BOOK MARK : Scenery at 60 Miles an Hour Is No Way to Enjoy Nature : Conservation: As Interior chief for FDR, Harold Ickes advocated strikingly contemporary notions of wilderness preservation.

Harold L. Ickes was one of the central figures of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The longest-reigning and one of the most influential interior secretaries, he built the department into a powerful tool for the protection of lands. As head of the Public Works Administration, Ickes was responsible for construction of public buildings, highways, dams and sewage systems across the country.

However sincere and deeply rooted, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brand of conservation was far closer to the utilitarian traditions of Gifford Pinchot than to the preservationist instincts of an Aldo Leopold or a Bob Marshall. If he believed in stewardship, it was stewardship for human use; if he believed in recreation, it was a democratic recreation, one to be enjoyed by and available to all Americans, including those like himself who could only embrace the outdoor experience by automobile. There was a powerful “need for recreational areas, for parkways which will give to men and women of moderate means the opportunity, the invigoration and the luxury of touring and camping amid scenes of great natural beauty.”

He had little sympathy for wilderness as an abstract idea, or much appreciation of wilderness landscape as pure aesthetic--particularly if it was not covered by trees. “It looks dead,” he said after his first visit to the Grand Canyon.

His secretary of the interior shared with him a decent regard for stewardship in the name of human use; he would spend billions of dollars proving it. At the same time, Ickes brought to his job a fully formed and genuine appreciation of wild country that had been nurtured in him from his childhood days in the tangled, woodsy beauty of the land around his boyhood home of Altoona, Pa., and reinforced by his trips to the West in the years before and after World War I.

On March 3, 1934, Ickes initiated a series of weekly broadcasts over NBC on the virtues of the National Park System. He began by recounting his first horseback trip into Glacier National Park with a friend in 1916, and if his description utilized every cliche he could lay hands on, it was no less valid as an illustration of his depth of feeling:

“I love nature. I love it in practically every form--flowers, birds, wild animals, running streams, gem-like lakes and towering, snow-clad mountains. All of these Glacier Park has--and much more besides.

“Imagine a great valley literally massed with lovely flowers in full bloom. A riot of color. No formal garden this, meticulously planted with an iris here, a phlox there and a peony yonder, but such a planting as only nature itself could plan or afford. As we went higher and higher into the mountains, the flowers, while of the same variety as those in the valleys, became smaller and smaller until way above the tree line where bitter winds blew constantly even in the bright sun and frost formed every night, we found some of these same flowers blooming on plants of alpine size. But the coloring! The higher up the mountains the flowers grew, the more vivid and deeply colored were the flowers, until one drew one’s breath at their marvelous beauty!”

This from the man whose Bureau of Reclamation dams and sundry PWA projects would take hold of nature and shape it to human purposes as never before in history. But if he endorsed and promoted such uses, Ickes would demonstrate repeatedly during his years as interior secretary that he was every bit as passionate in his determination to preserve the land in its wild state. It was a contradiction that apparently raised no questions in his own mind.

With equal sincerity, he could stand and deliver a speech in San Francisco in October, 1934, celebrating the delivery of the first water from the reservoir that had flooded John Muir’s incomparable Hetch Hetchy Valley, declaring it a great moment for human vision and foresight.

Fewer than four months later, Ickes could stand before a conference of state park authorities in the Interior Department auditorium and defy his President and his own director of the National Park Service, who wanted to extend the Blue Ridge Parkway through Great Smoky Mountains National Park in what was billed as a “Skyline Drive.” The beautiful Blue Ridge, choreographed by the National Park Service, built by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Public Roads with Civilian Conservation Corps labor and financed entirely by PWA funding, was just under construction as one of the showcase parkways of the New Deal. Ickes liked it well enough, but believed that it should go no farther than the northern boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains Park, and said so at a state park authorities meeting.

“I am not in favor of building any more roads in the National Parks than we have to build. I am not in favor of doing anything along the lines of so-called improvements that we do not have to do. This is an automobile age, but I do not have much patience with people whose idea of enjoying nature is dashing along a hard road at 50 or 60 miles an hour. I am not willing that our beautiful areas ought to be opened up to people who are either too old to walk, as I am, or too lazy to walk, as a great many young people are who ought to be ashamed of themselves. I do not happen to favor the scarring of a wonderful mountainside just so that we can say that we have a skyline drive. It sounds poetical, but it may be an atrocity. . . .

“I think we ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country as we can. It is easy to destroy a wilderness; it can be done very quickly. But it takes nature a long time, even if we let nature alone, to restore for our children what we have ruthlessly destroyed. . . .

“There ought to be many exceptions when it comes to dealing with wilderness areas, with regions of natural beauty. We ought to resolve all doubts in favor of letting nature take its course. In a field where nature is preeminently the master artist, where nature can do much more than we can do with all our cleverness, with all of our arts and with all of our best efforts, we cannot improve but can only impair if we undertake to alter.”

This was in the way of a manifesto, and he meant every word of it. The Great Smoky Mountains portion of the skyline drive was never constructed, and he consistently resisted the building of highways where he felt highways had no business being built.

“We are making a great mistake in this generation,” he told a group of road builders in his office early in 1937. “We are just repeating the same mistake in a different form that our forefathers have made. Instead of keeping areas . . . which will add to the wealth, health, comfort and well-being of the people, if we see anything that looks attractive we want to open up speedways through it so people can enjoy the scenery at 60 miles an hour.”

Ickes was quite as earnest about wilderness preservation. And in the great park battles to come, the secretary--a hard-boiled refugee from the meanly pragmatic street warfare of Chicago politics--would repeatedly validate his position as one of three interior secretaries in U.S. history--Stewart Udall and Cecil Andrus are the others--to understand and value the importance of wilderness preservation to the spiritual and ecological well-being of the nation.

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952” appears on Page 1 of today’s Book Review.