The Coming of the New Deal: 1933-1935, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume II by Arthur M. Schlesinger

Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger [Schlesinger, Arthur M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VII

The problem of grazing on the public range soon provided Ickes with an opportunity to demonstrate his conservationist passion. As long as western ranchers could remember, they had used the public lands to graze their cattle or sheep without supervision or payment of fee. The predictable consequence had been overgrazing, with the gradual destruction of the grass cover and the spread of desert. For some time, conservationists had urged public regulation of private grazing in order to check erosion. But the stockmen had always successfully fought such subversive proposals.

The depression, however, thrust the cattle industry into a predicament of its own. With beef prices falling and with cattle outside the AAA system, it seemed necessary to do something to stabilize the industry. One obvious way to protect cattlemen from the wildcatters, from overproduction, and from each other was to control grazing on the public range. This shift in the view of the cattle industry was reflected in the conversion of Congressman Edward T. Taylor of Colorado to national regulation. For years an enemy of federal conservation policies, Taylor now suddenly perceived malevolent consequences in unrestrained free enterprise on the public range. “The basic economy of entire communities was threatened,” he later explained ... Erosion, yes, even human erosion, had taken root. The livestock industry, under circumstances beyond its control, was headed for self-strangulation."

The first bill to regulate grazing was introduced in 1932 with the backing of Hoover’s Departments of the Interior and Agriculture. Reintroduced as the Taylor bill the next year, Ickes and Wallace led the fight for it on the Hill. The measure proposed to vest with Interior the responsibility for regulation. Since the Forest Service was already regulating grazing in the national forests, there were those who considered it better equipped to do so on the public lands. But Ickes argued that because Interior had always administered the public lands it ought to administer grazing on these lands. He added that he could do it at a figure far below the estimate offered by the Forest Service. What was doubtless persuasive to Taylor and to the cattle industry, however, was their supposition that Interior would be more amenable to pressure than the Forest Service. In any case, the Forest Service and Wallace in a mood of magnanimity finally decided that the important thing was to establish the principle of regulation. Agriculture remained unhappy over provisions in the bill which they believed diminished federal rights in the national domain; but Ickes overrode the objections. When Congress passed the Taylor Act in 1934, Ickes promptly set up the Grazing Service in his own Department.6

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