ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 13 



As Governor he had appointed (and listened to) vigorous conserva- 

 tion commissioners in the persons of Alexander Macdonald and 

 Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Over his young manhood had fallen the 

 image and the dream of the other Roosevelt whom some day it would 

 be his challenge to excel — and not the least in the field of conserva- 

 tion which the older man had made peculiarly his own. 



Perhaps never was there a president so temperamentally receptive 

 to new ideas. Nor, with Henry A. Wallace and Harold Ickes as Sec- 

 retaries of Agriculture and of Interior, and other men of the same 

 mood and mold as advisers and administrators, were new ideas lack- 

 ing. The spectacular and abortive action of the original industrial and 

 agricultural programs for the most part overshadowed at the time the 

 finer, ultimately more far-reaching elements of resource planning. It 

 was this dimension of planning and of foresight that was to come into 

 its own. Down the great river to the gulf had gone millions on mil- 

 lions of tons of our best topsoil. Once rich grazing lands were starved 

 and dust-blown, and the cattle and owners with them. Thus the Soil 

 Erosion Service of 1933 became the Soil Conservation Service of 

 1935 — and a program of national guidance and stimulation of wise 

 private soils use and replenishment has been part of American policy 

 ever since. That which began as terrace and check dams, contour and 

 strip farming, has attained the stature of a national land policy, the 

 child of the union of science and conscience. So also the Agricultural 

 Adjustment Act of 1933 with its crash program matured into the act 

 of 1938 with its "ever normal granary," its conservation overtones — 

 and its basic attempt permanently to give the farmer economic pro- 

 tection. 



Although at the time it was thought of only as a stopgap, the Taylor 

 Grazing Act of 1934 through its persistence down to the present day 

 did for the unclassified public lands much of what the Clarke-McNary 

 Act did for forests and the Federal Water Power Act for the waters. 

 It crystallized into policy the strands of land classification, local use 

 and adaptation, and the conservation interests of the future. While 

 the administration has been by no means perfect, yet what has proved 

 to be a fundamental policy was laid down, a norm to guide alike the 

 Administration and the local committees. In 1935, all the remaining 

 public domain was withdrawn from entry for classification purposes. 



