A Passion for The Land

John F. Seiberling and the Environment Movement

Daniel Nelson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781612775425
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Akron native and former U.S. Representative John F. Seiberling (1918–2008) grew up on his family's estate overlooking Ohio's Cuyahoga River Valley. Within his lifetime, Seiberling would become a leading player in the movement to protect the natural environment and help transform his childhood playground into the federally protected Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

A Passion for the Land begins with a fast-moving narrative of Seiberling's early life and a vivid description of the physical environment that stimulated his lifelong interests in nature and wilderness. Author Daniel Nelson provides a detailed examination of the congressman's role as a dedicated environmentalist, covering Seiberling's efforts to pass path-breaking legislation during the 1970s and the equally important period of defensive activity during the 1980s.

Seiberling's successful bipartisan campaign to protect the Cuyahoga Valley became a stepping-stone to other important conservation efforts. Working with like-minded legislators and activists in the expanding environmental movement, he used his increasingly influential position in Congress as chair of the House Subcommittee on Public Lands to foster urban parks, transform Alaska, and make wilderness protection a hallmark of the new approach to public lands management. The result was the creation of 100 million acres of parks and refuges in Alaska and millions of acres of protected wilderness in national forests.

Based largely on unpublished correspondence and other previously unused materials, A Passion for the Land concludes with a review of Seiberling's ongoing involvement in environmental affairs following his decision to retire from Congress in 1987.

1

John F. Seiberling and His Times

Just before noon on Monday, June 22, 1969, an oil slick near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, a quarter mile from Lake Erie and from Cleveland’s Public Square, caught fire. Over the years there had been at least ten fires along the heavily polluted waterway, but this one proved to be larger and infinitely more influential than any of its predecessors. Alerted at 11:56 A.M., the fire department dispatched units from three fire battalions and a fireboat and had the blaze under control by 12:20 P.M. In the meantime the flames had shot up forty feet and had largely destroyed the Norfolk and Western trestle across the river and badly damaged a second railroad bridge. Downtown Cleveland office workers were treated to an unexpected but all too familiar show.

The burning of the Cuyahoga on that June day soon became a cause célèbre, a vivid report on the accumulated problems of midcentury urban America. The Cleveland Plain Dealer interpreted it as one more embarrassment for a tired and beleaguered city. “Cleveland, eh? Isn’t that the place where the river is so polluted, it’s a fire hazard? Yuk, yuk, yuk.” Complaining that the river had given the city “a bad name for years,” the editors called for more stringent regulations. “We are tired of Cleveland being the butt of a joke that isn’t a joke.”¹ A month later, in a widely noted article, Time magazine described the plight of American rivers generally, using the Cuyahoga as a lurid example. The article featured photos of the Cuyahoga fire and of Cleveland’s mayor surveying the scene and bemoaning the blow to the city’s image. A caption read: “If you fall in, you don’t drown—you decay away.”²

Unhappily for the residents of Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River conflagration became an enduring symbol of the problems that all cities, indeed virtually all communities, faced in the late twentieth century. The growing sensitivity to those problems, such as water pollution, had far-reaching results. Like racial segregation, poverty, and other contemporary concerns that evoked similar responses, pollution was most effectively addressed through national legislation, with uniform restrictions and an overarching regulatory authority. A series of congressional acts, notably the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, attracted bipartisan support and comparatively little opposition. President Richard M. Nixon’s contribution, the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 by a reorganization act that consolidated the staffs and duties of several existing agencies, was also widely greeted as evidence of a new determination to ameliorate the social costs of postwar prosperity.³

But the infamous Cuyahoga River had a second symbolic role, arguably as important as its association with pollution. For nearly a decade local activists had argued that the river valley—the area between the southern Cleveland suburbs and Akron, Ohio, approximately thirty miles to the south—was the last large natural area in an increasingly urban region and deserved to be preserved as a public park. The polluted river was an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one, as the waterway itself was too small, irregular, and unpredictable to permit more than occasional recreational activities. It was the broad and surprisingly pristine valley, the “green shrouded miracle,” in the words of a later National Park Service author, bounded by steep hills on the east and west, that made the area appealing.⁴ The river’s periodic floods had discouraged farming in the nineteenth century and housing developments in the twentieth. An early canal, a later rail line, and a handful of farms and villages suggested, however, that the valley’s relatively pristine condition was not assured and that the encroaching suburbs were a harbinger of the Valley’s future. By the 1960s the campaign for a Valley park had enlisted public authorities in Cleveland and Akron; a variety of environmental, recreational, and historical groups; and many interested citizens. The most influential member of that diverse group was John F. Seiberling, a local attorney with a well-known name and a strong personal interest in the Valley and its possibilities. If revulsion against the burning of the Cuyahoga represented one major thrust of an emerging environmental movement, the campaign to preserve the Valley represented another, complementary expression of concern about the fate of nature in an urban-industrial world. Together, they accounted for the far-reaching changes in public policies toward the use and misuse of air, water, chemicals, and other dangerous substances and toward national parks and public lands generally that characterized the 1960s and 1970s.

Seiberling was well suited to this role. His family had arrived in northeast Ohio in the early nineteenth century, had flourished, and had become closely identified with the area’s industrial growth. His grandfather and great-grandfather had, for brief periods, been among the richest individuals in the region, and even in the nation, but their fortunes had waned, and Seiberling inherited little apart from his name and the memory of living in the family’s great estate at the north edge of Akron, overlooking the Valley. After a distinguished military career and a legal apprenticeship in New York, he had returned to Akron to work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, the company his grandfather had founded at the turn of the century. In the late 1950s he and his wife had begun to buy land in the Valley, and in 1960 they had built a home on a steep hill in Bath Township, north of Akron, with a magnificent view of the surrounding forest and ravines. This move was suggestive of other changes in Seiberling’s life: a growing civic role, notably in the burgeoning movement to preserve the Valley and in the larger environmental community; an association with the local Democratic Party (which made him something of a black sheep among the Seiberlings); and a more active interest in organizations devoted to world peace and, after 1965, opposition to the Vietnam War.

The antiwar movement prompted Seiberling’s decision, at the age of fifty-one, to run for Congress, but his link to the Cuyahoga Valley was a better predictor of his political career and the mark he would leave, quite literally, on the American landscape. In part because of an abiding interest in land use, and in part because of the narrow jurisdictions of congressional committees, Seiberling would play a leading role in the wholesale reorganization of public lands that began in the 1960s and peaked during his congressional career. Together with a handful of other political leaders and a much larger group of political activists, scientists, and enthusiasts outside government, he would help redefine the role of public lands for a burgeoning urban and suburban population and an environmental movement that increasingly viewed the ecosystem as the basic landscape unit.

None of this would have been possible without the groundswell of public interest in protecting and preserving the natural environment that became the basis for a wide-ranging political movement. Earlier efforts to conserve wildlife, special landscapes, and other natural resources had had lasting impacts on public policy, especially in the form of parks and wildlife refuges. But the post–World War II growth of the U.S. and world economies and the proliferation of new technologies demanded more vigorous and complex compensatory measures. The emerging environmental movement was both more holistic in perspective and more varied in its organizations and goals. Seiberling, for example, worked closely with the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society, and other groups that had a strong presence in Washington, D.C., by the 1970s. Yet he also had frequent contacts with the Cuyahoga Valley Association, the many groups that fought strip-mining abuses in Appalachia, and the wilderness coalitions that appeared in most states with substantial national forest lands after 1977. The organized environmental community proved to be as protean as the problems it addressed.

As a member of the House, and a practical politician, Seiberling quickly gravitated to the northern “liberal” bloc that dominated the House of Representatives and to a lesser degree the Congress in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he scorned labels and insisted on his independence, he shared many values with other representatives of urban districts in the Northeast and Midwest. As a student he had become an enthusiastic supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and, contrary to family tradition, a Democrat. Like most Roosevelt partisans, he believed that government had a responsibility to set and enforce appropriate standards for economic behavior. The Seiberling enterprises had been based on private entrepreneurship and a strong sense of social responsibility, but they were exceptions. As Seiberling explained to an executive friend in 1975:

I believe strongly in the free enterprise system, but I also believe that it must be subject to regulation where experience has shown the need to protect the public, and the system itself, from abuses. . . . I am old enough to remember the beginnings of the New Deal and to have heard at first-hand many dire predictions and complaints about the disastrous effect all the new regulatory agencies were going to have on business. However, as it turned out, the period since those days has seen the greatest material progress and the greatest prosperity and growth of business in our nation’s history. . . . So when I hear sweeping denunciations of government regulation, I am inclined to take them with a “grain of salt.”⁵

He was more concerned about unregulated or poorly regulated economic activity. Appalachia was the best (or worst) example. Seiberling was alternately appalled and fascinated by that vast and beautiful region, where government seemed oblivious to the surface (or strip-) mining of coal and the devastating impact it had on both the natural environment and the region’s citizens. The plight of Appalachia became a powerful argument for restrictions on natural resource industries in other regions, notably the West and Alaska. But the problem was even more complicated and challenging than the absence of adequate regulations. During the second half of Seiberling’s congressional career he devoted most of his attention to publicly owned lands and the professional public agencies that managed or, according to the many watchdog environmental groups that monitored their behavior, mismanaged them. Even capable public officials could become captive to the powerful groups they dealt with on a daily basis.

These were challenging assignments, but nothing that would have surprised a student of contemporary public policy. What Seiberling did not anticipate and found himself largely powerless to influence was the economic turmoil that beset Akron and most other midwestern communities from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, virtually his entire political career. The rubber industry, which had been so closely identified with Akron’s growth and his family’s fortunes, underwent a series of upheavals that made the city’s future more uncertain than at any time in the previous century. Like most elected officials, Seiberling worked to ameliorate the effects of these changes (including the application of pollution standards to the city’s industries). Yet, for all his flexibility, he remained independent and impossible to take for granted. He refused to cooperate, for example, when his union allies demanded protectionist measures to preserve jobs and traditional opportunities.

Seiberling’s opposition to protectionism was an indication of an underlying distrust of politicians and government that was another theme of his career. One reason for going to Washington had been to make government more transparent and accountable. He and like-minded colleagues enjoyed some successes in the 1970s, but the challenge remained nearly as formidable in 1987 as it had been in 1970. He made even less progress in curbing the Pentagon and its allies in the Congress. His frustration was evident in a letter to one of his staunchly Republican uncles: “Obviously, even the government of the United States cannot afford to go on indefinitely running a deficit year after year. A great many so-called ‘liberals’ have held this feeling for a long time, even if, unlike ‘conservatives,’ they did not make it their battle cry. What do you think I have been talking about the last 6 years when I constantly proclaimed that our national priorities needed some basic changes? How many times have I pointed out that waste in government, particularly in the Defense Department, was slowly wrecking our economy?”⁶ In the meantime, his battles for parks and wilderness provided more evidence that “nothing happens in Congress just because it’s right.”⁷ The only possible resolution of this dilemma, of flawed and highly corruptible public agencies performing important, indeed indispensable services, required the presence of an alert and public-spirited citizenry and enough honest, independent elected officials to maintain the integrity of the system. He summarized this perspective in 1977 when he told a Denver audience that he was often appalled by the “crassness” of Washington. He preferred to “come out and listen to the ordinary people who are approaching something not from the standpoint of selfish profit but of what is in the public interest.”⁸

Although Seiberling was involved in virtually all of the major political controversies of his time, his greatest interest and his greatest achievements were in the design and execution of public land policy. Casting himself as a representative of all the people, he attempted to chart a course that addressed the needs of a more congested and urbanized country, more sensitive to the natural environment. That meant creating new national parks, particularly parks near urban centers, such as the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area; redefining the functions of the federal land agencies, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in particular; and limiting the managerial authority of the agencies by setting aside public lands notable for their scenery, wildlife, unusual characteristics or resources, potential for watershed protection or other distinctive qualities as official wilderness, where commercial activities were forbidden and government would tread lightly. Taking advantage of the public attention that events like the Cuyahoga River fire had generated, he was among those most responsible for the initiatives that resulted in a quintupling of federal “acres managed for conservation” between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, and for the new order in public land management that accompanied and occasionally inspired that expansion.⁹

Seiberling’s career is best seen, then, as an expression of the growing environmental consciousness of the second half of the twentieth century, a consciousness that took myriad forms and was shaped and given permanent character by a relative handful of individuals in and out of government. In the right place at the right time, Seiberling brought a refined ethical sense, a keen intelligence, and infinite patience to that task. Two decades later, the significance of that contribution is more apparent than ever.

2

Origins

“I am deeply disgusted with the way the world is rushing headlong into world war no. 3,” John Frederick Seiberling Jr. wrote to an uncle on April 21, 1946. Three years of military service in Western Europe had made him aware of the “demoralization and disintegration that has been taking place in the democratic nations.” During a brief interlude at home before enrolling at Columbia University’s School of Law, he joined several concerned friends in founding the Akron United Nations Council. Meeting at the Akron Public Library on April 2, they had elected officers and formed committees; Seiberling agreed to serve as secretary. Their goal, he explained, was to “start the people as a whole to thinking creatively and in terms of basic principles again.”¹

Nearly a quarter century later, when Seiberling first ran for public office, he expressed similar sentiments. He was disillusioned with government, anxious about the future of the country and the world in the face of uncontrolled militarism and destructive military technologies, and yet hopeful of the people’s ability to think “creatively in terms of basic principles.” No less concerned about war—at this time, the Vietnam War—he was also alarmed by the accelerating assault on nature, the profligate use of natural resources, and an all too common tendency to disregard the environmental costs of economic activity. Immediate challenges drove Seiberling to seek political office just as they had led him to help form the...