Chapter 5
The War and Postwar Years, 19401963 (continued)
Wartime and Postwar
Pressures
Drury's conservative management fit the times. World War II and the
postwar years brought drastic reductions in money, manpower, and park
development, and a halt to expansion of the national park system. By
August 1940, when Drury assumed the directorship, the New Deal programs
were already diminishing, yielding to preparations for war and support
for the nation's allies. America's entry into the war in December 1941
led to a reduction of more than fifty percent in the Park Service's
basic operating budget and the termination in 1942 of the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which the Service had used to great benefit.
Personnel cuts were severe. The Service's staffing budget was
reduced, and many employees joined the armed forces or went to work in
warrelated agencies and could not be replaced. Just before Pearl Harbor,
the Park Service had 5,963 permanent full-time employees. This number
dropped to 4,510 by June 30, 1942 (the end of the fiscal year), and
plunged to 1,974 by the end of the following June. By June 30 of 1944,
the number stabilized at 1,573, about a quarter of the total of prewar
employees. These cuts affected individual parks. Sequoia, for example,
had lost more than half of its administrative, ranger, and maintenance
staff within six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With a wartime
economy, including gas rationing and rubber shortages, the number of
park visitors also plummeted, from a high of 19.3 million in fiscal year
1940 to a wartime low of 7.4 million in fiscal 1943. [4]
The Service maintained skeletal staffs in its Washington and
regional offices; and, by negotiating with the Bureau of the Budget and
with congressional appropriations committees, Drury was able to keep
professional engineers and landscape architects in key offices. The Park
Service's ability to function effectively was further diminished in
August 1942 when its headquarters was moved to Chicago to make office
space in Washington available for critical wartime use. Although the
transfer restricted his Washington contacts, Drury elected to move with
the headquarters to Chicago. Wirth went with him, leaving Associate
Director Arthur Demaray as the Service's principal representative in the
nation's capital. [5]
During World War II the National Park Service was, in Drury's words,
reduced to a "protection and maintenance basis." He later elaborated
that, overall, the Service had three primary wartime goals: maintaining
a "reasonably well-rounded" organization that could be expanded to meet
postwar needs, keeping the parks and monuments "intact," and preventing
a "breakdown of the national park concept." [6] Indeed, beyond the severe budget and
personnel cuts, the war put unusual demands on the park system. Military
rest camps were established in parks such as Grand Canyon, Sequoia, and
Carlsbad Caverns, while other parks, including Yosemite and Lava Beds,
provided hospitalization and rehabilitation facilities. In many
instances, the Service converted abandoned CCC camps to such uses. The
military held overnight bivouacs in a number of parks and conducted
maneuvers in Mt. McKinley and Hawaii national parks, among others.
Extended training occurred in numerous parks, including Yosemite,
Shenandoah, Yellowstone, Isle Royale, and Death Valley. Defense
installations were located in Acadia, Olympic, Hawaii, and Glacier Bay,
while two small historical units of the system, Cabrillo and Fort
Pulaski national monuments, were closed to the public and used for
coastal defense. [7]
The war put pressure on specific park resources, with limited
amounts of extraction allowed. For example, early in the war Secretary
of the Interior Ickes authorized the mining of salt in Death Valley and
tungsten in Yosemite. Seeking a balance between patriotic support of the
war effort and protection of the parks, Drury maintained that permission
for natural resource extraction in the parks must be based on "critical
necessity" rather than convenience, with the burden of proof resting on
the applicant. [8] Such concerns were raised
in the two principal resource extraction issues that confronted the
Service during World War II: demands to cut timber and to allow cattle
grazing, both promoted as patriotic efforts to support the war.
Of the wartime requests to cut forests for timber in a number of
parks, the most hotly debated was a proposal to harvest giant Sitka
spruce trees in Olympic National Park for use in airplane construction.
This proposal came soon after Great Britain and France entered the war
in the late summer of 1939. With Secretary Ickes' backing, the Park
Service refused the request. Under continued pressure, the Service (in
the last year of Arno Cammerer's directorship) recommended that spruce
trees be taken from two nearby corridors of land intended for a scenic
parkway but not yet part of the national park, thus still vulnerable to
resource extraction demands. The following year the size of the proposed
parkway corridors was reduced to allow cutting in the excluded
areasa means of evading the issue of taking national park
resources. Drury, who became director the following August, stated his
opposition to any cutting on the lands remaining in the corridors,
except as a "last resort," and where "immediate public necessity" could
be shown. [9] But local lumber interests
persisted in their demands to cut spruce within the park and in the
corridors, arguing that quality timber for airplane construction could
be found nowhere else. Drury resisted, and sought information on spruce
wood substitutes and the availability of spruce elsewhere, especially in
British Columbia. The Canadian government refused to release timber
statistics, however, citing wartime confidentiality. Pressured by the
Roosevelt administration, the Service backed down. Acknowledging a
"distinct sacrifice of parkway features," it allowed cutting inside the
corridors.
This concession notwithstanding, local businessmen (who had always
supported timber company interests and were backed by the Seattle
Chamber of Commerce and the city's newspapers) lobbied to reduce the
size of the park and open virtually all areas to cutting for wartime and
postwar production. [10] Although
vacillating, Drury opposed further cutting for any but specific military
needs, and only if there were no other available sources of
sprucea position that the congressional House Subcommittee on
Lumber Matters supported during hearings in June 1943. In August the
Canadian government eased the situation by releasing information on the
availability of British Columbia spruce. This change, plus greater
production of Alaska's spruce and increased reliance on aluminum instead
of wood in airplane construction, led to the administration's withdrawal
of pressure to harvest Olympic's forests. [11]
All the same, local campaigns to shrink the park and cut its forests
continued well beyond the war years. In a striking example of timid
leadership, Drury, with the Interior Department's concurrence, responded
to pressure from timber companies by supporting bills introduced in
Congress in 1947 to reduce Olympic National Park by fifty-six thousand
acres. Swayed by Olympic's assistant superintendent, Fred J.
Overlya forester and timber company cohort who argued that some of
the acreage was already cut over and that much of it was remote and
difficult to administer the Service declared that it sought to
"attain a better boundary from the standpoint of administration and
protection, following ridges wherever possible." [12] Naively, Drury hoped that the timber
interests would be placated and would not seek further reduction of the
park.
In fact, the Washington office did not have full knowledge of the
lands proposed for removal from Olympic. Included were tracts of heavily
forested virgin wilderness, particularly in the Bogachiel and Calawah
drainages. The proposal brought an angry reaction from conservationists.
Under intense pressure, and with timber interest testimony that the
reduction was, as Drury saw it, "only a first step" toward gaining
access to the rest of the park, Drury, backed by Julius A. Krug (Ickes'
successor as secretary of the interior), eventually reversed his
position. This belated opposition, along with President Harry S.
Truman's reluctance to give in to the timber companies, helped kill the
proposed reduction. Vast tracts of Olympic's forests were saved from
commercial harvesting. [13]
Nonetheless, park management continued to encourage the removal of
hundreds of individual trees blown down by windstormsa salvage
practice sharply criticized by the wildlife biologists as a disruption
of natural processes. Receipts from the sale of windblown timber went
mostly toward the purchase of inholdings, which served as the park's
main justification for the program. However, especially under Fred
Overly's direction, the practice became a means by which local companies
were able to remove millions of board feet of park timber, much of it
healthy. Overly, who became superintendent in 1951 and who almost
certainly enjoyed support from the Service's top foresters, set up
salvage contracts with timber companies that allowed the cutting of
standing mature trees in addition to any windblown timber.
In time this practice became an embarrassment to the Park Service and
to the new director, Conrad Wirth. Visitor abhorrence of the loss of
healthy trees began to be pointedly conveyed to the park's "seasonal"
(or summer) naturalists, who had daily contact with the publicand
who conspired to shame the Service publicly and force it to halt the
salvaging. Faced with growing congressional concern and an aroused and
angry conservation community, Wirth yielded. When Overly later resumed
the practice on a limited basis, the director felt compelled to remove
him from the park. Revealing the solidarity among Park Service
leadersand in an action not uncommon in the bureau's
historyWirth assigned Overly to another superintendency (Great
Smoky Mountains), rather than disciplining him for systematic
destruction of park resources. [14]
Just as lumbermen had sought to gain access to national park
resources during wartime, ranchers renewed pressure to increase
livestock grazing in the parks, claiming the need to provide beef in
support of the war effort. Hoping eventually to eliminate grazing from
national parks, the Service responded by applying very restrictive
grazing criteria. Critical wartime need had to be shown, and postwar
needs constituted no justification for grazing increases. Drury argued
for protecting all national parks and their "spectacular features" from
grazing. But under the force of wartime necessity, grazing could be
permitted "in the areas of lesser importance" or in areas where the
damage would not be "irreparable." The Park Service also calculated that
its employees and those of other Interior Department bureaus could
reduce their beef consumption by approximately one-third to compensate
for not allowing grazing in the parksbut there is no indication
that the Service or the department seriously pursued this idea. [15]
In early 1943, responding to persistent demands from livestock
growers' associations and from the War Production Board, Secretary Ickes
approved a livestock grazing "formula" submitted by Drury. The formula
imposed a ceiling of twenty-eight percent increase in cattle grazing in
the parks and eleven percent in sheep grazing. Although affirming the
goal of ultimately eliminating all cattle and sheep from the parks, the
formula established land classifications for grazing under wartime
emergency conditions. The classifications varied from total prohibition
of grazing in the most protected park areas, to allowing increases in
livestock numbers and range acreage in other park lands, especially
recreation areas. [16]
Permits granted under this arrangement resulted in a wartime grazing
increase of only about half the percentages set by Drury's
formulaa result of Park Service resistance and of support from
outside the bureau. For example, efforts by drought-plagued California
livestock growers in the spring of 1944 to gain access to grasslands in
nearby national parks failed after being opposed by the Service and
evaluated by a special committee of representatives from the Sierra
Club, California Conservation Council, Western Association of Outdoor
Clubs, and U.S. Forest Service. The demands by livestock ranchers came
even after range surveys indicated that national park grasslands in
California would support no more than six thousand beef cattle, less
than one-half of one percent of the state's 1.4 million head.
Recognizing that damage to vegetation would result from livestock
grazing, the Service viewed the proposal not as an attempt to support
the war, but merely as a means to use national park resources to benefit
the local cattle industry. The special committee found insufficient
justification for approving the grazing applications. Renewed pressure
to allow grazing in the Sierra national parks during postwar drought
periods suggests that the urge to increase ranchers' profits was as much
a factor as wartime need. [17]
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