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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 527 spect to agricultural lands, but many questioned whether effective private management of the remaining grazing lands was possible. Issues Unresolved The National Conference on Land Utilization, called by the Secretary of Agriculture for a meeting in Chicago in November 1931, held a point of view very different from the Garfield committee. It recommended that the public ranges should be retained and administered by a Federal agency "in a manner similar to and in coordination with the national forests." The proposal for the conference came from L. C. Gray, the intellectual leader of the land planners in the Department of Agriculture who with M. L. Wilson, Howard R. Tollev, John D. Black, and George S. Wehrwein (who were also active in the Conference) were to play major roles in shaping the New Deal farm program. Gray, Wilson, Wehrwein, and perhaps the others were in agreement with Hibbard's proposals made the previous year. Though Elwood Mead, Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and America's greatest battler for Federal reclamation, spoke at the conference (knowing that he was in a hostile group) the conference disagreed with him and with the recommendation of the Garfield committee that "the present conservative policy of reclamation development should be continued." In the depths of the Depression agricultural experts who were trying to find a way of dealing with the farm surpluses looked with skepticism upon further expansion of agriculture through reclaiming arid lands at heavy costs. The conference favored finishing projects already under way and rehabilitating the many badly planned ventures that had insufficient water but maintained that no new ones should be undertaken.76 76 Proceedings of the National Conference on Land Utilization, p. 243. Richard S. Kirkendall, One is entitled to wonder what President Hoover, an ardent advocate of order, efficiency, and consistency, thought of the activities of Gray anrd other intellectual leaders in the Department of Agriculture who differed so sharply on reclamation with Mead, on the ownership and management of the grazing lands with the Garfield Committee, and surely with Hoover himself in recommending what was later to become the submarginal land retirement program of the New Deal. The Forest Service, always prepared for opportunities to extend its influence and enlarge its area of control, won a considerable victory when the Garfield committee adopted its plan of adding some 19 million acres-it actually favored 23,000,000-to its administration. However, the Forest Service objected to the proposal to eliminate from existing forests areas the state boards might recommend for omission. Both the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture were to be represented on these boards but officials of the former could find little to praise in the report, for Interior stood to lose responsibility for the greater part of the unreserved and unappropriated lands without any compensating authority. The states could welcome the proposal to convey to them the non-mineral public domain lands but they, on second thought, came to realize that the real value in the lands was not in their forage value but in their minerals, which states were denied. The Senate hearings on bills to carry out the recommendations of the Garfield committee indicated many cross currents in the thinking about the future of the remaining public lands. Utah opposed turning the land over to the states and instead urged that range management should be concentrated in the hands of the Depart- Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia, Mo., 1966) , is useful for the background of the National Conference. |
