Tracing Land Use Across Ancient Boundaries: From San Dimas to Washington

This is the beginning of Walter Clay Lowdermilk’s journey from an experimental watershed in Southern California to the center of the New Deal’s campaign against soil erosion. A meeting at a plant-introduction garden in Chico would bring his ideas to the attention of Rexford Tugwell and send Lowdermilk to Washington, where an unexpectedly chilly reception awaited him.

Crisis and Leviathan

The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl created an extraordinary alignment of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and political opportunity, enabling Roosevelt’s New Deal to transform decades of Progressive thought into bold experiments in governance and conservation.¹

The Dust Bowl exposed the limits of knowledge and boosterism. Samuel Aughey Jr., a professor at the University of Nebraska claimed that broken soil absorbed water and released it back into the atmosphere. Land speculator and journalist, Charles Dana Wilber gave the doctrine its memorable formulation, “rain follows the plow” in his book, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the Northwest.

And Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Ph.D. had bold ideas for worldwide conservation. Having completed his graduate work at University of California at Berkeley, he was the principal scientific architect of the San Dimas Experimental Forest. He selected its paired watersheds, devised its original research plan and experimental procedures, and began the rainfall, runoff, and erosion studies that became the foundation of the project.

Knowles Ryerson’s work intrigued Lowdermilk. Ryerson directed the USDA’s foreign plant-introduction program, bringing legumes, shrubs, and grasses into the United States and testing them at Plant Introduction Gardens, including the station at Chico, California.

Lowdermilk had long imagined something more ambitious: an international exchange among the United States, China, and South Africa of plants capable of restoring gullied land and soils damaged by water and wind erosion.

The Meeting at Chico

In 1933, Ryerson telegraphed Lowdermilk that Rexford Tugwell, then Assistant Secretary of Agriculture and a prominent member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust would be coming to visit the program, he arranged for Lowdermilk to meet Tugwell at the Plant Introduction Garden in Chico.

Lowdermilk arrived carrying the working plan for his proposed international exchange. He showed it to Tugwell, who asked to keep the copy. Tugwell then spent several days examining Lowdermilk’s research at Berkeley and San Dimas and discussing the national menace of soil erosion.

The encounter changed Lowdermilk’s life. In September 1933, he was ordered to leave San Dimas and report to Washington as associate chief of the newly formed Soil Erosion Service.

Washington and Hugh Bennett

Believing the assignment to be temporary, he left Inez and their two children in Berkeley, packed two suitcases, and crossed the country by train. In Washington, he took a room at the then all-male Cosmos Club and walked and walked the few blocks to the Winder Building to report to Hugh H. Bennett.

Bennett did not offer to shake Lowdermilk’s hand.

¹ It also imposed new regulations, enforcement, and resentment — the machinery of a new administrative state arriving in places that had not asked for it and did not want it.

Sources

Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Soil, Forest, and Water Conservation and Reclamation in China, Israel, Africa, and the United States, interview by Malca Chall, 1969, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, p. 132

Inez Marks Lowdermilk, All in a Lifetime (Berkeley, CA: The Lowdermilk Trust, 1985), p. 104

Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation p. 34.