The American People and the National Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service

Contents

` C O N T E N T S Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 A Century of Change 1 2 The Silvicultural Imperative, 1891–1920 25 3 Evolution of an Agency Clientele, 1920–1975 55 4 Confronting the Ecological Forest, 1976–2005 106 5 Epilogue: Facing the Future 137 Notes 145 Sources 183 Index 191 Hays FM:Layout 1 12/14/08 1:27 PM Page vii Hays FM:Layout 1 12/14/08 1:27 PM Page viii P R E F A C E THE YEAR 2005 marked the centennial of the U.S. Forest Service. Until February 1,1905,the nation’s forest reserves had been under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. On that date, the Department of Agriculture‘s Bureau of Forestry assumed control of the forest reserves and the bureau debuted under a new name: the U.S. Forest Service. The onehundredth anniversary of the agency seemed a propitious time for historians to revisit its history. The passage of a century provides critical perspective with which to view just how much the agency had changed over that period of time. I was particularly interested in having an up-to-date account of the agency’s history that would incorporate material written since I first became interested in forest history.At that time,in 1948,the only useful source about the agency’s history was Gifford Pinchot’s autobiography, Breaking New Ground, published in 1947.Since that time,and especially since 1970,more than a hundred books and innumerable articles have focused directly on important aspects of Forest Service history or have covered the topic in more oblique ways.1 For the centennial itself,the agency produced both a DVD,which drew upon many interviews with both agency participants and historians, and a companion book, The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History, written by James G. Lewis. When the Forest Service released the DVD at the American Society of Environmental History’s annual convention in 2005,the ASEH echoed the federal agency’s self-congratulatory tone. The ASEH’s newsletter later published a review that praised the DVD as a “rich and satisfying historical narrative.” The agency’s own version of its century-long history ignored the rich accumulation of scholarship about the national forests and the agency.The DVD and this ASEH review thus made a serious revision of the agency’s history a timely project. ix Hays FM:Layout 1 12/14/08 1:27 PM Page ix The agency’s version of its first hundred years did not offer significant additions to or revisions of previous accounts. Its narrative of events up to 1920 seemed only to repeat the perspective of Breaking New Ground. A history published nearly sixty years after that book should have contained considerable revision,especially in its treatment of the role of Gifford Pinchot.2 Further detracting from its historical value, the agency’s centennial history devoted very little or no attention to such topics as wildlife, recreation, watersheds, and aesthetics, and historical perspective was nonexistent for the tumultuous years since 1970.3 The centennial year seemed like an opportune time to employ a new approach to the history of the Forest Service.The events of the last decades of the twentieth century forcefully suggested an approach that would address the relationship between the agency and society as it evolved during those years.Traditional accounts stressed “legislative”history,a context that brings together laws and agency policy in a legalistic pattern of administrative evolution.4 But in the years after 1970, the more compelling drama was the way in which that administrative structure was challenged time and again by impulses emanating from society at large. The agency’s responses to those impulses constituted major historical shifts. This type of wider historical perspective would put more emphasis on the broader forces impacting the agency and on the innumerable choices it made in response to those external impulses. This interaction between society and agency was an ever-present context for the agency’s history from the 1970s to the beginning of the agency’s second century in 2005. Applying that perspective to a history of the national forests all the way back to the first authorization of the forest reserves in 1891 should provide new insights, and that is the goal of this book. Since the focus of the following...