by Eric Rutkow
A Nation of Vagabonds
AS WITH SUBURBIA and tree farms, outdoor recreation had a history that greatly predated the form it would assume in America during the twentieth century. The idea of enjoying leisure time among the forests and their trees had been a recurring theme of life in the young nation. It informed the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. It helped inspire the urban parks movement that Frederick Law Olmsted spearheaded. And it brought thousands of well-heeled Americans into the grand hotels of the Catskills. Restless boys retreated to the forests to imitate the exploits of backwoodsmen, while grown men banded together into social clubs devoted to hunting and sport—the ranks of this latter group included President Theodore Roosevelt, founder in 1887 of the Boone and Crockett Club, an open-air fraternity of sorts.
Nonetheless, outdoor recreation was but a minor breeze in the gale of ideas that led to the creation of the national forests in the late nineteenth century. The 1897 Pettigrew Amendment—which outlined the purpose of the newly created national forests and which, Pinchot later determined, was among “the most important Federal forest legislation ever enacted”—did not even acknowledge recreation. It listed only three legitimate uses: “to improve or protect the forest,” “[to] secur[e] favorable conditions of water flows,” and “to furnish a continuous supply of timber.”
This was not to say that no one spared a thought to the recreational potential of these novel creatures of federal authority. Pinchot himself, in the 1907 Use Book, the pocket-sized bible of the Forest Service, wrote: “Quite incidentally, also, the National Forests serve a good purpose as great playgrounds for the people.” In the sentence that followed, however, he hinted at just why outdoor recreation was little more than an “incidental” concern: “They are used more or less every year by campers, hunters, fishermen, and thousands of pleasure seekers from the near-by towns.” This was, to put it mildly, not a very significant figure in a nation of 90 million souls—Central Park alone could boast a number of visitors several factors greater.
The paltry number of forest frolickers likely owed more to logistics than to custom. The government-owned trees could not be reached without expending great effort. Practically none of the new forest reserves—located exclusively in the far West before 1911—were accessible by tourist train, the primary mode of distance travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, public woodlands were functionally off-limits for nearly all Americans. The main exceptions were either the lucky few who lived close by, the devoted naturalists like Muir who gleefully tramped for days on end across any stretch of woodland they could access, or the thoroughly financed adventurers like Teddy Roosevelt who could afford a horse, ample provisions, and a competent guide.
But the inexorable process of development kept motoring along, bringing new opportunities with it. The same era that witnessed the creation of the nation’s timber reserves also saw the arrival of the most transformative technology of the twentieth century, the automobile. This new “horseless carriage” promised a degree of mobility and freedom hitherto unknown to the average American.
Of course, delivering on that promise seemed as difficult as chopping down a hickory with a blunt ax. The earliest car models, of which there were thousands, performed unreliably but carried pricetags that only the rich could afford. The automobile thus began as a luxury primarily confined to intracity transport. This situation, however, would soon change, thanks in large part to the efforts of Henry Ford, a mechanic whose name would eventually become synonymous with the idea of mass production.
Ford was born on July 30, 1863, in Dearborn, Michigan, a hamlet five miles away from the city of Detroit. His father was a prosperous farmer, one who pressured his son to adopt the family vocation. But the younger Ford showed little interest in agriculture. At sixteen, he headed to Detroit to apprentice and work with a number of manufacturing concerns, including Westinghouse. It was during this period that he encountered an early model internal combustion engine, a machine that grabbed his imagination as surely as a magnet attracts iron. He nonetheless returned to Dearborn in 1886 when his father offered him forty acres of timberland in exchange for abandoning the machinist trade. Ford thus briefly became a lumberman, though he also used this time to get married and continue his mechanical investigations on the side. As he explained, “[W]hen I was not cutting timber I was working on the gas engines—learning what they were and how they acted.” Once all the timber had been cut, Ford packed up his belongings and headed back to Detroit, entering the hurly-burly world of automobiles for good in 1890.
By 1903, he had amassed enough capital and experience to open his own shop, the Ford Motor Company. Six years of experimentation followed, until he and his team—which featured several future titans of the industry, including the Dodge brothers—settled on the idea of focusing all the firm’s efforts on the fabrication of a single, standardized design: the Model T. Ford declared, “I will build a motor car for the great multitude.” To make good on this promise, he needed not just a solid design—for which the Model T undoubtedly qualified—but also a manufacturing process that could churn out enough cars to meet the seemingly bottomless demand for affordable vehicles. His team began to analyze every facet of production, seeking ways to improve efficiency, accelerate fabrication, and increase scale. Within four years, they had settled on a revolutionary approach that would become the hallmark of modern industry: the assembly line. Complex tasks were broken down into their constituent parts, each of which was assigned to a single worker who remained stationary as his assignment arrived on an automated conveyor belt. The subsequent production numbers told the story: By Ford’s calculations, in 1909 his firm had produced 19,000 cars at a price of $950 each, but by 1916 the output had climbed more than forty times, to over 785,000, while the price fell by more than half, to $360. Suddenly, thanks to Ford and his team, the automobile was available to the average American.
Ford believed that his new car was a vehicle as much for pleasure as for productivity. The same speech in which he had announced his plans to build “a motor car for the great multitude” had also included the assurance that it would allow any man to “enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” Of the two types of Model T, the slightly more expensive one was branded specifically for “touring.” As Ford later explained, “The single matter of giving people a chance to move about and see the world is an element which of itself would be sufficient to change the character of the people.” And this change in character included the desire to access the forests and trees whose remoteness had thus far kept them segregated from the great majority of Americans.
On this matter, Ford led by example. Over a period of seven years, from 1918 to 1924, he embarked on a series of car camping trips that helped introduce this new form of outdoor recreation to the nation. Ford’s celebrity was so immense by this point that anything he did was likely to receive some degree of media coverage, but it was the company he kept that made these outings front-page news. Joining him were three other giants of the era, men whose reputations were of such vast magnitude that it was fitting they could only be contained in the open-air cathedral of the forests. There was Thomas Alva Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park, New Jersey, who, by dint of his 99 percent perspiration, had given the world the incandescent lightbulb, the motion-picture camera, the phonograph, and some thousand other patented devices. There was John Burroughs, the wise man of the Catskills, a naturalist whose writings about nature rivaled those of Muir in popularity and impact. And finally there was Harvey Firestone, the nation’s rubber baron, upon whose tires rolled the millions of Model Ts that the Ford Motor Company produced. Collectively, this unlikely grouping would soon be known as “the four vagabonds.”
The idea for their car camping trips dated to 1915, when Ford, Firestone, and Edison encountered each other at the World’s Fair in San Francisco. The occasion was the celebration of the fair’s Edison Day, a testamen
t to the popular reverence that the inventor enjoyed. After the festivities concluded, the threesome determined to travel together by private car to San Diego, where yet another Edison Day was about to be held. According to Firestone, “All of us had such a good time that Mr. Edison proposed that the three of us go camping the next year.” An invitation was soon extended as well to Burroughs, who was by then an octogenarian but as lithe as his beard was long. Firestone suggested that he was recruited because Edison “wanted a man along who could tell us about the trees and the birds and the flowers.” Ford may have also wanted a chance to proselytize for his product, noting that Burroughs had “developed a grudge against modern progress . . . [and] declared that the automobile was going to kill the appreciation of nature.”
Edison selected the Adirondacks as the site for their first trip in the summer of 1916. At the last moment, business obligations forced Ford to withdraw, but the other three traversed more than a thousand miles together, touring by day and sleeping in tents at night. Burroughs wrote, “John Muir would have called it a glorious trip. . . . We cut the heart out of the Adirondacks, and we took a big slice off the Green Mountains.” They planned to repeat the adventure the following year, but, as Firestone explained, “[T]he coming of the war found us with our hands too full to take any time off for gadding about.”
Circumstances were less chaotic by the summer of 1918, at which point all four men finally set out together. This time their destination was the Great Smoky Mountains of the Southeast (much of which would become a national park in 1934). Though they were seeking to escape among the trees, they nonetheless came equipped with all the conveniences that autocamping afforded. R. J. H. DeLoach, a professor who was one of several guests accompanying the vagabonds, explained,
The camping equipment was very elaborate. . . . The caravan, so to speak, was always headed by Mr. Edison’s 4-cylinder Simplex. Mr. Firestone’s Packard came next, followed by two Model-T Fords. Then came two vans, the first of which was called the dining room and kitchen, carrying all the necessary equipment for cooking and serving and an abundance of good food. At the end of the line was the van carrying the tents, cots, bedding, and blankets.
Burroughs, in reflecting on this scene, described his merry band as “a luxuriously equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort.” On their first night they camped in an oak grove about thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and each man began to assume his unique vagabond identity: Edison preferred to read or meditate, Ford would seize an ax and “swing it vigorously till there [was] enough wood for the camp fire.” At night, they gathered around the fire, beneath the shadows of the trees, to discuss literature, business, politics, the war, and anything else that came to mind (Ford hadn’t yet begun to express the anti-Semitic views that would tarnish his legacy). Such was their rhythm for days on end, as they cruised about some of the most majestic forestland remaining in the East. Firestone considered this 1918 adventure “the best that we ever had.”
But it was far from the last. The following year they returned to the Adirondacks for another grand tour. The next summer there was no car camping, but the group did briefly gather at Burroughs’s home. While there, a tree-chopping contest broke out between Ford and Burroughs. Firestone noted, “We gave the victory to Mr. Burroughs.” This would be the vagabonds’ last memory of the great naturalist, for he died soon after. But even without their tree-chopping champion, the car trips continued. In 1921, the remaining three vagabonds set forth into the woods of Maryland with an even grander assemblage and a guest list that included President Warren Harding and his wife. Their final gathering, in 1924, comprised a series of excursions in and around Massachusetts, the most notable of which was a visit to President Calvin Coolidge at his family home in Vermont.
The vagabonds might have continued their forest autocamping adventures beyond 1924, but as Firestone explained, “the publicity which the trips began to gather around them eliminated their object and charm. . . . [I]t became tiresome to be utterly without privacy.” Everywhere the group traveled it encountered eager crowds, a phalanx of reporters, and the constant whirring of motion-picture cameras. The attention made it near impossible for the vagabonds to find solitude among the trees, but it also meant that the entire nation was able to glimpse the pleasures of autocamping, something that no doubt pleased Ford.
By the time the vagabonds finally disbanded, millions of Americans had purchased mass-produced automobiles and sought to emulate the escapades of Burroughs, Edison, Firestone, and Ford. The New York Times estimated that by the early 1920s nearly 6 million cars a year were being used for autocamping (an impressive figure considering that there were only 10 million cars in the entire nation at that point). In response to this development, there soon appeared an industry of roadside services. Popular touring routes grew crowded with campsites, food vendors, gas stations, billboards, and restaurants. Products targeted at this new booming market also began to appear. In 1923, the Coleman Gas Lamp Company, previously the makers of domestic gas appliances, introduced a camp stove that it marketed as “The Smooth Way to Rough It.” Other businesses followed with tents, camp clothes, portable furniture, specially packaged food, and a slew of gadgets and gizmos designed for the outdoors.
The federal government took pains to usher along this new, seemingly unstoppable movement that had appeared on the heels of Ford’s innovations. In 1915, Congress passed a law that allowed long-term permits to be issued in the national forests for summer homes, lodges, and other recreation structures. The following year, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Highway Act, the first major legislation devoted to road construction. It included an allocation of $10 million for constructing new roads within the national forests, where the number of visitors had jumped from the “thousands” of Pinchot’s day to more than 3 million by 1917 (that same year, visits to the national parks, which had been established with recreation in mind but which had a much smaller total area, were fewer than 250,000).
Shortly after the passage of the Federal Highway Act, the Forest Service commissioned a landscape architect to study the question of forest recreation and autocamping for the first time. This initial review led to further discussions that ultimately prompted the nation’s chief forester to caution in 1920: “It is only by the adoption of a sound national recreation policy that the public interests can be safeguarded.” The recreation question, by this point, had risen all the way to the highest levels of government. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge convened the first National Conference on Outdoor Recreation (NCOR). It was, in certain respects, the era’s equivalent of the 1905 American Forest Congress that Teddy Roosevelt had hosted. Secretary of State Elihu Root wrote that the NCOR was a timely response to “one of the most important and necessary readjustments of American life.”
The decade that followed this first recreation summit brought more conferences, more federally sponsored studies, and more roads. But the demands that car-owning vacationers placed on the nation’s public lands rapidly outpaced the capacity of these measures. Established campsites became crowded and dirty. Roads got jammed with Model T Fords. Acres of trees fell victim to the flames that spread from unattended campfires.
This was the situation facing the nation when Franklin Delano Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1933. But the commander in chief soon had the so-called tree army at his disposal, and the CCC placed recreation among its highest priorities. The program’s forestry manual noted, “The growth of forest recreation since 1916 has in some sections placed it at the top of the list as a forest value.” With hundreds of thousands of young men and hundreds of millions of emergency funds, the CCC quickly revolutionized the recreational potential of the nation’s public forests. In total, CCC labor created or improved nearly five thousand public recreation spots. But this represented only half of the work necessary to increase public access to the outdoors: Roads would also be needed so that motorists could reach these CCC-sponsored sites. The tree army met this chal
lenge with equal enthusiasm. The national forests had contained fewer than fifteen thousand miles of roads at the program’s outset, but a decade later, that number had increased nearly ten times.
All of this activity turned out to be a mere prelude for the onslaught of recreationists that was about to descend upon the national forests like a horde of leisure-seeking locusts. The era of prosperity that followed the conclusion of World War II meant that suddenly almost every middle-class family both owned a car and had time for vacations (leisure hours had increased 50 percent since 1920). Furthermore, much of the postwar population growth occurred in the West, home to the overwhelming majority of national-forest acreage. In consequence, the number of recreational visitors increased from 10 million in 1945, to 27 million in 1950, to 46 million in 1955, to over 92 million in 1960. It marked a staggering 900 percent augmentation over a fifteen-year period in which the total population only grew by 35 percent.
But recreation was not the only activity that depended on widespread access to the nation’s publicly owned trees. Rather, its acceleration corresponded to a new era of intense logging in the national forests. These public trusts had hosted commercial lumbering before World War II, but on a relatively limited scale. The demands of the war and the subsequent housing boom, however, brought new pressures. The 1946 Report of the Chief of the Forest Service began by declaring: “Our forests today are not supplying enough timber products. While thousands search desperately for places to live, construction of urgently needed dwellings is hampered by lack of building materials.” In the fifteen years following World War II, the total cut of timber in the national forests ballooned from 2.7 billion to 9.4 billion board feet. And sites of timber harvesting—typically done through clear-cutting—rarely provided much recreation potential.
