Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss Page A

have attempted to represent that you and I were in some way at odds during the last three months, whereas you and I know that there has not been the slightest difference between us, and I welcome the opportunity to stay the last night of your administration under the White House roof to make as emphatic as possible the refutation of any such suggestion.

Twelve
    Gifford Pinchot was the handsome, patrician, ambitious, and idealistic son of a rich father who encouraged him to undertake the extensive training that would enable him to achieve his ambition of becoming America’s first professional forester. Initially employed in 1892 to manage the forest on George W. Vanderbilt’s immense estate in Asheville, North Carolina, he proved his mettle by reducing expenses to a minimum through the expedient of selective logging: excluding cattle from the forest (he called them “horned locusts”) and cutting only the trees that shaded the younger still-growing ones. He was soon called to government work in Washington, and in 1898 he was named chief of the Division of Forestry under the jurisdiction of the General Land Office in the Department of the Interior. The Land Office was totally incompetent to manage a cornfield, let alone a forest, but young Pinchot would soon enough change all that.
    TR, as newly elected governor of New York, now called on Pinchot for a plan to manage the forests of that state, and he went to Albany. As Pinchot wrote in his memoirs: “I laid before the governor my plan for a single-headed New York Forest Commission instead of the spineless, many-headed commission of those days, and he approved it entirely. TR and I did a little wrestling at which he beat me; and some boxing during which I had the honor of knocking the future President of the United States off his very sturdy pins.”
    It was the beginning of a friendship, not only of vital importance to the history of American conservation but to the story of the breakup of TR’s friendship with Taft and the split in the Republican Party.
    Roosevelt called for Pinchot’s assistance almost immediately after taking office as president. It is believed that Pinchot contributed this portion of TR’s first State of the Union address:
    The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them. The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity. We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forest, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our well-being.
    Pinchot, throughout Roosevelt’s two terms, was a power in the land. He never obtained cabinet rank, but he had constant access to the president, who always listened to him, and that, as in the case of Harry Hopkins under FDR or Colonel House under Wilson, was all he needed to implement his projects.
    They were sorely needed. Of 250 billion board feet of national timber, 40 billion were being cut annually and replaced by only 10 billion. The president could map out areas of the public domain and declare them natural forest-land and subject their new occupants, homesteaders or lumber interests, to regulations of yield cutting, cattle grazing, irrigation, and other protective restrictions.
    Pinchot’s interests as a naturalist were much narrower than Roosevelt’s. He did not share the latter’s passionate and expertly informed enthusiasm for birds or beasts. When Roosevelt claimed to have been the last person to spot a passenger pigeon in the wild, the ornithologists believed him. Nor did Pinchot share, at least to anything like the same degree, TR’s reveling in beautiful nature. He was not as bad as “Uncle Joe” Cannon, representative from Illinois and long-term Speaker of the House, who wouldn’t vote a cent for “scenery,” but his philosophy was