It’s hard to imagine that, a century ago, Gifford Pinchot received a standing ovation in Spokane when he railed against corporate titans who were exploiting the American West.
If you’ve spent time in the inland Northwest this summer you would have had a hard time escaping the news that this month marks the 100th anniversary of North America’s largest recorded wildfire, one that destroyed roughly three million acres in north Idaho and western Montana in August 1910.
As Timothy Egan explained in his book, The Big Burn, this was a natural disaster with sweeping consequences in the way that it provided the pivot point for a strong backlash against the enemies of conservation and the Forest Service. As such, the tragic fire not only helped conservationists protect lands in the West, but it also politically enabled public protection of millions of acres of hardwood forests in the East. 
One of the most compelling features of Egan’s book is the portrait of Teddy Roosevelt and his dear friend Gifford Pinchot, the father of the U.S. Forest Service. Here were a couple powerful Republicans from two of the wealthiest families in America, who attacked raw capitalism with the same passion that Crazy Horse brought to bear on Custer. Roosevelt and Pinchot were both greatly influenced by John Muir, the patron saint of American environmentalism. They vigorously challenged the railroad, mining, and timber barons who were plundering the West and championed the rights of ordinary people to experience the tranquility and splendor of the American wilderness.
Roosevelt’s rhetoric against the voracious corporations of his time makes Barack Obama sound like a dispassionate and moderate Republican by comparison. And, yet, Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore whereas a recent poll found that a majority of likely voters consider Obama a socialist. That’s pretty funny when you consider that not even socialists think Obama is a socialist.
What’s surprising, in retrospect, is that Roosevelt and Pinchot had the public wind at their backs, not just in eastern cities but even in places like Spokane which, of course, was built on the riches of gilded age environmental plundering.
Egan describes a scene from the summer of 1909, a year before the big fire, when Pinchot was struggling to continue working under Roosevelt’s spineless successor, William Howard Taft:
“In Spokane,” Egan writes, “Pinchot and Ballinger [the new Interior Secretary, who was doing Taft's bidding in trying to reverse Roosevelt's conservation commitments] found themselves in the same room before a large gathering of farmers dependent upon government irrigation. The audience members sat on their hands for Ballinger but gave Pinchot a five-minute standing ovation.”
Pinchot didn’t disappoint. He tore into the “great oppressive trusts,” taking on both Ballinger and Idaho Senator [and committed industry servant] Weldon Heyburn. As Pinchot expected, the speech caused a sensation and within months Taft fired him.
I doubt Pinchot would get a five minute standing ovation in Spokane today.
The farmers dependent upon government-subsidized irrigation are now conservative Republicans. They’re the ones who put Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers in office. McMorris Rodgers promotes herself as a patriotic, small government conservative who rails against taxes and profligate public spending but, of course, is all for shoveling millions of dollars in government subsidies to the overwhelmingly Republican farmers in her district. According to McMorris, government help for farmers is just different.
“Ensuring America’s farmers can profitably grow the food to feed the country,” she writes, “is an important economic and national security issue.”
It would be one thing if this were just one of those laughable ironies that makes for good political cartoons. But there’s a blue streak behind this counterfeit conservatism, an element of anger and moral indignation that is as hard to miss.
In Blaine Harden’s 1996 book, A River Lost, the Washington Post reporter who grew up in the Columbia Basin writes about how the “community I grew up in seemed contaminated by self-deception.”
These were, Harden wrote, “well-intentioned Americans whose lives embodied a pernicious contradiction. They prided themselves on self-reliance, yet depended on subsidies. They distrusted the federal government, yet allowed it to do as it pleased with the [Columbia] river and the land through which it flowed. As long as there was federal money, they did not mind that farmers wasted water, that dams pushed salmon to extinction, or that plutonium workers recklessly spilled radioactive gunk beside the river.”
In writing his book, Harden says that he “went searching for the myths that users of the river made up about themselves, myths of western individualism that had been sustained by a half-century’s worth of other peoples’ money.”
What galled him most was the contempt directed at the federal government, without whose ever-flowing largesse the communities of the Columbia Basin would either not exist or be mere outposts for gas stations and small grocery stores. It’s one thing to be oblivious to central realities, it’s another thing to want to address your internal contradictions by being consumed with anger toward those who’ve greatly assisted, if not essentially enabled, your material welfare and comforts.
So it’s a fair question to wonder how this happened. And I do. How could a progressive reformer and conservationist like Gifford Pinchot be greeted as a hero by the great-great grandfathers of today’s Columbia Basin Republicans? The ones who now define themselves (at least rhetorically) in opposition to the “big government” policies that built their communities and enabled their prosperity?
I’m sure media is part of the answer. The rightward shift in the region’s politics certainly preceded FOX News and the rise of right-wing radio. As Harry Truman famously noted in 1948, the Cowles-owned Spokesman-Review was among the “worst” papers in the country in terms of its rightward, anti-government leanings. The bully pulpit the Cowleses enjoyed for their anti-government coverage and editorials still exists but the paper has moderated its voice in recent decades, to the point that it is now attacked almost as often by self-identified conservatives as it is by liberals. (Here, I would puckishly observe that the Cowleses perfectly exemplified the phony ideology of the region’s conservatives when they broke with their long tradition of supporting Republicans by endorsing Patty Murray for the U.S. Senate against a popular conservative, Linda Smith. As they acknowledged in their 1998 endorsement, their support was a clear pay-off to Murray after the Democrat used all her influence with the Clinton Administration to secure the $22.65 million HUD loan the family demanded for its River Park Square mall.)
I’m certain another part of the answer is cultural machismo. As Harden found in his travels, the world of Northwest conservatives is a world well-bent to accord them their favored place in it, their tax breaks and subsidies and priorities. Loftier ideals, such as environmentalism and social justice, are for people in Seattle who don’t work with their hands and have a hard time minding their own business.
An area scorched by the "Big Burn" today.
Whatever the full explanation is, I’m still amazed by the contradictions, how the politics of a region dominated by federal subsidies are presently defined by angry ideologues who cash the government check while barking about the evils of “big government” and a “socialist” President.
Ironically, one of the best hopes for a change in our regional culture and a more sustainable regional economy is Roosevelt’s and Pinchot’s legacy of conservation and environmentalism. In the warmer months, I use the Spokane River as much as anyone and it’s been amazing to watch, just in the past couple years, the increasing numbers of people flowing by me in rafts and kayaks and tubes. This summer my daughter and I took a day trip with our bikes to Lookout Pass, to ride the Hiawatha trail in an area that was totally devoured by the epic fire. The lush, hundred-year-old forest is beautiful, and so was the sight of the hundreds of people we shared the trail with that day, so clearly experiencing the spiritual nourishment that John Muir anticipated for them.
–Tim Connor
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