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Show ()78 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT the Reclamation Service was to be charged to the Reclamation Fund but not to the construction or operation and maintenance funds. An Act of May 25, 1926, extended the maximum period of payments to 40 years but required 6 percent interest on delayed payments.131 Before the report of the Fact Finders Committee was presented, Hubert Work had appointed Elwood Mead, whom he called "the greatest American authority on rural institutions," Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation,* as the agency was now called.132 Nothing could have given more encouragement to the settlers and to the West generally than the appointment of Mead, a distinguished authority, a thorough believer in reclamation, though critical of many policies in the past. In the 12 years he served as Commissioner, Mead maintained close liaison with Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt and with Congress, which generally accepted his judgment and pushed reclamation along rapidly. Experts in the Department of Agriculture, however, watched with deep concern the expansion of irrigation and the opening of new land to agriculture at a time when the country was faced with large unsaleable surpluses and when prices of agricultural commodities were falling. * (Editor's note: To perform the functions called for in the Reclamation Act of 1902, the Secretary of the Interior in July 1902 approved an organization plan for a Reclamation Service in the Geological Survey. In March 1907 the Reclamation Service was removed from the Survey and established under a Director. In June 1923 the Secretary created the position of Commissioner of Reclamation and changed the name Reclamation Service to Bureau of Reclamation.) In his first report, in 1924, Mead took up the thorniest of the recommendations 131 Act of Dec. 5, 1924, 43 Stat., Part 1, p. 702; 44 Stat., Part 1, pp. 647-49. 1!!.Vm) Reclamation Era, XV (May 1924), 69. the Fact Finders Committee had presented, "that no reclamation project should hereafter be authorized until all privately owned land in excess of a single homestead unit for each owner shall have been acquired by the United States or by contract placed under control of the Bureau of Reclamation for subdivision and sale to settlers at a price approved by the Secretary." This recommendation had been opposed by some who regarded "land speculation as a legitimate feature of reclamation" and had no understanding of how it had increased costs beyond the capacity of settlers to pay. To Mead, public ownership or public control of the selling price of land for settlers was the first requisite for successful planning of new projects and failure to gain that control or ownership was the first cause of past failures. He regretted that the amendment to the deficiency bill then working its way through the congressional mill had no provision concerning such Federal ownership or control. Unless that control is provided for, declared Mead, "there is no reason to anticipate better results in the future," and Reclamation officers "would face the heartbreaking experience of seeing settlers work under conditions so discouraging as to give almost no hope of success." He did not discuss the equally necessary control of prices at which the first or second generation of settlers could sell their land to later comers. Mead devoted a section of his report to tenancy on the reclamation projects. "The principles of the public land law," he said, are opposed to tenancy "and the absentee landlord did not have a place in the picture of Federal irrigation as drawn by the sponsors of the organic act of 1902." Yet it had existed from the outset, ranging from 21 to 32 percent on the projects. He attributed the growth of tenancy to large ownerships within the areas and to foreclosure of mortgages too heavy to carry, both the result of speculation. Though ex- |
