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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 383 full rate should be charged the government until the courts had worked out a formula and this 50 percent rate was thereafter sanctioned by the courts and was to continue in operation until the adoption of the Transportation Acts of 1940 and 1946. Meantime, the rate for carrying the mails was fixed at 80 percent of normal rates.113 Originally the land grant rates only applied to those carriers which had received grants and only for that portion of their mileage thus aided but, because government business was diverted to the routes offering it the lowest rates, the non-land-grant railroads found it desirable to meet the competition by accepting the same land grant rates. There is no evidence that the carriers were happy with the reduced rates they received for government business, but they went along with it until the late 1920's and 1930's when their volume of transportation was slipping away to trucks, buses, and airlines. Then, under the leadership of the American Association of Railroads, and supported by many other business groups, a campaign got under way to end the land grant rates. As part of the program of education the AAR endeavored to show that the land grants were not as extensive as some historians had indicated, that the lands so given were on the whole not very valuable and that few railroads had netted any large return from them. Because of the extent of this campaign, the Federal Coordinator of Transportation was instructed to compile data showing the total amount of land grants by Federal and state governments, the amount in dollars of other aids of government at all levels, the gross and net return from the grants and the value of the lands remaining in railroad hands. There was a good deal of controversy concerning the respective data prepared by the 116 The Act of 1882 exempted the Pacific railroads which had received government bond aid from 50 percent rate charge. Haney, op. cit., p. 38. AAR and the Federal Coordinator which showed wide difference in calculation and appraisals.116 Opposition to the abandonment of land grant rates was centered in the two most interested Departments, War and Navy, which feared costs would be substantially 116 Colonel Robert S. Henry of the AAR prepared an article on "The Railroad Land Grant Legend in American History Texts," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXII (September 1945), pp. 171-94, wherein he takes the writers of history texts to task for magnifying the significance of the grants and their value and neglecting or minimizing the returns the government received in the form of land grant rates. His article was critically examined by a number of historians in the same journal for March 1946, pp. 557-76 and by Charles S. Morgan- under whose charge Vol. II of the Federal Coordinator's Report on Public Aids to Transportation was prepared-in the same journal, XXXIII (December 1946), pp. 443-54. Colonel Henry replied to his critics in ibid. (June 1946), pp. 115-20. The Henry map showing the Federal land grants only, and only those that were earned and patented and not forfeited, in actual proportion, has been reprinted by the Bureau of Land Management in Public Land Statistics, 1964, p. 11. There is much that is wrong with the map but to cite only one feature, it shows the Santa Fe grant in Kansas extending from Atchi-son to the western border of Kansas but for the first 125 miles it received no land. Consequently, it was permitted to take all the available lieu lands in the indemnity area for the next 100 miles, thereby giving it a big bulge in this fertile and productive area in contrast to the much slighter amount of land it acquired in the extreme western and semi-arid portion of Kansas. Furthermore, the Santa Fe was permitted to purchase the Potawatomi diminished reserve of 340,180 acres at a modest price which, as L. L. Waters has shown, it was able to sell quickly and to finance the beginning of its construction from their returns. L. L. Waters, Steel Trails to Santa Fe, pp. 219-20; the map of the Santa Fe lands on p. 221 showing this bulge in central Kansas and the Potawatomi Reserve is much more meaningful than Colonel Henry's map. Neither the Donaldson nor the Henry map shows grants made, and for years kept out of use and later forfeited, nor do they show the state grants. The Henry map obscures the rationale on which grants were made- that the building of the railroads would enable the government-reserved sections held at S2.50 an acre to be sold and thereby net the government just what it might have received from all the land. |