He never held public office but managed to exert considerable influence in reformist circles and did much to keep progressive and Georgist ideas alive in the 1920s.

[1] Pinchot was educated at St. Paul's, and at Yale where he was a member of the secret society Skull and Bones,[2]: 88–9  He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897.

[3][4] Shortly after being admitted to the bar, Pinchot was appointed deputy assistant district attorney for New York County.

[3][4] In 1905, Pinchot 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, which pitted his brother (recently fired as the US Forest Service chief) against President William Howard Taft's Secretary of the Interior.

Though a member of Roosevelt's inner circle during the Bull Moose campaign of 1912, Pinchot 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 Walbridge Perkins, who was a leading industrialist and sat on the board of U.S. Steel.

His opposition to preparedness before World War I, insistence that wartime profits be heavily taxed, strong anticommunism in his later years, and involvement in the America First Committee alienated many political allies and made his last days difficult.