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The Pinchot–Ballinger controversy, also known as the "Ballinger Affair", was a dispute between high level officials in the U.S. government regarding whether or not the federal government should allow private corporations to control water rights, or instead cut them off so that the wilderness would be protected from capitalist greed. Between 1909 and 1910, the dispute escalated to a battle between President William Howard Taft (who supported Richard Ballinger) and ex-president Theodore Roosevelt (who supported Gifford Pinchot). Pinchot and his allies accused Balinger of criminal behavior to help an old client of his and thus promote big business. Ballinger was eventually exonerated but the highly publicized dispute escalated a growing split in the Republican Party. Taft took control of the Republican Party in 1912, but Roosevelt started a third "Progressive" party. Both Taft and Roosevelt were defeated in the three-way 1912 presidential election, with Democrat Woodrow Wilson the winner.^[1]

Pinchot, a close personal friend of Roosevelt, was Chief of the U.S. Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. Richard A. Ballinger was U.S. Secretary of the Interior, a separate cabinet department. Roosevelt in 1908 selected Taft as his successor in the White House because he thought Taft fully agreed with his main policies. Roosevelt then left the country in early 1909. Roosevelt's friends flooded him with messages hostile to Taft, and Roosevelt returned in 1910 convinced that his protege had betrayed him. The feud helped to define national political alignments between 1910 and 1914, as well as the conservation movement in the early 20th century.

Ballinger's appointment

In March 1909, President William Howard Taft began his administration by replacing Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, James Rudolph Garfield, with Richard A. Ballinger, a former Mayor of Seattle who had served as Commissioner of the United States General Land Office (GLO) under Secretary Garfield. Ballinger's appointment was a disappointment to conservationists, who interpreted the replacement of Garfield as a break with Roosevelt administration policies on conservationism. Within weeks of taking office, Ballinger reversed some of Garfield's policies, restoring 3 million acres (12,000 km²) to private use.^[2]

Allegations by Pinchot and Glavis

Gifford Pinchot had been appointed by President William McKinley to head the USDA Division of Forestry in 1898, and had run the U.S. Forest Service since it had taken over management of forest reserves from the United States General Land Office (GLO) in 1905. In 1909 he became convinced that Ballinger was reversing the last-minute moves by outgoing President Roosevelt to block big business from gaining control of any major water sources. He said Ballinger intended to "stop the conservation movement". In August, 1909, speaking at the annual meeting of the National Irrigation Congress in Spokane, Washington, he accused Ballinger of siding with private trusts in his handling of water power issues. Meanwhile Louis Glavis,the chief of the Field Division of the GLO in Portland, Oregon, grew suspicious. He became convinced that Secretary Ballinger had a personal financial interest in obstructing an investigation of the Cunningham case. Glavis sought support from Pinchot, whose jurisdiction over the Chugach National Forest included several of the Cunningham claims. Glavis received a sympathetic response from Alexander Shaw, Overton Price and Pinchot, who helped him to prepare the presentation for Taft.^[3]^[4]

Pinchot now arranged a meeting between President Taft and Glavis. Pinchot and Glavis presented Taft with a 50-page report accusing Ballinger of an improper interest in his handling of coal field claims in Alaska. Glavis claimed (without evidence) that Ballinger while in office helped Cunningham. Glavis said that Ballinger first as commissioner of the General Land Office, and then as Secretary of the Interior, had tried to stop investigations of coal claim purchases made by Clarence Cunningham. In 1907, Cunningham had partnered with the Morgan–Guggenheim "Alaska Syndicate" to develop coal interests in Alaska. The GLO had launched an anti-trust investigation, headed by Glavis. Ballinger, then head of the GLO, rejected Glavis's findings and removed him from the investigation.

Dismissals, investigations, and escalating controversy

Taft consulted with Attorney General George Wickersham before issuing a public letter in September, exonerating Ballinger and authorizing the dismissal of Glavis on grounds of insubordination. At the same time, Taft tried to conciliate Pinchot and affirm his administration's pro-conservation stance.

Glavis took his case to the press. In November, Collier's Weekly published an article elaborating his allegations, entitled The Whitewashing of Ballinger: Are the Guggenheims in Charge of the Department of the Interior?

In January 1910, Pinchot sent an open letter to Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver, who read it into the Congressional Record. Pinchot praised Glavis as a "patriot", openly rebuked Taft, and asked for Congressional hearings into the propriety of Ballinger's dealings. Pinchot was promptly fired, but from January to May, the United States House of Representatives held hearings on Ballinger. Ballinger was cleared of any wrongdoing, Nevertheless he was criticized from some quarters with the accusation that he favored private enterprise and the exploitation of natural resources over conservationism.

Consequences

The firing of Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt, alienated many progressives within the Republican party and drove a wedge between Taft and Roosevelt himself, leading to the split of the Republican Party in the 1912 presidential election.^[5] ^[6] The clash had a long-term influence on the conservation movement because it spread misconceptions about a class warfare dimension. Contrary to the stereotype, many businessmen supported conservation programs and many farmers and workers opposed them. Furthermore there was a good deal of overlap in the goals of the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the Army Corps of Engineers.^[7]

Investigation

Henry F. Pringle, in his 1939 biography of Taft, portrayed Ballinger as an innocent victim of vindictive Roosevelt loyalists and of yellow journalism that gave their accusations velocity:

An examination of thousands of pages of evidence can lead the impartial reader only to the conclusion that Ballinger was the victim of an attack fostered by fanaticism and nurtured by bad journalism. But Pinchot, Glavis, Hapgood [of Collier's Weekly], Sullivan [also of Collier's], Marse Henry [Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal] and the rest handed down their verdict against Ballinger in 1909 and 1910 and a large element of the public believed that they had spoken justly.^[8]

Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior under Franklin Roosevelt, reached a conclusion similar to Pringle's. Ickes published a popular account of his findings in The Saturday Evening Post.^[9] After an official investigation, his findings were expanded to a 58-page report that asserts Ballinger's innocence and paints Pinchot as a vindictive publicity-seeker who pitilessly pursued Ballinger even after Ballinger's death.^[10]

Notes

^ James Penick, Jr., Progressive Politics and Conservation. The Ballinger-Pinchot Affair (U of Chicago Press, 1968), is the fullest scholarly history.
^ Ganoe, John T. (September 1934), "Some Constitutional and Political Aspects of the Ballinger–Pinchot Controversy", The Pacific Historical Review, 3 (3): 323–333, doi:10.2307/3633711, JSTOR 3633711
^ Smith (1971) p. 267.
^ Miller, Char (2001). Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. Island Press. pp. 208–211. ISBN 1-55963-822-2.
^ Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (2008) pp 11–13.
^ Goodwin, Doris Kearns (2013). The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 610. ISBN 978-1-4165-4786-0.
^ Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the gospel of efficiency: The progressive conservation movement, 1890–1920 (1969) pp.173–174.
^ Pringle, Henry F., The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, Vol.1, p.473 (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1939) (retrieved Dec. 30, 2023).
^ Ickes, Harold L. (25 May 1940). "Not Guilty! Richard A. Ballinger -- An American Dreyfus". Saturday Evening Post.
^ Ickes, Harold L., Not guilty: an official inquiry into the charges made by Glavis and Pinchot against Richard A. Ballinger, secretary of the interior, 1909-1911, p.3 (Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1940) (retrieved Dec. 30, 2023).