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E. Impact of New Deal Programs and Reorganization of 1933 on National Park Service Historical Program Development By the time of the reorganization in 1933 the historical program of the National Park Service had been underway for less than two years. Nevertheless, the foundations for a fully-developed historical program had been laid through the pioneering efforts in research, preservation, and interpretation at George Washington Birthplace and Colonial national monuments and Morristown National Historical Park. The reorganization, which quadrupled the number of historical areas in the National Park Service by adding some 57 such units, made the Park Service the leading historical park management agency in the United States virtually overnight. In 1934 Director Cammerer acknowledged the tremendous growth of the Park Service historical program as well as its goals, objectives, and inherent problems:
The "inestimable value" of the various New Deal emergency relief and funding programs was crucial to the implementation and extension of the embryonic Park Service historical program. The influx of money and personnel that became available to the agency as a result of its involvement in the New Deal public works programs presented great opportunities to the Service in carrying out a program of preservation, restoration, planning, and interpretation of historical areas. [20] Under the ECW program that was organized during the spring of 1933 the National Park Service was assigned the responsibility of directing the vast program of the CCC in the preservation, development, and interpretation of both National Park System units and state parks having historical and archeological values. Archeological projects undertaken through federal emergency funds were jointly supervised by the Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. Park Service historical and archeological personnel guided the technical phases of the historical and archeological activities of the CCC and provided state authorities with assistance in developing preservation policies while they further refined the historical policies governing historical areas in the National Park System. Through these efforts, the Service began to play a direct role in historic preservation at both the federal and state levels. [21] The ECW field organization in the historical parks provided for the position of historical technician in order "that the general viewpoint of the N.P.S. toward the development of historical sites could be represented." The historical technician was the field representative of the Park Service who was "above all familiar with the aims and objectives of the historical program." The ECW handbook noted that such persons were
In summary, the functions and duties of the historical technician included responsibility for: (1) interpreting the aims and objectives of the Park Service historical program as applied to the work projects: (2) furnishing historical advice on the relative importance of the historical remains on proposed work; (3) furnishing historical information necessary for work projects decided upon; (4) custodianship of historical and archeological artifacts found during the course of emergency conservation work; (5) providing technical expertise on the use of the park by the public; and (6) directing the park educational program. [22] At the beginning of the ECW program the historical technicians had no other assistance than that rendered by "so-called miscellaneous or cultural foremen." Appointed under the CCC field organization, these foremen, later classified as historical assistants, were primarily young men with training in history or the related social sciences. Of the thirty-five assistants that had been hired by 1934, nearly half had masters' degrees or doctorates in these fields. They were responsible not to the technicians, however, but to the work superintendents. The task of recruiting, training, and educating qualified historical technicians for the ECW program fell to Chatelain. In later years he observed:
The problems of recruiting and training historians, coordinating the historical program in the National Park System as well as the ECW State Park program, and establishing uniform historical research and preservation policies fell to Chatelain as a result of the reorganization in 1933. In effect, a branch of historic sites was established with Chatelain as acting assistant director and a small staff paid with emergency funds to oversee the increased historical activities of the National Park Service--a step that would later pave the way for passage of the Historic Sites Act in 1935. Accordingly, he had Elbert Cox assigned to his office in fall 1933 to provide assistance in hiring historians, establishing a centralized research staff at the Library of Congress, and reviewing reports coming in from the field. [24] Conferences were also organized to aid in the formulation and articulation of a National Park Service philosophy of historic preservation and a policy of administering historical areas. For example, B. Floyd Flickinger chaired a Conference of Historical and Archeological Superintendents in Washington on November 23, 1934. Chatelain, architect Charles E. Peterson, Assistant Director Demaray, and Director Cammerer were on the program to represent the administrative functions that related to the historical areas. At the conference Chatelain pleaded for better-quality restoration work based on thorough research and supervised by trained personnel, urged development of a more thorough historical interpretation program, and defended the idea of historic sites as educational tools, citing the nearness of the new park areas to the metropolitan areas of the East. [25] Thus by late 1934 many of the barriers that made the movement toward a national policy of historic preservation more difficult had been removed. The reorganization of 1933 had concentrated administration of all federally-owned historical and archeological areas in one agency. The National Park Service employed a staff of professional historians capable of providing the technical knowledge and skill that it needed to carry out its programs. Through the many relief programs large sums and personnel were available to carry out a comprehensive historical program. Through the many assistance programs federal officials had the opportunity to become acquainted with the major problems of the states and localities in the field of historic preservation. [26]
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