Ballinger‐Pinchot Controversy. The main actors in this bitter Progressive Era dispute over the future of conservation policy during the presidency of William Howard Taft (1909–1913) were Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger and Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot. At issue was the federal government's role in overseeing natural resources. From his post in the Department of Agriculture, Pinchot wanted to continue the forest‐management and coal‐land policies of Theodore Roosevelt that involved a large role for the federal government. Under Roosevelt, Pinchot had enjoyed wide discretion in setting priorities about western land, water, and mining issues. Ballinger, a westerner from Seattle, Washington, sought to shift power back to the states and to allow localities to develop their own resources. He also believed that Pinchot had often failed to follow the letter of government policy or to observe appropriate legal procedures.

The resulting controversy spilled into the press in the fall of 1909. Taft's critics argued that he and Ballinger had repudiated the conservation goals of Roosevelt. Spurred by overblown charges against Ballinger provided by Louis Glavis, a Department of the Interior official, Pinchot pressed his case in the newspapers with sensational, exaggerated allegations that Ballinger had approved the sale of valuable coal lands in Alaska to a consortium of Seattle businessmen, who had in turn sold the land to J.P. Morgan and other New York bankers. When Pinchot in January 1910 wrote a public letter criticizing Ballinger to a U.S. senator, Taft fired him. In the congressional inquiry that followed, the Republican majority exonerated Ballinger, and the Democrats sided with Pinchot.

A discredited Ballinger left office in the spring of 1911. The controversy became a decisive element in the split between Roosevelt and Taft that led Roosevelt to challenge Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912, and then to launch his independent candidacy on the Progressive party ticket.
See also Conservation Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of the Interior); Forests and Forestry; Land Policy, Federal; States' Rights.

Bibliography

Samuel P. Hays , Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920, 1958.
James L. Penick Jr. , Progressive Politics and Conservation: The Ballinger‐Pinchot Affair, 1969.

Lewis L. Gould

BALLINGER-PINCHOT CONTROVERSY

BALLINGER-PINCHOT CONTROVERSY. When William H. Taft became president of the United States in 1909, his administration canceled an order of former president Theodore Roosevelt that had withdrawn from sale certain public lands containing water-power sites in Montana and Wyoming. Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, protested and publicly charged Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger with favoritism toward corporations seeking waterpower sites. Pinchot also defended a Land Office investigator who was dismissed for accusing Ballinger of being a tool of private interests that desired access to Alaskan mineral lands. Taft fired Pinchot, and a joint congressional investigating committee exonerated Ballinger. Nevertheless, public outcry over the controversy forced Ballinger to resign in March 1911, and the controversy widened the split between conservative (Taft) and progressive (Roosevelt) Republicans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Donald F. William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Coletta, Paolo E. William Howard Taft: A Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1989.

Penick, James L., Jr. Progressive Politics and Conservation: The Ballinger-Pinchot Affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Glenn H.Benton/a. g.

See alsoEnvironmental Business ; Interior, Department of the ; Marine Sanctuaries ; Waterways, Inland .

Richard Achilles Ballinger , 1858–1922, U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1909–11), b. Boonesboro (now in Boone), Iowa. He was mayor of Seattle (1904–6) and commissioner of the General Land Office (1907–9); in 1909, Taft appointed him Secretary of the Interior. While Secretary, he was accused by L. R. Glavis of the Land Office of having halted investigation into the legality of certain private coal-land claims in Alaska. With Taft's approval, Glavis was dismissed from service. Glavis took his case to the public in a series of articles in Collier's Weekly that roused the conservationists. Led by Gifford Pinchot, they demanded an investigation. A congressional committee exonerated Ballinger, but the questioning of committee counsel Louis D. Brandeis made the Secretary's anticonservationism clear; he resigned in Mar., 1911. The incident split the Republican party and helped turn the election of 1912 against Taft.

Bibliography: See A. T. Mason, Bureaucracy Convicts Itself (1941); J. L. Penick, The Ballinger-Pinchot Affair (1968).