Amos Richards Eno Pinchot

• Amos Richards Eno Pinchot
• Born: December 6, 1873
• Died: February 18, 1944

Lawyer, progressive, foe of monopolies and militarism, was born in Paris while his parents were touring Europe. He was the youngest of three surviving children (one daughter and two sons) of Mary Jane (Eno) Pinchot, whose father was a prominent New York City real-estate operator and banker, and James Wallace Pinchot, whose success in the wallpaper business allowed him to retire at forty-four and pursue public interests. One of these interests was forestry, nurtured during his boyhood in Milford, Pennsylvania, where his father, an immigrant from France in 1816, owned a lumber business and large tracts of woodland.

Amos Pinchot attended grammar school in New York City and then boarded at Westminster School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, before entering Yale, from which he received a B.A. in 1897. Following a summer trip West to inspect the Northwestern Forest Reserves with his brother Gifford, a federal forest agent, he entered Columbia Law School. He left Columbia in April 1898 to serve as a private with the First New York Volunteer Cavalry in the Spanish-American War. In the fall he returned to New York City from Puerto Rico to attend New York Law School. The New York bar admitted him in 1900, and he went to work for New York City as a deputy assistant district attorney. He was married in November 1900 to Gertrude Minturn of New York City. They had two children, Gifford and Rosamond.

In 1901 Pinchot quit his job to manage the family estate. This was the role his father had ordained for him, in order to free his brother Gifford for a career in public life. Henceforth, he would practice law only when a case involved a cause that seemed important to him.

For the next seven years the Pinchot finances, his young family, his clubs, and his social life absorbed him, though he found time to sit on the boards of such charities as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, whose efforts he would later disdain as trivial and even harmful. He traveled often to Washington, D.C., where his parents had moved in order to be near their son Gifford, who was appointed chief U.S. forester in 1898.

In 1908 an incident occurred that changed the course of Amos Pinchot’s life. His brother, now chief of the U.S. Forest Service, accused Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger of torpedoing the government’s conservation program by permitting powerful corporations to mine coal on public lands in Alaska. President William Howard Taft backed Ballinger, Gifford Pinchot was dismissed, and the resulting furor precipitated a congressional investigation during the winter of 1909-10. Amos Pinchot, acting as his brother’s unofficial counsel, got a firsthand look at political compromise and came to believe that popular government was being victimized by monopoly interests. The extent of the control that corporations had gained over the nation’s natural resources shocked him, and he emerged from the hearings a foe of monopolies and of government by special privilege.

These insights, and his need to act upon them, brought him into contact with some of the leading progressives of his day, including Robert M. La Follette. Pinchot helped found the National Progressive Republican League in 1911 to promote progressive legislation. Theodore Roosevelt refused to join, and the league backed La Follette for president; but in 1912, after Roosevelt declared his candidacy, Pinchot shifted his support to the former president because it seemed that he had a better chance of winning. He helped start the Progressive (Bull Moose) party and acted as one of Roosevelt’s main publicists and speech writers.

Pinchot disagreed with the direction of Roosevelt’s campaign, which was under the generalship of George W. Perkins, a Wall Street banker, a director of U.S. Steel, and one of Roosevelt’s close friends. Pinchot wanted Roosevelt to run on a radical platform, one that would catch the public’s attention with a frontal assault on trusts. “Natural monopolies” such as railroads and utilities were acceptable to Pinchot, but he was unalterably opposed to all private monopolies because they reduced the competition he felt essential to a healthy capitalist economy. To Roosevelt and Perkins, however, monopolies were inevitable, and it would therefore be futile to apply any remedy more severe than regulation. Despite his misgivings, Pinchot ran for Congress in New York City to arouse interest in the Progressive ticket.

After the defeat of Roosevelt, Pinchot worked to keep the Progressive party alive. This meant gearing up for the 1914 congressional elections, and to that end Pinchot wrote a secret platform for the Progressives that called for public ownership of energy sources and utilities and an end to tariffs and large private landholdings. The platform was never released. Between 1912 and 1914 Pinchot, though never a commanding speaker, publicized his views at every opportunity. When the Progressives refused to adopt a more radical position, Pinchot distributed to the party’s top officials a 7,000-word letter attacking George Perkins. “Our party cannot exist as a party of balanced phrases and equivocations,” he wrote. “It cannot stand on the one hand with the people and on the other hand with the forces that oppress people.” The letter was leaked to the press and Pinchot was asked to leave the party.

By 1916 Pinchot was heading the Wilson Volunteers of New York. He opposed America’s entry into World War I because he feared it would eradicate twenty years of progressive gains, and Woodrow Wilson seemed determined to keep the United States out of the conflict. Pinchot chaired the Committee on Real Preparedness in 1916 and helped lead the American Union against Militarism in 1916-17. After the United States declared war on Germany, he proposed that the United States pay for its military efforts with an eighty percent tax on profits.

It was during World War I that Pinchot began to emerge as a civil libertarian. Under the Espionage Act of 1917 the radical magazine The Masses was excluded from the mails, and Pinchot, who had been fund-raising (and occasionally writing) for The Masses since 1913, became treasurer of the magazine’s defense committee. What shocked him was the ease with which the government could silence opposition to its wartime policies. In 1917 he helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which eventually became the American Civil Liberties Union, whose activities he helped guide until his death.

With the war’s end, Pinchot reentered politics, this time to help launch the Committee of 48 (states) in December 1918. The organization’s goals, at first restricted to advancing the candidacies of progressives in the Republican and Democratic parties, became more complex as Pinchot, always hopeful, tried to make the fragile group bear the weight of a third party. The effort failed, and Pinchot, discouraged, once more turned his back on politics.

His first marriage ended in divorce in 1919, and that same year, in August, Pinchot married Ruth Pickering, of Elmira, New York. They had two daughters, Mary Eno and Antoinette Eno.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Pinchot worked on, but did not complete, two books—one on monopolies and another on the Progressives. The latter, The History of the Progressive Party 1912-1916, was published posthumously in 1958.

Pinchot supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1932, but Roosevelt’s monetary policy alienated Pinchot, and Roosevelt’s tendency to centralize power in the executive branch of government frightened him. As the New Deal gathered steam, Pinchot came to view it as a machine more threatening to individual liberties than an economic monopoly. He went on the attack, making speeches and writing pamphlets against Roosevelt’s programs and lending support to opposition groups. With World War II raging in Europe, he helped organize the isolationist America First Committee in 1940 and headed the organization’s New York chapter.

Over six feet tall, muscular, and nattily dressed, Pinchot presented a cultivated, athletic appearance. He brushed his curly brown hair straight back and gave the ends of his mustache a slight twist. His goals, like his appearance, were hardly revolutionary. He wanted to make capitalism safe for the world. “What I am trying … to help do,” he wrote in 1914, “is to prevent violence, disorder, and misery by getting people to see the justice of the average man’s demand for a better economic position in this country, and the utter futility of denying or ignoring this demand.” He lost most of his major battles, but his perseverance and skill as a publicist, fundraiser, and organizer helped keep the spirit of reform alive through extremely difficult times.

Distressed by World War II, poor health, financial reverses, and his eldest daughter’s suicide in 1938, Pinchot tried to end his own life in 1942. He died of bronchial pneumonia in a Bronx, New York, sanitarium two years later, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Milford, Pennsylvania.

As a publicist for causes he believed in, Pinchot wrote for periodicals as well known as Collier’s and The New Republic and as obscure as Anthracite Labor News and Locomotive and Enginemen’s Magazine. The Library of Congress houses the Amos Pinchot Papers and the Gifford Pinchot Papers. The biographical introduction to his History of the Progressive Party 1912-1916 (1958) by its editor, H. M. Hooker, is the most extensive account of Pinchot’s life available. Books by and about Gifford Pinchot and Robert M. La Follette refer to Amos Pinchot, as does O. L. Graham, An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (1967). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973). The New York Times ran his obituary on February 19, 1944.