Arno B. Cammerer
Arno B. Cammerer
He started work in the federal government in 1904 as a clerk in the Treasury Department; was promoted to private secretary to the assistant secretary of the Treasury; and then became assistant secretary of the National Commission of Fine Arts and first secretary of the Public Buildings Commission of Congress. In these roles he interacted with Horace Albright on some of the numerous park issues with which the commissions were involved. In these positions, Cammerer prepared annual budgets, testified before Congress, and handled financial accounts. The Public Buildings Commission was in charge of the District of Columbia parkway system, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, and the care of many other structures.
When Albright went to Yellowstone in 1919, he and Mather concluded Cammerer would be a good choice for assistant director, and Cammerer accepted. They both believed he had the skills and experience to handle the routine work of the agency, allowing Mather and Albright to be absent from Washington extensively. Cammerer was such an excellent administrator that he freed them to focus on external and "big picture" issues. He knew nothing in the beginning about parks, but his administrative ability, extensive financial experience, supervision of office staffs, and knowledge of congressional budget and legislative processes made him an ideal complement to Mather.
"Cam" Cammerer became the third person in the NPS's founding triumvirate. He was hard-working, intelligent, amiable and even-tempered, with a great sense of humor and an optimistic, businesslike devotion to duty. In Albright's view, Cammerer evolved "into one of the best administrators in Washington, and in his quiet, unassuming way saw to it that things got done. He was also the person most responsible for getting private funding" which was so crucial to the NPS's early acquisition efforts. For example, Cammerer was the key person in securing the financing to acquire Great Smoky National Park. When the governors of Tennessee and North Carolina presented the deeds to 159,000 acres for the park they noted Cammerer was "unfailing in his cooperation, official and personal, in the enterprise and in his assistance in solving many unforeseen problems that constantly arise in a new project of this magnitude with few precedents to turn to for guidance."
Another example of Cammerer's tact and influence occurred in 1922 when the Secretary of Interior, Albert B. Fall, instructed Mather to acquire an "All-Year National Park" in New Mexico. Mather disapproved and drafted a negative report. His intense anxiety arising from concern that his negative report would anger the secretary and mean disaster for the fledgling NPS, caused Mather to suffer a nervous breakdown, so Cammerer became acting director. Cammerer responded to Fall's pressure by stating: "I don't have the background for judging something like this. After all, I came from the Fine Arts Commission." This effectively stalled the issue, saved Mather from being fired, and the issue went away soon after when Fall was forced to resign his position.
When Mather suffered a stroke in November 1928, and had to resign, Albright tried to persuade Cammerer to become director. Cammerer refused and insisted that Albright take the job. When he did so, Cammerer became associate director, remaining second in command in Washington.
When Albright resigned in 1933 he recommended to the Secretary of Interior, Harold Ickes, that Cammerer be his successor. Ickes flatly refused saying he didn't want someone who was "lock step in Civil Service." When an advisory committee subsequently recommended Newton Drury for the position, Cammerer was relieved. His health was never very good and he did not really want the position. When Drury refused the job, Ickes reluctantly appointed Cammerer.
However, Ickes never appreciated Cammerer's abilities and often failed to seek his advice and input when he should have done. At the same time Cammerer seemed to be intimidated by Ickes and when meeting with the secretary, often failed to state his views strongly, or accepted their rejection and withdrew from the discussion. Cammerer was a thoroughly decent individual, who was well respected by Congress, but Ickes belittled him unmercifully and Cammerer lacked the disposition to stand up to him.
Nevertheless, like his predecessors, Mather and Albright, Cammerer consolidated political support for the NPS, frustrated attempts to compromise the integrity of the parks, and secured significant appropriations for park development. Although Cammerer represented continuity, the milieu of the late 1930s in which he operated was very different from that of his predecessors. In his tenure, the agency played a central role in the New Deal efforts to cope with the wounded economy and its social consequences. Although much less dynamic than Mather and Albright, he effectively led the bureau during a period of rapid change and expansion. He took advantage of many opportunities using New Deal money and programs to develop the parks and move the NPS much further along in the direction set by Mather and Albright.
The CCC programs meant that funds were available in unprecedented amounts, so much of the parks development envisioned in master plans prepared during the Mather and Albright years were implemented in Cammerer's tenure. By one estimate, the NPS was able to advance park development as much as two decades beyond where it would have been without the New Deal emergency relief programs.
To cope with the big new workload created by the availability of the CCC programs, Cammerer introduced regionalization of the NPS by establishing four regional offices, each a small-scale replica of the Washington office. The park superintendents initially were opposed when Cammerer presented the idea to them in 1936. They were afraid they would lose some of their autonomy and lose access to the director by having a layer of management between them and the director. However, it was pointed out to them that they would be better able to justify their financial requirements when dealing with someone who had both knowledge of their needs and of the Washington office, than when 150 superintendents were all trying to get the attention of the director.
Cammerer's philosophy towards the NPS reflected that of Mather and Albright. He was adamant that the "core" of the NPS ideal was "conservation for human use." While he opposed building roads to penetrate all areas of a park, he supported building roads in a "portion" of a park so the public could enjoy it and thus at the same time save large undisturbed areas for the "relatively few who enjoy wilderness." He noted perceptively that unless �bolstered by definite, tangible returns, such as public use and enjoyment made possible through roads, the preservation of national park wilderness would fall before the onslaught of pragmatic economic needs.
Despite the tensions with Ickes, Cammerer maintained good relations with Congress and was rewarded with several important laws. Prominent amount them were the Historic Sites Act (1935) which established a national policy of preserving historic places; the Park, Parkway and Recreation Study Act of 1936 which marked the beginning on a national scale of an attempt to plan for the outdoor recreation needs of the entire country; and a law authorizing a National Park Foundation.
Although the National Park System did not grow as fast under Cammerer as it had under his predecessors, it did see the addition of nearly 30 new parks with over 5 million acres of land. These included the Everglades (1.2 million acres) and Big Bend (0.7 million acres) national parks, Joshua Tree (0.5 million acres) and Organ Pipe Cactus (0.3 million acres) national monuments, the first national recreation area, Boulder Dam (later Lake Mead, 2.0 million acres) and the first national seashore, Cape Hatteras (initially 62,000 acres). Park visitation grew from fewer than 3.4 million in 1933 to more than 15 million in 1939.
The frenzied pace of development in the parks spurred by the availability of CCC labor in Cammerer's tenure as director led to him taking less than two weeks leave in five years. This workload and pressures from the distain with which he was treated by Secretary Ickes, resulted in a heart attack in 1940. At that point, he asked Ickes to reassign him to become regional director in Richmond and he died from another heart attack a year later in 1941.
Cammerer's contributions to the NPS were honored with the naming of Mount Cammerer in Great Smoky National Park, in which he had played a prominent role in its acquisition.
Sources:
Sellers, Richard West (1997). Preserving nature in the national parks: A history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wirth, Conrad L. (1980). Parks, politics, and the people. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
Albright, Horace M., and Schenck, Marion A. (1999) Creating the national park service. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/sontag/cammerer.htm