Viewing the national parks as the highest incarnation of American attitudes on nature has long occupied an important historiographical space within nature's conception in the United States.Footnote ¹ Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind was the classic 1960s study proclaiming an American cultural nationalist and quasi-religious encounter with the sublime character of wilderness in which Americans sought and ultimately preserved the nation's unique heritage.Footnote ² The only scholarly synthesis on national parks, by Alfred Runte, a student of Nash's, has been the standard account for thirty years and has reached a fourth edition.Footnote ³ To Runte, the national park movement's core was western and preservationist; that is, those who wanted to stop the destruction of the nation's unique natural landscapes. These sites were economically marginal,Footnote ⁴ natural wonders but preservationists used arguments of economic gain to protect national parks in pragmatic coalition with eastern groups on the national level. Those groups shifted the focus, from preservation of remaining wild areas for their own sake to use, by democratizing access and by identifying American wilderness scenery with cultural nationalism. Runte wrote, “In America's perception of landscape as a cultural icon lies the enduring explanation for national parks.” When Americans think of national parks, they think of “the natural wonders of the West … indelibly associated with inspiring scenery and expansive nature.”Footnote ⁵

Recent accounts of nature appreciation in Europe have also tended to endorse a sense of American uniqueness by noting the absence of true wilderness areas in Europe, and the relative absence of national parks there before the 1950s. In a comprehensive survey of environmental history writing in Europe, Carolyn Ford writes of the contrast between European cultural sensibilities and “the ‘wilderness debate’ that so animates many scholars in the United States.”Footnote ⁶ Works comparing Mexican and Swiss national park history with the American (mostly for the years after the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916) complicate the story but still emphasise US difference from Europe.Footnote ⁷

Despite trenchant critiques of the wilderness concept and extensive historical research into its social construction, this narrative remains largely intact.Footnote ⁸ It is transparent in popular form in Ken Burns's National Parks: America's Best Idea;Footnote ⁹ Douglas Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior continues the theme by charting the enormous contribution of Theodore Roosevelt as a nature lover and creator of national parks during his presidency (1901–9).Footnote ¹⁰ The book reinforces the image in the public mind of American conservation as a unique and Whiggish product of an American experience.

Absent from this discourse is discussion of the international concern manifest in Europe and the British Empire about the advance of “civilization” and its effects upon the natural world. Those concerns produced national, international and transnational efforts for nature protection from the 1880s to the 1920s that included but were not limited to specific entities named national parks.Footnote ¹¹ Historians of the national parks in the United States have rarely noticed these developments, and then only to tell a story of American leadership and global dissemination of the American model of a national park idea. Nash explicitly named the national park an American invention exported worldwide in the twentieth century. To Nash, wilderness was “a natural extension of the national park idea” in the United States, whereas Canada had “too much wilderness” to love it, while nonwestern China and Japan lacked concepts of public ownership, and had no democratic tradition.Footnote ¹² Neither Runte nor Nash paid attention to park development in Australia, ignoring the early work for Audley National Park, New South Wales in 1879, the second so-called “national park” in the world.Footnote ¹³ For Nash, Banff (Rocky Mountains National Park), established in 1887, almost duplicated the language of Yellowstone's act of 1872, while the Maori tribal land donated to the New Zealand government for Tongariro National Park in 1887 (officially legislated in 1894) went unmentioned.Footnote ¹⁴ Each of these “national” cases had its institutional and cultural distinctiveness.Footnote ¹⁵ Not only did “national” parks fail to maintain a uniform rationale, form and structure across national boundaries, each also had its internal complexities that rendered cross-national uniformity beside the point. But uniformity does not eliminate transnational connections and influences.Footnote ¹⁶

Though the first “national park” was Yellowstone in 1872, the United States provided no model for global diffusion of the idea. Deep distrust of federal power and the parsimony of Congress meant that there was no clear opportunity to create a nationalist construction of nature through national parks during the 1870s to 1890s. Indeed, Yellowstone was called “national” by accident of administration since it was created in a US territory under federal control. As late as 1900 the United States had just four national parks and their composition was heterogeneous. One “national” park, tiny Macinack, had actually been decommissioned in 1895.Footnote ¹⁷ Theodore Roosevelt certainly proclaimed wildlife refuges and national monuments, the latter under the important American Antiquities Act of 1906, but use of executive power could not extend for any American President to the creation of parks, which needed Congressional approval. Congress approved five during the Roosevelt presidency, but not until after the Hetch Hetchy Valley proposal to dam part of Yosemite National Park heated up in 1908 did anything resembling a concerted national park “movement” emerge. The 1916 act creating the National Park Service followed as a reaction to and de facto compensation for the Hetch Hetchy debacle, and the parks were popularized in a key national construction of the environment. Yet preservation of national parks from dams continued to be an issue until after World War II.

The creation of a national park system would first be legislated in Sweden, not the United States, in 1909, and was more the product of German conservation or Naturschutz than of American inspiration.Footnote ¹⁸ However, Sweden's parks were mostly in the north and conceived, like early American national parks, as empty and wild spaces.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite the Swedish law of 1909, Canada also claims the title of the “world's first” national park administration (1911), and Queensland, Australia the title of the first to lay down a law specifying the terms for national park status (1906).Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, rather than a purely one-way American influence on Canada, the Canadian example was reciprocally influential for the US National Park Service Act of 1916 through American concerns that Canadian parks were better able through their superior, centralized administrative bureau to attract tourists.Footnote ²¹

Nor did American supporters of national parks “export” a wilderness version of parks when they worked abroad before World War I. Former US Geological Survey official Bailey Willis was hired in 1910 by the Argentine government to review its conservation policies. Already, in 1903, explorer Dr. Francisco Pascacio Moreno had donated land for the first Argentinian national park (Nahuel Huapi) but, working with the Argentinian government, Willis wrote the official statement for Argentina on “What Is a National Park?”. Argentina's desire for a utilitarian and multiple-use concept of national parks harmonized with Willis's own views. An ardent exponent of both utilitarian conservation and preservationist sentiments, Willis endorsed a mixed landscape for Nahuel Huapi. There would be economic development through hydroelectric facilities and a proposed city nearby, and recreational facilities as well as reforestation projects and preservation of the unique scenery. Was a national park a “wild region” for “the pleasure of the huntsman or occasional mountain climber?” asked Willis. This was, he argued,

The iconography of American landscape had been institutionalized by 1916 in these spaces of special national significance. Yet the contingency and complexity present at the creation of these national spaces suggests that American encounters with the wild and the role of wilderness as a force within the national parks movement constituted a variant on the transnational story of park creation.Footnote ²³ These worked in a more complicated way than American invention and diffusion, and reflected more than insistence on the primacy of wilderness in American motives.

In contrast, I argue that, in the early formation of national park ideas before 1916, American advocates of nature's preservation were aware of and in contact with nature-preservation ideas and movements in Europe and around the world.Footnote ²⁴ The rise of the national park concept occurred in a broader context of a transnational circulation of information on the apparent destruction of – or imminent threat to – nature on a global level. In 1900, fear over these threats brought the first international agreement on the preservation of wild fauna, a seven-party European treaty that applied to Africa. The destruction of birdlife was an issue that on the American side in 1900 produced the Lacey Act to preserve game and wild birds, and, on the European side in 1902, a Convention “pour la protection des oiseaux utiles à l'agriculture” signed by twelve countries in Paris. In 1913, the first International Conservation Congress was held under Swiss auspices in Berne, and an American delegate, the US minister to Switzerland, Pleasant Stovall, attended. This concern over the threats to global wildlife generated important transnational contacts. In 1908, for example, Roosevelt wrote a supportive foreword to the Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the [British] Empire, and he, William T. Hornaday, the advocate of bison protection, and William Dutcher of the National Association of Audubon Societies were members of that society.Footnote ²⁵

Examining links with ideas of nature protection in Europe allows us to rethink the conceptualization of national parks within the United States centered on the social construction of nature, and to specify the underlying assumptions about national park status and meaning by testing the geographical and social limits to the concept. In this sense, American national parks were institutionally and culturally shaped as explicitly national spaces, but produced in a transnational context of ideas about nature protection that helped to produce those spaces. Ironically, American protection of nature after about 1909 came to differ from some European countries in its higher valuation of popular use of the parks, rather than a commitment to preservationist or ecological values. The impact of utilitarian conservationism for “national efficiency” in the years just before World War I clearly affected this outcome yet should not obscure the common roots of park development. That reflected and was influenced by international sensibilities regarding the preservation of nature at the moment of industrialization in Europe and the American northeast; the intrusion of mechanization into the countryside; and, outside the metropolitan centres of the Euro-American world, high imperialism that exposed the widespread destruction of nature in Europe's colonies.

The case of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS) provides a lever to rethink these issues. Formed in 1895, and originally called the Society for the Preservation of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects, the society extended its “activities … to other States” after 1900. Though ASHPS was one of a number of local and state preservationist and antiquities societies to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, it was less inward-looking and conservative than others that remained focussed on the preservation of local issues and old buildings. ASHPS lacked the states’ rights inhibitions espoused by the Virginia Society for the Preservation of Antiquities against national government intervention to create national spaces of “sacred interest.” ASHPS first called for the creation of a national park in the case of Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing attention to the national spaces that defined American identity, ASHPS simultaneously recognized Jamestown as a transatlantic space, a product of “Anglo-Saxon civilization” that joined the “Old World” to the “New.”Footnote ²⁶ ASHPS and the Virginia society had some shared membership, but the former was studded with leading industrialists, financiers and other leading members of the northern elite. Prominent New York Democrat Andrew H. Green, a city comptroller and Central Park commissioner, was the influential first president.Footnote ²⁷ From 1907, a self-trained mineralogist and one-time special agent of the US Geological Survey, George Kunz, was the driving force. President of the New York Academy of Sciences, Kunz created mineralogical exhibits for US Government participation at several world's fairs and expositions from 1889 to 1904, and was Tiffany's jeweller.Footnote ²⁸ Among influential members were J. P. Morgan, who served as a vice president (and later honorary president), and US Steel's George W. Perkins. It also received Rockefeller family funding.

As these names suggest, this was not radical or populist material. The society began as a preservation society campaigning to save battlefields and historic homes. For the social elite, one attraction of ASHPS was the element of conservative ancestor worship when facing the problem of the incoming southern European immigrants. For example, in 1901 the society preserved state ownership of the ruins of an old fort at Crown Point, New York. The New York Times praised its work and described the fort as a relic of the Seven Years War, a war “by which North America was saved for Anglo-Saxon civilization instead of Latin.”Footnote ²⁹ The preservation of a cedar of Lebanon tree in New York City agitated the members because it was “a living thing which connected the local traditions of the Bronx of the latter part of the Eighteenth Century with the second decade of the Twentieth Century.” Scenically such a tree was “symmetrical, strong and vigorous” and “a symbol of Endurance, Prosperity and Hospitality in ancient times.” This was just how the wealthy elite that supported the ASHPS perceived themselves. This tree “demonstrated its ability and right to live by the law of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ ” To ASHPS supporters, there was no reason why it (and they) might not “flourish for generations to come.”Footnote ³⁰

The 1899 report makes clear the society's aesthetic, centered on a revolt against mechanical civilization and in favour of the authentic, a condition shared with European advocates of conservation:

Already, the ASHPS was involved in preserving landscapes by beautifying land around the railroads – to make journeys more pleasant – and campaigning against billboard pollution.Footnote ³²

These country landscape campaigns came to prominence at exactly the same time that similar organizations grew in Europe, groups with which they were closely connected by active correspondence and two-way emulation. That itself is an interesting parallel not remarked upon by historians on either continent. Their work was very similar to that of the societies for the protection of the countryside in France and Belgium, discussed in the pages of ASHPS reports. This paralleled concerns of the bicycle clubs in France and tourist interests for improvement of industrial and rural landscapes.Footnote ³³ “The problems with which they [the Belgians] have to contend,” wrote the ASHPS president, “are the same as those which confront the advocates of scenic and historic preservation in America.”Footnote ³⁴

Not only did they think like Europeans; the scenic-beauty people also worked with them. By 1900 the American society joined with the National Trust in Britain in a campaign to stop American millionaires from alienating important British heritage sites, by raising money to buy the properties for the Trust. The American organization saw itself as the Trust's equivalent, and its partner.Footnote ³⁵ It also backed the Trust's rearguard efforts at the protection in the Lake District of Thirlmere when a dam was installed. As told by Harriet Ritvo, this was an episode that anticipated some of the issues of the Hetch Hetchy dispute.Footnote ³⁶ In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the ASHPS contributed to the purchase of Sulgrave Manor in Oxfordshire by the British Committee for the Celebration of the Century of Anglo-American Peace. This was the home of George Washington's ancestors.Footnote ³⁷ An International Committee of Management was appointed in 1914, whose members included Lord Bryce and the Earl Grey and, on the US side, Andrew Carnegie, Wall Street banker John Aikman Stewart, and William B. Howland, publisher of the pro-Roosevelt Outlook (for the ASHPS). Chairman Walter Hines Page was the US ambassador to Great Britain from 1913, and had been a pro-conservationist and national park publicist as the editor of the World's Work. He was proprietor of Doubleday Page, the publishing house.Footnote ³⁸

The connections of this set of conservationists were indisputably cosmopolitan and broader than the transatlantic social elite's interest in old houses. ASHPS saw its work as “the general movement for the preservation of the beauties of the natural landscape, the protection of historical memorials and the improvement of cities throughout the world.” It was “a world-wide movement for the betterment of mankind” in which “the movement affects the very antipodes of the earth.”Footnote ³⁹ ASHPS reports carried discussions on national conservation in China and on national parks, landscape protection or historic preservation in Canada, Australia, Argentina, Norway, France, Sweden and Switzerland, among many others.Footnote ⁴⁰

This intellectual worldview was not concerned only with a wilderness ethic, but with a social and cultural aesthetic as well. The ASHPS work dovetailed with the Country Life Commission, which Roosevelt established in 1908 to restore social, economic and aesthetic “balance” to American society by making American agriculture more socially attractive. George Kunz's paper at the 1908 Governors’ Conference on Conservation called by Roosevelt was cast in these terms and, in the 1909 National Conservation Commission report that grew out of this work, Kunz wrote supportively on the country-life issue.Footnote ⁴¹ The alignment was illustrated in the use of Liberty Bailey of Cornell University, chair of the Country Life Commission, to represent ASHPS views.Footnote ⁴² The idea of the revitalization of the country was inspired by the Irish scheme of Sir Horace Plunkett, the Anglo-Irish reformer and friend of Roosevelt. Though historians have not appreciated Country Life's role in the architecture of Rooseveltian conservation, Morgan and Peters have correctly noted that it represented an early effort at socially sustainable agriculture.Footnote ⁴³ The commission's work was not brought to fruition during the post-Roosevelt period due to wrangling over the President's conservation legacy, but its ideas contributed to the conceptualizing of conservation issues, and reflected the aesthetic of conservation as a sustainable, urban–rural balance supported by active human intervention in the environment.

Information on European conservation of all forms, from protection of the countryside to preservation of wild nature and ecological niches in the closely settled European landscapes of central Europe, flowed via the channels of the elite media and ASHPS into the United States. The society's reports explicitly favoured both projects enhancing the built environment and those for the preservation of “essentially untouched” areas. For the latter, they endorsed the view of their honorary member, Prof. Hugo Conwentz, head of the Prussian State Agency for the Preservation of Monuments of Nature and an influence upon Swedish national park development.Footnote ⁴⁴ He defined “natural monuments as covering characteristic aspects of nature, especially those which are still essentially untouched by the development of human industry.” Scenic-beauty interest concerned “not only parts of the [untouched] landscape but also animal and plant species.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Conwentz knew that the establishment of vast national parks on the American model was not practical in much of Europe, due to the level of land alienation and ecological transformation into the cultural landscapes of the countryside. Conwentz therefore advocated the creation of representative niches within which ecological systems could be preserved or reestablished. Kunz strongly endorsed this same approach, believing that smaller parks and reserves needed to be established to preserve elements of wild nature and biological niches for a sustainable society: “Nature should be allowed a free hand, in the confidence, generally justifiable, that this will suffice to re-establish the old order of things,” and, above all, “no new elements of animal or plant life foreign to those originally presented in the region should be introduced there.”Footnote ⁴⁶

This scientific, almost ecological, view, championed by Conwentz and the ASHPS, was very similar to what historian Carolyn Ford finds to be the case for the French conservationists’ appreciation of early ecological sensibilities in colonial Africa of the 1920s. Conwentz and Kunz were happy to advocate much larger areas for ecological protection where, as in Sweden and the United States, these were available. As Conwentz's plans for an intricate system of niches within the countryside indicate, European conservationists did not generally seek to bifurcate ecological forms of conservation and protection of the highly “civilized” built landscape of the countryside.Footnote ⁴⁷

ASHPS gave a reasoned defence for combining preservation with recreation, scientific investigation and environmental restoration, based on the relationship of the human and the “natural.” It claimed that “owing to the intimate relation existing between topography and history it was unavoidable that the two ideas should be united.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Scenery was a key factor in evaluating “environment.” The

“The very sight of landscape”, reasoned the scenic-beauty people, “affects the character of a people” and influences “human history.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The underlying aesthetic was of a harmonious blend of nature and culture.

Within this linked aesthetic the society moved from historical preservation to scenic preservation, and then to working for protection of natural environmental “wonders.” Two key causes were the protection of Niagara from the diversion of waters for hydroelectric power, and the restoration of the scenery of the Palisades Cliffs on the Hudson River in New Jersey, against the sound and sight intrusions on the view of the Hudson from New York brought about by stone quarrying. Characteristically, ASHPS compared their work to the Naturschutz (nature conservation) work undertaken on the Rhine in the same period and they called the Hudson the Rhine of America.Footnote ⁵⁰ Finally they came to oppose damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. This was a natural progression for them, but ASHPS never lost sight of the complementarity of nature and culture.

At several hundred members, the scenic group was not significant.Footnote ⁵¹ But its influence was larger, since it could donate heavily to the cause, with more than $3.5 million given by 1914 to “public parks and landmark protection,”Footnote ⁵² and key members such as Howland had the ear of President Roosevelt. As governor of New York, Roosevelt supported ASHPS conservation efforts, especially the creation of the Interstate Palisades Park Commission that stopped the Hudson quarrying. In many ways the Palisades Park was a measure of the group's legacy; it was essentially a work of what in Britain came to be called “nature conservancy.” Partly privately funded, the commission was headed by financier and industrial magnate George Perkins, with land donated by Edward Harriman and money from J. P. Morgan and others. It undertook from its formation in 1900 much restoration work. Its founders clearly did not set aside untouched wilderness.Footnote ⁵³

Nevertheless, ASHPS was a vocal supporter of the battle against Hetch Hetchy, and for the protection of Yosemite National Park, the most important controversy between preservationists and utilitarian conservationists in the first decade of the twentieth century. The society's views were widely sought by institutions of learning, museums, the press, and members of the public,Footnote ⁵⁴ and they used legal counsel to represent them at the Congressional hearings on Hetch Hetchy. The society accepted that progress had to prevail where human interests required it, but argued, as many other easterners did, that the dam was not needed because there were alternative ways to satiate San Francisco's growing thirst.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wilderness had its place, but as another park-like environment in which nature could be nurtured by humans and could complement and enhance human activity. As Liberty Bailey stated for the society at the 1910 National Conservation Congress, national parks and national forests were complementary, not projections of alternative visions of preservation on the one hand and efficient economic conservation for maximum sustained forestry yield on the other. They should have “mutual regard for each other's claims.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Forests as much as national parks were in this scheme of things both aesthetic and utilitarian. Landowners would gain, said the society, from the “beautiful prospect” adjacent to a national forest.Footnote ⁵⁷

The ASHPS aesthetic was shared broadly across a range of organizations that lobbied against the Hetch Hetchy dam. The supporters that scenic-beauty people cited included the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Playground Association of America, the Sierra Club of San Francisco, the Society for the Preservation of the National Parks, and the New York Zoological Society.Footnote ⁵⁸ The most important lobbying came from the American Civic Association, whose leader, Horace McFarland of Pennsylvania, was a horticulturalist and journalist. He first came to prominence championing rose gardens, urban parks and city beautification.Footnote ⁵⁹ McFarland was aligned aesthetically, though not organizationally, with the scenic-beauty group, opposing billboard pollution and the desecration of Niagara by poorly designed and poorly sited hydroelectric facilities.Footnote ⁶⁰ ASHPS campaigned from 1895 to 1903 under its first president, Green, against all “schemes on a larger scale that would destroy this grandest of the world's natural phenomena,” and continued to support the latecomer McFarland's campaigns against hydroelectric expansion at Niagara thereafter with letters and petitioning.Footnote ⁶¹

The Niagara experience gave preservationists experience in organization, which they soon applied to the equally vexing problem of Hetch Hetchy's proposed dam. At that point, so the accepted interpretation goes, an eastern movement became aligned for tactical reasons with the preservationist supporters of the west, providing mutual support for the Niagara and Hetch Hetchy protests. Stung by defeat in the latter case, preservationists increasingly used utilitarian arguments emphasizing economic progress to achieve a national park service bill.Footnote ⁶² Among the proponents were many who sought to improve the tourist potential of the parks, and who championed the railroads’ “See America First” campaign as an expression of utilitarian conservation as well as cultural nationalism. As eastern conservationist Allen Chamberlain, president of the Appalachian Club, put it, conservationists wanted “to stimulate public interest in the National Parks by talking more about their possibilities as vacation resorts.”Footnote ⁶³ An oft-repeated argument scolded American travellers for going to Switzerland for their holidays, and conceptualized Yosemite as the superior Switzerland of America. A park engineer, Mark Daniels, claimed that 400 to 600 million dollars were “being spent by American tourists in Europe for the purpose of seeing scenery.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The ASHPS approach included these opportunistic aspects, but this approach was consistent and long-standing, not a tactical manoeuvre. From the late nineteenth century, it sought recreation for the masses as a goal of the national and state parks, in order to “promote the physical welfare of the people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Championing Adirondack preservation in New York against lower-class woodcutters and hunters, ASHPS nevertheless saw such state parks as the lungs of the cities of the east, and a safety valve for urban discontent.Footnote ⁶⁶ Labelling such support tactical misses the underlying aesthetic of either easterners or westerners. It does not take seriously the ideas of those who wrote and lobbied on the subject. ASHPS sought protection “where portions of Nature are preserved as they came from the hands of the Creator.” To that society, as much as to wilderness advocate John Muir, the divine was revealed in nature, but not just wild nature; if boulders or glaciated rock surfaces were included in parks, whether in Central Park or Yosemite, “the mind of the thinking person is set to working and the thoughts are lifted to the contemplation of the wonderful operations of nature.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Forests, waterfalls, and glaciated valleys were, the society argued in a quite conventional argument derived from Romanticism and the idea of the sublime, great “undenominational cathedrals” of physical and educational value “and, in a broad sense, religious.”Footnote ⁶⁸ No minor matter within this appreciation of wild and transcendently spiritual scenery was aesthetics, which should not be “disparaged,” ASHPS argued. A love of nature all peoples shared, including the working class. Its sources were beyond scientific analysis. That love could not be written about, but was experienced – like a thrill or a tear.Footnote ⁶⁹

To be sure, this was a class-based aesthetic. ASHPS included the same people (Perkins, Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman and others) whose steel, railroad and coal companies were scarring the landscapes of West Virginia and Pennsylvania with minefields and soot, and subjecting miners to dangerous living and working conditions. The scenic group included high financiers who promoted not simply mines but the expansion of global trade. ASHPS backed the New York Commercial Tercentenary, 1614–1914.Footnote ⁷⁰ In that connection, their long-time executive secretary Edward Hagaman Hall wrote of the Panama Canal as “the consummation of the hitherto unattained hopes of centuries … which is destined vastly to increase the commerce of the Port of New York and the Nation as time goes on.”Footnote ⁷¹ Such people saw no contradiction in the global expansion of market relations, but nevertheless sought to mitigate the deleterious aesthetic effects of those relations.

Where does this tie in with Theodore Roosevelt? Brinkley makes an important argument on Roosevelt's role in American conservation. He asserts the sheer size of Roosevelt's commitment to preserving nature in the form of wildlife refuges, national monuments and the like, a view that one can readily endorse. But whereas Brinkley sees that contribution rooted in the scientific curiosity of a self-educated naturalist, exponent of Darwinism and lover of wilderness, many of Roosevelt's actions look equally like those of the scenic-beauty group in aesthetic focus. The scenic-beauty movement contained his kind of people: Roosevelt implemented some of their ideas as governor of New York in the Palisades case.Footnote ⁷² Regarding national parks, he advocated in his 1901 message to Congress “free camping grounds for the ever-increasing numbers of men and women who have learned to find rest, health, and recreation in the splendid forests and flower-clad meadows of our mountains.”Footnote ⁷³ People of the scenic preservation movement wrote similar statements, and they reflected a shared class position and values.

Yet, in the Hetch Hetchy dispute, Roosevelt ended up not on the side of ASHPS and McFarland but of utilitarians led by US Forester Gifford Pinchot in allowing the project to proceed. Of all Roosevelt's annual messages to Congress, the last (in December 1908) was the most comprehensive and extensive on conservation. Roosevelt dwelt not on national parks, but on a moral tale of the fall of empires that failed to conserve resources. The address drew parallels between American and Chinese environmental decay. To Roosevelt, China was an internal, resource-consuming empire like the United States, and one that predicted the fall of future empires.Footnote ⁷⁴ This context of empire brings to the fore not national parks but the debate over waste, a debate stimulated by the acquisition of formal colonies from 1898 and growing awareness in the United States and other countries of possible future shortages of raw materials for economic development on a global level. From that encounter, twentieth-century US conservationist policy emerged as an interimperial struggle for national efficiency.Footnote ⁷⁵

ASHPS never directly opposed the utilitarian thrust of conservation, and hardly could be expected to do so because its leaders and sources of funding were centrally involved in the transformation of nature. ASHPS was “not opposed to the use of National Parks for utilitarian purposes if there is a paramount and unavoidable public necessity,” the society argued. This was so since the “necessities of existence must be provided before the luxuries; and considerations of scientific beauty must yield to the imperative demands of preserving human life.” But in other cases, the society believed in preserving “those things that minister to the happiness of the soul.” It claimed to have little patience with the “subterfuges” of “private greed,” as in the case of Hetch Hetchy. The difference was over whether utility required the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley or whether the greater utility of the nation's recreational needs and preservation of distinctive and representative natural landscapes should prevail.Footnote ⁷⁶

While increased tourist exploitation that park advocates adopted as their mantra to convince Congress after the defeat of 1909 played to arguments of economic benefit, it also drew upon the long-term agenda and aspirations of park advocates like ASHPS members. These hopes were to create national and state parks throughout the country that would combine the appreciation of beauty with the provision of recreational spaces that would alleviate the social and environmental conditions of American cities. ASHPS was not silent on urban blight and maldistribution of recreational spaces. It insisted that public parks, including national and state parks, be open to the masses and deplored as early as 1899 the alienation of public space in New York: the “lack of foresight in past years in not reserving adequate breathing places” when land could be got cheaply. Thus “the people must go without these absolute essentials of civilized beings” or city parkland must be purchased “for the health and comfort, not to say pleasure, of the inhabitants of the crowded metropolis.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Though support for national parks could be critiqued because they were in the American West and inaccessible to those same masses, the scenic-preservation people used the same arguments of utility and beauty to serve urban and regional parks that were more accessible to ordinary people. ASHPS and its allies looked to these as well as to the national parks in the West, the closer parks or potential park sites of the Adirondacks, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, and the Palisades park system they promoted. These all could be safety valves for urban dwellers and potential ecological spaces for the survival of wild nature.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the work and thought of Horace McFarland, these approaches gained a sharper edge. He, too, sought democratic access to urban as well as nonurban parks, but more explicitly developed a critique of urban industrial blight. At the 1908 National Governors’ Conference on Conservation, he made a stirring address on American “ugliness.” McFarland gave the example of steel-city businessmen who bought summer homes in Ontario,Footnote ⁷⁹ and he argued that the flight to nonpolluting areas indicated a social geography in environmental matters that required reform. “The iron manufacturers flee from the all-pervading ugliness they have created, and the money they have earned in complete disregard of the naturally fine scenic conditions about their own homes is used in buying scenic beauty in a foreign country!”Footnote ⁸⁰ McFarland went further, drawing on William Morris's ideas of beauty for the many.Footnote ⁸¹ “Beauty for the few, no more than freedom or education for the few, urges William Morris; and who shall say that our natural beauty of scenery is not the heritage of all and a plain necessity for good citizenship?”Footnote ⁸²

McFarland's approach tied in with the Country Life ideas of sustainable agriculture that ASHPS and Theodore Roosevelt alike promoted. McFarland's 1908 address put it thus: “The smiling farm, the glowing orchard, the waving wheatfield, the rustle of the corn[,] all these spell peaceful beauty as well as national wealth, which we can definitely continue and increase.” Rural landscapes he identified as not only sustainable, but also aesthetically pleasing compensation for industrial ills:

McFarland knew that urban blight could not be overcome, but that it could be mitigated, both by reform of agriculture to create a more sustainable rural economy, and by parks that were the solution to common rural and urban problems:

Only thus could “permanent business prosperity” be assured. The ASHPS submissions to the Governor's Conference at which McFarland spoke and in the 1909 National Conservation Commission were never explicitly critical of industrialization, but essentially duplicated his position that beauty and utility could coexist, and, in rural and forested landscapes, could even be the same thing.Footnote ⁸⁵ Though ASHPS included the same people whose railroad, steel and coal companies dealt many American landscapes a legacy very different from wilderness, the organization funded, supported and partly led by these people sought aesthetic reform of urbanization and industrialization along with selective preservation of wilderness in the interests of social stability.

Yet despite the attempt at linking parks with class improvement, a displacement that no conscious reasoning could overcome occurred. In coalition with the broader national park movement, scenic-beauty advocates’ unconscious effect was to occlude the dynamic of American conservation policy. By the 1920s, national park policy was institutionalized in a separate agency through the backlash against the Hetch Hetchy decision, in which parks assumed the role of natural scenic preservation while at the same time accommodating utilitarian demands for tourism. Meanwhile, the conservation of resources had been reinterpreted towards tacitly accepting future depletion of American nature's bounty, and of other countries. From that time on, the United States looked increasingly outward, not to a formal empire, but to a growing informal empire of abundance abroad that could sustain the nation's growth.Footnote ⁸⁶