Few features of the American landscape and culture have the name recognition of the National Parks. They are visited by millions of people every year and revered by countless others who never visit. For many people the parks are more than merely beautiful places, more than history and heritage, touching something deep in the human spirit, reminding us that we are part of a great cosmic enterprise in which the mysteries that surround its workings are cause for thought, reflection, and reverence. The parks kindle the wish to discover the world in which we live and to sample the world of our forebears and the places and things that bridge the gulf of time that separates us from our past. The parks are something about which poets write and into which philosophers delve. They are things to capture on film, canvas, and by the printed word. Our National Parks are places to be experienced with all one's senses.
The first National Park, Yellowstone, was created in 1872. Since that year, more than 365 other areas that collectively make up what is now called the national park system have joined Yellowstone. The modern system includes historic sites, battlefields, recreation areas, and other units across a wide geographic expanse. Since 1916 the national park system has been in the care of the National Park Service, a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The existence and permanence of the national park system are largely taken for granted. However, during the years of its growth the national park system has lost some five dozen areas. The second National Park, Mackinac National Park in Michigan, created only three years after Yellowstone, was abolished in 1895. Some parks were returned to private ownership. One park was never given any form of on-site protection, and after thirty years looters had stripped it of all reason for existence.
Proposals have been advanced from time to time to divest other areas, on grounds Congress or a president made a mistake in adding an area to the system. Tastes may change or the facts on which earlier decisions were based may now be believed to be untrue. Some park "hit lists" have even been drawn up by professionals in the National Park Service. As recently as mid-1992 the then secretary of the Interior endorsed carving off a seventy-four-acre tract at Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico for the private development of a golf course. Is it possible a consensus could be forged at some time in the future to execute someone's hit list?
About a dozen park areas have been authorized by Congress but never acquired or, if acquired, never developed for public visitation or use. How much discretion ought the National Park Service have to ignore new or authorized areas? For what reasons and for how long? At what cost to the resource? Some new parks were contingent on donations of land that have never materialized. Should the national park system depend on voluntary donations of nationally significant resources?
The modern creation of new park system areas by Congress has become what has been widely called a "park barrel," in which previously existing high standards of park selection have been compromised in the interest of local economic development or to honor someone unimportant. There were, however, no agreed-upon standards or guidelines to shape the growth of the national park system. It just grew site by site in response to the pleading of a constituency or the foresight or ambition of one or more members of Congress. New units were only rarely first proposed by the National Park Service.
The absence of agreed-upon standards for site selection and the lack of any national plan or strategy by which the merits of individual proposals may be weighed is a principal cause of today's park barrel. The political agendas of recent presidents to avoid enlargement of the federal estate have left the National Park Service without its own agenda, thereby leaving the initiative for all new park areas to the whim of Congress and interest groups.
The National Park Service has often been a reluctant bride in the wedding of new sites and areas to the system, especially those that cross new frontiers of representation or move into a new environment. In the early days much of the Service was uncomfortable managing historic sites; and in later times large parts of the Service only reluctantly took responsibilities for the urban National Recreation Areas.(1)
The National Parks and Conservation Association, a strong park system support group, has argued in times past that the National Park Service should be removed from the Department of the Interior and given the status of an independent agency. Others have suggested transfer of the parks or selected park management functions (such as visitor accommodations and food services) to a non federal or quasi-governmental institution. It is argued the parks would then be better insulated from pressures that favor over-development or excessive visitation.
Just how permanent is the national park system? How well shielded is it from interests that would shrink its size or manipulate permitted uses? How can the processes by which units are added to the system gain the integrity necessary to make every new unit secure for all time? Is absolute permanence an essential characteristic of the national park system? Or should the national park system be reviewed from time to time and units eliminated or altered to reflect contemporary thought and values?
Once secured, how can decision making and programming of capital investments and maintenance adequately deal with a long-term commitment to preservation? The resources of the national park system are often fragile. Sometimes they have been badly abused. Natural healing processes will take several generations of investment and care. All this must be accomplished, however, in a governmental structure whose longest time-line is the six-year term of a United States senator.
The National Park Service as well as its supporters perceive that the national park system is in trouble. Discussions focus on the need for large-scale reinvestment in the park system infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, and visitor facilities. The system also needs additional staff and new types of skills to upgrade resource protection or improve the quality of services to park visitors. In addition, the parks are the object of often serious threats from external forces: air and water pollution, urban encroachments, blight and decay, the spread of exotic animal or plant species, and other adversities. There is also need to eliminate the large land acquisition backlog--rounding out existing parks--to save money in the long run and prevent possible incompatible or damaging developments in the short term.
The National Park Service recently issued a report characterizing the bureau of "beset by controversy, concern, weakened morale, and declining effectiveness."(2) The report details a myriad of internal staffing, management, and organizational problems requiring the attention of the agency's top leadership and that of the administration and Congress.
In this book, I assert that important policy issues--including those mentioned above and others detailed in the chapters to follow--affect the existence, permanence, and condition of the national park system. Those problems need to be addressed by a broad spectrum of the interested public and by the president and the Congress. The time to do that is now, while supporters are concerned for the parks and while the National Park Service is sensitized to the need for change.
Today's circumstances are the consequence of a long history of concern for the best of America's natural and historic places. A complete history of the National Park idea and of the growth and development of the National Park Service as a bureau are beyond the scope of this book. Readers are encouraged to refer to sources cited in the bibliography, especially the books by former directors Albright, Hartzog and Wirth and the scholarly studies by Ise, Rothman, and Runte. The following historical overview sets the stage for the issues discussed in later chapters.
Yellowstone National Park existed for forty-four years before there was a National Park Service to care for it. The first National Park did not, however, come about because of any organized movement or articulate national objective.(3) It came into being because a small group of men experienced it first hand and agreed among themselves that it ought to be set aside as a public park.(4) In those years the public domain--lands owned by the federal government as a consequence of the nation's westward expansion--was the object of purchase and claim, from homesteads to gold mines. Without a law to withdraw the lands from public entry, the wonders that Yellowstone holds would have surely transferred to private ownership. At the urging of the men who had experienced Yellowstone in person, the support of several writers and publishers and a small group in Congress, the act creating Yellowstone National Park passed the Congress and was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.(5) In the early days funds and staff to care for the park were meager to nonexistent. Poaching and trespass were common. The pattern would continue for thirty years.
In 1906, in response to concerns about the destruction and looting by pot hunters of Indian cliff dwellings and other Native American ruins in the Southwest, Congress passed the Antiquities Act that gave broad new protection for historic and prehistoric artifacts on the public domain through fines for looting and injuring them. The law also gave the president authority to "declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest situated upon lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments."(6) The law was used by President Theodore Roosevelt to create Petrified Forest, Devils Tower, El Morro, and Montezuma Castle National Monuments and to begin a long process of saving parts of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. The Antiquities Act has been used by more than a dozen presidents to create national monuments.
Between 1872 and 1916 thirty-six areas were set aside by Congress and the president in units that would become part of the domain administered by the National Park Service upon its creation in 1916. The bureau was created to care for the parks and monuments then administered by the U. S. Department of the Interior. At the time other units were administered by the General Land Office, the Department of Agriculture, the War Department, and an office in the District of Columbia.(7) Between creation of the National Park Service and a major reorganization in 1933 some eighty-four new areas were set aside that would one day be part of the system. Of that number thirty-six were assigned to offices other than the Park Service and two were authorized but never established by the Park Service.
In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlarged the domain under NPS jurisdiction by transferring to it fifty-six parks, national monuments, battlefields, national cemeteries, and Washington, D.C., sites. The move was promoted by the pleading of Director Horace Albright, who saw the move as one that would make the National Park Service truly a national agency and give it a broadened constituency that would assure more attention (and money) from Congress.
The early years of the National Park Service were times of struggle for its leadership to gain the funds and people necessary to care for the parks.(8) Collateral work to develop a cadre of park professionals to carry out the day-to-day responsibilities in the parks was no less important. No such lines of work--combining resource-related skills and services for a growing number of visitors--previously existed.
The early units managed by NPS were largely natural area parks and national monuments in the West. It was not until the reorganization of 1933 that the Service's agenda took on the major responsibilities for historic areas and resources. The years of the New Deal also saw NPS overseeing the operations of an many as 600 camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps that provided Depression Era employment for more than 120,000 men. A total of 118 CCC camps were in units of the national park system, where enrollees constructed roads, bridges, buildings, and hundreds of recreation facilities, many of which are still in use today.(9) CCC funding also paid for a sizeable group of biologists working in the parks, numbering as many as 27.
During the 1920s and 1930s the Park Service played a leading role in the development of park systems at the state level. The Service helped in the formation of the National Conference on State Parks that sparked the growth of new park systems and helped professionalize agencies rampant with political patronage. NPS also took on the actual development of areas that were later turned over to the states. A group of parks dubbed "National Recreation Demonstration Areas" was put together through the federal purchase of submarginal agricultural lands that were converted into parks. Almost all of them still serve public park needs in either state or federal jurisdiction.
With the addition of new historic sites by the reorganization of 1933, new legislation broadened the NPS sphere of influence in historic preservation, such as happened with passage of the Historic Sites Act of August 21, 1935. This law authorized the Park Service to engage in surveys and other assistance under a national policy to "preserve for public use historic sites, buildings, and objects of national significance for the inspiration and benefit of the people of the United States."(10)
The law inaugurated the national historic landmarks program, under which the Secretary of the Interior could designate sites and structures not in federal ownership, thereby giving them the prestige associated with a "national" designation and at least some color of protection.(11) The law also authorized new areas for addition to the National Park Service but only if no federal funds were involved. The first area added under the law was Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri.
As long as the National Park Service has been associated with the field of historic preservation, the Service has struggled with the limits for its engagement with historic areas. The nominal standard for such involvement begins with the notion that any area must have national significance to qualify for NPS management. As will be explained in a later chapter on park system nomenclature, national significance has very much to do with the eye of the beholder. Sometimes disagreements over whether a site is nationally significant take the form of esoteric disputes between differing historical perspectives. In other instances, such differences boil down to the politics of management by a federal agency versus administration by a state or local government or a private body.
During World War II the parks and the Service retrenched in a major way. Appropriations to NPS dropped from $21.1 million in 1940 to $4.6 million in 1944. Recovery came back quickly, however, and by 1947 funding was back up to $26 million. Visitation was also growing and the backlog of needs and deferred maintenance was getting out of hand. By the time Conrad L. Wirth became director in late 1951, the Service was plagued by decrepit facilities of all types and inadequate facilities to meet growing visitation levels. Wirth's answer was to invent MISSION 66, a ten-year reinvestment and development program, which he presented to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1956. The president gave the program his support and so did Congress, which appropriated more than $1 billion for MISSION 66 projects over the next ten years.
The year 1966, which saw the end of the MISSION 66 effort, also saw the beginning of a new and wider range of NPS responsibilities in the field of historic preservation. In that year Congress passed the Historic Preservation Act, which defined major new departures for the entire preservation movement at all levels of government and in private efforts. NPS would oversee a National Register of Historic Places, keeping tabs on sites, structures, and objects of not only national significance, but also those associated with state and local interest. NPS also administered a program of grants-in-aid to the states for historic preservation purposes. The new law also created the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation with responsibilities for coordinating federal actions in the field and with the unique authority to "comment" on federal actions that it believed could adversely affect historic resources.(12)
These "exterior" programs in historic preservation suffered from the outset, being regarded by many NPS professionals as something in which the Service simply should not be engaged. The Service has usually found new departures difficult to assimilate into its perceived mission. In part for that reason, the external programs in historic preservation were reorganized early in the Carter Administration. The Secretary of the Interior consolidated them with the recreation grant-in-aid functions of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation into a new bureau, the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service (HCRS). The new bureau was, however, short-lived. In 1981 the external programs were returned to the National Park Service when HCRS was abolished by Secretary of the Interior James Watt.
The 1960s also saw a new environmental ethic emerging in public policy and in public support for new conservation initiatives under the leadership of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall. In those years a "last chance" effort succeeded in saving irreplaceable beaches and waterside resources at seashore and lakeshore parks on the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific Coasts and the Great Lakes.
Other national legislation during the 1960s and 1970s was also having an impact on management of areas by the National Park Service. The Wilderness Act of 1964,(13) which gave statutory sanction to road-free areas, set in motion a process for studying and subsequently designating such areas on lands administered by the Park Service and other federal land management agencies. In 1970 the National Environmental Policy Act (14) caused major changes in the way in which federal project planning would be accomplished. This new law required levels of public disclosure unknown before, compelled public involvement in federal project planning, and forced all agencies to consider and assess the environmental impacts of proposed actions. After the Park Service organic act, no single law has probably ever had such profound and enduring influence on the work of NPS. Also in 1970 Congress gave its first official recognition to the idea and concept of a national park system. The law and its consequences are discussed in detail in the following chapter.
In 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA)(15) to reconcile the land claims of Alaska's Native Americans and the often competing claims arising out of Alaska having become a state in 1959. ANSCA also contained provisions permitting the president to withdraw from the operation of the public land laws (homesteading, mining, and so forth) up to 80 million acres in Alaska "suitable for addition to or creation as units of the National Park, Forest, Wildlife Refuge and Wild and Scenic Rivers Systems." The law and withdrawals would remain in effect for five years or until Congress acted. Following two years of study, Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton, recommended the addition of some 32.3 million acres to the national park system.
When the Senate bogged down in considering the complicated and controversial proposals for the Alaska lands, President Jimmy Carter took the proverbial bull by the horns and a scant seventeen days before the withdrawals were due to expire he used the Antiquities Act authority to proclaim fifteen new national monuments and two expansions of existing monuments. In 1980 the lands were sorted out in new legislation, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).(16) The law added more than 47 million acres to the national park system--far more than was proposed originally by the previous administration.
Since the end of World War II the national park system has grown from 180 to some 367 units and has doubled in acreage. Visitation has increased from about 20 million to over 364 million.(17) Appropriations have increased from about $5.5 million ($36.8 million in constant 1990 dollars) to well over $1 billion in 1994. The Service's tasks have become more complicated in the wake of revised understandings of the effects of actions and developments on the environment. Other laws relating to endangered species, toxic and hazardous materials, workplace safety, accessibility for the disabled, relocation assistance, and the government-wide impact of nondiscrimination laws and policies have greatly complicated and expanded the responsibilities of NPS managers and staff. These corollary duties have often been placed upon the system without the coincident addition of funds or staff.
The National Park Service now manages areas, sites, buildings, artifacts, and works of art of inestimable value. Whether the numbers associated with growth and other realities, particularly in recent years, spell adequacy or disaster (or something in between) is the subject of later chapters.
The modern national park system is a complicated array of natural and historic resources, managed by an equally complicated system of people and financial assets. In the following chapters, I hope to sort through the complications and discover threads and meanings that can shape the future of the system.
1. In the early days Directors Mather and Albright sought to add various historic sites to the domain of the Park Service. Both men had an interest in things historic, but, more particularly, they saw such additions as an expedient means for enlarging the political constituency of the bureau east of the Mississippi.
2. National Parks for the 21st Century, 4.
3. The year 1872 is traditionally associated with the beginning of the national park system, but nineteen areas now included in the system had their origins earlier than Yellowstone. Some people claim that Yosemite was really the first National Park inasmuch as Congress undertook to create that park in 1864 through transfer of land to the State of California for "public use, resort, and recreation...inalienable for all time". The federal park was established in 1890 and in 1906 the lands ceded to the State were returned to become part of modern Yosemite NP. It is also possible to argue that Hot Springs NP (Ark.) was the beginning. It was reserved from the public domain in 1832, though it did not garner the title National Park until 1921. The other early units included parks in Washington, D. C. (1790): Ford's Theatre (1866); and twelve National Cemeteries (1863 to 1870), all of which are now part of the national park system.
4. In 1870 a well-appointed expedition visited Yellowstone under the leadership of Henry D. Washburn, a former congressman and Civil War general. Washburn and others wrote glowing articles about the wonders they had seen, sparking others to visit the area, including the U.S. Geological Survey, photographer William Jackson and painter Thomas Moran. Moran's large canvas "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone" was hung in the Capitol, and can be credited with "speaking louder than a thousand words" on behalf of the park.
5. 17 STAT. 32.
6. 34 STAT. 225. It is interesting to note that scenery or natural area values were not included in the list of reasons for creating national monuments. Needless to say the words "historic or scientific interest" have served as adequate. For an account of the passage of the Antiquities Act, see Rothman, Preserving Different Pasts, 34-51.
7. The National Capital Parks, the National Mall, and the White House were part of the original L'Enfant plan to establish a permanent national capital, beginning with seventeen public reservations purchased in the early years, and now made up of some three hundred sites. The National Capital Parks were managed by the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital until 1933, when they were transferred to the National Park Service.
8. See Appendix 5 and figure 1. For an account of the early years, see Albright, Birth of the National Park Service.
9. For a firsthand account of the Park Service role in the Civilian Conservation Corps, see Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People. Wirth was the NPS official primarily responsible for the program. He later served as NPS director from 1951 to 1964.
10. 49 STAT. 666.
11. National Historic Landmarks have no legally enforceable protection solely by virtue of that designation. The mere declaration, however, affords a modicum of non-legal protection that has had a surprisingly durable record of success. The landmark program is regarded by many people, especially within the Service, as a useful means to relieve the pressure of adding less than suitable sites to the system.
12. Although the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has no authority to veto federal (or local) actions that might adversely affect a historic property, in practice its power to "comment" on such actions has caused many proposed actions to be modified and some to be abandoned entirely. The council, made up of private citizens and representatives of federal agencies, has a distinguished record of successes against a collection of formidable economic and political forces.
13. 78 STAT. 890.
14. 83 STAT. 852.
15. 85 STAT. 688.
16. 94 STAT. 2371.
17. NPS is in 1994 engaged in a massive revision of its visitation statistics--largely downward. Official estimates have dropped from about 350 million (1991) to 267 million (1991, calculated in 1994.) See note at Appendix 5.
Continued in the book, which is available from your favorite book store (perhaps special ordered) or directly from the University of Illinois Press (see the form below), or Dwight will sell you a copy if you will send him an e-mail.