The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [44]
If President Taft had an Achilles’ heel, it was his stout refusal to grant interviews. This was not smart for a president trying to get traction. Ballinger called it White House “nopublicity.”36 Unsure how to cope with the Taft administration’s indifference toward federal land protection and its virtual boycott of the press, Pinchot founded the National Conservation Association as a watchdog group in 1909. The outgoing president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, who sympathized with Roosevelt and Pinchot’s land ethic, signed on as its honorary president; Pinchot served as president until 1925. Garfield joined the executive committee; so did Henry Stimson, a leader of the Boone and Crockett Club (later to be secretary of state for Herbert Hoover and secretary of war for Franklin Roosevelt) and a rising star in the wildlife protection movement. The purpose of the new association was to enact laws to promote conservation. “This association is to be the center of a great propaganda for conservation,” Pinchot wrote. “It is hoped that all organizations interested in special phases of the conservation movement will become affiliated with it.”37
No sooner had the National Conservation Association been formed, in the summer of 1909, than Pinchot, to his great dismay, discovered that Ballinger was allowing fraud to operate in the General Land Office (GLO) in the West. Alaska—in particular the areas surrounding the Chugach—was being leased to huge timber and mining operations so that quick profits could be made. Further irritating Pinchot was the fact that President Taft had killed Roosevelt’s grand notion of a Global Conservation Congress. Pinchot truly believed that Taft and Ballinger were hell-bent on deprioritizing conservation, and forcing it underground, back to mere “garden club” status. The populist movement of the early twentieth century viewed big business—particularly the railroad industry—with deep suspicion. A combination of conservationists, muckrakers, and trustbusters insisted, as Pinchot did, that Alaska should remain public land saved for public use.38
On November 13, 1909, Collier’s published a scathing “insider” article by Louis Glavis that linked Ballinger directly to the J. P. Morgan—Guggenheim syndicate. This New York–based syndicate had purchased the enormous Kennecott-Bonanza copper mine and monopolized the Alaskan steamship and rail transportation from Seattle; it also owned twelve of the forty canneries in the territory.39 “Gradually,” M. Nelson McGeary writes in Gifford Pinchot: Forester-Politician, “by highly intricate financial arrangements, this partnership extended its holdings in Alaska until by 1910 it controlled copper mines, a steamship company, and a salmon-packing concern.”40 Pinchot echoed Glavis’s article, charging that greedy, oppressive trusts had subservient lawmakers in the Taft administration doing their bidding—a barely concealed smear of Ballinger. In Pinchot’s mind, Roosevelt’s Alaskan policy was being compromised and ignored because of Taft’s complicity with “Morganheim.” Pinchot declared that under President Taft, the GLO reeked as badly as sulfur water. He wanted to clean the Augean stables; he wanted Roosevelt’s conservationist directive—the simple rule of always making the land better than you found it—upheld by Taft. Having the U.S. Forest Service give huge corporations and banks free rein in the Alaskan lands they leased, without federal regulation, was a recipe for disaster: long-term deforestation.
Pinchot had become a whistle-blower. Using information provided by Glavis, he declared that Ballinger was a traitor to the federal government and to the conservationist movement. If the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate wasn’t stopped, the rivers in Chugach National Forest—the Copper, Russian, and Trail—would