Chapter 2
An Ideal in Search of Itself
The early preservationists and park advocates
assumed, without ever explaining, that personal engagement with nature
could build in the individual those qualities of character that the
existence of the parks symbolized for us collectively. Perhaps the point
was made most explicitly by the celebrated wilderness pioneer Aldo
Leopold in his essay, "Wildlife in American Culture. "No one can weigh
or measure culture," Leopold observed.
Suffice it to say that by common consent of thinking
people, there are cultural values in the sports, customs and experiences
that renew contacts with wild things. . . . For example, a boy scout has
tanned a coonskin cap, and goes Daniel-Booning in the willow thicket
below the tracks. He is reenacting American history. . . . Again, a
farmer boy arrives in the schoolroom reeking of muskrat; he has tended
his traps before breakfast. He is reenacting the romance of the fur
trade. [1]
Certainly it would seem eccentric to hold national
parks simply so that people could go muskrat trapping. Like Aldo
Leopold, John Muir and most other early park supporters had an idea in
their minds about the importance to people of encounters with nature,
but they seemed at a loss when it came to formulating their intuitions
into any coherent recreational plan. To a substantial extent the
presumption seems to have been that if only people would come into the
parks, as John Muir put it, they would find "everything here is marching
to music, and the harmonies are all so simple and young they are easily
apprehended by those who will keep still and listen and look . . ." [2]
But it wasn't simple at all, as Muir himself soon
realized. Many came and looked, but they didn't see what he had seen,
just as they listened without hearing what he had heard. National park
admirers have frequently ignored the fact that nature has commended
itself to people in very different ways at different times. The awesome
grandeur of the parks has at times been thought fearsome rather than
beautiful. It is perfectly possible to conceive of wilderness as
something to be conquered rather than worshipped; people can, and have,
shunned rather than climbed mountains. And it is quite as possible to
respond to parks as pleasant sites for picnics and hotel resorts as to
view them as fragile museums of nature or history.
Aside from scattered hints here and there, there is
little serious or sustained writing to which we might turn for guidance
in seeking to understand how those who conceived of parks as culturally
important recreational resources meant them to be used. There is,
however, at least one document that seeks explicitly to address itself
to this question, a report entitled "The Yosemite Valley and the
Mariposa Big Trees," written in 1865 by Frederick Law Olmsted. [3] Olmsted is not a name that leaps immediately
to mind when one thinks of the national parks. He was of course
America's premier landscape architect, and though he was a man of many
remarkable accomplishmentsincluding the authorship of a fine
series of books on the pre-Civil War South, leadership in the United
States Sanitary Commission which was the predecessor to the Red Cross,
and innovative work in the design of suburban communitieshe is
known to most Americans only as the designer of Central Park in New
York.
For a brief period, however, during 1864 and 1865,
Olmsted left New York to become the manager of the troubled Mariposa
mining properties in northern California. While there is no conclusive
evidence, it is highly likely that he was one of a small band of
Californians who urged the federal government to preserve Yosemite
Valley and the Mariposa grove of giant sequoias from settlement and
destruction. [4] Olmsted was appointed the
first chairman of the board of commissioners that California established
to manage the Yosemite Park; and during his brief chairmanship he wrote
a report that was intended as a basis for future management. In it he
also set out to explain why it was desirable to have a place like
Yosemite as a public park, and in those observations lie the report's
great interest.
Olmsted read his report to his fellow commissioners
in August, 1865, but it was not published, and it then simply
disappeared. It has been suggested that the report was suppressed by
those in the California Geological Survey who feared that Olmsted's plan
for Yosemite might create competition for legislative appropriations.
Whatever the case, it was not until nearly ninety years later, in 1952,
that diligent searching by Laura Wood Roper, Olmsted's biographer,
turned up a virtually complete copy in the still-extant Olmsted firm's
office in Brookline, Massachusetts. [5] Roper
published the report in the magazine Landscape Architecture,
where it remains largely unknown, though in it, as she justly remarks,
"Olmsted formulated a philosophic base for the creation of state and
national parks." [6]
The failure of Olmsted's report to command modern
attention is less surprising than might at first appear. [7] Unlike much popular nature writing, the
report lacks rapturous descriptions of self-discovery, and it is marred
by a certain archaic nineteenth-century style of expression. Olmsted
talks about the advance of civilization and speaks of "scientific
facts," among which he numbers mental disabilities like softening of the
brain and melancholy. [8] Some effort is
required to penetrate these passages, but it is well worth making.
Olmsted begins at the beginning. The park was
established for the preservation of its scenery. He does not, however,
treat this as a self-justifying observation. The question is why
government should take upon itself the burden of scenic preservation.
His answer at one level is largely descriptive. Striking scenery has a
capacity to stimulate powerful, searching responses in people. "Few
persons can see such scenery as that of the Yosemite," he notes, "and
not be impressed by it in some slight degree. All not alike, all not
perhaps consciously, . . . but there can be no doubt that all have this
susceptibility, though with some it is much more dull and confused than
with others." [9] He does not claim to be
making some universally true claim, good for all time, but certainly it
was a claim that was true enough for his own time, and for ours. As
Olmsted observed, Yosemite had become a popular subject for artists and
photographers, and their widely reproduced works had induced a great
interest in, and admiration for, the place. Moreover, in the Old World,
it had long been a tradition to reserve the choicest natural scenes in
the country for the use of the rich and powerful. Apparently people able
to do whatever they wanted found great satisfaction could be elicited
from engagement with striking scenery.
At this point, Olmsted offers his distinctive
hypothesisthe basis of his prescription for the national parks. In
most of our activities we are busy accomplishing things to satisfy the
demands and expectations of other people, and dealing with petty details
that are uninteresting in themselves and only engage our attention
because they are a means to some other goal we are trying to reach.
Olmsted does not suggest that gainful activity is a bad thing by any
means; only that it offers no opportunity for the mind to disengage from
getting tasks done, and to engage instead on thoughts removed from the
confinement of duty and achievement. He calls this the invocation of the
contemplative faculty.
For Olmsted the preservation of scenery is justified
precisely because it provides a stimulus to engage the contemplative
faculty. "In the interest which natural scenery inspires . . . the
attention is aroused and the mind occupied without purpose, without a
continuation of the common process of relating the present action,
thought or perception to some future end. There is little else that has
this quality so purely." [10]
Olmsted does not purport to explain why scenery has
this effect on us, though doubtless the modern attraction to the idea of
God-in-nature is a plausible explanation. He is content to observe that
there is something that moves us to appreciate natural beauty and to be
moved by it, and "intimately and mysteriously" to engage "the moral
perceptions and intuitions." [11] He
recognized that not everyone responds in this way, thus anticipating the
objection that nature parks established for their scenery would not
likely be as popular as amusement parks. But he attributed this to a
lack of cultivation. It is unquestionably true, but it is not
inevitable, he said, "that excessive devotion to sordid interests," to
the constant and degrading work upon which most people are engaged,
dulls the aesthetic and contemplative faculties. [12] It is precisely to give the ordinary
citizen an opportunity to exercise and educate the contemplative faculty
that establishment of nature parks as public places is "justified and
enforced as a political duty." [13]
No one, he thought, was more relentlessly tied to
unreflective activity than the ordinary working citizen. The worker
spends his life in almost constant labor, and he has done so
traditionally because the ruling classes of the Old World had nothing
but contempt for him. They thought "the large mass of all human
communities should spend their lives in almost constant labor and that
the power of enjoying beauty either of nature or art in any high degree,
require[d] a cultivation of certain faculties, which [are] impossible to
these humble toilers." [14] Olmsted rejects
this belief categorically. Behind his rather archaic vocabulary, and his
pseudoscientific proofs, lies a prescription for parks as an important
institution in a society unwilling to write off the ordinary citizen as
an automaton.
Olmsted, as a practical man, set out a number of
specific suggestions for the management of parks. He had an idea about
the "thing" that should be made available to the public as a park, just
as the curator has an idea of the collection to be presented in a
museum.
The first point, he said, is to keep in mind that the
park was reserved because of its scenery, and therefore the first
task
is the preservation and maintenance as exactly as is
possible of the natural scenery; the restriction, that is to say, within
the narrowest limits consistent with the necessary accommodation of
visitors, of all constructions markedly inharmonious with the scenery or
which would unnecessarily obscure, distort or detract from the dignity
of the scenery. [15]
To read this formula in isolation is to have the
impression that Olmsted was advocating a pure wilderness status for the
parks or that he was interested only in an aesthetic or visual
experience, but plainly this is not at all what he had in mind. His
principal goal in seeking preservation of the scenery was to assure that
there would be no distractions to impede an independent and personal
response to experience. Olmsted did not have an ideological opposition
to the presence of any particular structure, such as roads or hotels in
the park, for, as we shall see, he found such developments perfectly
acceptable. His concern was with the installation of facilities or
entertainments where "care for the opinion of others" [16] might dominate, or where prepared
activities would occupy the visitor without engaging him.
Thus, for example, Olmsted would have found the
modern ski resort an anomaly in the parks, not because it intrudes upon
the scenery, or impairs the indigenous ecosystem, or because of the
skiing itself, but because of the crowding, commercialism, obtrusive
social pressures, and the inducements to participate in entertainments
planned and structured by others.
While he did not spell out his management theory in
detail in the Yosemite report, he returned to the problem twenty years
later in a report for a state park at Niagara Falls. Niagara had been
the most popular tourist attraction in America during the later
nineteenth century, but all the land had been sold into private
ownership and commercial enterprises had taken over. Tourists were
importuned and harassed, led around like trained animals and hurried
from one "scenic site" to the next. [17]
As early as 1869, Olmsted began a campaign to
establish a public park around Niagara Falls, and to combat the
desecration of the area that had taken place. [18] The park was finally established in 1886;
in 1879 Olmsted prepared a study proposing a management scheme for the
Niagara Park, [19] and eight years later he
drew up a detailed planning report. [20]
The Niagara report contains a passage almost
identical to that quoted earlier from the Yosemite work, asserting that
nothing of an artificial character should be allowed to interfere with
the visitor's response to the scenery. But in the Niagara report,
Olmsted set out his views about park management in much more detail.
Again, he made clear that a wilderness park need not be established. It
would be quite appropriate to provide, near the entrance, toilets,
shelters, picnic facilities, and the like. He also recommended the
construction of walkways, as well as restorative efforts to combat
erosion and revegetate barren areas.
He opposed fancy landscaping, however, because it is
calculated to draw off and dissipate regard for natural scenery. For the
same reasons he opposed a plan to build a fine restaurant on Goat
Island, a wild place just above Niagara Falls. Neither, he said, ought
sculpture or monuments to be placed within the park, worthy as they
are.
Probably the most revealing expression of Olmsted's
approach was his opposition to a proposal to permit people to see the
falls without having to leave their carriages. This was not an obvious
issue for him, for in the Yosemite report he had advocated the
construction of a carriage road in the valley. But Yosemite, at that
time, was a very remote place, with few visitors and difficult access.
Niagara was entirely different, and Olmsted's responsebased on
different circumstancestells a great deal about his conception of
a rewarding park experience.
He began with the observation that as many as ten
thousand people a day visited Niagara, and that to permit the scenic
grandeur of the place to engage the visitor it was necessary to see the
falls at length and at leisure. If the scenic viewing areas were
designed to accommodate large numbers of carriages, it would "interpose
an urban, artificial element plainly in conflict with the purpose for
which the Reservation has been made." The purpose of the park was to
encourage people to experience Niagara "in an absorbed and contemplative
way." A profusion of carriages, with crowds of people, would intrude
upon the opportunity for an independent experience.
He sought to restore the setting of an earlier
Niagara, where
a visit to the Falls was a series of expeditions, and
in each expedition hours were occupied in wandering slowly among the
trees, going from place to place, with many intervals of rest. . . .
There was not only a much greater degree of enjoyment, there was a
different kind of enjoyment. . . . People were then loath to leave the
place; many lingered on from day to day. . . revisiting ground they had
gone over before, turning and returning. [21]
It is striking to see how far removed Olmsted's views
are from the sterility of current battles over riding versus walking, or
wilderness versus development. Olmsted believed that the essence of the
park is not determined by the details of the visitors' activities, by
whether they see the park from a sitting rather than a standing
position, or sleep in a tent rather than a hotel bed. His attention was
focused on the attitude that the visitor brought to the park, and upon
the atmosphere that park managers provided for the visitor. He thought
it perfectly possible to have an appropriate park experience using a
vehicle in a remote enough place; just as he would, without doubt, have
condemned the relentless backpacker whose principal concern is to prove
that he can "do" so many miles a day, or climb more peaks than any of
his predecessors. His goal was to get the visitor outside the usual
influences where his agenda was preset, and to leave him on his own, to
react distinctively in his own way and at his own pace.
To understand Olmsted's views it is essential to keep
in mind that he was a republican idealist. He held, that is to say, to
what we generally call democratic values. He believed in the possibility
of a nation where every individual counted for something and could
explore and act upon his own potential capacities. He feared, and he
condemned, the nation of unquestioning, mute, and passive followers. The
destruction of Niagara's scenery appalled him, not simply because the
place was ugly, but because old Niagara was a symbol and a means for the
visitor freely to respond to his experience. The trouble with the new
Niagara was that it had returned, with its leading and hurrying of
visitors and with its commercial entertainments in the guise of free
enterprise, to the same contemptuous disregard of the individuality of
the visitor that had characterized the aristocratic, condescending
spirit of Europe.
Olmsted was criticized on the ground that his plan
for Niagara constituted an attack upon a place that wasfor all its
tawdry developmentextraordinarily popular. The charge was, as
Olmsted rephrased it, that "whatever has been done to the injury of the
scenery has been done . . . with the motive of profit, and the profit
realized is the public's verdict of acquittal." [22]
He, of course, conceded Niagara's popularity, but it
was his conviction that the best use of highly scenic areas was not to
serve popular taste but to elevate it. The new Niagara was a modern
version of precisely what he had condemned in the Yosemite report: the
belief of the governing classes of Europe that the masses were incapable
of cultivation. Hence, they had thought "so far as the recreation of the
masses receives attention from their rulers, to provide artificial
pleasures for them, such as theatres, parades, and promenades where they
will be amused by the equipages of the rich and the animation of the
crowds." [23] "The great body of visitors to
Niagara come as strangers. Their movements are necessarily controlled by
the arrangements made for them. They take what is offered, and pay what
is required with little exercise of choice." [24]
The commercialized Niagara was enjoyable, it provided
a service for the leisure time that citizens had to spend. Olmsted's
Niagara plan called for some sacrifice of that service in order to
provide a place designed to engage the contemplative faculty and to
encourage the visitor to set his own agenda. He believed these were
opportunities that citizens of a democratic society ought to want to
provide themselves.
Olmsted's distinctive conception of a park is not
easily captured in a phrase. He repeatedly uses the word
"contemplative," but plainly it is not an intellectual experience he has
in mind. He also talks about "cultivation" and "refinement," faintly
archaic terms, that are probably nearest to our notion of the conscious
development of aesthetic appreciation. Though he speaks principally of
the visual experience of scenic inspirationunderstandably enough
in light of his professional work as a landscape architecthis
Yosemite report also contains approving references to hunting and
mountaineering. And there is a strong element in his writing of
republican idealism, a distaste for the mass man unreflectively doing
what he is told to do and thinking what he is told to think.
Of course Olmsted was himself a man of the nineteenth
century, and his writing reveals a confident belief, characteristic of
the time, in the progress of the human spirit. The attitude he evinces
is reminiscent of the famous passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay,
"Nature":
Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Ceasar
called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade. . . .
Yet . . . your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine
names. Build there fore your own world, As fast as you conform your life
to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.
[25]
Olmsted's dedication to a spirit of independence also
echoes Emerson. "The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected
to be timid, imitative, tame," Emerson wrote in "The American Scholar."
[26] Indeed, Olmsted's views draw on a
pastoral, moral, and aesthetic tradition with even deeper roots. [27] The distinctiveness of his contribution
lies in the application of these ideas to the public institution of a
nature park, and therein lie some puzzling questions. What special
activities and attitudes, for example, would be called for on the part
of visitors to such parks; and how does one deal with the claim that as
public facilities parks also have a responsibility to meet the demands
of conventional tourism? Olmsted's work only hints at answers to such
questions.
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