Which Way's Up? Working with Progressive Era Policies When the Definition of 'Progress' Is Up for Grabs.
Patricia Nelson Limerick
Center of the American West
University of Colorado, Boulder
My thanks to Dean Salwasser, Bo Shelby, and all the members of the College of Forestry for their kind hospitality, and of course to the Starker Family for their support of this series. And I want to express my gratitude to foresters nationwide, both the membership of the Society of American Foresters and employees of the Forest Service, who have been remarkable in their willingness to take part in a conversation with historians, even historians who sometimes cook up theories of a disputable and speculative nature!
I have been forming theories about the history of forestry for quite a number of years. In a sense, I started working on these theories long before I knew a thing about Gifford Pinchot, Forest Reserves, or sustained yield. When I was a kid, I found most Western movies agonizing to watch. My agony spiked in the inevitable scene when the cowboys got into a fight and broke bottles and smashed tables and chairs and finally shattered the mirror over the bar. At this point the cowboys would usually get on their horses and ride out of town, but I would stay behind in the saloon, looking at all the broken wood and glass, and wondering, “Who on earth is going to get stuck cleaning this up?”
In no cowboy movie of my acquaintance did the cowboys ever ride out of town, then bring their horses to a sudden halt and say to each other, “Wait! We’re supposed to be the good guys, and yet we’ve left a terrible mess back there in town! We’ll have to head back in and clean that up before we ride on to our next adventure!”
If we go back a century in time, the rise of forestry as a profession represents one of those moments that never happened in the movies. The rise of forestry involved a segment of society saying, “Wait! We’re supposed to be the good guys; we can’t just keep wasting resources without a moment’s thought; we’ve got to settle down and clean up the messes we’ve made and prevent future messes from happening!” A century ago, foresters were the one of the groups that broke the pattern of riding off to the next adventure, and that settled down to figure out how we could deal productively with the dilemmas history had produced.
Thinking of forestry in these terms helps explain why today’s foresters respond with such prickliness and defensiveness to the criticisms that environmentalists make of them. To be accused of making environmental messes, when your profession originated as one of the prime components of an effort to find ways of rectifying previous messes: that is surely a historical turn of events that would make the world seem treacherous and troubling.
Thanks to projects undertaken by our Center of the American West, I am more and more interested in the role of engineers and scientists in the history of this region. I confess that, having wandered into this territory a few years ago, the distinction between the categories “pure science” and “applied science” has not been entirely clear to me. Whether we look at naturalists assessing the farming and grazing potential of the West in the middle of the 19th century, or at hydrologists and geologists assessing the West’s resources in the late 19th century, the “appliedness” of their scientific inquiries seems unmistakable. If engineers do the applied work, and scientists do the pure inquiry, then there really were no “scientists” in the West until the universities were created as refuges and habitats for people who would ask questions out of pure and entirely impractical curiosity.
The example of foresters blurs
the distinction between “pure” and “applied” science
very usefully. In many ways, the professionalization of foresters a century
ago was very similar, in content and method, to the professionalization of
engineers. The mission or mandate given to both occupations–to figure
out how material reality works so that society can get what it wants from natural
resources–led both professions to practice an intricate combination
of scientific inquiry and technological strategy.
The fact that these occupations, with their interwoven elements
of pure and applied science, emerged 100 years ago, in the midst
of
the Progressive
Era,
is a matter of huge significance for our times. The Progressives
set their stamp on the resource-management professions. As historian
Richard
McCormick
sums it up, the Progressives “honestly believed in the
almost unlimited potential of science and administration.”1
Despite the passage of time, the assumptions and, especially,
the hopes of the Progressives retain remarkable vigor. The psychic
sport known
as channeling,
when the people of the past speak through the voices of the living,
is a daily practice in resource management circles. In everyday
conversation as
much as
in formal pronouncements, the Progressives speak through us and
use our
voices to keep their beliefs before the public. I have thought
of calling this thesis
my “Possessed by Progressives” thesis. But “possession” may
not be the best term, since there is nothing particularly mystical about
the ways in which Progressive thought maintains its hold on us. Plus, there
are
plenty of positive and beneficial outcomes from the condition, which is usually
not the case with the more technically demonic form of possession. Still,
there must also be some advantage in being a bit more alert to the ways that
this
connection shapes our laws and our behavior today.
The federal land management agencies originated in the Progressive
Era, and these agencies were prime terrain for the development
and definition
of expertise
in resource management. To this day, the federal agencies are
shaped, in every imaginable way, by the mindset and operating
assumptions
of Progressives.
To
use one current example, when Chief Forester Dale Bosworth laments “analysis
paralysis,” he is expressing a very Progressive-era-like hope for the
assertion of rationality over a clutter of laws, policies, contentions, and
conflicts. Similarly, charter forests, and the broader movement of watershed
coalitions, represent a latter-day effort to reconcile the Progressives’ double
faith in democracy and in expertise.
And yet the Progressives had a certain naiveté about human nature. As
the influential reporter Ida Tarbell acknowledged, Progressives “knew
little about human beings, and what as individuals and herds they can be counted
on to do under certain circumstances.”2 In hindsight, it is perfectly
clear that, in enterprises of resource management, science and technology had
and have to share their territory with a complicated set of concerns that Progressives
referred to as the human element. A scientist, engineer, or forester could
come up with a fine and effective technical solution, but that solution would
still have to run the gauntlet of human response: even with technical elements
well attended to, a solution that did not anticipate and accommodate human
attitudes (whether manifested in the votes of Congress or the resistance of
local residents) was no solution at all. The Progressives, the historian John
Whiteclay Chambers writes, “represented an unprecedented willingness
to intrude into the economy, society, and world affairs.” They “believed
that intelligently directed effort could affect change and manipulate the environment
for the improvement of society.”3 But historian Richard McCormick captures
the naiveté behind that faith: “the reformers of the early twentieth
century nonetheless tended to consider conflicts resolved when, in fact,
they had only been disguised by the establishment of scientific policies
and the
creation of governmental agencies.”4
A fine example of Progressive attitudes toward “the human element” comes
from the origins of the Bureau of Reclamation, and its founder, the engineer
Frederick Newell. The Reclamation Service had barely been founded when Newell
was lamenting the complications of dealing with “the human element.” The
engineering side, he said in the Third Report, “does not offer usually
as great causes of delay as the . . . human element.” The most difficult
of the problems “are not those of engineering nor of construction,” Newell
said in the Eleventh Report, “but those having to do with the human side–namely,
the attracting or securing of the type of farmer who can and will make a success
by intensive agriculture.”5 The Eleventh Report came out not long before
Newell was maneuvered out of his position of leadership in the Reclamation
Service, surely its own testimony to the power of the “human element.”
As the first Chief Engineer of the Reclamation Service, Frederick
Newell repeatedly confessed his frustration with the “human element,” the factor
that threw the engineers’ calculations into disarray and disorder. In
1914, Newell was dismissed from the Service, and he transferred his substantial
energies to the cause of defining and formalizing the engineering profession.
Astonishingly--breathtakingly--he seems to have put aside everything he might
have learned from his work in Reclamation. In 1918, this is what Newell said: “In
all of these matters, which pertain to the conservation and use of the resources
of the country, both material and human, and the development of ideals, the
engineer should be the leader.” As historian Edwin Layton observed, “Newell
recognized that the engineering of society implied treating man as a material.” Human
groups should be thought about, Newell said explicitly, as machines “in
which the wheels and bearings are men and not metals,” while engineers
should develop a “beneficial control of human forces and sentiments.”6 Could
this be the same fellow who, during his years with the Reclamation Service,
repeatedly lamented the way in which “the human element” defeated
the plans and calculations of engineers?
Of all the people on the planet whom we might expect to be wiser
and more skeptical about the ability of experts to “engineer” human behavior,
Frederick Newell, after 12 years with Reclamation, would seem to be that
individual.
But Progressive faith is resilient, and breathtaking in its resilience. Twelve
years of having that faith battered, and Newell was ready to reassert it
as if he had spent those years in a library reading utopian literature about
ideal
human societies.
So here are two of the questions I put forward for our consideration.
First, how on earth did Frederick Newell, and other Progressives,
remain so innocent
on matters of human nature? And second, how much of that innocence
remains lodged in the souls of resource management professionals--maybe
especially
in the souls of foresters?
I regret to say that historians have not designed any sophisticated
methods to track the persistence and recurrence of attitudes
and habits of mind.
What does it mean, to live in the present and to continue to
hold to elements of
a faith set up and structured 100 years ago? How do some ideas
survive the passage of time in such robust and resilient shape?
What analogy
should we
work from, when we look at the passing on of values from one
generation to the next? We can probably throw out analogies drawn
from evolutionary
biology.
When ideas hang around long after their point of origin, this
is not a matter of “intellectual genes” replicating themselves in different host
organisms over time; there is far too much room for individual choice and
change in the workings of human minds than that analogy would allow. There
is probably
more to be made of frameworks drawn from anthropological studies of the ways
in which older members of tribal societies train younger members into certain
assumptions about right and wrong, the possible and the impossible.
My own preference, in analogies, would be this one: our relationship
to our intellectual ancestors is rather like inheriting a furnished
house. We can,
if we choose, just live in the house and keep all the furniture,
arranged just the way its first owners had it arranged. Or we
can keep some
furniture, and
unload the rest at a yard sale; we can even take out walls and
put in windows
and add rooms and generally reconfigure the place. But change
hinges on choice and conscious reflection.
In the person of Gifford Pinchot, foresters hold a direct tie
to the archetypal Progressive. Thanks to Char Miller’s recent biography of Pinchot, we
know a lot more about Pinchot’s life as governor of Pennsylvania, and
we know how truly dedicated he was to democratic values, so dedicated that
he alarmed many of his conservative contemporaries.7 After you have read Miller’s
book, you really cannot cast Pinchot as an elite expert who only mouthed the
slogans of democracy. Pinchot’s beliefs and convictions seem to be
very much alive in the minds and hearts of many foresters today, but it is
also
true that we should be careful to note the selectivity in this situation.
In the manner of many Progressives, to take one compelling example, Pinchot
was
a Prohibitionist. He did not drink alcohol himself, and he supported campaigns
to prohibit others from drinking. This is not a position held by many foresters
in our times. Pinchot may be a role model for foresters today, but not when
it comes to leisure-time activities. Some selectivity is noticeably at work
here!
When it comes to science and technology, the practices of foresters
of 2002 have changed substantially since 1902. The study of soil
organisms and their
crucial role in forest health, or the effort to reincorporate
fire into
forest processes, would be prime examples. That flexibility is
hardly surprising; by the very nature of scientific inquiry,
foresters were
professionally
encouraged,
even required, to reach new understandings and reconsider old
assumptions. But when it comes to a certain innocence and refusal
of realism
about human nature, foresters of 2002 bear a striking resemblance
to Progressives
of
1902. In fact, this situation extends well beyond forestry. A
decade of watching environmental scientists of many different
specializations
deal
with the
public
and with politicians has led me to see a certain similarity between
the vulnerability and defenselessness of resource scientists,
trustingly presenting their findings,
and the vulnerability and defenselessness of recently shorn sheep
venturing into a winter storm without the company of a shepherd.
The level of
trust–“we’ll
just have a press conference, and tell the public what we found!”–is
both astonishing and touching. Thus, there is something potentially very
practical in looking back to Progressivism and sorting through the heritage
that comes
so directly from that era to ours.
A particularly compelling reason to undertake this reexamination
in our times has to do with the very word “progress,” obviously key to the movement
called “Progressivism.” As much as the reformers of 100 years
ago varied in their opinions, they did share a belief in progress, and they
even
shared some elements of a definition of progress: greater harmony in society,
greater order and control, greater exercise of reason in managing natural
and human resources. Historians of the era do call our attention to the fact
that
the Progressives surrendered a belief in progress as automatic, as prearranged
by Providence. But human effort could keep progress moving along. Progressives
knew, in other words, which way was up.
To be a Progressive, you have to believe in progress and aspire
to be an agent working in progress’s behalf. And yet, in our times, the very idea of
progress is up for grabs. What previous generations considered, with few doubts,
to be progress–the development of resources for economic gain–is
now seen by some sectors of society as a process of decline and loss, the exact
opposite of progress. Rather than celebrating greater order and control as
a measure of progress, significant sectors of society–located at all
political positions, from far right to far left–see greater order and
control as dangerous tyranny. And, for an audible group of advocates, restoration,
or putting things back the way they used to be, has taken development’s
place as the desirable goal. In 2002, with the concept of progress so much
subject to a tug-of-war, it is indeed hard to know which way is up. In this
zone, the tensions of our Progressive Era heritage reach their peak. How
can one be an agent of progress when the direction of progress is so much
a matter
of dispute?
Promising to serve society and provide for its needs, Progressive
reformers asked society to give experts the authority to guide
resource decision-making.
This is clearly a case study in the proposition, “Be careful what you
wish for.” Society, more or less, agreed to the deal. And then society
turned out to be a very tough client to work for. Over the 20th century, for
foresters, having the obligation to serve society must have felt from time
to time as if they had the obligation to serve toddlers with a bad case of
the terrible two’s. You agree to get society the wood products it has
asked for; you do so; and society, skipping the part where it says, “Thank
you,” says instead, “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve
treated the forests as a commodity, and completely destroyed the biodiversity
we now value!”
When I was in college, I had a roommate whose interesting behavior
summed up, for me, this odd relationship between modern resource
users and their
attitudes
toward the production of resources. Once, when I was preparing
a turkey for roasting, I was able to elicit an archetypal response
from this
roommate. There was some loud music on, and, while washing the
turkey
and holding
it
under
its wings, I felt a momentary inspiration, and pretended to dance
with the turkey. My roommate Marcia, who was indeed an eater
of meat, shrieked
with
agony. “Oh, stop!” she said. “You’re making it look
like that turkey is alive!”
“
My goodness,” I wanted to say, “whatever its current condition,
if this turkey was not recently alive, then we are in trouble.”
So there, in Marcia’s reaction, you have it: desire to eat the turkey;
complete unwillingness to face up to the process that brought the turkey to
our oven and dinner table. Is there a way to call this hypocrisy to its practitioners’ attention
in a way that might lead to some degree of self-examination and a greater consistency
between practice and principle? I am afraid that my efforts in that direction
have produced more in the way of crankiness and defensiveness than enlightened
change. This contradiction in attitudes may be one of life’s miseries
that simply asks for our endurance. But the contradiction does require some
patience from those who have agreed to take on the job of “serving society” by
supplying it with the products derived from natural resources. Foresters
may just have to learn to live with a certain heightened sense of wonder
and amusement
when they see, for instance, some environmentalists building themselves large
log cabins because, after all, log cabins look more natural and are closer
to the earth.
Let us quickly review the way that historians describe and characterize
the Progressives. From that foundation, I will invite your reflections
on how we
can best manage and negotiate in this complicated and important
relationship between the past, and us.
By the 1890s, the pace of change in the United States had become
very disorienting indeed. As historian Steven Diner sums it up,
Americans of the Progressive
Era “watched the forces of change sweep away familiar modes of economic
life, alter the way they lived and worked, rearrange the familiar hierarchies
of social status, and redefine their relationship to their government. It looked
as if all the rules had changed.” As a result, “many middle-class
Americans concluded . . . . that they had lost control not only of their
society but of their own lives.”8
It is worth pausing here for a moment and noting one of the basic
values of paying attention to history: Everything that Diner
says about the
scale of
disorientation that afflicted Americans a century ago could,
with only small modifications, be reconfigured and made to address
conditions
today. Forestry,
in fact, may be a particularly good example of the phenomenon
of people
feeling that “all the rules had changed.” There is something a bit calming
about stepping away from the agitating and confusing conflicts of the present
and noting that people of the past felt that things were sufficiently agitating
and confusing in their own times. We should not, in other words, flatter
ourselves into thinking that rapid and disturbing change is a particular
burden of our
times.
In truth, many historians of Progressivism declare, very explicitly,
that they see some big similarities between today’s circumstances and the circumstances
a century ago. Here is Diner’s summation of these similarities: in our
time, “Americans are again struggling for control amidst new and wrenching
transformations brought on by the global information-age economy.”9 John
Whiteclay Chambers sums up the connections between the Progressive Era and
today: “Modern America was born in those early years, and we are heirs
of many of the institutions, attitudes, and problems of the Progressive Era.”10
If we think of the Progressives as people in disorienting times,
trying to assert control and find new ways of bringing order
to society, then
Progressives
are people with whom we must sympathize. And yet there are big
paradoxes in the results of their efforts that we must acknowledge.
Even though
the speeches
and writings of reformers were full of references to democracy
and the empowering of the people, even though some of the most
important
Progressive
innovations
involved ways of making the results of voting more direct and
consequential (in the initiative and referendum, and the direct
election of senators,
for instance), nonetheless, with all these expressions of hope
for and commitment
to democracy, this was an era in which “the electorate was contracting
as voters were excluded or simply stopped voting.” In practice, Chambers
sums this up, “much of [the Progressives’] emphasis on democracy
proved illusory.”11 Or, McCormick sums this up: by the end of the Progressive
era, “the active electorate had become relatively smaller and less
enthusiastic.”12
Here is another huge paradox of the era, visible with hindsight:
among the changes of the Progressive Era was the “development of a consumer society
and culture that emphasized the importance of the ongoing acquisition of goods
and services promoted as offering both a new frontier of economic expansion
and a new mechanism for individual happiness and fulfillment.”13 In the
same era in which American consumerism was unleashed, Progressive conservationists
regularly invoked the need to avoid and minimize waste. This was certainly
key to the origins of forestry; I think, especially, of the condemnations of “waste” that
were central to Gifford Pinchot’s declarations, and to those of others
in early forestry. Many factors, no doubt, drove forestry to surrender its
leading role in opposition to waste, to lose its commitment to speak to Americans
about the need to correct their habits of waste. One could, I suppose, simply
say that the rise of American consumerism was such an overwhelming historical
force that it swept aside and drowned out opposition. But an opposition to
waste still occupies a central place in the legacy and heritage of today’s
foresters, and for all sorts of good reasons it seems like a heritage they
could beneficially repossess. “Conservation stands for the prevention
of waste, “ Gifford Pinchot wrote in The Fight for
Conservation. “There
has come gradually in this country an understanding that waste is not a good
thing and that the attack on waste is an industrial necessity.”14
Having
foresters regain their identity as the resource professionals who won’t
tolerate waste would certainly add some productive disorientation to those
who think they have everyone’s positions on natural resources entirely
figured out and categorized. Why not have the SAF put Pinchot’s declaration–“Conservation
stands for the prevention of waste”–on bumper stickers, and then
distribute them to the many members of the Sierra Club currently driving
SUVs?
Another persistent paradox hinges on race. In the March 2002
issue of the Society of American Foresters’ newsletter, Forestry
Source, Michael B. Lester,
an SAF official and assistant state forester for Pennsylvania, writes with
great frankness about the racial composition of the Society’s membership. “Our
latest membership numbers put us at 88 percent white male,” he reports; “our
ethnic makeup is 98.5 percent white.”15 Lester further notes that these
proportions “do not reflect the demographics of people graduating with
degrees in forestry. This is good news, in terms of who is joining the profession,
but it is not so good news, in terms of who is joining the society.”
As we think about the presence and visibility of ethnic minorities
in the resource management profession, our thoughts should turn
to the legacy
we inherit from
the Progressives. Consider the matter of timing, of the rise
of the Progressives and the decline of the tribes. In the 1890s,
Indian
people were at their
nadir, both in power and in population. Disease, malnutrition,
and
warfare had left
the native population terribly reduced. Military conquest and
the creation of reservations had driven Indian powers of self-governance
underground.
The U.S. Supreme Court had supported the “plenary power” of Congress–the
power to govern Indian people with nearly complete authority. The idea of
the Indian as vanishing and disappearing seemed to be coming true.16
So there is the historical coincidence: the precedent-setting,
practice-determining laws of federal resource management were
written and passed at a
time when Indians and their desires seemed fading and irrelevant.
This timing
was
not a matter of conspiracy or of malevolence. But the historical
coincidence has
still been fruitful in misfortune and misunderstanding. The resource
management laws were written and implemented largely by people
who saw no role in
the American future for Indian people. Then the Indian population
began a resurgence,
and tribal self-government also underwent a restoration, both
through the efforts of John Collier in the Indian New Deal, and
in U.S.
Supreme Court
rulings of
the mid- and late 20th century. Here, the Progressive legacy
was a lasting assumption that Indians could be left out of the
planning
for
natural
resources. Years after the Progressive Era, this assumption had
been shown to be inaccurate
and unrealistic. It would prove to be a strenuous and contested
undertaking to incorporate a recognition of Indian people and
their circumstances
into laws that had been designed when their power and population
were at their
lowest points.
The Progressive Era was a time of trouble for American minorities.
The Indian situation was disheartening, and conditions for African
Americans
may have
been worse. In the 1890s and the early 1900s, the post-Reconstruction
arrangements of Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement became
institutionalized, and this was also an era of frequent and brutal
lynchings. Much of Southern
Progressivism
involved improving education for white Southerners, and very
explicitly finding ways to give white people opportunities that
blacks would
be denied.
As historian
Leon Litwack sums up Southern Progressivism, “some whites preferred to
view the new restrictions on blacks as reform, not repression, as a way to
use the laws to . . . . resolve racial tensions, and maintain the social order.” A
conviction in the inferiority of African Americans was by no means confined
to Southern Progressives. “Theodore Roosevelt shared fashionable views
of Negro inferiority, condemning, in his words, ‘those very foolish white
men who refuse to face facts and refuse to see that the average negro is on
a different and far lower level than is the case with the white man.’”17 That
complicated component is included in Progressivism’s legacy to us.
Reckoning with that legacy requires us to make our peace with the fact that
we will not
find much wisdom on the subject of race relations in the writings, speeches,
laws, and policies of the Progressives. But looking at the Progressives gives
us some clues as to how the resource management professions evolved as they
did, and also some clues as to how fundamental a rethinking and change in
customs is necessary to break free of these origins.
In the contraction of voter participation, the launching of American
consumerism, and the coinciding of racial exclusiveness with
precedent-setting reform,
Progressivism’s
paradoxes are powerful and lasting. Richard McCormick may have done the best
job of summarizing the paradoxes of Progressivism, in terms of the stance of
the reformers toward industrialism. The movement, McCormick tells us, “was
infused with a deep, lingering outrage against many of the worst consequences
of industrialism.” And yet the Progressives campaigned “not to
dismantle modern industry and commerce but rather to improve and ameliorate
the conditions of industrial life.” Thus, McCormick captures what he
calls the “powerful irony [that] lay at the heart of progressivism: reforms
that gained vitality from a people angry with industrialism ended up by assisting
them to accommodate to it.”18 Progressives acted in a very delicate set
of negotiations, criticizing and challenging industry on some occasions, supporting
and defending industry on other occasions. Surely that is one of Progressivism’s
most visible legacies to forestry: a complicated, sometimes fulfilling, sometimes
frustrating relationship to private enterprise and companies and corporations.
Writing of the engineers of a century ago, Steven Diner summed up the range
of their choices in a way that certainly still describes circumstances in forestry: “Some
professional engineers sought autonomy from their corporate employers while
others strove for economic security and social status by identifying completely
with corporate managers.”19 Progressivism left its heirs with an ambivalent,
unresolved, and perplexing relationship between experts and industry.
I now turn to a final paradox: the joining of scientific conviction
and religious belief in Progressivism. Preoccupied with the Progressives’ preoccupation
with science, we might be tempted to make assumptions characteristic of our
secular age and assume that people so loyal to science did not have much involvement
with religion. And yet historians of Progressivism frequently remark on the
religious faith that powered and guided many of the reformers. Historian Robert
Crunden calls his study of the movement, “Ministers of Reform,” and
he wants us to accent the double meaning of “minister.” As he says,
many Progressives “agreed that America needed a spiritual reformation
to fulfill God’s plan for democracy in the New World.” Many of
them had “absorbed” what Crunden calls “the severe, Protestant
moral values of their parents,” and “Protestantism provided the
chief thrust and defined the perimeters of discourse.”20 As “evangelistic
modernizers,” John Chambers says, “progressives had a sense of
morality and mission that led them to try to impose their standards on an increasingly
diverse society and, in fact, through cultural imperialism, on the rest of
the world as well.”21 Richard McCormick reinforces this point, reminding
us not to assume that religious belief and scientific practice are intrinsically
incompatible: “Progressivism,” he writes, “took its inspiration,
as well as much of its substance and technique, from two bodies of belief and
knowledge: evangelical Protestantism and the sciences, both natural and social.” As
McCormick sums this up, “Progressivism visibly bore the imprint of the
evangelical ethos. Basic to this mentality was the drive to purge the world
of sin.”22 These religious underpinnings help us understand how it is
that Progressives arrived at such a strong conviction in the justice and
wisdom
of their cause.
Now what bearing does this line of thought have on our understanding
of contemporary forestry?
On September 14, 2001, I was supposed to give a plenary address
to the Society of American Foresters, called “How Historians and Foresters Can Help
Each Other.” On the morning of September 11, I was up early, working
over the speech. When the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
I was thinking about the conflicts between foresters and environmentalists,
and especially about the way in which scientific expertise is placed at the
center of the fray, pulled on and tugged at by both sides. It took me awhile
to realize that the convention could not take place, and I would not be giving
this speech. Struggles over forest management and the events of September 11
are tied together in my memory. In that context, we must give peace-making
in natural resource conflicts our best shot. It may be that looking at the
Progressives’ orientation to religious belief could be a step in that
cause.
To prepare for the SAF speech, I had read over several years’ worth of
the organization’s newsletter, The Forestry Source. This was a wonderful
way to get a feeling for what was going on with the profession of forestry.
In January of 2001, SAF President John Heisenbuttel wrote a presidential column
which brought a response from SAF members which we will just call “spirited.” Because
my collection of issues of The Forestry Source was a little incomplete, it
took me a few more days before I saw the presidential column itself; I had
only seen the fevered or fiery or, at the least, heated responses. So, when
I finally saw the column that had triggered this reaction, I was properly
astonished to see how mild-mannered and seemingly non-inflammatory it was.
The column bore the title, “Ending the Cold War Between Environmentalists
and Foresters.” In it Heisenbuttel expressed his hope for more collaborative
relations and communications between the two camps. The temper of those SAF
members who wrote to respond inclined toward the declaration, “We do
not want to end this war. We want to win it.” “The environmentalists
are dedicated and determined to win the war,” one letter-writer said. “We
should be,” too. Or, as another SAF member wrote, “‘ending
the cold war between foresters and environmentalists’ sounds a whole
lot like capitulation or compromise with the enemy to me.” 23
Why did Heisenbuttel’s peace proposal trigger such an intense and inflexible
response? Why does the criticism of environmentalists bring such an unyielding
and determined defense in some foresters? Would a consideration of the Progressive
era’s fusion of scientific confidence with Protestant fervor help us
in answering this question, or would it distract us with a not-very-relevant
historical analogy? In the Progressive Era, John Chambers told us, “Resurgent
Protestant evangelism coalesced with such secular developments as professionalization
and bureaucratization.”24 Might it be worth a moment’s thought,
to ask whether or not we are seeing, in the early twentieth century, some
echoes
and replays of that coalescing of the religious and the secular?
For someone in my position, watching the clashes over resource
management in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first
century, it
is impossible to avoid thinking, “Perhaps we are not as secular as we think.” Whether
the argument is over implementation of the Endangered Species Act or the reduction
of forest fuel loads through commercial harvesting, if the observer’s
attention drifts for a moment, is easy to gather to gather the impression that
one has wandered into a fervent theological debate. “We stand at Armageddon,” Theodore
Roosevelt often said at the close of his speeches, “and we battle for
the Lord.”25 Whether that sentiment is voiced directly or not, it is hard
not to hear a message rather like that in many public statements on resource
management today. “We stand at Armageddon; we battle
for the Lord; and we believe that endangered species should be
preserved at all cost.” Or,
alternatively, “We stand at Armageddon; we battle for
the Lord; and we believe that forests should be managed for economic
productivity and contribute
to human well-being.” Maybe you have to be an historian and too much
under the spell of the past in order to hear these echoes. Still, once you
let yourself start hearing them, it is very difficult to shut them out.
The Progressives were people of great hope and optimism. They
were anxious; they were worried; they were alarmed. But they
were people
who believed
that the exercise of good will and hearty effort could make a
real difference in relieving human dilemmas. As Richard McCormick
puts
it, the Progressives
had “a
basic optimism about people’s abilities to improve their environment
through continuous human action,”26 and optimism is a resource we should
never dismiss or squander.
We should be more selective in the inheritance we accept from
the Progressives; some of the habits we acquired from them are
not
very functional in
our times, and actually present obstacles to finding and taking
the wisest
path of action.
In training foresters, we could increase the realism about human
nature, while being careful to keep this realism from edging
into disillusionment
or, even
worse, despair. It would be an awful mess, if we sorted through
our Progressive inheritance, and, in the process of discarding
some of
its features,
threw away that element of hope and optimism.
In Jim Fisher’s book on T. J. Starker, he quotes a number of T.J.’s
sayings, and one of them makes this point in a rather down-to-earth way. “Never
throw your soiled hanky down the chute,” T.J. used to say, “until
you have replaced it with a clean one in your pocket.”27 There is still
much of value in the Progressive legacy. As hankies go, this one is, by many
measures, barely used. With a little more attention to its care, maintenance,
and upkeep, the Progressive legacy can stay out of the chute for many years
to come.
Endnotes
1Richard. L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 287.
2Quoted in Steven Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), p. 263.
3John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (1992; rpt. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. xx.
4McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy, p. 288.
5Third Annual Report of the Reclamation Service for 1904, p. 44; Eleventh Annual Report of the Reclamation Service for 1911-1912, p. 2.
6Quotations from Newell and commentary from Layton, Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 117-118.
7Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001).
8Diner, A Very Different Age, pp. 3 and 6.
9Ibid., p. 13.
10Chambers, Tyranny of Change, p. xix.
11Ibid., pp. 277 and 287.
12McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy, p. 279.
13Chambers, Tyranny of Change, p. 279.
14Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (1910; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), p. 44.
15Forestry Source, March 2002, p. 3.
16Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
17Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 227 and 372.
18McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, p. 269.
19Diner, A Very Different Age, p. 11.
20Robert M. Crunden, Ministries of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. ix-x.
21Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, p. 279.
22McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, pp. 270-271.
23Letters, The Forestry Source (Vol. 6, No. 3), March 2001, pp. 2-3.
24Chambers, The Tyranny of Change, p. 280.
25Mario DiNunzio, editor, Theodore Roosevelt: An American Mind (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 160.
26McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, p. 270.
27Jim Fisher, Starker Forests: The Legacy of T. J. Starker (Corvallis: Starker Forests, 1991), p. 52.