Organizational Change

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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.

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