Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians: The Legacy of George B. Hartzog Jr.

Foreword

ix Foreword ROBERT M. UTLEY George B. Hartzog Jr. served as seventh director of the National Park Service for nine years, from 1964 to 1972. As an outsized personality who studded his career with outsized achievements, he has long deserved a biography . Kathy Mengak has filled that need admirably. She came to know both George and Helen Hartzog intimately when she began to interview him in 1996. In a succession of interviews that continued virtually to the day of his death in 2008, she drew from him a body of priceless oral history. He spoke in colorful, graphic, and emphatic language, so eminently quotable that deciding what to exclude proved a challenge. Relying on many other interviews with knowledgeable people and on her wide-ranging research in Hartzog’s papers and other primary sources, she crafted the excellent biography that follows. It not only portrays an extraordinary man but offers a valuable contribution to the history of the national parks and the National Park Service. I view George Hartzog from the perspective of both historian and participant in his administration. As participant, I served as chief historian of the National Park Service through his entire directorate. As historian, I have had more than three decades to study and reflect on those frantic, momentous years. I remember George Hartzog as an administrator of rare ability. He was a workaholic who drove his staff at his pace. He not only managed, he ruled. He could be deeply caring, friendly, and sentimental with everyone in the service. He could also be nearly tyrannical in his demands for x foreword by robert m. utley instant, superior performance. He entertained a broad vision of what the national parks should be and should mean to the American people, and he pursued his vision relentlessly. Above all, both with the executive branch and with Congress, he possessed political cunning, insight, and mastery almost nonexistent among federal agency heads. He employed these talents to the great benefit of the National Park Service and the environmental movement launched by his chief, secretary of the interior Stewart Udall. As historian rather than as participant in the Hartzog directorate and his friend, I appraise him and his career from a more detached point of view. Most important, he led the largest expansion of the National Park System in history. During his nine-year tenure, the system grew by seventytwo units totaling 2.7 million acres—he didn’t add just national parks but also historical and archaeological monuments and sites, recreation areas, seashores, riverways, memorials, and cultural units celebrating minority experiences in America. Working closely with subcommittee chairman Senator Alan Bible in 1971, he laid the legislative basis for the expansion of the National Park System in Alaska. When Congress in 1980 finally acted on this provision of law, it doubled the acreage of the National Park System. Determined that the National Park Service reflect the growing national concern for minorities, Hartzog developed programs that gave the service a different complexion. He took charge of a largely white-male organization steeped in tradition. It did not readily accept change. Even so, women and minorities of different color and ethnicity began to appear in its ranks. When he left the directorate in 1972, the promotion of women and minorities was firmly established procedure, and the number of women and minorities advancing in the ranks has steadily expanded over the years since. Hartzog persuaded Congress to authorize a program for citizens to volunteer their time and talents to both parks and park visitors. The Volunteersin -Parks program has flourished as budgetary shortfalls have increasingly overburdened permanent employees. Beyond the parks themselves, Hartzog pursued outreach programs. Examples are the first environmental education curriculum in kindergarten through the twelfth grade. Complementing this initiative, he inaugurated study areas in a system of national education and development landmarks, christened NEED. He also put into effect programs to make national parks relevant to an urban society, such as Summer in the Parks, Parks for All Seasons, and Living History—two urban parks, in New York and San Francisco, are testimony to his dedication to urban needs. He pushed foreword by robert m. utley xi legislation that created the National Park Foundation, which summoned philanthropic contributions to projects not funded by Congress. Vastly expanding the reach of historic preservation to the nation as a whole, the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 would not have passed but...