CHAPTER 16
NO SOONER HAD THE NEW CENTURY DAWNED than Frederick found himself subjected to a series of curious incidents that tested his mettle and interrupted his peace of mind. Despite all of his business success in the previous decades and the happy festival events of his cherished family, Frederick suffered under a set of personal challenges. He was not immune to surprises or attacks from others, some of which—like the earlier affair in Wisconsin, when he felt his integrity under fire—may have adversely affected his health. But his reactions to these new events in his older years also illustrate the strong character he had developed in his youth, maintained throughout his working life, and carried into his later years.
The stories revolve around a mentally unstable former employee, Teddy Roosevelt, some serious health issues for Frederick, and a muckraking journalist.
The episode of the disgruntled former employee began in 1900. The man’s name was Donald McDonald, but everyone called him Black Dan. He was known to Frederick from his Wisconsin logging days, when Black Dan and his brother John were river drivers (men who rafted logs down the Mississippi) for the Mississippi River Logging Company in the 1870s. Their working relationship seems to have been positive in those early days. Frederick even notes, in one of his letters to Black Dan, that he remembered him as a fine river driver.
In later years, however, Black Dan became something of a mystery to Frederick—and eventually he evolved into a major nuisance, demanding money. Beginning in 1900, and continuing until two years past Frederick’s death in 1914, McDonald sent a total of sixteen letters to Frederick or his sons. In addition, McDonald wrote to Sarah, and McDonald’s wife to Frederick. The letters all make the same charge: that Frederick personally owed McDonald money from the Smith-Ellison land deal in Wisconsin, which had taken place thirty years earlier.
Black Dan had lived and worked as a driver in Wisconsin, but the initial letter to Frederick in early 1900 was sent from Everett, Washington. Apparently McDonald had read in the newspaper that Frederick was in the West inaugurating his bold, new venture with his partners, and the former river driver decided to confront his former employer on this old, alleged debt connected to the sale of land called “Smith-Ellison.” The letter was a complete surprise to Frederick.
Black Dan’s initial approach to Frederick may have been generated by the publicity surrounding the Northern Pacific land purchase and the board of directors’ decision to name the company after Frederick Weyerhaeuser. McDonald, living in the region, had no doubt seen reports of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and decided that Frederick had money to spare.
When Frederick received McDonald’s letter, he went to great lengths to ascertain if the claim were real. He immediately wrote to his associates in Wisconsin to get the history of this land deal and McDonald’s role in it. The claim, if there had been one, would have been against the Mississippi River Logging Company, not Frederick personally, as the MRLC was purchaser of the Smith-Ellison land. Letters in the file from Artemus Lamb, vice president of the MRLC at this date, Thomas Irvine, secretary, and C. O. Law, an employee, testify to the thoroughness of their inquiry into past documents at Frederick’s request. Law did the heavy lifting in researching this matter. His notarized statement specifies not only the Smith-Ellison land transaction but the detail of every interaction Dan McDonald had with MRLC over the years and every payment made to him by the company.
The Mississippi River Logging Company vigorously protested the McDonald claim with careful analysis. The following letter was written on March 22, 1900, by C. O. Law of the MRLC, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, addressed to Mr. Thomas Irvine, St. Paul, Minnesota:
Dear Sir:
At the request of Mr. Weyerhaeuser I enclose a [notarized] statement of the Smith Ellison Land upon which Mr. Donald McDonald here in 1896 claimed he was to have an interest in. I told McDonald at the time just what I have stated in this paper, that he told me he did not want any interest in these lands, and supposed at that time he was convinced, but it seems he still claims an interest.
I have also shown that two years afterwards when he was owing the company [MRLC] and anxious to pay up, that he never mentioned that he had any claim or interest in these lands. However, the cutting of the land and the sale of the logs shows that there was no profit in the deal, and that is a fact for on 50,000,000 feet of logs which we cut and put in the waters of the Red Cedar we did not any more than come out even and we think we got all for the logs that we could have gotten at the time. It was a hard country to log in and a long, hard and expensive drive, and from what I know of this matter I know that there would not have been any profit in it for Don McDonald provided he had retained his interest, which he did not.
Yours truly, C. O. Law
Nevertheless, the Mississippi River Logging Company ultimately made a payment to Black Dan McDonald of $3,500 on May 19, 1900. The legal document McDonald signed at the time released the company from “all future actions, debts, suits etc.” The agreement contained the signatures of Artemus Lamb as well, and a notary public witnessed it. The statement does not provide an exact description of what the payment is for, and the company admitted no earlier wrongdoing.
It may have been a coincidence that the payment and signing of the official, notarized form by McDonald came several days after McDonald had written to Sarah, pressing her to intervene with Frederick on his behalf. On the seventeenth of May, 1900, McDonald wrote,
Dear Lady:
His [Frederick’s] excuse he can’t find it on the books I paid him $3000 for scale [logging term]…then he had me branded as a thief and then his gang kidnapped and through [sic] me in the madhouse…he turned me over to Mr. Irvine…if there is $8,000 sent to me one month I will call it settled for all time.
Perhaps Frederick wanted to protect his wife from further distress as a result of McDonald’s importuning. Or perhaps the MRLC officers decided that some payment would encourage their disgruntled former employee to cease pestering them. That course of action was to prove futile. Black Dan continued harassing Frederick for the next fourteen years, even though he had accepted payment and signed a release in May 1900.
When Frederick was at the Yosemite Hotel in Bullards, Oregon, a year later, McDonald tracked him down and wrote again. McDonald claimed in this letter that he was owed $16,000 for twenty-four years plus seven percent interest and that he had been “wronged and put in the madhouse” by Frederick.
Frederick by now had had enough. When he returned to St. Paul he sent McDonald a stern reply:
Dear Sir:
Your favor of even date at hand. In reply, I will say I cannot loan you $8,000.00 as I haven’t the money to spare. I have, for the last two or three years, been sending all my spare money to Washington, but I will make you this proposition: You claim the Mississippi River Logging Co., or I, owe you $16,000.00 on the Smith Allison [sic] deal. You claim we made a $40,000 profit. Now, I will permit you to hire any book-keeper you wish; I will pay him a reasonable compensation for doing the work and will give him the Mississippi River Logging Company’s books to figure them all over and where he can show that we owe you one dollar, I will agree to pay you two, but for you to simply say that we made $40,000.00 out of that deal and you not knowing anything about it, I do not think it is fair treatment toward us…
I am sorry to see you grow old and poor, but the Lord knows it is not my fault. I always treated you as a friend until you commenced setting up claims against me which I think are not fair…I will say this: as long as you worked for us you did your duty to the fullest extent…I am ready and willing to investigate matters and…if there is anything coming to you I will be very glad to pay.
Yours most truly,
F. Weyerhaeuser
Frederick had C. O. Law investigate McDonald’s commitment to a “madhouse.” Law reported to Thomas Irvine that the county records showed that James Cheaters was the person who made the petition for McDonald’s commitment. The commitment papers reference testimony about Black Dan’s heavy drinking, his purchase of pistols, and his habit of threatening people in his hometown with guns, people he claimed owed him money or had cheated him.
McDonald’s letters continued even after Frederick’s death, when he wrote to John (J. P.) Weyerhaeuser. On the last letter someone wrote simply, “File this with the others.” No payments were made to McDonald after the 1900 settlement with MRLC.
In spite of the somewhat scattered and deranged nature of McDonald’s communications, Frederick never patronized him. Perhaps he was motivated by recollections of earlier years and the work McDonald had done on the river for MRLC. But eventually, even Frederick’s patience had given out.
While Frederick was wintering with family members in San Antonio in 1903, a letter arrived from Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States. Roosevelt had become interested in conservation of U.S. forests and had established the post of chief forester with the appointment of Gifford Pinchot, who had taken his forestry training in France, focusing primarily on German forest conservation practices. Congressman John F. Lacey had mentioned to the president that Frederick Weyerhaeuser “was starting to come around, that he was becoming a forest advocate of sorts, that he was an untapped potential arborist.”
This information intrigued Roosevelt, and he sent the following letter to Frederick on March 5, 1903:
My Dear Mr. Weyerhaeuser:
Could you not come down here sometime next week so I could see you with Mr. Gifford Pinchot? I should like to talk over some forestry matters with a practical lumberman. I earnestly desire that the movement for the preservation of the forests should come from the lumbermen themselves. With regards,
Theodore Roosevelt
Some back-and-forth exchanges followed. Sam Davis apparently wired to the president that Frederick was ill and could not travel, but the secretary of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, R. L. McCormick, was in Charleston, South Carolina, and could represent Frederick in any Washington meeting.
Roosevelt’s office contacted McCormick, who then wired Frederick to ask what instructions he should follow. The president had asked that young Fred (F. E.) come with McCormick. Unfortunately, neither McCormick nor Fred went to meet the president. If such a meeting had taken place, perhaps Roosevelt’s attitude toward the lumber industry might have been modified, and he would not have made his aggressive attacks on the industry’s leaders shortly after this time, creating an irreversible animosity between his administration and leading lumbermen. That, at least, was F. E.’s opinion in later years.
Roosevelt’s public attack on leaders of the lumber industry took place at the American Forest Congress, held on January 3–4, 1905, in Washington, DC. Invitations came from Chief Forester Pinchot, who let it be widely known that they were issued at the behest of the president. Frederick was invited, but Fred informed Pinchot that his father never made public speeches and, besides, he had been ill and was still too fragile to travel. He would not be coming.
Pinchot then invited Fred himself to prepare and read a paper; Fred accepted. Fred had known Pinchot through their Yale connection (both were Skull and Bones), and at the time of this forest congress Pinchot invited Fred to stay at his own home in Washington. At Pinchot’s suggestion, Fred shortened his paper. Pinchot also asked Fred to review the speech Pinchot had prepared for the president to deliver. Fred was quite satisfied with Pinchot’s draft of the president’s proposed remarks and felt that the lumbermen would be accepting of its contents.
Pinchot’s forest conservation ideas had come from his intensive European education in these matters. However, he seemed to believe that ideas that worked in Europe could be put into practice in the United States, whereas the lumbermen, according to F. E.’s later account, saw that there were vast differences in the two environments. For example, because the forests in Europe were so much smaller at that time, one standing tree in Germany had the value of a thousand feet of finished lumber in the United States.
Fred had used his father’s influence to encourage other lumber leaders to attend this important first conference to discuss the future of forestry. Most of the country’s prominent timber owners and lumbermen were present, and they were invited to sit on the stage to hear the president’s address. The opera house where the American Forest Congress meeting was held was packed.
In the event, Roosevelt did not perform as either Fred or Pinchot had expected. He hurried onto the stage at the congress, acknowledged the applause that followed him, and then turned to face the assembled leaders of the lumber industry arrayed before him. (F. E. later recalled that the president was grinning. No doubt he was enjoying the moment of surprise.) Entirely ignoring the speech Pinchot had prepared for him, he proceeded to give the lumbermen a severe “tongue-lashing.” With intemperate language, he called the assembled leaders “skinners of the soil” and “despoilers of the national heritage.” The lumbermen, who had come in good faith to learn something about future forestry practices, left the meeting disgusted. The next morning, however, Roosevelt was undoubtedly pleased by the reception the press gave his performance. The media’s consensus was that the president was the savior of the American forests.
In an account of these events written years later, F. E. admitted not liking Roosevelt, whom he also fairly called “the greatest personality of his generation.” (He believed that the president’s grandstanding had imposed a heavy cost on both the conservation effort and the lumber industry—not to mention contributing to his own embarrassment at having lured his father’s associates to the congress where they were publicly harangued.) He wrote,
It is probable that the real cause of forestry in this country was delayed not less than fifteen years because of this one speech…Pinchot went about the country proclaiming that in twenty-five years the forests of the country would be exhausted…The great era of speculative buying of timber-lands followed lasting until the beginning of the Great War. The Administration’s ill advised attacks on the lumber industry brought many unhappy results and to a considerable extent are responsible for many of the industry’s troubles today, especially those that grew out of excessive private ownership of lands.
Efforts that might have been made in common between the conservationist Roosevelt and his forestry administration and the lumbermen were no longer possible at that time. The spectacle had severed any possibilities for cooperation. F. E. wished that things had turned out differently.
What, exactly, were the health problems that prevented Frederick from coming to Washington to meet with President Roosevelt? F. E. recalls that in the winter of 1902–3 Frederick was in a “nervous” condition, undoubtedly suffering from insomnia and perhaps high blood pressure. He had recently undergone extensive dental work, which may have contributed to his problems.
Sam Davis and Apollonia had gone to San Antonio, Texas, taking with them Margaret and Richard’s son, Fritz, along with their own son, Edwin. The Davis couple persuaded Sarah and Frederick, along with the boy’s parents, to join them in the more agreeable Texas winter weather. However, on this trip, F. E. later wrote, “[Frederick] was giving unmistakable indications of an impending nervous breakdown.”
There may have been some contributing factors to the stress Frederick felt at this time. Some of the Denkmann cousins had made an unfortunate investment in a sawmill property and timberlands near Hammond, Louisiana. There was some confusion or misunderstanding about the ownership, in which Frederick had a significant interest. This matter, and others, seemed to weigh more heavily on him through the following winter than was normal, for according to diaries kept by F. E.’s wife, Harriette, Frederick expressed great distress in his conversations with her. He did not, however, tell her what troubled him.
Then, on the morning of April 17, 1904, when he was seventy years old, Frederick awoke to an unpleasant surprise: some serious difficulty in speaking. He also had trouble dressing but managed to finish the task and walked to church as usual. The walk was downhill, to the Presbyterian church located “downtown” in St. Paul. Frederick must have appeared pale; after the service some friends insisted that he ride back home in their carriage. When Sarah saw him, she wanted to call the doctor, but Frederick refused. That afternoon a friend, George F. Lindsay, stopped by for a visit and, seeing Frederick’s condition, knew instantly what had transpired. He called Dr. William Davis, who came immediately. Frederick had clearly suffered a stroke.
Family members later could not fix the date for this event, but Frederick himself had written in his diary an entry that identified it as April 17: “I took sick with a stroke of A—.” His inveterate habit of recording detail was still operating.
In the course of the following weeks Frederick began to show improvement, although his speech was never again as clear as it had been. His handwriting also changed. A letter fragment started to his son John, dated April 22, 1904, was all the more poignant for the brevity and shaky scrawl in which it was written: “Dear John. Come home.” On the same sheet Frederick had also written several times, “Dear Margaret.” Apparently the letters were never sent. Gradually, the handwriting in his letters returned to something close to its previous elegant form.
Frederick continued to struggle with ill health for the next several years. His own fragile health could have been additionally compromised by worry over his eldest son’s situation. John’s wife Nellie had died in 1900, leaving him with three young children. A year and a half later John married Nellie’s closest friend, Anna Mary Holbrook. She was possessed of a “fine mentality and quite unusual executive ability.” Leaving her job in Chicago, she devoted herself to raising John’s children. However, in 1906 a large tumor was discovered in Anna Mary that required surgical removal. Although she came through this surgery and began to improve, the effect of another trauma caused John to develop a serious nervous disorder, an affliction more severe than his father had experienced a few years earlier in San Antonio.
At this time Frederick and Sarah were about to embark on their final trip to Germany. He must have worried about John’s condition when they left on August 3, 1906, after visiting Anna in the hospital in Chicago. It was no surprise that Sarah and Frederick returned home earlier than planned, after Frederick’s short stay in the clinic at Baden-Baden.
Frederick appeared to recover from these events, but it took some time. A semblance of his health returned along with the clarity of his handwriting. But the stroke and depression left their mark on him. Some of his former vigor was dissipated, and he began to turn over many of his day-to-day business responsibilities to his sons. He continued to take an interest in what was happening and went to the office regularly, but he now seemed willing to relinquish, gradually, his strong leadership role.
Less than a year later another event that must have affected Frederick’s well-being took place. At the turn of the century a brand of journalism arose in the United States that came to be known as “muckraking.” The original purpose of this type of reporting was to expose corruption. But the approach ranged from Lincoln Steffens’s reporting on corruption in politics in St. Louis and Minneapolis to highly sensational personal attacks on public figures. The latter describes the article about Frederick Weyerhaeuser published in Cosmopolitan Magazine in January 1907. The piece was written in what today would be termed a tabloid style and was intended to boost magazine sales. The public was hungry for startling opinion and flamboyant charges. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s dramatic address at the American Forest Congress, the Cosmopolitan Magazine article met both criteria.
Charles P. Norcross was writing for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1907. He came to St. Paul for an interview with Frederick’s neighbor James J. Hill. The journalist was interested in Hill because of the Northern Pacific Railroad sale of land to Frederick and his partners. Norcross thought that Hill himself was the buyer behind Frederick. When Norcross found out the land sale was exactly as it had seemed on the surface, he had to create another story. He then turned his attention to Hill’s partner in the land deal—Frederick.
But how to make the quiet, retiring lumber businessman interesting to the public? The journalist hit upon a novel approach: tie Frederick’s lifework to “a national crime.” Under the title “Weyerhaeuser—Richer Than John D. Rockefeller,” the preface to the article set the stage for the opinion behind it.
That a comparatively obscure man possessing properties worth billions of dollars should be living among us, silent, unobserved and unexploited, is in itself an astonishing fact. That this excessively modest, not to say secretive, character, despite his widespread dealings has managed to keep out of the lime-light of publicity is well-nigh a miracle. But the Cosmopolitan has uncovered him and, through its investigator Mr. Charles P. Norcross, gives to the world in the following article a complete exposition of this remarkable person, the story of his slow but certain accumulation of a gigantic fortune, and the national crime which made the Weyerhaeuser billions possible.
The article goes on to describe Frederick as
Timber king and recluse…lord of millions of far-flung timber lands…Weyerhaeuser’s wealth and opportunity grew out of a national crime. One of the most wanton wrongs ever committed in this country has been the spend-thrift waste of forests. It was only recently that the nation awoke to the vandalism that has been going on unhindered for years and began establishing forest reserves…Weyerhaeuser, born in a land where forestry is an exact science, realized that the methods in vogue, if left unchecked, would in time exhaust even the prodigal wealth of the land and bring on a timber famine that would cause forest lands to appreciate in value. Fifty years ago he sought out timberland and secured the best of timber properties.
Norcross had reduced Frederick’s decades of tramping forests, fostering partnerships, and building a lumber business to a conspiratorial land grab whose purpose was to acquire timberlands before conservation took over the country.
The article was based on misunderstandings of major proportions about how the timber business worked and how Frederick had organized his various partnerships for investing. Norcross knew little about the lumber industry and seems to have confused dollars with board feet of lumber, turning billions of feet of timber into billions of dollars. F. E. wrote later, “Not a single statement discrediting to Father in the entire article had one iota of truth. It is an amazing and brazen fabrication of lies and gross exaggerations.” Nevertheless, this article and the disagreeable publicity that followed caused the Weyerhaeuser family an immense amount of annoyance and left the impression that it was tremendously wealthy.
The allegations that Frederick would have had a grasp of German forest conservation practices when he was a farm boy in Niedersaulheim were unreasonable and unfounded. Frederick’s understanding of emerging forestry practices in the United States was grossly misrepresented to make it appear that his entire career was an effort to forestall conservation efforts. Yet once the article with its inaccuracies and misrepresentations was written, published, and read, the appalling picture of Frederick as the perpetrator of a “national crime” took hold in the public mind.
Frederick, F. E. later reported, “gave little attention to the article. He was rather amused than offended. It never occurred to him the American people would accept such drivel.”
But politicians read magazines. Frederick was eventually summoned to Washington to explain his alleged nefarious activities to Congress. He went with one of his longtime partners, William Irvine, and gave the information that was required. The Moline daily newspaper headlines were inflammatory, but the investigation came to nothing. A series of antitrust actions began at this time, and although the impact on the lumber industry was not positive, the suits generally petered out or were dismissed. As F. E. noted later, his father’s multiple, unique partnerships with various men for specific timber deals did not meet the criteria of Teddy Roosevelt’s targets, the huge conglomerates that Roosevelt labeled “combinations.”
Another of the so-called muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, had a markedly different experience with the “lumber king.” In The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Steffens writes that his editor at McClure’s sent him to St. Paul to interview Frederick, who was reportedly wealthy and a recluse. He gave the following account in his memoir:
I went to St. Paul, found Weyerhaeuser’s modest, orderly office, and learned from his clerks that he always refused to be interviewed. They told me a little about him, how precise he was, how quiet, methodical, prompt. “Gets down here at the office every day at exactly 7:30.” I think that was the minute; maybe it was 7:15. Anyway I was there five minutes before the hour named the next morning, and when the round, gray, smiling German arrived I asked him for an interview.
“I am never interviewed,” he said. “I don’t care for write-ups.” He was about to go through the swinging gate.
“I don’t propose to write you up,” I said. “I want to write you down.”
He stopped, looked. “Come in,” he invited, holding the gate open…
I told him I had learned that he had started with nothing and acquired great wealth and half the forests of America. “What did it cost you?” I asked.
He started to shake his head, as if to say, “Nothing,” but he was staring at me and his intelligent, wide-open eyes saw something of my meaning. His smile vanished. His face grew serious. “You mean…?”
Steffens claims to have spent several hours with Frederick and to have promised not to write an article in return for some candid conversation on the topic of Frederick’s wealth. He asked, “What did it cost you?” Steffens said Frederick told him how he got the timber, how he used power in politics and made campaign contributions during the Wisconsin river battles. Steffens implies Frederick confided in him. At the end of their conversation, Steffens asked how wealthy Frederick actually was. Frederick called the bank to inquire. The man at the bank could not tell him.
“He doesn’t know either, can’t say offhand.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” I said.
“No, that isn’t the point. We’ve got the cost; the profits don’t matter.”
This he said absentmindedly, and absentmindedly he saw me to the door. I went away and back to Chicago, like Weyerhäuser absentmindedly, thinking how much better a man can be than he thinks he is.
Steffens never published any article about Frederick Weyerhaeuser.
During these years, Sarah’s health worsened. Frederick, as he explained in letters to his friends in Niedersaulheim, wanted to do what he could to alleviate her difficulties. Because she found the Minnesota winters burdensome, he purchased a house in Pasadena, California. At one point, after the unwelcome notoriety caused by the Cosmopolitan Magazine article, the press had difficulty locating Frederick for comments. International headlines blared that Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the lumber king, was missing. However, as he telegraphed with typical brevity in response to an anxious telegram from his distant cousins in Germany, he “never was lost.”
On the matter of Frederick being “Richer Than Rockefeller” and the episode of alleged “lostness,” the irrepressible Bancroft Hill had his own amused response from Poughkeepsie on March 12, 1907.
Dear Father:
I see you are again making trouble. After having become the richest man in the world—greatly to the mortification of Rockefeller and the despair of Harriman—now you have gone and lost yourself in California, and have got all the poor, overworked employees of the Southern Pacific hunting for you. Really, you ought to be ashamed of yourself at your time of life—to keep the public mind so stirred up.
I have had short distance and long distance telephones asking me if I could throw any light upon the matter. I told them it was just what I expected—that you had most mysteriously appeared as richer than Rockefeller and I expected that at any time you would just as mysteriously disappear; that both stories came from the same source and there was as much truth in the one as in the other. Evidently the Hearst reporter has got Weyerhaeuser on the brain and whenever he takes a drink too much he sees visions of the billionaire.
The whole affair is annoying; but it can’t be cured so we might as well endure it cheerfully. Elise gets impatient sometimes and thinks something ought to be done by way of denial in the papers; but I tell her that the least said the sooner the whole matter will be forgotten. It is one of the penalties we have to take along with increase of riches.
W. B. Hill
Part of Frederick’s legacy was the evolution of his thinking on the future of forests. In the early part of his life, he was not concerned with supply. As he said himself, when he saw the forests of Wisconsin he felt as though he had seen a secret treasure. After forty years of working in the logging and lumber industry, however, his views had modified somewhat. In 1908 he still saw a nearly inexhaustible supply of timber in the nation. “There is very much more timber than folks have an idea of and it will last longer,” he said at that time. But by then he also saw certain threats to a future supply of lumber, due to multiple circumstances. Some of these were man-made and could be alleviated by laws, like the system of timberland taxation, and some were less easily controlled, like the threat of forest fires.
We know of his views because Frederick was called to testify before a committee of the Sixtieth Congress of the United States in 1908. The committee was concerned about the future of the nation’s wood supply, so they held hearings in Wisconsin and Minnesota from September through December. It was particularly appropriate to have the hearings in Wisconsin because severe fires had recently raged through that state’s forests, leaving devastation and destroying tens of thousands of acres of trees.
The “Pulp and Paper Investigation Hearings” panel interviewed Frederick on Monday, October 26, 1908, at ten o’clock AM. The purpose was to find out his thoughts on the future of forests and timber.
The chairman, James R. Mann, congressman from Illinois, asked Frederick for his views on “the present and future of pulp paper, including in its relations the situation concerning the forests and the future supply…We have been told by a great many people both in the East and in the West that there was no man in the country whose judgment would be worth more than yours, and we would like to hear your impressions of the subject.”
Frederick, with characteristic modesty, demurred that he “did not know more about the timber country than those men that travel around there,” but the chairman pressed him further for his thoughts. He complied by offering a series of comments about the future that appear, in retrospect, to be remarkably modern. They included thoughts on the preservation of forests for generations to come.
His statements about timber and the future supply of lumber had repercussions in subsequent years, particularly in actions by government or legislative bodies to protect forests. While there is not an exact cause and effect between his statements and these developments, his foresight and advice to Congress remain part of his legacy.
Frederick’s key points to the congressmen were these:
The major problem causing timber loss is forest fire and laws should be created to enforce that those in the forests take care not to create man-made fires through carelessness.
Taxes have an enormous impact on the timber output. Lumbermen have to pay taxes annually on their full crop of standing timber, yet it takes two hundred years to raise a good pine tree. Even if the trees are cut early, the Lumberman pays taxes fifty or sixty times for the pine tree he eventually cuts down.
The state should buy some land and try to raise forests for the future, such as is the practice in Europe.
We will not conserve until the value of a tree is recognized, and that will be when it is scarce.
We should be thinking about what comes after us and our children and grandchildren.
In retrospect, it’s amazing how forward-looking Frederick was on these issues. Many changes in the areas he cited subsequently came to pass. For example, state help for private associations to combat fires occurred in the West within a few years. Other changes, such as the Weyerhaeuser Company tree farm (reforestation) program, came decades later but continue down to the present. The seeds were sown when Frederick raised these issues.