"Shabby" National Parks
When Bernard DeVoto called for shutting down the parks
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If you’ve been reading Taking Bearings lately, you know I’m dialed in to national parks these days. Sometimes having a few thematically linked newsletters in a row helps me be less distracted.
For The Library this week I’m revisiting a writer I’ve focused on before, Bernard DeVoto, but I’m looking at a couple different articles this time. I was put in mind of these articles because DeVoto used his writing politically, and it is political season. Namely, he tried to motivate action in Congress. The problems he identified and the exasperated “solution” he proposed deserve at least a moment’s attention. Read on!
Devoted DeVoto
You can read my initial gloss on DeVoto here. But for a brief recap: DeVoto was a mid-20th-century author. He wanted to be a novelist but his greater talents lay elsewhere. He wrote sweeping historical epics that earned important awards (Pulitzer, National Book Award) and recognition. But some of his most important achievements, I think, came through his articles and columns in national magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s where he contributed to the venerable Easy Chair column.
DeVoto left Utah as a young man and returned to the West on research trips during which he was exposed to current events. He often used his columns to offer critical analysis of these.
Conservation became a key cause for DeVoto’s pen. He favored federal conservation programs and raised a ruckus more than once going to the magazine pages to expose attempts to undermine federal conservation programs, especially as they connected to western rangelands. (This issue is the focus of my earlier newsletter.)
But DeVoto also got exercised about the national parks. One campaign that heated up in the late 1940s concerned a dam planned for Echo Park, which would back up its reservoir into Dinosaur National Monument at the Utah-Colorado border and part of the national park system. He and many others took up the cause — and beat back the proposal. His best known article in this campaign appeared in the Saturday Evening Post under the title, “Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?” The answer was a resounding No! The Echo Park campaign helped launch the modern wilderness movement and marked a significant victory for wilderness and park proponents.
Park Troubles
If parks units were threatened by dams in the early postwar period, they also faced declining general conditions. DeVoto went after these too.
First in 1949, DeVoto wrote about how several parks were falling apart. Americans were allowing “one of our great public possessions to deteriorate,” he lamented in Harper’s. The National Park Service was not getting enough money and parks now looked “shabby,” he said. “All the roads are degenerating,” he reported.
This list of problems accumulated for two reasons, DeVoto explained. First, World War II had disrupted maintenance and cut deeply into staff. The National Park Service simply could not keep up. Second, after the war, the American public hit the road to the parks and overwhelmed them. DeVoto pointed out that between 1941 and 1948, National Park Service total employees were cut in half while visitation increased 40%. That math yielded negative results.
Visitors stole artifacts. They defaced rocks — like those I shared last week from Capitol Reef. They wrote obscenities on the walls of toilets. In Glacier National Park, an “evangelical sect painted its warnings of the wrath to come.” These things happened, DeVoto thought, because too few rangers were available to monitor the parks. “A ranger who cannot be hired deters nobody,” DeVoto pointed out.
DeVoto did not highlight a particular party or interest behind the park service’s neglect. Rather than animus, it was “sheer disregard.” He implored Congress to act quickly to reverse these trends.
It didn’t.
No Improvement
Four years later, in late 1953, DeVoto took to Harper’s pages again with the provocatively titled, “Let’s Close the National Parks.”
Conditions had not improved. If anything, they had worsened because park visitation increased — and so had tourists’ expectations. To start the article, DeVoto shared the sorts of complaints a park superintendent might hear. To the historian, they reveal well how the parks were conceived of by the visiting public mainly as a consumer good, a packaged experience to buy. “Satisfaction guaranteed” implied by the transaction.
DeVoto sympathized with the “dedicated” and “patient, frustrated, and sorely harassed” superintendent. There would be no relief to the constant complaints by the public and problems in the park until the “financial anemia” imposed by Congress abated.
The National Park Service employed ardent, devoted workers whose morale was collapsing alongside the physical plant of the parks. One of the specific complaints that echoes to today is poor housing options. This concern focused not only on poor quality quarters but also the exorbitant costs near the parks. (This continues to be a problem.)
“All park facilities are strained to the utmost,” DeVoto said. Campgrounds were “true slum districts.” Roads were inadequate. Tourists’ depredations mounted. Small savings here and there — “homeopathic measures” in DeVoto’s scathing tone — would not suffice.
So DeVoto advocated (tongue in cheek presumably) closing down the national park system “to a size for which Congress is willing to pay.” He started with the crown jewels and said it was time to “close and seal them, assign the Army to patrol them, and so hold them secure till they can be reopened.” His logic was simple: staff “are unable to do the job in full and so it had better not be attempted at all.”
DeVoto’s plan was designed to show the disgraceful situation and shame Congress into acting.
In relatively short order, the National Park Service launched Mission 66, an enormous investment in the parks.
Lessons?
DeVoto’s acerbic pen did not produce Mission 66, of course. But his article captured a moment in time, a frustrated pulse where a distracted Congress and public allowed a treasured national possession to become “shabby.” Sharp prose and provocative “solutions” can spark momentum. But in this moment of party platforms and conventions we need firsthand reports from the source to help us understand conditions on the ground. One reason DeVoto’s columns resonated is they proceeded from specific places and conditions.
Closing Words
Relevant Reruns
Besides the earlier DeVoto newsletter linked above, this newsletter about opposition to national monuments may be interesting in the context of this week’s newsletter. This article might provide some context too, written in the first year of the Trump administration during its efforts to undermine the public land system.
New Writing
I hope you’ll look at this month’s interview with Morgan Sjogren, which I made available for everyone. If this sort of conversation is something you enjoy, I encourage you to upgrade to a paid subscription where you’ll have access to a new conversation monthly. I contributed a co-written book chapter to a new volume on Wallace Stegner, which is the subject of this long, interesting interview with one of the co-editors. A local flower farmer profile I wrote a while ago has finally appeared, too.
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Taking Bearings Next Week
Next week is The Wild Card. Stay tuned!
national parks are such a mixed bag. while on the one hand they provide access to spaces with a container for vistors to still have modern comforts and guidances, they also are a reflection of the problem with wilderness and the museumification of nature in the United States in particular. I can understand the confusion of what to advocate for when parts of it seem beneficial and parts of it seem off the mark or slightly post-apocalyptic like degrading portapotties and roads for tourists to tour through 'looking' at nature that is destroyed elsewhere. So many national parks have problematic pasts, especially in their removal of indigenous peoples with the idea of the best interest of 'nature' in mind, but its tricky to suss out what is appropriate now that were here, in the situation we're currently in. Preserved land was a good forethought, but if it meant the abuse of land outside of those fenced boundaries than it makes me question the deep divide between the two.