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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 599 Conservation Programs in Depression Years The first of these two programs to get under way was the Civilian Conservation Corps into which were inducted at its highest level 502,000 men 18 to 25 years old for work in the national, state and local forests, parks, and other public lands. Before the CCC was disbanded with the coming of World War II it had accomplished more to protect and develop the forests and parks in the country than all previous action programs had done.94 Early 20th century Americans exhibited a marked tendency to favor proposals for government purchase of land for forestry, conservation, and recreation purposes, as shown by the general approval of the Weeks Forest Purchase Act, two major authorizations by the people of New York for expensive additions to state, county, and municipally owned land for recreational purposes, and projects in the Lake States for taking over tax delinquent land, and purchasing land to establish state forests on cutovers that were producing little or no useful timber. To these should be added the Submarginal Land Retirement Program of the New Deal which had as its prime objective the purchase and retirement from farming of unprofitable, badly eroded, thin-soiled and exhausted land and the removal of the occupants to other more promising areas where they could be rehabilitated and thus taken off the relief roles. The land was to be used either for growing tree crops, for recreation, for wildlife refuges, or pasturage under grazing controls. To prepare the way for a large-scale program of land retirement that might involve as many as 450,000 farmers, the New Deal planners had President Roosevelt set up the Na- 94 John Jacob Saalberg, "Roosevelt, Fechner and the CCC-A Study in Executive Leadership" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1962); John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Study (Durham, N.C., 1967). tional Resources Board, financed with emergency funds under control of the President. The board called upon experts from several bureaus in the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, including the Forest Service, the Bureau of Biological Survey, the National Park Service, the Office of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and from state forests, parks and agricultural colleges. From the plethora of recommendations received it drafted its program for land acquisition through the Submarginal Land Retirement Plan of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The Resources Board recommended the retirement of 454,200 farms comprising 75,345,200 acres having an estimated value as of 1934 of $682,090,000, including 50,300 farms containing 6,534,500 acres in the Northeast, 248,200 farms containing 19,-443,700 acres in the Southeast highlands, 58,000 farms containing 5,265,600 acres in the cutover regions of the Lake States and the Atlantic and Gulf Coast, and 26,000 farms containing 28,365,900 acres in the western Great Plains. Appropriations were not forthcoming for such an enormous purchase program and the proposals had to be scaled down. Each of the Federal land administering agencies made their proposals as to how the total sum available could best be shared.95 The Forest Service went far beyond making proposals for the use of the land retired from farming by advocating that the national forests should be increased by 130 million acres, 34 million of which might come from retired farms, 14 million acres from the public domain and the balance purchased. It was particularly anxious that land in the Pacific Northwest containing 90 billion board feet of standing timber should be placed under its jurisdiction. This amount of land 96 "Maladjustments in Land Use in the United States," part vi of the Report on Land Planning of the National Resources Board (1935), p. 49. |