You mentioned the Living History program, and I wondered if you wanted to talk some more about your initiatives in that area.
Well, they did some very innovative things. I mean they made lye soap at the Lincoln Boyhood Home [National Memorial] in Indiana. Imagine that, lye soap. I don’t know whether you were ever exposed to lye soap. I grew up in rural South Carolina in the Low Country and lye soap was our only soap until they came along with octagon soap, which was the first [alternative to lye soap] one. You wash in that stuff for a while, you shrivel up. It eats you alive. But we made lye soap at Lincoln Boyhood, and they cut it in slices and they couldn’t keep it in stock. People were buying it for 25¢ a slice. I often wondered what those lovely ladies did with that lye soap when they got home with it. If they started to wash their hands in it, and then looked at them …
It would take their skin off.
That’s right. And then we had a superintendent at Richmond [National] Battlefield [Park], who baked hardtack, which was a bread that the Confederates ate when they were under siege in Richmond. It would take a horse to chew it. We couldn’t keep it in stock. People bought so much hardtack. They did all kinds of things.
So those programs were well received.
Fabulous success. Fabulous. We had the [Navajo] Indians weaving their rugs in Hubbell Trading Post [National Historic Site], sitting in the building.
Why do you think it’s important for the Park Service to educate the American public about their natural and cultural heritage?
Oh, I think the only instrument in our society whose whole purpose is to restore a sense of community in our society is in the national parks, because it’s in the national parks that we can discover the answer to the great question—Who am I? It’s in the cultural parks that we can respond to—What have I done? What have my ancestors done? Where did I come from? Who am I?
Who am I? That question harasses and follows every one of us every day of our lives. Who am I? What am I doing here? What am I to do? Why? Why? Why? And until I have some feeling for the answer to that question, I have no relationship with you. And the National Park System is a place for the reestablishment of a sense of community in our society and that’s why I think those programs are important. That’s why I think the system is important.
What you’re describing, that parks help us define who we are as the American people, has that become even more important as American society has become more diverse?
I think so. Absolutely.
We’ve just been talking a little bit about the Park Service’s dual mandate, to preserve these cultural and natural resources, but also to provide for their use. I would very much like to hear your thoughts on that dual mandate and also the question of whether those two things are inherently contradictory. Can you do both, effectively preserve and provide adequately for public use?
Well, I think that you can, but it requires some new thinking about what “use” really should mean. I was mentioning just a few minutes ago in our conversation the idea that I’m not sure that the proper use of Old Faithful is to build an Old Faithful Inn. I don’t see the efficacy of somebody spending the night at Old Faithful in order to use Old Faithful. That’s what I’m talking about, the extent of the use. I think that sometimes we have erred in putting permanent facilities and long-term temporary facilities that are incompatible with the preservation of the natural environment in the wrong place.
That’s what’s got the public confused about the contradiction. I don’t see anything wrong with tour buses taking people to observe Old Faithful, Old Faithful as an observation point, to be inspired and to stand in awe of the handiwork of nature. That you can do by standing on the ground that’s exterior to the preservation of those hot-water pools and the environment around them and the geyser itself. So, yes, I think they’re [the elements of the dual mandate] compatible, but I think they’re greatly constrained in the way the Park Service is interpreting “use.” I don’t think Yellowstone should be a tourist mecca for the permanent overnight visitor. I think those accommodations should be outside the park.
I think that were we to adopt a policy that said we were even belatedly going to do that [keep accommodations outside the park], we could have the same success that they’ve had at the Great Smokies. When that park was established, Secretary Ickes said that if North Carolina and Tennessee would develop adequate recreation facilities outside the park, he would never allow government hotels and restaurants in the park. And to this day there are no permanent hotels and restaurants there, except for the historic Le Conte Lodge, which was there even before the park was established. It is a facility you can reach only by hiking to it.
We’ve talked about various ways in which your tenure marked a transition. Just a few minutes ago we talked about the role of science and the change that appointing Starker Leopold, a chief scientist, made. It seems to me that your administration was the first one in which decisions about preservation could be informed by science.
Right.
The decisions about preservation could, for the first time, be made on the basis of real scientific knowledge about the resources.
That’s precisely the basis on which we sold the program to the Congress in the resource management field, that you couldn’t make those kinds of decisions without an adequate base of study of the value of the resource. And that was inherent in the study of the North Cascade Report which was chaired by Ed [Dr. Edward] Crafts, deputy chief of the Forest Service, who was the director of the Bureau of Recreation. [The committee] consisted of two representatives from Interior and two from Agriculture who started looking at the North Cascades to decide whether there was a national park and recreation areas there or not. We agreed that we were first going to identify the resource and its value, and then we would decide who managed it and its use. That’s why you have a park at the core of that recreation complex that is to be preserved. It’s not to have hotels and highways in it. It’s to be preserved.
Do you have some additional thoughts on the basic purpose of the National Park Service and the National Park System? You talked a few minutes ago about how it brings us together as a people. Is there anything more you want to add to that?
I encouraged Freeman Tilden in his last book that he wrote for us, to answer that question: Who am I? The two books of which I am very proud are Ronnie Lee’s book the Family [Tree]— it was the last book he wrote that was about the evolution of the National Park System—and Freeman Tilden’s Who am I? I feel that the National Park System’s mission in life is to answer that question in our society, because we don’t get it answered in the church. We don’t get it answered in our political system. We don’t get it answered in any of the other organizations of which we are members, because they’re divisive in nature. Even the churches divide up into little sects and segments. As for our political system—if ever anybody wanted to know about its partisanship, I think that it’s now at the worst stage I have ever witnessed in my eighty-five years.
None of those things tend to build a sense of community, which is so important to the freedom that we cherish as Americans, except in the National Park System, where you can’t help, when you’re standing alone in a redwood grove at Sequoia or Yosemite, that you know that you are a part of that system. And that was the theme of our [first] world conference: there’s one web of life and you’re a part of it. The web of life is in trouble and you can do something about it. It’s the park system that knits that one web of life together and puts man at the center of it. That’s what I think its ultimate value is all about, not baking in the sun or running ski mobiles, or Jet Skis, or anything like that.
During your administration what did you see as the most serious threats to the National Park System?
I see the Park Service creating its own greatest threat by withdrawing from its contacts with society, and especially an urban society, because I think the salvation of the National Park System lies not in its managers but in the voters who send the Congress to Washington. More and more of those voters are in urban areas and they’re sending urban-oriented congressmen. So unless you can take the National Park System and make it relevant to men like Charlie [Charles B.] Rangel [a congressman representing a New York City district], for example, you’re missing an opportunity for the survival of the National Park System. If the urban population ever decides that the national parks are not relevant to them, then we’re not going to have them, because the Constitution says the Congress sets the public-land policy of America. So it’s not whether the Park Service believes or the citizen environmental organizations believe it’s a good thing; it’s whether the Congress believes it’s a good thing. And that depends on what those individual members of Congress are committed to when they stand for reelection every two and six years.
