Pinchot’s grievances against the Taft administration were many. For starters, the new president had flat-out rejected a World Conservation Congress that Roosevelt had proposed in February 1909. Roosevelt had gotten the queen of the Netherlands to join him in actually creating a United Nations for Conservation; Taft scoffed at this notion. Adding insult to injury, Taft replaced the preservation-friendly James R. Garfield (son of the assassinated twentieth president) as secretary of the interior with a Republican land dealer, Richard Ballinger of Seattle, who favored the rapid exploitation of western resources.24 Garfield had been an excellent secretary of the interior, and had regularly gone on long hikes in Rock Creek Park and swims in the Potomac River with Roosevelt.25 Ballinger, by contrast, had been vehemently opposed to the Roosevelt administration’s creation of both the Tongass and the Chugach national forests.
An investigator for the Department of the Interior, Louis R. Glavis, had documentary evidence, which he handed to Pinchot, that Ballinger was expediting the sale of federal coalfields in Alaska’s Wrangell–Saint Elias Mountains to sell to the financial titans J. P. Morgan and Solomon R. Guggenheim, sometimes called the Alaska syndicate or, more often, derided as “Morganheim.” According to Pinchot, Ballinger was offering sweetheart deals to railroads, mining outfits, cattle concerns, and logging conglomerates on public lands. Ballinger insisted that the U.S. Land Office had only one job: let private concerns divvy up the public domain in orderly fashion. “Morganheim” dominated the district’s economics in the early twentieth century. Starting with the Kennecott copper mine deposits, “Morganheim” wanted to form an industrial empire in Alaska. Corporation heads such as George Hazlett, Stephen Birch, and David Jarvis constantly flouted U.S. government regulations, maintaining an adversarial attitude. Luckily for America, they were thwarted by conservationist leaders of the progressive era such as Roosevelt and Pinchot, along with some muckraking journalists.26
Arrogant, and opposed to the very concept of forest management, Ballinger—who had strong affiliations with western land barons—even opposed fire control because it involved state, federal, and private cooperation. “A stocky, square-headed little man who believed in turning all public resources as freely and rapidly as possible over to private ownership,” Pinchot complained in his diary about the new secretary of the interior.27 With Ballinger spearheading the effort, more than 1.5 million acres that the Roosevelt administration had set aside for future federally controlled waterpower sites had been forfeited.28 With Wall Street putting pressure on his administration to open up Alaska’s storehouse of natural resources, Taft capitulated, weakening federal authority over public lands in the Chugach. “Taft’s betrayal was a constant topic of conversation,” Pinchot later recalled, “between TR and his intimate advisers.”29
Ballinger, a lawyer who was a former mayor of Seattle, thought that between 1901 and 1909 President Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Garfield had withdrawn too much public land for national forests in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Were huge federal forest reserves such as the Tongass really necessary? Why did Roosevelt want to save the Chugach, which held one-third of all the territory’s glacier-covered land, including the Bering Glacier (one of the largest glaciers in North America)?30 Ballinger, who distrusted easterners and science, wanted the pendulum to swing back to nonregulated capitalism. He respected Puget Sound business interests. Roosevelt and Pinchot’s crusade had, he said, “gone too far.”31 Not only did Ballinger consider the acreage of Mount Olympus National Monument (in Washington state)—which President Roosevelt had created with an executive order in March 1909—excessive, but he thought more Alaskan coalfields should be opened up to the private sector. The Roosevelt administration had favored leasing U.S.-owned coalfields in Alaska whereas Ballinger wanted them sold outright to the private sector.
When Garfield left Washington, D.C., Pinchot tried to stop the newly appointed Ballinger from undoing the achievement of the Roosevelt administration regarding Alaskan public lands. By the fall of 1909, Pinchot had come to the conclusion that Ballinger was two-faced, the worst swindler he’d come across in decades, a toady for “Morganheim.” Pinchot met personally with President Taft in the White House, pleading with him to control Ballinger before Alaska’s boreal forests became permafrost wastelands of rotted tree stumps. Pinchot was worried that in the early summer months, the towering Chugach Mountains, rising dramatically from the sea, were a tinderbox. (Ballinger and his associates believed fires didn’t happen around glaciers.) A wildfire caused by an industrial accident or by a bolt of lightning could suddenly ignite the forestlands. Strong prevailing winds would spread the flames uncontrollably in all directions.32 Pinchot strongly feared that the major development projects of the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate—the Kennecott Copper Company and the Copper River and Northern Railway—were monopolistic in in- tent.
Even though Taft thought Pinchot too zealous a promoter of federal forestry, Pinchot was a Yale man of stature, with impeccable New England credentials. Strong-willed, devoted to natural resource management, and convinced that God was in forests, Pinchot would often sleep outdoors with a wood block pillow to increase his hardiness. When he went camping, he would order his valet to wake him in the mornings as bracingly as possible—by dousing him with water from an icy stream.33 “I do regard Gifford as a good deal of a radical and a good deal of a crank,” Taft wrote to his brother, “but I am glad to have him in the government.”34 But Taft also frequently mocked Pinchot for being a sycophant of Roosevelt, engaging in “sort of a rough rider fetish worship.” To Taft, GP, as his troops in the Forest Service lovingly called him, was a troublemaker. “G.P. is out there again defying the lightning and storm and championing the cause, or the oppressed and downtrodden,” Taft wrote his brother, “and harassing the wealthy and the greedy and the dishonest.”35
If President Taft had an Achilles’ heel, it was his stout refusal to grant interviews. This was not smart for a president trying to get traction. Ballinger called it White House “nopublicity.”36 Unsure how to cope with the Taft administration’s indifference toward federal land protection and its virtual boycott of the press, Pinchot founded the National Conservation Association as a watchdog group in 1909. The outgoing president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, who sympathized with Roosevelt and Pinchot’s land ethic, signed on as its honorary president; Pinchot served as president until 1925. Garfield joined the executive committee; so did Henry Stimson, a leader of the Boone and Crockett Club (later to be secretary of state for Herbert Hoover and secretary of war for Franklin Roosevelt) and a rising star in the wildlife protection movement. The purpose of the new association was to enact laws to promote conservation. “This association is to be the center of a great propaganda for conservation,” Pinchot wrote. “It is hoped that all organizations interested in special phases of the conservation movement will become affiliated with it.”37
No sooner had the National Conservation Association been formed, in the summer of 1909, than Pinchot, to his great dismay, discovered that Ballinger was allowing fraud to operate in the General Land Office (GLO) in the West. Alaska—in particular the areas surrounding the Chugach—was being leased to huge timber and mining operations so that quick profits could be made. Further irritating Pinchot was the fact that President Taft had killed Roosevelt’s grand notion of a Global Conservation Congress. Pinchot truly believed that Taft and Ballinger were hell-bent on deprioritizing conservation, and forcing it underground, back to mere “garden club” status. The populist movement of the early twentieth century viewed big business—particularly the railroad industry—with deep suspicion. A combination of conservationists, muckrakers, and trustbusters insisted, as Pinchot did, that Alaska should remain public land saved for public use.38
On November 13, 1909, Collier’s published a scathing “insider” article by Louis Glavis that linked Ballinger directly to the J. P. Morgan—Guggenheim syndicate. This New York–based syndicate had purchased the enormous Kennecott-Bonanza copper
mine and monopolized the Alaskan steamship and rail transportation from Seattle; it also owned twelve of the forty canneries in the territory.39 “Gradually,” M. Nelson McGeary writes in Gifford Pinchot: Forester-Politician, “by highly intricate financial arrangements, this partnership extended its holdings in Alaska until by 1910 it controlled copper mines, a steamship company, and a salmon-packing concern.”40 Pinchot echoed Glavis’s article, charging that greedy, oppressive trusts had subservient lawmakers in the Taft administration doing their bidding—a barely concealed smear of Ballinger. In Pinchot’s mind, Roosevelt’s Alaskan policy was being compromised and ignored because of Taft’s complicity with “Morganheim.” Pinchot declared that under President Taft, the GLO reeked as badly as sulfur water. He wanted to clean the Augean stables; he wanted Roosevelt’s conservationist directive—the simple rule of always making the land better than you found it—upheld by Taft. Having the U.S. Forest Service give huge corporations and banks free rein in the Alaskan lands they leased, without federal regulation, was a recipe for disaster: long-term deforestation.
Pinchot had become a whistle-blower. Using information provided by Glavis, he declared that Ballinger was a traitor to the federal government and to the conservationist movement. If the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate wasn’t stopped, the rivers in Chugach National Forest—the Copper, Russian, and Trail—would become contaminated from copper pit runoff. The margin of life for mountain goats and Dall sheep would become narrow. The finest salmon runs in Alaska—like those in the Bristol Bay Basin—would become stinking mudholes. Backing Pinchot was James Wickersham, Alaska’s lone congressional delegate in Washington, D.C., who was a rip-roaring critic of the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate (although he preferred that the Tongass and Chugach be redesignated as state forests). An Alaskan district judge, Wickersham loved wild country. In 1903 he tried to climb Mount McKinley but aborted the attempt at 8,000 feet. Wickersham, whose memoir Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials is an Alaskan classic,41 understood that all the syndicate wanted to do was mine copper ore for its smelter in Tacoma, Washington. “The delegate approved of federal conservation policies,” the historian Peter A. Coates writes, “as a restraint on outside interest that creamed off Alaskan wealth.”42
What truly concerned Roosevelt about the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate was that it was planning to bring hydraulic machinery to Alaska to supersede small, individual placer operations. Rooseveltian conservationists did not want any monopoly to get a sweetheart lease for timber, copper, or ore in Alaskan national forests. Roosevelt and Pinchot’s policy was for the General Land Office to lease coalfields in Alaska, whereas Ballinger and Taft wanted outright selling of the lands—a big difference.43 From his experience with the construction of the Panama Canal, Roosevelt knew how brutally destructive such large-scale construction projects could be to pristine landscapes. (When Roosevelt visited the Canal Zone in 1907 as president, he kept natural history records of the tropical foliage.) Pacific Northwest banks, however, were itching to clear-cut the Chugach and Tongass national forests. Because the U.S. Forest Service didn’t have a team of full-time rangers, bootleggers set up distilleries on federal property, convinced that they could operate undetected in such expansive outdoors settings. Whether as president or as a private citizen, Roosevelt wasn’t about to let a few New York or Seattle bankers desecrate America’s great rain forests. The fact that the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate wanted to keep its Tacoma smelter burning around the clock didn’t mean Alaska should be recklessly exploited.
Roosevelt always took the high ground with regard to Alaskan affairs. But as proof that he hadn’t been antidevelopment, consider this: in 1906 he had appointed Wilds Preston Richardson, a U.S. Army officer from Hunt County, Texas, who had attended West Point, to become the first chairman of the Alaska Roads Commission. During the Klondike gold rush, Richardson, in command of the Eighth Infantry (eighty men), kept law and order around Skagway. He later oversaw the construction of army posts at Rampart, Eagle, and Nome. Then in 1906 Roosevelt ordered the army to build what today is known as the Richardson Highway, the two-lane road connecting Valdez (the seaport on Prince William Sound) to Fairbanks (gateway to the Brooks Range). Clearly, Roosevelt wasn’t antidevelopment. He just wanted the U.S. government, not private concerns, to control the infrastructure of Alaska.44 Nevertheless, in 1909 the Cordova Daily Alaskan ran a headline that evidently spoke for the majority of district citizens: “Pinchot Is Daffy over Conservation.”45
III
The feud between Pinchot and Ballinger had become a brouhaha in America throughout 1909. On August 12, the New York Times ran the headline “Pinchot in Danger of Losing His Place.” The charge against Pinchot was insubordination. No president likes leaks from or even dissension in the ranks, let alone whistle-blowers. From Taft’s perspective, Pinchot was a socialist-minded menace: arrogant, fanatical about trees, one-dimensional, and unable to understand that American politics involved the art of give-and-take. The biographer Nathan Miller wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: A Life that Pinchot was desperate to expose Taft’s deficiencies and in doing so “courted martyrdom.”46 In truth, Pinchot was a lot more politically pragmatic than that. Under Taft, scant progress was made in pushing conservation forward. A sworn enemy of reckless corporate despoilers, Pinchot was willing to shatter the Republican Party for the sake of the western forest reserves. “Without fully intending to do so,” Pinchot wrote, “I think I have probably forced Taft to take his stand openly for or against the Roosevelt policies in act as well as in word.”47
From September to December 1909, Taft was looking for a convenient way—or any way—to fire Pinchot while TR was still collecting specimens in Africa. Pinchot stumped the West, calling citizens to fight for public land: it was their birthright as Americans. Although Pinchot had staunch allies in the establishment—for example, the agribusinessman Henry C. Wallace—leaders of the big corporations wanted the chief forester gone. Pinchot fumed that the “great oppressive trusts” existed in the United States because of “subversive law-makers.”48 In 1908 there were 770 serious placer mines in Alaska, employing 4,400 men.49 Taft and his supporters wanted to see that number doubled, for the sake of the economy of the Pacific Northwest. They sought jobs, jobs, jobs, and quick money over long-term land management.
Taft, you might say, was complicit in the radical anticonservation movement in Alaska. He simply wouldn’t enforce scrupulous federal protection of the Chugach and Tongass. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Taft initially ignored the issue but then became pro- development and pro–big business concerning Alaskan affairs. Clearly Taft was untouched by Thoreau’s belief (shared by the Tlingit Indians) that wilderness represented the preservation of the world; money was what drove Taft forward. “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up,” Pinchot wrote to Roosevelt (who was in Khartoum, in the Sudan). “There is a general belief that the special interests are once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration.”50
Feeling the pressure from being constantly in the public eye during the feud with Ballinger, Pinchot headed to Santa Catalina Island, California, in the blue Pacific, to clear his head. Armed with a fishing pole, transported by a skiff, Pinchot perhaps thought about the role of dissenters from Thomas Paine to William Lloyd Garrison to John Muir. As he was riding Pacific swells, drifting eight miles from shore, hoping to catch a few good yellowtail or albacore tuna for supper, Pinchot’s rod nearly split in half from a titanic tug. Suddenly a blue marlin as large as William Howard Taft leaped from the water. “High out of the water sprang this splendid creature,” Pinchot wrote, “his big eye staring as he rose, till the impression of beauty and lithe power was enough to make a man’s heart sing with him. It was a moment to be remembered for a lifetime.”51
Pinchot soon returned to Washington, D.C., ready for combat. By December, the situation concerning Ballinger had become even messier for Taft. People were always quoting Pinchot to him, and muckrakers were stepping up thei
r attack on Ballinger as a crook. Collier’s magazine ran an inflammatory story, “Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of Interior?”52 Meanwhile, Alaskan forests were front-page news in New York City. Should the virgin stands be federal reserves? Or should they be clear-cut for the pulp industry to help the Pacific Northwest economy? By January 1910 Taft, exhausted by the feud, knew he had to “wrestle with Pinchot,” as he put it. Taft composed a stern letter charging Pinchot with disrespecting the office of the president. “By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the government,” Taft wrote, “and it therefore now becomes my duty to direct the secretary of agriculture to remove you from your office as the forester.” What a bad political move by Taft! Why fire the honest protégé of TR and keep the money-grubber from Seattle? At the very least, Taft should have also asked Ballinger, who resigned in 1911 anyway, to leave simultaneously with Pinchot. Truth be told, from the White House perspective, both Pinchot and Ballinger were behaving badly in the public sphere.53
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