| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Public Lands and Political Meaning: Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them. By Karen R. Merrill. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xix + 274 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $50.00.)

Merrill explains that she has looked "at the [livestock] industry's changing ideas about public rangelands" from early organizational efforts by ranchers to their emergence as "a significant political lobby" (p. 3). First sketching the grazing industry at the turn of the twentieth century, and the extent and administration of public lands, she describes the U. S. Forest Service and its range policies, noting also the emergence of major livestock growers associations. Key later developments included enlarged homesteads, the enhanced wartime status of stock growers, criticism of homesteading, the post-war depression, denunciation of the Forest Service in the 1920s, Herbert Hoover's associationism, and the proposal to cede the ranges to the states. In the depressed 1930s, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act, drafted to organize the range lands into grazing districts. Thereafter the Departments of Agriculture and Interior contested for control, a victorious secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, found it necessary to fire the department's first director of the Grazing Service, ranchers increasingly protested against regulation, congressmen attacked the service, and it was ultimately merged in the Bureau of Land Management. When ranchers demanded title, impassioned Bernard DeVoto asserted the American peoples' claim to these lands—environmentalists had joined the battle.

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