It's Friday, August 25, 2023, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be inspiring or elucidating. Today's uplifting words come from four 20th-century U.S. presidents extolling the virtue of the great outdoors.
The news peg is that it was on this date in 1916 that President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation creating the National Park Service to administer the nation's growing system of parks, treasures that have become known as America's version of the "crown jewels."
In the ensuing century, tens of millions of Americans have forged a personal frame of reference for the parks. This includes many U.S. presidents.
The legislation signed by Woodrow Wilson on August 25, 1916, created a new federal bureau, the National Park Service, to be housed in the Department of the Interior. Its mission was to provide stewardship of the 35 parks and monuments managed by the department (there are more than 400 today) and "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
Year by year, the scope and mission of the NPS grew. Presidents, both before and after Wilson, kept pace with the national impulse to preserve our heritage in this way. This was true of lesser presidents as well as great ones: Abraham Lincoln signed legislation protecting Yosemite; Ulysses Grant did the same for Yellowstone. Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order transferring 56 national monuments and military sites that had been under the purview of the U.S. Forest Service and Department of War to the National Park Service.
"The fundamental idea behind the parks," FDR explained, "is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us."
FDR's less-popular predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was also a dedicated nature lover, and loved nothing more than fly-fishing in a mountain stream. It was people like Hoover whom Sierra Club founder John Muir had in mind when he said that "catching trout with a bit of bent wire is a rather trivial business." But Muir tolerated angling because it got people into the woods. This point was punctuated by Hoover himself many times, including in a book he wrote called "Fishing for Fun -- and to Wash Your Soul."
It was Warren G. Harding, whose administration is mainly remembered for scandal, who vowed at Yellowstone National Park, "Commercialism will never be tolerated here as long as I have the power to prevent it."
Theodore Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment after visiting the Grand Canyon: "Leave it as it is," he said. "You cannot improve it."
And those are the quotes of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
