"Putting Our Lands In Order"

Chapter 18 of New Frontiers, by Henry A. Wallace

New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934. Pages 239-248

They have been there a long time. Destructive as they have been, we in the United States, during the past mere 150 years, have handled our land in a way that indicates even more destructive possibilities. Over large areas we are even worse than the Chinese, because we made no real effort to restore to the soil the fertility which has been removed.

We have permitted the livestock men of the West to overgraze the public domain and so expose it to wind and water erosion. Much of the grass land of the great plains has been plowed, exposed, and allowed to blow away. Timber land under private ownership has been destructively logged off, without proper provision for leaving seed trees. All of this has been careless, thoughtless, wanton and to the disadvantage of nearly every one, immediately and in the future.

Early in the century, the conscience of our people began to awaken, under the leadership of Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. One hundred and sixty million acres of western public land were withdrawn from entry and set aside as National Parks. More recently we have appropriated money year by year to buy new land to incorporate in the national forests.

There are now 230 million acres of land in private ownership which are in serious danger of being exploited in ways harmful to the public welfare, and which should be purchased as rapidly as possible. During the 22 years of the Weeks' Forest Purchase Act, previous to this Administration, a total of 4,700,000 acres of forest land had been acquired. During the first year and a half of this Administration, this 22-year total has been slightly exceeded, and if this rate of acquisition is continued, the forest resources of the United States will be under adequate supervision and the headquarters of streams will be protected from erosion and unduly rapid run-off within twenty years.

Under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, the whole land problem had received an emphasis such as it never had before. As a young man, he was a close student of the Pinchot conservation policies, and he set out thousands of trees on his own farm. As Governor of New York, he had inaugurated a policy of buying poor land and reforesting it. As President, he soon saw the foolishness of spending millions in public works money to irrigate new land while at the same time, the AAA was taking land out of use. His suggested solution was to unify the program by allocating money to buy sub-marginal land to off-set the new irrigated land. To carry out this policy, 25 million dollars were allocated by Public Works in 1934 to buy poor land.

In the meantime, as a result of the AAA taking out of use 40,000,000 acres of crop land on 3,000,000 different farms, there was growing interest in a more permanent solution. Sensible business men said, "Let's buy these surplus acres and have done with it instead of renting them year after year." Economists pointed out that it would be much sounder to take out of use the 70,000,000 poorest acres of crop land concentrated in the sub-marginal areas than 40,000,000 average acres on 3,000,000 farms scattered all over the United States. The best farmers on good land had adopted rotations and reduced their percentage of land in a cash crop like corn and cotton to 20 per cent but were getting yields twice that of their neighbors. Poor farmers on poor land without rotation sometimes had 60 per cent or more of their land in cash crops and were getting yields only half as great as their neighbors, or one-fourth as great as the good farmers. From the standpoint of pure mathematics, and of getting as much as possible out of our farm labor, it would seem that we should not take any of our good land out of use, but should confine our attention to buying poor land.

Unfortunately, from the standpoint of meeting the agricultural emergency at any time in the next five years, the proposal to buy poor land is not as practical as it sounds. In the first place, people living on the poorest land do not sell much. If we bought the 100 million poorest acres of farm land, we probably would not cut the crop output of the United States as much as 5 per cent. Moreover, the people who sell the poor land will often buy better land, and that leads to the application of more labor to the better land of the United States.

In the second place, the purchase of sub-marginal lands must of necessity be slow, partly to protect the government from the standpoint of reasonable price and good title, and partly to protect the human rights of the people living on the poor land. Franklin Roosevelt, working out the New York land problem as Governor of New York, solved the human side of the problem by giving a life estate in the property under consideration to old couples who were so fond of a particular spot that they did not want to move. Human rights much be conserved, and the government must not be cheated. Of necessity, then, the land program will develop so slowly that it will not greatly help the agricultural emergency at any time in the next five years.

Nevertheless government land purchase of poor and eroded land should be pushed will all possible speed. Human beings are ruining land, and bad land is ruining human beings, especially children. There are certain poor land regions so remote that it is impossible to maintain decent schools, roads and churches. It would be economy not to permit such areas to be settled except perhaps by childless adults who do not expect ever to lead civilized lives. Some areas are so unproductive that they will actually produce more food per acre if returned to natural game cover and restocked with wild life.

The human waste on poor land is even more appalling than the soil waste. The Federal Emergency Relief has approached the land problem from the standpoint of farmers now on relief. Several hundred thousand of these have been trying to accomplish the impossible, but they didn't know it until their endurance was sapped, and their case made plainly hopeless by the depression. With these families, the smaller part of the problem is buying the miserable land where they have been trying to make a living. The difficult thing is to find a new and better place for them to go — a place that will not mean that the government, in placing them there, is simply subsidizing trouble for someone else. While no hard and fast rule can be drawn, it would seem that in the eastern half of the United States, the ideal location for many of these poor land farmers who are now on relief would be on self-subsistence homesteads where part of the family can work in industry. This may also be the destiny of some of the unemployed in our cities. It costs only one-third as much to take care of a farm family on relief as a city family, and if the Federal Relief has to support several million families for several years, it will try to make the money go as far as possible by getting several hundred thousand of them out on the land, establishing them in part-time farming and part-time industry.

This trend is a matter of grave concern to established industry and agriculture. We in the AAA will of course insist that these government financed people do not produce farm products for sale. Industry will probably insist that they do not produce industrial products for sale. But industry can not solve the problem this easily, because ultimately industry through the income tax has to foot the government relief bill.

The 10 million unemployed plus the 5 million living on land which can never be farmed are a continuing menace to the established industry and agriculture of the United States. To solve it means decentralized industrial planning relative to land. If the heads of our two hundred leading corporations were to take into account the full significance of paved roads, autos, trucks, high line electricity, and the increased happiness of human beings close to the land, might they not enthusiastically start a decentralized, industrial, self-subsistence homestead program on a scale which would jerk us out of the depression for years to come?

If industry does not seize this opportunity, its only effective defense against serious trouble will be such a revival in business that two-thirds of the unemployed will be put to work again at their accustomed places in the big cities. It would seem high time for those big industries which are truly conservative and interested in their long-time welfare to begin to do a little real planning about the unemployment problem. Agriculture should be in on this, because the wrong kind of decentralization would increase the burden of agriculture.

Land planning is no longer an academic question. A wise use of our land is intimately related to future of industry and the unemployed. So long as there are more than five million unemployed in the United States, there will be a steady and irresistible push toward the lower living costs of open country. Nearly half of the unemployed are under thirty years of age. The larger part of them have at least high school education and many have college diplomas. They are well equipped in mind and body and can see no good reason why it is so hard for them to find jobs.

As I have indicated, there is some danged that these younger unemployed, joining hands with farmers who have been in the most serious trouble, and with certain other underprivileged groups, will push the nation so far to the left that we will be headed toward the land of nightmare, even as unemployed youths have succumbed to misguided leadership in certain foreign countries. This group, by asking more relief year after year than the Government can afford, can eventually bring on an uncontrolled inflation. To avoid this disaster, it will be necessary to get more and more of our people thinking seriously about that continuously balanced harmonious relationship which I call the Land of Tomorrow. The industries of the country must be brought definitely face to face with their responsibility for these unemployed. If they dodge, it will be the duty of the Government to go ahead with its own method of rehabilitation and build out of the unemployed a self-subsistence system of exchange cooperatives which are outside the capitalistic system.

The repeated droughts of the last five years demand special attention to another critical maladjustment. During the last 70 years several generations of suckers have been enticed by real estate men to the western great plains in years of good rainfall, only to be burned out later. This sort of robbery should not be perpetrated. No state can build a permanent prosperity on the falsehoods of realtors and promoters. Wisconsin has recognized this by adopting a zoning law which divides the state in such way as definitely limits the field of these predators. Their game can be rather definitely limited to areas where a man has at least a gambling chance to make a living at farming.

Persons deeply interested in ducks, pheasants, deer, fish and other forms of game, and who lament the passing of these native species, want the government to acquire the poorer types of land, especially low-land pastures and meadows near streams and lakes, for game refuges. By planting the right kind of shrubs and grasses and protecting nestlings from pasturing and mowing, we can work wonders in restoring wild life over considerable areas unfit to farm.

In the eastern half of the United States, we need national recreational parks fifteen or twenty miles from the larger cities. These parks might well be located where most of the land is so rough that farmers there are making a miserable living now.

Because of white encroachments, many of the Indian reservations are now terribly short of land. An increase in Indian population had contributed to this jamming-in of too many Indians on too little land. Indians are already subsistence farmers. To transfer to certain of their land-hungry tribes the sub-marginal land of the neighborhood, would seem to be both fair and wise.

Other poor land might well be turned over to the Erosion Service to see what can be done to restore it. If nothing else can be done with it, it can be put into long-time use under the Forest Service, the National Park Service, or restored to the Public Domain.

Certain large areas of the great plains now plowed, should be put down to grass again. Some of these regrassed areas might be grazed by cattle, under controlled conditions. Other areas of regrassed land might be best restored to wild life, including antelope, deer and buffalo.

But these are fragments. Fortunately the whole land question will probably be debated at length in 1935. In June of 1934, President Roosevelt appointed a special natural resources committee — the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of War, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Labor, Frederick Delano, Wesley C. Mitchell, Charles Merriam, and Harry Hopkins.

Frederick Delano, serving as chairman of a special advisory committee of this board, had prepared a report which will be submitted to Congress when it meets in January of 1935.

When this report is submitted we shall have had the benefit of some of the preliminary experience gained by spending a part of the 25 millions dollars for purchase of sub-marginal land. We shall know more definitely the nature of the obstacles and how fast we can go.

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration had been discovering more definitely the areas where the farm people have the lowest standards of living and where it is impossible, one year after another, to make enough out of the soil to raise the children decently. Already the FERA has had some experience with buying out farmers in western South Dakota, and in providing them a better farm opportunity in eastern South Dakota. The money for purchasing the land in eastern South Dakota had come in considerable measure from the Farm Credit Administration, but a part of the money has also been furnished by the FERA, on the theory that such expenditure would reduce the relief load next year, and for years to come.

In the past, our land policies have often contradicted and canceled each other. The government had no agency to unify such policies. Both the land and its people have suffered.

This year we are really beginning to build on the foundation nobly laid by the forest acquisition policy of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. The report submitted by the natural resources committee to Congress in January of 1935 will, in all probability, if the Congress and the American people are willing, furnish the blueprint for putting our lands in order. In many parts of our social structure the blueprint method of approach is not advisable, but land is so fundamental and precious a heritage, that we should outline a policy to continue over many administrations, and stick to it for the sake of our children and their grandchildren. The alternative is to main and misuse our basic heritage, as have the Chinese.

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