A Call for Unity Against the Shields Bill

Gifford Pinchot

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, March-April 1916]

EDITOR SINGLE TAX REVIEW:

I write to ask the help of Single Taxers to defeat a most serious attack on our public resources. Since the fight over the Alaska resources was won there has not been so pressing a threat against the Conservation policy as the present effort in Congress to give our public water powers for nothing into monopolistic control.

The Shields Bill, now before the Senate, gives to the power interests without compensation the use of water power on navigable streams. The amount of water power these streams will supply is larger by far than all the power of every kind now in use in the United States,. It pretends to, but does not, enable the people to take back their own property at the end of fifty years, for in order to do so under the bill, the Government would have to pay the unearned increment, and to take over whole lighting systems of cities and whole manufacturing plants. Private corporations are authorized to seize upon any land, private or public, they choose to condemn.

Bills which gave away public water powers without due compensation were vetoed by President Roosevelt and President Taft. The Shields Bill will do precisely the same thing today. Another water power bill, the Ferris Bill, relating to the public lands and National Forests, was in the main a good bill as it passed the House. As reported to the Senate, it encourages monopoly by permitting a corporation to take as many public water power sites as it may please. Under it the corporations could not even be kept from fastening upon the Grand Canyon, the greatest natural wonder on this continent. This bill takes the care of water powers on National Forests from the experienced and competent Forest Service, and gives it to the Interior Department, thus entailing duplication and needless expense.

In my opinion, there is undue carelessness as to the disposal of public resources at present in Washington. The water power legislation now before the Senate is too favorable to the men who, as Secretary Houston's admirable recent report shows, control through 18 corporations more than one half of the total water power used in public service throughout the United States. The water power men charge that Conservation hampers development. The Houston report shows, on the contrary, that the most rapid development is in the National Forests, where conservation is best enforced. On the other hand, 120 public service corporations own and are holding undeveloped and out of use an amount of water power equal to four fifths of all there is developed and in use by all the public service corporations in the whole United States.

As I said in an open letter of January 29 to the President:

"Natural resources lie at the foundation of all preparedness, whether for peace or for war. No plan for national defense can be effective unless it provides for adequate public control of all the raw materials out of which the defensive strength of a nation is made. Of these raw materials water power is the most essential, because without electricity generated from water power we can not manufacture nitrates, and nitrates are the basis of gunpowder. There are no great natural deposits of nitrates in the United States as there are in Chili. It would be folly to allow the public water powers, which can supply this indispensible basis of national defense, to pass out of effective public control."

A concerted movement is on foot to break down the Conservation policy. Feeble resistance or none at all is being made by official Washington. Unless the press and the people come to the rescue, the power interests are likely to win. This is a public matter wholly removed from political partisanship. Your help is needed, and that of your paper; For nearly ten years this fight for the public water powers has gone on. We ought not to lose it now.