Char Miller has
written a book intended to rescue Forest Service founding chief
Gifford Pinchot from the battering he has taken over the flooding
of Northern California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. In almost all
accounts of that fight, Sierra Club founder John Muir is the
defender of the beautiful valley while Pinchot wants to flood it so
San Francisco can continue to develop. By extension from that
famous fight, Pinchot is said to have seen forests as standing
two-by-fours, and to have founded an agency that has the same
vision.
Miller, writing in Gifford
Pinchot and the Foundation of Modern Environmentalism,
says we should beware of putting the complex Pinchot into such a
neat cubbyhole. Pinchot, Miller writes, was a political operator of
the highest order, but he used his politics, where possible, to
protect the environment.
According to Miller,
Pinchot, like his champion, President Theodore Roosevelt, was an
environmentalist who was a social progressive. At the Forest
Service and later as two-time governor of Pennsylvania, he
championed both trees and people, and fought for unions, for
farmers, against child labor, and against the trusts and financiers
who were degrading the American people and despoiling the American
landscape.
There’s a lot to what Miller, an
historian at Trinity University in San Antonio, argues. But given
Pinchot’s supposed love of nature, it’s amazing that he would work
to flood Hetch Hetchy, already a longtime part of Yosemite National
Park, without initially ever having seen the valley. That fight
could have gone either way; the public was split, and there were
other ways to water San Francisco. Pinchot wasn’t just responding
to the politics; in part, he was an important part of the
politics.
Then, more than 20 years after leaving
the Forest Service, he lined up with his old enemies, the timber
companies, to stop President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from
creating a cabinet-level Department of Conservation that would
contain the Forest Service. Pinchot claimed the forests would be
exploited if the national forests were transferred to a new
Department of Conservation, but he never explained why the timber
industry was also opposing the shift. Was the industry also intent
on protecting the forests? Of course, we don’t know how a new
conservation department would have worked out, but we do know that
the Forest Service, safe within the Department of Agriculture, went
on to slaughter the national forests after World War
II.
Pinchot’s missteps don’t overwhelm his
creation of the U.S. Forest Service to protect the nation’s forests
from certain destruction; his alliance with Teddy Roosevelt to use
middle-of-the-night executive orders to put vulnerable forested
land under the protection of the Forest Service (shades of Bill
Clinton and Bruce Babbitt and their new national monuments); and
his many fights against monopolists and clear-cutters and
exploiters of working people.
Which is the real
Gifford Pinchot: flooder of beautiful valleys and clear-cutter of
forests, or the creator of modern environmentalism? Neither, I
think. As I read Miller’s fine biography, Pinchot’s core concern
comes through as his career and how history would see him. Very
early in his life, he saw the then nonexistent field of forestry as
his passport to power. Using intelligence and hard work and
ruthlessness (he discarded mentors and friends like Muir when it
suited him), Pinchot came close enough to the pinnacle of power to
think of running for president.
He didn’t run,
but he did the next best thing: he toppled a president – fellow
Republican William Howard Taft – and he thwarted the nation’s most
powerful Secretary of Interior, Harold Ickes, and the second
Roosevelt. He also made life miserable for President Warren G.
Harding by publicizing the Teapot Dome scandal. That story,
however, is missing from the biography.
Pinchot
was groomed to exercise power from birth. He came from a family
whose inherited wealth rested on clear-cutting, and his parents
guided his every step. His mother once complained to former
president Teddy Roosevelt that he hadn’t given her son enough
credit in the draft of his autobiography. Roosevelt rewrote the
chapter to include her Gifford. Pinchot was 47 years
old.
But Pinchot, warts and all, makes me
nostalgic for the old days. How wonderful to have national forest
issues so engage the nation that a forester could topple presidents
and secretaries of Interior.
Today, I’m
guessing, 99 percent of Americans could not name anyone associated
with forestry. Pinchot may have been a self-serving careerist
first, but he cared about forests second, and he had the power and
smarts to inspire his fellow Americans to care about them, too.
That’s much more than we have
today.
Gifford Pinchot and the Making of
Modern Environmentalism, by Char Miller, 458 pages,
Island Press, Washington, D.C.; cloth:
$28.
Ed Marston is the publisher of
High Country News.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Will the real Gifford Pinchot please stand up.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
