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On February 13, 1932, Utah governor George H. Dern appeared in Washington, D.C. before the House Committee on the Public Lands in an effort to stave off an attempt to divest the federal government of the unreserved public domain in western states. Dern’s opposition to the proposal, which would transfer the public domain’s surface rights to the states, was clear. The governor testified that Utah could not adequately manage these lands and that, indeed, the state was not interested in accepting them. “Comes now the Government of the United States, tentatively offering us what looks at a distance like a fine, large horse,” said Dern in his opening remarks. “As we get closer we have some difficulty in discerning whether it is actually a fine, large horse, or a fine, large white elephant.”1 For Dern, it was the absence of mineral rights, the federal government’s ability to finance and oversee interstate range rehabilitation, and his ultimate goal of long-term conservation that turned a statutory gift horse into a legislative white elephant.2
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Bucking the White Elephant: Utah’s Fight for Federal Management of the Public Domain, 1923–1934
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Dern also dismissed notions that rampant overgrazing on the unreserved federal domain could best be mitigated through private control and laid out a case aimed at derailing the proposed transfer. Citing environmental disasters caused by mismanagement of private land in his state, he contended that “private ownership is not the answer to this problem of overgrazing.”3 Furthermore, the governor pointed to the potentially detrimental impact the bill might have on interstate watersheds, the antagonism of Utah stockmen toward the plan, and the possibility that a land transfer would also shift the cost of federal reclamation projects onto the states.4 Unlike some western politicians and ranchers of the time, Dern’s understanding of property favored constitutional federal authority over the definition of property usage that many ranchers held over the unreserved public domain.5 Dern’s interpretation of property allowed him
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