Government actually had a 'best idea'

"If you want to take over health care, can you name for us a single government program that has worked?"

At the moment that question was being asked at one of August's fiery town-hall meetings, I was sitting in an alpine meadow with my 9-year-old daughter, watching a perfect half-moon go down behind a wilderness ridge.

We had hiked three and half miles that day, past glaciers and treeless lakes. Now we were alone in a darkening emerald valley. One hiker back at the parking lot had described this spot as a "hobbit glade."

There's nothing man-made here but the trail, I said. No lights or sounds. No planes overhead. At that my daughter looked up and noticed, for the first time in her life, that there was a dark side of the moon.

The fee for this? Fifteen dollars. For three days at the close of summer in Mount Rainier National Park. For that same price we could have stayed seven.

"There is no way you would have any of that without the power of the federal government."

That's Al Runte, a Seattle historian who has written four books about national parks and preservation. He recently advised documentary filmmaker Ken Burns for the upcoming series "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."

Says Runte: "We would have trashed Mount Rainier the way we did Niagara Falls. There wouldn't be the low-cost access we have today. Without the government, it is inconceivable that any of that area would be the magnificent thing it is today."

I called Runte because it occurred to me while hiking that by the standards of today's political discourse, Mount Rainier is a citadel of socialism. A federally owned, taxpayer-subsidized nanny state run by a quasi-military organization.

No weapons allowed. Pick a plant and you may go to jail. I had to get a special permit to go backpacking, which got checked by vigilant park rangers three times in one day.

How, a hundred-plus years ago, did a freedom-loving, maverick American society agree to such a heavy-handed scheme?

The short answer is that it didn't.

"The national parks were bitterly fought, every one of them," Runte says.

Burns' documentary tells the stories of people who pushed to conserve places such as Mount Rainier. But their efforts, Runte says, were often met with "howls of protest, the same kind of anger you see in the town-hall meetings today."

Before Mount Rainier was a national park it was designated a "forest preserve" (the forerunner to the national forests). When Grover Cleveland set aside much of the Cascades and Olympics in 1897, Northwesterners all but mutinied.

It's "a galling insult to local sovereignty," the Seattle Chamber of Commerce wrote to Congress. "King George had never attempted so highhanded an invasion upon the rights of Americans."

The controversy later cooled at Mount Rainier. Mostly due to a corporate giveaway. The railroad that owned land there cut a deal to swap it for far more valuable acres elsewhere.

Still, the park was blocked for years on the grounds that it was too much government.

"I object to the Secretary of the Interior becoming the keeper of a park, and I object to taxing all the people of the United States to maintain a park in the state of Washington," said a Texas congressman, in 1896.

In 1899, a Seattle advocate of the park described how Congressman Joseph Cannon, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, told him, while puffing on a "big, black cigar," why he was going to shoot down the idea.

"... In a year or so you will be coming back here seeking money from the Treasury to improve the place, and make it possible for visitors to go there, which things we do not need," Cannon said. "We haven't the money therefore, and I think I will kill it."

He didn't kill it — because backers promised not to seek federal aid for the park. Which of course in short order they did.

"He saw the light later on," the advocate said of Cannon. "He realized that his view and conservatism was not the right principle for so great a country."

I don't know about all that. But clearly a more collectivist, communal philosophy won out in the end.

Today the idea of using government power to preserve nature has swept the globe. In addition to 58 national parks here, nearly 13 percent of all the land in the world now is under park or reserve protection.

"That all comes from us," Runte says. "It started here. It is truly a great American achievement."

Do we even know we did this? Are we willing to admit, today, that government actually did something great?

The other day in this newspaper, the former chief operating officer of Microsoft, Bob Herbold, wrote an op-ed arguing that "collectivist, government-led reforms" always fail and are, at root, anti-American. I wonder: Has he ever been to Mount Rainier?

I'm not saying all government is good. A lot of our effort at this newspaper is spent chronicling how it can go bad.

It just seems we've accepted the cynical notion that any collective action is cancerous.

Why did the rugged individualist leaders of a century ago not pass on the "best idea"? Runte says we had an inferiority complex to Europe. (They have the Sistine Chapel; can't we at least have Yellowstone?)

But there was also a strong ethic of national purpose. It was enough for them to take what Ken Burns calls the "radical" step of levying broad taxes to preserve a few of the greatest places. For all, not just for the rich. And for all time.

"A hundred years ago, they got it — that as much as America is about freedom, there are also obligations to the society and to future generations," Runte says. "Now it's all, 'What are you going to do for me? Right now?' "

I hope my daughter remembers our little hike to that hobbit glade at Mount Rainier. But I also know it doesn't matter, because it will be there forever.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.