Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site
Philosophical Underpinnings of the National Park Idea
Dwight T. Pitcaithley
Chief Historian
National Park Service
Copyright © 2001 by the Association of National Park Rangers. All rights
reserved. This article is republished from Ranger, Fall 2001, with
permission from the
Association of National Park Rangers.
Wallace Stegner, that insightful observer of the
American West, liked to remark that the idea of national parks was the
best idea we ever had. He believed that the concept of national parks
was inevitable "as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild
continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe."
Inevitable or not, the idea gradually took form from multiple threads.
The artist George Catlin first articulated the idea of large western
national parks in 1832, the same year Congress set aside the Hot Springs
Reservation in central Arkansas, now known as Hot Springs National Park.
On a trip to the Dakotas Catlin worried about the impact of America's
westward expansion on Indian civilization, wildlife and wilderness. They
might be preserved, he wrote, "by some great protecting policy of
government . . . in a magnificent park . . . A nation's park, containing
man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's
beauty!"
Artist George Catlin first articulated the idea of large western
national parks in 1832
Lawyer, writer and philosopher Joseph Sax has given
us perhaps the most comprehensive and articulate assessment of the
growth of the idea in an article titled, "America's National Parks:
Their Principles, Purposes and Prospects."
One thread, according to Sax, was the growing belief,
by the midpoint of the 19th century, that spectacular natural areas
could be quickly and profoundly despoiled. Beginning in 1806, developers
bought land adjacent to Niagara Falls for industrial and tourism
purposes. By 1860, the famous falls were so congested with haphazard
development that the area had become the prime example of how a scenic
wonder should not be developed.
Photo courtesy of Association of National Park Rangers, Copyright © 2001.
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The earliest and clearest articulation of a
philosophy for the use and enjoyment of public pleasuring grounds came
several decades after Catlin, but long before President Woodrow Wilson
established the National Park Service in 1916. In 1864 Abraham Lincoln
authorized the transfer of the Yosemite Valley to the state of
California for "public use, resort and recreation." Frederick Law
Olmsted was appointed chairman of the board of commissioners established
to oversee the administration of the park, and he formulated a theory of
use for this new type of land. The national park idea took root in an
1865 report that presented his views on how Yosemite should be
developed.
Olmsted, the preeminent landscape architect of the
19th century, presented more than a theory of use, he articulated a
philosophy of leisure based on nature's regenerative powers for an
urbanizing society. He believed, this builder of Central Park in New
York City and countless other urban parks throughout the country, that
the essence of park land should be in establishing a contrast to the
pace of the modern world. Anchoring his thinking at the conclusion of
the Civil War and amid the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, Olmsted
envisioned a need for ordinary citizens to maintain perspective in their
daily lives by being exposed to, and encouraged to contemplate, the
natural rhythms of the natural world.
Olmsted wrote during a period in American history
when American society was eager to find ways to measure up to European
society. Before the 1860s and 1870s, North America had nothing to
compare to the Swiss Alps or the antiquities of Rome or the canals and
museums of Venice. Americans who took the "Grand Tour" to experience the
sights and culture of Europe did so because there was no equivalent in
the United States. (It would be several decades before the wonders of
Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon would be revealed to the American public.)
The grandeur and spectacle of the Yosemite Valley and the sequoia trees
of the Mariposa Grove, however, were something else. Therein was scenery
that could compare favorably with the best Europe had to offer.
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Olmsted was not an advocate of wilderness, rather he
thought it most appropriate that parks have restaurants and hotels and
carriage paths and trails so that a leisurely appreciation of nature was
possible. How else could men and women of leisure enjoy the sights and
scenery of these grand places? These conveniences, however, should not
interfere, visually or audibly, with the process of appreciation. This
policy of recreation, in the words of Joseph Sax, "of testing the
importance of one's daily tasks against some permanent standard of
value," was at the heart of Olmsted's philosophy. It was contrast
Olmsted was after, contrast of the rhythm and pace of a daily existence
with the rhythm of the natural world. "We want a ground," he wrote, "to
which people may easily go after their day's work is done . . . we want
. . . the greatest possible contrast with the restraining and confining
conditions of the town . . . we want . . . tranquility and rest to the
mind. With this thought in mind, Olmsted constructed many of the nations
most significant urban parks. It was not a stretch, then, for Olmsted to
adopt the same philosophy of contrast for Yosemite. The Mariposa Grove
was not as accessible to the working class at the end of the day, but
the park did carry the concept of contrast to its logical
conclusion.
Later, the founding fathers of the NPS made clean
distinctions between the conservation of "scenery and . . . natural and
historic objects" and the "enjoyment of the same." Although pleasure and
enjoyment were seen as byproducts of recreational use of parks,
enjoyment was also to be derived through education. "The educational, as
well as the recreational, use of the national parks," Secretary Lane
wrote to Stephen T. Mather in 1918, "should be encouraged in every
practicable way." The connections between parks and learning, formal and
informal, constitute another philosophical thread, and were recognized
early as an important element in the purpose of parks.
Olmsted, as noted, wrote from the vantage point of
mid-19th century America near the end of the American Civil War, at the
same time, interestingly enough, as George Perkins Marsh was developing
his pioneering work on conservation, Man and Nature. The country was
different then. The nation's population stood at a mere 31 million. Most
of the West, with the notable exception of parts of California,
Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, was still occupied only by scattered
Indian peoples. By the time Congress established the NPS in 1916 the
population had multiplied threefold, and by 1960 it had grown almost
tenfold to 180 million! The spatial relationship between towns and
cities and uninhabited sections of the country was different 100 years
after Olmsted's report on the Mariposa Grove. Wild places were shrinking
and becoming more precious. The sense of place with which Americans
viewed Yosemite and Yellowstone was different. The manner with which
Americans viewed their environment had also changed. The change was
reflected in a flurry of legislation that affected the management of the
National Park System as much as it recognized this country's commitment
to environmental health. By the 1960s, population and development
pressures throughout the country resulted in the passage of the
Wilderness Act (1964), National Historic Preservation Act (1966), Clean
Air Act (1967), Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), National
Environmental Policy Act (1969), and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.
The country had changed and so would the NPS as it implemented these and
other laws, and recognized the global implications of its actions.
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Another factor affecting the philosophical framework
of the Service present from the beginning, but expanded and clarified
over time was the emphasis placed on the preservation of cultural
resources. Even before the establishment of the NPS, Congress and the
President (through the authority of the 1906 Antiquities Act) began to
define a national policy of historic preservation as they recognized the
nationally significant values of Casa Grande, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon,
Gran Quivira, and Sitka among others. Subsequent legislation such as the
1935 Historic Sites Act, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966,
and Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 further enhanced the
Service's philosophical (and legal) underpinnings in the area currently
identified as heritage preservation. (Additional philosophical
expansions resulted from the creation of numerous preservation and
technical assistance programs Congress authorized over time in the areas
of historic preservation, recreation, and open space conservation.)
The philosophy of national park management is now
more expansive, and certainly more complex, than it was in either 1865
or 1916, but it continues to revolve around the protection and
preservation of cultural and natural resources. While it has not been
entirely consistent on this point through the decades, the Service is
mindful of its responsibility to manage resources with care and
thoughtfulness sufficient to leave them unimpaired for future
generations. That attentiveness to preservation and its co-mandate in
the 1916 Organic Act, "enjoyment," has led the Service to revisit
continuously the philosophy of managing national parks, and to ensure a
clear understanding of the Service's legislative mandates. The latest
version of the Management
Policies (2001) represents the current evolution of that
thinking and should be required reading for all interested in
understanding the practical implications of the philosophical structure
that guides the management of parks. As the Policies have tried
to make clear, the philosophy of park management stems not only from key
aspects of the Service's history Olmsted's thinking,
Yellowstone's founding, Stephen T. Mather's passion but from the
subsequent laws and proclamations passed by Congress and issued by
presidents. The governing philosophy of the NPS is more complex these
days because the society in which it operates is more complex. The
population of the United States now stands at 280 million, almost 10
times that when Olmsted articulated his philosophy of leisure during the
1860s. And yet, the Service still provides a sense of contrast, of
wonder, of awe, at cultural and natural sites alike.
Somewhere between the prose of Congress and the poetry of Stegner
lies the philosophical soul of the National Park Service.
Congress and Wallace Stegner, not surprisingly, had
different ways of capturing the values of the Service and System. In
1970, and again in 1978, Congress summed up its 100-year history of
setting aside special places by stating that the parks that comprise the
National Park System "are united through their interrelated purposes and
resources into one national park system as cumulative expressions of a
single national heritage; that, individually and collectively, these
areas derive increased national dignity and recognition of their
superlative environmental quality through their inclusion jointly with
each other in one national park system preserved and managed for the
benefit and inspiration of all the people of the United States," . . .
and that all management activities "shall be conducted in light of the
high public value and integrity of the National Park System and shall
not be exercised in derogation of the values and purposes for which
these various areas have been established."
A decade earlier, Stegner mused with his poet's heart
on the preservation of wild space:
We need wilderness preserved because it was the
challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The
reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our
spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It
is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it
can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is
important to us when we are old simply because it is there
important, that is, simply as idea . . . We simply need that wild
country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge
and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity
as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Somewhere between the prose of Congress and the
poetry of Stegner lies the philosophical soul of the National Park
Service.
Suggested readings
Wallace Stegner, "The Best Idea We Ever Had,"
in Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West. Edited
by Page Stegner. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, p. 137.
Joseph L. Sax, "America's National Parks:
Their Principles, Purposes, and Prospects," in Natural History
(October 1976), pp. 59-87.
Dwight T. Pitcaithley, "A Dignified
Exploitation: The Growth of Tourism in the National Parks," in Seeing
and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, edited by David M. Wrobel
and Patrick T. Long. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
The growth of the National Park System is detailed in
Barry Mackintosh, "The National Parks: Shaping the System." The
most current edition of
Shaping the System is found only on the Web.
Dwight T. Pitcaithley is the chief historian of
the National Park Service. He began his NPS career as a seasonal laborer
during the summer of 1963. In 1976 he was hired as a research historian
in the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe and later became the
regional historian in the Boston regional office. He served as chief of
cultural resources in the National Capital Region before becoming chief
historian in 1995.
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