WINNING THE WEST FOR THE DEMOCRATS
Neuberger, Richard L.
Winning the West For the Democrats by RICHARD L. NEUBERGER TN NO realm of government has the present national Administration been so abysmally backward as in custodianship of the nation's limited...
...All of this weighed heavily on Western consciousness when the people voted November 6. They were aware that the Republican Administration, alarmed over the loss of almost 3,000,000 acre-feet of flood-control storage at Hells Canyon, was proposing alternative projects which inevitably would choke off fish pilgrimages and flood the forage grounds of big-game animals...
...Its House of Representatives at the state capitol is Democratic, and the Democrats hold RICHARD I. NEUBERGER, Democratic Senator from Oregon, has specialized in his writing and political career on conservation of natural resources...
...They may never do this, but they like to contemplate the prospect...
...On November 6, Langlie became his state's most overwhelmingly-defeated Senatorial candidate of modern times...
...Its legislature had not been Democratic since 1878...
...It has elected a Democratic governor...
...The reason, of course, was that private utilities would not touch six-mill-per-kilowatif-hour power in Colorado, but they covet two-mill sites in Oregon and Idaho...
...This state, alone with rock-ribbed Maine and Vermont, never elected a Democratic Senator while Roosevelt was President...
...Bad legislation dealing with taxes, agriculture, labor, or highways can be corrected at a later date...
...Unwise policies in the field of resources are different from those anywhere else in government...
...That is why a resource-conscious nation would hasten to put its Western railroads under trolley wires stoked with water power, while precious stores of oil were thus saved for future generations...
...This action was condemned unanimously by a House committee of 17 Democrats and 12 Republicans as threatening the entire original purpose of the refuges, which of course has been the protection of waterfowl and other wild species...
...The bearded naturalist John Muir once observed, "While only God can grow a tree, only Uncle Sam can save a tree...
...Winning the West For the Democrats by RICHARD L. NEUBERGER TN NO realm of government has the present national Administration been so abysmally backward as in custodianship of the nation's limited remaining supply of natural resources...
...Such inconsistency deluded no one, not even its potential beneficiaries...
...6. No invasion of national parks and monuments for such commercial activities as logging, mining, or reservoirs...
...Each day of the year 18,000,000 barrels of petroleum are burned for fuel...
...It seems certain that the world's annual production of petroleum will have fallen far behind demand by 1965...
...2. Development by the federal government of multi-purpose sites on major rivers, where such benefits as power, navigation, irrigation, and flood control are jointly involved...
...Seaton had the effrontery to indorse the "partnership" program with this statement: "We see no reason to inflict the whole burden of financing of these projects on the federal government wherever and whenever non-federal interests are willing to assume a share...
...Pleasant Valley would provide a subsidy for irrigation works, although Republicans referred to this feature of the Hells Canyon project as a "handout...
...Then the government gets the fish ladders, navigation locks, and flood gates as its share...
...The passenger pigeon once was slaughtered indiscriminately, and not another one of these lovely birds ever will be seen again...
...3. Substitution of a high federal dam at Hells Canyon for the low-dam scheme of the Idaho Power Company, and an end to fiscal policies designed to garrote the TVA...
...The American voter, never fooled for long, sensed this fact...
...5. No blockading of rivers where major runs of migratory fish will be shut off from spawning grounds...
...The Indians said the Columbia River would flow to the sea "as long as grass grows on the hills and the sun sets in the sky...
...Yet, inasmuch as the Eisenhower Administration presumably intends to take another look at an area where its policies have been singularly inimical to the public interest for nearly four years, I would like to propose a 10-point program which I trust will be found worthy of study by Mr...
...Eugene Ayres, former manager of research for the Gulf Oil Company, recently wrote in Scientific American: "We can now forecast reliably that production of oil will begin to decline in the United States in 10 or 15 years, and in the rest of the world not very long afterward...
...If the fabulous Chinook pilgrimages of the Salmon River are denied their spawning grounds, they may go the way of the passenger pigeon...
...It had elected only one Democratic Senator in history by popular vote, prior to 1956...
...The United States consumes half this prodigious torrent...
...They are harnessing to the full such immense rivers as the Volga and Yenisei...
...9. Elimination of favoritism in the sale of federal timber stumpage, in setting rates for federal water-power contracts, and in the leasing of federal acreage for livestock grazing...
...It is inexhaustible...
...This explains why, after they had voted for the soldier-hero for President, so many of them cast their ballots for Democratic candidates for the Senate and the House...
...pool assets to erect a great power project...
...In the West, where are concentrated such of our resources as survive, the Republicans faltered badly on Election Day despite the personal victory of President Eisenhower at the top of their ticket...
...The Pleasant Valley Dam would be owned by the government, although leading Republicans described a government-owned dam at Hells Canyon as "socialistic...
...After the precincts had been heard from, Charles A. Sprague, a former Republican governor of Oregon and distinguished journalistic winner of the Lovejoy Memorial Award, wrote in his Salem Statesman: "Had the Republicans held to the program of federal development of the Columbia and its main tributaries, leaving other power sites for local or private development, they would have held public confidence in greater degree...
...The federal projects in the Columbia River system—Bonneville, Grand Coulee, Hungry Horse, etc.—are $77,000,000 ahead of the repayment schedule set up by Congress, and this includes interest as well as principal...
...His conqueror was Warren G. Magnuson, Democrat, a supporter of federal power development in the Columbia Basin...
...Now that the election has gone so adversely for them in the Western states, the Republicans are entertaining some weird afterthoughts...
...7. An end to surrendering national forest timber under the guise of dubious mining claims, with the eventual separation of surface from sub-surface rights on public lands...
...The people of the West didn't want Uncle Sam to fall into the wrong hands...
...This could be the case, however, because it seems to be based solely on the decisive defeats Republican nominees suffered in the Western states November 6, rather than on any genuine feeling of alarm over the fate of forests, rivers, wildlife, and fisheries...
...They have never been free of it, nor of such McKay programs as opening up national wildlife refuges to wholesale oil and gas prospecting...
...Expansion and improvement in national parks and national forests of such recreational facilities as campgrounds, trails, lodges, and access roads...
...At the root of the Republicans' dif ficulty in the West lurks the fact that they are motivated in their approach to resources by private favoritism rather than by the public welfare It is not even a question of philosophical opposition to federal power, projects...
...He reaffirmed his support of the "partnership" power scheme, under which the government and private utilities...
...Nixon and his associates: 1. A national water-management plan aimed at cleaning up stream pollution and safeguarding watersheds from the mountains to the sea...
...Whether the "reappraisal" will be agonizing is presently not known...
...This implies that federal hydroelectric undertakings are a total loss to the government, yet the Bonneville Power Administration has collected over $400,000,000 from the sale of energy since 1939...
...8. Protection of the existing boundaries of wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and similar reserves...
...Republican subservience to private utilities helped accomplish this outcome—and the Republicans know it.-It is against this background that Americans must consider the Administration's sudden decision recently proclaimed to conduct a so-called "reappraisal" of its policies on natural resources...
...Nothing is so sharp a prod as failure...
...In the interval, the company has cut more than 2,000,000 board-feet of valuable fir and pine timber, but it has not mined a teaspoonful of ore...
...The New York Times reported that the heaviest Administration political pressure during President Eisenhower's tenure was exerted to save Hells Canyon for the Idaho Power Company...
...Had this same ratio of Democratic success prevailed elsewhere in the country, the Democrats now would control Congress with a majority reminiscent of the brightest political hours of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...At Hells Canyon, finest power site left in the land, the massive influence of the White House was used to push through a private-utility program resulting in permanent loss of over 400,000 firm kilowatts of energy and of nearly 3,000,000 acre-feet of flood-control storage...
...Evidently the construction of a federal dam in the wrong place removes all ideological objections, particularly if the cream of the Snake River's force and futy is jealously guarded for the Idaho Power Company...
...The Russians, with their ambitions for eventual world domination, realise the strategic importance of energy reserves...
...The hostility of the Administration to great water-power projects calls forth another issue—one sharpened by the crisis flaming over the oil riches of the Middle East...
...Millions of Americans love to think of hiking, camping, fishing, or mountain-climbing in the majestic grandeur of the West...
...Former Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman once told me that Bonneville Dam was "an oil well which will never run dry, a coal mine that will never thin out...
...4. Use of falling water for fuel wherever possible, thus sparing our stores of such exhaustible resources as oil, coal, and natural gas...
...Furthermore, the Administration advocated the abandonment of Dinosaur National Monument to inundation by a commercial reservoir...
...This is the high-water level for any Democratic tide in the annals of Oregon...
...Of eight Senate seats at stake in the states sprawling between the Continental Divide and the Pacific Ocean, six were won by Democratic candidates...
...The utilities, on the other hand, obtain the only revenue-producing feature of the dam—the powerhouse...
...it might have furnished the excuse of "me too" for big absentee lumber corporations which hope to log the irreplaceable spruce, fir, and cedar "rain forests" of Olympic National Park...
...In resources, however, the damage can be for eternity...
...It took a tenacious fight for more than three years by such groups as the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Wildlife Management Institute to discourage the Administration from pressing a policy that would have reversed many decades of protection for national parks and monuments...
...Mr...
...Faith in the forthcoming "reappraisal" has been weakened by a speech Secretary of the Interior Seaton delivered in Salt Lake City several weeks after the election...
...If ill-considered dams at Bruces Eddy and Penny Cliffs flood the feeding domain of the Lochsa elk herds, America's largest group of these animals may starve to death— and death is so irrevocable...
...a 15-to-15 deadlock with the Republicans in the State Senate...
...During these negotiations, Governor Arthur B. Langlie of Washington, Republican National Convention keynoter, said it was not too important if Canada even diverted the upper Columbia River...
...Had the assignment gone to a person closely identified with conservation instead of with partisan politics, the "reappraisal" might be accepted with less skepticism...
...Falling water, by contrast, goes on forever...
...Yet, today, Oregon has two Democrats in the U. S. Senate...
...This would be at a site known as Pleasant Valley...
...But the, Eisenhower Ad ministration, while against federal development of Hells Canyon or the John Day site in the Columbia Basin, favored federal development of far less propitious locations on the Upper Colorado River...
...This would have set the precedent for similar invasion of other units of the National-Park system...
...Power generated by the burning of oil, coal, or natural gas relies upon resources which are not limitless...
...But while Russia erects dams bigger than Grand Coulee, negotiations collapse between Canada and the United States for a colossal storage project at Mica Creek, in British Columbia, which would enormously increase power production along the Columbia River on both sides of the international boundary...
...Once the Idaho Power Company has penned the Snake River behind its small dams, the towering high barrier at Hells Canyon will probably never be built within the life-span of any person now living...
...This kind of episode has pursued McKay and other GOP nominees like a Mountie...
...That approach by a steadfast conservative like the late Senator Robert A. Taft could be readily un-derstood...
...The Eisenhower Administration has placed in charge of these delicate negotiations former Governor Len Jordan of Idaho, an implacable critic of the federal dams that would expand their output if the mediation with Canada were successful...
...This is not to minimize the harm done, but ultimate solution is possible...
...This is tantamount to a department-store partnership, in which one partner gets the sales counters and cash registers, while the other partner must, be content with revolving doors, elevators, escalators, and drinking;' fountains...
...One is that they should favor a federal dam on the Snake River, but not at Hells Canyon...
...In addition, the Soviet Union possesses 28 per cent more unharnessed hydroelectricity than all of North America...
...If all government ventures were so successful financially, the Treasury now would not be burdened with a vast national debt...
...When he was head of the Interior Department, Douglas McKay relinquished 15 controversial claims in the Rogue River National Forest to an Alabama mining corporation...
...They bristle with indignation when somebody gives hint of forfeiting this grandeur to private gain or greed...
...In Oregon and Idaho the voters backed the Democratic Senatorial" candidates, Wayne Morse and Frank Church, and they also did in Colorado, where they elected John Carroll over the President's fishing companion, Dan Thornton...
...Indeed, the Administration has virtually admitted as much because Vice President Nixon, never known as a disciple of Gifford Pinchot or George Norris, is to preside over the "reappraisal...
...That was nearly three years ago...
...Three out of its four national House members are Democrats...
...Most significant of all the election results in any state occurred in Oregon...
...And many Westerners are aware that our fisheries and our wild-animal population, once seemingly inexhaustible, have become gravely menaced as civilization has moved in aggressively upon the wilderness...
...The main purpose appears to be not so much the saving of natural resources, but the saving of Republican politicians whose constituents care greatly about natural resources...
...This may have been good for the absentee owners of Idaho Power, but it was not good for such Republican Senatorial nominees as McKay of Oregon, Langlie of Washington, and Welker of Idaho on Election Day...
Vol. 21 • January 1957 • No. 1
