Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency

The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890 -1920

Samuel P Hays

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839745423
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The relevance and importance of Samuel P. Hay's book, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, has only increased over time. Written almost half a century ago, it offers an invaluable history of the conservation movement's origins, and provides an excellent context for understanding contemporary enviromental problems and possible solutions. Against a background of rivers, forests, ranges, and public lands, this book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for a looser system allowing grassroots impulses to have a voice through elected government representatives.—Print ed.

 

Chapter I—Introduction

The conservation movement has contributed more than its share to the political drama of the twentieth century. A succession of colorful episodes—from the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, through Teapot Dome, to the Dixon-Yates affair—have embellished the literature of the movement, and called forth fond memories for its later leaders. Cast in the framework of a moral struggle between the virtuous “people,” and the evil “interests,” these events have provided issues tailor-made to arouse the public to a fighting pitch, and they continue to inspire the historian to recount a tale of noble and stirring enterprise. This crusading quality of the conservation movement has given it an enviable reputation as a defender of spiritual values and national character. He who would battle for conservation fights in a worthy and patriotic cause, and foolhardy, indeed, is he who would sully his reputation by opposition!

Such is the ideological tenor of the present-day conservation movement and of its history as well. But, however much an asset in promoting conservation, this dramatic fervor has constituted a major liability in its careful analysis. For the moral language of conservation battles differed markedly from the course of conservation events. Examining the record, one is forced to distinguish sharply between rhetoric and reality, between the literal meaning of the terminology of the popular struggle and the specific issues of conservation policy at stake. Conservation neither arose from a broad popular outcry, nor centered its fire primarily upon the private corporation. Moreover, corporations often supported conservation policies, while the “people” just as frequently opposed them. In fact, it becomes clear that one must discard completely the struggle against corporations as the setting in which to understand conservation history, and permit an entirely new frame of reference to arise from the evidence itself.

Conservation, above all, was a scientific movement, and its role in history arises from the implications of science and technology in modern society. Conservation leaders sprang from such fields as hydrology, forestry, agrostology, geology, and anthropology. Vigorously active in professional circles in the national capital, these leaders brought the ideals and practices of their crafts into federal resource policy. Loyalty to these professional ideals, not close association with the grass-roots public, set the tone of the Theodore Roosevelt conservation movement. Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts. It molded the policies which they proposed, their administrative techniques, and their relations with Congress and the public. It is from the vantage point of applied science, rather than of democratic protest, that one must understand the historic role of the conservation movement.{1}

The new realms of science and technology, appearing to open up unlimited opportunities for human achievement, filled conservation leaders with intense optimism. They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations. True, they expressed some fear that diminishing resources would create critical shortages in the future. But they were not Malthusian prophets of despair and gloom. The popular view that in a fit of pessimism they withdrew vast areas of the public lands from present use for future development does not stand examination. In fact, they bitterly opposed those who sought to withdraw resources from commercial development. They displayed that deep sense of hope which pervaded all those at the turn of the century for whom science and technology were revealing visions of an abundant future.

The political implications of conservation, it is particularly important to observe, grew out of the political implications of applied science rather than from conflict over the distribution of wealth. Who should decide the course of resource development? Who should determine the goals and methods of federal resource programs? The correct answer to these questions lay at the heart of the conservation idea. Since resource matters were basically technical in nature, conservationists argued, technicians, rather than legislators, should deal with them. Foresters should determine the desirable annual timber cut; hydraulic engineers should establish the feasible extent of multiple-purpose river development and the specific location of reservoirs; agronomists should decide which forage areas could remain open for grazing without undue damage to water supplies. Conflicts between competing resource users, especially, should not be dealt with through the normal processes of politics. Pressure group action, logrolling in Congress, or partisan debate could not guarantee rational and scientific decisions. Amid such jockeying for advantage with the resulting compromise, concern for efficiency would disappear. Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it.

This phase of conservation requires special examination because of its long neglect by historians. Instead of probing the political implications of the technological spirit, they have repeated the political mythology of the “people versus the interests” as the setting for the struggle over resource policy. This myopia has stemmed in part from the disinterestedness of the historian and the social scientist. Often accepting implicitly the political assumptions of eliteism, rarely having an axe of personal interest to grind, and invariably sympathetic with the movement, conservation historians have considered their view to be in the public interest. Yet, analysis from outside such a limited perspective reveals the difficulty of equating the particular views of a few scientific leaders with an objective “public interest.” Those views did not receive wide acceptance; they did not arise out of widely held assumptions and values. They came from a limited group of people, with a particular set of goals, who played a special role in society. Their definition of the “public interest” might well, and did, clash with other competing definitions. The historian, therefore, cannot understand conservation leaders simply as defenders of the “people.” Instead, he must examine the experiences and goals peculiar to them; he must describe their role within a specific sociological context.

This study, then, is an examination of the ideas and values of conservation leaders as a special group in American society, and an analysis of the wider implications of their attempt to work out the concept of efficiency in resource management. I will not undertake here an exhaustive treatment of the specific struggles over conservation policy. I am more concerned with the development of a group of ideas determining the behavior of technicians, and of the impact of these ideas upon the wider public. I will make a special effort to illuminate the points of cooperation and conflict between the values of technology implicit in conservation and competing values with which they came into contact. This study, it is hoped, will bring the history of the conservation movement into sharper focus, and emphasize its hitherto neglected features. It might also serve as a fruitful point of departure for exploring the wider political implications of technology in recent American history.

Chapter II—Store the Floods

The modern American conservation movement grew out of the firsthand experience of federal administrators and political leaders with problems of Western economic growth, and more precisely with Western water development. Such men as Frederick H. Newell of the United States Geological Survey, George H. Maxwell, a California water law specialist, Representative Francis G. Newlands of Nevada, and President Theodore Roosevelt joined to promote a federal irrigation program.{2} Their experience in this campaign, and their later experiences—as they constructed and operated irrigation works—with problems of water rights, speculation, and siltation gave rise to extensive ideas about water conservation. These views gradually became crystallized into an overall approach and by 1908 emerged as a concept of multiple-purpose river development. The movement to construct reservoirs to conserve spring flood waters for use later in the dry season gave rise both to the term “conservation” and to the concept of planned and efficient progress which lay at the heart of the conservation idea.{3}

New Horizons in Water Use

In their task of gathering technical data about stream flow, hydrographers of the United States Geological Survey evolved the idea that water is a single resource of many potential uses.{4} This simple reorientation in outlook opened up new vistas of water development. It became the fundamental idea in water conservation.

In 1888 Congress authorized the first water resources investigation of the arid lands, a measure which Major John Wesley Powell, Chief of the Survey, had encouraged for over a decade.{5} Under this law the hydrographic branch of the Survey set out to measure water supplies, locate reservoirs and canals, and map areas susceptible of irrigation. It soon turned to studies of the movement of ground water and sedimentation, and before long was called upon to expand its work to the East.{6} On the basis of this information federal officials planned Western irrigation works. Corporations interested in irrigation, water power, and domestic water supply also drew upon the new data.{7} These private groups, in fact, encouraged the ever-widening activities of the Survey’s hydrographic branch and supported its campaign for larger congressional appropriations.{8}

A young engineer, Frederick Haynes Newell, took charge of this work. Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1862, Newell graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1885 as a mining engineer. Three years later he became the assistant hydraulic engineer of the United States Geological Survey, and the first man assigned to carry out the Act of 1888. In 1890 he was promoted to chief hydrographer. From the very start of his official career, Newell took an active interest in the scientific work of the federal government and especially in promoting the dissemination of scientific information. He served, for example, as voluntary secretary of the National Geographic Society in 1892-93 and again in 1897-99. He also promoted a federal water development program, at first for irrigation, but later for power, navigation, and flood control as well. During the Roosevelt administration Newell became one of the architects of water policy and of the entire conservation movement.

The Geological Survey, among federal agencies, did not pioneer in water resource studies; yet it did bring forth a wider concept of water use. In 1824 Congress instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to improve the navigable streams, and since that date the Corps had carried out frequent hydrographic investigations such as the extensive Humphreys and Abbott survey of the Mississippi River completed in 1866.{9} Confined by Congress to the improvement of navigation, however, the Corps limited its hydrographic work to measurements of low water flow. It placed upon private landowners the responsibility for collecting data about drainage and floods, even though such matters, in the same watershed, intimately affected navigation. Until the advent of the Geological Survey these wider uses of water remained uninvestigated. As the California Commission on Public Works remarked in 1895, “The Army Engineers...failed to appreciate the importance of the study of the water resources of the country....It was left to the United States Geological Survey, through its Hydrographic...Branch, to collect the much-needed information.”{10}

The Corps of Engineers also held a narrow view of water use and water development. Viewing rivers primarily in terms of transportation, the Corps confined its congressional reports to the effect of new projects on navigation.{11} It referred to water power, irrigation, and drainage as secondary to navigation; it did not propose studies or plans for the development of all possible uses of water. The Corps of Engineers, commented Mr. Carl Grunsky, a leader in the civil engineering profession, “has never looked upon the related problems in the broad progressive way that led the U.S. Geological Survey into a study of stream flow.”{12} At the same time, the Corps regarded the Geological Survey as a competitive administrative agency and sought to protect its own role in water development by resisting coordination of navigation with any other water use.

The scientists and engineers of the Geological Survey approached water development from a fresh point of view, unhampered by limited interests or institutional loyalties. They investigated flood water as part of a cycle of precipitation, evaporation, percolation, run-off, and stream flow, rather than as simple quantities to be diverted or as instruments of navigation. They were as concerned with the sediment content and mineral quality of water as with its physical movement.{13} This approach gave rise to a broader view of river planning. In federal programs, the Survey argued, all possible uses of water should be considered so that rivers could produce the greatest possible benefit for man. Multiple-purpose river-basin development in later years arose directly from the experiences and ideas of these new hydrographers in the Geological Survey.

The Federal Government Undertakes Irrigation

While Newell and his field force carried on their hydrographic studies, Western leaders undertook a search for capital for reservoir construction which was to bring the federal government directly into the task of water development. After the irrigation boom-and-bust of 1887-93, private investors turned away from the West to seek more lucrative opportunities. The West, in turn, began to look to the federal government for aid. The Carey Act of 1894, passed in response to this demand, sought to solve the problem by granting a million acres of land to each Western state to be used to finance irrigation. This program produced few projects, so that by the late 1890’s the West, through the National Irrigation Congress, demanded a new program.{14}The Act of 1888, which initiated hydrographic studies, had anticipated direct federal financing, and members of the Geological Survey, especially Frederick H. Newell, strongly backed the proposal.{15} Toward the end of the nineties these federal officials jo...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter I-Introduction
• Chapter II-Store the Floods
• Chapter III-Woodman, Spare that Tree
• Chapter IV-Range Wars and Range Conservation
• Chapter V-The Public Land Question
• Chapter VI-Taming the Nation’s Rivers
• Chapter VII-The Conservation Crusade
• Chapter VIII-Conflict over Conservation Policy
• Chapter IX-Organized Conservation in Decline
• Chapter X-The Corps of Engineers Fights Water Conservation
• Chapter XI-Congress Rejects Coordinated Development
• Chapter XII-The West Against Itself
• Chapter XIII-The Conservation Movement and the Progressive Tradition
• Bibliographical Note