National Parks: The American Experience by Alfred Runte (review)

340 Western American Literature Nelson’s tough-minded examination of life as it is in the West as it is will not suit the palates of those who prefer life as they wish it had been in the West that never was. Those with more adventurous tastes will find it heady stuff indeed. JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado, Boulder National Parks: The American Experience. By Alfred Runte. (Lincoln: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1979. xiv 4- 240 pages, $16.50.) There are ample ironies and intelligent insights even in Runte’s title, for the many conflicts over land use he discusses, coupled with several styles of popular historical consciousness, can certainly be defined as “the American experience.” The parks embody the myth that we are a “wondrous” people in a “wondrous” land (“scenic nationalism”), yet they also embody the cultural conflict between belief in “the sanctity of private property” and the conviction “that no individual had the right to own a national monument.” The tensions between these oppositions are further complicated by the shifts in the argument of what a “park” is or ought to be, and one of Runte’s central stories is to trace the national park idea at several cultural levels as it moves from a nineteenth-century preoccupation with “panorama” to the 1960s’ conception of “ecosystem.” The chronological narration of how our national parks emerged as cul­ tural entities allows Runte to discuss the criss-crossed (or maybe cross-eyed) function of visualization as a mass mediation in national life. Runte’s contri­ bution to the literature of land, eye, and expansionism is to detail concretely what happened to land and how metaphorical and ideological representations acted as historical forces in the creation of both real estate and a geo-centered cultural identity self-consciously and (later) pridefully different from Eur­ ope’s. Runte’s first three chapters link the rise of mass media to the operations of an iconography of landscape ideologically inseparable from the rise of “scenic nationalism.” By mid-century, we recall, the United States acquired the Rockies, Texas, the Southwest, California, and the Pacific slope, an awe­ somely compressed expansion and one making the East “the audience to frontier events.” In the pages of the New York Tribune Greeley intoned typologically that the redwoods were big “when David danced before the ark,” and in 1865 Bierstadt sold his canvas “The Rocky Mountains” (1863: 6/ x 10') for $25,000 (a record for an American painter) and of course saw his works and those of other artists mass-duplicated as prints, newspaper and Reviews 341 magazine illustrations, and engravings. With the additional publicity of the Washburn Yellowstone articles in Scribner’s, the Hayden Survey of the Yel­ lowstone in the early 1870s, and with the Northern Pacific Railroad’srecogni­ tion that it “would be the sole beneficiary of the tourist traffic” to the northern Rockies, the time for the national park idea was fully coincidental with the materialism and economic structure of the Gilded Age, with the full swelling of “scenic” or “cultural nationalism,” the notion of the rustic “resort,” and with the “concept of useless scenery.” Runte’s remaining chapters frequently use the case study method. The need to preserve Mt. Rainier below timberline, for example, was argued by an elderly John Muir, who saw early on that an icy summit could take care of itself but that the flora and fauna of the lower slopes were in clear and present danger of becoming a wipeout of black stumps. Differences, confron­ tations, and ruptures of all sorts Runte locates finally in two competing economies of meaning — on the one hand, one investing the land with moral values, a surrogate cultural historicism (the Grand Canyon is equal to a European cathedral), and a nationalist sublime (a “suspended” or “primitive America” existing as a “classroom”) ; and on the other, an opposed economy realizing the land’s commodity exchange and use values, its potential as deferred or future payoff, and a nationalist resource much like a bank. Yet another topic this book approaches is the American (but by now global) conversion of directly lived life into a spectacle, which is the domi­ nant...