Hi there. My name is Tyler. I'm a fifth year PhD candidate in the history department here at UT. I'm really excited to tell you about my work and my projects called the politics of beauty. It's about the origins of environmental politics in post-war, America. Had a great time working on it this year. And I'm really genuinely grateful for the opportunity the fellowship afforded me. So, like I said, my projects about the origins of environmental politics. But it has kind of a weird twist. And as a result, I've always had sort of trouble distilling it into an elevator pitch. But it came up with one recently that I kinda liked and I thought I would try it out. So my work, I argue that the origins of environmental politics didn't really have much to do with the environment. That might sound faintly ludicrous. I wouldn't blame you for thinking. So what I'm gonna do you one better? I'm going to argue that something called the White House Conference on natural beauty is in fact key to the origins of environmental politics. If you're thinking, boy, that doesn't strike me as a likely name for a history moving event. New York Times didn't think so either. They were poached some fun edit and fix. These referred to it as a top-level Tea Party for little old ladies. So how did I come to be interested in this Tea Party? And how did I come to be convinced that had something to do with the advent of environmental politics. Well, to tell that story, we gotta go back a couple of years to when I was a third year PhD candidate. And when I was searching a little bit desperately by that point for a dissertation topic, I was interested in doing something on design and the state, meaning the government, had come to UT with an interest in design and urban planning and topics like that. And in those third-year moment of desperation, I can across this document called beauty for America, which was an 800 page transcript of this White House Conference on natural beauty. And the conference was held in Washington DC in May 1965 by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. And right away this document intrigued me. The first thing I was interested in was the Table of Contents and particularly the topics discussed at this natural beauty conference. They had panels dedicated to things like the townscape, which was a hot new urban design idea. No, it's just bubbling up in England at the time. The panels on the design of the highway, automobile junk yards and the new Suburbia. I thought these were kind of strange topics to be brought together at any single conference. Much less one dedicated to natural beauty. What did the townscape or automobile junkyard sending to a natural beauty, for instance. I was also kind of perplexed by how the President was talking about these issues. Lyndon Johnson was saying things like association with beauty can enlarge man's imagination, whereby his spirit, ugliness can demean the people who live among it. So some very eloquent rhetoric. Things got even stranger when I started looking at the press coverage, but it's about New York Times wrote a very laudatory editorial. And indeed they wrote like a dozen laudatory editorials. So serious people were taking this thing very seriously. And indeed, they're a bit about the top-level Tea Party. What they're really saying was that the White House Conference on natural beauty. Sounds deceptively like a top-level Tea Party for little old ladies was in fact dedicated to one of the largest and toughest problems of the century, the total American environment. Now this raises some questions. Why was everyone so excited about the White House Conference on natural beauty? And what the heck is the total American environment? If I was a copy editor, I might have said, it seems to me like you have two extra adjectives and that construction, what are total or American doing there? So that's about where I was a year and change ago when I applied for the fellowship. What have I learned since what's going on with the strange to them? Well, the first thing I learned was that there's beauty talk didn't come out of nowhere. And in fact, it was sort of a pretty direct response to this surge of concern in the early 1960s about man-made agreements. And how big of a problem can man-made openness rather be? Well, ask the denizens of post-war America because they were really up in arms about it. And I was just staggered at the volume of this stuff by hand. As I really gotten to my research, just endless discussion about ugly America. So what was ugly America? What were they so concerned about? On one level, it was just this explosion of everyday I source things like junk yards, billboards, litter, water pollution, air pollution. All these overripe fruits of this super abundant age in American history. But there's also sort of a, a bigger moments where there's things going on like suburbanization, the national highway building and urban renewal. So it's a moment of dramatic physical transformation in the country. Just constant change, ra, change on a huge scale. And this aesthetic idiom, this, this vocabulary of man-made ugliness and natural beauty sort of becomes the way that the country reckons with these changes in their everyday surroundings. So if you're the incoming administration and the countries clamoring about man-made openness. What do you do? Propose a new initiative on natural beauty. That's what the Johnson administration did. They put together this taskforce on the preservation of natural beauty? It was one of a dozen task forces. They can be in secret in 1964 as part of the Great Society. And this task force was a little bit different from the other ones. The others were dedicated to topics like education, government reorganization, foreign policy, all things that were sort of traditionally within the federal government's wheelhouse. But this natural beauty thing was entirely novel. And so the test force could kind of make it up that carte Blanche on this brand new issue, this whole new political category. So who was the task force on natural beauty? It was kind of an all star alignment. And it people like Jane Jacobs, John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, William H way, Loren Eiseley. These are all big time postwar fingers. And they put together this sweeping natural beauty program that includes things like parks in historic preservation and trails in rivers and pollution remediation, just this really ambitious program. Now another member of the test force was Lawrence Rockefeller. Of the Rockefeller, Rockefeller's, here's the conservation right? And he wrote this article in the Washington Post to sort of explain to people what was going on with this weird beauty event that was about to happen at the White House. And I want to show you what he says because here we'll sort of turn back to my weird elevator pitch and what I'm getting. So Rockefeller says, someone doesn't. People will convene in the State Department auditorium Monday to talk about natural y in light of other pressing issues, should these important people spend their time talking about beauty? And why should the president take time to hear what they have to say? The answers that the President, the liters, and most significantly the people of this country, have become concerned about the kind of America effluent is created. In many ways, natural beauty is an inadequate term. Conservation, outdoor recreation, natural resources, urban renewal, and environmental health are all parts of it, but not as inclusive. What's involved here is the basic quality of environment. We believe that natural beauty, or whatever term one chooses to use for it, is an idea whose time has arrived. So even the people behind this natural beauty program could sense that they were on to something even at this natural beauty labels and quite right. And indeed at the conference, experts were using another label. Environment was the word on every experts tongue. But they didn't talk about the environment in the sense that we did today. And at some point I counted and there are a 192 or something like that. Utterances of environment or some variance over the course of this today, but only once to somebody say the environment with a definite article. Instead, you hear about the human environment, the physical environment, the natural learn the urban environment, the wilderness environment, unhealthy and unhappy environment, noble an ennobling amendments. You heard about environmental maintenance, environmental stewardship, environmental control. You've heard a lot about environmental quality. And when somebody needed a word that would sum up all of these contexts that people were all of a sudden concerned about. You heard people talk about the total environment. So this was a new concept and politics. And this is sort of the first time that environment becomes a key word in American public life. But we're not yet talking about the environment. This is something bigger, something slightly more diffuse, something slightly more plural, something more relational. 1965 is a moment where there are a lot of different environments that exist. So to get back to my elevator pitch, I would say that typically when we think about the origins of environmental politics, we imagine something like this, where concern for the environment is some pre-existing entity that's growing over the years. But what I'm going to suggest is that this is sort of an Illusion. We're projecting concepts from the seventies back in time. That knee environment doesn't really get invented until 1969, 1970. So what I'm trying to do is look at the story as it happens. And what I do. When I do, I find that this White House comes to natural beauty is really sort of the keystone that created this category. And indeed this whole issue of environmental politics. Thanks.
The Politics of Beauty: The Aesthetic Origins of Environmental Politics in Postwar America, Kyle VanHemert
From Huma Rasheed April 15, 2021
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In the mid-1960s, influential Americans flocked to a hot new political issue: man-made ugliness. “Ugly America,” as critics called it at the time, comprised a diverse ensemble of visual offenders: junkyards, billboard, litter, pollution. Formerly “eyesores,” with the coming of postwar abundance, these everyday sights mushroomed into a national menace. In response to public concern, Lyndon Johnson made the preservation of “natural beauty” a national ideal, launching a “war on ugliness” that was cheered by press and public alike. My project recovers this overlooked episode in postwar history, tracing how an unlikely aesthetic crusade put “environment” on the nation’s political agenda.
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