Newton Bishop Drury Oral History Interview, Part III

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Newton B. Drury, dated October 18, 1972. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.The legal agreement with Newton B. Drury requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

Opened 1972
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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PART III
NATIONAL PARKS

DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
The Initiation
The Appointment

FRY: How would you suggest we approach this rather large subject of your experiences in the national parks?

DRURY: Well, it is as you imply a large order. The great problem is that sometimes the person who's immersed in the everyday affairs of an organization like the National Park Service can't see the woods for the trees. I take it that the purpose of these interviews is not in any way to develop an exhaustive treatise on an institution like the national parks or the state parks, but to give collateral matter that perhaps in the more conventional types of records such as books and magazine articles, even correspondence, might be missed.

FRY: Plus the advantage of this being from a unique point of view, that of the drafter himself.

DRURY: [Laughing] The person who had to bear all the slings and arrows of both good and outrageous fortune.

FRY: Would you like to start at the very beginning of your national park career by telling us how you found out about your appointment?

DRURY: Perhaps I ought to mention when we begin to express my relationships to the National Park Service that in 1933 Secretary Ickes to my surprise offered me the position of Director of National Parks. This was done on the recommendation of the advisory committee that he had appointed at the time when Horace Albright indicated that he wished to resign to go into private business. One of the members of that committee,

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DRURY: and I think the chairman, was Dr. John C. Merriam, who was also president of the Save-the-Redwoods League. A number of others with whom I was connected through the Save-the-Redwoods program and state parks were also on it. One was Dr. Harold Bryant who for many years was chief of interpretation in the national parks. I wouldn't say that it was exactly a stacked committee, but it wasn't an unfavorable one. I felt complimented at the time, but after studying the whole situation in California I decided that I could render my best service by remaining in California where the situation had not yet reached its climax; so I declined the appointment with thanks. There's a lot more to it than that but that's the essence of it.

You can understand my surprise therefore when seven years later, in 1940, Dr. Merriam and others intimated to me that Arnold Cammerer, who had been appointed director and had served seven years, was in a difficult position so far as his health was concerned and had to take it easy; and that they were considering me again as his successor, My first intimation of it was meeting on the street in Berkeley Professor Joel Hildebrand who'd just been to Washington and seen Harold L. Ickes. Out of a clear sky Joel said to me that when I was going to Washington shortly Harold Ickes wanted me to see him. Well, I was first going to New York and to Baltimore to meet with the ladies of the Garden Club of America and then I had an engagement to go to Washington and spent the weekend with Dr. and Mrs. John C. Merriam. When I arrived there I found a message from Harold L. Ickes. By that time I knew pretty well what he wanted but of

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DRURY: course I maintained the fiction of being duly surprised when I called him.

FRY: The office had been vacant for quite a few months at this time, I believe.

DRURY: I remember that just before I went over to talk with Secretary Ickes I had luncheon at the Cosmos Club with John C. Merriam and Dr. Waldo Leland, who was quite active in conservation matters and was later chairman of the National Park Advisory Board. Well, I was utterly green, didn't know my way around Washington, so after luncheon Dr. Leland kindly walked up the street with me and pointed out the Interior Building. Ten and a half years later when I was in some difficulties I told Dr. Leland that if he hadn't done that for me that day perhaps I never would have found the Interior Building and it would have spared me a lot of trouble. [Laughter]

Anyhow, I had a very pleasant talk with Secretary Ickes and told him I'd let him know within a few days, that I was favorably inclined towards taking the position; I didn't expect to impose any conditions but that I did want certain things understood that I was sure he would agree to, and that it would be worth my while to put in the time on it. I sent him a list of those things and I'll give that to you when I find it.(Appendix) He readily agreed to them although he said, as I have said, that of course nobody takes a government appointment conditionally

The announcement of my appointment was made a little prematurely. I'd come back to California and was about to send in my acceptance of the appointment. I was up in Yosemite with John C. Merriam and

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DRURY: his son Lawrence C. Merriam, who at that time was superintendent of Yosemite. We were at Glacier Point. There was a radio loudspeaker in one of the camps up there, and over that loudspeaker we heard that I had been appointed Director of National Parks, which was as much of a surprise to me as it was to a lot of other people. In other words, Secretary Ickes evidently got a little impatient and thought he’d force the issue.

FRY: When Ickes talked to you that day did he give you his evaluation of the state of the national parks at that time at all?

DRURY: Not in any detail, no. We just talked in very general terms about conservation generally and about parks. He was very friendly and kind in his remarks to me, as he always had been during the time he was in office. I told him that I was a little surprised because of the well-known fact that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and I never expected to have him offer me the position again. At the time I was sworn in he made a little speech, and all I said in reply was "I thank the Secretary for his persistence and his patience in regard to myself."

We had many discussions from time to time about basic principles in national parks, and he was kind enough to say that he thought that I could give an element of inspiration to the program that it needed.

FRY: Have you read Ickes’ diary?

DRURY: I've read portions of it, of the first volume. How many volumes have been issued, do you know?

FRY: Three. He and Roosevelt apparently couldn't come to agreement on a director. He suggested Bob Moses twice to Roosevelt and was turned down twice.

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DRURY: Yes, he told me when I went to Washington that he had offered it to Bob Moses. Moses was one of the most brilliant men in public life, but I think it would have been a sad day for the national parks if he'd ever been Director of the Park Service. He was a far abler man than most of us ever could be, but he was the promotional type--that is, from my cantankerous viewpoint. I told him that. I said, "I'm a great admirer of Moses, and of his ideology--he's a right-winger and an anti-bureaucrat; but nevertheless I think his ideas about development particularly in the states would have been bad for the national parks." As far as I was concerned, by the time I left Washington my view was that it would have been a happy day for me if he had appointed Moses instead.

FRY: I believe Roosevelt had the reaction, according to Ickes, that he felt that Moses simply couldn't be controlled. Ickes had said that they needed some new blood, with a fresh viewpoint.

DRURY: He wrote me some very nice letters about what we'd done in California, and I guess he was impressed by the fact that seven years before I considered the California work more important than the directorship, which I thought it was at that time.

FRY: Was Bob Moses actually offered this and turned it down, or did Roosevelt never permit Ickes to ask him?

DRURY: I don't know.

FRY: What did your family think about going back to Washington?

DRURY: My wife and I were in New York when I had this call for an interview with Harold L. Ickes. We discussed

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DRURY: it then, and finally we more or less cavalierly decided it would be a good idea and an interesting experience during which I might be able to contribute something if we went there for a year or two. Then after I took the job the war came on. It was a fascinating challenge, quite rewarding in satisfaction.

FRY: After the announcement of your new post, do you remember any particular "first official act"?

DRURY: I telegraphed my acceptance and appreciation, and shortly thereafter went to Washington. Almost immediately I had to plunge into things like, for one thing, the dedication of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which was quite an interesting experience. I was just barely there when they hustled me off down to North Carolina. Secretary Ickes presided and President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the chief speech. In my new capacity I had to sort of take the position that I had a lot more knowledge than I really had.

There must have been eight or ten thousand people down there at Newfound Gap, miles from anywhere, and one of the most dramatic happenings was right in the midst of this ceremony with all of these people sitting there silently while the speaking was going on. It happened that the Appalachian Trail--which is like our Sierra Trail, the main hiking and packing artery in the Appalachians--ran through Newfound Gap. Suddenly two hikers with their back packs, evidently having been in the wilderness for a week or two, came up over a rise and to their surprise were confronted with 10,000 people [Laughter]. The audience was a little surprised, too.

About the only part I had in the dedication of

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DRURY: the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was a decision on an issue that the superintendent of the park at least thought was all-fired important; Superintendent Ross Aiken had hired a brass band, evidently local talent, and they were not very good. The Secretary was a little irrascible that day anyhow; it was pretty hot and the situation was a little complicated and finally Ickes said to Aiken, "Now don't you let that band play again, under any circumstances." Just before we adjourned, Aiken turned to me and he said, "I have this order from the Secretary not to have the band play again. On the other hand, you said we were going to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. What shall I do?"

"Well," I said, "I think I can take the responsibility for having the band play the Star-Spangled Banner, which I did. So my sole exercise of authority that day was countermanding an order by Secretary Ickes. We both laughed about it afterwards.

Working Conditions of the Job

FRY: Your term of office, spanning the war years as it did, did not lack in challenges, did it?

DRURY: The difficulty was that almost immediately we began to edge into World War II, and very soon Secretary Ickes was absorbed with wartime tasks, particularly as the Director of Public Works and in the conservation of resources like rubber and oil, helium, that sort of thing, so that none of the bureau chiefs had the kind of normal touch with the Secretary of the Interior that we would have had if we weren't in the war. That was one factor.

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DRURY: The second factor was that early in 1942 we were notified that to save office and building space for the government some of the non-combative agencies like the National Park Service were to be decentralized and the headquarter office moved to Chicago. Well, of course we had a lot of hearings on that and we resisted it and there was considerable local opposition to moving any of the old-line bureaus, but it ended up with our moving to Chicago that summer. This was a very expensive thing for the government; they saved very little money because most of our personnel simply transferred from the National Park Service to war agencies--which of course was one purpose of the order. We had very expensive space, very good space, on the eleventh floor of the great Merchandise Mart in Chicago overlooking the Chicago River, a spectacular location. We stayed there for almost five years. I had to engage in almost weekly commuting to Washington but the enforced absence diminished my touch with Harold L. Ickes. I always regretted that I didn't have a more normal relationship with him. We had of course an extensive correspondence back and forth and every so often I would be there for staff meetings or formal hearings, but he just didn't have the time to give to a lot of the basic problems, such as the national parks, that would have been important in peacetime but were relatively unimportant in the war picture.

When we finally faced the problem of decentralization to Chicago I had to decide whether I would stay in Washington, where I would be closer to the Secretary of the Interior, or move with the organization where I could keep it together, and I elected to

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DRURY: leave Associate Director Demaray in Washington. He was born there; he'd lived in Washington all his life and knew the ropes, a very able man. I moved with the organization to Chicago and never regretted it except that I unquestionably lost some touch with the Secretary and his office in so doing, and some touch with the Congress and other bureaus in the government which remained in Washington.

FRY: It seems to me that would be the most unfortunate thing, that you wouldn't be there right near Capitol Hill all the time.

DRURY: Sometimes I'd have to jump on a plane, if I could get one, on half an hour's notice. There'd be a Congressional hearing, I'd wait around a day or two, and they'd adjourn the hearing till the following week. I always had lots of other business to do in Washington but that's the way it was frequently. It wasn't the best of arrangements and yet by and large I think the National Park Service did a higher quality of work in fields like planning and interpretation, isolated as they were in Chicago, than they did in Washington. I think the mere effect of isolation may have helped them somewhat to gain perspective. Anyhow, I was beginning to get my hand on the organization and I had a very capable group of colleagues, most of them, like myself, beyond military age so that they were rendering their service to the nation in their own calling. We got the organization, I thought, very closely-knit. Conrad Wirth, the present director of the NPS, was one of the chief assistants, as was Hillory Tolson. We had a very able group of division heads.

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Policy

FRY: How would you like to divide your comments on policy? I suppose there was first of all that policy that originated from some of your own built-in ideals when you joined the National Park Service.

DRURY: I had one or two principal motives I will confess. One of them and the least worthy perhaps was curiosity to find out whether a man of good will, as I more or less thought I was, and who wanted to do the right thing, could get anywhere in the jungles of politics and bureaucracy. But that was just a minor phase. I did feel rather strongly, due to the inspiration that I had from my contacts with Steven T, Mather, John C. Merriam, Horace Albright and others that there was a certain duty involved to try to give to this enterprise the best that I could and to bring to bear on it the somewhat varied experience that I'd had in the park field. I had pretty definite ideas as to what the National Park System should be. I must confess that my ideals were more austere than were generally acceptable. I think they were pretty close to the original ideas of Stephen T. Mather. I had felt that perhaps I might contribute something along those lines.

Then I had another motive, which was one of being of service to the very fine corps of men who made up the National Park Service. I felt that because of the experience I'd had with state parks and related matters and with the kind of people who dealt with them, as well as my contact over the years with national park people, I might help in bringing to bear on the running of the national park more than sometimes is customary

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DRURY: of the experience and the thoughts of the men in the field. They had, in my opinion, greater touch with reality than did the staff. I had been appalled sometimes to notice how newly appointed officials would brush aside all the accumulated experience of years on the part of such men, who not only were most closely in touch with the park properties that they supervised and the phases of park operations that they were in charge of but who also professionally--and because of their belief in the program--had most at stake. I've seen many issues, still occurring, decided absolutely independently of the findings of the men in government who are closest to the actual conditions. Of course, even then and more now after the sobering experience of about twenty years in government, I realized that there are at headquarters modifying factors that sometimes make it impossible to do what the man on the ground thinks ought to be done. There are fiscal considerations, there are political considerations, and there again I resolved that where compromise was necessary I would at least take into my confidence the men who perhaps expected to have their ideas more fully recognized.

Those are some of the motives that I had when I undertook this task and I am very happy that I did and very proud to have served even as well as I did in that capacity. I didn't do it for the salary, because when I arrived in Washington I didn't know exactly what the salary was. I found that out later.

FRY: Would you like to go into your specific ideals of preservation in the national parks and especially those that differ from the way things were being run at the time?

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DRURY: I had no criticism in my mind of the way things were being run or the ideals of Director Cammerer, who preceded me, and who retired because of a nervous breakdown, nor of the key men in the organization with most of whom I was pretty well acquainted. Most of the things that perhaps I objected to were the result of the warping of the intent of the National Park service officials through political and other pressures, and I'm frank to say that I wondered whether with what little footwork I'd learned in the California legislature and aspects of the Save-the-Redwoods League such as the money-raising and all, I perhaps could contribute some know-how as to the mechanics of maneuvering in order to attain a good end.

On the subject of wildlife policy, for instance, there were half a dozen moot questions that even to this day probably haven't been settled fully, although the National Park Service so far as I know today is adhering to the purist idea of letting nature take its course insofar as possible. It was felt that the nightly spectacle of the bears congregating at the garbage dump was surely an unnatural way to display this noble animal. Before my time the movement against this started and during my time we eliminated that kind of a show. The same way with the annual drive of the bison--partly because of the fact that that again was a tour de force and also, frankly, partly because it was an expensive process, it was eliminated. There were several other matters of that sort.

FRY: You had a pretty good idea, I imagine, of what pressures you would be under as you tried to implement these policies?

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DRURY: Yes, I think I had a pretty good sample of it in California, although the sailing in California when we initiated the state park system was a lot easier than anything I encountered in Washington. We had a friendly administration under Governor C. C. Young, and there was a new public realization of the importance to California of preserving for the future some of its outstanding scenic and recreational and historical areas.

Wildlife

FRY: Speaking of policy measures, I had noticed in your annual reports that you gradually were able to put the wild animals back on a natural forage basis and eliminate the garbage put out for the bears and the feeding of the bears in Yellowstone by tourists.

DRURY: Yes, I have already spoken of this. Perhaps I was a little too austere. There were those who felt that since the national parks had these animals to show the people, they should be displayed in a more or less spectacular manner to the largest possible number. Long before I joined up with the National Park Service I had belonged to the school of thought that believed in letting nature take its course insofar as possible. I recognized, of course, that the whole world has been artificialized; I also recognized that while some parks involve millions of acres none of the national parks or monuments is large enough to give free range to natural forces. There is bound to be artificial interference with the operation of nature that has to be compensated for.

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FRY: In cases of overpopulation of certain species, did you ever allow hunters in for a limited time?

DRURY: That was the dilemma we faced: whether we should allow hunting in the national parks. There were half a dozen reasons why hunting is inconsistent with and abhorrent to the idea of national parks, which are wildlife refuges. In general, I believed that processes like predation should not be interfered with unduly. If there was danger, on the other hand, of extermination of a valuable species, it might be necessary to reduce the number of predators. We faced that issue in Mt. McKinley National Park where there was a great hue and cry because apparently the population of the Dall sheep was reducing rapidly. It was blamed on the wolves, that the policy of hands-off as to predators on the part of the National Park Service was leading to the extermination of the sheep. Probably there were other factors, but there was a great pressure to reduce the number of wolves or even eliminate them. We were anathema to certain groups of sportsmen because we were thought to be "wolf-lovers". As a matter of fact, some of our naturalists like Victor Cahalane, who was our chief naturalist during my time, and Adolph Murie, a very eminent naturalist and well-acquainted with Alaska and Mt, McKinley, were great admirers of the wolf as an animal, as a spectacle of wild life. They contended, and I think the facts brought out, that the wolves were not exterminating the Dall Sheep, but finally after a great parley and after sending a representative of the American Museum of Natural History to make

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DRURY: a special report, I departed from my ideal to some extent and issued an order sanctioning the killing of ten wolves so as to reduce the number. Well, you know the Mt. McKinley ranger force, with all their trying never could locate and exterminate that many wolves, which shows that the wolves weren't so prevalent as they were thought to be, or at least were smarter than we were. Meanwhile I'm pretty sure that the Dall Sheep population has gradually come up again. I remember in our hearings Tom Wallace, a very eminent conservationist from Kentucky--editor of the Louisville Times and one of the successors to Col. Walterson of the Times and the Louisville Courier--also a member of our National Parks Advisory Board, was brought into the Congressional hearings as a witness. He aroused the ire of the sportsmen and some Congressmen by saying at one point that he wasn't worried about the wolves consuming the Dall sheep, what he was worried about was whether there were enough Dall sheep to keep the wolves alive. That had to be smoothed over.

FRY: Was artificial feeding in overpopulated areas ever practiced?

DRURY: Anyone would be unrealistic not to recognize that one alternative was the possibility of artificial feeding. It was practiced by the Fish and Wild Life Service, not by the National Park Service, although I believe in the early days the Park Service did some feeding of the elk.

FRY: The elk must have presented an unusually sticky problem, politically and biologically.

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DRURY: Yes. The Yellowstone and Jackson Hole elk herd, which would migrate south in bitter winters and would be bottled up in the Jackson Hole Valley, was one of the outstanding examples of this dilemma. In the original years of that migration they could spread out over the desert to the south--until that desert became settled and they were shut off. We had the problem of reducing the elk population within the limits of the food supply, but without violating the principle that there should be no hunting in the national parks. It was a very difficult thing to do and our success was incomplete in the end as far as Jackson Hole was concerned. We faced there very great opposition from the organized sportsmen, who apparently took the position, which somehow or other I've never been entirely able to comprehend, that it was cruel for the government to shoot these animals but was not if sportsmen did it for the fun of it. They apparently felt it was an atrocious waste of a natural resource that could make for recreation on their part. Some of them more or less demanded to be admitted to the national parks for hunting.

Well, it's another story. When we talk about Jackson Hole we can discuss it more if you want, but we finally did yield somewhat, and regretfully on my part, so far as the Jackson Hole itself was concerned. In finally getting through the bill to add Jackson Hole to Grand Tetons National Park we tried to save face by providing that the Secretary of the Interior could deputize sportsmen as temporary rangers who

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DRURY: could qualify to shoot a certain number of elk in a given season, thereby reducing the herd under the supervision of the park superintendent.

FRY: In problems of overpopulation, do the preservationists feel that if you simply let this go on for a few generations the principle of survival of the fittest would solve the problem for you?

DRURY: Perhaps it would if it weren't for the fact that these areas, large as they are, are nevertheless so constricted that populations that would escape to other areas are hemmed in.

FRY: It's not just a matter of letting the weak ones die off from lack of food. Some also have to be able to escape?

DRURY: Well, it is partly so, but the whole strain is deteriorated by an abnormal condition, you see. It's almost an impossible ideal to live up to, the ideal of maintaining in national parks or anywhere else a so-called balance of nature, but I think that's a more acute problem in relation to wildlife than it is in other aspects which in a sense perhaps are more important, namely the preservation of forests and of earth forms and of vistas and examples of superlative scenery. That to my way of thinking was the primary purpose of the national parks--to preserve the great spectacles of the original America as it was seen by the pioneers, and somehow or other make it possible for the public to enjoy these sights, to have the experience of being in this environment without destroying it. That was the challenge that anybody who was bold enough or benighted enough to go into the national park business had to face.

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Plants

FRY: There was never any problem about whether or not to undertake all the research necessary in treatment for plant diseases, such as the white pine blister rust?

DRURY: Yes, there was a continual problem of getting money for studies of that sort.

FRY: But this is no policy question?

DRURY: Well, there are policy questions involved. There are some cases perhaps where the cure would be worse than the disease when you would adopt artificial measures in order to preserve the species. I myself couldn't go so far as some of my colleagues but there were one or two of them who were even opposed to the white pine blister rust control program, which as you know involved millions of dollars and thousands of men over many years establishing camps, the main purpose of which was to eradicate the host plant of this rust, which has destroyed a great many of the white pines and related species. I myself feel that it was worth the try and I'm frank to say that I don't know at this moment just how effective it was. I know that the progress of the white pine blister rust was impeded, but I've heard that it's pretty close to Yosemite and some other national parks. It affects only certain species but it's a deadly thing.

We had a disease of the saguaro cactus that is still being studied, the necrosis. They've identified the disease but I don't think that they're at all sure of the method of its spread or of its eradication.

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DRURY: That's still the subject of study by the plant pathologists, who were in the Department of Agriculture related to the United States Forest Service and with whom we worked very closely. I remember with particular appreciation Dr. Willis Wagner of that bureau who not only worked with us in the national parks but who made a definitive study of the cypress canker which was threatening the cypress at Point Lobos. Undoubtedly his studies and the preventive measures that were taken to keep it from invading Point Lobos were at least partly responsible for saving the trees. In any event, I remember predicting about thirty years ago that it looked as if the Monterey cypress was doomed because cypress all around Point Lobos had died from this disease. But somehow or other we kept it out of the Point Lobos preserve. It may well be, as I think Dr. Wagner believes, that the presence of the salt spray from the Pacific has something to do with keeping it out, and also the fact that the trees on Point Lobos are native, whereas the trees that were affected in the surrounding country were many nursery trees that had been propagated.

There are other phases of what we have been discussing, but the primary purpose of the national parks in protecting the integrity of all the features that make up their greatness is one of resisting, and we hope effectively, any attempt to turn to utilitarian purposes the resources represented by the forests of the forage, which of course was subject to some use of grazing. The minerals in the soil

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DRURY: fortunately were not as prevalent or as rich in the national park areas as they were some places. Latterly the water resources, which have been a grave threat in the dam-building program which was our nemesis and which led to many many bitter disputes. We can talk about that more fully later.

FRY: Would you preserve these parks against all change, including natural change that might come about?

DRURY: No, I would say just the opposite, that if you took the simon-pure policy it would be almost one of laissez faire and would lead inevitably to reconciling oneself to change. We have plenty of concrete examples of that, which always involved a lot of discussion and soul-searching as to what was the right thing to do. One of them had to do with the vistas in Yosemite Valley. The old timers, like my dear friend William E. Colby, objected to the fact that the trees which in his youth were saplings had grown to such proportions that they impeded some of his favorite views, as of Yosemite Falls. The problem was whether or not we were justified in tampering with the processes of nature to the point where from an aesthetic standpoint we would probably get a better effect or anyhow an effect that we liked better. For instance, one of the great features of aesthetic appeal in Yosemite Valley is the contrast of the lyric beauty of the valley floor with the towering granite cliffs above; the forests on the floor of the valley are in a sense just an addition thereto which, as you suggest, is necessarily changing, evolving. I myself was inclined to let nature evolve, but there was a great deal of pressure on the

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DRURY: part of some of our friends to try to restore some of the early Yosemite vistas, such as the open floor of the meadows and the views of some of the falls like Nevada Palls and particularly Yosemite Falls, so that finally we compromised somewhat on that. We established a program of eradication of seedlings in certain of the meadows so as to restore the views of both the upper and lower Yosemite Falls from certain key points. But the principle I always tried to follow was this: that if any modification of natural conditions was effected, the burden of proof should rest upon the person who wanted to change the natural process, and it shouldn't be based on purely a personal idea that certain landscape arrangements would be more acceptable or more pleasing than those that existed.

FRY: In other words, not just for human aesthetics.

DRURY: Yes, but the best thinking that we could give it should be applied to this question, always recognizing that the burden of proof was on the person who wanted to make a change, whether he thought it was for better or worse.

Now of course you have the other side of it, where people want to cut down trees for lumber or flood lands by building dams or scour the landscape by mining or denude it by grazing. Obviously the burden of proof is upon them not to show that it's for the benefit of humanity, and that's what most of our arguments are about. Many times we lost.

Related Activities

FRY: As I understand it, you found your national park system included not only parks but national cemeteries.

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DRURY: Some of the national military parks were taken over in the 30's of course in the reorganization act, largely as an administrative expedient but also because in certain quarters they were felt to be nationally significant.

FRY: You also found yourself building airstrips and things like that in lands outside national parks under Civilian Conservation Corps, is that right?

DRURY: Well, that was of a piece with the basic policy that no construction should take place in a park unless it were obviously necessary to the enjoyment of the property for itself and its innate qualities, modes of transportation, roads, modes of communication, things like airstrips and all the rest of it according to the national policy were held to a minimum.

FRY: Weren't all Civilian Conservation Corps operations under you?

DRURY: The Civilian Conservation Corps so far as it related to parks was under the National Parks Service. The CCC was beginning to dwindle when I went to Washington. Its heyday was in the Cammerer regime and it did a tremendous amount of good, more good I think in the national parks than it did in the state parks because the national parks were organized to make use of it. They needed the labor, they had the skilled supervisors to direct it.

FRY: What happened when the days of the CCC and the Emergency Conservation Work came to an end?

DRURY: Well, the CCC and the Works Progress Administration and other work agencies gradually dwindled in the early forties, and I remember being way up on the Olympic Peninsula when I got word that the Congress had refused to make appropriations to continue the

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DRURY: CCC, whereupon I had to fly down to San Francisco and hastily call a meeting of all of our regional directors from all over the United States to figure on the problem of placing or eliminating about 300 employees almost within a couple of weeks. It was a very painful process. We had to make the program within less than two weeks and when the fiscal year rolled around some of these men went into state park work, some of them into other callings, and some of them, were absorbed into the regular national park organization. That was another of my objections to expanding unduly these emergency programs, because I'd had previous experience as to how painful it is when you have to contract. Many a time I advised men against going into that type of work as against the old-line established and reasonably well-financed basic work.

FRY: Didn't your policy have to cover much more than just the national parks--you also had to think of lands such as state recreational areas that originated in an act of Congress.

DRURY: Yes. The Park, Parkway and Recreational Area Act was passed before my time, but under that the National Park Service had begun to expand its functions to include advisory services to state parks and even to local parks in some cases, and I think some very effective and worthwhile work was done there. I was a little narrow in my view toward that in that I tended to discourage expanding that phase of the work of the National Park Service to the detriment of what I considered the more basic task they had of completing, protecting, and interpreting to the people, making available to the people, the really great places of the nation that were

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DRURY: so important nationally that it was obviously the proper function of the federal government to support them. As you can readily divine I was a conservative, even a Republican, so that I didn't believe that a paternalistic federal government should reach into every segment of government below it and more or less interpose in their affairs. But then I must confess that I was perhaps out of tune with the trend that was coming along pretty rapidly and that now is here.

My attitude is not original with me--there are lots of others like Frederick Law Olmstead and Duncan McDuffie and all the fine men I worked with who believed that the national park system should primarily be devoted to things of national significance. Whether the National Park Service is the best agency to do the local planning and to take the backward communities by the hand and guide them is no longer a moot question; it's been decided that that is one of their functions. They're doing it very well.

FRY: At the time you felt that local communities could handle these problems better?

DRURY: Well, I did, frankly. That is, I felt that the strength of America lay in the fact of its diversity, and I also have had the old-fashioned suspicion of bureaucracy in this: that in a small segment of government if a mistake is made it's immaterial, but in an all-pervasive government organization one mistake is multiplied many thousand times and its effect is sometimes almost disastrous. Questions, for instance, as to the over-development of areas for artificial sports and that kind of thing, if that were a national policy followed consistently throughout the United States in uniform pattern it would be much worse than if some local community takes

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DRURY: a fine natural area and defaces it by artificializing it and putting in paraphernalia for recreation that could be taken care of elsewhere.

FRY: Did you have any definite idea of the role that the federal government should play in providing tourist accommodations when you first went into national parks?  

DRURY: Yes, and I feel that that has been since the beginning in greater or lesser degree the basic policy of the federal government, that the accommodations and other facilities provided by concessionaires in the parks are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. I tried to make a definite distinction, for instance, between that kind of activity in the national parks and that kind of activity in a private resort, or even a government-owned resort. A resort is an area which might be originally a natural area, could be remolded in any way that the owner thereof pleased to attain his end, which is to get patronage through giving people the kind of experience they want, and endeavoring to do it at a profit. But surely when hotels are placed in a place like Yellowstone or Yosemite or Grand Teton or any of the other national parks they should be an essential facility and not an end in themselves; that is, the fact that the parks are remote, and that people have to have housing and be fed and accommodated in other ways makes those things necessary, but their installation should be related to the primary purpose of the park, and in design and in remoteness and in the character of their activities they should insofar as possible harmonize with the primary purpose of the national parks, which is to provide to the public these great spectacles of nature.

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FRY: The same would be true then for recreational provisions?

DRURY: Yes, for certain types of recreation which require very extensive artificial paraphernalia, such as power ski lifts and that kind of thing. That of course has been one of the moot questions since the beginning, and in general our policy was to try to help them find alternative sites to those within the national parks that they proposed for this overdevelopment, not that there was anything but good involved in those things, but that they were inappropriate or inharmonious with the purposes of the park. The prize park as far as I was concerned was the Great Smokies, where we had no concessions. It just happened historically that the Great Smokies had the town of Gatlinburg and some of the towns of North Carolina south of there which had rather adequate accommodations, so that they made money, which is the purpose of course of running a hotel or a resort. Nobody objects to that, but they didn't make it at the expense of the values in the park.

FRY: I guess the elimination of concessions within the parks altogether would more or less change the type of tourists to those that are a little bit hardier and who do their own camping.

DRURY: Well, there was no element of austerity in that policy in the Great Smokies.

The essence of an attitude that conservationists took in matters like decentralization of the mechanics of operation at Yosemite was that the finest places, those that were superlative examples of nature, should be held insofar as possible intact and unmarred by artificial inclusions, they should be the object

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DRURY: of a pilgrimage to enjoy them rather than being the scene of all the mundane activities of living, sleeping, eating, garbage collection and sewage disposal, and all those things. It's just ordinary horse sense and good taste, it would seem to me, to relegate that kind of activity to the lesser lands.

FRY: Did you undergo any major policy changes? I read in one of your annual reports about a reappraisal of policy.

DRURY: I don't think there's been anything fundamental. I think the keynote was struck in the original National Park Act and it was maintained by successive directors and their staffs and by the Secretaries of the Interior. I don't know of any institution where it's any clearer as to what the ideal is than it is in the national parks. The great problem in the light of all kinds of pressures and the frailties of human nature and the vicissitudes of politics and of financing is to live up to the ideal.

FRY: It seems to me that logically there should not be any concessions in the parks. The problem is that of becoming overcrowded anyway with tourists.

DRURY: Well, if the surrounding communities can amply provide accommodations for the public I think it's a grave question as to whether concessions should be intruded into the national parks.

FRY: How, in the early 1960s, do you see policy as taking in more recreation and development in the parks?

DRURY: Well, of necessity, as the millions of people come to the parks they have to be provided for, in the absence of some way of limiting attendance. I was up at the dedication of the Tioga Road, which has been the subject of considerable controversy. To me it represents a

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DRURY: great advance so far as transportation is concerned, but surely at some points does not adorn the landscape. Now maybe that's the price you have to pay for the increased attendance. We wrestled with and the Service is still wrestling with the problem of possibly limiting attendance, which is the only way that you can get away from the inevitable erosion of park values through mass use.

It isn't confined to the national parks at all. The city of Berkeley's a good example of that kind of erosion. In my neighborhood we had a little square pleasantly planted with trees and shrubs, Fremontia Park. It needed a new firehouse, so what did they do but cut down some of the trees and stick their rather futuristic-looking building--it looks like a merry-go-round--in the center of that park, and they justified it on the ground of public need. I myself think it was a breach of trust toward the people who established the park and I surely don't think it's an adornment to the landscape, but that kind of thing is going on by the hundreds of thousands in every community in the United States.

Now they're proposing to dispose of this little body of water at the entrance to Berkeley, fill it in and provide more taxable values by bringing in industrial sites. I would think it would be a violation of trust to do that, and it surely would not be an adornment to the city of Berkeley. I've seen in my time the city of Berkeley descend from the status of a quiet attractive village to that of a nondescript second-rate municipality, And on that high note let's end this session. [Laughter]

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FRY: Before we get too far in our accounts of what went on, wouldn't it be a good idea to explain the organization of the national park system and what the various classifications of park areas mean? Here is a current listing of them.(Areas Administered by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1961.)

DRURY: I think probably the best way I could describe the functioning of the Service is to give you the organization chart as it was when I was there. It was practically the same as it is now: administration, operations, design, construction, interpretation.

Now this summary of area types (National parks, national historical parks, national memorial parks, national battlefield parks, national monuments, national military parks, national battlefields, national battlefield sites, national historic sites, national memorials, national cemeteries, national parkways, national seashore recreational areas, national capital parks, national recreational areas, and national historic sites not owned by the federal governments.) was compiled by Hillory Tolsen, who was our conscience in most things and a very meticulous worker. He was assistant director, having to do primarily with management, fiscal affairs, and personnel and office operations, record keeping and that sort of thing. He was very good on compilation and he enjoyed doing it. This whole format was originated by him with my encouragement. After that time we really didn't have any other very clear-cut summary of just what there was in the national park system. Of course, like most institutions

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DRURY: that evolve, there was legislation that created a National Park Service under the act of August 25, 1916, but that act in a way was like the rules of grammar, which do not precede but usually succeed the evolution of speech.

Parks and Monuments

There were half a dozen of the national parks created by Act of Congress prior to 1916 and some national monuments. A national park usually, although not always, is an area on the grand scale, the boundaries of which are determined by an act of Congress. A national monument on the other hand, can be established either by act of Congress or can be carved out of public lands by Presidential proclamation. As far as the purpose and administration of either area is concerned, I have never recognized any difference. Both of them are intended to be outstanding, superlative examples of landscape or geological formations or other natural phenomena that are worthy of preservation by the federal government because they are of significance to the whole nation; it's worthwhile for the entire nation to see to it that they are preserved and held intact.  That's at least my conception of the purpose of national parks and national monuments.

Of course, the very presence of the word "national" in all these different types of areas would imply that they are of national significance, although of late there's been a tendency to look upon the great white father as just that and the word "national" really

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DRURY: means simply that the national government for one reason or another has assumed the responsibility for a given function or a given type of area. That I think is particularly true of the national recreation areas which are rather well down on the list and came in much later in the history of things.

FRY: Generally speaking, the terminology national park is meant to give an area a little higher status than a national monument, isn't it?

DRURY: Yes, but most of these other categories, under authorization from Congress, can be established by administrative order by the Secretary of the Interior. National monuments can, national historic sites can, and national memorials can.

FRY: But the money has to be appropriated.

DRURY: The money has to be appropriated, yes, but the anomaly in the situation is that sometimes Congress takes the reins into its own hands and by specific legislation also establishes national monuments and national memorials. There is confusion on that even within the Department of the Interior.

I remember that Lindsay Warren when he was the Controller of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., for some reason wrote an article to a national magazine in which he tried to distinguish between a national park and a national monument. He made the point--this was in the 40's--that the main difference was that national parks were administered by the Park Service and national monuments by the Forest Service, which hadn't been so since the reorganization act of 1933. Here he was seven years later, the Controller of the

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DRURY: Treasury, writing an article, or having an article written for him under his signature, making a statement of that sort.

The World Almanac still says so, as far as I know. We never could get them to change their statement that national monuments are administered by the U. S. Forest Service. All of them were transferred to the Park Service under the reorganization of 1933.

Even some of our best friends in Congress had strange ideas. They were asked continually what was the difference between a national park and a national monument and I remember one, Congressman J Hardin Peterson of Florida, who was the best friend we had there and who we thought understood what it was all about, when suddenly called upon to distinguish them said the only difference he knew was that swimming was allowed in national monuments but not in national parks, which was a preposterous statement to make. He may have been just kidding. But there is that constant confusion.

FRY: The question that's in my mind is why aren't more monuments established by Presidential order?

DRURY: Well, there are more and more being established by proclamation. But you can't establish a national park that way. Now, in my mind, and I think in the mind of all of the directors of the national parks, the word national park is like the word sterling on silver. It's the symbol of excellence. I tried to make a distinction at least in the minds of our own personnel between the primary national parks, the great parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and so forth, and the areas that are related to them as a part of

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DRURY: the national park system administered by the National Park Service. But I know from having been in charge of all of them that they don't any of them differ in their basic concept, after you've made that one distinction I've already made, between the primary national parks and the other areas in the system.

FRY: What about budgeting and development?

DRURY: Well, that's one reason I suppose for having so many categories.  You can break it down into these groups for budgeting and the money is appropriated usually by national park regions and then by specific areas under each region.

FRY: I imagine they would probably budget more for projects in national parks than in lesser parks.

DRURY: In general I think that was so, although not necessarily so. Some of the areas that were popular with members of the Appropriations Committee, like Boulder Dam national recreational area, fared pretty well particularly when Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada was on the Appropriations Committee.

FRY: Can you reclassify an area once it has become a national park but isn't really worthy of this classification?

DRURY: Attempt was made to do that in some cases, but I was never successful in getting it done. We were successful in getting it done. We were successful in getting relieved completely of the responsibility for certain areas, particularly the recreation-demonstration areas that were established during the early days of the New Deal by act of Congress. A considerable number, I'd say fifteen or twenty, of these areas by act of

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DRURY: Congress were authorized for transfer to the states, which we did in many instances. One of them was transferred to the state of California.

Historical Areas

FRY: I guess it's the distinction between historic sites and battlefield sites that confuse me.

DRURY: Well, the original national parks and national monuments were primarily concerned with works of nature. There was, however, a very strong movement to have the federal government preserve some of the outstanding scenes of our history, such as battlefields like Yorktown in the Revolutionary War, and Gettysburg, and the battle where Lee surrendered to Grant, Appomattox, in the Civil War. (When we dedicated the McLean House at Appomattox we had more people in the audience to which we spoke than took part in the battle of Appomattox.) Anyhow, the historical parks and the battlefield parks originally were established under the authority of the War Department. In 1933, the beginning of the New Deal, an act of reorganization was established which grouped together not only national parks and monuments but other significant national areas like the historical parks and the battlefield parks and military parks under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.

It's more a question of the terminology used when the orders were written or the laws were passed that we have so many different categories; they're all in purpose and function about the same.

FRY: They're not under different administrative structures

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FRY: within the National Park Service?

DRURY: No. They're grouped regionally in the National Park System. National parks had four regions during my time and they've now added a fifth region, the officers in the East in Philadelphia.

There is only one national memorial park. (Let's see what it says on page 12; no one without reference to this index could know.) It's the Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park. I can give you some history of that because with my purist ideas and my moderate familiarity with the badlands on the Little Missouri River, when Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota introduced a bill to create a Theodore Roosevelt National Park, rightly or wrongly I took the position that these lands weren't of caliber to be made a national park in the true sense of the word, and I opposed it, much to Congressman Lemke's disgust. Well, finally we compromised on calling it a national memorial park, because Lemke was in a position to put it through anyhow. He took the position that he had the most important park in the whole system because there was only one National Memorial Park.

FRY: This didn't actually make any functional difference, did it?

DRURY: No. They're all administered under the same policy. All the lands are protected with the same rules as to destruction of natural objects or wildlife or anything of that sort--and development for human use--in such way as not to impair seriously the natural qualities. There has been a tendency of late to weaken the policy so far as National Recreational Areas are

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DRURY: concerned, but in the rest of these categories there's no material difference.

Now, the National Cemeteries, in my humble opinion, were transferred mistakenly to the National Park Service. I think it would have been much better for the War department to have kept their management. It's a very sad function to have to perform anyhow; to me it didn't seem to be a matter of primary concern to the National Park Service, although it should be to the military forces. The reason that it was transferred to the National Park Service undoubtedly was that most of the national cemeteries adjoin these battlefields that have been set aside as historic exhibits. For instance, at Gettysburg adjoining the scene of the battle is some land where a great many of those who fell in battles in various wars and particularly the Civil War are buried. One of the complicating factors in World War II was that the War Department notified all parents of boys who had been lost in the war that they could select the cemetery of their choice, and overwhelmingly most of them settled on Gettysburg because it was the best known, and also I guess because a great many of the boys who were killed in the early stages of the war came from that part of the country. Anyhow, we were certainly overwhelmed with applications that we couldn't possibly meet. We had to acquire more land and we had to persuade some people to transfer their interments to other battlefield sites.

Each one of these categories historically has some reason for it. The national historic sites not belonging to the federal government were made possible by the Act of 1935, which provided that not only federally owned lands but also private lands could have the

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DRURY: stamp of approval of the federal government if an agreement was reached that they should be preserved and administered in a certain way and the public be admitted to them. The old Swedes' Church in Philadelphia was declared a national historic site in my time by a proclamation of the Secretary of the Interior simply because we had a cooperative agreement with the owners of it--the Episcopal Church has it now--under which they would keep the historic structure as it is and make it available for people to visit it. And Touro Synagogue in New England was another one that I remember our establishing. Each one of these involves a long series of negotiation with the owners of the property and has made it possible to hold intact certain outstanding historic areas even while they might not be owned by the government. Some of these of course were owned by the government. I spent some very pleasant hours at the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park; in fact I made a couple of trips with the President up there when he was paving the way for making the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt a national historic site. It was ultimately transferred by the Roosevelt family to the federal government. And there were others--Fort Laramie, Wyoming, was also transferred; the Adams mansion in Massachusetts was owned by the federal government; Federal Hall was designated a national memorial but is owned by the city of Philadelphia.

FRY: Under these cooperative arrangements do you ever have to put out money for the upkeep and the administration of these sites?

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DRURY: No. That's one condition, that the place shall be maintained by the owners.

Parkways and Local Parks

DRURY: Now the only categories in this list that we haven't discussed are the National Seashore Recreational Areas and the National Capital Parks. Well, of course the national capital parks are city parks in the District of Columbia, and I'll be frank to say that during the ten and a half years I was there I paid very little attention to the capital parks. I'm not sure I would have gone there if I'd known that we were responsible for six or seven hundred city parks on top of everything else, some of them little patches about the size of this room, but some of them tremendous areas and very beautiful. The Rock Creek Park is to some extent a man-made park; at least it was restored. It used to be a garbage dump but it was taken over by the District of Columbia and made into a very attractive area of great recreational value to the people of Washington, D.C. The national capital parks were administered primarily by a local superintendent under the immediate jurisdiction, which I arranged, of the associate director, who for a long time was Mr. Demaray. Mr. Demaray knew all the properties intimately and he was tremendously interested in them. I was very fortunate in having an associate who was interested, because my primary interest was out in the great open spaces.

The National Parkways are a distinct phenomenon which do not have all of the national park principles

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DRURY: applied to them. They're primarily scenic highways. The most extensive are the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Natchez Trace Parkway, the first of which runs between Shenandoah National Park and the Smoky Mountains National Park. The Natchez Trace runs between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez , Mississippi; the trace, which was the term for trail, was the route that the boatmen on the Mississippi who were taking cargo down to Natchez and other ports would take back to where they started from. They floated down the river and then they came back on foot or on horseback. Both of those are extremely interesting in that along them are relics of the early history of the region, the Blue Ridge, the mountain culture and the Natchez Trace, particularly the old inns and some of the old plantations that are scattered through that country, some of which are included in the parkway site and some of which are simply nearby.

FRY: In these parkways, none of this is for picnicking or camping or anything like that? It's just mainly to drive through, isn't it?

DRURY: Not necessarily. There are sections where they were able to get enough land where campgrounds have been developed and there are some places where concessionaires have cabins, particularly the Blue Ridge. The Blue Ridge was much better developed during my time than the Natchez Trace. I'm not sure just how much of that has been done on the Natchez Trace.

FRY: The parkways kind of stump me because this seems to be an eastern phenomenon, and I wondered historically how did they become parkways? Why didn't they become parks?

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DRURY: Well, because they were primarily related to a highway. You see, the original parkways developed in New York State, particularly around New York City and environs. One of the founders of the Save-the-Redwoods League, Madison Grant, was also one of the founders of the system of parkways in the Bronx in New York. Later the Sawmill Parkway and a half a dozen beautifully landscaped or preserved landscaped highways were established, primarily for light travel, not trucks and commercial travel, and to a considerable extent for recreational travel. The New Yorkers unquestionably are the most advanced in their attempt to preserve the amenities of landscape, far ahead of California. We've done probably just as much in establishment of state parks but we haven't done nearly as much in the field of parkways as New York. In fact, only in the current legislature has a resolution been passed which calls for recognition in highway building of the parkway principle.

FRY: Why were parkways undertaken by the National Park System instead of by the Bureau of Public Roads?

DRURY: It was done primarily because the Bureau of Public Roads wouldn't have been justified in including in the network of national highways travel routes that had as little travel as there was in those Southern states, and partly the colossal appropriations that we obtained for these parkways were due to the fact that from 1933 on these were located in states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I remember during the height of World War II when we put in a very modest budget--we weren't allowed to put in much--we asked nothing

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DRURY: for the Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace parkways, and when our budget finally went through they'd added two or three million dollars. The key men on the Appropriations Committee were also key men in those states.

They're wonderful accomplishments. The figures of expenditure on them would run to hundreds of millions now, because although these are highways of a somewhat lower standard than modern freeways, they're available for rather rapid travel, and they have the element of a park in that there are no billboards, practically no access, and there's some planting in country that has been mutilated by logging or by mining or whatnot. It's to preserve a natural route of travel which people will enjoy as they go along. It's primarily for recreational travel. That isn't entirely true of the parkways out of New York, because they're man-made and serve a dual purpose of pleasant travel and an agreeable environment, and the drivers get home to the suburbs quickly.

Program
Planning

FRY: I thought we could start out by talking about planning in our discussion of the program of the National Park Service. There is a great deal of data available on this because your master plans and also the more specific plans within the park system are a matter of public record. Could you comment today on the question of planning being a realistic procedure, in view of other influences over which you have no control, such as acts of Congress?

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DRURY: Well, needless to say planning is basic to all human activities, and it's particularly important when we deal with lands, whatever their purpose. Before you can make a plan for acquisition of land or development of it for park purposes, you have to have what we used to call our policy statement: to hold them intact for the enjoyment of this and future generations. This is simply the reason for existence and the purpose of the area in question.

At one time I made the rounds of many of the parks and personally asked each superintendent, and later I confirmed it in writing, to prepare a brief--usually a one-page--summary of what in his opinion and his experience with the public visiting the park was the reason for its establishment. Not until you have that, and a policy statement so that you know exactly what you want to do with the lands under your custody, is there much point in making a plan for them. That was one of the things I was able to incorporate in the master plans, which of course involved a great many other things.

They involved first of all the mapping of the physical characteristics of the land; they involved the existing holdings and a concept of the ultimate boundaries. It's the same thing we're doing now, for instance, up at the Rockefeller Forest in the Humboldt Redwoods, where for thirty-five years we've had a concept that this area should include the complete Bull Creek watershed from ridge to ridge-- in other words, from a fire protection standpoint and of course from an aesthetic standpoint controlling everything in sight from any adverse development. That thought is

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DRURY: important. Making our master plans really involved writing a book, almost, with abundant illustrations for each park.

There was a long process of investigating the physical conditions; in many cases we had basic maps, mostly from the U.S. Geological Survey, on which to base our data, but in other cases extensive and expensive reconnaissance and surveying were necessary to have an adequate map of the terrain. These maps were used in various ways; to record the vegetative cover, including the forest growth; to give the conformation of the land, which was essential in planning for construction; and to indicate natural or historic or aesthetic features, outstanding views or historic structures and whatnot, that made the area significant.

Then the development section would prepare detailed preliminary maps--first of the broad aspects of development such as the road system; the classification of areas that were to be held inviolate as against areas that could be developed for lodges and campgrounds and the necessary mechanics of operation--warehouses and machine shops and residences for personnel. As money became available all those things were broken down into much more detailed plans and specifications, and that's where the landscape architects and engineers came in.

Always, anything that we did or anything for which we asked appropriations was promised upon the then-existing master plan. Some of these master plans were works of art, and some of them were distinctly elementary. One thing that we had to keep in mind was that they were not static; that is, times changed,

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DRURY: as for instance the attendance of a park increased, as it has in places like Yosemite. It is often necessary to change the traffic pattern; it's necessary to provide more parking and in some cases, unfortunately, to widen roads, to provide more overnight accommodations, both through the lodges of the concessionaires and through campgrounds.

FRY: As I understand it the master plans were passed around to all of the employees, is that right? Everybody knew.

DRURY: During my time, the National Park Service one or two years had large appropriations for development. Most of the time, because of the war, we were almost on a maintenance basis, but although we were rather meager in staff we did have a breathing spell during the war in which we could get a great many of our master plans up to date. Incidentally, many of them never were up to date and I guess they're not today. You know, they're like good intentions everyone has.

At that time, in the forties, speaking of construction and development, we could foresee the increase in attendance as soon as the war was over and we had worked out a number of programs , the charts for which we thought extremely interesting and which were forerunners of Mission '66. They indicated what was needed in various phases of development, for instance employee housing, roads and trails, service structures, campgrounds, and the like, and projected the amount of appropriation in the then purchasing power of the dollar that would be adequate to meet these needs on a basis of catching up in five years or in ten years or in twenty-five or fifty years.

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FRY: Was this the plan that President Roosevelt asked for in 1943 for postwar planning?

DRURY: Yes. Unquestionably the fine concept that Director Wirth incorporated in the Mission '66 Program (a program aiming to bring the parks, so far as physical development and boundaries are concerned, up to the needs of the estimated population in 1966) was based on the data--not all of it, but a great deal--that we started to gather in those early days.

Problems: Artificial Lakes, Inholdings

FRY: I wonder how you handled such things as the Theodore Roosevelt Park, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, and Lake Texoma. It might serve as an example of something being put under your domain for recreation and development that had little relationship to master plans.

DRURY: I don't think that Grand Coulee--now Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake--was actually incorporated in our operation during my time.

FRY: It was mentioned in the 1946-47 report.

DRURY: I do remember many trips to Grand Coulee, and my vain efforts to keep from having anything to do with it. I spent endless hours there with our planners.

FRY: There were no funds and no land--

DRURY: Well, that's the point. The great defect of these recreational areas on the artificial lakes such as those created by the Shasta, Coulee, and Grand View dams, and Lake Texoma, was that the Park Service had no part in the initial planning. It got better as time went on, but in spite of our recommendations the

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DRURY: agency that was building the dams, and was primarily interested in construction and correct design, of course, gave practically no attention to the acquisition of adequate lands so that these reservoirs could be used recreationally by the public. Much of my time, which I begrudged because I'd rather have spent it on the major national parks where we were terribly behind, was spent in trying to induce the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Engineers to acquire, at the time when they got their holdings (lands in fee or their easements or flowage rights), adequate land on the margin so that a satisfactory recreational development could be planned and carried out. That was true at Texoma; it was very true at the Shadow Mountain Grand View Dam at Rocky Mountain National Park. I recommended that we not involve the National Park Service in that kind of thing. (See Appendix, correspondence with Strauss and Ickes, "Ivory Tower - Black Magic".) Needless to say I was turned down, but I then recommended that if we were going to do it, adequate land holdings should be acquired to make it a worthwhile job. The primary answer to that was that neither Reclamation nor the Army Engineers had legal authority to acquire land beyond what was actually needed for the operations of the dam.

FRY: I remember that in Texoma there was a great deal of local community feeling against acquiring any land at all.

DRURY: There always is, especially after the improvements are put in and land values are enhanced. That's one of the

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DRURY: things, not only there but even in my last years in the state parks here in California, I vainly tried to get the authorities to see, including the legislature, that land on the margin of proposed lakes should be bought in the original purchase. Shasta was our big project in the state parks; we spent over $2,000,000 to buy land at Shasta that could have been bought probably for $100,000 if at the time when the Army Engineers built it they had taken an adequate holding.

Well, they contended that they didn't have the legal authority to do that. That may have been true about the Bureau of Reclamation, but I know that it wasn't true of the Army Engineers because I helped draft some of the amendments to the act under which they had that authority. They just didn't want to exercise it. They wanted to husband their resources and use them on engineering works, which was only natural. And they frankly weren't interested in the recreational aspects. What I tried to do in this "ivory tower" correspondence, which was quite famous in the Bureau of Reclamation and in the National Park Service and provided a lot of merriment (an interchange between the commissioner, Mike Straus, and myself) was strongly to recommend that each individual bureau should plan, develop, and administer the recreation that was incident to its operation, because my firm conviction was that the importance of mass recreation to the public was a by-product of some purpose of different types of land management agencies. And I almost got away with it. Naturally the Reclamation Bureau and Army Engineers are primarily interested in water storage and in water supply and in flood

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DRURY: control, and the use that the public can make of the lands that are marginal to their artificial lakes is purely incidental, a by-product, of their primary function. I also contended, and as you know never quite got away with it, that in the National Park Service the purpose was to acquire, preserve, and reveal to the public the great works of nature and the great sites of history and that the very laudable and pleasurable and desirable incidental benefits through mass recreation were simply a by-product of that primary purpose.

The primary principle of course in connection with the mass recreation activities insofar as they are permitted in the national parks is that they should be limited so that they do not impair the qualities of the area that were the reason for its being made a federal reserve or a national park.

FRY: In the general problem of inholdings before you were able to get any of them, as I understand it the railroad lands and the congressmen's lands were the two that probably caused more pain in planning than the others. Is that correct?

DRURY: No, I think the railroad lands were susceptible of being purchased. The question with all land purchases is arriving at a value. The railroads as you know accepted these alternate sections for a given number of miles on each side of the lines as a government subsidy and their purpose was to turn them into money. I don't recollect offhand that we had much to do with railroad lands in the national parks. I'm sure we didn't in the East because there weren't any, except

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DRURY: in Florida. I believe we negotiated with the Union Pacific in Utah with respect to incorporating those railroad lands into the parks. They were probably the easiest people to deal with.

FRY: Were you able to acquire the property of people who were in Congress?

DRURY: Well, I didn't have any serious problems of that sort that I remember. Of course, one of the outstanding episodes, and it became something of a joke, was the summer home of Senator Wheeler in Montana in Glacier National Park. Needless to say, all of the plans for acquisition somehow or other managed to omit Senator Wheeler's home, and he also put on a lot of riders on the appropriations bills that further cramped our style. I think that in Glacier they're still forbidden by law to acquire land that's used for domestic residence. I'm not sure that that's still in effect, but it was in my time.

FRY: Did that apply only to Montana?

DRURY: It applied only to Glacier National Park. There are other riders on all the others. There are all kinds of limitations; you can expect that where you're dealing with human beings, and congressmen are more or less human beings.

FRY: I'd like to ask you about congressmen from California. Did Helen Gahagan Douglas author a bill for buying some redwoods?

DRURY: She introduced in several sessions the so-called Douglas bill, which had as its purpose the establishment of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial National Forest. It was a very interesting bill; I told her

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DRURY: right from the beginning it was an unrealistic bill: it would have put under the jurisdiction of the government the entire redwood industry, the entire redwood belt extending from the Oregon line down to lower Sonoma County. It didn't take in the Santa Cruz redwood region. It was undoubtedly generated by some members of the U.S. Forest Service, not the top command but some of them who were very strong for government ownership and operation of resources-- perhaps properly, I don't know. But the idea of putting an entire region and an entire industry under government control was something that I assured them I didn't think they ever could do, even assuming that it was the right thing to do. Secretary Ickes asked me to help Mrs. Douglas with this bill because of my knowledge of the redwood belt and my work with the Save-the-Redwoods League, and I did help her considerably in that first of all I asked the Secretary to let me narrow the issue as far as the Interior was concerned to those areas in the redwood belt which were obviously of park caliber and should be under government protection before the virgin forests were cut, and that applied primarily to the program of the Save-the-Redwoods League. Well, after considerable discussion both with Mrs. Douglas and with Congressman Clarence P. Lea, who represented that district, she did amend her bill to provide for so-called memorial units, which I called park units, that defined according to our suggestion certain buffer areas around the existing redwood state parks. The theory was that if federal money was spent on the redwoods it would acquire these essential properties,

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DRURY: which are still, incidentally, in our long-range master plan (which seems to get longer and longer as the years go by), in the main following the principle that logical park units are watersheds, taking the property from ridge to ridge.

Well, this bill went through several sessions of Congress and I don't believe ever had a hearing; I know that it didn't pass either house of Congress. Finally Mrs. Douglas was defeated for office and the thing dropped. But it did give the stamp of approval on her part and I think quite a few other members of Congress and of the Secretary of the Interior to these areas necessary to round out the California state parks. Now, I suppose I was carrying water on both shoulders in a sense but I persuaded her to put into the bill that although the federal government might purchase these lands, they were to be turned over to the state for administration inasmuch as the core of each of these areas--Bull Creek Flat and the main Prairie Creek area, Jedediah Smith and Del Norte Coast parks-- was already under state jurisdiction. Even today there's some discussion of the possibility of a redwood national park. The thing that really gave rise to the establishment of the Save-the-Redwoods League back in 1918, one of the main objectives, was to establish a redwood national park, but because of the unwillingness of Congress to appropriate any money for the purpose, and since all of the finer redwoods were privately owned, the state of California had to take the initiative. It may someday materialize.

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FRY: The Save-the-Redwoods League did not back the Douglas bill?

DRURY: No. The Save-the-Redwoods League felt that it was excessive, and felt also that they would not improve their chances of preserving the superlative examples of the redwoods if they championed the taking over by the government of the entire redwood industry.

FRY: Oh, I meant the amended bill.

DRURY: Well, the amended bill still called for the taking over for U.S. Forest Service administration of some millions of acres.

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APPROPRIATIONS

Budget Requests

FRY: We're going on to the appropriations task of the National Park Service. As I understand it, it takes strategy as well as sweat to prepare the budget request.

DRURY: In general, we had a continual and somewhat frustrating experience in spending interminable hours in charting what we considered the irreducible minimum for both maintenance and operation, and also for development. Our conception of what was irreducible was not quite as constricted as that of the Congress, and they gave us rather short shrift. In fact I feel that a tremendous amount of time that could have been spent on constructive work was put in on making estimates that everyone should have realized couldn't at that time be carried out.

FRY: Weren't the appropriation levels in your time very different from those in more normal times?

DRURY: Well, of course, when World War II came on there was a very pronounced drop. In fact the National Park Service being engaged in a "cultural" enterprise, more or less, was considered a non-essential branch of the government, so much so that they even decentralized us to Chicago for about four years. Consequently the appropriations were pretty well on a maintenance budget, even to the extent that there was practically no construction, no building, no development; as a matter of fact there was very little travel,

I remember for instance at Yellowstone, where we had been having close to a million visitors

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DRURY: the year prior to the war, we had printed one million copies of our park leaflet. Those lasted us about five years because the attendance dropped down from around a million to around 100,000. There were similar situations, although Yellowstone was the worst. The ban on travel, of course, and the rationing of gasoline was one of the reasons it's a little hard to present the exact facts from the records of the hearings or even from the actions taken by Congress because there are not only specific appropriations for what we call line items, but there is also in Congress the custom of making authorizations of a considerable sum of money subject to later appropriation which might or might not materialize. That's done particularly on construction projects such as roads. We always had a backlog of authorizations but the problem was to get the authorizations turned into appropriations. Of course, all of the development appropriations were dropped during the war. I have a series of graphs that we prepared for out budget hearings--think I still have them--that outlined in terms of dollars the deferred maintenance during World War II and showed graphically how many years it would take to catch up at various rates of appropriation. I think we might introduce that in the record.

Deferred Maintenance

FRY: Well, your maintenance problem was really a great one, wasn't it?

DRURY: Yes. Well, of course, we did a lot of what you might call propaganda in and out of Congress on that, making

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DRURY: reports on the run-down condition of the facilities in the parks and showing pictures indicating the ghastly exhibits. Following the war, that was quite effective. Most of my little speeches to the appropriations committees of the House and Senate revolved around the theme that what the NPS was presenting in its budget estimates was first an attempt to keep abreast of its present responsibilities and next to catch up on its arrears as far as maintenance and expansion were concerned. Of course, the unfortunate thing was that the types of construction that harmonized best with the outdoor scene were those that were perhaps least permanent. For instance, in the early days all of the structures in the national parks consisted of rustic architecture, you might call it, often made with unpeeled logs and with heavy masonry bases (usually not too "regelmässig" as the Germans say). It was fitted much better into the natural scene than the kinds of structures in the later days. Of course we had to put up with the absence of the old-time artisans--stone-masons and the like who were able to do excellent work, because of the cost of wages. Some of the most attractive masonry had been furnished in the CCC days when these boys who went into the camps had a flair for stone work. It probably cost ten times what you could afford to pay for it if you paid wages to union labor, but they were there to work and many of them did it with zest. The same thing also applied to a great many of the fittings like locks on the doors and hinges which were made in the blacksmiths' shops of the CCC camps by novices under the

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DRURY: supervision of old-time artisans who, like the boys, were out of a job. There was that silver lining to that cloud.

FRY:  Was there much of a silver lining during the war when you used the conscientious objectors?

DRURY: The conscientious objectors were a pain in the neck. [Laughter] I never will forget one tour that I made to Sequoia National Park in the height of the war. It was a very warm day and I had to leave early in the afternoon and fly East, but they had some issue up that they felt that I had to adjudicate with--well, I won't name the sect. It might be just as well not to. Anyhow, they insisted on my going down to this camp right after breakfast to have parley with the head of this religious group and we got down there and found that about 9:30 in the morning they were having prayers and we waited around for three-quarters of an hour for them to come out. Needless to say when they came out we didn't settle anything very much.

Another recollection I have, as long as we're talking about Sequoia, was the time that after a hard day I sat on the porch up there at the Giant Forest Lodge and beside me sat down a tall blond giant about six feet four who evidently recognized me and started in quizzing me and giving me a great deal of personal advice as to how the national parks should be run. Well, I was a little fagged anyhow and a little on edge. Finally I looked at this big hulk of a fellow and I said, "Tell me, how does it happen that a boy as husky as you isn't in the Armed Forces?" "Well," he said, "I'm only 14 years old." [Laughter] I think

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DRURY: he was from that conscientious objectors' camp.

FRY: Wasn't there some difficulty in administering the conscientious objector program?

DRURY: I didn't have much touch with that except on very general questions of policy because where they were put was determined by the Congress to some extent and by the Administration. Our job was simply to find work for them to do and it was sometimes pretty hard. But I wouldn't say that they were an impediment. Some of them did very good work. I think the CCC camp was much more successful in the early days, especially in the national parks. It wasn't so true of the state parks; the national parks had better supervision.

FRY: Speaking of your wartime problems, there were a number of uses made of national parks by the armed services. Did you have an income to cover these expenses?

DRURY: In some cases we did, yes, but in the main we were supposed to get along with just what we had. We have a report which I'll turn over to you on the quite extensive wartime uses of the national parks.(National Park Service War Work, December 7, 1941 to June 30, 1944 (with supplement to October 1, 1945). National Park Service, Ed. Charles W. Porter III.) Our primary problem was to keep from defacing the parks and still comply to the utmost to help in the waging of the war. We were pretty successful in selecting those types of activities such as rest camps, recreation centers for the troops, and some research projects; those things were not harmful to the parks, and we were I think

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DRURY: surprisingly successful in persuading the armed forces to look elsewhere than in the parks for sites for training and activities that would have been very detrimental to the natural features of the parks.

FRY: I wonder if this helped you any in the hearings, to be able to point out the fact that the parks were extremely helpful in wartime.

DRURY: Yes. We surely rang the changes on that. [Laughter] We probably would have gone out of existence if we hadn't done that. But the present Mission 66 which provides for a very extensive program of development, roads, structures, facilities of all kinds, is the outcome of that long lean period during World War II when we just were on a purely maintenance basis.

FRY: Well, since the parks are on public display at all times, did this problem of deferred maintenance lead to a natural protest from the public?

DRURY: In many cases it did, and particularly in the western national parks. When we had Westerners on the committees we had better treatment. I remember Congressman Carter was very much interested in our getting an appropriation to make accessible the Crystal Cave in Sequoia National Park, a very attractive, somewhat smallish cave, and he finally did get an item in the budget.

FRY: Somewhere I got the impression that California's Albert Carter was helpful in helping you protect the parks from overuse by the armed services.

DRURY: Congressman Albert E. Carter was for a great many years chairman of the subcommittee on Interior appropriations in the general House Appropriation Committee and was instrumental in getting a great deal of support for

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DRURY: the parks. He was very sympathetic with the idea that even in wartime we should avoid activities that would be permanently damaging to the parks, unless it was a matter of supreme necessity.

Land Acquisition Funds

Land acquisition was one of the big items, of course.

FRY: I was wondering if the privately-owned lands which lay within parks were a very difficult thing to get funds for.

DRURY: Yes, it was very difficult to get any funds for land acquisition at all. In these latter years, the National Park Service has been quite successful in getting millions of dollars of appropriations to extend the boundaries to a logical point and to buy up inholdings. But in those days--well, when I went to Washington we obtained nothing, and Mr. Wirth, who was assistant director in charge of land affairs, and I put a great deal of time on promoting the idea of getting a recurring annual appropriation to buy up private lands within the parks. Finally, we thought we'd done pretty well when we got the Bureau of the Budget to insert an item of $300,000 a year. But at that rate we figured we could buy up at existing values the inholdings in the national parks in perhaps the next hundred years. [Laughter] A great many of the solemn members of the committee weren't amused by any such statement.

We finally got that, and under this present Mission 66 a very satisfactory acquisition program is being adopted.

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FRY: Another drawback, as I understand it, and I wondered how you worked with this, was I guess in order to get support in Congress a great many of these funds were earmarked, so that you didn't have a great deal of flexibility.

DRURY: Almost all appropriations were line appropriations. Even when we got a lump sum appropriation as we did in this $300,000 a year for inholdings, we were required by the appropriations committees and the Bureau of the Budget to file with them a schedule of approximately the amount of land that this money was to be expended for, broken down not by legal description but by areas. That had its benefits, too, because we got the ardent support of the congressmen and senators from the states in which we were going to spend some money. The only trouble was we sometimes had to compromise in a way that didn't carry out our first priorities. You can see why that would be.

FRY: Well, my suspicious mind thought that probably a great deal of these strings on this appropriation originated with the congressmen from various states who wanted to have these projects.

DRURY: In some cases they did, but the congressmen that were most active in that sort of thing were the members of the appropriations committees. I remember that Congressman Taylor of Colorado and later Congressman Scrugham of Nevada and still later Congressman Peterson of Florida were all wonderful gentlemen and all fine friends of the national parks, but they all saw to it that a reasonable proportion of the appropriations were allocated to their bailiwicks, which is only human.

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DRURY: Of course, Colorado is a beautiful state. And as I once told the governor of Utah when we were talking about taking land for national parks and he was expressing some misgivings, "Governor, the main problem as you travel through Utah is not what you want to make a national park but to determine what can be left out of the national park system," which was exaggerated but which didn't hurt the governor's feelings.

FRY: How important was it to you that the National Park Service was almost alone among federal land-administering agencies in not being permitted to reimburse the community for tax losses when land was acquired by the government?

DRURY: Are you sure that's true? I wasn't conscious of the fact that it was. Is it true for instance of Reclamation and of Fish and Wildlife Service and the Indian Service and the others?

FRY: I'm quoting from a National Park Service annual report.

DRURY: I think what it probably refers to is the fact that many of these agencies paid a percentage of their revenues to the local community, and that was especially true of the U.S. Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. I think probably the text that you refer to made the invidious comparison between national parks and national forests. That's a question I've given a tremendous amount of time to; I personally do not believe in in-lieu taxes. I didn't believe in them there, and I don't believe in them in the state parks.

FRY: They're on an annually diminishing scale...

DRURY: Well, I was a party to the compromise in the enlarged Grand Teton Park Bill, where it seemed reasonable to cushion the shock of taking these lands off the local

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DRURY: tax roll by providing a one hundred per cent reimbursement the first year, ninety per cent the next, and so on down till the point where it tapered off, and that's worked out very well, they tell me. The communities were reimbursed, and the enhancement of assessed valuation because of the existence of the enlarged park and the developments that have occurred and the great rate of tourist traffic have more than offset this loss of ten per cent per annum, so that they surely have been made whole by that. But that's a compromise, of course. We did that other places.

FRY: Do you think that the general policy against paying in-lieu taxes was a serious problem in getting lands?

DRURY: Oh, yes, and I think even more the problem was the desire, which is only human I guess, of realtors and land speculators and financiers to make a fast buck through the enhancement of real estate values in the midst of a national park; that surely is true of the state parks, also. So naturally they resisted the attempt to incorporate these lands in the public reserve. This is a very interesting subject to speculate on, and when you ask whether that was a handicap to us in the national parks in rounding out our lands I can't say it actually was, because we didn't have enough money with which to attempt acquisition so that it became a problem. But it surely has been a handicap in the state park program where for instance in one year the Legislature voted $41,000,000 for land acquisition alone, as against the $300,000 a year that we used to get in the national parks.

Pork Barrels

And then there were pork barrel projects. We haven't talked at all about the parkways. That was purely an

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DRURY: eastern institution and even the New Deal finally reached the conclusion that they shouldn't establish any additional parkways. I personally have mingled feelings on them. I think the Blue Ridge Parkway, which extends from Shenandoah to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful achievement and it ought to be, because it'll cost, when it's finished, about $100,000,000, and the same way with the Natchez Trace, which goes from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi. Those two projects were conceived during the New Deal by Southern senators and congressmen and one year when we decided not to ask for any money in our budget for parkways, we ended up with three or four million having been added voluntarily by the Congress.

FRY: Another instance of unasked for funds was that given to you for re-doing the Statue of Liberty, landscaping it and so forth. It looked like that project was half your entire appropriation one year for development, building, and maintenance.

DRURY: I don't remember that. I probably was indignant at the time. I think that it would be a good idea for you to at least read this introduction to Freeman Tilden's book, (Tilden, Freeman, The National Parks, What They Mean to You and Me, Knopf, N.Y., 1951 [Introduction by Newton Drury]) because I think that summarizes better than I've done in any of these talks my conception of the essence and purpose of the National Park System. Then you'll have this compendium on the war work of the national parks, which represents another great handicap that took a lot of our time.

FRY: Wasn't the National Park Service a weak sister when it came to enticing appropriations through pork barrel projects?

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DRURY: Yes. One of the things that didn't popularize me in the Department of the Interior was the fact that I insisted on ferreting out that in that department, when the Bureau of the Budget gave the Department the over-all limitation as to how much they could ask for, they would then determine how much the great Bureau of Reclamation should have. What was left of that limitation was parceled out among the other agencies, such as Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Service. Well, it got to the point where we were so cramped for appropriations that we were brash enough to draw up one of these pie charts that showed how the lion's share went to Reclamation and the crumbs that dropped from the table came to the conservation agencies--which didn't popularize us with either the Department or the Bureau of Reclamation, but it was the truth.

FRY: Probably due to the fact that most of the congressmen could start reclamation projects more easily than national parks in their districts for their constituents?

DRURY: Well, it’s like the old rivers and harbors bill, you know, which was always a pork barrel measure before Congress. It's inevitable and it's still the case and always will be. Some of the national park appropriations were sort of treated like pork barrel items, too.

FRY: But it was more difficult.

DRURY: It was more difficult. They weren't large, and in many cases we had pretty strenuous opposition to the expansion of the national park system. That wasn't universally true. There were some parts of the country where they were very aggressive in pressing upon us areas that we didn't really feel measured up to national park standards and asking appropriations for them. One interesting aspect was in

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DRURY: the South, where there weren't many opportunities to establish areas of the first water.

FRY: But you had to deal with the Southern senators who had accrued seniority on committees?

DRURY: We usually did, yes. I remember Senator McKeller of Tennessee and Senator Rankin of Mississippi and some of the other southern senators were very aggressive in insisting upon large appropriations for these parkways. In fact, I remember one year when we did not--this was during the war--include in our request to the Bureau of the Budget any item for extension of these two parkways, and it was not included in the President's budget; nevertheless when our bill came out of committee, several million dollars had been added for the Blue Ridge and Natchez parkways.

Generally, I'd say that the national park appropriations were not treated as pork barrel items. Pretty well, within the ceiling that was established usually by the Department and the Bureau of the Budget, we were able to apportion our requests in accordance with priorities that had been determined by people who knew the facts.

Internal Division of National Park Service Budget

FRY: Did you have any additional income from your various organizations in conservation over the country?

DRURY: No, I don't know of any substantial funds from organizations over the country. We had what we called the National Park Trust Fund, but that only ran to tens of thousands of dollars a year, if that much. Occasionally somebody would want some special thing done for which we couldn't get government appropriations and they would make a gift of

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a thousand or two dollars.

There are, of course, the outstanding examples of the tremendous gifts by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his associated corporations. At the time when I was there we cast up what Mr. Rockefeller had done for the national parks and it was in excess of $15,000,000. The Mellon interests in the field of historical preservation had made pretty substantial gifts, and my understanding is that now, through the Old Dominion Foundation, which is one of their corporations, they have made lavish gifts to the NPS, as has Mr. Rockefeller and his son Laurence and the other Rockefeller brothers. But with the exception of occasional appropriations by states like Tennessee and North Carolina for the Great Smokies, and by states like Kentucky toward the Mammoth Cave, and gifts of lands from states like Florida for the Everglades National Park, money-wise the NPS was pretty well on its own and had to rely on government appropriations. Any income that you obtained from the parks did not go into your budget; it went into the general fund. I think that's a sound way to do it, myself. Of course, here in California we've had a special state park maintenance fund into which revenues from the parks would go, but I always felt both there and here that it was perilous to rely on that kind of thing, because obviously parks can't support themselves and I don't think as a matter of public policy that they should be expected to, because you could easily cheapen and commercialize them purely for the purpose of raising revenue. However, in the federal government we'd have cases like Carlsbad Caverns, which is the only one I recollect, which brought in in admission fees about twice as much as it cost to administer the area.

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DRURY: On the other hand most of the other parks were deeply in the red. I don't think anybody contends that parks should be run like a commercial enterprise and should be closed if they don't show in the black.

FRY: In your internal budget, I understand that after the war you had a "plans on the shelf" program; it was a five-year program. Was this another name for the five-year program you drew up for maintenance? This was apparently anticipation of a post-war depression in which more CCC boys might be forthcoming and some funds.

DRURY: Yes, that may have been one phase of it, but it was mainly following our custom. We had a section in the NPS that devoted itself to keeping current a five-year and I think also a ten-year program, estimates of appropriations that would be needed at current values and prices for construction to carry out the projects in our plans of development and acquisition that have priority.

FRY: This "plans on the shelf" program really was not a separate planning--

DRURY: Well, it probably was something called for by the President or by the Congress. We were making out reports all the time to somebody. In fact, there were times that some of us felt that we spent more time making out reports on what we were doing than doing the things themselves. On the other hand, I think that the function of Congress in calling government agencies to task on their expenditures is a sound one, but it can easily be run into the ground as it was in the case of the Senator Bird economy committee.

FRY: How much were you allowed to juggle funds? If you saw that something needed to be done were you allowed to take something out of one fund for another?

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DRURY: No, no. Neither in the federal government nor in the state. In the state there's more latitude than there was in the federal government, but it was a penal offense to expend money for a purpose other than that for which Congress earmarked it--within the limits of a general appropriation. For instance, if $50,000 were appropriated for historical research in certain areas, that could be spent on one of dozens of alternative projects within that framework, but you couldn't spend it on building structures or putting in roads or in hiring more personnel. In fact, at least one of my friends came to terrible grief years ago, before I was in the National Park Service, because in order to do something that he felt was in the interests of the government he used funds to do that although they'd been appropriated for another purpose. It was a tragedy for him that he did that. Of course, Congress is very jealous of its power and its responsibility, rightly. That’s the reason why the government has so much machinery now for checking that kind of thing,

National Redwood Park Proposals

FRY: Congressman Clarence F. Lea presented a resolution to the House of Representatives to investigate the problem of saving the redwoods in 1919 by creating national parks. Was that a sort of first effort that later culminated in the state funds?

DRURY: Well, the origin of the movement for a redwoods national park is sort of shrouded in mystery. I think we need a lot more research on that. I believe that Willis L. Jepson, who was head of the Department of Botany for a great many years at the University of California, in his

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DRURY: early writings proposed a redwood national park. John Muir, I know, very early wrote on the same subject, probably well before 1919, when the Save-the-Redwoods League began to operate.

I have and will send to you a photo static copy of an article in the journal--of which George Cornwell was the publisher--in which the subject of the redwood national park was discussed. John MacLaren, who was the outstanding city park man in charge of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was quoted, I remember, as advocating a redwood national park. At that time, following the Lea resolution, there was a report made to the Congress which was commonly referred to as the Reddington Report because the regional forester of the U.S. Forest Service, Paul Reddington, reviewed it. It was made primarily by foresters; the members of the field party who made it were Richard Hammett and Donald Bruce of the U.S. Forest Service and Merritt D. Pratt, who was the state forester of California. We have copies of that report and a map and I think they could be filed with this interview, if you want to.

FRY: Fine.

DRURY: It's interesting to note that that report took cognizance of all of the four main areas that became the program of major acquisition areas in which the state has made the most progress, because when the Save-the-Redwoods League came to make further study of the problem, it concluded that the four outstanding examples of redwood forest which were attainable and which were more accessible to the public were, first, the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which originally extended from Miranda to Dyerville, a distance

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DRURY: of about 15 miles, and the slopes on each side of the South Fork of the Eel River: number two, the Prairie Creek Redwoods just north of Orick in Humboldt County; number three, the Del Norte Coast park, which is a few miles south of Crescent City; and number four, what we then called the Smith River Mill Creek Redwoods, now known as the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, which is six or seven miles northeast of Crescent City. Those, by common consent and the judgment of men like Merriam and Madison Grant and Mather and particularly Frederick Law Olmsted, were considered the four primary goals that we should establish.

But the first recommendation of the Reddington Report, for a national park, was for a very extensive area along the Klamath River. At that time they were influenced somewhat by the fact that logging hadn’t started up there, and also that there were a great many Indian allotments that they thought might be turned over to the National Park Service by the Indian Service.

FRY: By Indian allotments you mean the ones--

DRURY: Land that was allotted to individual Indians in lieu of their being placed on a reservation.  My experience of ten and a half years in the National Park Service indicated to me that that was a vain hope. The Indian Service are very tough people to bargain with. It’s almost impossible to transact any effective business. We did acquire one property, I remember, down in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park but it took years of negotiation. Quite properly, the Indian Service is jealous of the rights of the Indians, and also like all of us who have been in government, slightly on the bureaucratic side.

Well, now the question of the redwood national park has recently been revived, and I’ve furnished the National

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DRURY: Park Service with copies of the Reddington Report and also two or three subsequent reports that were made at various times on other areas like the Jedediah Smith Redwoods. It's highly problematical whether there's a possibility of federal appropriations adequate to establish a national park. I have set forth my general view about that, which incidentally was written in a 1946 report to the Secretary of the Interior when I was director of the National Park Service. And the position of the Save-the-Redwoods League toward them, which I transmitted to the Secretary of the Interior, was that the State of California over the years had more or less met its responsibility in establishing these four primary parks and helping on the others, and that if there was any help forthcoming from the federal government it should be expanded partly at least in acquiring lands to round out and complete the existing state parks. Then the question was more or less a toss-up as to whether the federal government should incorporate all these in a great national park, or whether the federal government under some kind of use permit, having bought the lands, should turn them over to the state for administration. That really was the position toward which I inclined.

There are a good many reasons for that. One of them is that the state park holdings were purchased with money given to the Redwood league and through them to the state, matched by monies that were either appropriated by the Legislature or voted as a bond issue by the people, so that these park lands are to a considerable degree impressed with a trust to maintain them as state parks. That probably could be overcome.

All of that followed this resolution introduced by Congressman Lea which led to the very interesting speculation

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DRURY: over the years as to how far we should go with the redwood national park. Of course, the federal government in Sequoia and what was formerly General Grant, now incorporated in Kings Canyon, and in Yosemite in the Mariposa Grove has preserved the bulk of the best forests of the Sequoia gigantea, the Sierra redwoods, and it's debatable as to whether there shouldn't be a national park representative of the coast redwood, too.

FRY: At present there isn't one, except Muir Woods?

DRURY: Muir Woods is a national monument, but that again was donated to the government by William Kent. They wanted to call it Kent Woods, and he demurred. He was a very modest man, and at his suggestion it was named for John Muir.

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Congressional Committees and Hearings

FRY: Preparation of testimony before the appropriation subcommittees must have been one of your most important functions. What committees were the most important?

DRURY: Our primary committees that had the fate of the national parks in their hands were first the appropriations subcommittees, and second, the policy committees such as the House Committee on Public Lands and the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. I've mentioned the committee on interior affairs, which was a committee that passed on measures dealing with policy, whereas the general appropriation committee had a subcommittee on interior affairs which had to do primarily with appropriations for Interior, including national park matters. However, as everyone knows, the money bags control the authority more or less even in matters of policy, and we never went into an appropriations hearing that we didn't get a lot of rather contentious discussion on some of the policies that were involved in the spending of the money for park purposes.

FRY: In the hearings, your previous mastery of the art of debate must have been convenient to have at times.

DRURY: Perhaps, but I think I ought to make this clear, that the hearings before congressional committees are more or less pro forma. The real analysis of the needs of government agencies is made in the Bureau of the Budget, and of course the requests for appropriations are put in the President's budget which is presented to the Congress as a whole. The section dealing with the Department of Interior was more or less shaped by the Secretary of the

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DRURY: Interior and his fiscal advisors. There was a pretty cut and dried formula.

FRY: It seemed to me that you had a little easier time in the Senate subcommittee hearings on appropriations than you did in the House, most of the time.

DRURY: I think that's probably true, and largely due to Senator Carl Hayden and his understanding, and the fact that in general the senate operates on a little more dignified plane. There's not as much heckling. There was a sort of a disposition in these committees for some heckling of the government administrators -- perhaps it's justified in some cases. I always felt that it was somewhat unfair. We went there with a statement of our honest conviction as to what we should have in order to do the job that they asked us to do and there was a good deal of what I thought sometimes was rather superficial and somewhat prejudiced comment. That's particularly true in some of the hearings that bore on items for local projects that were being pressed upon senators or congressmen by their constituents but regarding which the National Park Service would surely not make a favorable recommendation. That's the kind of situation where rather fast foot-work was sometimes required, and it's the kind of situation that I spoke of where Congressman Jensen asked me whether I was telling the truth and I replied that I was trying hard to tell the truth. If we had revealed our inner thoughts about some of these real estate deals that were promoted by chambers of commerce that the congressmen almost tried to force on us, we wouldn't have helped our cause any and the net result probably wouldn't have been any different, so that we had to be supremely diplomatic. I remember particularly some of

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DRURY: the members of the House committees who heckled us quite a bit. One of my somewhat disturbing experiences when I first went to Washington, the first time I appeared before the House Appropriations Committee, I found myself in the midst of a rather bitter controversy between the pros and the antis as to further appropriations for the Mt. Rushmore Memorial, you know, that tour de force that Gutzon Borglum perpetrated. Well, I had my own inner thoughts about it but I didn't know those fellows well enough to expound them in a public meeting and wasn't very sure of my ground, because there was one group like Congressman Leavy of the state of Washington who denounced it as a waste of public funds, and then there were others, particularly from the Mt. Rushmore area in South Dakota who defended it warmly. Finally, I remember Congressman Leavy shook his finger in my face and said, "Now, I want to know, does the NPS intend to perpetrate anything more like this Mt. Rushmore atrocity?" And I thought fast and finally I said to him, "Well, Congressman, it seems to me that Mt. Rushmore should remain as it is now, unique." Whereupon both sides were satisfied. [Laughter] But I don't think I ever rose to such heights again. It was just an inspiration of the moment. I was a greenhorn and had to think fast.

But I remember particularly the heckling we used to get from Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee in the Senate. He was superannuated at that time and he got more and more so as time went on, and it was really a very serious thing. He was traditionally, for some reason that I can never understand, an enemy of the NPS, and he moved heaven and earth to put us in a difficult position. I remember one time--he was quite deaf, and

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DRURY: I knew that--Arthur Demaray, who was associate director with me, was testifying at one of the hearings and just to throw us off our stride McKellar interrupted and said, "Mr. Demaray, how many employees do you have at the Statue of Liberty National Monument?" Demaray said, "Well, about so many, but I couldn't give you the exact figure." He said, "What, don't you know how many employees you have at each of these areas? Why, if I were in charge of an enterprise and didn't know how many employees I had in every part of it I'd resign." Well, I was in a somewhat flippant mood and feeling pretty sore at the old gentleman anyhow, and knowing he was deaf I whispered to Demaray, "You tell him you'll resign if he will." And Demaray turned white, for fear the senator had heard it. But we got by. Oh, there were constant things of that sort.

One of the members of the House committee that I remember both with amusement and some distaste was a man named Jed Johnson from Oklahoma. He had several pet grievances that he always aired at every appropriations hearing. He always repeated them again and again. One of them was that when he and his mother-in-law and his wife and three children went to Rocky Mountain National Park several years before, before my time, they had been overcharged by a hotel, which, when I looked it up, I found was outside the park and in no way under our jurisdiction. But you couldn’t explain that to him. And there were several other things like that. Finally, one hot day in the hearings when we were pretty well tired out with Jed Johnson's heckling, he brought up this question again, and when he was through I said, "Well, Congressman, I have

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DRURY: here the transcript of the hearings of last year, and on page so-and-so in the second paragraph you'll find the answer to that question." [Laughter]

We had a lot of things like that, but generally the appropriations committees were sympathetic with our needs and as I said in the beginning I believe that all of them had their hands tied by a formula. I guess perhaps that's the only way you can do it. You can't in a public hearing adjudicate away competing interests such as are involved in the appropriation of funds for public projects.

FRY: Were there any congressional blind spots that you learned to steer away from in planning testimony?

DRURY: We didn't try to avoid them, necessarily, but I remember that one of the things that always struck me as rather frustrating was the fact that particularly the House appropriations subcommittee would go into a shrill rage if we endeavored in our argument to point out the diminishing purchasing power of the dollar in buying land. They would say, "Now, ten years ago you were getting a million dollars for this item, and here you come in with a one hundred per cent increase." Mr. Tolson or I would reply that that really didn't represent any increase at all, but we were told that we shouldn’t even think in terms of that sort. It was a sort of ostrich-burying-his-head-in- the-sand attitude on the part of the appropriation committees and to some extent on the part of the Bureau of the Budget. They continually talked in terms of formulas of increasing past appropriations by a certain per cent, but they weren't willing to cast those into present-day dollars. I finally found that it was futile even to present that argument.

FRY: Do you remember some arguments that really did sink in

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FRY: and make a difference?

DRURY: Well, of course, the primary argument that impressed any legislator was the call from his own constituents for more facilities in the parks, and in some cases for the establishment of new parks. The term national park is like the hallmark on silver; it's supposed to give any region a distinction that it didn't previously have. And I think that's true. But we had two extremes: we had in some cases Chambers of Commerce who felt we were taking too much land off the tax roll, and in other cases Chambers of Commerce who were urging us to do it because they wanted a national park. It used to be my duty to present some of the prologues to our appropriation bill because the committees always insisted on the head of each agency appearing. If he didn't they felt, or at least they pretended they felt, that he was not interested, and both they and my colleagues always insisted that I go to these hearings and make the preliminary statement and then they handled the details. Sometimes after starting out in the first fifteen minutes I frequently had a sense of futility. You could sense that the whole thing had been cut and dried. They were going through the motions of giving you a hearing but they had predetermined just about how much money you were going to get. And possibly that's the only way to do. I'm not conscious of any kind of argument ever having caused the appropriations committee to change their minds about any item in the budget. I think that a call from home districts sometimes changed their opinions on things, but not from the representatives of government agencies.

FRY: How much did you let yourself use this very effective technique of arousing a call from home?

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DRURY: Not much. I think our record was very good on that score. I felt at times when there were crises arising where the national parks were threatened with destruction, that since we had taken an oath of office to protect the parks, we were not barred from getting the facts to the people in the constituencies of members of Congress who were necessary to have them back us up in protecting the properties. Sometimes, of course, we were accused of propagandizing, but Secretary Ickes never objected to it and neither did any of the other secretaries. However, on the score of appropriations I can't recollect ever having inspired anybody to incite the members of Congress to be more liberal with the parks. Of course, we wrote articles for magazines explaining, just as these graphs that I speak of explain, how long it would take us to catch up with our deferred maintenance and the expansion of the system at given rates of appropriation.

But as I say, within the limits of the ceiling that some anonymous person always determined--probably the director of the Budget under the President--our appropriations in general followed a logical enough pattern but they never were adequate. We always felt that there was a formula that had not been divulged to us. I may be exaggerating when I say that I can’t recollect any decision by a committee having been arrived at because of argumentation on the part of the opponents of the appropriations. There may have been a few.

I dug up one of the transcripts of the hearings before the Senate subcommittee on appropriations for

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DRURY: the Interior for 1951, (See appendix.) which I think is fairly typical in that from pages 101 to 242 some of my colleagues and I--Hillory Tolson and Keith Neilson, our finance officer, and the assistant superintendent of the capital parks--discussed item by item the different phases of our appropriations. I thought that this might not be inappropriate to have in your appendix as a typical park hearing. It is not typical in one sense, in that as I said before the Senate was always a more agreeable place to be than the House; there was less heckling, I think that if you run through it, it will also give a pretty complete idea of the so-called mechanics of operation of the national parks because we had each item presented to them. This was after the House subcommittee had reduced our budget as approved by the Department and the Bureau of the Budget and we were there before them in an attempt to get restored $1,894,200, which was only a part of the $2,661,000 that the House reduction had amounted to. Well, item by item we take up funds needed for maintenance and operation, some very interesting discussion on the construction and land acquisition, and a special item on the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, which frankly was not one of my favorite projects--that is I didn't think it was a typical national park, it was subject to so many adverse uses, nevertheless it was our duty as long as we had it to try to obtain sufficient funds to take care of it.

Well, both Senator McCarran of the committee and Chairman Carl Hayden were from territory close to Lake Mead. I note that a good portion of the hearing was devoted to that subject. Senator McCarran (who incidentally

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DRURY: was a friend of my grandfather Dr. Bishop in the early days of Nevada) I remember asked a whole series of questions, some of which came perilously close to a sheer attempt to put us on the spot, but we did as well as we could. He was really a very benevolent gentleman, although I remember an incident at one hearing out in his own constituency at Fredonia --which I think is just over the border in Nevada--at a meeting attended primarily by stockmen who wanted to perpetuate grazing in the national parks. McCarran was an Irishman and quite a wit. At one point in the hearing, presumably jocosely, he said, "Well, now, I want to be pre-eminently fair in this hearing and yet give the National Park Service a little the worst of it." [Laughter] [Reading from transcript of hearing] Well, here's something. Senator Hayden and Senator McCarran were both quite insistent that the NPS should put in an item for a road to Scotty's Castle in Death Valley National Monument. We come to the showdown here, where we didn't particularly want to do it because we had hundreds of millions of dollars of construction that we thought was in high priority, and I notice they said, "Can we get some of this done this year?" There is some discussion and I point out, "It is a road that is undoubtedly in our master plan but it is not a main stem road. We can't even take care of the major roads in the national parks." Whereupon Senator McCarran with a touch of sarcasm said, "I am calling on your masterminds to get a road into Scotty." And perhaps just a little flippantly I replied, "We will try to rise to the challenge, sir." [Laughter]

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DRURY: This is all warmed-over material; I've forgotten all this that happened, but as I read it now it's quite amusing to me to see the blind alleys into which I was maneuvered and the attempts I made to extricate myself.

There's a very fine book written on the operations of Congress by a man named James Burns [Congress on Trial, Harper & Brothers, 1949]. He was a professor of political science at one of the smaller New England colleges. The burden of his whole discussion, after giving what I think is a very accurate picture of the workings of Congress and the motivation, was that when you speak about lobbyists you have to realize that by far the most potent lobbyists are the men who've been elected to Congress. That isn't a fair generalization, but in many specific cases you know that men were elected to Congress because they represented the point of view of the stockmen or the mining interests or some other group that they perhaps felt legitimately should have a voice in Congress.

FRY: Did you find this was as true of senators as of congressmen?

DRURY: It was rather true of senators, yes, in general. It wasn't true of men like Senator Bill Knowland. It might have been true of Senator Bird, the great advocate of economy, who always caused us considered additional expense because we had to hire extra men to furnish the figures that he demanded. I think a great many of them were like what they said of Senator LaFollette, that he was a free trader except when it came to cheese, that being one of the main products of Wisconsin.

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DRURY: Well, anyhow, the point I was trying to make was that this heckling on the part of congressmen sometimes represented their tendency to speak for certain interests in their constituency, which I suppose was perfectly normal. I think it also represented a rather subtle psychology that would be very difficult to discuss, and probably futile to try to describe. But I know this, that I've traveled in the field with members of both the Congress and the Senate, and when these men are out of the halls of Congress they are entirely different persons, broad-minded and generous and tolerant. But the minute they get into a committee, there's a sort of atmosphere that tends toward narrowing their point of view. For one thing, they're talking for the record. These transcripts go back to their constituents, and I knew just as well as I know my own name that some of the questions they asked were primarily for local consumption.

FRY: I heard this sort of thing described once as the unseen committee which sits behind every man.

DRURY: Well, that's it, and then of course the man who is a representative of a section of the country would be benighted--in any event he wouldn't last very long--if he didn't try to reflect the desires of his constituency, selfish and unselfish. I remember one congressman from Santa Barbara who was one of our great advocates in the Jackson Hole controversy. In his campaign for re-election after his first term he made the statement that he was for humanity first, for the nation second, for the state of California third, and for Santa Barbara last. He was not re-elected-- although he was from the standpoint of conservationists a very fine man to have on the interior committee.

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FRY: You must have had to learn how to be constantly aware of the re-election concerns of the congressmen.

DRURY: Yes, and one of the things that always interested me, if you feel it's worthwhile to talk about the workings of the minds of members of Congress, is the fact that a great many statements are made for the record.

I remember one case which occasioned quite a little excitement in the NPS in connection with our concessions policy. Rightly or wrongly we had the feeling that the dignity of the parks should be upheld in all phases of contact with the public, including the commercial enterprises like the hotels and souvenir shops and so forth, and there was a pretty trashy order of so-called curios that they sold in some of the parks. So gradually we tried to persuade the concessionaires to eliminate the junk and put in things that were reasonably appropriate and had some quality. Anyone who's frequented souvenir shops in and out of the national parks knows what atrocious things are sold, and it's unfortunately true that the artistry of these things is not necessarily a guarantee of their saleability. However, that's a very interesting aspect of park management, and in many of the parks we encourage them to sell local handicrafts. For instance, down in the Great Smoky Mountains and out in the Indian country, the Navaho silverwork, that kind of thing. There were many local items that, while they were sold for profit, nevertheless seemed to add to the richness of the experience of the visitor.

Anyhow, what I'm leading up to is that one day to our consternation we got a very bitter, scathing letter from a courtly gentleman, Howard Smith, a congressman

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DRURY: from Virginia, who was chairman at that time of the Small Business committee. Of course, all those committees have their specialized staff who do a great deal of the work. Well, I got this letter which called us to task for presuming to interfere with free enterprise on the part of these concessionaires. One sentence was that even in Nazi Germany they would not presume to tell independent businessmen what to do. Well, I called a group of my colleagues together and we had a discussion of how we should reply to this, and finally it was decided that I was the one who should go over and call on Congressman Smith and try to mollify him. So I prepared as carefully as I could and I went over there, made an appointment and greeted the congressman, and brightly I told him how my ancestors had come from Culpepper County, Virginia, which he represented, and talked about what a wonderful state Virginia was, especially that part of it. Finally, I said, "Senator, I know that you're interested in the national parks and I hope you're interested in some of the problems we have in connection with our concessions. Now I would like to ask your advice

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DRURY: as to the degree to which we should try to control the quality of the souvenirs that are sold in these concession shops." He looked me in the eye and said, "Mr. Drury, suppose you and the National Park Service settle that question. I'm not interested." And yet he had a signed letter evidently prepared by a member of his staff that just ripped the hide off us, and he'd completely forgotten about it.

FRY: But his unhappy constituent got a copy of it.

DRURY: Yes, that's the point exactly. I learned a great deal from that one episode.

FRY: Herbert Evison, your Information and Education officer, told me about the episode with Congressman Taber and the limitation put on National Park educational material.

DRURY: One difficulty that I remember was in connection with our appropriation for publications and Congressman John Taber, chairman of the Interior subcommittee. Largely as a reprisal against Harold L. Ickes the committee had put a limitation on the total appropriation for printing in the Department of the Interior, on the theory that they thought the

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DRURY: Department was engaging in too much so-called propaganda. Well, that pinched the NPS more than most of the agencies because we had in the course of the year tens of thousands of applications for the descriptive leaflets on the different parks -- people who wanted to have some foreknowledge of what they were going to see at Yosemite and Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Great Smokies, etc. The National Park Service was expected to send out these publications in response to requests. Under this limitation that the Committee imposed--and it was not necessarily limitations on the total appropriation, it was simply a ceiling on the amount to be spent on this one item of publications--we came to the point where we had a room stacked high with about thirty thousand unanswered requests for publications.

I remember getting a dressing down from Congressman Taber in one hearing because in answer to any number of complaints from congressmen whose constituents had complained that we hadn't answered their requests, I sent a letter to each member of Congress telling them the true facts, which Mr. Taber didn't like. When I appeared with my colleagues he held up this letter and said, "Who was it who sent out this foolish letter?" I said, "Well, I'll have to confess that I did. I'm sorry if it gave offense to anyone but it was an attempt to state the actual facts." We had other episodes like that.

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FRY: Was the western delegation your most dependable support in congress?

DRURY: As a rule, any Westerner was better than those Midwesterners who were less informed and less sympathetic than either the Westerners or the people from the East, but a notable exception was during the Eightieth Congress--and I say this although I am personally a Republican--in which the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee was Congressman John Taber of upstate New York. He’s been a small-town banker and, as somebody said about him, “Congressman Taber didn’t usually see the whole picture; he simply peeked under one corner of the blanket.” Anyhow, our experience with him was most distressing because he couldn’t see the advantage of any cultural enterprise like the national parks. We had some difficulties, but in general the subcommittee on interior affairs to whom we made our pleas was sympathetic. That was true both in the Senate and the House.

FRY: Your archeological studies seemed to have a little trouble in the Eightieth Congress, from Midwestern Senator Kenneth Wherry’s subcommittee on Interior Appropriations: and Senator Elmer Thomas was skeptical of the value of archeological remains, too.

DRURY: Anything of a purely cultural nature often had to battle for its life. The historical program, particularly in the South, was rather popular, and also in the New England states and New York. I think there was more interest in historical projects in the East and South than there was in the West.  Frankly, part of the incubus was that we always had quite a few members on these committees from the Midwest, where they had

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DRURY: very few national park areas and where they were more or less disinterested. We usually tried to get into the minds of these Midwesterners the fact that the parks were a national enterprise and belonged to all the people, and we had fairly convincing statistics as to the extent of travel to the national parks from states like Illinois and Ohio and Kansas and so forth.

FRY: I was wondering for instance about Jensen...

DRURY: Well, Congressman Jensen was a very fine friend of mine personally, and he I think was interested in our affairs. Frankly, he embarrassed us by pressing for us to make a national park of a project in his district--if I remember rightly the name was Lake Minatare--and all of our counter efforts were to try to induce the state of Nebraska to make it a state park, which it could appropriately have been. As far as I know Lake Minatare never was included in the national park system even as a recreational area.

FRY: In the Midwest generally do you think the influence of such unusually reactionary organs as the Chicago Tribune contributed any to this lack of enthusiasm for parks?

DRURY: Well, I think Illinois was fairly conservation conscious. I don't recollect any antagonism on the part of the Chicago Tribune. They were not super-enthusiasts the way, for instance, the New York Times is and has been for many years. In fact, New York, I think, is on a parity with California and I think perhaps a little ahead of it in advanced conservation thought, but you couldn't say that Illinois was in that class, or most of the midwestern states. I’ve never speculated as to why it is, but I think it's primarily because they don't have the outstanding, dramatically scenic areas that you find in the West.

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Congressmen

FRY: Were there any particular senators or congressmen whom you could call on the telephone and tell your troubles to?

DRURY: Oh, yes. In the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs (the policy committee) one of the finest friends the Park Service ever had was Congressman J. Hardin Peterson of Florida. "Pete", as we called him, was naturally park-minded and I think in any event would have been fair and generous, but he was in the excellent position of coming from what you might say was a neutral corner of the country. There were some projects in Florida but they were all projects pre-eminently worthwhile which we all agreed upon, such as the Everglades and the St. Augustine National Monument, the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, but I think that Pete in any event would have been impartial.

He was very helpful in many of our hearings. For quite a while he was chairman of the interior subcommittee of the Senate. We had him out at Jackson Hole during the controversy when the state administration, I think largely for political reasons, because of the local antagonism, did everything it could to disparage the properties that we were taking into the Grand Teton National Park. At one of the hearings the state geologist of Wyoming testified against the expansion of the park, and one of his arguments ran about as follows: if you took away these mountains in the background and the Snake River and the forests in the foreground, this would be just like any other landscape in

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DRURY: Wyoming. [Laughter] The reason I tell of that is that the last day we were out there the Rotary Club gave a banquet and Peterson was the main speaker. As he wound up his speech, showing that he had noted this rather weird testimony, he made a remark something like this: "Now, gentlemen, one of these days I'm going to come back to this state and take an advanced course in geology in the University of Wyoming,"

One of our park naturalists, who belonged to a geological professional society along with this Wyoming man, took it on himself to write a letter to the state geologist chiding him for unprofessional conduct--whereupon the governor of Wyoming started to bombard me, insisting that we discipline our naturalist some way. And that was another case where I had to use pretty deft footwork, because as far as I was concerned he shouldn't have written the letter but I'm glad he did it. He wasn’t reprimanded.

I think of quite a succession of interesting gentlemen who were in key positions, both in the House and the Senate, in the ten and a half years when I had to appear for appropriations. Carl Hayden was I think at the beginning chairman of the interior subcommittee but he is now I believe chairman of the entire committee. Senator Hayden again was a Westerner, came from Arizona and was a graduate of Stanford University and knew the West. It was very helpful to have him as chairman of the committee because he understood what we were talking about and he was interested in the national parks.

FRY: What about LeRoy Johnson?

DRURY: LeRoy Johnson happens to have been another classmate of mine in the law school at Berkeley along with Chief

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DRURY: Justice Warren and Herman Phleger and Horace M. Albright. He was the congressman from Stockton and I think more through persuasion by Horace Albright than by myself he always rallied to the defense of the national parks when he was a member of Congress, and he was a very good friend. I know that when I retired he was generous in inserting in the Congressional Record a speech which he made regarding my regime in the national parks. I think I have a copy of that somewhere.(See Appendix.)

FRY: Yes, that's another thing I want to append. We'll have to have a second volume for our appendices. [Laughter]

DRURY: LeRoy Johnson was a very excellent legislator. At least I think so, because he almost uniformly agreed with us.

FRY: People like LeRoy Johnson and Peterson of Florida, were very good in supporting park measures. Do you think this was because they came from areas where their constituents had the same point of view? I'm wondering if anybody functioned this way just because it was a principle.

DRURY: Yes, I think that's true of both of those men. Even if he hadn't been a classmate of mine I think LeRoy Johnson would have supported the national parks, in fact I know so.

The same was true of a man like Peterson, and there were many others that I could name. Pete's office was a thing to behold. It was cluttered up with all sorts of pictures and paintings of the parks, and he had geological specimens and shells of mollusks, and I think at one time he had a stuffed animal of some sort that came from one of the park areas. He had a park bench

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DRURY: from St. Petersburg, Florida. His wife, who for a while acted as his secretary, despaired of ever even clearing enough space so that people could get through his outer office.

FRY: Well, that's quite a testimonial to his sincerity.

DRURY: [Laughter] A testimony to the exuberance of his interests.

FRY: You had Hiram Johnson in the Senate until 1947. In the House, Congressman Albert E. Carter was one of the key men. Later on Congressman Clair Engle, who's now senator, became chairman of the Interior or House Committee on Public Lands and Insular Affairs Committee. Was he good for you to have?

DRURY: Yes. One of the congressmen that was a very potent force on the interior appropriations committee and who was chairman for many years of the subcommittee that heard our appropriations was Congressman James G. Scrugham of Nevada, former governor of Nevada who later became a senator, a very capable and aggressive gentle man with a fine understanding of the purposes of the national parks. Of course, he was like everybody else: he could see the beauties of his own bailiwick more clearly than he could those of some remote area. They tell one story about a tour of congressmen--or maybe they were senators--that was investigating Lake Mead at the Hoover Dam and the Boulder Recreational Area, which was under the aegis of the National Park Service. Senator Scrugham was one of that party and they were traveling by boat. The greater part of the area and some of the more spectacular part is in Nevada. Finally, as Senator Scrugham was standing up in the boat pointing out to his colleagues the vivid coloring of the cliffs and the picturesque geological

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DRURY: formations and all, somebody remarked that, "We've now passed out of Nevada into" -- I think it was California. Whereupon Senator Scrugham subsided completely and was no longer interested in the scenery through which they were passing. [Laughter] That's an extreme case. He was very helpful to us and was quite interested in the historical projects, the battlefields and that sort of thing.

Bureau of Budget

FRY: We've spoken so much about the congressional hearings; what about those hearings before the Bureau of the Budget? You said those were really the crucial ones.

DRURY: I think that the hearings before the Bureau of the Budget were sincere, but I always had the feeling that they, too, were cut and dried; the issues had been more or less predetermined and to some extent they were courtesy hearings. However, I believe that we did make some progress in those hearings in this respect: that within the predetermined ceiling for our particular function we sometimes were able to give higher priorities to items that we felt were of supreme importance, as against things that we felt were not too important. Of course, the great trouble about appropriations is you go into a hearing--this is particularly true of Congress--where certain people are plugging for a specific project, such as those parkways in the South. If those are granted it takes away from the more essential things, according to the opinion of the agency. But I look back with great pleasure on my associations

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DRURY: with the men with whom we had contact in the Bureau of the Budget.   One of them was a man named Sam Dodd, who was very much of a southern gentleman with a fine appreciation of park values. I couldn't help feeling at times that his hands were more or less tied. I think the same thing applied to Randall Dorton, whom I had taught speech and English composition, presiding for the Bureau of the Budget. But he didn't give us any breaks on that account. If anything he was more hard-boiled than Sam Dodd. However, he was highly intelligent and appreciative of park values.

There was none of that sense of being heckled that you always had before congressional committees. They were a hundred per cent sincere so far as the questions were concerned; there were no questions of the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" type, which we frequently encountered in congressional committees.

FRY: Was there anywhere along the way of preparation of the budget that you had a chance to influence it besides at the hearings?

DRURY: Yes, I think you could say that here and there, through the higher-ups in the Department of the Interior, through certain friends in Congress, you made a slight dent perhaps.

FRY: What about the President himself? Could you ever get any influence channeled through him?

DRURY: No, never. We'd never presumed to do that. But I'm sure there were cases under Franklin D. Roosevelt where he interposed to make sure that certain things were taken care of, and they were always worthwhile things.

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DRURY: He had a very fine sense of park values and he was a good park conservationist. One of my earliest relationships with Franklin D. Roosevelt was in connection with his home at Hyde Park, the ancestral home, which he felt and a great many Americans felt should be a national historic site, which sure enough it became. I went up there with him and had a very interesting visit.

FRY: Did he want this on the basis of strict preservation?

DRURY: Yes, preservation and display in the same way that the homes of other presidents had been preserved.

FRY: Does this about wrap up your comments on the appropriation process?

DRURY: There are many phases of the appropriations we haven't touched on, but I think that most of the main collateral thoughts that I would have on that have come out.

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PROTECTION

Fire

FRY: Could you tell us anything about problems or progress in fire prevention and control while you were head of national parks?

DRURY: The fire protection system in the national parks was well-organized when I went to Washington. John Coffman was our chief forester, a title that has recently been changed to "Chief of Park Protection." He was a very able man who'd had previous experience with the U.S. Forest Service, a very conscientious worker. He had direct charge of that phase of the ranger work which has to do with the prevention and suppression of fires, through the superintendents of each park and the chief forester of each region. As far as policy is concerned, the chief forester of each region reports to the Washington office, and as far as administration is concerned he reports to the regional director. Some of the parks like Yosemite have a forester on the staff. The U.S. Forest Service, whose holdings in the West generally bordered on the national parks, were very cooperative in coming in at our request, although they always rendered us a bill, as we did in the reverse case when we were called to help them with fires; we were very grateful for their help.

The parks had had some disastrous fires in the past. One of them was at Glacier. As a consequence we had a very thoroughly organized system of patrol and fire detection and fire suppression. During my time, the worst fire was at Acadia National Park where over a

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DRURY: quarter of the area was burned over in a fire that nobody expected because the fire history in Maine was practically nil. It just happened that there was a period of low humidity for a long period, with high winds, and it also happened that a fire on the garbage dump for the city of Bar Harbor, which was some miles away from the park, escaped and made its way across a bog and finally ignited some of the structures near the park, and the first thing we knew practically a quarter to a third of the town of Bar Harbor was destroyed, It was a multimillion dollar fire and some of the finest of the coastal scenery in the Acadia National Park was marred. It was nobody’s fault except perhaps the local authorities who should have kept more careful watch on the first fire, because it escaped during the night after they thought they'd mopped it up.

This brings out one of the very important principles of fire-fighting, which is that it doesn't do to assume that a fire's out. The mop-up is a very vital phase of the whole process. Offhand I don't think of any other disastrous fires that occurred during my time. As you know, the Sierra is a tinderbox at certain times of the year when the humidity is low and the winds are high. Both at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks we had two or three fires, but they were always brought under control within a few days.

One of the great troubles in California, and I guess it's true elsewhere, is that in the fire season, particularly in time of unemployment, they accuse the local residents or itinerants of actually setting the fires in order to get jobs as fire-fighters. It's hard

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DRURY: to believe anyone would do that. No one who understood the terrible calamities that sometimes ensue would do it. I had the impression in the days when I was active that the courts were never severe enough with people who were accused of arson, setting fires. In fact, I've known several cases where they would sentence them and then suspend the fine. I believe that the courts are more severe these days. They surely should be.

FRY: Was this also due to a lack of federal legislation on that score? Was it something, for instance, that you could press for in Congress or the Legislature?

DRURY: Well, no. There were plenty of laws; arson of course is a crime. But it's very difficult to prove. Yellowstone was subject every summer to dozens of lightning fires, and of course lightning usually struck in the remote parts of the park so there was scarcely a time that we weren't alarmed about Yellowstone.

FRY: I wanted to ask you about the personnel for fire-fighting.

DRURY: Of course, I don't claim to know much about fire-fighting, but the main thing that I insisted upon was that whoever it was, there should be someone in sole charge of each fire--  usually the superintendent who in some cases had been a ranger and had come up the ladder in the conventional way, and who was experienced in the technique of fire-fighting. Occasionally the superintendent preferred to delegate to his chief ranger the job of fire boss.

The great difficulty in several of our fires was that when the experts from Washington began to fly in

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DRURY: we'd have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. At the fire in Saguaro National Monument we had considerable confusion because at one end of the park was a very able forester who thought he was in charge and at the other end was the chief ranger who had the same idea. We learned the extreme importance of unified command.

FRY: Was your fire-fighting personnel in the parks any different then from what it is today?

DRURY: I don't think so. The ranger force in the park was organized for various types of duty.

FRY: And when you had to import fighters---?

DRURY: Usually the U.S. Forest Service was in a position to help us if our own ranger force couldn’t suppress the fires, and in times of great emergency people were recruited from the countryside.

I had never done any fire-fighting in the national parks; in fact I was a little mature for that kind of active work when I became Director, but in my earlier years up in the redwood country once or twice I was pressed into duty as a fire-fighter. One time I was on a fire line, battling away, keeping the fire from advancing, and I looked up and here was my next-door neighbor in Berkeley who had been touring in that country and had also been impressed.

FRY: How did you get involved in the fire?

DRURY: I was driving up the highway and in the old days they used to just take people and say, "Here, we delegate you as a fire-fighter." But I was a volunteer; I didn't get paid for it.

FRY: On the prevention side, what about building fire

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FRY: breaks in the national parks? Did that have to come out of your budget?

DRURY: Oh, yes. All of the construction work, fire trails and fire breaks and of course equipment for fire-fighting, motorized equipment, and in later years fighting fires with airplanes--we didn't own any ourselves but we could get the benefit of the U.S. Forest Service planes, all of that was included in our budget.

There was one very finely-balanced problem in relation to fire-fighting in the national parks. Our ideal of course was to maintain a state of nature, to interfere as little with the native landscape as possible, so that in designing roads and trails, which of course are the great facilities for getting fire fighters to the fires, our landscape architects tended to be very conservative, to put in the minimum necessary number of roads and trails. [Laughter] On the other hand, our foresters were constantly contending that we should have a more elaborate network, trails and fire roads, so that if we had followed their wishes completely we would have practically decimated the parks. It was the job of the Director of the national parks to try to adjudicate that problem.

FRY: If you went too far either way you would defeat your purpose.

DRURY: That's it. It was a very neat point to adjudicate at times.

In one instance we had a certain amount of controversy between the national park foresters and the landscape architects when we considered the possibility down in the Shenandoah National Park of clearing vistas along the

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DRURY: park roads. The Skyline Drive, which penetrates through the national park, is a magnificent scenic feature. It extends clear down to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Anyone familiar with highway construction knows that when you build a highway through a forest, the opening up of the right-of-way and the scarifying of the soil tend to accelerate the growth on the roadsides. We've had the experience up in the redwood country of a highway which, when it was built, opened up great vistas, but as time went on and the growth increased, it became simply a tunnel through a mass of trees. In Shenandoah we did a certain amount of vista clearing, but the foresters wanted a lot more done. One reason we didn't do more is because we didn't have the money; it was a very expensive process, cost tens of thousands of dollars per mile to do it. But I finally mollified the foresters by saying that we weren't going to do any more at that time but if there were any trees to be cut in the future the foresters would have the fun of cutting them. [Laughter] And that's the way we left it.

FRY: These were the foresters in the Forest Service?

DRURY: No, the foresters in our own division of forestry in the NFS, which is primarily a protection agency. You speak of changes in organization; I'm not as well up on the internal organization of the park service today as perhaps I should be. But I note that they have changed the title of the chief forester to "protective officer" or something of that sort.

Insects and Disease

FRY: What about protection against insects and plant diseases?

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DRURY: Well, there is today a tremendous revulsion against the widespread spraying to arrest diseases and to try to exterminate insects, because the reaction on bird life particularly and wild life generally has been very adverse in many parts of the country. Some areas have been depopulated of wild life because of an attempt to eradicate certain insects or fungi. Many of us feel that the cure in most cases has been worse than the disease.

In the national parks we had that problem, of course. We had, for instance, constant mosquito abatement problems. We had to take a realistic view where you had human habitations, as in the hotels and the campgrounds. You couldn’t just let nature take its course because the insects would have taken over.

The same thing applied to the spraying to reduce insect infestations like the bark beetle and fungi of various sorts. In the national parks we confined that work to the areas in the immediate vicinity of campgrounds and other places of habitation, partly as a matter of policy and partly because we didn't have the finances for wholesale spraying. We had up in the Rocky Mountains a beetle infestation, and then we had the spruce budworm, both of which we attempted to eradicate in the vicinity of the areas where people congregated.

The great scourge of the Sierra was the white pine blister rust which during my time was steadily making its way southward and now I think has pretty well surrounded Yosemite and Sequoia, although I haven't had any recent figures as to how much death of the five-needle pines has taken place as a result of this blister rust. We had during the days of the CCC dozens of blister rust camps. They grubbed out intensively over thousands of

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DRURY: acres the ribes (gooseberry or currant) that was intermediate host for this blister rust before it was carried to the white and sugar pines.

In fact, my two boys, Newt Jr. and Hugh Wells Drury, worked in a blister rust camp one summer. When they were in Washington they had asked me to get them a job and I had refused, so they went to our personnel officer independently and were put to work. They both told me afterwards that if they lived to be a hundred they never expected to work as hard as they did there at Yosemite that summer in the blister rust camp. The hours were long and the temperature was high. Like all boys they complained about the food. They killed a rattlesnake about every mile along the trail. I think it was very good training for them, because no matter what work they do now their yardstick is that summer they spent in the blister rust camp.

FRY: How much research for the various diseases came out of your budget?

DRURY: We had a very fine wild life staff, headed by Victor Cahalane. He's no longer with the Park Service; he's with one of the larger museums in New York. But most of the scientific research was done by related agencies of the government. The Department of Agriculture has what they called the Bureau of Plant Pathology in which there are several very fine scientists who worked with us very extensively. One of them was Dr. Willis Wagner, who worked not only with the national parks but with the state parks. That was a very common arrangement. The same thing applied to specific wild life problems, too. Anyhow, Dr. Wagner, for instance, made the basic study on the cypress canker, which was one of the threats to

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DRURY: Point Lobos Reserve State Park, They never did find a specific cure. For a while the cypresses all around Point Lobos were dying from this infestation and of course we took extreme care with the trees in Point Lobos, which are one of the unique natural features of the world. I saw Dr. Wagner just recently and asked him what had happened. He said none of this disease had hit the trees that were native at Point Lobos, which seemed to indicate that it was a pest that attacked trees that had been planted, or transplanted; and he also felt that possibly the salt spray had a therapeutic effect, in keeping out this carineum cardinale. which was the so-called cypress canker.

He and Dr. Bailey and E.P. Meinecke, who was the dean of the plant pathologists, worked with us on many of our problems, including the problem of the disease that was infecting the saguaro cactus in Saguaro National Monument in Arizona. Dr. Meinecke, incidentally, was with the U.S. Forest Service most of his life but was also a plant pathologist; he was the originator of the method of arranging campgrounds so as to give campers some degree of privacy by shielding by vegetation, a big improvement upon the stark regularity of the original campgrounds, which were more like a military encampment than anything else.

FRY: Did he have influence on the state parks?

DRURY: Oh, yes. In fact, what he did was primarily for the state parks. Not only did he design the system so that we carried it out, but he also made some very fundamental studies on the effect of trampling upon the roots of the redwood trees. There's a pamphlet which we

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DRURY: still reprint, a copy of which I'll furnish for your supplement, on the effect of excessive trampling. That was one reason why we moved many of the state campgrounds from the heavier and more attractive stands of redwood forest, and the same thing applied in the national parks, in Sequoia and other parks. Another reason why we moved the campgrounds was the extreme peril that people were in from falling limbs and also the fact that the summer came much later in the dense forest than it did in the open lands or the lighter timber on the fringe of the forest. But in connection with this campground design, somebody, surely not a purist in the English language, designed the atrocious word, "Meineckeizing, " so that when a campground was designed with staggered locations and a screen of vegetation it was referred to both in the national and state parks as a "Meineckeized" campground. That's one way new words get into the language.

FRY: Did you set up any new research groups?

DRURY: Not in the field of biology or pathology. Some of the research that we undertook during my time had to do with the mechanics of operation, like the concessions, and some of the historical programs.

FRY: How about archeology?

DRURY: We did a considerable amount of pioneer work in archeology under our history section, of which Ronald Lee was the head. In connection with the Bureau of Reclamation’s projects and the necessary destruction of archeological remains, we were able to get meager appropriations under which we, either directly through our own archeologists or through contracts with universities like California and Nebraska, tried to keep a jump ahead of the bulldozers in salvaging and saving archeological remains. In many

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DRURY: cases measured drawings were made of objects of one sort or another which couldn't be preserved. That was an offshoot of the upsurge in water development under the Bureau of Reclamation. The same way other phases of history were gone into in connection with these projects.

Public Use and Park Interpretation

FRY: Would you like to go into how much regulation was absolutely necessary to control public use for the perpetuation of the park?

DRURY: Of course, the parks would be without meaning if it weren't for the people. They belong to the people, they're paid for by the people for their inspiration and enjoyment. One of the close decisions that had to be made constantly was the choice between restrictive regulations and enforcement, which tended to curtail the freedom of the visitors, and the destruction of natural features, which would occur unless we did adopt a pretty stringent policy. There again we just had to feel our way. We always tried to minimize the number of things that were "verboten." We tried to be realistic and reasonable, but the basic idea of the national parks, and it applies also to state parks, was one of inviolate protection. Needless to say that was an ideal rather than a reality. The great problem, it seems to me, in dealing with visitors in parks is to give them the maximum natural experience.

One of the problems we wrestled with--and it still is plaguing the Park Service and will have to be dealt with before the public can get the most out of the experience of visiting the national parks--is the problem

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DRURY: of limitation of attendance. It works in a good many ways. In a great natural area its beauty is a fragile thing--usually that's particularly true of mountain meadows and other areas of relatively sparse vegetation, slow-growing plants. In one day an undue visitation might blot out many of the elements that made the beauty of the place, so that many a great area carries in its beauty the seeds of its own destruction. That to some extent is true of Yosemite. You can't hold the more fragile elements of vegetation and even geological formations if you have traffic akin to the traffic on city streets.

Then the other phase of it which I always deplored even more was the fact that in your facilities to take care of the public in such large masses you had to conventionalize. You had to put in, for instance, curbing on the roads and the parking areas, whereas if in the course of a day you had maybe one hundred people parking in a given area such rather stark and artificial introductions wouldn't be necessary. But when you have two or three thousand in a day, as we did at parks like Sequoia and Yosemite, it was anything but an improvement on the native landscape.

The same thing applies of course to all kinds of structures to provide shelter and public facilities generally. The more people you have the larger they have to be, the more difficult your problems of design and construction and of safety, so that there always was that problem of trying in some way or other to keep below the point of diminishing returns the attendance at the parks. Of course, World War II did pretty well in that

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DRURY: respect; as I remember the figures it cut down attendance in Yellowstone from a million to about a hundred thousand a year. In that respect the landscape got a little rest at Yellowstone, and to a lesser degree there was a reduction in most of the parks.

Ranger Naturalist Program

The dealing with the public of course was not primarily one of regulating them, it was one of facilitating their use and enjoyment of the parks. We had two phases of our staff that dealt particularly with that; the first were the rangers, who tried to keep the people within line reasonably, to inform them as to what they could and could not do, and if they got marooned on a cliff to take the risks of rescuing them and in cases of accidents bringing them in from the outlying country to the park hospital and so forth, and on days of heavy travel regulating traffic--they were in effect the police force and yet I think the universal opinion through the country about national park rangers is that there was nothing dictatorial about them. They always tried to be guides and friends of the public. I know that I felt and I think most of our people felt that we had no right to have any sense of possessiveness about this property. It wasn't our property, it belonged to the people. The people of course had a right to use it, but they did not have any right to use it up, which was the distinction that we tried to make.

Well, that was one phase of our public contact which was all-important, and the other was our ranger

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DRURY: naturalist service, the interpretive service. That was something that was built up gradually, first under Stephen T. Mather and then through the successive directors.

FRY: I'd like to check with you on something that I found. Dr. Hubert Jenkins, at Sacramento State, was supposed to have suggested extending the ranger-naturalist movement throughout the national park system, and you were supposed to have been the one who did this. Do you have any comment on that?

DRURY: Yes, I do have. It was a matter of considerable embarrassment to Dr. Jenkins and also to Mr. Goethe and myself that that statement was made, because, frankly, the extension of the ranger-naturalist system throughout the national parks was made not at all at my instance but in the time of Stephen T. Mather.  Mr. C. M. Goethe of Sacramento and Mrs. Goethe got Dr. Harold Bryant, who now lives out at Orinda and who was then with the California Fish and Game Commission, to organize this program and they carried it on for some years with increasing popularity. Stephen Mather happened to learn about it and he persuaded Mr. Goethe to transfer his subsidized enterprise to Yosemite, so that's the way the naturalist organization began. Dr. Bryant was one of the first chief naturalists who carried it on in the national parks, and Carl Russell--who also lives in Orinda, now retired--was one of the later chief naturalists. Dr. Jenkins felt a little badly about the error and so did Mr. Goethe. It happened that this press interview with Mr. Goethe took place in a hospital shortly after he had had an operation. You know how these newspaper reporters are; they'll go anywhere. The Sacramento Bee

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DRURY: was getting out a memorial issue--they were having their first issue with a colored supplement and they wanted to start it with a distinguished Sacramentan, so they did on Mr. Goethe. He was having a relatively minor operation. He told me that this and certain other statements were made just as he was coming out from the ether. [Laughter] That's why I don't always believe what I read in the papers. The Service puts as much stress now--I know we did in my time--on the interpretive effort as they do on the regulatory effort of the staff in the parks.

We had I imagine a hundred and fifty or more naturalists in the different parks and monuments during the forties, and while I don't have the figures right at hand I imagine there are three or four hundred of them now. Some of the parks have permanent naturalists--I'm talking now of the national parks--who are stationed there the year around and their work is supplemented by temporary seasonal naturalists, many of them science teachers in high schools and colleges, biologists and some foresters. The naturalist work has been expanded and pretty well codified. It's I think one of the most important phases of the park work. However, some of the seasonal naturalists have a hard time mastering the facts about the parks they're interpreting before the season's over.

FRY: How do they get all this information in their training? Dr. Bryant says there was a training school in Yosemite.

DRURY: That started I think largely because of this work that Dr. Bryant and Mr. Goethe and others began. The field was uncharted then. There was no such thing really as a park naturalist, so that Dr. Harold Bryant felt it was

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DRURY: important to have some guidelines for the functions of the position and to have some course of training for men who could go into it. Regularly since that time they have had some vestige of the course--I think that during the war it was cut down to the minimum, during World War II.

It recruited some very useful people. I know that Elmer Aldrich, who was our naturalist in the state parks until he took charge of this statewide recreational survey, was a graduate of that school and half a dozen of our state park naturalists as well as men in the national parks took that course. Dr. Bryant is a very wonderful character and quite a scholar as you can see, and he rendered a great service in keeping that school going.

Another very important man in that field was Dr. Carl Russell, who succeeded Dr. Bryant as the chief naturalist of the national parks in Washington and who in his earlier years had been a naturalist and museum curator at Yosemite. He's now retired and working on several books, one of them on the fur trade, on which he is quite an authority.

FRY: Was the school accredited so that whoever went there would be able to get any credit on a college transcript?

DRURY: I don't think so, no. But it was important as field training, important as qualification for civil service positions both federal and state.

FRY: How did this differ from the National Park Association training course?

DRURY: The National Parks Association training course was a summertime program devoted to much younger people, and it was not necessarily pointed toward obtaining positions in the government. The other difference perhaps was that those who went to Yosemite were a very select few, whereas those in the National Parks Association training course in Jackson Hole and elsewhere were recruited from

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DRURY: universities, not so much on a basis of qualification as on a basis of interest. It was partly a program to stimulate interest in the national parks as well as to give people an insight into performing their tasks. It was a contribution by these students towards the national park program.

FRY: But not necessarily students who wanted to make this a career.

DRURY:  No, not necessarily. That's what I understand; of course, that was instituted after I left Washington, when I was in Sacramento. In the state parks Mrs. Talbot, who was Miss Martha Haines, was quite active with a classmate of hers.

FRY: That must be the one Dr. Bryant mentioned: Elizabeth Cummings of Vassar.

DRURY: Yes. They became interested in getting a course established in the state parks, which we were planning to do, but the state had no money to finance it and the National Parks Association found that they couldn't swing it financially, either, so that never was done. It was a very fine educational effort and ought to be kept up.

Now, my understanding is that the National Park Service itself is getting appropriations to continue that type of student training. But most of our park naturalists are high school and college teachers in the sciences who welcome this chance to come as seasonal naturalists and spend three or four months in various parks. In fact, a good many of the parks do not have a year-round naturalist staff but rely pretty largely on the seasonal men, the same persons coming back year after year. They were a very exceptional crew and they still are.

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FRY: How does public information fit into the interpretation program?

DRURY: Well, intellectually of course interpretation is at the base of the whole philosophy of the parks, and their meaning and their purpose and what they're for and why they should be protected, why they were set aside in the first place. All that's interpreted to the public, and I don't doubt it has some effect on the public's regard for the parks. That's quite apart from what we call "public information," which is more regarding publicity and public relations.

FRY: Is this handled apart, too?

DRURY: Yes, it's handled in the National Park Service under an assistant director who coordinates both, but there are separate divisions.

FRY: Sometimes I think that the naturalists and the rangers who give information to the tourists during the rush season don't have access to an adequate fund of information and occasionally they give some wrong answers.

DRURY: That's particularly true of the seasonal rangers, more true of the rangers than the ranger-naturalists. When I was director of national parks, I happened in at a campfire where a very young man, not a naturalist but a ranger, was doing the best he could to keep the crowd interested. In the question period I very unkindly asked him the name of the Secretary of the Interior, which he didn't know. I didn't dare ask him the name of the director of national parks. [Laughter]

One very important aspect of the ranger-naturalist force is their research, which in certain proportion they carried on constantly, and particularly in the off-season.

FRY: This was inside the parks?

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DRURY: Inside the parks, yes, study and observations of wild life and study of vegetation and tree diseases, matters of that sort. In the Sierra some of the naturalists engage in the recording of snow depths and consistency of snow and so forth. That's done in connection with the weather bureau. I know that I have an old photograph that I think I sent up to Yosemite which shows half a dozen of the earliest rangers on one of these snow-gauge expeditions. Dr. Carl Russell was there.

Vandalism

FRY: Would you like to go on into control of vandalism? Were you bothered with that very much?

DRURY: Yes, that was one of the eternal problems of both the national and state parks. There apparently was no complete cure for it. It was astonishing the weird things that people would do. The Park Service tried to educate the people to the importance of protecting their own property and I would say that about 99 and 9/10 per cent of the public respected the natural features of the parks, but one-tenth of one per cent over a period of years could do a tremendous amount of damage and great damage was done, particularly in the earlier days before the parks were as well-staffed as they are now.

FRY: Yes, when you had your great cut in personnel during the war.

DRURY: Yes. Of course, to compensate for that we had a great reduction of the number of visitors, so that it about balanced. The main thing that happened during the war was deterioration of the plant because we had no adequate

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DRURY: funds for maintenance. But there are many examples of vandalism in most of the parks that we could protect against only by constant patrol plus public education. I can't really say whether it's gotten better or worse in the present day, and I know it's still a problem.

FRY: What about poachers?

DRURY: We had some problems of that sort but we had the parks pretty well patrolled and the boundaries adequately marked. Poaching was not a major problem in the national parks. When it came to the state parks, particularly the redwood parks, increasingly trespass and the cutting of timber on state land has become a problem. We had half a dozen cases where either by intent or because of ignorance of the boundaries, which of course was no excuse, private individuals cut down and harvested state-owned trees. It's particularly an aggravating problem and I imagine it still is in the national parks also because it's very difficult to go through the tortuous legal processes necessary to get restitution. I know that in the state I can’t remember our ever having an adequate payment in damages, and it was a very unfortunate circumstance. But the national parks were better protected, and then the merchantable species of trees weren't nearly as valuable as the redwoods, the only exception perhaps being the sugar pine and the ponderosa pine in Yosemite and Sequoia.

FRY: Did you have any trouble with grazing?

DRURY: Not as a matter of trespass. That was well taken care of by the ranger forces. There was constant pressure, of course, to open up the parks to grazing.

[465]

Inholdings

FRY: What about administration of the inholdings?

DRURY: Well, they surely were a headache. Usually, as in Yosemite and Sequoia, they are subject to local laws. It's a very interesting aspect to the whole problem and it's one of the many reasons why the inholdings should be consolidated.

FRY: By local laws you mean those outside the park.

DRURY: Yes, county ordinances and state laws. You take for instance the liquor laws. Up at Sequoia they still have a privately owned subdivision in the General Grant section of King's Canyon, a settlement established in the gay nineties. One of our constant sources of embarrassment was the insistence of some of the good people in this settlement that we should establish a no-liquor rule in some of these lands. Well, we didn't own the lands and we didn't have any jurisdiction until the people came outside onto the national park lands; and we had a similar problem in Grand Canyon National Park. It's not a pleasant simile but in testifying on these inholdings I sometimes would refer to them as "festering sores," because that's what they almost were. In the state parks as well as in the national parks we had these often cheap developments, but even if they were high-class developments they were a source of irritation and difficulty. In effect they got a lot of free services, police service for instance, and communications. They constantly were applying for rights of way across national park lands where we felt that it was a disfigurement of the landscape to grant them, but they needed more roads for

[466]

DRURY: transportation, and then there were moral issues sometimes involved. There was also the problem of their competing with the concessionaires who were granted a more or less controlled monopoly in the national parks, because they gave assurance of continuous high-class supervised service with government control. Well, there were all these considerations and a lot more why the inholdings should be extirpated.

I know that for instance Will Rogers, Jr., who became a good friend of mine and who was chairman of the State Park Commission, in his youth owned a piece of property on the brink of the Grand Canyon. He had engaged Frank Lloyd Wright, the spectacular architect, to design a structure where he would have had some kind of a commercial establishment, probably a motel or souvenir shop, right within a few thousand feet of the finest part of the edge of the Grand Canyon. The plans for this structure, in my old-fashioned opinion, were rather outré to say the least; it was a sort of cantilever construction that would bring the veranda of this building out over the Grand Canyon where you'd have a straight drop of a mile and a magnificent view, but it wasn't in key with the purposes of the Grand Canyon National Park. Well, fortunately Bill Rogers ran out of money. I don't know that he even paid his architect. Anyhow, he got out of there and the government I think has acquired that property. I know during my time we acquired by condemnation a property that was owned by William Randolph Hearst east of El Tovar. That was a more or less friendly suit and the jury awarded him a very liberal sum, which is as it should be.

[467]

Fee Structure

FRY: Would you like to comment on the question of fee structure? You had already mentioned that Representative Jed Johnson of Oklahoma was always getting upset about this.

DRURY: Oh, yes. Of course, we were constantly making studies. That's another thing in the off-season that everybody turned to doing. The great trouble about most studies is that by the time you get your data assembled and have drawn your conclusions, the conditions are changed. It's like the census.

FRY: Were you ever able to determine what income brackets the people were in who visited the parks, and if you were really getting enough people from lower income brackets?

DRURY: Yes, considerable progress has been made in the last five or six years in the national parks in getting data of that sort. They've carried on rather extensive studies in several parks and as a result of those studies there's been a very definite increase in the fees for admission to the major national parks. They've been practically doubled--which is something I was always in favor of but it was a very unpopular cause in Congress and also in the administration.

We found that same thing in the state. Governor Earl Warren, who was the best friend the parks ever had, nevertheless was against any kind of service fee, such as a camping fee. We finally persuaded him to let us put in a nominal fee, and since then it's been doubled, and I think it should be doubled again. I'm talking now about the overnight accommodations in the state parks. We found no great objection to it on anyone's part. I think for a

[468]

DRURY: normal family it's decidedly nominal because we made quite an analysis and found that it cost us about two dollars per night per party to service the camp units, whereas the fee now is one dollar.

FRY: In state parks this remains as part of your fund, doesn't it? But in national parks it doesn't. What was the advantage of national parks charging?

DRURY: There was no great advantage except two things: one was the position it gave you budget-wise with the Bureau of the Budget. For instance, one of the parks that was easiest to get appropriations for was Carlsbad Caverns where we had a very stiff entrance fee. There were no camp units at that time; I don't know whether they have them now or not. But under a strange tradition which so far as I knew was present in the law only in a rider on an old appropriation bill, we were precluded from making a charge for overnight camping. In the national parks there's no charge for the use of the camp units, you know, just the automobile entrance fee, which it seemed to me was a mistake but like a lot of other things on which I had opinions, an infinite amount of effort resulted in no progress.

FRY: So that the person who comes in just to drive around pays the same as the person who comes in to camp?

DRURY: Yes. I felt that was inequitable, and I know a good many of my colleagues did. And also I believed that a reasonable fee serves as a sort of protective tariff; it tends to weed out the casual, idly-curious visitors who could just as well be somewhere else, who don't go to a park like Yosemite for the intrinsic qualities that it possesses.

[469]

Segregation

FRY: Another thing I wanted to ask you about which might be of a little more interest to future historians. Did you have any problems of integrated use of parks, especially in the South?

DRURY: That's an interesting question. Of course the problem existed during my time. I imagine that my problems were less in that respect because of the fact that it was wartime and attendance in some of the years of my regime was at a very low ebb, but nothing in the way of a crisis occurred during my time. They'd had more trouble before, during the administration of Arno Cammerer, in some of the southern parks, particularly when they established campgrounds and tried to segregate them. I was very much interested at my own reaction a few years before I went to Washington, the first time I'd been in the Deep South. I think I was crossing from Jacksonville to St. Augustine, Florida, on a ferry, and for the first time in my life I suddenly was confronted with facilities marked "white" and "colored." To a Westerner, that was a strange thing. I must confess that I was a little taken aback by it. And then when I made the rounds of some of the southern national parks and historic battlegrounds I found that originally there had been facilities with this same distinction marked on them. The order of course had gone out from Washington to eradicate them and the workmen, who evidently were Southerners, had covered this lettering over, but the paint was not quite opaque and they still were distinguishable, and I think by more or less common

[470]

DRURY: consent in the South restrooms and things like that were used separately. But I never happened to have had the issue put squarely up to me. In the national capital parks we had one or two flurries because of the integration of use of the swimming pools, but even that was not a serious problem then. I don’t think that I evaded the problem but I must confess that I was very grateful that it never was a matter of major concern during my time. The concessionaires professed, and I think sincerely, not to discriminate on the grounds of race, color, creed, or anything else. That was the universal rule--in fact, it was in the concession contracts during my time that there should be no such discrimination.

FRY: That really surprises me; I can hardly imagine Negroes and whites eating together in a park restaurant in a place like Mississippi.

DRURY: Well, as I say it was very difficult, and more or less by common consent the old customs are still followed although in less and less degree. The closer you got to Washington, D.C., the more acute the problem was. I remember once at Shenandoah in Virginia, Shenandoah National Park, they had a lodge where there was an episode I was involved in and the complainant was Senator Byrd. I remember going with him to the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of the Interior standing firm that these concessionaires would have to live up to their contract.

FRY: Who was that?

DRURY: That was Secretary Ickes. I remember Senator Byrd saying, "Well, now, as far as these [Negro] people are concerned, I like them but I don't want to live with them." Which is the old hidebound southern idea.

FRY: Which issue was this with Senator Byrd?

[471]

DRURY: This was the issue of allowing colored people to eat at the lunch counter in the concessions. It was a government facility through contract, you see; but the Department stood firm on it, and we all did, as far as that's concerned.

[472]

CONCESSIONS
Advisory Committee

FRY: When you took over national parks in the early forties, most of the concessions were run on a leased basis, rather short-term leases as I understand, and with a flat fee charged for the franchise. Is that right?

DRURY: I think I'd better say that I didn't take over the national parks; they more or less took over me. [Laughter] I got to the point where I had a bear by the tail.

You couldn't generalize about the concession contracts, but I'd say that in the main the opposite was the case from the establishment of the flat fee. Usually the contracts were for a period of twenty years with an option for twenty years’ renewal, subject to approval by the Secretary of the Interior, with a provision for a percentage of the net proceeds. There were some cases where there was a flat rental fee, and there may have been some cases where there was a percentage of the gross revenue.

During my time we had quite a study made, something that I initiated, to try to get a more or less uniform policy and also, in the interest of protection of the parks themselves, to get a sound relationship with concessioners. We had a very distinguished group of men who acted as an advisory committee to whom we put various problems. One of them was Clem Collins of Denver, who'd been president of the National Association of Accountants. There was Elmer Jenkins of Washington, who was the head of the travel bureau of the American Automobile Association.

[473]

DRURY: The third was Mr. George Smith, who until recently was the owner and operator of the Hotel Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. All of them men who were interested in the subject and had a lot of experience with the hotel business.

FRY: And Charles G. Woodbury?

DRURY: Woodbury was not on that advisory committee; he was on the general advisory committee. And a great many people like Charlie Woodbury presented testimony to this group.

Well, I spent a lot of time with them and I must confess that the report they rendered was not entirely in accord with my thoughts on what we should do, but in general they made a recommendation that was accepted by the Secretary of the Interior and as we made new contracts we followed it. I'd have to review the files on it to give you many of the details. But one of the new principles, which I understand has been adopted in a good many of the other contracts now, was the collection by the government of a percentage of the gross proceeds from the concessions. The position a lot of people took was that there were too many avenues for ambiguity and perhaps misrepresentation when you started to base your take for the government on the net profits. That was one thing.

Frankly, my main interest was to get a high quality of concessioners, and concessioners that were not pressed unduly to follow policies that were detrimental to the parks in order to stay in business. That is, I believed the government could afford to be fairly liberal with them if they gave the thing that we wanted, which was public service, and did it in a way that did not impinge on the natural values of the parks. For instance, it might not

[474]

DRURY: be in the interest of the park to have a thousand-room hotel built, but it might be in the interest of the concessioner  and might be necessary even for him to survive if his contract were too stringent.

Another principle that I firmly believed in was that competitive bidding did not necessarily give you the best service from a concessioner, that the primary things were his character, interest in the parks, financial stability, and of course skill in the management of facilities such as hotels and lodges, transportation and so forth.

FRY: From reading in Congressional literature one gets the idea that this study was more or less forced upon the NPS by the appropriations subcommittee in the House in 1946 and 1947, and then that you insisted on this outside advisory committee to oversee it.

DRURY: Of course, we never had a meeting of any of our committees, either the appropriations or the public lands committees, that there wasn't somewhere along the line a discussion of concessions. It may be that that's what led us to getting this study made.

There's one angle that I hadn't mentioned, and that is that the Secretary of the Interior did not take the advisory committee's recommendations in some respects, in particular during the time of Secretary Krug, who had been in the public utility field in his earlier experience. There was an attempt to implant on the concessioners a system under which their returns were regulated like a public utility and held to a certain percentage return on the investment. That worked out in weird and wondrous ways for a while. For instance, we had two concessioners

[475]

DRURY: in Rocky Mountain. One of them was a competent operator and he by skillful operation was able to earn a much larger percentage on his invested capital than another operator who didn't give nearly as good service. Yet under this rule of thumb for a while we allowed higher rates to the inefficient operator because he wasn't making any money. You can see how it reduced it to an absurdity. That wasn't followed very long, as I remember.

FRY: Was that Davidson's idea? Assistant Secretary General Davidson?

DRURY: Well, Davidson was entirely in accord with that. It may well have been Mr. Davidson's idea although I think it originated with Mr. Krug because of his making the analogy between these concessions and public utilities, with which he'd had a lot of experience. He was I think chief engineer of the Public Utilities Commission in Wisconsin and a very fine public-spirited gentleman, but frankly in that respect a little on the theoretical side.

FRY: Well, is there any way to get around some sort of government subsidy of this, if not outright government ownership in the long run, due to the fact that most of these facilities stand there in disuse for half of the year?

DRURY: Of course that was one reason that it was difficult for a concessioner to be judged by the standards of ordinary business. It was seasonal business. However, it's no more seasonal than a business at Palm Springs or in Alaska in the hotel field, and quite a few of our concessioners did the way private operators do: they would in the wintertime operate in the south and in the summertime in the north. It's a long and complicated

[476]

DRURY: subject. It's a grave question as to whether a great deal of the impetus to the national park movement prior to the establishment of the National Park Service wasn't given by existing and would-be concessioners. There were one or two cases where would-be concessioners tried to promote putting certain properties under the jurisdiction of the federal government. I can't think of a very good example offhand. I'm going to give you for the record a copy of a report or a thesis by the dean of the faculties at Harvard, Paul Herman Buck. When he was a young man he wrote for his degree in Master of Arts at Ohio State University in 1921. It's called The Evolution of the National Park System of the United States, and for some reason I evidently had it reprinted during my time. I don't think it's an entirely complete or fair representation of the motivation back of the National Park Service, but it would be interesting for you to read it. It points out that particularly in Yellowstone and to some extent in Sequoia and other parks the main objective was to provide a lure for travel, in most cases railroad travel. The Union Pacific and the Great Northern in the case of Glacier National Park unquestionably exerted a great deal of influence which turned out to be helpful in getting appropriations to administer and develop those particular parks, and it was true in other cases. There's undoubtedly a tie-in between these commercial enterprises and the whole concept of establishing national parks. I think, however, that as the system grew the basic idea of the national park system was so great and so appealing that it dominated the whole situation, even though in the latter years we had to fend off somewhat the insistence of the concessioners that things be done

[477]

DRURY: primarily for their benefit. We used to have a saying that the concessions exist for the benefit of the parks and not the parks for the benefit of the concessions. The early parks are dealt with pretty well in this essay by Dr. Buck. Unquestionably the parks were very closely linked in with the development of the concessions. Take Yosemite. It's pretty hard to separate traditionally Yosemite from the Curry family, who were a very wonderful couple just as their daughter Mary Tresidder is; they have been identified with the Yosemite concession for seventy-five years--since almost before it became a national park. But they have persisted, as have the Fred Harveys of Grand Canyon and some of the other companies, because they gave excellent service to the public. They were in harmony with the purposes of the National Park Service and in general they didn't ride a willing horse to death. I think we can be very proud of them.

Government-Owned Plant, With Operations Contracted

One of the questions that was studied very carefully by the Clem Collins committee was the question of the ownership of the physical plant. I felt very strongly and the committee felt perhaps a little less strongly that the best arrangement would be for the government to own the plant but to contract with private operating concerns for a reasonably short period. I always felt that the twenty-year period was too long, especially when you prolonged it to forty years by giving them the automatic renewal if they wanted it and if you could make a proper deal. There were cases where we had concessioners

[478]

DRURY: whose operations were distinctly inimical to the best interests of the parks, and we would have been in a better position had the government owned the plant and we had a five or, say, even a ten-year contract, but we were in a very poor position since we were tied up with those people for twenty years and since they had invested millions of dollars in plant.

They had under their contracts been allowed to plow back earnings into physical facilities. The consequence was that in some cases the tail more or less wagged the dog in that the government was in no position to impose upon them restrictions that they felt were good policy from a park standpoint because these would be ruinous from the fiscal standpoint, and the last thing in the world we wanted to do was to put any of these people out of business.

FRY: After the war didn't you have a number of concessioners who wanted to sell out?

DRURY: We had to declare a moratorium on operation. The director of national parks had the authority to indicate the dates on which they should open their lodges and hotels and the dates on which they could close them if they so desired. Well, an oppressive use of that authority would absolutely skim off all the profits from the concession, so that you had that constant consideration that you had to keep in mind although it perhaps wasn't in the best interest either of public service or of the parks. That was due to the large private capital investment. I never was rabid on that but in theory I believed in new concessions being established with government-owned facilities. That was done during my time in Big Bend National Park and in the Everglades National Park.

[479]

DRURY: We acquired the lodge at the Petrified Forest and contracted with Fred Harvey to operate it.

We came very close to acquiring the Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel when it was wartime and the company was discouraged and wanted to sell out, or at least was willing to sell out. In fact, we went so far that I got Secretary Ickes to write to Jesse Jones, who was then the director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, asking for a grant. Well, it just happened that, as in other cases, Harold L. Ickes wasn't entirely en rapport with Jesse Jones; they'd had some disputes over other matters, so that when this letter came from Secretary Ickes proposing that they lend the National Park Service enough money to buy out this concession, documented to show that it would in the long run pay the government to do it, and giving the policy reasons for it, Jesse Jones simply wrote back, "Dear Harold, If you want to go into the hotel business why don't you get Congress to pass a law authorizing you to do so? Truly yours." And that was the end of that. [Laughter] We didn't press it particularly, and then the war ended and the Yosemite Park and Curry Company had a new lease on life and they rehabilitated the Ahwahnee. It had been turned into a naval hospital during the war, so they practically had to dismantle it and redecorate it, and they re-established their concession on a very satisfactory basis.

FRY: Did you think about carrying your idea a little farther and having a kind of a chain, a company to handle more than one park in servicing concessions?

DRURY: My colleague Arthur Demaray was more or less the originator in 1941 of an organization known as National Park Concessions,

[480]

DRURY: Inc., which was a "non-profit-distributing corporation." He always made the distinction that the title should be not non-profit corporation but non-profit-distributing corporation. Obviously they had to make a profit in order to have any money to put back into operations; its object was not so much not to make a profit as not to pay out those profits in dividends to private interests.

That was based more or less on the operations of government concessions in Washington, D.C., which ran the lunchrooms in the various government buildings. That was a tremendous enterprise; I think they had to keep ready cash of about $200,000 on hand at all times for current purchases and making change and all the rest of it.

FRY: This covered about how many parks?

DRURY: National Park Concessions went in at Big Bend, at Isle Royale in Michigan, at the Everglades, and in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky--that's another place where we bought the plant from the concessioner, and a very fine gentleman named Sanborn and his wife Beulah operated the concession. We inherited them from the old regime when the state of Kentucky owned the Mammoth Cave. The plan had this advantage:  National Concessions, Inc., didn't own the plant in any case, and in every case the provisions in their charter were that if they should go out of business their proceeds would go to the federal government, so that you didn't have the problem there of riding herd on them and making sure that you were fair to them from the standpoint of making profits. Under Sanborn and under Arthur Demaray, the associate director who was also one of their officers, they rendered very fine service in many of the parks.

[481]

FRY: Did this really lower the costs to tourists?

DRURY: No, it did not. That was one of the principles, too, that we had to scrutinize pretty carefully in the study we made of concessions. I purposely asked that the advisory commission be appointed because I had rather strong views and I didn't want to be in the position of trying to force them on anyone. One of my very strong beliefs is that the government should not subsidize enterprises of that sort to the detriment of competing outside industry. I was always a believer that the rates for hotel service and meals and transportation and all the rest should be in every way comparable to the rates charged by outside industry, taking into account such government subsidy as existed--and there always was a government subsidy. Of course, the greatest government subsidy was the lure of the national parks. Millions of dollars wouldn't have bought the publicity value that being located in Glacier or Yellowstone or Yosemite did, and needless to say, especially in the political climate of the government at that time, the position I took wasn't universally popular. It was popular enough among the concessioners, and it seemed to me it was just ordinary fairness and common decency. I remember while we had the rule of thumb under Secretary Krug as to four per cent return on investment, one of our concessioners in Yellowstone, Hamilton, who had a small investment but who had a tremendous volume and was making a large return on his investment, objected because the rule cut almost in half the price of milk shakes. He said, "I don't object to the loss of profit on the milkshakes but it makes me look like a fool with the other people who are in the milkshake business.

[482]

DRURY: They know that you can't make and sell a milkshake for twenty cents." And yet to apply your four percent return formula they had to make him cut things down that way. My concern on that was that it wasn't fair to outside competing industry. I've always taken that position in the state parks also. As I say, there are two schools of thought on that, nowadays under the Kennedy administration they even want to subsidize opera singers, so I suppose ultimately the government will be bailing everybody out.

FRY: Were most of the Secretaries for ownership and operation by the government?

DRURY: No. Most of them I think were in favor of private enterprise contracting with the government. I think in the main most of them were satisfied with the time-honored system that had grown up. Secretary Ickes and to some degree Secretary Krug were in accord with our thought that it would be better for the government to own the plant on an equitable basis, through the government buying them out and contracting with qualified private concerns outside the government. I'd hate to be responsible for running a restaurant under government civil service and fiscal policy and all the rest. Nobody'd ever get a decent meal, probably. The civil service cook would not be perhaps as competent as he would be under the competitive system--at least that's the way I felt about it.

FRY: I wanted to ask you too about Secretary Oscar Chapman's new principles that were supposed to have been laid down around 1949. What does that refer to?

DRURY: I think that refers to this modified acceptance of the committee’s report on concession policy. Of course, to

[483]

DRURY: some extent it was all theoretical because many of our concessions still had ten, fifteen, in some cases almost twenty years to run, and there was no disposition to modify their contracts in mid-course except where voluntarily, as in one or two cases, the concessioners relinquished them. However, during the war the concession at Lassen asked to have this National Parks Concessions, Inc., take over, primarily because the president of the company, Mr. Hummel, was in the armed services and had to go off to war and partly because it was an unprofitable enterprise.

FRY: I thought perhaps Oliver G. Taylor, who was chief of public services and had been with parks almost from the first, would have some ideas on concessions. Do you remember his viewpoint?

DRURY: I do, yes. Of course, I selected Oliver Taylor, in spite of the fact that he was not a hotel man, but because he was a long-time engineer and superintendent and administrative officer in the NPS, a very matter-of-fact, sensible person. He served for six or seven years as director of concessions, in fact until he died of heart failure. Just the other day when I was in Washington I had the pleasure of a reunion with Marshall Jones, who now is the manager of the Hay-Adams Hotel, one of the most expensive hotels in Washington. It was fortunate for me that I knew Marshall so well because [Laughter] when Marshall had had an illness and had gotten out of the hotel business and was looking for a job, I was very glad to induce him to come in as an assistant to Taylor, Taylor being the man who understood overall park policy and Marshall Jones being the man who understood the mechanics of hotel operation.

[484]

FRY: What did they think about the idea of government ownership and operation "by contract?

DRURY: They were all in accord with that. I don't think anyone considered it a very radical idea. Of course--

FRY: It seems to me it would be a happy compromise.

DRURY: It was, in the respect that you didn't have to concern yourself with the impairment of the investment the way you did with private enterprise. Of course, I wouldn't be a party to impairing a government's investment, but believe it or not, one of the primary concerns that I had, and I know my colleagues and my predecessors had, was that of being fair to the concessioners, and it was sometimes rather difficult to do so and still protect to the full the soundest interests of the national parks.

FRY: In Demaray's 1951 annual report he seemed a little disenchanted with the 1948 policy. Did he become disillusioned with this idea of the national park concessions?

DRURY: No, I'm sure he didn't. Of course, he stayed as director only about six months, you know, and then Conrad Wirth went in. But I'm sure that he was quite interested in the National Park Concessions, Inc. In fact, he continued on this board after he retired.

FRY: So this wasn't the source of his disenchantment?

DRURY: No. Well, I frankly don't remember just what details were involved in changes in policy after I went out. But the thing that impressed me was that you couldn't have a rule of thumb, as was once attempted, that would apply uniformly to all concessions; you had to tailor your contract to the local conditions. For instance, there were one or two concessions that practically were on an all-year basis. They were in a quite different position from those that were seasonal. And there were other circumstances.

[485]

Changes in Demands of the Public

FRY: I was wondering if you had noticed during your stint with the national parks that the public's desires and the kind of plant they wanted to use in the parks changes over the years. Was the post-war public demanding more, or less?

DRURY: Oh, heavens, I think it's all of a piece with the history of travel in America and the expansion of people's demands for more and more comfort and more and more facilities. The old-style cabins in Yellowstone and Yosemite, people now would turn up their noses at. Toilet facilities had to be the utmost in modern design and the same with every feature. Of course, with the coming of the automobile age--and also the expansion of travel and of national income--people's desires did change. I don't think the people who visited the national parks were any different from travelers generally. There was a very great expansion of the needs, and that was one of the great problems-- having to require that the concessioners put more and more of their own capital into facilities. I think probably we've gone too far to the other extreme nowadays and too much government money is put into things that are really luxuries. I remember when I was in Chicago I became quite well acquainted with Burton Holmes, the travelogue authority. He presented me with one of his early books, which I guess is fairly rare, a publication of his early lectures on Yosemite and Grand Canyon and other parks. In that book I remember seeing a picture of a tent with the flies rolled

[486]

DRURY: back and there was an iron bedstead and a dresser with a bowl and a pitcher of water on it: "These are the deluxe accommodations now available at the Grand Canyon National Park." [Laughter] You wouldn't find many travelers who would even look at them now. Of course, a great many people in those days derived pleasure from the fact that they felt they were "roughing it." Not now.

FRY: Yes. Now with the advent of the automobile don't you have a larger percentage of the population--

DRURY: Among the younger people there is a desire for dormitory type of accommodations, which of course are much simpler and more en masse. And then we have a very large segment who prefer to camp. My own personal inclination--I've done a certain amount of camping, not as much as most people, but I've always enjoyed it more in a solitary situation than in a regimented camp. Yet I've been a party to the design and operation of many many thousands of individual camp units which personally I wouldn't have wanted to occupy. But there again it's a question of what people want to get out of the experience. People who don’t travel much, who have say two weeks in the year and the rest of the time are in an office or a factory with a great many people probably would feel lost if they were out in the Maine woods with the nearest habitation ten miles away.

FRY: That's what I was told at Yosemite.

DRURY: They're gregarious; they like to be herded together. And then there is the question of cost.

FRY: What about the idea of eliminating all of the eyesore type of accommodations, such as the enormous campground in the floor of Yosemite Valley, and having

[486a]

FRY: most of the accommodations outside the park or up in the wilderness areas that are really secluded?

DRURY: Theoretically that's what I was personally in favor of, but I tried not to be narrow-minded about it. We established a long-range program, which is being carried out to a considerable extent over the years, under which we decentralized the mass recreation activities in Yosemite Valley, tending more and more to make that area the object of a pilgrimage for the enjoyment of its essential qualities and relegating to lesser lands the mechanics of operation--such as the warehouses, which have now been moved down to El Portal below the Yosemite Valley. Also, some of the campgrounds have been decentralized. But anybody who tries to change overnight an institution that has evolved over half a century, whether he wants it or not gets a lot of education. I think in general all the directors of the national parks have deplored the fact that, because of over-crowding, the so-called point of diminishing returns has been reached in some of the concession operations--as well as in some of the government operations like the campgrounds. That's another reason for a policy of having the government make the investment in plant so that it could, when it reached the point where from a policy standpoint it was unsound to expand further, refrain from such expansion without injustice to the concessioner.

I had some very interesting experiences with members of Congress who occasionally intruded into the concession field. They had constituents or protégés, you know.

I think we have already had quite a little talk about Senator McKellar and his relation to things. There is an episode that I remember that was a little

[487]

DRURY: embarrassing at the time. He called me over one day and said he wanted us to grant a concession to a constituent of his, a woman who wanted to run one of the bathhouses at Hot Springs National Park. So we went about our routine inquiry and uncovered a very unfortunate thing; to everybody's embarrassment we found that her reputation was perhaps not the best--in fact, it was brought out that she was living in sin with a handsome Greek, so it was my duty to go over and tell the senator, who was duly shocked. He said, "Well, that's too bad. I'll look into it." About a week later he called back. "Well," he said, "Mr. Drury, I know you'll be glad that we've shown this little lady the error of her ways. I'm sure that now -- she's just recently married this Greek -- you'll have no trouble in granting her the concession." And by gosh we ultimately did, and she was all right as a concessioner. [Laughter] There were other cases like that.

[488]

THREATS AND CONTROVERSIES

Jackson Hole

FRY: Here is a sort of preface to the Jackson Hole controversy which I've written out. [Reading]

The addition of Jackson Hole to Grand Teton National Park caused one of the biggest single controversies ever backed by cattlemen and ranchers. The Park Service had attempted to annex it to its system for decades when finally, in 1927, the Snake River Land Company was organized by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to buy the privately owned parcels of land in Jackson Hole for the purpose of making them a gift to the National Park Service. Subsequent acquisition bills before Congress failed for technical reasons and Mr. Rockefeller at last wrote Secretary Ickes urging the government to take the 35,000 acres off his hands. Unable to get Congress to act, President Roosevelt on March 15, 1943, set up Jackson Hole as a 221,000 acre national monument by presidential proclamation, which he could do under the Antiquities Act of June 8, 1908. About 75% of the land belonged to Forest Service and was simply transferred.

The following week bills were rushed to Congress by Wyoming Representative Frank A. Barrett of Wyoming to abolish Jackson Hole as a monument; some stockmen, like Senator Robertson of Wyoming, began efforts to amend the Antiquities Act. Senator McCarran of Nevada, Congressmen Chenoweth of Colorado and Dimond of Alaska introduced similar bills; a suit testing the legality of the President's action was begun in the courts in Wyoming. Enormous publicity campaigns against creating the monument were hammered out, although the Department of Interior had by this time offered to extend the grazing privileges that were then enjoyed under the Forest Service, and to grant an annual tax reimbursement to Teton County for lands removed

[489]

FRY: [Reading]

from its tax rolls. Strong opposition continued in Washington, much of it led by the same men who had offered or supported bills for the annexation of the land in the '30's. The acts were passed.

Although President Roosevelt vetoed the final Barrett bill, the Department of Interior was reportedly paralyzed in protection of its new territory because Congressman Barrett managed to prevent any appropriations for its administration from 1944 to 1948. This gave ranchers and hunters complete de facto access to Jackson Hole. Toward the end of Newton Drury's administration Senators O'Mahoney and Hunt and National Park officials agreed on points of arbitration so that in 1950 most of the area achieved national park status by becoming a part of Teton National Park. Unique provisions in the bill were: the concession of the Department of Interior for tax loss reimbursement to Teton County--in full for five years then decreasing 5% each year for twenty years; stockmen and owners of summer homes were allowed to perpetuate their current leases; and to the Wyoming sportsmen it was necessary to grant deputization of hunters as "rangers," free of licensing costs, to kill elk in the national park where overpopulation of the animals tended to endanger the ecological balance of the area.

DRURY: That is a good summary of what happened.

FRY: With this preface as an introduction to the Jackson Hole controversy, you and I can dwell on the lesser known facts about the case. Would you like to start out explaining what happened in your office preceding the Presidential proclamation?

DRURY: I didn't know about it till later, but before my time in Washington apparently all the papers for a Presidential proclamation, not only to establish Jackson Hole National Monument but to establish dozens of national monuments on United States Forest Service territory, were on file in

[490]

DRURY: the office of the Secretary of the Interior. Apparently this happened while I was out in Chicago. Secretary Ickes had become tired of waiting, and spurred somewhat by a letter from Mr. Rockefeller to the effect that he didn't feel that he should hold very much longer these lands that he had purchased, the secretary sent the Jackson Hole proclamation over to the President, and the first I knew about it was when I was having a staff meeting in Chicago and George Mosky, our chief attorney, came in, just having attended a meeting in Washington. He sat for quite a while through a lot of more or less inconsequential discussion; finally he interrupted and said, "I think maybe I ought to tell you that just before I left Washington this morning President Roosevelt signed the proclamation establishing Jackson Hole National Monument," whereupon I said, "The meeting is hereby adjourned." I called together a group of our specialists and assigned to each one of them the preparation of a summary of the reasons for establishing the Jackson Hole National Monument, so that we would be ready for the onslaughts that I knew would be coming from Wyoming.

FRY: Could you lay out here what it was that made you know that these onslaughts would be coming?

DRURY: Oh, general expressions that we'd had from people in Wyoming. I can't put my finger on any one thing. But what somewhat amused me and also caused consternation in our ranks was the fact that although there had been periodic discussion as to whether this action should be taken, it finally came like a bolt out of the blue.  

FRY: Ickes knew about it?

DRURY: Oh, yes. He was the one who got the President to sign it. It was, I suppose, a question of strategy. It would have been very handy for us if we had known some months in advance that this was coming up, because this way we had

[491]

DRURY: hurriedly to be summoned to meetings and present to hearings both out there and in Congress the justification for the monument. Ideally, we could have used more time for preparation.

I think you already have the record of the primary hearing that was held to indicate the reasons for the President's proclamation, which of course all of us believed in but which when the chips were down just a few of us had to defend. Another somewhat interesting phase of the matter was that within about a week I was on my way to California and stopped in at Wyoming. I had an interview with the then governor of Wyoming, Loren Hunt, who is since deceased. He was most agreeable about it and thought it was a good thing and had only one grievance, and that was that the President hadn’t taken him into his confidence when he issued the proclamation. The National Park Service was in the same boat. Later on when the heat began to get intense, Governor Hunt became a very bitter opponent of the whole program and was a party to the suit that was brought in the courts, and which of course failed, to abolish the Jackson Hole Monument. The President by law had authority to create the monument.

FRY: Questioning the legality of the Antiquity Act?

DRURY: Yes.

FRY: What about the motivations of the opposition?

DRURY: I think that in your preface to this discussion, you have pretty well indicated the economic interests that were concerned--the stockmen who had enjoyed certain privileges under the U. S. Forest Service and the Grazing Service of the Department of the Interior. There were other interests, too: I think the mining interests were apprehensive that having national and ultimate

[492]

DRURY: park status on these lands would cramp their style as far as exploration and extraction of minerals and oil and gas were concerned. And there was of course the customary states' rights spirit with which I personally have always been in sympathy. Undoubtedly that was one motive for the violent opposition to placing these lands in park status.

But above all else was the desire of certain individuals to make themselves much more prominent than they otherwise would be by opposing not only the great federal government but also Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It gave them limelight and prominence that they never otherwise would have attained. The people who concurred in the wisdom of preserving this area were not nearly as spectacular as those who put up the fight. I think that, when you get right down to it, was the main motive.

As a matter of fact most of the issues were trumped up and had no great validity. In our files there's an article by a friend, Freeman Tilden, discussing in a semi-humorous fashion the opposition to the Monument. Among other things I remember Tilden said that whereas the people of Wyoming had always bragged about the explorers and pioneers, Jim Bridger and the rest of them, now that this monument was created partly for its historical importance they tended to depreciate their heritage. Tilden says that, for once at least, understatement, which is more characteristic of the eastern states, had arrived in Wyoming.

FRY: Do you think this economic issue was a real issue? Because the number of cattle which were enjoying these grazing areas was rather small.

DRURY: Relatively few.

FRY: And weren't most of the ranchers eager to sell the land, too?

DRURY: It was an area of very high altitude and very mediocre agricultural land. They were all starving to death.

[492a]

DRURY: There were some of the stockmen who I think were genuinely opposed to the curtailing of their grazing privileges--they weren't rights--granted on certain types of federal land. The most obvious of those "rights," which we recognized from the beginning and incorporated in the final act was the right to drive their cattle across Jackson Hole from the summer to the winter range. Unquestionably they did a certain amount of damage in this process but probably not nearly as much damage as the tourists who were lured to that region because of its beauty.

FRY: I wanted to ask you about Representative Frank Barrett. Did you know him when he was in the balloon corps at the same time you were?

DRURY: I didn't remember him, no. In fact, I'd forgotten that he was in it. I think he came from Nebraska; of course, Omaha, Nebraska was the big balloon school. His name sounded familiar to me.

Barrett was a quite able man. He was later governor of Wyoming. He was rather over-emphatic, one might almost say vitriolic at times, but I rather enjoyed parrying with him. He was a Republican, and of course Senator O'Mahoney was a Democrat, and I think the intensity of the opposition was heightened by the fact that each vied with the other to see who could be the bitterest enemy of this supposedly nefarious deed that the great federal government was perpetuating.

FRY: When Ickes was called upon to testify in the first hearings on the bill to abolish the Monument, one of his first statements was that the entire opposition was caused by the Forest Service.

DRURY: Of course, he had almost a complex about the U. S. Forest Service. His ambition, conceived in the earlier days of his tenure, was to get the Forest Service transferred

[493]

DRURY: to the Department of the Interior. There was a bureau of forests in the Interior many years before the U. S. Forest Service was established in the Department of Agriculture. I think any reasonable person would see no objection to that, but there are a lot of more fundamental things to which public officials can devote their attention than simply the matter of departmental jurisdiction. There's no question that from some standpoints Secretary Ickes was logical, but he found that it was more than he could accomplish.

In fact I can remember making a trip with President Hoover after his time as president. It was in connection with the Butano redwoods which were at that time held in trust by Stanford University. During this trip it was very interesting that Mr. Hoover spoke of his youthful experiences at Stanford, his time as a young engineer in China at the Boxer uprising, and his service as food administrator in Belgium, but scarcely a word about his four years as President of the United States. [Laughter] He did say, however, with something of a chuckle that he noticed that President Roosevelt was having the same trouble getting the Forest Service transferred to Interior that he had always had.

FRY: What sort of attitudes did you find on the part of the local Forest Service people there?

DRURY: They were not uncooperative, and the U. S. Forest Service in Washington, of which Lyle Watts was the chief, were entirely cooperative about carrying out the mandate of Congress and the President when the transfer of lands within the monument was effected. Watts issued an order to the effect that they should vacate the forest station that they had out there and take their belongings, but every time I meet Watts he still apologizes for the fact

[494]

DRURY: that when the local rangers left their station they even pulled the casings out of the well, which he made them put right back. But I would say that all the time this thing was going on out there, there may have been some bitterness between the local U. S. Forest people and our staff, but I never heard much about it. I know there was none in Washington. I was always a very good friend of most of the Forest Service in Washington. Very able men.

FRY: The Cheyenne banker, Governor Leslie Miller--the one that Rockefeller worked through in his Snake River land company to buy up the land--had been in the Forest Service. This put a suspicious cast on this for Ickes, because although Miller helped buy up the land he became a leader in the controversy against acceptance--

DRURY: Well, I don't think that the opposition to the Jackson Hole National Monument was fomented by the U. S. Forest Service. I got no evidence of that. Of course I'm sure that I'm much more charitable than Mr. Ickes was.

FRY: Well, I did want to ask you about Miller.

DRURY: Well, Leslie Miller of course was a very fine and able man, who over the years had done a great deal to further the projects in which Mr. Rockefeller was interested. He's still, I think, going strong.

And there was a local banker named Buckheister who had also been in the U. S. Forest Service, and a local attorney named Simpson who later became senator from Wyoming.

FRY: The letter of his that was read at the hearings was one that had the resounding clang of someone about to jump into prominence somewhere.

DRURY: That's true all along the line. Here were these little, relatively unimportant local politicians who suddenly found themselves in the national arena. It was only

[495]

DRURY: human, I guess, for them to prolong the agony. They hadn’t anything to lose. And I think that probably the national park concept was strengthened by the controversy. The only thing we lost was a lot of time, because when there were so many constructive things to be done we spent most of our time in defensive effort. It's debatable whether short of arbitrary action of that sort anything could have been accomplished, and I was very glad to be one of those who defended it because I know that it was a fine constructive accomplishment in the national park system.

FRY: The witnesses that Barrett brought up included nearly all of the cattlemen's associations and the fisherman and hunters associations in Wyoming. It was really an impressive accumulation. I believe someone in Wyoming, after all this was over, brought suit against the county commissioners for money they had spent on propaganda for this campaign,

DRURY: I don't know about that. I never heard of that.

FRY: Could you give us a picture of the kind of propaganda in the campaign?

DRURY: It was a very skillfully managed campaign. They had some top-notch talent. I had been in the propaganda business myself for a great many years and was not a tyro at it. Others on our staff like Mr. Conrad Wirth and Mr. Herbert Evison, for instance, surely knew their way around. We had our own lofty type of propaganda which we contended of course was simply the giving of information. There was a top executive of a New York advertising agency whose name escapes me who had a ranch out there, and he undoubtedly gave generalship to their nationwide propaganda.

I remember this editorial in the Saturday Evening Post, in which the most extravagant claims were made. Among other things it spoke about the oppression of the

[496]

DRURY: stockmen and mentioned Wallace Beery as a "prominent stockman." I've already shown you the passage in our reply in which we indicated that Wallace Beery had a lease on one-half acre of forest service land, and he had one cow, which died during the controversy.

I remember one cartoon that the opposition published in a pamphlet--this apropos of our mutual friend Horace Albright, who was in on the very beginning of this thing and was the one who interested Mr. Rockefeller in buying these lands. They had a pamphlet in which they spoke about the structure shown herein as of great historic importance. It said that Horace M. Albright once occupied this structure, and they took a quotation from my testimony, "It is an eloquent reminder of the past," and then you opened it up and there was an old outhouse. [Laughter]

They carried on from many, many angles, all these resolutions from sportsmen's organizations and all that. Anybody that has had to do with campaigning knows that a great many of those quotations are not automatically generated. I guess the sportsmen did feel that they were losing something, although the hunting of the elk in Jackson Hole scarcely could be defined as a sport. It was more like going out into a pasture and shooting cows as they moved down through that narrow valley. That's why when it came to the showdown and we finally got the legislation adding Jackson Hole to the Grand Teton National Park we felt it was probably in the public interest, to provide in the legislation that the reduction of elk, which was an obviously necessary thing, could logically be effected by the Secretary of the Interior through the park service deputizing a certain number of licensed Wyoming hunters to act as deputy rangers in the process of elk reduction. I haven't followed it closely but I've been told that they haven't resorted to that

[497]

DRURY: expedient for several years. It hasn’t been a major drawback, although personally I always had misgivings about it and had great reluctance to be a party to it.

FRY: You had to go out there in August of that year. Was that about the first time that you were in Jackson Hole for any length of time after the passage of the proclamation?

DRURY: I'd been there before, but I spent a lot more time in Wyoming after this proclamation than I'd spent previously.

FRY: As you contacted the more hostile elements of the opposition there, did you run into any rather unorthodox methods of pressure on you, as a person?

DRURY: No. The personal relationships were always friendly enough. Of course, they were looking for an opportunity to stir up controversy; that's why this suit was instituted in the federal courts. While we won the case, the judge in his decision made a great dramatic plea for states' rights and condemned the supposedly underhanded way in which this monument was established. One of the main complaints was that Wyoming officials should have been consulted. Well, that was about tantamount to saying that if they had been consulted they would have prevented it, so that I don't think the President or Secretary Ickes or the National Park Service can be blamed for going ahead and doing something that they were convinced was right and which all subsequent experience has shown was a very constructive government act.

FRY: Another wail that came up frequently was that of the alleged promise of Albright to Senator John B. Kendrick that no more land would be taken in that area after the creation of Grand Teton National Park.

DRURY: I would doubt that Horace made any such commitment. He

[498]

DRURY: says that he didn't, and I believe him implicitly, but even if he did, it really isn't germane to the issue: that is, no question is settled until it's settled right. I never thought when I was Director of National Parks that I could commit the great federal government for all time to any course of action. I at least had that much sense, and Horace of course has too, so that I don't believe that's so. We have an illustrious case where Theodore Roosevelt to his ultimate grief stated that he didn't want a third term. [Laughter] Later he tried to explain it by saying that at that time he didn't want it. It's like a man who's asked if he wants another cup of coffee and he says no. That doesn't mean he's never going to want another cup of coffee. But I don't think that was the spirit in which Albright made any statements.

I guess it was in connection with. another controversy where somebody way down the line, a wildlife consultant for the National Park Service, was held up as an authority. This was in connection with one of the dams in the north. They rang the changes on the fact that this man, who was out there purely as a consultant on wildlife subjects, had made a statement that the National Park Service had no intention of including certain land in the Dinosaur National Monument. We had more trouble trying to deal with that allegation, which obviously was unauthorized.

It's something that I tried to impress on our representatives in the National Park Service, that the aura of the great federal government is constantly hovering over them, and in the minds of some people anyone who happens to work for the federal government can speak for it, which is preposterous, of course.

[499]

DRURY: Another thing that I used to emphasize was this (being myself something of a states' righter): that the federal label of itself did not endow any man with virtue or wisdom above his fellows. As you doubtless know in what they call the bureaucracy there is a certain tendency--I think it's also true in large corporations--for the employees to arrogate to themselves some of the elements of greatness or omniscience or omnipotence of their employer. It's a very dangerous thing, and while we may have been guilty of throwing our weight around to a slight degree out there, I think in general we leaned over backward in all of our dealings with the local people. In fact, I never noted any personal hostility.

At the very beginning, right after the establishment or issuance of the proclamation by President Roosevelt creating the Jackson Hole National Monument, there was an unfortunate incident in which our superintendent, who was nicknamed "White Mountain" Smith, a very able veteran of the National Park Service, was asked what he would do if people violated the rules and regulations of the national monument, and he answered, forthrightly, as any of us might have done, that he would arrest them. Well, that of course was used as a rallying point, the "arbitrary attitude" of the federal government, which led me to caution the boys all through the service never to answer a hypothetical question. We had enough trouble without stirring up controversy over what we would do if something happened when it might never happen. That's a pretty general rule that can be followed in most affairs.

FRY: I remember that Ickes refused to answer a hypothetical question in front of the committee.

[500]

DRURY: I remember very well one of the hearings on a typically hot Washington day and the hearing rooms in the capitol weren’t air-conditioned in those days. He was in a terrible state of mind because of the great coal strike that was going on, and they called him up. He asked me to sit in back of him, and when questions of fact came up he would turn to me occasionally. Finally he turned to me, and he said, "This is just killing me. I can't stand much more of this." About that time one of the questioners said, "Mr. Secretary, you say there are high wildlife values in this Jackson Hole monument. Would you tell me what you consider the most important wildlife value?" He said, "Yes, the size and ferocity of the mosquitoes." [Laughter] This was seized upon to show the arbitrary attitude of the federal officials toward the inalienable rights of the local people. I think that the atmosphere out there in Wyoming is very good now; so far as I know there's no hostility. Nobody was harmed, and the state of Wyoming tremendously benefited on it.

FRY: How did the local community manage to get $25,000 in in-lieu taxes instead of the $10,000 that Rockefeller had been paying each year?

DRURY: That's something that happened after my time, I guess, and I don't know. It was a poor county; it was so small that they say the town of Jackson was illegally incorporated. They applied for incorporation and they had to list, I believe, five hundred citizens. Anyhow, they had four hundred and ninety-nine, so it is said they listed an unborn child as the five hundredth -- or whatever the required number was. Which was more or less typical of the rough and ready ways out in Wyoming.

[501]

DRURY: But I liked them. It was a very interesting place to be.

FRY: You mentioned to me once off the tape about the cattle drive across in objection to the whole thing, led by Wallace Beery,

DRURY: Well, that was staged by this New York advertising executive. They say that to get Wallace Beery onto his horse, they had to get a stepladder and hoist him on. But he looked the part of a Western bad man.

FRY: What did the ranchers do?

DRURY: They just drove across for publicity purposes. Nobody was trying to stop them.

FRY: What about the objection to this by the National Parks Association? I understand they did have some reservations about the proclamation.

DRURY: Oh, there were some aspects of it that none of us liked. The compromise on grazing and also on hunting.

FRY: I mean right after the proclamation.

DRURY: I don’t know.

FRY: I think it had something to do with two lakes, because they weren't natural.

DRURY: It might have been that the attitude prevailed then. Everybody's gotten bravely over that nowadays, incidentally. They're taking lands into the national parks that are far from having their pristine quality. To me it seems too bad in some cases. I believe that maybe some of those in the National Parks Association felt that an artificial lake lowered the standards of the national park to incorporate an area of that sort within it. It was Jackson Lake, which has a low earthen dam and has been artificialized to some extent. I myself hold that general belief, but to have left out the primary lake there would have left an inholding of private lands and would have been worse than the minor sin of incorporating an artificial feature.

FRY: John Ise (Ise. John, National Park Policy, New York, 1961.) says the dams were broken and the rivers restored

[502]

FRY: to their original level.

DRURY: Well, that isn't strictly true. There's still a low dam. But one of the things we obtained before we included it in the national park was a commitment from the Bureau of Reclamation that there wouldn't be any increasing of the height of the dam. Of course, even a commitment like that can be nullified in future years. Anyhow, that's one of the many compromises you have to make for a larger end, and the National Park Association officially I'm sure supported us in our defense of the Jackson Hole Monument even though they might not have approved of it in some details.

FRY: I understand that Struthers Burt in Wyoming was a good supporter.

DRURY: Yes, he was. He died only four or five years ago. He was a very energetic little fellow, a man of great ability, a brilliant writer. He wrote these various books on the great roundups, like Powder River and some others. Struthers Burt had a sort of a dude ranch down there, possibly for income tax purposes because I don't think he ever had many guests and I don't think he wanted many. I'm sure he didn't make much money out of it but he had a lot of fun and part of his fun was being one of the champions of the Jackson Hole National Monument, which was fortunate for us because he lived there and people liked him and he had quite a little prestige nationally as well as locally.

FRY: He rounded up an imposing number of supporters, too.

DRURY: He was one of our best supporters.

FRY: Could you give us a picture of the support, because not only have we dwelt a long time on the opposition this afternoon, but the opposition is more picturesque and is played up a lot in the other accounts, so that what support you did have is sort of left out of the record.

[503]

DRURY: Yes. We had the disadvantage that the nonconformist is always more spectacular, but we had the National Parks Association and the Audubon Society and the Izaak Walton League, of which Kenneth Reid was the executive, and dozens of other conservation organizations, all of whom testified in our hearings and in their publications supported the general position of the National Park Service. And the women of the country I think were very potent, including the Garden Club of America and the National Council of State Garden Clubs. The Sierra Club of course frequently took part in the hearings and was a strong supporter.

FRY: Did Albright help you?

DRURY: Oh, yes, Horace Albright testified at a number of the hearings and always was very effective. He speaks of the one episode where somewhat inadvertently he quoted the local newspaper which said that all that was needed out there was a few first-class funerals, where upon Senator O'Mahoney rose and made the welkin ring in his denunciation of these cruel government officials who would harbor a thought of that sort. Well, anybody who knows genial Horace Albright knows that the last thing in the world that he would wish would be the demise of any citizen of Wyoming or anywhere else. But it caused quite a stir, and while we didn't enjoy the incident at the time, in retrospect it's quite amusing.

FRY: I don‘t understand the Alaskan delegates' opposition to this. Can you link that in? There was Anthony Dimond, who used to be governor, and Bartlett, who even went so far as wanting to abolish about all the national parks.

DRURY: Well, Bartlett and Dimond, as representatives of their constituency, reflected the more or less resentful attitude of the old-timer against any change in status and particularly the local antipathy to regulation from

[504]

DRURY: the central government, I think that's all that amounted to. After one has been through a great many Congressional hearings he can almost predict what the line of the representatives of different districts will be. We had some very staunch support also in Congress, men like J. Hardin Peterson of Florida and a number of the New York congressmen, and while Chenoweth of Colorado is mentioned in your introduction, I would say that generally he was very friendly to us and helped us in getting things done.

FRY: Their bill to abolish the national parks and monuments in Alaska was never taken too seriously?

DRURY: No, that was just a sort of a counter-offensive, what the politicians refer to as a "cinch bill."

FRY: What about your California senators and representatives, such as George Outland from Santa Barbara

DRURY: He was very outspoken in his support, and the others, like Claire Engle of California-- I'm not sure that Engle was on the committee in those days--and several others were very friendly. Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona was very friendly to the National Park Service and helped us in various ways and there were quite a few others.

FRY: Could you tell us about the meeting that you had about four years later which eventually resolved this controversy into a bill for national park status?

DRURY: Yes. We had a series of meetings, some of them out in Wyoming, which Mr. Wirth attended as our chief of lands, and some of which we had in Washington where several of us spent many hours with Senators O'Mahoney and Hunt (Governor Hunt had become a senator by that time) and Congressman Barrett, in which we tried to work out a reasonable compromise that would accomplish what the government wanted in the way of preserving the beauty and interest of Jackson Hole and unifying the Teton National Park. I'm not sure that Congressman Barrett

[505]

DRURY: was as active in those meetings as Senator O'Mahoney. He felt that the turmoil had gone on long enough, and he might also have felt that it no longer was political capital so far as he was concerned. Senator Hunt, I think, from the very beginning would have liked to support us, but he found that such a position was untenable for anyone representing the hotheads in Wyoming. But it was O'Mahoney and Hunt particularly that met with us day after day and ironed out these various provisions that you've mentioned in your introduction, particularly those relating to taxation and grazing and hunting. Those were the three primary issues. On each of those subjects we compromised somewhat more than probably we should have, but the end result probably justified it. We always tried, when it was necessary in order to accomplish something, to make a semblance of compromise, to agree to an arrangement that was terminable. That's what we did in the case of the oil reservations in the Everglades, which now have run out.

FRY: After this became a park, was there any change at all within the administration of it, or did it more or less run on as it would have?

DRURY: It ran on just about the same. We had meager but nevertheless some appropriations for the operation of Teton National Park, which adjoined these lands, and while we weren't equipped to patrol and enforce regulations on all of Jackson Hole until the Barrett rider was taken off, there was no material damage done. As a matter of fact we didn't have much money for any of the national parks in those days. It wasn't any worse off than others that were impoverished because of the war conditions. I didn’t feel conscious of any great harm from the Barrett rider. There weren't many visitors at

[506]

DRURY: Jackson Hole and Teton National Park in those days. We didn't have a twentieth of the visitation of Yellowstone. That's one thing I used to like about it. When Yellowstone was a madhouse you could take a half day's trip to the south and you'd be in the relatively undeveloped area of Jackson Hole and the Tetons. Now it's just about as popular as Yellowstone and I don't think it has nearly the charm that it did in the early days.

FRY: Did Barrett have an agreement with the National Park Service that he would continue this rider for a year or two years, a specified length of time, at the end of which he would try to comply with the compromise that would be worked out? I got this impression from something I read in the hearing.

DRURY: I got that impression too, but you can bet he never explicitly agreed to anything of that sort. He was looking, as Senator O'Mahoney was, for an opportunity to save face, and that's one of the most difficult things in public life. You're apt in a controversy like that to drive a man into a position from which he cannot with dignity withdraw. That was the reason some of our responses in these various hearings may have seemed a little tame because of the fact that we felt that as public servants it wasn't part of our function to make inflammatory speeches or to stir up controversy. At the same time, we tried to adhere strictly to the basic principles which had governed the national parks. It's a tight-rope walking process. [Laughter]

As to Jackson Hole, I think we've pretty well discussed the motivation, the surrounding circumstances and some of the dramatic incidents. It came out very well in the end, although it took a lot of time that could have been spent on possibly more constructive

[507]

DRURY: things. It was of a piece with half a dozen controversies that occurred during any time in the National Park Service. Most of them, as I've already stated, centered around dam-building projects of the Bureau of Reclamation or the army engineers, dam-building projects.

Grazing

FRY: We have spoken a little bit on grazing from time to time, but we've never had a comprehensive discussion about it. There seems to have been a fairly organized lobby all the time in Congress.

DRURY: Yes, the sheepmen and the cattlemen were both very well organized, and whenever there was a proposal for a new national park or monument, particularly in the public lands states of the West, they'd gang up on the congressional committees and try to defeat the whole project or at least whittle it down as much as they could. I think though, that Jackson Hole and the controversy there was more or less typical of our relationship with the grazing interests and the pressures they brought to bear. Of course during World War II there were a number of proposals to open up some of the meadowlands in the national parks to grazing. We were able to fend those off, however, partly because of the remoteness of the parks. We found, for instance, that they wanted to turn cattle into some of the meadows in the lower reaches of Sequoia National Park, but the experts found that although the cattle might take a lot of weight while they fed in the meadows, they would work it all off being driven back to the point at which the cattle would be sold. So that we were able to get the Secretary of the Interior, although he

[508]

DRURY: was very patriotic about helping to win the war, to refrain from granting any such permits. We did at one time suggest that in Yosemite certain restricted lands might be opened to the grazing of purebred breeding stock, but there again when it came to a showdown it was found that it was uneconomical for them to do it. To my recollection, there was no land in the national park system opened up to grazing during World War II, although of course we still had some areas where there was a holdover from the old days.

Now the reason, and you can understand it, why some of these grazing interests felt aggrieved was that originally a great deal of this land in the national park system was public domain, and there had been a very lax policy or no policy at all for three quarters of a century with respect to grazing on the national domain. There it was, and sometimes the lands had been grazed under permit and sometimes just by sufferance. The grazing act, which was passed in the thirties, establishing a grazing service and systematizing the granting of permits, was the first orderly attempt to deal with the grazing problem. One of the reasons we had so much controversy in Jackson Hole was that part of the land that was taken into the monument and later added to the park was U. S. Forest Service land, which was open to grazing leases. Part of it was in the grazing district, so that we had not only the permittees who derived benefit from grazing on these lands but we also had these two bureaus that in a sense were rivals, or at least represented different points of view. To say the least, they somewhat dragged their feet when it came to cooperating towards setting up the Jackson Hole Monument.

FRY: I was thinking that there were a few senators such as McCarran and Robertson who were just always on hand to try to put a bill through for the grazing interests.

[509]

FRY: Was this your impression?

DRURY: Yes. Robertson represented Wyoming, of course, and his special interest was the Jackson Hole area. McCarran was from Nevada. Incidentally, my father and mother came from Nevada and knew the McCarrans quite well in the early days, when Senator McCarran was a little boy. I always found Senator McCarran very friendly. I tried to point out to him that we wanted to be reasonable in our dealings with the interests in his state, but he replied, "Maybe you do want to, but Secretary Ickes won't let you be reasonable." [Laughter] Which gave some key to his definition of "reasonable."  

Of course McCarran in his capacity in the Senate Public Lands Committee would spend the summertime using up our vacations on hearings in Nevada and Arizona and New Mexico. I remember one several-day hearing that we had at Kanab, which is right on the border between Arizona and Utah. Finally there was some dispute as to whether the hearing was being conducted in a proper manner, and Senator McCarran, who as an Irishman was quite a wit, said, "Well, all I've got to say is that I want to be perfectly fair in this hearing and still give the National Park Service a little the worst of it." [Laughter] Which of course in the cattle country was received with great applause.

[510]

FRY: other than counter pressure from your amateur conservation organizations?

DRURY: We have recourse in that we were free to testify against such bills, and we also were able to summon our friends, Sierra Club and Isaac Walton League and the National Parks Association and all the rest that we've talked about. We had some very spirited hearings on those bills. Those bills were what in the terms of legislators might be called "cinch bills," bills that are introduced not so much to attain their ends as to embarrass the other side and to try to get them to compromise or temper their efforts. I don't think that either Senator McCarran or Senator Robertson ever expected to open the primary national parks to grazing.

FRY: Did you not think so at the time this bill came up?

DRURY: No, I didn't think so. I thought they were for the purpose of embarrassing us and also an attempt to temper the enthusiasm of the park people who, they claimed, were trying to take in too much territory. That of course is one of the $64 questions that is still not answered, as to what percentage of the face of America should be set aside according to the National Park pattern of land management, to preserve its beauty and its interest, keep it intact as it was originally created. I don't suppose there'll ever be a complete answer to that.

FRY: In California, did you have the support of Senator Engle in the grazing question?

DRURY: Mostly we did. I'd say that Senator Engle was quite park-minded. There were one or two cases during the war, as I remember, where he represented these people who thought they wanted to graze in the park meadows, but in general Senator Engle was a very good friend of

[511]

DRURY: the national parks. And Senator William Knowland the same way. Of course there's the old story, you know, of Senator LaFollette of Wisconsin who was a free trader except when it came to cheese. All of these senators and congressmen, in general, where their bailiwick wasn’t affected, stood on principle quite well. But when some special interest in their constituency was involved they had to temper theory with what they considered practical politics.

Dams

Bureau of Reclamation

FRY: Going on to dams, I think you have alluded to the predicament that National Park Service often found itself in, when it was competing with Bureau of Reclamation or Army Engineers for future jurisdiction over land.

DRURY: It is a paradox of our time, that the one element in the country that's done more harm to natural scenery, particularly our national parks, is the water development agencies, not necessarily by intent but because of the fact that they're so large and what they deal with is so vital that other perhaps equally important government responsibilities are just brushed aside. That was the constant problem we had: in fact I didn't endear myself to the administration when I made a statement to a Sierra Club meeting out here that whereas in the old days the private interests--lumbering and mining and grazing and other economic uses of government lands--were the great enemy of park preservation, currently the arch enemy was the government itself through some of its developmental projects, such as highways and water

[512]

DRURY: development. One of the things that I felt the lack of, and I felt it both in the state and the federal government, was the presence anywhere of any arbitrating agency that could evaluate the relative importance of different government functions, such as the park function as opposed to the highway function and that sort of thing. That's particularly true today in California.

FRY: How do you account for the power behind the Bureau of Reclamation?

DRURY: Well, there were two or three reasons for that. One was the tremendous size and the persuasive effect of the large appropriations that the Bureau of Reclamation could spend in a community if it put its projects through.

I think another was the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation, much like the U. S. Forest Service, was not as well centralized as some of the smaller bureaus such as the National Park Service. The local interests bore down more heavily on the Bureau of Reclamation and influenced their planning and their programs I think, probably much more than was true of National Park projects. On one or two of the dams, for instance, the Glacier View Dam, Mike Strauss, who was then Commissioner of Reclamation, would never admit it, but I'm as sure as I am of my own name that he didn't know any more about the plans for the Glacier View Dam than I did until the project came to him full-blown from his engineers out in the West. And that was true I think of a good many other projects.

FRY: In the case of Glacier View, was that to be a power dam?

DRURY: It was for flood control and power, if I remember rightly.

FRY: I was wondering if some of these local interests would be private power companies. Would they have stood to gain by this?

[513]

DRURY: Yes indeed, in many cases they would have. It's a very complex situation and I've oversimplified it of course, but as I say there were those cases where the pork barrel aspects, as you've called them in your memorandum to me, were definitely to the fore. It was a task of no mean difficulty to divert them. We were successful, as you know, in one or two cases, and in other cases--they're still wrestling with the problem of the Rainbow Bridge National Monument, as you know, and its inundation. While everybody seemed to agree that they should put up protective works to prevent Rainbow Bridge being flooded, the Congress conveniently, or inconveniently, refrained from making the necessary appropriation, but nevertheless they're going through with the dam.

FRY: I'd like to ask one more question about the local situation when dams were put forward as an idea in a local community. I gather that in some instances there wasn't necessarily any communication especially about these plans to Washington, and that in some cases the national parks really didn't know about it until it was almost a fait accompli.

DRURY: That's true, that's true, and as Ise(Ise, John, National Park Policy, New York, 1961.) brings out, we finally got Secretary Chapman to issue an order that even for exploration purposes the Bureau of Reclamation was not to send planning parties into the national parks or monuments. That came pretty late.

FRY: Bernard De Voto wrote a comment that the National Park Service was ignorant of the withdrawal that had been made to Bureau of Reclamation concerning the Dinosaur Dam in 1943. You suddenly found yourselves without that land--

DRURY: That's right. We read about it in a Salt Lake newspaper. But that's one of those that I believed that Michael Strauss, who was then the commissioner, himself didn't know about until the thing was sprung on us. He might

[514]

DRURY: have known about the withdrawal but he surely didn't know about the full blown plan.

FRY: Wouldn't Ickes have known about it?

DRURY: Well, in Ickes' time, as I remember, we fended them off. Of course, there was an equivocal situation there, in that the area of the extension of the Dinosaur National Monument was subject to some kind of a stipulation. I'm not clear in my memory as to what it was; I think that a certain dam site, the Browns Park Reservoir Site, was not to be upset by the expansion of the monument. Then the great and complex situation that arose was that the Browns Park Reservoir Site was abandoned by Reclamation, but they then tried to develop new sites, and that was what we objected to. What Ise says about that is true, including the fact that Secretary Chapman later on reversed himself--that was after I left Washington--and was just as emphatic (he was never very emphatic on anything) against the dam as he had previously been in its favor.

FRY: What really was it that made him come out in favor of the dam in the first place?

DRURY: I don't know, but I would assume that the papers were prepared for his signature by the Bureau of Reclamation and some of his friends in the Congress pressed upon him to sign them and that's about how much thought was given to it.

FRY: You gave a few eloquent statements in the hearing on April 3, 1950, held in Washington, D.C. under the title, "Shall Dams Be Built in Dinosaur National Monument?" It was printed April 7, 1950.

DRURY: That was the hearing which I'm afraid was mostly window-dressing.

FRY: Could you give us an idea of what the National Park Service could do, if anything, with public sentiment

[515]

FRY: in these local situations? For instance, the superintendents in your parks might be able to do something, but as a rule I suppose the local public seems to think that any dams are a good thing,

DRURY: Building the dams is usually profitable for the local merchants and business enterprises, and in some cases they're good for agriculture and the water users. There was no pat formula, and of course each situation differed from the others. But I would say that in general there was local support on the principle of not invading the major national parks with dams. Such a thing as the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam of course wouldn't have been thought of after Yosemite National Park was established.

In one or two cases there are artificial lakes that were present before the park areas were established. A lot of marginal decisions had to be made; there were some cases where I personally was disinclined to include areas in the national park system because artificial works of that sort were in prospect. You have to weigh the compelling reasons other than that which might tip the balance in deciding it. I think it was some administrator who said that anybody can decide the issues where you have a sixty to forty percentage in favor of them; it's the fifty-fifty or less situations that are difficult to deal with, where you can't decide on any tangible evidence. You've got to consider the nuances of the situation and try to foresee what the consequences will be.

FRY: And the most subtle nuances are the deciding factors.  

DRURY: They are. That's what our good friends in the State Department are up against today.

FRY: Did this problem of field-to-headquarters communication

[516]

FRY: subside any when the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Engineers agreed that before they actually started planning and digging in a place they would check with the particular land agency involved?

DRURY: Oh, yes; that helped tremendously, and of course that agreement was initiated by the National Park Service. That's a very complex subject, but as you know the federal power act now contains a prohibition against water and power development projects in national parks. Yet it's always possible for the Congress to modify that, and in some cases they have done so.

In that connection one of the things that we had considerable internal turmoil about was the question of the administration of the recreational activities on a great many of the artificial lakes that have been created by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Engineers. I probably took a narrow view, but I always felt that to undertake the management of these areas just because they provided recreation might lead to the diffusing of the energies of the National Park Service and somewhat the debasement of their standards. I believe that has to some degree taken place. How far that's inevitable nobody knows.

At the height of that kind of controversy my good friend Mike Strauss, who was then the public relations man of the Department of Reclamation, and I had quite a passage at arms in which I tried to get Secretary Ickes to compel the Bureau of Reclamation to manage their own recreation on these lakes that we felt were not of national park standards because of their artificiality. There ensued the celebrated "black magic-ivory tower" correspondence (See Appendix.) in which I contended

[517]

DRURY: that at Shasta Lake and Friant Dam, Millerton Lake in Fresno County, and several others, the Bureau of Reclamation should themselves organize, with such help as the National Park Service could give them, their own recreational departments to regulate boating and camping and fishing and swimming and all the rest. The theory in my mind was that these were not of such superlative character as to justify the National Park Service expending its funds and energy upon them. Anyhow, I tried to make the point that there was no "black magic" in the administration of recreation, that it was a managerial task that people who were experienced and trained could perform, and that the primary and more delicate task of the National Park Service was to organize to preserve the outstanding natural qualities, the scenic beauty, the wildlife, the geological significance and all natural phenomena in areas like Yosemite and Grand Teton and Yellowstone, leaving the management of recreation on any type of government area to the agency that had the primary responsibility for it. In other words, I always felt that recreation was a by-product of each of their functions, whether it be a national park or national forest or reclamation development.

But Mike Strauss issued a memorandum to Secretary Ickes also, urging that the National Park Service come down from its "ivory tower" and that we be compelled to undertake these responsibilities. Mr. Ickes on February 9, 1945, concurred in Mr. Strauss 's recommendation and turned mine down, so that we took over, for a while at least, the management of Shasta Lake. Congress later on transferred it to the Forest Service, which was all right with us, and Lake Millerton was administered by the National Park Service, but now has been conveyed to the state of California as far as jurisdiction over recreation is concerned. I don’t believe that

[518]

DRURY: Secretary Ickes was one hundred per cent right; generally, as far as the policy viewpoint was concerned, he was what some of us considered sound, which was another way of saying that he agreed with us.

Archaeological Preservation

FRY: You managed to arrange some archaeological surveys on some of the sites that were to be flooded. Could you explain how you managed to get that?

DRURY: Yes. That was something that we were able to get into our appropriations. We had the help of some very eminent men in the field of archaeology and of history, and then we had in the National Park Service a very fine section of history, of which Ronald F. Lee was then the chief. Herbert Kahler is now the section head. Both of them were working on that, and we had a number of able archaeologists on our staff as well as several advisers such as Dr. Joe Brew of Harvard University. Of course, Dr. Ralph W. Chaney, whom I've just left this noon, was a member of our advisory board and very close to people in that field. He's a paleontologist and geologist by profession--primarily a paleobotanist, an authority on fossil plants. (Cf. Chaney, Ralph: Paleobotanist, Conservationist, interview conducted by Edna Tartaul Daniel for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1960.)

FRY: In something like this that you were instituting, did the advisory board really play a highly functioning part?

DRURY: Yes, they had a very important part, especially in helping us to get the appropriations. I remember Dr. Brew appeared at several of the appropriations hearings. Of course the amounts we got, twenty, fifty thousand

[519]

DRURY: dollars per year, were inconsequential compared to the hundreds of millions that were spent on reclamation projects, but we had to fight for those items just about as hard as you’d fight for $100 million appropriation.

FRY: They didn't take this out of Reclamation, either, did they? This was a separate appropriation for your budget?

DRURY: I wouldn't be sure, but that in some of the projects, I think maybe in some of the Army Engineers' projects, they did allocate funds from the appropriations for the dams to cover this work. But in general, for the supervision of the work in our own organization we had to get our national park appropriations. But it was a fine far-sighted thing to do and as I say it took a lot of effort to get accomplished.

FRY: Did anybody in Bureau of Reclamation help in putting this through? Did you have any enthusiastic support?

DRURY: Oh, not aggressively, but they were not unwilling. Of course, the Reclamation and the Army Engineers were in the same boat so far as the destructive effect of these public works was concerned. I recollect that we had archaeological projects in both kinds of dam sites. A great deal of our archaeological work was done by contract with universities in the states where the areas were located.

FRY: Did you use Smithsonian for this?

DRURY: Yes. The Smithsonian was quite active in it. Alexander Whitmore, who was first assistant and then director of the Smithsonian, was a very close friend of mine and a strong supporter of the National Park Service; he knew a great deal about the national parks from the beginning. He and one of our University of California alumni, Matt Sterling, quite an eminent archaeologist, John Graff, and Frank Setzler--all of these men in the Smithsonian were extremely helpful in this program of

[520]

DRURY: salvaging archaeological materials before they were inundated.

FRY: I wanted to ask you what tangible results you got out of this. Were you able to contribute to museums all across the country?

DRURY: Quite a bit, yes. The work I think was generally recognized as being well worth while.

[521]

SECRETARIES KRUG AND CHAPMAN

The Rise of the Assistant Secretaries

FRY: What about Secretary Krug? Were there many things that had to die on his desk during his period in office?

DRURY: I wouldn't say that, but I would say that there were a great many matters that took an interminable time to carry through. Of course that's always true in government, but it was particularly true then. Secretary Ickes was a very self-reliant type, and while he operated soundly so far as line of authority is concerned, he wasn't much inclined to delegate to assistants. When Julius Krug succeeded Ickes he immediately set up an echelon of assistants through whom the services had to bore their way to get anything determined by the Secretary. The Ickes system, from a bureau head's standpoint, was far superior to that of the Krug administration. It got so that every transaction was processed two or three times and finally in disgust I said to one of Krug's assistant secretaries, "Well, I wish that you fellows would let us make the mistakes instead of making them up here. It would save everybody a lot of time,"

It was the beginning of the kitchen cabinet idea that had been early in the Roosevelt Administration but hadn't found its way into the departments so much. These bright young men and good-looking young women, who were trained in various institutions of higher learning with no practical touch of reality but with lots of ideas, and some very fine ideas, were out to remake the world. On the Krug administration one of the

[522]

DRURY: difficulties, particularly with assistant secretaries, was that they weren't content to coordinate affairs but wanted to originate policies and have the veto power on even minor transactions. In my humble opinion they rode a lot of hobbies that were not entirely realistic.

FRY: They were not just staff assistants then; they did have authority over the services?

DRURY: Oh, yes. They had delegated to them from the Secretary his authority over the bureaus.

Drury's Resignation and Secretary Chapman

FRY: Would you say that what John Ise (Ise, John, National Park Policy, New York, 1961).relates about you and Secretary Chapman and your resignation is essentially correct?

DRURY: I think I'd better read these pages again in Ise's book before commenting on them. I've read them once; I think the statement there about my relationships with Secretary Chapman is substantially accurate, although as with everything written about government, it is oversimplified. There were a lot of factors that entered into the fact that I didn't get along as well with Mr. Chapman as I did with most people.

I'm not inclined to comment very much on it, because while in some ways it was a matter of regret for me to leave Washington, the associations with the personnel of the Service and the important unfinished work and all, so far as many aspects of government work in that environment were concerned it was a deliverance that I had not sought, I can't find myself with any feeling of rancor toward Chapman or anybody else.

[523]

DRURY: Secretary Chapman, who doubtless meant well, was utterly impotent in the hands of his subordinates. He was very much in the position of the mahout who rides the elephant and thinks he's guiding it but really is being carried along. That wasn't true of men like Ickes, but it surely was true of Chapman as Secretary of the Interior. The great Bureau of Reclamation was the--well, it was like the state of Prussia in the German empire, where everything was weighted in its favor. That's about the essence of the situation.

FRY: This comes from the Congressional Record, the statement of Congressman LeRoy Johnson on your resignation.(Johnson, LeRoy: "Newton B. Drury a Great Conservationist," Congressional Record, Friday, July 13, 1951.
 See Appendix.)

DRURY: A very flattering statement. I was grateful to Congressman LeRoy Johnson for placing it in the Congressional Record. I suspect that my classmate Horace M. Albright had something to do with that. We'd all three been in the law school at the University of California together. In reading it, that has to be borne in mind.

FRY: Congressman Johnson quotes a tribute from Waldo G. Leland on page 7 of his speech.

DRURY: Dr. Leland was for a good many years chairman of our National Parks Advisory Committee. He was appointed on the Committee by Secretary Wilbur in 1932 and served for many years as chairman of the board. Any tribute from him was an honor indeed.

FRY: I wanted you to comment on the accuracy and so forth of these accounts that I've mentioned.

[524]

DRURY: I would hesitate to comment very much on their accuracy because they are unquestionably unduly flattering to yours truly; but the details of events are all right, the appraisals of accomplishment and all are debatable. Of course, my experience in that kind of situation is that when you're in any public capacity you are often praised for things that you didn’t really accomplish and you're blamed for atrocities that you didn't really perpetrate, so it all balances up pretty well.

FRY: The praise and the blame that you get in these is more or less accurate?

DRURY: Yes, I think so.

FRY: Prior to this had you given any thought to resigning?

DRURY: Oh, of course I always wanted to get back to California. In fact, I didn't want to leave California. But heading the national parks really was a very rewarding job and I think a rich experience and I enjoyed it, although there were some distressing and frustrating aspects of it.

FRY: What about the comments in here that just a few months before you resigned you considered a "high administrative job in a great university?" According to the Washington Evening Star, "Mr. Chapman explained that last June"--that's the June previous to your resignation--you "came to him to say [you] had a very good offer of a job and were thinking of resigning," At that time he urged you to stay on.

DRURY: I guess that's substantially true. It was a state position, it wasn't in a university. I was also thinking of the statement Dr. Leland made, which was true, that before I went East I had to decide among a post at the University and a job with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which would have been much more peaceful than the one that I elected to take.

[525]

FRY: Why did you choose National Park Service?

DRURY: Oh, well, of course it was in a very important cause and I had known Stephen Mather and I had known Horace Albright. I'd been offered the position seven or eight years before in 1933, and at that time I didn't feel my work here was at the point where I wanted to leave it, and furthermore I didn't feel I could afford it. I found later that I couldn't afford it at a later time either, but my wife and I thought we'd try it for a while. I really went there for only two or three years, and I stayed ten and a half, which is pretty good for a Republican in Democratic territory. [Laughter]

FRY: Are you ready to go on to state parks in the 1940's?

DRURY: I think so.

In the national parks, simply for the record, let me say that I sometimes have asked myself whether, if I had it to do over again, I would have taken out those ten and a half years in banishment from California. But as I look back on it I think it was a very rich experience, and the associations with the persons in the National Park Service were surely tremendously worth while. In fact, they compensated for some of the other associations with some elected officials and pressure groups, and the people who were out for a fast buck.

[526]

AUBREY DRURY IN THE 1940's

FRY: While you were running the national parks in Washington, Aubrey was in California with the Save-the-Redwoods League, wasn't he?

DRURY: Yes. Aubrey Drury and I had worked together since the beginning of the Drury Company on the affairs of various organizations, principal among which was the Save-the-Redwoods League, Aubrey had always been interested in California; in fact he was then in the process of writing his tourist guide which was later published by Harper's: California. An Intimate Guide [1935]. So when I decided to take a fling at Washington for a while he naturally gravitated into the administrative position in the Save-the-Redwoods League.

It's like a lot of other things; I went there expecting to stay maybe a year or two and I didn't get back into the Redwoods League for twenty years. During those twenty years Aubrey did some very remarkable things, particularly in the way of money-raising and getting widespread publicity for the save-the-redwoods movement and building up the membership. I had never expected to go back into anything but just a casual and consulting relationship to it but suddenly he passed away in '59 and the directors asked me to go back into it. But that's a later story of course.

FRY: The fact remains that he was very happy to go ahead and fill your shoes while you went to Washington.

DRURY: Yes. It was just as familiar to him as it was to me. He had a phenomenal memory and that was a great help to him in the matter of personal relationships.

FRY: I believe that while your brother was heading the Save-the-Redwoods League, there was a large state appropriation for acquisition.

[527]

DRURY: Yes, in 1945.  There was an appropriation of $15,000,000; however, two-thirds was for beaches and one-third for inland parks. Unfortunately, I think, this act carried language requiring that county master plans of shoreline development must be completed and approved by the Park Commission before the money could be expended. I say 'unfortunately’ because the state already had its plan based on long experience and observation, and to some degree that proviso slowed things up, and it also introduced what I consider the erroneous principle of subjecting state authority to veto by local authorities. The counties, after all, are only segments of the state. They are not distinct government entities. They are set up to enable the state to administer county affairs in orderly fashion, and to give the county supervisors what amounted to a veto power was very much a deterrent to carrying out a sound, logical program.

FRY: Was this in response to pressure from the counties against too much "land grabbing?"

DRURY: I wasn't here when it went through the Legislature, but my guess is that they got the best act they could, and that the county master plan provision was put in during the process of legislation. That happens to the best of legislation.

[528]

OTHER NATIONAL PARK WRITING

John Ise's National Park Policy

FRY: Have you had time to read John Ise's new book? (Ise, John: Our National Park Policy, A Critical History, Knopf, 1961.)

DRURY: I thought his book was a fine contribution to the cause of national parks. Some of my friends like Herb Evison have been a bit critical of it, but I couldn't very well be because [laughter] for some reason he speaks rather favorably of my administration in the national parks.

Perhaps my only critical thought about the book was that it was derived from secondary and even tertiary evidence in some cases. It would be very difficult I suppose for anyone to gain firsthand knowledge of the national parks without having been a part of the staff. That's the great advantage that Herbert Evison will have when he writes his voluminous history. On the other hand, someone from the outside can perhaps get a better perspective.

Of course, partly because I initiated the arrangement, it seemed to me that Freeman Tilden, who wrote in the late forties, The National Parks, What They Mean to You and Me (Knopf), was in about as good a position as anyone to interpret the parks, because he had been a consultant on our staff and had traveled widely through the parks. He was well versed in the geography of America and its history. He is a very able gentleman--in fact, I think that Freeman Tilden probably is one of the leading essayists in the United States.

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DRURY: He gets the background and philosophy I think more profoundly than Ise does. Ise is more the detailed historian.

Another thing about Tilden is his delightful sense of humor. If you've read the section he wrote about Carlsbad Caverns and some of the other caves and his sense of claustrophobia--he dealt with that very deftly. In general, all of his commentaries were leavened with a certain amount of humor.

FRY: I don't believe he is quite as minutely analytical as Ise is.

DRURY: No. He was trying to tell what the message, the philosophy if you will, of the national parks was, and I think he ended up as any of us would with the conclusion that they were what they were to the person who gained the experiences in them.

FRY: Do you think that Ise missed the boat in any important place because of his lack of time in tracing down primary sources?

DRURY: No, I think that he unquestionably was accurate according to the letter of the annual reports and the Congressional hearings and the other documents he had access to.

FRY: I mean according to what actually happened as you knew it.

DRURY: There were just one or two things that I wrote him about in April of 1961 after reading the book. He spoke, I think, with considerable accuracy about several of the compromises that had to be made in my time, notably at the Everglades and at Jackson Hole National Monument. But some of the nuances of the situations, of course, he couldn't know because he wasn't in the thick of the battle. I noticed on page 509, he had something about the Everglades. Oh, yes, he spoke of the Everglades National Park and the fact that we condoned oil drilling. That happened during my administration. The state had certain lands where, because of an oil flurry nearby,

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DRURY: they weren't willing to relinquish the oil and gas rights, so that in order to establish the Everglades National Park we had to accept the land subject to those rights, but for only ten years. Those ten years have now expired, so that the Federal Government now has a hundred per cent possession of the state lands that were conveyed to it. The reservation of oil and gas has lapsed. However, we had to agree also that if, in the future (and I think this is all right myself, I was a party to making the agreement) there is extraction by the Federal Government of oil and gas on those lands, directly or under leases, the royalties will go to the state of Florida. If the park is violated from now on, it will be the Federal Government that does it. The question of who gets the money from the oil and gas is a relatively unimportant question. Of course, it's no more susceptible to oil-drilling than any other national park; it would require probably an act of Congress, and be done by administrative act, so that the issue could be fairly debated by the public and the question decided as to whether the natural values in the Everglades were too great to allow the extraction of oil and gas. That I think is an important point that Ise didn't follow through--that while it was too bad to have to make that concession, it was a calculated risk that we thought was necessary to success in establishing the Everglades National Park. The reservation has now run out, the ten years having expired. That's on page 509-510.

One thing that I wrote Dr. Ise about that I felt gave a mistaken impression was in the footnote on pages 484 and 485. Although he didn't attribute it to the period when I was in Washington, he spoke of the criticism by Secretary Ickes of the practice that had been followed in acquiring national park lands whereby the government

[531]

DRURY: appraisers would put a value on the property, and the government, out of an appropriation that required matching, would pay them one-half of that appraised value.  I never would be a party to that particular process because I think it's fraught with danger. You mean the appraisal was double the value of the land--No, I don't say that at all, but there's always the danger of that. Most of the purchases were made in Rocky Mountain National Park. I think the appraisals were sound and I think the owners and the government acted in good faith, but there's the very great danger of inflating the values because of over-eagerness to get the land. Of course, appraising is not an exact science in any event. I've had a lot of experience with that and I've known appraisals to be nine hundred per cent apart in cases of lands that were perhaps almost worthless and for which there was no market, as in the desert. I remember one case in the Anza Desert in the early days when we were acquiring half a million acres, and one appraiser put a value of one dollar per acre on the land and the other one put a value of ten dollars per acre on the land, and when I protested to the second appraiser he said, "Well, what difference does it make? Ten dollars is a nominal value in any event." To which I replied, "It is if you're buying one acre, but it isn't if you're buying 250,000 acres." We did get a lot of the land, as you know, in the Anza desert for less than one dollar an acre.

FRY: What do you think of Ise's portrayal of the Dinosaur Dam controversy? This is on page 478.

DRURY: Of course, I wish that Dr. Ise might have had access to the official files, because some of us thought at the time that we were casting pearls in a certain sense; in some of our memoranda, the intimate memoranda between

[532]

DRURY: the regional directors and the heads of the different divisions of the Service, and in particular between the Director's office and the Secretary's office. Those memoranda got to the heart of many a controversy and dealt with what for the lack of a better word I refer to as the nuances of the situation, the political overtones and that kind of thing.

FRY: I should mention for the record, that he wrote me that he regretted very much that he couldn't get out here and talk to you before he had to set down anything about your administration.

DRURY: That was very kind of him, but I had no objections to that section. In the main it was I think fair; some of the remarks perhaps a little over-complimentary.

FRY: He has a very high regard for you; he wrote me that he rates you up with Mather, that probably no one else has protected the parks with the zeal that you did.

DRURY: Well, that's very high praise and gratifying, but I take that with a grain of salt. All of Mather's successors, of course, were men who knew him well and who derived their inspiration from him.

Ise also gives a very fair account of the unfortunate incident at the time when I left the National Park Service and the administration of Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman. But on page 517, there is a very minor matter. Just as long as we're meticulous about dates he indicated that I had retired January 19, 1951. As a matter of fact, I retired April 1, 1951. I had enough time to write my philippic and do a few other things, get ready to come back to California, which I never should have left. On the whole, I think it's a well written book and it gives a very accurate

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DRURY: account of the genesis of the National Park Service and its policies.

FRY: Do you think he has any personal biases that show through?

DRURY: Well, I wouldn't be critical of those because his bias is very much like mine. It's favorable to the preservation of the natural scene unimpaired and the limitation of human use, to the degree that it's necessary, to maintain natural values. He has a very interesting chapter on protection of wilderness, and on the impact of mass recreation on natural areas, which were some of the things that I put my time on when I could get away from Congressional hearings and investigations and that kind of thing.

Herbert Evison is going to be here, and I think it would be very appropriate, if you want to, to try and get him over for an hour's interview. He's a very remarkable person: he was one of my colleagues with whom I worked very closely, our information officer.(Herbert Evison & Newton Drury; National Park Service & Civilian Conservation Corps, interview conducted by Amelia R. Fry for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1963) In fact, during my time back there, I was invited by the University of Michigan to make a series of talks, similar to those that Horace Albright is giving here, and also a number of seminars, and I asked Herb Evison to go with me. It made a very interesting two weeks. We met not only with the University of Michigan, but also with Michigan State--they're close to each other.

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Herbert Evison's Manuscript in Preparation

FRY: How do you think Mr. Evison's book will fit in with histories already available?

DRURY: I think Herb Evison's book will give a much more comprehensive view of the mechanics of operation, because Evison had a broad experience with almost every phase of park work. For one thing, he was a former newspaperman and he had the instinct for gathering detail and correlating it. And he was imbued with the same philosophy as Stephen Mather.( see Herbert Evison's correspondence, appendix). Besides Mather's vision, which was tremendous, his great trait that meant so much to the success of the national park system was his persistence and his ability to follow through. He was like my classmate, Horace M. Albright; he liked people and consequently he got a lot more done by more people than the average person would.

FRY: He and Albright must have made quite a pair.

Albright-Drury Interview

DRURY: I read rather carefully those two interviews we had in company with Albright (Horace M. Albright & Newton Drury: Conservation 1900 to 1960, interview conducted by Amelia R. Fry for the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1962.) and I appended a note that it seemed to me it was rather full of persiflage, but it might give someone sometime a little conception of what you might call the nuances of park administration, the surrounding circumstances that sometimes modify the ideal.

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FRY: I think so, and the fact that you two, as ex-directors of National Park Service are comparing notes might help to make things fall into place for a scholar who's been dealing with rather sterile material.

DRURY: Well, I'm afraid that that transcript at least will bear out the fact that government administrators are sometimes human. I must say that I disagree with some of the rather materialistic doctrine that Horace was expounding, but neither did he go along with some of my so-called idealism. But the country owes a great deal more to Horace Albright than most people realize. Mather was the inspirer, you might say; Albright was the organization man right from the beginning who worked with Mather, and it was he who really erected the framework of the organization, without which inspiration would have vanished into thin air. Horace was primarily, you might say, the businessman of the team and a very wonderful detail man, and Stephen Mather was the inspirer, the prophet. Yet Horace also had an important part in formulating national park philosophy.

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