Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot's Path to Progressive Reform

Abstract

Gifford Pinchot was the Progressive Era's Forrest Gump. When it came to the politics of conservation, he was everywhere. Pinchot was the youngest member of the National Forest Commission in 1896. He directed the Division of Forestry (later the Forest Service) from 1898 through 1910. Pinchot engineered the transfer of the national forests from the Department of Interior to the Department of Agriculture, where his Forest Service was based. He actively managed those forests, even when this entailed fierce battles with western interests. Pinchot battled Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger over the future of conservation in the Taft administration. He insisted that the nation's natural resources be used productively, even at the expense of damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water to the city of San Francisco. No wonder that Pinchot is a central figure for environmental and political historians alike. Illuminating a powerful new current in environmental history that treats humans as essential parts of nature, Char Miller's recently published Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism portrays Pinchot at ease in both the utilitarian world as well as the world of trees, streams, and wildlife. Miller's work offers a promising route out of the conservation versus preservation dichotomy that once structured the work of environmental historians examining the Progressive Era.' Complementing Miller's contributions to environmental history, this article reconsiders the political ground that Pinchot stood on when he launched his career in the late nineteenth century. William Cronon has summed up Pinchot's current political profile best in a synthetic essay written for The Oxford History of the American West Pinchot spearheaded a drive to convert public land policy from one that sought first and foremost to disperse public holdings to private interests to a policy that sought to retain, conserve, and manage the public land. To achieve this, Cronon writes, Pinchot turned to a new body of knowledge-scientific for-