variables at work in the Tularosa basin, however, Tom Charles had managed no small feat when in the fall of 1932 Senator Cutting promised in a private meeting in Alamogordo: "I will do everything I can for you but suggest that you be satisfied with a National Monument instead of an National Park, it will be much easier to get."[1]
The promise of Senator Cutting convinced Tom Charles that establishment of the monument lay close at hand. Cutting's biographer, Richard Lowitt, wrote that Cutting had great influence with President Hoover, sharing with him the Progressive faith in "wise use" of western lands. As 1932 was an election year, with Hoover facing a strong challenge from the charismatic Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president accelerated the pace of park review and selection. White Sands would benefit from Hoover's decision to expand the NPS with nine new units that year, and from the forty percent increase in park holdings by the time Hoover left the White House the following March.[2]
Hoover's ignominious defeat at the polls in November 1932 has been described as the nadir of his administration. Yet the president exercised his executive authority in the waning days of his term to accept the judgments of the NPS staff, and of Bronson Cutting, to establish White Sands National Monument. Acting under the auspices of the Antiquities Act of 1906, Hoover issued on January 18, 1933, a proclamation designating 142,987 acres of the White Sands dune fields as the nation's newest National Park Service facility. In recognition of the sands' distinctiveness and multifaceted appeal, Hoover wrote that the NPS should manage the unit not only for the generic purpose of preservation, but also for its "additional features of scenic, scientific, and educational interest." Bronson Cutting then congratulated Tom Charles by telegraph, and the thirty-five-year journey of dune preservation had reached a satisfactory conclusion. O. Fred Arthur, supervisor of the Lincoln National Forest from 1918–1934, spoke for many when he wrote upon retirement: "Tom Charles always worked best when confronted with opposition." Arthur, the veteran of many collaborative efforts with the Kansas insurance agent, concluded of Charles: "As everyone knows it was mainly through his persistence and efforts that the Monument became an actuality."[3]
- ↑ Runte, National Parks, 140; Tom Charles, Story of the Great White Sands (Alamogordo: n.p., 1938, 1955 reprint).
- ↑ Schneider-Hector, White Sands, 90; Richard Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Politician (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
- ↑ Charles, Story of the Great White Sands; O. Fred Arthur, Then: 1907 to Now: 1945 in the United States Forest Service (La Habra, CA: Pamphlet Press, 1945).
