Breaking New Ground

By Gifford Pinchot, Al Sample and Char Miller

Vigorous, colorful, bold and highly personal, Breaking New Ground is the autobiography of Gifford Pinchot, founder and first chief of the Forest Service. He tells a fascinating tale of his efforts, under President Theodore Roosevelt, to wrest the forests from economic special interests and to bring them under management for multiple- and long-range use. His philosophy of "the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest time" has become the foundation upon which this country's conservation policy is based.

In a new introduction for this special commemorative edition, Char Miller of Trinity University and V. Alaric Sample of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation trace the evolution of Gifford Pinchot's career in the context of his personal life and the social and environmental issues of his time. They illuminate the courage and vision of the man whose leadership is central to the development of the profession of forestry in the United States. Breaking New Ground is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the basis of our present national forest policy, and the origins of the conservation movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912556

Book preview

1946

PART 1

CHOOSING A LIFEWORK

1. Through Yale to Nancy

How would you like to be a forester? asked my foresighted Father one fortunate morning in the summer of 1885, just before I went to college. It was an amazing question for that day and generation—how amazing I didn’t begin to understand at the time. When it was asked, not a single American had made Forestry his profession. Not an acre of timberland was being handled under the principles of Forestry anywhere in America.

Outside the tropics, American forests were the richest and most productive on earth, and the best able to repay good management. But nobody had begun to manage any part of them with an eye to the future. On the contrary, the greatest, the swiftest, the most efficient, and the most appalling wave of forest destruction in human history was then swelling to its climax in the United States; and the American people were glad of it. Nobody knew how much timberland we had left, and hardly anybody cared. More than 99 per cent of our people regarded forest perpetuation, if they thought about it at all, as needless and even ridiculous.

So far as the natural resources were concerned, we were still a nation of pioneers. The world was all before us, and there would always be plenty of everything for everybody.

Public opinion held the forests in particular to be inexhaustible and in the way. What to do with the timber? Get rid of it, of course.

Only a meager handful of men and women had any concern for the future of the forests. They spoke of Forestry, but they thought only of forest preservation, forest influences, and tree planting. The actual practice of Forestry—forest management for continuous production—if they had ever grasped what it meant, was something far outside the field of practical affairs.

At a time when the few who considered Forestry at all were discoursing, deploring, and denouncing, and nothing more, my Father, with his remarkable power of observation and his equally remarkable prophetic outlook, looked ahead farther and more wisely than the rest. While they talked, he compared the forest conditions on two continents and clothed his thoughts with action.

He had seen foresters and their work, and the results of their work, in France and elsewhere in Europe. He was fond of quoting the great saying of one of his heroes, Bernard Palissy, the inspired potter, naturalist, and philosopher, who died in the Bastille, that neglect of the forest was not merely a blunder, but a calamity and a curse for France.

Without being himself a forester, my Father understood the relation between forests and national welfare, as another of his heroes, Colbert, minister of Louis XIV, had understood it three centuries before. He was sure that Forestry must come to America, he was convinced of the prodigious service it could render, he was confident that foresters would be needed, and he believed the time was ripe.

My Father was the first American, so far as I know, to ask his young hopeful the question with which this chapter begins. He saw what nobody else had seen, that here was a career waiting for somebody’s son.

Looking back over more than sixty years, his clear vision and far-seeing action seem to me most remarkable. And equally so was his refusal to be shaken by the cold water thrown on his plan by most of his friends and substantially all the leaders of the forest movement. He was sure he was right, in spite of the general judgment against him, and because he was sure, so was I.

My Father’s foresight and tenacity were responsible, in the last analysis, for bringing Forestry to this continent. That being true, he was and is fairly entitled to be called the Father of Forestry in America.

Forestry was a brand-new idea to me. I had no more conception of what it meant to be a forester than the man in the moon. Just what a forester did, since he no longer wore green cap and leather jerkin and shot cloth-yard arrows at the King’s deer, was beyond my ken. But at least a forester worked in the woods and with the woods—and I loved the woods and everything about them.

As a boy it was my firm intention to be a naturalist. Camping was my delight. My pin-fire shotgun was my treasure. I had heard a panther scream in the Adirondack woods the summer my Father gave me my first rod and taught me to cast my first fly. The broken butt of that rod is in my rack to this very day.

Of course a youngster with such a background would want to be a forester. Whatever Forestry might be, I was for it.

Until that moment I had been undecided between medicine and the ministry. My Father’s suggestion settled the question in favor of Forestry. There were not many tracks in that trail, and that was all the more reason for taking a chance. So simply my happy adventure began.

But how to start on my adventure—how to become a forester—was not so simple. There were no schools of Forestry in America, nor even any school where Forestry could be studied, so far as I could learn. And even if there had been, for the time being I had other fish to fry. I proposed to follow the family tradition and go to Yale. Once there, I would look around and pick up what Forestry I could. And what I could pick up turned out to be little enough.

Whoever turned his mind toward Forestry in those days thought little about the forest itself and more about its influences, and about its influence on rainfall first of all. So I took a course in meteorology, which has to do with weather and climate. And another in botany, which has to do with the vegetable kingdom—trees are unquestionably vegetable. And another in geology, for forests grow out of the earth. Also I took a course in astronomy, for it is the sun which makes trees grow. All of which was as it should be, because science underlies the forester’s knowledge of the woods. So far I was headed right.

But as for Forestry itself, there wasn’t even a suspicion of it at Yale. The time for teaching Forestry as a profession was years away.

Under such circumstances, with little more knowledge of what I was after than a cat has about catalysts, and with the thousand pressing interests of the undergraduate busily blocking off the future, I set out to become a professional forester.

In those days undergraduate life at Yale was strenuous enough to block off any future. Forestry was forgotten when, in a Freshman-Sophomore rush, half a dozen Sophomores got hold of my arms and pulled me across the famous Yale Fence. Half a dozen more detained my raiment, so that I came out of that rush tastefully, if not lavishly, attired in a pair of shoes and a leather belt. My Father, on a surprise visit to his serious-minded son, turned up just as a delighted Junior was covering me up with a linen duster.

My family gave me some books on Forestry, and I searched the Yale Library for others. Marsh’s great work, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, led me along the path a little way. Charles S. Sargent’s monumental volume on American Forests in the Tenth Census contained much information on distribution and botanical relationships, but nothing at all about forest management.

The publications of the Department of Agriculture and the American Forest Congress set me no forrarder. Indeed only one book that came my way at Yale actually discussed the application of Forestry to the forest, and that was published in Paris three years before I was born—Jules Clave’s Studies in Forest Economy.

But if there was little or nothing to be learned at Yale about the practice of Forestry, there was some information to be had about forests. William H. Brewer, Professor of Agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School, had published a highly intelligent mapping and description of the distribution of American forests in Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the Ninth Census, thus antedating Sargent by ten years. I found that Brewer knew far more about forests at home and Forestry abroad than any other man at Yale.

Dear old Professor Brewer, that wise and kindly compendium of universal information, was among the very last of the great men who took all learning for their province. There appeared to be no subject upon which he was not ready to lecture, or give a whole course of lectures, at a moment’s notice—forests among the rest. His service to Forestry in America should never be forgotten.

Four busy and happy years at Yale passed like a watch in the night. We had a good time and studied, some—Fol de rol de rol rol rol. What with my work as a Class Deacon, Class committees, athletics, writing for the Yale Literary Magazine, the Grand Street Mission, and a thousand other matters, my studies got no more than half my time. And that was well enough. What I learned outside the classroom was worth at least as much as what I learned inside it.

As a sample of my economic views in college, I submit my indignation over Government regulation of railroad rates: The railroads own the tracks and the cars, don’t they? Then why shouldn’t they charge what they please? Which wasn’t exactly a good start for a forester and a man who was to become and remain a Theodore Roosevelt Progressive.

The truth is that I had not yet begun to think. Like most of the glorious class of ’89, I was too much absorbed and fascinated by living to do much thinking. I had a lively and deep-seated desire to be of use in the world, and occasional questionings as to whether I could serve best as a minister, a doctor, or a forester. But the why of things interested me little.

Action was what I craved. The fact that Forestry was new and strange and promised action probably had as much to do with my final choice of it as my love for the woods.

During the winter of my senior year (1888-89) I went to Washington to check my plan to be a forester against the Government forest authorities.

Dr. George B. Loring, then recently retired as United States Commissioner of Agriculture (we call them Secretaries now), and one of the leaders in advocating forest preservation, thought there was little chance to find work in Forestry, and little need for it anyhow, because there was no centralized monarchical power, and because the country was so vast and second growth so rapid.

Dr. Bernard E. Fernow, a trained German forester, Chief of the Forestry Division, and as such head of the Government’s forest work and of the forest movement in America, advised me not to take up Forestry as my profession, but only as second fiddle to something else. A few days later he wrote, The wiser plan would be to so direct your studies that they will be useful in other directions also. The study of the sciences underlying forestry will also fit you for landscape gardening, nursery business, botanist’s work, etc.

Dr. Fernow, a tall, vigorous, and very active man, spoke naturally with the voice of authority. He saw the American situation through European eyes, and one of his fundamental ideas was that under existing conditions Forestry was impracticable in the United States.

Other opinions agreed with Washington. Professor Charles S. Sargent, head of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard and publisher of Garden and Forest, the foremost advocate of forest preservation, took the same position. So did my Grandfather Eno, who had made a great fortune for himself and offered me the chance to do likewise. It was pretty unanimous.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, my Father strongly advised me to stick to my guns. With his support I did stick to them. As I wrote him: In spite of the unfavorable opinions of those who know, it appears to me that there must be a future for Forestry in this country.

At the end of the course at Yale I had a little new knowledge, many friends who were to last through life, and associations worth more than any riches. And I was more than ever determined to be a forester, although I had yet to learn just what it was I had started to become.

Being a convert to Forestry, I was eager to bear witness to my faith. Out of a clear sky came the chance. At Commencement, after Mark Twain, in a speech since become famous, had discussed macerated spiders, pulverized lizards, and other abominations which doctors fed to their patients in the not-so-long-ago, and after other notables had said their say before the Alumni meeting, a member of the graduation class by the name of Pinchot, sitting with his Father in a modest place, was called upon.

I had carefully prepared myself to talk, not on Forestry, but on some subject long since forgotten. But on the spur of the moment I dropped it, my future profession welled up inside me and took its place, and I made to the exalted graduates of Yale (in June of 1889) my first public statement on the importance of Forestry to the United States—and my first public declaration that I had chosen it for my lifework.

I had chosen Forestry, but still I did not know exactly what it was I had chosen. So in the fall, when the will to work came back to me after the strenuous senior year at Yale, in spite of an offer to be Secretary of the Yale Y.M.C.A. for a year, another from the University of Chicago, and still another to study in the Forestry Division at Washington, I went abroad to find out. It was my simple intention, after having done so, to buy a few books and come home—proof enough that I was still lost in the fog.

There was then in Paris a Universal Exposition, which included a special exhibit of Waters and Forests. I was on my way to see it when good fortune overtook me. What set my feet in the path was the kindness of an Englishman to an American youngster who had no possible claim upon him.

I had heard that Forestry was practiced in British India, and it occurred to me that I might get some publications on the subject if I went to India House in London and asked for them. The publications I got, but I got also what was worth infinitely more. Mr. W. N. Sturt, a high official of the Indian Civil Administration, was good enough not only to see and talk with the seeker for light, but also to take an interest in him.

Mr. Sturt got me a letter from his Chief, Sir Charles Bernard, to Sir Dietrich Brandis, founder of Forestry in British India; and another to Sir William Schlich, head of the Forest School at Cooper’s Hill, where foresters were trained for the British Indian Service. Like Brandis, Schlich was a German—a man of great experience and learning, a trained forester who had succeeded Brandis as Inspector General of Forests to the Government of India.

Schlich received me most kindly; listened to my story; regretted that under the rules he could not take me as a student at Cooper’s Hill; and advised me to strike for the creation of National Forests (this was before there were any in America). Also he gave me an autographed copy of Volume I of his Manual of Forestry (I have just been running over that well-thumbed book once more), and sent me with his blessing on my pilgrimage to Sir Dietrich Brandis at Bonn-on-the-Rhine.

As I learn more of Forestry, I see more and more the need of it in the United States, and the great difficulty of carrying it into effect. So I wrote home after seeing Schlich. Sir William had done nothing to conceal the hard going ahead.

In Paris (and how glad I was to be in Paris again!) I revisited the Jardin des Plantes (where as a boy I had studied insects and snakes), saw Louis Pasteur inoculate an American friend of mine for mad-dog bite, was given letters to the French forest authorities by Whitelaw Reid, an old friend of my Father’s and our Minister to France (Ambassadors came later), and met M. Daubrée, head of the French Forest Service, who in turn put me in touch with the head of the French Forest School.

I recall being introduced, also, to William M. Evarts, then a big figure in American public life, and escorting some of my French and American friends to see Buffalo Bill, the great American Scout, who was taking Paris by storm. To him I had been made known years before by William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army and close friend of the Pinchots. The tree the latter planted at Milford is still the finest Maple on our place. As to Buffalo Bill, for him I came to have strong liking and high respect. He remained my friend until he died.

In between many distractions I studied the Forest Exhibit; was impressed, bewildered, and discouraged by its complexity and extent ; recovered and made no end of notes upon it; and went up in a captive balloon with my best girl of that period, who happened to be in Paris with her mother.

From the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure ever built by human hands, I looked down upon Passy, where as a small boy I had seen streets still filled with debris, and houses cut in two, by the German bombardment of 1870; upon the Gardens of the Tuileries, whose palace was burned by the Communards after the siege; upon Saint Cloud, where I watched some of these same Communards waiting in a prison yard for their trial and the blank wall; upon the Mare d’Auteuil, where, like Peter Ibbetson, I followed the dragon flies; and upon the Arc de Triomphe, in sight of which so much of my childhood had been spent.

Meanwhile, by another great piece of luck, I forgathered with a young French forester named Edouard Blanc, and told him my story. He insisted that I could get little or nothing by going to a forest school just to look it over, and that I would have to spend a year in study to do anything worth while. He said that my best chance was at the Ecole nationale forestière at Nancy in Lorraine, and added that now was my last chance, for after this year the course there would require three years’ preliminary work in Paris.

Edouard Blanc’s talk was convincing. So at the end of a hectic stay I departed for Bonn with the consciousness that I had certainly put in my time, and the determination to go to Nancy unless Brandis said no.

Those were great days, as I look back upon them. I was on my own and on my way. The world was all before me. I was having a lot more fun than I realized while I was having it.

En route to the Valley of Decision, I saw again the Cathedral at Cologne, which all my life has seemed to me the most impressive building ever raised by human hands, and the hawks that lived and nested among its pinnacles. Arrived at Bonn, I put on my best bib and tucker at the Inn of the Golden Star, and at the appointed hour presented myself, with no little trepidation, before Sir Dietrich Brandis.

He was a tall, spare, austere, and formal man, a perfect Prussian in appearance, who concealed immense kindliness and helpfulness behind an old-fashioned manner of great courtliness and severity. Like Umslopagaas in Rider Haggard’s story, there was a deep hole in the middle of his forehead, made, however, not by a battle ax, but by a surgical operation.

My first impression of him I never had reason to change. Dr. Brandis is splendid. Energy, power, thought, determination—all these and much more. He was more than kind. He was inspiring.

Dr. Brandis, as I always think of him (like most big men, he was much bigger than his title), was originally a botanist. He had been knighted by the British Government for his service in organizing the forests and introducing systematic forest management in Burma and India, beginning in 1856. Measured by any standard of achievement, he was the first of living foresters.

But what came first with me, he had done great work as a forest pioneer, had made Forestry to be where there was none before. In a word, he had accomplished on the other side of the world what I might hope to have a hand in doing in America.

To Dr. Brandis the American forest problem was neither new nor strange. He knew far more about it than I did. He was acquainted, for example, with Franklin B. Hough, first Government forest officer in America, and for years had corresponded with him.

It was almost the luckiest day in my life when Dr. Brandis took charge of my training—and so it was also, later on, for the long succession of young American forest students who followed me to his door. To them, as to me, he was guide, teacher, example, and friend.

In a few words I laid my problem before him. He asked me many questions, seemed pleased to know that I could chop and plow, and decided on the spot that I should go to the French Forest School, as I had planned. He also gave me a letter to the Director, M. Puton. I remember to this day the queer broken-backed steel pen he wrote it with, and the table at which he sat.

And I shall never forget how, when I said (to make a good impression), I don’t mind getting up to take an early train, he snapped, Of course you’ll take the first one.

I did take it in the cold gray dawn of the morning after. Taking the first train is no bad plan.

2. At the French Forest School

I was glad the choice fell on the French Forest School because my Grandfather Pinchot was French. He was a soldier of Napoleon, at nineteen captain of a company on its way to join the Army when Waterloo was fought. After the return of the Bourbons he was driven out of France for taking part in a plan to get his leader off the island of St. Helena on an American vessel. He escaped to England in a fishing boat, and in 1816 with his father and mother came to Milford, Pennsylvania, where the Pinchots have been ever since. I could speak French about as well as English.

At Nancy I presented my letters and was accepted as a foreign student by Director Puton on November 13, 1889—thirteen always was my lucky number—found rooms in the house of le Père et la Mere Babel, just outside the school gate, bought the necessary books, went to work, and cabled home for permission to stay, all in the order named.

L’Ecole nationale forestière was an enclosure of dull gray buildings, whose only cheerful spot was the garden of the Director. The latter was a precise little man, a high authority on forest law, whom I remember chiefly for his genuine kindness. He opened to me all the doors there were. If I got nothing out of Nancy it would be my own fault.

The work at the Forest School was almost entirely in the form of lectures of an hour and a half each, with occasional excursions in the woods and some reading on the side. My courses were three:

Silviculture, which deals with trees and forests and what they are, how they grow, and how they are protected, handled, harvested, and reproduced.

Forest Organization—the economic side of Forestry—dealing with the forest capital, rent, interest, sustained yield, and in general with how to get out of the forest the most of whatever it is you want.

Forest Law—which, since it was purely French and based on the Code Napoléon, I thought of very little use. Today I am not so sure. I have had to spend no little time on American forest laws since then.

In general the professors could hardly have been kinder; partly, perhaps, because I was the first American to come to Nancy; and perhaps also because they saw I wanted to learn. They gave me much help, counsel, and forest lore that was not in the regular courses.

The Assistant Director, Lucien Boppe, who taught silviculture, was by far the most pervasive personality in the school. Short, stocky, with immense vitality and a great contempt for mere professors, he had learned in the woods what he taught in the lecture room. He made a tremendous impression on me.

Professor Boppe’s lectures made Forestry visible. I followed his excursions in the woods with delight. We measured single trees and whole stands, marked trees to be cut in thinnings, and otherwise practiced the duties of a forester. Such work was far more valuable than any reading.

Patience, insisted this impatient man, is the master quality of the forester. But his whole teaching went to prove that the master quality of the forester is not patience but what he called le coup d’œil forestier —the forester’s eye, which sees what it looks at in the woods.

When you get home to America you must manage a forest and make it pay, said Boppe. I never lost sight of his advice.

But if the professors were admirable, the French forest students were distinctly otherwise. Many of them looked with contempt on the profession they had chosen, and most of them were far more interested in their light-o’-loves than in their work. Their resort in the evening was a low-class music hall. I went to one students’ ball, and that was enough.

One French student, however, was a notable exception. He was Joseph Hulot, who lived with his mother in the charming little château of Sainte Cécile on the outskirts of Nancy. In spite of being a baron he was really interested in Forestry. He was simple, straight, eager, and clean. We spent many days together in the forest, and we struck up a friendship that lasted until his death.

Nancy was used to foreign students. For many years the foresters for the British Indian Service had been trained there. In my time the outlanders were mixed peoples, mostly from Eastern Europe. The one Russian, Nesteroff, was different from the rest. He worked. Many years later I met him again in Moscow and saw something of Russian Forestry under his kind and understanding eye.

Because Joseph Hulot and I tramped the woods in all weathers, many of the French and most of the foreign students thought we had lost our minds. I wrote home: That any human being should ever think of walking abroad when it is snowing is a thing which has not entered into their conception of civilized man. I have been lucky enough to find another fellow, a Frenchman, fool enough to love the woods as I do, and who is not so miserably afraid that he may be a little too hot or a little too cold or may get a little tired, as the rest of these scarecrows are.

As to living quarters, I had fallen on my feet. The Babels did everything they knew how to make the stranger happy. But they could never reconcile themselves to my crazy notion that I must sleep with the windows open, nor understand my neglect to faire la noce (raise Cain) with the other students.

Every morning le Père Babel brought me my breakfast. Part of the time I went to Le Rocher de Cancale for the rest of my meals, part of the time I cooked them myself. Broiled tenderloin à la Pinchot is not to be sneezed at, and neither is the humble prune, if you soak it long enough.

Among my few amusements were fencing bouts with the bully of the school. Joseph and his family, two or three professors, three or four students, and the Presbyterian minister, M. Cleisz, under whom I sat, made up my circle.

Nancy itself was a pleasant town. I liked it well. There was the Librairie Husson-Lemoine, where I bought such books as my courses demanded and where a fierce-eyed older sister watched like a dragon in black alpaca over the safety of a plump little, meek little younger sister. The town was full of wicked students. There was the conscientious shoemaker who made my woods shoes too big because they would grow smaller with use, which they did. And there were also drugstores. A generation later M. Coué, the world-famous author of Every day in every way I am getting better and better, recognized me in New York as the American student who used to come into his pharmacy at Nancy so many years before. It was a delightful meeting.

Saturdays, if the weather was good, all the budding foresters at Nancy went into the woods. I went anyhow. Fridays, having no lectures, I spent in the National Forest of Haye and the Communal Forest of Vandoeuvres; on the latter I was writing a report for Dr. Brandis. I was learning more about Forestry from the forests than from lectures and books.

Usually I went alone, but often with Joseph, who knew all the forest guards, wood choppers, and peasants for miles around. We ate our lunches with them and saw the inside of practical forest questions through the eyes of the men who did the work with their hands. I was on the job at last.

The Forests of Haye and Vandoeuvres are (or were, for they stood near Verdun, and I suppose the two World Wars have left little of them) hardwood forests, managed on the system of coppice (sprouts cut once every thirty years) under standards (seedling trees cut once in 150 years). They gave me my first concrete understanding of the forest as a crop, and I became deeply interested not only in how the crop was grown, but also in how it was harvested and reproduced.

Work in these woods was assured for every year, and would be, barring accidents, world without end. The forest supported a permanent population of trained men—expert woodsmen who handed down their knowledge from father to son—and not only a permanent population but also permanent forest industries, supported and guaranteed by a fixed annual supply of trees ready for the ax.

The French wood choppers’ axes were wretched, ill-balanced, goosenecked abominations, made by the local blacksmith. Just to demonstrate the difference, I wrote home for some American axes. But the choppers declined to use the newfangled tools, even though they came from Collinsville, near Simsbury, Connecticut, where I was born. They warned me that the bits would break in cold weather, like their own. Custom, as is not unusual, was stronger than common sense. So I presented my axes to the museum of the School and let it go at that.

These forests, the first I ever looked over that were managed by professional foresters, lay on a level plateau above the town of Nancy. They were divided at regular intervals by perfectly straight paths and roads at right angles to each other, and they were protected to a degree we in America knew nothing about. There was, for example, a serious penalty for building any fire in the woods for any purpose, except that wood choppers might do so on spots picked out in advance by the forest guards.

This was the kind of forest I had read about, where peasants carried away every scrap of dead wood, and where branches down to the size of a pencil could be made into fagots and actually sold. And unfortunately this also was what the advocates of Forestry back home were recommending for America—for America, where settlers were still rolling saw logs into piles and burning them to get them out of the