SAMUEL p. HAYS 43 



tion since 1908. Instead, it has radically altered its course, shifting 

 from an open, optimistic, hopeful movement, tied to a broad philoso- 

 phy of human improvement, to a more rigid, pessimistic one, deeply 

 affected by a fear for human survival. Can one call this a change 

 toward maturity? * 



As one evidence of the greater maturity of the conservation move- 

 ment, Mr. Griffith cites a growing acceptance of the concept of the 

 public interest. Past struggles, so the reasoning goes, have centered 

 on the conflict between public and private interest, but with the tri- 

 umph of the idea of the public interest this controversy has abated 

 and conservation displays a growing unity. Many writings support this 

 analysis of the past, for conservation history has emphasized those 

 major episodes of the fight for public control: the Pinchot-Ballinger 

 controversy, the struggle for the Water Power Act and the Mineral 

 Leasing Act, and the Teapot Dome controversy. But this emphasis is 

 misleading. Public control is not an end in itself; it is only a means 

 to an end. Conservation means much more than simply public action; 

 and we should be more concerned with the history of its objectives 

 rather than of its techniques. In fact, by dwelling on the struggle for 

 public action historians have obscured the much more basic problem 

 of the fate of conservation objectives. 



Some apparent victories for the principle of public ownership have 

 actually involved defeats for conservation goals. The Water Power 

 Act of 1920, for example, established the principle of federal adminis- 

 tration of hydroelectric power on the public lands and in the navi- 

 gable streams. Yet that act also marked the failure of the fight for 

 one of the major conservation ideas of 1908 — multiple-purpose river 

 development. Ever since 1908, Senator Francis G. Newlands had 

 fought for his measure to establish a multiple-purpose planning and 

 development commission, and in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1917 

 he finally obtained authorization of a planning body. But the Water 

 Power Act of 1920, which was the real answer of Congress to the 

 Newlands program, repealed this one meager foothold for the mul- 



*NOTE BY MR. GRIFFITH Granted that we are pessimistic today, 

 I do not think we are pessimistic about conservation — Vogt and Osborn to the 

 contrary, notwithstanding. I think I shall retain my optimism on conservation 

 on the assumption that we shall see another fifty years and that, at least for 

 the United States, science will rout Malthus. 



