1933–1941, a New Deal for Forest Service Research in California

The Search for Forest Facts: A History of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1926–2000 Chapter 4: 1933–1941, A New Deal for Forest Service Research in California By the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his landslide election in 1932, forest research in the United States had grown considerably from the early work of botanical explorers such as Andre Michaux and his classic Flora Boreali- Americana (Michaux 1803), which first revealed the Nation’s wealth and diversity of forest resources in 1803. Exploitation and rapid destruction of forest resources had led to the establishment of a federal Division of Forestry in 1876, and as the number of scientists professionally trained to manage and administer forest land grew in America, it became apparent that our knowledge of forestry was not entirely adequate. So, within 3 years after the reorganization of the Bureau of Forestry into the Forest Service in 1905, a series of experiment stations was established throughout the country. In 1915, a need for a continuing policy in forest research was recognized by the formation of the Branch of Research (BR) in the Forest Service—an action that paved the way for unified, nationwide attacks on the obvious and the obscure problems of American forestry. This idea developed into A National Program of Forest Research (Clapp 1926) that finally culminated in the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act (McSweeney-McNary Act) of 1928, which authorized a series of regional forest experiment stations and the undertaking of research in each of the major fields of forestry. Then on March 4, 1933, President Roosevelt was inaugurated, and during the “first hundred days” of Roosevelt’s administration, Congress passed his New Deal plan, putting the country on a better economic footing during a desperate time in the Nation’s history. Many foresters at the time looked forward to a New Deal in forestry as well. But before that story can be told, a brief description of some of the key New Deal programs that would affect their desires for a new day in forestry research is necessary. New Deal Programs Roosevelt’s New Deal contained several relief programs for the unemployed that were designed to bring immediate assistance to the millions of native-born unemployed and to restore their morale and health. The first of these programs was the creation of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) on November 9, 1933, a temporary agency to employ millions of people to help them survive the winter of 1933– 34. By January 1934, the CWA had provided employment to more than 4 million Americans, and in California, the CWA employed more than 150,000 Californians 167 GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PSW-GTR-233 in a wide variety of activities, such as building airports, bridges, roads, schools, and other public structures. The CWA remained in operation until March 1934, when the federal government terminated the program owing to its tremendous costs. With the pending expiration of the CWA, Congress established other relief projects. There was the Public Works Administration (PWA), created on June 16, 1933, under the authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA).1 It called for a comprehensive program of public works and channeled special allotments to fund capital improvements for federal projects. As a result, the Forest Service received funding for a great many improvements. Projects ranged from the development and improvement of roads, to a wide range of much-needed Forest Service buildings, the most common being ranger stations, fire lookouts, garages, residences, and maintenance shops. Then there was the Works Progress Administration (WPA)2 created in 1935 to supersede NIRA and other short-term programs. The WPA funding was used to construct schools, post offices, and other public structures.A program closely related to the CWA, PWA, and the WPA was the popular Civil- ian Conservation Corps (CCC), which combined relief and conservation and put millions of unemployed young people to work in national forests. The CCC evolved from the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) program, an interagency effort established on March 31, 1933, involving the Departments of Labor, Army, Interior, and Agriculture and administered by an interagency advisory board. From the beginning, the CCC program was intended as a temporary emergency measure, and therefore required reauthorization periodically. Camps of CCC enrollees, young men between the ages of 19 and 28, carried out emergency conservation work on each national forest. The Army was placed in charge of all CCC camps themselves, and controlled the enrollees when they were in camp. Alternatively, the Forest Service handled all the men while they were on the job, including their transporta- tion between camp and work points. A total of 166 camps were eventually authorized for California national forests and the enrollees set out to build a variety of building types, such as ranger stations, guard stations, offices, and large and small warehouses (Godfrey 2005). 1 One of the express purposes of the National Industrial Recovery Act was to conserve natural resources. Toward this end, NIRA set up lumber codes for industrial forests requir- ing practices based on sustained yield that would keep the land from becoming wholly unproductive, which was thought of as a great gain over the destructive methods previously in general use. Meanwhile, the Forest Service offered its knowledge and research experi- ence to industry through a lumber code that set forth minimum standards of logging with a conservation theme. However, on May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court declared NIRA’s code system unconstitutional because it unreasonably stretched the Commerce Clause of the constitution (Silcox 1934). 2 In 1939, the WPA changed its name to the Works Projects Administration. 168 The Search for Forest Facts: A History of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1926–2000 As will be seen, the California Forest and Range Experiment Station (CFRES) took advantage of the New Deal “alphabet” relief and recovery programs such as CWA, NIRA, PWA, WPA, and the CCC to obtain lands and construct many of its research facilities at a number of experimental forests that it would acquire during the New Deal years. These programs contributed indirectly to a new era for forestry research in California by supplementing the appropriations available through the Forest Service budget. However, these programs cut like a two-edged blade. They certainly helped build up needed CFRES facilities and bought experimental forest lands, but in some respects, regular dollars needed for research were forgone at the expense of these federal activities. Ironically, because these emergency programs dollars could not be used for research activities, CFRES was left at times with excellent facilities with no funding for conducting investigations. A National Plan for American Forestry: Copeland Report On that March morning of President Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, Earle Clapp, head of the Forest Service Research Branch, perhaps hoped that Congress and the president would move just as quickly on forestry issues as they seemed to be willing to attack the relief and recovery of the Nation from the Great Depression. Opportu- nity was not wanting. Shortly after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace submitted for the president’s consideration A National Plan for American Forestry (USDA FS 1933) (known more commonly as the Copeland Report)—a two-volume nearly 1,700-page report on the state of forestry in America with recommendations.3 Beside calling for planned forestry development through cooperative arrangements with forest industries for sustained yield and to build up 3 On March 27, 1933, A National Plan for American Forestry was transmitted to the Senate. The idea for this report, according to Clapp, developed during a meeting of a small group of people in the fall of 1931. While reviewing the forest situation from the standpoint of the responsibilities of research organizations in general, and of the research organization of the Forest Service in particular, they came to the conclusion that one imperative need was for an entirely fresh examination of the whole forestry situation in the United States as a basis for clarification and reorientation. This opportunity came “out of a clear sky” on March 30, 1932, months before the 1932 presidential election, when Senator Royal S. Copeland from New York called for a congressional investigation of forestry under Senate Resolution 175. The central purpose of Copeland’s investigation was to outline a coordinated plan that would “insure all of the economic and social benefits which can and should be derived from productive forests by fully utilizing the forest land” (Clapp 1934, Godfrey 2005). In July of that year, Earle Clapp wrote to all experiment station directors that the Copeland resolution offered a “great opportunity” to restate American forestry in a positive fashion, much like the Capper Report had done a decade earlier (Steen 1998). Regional Forester S.B. Show, along with Director Edward Kotok and his staff, responded to Clapp’s letter by preparing a lengthy, detailed, and very comprehensive report on California’s forestry situation including research (USDA FS 1932a). 169 GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PSW-GTR-233 public forests (Stuart 1933), the Copeland Report brought together the latest forestry information and included two sections on Forest Service research.4 The first section written by Clapp himself provided a history of the BR, which Clapp portrayed as a “nearly heroic struggle for independence from the administrative side of the agency.” Clapp’s chapter contained an impressive list of accomplishments. It also criticized previous Forest Service administrations for “routinely using Research as a dumping ground for those who did not fit well in Administration.” The second section, written by Earl Frothingham,5 provided a recommended research program for the future.

Load more