The National Park Service entered the postwar years with a huge backlog of deferred maintenance and a depleted staff. During the difficult transition to a peacetime economy Congress increased appropriations for the parks, but slowly in the face of many other urgent demands. Meanwhile the number of park visitors grew at an unprecedented rate. These factors in combination threatened disaster. A decade after V-J Day influential voices called for closing the parks before they wore out beyond repair. It took Mission 66, an emergency development program, to turn the tide.

Before Mission 66 money for museum development came grudgingly from Congress. Some key congressmen viewed any kind of museum as inappropriate for federal funding. To them the word had a negative connotation, much as "education" had in the 1930s. Sensitivity to this aversion infiltrated the parks in some measure. There was talk of hiding museums under a different name, and one superintendent even forbade his historian to put up a sign pointing out the park museum. Consequently the Service had to depend for several years on supplementing designated museum development allotments with a succession of reimbursable jobs and donations. Existing museums, on the other hand, found a welcome place in the strained but regularly funded maintenance program.

Progress on postwar museum projects was also hampered by a two-year delay in moving the director's staff back to Washington from its wartime headquarters in Chicago. Coincidental with the move the Interior Department reversed the terminology for organizational units in its bureaus. To agree with practice in other departments, "division" became the term for the higher echelon and "branch" for its subunit. In October 1947, therefore, the Museum Division of the Branch of Natural History became the Museum Branch of the Natural History Division.

For the Museum Branch the period before Mission 66 witnessed evolutionary changes in exhibit thought and practice, a marked increase in attention to curatorial concerns, and a ready acceptance of scientific specimen conservation as a new museum discipline. (Curatorial and conservation developments will receive fuller discussion in subsequent chapters.) Mission 66 then brought an upsurge of opportunity to expand museum services to parks and their visitors.

Resumption of Museum Development

Ned Burns made a field trip to New Mexico in the spring of 1946. His assignment included examining the site of the first atomic bomb explosion, which was being proposed for the national park system. The spot qualified in historical significance, but he judged the visible evidences of the blast quite impractical to preserve. His trip also took him to 14 national parks in the Southwest where he inspected museum conditions. All had suffered from wartime neglect and needed help for which neither funds nor personnel were available. White Sands National Monument had barely enough money in its museum account to replace a fourth of the museum light bulbs that would burn out during the year. Parks throughout the system faced comparable problems. Burns could take only a little positive action before new appropriations came from Congress.

That January Burns had launched one planning project, the new prospectus for Great Smoky Mountains National Park noted previously. Funds available for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial allowed him to start a limited exhibit preparation scheme as well. It reflected Carl Russell's abiding interest in fur trade history, and Russell undoubtedly had a hand in its inception. Two artists were hired to make detailed drawings of objects typical of the Rocky Mountain fur trade and sketches showing the manner of their use. The pictures would fill an anticipated need in future exhibits at the memorial. Time would prove them doubly useful as illustrations for books Russell hoped to produce on the material culture of the trade.