Unlikely leading man in Pa. politics

In 1914, at age 49, Gifford Pinchot strode onto the Pennsylvania political scene when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

He was, from the beginning, a showman campaigner the likes of which Pennsylvania voters had not seen in many years. Pinchot projected the image of a character. He was a lean, 6-foot-tall man with a bald head over which he wore a slouched hat. His appearance was touched off by a scraggly mustache.

Joining Pinchot on the Senate campaign trail was his bride of a few weeks, Cornelia Bryce, a woman of wealth, active in feminist politics and 16 years his junior. She also was a natural campaigner.

Given Pinchot's views on public policies and the political climate in the commonwealth, it appeared to be an unlikely pairing. At the time, Pennsylvania was a one-party Republican state dominated by the interests of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association and run by a powerful machine boss, Boies Penrose.

It was Penrose who opposed Pinchot in the Senate race. Pinchot ran on the Progressive third-party ticket on a platform opposed to special interests and machine politics.

In the general election, Penrose handily beat both Pinchot and Democratic candidate A. Mitchell Palmer. But for Pinchot, it was not the end but rather the beginning of a notable career in Pennsylvania political history that included two terms as governor.

"More than any other person, Gifford Pinchot dominated Pennsylvania in the 1920s and early 1930s," Philip Klein and Ari Hoogenboom wrote in their book, A History of Pennsylvania (1973).

Pinchot was born into a life of privilege in 1865 in Simsbury, Conn. His family had large real estate holdings in New York from which the young Pinchot inherited millions of dollars. He also inherited the family estate, a 41-room mansion called Grey Towers in Milford, Pike County.

Pinchot received his basic education at Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Yale in 1889. He studied forestry in France and did field work in central Europe.

When he returned to the United States, he established himself as a consulting forester and, within a few years, gained a reputation as the country's leading expert on forestry. He was appointed first director of the U.S. Forest Service in 1897.

Politically, he identified with the Progressive Movement, a bipartisan reform effort that opposed the corruption of U.S. democratic institutions by Wall Street financial interests. He particularly championed the conservation of the nation's natural resources.