iv 



Structure of the Series 



The series, with a working title of &quot;The History of Forest Service 

 Policy, 1900-1950&quot;, began and ended as a multiple use project. Its major 

 aim was to provide tape-recorded interviews with men in the Fotest Service 

 who during most of the half -century had been in policy-making positions. 

 The series also served as a pilot attempt to try the relatively new technique 

 of oral history as a method of gathering primary information within a specific 

 subject field (one which might be defined here as the origins, operations, 

 and effects of policy in public administration). The method, in turn, was 

 hung on the superstructure of a list of retirees who were considered to be 

 able to contribute the most to that subject. 



Each major interview contains the standard stock of questions on 

 Service-wide controversies of the past: the attempts to reorganize the con 

 servation agencies - specifically, to transfer the Forest Service out of the 

 Department of Agriculture; the efforts to get passage of federal legislation 

 that would have regulated timber management on private lands; the competition 

 with other agencies and with private owners for land acquisition determina 

 tions; on-going issues, such as competing land uses like mining or grazing, 

 which often reflected years of patient negotiation with and bearing up under 

 the pressures of well-organized special interest groups. 



Each interview covers as well topics that are unique to that particu 

 lar person s experiences, so that tracing &quot;policy in its origins, operations, 

 and effects,&quot; necessitated a detective job to discover, before an interview 

 took place, those policy questions with which the particular individual had 

 had experience. It was here that an interviewee s own contemporaries frequently 

 gave guidance and counsel; advice was also provided by academic specialists in 

 forest economics, recreation, fire control, silviculture, and so on. 



Given questions on the same subjects, the interviewees sometimes speak 

 to them from contrasting points of view, and thereby provide a critique of 

 inner validity for the series. For instance, while Lee Kneipp and Ed Crafts 

 comment on the informal power in Congress of the Forest Service s widespread 

 constituency, other men (such as Ed Kotok) who actually had been in the field 

 and involved in local public relations verify how the system worked. 



The structure of an oral history series depends on many factors beyond 

 the control of the oral historian: the health of the interviewee, his willing 

 ness to interview, and how much he can or will say about his career. The 

 fluid state of our interview list caused our cup to runneth over more than 

 once with more interviewees than we could add to our original list of three. 

 Twice the list was enlarged - and fortunately funded further by Resources 

 for the Future. The phenomenon of expansion was due largely to the tendencies 

 of a few memoirists (especially Christopher Granger, Lee Kneipp, and Raymond 

 Marsh) to touch lightly on events in which he had only slight involvement, 

 then refer the interviewer to the man who could tell the whole story from a 

 leader s eye view. The result is that some of the interviews on the accom 

 panying list are one-subject, supplemental manuscripts. 



