Friendly Persuasion: Stephen Mather and the National Parks Portfolio

The Homestead archives recently acquired a copy of the first National Parks Portfolio. The Portfolio text was written by Robert Sterling Yard, Stephen Mather’s best man at his marriage, and whom Stephen enlisted in his campaign for a National Parks Service.

As TIME Magazine wrote, “Mather and Yard reasoned that public support for a centralized management of the national parks would be a key step in making sure that the government took action…The cornerstone of the Mather-Yard public relations endeavor was the National Parks Portfolio, a collection of nine heavily-illustrated pamphlets that conveyed the grandeur and diversity of America’s natural scenery, and also suggested that visiting these national parks, aside from being enjoyable, was an act of good citizenship. The Portfolio’s 1916 first edition ran 275,000 copies, many of them distributed to prominent Americans, including every member of Congress.”

In that first edition Stephen wrote: “The Nation must awake, and it now becomes our happy duty to waken it to so pleasing and profitable a reality.  This portfolio is the morning call to the day of realization…”

Twelve years later, in the fifth edition of the National Parks Portfolio, Stephen wrote: “When the first edition of this Portfolio was issued in 1916 comparatively few people were aware that the country possessed this empire of grandeur and beauty…In that year only 356,097 people visited the national parks.  Since then, however, the visiting list has steadily mounted…until in the 1927 travel year 2,354,643 visitors saw the national parks…”

In 1931, the sixth and final National Parks Portfolio was published, and in the Forward, Stephen’s successor as NPS Director, Horace Albright, acknowledged the fortitude and foresight of his mentor and predecessor…

“To Stephen T. Mather, first Director of the National Park Service, is due the greater part of the successful development of the national park and monument system.  The issuance of the first National Parks Portfolio in 1916 was his personal accomplishment.”