Gifford Pinchot: Midnight Forests, the Ballinger Fight and State Liquor

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Gifford Pinchot was born in 1865 into Gilded Age wealth; his father James was a New York furnishings merchant who urged him to make forestry his profession before he entered Yale in 1885. At Yale he joined Skull and Bones and played on the 1888 national champion football team. With no forestry schooling in America, he enrolled at the French National School of Forestry in Nancy and left after 13 months. He proved scientific forestry could pay at the Vanderbilts' Biltmore Estate in 1892, and his family endowed the Yale School of Forestry. Taking over the federal Division of Forestry in 1898, he grew it from 60 to 500 staff, and in 1905 became first chief of the new U.S. Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1907, when Congress barred new forest reserves in six western states, Pinchot's team mapped 16 million acres that Roosevelt protected minutes before signing the bill. Pinchot defined conservation as use, the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run, and backed damming Hetch Hetchy against John Muir. He leaked memos and wrote to Congress against Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger's Alaska coal claims until President Taft fired him in 1910. He helped found the Bull Moose Party, then served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, paving rural Pinchot Roads and, though a teetotaler, creating the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board in 1933 to undercut bootleggers. He died of leukemia in 1946.

• Under William Greeley, after the Great Fire of 1910, the Forest Service shifted toward firefighting that protected timber for industry.
• He settled a 1923 coal strike with a wage increase that raised heating prices and hurt his presidential hopes.
• He mourned his fiancée Laura Houghteling, who died of tuberculosis in 1894, for 20 years before marrying suffragist Cornelia Bryce.
• He served on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society.
• In 1929 he took his family on a seven-month yacht voyage to the Galápagos and Tahiti.