What's the matter with America : the meaning of the progressive movement and the rise of the new party
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This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
War and the king trust; an address to the Anglo-German club
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format. Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship.
Amos Richards Eno Pinchot was an American lawyer, political publicist and reformer.
Background
He was born on December 6, 1873 in Paris, France. He was the second son and youngest of three children of James Wallace Pinchot and Mary Jane (Eno) Pinchot and the brother of Gifford Pinchot, forester and conservationist.
His paternal grandfather, Cyril Constantine Désiré Pinchot, a captain in Napoleon's army, had emigrated in 1816 to Milford, where he opened a general store. His maternal grandfather, Amos Richards Eno, was a well-known real estate speculator and banker in New York City; William Phelps Eno was the boy's uncle.
His father achieved sufficient success in the wallpaper business to retire at the age of forty-four and devote the rest of his life to philanthropy and conservation. The family lived in New York City.
Education
Amos Pinchot attended Westminster School (Dobbs Ferry, New York), Saint George's School (Newport), Yale (B. A. , 1897), and the Columbia Law School. He left Columbia before the end of his first year, however, to serve with the New York Volunteer Cavalry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, after which he attended the New York Law School.
Career
He was admitted to the bar in 1900, and soon afterward accepted a position as deputy assistant district attorney of New York City. The following year he resigned to devote full time to managing the family estate - the role marked out for Amos from his youth so as to free his older brother, Gifford, for the distinguished political career that, by general family conviction, lay in store for him.
Amos Pinchot first became active in politics in 1908 when his brother, then chief of the United States Forest Service, accused Secretary of Interior Richard A. Ballinger of favoring corporate interests at the expense of the government's conservation program. President Taft sided with Ballinger and ordered Gifford's removal from office, precipitating a famous controversy. Amos, who had served his brother as an unofficial adviser and liaison man, emerged from this experience determined to break the hold that he believed industrial monopolies had on government policy.
He then launched a vigorous attack on George W. Perkins, chairman of the Progressive national executive committee and a prominent banker, whom he accused of favoring the protection of private monopoly and of tying the party to business interests. Their quarrel came to a head in 1914 when a letter that Pinchot had sent to leading Progressives urging Perkins's resignation was leaked to the press and widely publicized. Roosevelt publicly repudiated his suggestion, and embarrassed party officials, who regarded Pinchot as unrealistic, intractable, and dogmatic, suggested that he leave the party.
He was chairman of the Committee on Real Preparedness (1916), served on the executive committee of the American Union against Militarism (1916 - 17), and was treasurer (1917 - 18) of the defense committee set up to support Masses, which had been excluded from the mails under the Espionage Act of 1917. Such infringements on the activities of people opposed to the war had awakened in Pinchot a deep interest in civil rights.
In 1920 it sought to form a new third party in the progressive tradition, but the effort proved abortive, and Pinchot, disheartened, withdrew from politics. During this period he wrote, but did not finish, his History of the Progressive Party, published posthumously in 1958.
Pinchot returned to the political arena in 1932 as an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but broke with him the following year over the question of monetary policy. Convinced that the President was leading the country toward war, he also helped found the America First Committee (1940) and later served on its national committee.
Illness, a series of financial setbacks, and the suicide of his daughter Rosamond in 1938 contributed to a sense of discouragement and disintegration, and in 1942 Pinchot himself attempted suicide. He died two years later of bronchial pneumonia at the West Hill Sanitarium in the Bronx, New York City.
Achievements
Amos Richards Eno Pinchot helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union. He also helped organize the "Committee of Forty-Eight, " initially set up as an independent pressure group to influence the selection of candidates by the two established political parties. Thus, he never held public office but managed to exert considerable influence in reformist circles and did much to keep progressive and Georgist ideas alive in the 1920s.
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Politics
He supported the presidential aspirations of Robert M. La Follette and in 1911 helped found the National Progressive Republican League. He backed La Follette until January 1912 when, with his brother and other insurgent Republicans, he switched to Roosevelt and helped organize the Progressive party.
Within the Progressive party, Pinchot aligned himself with the "radical nucleus, " a small group that favored public ownership of waterpower, forests, utilities, and other sources of energy, and the breaking up of private monopolies. His unsuccessful efforts to have these reforms incorporated into the platform left him disenchanted with what he regarded as the opportunism of the party leaders.
Though at first reluctant to break with his brother's party, Pinchot soon faded from the Progressive group. In 1916 he assumed the chairmanship of the Wilson Volunteers of New York, a move that temporarily alienated his brother. Pinchot disagreed with Wilson on many domestic issues but admired him for his peace stand. Fearful that American involvement in World War I would destroy hard-won economic and social gains, he became an ardent antimilitarist.
Objecting strenuously to the growth of federal power, he increasingly viewed the New Deal as an incipient political dictatorship. His opposition to big government was consistent with his early views on business monopolies; he regarded all aggregations of power as a threat to the individual. In radio speeches and pamphlets Pinchot attacked the administration's labor policies, the "court-packing" bill, the executive reorganization plan, and Roosevelt's bid for a third term. He joined a number of anti-New Deal organizations, among them the Sound Money League, the Committee for the Nation, and the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government.
Personality
Fastidious in dress, tall and muscular, Pinchot had the look of a cultivated and athletic gentleman.
Interests
He played squash, was an enthusiastic fisherman, and took great pleasure in following tennis and baseball.
Connections
On November 14, 1900, he had married Gertrude Minturn of New York City; they had two children, Gifford and Rosamond. This first marriage ended in divorce in 1919, and on August 9 of that year Pinchot married Ruth Pickering of Elmira, New York, by whom he had two daughters, Mary Eno and Antoinette Eno.
