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Show 524 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT also thought it desirable and only fair that the fees should be so based but had been reluctant to press the matter at a time when the livestock industry was going through a serious post-war depression, aggravated by droughts and the revival of range conflicts. There was another count against the Forest Service officials: they had cut the number of livestock permitted within the forests in order to allow the badly overgrazed areas to recover and also to allow newly arriving small settlers to graze up to 10 cattle in the forests.70 Discontent with the Forest Service made the virtues of the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior stand out in contrast when plans to bring some form of control to the remaining public lands were being considered. But the Interior Department had not acquired experience in range management and it had no agency, other than the General Land Office, to which responsibility could be delegated. From its inception in 1812 that Office had been primarily concerned with disposal through sale for revenue. Aside from its surveyors general, its principal local officials in the West were largely dependent on the fees they received and had shown in the past favor for legislation that would facilitate and increase the flow of land into private ownership. Whenever it had seemed to take a firm stand, as in the use of investigating agents which delayed patents, it had incurred the animosity of western people. The Department's prestige had not been improved by the handling of oil leases under Secretary Albert B. Fall. There was an alternative to continued Federal ownership and the establishment 70 Probably nothing so antagonized the West as the reductions the Forest Service required of the herds of permittees except the actions of the investigating agents sent out by the Department of the Interior to ferret out cases where the land was being entered for second parties and the timber agents, to stop pillaging on public lands and to bring the guilty to punishment. of centralized leasing control: cession of the lands to the states in which they were located, Calhoun's old plan of the 1830's. It was to this plan that Herbert Hoover and his Secretary of the Interior, Ray Ly-man Wilbur, turned in 1929 and for much the same reason that Calhoun had favored it in 1836. In presenting the matter to Congress the President averred that the western states "are today more competent to manage" the public lands "than is the Federal Government. Moreover we must seek every opportunity to retard the expansion of Federal bureaucracy and to place our communities in control of their own destinies." His first assumption, notwithstanding some fairly recent events, is dubious, but Calhoun would have agreed with it and with the reasoning behind the recommendation for cession, though he would have expressed himself in more durable prose.71 More concretely, the President suggested that, subject to full protection of rights of homesteaders on the public lands, the surface rights of the unappropriated lands (estimated at 190 million acres, plus 10 million acres withdrawn under the Act of 1909 for stock driveways, and 35 million acres withdrawn for coal and shale reserves), none of which produced any revenue to the Federal government and of which "the Federal Government is incapable of ... adequate administration . . ." should be conveyed to the states for public school purposes. "For the best interest of the people as a whole, and people of the western states and the small farmers and stockmen by whom they are primarily used, they should be managed and the policies for their use determined by state governments." He requested of Congress authorization for the appointment of a commission to study "the whole question of the 71 Ray Lyman Wilbur and Arthur Mastick Hyde, The Hoover Policies (New York, 1937), p. 230. |