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The Environmental Movements
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What factors influenced the conservation and wilderness-preservation movements that emerged in America during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and what were their goals?
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Construct your arguments using the documents provided below as well as your knowledge of the time period.
Primary source: Jacob Riis, "Five Cents a Spot, Unauthorized Lodgings in a Bayard Street Tenement, c. 1890," photograph.
Background information: Jacob Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun newspaper, helped raise awareness about the conditions of the urban poor with his 1890 publication, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. This book would later influence Theodore Roosevelt.
Jacob Riis, "Five Cents a Spot, Unauthorized Lodgings in a Bayard Street Tenement, c. 1890," photograph, in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1890.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
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Primary source: F.B. Tracy, "Why the Farmers Revolted," magazine article, 1893.
Background information: This article appeared in the magazine Forum in 1893, during a time when many American farmers were facing great distress.
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The land question, also, is a source of righteous complaint. Much of the land of the West, instead of being held for actual settlers, has been bought up by speculators and Eastern syndicates in large tracts. They have done nothing to improve the land and have simply waited for the inevitable settler who bought cheaply a small "patch" and proceeded to cultivate it. When he had prospered so that he needed more land, he found that his own labor had increased tremendously the value of the adjacent land. . .
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F.B. Tracy, "Why the Farmers Revolted," Forum 16 (October 1893): 242–43.
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Primary source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, essay, 1893.
Background information: After the 1890 census, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an essay on the role of the American frontier in shaping the American character.
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But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.
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From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier form colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for the opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect on a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint in triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lesson, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
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Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893) in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 1–38.
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Primary source: Northern Pacific Railroad Advertisement, 1900.
Background information: This Northern Pacific Railroad advertisement appeared in a 1900 issue of Harper's Weekly. The advertisement promotes travel to Yellowstone National Park.
Northern Pacific Railroad Advertisement, Harper's Weekly, 44, no. 2270 (23 June 1900), 568.
Courtesy of American Studies at the University of Virginia.
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Primary source: Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, 1902.
Background information: The future president, Theodore Roosevelt, discusses the importance of physical health and strength for American males.
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Nowadays, whatever other faults the son of rich parents may tend to develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all his associates of his own age to bear himself well in manly exercises and to develop his body--and therefore, to a certain extent, his character--in the rough sports which call for pluck, endurance, and physical address.
Of course boys who live under such fortunate conditions that they have to do either a good deal of outdoor work or a good deal of what might be called natural outdoor play do not need this athletic development. In the Civil War the soldiers who came from the prairie and the backwoods and the rugged farms where stumps still dotted the clearings, and who had learned to ride in their infancy, to shoot as soon as they could handle a rifle, and to camp out whenever they got the chance, were better fitted for military work than any set of mere school or college athletes could possibly be. . .
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Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York: Century, 1902), 156–57.
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Primary source:
Reclamation Act/Newlands Act of 1902.
Background information: The Reclamation Act / Newlands Act of 1902 allowed the government to undertake irrigation projects to establish farms for relief of urban congestion. The bill was named for its author, Francis Griffith Newlands, Democratic Representative from Nevada. The Reclamation Service, created in July 1902, was established a month later and eventually became the Bureau of Reclamation.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all moneys received from the sale and disposal of public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, beginning with the fiscal year ending June thirtieth, nineteen hundred and one, including the surplus of fees and commissions in excess of allowances to registers and receivers, and excepting the five per centum of the proceeds of the sales of public lands in the above States set aside by law for educational and other purposes, shall be, and the same are hereby, reserved set aside, and appropriated as a special fund in the Treasury to be known as the "reclamation fund," to be used in the examination and survey for and the construction and maintenance of irrigation works for the storage, diversion, and development of waters for the reclamation or arid and semiarid lands in the said States and Territories, and for the payment of all other expenditures provided for in this Act . . . .
SEC 5. That the entryman upon lands to be irrigated by such works shall, in addition to compliance with the homestead laws, reclaim at least one-half of the total irrigable area of his entry for agricultural purposes, and before receiving patent for the lands covered by his entry shall pay to the Government the charges apportioned against such tract, as provided in section four. No right to the use of water for land in private ownership shall be sold for a tract exceeding one hundred and sixty acres to any one landowner, and no such sale shall be made to any landowner unless he be an actual bona fide resident on such land, or occupant thereof residing in the neighborhood of said land, and no such right shall permanently attach until all payments therefor are made . . .
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Reclamation Act / Newlands Act of 1902, 57th Cong., 1st sess., ch. 1093 (June 17, 1902): Public, no. 161.
Courtesy of the Center for Columbia River History.
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Primary source: Theodore Roosevelt, "Seventh Annual Message to Congress," 1907.
Background information: In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt explained in a speech to Congress the purpose of the Conservation Movement and how the government would seek to implement its goals.
To the Senate and House of Representatives:
. . . . The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life . . . As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. For the last few years, through several agencies, the government has been endeavoring to get our people to look ahead and to substitute a planned and orderly development of our resources in place of a haphazard striving for immediate profit. Our great river systems should be developed as national water highways, the Mississippi, with its tributaries, standing first in importance, and the Columbia second, although there are many others of importance on the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Gulf slopes. The National Government should undertake this work, and I hope a beginning will be made in the present Congress; and the greatest of all our rivers, the Mississippi, should receive special attention. From the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi there should be a deep waterway, with deep waterways leading from it to the East and the West. Such a waterway would practically mean the extension of our coastline into the very heart of our country. It would be of incalculable benefit to our people. If begun at once it can be carried through in time appreciably to relieve the congestion of our great freight-carrying lines of railroads. The work should be systematically and continuously carried forward in accordance with some well-conceived plan. The main streams should be improved to the highest point of efficiency before the improvement of the branches is attempted; and the work should be kept free from every taint of recklessness or jobbery. The inland waterways which lie just back of the whole Eastern and Southern coasts should likewise be developed. Moreover, the development of our waterways involves many other important water problems, all of which should be considered as part of the same general scheme. The government dams should be used to produce hundreds of thousands of horse-power as an incident to improving navigation; for the annual value of the unused water-powered of the Untied States perhaps exceeds the annual value of the products of all our mines. As an incident to creating the deep waterways down the Mississippi, the government should build along its whole lower length levees which, taken together with the control of the headwaters, will at once and forever put a complete stop to all threat of floods in the immensely fertile delta region. The territory lying adjacent to the Mississippi along its lower course will thereby become one of the most prosperous and populous, as it already is one of the most fertile, farming regions in all the world. I have appointed an inland waterways commission to study and outline a comprehensive scheme of development along all the lines indicated. Later I shall lay its report before the Congress.
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Theodore Roosevelt, "Seventh Annual Message to Congress" (3 December 1907) at New Perspectives on the West.
Courtesy of PBS, New Perspectives on the West.
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Primary source: Marsden Manson, "Petition . . . on behalf of the City and County of San Francisco . . . for Reservoir Rights of Way in the Hetch Hetchy Valley and Lake Eleanor Sites in the Yosemite National Park," 1908.
Background information: San Francisco petitioned Congress for use of the Hetch Hetchy area of Yosemite National Park for reservoir rights. The petition was presented at the congressional hearing before the Committee on the Public Lands of the House of Representatives.
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. . .
The honorable Secretary of the Interior.
Sir: On behalf of the city and county of San Francisco, I respectfully petition you to exercise your supervisory authority and reopen the matter of the application of James D. Phelan for reservoir rights of way in the Hetch Hetchy Valley and Lake Eleanor sites in the Yosemite National Park. This application was made October 15, 1901, by James D. Phelan, then mayor, in conjunction with an effort that was being made to secure an adequate and pure supply of water for the city and county of San Francisco, and was assigned to said city and county February 20, 1903, in order to carry out the original intent in making the application and that the city might be of record as the successor to any rights that may have been gained by the application. Subsequently, on December 22, 1903, the application was rejected on the ground that the Secretary of the Interior did not have power to allow such right of way within the Yosemite National Park. Thereafter I, as the representative of the said city and county, came to Washington and asked for a reconsideration of the matter. This reconsideration was granted in the form of a request for an opinion from the Attorney-General concerning the Secretary's contention that he did not have the power. The Attorney-General held that the Secretary of the Interior had full power, and that it was merely a matter of administrative judgment as to whether the application for rights of way should or should not be granted. . .
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U.S. House Committee on the Public Lands, Petition of Marsden Manson, City Engineer of San Francisco, on Behalf of the City and County of San Francisco, to the Secretary of the Interior Department, Washington, D.C., to Reopen the Matter of the Application of James D. Phelan for Reservoir Rights of Way in the Hetch Hetchy Valley and Lake Eleanor Sites in the Yosemite National Park: Hearing Held before the Committee on the Public Lands of the House of Representatives, December 16, 1908, on House Joint Resolution 184, part 2, 60th Cong., 1st sess., 7 May 1908.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of San Francisco.
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