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Book Review
| The State Park Movement in America: A Critical Review. By Ney C. Landrum. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. xv + 288 pp. Illustrations, selected bibliography, index. $44.95.
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| After a distinguished career as director of Florida's state parks, Ney Landrum has written his valedictory. In doing so, he highlights a gap in the historiography of state parks. Unfortunately this work, as he acknowledges, does little to address this need (although his publisher would have potential readers believe otherwise). Given the dearth of studies of individual parks or park systems, a synthetic history of American state parks would be difficult, even for a practiced historian. Instead, Landrum attempts to identify a nationwide "movement" to preserve and make accessible a variety of landscapes. |
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As local adjuncts to better-known but less accessible national parks, state parks, Landrum writes, have protected scenic resources and provided recreational space and spiritual uplift. He distinguishes between "user-oriented" parks, built around artificial features (e.g., tennis courts) and "resource-based" parks—landscapes of notable scenic value, including historic sites (p. 21). Only the latter, he contends, are the proper domain of state park administrators. |
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Landrum stresses the degree to which state parks have been the creation of the federal government (specifically the National Par Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps) and notes that today's state parks offer an array of amenities, including inns, marinas, golf courses, zoos, and "living history" displays. These offerings comprise an attempt to make state parks as self-sufficient as possible: Modern park administrators seek revenue from user fees, corporate sponsors, and, if fortunate, dedicated tax funds (pp. 245–50). |
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Oddly, Landrum fails to make a case—arguing either from precedent or administrative necessity—for his strictly preservationist understanding of state parks. In dismissing, for example, Manhattan's Riverbank State Park atop a twenty-eight-acre rooftop (home to pools, a restaurant and a carousel), he writes that its "only distinguishing characteristic [as a state park] may be the signs identifying it as such" (p. 237). If there are reasons for such parks to be run solely by municipalities rather than states, Landrum fails to cite them. Why are historical reenactments suitable for state parks but not urban swimming pools? |
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Ultimately, Landrum's professional desire for some standardization in modern park administration leads him to seek evidence of such uniformity of purpose in the past, an apparently fruitless quest driven at least in part by his choice of protagonist, the National Conference on State Parks. To portray the growth of state parks as a "movement," he assigns importance to an organization that, based on his own evidence, was too marginal to have fostered any coherence in state park development. In a frustratingly inconsistent narrative, NCSP is variously described as "interventionist" on behalf of state parks, but also prone to passing resolutions that were "so broad ... as to be almost useless," whose "relevance to the state park movement became tenuous at times" (p. 119). Indeed Landrum eventually concedes that this Conference "could be [either] used or ignored" by potential constituencies (pp. 123, 172), and acknowledges the "futility of trying to devise a single pattern to fit all state park programs" (p. 175). |
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What Landrum's work—poorly edited and severely lacking in substantive historical analysis—underscores is the need for a set of serious histories of state parks. Either a memoir recounting his own work in Florida or an in-depth study of his own state system would have been a far greater contribution to the literature of American parks. |
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Peter Mickulas is a staff member of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, Department of History, Rutgers University, and Senior Historian at the Cultural Resource Consulting Group in Highland Park, New Jersey. He is the author of the forthcoming, Giving, Getting, and Growing: Philanthropy, Science, and the Founding of the New York Botanical Garden, 1888–1929 (NYBG Press, 2005). |
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