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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 579 ing Roosevelt's administration, when Pin-chot was pressing forward the selection of western timberlands for creation into reserves. On June 10, 1902, the House voted 100-73 against a measure to transfer the forest reserves from Interior to Agriculture after Joe Cannon of Illinois and John F. Shafroth and John C. Bell of Colorado had condemned it and excoriated Pinchot for his "so-called scientific forestry." However, Binger Hermann had fallen into trouble with corrupt elements in Oregon who had been taking advantage of the loopholes in legislation to gain ownership of timber-land. Before his dismissal he had managed to destroy incriminating evidence, for which he was later indicted. Officials in Oregon as well as Washington were involved, including a Congressman and a Senator. The affair did no good to the General Land Office and its administration of the forest reserves.41 In 1904 and 1905 a measure to transfer administration of the reserves that was shorn of a provision for game preserves passed both Houses without a division.42 Reserves Transferred to Agriculture Nineteen hundred and five marked a high point in the history of the forestry and conservation work of the United States with the transfer of the forest reserves to the Department of Agriculture.43 By then the total acreage of reserves, including those recently ordered by Roosevelt, came to 85,627,472 acres and constituted the most valuable of the remaining forest lands in public ownership. It was notable, indeed unparalleled, for Secretary Ethan Allen Hitchcock and Land Commissioner W. A. Richards to strongly recommend the trans- 41 Cong. Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., p. 6573. 42 Ibid., 58th Cong., 3d sess., pp. 1370, 1397; John Messing, "Public Lands, Politics and Progressives: The Oregon Land Fraud Trials, 1903-1910, "Pacific Historical Review XXXIV (February 1966), 35-66. 43 33 Stat., Part 1, p. 628. fer of such a potentially large and important responsibility from the General Land Office, whose obligations were bound thereafter to diminish, to Agriculture. By 1921 the Forest Service had 2,572 employees compared to 1,275 in the Land Office, and the disparity increased thereafter. Small wonder that two later Secretaries of the Interior, Albert B. Fall and Harold Ickes, were troubled about the loss of the forest lands from their jurisdiction.44 Fall's campaign to regain the Forest Service fell apart when the Teapot Dome transfer scandal became known. Ickes carried on his campaign for years and came close to success.45 After the transfer, responsibility for surveying and for all mineral entries within the forests remained in the hands of the Land Office. The Transfer Act of February 1, 1905, allowed the Forest Service 5 years during which all moneys received from cutting of timber, grazing fees, and other sources should be conveyed into the Treasury for a special fund on which the Service could draw for the protection, administration, improvement, and extension of the reserves.46 In addition Congress appropriated a record sum for salaries and other 44 For Fall's efforts to bring the forests back to Interior see Greeley, Forests and Men, pp. 96-101. Ickes' lobbying for the return of the forests to Interior may be seen in his Diary. 46 When Congress showed no inclination to accept the recommendation of his Public Land Commission, President Hoover presented to Congress in late 1932 a plan for the reorganization and transfer of a number of the major agencies of the government, including the transfer of the General Land Office to a Division of Land Utilization in the Department of Agriculture which was also to have jurisdiction over the Forest Service and the Bureau of Biological Survey. In return public works was to be concentrated in Interior with the nonmilitary functions of the Corps of Army Engineers and the Bureau of Public Roads transferred to it. The order was poorly timed, members of Congress felt, and it was voted down 202-176. American Forests, XXXIX (January, February, and March, 1933), 33, 93, 138. 48 The Act of Transfer had the approval of W. A. Richards who had succeeded Binger Hermann as Commissioner in 1903. |