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4. Advertising the Wild: Robert Sterling Yard
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CHAPTER 4 Advertising the Wild: Robert Sterling Yard As the only founder to come from National Park Service circles, Robert Sterling Yard was an anomaly among the foresters and hiking activists who made up the Wilderness Society’s original membership. He was the lone envoy—though an alienated one—from an agency that had defined nature preservation in the early twentieth century. Yard brought to the Wilderness Society twenty years of grappling with the national park ideal in an era of substantial change. In particular, he came burdened with questions and disillusionment about the intermixture of advertising, recreation, and tourism—forces he had once thought so promising in a national program of preservation. Yard began his conservation career in the mid-teens as a promoter of the national parks and a defender of their scenic magnificence; by 1935, he embraced wilderness advocacy as an alternative to scenic preservation and the recreational developments his promotional efforts had facilitated. His change of heart helps to explain why, less than two decades after the creation of the National Park Service, preservationists coalesced around wilderness as a new paradigm. Yard was not one of his generation’s great thinkers, and my claims for his importance should not be misinterpreted as such an assertion. He was a quixotic character whose stodginess and obsessive attention to semantics —what many have called his “purism”—made him resist change when the majority of his preservationist colleagues were busy crafting positions more amenable to the growing popularity of outdoor recreation . At times, Yard’s greatest distinction was his thorniness, and his career is remembered more for the principled enthusiasm of his one-man crusade for standards than for any formidable intellectual legacy. But his stodginess, his purism, made his journey to the wilderness ideal a revealing one. Although his critics saw him as elitist and blind to political 100 realities—and to a great extent he was both—Yard was able to focus more clearly than most on the ways Americans were revaluing nature in the midst of an emerging consumer culture. His response was a shift away from sublime scenery toward wilderness as a preservationist ideal. A Publicity Man in an Advertising Age Robert Sterling Yard was born in Haverstraw, New York, in 1861. After graduating from Princeton University in 1883, his first career, which spanned more than thirty years, was as a journalist and publisher. During the 1880s and 1890s, he wrote for the New York Sun and the New York Herald. In 1900 he moved into publishing, where he spent more than a decade before becoming editor-in-chief at Century Magazine in 1913. After a brief stay at Century, Yard returned to the New York Herald as Sunday editor. It was at that point, in 1915, that his old friend from his New York Sun days, Stephen Mather, summoned him to Washington, D.C.1 Stephen Mather left a successful career in the borax business in 1914 to accept a challenge from Interior Secretary Franklin Lane, a fellow graduate of the University of California. Mather had sent Lane a letter critical of national park administration, and Lane responded by urging Mather to come to Washington to see if he could do better. Mather accepted with the understanding that his stint as Assistant Secretary of the Interior in charge of the national parks would last only one year. As it turned out, he stayed for a decade and a half, a tenure marked by his frenetic efforts to build a national park system and punctuated by a series of nervous collapses. He was wildly successful at getting Americans into the national parks, and at getting the national park ideal into the hearts of Americans.2 Mather entered government service with two goals. First, he sought to create an independent agency to oversee the national parks. Utilitarian conservationists had agencies in the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation that lent them credibility and a clear policy voice. The parks, Mather thought, deserved similar institutional power. Mather’s second goal was to publicize the national parks as proper destinations for the masses, and to build a strong national constituency interested in preserving scenic areas from the reigning conservation doctrine of utilitarianism. Mather arrived in Washington at a propitious time. The Hetch Hetchy battle had heightened Americans’ awareness of the value of national parks and increased political support for park preservation. Mather also 101 Advertising the Wild: Robert Sterling Yard had a great opportunity to connect the parks...