Gifford Pinchot Socialites Information

Gifford Pinchot (August 11, 1865 – October 4, 1946) was an American forester and politician. Pinchot served as the first Chief of the United States Forest Service from 1905 until his firing in 1910, and was the 28th Governor of Pennsylvania, serving from 1923 to 1927, and again from 1931 to 1935. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his life, though he also joined the Progressive Party for a brief period.

Pinchot is known for reforming the management and development of forests in the United States and for advocating the conservation of the nation's reserves by planned use and renewal. He called it "the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man." Pinchot coined the term conservation ethic as applied to natural resources. Pinchot's main contribution was his leadership in promoting scientific forestry and emphasizing the controlled, profitable use of forests and other natural resources so they would be of maximum benefit to mankind. He was the first to demonstrate the practicality and profitability of managing forests for continuous cropping. His leadership put conservation of forests high on America's priority list.

Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest "as though it were spelled pin'cho, with slight emphasis on the first syllable."

Gifford Pinchot was born August 11, 1865, to Episcopalian parents in Simsbury, Connecticut, the son of James W. Pinchot, a successful New York City wallpaper merchant, and Mary Eno, daughter of one of New York City's wealthiest real estate developers, Amos Eno. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and in 1889, Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He had a brother Amos Pinchot and a sister Antoinette (who married the diplomat Alan Johnstone).

The Pinchots made a great fortune by importing French wallpaper to furnish stately American homes during the late Victorian era. Pinchot's father James made conservation a family affair and suggested that Gifford should become a forester, asking him just before he left for college in 1885, "How would you like to become a forester?" Gifford studied as a postgraduate at the French National School of Forestry, in Nancy, for a year. He returned home and plunged into the nascent forestry movement, intent on shaping a national forest policy. At Gifford's urging, together James and Gifford endowed the Yale School of Forestry in 1900, and James turned Grey Towers, the family estate at Milford, Pennsylvania, into a "nursery" for the American forestry movement. Family financial affairs were managed by brother Amos Pinchot, thus freeing Gifford to do the more important work of developing forest management concepts. Unlike some others in the forestry movement, Gifford's wealth allowed him to singly pursue this goal without worry of income.

Pinchot's approach set him apart from the other leading forestry experts, especially Bernhard E. Fernow and Carl A. Schenck. Fernow had been Pinchot's predecessor in the United States Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry before leaving in 1898 to become the first Dean of the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell. Schenck was Pinchot's successor at the Biltmore Estate (widely recognized as the "cradle of American forestry") and founder of the Biltmore Forest School on Biltmore Estate. Their schools largely reflected their approaches to introducing forestry in the United States: Fernow advocated a regional approach and Schenck a private enterprise effort in contrast to Pinchot's national vision.

Perhaps, the men who had the most influence on his development as a forester were American foresters Dietrich Brandis, who had brought forestry to the British Empire, and Wilhelm Schlich, Brandis' successor. Pinchot relied heavily upon Brandis' advice for introducing professional forest management in the U.S. and on how to structure the Forest Service when Pinchot established it in 1905.

In 1896, the National Academy of Sciences formed the National Forest Commission. Pinchot was the only non-Academy member. President Grover Cleveland later asked Pinchot to develop a plan for managing the nation's Western forest reserves.

In 1897, Pinchot became a member of Boone and Crockett Club one of North America's first conservation organizations, which was founded by Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1898, Gifford Pinchot succeeded Bernhard Fernow as chief of the Division of Forestry, later renamed the United States Forest Service in 1905. Thus, management of the federal forests changed from the United States Department of the Interior to this agency within the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot introduced better forestry methods into the operations of private owners, large and small, by using new forestry school graduates to demonstrate good practices and help make working plans.

In 1900, Pinchot established the Society of American Foresters. This helped bring credibility to the new profession of forestry, and was part of the broader professionalization movement underway in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Until 1900, only two American schools trained professional foresters, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell and the Biltmore Forest School. The Pinchot family endowed a 2-year graduate-level School of Forestry at Yale University (now the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), and at Pinchot's urging, fellow Yale alumnus Henry S. Graves, along with James W. Toumey, left the Division in 1900 to start the school. By the fall of 1900, Cornell's forestry program had 24 students, Biltmore 9, and Yale 7. One unique feature of the Pinchot/Yale approach was requiring students to first experience the forest at a camp at Grey Towers before beginning their academic studies.

Pinchot sought to turn public land policy from one that dispersed resources among private holdings, to one that maintained federal ownership and management of public land. As a progressive, Pinchot strongly believed in the efficiency movement. Waste was his great enemy, and he well knew the tragedy of the commons, the destruction of resources for short-term gains. His successes, in part, were grounded in the personal networks that he started developing as a student at Yale and continued developing throughout his career. His personal involvement in the recruitment process led to high morale in the Forest Service and allowed him to avoid partisan political patronage. Pinchot capitalized on his professional expertise to gain adherents in an age when professionalism and science were greatly valued.

Pinchot used the rhetoric of the market economy to disarm critics of efforts to expand the role of government: scientific management of forests and natural resources was profitable. While most of his battles were with timber companies that he thought had too narrow a time horizon, he also battled the forest preservationists like John Muir, who were deeply opposed to commercializing nature.

Pinchot was generally opposed to preservation for the sake of wilderness or scenery, a fact perhaps best illustrated by the important support he offered to the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.

Pinchot rose to national prominence under the patronage of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, his department also gained control of the national forest reserves, thereby dramatically increasing the authority of the Forest Service. Pinchot developed a plan by which the forests could be developed by private interests, under set terms, in exchange for a fee. Pinchot embarked on many publicity campaigns to direct national discussions of natural resource management issues. In 1907 Roosevelt appointed Pinchot a member of the Inland Waterways Commission in a Progressive Era investigation and study of water resources usage from a multi-purpose approach.

Central to his publicity work was his creation of news for magazines and newspapers, as well as debates with opponents such as John Muir. His effectiveness in manipulating information hostile to his boss, President William Howard Taft, led to his firing in January 1910. But his successes became a model for other bureaucrats on how to influence public opinion.

Pinchot's policies encountered some opposition. Preservationists were opposed to massive timber cutting while Congress was increasingly hostile to conservation of the forests, bowing to local commercial pressures for quicker exploitation. In 1907, Congress forbade the creation of more forest reserves in the Western states. Roosevelt designated 16 million acres (65,000 km²) of new National Forests just minutes before his power to do so was stripped by a congressionally mandated amendment to the Agriculture Bill. These were called the Midnight forests. For his contributions to conservation, Pinchot was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1916.

Pinchot's authority was substantially undermined by the election of President William Howard Taft in 1908, who Pinchot considered insufficiently supportive of conservation efforts. Taft later dismissed Pinchot for speaking out against his policies and those of Richard Ballinger, Secretary of the Interior.

Pinchot launched a series of public attacks to discredit Ballinger and force him from office in what became known as the Pinchot–Ballinger controversy. That episode hastened the split in the Republican Party that led to the formation of the Progressive Party, of which Pinchot and his brother were top leaders.

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