Chapter 7:
Boss Pinkley's Domain (continued)
Throughout the 1920s, the Park Service budget
provided for the development of the national parks and largely ignored
the national monuments. During the first half of the decade, money was
scarce in the agency, and the agency used its funding to minimalize the
impact of visitors. But the additional resources of the agency did not
help the monuments, and the budget for the entire monument category
compared unfavorably to that of even the lesser national parks. For the
fourteen areas Pinkley administered during the travel season ending 30
September 1924, he received less than $15,000. That year, he calculated
the cost per visitor in thirteen national parks and came up with an
average of 68.4 cents. In contrast, the agency spent a nickel per
visitor in a comparable group of thirty-one national monuments, and only
9.2 cents for each visitor to his southwestern national monument
group.
The disparity persisted throughout the decade. By
1927 Pinkley took charge of four additional monuments, and the eighteen
southwestern national monuments drew nearly 270,000 visitors. Yet the
budget allocated less than $15,000 for the southwestern national
monuments group. Pinkley did not even have the money to pick up the
garbage visitors left. The other fourteen Park Service national
monuments drew an additional 163,197 visitors, for which the agency
allocated roughly $6,200. In comparison, Mesa Verde National Park
received $72,300 for its 11,915 visitors that year, Yellowstone had a
$398,000 appropriation for its 200,825 visitors, and Park Service
officials at the Grand Canyon spent $132,000 on 162,356 visitors. Platt
National Park, an unimportant pork-barrel park in Oklahoma, received
$12,400, more than half the amount allotted to the entire monument
category. Wind Cave, another inconsequential park, also received
$10,275. That year, only Sully's Hill, a small wildlife park in North
Dakota that Mather wanted to abolish since he entered the Park Service,
was left out of the budget. [14] Even
national parks that the agency regarded as insignificant received more
money and attention than the national monument category.
In 1927 the budget of the entire monument category
roughly equalled that of Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska. For the
$18,700 spent there, the Park Service entertained 651 visitors. With
less money, Pinkley was supposed to handle 270,000 visitors at eighteen
southwestern parks. Without the network that Pinkley developed and
minus his continuous encouragement, custodians of the fourteen national
monuments not in the southwestern national monuments group served an
additional 163,000 visitors on meager funding. In sum, the care and
maintenance of a total of thirty-two diverse park areas had to be
carried out on this minuscule budget. The superintendent of any national
park would have complained at what the agency allotted Pinkley for all
of the southwestern national monuments.
But throughout the 1920s, funding for the Park
Service was always precarious. Although the prosperity of the 1920s
dramatically increased the popularity of the park system and Mather
built powerful alliances throughout Congress, when the Park Service drew
up requests for money, Congress often overlooked the monuments. By 1927
Mather had spent more than a decade building a constituency to support
the national parks, and he consistently asked a great deal more money
for the parks than he did for the monuments. In his view, the monuments
were complements, worthy of substantial expenditures only if they helped
develop national parks. Because he constantly pressured Congress for
national park programs, Mather had to be prepared to come up short in
other areas, especially national monument funding.
The demands at some of the national parks were also
different from those at the monuments. Some parks required extensive
management of natural resources. Mount McKinley contained 2,645 square
miles of wild land that miners and trappers often threatened. Part of
its appropriation went for protection of the area. Hunters became a
problem at Yosemite and Yellowstone, and the battle against poaching
cost the Park Service money. Funding at these parks covered more than
visitor services, whereas Pinkley's custodians generally had
responsibility for areas small enough to protect with their presence.
Managing natural resources became an agency priority because meadows,
mountains, glaciers, and geysers were the attractions that brought
visitors to the national parks. When protection for these resources
required extra money or additional employees, the Park Service under
Mather did all it could to convince Congress to allocate more funds.
Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the categories
was too great. Pinkley wanted a budget that gave him a fighting chance,
and in 1927 he settled upon an average of twenty-five cents per visitor
as the bare minimum for adequate protection and care of the monuments.
By the end of the 1920s, his staff clamored for salaries, an additional
drain on his limited resources. Pinkley also had stabilization and
preservation responsibilities for archaeological and historic sites,
which could be as expensive as managing natural areas. His job included
offsetting the impact of more than 100,000 pairs of hands and feet upon
his monuments. But Pinkley's seemingly reasonable request amounted to
nearly three times the annual sum allocated for the southwestern
monuments and five times the total amount that the monuments had
received the previous year. After making his pleas, he received little
more than before.
In a way, Pinkley was penalized for his success. The
work he did on his own time helped minimize the impact of visitation,
and no one could match his personal dedication. As a consequence of
Mather's drive to build public support for the agency, visitation became
the basis for most Park Service funding. Pinkley understood those rules,
and while he was in charge, he brought flocks of people to the
monuments. The number of visitors at the southwestern monuments in
creased exponentially, and by agency standards, his record justified
greater support. But Pinkley's monuments were not national parks, and
increased visitation only guaranteed greater support in the national
parks. The Park Service always had other holes to plug in the system,
and even though Pinkley drew as many visitors as most national parks, he
never received any more than a skeletal budget.
The need for money frustrated Pinkley, and throughout
the 1920s, he challenged the priorities of the agency. In 1924 Pinkley
exploded when Cammerer contended that the decision not to place
full-time paid custodians at Montezuma Castle and Chaco Canyon was "a
question of policy. . . . I never knew this was a matter of policy at
all," Pinkley roared. "I always thought it was purely a lack of money
which prevented us putting full-time men at all the national monuments
which are open to vandalism or where a man in charge would be valuable
for the distribution of information. No other policy could be backed by
logic." [15] From Pinkley's perspective,
such a contention revealed duplicitous conduct on Cammerer's part. It
appeared to Pinkley that agency policy encouraged vandalism and neglect
in the southwestern monuments.
If visitation was the standard that determined
funding for park areas, Pinkley wanted to know why his monuments did not
get more money. By his calculations, in 1924 the national parks averaged
one dollar per visitor in allocations. Pinkley knew he would never get
that much, but his monuments attracted more visitors each year.
Significant visitation figures notwithstanding, funding for the
monuments remained nonexistent. In 1924 more visitors went to Montezuma
Castle, with its annual appropriation of less than $600, than to Zion,
Sully's Hill, or Mesa Verde national parks, the last of which received
$43,000 in appropriations. Pinkley wanted to know why visitation at
Montezuma Castle did not merit at least $2,500, the annual cost of a
full-time custodian.
To appease Pinkley, Cammerer explained that he had
the "general situation of all the monuments in view" when he made his
comments, and he tried to show that the agency did not completely
neglect Pinkley and his monuments. When a caretaker "who will be willing
to give his whole soul to the work" could be found, Cammerer told
Pinkley, "there is no question but what an expenditure for a comfortable
salary and comfortable living quarters is justified." Cammerer played to
the biases of the superintendent. He suggested that E. Z. Vogt at El
Morro deserved a salary, and that Tumacacori would also soon justify a
paid custodian, but insinuated that places like Devils Tower, Capulin
Mountain, and Verendrye needed little more than nominal care. [16]
Pinkley could tolerate such a compromise. A champion
of the archaeological and historical monuments, he paid markedly less
attention to natural areas. Cammerer was telling him that the places to
which he had devoted half a lifetime were soon to receive adequate
protection. Of the areas Cammerer named, only Capulin Mountain belonged
to the southwestern monument group. Far from the main highways, it
attracted few visitors, and Pinkley did not promote it heavily. The
other natural monument in his care, the Petrified Forest, already had a
full-time custodian. In order to pacify the superintendent, Cammerer
agreed to Pinkley's vision of the monuments.
Despite his diligent service and effort, Pinkley felt
like an outsider in the NPS. His concerns were at odds with many in the
agency. He often reminded Cammerer that there were "phase[s] of monument
administration which . . . park men ought to consider and there is no
chance to bring up when we are in conference because park problems only
have the right of way there." [17] While he
struggled to administer the monuments, superintendents of national parks
spent five times his annual allotment on road-building projects. Pinkley
understood that the parks were and would remain the focus of the agency.
His enthusiasm could help counteract the lack of funds, but he could do
little about agency policy regarding the integrity of the national
monuments.
Always a "strict constructionist," Pinkley fought to
keep the areas that fit the terms of the Antiquities Act in the monument
category. In his view, places of "pre-historic, historic or scientific .
. . interest" belonged among the monuments. [18] This proved a difficult stance to maintain
in a system that saw the monuments as bargaining chips and routinely
reassigned the best of that class to national park status.
Pinkley's frustration with the status quo predated
his appointment as superintendent of the southwestern national monuments
and never lessened. There was always a proposal afoot to convert one or
another of the important national monuments into a national park, and
Congress and the Washington, D.C., office of the NPS irked him with
their tendency to ignore the needs of the monuments when concerned with
"park issues." When Dr. Willis T. Lee of the U.S. Geological Survey made
his inspection of Carlsbad Cave and other southwestern national
monuments in September 1924, E. Z. Vogt told Pinkley that Lee
recommended that a state or local historical society take charge of El
Morro. "What I think is better expressed with the shift key up among the
exclamation points and asterisks," Pinkley exploded. "I have been stung
by these monument robbers till I am sore. And every last time, if you
make them come clean, it reduces itself to a matter of money. If we
could get $50,000 to support El Morro as a Monument, would anyone be
claiming it was not of monument status but ought to be turned over to
some society or some individual for administration. . . . It is always a
matter of turning a Monument into a Park or into something else, so as
to increase its appropriation." There were distinct differences in law
between what constituted a monument and a park, Pinkley bellowed, "and
there ought to be a definite line between them, so that when a
monument is once created its biased firends [sic] can not dress
it up a little and bob its hair and run it over into the Park crowd
simply because there is more feed in the Park trough." [19]
Pinkley thought that Mather's and Albright's tactics
turned the monument designation into a liability. "Congress is never
going to get enthusiastic over a lot of picked-over monuments," he
stormed, "and unless we stop this talk of transferring the Carlsbad
Cavern and the Petrified Forest and the Casa Grande Ruin and the Chaco
Canyon, we are never going to get adequate appropriations for the
National Monuments. When Congress realizes that the Monuments are a
class quite to themselves and are not little Parks but are just as
important as the Parks, we will begin getting enough money to handle
them properly." [20]
Pinkley wanted a clear definition of national
monuments and national parks to which both he and the agency would
adhere. He told Albright that the agency needed to decide what
constituted a national monument, and "when a newly proposed reservation
falls under that definition, let us make a monument of it and ever after
keep it in the monument class." He thought that the NPS caused some of
the confusion "by making monuments of Zion and Grand Canyon when they
didn't belong in that class and we never expected to keep them there."
[21] In his view, inappropriate
proclamations gave ammunition to those who wanted to make national parks
out of important national monuments.
Pinkley challenged agency attempts to broaden the
definition of the national park category. Originally, Mather included
only the most spectacular scenic areas among the flagship parks. NPS
policy had to be revised for the agency to become an important federal
entity. By the late 1920s, national park boundaries included most of
what Mather and Albright desired in the West, but the survival of the
agency dictated a policy of expansion, which in turn required a broader
definition of the park category. There were very few places like
Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Mount Rainier. Areas that were more than
scenic mountaintops had to be included, and the monument category was
the storehouse for the most appropriate places. The way-station
precedents already existed, and the agency planned future conversions of
monuments. But in Pinkley's hands, the move to preserve historic and
prehistoric sites was on a collision course with the broadened
definition of the national parks. As the agency began to regard
one-of-a-kind natural wonders as national park material, Pinkley fought
for his monuments. His position was grounded in statute, and he
challenged the supremacy of the national parks in the park system.
Mather's and Albright's ideas and policies coincided
more with Dr. Willis T. Lee's sentiments than they did with Pinkley's
strict constructionism, and the possibility that Pinkley might damage
the development of the park system became a threat that the agency had
to address. Having created the priorities that initiated the conflict,
Mather could not capitulate to Pinkley's vision of the system. Mather
and Albright wanted the national parks to compete with the culture of
Europe for the American tourist dollar. This required the inclusion of
areas that were already designated as, and the might technically be,
national monuments. No matter how the Antiquities Act was written,
under Mather's and Albright's guiding hands, the best national monuments
would be made into national parks and the remainder would continue to
languish. The national monuments were simply not a priority in an agency
with an orientation toward the national parks.
According to Mather's conception, the national parks
inspired awe in those who came to visit. In contrast, most of the
monuments lacked the commercial appeal and the postcard scenery of the
majority of the national parks. But if the park category was to be
superlative, if it was going to have a cultural significance equal to
its scenery, places like the Carlsbad Cave National Monument in
southeastern New Mexico were essential additions. Although its
topography differed from the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, its caves were
awe-inspiring. Carlsbad drew more visitors than most of the national
parks, and its popularity affirmed that Americans were interested in
seeing places that highlighted the interaction between this
extraordinary continent and the powerful individuals who had the will to
tame it. Because it filled a need within the park system, agency
officials broadened the ideology of the park category to make room for
Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
The status of Carlsbad Cave as the most extraordinary
feature of its kind set the stage for its transfer. It had the ability
to inspire the kind of awe that Mather wanted. A commercial campaign by
citizens of the nearby town of Carlsbad led to dramatic increases in
travel. The limestone formations there also required protection,
forcing the NPS to give it the kind of administration normally reserved
for national parks.
The process of converting Carlsbad Cave moved slowly.
Like many comparable national monuments, it lacked amenities. In
1923-24, the first year after its establishment, Carlsbad drew only
1,280 visitors, largely because the only way into the cave "was to be
lowered 200 feet in a metal bucket attached to a pulley, through the
natural opening at the mouth of the cave." [22] The roads in southeastern New Mexico were
poor, and rail service only reached to El Paso, about one hundred miles
distant. The NPS seemed content with the status of Carlsbad Cave
National Monument, and the impetus for change came from other
quarters.
The large limestone caverns appealed to the
scientific community, which took responsibility for popularizing the
site. Dr. Willis T. Lee explored the caves late in 1923. Lee compiled
his findings in an article for the January 1924 issue of National
Geographic. He persuaded the National Geographic Society to finance
an expedition to explore the caves at Carlsbad further. In September
1925 National Geographic again carried an article about Carlsbad,
and Lee began lobbying to convert it into a national park.
The Carlsbad chamber of commerce responded
enthusiastically to the establishment and popularization of the
monument. In 1924 and 1925 it paid $1,600 to finance the construction of
a winding stairway through the natural opening, eliminating the
necessity of the bucket and cable descent. Work on a road with an easier
grade to replace the existing twenty-eight percent grade also began that
year. People who read National Geographic put Carlsbad on their
itineraries, and the improvements made it easier to reach the monument
and to enter the cavern. In 1925-26, 10,904 people visited Carlsbad
Cave, an almost one thousand percent increase from the previous year. By
1928-29, 76,822 visited the monument, 1,680 of whom came on 1 September
1929, the largest one-day attendance to that point at Carlsbad Cave. [23]
As the result of its popularity, the problems of
Carlsbad Cave were very different from those of the rest of the national
monuments. First and foremost, Carlsbad Cave became self-sustaining; at
two dollars per adult for mandatory guided tours, 76,822
visitorsexcluding children, who were admitted freeprovided
more revenue than any of the rest of the monuments generated in a
decade. Despite the fact that the revenue went directly to the United
States Treasury, the NPS had justification for spending money on this
monument, and by 1928 it started spending $100,000 per year there.
Carlsbad could bring in money, it had excellent support from the local
community, and it was the focus of national interest. Carlsbad Cave
resembled the national parks more than the mostly unimproved national
monuments.
There were also concessions, which separated Carlsbad
from the other monuments. By the 1928-29 season, the Cavern Supply
Company, already established as a concessionaire in the monument, built
a stone, pueblo-style building, from which it sold lunches and
souvenirs. This was the first permanent concession structure at a
national monument. In the same year, the company began to serve lunches
inside the cave, 750 feet below the surface. These facilities increased
the resemblance between Carlsbad Cave and the national parks, a fact
Superintendent Thomas Boles emphasized in his report for 1928-29. Boles
thought that the self-supporting status of the monument suggested that
future appropriations "should be in keeping with the public demand for
comfort and convenience." [24] Clearly, by
the end of the 1920s, the status of Carlsbad Cave merited
reexamination.
Carlsbad Cave increasingly seemed to fit the largely
unwritten criteria that determined what constituted a national park.
Visitation increased to 90,104 visitors in the 1929-30 season, and the
situation at Carlsbad Cave resembled that at the original Grand Canyon
National Monument a decade before. Many Americans knew of it through
National Geographic, and a promotional campaign further extolled
its virtues.
Yet the initial monument proclamation made Carlsbad
Cave a small area, confined to the land under which the magnificent
caverns existed. The limestone formations at Carlsbad, its revenue, and
advanced promotion and access gave it good qualifications for park
status, but the Mather-Albright definition of a national park required
more. Like the earlier monuments transferred to park status, Carlsbad
Cave had to be differentiated from its peers. As a result, the proposals
to convert Carlsbad Cave to a national park throughout the 1920s
included extending the boundaries of the new park across the Texas
border, into what is now the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. These
attempts failed because the land between the caverns and the mountain
was nondescript desert, not worthy of the national park
designation.
By 1930 the situation was resolved. The bill that
converted the monument to Carlsbad Caverns National Park authorized the
president to add to its size by selecting suitable lands from the 193
square miles surrounding the known caverns. The size of the park was to
be enlarged as new caverns were discovered, thus preventing private
exploitation and allowing the new park to be distinguished from other
national monuments by its increased size. In 1933 Herbert Hoover
utilized this provision, and six years later Franklin D. Roosevelt added
another 39,444 acres to the park, an area fifty-five times as large as
the original monument. As in the case of the Zion National Monument, the
new Carlsbad Caverns National Park grew to approximate the dimensions of
the other national parks more closely than those of the majority of the
national monuments. [25]
Pinkley did not protest the transfer of the Grand
Canyon and Zion in 1919, but the reassignment of Carlsbad a decade later
was another story. Pinkley had a great deal of time and effort invested
in the monument system. Losing the one-of-a-kind park areas that
dominated the national monument category reinforced the view that the
monuments were inferior to the national parks and insinuated that the
most important national monuments would become national parks as soon as
congressional authorization occurred. The transfer of an area like
Carlsbad Cave threatened Pinkley's world. He believed that the monuments
were on the verge of being stripped of all vestiges of the identity he
had been working to establish.
Agency policy trapped Pinkley and his monuments and
forced him into controversy with the proponents of the mainstream views
within the NPS. From its inception, the agency had directed its
programs towards the improvement of the national parks. Between 1925 and
1930, the NPS spent $10,000,000 on road building within the national
parks. [26] Most parks required this sort of
physical improvement to make them suitable for tourism, and it was here
that the Mather administration concentrated its efforts. As Pinkley
correctly saw, the national monuments did not require highwaysthey
required explanation for visitors to comprehend their significance.
During the 1920s, "explanation" cost money that the agency was spending
on the national parks. Pinkley could achieve significant results in the
monuments with much less money than the agency spent on the parks, but
he alone saw this as a primary goal for the NPS.
Despite these setbacks, Pinkley continued his
energetic, innovative management, which began to attract attention as
conditions in the southwestern national monument group improved. He
continued to accommodate tourists, and in July 1927 the NPS promoted him
a civil service grade. Later that summer, when Dr. Alfred V. Kidder put
together the famous Pecos archaeological conference, Pinkley requested
an unpaid leave of absence to attend at his own expense. In a gesture of
appreciation of his work, the central office offered to pay both his
salary and expenses. Pinkley also became a popular speaker on monument
and archaeological topics. Despite protestations of unworthiness, he
accepted numerous engagements, the highlight of which was a lecture
series at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles in November 1927.
Ever the perfectionist, Pinkley wanted to accomplish
more. He began to establish a way to professionalize monument service,
arranging for his former assistant at Casa Grande, George Boundey, to
take over at the Aztec Ruins National Monument after the archaeologist
Earl Morris and the American Museum of Natural History ceased their work
at the monument. This move infuriated many of the locals in nearby
Farmington and Shiprock, who saw the position as a local perquisite, but
Pinkley stood his ground and began to develop other assistants for
future openings.
By promoting through the monument system, Pinkley
tried to make service in the monuments, with its all too infrequent
rewards, comparable to service in the parks. Mather made the Park
Service an organization that rewarded employees by moving them up a
performance-based career ladder. This created a hierarchy among
positions in the parks. By 1930 the superintendency of any of three
national parksYellowstone, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountainwas a
significant step on the way to a high-level administrative position in
Washington, D.C. Pinkley emulated that system to build the self-esteem
of his staff. He promoted custodians to the places he believed were most
desirable. Through his scheme of career promotions, Pinkley sought an
esprit de corps, stronger even than the camaraderie that he had already
created. He inspired loyalty to the monuments as well as to himself.
An incontrovertible fact emerged from Pinkley's first
decade as superintendent: no one could match his record when it came to
the protection, care, and promotion of national monuments. Almost
completely independent of the Washington, D.C., office of the NPS, he
developed a system of management and care with which the casual efforts
of the War Department and the Forest Service could not compete.
But despite Pinkley's efforts, the gap between
services in the national parks and the national monuments widened during
the 1920s. The parks were still the priority areas in the system and the
second-class status of the monuments continued. Parks and park projects
were generally well funded; Pinkley had to battle for every penny beyond
a skeletal minimum unless the monument in question was targeted for
eventual park status. Not surprisingly, his frustration showed on many
occasions. "Congress," he wrote in 1929, "has never given us a fair
chance with the monuments." [27] Pinkley's
determination kept the condition of the monuments from deteriorating
further, but even his effort could not prevent the public from regarding
the monuments as places of secondary importance. Substantial numbers of
visitors came to the monuments annually, but they often found
deteriorating sites and inadequate facilities. This helped to confirm
the generally held impression that the national monuments were of lesser
caliber than the national parks.
|