Chapter 2
Codifying Tradition:
The National Park Service Act of 1916 (continued)
Advocates and Opponents
The drive to establish a national parks bureau was led by four
individuals: a horticulturalist, a landscape architect, a borax industry
executive, and a young lawyer. The campaign began through the efforts of
J. Horace McFarland, a nationally prominent horticulturalist, urban
planner, and leader of the "city beautiful" movement to improve the
attractiveness of America's growing cities. McFarland's career was built
on his passion for landscape aesthetics and the social benefits to be
derived from parks and other professionally landscaped areas. From 1904
until 1925 he served as president of the American Civic Association, an
organization that promoted intelligent planning and development to make,
as McFarland described it, "American cities, towns, villages and rural
communities clean, more beautiful and more attractive places in which to
live." McFarland and the association had participated in the move to
preserve Niagara Falls and had supported shade-tree planting, city
parks, and recreation areas, while opposing the growing billboard blight
along the nation's roadsides. Under his guidance the American Civic
Association became the leading professional organization supporting the
national park legislation. The association would be instrumental in
drafting the Organic Act's statement of the parks' principal purpose,
and, in the winter of 1911-12, would recommend that the proposed new
bureau be designated the National Park Service. [3]
McFarland's contacts extended to cabinet officials and to President
William Howard Taft, through whom he initiated the legislative campaign.
Alarmed about the proposal to create a reservoir in Yosemite National
Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley to supply water to San Francisco, McFarland
suggested to Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger in May 1910
that the national parks needed a "general, intelligent and logical
supervision." McFarland believed that strong, coordinated oversight
could best defend the parks against threats such as the damming of Hetch
Hetchy, one of Yosemite's outstanding scenic areas. [4]
In December 1910, when Secretary Ballinger formally recommended a
national parks bureau to President Taft, he employed a statement
prepared by McFarland and reflecting utilitarian goals. Ballinger
proposed a bureau of "national parks and resorts," to include a
"suitable force of superintendents, supervising engineers, and landscape
architects, inspectors, park guards, and other employees." Subsequently,
Taft incorporated these views into his message to Congress, advocating
that the parks be preserved for the public's "edification and
recreation." He called for sufficient funds to "bring all these natural
wonders within easy reach of the people"a means of improving the
parks' "accessibility and usefulness." [5]
That same year, at the suggestion of Secretary Ballinger, McFarland
recruited the nationally known landscape architect Frederick Law
Olmsted, Jr., to the campaign. Son of the principal founder of American
landscape architecture, Olmsted, on graduating from Harvard, became an
apprentice and then a partner in his father's firm. Adding to his
credentials, the younger Olmsted had helped found Harvard's academic
program in landscape architecture and served as president of the
American Society of Landscape Architects, a professional organization he
had helped establish. [6] He had, as well,
served on the executive board of the American Civic Association. The
year 1910 marked the beginning of Olmsted's long association with the
national parks, one that would last until the 1950s, when he became
involved in the momentous Echo Park controversy in Dinosaur National
Monument.
In line with McFarland's views, Olmsted believed that national park
management lacked coordinated leadership and was "mixed up and rather
inefficient." Consequently, the parks were in poor condition, without an
"orderly or efficient means" of being protected. This "chaotic"
situation could, however, be addressed through the "proper businesslike
machinery" of sound management. Good national park leadership, Olmsted
judged, could be found in a "Western man"- one familiar with the country
where all of the national parks were then located, and a man "of really
large caliber, of executive ability... with the instincts of a
gentleman." [7]
Early in 1915 such an individual appeared on the scene when Stephen
T. Mather, a Chicago businessman, joined the campaign for a national
parks bureau. Mather had political instincts and strategic abilities
that complemented those of McFarland and Olmsted. Polished and at ease
with the rich, powerful, and famous, he displayed ardent enthusiasm- his
biographer referred to him as the "Eternal Freshman," who was "almost
pathologically fraternal." [8] In 1917 Mather
would be officially appointed as the National Park Service's first
director. But beginning in early 1915, after a friend, Secretary of the
Interior Franklin K. Lane, asked him to serve as his assistant in the
national park legislative drive, Mather devoted his impressive talents
and much of his own money (he had amassed personal wealth as head of a
borax company with mines in the West) to boosting the national parks. As
a chief goal, Mather sought public acceptance and political support for
the parks through opening them to greater use. Along with his
politicking, he helped finance the purchase of the Tioga Pass Road to
make Yosemite's high country accessible to the automobile-touring
public. For a while he even paid the salary of the national parks' chief
publicist, Robert Sterling Yard. [9]
Serving at Mather's side was his assistant, Horace M. Albright, a
young graduate of the University of California and the Georgetown
University Law School, who shared Mather's enthusiasm for the parks and
gave energetic, intelligent support to the legislative campaign.
Albright proved highly effective within the Washington political system,
and his skills were crucial to the passage of the act. [10] The youngest of the founding fathers,
Albright would resolutely proclaim the founders' concepts of national
parks to succeeding generations.
During the legislative drive, from 1910 to 1916, the Department of
the Interior sponsored three national park conferences. The first
general meetings to be held in the decades since Yellowstone's
establishment, these conferences brought together influential people
from inside and outside the federal government. Especially because the
Organic Act's legislative history includes few official congressional
hearings and reports, the conference proceedings provide important
evidence of the intentions behind the act. Repeatedly during these
conferences, supporters depicted the parks as scenic places for public
recreation, enjoyment, and edification-indeed, one participant described
the national parks movement as a "campaign for natural scenery." At the
first conference (1911, in Yellowstone), Secretary of the Interior
Walter L. Fisher's opening remarks drew attention to the crucial need
for the parks to attract more visitors; he directed that, in addition to
park administration, the meeting should be devoted to concession and
transportation matters related to accommodating tourists.
Significantly, the lists of conference participants and agendas
reflected what had already become a major factor in national park
affairs: the various interest groups that sought to generate business in
or near the parks and thus to apply political and economic leverage to
shape the character and direction of national park management. The
conferences were absorbed with the concerns of these groups. For
instance, building on their long involvement with the parks, railroad
companies sent numerous spokesmen to the meetings, as did smaller-scale
concessionaires who operated facilities in the parks. Representing the
industry that would ultimately have the greatest impact on national
parks, the fledgling automobile associations were especially prominent
at the 1912 conference in Yosemite and the 1915 conference in Berkeley
and San Francisco. To one or both of these meetings, officials of the
American Automobile Association, the Southern California Automobile
Association, and the Automobile Dealers Association of Southern
California, among others, came to promote increased public use of the
parks. [11]
From within the government came national park superintendents,
engineers, landscape architects, and other officials of the Interior
Department. Even the secretary attended the 1911 and 1912 conferences,
and Mather officially represented the secretary at the Berkeley meeting
in 1915. Foresters and entomologists represented the scientific
professions. At the 1911 meeting, for example, an "expert lumberman" and
an "expert in charge of forest insect investigations" advised how to
protect forests from fires and insects. Forests, the participants were
told, form the "attractive feature in a landscape," and damage to trees
"must be considered... on the basis of the commercial value" as well as
the "aesthetic and educational value." [12]
Most prominent among the railroad delegates at the 1911 conference
was Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway Company and
enthusiastic promoter of the newly established Glacier National Park.
Hill's company already had plans for extensive tourist accommodations in
and adjacent to Glacier. His remarks to the conference attested to the
railroad industry's clear profit motive in its concern for the national
parks: the railroads were "greatly interested in the passenger traffic
to the parks" and, with lines already built nearby for "regular
traffic," each passenger to the national parks represented "practically
a net earning." Because his railroad operated in the northern tier of
states, Hill was much aware of Canada's aggressive national park
promotion, which he claimed diverted many tourists from United States
parks. Echoing a prevailing theme in the conferences, he encouraged more
advertising of American parks, arguing that such publicity would divert
visitors otherwise bound for Canada or Europe. [13]
Throughout the meetings, proponents urged that the parks no longer be
abandoned to the haphazard supervision of an Interior Department clerk
burdened by other responsibilities. At Yosemite in 1912, Secretary
Fisher acknowledged that the Interior Department had "no machinery
whatever" to deal with the national parks. He noted that the department
lacked the expertise to handle matters such as engineering, park
development, landscape management, forestry, sanitation, and
construction. Indeed, his office and that of the chief clerk had "never
really been equipped to handle these matters, [even] if it had been
possible to give them the necessary time and attention." [14]
At the 1912 conference, Richard Watrous, secretary of the American
Civic Association, supported maintenance of the parks as "playgrounds,"
and introduced a resolution supporting creation of a national parks
bureau. He believed the bureau could provide the parks with a "definite,
systematic, and continuous policy" to improve efficiency of
administration. Watrous stated that concern for efficiency was being
brought "very prominently" before business leaders and the people,
because the White House was giving more attention to the "general
subject of economy and efficiency than ever before." [15]
To accommodate visitors, the scenic parks needed to improve
accessibility and facilities- practical requirements that put the skills
of engineers and landscape architects in demand, as repeatedly
emphasized during the conferences. At the 1912 meeting, John Muir
recommended utilization of these professions in the parks, a reflection
of an increased (but wary) tolerance of tourism late in his life. And
Robert B. Marshall, a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey, who
would later serve briefly as chief administrator of the national parks,
believed that the proposed bureau should have an engineer as director
and that park superintendents should also be engineers, or at least have
a substantial knowledge of engineering. Such individuals could ensure
"proper maintenance of the great recreation and playgrounds." [16]
Secretary Fisher's successor, Franklin Lane, shared Marshall's views,
and in the spring of 1914 created the position "general superintendent
and landscape engineer," to provide administrative leadership for the
national park system. Initially held by San Francisco landscape
architect Mark Daniels, this position replaced the chief clerk as the
department's coordinator of parks. Daniels remained in the job until
December 1915. He was succeeded by Robert Marshall, whose title became
"general superintendent of national parks." [17] These positions were forerunners of the
National Park Service directorship.
Addressing the 1915 conference as general superintendent, Daniels
declared an urgent need to develop national parks for tourism: "There
are roads to be built, and there are bridges to be built, and there are
trails to be built, and there are hotels to be built, and sanitation
must be taken care of." Earlier he had told the same conference that the
only two justifications for the national parks were "economics and
esthetics." These factors, he claimed, "really go hand in hand" and were
"so intimately related that it is impossible to disassociate them." For
Daniels, the function of national parks was like that of city, county,
and state parks, because all required the "supplying of playgrounds or
recreation grounds to the people." [18]
Daniels spent much of his time as general superintendent seeking to
increase public accommodations in the parks with what one observer
described as "artistic development" and the "adaptation of the
town-planning method." Daniels informed the 1915 conference that he had
planned and designed new development for the Yosemite Valley and other
national park "villages," where tourist and administrative facilities
were to be concentrated, and that he had planned new roads and other
developments in several of the larger parks. [19]
Robert Marshall, his successor, shared Daniels' eagerness to develop
the national parks for tourism. At the 1911 conference Marshall had
advocated tennis, golf, and skiing facilities as means of improving the
"national playgrounds" and competing with Europe for American dollars.
He also recommended that firebreaks be cut throughout the parks, and
stated that thousands of cattle could graze the parks each season
without doing harm. [20] Marshall elaborated
on these ideas at hearings before the House Committee on the Public
Lands in the spring of 1916, claiming that the number of visitors to the
national parks could be greatly increased- that through businesslike
management the parks could pay for themselves: "In a few years we will
have an enormous population in the national parks. It is worthwhile. It
does not cost much money, and eventually the people will pay for the
pleasure we give them." [21]
When the National Park Service Act finally passed in 1916, nearly
half a century had elapsed since the Yellowstone Act of 1872. In part,
the delay in creating a parks bureau stemmed from concerns about
increasing the size and cost of the federal government. Strongly
favoring a central national parks office, participants at the
conferences scarcely considered the possibility of managing the parks
without creating a new bureau. Yet Secretary Fisher cautioned the
1912 conference that there was "considerable sentiment" among
congressmen to avoid creating a bureau; instead, they would simply
designate within the Interior Department an office having as its sole
responsibility the management of national parks. As one congressman
later put it, an aggrandizing parks bureau might expand and spend ever
larger sums of money- it would "start in a small way and soon get up to
a big appropriation." Congressman William Kent of California reiterated
such concerns in early 1916 when he wrote to Richard Watrous of the
American Civic Association that the "most difficult bump to bump is the
proposition so blithely entered into of obtaining another bureau," a
matter that should be "approached with fear and trembling." [22]
Away from the conferences, the U.S. Forest Service voiced objections
calculated to impede passage of the Organic Act. As a bureau of the
Department of Agriculture created to manage the already expansive
national forest system, it recognized the proposed national parks bureau
as a competitor. Forest Service attitudes reflected bureaucratic
territorialism and the belief that management of the parks and national
forests involved similar principles. Gifford Pinchot, the first director
of the Forest Service and a premier power in natural resource politics,
steadfastly opposed the concept of a parks bureau. Earlier he had
received support from Secretary of the Interior James R. Garfield, who
reported in 1907 that development and maintenance of the parks and the
forests were "practically the same," and that roads and trails, fire
protection, and game management were all problems that were "being
studied in a broader and better way in the Forest Service" than within
the park system. Garfield's recommendation that the parks be placed
under the Forest Service was rejected by park proponents, who insisted
more vehemently than ever that a bureau be established specifically to
manage national parks. [23]
With the Park Service legislative campaign under way in earnest,
Pinchot wrote to Olmsted asserting that the national forests already
provided recreation for about as many people as did the national parks,
and that the methods of protecting the parks and forests were similar.
To Pinchot, both were "great open spaces," essentially the same except
that certain uses were not allowed in the parks. Thus a parks bureau
would involve "a needless duplication of effort." Henry S. Graves,
director of the Yale School of Forestry before succeeding Pinchot as
head of the Forest Service, took a conciliatory stance, agreeing to the
establishment of a national parks bureau. However, Graves sought to
maintain a clear distinction between national parks and national
forests. He wrote to Horace McFarland in March 1916 that he hoped to
avoid "hybridizing" through the establishment of "so-called parks" where
(just as in the national forests) lumbering, mining, grazing, and
water-power developments were allowed. Very likely Graves had in mind
parks such as Glacier, where the enabling legislation permitted railroad
rights-of-way and water reclamation projects. True national parks,
Graves wrote, should be set aside exclusively for the "care and
development of scenic features and... for the enjoyment, health and
recreation" of the people. [24]
Indeed, Graves agreed with Pinchot that duplication between forest
and park management would be inevitable, and he wrote that he absolutely
opposed any attempt to "dismember the National Forests." He recommended
strict qualifications for national parks to resist park proposals on
lands that had value for "other purposes," a strategy that would prevent
many public lands from becoming parks. Graves would not only keep the
national park system smaller, but also place the new bureau within the
Agriculture Department, where the Forest Service could exert greater
influence. As he described it, this arrangement would promote a close
relationship with the Biological Survey, the Bureau of Entomology with
its "experts in insects," and the Bureau of Public Roads with its "corps
of trained road engineers." [25]
In contrast, Horace McFarland informed Graves early in the national
park campaign that he saw a distinct difference between park and forest
management. To McFarland, a national forest was "the nation's woodlot,"
while a national park was "the nation's playground." He fervently
believed the two kinds of management did not mix well- it was unwise for
a bureau that managed forests on a sustained-yield commercial basis also
to manage national parks. The parks should not be the "secondary object"
of the agency overseeing them; this would make park management, as he
explained to Pinchot, "incidental, and therefore inefficient." McFarland
had no confidence in Pinchot's sense of Forest Service "harmony" with
the "economic and sociological purpose" of the national parks. He
asserted that there was "very good reason to suppose" that the attitude
of the Forest Service was "inimical to the true welfare of the national
park idea as serving best the recreational needs of the nation." [26]
McFarland's apprehension about Forest Service opposition remained
strong. As congressional hearings on the legislation proceeded in the
spring of 1916, he wrote to Olmsted on the difficulty of overcoming the
Forest Service's attempt to "emasculate this Park Service proposition."
He pointed out that Stephen Mather believed "there is a constant and
continual hostility in the Forest Service against the whole idea of
National Parks as such." [227]
As the legislative campaign progressed, opposition also arose from
western livestock ranchers, concerned about permanent loss of grazing
privileges in present and future parks. William Kent, an influential
congressman who would soon introduce the national park bill in the
House, had a ranch of his own in Nevada and a number of rancher
constituents and friends. He backed their cause, arguing that grazing
had a beneficial effect on parks by preventing forest fires (a generally
accepted belief at the time). Kent would allow grazing, yet ensure that
public use areas were preserved "so far as their beauties are
concerned." [28]
Although privately opposed to grazing livestock in the parks, Stephen
Mather's public stance was influenced by his need for Kent's support in
the legislative campaign. Thus, Mather compromised with the ranchers and
told Congress in April 1916 that permission to graze was a "very proper"
amendment to the bill. In accord with Kent's views, his chief concern
was to prevent grazing in areas frequented by park visitors. Mather
recalled that the parks' general superintendent, Robert Marshall, had
asserted that "a certain amount of grazing in those areas where it will
not interfere with the campers' privileges is perfectly proper." Mather
testified that he concurred with this assessment, noting also the
hazards of allowing grasses and other plants to build up to the point
where they could ignite and feed destructive fires. Although initially
the Senate would vote against grazing in the parks, inclusion of the
provision helped secure House support for the legislation. Mather,
Albright, and others found it expedient to agree to the provision
despite their private opposition. [29]
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