American Politics; 13; Rivers to the Ocean Run

This is National Educational Television. Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station, present American politics, of course, for television. With Professor Thomas H. Elliott, Chairman of the Department of Political Science of Washington University. Political issues have a way of becoming oversimplified in terms of black versus white, or even if you will, sometimes black versus black.

Our natural resources policies are a political issue and to some degree a partisan one. And in typical fashion, the partisans have boiled them down to two slogans with each with unpleasant connotations. Democrats accuse Republicans of a huge giveaway of our natural resources. Republicans answer that in the 20 years of democratic administrations from 32 until 52, the natural resources policies amounted to creeping socialism. Let's see if we can't state the issues in somewhat less loaded terms. Basically, I think the question is this. To what extent should the national government conserve and develop or exploit the national resources? To what extent and under what restrictions, if any, should these national resources be developed or exploited by private enterprise?

You may have noticed that in this last sentence or two, I have used the term not natural resources, but national resources. By that, I mean two things. First, let's remember that at one time, I guess before the lives of any of us now, more than one half of the land on our portion of the North American continent was owned by the people of the United States, or rather by the people's government, to the government of the United States. Even today, nearly a quarter of that land, approximately 700,000 square miles, is federal land, the property of all of us. Everything on and everything under this land is a national resource. Secondly, enduring strength of this country depends in part, certainly on its natural resources, including those in private hands.

If farmers carelessly deplete the soil, or lumbermen permanently destroy the forests, our national future is to that extent endangered. In the last analysis, then, and if you want to put it very broadly, everything in America that America needs to be strong, soil, water, oil, metal, lumber is a national resource. For a century after our constitution was adopted, our resources seemed to most people to be virtually limitless. Nobody seriously worried about destruction or waste. To be sure, as early as 1872, we began setting aside certain areas for permanent national use, but those were the national parks, beginning in 72, as I say, with Yellowstone.

This was simply because of the beauty and geographical grandeur and recreational value of these areas. Not until the turn of the century did conservation for more practical purposes, perhaps, become a real political issue. Then, in 1991, the came to the White House, a Republican president, who loved nature, loved the West, who loved the Great Outdoors, Fedor Roosevelt. To two men, especially he listened, to an Irrigation expert, and the young Mastashio and Tuziasque for forestry, Gifford Pinchot of Philadelphia, of Pennsylvania. Under Teddy Roosevelt's leadership, the Reclamation Act, the Reclamation Act, was passed, putting the federal government into the business of selling water, building irrigation canals, like the one you see here, irrigation canals taking water to dry areas, and selling that water to the small farmers, settling in those dry areas.

The deserts began indeed to bloom. Perhaps some of you have had this experience as I have, fly over long areas, long stretches of our West, after going for many minutes over perfectly brown, arid earth below you. Suddenly you will notice a great patch of green, and those patches of green are patches of green, because they are the beneficiaries of the water brought to them for irrigation purposes through the federally built reclamation canals. One of the typical ones of the typical part of this story of reclamation can be seen in one of these patches, happens to be one of the first ones I ever saw from the air, the Yakimov Valley in the state of Washington. In 1910, the Irrigation canals were built across the mountains into that dry area, and it bloomed, and it's now one of the most productive, especially fruit growing areas in the United States, if not in the world.

It cost about three and a half millions to build that canal. For 1910 until 1947, the water was sold to the farmers, and by 1947, the entire cost of that operation had been repaid out of the money that was paid as the purchase price of the water that was brought through those canals. Now this was a government enterprise to be sure, but think for a moment of the effect it had on private enterprise. Because during that period, not only did 25,000 acres get settled by private farmers, which had not been settled before, but so productive was that soil once the water was brought to it. That in those 37 years, the value of the total crop is grown and sold by private enterprises, amounted to $157 million.

As the one commentator put it, here the government was most successfully in business, but if it was most successfully in business, it was perhaps more importantly creating business for private enterprise. Under the leadership of Vidor Roosevelt, and here, especially to the dramatic forest propagandist, Mr. Pinchot, is a picture of the two of them, the United States Forestry Service was established early in this century. Last wooded areas were set aside in perpetuity for the people of the United States. Any private timbering of those national forests would be permitted thereafter, only on conditions that assured that there would be no depleation, no permanent depletion of this particular national resource. Well, wood is important, I don't share and I don't suppose so many others do, the passion that Mr. Pinchot had for it. Wood is certainly important, but let me turn now to the most basic resource of all, or at least one of the two most basic resources, the other one perhaps is soil.

What I refer to is again water, water to drink, water to make crops grow, water to finish the electric energy that turns the fields of industry. We have just seen how the national government put this public property, water, running water, to use as early as 192 to make the soil productive. For nearly 20 more years, however, it showed little concern for water as a source of electric energy. During that time, valuable dam sites, potential dam sites were virtually given away to whatever private company wanted to claim them. And these private developers might or might not make full use of the dam site once they had the license to build a dam there, not all of them actually build anything at all. It was under a democratic administration this time, that of Woodrow Wilson, that the Congress finally stepped into the picture. In 1920, it passed the Federal Water Power Act, which put conditions for the first time real conditions on handing over of these waterfalls to possible private developers, and provided that the government could recapture them if the private developers did not actually put them to full use.

As a matter of fact, neither of these steps, either under Teddy Roosevelt or under Wilson, were essentially partisan, geography, local interest, sometimes local selfishness, business pressures, all took a hand in breaking the party lines. In the 20s, the water power issue, which was now coming to the fore among natural resource issues, the issue of whether the federal government itself should go ahead and develop some of these biggest dam sites, if no private company wished to risk the capital involved, was fought out largely within the ranks of the then dominant Republican majority. George Norris of Nebraska, at least then, still a Republican, emerged as the champion of public power development, and for a time, another Republican, even more prominent, Herbert Hoover, appeared to be its most adamant opponent.

Even Mr. Hoover, however, compromised a certain extent, at least to the extent of sponsoring the actual federal construction of a great dam in Boulder Canyon in Colorado, a dam which only the federal government was willing to finance, the cost otherwise would have been prohibitive for any private enterprise. I think Mr. Hoover departed from his earlier reluctance to see the government build these dams, partly because he was an engineer and was fascinated by that side of it, and also because of the tremendous desperate need for water, which would be stored by this dam, in what is now Lake Mead, in the southwestern states, and for both water and electricity in the rapidly growing community of Los Angeles. Even so, Mr. Hoover then and thereafter, still insisted that the federal government, whatever it did with dam building, should stay out of the power business.

The electricity generated at any federal dam should be turned over to whatever private companies would buy it right at the dam, at the bus bar, as the engineers say. And the private company should then build the transmission lines itself to take the electricity from the dam to its own customers. The great change, and it was a marked change from this kind of policy, came in 1933 when the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. First, first in point of time anyway, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a new federal agency, was established and promptly went into the power business in a big way. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA, built dams, like the high-wassy dam that you see here, but it not only built dams, it also built transmission lines, and it sold electricity. Not to the power companies, for resale to the consumers, not to the middlemen, but directly to the users of that electricity.

Very shortly thereafter, the New Deal, moved in this subject matter, moved west, west into the enormously potential valley of the Columbia River. There it built dams first at Bonneville, and then the colossal dam at Grand Cooley, and again built a net of transmission lines to market the power developed by this falling water. Incidentally, Grand Cooley is a perfect example of the difficulty of private capital going into a program of this sort. The Grand Cooley dam, as built, was built in a desert about 60 miles away from anywhere. No private company would have been willing to risk its stockholders' money on such a fabulously expensive and risky venture. The federal government was able to do it, and no longer is there a great distance between the dam and the potential market for its power.

The irrigation that followed the electricity being there attracted the population in the adjacent area. Meanwhile, simultaneously, while it was going forward in this fashion, the Democratic Administration in the 30s made a frontal attack on the power companies themselves, on the private companies, the public utilities, so-called themselves. Many of these public utility corporations were actually owned by huge holding companies, and these holding companies, rightly or wrongly, had been accused of many practices, including practices which made regulation virtually impossible, and which allegedly raised the price of electricity to the consumers. The administration's bill in 1935 was aimed at simply abolishing these holding companies. That bill was passed on the key vote in the Senate. It passed by only a majority of one, and on that vote, here's the way the parties divided.

The Democrats, in favor of abolishing the holding companies, consistent with the administration's public power, if you will, policy, divided 36 for it and 29 against it. The Republicans, of whom there were not very many, then, in the Senate, divided against the abolition of the holding companies, 9 to 15. Both parties divided, but the Democratic majority, for the public power, as it were, and the large group of the Republicans, upholding the private enterprise position as represented by the public utilities and the holding companies. With all the new dams, all the growth of federal electric power, it still remains true that only about 13 percent of the total generating capacity of the nation is today in federal hands, about 13 percent. Nevertheless, this fact indicates that in some areas, government power, public power, may be, and is, a substantial competitor of private business.

And this, I take it, is the chief basis of the charge of creeping socialism, leveled at the Democratic policies. I saw an advertisement just the other day in a magazine published by America's independent electric light and power companies, as they call themselves. This group, presumably representing about 80 percent, about 80 percent, of the total generating capacity in the United States, asked this question, I read it. Are the advocates of federal government electric power really interested in plenty of electricity for all Americans, as they so often claim, or are they interested primarily in building a government power monopoly? This is a question asked by the owners of 80 percent of the electrical capacity, about the aims of the group that owns about 13 percent of the total generating capacity. The rest of this advertisement goes on to say that the public power people are deliberately trying to prevent any dams being built unless they can be public power dams.

And this brings us, I think, to the consideration of the Eisenhower administration in the year 1956. There are good many complications about that, and some of them I just haven't got the time to examine. I cannot, for instance, possibly go into the very great complications of the Dixon-Yates affair, so-called, which Democrats charged, was intended to undermine the TVA. A good deal simpler, and perhaps more typical, is the issue typified by the controversy over Hell's Canyon in the state of Idaho, on the Snake River. Here the former administration, the Democratic administration, the Truman administration, wanted to build a very high dam, which would yield a great amount of electric energy. A private corporation, the Idaho Power Company, wanted very much to build, instead, three low dams. The weight, I think, it's fair to say, that the weight of expert testimony indicated that all three dams together would generate on the whole less electric power than the single high dam.

There's some question about that. In any event, the Republican administration, when it came into office, dropped the plan for a high government dam, and in effect supported the Idaho Power Company's application to occupy this very important and valuable site. This, I think, is fair to say, is typical of present Republican policy. The most recent Hoover Commission report illustrates this. The Hoover Commission report denounces government competition with private enterprise in the electric power field. It calls it, and I quote, the negation of our fundamental economic system, unquote. If anywhere there is a real need for dams, this is what the Hoover Commission says. If anywhere there's a real need for dams, which are too expensive for private enterprise to finance, the government should build the dams, but the power should be sold at the dam to the private utilities who could then retail it at the profit to its own customers.

The editor-in-chief of the Hoover Commission reports says that these objectives, as I've just outlined them, and I quote again, are similar in all respects, in all respects, to the power policy developed by President Eisenhower and the leaders of his administration, unquote. On the opposite side, I think it's fair to summarize the Democratic Party policy as a whole about his follows. Falling water as a national resource can be properly used by the national government. And if the government does build a dam, the public, the consumers, should get the benefit of the resulting cheap power rather than the private power companies. To the expressed fears that I've mentioned several times about government monopoly, the Democrats would answer that the government, in fact, develops less than one-sixth of the nation's total hydroelectric power.

To the charge of creeping socialism, they would reply by pointing to the TVA and saying that there, since the TVA has been established in the 23 years since then, private enterprise has flourished in the Tennessee Valley, as it never did before. One other point. The President has spoken of power developments, preferably in partnership, as he calls it, in partnership with the states and local governments. The Democrats, or some of them, would claim that this has no practical meaning, whatever. Our next lecture in this series is going to be about labor, but the one after that, the final one in the whole series, will concern federal state relationships. Perhaps at that time, we can return to a consideration of this concept of partnership between federal and state governments in the public utilities field. Now, I think we have just time to take a quick look at the politics of one other, natural or national resource, and a very important one, oil.

Oil got into politics in a very big way in the 1920s. The Harding administration was smeared with it, but at the same time, very shortly thereafter, a leading Democratic contender for his own party's presidential nomination, that saw his try fail because of a previous connection of a legal nature with an oil company. Congress, without any party fight, wrote into the tax law's special favors, depletion allowances for the oil producers, by and large, and it's partly because of that tax law. Today, most of today's new millionaires, I think, are oil millionaires, and in politics, money talks. It talks so loud that, in some degree, it seems to have caused the split in the Democratic Party. Off the shore of some of our southern states, but more particularly off the shores of Texas and Louisiana, underwater and submerged lands are oil deposits.

These deposits prior to 1953 belonged to the American people. They were national property. In the 1952 campaign, the Republican Party advocated giving these deposits to the states. The Democratic platform, and particularly the Democratic candidate, said that they should not be given to the states. They should not be given away. The Democratic governor of Texas, the state most affected more affected than any other, thereupon announced his support of General Eisenhower, and, as you will recall, Texas went Republican. In 1953, the Republicans having won the election, Congress enacted a law giving this hitherto national property to the states, or whose shores the oil deposits were. The vote was as follows. In the House, the Republicans were, for giving the tidalands oil, so-called, the offshore oil to the states, and away from the government, 188 to 18. And the Democrats divided almost evenly, but voted on the whole for it, 97 to 89.

In the Senate, it was a rather similar picture. The Republicans were for it, 35 to 9, and the Democrats divided again almost equally this time a little bit against it. Now, 21, those are almost right, 21 to 25. The reasons for this close Democratic vote, as compared to the rather unanimous Republican vote, I will come to it in a moment. First, let me turn to a second phase of the oil picture in the President's administration and its dealings with natural resources. The second point I want to make was one of an administrative nature, an administrative rather than a congressional action. It typifies, however, much of the present Republican policy, respecting property under federal control. In the less than three years, or approximate three years, that Mr. Douglas McKay of Oregon, was Secretary of the Interior, for he resigned in 56 to run for the Senate. Under his administration of the Department of the Interior, 274, 274 leases were written, enabling oil companies to drill for oil in national wildlife refuges.

Third, we're back to Congress again, came the contest over the so-called natural gas bill, a matter of primary concern to the oil industry. The oil man, putting it bluntly, wanted to build past exempting national gas from federal price control. Congress passed the bill. The House vote on the natural gas bill was the Republicans for it, 123 to 67. They Democrats against it, 86 to 136, close vote. In the Senate, the Republicans were for it again, more strongly than they had been in the House, 31 to 14.

And the Democrats were almost evenly divided, slightly against it, 24 to 22. Now why again, in this case, as in the earlier vote that I portrayed there, were the Democrats sort of ambivalent, sort of evenly divided? I think the answer is pretty plain, possibly it may be something to do with the old-fashioned ideas about state's rights, but I think not. I think much more important is the fact that the Democratic leadership in both houses came from a state deeply concerned with these issues and in favor of the oil producers position. The state of Texas, the leaders being in the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn, and in the Senate, Senator Lyndon Johnson. President Eisenhower vetoed that bill, as you will recall, but he did so expressly because of the charges of bribery that clouded the issue at the time the final vote was taken. Money talked too loud that time.

The President said that he still favored what the oil men wanted, the exemption of natural gas from federal controls. Well, the party differences on oil are perhaps less clear-cut than the cleavage on other natural resource issues. By and large, we still have a discernible difference. There are Republicans inclining to encourage private enterprise to develop and sell for profit the public's resources. The Democrats inclining to resist demands for such private use and to favor public development and sale where sound conservation practices permit any development. You can call the first policy giveaways and the second creeping socialism if you like. American politics is presented by Washington University and KETC Channel 9, the St. Louis Educational Television Station and Production Center.

This is National Educational Television.