HENRY C.HART 37 



catch on. But some of the Theodore Roosevelt policies were designed 

 to make good particular deficiencies of nature so the difficult reaches 

 could be occupied like the rest. Reclamation was the key word: bring- 

 ing land up to par. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt there was no 

 par. Classification, uses accommodated to special potentialities, were 

 substituted, as in the Taylor Grazing Act, the programs for the Plains, 

 the soil conservation districts. Or regions were examined for their own 

 resource emphases and tie-ups. These are the common threads of 

 much of the work of the TVA, the National Resources Planning 

 Board and the New Deal resource agencies. The report Regional 

 Factors in National Planning and Development ^ expressed the clear- 

 est thinking of the advance. 



By the time of the Board of Economic Warfare, we were thinking 

 of our resource problem as encompassing, for some purposes, the 

 friendly part of the world. The same note was sounded strongly a few 

 years after the war in the Paley Report.^ Perhaps this fourth change 

 of context, too, was an indirect consequence of our filling up of the 

 continent. In any event, the nearest current counterparts to the New 

 Deal programs of putting people to work at harnessing nature to end 

 poverty are to be found in the newly developing countries overseas. In 

 this sense, the TVA is not a lonely experiment. India has copied it 

 directly. In Iran some of the leading ex-administrators of TVA are 

 developing the hydraulic and mineral resources of a river. Apparently 

 there was more to the American conservation tradition than husband- 

 ing the resources of our homeland. But have we not a hint here, also, 

 that conservation programs as such, even in the scientific, region- 

 adapted versions of the New Deal, had their role in parts of the world 

 not yet highly urbanized and industrialized, where the potential of 

 nature could give shape to a civic consciousness still in a formative 

 stage, where demands on resources were not yet highly organized and 

 highly competing? 



Now, I think, we are back to the questions posed in Mr. Griffith's 

 paper a little better equipped to look for answers. 



1 National Resources Committee (Washington: U.S. Government Printing 

 Office, 1935). 



2 Resources for Freedom, report of the President's Materials Policy Commis- 

 sion (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952). 



