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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. Map, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00
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| "Git off my land!" These words resonate with an American respect for private property. But public lands are something different. Or are they? Karen Merrill struggles with this question as she analyzes the federal government's ever-tightening grip upon lands of the public domain in the twentieth century. Two principal milestones on this road, the establishment of national forests early in the century and the Taylor Grazing Act during the Great Depression, tried to settle the question of who owns what. On the rangelands, ambiguities about ownership persisted in conflicts over grazing permits: Stock operators argued "rights," government land managers "privilege." |
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Some will say this is an old story. But Merrill's argument contributes mightily to our understanding of how disputes arose about the lands that separate ranchers and government. The reviewer uses the word "argument" because throughout the text the author repeatedly asserts, "I would argue ..." The argument includes an interpretation of the nature of property and quotes legal scholars who describe property not as an absolute but rather as a "bundle of rights or sticks." The analyses and the arguments do not always make for easy reading, especially when the reader is asked to comprehend the opaque meanings of "slippages" which may mean (or not mean) a transformation of meaning in words and mental images between persons and groups over time. |
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Two lines of analysis appear. The first involves a growing disaffection of stock organizations from federal land managers from the beginning of the century to 1930. When ranch interests experienced a bitter fight with the Forest Service over grazing fees after World War I, it became clear that the agency looked upon itself as a landlord seeking a fair market return. If the Forest Service pursued this policy toward its lands, certainly any future federal administration of the remaining grazing lands portended the same. |
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What to do? Here commences the second phase of analysis. Under pressures of drought and depression, the New-Deal Congress responded with the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes appointed rancher-lawyer Farrington Carpenter to set up the new Grazing Service. Carpenter could not help himself in conveying the impression that the new grazing districts somehow conferred range rights either by priority of use or through what was called "commensurate" property holdings in the vicinity of the public grazing lands. Lending practices of local banks confirmed the views that grazing permits were property. The story unfolds with the demise of the Grazing Service by 1945 and its replacement by the Bureau of Land Management in 1946. |
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Merrill asserts that arguments over the range grew out of ideas about property and more concretely how they bear upon who gets what. Stock growers genuinely saw themselves entitled to claims on a common property that should be run as a non-profit public concessionary or public service. Needless to say, this provides the basis for all sorts of dispute in that perennial question of the relationship of government and the private economy. Although by no means the focus of this study, the environmental movement complicated the range argument after 1970. Where Merrill stands on these issues is a bit murky because of her very proper devotion to analysis, but one suspects that she hopes the cowboy will continue riding the range. |
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Reviewed by William D. Rowley, professor of History, University of Nevada, Reno. |
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