American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  This was not to say that no one in America was talking of forestry before Pinchot. Fears about rapacious lumbering and unchecked forest fires had convinced some that the nation needed to rethink the way it handled its tree resources. As early as 1875, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had noted in its annual report: “Forestry has excited much attention in the United States in recent years in consequence of the rapid deforesting of large areas, and the expression of fears of a timber famine at no distant day.” That same year a group of private citizens formed the American Forestry Association—one of the founders and early leaders was James Pinchot. The federal government soon took up the issue as well, allocating funds in 1876 to the study of the topic and formally creating a Division of Forestry five years later. Then, in 1882, the city of Cincinnati hosted the first American Forestry Congress, an event that lasted for several days, brought together the most knowledgeable voices on trees, and even included a citywide parade that culminated with an Arbor Day–inspired tree planting.

  The problem with this early American forestry movement, at least in Gifford Pinchot’s view, was that those involved “thought only of forest preservation, forest influences, and tree planting.” In other words, “forestry” functioned as something of a catchall term to describe almost any late-nineteenth-century activities concerned with tree protection or propagation. Arbor Day was thus an aspect of forestry. The campaign to create the Adirondack park was another. Muir’s advocacy of saving the trees of the Sierras also counted. The subjects that received the least discussion were forest management and continuous timber production, the mainstays of the actual profession in Europe.

  When Pinchot arrived at Yale, he attempted to study forestry, but the school offered few relevant classes besides botany and natural history. It was just as well, since his collegiate interests were more social than academic. Pinchot wrote, “What I learned outside the classroom was worth at least as much as what I learned inside it.” He threw himself into the vibrant extracurricular scene, eventually earning membership in Skull and Bones, the legendary secret society. At commencement, he was even given the honor of addressing his class. Though he had carefully prepared a talk, he abandoned it at the last moment in favor of an impromptu discussion of forestry. He explained: “[M]y future profession welled up inside of me and took its place, and I made to the exalted graduates of Yale . . . my first public statement on the importance of Forestry to the United States—and my first public declaration that I had chosen it as my lifework.”

  Not everyone was thrilled to learn of Pinchot’s intentions. His maternal grandfather, for example, wanted Pinchot to become a businessman—he would go so far as to offer Pinchot a twenty-five-hundred-dollar salary as inducement to abandon his plans. Even those at the forefront of America’s proto-forestry movement found Pinchot’s proposal suspect. Charles Sprague Sargent, dean of American trees and a family friend, dismissed it as tomfoolery. George Loring, former U.S. commissioner of agriculture, was equally skeptical. No less an authority than the director of the federal government’s Division of Forestry, a German-born forester named Bernhard Fernow, cautioned Pinchot that true forestry was simply impractical in America and that any effort in that direction was largely a waste of time. About the only people who supported him were his parents, but in the end that was enough, and the headstrong Pinchot went forward with his plans.

  He traveled to Europe shortly after graduation to begin training as a forester. Armed with letters of introduction and the mystique of being the first American to study the profession seriously, Pinchot received a warm reception from many of the Continent’s greatest authorities. His formal studies took place at L’Ecole Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France, one of the most prestigious forestry academies in Europe. This was where he gained an initial understanding of the profession, learning the basics of forest economics, law, and science. It was also where Pinchot first encountered a professionally managed forest:

  [The French forests] were divided at regular intervals by perfectly straight paths and roads at right angles to each other, and they were protected to a degree we in America know nothing about. There was, for example, a serious penalty for building any fire in the woods for any purpose. . . . This was the kind of forest I had read about, where peasants carried away every scrap of dead wood, and where branches down to the size of a pencil could be made into fagots and actually sold.

  In addition to his training at Nancy, Pinchot spent extensive time with Sir Dietrich Brandis, a Prussian-trained forester who had famously introduced the profession to British-controlled Burma and India in the 1850s. Pinchot immediately felt a kinship with Brandis and treated him as a mentor, noting that “he had accomplished on the other side of the world what I might hope to have a hand in doing in America.”

  Pinchot decided to return to America after thirteen months, before completing his curriculum. Both Brandis and the forestry professors at Nancy cautioned him that it was too soon, that his training was incomplete. Of this there was little doubt, but the cocksure Pinchot felt that additional training was excessive. In his view the technical aspects of European forestry were ultimately of limited applicability in America. What mattered was getting the new profession started, and for that further study was unnecessary.

  He returned home in late 1890, eager to put his training to use. Fernow, head of the Division of Forestry, made him an offer to serve as the division’s assistant chief, but Pinchot demurred. His mentor, Brandis, had advised him that the best way to introduce forestry was not to work for the government, but to find a forest and start. No such opportunities, however, were forthcoming. For much of the first year, he worked in a series of consulting jobs. The pay was often nonexistent, but the work, which required extensive travel, allowed him to discover the nation’s diverse forests and their seemingly innumerable varieties of trees.

  In early 1892, the opportunity that Pinchot had been awaiting finally materialized. George W. Vanderbilt, heir to one of the nation’s greatest family fortunes, was constructing near Asheville, North Carolina, a grand estate—the Baedeker Company, then the world’s authority on travel, would soon call it “the finest private residence in America.” Known as Biltmore, it stretched out across eighty-eight hundred acres, half of which were forest. Frederick Law Olmsted, the venerable landscape architect who was rapidly approaching the end of his career, was commissioned to oversee the project and, ever the innovator, recommended that the woodlands of Biltmore be devoted to practical forestry. When Vanderbilt agreed to this plan, Olmsted, who was an old friend of Pinchot’s father, offered the job to Gifford.

  At twenty-six years old, Pinchot finally had a chance to practice his new profession and realize the goal that his father had first suggested seven years earlier. Under his guidance, the woods around Biltmore were transformed from an unmanaged oak forest to a center of lumber production where trees were carefully chosen and selectively cut. Timber was treated like a crop to be grown, not a resource to be mined, and Vanderbilt’s property quickly became, in Pinchot’s words, “the beginning of practical Forestry in America.” Pinchot’s venture even generated a profit, at least on paper—this was vital, since one of the strongest critiques of forestry in America was that it fundamentally cost more than traditional “cut out and get out” lumbering.

  Pinchot’s twenty-five-hundred-dollar Biltmore contract stipulated that he prepare an exhibit on forestry for the upcoming 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a grand gathering to honor the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. More than 26 million people would attend the celebration. Attractions included the original Ferris wheel, the world’s first commercial movie theater, and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Alongside these unforgettable exhibits, Pinchot presented the first public display of practical forestry in America.

  WHILE PINCHOT WAS BUSY launching his professional forestry career, others in the nation’s proto-forestry movement were concentrating on a different initiative. The federal
government, despite its policy of distributing lands as quickly as practicable, still possessed hundreds of millions of forested acres throughout the West. Nearly all of these public wooded lands faced direct threats from logging, grazing, or the forest fires that such activities helped bring about. The fate of these forests up to this point had been largely ignored, but various groups started lobbying to change this. The most vocal faction, taking a page from the Adirondack park movement, wanted the public’s tree resources protected because of their role in regulating watersheds—this was especially important throughout the West, where water was relatively scarce. Others felt that tighter control over the nation’s trees was the only way to stave off the impending timber famine, a concern that swelled following the declaration by the superintendent of the 1890 census that the nation’s frontier was effectively closed. A small faction of activists also wanted to expand Muir’s ideas of preservation throughout the public domain. From these diverse viewpoints arose the idea of forest reserves, areas carved from the extensive western public domain where settlement would be forbidden and commercial activities, such as lumbering, would be limited if not restricted entirely.

  Initial efforts to win over Congress failed under heavy resistance from westerners. Then, in early 1891, a landmark piece of forest legislation, in Pinchot’s words, “slipped through Congress without question and without debate” when a last-minute amendment was added to a bill whose main purpose was to repeal the disastrous Timber Culture Act. Known as Section 24, or the Forest Reserve Act, the amendment stated: “That the President of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and reserve, in any State or Territory having public land bearing forests, . . . public reservations.” At its most basic, Section 24 simply transferred power to create reserves from the legislature to the executive, but this proved crucial. Shortly after the act’s passage, President Benjamin Harrison set aside the first reserve, an area adjacent to Yellowstone National Park that contained more than one million acres. By the end of 1892 he had created fifteen reservations that totaled over thirteen million acres, mostly with the stated purpose of protecting water supplies.

  While the Forest Reserve Act marked the beginning of a system of national forests, problems with the new reserves quickly surfaced. Section 24, reflecting the general confusion over just what the reserves were for, had failed to provide any mechanism for administration. Consequently, once a reserve was declared it signaled the end of any commercial activities whatsoever, a fact that pleased the more hard-line forest defenders but enraged westerners used to unencumbered use of public lands. At the same time, the absence of any effective administration meant that the federal government had no way to enforce its stated policies. Thus, timber theft, grazing, and forest fires continued unabated regardless of presidential decree. By 1893 President Grover Cleveland, recognizing the inherent flaws in Section 24, decided to temporarily suspend the creation of any additional reserves.

  The need for a solution to this reserve situation preoccupied many in the proto-forestry movement. Sargent’s Garden and Forest journal began advocating a high-level, expert commission to study the issue fully. Soon others joined this chorus. By 1895 Robert Underwood Johnson’s influential Century Magazine was also calling for “a commission composed of men of sufficient reputation to make their recommendations heeded.” Action was finally taken the following year, when the secretary of the interior asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to appoint a committee to investigate the matter and prepare a report for Congress and the president. To lead the seven-person committee the NAS selected Sargent. He, in turn, appointed Pinchot, bringing the young forester into national politics for the first time.

  The NAS committee headed west in July 1896 to study the forest situation firsthand. When the men eventually arrived in California, they met with John Muir, who had been invited to act as an advisor. Muir’s inclusion in the committee reflected the eclectic nature of the early forest reserve movement; differences over policy—specifically about whether to preserve forests or put them to productive use through professional forestry—had not yet calcified as they would during the twentieth century. Pinchot and Muir, who had met several years earlier and corresponded, used the trip to solidify their friendship. They bonded over their appreciation of nature and their interest in trees. Pinchot especially impressed Muir through his ruggedness when facing the elements. Describing an August excursion to Crater Lake in Oregon, Muir wrote: “Heavy rain during the night. All slept in the tent except Pinchot.” The two men were kindred spirits on the trail.

  The trip west left the committee divided over the question of whether to open the reserves to use, but a strong majority felt that the reserve system, despite its flaws, warranted expansion even before this issue was resolved. In January 1897, Sargent sent a preliminary report to the NAS calling for the creation of thirteen new reserves totaling more than 21 million acres. The report landed on President Cleveland’s desk in a matter of days, with an additional note from the secretary of the interior: “[T]he birth of the Father of our Country could be no more appropriately commemorated than by the promulgation by yourself of proclamations establishing these grand forest reservations.” Cleveland took this suggestion to heart and on February 22, 1897, ten days before his presidential term concluded, he authorized all of the proposed reserves, more than doubling the national system in a single stroke.

  This proclamation, however, triggered another firestorm, one that far exceeded any earlier furor over forest reserves. Voices across the West complained that the federal government had finally gone too far and that this presidential power to lock up huge swaths of forests without any legislative approval was simply intolerable—one could almost hear echoes of the colonial loggers protesting the King’s Broad Arrow policy. Sympathetic western congressmen rushed to appease their irate constituents. Their solution was to revoke Cleveland’s actions through an amendment to the 1897 Sundry Civil Bill, an omnibus legislation that provided government funding for the upcoming year. The modified bill reached the president for signature the day that he was leaving office, and when he learned that his forest reserve proclamation had been undone, he threw the measure on the floor in disgust. According to Robert Underwood Johnson, who was involved with the reserves, the president declared, “I will veto the whole damned Sundry Civil Bill!” The fight over the nation’s forests had, for the moment, paralyzed Washington.

  Cleveland’s pocket veto of the Sundry Civil Bill forced his successor, President William McKinley, to call an extra session of Congress on March 15, 1897. Those who supported the forest reserves used this window to lobby for alternative legislation. The situation seemed to favor the western-based opposition, but then the proponents of reserves scored a coup with the conversion of South Dakota senator Richard Pettigrew, a powerful member of the Public Lands Committee. He soon sponsored a new, compromise amendment allowing the Cleveland reserves (and any future reserves) to stand, but granting the secretary of the interior administration rights, including for the purpose of logging. This so-called Pettigrew Amendment, by opening the government forests to use, diffused the core of western opposition, and a new Sundry Civil Bill was signed into law in early June 1897.

  While the more preservationist-minded members of the nation’s forestry community were upset with the outcome, believing that it was a capitulation to the lumber industry, Pinchot was thrilled. The new legislation opened up a path for professional forestry to be practiced across tens of millions of acres, on a scale unknown anywhere in the world. He later commented, “Except for the Act of 1891, the Pettigrew Amendment . . . was and still is the most important Federal forest legislation ever enacted.”

  Nonetheless, many obstacles stood in the path to effective administration of the government’s forests. The new administrative power rested with the Department of the Interior, a hotbed of cronyism and petty corruption. The government’s purported experts on forestry, meanwhile, worked for the Division of Forestry, which was part of the De
partment of Agriculture. A bureaucratic wall effectively kept the division separated from the new timber reserves. And even if this hurdle could be overcome, the division was poorly equipped to provide assistance—it had placed little emphasis on forest management out of the conviction that professional forestry was impractical in the United States.

  IN MID-1898, thirty-two-year-old Pinchot was offered the chance to run the Division of Forestry after Fernow, the former director, resigned to take over a new forestry school at Cornell. Upon learning that he’d been selected, Pinchot’s first reaction was to refuse the job. His private-sector responsibilities kept him busy, and he remained skeptical of the division as ineffectual. However, as Pinchot later explained, “[E]verybody I consulted in Washington said I ought to pitch in and have a try at bringing the Government’s forest work to life. So did my Father. . . . In a week I threw off my prejudice, came to my senses, and realized that here was the chance of a lifetime.”

  Pinchot’s arrival as chief forester marked a new era for the fledgling division. The top priority was now the expansion of professional forestry in America, and Pinchot brought seemingly inexhaustible energy to the task. He began to spread the word that his division was prepared to offer free assistance to any timberland owners interested in applying the principles of practical forestry. Then, on October 15, barely three months after his arrival, the division issued Circular 21, a short pamphlet that publicized these free services. The effect was nearly immediate: Applications poured in, and soon Pinchot was using much of his meager twenty-nine-thousand-dollar budget and his small staff of ten to handle the Circular 21 program. Early beneficiaries included lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the Great Northern Paper Company, and the Northern Pacific Railroad.