Stephen Mather's Soapbox

Our national parks may seem permanent, but what we allow in and near them can change.

BY DON LAGO

The 100th anniversary of the National Park Service has generated many commemorations—indeed, many self-congratulations. And rightly so. The rim of the Grand Canyon might have consisted of miles of mansions and security gates, but instead it is open to all Americans and the world.  Every year millions of foreigners, who might disapprove of America for our politics or our peanut butter, come to the national parks and go home deeply impressed by not just their wild beauty, but by their democratic values. Our best lands have brought out the best in our ideals.

Yet, in one respect, the national parks were an improbable development. Perhaps more than any other nation in world history, America has been defined and driven by a national mythos and mission of wilderness conquest. Colonists arriving on the Atlantic coast in the 1600s saw a vast continent of inexhaustible resources, of farmland, forests, minerals, wildlife, and water.  Refugees fleeing Europe for religious reasons soon perceived the American continent as a God-given gift that would reward righteousness with prosperity. At the same time, the unfolding era of technological invention would give Americans unprecedented tools for conquering nature.  In the 1740s, Peter Kalm, a student of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, toured America as an environmental Tocqueville and was appalled by its already-obvious culture of greed and waste; he saw that Swedish emigrants, who had settled on the Delaware River a century before, had been corrupted into abandoning their old nature-humble ways and were using timber and fish as if they were endless.  This was long before America had the government or corporations or industrialism that today’s ideologies tend to blame for all our troubles. Environmental destruction has deep cultural momentum. Our frontier experience also generated strong social norms, including individualism, rootlessness, and violence, that long ago became dysfunctional, but seem unyielding. 

It was precisely because this frontier juggernaut was so powerful that it generated a powerful and unique response. Early on, this reaction was feeble and dismissed as eccentric—silly Thoreau nagging his neighbors for enjoying material success. But half a century later, with the Gilded Age devouring nature, Americans who loved nature were forced to confront our national values, especially Americans who loved both nature and our frontier mythos. Teddy Roosevelt was enthralled with the heroic cowboy/hunter persona and pursued it all his life.  Young Stephen Mather, a native Californian working in advertising, harnessed the American mythic imagination by inventing the image of the 20-mule team for selling Death Valley borax soap.

Yet both men also grew up loving nature, and both were distressed by the destruction marching around them.  Wrestling mightily with their consciences, Roosevelt and Mather decided that America’s frontier mythos needed to be challenged and subdued. Yet they were up against a force far more powerful than themselves, more powerful than a president.  Roosevelt didn’t become president because Americans were clamoring for conservation, but only as an accident of history—the assassination of President McKinley. If William McKinley had remained president, the Gilded Age would have continued steamrolling the modest conservation movement.  When Stephen Mather became head of the National Park Service, he had a tiny staff and budget and had to fall back on Wild West mythos to promote not borax soap but Death Valley itself, and other landscapes.                  

Decades later, Ronald Reagan would host TV’s “Death Valley Days” and enthusiastically enlist in Mather’s Wild West iconography and sell lots of soap, but he never enlisted in Mather’s change of heart.  Reagan got elected president by reassuring Americans that the frontier was still alive and well, that our resources were still unlimited, that individualism and guns were healthy, and that if American prosperity was not functioning as national myth had always promised, it wasn’t because it had become invalid but because something was interfering with it, such as government regulation.  If only we returned to 1870, everything would be great again. The power of the frontier myth means that Americans, in a far larger percentage than any other Western nation, reject the concept of global climate change, which simply does not fit into our national belief that God had arranged nature and history to serve American prosperity.  Three decades after Reagan, the frontier myth has lost much of Reagan’s easy confidence and become more frustrated, more crude, angry, and paranoid, but it remains powerful enough to steer our destiny.

In the midst of celebrating our national parks, which might seem as solid and ancient as canyon cliffs, we should remind ourselves that our parks and other public lands are human institutions, created out of conflict.

For half a century after Yellowstone became the first national park, Arizonans fought to prevent the Grand Canyon from becoming a park, out of deeper loyalty to the belief that the land was made to be exploited for wealth. 

Most national parks and other public lands were created in an era when Americans felt they could have both prosperity and great scenery for their vacations. As confidence in prosperity erodes, so may support for public lands. While national parks are unlikely to be abolished or contracted, their budgets easily can be. Even ancient cliffs sometimes collapse.

By some measures, we have to wonder how much progress we have made.

Stephen Mather and his successors, in trying to define the values of the Park Service, ruled out building a tramway to the bottom of the canyon—too unnatural.  A century later, we are battling over just such a tramway.  

Mather worked relentlessly to stop mining inside national parks, but park boundaries were never drawn up with regard to groundwater or radioactive contamination of it.  Mather was passionately opposed to the idea of air tours over national parks, but they have become a routine part of park skies. When Teddy Roosevelt declared “leave it as it is,” he meant not building any lodges or other tourist facilities inside parks. But Mather was so desperate to draw voters to the parks and please them that the Park Service spent its first half-century bulldozing forests and paving wildlife habitat, and it has spent the last half-century uncomfortably trying to back out of its own trap, and it did not set a high standard for discouraging development near park boundaries.  Roosevelt and Mather saw a wild Colorado River, but today it’s an overtaxed water supply for grossly misplaced cities. As national mythology discourages action over global climate change, park boundaries won’t stop massive ecosystem erosion. 

Celebration does not mean relaxation.          

Don Lago is the author of “Grand Canyon: A History of a Natural Wonder and National Park” from the University of Nevada Press.  

EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.                           

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