The Forest Service, the Depression, and Vermont Political Culture: Implementing New Deal Conservation and Relief Policy

Abstract

John Aubrey Douglass 0 n 25 April 1932, during a time of severe unemployment, poverty, and despair, President Herbert Hoover established the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. In many ways, the economic downturn and the subsequent onslaught of New Deal programs offered the Forest Service a unique opportunity in Vermont and throughout the nation. The depression years forced the federal government to think of its land management and forestry programs as more than conservation activity, more than a way to provide sustained yields of timber and to preserve western federal lands. Federal conservation policy and geographically dispersed agencies such as the Forest Service became a central means of instituting new economic relief programs. During the Great Depression unprecedented levels of funding came to the Forest Service to establish twentysix new national forests, mostly in the East, and to expand work in watershed protection, timber improvement, reforestation, disease control, and wildlife management. Additional resources were allotted to the Forest Service for the construction of buildings, roads and trails, bridges, recreation facilities, water-control dams, and lookout towers — often in cooperation with the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Army Engineer Reserve Corps, and other federal and state agencies. In Vermont such federal programs and public works projects provided jobs and capital, built the physical infrastructure of today's Green Mountain National Forest, and contributed greatly to the long-term economic development of what was a rural and relatively poor state' Yet even with abundant Washington policy directives and money, the task of creating a national forest in Vermont remained daunting. Although President Hoover established the new national forest's boundaries with the stroke of his pen, virtually all acreage within it had to be purchased from the private sector— a situation common to all eastern federal forests established and funded under the 1911 Weeks Act. 2