![[node-title]](http://www.umass.edu/umpress/sites/default/files/imagecache/Title_Image_Scale_300H/covers/CarrReady.jpg)
424 pp.,
200 illus.
Related Subjects:
Mission 66
Modernism and the National Park Dilemma
How a major federal program shaped the development of the national park system
In the years following World War II, Americans visited the national parks in unprecedented numbers, yet Congress held funding at prewar levels and park conditions steadily declined. Elimination of the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs further reduced the ability of the federal government to keep pace with the wear and tear on park facilities.
To address the problem, in 1956 a ten-year, billion-dollar initiative titled "Mission 66" was launched, timed to be completed in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the National Park Service. The program covered more than one hundred visitor centers (a building type invented by Mission 66 planners), expanded campgrounds, innumerable comfort stations and other public facilities, new and wider roads, parking lots, maintenance buildings, and hundreds of employee residences. During this transformation, the park system also acquired new seashores, recreation areas, and historical parks, agency uniforms were modernized, and the arrowhead logo became a ubiquitous symbol. To a significant degree, the national park system and the National Park Service as we know them today are products of the Mission 66 era.
Mission 66 was controversial at the time, and it continues to incite debate over the policies it represented. Hastening the advent of the modern environmental movement, it transformed the Sierra Club from a regional mountaineering club into a national advocacy organization. But Mission 66 was also the last systemwide, planned development campaign to accommodate increased numbers of automotive tourists. Whatever our judgment of Mission 66, we still use the roads, visitor centers, and other facilities the program built.
Ethan Carr's book examines the significance of the Mission 66 program and explores the influence of midcentury modernism on landscape design and park planning. Environmental and park historians, architectural and landscape historians, and all who care about our national parks will enjoy this copiously illustrated history of a critical period in the development of the national park system.Choice
"This book deserves high praise and wide circulation because of its intellectual scope and analytical, as well as documentary, content. Ethan Carr's framing of the subject within the broader context of the wilderness vs. recreation dialectic makes the book valuable beyond the immediate subject. Mission 66 addresses an issue that is central to many of us today and one that will continue to be vigorously debated well into the future."—Richard Longstreth
, George Washington University
"This is an intelligent and level-headed look at the great promise and the great problems associated with the Park Service's Mission 66 program. Embedded in it—and in this fascinating book as well—is the age-old dilemma that has plagued our National Parks since their inception, namely, how to make them accessible to everyone while at the same time saving them from those who too often end up "loving them to death."—Ken Burns, Filmmaker
"The book succeeds as an account of large-scale government planning and standardized environmental intervention, a comparison of visitor versus wilderness-oriented ethos, and a solid example of scholarship that both explains and enriches. Carr focuses on landscape architecture, integrating the economic, sociological, and geographic aspects of the changing national park landscape. This volume should be part of every library supporting planning, recreation, land economics, and geography."—Choice
"Anyone interested in learning more about our national parks, especially as we approach the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016, as well as scholars of urban planning, suburbanization, historic preservation, landscape architecture, and post-World War II modern architecture, should read this book. . . . Mission 66 was a huge program and Carr makes an important contribution by examining many of its facets."—The Public Historian
, George Washington University
"This is an intelligent and level-headed look at the great promise and the great problems associated with the Park Service's Mission 66 program. Embedded in it—and in this fascinating book as well—is the age-old dilemma that has plagued our National Parks since their inception, namely, how to make them accessible to everyone while at the same time saving them from those who too often end up "loving them to death."—Ken Burns, Filmmaker
"The book succeeds as an account of large-scale government planning and standardized environmental intervention, a comparison of visitor versus wilderness-oriented ethos, and a solid example of scholarship that both explains and enriches. Carr focuses on landscape architecture, integrating the economic, sociological, and geographic aspects of the changing national park landscape. This volume should be part of every library supporting planning, recreation, land economics, and geography."—Choice
"Anyone interested in learning more about our national parks, especially as we approach the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016, as well as scholars of urban planning, suburbanization, historic preservation, landscape architecture, and post-World War II modern architecture, should read this book. . . . Mission 66 was a huge program and Carr makes an important contribution by examining many of its facets."—The Public Historian