area, which would interfere with our shipping on that lake. We were very much concerned about that because they absolutely ignored us. That is all set out in detail, so I will not repeat it here. It is in that record, and you are probably familiar with it.

Senator ÅNDERSON. Yes. I can understand your concern. I am just trying to find out how you think the language of the Holland bill or the Daniel bill would protect you more than the language that is in my bill, which is designed to protect you as completely as it is possible for a group to be protected.

Mr. MILLARD. I think that is a positive statement, and yours is more or less a negation or negative statement.

Senator ANDERSON. If you will read the language in the Holland bill, it gets to where it excludes these very things that we have tried to exclude.

Mr. MILLARD. That is all my statement, gentlemen.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions? Senator Kuchel? Senator KUCHEL. No, sir.

Senator ANDERSON. I want to ask just one other question.

The statement says that Michigan officials felt it necessary to support Federal legislation which once and for all would confirm Michigan's title to the bottoms of the vast Great Lakes area.

There were pending in the 82d Congress two bills. The last was S. 3306, which Senator O'Mahoney and I introduced, which tried to confirm to the States title to these Great Lakes lands. Do you know of any official from your State who supported that legislation?

Mr. MILLARD. We were interested in House bill 4484, and we supported that.

Senator ANDERSON. That had to do with other States. S. 3306 was an attempt to

Mr. MILLARD. I had no knowledge of that bill, Senator.

Senator ANDERSON. Prior to that, there was a bill which dealt only with a quitclaim to the States, only in an attempt to quitclaim this to the States. Was that bill ever called to the attention of public officials up there?

Mr. MILLARD. I had no knowledge of that bill at all. We had a lot of information on House bill 4484, however. That is the one we were primarily interested in.

Senator ANDERSON. Nobody can condemn you for trying to protect the interests of your State.

Senator DANIEL. Mr. Chairman.

While we are on Lake Michigan, I would like the general to turn to exhibit 3 of Senator Holland's statement, the table you referred to. giving your total acreage beneath the Great Lakes within your State. Mr. MILLARD. Yes, sir.

Senator DANIEL. You say there are over 24 million acres of submerged lands under the Great Lakes within your State, and Senator Anderson said he is willing to quitclaim it to Michigan. Is it not true that that is considerably more than all the marginal sea belt of all the coastal States put together?

Mr. MILLARD. Referring to the table that is in exhibit 3 of Senator Holland's statement, it shows that the marginal seas are 17,029,120 acres; whereas the total of submerged lands in the Great Lakes within the boundaries of Michigan is 24,613,760.

Senator DANIEL. In other words, Senator Anderson's bill would quitclaim to the State of Michigan 7 million acres more land than that which all the coastal States combined would get under the Holland bill in the marginal sea; is that not correct?

Senator ANDERSON. By the same token, could you not just quitclaim to the State of Pennsylvania all the land in the State of Pennsylvania and say that was tremendous?

Senator CORDON. Could we get an answer to that question first, please?

Mr. MILLARD. That is true.

In answer to you, Senator Anderson, we have a lot of minerals which have been undeveloped under the Great Lakes. We know we have iron, and we know we have copper. There is oil under there. There is salt. There is brine. The Dow Chemical Co., one of the greatest chemical companies in the world, draws its brine out from under the ground. We know that brine is under the Great Lakes,

We do have a lot of resources there which we want to develop, and we would like to have a clear title to it so we can go ahead and develop it.

Senator ANDERSON. You think you do not have a clear title to it now?

Mr. MILLARD. Well, there are doubts. Doubts have been raised, and that is why we are here, to resolve those doubts.

Senator KUCHEL. Mr. Chairman, if I may say this to Senator Anderson, the people of California up until 1947 thought that they had clear title to the tidelands. By the same token, I cannot blame the people of Michigan for feeling that until legislation is passed by the Congress, they, too, have the hazard of a future claim by the Federal Government contending that the paramount rights doctrine might well apply to the lands beneath the Great Lakes.

It would appear to me that it is on that basis that the people of Michigan desire to avoid or eliminate the hazard of the application of that doctrine on those lands.

Senator ANDERSON. Senator, maybe it would help if you would tell me when the State of California first asserted title to the land that lies out to the outermost reef of the outermost island, which it did in 1949 by its legislature?

Senator KUCHEL, I think the activity of the government of the State of California during all the time that leaseholds were entered into by the State of California with lessees for the production of oil in parts of the California tidelands, was every indication of claim by the government of California to proprietary interest in those tidelands. It seems to me that the manner by which the government of California purported to convey its interest to the people of the city of Long Beach in the lands which adjoined the city of Long Beach indicated again the judgment on the part of the people of California that they owned that property and were conveying their title to it, by appropriate legislation, to the city.

I think it can be documented again and again that the government of California considered itself to be the owner of that tideland area and acted accordingly. Certainly until the Supreme Court decision in 1947 was announced, I doubt very much that there was anyone in the legal profession in California who would seriously have urged

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that the Federal Government had a paramount right over the tidelands.

By the way, I suppose it is clear, so I do not need to say it, there is no question but that the paramount-rights doctrine, as pointed out by the dissenting opinion in the decision, does not vest title in the Federal Government at all. In other words, the question of bare legality is something which the majority opinion of the Supreme Court did not pass judgment upon. Paramount rights is something different from proprietary rights, in my opinion.

Again, to endeavor to answer your question, it does seem to me that the whole history of the government of California up until 1947 was indicative of its continuing claim of actual ownership of the tidelands.

Senator ANDERSON. My interest in this, Mr. Millard, is a very plain interest which the Solicitor General pointed out in the Interior Committee's pamphlet, The Submerged Lands Controversy, which was in reply to the briefs of the various attorneys general, in which you find, on page 9, these words:

As to inland waters, the Attorney General's pamphlet makes the amazing contention that S. 1540

which was a bill which Senator O'Mahoney and I joined in presenting

the bill to dispose of, forever

the word here is

the phony claim that inland waters are involved-was prepared by the Attorney General "in an attempt to split the ranks of the States."

The pamphlet says that

"State officials oppose this (1) as an effort to divide their forces,

Some of us recognize that the Great Lakes are stressed heavily in this in an attempt to secure the votes of Senators who live along the Great Lakes. We tried to divide their forces. We tried to reassure these Great Lakes States. We tried hard to pass S. 1540 that would forever have disposed of it, but I could not get it out of committee, because if I had gotten it out of committee then certain Senators from Great Lakes States might not have felt impelled to vote for the Louisiana, Texas, and California situation.

That is why I raised the question as to why you felt this quitclaim was insufficient. I know that good lawyers think it is a very good quitclaim.

Mr. MILLARD. Yet you put a reservation in it. That is the only objection I have.

Senator ANDERSON. No; we did not put a reservation that is not named in the Constitution, and you run squarely against that in the Holland bill. The same things are mentioned, defense and navigation. You cannot get away from those things without destroying the Constitution. I do not think you desire to do that. I know you do not.

Mr. MILLARD. One of my Senators voted against the bill.

Senator ANDERSON. Yes, but I have the suspicion that this time, on the Great Lakes issue, he may change his vote.

Mr. MILLARD. I hope so.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Senator HOLLAND. If I may, I would like to call at this time Attorney General Roy H. Beeler, of the State of Tennessee, former president of the national association-I believe only last year he was presidentnow chairman of the submerged lands committee and, as I stated in the beginning off the record and state now on the record, I understand the committee is willing for him to present not only his own written statement and to testify in connection therewith, but also the statement prepared by Attorney General Harold R. Fatzer, of Kansas, the present president of the National Association of Attorneys General, who was called home last night due to important business pending in his State legislature.

STATEMENT OF ROY H. BEELER, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, AND CHAIRMAN OF THE SUBMERGED LANDS COMMITTEE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF ATTORNEYS GENERAL

Mr. BEELER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I have a letter here from my Governor in response to a questionnaire sent out by the chairman of the committee. He did not fill out the questionnaire because he has legislative pains down there in Tennessee, with an investigation going on which, I believe, is more sweeping than this one is at times. So I will file that letter for the record.

(The letter referred to is as follows:)

TENNESSEE EXECUTIVE OFFICE,
Nashville, February 11, 1953.

Hon. HUGH BUTLER,

United States Senate, Senate Office Building,

Washington, D. C.

DEAR SENATOR BUTLER: Reference is made to your letter of January 30, 1953, concerning my State's position and views on the question of whether the States should own the submerged land within the historic State boundaries.

Hon. Roy H. Beeler, attorney general for the State of Tennessee, has been requested to testify in this year's hearing before Congress on the questions referred to in your letter. General Beeler, in his testimony, will present the State of Tennessee's and my position in this matter and for that reason I am not filling out the questionnaire enclosed with your letter.

I appreciate your inviting me to comment on this matter and trust that the proposed method of setting forth our position is satisfactory.

Sincerely yours,

FRANK G. CLEMENT, Governor. Mr. BEELER. Before I came up here, I dictated a little statement, but you know what has happened to it. The distinguished Senator from Florida and the distinguished Attorney General from Michigan have already just about covered what I said in that statement. I am perfectly willing to file that for the record without reading it, in the interest of conserving the time that you folks need. I think it has been passed around. I will refer to one thing in the back of it, commenting on the three cases. It already has been called to your a tion. That is, when they went to prepare the decree, the foot the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States of my statement shows that the decree as submitted by Go counsel, in addition to the Federal Government's being pos paramount rights, had the word "proprietorship" in there. Stricken out before the decree was entered.

Senator ANDERSON. Have you any theory why that was done?

Mr. BEELER. Yes, I have a theory why, because the courts never have said that these submerged lands belonged to the United States. They did not say that in the opinion in the California case. They have not said it in either one of the other two cases. They simply say they have dominion and control over them.

I am a sort of country lawyer, Senator. I come from the mountains of east Tennessee, where we have a whole lot of ejectment suits, and the theory of ejectment law is that the fellow asserting title and the right to possession of a piece of land must rely on the strength of his own title rather than on the weakness of his adversary's. They said in California opinion that they did not find that California had title to these lands. They did not find that the United States had title to them, either.

Senator ANDERSON. Did you follow the reasoning as to why?

Mr. BEELER. I do not know whether I did or not. I would be happy to be enlightened.

Senator ANDERSON. I do not have it. I am not a lawyer. I am one of the lay members of the committee.

Mr. BEELER. You would make a pretty good lawyer.

Senator ANDERSON. If you read the decisions, you may find the rights which the Federal Government has in that area it acquired because of its membership in the family of nations. That is not always a proprietary right. It may be a paramount right. It may be dominion in the terms that the court uses, but it does not say they have a property right to it. If the Federal Government cannot get a property right to it because of the relationship of sovereign to sovereign, on what theory can the State get a property right to it?

Mr. BEELER. I will answer that question in this way: Of course, the Federal Government in time of emergency or war has control over the whole thing. It has a right to exercise that control and protect the United States as a whole. As stated in one of these opinions, it is no answer to say if wars come they are fought by the Nation. Everybody knows that. We have fought these wars by the Nation all the way through, and everybody is taxed to carry on these wars. They go out and do it right along.

I guess most of you voted for a law to draft you and me and everybody else and put us in there. If they can do that, they certainly can draft the lands and things of that sort in time of emergency. I do not know whether that begins to answer your question or not.

I wish you would come down to Tennessee, and I would have you admitted to the bar. You say you are not a lawyer. I could make one out of you.

I will file that statement simply for the record.

Senator CORDON. The statement of Attorney General Beeler will be made a part of the record at this point.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Beeler is as follows:)

STATEMENT OF ROY H. BEELER, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF TENNESSEE, AND CHAIRMAN OF THE SUBMERGED LANDS COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ATTORNEYS GENERAL

This statement by me is made in my capacity as attorney general of the State of Tennessee and as chairman of the submerged lands committee of the National Asociation of Attorneys General of the United States, with the hope that it may be of some help to the members of this committee in determining what