Ninety Years Ago a Highborn Zealot Named Gifford Pinchot Knew More About Woodlands Than Any Man in America

! Ninety years ago a highborn zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism. ike most public offi- freedom, and prosperity. The cials, Gov. Gifford Pin- urge was not entirely selfless; chot of Pennsylvania the acquisition and exercise of could not answer all power have gratifications to his mail personally. which Pinchot and his kind ..- __ Much of it had to be were by no means immune. left to aides, but not all of But at the forefront was a sol- these realized the character of emn and utterly earnest desire their boss. When a citizen that the lot of humanity wrote in 1931 to complain an- should be bettered by the grily about one of the gover- work of those who were nor's appointments, Pinchot equipped by circumstance, tal- was not pleased to find the ent, and training to change the following prepared for his sig- world. It had something to do nature: "I am somewhat sur- with duty and integrity and prised at the tone of your let- honesty, and if it was often ter. ... It has been my aim marred by arrogance, at its since I became Governor to se- best it was just as often lect the best possible person touched by compassion. for each position .... I hope And the world, in fact, was time will convince you how changed. greatly you have erred." The governor was not given have ... been a Gover- to such mewlings and forth- nor, every now and then, with composed his own letter: but I am a forester all the "Either you are totally out of time-have been, and touch with public sentiment, shall be, all my working or you decline to believe what life."GiffordPinchot made you hear .... To say that I was this pronouncement in a not attempting to do right speech not long before his when I made these appoint- death at the age of eighty-one, ments is nonsense. I was doing and repeated it in Breaking the best I knew how, and my New Ground, his account of confidence that I did so is by the early years of the conserva- no means impaired by your let- tion movement and his consid- ter." That was more like it- erable place in it. It was true and more like the man too. enough, but it could just as le- Gifford Pinchot passed gitimately be said of him that through nearly six decades ofAmerican public life like a Jere- he had been a forester every now and then but was a politi- miah, the flames of certitude seeming to dance behind his cian, had been and would be, all his working life. dark eyes. "Gifford Pinchot is a dear," his good friend and It could also be said that it was forestry that taught him mentor Theodore Roosevelt once said of him, "but he is a fa- his politics. Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, into the natic, with an element of hardness and narrowness in his tem- sort of environment that would normally have pointed him perament, and an extremist." in the direction of nothing more exotic than law or one of The complaint was legitimate, but the zealot in question the other gentlemanly persuasions. His father, James, a self- also was the living expression of an idea shared by much of made man of the classic stripe, had acquired so much an entire generation (indeed, shared by Roosevelt himself): money as a dry goods merchant in New York City that he the conviction that men and women could take hold of their government and shape it to great ends, great deeds, lifting Above, Pinchot near the turn of the century. Opposite page: High Rock all elements of American life to new levels of probity, grace, Lookout at Gifford Pinchot National Forest, in Washington State. 86 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 GARY BRAASCH, 01990 r He and Theodore Roosevelt hit it off from the start. "There has been a peculiar intimacy between you ... and me," the President wrote in later years, "because [we] have worked for the same causes, have dreamed the same dreams." had been able to retire to the pur- touched forest land outside the es- suit of good works at the age of tate. This new enterprise became forty-four. His mother, Mary, was known as the Pisgah Forest, and it the daughter of Amos Eno, a Man- was there in 1895 that Pinchot in- hattan real estate tycoon whose troduced what were almost cer- Fifth Avenue Hotel was so valu- tainly the first scientific logging op- able a property that his estate was erations ever undertaken in this able to sell it after his death for country. the staggering figure of $7,250,000. By then the young man had The Pinchots figured promi- made a secure reputation in the nently, if sedately, in society and field; indeed, he was the field. In traveled ambitiously in England December 1893 he opened an of- and on the Continent. Gifford, his fice in Manhattan as a "consulting younger brother, Amos, and their forester." Over the next several sister, Antoinette, all grew up able years, while continuing his work to speak French and snatches of for Vanderbilt in North Carolina, German at early ages, and Antoi- he provided advice and research nette, in fact, would become Lady work on forest lands in Michigan, Johnstone, wife of the British con- Pennsylvania, and New York sul in Copenhagen. State-including the six-million- Altogether it seemed an unlikely acre Adirondack Park and Forest background for a man who was to Preserve, established in 1895 as spend much of his adult life with the largest state-owned park in trees. There was not at the time a the nation. He could-and doubt- single American-born man and pre- Pinchot confers with President Theodore RooseveH less did-take satisfaction from a cious few men of any nationality aboard the steamer Mississippi in October 1907. description given of him by a news- in this country practicing anything paper columnist as early as 1892: that could remotely be described as forestry. Nevertheless, "Contrast the career of this Yale graduate with that of cer- "Howwould you like to be a forester?" Pinchot's father asked tain young men of Gotham who flatten their noses against him in the summer of 1885,as the young man prepared to en- club windows in the morning, and soften their brains with ter Yale. "It was an amazing question for that day and gen- gossip, champagne and the unmentionables at other periods eration," he remembered, "how amazing I didn't begin to of the day and night." understand at the time." In his travels the elder Pinchot had There was nothing soft in this graduate's brain, and since become an admirer of the kind of scientific forestry prac- he lived most of his time at home with his mother and fa- ticed in France, Germany, and Switzerland and had even writ- ther, there was even less that could be called unmentionable ten a few articles on the subject. in his behavior or experience (his first fiancee died in 1894, The son proved open to his father's enthusiasm. From an event that so devastated him he did not marry until childhood Pinchot had been active in the outdoors, fond of twenty years later, after his mother's own death). By the hiking, camping, and, especially, trout fishing. Since there turn of the century he was fully equipped by temperament was nowhere yet in the United States to study his chosen pro- and experience to assume the task that would soon be given fession, after graduating from Yale he took himself back to him: the intelligent management of more forest land than Europe, where for more than a year he studied forest man- had ever been placed in the control of any single individual. agement at the French Forestry School in Nancy and put in a month of fieldwork under Forstmeister ("Chief Forester") t would be difficult to find a more convenient symbol Ulrich Meister in the city forest of Zurich, Switzerland. for the dark side of American enterprise than the state Back in this country he was hired by George W.Vander- of the nation's forest lands in the last quarter of the nine- bilt in 1892 to manage the five-thousand-acre forest on his teenth century. Restrained only by the dictates of the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, a ragged patchwork of marketplace, the timber industry had enjoyed a free abused lands purchased from numerous individual farmers. hand for generations, and the wreckage was consider- While nursing this wrecked acreage back to health, the able. Most of the best forest land east of the Mississippi had young forester persuaded Vanderbilt to expand his holdings long since been logged out-sometimes twice over-and by an additional one hundred thousand acres of nearly un- while generally humid conditions had allowed some of the 88 AMERICAN HERITAGE· FEBRUARYIMARCH 1991 land to recover in second and third growth, erosion had of protection and managed use, Congress passed the Forest permanently scarred many areas. Unimpeded runoff during Organic Act of June 1897,which stipulated that the forest re- seasonal rains had caused such ghastly floods as that lead- serves were intended "to improve and protect the forest ... ing to the destruction of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 1889. for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water The land of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys was almost en- flow, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the tirely privately owned; west of the use and necessities of citizens of Mississippi most of the land be- the United States." longed to the nation.

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