Newton Drury

Cornelius Amory Pugsley Silver Medal Award, 1940
Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award, 1950

 

Newton B. Drury (1889-1978) received the Pugsley Silver Medal in 1940 and the Gold Medal in 1950. The Silver Medal was for his leadership of the Save the Redwoods League of California, while the Gold Medal was for his leadership as director of the National Park Service and "for his courage, resourcefulness, and adherence to high principles." He was born in San Francisco on April 19, 1889, and became student body president and a leader of the campus progressives at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating with a degree in English in 1912, he taught at the university and was an assistant to its president, Benjamin Ide Wheeler. In World War I, he served in the Army Balloon Corps as an aerial observer and later said that the destruction he witnessed had motivated him strongly toward conservation. In 1919, he and his brother Aubrey formed the Drury Brothers Company, an advertising and public relations agency. That same year, the organizers of the Save-the-Redwoods League, many of whom knew Drury from the university, asked Drury Brothers to manage the League. Newton Drury became executive secretary in charge of publicity and fund raising.

 

The League had been founded in 1919 with the help of NPS director Stephen Mather. The position of executive secretary for which Drury was hired was the functional equivalent of executive director today. His task was to engineer legislation, orchestrate public support and woo donors to save the magnificent redwood forests of northern California from being logged. He admired Mather's charisma, vision and selling ability and set out to emulate his techniques. The League's founders were men of wealth and influence, and in the absence of any federal or state appropriations for acquisition, private fundraising was the primary challenge.

 

However, after a few years it became apparent that private philanthropy would be inadequate to save large areas of the redwoods, so Drury and the League lobbied for a $6 million bond issue. To win broad state support, it was directed at land purchases throughout California. Nevertheless, to quiet suspicion that the measure would benefit the redwoods only and not the whole state, Drury and the League campaigned for legislation authorizing a California State Park Commission, which would have responsibility for administering the funds. Drury organized what was at that time the largest publicity campaign in California's history. The campaign was successful and the bond authorization was approved in 1928. Nowhere in the state did the negative votes outweigh the positive.  However, the bonds were limited to providing 50% matching money for parks. The first 50% still had to be raised from philanthropy. Given Drury's expertise at raising funds and his high visibility in the parks field, after the bond issue passed the State Park Commission hired him as its land acquisitions officer.

 

By 1928, the decade's peak year for American philanthropy, the League had raised over half a million dollars and acquired 3000 acres of redwood forest. Subsequently, with matching public dollars available, it was able to substantially build upon this foundation. Under Drury's 20 years of leadership, the league preserved nearly 50,000 acres of the finest grove of Sequoia Semperviriens or coast redwood, as well as the Calaveras Grove of Sequoia Gigantia, or big tree. The organization was successful enjoying broad political support and attracting donations from America's elite. It built for California a rational structure of resource management and established four redwood parks to which in the next decades it would add lands bit by bit. Drury's leadership bridged the traditional park philanthropy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the public structures of subsequent decades.

 

When Horace Albright announced in 1933 that he was resigning as director of the National Park Service, it was Drury who was Secretary Ickes' first choice as his successor. The Secretary's invitation was turned down for a variety of reasons of which the principal one probably was that he felt obliged to continue with the state park land acquisition program which remained challenging as the state's purchase funds had to be matched either with equal funds from other sources or with contributions of lands or other properties of equal value.

 

In the League's early years Drury and its other leaders were receptive to federal advice and involvement, but by the end of the 1920s, they had adopted a different philosophy. They disapproved of the NPS placing hotel structures, museums, camping and extensive road systems in the national parks, believing such features and popularization was degrading the inspirational value of national parks and destroying their primitive character. The redwoods, they believed, deserved better. The League's aversion to the NPS helps explain why no redwood national park was established in the 1930s despite massive expansion of the NPS system. Drury complained that the NPS had an "itch to become a Super-Department of Recreation" or "a glorified playground commission." He was alarmed not only by the construction of tramways, toboggan runs, and ski lifts, but also by "the almost hopeless lack of imagination and the cheap showmanship" evident in the agency's programs.

 

In 1939, Secretary of Interior Ickes again faced the necessity of appointing a director for the NPS. There was rising concern by groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society about the extensive developments in the parks built by the CCC. In response, Ickes decided to go outside the NPS for a new director whose preservationist credentials were impeccable, and this time Drury accepted the position. His NPS reign as director from 1940 to 1951 was characterized by purism and moderation. He coined the phrase "the Crown Jewels" to describe his beloved parks. He was repelled by what he termed the NPS's "cheap showmanship" in its efforts to increase park use. He fought to end the park concessionaire's practice of throwing a ball of flaming brush over Yosemite Valley's Glacier Point for the entertainment of nightly visitors because the "fire-fall" damaged the terrain and was inappropriate. He discouraged the service's scheduled feedings of garbage to the Yellowstone bears, a practice conceived to ensure tourists a glimpse of wildlife. Somewhat disgruntled, Albright is reputed to have commented facetiously to a friend that "Drury wants things so natural in the national parks that he would like people to check their contraceptives at the entrance station." Drury also invested much effort in his twelve years as director staving off attempted inroads into the parks by an array of military, business and agency interests, many of which used the mantra of "essential to the war effort" ostensibly to justify their intentions.

 

There were two particularly prominent political battles during Drury's tenure as director. First, was the expansion of Grand Teton National Park after two decades of bitter controversy. A 310,000-acre Grant Teton National Park had been created in 1929, but the NPS wanted much more. First, it hoped to add nearly a million acres of adjacent national forest lands.  Second, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had purchased tens of thousands of acres of Jackson Hole and wanted to donate it to the NPS. Both steps met with fierce opposition. The Forest Service didn't want to lose its land and local ranchers didn't want to lose their grazing rights. The local community objected to Rockefeller's donations because it would reduce property tax revenues. The Wyoming Congressional delegation supported the opposition of the local community. After a political battle lasting two decades, the Wyoming delegation and conservationists agreed to a scheme in which the federal government paid the property taxes. Also as a part of the final compromise, elk hunting was allowed in the park under certain conditions, part of what had been the Jackson Hole Monument was to be managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the president lost any authority to create new monuments in Wyoming. The final bill was passed in 1950.

 

Drury played a greater role in another controversy that ultimately led to his resignation. The Bureau of Reclamation wanted to build dams in Dinosaur National Monument. According to Park Service legend, Drury opposed such dams and, when the Secretary of the Interior decided to build them anyway, Drury resigned in protest in 1951. Encouraged by his martyrdom, dam opponents successfully stopped the Dinosaur projects, but only after several more years of acrimonious debate.

 

Drury became NPS director at the onset of World War II and as a consequence the yearly appropriation for the NPS dropped from the 1940 high of nearly thirty-five million dollars to a low of under five million dollars in 1945. All construction was stopped, maintenance was minimal and facilities deteriorated. Because of gas rationing, travel through the parks was reduced to a mere trickle in the war years. Government agencies and private industry, with the cry of "national emergency" on their lips, looked at national park resources as a free resource to be exploited. Drury, however, stood firm against those who demanded that the parks be used as sites for mountain warfare training, as grazing areas for cattle and, in the case of the parks of the Pacific Northwest, as sources of sitka spruce, a light wood important in airplane construction. The position of the NPS was a weak one. Much of its staff had been drafted into the armed services, its concerns were of low priority to the administration, its appropriations were minuscule, and, if that were not enough, its headquarters was moved to Chicago to make room in Washington for the war effort. In the face of enormous political presence, it was Drury's guts and fortitude alone that held the park policy and its principles intact. His final argument to a stubborn government agent would go something like this:  "All right, if you will bring me a signed statement from your Secretary that what you propose is essential for the survival of the nation, I'll step aside." Nobody ever did.

 

As the war concluded, more attention was directed to needs at home. But then the nation found itself immersed in "the cold war". Many felt it was necessary not only for the US to remain well armed but also to help arm other nations in the interest of maintaining peace throughout the world. It was a period of many international compacts and defense agreements, and these activities required a great amount of money. Thus, it was exceedingly difficult for the NPS to obtain funding for the rebuilding and refurbishing of park roads, buildings, and other facilities that had deteriorated from years of disuse and lack of maintenance.

 

In these trying times Drury gave more and more thought to going back to California and his beloved Save-the-Redwoods League. Finally, in 1951 he announced his decision to resume his work with the League and to accept appointment as director of state parks for California, which had been offered to him by Governor Earl Warren, a classmate of his and Grace and Horace Albright's at the University of California. He served as director of the State Division of Beaches and Parks until 1959 then, at the age of 70, he returned to the League as its executive director, observing "Retirement is a relative thing, I expect that I'll still be as active as possible in fights for conservation."

 

After World War II, accelerated logging of redwoods and the rising stumpage rates rendered state and private park funding increasingly inadequate to save these areas. In the 1960s, Drury led the League in a low-key campaign for a Redwood National Park. The battle was marred by bitter opposition from industry and differences between the militant Sierra Club and the League under Drury's moderate leadership. The Club and the League, however, joined forces in urging expansion of the park after its establishment in 1968. Drury was executive secretary of the League until 1971, president from 1971 to 1975, and chairman of the board of directors from 1975 until his death in December 1978.

 

Newton B. Drury was one of the truly great conservationists of American history. His lifetime leadership with the Save-the-Redwoods League was central to the League's success in raising over $25 million, preserving 135,000 acres of Redwood forest for annexation to thirty state redwood parks in California. Two redwood groves are designated as living memorials to Drury, the Drury Brothers Grove in Prairie State Park and the Newton B. Drury Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. When Newton B. Drury Peak in Mount San Jacinto State Park and State Wilderness was dedicated after his death, William Penn Mott observed, "It is important that this mountain is a granite peak because it will be there forever." Drury, through "diplomacy and cooperative efforts, was instrumented in securing Mount San Jacinto as a wilderness area."

 

Sources:
Sterling, K.B., Harmond, R.P., Cevasco, G.A., & Hammond, Lorne F. (1997).  Biographical dictionary of American and Canadian Naturalists and environmentalists.  Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press.
Schrepfer, Susan R. (1983).  Drury, Newton B.  In Encyclopedia of American Forest and Conservation History editor Richard C. Davis.  New York:  Macmillan.
Evison, Herb (1979).  Newton Drury:  long remembered and missed.  Courier:  The National Park Service Newsletter, March, p. 7.
Schrepfer, Susan R. (1983).  The fight to save the redwoods.  Madison, Wisconsin:  The University of Wisconsin Press.
Wirth, Conrad L. (1980).  Parks, politics and the people.  Norman, Oklahoma:  University of Oklahoma Press.
Forresta, Ronald A. (1984).  America�s national parks and their keepers.  Washington D.C.: Resources for the Future, Inc.

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