Vision

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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.

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