S3 E6: Environmental Protection

This week, we are going to be exploring the relationship between presidents, the bully pulpit, and environmental protection. When did presidents start thinking about federal use of land? When did that consideration change from an economic one based on maximizing profit and agricultural production for white settlers to something else? 

We are going to tackle these questions and more on today's episode. First, we spoke with Dr. Mark David Spence, the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks, about the early history of presidents and land as a national resource. We talked about the role of national parks in the late 19th century and the complicated relationship between national parks and native peoples.

Next, we spoke with Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, the author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America. Nelson gave us a history of the first national park in the world, told us about the outsized impact of Theodore Roosevelt in the national park system, and discussed executive action on national parks today.

Finally, we spoke with Dr. Brooks Flippen, author of Nixon and the Environment, about Richard Nixon, environmental protection, and the creation of Earth Day. Brooks shares the really interesting political motivations behind Nixon's climate actions. You might be surprised to learn that climate change was once a bipartisan issue!

Transcript

44. Season III, Episode VI: Environmental Protection

Release Date: April 28, 2022

Guests: Mark David Spence, Megan Kate Nelson, Brooks Flippen

Interviewers: Dr. Lindsay Chervinksy, Dr. Brian Franklin

Citation: 

Environmental Protection, 44. Center for Presidential History, Southern Methodist University, The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, 28 April 2022, accessed at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1304182/10517463-bully-pulpit-episode-vi-environmental-protection.mp3?download=true 

Lindsay: Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, a podcast production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. I'm Lindsay Chervinsky. And along with my colleague, Brian Franklin, we are your historian hosts for season three: The President and the Bully Pulpit. 

Last week, we talked about presidents, prohibition, and drug policy.

This week, we are going to be exploring the relationship between presidents, the bully pulpit, and environmental protection. When did presidents start thinking about federal use of land? When did that consideration change from an economic one based on maximizing profit and agricultural production of land for white settlers to something else? 

How do national parks fit into the equation? And what are the implications for Native sovereignty? Finally, how do the environmental protection agency, Earth Day and Nixon fit into this story? 

We are going to tackle these questions and many more on today's episode. It is a good one. And the information is a little bit complex but has so many fantastic details that we actually have brought on three guests to speak with you today.

First, we spoke with Mark David Spence about the early history of presidents and land as a national resource. We talked about the role of national parks in the late 19th century, the complicated relationship between national parks and native peoples and how community interpretation shapes this story. 

Mark David Spence is a public historian specializing in environmental history, the American west, and the history of national parks. He is the author of Dispossessing the Wilderness and a regular consultant for the national park service, public schools, nonprofits, and many public facing publications.

Next, we spoke with Megan Kate Nelson, about the creation of Yellowstone, the first national park. We chatted about who was actually responsible for the parks, recreation, how it featured in the post-Civil War United States, and why the park was created.

We also chatted about a president who signed into law several parks, but is someone you probably don't know all that much about, the oversized impact of Theodore Roosevelt and the legal implications of executive action on national parks.

Finally, we spoke with Brooks Flippen about Richard Nixon, environmental protection, and the creation of Earth Day. You might be surprised that climate change was once a bipartisan issue. And Brooks shares with us the really interesting political motivations behind Nixon's climate actions.He also shares what shifted in the political calculus and why we should see the 1970s as an important turning point.

Okay. So without further ado, let's get to the interviews.

Mark David Spence

Lindsay: Let me ask you to let people know who they're hearing from and what you work on. 

Mark: My name is Mark David Spence. I'm a historian. I've done a lot of book-length projects for the national park service. They use them either for planning or interpretation or how to approach consultations with tribes. 

Lindsay: Then you are the perfect person for this episode because we are going to talk about environmental protection and national parks and the president's use of the bully pulpit. 

When did environmental protection become part of the president's agenda and come onto the president's radar?

Mark: I think in terms of land policy, the two most profoundly significant presidents in that would be Washington and Jefferson. 

Washington, while not as president, but as a land surveyor, a lot of his job was finding good land and trying to survey it, not for the federal government, but for figuring out its value.

And then Jefferson, after him, essentially plans the cadastral survey across the continent. One reason why that's worth knowing is because pretty much every national park has got a lot of straight lines composing its boundaries.

And Yellowstone is a perfect example. The first national park, it's basically a giant square with an odd little wiggly carve out to follow a river drainage. 

So property and surveys are the fundamental definers of, when are you in a national park, when you out of a national park and on one side of the line, you can do certain things. And the other side of the line, you cannot. 

Both men were deeply involved in Native dispossession. They created the process and the template for how to carve out land that otherwise doesn't have a particular commercial basis.

Lindsay: When did presidential conception of land transfer from the more pure economic considerations of how this land could be captured to be sold for financial resources or captured to be used for production. When did presidents start thinking of it in terms of preserving what they saw as pristine wilderness? 

Mark: Jefferson was one of the first and he just bought the place, the Natural Bridge in Virginia and he thought it was a wonder of the world.

Teddy Roosevelt was Indirectly and directly an absolute champion of national parks. He went out to Yellowstone and again, he was selling something a little bit different than astounding and sublime beauty.

He was selling virility and we have these phenomenal, scripted landscapes where men can become real men just by encountering the elements and finding some personal triumph in that process. 

It was also about science. So, for him, it became part of his presidential identity. 

The call of the wild was what America had in spades. You could go to various places. Certainly, in California, Colorado, and what have you, you could just go on out there: it's an empty landscape you can do as you want, and you'll come out a better person. 

Lindsay: A lot of times that emptiness is intentionally constructed and has been intentionally constructed by the eviction of people who have lived there for a really long time. So can you talk to us a little bit about places? Like Yosemite and Yellowstone and some of the other national parks and what was required to create the artificial emptiness that we now sometimes talk about? 

Mark: So the definition of wilderness and this comes from the 1964 Wilderness Act is: wilderness is a place where humans are not to remain. The park's job is to represent and promote Americanness and in large part through, through the sense that we're smart enough to want to save wilderness and not just wreck it all. And it's a nationalizing of the sublime. 

Lindsay: What was the impact on native nations as the federal government, (sometimes spearheaded by presidents and sometimes not) started to set up invisible or sometimes visible borders around huge swaths of territory. 

Mark: Glacier National Park straddles the Rocky Mountains and the east side of the. Borders the Blackfeet Nation’s reservation. On the west side, there's a couple there's Kootenai and a few other groups that live to the south.

George Bird Grinnell, who was a very good friend of Teddy Roosevelt just said, no, there's no treaty. We can't find a treaty that says that you had land up to the crest of the mountains. That in a sense was illegal dispossession. 

Lindsay: So I write a lot about the cabinet and I argue in my work that choices like Deb Holland are symbolic choices, but they're more than just symbolic choices because the firsthand and personal experience for someone like that who has experienced what it's like to be, to have a nation under technically under the auspices of the Department of the Interior running the Department of the Interior is expertise that no one else can bring. 

Mark: What is going on at the threshold of parks and Indian Country now is this land back movement. And often those are Native peoples who are employees of the National Park Service.

one of the most helpful things I've come across is I, when I left academia, the first project I took on was Redwood National and state parks, which are up in far Northwest California. And at the time the park had all been massive Redwood forests that were, that most of them had been clear-cut and the parks service wound up buying a ton of cut-over land. 

And then they used like heavy machinery to recontour gullies, riverbanks or not just riverbanks, but the floodplain around the riverbanks. There was a mill site that was converted into a vast meadow that elk use all the time. 

They are now dumping in to the tune of a few million dollars, at least helping tribal nations, restore edible plants, culturally significant plants, medicinal plants, even animals: minks and the condor as well, and, some flying squirrels and things like that. And other bird habitats, and then this, and some of the surrounding tribes much smaller than the Yurok are also getting tapping into that a bit.

And it's and the one thing they're doing now is the way tribes deal with the Park Service. They're able to make it extremely clear what the significance of a particular park project might mean to them. And it was always, when the door opened and the two sides met the superintendent and the tribes, it was always pretty flinty.

And actually, the superintendent that was there when I was doing my project was like, why the hell are you writing about Indians? And those, and because they've been here for a lot longer than you can imagine, and they're still here and they'll be here when you retire. Whether those are always good meetings or not, they're happening. They're happening purposefully and with efficacy.

So there's and it's not I think a lot of people are fine. It's like land back can take 20 years. It doesn't have to be next week or next month in a sense. So there's going to be some handoffs, I believe here and there. 

And so the project I'm doing right now of all the many things I don't get paid for, one is working for a group that's trying to help the Yosemite. They refer to themselves as the Southern Sierra Miwok, but also refer to themselves as the Yosemite Indians to gain federal recognition. 

And that's a potent divider between the haves and the have nots. Can you tap federal programs and the so it's, these are interesting times I'm bewildered that my book has more interest now than it ever had. 

Lindsay: It was my sense as someone who doesn't really work on environmental history, that the previous administration, by trying to change policy of certain lands and change boundaries of certain parks and change boundaries of lands that are significant to Native peoples elevated this subject, maybe in a way that wasn't intended.

In your experience, just in the last couple of administrations, how does presidential focus really change . . . does it change the conversation or how much does it change the conversation?

Mark: Biden is reacting to the previous administration. It's not as if six years ago he was thinking bears ears has to be protected forever. It was Trump's style to do something slapdash and quick and but with some kind of bitterness that would redound to him.

And so whatever good policies come about could go away with an election, all depending on who comes after. I think presidents are extremely important. And again, I'm not a presidential scholar, but they're very important because of the cabinets that they put together and then, a lot of it is just on trust. You can't micromanage your cabinets. One of the first things Biden did was unwound Bear’s Ears. Clinton's approach to national parks was quite different than Obama's. 

And Ronald Reagan's was quite different. And that work that was sort of James Watt’s bailiwick, and the odd thing about it, so when I was in college at Santa Barbara Reagan was coming out a few times a year to be on this ranch, way up on these mountains way above and the view from his ranch is the Channel Islands, which is a national park unit. 

I don't think he ever went there. And which is odd. I don't think it, I don't think it mattered. He got enough outdoors just being on a horse, jimmy Carter was very, he was pretty progressive. He was pretty energetic in creating new types of parks.

There's a park in Ohio called Cuyahoga Valley National Recreational Park or something like that. Because it has too much observable history in it. You can't just try to turn it into the Great Smoky Mountains or something like that. So these are different kinds of parks.

Obama also was doing just some odd little parks here and there. They don't fit the video montage of what the national park service would look like, but there and that's getting interesting. There's a lot more history getting inserted into the interpretation of these parks. 

I did work for a tiny little park that turned out to be the hardest, most, wide ranging study I'd ever done because there's indigenous peoples it's in Michigan, but the reason an event occurred there is because people from basically Maine to Wisconsin were having, trying to defend it as a last stand fight during the war of 1812. And they were basically fighting Kentuckians and Ohioans. 

Lindsay: You've been so generous with your time. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you think is really essential? 

Mark: I think so I was trying to be more presidentially focused in a way. And again, as a historiography, that's a weakness for me. It's not a strong point. 

I do think, it's very odd that presidents can not create national parks, but they can create national monuments and most of those become national parks.

So they have a lot more power than the statutes might suggest. That the Congress creates a national park, the president decides if they want to sign that legislation or not. 

I think it would be, to me, it'd be interesting at least as an, had an article level. Not that I would do it, but how presidents think of, or, approach that sort of national monument power. And I think they can do it for national seashores and things like that as well. National monuments don't have a great audience, across the whole country. It's oh, we've got hundreds of them. We have to save them all.

But I think, to the degree, to which a president can, say, advocate for this is going to be a kind of national park that will provide all these things to the locals. And visitors will get a deep understanding of this, that and the other that's, I'm sure speech writers get, are able to work that in, but it is, I think it's a potentially wonderful template or litmus test for what really makes a president tick.

Lindsay: For all the students out there listening who are looking for a subject, there is a good prompt for you to begin your research project or your dissertation. Mark, well thank you so much. Could you tell us where people can learn more about you and your work? 

Mark: It's just my website. It's got my professional life just on it and it's simply my name in one word, https://www.markdavidspence.com/. So that's all there is to it. And I have some of the things I've written, I've put on there. A couple of them are with publishers, so they're on the site, but not reachable. 

But I wanted to say one more thing if you don't mind.The issue with the park service and Native peoples is that Native peoples are just absolutely relational with each other, with their kin, with specific plants with particular animals. Humans are just another species in this connected world, is how they see it. That's just how they see it. 

Park service personnel move around as much as, or more than people in the military. And so they never, it's very rare for a person to get a full sense of place and to find a place within the community, whether that be indigenous or not indigenous. And that undermines the parks service. I think it really does. And it certainly undermines their statutory obligation to deal with native peoples. 

Lindsay: That's such a good point. Thank you So much for bringing that up. I know that for people who have worked in the park service, the inability to stay in one place, even if they aren't native is often very frustrating because of that exact reason, they can't develop those community ties that they would really like to be able to do. And it would make them better. I think it would make them better stewards of the land and the stories they're trying to tell. 

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Cause they're telling the stories of people there.

MKN Intro

Lindsay: We then spoke with Megan Kate Nelson a writer, historian, and an expert on the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture. She is the author of The Three-Cornered War, which was a Pulitzer prize finalist in 2021. And most recently Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America which was just published on March 1st, 2022. She writes regularly for public audiences and was elected as a fellow of the Society of American Historians just last year.

Megan Kate Nelson

Lindsay: Well Megan thank you so much for joining us. Could you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit about your work? 

Megan: Of course, thanks for having me. I am Megan Kate Nelson. I am a historian and writer. I grew up in Colorado, but now I live in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and I am writing about the West and its history. My most recent book is Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, which tells the story of the first scientific expedition to Yellowstone in 1871 and how it led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872.

Lindsay: That is the perfect topic for today's conversation about the president and national parks, environmental protection. Yellowstone of course, was the first national park. How did that process happen? 

Megan: There had been interest in preserving natural spaces for the benefit of the people. This led to the rural cemetery movement, the city park movement during the years before the war. And then the passage of the Yosemite Act in 1864, a wartime measure, which is very interesting that the U.S. Congress in the midst of war time, soffits to give lands over to the state of California to manage for the benefit of the people.

And this was really the direct precedent for the Yellowstone Act, which Ferdinand Hayden began to lobby for in November and December of 1871. He was helped in that effort by Jay Cook, and investment banker, who had an interest in the Northern Pacific Railroad, which would run north of Yellowstone.

And they really had a Congress who was willing to listen and willing to be lobbied. They had given Hayden $40,000, which was a lot of money in that time equivalent to now about a million dollars, to go and survey Yellowstone and find out what was there. Make some discoveries for science to decide if they could develop it.

And Hayden came back and began talking to them about how there really was nothing mineralogical or agricultural that they could do with Yellowstone, but they needed to save it for science, save it for the American people and keep it out of the hands of small time entrepreneurs and developers.

But that was really the crux of the argument about the Yellowstone Act when it came up in the Senate and then the house in the winter of 1872.

Lindsay: Who was the driving force behind this, was this primarily a congressional act. Was the president playing a big role? Who were the movers and shakers? 

Megan: It really was Congress and some powerful members of the house in particular including Dawes from the state of Massachusetts who had been a fan of Hayden's had supported his work and his son Chester had gone along on the Hayden expedition. And several other key members, really powerful members of the Republican Party believed in extending the power of the federal government into the West.

Also believed in using federal power and federal supremacy to provide for the people. And this extended in this moment to providing them with natural spaces where they could go to, and they used the term to “recreate themselves” in this really pivotal moment in reconstruction after the civil war, when the nation is really trying to come back together.

So it was the Republicans in both the Senate and the House who really pushed this act through. And it set a precedent actually that really it would be Congress who would create national parks. There were other forms of preservation that would come up later.

 But it was Congress who pushed this through and Ulysses S. Grant supportive of this effort, he was supportive of Hayden's expedition had always been supportive of exploration of the West. And he signed the Yellowstone act with no objections, but he was not the one who was driving the effort. It was this lobbying team of Hayden and Cook and a couple of Montana civic officials who were quite invested in the creation of the park and the gateway to the park being in Gardner, Montana. And then also these congressional Republicans.

Lindsay: It strikes me that this is a moment when the national conversation about land and land usage switches from using the land out west for settlement, for population expansion release, for farming, to thinking about, and the government playing a very strong role in that to thinking about land usage in another way. Do you pinpoint this moment as that switch? Or is there a different way we should be thinking about it? 

Megan: There definitely is this growing sense that it will be state or federal governments that will save lands and keep them out of development. And that was something worthy. That was a goal that we should strive for that these. Landscapes are places that are unique in the world and they provide something to Americans beyond any kind of monetary value but more of a cultural value and a kind of human value.

And that does start to change. And what is pivotal in this moment with the passage of the Yellowstone act is even though there is the Yosemite precedent, what Congress did in this moment was take lands and give them to the federal government, give them to the Department of the Interior to manage; and that's what was new. The federal government had always taken up public lands, but usually it was to survey them and sell them to people and or to create reservations and force Native peoples onto them. So this was a new, I think this really was a new and unique moment and it really turned the tide.

Now that said, Congress did absolutely nothing for quite a long time. Almost a decade to support any kind of development of Yellowstone. They gave very little money to the superintendents they appointed. There was very little tourist infrastructure and very little actual tourist visitation in Yellowstone until the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883.

I think that it is probably because pretty soon after this in 1874, the Republicans lost control of Congress. They had in 1872, the executive and both houses. They lost that and they didn't really regain it until 1890, the next time that Congress created multiple national parks.

Lindsay: Okay. So tell us about that next moment. What happens in 1890? 

Megan: Benjamin Harrison is president. He's a moderate Republican from the Midwest. And he is interesting because when he was a senator from Indiana, he was defending the rights of homesteaders and Native peoples against railroads. But that seems to suggest that he would have supported development of natural landscapes and giving them over to individuals to use privately. But he also visited Yellowstone three times. 

So Benjamin Harrison had Republicans controlling both houses and he presided over the admission of multiple Western states.

North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Washington and Montana and Idaho. So he's really bringing the West into the nation and seeing these lands for the first time and how large they are and the kinds of natural resources that they had, including trees. And so he actually signed the Forest Reserve Act, which gave the federal government the power to create forest reserves. And then Congress created Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant. 

So this sort of flurry of national park creation and he signed those acts just like grant had done with the Yellowstone Act. And this is an important moment too, because 1890 of course is the year of the census where census takers determine that there is no kind of frontier status left in the United States. 

And so I believe that this may have created a little bit of a sense of urgency, that we have so many people in the nation. Now they are o’er spreading the continent as Timothy O'Sullivan predicted in 1845 as part of manifest destiny. And that maybe now is the time to start preserving lands to keep developers out of them.

Lindsay: Benjamin Harrison is not typically the president one would think of when one thinks of national parks and perhaps his quieter historical record reflects his lack of either use of the bully pulpit or lack of personality. But there is another president that we were talking about that does not lack any of those things. Can you talk to us a little bit about Theodore Roosevelt, national parks, and his extraordinary use of the Bully Pulpit? 

Megan: Teddy did such an amazing job using that bully pulpit to preserve more than 230 million acres of American land for public use that he has overshadowed everyone who came before him including Harrison.

He is really our first legitimately conservationist president he had been an outdoorsman from his youth trying to get over illness, had spent considerable time in the West before his presidency and really came to love the idea of preserved open spaces.

And so when he became president he really did start to use his executive power in really remarkable and unprecedented ways to save all kinds of places, national forest reserves, bird and game preserves, he created 18 national monuments and then supported and lobbied for the creation of five national parks which Congress, only Congress can create national parks, but he really lobbied heavily and supported that effort to create those parks during his presidency.

And one of the things that enabled him to do so was the Antiquities Act of 1906. So Congress actually gave over their power of preservation and conservation to the executive in this moment and made it really possible for Roosevelt to just go on a conservation tear and is the reason that we have so many preserved spaces today. 

There is a weakness though about this, which is that any subsequent president can revoke those orders. And we saw that most spectacularly during the Trump presidency and his use of executive power, and then also the EPA, and the Department of the Interior to overturn I think a hundred conservationist actions that Obama had put in place because he could do so because they weren't congressional actions. 

So this is the, I think the inherent tension in this issue and the issue of conservation and preserving natural spaces and also historical sites who is going to take up that power. 

Lindsay: We often don't think about the legal side or the executive power side of the bully pulpit. We treat that as presidential authority and presidential power, but it is, there is a bully pulpit aspect to it as well, which I think is so important.

Megan, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us where we can learn more about you and find your fantastic books? 

Megan: Absolutely. You can come to my website, which is http://www.megankatenelson.com/. And through that website, you can buy any of my books, including saving Yellowstone and multiple. On hardcover and eBook and audio book. And yeah, I'm hoping that the book will, for those of you who have been to Yellowstone give you a new angle on its history.

And for those of you who haven't been maybe provoke a trip like the one the ones that Benjamin Harrison took during his presidency in 1880s that really shaped his view of the West.

Flippen Intro

Lindsay: Next we talked with Brooks Flippen, a professor of history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. He is an expert on American religious and environmental politics, a Fulbright scholar, and author of Nixon and the Environment and Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism.

Brooks Flippen

Lindsay: Thank you so much for joining us. Could you please introduce yourself to the audience? 

Brooks: I am a long-time history professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I have written four books, two of which pertain to the Nixon administration's environmental record. And I did work with the national archives on the Nixon environmental record oral history. 

Lindsay: We're going to be talking about the Environmental Protection Agency and Nixon's role in that process. But perhaps you could tell us a little bit of background. How did the conversation around that concept, the need for an EPA, how did that bubble up? 

Brooks: The environment was becoming a major issue in the 1960s. Politicians were taking notice and the Democrats had an advantage on the issue through the legislation passed during the Johnson administration and Nixon was being criticized and he saw the environmental vote as a way to soften opposition. And so he came out strong for environmental protection. 

Lindsay: So the EPA was created in 1970? 

Brooks: EPA was created in 1970, there was debate in Congress about creating a central focus for pollution fighting efforts. Nixon is going to sign the EPA administration but he had not participated greatly in the legislation.

He had proposed a much broader overhaul of the executive branch, including a department of natural resources, which didn't take place. 

He wasn't against EPA and he signed EPA trying to take credit for it. When in reality he had done little in the actual debate over the formation of it.

Lindsay: So the EPA, if Nixon wasn't behind the passage of that legislation, how did that get passed? Who were the big drivers behind that movement? 

Brooks: When you think of the people that are pushing environment in Congress at the time Edmund Muskie, the senator from Maine is first and foremost, Henry Jackson, a senator from Washington; they were leading the effort.

Lindsay: What did the EPA end up doing once it was passed? What was its scope of responsibilities and maybe how has it evolved since? 

Brooks: EPA is operating now under a lot of restraints through subsequent legislation when Nixon was in office, they were forming the agency itself. And what was really important at that time was Nixon selection of William Ruckelshaus. And because of Ruckelshaus, EPA was organized efficiently and later Nixon administration, when he began to shift away from the environment, he began to cut some of the budget for EPA, the very agency he had signed into existence.

Lindsay: What were some of the ways that Nixon tried to. Take credit for this action. Did he obviously the signing of the bill, but then what were the other methods where he tried to gain political credit for this action? 

Brooks: You see this in the way Nixon reacted to Earth Day. Earth Day was in April, 1970, which is about time EPA was created, and Nick was afraid that there'd be violence, a radical anti Nixon, anti-Vietnam type of result from these massive rallies, but he wanted to win the environmental vote. So what they ended up doing was sending cabinet members out to all the talk shows, having White House staff go out to do a symbolic cleanup on the Potomac River.

In February 1970, Nixon gave the first environmental message to Congress, and it was a 37-point agenda. Nixon did it with quite a bit of fanfare as part of this coordinated program when he signed the national environmental policy act. He signed it on the first day of the decade of the 1970s at San Clemente, Western White House.

He invited press in and said, this is a new day, a new decade. We're protecting the environment. And he is going to endorse these bills that Muskie and Jackson and others proposed. But he is trying to water them down and you really see that shift after 1971. 

When he signs bills, he's worked behind the scenes to weaken them. And by the end, he's using the power of the presidency to stress that the economy is hurt by the. And so there really is a rhetorical shift there. 

And by that point, the environment was overshadowed by all of the other momentous events of the time. The Vietnam War, and then of course the energy crisis, and then of course, Watergate. And so Nixon realized that his efforts to win the environmental vote be it both rhetorically and substantively, were doomed. 

I argue that shift was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship on the environment. You see the Republican Party from that point on beginning of slow evolution away from the environmental issue. 

Lindsay: So if Nixon makes the shift starting in 1971, and he starts to back away from some of these things, but legislation continues to get passed, including the Endangered Species Act, which I think was passed in 1973. Is that right? 

Brooks: The first one was soon after Nixon took office in 1969 and it added crustaceans to endangered species list and also banned the importation of endangered species.

The big one was ‘73, as you say. And that extended protection to not just endangered species but to threatened species, which is much broader. And allowed protection of critical habitats. 

Lindsay: Did he actively work against it behind the scenes or did he, was he content to let Congress figure it out? I How much was it passed over his objection and how much just Congress acting on their own?

Brooks: Nixon did not come out publicly against it. It was behind the scenes weakening of the legislation. He was, this is a perfect example of something that's really overshadowed. And this is going on when the Senate Watergate hearings are taking place.

It's not like Nixon is sitting down thinking about this in any great detail. By that point, a lot of his initial environmental advisors had been replaced. People like John Whitaker and Ruckelshaus had been moved on from EPA and, it's, they're the ones who had recommended the administration signed the bill, Nixon is saying, okay, but make sure it doesn't hurt. And you can argue that was because at that time he's trying to shore up support, conservative support, for a possible impeachment and Watergate.

But the endangered species legislation is really important and it just didn't get the headlines. Nixon was never really concerned with substantively with the environment. It was always a political issue. Nixon’s focus was always on the foreign policy, Vietnam, and the Cold War. That was his foremost interest throughout his press.

Lindsay: Previous presidents, when they sold environmental protection, even if they didn't call it that if they were talking about national parks or national forests or things like that, they often talked about either protecting America's future or protecting America's treasures, they really use this very lofty rhetorical and symbolic language.

What was the messaging behind these actions in the 1970s? Was it similarly idealistic or was it much more like: there’s smog and that kind of stinks? How did, how are they packaging it? 

Brooks: It is a threat to our nation, and we need to address it. Nixon himself didn't really come out and say the environmental issue is a matter of humankind ending or anything like that. But he did stress it. 

Lindsay: I think that's a really interesting way to describe it because now when we talk about climate change, it is often in quite dire terms. And I think when originally presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, or even Ulysses S. Grant, were talking about national parks, they were talking about preserving the wonders of America.

And it sounds like Nixon was somewhere in between. It was neither this glorious thing nor the world is ending. 

Brooks: I think you can see this in the debate over population control. Nixon signed legislation to promote population control. The people that were advocating for this bill wanted zero population growth and Nixon and the White House understandably saw that as extreme and what they ended up doing was signing a bill that spent money to research population growth.

Lindsay: When we look at Nixon's position on environmental protection and the legislation that was passed during his presidency and his sometimes minimal role in that process and yet his very big role in maybe the decline in the bipartisan nature of this issue -- what do you think the impact is for the bully pulpit? What does this episode tell us about where the bully pulpit matters? 

Brooks: If you look at the next administration, one would conclude that the environment had little coattails politically. It doesn't galvanize the public as much. And the energy crisis highlighted the effects of the environmental restrictions on the economy. 

That is the way it went during the Nixon administration. The bully pulpit on the environment isn't that great. People were concerned about their paychecks and that's always been the case. And Nixon came to that realization when a poll showed that the environment was fading as a public concern, there was a sense that this legislation that had passed had addressed the issue. 

When you talk about parks, I just want to throw in something here, Lindsay, Nixon is known for parks because he recommended urban parks. There's a lot of good substance to that, but it's more quality of life than it is environmental. 

When it comes to the Wilderness Act of 1964, the wilderness act required a 10-year study for lands that are pristine. And that 10-year study went through 1974. So, it culminated during Nixon's presidency. Nixon was working to limit a lot of those wilderness areas under lobbying of industry. 

So, Nixon would say I'm all for parks, I'm all for public lands. Behind the scenes he's more about the greatest use of those lands. It was a political issue and the political wave crested, Nixon was there, it began to fade, there's reaction to it. That's what I would stress. 

Lindsay: A helpful part of the story. I'm so glad that you brought up that parks element, because I do think that continuation is really essential. So if people want to learn more about you and your work, where can they find you? 

Brooks: If you're interested in this my work can be found on Amazon. It's a Nixon and the Environment. And then I did the biography of a Russell E. Train, who was one of Nixon's foremost, environmental advocates. He was a Republican and the books entitled Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism.

Train was pushing Nixon to embrace the environment, Train very conservative, very Republican by the time he passed away he was voting democratic. He was more environment than Republican. Are you a Republican or are you an environmentalist that's where it comes to the head in the Nixon administration, but those two books you can get online.

I'm not, and don't quote me on this Lindsay, but I'm not anybody prominent.

Lindsay: No, there is people always want more reading. That's very helpful. 

Discussion

Lindsay: There was a lot of wonderful information in those conversations and a lot to digest. So, what were the main takeaways you had from those interviews?

Brian: So, listening through them this word kept coming up, but the question kept coming up in my mind, which was this word: sincerity. And what does the bully pulpit and the president's use of it have to do with how sincere they are about a topic. So, there are two things that come to mind.

So, Megan talked about how Benjamin Harrison, pretty unknown president for most people, was really important for the national park system and the saving of land in the West. And it came out of his visits to Yellowstone. The way she talked about it, it was almost like it was this conversion moment of sorts where he had to come back and testify and do something.

And then on the flip side of that, you had Brooks talking about Nixon and his overall interpretation that I read as I listened to him was you should see Nixon as being basically political, partisan political.

When he speaking about major environmental issues that happen even during his presidency, like the endangered species act, because really what he was concerned about was making sure he appeared to speak about those things on the surface. But underneath being more friendly to policies that really weren't in the service of the environment at all. 

So both of these presidents use their pulpit to speak about the environment and ways to protect it. But they're coming from very different points of view or levels of sincerity. 

Lindsay: That's such a great point and I love that she brought up Benjamin Harrison. It also confirmed my deep belief that I need to get to Yellowstone. I'm so glad that as a nation, we have preserved it. 

And I love that point and mine dovetails off of it because what I found so fascinating was the role of political parties in this question. And early on, when Mark was talking about how Washington and Jefferson believed in the importance of capturing land out West to sell for the government to have funds or to ensure that there was a release valve for white settlers, that was a bi-partisan concept. Pretty much all white officials believe that the West needed to be captured for white farmers. 

And then we see a pretty significant shift in the late 19th century when only the Republican Party really seems interested in preserving the land for the purpose of preservation, as opposed to for farming or for agriculture. And we start to see real political differences.

Yet there was almost a shift back in the 1970s where climate change was for a brief moment, a bipartisan issue. Now, not maybe necessarily everyone agreed on all factors, but the fact that Nixon was the one that signed in these agencies into law and created or signed these bills is pretty remarkable.

And so I just makes me sad that preservation is a political football, but I feel like maybe there's an answer to be found perhaps in this past story about how to make it less of a partisan football.

Brian: I wonder how we get there as I do with a lot of things, because increasingly not just the president, but senators and congressmen and individuals have these limitless platforms from which to garner support. And rarely do I feel like people are using them in ways that are meant to do good for broader people so much as they're using them for the next election cycle. 

And the environment seems like the sort of thing that gets most caught up in that, because unlike say, your political opponent, the trees don't fight back, they don't have a voice and nor do the animals usually. And so when people continue to use their platforms on this issue to score political points, it makes me long for someone who might just stand up and do it for the, do it for the parks. 

Lindsay: It's true. When I think one of the elements of this topic that's particularly difficult is the changes that we would see occur slowly. They are done in an incremental sort of way. And unless you have a giant collapse of an iceberg or an ice shelf, or you have a huge flood, you don't typically see the change in a day-to-day way, unlike gas prices or your election procedures, which are very tangible.

And it's easier to punt the issue, and it's easier to leave it to executive discretion or executive order, which was one of the issues that Megan talked about. And there's real benefit there when a president is committed to preserving our resources and trying to take action to combat climate change.

But then if a president isn't there, isn't a whole lot of oversight. And as we saw with former president Trump, he could roll back a lot of the things with little recourse. And I agree with you we need some Lorax. We need someone to fight for the trees.

Brian: Perhaps we can take a podcast road trip to Yellowstone and fight for them together there. 

Lindsay: I love this idea and you definitely need a podcast road trip and we should do it as you know how, okay, we're going to test to see whether or not Jeff is listening to the podcast our beloved intrepid leader and our former cohost and hopefully future co-host has often done trips to different places for D-Day and Pearl Harbor.

And I think that we should do a Yellowstone trip to commemorate national parks. And I'm going to see if he's listening and see if he likes that idea.

Brian: I support the idea of a trip to national parks for CPH. I don't know, vote, make your voices heard on the non-existent poll that we have. Perhaps you can vote by telling a friend about this podcast and helping us spread the word. 

Lindsay: Sounds good.

Outro

Lindsay: That's it for today's episode on the bully pulpit, national parks, environmental protection.

Thanks so much to Mark David Spence, Megan Kate Nelson and Brooks Flippen for sharing their insights and experience with us today. 

The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, is a production of Southern Methodist University's Center for Presidential History. Our thanks to the office of the provost and the Dedman College of Arts and Sciences for their support and special thanks to the entire CPH team for producing this episode.

Our original theme music was composed by Marshall Engel. For show notes, more information on our experts, guest’s recommended readings and so much more about the Big Speeches and the other presidents we are talking about this season visit pastpromisepresidency.com. Tune in next week to learn about presidents, Native sovereignty, and Native removal.

It's going to be an important episode and you won't want to miss it.