Gifford Pinchot

Pinchot was born into money that came from Manhattan real estate on his mother's side and French-immigrant land dealing in Pennsylvania on his father's. His father James spent part of that fortune on European scenery and part of it on ideas about what a public-spirited son might do with a life. Just before Gifford left for Yale in 1885, James asked him a question nobody had much reason to ask an American yet: how would you like to become a forester? No American university taught the subject. Pinchot took the dare literally, studied afterward at the French national forestry school at Nancy for thirteen months, and came home in 1890 about as close to a credentialed forester as the country had.

His first real job, in 1892, was managing 100,000 acres of forest at George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted. President McKinley made him head of the Division of Forestry in 1898, and once Theodore Roosevelt reached the White House the two of them built the U.S. Forest Service together, moving the national forests out of the Interior Department and putting Pinchot in charge as its first chief in 1905, over a staff that had grown from 60 to 500. He coined "conservation" as a working policy rather than a sentiment, founded the Society of American Foresters, and helped set aside timberland by the tens of millions of acres before President Taft fired him in January 1910 for insubordination he never said he regretted.

The firing followed a public fight with Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger over Alaskan coal claims, which Pinchot pursued as corruption rather than as a policy disagreement he happened to lose. Thirty years later, in 1940, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes reopened the file and reached the opposite conclusion: Pinchot's allegations were unfounded, and what drove them was an appetite for publicity rather than the evidence. He also carried private grief the public record barely touches. His fiancee, Laura Houghteling, died of tuberculosis in 1894, and he wore mourning black and wrote about her in his journal for years before marrying anyone else, at 48. The conservation circles he moved in were not free of their era's worst ideas either — he sat on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society from 1925 to 1935.

Pinchot spent his last two decades as Pennsylvania's governor, elected twice, turning an eight-figure deficit into a surplus in his first term and running Depression relief through 113 Civilian Conservation Corps camps in his second. In 1937 he toured his old national forests with a former colleague and found them clear-cut under his own successors, and said so publicly. He died of leukemia on October 4, 1946, and is buried at Milford Cemetery in Pennsylvania. His family gave the family estate at Grey Towers to the Forest Service in 1963, the only National Historic Landmark that agency runs, and his name is now scattered across a national forest, a state park, and two features of the Sierra Nevada.

Gifford Pinchot's life against the full span of the corpus.

• United States Forest Service company
  Built with Theodore Roosevelt, with Pinchot as first chief 1905
• Society of American Foresters company
  The trade's first professional body, which he founded 1900
• Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board law
  Championed after Prohibition's repeal, which he called the best liquor system in America 1933
• Breaking New Ground book
  His autobiography, published the year after he died 1947

• 1885 aged ~20 His father asks if he would like to become a forester No American university taught the subject yet.
• 1892 aged ~27 Takes his first forestry post at the Biltmore Estate
• 1894 aged ~29 His fiancee, Laura Houghteling, dies of tuberculosis
• 1898 aged ~33 McKinley names him head of the Division of Forestry
• February 1, 1905 aged 39 Becomes first chief of the new U.S. Forest Service
• January 1910 aged 44 Taft fires him over the Ballinger affair
• August 1914 aged 48 Marries Cornelia Bryce
• 1923 aged ~58 Elected governor of Pennsylvania the first time
• October 4, 1946 aged 81 Dies of leukemia

• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. landscape he first worked under
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. built the Forest Service with
• William Howard Taft 1857–1930
  Only person to serve as both president and Chief Justice of the United States. fired him
• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. conservation rival
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. ran CCC camps for