Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma

by Ethan Carr

In the years following World War II, Americans visited the national parks in unprecedented numbers, yet Congress held funding at prewar levels and park conditions steadily declined. Elimination of the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs further reduced the ability of the federal government to keep pace with the wear and tear on park facilities.

To address the problem, in 1956 a ten-year, billion-dollar initiative titled "Mission 66" was launched, timed to be completed in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the National Park Service. The program covered more than one hundred visitor centers (a building type invented by Mission 66 planners), expanded campgrounds, innumerable comfort stations and other public facilities, new and wider roads, parking lots, maintenance buildings, and hundreds of employee residences. During this transformation, the park system also acquired new seashores, recreation areas, and historical parks, agency uniforms were modernized, and the arrowhead logo became a ubiquitous symbol. To a significant degree, the national park system and the National Park Service as we know them today are products of the Mission 66 era.

Mission 66 was controversial at the time, and it continues to incite debate over the policies it represented. Hastening the advent of the modern environmental movement, it transformed the Sierra Club from a regional mountaineering club into a national advocacy organization. But Mission 66 was also the last systemwide, planned development campaign to accommodate increased numbers of automotive tourists. Whatever our judgment of Mission 66, we still use the roads, visitor centers, and other facilities the program built.

Ethan Carr's book examines the significance of the Mission 66 program and explores the influence of midcentury modernism on landscape design and park planning. Environmental and park historians, architectural and landscape historians, and all who care about our national parks will enjoy this copiously illustrated history of a critical period in the development of the national park system.

Published in association with Library of American Landscape

Genres: History, Nature, Architecture

424 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 2007

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

As defined in the preface, Mission 66 was a decade-long planning, landscape, and architecture initiative begun in 1956 that transformed the national parks in the United States into the form we know them today” (ix). Due to the deteriorating condition of America’s national parks, which had received little attention during World War II and were being visited by unprecedented numbers of people, Mission 66 sought to improve the situation of crowded roads, jammed parking lots, inadequate visitor facilities, and poor maintenance in time for the 50th anniversary of the National Park Service: 1916-1966. Ethan Carr points out the main controversy of the movement in that it paradoxically catalyzed the environmental movement (in opposition to park services expansion); more utility by humans meant less preservation from their destructive uses. These issues were closely related to highway expansion and extension into and through national parks. What was intended and advertised as ensuring that the national park service maintained its commitment to being public parks--open to all Americans for scenic enjoyment and recreation--was viewed by many environmentalists as an unsustainable development plan that commercialized and damaged nature.

"Above all, Mission 66 funded more than one hundred ‘visitor centers,’ a new building type invented by the agency’s planners and architects, which was at the heart of revised ‘master planning’ goals for the parks” (10-12).

“A new identity for the agency was forged, represented by a new idiom of park architecture and by the ‘arrowhead’ agency logo, introduced in 1951 and featured prominently on buildings, publications, and redesigned uniforms” (12).

The purpose of Mission 66 was accomplished: “the reinvention of the national park system and the National Park Service—and to some extent the national park idea—to meet the exigencies of postwar American society” (12).

Mission 66 was presented to the public as a dramatic new initiative in 1956, but it was responding “to severe pressures on the national park system that had already been analyzed and lamented for years.” Many aspects were first suggested in the 1930s, but the story of Mission 66 “really begins in 1945, as the dismal postwar situation described as ‘the dilemma of our parks’ rapidly unfolded” (19).

Another secondary controversy concerning Mission 66 was its adoption of modern architecture in its design. Through the late1930s, "rustic" architecture made of local wood and stone carried the day in park architectural style. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) ensured that this preferred style could be financed and Americans in general became familiar with favorably associating it with "natural" environments. Upon returning to full employment in the postwar era, modern architecture and its associated construction techniques came into the park system. In general, most critics responded unfavorably as horizontally oriented flat roof designs and ranch style houses came to replace steeply pitched log cabins and cottages made of rusticated stone. In his conclusion, however, after chronicling how Mission 66 came about and became a realization, Ethan Carr stresses that whether you agree with the policies and legacy of Mission 66 or not, understanding it is key to moving forward with future plans for our national parks, that again stand largely in need of long-overdue deferred maintenance funds and care.

[Gib]

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