Archival Interviews: Session Two

After thinking last night about the use of archives in oral history, in conjunction with the subject of the interview I chose with a founding member of the National Parks Service, I started to wonder if the National Parks themselves were some kind of archive. So today when I set out read more of the transcript with Albright, I had it in mind to compare the way he talked about the Parks with the way some of the authors I consulted this week wrote about archives.

I had been thinking that certainly the organizational structure of the Parks and their relationship to the Forest Service, the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Mines, and so on and so forth along the scale, were in some ways analogous to Brown and David-Brown’s description of hierarchies that are constructed through use of the Library of Congress Classification System—perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the LoC is also federally managed. And Albright did spend a bit of time going over the organization of the governmental offices during his tenure (both his interviewer and I had trouble keeping all the offices straight).

I felt like I struck some sort of mother lode when Albright started talking about Theodore Roosevelt. First, he answered a question I wished I could have asked about how the conservation movement came about. He said,

TR is rated as the founder of the conservation movement. Well, that’s not exactly so, because what he did…was to bring together all the men who at that time were interested in conservation and natural resources, including industrialists, and who put programs and policies looking to the future. What he really was was a catalyst….TR glamorized conservation, emphasized it at every turn. He got out into the woods. He was a hunter and a horseman and a rancher, he understood cattle, sheep ranching. He traveled extensively through the National Parks and the National Forests. No president before or since has been so active personally in covering the territory involved in conservation, nor in understanding and even participating in the use of its resources. He knew natural resources and their use.

Specifically, I wanted to know how close were the concepts of preservation, use, and recreation. And much to my surprise, Albright united them in a way that—even though I wasn’t able to ask my specific question—leaves me with a lot to work with. Earlier in my reading of his transcript, I had gotten the sense that a lot of the intermingling of these issues, which I perceive to be very different from one another, happened because of the way the resources were organized under the Federal government, and not so much because of the way the resources were thought of by the people who were in charging of protecting them. At the very least, reading this part of the interview provided me with some evidence in that direction.

Another thing I found amusing was that as soon as Theodore Roosevelt died, as Albright explained, there was a big rush to name a Park after him. Originally, they wanted Sequoia National Park (then a National Forest, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture)--meaning, they wanted the land and thought they could nab it from the Forest Service using Roosevelt's name. But that didn't work out, so they settled on a part of the Badlands in North Dakota where Roosevelt had his Elkhorn Ranch, which is today Theodore Roosevelt National Park.