Gifford Pinchot

Gifford Pinchot. [Born] 1865. Forester, teacher, author, public servant

A Centurion for fifty-four years—the longest membership on the list of our dead this year—proposed by John Bigelow, then a Vice-President of Century who had been elected in 1868, and seconded by Secretary A. R. Macdonough elected in 1852.

It was to our land and all that was fair within it that Pinchot gave his heart. “The taint of big money and vested interests” he fought all through his long public life, and he fought for the common man. But to understand him it must be seen clearly that his fight for the common man was incidental to his fight to save our natural resources. He stood square against greed and corruption and he fought on the ground he chose to fight on because he loved our land and because he understood what it meant to the future of the people. To those he classed as despoilers of the public domain, he gave no quarter. It was not so much to him that they were depriving the common man of his heritage, as that they were impairing the natural resources of the nation.

He was the first professional forester in the United States, twice Governor of Pennsylvania, Chief Forester of the United States under two Centurion Presidents [Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft], Professor of Forestry in Yale University for thirty-three years, the author of a dozen books, fisherman, traveller, lover of nature and, always, of our country.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1946 Memorials