Old Growth: A Reconstruction of Gifford Pinchot's Training of a Forester, 1914–37

Abstract

In 1897 while serving as a special forestry agent for the Department of the Interior, a young Gifford Pinchot (he was thirty-one years old at the time) travelled to the Pacific Northwest. His task was to inspect the newlycreated federal forest reserves that PresidentCleveland established beforedeparting from officethat March, to offer recommendations about their current boundaries, and to report on their future management. To this list he added a fourth goal: to persuade the region's citizenrythat the forest reserves, against which many had protested for fear that their natural resources would be forever locked up, were a politicaland economic benefit. His was going to be a hard sell.' But sellhe did, arguingthat his philosophy of conservationemphasized "wise use" of resources,not their completepreservation. To plead his case, Pinchot carried his message first to that emerginglocus of power in late-nineteenth-century America: the newspapers.At everystop on his three-month tour of the northwest, Pinchot made certain to meet with leadingnewspaper owners and editors to persuade them of the need for federal regulation of natural resources, hoping thereby to shift their editorial opposition. In Spokane and Seattle, for instance, he securedlengthy interviews with publishers,defusing their sharp denunciations of the reserves. He was "greatly pleased" byhis action, he wrote his mother after meeting with the editorial board of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, "because this is one of the most influential of the western papers, and it has hitherto not beenin favor of the reserves. " Revising the newspapers' perspective, in short, was the most effective means to reshape publicopinion.' Early in his career Pinchot recognized that politics was persuasion, and that airing his ideas before the public was critical to introducing forestry principles to a skepticalnation. His insight into the manner in which "public opinion is made or directed" would prove invaluable "in the work of the Forest Service later on," as he acknowledged in his autobiography, Breaking New Ground. Indeed, at the conclusion of his serviceas chiefof the United StatesForest Service in 1910 he had amassed a file of more than 750,000 names of individuals and organizations to whom he regularly sent mass mailings to press his case on conservation, federal regulations, or pending legislation. He had become, as one historian has argued, the "Press Agent for Forestry."! Getting the word out was not simply a facet of successful public relations. Pinchot understood that this was also a means of writing history; his versionof events, if repeated enough and cast as broadly as possible,would becomethe version. Having set the agenda for the present, he could influencethe agenda for the future, consequentlystructuring how succeeding generationswould come to know the past. As he asserted in his autobiography: "[to] many parts of the story of Forestryin Americafrom 1885 to 1910, I am the only living witness," and that is why "you must take my word or leaveit." To a large degreehis assertion has held, and he has remained central to any discussion of the introduction, development, and continued relevance of forestry and conservation in the United States. Gifford Pinchot changed the course of history.'