The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Preserving Our Natural Heritage The Congressional Record is still my favorite journal. You go reading along, following the doings of the Senate or the House. One...
...I would not dare to guess her age...
...Now the members of the Senate concerned about further development of this great cause propose to hold another Governors' conference in 1958 to celebrate the golden anniversary of the earlier one...
...Gifford Pinchot--and she was on the pages of the Record because she had just testified before the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee of the Senate...
...Pinchot is a striking person, tall and straight with deeply marked features and vivid red hair--at least her hair used to be red...
...The encyclopedia tells me that Gifford Pinchot was born in 1865 and died in 1946...
...This star attraction was Mrs...
...This may not seem exciting to you, but it was to me...
...It was getting late, and I was ready to call it a day...
...Then, suddenly, you are jerked wide awake...
...At any rate, you have found here in this closely printed, unillustrated and dull-looking journal the lively stuff of history and human nature...
...I know that she said exactly what the old forester-Governor would have said had he been there...
...It was this meeting which gave the cause of conservation the needed push and definitely made it a part of the American economy...
...To Pinchot, you see, man himself is a natural resource, the basic and primary resource for whose material, moral and spiritual welfare the conservation doctrine is invoked...
...Among other things, he explained that our conservation movement really got started in a big way at a conference of state Governors in 1908...
...When I thought of the work which those two people had done together through their long life and then pictured her going on alone to speak for them both, it seemed to me that it would be difficult to contrive a more affecting or dramatic scene...
...Conservation to Gifford Pinchot was never a vague, fuzzy aspiration...
...Possibly Douglas or Humphrey says a few sharp words about the situation of the farmers...
...So last night I was dozing over the Record of June 13...
...Or Senator McNamara speaks for the unemployed of Michigan...
...It seems just the other day that I talked with him while Mrs...
...Or some undistinguished and not very bright statesman betrays the parochial quality of his mind and his vocabulary...
...It is well that young people should be reminded that there were Republicans of that sort in those days...
...On June 13, Senator Arthur Watkins, a member of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, made an enlightening statement before the committee about the work these men did and how they went about it...
...There are, of course, powerful reasons for holding a second great meeting on the subject of preserving and developing our continental heritage...
...Our whole Federal system designed to preserve and utilize our natural wealth-- soil, forests, waterways, minerals--was started by two Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot...
...And then suddenly there came before me an old friend, one of the most wonderful women this country has produced...
...Maybe Dick Neuberger or Wayne Morse opens up about the Hell's Canyon dam...
...Perhaps Senator McCarthy attacks the Supreme Court...
...Pinchot sat proudly by...
...Pinchot was called to contribute her ideas...
...Pinchot projected the scope of the whole idea in ringing words: "Beyond the preservation of the forests, beyond the reclamation of the soil, beyond the various techniques of land and flood control, over and above and back of all these stands the philosophy of conservation, the philosophy that informs and polarizes and directs action throughout...
...I have not seen her in many a year...
...It was in the hearings on this proposal that Mrs...
...One Senator or Representative after another rises to speak about this or that--and you have in your mind's eye a picture of either chamber with a thin sprinkling of the orator's colleagues listening to his eloquence...
...They were terrific men, full of ideas and energy...
...There are men and companies ?great and powerful groups--who are constantly trying to get hold of forest reserves, national parks, waterways or mineral resources in order to strip them for quick profits...
...Now he has been gone for ten years...
...Color, emotion, drama leap from the page...
...It was concrete, exact, dynamic--the application of science and technology to our material economy for the purpose of enhancing and elevating the life of the individual...
...The whole problem of wealth utilization and development must be thought through anew...
...But his lady appeared before that Senate committee and spoke in her deep contralto about the conservation of natural resources...
...Mrs...
...In every part of the country, there are self-centered people who try to nibble at the edges of the conservation provisions...
...No youthful and sparsely covered female exhibited in the pages of Life or Look could have aroused keener interest...
...Scientific advances require that we expand our protective and developmental measures rather than cut them down...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
