The Big Burn (12 page)

The town of Pinchot had to go. The Milwaukee Road was coming through, and they wanted the land on which the new ranger station had been built. They had their legal right of way, awarded in an earlier land grant. Worn down, the fight drained away, the Forest Service retreated. And so Weigle's rangers took their hammers, saws, and crowbars to the outpost they had so lovingly constructed in honor of the Chief, and tore it apart. Off came the roof, the porch, the well-crafted loft space, the perfectly cut timbers. They would move the station upriver to join the rowdies at the edge of the new town. The people there had no use for them, of course, and reminded the rangers of it daily. At the least, the rangers thought, the town, now with about 250 people, would keep the name of the founder of the Forest Service. Sorry, they were told: this cluster of humanity on the St. Joe River was now a projection of the very Gilded Age powers that Pinchot and Roosevelt had been fighting for nearly a decade. The name of the town would be Avery, after William Rockefeller's grandson. Pinchot, the town, was erased from the map. Pinchot, the man, would be the next to fall.

O
N ONE OF THE LAST
days of Teddy Roosevelt's time in the White House, the president called in his handpicked successor to talk about plans to run the nation in the second decade of the American century. Despite his girth, William H. Taft was always the smaller man when in Roosevelt's presence, or so he felt. Roosevelt was the human volcano; Taft was a putting green. Roosevelt sucked the air out of a room; Taft tried to be invisible. Roosevelt barked; Taft had a low monotone, punctuated by a random and annoying chuckle. Roosevelt burned two thousand calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar; Taft was the picture of sloth: multiple chins, a zest for five-course meals and long baths. Sleeping Beauty was the nickname his wife, Nellie, gave him, and oh, how he loved to nap. But on the question of how and where to lead the country, they did not differ, the president believed.

Taft had spent the past three years observing Roosevelt's likes and dislikes, his private quirks and public persona. He took it all in carefully and then projected it back to him, hitting the right notes as Roosevelt probed him on his political beliefs. As such, he seemed to be the perfect successor. Roosevelt was full of energy, at the peak of his power and popularity, but he felt duty-bound to keep the
promise he had made to serve only two terms. More than any guiding philosophy, Will Taft simply was driven by the desire to please the man he considered his closest friend. And so when Roosevelt asked him to the White House in late 1908, after a campaign in which Taft won with the full backing and expert advice of the still-young Roosevelt, the incoming president again said all the right things. Taft had won in a landslide, crushing the perennial Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. For this meeting in the old cabinet room upstairs Roosevelt invited Pinchot along. The three men talked late into the night.

Roosevelt was convinced that conservation and the rest of the progressive agenda would have a central place in the Taft administration. No need for the big man to be bold; just keep the ship going forward, even keel. Fighting the trusts, holding firm to the idea that natural resources belonged to the public, setting aside unique pieces of land for future generations, trying to do something about nine-year-old girls working twelve-hour days in cotton mills down south—on all of these issues Taft would be solid. But Pinchot thought otherwise. He considered Taft superficial, somewhat silly, and malleable. He didn't trust him. Taft, in his view, "had successfully followed and chuckled his way through life."

The country was bursting at the seams, people buying automobiles and feathering the insides of gabled houses, on a roll with the downturn of 1907 behind them. In Pinchot's eyes, Taft had been carried into office by the tail wind of T.R.'s popularity. Pinchot thought of quitting. How could he work for a man he didn't respect? But Roosevelt talked him out of it, inviting him to come to the White House to hear out Taft in the cabinet room. Their work was not finished, the president reminded the forester; stay on for the good of all the Little G.P.s if nothing else.

That night in the White House, Taft made a promise. "Then and there Taft pledged himself to T.R., and incidentally to me, to stand by and carry on the conservation fight," wrote Pinchot. "It was no perfunctory promise ... He bound himself, as completely as
one man can to another, to stand by and go forward with the T.R. conservation policy."

In his final months as president, Roosevelt tried to ensure that his policies had a permanent place in the country. That meant conservation was to be as lasting an American principle as free speech. Three weeks before leaving office, he requested that the world's great powers meet in The Hague to do an inventory of the world's resources. Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.

In barely five years' time, many of these same powers would be at war, in a drawn-out conflict of nationalistic frenzy with repercussions for the rest of the century. But for now Roosevelt wanted only to get other nations to see their rivers, their forests, their farm fields, their oil and coal, their wildlife as valuable assets that would not last if they failed to become good stewards. There was a limit to what the world could bear. His idea was not a complicated notion, he said—"all of this is simply good common sense." At home, Roosevelt's legacy was intact: he had added about 230 million acres to national forests, parks, wildlife refuges, and other lands managed for future generations—an endowment 50 percent bigger than all of Texas. In one of his last acts as president, Roosevelt presented a report on what conservation had meant for America—and what it could mean for the world. People living in 1909 were obligated to the future, he wrote.

"It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children."

In the final hours of his presidency, Roosevelt gathered his closest confidants for a self-congratulatory lunch, excluding Taft. He spoke of their achievements, how they had altered the American landscape, changed its politics, its view of itself in the world. Not all of their goals had been achieved, but the United States was a nation transformed — for the better, he believed. As a parting present, Teddy's friends gave him a bronze lion; it brought him close to tears.

Early on, there were clear signs that Congress would have its way with Taft, simply because he so loathed conflict. With Roosevelt out of the way, the spark-eyed, cigar-chomping Speaker of the House, Uncle Joe Cannon, was back in full form, a force that Taft tried first to avoid and then to please. Senator Heyburn was ginning up complaints from powerful constituents in the West, preparing to cripple the Forest Service with a thousand little blows. His bully pulpit gone, Roosevelt left for Africa on a long-planned safari. "To the lions!" his enemies toasted. Like a fresh college graduate who has waited years to hit the road, T.R. lighted out for adventure in distant parts of the big continent, with plans to make his way up through Egypt, the Mediterranean, and much of Europe. He was free. Pinchot hated to see him go. Two days before he left the White House, Roosevelt penned a farewell to G.P.

"I am a better man for having known you," he wrote, "and I can't think of a man whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the Nation than yours would be. For seven-and-a-half years we have worked together, and now and then played together..."

Not long after Roosevelt sailed for Africa, Pinchot headed out west on a trip of his own. He found his rangers full of misery: the budget cutbacks were killing them. No pay raises. No new funds for roads, trails, telephones. No money to hire fire patrols in advance of the perils of the dry season. All these restrictions came after a fourfold expansion in the land the rangers had to oversee, and it was taking its toll. With room, board, laundry, tools, the costs of maintaining their own four-footed transports—it was a lot to cover on a ranger's salary of barely $1,000 a year, the foresters complained. Yale graduates, five years into service, were not making as much money as a first lieutenant in the Army, whose pay was 50 percent higher. Pinchot promised to take the fight to Congress. He would stay on to keep his creation intact, to remind the rangers of their
sense of purpose, keepers of this great experiment. But when he returned to the capital after a month, it was as if the life had been vacuumed from the city.

"Washington was a dead town," Pinchot wrote. Without Teddy Roosevelt, the city was lifeless, apathetic. In the White House, where pets, games, and kids once filled the halls, where a rooster crowed in a bedroom, where a pony rode in the elevator, where the crack and snap of energy and excitement, of youth and purpose, filled every cubic foot, there was now nothing but the silent passing of time, Pinchot felt — which in itself was backward motion. The forester tried to give Taft counsel, but they clashed, opposites in every way. In the new Washington there was no more incongruous sight than the skeletal Pinchot, with all his nervous energy, and the spherical Taft.

Just before Inauguration Day, March 4, 1909, Roosevelt had offered Taft one last bit of advice: stay off the back of a horse, at least in public. He feared for beast and man, he said. And in fact, a horse had already collapsed under the weight of the man. Taft had shed some fat during the campaign, getting down to 280 pounds. But he started to gain it back almost as soon as the election returns were counted. Pictures of the new president shot from behind—"Aft Taft," they were called—made him look ridiculous, as he was.

Beyond the surface ridicule were much deeper concerns. The energy of the Progressive Era, the sense of taking on giants and bringing them down, of gleefully tripping up the "malefactors of great wealth," of changing the way America looked at its future, its land, the world around it — all had disappeared. Soon the nation would have another loss, with the death of Mark Twain. "It's a losing race," the writer said before he slipped away in 1910. "No ship can outsail death."

Pinchot fell into a deep funk. He grew moody and somber despite his outward vigor and cheer. He did not think Taft was evil or open to petty corruption. Nor did he think the new president was stupid. "Weak rather than wicked" was his view, though he kept
such musings to himself. Pinchot's closest ally in town was the secretary of the interior, James Garfield, son of the assassinated twentieth president and a Roosevelt holdover like Pinchot. Garfield had been along on many of the rigorous walks in Rock Creek Park and swims in the icy Potomac, when the grand ideas of conservation were hatched. He also shared Roosevelt's and Pinchot's disdain for the gilded rulers of American industry who maneuvered around G.P. during his years working for Teddy. In one of Taft's first acts as president — and a surprise, at least to Pinchot — he let Garfield go, and replaced him with Richard Ballinger, a former Seattle mayor and lawyer with ties to some of the biggest land barons in the West. Ballinger believed that the conservation crusade had gone too far, a view secretly shared by Taft. Pinchot was stunned.

"A stocky, square-headed little man who believed in turning all public resources as freely and rapidly as possible over to private ownership," Pinchot said of the new secretary of the interior. And regarding Ballinger, Pinchot did not keep his comments to himself.

Compounding Pinchot's woes, he had more trouble summoning Laura, his dead lover. Oh, she was there when he faced his nemesis in Congress, fighting for the Forest Service against the blunt scorn of the swollen-faced Senator Heyburn. "I felt my Lady's help," he wrote after numerous appearances in the hot seat. But during the first year of Taft's presidency, Laura started to fade. She had been his refuge, confidante, and spiritual wife. But the apparition had grown dimmer, its appearances less frequent, with each passing year; by 1909, the flesh-and-blood Laura had been gone for fifteen years. No more did Pinchot write of "bright days" in which Laura was clear as a chatty seat-mate at dinner. Now it was mostly "cloudy days" or worse. "A blind day," Pinchot wrote, night-after-day. About this time, Pinchot may have started to think of seeing other women. His friend in the psychic world, the London editor W. T. Steadman, advised Pinchot that he owed it to Laura to let her know if he ever gave his heart to someone else. "You should at least be able to get in direct touch with her mind to know her wishes," he
wrote Pinchot. The forester's long spiritual affair with the lovely, deceased woman of his youth was nearing an end, it appeared, just as the man who gave life to his biggest ideas had left the country.

On top of everything else, Pinchot now had a troubled relationship with his mentor, John Muir, the man who had done even more than Roosevelt to get Americans to rethink their ideas on the land. Muir seemed dismissive of Pinchot's gloomy year. They drifted apart, and then began to feud at a distance. Muir thought Pinchot had become drunk with power and his status in the Roosevelt administration. "P. is ambitious," Muir wrote, "and never hesitates to sacrifice anything or anybody in his way."

Pinchot wanted the land to work for the people. His was a practical conservation, forged from the daily struggle with his adversaries—the art of the possible. Muir saw the land as sacrosanct, best when left alone, without human shaping. He seldom dirtied his hands in the muck of politics. "I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness," Muir said, floating above the conflict. It was a debate, mostly abstract, that they could have on civil terms. It turned personal after business interests in San Francisco pressed to dam the waters of the Tuolumne River in Muir's temple of Yosemite National Park. Muir believed it was an abomination, a high crime against nature, to back up the river in the Hetch Hetchy Valley so that San Francisco could outgrow its water shortages. In 1905, Muir had taken his case directly to another hiking friend—Roosevelt, who seemed sympathetic. But then the earthquake of 1906 gave fresh urgency to the case for helping San Francisco, with many people left homeless on the hills of a burned-out city. Pinchot favored the dam, which would provide a humanitarian lift, he believed. And from there the argument simmered off and on for years between two of the founding voices of conservation, the fate of Hetch Hetchy undetermined for the rest of the Roosevelt presidency and into the new president's term.