W

E share two ingredients to a greater degree than any other people in the world todaypolitical freedom, and economic freedom. Economic freedom, which has given vitality to our political liberty, is due largely to the American people transferring one billion acres of land from public to private ownership, and to managing half a billion acres remaining in public ownership in the public's interest.

These acres lie principally in the great continental heartland stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies, the area drained by the Mississippi, and in scattered blocks west of the 100th meridian. These are the acres from which come the iron ores of the Mesabi, the lumber of the Great Lakes and the South, grass from the High Plains, cotton from the Old South, corn from the rich soil of Iowa, coal from the bituminous beds of the Ohio Valley, grain from the Great Plains, hay and potatoes from irrigated farms at the foot of the Rockies.

About 1760, when these were still the Crown Lands of Great Britain, advance guards of the American occupation fanned out from the great gaps in the Appalachian Mountains. Two centuries later the Mississippi Valley has already taken its place among great river valleys which have been the crucibles of civilization. The great catalyst in this development was the opportunity for people to procure land without feudal encumbrance.

Until the emergence of the United States as a world power early in this century, every great turning point in our national history has pivoted in some manner on the public lands. The very formation of the Con

tinental Army led directly to the creation of a landed patrimony for all the people.

Land for Revolutionary Soldiers

When it became obvious to George Washington that the independence so lustily proclaimed by the American Colonies would have to be defended by regularly enrolled troops, he asked the Congress to create a "Continental Line" of 88 battalions.

One inducement was the promise of a land grant to men who would enlist. The battalions were to be raised by the States, but Maryland balked at the measure on the plea that it was a landless State and had no claim on Crown Lands needed to fulfill such a promise.

Maryland and the other landless States insisted that the Crown Lands be transferred to a central government, to be the patrimony of the entire people and not just the property of the seven colonies which had been beneficiaries of the generosity of the British monarchs. Negotiations continued until 1802, but the public domain resulted-roughly covering the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley.

Confederation Government

The early government has three accomplishments of public land administration to its credit. Two are often commented upon; a third is not often noted but is of utmost significance.

The Confederation Government adopted for public lands the rectilinear system of land surveys, rather than the system of metes and bounds. Thereby they

established a system of cadastral survey similar to the one still used today.

Use of public lands to support public purposes was embodied in the Land Ordinance of 1785. One section per township was granted to the Northwest Territory for the support of education. In providing a transitional government leading to statehood, this ordinance also set the far-reaching precedent that any area held by the United States would someday be embraced within a State, admitted to the Union upon terms of full equality with all other States.

A third decision of the Confederation Congress also deserves analysis. Unconsciously perhaps, the Congress decided to grant only allodial titles; that is, titles of absolute ownership not subject to any feudal duties or burdens.

It is difficult to conceive that America could have come to its place in the world today had the people been hampered by such vestiges of feudal land tenure as primogeniture, entailments and quit rents. Ample precedent was available for loading land titles with such encumberances. Instead, without excitement or drama, possibly even routinely, they forestalled such inhibiting arrangements and provided free exchange of land from the day of the Continental soldier locating his land bounty to the day of the suburbanite who buys and sells houses with alacrity if not always with profit.

The weak Confederation Government was followed by the National Government in 1787. One great act of this young Republic was transforming the public debt from a drag on the Nation to the keystone of a system of public credit. At the very base of the system were the public lands, upon which financier Alexander Hamilton depended for one of the two main sources of revenue to retire the debt.

Hamilton's Policy

Hamilton's policy of selling the public lands for their revenue did not mesh with the needs of America, at least as those needs were defined by the restless frontiersmen who believed fervently that God meant land to be owned by those who occupied it.

Agitation for alteration of Hamilton's policy began immediately. The first breach was made by the Harrison land law of 1800, and ended in 1862 in an absolute reversal upon enactment of the Homestead Act.

Hamilton's policy did prevail, however, for some 60 years. Sectional balance was so fine that Western Congressmen at first could not get support from the Northeastern commerical and industrial representatives. Later the South withheld its support when implications for slavery were well understood.

Almost any debate in the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century became a debate on theories of government. Although the listening Senate never got around to voting on the matter, the great debate between Webster and Hayne was set off by a resolution for restriction on the sale of public lands.

In 1830, during the Webster-Hayne debate, the South was not wholly opposed to homesteading. By 1848, when the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Country had rounded out the Nation, southern defense of slavery had become a demand that slavery expand into the new territory.

The question was whether lands forming the public domain were to promote a freeholding society or whether areas were to be reserved for a society based on slaves. Stated in Senator O'Mahoney's dictum, the question was whether public lands were to furnish economic freedom as a buttress to political liberty-or whether this was to be blighted by the legal right to carry chattel slaves onto some of these lands.

In this context it is not necessary to pass judgment

upon the merits of the opposing interpretations. The interpretations were fatefully put to the test of battle in the Civil War. The view of the American Union espoused by Webster and relentlessly pursued by Lincoln prevailed on the battlefield and now prevails in the Constitution by virtue of the Fourteenth Amend

ment.

The generation after the Civil War turned its energies from warmaking into the creation of great cities, as transportation, commerce and industry increased in tempo. And under the stimulus of the Homestead Act and related acts, the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains and Inter-Mountain basins of the Far West began. By 1890 the frontier line no longer existed. This meant that the expansion could no longer be shown on a map by a single line depicting the outer edge of settlement.

Homesteading is invariably associated with the wagon trains of the Nineteenth Century, but the decade of greatest use, as measured by acreage patented, was the second decade of the Twentieth Century. That this anticlimatic drive to secure land was more enthusiastic than rational can be read in the statistics of the 1930's when millions of acres were bought back by the Government under the Bankhead-Jones Act.

The Taylor Act

After 1934 most homestead entry was foreclosed by enactment of the Taylor Act, which set forth the orderly conduct of grazing on the public lands. To call it the Taylor Grazing Act, however, obscures its place on the statute books as a general public land administration

The origin of the term "Land Office business" is clearly shown in this 1907 photograph of applicants lined up outside the Land Office in Lakeview, Oregon. Scenes

act, equal in importance to any land act in the cou of a nation's history.

Taken with two Executive orders withdrawing fro further entry the remaining unoccupied vacant, appropriated public lands outside the grazing distri created by the Taylor Act, it is a decisive public la act-further disposition is contingent upon a classific tion by the Secretary of the Interior that the lands "a more valuable or suitable for the production of agricu tural crops or more valuable and suitable for an other use than (grazing). . . .'

...

As proof this was not a hasty action, it should b recited that the first recommendation for authority t classify the public lands was made by the Public Land Commission in its report to Congress in 1884.

The 170 million acres in 11 Western States embrace by the Taylor Act were the "remnants" of the publi domain, located in many scattered blocks between the Continental Divide and the Pacific Ocean.

Intermingled with the "remnants" are the blocks of privately owned land. This land varies in extent from Nevada's 13.6 percent to Washington's 70.4 percent

The public lands set aside by the Taylor Act to form the national land reserve, combined with the virgin expanses of Alaska and certain other lands, are the residuum of the patrimony created by the cession of the former Crown Lands.

These are the lands for which there were no takers under the numerous land disposition laws, or defied those who tried to reduce them to cultivation and the lands which prompted the refrain "Way out West in the country, starving to death on my Government claim."

such as this were common whenever additional lands were open to entry near areas already settled. This line had been forming for three weeks prior to filing time.

This act was followed by other national park acts, and in 1891 authority was granted by Congress to set beyond the reach of the public land laws timbered lands which eventually became the national forests. These, together with withdrawals later authorized by Congress and made by the President on his own authority, constituted a new public policy-retention of land in public ownership where presence of public values justifies it.

The two public land policies-disposition and retention-have existed side by side for 70 years. In recent years there has been far less emphasis on disposition, and far more on retention.

Although climate, topography and tenure patterns underscore the need for retention of the reserved lands, retention of great portions of the remaining public lands rests athwart the landowning instincts of people whose desires to possess land have been honed by the very success of the American people in making available to themselves one billion acres of a continental domain for development in a free society.

The Growth of Our Nation

THE

HE original public lands, as conveyed by the treaty of Paris in 1783, consisted of 541,364,480 acres (including $14,794,240 acres of water area). Of this original land area, 236,825,600 acres (including 3,409,920 acres of water area) were ceded by the individual States.

Major acquisitions were the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which added 529,911,680 acres (including 6,465,280 acres of water area); the Florida Purchase of 1819, adding 46,144,640 acres (2,801,920 acres of water area); the Oregon Annexation of 1846 for 183,386,240 acres (including 2,741,760 of water area): and the Mexican Cession of 1848, 338,680,960 acres, including 4,201,600 acres of water area. The annexation of Texas in 1845 did not add any acreage to the public lands, since the State of Texas retained the public lands of the former Republic of Texas. The United States did purchase from Texas lands outside the present borders of the State, adding 78,926,720 acres (including 83,840 acres of water area) to the public lands.

The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added another 18,988,800 acres (including 26,880 acres of water area), and the final significant acquisition was Alaska in 1867, which added 375,296,000 acres, including 9,814,000 acres of water area.

Equal Opportunity

Our public land laws, when taken with judicial decisions and departmental decisions, are complicated, cumbersome, and at this writing completely out of date. They were enacted to meet the dynamics of expansion, at a time when argricultural development was considered the highest use.

America, now seven decades into the Twentieth Century, is an industrial and urban nation. Those lands remaining in public ownership must either be transferred or retained under laws which are responsive to today's needs. Even in the outmoded laws there glimmers, nevertheless, a great American principle: "Equality of opportunity for all, special privilege for none." These laws provide economic freedom to insure political liberty. It is doubtless true today, as in the past, that not all who are legally eligible can take advantage of the opportunities presented by the public land laws.

There are, for instance, many independent oil and mining operators using public lands, but large development is in the hands of large corporations commanding resources and organizations to cope with the huge risks involved. The important point is that facts, not law, grant this advantage.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," we recognize as one of the truisms of the race. And if this be so, the United States has received as much flattery as any modern nation. Our Constitution has been adapted by many countries. The fruition of this, however, has never sustained the high hopes envisioned.

Could the difference be that America's national patrimony has been employed to secure our political liberty by providing at least a modicum of economic freedom, while other nations have either possessed no such patrimony or have been unable or unwilling to use it to secure economic freedom?

In this year, replete with its many public land anniversaries, Americans are competing to attract the emerging nations of Africa and Asia. We are also increasing our efforts to keep in our orbit the nations to the south in our own hemisphere. We hope that the people of these nations will adapt the lessons learned by the American people in giving self-government a continental dimension. In that connection, both we and they should be ever mindful of the relationship of land to Senator O'Mahoney's observation: "There can be no permanent political liberty without economic freedom."