Part 22 (1/2)

In response to this invitation, which included the colony of Newfoundland, the Commissioners assembled in the White House on February 18, 1909 The American Commissioners were Gifford Pinchot, Robert Bacon, and Jah five days, the Conference united in a declaration of principles, and suggested to the President of the United States ”that all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources, and their inventory, conservation, and wise utilization” Accordingly, on February 19, 1909, Robert Bacon, Secretary of State, addressed to forty-five nations a letter of invitation ”to send delegates to a conference to be held at The Hague at such date to be found convenient, there to ates of the other countries, with a view of considering a general plan for an inventory of the natural resources of the world and to devising a uniform scheme for the expression of the results of such inventory, to the end that thereand appreciation of the world's supply of the material elements which underlie the development of civilization and the welfare of the peoples of the earth” After I left the White House the project lapsed

Throughout the early part of my Administration the public land policy was chiefly directed to the defense of the public lands against fraud and theft Secretary Hitchcock's efforts along this line resulted in the Oregon land fraud cases, which led to the conviction of Senator Mitchell, and which made Francis J Heney known to the American people as one of their best and most effective servants These land fraud prosecutions under Mr Heney, together with the study of the public lands which preceded the passage of the Reclaation of land titles in the National Forests by the Forest Service, all co of the need of land law reform, and thus led to the appointment of the Public Lands Commission This Commission, appointed by me on October 22, 1903, was directed to report to the President: ”Upon the condition, operation, and effect of the present land laws, and to recoest practicable disposition of the public lands to actual settlers ill build permanent homes upon them, and to secure in permanence the fullest and most effective use of the resources of the public lands” It proceeded without loss of tiround of public land problehout the West, to confer with the Governors and other public menthe public lands, the laws and decisions which governed the those lahich was already in existence, but which remained unformulated in the records of the General Land Office and in the mind of its employees The Public Lands Commission made its first preliminary report on March 7, 1904 It found ”that the present land laws do not fit the conditions of the rees to meet the public needs A year later the second report of the Coes, and said ”The fundamental fact that characterizes the situation under the present land laws is this, that the nu out of all proportion to the number of new homes” This report laid the foundation of the e, and included by far the most complete statement everthe most difficult topics considered by the Public Lands Commission was that of the mineral land laws This subject was referred by the Coineers, which reported upon it through a Committee This Co others, ”that the Government of the United States should retain title to allcoal and oil, in the lands of unceded territory, and lease the same to individuals or corporations at a fixed rental” The necessity for this action has since conized Another recommendation, since partly carried into effect, was for the separation of the surface and thecoal and oil

Our land laws have of recent years proved inefficient; yet the land laws theent, and often corrupt administration of these laws The appointment on March 4, 1907, of James R Garfield as Secretary of the Interior led to a new era in the interpretation and enforce the public lands His administration of the Interior Department was beyond comparison the best we have ever had It was based primarily on the conception that it is as much the duty of public land officials to help the honest settler get title to his clai of the public lands The essential fact about public land frauds is not merely that public property is stolen, but that every clai of a home or a livelihood by an honest man

As the study of the public land laws proceeded and their administration improved, a public land policy was for of the resources on the public do principle There followed the withdrawal of coal lands as already described, of oil lands and phosphate lands, and finally, just at the end of the Administration, of water-power sites on the public domain

These withdraere ress the necessary opportunity to pass wise laws dealing with their use and disposal; and the great crooked special interests fought the thethe welfare of the ordinary hard-working men and women of the Nation, there is none whose interest has been ht of self, than that of Thoia

While President I often discussed with him the condition of women on the small farms, and on the frontier, the hardshi+p of their lives as co their welfare into consideration in whatever was done for the improvement of life on the land I also went over the ia, a leader in the Southern farmers' movement, and with other men, such as Henry Wallace, Dean L H Bailey, of Cornell, and Kenyon butterfield

One man from whose advice I especially profited was not an American, but an Irishman, Sir Horace Plunkett In various conversations he described to me and my close associates the reconstruction of faranization Society of Ireland, of which he was the founder and the controlling force; and he discussed the application of similar methods to the i of 1908, at my request, Plunkett conferred on the subject with Garfield and Pinchot, and the latter suggested to him the appoint the attention of the Nation to the problee of the actual conditions of life in the open country After long discussion a plan for a Country Life Commission was laid before me and approved The appointust, 1908 In the letter of appoint the Commission were set forth as follows: ”I doubt if any other nation can bear coiven by the Governricultural matters But practically the whole of this effort has hitherto been directed toward increasing the production of crops Our attention has been concentrated al this was unquestionably the right thing to do

The farood crops in order to support himself and his family But when this has been secured, the effort for better far should cease to stand alone, and should be acco on the faret the largest possible return in rows, as that he should get the largest possible return in crops froriculture is not the whole of country life The great rural interests are huood crops are of little value to the farood kind of life on the farm”

The Commission on Country Life did work of capital importance By means of a widely circulated set of questions the Comhout the Nation Its trip through the East, South, and West brought it into contact with large numbers of practical farmers and their wives, secured for the Commissioners a most valuable body of first-hand infor of interest in country life which has since taken place throughout the Nation

One of the --and incidentally one of the --series of answers sent to the Commission was from a far children, he and his wife being each 52 years old; and that they owned 520 acres of land without anyover their heads He had hihbors had done less well are entitled to consideration These views are expressed in terse and vigorous English; they cannot always be quoted in full He states that the farood as they should be because too es; that the schools do not train boys and girls satisfactorily for life on the faret an idea in their heads that city life is better, and that to reht To the question whether the farhborhood are satisfactorily organized, he answers: ”Oh, there is a little one-horse grange gang in our locality, and every darned one thinks they ought to be a king” To the question, ”Are the renters of far?” he answers: ”No; because theya better job” To the question, ”Is the supply of farhborhood satisfactory?” the answer is: ”No; because the people have gone out of the baby business”; and when asked as to the reives birth to seven living boys on American soil” To the question, ”Are the conditions surrounding hired labor on the farhborhood satisfactory to the hiredthat he would like to blow up the stillhouses and root out whiskey and beer To the question, ”Are the sanitary conditions on the farhborhood satisfactory?” he answers: ”No; too careless about chicken yards, and the like, and poorly covered wells In one well on neighbor's farm I counted seven snakes in the wall of the well, and they used the water daily: his wife dead now and he is looking for another” He ends by stating that theto be done for the betterood roads”; but in his answers he shows very clearly that most important of all is the individual equation of the man or woman

Like the rest of the Commissions described in this chapter, the Country Life Commission cost the Government not one cent, but laid before the President and the country a mass of information so accurate and so vitally is as they are; and therefore it incurred the bitter opposition of the reactionaries The report of the Country Life Coress by e I asked for 25,000 to print and circulate the report and to prepare for publication the immense amount of valuable material collected by the Coress was not only a refusal to appropriate thethe work The Tawney amendment to the Sundry Civil bill forbade the President to appoint any further Coress to do so Had this prohibition been enacted earlier _and complied with_, it would have prevented the appointment of the six Roosevelt commissions But I would not have complied with it Mr Tawney, one of the most efficient representatives of the cause of special privilege as against public interest to be found in the House, was later, in conjunction with Senator Hale and others, able to induce my successor to accept their view As as alress that if I did not believe the Tawney amendment to be unconstitutional I would veto the Sundry Civil bill which contained it, and that if I were re in office I would refuse to obey it The memorandum ran in part:

”The chief object of this provision, however, is to prevent the Executive repeating what it has done within the last year in connection with the Conservation Commission and the Country Life Commission It is for the people of the country to decide whether or not they believe in the work done by the Conservation Commission and by the Country Life Co our ays, in preventing the waste of soil, in preserving the forests, in thrifty use of the mineral resources of the country for the nation as a whole rather thanfor the betterment of the condition of the men and women who live on the farms, then they will unstintedly condemn the action of everythis provision, and will support those islative branch who opposed its adoption I would not sign the bill at all if I thought the provision entirely effective But the Congress cannot prevent the President fro advice Any future President can do as I have done, and ask disinterested ive this service free to the people through these commissions

”My successor, the President-elect, in a letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, asked for the continuance and support of the Conservation Commission The Conservation Commission was appointed at the request of the Governors of over forty States, and almost all of these States have since appointed commissions to cooperate with the National Coanizations concerned with natural resources have been heartily cooperating with the coress has refused to pass a law to continue and provide for the commission; and it now passes a laith the purpose of preventing the Executive fro the commission at all The Executive, therefore, must now either abandon the work and reject the cooperation of the States, or else h executive officers whom he may select for that purpose”

The Chaularly energetic and far-seeing organization, itself published the report which Congress had thus discreditably refused to publish

The work of the Bureau of Corporations, under Herbert Knox Smith, formed an iinning Mr Smith was a member of the Inland Waterways Commission and of the National Conservation Commission and his Bureau prepared ation of standing timber in the United States by the Bureau of Corporations furnished for the first tie of the facts Over nine hundred counties in tiions were covered by the Bureau, and the work took five years The o three-fourths of the standing timber in the United States was publicly owned, while at the date of the report four-fifths of the timber in the country was in private hands The concentration of private ownershi+p had developed to such an a extent that about two hundred holders owned nearly one-half of all privately owned tireatest holders, the Southern Pacific Railway, the Northern Pacific Railway, and the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, held over ten per cent Of this work, Mr Smith says:

”It was important, indeed, to know the facts so that we could take proper action toward saving the timber still left to the public But of far ht that this history (and the history of our other resources) throws on the basic attitude, tradition and governmental beliefs of the American people The whole standpoint of the people toward the proper aiovernment, toward the relation of property to the citizen, and the relation of property to the governht out first by this Conservation work”

The work of the Bureau of Corporations as to water poas equally striking In addition to bringing the concentration of water-power control first proh e in my veto of the Jareat interests and their allies held nearly sixty per cent of the developed water power of the United States

Says Co in the whole as its clear demonstration of the fact that the only effective place to control water power in the public interest is at the power sites; that as to powers noned by the public it is absolutely essential that the public shall retain titleThe only way in which the public can get back to itself the e in the water-power site is to rent that site at a rental which, added to the cost of power production there, will make the total cost of water power about the same as fuel power, and then let the two sell at the saht of the water-power ress in September, 1909, Con of the shi+ft of the special interests to the Deical political reason, nahts idea for the purposes of the large corporations It ht to the attention of the Inland Waterways Co importance to ays of their relation with railroad lines, the fact that the bulk of the traffic is long distance traffic, that it cannot pass over the whole distance by water, while it can go anywhere by rail, and that therefore the power of the rail lines to pro-rate or not to pro-rate, ater lines really deter value of ter ports, over half the active water frontage in twenty-one ports was controlled by the railroads, was also brought to the Coreat value were prepared both for the Inland Waterways Commission and for the National Conservation Co the basic facts about the available timber supply, about ays, water power, and iron ore, Mr Smith helped to develop and drive into the public conscience the idea that the people ought to retain title to our natural resources and handle thes accomplished that have been enumerated above were of i of our people In addition certain things were done of which the econo was more remote, but which bore directly upon our welfare, because they add to the beauty of living and therefore to the joy of life Securing a great artist, Saint-Gaudens, to give us the e since the decay of hellenistic Greece was one such act In this case I had power myself to direct the Mint to employ Saint-Gaudens The first, and most beautiful, of his coins were issued in thousands before Congress assereat and pere In the saot some really capital medals by sculptors of the first rank Siton were erected and placed in proper relation to one another, on plans provided by the best architects and landscape architects I also appointed a Fine Arts Council, an unpaid body of the best architects, painters, and sculptors in the country, to advise the Governs The ”pork-barrel”

Senators and Congressmen felt for this body an instinctive, and perhaps from their standpoint a natural, hostility; andoffice revoked the appointment and disbanded the Council

Evenof steps to preserve from destruction beautiful and wonderful wild creatures whose existence was threatened by greed and wantonness During the seven and a half years closing on March 4, 1909, more was accomplished for the protection of wild life in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park The record includes the creation of five National Parks--Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Platt, Oklahoma; Sully Hill, North Dakota, and Mesa Verde, Colorado; four big gaton; fifty-one bird reservations; and the enactment of laws for the protection of wild life in Alaska, the District of Columbia, and on National bird reserves These measures may be briefly enuame laws for the Territory of Alaska in 1902 and 1908, resulting in the regulation of the export of heads and trophies of big ga the southern coast of the Territory

The securing in 1902 of the first appropriation for the preservation of buffalo and the establishment in the Yellowstone National Park of the first and now the largest herd of buffalo belonging to the Governe of the Act of January 24, 1905, creating the Wichita Gaame preserves In 1907, 12,000 acres of this preserve were inclosed with a woven wire fence for the reception of the herd of fifteen buffalo donated by the New York Zoological Society

The passage of the Act of June 29, 1906, providing for the establishment of the Grand Canyon Ga 1,492,928 acres