Tom Wallace

Tom Wallace (1874-1961) received the Pugsley Silver Medal “for his services in saving Cumberland Falls in Eastern Kentucky.”  He was born in Hurricane, Kentucky, and studied at Weaver’s Business College in Louisville and at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia.  In his early years, he worked in Richmond, Virginia, as a bookkeeper; with an ice-company in Shelbyville and in a tooth-power factory in New York City.  Wallace first joined the Louisville Times in 1900 as an unpaid police reporter because he “hated all kind of business.”  After six weeks, he was offered a salaried position, and he subsequently worked at the Evening Post, The Louisville Herald and The St. Louis Republic before returning to the Times as its Frankfort and Washington correspondent.  In 1923 he became chief of the editorial staff at the Louisville Times and was its editor from 1930 to 1948.  Wallace attained national and international prominence both for his advocacy for the betterment of relations between the US and Latin America, and for his outspoken advocacy for conservation.

He conducted a vigorous editorial crusade to save Cumberland Falls from being destroyed by the Samuel Insull electric power company, which proposed to develop the Falls for waterpower.  The following statement is a sample from among the hundreds of thousands of words that Wallace wrote and spoke against Insull and those who supported the company’s proposal:

“Cumberland Falls should be saved, not only because it belongs to the people of Kentucky and Eastern America, but also because its revenues to Kentucky (as a tourist attraction) would be greater annually, in the near future, than revenues accruing to Kentucky from building the proposed power plant.  In Kentucky we have an Anti-State Park Commission, headed by an Anti-Park Governor, which is under agreement to aid a power company to destroy Cumberland Falls as a natural cataract.”

Wallace considered his role to be analogous to that of an alarm clock.  “A few of us who are not seeking political office, are not obliged to consider what this or that corporation might think about what we say, insist upon speaking aloud on behalf of this generation and future generations, on certain aspects and assets of Kentucky.  By so doing, we hope to perform the function of an alarm clock.”

The fight over Cumberland Falls was bitter and it took place on two battlegrounds.  In Kentucky the tactical challenge was to build so much public sentiment and support for the preservation of the Falls that it would force legislative action.  Initially, the governor and legislative leadership in Kentucky refused to pass a condemnation bill to reclaim the Falls and preserve it as a state park.  Rather, the pro-power governor negotiated a friendly contract with the Insull company which gave them ownership of the Falls and the right to strip lumber for construction purposes from adjacent land.

The second battleground was in Washington D.C. where several objectives were pursued.  One was to get the Federal Power Commission to accept jurisdiction; another was to convince the Commission that it could legally consider the preservation of scenic values as one of the public benefits to be served by its decisions; another was to show the Commission that, having such power, it should exercise it to exclude power development at the Falls.  But the great purpose served by the fight before the Federal Power Commission was delay-until the people of Kentucky could assert legal jurisdiction over the Falls and establish machinery for its preservation.

Wallace’s fight in the Louisville Times began in 1925, in editorial columns, and continued steadily.  In 1926, the Times published more than 100 editorials on the subject.  His spirit and fortitude were exemplified by such pithy comments as: “An editorial without spunk is punk”; “An editor cannot be valiant in print and a valet at heart”; and “Some columnists serve the public and the press and some stink, and that is equally true of editors”. Wallace, who was editorial chief of the Times, went on the stump for the preservation of Cumberland Falls in 1925 and spoke all over Kentucky and in several other Sates, sometimes in joint debate, whenever and wherever invited, using, often, slides of Cumberland Falls and its surroundings.

Wallace was unrelenting in using his newspaper columns to build public support and after a five-year fight he won.  In 1930, the 2000-acre site was purchased by T. Coleman du Pont, former Senator from Delaware, a native of Kentucky and he offered it as a gift to the state.  Legislation to accept the gift was approved by the Kentucky House and Senate, but vetoed by Governor Sampson.  After a close vote in the Senate, the veto was over-ridden and the bill became law.  The legislative fight was one of the most heated and dramatic events in the history of the Kentucky Legislative, but Wallace and his supporters prevailed.  When the site was converted into a state park, he was acclaimed for his leadership of the successful campaign.

Wallace’s concern for saving the Falls was part of his deeper concern for the land in general.  “The time will come, if vandalism proceeds, if conservationists are called mere visionary fellows, when the hills surrounding Pineville and Harlan on the Cumberland River, those above Irvine and Beattyville and Whitesburg on the Kentucky River; those about Pikeville on the Big Sandy, will be denuded – and when the hills all over the state… will be bare and bleeding under the pelting of every rain.”  He observed that those hills “will produce merchantable timber and provide range for game, but will not produce crops or provide pasture.”

Wallace deplored artificial “improvements” on nature generally, and declared: “All such things are an outrage.  They don’t belong, anyway.”  This philosophy led him to criticize the Mount Rushmore memorial in the Dakota Black Hills with its giant carving of the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.  He made his criticism face-to-face with the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, at a state parks conference in Virginia.  Borglum had said that such carvings were an integral part of natural scenic beauty.  Wallace said that he was sorry to disagree with “a great artist,” but that they were “horrible.”

Wallace’s enthusiasm as a conservationist was reflected also in his leadership of campaigns against stream pollution for the preservation of forests, game and fish.  On the issue of water pollution, he did not hesitate to criticize Kentucky’s Senator Alben Barkley.  In March 1941, a stream pollution bill sponsored by the senator had been deadlocked in the previous session of Congress over an amendment, which had been offered by Representative Karl Mundt of South Dakota.  The amendment would have given the Federal Government power to compel states and industries to co-operate in eliminating stream pollution.  Wallace contended that the bill had no real force without this amendment and said: “The tooth in that bill was the Mundt amendment, from which the House refused to recede, and the legislative dentist who extracted that tooth – without explaining why he extracted a sound tooth – was the Senate majority leader, Alben W. Barkley, of Kentucky.”

Plans for multiple power dams in Western national parks aroused Wallace’s ire: “An agency of the Government wants to build multiple-purpose power dams in all Western national parks in which there is sufficient slant for water to move by gravity.  One purpose is to give employment to the needy blind-- to engineers who cannot see why everything should not be destroyed.” If I had my way, land and water would be regulated on behalf of the unborn.

Wallace had a vision for the nation’s parks.  In 1933, speaking to the National Conference of State Parks, Wallace predicted that the time would come when parks would provide a chain of comfortable way-stations across the country so that “the traveler who has the time, and can spend a few dollars a day for his transportation and accommodation may travel from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stopping each night at a different State park, enjoying the simple, but substantial, comforts of a park inn.”

Wallace served as a director of the Izaak Walton League in 1946 and 1947, vice president of Natural Bridge State Park Association, executive-board member of Mammoth Cave National Park Association, secretary and vice-president of the Planning and Civic Association and board chairman of the National Conference on State Parks.  In recognition of his contributions his name was attached to Tom Wallace Lake in the Jefferson County Forest and the Tom Wallace chapter of the Izaak Walton League; and in 1956 the Tom Wallace Chair of Conservation was established in the Biology Department of the University of Louisville with an endowment of $235,000 provided by friends.

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