I went to a birthday party yesterday at the Statue of
Liberty and Ellis Island. Yes, the NPS turned 100. Lady Liberty continues to draw
people to her island and to our shores, and Ellis Island bears witness to the
diverse strength of our people. More about this in a future posting.
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| Rangers at the base of the Statue of Liberty holding the lyrics to "This Land is Your Land" (Photo by Hunner) |
Driven by History has celebrated our parks and historic
sites since February with weekly blogs. Some parks are the jewels in the crown,
like the Grand Canyon which still takes my breath away, Yosemite with its
magnificent wilderness, and the majestic Statue of Liberty. Others are
pinky-toe parks with small visitation and scant staff that require
determination to get to and imagination to envision. Since I already honor the
parks with my weekly blogs, this posting celebrates the creation of the
National Park Service and the people, past and present, who made it happen and
keep it going.
Many people find spiritual renewal in our parks. Their spirits
soar with the landscapes, their senses come alive to the sounds and smells, their
souls revitalized with tall trees, glaciers, grizzlies, and waterfalls. I too am
nourished by wilderness, but I also get rejuvenated at our historical parks. The
past grabs me in hardy embraces, and I am fascinated by our predecessors who
created our country and then changed it again and again. Our national parks
preserve this history and narrate what we have achieved and how we continue to
work towards our best idea—the Declaration of Independence.
A century ago however, most Americans did not find communion
with sublime nature, but saw the seemingly boundless resources in our continent
solely as sources for profit. Others did grow concerned about the vanishing wilderness.
One of the most influential was John Muir who I wrote about in a previous blog.
In his ten books and over 100 articles, he helped launch the preservation
movement with calls like this: “The forests are not inexhaustible, quick
measures must be taken if ruin is to be avoided.”
Others joined him. In 1908, Republican President Teddy
Roosevelt acknowledged: “We have become great because of the lavish use of our
resources, but the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our
forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted,
when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams,
polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
Roosevelt worked to pass the Antiquities Act of 1906 which
gave presidents the authority to designate public lands as national monuments. Within
ten years, presidents had designated twenty-one national monuments across the
country, but no bureau to manage them or the parks. Consequently, some parks
lost valuable resources. For example, part of Yosemite National Park was lost
to San Francisco in 1913 when Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed to provide water
to the Bay Area. This loss motivated the preservationists to work for the
creation of the NPS in 1916.
The idea that public lands needed protection from those who
wanted to extract resources from them dates back to after the Civil War when a movement
to preserve Yellowstone gained momentum. It resulted in our first official
national park in 1872. Setting aside the groves of giant sequoias in California
and the waterfalls in Yosemite established the next parks in the 1890s. More
followed. By 1916, the U.S. had fourteen National Parks.
A wealthy Chicago businessman, Stephen Mather, loved the existing
parks. He complained to the Interior Secretary Franklin Lane about the deterioration
of the parks who invited Mather to come to Washington to straighten things out.
Mather realized that the parks needed their own agency. Some resource
extraction companies fought against protecting these public lands.
Additionally, some federal agencies did not want to share their lands with a
national parks bureau, especially the Department of Agriculture’s Forest
Service. By emphasizing the economic benefits of parks as a tourist draw,
Mather won over Congressmen to his cause, and President Wilson signed the
enabling legislation for the National Park Service on August 25, 1916.
As with any new agency in government, creating the NPS was a
political act. In fact, creating every park has been a political act since our elected
officials do it. Vested interests often fight new park proposals. A convoluted example
of this concerns the Grand Canyon. Ralph Cameron arrived at the Grand Canyon as
a miner in 1890. In the coming years, he filed dubious mining claims so that he
could charge people to hike on the Bright Angel Trail. In 1919, the Grand
Canyon became a National Park but Cameron continued to act as if he owned the
trail from the South Rim. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him, the NPS
tried to dislodge him, but after he got elected as a Senator for Arizona, he used
his office to defund operational funding for the Grand Canyon so he could
continue to profit from tourists hiking on the Bright Angel Trail. In 1926,
Cameron lost his reelection bid, exposed for using his office to help him profit
at the Canyon. The Bright Angel Trail became part of the NPS in 1928.
Congressional opposition to the parks continues today. The Center
for American Progress has found that over the last three years, conservative
members of Congress have introduced forty-four bills or amendments to strip
away protection for national parks. Some in Congress want to devolve units of
the NPS to state ownership. And the Republican Party’s 2016 official platform
states: “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s
enormous landholdings and control of water in the west could be better used for
ranching, mining or forestry through private ownership.”[1]
Our public lands, especially those protected by the NPS, continue to be
targeted by a dedicated group in Congress.
In fact, funding for the NPS has
declined 15% over the past fifteen years despite the addition of twenty-two new
units in just the last eight years. The NPS estimates that it has a backlog of
deferred maintenance of $1.2 billion. In the historic preservation field, we
call this “demolition by neglect.”
Nonetheless, our parks enjoy robust public support. Over
300,000,000 people will visit the parks this centennial year. To take care of
that many visitors to the 413 units of the NPS, three key groups of people make
the parks work. First, permanent NPS staff manage many of the aspects of park
operations, from interpretation to preservation to administration to maintenance
to search and rescue (yes, places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite have a team
of rangers to help those visitors who are lost or injured while hiking and
camping).
The second group are seasonal park employees who work during
the peak summer months. They are college students doing an internship, recent
graduates, retirees, and people who are dedicated to the parks. A total of
about 22,000 people—permanent, temporary, and seasonals—work for the NPS.
The third group of people are volunteers. The parks would
not be able to operate at the level they do without volunteers who sit at the
reception desks, who give tours, and who help with maintenance and
preservation. Over 200,000 volunteers make the parks happen. Here are some of
the park people that I have met recently.
Retired elementary school teacher Tom Wilson at Ft. Clatsop
in Oregon role played being a sergeant with the Corps of Discovery. Blacksmiths
Dennis Torresdahl and John Prutus at Fort Vancouver in Washington demonstrated
working hot iron at their fur trading site. Maria Wynn and Kay Morrison at the Rosie
the Riveter/World War II Home Front park in California are true Rosies who
welded the Liberty ships that helped win the war. All the above are volunteers
who enriched my experiences at the parks.
Ranger Alisa Lynch showed her commitment to telling the
story of Japanese American internment camps during the war at Manzanar in
California. Ranger Robert Petersen at Huffman Prairie Field explained the
dramatic events at the place where the Wright Brothers perfected their flying
machines. Rangers Joe Ratterman and Kate at Hopewell Heritage in Ohio argued
with me and each other about the theories of the people who lived there 2,000
years ago. Rangers Joel Shockley and Richard Zahm at Washita spent a good part
of a morning discussing with me the events of Custer and Black Kettle at their
site. Ranger James and volunteer Paul shared with me their deep knowledge about
the French and Indian War at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania.
Volunteer Roxanne Sullivan, who lives near where Flight 93
crashed on September 11, 2001, shared with me her experience as she first grappled
with this horrid tragedy and then healed through taking care of the items left
at the site by visitors. These are just a few of the many people who I met and
engaged with on a wide variety of topics. I am a better historian hearing about
our pasts from them, and I am a better citizen knowing that we have such
dedicated, caring, and lively people preserving and interpreting our past.
So happy birthday National Park Service. We are a better
country having you around. Our parks nourish us, enlighten us, and explain us. And
they are fun to visit. For me, celebrating this birthday at the Statue of
Liberty and Ellis Island was a blast.
[1] Oliver
Milman, “The Political Crusades Targeting National Parks for Drilling and
Exploitation,” The Guardian, 8/23/2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/national-parks-100th-birthday-political-threats?cmp=oth_b-aplnews_d-1.
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