ER N EST S . GRIP FITH 5 



part, marking continuity in that growing recognition of the public 

 interest which registered our growing national maturity and our grow- 

 ing concern with the future. 



Much spade work had preceded 1908. Gifford Pinchot as Forester 

 and later as Chief of the Forest Service, had not only become a na- 

 tional figure, but, what was perhaps more important, had established 

 a personal rapport with Theodore Roosevelt which changed the course 

 of conservation history. Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, and McKin- 

 ley with WJ McGee, Frederick Newell, George Maxwell, and others, 

 had fostered the practice of forest reservation. ^ The Land Grant Col- 

 leges had had four decades of activity in studying and stimulating 

 creative agricultural land use, later to come to its full flowering when 

 the disaster of used-up land was dramatized in the 1930's. Irrigation 

 had made notable strides. Science and the idea of progress were twin 

 factors in preparing the public for efficient utilization of all resources. 

 Exposures of misuse and malfeasance had lowered the resistance po- 

 tential of those who would block the public interest. The Spanish War 

 had excited a growing nationalism, and an incipient imperialism cap- 

 tured the imagination of more than merely the flamboyant. 



The age found the man. It is currently fashionable in academic 

 circles to belittle the achievements of Theodore Roosevelt. Most his- 

 torians would now downgrade him to the ranks of the mere near-great. 

 No longer does the monument of Mount Rushmore with its Washing- 

 ton, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt represent even the popular 

 verdict, not to mention the considered judgment of our scholarly 

 elite. The glamor of the other, later, Roosevelt, with his hospitality 

 to ideas and eggheads, the world stage on which he played his part; 

 the scholarly leadership of Woodrow Wilson; the political drama of 

 Andrew Jackson; even the achievements of a Polk are preferred. Yet 



1 WJ McGee (he never used periods or separated the initials) had served 

 under Major J. W. Powell from 1893 to 1902 as Ethnologist in Charge in the 

 Bureau of American Ethnology. He is especially remembered for his work 

 as a member, and secretary, of the Inland Waterways Commission, and 

 for the study of United States water resources which he directed for the 

 Department of Agriculture. Frederick Newell, Director of the Reclamation 

 Service, 1907-14, was also a commissioner of the Inland Waterways Com- 

 mission. George Maxwell's activities in organizing the National Reclamation 

 Association in 1899 had led to passage of the National Reclamation Act in 

 1902. Subsequently, in Arizona, he organized the first Water Users Association. 



