The Peripatetic Reviewer

GIFFORD PINCHOT was a tall, lean, aquiline Pennsylvanian with a charming smile and the courage of a visionary. He had his big idea as he was riding his horse in Rock Creek Park near Washington in February, 1907, and the vision which seized him then was one of the best things that ever happened to this country. Pinchot’s family had made their money in lumber, and he knew something about the depletion of American forests before he went abroad to study silviculture in France and Switzerland. On his return he was put in charge of the Biltmore Forest near Asheville, North Carolina, George W. Vanderbilt’s huge estate which was then employing more men than the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Frederick L. Olmsted, the great landscape architect, was also on the staff; Charles S. Sargent was head of the Arnold Arboretum, and Bernard E. Fernow, director of the insignificant Forestry Division in Washington. These were Pinchot’s mentors, and he surprised them all by making the Biltmore Forest a paying proposition from the start, his policy being “not to stop the ax but to regulate its use.”

Young Pinchot’s next move was to urge the Administration to withdraw forest reserves from the vast public lands in the West. Both Cleveland and McKinley were sympathetic, but in Teddy Roosevelt, with whom he had camped and hunted, Pinchot found his wholehearted supporter. When T.R. came into office, millions of acres were added to the national forests and their control vested in an independent Forest Service with Pinchot as its head.

Pinchot is the soloist, as he deserves to be, in DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE’S new book CONSERVATION: AN AMERICAN STORY OF CONFLICT AND ACCOMPLISHMENT (Rutgers University Press, $5.00). The conflicts came first, and the young forester figures prominently in all of them. Forestry as Pinchot envisioned it was not only a replenishment of the woods, it was a program affecting the management of grazing, fish and game, minerals and water, and soil erosion; it was a program which called for research — how, for instance, could the Southern pine be bleached to make a pulp suitable for white paper? — it was a program which called for schools of forestry (one of which Pinchot founded at Yale), and for public support it needed a rallying cry. The word which he invented for that purpose was “conservation.”

Such an ambitious movement backed by such brisk initiative soon stirred up a powerful opposition. It rattled the bureaucrats in Washington, for it cut straight across departmental lines, and it infuriated the Western lumbermen and mininginterests, who regarded the public lands as fair game and who resented any controls as far-reaching as Pinchot’s promised to be. Their lobbyists went to work, but T.R.was not to be stopped, and in the last weeks of his Administration he added sixteen million acres to the national forests by proclamation.

The executive who first applied the brakes was William Howard Taft, “that ponderous and pleasant person entirely surrounded by men who know exactly what they want,” in the words of Senator Dolliver. Taft found Pinchot a nuisance. The President was an anti-Federalist, and he favored private (to use a kindly word) “developments” such, for instance, as the Morgan-Guggenheim Syndicate, which was striving to get control of as much of Alaska as possible. Taft approved of the policy of converting government lands into private ownership, and so did his Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger. But the conservationists found allies in Congress in the elder La Follette and George Norris, and in the investigation that followed, a Boston lawyer, Louis D. Brandeis, destroyed the case for the monopolists. This was the first big fight before the people, and that their verdict was against Taft and Ballinger was made emphatically clear in the elections that followed. Taft had forced Pinchot to resign, and this too was a blessing in disguise, for the forester assumed the leadership of the National Conservation Association, from which vantage point he continued to arouse the nation’s interest.

In his fair, terse style, Mr. Coyle shows us the emergence of a national philosophy, and in such vigorous encounters as I have been citing, he identifies the two contending factions which have striven to bend that philosophy to their particular views: those who — like the two Roosevelts believed in the extension and protectiveness of federal conservation, and those who did not.

In the second hall of his book Mr. Coyle traces the long steady record of accomplishment: the coming of fire wardens and of tree farming, the campaigns against erosion and lor contour larming, the twin sisters irrigation and water power, Hood control, river basin developments, the building of Bonneville and the TVA. It is a record which foreigners, not least the Russians, study and emulate, and today as in the beginning the same rival factions are still at grips. It interests me to see Mr. Coyle point out how repeatedly the Department of the Interior has reached for control of the Forest Service; how Harding hesitated to restore it to Secretary Fall because of Pinchot’s opposition, and how wrathful Harold Ickes became when F.D.R. would not restore the forests to him. The Western stockmen still see no good reason why they should not take over the public range lands, and the Army shows its exasperation when conservation prevents their dipping into our national parks and wildlife refuges for new shooting ranges. Hetch Hetchy, and Dixon-Yates, and Hell’s Canyon—each battleground has left its scars, and still the light goes on.

This is an invigorating book and an edifying one in that Mr. Coyle compels us to think beyond our regional interests, to ask ourselves if the country has not done right in assuming this guardianship of our natural resources, to ask ourselves where we are going as we poise here at the entrance of the atomic age.

ROBERT TRAVER is the pseudonym of a distinguished jurist, a member of the Michigan Supreme Court, who has considerable skill for dramatizing what goes on in the courtroom. In his new novel, ANATOMY OF A MURDER (St. Martin’s Press, $4-50), he is writing about a lurid case, a case involving rape and murder at a summer resort in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The narrative comes to us through the eyes of Paul Biegler, the former D.A. of Iron Cliffs County. Paul has had a rather thin time practicing law on his own, and when on his return from a fishing trip the call comes through for him to defend the murderer, he is quite aware of what the case might mean for him in his upcoming campaign for Congress. He decides to take it, and from that moment his impressions and his thinking are ours.

Paul is a rawboned bachelor in his early forties, garrulous, well-read, with a wry sense of humor. His ten years of experience as prosecuting attorney have sharpened his knowledge of human nature and have left him on easy terms with the sheriff, the jailer, and the state police. They have also left him with no little jealousy of Mitchell Lodwick, the present D.A., who is running against him for Congress and who will be his opponent in the trial. Paul’s client, an Army lieutenant, has been locked up in the jail at Iron Bay, an unprepossessing little resort on the shore of Lake Superior, and it is here in the stinking confinement that he has to size up his man and begin to unravel and decipher tHe dark twisted threads.

Paul’s job is complicated from the outset by his dislike of Lieutenant Manion. The killer is an arrogant, much-decorated veteran of World War II and Korea, and the little he confides is this: his wife Laura was assaulted and brutally raped by Barney Quill, owner of the local tavern. As soon as he had quieted his wife, he went straight down to the tavern and drilled Barney five times with his lüger. Paul’s task, as he soon sees, is to admit the murder, to arouse sympathy for the wife, and to build his defense on “the irresistible impulse” which compelled the lieutenant to kill in cold blood.

For good measure the novelist — as a possible relief from the lurid — has tossed in a number of romantic details, some of which Paul notices and some of which he doesn’t. Laura in her sweater and without her girdle is a budding Miss America, but Paul decides there should be no sweaters in court. Laura’s little dog with the probable name of Rover has the improbable habit of carrying a flashlight in his mouth. Lieutenant Manion was a platoon leader in the war, and is still a lieutenant twelve years later (why no promotion with all those decorations?). But once the story moves into the courtroom, once Judge Weaver takes his seat and the rancorous Mr. Dancer, the prosecutor from Lansing, gets into the act, the book really begins to roll. The testimony, the crossexamination, the objections, the Judge’s ruling, the infighting between Paul and Dancer, are absorbing, the kind of thing that keeps you going for a long uninterrupted stretch. Robert Traver has quite a lot to learn about the handling of casual talk and his characters’ introspection, but once he gets his people into the courtroom, he calls his shots with an authority few writers can challenge.