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Theodore Roosevelt and His Times
Chapter IX. Reclamation and Conservation
by Howland, Harold
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The first message of President Roosevelt to Congress contained
these words: "The forest and water problems are perhaps the most
vital internal questions of the United States." At that moment,
on December 3, 1901, the impulse was given that was to add to the
American vocabulary two new words, "reclamation" and
"conservation," that was to create two great constructive
movements for the preservation, the increase, and the utilization
of natural resources, and that was to establish a new
relationship on the part of the Federal Government to the
nation's natural wealth.
Reclamation and conservation had this in common: the purpose of
both was the intelligent and efficient utilization of the natural
resources of the country for the benefit of the people of the
country. But they differed in one respect, and with conspicuous
practical effects. Reclamation, which meant the spending of
public moneys to render fertile and usable arid lands hitherto
deemed worthless, trod on no one's toes. It took from no one
anything that he had; it interfered with no one's enjoyment of
benefits which it was not in the public interest that he should
continue to enjoy unchecked. It was therefore popular from the
first, and the new policy went through Congress as though on
well-oiled wheels. Only six months passed between its first
statement in the Presidential message and its enactment into law.
Conservation, on the other hand, had to begin by withholding the
natural resources from exploitation and extravagant use. It had,
first of all, to establish in the national mind the principle
that the forests and mines of the nation are not an inexhaustible
grab-bag into which whosoever will may thrust greedy and wasteful
hands, and by this new understanding to stop the squandering of
vast national resources until they could be economically
developed and intelligently used. So it was inevitable that
conservation should prove unpopular, while reclamation gained an
easy popularity, and that those who had been feeding fat off the
country's stores of forest and mineral wealth should oppose, with
tooth and nail, the very suggestion of conservation. It was on
the first Sunday after he reached Washington as President, before
he had moved into the White House, that Roosevelt discussed with
two men, Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, the twin policies that
were to become two of the finest contributions to American
progress of the Roosevelt Administrations. Both men were already
in the Government service, both were men of broad vision and high
constructive ability; with both Roosevelt had already worked when
he was Governor of New York. The name of Newell, who became chief
engineer of the Reclamation Service, ought to be better known
popularly than it is in connection with the wonderful work that
has been accomplished in making the desert lands of western
America blossom and produce abundantly. The name of Pinchot, by a
more fortunate combination of events, has become synonymous in
the popular mind with the conservation movement.
On the very day that the first Roosevelt message was read to the
Congress, a committee of Western Senators and Congressmen was
organized, under the leadership of Senator Francis G. Newlands of
Nevada, to prepare a Reclamation Bill. The only obstacle to the
prompt enactment of the bill was the undue insistence upon State
Rights by certain Congressmen, "who consistently fought for local
and private interests as against the interests of the people as a
whole." In spite of this shortsighted opposition, the bill became
law on June 17, 1902, and the work of reclamation began without
an instant's delay. The Reclamation Act set aside the proceeds of
the sale of public lands for the purpose of reclaiming the waste
areas of the arid West.
Lands otherwise worthless were to be irrigated and in those new
regions of agricultural productivity homes were to be
established. The money so expended was to be repaid in due course
by the settlers on the land and the sums repaid were to be used
as a revolving fund for the continuous prosecution of the
reclamation work. Nearly five million dollars was made
immediately available for the work. Within four years, twenty-six
"projects" had been approved by the Secretary of the Interior and
work was well under way on practically all of them. They were
situated in fourteen States--Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas,
Montana, Nebraska, Washington, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North
Dakota, Oregon, California, South Dakota. The individual projects
were intended to irrigate areas of from eight thousand to two
hundred thousand acres each; and the grand total of arid lands to
which water was thus to be brought by canals, tunnels, aqueducts,
and ditches was more than a million and a half acres.
The work had to be carried out under the most difficult and
adventurous conditions. The men of the Reclamation Service were
in the truest sense pioneers, building great engineering works
far from the railroads, where the very problem of living for the
great numbers of workers required was no simple one. On the
Shoshone in Wyoming these men built the highest dam in the world,
310 feet from base to crest. They pierced a mountain range in
Colorado and carried the waters of the Gunnison River nearly six
miles to the Uncompahgre Valley through a tunnel in the solid
rock. The great Roosevelt dam on the Salt River in Arizona with
its gigantic curved wall of masonry 280 feet high, created a lake
with a capacity of fifty-six billion cubic feet, and watered in
1915 an area of 750,000 acres.
The work of these bold pioneers was made possible by the fearless
backing which they received from the Administration at
Washington. The President demanded of them certain definite
results and gave them unquestioning support. In Roosevelt's own
words, "the men in charge were given to understand that they must
get into the water if they would learn to swim; and, furthermore,
they learned to know that if they acted honestly, and boldly and
fearlessly accepted responsibility, I would stand by them to the
limit. In this, as in every other case, in the end the boldness
of the action fully justified itself."
The work of reclamation was first prosecuted under the United
States Geological Survey; but in the spring of 1908 the United
States Reclamation Service was established to carry it on, under
the direction of Mr. Newell, to whom the inception of the plan
was due. Roosevelt paid a fine and well-deserved tribute to the
man who originated and carried through this great national
achievement when he said that "Newell's single-minded devotion to
this great task, the constructive imagination which enabled him
to conceive it, and the executive power and high character
through which he and his assistant, Arthur P. Davis, built up a
model service--all these made him a model servant. The final
proof of his merit is supplied by the character and records of
the men who later assailed him."
The assault to which Roosevelt thus refers was the inevitable
aftermath of great accomplishment. Reclamation was popular, when
it was proposed, while it was being carried out, and when the
water began to flow in the ditches, making new lands of fertile
abundance for settlers and farmers. But the reaction of
unpopularity came the minute the beneficiaries had to begin to
pay for the benefits received. Then arose a concerted movement
for the repudiation of the obligation of the settlers to repay
the Government for what had been spent to reclaim the land. The
baser part of human nature always seeks a scapegoat; and it might
naturally be expected that the repudiators and their supporters
should concentrate their attacks upon the head of the Reclamation
Service, to whose outstanding ability and continuous labor they
owed that for which they were now unwilling to pay. But no
attack, not even the adverse report of an ill-humored
congressional committee, can alter the fact of the tremendous
service that Newell and his loyal associates in the Reclamation
Service did for the nation and the people of the United States.
By 1915 reclamation had added to the arable land of the country a
million and a quarter acres, of which nearly eight hundred
thousand acres were already "under water," and largely under
tillage, producing yearly more than eighteen million dollars'
worth of crops.
When Roosevelt became President there was a Bureau of Forestry in
the Department of Agriculture, but it was a body entrusted with
merely the study of forestry problems and principles. It
contained all the trained foresters in the employ of the
Government; but it had no public forest lands whatever to which
the knowledge and skill of these men could be applied. All the
forest reserves of that day were in the charge of the Public Land
Office in the Department of the Interior. This was managed by
clerks who knew nothing of forestry, and most, if not all, of
whom had never seen a stick of the timber or an acre of the
woodlands for which they were responsible. The mapping and
description of the timber lay with the Geological Survey. So the
national forests had no foresters and the Government foresters no
forests.
It was a characteristic arrangement of the old days. More than
that, it was a characteristic expression of the old attitude of
thought and action on the part of the American people toward
their natural resources. Dazzled and intoxicated by the
inexhaustible riches of their bountiful land, they had concerned
themselves only with the agreeable task of utilizing and
consuming them. To their shortsighted vision there seemed always
plenty more beyond. With the beginning of the twentieth century a
prophet arose in the land to warn the people that the supply was
not inexhaustible. He declared not only that the "plenty more
beyond" had an end, but that the end was already in sight. This
prophet was Gifford Pinchot. His warning went forth reinforced by
all the authority of the Presidential office and all the
conviction and driving power of the personality of Roosevelt
himself. Pinchot's warning cry was startling:
"The growth of our forests is but one-third of the annual cut;
and we have in store timber enough for only twenty or thirty
years at our present rate of use . . . . Our coal supplies are so
far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of
consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years
continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last
but fifty years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred
years . . . . Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, and the Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet
vast quantities of gas continue to be poured into the air and
great quantities of oil into the streams. Cases are known in
which great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to
get rid of it . . . . In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no one
has spoken with greater authority on this subject, estimated that
in the upland regions of the States South of Pennsylvania, three
thousand square miles of soil have been destroyed as the result
of forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at
the rate of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year . .
. . The Mississippi River alone is estimated to transport yearly
four hundred million tons of sediment, or about twice the amount
of material to be excavated from the Panama Canal. This material
is the most fertile portion of the richest fields, transformed
from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion . . . . The
destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the
opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing
value of the public lands by one-half."
Here, then, was a problem of national significance, and it was
one which the President attacked with his usual promptness and
vigor. His first message to Congress called for the unification
of the care of the forest lands of the public domain in a single
body under the Department of Agriculture. He asked that legal
authority be granted to the President to transfer to the
Department of Agriculture lands for use as forest reserves. He
declared that "the forest reserves should be set apart forever
for the use and benefit of our people as a whole and not
sacrificed to the shortsighted greed of a few." He supplemented
this declaration with an explanation of the meaning and purpose
of the forest policy which he urged should be adopted: "Wise
forest protection does not mean the withdrawal of forest
resources, whether of wood, water, or grass, from contributing
their full share to the welfare of the people, but, on the
contrary, gives the assurance of larger and more certain
supplies. The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of
forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is
a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and
the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our
forests is an imperative business necessity. We have come to see
clearly that whatever destroys the forest, except to make way for
agriculture, threatens our wellbeing."
Nevertheless it was four years before Congress could be brought
to the common-sense policy of administering the forest lands
still belonging to the Government. Pinchot and his associates in
the Bureau of Forestry spent the interval profitably, however, in
investigating and studying the whole problem of national forest
resources and in drawing up enlightened and effective plans for
their protection and development. Accordingly, when the act
transferring the National Forests to the charge of the newly
created United States Forest Service in the Department of
Agriculture was passed early in 1905, they were ready for the
responsibility.
The principles which they had formulated and which they now began
to apply had been summed up by Roosevelt in the statement "that
the rights of the public to the natural resources outweigh
private rights and must be given the first consideration." Until
the establishment of the Forest Service, private rights had
almost always been allowed to overbalance public rights in
matters that concerned not only the National Forests, but the
public lands generally. It was the necessity of having this new
principle recognized and adopted that made the way of the newly
created Forest Service and of the whole Conservation movement so
thorny. Those who had been used to making personal profit from
free and unrestricted exploitation of the nation's natural
resources would look only with antagonism on a movement which put
a consideration of the general welfare first.
The Forest Service nevertheless put these principles immediately
into practical application. The National Forests were opened to a
regulated use of all their resources. A law was passed throwing
open to settlement all land in the National Forests which was
found to be chiefly valuable for agriculture. Hitherto all such
land had been closed to the settler. Regulations were established
and enforced which favored the settler rather than the large
stockowner. It was provided that, when conditions required the
reduction in the number of head of stock grazed in any National
Forest, the vast herds of the wealthy owner should be affected
before the few head of the small man, upon which the living of
his family depended. The principle which excited the bitterest
antagonism of all was the rule that any one, except a bona fide
settler on the land, who took public property for private profit
should pay for what he got. This was a new and most unpalatable
idea to the big stock and sheep raisers, who had been accustomed
to graze their animals at will on the richest lands of the public
forests, with no one but themselves a penny the better off
thereby. But the Attorney-General of the United States declared
it legal to make the men who pastured their cattle and sheep in
the National Forests pay for this privilege; and in the summer of
1906 such charges were for the first time made and collected. The
trained foresters of the service were put in charge of the
National Forests. As a result, improvement began to manifest
itself in other ways. Within two years the fire prevention work
alone had completely justified the new policy of forest
regulation. Eighty-six per cent of the fires that did occur in
the National Forests were held down to an area of five acres or
less. The new service not only made rapid progress in saving the
timber, but it began to make money for the nation by selling the
timber. In 1905 the sales of timber brought in $60,000; three
years later the return was $850,000.
The National Forests were trebled in size during the two
Roosevelt Administrations with the result that there were
194,000,000 acres of publicly owned and administered forest lands
when Roosevelt went out of office. The inclusion of these lands
in the National Forests, where they were safe from the selfish
exploitation of greedy private interests, was not accomplished
without the bitterest opposition. The wisdom of the serpent
sometimes had to be called into play to circumvent the adroit
maneuvering of these interests and their servants in Congress. In
1907, for example, Senator Charles W. Fulton of Oregon obtained
an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill forbidding
the President to set aside any additional National Forests in six
Northwestern States.. But the President and the Forest Service
were ready for this bold attempt to deprive the public of some
16,000,000 acres for the benefit of land grabbers and special
interests. They knew exactly what lands ought to be set aside in
those States. So the President first unostentatiously signed the
necessary proclamations to erect those lands into National
Forests, and then quietly approved the Agricultural Bill. "The
opponents of the Forest Service," said Roosevelt, "turned
handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against
the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were
really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action."
The development of a sound and enlightened forest policy
naturally led to the consideration of a similar policy for
dealing with the water power of the country which had hitherto
gone to waste or was in the hands of private interests. It had
been the immemorial custom that the water powers on the navigable
streams, on the public domain, and in the National Forests should
be given away for nothing, and practically without question, to
the first comer. This ancient custom ran right athwart the newly
enunciated principle that public property should not pass into
private possession without being paid for, and that permanent
grants, except for home-making, should not be made. The Forest
Service now began to apply this principle to the water powers in
the National Forests, granting permission for the development and
use of such power for limited periods only and requiring payment
for the privilege. This was the beginning of a general water
power policy which, in the course of time, commended itself to
public approval; but it was long before it ceased to be opposed
by the private interests that wanted these rich resources for
their own undisputed use.
Out of the forest movement grew the conservation movement in its
broader sense. In the fall of 1907 Roosevelt made a trip down the
Mississippi River with the definite purpose of drawing general
attention to the subject of the development of the national
inland waterways. Seven months before, he had established the
Inland Waterways Commission and had directed it to "consider the
relations of the streams to the use of all the great permanent
natural resources and their conservation for the making and
maintenance of permanent homes." During the trip a letter was
prepared by a group of men interested in the conservation
movement and was presented to him, asking him to summon a
conference on the conservation of natural resources. At a great
meeting held at Memphis, Tennessee, Roosevelt publicly announced
his intention of calling such a conference.
In May of the following year the conference was held in the East
Room of the White House. There were assembled there the
President, the Vice-President, seven Cabinet members, the Supreme
Court Justices, the Governors of thirty-four States and
representatives of the other twelve, the Governors of all the
Territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico, the
President of the Board of Commissioners of the District of
Columbia, representatives of sixty-eight national societies, four
special guests, William Jennings Bryan, James J. Hill, Andrew
Carnegie, and John Mitchell, forty-eight general guests, and the
members of the Inland Waterways Commission. The object of the
conference was stated by the President in these words: "It seems
to me time for the country to take account of its natural
resources, and to inquire how long they are likely to last. We
are prosperous now; we should not forget that it will be just as
important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time."
At the conclusion of the conference a declaration prepared by the
Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South
Carolina, was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the
conservation movement declared "that the great natural resources
supply the material basis upon which our civilization must
continue to depend and upon which the perpetuity of the nation
itself rests," that "this material basis is threatened with
exhaustion," and that "this conservation of our natural resources
is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage
unremittingly the attention of the Nation, the States, and the
people in earnest cooperation." It set forth the practical
implications of Conservation in these words:
"We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil
wash shall cease; and that there should be reclamation of arid
and semi-arid regions by means of irrigation, and of swamp and
overflowed regions by means of drainage; that the waters should
be so conserved and used as to promote navigation, to enable the
arid regions to be reclaimed by irrigation, and to develop power
in the interests of the people; that the forests which regulate
our rivers, support our industries, and promote the fertility
and productiveness of the soil should be preserved and
perpetuated; that the minerals found so abundantly beneath the
surface should be so used as to prolong their utility; that the
beauty, healthfulness, and habitability of our country should be
preserved and increased; that sources of national wealth exist
for the benefit of the people, and that monopoly thereof should
not be tolerated."
The conference urged the continuation and extension of the forest
policies already established; the immediate adoption of a wise,
active, and thorough waterway policy for the prompt improvement
of the streams, and the conservation of water resources for
irrigation, water supply, power, and navigation; and the
enactment of laws for the prevention of waste in the mining and
extraction of coal, oil, gas, and other minerals with a view to
their wise conservation for the use of the people. The
declaration closed with the timely adjuration, "Let us conserve
the foundations of our prosperity."
As a result of the conference President Roosevelt created the
National Conservation Commission, consisting of forty-nine men of
prominence, about one-third of whom were engaged in politics,
one-third in various industries, and one-third in scientific
work. Gifford Pinchot was appointed chairman. The Commission
proceeded to make an inventory of the natural resources of the
United States. This inventory contains the only authentic
statement as to the amounts of the national resources of the
country, the degree to which they have already been exhausted,
and their probable duration. But with this inventory there came
to an end the activity of the Conservation Commission, for
Congress not only refused any appropriation for its use but
decreed by law that no bureau of the Government should do any
work for any commission or similar body appointed by the
President, without reference to the question whether such work
was appropriate or not for such a bureau to undertake. Inasmuch
as the invaluable inventory already made had been almost entirely
the work of scientific bureaus of the Government instructed by
the President to cooperate with the Commission, the purpose and
animus of this legislation were easily apparent. Congress had
once more shown its friendship for the special interests and its
indifference to the general welfare.
In February, 1909, on the invitation of President Roosevelt, a
North American Conservation Conference, attended by
representatives of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, was
held at the White House. A declaration of principles was drawn up
and the suggestion made that all the nations of the world should
be invited to meet in a World Conservation Conference. The
President forthwith addressed to forty-five nations a letter
inviting them to assemble at The Hague for such a conference;
but, as he has laconically expressed it, "When I left the White
House the project lapsed."
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