ROOSEVELT'S PART IN FORESTRY 
By Dr. Gifford Pinctiot 
Instead of a formal article from me describing in a balanced way 
President Roosevelt's service to forestry, will you accept this dis- 
cursive letter, which neither surrounds the subject nor lays 
measured stress upon its different parts, but just talks about the 
man and the leader whom we all loved. Just at the moment I am 
deep in an effort to defend the Roosevelt policies as to coal, oil, 
and phosphate, and that comes first. 
Some men belong to all people and all time. I suppose it is 
true that Theodore Roosevelt was loved and trusted by more men 
and women in more lands during his lifetime than any other man 
who ever lived. Certainly more men and women followed him in 
spirit to the grave than ever did the like before for any other man 
in human history. 
Very much of the work that Roosevelt started is yet unfinished. 
As his great soul goes marching on, we know that at the very heart 
of the goal to which it marches is that greatest of Roosevelt policies 
— the planned and orderly development and conservation of the 
natural resources of America — by no means forgetting the forest, 
which in a true sense in the mother of all the rest. 
No matter how or where you touched him, you could not long 
delay in finding that Roosevelt was an outdoor man. Gifted in 
the highest degree with the forester's master qualities of hardiness, 
judgment, self-control, and the power of observation. Roosevelt 
brought with him to the White House so deep a sympathy with 
the foresters' viewpoint that it gave co'or and direction to all he 
did touching the great central problem of conservation. 
There was no forester but would have liked to have him on the 
hardest of his trips. There was no time when his mind was not 
alert for the protection and advancement of the forests. His 
sympathy with foresters as such was well shown when he broke 
all presidential precedents to attend, at a private house, a meeting 
of the Society of American Foresters, to address its members and 
to meet them all personally. 
Roosevelt's sympathy with forests and his genius for admin- 
istration made him from the first an active and powerful supporter 
