America's national parks: 'An empire of grandeur'

Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns | Special for USA TODAY

One hundred years ago, only about a dozen national parks existed, all of them in the Far West. The departments of Agriculture, Interior and War each claimed some responsibility over them, but in truth, no one was in charge, and the parks suffered as a result.

Stephen Mather set out to change all that. An energetic businessman with what reporters called "an incandescent enthusiasm" and a special genius for promotion, Mather had already made a small fortune by portraying California's Death Valley as an exotic location in advertising his company's 20 Mule Team Borax brand laundry cleaner to American housewives.

In 1915, he called attention to something closer to his heart. He embarked on a campaign to convince Congress that the national parks needed both protection and promotion from a single agency of the federal government.

Mather, an admirer of John Muir, who had called national parks "places to play in and pray in," knew from personal experience that time spent in nature could provide inspiration and solace to a person's spirit and restore a person's health — mental as well as physical. But now, he added two more arguments to advance his case.

On the one hand, he said, parks were "an economic asset of incalculable value." They generated millions of tourism dollars that benefited the nation as a whole, and especially the states and communities where they were located. They were also, in his words, "vast schoolrooms of Americanism," by which he meant that people who enjoyed their national parks would have greater pride in the nation that created them.

Throughout 1915, Mather traveled the country, covering nearly 35,000 miles, calling on Americans to see their parks as "an empire of grandeur" that had been neglected for too long. He led (and paid for) a lavish backcountry trip into the Sierra Nevada with influential media magnates and industrialists, taking every opportunity to preach his vision for the national parks: better protection, improved services for tourists, more parks and expansions of existing parks, all brought together in a unified system under a single government agency.

He attended the ceremonies dedicating the brand-new Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where another Muir acolyte, Enos Mills, had finally achieved his dream of setting aside the place he loved for future generations. In Arizona, he stood in awe at the rim of the Grand Canyon — at the time a national monument only loosely protected by the Forest Service — and implored of anyone who would listen, "Make this unbelievable wonder your next national park."

All the while, Mather enlisted a diverse coalition into his greater cause — from schoolchildren to chambers of commerce, from railroads to the General Federation of Women's Clubs. And ultimately, in August 1916, it all paid off when Congress created the National Park Service and Mather was named its first director.

A lot has happened in the intervening hundred years. As the Park Service prepares to celebrate its centennial, it now manages more than 400 special places, with at least one in every state. They are urban sites as well as majestic landscapes; shorelines and mountains as well as artists' or inventors' studios; historic places that commemorate our proudest moments as a people as well as reminders of darker episodes that a truly great nation must never ignore or forget.

In advance of its 100th birthday, the National Park Service and its partners, with first lady Michelle Obama and former first lady Laura Bush as co-chairs, launched an ambitious program of outreach — called "Find Your Park" — that is meant to encourage more Americans to visit some part of this legacy, this "empire of grandeur," that has been passed on to us. With an increasingly urban, increasingly diverse population, it's essential that all citizens understand that they are welcome in our parks, which, after all, belong to them.

In addition, they have announced an exciting initiative, "Every Kid in a Park," with the grand ambition of getting every fourth-grader in America into some park during the upcoming school year by providing free passes to the children and their families and giving teachers lesson plans to turn the visits into learning experiences. Stephen Mather's "vast schoolrooms of Americanism" will become actual schoolrooms.

As honorary park rangers, we hope you will support these efforts even before the centennial birthday party begins. We encourage you to "Find Your Park" this summer, whether it's a grand portion of America's great outdoors or some small piece of the mosaic of our history.

You won't have to travel 35,000 miles, as Stephen Mather did a hundred years ago; there's a park closer to you than you think.

Take your children along, as we have, regardless of what age they are. You will be the better for it, and the youngsters exposed to any national park today will be tomorrow's guardians of "America's best idea."

Burns and Duncan are the creators of the PBS documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea.

See more with a gallery of the most visited national parks in the USA: