The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [47]
Pinchot took his dismissal like a gentleman, or so it seemed at first. But as his biographers have remarked, he was ultimately simply unable to accept it. Seeking revenge, he hatched a hidden agenda against Taft. With the help of Garfield, Pinchot composed a sixteen-page memorandum for Roosevelt to read in Africa. Written as a prosecutorial brief, the memo detailed how Roosevelt’s conservation policies were being ravaged by the Taft administration, which had connections to unsavory syndicates. Taft, while not personally corrupt, was the enabler in chief. Pinchot told Roosevelt that “complete abandonment” of his Alaska policies was taking place. Furthermore, Pinchot claimed, Taft had surrounded himself with “reactionaries” from big business who were bragging about a “vicious political atmosphere” aimed at undoing Roosevelt’s conservationist accomplishments. According to Pinchot, Taft had “yielded to political expediency of the lowest type.”54
What was initiated here was the eventual breakup of the Republican Party in the early twentieth century. Ballinger represented its free enterprise, big business wing; Pinchot represented the progressive-reform wing, with the “conservation doctrine” at its core. Taft was now the leader of the corporate conservatives; Roosevelt, essentially unreachable in the African bush, was the champion of the left-leaning progressives.
While field collecting for the Smithsonian Institution along the White Nile, Roosevelt received from a runner Pinchot’s sixteen-point indictment of Taft in January 1910. He pored over the bracing document with gloomy curiosity. Was this memo accurate? Or was it a distortion by Pinchot? Cleverly, Taft had appointed Henry Solon Graves as Pinchot’s replacement to lead the U.S. Forest Service. Graves had been a fine director of the Yale School of Forestry from 1900 to 1910 and was a solid forester incapable of making a fuss. A graduate of Yale (in 1892), he was book-smart, and he had studied forests abroad at the University of Munich. As replacements went, Taft had chosen wisely. This did not mollify Roosevelt, however, because Graves had worked as a forester for the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Corporation in Michigan. Graves was too much of a forest industry insider to be trusted fully as a regulator of the federal forest reserve.55
“The appointment in your place of a man of high character, and a noted forestry expert, in no way, not in the very least degree, lightens the blow,” Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot on March 1, 1910, attempting delicately not to trumpet a rival. “For besides being the chief of the forest bureau you were the leader among all the men in public—and the aggressive hard-hitting leader—of all the forces which were struggling for conservation, which were fighting for the general interest as against special privilege.”56
Deeply disturbed by the feud, Roosevelt asked Henry Cabot Lodge to advise him in an unbiased way. Sentimentally, Roosevelt wanted very much to see Pinchot personally. But at the same time, internal warfare in his party wearied him. His affection for and his sense of obligation toward Pinchot won out. “I’m very sorry for Pinchot,” Roosevelt wrote to Lodge. “He was one of our most valuable public servants. He loved to spend his whole strength, with lavish indifference to any effect on himself in battling for a high ideal and not to keep him thus employed rendered it possible that his great energy would expend itself in fighting the men who seemed to him not to be going far enough forward.”57 Lodge, by contrast, wasn’t so affectionate toward Pinchot: he warily advised Roosevelt not to meet with the former forestry chief in Europe. Pinchot was guilty of vicious gossip and shameless politicking and had been wrong to smear Ballinger in the press by using allegations of Alaskan fraud.58
Glad that Lodge had given him sound counsel, Roosevelt nevertheless wanted to hear from his forty-four-year-old