Conrad Wirth

Conrad L. Wirth
Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award, 1947: Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award, 1963
Conrad "Connie" L. Wirth (1899- 1993) received the Pugsley Gold Medal in 1947 and in 1963. He was described as "A man of action with boundless enthusiasm...the outstanding executive, thinker and leader in the field today." He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1899, to Theodore and Leonie Mense Wirth. The senior Wirth, horticulturist, park planner, and administrator, is best remembered for his directorship of the greatly admired Minneapolis park system. He imbued the second of his three sons with a lifelong passion for parks designed for people. Conrad earned a Bachelor of Science degree in landscape gardening from Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts).
After graduation Wirth went into private practice in New Orleans and subsequently in San Francisco, but then the Depression occurred and private sector jobs disappeared. Thus, in 1928 he obtained a job with the National Capital Park and Planning Commission which was the start of his long federal career. In 1931, Horace Albright brought him into the National Park Service (NPS) as assistant director for land planning. When President Roosevelt launched his public works programs Albright was responsible for implementing them in the Interior Department. He delegated that responsibility to Wirth, so in 1933 Wirth was given supervisory responsibility for all state and county park activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). During the Great Depression, Wirth distinguished himself with his brilliant implementation of CCC programs in support of federal, state, and local parks. He developed proposals for creating new state parks and he oversaw the planning, design, and construction of the facilities necessary for state parks to accommodate public use. Under his direction, the NPS employed hundreds of thousands of CCC workers in state parks, constructing roads, trails, cabins, museums, campgrounds, picnic grounds, administration offices, and other state park facilities. At first many state and local entities had been suspicious of the quality of the CCC suspecting these young men had little to offer. But they were quickly proved wrong and there was a growing demand for their services. Many of the skilled foreman and leaders who were recruited to supervise the corps, remained with the NPS after their responsibilities with the CCC were completed, and provided the NPS with a valuable management cadre as it expanded.
With Conrad L. Wirth in charge, the local, state, and national park development program of the CCC could not be a pick and shovel or leaf-raking project. In addition to necessary construction and other physical development, he saw the need for survey, study, and planning, and largely due to his vision, breadth of interest, vigorous direction and leadership, there appeared a remarkable series of reports, preservation bulletins, digests of laws, printed volumes and brochures designed to put park and recreation planning on a nation-wide basis with well thought-out state and national plans and programs. When this work started, there was no national plan; and the majority of the states had no state park system or park organization. Among the valuable contributions made was the report on Recreational Use of Land in the United States, a nationwide study prepared by the National Park Service in 1934 for the National Resources Board, published as a 280-page volume in 1938, and The Park and Recreation Problem of the United States (279 pages), an important and basic work in the field of park planning. Meanwhile, state park systems came into being or were benefited and improved. During 1936-1942, eighteen states were aided in rewriting their general conservation laws. By July, 1942, more than 561 non-federal park areas throughout the country were improved by all manner of CCC construction and landscaping projects necessary to develop them or make their recreational resources and scenic beauty available for public use and enjoyment.
It is not too much to say that under Wirth's farsighted and energetic leadership, state and national park conservation, and with it scenic preservation, made as much progress in the ten years of the life of the CCC as it might have been expected to make in 50 years without it! The fruitful ideas in the printed reports, periodicals, handbooks, and brochures remain a permanent contribution to park policy and park planning, - a heritage that promoted the wise preservation of those places of scenic beauty already in public ownership and led to the conservation of many others in future years.
His remarkable contributions in this role, however, were a prelude to the profound impact he had on the NPS when subsequently serving as the agency's director from 1951 to 1964. In 1951, NPS Director Arthur E. Demaray named Wirth an associate director. Soon thereafter Wirth succeeded Demaray. In some ways this was an unusual appointment because Wirth had no experience in the field, but he had proven his administrative intends in the headquarters office. A planner and developer at heart, Wirth moved in a different direction from earlier NPS preservationist policies. Wirth was confronted with a physical plant in the parks that had deteriorated during the war years when the parks were largely mothballed. After the war, when gas rationing was removed, millions of Americans poured into the parks and the infrastructure was inadequate to accommodate them. He proposed an ambitious development program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the NPS, and, in his own words, to "...overcome the inroads of neglect and to restore to the American people a National Park System adequate for their needs." The goal was to bring all units of the NPS "up to a consistently high standard of preservation, staffing and physical development, and to consolidate them fully into one national park system." The scale of his vision was extraordinary. There had been little investment in the parks after the war and Wirth believed the only way to quantumly increase it was to present a total program for the whole system from which all legislation and their constituents would benefit, rather than to seek incremental improvements in particular peaks each year. Such an ambitious plan would require a level of annual appropriations many times higher than the existing level. Titled Mission 66, the ten-year construction and rehabilitation program cost $11 billion. Wirth personally convinced President Eisenhower of the merits of the plan, carefully cultivated powerful people in Congress, and ensured there was something nice in the package for every member of the House and Senate who had a park in his/her district. No legislation authorizing Mission 66 was passed. Rather it relied on annual appropriations and Congress followed through each year with the appropriations needed to fulfill the ten year program.
Under Wirth's direction, Mission 66 built more than 130 new visitor centers, 2,000 new homes for employees, and training centers at Grand Canyon and Harpers Ferry. It built and repaved 2,000 miles of roads, rehabilitated and expanded concessionaire facilities, and greatly increased the number of campsites in the parks. While criticized by many in the conservation movement as self-serving development, Mission 66 fostered a spiritual rejuvenation within the NPS "family."
By increasing park capacities, Mission 66 also led to -- or helped prepare the parks for -- the greatest absolute increase in tourism in park history. In 1951 the parks hosted 37 million visitors. By 1956, when Mission 66 began, visitation had exploded to more than 60 million, and park planners projected a 25 percent increase to 80 million by 1966. In fact, usage more than doubled; 1966 saw 133 million people visit the parks.
Wirth's regime also brought huge increases in park budgets. Construction monies -- mainly for Mission 66 -- increased six times, from $42 million in 1955 to $260 million in 1966. But the budget for operating the parks also nearly tripled, from well under $93 million in 1954 to $246 million in 1966.
Wirth saw the importance of bolstering support for the NPS by expanding access to the parks and amenities in them. This expansion was inconsistent with the notions of preservation-minded groups. To them, Wirth's Mission 66 was the essence of those things they detested; it was the sacrifice of preservation to mass use; it was catering to the lowest common denominator of park taste; and it was the subservience of the unique qualities of the individual parks to seemingly interchangeable, undistinguished development plans. While most people in the NPS saw Mission 66 as an unmitigated boon, preservationists viewed it as a boondoggle, trampling on parks like an invading army. Referring to a reconstruction of Yosemite Park's Tioga road, for example, Ansel Adams complained that, when the old road had "tiptoed across the terrain," the new one "blasts and gouges the landscape."
Nevertheless, in many respects, the period of Wirth's directorship was similar in many ways to the era of Mather and Albright, in that it was the embodiment of the progressive vision that guided Mather and Albright. In the 1920s, the first directors planned for the vanguard of the modern life; in short, for those in nuclear families, with dependable incomes, a family car, and paid annual vacation. Although such Americans did not constitute an absolute majority of the population then, faith in progress led Mather and Albright to believe that they were the clientele of the future. By Wirth's time the vanguard had come closer to being the norm.
Mission 66 succeeded for the same reasons the policies of Mather and Albright did; they were consonant with the dominant social values of the era and they catered to the articulated demand of the times. In a strategic sense, the late 1950s were halcyon years for the National Park System. System-wide, annual visits rose rapidly. The parks seemed secure, and their managing agency seemed to have a comfortable niche in the federal bureaucracy.

Sources:
Forresta, Ronald A. (1984). America's national parks and their keepers. Washington D.C.:
Resources for the Future, Inc. Citation for Conrad Wirth's award of the Horace Albright Scenic Preservation Medal in 1959.
Dan Dustin contributed to the development of this profile.

Back to Pugsley Award Winners