Striking a Balance: Managing Concessions in the National Parks, 1916–33

Abstract

W Stephen T. Mather assumed the directorship of the newly formed National Park Service on 17 April 1917, his infant organization confronted many serious challenges. One of the most vexing, then and thereafter, sprang from the service's obligation to oversee the conduct of the private concessionaires within the national parks. In an era of booming popularity for the parks, the quality of services offered to the public was a particularly pressing matter. Drawing upon existing precedents and upon his own notions of successful administration, Mather sought a proper balance between the rights of private enterprise and the responsibilities of public management. An exploration of concessions policy during the administrations of Mather and of his successor, Horace M. Albright, reveals much about the assumptions that governed National Park Service relations with the private concessionaires for many years. Since the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the regulation of businesses serving the needs of park visitors had rested uneasily in the hands of Congress and the secretary of the interior. Congress, which was slowly accumulating a body of practical regulatory experience, made park regulations intermittently and enforced them fitfully. Enforcement was also in the hands of the Department of the Interior, which lacked an efficient bureaucratic structure to provide continuous supervision and enforce regulations. In the case of Yellowstone, as Richard Bartlett has demonstrated, nearly a decade passed after the park's creation before the Interior Department tried to assert its right to regulate park businesses, and these efforts fell prey repeatedly to political influence peddling. The proliferation of parks during the next quarter century only exacerbated the problem, as the department's responsibilities outgrew its resources) Early in this century, burgeoning public interest in national parks heightened the problem of development. However one park might differ from another, all the parks had to provide the same essential services for their visitors. Even at the nadir of Yellowstone's administration, during the era Visitors arriving at the train station near Yellowstone National Park's Gardner entrance were carried by taxi concessionaire into the park (ca. 1910). Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, Springfield, Virginia.