The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [43]
Arrogant, and opposed to the very concept of forest management, Ballinger—who had strong affiliations with western land barons—even opposed fire control because it involved state, federal, and private cooperation. “A stocky, square-headed little man who believed in turning all public resources as freely and rapidly as possible over to private ownership,” Pinchot complained in his diary about the new secretary of the interior.27 With Ballinger spearheading the effort, more than 1.5 million acres that the Roosevelt administration had set aside for future federally controlled waterpower sites had been forfeited.28 With Wall Street putting pressure on his administration to open up Alaska’s storehouse of natural resources, Taft capitulated, weakening federal authority over public lands in the Chugach. “Taft’s betrayal was a constant topic of conversation,” Pinchot later recalled, “between TR and his intimate advisers.”29
Ballinger, a lawyer who was a former mayor of Seattle, thought that between 1901 and 1909 President Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Garfield had withdrawn too much public land for national forests in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Were huge federal forest reserves such as the Tongass really necessary? Why did Roosevelt want to save the Chugach, which held one-third of all the territory’s glacier-covered land, including the Bering Glacier (one of the largest glaciers in North America)?30 Ballinger, who distrusted easterners and science, wanted the pendulum to swing back to nonregulated capitalism. He respected Puget Sound business interests. Roosevelt and Pinchot’s crusade had, he said, “gone too far.”31 Not only did Ballinger consider the acreage of Mount Olympus National Monument (in Washington state)—which President Roosevelt had created with an executive order in March 1909—excessive, but he thought more Alaskan coalfields should be opened up to the private sector. The Roosevelt administration had favored leasing U.S.-owned coalfields in Alaska whereas Ballinger wanted them sold outright to the private sector.
When Garfield left Washington, D.C., Pinchot tried to stop the newly appointed Ballinger from undoing the achievement of the Roosevelt administration regarding Alaskan public lands. By the fall of 1909, Pinchot had come to the conclusion that Ballinger was two-faced, the worst swindler he’d come across in decades, a toady for “Morganheim.” Pinchot met personally with President Taft in the White House, pleading with him to control Ballinger before Alaska’s boreal forests became permafrost wastelands of rotted tree stumps. Pinchot was worried that in the early summer months, the towering Chugach Mountains, rising dramatically from the sea, were a tinderbox. (Ballinger and his associates believed fires didn’t happen around glaciers.) A wildfire caused by an industrial accident or by a bolt of lightning could suddenly ignite the forestlands. Strong prevailing winds would spread the flames uncontrollably in all directions.32 Pinchot strongly feared that the major development projects of the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate—the Kennecott Copper Company and the Copper River and Northern Railway—were monopolistic in in- tent.
Even though Taft thought Pinchot too zealous a promoter of federal forestry, Pinchot was a Yale man of stature, with impeccable New England credentials. Strong-willed, devoted to natural resource management, and convinced that God was in forests, Pinchot would often sleep outdoors with a wood block pillow to increase his hardiness. When he went camping, he would order his valet to wake him in the mornings as bracingly as possible—by dousing him with water from an icy stream.33 “I do regard Gifford as a good deal of a radical and a good deal of a crank,” Taft wrote to his brother, “but I am glad to have him in the government.”34 But Taft also frequently mocked Pinchot for being a sycophant of Roosevelt, engaging in “sort of a rough rider fetish worship.” To Taft, GP, as his