Conservation Through Engineering / Extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior

by Franklin K. Lane

Within a 10–mile circle drawn around the Capitol dome are thousands of acres of good agricultural land, of which the merest fraction has been reduced to intensive cultivation. Much of it is wastefully used, and much of it is not used at all. Conditions of soil, climate, and water supply are good and represent a fair average for the United States. Suburban transportation is a serious problem in some localities and less so in others, but tends to become more simple with the extension of good roads and increasing use of motor vehicles, including the auto bus.

Somewhere and sometime, it seems to me, a new system must be devised to disperse the people of great cities on the vacant lands surrounding them, to give the masses a real hold upon the soil, and to replace the apartment house with the home in a garden. Such a system should enable the ambitious and thrifty family not only to save the entire cost of rent, but possibly half the cost of food, while at the same time enhancing its standard of living socially and spiritually, as well as economically.

It has been suggested that there is no better place to demonstrate a new form of suburban life than here at the National Capital, where we may freely draw upon all the resources of the governmental departments for expert knowledge and advice and where the demonstration can readily command wide publicity and come under the observation of the Nation's lawmakers. And I am expecting that this experiment will be made. Such a plan of town or community life, rather than city life, should be extended to every other large city in the Nation. A simple act of legislation, accompanied by a moderate appropriation for organization and educational work, would enable the department to put its facilities at the service of local communities and of the industries throughout the United States. This form of national leadership would be of value both to investors in the local securities and to the home builders themselves. If the work of land acquisition and construction, together with the organization of community settlements resulting therefrom, were conducted under the supervision of the State or the Federal Government it would safeguard the character of the movement from every point of view.

Therefore, I put first among the constructive things which may be done by the exercise of the Government's power of supervision and direction, with the smallest outlay of money, this matter of providing suburban homes for our millions of wage earners.

RECLAMATION BY DISTRICT ORGANIZATION.

The provision of garden homes for millions of city workers will contribute largely to the Nation's food supply and become in time a most effective influence in reducing excessive cost of living for many of our people. It will not, of course, solve the problem of increasing the number of farms and the area of cultivation to meet the needs of growing population. Neither will it enable us to expand our home market rapidly and largely enough to keep the country on an even keel of prosperity.

We must go forward with the development of natural resources as we have done for the past three centuries. And we must recognize at the outset that conditions have changed with the depletion of the public domain to the point where it offers comparatively little in the way of cultivable lands.

We have now to deal principally with lands in private ownership. This calls for a new point of view and for the application of a somewhat different principle than that which has governed our reclamation policy heretofore. Moreover, reclamation is no longer an affair of one section of the United States. The day has come when it must be nationalized and extended to all parts of the Republic.

To the deserts of the West we have brought the creative touch of water, and we must find a way to go on with this work. But it is of equal importance that we should liberate rich areas now held in bondage by the swamp, convert millions of acres of idle cut-over lands to profitable use, and raise from the dead the once vigorous agricultural life of our abandoned farms.

One more fundamental consideration—we have outlived our day of small things. Whether we would or not, we are compelled by the inexorable law of necessity arising out of existing physical conditions to cooperate, to work together, and to employ large-scale operations, and on this principle we should move: Not what the Government can do for the people, but what the people can do for themselves under the intelligent and kindly leadership of the Government.