RONALD FORESTA

 

ABSTRACT. Social reformers originally proposed the Appalachian Trail as the core of a new communitarian domain. Modern

professionals and public-land managers removed the reformist goals and made the project a recreational facility. The trail became

a medium of adjustment to urbanism rather than an alternative to it.

 

THE Appalachian Trail is perhaps the best-known cultural element in the Appalachian highlands of eastern United States. The

trail, stretching along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains through fourteen states, is now fifty years old. Millions of

persons use it annually for outings that range from casual strolls to expedition like hikes along its entire length. When it was

initially proposed in 1921, the trail was envisioned as a first step toward a new socioeconomic domain where traditional American

lifeways would be rationally reconstructed in a modern context, where communitarian principles would order social relationships,

and where need rather than profit would motivate economic activity. The trail and much of the mountainous countryside through

which it passed became instead a place to which persons retreated for brief respites from everyday lives, a place where they

could briefly express their individualism and could have recreational contact with nature. This transformation of the trail reveals

much about the development of the modern role of nature in the American landscape as a response to the emergence of

industrial, consumer society during the early twentieth century.

 

Benton MacKaye, born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard University, proposed the trail. After leaving Harvard in 1905, he

joined the fledgling United States Forest Service. During his years as a federal forester, he came to interpret the American

landscape as a product of two conflicting cultures: the metropolitan and the indigenous. The first was a "worldwide standardized

civilization [that had] formed around modern industry and commerce.'' It was marked by inhumane cities with "brutalizing slums"

in their cores and "cancerous tissue" of suburban growth on their margins. According to MacKaye, metropolitanism caused

many nonurban problems, including the improvident use of natural resources and the deterioration of stable, traditional society.

 

Indigenous culture was rural and very place specific. In reality, it was "a quiltwork of varied cultures, each with its own

environment and regional setting." To MacKaye, this culture was "the pervasive source of man's true living. Having reached its

apex shortly before the Civil War, indigenous culture was being eroded by innovations such as railroads, motorized

transportation, and electrical power that had been allowed to serve solely metropolitan interests.

 

According to MacKaye, strengthening the ability of indigenous culture to resist the inroads of metropolitanism was one of the

pressing tasks that faced the United States. He advocated public ownership of natural resources to accomplish those goals, and

he devised strategies for using public lands, timber, and minerals to create new communities that would reflect and strengthen

indigenous American culture.

 

MacKaye transferred to the Department of Labor in 1919, where he concentrated on community planning and presented several

proposals during the next few years. None were implemented, but they caused considerable discussion in governmental circles.

One was a proposal to establish logging communities in national forests; another was an agricultural-marketing plan for the

District of Columbia region. The Appalachian Trail, which he proposed in 1921, contained certain elements of those previous

plans: the focus on problems of community and ecology, and the use of publicly held resources.

 

MacKaye envisioned the trail as a footpath through the wilderness that stretched like an unbroken chain along the crest of the

Appalachians. However, the footpath was only the start of the scheme. MacKaye hoped that the trail would attract persons from

the eastern cities for short vacations of hiking and camping.

 

During the sojourns, the visitors would get a perspective on the social context of their lives, much as they would obtain a literal

perspective on the cities that lay below. He envisioned vacation communities springing up around the shelters. Those centers

would foster others on hospitable parts of the public lands through which the trail passed. Eventually the communities would be

permanent, with an economy based on farming, timber cutting, or local manufacturing. With governmental encouragement,

circulation of those goods would fuse the communities into a domain of small-scale producers, traders, and consumers. That

domain would be an alternative to urban industrialized society and a bulwark of indigenous culture capable of confining

metropolitanism to the eastern seaboard.

 

In terms of the current role of the trail in American recreational lore, it is difficult to view MacKaye's reformist aims without

incredulity. Arising from his very personal interpretation of the forces forging the American landscape, the idea of the trail did

address two of the deepest concerns in contemporary United States: the growth and changing character of cities, and the

stagnation of many rural areas.

 

The proposal for the trail also tapped three important ideas in American reformist thought that had prompted previous action

and, in some cases, had profoundly affected the American landscape. The first idea was that cooperatively organized

communities were a more just and ultimately more efficient economic mode than capitalistic corporations. The second idea was

that government-held natural resources could be used to redirect the economy toward a satisfactory distribution of power and

wealth. Third was the homestead concept that had then recently been revived in western irrigation projects and that seemed to

hold further promise because the federal government was purchasing eastern forested land under the Weeks Act.

 

MacKaye's proposal for the trail was not naive or idiosyncratic. He addressed grave societal problems within the broad traditions

of American reformist thought and action. The proposal had a fatal flaw: it came too late. By 1921 circumstances no longer

allowed such an ambitious or direct assault on modern industrial society. Stripped of its reformist goals and placed in a different

ideological context, the trail had great appeal for one societal group--the modern professionals whose fortunes were based on the

metropolitanism and the industrialism that MacKaye so disliked.

 

TRAIL BUILDERS

 

In April 1922 MacKaye gathered a small group of friends and associate to initiate his project. Prominent among them were

persons who, like MacKaye, envisioned the trail as a catalyst for social reform: Clarence Stein, chairman of the American Institute

of Architects' Committee on Community Planning; Charles Whitaker, editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects;

Louis Post, an assistant secretary of labor in the Wilson administration; and his wife, Alice Thatcher Post, a reformer in her own

right. For various reasons the early supporters did not provide the leadership that the project needed. Several short segments of

the trail were blazed in the next two or three years; a logo was designed, and some organizational meetings were held. However,

implementation of the project was erratic and lacked coherence.

 

During that initial period, a new cadre of professionals with an avocational interest in the outdoors and of trained recreationists

emerged to give the project momentum and leadership. Three members of that cadre were especially important: Raymond H.

Torrey, a newspaper editor whose column in the New York Post emphasized hiking and outdoors life; Major William Welch, the

general manager of Palisades Interstate Park in New York and New Jersey; and Arthur Perkins, a long-time outdoorsman and

retired judge from New Haven, Connecticut. That new leadership established the Appalachian Trail Conference in 1925 with

Welch as the chairman. The conference was to be an umbrella organization to handle liaison with governmental agencies, to

promote standardized trail construction and design, and to coordinate activities of local groups. The last were volunteers

organized into local trail clubs, each with responsibility for building the segment of the trail that ran through its region. Perkins

joined the executive committee of the conference in 1926 and for the next three years promoted the project along the length of the

Appalachians. However, his most important contribution was to recruit Myron Avery, who more than anyone else was

responsible for the success of the trail.

 

Born in Maine in 1899, Avery graduated from Harvard Law School in 1923. He was thirty-three years old and residing in

Washington, D.C., when he became chairman of the conference, a post that he held until his death in 1952. He was a meticulously

dressed lawyer who both pursued a successful public career in maritime law and tirelessly promoted, scouted, and built the trail.

Although he was exceptional in the amount of time and energy devoted to the trail, he was in many ways typical of persons who

were most active in the project: educated, successful, mostly young, professionals, whose vocations and activities for the trail

were largely separate. Examples included Harvey Broome of Knoxville, Tennessee, the driving force behind the Smoky

Mountains Hiking Club. Broome, like Avery, was a Harvard-trained lawyer. His close associate in the club, Frank Fowler, was

also a lawyer. Much of the trail in Virginia was scouted by a professor of optomology at the University of Virginia in

Charlottesville. The two most important trail builders in Pennsylvania were a physician and a college professor. Lawyers,

professors, editors, and scientists predominated among the significant implementers of the project."

 

Characteristics of local clubs varied. The Washington-based Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, to which Avery belonged, had

many federal employees as members. The membership of the Appalachian Mountain Club was dominated by scientists and

academics from New England universities and colleges. The Blue Mountain Eagle Climbing Club in Reading, Pennsylvania, was

exclusively male with membership further limited to one hundred "community leaders" from the area. The Dartmouth Outing Club

comprised students and faculty at the college. Many affluent young single men and women belonged to the Georgia

Appalachian Trail Club. The pattern was variation in a definite stratum of American society. The clubs were united by a strong

thread of professional membership found in all of them.

 

The enthusiasm of professionals was not enough to ensure success for the project. Because more than half of the trail was

across land in state and federal ownership, the cooperation of managers of public lands was crucial for success. By and large,

that cooperation was unstinting. The managers of eight national forests and two national parks through which the route passed

aided in its construction with whatever resources that they could spare. State foresters, especially in Maine, Pennsylvania, and

Georgia, had their staffs cut sections of the trail and gave freely of their own time to work on it. State foresters founded the trail

club in Georgia, were its officers, and ordered departmental employees to attend its meetings. The domination of the Georgia club

by foresters faded only after it became a well-established, laic organization. During the 1930s after the creation of the Civilian

Conservation Corps, public-land managers quickly used its personnel on unfinished sections of the trail.

 

Although MacKaye envisioned the trail as a cooperative endeavor of working people, guided perhaps by social reformers, the

project became avocational for professionals who were assisted by managers of public lands. That appropriation of leadership

was crucial in determining the character of the trail, because the professionals and managers conceived of it solely as a

recreational facility.

 

Neither group had any interest in a broad societal mission for the trail in the manner of MacKaye and other founders. Why the

appropriation and transformation occurred is easily explained in a narrow sense: the professionals were in a position to assume

leadership and to shape the project to their goals, but the working class was not. The answer to the broad question of why this

was the case lies in the changing social structure and class outlook that had occurred in the years prior to MacKaye's proposing

the trail.

 

PROFESSIONALS PERSPECTIVE

 

While the growth of modern industrialism between 1880 and 1920 caused the problems associated with urban expansion and rural

decay that so disturbed MacKaye and fellow reformers, it created a secure, privileged group of professionals. New professions

like forestry or social work emerged. Advances in chemistry, geology, and physics invigorated many fields like metallurgy and

soil science as well as most branches of engineering. New rigor and standards in training and practice spread through

established professions like medicine, journalism, and law to raise both their effectiveness and esteem. The new professionals

were courted by industry, whose operation was being reordered in accordance with principles of scientific management, and by

government, whose activity was expanding into new spheres of social welfare and resource use. Indeed, the daily functioning of

an increasingly technology-based, educated, litigious society depended on professional services.

 

Those professionals did not directly experience many of the negative consequences of industrialization that were so worrisome

to MacKaye and other social reformers. Professional organizations provided occupational and sometimes social associations to

replace the older communities of propinquity. The professionals who were employed by large modern bureaucratic organizations

like universities, public agencies, or corporations often enjoyed an upward mobility unavailable to factory workers or members of

the typing pool. The tasks of professionals allowed them to preserve a sense of individuality, while repetitious and anonymous

productive techniques made inroads into many economic activities. Comfortable incomes insulated most professionals from the

worst effects of the rising costs of living that marked the early twentieth century.

 

Although the professionals were not entirely removed from the dislocations that accompanied the emergence of recognizably

modern society, they did form a self-conscious, self-satisfied segment that was accustomed to viewing the world confidently.

Because they benefited from the rise of industrial capitalism, the professionals were not revolutionaries. Yet each profession

made ambitious assertions about its capacity to advance the commonweal and affirmed an obligation to do so. That sense of

confidence and public responsibility, combined with the inherent conservatism of a comfortable and broadly improving position,

imbued professionals with a desire to improve the world for themselves and for society in general, yet to leave it recognizable and

within the bounds of established order. For professionals with an avocational interest in the outdoors, the Appalachian Trail as a

recreational facility was an ideal project.

 

Many persons active in the project recorded how they were affected by the iconographic antipodes of modern life: nature,

wilderness, and a romantic past. Their writings had many themes. Horace Kephart, active in the Smoky Mountains Club, wrote

practical books on sporting, firearms, and woodcraft as well as colorful descriptive ones about Indians and mountaineers. His

associate, Broome, was the author of introspective essays on the benefits of personal contacts with wilderness. Avery wrote

nostalgically about the natural history of his native

 

Maine. Torrey was a coauthor of the "New York Walk Book," a practical trail guide that was a masterpiece of descriptive prose.

These works were antimodern in one way or another, and whether stressing romance, philosophy, or practical guidance, as a

whole they were a literature of escape. Those trail builders, like MacKaye, envisioned a natural alternative to modern life in the

Appalachian region, and, again like MacKaye, they perceived the trail as the means to make that alternative accessible. For them,

however, the trail was for a temporary rather than a permanent alternative. A friend of Broome wrote, "The law was [his] means of

making a living . . . the wilderness was his way of life.'Inverting that observation gives it more social resonance: the wilderness

was Broome's way of life, but he made his livelihood by practicing law. Some variation of this arrangement marked the existence

of most builders of the trail, an appropriate juxtaposition, because most of them enjoyed occupations that were as secure as

modern American society can offer. Their writings are devoid of commentary on the broad social issues that perplexed and

motivated MacKaye. Instead personal adjustment to life, not the worldly context of that adjustment, was the concern. In the

writings of the trail builders, the bond that linked individuals was the common search for the satisfaction that came from

temporarily departing contemporary society.

 

The Appalachian Trail thus neatly fitted the general outlook of the professionals. The project would improve the world in a

fundamentally conservative way by creating a congenial landscape for persons firmly and comfortably rooted by occupation in

modern life. The eastern cities and their lowland environs would be given to work and material life, while the Appalachian

highlands, looming above them, would be a wilderness made accessible by the trail. Individuals who built or walked the trail

could bring an equilibrium to their lives: enjoying the material benefits of the city, while tapping the wilderness for physical

conditioning or spiritual and psychological rewards. The notion of balancing the urban material world with the rural spiritual one

has been a dominant theme in the Appalachian Trailway News, the journal of the trail conference since its founding.

 

What was the role of the urban working class, the group for whom MacKaye intended the trail? There was no hint of a social

contest for the trail. Working-class participation in its construction was minimal, probably because of two factors. Firstly,

organized interests of the working class as expressed in the union movement narrowed to an emphasis on the workplace in the

early twentieth century. Broad issues of social and economic reform were beyond the range of articulated concerns for all except

the most radical activists, who were so embattled that a project like the trail must have seemed unworthy of their attention. The

trail as an agent of reform thus was not on the agenda of the organized working class. Secondly, when the project had been

appropriated by the professional group, participation by the urban working class must have been discouraged purposively or

otherwise by the gaps of values and outlooks that separated it from the professionals.

 

CONSUMER OPTIONS AND PUBLIC-LAND MANAGERS

 

The volunteer builders of the trail could not have changed the context of the project without the cooperation of the managers of

public lands through which the route passed. Defined solely as a recreational facility, the trail was a godsend to those managers.

Large-scale industrial capitalism, a dominant presence in the United States after the Civil War, shaped the political concerns of

the populist and progressive decades. The fundamental goodness of capitalism had been broadly and openly challenged in the

second half of the nineteenth century, but discontent softened as consumerism deepened and industrialism funneled new wealth

into many sectors of American society. The rise of progressivism in the early twentieth century saw attacks on the capitalist

foundation of the economy being more and more limited to the left margins of the political spectrums However, the progressives

were concerned about the proper role and extent of capitalism in the various spheres of American life.

 

MacKaye was preoccupied with that problem. His interpretation of the American landscape as one of conflict between the

indigenous and the metropolitan makes sense only when it is recast in terms of spatial and institutional penetration by industrial

capitalism and of resistance to it by old forms of community and production.

 

Progressives engaged in many struggles like the use of public lands over that issued In the early decades of the twentieth

century, when systematic management of public lands was being established under the leadership of Gifford Pinchot and the U.S.

Forest Service, governmental control of large amounts of national lands and their resources was considered to be a means to

manage the economy for the common good. That potential prompted Theodore Roosevelt to devote so much attention to the

public lands and aroused interest among reformers like MacKaye. As long as that potential existed, managers of public lands

were more than technicians: they were public officials poised to play key roles in some important issues of the times.

 

When the trail project was initiated in the early 1920s, the debate about the role of capitalism in American life was narrowing.

Industrial capitalism had become so entrenched that further rethinking about socioeconomic reordering seemed useless and

inappropriate to the practical minded.With the fading of that potential role for the public lands in a societal reordering, managers

faced the prospect of becoming mere supervisors of timber cuts and grazing regimes. To avoid the looming loss of status the

managers turned increasingly to recreational land uses.

 

After 1918 the question of how to improve American life became largely an accommodation of the reality of industrial capitalism,

and much of the answer focused on pleasing the individual in a consumer society. While intellectuals grappled with the role of

citizens as consumers, societal institutions expanded the range of options for consumption that was available to Americans.

With that expansion came increased possibilities of finding personal satisfaction. Among other things, a consumer might select

preferred styles of leisure.

 

An enlarged middle class, newly mobile with the automobile as well as increased discretionary income and time for leisure

activities, created a vast demand for outdoor recreations From that demand the public lands took on a new, important role in

American life, and their managers rushed to meet it. They became the heirs to the escape-to-nature tradition of popular writers

like John Burroughs or John Muir and gave philosophical underpinning to the new sense of mission. Cooperation in the

construction of the trail as a recreational facility neatly fitted the new role. Conflict arose between proponents of recreational

uses and persons who thought of the public lands primarily as a source of raw materials, but that difference, so extensively

studied in the literature, did move the debate on use of the public lands to an inherently more conservative arena. The issue was

how rather than if the public lands should serve a society that was irrevocably urban, industrial, and consumer oriented.

 

Sixteen years after MacKaye first proposed the Appalachian Trail, the last two sections, one in Maine and the other in the Smoky

Mountains, were completed. The new communities and the exchange-based economic domain of the original proposal were

forgotten. A recurrent fear of persons who later maintained the trail was that squatters might settle along its route. MacKaye,

who became a planner for the Tennessee Valley Authority and continued to promote reform through resettlement, lived long

enough to see the trail completed and placed under federal protection. Even he accepted what the trail had become: an alternative

to nonconstructive urban leisure, a place where individuals could exercise their bodies and explore nature.

 

The transformation of the trail from an instrument of social reform to a recreational facility was thus smooth, uncontested, and

forgotten. There were ironies of mutation and inversion. MacKaye thought that disaffected, radical members of society would

support the trail, while corporations and conservatives would denounce it. Instead the radicals ignored it, and a contented

segment of society espoused it. MacKaye envisioned the trail as a cooperative venture for the working class, but middle-class

professionals came to dominate it.

 

MacKaye foresaw governmental support for the trail as a community-forming agent, but that support has been for the

recreational aspect. To MacKaye the trail was to be a catalyst for regional planning, but that became the method to protect the

trail and its route. Each of these ironies appears to juxtapose realism in American thinking about governmental responsibility,

potential for socioeconomic change, and appropriate landscape with old illusions about the possible. From a late

twentieth-century perspective, the trail as an instrument of temporary, playful retreat from the /pressure of contemporary society

seems as reasonable as the juxtaposition of the forested Appalachian ridges with the busy cities of the lowlands, while the

concept of the trail as a catalyst for reform appears farfetched.

 

 

 

The linkage of leisure activity with practicality has both deep roots in American consumer capitalism and ramifications that

extend beyond the Appalachian ridges. It underpins modern notions of recreation and is such a pervasive part of American life

that only occasionally does one glimpse the original intent. Unfortunately this link restrains contemporary vision of the practical

and thereby reduces current capacity to deal with the shortcomings of modern life through rearrangements of landscapes. The

aura of success about the trail is a reminder of this potential and of the degree to which a sensibly arranged landscape is a social

artifact.