Gertrude Greeley could not believe her ears. After her husband, William B. Greeley, the third chief of the U.S. Forest Service, finished testifying at a congressional hearing in the mid-1920s, an older man in the audience vigorously rebutted his comments. The agency’s founder, Gifford Pinchot, then governor of Pennsylvania, had traveled to Washington, D.C., to counter his former subordinate’s proposal. “How does it happen that this young successor of yours believes this way?” a member of the congressional panel asked Pinchot; Mrs. Greeley later recalled that Pinchot shot back, “‘Oh well, he’s young,’ or something to the effect that the lumbermen had ‘pulled the wool over his eyes.’”

She was right to be amazed: it was highly unusual for former agency directors to challenge the policy decisions of those who had replaced them. And it was unheard of, then as it is now, to throw down the gauntlet, as Pinchot did, in a face-to-face encounter in an open committee session.

Greeley might have wished otherwise, yet he was hardly caught off-guard that day in Washington when Pinchot lit into his testimony. Pinchot was not just another retired—or retiring—bureaucrat. Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of him as Chief Forester in 1905 had marked the culmination of seven years of energetic activity to create the Forest Service. In 1898, President William McKinley tapped the 32-year-old Pinchot to head the Division, later Bureau, of Forestry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the young forester threw himself into the work of advancing the conservationist cause. Keenly aware that control over national forest reserves was then located in the Department of the Interior, and that he and his small staff had no woods to manage, he began the tricky negotiations with Congress and the executive branch to have the reserves transferred to agriculture.

That it took until 1905 for this to occur was a blessing in disguise; had it happened immediately the agency would have had no on-the-ground employees or line officers to regulate land use. These occupations—and the individuals to fill them—had to be invented. So in 1900, Pinchot and his family endowed the Yale School of Forestry; from it graduated the next five Forest Service chiefs, and countless district rangers, regional officers and Washington-based division heads. To invigorate their ongoing professional training, that same year Pinchot launched the Society of American Foresters, which in time would publish the field’s premiere publication, the Journal of Forestry. He also proved a relentless pitchman for forestry and conservation, crisscrossing the country to speak in venues large and small, urban and rural. It was no accident that Pinchot became the agency’s public face.

It’s no shock either, given his close identification with its mission, that he acted as its public conscience. Upholding the agency’s virtue was what had led him to confront Chief Greeley on the Hill, but Greeley was not the first to experience Pinchot’s withering disapproval. During his early years in the Forest Service, Pinchot repeatedly clashed with the director of the General Land Office, Richard Achilles Ballinger. Initially they contended over water-power sites. Pinchot believed these critical resources should not be leased or sold to developers; Ballinger advocated their outright sale, a dispersal of the public domain. Pinchot prevailed, convincing President William H. Taft that relinquishing federal regulatory authority was contrary to good stewardship.

The president was not as amenable when the two next squared off over Alaskan coal leases, the “Cunningham Claims,” some of which were located on the Chugach National Forest. Rumors had long been rife that prospector Cunningham was a dummy claimant for the American Smelting and Refining Company, an old ploy enabling investors to gain control of publicly owned resources. In 1908, to protect their standing, the mining claimants had hired Ballinger, who practiced law after leaving the General Land Office that same year. His entanglement in the case only heightened suspicions about the claims’ legality, especially when, after Taft appointed him secretary of the interior in 1909, Ballinger rejected staff member Louis Glavis’s request to investigate their potential criminality.

Though he was well aware of possible political fallout, when Pinchot heard Glavis’s version of the story, he instructed subordinates to follow the paper trail and develop a strategy to halt the sale of the coalfields. Subsequently, he arranged a meeting between Glavis and the president, for which his staff prepped the land office agent. Taft rejected Glavis’s claims, and backed Ballinger’s decision to fire him, so Forest Service employees funneled damaging documents to sympathetic reporters.

For his part, Pinchot pounded away at what he perceived to be the administration’s alarming relations with big corporations. “The forest is not alone useful for the timber we get from it; there are the streams, recreation grounds, shade and comfort and fertile soil,” he asserted. But Taft and Ballinger ignored a complex of uses and users in their rush to appease the powerful few. Determining who “is to get the benefit of conservation of the forests…is primarily a question of morals,” the forester declared, and the “time fast approaches when we will have to decide whether men or dollars control the country.”

Pinchot followed up this public chastisement with a private warning, advising President Taft in November 1909, “I would not make trouble if I could avoid it, but might be forced to, and he might be forced to fire me.” Two months later, on January 10, 1910, Pinchot sent a letter to Senator J. P. Dolliver to be read on the floor, in which the chief praised his staff’s role in publicizing the coal controversy. Acting from a “high and unselfish sense of public duty, they deliberately chose to risk their official positions rather than permit what they believed to be the wrongful loss of public property,” a defiant show of support that called into question Taft’s and Ballinger’s characters. Within a day, Taft had fired Pinchot for insubordination.

Pinchot exulted in his termination, knowing that his willful disobedience had forced the president’s hand and had revealed the administration’s conscious retreat from Roosevelt’s conservationist agenda. An aroused citizenry and blood-scenting media created such a storm of protest that Ballinger ultimately resigned. In the furor, and goaded by Pinchot and other progressives, Theodore Roosevelt jumped into the 1912 presidential campaign, running on the Bull Moose ticket; although he came in a close second to Woodrow Wilson, Taft placed a distant third. Moral of the story? Don’t mess with Giff.

Albert Fall learned the same lesson. Secretary of the interior under President Warren G. Harding, initially he thrived in an administration that had swept into office in 1920 chanting “Less government in business, more business in government.” The former New Mexico senator took those words to heart, leasing at minimal cost critical U.S. Navy oil reserves in Wyoming to eager corporate bidders. His actions, when exposed, triggered the infamous Teapot Dome scandal; it led to Fall’s indictment and eventual incarceration. He was the first cabinet official to go to jail.

Pinchot had a hand in Secretary Fall’s political demise. With the staff of the National Conservation Association, which he had founded and funded since 1910, Pinchot investigated early gossip about Fall’s impropriety, interviewed the secretary and his subordinates and dug through relevant government documents. Through timely leaks to the press, and in its own muckraking releases, the association revealed the sordid story of official connivance at the plundering of vital public resources that compromised national security.

That same failing led Pinchot to rebuke his successors at the Forest Service. Since the late teens Greeley and Pinchot had butted heads over proper forest management; after one dustup in 1916, Greeley crowed that Pinchot had “lost caste in the temple of conservation on Rhode Island Avenue,” site of the former chief’s capital manse. They wrangled repeatedly in the Journal of Forestry over accommodations with the lumber industry—Greeley called it cooperation; Pinchot denounced it as co-optation. Over the role of the federal and state governments in managing the national forests they also sharply disagreed: Greeley believed that state control was preferable to national regulation, with Pinchot countering that national sovereignty was essential to blunt industrial exploitation of the public domain.

They could not agree on sheep, either. In advance of Greeley’s 1926 testimony supporting alterations in national forest grazing regulations, Pinchot sent him a note indicating he would go public with his concerns. Pinchot picked away at specific defects of the bill, but concentrated his fire on its ethical lapse, claiming the bill “was written from the point of view of protecting the special interests of a special group instead of protecting the interests of the general public,” and thereby tarnished the Forest Service’s once-sterling reputation.

Yet Pinchot could do only so much to polish its image. During the 1920s he grew dispirited watching the agency, and the larger forestry profession, embrace what he castigated as a pro-industry reflex. Former colleagues and close friends rejected his conviction that foresters and forestry must protect the commonweal. His allies either resigned or, like Raphael Zon, were transferred out of the Washington office. When Pinchot attended meetings of the Society of American Foresters, he was ignored, ousted from the very profession he had founded.

Even when his energies were drawn away by Keystone State politics, he kept fighting. In 1928, for instance, Pinchot underwrote the publication of George P. Ahern’s tract, Deforested America. The two had met in the Philippines years earlier, and they shared a deep distrust of industrial forestry, as Ahern’s pamphlet demonstrated. It offered a blistering indictment of timber corporations, unmasking their destructive harvesting techniques and deceptive public-relations campaigns. In his preface to the pamphlet, Pinchot lambasted corporate profligacy, the “spending of millions of dollars to forestall or delay the public control of lumbering, which is the only measure capable of putting an end to forest devastation in America.” The advertisements this money purchased were designed “to fool the American people into believing that the industry is regulating itself,” chicanery that “Major Ahern has proved…beyond question.”

Greeley resigned as chief that same year to become the executive secretary of the West Coast Lumberman’s Association, a post that confirmed Pinchot’s opinion that he had been an industry shill. With Greeley’s “malign influence” over the Forest Service removed, public foresters were “returning to what they had known all along was the right point of view,” Pinchot applauded. He clapped louder when Ferdinand Silcox became the chief in 1933 and asserted that public control of forested lands must “take precedence over private profit.” Under Silcox’s management, Pinchot exulted, the Forest Service once again would become “the aggressive agent and advocate of the public good and not the humble little brother of the lumbermen.”

Over the final thirteen years of his life—he died in 1946—Pinchot continued to battle for and against the agency. At Silcox’s behest, he took on Interior Secretary Harold Ickes in a legendary brawl to stop the transfer of the Forest Service into a proposed Department of Conservation; Ickes lost. In the 1940s, as Europe exploded into war, Pinchot warned that post-conflict reconstruction would be hampered and global peace unfulfilled without strict international regulation of timber, coal, water and other resources to counter the power of the emerging multinational conglomerates. His radical assertion did not sit well with many fellow foresters, who reacted angrily in 1945 when he argued his case before the Washington chapter of the Society of American Foresters. Reading from the final draft of Breaking New Ground (1946), an ailing Pinchot demanded that they “see to it that the rights of the people to govern themselves shall not be controlled by great monopolies through their power over natural resources.”

His clarion call reverberates still.