PINCHOT, GIFFORD 1865-1946
Head of the forestry division, us. department of agriculture, 1898-1901
Head of the bureau of forestry, 1901-1905
Head of the u.s. forest service, 1905-1910
A Valued Adviser
The most influential of the small group of close friends who advised President Theodore Roosevelt on conservation issues, Gifford Pinchot made conservation one of the leading causes of the Progressive Era. In the course of his career he slowly expanded the nation's concept of conservation from protection of forest resources to the conservation of human society itself.
Background
Born on 11 August 1865 at his maternal grandfather's summer home in Simsbury, Connecticut, Gifford Pinchot, the son of a wealthy New York merchant and land speculator, spent much of his childhood abroad with his parents and three siblings. After graduation from the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in 1884, he enrolled at Yale University. His maternal grandfather, who had achieved even greater wealth in Manhattan real estate and construction than Pinchot's father, promised to leave his entire fortune to young Gifford if he would enter the business after he graduated from Yale in 1889. Instead, he followed his father's advice and decided to become a forester. His father had seen the great working forests of Europe and anticipated the need for such scientific management of American woodlands in the near future. There were no schools of forestry in the United States, and Pinchot naively shared the American conception of a forester that came from the tales of Robin Hood, a man prancing about in the forest looking after the king's animals while wearing green stockings and leather cap. (In fact, students at the first forestry schools in the United States often formed Robin Hood Societies, with members appearing in pictures dressed like that legendary outlaw.) Pinchot learned differently in Europe, where he went after graduation in 1889. There he studied at the French Forest School in Nancy and went to Germany to meet Sir Dietrich Brandis, former head of forestry in British India and one of the leading foresters of the age. Pinchot returned to the United States in late 1890, and in February 1892 he took a job supervising forestry work at George W. Vanderbilt's sprawling Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Vanderbilt wanted to try scientific management in his private forest, the first attempt of its kind in the United States.
Forester-Politician
Achieving modest success in North.Carolina, Pinchot opened a consulting office in New York City, hoping to attract the attention of the wealthy landowners of the Adirondacks. He became deeply involved in the forest conservation movement emerging in the early 1890s, serving on several government-appointed investigative committees. In 1898 President William McKinley invited him to take the position of chief of forestry in the Division of Forestry, then part of the Department of Agriculture. He replaced Bernhard Fernow, a German-born forester whose work in the division had done much to promote conservation. Two years later Pinchot's father and mother joined him in establishing and endowing the Yale University School of Forestry, where Pinchot began delivering a series of annual lectures in 1903. Pinchot's close friendship with President Roosevelt, who took office in September 1901, proved crucial to the survival of the conservation movement. In the Forest Service he built a strong bureaucracy that became a model of efficiency and professionalism. He urged Roosevelt to appoint many conservation commissions and then, to insure they carried out his vision, had himself appointed to them as secretary, the most powerful position on such commissions. Pinchot zealously carried out conservation policies, exerting strict control over all mining, grazing, and lumbering in the two hundred million acres of National Forests and withdrawing from the public domain large tracts of western land to manage resources that had previously been exploited for free.
Making Enemies
Bernhard Fernow and Pinchot had quickly taken a disliking to one another while working together on various forestry committees, and Fernow was only the first of many enemies Pinchot made because of differences of opinion over the goals of conservation. Pinchot's friendship with the naturalist John Muir ended in 1905, when Muir, who believed in preservation of America's scenic resources in their pristine natural states, opposed the construction of a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, while Pinchot favored the dam because it would provide water for the city of San Francisco. He made many other enemies who believed he erred too much on the side of conservation. The uncompromising power with which he controlled grazing, lumbering, and mining activities on government land led to cries of "Pinchotism" from western newspapers and citizens. Western congressmen resented the power held by this mere bureau chief and tried cutting off funding for some of his commissions and to the Forest Service itself, but Pinchot and Roosevelt's efforts to publicize their efforts had helped create a conservation-minded public, ensuring that the federal government would always have a hand in regulating the development of natural resources. In 1907 Congress finally succeeded in reining in Pinchot by attaching to an Agriculture Department appropriations bill a rider forbidding the Forest Service to withdraw land in six western states without the approval of Congress. Pinchot's downfall came in January 1910, when he was dismissed from the Forest service after publicly accusing Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger of illegal actions in permitting the development of Alaskan coal lands under federal protection. The "BallingerPinchot Affair" hurt President Taft politically and widened the split within the Republican Party between conservatives and Roosevelt Republicans, or the "insurgents," who supported Pinchot.
Outside Looking In
After his dismissal Pinchot continued to exert influence over forestry and conservation. Over the next decade he served another term as president of the Society of American Foresters (1910-1911), which he had founded in 1900 and headed until 1908. From 1910 until the mid 1920s he was president of the National Conservation Association, which he had formed in 1909 to further his conservation goals. He also wrote books on forestry and conservation, including The Fight for Conservation (1910) and three editions of The Training of a Forester, the first appearing in 1914. From 1920 to 1922 he was the commissioner of the Pennsylvania Department of Forestry, and later he served as secretary of the Department of Forests and Water in that state. As governor of Pennsylvania in 1923-1927 and 1931-1935, he carried out a progressive agenda in a time of political conservatism and became known as the "governor who got the farmers out of the mud" because of his extensive rural road-building program. Toward the end of his life Pinchot espoused the belief that conservation of global resources was the foundation for world peace. He served as an informal conservation adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt and worked on the president's behalf to put together a World Conservation Conference. Roosevelt's death put a temporary halt to the plan, but a few days before Pinchot's death, President Harry's Truman submitted the plan to the United Nations. Pinchot's plan for a meeting on global conservation became a reality after his death on 4 October 1946.
Sources:
M. Nelson McGeary, Gifford Pinchot: Forester-Politician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960);
Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947);
Harold T. Pinkett, Gifford Pinchot: Private and Public Forester (Urbana, Chicago & London: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
