This is the final installment in a multi-part series exploring the youth and adolescence of Robert Stanton, former Director of the National Park Service and the first director of color, and how the context of his early years informed his tenure atop the NPS. You can read part I here, part II here, part III here, and part IV here.
I set out to write about Robert Stanton, 15th Director of the National Park Service, by chance. I was taking a course on the art and craft of biography with Dr. Marla Miller and I needed a subject. With an interest in national parks, public spaces, monuments, and memorials, I often found myself scrolling through various NPS webpages. When I happened upon this page, a list of past directors, I noticed that until Stanton, the directorship was exclusively a white man’s club. I thought there must be a story here.
Stanton brought a unique lived experience to the NPS which informed his time within the service and at the helm of it. I thought it was important to bring at least some of that experience to light.
The historical narrative of the NPS is dominated by white male actors like Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, Franklin Roosevelt and Conrad Wirth, and Stewart Udall and George B. Hartzog. Few of these men could understand poverty; none could understand segregation.[1]
No one, for example, could relate to Stanton’s arrival at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming as a seasonal ranger in 1962. He had to borrow money for travel and room expenses, and he couldn’t find any lodging:
“So I thought obviously there must be one or two black families here that I could stay with, because I didn’t have money for a hotel room. I walked around and didn’t see any black faces. So I inquired. ‘No, no black folks live up here.’ So I said, ‘Oh, what am I going to do?’ I went to a gentleman, Mr. George Lumley, who owned and operated a drugstore, and he also had some rental units, like a motel, and I told him my plight. And he said, ‘No problem. I’ll just put you up for the night. And when you get paid, just come back and settle up with me.’ That was great.”
None could relate to going out for a meal with friends only to be denied service because of the color of their skin:
“When we arrived in Jackson Hole, we went to this particular lounge or bar to be served. The waiter approached the table and said, ‘Sorry, we can’t serve you here.’ When we asked why, he repeated, ‘Sorry, we just can’t serve you here.’ The four of us left. In Texas or North Carolina we expected it, but not in Wyoming. So there were still certain establishments in Wyoming pre-1964 Civil Rights Act that would not serve African Americans. But I contrast that experience with the generosity or benevolence on the part of the gentleman, the drugstore owner, who just extended himself.”[2]
His account of landing as a stranger in the vast expanse of Wyoming is no doubt instructive when trying to understand the formative experiences and effects of Stanton’s life. His descriptive memory of Mosier Valley is quite vivid. It is a trove of information on life in rural Texas, a microcosm of the Jim Crow Southwest, a highlight of the power dynamics at play within entrenched social and political constructs. The Mosier Valley School protest is one such example.
In interviews, speeches, articles, and other materials Stanton described the prejudice of his environment but also how culture, family, and community institutions resisted and thrived despite a socio-political system corrupted by racism and oppression. It’s hard to imagine how a person couldn’t be affected by these kind of violent circumstances and carry them for the rest of their life.
I was fortunate in my research to find supporting resources, such as newspaper articles and oral history transcripts, which illuminated new dimensions of the Mosier Valley protest and other incidents in Stanton’s youth. Memory-making is a very personal and powerful phenomenon, so when I was able to enmesh the perspectives of other Mosier Valley and Euless residents together, I found greater depth and detail behind the motivations, expectations, reactions, and resistance that made these events feel as graphic today as they were in the 1950s.
Stanton’s life and his tenure at the NPS deserve further study. His presence continues to be felt at the park service from strategic planning to ceremonial events to its overall vision. My short biography of Stanton offers us a backstory of the man during his formative years but there’s plenty more than can be gleaned about him and, as a result, the NPS. For example, his days as a seasonal ranger in rural Wyoming, his rise through the park service bureaucracy, the management positions he held, his relationships with lawmakers and scholars like John Hope Franklin, and the cultural exchange between himself and the various park sites he directly and indirectly oversaw, are all elements that comprise a larger, dynamic, and complicated historical narrative of our collective relationship with public lands.
I hope someone better informed and better equipped than I (and with express authorization from the subject himself!) takes up this worthy challenge.
[1] In his memoir, George Hartzog wrote “Poverty clung to us like a sweat-soaked shirt.” (Hartzog, Battling for the National Parks, 15.)
[2] Stanton, interviewed by McDonnell, 7-8.
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