ABSTRACT
SKIMPY FINANCIAL SUPPORT The postwar financial embarrassment of the Park Service continued with little abatement for several years. The number of visits increased by leaps and bounds— from 37 million in 1951 to 54,923,000 in 1956—but appropriations remained about the same during that time, and the Park Service and the concessioners were hard pressed to care for the invading hordes; in fact they could not care for them at all well. 1 The Park Service simply could not pay for the rehabilitation of roads, buildings, and facilities, or for enough rangers to attend to all the wants of the visitors, to guard the natural wonders, or at times even to man the entrance stations. The result was that rangers were overworked and yet the visitors ran wild. Vandalism flourished, even to the stealing of precious and irreplaceable objects. 2 There was some discussion of the "erosion" of our parks, and predictions that some of them, for instance Yellowstone, would be largely ruined in fifty years. Bernard De Voto, the able and tireless friend of the parks, urged as the only way to save them, "Let's close the national parks," because "so much of the priceless heritage which the Service must safeguard for the United States is beginning to go to hell." 3
