CONSERVATION COMPETITION: PERSPECTIVES ON
AGRICULTURAL DRAINAGE DURING THE NEW DEAL ERA
by
DAVIS ALLEN
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Ted Steinberg
Department of History
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
August 2016
2
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of
Davis Allen
Candidate of the degree of Master of Arts*
Research Advisor
Dr. Ted Steinberg
Committee Member
Dr. Peter Shulman
Committee Member
Dr. David Hammack
Date
1 June 2016
*We certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material
contained therein
3
Table of Contents
Title Page
1
Committee Approval Sheet
2
Table of Contents
3
List of Abbreviations
4
Abstract
5
Introduction
6
Early American Drainage
13
Progressive Era Drainage and the Rise of Drainage Districts
19
Drainage Fluidity and the Great Depression
23
The New Deal
26
Conclusion: Wetland Protection?
59
Bibliography
68
4
List of Abbreviations
AAA: Agricultural Adjustment Act
BAE: Bureau of Agricultural Engineering1
BBS: Bureau of Biological Survey
CCC: Civilian Conservation Corps
CWA: Civil Works Administration
FWS: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
NJMEC: New Jersey Mosquito Extermination Commission
NWF: National Wildlife Federation
SCS: Soil Conservation Service
SES: Soil Erosion Service
USDA: United States Department of Agriculture
USFS: United States Forest Service
WPA: Works Progress Administration
1
Some historians use the acronym BAE for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Because much of the
agricultural drainage work during the New Deal period was carried out by the Bureau of Agricultural
Engineering, I use BAE as the acronym for that agency and write out the full name of the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics whenever it is mentioned.
5
Conservation Competition: Perspectives on
Agricultural Drainage During the New Deal Era
Abstract
by
DAVIS ALLEN
The drainage of wetlands for agriculture has had a profound effect on the
landscape of the United States. Increased federal involvement in the practice during the
New Deal era forced conservationists within the government to engage with drainage
policy in new ways. This paper explores these ideas by examining the conservation
philosophies and goals of five different conservationists—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hugh
Hammond Bennett, Henry A. Wallace, Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, and Aldo
Leopold—who worked within the federal government during the period and took distinct
approaches to drainage. This illuminates the differences in their conservation
perspectives that are not always apparent and illustrates how what different figures
actually sought to conserve was fundamentally different.
6
“There is such a thing as being too neat and tidy. Swamps
are often dismal and rank. People itch to clean them up.
Leave them alone, fellow citizens, leave them alone…
Like grass, they help hold the world together.”
— Stuart Chase, 19362
The Winged Scourge, a 1943 short animated film produced by Disney, opens with
an image of a wanted poster for a mosquito reading, “Public Enemy Number 1.” The film
shows a mosquito (that the narrator explains is not carrying malaria) enter a dark,
threatening, swampy area before finding its way into a decrepit shack at the edge of the
water. There, the mosquito sucks the blood of a malaria-infected man and becomes a
carrier of the disease. “She” then heads directly to a landscape that is intentionally in
stark contrast: large, brightly-lit fields with neat rows of crops surround a wellmaintained house. On the porch, a farmer sits smoking a pipe, looking out over his land
and, according to the narrator, “enjoying the peace and plenty of the home he’s worked
so hard to build.”3
But the malarial mosquito bites him, and the farmer immediately becomes
seriously ill. The farm quickly falls into complete disrepair and the fields appear to turn
into swampland. The narrator explains that “his crops will rot in the fields, his buildings
and fences will fall into disrepair, his livestock will be neglected, and he’ll be unable to
earn the money to feed and clothe his family.” Extrapolating this experience across the
2
Stuart Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America (New York:
Whittlesey House, 1936), 145.
3
The Winged Scourge (short film) (Los Angeles: Walt Disney Productions, 1943),
https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.47063; Julie Prieto, “Making a Modern Man: Disney’s Literacy
and Health Education Campaigns in Latin and South America during WWII,” in The Pedagogy of Pop:
Theoretical and Practical Strategies for Success, ed. Edward A. Janak and Denise F. Blum, 29-44
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 30.
7
nation, the result would be “millions of dollars lost.” In response, the film calls upon
people to follow the lead of Disney’s Seven Dwarves by cutting weeds where mosquitoes
can reproduce in swampy areas, spraying standing water with oil, applying chemical
treatments, filling in wet areas with soil, and, most importantly, draining any and all
wetlands.4 This call for action concludes with an impassioned statement that sounds like a
plea: “These pools will always be a menace to our health unless we drain the water
away.”5
The land area of the modern United States once contained more than 220 million
acres of wetlands. Over the last two centuries, more than half of those wetlands have
been “reclaimed,” or drained, mostly for agriculture.6 The Winged Scourge highlights
some of the principal themes of that history. Most importantly, it didactically tells the
story of American wetland drainage, presented as a lesson for “less civilized” nations. In
spite of the Anglo-American appearance of the characters and the film’s original Englishlanguage production, it was part of a series sponsored by the U.S. Office of the
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs for distribution in Latin and South America. Each
short film emphasized the advantages of modernization and sought to encourage people
4
It is worth noting that I use the modern term ‘wetland’ throughout this paper, even though the term was
not in use during the New Deal period. Before the creation of this term, wetlands were often referred to as
swamps, marshes, wet lands (with a space between the words, where wet was used as an adjective to
describe the soil), or without a clear, direct term. When quoting from contemporary sources, I obviously
maintain their usage, but I have decided to use ‘wetland’ to provide more clarity in making clear when I am
discussing actual wetlands.
5
The Winged Scourge.
6
According to data published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1984, at least 124 million acres have
been brought into drainage out of the 215 million acres of wetlands thought to have existed at the time of
European settlement. Between 80 and 87 percent of that acreage was for agriculture. Mary McCorvie and
Christopher Lant, “Drainage District Formation and the Loss of Midwestern Wetlands, 1850-1930,”
Agricultural History 67, no. 4 (Fall 1993), 13; Phillip Garone, “Rethinking Reclamation: How an Alliance
of Duck Hunters and Cattle Ranchers Brought Wetland Conservation to California’s Central Valley
Project,” in Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism, eds. Michael Egan and
Jeff Crane (New York: Routledge, 2009), 137; William J. Mitsch and James G. Gosselink, Wetlands (New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 4.
8
who were seen as primitive and susceptible to the influence of the United States’ enemies
to adopt practices and technologies that would improve productivity and public health.7
The film highlights the fear of malaria, relating mosquito control to wetland
drainage for public health as well as agricultural purposes. This connection can be seen in
the film in various ways. First, the imagery of swamp land harkens back to the earliest
Americans’ fears of that landscape, an essential factor in understanding the motivation to
drain. Second, the transition of farmland into wetland suggests the abiding awareness of
the possibility of drained land returning to its “natural state” of wetland. And third, the
perpetual fear of productivity being hampered by the failure to control natural landscapes
is evident in nearly all of the imagery and commentary surrounding the farm’s decline.
The film inspires these visceral reactions by design, simultaneously feeding and
reinforcing viewers’ sense that their interests are best served by draining as much land as
possible.8
The history of drainage in North America goes back to the early colonial period.
Europeans arriving to the continent began digging drainage and irrigation ditches to
increase agricultural productivity from the early days of settlement, emulating established
practices from the old world. Two developments in the mid-nineteenth century led to far
more extensive drainage. First, the development of tile drains made drainage possible in
many areas where open drains were not sufficient, as well as allowing for more
thoroughly-drained land than had previously been attainable. Second, the passage of the
Swamp Land Acts in 1849 and 1850 moved significant amounts of land—Midwestern
states received more than fifteen million acres—from public to private ownership. By the
7
8
Prieto, “Making a Modern Man,” 30-5.
The Winged Scourge.
9
early twentieth century, the creation of drainage districts, the rise of Progressive
ideology, and the beginning of federal involvement in drainage further enhanced farmers’
abilities to drain their land, leading to unprecedented wetland transformation between
1880 and 1920. The Great Depression resulted in a dramatic shift in this pattern of
exponential growth in acres in drainage, as struggling farmers had little money to invest
in new drainage projects or even in the maintenance of their current drainage systems.
This context provides the opportunity to explore the complex relationship of New
Deal conservationists to wetlands and agricultural drainage. Environmental historians
have produced a relatively substantial body of work on wetlands in recent decades, and
the field has been inundated with analyses of conservation since its inception. But the
correlation between agricultural drainage and federal conservation has remained
understudied. Histories that delve into the nuances of conservationist thought—how the
ideas of some conservationists were different from others—during the New Deal almost
categorically ignore drainage. In some instances, this is justified based on the subject. For
example, Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) covers
the Great Plains, a region where farmers were dealing with land that was too dry, and
Dust Bowl agricultural policy effectively sought to address the opposite problem from
that faced by farmers in the humid East. In others, the exclusion of drainage seems more
problematic. Neil Maher’s Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the
Roots of the American Environmental Movement (2008), for example, fails to explain the
scale or significance of drainage, as it essentially only mentions it in contexts that support
its central argument, largely ignoring the CCC’s actual drainage work.9 Other
9
Selected others that helped me better understand New Deal era conservation, agriculture, and the
relationship between the two but do not cover drainage extensively include Sarah T. Phillips, This Land,
10
environmental histories of wetlands or drainage, in spite of their valuable contributions,
simply do not include the time period of the New Deal,10 cover drainage outside of the
United States,11 or focus on localized drainage, thus missing the federal perspective.12
That perspective is essential because federal involvement in drainage reached
unprecedented levels during this period and, as a result, many important debates about
the practice took place within the federal government.
Two of the most focused environmental histories of drainage—Ann Vileisis’s
Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (1997) and Hugh
Prince’s Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing
Attitudes (1997)—provide wide coverage, both temporally and geographically, but their
treatment of conservation suffers as a consequence. Both essentially see the struggles
over drainage from the Progressive Era on as conservationists versus anticonservationists—with conservationists, from the New Deal period through the rest of the
twentieth century, being opposed to drainage. Vileisis provides interesting insights into
aspects of the federal government’s increased involvement but focuses on mosquito
This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (2007); Jane Adams, ed., Fighting for the
Farm: Rural America Transformed (2003); Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., FDR and the
Environment (2005); Paul Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American
Agriculture since 1929 (2008); Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in
American Agriculture (2003); Bill Winders, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the
World Economy (2009); and Theodore Cart, “‘New Deal’ for Wildlife: A Perspective on Federal
Conservation Policy, 1933-1940” (1972).
10
See, for example, John Thompson, Wetlands Drainage, River Modification, and Sectoral Conflict in the
Lower Illinois Valley, 1890-1930 (2002); and Mary McCorvie and Christopher Lant, “Drainage District
Formation and the Loss of Midwestern Wetlands, 1850-1930” (1993).
11
Examples include Richard Hoffman, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (2014); Joan Thirsk,
ed., Rural England: An Illustrated History of the Landscape (2002); Stephen Rippon, The Transformation
of Coastal Wetlands: Exploitation and Management of Marshland Landscapes in North West Europe
During the Roman and Medieval Periods (2000); and I. G. Simmons, The Moorlands of England and
Wales: An Environmental History, 8000 BC to AD 2000 (2003).
12
For instance, see Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
(2006); David McCally, The Everglades: An Environmental History [2000); Philip Garone, “Rethinking
Reclamation: How an Alliance of Duck Hunters and Cattle Ranchers Brought Wetland Conservation to
California’s Central Valley Project” (2009).
11
control drainage for the most part. Prince actually writes that drainage for agricultural
purposes “was replaced by conservation of wetland habitats for wildlife, reforestation,
and outdoor recreation” during the 1930s.13
This kind of dualism seems reminiscent of the conservation-preservation
dichotomy environmental historians have long drawn on, perhaps most prominently
explained in Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (originally published
1967). Nash used Gifford Pinchot and John Muir to exemplify the respective approaches
to the environment, writing: “The schism ran between those who defined conservation as
the wise use or planned development of resources and those who have been termed
preservationists, with their rejection of utilitarianism and advocacy of nature unaltered by
man.”14 The fundamental problem is that none of these histories are able to sufficiently
deal with the essential tension that spans the entire discussion: it was not clear what the
conservation philosophy of the period would dictate as the appropriate action to take
regarding drainage, and there is no clear answer since conservationists themselves had
very different ideas about what should be done.
In contrast, I seek to delve into the great diversity of ideas toward drainage during
the New Deal, even among professed conservationists. I focus on five conservationists
who worked within the federal government and who affected or commented on drainage
policy during the New Deal era—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hugh Hammond Bennett, Henry
A. Wallace, Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling, and Aldo Leopold—illustrating how, in spite
of similarities that run through the conservation philosophy of each figure, they have
13
Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 341.
14
Roderick Frasier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
129.
12
fundamentally different perspectives that define the way in which they resolve this
drainage tension. These men were not by any means the only conservationists engaged in
the debates around drainage and the meaning of conservation during the period; they are
emblematic of five distinct perspectives and approaches to conservation and drainage that
defined almost all federal practices during the period. Ultimately, I argue that while each
of these individuals were conservationists, what they actually sought to conserve varied
significantly.
Examining drainage provides the opportunity to see the nuance here more than
with other forms of conservation during the New Deal because their conservation goals,
which were aligned in many cases, were often directly contradictory when it came to
agricultural drainage. Soil conservation is an example of a cause that united
conservationists of all forms; everyone could agree that what had happened in the Great
Plains must be prevented again, whatever their individual philosophy of conservation.
Drainage, in contrast, divided conservationists with different perspectives. Those that saw
conservation centrally as a way to help the people of the nation recover economically or
maintain their health often supported drainage, while those who had more ecologicallydriven understandings of conservation typically opposed drainage work. The five
conservationists—and wider conservation positions—discussed in this paper represent
distinct positions across that spectrum. As Leopold explained, “When it comes to actual
work on the ground, the objects of conservation are never axiomatic or obvious, but
always complex and usually conflicting.”15 This paper will seek to delve into that
complexity and explain those conflicts.
15
Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott,
eds. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 83.
13
Early American Drainage
In 1936, Stuart Chase, an economist who was a member of Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s inner circle of advisors and the source of the phrase “a New Deal,” wrote a
book entitled Rich Land, Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of
America.16 In it, he imagines what early colonists settling in the Americas would have
found in a time before drainage so fundamentally altered the landscape. As of the year
1630, he wrote,
average rainfall was probably not different from what we know today, but
nature by every possible device kept the water on or in the land… Lowlying flat lands had become swamps and marshes. The industrious beaver,
first of conservation planners, was patiently making more swamps.
Pockets and depressions, many of them scooped out by the glaciers of the
ice ages, became ponds and lakes. The rain which soaked into the humus
filtered in due course to vast underground artesian basins… These
underground waters, together with the surface lakes, ponds and marshes
and the spongy, absorptive humified soil, formed great natural reservoirs
which held the cloudbursts, the freshets and the melting snows of spring,
stored the surplus waters snugly underground or on the surface, reduced
the flood crests and released the surplus slowly over the dry seasons…
Here we have a great device for keeping the inflow and outflow of water
in equilibrium… Although floods were known before the white man, not
only was their violence restrained in the headwaters by natural reservoirs
but in their lower courses they normally overflowed into wide plains
which again broke their destructive force. Nothing speeds a flood like
walling it in levees.17
It was in this context that European settlers began to make their mark—not upon an
unaltered, pristine landscape protected by noble savages, but making radical changes all
the same. Describing the motivations of settlers clear cutting forests in New England,
historian William Cronon wrote: “The colonists understood what they were doing… as
16
17
Ronald, “Obituary: Stuart Chase, 97; Coined Phrase ‘A New Deal,’” New York Times, Nov. 17, 1985.
Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 21-3.
14
‘the progress of cultivation.’… The rural economies of Europe were adapted to a far
different mosaic of ecological habitats than were precolonial Indian economies. Reducing
the forest was an essential first step toward reproducing that Old World mosaic in an
American environment.”18
Drainage has played a similar role in the expansion of agriculture around the
world for millennia, there is little evidence of successful drainage in North America prior
to permanent European settlement. This is unsurprising, as drainage would have made
little sense for most American Indians; the practice is far more suited for the European
style of agriculture. One historian explains that Europeans associated drainage with
“stable populations, permanent fields, and a manorial economy,” and this likely explains
some of the primary motivations of early American settlers. They began attempting to
drain their land almost immediately, although their progress would be markedly limited
for some time. Early drainage work only consisted of open ditches running from wet
areas of land to nearby outlets that could move the water away from farms, such as rivers
or streams.19
The first major technological breakthrough coincided with the introduction of tile
drains in 1835. This innovation allowed for almost all of the significant drainage that has
occurred since. Tile drainage works by creating an open path for water to flow from
18
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1983), 126.
19
Salvatore Circiacono, Land Drainage and Irrigation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), xiii, xxi-xxii, xxvxxvii; Keith H. Beauchamp, “A History of Drainage and Drainage Methods” in Farm Drainage in the
United States: History, Status, and Prospects. Miscellaneous Publication No. 1455, ed. George A. Pavelis
(Washington, D.C.: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1987), 15; Richard
Hoffman, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
138; Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 311-2; Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown
Landscape: A History Of America’s Wetlands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997), 122-4. For an
overview of the complexity of wetland ecosystems and explanations of why this would have posed a
challenge for early settlers attempting to drain, see Mitsch and Gosselink, Wetlands, esp. 21-4.
15
fields, where it would normally settle and remain in the soil (and, in some cases, on the
surface), to larger open ditches or directly to outlets, without actually being exposed to
the soil surface. This allowed farmers to drain more thoroughly, enabled the entire
surface of the field to be brought under cultivation, and, particularly as the technology
improved, significantly reduced the maintenance requirements of drainage systems.20
Drainage became extremely popular with farmers and many Americans came to
believe that drainage was an unmitigated improvement on “wasteland” wetlands, leading
Congress to pass the first Swamp Land Act in 1849. The idea seemed to be a relatively
simple solution to a multi-layered problem: significant amounts of wetlands remained
under federal ownership; small farmers could not afford to buy property and drain it (and
could usually find superior land that did not need to be drained anyway); and state
governments had little power to do anything to encourage development of wetlands.
Some members of Congress thought the federal government should undertake drainage of
public lands itself, but, because drainage was so expensive, proponents argued that direct
federal involvement would put the government in significant debt without any way to be
compensated for its expenditures.21
The proposed solution, submitted by lawmakers from Louisiana and Mississippi,
was to have the federal government transfer ownership of swampland to the state
governments from those two states, have state governments sell that land to small farmers
at reduced prices (to encourage them to buy it instead of easier-to-develop or less
expensive land elsewhere), and then allow state governments to use the money earned
20
Pickels, Drainage and Flood-Control Engineering, 2-4, 209-248; Bennett, Elements of Soil
Conservation, 272-86; Circiacono, Land Drainage and Irrigation, xiii, xxi-xxii, xxv-xxvii;; Prince,
Wetlands of the American Midwest, 311-2; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 122-4.
21
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 72.
16
from land sales to fund the installation and improvement of drainage systems. The hope
was that this would result in more economically feasible drainage, relatively cheap land
for small farmers, and increased income for state governments because of local taxes
generated from settlement in their state.22
One factor did stand in the way of the Swamp Land Acts: concerns about
unintended consequences. Wetlands provide many “ecosystem services,” or “aspects of
ecosystems consumed and/or utilized to produce human well-being.” Wetlands offer an
astounding variety of these services; most relevant to the history of agricultural drainage
is their role in flood mitigation. Flooding contributes to soil erosion; can lead to damage
of structures, crops, and ecosystems downstream; and presents a threat to human safety.
But wetlands essentially act as a sponge for the landscape: when water moving across the
surface of the soil encounters a wetland, it is absorbed, decreasing the rate of discharge.
And because wetlands are connected to aquifers and other wetlands underground, this
effect is not limited to water concentrated within a single location; wetlands can form a
network that disperses localized floodwaters across wide areas. Drainage, then, creates
the potential for substantial unintended consequences. When wetlands are replaced with
farmland their flood mitigation potential is eliminated, which can have destructive
consequences, including downstream flooding and rapid soil erosion.23
Although this relationship has been more thoroughly studied in recent decades
than ever before, the association is not something that modern scientists and historians
have only recently discovered. Members of Congress identified the issue during debates
22
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 72; Pickels, Drainage and Flood-Control Engineering, 4.
Mitsch and Gosselink, Wetlands, 507-29; R. Kerry Turner, Stavros Georgiou, and Brendan Fisher,
Valuing Ecosystem Services: The Case of Multi-Functional Wetlands (London: Routledge, 2008), 5, 34, 6872.
23
17
over the Swamp Land Acts, and, while their understanding of the hydrology was not as
sophisticated as ours today, it is apparent that the central ideas were well understood.
They recognized that the drainage and water control projects they planned and carried out
would result in more flooding—or the need for more flood control measures—
downstream. In spite of their recognition of the consequences, both lawmakers and
engineers supported the Swamp Land Acts anyway, thinking they would be able to divert
the water of the Mississippi (and of the other rivers that feed it) to the mouth of the river
at the Gulf of Mexico. Essentially, they bet on their ability to engineer solutions to future
problems as they encountered them. Their overriding goal was to maximize the potential
for agricultural productivity, instead of taking precautionary action to avoid the problems
from the beginning.24
The concerns about unintended consequences went unheeded and the initial act
passed easily. Nearly as soon as it had, though, representatives of other states began
requesting similar programs, forcing legislators to deal more carefully with the specific
definition of swampland and the exact purposes of the program. The language made clear
that the purpose of the legislation was to create more available farmland, literally
defining the land set to be transferred by the inability to put it under cultivation in its
present condition. The fear that surrounded wetlands almost certainly served as an
additional motivating factor, however. The world would not learn that malaria was
carried by mosquitoes for nearly another half century, but people had long understood, as
24
A senator from Louisiana explained the concept of flood mitigation during the hearings and serves as a
particularly good example of their familiarity with the connection between drainage, flooding, and erosion.
He explained: “It is reasonable to suppose that the whole country is now more rapidly and thoroughly
drained into the Mississippi than when in a state of nature. Then no doubt, a great quantity of water was
collected in pools and swamps, and there remained until carried off by gradual evaporation.” Vileisis,
Unknown Landscape, 72-3.
18
far back as late antiquity, that there was a relationship between disease and the standing
water of swamplands. It was attributed at the time to ‘miasma,’ a gaseous substance
thought to be produced by standing water and to infect anyone who encountered it. The
miasma theory appeared to be substantiated by scientific research and the stories of its
effects travelled around the country, which made state governments fear that people were
being dissuaded from settling in their states as a result. Following these discussions, the
calls for the expansion of the law were successful, and Congress passed an expanded
version in 1850 that came to be known as the Arkansas Act. This new legislation
transferred land to the state governments of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi,
Alabama, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and California,
and an 1860 version did the same for Oregon and Minnesota.25
In spite of the high hopes that the Swamp Land Acts would rid the country of
unproductive swamp land, little drainage actually occurred under the program because
the technological and legal infrastructure that developed in the final decades of the
nineteenth century and would allow for much more widespread drainage did not yet
exist.26 Still, the Swamp Land Acts did have significant effects, particularly since much
of the infrastructure that allowed drainage likely developed as a result of federal
endorsement of drainage. First, the legislation created enough incentive to drain that
engineering techniques were improved enough to enable later drainage projects. Second,
the Acts resulted in the development of various legal means of dealing with wetlands that
would remain important throughout the next century and beyond. The idea developed
during this period of having local collectives of farmers collect taxes for drainage was
25
26
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 43-4, 63, 73-7; Hoffman, Environmental History of Medieval Europe, 54.
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 77-8, 90.
19
particularly important. And third, the Acts led to more than 60 million acres of wetlands
being moved from government control to private ownership. Some of this acreage ended
up in the hands of small farmers who were then left with land that could not be farmed
and that they could not afford to drain; most went to speculators who intended only to
maintain ownership until they could sell the land at a profit. This transfer would have
significant consequences later. Besides these more tangible changes, the Acts also further
entrenched the way that people had come to think about wetlands: “ditch and drain” came
to define the agricultural perspective towards wetlands, eliminating any notions of
alternative uses. This meant that whereas in the early nineteenth century people had
generally assumed some land would never be inhabited, the Swamp Land Acts led people
to increasingly believe that all lands would eventually be drained.27
Progressive Era Drainage and the Rise of Drainage Districts
The Progressive Era coincided with the origins of the conservation movement,
and the two aligned closely—both valued centralized planning to manage resources
efficiently—which created significant overlap. Donald Worster writes that the
Progressive conservationists “were dedicated to reorganizing the natural economy in a
way that would fulfill their ideal vision of what nature should be like.” The movement
was exemplified by Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, who took a
utilitarian approach to natural resources based on the ideas underlying scientific
management. He understood forestry, and the management of natural resources generally,
27
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 83-5, 90-1; Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Soil Soldiers: The Civilian
Conservation Corps in the Great Depression (Radnor: Chilton Book Company, 1976), 163; Prince,
Wetlands of the American Midwest, 203.
20
as a form of farming; this meant that his primary motivation was the maximization of
productivity and efficiency. “Protecting the nation’s economy, not nature’s,” Worster
explains, “was the central theme of his conservation philosophy.” He argues that the
conservation movement, then, was not as revolutionary as some within the conservation
movement imagined. “Nature was still valued chiefly as a commodity to be used for
man’s economic success,” he explained. The central difference was that the “old attitudes
were given vastly more effective means for their implementation.”28
This idea seems to be supported by the narrative of drainage during the period; the
first era of conservation actually saw massive expansion in acreage of land in drainage
between 1880 and 1920, and Progressive ideology was fundamentally important in this
growth. Earlier drainage systems had been built haphazardly based on the calculations of
individual farmers, but the expert-driven, scientific approach of the Progressives led to
carefully designed drainage plans formulated by engineers based on, in the words of a
drainage textbook from 1925, “the fundamental sciences of hydrology, hydraulics, and
soil physics.” The technocratic approach of Progressives coincided with important
technological developments. Drainage tile-laying machines came into widespread use in
the 1880s, and they were quickly followed by the introduction of steam-powered ditchdigging machines. Together with industrialized tile drain production, these machines
allowed for the installation of drainage systems at a pace that would have been
unimaginable just a few years earlier, when drainage required making individual clay
28
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 262, 266-9.
21
tiles, digging the ditches by hand, carefully laying them, and then filling in the ditches
again.29
The Progressive Era also saw the introduction of drainage districts, ‘quasi-public’
institutions that gave land owners and tenants the ability to officially organize themselves
with many of the features of municipalities. This allowed groups of farmers to collect
taxes to fund drainage across property lines and build drainage systems across entire
watersheds, dramatically increasing the effectiveness and scope of drainage.30 Their legal
powers gave drainage districts considerable influence, but there was a significant caveat.
As quasi-public entities with powers that resembled municipalities, the drainage districts
had to demonstrate that their projects served the public interest and that the benefits
outweighed the costs.31
This connection would continue to be used as a justification for drainage work for
decades, but contemporaries believed the work of drainage districts was centrally about
private gain and served “no public purpose whatsoever so far as the legal definition of
that term is concerned.” Agricultural publications continued to exert their influence
during this period, and they made their drainage pitch exclusively in terms of agricultural
productivity, without any reference to public health concerns or any other potential public
benefits. But this did not stand in the way of drainage progress either, since some courts
simply ruled that the public interest was served by the very act of drainage, through
29
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 113, 124-5, 127; Pickels, Drainage and Flood-Control Engineering, v;
Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1959. Vol. IV, Drainage
of Agricultural Lands (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 3, 12; John Thompson,
Wetlands Drainage, River Modification, and Sectoral Conflict in the Lower Illinois Valley, 1890-1930
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), xi; Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 2134.
30
Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 206. For more on the way drainage districts were defined as
‘quasi-public,’ see Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959.
31
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 92-4, 125; Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 207.
22
“reducing areas of wasteland and extending productive agriculture.” Still, disease was a
legitimate problem in certain places. As a result, the language of public health continued
to play a role and was acted upon more than ever during the Progressive Era. The
drainage movement was encouraged by the discovery around the turn of the century that
mosquitoes acted as a vector for malaria, and the idea of mosquito control drainage
gained popularity during the first decade of the twentieth century.32
Drainage created substantial opportunities for increased productivity, and the
reality of immediate gain was generally prioritized over the possibility of future
consequences throughout the period. By 1920, nearly sixty-six million acres of land were
in drainage for agriculture. Much of that was concentrated in the Midwest—Michigan,
Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, and Iowa accounted for more than forty-one million of those
acres—and came in bursts during the first decades of the new century. Between 1906 and
1920, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa brought roughly thirty percent of their combined
wetlands into drainage. Hundreds of thousands of miles of newly-laid drainage tiles
turned the once varied countryside of the Midwestern states into uniform farms across the
landscape.33 Thus, at the end of the Progressive Era, most areas of wetland were within
drainage districts (even if they were not yet drained) and more land was in drainage than
was too wet to farm. Drainage had, in the words of Hugh Prince, “produced a remarkable
32
Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 206-8, 220-1; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 125; Franklin
C. Daiber, Conservation of Tidal Marshes (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 95. Interestingly,
this was also apparent to Civilian Conservation Corps officials during the New Deal period. In CCC
documents, they acknowledge that the work was effectively exclusively for private benefit, but instead of
rejecting drainage work, they decided to undertake “only a small amount of work on such projects,” an
inexact and, ultimately, dubious standard. Civilian Conservation Corps Office of the Director
Memorandum, Washington, D.C., Jan. 5, 1938, Correspondence about Permissible and Non-Permissible
Civilian Conservation Corps Work, Box 1, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35,
National Archives Building II, College Park, MD.
33
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 113, 127; Pickels, Drainage and Flood-Control Engineering, v; Bureau of
the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959, 3, 12; Thompson, Wetlands Drainage, River Modification, xi;
Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 213-4.
23
uniformity of landscape and land use,” and that uniformity paid significant dividends,
virtually turning the region into an orderly factory for food production. As a result, soil
fertility went up significantly and land values spiked. Drained land was typically worth
five times as much as undrained land, and undrained land came to be worth more than
three times what it had been prior to 1880. “In the end,” explains Prince, “greater
productivity was the decisive argument in favor of tiling.”34
Drainage Fluidity and the Great Depression
The benefits were apparent, but there was an issue: drainage was not static, and
drained land did not simply remain drained. Without constant maintenance, drainage
systems would cease to keep land suitable for cultivation. Historian Christopher Taylor
identifies this pattern through examination of the English fens. Rather than seeing
declines in total land in drainage simply as less drainage taking place, he shows how
financially bad times meant that farmers would actually allow land to revert back to an
undrained status. When farmers could not afford to pay their drainage taxes and drainage
work effectively ceased, “a spiral of limited finance, poor drainage, floods, and the
abandonment of land developed.” Essentially, without active drainage, farmland flooded
and became wetland again.35
The U.S. Census of Agriculture provides a helpful explanation of this distinction:
“agricultural drainage refers to the removal, by artificial means, of excess water to
34
Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 219, 224-6, 228-9, 231; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 127.
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 140; Christopher Taylor, “Fenlands,” in Rural England: An Illustrated
History of the Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk, 167–87 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 185-6;
Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,” 18.
35
24
improve the condition of land used or to be used for agriculture.” By this definition,
drainage is not the installation of drainage systems, but something that the system
actively does: the removal of water. It defines land not in terms of drained lands, but
rather as land in drainage.36 The Census further explains that “a drainage project is a plan
undertaken as a unit to provide new construction, or to provide maintenance and
operation of existing drainage works.”37 Because drainage is an active process requiring
maintenance, measuring the prevalence of drainage in terms of “land in drainage” is more
accurate than representing it exclusively as the construction of new drainage works. The
implications of this are significant: if drainage is an active process, it means the
continuation of drainage is active as well. Thus, it was entirely possible to stop draining
land. The decision not to do was, instead, influenced by the desire to not relinquish
valuable, productive farmland.38
Farmers struggled to keep “drained” land dry during the Progressive Era, and this
problem was exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression. Already reeling from the
agricultural commodity price crash of 1920 and 1921, a quarter of farmers went bankrupt
following the 1929 crash, and as many as half probably would have if not for government
supports. Anticipating problems, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics actually sought to
restrict reclamation programs during the twenties. Although active restrictions were not
enforced, the Depression led to a similar result. Farmers that were reliant upon drainage
36
The Census excludes irrigation drainage, the removal of water that can collect in fields as a result of
artificial irrigation, so the definition and figures from the Census are appropriate for this sort of analysis of
agricultural drainage of naturally wet land. Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959, ix.
37
Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959, xvi, my emphasis.
38
The Bureau of Biological Survey illustrated how this could be an active decision instead of simply a
consequence of failing to maintain systems. When they wanted to revert drained land to wetlands during
the thirties, they did so primarily through “the removal of drainage devices previously installed” and “the
plugging of ill-advised drainage ditches.” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1935
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 331; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of
Agriculture 1938: Soils & Men (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1938), 83.
25
had additional expenses in the form of taxes to drainage districts and many were unable
to pay. This put many drainage districts and enterprises into severe debt, making it almost
impossible for them to maintain drainage works. The ensuing loss of farmland further
hurt the economic security of farmers, as many fields became too wet to produce
sufficiently high yields to make enough profit to pay their debts and satisfy their needs.
Many of these farmers who relied on drainage eventually lost their farms in foreclosure
or were forced to sell to pay the back taxes they owed.39
This process was the defining feature of drainage during the Depression era, and
the idea of drainage as an active process is supported by the Census of Agriculture data
from the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1940, the “total area in drainage projects” increased
by only 2.6 million acres (compared with 18.9 million acres from 1920 to 1930 and 15.7
million acres from 1940 to 1950). While this could be taken to mean that only 2.6 million
acres were drained during the period, this would be extremely misleading; what is being
measured is not how much drainage took place in each decade, but the change between
net figures of land in drainage. Because drainage is not static or passive, these total
figures obscure the extent to which it is active or in flux.40
Although the same limitation is true of the data for individual states, they are
more revealing because of the way the data is divided further. Drainage figures for each
state in the Census reveal that 15 of the 38 states with land under agricultural drainage
actually had fewer acres in drainage in 1940 than they had in 1930. This could be taken to
39
Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 44; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1933
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1933), 91; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 140; Paul K.
Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 51; Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,”
18.
40
Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959, 3.
26
mean that drainage had ended. Prince, for example, argues that drainage in the Midwest
slowed down as the Progressive Era came to an end before it “ceased in the late 1920s.”
This claim would be understandable if one saw drainage only as new drainage; the seven
states Prince examines reached 1940 with nearly 1.3 million fewer acres in drainage than
in 1930.41
Even acknowledging regional differences, the idea that drainage ended remains
problematic. New drainage could have taken place but not been significant enough to
increase the net change of land in drainage for each state, and, even if no new drainage
systems were installed, those seven states still had more than 42 million acres of land that
were actively in drainage in 1940. If drainage had actually “ceased,” that land “ultimately
would have reverted back to [its] natural condition,” leading to “complete loss of the
investment” in drainage systems. Following that is a sort of purgatory status for the land,
the result is an environment that is poor for both farming and wildlife, as fully developed
wetland ecosystems do not immediately return when drainage ends.42
The New Deal
One historian has written that “there is much about the New Deal that can be
characterized as environmental once one substitutes the word ‘environmental’ for
‘conservation.’… The New Deal carried forward and greatly extended the work of the
41
Prince’s work examines Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Illinois. Bureau of
the Census, Census of Agriculture: 1959, 12; Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest, 287-8.
42
The twenty-three states that reached 1940 with more acreage in drainage than they had in 1930 gained a
collective total of more than 4.5 million acres. This tells us that at least that much new drainage (or redrainage of land that had been drained but reverted to wetland by 1930) occurred during the period. Taylor,
“Fenlands,” 183; Daiber, Conservation of Tidal Marshes, 68-96, especially 70-75; U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1934 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1934), 83-4.
27
Progressive Conservation era.”43 If, as Donald Worster implied, Gifford Pinchot was
emblematic of this process for the transition into the Progressive Era, Franklin D.
Roosevelt must be seen as Pinchot’s Depression-era analogue. Historian Paul Conkin,
often critical of Roosevelt, wrote that “in all the confusion of New Deal policy, one
theme endured from beginning to end. In the broad area of resource management,
Roosevelt was clear and consistent. He wanted conservation and planned land use. On
this he never equivocated and compromised only when he had to.”44 Born in 1888,
Roosevelt grew up at his family’s estate in Hyde Park, New York surrounded by a
manicured, controlled natural environment that seems to have come straight from the
idyllic visions of an improved-upon nature the Progressive conservationists desired. If
having one of the most widely-recognized conservationists in the world—Theodore
Roosevelt—as his uncle was not enough, FDR’s youth spent outside among “planted and
tended forests, sleek herds of cattle, and carefully cultivated fields” was enough to inspire
a deep connection with nature—or at least one very particular kind of nature.45
Roosevelt’s particular breed of conservation was perhaps first visible in a
significant way during his time as the governor of New York following the 1929 crash.
Building on his “belie[f] with Jefferson in the generative impulses of soil and woodland,”
Roosevelt tried to keep farmers on the land, and tried to transform rural communities—
through centralized planning of their resources—to make sure they would not be at risk
of losing their land again.46 Although neither Roosevelt nor Herbert Hoover, his opponent
43
A. Dan Tarlock, “Rediscovering the New Deal’s Environmental Legacy,” in FDR and the Environment,
Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., 155-76 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 155.
44
Paul Conkin, The New Deal (Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson, 1975), 45.
45
Otis L. Graham, Jr., Presidents and the American Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2015), 116; Conkin, The New Deal, 3-4.
46
Conkin, The New Deal, 4, 19.
28
in the 1932 presidential race, made conservation a significant part of their respective
campaigns, Roosevelt’s choice to respond to the Depression with a conservationist
approach as governor anticipated and served as the groundwork for his attitude toward
economic recovery once he arrived at the White House. He thought recovery for the
country as a whole was only possible by stabilizing and strengthening the agricultural
class and he appreciated the “economic necessity of conservation”—and, centrally, not
just conservation of the environment. Roosevelt blurred the line between the environment
and humans, seeing it as “inextricably linked with the human community, economy, and
system of values.” Neil Maher explains his approach: “Roosevelt was more a synthesizer
of existing ideologies than a creator of new ones. The president was original, however, in
his desire to combine the conservation of natural resources with the conservation of
young men.” Put another way, Roosevelt was trying to conserve people, the nation’s
economic system, and the nation itself more than any single ecosystem; his idea of
conservation seems to have typically included environmental conservation as the central
objective only when that action served these additional conservation goals.47
This is not to say that Roosevelt was uninterested in conservation of natural
resources. In much the same vein as the Progressive conservationists, FDR supported
various forms of conservation that attempted to make the environment more valuable for
humans. He even challenged the idea of drainage explicitly in a few instances, such as
when he explicitly rejected the idea that flooding was natural, placing the blame, instead,
47
Graham, Jr., Presidents and the American Environment, 115; Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 2-3, 24;
Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., Introduction to FDR and the Environment (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1; Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the
Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20, 24, 40, 185,
208-9; Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Garden
City: Doubleday & Company, 1957), 32; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 42.
29
on poor human planning. Perhaps most telling, though, is his 1933 request that the
Bureau of Biological Survey, an agency within the USDA, develop a plan for the
“wholesale restoration” of waterfowl habitat. Such a plan would have involved radical
land use alterations in the form of significant amounts of productive agricultural land
being reverted back to wetlands. In his effort to make these kinds of environmental
conservation ideas a reality, Roosevelt appointed Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling as chief
of the BBS.48
Darling was born in 1876 and moved to Iowa when he was ten years old. He
would remain there for most of his life, part of communities that were deeply connected
with both agriculture and conservation. Most widely-known for his success as a
cartoonist—his cartoons were syndicated across the country during his years at the Des
Moines Register and he won Pulitzer Prizes for his illustrations in 1924 and 1942—
Darling was also actively involved in conservation causes for much of his life. He
worked with the Iowa Fish and Game Commission and the Cooperative Wildlife
Research Center at Iowa State College, and, in 1936, would become a founding member
and the first president of the National Wildlife Federation. Although he was a staunch
Republican and was deeply critical of most components of the New Deal—so much so
that he would later help to form an organization that offered support for Republican
candidates running on the platform of reversing Roosevelt’s policies—he gained
Roosevelt’s attention for his commitment to wildlife, which led to him being appointed to
a committee to study waterfowl conservation in 1934 (along with Aldo Leopold) before
48
To Make the Civilian Conservation Corps a Permanent Agency: Hearing Before the Committee on
Labor, United States House of Representatives, 76th Cong. 43-114, 1939, 93; Vileisis, Unknown
Landscape, 171; Maher, Nature’s New Deal, 185; Conkin, The New Deal, 52; David L. Lendt, Ding: The
Life of Jay Norwood Darling (Mt. Pleasant: The Maecenas Press, 2001), 70.
30
he accepted the position of chief of the Biological Survey on a temporary basis. Although
Darling would remain in that position for less than two years, Roosevelt’s decision to
make him chief seems to indicate a desire to fulfill at least some environmentally focused
conservation reforms.49
Conservationists who prioritized the environment would likely have seen a lot
that needed to change in the Bureau of Biological Survey. Although the BBS was seen as
a conservation agency from the time it was created in 1905, it initially existed primarily
to carry out predator elimination projects—killing the natural predators of wild animals
that humans liked to hunt, as well as those that killed livestock. This work fit with the
Progressive conservationists’ “strong, highly moralistic sense of mission to clean up the
world around them,” and thereby improve nature for people. Over the years, the BBS
increasingly came to focus on “aspects of science with obvious economic value…
especially the economic condition of the farmer.”50 Even as late as 1934, Darling’s
conservation philosophy was quite distinct from what was typical at the Biological
Survey, as evidenced by his conflict with some of its staff during his time as part of the
Beck committee. Darling shared a concern for game animals, but his conservation
philosophy revolved around a subtly different set of ideas, which might be characterized
as ‘developmental regret.’ During his brief time in charge of the BBS, Darling helped to
reshape the agency’s purpose, clearly marking its differences from the past, while
49
Lendt, Ding, ix, 3-8, 49, 59-69, 71, 79, 85, 102-4, 110-8, 130; Richard N. L. Andrews, “Recovering
FDR’s Environmental Legacy,” in FDR and the Environment, Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner,
eds., 221-243 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 228.
50
Worster, Nature’s Economy, 262-5.
31
maintaining many of the most firmly-established components of its approach to
conservation.51
Darling’s conservation is most clearly articulated in an essay explaining his vision
for the Biological Survey from 1935. He began by immediately establishing his BBS as
distinct from its former iterations, writing, “The Bureau of Biological Survey is the
custodian of all of the wild life species that exist.” Broadly stated, he understood the
problem to be one of human overextension. He explained, “We have evicted [wildlife]
and spread ourselves out with all of our paraphernalia and our implements and
civilization now reigns were game used to live.” While many of his contemporaries—as
well as the Progressive conservationists—would likely have seen this narrative of
environmental change as indicative of success, Darling saw it as fundamentally
problematic. He explained that although he recognized the value of recreational hunting,
his motivation was far different: “I should not be here if all that I was doing was making
it possible for people to go out and kill game. My chief interest lies in restoring America
to itself.” While this is obviously reminiscent of Roosevelt’s goals, Darling’s idea of
“restoring America” had much more to do with animals and their habitat than economic
stability and human social values.52
In spite of Roosevelt’s support for Darling, fundamental contradictions remained
at the heart of New Deal agricultural conservation policy, and Roosevelt did not offer any
solution. Perhaps no aspect of the New Deal is more illustrative of this conception of
51
Lendt, Ding, 63-5; Andrews, “Recovering FDR’s Environmental Legacy,” 228.
J. N. Darling, “Conserving Our Wild Life,” Recreation, January 1935, Republished online by The
University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and University Archives,
http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/scua/msc/tomsc200/msc170/wildlife.html.
52
32
conservation and the contradictions built into it than the Civilian Conservation Corps.53
Imagined by Roosevelt even before he was elected president and created soon after he
took office in March of 1933 (initially known as Emergency Conservation Work), the
CCC represented his effort to develop and implement, as he explained, “a more definite
and comprehensive” federal conservation program that would benefit the nation even
“apart from the present emergency” as a way of providing “a means of creating future
national wealth.” CCC officials described the most significant threats to the nation as the
“destructive forces of nature, and destructive economic forces,” and Roosevelt believed
the CCC could help to address both. He understood the Corps as a way to lead the nation
out of the Great Depression by putting unemployable young men to work enhancing the
environment in every circumstance where it and human goals were at odds, thus
conserving the nation’s natural and human resources simultaneously.54
Roosevelt made it clear from the outset that the work relief program would be
principally about economic recovery in the short-term while creating circumstances that
would also support future productivity. In 1932 and 1933, before the program was
implemented, he described the Emergency Conservation Work as “sound economy” and
“a wise expenditure to be classified as dividend-paying investments.” The central
53
That said, the idea runs throughout New Deal conservation policy. The Tennessee Valley Authority
Project, which Roosevelt once wrote would link “industry and agriculture and forestry and flood
prevention, tying them all into a unified whole,” provides another good example. Andrews, “Recovering
FDR’s Environmental Legacy,” 224-5.
54
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York, to Mr. Freeman, New York, Sept. 6, 1932, Documents
Relating to the Organization and Operations of the CCC, 1933-1942, Box 1, Records of the Civilian
Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD; Franklin D.
Roosevelt, President of the United States, “Message to Congress on CCC,” Mar. 21, 1933, Documents
Relating to the Organization and Operations of the CCC, 1933-1942, Box 1, Records of the Civilian
Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD; “A Summary of
the Social Values of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1934),” Document 778, pages 11-2,
Documents Relating to the Organization and Operations of the CCC, 1933-1942, Box 1, Records of the
Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD; Maher,
Nature’s New Deal, 19.
33
emphasis was on finding “such public employment as can be quickly started” for young
men who could not find work, as there was a legitimate fear that this class of people
could “become permanently unemployable.” This kind of human conservation could be
prioritized over more traditional conservation ideas; one CCC document explained that it
was “of more immediate concern than waste.”55 The human conservation aspect was not
limited to jobs, though; Roosevelt and Corps officials also promoted a positive vision of
the future of conservation, citing the impact of the CCC beyond the tangible output of the
enrollees’ work. Having “[seen] with their own eyes the bitter fruits of unchecked
exploitation of resources,” the authors of the document explained, conservation had
“become a reality” to enrollees, “and they [would] throw their weight behind the
conservation movement as long as they live[d].”56
The CCC provided work for more than three million men in its ten years of
existence, and enrollees’ work in forestry and nature recreation area development has
largely dominated the discussion of their work in the decades since. Some of the most
consequential work, however, was in soil conservation and drainage, and these uses of
CCC labor—contradictions and conflicts included—found a home in Henry A. Wallace’s
Department of Agriculture. The man who would eventually develop a reputation as a
“devout agrarian fiercely devoted to progressive causes” was, fittingly, born in a small
55
Roosevelt to Freeman, Sept. 6, 1932, NARA II; Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on CCC,” Mar. 21,
1933, NARA II; “A Summary of the Social Values of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1934),”
NARA II.
56
“A Summary of the Social Values of the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933-1934),” Document 778,
pages 11-2, Documents Relating to the Organization and Operations of the CCC, 1933-1942, Box 1,
Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives Building II, College
Park, MD.
34
farmhouse on a farm miles from the closest town in Iowa in 1888.57 In some ways, his
life was like his birth, and was typical for someone born in rural Iowa in the late
nineteenth century. In other ways, his experiences were nearly as different as was
possible. The differences started with his family. Biographer Russell Lord described the
Wallaces as “democratic Midland aristocrats of a new sort,” explaining that they were
passionate about the experiences of ordinary people and sought to be part of that
community while simultaneously seeing themselves as different in comparison.58 His
father, Henry C. Wallace, had studied agriculture in college, “was a believer in ‘book
farming,’” and ran an agricultural newspaper, Wallaces’ Farmer. The elder Wallace
eventually became the secretary of agriculture under presidents Warren G. Harding and
Calvin Coolidge and received the praises of Gifford Pinchot.59
Henry A. Wallace followed in his father’s footsteps in many ways, and he too had
strong conservationist credentials. After his appointment to the position by Roosevelt,
support from the Des Moines Register even included a cartoon drawn by Darling; it
depicted Wallace as a doctor, coming to save a sick patient labeled ‘agriculture’ at the
bidding of FDR Wallace had promoted soil conservation measures as early as the
beginning of the 1920s and supported production controls even before the Depression.60
Historian Sarah Phillips explains that Wallace’s conservation was deeply connected to
the environment as well, writing that he “absorbed his family’s agricultural
fundamentalism and its conception of the farmer as God’s chosen servant and
57
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 68; Maher, Nature’s New Deal, 3-4, 61; John C. Culver and John Hyde,
American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2000), 3.
58
Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1947), 7-8.
59
Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 3, 19, 45-6, 51; Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 68.
60
Bill Winders, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 48, 56; Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 110; Lord, The Wallaces of
Iowa, 263-4.
35
environmental steward. To be a farmer meant that one must curb one’s greed, for the land
and the soil limited the full flowering of the profit motive.”61 Still, there were ways in
which his commitment to the environment seemed limited. Lord wrote that although he
was centrally concerned with “sound land use,” soil conservation was lower on his list of
priorities than economic recovery.62 As much as his conservation was based on romantic
ideas about the farmer’s relationship with the land, he still saw conservation as “a tool
both to preserve and modernize the family farm.”63
Contemporaries grouped the agricultural policy-makers of the Roosevelt
administration into three groups, and Wallace’s place in the middle group fits with this
understanding of his conservation ideas. The “agrarian intellectuals,” as one scholar has
called the group made up of Wallace, M. L. Wilson, and Lewis Gray, stood between the
adamantly business-centric agricultural policy experts and the “urban liberals” (like
Rexford Tugwell).64 Fittingly, Wallace’s conservation is probably best understood in
terms of its median position, and Wallace himself as a compromiser. His perspective was
not comfortably and confidently contradictory in the way Roosevelt’s conservation was,
but instead was defined by his efforts to resolve the era’s conservation paradoxes. At the
center of these issues was the idea of soil conservation, and at the center of soil
conservation was Hugh Hammond Bennett.
Bennett was born in 1881 and grew up on a farm in North Carolina where he was
exposed to the disastrous effects of soil erosion first-hand. After graduating from college
in 1903, he began working for the USDA’s Bureau of Soils. During his time as a soil
61
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 68-9.
Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa, 343-4, 347.
63
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 69.
64
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 108.
62
36
surveyor, he identified the problem of “sheet erosion,” coining that term to describe the
process. In contrast to many others within the USDA, at that time and throughout much
of his career, Bennett was less concerned with obvious gully erosion than he was with
this effectively invisible—and, as a result, often more insidious—form of soil loss.65
Bennett cared so deeply about the issue that he overcame his aversion to public attention
and began writing and speaking publicly about the problem widely in 1918. His calls for
soil conservation went largely unheeded until 1928, when his writing was recognized
within the USDA and he was placed in charge of experimental soil erosion work at a new
network of research stations. Through this work, he impressed Rexford Tugwell, a
member of FDR’s “brain trust” and the assistant secretary of agriculture in the early years
of Roosevelt’s administration, which led to his appointment in 1933 as chief of the newly
created Soil Erosion Service, a temporary agency within the Department of Interior.66
Bennett impressed upon members of congress, the Roosevelt administration, and
secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace the need for long-term soil conservation
measures, and, in March of 1935, the Soil Conservation Service was established as a
permanent agency within the USDA.67 During this period, “Bennett became one of
Washington’s most listened-to conservationists,” according to Donald Worster, “playing
for the soil the alarmist role Gifford Pinchot had once played for the forests.” The SCS
came to manage 123 soil erosion camps, working full-time in 22 states and part-time in
65
Austin L. Patrick, “Obituary: Hugh Hammond Bennett,” Geographical Review 51, no. 1 (Jan 1961), 121;
Paul Sutter, “What Gullies Mean: Georgia’s ‘Little Grand Canyon’ and Southern Environmental History,”
The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010), 591; Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 44-5.
66
Patrick, “Obituary: Hugh Hammond Bennett,” 121-2; Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa, 459; Charles M.
Hardin, The Politics of Agriculture: Soil Conservation and the Struggle for Power in Rural America
(Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), 54; Worster, Dust Bowl, 60, 213; Soil Conservation Service, U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Report of the Chief of the Soil Conservation Service, 1935 (Washington, D.C.:
The Service, 1935), 1.
67
Worster, Dust Bowl, 213; SCS, Report of the Chief, 1935, 1; D. Harper Simms, The Soil Conservation
Service (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 11-5.
37
17 others. Their work revolved around physical alterations to the land to decrease
erosion, like terracing; improved farm design, such as contour farming and stripcropping; and changes to planting practices, like encouraging farmers to rotate fields,
plant soil fertility-building plants like legumes and clover, and increase riparian
vegetation.68 The Soil Conservation Act, passed in 1935, provided incentives for farmers
to adopt conservation measures and further legitimized the SCS, and a second version
passed the following year expanded the effects on both counts. After the original
Agricultural Adjustment Act was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Wallace
began work on the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 as a
replacement. That bill largely unified federal conservationists because it revived farm
relief, maintaining many elements of the original AAA, while also making soil
conservation an explicit part of the USDA’s agricultural mission and tying farm benefits
to conservation practices.69
As with earlier generations, New Deal conservationists recognized the paradox of
trying to prevent soil erosion through this kind of work while continuing to engage in
drainage. The USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Engineering had a Division of Drainage
and Soil Erosion Control as early as 1933, illustrating how they understood those two
issues to be connected, and the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 made the relationship
between flood control and soil erosion explicit. Employees from various agencies within
the USDA also discussed how erosion prevention depended upon the type of natural
68
Worster, Dust Bowl, 213; Civilian Conservation Corps, Two Years of Emergency Conservation Work
(Civilian Conservation Corps): April 5, 1933-March 31, 1935, Based upon Reports Prepared by Robert
Fechner, Director of Emergency Conservation Work, the Four Departments Cooperating in the Program,
Namely War, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and the Veterans’ Administration (Washington, D.C., 1935),
USDA section, 5; Hardin, Politics of Agriculture, 60-6; USDA, Yearbook of Agriculture 1933, 61; USDA,
Yearbook 1934, 347-8; USDA, Yearbook 1935, 301-5; Maher, Nature’s New Deal, 64-6.
69
Conkin, Revolution Down on the Farm, 63-5, 73-4; Worster, Dust Bowl, 217; Culver and Hyde,
American Dreamer, 160-1.
38
environment and vegetation at the site of the rainfall. USDA conservationists were
particularly interested in the effect of the soil in determining the speed of run-off and the
effects of higher rates of flowing water coming off farmland, which they determined
contributed to “the savagery of floods.” Others, like a special panel from the National
Resources Committee, were less explicit about the connection but still recognized the
relationship. Without providing an answer, that group explained that the dilemma of what
to do about drainage required asking the “old question” of what to do when something
might be profitable for an individual but “which may cause damage to the community as
a whole.”70
Bennett wrote about what he described as “a new concept of flood control, based
on the idea of flood prevention through soil and water conservation at flood sources” in a
1936 report. In more complicated language than the Louisiana senator used eight decades
prior, he explained the exact same process: how particular kinds of soils71 could
“constitute an available storage reservoir capable of absorbing and retaining for slow
release at or near where it falls enough water to prevent or, at least, greatly reduce,
critical flood crests.” But “because natural reservoirs ha[d] been progressively
70
Henry A. Wallace, Functions of the Department of Agriculture. Letter from the Secretary of Agriculture,
Transmitting, In Response to Senate Resolution No. 351 (72d Cong.), A Report of All Functions of the
Department of Agriculture and the Annual Cost Thereof (Washington, D.C., 1933), 53; Simms, The Soil
Conservation Service, 16; USDA, Yearbook of Agriculture 1935, 202-6, 323-5; Foreword to U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1938: Soils & Men (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1938); Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Report of the Chief of
the Soil Conservation Service, 1939 (Washington, D.C.: The Service, 1939), 10; U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1940: Farmers in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1940), 416-7; Special Sub-Committee of the Water Resources Committee of the National
Resources Committee, Drainage Policy and Projects (Washington, D.C.: National Resources Committee,
1936), 14.
71
It is important to remember that, until the term wetland came about around the 1950s, “the emphasis was
on land” instead of its “wetness.” Bennett understands the relevant hydrology here, but, without a term to
describe the kind of ecosystem that provides it (and, likely, because he was the head of the Soil
Conservation Service), he has to come up with a different way to describe this, and he chooses soils. Using
soil simply makes sense, as the water of wetlands is held in the soil. Prince, Wetlands of the American
Midwest, 28-9.
39
weakened,” flooding and resulting soil erosion continued to cause significant problems.
Seemingly contrary to many of his typical views of soil conservation, he argued against
engineered solutions like flood control structures. Instead, he argued that the government
should focus on “prevention and control” at the source through development of soils to
discourage runoff.72
Although many within the USDA identified the association between drainage, soil
conservation, and flood control, perhaps none did so as decisively as Wallace. In 1935 he
wrote, “The conditions most favorable to wildlife are identical with those that reduce
erosion and promote flood control and soil improvement.”73 The following year, he made
the connection with agricultural drainage even more explicit: “The so-called
‘reclamation’ of certain areas by drainage may cause floods, heavy soil erosion, and other
damage. Flood control and the prevention of soil erosion may, indeed, depend greatly on
the conditions that also favor wildlife and wilderness areas.” He went on to praise efforts
by the USDA’s Bureau of Biological Survey to convert previously drained land back to
wetland, since that land would “become… a national asset for soil conservation and flood
control.” But these warnings were largely ignored. A typical description of drainage work
praised the effects, explaining that “the run-off from heavy rains has been carried without
overflow by the ditches rehabilitated by the camps” without any indication of any
72
Soil Conservation Service, Report of the Chief of the Soil Conservation Service, 1936 (Washington, D.C.:
The Service, 1936), 2-3; Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 168.
73
Wallace’s comments here are particularly interesting because, in the context of this quote, he presented
the conservation of these ecosystems as a benefit to human health and safety. Because drainage operations
carried out by drainage districts or the USDA had to serve the public interest, human health had long been
used as a justification for drainage, and would continue to be after 1935. This statement would seem to
contradict that, which may explain why Wallace did not discuss public health in this context again in the
Yearbooks. USDA, Yearbook 1935, 74.
40
concern for what happened to the water after it left the particular farm or drainage
district.74
In spite of all of these concerns and the nation’s “obsession” with soil
conservation during the thirties, little was done to address the contradiction between
drainage and soil conservation during the first years of the New Deal. In fact, the period
saw much more significant federal involvement in drainage than ever before, expanding
on the support and guidance offered to farmers and drainage districts that various federal
agencies had provided since around the turn of the century by providing CCC labor.75
The Bureau of Agricultural Engineering, which served as the main link between the
federal government and drainage operations from its inception in 1931 until 1938, made
this transition from an advisory to an active role, taking control of forty-six CCC
drainage camps beginning in 1935. Their responsibility was to “plan… and execute…
work projects on the maintenance of drainage improvements and the betterment of
drainage and flood control structures,” although this work was only to be undertaken on
land “of proven agricultural value.” In addition to “serv[ing] agriculture,” government
agencies claimed that this drainage work was also meant “to promote public health,
convenience, utility, and welfare.” They were not explicitly or publicly directed to
engage in new drainage works, although there is evidence to suggest that BAE/CCC
74
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture 1936 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1936), 54; Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938June 30, 1939 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 81; USDA, Yearbook 1938, 79.
75
Conkin, Revolution Down on the Farm, 72. For more information on earlier federal involvement in
drainage, see Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,” 18; Garone, “Rethinking Reclamation,” 137;
George A. Pavelis, ed., Farm Drainage in the United States: History, Status, and Prospects. Miscellaneous
Publication No. 1455, (Washington, D.C.: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture,
1987), ii; and David McCally, The Everglades: An Environmental History (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2000), xix.
41
camps built new drainage systems on land that had been drained previously and may have
brought some land into drainage for the first time.76
It is clear that most of the agricultural drainage work took place in the watersheds
of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers, but specific information about the extent of
the BAE drainage work, as well as figures detailing the scope of this work, are sparse.
The machinery used for agricultural drainage work can give us an idea of the nature of
the work. The ‘crawler dragline,’ used widely by the CCC for much of its drainage work
beginning with the tractor’s introduction around 1935, was used primarily for
“constructing V- and W- shaped and wide-bottom flat ditches for open drainage systems”
and for moving the significant amounts of dirt being excavated for open drainage
systems. This machine is the same kind that was used for new drainage work, indicating
the extent to which they were altering or supplementing existing drainage systems, even
if their work was technically only considered repair or maintenance. Some records can
also be useful. Louisiana’s eleven BAE-managed drainage camps produced records that
showed that CCC enrollees cleared more than 18 thousand miles of channels, built more
76
Special Sub-Committee of the Water Resources Committee of the National Resources Committee,
Drainage Policy and Projects (Washington, D.C.: National Resources Committee, 1936), 3-5; Bureau of
Agricultural Engineering, Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Engineering, 1932
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 718; Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the
Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1940), 81; “Emergency Conservation Work Organization, Functions and Personnel by
Departments” Chart, Oct. 31, 1936, Documents Relating to the Organization and Operations of the CCC,
1933-1942, Box 1, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives
Building II, College Park, MD; Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,” 18; Vileisis, Unknown
Landscape, 173. To contextualize the scale of this work in some sense, it is worth considering that soil
conservation efforts in response to the Dust Bowl only consisted of 25 CCC camps and that the total
amounts spent on salaries for BAE employees during this time were nearly twice that of Bureau of
Biological Survey employees. Worster, Dust Bowl, 215-6. There is a certain irony in Roosevelt’s reference
to the news of significant flood damage on the day of his address to Congress announcing the ECW. He
used the news as support for his statements about the need for conservation, not recognizing the ways in
which emergency conservation work would impact the nation’s flood control efforts. Roosevelt, “Message
to Congress on CCC,” Mar. 21, 1933, NARA II.
42
than four thousand water-control structures, and re-laid 250 miles of drainage tile there,
but other local and regional records are not as specific during this time period.77
A different source from 1935 says that CCC enrollees built 1.3 million linear
yards of drainage and diversion ditches, although it is unclear how much of this was
related to drainage specifically for agriculture, as mosquito control drainage actually
reached its peak during the thirties. There is evidence that complete elimination of
mosquitoes is actually not the most efficient way to reduce malaria rates and that
drainage and other engineered solutions for increasing agricultural production can
actually benefit mosquito populations. While people seem to have understood this during
the New Deal period, the language of public health continued to hold significant sway
and the complete elimination of mosquito habitat appealed to this interest. The drainage
progress that resulted was significant. An especially revealing example was in Michigan,
where 8 million acres of wetlands were drained during the thirties—made possible in
large part because of CCC, Works Progress Administration, and Civil Works
Administration labor. Officials from the three organizations were convinced to undertake
mosquito control drainage based on the promise that such programs could provide
immediate jobs for vast numbers of workers.78
77
Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,” 26; Initial and Completion Reports for Camps in…
Ohio, 1935-1940, Boxes 29-42, Records of the National Resources Conservation Service, Record Group
114, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD; USDA, Yearbook 1938, 728; Civilian Conservation
Corps, Two Years of Emergency Conservation Work (Civilian Conservation Corps): April 5, 1933-March
31, 1935, Based upon Reports Prepared by Robert Fechner, Director of Emergency Conservation Work,
the Four Departments Cooperating in the Program, Namely War, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and the
Veterans’ Administration (Washington, D.C., 1935), USDA section, 5; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 173.
78
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 173; Daiber, Conservation of Tidal Marshes, 68, 95; Sonia Shah, The
Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Mankind for 500,000 Years (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010),
159; Gordon Patterson, The Mosquito Crusades: A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from
the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 129-32.
43
Like work undertaken by the drainage districts, federal agricultural drainage
projects were almost always justified with the promise of a public health benefit, as these
kinds of public works had to serve the public good. There were challenges to the idea that
agricultural drainage fulfilled this requirement, but the courts continued to support the
practice. The requirements to prove that drainage served the public good had slackened
considerably as, by the thirties, the courts had basically accepted that drainage explicitly
for agriculture “advanced a public purpose.”79 BAE records from CCC drainage camps
based in Ohio show that the cost-benefit analyses in the exploratory reports included a
“public health benefit,” even though, at fifty cents per acre, it was far less that the $6 per
acre benefit to crop yields or the $50 per mile benefit as a result of new roads. This is
unsurprising, as increased yields and improved access to markets (via new roads) provide
direct economic benefits, although new roads could also be classified as a public good.80
Connecting flooding and soil erosion—but not linking these problems to
drainage—CCC officials argued that drainage systems became ineffective because of
eroded sediment, which led to higher water tables upstream, which left good farmland
saturated and covered in standing water. This resulted in significant declines in
productivity, of course, but officials rarely mentioned this aspect; instead, they justified
redrainage with claims that drainage system failures and the resulting water resulted in
increased numbers of mosquitoes and higher rates of malaria.81
79
USDA, Yearbook 1938, 303.
CCC, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939, 81; Initial and
Completion Reports for Camps in… Ohio, 1935-1940, NARA II; To Make the Civilian Conservation
Corps a Permanent Agency: Hearing Before the Committee on Labor, United States House of
Representatives, 76th Cong., 43-114 (1939), 77.
81
Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939,
81; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 173. It remains unclear whether or not malaria did become a more
significant localized issue when drainage systems failed and land that had been in drainage ceased to be
drained sufficiently.
80
44
Mosquito control drainage was especially significant in New Jersey, where that
state’s Mosquito Extermination Commission controlled eighteen CCC drainage camps.
Members of the Forest Service were critical of their work and wrote that the Commission
had virtually no understanding of what they were doing or what the ecological
consequences of the drainage might be. Still, Forest Service officials like William H.
Marshall felt that, as much as they would have liked to, they had no power to stop the
projects. Looking back on the period in 1984, he summed up his sense of the NJMEC’s
approach: “It was obvious that, come hell or high water, they were going to ditch every
salt marsh in the state.”82
There is also evidence to suggest that mosquito control drainage benefited
agriculture as well. In Delaware, for example, the CCC ditched 248,000 acres of wetlands
over the course of ten years. Although this was presented as an entirely different kind of
drainage, meant to address the threat of malaria, farmers there claimed that CCC drainage
had improved their yields significantly, allowing them to routinely get a full harvest after
being fortunate to get twenty-five percent yields since the Depression had left them
unable to maintain their drainage.83 As Sonia Shah writes, “Whether or not anti-mosquito
campaigns alleviated malaria, they almost always helped improve property values [and]
spur development.”84 None of this is to suggest that public health was exclusively a
pretext for increased agricultural productivity. Malaria was a real concern, and it likely
did motivate people to drain wetlands, just as it had for centuries. Instead, it is important
because it illustrates how different conservationists’ understandings of the ideology they
82
William H. Marshall, “A Teacher,” in Flyways: Pioneering Waterfowl Management in North America,
A. S. Hawkins, R. C. Hanson, H. K. Nelson, and H. M. Reeves, eds. (Washington, D.C.: The United States
Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 52.
83
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 173; To Make the Civilian Conservation Corps a Permanent Agency, 45.
84
Shah, The Fever, 161.
45
purportedly shared could actually be and how thoroughly the concept of conservation had
expanded among certain conservationists. Destruction of whole ecosystems by an agency
explicitly meant to do conservation work would seem to only be reasonable if the
meaning of conservation was expanded to include the conservation of human resources,
as Roosevelt had.
It is therefore important to recognize that, while there was a contradiction
between soil conservation and drainage, drainage work was not necessarily contrary to
every conservation perspective. Judged by Roosevelt’s version of conservation, the use of
Civilian Conservation Corps enrollee labor seems entirely reasonable; by any standard,
keeping drainage systems active seems to have successfully ‘conserved’ the productivity
of farms that relied upon drainage. Not all conservationists were comfortable with this
logic, however. Darling was a passionate critic of drainage work that threatened wildlife
habitat. His critique was so absolute that he defined his work at the BBS in opposition to
it, making his main project during that time the implementation of a “submarginal land”
purchase program.
The program sought to address the developmental regret that Darling and others
felt by actively reverting unproductive drained farmland back to wetland to provide
habitat for wildlife.85 Darling explained:
My particular job right now is to get back those old marshes, to stop up the
drainage ditches, put water in where it formerly made a pleasant picture on
the landscape, to restore the old lake bottoms, to divert streams that have
been hurried off down the river, and impound water… With the constant
encroachment upon nature's areas, with agriculture pulverizing all of the
natural fields where our upland birds used to live, with the effort to drain
all of the old marshes and lakes in order that we may make more farm
lands, with the pollution of the rivers and all the careless, thoughtless
85
Special Sub-Committee of the Water Resources Committee of the National Resources Committee,
Drainage Policy and Projects; Worster, Dust Bowl, 190-1.
46
things that we do, we are gradually taking out of our lives this element,
which I think is well worth preserving.86
The program ultimately did not convert as much land as Darling had hoped. The BBS
was able to purchase 750,000 acres of drained land, but this seemed insignificant
compared to the more than eighty million acres in drainage at the time and the 7.5 million
acres the BBS thought would need to be restored at minimum to protect wildlife habitat.
The most significant problem, according to a member of Darling’s staff, was that four of
every five sites they wanted to rehabilitate and protect were in drainage at the time and
the farmers that owned the land were unwilling to sell. Essentially, the lands that most
needed environmental conservation tended to be the least “submarginal,” or those that
most benefitted economic conservation.87 Although Roosevelt had been involved in
connecting the idea of protecting wildlife habitat as public land going back to the Beck
committee period, Darling blamed much of the BBS’s failure to accomplish more on
Roosevelt. He was convinced that FDR never actually read the report that the Beck
committee produced and wondered if his appointment had been a political tactic to
silence a significant critic by drawing him away from the newspaper, without any intent
of actually advancing environmental conservation goals.88 Looking back on the period
later, Ding wrote: “Whenever I hear anyone boasting of [FDR] as a conservationist I
think of how little the Public knows of the political crimes committed in the name of
Conservation.”89
86
Darling, “Conserving Our Wild Life.”
USDA, Yearbook 1935, 331; Theodore Cart, “‘New Deal’ for Wildlife: A Perspective on Federal
Conservation Policy, 1933-1940,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 63, no. 3 (July 1972), 117; Vileisis,
Unknown Landscape, 176-83, 205; Marshall, “A Teacher,” 53; Maher, Nature’s New Deal, 181-3, 186,
196, 208; To Make the Civilian Conservation Corps a Permanent Agency, 93.
88
Lendt, Ding, 67.
89
Lendt, Ding, 85
87
47
Aldo Leopold was also a consistent public critic of the CCC’s drainage work,
although his path to that point was, in some ways, the opposite of Darling’s; while Ding
moved from the private to the public sphere, trying to accomplish his conservation goals
working within the bureaucratic structure, Leopold became disillusioned with
governmental conservation and ultimately focused on advancing his form of conservation
from outside the government. A biographer of Leopold wrote that “Leopold was calm,
meticulous, and dry-humored; Darling was high-spirited, gregarious, and more politically
inclined. Different though they were, they shared… an overriding devotion to
conservation.”90 The two had a relatively long history and had significant respect for each
other: when Leopold was placed in charge of conservation work at Iowa State University,
Ding provided the financial support for his position; when Darling was being considered
for chief of the BBS, Leopold seems to have been involved in advocating for his
appointment.91
Like both Wallace and Darling, Leopold grew up in Iowa, and he found his way
to a form of agriculture relatively quickly. He attended the Yale Forest School, which
was founded through a donation by Gifford Pinchot and emphasized Pinchot’s wise use,
utilitarian approach to forestry. After his graduation in 1909, he joined Pinchot’s new
U.S. Forest Service, focusing primarily on game management in the American Southwest
for the next fifteen years. Although Leopold initially shared Pinchot’s desire to apply the
principle of scientific agriculture to nature more broadly, he came to question many of
the core principles of Progressive conservation during his time with the Forest Service.
He had some limited success encouraging alternative approaches but, recognizing the
90
91
Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 316.
Meine, Aldo Leopold, 288, 315-9.
48
incongruities between the Forest Service’s approach and his own, he left the USFS
briefly in 1918 and again in 1928.92 Leopold made a brief return to the USFS during the
first summer of the New Deal in 1933. He was recruited to return to the Southwest to lead
a CCC camp for the Forest Service, and helped to develop the soil conservation
demonstration area concept while he worked in that capacity. He then spent some time
working with the SES in Wisconsin, doing similar work. Working within the federal
conservation bureaucracy could not satisfy him though, and, again recognizing the
incompatibility of his ideas with government policy, he accepted a position to teach at the
University of Wisconsin’s Department of Agricultural Economics.93
Leopold is most well-known for the ideas that he developed in A Sand County
Almanac (1949), in particular that book’s essay “The Land Ethic.” But the development
of these ideas had already begun prior to the New Deal, and can be seen beginning to
reach maturity most clearly in two essays from the period: “The Conservation Ethic”
(1933) and “Conservation Economics” (1934). The first, which his biographer has called
“the full flower of his thinking as a conservationist,” was about his belief that the
centrality of economic thinking in conservation was problematic.94 Leopold wrote that
humanity was in need of a new ethic, which he defined as “a limitation on freedom of
action in the struggle for existence.”95 Although Leopold’s ideas are often characterized
as biocentric, he was still centrally concerned with maintaining stability for humanity.
What set him apart was the idea that there was something profoundly wrong about a
92
Worster, Nature’s Economy, 271-2, 284; Leopold, River of the Mother of God, xiii-xv; Paul Sutter, “New
Deal Conservation: A View From the Wilderness,” in FDR and the Environment, Henry L. Henderson and
David B. Woolner, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 89; Samuel P. Hays, The American
People and the National Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 78-81.
93
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, xiii-xv; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 301-2, 313-9.
94
Meine, Aldo Leopold, 306.
95
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, 181.
49
“land-relation which is still strictly economic,” as he wrote, “entailing privileges but not
obligations.”96
After Leopold’s time working with various parts of the federal government’s
conservation bureaucracy—between the Forest Service, the CCC, the SES, and the Beck
committee, he had developed quite a resume—his critique of the dominant principles of
conservation became increasingly structural. For him, “Conservation Economics”
represented a New Deal-era companion to “The Conservation Ethic.” He began to
criticize particular CCC policies soon after he left the federal government, including
specific references to drainage and policy contradictions among different agencies using
CCC labor. His criticisms of drainage inspired more widespread public outcry about the
policies as well. Moving beyond concerns about the immediate effects of the work, like
the destruction of habitat, Leopold came to question the Roosevelt administration’s
conservation goals at a fundamental level, focusing on two particular problems (which
both related to drainage). First, he thought that public ownership—one of the central
aspects of FDR’s conservation plans—could only go so far. He defined conservation as
“a state of harmony between men and land,” and he argued that the approach of those
who simply sought to remove land from private ownership failed to appreciate the extent
of the changes that were required. Second, he criticized the lack of coordination between
conservation perspectives. He recognized his own failures in this regard, but saw it as
something that ran through all of New Deal conservation: “The high-ups (of which I was
96
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, 182; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 303-6.
50
one) did not anticipate these conflicts of interest, sometimes did not see them when they
occurred, and were ill-prepared to adjust them when seen.”97
Leopold’s critique essentially came down to the idea that economics—which he
saw as the defining feature of Roosevelt’s conservation—was inadequate to undertake the
kind of conservation that the situation required. He explained in “Conservation
Economics” that he “previous to 1933 the entire search for economic mechanisms was
confined within the pre-existing limits sanctioned by our political and economic law and
custom. It suddenly appears that those limits are too narrow… We have invented engines
of unprecedented coarseness and power, and placed them freely in the hands of ignorant
men… I assert we should not be surprised, not that the pre-existing structure needs
widening, but that it will serve at all.”98 He concluded the essay by pointing out the
failures of the various conservation philosophies competing during the period, writing
that he held “a profound conviction that the public is at last ready to do something about
the land problem, and that we are offering it twenty competing answers instead of one.”99
These criticisms him to found the Wilderness Society with other environmentallyconcerned conservationists in 1936, which Leopold “made clear [was in response to] the
New Deal’s aggressive approach to conservation work—an approach that prioritized the
mobilization of workers over thorough land planning.”100 His vision of conservation, and
97
Worster, Nature’s Economy, 271-2; Leopold, River of the Mother of God, xiii-xv; Maher, Nature’s New
Deal, 123, 165-71; Sutter, “New Deal Conservation,” 87, 90, 96; Meine, Aldo Leopold, 306, 320-3, 390.
One of the great ironies of New Deal conservation is that drainage work was actually one of the areas of
work that extended conservation efforts beyond public work. Drainage work had to be shown to serve the
public interest precisely because it involved CCC labor being used on private land. The difference was that
instead of being used to inspire farmers to undergo radical transformations in the way they interacted with
the land, as Leopold wanted, the drainage work was used to maintain or re-establish drainage systems just
as they had been in the past.
98
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, 202.
99
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, 202.
100
Sutter, “New Deal Conservation,” 87, 90 (quoted), 96.
51
its differences from others, may be best explained by something he wrote in 1938,
describing “what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools
are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom,
to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live
on a piece of land without spoiling it.”101
Henry Wallace was relatively sympathetic towards these concerns—especially the
idea of a farmer and his relationship with the land. He was quoted in 1936 explaining the
predicament of farmers, who, on the whole, wanted to protect and conserve the land:
“But what choice have they… when low prices and high fixed charges compel them to
put in more and more acreage in order to produce enough to meet taxes and interest?”102
He also adopted the language and position of developmental regret often, explaining, as
he did in 1936, for example, that the USDA should only develop “suitable lands” and
praising BBS programs that “help[ed] to correct evils traceable in part to our national
land utilization.”103
Still, his was a subtly different form of developmental regret. This was clear from
early in the New Deal, when he dismissed the Beck committee’s final report, writing that
it was “too ambitious to be feasible in the immediate future.”104 It became especially
apparent in the context of the concerns about what land would be developed:
Land planning must consider wildlife, which is a valuable resource in
itself and has claims that we cannot ignore with impunity. Wildlife is a
crop. Its production depends on the preservation and development of
suitable lands. Failure to provide for wildlife is distinctly bad national
economy... The return to wildlife of land now in agriculture may seem to
involve a sacrifice of human interests, but it need not. On the contrary, the
101
Leopold, River of the Mother of God, 254.
Chase, Rich Land, Poor Land, 229.
103
USDA, Yearbook 1936, 54-5.
104
Meine, Aldo Leopold, 318.
102
52
economic advantage of protecting fur bearers, game animals, and birds,
and thus simultaneously of conserving water, soil, and forest resources
may be very great.105
He was interested in renewal of natural environments, but he did not justify that concern
with the same reasoning or language as Darling or Leopold. Instead, he pointed out that
land restored “to nature’s original purposes” would be capable of “producing milliondollar crops of waterfowl and other valuable forms of wildlife.”106
Judging Wallace’s actual beliefs or intent is nearly impossible, as his use of
conservation was almost always expressed in these sorts of ways, mediating between the
more extreme, marginal positions on the conservation spectrum. One of the instances
where this may have made the biggest difference for drainage was when he chose
Darling’s successor as chief of the BBS. Darling was given the chance to help choose his
replacement, but Wallace ultimately picked a different member of the staff who was
much more moderate.107 This is visible in his approach to addressing the complaints
about inter-agency conflict as well. The Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act (1934) was
meant to address issues related to inter-agency conflict around drainage, but it failed to
live up to its goal since it did not require coordination, leaving adherence to the
Biological Survey’s rejection of drainage voluntary.108
As a result of this failure, Wallace organized a conference in September of 1935
that included representatives of wildlife, pest control, malaria control, and reclamation
interests. He tried to help them reach some kind of agreement about what kinds of
drainage work could be undertaken, but they were ultimately “unable to reach a
105
USDA, Yearbook 1936, 54.
USDA, Yearbook 1936, 55.
107
Lendt, Ding, 85-6.
108
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 183.
106
53
satisfactory solution.” He tried to address the problem again in 1937, when he put out a
memo alerting USDA staff that drainage work would have to be submitted for Bureau of
Biological Survey approval. This represented a positive step in the Biological Survey’s
campaign to bring drainage activities more in line with their conception of conservation
as it had been defined by Darling during his time as chief, but it had a significant
qualification in that projects rejected by the Biological Survey were taken to the Office of
Land Use Coordination. This took the final decision out of the hands of some of the most
adamant advocates of drainage restrictions that remained in the department by that
time.109
While these specific efforts did not lead to immediate change, it is possible to see
tangible manifestations of Wallace’s form of conservation, characterized by
compromised developmental regret. The best expression of this comes from the USDA’s
1938 Yearbook of Agriculture in an essay written by F. R. Kenney of the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics and W. L. McAtee of the BBS, who was a sharp critic of Darling
before, during, and after his time at the Biological Survey. Their essay, too, expanded on
the theme of past drainage land-use failures, expressing that regret in terms of economic
loss or opportunity cost. For example, they write that early settlers sought "to wrest every
possible acre from nature and make it yield an income," before explaining how wildlife
protection programs serve as a way to maintain "nature's wealth-creating centers of every
kind." Their criticisms of the past imply that they understand their own perspective as
109
Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939,
68; Hardin, Politics of Agriculture, 18; Patterson, Mosquito Crusades, 133; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape,
171, 183; Special Sub-Committee of the Water Resources Committee of the National Resources
Committee, Drainage Policy and Projects, 2; Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, Memorandum
No. 744, Nov. 30, 1937, Correspondence about Permissible and Non-Permissible Civilian Conservation
Corps Work, Box 1, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35, National Archives
Building II, College Park, MD.
54
wholly different, but it seems that they have actually adopted Wallace’s perspective.
Recognizing the benefits of the economic language the wetland-draining farmers of the
past used, the desire to increase productivity and profitability, they seem to adopt this
language in an effort to advance their conservation goals.110
One aspect of Kenney and McAtee's essay that particularly stands out is their use
of the term 'reclamation.' They argue that "so-called reclamation was [in many cases]
accomplished at great expenditure of funds with no adequate return." Their use of "socalled" implies that they may have recognized an irony in that term, in that the land is
being claimed for cultivation for the first time rather than being re-claimed. But the term
‘reclamation’ actually would not have seemed like a contradiction at all during the early
periods of drainage in the U.S. In the mid-eighteenth century, a new definition of
reclamation came into use: "the action of civilizing a people considered wild and savage;
the removing or saving of a people from a way of life considered uncivilized." Sixty
years later, it was applied to agricultural drainage to mean, "the conversion of wasteland,
especially land previously underwater, into land fit for use, e.g. for cultivation or
construction." Considering the predominant attitudes toward wetlands and the view of
them as 'waste,' it seems likely that people saw their drainage activities as a way of saving
good land from wilderness and savagery.111
There was a problem with these definitions for the people expressing economic
developmental regret, but it was with the word waste instead. Wasteland, as defined in
the 1938 Yearbook glossary, is "land essentially incapable of producing materials or
110
Lendt, Ding, 65, 70, 84-6; USDA, Yearbook 1938, 73-83. The outcome they are advocating for is
undeniably superior, as it involves the conversion of land in drainage back to wetland, but it is important to
recognize the positions and justifications that create the possibility for these changes.
111
USDA, Yearbook 1938, 81; “Reclamation,” Oxford English Dictionary.
55
services of value." But all of the frustrations with uneconomic drainage carried out prior
to the thirties show that the employees of the USDA recognized the potential value of
production from land when it was not in drainage. Thus, the Oxford English Dictionary
references the definition of 'land reclamation' in the 1938 Yearbook to illustrate how the
meaning of that term changed. In the glossary, the definition is: "making land capable of
more intensive use by changing its character, environment, or both through operations
requiring collective effort." 112 When Kenney and McAtee use the phrase "so-called
reclamation," then, they are not expressing a critique of the term reclamation in the sense
that they see drainage as fundamentally problematic, as Darling did. Rather, they are
criticizing those that initially brought the land into drainage because the drainage actually
made the land, by their standards, less productive. The phrase "so-called" serves as a way
of pointing out that earlier drainers had failed in their effort to make the land productive,
not as a critique of the idea that all land should be made more productive. Of course, this
position may not be reflective of Kenney and McAtee’s personal beliefs. What is
instructive is that they chose to adopt Wallace’s compromising approach, recognizing the
inability of others to make drainage reforms that were not argued for in economic terms.
This underlying idea seems to be related to other events taking place in 1938. The
change with the widest reaching implications was the reorganization within the USDA
that led to the Bureau of Agricultural Economics “bec[oming] the broad planning agency
for the entire department,” in the words of Hugh Bennett. Many of Roosevelt’s most
trusted agricultural advisors, including Lewis Gray and M. L. Wilson, were economists
and conservationists, so the idea that they would favor centralized economical planning is
not surprising. The move also makes sense in the context of addressing drainage conflict.
112
USDA, Yearbook 1938, 1170-1; “Land,” Oxford English Dictionary.
56
As was discussed in the previous section, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics had
actually advocated for firm restrictions on new land that could be brought into drainage,
as they recognized that it would often be a bad investment. By 1938, the department’s
economists had found allies in the BBS, and had joined together to promote better land
use practices, as illustrated by Kenney and McAtee. This form of developmental regret
espoused in the BBS and the concern about uneconomical land use in the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics were especially compelling during periods of economic
recession—when agricultural prices were sufficiently low to make the reversion of
submarginal lands cost effective—such as the recession of 1937 and 1938.113
Additionally, 1938 saw two changes related to drainage that seemed to indicate
greater concern for wetlands, or at least increased sensitivity to the growing concern
about drainage practices. First, the CCC put out an official announcement explaining that
“drainage work [would] be limited to the repair, renovation or reconstruction of existing
facilities” and advising officials in charge of CCC work to consider “demonstrational and
public health aspects… as well as their worth in preserving, conserving or increasing the
productivity of agricultural land” in deciding what land should continue to benefit from
drainage work. Second, the BAE’s CCC drainage camps were transferred to the SCS. The
language of the CCC announcement represented little change from the official line that
the Corps and the USDA had used since 1935 (as quoted previously), though it seemed
that the reiteration of that position and the placement of the drainage work under a
conservation agency could be signs of progress.114
113
SCS, Report of the Chief, 1939, 14.
Worster, Dust Bowl, 217; SCS, Report of the Chief, 1939, 14; Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage
Methods,” 18; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 172; Civilian Conservation Corps Office of the Director
Memorandum, Washington, D.C., May 31, 1938, Correspondence about Permissible and Non-Permissible
114
57
In reality, the changes did not seem to stem drainage as might have been
expected. Although Hugh Bennett and the SCS were committed to conservation, it was a
particular form of conservation. Sarah Phillips has explained that he exemplified the
approach of relief measures during the Dust Bowl by using “technical and noncoercive
measures to halt soil erosion and to increase the productivity of private crop land,” an
approach that “would ultimately characterize the liberal conservation regime, its limits
along with its accomplishments.”115 Bennett spent much of his time focused on
convincing the public that soil erosion was not “just a series of isolated natural disasters
but… a persistent and widespread scourge of traditional agricultural land use.”116
Somewhat ironically, though, he struggled to act on the broader context himself, largely
confining his conservation goals to very limited reforms. Although he uses the language
of developmental regret at times, such as when he describes “the evil” of man-made soil
erosion, “the tendencies toward expansion,” as Charles Hardin put it, remain ever-present
features of Bennett’s writings. He takes it as axiomatic that no revolutionary land-use
changes are possible, promoting stances like “efficient protection.”117 Ultimately,
Bennett’s approach is hard to define, as he seemed to be quite willing to shift positions
based on expediency. Ultimately, his form of conservation was characterized by a singleminded focus on soil conservation, as he was willing to adjust virtually all of his other
positions based on their expediency in his mission of accomplishing more soil
conservation. In general, he also favored technocratic, engineered solutions to the
problems he identified to ensure that they were capable of serving long-term human
Civilian Conservation Corps Work, Box 1, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Record Group 35,
National Archives Building II, College Park, MD.
115
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 126.
116
Sutter, “What Gullies Mean,” 591.
117
USDA, Yearbook 1934, 322-7; Hardin, Politics of Agriculture, 102-3.
58
interests.118 Thus, in spite of what seems like its incompatibility with soil conservation,
Bennett himself did not see drainage as contradictory to his form of conservation.
Bennett’s avoidance could be related to an additional shift from around the same
period. Bennett placed very little emphasis on economics in his early reports, from 1935
through 1938. None of the reports mention economics in their introductions and the first
two do not include economics sections. In 1937, Bennett added a short discussion of
“Economic Studies” and included a slightly longer section the following year. But in
1939, Bennett puts soil conservation in economic terms in the second sentence of the
report’s introduction and the section on economics is nearly four times as long as the one
from 1938. His report in 1940 extended the transition; he opened the report with the
sentence, “Erosion of the soil costs the United States about $3,844,000,000 a year,” and
went on to describe the “irreplaceable wealth” lost because of soil erosion and to discuss
economics in even more detail than the year before.119
Ultimately, Bennett’s SCS continued drainage work much as it had been carried
out under the BAE. The only significant change seems to have been the increased
specificity with which he explained what the CCC’s drainage work entailed. In his 1939
report, he explained that the thirty-eight CCC camps under the charge of the SCS were
spread across eleven states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Maryland, Missouri, and Ohio), and also described their separate involvement in statesponsored drainage work in Mississippi. He claimed that the SCS drainage projects with
118
For additional discussion of Bennett’s conservation philosophy see, in particular, Worster, Dust Bowl;
Phillips, This Land, This Nation; Sutter, “What Gullies Mean”; and Sutter, “New Deal Conservation.”
119
SCS, Report of the Chief, 1935; SCS, Report of the Chief, 1936; Soil Conservation Service, U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Report of the Chief of the Soil Conservation Service, 1937 (Washington, D.C.:
The Service, 1937), 46-7; Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Report of the Chief
of the Soil Conservation Service, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: The Service, 1938), 47-8; SCS, Report of the
Chief, 1939, 1, 61-6; SCS, Report of the Chief, 1940, 1, 2, 17-25, 55-6.
59
CCC labor over the previous year “benefited” 1.5 million acres of land, including the
excavation of 4,328 miles of new ditches, 7,407 miles of cleared ditches, and 269 miles
of rebuilt tile drains. Bennett’s reports from 1939 and 1940 also included descriptions of
SCS research on improving the durability and overall effectiveness of tile drains and
drainage systems in general.120 The 1940 SCS report included information about the ways
in which drainage work had improved and developed with more time under SCS control.
Bennett explained how “drainage activities expanded to include assistance on all drainage
problems involving proper land use and conservation farming,” although he did not
clarify (in any report) how drainage could be part of appropriate soil conservation
practices. He continued describing the specifics of the work, explaining how CCC
enrollees “assisted in the removal of more than 8,500,000 cubic yards of material from
776 miles of drainage ditches being improved.”121
Conclusion: Wetland Protection?
As the New Deal period came to a close, much of the progress—what may be
better defined as token reforms—made by some conservationists in trying to reform
drainage practice was marginalized and forgotten. If conservation ideology continued to
play a role in the following decades, it was surely the idea of conserving agricultural
productivity and public health within the broader framework of human conservation;
biocentric conservation seemed to hold little weight. During congressional hearings
considering making the CCC a permanent agency in 1939, proponents argued that there
120
SCS, Report of the Chief, 1939, 25, 57; Soil Conservation Service, Report of the Chief, 1940, 56;
Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939, 81.
121
SCS, Report of the Chief, 1940, 38.
60
were 350 million acres of land that needed conservation work in the United States,
among which they counted eighty-four million “acres of our best agricultural land” in
drainage. That figure, the Census of Agriculture’s most recent at the time, reflected all
land within the country in drainage, but it seemed that the developmental regret that had
briefly dominated debates over the course of the decade was already beginning to
disappear. Instead, the focus was simply on how to improve the quality of the drainage on
that land. It seemed that even the idea of alternative forms of productivity was being
eliminated.122 The following year, CCC officials wrote about drainage work completed at
the National Agricultural Research Center, making “the land available for use.” Although
this drainage was not on a large scale, the way in which CCC officials documented the
work suggests increased comfort speaking directly about new drainage work. And
another CCC document from 1941 explains the job training benefits of the Corps with the
example of a ditch digger enrollee gaining “the initial and primary instruction in
surveying, drainage, hydraulics and sanitation,” making apparent that they believed
drainage would continue to play an important role in the future.123
The idea of drainage as a part of soil conservation came to seem natural, and over
the course of the next four decades, the USDA drained 57 million new acres for
agriculture, adding to the over eighty million acres that were already in drainage as of
1940.124 Increased legislative restrictions on wetland drainage began in 1962 with the
Drainage Referral Act, which limited drainage in some situations where it could pose a
122
To Make the Civilian Conservation Corps a Permanent Agency, 45; Bureau of the Census, Census of
Agriculture: 1959, 3.
123
Civilian Conservation Corps, Activities of the Civilian Conservation Corps, July 1, 1938-June 30, 1939,
84; Civilian Conservation Corps, The Civilian Conservation Corps: What It Is and What It Does
(Washington, D.C.: Federal Security Agency, Civilian Conservation Corps, 1941), 10.
124
Soil Conservation Service, Report of the Chief of the Soil Conservation Service, 1941 (Washington,
D.C.: The Service, 1941), ii; Beauchamp, “Drainage and Drainage Methods,” 18; Bureau of the Census,
Census of Agriculture: 1959, 3; Mitsch and Gosselink, Wetlands, 544.
61
threat to wildlife in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The Army Corps of
Engineers officially recognized the role of wetlands in preventing flooding a few years
later, and they began promoting the wise use of wetlands as a result. More federal
protection followed, including the 1977 Executive Order on Wetlands signed by Jimmy
Carter, which stated that federal agencies should not take action that harmed wetlands;
Section 404 of the 1977 Clean Water Act, that identified wetlands as a societal good; and
the Food Security Act of 1985, which prevented farmers from getting government
subsidies if they grew crops on wetlands brought into drainage after that year. While
these forms of protection did begin to restrict new agricultural drainage, they did little to
address the continuing active drainage that define the nation’s hydrology.125
A similar pattern played out within the SCS, which technically stopped assisting
with the drainage of wetlands in 1973—the same year in which the Service published a
book entitled, Drainage of Agricultural Land: A Practical Handbook for the Planning,
Design, Construction, and Maintenance of Agricultural Drainage Systems. Even later,
the SCS continued to help farmers with all aspects of drainage. In the book’s
introduction, the author wrote that federal participation had been limited until the thirties,
but, by the time of the book’s publication, had become “an integral part of a
comprehensive land and water development program through individual projects of the
Departments of Agriculture, Army, and Interior.” Essentially, the federal government
continued to become increasingly involved in drainage throughout the twentieth century,
125
Pavelis, Farm Drainage in the United States, ii-iii; Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 242-3, 252; Donald
M. Kent, Applied Wetlands Science and Technology (Boca Raton: Lewis Publishers, 1994), iii.
62
primarily working to conserve economic productivity, just as some conservationists had
been doing with drainage all along.126
By focusing on drainage during the New Deal period, the diversity of thought
within the period’s “conservation movement” (if it can even be defined as such) becomes
increasingly clear. This is not a narrative of conservationist heroes defending nature
against anti-conservation villains, nor is it the classic environmental history story of
Pinchot conservationists versus Muir preservationists. Instead, this narrative illustrates
the various forms of conservation of five individuals, each representative of a distinct
philosophy of and approach to conservation and drainage.
Roosevelt’s conservation—one of the most radical from a certain perspective, in
spite of his Progressive conservation pedigree—was defined by the idea of harnessing
natural power to serve his ideas of the human good, broadly defined. What separated his
approach was that he extended those traditional conservation principles to the
conservation of people, farm ownership, profit, agricultural yields, and the nation itself in
a time when many believed the nation needed help to be conserved. He understood these
goals to be best served by conserving—in a different sense than it had been understood
previously—the economic health of farmers and young men, the economic health of the
nation as a whole, and the core elements of the economic system that the entire New Deal
sought to protect. Conserving means maintaining, so for FDR, maintaining drainage
meant a way to conserve what was most valuable to him.
126
Pavelis, Farm Drainage in the United States, ii; Soil Conservation Service, Drainage of Agricultural
Land: A Practical Handbook for the Planning, Design, Construction, and Maintenance of Agricultural
Drainage Systems (Port Washington, N.Y.: Water Information Center, Inc., 1973), quote from page 2;
Vileisis, Unknown Landscape, 245, 252
63
Bennett served, in large part, as both the catalyst for and the figurehead of the soil
conservation movement that gripped the nation following the Dust Bowl. His
conservation ideology reflected his primary concern—soil erosion—in every instance. It
also illustrated his typical means of engaging with that problem: engineered alterations to
the environment. His approach, like most of these conservationists, falls somewhere
outside either of the clean categories of anthropocentrism or biocentrism. He had an
unwavering commitment to conserving a single natural resource, but that commitment
seemed to come at the cost of seeing the broader scope of conservation. Although he
recognized the potential costs, he embraced drainage when he was forced to take a side,
because his conservation philosophy did not have room for the kinds of fundamental
changes being against it would have required.
Darling’s conservation is best represented by the idea of developmental regret.
Ding wanted to protect wildlife by protecting the environments wild animals required to
survive. Although he was not exactly a preservationist, as he did not want the land being
protected to simply be left alone, his conservation philosophy revolved around the idea of
mostly separating humans from nature, as he saw that to be the only way to protect it. He
essentially understood past developmental mistakes as the result of human
overexpansion, and wanted to reverse those errors by removing much of human influence
from natural spaces. For drained wetlands, this meant reversing the drainage process,
helping to re-establish natural environments, and allowing wildlife to thrive there again.
Leopold’s form of conservation as expressed during the New Deal also placed the
environment more centrally than Roosevelt, Bennett, or Wallace, but was distinct from
Darling’s because of his sense of the need to conserve the natural world while engaging
64
with it. Leopold did not want to separate people from nature; instead, he wanted people to
conserve by appreciating the value of nature everywhere, recognizing their role in it, and
living accordingly. Central to his philosophy was his questioning of the wisdom of
economic conservation. The practical application of this for drainage meant that he
shared Darling’s desire to protect wetlands that had not yet been drained and to revert
drained lands back to wetland. He also extended the idea somewhat further than Ding,
questioning the very ideas of public ownership as a solution, of “submarginal” land as an
economic concept, and of decision-making processes that revolved around what he saw
as limited understandings of developmental costs and benefits.
Wallace, in spite of critics who disregarded him as a “dreamer,”127 spent his time
as secretary of agriculture trying to address the contradictions and tension between these
distinct approaches to conservation and their resulting different perspectives on drainage.
For this, Wallace’s form of conservation—defined by his effort to resolve the question of
what conservation did and should actually mean by developing compromises between
conservationists with more extreme positions—exemplifies the conservation of the period
as a whole most closely. Although the efforts of some New Deal conservationists to
restrict and reverse wetland drainage ultimately failed, nothing explains New Deal
conservation better than the engagement in the ongoing discourse and the effort to find
compromise. This effort was laudable in many ways, and it did lead to some positive
forms of progress, but this narrative should also serve as a warning in light of the
environmental challenges we currently face.
Wallace seems to have been genuine in his environmental conservation
motivations, but his compromising approach ultimately allowed for token concessions to
127
Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 328-9.
65
seem like progress and for drainage to continue largely unimpeded. The problems that
resulted from compromisers like Wallace embracing the language of economic
conservationists was two-fold. First, this logic severely limited the amount of land that
could potentially be removed from drainage, as highly productive land would never be
used more economically efficiently as wildlife habitat, no matter how much of a threat it
remaining in drainage posed. Second, it opened the door to continue drainage at previous
levels once the economic context no longer made wildlife habitat sufficiently beneficial;
as the country escaped the Depression and farm yields continued to rise because of
technological advances, it became increasingly difficult for wildlife habitat to compete
since the original determination had been exclusively economic. Ultimately, those that
emphasized economic conservation had more success in implementing policy than those
who emphasized environmental conservation.
Explaining why these economic approaches essentially won out is, of course, less
concrete than explaining what happened or why conservationists adopted economic
language. It is worth considering, though, because the implications are significant. It does
not strike me as a reach to say that many of the same features and outcomes are visible in
contemporary debates surrounding environmental policy. I attribute the dominance of
economic reasoning regarding drainage to what we might call the maximizing ethos of
conservation. When Leopold described the economic foundations of the ideology, he was
identifying this tendency. Essentially, conservation is about getting the most of a
particular resource out of a particular environment as possible, without harming the
ability to do so again in the future. Thus, it is about a purer form of maximization than
66
previous forms of natural resource extraction; it does not simply strip resources, taking as
much as possible all at once, but rather seeks to ensure that resources can be maximized
in perpetuity, increasing the total haul. Seen this way, the rise of conservation ideology in
the United States cannot be understood apart from the political-economic context from
which it came. In Dust Bowl, Donald Worster explains that there are three central
“ecological values taught by the capitalist ethos”: “Nature must be seen as capital”; “Man
has a right, even an obligation, to use this capital for constant self-advancement”; and
“The social order should permit and encourage this continual increase of personal
wealth.”128 Economic conservation seems to be directly in line with these principles.
Thus, this form of conservation is not an imposition on capitalism, but a practice in
service of it.
It is this reality that explains the tension in conservationists approaches to
drainage. Soil conservation in the Great Plains—which essentially entailed limiting the
damage that could be done, and limiting production as a consequence—may have both
prevented an ecological disaster and served the long-term interests of maximizing profit.
The same principle applies to forestry. But with wetland drainage, conservation’s
simultaneous insistence on maximization and limits, more and less, growth and
restriction, was exposed. The extension of conservation’s principles regarding limits
would have required significant changes to the country’s entire approach to drainage,
which would have had profound impacts on agriculture and would have come at
extraordinary economic cost. At the same time, conservation’s maximizing ethos would
insist upon the continued drainage of most agricultural land, as that was the way in which
it would be most economically productive. The outcomes of this tension were the
128
Worster, Dust Bowl, 6.
67
creation of token wildlife areas in instances where it was determined that they were more
economically productive than leaving the land in drainage and under cultivation, and the
continued drainage of all land that was more economically productive as agricultural
land.129 Both outcomes are in line with this maximizing ethos that is a fundamental part
of both conservation and capitalism.130
Long after his time as part of the bureaucracy during the New Deal, Rexford
Tugwell wrote a biography of FDR. In it, he described at one point how internal debates
about the Economy Act split the Roosevelt administration in 1933, dividing his advisors
along philosophical lines. Tugwell was quite sympathetic toward Roosevelt throughout
the biography, but, in this context, he identified a fundamental problem. He wrote:
“Franklin was soon caught in this contradiction of his own making: that he was trying to
reduce and expand simultaneously.”131 It seems this contradiction might extend just as
well to conservationist approaches to agricultural drainage during the period, and to
conservation ideology in general.
129
I refer to continued drainage in two separate senses: both during the New Deal period, in the sense that
they continued and re-established active drainage systems, and after, in the additional sense that much more
land was brought into drainage after an improved national economy meant that those areas became more
economically productive as agriculture than as wetland.
130
For discussion of the idea of a maximizing ethos in capitalism and the effects of this idea on the
environment, see, in particular, Steven Stoll, The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics,
and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (2008); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and
the Great West (1991); Worster, Dust Bowl; and Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History
of Greater New York (2014).
131
Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt, 274.
68
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