OCR Text |
Show ADMINISTRATION OF PUBLIC GRAZING LANDS 629 ful article that pulled no punches in dealing with the "rigged hearings" of the House Committee which were designed to "throw fear into the U.S. Forest Service," the "transparent manipulations of the meetings, the bias displayed by the chairman ... the very odor of the meetings ... ,"53 Before they were through, DeVoto, Velie, Neuberger, and the battery of defenders of the Forest Service quartered in the schools of forestry succeeded in blunting the attack on the two agencies and, indeed, in partly reversing it.54 Administration of the grazing districts, now in the Bureau of Land Management, began to recover from the recent onslaughts, partly because it was apparent the livestock people were not altogether in agreement, either that private ownership was superior to public management or that the appropriations for range management should be so greatly restricted. G. E. Stanfield of the National Advisory Board testified before a House Appropriations Committee that the staff had been cut too deeply. Even the spokesman for the National Wool Growers Association declared in 1949 that additional funds and staff were necessary to assure proper administration.55 As a result, the rangelands were not opened to sale to permittees, the forest rangelands were not eliminated from the national forests, and cuts in the number of permitted livestock continued to be made to improve the carrying capacity of these ranges. It can be said that the advocates of private ownership of the rangelands overreached themselves in 1946-48 and did the same again in 1953-54. A plank in the Republican platform of 1952 reflected the 63 Arthur H. Carhart, "Who Gets our Public Lands," Atlantic Monthly, 182 (July 1948), 57-61. 54 Miss Peffer has worked this out in "The Grazing-District Sale Proposal," Chap. XVI, The Closing of the Public Domain, pp. 279 ff. "National Wool Grower, 38 (May 1948), 17; and 39 (February 4, 1949), 5-7. views of the two principal stockmen's associations56 by calling for: An impartial study of tax-free Federal lands and their uses to determine their effects on economic and fiscal structures of state and local communities. ... In the management of public lands and forests [the Party] favors legislation to define the rights of grazers and other users, to provide the protection of independent judicial review against administrative invasions of those rights, and to protect the public against corrupt or monopolistic exploitation and bureaucratic favoritism. The stockmen drafted a bill to stabilize and make permanent grazing privileges already in existence on a temporary basis which, as the American Cattle Producer said, would freeze range customs into law. When introduced into Congress early in 1953, it ran into even stronger opposition than the similar proposals of 1946-48. Redrafted to eliminate some of the features which the small stockmen and the milder conservationists found objectionable, it won the approval of the Department of the Interior, but could make no progress. Perhaps it was the fact that conservationists had been so well alerted and organized, particularly on any measure affecting the national forests, that even a more moderate measure had no chance of adoption. As Wesley D'Ewart of Montana explained, the Uniform Federal Grazing Land Tenancy bill was intended to assure permittees the full right to the value of improvements they made on the range and to establish a procedure by which appeals could be made from decisions of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to a special court, a privilege not available at the time. This court, conservationists pointed out, would take out of the hands of experts the final decision on grazing matters. What alarmed them most was the fear that the measure, which would give permanent rights to grazers, might be a " Taken from The World Almanac, 1953, p. 48. |