take care of themselves."
Everything changed in the next year, with the 1904 election, when Roosevelt at last won his own full termâa victory that would literally be landscape-altering. "It's all colossal," his firebrand daughter, Alice, wrote in her diary. Indeed it was: Roosevelt won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate to date, taking thirty-three of the forty-five statesâsomething he could not keep from broadcasting. "How they are voting for me!" said Teddy as he skipped through the White House on election night. "I have the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for president," he wrote his son Kermit.
The public knew that this energetic leader was no mere keeper
of the dead President McKinley's name. His Republican Party stood for public ownership of natural resources, among the pillars of the progressive cause. At a time when the gap between rich and poor was never greater, Roosevelt called for a national inheritance tax on wealthy families. And looking to remedy a situation where 26 percent of all boys aged ten to fifteen spent their days working full shifts away from home, and less than 5 percent of all workers had graduated from high school, Roosevelt asked for wholesale changes in child welfare laws. He said people had a right to a safe food supply, to regulation of prescription drugs. And for the sake of future generations, he called for a broad range of measures to protect land and wildlife. He was eager to slay any foe. "I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere," wrote the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.
"We are the heirs of the ages," Roosevelt said in his 1905 inaugural address, signaling that he intended to use that inheritance.
In one of the first orders of business after Roosevelt's landslide, Congress agreed to transfer the reserves to Gifford Pinchot's fledgling agency, and gave him a small budget to train rangers who would have stewardship of the forests. The General Land Office, that hidebound bureaucracy, service station for the syndicates, was pushed aside. Outmaneuvering Clark and Heyburn, Roosevelt promised that legitimate homesteaders would be allowed to claim 160 acres of land within national forest boundaries if they could prove that it was right for farming. There was not much arable land for homesteading in the reserves, but this move silenced critics who said the president was sealing off the land from opportunity.
With the transfer, the newly named United States Forest Service was created in 1905, with Pinchot as the first Chiefâa job "worth more to me than all the treasures of all the pirates of history," he wrote. His domain was sixty million acres. Having fulfilled his promise to his friend, Roosevelt now gave Pinchot simple marching orders: "It must not be forgotten," he wrote to him, "that the forest reserves belong to all the people." Pinchot felt the same
way; if anything, he was more militant in his belief that the essence of Progressive Era ideals could be manifest on the land, guided by his new agency. Pinchot and Roosevelt also knew that they had only a short time to prove their worth. Congress was skeptical, and the leash was short; legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it.
"The transfer meant a revolutionary change," Pinchot wrote. "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West. From that time on, it was fight, fight, fight."
To win that fight, he now took on a greater one â against something as old as the earth itself. Fire was an enemy, a force feared by settlers, loggers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen. "Fire has always been, and seemingly will always remain, the most terrible of elements," said Harry Houdini, perhaps the most popular entertainer of Pinchot's age, who knew a thing or two about
Everything changed in the next year, with the 1904 election, when Roosevelt at last won his own full termâa victory that would literally be landscape-altering. "It's all colossal," his firebrand daughter, Alice, wrote in her diary. Indeed it was: Roosevelt won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate to date, taking thirty-three of the forty-five statesâsomething he could not keep from broadcasting. "How they are voting for me!" said Teddy as he skipped through the White House on election night. "I have the greatest popular majority and the greatest electoral majority ever given to a candidate for president," he wrote his son Kermit.
The public knew that this energetic leader was no mere keeper
of the dead President McKinley's name. His Republican Party stood for public ownership of natural resources, among the pillars of the progressive cause. At a time when the gap between rich and poor was never greater, Roosevelt called for a national inheritance tax on wealthy families. And looking to remedy a situation where 26 percent of all boys aged ten to fifteen spent their days working full shifts away from home, and less than 5 percent of all workers had graduated from high school, Roosevelt asked for wholesale changes in child welfare laws. He said people had a right to a safe food supply, to regulation of prescription drugs. And for the sake of future generations, he called for a broad range of measures to protect land and wildlife. He was eager to slay any foe. "I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere," wrote the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell.
"We are the heirs of the ages," Roosevelt said in his 1905 inaugural address, signaling that he intended to use that inheritance.
In one of the first orders of business after Roosevelt's landslide, Congress agreed to transfer the reserves to Gifford Pinchot's fledgling agency, and gave him a small budget to train rangers who would have stewardship of the forests. The General Land Office, that hidebound bureaucracy, service station for the syndicates, was pushed aside. Outmaneuvering Clark and Heyburn, Roosevelt promised that legitimate homesteaders would be allowed to claim 160 acres of land within national forest boundaries if they could prove that it was right for farming. There was not much arable land for homesteading in the reserves, but this move silenced critics who said the president was sealing off the land from opportunity.
With the transfer, the newly named United States Forest Service was created in 1905, with Pinchot as the first Chiefâa job "worth more to me than all the treasures of all the pirates of history," he wrote. His domain was sixty million acres. Having fulfilled his promise to his friend, Roosevelt now gave Pinchot simple marching orders: "It must not be forgotten," he wrote to him, "that the forest reserves belong to all the people." Pinchot felt the same
way; if anything, he was more militant in his belief that the essence of Progressive Era ideals could be manifest on the land, guided by his new agency. Pinchot and Roosevelt also knew that they had only a short time to prove their worth. Congress was skeptical, and the leash was short; legislators could kill the Forest Service simply by defunding it.
"The transfer meant a revolutionary change," Pinchot wrote. "We had the power, as we had the duty, to protect the Reserves for the use of the people, and that meant stepping on the toes of the biggest interests in the West. From that time on, it was fight, fight, fight."
To win that fight, he now took on a greater one â against something as old as the earth itself. Fire was an enemy, a force feared by settlers, loggers, ranchers, and outdoorsmen. "Fire has always been, and seemingly will always remain, the most terrible of elements," said Harry Houdini, perhaps the most popular entertainer of Pinchot's age, who knew a thing or two about
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