Amos Pinchot

Amos Pinchot (1872 - 1944) was an American political leader of the early 20th century. He never held public office but managed to exert considerable influence in reformist circles and did much to keep progressive ideas alive in the 1920s. He was the son of James Pinchot, a rich Pennsylvania lumberman who sponsored the conservation movement; his brother was forester Gifford Pinchot. Educated at Yale, he earned a law degree in New York, where he managed his family's estates. In 1905, he served a year's political apprenticeship as a lobbyist for President Theodore Roosevelt and returned to Washington again in 1909 to live and work with his brother Gifford during the Pinchot-Ballinger Controversy that pitted his brother (the US Forestry Service chief) against President William Howard Taft's Secretary of the Interior. Gifford was fired, which inflamed the insurgent wing of the Republican Party allied to Roosevelt.

Though a member of Roosevelt's inner circle during the Bull Moose campaign of 1912, Amos exasperated the former president with his moralistic criticism of the role of big business in the party, including his criticism of the party chairman, George W. Perkins, who was a leading industrialist and sat on the board of U.S. Steel. Pinchot ultimately joined the Democratic Party, defended the rights of workers, and became acquainted with leftist intellectuals. In 1924, he supported Robert La Follette's presidential bid and wrote a history of the Progressive Party. His opposition to preparedness before World War I, insistence that wartime profits be heavily taxed, strong anticommunism in his last years, and involvement in the America First Committee alienated many political allies and made his last days difficult. He was a founding member in 1937 of the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government.

References

* Pinchot, Nancy Pittman. "Amos Pinchot: Rebel Prince," "Pennsylvania History" 1999 66(2): 166-198. ISSN 0031-4528