The Big Thicket Tangle
Politicians, lumber companies, and even Time, Inc., are maneuvering to tell us what kind of park, if any, we'll have. That is, if there is any Big Thicket left by then.
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The Nixon White House, which had urged Bush to make the Senate race in the first place, rushed down then-Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel to tell Texans what a fine man George Bush is. Among other things, Hickel said he was "strongly committed to the preservation of the Big Thicket" and rhapsodized at length about the fine piece of legislation that was Bush's bill.
After Bentsen won and was installed in the Senate his first action was to introduce a 100,000-acre park bill similar to Yarborough's. By this time, political sentiment in Texas was undeniably on the side of a largish (100,000 acres or more) park. One of Lyndon Johnson's last speeches as President called for its enactment and most of Texas' daily newspapers had endorsed the idea. Even the Houston City Council, which has never zealously pursued the creation of parks within its own jurisdiction, went unanimously on record in favor of 100,000 acres.
By late in the next year, 1971, it was beginning to approach election time again, and politicians were dusting off their hiking boots. Rogers Morton, who had replaced Hickel as Interior Secretary, came to Texas to tour the site of the proposed park. He spoke out eloquently on the idyllic splendors of the Big Thicket and promised to "keep the pressure on" to create a National Park. What pressure he spoke of was left rather ambiguous. His one-time, off-the-cuff, whistle-stop remark was and remains the closest approach to positive action the Nixon Administration has made (as of late this spring) toward the creation of a Big Thicket Park.
WHAT WITH HIS BOW-TIES and rumpled suits, his misshapen felt hat and shaggy, forever mussed, greying hair, Bob Eckhardt seems a curious spokesman for urban Houston in a modern Congress. He is, though, of a kind with those people who have made representative democracy work in spite of itself. Eckhardt combines an intellectual facility for the abstract with an earthy affection for the commonplace, and is possessed of a keen instinct for channeling the energies of America's past to deal with the dislocations of its present. His respect for the country's traditions, both of its people and its institutions, has made him, simultaneously, a well-regarded Constitutional lawyer, an avid conservationist and amateur historian, a consistant but original liberal, and, perhaps most importantly, a powerfully adept manipulator of the ofttimes mysterious tools of Washington politics.
Charlie Wilson, on the other hand, is a more prosaic Congressman. An Annapolis graduate, he still looks like an ensign, sandy-haired and grinning, with the lanky presence of the junior varsity basketball player who only recently sprouted to six-five and hasn't yet decided how to deal with those legs. Young and exuberant, country affable, he has brought to Congress the back-slapping, hand-shaking, Good-Ole-Boy style of politickin' he perfected in 15 years in the Texas Legislature and East Texas stumping. He had always been vaguely typed as a liberal in the Legislature but, as he puts it, "bein' a liberal in the Texas Legislature ain't the same thing as bein' a liberal in Congress," and he has found himself steadily compiling what can only be called a conservative voting record. He is a freshman this year, representing the East Texas district that encompasses most of the Big Thicket.
Eckhardt and Wilson are, for the most part, the central figures in the parliamentary dance that will see the creation of a federally-protected Big Thicket. It can be easily viewed as an interesting confrontation—the urban liberal, Congressional veteran, thoughtful and intent, vs. the rural neophyte, uncomfortably conservative, contagiously friendly, accustomed to the dark machinations of Austin legislating—but it would be an oversimplification. There are other characters, in many ways larger ones, who figure in the dance, some of them tapping their toes on the outskirts, counterfeit wallflowers helping to set the rhythm.
It is Wilson, probably, who plays the pivotal role; without question he is subject to the most intense pressures of any of the participants. It is within his district that the park, whatever its eventual character, would be created, and Congressional protocol confers on him considerable influence for that reason alone. His predecessor in Congress, John Dowdy, had introduced a bill positing a 35,000 acre park configured in the shape of a "string of pearls." The String-of-Pearls proposal was the timber industry's first hesitant concession to the notion of a park and was a collection of smallish, widely scattered plots, or "units", that the experts all agreed were those most urgently in need of preservation. Dowdy's efforts in behalf of the timber lobby were, however, largely ineffectual; he was at the time under indictment for accepting a bribe and spent most of the 92nd Congress suffering "back trouble" that kept federal prosecutors from bringing him to trial.
Eckhardt was at this time (1971-72) pushing his own bill, calling for a 191,000-acre park. Texas conservationists, in the form of the Big Thicket Association, (BTA) , were as adamantly opposed to anything smaller as the timber lobby was to anything at all. As the BTA saw it, the Thicket had already dwindled to less than 300,000 acres and the String-of-Pearls was a ridiculous crumb to settle for. Their greatest disagreement, over and above the absolute size of the various units, was their determination to include stream-bed corridors. As conservation-minded ecologists pointed out, to preserve an isolated unit of woodlands without protecting the watershed of which it is part-and-parcel is to foredoom that unit to eventual destruction. The Eckhardt bill, together with bills offered by other members of the Texas delegation, again fell victim to Chairman Aspinall's general indisposition to parks of any sort; the House Committee never even held hearings and the 92nd Congress, like the three Congresses before it, expired without resolution of the controversy.
When the 93rd Congress opened in January the atmosphere had changed and the stage seemed ready for a concluding act: Wayne Aspinall had lost a Colorado primary and the House Interior Committee was suddenly shifted in a more conservationist direction; the several proponents and opponents, almost all of them, bad wearied of the steady buffeting of conflicting interests and the gentle serum of compromise had imbued them all; and Charlie Wilson had replaced John Dowdy as the 2nd District's Representative in Washington.
Without exception, the conservationists cheerfully welcomed Wilson as a considerable improvement over Dowdy but, as they saw it, a disquieting cloud hovered over him. For two decades Wilson had been an employee of Temple Industries, one of the largest of the timber companies, and it had been with the active support and encouragement of the Temple family that he entered his first political race. His offices still boast a score of photographs, interspersed with pictures of the ships he served on, of sawmills and lumberyards, and he long ago earned the nickname "Timber Charlie." To his credit, it is a relationship Wilson has never ducked, and he speaks of Arthur Temple, Jr., the company president, as "one of the two or three people in my life I have felt the closest to for the longest time, not just politically but personally, too, in every way possible."
The Temple-Wilson connection is not as worrisome to park advocates as it might seem at a glance. Temple Industries, of all the major timber companies with large East Texas holdings, is the only one that is locally owned. Together with the other companies, Temple declared a voluntary moratorium on cutting in the general area of the proposed park, but their proscription was far more generous and extensive, not to mention adhered to, than any other company's. Moreover, Temple has foresworn practices that the rest of the industry has found economical and environmentalists have termed detestable: the wholesale clear-cutting of large timber stands and the razing of cut-over lands, the airborne use of herbicides and defoliants to erase underbrush. Temple has also shown a willingness to encourage slow-growing, often fragile stands of bottomland hardwoods, like cedars and oaks, that other companies have ignored in favor of quick-and-easy pine plantations.
As Eckhardt conceded, Temple has had "a generally salubrious effect on conservation in the area; they have been the most reasonable to work with of any of the industry people." There is another, more pragmatic reason for Temple's conciliatory view of the park: their holdings lie further to the north than any other major company's, and they would be least affected by the park's creation. The company that would lose land to a federal park is the same one that environmentalists see as the most villainously obstinate: Mike Buckley's Eastex, Inc.
WHEN FRED BONAVITA BROKE THE story on Eastex's proposed donation, according to an insider at the National Park Service, "it blew the whole deal right out of the water." Corporate generosity seems somehow less charitable when it goes down in Washington's back rooms, and advance publicity about the deal scared the Park Service out of negotiations. Conservationists, who had been caught off guard, reacted with retroactive indignation; said an Eckhardt staffer: "Those sonsabitches, they nearly pulled a fast one there."
It had been but the latest in a long barrage of fast and slow ones, all aimed at the same general target: halting, or at least forestalling, the creation of the park. From the first, Eastex has been the most forceful opponent of the plan, lobbying against it at every turn. Ollie Crawford, the president of Southwestern Timber Company, a division of Eastex, has led the steadily retreating crusade against the park. Handsome and tanned in double-knit suit, with a Jimmy Stewart kind of masculine charisma, Crawford is an impressive spokesman for any cause. The walls of Southwestern's Neches River lodge are covered with pictures of him hunting, fishing, and flying in the company of congressmen, presidents and astronauts, photographs from his reign as the Jaycee's "Mr. East Texas" and plaques commemorating an astonishing variety of Chamber of Commerce-style honors.
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