Sleeping Bear Dunes A Nationalized Lakeshore: The Creation and Administration of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

It was both an end and a beginning. For Allen T. Edmunds, the Michigan man near the end of a long career in the National Park Service, being invited to address a joint session of the Michigan State legislature on the findings of the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey was a culminating honor. For the National Park Service the evening session in 1960 was the beginning of the political fight to ensure that the recommendations of the survey would become public policy. A few legislators, in studied disregard of Edmunds, read newspapers at their desks as he began his presentation. But the breathtaking pictures of Michigan's shoreline beauty soon riveted the entire legislature. The presentation went on for nearly an hour and introduced many of the politicians to the splendors of the Huron Mountains, the Pictured Rocks, and Sleeping Bear Dunes. Afterward, at an evening reception, park advocates and politicians shared their enthusiasms for what they had seen. Ronald Lee, representing the Northeast Regional Office, gushed to the other park service staff that the evening would be something to "write down in their history book" because he "didn't think it would ever happen in any other state." If the effort to create a national park can be likened to a courtship ritual between park advocates and politicians, the first date had gone very well. Yet it certainly would have taken the edge of triumph off the evening if Allen Edmunds and Ronald Lee had known that it would take ten difficult years to finally tie-the-knot on a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The presentation to the Michigan legislators was only the start of a long and divisive political fight. [1]

A quarter century after the creation of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore pockets of deep resentment to the lakeshore continue in Benzie and Leelanau counties. Some of this is the fault of National Park Service planners, such as Allen T. Edmunds, who in the rush to present five Great Lakes areas as shoreline national parks, did not thoroughly examine the assets required to make an effective Sleeping Bear park. The frequent fluctuation in the size and boundaries of the proposed park during the initial stages of the legislative process weakened the public creditability of the National Park Service. The agency was also guilty of failing to anticipate and bring into the planning process local stake-holders, so that the polarization that occurred during the struggle to create the park was more bitter and lasting than need have been. The early 1960s were an era of "top-down" federal leadership, an era when in both domestic and international affairs bureaucrats had considerable freedom of action. The later 1960s were a period of growing distrust of government and federal initiatives. The attempt to create Sleeping Bear Dunes took place in the midst of these contradictory political currents and the clash over the lakeshore was in part shaped by this tension. In the end, however, the vision of a publicly owned and accessible Sleeping Bear was at odds with the pattern of private recreation, which had taken root in northwestern Michigan since 1900. Property owners with deep personal attachments to their holdings were never going to yield without a fight.

SOS The First Sleeping Bear Bill

The first step in fashioning a national park out of the work of the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey was boldly taken by four members of the United States Senate in the summer of 1959. Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon, James E. Murray of Montana, Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, and Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, jointly sponsored S.2460, an omnibus shoreline preservation bill. They cobbled the best areas identified by the National Park Service from all of the shoreline surveys into a single bill. Behind the catchy title "Save Our Shorelines," or simply "S.O.S.," they grandiosely proposed a $50 million appropriation to create ten shoreline recreation areas. Their sites included Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Padre Island, Texas, the Oregon Dunes, Indiana Dunes, Point Reyes, California, Cumberland Island, Georgia, the Channel Islands, California, and the Huron Mountains, the Pictured Rocks, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. "Nearly all of the great National Parks of the United States are in mountain ranges," Richard Neuberger told the New York Times. "In the process of setting aside these magnificent upland reserves, the nation has neglected another realm which is equally alluring to the tourist and the seeker of outdoor recreation. This realm consists of the seacoasts and shorelines of the United States which are among the most beautiful on earth." Like Senator Neuberger's rhetoric, the S.O.S. bill was more designed to inspire future action than to be a serious proposal. Not only was S.O.S. opposed by the Eisenhower administration, it had only modest support from legislators actually representing the states effected by the bill, although Philip A. Hart, Michigan's junior Democratic senator did step forward as a co-sponsor. Neuberger's real concern was to promote the prospect of an Oregon Dunes and Sea-Lion Caves National Recreation Area. While he promoted S.O.S. in the national press he also sponsored a much less ambitious $15 million bill to create three new shoreline parks at the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior. Senate Bill 2460 succeeded in its initial purpose of putting shoreline parks on the legislative table. Individual bills were introduced for the creation of new park units at Cape Cod, Oregon Dunes, Padre Island, Point Reyes, and Indiana Dunes and the general issue of shoreline preservation was brought before the public through local and national media. But Senate Bill 2460 and House Resolution 8445, the companion bill sponsored by John Dingell, a Democratic congressman from lower Michigan, had a very negative impact on the prospect of realizing Michigan's new proposed national parks. [2]

The "Save Our Shoreline" bill came at an unfortunate time for the National Park Service in Michigan. In July 1959, the agency had just begun its specialized studies of Sleeping Bear, Pictured Rocks, and the Huron Mountains. Unlike Cape Cod, where the park service was well along in its plans for a park, the Michigan sites were known only through the recommendations of the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey. Casting those general recommendations into the form of a legal proposal exposed the budding park projects to premature public scrutiny. The greatest damage was done to the Huron Mountain proposal. While the National Park Service was still trying to negotiate access to the private preserve, critics were able to blast the prospect of a significant taking of well-managed private conservation lands. The Huron Mountain Club was able to frame the public debate strictly in its own terms. They were the "wise" husbands of the area and the government was uninformed about the recreational potential of the area. "We know very well," said Renville Wheat, a club director, that "casual visitors or tourists unaccustomed to such conditions (wilderness) would generally speaking, not enjoy these woods." Concepts only in the discussion stage at the Northeast Region Office, of trying to preserve individual club members' holdings while opening the lakes and mountains to the public, of working in partnership with the Huron Mountain Club, were too raw to be floated publicly. Before the park service even knew the battle had been joined, the club engineered a resolution in the Michigan State Senate to condemn a Huron Mountain National Park. [3]

While most of the attention generated by "Save Our Shorelines" in Michigan was focused on the Huron Mountain proposal, the well-meaning omnibus bill did negatively impact the Sleeping Bear area's park prospects. Senate Bill 2460 called for a 26,000 acre recreation area at Sleeping Bear. This figure was based on a one-page description of the area in the report of the shoreline survey. It did not grow out of a detailed local investigation and consultation with state officials and local conservationists. The bill did not even set any boundaries for the proposed park, leaving that to the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior. The prospect of a 26,000 acre park at Sleeping Bear did not draw a lot of attention, but when the agency after completing its detailed study of the Sleeping Bear area recommend a 77,000 acre park, the fact that a much smaller amount of land had been earlier endorsed was used to question the creditability of park planners and bolster opposition calls for a smaller dune park. Senator Philip Hart, who was on record as endorsing the 26,000 acre park, learned his lesson from the "Save Our Shorelines" bill. His office thereafter attempted to work closely with the National Park Service, he patiently avoided premature legislation, urged park supporters to be circumspect, least they arouse "local opposition," and he waited until the official proposal was ready for public scrutiny. [4]

The National Park Service Proposal: Sleeping Bear Seashore

That official proposal marked a major departure from the work of the shoreline survey, even though both reports shared several of the same authors. The reasons for this departure are more difficult to understand than to narrate. As late as the summer of 1960 the park service planners had in mind a modest recreation area of about 30,000 acres which included very little of the private lands around the shores of the inland lakes. This conservative view likely reflects the novelty in 1959 of carving national park units out of private holdings and a realistic understanding of the budget limitations traditionally placed on park projects. The shoreline proposals, particularly the Cape Cod seashore and the development of new streams of revenue dedicated to park projects, such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, were about to effect a revolution in park expansion. But those developments were still in the future. It was only after local conservationists expressed a lack of enthusiasm for the National Park Service's modest plans for Sleeping Bear did the proposed park become large and controversial. The person most responsible for that change was E. Genevieve Gillette, the President of the Michigan Parks Association.

Genevieve Gillette was the grand dame of conservation in Michigan. In 1920, she had been the first woman to graduate from Michigan State University's School of Landscape Architecture. She went on to work for several years in Chicago as an assistant to the dean of American landscape architects, Jens Jensen. Returning to Michigan she set-up her own practice. In addition to consulting on landscape design she became a vigorous proponent of the establishment of public preserves and recreation areas. Her former Michigan State classmate and life-long friend, P.J. Hoffmaster, became the first head of Michigan's budding state park system. His work with the Conservation Commission and her work as a tireless lobbyist played a major role in transforming the Michigan state park system into one of the best in America. In 1959, she founded the Michigan Parks Association to bring under one organization all of the naturalists, sportsmen, and tourism promoters she had previously rallied to sponsor park projects. That organization's support would be vital to the National Park Service if their Sleeping Bear proposal was going to be successful.

In the fall of 1959, the planners from the Northeast Region Office briefed the leaders of the Michigan Parks Association on their recommendations for Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear.5] The response to the Pictured Rocks proposal was unequivocally supportive. But the briefing on a Sleeping Bear park by Regional Director Ronald F. Lee left Genevieve Gillette cool. "Mr. Lee, one thing you'll have to explain to me," Gillette said. "I have the understanding.....that our National Parks are examples of great natural architecture and that they are great pieces of natural scenery that we must all protect them, and while they are to be used by the people, the over-riding thing is that they are so unusual they should be protected for the generations to come....It didn't seem to me that a sand dune compared in any way with such a thing as Rocky Mountain National Park. It seemed to be, while I didn't like to admit it, that it was probably second-rate." Gillette frankly thought that the park service must be so pushed to find recreational lands that it was "lowering its standards." Lee defended the park plan by arguing Sleeping Bear's unique geological origin as a perched dune created solely by the action of wind and water. Gillette countered that if it was the geological story that made Sleeping Bear of national significance than the 26,000 acre area set aside in the park service proposal was too small to "really tell the story of what happened before Sleeping Bear." "The greatest part of that story is quite a bit farther south and you're not even talking about it," argued Gillette. She went to a map of the area and traced out Platte Lake and the Platte River and contended that they were crucial to telling the "natural history of this region." She concluded by flatly stating, "I am not going to work ten years for a bill, unless it's a better thing than this bill is."6]

Gillette had used a complex geological argument, about the Platte River area illustrating how the creation of the dune changed the topography of the area to the south of Sleeping Bear to justify adding the Platte River, Platte Lake, and Platte Plains to the park proposal. It was an old argument that she had long used to try and persuade the State of Michigan to expand Benzie State Park. Since the early 1940's, Gillette had worked with the Michigan Botanical Club and the Cranbrook Institute of Science to have the Platte Plains protected in a park. It was Gillette's involvement, her insistence that "we're going for the right thing," that sent the National Park Service planners back to the Sleeping Bear area to reconsider their plan and to inspect the Platte River country. In the summer of 1960, the agency again met with Gillette and presented a greatly expanded park proposal. 7]

The new proposal was vastly different than the draft Sleeping Bear proposal. In place of a 26,000 acre park it called for 77,000 acres. While the earlier plan had emphasized the recreational resources of the area this final proposal put an equal emphasis on scenic and scientific values. "The most striking scenic landscape on Lake Michigan is found in the Sleeping Bear region," the proposal claimed. It aimed to preserve a "Land of Vistas," the bays and bluffs of the dunes, the morainal plateau, and the stunning views of the inland lakes. To do so it included within the park boundaries the entirety of eleven inland lakes including Glen Lake, Platte Lake, Little Traverse Lake, Long Lake, and Little Platte Lake. Also included were portions of the Crystal Lake Moraine, which afforded spectacular views of the gorgeous lake, but at the expense of taking out three holes from the elite Crystal Downs Country Club. The proposal had within it a contradiction which was later skillfully exploited by opponents to the park and which has bedeviled subsequent management of the lakeshore. On one hand the report clearly stated that "The mission of the National Park Service, if a National Seashore is created at Sleeping Bear, will be to protect and preserve the natural features and bring to the public an understanding of these phenomena through a program of interpretation." Yet the report also predicted that within the first five years of establishment the lakeshore would have a major and favorable economic development impact on the area by attracting an additional 1.2 million visitors. Clearly economic development was the sugar coating that the park service hoped to offer the local communities for the bitter pill of land acquisition with its prospect of loss of tax base and dislocation of families. The linkage of economic revival and conservation would become the principal strategy for selling the Pictured Rocks and Apostle Islands proposals to the residents of the Lake Superior region. Benzie County with only 8,500 permanent residents and chronic sixteen percent unemployment, was not immune to the lure of jobs and a rise in property values, but the incentive was much less attractive than in the beleaguered Upper Peninsula. At Sleeping Bear the unlikely blending of development and preservation caused many to question the thoroughness of federal planning or to suspect an ulterior motive behind the park proposal. The published version of the proposal had an additional weakness, it was extremely vague. The boundaries were imprecisely laid out on a large-scale map. Large numbers of summer homes were included within the park but the proposal promised to "keep to a minimum the disruption of economic and private life." [8]

S.2153 Senator Hart's Sleeping Bear Bill

The politician most responsible for the eventual establishment of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore was Philip A. Hart, Michigan's Democratic senator from 1958 to 1976. Hart was, in the words of a long-time activist in Michigan politics, "a genuine humanitarian." Naturally quiet, reserved in manner, he was anything but a typical politician. His experience in World War II as an officer in the D-Day invasion left him severely wounded, and after a long recovery, anxious to do something positive with his life. His marriage to a daughter of the powerful and wealthy Briggs family in Detroit gave him an entrée into Michigan politics. He was unphotogenic, modest to the point of being apologetic about running, scrupulous about campaign contributions, and intellectual in appearance and actual behavior. He was neither eloquent on the campaign trail or decisive in office. "He debated every possible angle to the solution before he would tell you his decision," recalled a former aide. "Often, if you didn't press him hard, he would never tell you what he decided." Yet as deliberate as Hart was about taking a stand he was dogged in maintaining his position, regardless of the pressure. "Once he made up his mind," a supporter recalled, "nothing could get him to change it." [9]

It was this later quality which would have a critical impact on the fate of the park service's Sleeping Bear shoreline proposal. Hart became the champion of the Sleeping Bear park in 1961 and he never backed down in the long fight that followed. Hart's commitment to the lakeshore grew-out of his belief that it was a project in the interest of the majority of his Michigan constituents and that it would serve the long-term needs of the American people. He personally had a summer house on Mackinac Island. He knew the popularity of the northern lakes region and the limitations of living within a publicly administered park area. Although the creation of National Lakeshores at Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear are a lasting legacy of his Senate career, Hart was not an enthusiastic conservationist in the mold of his fellow Democrats Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin or Frank Church of Idaho. The issues closest to Hart were civil rights and consumer affairs. "He was tolerant of everyone's right to follow his or her own conscience," a colleague recalled. In time he became known as the "conscience of the Senate" for his consistent support of civil rights legislation. His greatest moment came when Lyndon Johnson hand-picked Hart to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through the teeth of a Senate southern filibuster. While Hart was steadfast in his support for the Sleeping Bear proposal, he was seldom involved personally with the drafting or negotiations necessary to make the bill a reality. Hart had a reputation for having brought together an efficient staff and it was to that staff that he, by-and-large, delegated the Sleeping Bear issue. [10]

Hart's proxies in the Sleeping Bear fight were Muriel Ferris and William Welsh. The latter was the Senator's Administrative Assistant and a long-time Democratic Party--Washington operator. Welsh worked his way from positions in organized labor to Executive Secretary of the Democratic National Committee, to Hart's staff, and eventually served on the staff of Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey. Welsh was reputed to have "a keen political mind—and a sharp eye." He was very experienced with legislative matters and often represented the Senator in vital negotiations concerning the lakeshore proposals. Muriel Ferris was the staff member most intimately engaged with the Sleeping Bear issue. She attended meetings, organized supporters, and absorbed the flak of opponents from the beginning of the process in 1961 until the creation of the lakeshore in 1971. More than any other member of the Senator's staff she was interested in environmental issues. Her close and personal association with conservation groups like the Michigan Parks Association helped to keep alive support for the lakeshore plan during the decade long struggle. [11]

Hart's first Sleeping Bear bill, S.2153 was introduced jointly with S.2152, the bill to create Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on June 27, 1961. Both bills were strongly influenced by the National Park Service proposals and by the legislation, then near final passage, to create Cape Cod National Seashore. The Cape Cod bill had broken new conservation ground through its attempt to harmonize existing private developments with long-term conservation and by its revolutionary procedure of authorizing federal funds to purchase those private lands vital to public recreation and resource protection. Hart's bill had five vital provisions:

It called for a 77,000 acre recreation area in Leland and Benzie counties;

i) It gave the Secretary of the Interior the power to purchase or condemn all private land within the park;
ii) Owners of residences could negotiate for 25 year leases;
iii) Owners of residences might also be able to retain ownership in the park provided local zoning was in place;
iv) Contrary to usual National Park Service Policy, hunting would be permitted.

Hart had worked closely with the National Park Service on the bill and he felt confident that the legislation would meet with the support of his constituents. [12]

At first, there was little indication of a controversy over the bill. When the Michigan Park Association arranged an informational meeting on the proposal in Lansing, although notices had been sent to the Traverse City and Frankfort newspapers, only two people outside of the association bothered to attend. Such a response, however, was misleading. Around the Platte Lakes and in Glen Arbor word of Hart's bill spread like spilt milk. In the hot summer sun dismay soured into anger. Through neighbor talking to neighbor, summer residents to locals, a series of community meetings were organized. In a short time the Citizens' Council of the Sleeping Bear was formed as an organized expression of local concern. Senator Hart's office began to receive bundles of letters protesting his bill. Publicly he nursed the fiction that the public response to the Sleeping Bear park had been favorable, while behind the scenes his staff scrambled to come-up with a response that would calm the rising negative response. The solution, arrived at in conjunction with the National Park Service, was to have Conrad Wirth, the Director of the National Park Service travel to the area and calm things down. [13]

Senator Hart's staff, the National Park Service, and the Michigan Parks Association were all guilty of believing their own public pronouncements. The feeling was that people in northwestern Michigan simply were operating in an information vacuum: they did not understand the bill. What was needed was an official spokesman who could separate the facts from the misapprehensions. Conrad Wirth, who was warned by a local supporter, "its going to be rugged," merely joked "I never get called unless there's really fireworks." But the fact was neither he nor Muriel Ferris, who also had journeyed from Washington, D.C., anticipated the traumatic evening. Wirth spent the day of the meeting getting his first close-up inspection of the park area. "I don't know much about this project," he told Genevieve Gillette, but "I am sold on it." The trouble was Gillette was just about the only person in the audience who agreed with him. [14]

August 30, 1961, the day of Director Wirth's appearance at the public meeting in the Glen Lake Community High School, was the day the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore proposal nearly died. It was a hot, humid evening. The little school gymnasium, set-up like an auditorium, was packed with people. It was the end of the summer season and 1,500 to 2,000 angry summer and year-around residents had gathered. As Wirth and his park service staff came into the building they found the hallways leading to the gym packed with an overflow crowd. On the stage was a Michigan highway map with all state and federal forest and park lands highlighted in green to make the point that more recreation land was not needed. The moderator of the meeting was Ove F. Jensen, a long-time summer home owner who had retired to Glen Lake. As chairman of the Citizens' Council of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Area he was anything but a neutral voice. Director Wirth began with a slide presentation on the park service plan for Sleeping Bear. The rest of the meeting was to be devoted to questions. Rather than rely on spontaneous questions from the floor, the Citizens' Council had very cleverly prepared a long list of very detailed and antagonistically worded questions. Jensen put the questions to the Director and insisted that each be answered. Had Wirth been better informed regarding the proposal he would have made a stronger showing. At one point he described the area around Sleeping Bear as "undeveloped." Jensen shot back at him that the park service's own study allowed there were more than a thousand residences in the project area. Press accounts noted that he was "at times ill-prepared to explain the proposal," but the fact was that many of the questions were not fully answerable at that early stage of the project. 15]

The audience, hot and uncomfortable in the packed room, was restless and rude. Catcalls, jeers, and "humorless laughter" greeted many of Wirth's remarks. He emphasized that a federally approved zoning ordinance would allow most summer home owners to remain within the proposed recreation area, not realizing how hollow that sounded to his audience because all previous attempts at zoning in the area had been popularly defeated. Lamely the Director tried to emphasize the long-term beneficial aspects of the plan, such as the protection of the dunes and the increase of annual local revenues by a projected $10 million. Exacerbated members of the audience shouted back that they had moved to Leelanau County to avoid the crowds of visitors conjured by Wirth. The breaking point came when the Director, a second-generation park service employee and a veteran of more than thirty years of federal service, tried to defend the objectivity and competence of the team that put-together the Sleeping Bear plan. The crowd, however, would have none of it and complaints about not wanting to turn over the fate of their homes "to the bureaucrats" were voiced. Wirth, his dander up, proclaimed: "I'm a bureaucrat and proud of it." The meeting degenerated from there. The Director alternated his responses from the terse, "I expect you will disagree, so there is little point in answering," to the combative, as when he told Citizens' Council representatives "You have made a good showing, but we will vote you down." The meeting ended with Ove Jensen again demonstrating his deft handling of the situation. He asked all people opposed to the project to stand up. Virtually the entire room rose as one, save for four chairs in the front row where Muriel Ferris, Genevieve Gillette, and two representatives of the Michigan Conservation Commission sat. "People around us tried to pull us up by the arms," Gillette later recalled. "No, not me," shouted the feisty conservationist, "I'm Miss Genevieve Gillette, I'm President of the Michigan Parks Association, and I'm for this Park 100%." But it was clear that she was nearly the only person in the hall so inclined. 16]

For supporters of the Sleeping Bear bill the evening had gone about as bad as it could have. Senator Hart's hope that the meeting would generate "more light than heat" was dashed. Conrad Wirth felt that he had been ambushed. The blame, however, had to be shared by Hart and the park service. The latter sent the Director in without properly exploring local sentiment or fully briefing him on the plan. Hart was guilty of deferring to Wirth a job he should have done himself, explain why he was asking the Sleeping Bear homeowners to bear a burden for the good of all of Michigan. Not only did Hart beg-off that job but he left the planning of the meeting to the opposition Citizens' Council. Wirth compounded these errors by losing his composure. He latter admitted to an Iowa congressman, "it was a real bad night, sir." 17]

For the opponents of S.2153 the meeting was a defining and exhilarating moment. They had stood up, toe-to-toe with the experts from Washington and carried the day. The meeting had helped to forge a group of anxious and bewildered property-owners into a defiant and assertive organization. Many people heard and reported that Wirth threatened to take their homes. The image of the National Park Service they took away from the meeting was one of an arrogant, elitist, out-of-control agency. The Record-Eagle (Traverse City, Michigan) editorialized that Wirth's performance was "an appalling and almost unbelievable demonstration of how far bureaucratic planners in Washington can go in disregarding the people's rights." Donations began to flood into the Glen Arbor-based Citizens' Council of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Area. In little more than two weeks after the meeting they had received more than $16,000 in pledges and donations. Similar associations were formed in the Platte Lakes and Little Traverse Lake-Good Harbor areas. The tragedy of the Glen Lake meeting was that it had such an extreme polarizing effect on the prospect of a Sleeping Bear park. The opposition became rigid. The language used to describe the bill became combative. "A federal land grab" became the mantra in Leelanau County towns. With their dander up and war chests filled, the opposition left the Glen Lake meeting ready to hire a battery of lawyers and prepared to launch a public relations offensive of their own. The battle for the dunes had begun. [18]

Traverse City was the next engagement in the struggle. Senator Hart had arranged for a Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs field hearing to be held November 13, 1961. The hearing had the benefit of bringing Hart to northwest Michigan to speak directly about the bill. In his testimony before the subcommittee Hart argued that S.2153 was only a draft of a Sleeping Bear bill and that he fully expected to make changes. Introducing legislation he lamely contended was, in his opinion, the best way to spark "discussion." In fact the hearings were a good way to find out how angry and determined people could be when a "discussion" is started with a threat to take their homes. The opposition was able to turn out an audience of 850 people and dominate the hearing with twenty-six of the thirty-five witnesses speaking out against the Hart bill. The most important of these was Congressman Robert P. Griffin. Practically speaking there could be no Sleeping Bear recreation area without his support. Griffin had been among the minority of Republicans who had voted to create the Cape Cod National Seashore and like most members of the Michigan G.O.P. he was a supporter of conservation measures. He was, however, more impressed by the sincerity and strength of the popular out-cry against the bill than by the actual legislation drafted by Hart and the park service. Responding to the often-made charge that opponents of S.2153 simply did not understand what Hart was trying to do, Griffin testified: "I would suggest to the subcommittee that the problem you are having is because these people do understand the bill." That line brought down the house. "My goodness!" exclaimed Senator Moss as he tried to have his gavel heard amid the storm of applause. Griffin said he favored a recreation area that avoided the large inland lakes and the numerous property owners. Hart proposed to take too much land, in the congressman's opinion. 19]

Probably the most important development to come out of the hearing flowed from the testimony of Secretary of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall. The former congressman from Arizona was the most aggressive conservationist to ever occupy that office. Typical of his optimistic and grand vision was his statement that he intended to double the size of the National Park System in the next eight years. Udall thought big and acted aggressively. In keeping with that style he told the Senate subcommittee that the only thing wrong with Senator Hart's proposal was that it did not go far enough. Hart's 77,000 acre recreation area was too small in Udall's opinion. The Secretary outlined to the subcommittee a Sleeping Bear park 92,172 acres in size. New areas to be added included, for the first time in any proposal, North Manitou Island and Sugarloaf Mountain. Udall's mention of North Manitou Island had a significant impact on all subsequent Sleeping Bear proposals. That island, which failed to impress the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey and the subsequent park service study teams, thereafter was destined to become part of the park. At the time, however, Udall's testimony had a strongly negative impact. His contention that a Sleeping Bear park needed to be bigger in the face of strong public opposition made the bureaucracy seem insensitive to the popular will. Furthermore, for the Department of the Interior to move from recommending first a 26,000 acre park, to a 77,000 acre area, to now a 92,172 area gave the impression of a capricious planning process. For his contribution Udall had the honor of joining Philip Hart in being hung in effigy in Traverse City. 20]

The Traverse City hearing marked an effective end to S.2153. It was a poor bill—vague and imprecise--very poorly presented. Neither the National Park Service nor Senator Philip Hart had done the research in Leelanau and Benzie counties necessary to anticipate the needs and concerns of the local community. The partnership also had floundered with S.2152, their attempt to create a Pictured Rocks National Recreation Area. There the local community was supportive of the park plan but the bill ran into the buzz saw of corporate timber interests. Both bills were a product of haste and good intentions. For Sleeping Bear Dunes the legacy of these mistakes was lasting divisions, bad feelings, and a decade of delay.

New Approches, Old Problems

Senator Hart's characteristic doggedness, his unwillingness to surrender a principled point was demonstrated by his willingness to follow S.2153 with a new bill in July 1962. The legislative initiatives which followed that ill-fated first bill all were the result of a much higher degree of personal involvement, if not by the Senator himself, then by Hart's staff. The Senator was much less inclined to trust the National Park Service. He told the press that he was "as much on the side of the original bill's critics as a defender of the Park Service." Hart wanted less involvement by Conrad Wirth and Stewart Udall and more by William Welsh, his highly respected principal aide.21]

But like it or not Hart and the park service were joined at the hip and warily they worked together to make another attempt at creating a park. Hart's staff, understandably, was concerned with finding a formula to mollify the inland lake property owners. While the park service was open to doing this they were constantly concerned about setting a precedent that might affect other national seashore projects such as Point Reyes and Padre Island. Neither the agency or Hart's office wanted to swap land for peace, by reducing the acreage of the proposed lakeshore. But William Welsh did propose creating a narrow zone composed of the built-up sections of shoreline which would be fully exempt from the park so long as adequate zoning was in force. People in these zones would be totally outside the control of the Secretary of the Interior. In Welsh's view such a provision might have the effect of "cracking off" a portion of the solid phalanx of opposition arrayed before them, by "causing jealousy and resentment on the part of homeowners not included in one of the zones." The concept of a private exclusionary zone within the park, in effect, promised most inland lakeshore property owners there would be no condemnation acquisitions. Hart also added to the bill a twenty-five year moratorium on public access to the inland lakes from lands acquired from willing sellers. With these provisions they hoped to remove the image of Glen Lake crowded with unwashed urban masses as well as the unpopular specter of a federal land grab.22]

The fruit of their cooperation was Senate Bill 3528, but before Senator Hart introduced the bill in July 1962, his office and the park service's Allen Edmunds embarked on a careful campaign of preparing the people in the local area. Edmunds in particular was heartened by the first signs of popular support for the park he found budding beneath the winter snows. With the majority of their influential "summer neighbors" back home in the cities to the south a number of influential people in northwest Michigan began to emerge as supporters of a Sleeping Bear park. All of them agreed that the original bill had been badly bungled but that the basic idea was one that could attract local support. Organizations like the Motel Association of Traverse City naturally were open in their support of the project, but Edmunds found that the Traverse City Chamber of Commerce was not immune to the lure of national park dollars either. Judge Ormond S. Danford, well-connected in Traverse City political circles, assured Edmunds in February 1961, that if a "referendum were held today 95% of the people of the Grand Traverse region would favor a park—not necessarily this proposal, but some form of park." In Benzie County Edmunds found the same signs of an emerging pro-park leadership. Max Goin, chair of the Benzie County Board, told Edmunds that he had voted to reject the park plan out of sensitivity to his constituents, but that he was personally in favor of a dunes park and was sure that a better bill would win the support of the majority of the board. John Peterson, editor of the Benzie County Patriot, offered his support in the up-coming struggle. The strongest thing in favor of the park proposal, all supporters agreed, was the fact that most people felt that some type of federal dunes park was now inevitable. This sentiment became all the stronger in March 1962 when President John F. Kennedy delivered a special conservation message. Sleeping Bear Dunes was one of ten new park areas specifically named by the President as necessary to the nations' "increased need for additional recreation areas." [23]

The changes proposed by Senator Hart in S. 3528 were designed to throw the opposition Citizens' Council off-balance and feed the encouraging signs of growing local support. But Ove Jensen and the other home owners groups were not so easily outflanked. During the winter Jensen and his group had worked to promote township zoning in the areas proposed for park status. It was a divisive, thorny issue that split the community on economic lines, but by beginning the issue themselves the Citizens' Council was able to effectively make the point to the folks at home that this was not an issue they would want to defer to the Secretary of the Interior. At the same time, Jensen could argue to the press that there was no need to have the federal government come into the Sleeping Bear to save it, because the local people were already acting to preserve the area. Also, just as Hart's changes to the bill were beginning to be circulated, the Citizens' Council launched their own public relations drive. Don Gordon, a savvy publicist and a veteran Republican party activist, authored a scathing article for the March issue of Michigan Challenge magazine: "Sleeping Bear, A Big Idea with Little Merit." He used the forum to attack Hart's amendments to the original bill before they could be formally introduced. Those changes, he argued, "would soften the language of the bill to some extent, but it still would have sharp teeth and still would take the same 77,000 acre bite." Even before S.3528 was introduced it was painted with the same brush as the earlier bill and the Citizens' Council vowed to fight it "every step of the way." [24]

Even though the opposition had announced that the new bill was dead on arrival Allen Edmunds and two Hart staffers lobbied their way through Leelanau and Benzie counties. People in the area were still badly uninformed as to the provisions of the original bill, let alone Senator Hart's revisions. At public meetings Edmunds demonstrated patience and willingness to listen that had been sadly lacking in Wirth and Udall's previous attempts to impress local residents. Raised on a Michigan farm, Edmunds conveyed genuine sympathy for property owners swept-up in the park controversy. Yet he had personally seen almost every foot of shoreline on the Great Lakes, and he passionately believed in the importance of the park. In Edmunds the park service had at last found an effective advocate in northwest Michigan. But no matter how effective Edmunds and William Welsh were, opposition to the park remained high. In fact, based on a survey taken at the time, it was clear that the more people knew even about the revised bill, the stronger they were in opposition. Public meetings and private consultations had the effect of lowering the decibel level of the dispute, but they could not mute the opposition. [ [25]

A small, but significant change made in this second Hart proposal was the substitution of the phrase "National Seashore" for "National Recreation Area." The recreation area tag had been applied to both Sleeping Bear and Pictured Rocks because they had been identified by the Shoreline Survey, whose purpose had been, in part, to identify prime shoreline recreation areas. To the homeowners in the Sleeping Bear area the term connoted a heavily developed area overrun by swarms of Chicagoans and Detroiters—the summer-homeless working class some long-time residents dismissed with the term "fudgies." Nor was this characterization far from what many park service staff thought of as recreation areas. Northeast Regional Director Ronald Lee admitted, in 1961, that the term "carries an implication of use development which would increase the activity use pressures on any area under such a category." Lee favored the status of "National Monument" for Sleeping Bear but felt that in the early 1960s there was too much development within the park area to meet such a standard. The term "National Seashore" was borrowed from successful ocean-front parks at Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod. These parks embodied a compromise between recreational development and the preservation of the natural landscape. The incongruity of referring to the eastern shore of Lake Michigan as a "Seashore" prompted the coining in 1963 of a new label for the mixed use shoreline parks of the Great Lakes: "National Lakeshore." Defining just what a National Lakeshore was remained a work-in-progress for the next two decades as legislation creating such entities in Indiana, Wisconsin, as well as Michigan sought to devise formulas which balanced the needs of local communities and unique environments.26]

Further contributing to the confusion of terms was the introduction of a bill to create a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park by Congressman Robert P. Griffin in January 1963. Up for reelection, the Republican congressman needed a way to gain the initiative on the park controversy in his district. House Resolution 2400 was well calculated to demonstrate the congressman's support for a federal park in his district and still make clear his solidarity with aggrieved property owners. Griffin dusted off the original park service plan for Sleeping Bear, a dunes park that omitted the inland lakes and uplands. With 54,000 acres less than Hart had called for the plan looked a little light. Griffin solved that ingeniously by adding in his bill the 14,000 acre North Manitou Island, which Secretary Udall had earlier advocated. That increased the size of Griffin's proposed park to 37,000 acres. As a salve to the homeowners in the area Griffin's bill specified that none of the nearly one hundred improved properties within his proposed boundary would be subject to condemnation. Griffin claimed that his reason for introducing the bill was to bring "this prolonged Sleeping Bear controversy" to a head during "this session of Congress." 27]

But bringing the issue to a head was the last thing that came from his new park bill. Hart put up a brave front, saying he was "delighted" to have Griffin become a Sleeping Bear park supporter. "The remaining issue is the size of the park," Hart asserted. But no matter how the Senator tried to spin the rival bill there were deep ideological issues dividing his conception of Sleeping Bear from Griffin's. While Hart liked to describe his plan as a "moderate alternative" to the large park proposed by Stewart Udall, the fact was that he envisioned a major park service presence in northwest Michigan. As he indicated in a latter press release, "A national park development should include scenic overlooks, scenic drives, trails, campsites, and unspoiled, timbered countryside." Hart was a classic Democratic liberal, unafraid of a large public expenditure to produce a result of lasting value to Michigan and the nation. Griffin was a young Republican who was open to innovative conservation projects but suspicious of federal efforts to override local autonomy with a massive influx of federal dollars. In the classic mode of a mainstreet, Midwestern Republican he was a fiscal conservative conscious of budget deficits. Unabashedly he lashed out at Hart's proposal at the Traverse City hearing by saying it would "contribute needlessly to a weakening of the Nation's economic strength at a very critical time in history when we need every ounce of strength we can muster." Griffin, who would later work on behalf of President Richard Nixon's abortive "New Federalism" which was designed to return both decision making and money from the federal to state and local governments, favored a park in which the Department of the Interior worked cooperatively with the Michigan Department of Conservation. The idea that Secretary Udall would have control over local zoning and that a large number of citizens would have their property rights circumscribed was ideologically abhorrent to Griffin. The liberal spirit of the 1960s was on Hart's side, while Griffin's position resonated only in northwest Michigan. But the legislative traditions of the United States Congress lent significance to the young minority congressman's opposition because parks generally were not created over the objections of dissenting representatives. If Sleeping Bear was going to become a park Hart would have to compromise his vision of the type of area it would become and Griffin would have to yield at least a little on his conservative principles. [28]

Congressman Griffin's proposal was the first Sleeping Bear bill to propose the addition of North Manitou Island to the lakeshore park. Although Secretary Udall had earlier recommended its inclusion neither the National Park Service nor its supporters in Michigan, such as Genevieve Gillette, thought the island merited inclusion. "There wasn't the scenery on North Manitou—it was largely big woods," she later recalled. Nonetheless, North Manitou was pushed by Congressman Griffin and even more aggressively by local politicians in northwest Michigan. When Gillette tried to press Traverse City's state senator, William G. Milliken as to why he advocated the island's inclusion he coyly answered, "Well, maybe we need it for wilderness." North Manitou did offer 14,000 acres of wilderness, but it also was an opportunity for the island's owners to exchange a burdensome responsibility for a large federal buy-out. The island was owned by the Angell Foundation, the trustees for the estate of William R. Angell, former President of Continental Motors Corporation. Angell had operated the island as a retreat and game preserve, but it was an expensive drain on financial resources. With both Udall and the Michigan legislators pushing for the inclusion of the island, the National Park Service sponsored a fly-over for members of the Michigan Parks Association and representatives of the National Wildlife Foundation, Audubon Society, and the Wilderness Society. In spite of low clouds Stewart Brendborg of the Wilderness Society "was impressed by North Manitou as a wilderness addition to the proposed Lakeshore." From that time on North Manitou became part of the park planned and advocated by the park service, although it did not wish its additional acreage to come into the plan at the expense of mainland tracts. [29]

Senator Hart showed no willingness to compromise on the size of the mainland unit when in February of 1963 he introduced S.792. The new bill was roughly identical to S.3528, save for some minor modifications designed to reduce the period of uncertainty faced by property-owners should a park be created: all residential owners could obtain twenty-five-year leases and hardship sellers would have to be accommodated within one year of authorization. The most important features of Hart's plan, however, its 77,000 acres and the inclusion of the inland lakes remained unchanged. In lieu of Congressman Griffin's support Hart could point to a companion bill to S.792 introduced by Neil Staebler. Congressman Staebler was was a long-time Democratic party activist from Ann Arbor. Due to its growing population Michigan was awarded another congressional seat in 1962, but because the state legislature could not come up with a redistricting plan before the congressional election it was decided to elect a one-term congressman-at-large. Staebler won the seat. He could speak for all of Michigan in the House of Representatives, but he had the liability of being a lame-duck from the day he arrived since redistricting would take his seat in two years. Rather than resolve the differences between his and Griffin's approaches, Hart grasped at Staebler's temporary support and tried to push ahead. The Senator's influence was such that he was able to prevail upon the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs to hold new hearings on Sleeping Bear, in Washington, D.C. in March and in the field in July 1963. [30]

The Washington, D.C. hearings were on Senator Hart's turf and were an effective platform from which to demonstrate the progress he had made toward resolving the vexing Sleeping Bear issue. Both local citizens and politicians wrote or spoke in favor of S.792. One resort owner on Crystal Lake wrote that the new bill "gives us the protection we must have for our natural resources, yet sacrifices none of the fundamental property rights we have always enjoyed." Hart could also point to local newspaper editorials and county-wide public officials who were now in favor of a Sleeping Bear park. In contrast the opposition looked uninspired, and impertinent. They were most effective when counteracting the park service funded economic projections for the park, with much more realistic data from their own studies. They were least effective when their attacks became personal. Senator Alan Bible, (D) Nevada, twice interrupted the testimony of W.F. Meinhard of Maple City, Michigan, finally saying: "I am sure Senator Hart is acting from the highest possible motives. I do not see where you accomplish one bit in coming before a committee and impugning his motives." The hearing closed with a promise by Senator Bible to visit the Sleeping Bear area that summer [31]

That visit took place July 3-4, 1963. Senator Bible and three other members of his subcommittee were on grueling tour that included field hearings and tours of proposed parks in Oregon, Kansas, Utah, and Missouri. They flew over the entire proposed lakeshore and enjoyed a driving tour of the mainland scenic sites. Late in the afternoon of the Fourth of July a brief field hearing was held in the auditorium of the Frankfort High School. In spite of the holiday the school was packed with 1,500 spectators. The legislators entered under a sign that read: "Welcome Senators—Let Sleeping Bears Sleep."32]

As the sign indicated, the Frankfort hearing was a well-staged pep-rally for the park proposal opposition. The efforts of Hart's office and the involvement of Allen T. Edmunds had lowered rhetoric of the dispute over the course of the year. There was genuine optimism among park boosters that the tide of local popular opinion was starting to turn in their direction. The Frankfort hearing dispelled that delusion and demonstrated that Ove Jensen and the Citizens' Council were still a skilled and formidable force. Jensen had pressed Senator Alan Bible to visit the area and when the invitation was accepted the former made sure that the itinerary was not left completely in the hands of the National Park Service. Jensen personally took the senators out on Glen Lake in his boat and showed them the summer homes threatened by the Hart bill. The area was carefully manicured for the visit. Along the roads obnoxious signs were removed and all trash picked-up. At the hearings they presented a petition, supported by better than 18,000 signatures, condemning S.792. Organized by a housewife from Birmingham, Michigan, the petition resonated more in the red, white, and blue atmosphere of the hearing than Genevieve Gillette's presentation of letters of support from conservation groups representing 750,000 members. The most heartening moment for the opposition came at the end of the hearing when Senator Milward Simpson fired a withering concluding broadside at S.792. Simpson was a colorful and rare species in American politics—an unabashed 1930s Republican. The former governor of Wyoming was dedicated to opposing big government on all fronts. In another generation he would have been honored as a sagebrush rebel, but in the 1960s he was simply a throw-back to a discredited era. "I want to say to you that I've read this bill backwards and forwards," he proclaimed. "It shrieks with condemnation, it shrieks with authority....once the Park Service gets into the area, they'll take over.....I think it's a violation of individual freedom. I think the thing should be stopped. I'm hoping that Senators Hart and McNamara will withdraw their bill." A storm of applause swept over the auditorium. [33]

The 1963 hearings were a critical moment in the fight to make a Sleeping Bear park. The fact-finding and site visit had convinced the majority of the subcommittee, Senator Simpson not withstanding, that the time had come to move forward. The marked-up bill that was reported out of the committee contained many features that are part of the lakeshore today. The inland lake areas were removed from the park, eliminating more than 25,000 acres, all but 288 private structures from the plan, and ending the need for Senator Hart's complicated lakeshore zones. To maintain the viability of the park service's upland scenic vistas and the park road system, two scenic highway corridors were cobbled together from the remaining inland acreage. In deference to people who had improved property in the area since the original Hart bill, the cut off date for approved structures was advanced to December 31, 1962. Thus modified S.792 was approved by the full Senate in December 1963. A solid, reasonable Sleeping Bear bill had received the strong support of the upper house but because of Congressman Griffin's opposition and that of Representative Charlotte Reid (R—Illinois), who had a home on Crystal Lake, it did not have a chance to win approval in the lower house. The Sleeping Bear bill was sent to the over-burdened House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, of which Reid was a member, where it languished, without a hearing, without a reading, without any consideration whatsoever. Senate Bill 792 lapsed when the Eighty-eighth Congress adjourned at the end of 1964. [34]

The unwillingness of Representative Robert Griffin to either support Hart's compromises or advance his own still-born park proposal delayed the creation of a Sleeping Bear Park (which could, perhaps should, have taken place in 1964-1965) for an unnecessary additional five years. Those five years, to paraphrase Senator Hart, produced very little light and a great deal of heat. In northwest Michigan the Frankfort hearing served to reignite the bitter and vitriolic atmosphere of the original Hart bill. As Genevieve Gillette left the Frankfort High School auditorium she was confronted by a group of friends with homes in the park area. They looked her in the eye and then without saying a word, as a group, turned their backs on her. Ted Carland, who operated a lumber and building supply business, suffered an immediate fall in business when he publicly supported the park bill at the Frankfort hearing. Such was the climate of opinion that even customers who stuck with him occasionally requested that when he delivered building materials that he use an unmarked truck, so that neighbors would not know they were doing business with a park supporter. Edward Bradley, a Standard Oil distributor in Benzie County, supported the park because he thought it would be a shot-in-the-arm for local business. Then he received a call from the corporate headquarters. "What's going on up there," they asked after having received a flood of cancelled Standard Oil credit cards from irate former customers. Bradley, like others, had been put on an "enemy list" by the opposition. [35]

The bitterness and persistence of this opposition stemmed from the simple and obvious fact that some year-round residents and some summer home owners would lose their property to the proposed national park. As the park plans became clearer and less intrusive that threat was greatly reduced in fact, but not in perception. People chose sides on the issue at a very early date and did not change their minds as Senator Hart's proposals evolved. The Senator and the National Park Service did not have credibility in their eyes. Political ideology had a modest impact on how people perceived the issue. Democrats and Republicans were on both sides of the dispute. John Daugherty, Benzie County's Republican prosecutor, like other younger men was instinctively in favor of the park, which he saw as a solution to the area's chronic sixteen per cent unemployment. The fact that northwest Michigan was overwhelmingly Republican and Michigan's two Democratic senators were sponsoring the legislation, however, made the fight seem partisan. An attitudinal survey conducted in the area during the summer and fall of 1962 revealed that eighty-four percent of Republicans were strongly opposed to the park, while only forty-six percent of Democrats were strongly opposed. Geography and class also shaped the conflict. Senators Hart and McNamara were strongly identified with Democratic dominated Detroit and the influence of the United Auto Workers (UAW). The powerful union, then at the peak of its influence in local and national politics, was an enthusiastic supporter of the expansion of the National Park Service. The UAW tended to see Sleeping Bear, as a Detroit News editorial characterized the issue, as a choice: "For All, or a Few?" Summer home owners from Detroit and Chicago, who tended to be professionals or white-collar workers, sometimes quipped that the intent of Hart's bill was to create a "UAW park." [36]

To Promote or to Preserve?

An important factor in the development of local support for national park projects at Pictured Rocks, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and at Apostle Islands, in northern Wisconsin, was the desire of local communities to profit from the increased tourist traffic that a national park would draw to their area. The Upper Great Lakes Region (northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) did not share in the general prosperity that swept over the United States in the early 1960s. The poverty and unemployment rates in the region rivaled those of Appalachia, although the misery of that region was more celebrated in the national media. Orville L. Freeman, a Minnesota progressive and President John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Agriculture, was anxious to highlight the problems of the region and develop strategies to improve its economic prospects. In September 1963 he organized a regional convocation, the "Land and People: Northern Great Lakes Regional Conference," with the aim of encouraging the people of the region to decide for themselves how to "restore and sustain a healthy regional economy." At the same time President Kennedy was being pressured by Secretary of the Interior Udall to jump-start the latter's plan to double the size of the National Park System by undertaking a national conservation tour. The initiatives of the two ambitious cabinet members came together with the President's decision to visit the proposed Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and to open the "Land and People" conference. Out of the President's speech, and through the cooperation of local and national leaders to find a way to immediately help the area emerged the contradictory conservation strategy to promote the region through its preservation. [37]

Greeted by 50,000 enthusiastic citizens in the streets of Duluth, Minnesota, President Kennedy injected his personal blend of energy and optimism into the delegates to the "Land and People" conference. He announced that he was turning the attention of his administration to the problem of a region whose beautiful shorelines reminded him of his own beloved Cape Cod. "The economy of a region that should be prospering," he said, "has reflected instead a series of economic setbacks as mines and mills shut down." What was needed was the "full employment of both the natural and human resources which this area still possess in abundance." To do that Kennedy proposed linking economic development initiatives to conservation proposals, "this Region is more and more a major recreation area within easy access of tens of millions of Americans." Kennedy advocated new national park projects in the area and a regional approach to planning. [38]

The Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission was eventually created to provide the latter, while new park projects sprouted in the form of the Saint Croix National Scenic Riverway, the Ice Age Trail, Voyageurs National Park, and Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Each of those initiatives were at least in part supported by Wisconsin and Minnesota communities to foster a stronger tourist industry as well as to preserve treasured recreational resources. In the Upper Peninsula Kennedy's call to promote and preserve was received like a lifeline by a drowning man. The completion of the Mackinac Bridge in November, 1957 had not caused quite the tourist renaissance hoped for by northern Michigan communities, in part because of the opening of a scenic highway along the north shore of Lake Superior by the Province of Ontario, which tended to draw tourists farther north. The towns along Michigan's Superior shore were anxious for a potential tourist attractor like the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Lower Michigan, however, was cool to the call to preserve and promote. The result of the "Land and People" conference was to give greater impetus to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore as opposed to the stalled Sleeping Bear proposal. "I certainly didn't feel that Pictured Rocks was in as much danger of disappearing as Sleeping Bear," recalled Genevieve Gillette, who had been a delegate at the conference. "I presume most people in the Park Association, thought that Sleeping Bear was much more of a project and much more important to push strongly than Pictured Rocks." That perception changed due to the conference and Pictured Rocks was seen in light of the new regional strategy. Both Gillette and Senator Hart's staff devoted more attention to Pictured Rocks and in 1966 it was made the first national lakeshore. [39]

The strong local opposition to Sleeping Bear, both among the summer home owners, but also among business operators in the area prevented that project from fitting into the economic development push of the Kennedy—Johnson years. A considerable liability in trying to build support for the lakeshore's economic development potential was the economic feasibility study prepared for the park service by Michigan State University. Funded with the last of the Mellon money from the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey, the report was rushed to completion in 1961 to support the first Hart bill. The report began by noting that 20 million people lived within "an easy day's drive of the area," then went on to predict that within five years of the establishment of the park it would attract "an additional 1.2 million people" to the area each year. That figure would have given Sleeping Bear greater attendance than either Grand Canyon or Yosemite. The report allowed that park land purchases would take valuable land off the property tax rolls and cost the local school districts a combined $114,124, but the Institute for Community and Development Services at Michigan State, which wrote the report, blithely concluded that the increased sales tax in the area from the million plus visitors would offset these loses. From a statewide perspective that was true, but it was little consolation to the local community because sales tax revenues were distributed throughout Michigan and would not be available for the local schools. The report particularly angered fruit farmers in the area by disparaging the prospects for cherry growing, even though the county agricultural agents (also employed by Michigan State University) had been telling farmers the opposite for more than fifteen years. Predictions about how much money a Sleeping Bear lakeshore would generate were based on studies done at much larger and celebrated parks such as Grand Teton and Smokey Mountains. The hastily assembled study was less a scientific evaluation that it was a studied effort to boost the National Park Service's plans for the area. [40]

"That economic feasibility study almost cost the whole park proposal all creditability," recalled John Daugherty, a Benzie County park supporter. The Citizens' Council hammered away at the wild predictions of the study during the Washington and Frankfort hearings. They commissioned a Chicago consulting firm to conduct an independent study and used its findings to refute the government study point-by-point. The economic feasibility study was another misstep by the park service caused by the rush to advance a wide range of park projects, in too short a time, with a limited staff to manage the effort.41]

Once the National Park Service lost creditability in the Sleeping Bear area, the agency became the object of vilification, and the project was subjected to a scrutiny that was always close and probing, that sometimes bordered on paranoia. Most park opponents regarded the project as an example of a federal bureaucracy out of control and overstepping its legitimate mandate. In Ove Jensen's words, it was "a fight between small people and a big government." Others ascribed deep and dark designs to unseen forces behind the Hart bill. One story, faithfully told with seemingly genuine quotes and eyewitness verification, had Lawrence Rockefeller as the power behind the plan. Supposedly, Rockefeller's sister, while attending a wedding on Long Lake, fell in love with Glen Lake. "I have seen all the beautiful lakes in the world, and Glen Lake is the most beautiful of them all," she is reported to have exclaimed. Several years later Lawrence Rockefeller was reported as having personally inspected the area. The millionaire heir then promised to put up the money for the National Park Service to buy it. The story obviously conflated the Rockefeller's well-known philanthropy at Grand Teton National Park and Virgin Islands National Park with the support of Paul Mellon for the Great Lakes Shoreline Survey. "They don't want the Sand Dune," charged Nan Helm, a lakeshore property owner, "what the Rockefellers want is 'our lovely Glen Lake'." Such stories reveal the deep attachment people had to the area and their conviction that it was a special place. They also indicate the bewilderment that people who long regarded themselves as patriotic citizens felt when they suddenly found themselves at odds with their government. "I just can't understand why Mr. Udall wouldn't want me to go on growing my petunias," an elderly women asked at the time of the Senate subcommittee visit to Glen Lake.42]

Inflated arguments by federal officials predicting Sleeping Bear would be a major tourist attractor only stiffened the opposition by conjuring images of hordes of tourists and lines of cars jammed in traffic. People in northwest Michigan enjoyed its seclusion and slow pace. Some local businessmen, turning the economic development argument on its head, grouchily complained that more visitors to the area would force them to hire more staff and expand their operations. The prospect of "honk-tonk strips" as were found in Gatlinburg and other communities at national park gateways was repellent to many residents. When the House of Representatives finally held its own hearing on Sleeping Bear in 1965 Congressman Griffin argued that if a national lakeshore was ever going to be established it needed to be more committed to preserving the natural beauty and character of the area, than to its promotion. Griffin went so far as to propose a buffer zone around the park to restrain ugly commercialization. [43]

In August 1965, the Senate passed S.936, another Hart Sleeping Bear bill. This action keyed supporters of the park to lobby for congressional action. Genevieve Gillette met with Wayne Aspinall (D-Colorado) the powerful chair of the House Interior Committee and Republican attorney John Daugherty lobbied Representative Gerald Ford (R-Michigan). The passage of the Land and Water Conservation fund in 1964 had made all congressmen more receptive of park projects. The fund applied monies raised by selling leases for off-shore oil drilling to federal and state conservation projects. The bill made Sleeping Bear's multimillion dollar price tag much more palatable to representatives concerned with the growing federal budget deficit. Another event which gave the Sleeping Bear bill momentum in the House was the removal of Congressman Robert P. Griffin. Senator Patrick V. McNamara (D-Michigan), Hart's silent co-sponsor of the park bills, died in April of 1966. Michigan's Republican governor, George Romney, appointed Griffin to the vacant seat in the Senate. For the remainder of 1966 northwest Michigan had no congressional representative and park supporters sought to push the bill through in the vacuum. [44]

The Sleeping Bear bill nearly made it out of the House that summer. Chairman Aspinall aggressively pushed the bill forward in his committee. It fell to Representative Charlotte Reid (R-Illinois) the Crystal Lake cottage owner, to try and derail the bill. On August 6, 1966, Reid took advantage of the fact that thirty-two members, including most of the bill's supporters, were absent from the committee. She pressed for consideration of the bill and would have succeeded in killing it save for the astute maneuvering of John P. Saylor (R-Pennsylvania). A strong conservationist, Saylor pretended to oppose the bill because by voting "no" he would be permitted to have the full committee reconsider the bill at a more favorable time. That occasion came three days latter when the full committee voted to create a Sleeping Bear lakeshore. The amended bill differed from the Senate bill by its inclusion of North Manitou Island and a buffer zone along M-22. The bill now only needed to be considered by the full house to be law. But the 89^th Congress was one of the most activist in American history. President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory in 1964 had sent scores of liberal Democrats to the House on his coattails and they had spent their terms advancing an avalanche of legislation. It was the discipline and organization of the House which advanced Sleeping Bear lakeshore to the brink, even without a local representative as an advocate, but then the success of the 89^th Congress caught up with the lakeshore plan. There were so many bills reported out of committee that the House Rules Committee had a formidable task trying to arrange the schedule for presentation on the floor of the House. It did not help that the Chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard W. Smith (D-Virginia), was a lame-duck bitter over his recent defeat in a primary by the liberal wing of his own party. Smith resisted appeals by Democrats and Republicans to have the bill advanced to the floor of the House. But Smith favored other bills with a place on the calendar, and the Sleeping Bear compromise, on the brink of passage, expired buried in the Rules Committee when Congress adjourned in the fall of 1966.45]

From Economic Necessity to Environmental Amenities

As the Eighty-ninth Congress became history the Sleeping Bear compromise became a dead bill. Senator Hart could console himself that the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore had succeed in becoming law. Pictured Rocks was created out of the Kennedy-era emphasis on pairing conservation and economic development. That ambivalent, if not contradictory, approach to the environment had been successful in pushing a host of new park programs through a Congress committed to waging a "War on Poverty" and creating a "Great Society." During the two-year run of the Eighty-ninth Congress, twenty-two new areas were added to the National Park System, including three shoreline parks, three major new recreation areas, and a large number of new historic sites and national monuments. But the dubious linkage of conservation to economic development had outlasted its usefulness by the late 1960s. A fresh green wave was sweeping across the country that would transform the old conservation alliance of sportsman, nature lovers, and the recreation industry, and give birth to a more aggressive, alarmist environmental movement. [46]

The new environmentalism was born in an era of social and political conflict. Late 1960s America was a society wracked by social, racial, generational, and political conflict. The liberal orthodoxy of the early 1960s was followed by a deeply critical, often cynical, analysis of America. Taking its initial inspiration from Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring, this new environmentalism focused more on air and water pollution than public lands. Where older conservationists were concerned about the number of campsites at shoreline line parks, the new environmentalists recognized that pollution, some of it caused by recreation users, was degrading the waterways, in some places past the point of recovery. In the Great Lakes region sensational stories aroused the public. Giant algae blooms washed ashore at Chicago and Milwaukee, rendering beaches unswimable. The spring die-off of alewives, a small silver fish that invaded the Great Lakes from the Atlantic in the late 1940s, made it impossible to even walk along those beaches. The stench from the thousands of dead fish that washed ashore each day drove people from the lakefront. Lake Erie was even worse than Lake Michigan. Scientists testifying at Public Health Service hearings claimed that Erie was "dying." As if to punctuate that point emphatically, in 1969, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River at Cleveland caught fire. Waters stinking, lakes dying, and rivers burning were clear signs to environmentalists that America had put too much emphasis on economic development and not enough on natural resource protection.47]

The new environmentalists borrowed some of their tactics from the civil rights and anti-war movements. They took an aggressive and confrontational approach to the problems of the region. There was a counter-cultural tone to some of their rhetoric, particularly as it applied to business. Corporate polluters were the first to feel the weight of the new movement. If housewives had to give up their favorite dishwashing detergent to reduce phosphate pollution in the Great Lakes, ordinary citizens had no pity on corporate polluters. This sentiment spread out from the suburban subdivisions to elected officials in Washington, D.C. and Lansing. The hard-edged activism of the new environmentalism was best exemplified by the Sierra Club, which by 1968 had thrown-off its amateurish, if earnest, origins along with its not-for-profit status and became an active and effective political action organization. While involving itself full-time in legislative activities in Washington, D.C., the Sierra Club also began to build local chapters all across the country to be prepared to fight environmental battles in the hinterland. Nationally strict restrictions on air and water pollution were achieved in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Locally in northern Michigan, concern over what business, unrestrained, might do to Sleeping Bear attracted the interest of the newly organized Mackinac Chapter of the Sierra Club.48]

The building of subdivisions and summer homes in the Sleeping Bear area was initially hurt by Senator Hart's attempt to create a national lakeshore. But as each of the Senator's bills, year after year, met with a stonewall in the House, people in northwest Michigan went back to the business of development. In 1965, Senator Hart's proposal, as modified by the Senate Interior Committee, included 266 private homes. That number swelled to 436 by 1970. The opposition said that a National Park was not needed to take care of the area, but as more and more of the frontage on Glen and Platte lakes came under development, as neighbors became crowded on the edges of busy lakes and roads, that claim began to sound a bit hollow. At North Bar Lake, a secluded pristine embayment set among the dunes just north of the town of Empire, developers began to lower the level of this popular swimming area in order to create more frontage to sell. Another disquieting sign of unrestrained development was the chaos that descended on the Platte River each fall. In 1965, in an effort to control alewife populations in the Lake Michigan, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources had planted Coho Salmon in the Platte. In 1967, the mature fish returned to the river to spawn. Larger than anything most Midwestern fisherman had ever caught, the salmon ignited an acute case of angling fever. The press dubbed the result "coho madness." To the manager of Benzie State Park the rush of hundreds of vehicles and the swarm of anxious anglers did indeed look like madness. An unsightly concrete block motel, a gas station, and a hastily installed boat ramp marred the once beautiful mouth of the Platte. A swimming and picnic area enjoyed by generations of area residents and visitors had been transformed, almost overnight, into an example of the inability of local controls to preserve the area..49]

It was, however, the development of a privately owned park on the dunes that drew the most attention. The park was the work of Pierce Stocking, a flannel-shirted lumberman of the old do-it-yourself school. He was already a considerable property owner in the area when the National Park Service first nominated the dunes for park status. Stocking sensed a big payday when the legislation finally passed and he increased his holdings in the area. What he did not expect was a decade delay in the authorization of the lakeshore. With most of his assets tied-up in Sleeping Bear real estate, the failure of Congress to act on Hart's proposals left Pierce Stocking economically stymied. But he was not a man who was temperamentally or financially able to sit and wait for the folks in Washington to sort things out. He developed a trout pond on one piece of property and operated a motel on another. Finally, in 1968, he decided if the park service was not going to open a dunes park, Stocking intended to open one for himself. He had in the past sought the cooperation of the Michigan State Parks to operate a dune tour on state land, but in 1968 he opened his own dune scenic drive park. To the uninitiated visitor Stocking's "Sleeping Bear Dunes Park" had the look of a well-designed, if small, state or even federal park. From the attractive entrance sign to the "park headquarters building," to ten miles of scenic roads—complete with lookouts and picnic areas—Stocking's park was an impressive accomplishment considering it was constructed in six months. Even the National Park Service team that visited the park in 1968 offered a "favorable response." What troubled people was that in developing his park Stocking closed-off a large area in the middle of the dunes. Visitors had the option of paying a reasonable fee of five dollars per car to enter the park, but his effort was a blunt reminder that the fate of the dunes was, in part, in private hands. "Keep out" signs could just as easily be placed in the sand as a picnic area. [50]

In the end it was a curious alliance of environmental activists and business people in favor of economic development that formed the local impetus for the Sleeping Bear Lakeshore. Northwest Michigan began a slow but steady population growth in the 1960s. The terrible riot that rocked Detroit in July 1967 engendered in many middle-class Michiganders revulsion with the violence and racial tension of urban living. A pristine environment and access to nature were amenities that new residents and summer home owners expected in Leelanau and Benzie counties. Far-sighted business people realized that controlling the pace of development was critical to maintaining the quality of life that attracted residents and businesses to the area in the first place. A good example of the way in which the pro-development and pro-environment forces cooperated to promote the park plan was the "Save the Bear Day."

The Birth of a National Lakeshore

On June 16, 1969, the car ferry City of Green Bay departed Frankfort harbor for a cruise up the shore to Sleeping Bear. Aboard the ship were Senator Philip Hart, James Kellogg, the official representative of William Milliken, the Governor of Michigan, and various representatives of state and federal agencies. Jostled together in uneasy association on the crowded ship were hundreds of people evenly divided between chamber of commerce members and Sierra Club supporters, the latter led by their national president. But the beauty of the scenery and the splendid weather made the media event a huge success. Television, radio, and newspaper coverage of the four-hour cruise publicized the growing popularity of the Sleeping Bear proposal, while the "Save the Bear" slogan lent an air of urgency to their call for action—as if dump trucks were ready to haul the dunes away to a glass works. In the midst of the voyage local Republicans telephoned Congressman Guy Vander Jagt (R-Michigan) to let him know that the event was a big success and admonishing him "not to miss the boat" on Sleeping Bear. [51]

By 1969, Congressman Vander Jagt was scrambling to catch up "with the boat." The Republican from Luther, Michigan, had gone from being one of the bitterest opponents of the Sleeping Bear proposal to a late, but vital proponent. He began his journey in 1965 when as a state senator he testified against both the Hart and the Griffin bills. He was so against the prospect of a national lakeshore that a year later he secured passage of a bill that, against all precedent, required the State of Michigan to sell rather than donate all of its Sleeping Bear lands in event of federal park. Later he tried to secure federal funds to expand D.H. Day State Park, thereby removing the need for a national lakeshore. But even fellow Republicans were cool to this idea. Vander Jagt, however, began to waiver in his opposition in 1968. Richard M. Nixon's victory in the presidential election returned the executive branch to Republican control for the first time in eight years. Nixon was a pragmatist determined to direct domestic policy from the center of the political spectrum. In 1968, it was clear that environmentalism was an issue with broad public support. Neither Nixon nor key Republican conservationists in the House, such as John Saylor (R—Pennsylvania), were going to be caught unprepared on the issue. While the White House staff focused the bulk of its environmental energy on the Task Force which paved the way for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior continued to support the scores of park proposals generated during the Udall years. On the local level, Vander Jagt also saw the GOP getting greener. In 1968, party faithful packed the meeting of the Benzie County Republican Committee at the Crystal Lake Township Hall and resolved to support a national lakeshore. These shifts in the dynamics of environmental politics as well as a new set of economic incentives forced Vander Jagt to move toward a Sleeping Bear compromise.52]

The new economic incentive which stirred Vander Jagt was the prospect of a four-lane limited access highway. Michigan's Ninth Congressional District embraced a long stretch of Lake Michigan's east shore, from Holland, Michigan, north to near Traverse City. In 1967, the Michigan U.S. 31 Corridor Association, an alliance of every chamber of commerce from the Indiana border to Mackinac, began to push for such a road in order to attract Michigan-bound Chicagoans to their part of the state. By dramatically reducing travel times such a road would greatly increase the rate of development and tourist spending in the Ninth District. But communities east of the U.S. 31 corridor were not going to sit by and idly wait for the stream of tourists to be diverted away from them. By 1968, the business community of Vander Jagt's hometown of Cadillac, Michigan, realized that the creation of a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore could be a powerful argument that the freeway should indeed be built through their town and not farther to the east. There were more voters in Cadillac than Leelanau County, so it did not take long for their congressman to move from the status of opponent to supporter of Sleeping Bear lakeshore. As one businessman put it: "We need the highway, we need the park. Anyone in business opposed to the park must have rocks in their head." [53]

While Congressman Vander Jagt did not have "rocks in his head," he did try to make a final effort to protect his constituents in the Sleeping Bear area. In September 1968, Vander Jagt announced that he would support a Sleeping Bear bill if two issues could be resolved: 1) The local school districts would be reimbursed for the land withdrawn from the tax base, and; 2) That the rights of the owners of unimproved property within the proposed lakeshore, including their right to a speedy sale, be protected. Although these were not issues the Department of Interior could itself immediately solve, they were not deal breakers. From the time Vander Jagt first raised the issue, the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee made it abundantly clear that they would not countenance a provision for the federal government to make compensatory payments to the Leelanau County public schools. The committee did alert their colleague to the precedent in some park areas for the state government to commit itself to take up the burden. At Vander Jagt's instigation Governor George Romney and key members of the state house and senate pledged to make such payments, if they were needed. The second issue, securing the rights of the owners of unimproved property proved a bit more complicated. Vander Jagt proposed setting up a strict time limit in which all land acquisitions had to take place, so that owners of isolated tracts of land would not be surrounded by federal holdings and left for years with little more than the right to pay taxes on land that could not be developed, until such time as the government decided to make them an offer for their tract. The National Park Service rejected the very concept of a strict time limit because it would leave lands unpurchased by the deadline lost to the park forever, regardless of their importance for recreation or preservation purposes. Practically Vander Jagt's proposal would put the Sleeping Bear land acquisition priorities, ahead of all other park development projects in the system, something neither the agency nor the other members of Congress, with parks in their own districts, would tolerate. The solution was to place all lands within the proposed lakeshore into three land-use categories: 1) Public Use and Development, lands owned outright by the National Park Service; 2) Environmental Conservation lands, some of these Category II lands might be owned in fee by the government but others could remain in private hands subject to a scenic easement; 3) Private Use and Development, included all private lands within the lakeshore which were protected from condemnation. Vander Jagt also extracted a promise from the park service that at least fifty percent of the land acquisition funds would be expended within two years of authorization.54]

A howl of protest was let loose from the Sleeping Bear area when word of Congressman Vander Jagt's change of policy was received. The concessions achieved by their representative were of no consolation to the core of an opposition that was unilaterally opposed to any type of national park in their area. But by June of 1969 there were four separate Sleeping Bear bills before the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and every member of the Michigan congressional delegation, Republican and Democrat alike, had signed on to the project. The days when Citizens' Council could stop a Sleeping Bear park were at an end. Nonetheless, Muriel Ferris who had handled Sleeping Bear for Senator Hart's office for nine years confided to a friend, "we are all treading as though on eggs until we see the bill through the House."55]

At a final hearing on the proposed lakeshore, held in Washington, D.C. in June of 1970, the Council was clearly dispirited and on the defensive. "Now I feel sort of like the Indians felt 100 years ago," their spokesman observed. Stanley Ball, the Citizens' Council's Executive Secretary, tried to outline how state and private initiatives alone were sufficient to preserve the area and that a federalization of the area was "just plain wrong." Congressman John Saylor's (R—Pennsylvania) heated response to that sentiment indicated how far the pendulum had swung since the evening when Conrad Wirth was assailed eight years before. "I can tell you that you are like a good many other people," Saylor lectured. "It is all right to establish a national park as long as it does not affect you. This seems to be the attitude of a good many people in that area. They would like a national park in Wyoming, they would like a national park in California, they would like a national park in Key Biscayne in Florida, in Texas, but they do not want one in Sleeping Bear, Mich. In other words, 'because that is my home.'" Other members of the committee joined in to push Ball to explain why it was "plain wrong" to condemn land for national parks, when Leelanau County itself condemned land for schools and roads and benefited from the practice of condemning land to create parks in other parts of the country. Ball finally shook his head and resignedly said, "I am not too sure now what I did mean, after you fellows get through with me." Congressman Saylor concluded the exchange by declaring: "what I have an inclination to do right now, I will introduce a bill instead of taking 77,000 acres it will probably take about 277,000 acres up in that area, and then I will compromise it down to 177,000 acres, and those who oppose it will think they have won a great victory and I would have won a bigger one, and the American people a few generations from now will look around and say, 'Gee, we are sorry Saylor was not able to get 277,000 acres instead of 177,000.'" [56]

In spite of such contentious exchanges the hearing did establish a broad common ground concerning the Sleeping Bear area. The testimony of the Citizens' Council, the Sierra Club's endorsement, and the advocacy of the chamber of commerce boosters all shared a concern about maintaining the area in its current condition. Dayton Willard, who chaired the Platte Lakes Area Association, concluded his testimony before the House committee by putting new lyrics to the then popular "Hamm's" northwoods beer jingle:

A beer is a beer, is a beer.
A bear is a bear, is a bear,
Until you have seen our Sleeping Bear
Preserve our Bear, yes
Protect our Bear, yes,
Save our Bear, save our Bear, save our Bear from what?
Federal exploitation as a national recreation area,
A glorified camp ground,
Don't fence her in with bottles and rubbish cans,
Just let her stay there,
Majestic, silent, serene.
We who live in the area do care.

James Dorsey of Empire, Michigan, was one of those local people who cared. "Every man of good conscience agrees this should be done," he wrote, "the quarrrel is over the method whereby it is achieved." To many people in northwest Michigan the issue had come down to "either turning our backs and going home and watching the area go to pot, or making sure that steps are taken to curtail development in the area with a view to preserving it in a manner consistent with the interests and needs of those residing in the area, those owning property in the area, those using the area and those visiting the area, both now and in the foreseeable future." Put in those terms the difference between the supporters and the opposition to the lakeshore seemed less one of principle and more one merely of degree. With every member of the Michigan congressional delegation in favor of a Sleeping Bear lakeshore, the House committee chose to accept those areas of agreement at face value and ignore the very real differences of method between the two sides. [57]

While the hearings in June of 1970 may have established the desirability of a federal lakeshore in northwest Michigan, Interior Committee Chair Wayne Aspinall was faced with two competing bills to protect Sleeping Bear. House Democrats supported the bill introduced by James G. O'Hara of Michigan's Twelfth Congressional District. O'Hara had been a tireless advocate of the Sleeping Bear bill and a close ally of Senator Philip Hart. Since 1967 he had championed the lakeshore in the House. Michigan's Republican representatives had signed on to Congressman Vander Jagt's bill. The differences between the two bills were slight, and Chairman Aspinall requested a consolidated bill that everyone was prepared to support. Since Vander Jagt's support had been the critical breakthrough, it made sense for his bill to be the basis of the consolidation. For Congressman O'Hara, who had carried the torch for Sleeping Bear for so long, it was a bitter pill to be deprived of authorship of the final bill. The wisdom of the compromise was made manifest, however, when the bill moved to the Rules Committee. Charlotte Reid (R—Illinois), the Crystal Lake cottage owner who made herself the champion of the local property owners, used her influence to stymie the bill in that committee. Only when Vander Jagt came before the committee and in secret session argued his right to speak as the genuine representative of the people of northwest Michigan was Reid's influence overcome. The Sleeping Bear bill, H.R. 18776 then went to the House floor where it passed via a voice vote on September 22, 1970.58]

A final attempt to trap the bear was sprung in the Senate. Senator Robert Griffin had never been reconciled to Philip Hart's vision of a Sleeping Bear lakeshore that embraced inland as well as shoreline acreage. In a last minute attempt to monkey-wrench the compromise Senator Griffin attempted to replace his own Sleeping Bear bill, one based on his 1963 bill for a 37,000 acre park, for Senator Hart's 60, 600 acre bill. Senator Griffin had communicated his support for the compromise to the Senate subcommittee in June 1970, yet he had also remained largely aloof of the issue during his Senate career. To try and destroy Hart's bill at this point seems a contradictory and gratuitous gesture. Perhaps it was merely a play to the disgruntled property owners in Leelanau and Benzie counties. Robert Griffin argued his was the "better" bill, yet in seven years in the Congress he had done nothing to advance it toward passage. The majority, however, were with Senator Hart. He was one of the most respected members of the majority party. Griffin's maneuver, that would have robbed Hart of the fruits of victory after the latter had labored with such determination for so long, did not have a chance. After a brief debate the Sleeping Bear bill was approved by acclamation. President Richard M. Nixon signed the lakeshore into law on October 21, 1970.

At the conclusion of the long divisive legislative incubation Senator Philip A. Hart was justly hailed as the "father" of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. "Stick to your guns, & remember you've got millions of us little guys on your side," a supporter of the lakeshore wrote him back in 1962. Hart did stick to his guns and the fact that a large portion of the Lake Michigan shore in northwest Michigan is now open to use by people who could not afford the price of lake frontage is the result of his effort. That property owners on Glen and Platte lakes do not today enjoy the privacy or serenity of a generation ago is the cost they pay for the exclusion of the inland lakes from the national lakeshore. The long fight to secure Sleeping Bear exacted its price in the development of the area. In 1970, Genevieve Gillette lamented "its already pretty late....Sleeping Bear was already being eroded beyond sensible thinking." Yet if it had not been for the less than perfect bill that was finally passed in 1970 there would be even less of a wonderful landscape left to enjoy today.59]

If Philip Hart was the "father" of the Sleeping Bear Dunes then Muriel Ferris and E. Genevieve Gillette were the midwives. They crafted the basic concept and made the necessary compromises to make the lakeshore possible. Gillette not only built the coalition of environmentalists and state officials who made up the backbone of the bill's Michigan support, she was single handedly responsible for the inclusion of a significant portion of the lower end of the park within the original proposal. In the later years of the fight her role was less prominent in part because of her heavy involvement on several White House commissions as well as her role securing the Sylvannia National Recreation Area, the McCormick Experimental Forest, and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. By 1970 travel became more difficult for the seventy-two year old dynamo but she still contributed her "know-how and energy." After passage Hart sent Gillette a copy of that day's account in the Congressional Record along with the sentiment, "You deserve these historic pages." Muriel Ferris was Gillette's friend and associate during the long struggle. As Hart's legislative assistant it was she, not the Senator, who arranged the testimony for each of the hearings and attended the meetings and negotiations that made the lakeshore a reality. [60]

"Phil Hart is the father of the park; I might be the uncle or something like that," joked Guy Vander Jagt. The congressman from Cadillac, Michigan, had to make the hardest decisions regarding the Sleeping Bear proposal. His heart was with the people trying to keep the federal government out of their backyard. His proposal for federal funding of a state managed "Sleeping Bear Dunes U.S.A." recreation area was literally laughed out of Congress in 1968, fifteen years later amid the "Reagan Revolution" the Department of the Interior was itself making such proposals. In a climate of rising concern with environmental abuse, with opportunities for economic development at stake, Vander Jagt made the pragmatic decision to get the best deal he could for all of his constituents. It was fitting that when all of the rhetoric concerning the constitutional rights of property owners and the need to save the environment for future generations had been spent, the Sleeping Bear Lakeshore came into existence the same way most bills are born, swaddled in a blanket shorn from high principle and bundled in the basket of compromise.