National Historic Preservation Act

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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.

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