Pinchot, Gifford

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PINCHOT, GIFFORD

Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), first head of the U.S. Forest Service, was a pioneer in forest management. He promoted forest conservation as an effective way to provide a steady source of timber. Pinchot was a close advisor to fellow conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), and he twice served as governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot's zeal for conservation earned him loyal friends and bitter enemies. His legacy was the millions of acres of national forests that were preserved as a result of his activism.

Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865 to an affluent family in Simsbury, Connecticut. His boyhood was divided between his family's vastly wooded Pennsylvania estate and at their stylish home in New York City. He often traveled abroad, but he loved to go camping and to hike wilderness trails. Since there wasn't a U.S. college that taught forestry at that time he formulated his own course of study at Yale to provide him with the background he needed. He graduated from Yale University in 1889, and went on to do postgraduate forestry study in Austria, France, Germany, and Switzerland. In Europe forests were under the management of expert woodsmen; these men were Pinchot's teachers. Pinchot learned that European forests were safeguarded from extinction: lumbering was controlled under strict rules, waste was kept to a minimum, and tremendous precautions were taken to prevent fire and blight.

Pinchot returned to the United States with the realization that lumbering needed to be regulated in his own country. A bill was passed in 1891 that allowed the federal government to reserve 13 million wooded acres from lumbering. A year later Pinchot initiated the nation's first organized forestry management program at the Vanderbilt estate in Baltimore, North Carolina. He then became a member of the National Forest Commission and in 1898 Pinchot was appointed the Department of Agriculture's first Chief of Forest Service. He would serve in this position for the next 12 years.

In 1902 Pinchot designed a preservation program for the Philippine Islands. The following year he became a professor of forestry at Yale University, a position he would hold for the next 33 years. Wanting a single, memorable word to describe the great need to protect earth's resources, Pinchot coined the term "conservation" in 1907.

After Pinchot publicly criticized Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger's policies regarding the administration of coal lands in Alaska, President William Howard Taft (1909–1913) fired Pinchot for insubordination. The dismissal widened a Republican Party rift between Taft and the party's progressive wing, which was led by Theodore Roosevelt. Two years later, when Roosevelt won the presidency, Pinchot played an important role in Roosevelt's revolutionary conservation program. It was a period that became known as the "golden era of conservation."

Although Pinchot lost the Republican nomination for the Pennsylvania governor's seat in 1914 he eventually served two non-consecutive terms as governor of that state. During his first term (1923–1927) he directed the reorganization of the state government and enforced Prohibition. During his second term (1931–1935) he fought for stricter regulation of public utilities. In 1926 William S. Vare defeated Pinchot in a three-candidate race for Pennsylvania's Republican senate nomination. However, the Senate declined Vare after Pinchot announced that the nomination was "partly bought and partly stolen."

Pinchot remained active in conservation affairs throughout his political career and in 1910 he became president of the National Conservation Association. He served on the Inland Waterways Commission, the Commission on Country Life, the United States Food Administration (1917–1918), and was a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (1914–1915). From 1920 to 1922 he was the Pennsylvania Commissioner of Forestry and acted as federal mediator in the anthracite coal strike in 1923. The author of several books on forestry and timber, he also published an autobiography called Breaking New Ground (1947), which told of his commitment to conservation. Gifford Pinchot died on October 4, 1946 in New York, New York.

See also: Environmentalism, William Howard Taft