could not delegate his responsibility. In the end
it was all going to come, the things that get out of hand, come back to him.
So that is the way to operate the system, and
the difficulty was it got too big. Now it would be literally impossible. The
Park Service has become a bureaucracy. I guess what’s happened is, it [the
responsibility] has moved down. The superintendent now runs his park, and it’s a
bureaucracy. And a lot of the goodwill came out of it [the Service when it
became more bureaucratic]. [But] it’s still a great organization, and we still
have a great park system.
G.H.– I met with every superintendent in the
National Park System once every year, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We convened
on Friday night, had our meeting on Saturday, and tried to adjourn by noon on
Sunday, so they could be home to go back to work on Monday morning. They were
invited to bring their spouses, and I met with the wives separately during that
session to hear what they thought about the Park Service.
I don’t know. That took an awful lot of time
from my family, but my wife approved of it before I started it. I left this area
on Friday morning, and I didn’t come back usually until Monday, because if a
superintendent wanted to stay individually and talk with me on Sunday after the
meetings were over, I stayed overnight for that purpose. No minutes. No agenda.
Just your problems, whatever you want to bring up we’re going to talk about it.
The only record ever made was, if you brought up a problem and we agreed on an
answer that had Service-wide implication, then that answer went out the next
week on a pink memorandum to all regional directors so that that communication
went throughout the Service. But otherwise no record was ever made of it.
I felt that was one of the most important
things that I did in meeting with those guys, because we could sit across the
table from each other and talk about their problems. I had no agenda. I spent
the first fifteen minutes telling them what was going on in the department and
in Congress, where the legislation was, where the appropriations were, what, if
anything, the secretary was all churned up about and wanted to do something
about. That was it.
I also insisted that the regional directors
give me a list of five of the most talented people in their region every year.
And I kept that list in my desk drawer. At the end of the year, I took it out
and compared it with where those thirty-five people were at the end of the year.
And generally every one of them had been moved to a new position during the
course of that year.
You also sent them to the
Federal Executive Institute.
Absolutely. We contracted with the Federal
Executive Institute at Charlottesville, Virginia, to devise and implement a
team-building program to foster cohesiveness in our changing organization. The
institute was established by the Civil Service Commission (now the Office of
Personnel Management) to train senior managers in the federal government. The
University of Southern California loaned the director of its School for Public
Administration, Dr. Frank Sherwood, to the federal government to head the
institute. The sixty-day residential program that Sherwood designed for federal
managers was the most creative, innovative effort made by the federal government
during my career to improve the quality of government management. I attended the
first session and sent some of my principal assistants to each session
thereafter until each deputy, associate and assistant director, and each
regional director had completed the program. I thought it was one of the most
innovative, substantive things ever done to improve the quality of government
management.
In addition to providing advanced training
for Service managers, Hartzog retained the management consulting firm of James
M. Kittleman and Associates to conduct an organizational study of the National
Park Service. Later, Hartzog retained Kittleman personally as a part-time
consultant to monitor and advise him on the implementation of the study and
evolving management issues.25
Jim Kittleman, who was a consultant from
Chicago and the Federal Executive Institute, Frank Sherwood and R. T. Williams,
they were under contract for [a study of] organization development. Jim
Kittleman was the contractor for management [issues]. I kept those two
organizations as long as I was director, because that gave me an outside
viewpoint [along with] every one of my senior executives [whom] I sent to the
Federal Executive Institute, so that I had a community of people who spoke the
same language. I had them constantly in contact there. They’d call the regional
director, they’d call the assistant director, they’d call the director of
Harpers Ferry. Bill Everhart and Frank Sherwood became great personal friends. I
mean it was that kind of relationship, always getting the outside viewpoint,
because I felt that that was important for us to understand the world in which
we were trying to operate.
I would like to hear your
thoughts on what you view as the appropriate relationship between political
appointees and careerists. It’s generally regarded that after your departure
from the Park Service, the director position seemed to change with the political
administration. There were, as you mentioned in an earlier interview, instances
of political appointees making operational decisions that might be best left to
the careerist. Would you talk about that for a few minutes?
That problem was beginning before I got
fired.26 But that just never existed when I was director. If I had an assistant
secretary, and I had several of them, who wanted something done, I always made
it clear to them that when they went out in the field and they saw something
they didn’t like, something they thought ought to be changed, if they would call
me and tell me about it, we would talk it over. If I agreed with them, we’d
change it and we’d do what they wanted done in the way that they wanted it done,
because they’re from the outside. They’re sensitive to the community and the
political environment that exists.
Remember that I went through a change of
administrations, so I worked for Democratic assistant secretaries and Republican
assistant secretaries. But the one thing that we had an agreement on was that
they never ever ordered a change in my management directly to a superintendent.
I had one assistant secretary who had a tendency to let his staff do that. I
finally made a telephone call to all of my regional directors, a conference
call, in which I said, “I’m advised that the assistant secretary’s office calls
the superintendents in your region saying he wants this and that done. You get
on this phone today, before you go home, and talk with each superintendent
you’ve got. You tell him that I said if the assistant secretary calls him and
tells him to do something, and he has the money and he wants to do it, do it.
But I want to know how much it costs, because next year I will reduce his budget
by the same amount that he spent on this project.”
Then when I finished that conference call to
the regional directors, I got up and went to the other end of the hall and
walked into the assistant secretary’s office and I told him exactly what I had
told the regional directors. I said, “I’ve been trying to work with you to get
you to understand that if you want something done in the parks, tell me and I
will tell them, because we can’t have two directors of the Park Service. Those
superintendents know they report to me. When I call them and tell them to do
something, they do it, and when I get somebody off in left field here calling
them and telling them to do something, that confuses them.” I told him, “If you
continue to let that happen, they can do it if they want to, but the cost of
that project will be deducted from their budget next year.” He knew I could do
it, because he knew my relationship with my Appropriations Committee was such
that 99.9 percent of the time they would do what I asked them. If I told them I
wanted Yellowstone’s budget cut $100,000, they’d cut it $100,000. That [the
assistant secretary’s interference] stopped.
It seemed to me that you can’t run an
organization if everybody is intervening and countermanding what the director
has told them to do. That is unacceptable operation, and besides, in many
instances, like male alligators they eat their own. The career service works for
the political establishment. The interface between the political bureaucrat and
the career bureaucrat is of paramount importance to effective and efficient
government. The political bureaucrat has resources beyond his comprehension that
he can direct to any project he wants done, if he involves that career
bureaucrat in transmitting that energy through that system. The career
bureaucrats are much smarter than the political bureaucrats give them credit
for. See, this comes out of the philosophy that everyone [specifically every
political bureaucrat] is capable of doing a government job. That is simply not
so. They’re simply not. A political bureaucrat may be a great guy and a lousy
manager at the same time.
The Army Corps of Engineers is one of the
agencies I greatly admire. I say to people, they [the Corps] can do any damn
thing in the world that the Congress tells them to do and puts up the money for,
but they’re not efficient. I’ve adopted a lot of their tactics, because I was
never really all that innovative. I stole ideas everywhere I could find them
from whomever I could find them. And I was very much in the tradition of Mo
[Rep. Morris K.] Udall in telling jokes. The first time I used it, I said, “The
Army Corps does this and this and this, and this is what we think. And this is
what I think we ought to do.” And after that it was my idea. You [the other
person or organization] get credit for it the first time. After that it’s my
story. Mo Udall said he always stole his stories from everybody. The first time
he told it he said, “Joe Blow told me the other day.” The next time he told it,
“This is what I heard.” It’s my story now.
W.E.– To back him up, we had a slogan, “shop
the competition.” Our interpretation is fine, but there are obviously other
people who are doing better at whatever it is you’re doing. So look out. Just
because we’re the Park Service that doesn’t mean we’re the best in all elements
of it. Go out and look and shop the competition, which we did.
G.H.– You know I used to send maintenance
people to Coney Island. Now, why would I pay government transportation and per
diem to send people to Coney Island? They knew more about picking up trash than
anybody on the face of the Earth, because they had more of it. I don’t know what
the situation is now. I went there and I saw, and it was the cleanest beach in
America. You rode along our parkways and there was trash all over the side of
them. I paid to send them [Park Service staff] up there to let them experience
how you pick up trash. As Bill said, my motto was “shop the competition.”
Somebody has done what you’re now doing or you’re going to try to do. Go see how
they’re doing it. And if they’re doing it better, steal it. They don’t have a
copyright or a patent on it. So it’s in the public domain. Take it.
Political Appointees and Careerists
Is one of the things that
you’re talking about a level of mutual respect between the political appointees
and the careerists? Earlier you talked about what is clearly your great respect
for the legislative process.
Absolutely.
But also the political
appointees respecting the expertise and experience of the careerists, is that
part of it?
And the career guy respecting the process by
which this [political] guy got his job. This guy has some access to the
president of the United States, who has been selected by the people of the
United States for four years to be the chief of their government. He is the guy,
and he has chosen this man or this woman to be his representative for this
segment of that responsibility. So this is a presidential appointee and he’s
entitled to a lot of deference and a lot of respect. [But] he can’t make you
violate the law, and he’s not an excuse for abusing your authority.
I was impressed when [Walter] Hickel became my
secretary. I wrote a memorandum for him that outlined how he wanted the Park
Service run. And I gave it to him. He invited me to ride to the Hill with him
one afternoon. I had the draft and I took it with me and we got in the backseat,
and Carl McMurray, his chief of staff, was in the front seat. Hickel started
reading this thing and his face lit up like a candle. I’ve never seen a man who
was reading something and every word you could tell was penetrating and shedding
new light that he had never seen before. He read it, and he handed the first
page to McMurray, and the second one, and the third one, and when he finished he
said, “This is wonderful. The only thing I want changed is I don’t want you
contracting out campground operations,” because I had started doing that because
of the shortage of personnel. “I think the Park Service ought to continue to
operate its own campgrounds. So you change that one sentence, and I’ll sign it.”
He said to McMurray, “Carl, as soon as I sign
this memorandum, I want every agency in this department to write me a similar
memorandum for how we’re going to manage them.” Of course it never happened. He
never followed through. Most of why this occurs is that the political bureaucrat
is so insecure as to what he wants to achieve that he will not write down what
his vision is. And the career bureaucrat is so enmeshed in his bureaucracy and
in his awe of the new political leadership that he will not volunteer to say to
him, “Here is an idea that you might want to consider for your leadership.” Help
him get over that mountain. The political appointee is just as insecure in his
job as the career bureaucrat is in his, because he can fire you. In most career
appointments he [the political appointee] can’t fire you, but he can move you
out of that job in 90 days to Timbuktu if he wants to.
But the whole thing is, once he’s been there
for two weeks he [the appointee] has got enough smarts to know that you can send
him down so many dead-end roads that he’ll never find his way back. So I mean
both have got their own advantages. They just don’t ever sit down and talk about
how they are going to get the president’s job done. I think it’s the greatest
tragedy of government that every president, when he comes in, doesn’t say to
every cabinet officer, “In ninety days I want you to report to my chief of staff
that you have an understanding with each agency in your department about how it
is to be run for the next four years.”
Those cabinet officers, in my judgment, are
equally uninformed. They have walked into a department the dimensions of which
are enlightening to them every day. The most experience that they’ve had is (if
they have practiced law in Washington) they know generally this area of that
department’s responsibility. But they have no comprehension of the totality of
the authority that they now have….
There is no superior in the White House or the
departments who will say to the political appointees in the agencies, “How are
we going to run this agency?” “How are we going to run it?” “What do we want to
achieve?” “What are our objectives?” If he would just understand that he has a
reservoir of talent that is incomparable to anything that he’s ever known in his
life, no matter where else he’s been. Whether it’s academia, or business, or
anywhere, I’ll put the government employee up against [people in any of these
areas] for intelligence, for commitment, for ability, for vision, for insight,
whatever category you want to evaluate…. I’ll take the government employee with
me and put him beside anything that you’ve ever experienced. It is the most
incomparable pool of talent, and they [the political appointees] let it go to
waste by stupid damned arguments over, “We’re going to do this and we’re not
going to do that.”
That was my biggest problem with new assistant
secretaries, getting them to understand that if they wanted to move a mountain
all they had to do was call me and I had people skilled in moving mountains. If
they wanted to build a new vision, all they had to do was call me. I had people
skilled in that, too, and they were all their people. They’re your people.
They’re not my people. They’re your people. They work for the government. They
work for the taxpayers. Now if you’re going to run a donnybrook, don’t call me,
because I haven’t got anybody who runs donnybrooks.
When you were talking earlier,
it did sound as though you had learned a lot during your earlier positions with
the Park Service, things that really benefited your operations as director.
No question about it. And that experience in
St. Louis was so illuminating, because Mayor Ray Tucker and I sat down and we
understood, could see. Howard Baker took me down and introduced me to the mayor
as the new superintendent. We had a nice discussion and that’s where I was
advised that the relocation of the railroad track was to be under way by July 1,
in my meeting with the mayor. I was scared beyond my intelligence to learn that,
because here I was finding out stuff that I had never even dreamed about.
When that meeting was over and Howard left town
the next day, the first call I made was to the mayor’s office, to go over and
sit down and talk with him. That’s when we had a great conversation. I told him
who I was. “I’m a country boy from South Carolina,” I said. “I know the
bureaucratic game from square one, but I know nothing about big city politics.”
That’s when he made that great statement. He said, “We’ve got a winner. You
handle the paper and I’ll take care of the politics,” and that’s the way we
worked it. I’d call his office and say, “This is a political game and I can’t
move it.” And boy, he moved it.
Relationship with the White House
I’d like to talk a little bit
about the relationship that you had with the Johnson White House and compare it
to [your relationship with] the Nixon White House.
Well, we didn’t really have a lot of direct
contact with the Nixon White House. It mostly came through the secretary’s
office, Walter Hickel, and then Rogers Morton, especially Rogers Morton, who was
a personal friend of President Nixon. I did have occasion to deal with some of
their staff people early on, especially his [Morton’s] deputy and John Whitaker,
who later came over as an undersecretary of the Department of the Interior, and
there were several others over there. Of course, I knew Ron Walker. He was head
of the president’s advance team. I didn’t have a lot to do with him, because
they [Nixon’s senior staff] never went to parks. Nixon, I think, went to Grand
Teton National Park once, unlike [John F.] Kennedy, who made a tour of the
national parks when he became president.
So there was not a lot of direct contact. But
there was enough that they knew who I was, and primarily where we had contact
the most was on the Hill, because the Nixon administration wanted no park
legislation. Of course, coming off of the Johnson administration, I had a tidal
force of legislation in the Congress, and as you see in the record, we passed
almost as much in the Nixon administration four years as we did in the Johnson
five years, because that tide was moving in and there was literally nothing they
could do to stop it. Ron Walker made that statement, which I’m sure you’ve
heard, and which I’m sure he will repeat for you, that my relations on the Hill
were perhaps better than the president’s in terms of getting legislation
through. Nixon reciprocated by never having a park signing ceremony. He never
had one, whereas with President Johnson, his staff would set them up before I
even got the bill passed. So the relationship was different.
I reckon where the closeness came was with the
First Ladies, because in the Nixon administration I was chairman of the
Committee for the Preservation of the White House. This was a committee that
worked with the First Lady in preserving the furnishings and the historic rooms
of the White House. Mrs. Nixon was a very wonderful person. I always felt that I
had a very good personal relationship with her. She was a lovely lady, an
all-together different kind of personality than the president himself. So I had
a very good relationship with her and her staff. Of course, with the Johnson
administration my primary relationship was with Mrs. Johnson, and she became a
“First Lady of National Parks.” If you had a park trip, she and Liz Carpenter,
who was her press secretary, they were gung ho to go. And they went. She was
responsible for building up that wave of environmental interest and preservation
interest in the National Park System. In the case of the Redwood National Park
proposal, she arranged for President Johnson to have a pre-legislative press
conference announcing his support for the Redwood National Park, even before he
sent legislation to the Hill.
That personal relationship continued on after
they left the White House. I became much more personally acquainted with the
former president, and we got along very well indeed, because we shared a lot of
mutual background, his growing up in west Texas, the Hill Country, and my
growing up in the Low Country of South Carolina. We had a lot of the common
understandings of politics.
You spoke in our previous
session about the vision of the Great Society....
Well, our program fit precisely in with his
vision. He was not a person that went to a lot of parks. He went to the Statue
of Liberty to sign a bill. He went to his boyhood home before it was authorized
to sign the education bill, but he didn’t go to a lot of parks. Mrs. Johnson did
that. There was no question, however, that our park program was an integral part
of his legislative agenda, and he never missed an opportunity when a bill was
passed to have a bill signing ceremony and invite the legislators who were
responsible for it to the White House, which was a very important part of
keeping the interest going in the National Park System.
That just wasn’t a priority for
the Nixon administration to have those ceremonies?
They never had one. I interpreted that as a
message to me they didn’t want that legislation. But the Congress, as I pointed
out to you, is in charge of the public-land policy of America. President Nixon
never had the courage to veto one. So he signed it, but he never had any
ceremony to acknowledge it.
 |
| Director Hartzog escorts the First Lady, Mrs.
Lyndon B. [Lady Bird] Johnson, on a visit to the Blue Ridge Parkway, n.d.
(National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
Legislative Achievements
What legislative achievement
are you most proud of? Is there one piece of legislation that stands out in your
mind?
Well, I reckon, you’re right. There were so
many of them I wouldn’t want to put a priority on any of them. If I were putting
a priority on them, I would put the priority on the people side of it, the
National Park Foundation, which today is a major source of funding for national
parks and for program innovation, and the Volunteers in Parks, without which the
park system couldn’t operate today. And, of course, the Alaska bill that
preserved eighty million acres from state and Native selection in Alaska.27
If you had to prioritize them, Alaska would be
my most significant achievement, for the simple reason that it was achieved
despite significant opposition. A similar provision failed in the House despite
the support by the most powerful members in the Congress, Morris Udall and John
Saylor. The House disapproved it. So the only reason that I got directly
involved in it was when John Saylor called me after that fateful [House] meeting
to say we’d lost it and if we were to save Alaska we had to do it in the Senate.
That’s when I went to see Senator [Henry M. “Scoop”] Jackson, who said he had
given the responsibility for Alaska to Senator [Alan Harvey] Bible and that if I
was to get what I wanted in Alaska, which he agreed … was desirable, I’d have to
convince Bible.28
So I went to see Senator Bible and he said,
“I’ve never been to Alaska, and I’m going to be guided by what the two [Alaskan]
senators want.” Well, of course, I knew that Ted Stevens and [Senator Mike]
Gravel didn’t have any mind for what I wanted. And I said [to Bible], “Senator,
you’ve just got to go.” He said, “I’m not going, because I agreed with my former
law partner, Bob McDonald, and my dearest friend Dr. Fred Anderson, that we are
going to take our wives on a quiet vacation for the first time since I’ve been
in the Senate.” I said, “Senator, if you’d just take them to Alaska I will
guarantee you a vacation like none of you have ever had.” And he said, “Well,
you know I’m not for that, but I’ll think about it and I’ll talk with them.” So,
of course, I was on pins and needles for two weeks until he finally called and
said, “Well, I talked with Dr. Anderson and Bob McDonald and we’ll go to
Alaska.”
I took those six people to Alaska. Of course,
the great bounty of that [vacation] was that when Anderson and McDonald saw it
[the state], they wanted even more of Alaska than I did. Coming back from
Alaska, Bible had invited Mrs. Hartzog and me to go and visit with him and
Lucille Bible, his wife, at their cabin on Lake Tahoe at the end of the trip. So
we went to Tahoe and spent, I reckon, the better part of three days there with
them. During that time [in Alaska] he had not said one word to me about whether
he was going to support any program that I had in mind for Alaska or not. I mean
you knew as much about what he was going to do as I did.
We got up the first morning after we had gotten
in there late in the evening, and after breakfast he and I went out to the front
yard and sat down looking over the lake and he said to me, “Well, why don’t you
go ahead and draft for me what you would like to have in Alaska.” And that’s how
we got the Alaska Reservation legislation.
I had recommended seventy-six million acres,
and he upped it to eighty million, because while it was Alaska, neither the
Forest Service nor the Fish and Wildlife Service had done anything to try to get
the Senate to reserve any land for them. So toward the end of our trip to
Alaska, I said to him, “You know, Mr. Chairman, while we are here I think it
would be useful if you have had the opportunity of visiting with the local Fish
and Wildlife and Forest Service people.” “Well,” he said, “that’s not a bad
idea. How would we do that?” And I said, “Well, I can call the regional
directors and arrange for them to meet us in Anchorage and get a little coffee
and let you have an opportunity to chat with them.” He said, “Why don’t we do
that?”
We were staying at the Captain Cook Hotel when
we returned to Anchorage, and that incidentally was a hotel developed and owned
by Walter Hickel, who later became secretary of the interior. So I called the
Forest Service regional director and the Fish and wildlife people and invited
them to come down and have coffee with Senator Bible and talk about their needs
and their visions. It was on the basis of that [meeting] that he added four
million acres to what I had proposed.
Then, of course, when the bill passed, the
administration took control of it and this is now the Republican Nixon
administration. Rogers Morton is secretary and Nat Reed is the assistant
secretary, and Nat Reed makes quite a record down in Florida about what he did
in connection with the Alaska lands. My view is what he did in connection with
the Alaska lands is he reduced considerably the amount of acreage that was
supposed to have been in the National Park System, to leave it in the Fish and
Wildlife Service and the Forest Service. As I pointed out in my book and as I’ve
said and say again, the reason they did that is because those two areas are
accessible to the users. I mean the “rape and run” crowd, that’s where they
operate, in Fish and Wildlife areas and the national forests. They don’t operate
in national parks. If they had put the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge lands
in the national park, which we proposed, they would not be talking this nonsense
about drilling in it today. But they went and added it to the existing national
wildlife refuge there.
People have asked me why I did it that way.
Well, I did it that way because I thought that was the logical way to do it, to
give the Congress an opportunity to decide individually what they wanted done,
because there had been a lot of controversy when the Kennedy administration came
in between the House committee and the Kennedy administration over the exercise
of the presidential and secretarial authority to establish areas without
consultation of the Congress, national monuments and historic sites.29 Finally
[Congressman] Wayne Aspinall forced the administration to agree to insert in all
of those orders that no money would be provided to them until legislation
authorizing them had been approved. Well, I didn’t want that kind of fiasco in
Alaska. So I still think I was right in just simply reserving it, preserving the
Congress’s opportunity to do what they wanted to. In doing that I ran the risk
of that administration reducing the park system, which is what the Nixon crowd
wanted to do all along.
Where were some other pockets
of support in Congress? Do any of the other senators or representatives stand
out in your mind?
Oh my goodness, yes. We had them. I can’t
recall all of them. It would be an injustice for me to start naming them,
because I will omit somebody, because, you know, I’m eighty-five years old, and
I told you my caveat is that recollection is a damn poor witness to truth.
Well then, let me ask you this.
We talked in our previous session about the phenomenal expansion of the National
Park System during your tenure. You’ve just described Alaska, which was a huge
addition, but what about national recreation areas? Those marked another
expansion of the system. What were the challenges that you faced in
accommodating and managing that expansion?
Well, of course, my theory, and I think my
analysis of the record pretty much does support me until the Vietnam War caught
up with it. When Vietnam caught up with it, as you recall, I closed the parks
two days a week, because they were not properly funded by the administration and
the Congress. But until that episode, the appropriations and the personnel grew
in relationship to the additions to the system. I always argued that the
additions finance themselves and in many ways enhanced the base, because they
brought into our orbit a new group of congressmen and senators from the urban
areas of America where we were not previously represented. That was an important
part of the expansion, to make the park system relevant to an evolving urban
society, because I still contend that wilderness will never be preserved by the
people who manage it. Wilderness will be preserved by the people who elect
representatives to the Congress.
It occurred to me that in
managing this expansion, at least for a period, you benefited from having the
appropriations keep pace. But there’s a connection, too, I would suspect, to
your management policies. By having those new management policies in place the
Park Service was better able to handle this expansion.
Absolutely. And we made provision for it in our
management policies. That’s why we categorized the areas of the system into
recreation, natural, and historical, so that we could accommodate a variety of
uses. In other words, I agree with those management policies the way they’d been
written. I see nothing objectionable as applied to Lake Mead [National
Recreation Area]. But it’s only when back in 1978 in the Carter administration
they tried to take Lake Mead and make it Yellowstone [National Park]. I was very
concerned about that and expressed my concern then, that some administration at
some point in time would take the whole thing and turn it upside down and make
Yellowstone [a recreation area like] Lake Mead.
Organizational Change
Let’s look more at
administration in terms of the organization of the National Park Service. As I
understand, you did institute a number of reorganizations.
Well, they’ve got a movie on that. You ought to
get the movie. Harpers Ferry [Center] made it, for the party they gave me when I
got fired. It was titled “Reorganization.” And it shows me walking down the hall
and every door I entered was a reorganization.
You created some new offices,
like the Office of Urban Affairs, a law enforcement office in the headquarters.
If you want to talk specifics, that’s fine, but I’m also interested in just what
your guiding principle was in reorganizing. How were you framing that? What in
general were you hoping to accomplish by reorganizing various elements of the
Park Service headquarters specifically?
Well, I was trying to respond to what I
perceived to be the need of the organization to respond to an urban society, and
the requirements of that urban society. At the same time I was trying to
maintain or recover the vibrancy and the youth of the National Park Service in
its innovative years following its establishment and in the 1930s. And I allude
to that in that paper [reference to Hartzog’s memo, “Supplemental Remarks”] I
gave you. Those were the two most innovative periods in the history of the Park
Service, after its establishment in 1917 and then in 1930s when Franklin
Roosevelt reorganized government and made government responsive to the Great
Depression and the needs of the population. I was trying to recapture that
vitality.
I was trying to respond to what I perceived to
be a new challenge, at the same time to recapture the vitality that no longer
seemed to be there. And I don’t know that the philosophy of it was more profound
than that.
That’s just what you’ve been
describing though. That really was your overarching [philosophy].
That’s right.
You spoke a little in our
previous interview about what you perceived as the appropriate role for
superintendents and giving superintendents more authority. What about the role
of regional offices? Would you describe how you viewed the role of regional
offices?
Yes. The regional office was my management
center for the concentration of parks with instructions that it was to monitor
what was going on in the big parks, but it was to provide supplemental service
and assistance to the small areas that didn’t have the same level of
professional expertise as Yellowstone did. As a matter of fact, when I found
that the regions were not uniformly doing that,… I even organized state offices
so that we limited the authority of the regional director in supervising the
superintendents. I put them under a state director with the idea of giving them
the additional professional support they needed. So the regional office
performed an essential function in my concept of organization. Its role was to
encourage and to promote and assist the small area that didn’t have the same
level of professional support.
We spent some time talking
about cultural resources and historic sites, but we didn’t get to natural
resources. Before we talk a little bit about that, I’d be interested in hearing
you talk about how you balanced your attention to cultural resource issues with
attention to natural resource issues.
I don’t think I divided it. I thought I had two
of the most competent people in our organization to head each of these areas.
[For natural resources] I was fortunate to get our first chief scientist,
Starker Leopold, who was the son of the famous Aldo Leopold, and [for cultural
resources] Ernest Connally, who was a professor of the history of architecture
at the University of Illinois, [to head the new Office of Archeology and
Historic Preservation]. I felt those were pretty capable people to advise me in
those two areas, so I tried not to be the onsite manager, except for personnel
and budget and legislation. Then I wanted to know what was happening. If I knew
what was happening in operations evaluation then I was comfortable with letting
other people do the work.
What was the impact of Starker
Leopold’s report?30
Oh, it was fabulous. It changed the whole
attitude about natural history management in the Park Service.…When I came to
the Park Service as director, we had a $12,000 budget for research. One of the
recommendations of the Leopold committee was we had to revitalize the research
program of the National Park Service. So I went to see the chairman of our
[House Committee on] Appropriations Subcommittee [on Interior, Environment, and
Related Agencies], Mike [Rep. Michael J.] Kirwan, who was a very powerful member
of the legislature, and about whom I write significantly in my book. Mike was a
great friend of parks. He was a great personal friend of my predecessor, Connie
Wirth. With Wirth’s ideas and his power he implemented Mission 66 after World
War II.
I said to him, “Mr. Chairman, I got this
report. The secretary has approved it and directed me to do something about
research.” And he sat and looked at me very intently as I’m looking at you and
he said, “Research.” Put his hand on his chin and he said, “Research.” He said,
“George, that’s what NIH [National Institutes of Health] does. What the hell are
you doing it for?” And that was my response from the Congress on research.
Faced with that I came back and I said, “You
know, we’re never going to get that money. We’ve got to change the concept.” And
we did. We changed it to resource studies. I went back to see him and I said,
“You know, we’re not going to do research, but we’ve got these fantastic
resources and we’ve got to study to see what’s going on out there.” “All right,”
he said, so he funded resource studies.
The Congress went even further with me. While
we were going in this period of expansion and innovation, they agreed that I
could withhold from the appropriation an administrative reserve to solve
immediate problems that came up. And I did. I withheld 5 percent of my
appropriation, which I controlled. That’s how I moved change in the National
Park System. When I wanted something changed and called a superintendent and
said, “I’d like it changed,” the first thing he did was look at it and say, “I
don’t have any money.” My response was, “If you would like to implement this
change, tell me how much you think it will cost you and I will give you the
money, and I will put it in your budget next year.” And then I got change done.
I got a lot of work done through that reserve. That money funded the innovative
programs for serving people, Summer in the Parks, Parks for All Seasons, Living
History [program], all of those things that went to make our parks responsive to
an urban environment came out of that reserve.
In an earlier interview, you
talked about Congress’s tendency to support existing programs. They were much
more hesitant to support innovations. Was that [administrative reserve] a way of
accommodating that fact?
Absolutely. That was. I mean the innovation of
my getting Summer in the Parks started with Mrs. [Julia Butler] Hansen.31 I took
her to lunch for the sole purpose of getting her to agree to landscape the block
behind the Civil Service building, which was brand new, in accordance with Mrs.
Johnson’s beautification program. So after lunch I had the [park] police officer
drive us by there and I said to her, “Madame Chairman, this is what Mrs. Johnson
would like to have landscaped this spring, and I need so many hundred thousands
for it.” She looked at me and she said, “George, I’ve given Lady Bird all of the
money I’m going to give her this year, so you can forget it.”
At which point I said to the park policeman,
“Take me to Lincoln Park.” That’s that little park east of the National Capitol
with the statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in it. And fortunately for me it was a
nice, warm day, and little children were all over the street playing basketball.
The park was disheveled, unkempt, a first-class mess. He slowed down, in some
cases had to stop for them to retrieve their ball as he drove us around the
park. As he got around on the other side, I said to her, “Madame Chairman, what
would you think about doing something about this?” She said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Getting those youngsters off the street and in that park.” She said,
“If you’ve got a program to do that I’ll finance it.” I said, “I’ve got one.
It’s called Summer in the Parks.” She said, “How much?” I said, “$275,000.” She
said, “I’ll add it.” With that she gave me $275,000 to start Summer in the
Parks, and that
summer we put 300,000 of those children in the parks. For less than $1.00 a
piece we got them off the street instead of feeding them to the drug and crime
mills of the District of Columbia.
You mentioned the Living
History program, and I wondered if you wanted to talk some more about your
initiatives in that area.
Well, they did some very innovative things. I
mean they made lye soap at the Lincoln Boyhood Home [National Memorial] in
Indiana. Imagine that, lye soap. I don’t know whether you were ever exposed to
lye soap. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the Low Country and lye soap was
our only soap until they came along with octagon soap, which was the first
[alternative to lye soap] one. You wash in that stuff for a while, you shrivel
up. It eats you alive. But we made lye soap at Lincoln Boyhood, and they cut it
in slices and they couldn’t keep it in stock. People were buying it for 25¢ a
slice. I often wondered what those lovely ladies did with that lye soap when
they got home with it. If they started to wash their hands in it, and then
looked at them …
It would take their skin off.
That’s right. And then we had a superintendent
at Richmond [National] Battlefield [Park], who baked hardtack, which was a bread
that the Confederates ate when they were under siege in Richmond. It would take
a horse to chew it. We couldn’t keep it in stock. People bought so much
hardtack. They did all kinds of things.
So those programs were well
received.
Fabulous success. Fabulous. We had the [Navajo]
Indians weaving their rugs in Hubbell Trading Post [National Historic Site],
sitting in the building.
Why do you think it’s important
for the Park Service to educate the American public about their natural and
cultural heritage?
Oh, I think the only instrument in our society
whose whole purpose is to restore a sense of community in our society is in the
national parks, because it’s in the national parks that we can discover the
answer to the great question—Who am I? It’s in the cultural parks that we can
respond to—What have I done? What have my ancestors done? Where did I come from?
Who am I?
Who am I? That question harasses and follows
every one of us every day of our lives. Who am I? What am I doing here? What am
I to do? Why? Why? Why? And until I have some feeling for the answer to that
question, I have no relationship with you. And the National Park System is a
place for the reestablishment of a sense of community in our society and that’s
why I think those programs are important. That’s why I think the system is
important.
What you’re describing, that
parks help us define who we are as the American people, has that become even
more important as American society has become more diverse?
I think so. Absolutely.
We’ve just been talking a
little bit about the Park Service’s dual mandate, to preserve these cultural and
natural resources, but also to provide for their use. I would very much like to
hear your thoughts on that dual mandate and also the question of whether those
two things are inherently contradictory. Can you do both, effectively preserve
and provide adequately for public use?
Well, I think that you can, but it requires
some new thinking about what “use” really should mean. I was mentioning just a
few minutes ago in our conversation the idea that I’m not sure that the proper
use of Old Faithful is to build an Old Faithful Inn. I don’t see the efficacy of
somebody spending the night at Old Faithful in order to use Old Faithful. That’s
what I’m talking about, the extent of the use. I think that sometimes we have
erred in putting permanent facilities and long-term temporary facilities that
are incompatible with the preservation of the natural environment in the wrong
place.
That’s what’s got the public confused about
the contradiction. I don’t see anything wrong with tour buses taking people to
observe Old Faithful, Old Faithful as an observation point, to be inspired and
to stand in awe of the handiwork of nature. That you can do by standing on the
ground that’s exterior to the preservation of those hot-water pools and the
environment around them and the geyser itself. So, yes, I think they’re [the
elements of the dual mandate] compatible, but I think they’re greatly
constrained in the way the Park Service is interpreting “use.” I don’t think
Yellowstone should be a tourist mecca for the permanent overnight visitor. I
think those accommodations should be outside the park.
I think that were we to adopt a policy that
said we were even belatedly going to do that [keep accommodations outside the
park], we could have the same success that they’ve had at the Great Smokies.
When that park was established, Secretary Ickes said that if North Carolina and
Tennessee would develop adequate recreation facilities outside the park, he
would never allow government hotels and restaurants in the park. And to this day
there are no permanent hotels and restaurants there, except for the historic Le
Conte Lodge, which was there even before the park was established. It is a
facility you can reach only by hiking to it.
We’ve talked about various ways
in which your tenure marked a transition. Just a few minutes ago we talked about
the role of science and the change that appointing Starker Leopold, a chief
scientist, made. It seems to me that your administration was the first one in
which decisions about preservation could be informed by science.
Right.
The decisions about
preservation could, for the first time, be made on the basis of real scientific
knowledge about the resources.
That’s precisely the basis on which we sold the
program to the Congress in the resource management field, that you couldn’t make
those kinds of decisions without an adequate base of study of the value of the
resource. And that was inherent in the study of the North Cascade Report which
was chaired by Ed [Dr. Edward] Crafts, deputy chief of the Forest Service, who
was the director of the Bureau of Recreation. [The committee] consisted of two
representatives from Interior and two from Agriculture who started looking at
the North Cascades to decide whether there was a national park and recreation
areas there or not. We agreed that we were first going to identify the resource
and its value, and then we would decide who managed it and its use. That’s why
you have a park at the core of that recreation complex that is to be preserved.
It’s not to have hotels and highways in it. It’s to be preserved.
Do you have some additional
thoughts on the basic purpose of the National Park Service and the National Park
System? You talked a few minutes ago about how it brings us together as a
people. Is there anything more you want to add to that?
I encouraged Freeman Tilden in his last book
that he wrote for us, to answer that question: Who am I? The two books of which
I am very proud are Ronnie Lee’s book the Family [Tree]— it was the last book he
wrote that was about the evolution of the National Park System—and Freeman
Tilden’s Who am I?32 I feel that the National Park System’s mission in life is
to answer that question in our society, because we don’t get it answered in the
church. We don’t get it answered in our political system. We don’t get it
answered in any of the other organizations of which we are members, because
they’re divisive in nature. Even the churches divide up into little sects and
segments. As for our political system—if ever anybody wanted to know about its
partisanship, I think that it’s now at the worst stage I have ever witnessed in
my eighty-five years.
None of those things tend to build a sense of
community, which is so important to the freedom that we cherish as Americans,
except in the National Park System, where you can’t help, when you’re standing
alone in a redwood grove at Sequoia or Yosemite, that you know that you are a
part of that system. And that was the theme of our [first] world conference:
there’s one web of life and you’re a part of it. The web of life is in trouble
and you can do something about it. It’s the park system that knits that one web
of life together and puts man at the center of it. That’s what I think its
ultimate value is all about, not baking in the sun or running ski mobiles, or
Jet Skis, or anything like that.
During your administration what
did you see as the most serious threats to the National Park System?
I see the Park Service creating its own
greatest threat by withdrawing from its contacts with society, and especially an
urban society, because I think the salvation of the National Park System lies
not in its managers but in the voters who send the Congress to Washington. More
and more of those voters are in urban areas and they’re sending urban-oriented
congressmen. So unless you can take the National Park System and make it
relevant to men like Charlie [Charles B.] Rangel [a congressman representing a
New York City district], for example, you’re missing an opportunity for the
survival of the National Park System. If the urban population ever decides that
the national parks are not relevant to them, then we’re not going to have them,
because the Constitution says the Congress sets the public-land policy of
America. So it’s not whether the Park Service believes or the citizen
environmental organizations believe it’s a good thing; it’s whether the Congress
believes it’s a good thing. And that depends on what those individual members of
Congress are committed to when they stand for reelection every two and six
years.
In the past ten, twenty years
or so there have been a number of new parks that first of all reflect some
painful aspects of our history, such a Manzanar [National Historic Site] or the
Martin Luther King, Jr., [National Historic] Site, and also parks that reflect a
more diverse population. Do you see that as a positive trend? Do you see a need
for the Park Service to attract not only urban communities, but also is it
important for minorities to see their own stories reflected in them?
Absolutely it is. I mean our diversity is a
reality and to me it’s a source of pride. We’re the only nation on the face of
the Earth that is created like this nation. And it’s our diversity that lends a
pride to it, but it’s our oneness as a republic under the Constitution that adds
our freedom, which is also unique in world culture. So we are a unique nation
and the creation that we have in the National Park System is unique throughout
the world as well.
There were so many
accomplishments during your administration and we’ve only touched on a fraction
of them in our time together. Looking back at your administration what are the
things that you’re proudest of?
Well, the Park Service was my life. I’m just
proud of all of it.
Are there any accomplishments
that eluded you?
Oh, yes. I missed an area here and there, and
we all had our disappointments along the way. But I tell you, I don’t think that
I missed many balls during those nine innings. I usually got what I went after,
but I did miss a few. There’s no question about that. I got beat sometimes such
as that seashore in Oregon. I lost that to the Forest Service. Eleven Point
River in Missouri. But I didn’t lose many of them. 33
You never gave up the fight
either.
No, there wasn’t one that took the fight out of
me.
You wanted to share a few
thoughts about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.34
The primogenitor which was the Ozarks and what
happened there. The National Park Service had studied the Eleven Point, Current,
and Jacks Fork Rivers and their confluence in Missouri in the Ozarks for a
national monument. Some of the locals were violently opposed to a national
monument. So while I was superintendent at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
in St. Louis, Howard Baker was the regional director. He asked me if I would go
down there and talk with those people and see what could be done to move the
monument proposal forward, because it was not going anywhere. It had been
hanging out for a couple to three years and all he was getting was opposition to
it. The local congressman wouldn’t support it.
So I went down there and I first started
shaking hands with these guys and told them who I was, and where I was from, and
they weren’t all that happy about me or where I was from. Nevertheless they
liked me. I got to know them, and went out to their shacks on the river and
spent the night with them and fished. We talked about the heritage of which they
were very proud. They had a great deal of pride in it. They wanted the river
saved, but they didn’t want a national monument that was going to prohibit a lot
of things they were doing, such as turkey hunting and that kind of stuff.
In those conversations we came up with the
idea, well, why not a national river? We had never had one, but everybody wants
to save the rivers. Why not come up with the title National River? So we changed
it to National Scenic Riverways. We got almost unanimous support for it, except
again stumbling over hunting. And we finally worked out an arrangement with them
whereby in areas designated by the secretary, they could hunt. They agreed it
was infeasible to hunt in developed public-use areas; somebody would get killed.
The result was we had probably one of the largest local delegations to come to
Washington from any area during the nine years I served as director in support
of the Ozarks. Of course, we had great [congressional] hearings.
Stewart Udall had come to look at it before we
ever moved it up to the legislative state in 1961, right after he became
secretary of the interior. And we got a new [Missouri] congressman, Dick
[Richard] Ichord, who was trying to find his way as to whether he was going to
support this legislation with the changed concept or not. Stewart Udall was very
much impressed with it. He writes graciously in the book about his meeting with
me on the Ozarks and I appreciated that. It was out of that contact, I think,
that I was probably able later to become director of the Park Service. But
that’s another issue. The river made such an impression on him, he admitted
later, that it stayed in his mind as a prototype for a whole system of national
rivers. Later that evolved in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System
legislation.
Do you have any similar
recollections for the National Trails [System] Act? 35
Well, not that precise. Of course, the
inspiration for that was the Appalachian Trail, which is a large park, the
creation of that famous man in Maine [Benton McKaye]. I reckon that is where it
started, with his persistence over the years in taking it all of the way to
Georgia. That was the inspiration that goes to the National Trails legislation.
 |
| Left to right: Bill Bailey, Missouri State Park
Director Joseph Jeager, Jr., Congressman Richard H. Ichord, Secretary Stewart L.
Udall, and George B. Hartzog, Jr., in the Ozarks in southeast Missouri, 1961.
(National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.) |
They certainly all reflect the
variety of the new types of units coming into the system.
Well, see that was the whole thing about the
Kennedy-Johnson administration, the excitement and the tendency to innovate.
What can we do to preserve our heritage? The heritage preservation became a
great issue and it reflected itself in the plethora of legislation for the
National Park System, the Wilderness Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund
Act, the trail system [National Trails System Act], the Wild and Scenic Rivers,
all of those things were a package in effect growing out of the concept of the
Great Society which was people oriented. All of this legislation was aimed at
serving people, in one fashion or another. The way you serve them is you save
something. You preserve something for future generations, which they can’t do
for themselves.
That’s the oldest definition of government
that I know of that was given by Abraham Lincoln who said, “The function of
government is to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves,”
and preservation of natural and cultural resources is one of the things they
can’t do for themselves. They might do it on an episodic basis like at Mount
Vernon,36 but nationwide it can only be done by the government.
Do you think there’s such a
thing as a National Park Service culture? If so, has it changed over time? You
seemed to describe a [distinct] culture that existed at the time you came into
office.
Well, I believe that there was a National Park
Service culture, and I think that culture had at its [core] the expression “for
the good of the Service.” That was a frequently used phrase during the time I
was there. The sacrifices it would ask of you were “for the good of the
Service.” But I was disappointed to read Bill Everhart’s most recent book about
the Park Service in which he says that that is now largely gone. [He writes]
that if you tell some employee that some move that may not be convenient or
desirable from his standpoint that at the time is for the good of the Service,
you’re liable to receive a derisive answer. Well, if that’s true I think that’s
a great loss to the organization, because I think vibrant, talented, creative
organizations do have a culture. They need it in order to grow. I mean it’s just
part of the characterization of an alive, dynamic organization.
It certainly seems like it
would be important for an agency’s effectiveness.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean you know that’s
what binds them [the staff] together. You can write all of the policies in the
world, but unless they feel a part of something larger than themselves, and
that’s a culture, you’re not getting through to them.
As director did you see
reinforcing that culture as part of your job?
Absolutely. Every year I spent thirteen
weekends traveling, away from my family, to meet with every superintendent and
his spouse or her spouse, and every regional director of the system for two and
a half days. Friday evening, Saturday, and adjourn at noon on Sunday, to answer
any question they had, talk about anything they wanted to talk about, no agenda,
no minutes, no records, just to see and be seen, and explain, explain, explain.
Why? We were creating a culture of change and innovation and hopefully
inspiration. A oneness is what I was hoping for, and I think we probably did it.
But I don’t know what’s happened since. Well, does it make sense to you?
Yes. It does. It makes a lot of
sense.
I thought it did.
Advisory Board on
National Parks
We covered a lot of ground in
these sessions, but there are a few areas that I’m hoping we can talk about a
little bit more. One thing we have not discussed is the advisory board. It would
be helpful for me to get a sense of what role the secretary’s Advisory Board on
National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments played during your
tenure.
Well, I felt very good about the role the
advisory board played at the time that I was there, because we made a
substantive change in the way we managed the affairs of the advisory board. If
we had already made up our mind on an issue, we didn’t send it to the advisory
board. We started using them only for substantive material about which we had
not yet made any conclusions, so that we asked for their professional judgments
on what the issues should be and what the results should be. The result was that
after two or three years the [congressional] committees were sufficiently
impressed by the major change in the emphasis of the work of the advisory board
that they started always in the hearings asking for the report by the advisory
board on the subject matter.
We took them on their field trips and we
challenged them in new areas of work that were under consideration. For example,
the year that Mel [Dr. Melville B.] Grosvenor became chairman of the advisory
board. He was also the CEO of the National Geographic Society. We took the
advisory board to Alaska to review almost all of the proposals that we were
making up there for the expansion of the system and saving that great natural
and cultural area. Out of that trip came subcommittees appointed. I remember the
one on the land bridge between Russia and America. The historians, I think, have
pretty well settled with the archeologists today that there was originally a
connection between the continents. [Dr.] Emil Haury was the chairman of the
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Ned
[Dr. Edward B.] Danson, [Jr.,] who is the director of the Northern Arizona
Museum at Flagstaff, one of the greatest museums in the country, Bob [Dr. Robert
L.] Stearns, the president of the University of Colorado, and Justice Byron
White’s father-in-law.… that continued to be the composition of the board until
the Nixon administration came in. They came in and they started politicizing it.
W.E.– Excuse me, George, but wasn’t Alfred
Knopf on the board?
G.H.– Oh, yes, very much so.
W.E.– Yes.
G.H.– The other thing that we did to utilize
people like Alfred Knopf, we created a council to the advisory board so that
when these very distinguished people—and Alfred Knopf was one of them; Frank
[E.] Masland, [Jr.,] was another one of them, and the great old guy, who was the
president of the University of California, Dr. Robert G. Sproul—but when they
went off, when their term of six years expired, we didn’t want to lose them, so
we created a council which in effect gave them like an emeritus appointment and
they continued to work with the board. They had no vote after their term was
over. But they could participate in making a contribution to the learned
discussion of the committees and of the board, and many of them did participate.
We paid their travel, but they served without compensation. They didn’t get any
fee or anything. It was a contribution. But we did pay for their travel.
That was your initiative
because you started to feel like you were losing some expertise?
We did that when I was director, to capture
that talent which otherwise would be lost. After six years of experience, you
see, they’d been through the ropes. They knew it and they knew the history of
the Service. I’m glad you mentioned that.
W.E.– Also, wasn’t it customary that all
proposals for new parks were passed on to the advisory board?
G.H.– Oh, yes, absolutely.
W.E.–To advise the secretary of what they
thought, which was great.
Well, after you left, the
advisory board became a Park Service board instead of functioning at the
secretarial level. Is there anything you want to add about the board’s role and
how it might have changed?
W.E.– It was a board that was listened to and
the secretary would put things before them, like any proposed new park, and the
Congress, I mean, Alfred Knopf, yes, they listened to him. The fact that he
would take this job, he was a very busy man, I mean, if it was only to be a
figurehead he wouldn’t have taken it. For us it was great; he got a real
interest in the parks. He started to visit them and speak very highly of them.
So it was not politicized at all. The board was part of the 1935 Historic Sites
Act.
Did the passage of the National
Historic Preservation Act in 1966 make the board’s role any more important?
I don’t think it made it any more important,
because, you see, the 1966 act created the President’s Advisory Council on
Historic Preservation, so most of the authority that was given in the 1966 act
went to the president’s council. It became a very important part of the cultural
programs.
The Park Service had responsibility for
maintaining the National Register, which was an advisory board function. The
review of the [national] landmark decisions went to the secretary’s Advisory
Board on National Parks. And they had to clear them and then they went on the
[National] Register.
National Historic
Preservation Act
You have the vantage point of
not only steering the [National Historic Preservation Act] legislation through,
but being director long enough to see the implementation.
That was the crux of it. I was there long
enough, fortunately, to give it structure so that I left it exactly as I wanted.
Now, I don’t know what’s happened to it since. What I do know firsthand is that
President Carter sent it all over to the BOR [Bureau of Outdoor Recreation] and
reconstituted that. The bureau messed up a lot of peoples’ lives and a lot of
programs.
When you had a chance to see
the implementation of the [National Historic Preservation Act], was there
anything that surprised you? It’s one thing to draft legislation, to believe in
that legislation, to steer it through. But sometimes there are effects from that
legislation that simply can’t be anticipated. Did you experience anything like
that? Do you think the full impact on the Park Service was clear to you?
I don’t think we fully understood the
importance of money and matching grants when we started doing it. We had the
example of BOR and the Land and Water Conservation Fund,37 but this was a
brand-new program. There’d never been anything like it, matching private funds.
What we did with the Historic Preservation program of 1966 is that we reached
out to use that money for matching private money, which gave it a whole new
dimension that I don’t think and I don’t think anybody else in the Park Service
had any comprehension of what it meant when you started reaching out and
touching private people with matching money. I mean, you just open up a whole
Pandora’s [box] of power.
I didn’t look on it as an impediment. I looked
on it as an opportunity, because you’ve got powerful people involved in it.
You’ve got a lot of rich dowagers who had property that they were directing to
the National Trust, because that’s where you could get the public money to match
their private money. So I think that’s the most significant part of what I
didn’t understand. I don’t think there was much question that I relied on the
help of Ronnie Lee, Herb Kahler, and Bill Everhart. I reckon we had a guy named
John Corbett who was an archeologist. There were five or six of you guys?
W.E.– Don’t ask for names.
G.H.– I had the talent right there. We had
already put the talent together before we got the authority. So we had the
talent and we had the experience, all of which fed into dealing with as to how
we were going to organize it and everything else, because it did substantially
change the structure of the Park Service, wouldn’t you say, the Office of
Archeology and Historic Preservation?
W.E.– The emphasis.
I’d like to hear more about
that from either of you. It sounds like you viewed the legislation as
opportunity rather than being concerned with the restrictions that it placed on
the Park Service.
I always looked on legislation …
… as opportunity?
Yes. The neatest trick in town is legislation,
something very worthwhile.… and it’s worth the effort.
Well, what about your take on
the implementation of the legislation [National Historic Preservation Act], Mr.
Everhart?
Yes, I’d rather you ask Bill. I’m telling you
what I thought, but he can tell you how it was done. He saw it.
W.E.– Well, of course, history [the inclusion
of historic sites] came to the Park Service late. The original emphasis was on
natural history, and everything was there until the changeover under [President
Franklin D.] Roosevelt,38 so that most people who worked in the natural areas
thought that they were much more important than the historical areas. Of course,
the new historical areas tended to be small and peoples’ interest in them
[different]; peoples’ response to the Grand Canyon was one thing and to a Civil
War battlefield another. So that it really took a lot of doing for the Park
Service to begin to believe that historical parks were on the same level as the
natural parks.
And some would argue that still
happens.
W.E.– With good cause, because still “the great
western parks,” that used to always be the description, they were thought to be
our greatest. So I think this was one of the steps along the way to give history
some recognition and support inside the Park Service itself, as well as outside
the Park Service. And when you’re a park superintendent in the historical parks,
you look at it one way. If you’re a superintendent of a great western park, you
look at it another way.
So the implementation you were
talking about sort of changed the balance [between natural and cultural parks]?
W.E.– Well, it moved it. It changed it, but it
took a lot of time for the Park Service, inside the Park Service as well as
outside, to get the impetus. Now it’s almost going the other way. All kinds of
parks are now coming along and people are pushing the protection of particularly
Civil War areas in this area and so forth.
G.H.– Well, you see, at that time, too, we
hadn’t yet finished [with natural resources] because the Leopold Report had
really reoriented the natural history areas, and in addition to which Starker
Leopold had agreed to come aboard as our chief scientist. So the Historic
Preservation Act of 1966 gave us an opportunity, as Bill says, to elevate
history to the equal status of natural history. I think that was the first
opportunity that the Park Service had had to do that since Horace [Albright] got
the historic parks from the army in 1933. Don’t you think, [Bill]?
W.E.– He [Albright] gave it a nudge.
G.H.– And that brought about a reorganization
of the cultural resource program into a very powerful unit.
W.E.– I think that while Utley39 was here—you
know, Bob Utley left the Park Service, and one of the reasons he left was he
still didn’t think that the people in the Park Service were giving history the
emphasis that it needed.
G.H.– Well, when they got it [the historic
preservation functions] back from BOR, I don’t think they did. I don’t think it
[historic preservation] has it [emphasis] today. Do you? I don’t think they ever
recovered from that [transfer to BOR].
Would you tell me what you’re
referring to specifically?
I think the emphasis [was] on rangers and the
George Wright Society40 and the natural history. I don’t think the cultural
resource program ever caught up after that setback they got from going to the
BOR. I don’t think they had any director who was interested in correcting that
imbalance, because, I mean, all they did with those talented people they got
back from BOR was disperse them. A lot of rich talent was just totally
mis-assigned. Some parks that had no assistant superintendent got an assistant
superintendent. He didn’t know a damn thing about parks. He was a planner. Maybe
he’d been working on the national recreation plan. And parks that had one
assistant superintendent got two more. Olympic [National Park], for example,
wound up with three assistant superintendents. What they needed were rangers.
How much support for historic
preservation was there at the department level with Secretaries Hickel and
Morton and then Assistant Secretaries Stan Cain and Nat Reed?
Well, with Morton there was quite a bit,
because Morton is a very historic line in America. [The Morton family] goes back
on the business side; the ancestry goes back to the Revolutionary War. And they
were very prominent industrialists. The symbol which Pillsbury uses today, of a
woman sticking her finger in the Pillsbury Doughboy’s navel, that was Rogers
Morton’s creation when he owned Ballard Flour Company which was sold to
Pillsbury. Rogers went on to be a member of the Congress and from there he was
secretary of the interior. He was a very well rounded, educated man, who was
sensitive to historical preservation. So I would say that with Morton it was a
substantive concern. Hickel, I don’t think Hickel had any significant
appreciation for historic preservation. It wasn’t in his cultural background. He
was a builder.
What about the assistant
secretaries?
With Stan Cain, I would say that his interest
was primarily in the natural area. He graduated and got his Ph.D. out of the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He wrote his dissertation on the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park. So next to the naturalist whom we had there, he
knew the Smokies better than most NPS employees. He was just a perfectly
wonderful guy. Nat Reed, I’m not sure Nat had any philosophy outside of his
concern for Florida ecology. He very much was interested in that and played a
significant role in the preservation of that ecology there. Bill, did you do
find any emphasis in your experience with him in historic preservation?
W.E.– Not really.
In May 1966 Hartzog appointed a Special
Committee on Historic Preservation to recommend ways the Service could reassert
itself in the historic preservation movement. He named three distinguished
professionals: senior National Park Service historian Ronald Lee; J. O. Brew,
director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, to represent the field of
archeology; and Ernest Connally, professor of the history of architecture from
the University of Illinois to represent the field of historic architecture.
The Lee-Brew-Connally committee interviewed
senior administrators, historians, architects, and archeologists of the Park
Service to get their opinions on how the Service could improve its reputation in
the area of historic preservation. In June 1966 Lee wrote a draft report. The
report recommended that Hartzog create an Office of Archeology and Historic
Preservation to supervise the Service’s preservation activities. Lee also
recommended that the office be headed by a well-respected historical architect.
The office should include a division devoted to historic architecture and the
existing divisions of archeology and history. Hartzog accepted Lee’s
recommendations in September 1966 shortly before the National Historic
Preservation Act was approved.41
Apparently there was a
committee made up of Ronnie Lee, J. O. Brew, and Ernest Connally. What was the
role of that committee in [historic preservation]? Do you recall?
Yes, that committee was our advisory committee
which then went on after we got the legislation. I constituted them as a search
committee, to search for the head [of the Office of Archeology and Historic
Preservation]. It was embarrassing for them, because after they had done all of
that searching, they concluded that Ernest Connally was the best qualified guy
for the job and he was a member of the search committee. So they had to kick him
off of the search committee.
Would you both tell me a bit
about the concept and the creation of the Office of Archeology and Historic
Preservation? How that came about?
Well, that came out of the committee that [was
made up of] J. O. Brew and Ronnie Lee, and there was Ernest Connally. It came
out of that group that those matters should be put together, together with the
matching grants that we were going to administer. We should reconstitute the
National Register to make it a more authentic official document than it had been
under the 1935 Historic Sites Act. I don’t remember, but I think we still left
the National [Historic] Landmarks program there as an integral part of it. I
don’t think we moved them out, maybe we did, I don’t know. I don’t have any
recollection of that, do you?
W.E.– No, I don’t.
G.H.– You’d have to check that, whether we did
or not. I just think we kept the landmarks. But they suggested it had to be a
different organization structure to implement the powerful provisions that were
in that 1966 act.
Were you pleased with that
solution?
Oh, I was very pleased with the way it turned
out, yes. Weren’t you, Bill?
W.E.– Now what do you want me to say?
G.H.– Whatever you think.
W.E.– Well, when you talk about the Office of
History and Archeology, you’re getting to the Ernest Connally times. And Ernest
Connally came in, I think, with the thought that he was going to be up with
everybody else. But he still had to fight for his programs. And it came to the
fact that the Park Service was forced to look at its own [historic] structures
and to see whether they were of importance. Well, the park superintendents were
appalled. And George has a story about Udall who had some buildings he wanted
protected and the superintendent just … tore them down. The idea, for instance,
that along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon there are concessionaire buildings
that are now regarded as part of the fabric of this country, because they meet
the fifty-year [criteria for significance] and so forth [—that idea produced
conflict].
Well, when Bob Utley started to go out to get
the superintendents to save buildings of that nature, the superintendents said,
“Who the heck are you? Those backcountry buildings and ranger structures and so
forth are our buildings. And if I want to tear them down, I’m going to tear them
down.” Ted Swem and I were up in Alaska. And there was a battle going on in
there as one of the structures in, what do they call it now in Alaska?
G.H.– Denali.
W.E.– Denali, right. Well, a guy had gone up
there and was one of the earliest people to bring back word of what a place it
was. So his cabin was still there, and Ted and I were boating on the river that
ran through. The remains of that original cabin were off to the side. And Ted
said to the superintendent, “Goddamn it. And now you let it fall down, but
you’re going to save it.” He said, “Well, why would you want to save it? I took
a picture of it for gosh sake. It’s just an old cabin. It’s ours.” The point is
it doesn’t [matter if they are] “our” buildings we are talking about if they’re
fifty years old or whatever and so forth.
So it took a long time. In fact, I guess it had
to take a new generation to come along to really elevate the Park Service
concern for history within the parks, and the same way with outside. If they
[the old park structures] meet the standards, we’ve got to protect them. But the
superintendents and Bob Utley got into the issue of backcountry cabins where
superintendents really started to fight, because Bob said, “These cabins meet
the criteria.” And the superintendent said, “Don’t tell me what to do with my
cabins.”
So you are talking about not
only an educational process, but changing a mind-set.
W.E.– It’s a matter of all of those people had
to pass on and we needed a new set, I think. And Bob’s irritation with [the old
attitude], I think, was why he left the Park Service for another job. It seemed
at the time unbelievable that Bob would leave.
Law Enforcement
Shifting to another
topic—something we didn’t get to before, is the subject of crime in the parks.
We talked about the new recreation areas and urban parks that came into the
system during your tenure. With that came the Park Service’s need to
increasingly deal with urban-type crime. Even in some of large scenic parks,
because of the large number of people who are visiting, there were more episodes
of crime. I would like to get a sense of how you grappled with this. You were
able to translate those problems into increased funding for law enforcement and
changes in the Park Police.
When I was out there [at Yosemite National
Park] on a trip incognito, I asked one young man, “Why are you here?” He just
spontaneously said, “Because they ran us out of Haight Asbury.” People in San
Francisco got on the police, and every time they [hippies] popped out the door
with one of the cigarettes in their mouths, they went to jail. So they just
looked around and debated where they could go and have the same good time, and
they decided they would go to Yosemite Valley. That’s where they went. That was
the most obvious manifestation of the urban scene moving into the parks.
But we had it all over town. We had it here in
the District [of Columbia], all kinds of obscene activities in Lafayette Park
right across from the White House. The Park Police did a marvelous job in
handling those instances and keeping them out of the press. But where they
[incidents] usually broke out was when they [lawbreakers] went to the rural
parks with the urban problems, like in the Great Smokies and along the Blue
Ridge Parkway and its connection to Cherokee, [North Carolina], in the
[Cherokee] Indian community over there. Prior to that, the biggest problem you
had there was poaching black bear. The Indians were going up on Highway 441 in
the park and shooting the bears.
In fact, we had one lady come into the office
while I was there as assistant superintendent. She was just in panic. She could
hardly talk. She was short of breath. She was just petrified, because here she
was feeding the bear and the Indian walked up and shot the bear right out of her
hand, threw it in the back of the trunk and away they go down the mountain to
Cherokee. Well, it just absolutely floored her that anything like that could
happen.
But, you see, my view of the urban crime, we
were trying to handle it on an ad hoc basis. We didn’t try a general approach to
it until after the episode in Yosemite.42 And that’s when I decided that instead
of trying to use a ranger force which had been trained to protect people and to
manage resources and not to deal with crime that we were going to use the U.S.
Park Police. So I detailed the Park Police to a number of areas, only two of
which they still remain, and that’s Golden Gate in California and the Statue of
Liberty and Ellis Island in New York, maybe at Gateway [National Recreation
Area] in New York, too. I had them in a number of different parks, because I
felt that it’s a special skill which we put the police through…
National Park
Foundation
One other topic that we haven’t
gotten to is the creation of the National Park Foundation in 1967. Could you
tell me a little about your role in that?
Sure can. There was an existing board called
the National Park Trust Fund Board which consisted of the secretary of the
treasury, the attorney general, and the secretary of the interior to solicit
donations for the National Park Service. It never really amounted to very much
for two reasons. One was that the secretary of the treasury managed it and any
donation received immediately had to be converted to cash and invested in
government bonds. Well, people had the first inclination of not wanting to give
to the government after they had just paid their taxes. Secondly, they could see
the asset losing value as it was converted to government bonds, so it [the
National Trust Fund Board’s effort] was not going anywhere.
Connie Wirth hired a young man named Donald
Thurber, who was a very wonderful bright guy, and I believe he was from Detroit,
if I’m not mistaken, as a financial consultant, to have a look at this and
decide what to do. He came up with the idea that the trust fund board ought to
be abolished and in lieu of it we ought to establish a regular foundation that
would be managed by private trustees, and that would be the National Park
Foundation. We didn’t have any such thing as that.
T hat legislation was pending as a proposal,
not as an introduced piece of legislation, but simply as a proposal in the
Interior Department when I became director. It finally came to my attention, and
I thought it was a brilliant idea. I talked with the committees and the
committees agreed, so we introduced it and we passed it, and we were the first
ones who had one of these National Park Foundations and it was the genesis, the
groundbreaker, for seven more that followed for the Fish and Wildlife and Forest
Service. All of the land-management agencies, the Bureau of Land Management,
wound up getting these foundations to support their programs. So that’s the
background on how we got the National Park Foundation.
Conclusion
Let’s end with this question
for each of you: I’d like to know what each of you sees as the most serious
threats to the national parks and to the National Park Service both during your
administration and also today. What were the greatest threats then and now?
Well, I think “relevancy” is the word that
occurs to me most frequently, because unless the National Park System remains
relevant to the changes in our society it’s not going to last. [Consider] the
history of the Veterans Bureau that was established after World War I and their
last great act, the riot that they had when General [Douglas] MacArthur ran them
all out of town and that whole bureau was replaced, and it now is the Veterans
Administration.43 So that’s what happens when bureaus become irrelevant. So
remaining relevant…
That’s why Bill Everhart and I, (and I keep
referring to him, because that’s really the way it was; he and Ted Swem44 are
the two who are still alive who were a part of that inner group that managed the
National Park System) we felt that the Park Service had to be relevant to an
urban environment. We had to get urban people involved in the program. It was
not enough to have the Sierra Clubbers hiking the trails and using the private
campgrounds inside Yosemite. We had to get the little children playing in
Lincoln Park, into the park and off the street, if we were going to survive as
an institution and as a resource in America. So that was an emphasis of our
program, to make it relevant.
I still think that’s an issue, because, you
see, we have representation based on population and as our population becomes
more urban, the Congress becomes more urban. And if you’re not relevant to
Charlie Rangel, then Charlie Rangel is not going to be relevant to you. He’s
just not going to be voting for you or for what doesn’t affect his constituents.
So you’ve got to make sure that you’re relevant. That’s why we came up with
Parks for All Seasons. That’s why we bused the children from Bedford Stuyvesant
to Fire Island [National Seashore], so that they had a park experience. That’s
why, as I mentioned earlier, we came up with Summer in the Parks through the
generosity of Mrs. Hansen adding $275,000 to our budget to start it. That’s
where we came up with Living History programs, and Parks for All Seasons, and
Summer in the Parks, and other programs to make parks relevant.
That’s why we came up with National Educational
Landmarks, which the Park Service abandoned. After I left they had no interest
in it and abandoned the program, which in retrospect is ridiculous … when today
everybody is saying that the great thing is environmental education. We were the
first ones in the field. We even had a landmarks program to go with it.… I don’t
know. That is what I think: “relevancy” is the word that most aptly describes it
from my standpoint.
I can certainly see that if the Service isn’t
relevant it doesn’t get the funding it needs. Funding its needs is a function of
relevance. If those members of that committee believe that it’s important to
their constituents, they fund it. Why else do you think farmers are floating in
money? As they farm less and less they get more money, because the powerhouses
on the Appropriations Committee all are from the farm and that’s their
constituents and these lawmakers are going to make sure they’re financed.
Do the two of you feel that
you left behind a different Park Service than the one you joined?
W.E.– Wait a minute. You’re saying from the
time we joined until the time we left or from the time we joined until now?
From the beginning to the
end of the Hartzog administration. It sounds like there were changes in so many
ways, and over the last few sessions we’ve talked about those changes. I’m
wondering if when you left the Park Service, Mr. Hartzog, and you, Mr. Everhart,
looking back (I know you left later, Mr. Everhart), but looking back on that
span of years, those nine years, whether you felt like the Park Service was a
different agency than before.
W.E.– It’s like when some of the noted people
in the Park Service retire and somebody says, “Will we ever have another one
like that?” And somebody else says, “Well, we always have.” But I think things
are different. I could say I think one of the problems is—and it’s a problem which was inevitable—the Park Service has
become a bureaucracy. It had to, because when George and I were there, as I
recall, it was in the vicinity of 7,000 employees. It’s now double that and
more. And the areas [the Service has] taken on [are more diverse]—imagine having
a performing arts center, but I guess that was still in George’s time. Take the
Women’s Rights National [Historical Park]. Those are things that even George
Hartzog would have said, “Women’s rights?”
 |
| Left to right: Newton B. Drury, Horace M.
Albright, George B. Hartzog, Jr., Conrad L. Wirth. Director Hartzog gathers with
three former directors at the dedication of the Stephen T. Mather Home in
Connecticut, a Registered National Historic Landmark, July 17, 1964. Jack E.
Boucher, photographer. (National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection,
Harpers Ferry Center.) |
So the whole difference in that, and so forth,
is such that this is something that nobody can put their fingers on, but I think
it has gone from a small, wonderful, compact, highly motivated [organization to
a bureaucracy]. All of those [good points] are still present in a different way,
but it’s a bureaucracy. So I would say that is what has changed, the
organization itself. I don’t know how you prove it.
Not necessarily a product of
anything that your tenure …
W.E.– No. Just the times.
G.H.– I think it’s a product of all of those
handbooks. Anytime you have staff reading a handbook to determine what to do
instead of thinking with their head, that they spend seven, eight, or ten years
going to college to learn how to do, they basically vegetate into a
bureaucracy.…
I thought we wound up with a much more creative
organization than we started with. I say it was because I abolished fifty-six
volumes of handbooks, and I had those three little policy manuals, and that was
it. If you didn’t find it there, you were supposed to have a solution in your
head, not that somebody was going to write it up from Washington. I said to
them, “Hell, if I’ve got to write down everything you’re supposed to do, I might
as well stop the education level at the sixth grade because by the sixth grade
you ought to be proficient in reading and the English language. So I don’t need
Ph.D.’s.”
You provide the architecture
of the structure, the overarching guidance, and let people think through the
rest.
But the hell of it is, you see, they don’t want
mistakes. If you’re going to run that kind of organization, you’re going to have
mistakes, so you have to have a high tolerance level for mistakes.
We have covered many topics,
and this seems like a good place to end. I just wanted to thank you. It’s been a
real pleasure to spend time chatting with you.
My pleasure. Such a joy meeting you.
End
Notes
1 George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the
National Parks (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1988). For an interesting
portrait of Hartzog, see also John McPhee, “Profiles,” The New Yorker 47
(September 11, 1971): 45-88.
2 Hartzog, Battling for the National Parks, 14.
3 The headquarters of the National Park Service
was relocated from Washington, D.C., to the sprawling Merchandise Mart building
in Chicago from 1942 to 1947 to free up scarce office space during World War II.
4 Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was the renowned
architect who had won the international competition to design the Gateway Arch.
5 George B. Hartzog, Jr., “Supplemental
Remarks,” memo to interviewer, September 21, 2005.
6 Secretary Lane issued a policy memo on
management of the National Park Service on March 13, 1918, and Secretary Work
issued his policy memo on NPS management on March 11, 1925.
7 Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”
8 The pledge was printed on one side and
“goals” printed on the reverse side of wallet-size plastic cards distributed to
every employee.
9 Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”
10 Special blue envelopes were routinely used
for confidential correspondence.
11 Charles Eames (1907-1978) was a
distinguished American designer, architect, and filmmaker, as well as Saarinen’s
partner and friend.
12 The Park Service had had two female
superintendents. The Adams family recommended Wilhelmina Harris to administer
Adams National Historic Site. Previously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had
appointed Gertrude Cooper as superintendent at Vanderbilt Mansion. Not until
1971 were women appointed from within Service ranks to become park
superintendents.
13 Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts,
authorized in 1966, marked the beginning of National Park Service involvement in
cultural parks.
14 James M. Ridenour, director of the Service
during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, argued that the
addition of sites of less than national significance was “thinning the blood” of
the National Park System.
15 An Act for the Preservation of American
Antiquities, 34 Stat. 225 (June 8, 1906); Historic Sites Act, 49 Stat. 666
(August 21, 1935).
16 Historian Ronald F. Lee came from the
University of Minnesota to Shiloh National Military Park with the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC) program in 1933. He served from 1938 to 1951 as chief
historian for the National Park Service and later as regional director in
Philadelphia. He was instrumental in the creation of the National Trust for
Historic Preservation. In 1959 he proposed a program of designating nationally
significant properties outside the parks as national historic landmarks.
Historian Herbert E. Kahler also came from the University of Minnesota to
Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park through the CCC program. As
chief historian from 1951 to 1964, he oversaw implementation of the national
historic landmarks program.
17 The secretary sent a memo to President
Roosevelt designating Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on December 20,
1935. The president issued an executive order the next day.
18 James A. Glass, The Beginnings of a New
National Historic Preservation Program, 1957 to 1969 (Nashville, TN) American
Association for State and Local History, 1990), 10.
19 According to historian James A. Glass,
Laurance G. Henderson and Carl Feiss approached the Ford Foundation.
20 The administrator of the General Services
Administration agreed to participate. The panel also included politically
influential individuals: Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, Representative
Widnall, Governor Phillip Hoff of Vermont, former St. Louis mayor Raymond R.
Tucker, and Gordon Gray.
21 Glass, The Beginnings of a New National
Historic Preservation Program, 10.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Early in his administration, Stephen T.
Mather, the founder and first director of the National Park Service, was
incapacitated for a prolonged period due to illness, leaving management of the
new agency to his assistant director, Horace M. Albright.
24 On April 9, 1933, Horace Albright and others
accompanied President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a visit to Shenandoah National
Park. During the ride back to Washington, Albright mentioned his desire to
acquire historical areas that were currently under the administration of the War
Department. Roosevelt agreed and directed Albright to prepare an executive order
for the transfer.
25 Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”
26 President Nixon replaced Hartzog with Ronald
H. Walker, a former White House assistant. Hartzog was apparently forced out
after the Service revoked a special use permit allowing President Nixon’s
friend, Bebe Rebozo, to dock his houseboat at Biscayne National Monument [now
Biscayne National Park], Florida. See Battling for the National Parks, 247-248.
27 The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 85
Stat. 688 (December 18, 1971), directed the secretary of the interior to
withdraw from selection by the state or Native groups, or from disposition under
public-land laws, up to eighty million acres of public land that he deemed
suitable for national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, or
wild and scenic river systems.
28 Rep. John P. Saylor (R-PA) served on the
House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Jackson (D-WA) was the
powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.
Senator Bible (D-NV) chaired the Parks and Recreation Subcommittee of the Senate
Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and was the chairman of the
Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies. For an account of
Senator Bible’s influential role regarding National Park legislation and his
dealings with Director Hartzog, see Gary E. Elliott, Senator Alan Bible and the
Politics of the New West (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1994).
29 Unable to secure sufficient congressional
support, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his authority under the Antiquities
Act of 1906 to create the C & O Canal National Historic Monument in 1961.
Throughout the 1960s, Rep. Aspinall, chairman of the House Committee on Interior
and Insular Affairs, refused to fund the development of the park to send a
message that such actions must first be sanctioned by Congress. President
Kennedy declared only two national monuments: Russell Cave (Alabama) and Buck
Island Reef (Virgin Islands).
30 A. Starker Leopold chaired an advisory board
on wildlife management appointed by Secretary Udall. In 1963 the board produced
a report “Wildlife Management in the National Parks” (known as the Leopold
Report) that defined a basic management philosophy for national parks and
transformed policy priorities related to wildlife.
31 Rep. Julia B. Hansen (D-WA) chaired the
House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies.
32 Ronald F. Lee, Family Tree of the National
Park Service (Philadelphia, PA: Eastern National Park and Monument Association,
1972); Freeman Tilden, Who Am I?: Reflections on the Meaning of Parks on the
Occasion of the Nation’s Bicentennial (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service,
1975).
33 In the 1950s, the Service had proposed to
preserve portions of three rivers in Missouri (Eleven Point, Jacks Fork, and
Current) as a national monument. This proposal faced strong opposition from the
USDA Forest Service, which already managed much of the land along Eleven Point
River, and from locals who did not want to lose the ability to hunt and fish in
the area. Although the Jacks Fork and Current rivers later became part of Ozark
National Scenic Riverways, Hartzog was not able to incorporate Eleven Point
River.
The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area,
administered by the USDA Forest Service, was established in March 1972.
34 The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 82 Stat. 906
(October 2, 1968), identified eight rivers and adjacent land in nine states as
the initial components of a national wild and scenic river system, which was to
be administered variously by the secretaries of agriculture and the interior.
The act names twenty-seven other rivers or river segments to be studied as
potential additions to the system.
35 The National Trails System Act, 92 Stat. 919
(October 2, 1968), provided for national recreational trails accessible to urban
areas to be designated by the secretary of the interior or the secretary of
agriculture according to specific criteria, and for national scenic trails,
generally longer and more remote, to be established by Congress.
36 The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association,
originally chartered in 1856, purchased George Washington’s Virginia estate with
the goal of restoring and preserving it as a historic shrine.
37 As amended in 1968, the Land and Water
Conservation Fund Act, 78 Stat. 897 (September 3, 1964), set aside revenues from
visitor fees, surplus property sales, motorboat fuel taxes, and offshore oil and
gas leasing for the acquisition of federal and state parkland. The fund was
administered by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a new Interior Department
bureau that had been established in 1962. This bureau took away the Park
Service’s responsibilities for recreation planning and assistance along with
some of its staff and funds. The new bureau, which took over responsibility for
the National Register of Historic Places, the natural and historic landmarks
programs, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, did not function smoothly.
In 1978, the Carter administration reconstructed the BOR as the Heritage
Conservation and Recreation Service and reassigned some of these functions to
the Park Service. In 1981 Secretary James Watt abolished the Heritage
Conservation and Recreation Service and returned these functions to the Park
Service.
38 In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed two executive orders transferring a number of parks and monuments from
the the War Department and Forest Service to the National Park Service, as well
as the National Capital Parks in Washington, D.C., then managed by a separate
office. With the addition of forty-four historical areas, the Service’s
involvement in and responsibility for historic sites increased dramatically.
39 Robert M. Utley served as chief historian
for the Park Service from 1964 to 1972. He then became director of the Office of
Archeology and Historic Preservation and assistant director for park
preservation. Utley played a key role in implementing the National Historic
Preservation Act of 1966 and advancing preservation policies. In 1977 he left
the Service to become deputy director of the Advisory Council on Historic
Preservation.
40 The George Wright Society is a nonprofit
association of administrators, educators, and other professionals who promote
excellence in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection,
and interpretation of parks, historic sites, cultural landscapes, and other
protected areas.
41 Glass, The Beginnings of a New National
Historic Preservation Program, 29.
42 During the summer of 1970, young people from
the San Francisco area poured into Yosemite National Park. Their unruly behavior
disrupted other visitors and alarmed park rangers. During the July 4th weekend,
several hundred hippies gathered in Stoneman Meadow, a grassy area at the center
of Yosemite Village. When rangers tried to disperse the crowd, violence erupted,
resulting in dozens of injuries and arrests. The incident highlighted the need
for a professional law enforcement program for park rangers.
43 The Veterans Bureau was established in 1921
and consolidated into the newly created Veterans Administration in 1930. In May
1932, thousands of veterans of the World War American Expeditionary Force
descended on Washington, D.C., calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force,
to lobby Congress for an early cash payment of a war service bonus due them in
1945. A number of the veterans camped out around the capital and refused to
leave. In July, President Herbert Hoover ordered the secretary of the army to
evacuate them. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur led infantry troops with
swords drawn and pursued the Bonus Forces into their main encampment on the
other side of the Anacostia River, where a fire erupted. Americans were outraged
at the spectacle of the army attacking unarmed citizens with tanks and
firebrands, and the episode became a symbol of President Herbert Hoover’s
indifference to the plight of the unemployed.
44 Theodor R. Swem passed away in 2006.