Walter Lowdermilk was recruited by Rexford Tugwell in 1933 to serve as the second-in-command of the new Soil Erosion Service, later called the Soil Conservation Service. In 1938, he was tasked with studying how soil affects human life and well-being. He spent two years exploring lands once ruled by the Romans to find answers.
The cold welcome
When Walter Lowdermilk arrived in Washington to meet his new colleagues in the newly formed Soil Erosion Service, Bennett did not offer to shake Lowdermilk’s hand.
Hugh Hammond Bennett had not asked for an associate chief, it was particularly irksome that the new man came from the Department of Agriculture.
According to Lowdermilk in conversations after retirement, Bennett was vain,1 wanted to be in charge of all media and public contact, politically adept, especially in the Department of the Interior; and did not want this this man from the west who possessed a doctorate in forestry and geology in his inner circle. Lowdermilk was an interloper, and Tugwell’s man. Though the two men possessed complementary strengths: Bennett had spent years documenting erosion across American farmland; Lowdermilk brought experimental hydrology, forestry, Chinese experience, and a habit of connecting erosion with floods, famine, and the decline of civilizations, they mixed like oil and water.
2. Making erosion visible
The new Soil Erosion Service had to show Congress and farmers what erosion was doing and prove that it could be controlled.
Lowdermilk helped recruit technical personnel and promoted:
- reservoir-sedimentation studies;
- aerial photography and land classification;
- experimental watersheds and erosion stations;
- field investigations in places such as the Navajo Reservation and Arizona’s San Simon watershed;
- cooperation among engineers, agronomists, foresters, geologists, and plant specialists.
The oral history treats this integration of specialties as one of his central contributions. He believed no single profession could solve a problem that connected rainfall, vegetation, soil, farming, gullies, streams, reservoirs, and floods.
3. From emergency demonstrations to a permanent institution
The Soil Erosion Service initially established demonstration projects to show farmers that contour cultivation, strip cropping, terraces, pasture improvement, farm ponds, and revegetation could protect land while maintaining production. After the agency moved into the Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conservation Act of April 27, 1935, created the permanent Soil Conservation Service. Lowdermilk helped shape that legislation and later assisted with the Omnibus Flood Control Act of 1936, which connected damage downstream with land treatment upstream.
Then came the crucial political insight: conservation could not simply be imposed from Washington. Locally organized soil conservation districts would allow farmers to participate in planning and administration. Farm planners surveyed individual holdings, considering soil, slope, erosion, present land use, economics, and the effects upon neighboring properties before recommending a coordinated conservation plan.
4. Chief of Research
When Bennett eliminated the associate-chief position, Lowdermilk became chief of research—a title that suited him better. He expanded the network of erosion experiment stations and sought a coordinated national research program adapted to different climates, soils, crops, and watersheds. The work included agricultural lands, forests, grasslands, sedimentation, plant introduction, and watershed hydrology.
5. The fence post and the road to Rome
Congressional history is filled with pugnacious and eccentric legislators; and Clarence Cannon, a congressman from Missouri, can be counted in their company. In 1945, Cannon, a skilled parliamentarian, wiry, and roughly 140 pounds, punched the ranking Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee, John Taber of New York, in the face and split Taber’s lip.
A fiscal hawk, he disliked all federal spending except to support farmers. He favored parity payments to farmers, low-interest federal farm loans, soil conservation, and flood control projects. He especially liked spending to help Missouri farmers.
The SCS told Cannon and the House Appropriations Committee that in a comparatively short time in the United States had brought about destruction of needed soil through mismanagement that the future of the country was at stake. This was a challenge not only to farmers, but also to lawmakers.
The SCS wanted to develop commercially viable specialty crops for steep slopes and one of the species they proposed was the so-called ‘shipmast locust’ tree (Robinia pseudoacacia var. rectissima), a variety of black locust.
Dr. Lowdermilk brought a century-old fence post made from black locust to an appropriation sub-committee meeting, probably in 1936 for the 1937 federal budget, “Here, this is a one hundred year old fence post,” he told the congressmen. It showed no indication of rot.
This greatly interested representative Cannon and instead of recommending the SCS receive a $50,000 appropriation for their plant introduction work, the committee recommended $100,000, double what the SCS had asked for, an unheard of idea in those days.
According to Lowdermilk, the Roman Lands Survey began with Clarence Cannon’s suggestion that the SCS examine lands cultivated for more than a thousand years and determine what human use had done to preserve or destroy them.
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.
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.
- Lowdermilk in his Oral History interview with Malca Chall relates a story that Bennett objected to having an assistant called “Doctor Lowdermilk” while Bennett, the chief, was still called “Mister.” According to Lowdermilk, Bennett then instructed an SCS colleague to approach Bennett’s alma mater and arrange an honorary degree. Lowdermilk carefully inserted “I was told,” showing that he had not personally witnessed the arrangement. He finished with the wonderfully barbed observation: “I was glad that he could get without effort what was a long hard pull for most of us.” ↩︎
Nullius in Verba 