Oil into Trees

Trust-busting and conservation were two prime preoccupations of President Theodore Roosevelt. At his instigation John Davison Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust was ultimately smashed to bits. At his instigation five of the Government's 21 national parks came into being. Were he alive today, he would have the satisfaction of seeing the remains of a thing he hated at work for a thing he loved, Rockefeller money developing a national park.

For last week Secretary of the Interior

Wilbur announced that the U. S. had just taken title to 13,000 acres of timberland owned by Sugar Pine Lumber Co. in the heart of Yosemite National Park. The U. S. paid $3,300,000 for the tract, half the purchase price being donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr.* Last year, over the vigorous protest of Senator Thomas James Walsh of Montana who owns a summer home in Glacier National Park, Congress ordered the Interior Department to buy up all private land within national parks to save them from mutilation (TIME, Feb. 18, 1929). Under the law the U. S. pays one-half of such cost, private contributors the other half. In his announcement of this first major acquisition of national park private land Secretary Wilbur made deep bows of gratitude to Mr. Rockefeller, to Michigan's Congressman Louis C. Cramton, author of the purchase provision in the Interior Department appropriation bill, and to the lumber company in Yosemite which had withheld cutting over its timber tract until the U. S. was ready to buy.

*Mr. Rockefeller has also pledged five million dollars, on a 50-50 basis with Tennessee and North Carolina, for land purchases to create the Great Smoky National Park (TIME, Feb. 17).

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