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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 525 public domain particularly the unreserved lands."72 After President Hoover had made his original proposal for a cession of the remaining lands to the states, but before the Public Land Committee had made its report, Benjamin H. Hibbard, author of a History of the Public Land Policies, which a generation of students has regarded as the basic work on public land questions, and a distinguished agricultural economist of the University of Wisconsin, published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science a truly startling paper on "A National Land Policy to Conserve Land Values." The ideas had been discussed for some time by agricultural economists but they were brought together and here presented as a more thorough program of reform than merely turning the rangelands over to the states. Among the proposals Hibbard suggested were: (1) the government should cease selling land of doubtful value and quality; (2) it should regain possession of much submarginal land such as the cutovers and the homesteads that had been permitted on range-land not suitable for cropping; (3) it should halt further reclamation development; (4) it should reforest some of the land withdrawn from cultivation and put other portions in wildlife refuges; and (5) tariffs should be reduced.73 Study Committee Makes Recommendations Notwithstanding the highly charged political atmosphere prevailing in the House at the time, members gave serious consideration to the President's proposal. Some thought the study could better be made by the House and Senate Committees on Public Lands. William B. Bankhead of Ala- 72 Wilbur and Hyde, op. cit., pp. 232-33. 73 The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 148 (March 1930) , 115-19. bama maintained that past commissions had not been productive of results (he might have alluded to both Commissions of 1879 and 1904), and R. A. Green of Florida argued that members of Presidential commissions "are usually appointed . . . with a certain purpose in view, and often their recommendations can pretty safely be recognized in advance." He went further, saying that members who might be appointed to the commission "could write 90 percent of their report the day after they are appointed." The best reply to these views was that the question of administration of the public lands had been before the two committees for many years, numerous bills had been forthcoming but none had drawn much support. The President had lent his prestige to a plan that, while not new, offered a way out of the cross purposes that had prevented action in the past and with a commission of distinguished leaders commending it the plan might gain sufficient support to be enacted. Authorization for the appointment of a Committee on the Conservation and Administration of the Public Domain was approved by both Houses.74 President Hoover appointed distinguished leaders in various fields. The chairman was James R. Garfield who had been Secretary of the Interior for 2 years under Theodore Roosevelt and closely identified with Gifford Pinchot's views on conservation. Both Ray Lyman Wilbur and Arthur M. Hyde, Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, were ex officio members. Other well-known figures were William B. Greeley, Chief Forester of the Forest Service from 1920 to 1928 and somewhat close to the Pinchot views; H. O. Bur-sum, former Senator from New Mexico; Gardner Cowles, publisher of the Des Moines Register; George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post and ™Cong. Record, 71st Cong., 2d sess., Dec. 23, 24, 1930, pp. 2249, 2324-29. |