America’s national parks: ‘An empire of grandeur’

Posted by Jeff on Aug 10, 2015 @ 8:59 am in Conservation | 0 comments | Last modified: August 10, 2015

One hundred years ago, only about a dozen national parks existed, all of them in the Far West. The departments of Agriculture, Interior and War each claimed some responsibility over them, but in truth, no one was in charge, and the parks suffered as a result.

Stephen Mather set out to change all that. An energetic businessman with what reporters called “an incandescent enthusiasm” and a special genius for promotion, Mather had already made a small fortune by portraying California’s Death Valley as an exotic location in advertising his company’s 20 Mule Team Borax brand laundry cleaner to American housewives.

In 1915, he called attention to something closer to his heart. He embarked on a campaign to convince Congress that the national parks needed both protection and promotion from a single agency of the federal government.

Mather, an admirer of John Muir, who had called national parks “places to play in and pray in,” knew from personal experience that time spent in nature could provide inspiration and solace to a person’s spirit and restore a person’s health — mental as well as physical. But now, he added two more arguments to advance his case.

On the one hand, he said, parks were “an economic asset of incalculable value.” They generated millions of tourism dollars that benefited the nation as a whole, and especially the states and communities where they were located. They were also, in his words, “vast schoolrooms of Americanism,” by which he meant that people who enjoyed their national parks would have greater pride in the nation that created them.

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