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Article Excerpt
The American national park system embodies the heritage of the United States and the values held by its citizens. Today the system consists of 391 places chosen over the last 136 years for their superlative natural, historical, archaeological, or recreational significance. (1)
Essayists, poets, and social theorists have acknowledged the national parks as iconic sites of great importance to the American people. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., landscape architect and conservationist, lauded the civilizing and patriotic qualities of Yosemite Valley after Congress set it aside as a California state park in 1864. The naturalist John Muir celebrated Yosemite and other parks as works of God. Generations of legislators, wealthy patrons, and commentators have saluted the parks' value as heritage and even sacred space. (2)
Great scenic parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier demonstrated to the world, and especially to a Europe scornful of American cultural heritage, that America was a land of imposing natural wonders that reflected the wilderness experience and optimistic vision of its people. As the park system broadened to include more subtle natural themes, as well as historical, archaeological, and recreational sites, the wonder of those first magnificent parks, established in the late nineteenth century, extended to all subsequent areas. Congress recognized this with passage of the General Authorities Act in 1970: Legislators, acting to improve the administration of the national park system, found that "these areas, though distinct in character, are united through their interrelated purposes and resources into one national park system as cumulative expressions of a single national heritage." (3)
Scholars of history, geography, anthropology, and even philosophy have studied our national parks, monuments, and historic areas in an attempt to understand this fundamental expression of cultural values. A large body of park history literature exists in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and video presentations, as well as online, including the National Park Service's Web site. The authors of these histories try to explain why the sites were chosen for inclusion in the system, what they mean to various constituencies, and how park service officials manage and interpret them in light of those meanings. (4) Because the parks remain official statements to ourselves and to the world of who we are and what we value, research on them undoubtedly will continue.
Another approach to understanding the significance of the park system is the study of areas proposed for inclusion in the system that for some reason failed. Although records are scattered and sparse, research reveals more than two thousand places throughout the United States that were proposed, investigated, and found unqualified by National Park Service officials. (5) Just as engineers and architects study why structures failed in order to improve their knowledge of what they should build, and, more recently, as observers of business and government analyze failures to learn more about their fields, (6) an analysis of unsuccessful national parks proposals can illuminate the origin of the proposals, the reasons they failed, and the economic, political, and social backgrounds of the people who supported or opposed them.
The purpose of this essay is to provide an analytical overview of the 143 failed proposals in California. The Golden State has twenty-four national park units, more than any other state. (7) Some are large enough to include multiple sites that were proposed separately in the past. Park service files show that California also has more unsuccessful proposals than any other state. The Golden State leads both lists for a variety of reasons. First, it is the most ecologically diverse state, with a remarkable number of the tallest, oldest, and biggest features in the country or, for that matter, the world. (8) Second, it is the third largest state in area. Finally, as a leader of the conservation, preservation, and outdoor recreation movements since the late 1800s, California's contribution to the development and history of the National Park Service is substantial. Indeed, the first two park service directors grew up in California.
PARK-MAKING AND THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
The history of the National Park Service provides insight into the park system's criteria for acquiring sites as national parks. Two processes in particular shaped the park system as the park service and the American preservation movement evolved. The first was a continuous, seemingly random flow of proposals from the public and lawmakers. The second was the agency's aggressive efforts to control all facets of the system's expansion.
The national park system has evolved through four periods, during which its control over park-making waxed and waned. Prior to the establishment of the agency on August 25, 1916, the public and various government officials submitted proposals directly to Congress or the president. If a senator or congressman could be convinced, he would introduce a bill to create the new park. The president could use the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gave him the authority to set aside certain areas as park and conservation land for preservation, to unilaterally proclaim such areas as national monuments. In California, Yosemite, Sequoia, General Grant (later absorbed into Kings Canyon), and Lassen Volcanic national parks, as well as Muir Woods and Pinnacles national monuments, were established by these means. During this period, most of the proposed parks contained magnificent and inspiring scenic qualities, while the generally smaller monuments protected curiosities such as archaeological sites, historic forts, and unusual natural features. Without a bureau to back the proposals, some major scenic sites, including California's Mount Shasta, Lake Tahoe, the Calaveras giant sequoia groves, and the Sierra Madre, failed due to political pressure and bureaucratic processes. (9)
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Creation of the National Park Service in 1916 initiated a second period as new director Stephen Mather struggled to bring order to the park system and to park-making. Mather and his assistant and successor, Horace Albright, established criteria to judge potential additions to the system, led efforts to create a thematic framework representing the country's complex natural and historical heritage, and vigorously campaigned to make parks more available to the public throughout the nation. (10) Despite the establishment of such crown jewel parks as Yosemite, the unstructured pre-1916 expansion of the system had led to unsatisfactory additions such as Platt National Park in Oklahoma and Sullys Hill National Park in South Dakota. Mather took steps to deflect proposals for inadequate or inappropriate sites by strongly supporting incipient state and local park agencies. He even co-hosted the country's first conference on state parks in 1921. These regional park systems provided other levels of protection for sites that were either less significant to the entire nation or were intended primarily for active outdoor recreation. A beneficial side effect of helping to form state and local systems was the elevation of the National Park Service to leadership in recreation planning throughout the country during the late 1920s and early 1930s. (11)
Mather and his staff also strove to develop the use of natural and historic themes to direct the search for places that best represented each scientific or cultural category designated by the framework. The park service could then proactively pursue their addition to the park system with Congress. Sites proposed by others that were redundant or of inferior quality could be rationally explained and rejected as unnecessary. Precedent existed for such a framework. Following a detailed study of all the battlefields in the United States, the war department, in its 1926 report to Congress, ranked the battlefields of each war on the basis of site integrity, significance to American history, and educational value. This process proved useful in judging historic sites, a particular priority of Horace Albright. The park service asked American Museum of Natural History curator Clark Wissler to design the first set of historic themes, while geologist/geographer Nevin Fenneman constructed a map of physiographic regions in the United States that became one of the analytical tools for measuring the worth of natural resource sites. Although these criteria were in use by the late 1920S, the park service did not issue its first full thematic framework until 1936. (12)
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The Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's election to the presidency dramatically accelerated the expansion of the system in three ways. First, reorganization of the executive branch brought sixty-nine national battlefields, memorials, and monuments of the war and agriculture departments into the national park system. The reorganization made the park service the sole agency administering preserved areas, bolstered its efforts to devise historical themes, and brought the first recreation unit, the George Washington Memorial Highway in Virginia and Maryland, into the system. (13) Second, the activities of Depression-era programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) came under park service control. The huge surge in funding that accompanied the CCC gave the agency the tools to evaluate the nation for new parks. Finally, Congress enacted two laws that enhanced the park service's power to determine its expansion. The Historic Sites Act of 1935 directed the park service to evaluate historic structures and sites throughout the country and recommend steps for the preservation of important ones. The Park, Parkway and Recreational Area Study Act of 1936 ordered the agency to study the recreation needs of the country and recommend sites for preservation at all levels of government. These sweeping laws gave the park service the greatest amount of control over its expansion that it would ever have. (14)
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With Depression-era funds and its thematic framework in hand, the agency undertook large-scale studies of river basins, seashores, reservoirs, and numerous other sites with the express purpose of identifying the best of each category.
More than a third of California's park proposals were initiated during the 1930s. Roger Toll, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, was the chief investigator and judge of proposed areas. Although he died in 1936, his influence strongly shaped the park system at a time...
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