service personnel charged with preserving the dunes and catering to a multiplicity of public tastes.[1]
At the close of the New Deal decade, NPS officials would have high praise for the consequences of planning and implementation of service policy. Hugh Miller, superintendent of the "Southwestern National Monuments [SWNM]," reported in September 1940: "White Sands has demonstrated its unquestioned standing as the most important southwestern monument from the standpoint of visitor interest." Within two years of its opening, the monument eclipsed all attendance records for the 23-unit SWNM system that encompassed the "Four Corners" states of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and southern Colorado. Yet no one connected to the park service could have prophesied the organizational debate that ensued in 1933 over the proper functions of the vast gypsum dunes. Some of this could be ascribed to the still-evolving corporate culture of the NPS, which along with other federal agencies had to learn hard lessons about western ecology, economics, and politics. It would not help, as Gerald Nash noted, that federal officials "often openly expressed contempt or hostility for western ways." Monument custodian Tom Charles, his contemporaries in Alamogordo, and the regional and national hierarchy in the park service thus spent seven years defining the standards that would guide White Sands for the remainder of the twentieth century.[2]
Within days of President Hoover's announcement, Tom Charles wrote to Horace Albright about the park service's strategy for assuming control of White Sands. Local civic boosters wished to celebrate their good fortune with a dedication ceremony that summer. Albright encouraged this as "a means of getting wide-spread publicity." The monument would come under the purview of NPS's famed superintendent of southwestern monuments, Frank "Boss" Pinkley. Because Pinkley worked at the Casa Grande ruins south of Phoenix, Arizona, he doubted that he could travel to southern New Mexico before the spring of 1933. Albright further warned Charles that no congressional action on funding for White Sands could occur until that July. This did not stop Charles from seeking Pinkley's permission to take a highway grader out to the dunes to create an access road into the monument. Pinkley thus had to issue the first of many warnings to the exuberant Charles, asking him to wait until NPS personnel arrived to survey the new monument.[3]
Pinkley's word of caution bothered Charles not a bit, as he believed that the real power in the federal government resided in Congress, not in the park service. He soon wrote to White Sands' benefactor, Bronson Cutting, asking his help in bringing highway
- ↑ Nash, American West in the Twentieth Century, 155, 169; Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 218.
- ↑ Report of Hugh Miller, Superintendent, Southwestern National Monuments (SWNM), September 4, 1940, RG 79, NPS, WHSA Files, Denver FRC; Nash, American West in the Twentieth Century, 169.
- ↑ Horace M. Albright, NPS Director, to Charles, February 6, 1933; Frank Pinkley, SWNM Superintendent, to Charles, February 12, 16, 1933, National Park Service, Central Consolidated Files (NPS, CCF) 1933–1949, New Mexico, White Sands Files, Box 2424, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (NARA, DC); Charles to Pinkley, February 14, 1933, RG79, NPS, WHSA Files, Denver FRC.
