Political Order and Political Decay (29 page)

The department under these circumstances found it very hard to retain trained scientific personnel. All of this began to change, however, after the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883 and the establishment of the merit system. The USDA was one of the first federal agencies to protect its personnel from political patronage and began hiring large numbers of recent graduates of the new land-grant colleges who had up-to-date training in scientific agriculture. As political scientist Daniel Carpenter explains, many of the department's division and bureau chiefs enjoyed relatively long tenure and could shepherd along an entire generation of new recruits who had no roots in either the patronage or seed-distribution systems.
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In contemporary parlance, this shift in USDA personnel policy constituted “capacity building.” The quality of the bureaucracy was dependent not just on the higher educational achievements of the new entrants but also on the fact that these individuals constituted a network of trust and possessed what has been labeled “social capital.” Much like their German or Japanese counterparts, these new officials had similar backgrounds (indeed, often graduating together from the same schools) and embodied a common belief in modern science and the need to apply rational methods to the development of rural communities around the United States. This mind-set over time became the basis for the organizational ethos of the Agriculture Department and in particular of one of its key divisions, the U.S. Forest Service.

Today, the Forest Service manages over 150 national forests and more than 200 million acres of land. Prior to the formation of the Forest Bureau in the Department of Agriculture in 1876, forests were regarded largely as an impediment to the westward flow of settlers; land was cleared and abandoned over large stretches of the country. In the first decade of the twentieth century, older parts of the country, like New England, had been largely denuded of trees; there were concerns that most of the nation's forests would disappear altogether within another generation. The recovery of these lands and their return to productive use was one of the great achievements of government intervention. The U.S. Forest Service has long been regarded as one of the most successful American bureaucracies, whose quality and esprit de corps became legendary. This achievement was all the more remarkable given the fact that individual forest rangers live in highly dispersed locations, whose isolation prevents the kind of bonding usually seen in urban organizational settings.
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This state-building legacy was largely the work of one individual, Gifford Pinchot, who came to head the department's Forestry Division in 1898. To the extent that there is (or was) an American aristocracy, Gifford Pinchot was a member of it. He was born in his grandfather's summerhouse of wealthy parents from Pennsylvania who sent him to the Phillips Exeter Academy and then to Yale.
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While at Yale he joined Skull and Bones, the secret society that would one day admit the forty-first president, George H. W. Bush. Like John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, William and Henry James, and other elite nineteenth-century Americans, Pinchot traveled extensively in Europe as a young man, where he came into contact with, among other things, European theories of scientific forestry. He was, for all his privilege, incredibly motivated to make something more of his life. When Pinchot went traveling with Sierra Club founder John Muir through the Crater Lake country of Oregon in 1896, Muir wrote in his journal, “Heavy rain during the night. All slept in the tent except Pinchot.”
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Religion played an important role in shaping his character; while traveling in England, he and his mother were caught up in the revival led by Reverend James Aitken that taught a social gospel of responsibility. Pinchot in many ways embodied Max Weber's Protestant work ethic, observing that “my own money came from unearned increment on land in New York held by my grandfather, who willed the money, not to the land, but to me. Having got my wages in advance in that way, I am now trying to work them out.”
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Perhaps because his own family were large landowners, Pinchot early on developed an interest in forestry and nature. At that time, however, Yale offered no courses in forest management. After graduating, he was advised to go to Europe, where he met an eminent German forester, Sir Dietrich Brandis, who had worked extensively managing forests on behalf of the British government in India and Burma. Brandis felt that Pinchot should spend several years studying scientific forest management, but the young American was too eager to bring the scientific forestry gospel back home. On returning to the United States in 1890, he began writing about forest management and was soon acknowledged as an expert on the subject. Pinchot was hired as a consultant by Phelps Dodge and later by George Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius, to manage the Vanderbilt family's forests in North Carolina.

The groundwork for a national forest service was laid not by Pinchot but by Bernhard Fernow, a Prussian who had trained at the Forest Academy at Münden and the Prussian Forestry Department, which had pioneered in developing techniques for the centralized planning of forest management. Fernow, on moving to America, became active in a number of scientific societies, serving as a secretary in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in the American Forest Congress. When Fernow was appointed to head the Agriculture Department's Forestry Division in 1886, it was run by two patronage appointees; he used his networks to begin staffing the organization with professionally trained agronomists. He also cultivated an extensive external constituency of local forestry associations, universities, private foresters, and other parties with an interest in forest management, through an aggressive campaign of scientific papers and bulletins. Fernow had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Pinchot to government work straight out of Yale; the latter took over as chief forester only in 1898. What Pinchot lacked in academic knowledge of forests, he made up for through his political connections and media savvy.
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Over the next three years, Pinchot turned the Division of Forestry into a Bureau of Forestry with a much larger budget and staff. Many of his closest associates in government had been fellow students at Yale—indeed, fellow members of Skull and Bones. He created a centralized system of training and socialization for national foresters built around the principles of expert, nonpartisan, and professional forest management for the benefit of multiple users. The purpose of the bureau was not, strictly speaking, conservation; Pinchot differed from early environmentalists like John Muir in believing that forests existed to be exploited. But economic benefit had to be extracted on a sustainable basis. Accordingly, he initiated a raft of new programs designed to help private owners of forests manage their properties better.

Pinchot's greatest triumph came in 1905 when he engineered the transfer of control over federally owned forests from the Department of the Interior to the Agriculture Department, lodging them under his own bureau's jurisdiction. The ethos of the Interior Department's General Land Office (GLO) was completely different from that of the Forest Service. The GLO was staffed by lawyers and accountants, with no expertise in forest management. They regarded their mission primarily as servicing the interests of private developers who wanted access to or ownership of public lands. The GLO was, however, politically very popular with western politicians and businessmen, who scoffed at the Forest Service as a bunch of “goggle-eyed, bandy-legged dudes from the East and sad-eyed, absent-minded professors and bugologists” and bureaucrats “who were too indolent to go over the country and examine its geography, who simply sat in their offices and made the laws, doing the utmost injustice to the people.” The GLO was an important source of Republican patronage. One of the biggest supporters of Interior Department control of forests was House Speaker Joe Cannon, Republican from Illinois (for whom the current building housing the U.S. House of Representatives is named), whose anticonservationist inclinations were summed up in the words “not one cent for scenery.” Cannon attacked Pinchot as having been “born with a gold spoon in his mouth,” and criticized government scientists for being “industrious to fasten upon the public teat.” Against this background, Pinchot began assembling a coalition of supporters in favor of a bill to shift authority over forests from Interior to Agriculture.
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The battle over control of public lands took place in the context of the big changes occurring elsewhere on the political scene. In contrast to the post–Civil War decades of shifting control of Congress between the two parties, the Republicans controlled both houses and the presidency after the realigning election of 1896. This had led to the appointment of James S. Wilson as secretary of agriculture, a post in which he would remain for a record sixteen years under three presidents. Wilson was critical in shifting the department from a seed-distribution agency to a forward-looking, science-based organization, not just with respect to the Forest Service but also in areas like agricultural extension services, the regulation of pure foods and drugs, and the like.
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Theodore Roosevelt had become president in 1901 on McKinley's assassination, and Roosevelt was of course a great outdoorsman who was converted to the cause of conservation by C. Hart Merriam of the Agriculture Department's Biological Survey and John Muir. Roosevelt, a friend of Pinchot's since his days as governor of New York, shared the chief forester's agenda and became a powerful patron of his initiatives.
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The mere fact that Pinchot had the support of the president and that his party was in charge of Congress did not, in America's system of separated powers, mean that the transfer of the land office was in any way a done deal. Joe Cannon was one of the most powerful House Speakers in American history, representative of the Republican Party's Old Guard and ally of a strong assemblage of western congressmen bitterly opposed to the transfer. This included Frank Mondell, representative from Wyoming and member of the Public Lands Committee, who led the opposition to the transfer bill. At Cannon's urging, the House in 1902 voted down the measure 100–73.

At this point, an ordinary bureaucrat in an ordinary bureau would have accepted his fate and backed down. But Pinchot was not just a bureaucrat; he also was a skillful political operator who had spent years cultivating a wide range of interest groups, newspaper editors, and scientific societies, including the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, western ranchers' associations, the National Board of Trade, the National Live Stock Association, and many others. To build support, he reassured the Homestake Mining Company, a constituent of transfer opponent Senator Alfred Kittridge, that timber on federal lands would not be transferred out of state. He succeeded in provoking a huge outcry in the press, among academics, and among respected scientific authorities in support of the shift. His most daring move was to outflank Cannon by personally cultivating a friendship with Representative Mondell, traveling with him to the Yellowstone region and lobbying him ceaselessly to support the Department of Agriculture. Speaker Cannon found himself outfoxed by a midlevel bureaucrat, and the transfer of land management to Pinchot's bureau was passed by both houses of Congress in 1905.
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As Daniel Carpenter has argued, Pinchot's victory over Cannon represents a remarkable case of bureaucratic autonomy in a country not famous, as are Germany and France, for its powerful bureaucrats.
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Pinchot achieved this degree of autonomy not because of any statutory authority he was given. Broad delegations of authority to the executive branch are rare in U.S. practice outside the realm of national security and foreign policy, and did not occur in this instance. What Pinchot did was to operate not bureaucratically but politically, building an informal network of allies both inside and outside government. In democratic America, this is how authority is exercised. His opponents, of course, accused him of bureaucratic imperialism and complained bitterly that “an individual executive officer of the Government [had no right] to legislate as to how lands shall be preserved.” Another congressman criticized Pinchot's “publicity machine” that had mailed out more than nine million circulars annually with taxpayer dollars and accused the Forest Service of being “a new institution, made without Congress.”
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Pinchot's downfall came three years later in the so-called Ballinger affair, and was the result of another power play on his part. Theodore Roosevelt had at this point been succeeded as president by William Howard Taft, whose commitment to conservation issues was questioned by those in the former president's inner circle. Of Taft, Pinchot said, “Weak rather than wicked, he was one of those genial men who are everything that fancy paints until a showdown comes along that demands real toughness of moral fiber.”
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The new secretary of the interior, James Garfield (son of the assassinated president), appointed former Seattle mayor Richard Ballinger to head the part of the General Land Office that had remained with the Interior Department, where he had authority over the opening up of land in Alaska to private development. A young GLO agent named Louis Glavis began noting questionable dealings between Ballinger and various Seattle land investors, including payments made to Ballinger after he was named to his office. When Glavis tried to report his findings to the president with the help of two of Pinchot's Forest Service agents, Taft issued a gag order and allowed Ballinger to fire the whistle-blower. Taft implored Pinchot to drop the issue, but the latter defied the president by defending the actions of his staff in a letter to Jonathan Dolliver, chairman of the Agriculture Committee, which was to be read on the Senate floor. For this, Taft fired Pinchot and ended his career as the nation's chief forester.
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