Horace
AlbrightHorace
AlbrightHorace M. Albright (1890-1987) received the Pugsley Gold Medal “for his work in the National Park Service.” He was born in Bishop, California, and graduated with a law degree from the University of California in 1912. He went to Washington in 1913 as a 23-year-old to clerk for a year for one of his former professors at the University of California who had been appointed an assistant secretary of the Interior Department. His year nearly complete, Albright had made plans to return to California to marry and to enter a prestigious San Francisco law firm. In the meantime, Secretary of Interior, Franklin Lane, introduced him to Stephen Mather, whom he had invited to organize the National Parks. Falling under the spell of the dynamic, charismatic Mather, Albright accepted the invitation to remain as his assistant for the year Mather had agreed to serve. To the good fortune of all generations, they both stayed much longer. Mather remained as director until 1929. When ill-health forced his retirement, he was succeeded by his young assistant Albright.
Soon after the bill creating the NPS had been passed in 1916 Mather collapsed and was confined to a sanitarium for several months. Thus, Albright became acting director and ran the NPS during 1917. That kept him out of World War I which was a great disappointment to him.
Albright’s significance in the early years of the NPS can hardly be overstated. He made substantial contributions when he later became the NPS’s second director, but while working with Mather in the difficult birth years of the NPS and in the adoption of a creed to guide the infant agency, Horace Albright played a decisive role. Mather was the public-relations giant of sweeping vision, exceptional ability to persuade and move people, and unswerving dedication to a splendid system of parks for all Americans—talents tragically crippled by periods in which he suffered from manic depression. Horace Albright was the young, able, self-effacing, hardworking lawyer who made certain that the grand visions of his chief were carried into reality. It was a crucial partnership; neither could have achieved the outcome without the other.
In 1919, Albright at the age of 29, moved from Washington D.C. to become the first civilian superintendent of Yellowstone while remaining field assistant director of the NPS. His job at Yellowstone was to make the park available to campers, to build the campgrounds, and to improve the roads which had been built for stage coaches. He operated Yellowstone through the summer until the snow closed the park about the first of December, then he traveled to the other western parks “picking up the problems”, before returning to Washington to assist with legislation. It was said, during Albright’s years in Yellowstone when he entertained princes and presidents that Albright and his rangers believed the NPS was doing the Lord’s work. His administrative talent set a pattern for all the parks, and his attractive personality earned him a wide circle of friends, many of whom happened to be in Congress. Hardworking and self-confident, he candidly confessed to the habit of having about 500 irons in the fire at once.
When Albright became director of the NPS in 1929, there were twenty-one national parks, thirty-three national monuments and a budget of $9 million. A practical man, he realized that the unstructured, spur-of-the-moment methods of Mather must now be replaced by a more orderly approach. Albright brought cohesion to the inner workings of the Service, but continued what has been called the Mather style: dynamic, high-minded, opportunistic, if occasionally impetuous, administration. Albright defined his role as director on these terms:
“My job as I see it, will be to consolidate our gains, finish up the rounding out of the Park System, go rather heavily into the historical park field, and get such legislation as is necessary to guarantee the future of the system on a sound permanent basis where the power and the personality of the Director may no longer have to be controlling factors in operating the service.”
Growth of the park system and professionalism of personnel were two Albright objectives, and he succeeded in elevating his agency to an equal station with the other resource agencies. However, his most valuable contribution was in the field of historic preservation. Although the NPS had jurisdiction over a few Indian sites in the West, its primary function was considered to be the preservation of natural areas. When Congress began to establish national military parks to commemorate Civil War battles, beginning with Chickamauga-Chattanooga in Tennessee in 1890, it placed them under the War Department. When he visited the Chattanooga-Chickamauga battlefield Albright commented that the area was so poorly marked that he could not be sure whether he was in the park or out of it. He also could not find park employees who could help him understand the relationship between the landforms and the battle. Albright, a longtime history buff, believed historical sites were worthy of more enlightened stewardship. As early as 1917, when he wrote the first annual report of the NPS, he called for all such historical areas to be administered as part of the national park system.
Albright admitted that he “must have been born” with an instinct for history. He was brought up in a family where the California Gold Rush lived on as a physical presence. His mother had been raised in one of the mining camps, and as a boy Albright camped in the mountains and wandered through the remains of ghost towns. He devoured the novels of G. A. Henty, a series of books that placed boys into harrowing historical situations shoulder to shoulder with the heroes of the past. When he went to Washington, he found the same evidence of a living past in a city that had weathered many political and military crises. His spare time was quickly filled with hikes to Civil War fortifications.
The conservation movement in those days had almost no interest in historic preservation, but Albright held that as the American heritage was made up in equal parts of the unique grandeur of its geography and the heroic deeds of the people, it was just as important to preserve historic sites as to set aside places of natural beauty. Both were essential components of true conservation. To an up-and-coming agency like the NPS, the idea of including all parks, whether natural or historical, in one federal organization was particularly attractive. The fact that most of the historical preserves were located in the more heavily populated East, which would give the NPS a nationwide image and considerably more political support, was an added reason to embrace them.
The celebration in 1932 of the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Washington provided Albright with an opportunity. When a private campaign to reconstruct Washington’s birthplace failed to raise the necessary funds, he judged correctly that Congress would hardly turn its back on the Father of the Country during the bicentennial year. At the same time the massive restoration project at Williamsburg, begun by John D. Rockefeller several years earlier, helped to focus attention on the desirability of preserving nearby sites: Jamestown Island, where the first British colony was established, and Yorktown, where British rule over the American colonies ended on Surrender Field. Congress added the Washington birthplace, Jamestown, and Yorktown to the national park system, partly as the result of some skillful lobbying by Albright, thus enlarging the original park idea to include the preservation of historic places.
In the following year, Albright was driving back to Washington with President Roosevelt after accompanying him on a trip to the residential retreat of Camp David. Both were students of American history, and as they passed through the Manassas battlefield they discussed Civil War strategy – and the advisability of transferring all such military parks from the War Department to the National Park Service. “I knew before we got to Washington that night that I had my foot not only in the door for historic preservation, but that I had it in the White House,” Albright recalled.
Two months later Roosevelt signed an executive order that consolidated all federally owned parks, memorials, national cemeteries, and the parks in Washington, D.C., into a single system. The reorganization of 1933 added twelve natural areas in nine western states and fifty-seven historical areas in seventeen predominantly eastern states to the national park system. The system was transformed into a truly national one. The action also significantly broadened the national park idea, for joining such illustrious wilderness places as Glacier, Rocky Mountain, and Yellowstone were equally famous names from the American past: Gettysburg, Fort McHenry, and Appomattox Court House.
In his four-year tenure, Albright more than doubled the number of areas managed by the NPS. He wrote that due to his personal relationship with the President, he “could see opportunities at every turn,” and “money was coming in [for the national parks] in a golden flow.” His goals accomplished, Albright retired from the NPS when the executive order establishing the historical sites came into effect in 1933, and he began a successful business career as an executive of US Potash Company. When he retired from that company he was its president, but he continued to be active in issues involving parks and conservation throughout his life.
He lived for another 50 years and often acted as a sort of senior statesman for the NPS. He was the patriarch of the national parks. His continued involvement included being a member of the Board of Directors of Grant Teton Lodge Co.; a trustee of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1934-1958, and of Jackson Hole Preserve, Inc., 1945-1977; a member of National Trust for Historic Preservation, of the Desert Protective Council, of the National Parks Advisory Committee, and of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission 1959-1962; and President of Pacific Tropical Botanical Gardens 1964-1971.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. This is the highest civilian honor awarded in the US. The University of California established the Horace M. Albright Scenic Preservation Award and his friends and admirers permanently endowed the Albright Lectureship in Conservation at UC Berkeley. The NPS established the Horace M. Albright Training Center at Grand Canyon National Park, 1963. He received the Audubon Medal; Gold Medal from Camp Fire Club of America, 1962; Berkeley Fellow, 1968; Distinguished Service Award from America Forestry Association, 1968; award from Cosmos Club, 1974; Horace M. Albright Medal, 1979; U.S. Medal of Freedom, 1980; and the John Muir Award from the Sierra Club, 1986.
His writings included “Oh, Ranger!”: A Book about the National Parks (with Frank J. Taylor, 1928, rev. 1946 and republished 1972); The National Park Service: The Story behind the Scenery (with Russell E. Dickenson and William Penn Mott, Jr., edited by Mary Lu Moore, 1987); and The Birth of the National Park Service: The Founding Years, 1913-1933 (with Robert Cahn, 1985). He also authored numerous magazine articles on the parks, among them “Everlasting Wilderness” (1928) and “Drift of the Elk” (with Theodore G. Joslin, 1930) in the Saturday Evening Post.