Stewart Udall

Stewart Udall, in the 1960s

Stewart Lee Udall (born January 31, 1920 in St. Johns , Arizona , † March 20, 2010 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American lawyer and politician of the Democratic Party . He was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1955 to 1961 and then Secretary of the Interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1969.

Today he is mainly perceived as a pioneer in environmental policy .

Life

Steward Udall was the son of lawyer Levi Stewart Udall , multiple chairman of the Arizona State Supreme Court, from an established Mormon family. He described himself as a non-practicing Mormon. He studied law at the University of Arizona and paused to serve in the United States Army Air Forces Air Corps during World War II . He was mainly used as a gunner on a Consolidated B-24 in Italy. In 1947 he married Erma Lee Webb and they had six children. In 1948 he completed his training and settled as a lawyer in Tucson . He began to establish himself in local politics and was elected in the November 1954 congressional elections to represent Arizona in the US House of Representatives. He took up this mandate in January 1955.

After the end of his political career, he took on a visiting professorship at Yale University and founded a think tank for environmental policy and environmental law . He initially practiced law in Phoenix , Arizona, then in Santa Fé , New Mexico . In the 1970s and 1980s, he represented Navajo Indians from Nevada, Utah, and Arizona in a number of high-profile cases against the federal government of the United States for contaminating their areas with uranium mining and nuclear weapon tests . The legal proceedings failed because of the US doctrine of sovereign immunity , whereupon Udall raised the claims to the political level. In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Act awarded victims of uranium production and nuclear weapons testing up to $ 100,000 in compensation.

He also worked as a publicist and wrote about nature conservation and energy policy . His best-known book is The Quiet Crisis on environmental policy, published in 1963 in response to Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring of 1962. At Rachel Carson's funeral in 1964, Udall paid her last respects as pallbearer.

Member of the House of Representatives from 1955 to 1961

Udall was sent to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the Committee on Labor and Education. He was committed to hydraulic engineering projects such as the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River on the one hand and the protection of spectacular landscapes on the other. He worked with Senator John F. Kennedy on a labor market reform and employment promotion program and supported his 1960 presidential candidacy.

United States Secretary of the Interior 1961 to 1969

Udall on an excursion to Grand Teton National Park with First Lady Lady Bird Johnson in August 1964

President Kennedy called Udall in 1961 as interior minister in his cabinet. The office traditionally went to a representative of western states and Udall had supported Kennedy's candidacy so successfully that the votes of Arizona in the electoral committee went to him. Udall held the office under Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson until 1969.

In this role, Udall established essential parts of US environmental policy and has shaped the legislation to this day. Beginning with Kennedy's New Frontier policy and continuing in Johnson's Great Society , the United States attempted a socio-political awakening that included not only the civil rights movement but also early aspects of environmental policy. During Udall's tenure as Minister of the Interior, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System was founded, with which for the first time ecologically and scenically outstanding rivers were permanently taken out of use for hydropower . This was followed by the National Trails System with the designation of long-distance hiking trails through particularly attractive landscapes and the National Natural Landmarks program . The Wilderness Act created the strictest nature reserve class in the United States. Udall also laid the foundation for the later Endangered Species Act , the federal species protection law. Other projects under his direction were the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Water Quality Act of 1965, which set limit values ​​for air and water pollution and established special protection zones.

Under the administration of the National Park Service , four national parks , six National Monuments , eight National Sea and Lakeshores , nine National Recreation Areas , 20 National Historic Sites , and 56 National Wildlife Refuges of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service were established during Udall's tenure .

In cultural policy, he founded the National Endowment for the Arts funding programs for art and culture and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the promotion of the humanities .

There were conflicts with his environmental commitment because of his ongoing funding of dam projects. Udall was a proponent of developing the Southwestern United States through the construction of dams for irrigation and electricity generation. His biggest project was the idea of ​​channeling water from the Columbia River near Portland , Oregon into the world's longest canal to Arizona, where the water supply of the Colorado River was insufficient to meet the agricultural plans in the region. To provide electricity, the plans provided for two new dams on the Colorado River, through which parts of what is now the Grand Canyon National Park would have been flooded.

Udall 1974

The significantly reduced Central Arizona Project was finally implemented . Representatives of both major parties supported Udall's plans for the largest irrigation canal in the United States to divert water from the Colorado River near Lake Havasu City to irrigate agricultural land in central and southern Arizona. Instead of the dams in the Grand Canyon, coal-fired power plants were built. The plan was formally signed in 1968, work began in 1973, most parts were in operation until the late 1980s, but the last offshoots did not start operating until 1993. The benefits of the project are still controversial today, as parts of the costs were passed on to the farmers and some of them turned out to be prohibitively high. Farmers who couldn't afford the water had to go out of business.

A $ 500 million promotion of the economy in Indian reservations planned by Udall failed in 1967. Indian policy in the United States was still shaped in the 1950s by the idea of termination , the abolition of tribal rights and the assimilation of the Indians into the general population . The Indian Resources Development Bill called the 1967 draft law was intended to guarantee the Indian peoples economic self-government under the guarantee of collective rights. It was never implemented, not least because the Indian representatives were divided as to which form of self-government was suitable and to what extent the Bureau of Indian Affairs should be involved in the decisions of the peoples as a guarantor of the collective rights to land. Indian policy was not reformed until long after Udall's tenure in the Indian Self Determination Act of 1975.

family

His brother was the congressman and presidential candidate (1976) Mo Udall , whose campaign he supported as a manager. Mo Udall lost the Democratic primary to Jimmy Carter . Udall's son Tom Udall and his nephew Mark Udall are currently members of the US Senate (as of 2010).

Honors

• 1968 awarded him Bates College the honorary doctorate of law school.
• In 1986 he was accepted as an honorary member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Association.
• In 1989, King Juan Carlos I of Spain awarded him the rank of Knight in the Orden de Isabel la Católica for his book To the Inland Empire on Spanish colonial history and culture in the southwestern United States.
• In 1992, the United States Congress established the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation, a federal foundation dedicated to environmental issues and the advancement of the American Indians and Native Americans.
• In 1997 the Udall Center for Public Policies was founded at the University of Arizona . It organizes and finances research on environmental policy, immigration and Indian policy.
• 1999 Nuclear Free Future Award from the Franz Moll Foundation for his life's work
• In 2010, the historic main building of the Home Office in Washington, DC was renamed the Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building .
• Point Udall , the easternmost point in the United States on the island of Saint Croix , US Virgin Islands , was named after him.

literature

• Literature by and about Stewart Udall in the catalog of the German National Library
• Thomas G. Smith: John Kennedy, Stewart Udall, and new frontier conservation . In: Pacific Historical Review , Vol. 64, No. 3 (August 1995), ISSN  0030-8684 , pp. 329-362

Web links

Commons : Stewart Lee Udall  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Stewart Udall in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation
• University of Arizona Udall Center
• Online exhibition on Udall with curriculum vitae and further information on the website of the Udall Center of the University of Arizona
• Obituary for Udall by Brent Blackwelder , Honorary Chairman of Friends of the Earth
• Stewart Lee Udall: A Letter to My Grandchildren , December 24, 2006. His final essay and a legacy of his environmental policy.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 25, 1999, p. 279 in Google Book Search
2. ↑ Dieter Steiner: Rachel Carson - pioneer of the ecological movement . Oekom Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86581-467-8 , p. 329
3. ↑ Thomas G. Smith: John Kennedy, Stewart Udall, and new frontier conservation . In: Pacific Historical Review , Vol. 64, No. 3 (August 1995), ISSN  0030-8684 , pp. 329-362
4. ^ ^{A b} Charles Coate: "The Biggest Water Fight in American History": Stewart Udall and the Central Arizona Project. In: Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 79-101, Jstor: 40169924
5. ^ Robert Dean, "Dam Building Still Had Some Magic Then," Stewart Udall, the Central Arizona Project, and the Evolution of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, 1963-1968 . In: The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Feb. 1997), pp. 81-98, Jstor: 4492296
6. ↑ Christopher K. Riggs: American Indians, Economic Development, and Self-Determination in the 1960s. In: The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 431-463
7. ↑ Acknowledgment of Udall on the Foundation's website (German)
8. ^ Department of the Interior: Secretary Salazar Honors Stewart Lee Udall at Interior Building Dedication Ceremony , press release of September 21, 2010