An Interview with Robert M. Utley on the History of Historic Preservation in the National Park Service—1947-1980

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT M. UTLEY ON THE HISTORY OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE—1947-1980
by Richard W. Sellars and Melody Webb
September 24, 1985 - December 27, 1985

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Tape 12, 12/19/85

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Dick: Bob, how do you feel about the exclusion of cemeteries from the National Register in the criteria?

Bob: Cemeteries are not excluded. They are included under certain circumstances along with other things like memorials and birthplaces. That list of exclusions—inclusions if you will—is an expression of the professional community that these things are not legitimately historic preservation, but also a recognition that in some instances it will be desirable to have them in the National Register. The fact is that you can qualify any cemetery you want under that exclusion criterion, which has to do with transcendent significance. In the local context, which is what the National Register is all about, transcendent significance is not hard to establish. It can be what happened in the next block. I think this is one of several instances in which the maybe too-precious theories of the professionals have collided with the instincts of the people. If any messages come through to me over my 30 years in the business, it is that people have a deep and abiding affection for cemeteries and graves. They are fascinated by them. They will make long journeys to visit them, and in our parks graves always attract attention. So I believe that we need to recognize this fact and not be so resistent to cemeteries in the Register. There are plenty of them there.

Dick: If you were rewriting the National Register criteria, then you would either delete that reference to cemeteries or reword it?

Bob: I think I would reword that, yes. There are probably some other exclusions I would deal with too. I'd certainly do something about that so-called 50-year rule. There's a series of things that could stand to be tinkered with.

Dick: Bob, it seems that the Richard Nixon Birthplace might come into the National Park System. You've visited that site. What do you think of it?

Bob: It may have undergone some changes since I visited it. Shortly after Richard Nixon was elected, the congressman from that district, Wiggins, introduced legislation to put the Nixon Birthplace into the National Park System. I became involved with that congressman. I tried to make the point that it would not be politic for a sitting President to assist in putting his own birthplace into the National Park System. But the idea did not die easily. So we went the landmark route first, preliminary to reporting on the legislation. Joe Rumburg, the Regional Director in San Francisco, and I went down there and visited the Nixon Birthplace. It is an unpretentious, working-class bungalow with small rooms. It was situated on the grassless playground of a local elementary school. So the historic setting was totally destroyed. There it sat, forlorn and unimposing, with kids running around in all directions. None of us could get very enthusiastic about Richard Nixon even that early in his administration, but because the Advisory Board, in connection with Lyndon Johnson, had committed the Park Service to identify national landmarks for every President just as soon as he took office, we had to go forward with a Nixon landmark. That seemed to be the natural place, even though the criteria are stacked against birthplaces. But as with cemeteries there seems to be an affection for birthplaces. Someday we will run out of birthplaces because, shortly after Nixon was born, people started getting born in hospitals. I think someday the problem may self-destruct.

Dick: Let me point out that there are some national historic landmarks that are simply rooms in buildings, such as in Chicago and in Berkeley with regard to atomic research.

Bob: That's true. Those were mistakes too, for which we paid the penalty. But we prepared the material on the Nixon Birthplace, but Watergate overtook that whole proposition. A competing landmark, Nixon's law office, came into the picture and had its promoters. It was also in California, and it might have been a better site. Birthplaces don't tell anything but that a little baby was born here, and his birthplace was singularly uncommunicative of anything. We were taken up in the second floor, which is a tiny, loftlike room, and shown the very corner in which he first saw light of day. But Watergate overtook all of that and it died. I think no landmark plaque was ever presented, if indeed the Advisory Board ever dealt with the subject. But now we are getting a perspective on it. Now Nixon's administration is more than a decade in the past, and while I'm not crazy about that birthplace, I think that Richard Nixon ought to have a unit of the National Park System. I'd rather see San Clemente or Key Biscayne because the world was moved and shaken at those places as it was not at his birthplace, but that is probably not in the cards. I think you would have trouble finding more than two or three or maybe four Presidents in the 20th century who more profoundly affected the nation and the world in a historical sense than Richard Nixon. I think it is important to preserve the approach of our historical evaluation programs that refrain from moral or ethical judgments. It has always been our stock in trade that we are identifying places of historical consequence and not places that we prefer to remember and conversely leave out places we would just as soon not remember. Richard Nixon was a tremendously significant figure, and certainly that period of history, for all of its bad memories, needs to be commemorated in the Park System.

Dick: The birthplace carries not much symbolism in my mind compared for example to the Lincoln Birthplace, but couldn't you say that San Clemente is what he aspired to and was his during the height of his power.

Bob: San Clemente is not what he aspired to. He aspired to the White House. But San Clemente is the setting in which many White House decisions were taken and many figures significant in his administration gathered to deliberate. There may have been a lot of Deep Six plans laid in San Clemente.

Dick: Bob, you served under several Secretaries of the Interior. The most important ones I think were Udall, Hickel and Morton. Would you characterize them as to their interest in historic preservation or the National Park Service?

Bob: All three were deeply interested and committed to the National Park Service and the National Park System. Probably the one that we were most suspicious of was Walter Hickel, who came out of a purely development environment in Alaska and was widely expected to be anti-environment and pro-development. Actually Hickel and Hartzog hit it off beautifully right from the beginning, and Hickel was very supportive of the National Park Service. We were less skeptical of Udall and Morton. We had worked with Rogers Morton on the Interior Committee when he was a congressman from Maryland. He was the principal driving force behind Assateague Island. So Rogers Morton had a deep interest in the Park Service and the environment, although there was some apprehension because he was a conservative Republican. On the House committee he had frequently worked over the Park Service pretty badly and sometimes favored developmental interests when the Park Service would have preferred otherwise. The purest of all of them was Stewart Udall, the one who most uncritically served the park and environmental interest. But you have to make a distinction with all three, between Park Service and environment on the one hand and historic preservation on the other hand. I don't think Stewart Udall was ever more than superficially interested in historic preservation. I think he's become more so in recent years, at least more interested in history. But he didn't slight the historical areas because his commitment to the National Park Service inevitably had the effect of serving historic preservation as well as natural values. But I don't think his interest really lay there. I think Hickel's commitment was National Park Service—doing the right thing and leaving a good legacy. When he went out in that great blaze of glory after being fired by Nixon, the Park Service was genuinely sorry to see him go. Of all the three, the one whose personal interest most reflected historic preservation was Rogers Morton. He was not only knowledgeable but interested. Part of it was his wife, who was deep into historic preservation causes. But he had the right instincts also. And he got way out in front of us in that proposed Chicago Architectural Theme National Historical Park, which was supposed to spotlight the origins of the skyscraper through existing turn-of-the-century office buildings in Chicago. Rogers Morton wanted to move in there aggressively even though Mayor Daley and his development chief were resisting us at every turn.

Dick: Bob, Gordon Chappell has asked a question about Everhardt and Walker. He asked did we do much better with respect to historic preservation under Walker the outsider than under Everhardt the old hand, because Walker did not have preconceived antagonistic attitudes toward historic preservation within the parks while Everhardt did?

Bob: I would subscribe to Gordon's question essentially as he's framed it. Walker did not have preconceived notions. Walker wanted to do the right thing. Walker wanted to leave a reputation behind him. He had plenty of liabilities that stood in the way, but after he began to relax a little, be a little less suspicious of the career service, he was not bound by preconceived notions. His main problem was that he turned all of us loose to do our thing as we thought it ought to be done, and lent his name to it, and then didn't know what to do when several of these initiatives began to collide and had to be mediated. He gave me free reign to go out and try to do the right thing by historic preservation in the Park Service. I and my staff went all around the Service to superintendents' meetings and Regional Directors' meetings and portrayed our new initiative with Walker's backing. But then that backing turned to ashes when the chips were down. But for a year, or perhaps a year and a half, we were really flying high with the Director's backing. The field had not yet discovered that the Director's backing wasn't worth very much, and so they were inclined to go along with what we were advocating, however much they disagreed with the new emphasis. Then that began to fade because, first, of Walker's inability to choose among initiatives, and second, because Watergate overtook Walker as it did the whole Administration.

Gordon is correct, from my perception, on Gary Everhardt also. While his origins were not in the ranger service, certainly he personalized all of the ranger mentality that we associate with big trees and deep canyons and hostility toward cultural resources. His understanding was very limited, and his instincts were all negative. I shouldn't say all negative, but for the most part negative. He did make a big and serious effort that paid off to get Valley Forge, so you have to give him credit on some of these things. But the problem with Everhardt had less to do with promoting new areas, which he did effectively, than they did with caring for what we already had in the Park System, and there's where he fell down.

Dick: So his interest in day-to-day cultural resource management would have been fairly negligible.

Bob: It was not only nil, it was negative.

Dick: Bob, let's talk about some cultural resource management concerns here. Preservation and restoration, preservation and reconstruction. Would you give your thoughts on the policy implications stemming from the development and management of Bent's Old Fort on the one hand and Fort Bowie on the other?

Bob: The principles to govern historic preservation that the Advisory Board adopted in 1936 stacked the decks against reconstruction. They did not prohibit reconstruction, but there was that old saying—better to preserve than restore, better to restore than reconstruct, or some such thing like that. The preference was for preservation first. When I came to the Southwest Region, I don't think anybody ever thought of reconstruction. The fight was being conducted back East, most notably in connection with the Graff House at Independence. But out here in the Southwest, behind the adobe wall, when it came to Fort Bowie, when it came to Fort Union, there was never any other thought than doing it like they had been doing it for years at the prehistoric Indian ruins. You stabilize the standing walls and that's what people come and see. I didn't get plunged into reconstruction controversies until I went to Washington as Chief Historian, and there I was to some extent influenced by Roy Appleman, who believed strongly that the first mission in historical area was effective interpretation of the story and significance to the public. So Roy was in favor of reconstructions, and I guess I had got briefly into it in proposing Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, as a national historic landmark. The Washington staff opposed that because Fort Gibson was a reconstruction. My counter was that it was a good reconstruction. People could look at it and see what was there then, as they couldn't if it wasn't standing. That was still the thought in my mind when I went to Washington and Bent's Fort came up. Roy, who was my principal deputy, was for reconstructing Bent's Fort, and so was I. When the opportunity arose to get congressional backing, we manipulated the paper in such a way that the authorization came about. So I am in some measure responsible for the reconstruction of Bent's Fort. It wasn't until six to eight years later, when we became immersed in writing policies, and when we were going out through the System under Director Walker's initiative to try to sell those policies—not as something that ought to be adopted but something that had been adopted and had to be carried out—then is when I and everybody around me became vocal and vehement about reconstructions.

We had bad experience with reconstructions. Fort Vancouver cost lots of money and didn't add much to the scene there. Bent's Fort cost a lot of money and had turned out to be a construction disaster. Washing away in every rain. And we were coming philosophically to believe deeply that expenditure of sums of money on creating something like that from the ground up, while we left existing structures such as C & O Canal Aqueduct to fall down for want of money, didn't make sense. Also there was the experience that no matter how much you repeated to the visitors that this isn't the real thing, they still carried in their mind the feeling that it was the real thing.

Dick: At Fort Bowie and at Fort Union you felt the ruins were adequate for interpretation.

Bob: I don't think we even carried the thinking that far. The ruins were what was left and the idea was to preserve what was left and interpret what was left. I think it's only in retrospect, and as I have talked to visitors who were greatly inspired by these two places, that I have come to see both in terms less of a literal interpretation of history and historic properties and more in terms of a monumental commemoration. Those wall stubs standing,on the one hand on an open prairie, and on the other, amid desert mountains seemed to have a powerful effect on visitors, one you would never achieve through a more literal type of presentation such as we have, for example, at Fort Davis. Fort Davis offered the opportunity to go a step further than Union and Bowie because the walls stood almost to roof level. Maybe it's instructive that Davis was the first of the southwestern historic sites that a genuine historical architect got involved in.

Dick: Davis?

Bob: Yes and that was Charlie Pope. Our treatment was Charlie Pope's proposal. After years of experimentation at Fort Union and Fort Bowie, we were no closer to anything that could be called a stabilization technique that would keep those walls from melting away and falling down. As an architect, Charlie Pope said the only thing that would guarantee preservation was a roof. So let us in effect erect ruins shelters over these buildings at Fort Davis. We'll make them in the form of historic representations of the old roofs, and we'll protect the walls with these roofs. That's what was done there.

Dick: So the primary urge there was preservation rather than interpretation.

Bob: At Fort Davis?

Dick: Yes.

Bob: That was the justification. That was 1962. I think I was probably still thinking more in terms of interpretation, trying to achieve for the visitor a visual aspect that as nearly as possible duplicated what would have been seen there in the historic period. That was never possible either at Fort Union or Fort Bowie. They were strictly ruins stabilization projects. My thinking didn't begin to undergo modification in terms of the monumental aspects of those two until much later, when I began to see how these ruins situations affected visitors differently than the literal presentation of Fort Davis.

Melody: I guess what I am beginning to pick up in these interviews is that there was a very slow evolution to what we now know as either historic preservation or cultural resources management and that up through, say '66, most of the aspects of what we now know as cultural resources management was done more for interpretation than it was for the preservation of the resource. Would you say that there is some validity for that?

Bob: I'd say absolutely so, and I hadn't thought of it in exactly those terms until this moment, but I think that is an accurate statement of the situation, and I think the explanation lies in the new blood, the new perspectives, that the 66 act brought into the National Park Service. The biggest influence would have been Ernest Connally and the new way of looking at things that he brought to the Park Service. Not new in terms of the historic preservation movement at large. Not new in terms of the way Europeans and even Asians looked at it. But new in terms of the way the Park Service looked at it. The Park Service up to 1966 was hooked on interpretation, as I was, as I look back in retrospect. And the new dimensions of thought came from people like Ernest Connally and Joe Waterson. Hank Judd was being heard now where he hadn't before. Charlie Pope had never been listened to before, even though he had been saying these things. This was new thinking.

Dick: When you speak of new dimensions of thought, Bob, and of Dr. Connally, could you be more specific? What are you referring to there?

Bob: It has to do with the architectural and art dimension of historic preservation. It has to do with a preoccupation with the resource and its preservation in all of its elements that have meaning and significance. Before Connally and his crowd came in, we were interested in going back and freezing our properties at some significant date and interpreting what they had to say. This is an oversimplification because there were nuances beyond that, but basically that is what it came down to. Ernest and his people, if they didn't convert everybody, at least got them to thinking of different ways of looking at it—that the building in all of its evolutionary details said something beyond what was said by a building frozen at a certain time. Interpretation ceased to be the overriding consideration, although the tensions then became very marked between the professional interpreters at Harper's Ferry Center and Connally's people down in WASO. Connally was much more obsessed with the preservation of significant architecture. It came to a collision in the Nelson House at Yorktown, which in Connally's view was an architectural monument of first rank. In the view of the people at Harpers Ferry it was an ideal mechanism for putting on a living history production. Obviously the two approaches have major implications for how you treat the building architecturally. Connally opted for an exact restoration because it's an architectural monument as well as the headquarters of one of the generals. The interpreters wanted a series of rooms in which they could stage vignettes of Colonial life. Connally won that one, but this represents the tension and conflict that developed after 1966.

Dick: So in a sense preservation took the lead over interpretation with regard to how a site would be managed.

Bob: No I don't think it did. I think it represented a new way of thinking that entered into the mix that was going on in the Park Service. I think that conflict probably still exists to this day. I don't think it's ever been resolved one way or another. But it did have the effect of diluting the supremacy of interpretation and creating another dimension that has affected the way we do things.

Dick: You said that Dr. Connally was interested in the preservation of significant architecture. Does that translate over to significant original fabric in general whether it's of an architectural nature?

Bob: Yes, very definitely. He insisted on preservation of the maximum of original fabric with a minimum of intervention by today's architects and a clear differentiation between the original and the intervention. This was carried forward in the final stages of the Independence Hall restoration.

Dick: Bob, back to Bent's Old Fort just a bit. During the deliberations on that site, was it ever suggested that perhaps those walls might be ghosted somewhat like what those walls are ghosted at Jamestown.

Bob: Not to my knowledge. If so I never knew about it.

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