44 The Mythology of Conservation 



tiple-purpose approach. At the same time that act gave no acknowl- 

 edgment to what conservationists in 1908 had considered to be the 

 key to their proposal, the use of water-power revenues to finance the 

 multiple-purpose program. The Water Power Act of 1920 contained 

 a single-purpose approach. It did not mention flood control or irriga- 

 tion; it spoke of navigation only as a use to be protected from poten- 

 tial encroachments from power production. Even on the crucial item 

 of raising revenue from private hydroelectric power production to pay 

 for river development, the issue over which the battle had raged since 

 1908, the conservationists capitulated almost completely. In brief, it 

 seems clear that in the Water Power Act of 1920 conservationists sac- 

 rificed the essence of their ideas for the single advantage of public 

 control. 



Emphasis upon the struggle between private and public interest has 

 often transformed real conservation issues into spurious moral battles 

 between the selfish capitalist and the noble public. Historians, for ex- 

 ample, have ref ought the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy in moral terms. 

 Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes reversed the moral judg- 

 ments in his evaluation, recasting Pinchot rather than Ballinger as the 

 villain. But Ickes succumbed to the same error of permitting an ethi- 

 cal analysis to obscure the conflicts in conservation policy which lay 

 at the root of the trouble. It is misleading to argue that Roosevelt and 

 Taft had the same objectives; they did not. That celebrated contro- 

 versy arose because men whom Taft appointed sought to modify 

 policies instituted by Roosevelt administrators. These were policy 

 differences, and it is amazing how deeply such questions became ob- 

 scured, even at the hands of the participants, amid the mythology of 

 morality and the "people versus the interests." 



Our own times have witnessed similar simplifications. Preserva- 

 tionists, for example, have cast the struggle to preserve areas from 

 commercial development as a contest between private and public in- 

 terest. But commercial development is just as much a public value as 

 is preservation for recreation and wilderness areas. As a prominent 

 irrigation leader complained during the fight over the dam in Dinosaur 

 National Monument, "We are conservationists, too." Admittedly, 

 one can choose between these values only with great difficulty, but to 

 simplify the choice by invoking the mythology of the moral battle 



