Terra Incognita: The Neglected History of Interwar Environmental Thought and Politics

Kendrick A. Clements. Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. xiii + 332 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds. Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ix + 314 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $48.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

"For the most part," Kendrick Clements writes in his introduction to Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life, "the conservation history of the 1920s is terra incognita" (p. 6). He is right, and the same can be said about the 1930s. While there are some excellent histories of Progressive-era conservation and postwar environmental politics, with the scholarship of Samuel Hays looming large, few historians have paid attention to conservation during the interwar years. ¹ Donald Swain's Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933 (1963) was, until Clements's book, the only adequate overview of 1920s federal conservation policy, and, astonishingly, no one has yet provided a synthetic treatment of Depression-era conservation, despite the New Deal's obvious centrality to the history of American environmental thought and politics. There are some excellent case studies, but interwar conservation still lacks interpretive definition.

The neglect of interwar conservation is not accidental; it has much to do with the historiographical dominance of the two eras that adjoin it, and the logic that ties them together. The Hetch Hetchy episode during the early 1910s, in which the city of San Francisco invaded the boundaries of Yosemite National Park to dam the Tuolumne River and secure a supply of fresh water, still stands as the definitive moment not only of Progressive-era conservation, but of modern American environmental politics, because it featured two figures who have seemed the very archetypes of modern environmental conflict: John Muir, the great champion of the preservation of wild nature, and Gifford Pinchot, the embodiment of the utilitarian approach to the management of natural resources. This conflict between preservation and utilitarian conservation had particular resonance during the immediate postwar decades, as newly energized wilderness activists clashed with overzealous resource agencies engaged in a Cold War fit of timber liquidation and dam building. In other words, to those who have sought to explain the rise of a postwar environmental movement in the United States (or, to be more specific, the movement's preservationist wing), the Progressive era has seemed the most germane point of origin. In emphasizing the importance of these two eras, and in defining the history of modern environmental conflict around them, scholars have skipped over the interwar era.

Yet, as the two books under review here suggest, such neglect has been unfortunate. As Kendrick Clements argues in Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism, the rise of a consumer culture and the achievement of mass leisure reshaped American ideas of nature in ways that distinguish the interwar era. The proliferation of the automobile and the improvement of roads altered urban and suburban geography and gave a much wider swath of the American populace access to exurban nature. The federal government responded by becoming a crucial sponsor of outdoor recreation, facilitating national discussions on the subject and developing the public lands for modern recreational uses. This federal reckoning with outdoor recreation was one of the signature features of interwar conservation policy. Another was the centrality of large-scale environmental planning. As William Deverell and Greg Hise note in their introduction to Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region, the interwar era was a time "when large-scale, comprehensive plans were the norm rather than the exception" (p. 54). In their emphases on consumerism and planning, these two books provide an outline for rethinking interwar environmental thought and politics.

Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism has been a long time in the making. Kendrick Clements first offered his thoughts on Hoover's...