Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,860
By This is the grave of Ferdinand Silcox.
Born in 1882 in Columbus, Georgia, Silcox grew up fairly well off. He went to the College of Charleston, graduating in 1903. Then it was onto the new Yale School of Forestry. This was the child of Gifford Pinchot, who cofounded in 1900 to train American forest managers in the modern methods of scientific forestry. Pinchot himself had to go to Germany for this training. The same year that Silcox finished his graduate program, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt named Pinchot the head of his new agency in the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service.
The Forest Service immediately hired Silcox after he finished Yale and assigned him to a forest in Colorado. He moved up in the new agency very quickly, possible at this time when there were so few trained foresters in the country. By 1908, he was associate district forester in the office in Missoula, Montana. That might have been the most important office in the Forest Service because of the vast forests in the Northwest. He stayed in Missoula until 1917, being promoted to district forester in 1911.
Silcox volunteered for World War I. This was the same moment when the government intervened in the labor problems of the Northwest forests. It did this because softwoods–Douglas fir and especially Sitka spruce–became needed for lightweight airplanes. But conditions in the forests were so horrifically awful that the Industrial Workers of the World had successfully organized the region’s forests. Woodrow Wilson named Col. Brice Disque to solve these problems, which he did by creating the Spruce Production Division, which used American soldiers to get out the cut. Silcox was part of this, having been commissioned a captain, later promoted to major. But this wasn’t only unionbusting, though it was that. It also forced the companies to improve the working conditions for all the loggers, including implementing the 8-hour day, which many resented bitterly. Those conditions largely stuck after the war too.
After the war, Silcox worked in private industry. But in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president. He was a very committed forestry man. He managed his own forests at the family home in Hyde Park (good hiking trails today, thanks FDR!) and this was something between a hobby and passion for him. So he named Silcox chief of the Forest Service soon after his election. This was not usually a political job and it wasn’t that Roosevelt fired the previous guy. It’s that Robert Stuart died and the position opened up.
Now, by this time, the Forest Service was more or less serving the interests of private foresters. That was always a tension in the agency. Theodore Roosevelt had named Gifford Pinchot to the agency precisely not to do this. Neither of them trusted private companies to manage their lands effectively. There was good reason for that, as private industry had decimated the forests of Maine, the South, and the Great Lakes states in the decades after the Civil War. By the time the agency was created in 1905, industry was relying on the seemingly endless forests of the Pacific Northwest. But other forests had been seen as endless too and then very much were not. At this time, the private companies mostly wanted to keep federal timber off the market to avoid the competition and they saw it as a backup option for when that inevitably happened.
New Deal conservationists such as Silcox, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, and Soil Conservation Service head Hugh Bennett saw a denuded landscape stripped of its nutrients that led to interconnected natural and human disasters, most notably in the Dust Bowl. They sought to use state power to prevent future disasters, hoping to conserve both humans and nature through federal land management programs. Agencies such as the SCS, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Resettlement Administration worked to stabilize both people and land. By the late 1930s, the growing science of ecology began influencing New Deal land managers. Ecologists such as Bennett and Paul Sears sought to bring “permanent agriculture” to the soil through the application of ecology to agriculture. Wallace and Silcox roiled the timber industry by pressing for public regulation of private forests, the expansion of national forest lands, and limiting clearcutting. The last was key–should sustainable agriculture, which is how forestry was conceived, be about industrial efficiency that ripped through forests? Or should it be about selective cutting that would be less efficient but would maintain jobs forever?
Silcox had worked in the Northwest since the USFS’ first days, and became sympathetic to timber workers’ plight. At the 1935 Society of American Foresters conference, Silcox told the timber industry to choose between its current exploitative path and federal regulation of private forestry to stabilize communities. This outraged timber executives, who responded by trying to undermine Silcox in the media, halls of Congress, and Roosevelt Administration, referring to his plan as socialism. Silcox gained an ally in the International Woodworkers of America, the CIO-affiliated timber union that articulated a strong environmentalism that surpasses just about anything articulated in the country at that time. After a Malone, Washington mill shut down in 1938, the IWA used it as an example of the irresponsibility of private forestry. Depleted of timber supplies because of “unbridled greed,” the union fretted that much of southwest Washington could soon follow it into oblivion. Only working-class pressure on Washington to insist “on the New Deal conservation policies as expressed by Chief Forester F.A. Silcox” could save towns like Malone.
Unfortunately, Silcox died of a heart attack in 1939, at the age of 56, before could save the small timber towns. The great socialist forester Bob Marshall died the next year. The leaders of the forestry reform movement were dead. They might not have been able to resist the postwar decimation of the national forests through extreme clearcutting, but they at least might have been important voices to stop it. Their untimely deaths helped lay the groundwork for the environmental crisis in the forests that culminated in the spotted owl battles in the 1980s and 1990s. Those still lead to major tension in the Northwest today. Henry Wallace wrote,
“The death of Mr. Silcox was a blow to the whole American movement for conservation of human and natural resources. His work is commemorated in a government organization of highest efficiency and esprit de corps and in the grateful remembrance of great service to many of the worthy civic enterprises that American citizens are carrying on today.”
Ferdinand Silcox is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery, Alexandria, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other Forest Service chiefs, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lyle Watts is in Portland, Oregon and Edward Cliff is in Logan, Utah. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.