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Work for Worth. All this, to Secretary McKay, is too much. "Once we make a crutch of the Government," he believes, "we are on our way to becoming political cripples." He wants—at the right time and on the right terms—independence for the Indians, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, private initiative on electric power and more private ownership of public lands.
On the last named point of this program, McKay has good historical precedent. In the 19th century, Interior's General Land Office did a land-office business virtually giving away land—for railroads, land-grant colleges and, mostly, homesteading.* Lincoln, who made homesteading the law, believed in "settling of the wild lands into small parcels so that every poor man may have a home." The theory was that the people would work the land, build up the nation and make it great. In the 20th century came a new idea: the Federal Government should build up the nation and make it great.
That idea grew to obsess Ickes and, until McKay, the Interior Department. In 1935, under Ickes, all public lands were closed to public settlement. Thenceforth the pattern was plain: the public domain was for the Government, not the public. The result: 54% of the eleven Western states is still federal land, much of it undeveloped and unproductive. Nearly 100 million acres have never been surveyed. In Interior's forests some 9 billion valuable board feet of wind-thrown timber are moldering away, hindering new growth.
McKay believes in conservation, not decomposition. He has pushed the surveys needed for land development. In Nevada, which is 85% federally owned. says McKay, "the survey was going so slowly it wouldn't have been finished for a thousand years. I've fixed it so the job will be done this century anyway." He has pushed timber cutting to provide a permanent yield (as practiced by big Western operators, like Crown Zellerbach and Weyerhaeuser, whose future lies in future forest growth).
McKay's definition: "Conservation means wise use . . . Natural resources are not worth a thing unless you put work into them."
Struggle for Power. To Doug McKay, there is no public-power issue. In 1932 he was president of the Salem Public Ownership League; he has long supported local public power, and he insists: "Public power is here to stay." The real issue is federal power, which is very different—and which has increased from less than 1% of the nation's total in 1935 to more than 13% last year.
McKay ended Interior's struggle for power. One evening last year, soon after taking over, McKay told his wife: "I've made my decision on Hell's Canyon—boy, will I catch hell tomorrow." His decision: to drop Interior's delaying action against the Idaho Power Co. No Congress, Democratic or Republican, had ever authorized Interior to build at Hell's Canyon, and no Congress in the foreseeable future would vote the needed funds ($842.5 million). But Interior had done everything possible to get the site and to stop Idaho Power from building dams with its own money.