Horace Albright Quotes
Dealing with Wyoming is like dealing with the Russians. You never get anywhere by trying to cooperate.
The statement was made in the midst of the Cold War. There was a political battle ongoing over a national park in Wyoming. In the 1930s & 1940s John D. Rockefeller Jr. had tried to give his 33,000 acres of land adjacent to the Grand Teton National Park to the Federal Government as a park expansion. Residents of Wyoming at the time did not want the land to go to park use but wanted it available for commercial development & in a paranoid concern about the Federal Government controlling “their land,” Wyoming politicians blocked transfer. Finally Rockefeller wrote FDR telling him to take the land or he would sell it. The President did not have power to accept land to form a national park without Congressional action. So FDR did what his cousin TR had done and declared the land a national monument which transferred ownership to the government. Then Albright
tried to incorporate it into the park system & fought for years with the special interests and politicians of Wyoming.
Horace Albright, 1890-1967, Director, U. S. National Park Service, Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Quoted on PBS The National Parks, September 29, 2009
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
