replace the production control efforts invalidated by the Supreme Court, this program permitted the federal government to make payments to farmers who cooperated in shifting acreage from soil-depleting surplus commercial crops into soil-conserving legumes and grasses. This agricultural conservation program conducted by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration is delineated in a large body of archival materials. Some four million American farmers in 1936 participated in conducting operations on 66 percent of the total cropland of the United States. The program's records also provide significant insights into clashes of the economic interests of landlords and tenants participating in the program and the problem of promoting soil conservation on lands where farm tenancy was increasing. Speaking of this situation, H. R. Tolley, administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration declared in 1937: "We find that lack of income, soil waste and increasing farm tenancy are linked together in such a way that we can scarcely tell which is cause and which is effect. Lack of income causes soil waste and increases farm tenancy; soil waste impairs the basis for income and increases farm tenancy; and insecurity of tenure causes soil waste and lessens farm income." 4 Similarly, economic relief efforts blended with conservation activities in the operation of the Work Projects Administration, established in 1935 as successor to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Civil Works Administration. These activities, usually directed by permanent bureaus of the Department of Agriculture and of the Interior Department, involved largely water conservation, mine sealing, erosion control, forest conservation, and fish and wildlife protection. They are documented in a large portion of the nearly five thousand cubic feet of WPA records in the National Archives. Thus, there is treatment of drought conditions on the Great Plains in the 1930s, which led to a program for construction of dams in small streams to create lakes and ponds so that rainfall could be impounded near the place of its occurrence. There are also accounts of mine-sealing work in bituminous * Address of H. R. Tolley before the American Institute of Cooperation at Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa, June 24, 1937, central files, "Landlord-Tenant," Records of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, Record Group 145, NA. coal regions of the country to prevent the entrance of air into mines, while permitting underground water to drain out. Achievements in forest conservation are shown to have entailed planting 177 million trees and constructing or improving more than seven thousand miles of firebreaks. Efforts to protect fish and wildlife are shown to have involved constructing or renovating several hundred fish hatcheries and building numerous shelter houses, feeding stations, and sanctuaries for birds and other wildlife. There was still another federal emergency agency of the 1930s whose financial allocations made it possible to initiate and to expand conservation work by permanent bureaus. This was the Public Works Administration, established in 1933 to promote and stabilize employment and purchasing power by encouraging the construction of needed public works. An outstanding example of this agency's contribution to conservation was its allotment of some one hundred million dollars to the Bureau of Reclamation. This assistance gave a tremendous boost to the bureau's work on existing projects and helped it to make the greatest construction effort in its history. This effort, involving conservation of the waters of the arid West as well as the production of electric power, was lauded in 1936 by Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, for its role in "knitting together the western third of the Nation, in sustaining the people and in stabilizing the agriculture of the far western States, in moderating the effects of droughts and similar disasters." 5 An impressive body of federal records describes this widely praised program, for water conservation during the thirties. Correspondence, project reports, photographs, and maps depict some of the most ambitious work ever undertaken to impound and utilize great bodies of water. There unfolds the story of how reclamation projects brought water and agriculture to millions of acres of land in seventeen western states, provided hydroelectric power and greater sources of domestic and industrial water supply to major communities, and checked rampaging floods of great rivers. In this reclamation saga of the thirties, there loom large such structures as the towering 5 Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, 1936), p. 54. Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, the massive Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia, and the lofty Shasta Dam on the Sacramento. In speaking of federal water conservation programs of the 1930s, one cannot overlook the Tennessee Valley Authority- an innovative project started in 1933 to provide unified river control and to develop natural resources in the watershed of the Tennessee River and its tributaries. Records of this vast and varied undertaking are just beginning to be opened for general research. When they become more fully available, they are certain to add a new dimension to studies of the thirties. downpour in which he was speaking a "little shower" and a "mighty good omen" for the future of Amarillo. American history has recorded three great thrusts to conserve natural resources. The first of these was made in the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot early in this century. This period witnessed the crusade that had its origins in the ideas of leaders such as George P. Marsh, Franklin B. Hough, and Carl Schurz. There were antimonopolistic overtones in their crusade, but it was scientific. They helped to bring about the first phase of public management and to regulate the use of natural resources. The second great thrust came with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The third came with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations amidst reverberations from Rachel Carson's not so quiet book The Silent Spring. This discussion of records of federal agencies relating to programs dealing with conservation of natural and renewable resources during the decade would hardly be complete without mention of the papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park, N.Y. The richness of these documents for conservation history is significantly shown in the two-volume documentary publication Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation, 1911-1945 (1957). Among the papers themselves is a weatherbeaten copy of a speech delivered by Roosevelt in a downpour at Amarillo, Texas, July 11, 1938. In it he mentions the problems of land and water use in Texas, referring to the district of his friend, Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, where the problem was to keep the land from "washing down the rivers and into the sea." He praised efforts being made to conserve water, restore grazing lands, and plant trees on the plains, and with characteristic suavity called the Windbreak planted by farmer in South Dakota with assistance of the U. S. Forest Service. Here we have been concerned with the second historic thrust of America's conservation effort and the federal records that reveal its causes, course, and consequences. We mention only some of the major leaders and federal agencies that spearheaded the effort, to suggest the research potentialities of their records. The writings of a number of scholars attest to the value of these records in describing the environmental distress and the corrective action that it spurred in the third decade of this century. The records continue to offer a challenge as well as promising returns for other studies of the significant forward movement of that historic period. Hugh S. Johnson and the Draft, 1917-18 JOHN KENNEDY OHL On June 16, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, a retired army officer, to head the newly established National Recovery Administration. "Looking rather like Captain Flagg in What Price Glory, 'gruff and tough,'... tireless, rabid in his devotion to his job," Johnson "dramatized the New Deal as no one else could." 1 Four days after his appointment the "fiery general" had a permanent organization functioning. Invoking the war spirit of 1917 and calling upon the great store of knowledge about the workings of the American economy he had gained as a member of the War Industries Board, an executive in the farm implement industry, and as economic adviser to Bernard M. Baruch, he speedily launched an ambitious industrial recovery program to spur employment. Johnson directed the formulation of fair-trade codes for more than five hundred industries, "helped establish maximum hours and minimum wages as national policy, and made the 'Blue Eagle' symbol of the NRA a household emblem." 2 Yet for all of his ability and energy, Johnson 1976 by John Kennedy Ohl 1 Current Biography, 1940, s.v. Johnson, Hugh Samuel, p. 432. 2 Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. Johnson, Hugh Samuel. was an "emotional, pungent, truculent figure" who was drawn by temperament to excesses of scorn, language, and drink. When Bernard M. Baruch, Johnson's closest friend and business associate, heard of Roosevelt's decision to appoint Johnson head of the NRA, he informed Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins that Johnson was "a good number-three man, maybe a number-two man, but . . . not a number-one man." Johnson, he cautioned, was dangerous and unstable and needed a firm hand.3 In this assessment Baruch clearly knew his man, inasmuch as Johnson's administration of the draft during World War I had already revealed these very strengths and weaknesses. Born in Kansas and reared in Oklahoma, Johnson was graduated from West Point in 1903. From 1903 to 1914 Johnson served in the cavalry at several posts, from the Mexican border to the Philippines. He earned an outstanding efficiency record, and in 1914 the judge advocate general, Brig. Gen. Enoch H. Crowder, picked him to attend the University of California Law School to prepare for appointment to a vacant majority in the army's legal office. After a brief stint as acting judge advocate for the Punitive Expedition to Mexico, Johnson was summoned to Washington in October 1916. 3 Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York, 1946), pp. 200-201. There the crotchety Crowder put Johnson's ability to "express a proposition... in strong, clear and concise style" to good use in preparing briefs for cases to be argued before the Supreme Court.4 Johnson was introduced to the problem of manpower mobilization late in the afternoon of February 4, 1917. The day before, President Woodrow Wilson had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, an act foreshadowing American entry into the war in Europe. The United States, however, had undertaken only the most rudimentary preparation for war before the diplomatic break, and thus on the afternoon of February 4 Crowder was instructed by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to frame a bill by the next morning, authorizing the use of conscription in case of war. Just before five o'clock Crowder met with several of his assistants, including Johnson, explained Baker's instructions, and asked them to return that evening to help prepare the proposed legislation. Johnson was assigned to draft the section dealing with the raising of the army. With little deliberation he began by penning the phrase: "The President be, and he is hereby, authorized to select for induction and to induct into those forces, such male citizens . . . as he may deem necessary." When Crowder's group reconvened, Johnson's work was furthest advanced and most of his language was retained in the bill Crowder submitted to Baker the next morning.5 Baker thereupon pigeonholed the bill. Conscription was politically volatile and represented a fundamental departure from the nation's longstanding adherence to volunteerism. The Wilson administration entertained the somewhat naive expectation that it need mobilize only the Regular Army and the National Guard, to be followed by the traditional call for volunteers, to meet initial manpower requirements. Apparently it regarded the bill as a standby measure to be invoked only if enough volunteers did not come forward. In 4 Memo, Crowder to secretary of war, Sept. 11, 1916, John J. Pershing Papers, Library of Congress; memo, Crowder to chief of staff, June 18, 1917, office file, Records of the Selective Service System (World War I), Record Group 163, National Archives (cited henceforth as RG, NA). 5 David A. Lockmiller, Enoch H. Crowder: Soldier, Lawyer and Statesman (Columbia, Mo., 1955), pp. 152-154. Johnson's account of this episode may be found in Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle From Egg to Earth (Garden City, 1935), p. 73, and New York Times, Feb. 2, 1931. March, however, Maj. Gen. Hugh L. Scott, army chief of staff, effectively used the example of the British, who waited until 1916 to resort to conscription, to convince Baker that the availability of good paying jobs in war industries would limit the number of volunteers and that conscription would be less disruptive if enacted at once.6 Later that month a special War Department board ironed out the final features of the legislation to be proposed to Congress, drawing upon the bill framed in Crowder's office and the plan for a national army that had been worked out by the War College Division of the War Department's general staff. As soon as war was declared on April 6, 1917, Congress took up the legislation authorizing conscription and on May 18 approved the Selective Service Act, with only minor modifications. Vesting the president with plenary power to prescribe regulations and designating the age limits for conscription as twenty-one to thirty, the act authorized the president to raise one-half million men immediately by selective draft and an equal number by conscription "at such time as he may determine." The Regular Army and the National Guard were to be filled out with volunteers, but conscription could be invoked if shortages occurred. Johnson did not participate in shaping the Selective Service Act after that confused February night in Crowder's office, yet his involvement with the draft soon absorbed his energies. On the same day that Wilson asked Congress to declare war, Baker directed Crowder to prepare a preliminary plan for implementing the draft. Crowder, in turn, delegated this task to Johnson with instructions to avoid the mistakes of the Civil War draft. An army-run draft and America's only precedent for conscripting large numbers of men, the Civil War draft had been a miserable failure and had reinforced sentiment for volunteerism. Provost marshals, going door-to-door to enroll eligibles, had clothed that draft with a military character and the suggestion of force, breeding resentment and, in some instances, violent opposition. 6 Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917-1919 (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), pp. 27-30. 7 Memos, Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Kuhn to chief of staff, Feb. 20, Mar. 15 and 24, 1917, box 225, War College Division, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, RG 165, NA. First parade in the United States of men conscripted to fight in World War I marches in Chicago. Crowder, as a student of conscription, was cognizant of the Civil War experience and had already decided that conscription would be palatable to the public only if it was controlled by civilians. The judge advocate general's thinking was based on the 1866 report of Bvt. Brig. Gen. James Oakes, acting assistant provost marshal general for Illinois during the Civil War, and he had made Oakes's report required reading for all incoming judge advocates. Crowder probably had Johnson in mind for several weeks as the person to prepare just such a plan because he had begun priming his energetic assistant on the background of conscription early in February. Crowder made an exhaustive review of Oakes's report and a comparative analysis of the Enrollment Act of 1863, the national army plan of the War College Divi 8 Johnson to Pershing, May 29, 1925, box 108, Pershing Papers. sion, and the universal military training plan developed by the Senate Military Affairs Com mittee in the winter of 1916.9 With the aid of Capt. Cassius M. Dowell, Johnson was able to complete the new plan in a week. In drawing it up he scrupulously avoided the methods that had made the Civil War draft so controversial and generally followed the recommendations in Oakes's report. 10 This was most evident in the all-important administrative and enforcement features of the plan. Unlike the Civil War draft, which had been administered by a superimposed federal structure, Johnson cast the whole "execution of the draft back on local communities... made the governors of the states responsible 9 Memo, Johnson to Crowder, n.d., box 22, Crowder Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri. 10 Memo, Johnson to Mrs. Rogers, June 4, 1918, box 6, office file, RG 163, NA. |