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Original Document
William M. Hard, "Pinchot for President?" October 31, 1923.


PINCHOT is what is called an "anti-machine" politician, but he is a politician, thank God, never forget it. He is not a butcher or baker or candlestick-maker who in his spare moments and with his left hand is willing to be good enough to steer the ship of state for a while. Albert Lasker, after a few months of Washington, remarked to this writer "This public life is a business too," It is.

Pinchot in office under Roosevelt and Taft gave his time to public affairs; and then, out of office, subsequently, he still gave his time to public affairs and to deep thought on how to get back into office. People say: "Does he want to be President?" To a political reporter that question seems about as sensible as if a diligent inquirer were to go to a young man in the Harvard freshman football squad and say to him: "Can it be-can it be-that the thought has crossed your mind that you would like to be captain?"

Of course Gifford Pinchot wants to be President. A distinguished rival of his for the next Republican presidential nomination said to this writer last spring: "I am going to sit in the presidential $ambling game; and if I win, I win; and if I lose, I 1ose; and when it is all over, well, anyway, I shall have sat in a game for the biggest stakes in the world."

What is the use of pretending that the public man lives who if he has even one white chip of presidential gambling currency will not edge his way to the table of that game?

Pinchot has several chips-of several colors. Some he I acquired while in office under Roosevelt and Taft and some he acquired while out of office by active deliberate cultivation of certain issues and certain electoral elements.

Quarreling with President Taft and thereby forfeiting office, and quarrelling during the Great War with Food Administrator Hoover and thereby again departing from office, Pinchot proved indeed that the holding of office is not the total of his temperament or ambition.. His temperament, his ambition, is to deal with public questions, but to deal with them his way.

He is a stubborn, willful, conscientious, bigoted, charming, laughing, sweet-tempered. Smooth-mannered, hard-mouthed. stiff-necked, intractable person, who is congenitally interested in problems of state and who wants to hold an office, any office-but the bigger the better-in which God and Pinchot can solve those problems as they should be solved.

Out of office, and seeking the electoral resources with which to return to office and to resume the hunting and killing of wrongs, Pinchot explored the territories occupied by the labor vote and the farmer vote. Defeated for the United States Senate by Penrose, he did what few ex-Rooseveltians were wise enough to do: he dug trenches extending from the general moral issues of the Progressive Party to the specific economic issues of the rising farmer-labor groups.

He made his big house in Washington the organizing center for groups of representatives of farmers. He and Mrs. Pinchot gave parties for farmers as dazzling as any parties they gave for diplomats. Their hearty and straightforward manners served them as well in the one case as in the other. Simultaneously be made his way deeper into the labor world and came to be personally better known to the leaders of labor at Washington and in Pennsylvania. When his anthracite coal conference met this year at Harrisburg it surprised the reporters from afar to observe that for at least one of the miners' conferees the Governor was just naturally "Gifford."

Farm support, labor support, plus the echoes of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" made Pinchot Governor of Pennsylvania. He ran on the platform of honesty and efficiency at Harrisburg and of dryness throughout the state, but his platform would never have carried him into the gubernatorial mansion if underneath it there had not marched the new quiet confidence felt in him by farmers and by trade unionists whose acquaintance he had sought and whose organized intentions he was known to have studied and known to be capable of understanding.

He is, in a sense, a farmer-labor governor. He goes against much of labor in being so dry. He enjoys being dry. Enforcing the Volstead law is with him a labor of love. He talks about it as his duty. Roosevelt used to talk about the duty of hunting wild animals for fear that otherwise they might overcrowd the earth; Pinchot hunts bootleggers for duty and pleasure both. If much of labor would rather be wet Pinchot nevertheless will always be dry, bone dry, dust-dry; and the American Federation of Labor could make him President and then ask him for Heaven's sake to show one slender streak of humidity, it would not appear.

If people are going to make Gifford Pinchot President, they win have to take him, previously and subsequently, exactly as he is. He is sympathetic toward the toiler. whether on farm or in factory; he finds in the toiler an ally, against his old enemies the capitalistic grabbers of the forests and ranges and mines and water-power of the public domain; he gives himself to public questions and win climb the ladder of public offices to the highest rung within his reach; he will spread his issues before the public With all the craft of the experienced manipulator of political publicity; he will denounce the political "machine" and create in some minds the illusion of his being a. political amateur;
he will all the time be an absolutely accomplished professional political player of the lone-hand type; and the sum of him personally and politically is a consistent sum. It is this: he is an inveterate public man whose technique of playing over the head of the 'machine' to the "people" is just as competently and professionally managed as if he were playing directly to the "machine," Incurably a public man, he is also nevertheless incurably his own man; and in so far as he acquires political power in this country it win strictly technically resemble to the last line the political power now owned by Robert Marion La Follette. It will be an absolutely professional but absolutely personal possession.




Credit: William M. Hard, "Pinchot for President?" The Nation, October 31, 1923.
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