10 Main Lines of Thought and Action 



ery gave a twenty-year lease, subject to royalties and annual rent. 



Withdrawal of mineral lands in the interest of national defense had 

 been an allowed policy for many years. The right to lease was vested 

 in the Secretary of the Interior, however; and safeguards were inade- 

 quate unless intent of public interest were present. Nineteen hundred 

 and twenty-one and the new Harding Administration witnessed one of 

 the most flagrant betrayals of the public interest for private gain in 

 our history in the Teapot Dome scandal. There is no point in recount- 

 ing the episode here. It is enough to indicate the danger of postwar 

 reaction in the conservation field, as elsewhere; but likewise to indi- 

 cate the strength of public recoil that followed exposure. Conserva- 

 tion in the public interest may even in this case have registered a 

 net gain. 



The Federal Water Power Act was a landmark. For its day and age 

 — a period of decline in the national ethos, of renewed predatory 

 capitalism — it represented a real achievement. It was the end of un- 

 certainty, the beginning of policy. Private and public interests were 

 recognized — but the paramountcy of the national domain was estab- 

 lished. Public charges for private power became henceforth the rule. 



The next important act — and almost the only important act till the 

 conservation explosion of Franklin Roosevelt's first term — was the 

 Clarke-McNary Act of 1924. Here as in the Federal Water Power Act 

 there was a crystallization of issues, a forward move with most major 

 forces in substantial agreement. Federal, state, and private interests 

 found therein a basis for three-way co-operation in fire fighting. Re- 

 forestation was authorized on an unprecedented scale — in fact as a 

 program. Provision was made for the further extension of national 

 forests, especially when watershed values were at stake. Experiment 

 stations were established. This was followed in 1928 by the McNary- 

 McSweeney Act which gave a statutory base to forest research. All in 

 all, our national forest policy had largely come of age. Henceforth its 

 battles were to be largely administrative, or those that arose out of 

 defending a status quo against encroachment. Perhaps the only really 

 new and major strand subsequently to appear on the forest front lay 

 in the growing realization that the stake of the city man in the forest 

 was not merely the forest's role in conservation, but its facilities for 

 his future recreation. But of this more later. 



