370 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



THE ATTITUDE OF CONGRESS 



In the study of the forest policy, nothing stands out more promi- 

 nently than the unwise position Congress usually took. Of the im- 

 portant timber land laws passed in the half-century during which our 

 forests were disappearing or passing into the hands of private indi- 

 viduals, only two — the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, and the act of 

 1897 — stand out clearly as examples of intelligent legislation; and 

 the first of these was secured because Congress did not get a chance 

 to quash it, while the act of 1897 was drawn by a "theoretical" scien- 

 tist, and pushed through Congress on an appropriation bill. During 

 the seventies, eighties, and nineties, timber-steal measures of almost 

 any kind could get a favorable hearing in Congress, while conservation 

 measures were promptly eliminated from the calendar. The insistent 

 call of department officials and others for better legislation seldom 

 elicited a favorable response, while the complaints of timber tres- 

 passers who got caught in their illegal operations frequently received 

 a sympathetic hearing, and sometimes even legislative relief. For the 

 fact that the United States finally got some national forests, with a 

 scientific system of administration, credit is due, not to the wisdom 

 of our national legislature, but entirely to administrative officials — 

 Schurz, Cleveland, Sparks, Walcott, Fernow, Bowers, Pinchot, 

 Roosevelt, and others ; and these men had to fight Congress at almost 

 every step. 



The attitude of Congress was due, in the first place, to the in- 

 ability of most of the members to understand the necessity of forest 

 reserves. Most congressmen are "practical men" — lawyers, farmers, 

 merchants, successful business men — and not men of broad education 

 and scholarship. Few of them knew anything of the history of forestry 

 in European countries, in some of which the policy of private owner- 

 ship of timber lands had been tried and abandoned. It was the "mad 

 theorists" who first urged the establishment of reserves ; and, after 

 the reserves had been established — by the President, not by Con- 

 gress — some of the men in Congress began to understand the prin- 

 ciples underlying the new policy. Probably at the present time a 

 majority of them understand why timber land should be owned by 

 the government, but that was not true twenty years ago. 



A second reason for the failure of Congress to adopt a more intel- 



