4 Main Lines of Thought and Action 



In some uncanny measure this self-same commission identified all, 

 or almost all, of the strands of conservation thought and action which 

 crowded the intervening years and today furnish a still persistent 

 agenda of unfinished business. The emphases have changed but in 

 most essential elements 1958 is but 1908 illuminated. 



Twice only in this century has conservation been a major preoccu- 

 pation of our people and government: once in a rising crescendo 

 which culminated in the Governors' Conference of 1908; once in the 

 rebound from a depression's depths in the electric years of 1933-36. 

 By a strange coincidence — perhaps resting in some obscure genes of 

 the Roosevelt clan, more probably in the maturing of profound social 

 forces, possibly in the sheer coincidence of two presidents whose 

 earlier life had brought them into close and vivid relationship with 

 forest and wild land — only in these two periods have our presidents 

 dominated and dramatized the conservation scene. Between these 

 years, and ever since, Congress and not the President has been the 

 principal channel. The forces beating upon or expressed by Congress, 

 the recommendations of the bureaus of the Administration to Con- 

 gress, the deliberations and decisions within Congress — these, and not 

 presidential leadership, have been the major factors in conservation 

 policy development and change. 



This does not mean that the other presidents have been without 

 influence — and certainly not without views. But Taft was cautious; 

 Coolidge, resistant to federal action; Harding was lax; Wilson and 

 Truman and Eisenhower, preoccupied with other and to them more 

 important matters. Hoover did possess a genuine interest and effec- 

 tiveness in federal development of waterways, though with a mind set 

 toward state rather than federal activity in other areas. 



Hence the developments in conservation under these regimes were 

 not developments characterized by strong and concentrated leader- 

 ship. Rather they partook of the characteristic flavors of congressional 

 policy — the gradual, persistent growth of problems; the slow but sure 

 clarification of issues; the identification of local and national groups 

 with economic or other stakes in solutions; the steady sharing of ex- 

 perience on the part of the bureaus concerned with their congressional 

 counterparts — and finally decisions in Congress, in part the product 

 of balance and compromise, but also in part, and probably in greater 



