What did Herbert Hoover do for the National Park Service?

Hello, and welcome to Shenandoah National Park in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I’m Ranger Ginny, and I’m here today to talk to you a little bit about something that may be familiar to us, particularly at this at this time in our lives. Have you ever gotten to the point where you have felt you just had to get away? That you had to decompress? That you had to go somewhere and find a place to relax and to let go of the stress of the day? My guess is you probably have. Well, if you think back during the times in our history, another time when people were also looking for that time and place to get away, was during the early 1930s at a time in our history called the Great Depression, and people were very stressed. They were at the limit of being able to cope with life and what was going on, and they needed a place to be able to get away, to relax, to decompress.

They didn’t have a lot of money, 01:22 - certainly times financially were tough back then, but what they were able to do was to get away to national parks. They offered a great way to the good outdoors for beautiful places for scenic overlooks, for a way to let go of what was happening in their lives. Today to be able to go on and come back relaxed and refreshed, to be able to do that, they needed to have places that were, and still are today, fairly close. So it was important to have lots of national parks and sites that were close to where the masses of people were located. Well, we walk into that scenario to President Herbert Hoover, and he had, as a President of the United States, an opportunity to change how many places we had to go and to get away and relax.

So I’d like to talk a little bit about President Hoover and what 02:26 - he has done for the national park system. To be able to understand that, we need to understand a little bit about President Herbert Hoover, so we’ll go back and do a little biographical sketch. He was born in 1874 in a small Quaker community in Iowa. He loved the out-of-doors, and there was nothing he liked better than to get outside and to relax and romp and play, and that’s something that stayed with him throughout his entire life. He spent most of his adolescence and his teenage years in Oregon and California.

He ended up 03:08 - graduating from Stanford University with a degree in geology and mining engineering, and that had him become a mining engineer. He spent his young adult life as a mining engineer, and a consultant, and a world traveler. During most of the 1920s, he was back here in the United States and he was the Secretary of Commerce under both Harding and Coolidge’s administrations, and it was during that time in his history and the history of this country that he developed his idea of conservation. He believed, and it was his idea, that we needed to limit the amount of oil pollution that was happening in the coastal waterways. At the time, and this was back in the late 1920s, it was also Hoover’s idea to help protect salmon fisheries, and that was important for the salmon industry, and then he went so far as to suggest and to implement the standardization of the size of lumber products to eliminate the wasted resource from our trees.

His idea of conservation was more about the effective 04:30 - or efficient use of the natural resource rather than exploiting it and damaging the environment. When he was elected president in 1929, he had an opportunity to change things. He was very much concerned about certain things that he felt would be more helpful to agencies in the United States. One of those was combining certain agencies. He had the wild idea to combine the National Park Service with the National Forest Service even though those two agencies had very different ideas on conservation. Not all of his ideas were good or well received–lots of them were, one of his ideas was that it would be excellent for people to use the great outdoors as a way for them to be able to renew and to refresh themselves.

He held a lot of 05:35 - stock in people being outdoors and getting that fresh air and that rejuvenation that you can get from that. That is not something that ended with Hoover’s ideas–even today we have programs like Healthy Parks Healthy People and the Park Rx idea, and all of those are about parks being a place where you can go outside, enjoy nature, enjoy the surroundings, and that it will help your physical and emotional well-being, and that has still today–90 years after Hoover–a place in what we do with our national parks. As president, he had a big emphasis on increasing the number of parks and the size of the parks that already existed. To be able to do that, it had a double benefit of not only increasing the number of places where people could go and enjoy the great outdoors, but in increasing the size and the number. It also meant that they had to build roads to be able to get to those places, and that meant putting people back to work on construction projects, which was a very good thing to be happening during the Great Depression.

07:00 - During Hoover’s four-year tenure as president, he was able to convince congress to increase the spending on national parks by a million and a half dollars. By today’s standards, that may not sound astronomical, but imagine back during the Great Depression - a million and a half dollars was a huge boost for the national parks and what they were able to to be able to do. He worked very diligently with the Great Smoky Mountains and right here at Shenandoah and in the Everglades for those three sites to become national parks. None of them were established until actually his term was over, but he was instrumental in seeing that they would get done. When he was president, he oversaw the enlargement of twelve national park and area sites that already had existed.

Twelve of them got bigger under Hoover’s administration, and 08:05 - that included everything from Katmai in Alaska to Yellowstone in Wyoming and Yosemite in California and Hot Springs in Arkansas - lots of different places all over the country. He absolutely wanted to see the sites enlarged and that was something that he was able to do. In doing that, it increased the number of people who visited the parks by over half a million people, and that made it something that more people could enjoy and find the rest and relaxation that they were looking for. When he was president, not only did he enlarge twelve, he created seventeen new park sites. They included everything from the very first month that he was in office until the last week before he left office, with lots of things happening in-between.

The first one he was able to 09:08 - establish was Arches in Utah. Arches was started out as a national monument. It is now a national park, and it was able to be established under the Antiquities Act of 1906, and he used a presidential proclamation for that, and I have a quote here from the proclamation. It says: The purpose of the reservation under the Antiquities Act was to quote, “protect the arches, spires, balanced rocks, and other sandstone formation for their scientific and educational value.” Something that was very important to Hoover and that administration, but something important for all of us to be able to have available to us today. From that one in his first month, he went on to create sites like Isle Royal in Michigan, Death Valley in California, he did White Sands in New Mexico, and Appomattox National Battlefield in Virginia, and then all the way up until the last week of his presidency, this was several months after the election was over and he knew that Franklin Roosevelt was taking over, he was still working diligently to try to increase the national parks, and he was able to add as his last one the very first national historic park in Morristown, New Jersey, and that incorporated four sites that were very much a part of the American Revolutionary War history and included General George Washington’s winter headquarters from the winter of 1779 and 19–not 19–and 1779 to 1780. I’ll get the dates right sooner or later. That happened during his presidency.

When he was finished with his presidency, 11:15 - he continued to be actively doing things for the national parks. Here in Shenandoah National Park, he had a private fishing camp called Rapidan Camp that he used as a presidential retreat during the four years of his presidency, but after his years in office were over he gave his private land holding over to the government to be incorporated in the future Shenandoah National Park, since that was not established until after he left office. It was established in 1935. Herbert Hoover was president from 1929 until 1933. When he left office in 1933, he left his personal fishing camp at Rapidan to the government to be given to the future Shenandoah National Park. He was very much interested in personally being able to help give people a place to get away and to relax and rejuvenate.

He was very conscientious in what he did for the American people, in many ways 12:27 - what he did was leave a lasting legacy for this country so that they were able to have places that he enlarged and that he created new for the people to be able to get out and relax and benefit from the quiet solitude in nature and around them. When we think back on President Hoover, many times we think about things that he was not able to do. He was president during a very difficult time. He was president during the Great Depression. He could have done a lot more to help eliminate the difficulties that the country and the people were having, but if we look on the things he was able to do and not just on the things that he was not able to do, we are surprised at how many good things he was able to do for the American people. If you just think about what he was able to do for the national parks - he increased the size of park holdings by more than 40 percent; he increased spending by more than a million and a half dollars; park visitation was up, and all of that was with in in mind that President Hoover had was for the relaxation, and the rest, and rejuvenation of the American people because he wanted them to be able to come back to their jobs and be more productive and healthier individuals.

To do that, it’s nice to be able to remember somebody for a legacy that had something 14:07 - positive, to remember it was people like President Hoover, and others like him, who have also been diligently working for the national park system that have made places for us to have the solitude and the outdoor spirit where we can come back as renewed individuals. Thank you all very much, and I invite all of you to come to the relaxation and the enjoyment of Shenandoah National Park where you can see Rapidan Camp and one of the over 400 sites that we have in the National Park Service. .