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Show 528 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT ment of Agriculture. Other western states welcomed the proposal to transfer to them the unappropriated lands but not without the minerals or the other reserved lands, and looked forward to the possibility of gaining some parts of the national forests. Conservationists, alerted by three able and effective persons, Gifford Pinchot, Henry S. Graves, and H. H. Chapman, opposed reopening the question of whether there was any land within the national forests that might better be returned to the public domain and thus be conveyed the states, and at the same time they expressed horror at the prospect of cession which would, they feared, break down the Roosevelt conservation program. They also were opposed to the original Hoover proposals to convey to the states the unreserved and unappropriated lands. Stockmen looked forward with some eagerness to lifting the hand of the Forest Service from the rangelands and advocated enactment of the major proposals, though there were notable exceptions.77 Nor were the journals of opinion strongly inclined toward either the President's proposal, the committee's report, or the Senate bills to carry out the recommendations. Harpers Magazine in an article by Ward Shepard called "The Handout Magnificent," scored the plans as a major step backward from the conservation and management policies the lands badly needed. The New Republic's article entitled "Flinging Away an Empire," the Nation's "Soil," and Literary Digest's "Row over Mr. Hoover's Gift Horse," and a second in the same journal, "Threat to National Forests; Dr. Wilbur's New Land Policy," all indicated anything but support. In summary, President Hoover had shown a realization of the need for action to prevent the further deterioration of the 77 Hearings, Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, on Granting Remaining Unreserved Public Lands to States, March 15-April 5, 1932. unappropriated rangelands in the West and had wished to convey them to the states in the belief that they would give them the kind of management their condition called for. His greater faith in state as against Federal supervision had led him to ignore the fact that few or none of the states were prepared to take on the task of management; nor had he foreseen that the West would look upon the lands as a liability without the minerals which constituted by far the greater part of their actual value. Furthermore, he did not sense the strength of the conservation movement. The great resources of the West were regarded by conservationists as belonging to the Nation and all its people, to be retained for them and not conveyed to the western states. For many, especially in the older states, this belief in conservation had replaced the older theory that the public lands were owned by the people of all states and the revenue derived from them should be shared by all.7* Meantime, the Stock Raising Homestead Act and the 320- and 160-acre acts remained in operation, and continued to cut up and reduce the effectiveness of the public rangelands and aggravate the scramble for early grass. Between 1929 and 1934, 41,556 entries of land were made under the 640-acre act and a total of 54,465 entries under all the Homestead Acts. In this way the amount of rangeland open to livestock was further reduced by 24,449,408 acres, and the range livestock business further demoralized. A later judgment of the damage done to the public rangelands by the Enlarged Homestead and the Stock Raising Homestead Acts was that 50 million acres of land, relatively good for grazing but sub- 78 E. O. Wooten was quoted as saying, "What was wanted is a policy of management and not merely a transfer of responsibility." American Forests, XXXVI (January 1930) , 42. |