¹ George B. Hartzog, Jr., Battling for the National Parks (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1988). For an interesting portrait of Hartzog, see also John McPhee, “Profiles,” The New Yorker 47 (September 11, 1971): 45-88.

² Hartzog, Battling for the National Parks, 14.

³ The headquarters of the National Park Service was relocated from Washington, D.C., to the sprawling Merchandise Mart building in Chicago from 1942 to 1947 to free up scarce office space during World War II.

⁴ Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) was the renowned architect who had won the international competition to design the Gateway Arch.

⁵ George B. Hartzog, Jr., “Supplemental Remarks,” memo to interviewer, September 21, 2005.

⁶ Secretary Lane issued a policy memo on management of the National Park Service on March 13, 1918, and Secretary Work issued his policy memo on NPS management on March 11, 1925.

⁷ Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”

⁸ The pledge was printed on one side and “goals” printed on the reverse side of wallet-size plastic cards distributed to every employee.

⁹ Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”

¹⁰ Special blue envelopes were routinely used for confidential correspondence.

¹¹ Charles Eames (1907-1978) was a distinguished American designer, architect, and filmmaker, as well as Saarinen’s partner and friend.

¹² The Park Service had had two female superintendents. The Adams family recommended Wilhelmina Harris to administer Adams National Historic Site. Previously, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Gertrude Cooper as superintendent at Vanderbilt Mansion. Not until 1971 were women appointed from within Service ranks to become park superintendents.

¹³ Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts, authorized in 1966, marked the beginning of National Park Service involvement in cultural parks.

¹⁴ James M. Ridenour, director of the Service during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, argued that the addition of sites of less than national significance was “thinning the blood” of the National Park System.

¹⁵ An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities, 34 Stat. 225 (June 8, 1906); Historic Sites Act, 49 Stat. 666 (August 21, 1935).

¹⁶ Historian Ronald F. Lee came from the University of Minnesota to Shiloh National Military Park with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program in 1933. He served from 1938 to 1951 as chief historian for the National Park Service and later as regional director in Philadelphia. He was instrumental in the creation of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1959 he proposed a program of designating nationally significant properties outside the parks as national historic landmarks. Historian Herbert E. Kahler also came from the University of Minnesota to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park through the CCC program. As chief historian from 1951 to 1964, he oversaw implementation of the national historic landmarks program.

¹⁷ The secretary sent a memo to President Roosevelt designating Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on December 20, 1935. The president issued an executive order the next day.

¹⁸ James A. Glass, The Beginnings of a New National Historic Preservation Program, 1957 to 1969 (Nashville, TN) American Association for State and Local History, 1990), 10.

¹⁹ According to historian James A. Glass, Laurance G. Henderson and Carl Feiss approached the Ford Foundation.

²⁰ The administrator of the General Services Administration agreed to participate. The panel also included politically influential individuals: Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, Representative Widnall, Governor Phillip Hoff of Vermont, former St. Louis mayor Raymond R. Tucker, and Gordon Gray.

²¹ Glass, The Beginnings of a New National Historic Preservation Program, 10.

²² Ibid., 11.

²³ Early in his administration, Stephen T. Mather, the founder and first director of the National Park Service, was incapacitated for a prolonged period due to illness, leaving management of the new agency to his assistant director, Horace M. Albright.

²⁴ On April 9, 1933, Horace Albright and others accompanied President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a visit to Shenandoah National Park. During the ride back to Washington, Albright mentioned his desire to acquire historical areas that were currently under the administration of the War Department. Roosevelt agreed and directed Albright to prepare an executive order for the transfer.

²⁵ Hartzog, “Supplemental Remarks.”

²⁶ President Nixon replaced Hartzog with Ronald H. Walker, a former White House assistant. Hartzog was apparently forced out after the Service revoked a special use permit allowing President Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo, to dock his houseboat at Biscayne National Monument [now Biscayne National Park], Florida. See Battling for the National Parks, 247-248.

²⁷ The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, 85 Stat. 688 (December 18, 1971), directed the secretary of the interior to withdraw from selection by the state or Native groups, or from disposition under public-land laws, up to eighty million acres of public land that he deemed suitable for national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, or wild and scenic river systems.

²⁸ Rep. John P. Saylor (R-PA) served on the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Jackson (D-WA) was the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senator Bible (D-NV) chaired the Parks and Recreation Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and was the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies. For an account of Senator Bible’s influential role regarding National Park legislation and his dealings with Director Hartzog, see Gary E. Elliott, Senator Alan Bible and the Politics of the New West (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1994).

²⁹ Unable to secure sufficient congressional support, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create the C & O Canal National Historic Monument in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, Rep. Aspinall, chairman of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, refused to fund the development of the park to send a message that such actions must first be sanctioned by Congress. President Kennedy declared only two national monuments: Russell Cave (Alabama) and Buck Island Reef (Virgin Islands).

³⁰ A. Starker Leopold chaired an advisory board on wildlife management appointed by Secretary Udall. In 1963 the board produced a report “Wildlife Management in the National Parks” (known as the Leopold Report) that defined a basic management philosophy for national parks and transformed policy priorities related to wildlife.

³¹ Rep. Julia B. Hansen (D-WA) chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies.

³² Ronald F. Lee, Family Tree of the National Park Service (Philadelphia, PA: Eastern National Park and Monument Association, 1972); Freeman Tilden, Who Am I?: Reflections on the Meaning of Parks on the Occasion of the Nation’s Bicentennial (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1975).

³³ In the 1950s, the Service had proposed to preserve portions of three rivers in Missouri (Eleven Point, Jacks Fork, and Current) as a national monument. This proposal faced strong opposition from the USDA Forest Service, which already managed much of the land along Eleven Point River, and from locals who did not want to lose the ability to hunt and fish in the area. Although the Jacks Fork and Current rivers later became part of Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Hartzog was not able to incorporate Eleven Point River.

The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, administered by the USDA Forest Service, was established in March 1972.

³⁴ The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 82 Stat. 906 (October 2, 1968), identified eight rivers and adjacent land in nine states as the initial components of a national wild and scenic river system, which was to be administered variously by the secretaries of agriculture and the interior. The act names twenty-seven other rivers or river segments to be studied as potential additions to the system.

³⁵ The National Trails System Act, 92 Stat. 919 (October 2, 1968), provided for national recreational trails accessible to urban areas to be designated by the secretary of the interior or the secretary of agriculture according to specific criteria, and for national scenic trails, generally longer and more remote, to be established by Congress.

³⁶ The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, originally chartered in 1856, purchased George Washington’s Virginia estate with the goal of restoring and preserving it as a historic shrine.

³⁷ As amended in 1968, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, 78 Stat. 897 (September 3, 1964), set aside revenues from visitor fees, surplus property sales, motorboat fuel taxes, and offshore oil and gas leasing for the acquisition of federal and state parkland. The fund was administered by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a new Interior Department bureau that had been established in 1962. This bureau took away the Park Service’s responsibilities for recreation planning and assistance along with some of its staff and funds. The new bureau, which took over responsibility for the National Register of Historic Places, the natural and historic landmarks programs, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, did not function smoothly. In 1978, the Carter administration reconstructed the BOR as the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service and reassigned some of these functions to the Park Service. In 1981 Secretary James Watt abolished the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service and returned these functions to the Park Service.

³⁸ In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed two executive orders transferring a number of parks and monuments from the the War Department and Forest Service to the National Park Service, as well as the National Capital Parks in Washington, D.C., then managed by a separate office. With the addition of forty-four historical areas, the Service’s involvement in and responsibility for historic sites increased dramatically.

³⁹ Robert M. Utley served as chief historian for the Park Service from 1964 to 1972. He then became director of the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation and assistant director for park preservation. Utley played a key role in implementing the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and advancing preservation policies. In 1977 he left the Service to become deputy director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

⁴⁰ The George Wright Society is a nonprofit association of administrators, educators, and other professionals who promote excellence in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection, and interpretation of parks, historic sites, cultural landscapes, and other protected areas.

⁴¹ Glass, The Beginnings of a New National Historic Preservation Program, 29.

⁴² During the summer of 1970, young people from the San Francisco area poured into Yosemite National Park. Their unruly behavior disrupted other visitors and alarmed park rangers. During the July 4th weekend, several hundred hippies gathered in Stoneman Meadow, a grassy area at the center of Yosemite Village. When rangers tried to disperse the crowd, violence erupted, resulting in dozens of injuries and arrests. The incident highlighted the need for a professional law enforcement program for park rangers.

⁴³ The Veterans Bureau was established in 1921 and consolidated into the newly created Veterans Administration in 1930. In May 1932, thousands of veterans of the World War American Expeditionary Force descended on Washington, D.C., calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, to lobby Congress for an early cash payment of a war service bonus due them in 1945. A number of the veterans camped out around the capital and refused to leave. In July, President Herbert Hoover ordered the secretary of the army to evacuate them. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur led infantry troops with swords drawn and pursued the Bonus Forces into their main encampment on the other side of the Anacostia River, where a fire erupted. Americans were outraged at the spectacle of the army attacking unarmed citizens with tanks and firebrands, and the episode became a symbol of President Herbert Hoover’s indifference to the plight of the unemployed.

⁴⁴ Theodor R. Swem passed away in 2006.

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