Chiefly Politics: Contested Leadership in the USDA-Forest Service

After one hundred years of leadership, who is in charge of the U.S. forests? The tradition continues.

The tradition is actually a bit more complicated than that. True, the claim of a non-politicized transition dates from the agency's first change in leadership in 1910, when its founder, Gifford Pinchot, was dismissed, and replaced by Henry Solon Graves, Dean of the Yale School of Forestry. Moreover, this claim has been asserted ever since, serving as a rhetorical device by which the agency has sought to assert the primacy of internal control over succession. But that has not rid the process of politics. Not only has internal jockeying for place, (separate and apart from professional concerns), always played a critical role in determining who would become the next chief, but considerations external to the agency have regularly influenced this process. Politics have always been at the core of the administration of American public forestry.
No one appeared to appreciate the significance of this historical reality more than Jack Ward Thomas. Intriguingly, he acknowledged his debt to this past when in his discussions of the Forest Service's agenda for the forthcoming century he drew upon the insights and evoked the aura of the agency's controversial founder, Gifford Pinchot. There could have been no better reference. For Pinchot, the politics of Forest Service leadership was of utmost concern, and this was as true for the five years when he served as the agency's chief as it would be during the remaining 35 years of his life, a period in which five new chiefs were selected. It was Pinchot who initially and repeatedly claimed that the agency must insulate itself from outside political pressures by asserting the preeminence of professional values to those of administrative patronage. But he regularly undercut these assertions when one of his successors did not conform to Pinchot's well-defined sense of the Forest Services' mission; at these points, his public criticism could be as relentless as his private assaults. This 'old' chief never dropped his combative posture--never retired--and as such was in good measure responsible for establishing the complicated heritage that would lead to Thomas's contested ascension (Thomas, 1994;Fry, 1994).

Ground Work
The origins of this tradition can be traced to the explosive, but carefully managed conclusion of Gifford Pinchot's tenure in early January, 1910, when President Taft canned him for insubordination during the Ballinger-Pinchot affair. How he and the Forest Service responded to the debacle would have a significant influence on the future passing of leadership within the agency (Penick, 1968).
Pinchot's initial response demonstrated his understanding of the situation's delicacy and the presumed need for a grand gesture. The morning after he was fired, he arrived at the Forest Service's headquarters, meeting first with the agency's leadership, and then with a large gathering of staff, which included "white and colored, men and women, varying in rank from charwoman to assistant chiefs." As he entered the general forum, he was greeted with a thunderous ovation, "as demonstrative as it was possible for three hundred persons to make." According to one account; the roar penetrated to the street below, leading a passerby to remark, "the whole service was insubordinate." But encouraging further unrest was not on Pinchot's mind, rather he urged his fervent supporters to demonstrate their loyalty to him by sticking to the Forest Service: he confirmed that "the work of conservation, to which they were devoting their lives, was greater than any one man or any administration, and should be carried on despite all obstacles." He had been fired, but they must keep the faith (Washington Star, 1910, p. 1, 10).
Pinchot had no intention of disappearing from the scene, however. "We are still in the same work--different parts of it, but always the same work," a congruence he reinforced when he urged his now-former subordinates "to call on him whenever perplexing problems vexed them," assuring them that the door to his palatial home at 1615 Rhode Island Avenue "would always be open to them." No longer the nation's forester, Pinchot was positioning himself as a power behind the throne. Any new chief would have to contend with the old (Washington Star, 1910, p. 1, 10).
How fortuitous, then, that the man Taft selected as the second chief of the Forest Service was one of Pinchot's oldest friends and closest colleagues, Harry Graves, then Dean of the Forestry School at Yale. Actually, there was nothing fortuitous about his selection--Pinchot arranged it. Even as he bid an emotional farewell to the assembled throng at the Service's headquarters, he and his associates, most especially Herbert A. Smith, director of the agency's public relations, maneuvered to insure the selection of one who shared Pinchot's sense of the Forest Service's professional mission and political perspective. This was essential, Pinchot believed, for whomever "guided the future of the Forest Service...would have no small influence on the future of the great [conservation] cause the Service had embodied and led" (Pinchot, 1998,p. 459).
Worried that President Taft would select an outsider whom he could not control, and hearing rumors that A. P. Davis of the Reclamation Bureau was under serious consideration as Pinchot's replacement, Pinchot and Smith embarked on what they considered a "benevolent conspiracy" to change the President's mind. Smith fired off a series of telegrams, one to Graves urging him to consider the appointment (if offered), and another to Lee McClung, then Taft's Secretary of the Treasury but formerly Treasurer of Yale, requesting that he persuade Anson Stokes Phelps, Yale's Secretary, to slip Graves' name before Taft, yet another son of Eli. This complicated series of contacts within an old-boy network produced the outcome Pinchot and Smith desired: Davis never interviewed with Taft, A. F. Potter, the acting Chief of the Forest Service, did, but withdrew in favor of Graves; on January 12th, a mere five days after Pinchot had been dismissed, the dean of the school of forestry that the Pinchot family had helped establish became the Chief of the USFS, the agency that Gifford Pinchot had created. Unknowingly had Taft done Pinchot's bidding, one good reason why Graves' appointment gave the fired forester such a sense of "keen satisfaction" (Smith, 1941;Pinchot, 1998).
This episode satisfies in another sense, serving as a bellwether for the complex relationship that thereafter would unfold between Pinchot and the Forest Service. This would not be the last time, for example, that the agency, or certain members of it, would call upon him to flex his political muscle, or draw upon his well-developed capacity for political intrigue to protect the Forest Service from White House machinations; Taft was but the first of a long line of presidents who would discover just how effective this strategy could be. But this incident was also a mark of Pinchot's ongoing presumption of preeminence, of his willingness to employ external forces to mold the internal character of the Forest Service, thereby securing the ends he desired. He was still in the game, his presence at once clarifying and complicating the world in which the service, and especially its chiefs, operated (Miller,1994).
His would not be an every day presence. In the years following his 1910 dismissal, he spent considerable energy and capital on an ever increasing number of political campaigns, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt's comeback bid in 1912, and then escalating with his own attempts to secure state and national offices in and from Pennsylvania; in the early '20s he was appointed Commissioner of that state's forestry department, the first of many political posts he would seek; although Pinchot never won a coveted seat in the U.S. Senate, he twice served four-year terms as the Keystone State's governor, in 1922 and then in 1930. The intense pressures of governing one of the nation's largest and most populous states necessarily limited his capacity to insert himself into the quotidian operations, political decisions, or professional concerns of the Forest Service. He had moved on.
But that did not mean he could not be called back, even on the seemingly most minor of issues. During the second week of January, 1914, for instance, while ostensibly huddling with Pinchot about the Forest Service's proposed response to a grazing bill that was due for debate during the forthcoming session of Congress, Graves asked him for advice on a troubling personnel matter. A "Mrs. Pryor," a member of the Washington staff, had complained about her "working conditions." Pinchot immediately interviewed her, was persuaded that she had been "treated unjustly," and recognized that this situation contained some unspecified political fallout: "The FS is in real danger because she has told Sen. [John Sharp] Williams [D-Miss.] and will tell others," he jotted down in his diary. What bothered Pinchot most was that when he informed Graves of this complication, the chief did not grasp its significance: "HSG does not seem to get the point." Pinchot did, however, and the next day had another meeting with Graves in which he laid out his worries, conferred again with Mrs. Pryor, apparently smoothing over her concerns, and then deflected what he called "a very determined" Senator Williams. There was nothing he would not do to stave off threats to the integrity of the Forest Service (Pinchot, 1914).
Even if that meant saving it from itself: Pinchot's response to Graves' hesitant handling of the Williams episode was of a piece with his perception that the second chief was waffling on a larger issue--that of the appropriate relationship between the Forest Service and the lumber industry. Unlike Pinchot, who distrusted industry and believed the agency should be its sharpest critic, Graves preferred to seek a middle ground with opposing forces. Encouraged by his own proclivities, and by his more accomodationist staff, especially William B. Greeley, who oversaw the agency's timber management programs, Graves had begun to map out a closer alliance between public forestry and private lumbering interests. A series of joint studies of the lumber situation in the United States, launched in cooperation with the Bureau of Corporations (and its successor the Federal Trade Commission), and industry representatives, concluded that private timber corporations were compelled to strip their forested lands even when timber prices were low, due to ongoing taxation and credit pressures. The Forest Service's response to this situation, Graves and Greeley believed, should be to manage its timber so as not to compete with private cuttings; the public good would best be served by sustaining private interests (Greeley, 1917;Greeley, 1951;Graves, 1919).
Pinchot was shocked. These reports' findings at once were a "whitewash of destructive lumbering" and reined in the Forest Service's capacity to offer independent judgment of industrial production, a quick way, he believed, to compromise the public interest. Although when he had been chief he too had sought cooperative programs between industry and the service, and had sought to encourage the creation of a mutual agenda because of the power that lumbering lobbyists held in Congress, he was now convinced that accommodation meant capitulation. The integrity of the Forest Service lay in the balance: it was time to attack (Greeley, 1951).
The clash came in 1919, when Pinchot and others prodded the Society of American Foresters to assess the situation confronting the American lumber companies. Few could have doubted that SAF's Committee for the Application of Forestry, which Gifford Pinchot chaired and whose membership he helped select, would challenge the Forest Service's research, results, and recommendations. Any doubts remaining were dispelled when the report was published in the December 1919 number of the Journal of Forestry: the title of the lead piece, Pinchot's "The Lines are Drawn," made it clear that a battle had been joined against the "continued misuse of forest lands privately owned." The widespread and "destructive lumbering on private timberlands is working a grave injury to the public interest and must be stopped," he proclaimed, but that would only occur if foresters joined together and fought against these depredations. "I use the word fight," the chairman trumpeted, "because I mean precisely that. Forest devastation will not be solved through persuasion, a method that has been thoroughly tried out for the past twenty years and has failed utterly." New tactics must be employed to insure that "private owners of forest land," who are "so constituted and inspired that a change from within is not to be expected," are "compelled to manage their properties in harmony with the public good." That would only come from "[p]ressure from without, in the form of public sentiment, crystallized in compulsory public regulation." This alone "promises adequate results," he observed, an observation that carried with it a clarion call: with the "field cleared for action and the lines...plainly drawn," he who is "not for forestry is against it. The choice lies between the convenience of the lumbermen and the public good" (Pinchot, 1919, p. 901-02).
It was Graves' turn to be shocked. Not because he fundamentally disagreed with Pinchot--by 1919, he too had realized that lumber interests talked more about cooperation than they practiced it; he too thought that some regulation was necessary, though stressed state rather than federal control. No, what bothered Graves was that the committee appeared to be pursuing what he labeled a "socialistic" agenda and that Pinchot, in undertaking "this scheme of his own," was attempting to supplant Graves and "become the hero in saving the forests of the country." Confirmation of the continuing regard with which Pinchot was held emerged in a straw vote that the SAF held in response to the Pinchot committee's findings: two-thirds affirmed their support of some form of national regulation of private lumber practices. Pinchot, it seemed, continued to do more to articulate and set the agenda of American forestry than did his successor (Steen, 1976, p. 178).
This was a difficult situation at best: these once-close friends now communicated, when they did, through third parties. It would be through this indirect means that Pinchot learned in March, 1920 that Graves, worn down by illness and worn out by the politics of his job, had resigned as Chief. Freed from Pinchot's shadow, he no longer had to fear, as apparently he had for several years, that his "enemy" was poised to rebuke him for cozying up to the lumber industry. That fear would be all-too publicly realized during the eight-year term of Graves' assistant, William B. Greeley, who became the third Chief of the Forest Service in April, 1920(Steen, 1976.

Transition Game
Years later, and with the prompting of an interviewer, Greeley's widow was pained to recall that her husband's accomplishments had gone unacknowledged in Gifford Pinchot's autobiography, Breaking New Ground (1946): "Mr. Pinchot just had no use for Billy that was all," she remembered; to him, "Billy was a traitor." Although there was no reason for Pinchot to have included Greeley in his memoirs--Breaking New Ground concluded with Pinchot's dismissal from the Forest Service in 1910, several years before Greeley became a central player in agency matters. Had Pinchot written the planned second volume, Greeley would have been the prime target of his scorn, pummeled as was the despised William Howard Taft in the first volume (Greeley, 1960).
Certainly the two men were acutely aware of each other's perspectives throughout the 1920s, differing stances that consistently drew them into public confrontations of a kind and intensity that had not occurred between Pinchot and Graves. This struggle, whether splashed across the pages of the Journal of Forestry or aired in congressional hearings, turned on different constructions of the Forest Service's mission, its professional ideals, social significance, and political agenda. As Greeley put it: Pinchot "saw an industry so blindly wedded to fast and destructive exploitation that it would not change. I saw a forest economy overburdened by cheap raw material. Mr. Pinchot saw a willful industry. I saw a sick industry." And when they fought over these positions, they gave no quarter, making them more alike than they might have been willing to admit (Greeley, 1951, p. 118).
The two clashed even before Greeley had replaced Graves, first over a 1916 report Greeley had authored on the economic troubles underlying the lumber industry, which Graves supported and Pinchot denounced; with that, Greeley noted proudly, "I lost caste in the temple of conservation on Rhode Island Avenue." More sustained were their disagreements in 1919 over the need for federal oversight of private lumbering activities. When, in the Journal of Forestry, Pinchot had asserted that only strict national regulation would halt destructive lumbering, Greeley promptly rebuked him: not only were Pinchot's proposals of doubtful constitutionality, they were in direct conflict with the powers and inclinations of the states, a situation that would "seriously confuse and hamper our national development of forestry." The states instead must be recognized, he wrote, as "the proper agency to deal with private lands within their borders"; any other approach was undemocratic, un-American. That political principle was reinforced by another concerning foresters' social concerns: they had no business involving themselves in what he called "purely industrial conditions," that is in the relations between employers and employees. "Let us stick to the subjects in which, as foresters, we can claim some degree of expert knowledge," he concluded, exhausting, for instance, "every opportunity for education, for showing the forest owners that the arrest of denudation is to their benefit." By this approach would the profession avoid what Pinchot had thought axiomatic, "a 'fight' between the public and the timber owners" (Greeley, 1951, p. 118;Greeley, 1920, p. 103-05).
Greeley knew he could not avoid a brawl with Pinchot and the old chief felt no restraint in roughing up the new one. In a series of rebuttals published in the Journal of Forestry, one just before Greeley assumed his new post and one just after, Pinchot dismissed the claims for state control, observing that this form of management would result in more litigation and conflict than would national regulation. Federal control alone would counteract the power special interests would exert in those states that witnessed the greatest devastation. "It would be only necessary for the lumber interests...to prevent the passage of bills in three or four great lumber states in order to effectually cripple the whole plan of State control." Pinchot, who had long battled against such interests, reminded his readers that what had kept the National Forests inviolate (and the Forest Service independent) was "that both were free from State control," free from the meddling of the western states' timbermen. They were "saved in Congress by the support of the Central and Eastern states," he asserted, the very "forces which the State control plan now proposes to eliminate from the critical points in the fight" to regulate private land exploitation. "The problem is National, and the Nation alone is strong and steady enough to handle it" (Pinchot, 1920, p. 106-09;Pinchot, 1920B, p. 441-447).
Pinchot's political analysis had professional consequences, which he made certain to emphasis in his second rejoinder: "Where We Stand." Its title, set in the first person plural, assumed a direct correspondence between where Pinchot, and foresters in general, stood. As he asserted his claim to institutional memory, he positioned himself as the keeper of the flame, the definer of faith--he was "we." By this definition was Greeley an interloper, a flack for corporate interests who sought to damage the Forest Service's integrity and its commitment to the public good (Pinchot, 1919).
This point was more subtly made in an obituary of Eugene S. Bruce that Pinchot co-authored in the same number of the Journal of Forestry in which "Where We Stand" appeared. Bruce, a lumberman in the Adirondacks when Pinchot met him in the late-nineteenth century, "abandoned a career rich in promise," and at a "real sacrifice to his own financial future" to join with "a little band of foresters in Washington filled with enthusiasm but void of experience." Driven by a "clear vision of [the] better handling of the forests which he loved," he had a "grim determination to see this better handling realized," and with "the zeal of a new convert to a great cause," fought unsparingly for his principles. The memory of this lumberman who had become a forester was honored in ways that Pinchot would never grant to a forester who acted like a lumberman, a dismissal that surely William Greeley, now in his first month as the new chief, recognized, and his widow forty years later could still recall (Graves, et al., 1920).
The third Chief was not Dead On Arrival. He proved an adept opponent, a skilled political player who challenged Pinchot's claims to define the profession, and proclaimed his own with considerable success. In the process, he reshaped public foresters' sense of their duties, especially in the establishment of a cooperative relationship with the timber industry. With Pinchot, there would be no reconciliation.
This was particularly clear in Greeley's deft handling of a series of legislative initiatives that surfaced in response to the findings of the SAF Committee for the Application of Forestry. In response to Pinchot-inspired legislation, specifically several versions of the so-called Capper Bill that was designed to enact federal controls over timber cutting on private lands, Greeley encouraged industry executives to form the National Forestry Program Committee, then cooperated quietly with its efforts to counter Pinchot's congressional supporters; one aspect of this included the drafting of a bill that Graves gave to lumber lobbyists, and who dropped it into the legislative hopper. Pinchot was not the only one who knew how to manipulate the political process to his advantage (Steen, 1976, p. 179-181).
Greeley's legislative rebuttal, the Snell bill, named for its sponsor, Representative Bertrand Snell of New York, advocated state control of lumbering practices, and, due to its origins, quickly gained unanimous industry support. Sparks flew at public hearings in Washington, when Greeley and Pinchot predictably dismissed one another's position. There was one direct interchange between them that would later trouble Greeley's widow. After the two men had offered contrary testimony, she recalled, a member of the committee asked Pinchot "how does it happen that this young successor of yours believes this way?", to which Pinchot reportedly replied, "'Oh well, he's young,' or something to the effect that the lumbermen had 'pulled the wool over his eyes.'" As usual Pinchot had the last word (Greeley, 1951, p. 104-05;Greeley, 1960). But Greeley had the last laugh. When the Capper Bill failed to reach the Senate floor, and the Snell bill, which did not have a Senate counterpart, languished in the House, a successor was drawn up, the Clarke-McNary Act. it secured bicameral sponsorship, and the issue of control over private lumbering flared anew, with a significant difference. This time Greeley stacked congressional hearings with witnesses friendly to his position on state control. The opposition never mounted serious resistance. By June 1924, the act had swept through Congress, and as Greeley stood in a cloakroom listening to the final vote he exulted: "it was a great thrill to be in on the kill--even if the victory was bloodless." That it was so, he knew, was at least in part due to the fact that Pinchot had been embroiled in a tight campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania; although he had dismissed the Clarke-McNary Act as a violation of the public trust, and a gift to the lumber interests, his absence meant there was, Greeley beamed, "no fight against the new and popular proposal from the West." His characterization of the geographical source of support for Clarke-McNary neatly confirmed Pinchot's deep-seated fears that the influence of western lumbermen now dominated the Forest Service (Greeley, 1951).