| Rather than traverse this ground in detail, I wish here simply to sketch the larger implications of ideas which were most succinctly stated originally in the first and last chapters. The natural tendency of the reader is to fit the book into his pigeon-hole of "natural resource policy." Perhaps by this explicit statement it can be transferred to the pigeon-hole of "political structure" and I can thereby draw attention more sharply to the type of problem which I consider to be the most crucial in the evolution of modern, urban-industrial America.1 |
| Conservation cannot be considered simply as a public policy, but, far more significantly, as an integral part of the evolution of the political structure of the modern United States. This twist in approach to the study of resource policy, though difficult to grasp, is fundamental. To most historians the significance of the conservation movement lies in the substance of conservation programs, sustained-yield forestry, multiple-purpose river development, and efficient public land management; in the active political forces supporting and opposing those policies; and in the relative success of their implementation in Congress and the administrative agencies. But this book is concerned in a broader way not with events and decisions, but with political structure; not with the way in which political forces produced a given outcome, but in which events and outcomes can shed light on the forces which constitute the larger system. We shall work not from forces to results but from events back into the patterns of forces. |
| This book, therefore, constitutes an attempt to re-create the larger political structure of the Progressive Era. For this purpose the decisions and events of conservation are simply an occasion for the examination of political change, a prism through which more extensive developments are observed. For too long historians have been mesmerized with events, with the episodic and the isolated, and have failed to be concerned with pattern. Here we shift from event to structure so that the more significant context can come into view and |
 | | | | 1 For more extended statements of this problem see Samuel P. Hays, "The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Quarterly (October 1964), 55 #4, 157-169, and Hays, "Political Parties and the Community-Society Continuum," in William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham (eds), The American Party Systems (Oxford, 1967). |
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