Conclusion
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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.
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