The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [46]
From September to December 1909, Taft was looking for a convenient way—or any way—to fire Pinchot while TR was still collecting specimens in Africa. Pinchot stumped the West, calling citizens to fight for public land: it was their birthright as Americans. Although Pinchot had staunch allies in the establishment—for example, the agribusinessman Henry C. Wallace—leaders of the big corporations wanted the chief forester gone. Pinchot fumed that the “great oppressive trusts” existed in the United States because of “subversive law-makers.”48 In 1908 there were 770 serious placer mines in Alaska, employing 4,400 men.49 Taft and his supporters wanted to see that number doubled, for the sake of the economy of the Pacific Northwest. They sought jobs, jobs, jobs, and quick money over long-term land management.
Taft, you might say, was complicit in the radical anticonservation movement in Alaska. He simply wouldn’t enforce scrupulous federal protection of the Chugach and Tongass. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Taft initially ignored the issue but then became pro- development and pro–big business concerning Alaskan affairs. Clearly Taft was untouched by Thoreau’s belief (shared by the Tlingit Indians) that wilderness represented the preservation of the world; money was what drove Taft forward. “We have fallen back down the hill you led us up,” Pinchot wrote to Roosevelt (who was in Khartoum, in the Sudan). “There is a general belief that the special interests are once more substantially in full control of both Congress and the Administration.”50
Feeling the pressure from being constantly in the public eye during the feud with Ballinger, Pinchot headed to Santa Catalina Island, California, in the blue Pacific, to clear his head. Armed with a fishing pole, transported by a skiff, Pinchot perhaps thought about the role of dissenters from Thomas Paine to William Lloyd Garrison to John Muir. As he was riding Pacific swells, drifting eight miles from shore, hoping to catch a few good yellowtail or albacore tuna for supper, Pinchot’s rod nearly split in half from a titanic tug. Suddenly a blue marlin as large as William Howard Taft leaped from the water. “High out of the water sprang this splendid creature,” Pinchot wrote, “his big eye staring as he rose, till the impression of beauty and lithe power was enough to make a man’s heart sing with him. It was a moment to be remembered for a lifetime.”51
Pinchot soon returned to Washington, D.C., ready for combat. By December, the situation concerning Ballinger had become even messier for Taft. People were always quoting Pinchot to him, and muckrakers were stepping up their attack on Ballinger as a crook. Collier’s magazine ran an inflammatory story, “Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of Interior?”52 Meanwhile, Alaskan forests were front-page news in New York City. Should the virgin stands be federal reserves? Or should they be clear-cut for the pulp industry to help the Pacific Northwest economy? By January 1910 Taft, exhausted by the feud, knew he had to “wrestle with Pinchot,” as he put it. Taft composed a stern letter charging Pinchot with disrespecting the office of the president. “By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the government,” Taft wrote, “and it therefore now becomes my duty to direct the secretary of agriculture to remove you from your office as the forester.” What a bad political move by Taft! Why fire the honest protégé of TR and keep the money-grubber from Seattle? At the very least, Taft should have also asked Ballinger, who resigned in 1911