Paradise Found and Lost

...The pastoral musings of Vander-bilt's Agrarian Fugitives of the 1930s are generally regarded as a curious sideshow of America's intellectual history...

...Since the early 1950s, the debunking of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis has been something of a growth industry among chroniclers of the American past...

...It is also the story of how a European culture imposed its dominion over the North American continent and then proceeded to convert its wild bounty into something called real estate...

...Thus, at the end of 1976, the United States still held title to 97 per cent of Alaska, 86 per cent of Nevada, 66 per cent of Utah, 63 per cent of Idaho, and roughly half of the states of Oregon, Arizona, California, and Wyoming...

...It has not always been so...

...Most of its huge domain, which covers an area roughly the size of India, lies in the arid and mountainous West...

...started it in 1949, with his essay on "The City in American Civilization," historians have lined up like contestants at a county fair dunking booth, eager to affirm the significance of the city in American history and to knock poor Turner and his thesis into the hooped barrel below...

...Before the debunking of Turner, even before his 1893 thesis, writers as disparate as Walt Whitman, James Madison, Henry George, and Charles Beard sought to understand the nation's wealth and vision in terms of the land itself...

...The final chapters deal with the conservation movement, Alaska, oil shale, and prospects for the future...

...Schlesinger argued that to understand the American character, one must go to the city...

...Of these Federal lands, the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management holds about 60 per cent of the total...

...In a larger sense, however, this 536-page, abundantly documented study is a history of American land—from its occupation to its settlement, from its exploration to its exploitation...

...A reconsideration of the history of our land and of the history of land reform in America, Wyant writes, may serve "to recall the freedom and flexibility with which our forefathers discussed the nature of government and the propriety of property rights in the ownership of land...

...The book's middle describes the fate of specific resources under Federal stewardship—oil, coal, natural gas, timber-lands, hard-rock minerals, wetlands, and the continent's outer shelf...

...We are in a time when many citizens coming of age find themselves excluded from living space and employment...

...We may no longer be able to afford the raids of self-styled laissez-faire capitalists on vital public treasures...

...The subtitle of this otherwise excellent work is unfortunately restrictive because the book's scope is broad and deep...

...In an age of dwindling resources, he reminds us, we face hard choices...

...Sometimes it takes an energy shortage and an obscenity like Interior Secretary James Watt's proposals to open pristine wilderness areas to oil companies to remind Americans that much of this country remains unsettled—and that one third of it remains under Federal title...

...The story involves adventurers, swindlers, crooked politicians, boosters, earnest reformers, and an occasional enlightened public official who understood the waste and tried to stop it...

...Still, I know of no other book like it: no writer has explored with such breadth and single-mindedness the distance between Daniel Boone's yearning for "elbowroom" and the Manifest Destiny of Atlantic Richfield on Alaska's North Slope...

...In the final chapter, Wyant urges Americans to take up again the debate on land— its ownership, its use, its destiny...

...They also changed the locus of American historiography from the country to the city...

...Consequently, in recent years, most of America's best historians and social thinkers have addressed the making and growth of the nation's cities...

...Subject to legislative and statutory review, Uncle Sam is free to hold, lease, or give away these lands...

...Since Arthur Schles-inger Sr...

...Wyant negotiates his path with surefooted prose and an intellectual historian's sense of balance...

...some to railroads, timber operators, cattlemen, and mining companies...

...If the counsel of the past tells us anything, it is that a government that does not find remedies for such evils will go down...

...The next largest Federal land manager is the Agriculture Department's Forest Service, which controls about 25 per cent...

...Tom Chaffin (Tom Chaffin is a free-lance writer based in San Francisco...

...Without entering the debate, it's fair to assert that the ritual dousings of Turner altered more than our historical vision...

...Such realignments, however, do not occur in a vacuum: concurrent with the waning of Turner's influence, the nature of American culture became increasingly urban and suburban, and interest grew in the histories of blacks and other ethnic groups, most of whom tend to be poor and live in towns and cities...

...For any journalist or activist with that interest, it should become a standard reference work...

...I recommend this book to any reader, general or specialized, with an interest in America's destiny...

...That this book will probably not reach its proper audience is a measure of how little we can count on the marketplace to deliver the right goods to the right buyers...

...Ostensibly, Westward in Eden is a history of America's public lands and their fate under the stewardship of their absentee owner...

...Some went to states, some to homesteaders, some to veterans...

...Turner, in an 1893 paper, argued that the settling of the ever-receding American frontier was the critical experience in developing the national character...

...Much of his reporting here, though understated, has the audacity of muckraked material, even when he is writing about the events of a previous century...

...Between 1781 and 1976, he disposed of 1.144 billion acres...

...These figures come from William K. Wyant's Westward in Eden: The Public Lands and the Conservation Movement...

...It is easy to forget the staggering size of this country—with 3.5 million square miles, the fourth largest in area in the world...

...A historical vision that posits the essence of national culture in cities tends to emphasize the social geography of urban environments, not the natural geography of the land itself...

...The Federal Government retained title to very little of the land in the arable East and Midwest...

...Seventy-five per cent of America's 225 million people live on less than 16 per cent of its land...

...The story of how Congress gave the railroads an area three times the size of Colorado—about a third as much free land as the homesteaders got—almost makes Frank Norris's The Octopus look like an apologia for big industry...

...Westward in Eden opens with an overview of early North American exploration and settlement and moves quickly into the entrepreneurial Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries...

...But if modern times have done violence to America's agrarian myth, still the land abides—vast, mostly unsettled, in the best of times almost forgotten...

...Wyant, a former Washington reporter, brings the skills of both journalist and scholar to the effort...

...Few today talk seriously about Jefferson's vision of America as a race of yeoman farmers...

...Much—but not all—of the material in Westward in Eden will be familiar to readers of Bernard DeVoto, Roderick Nash, Wendell Berry, and Wallace Stegner...