COASTAL PARKS FOR A METROPOLITAN NATION: HOW POSTWAR POLITICS AND URBAN GROWTH SHAPED AMERICA’S SHORES by Jacqueline Alyse Mirandola Mullen A Dissertation Submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy College of Arts & Sciences Department of History 2015 UMI Number: 3707302 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 3707302 Published by ProQuest LLC (2015). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 Abstract Between 1961 and 1975, the United States established thirteen of the nation’s fourteen National Seashores and Lakeshores. This unprecedented, nation-wide initiative to conserve America’s coasts transformed how the National Park Service made parks, catalyzed the shift in conservation definitions in America, and created new conservation coalitions that paved the way for the environmental movement. The Department of the Interior began shoreline park establishment as a concerted effort to protect the nation’s more natural shores from the tourist development rapidly covering American coasts in the post-World War II period. The Park Service’s urgency on coastal conservation arose from concerns of overdevelopment, overpopulation, and overuse. America’s coastal buy-up began as a federal initiative, a top-down bureaucratic idea presented to local communities to provide increased recreational opportunities. By the mid-1960s, however, new coalitions begged the Park Service to conserve the shorelines into their backyards. This dissertation considers five case studies, all coasts proposed for federal protection in the late 1950s and all near metropolitan areas that experienced significant suburban expansion in the postwar period. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Early Piecemeal Coastal Park Plans Chapter One: Federal Beaches from the Progressive Era to the Cold War Chapter Two: The Cape Cod Formula: Listening to “locals” Chapter Three: “The Vanishing Dairy Rancher”? Point Reyes and Work Chapter Four: “Needed: Somebody who isn’t mad”: Forest Service vs. Park Service at the Oregon Dunes Chapter Five: A Naturally Disastrous Boost: Fire Island National Seashore Chapter Six: Industrial Wasteland or Ecological Sanctuary? The Indiana Dunes Epilogue: A Slow and Contested Path for Coastal Park iii Introduction: Early Piecemeal Coastal Park Plans In 1955, National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth penned a short introduction to a National Park Service report. “One of our greatest recreation resources – the seashore—is rapidly vanishing from public use,” Wirth warned the public in the foreword to Our Vanishing Shoreline. “Nearly everyone seems to know this fact, but few do anything to halt the trend.” With this report, and the “alarming” facts uncovered by the survey, Wirth and the Park Service hoped to create a sense of urgency for coastal conservation initiatives.1 A century-long penchant for beach-going had coupled with a prosperous postwar economy to strain America’s beaches. More Americans visited and built homes on the shore than ever before, but most of the country’s coasts remained unregulated and became increasingly private, greedily swallowed up by the highest bidder.2 To address this “Seashore Fever,” the Park Service insisted that the federal government needed to step in. The “signs of the times” along America’s Eastern Coast were “Private Property,” “No Trespassing,” and “Subdivision: Lots for Sale.” Gone were the days when a boy could “go five miles from the city of Boston, spend the day combing the beach or digging mud clams in the estuaries, and seldom see another human being within shouting distance.”3 With their nostalgic and foreboding report, the Park Service started a chain of events that led, in just 15 years, to the establishment of 14 new National Seashores and Lakeshores. Why the sudden rush? And how did the Park Service act so quickly? 1 Conrad Wirth, Foreword, in U.S. National Park Service, Our Vanishing Shoreline (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1955). 2 On beach popularity rising in Europe and the United States during the Victorian era, then increasing in popularity with a broader segment of the population in the twentieth century, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1994); Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: a Social History 1750–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983); Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 3 U.S. National Park Service, Our Vanishing Shoreline (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1955), 8-9. 1 The creation of National Seashores and Lakeshores transformed how the National Park Service made parks, catalyzed the shift in conservation definitions in America, and created new conservation coalitions that paved the way for the environmental movement. The Department of the Interior (parent department to the National Park Service) began shoreline park establishment as a concerted effort to protect the nation’s more natural shores from the tourist development rapidly covering American coasts in the post-WWII period.4 The Park Service’s urgency on the matter arose from concerns of overdevelopment, overpopulation, and overuse. America’s coastal buy-up began as a federal initiative, a top-down bureaucratic idea presented to local communities to provide increased recreational opportunities. By the mid-1960s, however, new coalitions begged the Park Service to conserve the shorelines into their backyards. The debates over the nation’s metropolitan beaches brought urban residents, summer homeowners and ranchers, shellfishermen and tourists, loggers and urban residents, conservation groups and gay communities, planners and legislators, steel companies and unions all in conversation with one another. All had a stake in these metropolitan coastal parks. Coasts that lay within a short drive of major cities were familiar day trips for millions of urban residents, who got involved in the conservation conversation. The seashore initiative engaged a broad swath of the American population, including those not traditionally associated with conservation issues. The diverse coalition that supported National Seashore establishment helped to solidify urban support for the National Park Service and for a new type of conservation that touched on 4 For more on the increasing leisure time and the subsequent growth in tourism in the postwar period, see Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargain: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Susan Sessions Rugh, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). On the general affluence of the postwar period and its influence on American culture, see David Potter, People of Plenty: People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) 2 issues of pollution, overpopulation, and suburban growth. National Seashores connected these issues to traditional land conservation, thus aiding in the mid-twentieth century transition of urbanites from a “conservation” to an “environmental” ideology. Coastal Parks: between Progressive Era Conservation to Environmentalism The federal national seashore initiative in the 1950s and 1960s catalyzed the shift in conservation thinking from Progressive Era conservation ideology to the environmentalism of the 1970s.5 A few core tenants continued from the Progressive Era conservation movement into the National Seashore push. These included land conservation, the activism of women, and the continuation of the wilderness strand that began during the interwar years. On the other hand, the federal coastal conservation initiative of the 1960s included new concerns that had not been a part of early twentieth century conservation concerns. These included a much stronger focus on recreation for the masses, creation of federal parks in proximity to urban areas, sensitivity to a Cold War fear of the state even amid federal land purchases, newly broad coalitions, ecological conservation, overdevelopment fears, and concerns about air and water pollution. In working with the National Park Service in the 1960s, coastal conservationists addressed new concerns by leaning on traditional conservation policies and procedures in which bureaucrats drew lines on a map to protect natural areas. Federal coastal