Oscar L. Chapman Oral History Interview, September 22, 1972

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened 1980
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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HESS: Did you want to start off with clarifying a few of the points about the June trip, today?

CHAPMAN: I think I should review a couple of records that I have, and I believe that they are available in copy forms here in my office, before I proceed into the discussion of the June trip. I want to get thoroughly identified as to the dates and the exact timing of that trip. There has been some confusion about the dates of that trip and some dates have differed from others on that trip, and I find that mine is not the only one. I think somebody else has another date on the June trip, and he had it set back in May--more or less coincided with my dates that I had on it. I want to clarify that before we make this a permanent part of our record here. So, if you will permit me to, I will take this part of the record and I’m going to go through some

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files here at the office. I'll have one of the secretaries to do that, to search through my files here to find that piece of record that I want; two, three sheets of paper that's got some data on it that I think will clarify very definitely, convince me of my position either one way or the other, because I made a notation of that trip in that particular part; I made a memorandum.

Now, I want to point out and clarify it if I can. Some parts of it confused me considerably the other day when we were talking. I didn't have any records with me to take a tape recording down. I think that if you will permit me to, we'll shut this interview at this point and let me pick it up here at a later date.

HESS: All right, Mr. Chapman, to conclude what we want to say about tidelands oil, let me give a further quote from the book, The Tidelands Oil Controversy, by Ernest R. Bartley; this is a quote from pages 257 and 258:

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Truman added further fuel to the fire with his Executive Order 10426, which was issued 16 January 1953. This order created the continental shelf as a naval petroleum reserve and placed the area under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Navy. While the order apparently was a sweeping one, in reality the status quo was not substantially disturbed.

The order was issued for political purposes. As a measure designed to gain time for the proponents of national control and as a tactic for harassing the incoming Eisenhower administration, the action was masterfully conceived and executed. The timing was most adroit. True, the action evoked criticism from many persons who felt that it was not in the American spirit of 'fair play.' Yet as a political maneuver, the order may have served to delay quit-claim legislation at least a short time, while the resulting legal snarl was unraveled.

Was that a political maneuver?

CHAPMAN: You will find, Mr. Hess, that there are many people who are very well-acquainted with the history of this case from the very beginning of the time the order was discussed with the staff, both at the White House and my own staff, and there was a wide difference of opinion among a lot of people. I made a real effort to bring them together with an understanding of the value of that order irrespective

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of any political implications whatsoever. You couldn't possibly support that order and not have a lot of people disagree with you and think that it was for political purposes, because there wasn't any question about it; there was no way that you could remove the political implications. It did have some political implications, and a decided benefit to Truman's campaign. It was helpful, but I would have supported this order entirely without any respect whatsoever to the campaign, because it could stand on its own feet, on the merits of economics of managing public lands.

Now, you see, we had pretty general control of most public lands, as such, public lands broken into several divisions, some parts managed by the Agriculture Department, such as the Forest Service; some naval lands were under Navy control already that we had given them for management purposes.

Now, having to examine that from an economic

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point of view without any regard to politics whatsoever, I think any reasonable man would have come to about the same conclusion I did--that you couldn't avoid seeing that there were some definite benefits in that order for the public generally, and that was mostly for the little man to get a chance at these oil leases that we located. I studied that case very hard, briefed it very cautiously, and I came to my own conclusion that there was no question in the world but that this was a piece of administrative action that definitely was an advantage to the little man at dealing in these oil leases and gas leases in the continental shelf.

Now, there had been no oil issue previous to this time, regarding the management, power, and control of this area of public domain that is under the water, because there had never been a Supreme Court decision clarifying the control of that.

Now, this order gave us a chance so we got it in a judicial forum to get a hearing. I was

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looking at the next step; if we issued the order this month, what would we be doing with it next month.

Well, obviously, I was looking at it from the point of view of the President, who had talked to me so much about how you ought to really try to help him find a way to give more benefits, an easier and simple way of operation. And that is what this did. It simplified the operations a great deal, by managing it this way under this order. The Navy was naturally very pleased about it, to have it, because they had a Naval Reserve in California, a very good one as a matter of fact, which Ickes had signed for. You see, under the law, the Secretary could sign an order affecting the regulations and the matter of managing this land 12 miles under the low water mark, and could affect the management in a very simple way, but could become a very dangerous thing if you handled it wrong. That's an area in which a Secretary can get into most serious difficulty with

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the management people or the company per se when they are managing this thing for the purpose of making a profit, and you are helping manage it from the point of view of helping save some of their profit for the public good, and the oil would go to the oil people.

And so, I can say to you that irrespective of whether the effect of that order was a political benefit to the campaign for Truman, it was a benefit to the American people.

Now, I measured this case on that basis first and decided in my own mind that this was the right thing to do for good management; and I took it up on that basis first to study the management of this bill and whether the method of how he was handling it and who he had handling it there in the Department, would determine the good or bad affects of this executive order. I was strongly for this order and I think it took Clark a little while before he was thoroughly convinced that it also had an overriding effect politically.

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Well, it did have; I wouldn't use the word overriding, but I think he did feel that he would be accused, and the President would be accused of having an order issued that was so overriding in its implications of the campaign that he'd be accused of that. Well, my point was, he’s going to be accused of that whenever he does it.

HESS: Is that Mr. Clifford?

CHAPMAN: No, not Clifford. Clifford was...

HESS: He had left.

CHAPMAN: He had left, I think, by that time. I think he had left, but I don't think he was...

HESS: He was not involved--was he involved in this at all?

CHAPMAN: He was some; he was really personally advising the President and talking to him.

HESS: Even though he had left the staff?

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CHAPMAN: Yes, the President would call him down and he'd stop by the next morning and go in and see him.

HESS: I believe at this time, too, there was some discussion of taking a part of the profit of the oil drilled from the submerged lands and spending that on education in all of the states. Is that right?

CHAPMAN: Yes. That was a strong argument. For several months in these conferences, discussions went on concerning what to do with that money. Should it go to the general treasury, and come back through the appropriation method? That, of course, was what Congress wanted. But, while we had it in this position, we wanted to put into this order, that the money be set aside for the purpose of education--strictly an educational bill. The proceeds from this bill would be built up in the Treasury Department for the purpose of an educational fund to help boys or girls who

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were trying to make it through college and just didn't have money to go on.

HESS: I believe that that provision made it into the final order, did it not?

CHAPMAN: It didn't get in. It took; oh, we spent two months on it, and...

HESS: That was one that fell by the wayside?

CHAPMAN: That was one I lost. I found I lose one and I win one, so you come out all right, sometimes; and in this case I lost my argument, and I wasn't able to convince my colleagues that that was a good, fair way to handle it and it would not hurt us politically if it was done at all. And they all laughed and said, "That'll be your campaign for another term."

"Well," I said, "I need a little bit more help on the campaign anyway," and then we laughed and I said, "I'd be for this bill whether it was helping the President for reelection or not; I'd

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be for it." But I said, "The President is not going to turn this public land over to a free grab, to the states, or to Congress anymore than he could avoid it."

HESS: Now, of course, at the time that that order was signed, that was four days before Eisenhower took over.

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: So, now the election was over and the Republicans were on their way...

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: ...four days later.

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: So, Mr. Bartley thinks that it was a time bomb, more or less, that had been left for the Republicans to contend with, something to put quitclaim legislation off, to muddy the waters for a period of time, and delay legislation.

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CHAPMAN: Now, that is not quite true. In the first place, any political effect on the administration was already accrued on election day. Whatever we were going to get out of it we got out of that election day, period. I'll say whatever we lost, we lost it in that period. So, the fact that he signed it just four days before he went out of office had really no effect politically upon the picture whatsoever.

You know, Mr. Hess, that our Department of Interior in its makeup of the authority and the management of the Department as such, is assigned by the Secretary of the Interior to the various assistant secretaries, and they are given a certain number of bureaus to work. The Secretary always tried to equalize the burden and divide up the work among the bureaus to the assistant secretaries. He generally tried to assign the bureaus that a man showed some special interest in. Well, he soon found out that I had a special interest in the minority problems, the human rights

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issue, and basic principles of that; that I was very much interested in it.

Therefore, when I first went to the Department of the Interior, the Office of Education was in the Department of the Interior. Howard University, which is a Negro university, was assigned to me. The whole question of the territories was under me then, because the Virgin Islands had some 22,000 black people and about 1,100 white citizens; of course, that has changed considerably since I first came to the Department in 1933 on May 4th. I was sworn in as Assistant Secretary on that date. And now its population has shifted a great deal since then. But in the meantime, that was one of the human rights issues that surfaced in the Virgin Islands with regard to the rights of the black people, and the Secretary--and I want to say Secretary Ickes supported me 100 percent in these issues dealing with the rights of minority people. He was very generous in his feelings of trying to help those people, and he

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did do it. His biggest problem that he had was usually brought on by his own--let's use the expression that they always use that "a man is his own worst enemy." He was sometimes his own worst enemy in getting bad publicity about some individual that he would have a personal vendetta with, some individual he'd appointed. It doesn't matter whether it was his appointment, or John Smith's appointment, anybody's; he would soon have a fight going with that fellow, and it was one of the things that he had about him controlling himself to get a better understanding of the man's point of view--and what he was trying to do, of the assignments that were given him.

Now, the assignments regarding the human rights were left with me and in my hands practically all the time; they practically never changed. They usually would change them every two years and sometimes longer. There was no given time to control that. That was in the Secretary's hand; he could do it whenever he pleased.

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And then, the next thing comparable to that was the question of oil. I'd come from a state, Colorado, that was just beginning to produce some oil, but it was not an oil state in a sense of any real material value, but they had found oil. They had been producing some oil, and they had been making some money for the State of Colorado.

Now, the problem that the Secretary was faced with was, first, his problem in having disagreements with the administration of the oil companies, we'll say, the administrative side; he had many differences of opinion with the oil management, particularly the major oil companies. But in most of those cases, they were cases going back to when I first went there in May 4, 1933, and he left in...

HESS: In '46.

CHAPMAN: '46.

HESS: In February, I think.

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CHAPMAN: Yes, February of '46, I think, was when he left. Now, when he left, he left on the basis that he was quite certain in his own mind that he was going to develop a public vendetta with the President on the basis of an issue of the tidelands oil, and he thought he could make an issue out of that against Truman.

Well, the truth of it was, after he had written this very, should I say unfortunate, letter he wrote to the President, he kept trying to build a case in the public mind against the President on oil, and to leave an impression that he didn't want to leave the oil management and control under Truman. He thought the President was too close to Pauley and to several other oil men, but particularly to Pauley. But, now, for awhile he worked very closely with Pauley. He didn't have any fight with him for a little while, but when Pauley's nomination came up for confirmation to be appointed to the Navy Department, I believe that was as--was that an Assistant...

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HESS: Under Secretary.

CHAPMAN: Under Secretary of Navy, was what it was. Ickes took it on himself to write that letter, use this excuse of writing the President that kind of a letter, which was not the kind of a letter a man should write the President of the United States at any time. You just don't do those things. He had no real grounds from which he could establish and maintain this issue with the President, with regard to the Pauley appointment. It was a personnel matter that he had a personal vendetta going with Pauley as an oil man and he was opposing him for anything that Pauley wanted; it didn't make any difference what it was, he was opposed to it. He carried that fight on, and then the climax of his letter to the President was reached at that stage, you see.

HESS: Was most of his opposition to Mr. Pauley over the offer that had been made to raise money?

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CHAPMAN: Yes.

HESS: What was the basis of their difficulty?

CHAPMAN: Pauley wanted an opinion of the Department that Ickes wouldn't give.

HESS: As favorable to Pauley's oil interest?

CHAPMAN: Yes, as favorable to Pauley's interests, and Pauley was trying to get a decision out of the Secretary that would have been favorable to his interests, and he wouldn't do it; he wouldn't give it to him.

Now, Pauley had a lot of money caught in this kind of a play, he had a lot of money. Now, he was trying his best to get this thing worked out if he could and for him to get out of the way without bothering anyone. Now, that turned out just as I thought it would; he blocked Pauley's nomination deviously, his supplying Senator--what's that New Hampshire fellow's name?

HESS: Green?

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CHAPMAN: No, that's Burns. You know, that tall, grey-haired fellow, he was a Republican, fairly liberal fellow, and, of course, he didn't like Pauley. They were trying to see if they--Ickes and his friends--were trying to block Pauley's appointment. He thought if he blocked that appointment it would strengthen his position in his fight against the President. Normally that's true; it does have an effect, but it doesn't have enough of an effect to effectively accomplish what they wanted. You see, they were trying to get the President into a position where he would have to come to them for support or get him to drop this animosity if he could.

Well, he didn't do it. Truman had his mind made up on this gas bill; he had talked with me about it, and I knew what he was going to do, and he was not faulty in terms of error or anything, anymore than Ickes was. He happened to be a friend of Pauley, but that friendliness was one

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of pure friendly relations to a man, but not to give him anything of the public lands. Truman wasn't about to give that to anybody, and he didn't. A strange part of all this, and I'll show you his [Ickes] personality and how he was handling this. I was with him about 15 years, I guess, pretty close, 4th of May of '33...

HESS: '33 to '46.

CHAPMAN: Yes.

HESS: Thirteen years.

CHAPMAN: Thirteen years. Out of all of that time, he never changed the oil management of the Department of the Interior; he kept it under me. Now why? Well, I knew he distrusted me at times. It wasn't a question that he distrusted me, it was a question that he was jealous of me or something.

HESS: Why, did you ever figure it out?

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CHAPMAN: I could never figure it out except this way, I was a single man at the time. My first wife had died, and I didn't get married until, oh, seven, eight years after she died. I got married in 1940, and I had a most fortunate and happy marriage. I must say that to you as a friend; I was happily married and spoke of the good luck of a man that had two fine characters that did accept me at face value, until I proved myself as being worthy of being their husband.

Now, I had the good fortune--I was not married when I came here; my first wife had died in January of '31, and I came here in November of '32, after the elections were all over. I came here at Senator and Mrs. Costigan's request, and they were more like my parents than they were any political friends. He was just like a father to me and she was, too, as a mother. They just couldn't be any better. They were just like my parents, and he was a wonderful man, a man that I just worshipped almost. Senator Costigan was

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one of the brainiest men I have ever worked with in my lifetime, and of all of the public officials I have worked with, none of them could match him with their brilliance, and real brains. He was one of the most brilliant men and one of the finest men in his feelings and relationships toward his fellow man. And he would fight, this man who was cut out to be the underdog. He could have been a millionaire easily if he had wanted to be, because he could have gotten into any corporation anywhere in the world. But he wouldn't take a case. He wouldn't take a corporate case or any case.

HESS: Was Mr. Ickes jealous of you because you were a bachelor at that time?

CHAPMAN: That leads up to the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt had a habit of inviting a group of us fellows (I was 36 then) over to the White House,

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usually for those Sunday night scrambled egg dinners that she would fix herself. A chafing dish, she would handle those scrambled egg dinners, eight or ten young men; sometimes there would be some women, not many. But I think he got a little jealous of my going to the White House.

HESS: When he was not invited?

CHAPMAN: Yes. You see, I didn't catch that at first; it took me a little while to get onto what this was all about, and I finally decided that that was what it was. It was that I'd be in the doghouse this week, because I would remember that I had gone to the White House for dinner with a group of 10 or 12 people, and it would usually be the same group or it would be a bunch interested in a special subject. Well, now, Secretary Ickes got very much perturbed about my going to the White House so much, and he told me about it one day.

I said, "Mr. Secretary, I've enjoyed working

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for you from the point of your handling the public issues; it couldn't be done better, from my thinking. I think it's wonderful. You have always supported my position on civil rights matters and you have supported me on everything that I have done; now," I said, "I don't know why you feel this way, because what could I do to hurt you with the President? Do you think for one minute that I would go to the White House and try to undercut you by making comments to the President or to somebody on his staff, trying to hurt you? I have done other things, where I would invite friends to my apartment for dinner and I'd talk with them. We couldn't have a misunderstanding of a very serious nature, one in which I hate to see you waste a good life that you are making for yourself, the good name you are making for yourself, you are making and..." Well, he left the oil matters that were so vital to him; it was one of the top fighting issues in the Department all the time. He never changed that from

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my assignment all the time he was Secretary; he left this oil assignment with me.

HESS: Did he watch that closely; did you and he have conversations about handling of oil matters?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes. We had a lot of talks about it. Now when [Abe] Fortas was in there, and he was in there just a short time; let's see didn't he leave before Ickes, I've forgotten whether he did or not.

HESS: I think so, but we can check.

CHAPMAN: I think he left before Secretary Ickes did. Well, he did give Fortas authority that he already had as a review matter, being Under Secretary of the Interior, he could review anything that I was sending on to the Secretary that would go over his desk on the way to the Secretary. So he had that. I want to correct my statement that much, because from that may appear that he changed an order, but it was not a change;

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he simply--that was his normal assignment--all Assistant Secretary stuff would go over the Under Secretary's desk going to Ickes; so he had had that force in effect. But I couldn't ever understand why he left that oil thing with me knowing that he and I disagreed on one or two points. We had no serious differences; we were pretty much together on the oil matter. I had done everything I could to interrupt Mr. Pauley's operation, because I thought he was getting too much of a share of what was going on in the oil end of the thing there, and that's one of the things that Jebby Davidson always felt that I didn't fight Ickes enough about that. He thought that I gave in too easily to Ickes on this kind of a fight. Several, I did. You have to adopt a strategy on making your fight. I tried to pick my grounds and my timing myself, and I found that I came out much better when I'm using my own judgment; pick the timing for the fight. I developed if I could--you can't always do that,

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and I really--Fortas joined me in most of that fight. It's hard to sit here and tell a man something and to interpret the man's thinking of what his mind is on a given subject in dealing with human beings. Yet, there are two people, both Fortas and Ickes, who are so much alike in many respects, and in many others they were not alike at all, that's all.

HESS: How were they alike and how did they differ?

CHAPMAN: Fortas played a shrewd, carefully planned fight all the time, regardless of who it was or what it was that he was fighting about or who he was fighting for, but he would do this in a natural sense. Ickes on the other hand worked like a meat axe on you and he didn't try to be the world's champion diplomat. He didn't try to be; and, consequently, that led him into many side issues or differences with many people, when in actual fact, he wasn't nearly so much against the issues as it appeared to be. I felt that Ickes on

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liberal things would generally be honest about it and was quite liberal. Now, that was not true in a lot of other things, but when it came to liberal principles I'd stand by Ickes.

HESS: What other assignments did you have?

CHAPMAN: I had the Park Service, the Land Office, which gave you public land law...

HESS: Grazing.

CHAPMAN: Grazing. I set up the Grazing Office, or I tried to, and I never was happy with that.

HESS: Why weren't you? What went wrong?

CHAPMAN: Well, the trouble about the Grazing Service was that you were representing a constituency there that was very hard to please. They were a very selfish type of people and they were people that wanted everything they could get off of the public land, or the Federal Government, for nothing. And they would have a fight with

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Ickes about every other day, and then they would try to put on a campaign against the Secretary in order to get better control of the Grazing Service, through these volunteer...

HESS: Advisory boards.

CHAPMAN: These advisory boards; they would try to insist on the advisory boards having the power; now, this was where we all differed--not any of us were together on this. Ickes would not, and did not want to approve the creation of an advisory board, but the law had been amended and here's a copy of it.

I have here in my hand at this moment a letter that I received from Ferry Carpenter who was the first director of the Grazing Service, and I got him promoted.

HESS: He was appointed the first Director of Grazing on September the 7th, 1934.

CHAPMAN: 1934, that's right.

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HESS: And served to '38, I believe.

CHAPMAN: That's right. And Ickes tried to fire him, but...

HESS: What didn't he like about him?

CHAPMAN: Oh, Secretary Ickes didn't like him because he said Carpenter went up on the Hill and talked to Congressmen and Senators around him, without telling him, before Carpenter went up there, what he was going for, and the Secretary didn't like that.

HESS: Mr. Carpenter was appointed with your recommendations, is that right?

CHAPMAN: Yes.

HESS: Now, this is just a quote from a book, Politics and Grass: The Administrating of Grazing on the Public Domain, by Phillip O. Foss; and in here it mentions that Mr. Carpenter said that "He, Ickes, wanted a combination lawyer and stockman to

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administer the Act, and in reading over the proceedings ran into my [meaning Carpenter's] testimony and asked Oscar Chapman (Assistant Secretary of Interior) about me as he was also from Colorado. As a result, I was appointed for an interview with Ickes in which I told him of three reasons why I should not be appointed: 1. I was a Republican; 2. I was a cowman who was identified with being anti-sheep; 3. I was not interested in building up a Federal reserve."

How come this man was appointed when he--well, you know, he was a Republican. That's not so important, but he was a cowman who was anti-sheep, and he was not interested in building a Federal reserve. He admitted to these three things, but he was still appointed.

CHAPMAN: You have this fact to consider. In the first place, it was almost parallel to the same problem with a far-out advisory board. They had an advisory committee of the petroleum industry, in which 100 members were appointed to the national

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board here in Washington, and we met every month. These people had almost identically the same feelings and the same ideas about private enterprise, or running the public domain, and everything else that was in it. Now, I--in respect to his being a Republican, I knew he was a Republican, but to me that was an asset because I did not want this bureau to start being built up around a political...

HESS: You wanted it kept out of politics?

CHAPMAN: I was trying to keep it out of politics by appointing a Republican against the wishes of my Democratic friends, who didn't like it, but I thought this was better administration than the other method, and I adopted this approach.

HESS: Okay, you said he was anti-sheep.

CHAPMAN: He was to a certain extent; every sheepman and every cowman dislike each other.

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HESS: That was nothing new, was it? If you were a cattleman you were anti-sheep and if you're a sheepman you're anti-cattle.

CHAPMAN: I don't care who you'd appointed, you'd have had that same issue, because the issue between the cattle people and your sheep people had gone so deep and vicious in the Department, that it was almost impossible for them to work together on a harmonious basis. I didn't pay any attention to that because you couldn't have appointed a man that wasn't either a sheepman or a cowman; because, in the first place, they wouldn't have accepted if they'd opposed it. They'd have fought it viciously if you had, and they'd have all fought for it. Another thing that he raises a question about there...

HESS: Not building up a Federal reserve.

CHAPMAN: He was opposed to building up a Federal

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reserve, where the power for the Senate is in the Secretary of the Interior. He didn't want any further leaning towards the principle of public control of public lands. He wanted the states to control those public lands in every respect, and...

HESS: That was the prevailing view of the cattlemen, was it not?

CHAPMAN: Yes. Yes, I think that's the prevailing view of cattlemen, and the sheepmen pretty much, too. They were pretty much together on that issue, and...

HESS: Now, if the land had been administered as public domain would they have grazed free?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes. They would have grazed free, if they had been left with the control, if the power was in the hands of the advisory boards; they wouldn't set a fee upon themselves.

HESS: Now, wasn't there a good deal of overgrazing

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in the Western lands at this time?

CHAPMAN: Of course, that's what brought on the bill to start with.

HESS: Fine, now let's mention that. Now, that's the Taylor Grazing Act, in 1934.

CHAPMAN: Taylor Grazing Act.

HESS: And he was also from Colorado.

CHAPMAN: From Colorado.

HESS: Edward T. Taylor...

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: ...who had been in Congress since 1909, and I'll throw out just a couple of figures here that I've taken from the book. The total acquisition of public domain of the entire United States had been 1,442,200,320 acres, and in 1934 approximately 170 million acres remained. I think it was 173 million acres remained, but just

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what was the condition of the western range at this time that made it necessary for the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act?

CHAPMAN: Now that's the crux of the whole issue here. To do what they wanted to do, the cattle and sheep people, they wanted to select an advisory board of seven, I think, seven or nine, of a certain Grazing district. Those districts would be organized by them according to the more or less geographical outlay of the land; how many cattle could be grazed on a given area where there was more or less a natural boundary line where they could graze on this valley, and on this hillside. All of that was broken down into the details of where these people would definitely be running the Grazing Service entirely for the cattle and sheep people. You couldn't get the cattle and sheep people to agree on any one man hardly; as a matter of fact, Carpenter was the only man I could get them to agree on,

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and Foss was a very good man who turned it down.

HESS: The man who wrote the book here?

CHAPMAN: Yes. He wasn't a bad fellow; but he wrote the book promoting and advocating his own theory of management of public land, which, of course, he gets off on just like they do today. These people would talk and discuss, tell you that they are for law and order, but they never start off by saying, "I’m for justice and order;" they always leave out the justice. You can get an awful lot of unhappy people misjudged, mistreated, in that category of being mistreated in this country under the old cliche of law and order, and "I believe in law and order;" if we get that law and order, everything will be all right, there won't be any problem.

HESS: Law for you and order for me.

CHAPMAN: That's right. And we’ll try you by the law and we passed all the laws, so they get you.

[562]

Now, that really was a theme that ran through the whole thing of the cattle and sheep people. Those are the two best organized economic groups in America. They were two of the best organized and managed groups in the whole world.

HESS: In your opinion, were the cattlemen overgrazing and exploiting the land?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes. I started to tell you. They forced this thing on the public land themselves. The question was, could they be allowed to continue to graze without some regulations and some legitimate control, where somebody could say, "Stop and don't put any more cattle on this range this next year, and you mustn't run any more, you're running too many, cut your head down by fifty head of cattle or an "X" number of cattle, cut it down next year." They didn't want that; they wanted to be able to cut it down or raise it themselves.

[563]

Now, it was their policy to raise every cow they could on land even if it turned the place into a dust bowl, and that's what they did. They agitated and did so much work on the public land with the sheep and cattle, but sheep, in particular, destroys the public land. You see, those little sharp feet, those two claws, they're very sharp and they walk little short steps, but they are just heavy enough to cut through that grass root.

HESS: They kill the roots.

CHAPMAN: Kills the grass definitely, at least for the next year, and if it doesn't rain pretty consistently, which you don't have regularly there, it'll kill off the grass in that part and the forage just simply disappears and you have nothing for the cattle to graze on. In the first place they'll starve to death; the stockmen have to feed them. Then they'll start buying up feed grain and stuff like that

[564]

to feed the cattle on, and--but they have to do it to keep them alive and fat enough to sell them.

Now, Carpenter was a very capable man; he was a very fine man.

HESS: What caused this falling out?

CHAPMAN: Oh, as I said, that was a case again that he just didn't take Ickes' abusive approach in talking to him, things like that; he just wouldn't take it. That was what really caused the whole thing, the falling out. Carpenter was a very fine person, but he was quite conservative when it came to the question of the use of public lands. He wasn't as liberal as I thought he was going to be; he ran a beautiful ranch up there.

HESS: Did he try to get the cattlemen to cut down on the number of cattle that they were putting out on the range?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes, he did that. He did a good deal of

[565]

that. This is the way he would do it. He was a clever fellow; he had two degrees from Princeton, and was a smart lawyer, and he was really very smart and he was a good economist.

HESS: A cowman from Princeton?

CHAPMAN: Yes, he was from Princeton, and he brought his fortune with him on out there to Colorado, and he just settled on this land and took it for nothing. That is when you could get it for nothing. See, that law was changed afterwards, but he, at that time, could get his for nothing; so, he got I don't know how many thousands of acres, and he's got a beautiful ranch up there. He has developed a special breed, a herd of cattle that's now a special breed that's adapted to the hillsides of the mountains of the Rockies and they are as beautiful cattle as you ever saw. They've done very well; he's a scientific man from that point of view.

HESS: To help our typist let's say that that's

[566]

Farrington R. Carpenter...

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: ...of Hayden, Colorado.

CHAPMAN: Hayden, Colorado, and that's right up just next to Steamboat Springs, about ten miles.

HESS: Skiing country, isn't it?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes, there's a nice ski ride up there, but the better ski rides are down toward...

HESS: Aspen.

CHAPMAN: In Aspen are better ski layouts, natural ones, than they are up there. Although there are some good ones up there.

HESS: And he was replaced by Richard H. Rutledge.

CHAPMAN: That's right.

HESS: And he was Director until 1944. How was he chosen and what type of a Director did he make?

[567]

CHAPMAN: Fairly good. He made a fairly good Director. In Carpenter's fight with Ickes, sometimes I supported Carpenter, other times I didn't, because I felt that there were times when his policies were leading us really into the wrong place.

HESS: What policies--give me an example, what policy would you not support?

CHAPMAN: I wouldn't support his policy of giving the power to the grazing advisory boards. Now I did not believe that a Secretary should as a policy, have authority to give away his right to make final decisions on the control and management of a grazing district.

HESS: Now, that is one point that Mr. Foss makes quite plain in his book, that many of the advisory boards wanted the power to set the grazing quotas and they thought that the grazer sent from the Government was just there really to carry out their dictates...

CHAPMAN: That's right.

[568]

HESS: ...and not the other way around, not for the grazer to have the authority to tell them how many animal units should go out.

CHAPMAN: That's exactly right.

HESS: Sort of a running battle that just kept on going, just kept on running,

CHAPMAN: That was the issue that was always in the forefront, because that's an issue for a man like myself who had been pretty much associated and worked with the cattle people of the West a good deal. But I was usually working on the little man's problems of giving him a right, giving the little man a right, to run a certain number of cattle as a minimum economic unit, and not to force him down to where his unit isn't sufficiently strong enough to be of economic value.

HESS: And also, I understand the cattlemen wanted priorities for the number of years they had been

[569]

there. In other words, who came first and who…

CHAPMAN: They wanted priority given them according to the number of years they had been using the public range, even though they had been using it as a rule for nothing most of the time. Now, the inside fight going on all the time with that, was that the cattle and sheep people never agreed on the location of these districts. They always disagreed with each other as to where the districts should be drawn. On a given map, sheep people were going to run them further up on the mountains, and the cattle people wanted them down in the valley. And you'd get the damndest fights with those people on this thing.

Now, Carpenter was a very good man in many ways. He was more conservative in his point of view on this than I realized he was and I reprimanded him. I didn't think he was quite as conservative as some of my friends had told me about him, but so many of my good friends in Colorado were liberals on this range fight and

[570]

I'd been with them publicly out there so long I never thought there was any question about it that anybody admired him about that. I just thought Carpenter was more or less a good middle-of-the-road man that didn't really believe that Government ought to give final control and power to the hands of the district grazers or advisory boards, but he did more than I could support later, when I discovered how strong he was going in it.

Now he's writing this book and he's trying to get me to verify something and he's only half right, and it takes a hell of a lot of my time to keep these things straight. He writes a letter that's self-serving, you see. And he writes me this long letter, puts it in longhand; you can't read it. He's smart as a whip; and he writes me this long letter; here's a copy.

HESS: What's the point he wants verified?

CHAPMAN: Oh, he is trying to get me in this to make

[571]

some verification of some statement that Ickes had said. Well, I didn't hear it said. I don’t know. I'm not going to verify something was gossip, in part because..."

HESS: It would be wrong to verify it if you didn't hear it made.

CHAPMAN: I can get the Department in a mess fooling around with things like that and I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't involve people in something that they couldn't verify.

HESS: Is he trying to justify some position that he took...

CHAPMAN: Yes.

HESS: ...when he was…

CHAPMAN: Yes, that's what he is really trying to do; he is head of...

HESS: Head of Grazing.

[572]

CHAPMAN: This is a funny thing. He's trying to justify his successful fight in getting the grazing committees appointed. You see, at first they weren't going to have any grazing committees at all...

HESS: These advisory boards?

CHAPMAN: Yes, they weren't going to have any at all; they just talked of them, but planned to drop it and not do anything. But when the grazing people found that out that shocked them and they went home.

HESS: They wanted a voice in policy matters, too, is that right?

CHAPMAN: They wanted a voice in the policy matters and the actual administration. They wanted to say to me when Oscar Chapman files his application for running 400 head of cattle this year, we want to cut him to three, and they all write out their little reasons for it, usually very brief. Then,

[573]

on the other hand, the sheep people are the same way, so there's no difference. The fight joins right there and they didn't fight anybody else right then; they stayed after each other. But he took on terrific battles with some of the cattle people, Carpenter did. He was a real courageous fellow and he took on the cattle...

HESS: Battling the cattlemen?

CHAPMAN: Yes. He had a big fight with them. And he won his fight. However, he paid too much of a price for it. I didn't think he'd won much, and he thought he'd won a lot of leverage in his arguments with the cattle people, but I didn't think he had. I didn't think he had won as much as he thought he had, but he was a pretty darn good maneuverer among that group. He asks me here, "Can you add information that will show how Congress was so willing to amend their law although it wasn't Ickes' wish. I will send you our manuscript before it is published, at least

[574]

all that mentions your name and as many more as you may wish to read."

I'll have to write to him rather quickly on this letter, in a hurry, because I don't know how he is using my name in that, you see.

HESS: Well, you want to find that out.

CHAPMAN: Well, you see these fellows here write these darned books and I never get a chance to read all of them. They're sitting back there drawing the dividends off of that cattle, off of public land, and they are writing of something I was supposed to have said or done twenty years ago. Well, no man can remember those things in detail to save your life.

HESS: Well, the Grazing Service was established in 1939. They took over from the old Division of Grazing.

CHAPMAN: Well, we had a Grazing Division in the land office.

HESS: That's right, up until that time, and then the Grazing Service...

[575]

CHAPMAN: We got it finally organized.

HESS: And in August of 1941 the Grazing Service headquarters was moved to Salt Lake City. Why was that move made?

CHAPMAN: It was a very bad move.

HESS: I wondered if you wouldn't say that, because a few years later it was moved back, and I have found records in the National Archives where you were a proponent of moving it back to town.

Right?

CHAPMAN: I was.

HESS: All right, why was it a bad move to move it to Salt Lake City?

CHAPMAN: Well, with the type of people you were dealing with, and knowing their policies, you were setting yourself right out there in the middle of your opponents and they were harassing many of the Grazing people to death, since you were

[576]

setting them right out there among them. They just harassed them to death; but if you set it up here in Washington they couldn't get here so often, get down here so much, and management would have a better opportunity to study that stuff in writing than they could by just a quick conversation running over something.

HESS: Out in Salt Lake City.

CHAPMAN: Yes, exactly. And I've just felt, with all the things that I've seen happen like that, you've got to protect the administrator a little bit, because he's left out on a limb with everybody who wants to pick on him; anything like that, so you've got to protect him.

HESS: In May of '44 a new man came in, C. L. Forsling.

CHAPMAN: He was a good man. Forsling was a very good man and was one of the best. I'll tell you how to describe him. I would say he was a good forest man; he was a Forest Service man.

[577]

HESS: He had come from the Forest Service, had he?

CHAPMAN: Yes, he came from the Forest Service and I recommended his appointment because he was very familiar with the cattle problem and the sheep problem out there, very familiar with it; and, therefore, I thought he'd make a good man from the management end. He was a man with a good education and you had to have a damn good education to run that thing, because to your surprise, nearly every one of these are second generation men and their fathers and mothers had homesteaded this land and got it for nothing you see. Therefore, they wanted to continue pushing for the stronger management, stronger control for the advisory boards that they wanted to name. Well, we finally allowed them to elect their advisory boards. You can't elect a man and get him on one of those boards if he wasn't a cattleman or a sheepman; he couldn't be elected anyway.

HESS: And usually if they were going to elect three

[578]

they'd have the three strongest proponents, would they not?

CHAPMAN: That's right. Oh yes.

HESS: According to Mr. Foss in his book that's about the way it went.

CHAPMAN: That's the way it went. What kind of a reaction did you get of that total book? Is he in the end supporting the policy of the Grazing Service or is he trying to take the side of the cattle people?

HESS: I did not come away from this book with a strong opinion one way or the other. It was more of an objective history of the Grazing Service. Now, the book on tidelands oil by Bartley is completely biased.

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes.

HESS: ...towards the states having the right to the oil. But, really, in Foss' book, now he does

[579]

have a summary here. I'm not sure right now; it's been a couple of weeks since I've read it, but I came away from this book more--it was just full of facts and figures and a more objective history.

CHAPMAN: It's more of a recording, historical operation, than anything else.

HESS: But he does say one thing in here that's very interesting that I wanted to bring up now. Senator Pat [Patrick A.] McCarran of Nevada had an investigation of the Grazing Service and that lasted from May of '41 to the fall of 1947, and Mr. Foss says: "During 1946 Senator McCarran and others were able to reduce the Grazing Service to a 'paper' organization," almost do away with it. He says, "This story will be told in more detail in a later chapter. At this point we need only note that the Grazing Service was abolished as a separate organization on July 16th, 1946, and consolidated with the old

[580]

General Land Office to form the present Bureau of Land Management. By this time Harold Ickes had been replaced by Julius A. Krug as Secretary of the Interior and C. L. Forsling had resigned. Total personnel were reduced by 79 percent; some of the old people discharged had over twenty years of Government service. Four regional offices and many field offices were closed." This gives an indication that he thought that Pat McCarran and the advisory boards were winning out over the administration--a strong administration from Washington.

CHAPMAN: There wasn't any question about it that Pat McCarran got into the fight to help the cattle people lead their fight against the Department of Interior as a whole.

HESS: He wanted to hold down the fees that the ranchers paid, which I gather was one of his main things.

CHAPMAN: He wanted to cut it down to half of what it had been.

[581]

HESS: Which was practically nothing.

CHAPMAN: Well, I think they were only paying a quarter or something, 25 cents a head.

HESS: Do you think it’s fair to say that the Grazing Service was cut back to a paper organization, and it was, therefore, rendered ineffective?

CHAPMAN: It wasn't totally ineffective, but they kept so well organized among themselves because of the experience they had had working with some of the Grazing people, administration people in Washington. They had learned how to work together as a group.

HESS: The advisory boards?

CHAPMAN: No, the cattle people and the boards.

HESS: Well, that's what I mean. Yes, that's what I meant.

CHAPMAN: The cattle people.

[582]

HESS: The industry.

CHAPMAN: Yes, the industry; they began to learn how to work together and they could get almost anything they wanted. They could just override you and Pat McCarran would see to the fight on the Hill, and he hated my guts; he disliked me so much.

HESS: He threatened to get you impeached a couple of times, did he not?

CHAPMAN: Yes, he was going to get me impeached a couple of times, once because I wouldn't give him a right to an Indian reservation lease. He didn't have any rights and I wasn't going to give them to him. He didn't have a cockeyed thing to show that he had any rights to those Indian lands, and he was using their water and their land. Now when you use their water up, you're using their lifeblood and they can't survive without it. You get them down to the death row and then you go in and buy them out for ten cents an acre.

[583]

HESS: That's what he had in mind?

CHAPMAN: That's what he did do on several cases. He violated the law to start with, because he had no legal right to get water in our land. Our own man violated the law out there by selling it to him. I made him give them up; that was when he was going to have me impeached. I made him pay the difference to these Indians from 10 cents--I think it was 10 cents; now on these figures I'm not certain, but whatever the figure was that he paid them, I made him double that to pay them for the use of their water and their range for those years between--for four or five years. He took the land, used it, used their water, and the minute he got their water, his dry land became valuable over here on this hillside and down this valley. This land became extremely valuable land the minute you got the water rights. That land isn't worth two cents an acre as it is, but when you establish the water rights for that land, you can get the water for it, and we had a good river

[584]

running through there, right through the Indian reservation. McCarran had cut in on that river just above the Indian line and deployed their water around their reservation and had it to run down through his valley and he'd pay them a little bit. I've never seen a man with such a craven desire to take everything he could see and not pay for it. He didn't want to pay them anything, and he...

HESS: And he got away with it, it looks like.

CHAPMAN: He did get away with it. He did get away with it and he...

HESS: What could they--let's talk about this relegating the Grazing Service to a paper organization at this time. Is this an example of the Department of the Interior and the Truman administration not properly regulating an industry?

CHAPMAN: I think in my last years in there they had not adequately managed and controlled the Grazing

[585]

Service. I didn't think we had and I...

HESS: What went wrong, what could have been done about this?

CHAPMAN: Well, you were blocked on the Hill by enough Western Senators...

HESS: McCarran and his friends?

CHAPMAN: Oh, yes, and he was chairman of an appropriation committee remember, and he’d knock out their appropriations on that.

HESS: So they just had the power in the Senate...

CHAPMAN: That's right. They had the power, and we had the responsibility and no power for doing it; couldn't do anything about it.

HESS: They take your money away from you; you can't do it.

CHAPMAN: Well, they took the money away from us and I refused to concede to him on these basic issues.

[586]

I conceded as far as I felt I could and hold up my head, and I refused to concede anything to him any more than I had to. I had to concede a few things, which I did, but then I cut him back pretty hard on the last round. Now, I won it; it was good for three months, because after that they appointed a new man and they put one of their cattle people in charge of the thing. McCarran was running the Grazing Service; he was practically running it, he was doing it. I am not proud of the Grazing Service’s record, and it was all because, partly, not all, but partly because I couldn't win a fight against McCarran's position on the Hill when he had so many Western Senators lined up. He had so many Western Senators he had lined up, that he couldn't lose a fight on that debate on the thing.

HESS: The Grazing Service then was abolished and went into the Bureau of Land Management. The first Director there was Fred Johnson. He had been Director of the General Land Office from '33 to

[587]

'46. He stayed two more years; he stayed until '48, and then Marion Clawson, who lives out here in Silver Spring or someplace around, from '48 until '55 was Director of the Bureau of Land Management.

CHAPMAN: Well, Marion, frankly, was a very good man. He didn't have good judgment on following a certain direction of policy. He was potentially a good administrator, but he would lose it--he would lose his values in his method of doing these things and he'd lose all that he had gained by his--what I thought were his good policies. He had some--he was very good on the policies. I tried to help him out on two or three things, and he got the impression that I was trying to kick him out, but, frankly, I could have moved him anytime I wanted to.

What those boys don't learn is after they get stuck with it, they learn that the Secretary of the Interior can move you regardless of what

[588]

that regulation says. You can move them if you have a basic--follow your regulations very carefully, and then follow those regulations to the end and you can transfer him up to Alaska, that we always called Alaska and the Pribilof Islands and outer Siberia.

HESS: Butte, Montana, I believe the FBI uses. Isn't that right, isn't that what you read in the paper lately? If you did something that J. Edgar Hoover didn't like when he was living.

CHAPMAN: You'd get sent to Butte.

HESS: You'd end up in Butte, Montana.

CHAPMAN: Well, we used the Pribilof Islands up there; but, I will say the Park Service Director, Drury, oh, he got very mad at me because in the end I fired him; he didn't think I could do it. But here's what he did to hurt the Service and to hurt me. I was holding a hearing in the Department of the Interior for all the--it's a public

[589]

hearing--all the people that are interested in the building of this dam at the Dinosaur National Park out in Utah, the Green River location; and he had signed an agreement with Mike Straus, the Commissioner of Reclamation. Newton Drury, Director of the Park Service, had signed an agreement with Straus whereby Drury did agree in this memorandum to support the Reclamation Commission position on the building of the Dinosaur National Monument dam, if Straus would--well, he wouldn't do anything to amount to anything, it was just an excuse. I forget what it was he wanted Straus to do, but Straus would do that in a minute because he wasn't interested in that subject; he didn't even care.

I can't remember what that basic agreement was, but Drury agreed with the Commission of Reclamation that he would support the building of that dam in Dinosaur National Monument, when he knew I was opposed to it. He knew I was opposed to it. Well, now

[590]

that doesn't mean that fellows in there had to all agree with me. There was no such thing as that. I had an entirely different theory on all of that kind of stuff.

HESS: You didn't want to run it in a dictatorial manner?

CHAPMAN: Well, I didn't want to try to utilize my powers just to see if I could. I wasn't playing games in that. I was deeply interested in the success of the Service and seeing this thing done. I was opposed to seeing that dam built in that park. That was within the Dinosaur National Park, and I didn't want to see them build a dam in there because I was convinced by the report of the engineers that said the dam could serve us just as well if built 50 miles down the river. And that way it would not interfere with the Park Service; it wouldn't interfere with our forest in any way. Therefore, I would

[591]

support that one, but I would not support the one they wanted to build in the Dinosaur National Monument.

Now, that fight went on for quite a while. The different groups of people that decided to scrap with me, or held a difference of opinion with me, sometimes had some pretty strong feelings against me for wanting to do these things the right way. Some of those things have been on the books for years and you want to get them straightened up. This was one of them that had been on the books for a long time and I wanted to get the thing done--get it picked up and take the ball and carry it.

HESS: I think we're about to run off here.

CHAPMAN: I think that's enough.