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Show 616 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT tional forests lost to Agriculture in 1905.18 One of his first steps to gain that end was a proposal he advanced to have his Department renamed the Department of Conservation. From 1935 to the approach of World War II he strove mightily to persuade Congress to provide for this change and to convince the President that the Forest Service should be transferred to Interior. The passage of the Taylor Grazing Act seemed likely to further Ickes' plan of having all agencies dealing with the administration of the public lands placed in Interior. Ickes called the act, with some justification, the "Magna Carta" of the conservation movement, making it rank with the Act of 1891 authorizing the withdrawal of public lands for watershed protection and forest conservation, the Weeks Forest Purchase Act of 1911 authorizing the purchase of lands to be placed in national forests for watershed protection, and the Act of 1916 for the creation of the National Park Service. The Taylor Act made the Department of the Interior responsible for the management, development, preservation, and conservation of some 142 million acres of grazing lands, in addition to its responsibility for the administration of the 50 million acres of Indian lands and the public lands in Alaska. True, conservation of land and its resources was a new concept for Inte- 18 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes. The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936 (New York, 1953), p. 21. As part of his efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of his Department which had not recovered from the scandal involved in the leasing of Teapot Dome by his predecessor, Albert W. Fall, Ickes had published in the Saturday Evening Post of May 25, 1940, an article entitled "Not Guilty: Richard A. Ballinger, An American Dreyfus," wherein he cast aside the interpretation of the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy that writers had generally followed and attempted to show on the basis of rereading the evidence that Ballinger had been badly maligned, not only by Pinchot, Louis Brandeis, and others as of 1910 but by most subsequent writers who had not, he thought, carefully investigated the facts. rior. In the past the Department's major responsibility had been conveying the public domain and the country's natural resources into private ownership by administering acts providing for the sale or grants of public lands to individuals, railroads, and states. Another development that added much strength to the plan to concentrate all government land-administering agencies in Interior was the Report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management, which President Roosevelt appointed in 1936. The committee was to make suggestions for bringing order out of the "antiquated machinery" of government that had grown up in the past and been vastly expanded in 1933-35 and for providing "more effective administration and . . . adequate control by the Congress." The men selected for the task-Louis Brownlow, head of the Public Administration Clearing House, Charles E. Merriam, professor of political science in the University of Chicago, and Luther Gulick, director of the Institute of Public Administration-constituted the most distinguished panel of experts that could be assembled in the country. The committee's great prestige and the skill with which it went about its task, were certain to give its recommendations great weight with the President, Congress, and the public. On January 12, 1937, the Brownlow committee report was sent to Congress.19 In its Plan of Reorganization the committee recommended the consolidation of the more than 100 separate administrative agencies into 12 departments, two more than existed at the time, the Department of Social Welfare, virtually the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare of a later time, and the Department of Public 19 Report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management (Washington, 1937), pp. 33-35; Louis Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity. The Autobiography of Louis Brownlow, 2d half (Chicaeo. 1 pp. 313" ff., esp. 373, 380. |