Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Pinchot was the first director of Roosevelt’s pet creation, the Forest Service, but that was only one of his roles. He was also the Cardinal Richelieu of TR’s White House. Temperamentally and ideologically, the two men fit hand in glove. Both were wealthy patricians (Pinchot came from Pittsburgh, where his family had made a fortune in the dry-goods business); both were hunters and outdoorsmen. Though their speeches and writings rang of Thomas Jefferson, at heart Pinchot and Roosevelt seemed more comfortable with Hamiltonian ideals. Roosevelt liked the Reclamation program because he saw it as an agrarian path to industrial strength, not because he believed—as Jefferson did—that a nation of small farmers is a nation with a purer soul. Pinchot espoused forest conservation not because he worshiped nature like John Muir (whom he privately despised) but because the timber industry was plowing through the nation’s forests with such abandon it threatened to destroy them for all time. Roosevelt was a trust-buster, but only because he feared that unfettered capitalism could breed socialism. (For evidence he only had to look as far as Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis was whipping labor radicals into such a blind, vengeful froth that two of them blew up his printing plant in 1910 and killed twenty of their own.) The conservation of Roosevelt and Pinchot was utilitarian; their progressivism—they spoke of “the greater good for the greatest number”—had a nice ring to it, but it also...