I had some friends who worked for the National Park Service in the 1980s when President Reagan appointed James G. Watt as Secretary of the Interior. Watt was reputed to be a Christian fundamentalist who believed that the world was going to end soon and so it wasn’t really all that important to conserve natural resources and that’s why it would be okay to do mining in the national parks.
Whether or not that bit is true, he was certainly a political conservative.
The story I’d like to check on is this: Did Watt and/or the new conservative administration of President Reagan get the Dept. of the Interior’s logo changed so that the buffalo faced right instead of left? As in, the buffalo shouldn’t be seen to be leftward-looking? (You can see the current logo at http://www.doi.gov ).
Maybe this was just a joke that I took to be a serious story. When I was much younger, I took my dad literally when I asked who Richard Nixon was and he said he was the king of America…
Thanks.