Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the Development of the American State, 1900–1912

Abstract

In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States created modern resource management—a collection of administrative bureaucracies that reversed long-standing policies of distributing lands into private hands and instead managed the public domain from Washington. The creation of these powerful, independent agencies underlay a broader effort to reorganize and enlarge the national government. The very same administrators who built the new conservation bureaucracies—Gifford Pinchot of the Forest Service, James R. Garfield of the Department of Interior, and Frederick Newell of the Bureau of Reclamation—also led President Theodore Roosevelt's drive for reorganization of the executive branch.