ABSTRACT
A REVIEW OF past experience is not always a guide to the future, but it can help in identifying some relatively persistent problems. Decisions of the Secretary of Agriculture in the thirties concerning the organization and objectives of the Departments soil conservation programs still limit the practical range of choices open to his successors. One basic aim of the policies adopted thirty years ago was to create a novel blend of power and responsibility; it was to be neither wholly centralized nor decentralized. The optimum use of human and natural resources depends upon sound national planning, according to the view which prevailed in the Roosevelt Administration. Some of the Department of Agriculture's leading policy-makers were equally certain that successful national planning and administration require enough decentralized authority and action to fuse the knowledge of the specialist with the experience and interests of farmers affected by agricultural programs. The novelty of these ideas in the thirties seemed to demand new organizations to develop policies and procedures which could be understood and accepted by the public.
