| Description |
The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which provided for dry farm homesteads of 320 acres, and the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916, which provided for grazing home steads of 640 acres, were the last homestead acts of significance passed by Congress. The leading historians of United States public land policy have been consistently harsh in their appraisal of these two homestead measures and quick to fault the congressional sponsors and supporters of them. Their consensus is that the acts were unrealistically suited to conditions in the semiarid West, that they were contrary to the basic principles of conservation, and that they were pushed through Congress by rapacious western interests. This dissertation offers no challenge to the first of these judgments; on the contrary, it proceeds on the assumption that more homesteaders failed that succeeded under these acts. But the second judgment, that these enlarged homestead acts were repugnant to conservation principles, is open to question--as an oversimplification, if nothing else. As shown in this study, the dry farm measure had been preceded by many impressive and well-publicized developments in dry farming techniques; and by opening non irrigable lands to development under this system of agriculture, the act represented exactly the principle of scientific use and management which was the essence of conservation to Theodore Roosevelt (who signed the measure into law) and his close advisers. Moreover, the congressional debates reveal virtually no opposition to either act in the name of conservation. |
