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Show 628 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT elimination of its rangelands from the forests was to strike a death blow at the Forest Service. Conservationists and foresters sprang to the defense and began an outright attack upon their critics. First to attack was Bernard DeVoto, a native westerner, an authority on Mark Twain, an historian, and a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine. DeVoto was not one merely to defend; instead he swung his literary hatchet right and left, cutting down the stockmen, their lobbyists, and defenders. "They were always ignorant and deluded .... They thought of themselves as Westerners and they did live in the West, but they were enemies of everyone else who lived there." They kept out the homesteader by terror or bankrupted him if he could not be otherwise eliminated, squeezed out the small stockman by grabbing the water rights and even resorting to murder. Though they owned but a minute fraction of the range they convinced themselves that it was theirs and tried to gain title through the final liquidation of the public domain. They paid in fees only a small part of the value of the forage; in effect, they received a subsidy from the Federal Treasury. Worst of all they plundered the public lands by overgrazing, destroying the natural forage and leaving only desert areas covered with weeds unfit for forage. Now, said DeVoto, the stockmen want to convert their grazing privileges into an ownership right, they want the remaining rangelands distributed to the states in which they are located, and they want to eliminate all lands suitable for grazing from the national forests and have them transferred to the states. Beyond that they hope to wrest from the Forest Service control of all forested lands and confine its attention to reforesting areas already stripped of their cover. To achieve these objectives they had forced the sharp contraction of the staff of the Grazing Service by reducing appropriations, thereby per- mitting widespread and flagrant, trespasses on the public ranges to go unpunished.51 Next in the onslaught against the "cow bloc" as some called the stockmen's group, were two articles by Lester Velie, a popular writer for Collier's. Smartly written and illustrated, these articles entitled "They Kicked Us Off Our Land," were calculated to raise prejudice against the livestockmen and their lobby which by now was trying to have the grazing lands eliminated from the national forests. Richard Neuberger, later to be Senator from Oregon, in an article entitled "Looting the National Forests," challenged the position of the livestock industry which had emasculated the Grazing Service and now proposed to eliminate the grazing lands from the national forests and to turn them over to the cattlemen and sheepmen using them.52 Even the staid old Atlantic Monthly, which was less inclined to get out on the firing line than its more popular contemporary, Harper's, joined in the defense of the land administering agencies by a force- 61 Bernard DeVoto, "The West against Itself," Harper's Magazine, 194 (January 1947), 1 ff.; and DeVoto's "Easy Chair," 45-48; and "The Western Land Grab," Harper's, 194 (June 1947), 543-46 and "U.S. Forest Service and Western Land Grab," Harper's (January, May, 1948), 28-31, 441-444. These are partly reprinted in DeVoto, The Easy Chair (Boston, 1955). Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in The Politics of Hope (Boston, 1962), pp. 155-82, assesses the role of DeVoto's struggle against efforts to break down the conservation policy and turn the rangelands over to the stockmen. 5J Lester Velie, "They Kicked us off our Land," Collier's, 120 (July 26, 1947), 20 ff. and (Aug. 9), 73 ff., and reprinted in Reader's Digest, 51 (November 1947), 109-113; Roscoe Fleming, "Bars up or Down for Grazing. Public Land for Livestock Use. Stirs Broad Controversy," Christian Science Monitor Magazine, April 26, 1947, p. 7; Richard L. Neuberger, "Looting the National Forests," The Nation, 164 (April 26, 1947), 471-73. For a restrained defense of the proposal to reverse the Federal ownership trend by providing for their transfer to the states or sale to private owners see the Denver Post in Cong. Record, App., 80th Cong., 1st sess., p. A77O. |