The Big Burn (13 page)

Taft was emboldened by Pinchot's woes, but he knew he could not fire him without causing a storm among Roosevelt loyalists. Despite his promise to Roosevelt that night in the White House, Taft believed the conservation movement had gone too far too fast, and that too much land had been put in the public's hands. Roosevelt and Pinchot were radicals, he said in confidence to his brother; they were crusaders. They had steered the Republican Party into territory where Taft was clearly uncomfortable. In private, he dismissed Pinchot as "Sir Galahad" and agreed with the forester's many enemies who derided him as "a millionaire with a mission." Of course, Taft had competed with him for the affections of Roosevelt; both the new president and the Chief adored T.R. But Taft thought Pinchot's ardor was over the top—"sort of a fetish worship," he said. He mocked Pinchot in a letter to his brother in 1909: "G.P. is out there again defying the lightning and the storm and championing the cause of the oppressed and downtrodden, and harassing the wealthy and the greedy and the dishonest."

Out west, the Little G.P.s felt overwhelmed. Prosecutions for fraudulent homesteads were few and time-consuming. It would take a single ranger months to make a case against someone who tried to claim part of the national forest as his own. On fire patrol, the rangers were even more short-handed, and volunteers to help with the watch were scarce. A killing could be made in these public lands, but not by befriending the Forest Service. With the opening of the Milwaukee Road in 1909, the iron muscle of modern industry came to the Bitterroots, the trains charging through, all roars and thunder, whistle yelps bouncing off the rock walls of the mountains. In the first summer of the new line, the train also proved to be an iron fire-starter—a serious problem for the undermanned Forest Service. From his headquarters in Wallace, Bill Weigle sent a man to do nothing but follow the tracks all day on a velocipede, putting out small fires. He could not keep up. Suddenly, as if an immigration starting gun had gone off, people poured into Montana, Idaho, and Washington — a growth spurt like no other in the history of the Northwest. Nancy Warren, the Chicago transplant in Idaho, had
been rhapsodic over the beauty of the area. Now she saw a different side. "The possibilities of profit soon mounted to millions in terms of money and board feet. Everyone was elated at the sight of so much raw material for monetary advancement," she wrote. "The timber companies were planning a monstrous cut."

At the least, Weigle, Greeley, Pulaski, Koch, and other rangers expected a bit more support from their government. During a meeting in Missoula, the foresters spent all day commiserating about low pay and constant harassment from Heyburn and his monied clients in the woods. "It's a well-known fact that on several occasions Senator Heyburn has solicited complaints from residents of the Coeur d'Alene against the Forest Service," one ranger wrote in a letter to Greeley. Heyburn was working several angles to crush the national forests. He had drawn up a bill, not yet announced, that would take millions of acres out of public land and give them to private interests—a complete reversal of the Roosevelt agenda. The best forest rangers were tempted to leave. "The spirit of the young men in the service is kept alive only by the ideals of leaders in forestry and the optimism from youth," wrote one forest supervisor. "But there must be a living wage."

They would get no help from Congress. Pinchot pleaded with the president to take on the enemies of the Forest Service. In desperation, Pinchot again paid some ranger expenses with money from his own pocket. But even a man as rich as Pinchot could not fund the service on his own. And Taft, wincing at conflict as someone blinking in the dawn sunlight, did not want to go after Heyburn or the Speaker of the House. "He is an amiable man," said one senator, referring to the new president, "completely surrounded by men who know what they want."

Less than a year into Taft's presidency, a scandal engulfed Pinchot's nemesis, Ballinger; it would split the Republican Party. The interior secretary, whose duty was to oversee an empire of public land on behalf of the American people, had once backed a syndicate as it tried to take control of coal in a part of Alaska that was later
added to the Chugach National Forest. When a federal official complained that the coal deal was a fraud, like one of the homesteading schemes of the timber industry, Ballinger fired the whistleblower rather than move against the syndicate. The fired official went public, creating a furor — page-one stories for nearly a year. Pinchot called Ballinger a crook and urged the president to get rid of him. Taft advised the forester to lie low, and promised that he would look into the matter and listen to all sides. Privately, he fumed, and seemed flummoxed. He backed Ballinger, and he did not know what to do with Pinchot, the most public link to Roosevelt. "He is a good deal of a radical and a good deal of a crank," Taft said of Pinchot in a letter to his brother. "Still, I'm glad to have him in my administration."

Beyond the Alaska coal deal, Ballinger was now showing his true colors—as a traitor to the progressives, Pinchot believed. "You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong," Ballinger said in a speech. "You are hindering the development of the West. In my opinion, the proper course is to divide it up among the big corporations and let the people who know how to make money out of it get the benefits of the circulation of money." This was what Pinchot was up against, what the saintly Muir could never understand: the wolves were at the door, working with the president to undo all that Roosevelt had accomplished. They wanted to hand public lands over to the very people Roosevelt and Pinchot had battled for the past decade.

Defying Taft, Pinchot took his case to the public. But first he touched home and tried to rally his base. In the summer of 1909, he met as usual with a large group of students from the School of Forestry at Yale, encamped at the Pinchot family estate of Grey Towers. They spent their nights in tents, but often were invited to cross the moat surrounding the castle and share dinner with the Chief inside the forty-two-room chateau. After dinner, it was songs around the piano or speeches in front of a huge bonfire outside. Pinchot told the young foresters that his fight was their fight — a battle for
the land itself, and the future. Posing with the students, Pinchot looked grim, gaunt, grey, and out of place with a bow tie on a hot summer's eve. He tried to summon Laura from the mists, but the spirit was absent.

Then he went west for a series of incendiary speeches, vowing not to quit and urging Americans to stand on behalf of their birthright. Nothing brightened his mood like a battle, and he fed off the energy of westerners who shared his views. In Spokane, Pinchot and Ballinger found themselves in the same room before a large gathering of farmers dependent on government irrigation. The audience members sat on their hands for Ballinger but gave Pinchot a five-minute standing ovation. These people were his "Little Men," and they loved him—or so he felt.

"The great oppressive trusts exist because of subservient lawmakers," he told the farmers in Spokane. It was a direct slap at Ballinger, seated a few feet away, and at Heyburn. "I stand for the Roosevelt policies because they set the common good of all of us above the private gain of some of us," he said. The speech landed him, again, on front pages of newspapers across the nation. It was conflict! Defiance! The feud was on! Furious, Taft called the forester to the woodshed at a meeting in Salt Lake City. Their face-off was tense, precisely the kind of confrontation that Taft could not stomach. Pinchot gave little ground, telling the president he had "no confidence" in the interior secretary. And, he vowed, he would not resign. Now Pinchot was truly on his own. He knew he was insubordinate, and was surprised Taft did not fire him on the spot.

"As President, he should never have approved my aggressive and defiant statement," Pinchot wrote later. "And as a man he was in honor and in duty bound to stick to his word, given to T.R. in my presence." But Taft did not have the nerve to fire him. Fresh stories were breaking every day on the Ballinger affair, and it would look bad to ax the face of Roosevelt's conservation policies at the very time when Taft was being accused of caving in to the trusts. "Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of Interior?" was a
Collier's
headline.
The scandal threatened to make Taft a one-term president. There was a stirring among progressive Republicans, called Insurgents, of turning against Taft — very early in his term for a party mutiny. Pinchot appeared to have the public, or at least the press, on his side. Taft was portrayed as a bulbous buffoon, easily manipulated. There were snide remarks about the huge new bathtub he had installed in the White House; it was said he got stuck in the old one. Consuming meals of roast turkey and lobster, ham, cakes and pudding, a hefty steak for breakfast every morning, and salted almonds at all times, he ballooned beyond the 330-pound mark, and his shirt buttons strained on his vest when he sat down. He fell asleep in the middle of a meeting with Cannon, snoring loudly, to the Speaker's annoyance.

What Pinchot had going for him, in addition to sympathetic press coverage, were his Little G.P.s—"probably the best-trained body of men and women in the government today," as the
New York Times
noted in a story about his legacy in the heat of the controversy. "Wherever you find a Forest Service man or woman, you find a devoted believer in Gifford Pinchot. He is the Little Father of his people and they know it and will show it by the most faithful and loyal service that Uncle Sam gets from any of his employees." But the
Times
warned Pinchot to be careful, and to back off, or he would soon find himself out of power.

"Mr. Gifford Pinchot, the savior of the country's forests, is wrong," the paper concluded. "Unless he rights himself speedily, he may cease to become a member of Mr. Taft's administration, despite his great services to the Nation."

Exhausted after more speeches similar to his exhortation in Spokane, Pinchot took refuge on a little island off the coast of southern California. At the height of the biggest battle of his public life, he decided to disappear for a few days, perhaps to summon Laura, to be alone with nature and in pursuit of a big fish. He missed T.R. and wished that he were in Africa with him. "We have fallen back down the hill you led us up," he wrote to Roosevelt, who was then in Khartoum. "There is general belief that the special interests are
once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration."

On a day infused with the winter sun of California, Pinchot took a fishing rod and a small skiff to the sea. He trolled most of the morning, ate a packed lunch, and continued through the afternoon. A few hours before the sun set, his line snapped taut, the reel disengaged, and Pinchot was jolted to one side of the skiff. Fish on! The swells of the Pacific rolled in, rocking his small craft. He fought and reeled, tugging and giving back much of the line to the fish. Near dusk, his arms ached and his back was stiff but the fish was nowhere near to being landed. At one point, his line went briefly slack, and the surface water broke with a loud splash. He saw then that he had hooked a man-size marlin. It leapt well above the surface, a stirring encounter. "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." Forester and fish fought for two and a half hours. Near the end, Pinchot was eight miles from land, and it was dark. At last he brought the fish close enough to spear and haul it into the boat. The marlin weighed 168 pounds.

Back in Washington for the new year, Pinchot geared up for congressional hearings on the Ballinger affair. The story dominated the news and preoccupied the Taft administration. Pinchot was rested and ready for battle; he not only felt renewed, he felt more than ever that the country was with him. Taft could not bear the thought of another year with a chief forester in unbridled defiance. And then Pinchot pushed him to the edge. He arranged for a letter to be read in Congress that was openly critical of the president, saying his boss had misinterpreted the facts in the Ballinger imbroglio. The next day's headlines—"Forester's Letter Creates Sensation" was typical—foretold the logical outcome. On January 7, 1910, just as Pinchot was leaving the family home on Rhode Island Avenue
to go to a dinner party, he was approached by a messenger with an envelope, a long, formal letter from the president. Pinchot, dressed in evening clothes, silk hat in hand, hastily read it. He turned to his mother.

"I'm fired."

"Hurrah!" she replied, clearly relieved.

In his letter, Taft wrote, "By your own conduct you have betrayed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the government."

For Pinchot's enemies, the firing was received like news of a large inheritance from a rich uncle. Syndicates that fought for free grazing on millions of acres of public land were holding a national meeting in Denver at the time. They had battled Pinchot for nearly a decade. In the forests of Colorado and Arizona, they ran rangers out of the woods, hiring killers in some cases to threaten their lives. When that didn't work, they tried to bribe the Little G.P.s, reasoning that it was still cheaper to pay off a ranger than pay a grazing fee. The convention was interrupted with a bulletin, read from the podium: Pinchot is gone! Great cheering and whistling broke out, lasting several minutes.

It took a few weeks for the news to reach Roosevelt in Africa. "We have just heard by runner that you have been removed," he wrote to Pinchot. "I cannot believe it. I do not know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered; and it seems to me absolutely impossible that there can be any truth in this statement. But of course it makes me very uneasy." With time to reflect, Roosevelt was more than uneasy. He was angry. Pinchot, he said in his letter, was a fighter who stood for good causes. Taft was jelly. "You were the leader among all the men in public office—and the aggressive, hard-hitting leader—of all the forces struggling for conservation," he said in his letter to Pinchot. He had started to think of Taft as a "puzzlewit," as he put it later, and wondered if he had made a terrible mistake in choosing him. Yes, Pinchot, his friend since they boxed together in Albany, the man with whom he built the conservation dream from scratch, had all but
asked to be fired. And no doubt Pinchot could be too zealous, too eager for a fight, too full of his own self-righteousness. A
pain!
But for Roosevelt, the forester always had a special place: Gifford Pinchot, he told a friend, was the true keeper of his conscience.