LABORATORIES, LYCEUMS, LORDS: THE NATIONAL ZOOLOGICAL PARK AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUMANISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Daniel A. Vandersommers, M.A.
Graduate Program in History
The Ohio State University
2014
Dissertation Committee:
Professor Randolph Roth, Advisor Professor John L. Brooke Professor Chris Otter
Copyright by
Daniel A. Vandersommers
2014
ABSTRACT
This dissertation tells the story of how a zoo changed the world. Certainly, Charles
Darwin shocked scientists with his 1859 publication On the Origin of Species, by showing how all life emerged from a common ancestor through the process of natural selection. Darwin’s classic, though, cannot explain why by the end of the century many people thought critically about the relationship between humans and animals. To understand this phenomenon, historians need to look elsewhere. Between 1870 and 1910, as Darwinism was debated endlessly in intellectual circles, zoological parks appeared suddenly at the heart of every major American city and had (at least) tens of millions of visitors. Darwin’s theory of evolution inspired scientists and philosophers to theorize about humans and animals. Public zoos, though, allowed the multitudes to experience daily the similarities between the human world and the animal kingdom.
Upon entering the zoo, Americans saw the world’s exotic species for the first time—their long necks, sharp teeth, bright colors, gargantuan sizes, ivory extremities, spots, scales, and stripes. Yet, more significantly, Americans listened to these animals too. They learned to take animals seriously as they interacted with them along zoo walkways. In fact, zoo animals led zoogoers in surprising directions— to the halls of Congress, to the halls of museums, to global trade networks, to the birth of the airplane, to the formation of primatology, to tuberculosis outbreaks, to the rise of animal rights, and to the genesis of ecology. Zoos, in turn, ushered animals into the heart of American politics, print culture, science, environmentalism, ethics, and medicine.
Zoological parks encouraged visitors to approach animals on their own terms. In so doing, zoos put Humanism on display, where the limits of anthropocentrism could be scrutinized ii by a zoogoing world. Zoological parks at the turn of the century prepared the way for later environmental, conservation, and animal rights movements. They prepared the way for later cultural entanglements with the life sciences, like the Scopes Monkey Trial. Zoological parks functioned as theaters that first demonstrated simple lessons about animals that would capture the attention of the ever-expanding and ever-specializing body of scholars devoted to the study of life throughout the twentieth century. And zoological parks functioned as the first public tutorials in post-humanist thinking. This dissertation tells the story of how a zoo transformed the way that
Americans thought about humans, animals, and environments.
iii
DEDICATION
To Miles
From Daddy
I love you
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many individuals have contributed to the successful completion of this dissertation. First mention is reserved for my dissertation committee. Randolph Roth, my dissertation advisor, taught me to embrace interdisciplinary thinking, encouraged me to follow my passions, pushed me to improve my writing, and always provided encouragement and support. John Brooke showed me how to look into the past and see both micro- and macrocosms simultaneously. He always went out of his way to express confidence in my project and me. And Chris Otter, who directed the environmental history seminar in which this project was born, taught me the most important lesson of my graduate school years—Read broadly because things are interconnected in surprising ways. Beyond these three mentors, I must also thank Alan Gallay, Walter Rucker,
Stephen Kern, Nigel Rothfels, and Leslie Alexander. These professors took interest in me, and they all contributed to shaping me as a scholar and teacher. Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge Michael Kimaid, Amílcar Challú, and Leigh Ann Wheeler for first kindling my love for history at Bowling Green State University.
Research over the last four years has led me to many archives. I must thank the staff of the following institutions: The Philadelphia Zoo Archives, Library Company of Philadelphia,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Museum of Science in Boston, Harvard University Archives,
Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Massachusetts Historical Society,
Bronx Zoo Archives, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, National Air and Space
Archives, National Anthropological Archives, and (most importantly) the Smithsonian Institution
Archives. Research conducted at these institutions shaped this dissertation and my larger project
v concerning zoos and zoology in American history. I am indebted to the archivists, librarians, and staff associated with these institutions. Financial support for my research has been provided by
The Ohio State University Graduate School; The Ohio State University Department of History;
The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences; The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; The Kauffman Family Research Fund; and the National Science Foundation. I am thankful for everyone who believed in and supported my research.
When I page through this dissertation, I see the fingerprints of loved ones in its margins.
First, I would like to thank my parents, Dana and Aaron Vandersommers, for reading to me as a child. I truly believe that those (almost) daily trips to the library and bookmobile are somehow responsible for everything I have accomplished in school, from elementary years to doctoral years. I would like to thank Steve and Debbie McCarter for demonstrating what it means to live lives fueled by curiosity. They also showed me how to live for others. I would like to thank Dan
Watkins for reading and commenting on drafts of several of the chapters below. I would like to thank Jeff Battiste for a decade of intellectual conversation and, more importantly, friendship.
And I would like to thank Megan Pillar for loving me in and through all things.
vi
VITA
June 2003 Graduated High School Wadsworth High School Wadsworth, Ohio
May 2007 Earned B.A. in History Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio
June 2010 Earned M.A. in American History The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio
May 2011 Ph.D. Candidate The Ohio State University Department of History Columbus, Ohio
PUBLICATIONS
“History from the Howdah: A New Methodology for Animal History.” Review of Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, by Susan Nance. Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies 5, no. 2 (Spring 2014).
"William Temple Hornaday e Sua Zoologia Taxidermista: de animais mortos a animais vivos." Translated by Eduardo Vasconcelos. Expedições: Teoria da História e Historiografiada 3, no. 2 (2012): 9-46.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: History
Specialization: Early American History
Secondary Specializations: Environmental, Atlantic World
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... ii
Dedication ...... iv
Acknowledgments...... v
Vita...... vii
List of Tables ...... ix
List of Graphs ...... xi
List of Images ...... xii
Introduction: A “New Institutional History” of the Zoological Park ...... 1
Chapter 1: William Temple Hornaday and His Taxidermist Zoology ...... 14
Chapter 2: The Utility of a National Zoo ...... 76
Chapter 3: Runaway Animals ...... 120
Chapter 4: The National Zoological Park as a Crossroads for Science and Popular Culture ...... 161
Chapter 5: Environments and Ecologies in the National Zoological Park ...... 229
Chapter 6: Animal Activism and the Zoo-Networked Nation ...... 298
Chapter 7: The Zoonotic Nature of Tuberculosis ...... 349
Conclusion: Being-in-the-World After the Zoo Movement...... 403
Bibliography ...... 457
viii
Appendix A: Tables ...... 484
Appendix B: Miss M. Gunderson Letter ...... 490
Appendix C: Images for Chapter One...... 493
Appendix D: Images for Chapter Two ...... 500
Appendix E: Images for Chapter Three ...... 514
Appendix F: Images for Chapter Four ...... 515
Appendix G: Images for Chapter Five ...... 522
Appendix H: Images for Chapter Six ...... 535
Appendix I: Images for Chapter Seven ...... 540
Appendix J: Images for Conclusion ...... 546
ix
List of Tables
Table 1. Mammals in the Department of Living Animals ...... 484
Table 2. Birds in the Department of Living Animals ...... 487
Table 3. Reptiles in the Department of Living Animals ...... 489
x
List of Graphs
Graph 1. Usage of “National Zoological Park,” 1820-1930 ...... 347
Graph 2. Usage of “zoological garden,” 1820-1930 ...... 347
Graph 3. Usage of “animal rights,” 1820-1930 ...... 348
Graph 4. Usage of “animal rights,” 1800-1980 ...... 348
Graph 5. Death Toll by Tuberculosis in the National Zoological Park, 1903-1916 ...... 368
Graph 6. Usage of “natural history,” 1780-1920 ...... 425
Graph 7. Usage of “biology,” 1780-1920 ...... 426
Graph 8. Usage of “zoology,” 1780-1920...... 426
xi
List of Images
Image 4.1. Soaring Bird Sketch ...... 205
Image 4.2. “John Crow” In Flight ...... 207
Image 4.3. Weathercock ...... 215
Image 4.4. Langley’s Aerodrome ...... 217
Image C.1. Hornaday’s Bison ...... 493
Image C.2. South Hall of the USNM ...... 494
Image C.3. Hornaday’s Bison Family ...... 495
Image C.4. William Temple Hornaday ...... 496
Image C.5. Hornaday and the Taxidermic Laboratory ...... 497
Image C.6. Hornaday and Baby Bison ...... 498
Image C.7. The Smithsonian Bison Herd ...... 499
Image D.1. Surveying Zoo Grounds ...... 500
Image D.2. The Rock Creek ...... 501
Image D.3. The Rock Creek Valley ...... 502
Image D.4. Fields along the Rock Creek ...... 503
Image D.5. Early Model of the NZP ...... 504
Image D.6. Road Running Through the Rock Creek Park ...... 505
Image D.7. The Woodlands of the Rock Creek Park ...... 506
Image D.8. Bird’s-Eye View of the Rock Creek Park ...... 507
Image D.9. Woodlands and Holt House ...... 508
Image D.10. Samuel P. Langley ...... 509 xii
Image D.11. Frank Baker ...... 510
Image D.12. Plans for the National Zoo ...... 511
Image D.13. The Zoo in Washington, D.C...... 512
Image D.14. “Sharing The Expense” ...... 513
Image E.1. Admiral George Dewey ...... 514
Image F.1. Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ...... 515
Image F.2. Richard Lynch Garner ...... 516
Image F.3. Garner in His Cage ...... 517
Image F.4: Garner Attracting Monkeys ...... 518
Image F.5. A Gorilla Subject Approaches Garner’s Laboratory ...... 519
Image F.6. Langley Observing a Buzzard...... 520
Image F.7. Langley’s Zoo Tower ...... 521
Image G.1. Young’s Pier ...... 522
Image G.2. Net Haul on Young’s Pier ...... 523
Image G.3. Seton’s Study of Antelope Heads ...... 524
Image G.4. Seton’s Study of Antelope Rumps ...... 525
Image G.5. Seton’s Study of Antelope “Flashing” ...... 526
Image G.6. Seton’s Study of Antelope Glands and Rump-Patches ...... 527
Image G.7. Seton’s Study of the Peacock Train ...... 528
Image G.8. Seton’s Study of Ostrich Movement ...... 529
Image G.9. Ernest Thompson Seton ...... 530
Image G.10. Bison Grazing ...... 531
Image G.11. Elk Enclosure ...... 532
Image G.12. Swans in the Rock Creek ...... 533
xiii
Image G.13. Eagle Cage ...... 534
Image H.1. Blackburne with Dunk and Gold Dust ...... 535
Image H.2. Gold Dust, Dunk, Blackburne ...... 536
Image H.3. Elephant House ...... 537
Image H.4. Secretary Charles Walcott ...... 538
Image H.5. Blackburne and a Camel ...... 539
Image I.1. Tubercle Bacillus ...... 540
Image I.2. Robert Koch ...... 541
Image I.3. Frederick William True ...... 542
Image I.4. William Temple Hornaday and a Greater Kudo ...... 543
Image I.5. Peter Chalmers Mitchell ...... 544
Image I.6. Cy DeVry ...... 545
Image J.1. “Statistics of Zoological Collections” ...... 546
Image J.2. Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park, 1902...... 547
Image J.3. Guide Book: Lion ...... 548
Image J.4. Guide Book: Carnivora House ...... 549
Image J.5. Guide Book: Moose ...... 550
Image J.6. Guide Book: Caribou ...... 551
Image J.7. Guide Book: Antelope ...... 552
Image J.8. Guide Book: Grizzly ...... 553
Image J.9. Guide Book: The Bird Cage ...... 554
Image J.10. Guide Book: Elk ...... 555
Image J.11. Guide Book: The Buffalo...... 556
Image J.12. Guide Book: Beaver ...... 557
xiv
Image J.13. Guide Book: Tiger ...... 558
Image J.14. Guide Book: Bear Dens ...... 559
Image J.15. Guide Book: Rocky Mountain Sheep ...... 560
Image J.16. Guide Book: Puma and California Condor ...... 561
Image J.17. Guide Book: Philippine Buffalo ...... 562
Image J.18. Tasmanian Zebra Wolf ...... 563
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Introduction A “New Institutional History” of the Zoological Park
An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language. . . . This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic venture that we call man. But no speech will ever repeat what that stammering knows and can proclaim. -- Martin Buber, I and Thou1
America’s Gilded Age and Progressive Era was also an age of popular science. In the
November, 1913 edition of The Popular Science Monthly, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, a leading ornithologist, osteologist, paleontologist, museologist, and anthropologist, published a short article entitled “The National Zoological Garden.”2 He opened in the following manner: “My home at the present time is within ten minutes’ walk of the National Zoological Park at
Washington, and, as a matter of fact, when my study window is open, and outside conditions are favorable, the howling of the coyotes and wolves, the barking of the seals, and the calls of the big birds of prey are, each and all, heard with delightful distinctness.”3 The National Zoological Park opened to the public in 1891, yet more than two decades after its establishment, the voices of the zoo’s inhabitants still reverberated beyond the zoo’s fences, intriguing all in earshot.4
1 Buber, Martin, I and Though, Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004), 75. 2 Lambrecht, Kalman, "In Memoriam: Robert Wilson Shufeldt, 1850-1934," The Auk: A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology 52, no. 4 (October 1935): 359-61. 3 Shufeldt, R. W., "The National Zoological Garden," The Popular Science Monthly 83, no. 5 (November, 1913): 434. 4 In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the term “zoo” was sometimes viewed as a crass abbreviation of “zoological park” or “zoological garden.” Throughout this dissertation, I use “zoo,” “zoological park,” and “zoological garden” interchangeably. An 1879 Harper’s Monthly Magazine article about the Philadelphia Zoo illustrates how the term “zoo” was sometimes heard by the elite. In this article, Marie Howland wrote, “Should any purist object to the word ‘zoo’ for ‘zoological garden,’ he must be reminded of the folly of resisting the popular will, or even a popular whim. The people will not take the time nor the trouble to say ‘zoological garden’ when ‘zoo’ will answer all practical purposes. Londoners, even the most elegant, talk of their ‘Zoo,’ and the use of this diminutive is so common in this country that 1
Shufeldt’s seven-page article conveyed many messages. First, Shufeldt wrote as an advocate for zoos everywhere, claiming generally that zoos were “extremely valuable institutions
. . . to any civilized community of people.”5 Second, Shufeldt wrote as an animal activist. He encouraged the National Zoological Park to build larger enclosures that did not “torture” animals, and he urged Congress to pass appropriations that could support a humane zoo.6 Specifically,
Shufeldt found the state of the bear cages and “dens” appalling, and he believed that many zoo animals were “fit subjects for the action of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.”7
He informed his readers that “[e]very intelligent naturalist and psychologist knows what wild animals of all kinds hourly suffer when confined for months—sometimes for several years—in small cages, pits and pens; their mental suffering is terrible, and only equaled by that endured by some highly educated person similarly confined.” Third, Shufeldt wrote as an environmentalist when he lamented the failure of the zoo’s aquarium, for he believed that the “immense problem” of fisheries made it “vitally important” to study fish “both in nature and in aquaria.”8 Fourth,
Shufeldt wrote as a booster for the National Zoo, praising the spaciousness of some of its
one zoological society, and that the second in importance in the country—that of Cincinnati—publishes its catalogue and guide under the title, The Zoo-Zoo, and in the preface to the work the word zoo occurs in all seriousness and without quotation points.” Howland, Marie, "The Philadelphia Zoo," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (1879): 699. The word “popular,” which will be used throughout this dissertation in various contexts, also sometimes held negative connotations in the nineteenth-century. When I use the words “popular” or “popularize,” I do so to convey the public reach of the subject attached to these words. In no way do I use these words to express judgment, as some individuals in the nineteenth century might have done. For an historical examination of the always-contested term “popular” see Morag Shiach’s Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in Cultural Analysis, 1730 to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 5 Shufeldt, 434. 6 Ibid., 435. 7 Ibid., 434-435, 437. Concerning bears, Shufeldt wrote, “These cages are doubtless the best that the limited funds at the disposal of the management will purchase; but any one who knows anything of a bear’s needs, knows full well that it is a cruelty to keep them in such quarters as those in which they are now confined. These cages should be five or six times their present size, and running water should pass through them. There should be areas enclosed of soft ground for the bears to scratch and roll upon; and, above all, a number of trees, as large as possible, should be enclosed, in that they could climb to their heart’s content. It is a truly pitiable sight to see these poor creatures try to “kill time” in every way that their tortured ursine minds can devise in these big rat-traps.” 8 Ibid., 439. 2 enclosures. Despite hosting substandard exhibits, the National Zoo’s “flying-cage” and deer, moose, and caribou paddocks, for example, represented pioneering enclosures modeled on naturalistic settings.9 Fifth, Shufeldt wrote as a man of science and medicine who believed that the zoological park made the perfect place for anatomical laboratories.10 And sixth, Shufeldt wrote as a patron of the arts who smiled approvingly upon the “enthusiastic boy, vigorously at work with pencil, color or brush, in front of one of the cages, doing his best to faithfully portray its inmate.”11
Shufeldt saw the National Zoological Park as a dynamic place. He recognized that the salaries of zoo employees “would make a car conductor blush.” He recognized that “a third of the rare animals [were] housed in hat-boxes.” And he recognized that the zoo possessed “no aquaria or reptile house worthy of the name.” Nonetheless, Shufeldt also recognized that, by 1913, “so much [had] been accomplished” in the National Zoological Park.12 For “the sculptor in search of correct poses of animals for his art; the scientific taxidermist; the artist and biologist, and an hundred others of the classes that make up the great scientific, artistic and learned body of people of the country”— “classes” that Shufeldt labelled the “nature classes”— the National Zoological
Park represented a place of opportunity.13
9 Shufeldt, 436-437. Concerning the flying-cage, Shufeldt wrote, “One of the grandest sights in our National Park at Washington is the great flying-cage for large-sized living birds. This immense wire structure is no less than 150 feet long, and 50 feet high and wide . . . the interior of this elegant structure, which is situated in a very attractive spot, the surroundings being forest, stream and wooded hillside. Two black-bellied tree ducks (Dendrocygna autumnalis) are seen at the edge of one of the swimming pools . . . and fine examples of pelicans, water turkeys, night herons, gulls, cranes, storks, and their many allies live most happily in this enormous and attractive cage, — indeed, so attractive has it been made, and in such a secluded spot, that the wild herons come every year and build their nests on the top of it, in the vines there running over the wire. It is truly a grand sight and one of the redeeming features of the place.” Concerning the paddocks, Shufeldt wrote, “Some of the paddocks for deer, moose, caribou and the like are as fine as can be found anywhere in the world, and the animals inhabiting them are probably as contented and certainly as comfortable as their relatives enjoying their freedom in their native wilds.” 10 Ibid., 435. 11 Ibid., 439. 12 Ibid., 435. 13 Ibid., 440. 3
Robert Wilson Shufeldt recognized the National Zoological Park as a place filled with many different stories, written by and for many different people. And he recognized the zoo as a laboratory and lyceum for the “nature classes” of the United States. What he did not quite recognize, though, was the extent to which the National Zoological Park transported its zoogoing public into a wider world of Nature. Upon its foundation, the National Zoological Park achieved a transformative life of its own. This dissertation will examine what transformational power looked like when manifested along zoo walkways.
Zoo History
Prior to the new millennium, the historiography of zoological parks remained thin. The first serious academic histories to examine zoos were written by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in the
1970s. Her research casted zoological parks as important subjects for historical analysis, yet she focused on the establishment of zoos as new and elite cultural institutions. Her work relied upon top-down analysis and largely bypassed issues concerning zoogoers’ experiences within zoos, as well as topics relevant to environmental history, intellectual history, and the history of science.14
Then, in 1981, R. Jeffrey Stott examined American zoos through the lens of intellectual history.
His dissertation explored the American conception of zoological parks over the course of a long twentieth century, but did not delve into any single zoo, situated in a specific time and place.15
The most foundational work in zoo history, though, arrived in 1987 with Harriet Ritvo’s The
Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. A must-read classic in environmental history and the now emerging field of animal history, a chapter of Ritvo’s work examined the imperial significance of the Regent’s Park Zoo and showed historians how to
14 Horowitz, Helen L., “The National Zoological Park: ‘City of Refuge’ or Zoo?” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 49 (1973-74): 405-429; Horowitz, “Animal and Man in the New York Zoological Park,” New York History 56 (October 1975): 426-455; Horowitz, “Seeing Ourselves through the Bars: A Historical Tour of American Zoos,” Landscape 25, no. 2 (1981): 12-19. 15 Stott, R. Jeffrey, “The American Idea of a Zoological Park: An Intellectual History” (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Santa Barbara, 1981); Stott, “The Historical Origins of the Zoological Park in American Thought,” Environmental Review 5 (Fall, 1981): 52-65. 4
“read” zoo animals as living texts of human society.16 Together, Horowitz, Stott, and Ritvo proved that zoological parks were worthy subjects of historical analysis.
In the 1990s, as zoos became politicized in the American public sphere and as several zoos celebrated significant anniversaries, the number of zoo histories expanded greatly. However, most of these histories were “popular histories.” Written by armchair historians, zoo enthusiasts, or zoo employees, this literature, in the words of historian Jeffrey Nugent Hyson, is mostly a collection “of colorful personalities and amusing anecdotes, helpful as source material but useless as analytical guides.”17 Some of these works were sweeping and generalized histories of zoological parks everywhere, and others were studies of individual zoos that simply connected a local zoo to local history. Generally, this body of literature lacked analytical depth, placing “zoo history” along an outmoded, teleological narrative of progress, where zoos rose to glory with
Civilization over the course of the twentieth century.18 Nonetheless, the sheer volume of
16 Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 205-242. For another early academic history of European zoos, also emphasizing issues of imperialism see Ilse Jahn’s “Zoologische Gärten in Stadtkultur und Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 15 (December 1992): 213-225. For thoughts on “animal history” see Harriet Ritvo’s “History and Animal Studies,” Society and Animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 403-406, Harriet Ritvo’s "Animal Planet," In Global Environmental History: A Reader, edited by John R. McNeill and Alan Roe (New York: Routledge, 2013), and Richard W. Bulliet’s Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 17 Hyson, Jeffrey Nugent, “Urban Jungles: Zoos and American Society” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1999), 3-4. 18 For good histories of individual zoos see David Ehrlinger’s The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden: From Past to Present (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, 1993), Andrea Friederici Ross’s Let the Lions Roar! The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo (Brookfield, IL: Chicago Zoological Society, 1997), or Carolyn & Don Etter’s The Denver Zoo: A Centennial History (Boulder, Colorado: Denver Zoological Foundation/Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1995). For less scholarly histories of local zoos (most, but not all, of which were published around the 1990s) see William Bridges’s Gathering of Animals: An Unconventional History of the New York Zoological Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); An Animal Garden in Fairmount Park (Philadelphia: Zoological Society of Philadelphia, 1988); and Harry M. Wegeforth and Neil Morgan’s It Began with a Roar! The Beginning of the World-Famous San Diego Zoo, rev. ed. (San Diego: Zoological Society of San Diego, 1990). For other popular histories of zoological parks (published in the 1990s as well as earlier) see James Fisher’s Zoos of the World (London: Aldus Books, 1966), Emily Hahn’s Animal Gardens (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969), Vicki Croke’s The Modern Ark: The Story of Zoos, Past, Present and Future (New York: Scribner, 1997), Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier’s Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: 5
“popular” zoo histories produced in the 1990s demonstrates the degree to which zoos were coming into view, by both scholars and the public.19
In 2002, two groundbreaking histories paved the way for further research in zoo history.20
By examining German entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck’s nineteenth-century animal collecting and zoo-building endeavors, Nigel Rothfels’s Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo became the first history to examine the complicated processes involved in establishing a zoological park. Savages and Beasts documented the rise of large-scale, international animal trading, described the Hagenbeck Revolution that relocated zoo animals from cages to naturalistic enclosures, and used both topics as windows into German business and culture in an increasingly globalizing world. This dissertation, and all historical work on zoological parks, is indebted to
Rothfels’s classic.21 The year of Savages and Beasts was also the year of Elizabeth Hanson’s
Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos, which instantly became the most important history of the American public zoo movement. Through in-depth research in several
American zoo archives, Hanson demonstrated the importance of zoological parks to not only cultural history, but also to environmental history and the history of science. Animal Attractions was a foundational zoo history that explored many issues surrounding the first eight decades of
Reaktion, 2002), Wilfrid Blunt’s The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), Robert J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Marthe Kiley-Worthington’s Animals in Circuses and Zoos: Chiron’s World? (London: Little Eco-Farms Publishing, 1990), and Vernon N. Kisling, Jr.’s Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens (New York: CRC Press, 2001). 19 Not only were zoos “coming into view,” but so was Sea World. For an excellent scholarly examination of Sea World and corporate America see Susan G. Davis’s Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 20 In 2001, David Hancocks published his well-written A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2001). While written for a popular audience, this book is an important interpretation of zoos past and present, written by a former zoo director and architect. 21 Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 6
American zoological parks. Animal Attractions should be viewed as a prelude to this dissertation, for many of the topics explored in-depth below were first introduced by Hanson’s little book.22
Since 2002, and especially in the last few years, zoo history has become a burgeoning field of research. In 2009, Lynn Nyhart, with her widely-read Modern Nature: The Rise of the
Biological Perspective in Germany, furthered Rothfels’s discussion of German zoological parks and extended Hanson’s analysis of zoos as scientific and environmental institutions.23 Since then, research in zoo history has proliferated, producing several recent dissertations not yet published as monographs.24 Not only have zoos become relevant subjects of historical inquiry, but they
22 Hanson, Elizabeth, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Whereas Hanson’s work discusses many American zoos over longer periods of zoo history and presents brief conversations about many different topics surrounding American zoos (including: zoos in relation to parks and circuses, the types of inhabitants and visitors found in zoos, the American animal trade, zoo expeditions, and enclosure design), this dissertation presents a focused analysis of the first two decades of one zoological park. Animal Attractions utilizes the National Zoo’s archival collection more than any other published monograph. However, those interested specifically in the history of the National Zoo should read the unpublished manuscript of Sybil E. Hamlet. Found in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 37, this manuscript discusses the history of the National Zoo until 1987. This history is quite helpful in providing a general timeline of happenings within the zoo, especially concerning issues of building and funding (topics largely sidestepped in this dissertation). However, Hamlet’s manuscript simply presents the history of the zoo quite literally as an unpolished, unedited “list” of events. Hamlet never used the data compiled to create either a work of historical analysis or a work of historical narrative. The information functions only as a detailed “timeline.” In no way will this dissertation provide an exhaustive, chronological, and “classical” institutional history of the National Zoological Park, one that outlines everything that occurred in a month-by-month order. For this type of institutional history, please see Hamlet’s unpublished work. I only draw off this manuscript when doing so bolsters the arguments of the chapters below. I occasionally use this manuscript as a primary source, but since Hamlet provides no citations, I do not rely upon this manuscript as a secondary source. I footnote Hamlet when I use information from the manuscript to strengthen my own research. In several instances (concerning flight in Chapter Four, for example) I reconstruct events that Hamlet mentions briefly. When relying upon primary sources, I footnote these instead of the “citation-less” Hamlet manuscript. 23 Nyhart, Lynn K., Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 24 These dissertations, as demonstrated by their titles, explore many issues and many different zoos. Together, they show the growing relevance of zoos as subjects of historical inquiry. See James M. Burnes’s "The People's Zoo: William M. Mann, the National Zoo, and the Birth of American Wildlife Conservation, 1889-1960," (Thesis, Lamar University - Beaumont, 2012), Noah Cincinnati’s “Arks for Empires: American Zoos, Imperialism, and the Struggle for International Wildlife Protection, 1889-1936” (Ph.D. diss., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 2012), Narisara Murray’s “Lives of the Zoo: Charismatic Animals in the Social Worlds of the Zoological Gardens of London, 1850-1897” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2004), Diane Marie Smith’s “Animals and Artifacts: Specimen Exchanges and Displays in Yellowstone National Park, the National Museum, and the National Zoo, 1846 to 1916” (Ph.D. dissertation, 7 have also captured the attention of scholars in other fields.25 As Hanson noted in Animal
Attractions, “[e]ach year more than 130 million Americans visit zoos—more people than attend professional baseball, football, and hockey games combined.”26 Globally, conservative zoo attendance figures can be estimated around 675 million, or approximately ten percent of global population.27 In 2014, as this dissertation reaches final form, scholars across academia have finally realized that zoos are worth studying.
A “New Institutional History” of the National Zoological Park
In his recently-published Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of
Modern Wildlife, historian Etienne Benson shows how late-twentieth-century wildlife biology
Montana State University, 2012), and Lisa Uddin’s “Breeding Grounds: Race, Space and Species in the New American Zoo” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2009). 25 For scholarly research on zoos not produced by historians see art critic John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 1-26; social scientists Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin’s Zoo Culture (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); geographer Kay Anderson’s “Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of ‘Human’ Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers n.s. 20 (1995): 275-294; geographer Gail Davies’s “Virtual Animals in Electronic Zoos,” In Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, edited by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (New York: Routledge, 2000): 243-262;geographer Irus Braverman’s Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2012); literary critic Randy Malamud’s Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); playwright Derek Lee Barton’s “Staging Nature: Ecology, Performance, and Environments” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2012); philosopher Keekok Lee’s Zoos: A Philosophical Tour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); literary scholar Mark Bennett Felman’s “Narrating, Displaying and Spectating the Animal: Frank Norris, Jack London, and the Urban Zoo (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 2005); and anthropologist Diane C. Shea’s “The Role of the Western Zoo in Shaping Concepts of Nature: Analysis of Visitor Behavior and Perception at Primate Exhibits” (Ph.D. diss., University of Houston, 2006). This list is not exhaustive but is meant to give an idea of the types of diverse research now being conducted about zoological parks. There is also a fairly large literature concerning zoo exhibit design, zoo architecture, and zoo planning. For the historian, the best works to read in this genre are Jon C. Coes’s “The Evolution of Zoo Animal Exhibits,” In The Ark Evolving: Zoos and Aquariums in Transition, ed. Christen M. Wemmer, 95-128 (Front Royal, Virginia: Smithsonian Institution Conservation and Research Center, 1995); Jon C. Coes’s “Future Fusion: The Twenty-First Century Zoo,” In Keepers of the Kingdom: The New American Zoo, 105-15 (New York: Thomasson-Grant and Lickle, 1996); Heini Hediger’s classic Man and Animal in the Zoo: Zoo Biology (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969); and Patrick H. Wirtz’s “Zoo City: Bourgeois Value and Scientific Culture in the Industrial Landscape,” Journal of Urban Design 2, No. 1 (February, 1997): 61-82. 26 Hanson, 2. 27 Miller, Ian Jared, The Nature of the Beasts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 8. 8 was indeed quite open to “public engagement.”28 Benson demonstrates how popular fascination with wild animals shaped a field science that was often considered to be reserved for specialists.
Similarly, the following history of the National Zoological Park documents how public enthusiasm for wild animals in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century influenced another branch of science—zoology.
This dissertation is an institutional history of the National Zoological Park, yet it is a new type of institutional history, one whose methodology and theoretical approach is influenced by two different literatures. First, this account of the National Zoo could be considered as a part of the historical institutionalism embraced by sociologists, political scientists, economists, and new political historians. In the words of political economist Sven Steinmo, “[h]istorical institutionalism is neither a particular theory nor a specific method.”29 In fact, many different
(even opposing) theoretical positions can fall under the umbrella of “historical institutionalism.”
However, despite their differences, historical institutionalists “are something like the environmental biologist who believes that in order to understand the specific fate of a particular organism or behavior, she must explicitly examine that organism or behavior in the ecology or context in which it lives.”30 Historical institutionalists avoid grand theorizing for fear that it essentializes the past by reducing complexity to fit the (non-empirical) metanarratives of
Marxism, Functionalism, Systems Theory, Rational Choice Theory, and Post-structuralism.
Historical institutionalists, at the same time, avoid flattening complexity to fit the linear
(empirical) timelines of outmoded “institutional histories” that all-too-frequently rely upon straightforward cause-effect and top-down analytical vantages. While historical institutionalists
28 Benson, Etienne, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 4. 29 Steinmo, Sven, “Historical Institutionalism,” In Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating (eds), Approaches in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113. This essay is a readable, concise introduction to the history of “historical institutionalism.” 30 Steinmo, 166. 9 usually study politics (which can be defined in many ways—“rules,” “norms,” “organizations,”
“power structures,” etc.), this dissertation adapts their methods to study the cultural “institution” of the zoological park.31 This dissertation examines the National Zoological Park as an institutional “organism” with a complex life. Rather than mapping this institution’s chronology onto a timeline (as most of the other histories of individual zoos have done), this history examines the “ecology” of the National Zoological Park, showing how this zoo was intertwined with science, society, and environment. This history glimpses at some of the National Zoo’s
“ecological” relations while building up to larger historical argumentation.
More important than the methods of historical institutionalism, are the methods of micro- history that champion narrative and what Clifford Geertz would call “thick description.”32
Microhistorians believe that by examining focused topics and small units of time, they can uncover large historical processes. They also believe that microhistory is more capable of transporting readers into past times and places through the act of story-telling. Stories, their vivid characters and twisting plots, hold an imaginative potential that argument-driven analysis often struggles to find. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has said about her powerful microhistorical work A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, “When I
31 The literature of historical institutionalism, which spans several academic disciplines, is quite voluminous, and it would be impossible to “sum it up” with descriptions of a few methodologies or arguments. A few classic works that belong to historical institutionalism, though, include James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Paul Pierson’s Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), Ira Katzelson and Barry Weingast’s edited collection Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), and Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth’s edited collection Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 32 Geertz, Clifford, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretations of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30. Regarding animal history, see Geertz’s classic “Deep Play: Notes of the Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretations of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 412-453. 10 was finally able to connect Martha’s work to her world, I could begin to create stories.”33 If the goal of the historian is to educate about the past, microhistory presents one priceless approach.
For this reason, some of the most important and memorable works produced within the historical profession have been microhistories.34 Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (possibly related to trends toward global, “big,” world, and transoceanic histories and possibly related to the pressure of convincing non-historians that particular research projects deserve funding), the mode of microhistory has become less popular over the last decade or so.35 This dissertation seeks to reinvigorate microhistory, showing that “opening up” three decades of the National Zoological
Park is also “opening up” the world.
This new institutional history of the National Zoological Park will address issues of intellectual history, environmental history, and the history of science. Rather than forcing the
33 “Film Description” of A Midwife’s Tale, PBS, Accessed February 6, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/mwt/filmmore/fd.html. This film is based on Laurel Thatcher’s Ulrich’s A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 34 Some classics of microhistory include the following: Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Every Day Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1984), Davis, Natalie Z., The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1974), Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324, translated by Barbara Bray (London: Scolar, 1978), and Taylor, William B., Drinking, Homicide and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). Also, see the many titles produced by Carlo Ginzburg, Luis González, David Sabean, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. 35 There are a few exceptions of great microhistories produced since 2000. See, for example, Rhys, Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on A Virginia Plantation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004), Brewer, John, Sentimental Murderer: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), and Brown, Richard D., and Irene Quenzler Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003). Also see Richard Brown’s reflections on microhistory in his “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” The Journal of the Early Republic 23/1 (2003), pp. 1-20. For a thought-provoking theoretical perspective see Dominick Lacapra’s “The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Twentieth–Century Historian,” History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 45–69. 11
National Zoo onto a grand argument regarding humanism, animal-human relations, and popular science in the late nineteenth-century world, this dissertation will slowly build up to such arguments, reserving its largest historical and historiographical claims for the conclusion. The reason for this decision is four-fold. First, this study of the National Zoo began with the discovery of “zoo stories,” and only then led to larger historical visions.36 Leaving historical argumentation for the Conclusion, then, seems more intellectually honest. This decision also should enable the reader to experience “zoo stories” in a way that more closely resembles how they were experienced by the humans and animals that first filled the National Zoological Park. Second, by employing “zoo stories” as vehicles to argumentation, this dissertation not only subscribes to methods of historical institutionalism and microhistory, but adheres to the recent tenet, pronounced by sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour and put into practice by scholars in
Science and Technology Studies, that description is explanation.37 By describing the first three decades of the National Zoological Park, by transporting readers to this time and place, this dissertation seeks to narrate a history of ideas-come-to-earth. By engaging “zoo stories,” this dissertation hopes to demonstrate what intellectual transformations looked like on the ground for the people who were transformed by them. Third, by leading readers along the meandering paths of “zoo stories,” this dissertation hopes to underscore the point that biographies of living institutions, like biographies of living humans, are complicated. Fourth, and most significantly,
36 I borrow the term “zoo story” from Randy Malamud’s Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. Malamud defines the term “zoo stories” as “a catchall reference to a diverse range of literary and popular cultural artifacts.” Malamud describes a juxtaposition between “zoo stories” and “how zoos actually function” (5). I believe that this dichotomy is a false one. First, how zoos “actually function” and how they are imagined are interconnected. Second, neither “zoo stories” nor zoo practice can be viewed as monolithic—both change over time. The history of zoological parks is filled with stories. Indeed, these stories were what drew Americans to zoos in the first place. Throughout this dissertation, I will borrow Malamud’s phrase, for I believe the “zoo story” is a useful metaphor to describe the nature of zoological parks and popular zoology during the time period discussed in this dissertation. 37 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12 by foregrounding “zoo stories,” this dissertation hopes to intrigue present-day zoogoers about ideas, animals, and science in the past and present.
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This dissertation shows that the rise of the public zoo in the late nineteenth century was far more than the emergence of a new form of popular entertainment. It contends that the zoo was a site of numerous transformations in American thought. This dissertation examines the first decades of the National Zoological Park, founded by the Smithsonian Institution in 1880s, and shows how this zoo shaped different genres of intellectual inquiry— political thought, popular cultural, the life sciences, ecology and environmentalism, ethics and animal rights, and medicine.
This dissertation demonstrates the centrality of the National Zoological Park to these very different discourses and argues that the zoo made academic scholarship accessible to the
American public by molding it into a popular zoology that captivated a nation. This popular zoology encouraged publics to think critically about the differences between humans and animals.
By exploring newspaper and magazine articles, zoo guides, pamphlets, advertisements, natural histories, scientific publications, personal correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, purchasing ledgers, institutional records, and autopsy reports, this dissertation argues that the National
Zoological Park complicated a human-centered worldview that had stood unchallenged for centuries.
13
Chapter 1 William Temple Hornaday and His Taxidermist Zoology: From Dead to Living Animals
“The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy”
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By way of illustration, let us imagine a group of young people from Mars landing upon this earth, drifting into a normal school, and saying to the teacher of zoölogy:
“Is there any wild animal life on this continent of yours?”
“Oh yes,” the teacher would reply; “we have a marvelously rich fauna—thousands of species, and millions of individuals, great and small.”
“Well, we would like to know about them—all that we can possibly learn in a few weeks.
(“Weeks” is the word that best represents the total time that the average pupil spends in school on zoology.) “We want to know the creatures that are most worth knowing, so that we can take back to Mars a good general knowledge of your wild life.”
Says the teacher, joyously:
“Oh, yes. Certainly. Let us go out into this vacant lot . . . Ah, here is the very thing to begin with. A grasshopper!” . . .
(Several of our modern text-books on zoology really do begin with the grasshopper; and so do very many school courses.)
Then follows a long disquisition on the anatomy of that wonderful insect. Its component parts are expounded in minute detail—trochanter, femur, abdomen, and thorax—and the pupils from Mars patiently try to learn it all. They draw it, and redraw it, and tre-draw it, two days a week, for four mortal weeks! 14
Then comes the butterfly, in the same way. Great is the butterfly; and the shape of its antennae and the scalation of its wings are highly important. Three weeks flit by on the gilded wings of the butterfly.
Then for a week or two comes the beetle; and in dazzling sequence the crayfish, the amoeba, the paramecium, until on those four or five forms of life, utterly unimportant in comparison with thousands of others, two or three precious months have been spent! In that period, and by the same amount of effort, those pupils could have become permanently acquainted with at least fifty useful and interesting birds or mammals of North America— acquired as friends for a lifetime.
And what will the harvest be? At the end of a year of such work will the young people from Mars have even the beginning of a general view of our continent’s most interesting, most valuable, or most harmful wild creatures? I put the question squarely to the boards of education of all America.1
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William Temple Hornaday annotated the above dialogue between an American zoology instructor and alien visitors from Mars in “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy,” an acerbic, eight- page critique of the zoological establishment published in a 1910 edition of Outlook magazine.
Hornaday’s alien allegory was more caustic than other early-twentieth-century satires involving
English-speaking extraterrestrials. Hornaday insisted that readers understand that the “above hypothetical case is no nightmare of the imagination.” The hypothetical and foolish zoology teacher who showcased the grasshopper as the creature “most worth knowing” was an unfortunate symptom of a zoological institution influenced by the legacies of Louis Agassiz and
1 Hornaday, William T., “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy,” Outlook (Jun 04, 1910): 258. 15
Charles Darwin. By labeling these two as the culprits responsible for the deterioration of zoology,
Hornaday presented a familiar criticism of “science” in a new and surprising way.
When Agassiz, according to Hornaday, “first set up in America the research idea, and turned every pupil of zoology into an original laboratory ‘investigator,’ he little dreamed that he was creating a serious handicap for the practical teachers of zoology.” Hornaday maintained that the “research” and “investigation” promoted by Agassiz at Harvard became the “Slough of
Despond of the general student,” depriving this pupil “of a great store of useful zoological knowledge which by right is theirs, and which they should have.” 2 Hornaday correctly attributed, as historian Mary P. Winsor has demonstrated, the “case study method” of instruction to Louis
Agassiz. By giving students, the first in America to pursue advanced degrees in zoology, a
“solitary fish” or a “unique lobster” for examination, Agassiz taught them that “even a single individual embodies the layered structure of the hierarchy of taxonomic categories.” The close examination of one specimen, Agassiz believed, would assist the scientist in finding that long- coveted order in nature.3 After Agassiz, lessons, lectures, and courses in zoology from grade schools through graduate programs used representative specimens as windows into the animal world. Students devoted their time to understanding the anatomical complexities of a “case study” specimen, and theoretically, this microcosmic body, pinned open for examination, would teach important lessons regarding the macrocosmos of zoological life. Hornaday strangely, though, did not disagree with either Agassiz’s or the zoological establishment’s priority in placing animals into systems of classification; instead, he worried about how zoology teachers demonstrated classificatory structures and methods to students. He admitted that “[c]lassification . . . [was] the
2 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 256. 3 Winsor, Mary P., Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 12-15. A vast historiography deals with the long history of “finding order in nature.” While this is not the place to open the annals of this literature, Paul Lawrence Farber’s Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E.O. Wilson (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) provides a concise and useful “suggestion” for “further reading” at the end of this short survey. 16 bed-rock foundation of all perfect zoological knowledge,” but he simply could not understand why in contemporary zoology text-books “the least interesting animal forms [were] given first place, and those that [were] most interesting and important receive[d] the last and the least attention.” The pupil “desire[d] and need[ed] to be taught” about buffalo, elephants, rattlesnakes, and alligators— not about the “grasshopper or the paramecium” or others from the “great mass of obscure, uninteresting, and useless forms of life.”4
Hornaday’s critique of Agassiz’s “object-teaching” was entangled with his conviction that zoology teachers gave Darwinian evolution an undeservedly preeminent place in their curriculums. He contended that “[w]hen Charles Darwin published the “Origin of the Species,” and for the first time focused public attention on the theory of evolutionary development of all animal life, he little dreamed that he was furnishing the raw materials from which there would be set up at this time a fetish idol that would stand like a wall of adamant between the boys and girls of to-day and the animal world they desire to know.” Even though Louis Agassiz famously argued against Darwin’s theory of evolution, positing instead that a Creator before creation, not adaptation after creation, accounted for both the “analogous” and “homologous” similarities among animals, his method of using the “solitary fish” or the “unique lobster” as a window into
God’s vast creation ironically served as the perfect starting point for a zoologist’s evolutionist agenda. Hornaday explained, in a tone of undisguised frustration, that “[t]o ignore the lamp of evolution is to walk in darkness, far below the level of the elect; and therefore the biology teacher must lay out his courses as an evolutionist. He must begin with the cell, and struggle upward toward humanity; and there is where the unfortunate pupil begins to feel the weight of the burden of too much ‘evolution.’”5 Hornaday did not dispute Darwin’s theory, as Agassiz did for spiritual,
4 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 257. 5 Ibid., 256, 263. 17 philosophical, and scientific reasons or as American publics often did for religious, ethical, and cultural reasons.6 Hornaday’s argument with evolution was simply pedagogical and practical.
Hornaday informed his readers that he had “neither time nor inclination to hunt for euphemistic phrases or to gently insinuate things that need to be stated as plain fact.”7 The “rising generations of Americans,” Hornaday averred, “do not need to be trained as laboratory investigators, at the expense of practical knowledge in zoölogy.”8 Zoology students should not spend weeks examining a single case study, nor should they be worried about the abstruse and impractical concerns of evolutionary lineage and descent. Hornaday advocated for “practical zoölogy,” a “vast field” that “to-day lies as fallow and uncultivated as the tundras of the arctic
Barren Grounds.”9 Practical zoology should give the American student a “general knowledge of the most interesting animal forms of his own country.” 10 Hornaday attacked, as many other commentators (especially naturalists and natural historians) did during the decades surrounding
1900, the trend toward specialization that characterized developments in contemporary science.11
While the names of Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin were honored by life scientists standing on opposing sides of the evolution debate, for William Temple Hornaday, their legacies both bolstered and encouraged the specialization of zoologists and the subsequent specializing trends of zoological education. In the middle of his caustic critique of the zoological establishment,
6 Bowler, Peter J., Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (Harvard University Press, 2009); Larson, Edward J., Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2003); Roberts, Jon H., Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Winsor, Mary P., Reading the Shape of Nature. 7 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 258. 8 Ibid., 260. 9 Ibid., 257. 10 Ibid., 256. 11 For more on specialization see Philip J. Pauly’s Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). The trend to specialization, Pauly explains, seemed to many “outsiders” as a “bewildering proliferation of neologistic identities, ranging from agrostology, bacteriology, cytology, dendrology, and ecology, to limnology, morphology, neurology, oology, and pomology, and so on” (103). 18
Hornaday quoted American college students who complain in unison, “As soon as I entered they put me to specializing, and there is nothing else to do. It’s all anatomy, and embryology, and mountains of work on things of mighty little importance. What do I care about the exact number of scales on a fish from Central Africa, or the nervous system of the parasites of a mud-puppy from South America?”12 Hornaday truly believed that “[e]very child is born with a love for animals quite as instructive as its love for toys,” and to then force these children to learn about grasshoppers in the name of specialization only deprived them of a practical zoology by which
“the interest of the pupil can be aroused and prolonged to infinity.” Practical zoology could be “as musical as Apollo’s lute,” the zoology of the day, however, proved monotone.13
Hornaday argued that zoology should meet the “needs of the masses” by showing how animals “relate to the utilitarian or commercial side of life.” Students needed to be taught a zoology that proved useful to them, a zoology that could instruct them in new ways of being in the world. In “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy,” Hornaday not only diagnosed the illness afflicting zoological education, but he also offered a prescription. He admitted that “[t]he amount of general knowledge regarding American wild life that countless thousands of Americans need to know . . . is really great,” and he suggested that a zoological curriculum should discuss such topics as:
The birds that are useful to man and deserving protection; the birds that men and women are ruthlessly exterminating in ways that constitute crimes against nature; the mammals that are of most value, and those that are of the greatest interest to mankind; the mammals that are most destructive to man’s possessions, and which need to be destroyed; the fishes that need perpetuation and propagation as a cheap food supply for the poor; the conservation of marine life generally; the reptiles that are deadly, and those that are harmless; the reptiles that are useful to man; the insects that are injurious, and how to cope with them; [and] the crustaceans and mollusks that can be cultivated and perpetuated by intelligent effort.14
12 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 261. 13 Ibid., 257-258. 14 Ibid., 259. 19
Hornaday advocated for an anthropocentric and utilitarian zoology, a science that studied animals in relation to and for the sake of humanity. While he may seem to have dismissively characterized butterflies, crayfish, amoeba, and paramecium as uninteresting and useless, too much should not be made of his hyperbolic and rhetorical relegation of the “lowest” forms of life.15 Hornaday simply desired to broaden the perspectives and heighten the sensitivities of Americans by encouraging zoologists to cast nets that could catch more than a “solitary fish” or “unique lobster.” He wanted zoologists to teach their students about animals “of value.” While Hornaday never clearly defined “value,” nor explored its philosophical implications despite its relevance to the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he seemed to employ the term to describe an animal that held an acknowledged presence in popular culture. “Useful” animals provided
Americans with work potential and commodities (food, feathers, fur, etc.). Dangerous animals threatened Americans and their “possessions.” And animals “of interest” inspired Americans with their unique, grand, or colorful characteristics. For Hornaday, useful, dangerous, and inspiring animals all possessed “value” because Americans acknowledged their existence. Zoologists, according to Hornaday, needed to educate Americans about animals that mattered, not about case-study creatures that lay below public perception. By teaching students about “valuable” animals, zoologists could help forge new ways of engaging these animals— halting “crimes against nature” and promoting projects of “perpetuation,” “propagation,” and “conservation,” all while protecting American interests. Studying “valuable animals” served a purpose. Studying grasshoppers was only a waste of time.
Hornaday divided the elementary zoology textbooks of the day into three groups—
“[t]hose in which anatomy prevails over all other considerations,” “[t]hose which are dominated by the philosophic idea, and deal out learned discourses,” and “[t]hose which jump all over the
15 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 261-262. 20 face of nature, first in one field and then in another, as children play hop-scotch.”16 For Hornaday, the first type of textbook was too narrowly focused to be useful. The second type was a deterministic and bombastic deviation from zoology, spending its pages situating animals in
Darwinian meta-narratives rather than examining animals and how they interacted with human society. And the third type appeared too unorganized and heterogeneous to leave readers with any coherent knowledge of the animal world. All three groups of textbooks overlooked the place of humans and animals in their shared environments.
“The old idea,” Hornaday declared, “that the text-book should contain the things that the pupil needs to learn and remember is absolutely right, and always will be right.”17 The pages of zoology textbooks, therefore, must not only hold information; they must also display pictures of animals whenever possible. Hornaday believed that zoology needed to become a science that transcended both the laboratory and Science itself. In many ways, Hornaday thought that sight made this transcendence possible. Simply through the process of looking at animals, zoology students could absorb many conclusions of the science. Sight could liberate the zoology student and transform zoology from a discourse into an experience. Near the end of the article,
Hornaday’s voice became almost audible as he described the experientiality that zoological instruction must cherish:
The way to give any pupil a general knowledge of the animal life of the world is to show good pictures of the objects that cannot be seen, and make the pupil learn from his own book (not from a book owned by a much-too-paternal State) the names of the animals, and the simple English words that stand for their classification. The modern idea that the teacher must do all the work is outrageously wrong and mischievous. Any pupil who will not dig out his lessons from a good text-book, with reasonable aid from the teacher, should be taken out of school and put to work.18
16 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 262. 17 Ibid., 261-262. 18 Ibid., 262. 21
At the end of his article, Hornaday stated that the reinventing of American zoology should begin at premier American universities. The above passage, though, drew attention to the radical nature of his proposed reformulation.19 Indeed, Hornaday previously in the article called for a “complete revolution in the methods of teaching zoölogical subjects,” yet the zoological revolution he depicted seemed to upset far more than the rostra of the zoological professoriate.20
By accentuating the role of pictures in zoology textbooks, Hornaday underscored a sensory dimension of zoology that he (as well as, apparently, visitors from Mars) found crucial.
Visual images of animals allowed students to see “objects that cannot be seen.” These images acquainted Americans with the spectacular features of elephants, beavers, and albatross— animal
“objects” that few would ever see in the wild. Pictures made the invisible and exotic creatures of the world manifest, and in so doing, allowed viewers to learn about animals without relying on the abstract lectures of zoology instructors. A zoology textbook with visual depictions of animals freed the student from those ancient Platonic teacher-student bonds, fashioned so long ago in the lyceums of Athens, where Aristotle, stylus in hand, wrote the first classics of zoology.21 A proper
19 To conclude his article, Hornaday listed four “recommendations,” which I will quote here: “1. Some university of commanding influence, like Yale or Columbia or Cornell, and some university president like President Hadley or President Butler, should elect to lead a reform, and begin by establishing a chair of Practical Zoölogy—first, for the purpose of setting a new pace, and, secondly, to furnish that which is not now obtainable, a general course in practical, common-sense zoology, such as thousands of teachers and millions of other men and women need for daily use. This course should show how biology teachers should be taught! – 2. At least a dozen other universities and colleges should do the same thing. – 3. All boards of education should recognize their responsibilities in this matter, and not permit the present illogical situation to endure. A completely reformed and rational system could be inaugurated within two years’ time; and the way to do it is to order that it be done! – 4. The “object-lesson” fetish-worship should resolutely be broken up, and the basic idea of it should be set up on a rational foundation. For any teacher to hold that a pupil can learn about the animal kingdom only by holding actual specimens in his hand, or by viewing their dismembered remains, is ridiculous. Sensible parents know—even if there are some teachers who do not— that a normal child who can learn of continents, seas, lakes, and rivers from maps, and retain the knowledge throughout life, can also learn of the gorilla, the moose, the musk-ox, the vulture, the eagle, and the alligator from an illustrated text-book” (262-263). 20 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 259. 21 For more on Aristotle’s place in the life sciences see Pierre Pellegrin’s Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus, trans. Anthony Preus (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Étienne Gilson’s From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009); Stefano 22 zoology textbook should bring zoology to the masses, ushering students into a vast and vibrant animal kingdom that was relevant to their everyday lives. Furthermore, a proper textbook should be owned by students themselves, not the schools or universities, or as Hornaday worded it, the
“much-too-paternal State.” When zoology students could own their zoology textbooks, they may finally own their zoological education as well. Hornaday’s conflation of school-owned textbooks with the State transported the reader far beyond the confines of the zoology classroom and into a world where knowledge was bestowed upon students by an overly-specialized and supposedly misguided intellectual elite. The revolution envisioned by Hornaday, then, was a democratic one, where the American people would seize zoology once again. Yet the revolution would not simply be led by the people; it would also be for the people, reforming zoology so that it was accessible and useful to everyday Americans.
This utilitarian approach to zoology prioritized the needs of Americans, situating nonhumanity in relation to humanity. Hornaday’s zoology, then, was anthropocentrically pragmatic, yet by centering the study of animals around humans, the dead animal specimens of the laboratory found new lives in a reformed zoology, lives that Hornaday hoped would inspire students to save “the most interesting of the world’s wild life [before they] have been ground to dust under the iron-shod heel of Modern Civilization.”22 Pictures in zoology textbooks helped readers envision, engage, and imagine animals. This experiential process allowed readers to collectively construct and participate in an active, democratic, and practical zoology. When
Hornaday eventually published his own textbook, it abounded with photographs and illustrations.
The 449-page-fourteenth edition, for example, boasted 344 images. Even at the title page,
Hornaday required his readers to encounter the protective countenance (staring out from the
Perfetti’s Aristotle’s Zoology and Its Renaissance Commentators, 1521-1601 (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2000); or James G. Lennox’s Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 263. 23 adjoining page) of an antlered bull moose accompanied by a cow at the shoals of a New
Brunswick glacial lake, a dramatic scene painted by the famous wildlife artist Carl Rungius.
Zoology was meant to be experienced.23
Either Hornaday or an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons placed a quotation by G. Brown
Goode, former director of the United States National Museum and an important figure in
Hornaday’s zoological career, on a page prior to the Rungius painting that echoed the negative thesis of “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy”: “The concise and precise phraseology of science, admirable though it be for the use of those who have been trained to employ it, is to others not only misleading, but it may be repulsive.” A second quotation, on the same page, by educator
L.A. Mann parroted the positive thesis of Hornaday’s article: “The highest type of scientific writing is that which sets forth useful scientific facts, in language which is interesting, and easily understood by the millions who read.” Hornaday endorsed a zoology accessible to the masses and concluded his article hoping “that somewhere a Moses will be found to lead our boys and girls out of the zoological darkness and bondage that now encompasses and enthralls them.”24
While the zoological literature of the period proved voluminous, few writings on zoological pedagogy appeared in the periodicals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but Hornaday’s editorial found a place in the widely distributed Outlook and was the lengthiest article in the edition, longer than the other feature about “Mr. Roosevelt in Europe.”25
While it may be surprising that a mordant diatribe of zoological instruction trumped an eloquent account of former president Theodore Roosevelt’s adventurous, six-week tour of Europe
(including a reception of an honorary doctorate from Norway’s University of Christiania), when
23 Hornaday, William T., Hornaday’s American Natural History: A Foundation of Useful Knowledge of the Higher Animals of North America, 14th ed. (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927). 24 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 263. 25 Abbott, Lawrence F., “Mr. Roosevelt in Europe: Staff Correspondence of the Outlook,” Outlook (Jun 04, 1910): 249-255. 24 contextualized within the popular culture of 1910 New York City, where Outlook was published and where Hornaday worked and lived, one sarcastic anecdote and one seemingly trivial reference will suddenly become critically important to understanding both the author’s impassioned tone about and Americans’ passionate interest in zoology.
While William Temple Hornaday was nationally known as a nature writer, conservationist, and taxidermist, he became a local celebrity as the director of the New York
Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo). A New York City audience would have read “The Right
Way to Teach Zoölogy” with their zoo in mind. Hornaday’s critique of zoological instruction emanated from his experience with public zoos. By establishing the National Zoological Park in
Washington, D.C. and by serving as zoo director in New York, Hornaday was among few in the
United States who shaped the American zoo movement. Any word Hornaday uttered about zoology would have been informed by zoo experiences. Hornaday witnessed daily the dearth of zoological knowledge possessed by everyday Americans in the dialogue of common zoogoers, for “[i]n the Zoölogical Park we have heard many queer things put forth as information regarding our animals.” One day, Hornaday observed the following scene:
Eight years ago we liberated a lively young orang-utan in a small tree, to see whether the instinctive nest-building habit of that species would produce in captivity a practical result. In ten minutes’ time the animal industriously broke branches, piled them into a crotch, and completed a typical nest. We were so pleased with the result that immediately we placed a large label below it, that all visitors might understand. Up to this label a teacher presently led her class of twenty girls of . . . twelve to fifteen years, and to them she read the label aloud, beginning thus: “Next of an Or’ange Oo’-tan” (We had it “Orang-Utan.”) “This nest was constructed in about ten minutes,” etc. From the gathering of girls a voice arose: “What is an ‘or’ange oo’tan,’ Miss Teacher?” “An or’ange oo’tan, my dear,” answered the teacher, “is a large tropical bird with a very large beak, that lives upon fruit.” “Why,” said a small voice from the outer row, “I thought it was a kind of monkey!” “Oh, no, my dear. It is a large bird from South America.”
25
Hornaday linked this dialogue, supposedly heard along the walkways of the New York
Zoological Park, to the central argument of his article. “As the result of a lack of proper training for our teachers, and of wholly inadequate instruction,” Hornaday maintained, “our children are coming out of the secondary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities lamentably lacking the systematic knowledge of our finest wild species that they ought to possess.”26
Obviously the foolish schoolteacher did not see the anthropoidal orangutan in the exhibit; otherwise, the presence of the nest probably would not have led her to the conclusion that its builder could only have been a bird. By seeing the orangutan, it is fair to assume that the schoolteacher’s ignorance would not have been as comical. The zoological park was an urban institution based on the visual experience of seeing the exotic. By displaying animals, organizing informational placards, and publishing guidebooks, zoos educated the masses about the immense diversity displayed within the animal kingdom.
Zoos attempted to give Americans what zoology could not—a broad understanding of the animal world. However, Hornaday revealed that zoological parks advanced far more than general education. Referring again to Agassiz’s subversion of zoological instruction, Hornaday, on the last page of the article, qualified and softened his boisterous opinions: “I do not mean for one moment to oppose the principle of object-teaching; but I do oppose every reduction-ad-absurdum application of it. Let us have it, by all means, in museum and menagerie and zoological park, whenever and wherever it is possible; but, for the love of nature, do not confine to the chipmunks, the sparrows, and the frogs around the schoolhouse the lessons on the great animal kingdom that are desired by the millions upon millions of school pupils who have no access to museums and menageries.”27
26 Hornaday, “The Right Way to Teach Zoology,” 259-260. 27 Ibid., 263. 26
The argument laid out by Hornaday in “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy” concerned schools, not zoos. Yet the two mentions of zoos in the work only reminds us that its words were most likely penned or typed in Hornaday’s zoo office, where he probably pondered the state of zoological education amidst muffled roars, howls, and laughs. On close inspection, Hornaday’s
(probably unconscious) placement of “zoological park” and “menagerie” (which operate here as synonyms) on both sides of the second conjunction “but” proves telling. After qualifying his position on “object-teaching,” Hornaday told his readers that the zoo, not the classroom, would be the appropriate setting for Agassiz’s pedagogical method. Hornaday thus situated the zoo (in his words, “museum and menagerie and zoological park”) into the overly-specialized scientific establishment he just finished criticizing, a shocking move considering his zoo directorship.
Within the same sentence, though, Hornaday suggested ironically that zoos also provided pupils with “lessons on the great animal kingdom,” meaning that zoos taught about animals more exciting and exotic than the mundane, commonplace creatures often used for “object-teaching.”
Hornaday, then, seemed to view the zoo (in his words, “menagerie”) as an entity opposed to science. This assertion remained consistent with the argument presented in the article, but it contradicted the statement made a few words before! The surprising and contradictory syntactical positioning of the “zoo” in the above quotaton, as well as the dual implications this semantic issue held for the ideal relationship between public zoos and Science, did not necessarily stem from an incongruity in what Hornaday envisioned the purpose and place of zoos in society to be.
In fact, his semiotic conundrum reiterated perfectly the zoo rhetoric that promoters of the zoo movement had employed for several decades—namely, that zoos should advance science and educate the masses.28
28 Nigel Rothfels points this out in his Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, 18. 27
Hornaday’s role in the zoo movement, gave him a unique way of envisioning animals that informed his opinions about the right way to teach zoology. Hornaday’s zoo career began in
1887, while he served as the chief taxidermist of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum.
In this capacity, he became known as one of the world’s finest taxidermists, “achieving recognition for his naturalistic treatment of animals and his effort to place them in habitat settings.”29 Hornaday, not only became famous for resurrecting dead animals in the exhibits of
America’s finest museum; he also gained fame by giving literary life to the living through published works like his widely-read Two Years in the Jungle: The Experiences of a Hunter and
Naturalist in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. In establishing the National
Zoological Park, Hornaday reconciled the knowledge he acquired while chasing (and writing about) exotic fauna, with his expertise at preserving, stuffing, and mounting their carcasses. He cultivated the former skills from his dramatic experiences in faraway lands, and he gained the latter through the precision learned in the “laboratory” of the taxidermist.30 Hornaday, of course, did not have strong convictions about zoological instruction in 1887, for the first collegiate zoology departments and curriculums were just being formed. But in helping establish a national zoo, he envisioned a public attraction that would unite different types of knowledge in the name of public education. Hornaday’s convictions about the importance of a broad zoological
29 Horowitz, Helen L., “The National Zoological Park: “City of Refuge” or Zoo?” 409. 30 This chapter only begins to touch on the adventurous life of William Temple Hornaday prior to his zoo career. In his autobiographical notes, typed near the end of his life, Hornaday reflected, “I have had unmeasurable fun in the great outdoors, chasing wild Nature over the plains and across mountains, and sailing the seven seas, to find it.” Hornaday, William T., “Adventures with Wild Animal Books,” The Papers of William T. Hornaday, Box 16, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. The Papers of William T. Hornaday, held in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, are quite voluminous, and this chapter on Hornaday and the foundation of the Department of Living Animals is no place to explore the complexities of Hornaday’s influential life. Particularly noteworthy in this collection are Boxes 15-30, which hold speeches, articles, poems, and extensive notes for his unpublished autobiography. These boxes alone house thousands of pages of Hornaday’s writing and are worth a whole study of their own.
28 education were fashioned during his first experience with zoos, when he transformed a museum of dead animals into a zoo of and for the living.
The Department of Living Animals: Between Museum and Zoo
William Temple Hornaday was born in 1854 on his father’s farm in Hendricks County,
Indiana. When he was three years old, his family moved to the pristine prairie land of Wapello
County, Iowa, where young William cultivated a passion for the passenger pigeons, turkey vultures, and prairie chickens that frequently soared overhead. At some point during this agrarian childhood, he visited a half-brother who stayed behind in Indiana. And there, William encountered a case of stuffed and mounted birds and became fascinated with the art of taxidermy, to which he would devote a great portion of his life. At fifteen, William was left an orphan, and in
1870 he attended Oskaloosa College, later to enroll in the Iowa State Agricultural College. At school Hornaday discovered the world of natural history through John James Audubon’s classic
The Birds of America, Audubon and John Bachman’s Quadrupeds of North America, and Paul
DuChaillu’s Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. Soon after, Hornaday became a taxidermist for a campus museum to train as a naturalist. In 1873, Hornaday left Iowa State to serve as an assistant to Henry Augustus Ward, a prominent naturalist and geologist, in Rochester,
New York, the site of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. With Ward, Hornaday made a name for himself as a successful naturalist and taxidermist, famous for his collecting trips to the
Caribbean, South Asia, and Indonesia. George Brown Goode soon recognized Hornaday’s ambition and recruited him to fulfill the taxidermy needs of the rapidly expanding National
Museum.31
31 In his day, Hornaday gained fame as a naturalist, zoologist, realtor, conservationist, animal collector, songwriter, poet, nature writer, and political activist. He not only played a central role in the American zoo movement, but he is popularly attributed the honor (surely an exaggeration, but the lore is noteworthy nonetheless) of single-handedly discovering the American crocodile and saving the buffalo and the Alaskan fur seal from extinction. Although there is both a mountain range in the Absaroka Range of Yellowstone 29
In 1882 George Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and director of the United States National Museum, hired William Temple Hornaday as chief taxidermist in charge of the Museum’s mammal collection. At that time, the Institution, under the leadership of its second Secretary, Spencer F. Baird, expanded its priorities beyond research to include the development of the National Museum and the expansion of its natural history and ethnography collections. Goode, a famous ichthyologist and taxonomist who studied at Harvard’s
Museum of Comparative Zoology under Louis Agassiz and whose first major responsibility with the Smithsonian was to organize its zoological display for the Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia, increased the National Museum’s collection from 200,000 specimens to more than three million. On the eve of Hornaday’s arrival, the burgeoning collection was to serve both the
American public and the researchers of the Smithsonian. The need for a skilled taxidermist would have been great.32
and a series of Boy Scout medals named after him, there is surprisingly very little literature written about the life, works, or legacies of William Temple Hornaday. The above biographical information comes from Fairfield Osborn’s “William Temple Hornaday,” Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), Supplement II, 316-318. At the end of this short dictionary entry, Osborn claims that this small amount of biographical information came from a partial and unpublished autobiography held at the New York Zoological Society, a memoir of W. Reid Blair, a 1942 edition of Who Was Who in America, and a 1933 edition of American Men of Science, as well as from “personal knowledge.” Stefan Bechtel recently published Mr. Hornaday’s War: How A Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife that Changed the World (New York: Beacon Press, 2012). Before this work, the closest thing to a biography ever published about Hornaday was John Ripley Forbes’s In the Steps of the Great American Zoologist: William Temple Hornaday (New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1966), an illustrated children’s book. Also, for more on Hornaday, the Smithsonian, zoos, and bison see Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 108-123. For more on Henry Augustus Ward and his Natural Science Establishment see Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s “The Specimen Dealer: Entrepreneurial Natural History in America’s Gilded Age” Journal of the History of Biology 33, No. 3 (Winter, 2000): 493-534. 32 Horowitz, 408-409; Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, “History in a Natural History Museum: George Brown Goode and the Smithsonian Institution” The Public Historian 10, No. 2 (Spring, 1988): 11. For more on the history of the Smithsonian Institution previously in the nineteenth century see Wilcomb E. Washburn’s “The Influence of the Smithsonian Institution on Intellectual Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Washington” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 63/65 (1963/1965): 96-121; Nina Burleigh’s The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian (New York: Harper Collins, 2003); Heather Ewing’s The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007); Jean V. Matthews’s “Libraries, Books, and the Nature of America: The Creation of the Smithsonian Institution” The Journal of Library History 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1981): 152-165; and Daniel Goldstein’s 30
Upon his hire, Hornaday shifted his focus immediately from the exotic animals of Asia and Africa, which were displayed often in Rochester, to the large fauna of North America that needed to be honored in a national museum. His years in Washington, D.C., were devoted especially to the American bison. In 1886, the Smithsonian Institution funded an expedition to
Montana to collect bison before the rapidly disappearing herds of the American West reached the inevitable extinction that some naturalists were predicting. On the trip, Hornaday experienced for himself the gravity of these forecasts. The herds that Hornaday saw roaming the plains earlier in his life had been reduced to individuals thinly scattered throughout the West, and it took months for Hornaday to locate and shoot twenty-five individuals for the Smithsonian. In a letter to
Secretary Baird, mailed from Miles City, Montana, Hornaday penned:
We killed very nearly all we saw and I am confident there are not over thirty- head remaining in Montana, all told. By this time next year the cowboys will have destroyed about all of this remnant. We got in our Exploration just in the nick of time, -- the last day in the evening, so to speak, and I do not hesitate to say that I am really rejoiced over the fact that we have been so successful in securing the specimens we needed so urgently. With the life studies I have been able to make, & the specimens that our good luck has brought us, I think we can have a series of mounted specimens that will be envied by all other museums.33
Along with these specimens, which he would transform into a famous bison exhibit for the halls of the National Museum of Natural History, Hornaday brought a new sense of purpose back to the nation’s capital.34 On the rolling fields of Montana, Hornaday cultivated a conservationist ethic that would not only shape his future career but would also be etched into the National
Zoological Park that he would help create. Hornaday famously informed the American public of
““Yours for Science”: The Smithsonian Institution’s Correspondents and the Shape of Scientific Community in Nineteenth-Century America” Isis 85, No. 4 (Dec., 1994): 573-599. 33 Hornaday to Baird, December 21, 1886, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 305, Accession 18617, Acquired online at Smithsonian Scrapbook: Letters, Diaries & Photographs from the Smithsonian Archives, Accessed February 14, 2014, http://siarchives.si.edu/oldsite/history/exhibits/documents/21Dec1886Letter.htm. From this point forward, “Smithsonian Institution Archives” will be abbreviated “SIA” for footnote purposes. 34 Hanson, Animal Attractions, 134. 31 the genocide committed against the nation’s bison herds in an often-cited book-length report entitled The Extermination of the American Bison.35
Hornaday’s desire to protect the bison led directly to the genesis of the National
Zoological Park. In an 1887 letter to Goode, Hornaday stated:
In view of the fact that thus far this government has done nothing to preserve alive any specimens of the American Bison, the most striking and conspicuous species on this continent, I have the honor to propose that the Smithsonian Institution, or the National Museum, one or both, take immediate steps to procure either by gift or purchase, as may be necessary, the nucleus of a herd of live buffaloes. Having been spared the misfortune, thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, of being left without a series of skins and skeletons of the species suitable for the wants of the National Museum, it now seems necessary for us to assume the responsibility of forming and preserving a herd of live buffaloes which may, in a small measure, atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in a wild state.36
Hornaday echoed this sentiment in his Extermination, suggesting that the Smithsonian acquire several bison to keep the “breed absolutely pure.”37 Soon after, Hornaday purchased six buffalo, which he placed in a corral on the lawn behind the Smithsonian Castle.
As bison muddied their makeshift pasture along the National Mall, other living animals crowded the inside of the Smithsonian. The Museum had long hoped to develop a “Department of
Vivaria, to afford materials for the prosecution of scientific studies, as well as for general education purposes,” but it was William Temple Hornaday who, in 1887, took the initiative to create the Department of Living Animals. This Department simply grew from the practical and
35 Horowitz, 409-412; Hornaday, William T., “The Extermination of the American Bison with a Sketch of its Discovery and Life History,” printed in Report of the United States National Museum under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889), 367-548. For more on the decimation of the American bison see Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). There were also many magazine articles that discussed the buffalo exhibits of the Smithsonian, as well as Hornaday’s role in creating these exhibits, including the following: “The National Museum Buffalo,” Forest and Stream; A Journal of Outdoor Life, Travel, Nature Study, Shooting, Fishing, Yachting 28, No. 6 (March 3, 1887): 106. 36 Hornaday to Goode, December 2, 1887, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 201, Box 17, Folder 10. 37 Hornaday, “Extermination,” 528. See James A. Dolph and C. Ivar Dolph’s “The American Bison: His Annihilation and Preservation” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 25, No. 3 (Summer, 1975): 14- 25. 32
“imperative” need of Hornaday to keep living animals on hand while he worked on a “series of family groups of American mammals” for the Museum. These animals served as models that helped Hornaday enliven the dead animals that he preserved, stuffed, mounted, and displayed. By referencing the living animals scattered around his taxidermic laboratory, Hornaday could make the dead look alive, giving his specimens realistic poses and natural expressions. And surely, these living animals inspired him in his craft, reminding him that taxidermy was as much about the living as about the dead.38 However, “[t]he experiment of keeping live animals for this purpose in the taxidermic laboratory,” Hornaday admitted, “had proven expensive, and in many ways unsatisfactory.” Animals could not be haphazardly scattered around his workplace, so
Hornaday “deemed [it] necessary to form a small collection of living animals for purposes of study, and, if practicable, to also arrange for its exhibition to the public.”39
To collect animals for this purpose, Hornaday, in the fall of 1887, accompanied Mr. J.
Frank Ellis, with the United States Fish Commission, to the Pacific coast with the hopes of
“collecting and bringing back as many specimens of mammals as could be secured by gift, or purchased at nominal prices.” Passing through St. Paul, Minnesota; Fargo and Mandan, Dakota;
Helena, Montana; Tacoma, Washington Territory; Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City, Utah; and
Cheyenne, Wyoming, Hornaday acquired the first sixteen animals of the Smithsonian’s
Department of Living Animals. The National Zoo, then, emerged from two red foxes, one cinnamon bear, one white-tailed deer, one Columbian black-tailed deer, one cross fox, one mule deer, two badgers, five prairie dogs, one golden eagle, and one spotted lynx. Hornaday brought these animals back to Washington, D.C., and instead of caging them in his laboratory, he housed
38 For an excellent discussion of taxidermy, a must-read, see Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy (Wilmington, MA: Mariner Books, 2011). 39 Hornaday, W. T., “Report of the Department of Living Animals,” 1-2, SIA, Record Unit 158, Box 5, folder labeled “Department of Living Animals, 1887-1888.” Hornaday filed this report as one of the curators associated with the United States National Museum. The Museum’s curators wrote these reports annually. 33 them in a temporary structure (25 x 106 feet) he had built cheaply from the scrap wood of the recently demolished New Orleans Annex building. This makeshift Department, located on the south side of the eastern wing of the Smithsonian, was filled with temporary cages, heated, and opened to the public on New Years Eve of 1887.40
As soon as the facility opened, individuals from around the United States presented
Hornaday with “rare and valuable” animal gifts that he could not turn down. The population of the Department of Living Animals increased rapidly, tripling in size by the end of the first month.
The collection demanded “constant attention,” and on February 1, 1888, Hornaday hired Mr. N.
R. Wood as “keeper,” to feed, care for, and protect the animals. In February and March, the number of animal occupants doubled again, filling the wooden building to capacity. At the western end of the building, a pit was constructed for the black bears. In the center of this pit, stood a single cage for the cinnamon bear. Another large cage was subdivided into individual compartments to hold the large birds of prey: eagles, owls, and vultures.41
Animal donations bombarded Hornaday, and “[a]s gifts were received, temporary cages were hastily constructed for their accommodation, and every effort was made to make the best showing possible under the circumstances.” The Department of Living Animals was bursting at its seams, and “[w]ith the rapid increase in the size and value of the collection came an increase in the amount of labor and attention it absolutely required.” Especially important to keeping the
Department operational was W. C. Weeden, Assistant Engineer of the Smithsonian, who as a favor to Hornaday took on the extra responsibilities of caring for the animal collection. According to Hornaday, without Weeden, the Department of Living Animals “would have suffered very
40 Hornaday,“Report,” 2-3. 41 Ibid., 4-5. 34 serious embarrassment.” On May 12, 1888, William Temple Hornaday was officially appointed
Curator of the Department of Living Animals.42
Most of the animals held in the Department were acquired by Hornaday as gifts. Most zoological parks and animal collections in the 1880s and 1890s often purchased their collections from exotic animal dealers, like Germany’s famous Carl Hagenbeck, who had created a well- established and profitable industry that bought and sold rhinoceroses, lions, elephants, and giraffes. Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, and later the National Zoological Park itself, came from more humble origins. Between October 8, 1887 and June 30, 1888, the Department purchased thirty-two mammals, five birds, and one reptile, while receiving as donations, forty- two mammals, fifty-six birds, and twenty-five reptiles. In addition, eleven birds were born in the
Department. After nine months, the Department possessed 172 specimens, representing sixty- eight species. One hundred twenty three of these were gifts, three-fourths of which “were offered voluntarily, and without either suggestion or personal solicitation from the curator.”43
The first animals exhibited on the Smithsonian grounds were not the exotic species typical of most zoos’ founding generations. While the zoos of the world surely originated from diverse origins, local zoological societies, comprised of the urban intellectual elite, often played an important role in establishing zoological gardens that could transform crowded metropolitan centers into refined capitals of modernity, a precedent set by the Jardin des Plantes of Paris. The
Department of Living Animals, on the other hand, emerged quickly and spontaneously from the practical needs of William Temple Hornaday and the Smithsonian Institution, and therefore, the founding generation of the national zoo possessed a purpose beyond mere spectacle. Of the animals donated to Hornaday, “the most noteworthy mammals [were] the following:
42 Hornaday,“Report,” 5-7. 43 Ibid., 8-9. 35
A fine pair of American Bison, from Mr. E. C. Blackford, New York; a very large male Jaguar, from Mr. J. W. Riddle, Eagle Pass, Texas; two black bears from Mr. J. J. E. Lindberg, El Paso, Texas; a male Virginian Deer, from Capt. R. L. Hoxie, Montgomery, Alabama, and a female of the same species from Dr. P. Glennan, Washington, D.C.; two black bear cubs from Mr. J. S. Miller, Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Washington; a coyote from Mr. P. D. Nowell, North Platte, Nebraska; a gray wolf from Mr. C. A. Dole, Glendive, Montana; a grivet monkey from Mr. L. Moxley, Washington, and an exceedingly interesting Spider Monkey (Ateles vellerosus) from Mr. C. H. Townsend, U. S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross; a gray fox from Mr. Geo. E. Brown, Alexandra, Va.44
With the exception of the monkeys, all of the above mammals called North America home and would have been popular species for taxidermic displays around the United States. Even the animals that Hornaday purchased fit the same description— “a puma from Ft. Keogh, and a
‘silver tip’ grizzly bear cub from Billings, Montana; a fine black bear from South Carolina, received from Dr. G. H. Manigault in exchange; and the deer and spotted lynxes” acquired on the trip to the Pacific coast. The Department of Living Animals was indeed formed to assist
Hornaday in creating a realistic taxidermic collection of North American fauna to put on display in the Museum.45
Despite the rapid growth of the Department, Hornaday, Wood, and Weeden kept the animals in relatively good health. Two spotted lynxes died, from pneumonia and uraemic poisoning, respectively, in the winter due to an inefficient heating system, and six quails and two partridges were killed by the rats that “completely infested” the Department. Other than these unfortunate deaths, which were caused by the shortcomings of the Department’s building, some opossums and woodchucks also managed to escape the premises, setting a precedent for the runaway animals that would occasionally abscond from their enclosures and run amuck in the streets of Washington. Nineteenth-century zoological parks, the world over, often dealt with
44 Hornaday,“Report,” 10. 45 Ibid., 11. 36 elusive animals that exploited the still developing expertise of zoo architects and engineers. The
Department of Living Animals proved no exception.46
The Department immediately required a great deal of labor in order to care for both its animal inhabitants and its infrastructure. Wood and Weeden could not do it all and, in fact, required the “daily assistance of a laborer.” Feeding the animals proved to be a monumental task.
Many of the birds and mammals needed meals three to five times every day, and each species required a specialized diet. The young animals, especially, needed attentive care. Furthermore,
“[w]ith the exception of the reptiles, each species in the entire collection” was given a “label” that would instruct visitors on general information regarding type. Hornaday tried to create maps that would show the “geographical distribution” of each creature, but the “size and importance of the collection overwhelmed him with more imperative duties” than signage. In March, April, May, and June, Hornaday purchased only four animals; “the gifts that came in from day to day” alone
“required diligent exertions” on labor. The “crowded conditions of the building,” Hornaday admitted, “and the small size of most of the cages, the healthy condition of the animals and the general cleanliness of the establishment attest [to] the energy and vigilance of the keepers,
Messrs. Wood and Weeden.”47
Of course, these duties also placed a significant burden on the Department’s finances.
Hornaday attempted to be as frugal as possible by saving the “fine clover hay” used by the
Department of Public Grounds as feed for the ruminants. Such prudence probably saved
Hornaday around one hundred dollars. Furthermore, birds of prey were given the building’s captured rodents. Bison grazed on the Smithsonian lawn. Nonetheless, despite Hornaday’s innovative attempts to save, feeding the living animals inevitably became costly.48
46 Hornaday,“Report,” 11-12. 47 Ibid., 12-13. 48 Ibid., 13-14. 37
As expensive as maintaining the infrastructure of the Department of Living Animals could be, the cost of transporting the Department’s animals beyond the confines of the
Smithsonian proved quite reasonable. Typically railroad companies in the late-nineteenth century would charge “two to four times the amount of ordinary rates” for the shipment living animals.
However, due to the negotiation of Mr. S. C. Brown, Registrar of the National Museum, the
United States Express Company (then including the B. & O. Company) agreed to transport the animals to the Smithsonian at an “ordinary merchandise rate.” Despite the obduracy of the Adams
Express Company and the Southern Express Company, which refused Brown any discount,
Hornaday announced that the “generous concession” of the U.S. Express “will be of great value to us in building up the collection,” and he urged all of his magnanimous donors to ship animals using the B&O lines.49
Operating and managing the Department required practical and pragmatic solutions to mundane problems. The modern zoo functioned as a city within a city, an exploding metropolis of animals that drew the attention of the human metropolis in which it was situated. The
Department of Living Animals resembled an exploding animal district existing within the greater
Smithsonian community. While the day-to-day affairs of the Department answered many of the unexpected problems that a collection of living animals posed for the nation’s most prestigious museum and research institution, upon the erection of the recycled-wood building, the
Department of Living Animals began to make noteworthy contributions to science in
Washington, D.C. and the nation at-large. The bears of the Department especially captured
Hornaday’s research curiosity. Since the black, cinnamon, and grizzly bears coexisted in the same exhibit, the Department provided a unique opportunity to study how different species of bears interacted with one another. The amateurish organization of the Department fostered a unique
49 Hornaday,“Report,” 14-15. 38 situation for scientific inquiry. In established zoos, different species of bears rarely found themselves sharing an exhibit, but Hornaday planned to take advantage of the opportunity that the
Department offered.50
While his ursine research may have been a work in progress, the Department immediately gave Hornaday the opportunity to pursue his authorial and activist endeavors. He spent a “very noticeable portion” of his time writing about the decimation of the bison and the “protection of game in Yellowstone National Park.”51 In this way, William Temple Hornaday used his position as head of the Department of Living Animals to ignite his future career in conservationism. For the 1889 Cincinnati Exposition, he prepared an exhibit to “call the attention of the public to the fact that several important species of North American mammals have already been exterminated by man, and many others are rapidly going the same way.” In the exhibit, Hornaday included exquisitely mounted specimens of the “American bison, West Indian seal, California elephant seal, walrus, moose, elk, mountain goat, mountain sheep, antelope, and beaver,” surrounded by a series of paintings and photographs documenting the buffalo’s demise, a series of bison hides, a collection of rifles (the “modern weapons of destruction”), and seventy skins of the Rocky
Mountain goat. This exhibit, covering 800 square feet at the Exposition, commemorated the deceased by displaying their remnants.52 As curator of the Department, Hornaday wasted no time in developing his activism, organizing a vociferous campaign against the hunting establishment that would shape his career well into the twentieth century. Even though from a twenty-first- century vantage point it may seem contradictory for a famous hunter to stand next to a display against hunting, his fame as a sportsman bolstered his standing as a critic in the eyes of the public, distancing himself from the radical humanitarians who challenged the “human superiority
50 Hornaday,“Report,” 15. 51 Ibid., 17. 52 Ibid., 18-19. 39 and dominance” central to “Western thought.” As historians Lisa Mighetto, Harriet Ritvo, and others have demonstrated, hunters frequently contributed to early conservation and humanitarian movements.53
The Department of Living Animals grew rapidly, but the building lacked the space “for the proper comfort of the visitors who daily visit[ed] the collection.” In fact, the “daily throng” of people, sometimes approaching 3,000 individuals, had “been so great as to make it a matter of difficulty to pass through the building, or even to perform necessary work in connection with the care of the animals.” The Department became unexpectedly popular to the Washington public, and the crowds required Hornaday to hire a watchman “to compel the small-boy element,” as well as the “ragamuffin element,” “to depart after reasonable time.” By the summer of 1888, the
Department functioned in the Washington entertainment scene as a proto-zoo, while it served the
National Museum as a unique collection and Hornaday as a taxidermic workshop of sorts. As
Hornaday noted, “[t]he character of the visitors in daily attendance is in the highest degree complimentary to the experiment of opening this collection to the public, and causes a constant regret that is impracticable, if not also impossible, to provide ample room for the comfort of the visitors and also to have all the appointments of the collection of the highest order of excellence.”54
Hornaday knew that it was not practical for the Smithsonian Institution to manage a zoo on the Washington Mall. Space and resources were not available to house permanently an expanding collection of living animals. In the eight months between October eighth and June
53 Mighetto, Lisa, Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991): 42; Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate; Vandersommers, Daniel, “Violence, Animals, and Egalitarianism: Audubon and the Intellectual Formation of Animal Rights in America,” (Masters Thesis: The Ohio State University, 2010). 54 Hornaday,“Report,” 20-21. 40 thirtieth, the Department amassed quite the collection, expressed in Appendix A.55 Yet at first glance, this collection appears peculiar.
Before the creation of the Department of Living Animals, public zoological collections had always needed exotic creatures, spectacular mammalia from distant continents rarely seen by urban publics. By displaying elephants, giraffes, and hippopotamuses, zoos ushered viewers into larger cultural projects that sustained and legitimated their existence. As art critic John Berger and historians Keith Thomas and Harriet Ritvo have demonstrated, “the zoo became a symbol of colonial conquest as well as of wealth and status.”56 Zoos embodied the values of nation states in an imperial world: the ability to conquer, control, and display the wild. Zoos not only exemplified colonial power; they represented a bourgeois hegemony, the ability of the economic elite to amass and advance knowledge, to distance themselves from the uneducated and unrefined lower orders, as historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley have noted.57 All of these significations required exotic animals—long necks, sharp teeth, bright colors, ferocious tendencies, gargantuan size, valuable ivory extremities, spots, stripes, and rarity.
The Department, though, emerged primarily to satisfy the practical needs of the
Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist. Many of its first animal inhabitants were commonplace and unspectacular, including rats, foxes, rabbits, deer, owls, doves, pigeons, and garter snakes, many of which were often considered weeds or pests. Hornaday even found it necessary to purchase two squirrels, two raccoons, two opossum, and a box tortoise. The jaguar, buffalo, bears, monkey, prairie dogs, eagles, and macaw would have attracted attention in the Philadelphia Zoo or the zoological parks of Europe, but none fetched high prices in the exotic animal trade and none
55 Hornaday,“Report,” 21-26. 56 Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 277; Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 21-25; Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 57 Blackbourne, David and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 200. 41 would have been “fabulous animals” to build a zoo around.58 Ordinary animals filled the
Department, and while Hornaday probably would not have showcased many of them to Martian ambassadors visiting the nation’s capital, they served as the living models that Hornaday needed for his taxidermic displays of North American wildlife. While the Department of Living Animals emerged to satisfy a practical need, it quickly began to demand too much from the Smithsonian.
As Hornaday recognized, “The most important result accomplished thus far by our collection of
Living Animals has been in emphasizing the great need of a national zoological garden, established in the city of Washington.”59 The Department needed a metamorphosis.
Taxidermic Zoology: From Death to Life
In hindsight, that the Department of Living Animals, the embryo of the first national zoo of the United States, emerged from the needs of a taxidermist may seem unlikely. That a hunter and animal collector who specialized in killing the living in order to preserve the dead would establish an institution with the purpose of preserving the living by preventing death, in the very least, seems wildly ironic. However, a very logical and practical connection existed between the processes of taxidermy and national-zoo-building. The Department of Living Animals served as far more than a practical means to an end. Surely, the Department provided Hornaday with living models that would help him create lifelike taxidermic displays, yet this purpose seems to only justify the Department after its genesis. Taxidermania had consumed transatlantic bourgeois culture for well over a century, and while taxidermists had long interacted with living animals in the wild and often kept raccoons and birds in cages scattered about their laboratories, the most prominent nineteenth-century taxidermists never required their own personal menageries. The
Department of Living Animals emerged as a unique extension of the specific animal collecting processes of the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist. The Department (and thus the National Zoo
58 Rothfels, 56-57. I borrow this term “fabulous animals” from the title of Rothfels’s third chapter. 59 Hornaday,“Report,” 16. 42 itself) did not arise as a thing-in-itself, but as a byproduct of an age-old taxidermy employed in the sacred space of the National Museum. Both dead and living animals proved central to the everyday work of William Temple Hornaday. The dead found homes in the Museum’s exhibits, and the living paced the confines of the Department. Before reaching their respective destinations, though, all animals, breathing or otherwise, found themselves living in close proximity to each other.
As chief taxidermist of the Smithsonian, Hornaday found himself an important actor within overlapping and extensive “artefact” networks associated with museums, zoos, “cabinets,” and other multifarious institutions dependent on nineteenth-century “collecting” enterprises.
Within these networks, heterogeneous “artefacts” were bought, sold, exchanged, and transported around the world. Hornaday simultaneously purchased both living and dead animals, often from the same suppliers, and alongside animal transactions he bought oats, corn, hay, and straw for the living animals, and salt, alum, salometers, arsenical soap, fine steel combs, tanks, alcohol barrels, benzene, and glass eyes for the dead animals. Preserving dead animals and keeping living animals required an extensive and diverse list of materials. The Department of Living Animals cannot be understood apart from the material world that supported it.
Referring specifically to the princely collections of the Renaissance, spatial theorist
Kevin Hetherington explains that “[i]n actor-network terms the heterogeneous materiality of a network, in this case the collection of artefacts, the artists who produced them, the scholars who come to study them, the buildings in which the collection is housed, is embodied in the Prince who is mirrored by his collection.” 60 The theorists and philosophers who have commonly examined actors, networks, heterogeneity, materiality, and subject-object interrelations under the
60 Hetherington, Kevin, "From Blindness to blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject," In Actor Network Theory and After, John Law and John Hassard, 51-73 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) 59-60. 43 grand pursuit of Actor-Network Theory (often abbreviated ANT) usually write about post-
Renaissance “collections” that no longer reflected an image of an ornate Prince (a privileged
Actor), and instead imagined “collections” in which all its components (subjects-objects, humans- animals, individuals-collectives, materials-nonmaterials) are equally bounded together. In the buying and selling of animals, artefacts, and materials, William Temple Hornaday worked as a single actor in a long-established and far-reaching collecting network. However, in exploiting this collecting enterprise to meet the needs of the Smithsonian, and forming the first zoo of its kind,
Hornaday acted far beyond the role of actor. Hornaday acted as the Prince of the Department of
Living Animals and the National Zoological Park.
In the process of establishing a zoo, animals existed only as imagined entities on paper, as utilitarian “objects” possessing fixed monetary values calculated through complex formulas including the variables of supply, demand, rarity, cost of transport, cost of maintenance, cultural importance, and symbolic appreciation. Before a given animal was placed in the Department exhibit, it existed simply as an actor in a network, as a line scribbled onto the page of a memo, letter, order form, or accession record. In the voluminous correspondence of William Temple
Hornaday, the animals that would give birth to the first national zoo were devoid of animality, personality, and agency. Again, to borrow the words of Hetherington, in the process of national- zoo-building, “everything is similitude.” Collecting processes temporarily reduced heterogeneity to homogeneity. When a set of unique objects were collected for a cabinet, museum, or zoo, between extraction and display, these objects temporarily lost their uniqueness. From a museum’s perspective, an arrowhead, chair, and sword were only abstract items on an order list until their uniqueness could finally be displayed. Similarly, until they arrived at the Department, a bear, deer, or eagle were one-in-the-same, abstractions being transmitted along a collecting network.
Yet, through this process, and from the similitude of the network, animals emerged, animal-actors
44 transformed into animal-agents, and despite captivity, their animality would eventually challenge the anthropocentrism of a nation.61
To show how William Temple Hornaday built the Department of Living Animals, this section will delve into his extensive correspondence. Like other nineteenth-century public intellectuals, sending and receiving letters marked an important part of everyday life. This section will examine the animal-actors of Hornaday’s correspondence to show how the Department emerged from taxidermic practices. By discussing animal-actors, of course, this section will necessarily ignore animals as natural creatures, entities with lives prior to the network which they were forced (and possibly born) into. As far as Hornaday’s correspondence is concerned, animal- actors did not possess lives prior to their commodification, transport, and exchange. Like arsenical soap or glass eyeballs, animal-actors existed only as objects to be consumed by the
National Museum. First, this section will describe thickly Hornaday’s taxidermic laboratory, highlighting its materiality. Second, it will show how Hornaday’s laboratory operated as a way station in an expansive and international exchange network by revealing how the nonliving, living, and dead were acquired through a singular process.
Hornaday’s Laboratory and An Internal World
In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve
Woolgar described the typical compartmentalization of a scientific laboratory. “One area of the laboratory (section B),” they depict, “contains various items of apparatus, while the other (section
A) contains only books, dictionaries, and papers.” The spatial organization of the archetypal laboratory leads to a common division of labor; they elaborate:
Whereas in section B individuals work with apparatus in a variety of ways: they can be seen to be cutting, sewing, mixing, shaking, screwing, marking, and so on; individuals in section A work with written materials: either reading, writing, or typing. Furthermore, although occupants of section A, who do not wear white
61 Hetherington, 58. 45
coats, spend long periods of time with their white-coated colleagues in section B, the reverse is seldom the case. Individuals referred to as doctors read and write in offices in section A while other staff, known as technicians, spend most of their time handling equipment in section B.62
Hornaday’s taxidermic laboratory diverges drastically from this representative organization of the
“scientific” laboratory, for Hornaday managed sections A and B. His publications (“The Right
Way to Teach Zoölogy,” for example) cannot be understood apart from his taxidermic work, and he justly became famous for both.63
While it proves impossible to reconstruct perfectly Hornaday’s Smithsonian laboratory, his book Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting: A Complete Handbook for the Amateur
Taxidermist, Collector, Osteologist, Museum-Builder, Sportsman, and Traveller, published in
1891, provides a vivid glimpse into what his Smithsonian lab probably looked like. “To begin with,” a proper laboratory needed “a good room, if possible 15x25 feet, or even larger, with good light, a high ceiling, and an abundant supply of water.” In addition to the primary workspace,
“[t]here must be somewhere a storeroom for bulky materials, and a drying-room for freshly mounted specimens. There must be provided somewhere, for the wet mammal skins, a big, box- like tank lined with sheet lead, for very large objects, and some alcohol barrels for smaller ones.
These must be provided with tight covers, or the salt-and-alum bath will evaporate with great rapidity.” A laboratory also required furniture: a work table (ideally “8 feet long, 4 feet wide, and
2 feet 6 inches high; top 1½ inch thick”), a tool case and chest of drawers, a stove, a chopping-
62 Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1979), 45. 63 The laboratory of the taxidermist obviously differs greatly from the laboratory of the “neuroendocrinologist,” for example. However, this is not the place to deliberate on the structural differences between Latour and Woolgar’s quintessential laboratory and the laboratory of Hornaday. 46 block, a heavy bench vise, a grindstone, a blacksmith’s anvil, a portable forge, and a water-tight platform on castors, “on which to stand large mammals that are wet and dripping.”64
Some equipment in the laboratory served a purpose particular to the mounting of a certain type of specimen. In fact, particular animals often required an entire set of specialized equipment.
Hornaday used “Agassiz tanks” to preserve fish specimens, for example. These “square, box- like” tanks were “made of copper and lined with tin” and could be “closed tightly by means of a screw cover.” Agassiz tanks, originally designed by Louis Agassiz, were “light, not very costly, easily managed, and [were] about as nearly perfect for their purpose as anything can be in this world.” During shipment, Hornaday would place the Agassiz tanks in pine chests, equipped with
“wrought-iron handles, hinged cover, hasp and padlock.” These chests could accommodate “one sixteen-gallon tank, two of eight gallons, and either three or four four-gallon tanks.” When he could not afford the costly Agassiz tanks (which cost $16.50 for a 16-gallon tank, $10 for a 8- gallon tank, and $4.25 for a 4-gallon tank), Hornaday would simply find “some large round cans made of galvanized iron, with tops that can be soldered on when the time comes to ship specimens,” or he would use empty kegs, barrels, or kerosene cans lying around the Smithsonian grounds.65 Preserving fish required various spirits (usually carbolic acid, chloride of soda, and preservative alcohol), an alcoholometer, and curing bathtubs. Skinning the fish called for an assortment of scissors, knives, scalers, and bone scrappers.66 These items were used only for the collecting, preserving, and transporting of fish, some of the smallest, and often most overlooked, specimens Hornaday dealt with at the Smithsonian.
64 Hornaday, William T., Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting: A Complete Handbook for the Amateur Taxidermist, Collector, Osteologist, Museum-Builder, Sportsman, and Traveller (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 99-100. 65 Hornaday, Taxidermy, 72-73. 66 Ibid., 73-79. 47
Mounting a “solitary fish” required many more materials, specifically, “an assortment of hard brass wire, Nos. 3 to 10, a hack-saw, some brass rosettes, a small die for cutting threads on brass wire, and taps of corresponding sizes for cutting threads in the brass nuts and rosettes.”
Also, to mount a fish, Hornaday would need a small piece of soft pine wood (carved with a whittle) on which he could place the skinned body as he transformed it into a stuffed specimen.
With brass standards, nuts, and rosettes, as well as thread, Hornaday would attach the fish to the pine board. He would wash the body with arsenical soap or powdered arsenic and would stuff it with a mixture of clay and chopped tow. The stuffing would require Hornaday to use forceps, needle, thread, and sticking pins. Once the fish body was filled and threaded together, the scales would be sponge-washed with a mixture of white varnish and turpentine to prevent them from curling in the drying process or losing their true colors over time. While the fish dried, Hornaday would paint either silver or gold glass eyes using oil colors, finishing them with coats of shellac for protection. Before placing the eyes into the stuffed fish body, they would be situated in clay, putty, or papier-maché, depending on the size of the “solitary fish’s” eye socket. Once the dried fish specimen received its glass eyes, the body was sometimes painted. Hornaday employed widely diverse and complicated methods of painting fish, which depended on the species of fish he was working with.67
Preparing taxidermic displays of fish alone required a diverse list of materials. Depending on the type of fish, the number of materials could expand. Larger fish like sharks, saw-fishes, or jew-fish needed to be stuffed with straw and required thicker iron rods for standards.
Cartilaginous fishes, especially rays, posed all types of challenges to Hornaday and demanded special methods. Ray specimens (“abominable animated pancakes”) sometimes proved so irascible that Hornaday would simply throw them into a compost heap and resort to simply
67 Hornaday, Taxidermy, 208-216. 48 making a plaster cast model of the batoidea.68 As the chief taxidermist of the Smithsonian,
Hornaday mounted a grand diversity of animals. Fish actually proved fairly unimportant to the great displays of North American animals to which Hornaday devoted most of his time and efforts. Hornaday preserved, stuffed, mounted, and displayed both small and large mammals, small and large birds, reptiles, fishes, lobsters and crabs, and insects, and each genre of animal as well as each individual specie required particular materials. Materials and dead animals filled the taxidermic laboratory, and since the ideal work space of the taxidermist was 375 square feet, one can imagine his workspace being crowded. The taxidermic laboratory certainly could not have been spatially divided in the manner of Latour and Woolgar’s model laboratory. Hornaday performed all of his taxidermic responsibilities and activities around his eight-foot work table and probably engaged in his prolific writing (correspondence, scientific articles, and monographs) either at a desk placed in his laboratory or in one of the quiet corners of the Smithsonian Castle.
Nonetheless, while the “solitary fish” and the “unique lobster” may have later received
Hornaday’s disdain in his article “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy,” he certainly possessed a great deal of respect for all creatures big and small, always trying the best he could to let a specimen display accurately the characteristics of its Linnaean class, order, family, genus, and species. While Hornaday fails to mention the importance of the grasshopper in his writing on taxidermy, he does have photographs of himself, net in hand and cigar in mouth, looking up into the branches of a tree to catch a butterfly, a specimen colorful enough to impress Martian visitors.69
Hornaday’s laboratory would have been equipped with “[f]irst-class tools, and a good assortment of them,” for “[a]s well might an artist attempt to paint a grand picture with a sash tool as a taxidermist attempt to mount fine specimens with a dull knife, an old file, and a pair of rusty
68 Hornaday, Taxidermy., 212-216. 69 Ibid., 320. 49 pliers.” Hornaday recommended that the taxidermist include the following tools in his laboratory:
2 killing-knives, 2 cartilage-knives, 1 pair shears, 1 pair fine scissors, 1 draw-shave (adjustable handles), 2 skin-scrapers (of sizes), 3 gouges (of sizes), 3 chisels (of sizes), 1 screw-driver, 1 2- foot rule, 1 tape-measure (12 feet), 1 thread-cutter (for iron), 1 thread-cutter (for brass), 3 pair pliers (of sizes), 3 pair cutting nippers, 4 pair forceps (of sizes), 1 hand vise, 1 hand drill, 2 monkey wrenches (of sizes), 1 ratchet brace (with bits and drills), 4 gimlet bits (of sizes), 1 hand- saw, 1 key-hole saw, 1 claw hammer, 1 tack hammer, 1 machinist’s hammer, 1 hatchet (to lend),
1 sharp hatchet (to use), 1 cold chisel, 1 set stone-cutter’s chisels, 1 punch, 1 tap wrench, 1 pair calipers, 1 set of hack saws (for iron and brass), 1 set iron fillers (of sizes), 1 set wooden fillers
(of sizes), 1 set modeling tools, 1 set of files, 1 set of paint brushes, 1 set of brushes for hair and teeth, 1 glue-pot, 1 set of awls, 1 set of glover’s needles (3 sizes), best linen sewing twine
(“gilling thread”) of two or three sizes, 1 iron thimble, 1 spirit-lamp or gas-stove, pails, kettles, cups, bowls, etc., and 12 spools of Barbour’s linen thread.70 With this assortment of tools,
Hornaday could mount any specimen that reached his work table, from buffalo and grizzly bears to sparrows and chipmunks. “Perish the thought” that Hornaday could not “cope with dog, deer, or even elephant.”71
In addition to the above tools, the taxidermist also needed a long list of materials.
Hornaday would have stocked his laboratory with the following:
[e]xcelsior; hemp tow of two qualities, coarse and fine, both of long fibre; flax tow, such as upholsterers use; cotton batting; oat straw; potter’s clay; good glue; plaster Paris; arsenical soap; spirits of turpentine; benzene; salt by the barrel; ground alum by the hundredweight; pine and hemlock lumber, one to two inches thick; 2x4 pine scantling; an assortment of annealed wire; rods of Norway iron,
70 Hornaday, Taxidermy, 100. Hornaday expressed this list as a table. For the aesthetic purpose of allowing the reader to experience the materiality of the taxidermic laboratory, and to underscore the diversity of the tools present, I decided that it would be best to express this table as a lengthy (and intentionally tedious) list. To transform a table into text, I added parentheses and commas and decided not to bother with the formal method of “direct quotation” that would have required cumbersome brackets and ellipses. 71 Ibid., 101. 50
from 3/16 inch to 1 inch; nails, tacks, wrought-iron staples, screws, nuts, bolts, wrapping twine; rosettes for iron standards; washers, all sizes; alcohol, shellac, white hard oil finish (varnish); muriatic acid, sheet wax, sperm oil; glass eyes, all sizes, kinds and colors; unlimited pluck, patience, and perseverance.72
In a laboratory filled with so much furniture and equipment, so many tools and materials, there would have been little space for living animals. However, as the “2 killing-knives” (which
Hornaday listed first in the set of tools needed by the taxidermist) suggest, the taxidermic laboratory was as much about the living as about the dead.
Hornaday’s Laboratory and External Worlds
The material world inside the taxidermic laboratory allowed Hornaday to represent outside worlds. Taxidermic art had long focused on modeling nature, on capturing that elusive fantasy-object in the bodies of the mounted dead.73 At the National Museum Hornaday gained fame for his habitat group-making, most famously for an 1887 exhibit of a small buffalo herd, with calves, surrounded by the grasses of a prairie landscape.74 Hornaday not only preserved, stuffed, and mounted animals in his laboratory; he also designed and constructed the group displays that would adorn the halls of the Museum.
Hornaday strove to create group displays that would be “bold in design, theatrical in effect, and . . . represent a tour de force on the part of the originator.” He hoped to create exhibitions that would rival Verreaux’s “Arab Courier attacked by Lions,” Edwin Ward’s “Lion and Tiger Struggle,” and John Wallace’s “Lions Fighting” and “Horseman attacked by Tigers.”75
72 Hornaday, Taxidermy, 101. 73 For more on “nature” as an elusive fantasy-object see Timothy Morton’s beautifully written Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For more on nineteenth-century taxidermic art (written from a nineteenth-century perspective) see Franklin H. North’s “The Taxidermal Art” Century Illustrated Magazine 25, No. 2 (Dec., 1882): 230-240. 74 Horowitz, 410. 75 Hornaday’s famous bison exhibit lacks the violence depicted in these other famous group exhibits. He also opposed the placing of the human form in group displays, and, therefore, his displays provide an interesting contrast to the living exhibits described by Nigel Rothfels and the taxidermic exhibits described by Lynn Nyhart in her Modern Nature. He comments in Taxidermy, “Animals are usually chosen which will admit of a representation of vigorous action. The most favorite theme is large animals in combat. He 51
Hornaday argued that the most important “principle” of group-making was procuring the finest possible specimens. “It is a mistake,” he emphasized, “to go to the trouble and expense of mounting a number of specimens in a group unless each object is entirely satisfactory in quality.”
Hornaday believed that the specimens of a group display needed to have perfect pelage or plumage in order to capture the admiring eyes of their observers. If a specimen ever failed to reach his high expectations (even after completing its mounting), Hornaday would “discard it by all means in favor of a better one.”76
Of course, Hornaday admitted, “[t]he best of all ways to procure specimens for groups is to go into the field, find them in their haunts, study them alive, study their habitat and their habits; shoot, measure, and preserve them with your own hands.” The Smithsonian, though, kept
Hornaday very busy, so while in a previous life he may have been one of the most qualified hunter-collectors of animals in the world (indeed, he published Two Years in the Jungle to share his expertise), he simply lacked the time for hunting expeditions beyond those funded by the
Smithsonian. “If you are unable to [procure specimens] yourself,” Hornaday qualified, “then it must be done for you by some competent person, under your direction.” In reality, however, the taxidermist-collector relationship proved distant and abstract, often far less than ideal. As chief taxidermist of a growing national museum, Hornaday found himself in constant need of specimens. To meet his Department’s demand, he took part in an extensive animal and artifact trade. To represent natural worlds through taxidermy, Hornaday opened his laboratory to a material network that met many of his multifarious needs. William Temple Hornaday, his laboratory, his taxidermy, and the Smithsonian became major actors in a heterogeneous trade of who has the boldness to introduce the human form divine in such a composition will oftener than otherwise have occasion to wish he hadn’t. The human figure is, at best, a difficult subject to handle, and in its introduction with mounted quadrupeds the designer often finds, to his sorrow, how very short is the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. In general I should say that the human figure is an excellent thing to leave out of a group of mounted quadrupeds, unless it happens to be an Esquimau completely enveloped in thick furs.” 76 Hornaday, Taxidermy, 236-239. 52 non-exotic animals, animal-parts, and museum salmagundi that supported a diverse assortment of museums, zoos, circuses, collectors, taxidermists, and parlors around the Atlantic world.77
The animal trade from which the National Zoo emerged surely appears less luxurious and spectacular than the animal trade that filled the menageries of Charlemagne in the eighth century,
Henry I in the eleventh (who started a royal tradition of keeping animals at Woodstock), and
Akbar in the sixteenth. Asian, African, and (eventually) American fauna were not strangers to the
European continent in the medieval or early-modern period. As historian Nigel Rothfels points out, “In Europe . . . the dry moats surrounding walled cities were often stocked with deer, songbirds were kept in elaborate aviaries, falcons and cheetahs were kept for hunting, and bear collections were relatively commonplace.” In addition to bourgeois collections, traveling fairs carted elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and hippopotamuses, the most famous exotic creatures, from town to town. 78 The animal trade utilized by Hornaday also appears less organized, extensive, profitable, and elitist than the exotic animal business that provided the London Zoo in
Regent’s Park (founded in 1828), the Dublin Zoo (founded in 1831), the Philadelphia Zoo
(founded in 1859 and opening in 1874), and Tierpark Hagenbeck of Stellingen (founded in 1907) with their inhabitants. As Rothfels also demonstrates, the modern exotic animal trade, which
German entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck played an important role in establishing, operated as a business which pragmatically captured, bought, sold, and exchanged expensive animal commodities.79 Like other nineteenth-century capitalists, animal dealers attempted to maximize
77 On zoos in relation to circuses, amusement parks, and fairs see Hanson, Animal Attractions, 34-38. The history of circuses is quite voluminous. A few good works on circus history include Janet M. Davis’s The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Gregory J. Renoff’s The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820-1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Helen Stoddart’s Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). A great bibliographic essay on circus history can be found in Susan Nance’s Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 279-280. 78 Rothfels, 13-14. 79 Ibid., Chapters 2 and 4. 53 profits and efficiency, engaging in both vertical and horizontal integration and creating large- scale, international enterprises employed in dealing animals around the world. The animals
Hornaday purchased, though, seem far less spectacular than those bought by other zoos, and the dealers from which he purchased his animals operated on the margins of the formal animal trade industry. Hornaday forged a public menagerie from taxidermic practices, and, therefore, the
Department of Living Animals functioned as a unique hybrid of museum and zoo.
Hornaday purchased all kinds of animals and all types of animal-parts from an immense diversity of individuals, companies, and organizations located in every metropolis and frontier of the United States. He maintained a voluminous record of these transactions and potential transactions by keeping all the correspondence he received and many copies of his responses to this correspondence. The records of living animals, animal corpses, animal parts, and the nonliving materials of the laboratory appear side-by-side in Hornaday’s collection of letters, and it is clear that the taxidermic laboratory, the halls of the National Museum, the Department of
Living Animals, and, eventually, the National Zoo were created and maintained by similar methods. Hornaday acted as a well-known member of a peculiar network.
And this network could be peculiar indeed. Hornaday received inquiries, requests, and offers of every kind imaginable—and some barely so. Alice Margaret Guernsey, Chicago editor and future author, mailed Hornaday the following question:
In face of the fact that we have always claimed that alcohol is nowhere found in nature, the following comes to me for explanation: “In a book entitled, ‘Sea and Land—An illustrated history of the wonderful and curious things of nature existing before and since the deluge,” published by the Bridgeman and Smythe Co., Boaton (1887), is the following statement, “The wine-trees found in Mauritius Island, is only more wonderful than the pitcher-plant in that it distils an excellent quality of wine instead of water, corresponding to old Concord. The natives are extremely fond of this natural intoxicant, and abuse its use like wine- bibbers throughout the world; but it is said that its effects are not so pernicious on the system as fermented wine.” I am unable to find any confirmation or denial of this statement, though I have made careful search in our excellent Public Library. In the dilemma, I turn 54
to the Smithsonian. Is the statement correct? If not, how can I disprove it to the satisfaction of some wide-awake children in one of our temperance organizations?80
No trace of a response exists in Hornaday’s correspondence, but he probably was preoccupied with more pressing concerns. The chief taxidermist always found himself busy purchasing preserved and properly-colored poison ivy, giving advice to island-owners about whether seaside salt-grass could support a private buffalo herd, answering random questions about the ancient ruins of Tegucigalpa, or determining the pedigree of pug owned by Mrs. Karl.81
Of course, as a taxidermist, Hornaday spent most of his time accumulating dead animals.
Individuals around the country offered him every type of specimen. C. H. Harlow, from Ohio, sold him an Eskimo dog named Growler that died from consuming the toxins of a bear’s liver.82
Hornaday mounted the head of Dr. Bessler’s pet dog in exchange for ethnological objects.83 J. A.
Gillfillian, from Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation, sent price estimates of moose and caribou heads.84 Henry Ward traded Hornaday a mounted rhinoceros, procured from P. T. Barnum, for the
National Museum’s mounted rhinoceros and gnu.85 In fact, Hornaday frequently haggled with
Barnum. In one letter of 1885, Hornaday wrote to G. W. Johnston, “Professor Baird has just shown me two letters from Mr. Barnum, in which he announces his intention to have all dead animals to us hereafter, in exchange for specimens of various kinds—stuffed birds, casts, fishes, pottery, Indian implements, + which we are to give Mr. Barnum for his museum at Tufts’
College.”86 Cash M. Mead, from Crawford, Nebraska, offered Hornaday “the left half of the
80 Alice M. Guernsey to Hornaday, 27 May 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 7. 81 C. Pelletetier to Hornaday, 31 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 4; John H. Harmanson to Hornaday, 4 April 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8; Fletcher M. Noe to Hornaday, 25 May 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 3; “Pedigree of Pug” Scribbled Note, 24 December 1882, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9. 82 C. H. Harlow to Hornaday, 3 September Unknown Year, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 83 G. Brown Goode to Hornaday, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 6. 84 J. A. Gilfillian to Hornaday, 14 April 1887, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 7. 85 Hornaday to Unknown, 30 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 86 Hornaday to G. W. Johnston, 18 May 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9. 55 lower jaw of a mastodon with . . . 5 molar teeth intact [and] petrified.”87 And Y. E. B. Lasham, from Florida, offered Hornaday a collection of a loggerhead turtle’s embryos, preserved in alcohol.88 Even the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens sent Hornaday a dead walrus that died in its aquarium.89 Carcasses served as the taxidermist’s raw material, and transactions like those above characterized the day-in-the-life of the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist. Hornaday received dead animals from a diversity of individuals and businesses all over the United States.
Often times, zoos would send the National Museum the corpses of animals that had died in their cages. Hornaday forged a working relationship, for example, with the menagerie in
Central Park (at 5th Avenue and 64th Street), which would eventually morph into the Central Park
Zoo, long before he had even conceived of the Department of Living Animals. In 1884 Hornaday wrote a letter to William A. Conklin, superintendent of the menagerie, asking, “whether it would be possible under existing circumstances for us to secure . . . specimens as [they] die in your menagerie.” Hornaday then explained that since the Smithsonian lacked funding, he was “obliged to depend largely upon the generosity of . . . friends and what [he] can secure by exchanging.”
Hornaday emphasized that the Smithsonian would take any animal, but he particularly hoped for
“foreign species.” The Smithsonian would, of course, pay shipping-and-handling fees and while the Institution might not be able to pay with cash, Hornaday himself promised to compensate animal donations with “pieces of taxidermic work suitable for your parlor.”90 That year, Conklin sent Hornaday the bodies of a common Egyptian jerboa, grey monkey, giant kangaroo, Siberian crane, mona monkey, Celebes macaque, lemur, condor, and python skin.91 These donations do not
87 C. M. Mead to Hornaday, 3 November 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 2. 88 Y. E. B. Lasham to Hornaday, 17 December 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 1. 89 Baird to J. A. Thompson, 15 December 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 90 Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 14 March 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 91 W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 20 September 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 6 November 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 9 October 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 26 March 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 8 April 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, 56 necessarily demonstrate an inability on the part of the Central Park Menagerie in keeping living animals alive, for as Conklin pointed out later, “people forget that animals are like human beings
+ will die even under the best of care + attention.”92 Hornaday, of course, made good on his promise, sending Conklin, in 1884 and the beginning of 1885, a roseate spoonbill screen, scarlet ibis screen, stuffed Great Horned Owl, deer and antelope heads, and several government scientific publications. This trade in dead animals increased over the next few years, and Hornaday always proved prepared “to mount anything and everything from Jumbo [the infamous elephant of P.T.
Barnum] down.” 93 When the lion of the St. Louis Zoological Gardens passed away, Hornaday hoped to take the body off the zoo’s hands.94
Hornaday also acquired specimens from circuses. In 1885, H. B. Everett, employed with
Barnum’s Show, wrote to Hornaday about an elephant named Albert who had killed a keeper.
Everett apprised the taxidermist that the elephant “would make a fine specimen for the museum, if you wanted him, they would probably send him alive, in a car, a man with him, who has control of him, and you could kill him in Washington, by electricity, or experiment as you might wish.”
Everett continued that “[e]lectricity might subdue him so that he would not need killing, and he would make a nucleus, as it were, for a zoological garden.” Everett sent this letter while Mr.
Bailey, Barnum’s partner, was “away,” expecting that upon his return he would immediately order Albert’s execution. By contacting, Hornaday, then, Everett was giving Albert either a chance at life in the hypothetical case that the Smithsonian would form a zoo in Washington, or
Everett was offering Albert an opportunity for a new life-in-death enshrined within the walls of
Folder 3; Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 11 November 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 9 May 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 92 W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 10 July 1886, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 93 Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 11 November 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 6 February 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 6 November 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; W. A. Conklin to Hornaday, 5 June 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3; Hornaday to W. A. Conklin, 26 March 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 94 Hornaday to Mr. John B. Winner, 14 April 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 9. 57 the Museum.95 Everett frequently looked after the afterlife of circus animals as they approached their final days, asking Hornaday, on a prior occasion, about his interest in the bodies of a black bear, anaconda, and lion kept in the circus’s menagerie.96
That same year, Hornaday asked Adam Forepaugh, the great circus owner, whether his dead lion was for sale.97 Hornaday told the Superintendent of the O’Brien’s Show that “[t]he following are the only animals in your menagerie which we would like to have when they die: yak, tiger, lion, leopard, sable antelope, and oudad.” Hornaday then provided instructions in preserving and shipping the carcasses, writing:
In case any of these die, cut them open along the belly, take out all the entrails, put in a quantity of salt, and, if the weather is best, and the distance over 300 miles, pack the animal in sawdust and ice. Send by express, securely boxed, and addressed to me at the U.S. National Museum, but do not prepay charges. Whenever convenient, telegraph me, at my expense, stating that the animal has been sent, so that I can be on the watch for it. As I said before, we will pay you in full for boxes, ice, salt, etc. etc. and enough in addition to pay you and your men well for your trouble. Although we are not allowed to buy specimens as private parties do, I have things so arranged that I can make it worth while for showmen to send us the animals they lose instead of throwing them away. For an animal like your yak, for instance, we would pay $10 to $15, for the trouble of cutting open, boxing + sending in addition to the cost of the box, ice, etc.98
These general instructions applied to anyone sending Hornaday dead animals. If circuses neglected to properly package and ship a dead body, it would prove useless to Hornaday.
Occasionally, for example, when the Sells Brothers Circus tried to send Hornaday a package in
1889, bodies would decompose in their boxes and an “express company” would refuse “to accept it on account of the odor.”99 Clearly, the National Museum had an intimate relationship with the dead. Yet its deceased often originated from institutions based around life—zoos, circuses, and
95 H. B. Everett to Hornaday, 20 July 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 5. 96 H. B. Everett to Hornaday, 26 April 1884, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 5. 97 Hornaday to Adam Forepaugh, 10 December 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 6. 98 Hornaday to Mr. Add. Lake, 11 May 1885, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 4. 99 Sells Bro’s. Circus to Hornaday, 1 October 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder, 6. 58 menageries. Ironically, as Hornaday amassed a collection of dead animals, he simultaneously collected living animals.
On March 7, 1888, A. B. Baker, the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Trego
County, Kansas, as well as an amateur taxidermist, penned a simple note to Hornaday concerning the importance of dead and living animals for taxidermy. Baker explained that “I mounted last week a Coyote – put in on him all my spare time for a week! I seem to make very slow headway, but try to have the work as nearly correct as I can make it. In this case I had for models, a dead
Coyote and living dog.”100 Using living models to perfect the art of taxidermy was a common practice for all taxidermists, and they often acquired dead and living animals through the same means. W. W. Holton of Fauquier County, Virginia, for example, offered to “procure some
“ground hogs” both dead & alive.” Holton explained that, on the farms of eastern Virginia, he could acquire ground hogs “ranging from ½ lb. to 25 lbs. in weight.” “We get them occasionally to eat,” he continued, “but do not make a practice of hunting them. If you send a man to get them you may have all you wish free of charge. If you catch them alive you will have to have something stronger than wood cages as they gnaw the wood.” Holton offered Hornaday his services free of charge; he only wished to “furnish the museum with good hogs.”101
Similarly, A. S. Knight, from Vancouver, Washington, offered to capture for the Museum
“a pair of rocky mountain goat[s] or snow ibex” for $1000. He would also “furnish . . . a pair of skins all ready for mounting for $400. [O]ne specimen for $200. Or one specimen alive for
$500.” He even thought he could “capture the kids” of either species and tame them if desired.102
To a Lewis McC., Hornaday hastily penned the following note:
I will give from $5. to $10. for an old ♀ and 4 young ones of about the same age as the those you mounted. and all the materials found in the burrow. x x Will
100 A. B. Baker to Hornaday, 7 March 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 2. 101 W. W. Holton to Hornaday, 4 July 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 102 A. S. Knight to Mr. Brown Goode, 22 September 1887, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9. 59
pay $10 gladly for a complete outfit of male, female, 4 young + burrow materials. x x x Will take the animals dead or alive [emphasis added] if they are in good condition for mounting. If taken dead, they had better be cut open on the belly, + take out all viscera, then put in plenty of salt.103
For the taxidermist, the living and the dead often came as a package, and many of the letters exchanged between Hornaday and others in animal-related careers demonstrated this. Animal collectors, hunters, taxidermists, and traders all over the American West knew that the
Smithsonian needed, in the words of I. A. Porter of Madison, Wisconsin, “good specimens dead or live.”104
Hornaday received living animals throughout the 1880s. However, once the Department of Living Animals was established in 1887, and especially after the National Zoo was officially founded in 1889, fauna found their way to Washington not only to assist the Smithsonian’s taxidermic enterprises, but also to become a part of the collection. The Department of Living
Animals became an end in its own right, and Americans around the country tried to peddle their unwanted pets, vermin, beasts, and exotica to Hornaday. George N. Clayton, a shop owner from
St. Joseph, Missouri, wrote a comical letter to “Prof. Hornaday or Captain Weeden” to enquire about the interest of the Smithsonian in a living mountain lion. Clayton, who (judging by the word “[junk dealer]” scribbled in the margins of one of his letters) earned little respect in the eyes of Hornaday, comically penned the following request:
I have at my store on Frederick Ave. . . . a year old Mountain Lion which I wish to sell. Do not know certainly the sex but believe it is a male. I have however named it Fanny and it answers to that name. It is perfectly tame and runs about my store perfectly at home . . . Many little children come to see it and think it a beauty. Its companion is a water spaniel puppy 9 mon[ths] old which was raised with it. They play like two kittens. There is not a blemish on it. I have had it ever since it was about a week old. I brought it from Mexico with me. It is 4 ½ or 5- feet long. I wish to dispose of it at a reasonable price. What is it worth to you? I
103 Hornaday to Lewis McC., 10 May 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 2. 104 I. A. Porter to Hornaday, 8 June, 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 4. 60
would like to sell it where it would be well cared for. It is fat and sleek now. It eats cooked meat mostly. Sometimes I feed it raw meat. Please reply.105
The “junk dealer” offered to ship this cat to Washington for the price of $40, but even though
Clayton emphasized that the lion played around his “legs like a kitten” and attracted “hundreds of people” to his store, Hornaday turned down the offer.106
Many, like Clayton, tried to make a quick buck from the Department of Living Animals.
Philip Hucker, from Mascoutah, Illinois, tried to sell a “troublesome” raccoon with “pink eyes” for five dollars.107 T. M. Rudd of the District hoped to profit from some rabbits he caught in the mountains of Virginia.108 S. J. King, from Memphis, Tennessee, informed Hornaday about a
“beautiful specimen of the wild cat tribe, which was captured in a log trap down on my place” and wanted to know what the Smithsonian would give him for it.109 A resident of Fredericksburg,
Virginia, scrawled to Hornaday, “I hear you are collecting animals . . . I have a Silver Fox . . . He is perfectly tame, and will play with anyone like a kitten. I would not part with him but am compelled to do so as I am going away.” He hoped that Hornaday would purchase his domesticated silver fox, which in hindsight might have actually made a valuable purchase considering the Soviet Union would someday spend five decades studying the animal to illuminate the complex topic of early canid domestication and evolution. In any case, Hornaday responded that he would not want a pet fox unless it came with a family.110
“Animal catchers” around the United States quickly heard about Hornaday’s Department, and they wasted no time in offering to procure animals for the Smithsonian. A hunter from
Georgia sent Hornaday the following letter:
105 Geo. N. Clayton to Hornaday or Weeden, 11 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 106 Geo. N. Clayton to Hornaday, 23 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 3. 107 Philip Hucker to Hornaday, 11 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 108 T. M. Rudd to Hornaday, 10 July 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 5. 109 S. J. King to Hornaday, 10 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9. 110 H. Huzurn (sp?) to Hornaday, 15 May 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8; Trut, Lyudmila, “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment,” American Scientist 87, no. 2 (1999): 160-165. 61
I hear . . . of you getting up a menagerie, attached to the museum, of native animals. It is my cherished plan when it is well under way to come + look around at some, nature was always my greatest Study, I hope you will prosper at it by the grace of the true + living God. Is there any thing alive I can furnish for the menagerie in my state[?]111
Other hunters, taxidermists, farmers, storeowners, ranchers, frontiersman, boundary dwellers, and upcountry folks mailed similar requests to their nation’s capital. For example, when Indian scouts stationed at Fort Keogh, Montana, captured a mountain lion, 1st Lieutenant Thompson asked
Hornaday whether he would want to purchase the animal.112 People of all types frequently asked the taxidermist to send a “list of what you have not got,” so they could meet the Smithsonian’s needs.113 Requests like these referred to both dead animals for the Museum and living animals for the Department.
Even though Hornaday confronted many “junk deals,” some individuals genuinely believed that the Smithsonian would make a better home for their living property or could better care for an animal that they no longer wanted. George H. Forester, M.D., stationed at Fort
Morgan at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama, offered to trade Hornaday a living bald eagle in exchange for a stuffed one. “One of my neighbor boys,” he explained, “took this young eagle from the nest last February, as the birds breed near here. [I]f not too much trouble, please let me hear from you on the subject of eagles.”114 Allan H. Jennings of Baltimore caught a “quite handsome” yellow-crowned night heron while traveling in the Bahamas and simply wanted to donate it to Hornaday to support the Smithsonian.115 Similar generous offers were made by Miss
Grace Montagne of the District with a flying squirrel, Virginian H. D. B. Norris with an owl and eagle, a donor from Portland, Oregon, with a family of wolverines, an El Paso resident with some
111 Juo. L. Tennent (sp?) to Hornaday, 3 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 7. 112 Thompson to Hornaday, 31 March 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 7. 113 Joseph A. O’Donahue to Hornaday, 18 March 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 4. 114 George H. Forester to Hornaday, 31 July 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 6. 115 Allan H. Jennings to Hornaday, 21 November 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9.
62 bears who were “great friends of the family,” and an employee of the Department of the Interior with two land terrapins.116 Many of these donations were small. Most offered American mammals like foxes, opossum, rats, hares, and squirrels. However, as Table 1 in Appendix A demonstrates, occasionally larger and more expensive animals like jaguars, bears, and buffalo were charitably deposited in the Department. In 1887, J. H. Riddle, for instance, offered to send Hornaday a living tiger for free as long as the Smithsonian was willing to spend the $25 needed to build a
“cage in which to ship him.”117
Of course, most who hoped their animals would find a home at the Smithsonian were neither “junk dealer” nor donating patron. Hornaday received countless offers from respectable
(and interesting) citizens to purchase healthy animals. Virginian G. J. Pollock entertained himself over a summer by catching poisonous snakes, including rattlesnakes, copperheads, a puff adder, black snakes, moccasins, and water snakes. His hobby proved dangerous when one of Pollock’s friends suffered a bite from a rattlesnake. He informed Hornaday that “we filled him with whiskey and he suffered nothing more than a swelled hand,” yet the incident may have motivated
Pollock to try to sell his serpentine collection to the National Zoo and give up his risky pastime.118 Nebraskan James R. Rourke asked Hornaday to make him an offer for his wild cat, two eagles, prairie hawk, and horned owl.119 Minnesotan Merrell Ryder hoped to sell Hornaday a female cinnamon bear simply because he had “no place for [it] at present.”120 And Dr. John
Vedder, from St. Augustine, wanted to “dispose” of his own personal collection of live animals
116 Miss Grace Montagne to Hornaday, 16 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 2; H. D. B. Norris to Hornaday, 13 May 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 3; Hornaday to Goode, 21 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 7; Unknown Name to Hornaday, 1 March 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 6; Rolt T. Hill to Hornaday, 18 June 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 117 R. E. to Miffitt to Hornaday, 19 December 1887, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 2. 118 G. J. to Pollock to Hornaday, 12 August 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 4. 119 James R. Rourke to Hornaday, 16 August 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 5. 120 Merrell Ryder to Hornaday, 14 April 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 5. 63 that included a nine-foot-long alligator by selling it to Hornaday for his “Zoological
Department.”121
The network that Hornaday used to create the Department of Living Animals was forged and maintained through informal means. Strangers of very different backgrounds and from very different places took part in forming this peculiar network that circulated animalia around the country. Some actors were educated. Others were not. Some were from the city; others were from prairies and forests. Some were altruisic; others, selfish. These unlikely actors fashioned this informal network through unlikely means. G. O. Shields, writing to Hornaday about whether a species of ibex exists in the Rocky Mountains, adds at the end of a letter, “By the way I met, some time ago, a man named Harvey, on a ranch north of Spokane Falls, who said he had entertained you in Borneo when you were collecting there + when he was mining. Do you remember him? He is now prospecting in M.T. Mr. Huffman of Miles City has also frequently spoken to me of you. This is why I address you personally.”122 Actors in the animalia network often established relationships by word-of-mouth and through unexpected encounters. By asking simple questions like “Can you tell me where I can find sale for Western Animals and what price can I ask for them?” or “Do you know where there are any lynx?” anyone could be suddenly initiated into a web of actors.123 This network made a vast world smaller, linking places as distant as Borneo, Montana, and Washington, D.C.
Mere acquaintances could mature years later into important animal-business partners.
Hornaday corresponded frequently with Vic Smith of Montana about potential animals that he could catch for the Smithsonian. One letter proves particularly revealing about the nature of
121 Dr. John Vedder to Hornaday, 25 May 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 8. 122 G. O. Shields to Hornaday, 19 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 6. 123 B. E. Winston to Hornaday, 28 December 1887, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 9; B. E. Winston to Hornaday, 19 January 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 9. 64 relationships between animal traders. In 1888, Hornaday responded to one of Smith’s letters in the following manner:
I am just in receipt of yours of April 13th, which was preceded by your photograph and the newspaper sketch, all of which have interested me greatly. From your photograph I learn the fact that I saw you on a N. P. train going west in May 1886. When I was going out to look for buffalo. I remember your face well, and also the fact that you were talking with a fair damsel of about 35 summers, who owned a ranch somewhere in Montana. So I now know that you have an eye for the beautiful!124
Strangers on trains could unexpectedly become key actors in an animalia network, and Hornaday seemed quite adept at creating contacts wherever he traveled. In fact, Hornaday cherished socializing. He was a gifted communicator who engaged people from all social classes. And while he still carried the common biases of his day, especially regarding race and ethnicity, he saw himself as social intermediary attempting to pull society together. Furthermore, Hornaday exuded a confidence that captured the attention of all he met. Few could forget the gregarious
William Temple Hornaday, the man who bought, sold, exchanged, collected, studied, and saved
American animals.
Hornaday built the Department of Living Animals and the National Zoo by acting as a taxidermist on the margins of the formal exotic animal trade usually utilized by zoos. However, he still occasionally purchased living specimens (especially the high profile and expensive animals that characterized the modern zoo) from elite “animal traders” when other options proved unavailable. Long before the genesis of the Department, Hornaday gained experience dealing with commercial traders. In 1883, for example, Chas. Reiche & Brothers, “Importers of Rare
Animals, Birds, &c.,” answered an inquiry about the dead animals they had on-hand. More significantly, though, with less than two years of experience working at the Smithsonian,
Hornaday had already begun communicating his desire to forge a zoo in the nation’s capital, even
124 Hornaday to Mr. Vic Smith, 21 April 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 6. 65 expressing this desire to the animal merchants who could provide him with the dead rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses of the Museum. On December 20, 1883, Hornaday leveraged Reiche &
Brothers, stating, “In view of the fact that a large Zoological Garden is soon to be established here I think the Director of the Museum could easily make it to your advantage to send us all the animals that die on your hands.” The New York animal importers responded,
In regards to the projected Zoological Garden we would say that it is a long-felt want that enterprises of such a nature have not been established in all the principal cities of America long before this. We earnestly hope that bill will be passed. It would afford us great honor and we would take special pride, if we could assist in making the Garden complete + worthy of its name . . .
Hornaday’s dream would not reach fruition until the end of the decade, yet it is clear that from the beginning, he viewed taxidermy and zoo-building as similar and intertwined endeavors.125
Hornaday not only relied on individuals approaching him with animals. He was also proactive in seeking the additions that he wanted for his Department. Often, rumors of potential specimens would travel throughout his peculiar network, and Hornaday would initiate a transaction. In one case, he told Captain R. L. Hoxie, stationed at Montgomery, Alabama, that
“Mr. Thomas Robinson, late of Harvard University, has informed me by letter that you have a living deer, which you are willing to present to us.”126 The deer, according to Hoxie, had “vicious propensities,” killing another male deer and frequently befriending chickens for the purpose of
“devour[ing]” them later. Yet, Hornaday took the “quarrelsome and dangerous” animal for his
Department.127
Circus auctions also provided Hornaday with opportunities to “shop” for the living animals that he might want to acquire. In 1888, a pamphlet advertising the “Dan Shelby Circus at
Auction” found its way to Hornaday’s desk. At this event, held in nearby Richmond, the
125 Hornaday to Mr. Henry Reiche, 20 December 1883, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 5; Chas. Reiche + Bros. to Hornaday, 21 December 1883, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 5. 126 Hornaday to Capt. R. L. Hoxie, 29 May 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 127 Capt. R. L. Hoxie to Hornaday, 8 June 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 66 taxidermist could purchase either animals or cages. Auctions frequently occurred after a circus company experienced bankruptcy, and these events enabled animal collectors to find good prices on high-value animals. Hornaday usually maintained relationships with circuses for access to the dead, but sometimes these relationships created another way to gather a diversity of living animals.128
William Temple Hornaday and his taxidermic practices produced a zoo of humble origins. While other zoos matured around lions, tigers, and elephants, the National Zoological
Park of the United States emerged around, in the words of hunter and “animal-catcher” Amory R.
Starr, the common “varmints” of the American woods.129 Myron Huff, another “animal-catcher” of sorts from Lodi Centre, New York, wrote a punctuationless letter to Hornaday that perfectly illustrates the taxidermic ballast of the National Zoo. Huff informed Hornaday,
I should have answered your letter before this having recid [sic] it a week ago I can name a list of Animals in this county but I think it would be impossible to catch them with the exception of 3 or 4. Foxes are scarce I know of 3 having been shot this winter Raccoons are plenty can catch them in the Summer or Fall Woodchucks are plenty in the summer a number having been caught on my farm this last summer Skunks are scarce men trap them for their skins Muskrats are plenty in the summer they are shy to catch I have only heard of one Black Squirrel in the six years that I have lived here Aaron Sheridan of Ovid has one in his collection and says it is the only one he has seen in fifteen years. Grey Squirrels are quite plenty it is almost impossible to catch them. Red Squirrels are plenty they are very shy. Chipmunks are plenty see them almost every day. in the summer we see a few red weasels and of the tail black and in the winter white weasels and of the tail black some men claim they change their color I have 2 in
128 “Dan Shelby Circus at Auction,” SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 6. Circus auctions provided animal collectors with a great opportunity to buy exotic animals for prices much cheaper than those set by formal “exotic animal dealers.” This particular auction, the Dan Shelby Circus, was selling the following: “1 Mountain Lion, 4 Monkeys, 2 Sooty Pacas, 1 Parrot, 2 Ant-Eaters, 3 Marmazet Monkeys, 2 Dog-Faced Monkeys, 1 Civet Cat, 1 South African Elephant “Zip,” 7 feet 8 inches high, formerly with Sell Bro.’s Circus, 34 Draught Horses, 3 Ring Horses, Large Lot of Harness, 1 Leopard, 1 Deer, 1 Golden Pheasant, 1 Cockatoo, 1 Rat Kangaroo, 2 Cudge Monkeys, 1 Antelope, 1 Ibex, 1 Camel, 1 Dromedary, and the COVERS and SUITS used with said Elephant, Monkeys and other animals, [and] [t]he necessary CAGES used to contain said animals.” 129 Amory R. Starr to Hornaday, 30 July 1888, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 2, Folder 6. In another letter, dated July 9th, 1888 [found next to the previous letter in the Archives], Starr interestingly writes, “I hope that the bill to establish a National Zoological Garden will be a success; while I will probably never go out enough in the world to see it, I fully appreciate the civilizing influences of such institutions.” 67
my collection one pure white and of tail black the other white and has streak of faded red about an inch wide the length on its back and of tail black. there is lots and plenty of wild little Grey Rabbits can catch them almost any day. you see there is no valuable animals around this section of country there is a number of different kinds of mice we catch a peculiar one in the summer called a star nosed mole with peculiar front feet short and large for a mouse I cant think of any more present so will close130
Hornaday had apparently inquired about the types of animals that could be caught in the forests of
New York. It is unclear whether Huff specifically intended these creatures to serve as specimens for Hornaday’s taxidermic responsibilities or for his zoo-building endeavors, for foxes, raccoons, woodchucks, skunks, muskrats, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, and mice found their way to both the museum and zoo exhibits. However, as demonstrated above, the Department of Living
Animals not only supported Hornaday in his taxidermic art by acting as a cabinet of living models, but the processes he employed to gather the animals and materials needed for either enterprise proved nearly identical.
In fact, when reading Hornaday’s correspondence, dated between the foundation of the
Department of Living Animals, in 1887, and the first years of the National Zoo’s existence, it can be difficult to discern whether any particular living animal, as well as miscellaneous supplies
(cages, glass, feed, etc.), shipped to Hornaday was ultimately meant for the National Museum, the
Department of Living Animals, or the National Zoo. In the process of constructing the
Department, means blurred with ends. The Department formed organically as a living storehouse and aesthetic inspiration for Hornaday’s taxidermic work. While the Department served this practical function for the Smithsonian, it doubled as an end-in-itself, as a prototype of the zoo
Hornaday had long dreamt of establishing, and as Washington citizens began to visit the
Department, it began to function as a de facto zoo, no matter its official status in Smithsonian budgets. To legitimate the expenditures of the Department, Hornaday emphasized its necessary
130 Myron Huff to Hornaday, 2 January 1889, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 8. 68 role in supporting his taxidermic work. Yet when trying to obtain animals (especially large, expensive, grand fauna) he would sometimes cast the Department as the “nucleus” of a National
Zoo dedicated to conservation and education. The Department played many intertwined roles for
Hornaday and the Smithsonian. Hornaday himself may not have always even known the final destination of the animal specimens he acquired. If an animal died in his Department (or later, zoo), Hornaday would mount it for the museum. He built a multifaceted establishment, a unique museum-zoo, that accommodated both life and death. Furthermore, when reading any given letter contained in his collection of correspondence, the plans that Hornaday had in mind for any particular specimen often proved vague. Would the animal continue to live in the Department, be killed and mounted for the Museum, killed and mounted as either gift or payment to another actor in the animalia network, or traded (dead or alive) to another zoo-museum-menagerie-collector for other living, dead, or nonliving objects? Sometimes a letter expressed Hornaday’s intentions; other times it did not. It is conceivable that Hornaday did not even know his intentions until the animal arrived on his doorstep for him to assess. Truly, in the process of building the Department of Living Animals, and thus the National Zoo, everything was similitude.
Resurrection: From Taxidermy to Zoölogy
William Temple Hornaday built a zoo from taxidermic practices. In the process of forming the Department of Living Animals, out of which the National Zoological Park emerged, animals mixed with materials, and life melded with death. The world of Hornaday’s laboratory housed a chopping-block, a bench vise, and a grindstone. The taxidermist reduced animals to their parts, only to put them together again. Hornaday’s laboratory, filled with tools and chemicals that supported the mechanistic enterprise of the taxidermist, embodied precision. The product of the laboratory, though, transcended mere material, and Hornaday acted beyond mere mechanist. Hornaday stuffed carcasses for purposes greater than the creation of Enlightened
69 displays that signified the “cultural constructs . . . of imperialism; consumerism; cultural processing, mediation, and consumption; imprisonment, enslavement, and sadism; and voyeurism and spectatorship,” in the words of critic Randy Malamud, who fittingly relates these constructs
(which have been often attached to museum displays) to zoos.131 As Hornaday opened the dead upon his work table, he simultaneously reached out, through an expansive network, into tangible worlds outside his laboratory, scattered around the United States. With Hornaday organizing the diverse interests represented in the animalia network, hundreds of Americans played a role in shaping both the National Museum and the Department of Living Animals.
The Department itself demonstrated Hornaday’s ambition as well as his values, and as the
United States Congress, as well as the American citizenry, deliberated on the utility of forming a
National Zoo from the Department of Living Animals, the full dream of William Temple
Hornaday became apparent. In this dream, as will be shown, the animals that lived in the
Department signified far more than the relics of the museum. For Hornaday and others in
Washington, the forthcoming National Zoological Park would be unique in its appearance, operation, management, and purpose. Residents of Washington, D.C., would herald Hornaday as a hero, the architect of a national achievement worthy of admiration, and the animals in the zoo will gain many new lives—literal and symbolic. However, in the act of forming the Department, animals, whether alive or dead, were nothing but “raw material,” equivalent to the mundane supplies needed by the Smithsonian.
In the last twenty-five years, a literature about animal-others, animal-objects, and animal-signifiers exploded in the “animal studies” and “post-human” corners of the Humanities.
This literature traverses the nearly-infinite meanings inscribed upon nonhuman animals throughout time and across space, making the universalistic point that humans, in myriad ways,
131 Malamud, Randy, Reading Zoos, 13. 70
“capture” animals (corporeal and metonymic) as they pursue their own interests. In addition, scholars interested in animals later emphasized a corollary—namely, that animals, despite humans’ will-to-power, always manage to assert themselves and their “agency” (if this term still means something) in surprising ways. The animal as both “Object” and “Subject” will appear throughout this dissertation. In the National Zoological Park, animals will be subdued, and, of course, they will act out. Animals will be shaped by human knowledge as they, in turn, shape discourse themselves, even challenging deeply-rooted notions about “life” and “death.” For now, though, in the process of creating the Department of Living Animals from the National Museum, these most prosaic of concepts prove elusive. Hornaday traded, bought, and sold animals, pieces of animals, anthropological artifacts, museum potpourri, and basic supplies as raw materials for a larger enterprise. Whether the “objects” of exchange were breathing or not did not alter the manner that Hornaday dealt with them on paper. Until he received these “objects,” before he engaged and experienced them in person, they were “matters of business” to be put in crates, packaged, and given an accession number.
Of course, for Hornaday to begin the entire process of forming a Department and zoo,
Society had to have previously Objectified and Commodified the Animal. In this sense, the early zoo movement was surely entangled with the “Imperialistic,” “Bourgeois,” “Chauvinistic,”
“Humanistic,” “Anthropocentric,” and “Otherizing” projects that human rights advocates of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries highlight in their critiques of zoos past and present.
When scrutinizing the early process of building the National Zoological Park, though, these critiques of the grand Anthropocentric Establishment explain little about the status of animals during the actual formation of a particular zoo in a specific moment of time. Animals, in the collective sense of the term, may have been turned into Objects, allowing individual animals to be traded in networks. Nonetheless, in the actual process of zoo-building, individual animals were
71 not Objects in the capitalized sense of the term. Hornaday dealt with animals on paper as quickly and efficiently as he dealt with any item of business. The individual animals written about in the process of zoo-building had not yet been casted into Others, transformed into Objects, or molded into Signifiers. Meanings had not yet been inscribed onto them, nor had they, as far as Hornaday was concerned, asserted themselves as Subjects. Prior to arriving in Washington, the animals that would compose the Department of Living Animals, existed as hypothetical entities (raw materials) of a network that would soon materialize into actual beings capable of making (and receiving) demands of onlookers. In the process of building the National Zoological Park, the ontological status of individual fauna was equivalent to the status of any of the materials of the taxidermic laboratory. While animals-on-paper had not yet come into being, they would soon be born into the theatre of the National Zoological Park. By opening up the worlds contained within a specific zoo, the following case study will allow the National Zoological Park to speak for itself and will allow animals to escape the “closed” theoretical paradigms involving simplistic human- nonhuman binaries.132
The following chapters will not only offer an opportunity to (re)think the interactions between animals and humans, but they will also show how the zoo as a popular and public institution transformed the intellectual lives of Americans. The Department of Living Animals not only figured prominently in the imagination of William Temple Hornaday, but, as will be shown in the next chapter, it captured the public imagination of the nation’s capital. From the beginning, though, Hornaday’s interests in the Department intersected with the interests of
132 I am using “closed” here in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal, translated by Kevin Attell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), a classic in “Critical Animal Studies.” While Agamben ultimately attempts to “open” (in a Heideggerian fashion) the ontological categories of “human” and “animal,” he never manages to escape the rhetorical hegemony that these two terms hold over our conceptions of biological life. In this dissertation, I similarly hope to “open” these categories. However, rather than focusing on human language, I hope to focus on human and animal experiences, in the theater of the zoo, in order to understand the interconnectedness between humans and animals. 72 medical and scientific communities, and as the Department matured into a zoo, its impact on professions devoted to studying lives and bodies would intensify.
John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., Superintendent of the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium located in Battle Creek Michigan (which became known as the best-known health resort in
America by the end of the nineteenth century), asked Hornaday in February,1887, about the best way to acquire living monkeys. Kellogg had “[n]o doubt” that Hornaday would be “acquainted with parties who make a business of importing these and other animals,” and he needed living primates to research the “cause of pneumonia.” A dynamic Seventh-day Adventist, vegetarian, and medical doctor famous as a reformer, nutritionist, advocate of abstinence and exercise, educator on sexually transmitted diseases, and inventor of corn flakes breakfast cereal, J. H.
Kellogg viewed Hornaday’s relationship with living animals as potentially helpful for his medical research.133 Many other doctors and surgeons will follow Kellogg’s example and look to
Washington’s zoo for answers to current medical quandaries.
Life scientists would similarly become entangled with Hornaday’s zoo. At the same time that zoos became popular in American cities, prominent American universities fashioned zoology departments, organized not only by professional zoologists but by anatomists, biologists, entomologists, osteologists, paleontologists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, ornithologists, and others. Scientists of all sorts would find their way to the National Zoological Park, and they would collaborate with Washington’s zoogoing public in fashioning a popular zoological science instructive for all Americans.
William Temple Hornaday’s experience founding the Department of Living Animals ushered him into a zoo career and gave him a voice about the subject of zoological pedagogy. By
133 J. H. Kellogg to Hornaday, 7 February 1887, SIA, Record Unit 210, Box 1, Folder 9. For more on Kellogg see Richard W. Schwarz’s John Harvey Kellogg: Pioneering Health Reformer (Hagerstown, Maryland: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 2006). 73
1910, when he published “The Right Way To Teach Zoölogy,” Hornaday had emerged as one of the first commentators on zoological instruction in American history. In his article, Hornaday contended vociferously that “practical zoölogy” should dominate all zoology classrooms, giving students a “general knowledge” of the world around them. Zoology instructors should not devote weeks to the examination of a single grasshopper’s anatomical structure and evolutionary lineage when their students lacked basic knowledge about the animal kingdom. Examining Hornaday’s establishment of the Department of Living Animals sheds light on the important role that the space of the zoo played in developing his zoological philosophy.
As demonstrated above, Hornaday proved no stranger to individual specimens, the
“solitary fish” or the “unique lobster.” In fact, Hornaday’s taxidermic expertise made him a foremost expert in the anatomical minutiae of individual animals, large or small. Surely,
Hornaday, as he admitted himself, did not “oppose the principle of object-teaching.” He only
“oppose[d] every reduction-ad-absurdum application of it.” The taxidermist built his laboratory off objects (notice the lower-case “o”). The laboratory acted as a filter, a medium with a semipermeable membrane, of objects in an expansive object-network. Once an object found a place on his worktable, Hornaday spent hours or days opening them up, losing himself in its intricate details. Hornaday was surely no stranger to objects, and he would not have found the scientists’ fascination in and research of the complexities of an individual species futile.
However, he believed that the zoologist’s research agenda should not shape his teaching agenda.
He worked with objects in order to place them in museum displays, to put them into narratives that could capture viewers’ curiosity and transport them into larger historical, cultural, or natural contexts, allowing the individual to transcend individual circumstances and become, if only momentarily, part of a world outside. Hornaday transferred this purpose, through the Department of Living Animals, from the museum to the zoo, and eventually, from the zoo to the classroom.
74
The ideal zoology classroom, for Hornaday, would function as a zoo, giving pupils a glance of as much of the animal kingdom as possible. Zoology instructors should not lose students in the theoretical abstractions of evolutionary genealogy when they have the opportunity to create an
America more engaged with the natural world.
William A. Kepner, Adjunct Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia, published an abrasive response to Hornaday’s article. “The boy takes delight in discovering his first lamprey’s nest and in watching it being built;” Kepner stated, “but this and like knowledge is not necessary for his understanding the thought and teachings of his time and station.” In a concluding assault on the zoo director, Kepner posited that “it is better to help college students more clearly to think the thoughts of civilized men than to lead them to an interest in phases of animal life which are essential only to the life of jungle men.”134 The United States Congress and the subsequent history of the National Zoological Park, though, would prove otherwise.
America needed to rediscover the lamprey’s nest.
134 Kepner, William A., “How to Teach Zoölogy in College,” Outlook (Jun 02, 1910): 496. 75
Chapter 2 The Utility of a National Zoo: Congressional Debate and Common Intrigue
The Department and Common Intrigue
Thanks to William Temple Hornaday, a Department of Living Animals emerged from a museum of dead animals. Hornaday did not always receive credit for the role he played in forming this institution, however. Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution, recognized the taxidermic nature of Hornaday’s Department, commenting:
It has been customary, ever since the Institution commenced to form collections, that skeletons and skins of wild animals should be sent here for preparation, so that a certain regular supply of such material now comes in without solicitation every year, together with occasional live animals, which have been usually sent to the Zoological Gardens of Philadelphia. It seemed to me [emphasis added] worth while to try the experiment of having all animals sent on alive when this could be done without enhanced cost; and thus has been formed the nucleus of a collection of living animals . . .1
Rather than acknowledging Hornaday’s role in laying the Department’s taxidermic ballast, though, Langley attributed the achievement to his own ingenuity, a presumptuous claim that would not go unnoticed by either the Smithsonian community or the Washington public, eventually having serious ramifications on the leadership of the National Zoological Park.
In June, 1888, Hornaday commented on the overcrowded conditions of his Department, only nine months after its establishment.2 Exactly one fiscal year later, Langley again reported that “[t]he overcrowded condition of the temporary cages and yards containing the larger animals has caused extreme trouble, not only to provide properly for the shelter and comfort of the
1 Langley, Samuel P., “Report of Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, For 1887- ‘88,” “Zoological Park,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 2 Hornaday, W. T., “Report of the Department of Living Animals,” 20, SIA, Record Unit 158, Box 5, folder labeled “Department of Living Animals, 1887-1888.” 76 specimens, but to keep them from either killing or injuring each other.” The Department offered rudimentary accommodations of the “most temporary character,” housing quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles alike in “one small and ill-ventilated building.” The animals of the Smithsonian needed more space, and until the Department could remedy its Malthusian crisis, Langley, Hornaday, and the Institution needed to “check its growth” by either refusing specimen donations or redirecting them to the Philadelphia Zoo.3
Between June, 1888, and June, 1889, Hornaday fitted 171 additional specimens into the collection, “of which 126 were gifts, 37 were deposited, and 8 purchased.” On the last day of the second fiscal year, the Department boasted a total population of 341 living animals, many of which were shipped by United States Army officers stationed in Texas. As demonstrated in the last chapter, Hornaday had spread word of his Department throughout the nation. Even Buffalo
Bill Cody wanted to assist the Smithsonian, donating three elk to the Cause. Occasionally, like when Dr. V. T. McGillycuddy of Dakota offered the Smithsonian four American bison, Hornaday and Langley felt obligated to make room for the valuable creatures in the Smithsonian’s herd. In most cases, though, donations simply could not be accepted. The Department was bursting at its seams. Yet despite cramped quarters, the only inhabitants to die on Hornaday’s watch were small and inexpensive animals. Other than an antelope, given by Senator and railroad tycoon Leland
Stanford, which died from the exhausting effects of its transcontinental journey from California to
Washington, “all the large and most valuable animals [were] alive and in good health.” Thus far,
Hornaday’s experiment seemed successful.4
3 Langley, S. P., “Report of S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, For the Year Ending June 30, 1889,” “The Department of Living Animals,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887- 1902.” 4 Langley, “Report.” The actual report stated that the Department added 271 (instead of 171) specimens in the considered fiscal year. However, this is simply a typographical error, evident from the number of animals given, deposited, and purchased, as listed in the same report—126, 37, and 8, respectively. 77
Humans also filled the Department in increasing numbers. Langley found the “degree of interest manifested in this small display” quite surprising. In fact, common intrigue became so great that it “forcibly emphasized the general desire and need” for a National Zoological Park in
Washington.5 Not only did citizens, tourists, and travelers embrace the Department of Living
Animals, but so did the press. The “little frame structure fitted up with cages in the rear of the
Smithsonian building” attracted the attention of Washington’s leading newspapers. As early as
June 2, 1888, The Evening Star publicized Hornaday’s interconnected taxidermic expertise and zoo-building endeavors, reporting:
The taxidermist and superintendent of the collection, Mr. W. T. Hornaday, was found studying the antics of a mountain lion in the animal building. When asked how the collection was begun he said: “The idea originated by studies we taxidermists were making preparatory to mounting some specimens. We found that the live animal could be studied and attitudes obtained from minute daily observations that would be impossible to get by artificial means, so several of the specimens we needed were obtained. These were followed by others, until it has grown to what you see. In a few years, at the present rate at which animals are being killed in the West, many of the representatives of American animals will be entirely extinct. In my opinion this is a matter that needs attention, or many of the most valuable species will be gone, leaving no trace behind them.
In this explanation about the Department’s origins, Hornaday credited taxidermy as bringing rise to the Smithsonian’s animal collection. He also admitted that ulterior motives first inspired him to form a Department— namely, the goal to prevent the mass extinction of American wildlife. This purpose would not only define the rest of Hornaday’s life as a conservationist and activist, but it would also reverberate in the halls of Congress as a noble responsibility to which a national government should commit itself.6
Indeed, Hornaday’s ambition and innovativeness enabled him to shape the vicissitudes of the Smithsonian; ultimately, however, animals, not taxidermists, attracted visitors to the
5 Langley, “Report.” 6 “An Embryo Zoo” (Evening Star, June 2, 1888), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. Again, for more on Hornaday’s legacy see Stefan Bechtel’s Mr. Hornaday’s War. 78
Department’s cages. From the beginning, these animals, of course, entertained and educated.
When onlookers expressed confusion about how the baby barred owls could digest raw meat with the “hair and bone intact,” the keeper (most likely, Mr. W. C. Weeden) explained to the questioning crowd that after three or four hours the bones would be “disgorged in the shape of small pellets.” In fact, the keeper emphasized that if the owls consumed raw meat without hair and bone, the owls would die. Visitors to the Department were similarly captivated by famous carrier pigeons named Liberty and Minstrel, a jaguar, the prairie dogs, a trio of tame black bears named after Confederate generals, a trio of buzzards, and Jim the cinnamon bear. A cage that housed a monkey and a opossum together especially attracted attention, for the monkey would
“hug the ‘possum until it would cry out, and then drag it around the floor until tired of the fun.”
Since the Department rarely had the room or resources to confine individual species to their own cages, rich interactions between species entertained visitors in ways that a zoo rarely could.
Unfortunately, these interactions sometimes exceeded fun-and-games—for example, when a monkey kidnapped baby opossums from the mother’s pouch only to bury them alive beneath the
Department’s dirt floor.7
A black-tailed deer held in the Department, remembered by Hornaday as a “cannibal deer,” refused to be contained with any other animals, killing and consuming the chickens and rabbits that shared its exhibit. When Hornaday attempted to move the deer into another enclosure, it attacked him, pinning him against the ground. Mr. Weeden hit the deer with his club, and according to the first keeper, “had it not been for me the professor would, in all probability, now be chanting with the angels.” Even a Rocky Mountain sheep had to be removed from its stall and relocated to the buffalo yard because it kept kicking the indoor structure, damaging the wall and creating havoc in the crowded Department. Washington’s newspapers captured these incidents in
7 “An Embryo Zoo.” 79 frequent “zoo stories,” simple narratives featuring plots, dramas, suspense, humor, and animal antagonists, and even though such stories drew attention to the Department’s shortcomings,
“crowds still continue[d] to flock around the building, and visitors to the city never miss[ed] an opportunity to look in on an embryo zoo.”8
Before the end of the first year, Hornaday acquired a silver-tipped grizzly bear cub that drew a great deal of attention to the Department. This animal became the most prized species in the collection, not only for its high value among North American fauna in the international exotic animal trade, but also for the way it entertained women and children with its “quaint and attractive airs.” Hornaday acquired this specimen, however, for its entertaining, educating, and scientific value. When interviewed about the procurement, he emphasized the zoological quandary that he hoped the grizzly would resolve, commenting, “We expect to settle a widely disputed point with this grizzly. That is, regarding the difference in the two kinds of grizzlies. We have already found that the cinnamon bear has gradually grown darker since we have had him.
Some maintain that the cinnamon bear and the black bear are the same. This I disbelieve, and by keeping these specimens on hand we can settle these points.”9 The animals in the Department served multiple functions, and they quickly exceeded their taxidermic expectations, placing the
Smithsonian both at the center of the life sciences and Washington’s popular culture. As the
Department approached capacity, the animals acquired ushered the Smithsonian into a peculiar yet longstanding animalia network that had expanded with the nation through the nineteenth century.
Chicago’s newspaper The Evening Lamp ran a two-page, six-column feature about the
Department of Living Animals and its potential transformation into a national zoo. According to
8 “Novelties at the “Zoo”” (Washington Star, June 6, 1888), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 9 “Mr. Hornaday’s New Pet” (The Washington Critic, November 21, 1888), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888- 1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 80 the author, the originators of the Department were “Mrs. Cleveland’s fawn and Mr. Hornaday’s buffaloes.” First Lady Frances Cleveland received a spotted fawn as a gift from a friend in northern New York, and since the “White House grounds afforded no good place for the little thing,” the First Lady donated the beautiful animal to Hornaday and the Smithsonian. President
Grover Cleveland also contributed an animal to the Department, a golden-headed eagle sent to the
White House by a friend from Tennessee. The author dedicated a significant amount of space to recounting the creatures received by the all the great American presidents, asserting that “[i]f all the animals that have been sent to the White House from first to last had been turned over to a zoological garden the capital would have the finest collection of animals in the world.” The
Emperor of Morocco sent Martin Van Buren two Mauritanian lions, and the Imaum of Muscat, a pair of Arabian horses, which sparked quite comical ordeals in the world of international diplomacy.10 The King of Spain sent George Washington three asses, one of which the President named the Royal Gift. Washington eventually bred Royal Gift with a jackass, sent by the Marquis de La Fayette, named the Knight of Malta, which produced an offspring Washington called the
Compound, a horse that possessed “the great size of the Gift and the courage and character of the
Knight.” Thomas Jefferson shipped his close friend and French naturalist Comte de Buffon the
10 The following passage, concerning the Emperor of Morocco and Martin Van Buren, comes from the source listed in the footnote below. “When Martin Van Buren was President the Emperor of Morocco sent him two Mauritanian lions, male and female, noble specimens of their race. Nobody knew what to do with them. The nephew of the Emperor took them to the house of the American Consul and told him they must be accepted. The Consul refused the lions and the messenger said that if Mr. Van Buren were the Emperor of Morocco the Consul’s head would come off for refusing to accept such a fine gift. Still the Consul declined, when the nephew of his uncle solicitous about his own head, proceeded to let the brutes loose in the Consul’s yard, making a virtue of necessity. The representative of the United States took the lions in charge and sent them home by a naval vessel. – In 1840 James Buchanan rose in the Senate and moved a resolution providing for the sale of these lions, and after a good deal of discussion this was done. The Mauritanian lions were seen by thousands of American who visited Van Amburgh’s. The Imaum of Muscat endeavored to show his esteem for the United States by sending President Van Buren a fine pair of Arabian horses. When his Highness, the Imaum, was told the President of the United States could not accept his gift, he asked who ruled in America. – The answer was “the people.” – “Then, if you please,” replied the ruler of Muscat, “send my steeds to the grand Sultans of the United States, the people.” – These horses were also sold and the proceeds covered into the Treasury.” 81 horns of a Virginian deer, which were the largest ever seen. Jefferson not only received living deer while President, he also obtained a living panther from Western Virginia and a moose from
New Hampshire. Andrew Jackson allowed a pair of raccoons (a gift sent by a hunting friend) to run around the White House, and Chester Arthur kept prairie chickens on the back porch of the presidential mansion. Abraham Lincoln, while in the midst of the Civil War, received a one-year- old grizzly bear that offered the Commander-in-Chief a much-needed distraction from strategy and bloodshed. The President eventually sent the bear, though, to a nearby insane asylum, where it lived in captivity for seventeen years. When the bear died, the Smithsonian mounted and placed it on display in the National Museum. Apparently, keeping animals came with the many responsibilities inherited by the nation’s executive, and by expounding on the infamous animals of the White House, the journalist of The Evening Lamp called attention to the nationalist purpose that a national zoo would serve.11
As Hornaday’s Department grew in popularity and captured the attention of a nation, its eventual evolution into a zoological park appeared inevitable, almost predestined, simply the next step in a logical progression. Before the Department could fulfill its destiny, the Smithsonian
Institution would have to gain Congressional support. Whereas other zoological parks simply needed funding and public sanction, a national zoo constructed and administrated by a federal institution required approval by the federal government. Hornaday, Langley, and the public hoped that the transition from Department to zoo would prove facile and unobstructed, and they urged the wheels of change to turn quickly. Yet even seemingly uncontroversial and nonpartisan issues, broadly supported by constituents, can become contentious and complicated in the hands of policymakers.
11 “The National Zoo” (The Evening Lamp, July 14, 1888), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 82
Congressional Debate
On April 23, 1888, two months before the close of the Department’s first fiscal year,
United States Senator James Burnie Beck, a Democrat from Kentucky, proposed the first bill to create a national zoological park. Senate Bill 2752 sought to “establish a Zoological Park in the
District of Columbia, for the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people.” First, this act called for the formation of a “commission for the establishment of a zoological park” that would include the Secretary of the Interior, the president of the board of
Commissioners of the District of Columbia, and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Second, the bill gave said commission the right to survey a portion of wooded land, three miles north of the White House, called Rock Creek and choose a tract of land one hundred acres or less that could support a zoo. After the survey, the commission needed to produce a map locating the boundaries of all the private properties that lay within the land selected. All private property would be “condemned for public uses,” and the owners paid a “just compensation” determined by the commission, with the President of the United States’ approval. If these owners refused to accept payment, the value of their lands would be determined by the Supreme Court of the
District of Columbia and the properties seized by eminent domain. Third, Beck’s bill allowed the commission to erect buildings on the newly acquired land that “may be necessary for the scientific purposes to which the park is dedicated and proper, for the custody, care, and exhibition of a collection of animals.” Once these structures were in place, the commission would transfer control of the park over to the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, who would then establish rules and regulations and handle all day-to-day affairs, always keeping in mind the
83 establishment’s ultimate purpose – the “advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people.”12
Congress deliberated over Beck’s proposal for two full sessions, arguing about issues of funding. In this time, two spokesmen carried the zoo standard before America’s representatives,
William C. P. Breckinridge (a Democrat from Kentucky) in the House of Representatives and
Justin S. Morrill (a Republican from Vermont) in the Senate. For zoo proponents, utilizing
Federal dollars to build and support a national zoo only made sense. Of course Congressmen recognized that the “Smithsonian Institution ha[d] not customarily received with favor the propositions continually made it, to place different local or national interests under its charge,” and legislators surely would not encourage the federal government to finance a cause solely because its boosters unsurprisingly claimed it would benefit the citizenry. However, the zoo bill came with
very special reasons which seem in this case to enable it to at once secure a home and city of refuge for the vanishing races of the continent, and a place for the health and recreation of the inhabitants of the city and citizens of the United States, together with an opportunity for the carrying out an enterprise of national scientific value, and the formation of what, as regards its site at least, is the finest zoological garden in existence—all these considerations have moved [the Smithsonian and United States Congressmen] to see in this an opportunity to carry out its legitimate work, “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”13
The zoo bill sought to emancipate species of American animals from extinction by not only preserving troubled species in the safe confines of a zoo, but also by organizing breeding projects that would hopefully spark the proliferation of these endangered species. In addition to this primary aim, the zoo bill would simultaneously bolster the nationalist ambitions of the United
12 “A BILL for the establishment of a zoological park in the District of Columbia” (amended version of the sundry civil appropriations bill, with an introductory report by Langley), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 13 Langley, S. P., “Zoological Park in the District of Columbia,” Report to accompany bill H.R. 11810, 2 February 1889, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 84
States by giving the country the grandest zoo in the world (rhetoric, to be sure, but powerful nonetheless) while at the same time educating American citizens and enriching American science.
For zoo champions like Breckinridge and Morrill, Beck’s bill proved uncontroversial. As historian Helen Horowitz emphasizes, “There was no discernable difference between the collection of living animals in a national zoological park and the stuffed dead ones in the National
Museum. Goals were the same, the advancement of science; the authority was the same, the
Smithsonian; thus the means of support should be the same, Federal sponsorship.”14 Some
Democrats, especially Southern Democrats, disagreed with this logic, however.
Tennessee Democratic Representative, Benjamin A. Enloe barked before the House that
“this park might well furnish a very valuable and a very much appreciated entertainment to a large class of citizens of the District of Columbia, by providing a possum and coon hunting ground where they could go, in the old-fashioned way, at night, and hunt the possums and coons.”
Benton McMillin, from the same state and of the same party, gnarled, “A bear garden is to be established ‘for the advancement of science!’ . . . Barnum is to have a new rival in his ‘animal industry.’” In a similar way, R. P. Bland, a Democratic Representative of Missouri, sarcastically advised, “hundreds of the people of my state would prefer, if this circus is to be inaugurated, that it shall be carried around . . . put on wheels. . . . Let us organize the menagerie, appoint the clown, get all the actors, and visit all the States and capitals of the country.” Despite the mordant tone of many zoo adversaries, their grievances were usually structured around a consistent stance that opposed both the expansion of Federal power and the increase of taxes, a position typical of
14 Horowitz, Helen L., “The National Zoological Park: “City of Refuge” or Zoo?” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 49 (1973/1974): 412-415. I rely heavily on Horowitz’s first (and concise) explanation about the Congressional debates surrounding the zoo bill. Her article gave me a starting point into an immense and diverse body of primary sources, and this work helped me make sense of a seemingly befuddling timeline of events between 1888 and 1889. The sources I use to expound on the issue of Congressional debate have been situated into the framework which Horowitz set up. I am greatly indebted to her brief, yet helpful, study of the NZP. 85
Southern Democrats in the decades following the Civil War.15 The positions of the press casted the zoo bill as a nonpartisan issue, and even though the public broadly expressed a support that crossed party lines, opponents of the bill failed to see zoo prospects as anything more than a popular spectacle disguised in Yankee or Republican rhetoric.
A majority of legislators, both in the Senate and the House, supported the zoo bill, and this support surely stemmed from the zoo-mania that gripped headlines, and their readers, around the nation. The proposal for a National Zoological Park resonated with popular audiences on many levels. The zoo would serve the United States in many different ways, some expressed explicitly in the zoo bill itself and others only implicitly, existing in the margins of the legislation.
First, newspapers most often cited the purpose of saving American wildlife when defending the zoo, a reason that also served as the chief justification in the text of the zoo bill. While Americans had been confronting extinction over the course of their history, acclamation surrounding the bill amplified and popularized the call to defend wild animals; and this call to prevent extinction indeed proved fairly nonpartisan.16 The Democratic Charleston News, for example, exclaimed:
15 Horowitz, 414. She cites “Speech of Benjamin A. Enloe of Tennessee in the House, Feb. 10, 1891, quoted in Rhees, Smithsonian Institution: Documents, II, 1454”; “Speech by Benton McMillin of Tennessee in the House, Feb. 27, 1889, quoted in Ibid., 1196”; and “Speech of R. P. Bland of Missouri in the House, Sept. 12, 1888, quoted in Ibid., 1164-1165. 16 William Temple Hornaday was not the only person advocating for the protection of wildlife in the 1880s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, yet especially after the Civil War, naturalists, scientists, animal rights activists, sports hunters, anglers, and Romantics of various kinds increasingly began to draw attention to the plight of American wild animals. For more on this topic see Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); James Turner’s Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Lisa Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics; Diane L. Beers’s For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920; James A. Tober’s Who Owns the Wildlife?: The Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Richard W. Judd’s Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 86
Several of the leading Northern newspapers are advocating the project of establishing a National Zoological Garden at Washington. It is known that the wild animals of America are rapidly becoming extinct, and steps should be taken in the interest of science for the preservation of the species which have had their habitat on this continent. The scheme is well worthy of consideration, and, if it is carried out, will be of great advantage to the future student of natural history. The buffalo has disappeared from the plains. The megatherium is with us no longer [and] . . . [m]any of the rarest specimens of the animal kingdom have been lost for the reason that no well organized attempt has ever been made to preserve them.
Even though opponents of the zoo bill were Southern Democrats, just being “Southern” and/or
“Democrat” did not necessitate opposition. Not only did the Charleston News pledge allegiance to the cause of preventing extermination, but so did other Southern, Democratic papers, including the Petersburg Index-Appeal and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. As the Democratic Boston Globe put it, “there should be no partisan difference of opinion” with rescuing elk, beavers, bison, moose, caribou, antelope, mountain sheep, manatees, mountain goats, grizzly bears, elephant seals, and walruses from annihilation. Otherwise, as the Independent San Francisco Call exclaimed, “they will [disappear] . . . as completely as the pterodactyl.”17
The periodicals that endorsed the zoo bill unanimously proclaimed the cause of saving animals, but these papers desired a zoo for many other reasons as well. Second to the prevention of mass extinction, journalists frequently praised the zoo as an opportunity to provide, in the words of the New York Tribune, “instruction and pleasure to a great number of visitors to the capital,” an argument that pervaded the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century zoo movement worldwide, from Dublin to Melbourne and Paris to Philadelphia.18 This common defense of zoos often paralleled the justification of the publicly supported parks, botanical gardens, and museums
17 “The Zoological Park Proposition, And The Voice of the Press in Regard To It” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 18 Ibid. 87 which enlightened crowded urban spaces.19 In this respect, zoological gardens offered the flâneur a new set of walkways to stroll upon.20 Born within the transatlantic genteel cult of sensibility, the virtuous ideals of “instruction” and “pleasure” baptized the prospective zoological park with a mystique that members of all social classes would have found alluring. Zoogoers would not only attend the zoo to be “instructed” and “pleasured,” but they would pass through its entrance gate to take part in a grand cultural production of purifying their city and nation.
Third, boosters also described the zoo as a bulwark for American science. The Journal of
Comparative Medicine and Surgery especially expounded upon the national zoo as an institution of science, commenting:
The project originated long since with the late Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Professor Baird, and having in view the peerless liberality of the
19 The public zoo movement was very much a part of the public park movement. Both were American phenomena that sought to create, what Hanson, in Animal Attractions, calls, “middle landscapes.” These were parks and gardens built in and near cities that offered urbanites a “natural” refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city. For an excellent discussion of the public park movement as it relates to American zoos see Hanson, 16-28. For more on the idea of the “middle landscape,” which Hanson applies to zoos, see Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Also on the American public park movement see David Schuyler’s The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and Galen Cranz’s The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). Cities exploded in size at the end of the nineteenth century. Suddenly, an agrarian society became an urban one. Many worried that this transformation, and its accompanying detachment from “wild” and “natural” spaces, would lead to moral decay. See Paul Boyer’s Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). On national parks see Alfred Runte’s National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), Richard West Sellars’s Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), and James A. Pritchard’s Preserving Yellowstone’s Natural Conditions (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 20 “Flâneur,” a French masculine noun, can be translated as “stroller,” “lounger,” “saunterer,” or “loafer,” and is derived from the French verb “flâner,” or “to stroll.” Charles Baudelaire instilled the noun “flâneur” with a philosophical depth, defining it as one who not only physically “strolls” but who, as a product of the modern city, has learned to navigate the crowds of the city—physically, psychologically, emotionally. Since Baudelaire, the concept of the “flâneur” has gained theoretical power in academic studies of literature, economics, culture, and history. Particularly important in refining the concept of the “flâneur” was social theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin—specifically in his work The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). This is not the place to explore the complexities of this construct, but I use the word to underscore the point that the zoo, as an urban space, is also at the center of the scholarly debates that surround the “flâneur.” Also, while this term usually appears in either a French-historical context or in a French-driven theoretical context, I believe the term is broadly useful in discussing any major nineteenth-century metropolis. For a good discussion about the “flâneur” see Keith Tester’s The Flâneur (New York: Routledge, 1994). 88
General Government in the prosecution of scientific work, and the splendid resulting series of publications which have followed one another from the Government printing office, we cannot but regard it as strange that attention has not been more strongly drawn to the need of multiplying just such institutions as this—invaluable adjuncts to observation, and as storehouses of material for exact work in more than one branch of natural science. . . . It can hardly be doubted that the establishment of a suitable zoological garden under Government patronage at the National Capital would give a stimulus to interest, not only there, but throughout the country—greatly beneficial to education in popular zoology, and this in turn would certainly lead to desires and attainments far beyond its own immediate sphere of influence.21
A national zoo would contribute to science in multiple ways. It would serve as a governmental publishing house for science. According to the Washington Star, “the published results of scientific work done in the London Zoo ma[d]e over 75 volumes, so valuable that no zoologist can afford to be without them.”22 A national zoo would hopefully produce a similarly impressive zoological literature. While serving as a research engine, a national zoo would also provide a space for scientists to view living animals without requiring travel to faraway savannahs, jungles, and deserts. Furthermore, a national zoo would function as a “storehouse” for the sciences, a place where large specimens could be accumulated. The dusty corridors of a university biology department and the labyrinthine hallways of the nation’s museums surely had little room for elephants, bison, and giraffes—either dead or alive. Last, and as I will demonstrate throughout this dissertation, a national zoo would educate the masses in “popular zoology,” which as the author suggests, may have far-reaching and transformational implications beyond zoology’s
“typical sphere of influence.”
According to one editorial, since the zoological garden in San Francisco possessed “few animals,” the zoos in St. Louis and Cincinnati needed more funds, the zoological park in Chicago displayed a limited number of species, the zoo in Central Park found itself “cramped in space,” and the nation’s first zoo in Philadelphia had lately undergone “periodic struggles with poverty,”
21 “The Zoological Park Proposition, And The Voice of the Press in Regard To It.” 22 Ibid. 89 a national zoo in Washington could, for the first time, usher “popular zoology,” “on this side of the Atlantic,” out of its state of “infancy.” While this institution supported the advancement of
“popular zoology,” it would simultaneously strengthen the scholarly research of life scientists.
The anonymous author of this editorial emphasized:
The fact that under modern scientific methods, the objective study of man, on lines of research tending to results of high importance—the most important of all, in regard to his needs and welfare—is largely based upon similar observation of the lower animals, receives fresh demonstration with almost every advance in biology—and it is in collections of living animals that the field for such investigations is largely found. The human anatomist, the human physiologist, pathologist, and even psychologist of today, save for the astonishing development, within a few years, of the comparative side of those branches of study, would stand about where his grandfather did, in prospecting the paths of science.23
By displaying animals side-by-side, a zoo offered scientists myriad opportunities for their comparative studies, a pursuit increasingly popular in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Fourth, journalists from coast to coast lauded a national zoo as a symbol of American pride. The Boston Globe described the United States as “the only great nation in the world which does not possess such an institution, and it is the one of all others which needs it most.” Similarly, according to the Minneapolis Journal, “All the great nations of Europe have their “Zoos,” but so far the United States has made no move in that direction.” And the American Naturalist lamented that the “United States, with a greater territory, greater riches, and with undoubtedly greater opportunities, is behind third and fourth-rate kingdoms in the matter of zoological gardens.” Even the “effete monarchies” of Europe, in the words of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, were “superbly equipped” with zoological gardens.24 Rightfully so, the American press extolled the potential national zoo for its ability to swell the greatness of a nation in command of a late-nineteenth-
23 “The Value of Zoological Gardens to Education,” Editorial Department, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 6, Folder 3. It is unclear to me which institution’s “editorial department,” originally created this four-page letter. The authorship of this letter remains anonymous. 24 “The Zoological Park Proposition, And The Voice of the Press in Regard To It.” 90 century globalizing world. The press seemed to unanimously agree with all the official justifications for a national zoo outlined in Beck’s bill—preventing of extinction, enriching citizens, improving science, and extending nationalism (the last three of which legitimated all nineteenth-century zoos).
Newspapers the nation over, however, imagined many purposes for a national zoo not spelled out in Beck’s bill. The Charleston News predicted that a national zoo would become “the most interesting museum of natural history in the world.” The Petersburg Index-Appeal suggested that the zoo could accommodate a large botanical garden, another attraction required in a capital city. The Washington Star believed a national zoo could practice “the free distribution of its duplicate specimens to educational institutions,” fulfilling a philanthropic function by donating living animals to American schools. The Washington Post, on the other hand, saw the zoo as an opportunity to protect the pristine Rock Creek from local “real estate vandals” that would undoubtedly want properties with appreciating values on which to build new housing subdivisions for the city’s poor.25 The zoo, therefore, would protect Washington’s park lands from both the upper and the lower classes. And the Public Opinion portrayed the zoo as an asset for Washington’s tourist industry, a “leading attraction” that would draw both American citizens and foreign visitors to the capital. This proved especially enticing since the 1892 World’s Fair would be held somewhere in the United States, certainly encouraging, in the words of Langley,
“hundreds of thousands of intelligent people from abroad” to travel to America, many surely visiting the capital.26 Truly, to most Americans, Beck’s zoo bill seemed uncontroversial. The
25 “The Zoological Park Proposition, And The Voice of the Press in Regard To It.” 26 Langley, S. P., “National Zoological Park,” Report to accompany bill S. 2284, 19 February 1890, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 91 people wanted a zoo, and on March 2, 1889, the zoo bill passed. The National Zoological Park would officially grace the nation’s capital.27
Despite the few Democratic outliers that considered the legislation an inordinate breach of federal power, Senators and Representatives largely viewed the concept of a national zoo favorably. The following summer, issues of funding, though, concerning both quantity and method, sparked a quagmire of debate that significantly slowed the process of zoo-building, embroiling District residents, federal legislators, and disgruntled anti-zoo Southerners into a contentious quarrel over finances and legal hermeneutics, for the already-passed zoo bill proved vague and confusing in regards to where the zoos’ monies would come from. Specifically, the
Organic Act of 1878 set the precedent for financing public works constructed in the District of
Columbia through equal proportions of Federal dollars and District taxes, and some assumed that a public zoo would naturally be funded in the same way. Others, however, argued that a national zoo was just that—national. The diverse goals the zoo would strive for, outlined above, were meant to serve a nation, not simply the city of Washington. Deliberation followed along these lines. Who should pay for a national zoo?28
Those who believed that the zoo should be the complete responsibility of the federal government (the District Commissioners especially vocal on the issue) argued that “it was not the intention of Congress to place any portion of this burden upon the taxpayers of the District,” and they built a convincing defense through close readings of the bill.29 Simply put, in the words of
The Washington Post,
27 Untitled article (Public Opinion, August 4, 1888), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 28 Horowitz, 412. 29 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, July 25, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. The District Commissioners sent the following letter to the Comptroller. I quote this letter (which also appears in the article cited in this footnote) at length in order to show why many seemed to legitimately believe that Congress did not intend for the National Zoological Park to be half-funded by the taxpayers of the District. I believe that the Commissioners’ reading of the bill was 92
It would be quite as fair to charge the people of the District with half the expenditures authorized by Congress for the Botanical Garden, the Army and Medical Museum, the Congressional Library, or the new Capitol terraces as with
correct, and their objections were valid. Others, obviously, disagreed. Nonetheless, the press (and thus the public) was so passionately invested in the prospects of a national zoo that major newspapers devoted a significant amount of space to the particularities of legislative exegesis. The Commissioners write, in adamant yet, at times, comical words: The Commissioners invite your attention to what appears to be an ambiguity in the act making appropriations for the support of the District for the current fiscal year, upon which they desire your opinion. – Section 4, under the head of the water department, provides for the establishment of a zoological park in the District of Columbia, and appropriates $200,000 therefor. The Commissioners desire to be informed whether, in your opinion, any portion of this appropriation is chargeable to the revenues of the District of Columbia. In their judgment it was not the intention of Congress to place any portion of this burden upon the taxpayers of the District. The appropriation contains no requirement of that character, but, on the contrary, has every evidence of being an independent provision, having no relation to the municipal administration of the District. The clause in which it is contained comes under the head of ‘water department,’ the appropriations for which are required to be paid wholly from the revenues of the water department. It therefore cannot consistently be held that the park appropriation is governed by the first clause in the appropriation law, which prescribes that ‘one-half of the following sums named respectively shall be appropriated out of the District revenues.’ If this were so, that clause would control the entire bill, and all the water department appropriations would also be chargeable in equal parts to the United States and to the revenues of the District. Neither can it be reasonably presumed that Congress intended to purchase this park wholly out of the revenues of the water department, with which it has no conceivable connection. The object of the park, as stated in the bill, is the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people. Nothing appears in the bill to show that the District is so specially interested in the advancement of science that a park under the control of the United States should be established at its expense for that purpose. The Smithsonian institute, the Agricultural and other departments have that object in view, but no part of their expenses is charged to the District government. Therefore, it is evident that the advancement of science referred to in the law under consideration is the improvement in national education, and the facilities provided are not to be restricted to the few persons permanently located in this District. The instruction and recreation of the people evidently means all the people of the Union who may desire to visit the capital for the advantages it offers in these respects. Furthermore, the fourth clause of the section referred to provides that the land purchased shall be held for public use without restricting such use to the District or giving the District officers any part in controlling it. The intention to give it a national character is further indicated by the requirement that payment for it shall be approved by the President of the United States: that the United States shall take the title to the property so acquired, and that the survey should be made by United States officers. The only possible color for a claim that Congress intended any part of the expenses of this park to be borne by the District is that derivable from the fact that the appropriation occurs in the District appropriation bill. But this the Commisioners hold is not sufficient to justify the imposition of such a burden upon the District revenues. The most plausible inference seems to the Commissioners to be that the item for the park was inserted in the District appropriation law merely for some purpose of legislative convenience.” The Commissioners’ argument here, in my opinion, should have put this controversy to rest. 93
any portion of the cost of the “National Zoo,” and we shall be greatly surprised if the Comptroller does not coincide with the Commissioners on this point.30
The controversy, according to this argument, was only a matter of technicalities. Various subcommittees had worked on many drafts of the zoo bill (which never explicitly mentioned
District taxes) for quite some time, and as the session of Congress was coming to a close, the bill was conveniently attached to the District appropriation bill (governed by the Organic Act) in order to pass the legislation so that the next session of Congress would not have to muddle through old issues. Congress expressed no desire in making half of the $200,000 zoo bill the responsibility of the District, a significant expense for a city smaller than Cincinnati. Its placement in the District appropriation bill, under the “water department” heading specifically, was only for expediency’s sake. Clearly, neither District taxes nor water department funds would pay for a national zoo! Or, so went the strong consensus of the Senate. . .31
The Comptroller and the House of Representatives, on the other hand, saw this issue differently, and while Beck’s zoo bill started as a virtually nonpartisan measure, after its approval by both houses, the National Zoological Park ripped Congress apart. In August of 1889, the
Comptroller ruled that the District of Columbia would indeed have “to pay one-half the expenses incurred in the establishment of the Zoological Park,” and once this issue was ordained, the precedent was set for future expenditures.32 It remains unclear whether the House initially envisioned the National Zoological Park being paid for by both Federal and District dollars; no evidence seems to indicate that Representatives intended on the conclusion determined ex post facto. However, once the controversy was settled, the penurious House acted as if this decision
30 “The Park Appropriation” (The Washington Post, July 27, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 31 “Money for the Park” (The Washington Post, July 26, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 32 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, August 3, 1889) and “The District Pays One-Half” (The Washington Post, August 4, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 94 was their original intent, and they shaped their stances regarding future zoo bills accordingly— of course, to the dismay of the Senate.
In February of 1890, Congress passed a bill “providing for the organization, maintenance and improvement” of the National Zoological Park. The initial zoo bill of $200,000 enabled the
Smithsonian to acquire the land needed for the zoo, but the small amount remaining would not be able to support the construction of the zoo itself. The Senate drafted and approved a bill that would appropriate $92,000, of Federal monies, for buildings, cages, fences, enclosures, and other infrastructural expenses, as well as for salaries.33 The House only approved the bill after adding an amendment clearly stating that $46,000 of the expenditures would be financed by District taxes. Protest and disputation again commenced, escalating this time into a Congressional dispute about the state of the relationship between the District of Columbia and the Federal government.
This second zoo bill forced legislators, newspapers, and constituents alike to contemplate not only the place of the zoo within both the city of Washington and the nation, but, also, to meditate upon their investment in local and national government, as well as the power federally distributed between these levels of government.
Georgian Democrat James H. Blount summarized the primary argument against the
Senate bill. The Evening Star reported that Mr. Blount believed that “[t]he declaration that the park would be a source of education to the people of the country was a mere pretense. The park would simply be a feature of city life.” This position of dissent (and the one most often levied against the 1890 Senate bill) essentially contended that despite the grand, national goals etched into the National Zoological Park, in all practical purposes, the institution would function nominally, in everyday life, as an ordinary urban zoo, no different than the zoological gardens of
Brooklyn, Philadelphia, or St. Louis. In addition to the “pretense rhetoric,” others, like Georgian
33 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, February 11, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 95
Democrat Judson C. Clements, simply thought that the Federal government was already paying too many of the District’s expenses—for example, witness fees and District prisoner expenses.
For many Representatives a zoo just did not seem to be “on the same plane as a government building.”34 District citizens should pay for their own zoo and not rely on the tax dollars of faraway citizens.
Opinions like those above reverberated throughout the House of Representatives. When
Kentucky Democrat James B. McCreary delivered an impassioned speech not only against the zoo bill, but also attacking the zoo itself, “tired of these propositions to commit the government to build parks and gardens,” an anonymous spectator in the gallery (most likely a local resident) interrupted him with loud, disapproving hissing.35 Not all Representatives, though, agreed with forcing the District to pay for half of the zoo bill. Representatives like Louis E. McComas
(Maryland), William C. P. Breckinridge (Kentucky), Benjamin Butterworth (Ohio), and James
Buchanan (New Jersey) emphasized the National Zoological Park as solely a national institution.
According to Massachusetts Representative Elijah A. Morse, the United States was a “nation and should have a capital worthy of a nation,” and in the words of Illinois Representative Charles A.
Hill, the zoo “was for the benefit of the whole world.” And West Virginian George W. Atkinson specifically stood in defense of the District’s citizenry, which carried a large enough tax burden on its shoulders. The District, in fact, possessed $19,000,000 of debt, “which [was] larger in proportion to the assessed value of property than any other city in the country.” The relationship between the District and Federal government, as well as the status of the District in national
34 Untitled Article (The Evening Star, April 9, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 35 Untitled Article (The Evening Star, April 18, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 96 politics, proved to be contested and controversial throughout the history of D.C.36 Nonetheless, dissent of the zoo bill won the day in the House, and after a decisive vote of 118 to 27, the House concluded that its amendment, forcing the District to pay, would stand.37 The Senate had no choice but to accept the amendment, which it did after a “little spicy debate” on April 22, 1890, reluctantly accepting the House’s resolve with a vote of 33 to 20.38
After the idea for the National Zoological Park emerged from Hornaday’s taxidermic laboratory, it immediately became a stage upon which actors could reenact the dramas of national politics, constructing a “zoo”-morphic (as opposed to zoomorphic) script that outlined different
36 Untitled Article (The Evening Star, April 9, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 37 Untitled Article (The Evening Star, April 18, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 38 “The Zoological Park Bill” (The Evening Star, April 23, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. Senator John J. Ingalls from Kansas delivered a vehement soliloquy, addressing the President, stating, “Mr. President, the government of this District is an absolute despotism, but I do not think that I ever knew of an illustration of more perfect tyranny than is evinced by that provision in this bill. The people of the District of Columbia have absolutely nothing whatever to do with that park or with its maintenance or its management. It is to be under the control of the regents of the Smithsonian Institution. The people of the District have no representation on the board, no connection with its management, no disposition whatever of the finances which are to be appropriated and disbursed. The Senator from Vermont speaks about the precedent already established. If there has been one established— which I do not know—of course I am bound to accept his statement—it was a most pernicious precedent, and if we allow this one to be established there will be no escape from it hereafter. They can then plead that the money for the original investment having been shared by the District, and the money for the first annual appropriation having been shared by the District, it has crystallized and passed into the form of law and cannot be changed. How far this expenditure will extend nobody can tell. It may go into the millions. It will go into the millions. It is to be a great national institution, and I protest in the name of the people here against imposing upon them this invidious and unjust and unnecessary in addition to what they already endure.” Just as alternative opinions were present in the House of Representatives, not all Senators agreed with Ingalls’s diatribe. Missouri Senator Francis M. Cockrell retorted, “This park is for the convenience of the people of the District of Columbia nine hundred and ninety-nine times more than for the people of the United States. Not one in ten thousand, not one in a hundred thousand of the great mass of taxpayers of the United States will ever see this park; and it is for the beautifying of the city of Washington, it is for the increase of the value of property here, and for the benefit of the citizens who reside here and who will frequent it.” Matthew C. Butler (a Southern Democrat from South Carolina of all places!) responded to Cockrell’s critique, “So would the public building in St. Louis be for the entire benefit of the people of St. Louis and no other portion of the American Union, and yet I suppose they would think it a great hardship if St. Louis should be called upon to pay half the expense of the court house and post office building there. I do not understand that the District of Columbia has anything to do with this public park more than that it is within the limits of the District of Columbia. It is a government institution which all the people have a right to get the benefit of, not alone the people of the District: and it would seem to me to be a very great hardship to require the District of Columbia to pay one-half of the expense of the park which is intended solely as a national affair.” 97 opinions about the role of the Federal government in funding the gild of America’s Gilded Age.
Debates about and defenses of the National Zoological Park circumnavigated issues of utility, power, and refinement, all powerful tropes of transatlantic discourses since the revolutions of the eighteenth century. What purpose will a national zoo serve? And who will benefit from this purpose? Can a national zoo reach its potential? Or are its aims idealistic? What role will a national zoo play in the city of Washington and in the nation writ large? And is a zoological park an essential feature of, to borrow David Harvey’s appropriate phrase, a “capital of modernity”?39
These questions structured all analyses about the National Zoo as a governmental institution. The
Department of Living Animals answered the practical needs of both the Smithsonian’s National
Museum and Hornaday’s taxidermic laboratory, yet even in these proto-zoo stages, the National
Zoological Park had been established for the people, inheriting the mission of the museum display—to create a well-educated and worldly citizenry.40
The ideals of the National Zoological Park were practical. At first glance, the conception of “practical ideals” may seem to be nothing but dimorphic contradiction, an ironic fusion of opposites. Rarely are “idealistic” convictions also labeled “practical.” And seldom are “practical” ends also seen as ideals. Yet “practical” in the late nineteenth-century exuded a democratic spirit.
To make an intellectual pursuit of any kind “practical” was to make it both palatable and beneficial to the masses. William Temple Hornaday (as we saw at the beginning of the last chapter) believed, in 1910, that the right way to teach zoology was to reinvigorate “practical zoology” with new life, that is to keep in mind the American collective when designing
39 Harvey, David, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2005). 40 This relationship between museums and zoos was not unique to the United States National Museum and the National Zoological Park. An 1890 circular concerning the proposed zoological gardens and aquarium for Boston, for example, stated, “The interest taken by the general public in our natural history museums must be seen to be appreciated; and if dead creatures and their bare skeletons can attract multitudes of visitors, of how much deeper interest will living creatures prove.” “Circular About the Proposed Zoological Gardens + Aquarium for Boston as put forth by a Committee from the BSNH [Boston Society of Natural History],” undated but around 1890, page 7, BSNH III-1.7, Museum of Science, Boston, Archives. 98 zoological curriculum. Hornaday wanted to maximize the utility of zoological instruction by widening its scope— increasing the number of students reached and the number of species examined by zoological education. Making zoology “practical” represents nothing more than the democratization of a life science, replacing the “advancement of knowledge” (an Enlightenment teleology) with the “dissemination of knowledge” (a Progressive teleology).41 Hornaday’s experience establishing a national zoo directly shaped his commitment to “practical zoology.”
Throughout its genesis, the National Zoological Park proved “practical,” both in its promotion by
Hornaday and the Smithsonian and in its conceptual life within the halls of Congress.
Like the museum, the National Zoological Park was built for the public. As Steven Conn has demonstrated, “[m]useums functioned as the most widely accessible public fora to underscore a positivist, progressive and hierarchical view of the world, and they gave that view material form and scientific legitimacy.” Through an “object-based epistemology” (the assumption that objects
“could tell stories”), the museum could transport the museumgoer into wider worlds.42 Similarly, according to its boosters, the National Zoological Park, with its living “objects,” would extend this same logic. In this way, the National Zoological Park was practically just another institution among many, and these institutions not only included museums but also hospitals, universities,
41 Andrew J. Lewis in A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) similarly describes a “democratization” of “knowledge.” However, situated in the early republic of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, his story focuses more on how the American public took part in shaping natural history alongside academic elites. While, surely, natural knowledge always remained “socially constructed,” by the end of the nineteenth century, academic Science had achieved a position of power within society and culture that it had not possessed in earlier times. All types of specialized sciences were given their own “departments” in universities around the world. These sciences developed their own specialists, academic publications, esoteric lexicons, and avenues of funding. By the late-nineteenth century, “democratization” drew less attention to the role of laypeople in the formation of knowledge, choosing to emphasize, instead, the responsibility of “scientists” in reaching the laypeople with the knowledge formed by their own expertise. In both cases, though, “democratizing” knowledge (whether zoological science or natural history) brought elites and publics into education. Both models of “democratization,” while different (and surely intertwined) shed light onto the importance of utility and the suspicion of authority in American culture. 42 Conn, Steve, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4-5. 99 and libraries—or any space that could help Americans cope with the “dislocation brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization.”43 Ideally, supporters of the National Zoological Park
(as demonstrated above) believed that such an institution would deepen American culture in many ways, democratically benefiting all, and thus making it “practical.” For its supporters, a national zoo promised a utility that undoubtedly justified its expense.44
“Practical,” though, evidently does not translate to uncontroversial. Surely, if “practical” signifies a “democratic” aspiration, then such a notion would exist at the very heart of the foremost political anxieties of an industrializing and globalizing America. While the national zoo emerged directly from a museum culture, and thus acted as a museum-like institution, it existed simultaneously at the nexus of national political discourse, a place that a local zoological garden could never occupy. The National Zoological Park and the animals therein sat upon a grand, national stage, and Americans the nation over developed boisterous opinions about this new living museum. The debates that roared in the houses of Congress rarely discussed the essential qualities that a zoo required. Rarely did legislators mention animals, mingling crowds,
43 Conn, 9. 44 A large historiography deals with the cultural transformation of American society in the late decades of the nineteenth century. Reformers of the Progressive Era dreamed of remaking America with an omnipresent public-spirit; a society that would boast affluent, safe, and attractive cities; well-educated and refined citizens; and attractions that would foster the reimagining of the world as increasingly interconnected. While I will not explore this topic with a wide lens, hoping to sidestep the usual constructs of “historiographical debates,” the National Zoological Park was an “institution” interwoven into this broader contextual fabric. This fabric was composed of intertwined political, social, cultural, and intellectual elements. For more on these transformations take a look at these broadly-written syntheses (many classics) of Progressivism, the Gilded Age, and the rise of “modern America”: Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of Progressive Movement in American, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988); John F. Kasson’s Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997); Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Robert H. Wiebe’s, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John D. Buenker’s Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973); and Nell Irvin Painter’s Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008). 100 transportation, fences, moats, animal feed, the exotic animal trade, or concessions. Congressmen chirped about issues of funding, and thus the role of the federal government in establishing institutions for the “benefit of the people.” National deliberation imagined a national zoo as one institution among many, a byproduct of the great age of institution-building. The national zoo might be “practical,” but its “practicality” sparked contestation. However, the idea of the National
Zoological Park as an institution rarely altered the myriad and miscellaneous experiences of the zoogoers, zookeepers, laborers, scientists, tour guides, businessmen, and, most importantly, the animals that composed this institution’s population. The rhetoric surrounding the establishment of the national zoo may have given zoogoers notions about the zoo as a monolithic entity (an
Institution) that merged easily with other national dialogues, and the zoo may have also partially arisen from the democratic desire for “practicality.” Yet, once the National Zoological Park was established and zoogoers entered through its gates, all premonitions and forethoughts would fade.
The rhetoric, arrogance, ignorance, and dreams of zoogoers could never make sense of zoo experiences.
William Temple Hornaday recognized the experiential power of the zoological garden, and henceforth, he nuanced his “practical zoology” with an experiential dimension that could only be forged before the countenances and gazes of the Others (mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish) that looked through and beyond the confines of their exhibits, or in the case of zoology, beyond the bounds of Science. Hornaday wanted to free zoology from the “much-too-paternal- state,” as he asseverated in his 1910 article, and he surely wanted to free zoology from the grasps of intellectual erudition. Hornaday ironically called for government funding to support a national zoo because he viewed the endeavor as “practical,” as abounding with utility. But the zoo was far more than practical. Hornaday advocated for a government-sponsored, public space within which
American individuals could form their own experiences. Through the National Zoological Park
101
(as well as through his later stance on zoological pedagogy), zoology could be brought to the masses, and then remade in infinite ways. Within the park, the human constructs of “utility,”
“power,” and “refinement” needed to make room for the unpredictable, the unimaginable, and the uncanny. Animals, real and imagined, would have it no other way.
The National Zoological Park and Changes in the Land
At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, on March 12, 1889, John Willock Noble (Secretary of the
Interior), Samuel Pierpont Langley (Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution), and William
Benning Webb (president of the board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia), comprising the “commission for the establishment of a zoological park,” travelled together in an open carriage, accompanied by John Wesley Powell, the Superintendent of the United States
Geological Survey, to the beautiful Rock Creek valley. These gentlemen, on this “exceedingly fine” day, faced the task of choosing one hundred acres best suited for a zoological park. The vast beauty of the Rock Creek made the decision of placement a difficult one, and since Secretary
Noble had never toured the area and his hectic schedule prevented him from seeing the entire park, the foursome decided it was best to take several excursions before choosing the best terrain for a zoo.45
The zoo bill prescribed the boundaries within which the National Zoological Park could be located, Massachusetts Avenue being the southernmost border and Military Road running west from Brightwood being the northernmost limit. The one-hundred-acre zoological park would be placed between these two avenues, and wherever located, the zoo would include a portion of the
45 “The Land for the Zoo” (The Washington Post, March 13, 1889) and “The Zoological Commission” (The Evening Star, March 13, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. Of the four individuals on this excursion, John Wesley Powell now has the most well-known legacy, famous as an explorer of the American West who travelled through the Rocky Mountains and along the Green and Colorado Rivers. For more on Powell see Donald Worster’s A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) or Edward Dolnick’s Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002). 102 creek. The placement of the zoo, though, was no straightforward matter. Langley hoped the commission would find a location as close to the city as possible, “for in his view this was to be the poor man’s park.” In Langley’s mind, “[t]he location should be such that the park could be easily reached by horse cars or afoot,” but the properties nearest the city proved expensive and would be the most difficult for the commissioners to attain.46
The first location proposed and officially presented to Congressional committees located the zoo slightly south of Adams’ Mill Road and extending to Klingle Road. This prospective location, five-eighths of a mile long and one-half of a mile wide, included 121 acres where the
Rock Creek meandered through two bends, which would maximize the amount of creek that the park could utilize. This early model situated the park north of the Woodley lane bridge, assuming that the land below the bridge would be exorbitantly priced. Around two thousand acres composed this broadly defined region of the valley, and at least three, topographically-suitable sites of around one hundred acres could be carved from this expanse.47
The commission began surveying the Rock Creek in mid-March, 1889, and they spent the next two months deliberating with private property owners about issues of pricing. While some owners reached an agreement with the commission quickly, possibly assuming that they would earn a better price for their land through negotiation than by waiting for condemnation hearings to proceed, other owners either asked for outrageous amounts or simply refused to respond to the commissioners’ request for an offer.48 On May 17, 1889, the commissioners met and thoroughly considered the merits and value, with the assistance of various experts, of every piece of property between Woodley Road and Military Road, the land that overlay the prospective site for the zoo.
46 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, March 26, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 47 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, March 26, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 48 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, March 16, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 103
Properties that lay close to Massachusetts Avenue, though, were not considered due to their high values.49 By the end of May, the issue was settled—the zoo would lie above Woodley Park, along
Rock Creek, a positioning almost identical to the original proposal. Generally, the land above
Klingle Road would cost much more than the land between Klingle and Woodley Roads. William
Temple Hornaday travelled through the area and met with property owners, and he discovered that most were “in the most liberal spirit,” fully enthusiastic about the National Zoo.50
As Hornaday and the commissioners worked out the details of purchasing the land needed, surveyors were busy creating an official map.51 On the morning of November 22, Noble,
Langley, Webb, and John Watkinson Douglass (who had by then replaced Webb as the president of the board of commissioners for the District of Columbia) gave the President of the United
States, Grover Cleveland, official and finalized plans for the National Zoological Park. On average, the land cost $1,000 per acre, and the total expected purchase amounted to $177,128.76, leaving $22,871.24 of the original $200,000 allocated by Congress left for infrastructural expenditures. The land would be purchased from several owners, but Miss A. E. J. Evans owned the majority of the property, 94.05 of 166.50 acres. Most of these landowners were, in the words of a Geo. B. Starkweather, “animated by a spirit of patriotic fair-mindedness,” negotiating fair prices for their land and expressing enthusiasm about the prospects of a zoological park along
Rock Creek.52 Only 33.435 acres of privately-owned land was acquired by condemnation, most of which was owned by the aging Pacificus Ord, who previously served as a member of California’s
Supreme Court. When all the purchases were complete, however, the irascible landowners who
49 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, May 18, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 50 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, May 29, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 51 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, August 19, 1889) and “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, September 20, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 52 Geo. B. Starkweather to Hon. Commissioners of the Zoological Park, 22 April 1889, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 6, Folder 3. 104 chose to wait for the condemnation process (which dragged on for an entire year) instead of negotiating with the Smithsonian received more for their property. The final expenditure on land amounted to $190,824.59, and after legal fees of $8,789.57 were added to this amount, only
$385.84 of the original $200,000 remained.53
The Rock Creek valley possessed many natural advantages that made it an ideal location for a zoo. First, as The Evening Star advertised, the valley boasted a stream of running pure water, whereas in “other gardens water [was] either collected in pools that [became] stagnant or a running supply [was] provided for at much expense.” The creek flowed throughout the entire park and could be widened artificially as needed for the zoo homes of aquatic animals like beavers, otters, muskrats, and seals.54 Second, a zoo located in the valley would easily become the largest zoo on the planet, especially in comparison to the great zoos of Europe, all located on small tracts of land at the center of exploding metropolises. While zoos compacted into cramped urban spaces
53 “Land for the New Zoo” (The Washington Post, November 21, 1889); “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, November 22, 1889); “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, November 25, 1889); “The Land for the Zoo” (The Washington Post, December 3, 1889), “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, December 3, 1889); and “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, January 27, 1891), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. The exact ownership, acreage, and finalized values of the properties purchased for the National Zoological Park are listed below (italics represents land seized through condemnation: Miss E. A. J. Evans . . . 94.050 acres . . . $94,860 H. D. Walbridge . . . 14.450 acres . . . $14,450 Woodley Park, owned by H. P. Waggaman and others, One lot, conveyed by Mr. Waggaman . . . 5.103 acres . . . $1 One lot, owned by Mr. Waggaman . . . 2.350 acres . . . $5,865 Henry C. Holt . . . 13.360 acres . . . $40,000 Mrs. M. Caney . . . 1.440 acres . . . $3,000 Mrs. E. L. Dunn et. al . . . .392 acres . . . $170.76 Pacificus. Ord . . . 24.570 acres . . . $16,696.73 Colored Cemetery . . . 1.700 acres . . . $3,000 J. P. Klingle . . . 6.180 acres . . . $9,270 E. E. Hayden . . . .670 acres . . . $1,897 McPherson and Finley . . . .315 acres . . . $1,372 Quarry Road, public tract . . . .846 acres . . . none Streambed owned by J. L. Kervand (originally of unknown ownership) . . . 1.060 acres . . . $233.10 The total of all the individual land values strangely comes up $9.00 short of the official amount (which is the amount listed in the public record) listed in the text proper. 54 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, March 14, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 105 enabled zoogoers to easily view an entire animal collection in a short amount of time, a larger zoo would allow animals to live in exhibits that more closely modeled their natural environments. For example, a zoo in the Rock Creek valley could accommodate herds of buffalo within large fields instead of forcing several individual buffalo into tiny pastures. This extra space would also allow the National Zoological Park to not only display animals, but also to engage in breeding projects.
Animals bred along the Rock Creek would, of course, encourage the growth and protection of disappearing species, but breeding would also provide the zoo with a supply of animal capital, giving the park a constant supply of American animals with which they could ship to other international zoological parks in exchange for exotic and expensive species. In this way, land would theoretically give the National Zoological Park a competitive edge in the international exotic animal trade; it would no longer have to rely on receiving donations and haggling offers with actors of America’s animalia network.55 Third, the Rock Creek valley would endow
America’s zoo with an indescribable aesthetic quality. In fact, William Temple Hornaday believed that the valley offered more resources than the environment of any zoo ever established.
When interviewed by an Evening Star reporter, Hornaday proclaimed, “We will without any doubt have the best drained, best watered zoological park in the world. We will have more of the natural forest [and] the natural growth both of deciduous and evergreen trees than any other park of this character. A million dollars expended on the Potomac flats could not do for a park there, what nature has done along the banks of Rock Creek.”56 The park site possessed rolling hills and
55 The National Zoological Park, though, like many early zoological parks, would continue to receive donations and haggle with animalia actors. Elizabeth Hanson documents how early American zoological parks acquired animals in a chapter entitled “Who Belongs in the Zoo?” in her Animal Attractions. This chapter, when read alongside the previous chapter of this dissertation, demonstrates that Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, in many ways, might stand as a fitting window into the origins of manyAmerican zoos—not just the National Zoo. 56 “The “Zoos” of the World” (The Evening Star, March 30, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1; Donald McPherson to Hornaday, 17 May 1888, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 6, Folder 3. Property owners also recognized the benefits of placing a zoo in a location with a diverse landscape. For example, Donald McPherson, in correspondence with Hornaday about selling his land, adds 106 dales ideal for pastures; various lakes and ponds; forests of oak, beech, locust, mulberry, hickory, sassafrass, persimmon, dogwood, and pine; deep ravines with cliffs and high bluffs; a stream with banks both smooth and rocky; and granite and limestone boulders covered with mosses and ferns— the perfect landscape for the many manmade (and diverse) microenvironments a zoo required.57
The beauty of the Rock Creek valley so captivated America’s Congressmen that attempts to make the area the site of an urban park began twenty years earlier. Immediately following the
Civil War, in 1867, Republican Senator B. Gratz Brown of Missouri presented Senate Bill 549, which sought to establish a public park in the valley. He pronounced, before his peers in the
Senate:
I suppose all members of the Senate are familiar enough with the environs of the city to know the beautiful and romantic valleys of Rock Creek. The character of the ground around and adjacent to that stream is exactly suited to the purposes we desire. It has running water; it has rugged hills; it has picturesque scenery; it has abundance of varied forest timber; it has a native undergrowth blushing with beauty; it has the tangled vine and clustering wild flower, and the quiet mosses gray with age, and indeed a thousand imprints of native adornment that no hand of art could ever equal in its most imitative mood. Moreover, with so much of attractiveness in its present uncultured state, it has likewise every capacity for adornment and development, and can be made with less expense than almost any spot of equal area I have ever seen within the reach of a great city one of the most beautiful resorts in the world.
Along with this impassioned speech, Senator Brown recited a report written by Brigadier General
Nathaniel Michler, who similarly attested to the wonder of the 2,700 acres that he surveyed for the bill. A park of this sprawling size, with the natural aesthetics of the Rock Creek valley, would surely rival some of the great parks of the world—Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Paris’s Garden of
at the end of a letter, “Permit me to say that I am of the view that only a park, including both hill and valley has any fitness or adaptation for such a purpose and in the form suggested, habitat (apparent) in great variety could be furnished, as fine as anywhere within reasonable access in one year. A meandering enclosure along the creek would be a tame and nearly worthless affair and destitute of any possibilities.” 57 “Rock Creek National Park: Information for the Public,” (Washington: Judd and Detweiler) 3-5, Document in “NZP Commission Papers: Printed Documents,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Series 4, Box 6, Folder 8. 107
Versailles, London’s Regent’s and Hyde Park, Vienna’s Prater, and Munich’s Englische Garten.
For various reasons, though (especially since the nation confronted more pressing Reconstruction concerns in the wake of the Civil War), the national park bill never passed, even when it was discussed again in 1886 and 1887. Beck’s bill reinvigorated the issue of placing a park in the
Rock Creek valley by presenting tangible plans for a zoological park. The zoo bill not only proved attractive because of the many benefits the zoo would offer the public, but also because its location was within the pristine valley that had long featured in the public imaginary of the
District. Shortly after the zoo bill passed and zoo construction was underway, Congress finally protected the rest of the Rock Creek valley as a public park. Washington’s Rock Creek Park would join New York’s Central Park, Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park,
Boston’s Franklin Park, and Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park as one of the finest parklands in urban
America.58
While Nature could create the Rock Creek and its natural wonders, only humans, of course, could transform unpopulated land and uncut forests into a zoological park and garden. If the modern zoo usually functioned as a city within a city, the location of the Rock Creek valley on the outskirts of the District’s urban center required Washington to extend its urban infrastructure to the zoo rather than simply accommodating the zoo within an already established urban system.59 The National Zoological Park required, in the most literal terms, both the growth of the human city and the creation of an animal city, and the 1890, $92,000 zoo bill (whether
“unjust” or not) fostered this expensive and necessary dual project.
58 “Rock Creek National Park: Information for the Public,” 5-26. Eventually, in 1933, the Rock Creek Park, as well as the National Capital Parks, was transferred to the National Park Service. The National Zoological Park, though, to this day, is not a part of the National Park Service. It still remains under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. 59 Hanson, Animal Attractions, 32-34. In a similar manner, Hanson refers to zoos as “planned communities.” 108
Of the $92,000, $15,000 was allocated for the construction of animal shelters. One building, costing around $10,000, would be a “half permanent” house that could accommodate subtropical animals, generally, and lions, tigers, ostriches, kangaroos, and camels, specifically.
Also the bill funded the creation of an aviary, costing around $5,000, that would temporarily keep primates and reptiles until each could eventually be relocated into their own building. Even though Representatives worried about these expenses, in actuality, the amounts budgeted for the buildings were actually quite reasonable. In comparison, Cincinnati’s zoo spent $19,312 for the main animal house and $13,098 on the aviary while Philadelphia’s zoo spent $55,638 and
$12,525, respectively.60 The bill also designated $9,000 for the “custody of the animals” including: a barn for the buffalo and elk ($1,500), fences and shelters for eight ruminant yards
($3,000), four cages and dens for the bears ($3,000), and fifteen iron cages for animals like wolves and foxes ($1,500). Two thousand dollars were earmarked for repairing the Holt mansion, already existing on the zoo land. This mansion would be equipped with zoo offices and rooms that could accommodate guests; the $2,000 could fix the leaky roof, repair the skylight and ventilator, mend the plastering, restore the stairs, patch the water closet and furnace, and purchase new desks, bookshelves, and chairs. Another $2,000 would create artificial ponds for the aquatic quadrupeds—seals, sea lions, beavers, otters, and muskrats. These expenses provided for the animals’ dwellings.61
The zoo, the microcosmic city, demanded a water infrastructure for animals and humans alike. The 1890 bill provided $7,000 for water supply, sewerage, and drainage. Laying supply pipes to the zoo’s buildings and yards, installing a supply tank, and placing a pump on the Rock
Creek accounted for $4,500. The rest of the amount would be devoted to the laying of sewers
60 “At Work on the Zoo” (The Washington Post, August 27, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 61 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, February 11, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 109 pipes and drains around the two buildings. These initial efforts to establish the water infrastructure that a zoo required only provided the bare necessities; maintaining and expanding the water system would inevitably require more funds in the future. Human zoogoers also needed another type of infrastructure, namely roads, walkways, paths, and bridges, for which the bill apportioned $15,000 (an expense equal to the cost of animal residences). Upon opening day, visitors would gallivant upon 4,880 linear feet of macadamized roads (stretching from the entrance gate, along Adams Mill Road, across to the Rock Creek, and tracing the opposite ridge), stroll over a new iron carriage and foot bridge, and meander along five thousand feet of boardwalks.62
Since its emergence from the taxidermic laboratory, the National Zoological Park required a heterogeneous and diverse list of materials and supplies. The transition from a
Department of Living Animals to a legitimate zoological park, though, required many more provisions than the shack behind the Smithsonian building; $5,000 would be spent on “hardware, lumber, paint, fuel, stationary, printing, horse and wagon, library, typewriter, tools, and telephone
. . .” In this way, though, the transition to zoo did not represent the invention of a new type of institution as much as it marked the metamorphosis (eruption even!) of an old type of institution.
The operations of Hornaday’s laboratory, and the materials therein, transferred from inside the walls of the Smithsonian Museum to a place outside, beneath the forested canopy of the Rock
Creek valley. The National Zoological Park signified the apex, the culmination, of taxidermic education. No longer could Hornaday’s laboratory and Department hold the materials, animals, and people needed to sustain the proto-zoo that arose as a byproduct of museum displays. And no longer could his laboratory keep up with its own intellectual and scholarly goals. Everything that the Smithsonian’s taxidermic displays and the Department of Living Animals (maybe even
62 “The Zoological Park.” 110
American natural history in its grandest sense) stood for could no longer be bound, contained, and exhibited within the Museum. The National Zoological Park gave taxidermy and all its significations room to expand, making commitments and pleasures of the nineteenth century accessible to the masses of a new (“gilded” and/or “progressive”) age. The greatest cost of the
1890 zoo bill was not dedicated to the “building of the new” (paths, exhibits, buildings, water systems, etc.), but funded the expenses of old; in fact, $37,000 (40% of the bill) was dedicated to
“current expenses” and the “maintenance of collections, food supplies, salaries of all necessary employees and the acquisition and transportation of specimens.” These monies would pay for
1. Food for animals, all kinds—hay, grain, meat, fish, vegetables, &c., $8,000. 2. Heating apparatus and fuel for large animal building and aviary; total, $4,000. 3. Railway, steamship and other transportation of specimens to the park, $5,000. 4. Purchase of rare specimens, not obtainable by donation, $2,000. 5. Salaries of 24 employees . . .
In many respects, these everyday costs of Hornaday’s Department, as much as the lofty goals that zoo rhetoric rhapsodized, justified, in a very practical manner, the establishment of the National
Zoological Park, a new branch of the Smithsonian that could manage old expenses and, subsequently, older ambitions.63
Also, just as any human metropolis, the emerging animal metropolis required a working class in order to build and maintain the urban infrastructure described above. The 1890 bill approved the salaries for one superintendent ($2,500), two keepers ($900 each), two assistant keepers ($600 each), one clerk ($1,200), one gardener ($1,000), six laborers ($45 per month each), one copyist ($480), one messenger ($480), two painters ($700 each), two carpenters ($900
63 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, February 11, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. By 1894, trees and shrubbery also represented a major expense for the zoo, for in that year, $591.46 was devoted to purchasing and planting trees. This marked a major percentage of a quite meager appropriation. Trees proved quite important, though. Beyond their simple aesthetic function, they were important to preventing floods. Between 1894 and 1898, 3,600 willow trees were planted along the Rock Creek to reinforce its banks. Also, between those years, more than $4,000 was spent on purchasing trees and shrubs. Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word-processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, “1894,” 6-7. 111 each), four watchmen ($600 each), and one teamster ($500).64 However, despite these official zoo employees, building the zoo required the “outsourced” and temporary help of Washington’s laborers, and these individuals drastically transformed the land of the Rock Creek valley. The commission received bids for repairing the Holt House, digging fence post holes (a task that required a “gang of laborers” to dig at a pace of fifteen to twenty holes per day), purchasing building materials, placing cedar posts into the ground, and for other elements of the zoo’s initial construction.65 When laying the infrastructure of a zoo, common laborers performed everyday yet essential tasks. The National Zoological Park could not function without fences, roads, walkways, pipe networks, electricity, water pumps, and storage facilities; and manual laborers should also be given credit for the zoo-building process that had begun in Hornaday’s laboratory. However, seemingly menial jobs could sometimes have a transformational impact on both the life of the zoo, in particular, and on the intellectual life of a nation, in general.
Fence-building, in particular, proved to be a monumental task—even worthy of its own newspaper article, reminding the public that “now everybody who rides or walks out in that vicinity will have a reminder of the existence of the park in the shape of a board fence which is now being built to inclose the park. This fence will be seven feet high and in order to deter the small boy from trying to climb over it instead of coming in properly by the entrances, there will be two rows of barbed wire strung along on top of the fence.”66 The fence that enclosed the site of the National Zoological Park not only demarcated the relatively wild land of the Rock Creek valley, symbolizing the taming of wilderness consistent with all park-building ventures, but this fence also memorialized the land, transforming the valley into a national monument, spectacle,
64 “The Zoological Park” (The Evening Star, February 11, 1890). 65 “Memoranda Relative to Work on the National Zoological Park,” “Diaries, Ledgers, and Memoranda, & Memorandum Books, 1890-1931, and Undated,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 4. 66 “A New Suburban Attraction” (The Evening Star, August 16, 1890), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 112 and attraction worthy of a nation.67 Yet, twisting atop the fence lay barbed wire, reminding all strollers, tourists, and gawkers that while the National Zoological Park would become
Washington’s newest public space, the federal government (obviously at the dismay of some, especially those in the House of Representatives) would always keep a watchful eye and guiding hand on the park’s future. Yet Congressmen, taxidermists, Smithsonian officials, and construction workers alike carved the National Zoological Park from a forested Rock Creek valley for purposes of practical and national importance, and in so doing, they installed another Washington monument in the capital city, one surely more sprawling than the 555-foot obelisk erected on the
National Mall six years before.
From Taxidermist to Anthropologist: Institutional Politics and Hornaday’s Departure
The idea for a collection of living animals in Washington originated with Spencer Baird, the first curator of the Smithsonian Institution, but William Temple Hornaday gave form to
Baird’s amorphous vision. Hornaday first brought living animals to the Smithsonian, buying, selling, and trading them through the innumerable business relationships he cultivated. Hornaday established the Department of Living Animals, locating building supplies and adjusting budgets.
Hornaday managed its routine operations, responded to problems, hired employees, interacted with visitors, cared for animals, and researched within its walls—all while performing his many duties as the chief taxidermist. Most importantly, Hornaday first articulated and advertised the need for a national zoo in Washington, D.C. While trading animalia, he simultaneously garnered support around the country for a prospective zoo. He spoke before Congress. He interviewed with journalists. He personally met the property owners of the Rock Creek valley on behalf on the
Smithsonian. He communicated with zoological parks around the nation and world. He contacted
67 I borrow the “changes in the land” metaphor, as well as the above thoughts concerning fences, from William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 113 scientists, professors, medical doctors, veterinarians, exotic animal dealers, museum curators, and naturalists concerning all types of zoo-related and animal-related issues. He generally served as a mediator between those inside and outside the Smithsonian, between Langley and legislators and between Langley and laypeople. William Temple Hornaday, with his enthusiasm, work ethic, and expertise, facilitated the transition from the Department of Living Animals to the National
Zoological Park. Hornaday knew all the minutiae of the zoo plans, and he knew the terrain of the
Rock Creek valley intimately. William Temple Hornaday was not only the “Prince” of the
Department of Living Animals, he was the author of the National Zoological Park, and publics far and wide associated his name with America’s first national zoo. Amidst all the Congressional debates, William Temple Hornaday had surely become a household name in Washington, and when his name appeared in headlines, on May 20, 1890, above articles detailing his resignation, surprise and bewilderment united the greater Smithsonian and Washington communities.
The Washington Post published an article entitled “Prof. Hornaday Resigns,” informing the public that the taxidermist “resigned his position, and will shortly go to Buffalo, where he will engage with others in the wholesale real estate business.” This report elaborated by explaining why the professor chose to abandon the zoo blossoming from the embryo he had nurtured:
The general expectation was that he would be made, the general director of the new zoological park, in which he has taken a warm interest, and to which he has devoted considerable labor. He has been an enthusiastic promoter of the enterprise, and it was generally thought that he would be put in charge of it, and would direct its development. But it seems that a difference of opinion between him and Secretary Langley, of the national museum, will prevent this. While the latter is going to make Mr. Hornaday superintendent of the park, and even give him greater powers than are generally given such superintendents, he is not willing to put him in full control, and allow him to shape the policy of the new institution, owing to his lack of administrative experience.
The Post concluded by emphasizing Hornaday’s ambition, explaining that “Mr. Hornaday . . . looked forward to something better than being the head-keeper of a collection of animals. He had hoped to be the instrument to build up a great and valuable collection of animals at the National 114
Capital.” Even though the Post highlighted the zealous nature of Hornaday, according to this interpretation, the taxidermist desired authority that superseded the amount usually granted to zoo superintendents. According to this reading of events, despite his aspiring drive and purpose,
Hornaday simply wanted too much.68
The Evening Star, on the other hand, presented a telling of events that seemed to cast
Hornaday as a victim of Langley’s injustice. This rival newspaper reported:
This action [his resignation] of Prof. Hornaday’s was a great surprise to every one, as he has been superintendent in charge ever since the appropriations were made for establishing the park. He has been in the heartiest sympathy with the new institution ever since it was first discussed, and a large share of the success that has attended it so far has been due to his zeal and untiring energy. Previous to the establishment of the park Prof. Hornaday was curator of the department of living animals in the Smithsonian, a department that was established at his earnest solicitation. When the prospect of a zoological park became a reality Prof. Hornaday at once took charge of the work connected with it, and being a naturalist as well as a scientist he found it very congenial, and threw himself body and soul into it. He has declined a number of business offers more tempting from a business point of view in order that he might devote himself to building up the new park. For more than a year he has not been connected with the Smithsonian Institution, but has been under the zoological park commission. But the park is now to be organized under the Smithsonian Institution and it seems that it has not been Prof. Langley’s intention to make Prof. Hornaday superintendent under the new dispensation. On the contrary Prof. Hornaday was recently told that he would be expected to work under another superintendent, who would have charge of the new park and its future development. . . . Mr. Langley’s reason for not continuing him as superintendent is that Mr. Hornaday has not had sufficient executive experience to entitle him to the position. Mr. Hornaday has been connected with the Smithsonian for nine years as a taxidermist and naturalist. He offered to continue in his position for six months on condition that if he made a single misstep or error of judgment he should step down and out without anything being said. His offer was declined.69
This interpretation more explicitly underscored Hornaday’s heroic attributes (for example, depicting him as a man who selflessly and energetically threw “himself body and soul into” the
National Zoological Park instead of accepting financially-enticing job offers), and indirectly
68 “Prof. Hornaday Resigns” (The Washington Post, May 20, 1890), “Scrap book, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 69 “Mr. Hornaday Resigns” (The Evening Star, May 20, 1890), “Scrap book, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 115 defended Hornaday against the charge of not having enough “executive experience.” While The
Evening Star seemed to take a more critical stance against Langley, potentially encouraging readers to question the Secretary’s motivation, both the Star and Post article lauded Hornaday’s work ethic and avidity and recognized his notoriety in the eye of the public. Both articles also concluded that Hornaday and Langley parted on good terms, “with professions of mutual esteem.”
Hornaday and Langley, though, probably feigned this “mutual esteem” in public. Behind closed doors, as Helen Horowitz has suggested, Hornaday and Langley’s relationship seemed strained. While the source of contention between these two powerful and intelligent Washington figures may never be known, Horowitz attributed their discordance to several factors. First,
Hornaday may have struggled through the changing-of-the-guards from Spencer Baird (the second Secretary whom Hornaday expressed the utmost adoration for) to Samuel Langley.
Second, Langley was known to possess a strict and austere demeanor that made him difficult to work with, and as the new Secretary, he was intently asserting his authority over those beneath him, still in the process of defining the relationships he would forge with others within the
Smithsonian. Third, Hornaday probably felt disheartened with the debates that took place around the Congressional zoo bills, especially the altercation sparked by the 1890 appropriation concerning the role of District taxes in funding the zoo’s construction. Lastly, Hornaday had received information (probably transmitted through his animalia networks) that New York City was about to build a zoo of grander scale than the pithy one in Central Park. Surely, the prospects for a leadership role in a major zoo-building project elsewhere, especially in a metropolis larger
116 than Washington, would have been seductively enticing for a man feeling underappreciated despite his unique role in forging the zoo Langley supposedly believed was his own.70
Two days after Hornaday’s resignation, Langley hired Frank Baker, the Assistant
Superintendent of the United States Life Saving Service (which would eventually become the
United States Coast Guard) and Professor of Anatomy at Georgetown University, to the position of curator of comparative anatomy in the National Museum with the understanding that upon hire
Baker would serve as a temporary manager of the National Zoological Park until an official and permanent superintendent could be found.71 This position, however, proved far from temporary, for Baker would serve as Superintendent of the National Zoo until 1916. Unsurprisingly, under
Langley’s dominance, as Horowitz makes clear:
Baker’s ability to act was severely restricted. Step by step through letters and memoranda Langley clarified that the Secretary’s authority ranged from general guidelines to specific and minute detail, that Baker could make no move beyond day-to-day management without written authorization, and that Baker had only a very limited ability even to correspond in his own name. Langley’s domination of his Acting Manager was unremitting. But, unlike Hornaday, Baker bore up, learned to satisfy Langley’s demands, and little-by-little became an efficient bureaucrat asserting authority over his own staff.72
70 Horowitz, 420-422. Biographers of Langley have echoed Horowitz’s assessment (as she also acknowledged in her article’s footnotes). See, for example, Vaeth, J. Gordon Langley: Man of Science and Flight (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1966), 54-62. The animosity between Langley and Hornaday often appeared subtly in the correspondence they exchanged. Langley, especially, added short acrid remarks to letters concerning everyday items of business, in an attempt, I believe, to assert his dominance over Hornaday. For example, see Langley to Hornaday, 15 March 1888, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 6, Folder 3. In this letter, Langley stated, “I desire that you will obtain for my private information, any facts as to the legitimate values of land on Rock Creek, between Military Road and Massachusetts Avenue.” The letter continues by elaborating on how to actually assess this value. At the end of the correspondence, though, Langley reminds (in my opinion, caustically), “In making these inquiries, you will please bear in mind that not only you have no official character, but that it would be extremely undesirable that it should be thought you have, or that your name should have any notoriety at all in this connection.” In the Sybil E. Hamlet manuscript, Langley’s dislike of Hornaday and Hornaday’s refusal to be demoted by Langley was also shown to be the primary reason for Hornaday’s resignation. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1890, 16-26. 71 “To Manage the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 22, 1890), and “New Director of the Zoo,” (The Washington Post, May 23, 1890), “Scrap book, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 72 Horowitz, 423-424. 117
Baker, though, exceeded mere bureaucrat. In-between zoo tasks, Baker pursued his own research, eventually making a significant contribution to anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary thought. As Superintendent, while Baker certainly learned to live with Langley’s assertive ways, he also learned how to shape the life of the National Zoological Park in indirect ways, managing a park where medicine, science, ecology, philosophy, and popular culture could jointly challenge the commonplace assumptions of all who would stroll along the Rock Creek. The National
Zoological Park, born in the laboratory of William Temple Hornaday, would become one of the world’s great zoos, serving the nation in ways that far surpassed the goals imagined by either the
Smithsonian or Congress.
118
Let us sing a song of the Zoo, The beautiful U.S. Zoo, Where the dugongs jump and gobble the chump From the wilds of Timbuctoo.
Where the cockroach sweetly sings, And the bobolinks growl and scratch, And the megliosaurus pulls the leg Of the fruminous bandersnatch.
Where the moose, so light and free, Goes skipping the tra-la-lee, And the hippopotamus rolls in the mud And sports with the bumblebee.
There the rabbit shivering-lee Sits scared as scared can be, While the anaconda skins up a limb And casts an eye on he.
There the owls sit up in a row, And solemnly blink at the crow; The sea lion snorts and the sloth cavorts Beside the bounding doe.
And the badger badgers the monk, And climbs up the elephant’s trunk; The camel humps and the baboon jumps, And the big snake swallows the skunk.
There the coon makes love to the gnu, While the Barbary boy chews glue, And the buffalo sits on a hickory limb And winks at the kangaroo.
Oh the beautiful Zoo, Zoo, Zoo! Where terrapins purr and mew, And the boaconstrictor playfully bites The ear of the cockatoo.73
73 “Topical Talk” (The Washington Post, March 10, 1889), “Scrap book, vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. The National Zoological Park, from the very beginning, captured the attention of everyone. While Congressmen argued about the utility of the zoo, adults and children sang its praises. 119
Chapter 3 Runaway Animals
Bear Hunt in the Capital
At the break of dawn on Tuesday, May 24, 1892, William Gross, a boy who lived near the zoo, was walking down Pierce’s Mill Road when he stumbled upon a grizzly bear climbing a hill alongside the avenue. The boy ran. And the bear pursued.1
Luckily the boy got away unscathed. Prior to this encounter, according to other reports, the bear was seen wandering down Quarry Road, over the Walbridge property, along Klingle
Road, and through Harvey Page’s lettuce patch. When done grazing in the field, the grizzly approached Page’s stable, where it encountered children who, “nearly frightened to death . . . ran screaming in every direction.” It was this commotion that had apparently scared the bear back over Klingle Road and into Gross’s walking route.2
The grizzly had escaped from the zoo shortly after four o’clock in the morning, when the night watchman last noticed the animal in its enclosure.3 The bear pits, dug out of the soft-rocked cliffs between Ontario Avenue and the Quarry Road, were supposedly “quite homelike” for the bears.4 The pits were also supposedly secure. Yet, somehow, the bear escaped.
The runaway animal was around three years old. The bear was “small for its age,” but was known to have a “bad disposition.” Caught near a Yellowstone hotel the previous September, the bear was relocated from its natural Wyoming environment to an enclosed environment along
1 “Escaped from the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 24, 1892), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 2 “A Zoo Bear At Large” (The Washington Post, May 25, 1892), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 3 “Escaped from the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 24, 1892). 4 “At Work On The Zoo” (The Washington Post, August 21, 1890), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 120 the Rock Creek. Now, though, the bear found itself at large in the nation’s capital. Alarm spread throughout the vicinity of the zoo, causing “a feeling of uneasiness, especially to those persons who had to send their children to school.” Neighboring farmers immediately checked on the safety of their livestock, and at every household “the doors and windows were kept closed, for fear that the animal might appear at the wrong time and play havoc with the people.”5
When an Evening Star reporter reached the Pierce’s Mill Road, on the other hand, he found “[n]o such fear” and “no apprehension.” Head keeper William Blackburne saw no need to panic, for he believed that since the bear was recently fed, it would not hunt any humans for the purposes of “securing a square meal.” In fact, its diet consisted mostly of roots and grasses anyways, so the runaway ursine should be easily able to assuage an appetite if it was to develop one. The zookeepers believed that the bear was relatively harmless and would only attack if “it was cornered or an attempt was made to recapture it.”6 The troubling fact, though, was that such an attempt was unavoidable. A grizzly bear could not be let free to roam through Washington.7
Upon discovery of the escape, and despite his apparent calm, Blackburne immediately sent for a pack of search hounds that could sniff out the bruin. However, for unknown reasons, the keeper could not attain the hounds. Soon thereafter, around 11 o’clock in the morning, a posse of local citizens formed, spearheaded by two men with the last name Cramer, one apparently an employee of the Rock Creek Park and the other an employee of the zoo. Citizens Coyle and
5 “Escaped from the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 24, 1892). 6 Ibid. 7 William H. Blackburne, the first Head Keeper of the National Zoological Park, was hired on January 29, 1891, not long after Hornaday’s departure and Frank Baker’s arrival. Previously, Blackburne had worked, for twelve years, as a trainer with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Blackburne proved an important and highly respected figure within the National Zoo, working there as Head Keeper for fifty-three years. With Presidential approval, Blackburne worked long past the mandatory retirement age, retiring at the age of eighty-seven. Blackburne was not only known by the zoogoing public as an animal expert, but also as a romantic. Supposedly, as the story went, the love of his love would not marry him unless he stopped his traveling circus life. This was Blackburne’s primary motivation to become a Head Keeper with the National Zoo. Blackburne was known to have “quit the circus, joined the zoo, got married, and gave up drinking all on the same day.” Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word- processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, “1891,” 5-6. 121
Houghton were among the first to enlist their support. Farmer Routt, wielding a breech-loader, also enlisted his. Some were mounted on horseback. The Star journalist chose to observe the chase on a bicycle. Once this people’s party had departed, Frank Baker arrived at the scene, and he formed his own search party, calling “almost every “Zoo” employee” to serve their zoo.
Armed “with pick handles, pitchforks, stones,” and pistols, the zoo mob took off after their bear.
They tracked the animal to Pierce’s mill, but doubled back when they lost its trail.8
The number of people involved in the bear hunt increased steadily over the course of the morning, probably totaling around twenty or thirty people.9 After 11 o’clock, the bear was located a short distance from the rear of the zoo. Eventually, the zoo’s carpenter Louis Hess and a citizen with the fitting last name Hunter had surrounded the bear when “for the first time the infuriated animal showed fight.” The bear attacked Hess, biting his leg, until Hunter managed to beat it away with a club. The bear, then, ran for the woods, and en route attacked different members of the search party. Shots reverberated through the valley. Head keeper Blackburne had fired two loads of buckshot into the bear, and Farmer Routt contributed a bullet. The grizzly collapsed and died.10
In response to the incident, Frank Baker blamed “the insufficiency of the watch force, as their funds enabled them to employ only one watchman for night duty.” Blackburne, on the other hand, simply stated, “Animals cannot be properly cared for unless the proper quarters are provided.”11 Interestingly, the automatic response of both Baker and Blackburne to the runaway bear was to spin the entire incident as the direct result of insufficient funding. The next day, though, The Evening Star paraphrased a more detailed account of the event:
8 “Escaped from the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 24, 1892). 9 “A Zoo Bear At Large” (The Washington Post, May 25, 1892). 10 “Escaped from the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 24, 1892). 11 Ibid. 122
[T]his morning that he [Frank Baker] hoped people understood that the killing of the bear was an absolute necessity in order to prevent the maiming and perhaps killing of some person. The bear, he said, had never been tamed, and but few visitors to the park had ever seen him. During the day he always remained in the cave, and at night he did his prowling. When he was first put in the cave a watchman was put to watch him every night and his attempts to escape were always ineffectual. After being in there seven months it was thought that escape was impossible. An examination of the cave showed that he got away over the rocky cliff, where there is about fifty-five feet of almost perpendicular rock.12
Baker admitted that the bear’s escape was not completely due to a dearth of night watchmen. He now seemed to agree with Blackburne’s assessment—that the bear’s quarters were to blame.
However, rather than to vaguely suggest that the zoo lacked the proper financial support to build
“proper quarters,” he instead seemed to believe that a technological flaw in the cage and an oversight on the part of the zoo made the escape possible. The cage did not properly seal off the space between the edge of the ceiling and the rock face because its designers apparently did not think a grizzly bear could scale straight up sheer cliff. No formal or direct apology or admittance of blame was ever given. Technological shortcomings and the mysteries of wild animals served as a rhetorical exculpation. Baker’s greatest worry, it seems, was that the killing of the bear may, in fact, bother the public more than its escape, so he took extra measures to emphasize that its death was needed and unavoidable.
The next day, the lifeless grizzly was carted from the zoo to the Smithsonian Institution, where taxidermist William Palmer (successor to Hornaday) examined its body. The autopsy revealed that the bear had either died from a load of shot that mangled its left eye, where some grappling penetrated into the animal’s brain, or from a bullet embedded in its side. A revolver bullet was also discovered in one of the bear’s paws, which Palmer concluded was an early attempt to mildly injure the bear so that it could be captured alive and spared death. Palmer cut
“the porterhouse, tenderloins and round steaks” from the carcass and gave them “to all
12 “The Dead Grizzly” (The Evening Star, May 25, 1892), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 123 applicants” hungry for bear meat.13 Some of this meat was specifically sent to the Metropolitan
Club and served to its members and to supper parties in the club’s dining room.14 Then, Palmer assessed the body for mounting, determining “that the skin [was] in excellent condition, but the hair is considerably worn on the rump, which is the result of the animal’s sitting on the rocks.”
The mounting would, of course, take several months, but eventually the bear, unsurprisingly, would be preserved and celebrated either in the zoo or the United States National Museum.15
More interesting, though, was that these gory details were published in The Evening Star for all to read. The people not only wanted to know about a runaway animal, they wanted to know precisely how the shards of metal encased in a shotgun round could have killed this bear and exactly that state of the fur on its rump.
Every detail of the grizzly escape and the ensuing drama fascinated and worried the
District public. On May 26, two days after the bear was killed, The Washington Post reported that
“[t]he exciting bear hunt in the Zoological Park . . . had the effect of attracting an unusual number of visitors to the romantic and panoramic inclosure, and all during yesterday there were crowds of curious of people on foot and in vehicles of all sorts gathered in front of the bear caves” to see the grizzly, polar, cinnamon, and black bears. The article [note the emphasis placed on
“environmental” aesthetic] continued,
A POST reporter was among those who trudged over the pretty roadways, fringed with deep green foliage and waving thickets, with now and then a rippling rill playing weird accompaniments to the soft melodies being rendered by nature’s choral through the howling pine tops and laurel groves. In the neighborhood of the park the reporter found a condition of uneasiness existing among the residents in their pretty, and in many cases, poetic looking residences. This feeling was the result of the bear’s escape and Supt. Frank Baker’s statement in THE POST, in which he said accidents of that kind are liable to occur owing to a shortage of funds for the proper care of wild animals in the Zoo,
13 “The Dead Grizzly” (The Evening Star, May 25, 1892). 14 ““B’ar Meat ” for Clubmen” (Unknown Newspaper, Unknown Day, 1892), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 15 “The Dead Grizzly” (The Evening Star, May 25, 1892). 124
and that he was not prepared to say what he would do under the circumstances should one of the big elephants or the fierce African lion get loose.16
The runaway bear, according to the Post, sparked fear in the public. It seems, though, that this fear was, in part and unsurprisingly, incited by both Frank Baker and the media, for they both had long molded public opinion about the zoo. Rather than directing outrage toward the zoo, though,
Washington newspapers tried to direct anger towards Congress for failing to pass new appropriations. In this way, unlike the grizzly, the zoo dodged a bullet. The zoo was not a danger to Washington; Congress was. The keepers did not fail to do their jobs; legislators did. And, for the most part, this spin seemed to work.
The grizzly quickly became a rallying symbol for zoo boosters. One satirical dialogue, printed in The Evening Star, put the issue succinctly:
“Why was it that you fled, oh Bear? Why did you leave the Zoo?” “Alas, with this economy, It was the only thing,” quoth he, “That I could safely do.” “Why were not forced to fly, oh Bear; What led you thus to do?” “Appropriations are so scant That I must surely come to want By living at the Zoo.”17
The zoo even underwent an inspection that especially examined the bear caves and the elephant house. The inspector, Mr. Harry Lanning, concurred with Baker’s assessment that the cliff served as the grizzly’s escape route, stating, “any of the bears with their sharp claws could climb the inclined rocky faces to freedom.” To remedy the threat, “there should be an iron grated covering extending from the top of the fence in front of the cliff face in the rear, being securely fastened into stone.” In addition, Lanning believed that the elephants could escape with ease if they so
16 “The Big Bear Hunt” (The Washington Post, May 26, 1892), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 17 “The Reporter and the Bear” (Unknown Newspaper, Unknown Date), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 125 desired. Despite this report, which he freely gave to the Post that so openly supported the NZP,
Lanning concluded in the following manner—“I have no blame to attach to the managers of the park. [T]hey have done remarkably well with the small amounts at their disposal – better than I could have done—but I do blame Congress for its ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ policy.”18
The Washington Post elaborated on this policy a day earlier in a long diatribe against
Congress for its perceived role in the runaway bear affair. The philippic began by contending that
“[i]t may be necessary that human blood shall flow and the lives of a few persons be sacrificed to bring Congress to an appreciation of what it is doing.” Then, the article continued by elaborating on the problem of funding. The issue was not solely about not receiving enough funding
(although this was a concern nonetheless, for that year, the NZP only received $29,000 instead of the $73,000 requested), but was also about how the money appropriated was earmarked for specific uses. As the Post put it, “[e]very dollar is so tied up that it must be used for a specific purpose or not at all, regardless of the welfare of the Park or the public.” It would make more sense for Congress to grant a general appropriation and then allow the regents of the zoo to “lay out the money in such a way as seemed best” than to let politicians decide how a zoo should be managed.19
From this sober critique, the harangue on Congress only heightened. The Post article continued in the following manner:
It may be asked, why should Congress have established a national zoölogical park? True; however great an advantage the people may derive from the possession of such an institution, it was not absolutely essential to the perpetuation of our Government, or of any branch of it. But it is too late to ask such questions now. Congress may vote to-morrow, if it chooses, to abolish the Park, sell the land, and give away the animals. As long, however, as it pretends to continue the Park’s existence, it has no right to impose upon a body of humane men of science the duty of starving several hundred wild beasts, or to expose a city’s population of a quarter of million souls to the perils of having daily bear-
18 “The Big Bear Hunt” (The Washington Post, May 26, 1892). 19 “A Zoo Bear At Large” (The Washington Post, May 25, 1892). 126
hunts in the public streets. Let one thing or the other be done. Let us have a Government menagerie of which every taxpayer will not be ashamed, or else no menagerie at all. Let the ignorant backwoods statesmen, who set the pace for our governmental expenditure, have things all their own way, and spend the money which better men put into the Treasury exclusively on the trumpery little creeks and ponds in their own pet “deerstriks,” and on volumes of “obsequies” literature which no one reads; or else give the intelligent legislators a chance to redeem themselves and the Government from disgrace. We can afford, as a nation, to get on without science and without art, with little useful knowledge and with less beauty, but we cannot afford to be deliberately cruel, or to make promises or to set afoot undertakings, and hypocritically shirk their fulfillment.20
Frank Baker, the NZP, and the Washington press had transformed a dead bear into political capital. An incident that resulted in some frightened schoolchildren, a carpenter with a bit leg, and a dead grizzly bear, first produced local panic about runaway animals. Yet, as zoo neighbors worried about which animal might next wander onto their properties, the District public at-large excitedly read about the bear that gained its own freedom despite its captivity, a “zoo story” etched with a metanarrative that could be applied to all sorts of larger American dramas, ranging from the plight of former slaves trapped in slavery, to former Confederates trapped in recession, or to the industrial workers trapped in the capitalist machine. This public themselves, as they read about the shards of metal buried into the lifeless brain of the beloved bear, ran away to their zoo to pay respects to the animal’s ursine relatives. The death of the grizzly bolstered the zoo’s popularity.
A dead bear in Washington meant different things to different people. As William Palmer began the reconstruction of the grizzly’s literal carcass, the zoo and the press began stuffing its symbolic body with memory and meaning. The National Zoological Park and all the animals therein lived and died at the center of American politics. “Griz,” as the Post called the bear, was no exception. As demonstrated by the printed invective above, the runaway bear was quickly resurrected into a martyr for the National Zoological Park, a progressive representative in support
20 “A Zoo Bear At Large” 127 of “science,” “art,” “knowledge,” “beauty,” and federal support of these ideals, and into an animal activist against cruelty and for humane treatment. The legitimacy of the very idea of a
“national zoo” was far from settled in 1892, so the death of an escaped grizzly bear opened up issues of government spending, Congressional oversight, and the role of the state in the daily affairs of the American people that had not only surrounded the controversial founding of the
NZP, but had framed all national debates in America’s Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The dead bear also rose again to serve popular science, promote public education, and push for an ursine-infused popular culture. Almost two weeks after the bear hunt, an Evening Star article entitled “Concerning Bears,” with the byline “Some Stories Suggested by the Recent
Incident at the Zoo,” hit the public sphere. This article opened with a line that perfectly captured the influence that animal escapes could have on popular imagination. “It is safe to say that the escape and killing of the little grizzly bear at the Zoo, just outside the city, last Tuesday morning has stimulated the telling of a thousand bear stories by the people of this town . . .” Bear stories saturated nineteenth-century nature and travel writing, natural history, and fiction, and to no surprise did the National Zoo’s runaway grizzly stir up these stories, for “[n]o other animal is so endowed by nature that can afford such an entertainment for the contemplation of man.”21
“Concerning Bears” tapped into this enthusiasm by conveying a “few pointers on bears, and a fresh story or two,” told by a “well-known” naturalist. This naturalist began by summarizing general data about bears, the bare necessities so to speak—range, habitat, diet, hunting behaviors, and the nature of their interaction with humans. He continued, in eight paragraphs, to tell a dramatic story about a previous encounter with a cinnamon bear along a creek in British Columbia some years past. Then, the naturalist attempted to dispel stereotypes about the savagery of bears, emphasizing that wild ones usually “will run away from man.” Bears
21 “Concerning Bears” (The Evening Star, June 4, 1892), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 128 that escape from zoos and circuses, on the other hand, prove far more dangerous than wild bears because while in captivity, they “become in a certain sense fearless of man.” Next, the naturalist told a different kind of tale, a story quoted from a letter penned by an American colonist that had somehow found its way into the naturalist’s hands. This story [told in the footnote below] described the rituals that some New England Indians took part in after the discovery that frontier colonists had killed a local bear for its oily fat. The naturalist’s retelling of this story (although unavoidably filled with eighteenth-century racist tropes concerning Native Americans) sought both to educate Washington citizens about Indian culture and to engender respect for bears. To conclude his monologue and to transition back to the topic of the NZP’s runaway grizzly, the naturalist drew recognition to the fact that those who had shot the zoo bear surely did not
“venerate” the animal like the Indians in his story. Nonetheless, he emphasized that “it was wise and timely that it was destroyed” because it would have naturally lingered around all the local gardens and orchards.22
22 “Concerning Bears.” Below I quote the story that the naturalist told about Indians and their veneration of a great bear. This story provided its readers with new ways to think about animals while still upholding standard conceptions of racial hierarchy. The two subtitles included with this story, left out in the transcription below, were “Venerated by Savages” and “Begged Pardon for Killing It.” “In the course of the month of January I happened to observe that the trunk of a very large pine tree was very much torn by the claws of a bear, made both in going up and going down. On further examination I saw that there was a large opening in the upper part, near which the smaller branches were broken. From these marks and from the additional circumstance that there was no tracks in the snow there was reason to believe that there was a bear concealed in the tree. On returning to the lodge I communicated my discovery; and it was agreed that all the family should go together in the morning to assist cutting down the tree, the girth of which was not less than three fathoms. The women at first opposed the undertaking, because our axes being only a pound a half weight were not well adapted to so heavy a labor. But the hope of finding a large bear and of obtaining from its fat a great quantity of oil, an article at that time was very much wanted, at length prevailed. Accordingly in the morning we surrounded the tree with both men and women, as many at a time as could conveniently work at it, and there we toiled like beavers until the sun went down; the day’s work carried us about half way through the trunk and the next morning we renewed the attack, continuing it till about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, when the tree fell to the ground. For a few moments everything remained quiet, and I feared that all our expectations would be disappointed; but as I advanced to the opening to the great satisfaction of all the party there came out a bear of extraordinary size, which I shot.” “The bear being dead, all the Indians approached, and all, but particularly my old mother (as I was wont to call her), took the head in their hands, stroking and kissing it several times, 129
Articles like “Concerning Bears” became increasingly common in newspapers, magazines, and journals throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning decades of the twentieth. These publications not only stood as symbols of popular zoology, but they also demonstrated how the zoological park amplified popular zoology’s popularity. On the surface, “Concerning Bears” appeared as an unorganized collection of ursine-related trivia compacted into three columns of newsprint. Writing that could be considered in the genre of
“popular zoology” often wove together seemingly disparate zoological and nonzoological information that surrounded the metonymy of any given nineteenth-century animal, and after the rise of the public zoo in America, popular zoological writing often linked this data to the specific animals of a local zoo. Articles like “Concerning Bears” confronted commonplace assumptions and stereotypes of wild animals. They discussed the latest scientific facts and discoveries about these animals. They told stories about animals in wild environments—sometimes true, sometimes fictional. And they frequently drew upon tales of zoo animals. Popular zoology like “Concerning
Bears” amalgamated multiple discourses into a single, new and popular, animal-centered
begging a thousand pardons for taking its life, calling it their relation and grandmother and requesting it not to lay the fault on them, since it was truly an Englishman who had put it to death. This ceremony was not of long duration. The skin being taken off, we found the fat in several places six inches deep. This being divided into two parts, was all that was necessary to load two persons, and the flesh parts were all that four Indians could carry. In all the carcass must have weight 500 pounds. As soon as we reached the lodge the bear’s head was adorned with all the trinkets in the possession of the family, such as silver arm bands, wrist bands, belts of wampum, and then laid on a scaffold set up for its reception in the center of the lodge. Near the nose was placed a large quantity of tobacco. The next morning no sooner appeared than preparations for a feast to the manes was made, the lodge was cleared and swept and the head of the bear lifted up and a new blanket, never used before, was spread under it. The pipes were lit and Wawatem blew tobacco smoke into the nostrils of the bear, telling me to do the same, and thus appease the anger of the bear for having killed her. I endeavored to persuade my benefactor that she no longer had life, and assured him I was under no apprehension of harm from her displeasure; but the first proposition gave me no credit and the second gave the Indians but little satisfaction. At length, the feast being ready, Wawatem made a speech resembling in many respects his address to the manes of his relatives and departed companions, but having this peculiarity, that he here deplored the necessity under which men labored to destroy their friends. He represented, however, that the misfortune was unavoidable since without the flesh we could not subsist. The speech ended we all ate heartily of the bear’s meat, and the head itself, after remaining three days in the scaffold, was put into the kettle.” 130 discourse, one that depicted animals both inside and outside zoos. Zoological parks functioned as important portals for readers of popular zoology. In May of 1892, everyone in Washington heard about the runaway grizzly bear, for as the article admitted, the incident sparked thousands of bear stories in the District. Therefore, any readers of “Concerning Bears” automatically had a frame of reference, a context so to speak. Washington readers no longer needed to imagine bears as simply distant symbols of imaginary frontiers. No longer were bears completely “Other” for those that lived in the nation’s capital. Indeed, for William Gross, and the other school children living around the Rock Creek, bears were now very much “real.” Zoological parks allowed millions of
Americans to experience wild animals of all sorts, and this experience, as William Temple
Hornaday himself pointed out, proved central to popular zoology. America needed to rediscover
(that is, (re)experience) the lamprey’s nest.
A runaway grizzly meant many things to many people. When animals escaped from a zoo, they transcended far more than the bars, wires, and fences that held them in captivity. When zoo animals ran away, they burst suddenly and unpredictably into the Open, into the public imagination, where they took on multiple lives, even in and after death.23 Animals that absconded became protagonists and heroes of newsprint and gossip, suddenly publicizing and popularizing their species and their zoo, bringing the former closer to humans and the latter closer to humans’ daily lives. When animals escaped, sometimes they were caught. Sometimes, they died. Other times, they ran away forever. Always, these animals resisted the very idea and illusion of a zoological park, a place where Nature could be reconstructed, bound, and controlled. And as soon as runaway animals were written and talked about, they found themselves out of their enclosures yet lost in the depths of culture, politics, entertainment, and science. Runaway animals
23 See Giorgio Agamben’s The Open. 131 demonstrated how the zoo suddenly, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, brought animals closer to humans.
Animals Everywhere!
Runaway animals also demonstrated that building a secure zoo was a hard thing to do.
Zoo animals frequently got away. In fact, the history of the entire public zoo movement is filled with runaway animals. Washington, D.C., was not the first city that observed a bear hunt along its streets. In the summer of 1890, a young black bear squeezed through the bars of its cage in the
Central Park Zoo and began to explore the park. The alarm was sounded, and keepers searched for the bear. Before it could be captured, though, a panther reached through its bars, grabbed the bear, squeezed it into its own cage, and ripped the bear’s neck open with its teeth. Then, as a passerby explained, the panther mauled the bear’s lifeless body. He could even “hear the crushing of the bear’s bones.”24 In 1891, a younger bear climbed out of its den in the John Ball Park Zoo of
Grand Rapids, Michigan. The cub dashed up a nearby tree, and to force the bear from its branches, zoo keepers wrapped the end of long poles with rags, caught them on fire with kerosene, and waved the lengthy torches above the cub’s head. The bear was captured, and the den was quickly equipped with a ceiling of wire netting.25 A more dramatic bear hunt occurred in
July of 1900 when a black bear, shortly after being purchased, escaped when being led into his cage in the Bronx Zoo. The bear bit and scratched three men, one of which was William Temple
Hornaday (who, by then, was the director of this zoo), ran down the avenue, raided a local restaurant of its pies, and swam 1,500 yards up the Bronx River. A group of policemen and zoo laborers, armed with “shotguns, pistols, lassos and clubs” pursued the escapee. Eventually, the posse caught up to the bear, managing to get two lassos around its neck. However, the bear was
24 “The Fierce Grip of the Panther” (New-York Tribune, June 27, 1890), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 25 “Broke Out the Den,” Grand Rapids Herald, March 4, 1898, 5. 132 strangled to death when it refused to submit and give up the fight.26 Runaway bears seemed to frequently challenge early zoological parks, which often underestimated their climbing abilities.
Many different types of animals escaped from many different zoos in many different cities. When the prairie “dog-town” of the Philadelphia Zoo opened in the 1870s, a wall extending fourteen feet underground surrounded the town’s perimeter with the intention of accommodating and containing the exhibit’s inhabitants as well as their underground tunnels.
However, this attempt proved futile when the prairie dogs burrowed out of their enclosure and colonized the front lawn of the historical neoclassical Solitude mansion (owned by John Penn, grandson of William Penn) while the zoo struggled for months to capture the animals.27 Zoo employees flooded the prairie dogs’ dwellings to drive them out of their holes, and, one-by-one, the animals emerged from their tunnels half-drowned, only to be caught by the workers waiting with their nets. Eventually, the prairie dogs were secured and a new exhibit with deeper walls constructed.28 In that same zoo, sometime around 1890, a leopard got out of its cage one night and had to be shot the next morning.29 In 1899, an ostrich ran away in Chicago, and the “Lincoln
Park became a Sahara” and hosted a “genuine ostrich hunt.” The bird sprinted out of the zoo, through the park, down the shoreline, and finally leapt from a high bridge into the lagoon. Not only did this ostrich resist by fleeing captivity, but Keeper Cy B. DeVry believed that the ostrich was attempting the ultimate resistance— suicide. DeVry commented that not only did the bird fall from the exact bridge that watched many humans fall to their death, but four months earlier the ostrich lost its mate while in transit to Chicago and had been “suffering from melancholia or some
26 “Bear Hunt in Bronx Park” (The Evening Star, July 17, 1900), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 27 “An Animal Garden in Fairmount Park,” (The Zoological Society of Philadelphia, 1988), 5, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 28 Howland, Marie, "The Philadelphia Zoo," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (1879): 708-709; Howland, M., “Prairie-Dogs in the Philadelphia Zoo,” The New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register 58 (Apr. 19, 1879): 4. 29 “In the Zoo Garden By Day and Night” (The Press, November 29, 1891), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 133 kindred ailment of a purely mental origin.”30 Most likely such statements represent only an anthropomorphization of the ostrich. Nonetheless, the escape encouraged thoughtful interpretations of the animal’s behavior. Maybe zoo animals could cope with pain and resist bondage in similar ways as humans . . .
In 1900, a yellow lemur of the Philadelphia Zoo snuck out of its cage when the door was left ajar and ran up a tree, across the buffalo yard, and “[o]ver the high fence to the tracks of the
Pennsylvania Railroad.” Three keepers, one chief gardener, and other reinforcements, holding
“pitchforks, brooms and whips” chased the lemur along the tracks, into an area of Philadelphia known as “Lanniganville.” Eventually, the monkey was cornered in a coal bin, and the yellow- turned-black lemur was finally captured and returned to the zoo.31 That same year, seven buffalo of the Lincoln Park Zoo broke down their fence and ran amuck through a Chicago neighborhood.
It took two hours for keepers to catch them.32 Also, in 1900, a wildcat escaped from the zoo in
Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park.33 Luckily, this feline was easily captured, unlike the one that was killed in a hotel after escaping from a short-lived zoo near Old Point Comfort, Virginia.34
In 1901, an elephant charged out of the Indianapolis Zoo, “smashed” into a barber shop, and then continued running down Market Street.35 In 1902, a panther named “Tracy” escaped from the Bronx Zoo. When the panther was spotted one mile away, an alarm was sounded and about two hundred Bronx residents, “armed with all sorts of weapons,” sought to capture the animal. When the crowd finally confronted the panther, only two pursuers stood their ground, managing to toss a net over the cat. It was returned to its zoo that day.36 Two years later, eighty
30 “Ostrich Bent on Suicide,” New Haven Evening Register, July 24, 1899, 5. 31 “Foxy, the Mischievous Lemur, Leads Keepers a Merry Chase,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15, 1900, 2. 32 “Buffaloes Riot Through Chicago,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 1900, 4. 33 “Wildcat Escaped,” The Sun (Baltimore), May 4, 1900, 10. 34 “Wildcat in a Hotel,” The Evening Press (Grand Rapids), January 22, 1903, 4. 35 “An Elephant on a Tear,” The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), March 19, 1901, 10. 36 "Panther Captured," The San Antonio Daily Express, July 31, 1902, 8. 134 snakes, including “rattlers, moccasins, chasers, pinesnakes, coachwhips, copperheads, and blacksnakes,” slithered cage-less around the Bronx Zoo as well. After three hours of searching, seventy-seven of the snakes were recovered, and by the next day, the last three snakes were found.37 In 1906, a wolverine ran out of that same zoo and was at-large in New York for twelve hours. Director Hornaday, “with a squad of keepers armed with ropes, poles and nets[,] scoured the country far and near,” but to no avail. Only when two boys caught a “queer looking dog” in
Fordham Park was the wolverine finally seized and returned.38 That same year, a lion escaped from a traveling menagerie located in a park outside of Newark. Terrified by the screaming crowd, the apparently domesticated lion hid behind a tree until he was captured.39 And in 1910, a sea lion escaped from the Walbridge Park Zoo (eventually known as the Toledo Zoo) and swam in the Maumee River for six days until it was caught by a local fisherman.40
These are just a few examples of animals that escaped American zoos as the National
Zoological Park was underway with its first two decades. Wherever a zoo established itself, runaway animals were soon to follow. A leopard escaped from a zoo in Baltimore and clawed a boy in the face and neck.41 Two monkeys got loose in the Lincoln Park Zoo and ended up wandering to the park police station.42 In Venice, California, three buffalo broke out of a nearby zoo, ran down a nearby beach, and stampeded an automobile. Luckily, some cowboys at a nearby
Wild West show managed to lasso and corral the bison.43 Every modern zoo dealt with animals that tried to seize their freedom. And these ambitious animals captured the public imagination of both the city of their zoo and the nation. As the footnotes in this section demonstrate, newspapers
37 “Eighty Snakes Escape from a Box in Zoo,” The Evening News (San Jose), April 11, 1904, 6. 38 “Wolverine Saw New York,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), February 13, 1906, 2. 39 “People Scared the Lion,” Jonesboro Evening Sun, March 27, 1906, 4. 40 “Catch Sea Lion in River,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), July 24, 1910, 1. 41 “Leopards Cause Big Panic in Audience,” The Fort Worth Telegram, May 1, 1908, 5. 42 “Monkeys Elope from Lincoln Zoo,” Grand Forks Daily Herald (Grand Forks, North Dakota), April 27, 1909, 4. 43 “Bull Buffalo Wins In Battle With Automobile,” The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Washington), January 16, 1912, 1. 135 regularly printed reports and articles about runaway animals elsewhere, often hundreds or thousands of miles away. People in San Jose cared about snakes in New York, and citizens of
New Orleans were interested in charging elephants in Indianapolis. By running away, zoo animals helped mold the United States into a zoo-networked nation. Also, by running away, zoo animals forced zoological parks to adapt, making them alter enclosures to prevent future escapes.
The animals discussed in this section were memorialized in newsprint; however, most runaway animals were quickly and quietly caught and their escapades remained unrecorded in the public record.
Zoo animals frequently deserted, disappeared, and departed, and when they did, they often sparked fear among the captive urban populations within which they were fugitives.
Throughout the history of the public zoo, animals escaped frequently. However, zoo animals also caused fear from within their cages—and rightfully so, for sometimes the “acting out” of animals within their zoo enclosures proved more violent than their escapes. A simple glance at the first few years of America’s first public zoo in Philadelphia reveals the variety of ways in which a zoo animal could act out violently. A bison stampeded the fence surrounding its pasture so that it could charge the elk in the neighboring exhibit.44 A kangaroo broke one of its legs attempting to jump out of its enclosure after being frightened by the sound of a nearby locomotive.45 “Jim,” the
Bengal tiger, grabbed the tail of the tiger in the adjoining cage, “dragged it in until he could seize its leg,” and ripped the thigh-bone from its socket, killing the victim.46 A Macaque, or pigtail, monkey tore another primate in half with its hands, and had to be quarantined in its own cage
44 “The Zoo: Incidents of Animal Life” (Evening Telegraph,, March 10, 1877), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 45 “Open to the Public,” The Press, July 1, 1874, 8, Folio Entitled “Articles on Zoo Opening, July 1, 1874,” Item #ZH A1 #4, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 46 “The “Zoo”: How the Animals Live ” (Evening Telegraph, March 9, 1877), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 136 marked with a sign warning zoogoers to keep a safe distance from the bars.47 An elephant tried to
“crush” his keeper “against the bars” of the exhibit.48 And a young boy climbed over the railing of the open cages where the lions sunned themselves, and barely made it out alive.49 Zoo animals enacted violence toward other animals, toward themselves, toward their keepers, and toward zoogoers. Over time, zoos, through trial and error and by communicating with one another, reduced the frequency of these violent encounters. However, they never ceased.
In 1891, a Mexican lion held in Grant’s Park Zoo in Atlanta seized a child with its paw and bit his arm, refusing to let go until a crowd of zoogoers attacked the lion with sticks and umbrellas.50 That same year, a keeper in the Philadelphia Zoo was attacked by a tapir when he entered the enclosure to stop two male tapirs from fighting over a female that was recently added to the collection. This same keeper also had to stop two elephants, with a pitchfork, from charging the brick wall surrounding the exhibit.51 In 1904, a brown bear grabbed seven-year-old
Robert Mayer with its claws as he passed by the cage. The bear “sunk his teeth in the boy’s leg.”
The boy was eventually rescued by keepers and rushed to the hospital, but the injuries proved so severe that the boy was “lamed in all probability for life.”52 In 1907, a keeper in the Bronx Zoo was nearly killed by deer when five (including both mule deer and black tailed deer) charged him during feeding time. The deer butted the keeper with their horns and kicked him with their hooves, breaking two ribs and inflicting serious head wounds and abrasions around his body.53
This type of deer attack was not novel, though, for, in 1896, a keeper of the zoo in Cadwalader
47 “Novelties of the Zoo” (Evening Telegraph, March 25, 1879), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 48 ““Don” Put in Chains” (Unknown Newspaper, November 2, 1882), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 49 “Tale of a Lion ” (Practical Farmer, September 15, 1877), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 50 “In the Lion’s Mouth,” The Columbus Enquirer-Sun, June 3, 1891, 1. 51 “In the Zoo Garden By Day and Night” (Press, November 29, 1891), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 52 “Bear’s Claws on Him,” The Evening Press (Grand Rapids), August 1, 1904, 5. 53 “Attacked By Deer,” The Evening Press (Grand Rapids), December 20, 1907, 13. 137
Park, New Jersey, was also almost gored to death inside the deer enclosure.54 Zoo animals ran away. They attacked. They acted out. They were unpredictable. And the zoo animals of the
National Zoological Park proved to be no exception.
Possibly the first breakout in Washington occurred when the National Zoo was still in its gestational phase within the Department of Living Animals. In June of 1889, Smithsonian workers built the puma a new cage, for the other one was “deemed insecure.” However, when relocated into its new cage, the puma escaped. Luckily, it never freed itself from Hornaday’s
Department to roam free along the Mall. Instead, it prowled around the coyote pen and eventually found its way into the bear pit. The puma harassed one of the bears, but Keeper W. C. Weeden heard the commotion, came to the rescue, hit the puma with a club, and returned the cat to its cage.55 Almost exactly one year later, while the proto-zoo was still pent up in the Department of
Living Animals, a bison charged through its fence and butted a girl with its horns.56
In 1891, shortly after the National Zoo’s official opening, a deer jumped out of its fence and ran around the zoo until it was finally caught and returned.57 Deer again acted out in the winter of 1892. One day in February, Head Keeper William Blackburne told The Washington
Post, “I have had a good many hard fights with wild animals and savage beasts, but about as close a place as I was ever in was the other day, when I walked into the deer pen.” He continued to tell a good, old fashioned zoo story:
The wild buck came bounding at me, as I thought in play, for, you know, I’m such a good friend to all the animals that they delight to have a bout me with me now and then. But, sir, the old buck was mad, what about I don’t know, and, seeing that he meant mischief, just as he lowered his broad horns with which to give me a toss in the air, I leaned aside. I did not have time to jump, and one
54 “Attacked By a Park Deer,” Trenton Evening Times, December 27, 1896, 1. 55 “Sunday at the “Zoo”” (The Washington Post, June 23, 1889), “Scrapbook, Vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 56 “Tossed By a Buffalo Cow” (The Washington Post, June 9, 1890), “Scrapbook, Vol. 2, 1888-1891,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. More about this episode will be discussed in Chapter Six. 57 “At the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 20, 1892), “Scrapbook, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 138
prong of the horns struck me on the arm. I saw then I had to fight, but I had nothing but my naked hands. He came with such force that he passed several lengths before he could turn to follow up the attack. Fortunately, I was not many yards from a small tree, and facing the deer I backed toward it, knowing it would never do to turn my back on him, for I could not outrun him to the tree, and if ever he got me on the ground he would cut me to pieces with his sharp-pointed hoofs. In an instant almost he was upon me. I seized him by the horns, and he gave me such a shove that he rammed my back against the tree, but as he did so one sharp prong pierced my leg through just below the thigh, and then I was in a fix. I knew I could handle him for a time with the leverage of his horns, but the question was how fast would I be exhausted by the loss of blood. The wound was not so bad as I thought for the moment, and in the jerks and turns, twists and pulls, I soon got the deer between myself and the sapling, and, retaining a firm hold on his long horns, I tried in every way to exhaust him, or wrench the horns off and thus wound him.
The battle continued in this manner for thirty minutes until Blackburne managed to rip the right antler from the deer’s head. Immediately, then, the buck ran away in pain. Blackburne concluded this dramatized saga by emphasizing that he “never [before] dreamed of being attacked” by a deer and then reminisced that the encounter “was the deer-est joke I have had played on me for some time.”58
In this narration, William Blackburne began by casting himself into the role of the fearless, masculine, yet gentle “Zoo Keeper” that could “tame wild beasts.” In his words, he was a “good friend to all the animals” in the zoo, but, at the same time, he also had his share of “hard fights” with “savage beasts.” In this way, Blackburne opened his deer story with a familiar figure, a keeper who, as a hybrid of Noah, Daniel, and David, could lead an ark in the park, lie amongst the wild animals, and still stand his ground against giants when needed.59 This type of character typified the narratives inscribed into both the menageries and circuses of a previous era and into the world’s first “modern zoos,” especially those of France, Germany, and England. The
58 “Battled With a Deer” (The Washington Post, February 15, 1892), “Scrapbook, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 59 I borrow this phrase from Wilfrid Blunt’s The Ark in the Park.
139 enlightened, genteel, and nationalistic zoo keeper used reason to care for a diversity of animals, exercised compassion to befriend animals usually imagined as ferocious, and could subjugate animals when they occasionally acted out. The hero of the zoo keeper echoed the lessons that first reverberated throughout zoological parks, that the modern nation state could simultaneously manage, nurture, and dominate Nature. In many ways, Blackburne’s story kept in tune with these larger tropes. However, he added two twists that hint at changing ideas of animals. First, and most importantly, the showdown described was not one between human and lion, elephant, bear, or other animal that could be seen as a “savage beast.” Instead, the battle was between human and deer, a creature usually viewed as skittish and docile. Blackburne, though, made sure to offer the zoological explanation for the deer’s unexpected violence—as spring approaches, male deer, for mating purposes, become territorial. Second, even though the story underscored Blackburne’s strength and ingenuity, the central lesson of the zoo story seemed to teach that zoo animals asserted themselves in unpredictable ways. Within the artificial environments of a zoological park, animals, even the typically tractable deer, could turn deadly.60
Blackburne consistently experienced zoo animals’ unpredictability firsthand. Just a few days prior to the deer encounter, the zebu acted out when it head-butted its keeper to the ground.
The zebu then proceeded to paw the keeper with its hooves once he was knocked off his feet.
Blackburne and another keeper came to the rescue and beat the zebu off their fallen comrade.61 In
1896, two buffalo fought in their paddock. One of the combatants was one of the original specimens received by Hornaday and showcased behind the Smithsonian Institution along the
Washington Mall. The other combatant was a large, younger, and newer addition to the herd. The
60 “Battled With a Deer” (The Washington Post, February 15, 1892). One article about Vermont deer was published in 1894 with the following byline: “The Usually Shy Aristocrats of the Forest Gambol Along the Highways.” Included in the same article was a picture of deer “mingling with horses and cows in a Vermont pasture.” This view of deer was the commonplace one. See “Vermont and Its Deer” (Unknown Newspaper, 1894(?)), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 61 “Battled With a Deer” (The Washington Post, February 15, 1892). 140 unprecedented fight lasted for half an hour and ended with the older buffalo dead. The keepers tried to, first, break up the fight and, second, to save the victim’s life. They failed at both attempts, and Superintendent Frank Baker became “greatly distressed over the loss.”62
The animals of the National Zoological Park always had the potential to run away or act out violently against keepers or zoogoers. A mule deer escaped from its enclosure. A wildebeest did the same. A leopard buried its claws into a zoogoer. A zoo worker was bit by a rabid dingo.
And a zoo keeper was bit by a rattlesnake.63 One especially dramatic episode occurred in May of
1904. On the fifteenth of that month, around noon, Keeper Arthur Edwards was cleaning the coyote enclosure, when one of the animals “sprang at his throat with a snarl of rage.” Edwards threw the coyote to the ground, but the animal again pounced. To protect his life, Edwards quickly covered his neck with his hands. First, the coyote bit down on his right hand, breaking every bone. Then, it bit his forearm. The struggle brought Edwards to the ground of the enclosure, underneath the coyote, and “[f]inding the strength gone from his right arm, Edwards put forward his left, from which, in the twinkling of an eye, the ligaments were torn horribly.” Edwards fought for his life until another keeper saw what was happening, ran into the enclosure, and beat the coyote until it released its grip on Edwards. The keeper was rushed to the hospital. His “right hand and arm were badly torn.” His left hand was almost crushed. The ligaments of his left arm were ripped “out of place.” And the pinky finger of his right hand was amputated. It was reported
62 “Fight to a Finish” (The Evening Star, March 30. 1896), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 63 Table of contents for scrapbook, “Scrapbook, 1900-1919,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. This table of contents appears at the beginning of the scrapbook listed. It appears to have been assembled (literally using “cut and paste” methods) sometime early in the twentieth century. I suspect that this table of contents was made at the same time as the scrapbook. It lists certain articles in the ensuing scrapbook. Specifically, it seems to call attention to some of the most dramatic stories. Oddly, not all of the article titles can located in the scrapbook that follows, nor does the table of contents accurately describe the order of the scrapbook’s content. This means that it is possible that this hodgepodge document actually belonged to another type of scrapbook or document lost to history. Nonetheless, since some of the articles listed exist in the scrapbook, the others presumably once existed as well. I am trusting that the content in the table of contents was compiled in good faith, and does accurately survey articles, pertaining to the NZP, that actually existed at some point in the first two decades of the twentieth century. 141 the next day that the coyote, on the other hand, was simply lying in the sun as if nothing happened.64 The animals of the National Zoological Park were unpredictable. However, the unpredictability of these animals did not always lead to violent and dangerous encounters.
In the autumn of 1896, while their enclosure was undergoing renovations, five beavers escaped. The next morning, four returned by themselves to their artificially built dam, but the fifth remained at-large. Zoo employees searched “up and down Rock creek, in the Zoo and outside.” After a few days missing the fifth beaver was “given up for lost,” never to be seen again. Six months later, though, while a group of boys from the Mount Pleasant district of
Washington meandered through the woods, they stumbled upon a beaver dam along the Rock
Creek, north of the zoo. Once the boys reported the discovery, it was concluded that the dam was indeed constructed by the long lost beaver. The runaway built a dam from felled beech and maple trees that grew along the creek’s banks. All around the dam were logs without bark, trees partially cut, and others completely girdled. The willows, poplars, and birches in the vicinity were consumed as food. Once locals read about the discovery of the beaver dam, visitors began arriving to the site to examine a “real” dam, the likes of which had disappeared from the mid-
Atlantic almost two centuries prior. The runaway beaver also encouraged scholarly work. As The
Evening Star reported, “A teacher from the Penn school of Philadelphia was so interested that she carried back to the scholars pieces of the small logs and chips to be examined. They have sent to
Washington bright ‘essays’ on beavers and their work, and the story of the ‘Lost Beaver of the
Zoo.’” The beaver that evaded its enclosure created a dam that captured public imagination and stimulated popular science.65
64 “Coyote Attacks Keeper Edwards in National Zoo” (Times, May 16, 1904) “Scrapbook, 1900-1919,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 65 “The Lost Beaver” (The Evening Star, April 3, 1897), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. The original beaver colony in the National Zoological Park was formed in 1894, consisting of nine beavers acquired from Yellowstone National Park. Elwood (Billy) Hofer, a famous hunter and trapper, 142
And not all runaway animals from the National Zoo were found. In 1899, the National
Zoo received a shipment of one dozen Arctic foxes sent directly from an island off the coast of
Alaska. Since there was no exhibit prepared for the foxes, they were temporarily placed in a room within the zoo’s stables. One of the foxes managed to pry apart the bars of the cage placed in the stable. It then climbed up to a windowsill and “vaulted” “to his liberty.”66 A plea was published in
The Evening Star asking District citizens to keep lookout for a dog-like animal “prying into yards or woodsheds,” but the fox was never found.67
Most likely this was the experience for the majority of absconding zoo animals. Most runaways did not receive headlines and entire articles devoted to their escape. Usually, when zoo inhabitants got away, they did so quietly and mysteriously, disappearing anonymously into the urban jungles (or rural hillsides mixed with light suburban sprawl, in the case of the National
Zoological Park) that surrounded their zoo.68 Of course, when large, charismatic animals broke out or potentially dangerous animals sneaked off, as in the case of the grizzly bear, they would be more likely to capture the attention of both journalists and the public. In many cases, both were directly warned by zoo officials either to prevent children from being mauled or devoured while walking to school or to increase the likelihood of finding their expensive investments.
Sometimes, reporting runaway animals could even bolster attendance, as shown above, for visitors flooded the National Zoo to see the bears after the hyped incident. Yet, for animals that
was given instructions by Captain George S. Anderson to capture these beavers for the zoo. When these animals arrived in Washington, they were placed in a part of the Rock Creek that was labelled the “Missouri Valley.” Their enclosure was 100 x 200 feet. Immediately these beavers began felling small trees and built three dams. One of the dams reached four feet in height. Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word-processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, “1894,” 1-2. 66 “Fox Makes Its Escape” (The Evening Star, November 23, 1899), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 67 “Anxious for Return of Fox” (The Evening Star, November 24, 1899), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 68 I borrowed this term from Jeffrey Nugent Hyson’s dissertation “Urban Jungles: Zoos and American Society.” 143 appeared less exotic to the public eye, their disappearance was often just grumbled about by keepers and recorded as non-descriptive statistics in the yearly reports. Many animals that died while unpredictably acting out were recorded in the same way.
The report for the year ending on June 30, 1900, simply and straightforwardly stated that
“a number of raccoons escaped from their enclosure.”69 The report for the year ending on June
30, 1904, recorded one female mule deer killed by a male and one Japanese bear that died from
“shock.” It also listed the deaths of two moose, an antelope, and a puma, leaving the reason unknown.70 The report of 1905 listed two elk and one pronghorn that died from an “accident.”71
The one of 1906 declared a bison dead from a broken spine and a zebra dead from an “accident,” failing to be more specific.72 Eventually, the yearly reports actually made entire categories that could encompass these vague and mysterious deaths, which surely included animals that came up missing, died running away, or died in an “accident,” acting out. In the 1908 report, three animals were listed under “cause of death not found.”73 In the 1909 report, seven animals died from an
“accident.”74 The 1911 report stated that thirteen animals were killed by “accidents and
69 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1900, p. 21, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 1, April 2, 1900 – January 28, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27. 70 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1904, p. 7- 8, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 5, November 17, 1903 – February 21, 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 28. 71 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1905, p. 7- 8, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 6, February 25, 1905 – June 2, 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 28. 72 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1906, p. 6- 7, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 7, June 2, 1906 – January 13, 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 28. 73 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1908, p. 6- 7, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 8, January 15, 1908 – September 2, 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 1. 74 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1908, p. 6, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 8, January 15, 1908 – September 2, 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 1. 144 injuries.”75 The 1912 report listed a remarkable nineteen animals dead from “Accident (fighting, killed by wild animals, etc.).”76 And the 1913 report revealed an astonishing thirty-two animals dead by “accidents.”77 Animals killed when acting out or running away would have been reported
(if reported at all) under the ambiguous category of “accident.” What specifically caused these deaths will remain a mystery. However, clearly, zoo animals were unpredictable agents, and the zoo an unpredictable place.
Zoo animals asserted themselves. They acted out. And zookeepers learned that they needed to take these animals seriously. William Blackburne told The Evening Star in 1897 that
In order to handle animals properly, as in everything else, the person must understand them thoroughly. They have much more sense and understanding . . . than they are generally given credit for. They can tell in an instant when any one is afraid of them, and will take advantage of it in a moment. At the same time nerve is not everything requisite in going among wild beasts with impunity. Their moods and tempers change just the same as do those of persons, and treatment which will be well received one day, will probably invite an attack another.78
Even more than in the above telling of his close 1892 encounter in the deer enclosure, this reflection five years later strayed even further away from the old tropes surrounding the mythology of the keeper or the image of the tamer. Zookeepers did not so much “keep” animals, they interacted with them. They needed to “read” the animals, their “moods and tempers,” and then engage them on their own ground, so to speak. Zoo keepers could not simply manage, nurture, and dominate the animals that they “kept.” While in an enclosure with an animal,
Blackburne seemed to suggest that he needed to treat them as individuals worthy of respect.
75 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1911, p. 6- 8, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 9, September 6, 1910 – April 5, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 2. 76 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1912, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 9, September 6, 1910 – April 5, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 2. 77 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1913, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 10, April 7, 1913 – January 27, 1916, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 3. 78 “Wild Animals in Captivity” (The Evening Star, November 13, 1897), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 145
Zookeepers could not take animals lightly, or let their guard down, because zoo animals, as shown above, acted out all the time. Yet, this did not mean that zookeepers should be afraid, for if they demonstrated fear, the animals “will take advantage . . . in a moment.” Nonetheless, zookeepers needed to enter an enclosure displaying “nerve,” for displays of blind arrogance could provoke aggressive reactions from the enclosure’s inhabitants. Instead, keepers needed to take animals seriously. They should not be naïve. They should not show fear. They should not subjugate.
Blackburne never argued that zookeepers should treat animals as equals, nor did he think that keepers should relinquish all control. In fact, he believed that control was important to keeping keepers safe. He elaborated in the following manner:
If there is any familiarity to be indulged in between a keeper and an animal always let it come from the man and never from the beast. If he wants to pet an animal, all well and good, but he must never let one of them have an idea that it can presume to ‘jolly’ a keeper. If this takes place control is lost over the animal, as it immediately imagines it is as capable of running things as its keepers. The old adage that familiarity breeds contempt is never more truly exemplified than between a keeper and an animal.79
Striking in this statement was Blackburne’s treatment of zoo animals as opportunistic and ambitious agents. Keepers, he posited, needed to maintain control. Otherwise, animals would seize it. However, he did not cast animals as conniving, the way in which bears and wolves were often characterized by others at the end of the nineteenth century.80 Blackburne did not adhere to the simplistic mythologies, like the “cunning fox” or the “coy raccoon.” The agency he attributed to animals was not the type that allowed humans to dismiss or degrade them on moral grounds, or on account of their character. Instead, Blackburne depicted zoo animals as storehouses of initiative and agency, and it was the keeper’s job to do everything possible to acknowledge this
79 “Wild Animals in Captivity.” 80 For more on wolves in American history see Jon T. Coleman’s Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 146 potential in individual animals while minimizing the chances that these animals would exercise their agency in ways that would be put keepers, animals, or the public in danger.
Throughout the twentieth century, zookeepers learned how to manage and lessen risk.
Never could they subdue it.
A Truant Wolf and a Rabid Dog
On October 18, 1902, a little more than a decade after the runaway grizzly incident, another animal ran away. As shown with the bear, once animals left their enclosures, they often found themselves in surprising places. This time, prints were tracked to the steps of the District
Supreme Court.81
At around 9:30 in the morning, Mrs. George Jackson, who lived in a small white house along Klingle Road, only a short distance from the National Zoo, was doing chores when she suddenly heard her children screaming outside. She rushed through the door and saw what looked like a vicious dog on top of her three-year-old, teeth buried into the back of the child’s head. Her seven-year-old daughter was attempting to pull her sibling away from the dog, but she could not outmuscle the animal. The mother sprinted toward the dog, gripped it by the hair, and “with a strength born of her frenzy,” threw it into the nearby chicken coop. The child lay upon the ground bleeding. The dog escaped through a window of the coop and vanished.82
Thirty minutes later, the residents of a house in Cleveland Park, belonging to G. H.
Powell, heard the piercing screeches of a bull terrier chained in the backyard. A servant saw the pet being attacked at the throat by a dog. She grasped a clothes prop and beat the wild dog, which released the terrier and ran to the front of the house. Mrs. Powell and Andrew Jackson (an uncle
81 The only literature on following episode is Abe Gibson’s short online article "Dog Days at the Zoo, Part II,” Smithsonian Institution Archives (September 18, 2012), Accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.siarchives.si.edu/blog/dog-days-zoo-part-ii. 82 “Mad Wolf From Zoo” (The Washington Post, October 19, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 147 to the siblings first attacked) ran out the front door to see what the commotion was all about. The dog tried to bite Jackson, but he, armed with a cobblestone, scared the dog off the property.
Shortly thereafter an employee with the National Zoological Park arrived at the Powell property and tried tracking the animal. About one-third of a mile down the road, the dog again attacked.
This time, it charged a collie owned by a Mr. Sharpe. The pet held its own, and the dog ran off toward a field along Woodley Road, owned by Nevada Congressman Francis G. Newlands (next to the home of the famous Admiral George Dewey, who four years earlier, won the Battle of
Manila Bay). A gardener by the last name Bowles, employed on the Newlands property, shot and injured the animal with a revolver and put a rope around its neck. A few hours later, keepers from the zoo arrived, seized the injured animal, and shot it in the National Zoo.83
Soon after the incident, those who had encountered the savage dog had come to the conclusion that the animal was indeed no dog at all, but a runaway wolf from the zoo. Why else would zookeepers have mysteriously arrived on the Powell property, tracked and chased the animal, and then took it back to the National Zoological Park to be clandestinely killed? Word spread like wildfire, and by the time The Washington Post caught wind of the story, it was popularly understood throughout the District that the ruthless attacks were led (as the headline of the article which first summarized the above events explicitly stated) by a “Mad Wolf From [the]
Zoo.” Somehow, a wolf had escaped from the zoo, and had gone on a rampage against innocent citizens living on the outskirts of Washington. The nation’s capital, according to the Post, was in a “nervous frenzy over the possibility of the escape of other and probably more savage animals.”84 And thus goes the story that was first told. When the public first read about this event in their most trusted newspaper, there was no question that the “dog” in question was actually a runaway wolf.
83 “Mad Wolf From Zoo” (The Washington Post, October 19, 1902). 84 Ibid. 148
However, upon further inspection, “facts” never seem as factual as they first appear. Only one set of facts proved absolutely true— the Jackson children were in the hospital after sustaining serious injuries. The three-year-old had both a “large piece of scalp” lifted from its skull, teeth marks embedded into the back of the neck, and a large wound under the right eye. The older sibling, in turn, had a “badly lacerated” hand, which received three bites that penetrated to the bone. Luckily, the children, although “well bandaged,” survived the attack. Other information associated with the original story became blurry as new information was released. First, the dog- wolf that was captured on the Newlands property and taken back to the zoo was indeed a wolf.
Second, this wolf was not killed by the zoo, but was instead “placed in one of the strong cages outside of the animal house.” Mrs. Jackson went to the zoo the next day and identified the injured wolf as the animal that attacked her children. The zoo, though, claimed that Mrs. Jackson originally stated that the animal that attacked her family was wearing a collar. Mrs. Jackson responded that she had never said any such thing, insisting that the attack animal was the escaped wolf. The zoo, though, insisted that the children were attacked by a wild dog, not by the wolf that, only by an unfortunate coincidence, happened to run away around the same time as the attack. As
The Washington Post skeptically stated, “The real Hound of the Baskervilles is in town at least that is what the officials of Zoological Park would have the public believe. But a Sherlock
Holmes would seem to be needed to sow the seeds of the detective instinct in the special policemen who stand about the gates of the Zoo and watch a wolf walk leisurely down the road and think it a dog.”85 Let us begin with the zoo’s defense.
Superintendent Frank Baker, when questioned by a reporter from the Post, “ridiculed the idea that the animal [wolf] had bitten the babies.” To prove his point, Baker, in front of the
85 “Zoo’s Truant Wolf” (The Washington Post, October 20, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3; “Cleveland Park In Arms” (Unknown Newspaper, October 21, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 149 reporter, walked into the cage holding the injured wolf and “stroked it with a broom.” Baker insisted that the wolf was “gentle and quiet” and “wouldn’t hurt any one.” The journalist wrote that this demonstration was “not altogether reassuring, however, as the animal was helpless.”
Head Keeper William Blackburne tried to bolster Baker’s defense by stating, “He [the wolf] is nothing but a baby . . . eight months old.” The journalist countered, though, that this “baby wolf” was oddly larger than its mother. This journalist also reported that William Blackburne “bet $100 that if he were to let out either of the brother wolves, they would wander about the Zoo and make friends with any children they happened to meet.” Blackburne supposedly also made a joke about how if he had to choose to be bitten by a wolf or a dog, he would prefer a wolf because its teeth
“clean and white and free from poison.”86 This was the first response by zoo officials released to the public, but clearly this defense was mediated by a skeptical and incredulous journalist.
Baker and Blackburne had their propagandizing work cut out for them. It was undeniable that the wolf had escaped from the zoo. The cage, surrounded by a chicken wire fence, possessed a floor made of two-by-four wood planks, and it was clear that at one side of the cage this floor was “water-soaked and decayed” and had “given way under the scratchings” of the wolf. Baker and Blackburne could not deny that the wolf escaped. Instead, they had to convince the public that even though their wolf was at-large that day, the nearby attacks were still prompted by a stray or wild dog. Others in the zoo came to the zoo leaders’ aid. The zoo lemonade seller and a zoo security officer both claimed they saw a “mammoth dog” running along the cliff across from the
Chevy Chase entrance. To corroborate this claim, paw prints that “were unquestionably those of an animal at least as large as a full-grown mastiff, too large, in fact, to have been made by the wolf” were discovered around the zoo. Both witnesses also claimed they saw a collar on the dog
86 “Zoo’s Truant Wolf” (The Washington Post, October 20, 1902). 150 and observed it running “madly out Connecticut avenue toward Cleveland Park.”87 However suspect this evidence may seem, in the afternoon of October 20th, the police at the station in
Georgetown were notified of a rabid dog loose in Cleveland Park. They sent officers to kill the animal, but the mad dog had not been found.88 Nonetheless, this report officially legitimated the stories told by the lemonade man and security officer. A canine suspect was on the loose in
Washington!
At first, it seemed as though public opinion was pitted against the zoo. What are the chances that a stray or rabid dog attacked the children living near the zoo on the same morning that a wolf escaped? This hypothesis seemed to be only a far-fetched attempt by the National Zoo to either protect its reputation or sidestep a lawsuit. Certainly, this would not be the first time that
Baker and Blackburne tried to shape and manipulate public opinion. However, when reports about a rabid dog reached the police department two days after the wolf escape, public opinion became more mixed. William Blackburne told The Evening Star, printed in an article entitled “It
Was Not a Wolf,” that “[i]f we thought the wolf inflicted the wounds, we would willingly admit it, as we have no desire to conceal anything, but there is no necessity for people to become unreasonably alarmed.” He continued to explain that the zoo has had “agents investigating the case, and we are positive that the wolf did not leave the park until 10:30, while the attacks are alleged to have taken place earlier.”89 Surely, different readers probably formed differing opinions about whether the zoo would “willingly admit” that an escaped animal had attacked two
87 “Zoo’s Truant Wolf” (The Washington Post, October 20, 1902). 88 “Mad Dog Appears” (The Evening Star, October 20, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3; “Police Believe Dog Bit Jackson Children” (The Times, October 21, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 89 “It Was Not a Wolf” (The Evening Star, October 20, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 151 children. To express sympathy, Frank Baker did make a trip to the hospital to visit the maimed children.90
The saga gripped the interests of the nation’s capital. Some sided with the zoo. Some sided against it. On October 21, as The Washington Post appeared to be leveling an all-out attack against the National Zoological Park, The Times decided to weigh in on the controversy, publicizing a case in defense of the zoo. First, The Times reported that a few days before the attack on the Jackson children, there was reportedly a “dog fight” in the same neighborhood, in which an aggressive and anonymous dog attacked a pet bull dog. The “fight” was stopped by servants, and the aggressor supposedly ran off to Cleveland Park and bit a child. Then, the attacker was pursued and shot by neighbors of the park. The Times, then, printed the following statement:
A remarkable point in this case seems to be that the wolf was not recognized as such by any of his assailants, all of whom have been living in close proximity to a zoological park, the professed object of maintaining which is the promulgation of a knowledge of natural history. This, however, is not the first instance of mistaken identity that has occurred, for it is a matter of very recent history that a bill was rendered to the master of the local hounds for damages for the killing of a pet dog, which had been taken not only by the hunt, but by the hounds themselves, for a fox. But all this does not excuse the fact that the wolf succeeded in escaping through the carelessness of some employee of the establishment; nor does it speak well of the vigilance of the keeper that his loss was not immediately discovered and the hue and cry of “Wolf!” promptly raised.91
On the one hand, regarding the case of the Jackson children, The Times seemed to support Baker and Blackburne’s stance. It appeared unlikely that the wolf was responsible for the attack. This fact, though, should not free the National Zoo from criticism, though, for this “establishment” allowed a wolf to escape. Whether it attacked the Jackson children or not should, The Times
90 “Zoo’s Truant Wolf” (The Washington Post, October 20, 1902). 91 Article Title Unknown (The Times, October 21, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 152 suggested, such negligence was unacceptable. The “daughters” of the District should not be forced to play “the role of Little Red Riding Hood.”92
Now, if The Times was correct, there appeared to have been two crimes committed on
October 18, 1902. First, a dog attacked the Jackson children. Second, the zoo allowed a wolf to escape. However, both cases were deadlocked until evidence could be found. And that evidence presented itself when five or six days after the attack on the Jackson children, Gardener Bowles, the gardener who shot and injured the runaway wolf, came forth and admitted that he was previously bitten by Admiral George Dewey’s dog.93 The details of this story were immediately released to the public. Dewey’s dog, a collie named “Prince,” bit Bowles on the same day that the wolf escaped. Dewey also admitted that the dog probably had rabies, recalling that “Prince” was himself bit two weeks earlier by a strange, stray dog. Once this news was released, “the majority of the residents of Cleveland Park” believed that the collie, not the wolf, was responsible for the atrocities. Locals armed with sticks and a “corps of sleuths” from the dog pound mounted a search for the dog. Admiral Dewey himself issued a death sentence for his pet, instructing his own gardener T. W. Ogden to kill the collie “on sight” if it happened to return to the Admiral’s property. Dewey reportedly told Ogden to kill the dog with a brick, but lacking the courage possessed by the “hero of Manila,” Ogden went to town and purchased an old Harpers Ferry musket, “loaded it with slugs, and barricaded the place.”94 The northwest corner of Washington was both on watch for an enraged collie, frothing at the mouth and searching for its next innocent victim, and on watch for the next zoo animal to break free of its enclosure. All the while, Dewey offered to pay for the Jackson children and Gardener Bowles to be sent to the Pasteur Institute in
92 Article Title Unknown (The Times, October 21, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 93 “Admiral Dewey’s Dog Now Under Suspicion” (Unknown Newspaper, Unknown Date, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 94 “Dewey Says Kill the Dog” (The Washington Post, October 25, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 153
Baltimore to be tested for hydrophobia.95 And the injured wolf in the NZP still lay panting on the floor of its cage, most likely soon to be “killed and stuffed.”96
What took Gardener Bowles, the only person that had seen both the wolf and the collie, so long to come out with this information remained unexplained. Bowles did say that he had
“been bitten by dogs before,” so maybe he thought nothing of the implications of a snapping collie.97 Also, how the lemonade seller and zoo officer could confuse a collie (which would be of a comparable or smaller size than a wolf) with a much larger mastiff also remained unknown at this point. Nonetheless, for the meantime, the District forgot about the wolf in the zoo, and instead grew frantic about a rabid dog still at-large. For the time being, even The Washington Post redirected its gaze from the zoo to the woods and fields in the area around Cleveland Park. In fact, the Post decided to capitalize on this new phobia of hydrophobia by printing a five column feature about rabies, which surely only heightened the fears of the District. This article exclaimed that “all Washington . . . shares the feeling of apprehension and solicitude that exists among friends and neighbors of the victims of the mad-wolf-mad-dog invasion.” The article then continued to tell a long-winded story about a mad wolf that “invaded” Fort Larned, Kansas, in
1868, leading to the horrific death of a soldier stationed there.98 In this way, the Post frightened any reader not already panicked about the missing dog, exploiting a longstanding obsession with and fear of hydrophobia.99 However, the possibility remained that both the wolf and the collie had bit innocent victims. The Trenton Times put the problem succinctly: “the victims of the animals’ fangs cannot tell for certain whether they received a wolf bite or a dog bite.”100
95 “Admiral Dewey’s Dog Now Under Suspicion” (Unknown Newspaper, Unknown Date, 1902). 96 “Dewey Says Kill the Dog” (The Washington Post, October 25, 1902). 97 Ibid. 98 “Mad From Wolf’s Bite” (The Washington Post, October 26, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 99 See, for example, Chapter Four of Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate. 100 “Mixed as to the “Bites”,” Trenton Times, October 24, 1902, 7. 154
The District clamored over the incident as it became the topic of conversation in every restaurant, tavern, and government building. Some citizens even amplified their voices for larger audiences by sending editorials into the papers. One person wrote,
We do not quite see how this community is to get back to normal conditions until somebody solves the problem. It was bad enough to hear that a particularly ferocious wolf had escaped from the Zoo and was running amuck in one of our prettiest and most attractive suburbs. It was still worse to read in the next day’s paper that the beast had attacked a number of children and old persons as he went upon his devastating way. But we could have put up with that all right, especially after the announcement of the wolf’s death [this announcement was either false or not made by a zoo official]. The incident had not been without a certain charm. It was rather pleasant than otherwise to read about the huge, gaunt monster, with bloodshot eyes and glistening fangs and lurid tongue.
This editorialist then continued with a harangue of those in the District who dismissed the wolf as only a “skulking chicken thief, without the courage to attack anything bigger than a guinea-pig” and instead chose to worry only about Dewey’s dog. How can the people forget that the National
Zoo allowed a wolf to escape? At the same, though, this writer was not trying to exculpate
Admiral Dewey, for he “must [also] be held accountable for everything dreadful that has happened in the neighborhood.” In this way, the column served as an assault against both the zoo and the Admiral. Both committed crimes that held deadly potentials. Yet the question still remained— was it the wolf or the dog that bit the victims? The writer concluded, “We protest against injustice. Call a court of inquiry, somebody; that’s the way to get to the truth!”101
The animals of the National Zoological Park always lived political lives. Usually, though, this only meant that the idea of zoo animals possessed political imports, nationalistic significations, or legal valences. Now, though, the wolf of the National Zoo and the dog of a
United States Admiral entered “directly” into legal and political arenas as the wolf-dog debacle shifted from a topic rattled about in the public sphere to a legal case in the court system. As this
101 “Was It Admiral Dewey’s Dog?” (The Washington Post, October 27, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 155 took place, Dewey’s dog seemed (although, not for certain) to have been caught and killed. One report stated that “Prince” was captured and shot on the same day as its escape, but, for some reason, this was not made known to the public or discovered by authorities until three weeks after the original incident.102 A differing report asserted that Poundmaster Einstein, who had “endeared himself afresh to this community by a careful, painstaking, and highly intelligent investigation in the case of Admiral Dewey’s dog,” found on November 4th, two weeks after the Jackson children were attacked, that a “large dog, of a dark grayish color,” was recently killed by a man in
Georgetown. Einstein presumed, for reasons not quite clear, that this dead dog was, in fact,
Admiral Dewey’s runaway.103
The zoo wolf, on the other hand, was killed on Wednesday, December 31, 1902, the last day of the year. Upon order of Frank Baker, the wolf was sent to the Bureau of Animal Industries, exterminated, and tested for rabies. The reason that the zoo had kept the wolf alive for so long was to prove that the animal was not rabid. However, “zoo authorities shrouded the death of the wolf in a veil of secrecy.”104 Immediately after Baker announced publicly that the wolf had been put to death (the announcement was made on January 2, 1903), rumors began swirling that the wolf killed was not the one that escaped. This suspicion arose after someone in the Bureau leaked information that the wolf executed was dying from ingesting “a steel coil spring of intense power, which, once fairly in the stomach, recoiled with great force, and caused the miserable wolf considerable trouble with its digestive apparatus.” Some saw this as proof that the wolf was simply one that ate a foreign object thrown into its enclosure and was not the one that escaped.
The “truant wolf is [still] alive!” these citizens clamored. Of course, no evidence came forth to
102 “Was Zoo Wolf Mad?” (The Washington Post, January 3, 1903), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 103 “Mr. Einstein, Many Thanks!” (The Washington Post, November 9, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 104 “Was Zoo Wolf Mad?” (The Washington Post, January 3, 1903). 156 corroborate this conspiracy theory, and zoo authorities and members of the Bureau of Animal
Industries refused to comment.105 Frank Baker only announced, “The wolf was a harmless, playful, innocent little animal, and there was nothing the matter with it except the gunshot wound in its hind legs . . . It had been in considerable pain, and we kept it simply to prove that it was healthy.”106 By the beginning of 1903, two dead canine bodies represented two different suspects.
Despite the state of their likely-although-not-certain deaths, though, both canines found new lives in the legal system.
Chatter about potential lawsuits commenced immediately after the wolf-dog incident.
However, nothing of this sort took place until the following summer. In June, 1903, one Post article entitled “Wolf Case in Court” announced that “[t]he zoo wolf that escaped last fall . . . [has finally] invaded the City Hall in the guise of a damage suit.” Augusta V. Jackson, on behalf of
George W. Jackson, filed a lawsuit against Frank Baker for the recovery of damages to the children. The suit, presented to Justice of the Peace Mills, was for $300. More important than the dollar amount, though, this lawsuit gave “[l]egal and judicial intellects of high caliber” the opportunity to decide, once and for all, “the mooted question whether it was the wolf or Admiral
Dewey’s dog” that attacked the girls and spread pandemonium through Cleveland Park and intrigue throughout Washington. Before the case could be heard, though, Baker applied to the
District Supreme Court for an appeal. Being the director of the National Zoological Park,
Jackson’s suit against him was indeed a motion against the government of the United States, and for this reason, Baker wanted the case to be heard by a higher tribunal.107 The appeal was granted
105 “Truant Wolf Is Alive” (The Washington Post, January 16, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 106 “Was Zoo Wolf Mad?” (The Washington Post, January 3, 1903). 107 “Wolf Case in Court” (The Washington Post, June 24, 1903), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 157 and scheduled to be heard the upcoming autumn.108 Attorney General Philander Chase Knox appointed two highly-skilled lawyers to defend Baker, to prove before the jury-to-be that it was indeed Admiral Dewey’s dog that attacked the girls. The defense was preparing for a case that
“will be fought to a finish on the side of the government,” and the Washington public was excited to hear all the mysteries of the wolf-dog incident revealed and unraveled.109
The case, though, apparently never reached the court system, for no trace of it appears in the record. Most likely, this indicates that either the Jackson family dropped their suit upon learning of the granted appeal or that Frank Baker simply decided to settle with the family outside the court room. Either decision would make sense. The Jackson family may have decided that time, effort, and potential court costs and lawyer fees would not be worth risking for a case that would be lacking direct evidence. The daughters who were attacked were undoubtedly better by the summertime of 1903. Surely, there could have been scars, but the wounds would not be able to be reexamined for any sort of proto-forensic analysis. Furthermore, the bodies of the suspects no longer existed (if the wolf was ever truly killed and the dog truly caught in the first place), for both would have been cremated by the summer. Little evidence existed for the Jacksons to rely upon, and they may have decided it better to drop the issue than take on the United States government in a high-profile law suit. Frank Baker, on the other hand, may have decided to pacify the Jacksons with some sort of settlement so that he would not attract bad publicity to the zoo, reigniting the issue that a wolf easily dug its way out of its enclosure. All that is known is that the law suit, for whatever reason, fizzled out. Yet a truant wolf still managed to escape out of its cage and creep to the steps of the District Supreme Court.
108 “Another Wolf Damage Suit” (The Washington Post, July 15, 1903), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 109 “Wolf Case in Court” (The Washington Post, June 24, 1903). 158
The mania sparked by a runaway wolf and a runaway dog sheds light upon the latent fears toward wild animals held by the citizens of the nation’s capital. In 1902, Americans recognized the agency of animals. Although zoological parks, for some, symbolized the domination of Nature and the subjugation of wild natures, in reality, as the citizens around
Cleveland Park and as zoogoers everywhere realized, zoological parks only held wildness at bay.
Occasionally, and possibly inevitably, this wildness broke free of captivity as animals acted out, attacked, escaped, and ran away. Zoo animals meant many different things to many different people. All zoo animals lived multiple symbolic lives simultaneously. However, when they ran away and acted out, the lives of animals, literal and metonymic, were pushed to the brink. When zoo animals ran away, they often confronted injury or death, yet at the same time, their rhetorical power exploded as zoo directors, zoogoers, journalists, and citizens harnessed the agency of animals for many different purposes. Runaway animals revealed two important lessons. First, zoo animals possessed agency. They ran away all the time. Second, urban publics took zoo animals, runaway or not, seriously. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Americans invested animals with many meanings, yet no matter how metonymic animals were captured, they always escaped. In some ways, this agency only enhanced their utility for humans, making them stronger, more intriguing emblems. The agency of zoo animals also limited this utility, underscoring the point that animals could never completely be controlled. Even the dog, the archetype of domestication, could act out in unpredictable and deadly ways.
Zoological parks functioned as a site where all discourses about animals converged.
People used their zoo as a place where they could project ideas of animals, and thus as a place to work through beliefs, agendas, politics, anxieties, fears, and passions. A runaway wolf could both attract people to the zoo and scare people away. It also could incite a generalized fear. Fear of captive beasts and fear of rabid pets arose from the same place within human sensibilities. Fear of
159 the one only bolstered fear of the other. No matter what specific meanings runaway animals held for specific individuals, though, zoological parks, in all cases, brought animals closer to humans.
The most surprising facet of the truant wolf debacle was that the fear of runaway animals quickly subsided. District citizens and zoogoers demonstrated liberal forgiveness. They quickly forgot about how the National Zoological Park allowed a wolf to escape, and they seemed far more worried about rabies than about runaway carnivores. In fact, like zoo publics everywhere, they quickly forgot about all the runaway animals of the National Zoo. These animals simply seemed to be accepted as inevitable accidents endemic to the very idea of holding wild animals in the heart a human metropolis. If a city chose to build a zoo, it would occasionally serve as a stage for great escapes. Urbanites, though, surely needed these occasional escapes—these confrontations with the Other, the wild, and the exotic.
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Chapter 4 The National Zoological Park as a Crossroads for Science and Popular Culture
In many respects, science lies at the heart of every chapter of this dissertation. To tell any story about the first decades of the National Zoological Park is to also tell a story about the popularization of science. By showing how it became enmeshed with political thought, popular literature, ecology and environmentalism, ethics and animal rights, and medicine, this dissertation shows how the National Zoo made these quite different discourses, each with their own
“specialists,” accessible and relevant to the American public by weaving it into a popular, heterogeneous zoology. The National Zoological Park served as a cultural nexus where lay audiences and experts of all sorts together formed a zoological discipline worthy of intellectual deliberation, popular debate, and common intrigue.
The question What exactly is popular zoology?, though, has yet to be systematically dealt with, for this question cannot be addressed until the stories of each chapter have been told. These intertwined tales of zoogoers and zoo animals narrate “the people’s” interactions with the
National Zoo. Therefore, to avoid the oversimplification or essentialization of “popular zoology,” any explication of this term should follow, not precede, the experiences that popularized zoology in the first place. “Popular zoology” reached far beyond the laboratories and lyceums of scientists and encompassed far more than what most of these scientists would have considered as dwelling within the realm of Science. While this entire dissertation speaks to the popularization of science, this chapter focuses specifically on the direct connections between the life sciences and the
National Zoological Park, reserving a discussion of both “zoology” and “popular zoology” for the conclusion.
161
It should come as no surprise that a zoo sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution immediately found a place at the epicenter of American science. Conveniently located in the nation’s capital and in the midst of a scientifically-minded Smithsonian community, the National
Zoological Park quickly forged inroads into myriad branches of the life sciences. This chapter will explore some of these relations, demonstrating the centrality of a zoo to the ever-specializing world of science. The National Zoological Park contributed to these specializing trends while simultaneously offering scientists as diverse as anatomists, entomologists, microbiologists, osteologists, paleontologists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, ornithologists, and psychologists both a common laboratory and a storehouse of living and dead specimens needed for research. The
National Zoological Park, then, not only functioned as a laboratory and a cabinet for the life sciences, but also as a crossroads.
Frank Baker: A Superintendent of Science
Since its gestation within William Temple Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, the National Zoological Park was destined to become a place for scientific study. When establishing the National Zoo, Hornaday infused his taxidermy with both scientific means and ends. Employed in the United States National Museum, his primary job was to create taxidermic displays that would educate museumgoers about the disappearing animals of America’s vanishing frontiers. To accomplish this task, Hornaday rebuilt animal carcasses with scientific precision in order to make dead animals look as lifelike as possible. This purpose led directly to the genesis of his Department of Living Animals, the “embryo” of the National Zoological Park. Not only was the taxidermic process itself scientific in many ways; Hornaday also used his Department of
Living Animals directly for the purpose of scientific observation and study. Even though the cramped and underfunded Department may not have offered the ideal “laboratory,” Hornaday found innovative ways to transform its faults into benefits for science. For example, the cramped
162 bear exhibit particularly interested him. Since the black, cinnamon, and grizzly bears coexisted in the same exhibit, the Department provided a unique opportunity to study how different species of bears interacted with one another. While the conclusions to this ursine research are lost to history, it is clear that the amateurish organization presented Hornaday with a unique situation for scientific inquiry. In most established zoos, different species of bears rarely found themselves sharing the same exhibit, and Hornaday planned to take advantage of the opportunity that the
Department offered.1
As the Department of Living Animals underwent its metamorphosis into the National
Zoological Park, its marriage to science became foregrounded through the Congressional debates that preceded the zoo’s official establishment by the federal government. One of the key justifications for establishing a national zoo in the first place was emphasizing the role that this institution would play for advancing the scientific endeavors of a modernizing nation. The
National Zoological Park, in the eyes of the nation, became a symbol for national science writ large. The New York Tribune emphasized that the National Zoological Park “originates with scientific men.” The Washington Post claimed that “[i]t is the duty of every Congressman who is a friend to science” to support the zoo bill. The Boston Globe recognized that the “object” of a national zoo would be “the advancement of science and the instruction . . . of the people.” The
Washington Star predicted that a national zoo would be a “resort for scientific study and investigation.” And the Journal of Comparative Medicine and Surgery explained that
The [zoo] project originated long since with the late Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Professor Baird, and having in view the peerless liberality of the General Government in the prosecution of scientific work, and the splendid resulting series of publications which have followed one another from the Government printing office, we cannot but regard it as strange that attention has not been more strongly drawn to the need of multiplying just such institutions as
1 Hornaday, W. T., “Report of the Department of Living Animals,” 1-2, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 158, Box 5, folder labeled “Department of Living Animals, 1887-1888.”15. 163
this—invaluable adjuncts to observation, and as storehouses of material for exact work in more than one branch of natural science.2
The nation’s newspapers and legislators bestowed a scientific purpose onto the National Zoo, and as we will see, despite the practical setbacks that come with zoo management, the nation’s newborn zoo lived up to its promise and fulfilled its destiny.
After William Temple Hornaday’s controversial departure, the responsibility for managing the National Zoological Park fell to Frank Baker, an appropriate leader for a zoo inscribed with a scientific mission. Born in Pulaski, New York, on August 22, 1841, to Thomas
C. and Sybil S. Baker, the future zoo man found himself emerging into adulthood at the dawn of bloody civil war. He enlisted with the 37th New York Volunteers in 1861 and faced the war’s worst ferocity at the battles of Seven Pines, Seven Days, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and
Chancellorsville. In 1863, when his regiment was disbanded, Baker worked in a Washington bureau, where he became friends with John Burroughs and Walt Whitman. After the war’s end,
Baker focused on his education, receiving an M.D. from Columbia University in 1880, an M.A. from Georgetown University in 1888, and a Ph.D. from the same university in 1890. At
Georgetown, Frank Baker forged quite the reputation for himself within the District’s medical and scientific communities. Most famously, Baker was one of the surgeons who stood at the bedside of President James A. Garfield, looking desperately for the bullet lost inside the President after he was shot at the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad. In 1883,
Baker became an anatomy professor at Georgetown. In the late 1880s, he established the
Anthropological and Biological Societies of Washington, became a member of the famous
Cosmos Club (which formed the National Geographic Society), served as an editor of the
American Anthropologist, and authored important articles about human morphology. Baker’s zoo
2 “The Zoological Park Proposition, And The Voice of the Press in Regard To It” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285, “Scrapbook, 1887-1902.” 164 career, which would define the rest of his life, commenced in 1889, when Secretary Samuel P.
Langley appointed him acting manager immediately after Hornaday’s controversial resignation.
In 1893, Baker was officially appointed Superintendent, a position he would hold until 1916, two years before he died at the age of seventy-seven.3
Zoo life did not halt his scholarship, for a year before the National Zoological Park’s inauguration (as elephants, Dunk and Gold Dust, and lion, French, were escorted with much fanfare into the park), Frank Baker published an article on evolution entitled “Ascent of Man,” a topic he explored again in 1899 with the publication of “Primitive Man,” both appearing in the
American Anthropologist.4 In “Ascent of Man,” Baker advanced Lamarckian evolutionary theory
(“the adaptations of each individual are transmitted to its offspring; or, to speak more accurately, the offspring pass through the changes more easily and quickly than the parent did,” as explained by Baker at the beginning of his article) by examining the characteristics of human limbs in comparison to those of the limbs of anthropoids.5 Regarding the human hand, Baker argued that
3 Jenkins, Mark Collins, “Dr. Frank Baker: If Only He Had Been Allowed to Treat President Garfield…,” National Geographic, Accessed March 1, 2013, http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/12/dr- frank-baker-if-only-he-had-been-allowed-to-treat-president-garfield/. Despite his accomplishments, there is no other secondary literature about Frank Baker. The biographical sketch outlined in this paragraph is solely derived from Mark Jenkins’s article. Speaking to the article title, Jenkins writes, “For over two months Garfield lingered on his deathbed while doctors sought some means of finding and removing the slug. Dr. Baker drew up a diagram that proved to be remarkably accurate and shared it with Dr. Smith Townsend, who had been the first to examine the President. However, Dr. D. Willard Bliss, the physician in charge, was adamantly opposed to second opinions, and Baker did not press to have his theory presented. At the same time, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, tried to locate the projectile using a magnet, while George Kennan, a young journalist, was in charge of all the telegraphic reports describing the President’s condition that were sent out to the world. But it was all to no avail, and President Garfield died in September.” For more on the Cosmos Club see: Paul H. Oehser’s “The Cosmos Club of Washington: A Brief History,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 60/62 (1960/1962): 250-265; Wilcomb E. Washburn’s The Cosmos Club of Washington: A Centennial History, 1878-1978 (Washington, D.C.: The Cosmos Club, 1978); George Crossette’s The Founders of the Cosmos Club of Washington, 1878 (Washington, D.C.: The Cosmos Club, 1968); and Thomas M. Spaulding’s The Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square (Washington, D.C.: The Cosmos Club, 1949). 4 Baker, Frank, "The Ascent of Man," American Anthropologist 3, no. 4 (October 1890): 297-320; Baker, Frank, "Primitive Man," American Anthropologist 11, no. 12 (December 1898): 357-66. 5 Baker, “Ascent,” 298-299. As a pronounced Lamarckian, Frank Baker can be associated with Julian Huxley’s “eclipse of Darwinism,” a term that this British evolutionary biologist employed to describe the trend in which many scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century refused to subscribe to Darwin’s 165 two differences separated the human hand from the hand of apes. First, the thumbs and fingers of the human hand possessed greater “mobility and variety of action” than their counterparts on the other primates. Second, the muscles responsible for “prolonged grasp” in the anthropoid hand were much smaller in the human hand. Evolved from the anthropoid hand, the human hand gained “a special flexor muscle for the thumb arising high up on the fore-arm” and lost to atrophy
“the palmaris longus, an important aid in climbing and grasping.”6 Baker not only compared human hands to anthropoid hands, but he also discussed elbows, fore-arms, upper-arms, scapulas, shoulder ligaments, pectorals, ulnas, humeri, legs, feet, and toes. Baker not only engaged in a cross-species comparative anatomy between humans and other primates; he also conjectured about the “primitive” state of the named body parts in “negroes,” “Bushmen,” “Australians,”
“Indians,” “South Africans,” and “men of the stone age,” as well as in fetuses, marrying his anthropological research to the latest racialist science of the day.7 He continued the “Ascent of
Man” theorizing about how the “Caucasian type of foot is evidently that best adapted for the erect position” and how the Caucasian’s perfect bipedal erection can be explained by close examination of his toes, muscles, spines, heads, nervous systems, pelvises, viscera, and circulatory systems, adding conjectures about the “Polynesian races” and “Andaman Islanders.”8
He concluded by thinking briefly about the evolutionary implications of spinal segmentation,
evolutionary theory of natural selection. Instead, biologists advocated for various other types of evolutionary theory, many of which were Lamarckian in nature. For more on the “eclipse of Darwinism” see Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942), 22-28; Peter J. Bowler’s The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Peter J. Bowler’s Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 196, 224; Peter J. Bowler’s “Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 1 (Spring, 2005): 19-32; or Mark A. Largent’s “The So-Called Eclipse of Darwinism,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 99, no. 1 (2009): 3- 21. 6 Baker, “Ascent,” 299-300. 7 Ibid., 301-305. 8 Ibid., 306-312. 166 cranial capacity, and other characteristics, still emphasizing, of course, anatomical detail and race.9
Frank Baker, through his “Ascent of Man,” sought to accomplish three tasks. First, he wanted to nuance the natural history of man “by studying the constitution of his body,” for “the changes and vicissitudes of his existence are recorded on his very bones, in characters long undeciphered but to which the clue has at last been found.”10 In this way, as an anthropologist with expertise in comparative anatomy, Baker used Lamarckian evolutionary thought to search tangible bodies for historical evidence, just as archaeologists “search[ed] for the remains of peoples,” in order to reconstruct humankind’s past. He strove to prove the point that just “[a]s
Cuvier was able to deduce an animal’s habits from the shape of his teeth, so we may speculate as to man’s past and future from an examination of his anatomy.”11 Second, Baker hoped to bolster the triumphalist narrative commonly accepted in Gilded Age science that “humanity has climbed from darkness to light, from bestiality to civilization.”12 Last, while telling this story of man’s ascent to glory, Baker sought to scientifically justify the hierarchy of the races. Baker published
“Ascent of Man” on the eve of his emergence as leader of the National Zoological Park, and surely the three-fold purpose of his article did not prove incompatible with the goals of his zoo since, as zoo historians have recognized, the modern zoo was built upon a foundation of imperialism that would have also encouraged enlightened teleologies of progress and conceptions of racial order.
In 1898, Frank Baker again pondered the origins of mankind, publishing an article entitled “Primitive Man.” While “Ascent of Man” showcased Baker’s expertise in comparative anatomy, his next work was a timely review of anthropology’s discoveries in human evolutionary
9 Baker, “Ascent,” 312-320. 10 Ibid., 298. 11 Ibid., 319. 12 Ibid., 299. 167 history. In this work, Baker explored two types of evidence that proved the “existence of man in previous ages”—“first, the finding of human remains, and, second, the recognition of human products.”13 In his ten-page discussion of these archeological findings, including consideration of the famous Neanderthal, Baker seemed to stray from his pure Lamarckian commitments to a more nuanced recapitulation theory, based on Ernst Haeckel’s contention that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”14 Baker concluded “Primitive Man” by stating that “[t]he infant does not learn to walk because its brain tells it to do so, but by experience and trial its hands and feet teach its brain that this is a more effective method of locomotion. In this, as in so many other instances, the history of the infant recapitulates that of the race.”15 For Baker, the stages of development separating babies from adults mirrored the stages separating the most “primitive” of humans of long ago from the most advanced of his day. This article was not devoid of anatomical analysis, however, for as Baker surveyed archeological findings and their anthropological significances, he simultaneously wove comparative data concerning bones into the story, for example comparing the length of a gibbon’s femur to that of a Pithecanthropus.16
Frank Baker’s scientific research lay at the intersection of comparative anatomy, evolutionary theory, archeology, and anthropology. While his own scientific interests may not have directly impacted or have been directly impacted by the National Zoological Park, they certainly prepared him to head a zoo that would challenge commonplace assumptions about humans’ place in the world. More important than his specialized knowledge of primates (despite their prevalence in zoo exhibits and along zoo walkways) to the management of a zoo was his breadth of knowledge and range of connection. Even in the earliest years of the National Zoo’s
13 Baker, “Primitive,” 357. 14 For more on biology and recapitulation theory see Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). 15 Baker, “Primitive,” 366. 16 Ibid., 364. 168 history, between 1890 and 1892, when the institution was evolving from a Department of Living
Animals to an established zoological park, Frank Baker wasted no time in displaying his intellectual versatility. While simultaneously overseeing the construction of the zoo, the relocation of animals from the Washington Mall to the Rock Creek, and the management of an instantly popular public attraction, he read and reviewed Professor G. E. Manigault’s paper on the osteology of chinchillas.17 He fielded questions concerning the current literatures of zoology and geology from government employees.18 He advised New York publishers about which entries of an anatomy dictionary needed illustrations, creating a list of vocabulary (eleven pages long) that he believed absolutely required accompanying diagrams. He even hinted that he would be willing to produce some of these illustrations if the price was right. The list he compiled included entries that surveyed the human body, as wide-ranging as the columns of the spinal cord, the types of cranial nerves, the structure of the hippocampus major, and the parts of an ovum.19 And he gave advice about how to organize a national anthropology conference that could allow scholars to share the latest research occurring at the intersections of fields like somatology, psychology, ethnology, and philology.20
Frank Baker did not stop there. He planned experiments to test the “venomous character” of unknown reptiles.21 He personally identified a dead beetle sent from Texas, and did the same for a coatimundis sent from New Orleans.22 He reviewed books concerning vertebrates, embryology, and natural history for the zoo’s library.23 He developed a new “disinfecting apparatus” which proved so successful in sterilizing the tropical house that he quickly applied for
17 Frank Baker to Prof. G. E. Manigault, 2 December 1890, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 2. 18 Frank Baker to Mr. William Fewsmith, 3 December 1890, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 2. 19 Frank Baker to Messrs. Funk A. Wagnalls, 4 June 1892, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 3. 20 Frank Baker to Mr. Dorsey, 4 October 1892, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 3. 21 Frank Baker to Hon. J. B. Bullane, 2 July 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 22 Frank Baker to Mr. A. C. Downs, 22 July 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4; Frank Baker to Mr. G. O. Ghenault, 26 August 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 23 Frank Baker to Messers B. Westerman & Co., 28 July 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 169 a patent to protect his invention.24 He sent a letter discussing the extensor tendons of a gibbons’ hand to medical doctors, recommended special cages be purchased for an experiment that two scientists asked to conduct on the zoo’s birds, encouraged the official photographing of zoo animal expressions for the “interests of science,” and peer-reviewed an article concerning brain morphology.25 He even found time to have the feces of a zoo snake mailed to an unknown laboratory for experimental purposes.26 Frank Baker proved far more than a comparative anatomist with interests in primate evolution; he expressed a curiosity that spanned the full range of sciences and commanded a working knowledge of all sorts of scientific issues. Like William
Temple Hornaday before him, Frank Baker represented a versatile man of science not constrained to a single research area. In managing a zoological park, breadth served a superintendent far more than depth, providing a skillset appropriate for addressing the challenges of keeping thousands of diverse animals alive together in a single location. In an age of scientific specialization, the
National Zoological Park served as a site where the distinct trajectories of multitudinous sciences collided. With a man like Frank Baker at the helm of Washington’s ark, potential chaos could be redirected into unique scientific opportunity.
Richard L. Garner: Zoo Experiments and the Birth of Primatology
From the very beginning the National Zoological Park popularized science. Inscribed with scientific purpose by both Hornaday and Congress, and managed by Superintendent of
Science Frank Baker, the NZP had a destiny to fulfill. Yet its purpose was not unique. Zoological parks worldwide had long been built for the sake of science. To gain support for zoological parks, zoo boosters praised these institutions as places that would support both scientific research and
24 Frank Baker to Mr. G. Brown Goode, 12 August 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 25 Frank Baker to My dear Doctor, Unknown Date, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4; Frank Baker to Mr. G. Brown Goode, 2 September 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4; Frank Baker to G. B. Goode, 12 September 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4; Frank Baker to Hon. S. P. Langley, 13 September 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 26 Frank Baker to Dr. Stiles, 29 September 1891, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 7, Folder 4. 170 scientific education, thus contributing to the advancement of Knowledge. While European zoo boosters from London to Paris to Hamburg employed this rhetoric of refinement as well, the idea of “advancing knowledge” held particular resonances in an America attempting to get past the legacy of its Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. By “advancing knowledge” in the Gilded
Age, Americans strove to legitimate themselves on the world stage, and as the twentieth century approached, American intellectuals worked to create an American literature, American philosophy, and American science on par with Europe’s. American zoo boosters casted zoos as a means for that end.
When the Philadelphia Zoo became, in 1874, the first public zoo in America, Dr. J. L. La
Conte enumerated, in 1875, four “events of importance to science which occurred last year”—
“the appearance of the Coggia’s comet,” “the establishment of the Anderson Scientific School on
Penikese Island,” “the establishment of hospitals for the sick in civil life on the principal of the army hospitals,” and “the opening of the zoological garden” of Philadelphia.27 Even though zoos clearly doubled as urban spectacles meant to entertain, the Philadelphia Zoo marked the beginning of a new type of institution where science and entertainment became a single pursuit.
The zoo was designed to be a “healthy form of amusement offered to the public,” a place where
“children [could] gain a knowledge of natural history . . . while at the same time . . . [having] the advantage of fresh air and exercise.”28 One booster touted that “[e]very man” will be able to comprehend the value of a superb zoological garden as a pleasure ground, apart from its scientific importance.”29 And another journalist described zoological gardens generally as “most agreeable places of popular resort, while their importance as means of educating in an interesting branch of
27 Untitled Article (Unnamed Newspaper, 1874?), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archives. 28 “Zoological Garden” (Unnamed Newspaper, 1867), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, PZA. 29 “Cash Wanted” (Unnamed Newspaper, 1874?), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, PZA. 171 natural history is fully recognized by the most cultured men of Europe.”30 The National
Zoological Park followed the precedent set almost two decades before in the Philadelphia Zoo, blending science and entertainment.
Science in action captured District attention from the beginning. In 1891, shortly after the
National Zoo’s grand opening, Professor Richard L. Garner carried controversial speculations about gorillas to both the nation’s capital and zoo, suggesting that the new national zoo could serve as a personal laboratory for groundbreaking anthropological research.31 Prior to his interest in the zoo itself, Garner’s voice had already echoed throughout Washington, in general, and the
Smithsonian, in particular. A local anthropologist and professor living in Roanoke, Virginia,
Garner postulated, in the words of a Washington journalist, that monkeys possessed “articulate speech like that of human beings and differing from the latter only in development.” Garner supported such claims with a series of experiments done with a graphophone, a then recent improvement on Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Garner’s experiments took the following form, as explained by The Washington Star:
He has been experimenting of late with the graphophone in this connection, securing a “record” of squeaks and gibberings by one monkey and subsequently grinding them out through a trumpet for the benefit of another monkey, in order to observe what remarks were elicited from the second monkey in response. In this way he has hoped to gradually make up a lexicon of the monkey language, which would probably not be very voluminous, inasmuch as the simian vocabulary does not appear to contain more than forty words. The doctor thinks he has already secured five of them.32
Word of Garner’s experiments spread quickly.
30 “Zoological Gardens” (New York Sun, October 21, 1874), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, PZA. 31 For more on Garner see Jeremy Rich’s Missing Links: The African and American Worlds of R. L. Garner, Primate Collector (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 32 “Do Monkeys Talk?” (The Washington Star, 1891(?)), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 172
As Garner worked on this research, he eventually reached out for the support of fellow anthropologist Frank Baker. While Baker remained skeptical of Garner’s claims, the acting manager of the National Zoological Park, admitted, according to the Star, that “there was something in the idea . . . inasmuch as in the case there was an illustration to be found of evolution backward from the language of man to the speech of the monkeys.” A fitting response from an anthropologist who just published “The Ascent of Man,” Baker recognized some merit in
Garner’s line of research. If evolution explained man’s body, surely it could potentially explain man’s language as well. Garner argued that the language of a monkey appeared analogous to the language of a human infant—mostly composed of vowel sounds. He suggested that the human child possessed an advantage not given to monkeys, namely “education for” and “hereditary experience of the use of” vocal organs. In this way, Garner compared the language of monkey and human children. While their language proved structurally similar, human children, according to Garner, inherited greater future possibilities due to a mix of culture (education) and evolution
(specifically drawing from the Lamarckian concepts of heredity and use), or, that is, both nurture and nature. Baker would have surely been, as evidenced above, familiar with Garner’s sort of recapitulation theory. However, Baker doubted Garner’s claims that he had deciphered the monkey’s “monosyllabic” words for “pain,” “satisfaction,” “fear,” and “menace.”33 Through the medium of The Washington Star, the Washington public received an education concerning
Garner’s simian theory and Baker’s reaction to this theory, and this episode proved to be only the beginning of a long scientific saga that would capture headlines over the course of the year.
Later in 1891, another article, written by Garner himself, captured Washington headlines.
In this feature, Garner summarized the origin story of his notion of simian speech, rooting his concept in a zoo experience. He informed his readers that his theory was born seven years earlier
33 “Do Monkeys Talk?” 173 in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, opening in 1875, just after the Philadelphia Zoo. In
Cincinnati, Garner explained, “I was deeply impressed by the conduct of a number of monkeys caged with a savage rib nosed mandrill, which they seemed to fear very much.” After studying this primate enclosure, which was divided into several compartments, Garner noticed that the
“[e]very movement of the mandrill seemed to be closely watched by the monkeys that could see him and instantly reported to those” who were out of sight. This behavior of the zoo monkeys, caged unnaturally together in Cincinnati, “confirmed” and “inspired” Garner’s belief in monkey speech. To prove this hypothesis, Garner examined “such specimens as [he] could find with the travelling menagerie, museum or hand organ, or aboard some ship, or kept as a pet in some family.” More important, though, Garner travelled to the same type of outdoor laboratories which inspired his theory in the first place, undergoing research in the zoological parks of New York,
Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Eventually, his research led him to the National
Zoological Park, where Frank Baker gave Garner access to his newly opened zoo as a place where he could continue his graphophone experiments.34
Baker, however, granted this permission reluctantly, holding reservation and expressing skepticism about Garner’s methodology and oversimplified hypothesis. In a letter written to
Secretary Samuel Langley, from one scientist to another, Baker worried about Garner’s prior utilization of professionally trained primates (the ones that cranked hand organs in the streets of large cities, for example) for his experiments. He also called Garner’s qualifications as a scientist into question, telling Langley that Garner “was first a peddler of trees and nursery stock afterwards a real-estate drummer. Do not understand that I consider that these occupations in any
34 Garner, R. L., “Do Monkeys Express Themselves in Words?” (Unknown Newspaper, June 8, 1891(?)), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285; Harrington, John P., “He Spoke: Biography and Scientific Work of Richard Lynch Garner” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), 10, Richard Lynch Garner Papers, Box 5, Folder Entitled “Biographer’s Papers,” National Anthropological Archives. The implications of the experiments described in this section for the history of twentieth-century biology can be found in Gregory Radick’s “Primate Language and the Playback Experiment, in 1890 and 1980,” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005): 461-493. 174 direct way detract from his merits as a citizen or diminish his general worth. I merely think that they are not exactly those that enable one to ‘catch the eel of science by the tail.’”35 Garner seemed to fall short of the standards that Baker believed should characterize a man of science.
Nonetheless, he (with Langley’s recommendation) gave Garner access to the zoo, for the National
Zoo was a place where any American should be able to put science into action. Indeed, Baker explained to Johns Hopkins zoologist and morphologist William Keith Brooks that since the
“National Zoological Park is a public institution, I have thought it proper as Manager to give investigators as wide a liberty as is compatible with the health and comfort of the animals.”36 In other words, since Baker saw no harm in allowing Garner to talk to monkeys, he had no reason to censor his research—especially since the National Zoological Park was a public zoo. Even though
Garner’s employment of trained primates in his experiments may not have passed a peer review conducted by professional biologists or anthropologists, and even though Baker found Garner’s experiments “illusory and of no real value,” in the world of popular science and in the world of public zoos, Garner’s peers approved—Americans were enamored with the thought of talking with monkeys.37
35 Frank Baker to Professor Langley, 3 May 1892, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 12, Folder 25. 36 Frank Baker to Professor W. K. Brooks, 22 April 1892, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 12, Folder 25. 37 Ibid. In this communication with Brooks, Baker did not hold back about his reservations concerning Garner’s credibility, explaining, “I have never found any proof whatever that his “words” do anything more than excite the curiosity of the monkeys in precisely the same way that any odd noise would do. Any person that carefully tries to interest monkeys can do so, and by patiently standing quiet and making chirping noises of any kind whatever can arrest their attention and cause them to come up to him. Any monkey will be interested in a phonograph funnel that makes such noises and will try to reach it as he will any other strange object.” Baker continued, “In all of Mr. Garner’s experiments that I have seen he has been self-deceived with regard to this matter and he has placed an undue value upon the attention and curiosity he excites. He has no clear idea of the care necessary to eliminate sources of error in a scientific experiment, and under the dominion of his hypothesis does not see that he [is] wandering far from the facts. I think he has but little acquaintance with the investigations already made on this subject, and am quite sure he has no knowledge whatever of the primitive forms of speech, and is not well versed in the prevailing theories and discussions with regard to the origin of language.” He concluded, “I am not aware that his work has been corroborated by any person properly trained in scientific methods, nor that it has been submitted to any scientific body for examination. Indeed his claims are so vague and so scattered through a wide range of popular publications that it is difficult to ascertain what results he thinks he has reached. 175
In the National Zoological Park, Garner staged a series of experiments. First, Garner and
Baker separated two monkeys (female and male) that previously lived together in the same cage.
Second, using the graphophone, Garner recorded the sounds of the female monkey. He, then, replayed these recordings for the male monkey, describing his reaction:
The surprise and perplexity of the male were evident. He traced the sounds to the horn from which they came, and failing to find his mate he thrust his hand and arm into the horn quite up to his shoulder, withdrew it, and peeped into the horn again and again. He would then retreat and again cautiously approach the horn, which he examined with evident interest.”
Garner repeated this procedure in reverse order, recording the male and then playing his utterances for the female, thus sparking similar reactions on her part. When these tests were completed, Garner finally concluded (despite being unperceptive to both the obvious lack of a control group as well as the problem of personal projection) that the sounds emitted by monkeys housed in the National Zoo represented a structured verbal language. Garner replicated this experiment in the Chicago and Cincinnati zoo, but, it was within the NZP that “the simian tongue was reduced to record” for “the first time in the history of philology.”38 Utilizing the National
Zoological Park as a laboratory in which he modeled experiments, Garner sought to bring human and nonhuman primates closer together.
In Chicago, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C., Garner closely studied his recordings, seeking patterns that could break their code. Through these zoo experiments, Garner claimed that he had deciphered sounds that translated to milk-water-drink-thirst, eat-hunger-food, pain-sick, and menace-cry of alarm. Garner strove to not only record and decipher the vocabulary of monkeys, but he also tried speaking this vocabulary himself. From this research, which he admitted was still in a stage of infancy, Garner drew several specific conclusions about the
Twice he has been announced for a paper before the Anthropological Society of Washington, but failed to appear on both occasions, for what reason I do not know.” 38 Garner, “Do Monkeys Express Themselves in Words?” 176 elocution of primates. All of these conclusions, though, were only true for the single species of monkey that Garner mostly limited his studies to. According to Garner, the capuchin marked the
“Caucasian of the monkey race,” for it was “less vicious and more willing to treat one civilly.”
Also, the capuchin seemed to possess more refined language capabilities.39 Despite the racialized intonation of his research assumptions, Garner’s larger thesis provoked much interest both in the nation’s capital as well as throughout the nation at-large. In 1892, much of the literate public sphere had at least heard of his recently published The Speech of Monkeys.40
Garner not only forged his experimental methodology within the National Zoological
Park, but he also used this institution to expand his research. Using the NZP as a home base,
Garner, with the support of the Smithsonian Institution, planned an expedition to the Gabon
River, where he could continue his recordings, but, this time, with wild gorillas.41 For these extensive outdoor experiments, he intended to take “phonographs, telephones, photographic apparatus, an electric telegraph, and a complete taxidermist’s outfit” along with him. He also prepared to take two cages—one to protect him while conducting experiments and one to hold a living gorilla in case one could be captured alive. By attracting wild gorillas to his cage, Garner believed he could reconstruct his zoo experiments outdoors in equatorial forests, recording the sounds of gorillas that approached his cage and then replaying those recordings for other
39 Garner, “Do Monkeys Express Themselves in Words?” Some of Garner’s specific conclusions include the following: 1. The simian tongue has about eight or nine sounds, which may be changed by modulation into three or four times that number. . . . 3. The sound used most is very much like “u” “oo” in shoot. The next one something like “e” in “be.” So far I find no a, i, or o. . . . 11. They use their lips in talking in very much the same way that men do, but seldom speak when alone or when not necessary. . . . 14. Simians reason from cause to effect, and their reasoning differs from that of man in degree, but not in kind.” 40 Garner, R. L., The Speech of Monkeys (London: William Heinemann, 1892). 41 Scientific expeditions like Garner’s became quite common in the early twentieth century. For an interesting discussion of William M. Mann, the fifth Superintendent of the NZP, and his expeditions to Taganyika (1926), the Dutch East Indies (1937), and Liberia (1940), see Hanson’s chapter “Zoo Expeditions” in Animal Attractions. 177 approaching gorillas. By comparing the responses of gorillas over time, Garner hoped “to get an inkling of the meanings intended.” Essentially, an expedition of this design simply represented an expanded, larger-scale zoo experiment. Garner not only created the methods for this gorilla experiment in the National Zoo, but he also intended for the Gabon River expedition to end where it started, in the Rock Creek, for one central “purpose” of the expedition was to “secure desirable specimens alive for the National Zoological Park.” And these “specimens” not only included gorillas, but other “strange beasts as yet unfamiliar to science.”42 By procuring new animals for the National Zoological Park, Richard Garner could “reimburse,” so to speak, the zoo for its support, supplying it with exotic-animal capital at a moment when most of its collection hailed from North America. Animals from equatorial Africa would surely have facilitated the transition of the NZP from Department of Living Animals to “embryo zoo” to modern zoological park.
Furthermore, by donating living specimens to the NZP, Garner was also doing himself a service by bringing a non-capuchin primate (and a dangerous one at that) back to the zoo nearest his home, where he could easily orchestrate future experiments.
The plans for this scientific expedition received two full columns of newsprint attention, fascinating Washington’s zoogoing public. Garner’s experiments, though, captured the attention of Americans far beyond Washington, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Sometimes, the story of Garner’s relationship with the National Zoo even developed fanciful and comedic dimensions. On
December 13, 1891, the Buffalo Daily Courier, for example, published an article entitled
“Talking with Gorillas,” which not only informed its readership that Richard Garner planned on capturing a living gorilla for the National Zoo, but also that “[t]he idea is to place the animal in an official position directly under Prof. S. P. Langley, head of the Smithsonian Institution, by which means it is absolutely certain any gorilla would be swearing in seven languages within six
42 “To Talk With Gorillas” (Unknown Newspaper, 1891(?)), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 178 months—in case he could survive that long in such a position.”43 Between 1891 and 1892, magazines and newspapers across America publicized Garner’s zoo experiments and theory of simian speech. Current Literature published “Phonographing the Language of the Apes.”44 The
Youth’s Companion published “Monkey Talk.”45 And The Cosmopolitan published “Simian
Speech and Simian Thought,” authored by Garner himself.46 Similarly, in New Orleans,
“Monkeys Can Count: They Can Also Call for Peanuts in Their Language” headlined in The
Daily Picayune.47 Mormon citizens of Salt Lake City, in their Weekly Tribune, perused “Richard
L. Garner: Now in Africa Making Investigations in the Monkey Language.”48 And the Wheeling
Sunday Register referenced Garner’s research in an article about a love sick monkey.49 The experiments Garner created in the National Zoo, as he attempted to replicate them along the
Gabon, truly aroused the scientific sensibilities of a nation.
They also raised the ire of established men of science. Frank Baker, again in his letter to
Brooks, admitted his true feelings about Richard Garner:
His scheme for going to Africa appears to me very wild and fantastic. As stated to me he proposes to take a cage weighing 700 pounds with a large quantity of electric and other apparatus (with which by the way he appears to be imperfectly acquainted) through a trackless jungle into the heart of gorilla country. In this cage he will establish himself, enticing to him those shy and wary animals by means of lures and then get them to speak into his phonograph so that he may record their language. This sounds more like Jules Verne than it does like a proper scientific experiment.”50
Nonetheless, the public held quite different opinions. The popularity of Garner’s African expedition, despite its callow immaturity in the eyes of scientists, drew popular attention to the
43 “Talking with Gorillas” (Buffalo Courier, December 13, 1891), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 44 "Phonographing the Language of the Apes "Current Literature 10, No. 2 (June, 1892): 207. 45 “Monkey Talk” The Youth’s Companion 75, No. 23 (June 6, 1901): 296. 46 “Simian Speech and Simian Thought” The Cosmopolitan; a Monthly Illustrated Magazine 13, No. 1 (May, 1892): 72. 47 "Monkeys Can Count" The Daily Picayune 29 May 1892: 16. 48 “Richard L. Garner” The Salt Lake Weekly Tribune 11 August 1892: 7. 49 “A Love-Sick Monkey” Wheeling Sunday Register 9, Issue 314 (May 22, 1892): 9. 50 Frank Baker to Professor W. K. Brooks, 22 April 1892, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 12, Folder 25. 179
National Zoological Park. Surely, Baker was quite aware that Garner’s fantasies and delusions could at least function as a publicity stunt of sorts, at a very important moment in the life of the
National Zoo. Garner interested Americans so much that correspondence meant for Garner even occasionally ended up on Frank Baker’s desk.51 The public associated Garner with the National
Zoo, for in many respects, this zoo functioned as Garner’s storehouse, booster, advertiser, marketplace, publisher, and laboratory.
The expedition Garner organized and advertised under the auspices of the National
Zoological Park was in many ways a success. Garner embarked for Liverpool in July of 1892 to gather supplies and continue his advertising. In December, he left for the Great Lakes of Africa
(the region in the Great Rift Valley surrounding Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika) to gather information about the area’s human and animal inhabitants. Eventually, he placed his cage near the Lagune du Fernan Vaz, along the Gabon River, where he would conduct his high-profile experiments. When describing this outdoor laboratory, Garner often emphasized the rugged masculinity that enabled him to tame the perilous, equatorial wild, especially highlighting the need for protection. Along with food and scientific equipment, Garner stored “two revolvers, one magazine rifle, one air gun and hollow arrows filled with prussic acid, which [he] discharged with a blowgun.” He also fashioned makeshift ammonia bombs that could suffocate a gorilla from ten feet away in case the above firepower was not enough to stop an angry ape.52
However, Garner’s expedition proved successful as more than simply a display of imperialistic chauvinism. He did see, in his words, “a great many gorillas,” informing the press after his return to America, “My position was such that gorillas would come very close and I could sit silently and study every detail of movement and expression.” Garner also reported that he learned “six or eight words of the chimpanzee language,” yet (conveniently) he could not
51 Frank Baker to Mr. Sterling Ruffin, 12 April 1892, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 12, Folder 25. 52 "Monkey Talk" Bismarck Daily Tribune 27 March 1894: 1. 180 explain what these words were because they were “not amenable to any known etymology or orthography.” He also concluded that, while far from completely deciphered, the language of monkeys contained forty or fifty words, “utterances.” Finally, Garner’s expedition to the French
Congo enabled him to discover, in his words, that “[m]any things . . . in magazine articles and natural history about the gorilla are fiction.” He returned to the United States in 1894.53
Clearly, Richard L. Garner could not discern Simian Language. Clearly, he could not reduce the complex behaviors of nonhuman apes to either the signs of the English language or to the Western constructs employed in the new studies of historical linguistics and human anthropology. Yet his experiments were clearly successful in drawing public attention to the possibility that monkeys and humans shared a closer affinity than previously imagined. By travelling to Africa, Garner travelled, in the eyes of the public, to Eden, to a land before time, where the origins of humanity still lived in wild jungles. Donna Haraway, in her Primate Visions, has famously emphasized the edenic dimensions of early primatology, calling attention to notions of race and gender entwined with the images of primates throughout the twentieth century.54 Even though this examination of Richard Garner pushes back Haraway’s intellectual history of primatology to the early 1890s, it does not change her primary thesis that primates, as boundary dwellers, functioned as perfect tabula rasas onto which “White Capitalist Patriarchy” could inscribe their own pretensions and insecurities, a process that intimately brought about the emerging and specialized field of primatology within the life sciences.55 Garner also underscores
53 "Monkey Talk" Bismarck Daily Tribune 27 March 1894: 1. 54 Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). In a similar vein see Donna Haraway’s “Primatology is Politics by Other Means,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984, volume 2 (The University of Chicago Press, 1984): 489-524. For more on the history of primatology see Georgina M. Montgomery’s “Place, Practice and Primatology: Clarence Ray Carpenter, Primate Communication and the Development of Field Methodology, 1931-1945” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005): 495-533 or Amanda Rees’s “Reflections on the Field: Primatology, Popular Science and the Politics of Personhood” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 6 (December, 2007): 881-907. 55 Haraway, 13. 181 an important corollary evident in Haraway’s classic (and a major contention in the “Science
Studies” movement in which she was a major figure)—namely that “[t]he boundary between technical and popular discourse is very fragile and permeable.”56
Richard Garner, using the National Zoological Park, popularized the primate-centered life and human sciences. He, and the science-culture hybrid he embodied and exemplified, helps explain the emergence of not only the new twentieth-century primatology, but also the growing public interest in previously erudite scientific issues. Frank Baker, in his own research, for example, asked similar questions of primates as Garner. How did human cultures arise from primate cultures? What can humans learn about themselves by looking at their primate ancestors? What can humans learn about primates through this quest for human knowledge?
How do close examinations of primates solidify American-male-white-scientific supremacy?
Whereas, Baker encoded these questions in the language of Lamarckian evolutionary theory and the morphological concerns of anatomy and anthropology, Garner packaged these questions in rhetoric and narratives that lay audiences could easily understand. Garner drew from the anthropomorphizing structures upon which seductive “zoo stories” were built, and these stories enthralled both the United States and the Smithsonian Institution long after 1894.
When Garner returned to America, his name riddled headlines from coast to coast for several years. In Charlotte, newspaper audiences read “He Knows Six Gorilla Words.”57 In
Knoxville, “Talks to Gorillas.”58 And in Topeka, Bismarck, and Trenton, they read about “The
56 Haraway, 14. 57 "He Knows Six Gorilla Words" Daily Charlotte Observer 7, Issue 733 (April 1, 1894): 4. 58 “Talks to Gorillas” The Knoxville Journal 11, Issue 139 (July 15, 1895): 8. 182
New Philology.”59 Even in Prescott, Arizona, newspaper-toting miners received updates about
Richard Garner’s expedition to Africa.60 An entire nation read about Garner’s zoo experiments.
For Garner himself, the years between 1891 and 1894 marked only the beginning of a long career dedicated to the speech of monkeys, and throughout the 1890s, he returned to French
Congo multiple times to amass more evidence for his theories.61 In 1900, Garner published Apes and Monkeys, which detailed the research he conducted on “simian speech” after his first return from Africa.62 Garner, though, never lost sight of the general public. Indeed, in many ways
Garner stood as a perfect symbol for popular zoology simply because his entire scientific career was directly shaped by and tailored to the interests of the larger public. In the opening pages of
Apes and Monkeys, Garner perfectly expressed the intentions that undergirded his science, stating, “A careful aim to avoid all technical terms and scientific phraseology has been studiously adhered to, and the subject is treated in the simplest style consistent with its dignity.”
Furthermore, Garner, writing in the third person, admitted, reaffirming one of Frank Baker’s
59 “The New Philology” Kansas Weekly Capital and Farm Journal 16, Issue 23 (June 7, 1894): 10; “The New Philology” The Trenton Times 6 April 1894: 6; “The New Philology” Bismarck Daily Tribune 18 April 1894: 4. 60 Untitled blurb about Garner, Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner 31, Issue 40 (January 22, 1896): 4. 61 For vivid detail about Garner’s experiences and research in Africa see not only Rich’s Missing Links, but also Harrington, John P., “He Spoke: Biography and Scientific Work of Richard Lynch Garner” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), 12-28, Richard Lynch Garner Papers, Box 5, Folder Entitled “Biographer’s Papers,” National Anthropological Archives. The Richard Lynch Garner Papers contains a vast amount of material concerning Garner’s work in Africa and his writings on primates. Garner was interested in a wide range of topics, and he wrote voluminously. I believe there is much work to be done on figures like Garner. He, in my opinion, is a great symbol of “popular zoology,” in particular, and “popular science,” in general. I also believe that he is an important individual in the history of both primatology and field-based anthropological research. Of particular interest in the collection at the National Anthropological Archives is his assemblage of “Writings,” which includes scientific analysis, poetry, short fictional stories, diary entries, nonfiction accounts of African societies, political commentaries, and bizarre musings on all sorts of topics. 62 Garner, Richard Lynch, Apes and Monkeys (Boston: Ginn and Company’s The Athenaeum Press, 1900). Apes and Monkeys is a rich 300-page account of Garner’s experiments. Composed of twenty-four chapters, Garner balances his observations of specific primates with general analysis of the implications of these observations. While scientists like Baker would disregard the integrity of Garner’s work because of its colloquial style, anthropomorphizing tendencies, and lack of scientific rigor and discipline, these “flaws” make this book an interesting window into popular conceptions of primates at the turn of the twentieth century. Apes and Monkeys, and books like it, deserve a study of their own. 183 original concerns with his research, “Most of the acts related [in this book] are those of his own pets. A few of them are of apes in a wild state. The author has carefully refrained from abstruse theories or rash deductions, but has sought to place the animals here treated of in the light to which their own conduct entitles them, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions.”63 In this way, Garner not only explicitly revealed the popular motivations of his research and scientific career, but he also underscored two important dimensions of popular zoology. First, popular zoology must not rely upon the arcane languages of science. Second, and similarly, popular zoology should not make the abstract and erudite theories of science its focus. Instead, it should allow lay audiences to experience animals and “draw” their “own conclusions.” Just like William
Temple Hornaday in his “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy,” Garner wanted science to be accessible and experiential.
In 1905, five years after the publication of Apes and Monkeys, Garner built a house on the shores of Lake Fernan Vaz, Congo, where he placed his first outdoor cage-laboratory. And between 1916 and 1919, with the full sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution, Garner made his last expedition to the French Congo in search for more missing links between human and monkey languages and cultures. Shortly after returning to the United States from Africa for the last time,
Garner died in Chattanooga, Tennessee.64 Although many of Garner’s grand claims about being able to discern and then translate simian language into human language proved, at best, naively overstated, or, at worst, purposefully deceptive, and although his experiments proved, at best, unprofessional, or, at worst, denigrated by profiteering motives, his larger project addressed questions that fascinated both scientists and laypeople alike. How similar were humans and monkeys? What could monkeys teach us about our own natural history? Did we have language
63 Garner, Apes and Monkeys, iii-iv. 64 Register to the Papers of Richard Lynch Garner, “Introduction” and “Chronology,” National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. 184 and culture from the Beginning? Salient questions like these made Darwin and Lamarck palpable for Americans at the turn of the century, and Richard L. Garner, by foregrounding these questions in his high profile zoo experiments, enhanced their popularity and relevance in the public sphere.
As American zoogoers increasingly came into contact with their living ancestors, held captive in monkey houses, they simultaneously grew curious about the implications of this encounter.
Garner’s research on language structured intersecting primate gazes for the edification and pleasure of the human primate gazer. He created a narrative that, at least in some ways, lessened the gap between human and nonhuman primates by exploring the long held fantasy of cross- species discourse. In addition to this specific thesis, Garner created a discursive space for other counternarratives concerning the affinities between human and nonhuman primates, stories that would become the central concern of the new science of primatology—born dialectically in the outdoor laboratories of zoos and jungles.
By “communicating” with monkeys, Garner experimented at the fringe of humanity, in a realm Haraway labels as “science fiction,” “where possible worlds are constantly reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds.”65 For American zoogoers in the 1890s, primates represented new, exotic worlds, and language functioned as a mechanism through which to order the order of primata. Despite Frank Baker’s professional opinion of Garner’s scientific methodology, Garner’s research eventually proved important to early primatology, posthumously proven relevant by comparative psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes in the mid-1920s.66 Yerkes, hired as a psychobiologist at Yale University in 1924, founded both the Yale University Laboratories of Primate Biology and the Anthropoid Breeding and
Experiment Station in Orange Park, Florida, where the primate language Yerkish was first
65 Haraway, 5. 66 Register to the Papers of Richard Lynch Garner, National Anthropological Archives. For more on Yerkes and primatology see Haraway’s fourth chapter entitled “A Pilot Plant for Human Engineering: Robert Yerkes and the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, 1924-42.” 185 developed and where the field of primatology was partially legitimated.67 The history of language and primatology is a complex one needing told. Richard L. Garner, though, shows that this history may indeed find its genesis in the birth of the National Zoological Park, where primates were, for the first time, showcased before a nation, and where a tree-peddler-turned-scientist first staged his famous phonograph experiments.
Zoo Sciences and the Public Sphere
Beginning in 1891, Garner’s graphophone experiments baptized the National Zoological
Park as the perfect public laboratory for science, where science and entertainment met and mingled, where science could educate a nation, and where a nation could shape its science.
Shortly before monkeys began to talk into Edisonian devices, Secretary Samuel Pierpont Langley hoped to build a surprising yet grand symbol of science on the zoo grounds. In the first year of the
National Zoo’s existence, Langley ordered an astro-physical observatory to be constructed in the park so that the Smithsonian’s current observatory could be relocated from a ramshackle shed behind the Smithsonian Castle (where, ironically, the Department of Living Animals was also located) to a more fitting location.68 Reigniting older controversies about whether a federal government should and could support a zoo, a parallel controversy ensued before Congress about whether the same federal government should and could pay for an observatory built in a place reserved for animals. One House Representative from Tennessee, Benjamin Augustine Enloe, complained that the purpose for such an out-of-place building within a zoological park was solely
67 Yerkish was a language developed by humans for primates. This language required primates to use a keyboard that possessed keys that contained pictures of lexigrams, symbols that represent larger concepts. 68 The space surrounding the Smithsonian Castle functioned as an ad-hoc “science center,” filled with quickly and cheaply built buildings that supported the heterogeneous scientific endeavors of the Smithsonian Institution in various ways. One of the buildings in the corresponding image may very well be Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, which has not been captured in any known photographs. 186 to provide “men of science” a place where they could do research on the nation’s dollar.69 An inflamed editorialist also bitterly typed for The Evening Star in January, 1891, that
[i]nstead of devoting the 168 acres of the Z. P. to the uses for which it was intended, and carrying out the professions and promises made to Congress and the public, they have set aside 38 acres only to be occupied by animals and the public. The rest is ‘reserved,’ 10 acres for an ‘astro-physical observatory’ and 14 acres or more (the Holt property) for the private ground of the ‘park administration.’70
Langley responded to these criticisms (upon the floor Congress even) by emphasizing the humble nature of the observatory he intended to have built. The structure would not be a large and expensive domed building, but would hardly be more than a “low shed.” The Rock Creek’s valley, Langley explained, simply made the ideal site for an observatory equipped with instruments designed to measure earthquakes and view stars due to its quiet and seclusion, a place
“free from noise and tremor.”71 Unfortunately, for Langley, the Smithsonian had run out of political capital, and Congress denied the request to build an observatory within the new (and still being built) zoological park. Nonetheless, the request itself underscored the scientific intentions built into the National Zoo from the very beginning. The zoo could support all sciences, even the new geo- and astrophysics emerging just prior to 1900.
Yet most often the zoo served as a place that would foster the life sciences, educating zoogoers, in various ways, about living animals. Most frequently, scientific education about animals happened not as a part of a highly publicized experiment (as in the case of Richard
Garner) nor as a part of a large educational program. Instead, scientific education operated below perception, structurally and subtly encoded into the zoo experience. As zoogoers engaged the
National Zoological Park, they simultaneously learned about science. Journalists, by weaving
69 “The Zoological Park” (The Washington Post, January 30, 1891), “Scrapbook 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 70 Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word-processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, “1891,” 2-3. 71 “The Zoological Park” (The Washington Post, January 30, 1891). 187 scientific data and information into the zoo stories they publicized, played an important role in this type of quiet education. In fact, newspapers nationwide published consistent updates about local zoos, demonstrating the important place public zoos held in the popular culture of a nation.
As early as June 23, 1889, when the “zoo” was still located upon the lawns of the Smithsonian,
The Washington Post published an article entitled “Sunday at the Zoo,” what would become a regular feature devoted to updating the District public about happenings in their zoological park.
This article discussed a wide range of topics, including: the large crowds gathering on the
Smithsonian lawn, a goat’s consumption of popcorn, the pumas’ hatred for small dogs, the deviances of zoogoers, and a grizzly bear’s fondness for garden-hose baths. Interwoven into this heterogeneous collection of zoo stories appeared a scientific blurb about antlers. The article raised a question frequently asked by zoogoers: “Many persons have called attention to the antlers of the elk in the inclosure. They appear to be covered with a grey velvety material?” Answering the question, the article continued,
Every year elks shed their antlers and those at the Smithsonian Institution dropped their head ornaments the 6th and 8th of April, respectively, a little over two months age. Their antlers came off close to their skulls and the growth now visible is covered with a soft, hairy substance, which is very sensitive, and accounts for the frequent rubbing of the elks against convenient trees. A saw buck [a device that holds firewood] placed in their inclosure serves to give them a great deal of relief, for the growth on the antlers or horns itches exceedingly, and pushing the saw buck serves to allay the irritation.72
Newspapers communicated scientific information in inconspicuous ways. This short blurb gave voice to a zoological question which zoogoers frequently asked when curiously observing elk rubbing their antler nubs against anything they could find. The Washington Post magnified these queries, asking the question about elk antlers in and for the public sphere. Then, presumably with the knowledge of the zoo’s keepers, the Post answered this question, educating the entire District
72 “Sunday at the “Zoo”” (The Washington Post, June 23, 1889), “Scrap book 1888-1891, vol. 2,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 188 about antlers. Furthermore, this commentary also educated the public about how the zoo accommodated the needs of previously wild animals. By providing sawbucks, the zoo attempted to remedy for the lack of trees in the elk enclosure, giving the animals something else to assuage the itching of their antler fuzz. The Washington Post quietly informed the District about the animals of the National Zoological Park, about how this park met the needs of the animals, and about science generally.
A little over a year later, yet still before the Park’s official opening, The Evening Star tackled the topic of science more directly. In an article entitled “This Is Our Own Park,” The
Evening Star explained that “[n]ow that the National Zoological Park has become an accomplished fact, the management in charge is starting in with energy upon the task of preparing this future playground of the people for use.” Yet, as the article continued to detail, one of the primary functions of this people’s “playground” was to conduct scientific experiments that would study “the habits of beasts and birds and the limits [emphasis added] of species.” The Star then offered some suggestions of scientific topics that could explore the conceptual boundaries of
“species.” “[A] rough definition of the meaning of the word species,” according to the Star, explained how individuals of a similar species could produce, when mated, fertile offspring capable of reproduction. According to this reasoning, the dog and the wolf, as well as the horse and the ass, were considered by scientists as members of different species. However, as the article made clear, the species of known animals frequently remained unknown. “Take the case of the puma,” the article posed, “which is found, with variations in shape and otherwise, all the way from far north to the other end of South America. Are these different pumas different species or different varieties merely?” The National Zoological Park, the Star contended, would be the perfect laboratory to settle such matters. And while advancing this thesis concerning the experimental potentials of the NZP—generally, that “the park will afford naturalists opportunities
189 for adding a great deal to present knowledge of zoology”— the leading Washington newspaper simultaneously educated the public about contentious scientific debates surrounding systematics
(a branch of biology devoted to the classification of life forms for the purpose of discovering their evolutionary histories), which consumed biologists around the Atlantic world.73 Before the
National Zoo even opened, The Evening Star ushered its readers to the “limits” of “species,” where they could both recognize the contested nature of such terms and hope to solve some of the outstanding mysteries regarding the classification of animals.
One 1895 assessment of the National Zoo, published in Baltimore’s newspaper The Sun, argued that the zoo had not yet met the scientific agenda it had set out to accomplish. This assessment stated, “It was hoped that the Zoo would afford an opportunity to the numerous naturalists in the employ of the Government to closely study the characteristics and habits of the animals threatened with extinction. This original idea has been carried out only in part, as the predominant feature has become the recreation of the people.” This failure, the author recognized, was partially due to a lack of funding. The money appropriated to the park was enough to provide
“simple shelter and preservation,” but could not fund needed construction, let alone science.74
What this assessor overlooked, though, was that “science” and “recreation” did not function necessarily as distinct and separate entities. Science and recreation could and did go hand-in- hand. Zoogoers often participated in both science and recreation simultaneously.
Zoogoing publics read about all sorts of scientific issues woven throughout newspaper articles seemingly devoted, first and foremost, to entertainment, leisure, and publicity. In 1899, for example, when the National Zoological Park began a large-scale purchasing campaign to bring legions of new and exotic animals to the Rock Creek, a torrent of articles flooded the
73 “This Is Our Own Park” (Evening Star, October 18, 1890), “Scrapbooks 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 74 “The Zoo at Washington” (The Sun, February 24, 1895), “Scrapbook 1887-1902” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 190 national public sphere, from New Orleans to Grand Rapids, advertising this grand expansion.75
While boosters tried to seduce their readers’ sensibilities for leisure and entertainment, enhancing the NZP’s image as a national attraction, they also taught about animals. One article of this advertising campaign (with the title “Uncle Sam, His Show” and the subtitle “It Will
Undoubtedly be the “Greatest on Earth”) discussed in detail the NZP’s potential acquisitions.
First, the National Zoo hoped to obtain a gorilla, a procurement that would create quite the fanfare since “the gorilla has never yet been brought to the New World.” When hyping this potential addition, the article also detailed the gorilla’s range, habitat, defensive habits, and the history of its natural history (beginning in antiquity with Admiral Hanno of Carthage) while emphasizing the dangers and dramas of capturing a gorilla essential to a good story. Second, the zoo planned to acquire chimpanzees, baboons, and monkeys. In similar fashion, the article provided data about their range and defensive habits, going into special detail about the physical characteristics of a particular species of baboon called the hamadryas, while simultaneously calling attention to the thieving nature of chimpanzees, as well as to the war tactics and occult powers of baboons, making these monkeys enticing characters for zoogoing readers. In this manner, “Uncle Sam, His Show” intertwined scientific information with advertising techniques.
And through forming these hybridized descriptions of animals, fusing entertainment and science, the newspaper feature continued to list other animals that the NZP hoped to add to its animal collection— including giraffes, elephants, African buffalo, wart hogs, manatees, zorillas, spectral tarsiers, and tamarau. The National Zoo’s expansion, the article concluded, would “out-Noah
75 “An Immense Zoo” (Times-Democrat, New Orleans, LA, October 29, 1899), “Scrapbook 1887-1902” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285; “Nation’s New Zoo” (Press, Grand Rapids, MI, November 9, 1899), “Scrapbook 1887-1902” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 191
Noah,” attracting throngs of zoogoers to the Rock Creek, where they could be both educated and entertained.76
“Zoo stories” blurred science and entertainment, and they found their way into the newspapers of every city that boasted a zoo. These stories, representing subtle zoological education and exemplifying the flexible form that science could take in the public sphere, became the ballast of zoo discourse, the rhetorical-zoo beyond the material-zoo. Zoo stories ushered zoogoers into a world of science that seemed disguised as simply a world of entertainment. They used science to draw publics into both the idea of the zoological park as well as into the actual zoological park. In this way, zoo stories played an important role in structuring the experience of zoogoers, teaching them from the beginning that science could allow humans to better understand exotic animals. Science made exotic animals seem a little less exotic, a little less Other. The pleasure of an outing to a zoological park, then, was not simply derived from gazing upon exotica, but from becoming closer to foreign beings, from peeling away layers of alien symbolisms to find recognizable animals and familiar mirrors beneath. The zoo stories that weaved science into entertainment transformed animals on display, albeit incompletely, into animals beyond mere spectacle and transformed zoological parks into institutions more complex than its menagerie predecessors. In the District of Columbia particularly, zoo stories amalgamated science and entertainment for the National Zoo’s public, and they continued to do so into the twenty-first century. Zoo stories changed with the times, but the idea of popularizing science within the rhetorical space of the National Zoo remained constant.
Throughout the zoo’s first decade, entertaining articles about science consistently brushed against the page-turning fingertips of the Washington public. In the winter of 1891, before the National Zoo’s official opening, a bison calf was born, the first of its kind ever to enter
76 “Uncle Sam, His Show” (Unknown Newspaper, Section title “Illustrated Magazine Section,” November ?, 1899), “Scrapbook 1887-1902” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 192 the world through the nation’s capital. An article entitled “An Odd Infantile Pet” was quickly published, calling public attention to the bison, casting this calf as “the idol of the children.” The purpose of this feature was, first and foremost, to entice zoogoers to see the baby bison for themselves. Zoo stories always sought publicity before all other ends. This story began by narrating how the baby bison received the name “Baby May Weeden.” While the bison received its surname in honor of its keeper, W. C. Weeden, the first keeper of the Department of Living
Animals and the National Zoo, its first name was bestowed upon it by a child of the District. The article described the endearing episode in the following manner:
One day last week a pretty girl, who has taken a lively interest in the baby buffalo, went down to the pen on the Mall and christened the baby May Weeden. The young lady herself is named May . . . The pretty girl stood beside the pen with the gloved fingers of one hand hooked in the wires of the inclosure, while the little brown calf stuck its wet, black nose out to her inquiringly, and the old cow watched rather sullenly, and the young lady said: “I christen you May Weeden.”
In this way, the article continued with thick anthropomorphisms and romantic imagery, portraying Baby May’s ears flopping “back and forth,” describing the manner in which she sniffed and licked the hands of children, and generally emphasizing her “wonderfully spry” character. Although clearly giving precedence to the role of entertainment, the article nonetheless intertwined science into the narrative. What began as a maudlin story of a little girl and baby bison, concluded as a commentary on the “doctrine of affinities,” which consumed so many naturalists and scientists of the day. The last two paragraphs discussed the common descent of ruminants, the maturation process of bison as they grow from infancy to adulthood, and a brief comparative analysis between the evolution of ruminants and the evolution of animals derived
193 from the wild ass—horses, mules, and zebras.77 Entertainment and science could go hand-in- hand.
One year later, The Evening Star proved this point again with another article that discussed the maturation processes of zoo animals. This time, making science more central, the article sought solely to explore “how animals grow from the time they come into the world to the time they are able to take care of themselves.” The article, then, continued by detailing closely the functionality of the kangaroo’s pouch, the biology of the eggs of sharks and skates, the spawning patterns of fresh water fish, and egg-carrying behaviors of the Surinam toad (a species that volunteers the males to carry the lain eggs upon his back until they hatch). Occupying two full columns of newsprint, this article entertained by instructing readers in matters of science, exploring some of the peculiar characteristics of three different zoo animals.78
In the autumn of 1895, when the NZP invited a traveling snake collector to display his serpentine collection at the park, subscribers of The Evening Star read about the differences between water moccasins, copperheads, common rattlers, diamond rattlers, gopher snakes, boa constrictors, and African rock snakes. As they learned about the different physical attributes of these various snake species, they also consumed an advertisement implicitly beckoning them to the zoo in order to see the snakes for themselves. To add a bit of drama to this herpetological description, the author concluded the article by reporting that one of the men traveling with this collection had been bitten sixty-three times, so frequently, in fact, that he “now does not mind a snake bite any more than a flea bite.”79
77 “An Odd Infantile Pet” (Unknown Newspaper, Winter (?)1891), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 78 “The Care of Young” (The Evening Star, March 5, 1892), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 79 “Now for the Snakes” (The Evening Star, October 19, 1895), “Scrapbooks, 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 194
In July of 1900, through a three-page feature article largely meant to bring more visitors to the National Zoo, the District public was informed about the diversity of animals housed in the zoo, including the largely unheard-of and obscure Tayra, a marten-like mammal of South
America. They also learned that the zoo offered formal classes in natural history and informal classes in art. The previous winter, for example, zoogoers had the opportunity to see famous wildlife artist Ernest Thompson Seton at work drawing animals from a temporary house built by the zoo solely to support his work.80 In November of that same year, through an article entitled
“Some Queer Freaks Among the Cubans,” clearly meant to entertain, readers not only learned adjectives by which to think of the Caribbean subaltern, but they also learned about the habits of iguanas; the habitats of bats and trogons (birds in the same order as quetzals); and the natural history, habits, habitats, anatomy, range, speciation, and diets of hutlas (a tree-climbing, rat-like rodent).81 In 1901, through more similar boosterist newspaper articles, District citizens became educated on the range, plumage, and taxonomy of the king vulture.82 And they learned about the nocturnality of many species from hyenas to wolves.83 In 1902, readers perused print pages that examined in great detail the characteristics of the world’s largest carnivore, the Kadiak bear of
Alaska, which then, for the first time, reached the National Zoo.84 And on the very day the public
80 Hunter, Susan, “A Nation’s Zoo: Government Zoological Park at Washington” (The Home Magazine (?), July, 1900), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. For more on Seton see Hugh Allen Anderson’s The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2000) or David Witt’s Ernest Thompson Seton: The Life and Legacy of an Artist and Conservationist (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2010). Seton’s own work was quite voluminous. His most famous book is Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). Also, for larger and interesting context about Seton, others like him, and environmental ethics see Lisa Mighetto’s classic Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics. 81 “Some Queer Freaks Among the Cubans” (The New York Times, November 10, 1900), “Scrapbook 1900- 1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 82 “Spring at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, April 1, 1901), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 83 “A Night Visit to the Zoo” (The Washington Times, May 26, 1901), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 84 “Largest of All Carnivora” (The Washington Post, March 2, 1902), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 195 read about Kadiak bears, they also read an entire column about musk oxen in the very same paper.85 In all of these writings, and countless more like them, newspapers published fascinating and gripping stories about the National Zoological Park that simultaneously presented scientific information about their zoo-animal protagonists.
As evidenced above, science and entertainment appeared side-by-side in the print culture of the District during the first decades of the National Zoo’s existence. Sometimes newspapers favored science. Other times, they favored entertainment. Rarely did articles fuse science and entertainment together in equal proportions. In fact, in most cases, especially in the 1890s, entertainment usually trumped scientific concerns. These priorities could be seen in the headlines themselves, headlines that introduced readers to a good story rather than an informative tract.
1892: “Battled With a Deer: Keeper Blackburne’s Bloody Fight with a Vicious Buck.”86 1892:
“Christening at the Zoo: Pet Names Bestowed Upon Animals in the Collection.”87 1892:
“Fraternalism at the Zoo: Native Animals Make Friends with the Imported Ones.”88 1893:
“Midnight Out at the Zoo: Sights and Sounds after Gates Are Closed to the Public.”89 1896:
“Tiger That Eats Rats: Curious Tastes Developed by Ex-Man Eater.”90 On the surface, articles with these titles seem to have possessed the sole purpose of entertaining and amusing, casting the zoo as a cultural site that staged endless dramas performed by a multitudinous cast of nonhuman actors. However, no matter how colloquially comical or lively a zoo headline was, science often
85 “Zoo May Have a Musk Ox” (The Washington Post, March 2, 1902), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 86 “Battled with a Deer” (The Washington Post, February 15, 1892), “Scrapbooks, 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 87 “Christening at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, July 5, 1892), “Scrapbooks, 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 88 “Fraternalism at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, August 22, 1892), “Scrapbooks, 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 89 “Spring Opening at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, April 3, 1893), “Scrapbooks, 1890-1896, vol. 3,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 90 “Tiger That Eats Rats” (The Washington Post, September 14, 1896), “Scrapbooks, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 196 made subtle appearances within the plots and scripts of zoo stories, if not a grand entrance to center stage.
After the turn of the century, science became more visible within zoo print culture.
Articles about the happenings of the National Zoological Park moved away from the amusing headlines that signaled comedic or peculiar plots and more frequently presented technical headlines that signaled reports meant to inform and educate. In these articles, issues of science more frequently moved from the margins and the subtext to the text itself. Again, headlines and accompanying bylines speak for themselves. 1902: “Sea Water for the Zoo: Vessels Bring It in
Tanks from Off the Coast of Virginia.”91 1902: “Arctic Foxes at Zoo: Novel Experiments with
Fur-bearing Animals.”92 1903: “Patients at the Zoo: How the Sick Animals Are Cared For: A Full
Record Kept.”93 1903: “Painting Animals’ Eyes: One of the Most Difficult Tasks of the
Government Taxidermist.”94 1903: “Meat Contract for Zoo Animals: Clerk Tells Why the Lowest
Bidder Didn’t Get It.”95 1907: “Big Lion Chloroformed At the National “Zoo” to End His
Suffering.”96 At no point in zoo history did the more technical headlines like these replace the more colloquial headlines that preceded them; they coexisted, sharing the same pages. Yet the rise of the rate at which technical and scientific headlines appeared in newspapers marked a transformation in the intellectual palate of Washington zoogoers. These zoogoers were suddenly, by the turn of the century, interested in the intricacies of zoo animals—their bodies, diets, and
91 “Sea Water for the Zoo” (Unknown Newspaper, 1902 (?)), “Scrapbooks, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 92 “Arctic Foxes at Zoo” (The Washington Post, December 12, 1902), “Scrapbooks, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 93 “Patients at the Zoo” (Unknown Newspaper, March 23, 1903 (?)), “Scrapbooks, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 94 “Painting Animals’ Eyes” (The Washington Post, May 30, 1903), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 95 “Meat Contract for Zoo Animals” (The Washington Post, July 14, 1903), “Scrapbook 1900-1919” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 96 “Big Lion Chloroformed At the National “Zoo” to End His Suffering” (The Washington Times, August 19, 1907), “Scrapbooks, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 197 deaths, topics that often required some type of scientific explanation. The National Zoological
Park first caused its audiences to be amused by animals, but then it encouraged and enabled these audiences to learn more about them.
Washington zoogoers not only passively received a scientific education by reading newspaper articles about the National Zoological Park. They also looked to the National Zoo for answers to scientific quandaries. Throughout the first two decades of the Zoo’s existence, correspondence riddled with questions concerning matters of science flooded the Holt Mansion, where the zoo administrative offices were housed.
The National Zoo not only schooled zoogoers in topics of experiment, discovery, and formal matters of science, but it also educated zoogoers in the lexicons upon which science was built. The zoo gave publics a working zoological vocabulary. In 1903, a Washington Post article byline described the National Zoo as “A Place to Improve Your Pronunciation.” This article quoted Headkeeper William H. Blackburne at length on the topic of the National Zoo as a university for pronunciation education, even contending that the zoo made the schoolchildren of
Washington “quicker, shrewder, brighter, and greater sticklers for proper pronunciation” than children elsewhere in the United States. The “Washington youngster has [even] taken the shine off the Boston urchin,” children who were supposedly raised in what was typically considered the
Puritan epicenter of American education. In Blackburne’s view, based on evidence gathered in the National Zoo, young Washington zoogoers’ knowledge of zoological pronunciation surpassed that of the brightest youth of the nation. As an example, Blackburne relayed the following story regarding a Himalayan bear:
Recently . . . we received a very fine Himalayan bear, and the Sunday following a considerable crowd gathered about the cage of the newcomer anxious to see what manner of beast it might be. Among the number was a little girl who, after gazing at Mr. Bear for some few minutes, turned to interrogate me as to its species. ‘It’s Himaalayeyun bear,’ I replied. The words had hardly left my mouth when the little miss, with a look half scornful, half pitying, replied: ‘Oh, don’t 198
say Himaalayeyun; don’t you know better? That isn’t right; it’s Heemahlahyahn.’ Since which time I have been careful to say ‘Heemahlahyahn.’
Blackburne similarly told a story about a “bright-eyed tot” who informed him that the sacred cow of India should be pronounced ‘zayboo’ and not ‘zeebyew.’ Blackburne described this “tot” as
“well posted on zoology” and “forward with his French.” This child also corrected Blackburne in his use of the word “buffalo” when referencing American bison, for the word “buffalo,” according to its precise taxonomical definition, was only supposed to refer to water buffalos, like the ones of the Philippines, housed, according to the child, in the kangaroo exhibit.97 These musings about pronunciation underscored the function of the National Zoo as an educational medium of science, a place where children not only could “interrogate” a zookeeper about an exotic animal’s species, but where they could also practice proper scientific elocution, even, at times, modeling such speech for the benefit of zookeepers.98
Few of the anecdotes and examples from this section would have been recognized as
Science to professional scientists, and the zoo stories that blended scientific information with age old tropes, myths, and narratives associated with animals would never have constituted a scientific education in the eyes of any university professor. Void of specialized scientific languages, lacking the structure of scientific method, missing the veneer of scientific neutrality, and created for the obvious purpose of entertainment and amusement, zoo stories have been overlooked, then and now, for their educational influence and intellectual power. Zoo stories
97 “At the National Zoo” (The Washington Post, September 6, 1903), “Scrapbooks 1896-1907” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 98 The pronunciation of animal names did not first surface in the NZP. A decade earlier, a byline of a Philadelphia newspaper (unknown) concerning that city’s zoo stated the following: “The Parrots Are Growing Cross-Eyed and Very Weak from Watching Visitors Trying to Pronounce Their Latin Names.” The above Philadelphia byline suggested that zoogoers needed to better their pronunciation, whereas the Washington article of 1903 bragged about the pronunciating abilities of NZP zoogoers. Maybe the pronunciation of zoogoers nationwide improved between 1892 and 1903. Or, maybe these article were merely emphasizing two different sides of zoo booster rhetoric—zoo as an elitist display of refinement and zoo as an educating medium for the people. For either case, however, the issue of the democratization and popularization of scientific language proved noteworthy in zoo journalism. “Some 300 “Suspects”” (Unknown Newspaper, September 19, 1892), “Scrap book 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 199 popularized science, translating the erudition of laboratories into the everyday conversations of zoogoers. If Nancy Fraser is correct in defining the “public sphere” as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk,” then this study demonstrates that the National Zoological Park extended the concerns of the public sphere from politics to science. The NZP clearly served as a “theater” for “scientific participation,” ushering everyday zoogoers into conversations about animals previously reserved for either scholars trained in the life sciences or for the traveling naturalists of the nineteenth century.99 In the space of the zoo, zoogoers talked about the animals they gazed upon. Surely, this discourse often consciously entertained more than it educated, yet subconsciously, through the medium of curiosity, the objects of lighthearted amusement could become the objects of serious interest. Just as literary scholars have recently labeled commonplace notions of highbrow versus lowbrow as overly simplistic and dismissive, similar challenges to bimodal thinking could be leveled at the way many perceive science. A child trying to properly pronounce “Himalayan” or zoogoers pondering itching antler fuzz constitutes Science as much as an astronomer experimenting with flight—a topic to which we will now turn.
Samuel Langley: Zoo Experiments and the Birth of Human Aviation
Samuel Pierpont Langley served as the third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from
1887 to 1906. In relation to the National Zoological Park, Langley usually played the role of overseer. While he always proved invested in the wellbeing and reputation of the park, he delegated the day-to-day responsibilities of governing a zoo to Frank Baker. Nonetheless,
Langley, as Secretary of the Smithsonian, still let his power be known, sending Baker frequent directives regarding issues of high public visibility. And while he typically allowed Baker to
99 Fraser, Nancy, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 110. 200 govern the NZP as he saw fit, Langley would also occasionally fall into fits of micromanagement, something he became known for throughout the worlds of the Smithsonian.
As Secretary, Langley devoted much time to his own scientific interests. Before entering the Smithsonian, he pursued an academic life at Harvard Observatory, the Naval Academy,
Western University of Pennsylvania, and the Allegheny Observatory.100 Shortly after his arrival to the District, though, Langley pursued the new line of research for which he would be remembered—aeronautics. On May 6, 1896, he successfully flew the Aerodrome No. 5, an aircraft equipped with a one horsepower steam engine, three-fourths of a mile, exceeding any distance reached by previous experimental aircrafts. After this flight, with the support of the
United States Army, Langley developed the Great Aerodrome (also known as Aerodrome A).
Piloted by Charles M. Manly, this flying machine failed to actually fly, crashing into the Potomac
River on both October 7 and again on December 8, 1903. Nine days after this second failed flight attempt, the Wright Brothers famously achieved their four successful flights near Kitty Hawk,
North Carolina. However, despite failed experiments, Samuel Pierpont Langley represented a major figure in the history of aeronautics, and his Great Aerodrome, despite its crash landings,
100 Charles D. Walcott’s Biographical Memoir of Samuel Pierpont Langley, 1834-1906 (City of Washington: National Academy of Science, April, 1912) is the first biographical account of Langley, and it is still one of the only existing biographical accounts. At Harvard, Langley was employed as an assistant in Harvard’s College Observatory. At the United States Naval Academy, technically employed as an assistant professor of mathematics, Langley also primarily worked on creating an observatory. At the Western University of Pennsylvania, Langley not only continued his work in observatories, but he also worked as a professor of astronomy and physics. While professor there, Langley interestingly created the Allegheny system—the first system of standard time distribution employed by railroads for the purpose of shipping goods efficiently around the country. Simultaneously, Langley, as an astronomy professor, studied “the physical nature and functions of . . . celestial bodies” (248). He was particularly known for his examination of an 1873 sunspot and the total eclipses of 1869, 1870, 1878, and (later while with the Smithsonian) 1900. Most famously and most influentially, before beginning his work on flight, Langley worked on researching and revising the principles of solar radiation. Langley’s work on this topic is certainly worthy of a study of its own. Finally, it is worth recognizing Langley’s history as an inventor prior to his arrival in Washington. In the words of Walcott, “The inventiveness of mind displayed by Mr. Langley in all his work was remarkable. Among many devices which he originated are means for determining times of transit without personal equation; means for observing sudden phenomena, by substituting the observation of a place for a time; the bolometer and its automatic registering devices; and means for producing improved seeing by stirring the column of air traversed by a beam of light. He also re-invented, without knowledge of its earlier use, the principle of the coelostat, and employed that instrument in 1880 at Allegheny” (251). 201 marked an important, high-profile flight attempt. In addition to his Aerodrome experiments,
Langley also published various articles on aerodynamics.101
On the surface, Samuel Langley’s involvement in science seemed far removed from the life sciences. Aeronautics, the scientific study of flight through the atmosphere, joined the sciences of physics, meteorology, and aerodynamics with engineering. Nonetheless, Langley rooted many of his aeronautic experiments in the life sciences, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the national zoo at hand. On March 14, 1901, Langley informed Baker that he wanted to measure the wings of six different birds—the condor (Sarcroramphus gryphus), golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), Egyptian crane (Grus cineara), Jamaica buzzard (Cathartes aura), albatross (Diomedea exulans), and frigate bird (Fregata aquila). He hoped Baker would
“prepare a table giving in each case, in addition to the names as above, a column to be filled in later with the weight of the bird; the wing surface, divided by weight, showing how much goes to the pound; [and] the distance from tip to tip of the wings as extended in flight.” Langley hoped
Baker would procure any of the above species not currently held in the NZP, suggesting that the frigate bird could be found in Santiago’s harbor, the albatross “in the neighborhood of New
Zealand” or “on the Island Laysan, one of the Hawaiian group,” and the Jamaica buzzard (also known as a “John crow”) from Jamaica. In addition, the Smithsonian secretary added that he was
“particularly interested in getting the largest specimens of birds,” and he emphasized that he wanted all the above measurements taken on living, not dead, birds.102 In response, Baker informed Langley that the zoo only possessed the golden eagle, but that all the other desired birds
101 “Historical Note,” Samuel P. Langley Collection,” National Air and Space Archives, Accession No. XXXX-0494; Walcott, 252-254. For more on Langley and other experimenters preceding the Wright Brothers see John D. Anderson’s Inventing Flight: The Wright Brothers and Their Predecessors (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Tom D. Crouch’s A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Richard P. Hallions’s Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity through the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (New York: Free Press, 2004). 102 S. P. Langley to Dr. Frank Baker, 14 March 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7. 202 could probably be purchased from Carl Hagenbeck, the famous Hamburg animal dealer.
Regarding the “John crow,” Baker suggested that maybe a Turkey buzzard would suffice since it belonged to the same species.103
Within five weeks Frank Baker had acquired a condor and a Jamaica buzzard (although presumably not from Hagenbeck since it would take longer than five weeks to make a transatlantic animal purchase), and he immediately sent the measurements of the three soaring birds then in the zoo, taken by Head Keeper William H. Blackburne, to Langley. The condor weighed eighteen pounds and eight ounces, with a nine-foot, two-and-a-half inch wing span. The golden eagle weighed twelve pounds, with a six-foot, ten-inch wing span. And the “John crow” weighed three pounds and twelve ounces, with a four-foot, nine-inch wing span. In addition, to finding a frigate bird and an albatross, Baker informed Langely, that he had not only sent a letter to Hagenbeck, but also to the Commanding Office in Santiago, Cuba, to a prominent animal dealer who previously sent the NZP a pair of flamingoes, and to the Fisheries Commissioner of the New Zealand government.104 The National Zoological Park, then, not only functioned as a storehouse of living animals available for scientific study, but also as a purchaser for that storehouse. In this case, Samuel Langley not only saw an opportunity to study the birds housed in the NZP, but he also saw an opportunity to obtain new birds that would possess a specific scientific utility. When he instructed Baker to acquire these new additions, he used the zoo-as- storehouse for his own research purposes, emphasizing the flexible nature of the zoo.
The National Zoo not only acquired the animals Langley needed, but it also provided him with personal assistants. Quickly, in the above letter listing the condor, eagle, and crow’s sizes,
103 Frank Baker to S. P. Langley, 15 March 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7. 104 Frank Baker to S. P. Langley, 30 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7; Frank Baker to Mr. Carl Hagenbeck, 25 March 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7; Frank Baker to Major Chas. A. P. Hatfield, 30 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7; Frank Baker to Mr. L. F. Ayson (Fisheries Commissioner for the New Zealand Gov’t), 30 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7; Frank Baker to General S. M. Whitside (Commanding Department of Santiago), 30 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7. 203
Baker mentioned that Blackburne did not “attempt the calculation of wing surface to weight on account of the considerable variation in the shape of the wing.”105 After receiving this letter,
Langley responded with a four-page instruction manual about how to calculate wing surface, also surely showcasing his reputation as a micromanager.106 First, he described the basic method that
Blackburne should employ:
The determination of wing surface, however, may be made far more accurately by placing the bird, alive or dead, on a sheet of coarse white or brown paper wide enough to receive the shadow of the body and tail of the bird and at least one of the wings. Let the shadow be taken near noon, when a pencil can readily be run around it and a correct outline traced. The wing should be supported by the tip so as to be a trifle turned up as during flight, when the shadow is taken. Afterward the sheet of paper may be ruled up roughly into inch squares and the number of whole squares may be taken and also the number of broken squares (which may generally be averaged a half a square each). Hence we get the area of the wing and thence of the two wings.107
This process seemed quite rudimentary. Stand a large bird on a piece a paper at high noon.
Spread its wings to their fullest extent. Trace its shadow. Fold paper into squares. Repeat. After outlining this methodology, Langley continued to elaborate on how to assess wing curvature.
“The curvature,” Langley explained, “should be referred to a plane parallel to that of the level sheet of paper the bird is standing on.” He continued to give an example:
Suppose, for instance, the bird were facing the south, and were consequently under the sun at noon when it is highest; then we may suppose two north and south sections to be made through the wing, one quite close to the body (1), the other at some point near the middle of the wing (2). In many specimens the section nearest the body will have the chord of its arc pointing slightly downward, as in this illustration, (C) while the chord near the middle of the wing may be pointing horizontally or a little upward, (D). This may be not always so.108
105 Frank Baker to S. P. Langley, 30 April 1901. 106 Langley’s personality frequently aggravated those dispersed throughout the Smithsonian community. Langley’s response to Baker’s letter opens without any expression of thank, stating simply, “Answering yours of April 30th, I note the report by Mr. Blackburne on the weight, wing surface and extent from tip to tip of wings in certain soaring birds in the park.” See footnote below for citation. 107 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 May 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7, 1-2. 108 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 May 1901, 2. 204
This process of calculating wing surface area and curvature proved quite mechanical. The living birds in the above description failed to prove living at all—they were placed on paper, easily manipulated, and reduced to mere pencil sketchings. Langley’s interest lay not in the birds themselves, but in the outlines of these birds, which were themselves riddled with bisections. The
“soaring birds” that captivated Langley were not the same ones that captivated zoogoers.
Langley’s birds looked like the one below, animal images similar to those produced in
Hornaday’s taxidermic laboratory— pinned and opened for study. The final product which
Langley desired possessed no hint that they were derived from anything but nonliving bird bodies.109
Image 4.1: Soaring Bird Sketch A model sketch that Langley sent to Baker and Blackburne.
William Blackburne and Frank Baker knew otherwise, for they were the ones chosen to pose living birds of prey on a single sheet of paper, with wings extended and presumably flapping, long enough to get an accurate tracing that would appease the Secretary’s expectations.
While no record exists concerning how this task was accomplished, it is clear that the condor gave Blackburne a difficult time because Langley concluded his letter, “I am very sorry to hear of the annoyance that I have been to the condor in these measurements, but I hope that useful bird
109 Soaring bird sketch, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7. 205 will feel persuaded that it is all in the cause of science.”110 Whether Langley’s concern about the condor was genuine, or whether he was using “condor” as a euphemism for “Blackburne” remains unclear; however, no matter Langley’s true feelings, the condor must have acted out in some way, refusing to adhere to the script it needed to follow for the sake of science.111
These measurements of living zoo birds helped Langley advance his research on flight.
To accompany the letter discussed above, Langley also sent Baker and Blackburne a copy of a missive he had sent a year earlier to Robert Ridgeway, a curator of birds at the United States
National Museum originally appointed by Spencer Baird before Hornaday came into his taxidermic position. This letter to Ridgeway revealed Langley’s true purpose for his study.
Langley informed Baker and Blackburne, “I may mention that the line AB in the drawing enclosed with the letter to which this is a postscript, is supposed to be drawn to represent the trace of a plane passing through the center of gravity of the bird when its wings are extended in the attitude of flight.” While these drawings, Langley admitted, would be difficult to obtain from a living bird, he wanted Blackburne to “familiarize himself” with them.112 More importantly, the images Langley sent to Ridgeway, of a soaring “John crow” [below], instantly reveal how the birds of the National Zoological Park could be helpful to a scientist interested in aeronautics, aerodynamics, and the engineering of flying machines.113
110 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 May 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7, 3. 111 Langley at the end of these directions, just prior to the conclusion discussed above, added, in what must have been read as a patronizing tone, especially considering the task at hand, “It is a hard matter to give this exactly, and I do not expect exactness. I send Mr. Blackburne, however, a copy of a book treating largely on the wings of soaring birds. I trust he can understand the French, for it is written in a most charming style and is as interesting as a story; but the pictures will explain themselves.” S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 May 1901, 3. 112 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 May 1901, 4. 113 Sketches attached to S.P. Langley to Mr. Robert Ridgeway, 29 March 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7. Birds #1 and #2 (“John crows”) were done by Holmes (?) with the assistance of photographs and sketches taken by both himself and Langley. Bird #3 (“John crow”) and Bird #4 (gull) was sketched by Langley. Langley had communicated with Ridgeway about “soaring” and “hovering” birds prior to his interest in studying flight in the National Zoo. A few of these letters are contained in “Notes on Bird Flight – Langley,” Samuel P. Langley Collection, Accession # XXXX-0494, Box 44, National Air and Space 206
Image 4.2: “John Crow” In Flight Sketch of a soaring “John Crow” and a soaring seagull sent by Langley to Ridgeway.
The Ridgeway letter demonstrates that in studying these living birds, Langley was most interested in their center of gravity and centers of pressure. As Langley explained, all birds possess one center of gravity, but this center could be “considered with reference to its position on the horizontal plane of the bird with wings extended” or it could be considered “with reference to a vertical plane” when the bird’s wings are closed. In other words, the center of gravity “would
Museum, Air and Space Archives. In this collection, there is data (compiled by either Langley or Ridgeway) concerning American Bald Eagles, American White Pelicans, Common Turkey Buzzards, South American Condors, Humming Birds, English Kestrels, and Frigate Birds. 207 have a certain position when the bird was at rest, and another position when it was soaring and the wings were above the body.”114 This center of gravity was labeled “C” on the above diagrams.
Points “A” and “B,” on the other hand, represented the two centers of pressure present on a soaring bird, one under each wing. At these points, “all the efforts of the upper pressure of the air may be supposed to be centered.”115 Langley also thoroughly summarized the methods used to find the center of gravity and centers of pressure, which, ironically, could only be done on a recently deceased bird. To find the center of gravity, a dead bird’s wings needed to be spread and held in position with wire. The bird then needed to be suspended from the ceiling by the tip of its wing so that the calculator could note the location where this line would theoretically pass through the body. The same process would be repeated after hanging the bird, from the ceiling, by either its head or tail. The point where these two imaginary lines crossed, within the body of the bird between its breasts and mantle, should be very close to its center of gravity.116 The center of pressure for one of the bird’s wings could be found by accurately tracing its outline on thick paper, cutting it out, and then balancing it on the tip of a pencil. The point at which a single wing could lay horizontally on the end of a pencil would be very close to the center of pressure for that wing, and the second wing should have a corresponding center of pressure. These centers of pressure could be corroborated by cutting the wings from the dead bird’s body and balancing these as well.117
The purpose of explaining, in such detail, Langley’s methodology in analyzing bird anatomy is to underscore three important points about the avian foundations of his aeronautical experiments. First, it is clear that Samuel Langley thought about birds as machines that achieved flight by neutralizing the opposing forces of downward gravitational pull and upward air pressure.
114 S.P. Langley to Mr. Robert Ridgeway, 29 March 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 7, 3. 115 S.P. Langley to Mr. Robert Ridgeway, 29 March 1900, 4. 116 Ibid., 4-5. 117 Ibid., 5-6. 208
By thinking about birds in this way, Langley hoped to replicate their physical structure in his designs for flying machines, thus rooting his aeronautical technology in the evolutionary
“technology” exemplified within any given bird of flight. Second, in order to properly assess this evolutionary “technology,” Langley needed both dead and living birds. From living birds,
Langley could find weight (something that could not be calculated from a dead bird once fluids were lost and decomposition set in); wing surface, divided by weight, creating a surface-per- pound ratio; and distance of actual wingspan, as a living bird spread its wings in life, not as they were spread by humans in death. Modeling living birds enabled Langley to “check” many of the figures determined from dead birds. Third, comparing how Langley thought about birds with how he thought about flying machines will inevitably bring parallels to light, showing the influence of the life sciences to a branch of science (aeronautics) usually considered as distinct from those sciences focused on organisms.
While Langley’s interests in the birds of the National Zoological Park materialized in
1901, when he began his bird experiments, he had thought about birds before. According to his memoirs, Langley “often stated that even as a boy he was interested in watching the motions of hawks and buzzards, and he wondered by what mysterious power birds so much heavier than the air could maintain themselves in space and could move about at will without apparent movements of their wings.” In 1886, while listening to a paper delivered at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, this formative curiosity developed into a professional interest when
Langley concluded that “[i]t seemed to him that prevailing theories as to how birds fly were not based on sound facts, and he resolved, as a fundamental problem, to ascertain by scientific observation and experiment what mechanical power was required to sustain a weight in air and
209 make it move at a given speed.”118 From the beginning, then, birds sparked and shaped Langley’s interest in human flight.
In 1891, through his publication Experiments in Aerodynamics, Langley first announced that “mechanical flight is possible with engines we now possess.”119 While this is not the place to detail Langley’s physics, mathematical computations, or proposals concerning the actual engineering of engine-powered flying machines, it would be worth noting the bird references perched in his foundational text on aeronautics. In his third chapter, entitled “The Suspended
Plane,” Langley challenged what he viewed as a widely held misconception about the physics of avian flight, namely, that “the energy expended [by flying birds] increases with the velocity attained.”120 This assumption, first forged by the French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis
Navier in 1832 while studying the flight of a swallow, wrongly likened avian motion to pedalistic animal motion, advancing the view that “there exists the same ratio between the efforts necessary for simple suspension and for rapid flight as exists for terrestrial animals between the effort required for standing upright and that required for running.”121 After “proving” this mathematically, Navier’s assertion led to the longstanding opinion in the scientific community
118 Walcott, 251-252. 119 Langley, S. P., Experiments in Aerodynamics (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1891), 107. On the next page of the work, Langley qualifies this assertion: “While calling attention to these important and as yet little known truths, I desire to add as a final caution, that I have not asserted that planes such as are here employed in experiment, or even that planes of any kind, are the best forms to use in mechanical flight is practically possible, since this involves questions as to the method of constructing the mechanism, of securing its safe ascent and descent, and also of securing the indispensable condition for the economic use of the power I have shown to be at our disposal—the condition, I mean, of our ability to guide it in the desired horizontal direction during transport,-- questions which, in my opinion, are only to be answered by further experiment, and which belong to the inchoate art or science of aerodromics, on which I do not enter.” While Langley, through his career, cannot provide complete answers to all of these questions and concerns, they do represent the central problems of the new scientific field of aeronautics. 120 Langley, Experiments, 12. 121 Ibid., 12. Navier was responsible for these calculations, and the results were published in Gay-Lussac, Flourens, Navier, “Rapport sur un Mémoire de M. Chabrier concernant les moyens de voyager dans 1'air et de s'y diriger, contenent une nouvelle théorie des mouvements progressifs” (Paris: Mém. Acad. Sci. XI, 1832), 61-118. 210 that “mechanical flight is practically impossible."122 However, through Experiments, Langley blamed Navier for faulty differential equations, figuring wrong constants, and assuming that the physics of flight for all birds (from swallows to eagles) could be computed in exactly the same way.123 Essentially, Langley accused Navier of generalizing about all birds, ignoring their differences, and imposing mathematical formulas used for calculating terrestrial animal work and motion on analysis of a bird’s work and motion through air. The class of animals labeled “birds” should not be thought about monolithically. By challenging Navier’s work with birds and his conclusions about the physics of flight, Langley opened a previously closed space regarding the possibility of human flight. It is fitting, then, that in Experiments, Langley used “bird” and “flying machine” interchangeably when he argued the opposite of the Navier thesis—that “effort . . . [of] a bird or flying machine in the air is greatest when it is at rest relatively to the air, and diminishes with the horizontal speed which it attains.”124 While Langley’s direct discussion of birds in
Experiments in Aerodynamics proved limited in terms of page-space within the book, birds lay at the core of this work’s central thesis that human flight may indeed be possible. Langley’s revision of aeronautical physics depended upon viewing both birds differently (as different from both each other and from land-based animals) and flight differently (as different from land-based locomotion). Unsurprisingly, Experiments in Aerodynamics would lead Langley to experiments with birds themselves.
Two years after positing the possibility of human flight, Langley published “The Internal
Work of the Wind,” which directly examined the flying behaviors of birds. In fact, the paper opened with the following observation: “It has long been observed that certain species of birds maintain themselves indefinitely in the air by ‘soaring,’ without any flapping of the wing, or any
122 Langley, Experiments, 4. 123 Langley, Experiments, 12. 124 Ibid., 34. 211 motion other than a slight rocking of the body; and this, although the body in question is many hundred times denser than the air in which it seems to float with an undulating movement, as on the waves of an invisible stream.”125 In this paper, Langley offered an explanation for this avian phenomenon of “soaring,” which challenged, very visibly even, Navier’s claims resulting from an overemphasis on the importance of flapping. Langley concluded that wind was inherently
“irregular,” and that, in the concise words of Charles Walcott, “these irregularities might be a source of power and might to a considerable degree account for the ability of certain birds to soar with outstretched, unflapping wings.”126 This important conclusion set the precedent of taking soaring birds seriously in the study of aeronautics, for if the wind provided these birds with
“invisible support,” then it could potentially provide the same support for a “future aerodrome.”127 Langley, in this paper, focused on birds, recognizing that a successful flying machine would need a “mechanical brain” that replicated the birds’ abilities to “see the wind,” constantly adapting to its ever-changing irregularities.128 In “The Internal Work of the Wind,”
Langley presented an in-depth analysis of soaring birds and their relationships with an unstable air environment, and throughout this work he mentioned the behaviors of specific types of soaring birds like buzzards and condors, behaviors he would later examine more closely within the National Zoological Park.129
As Langley wrote these two classics of aeronautics, he simultaneously worked on designs for his future aerodrome. Between 1891 and 1895, Langley built four model aerodromes. In 1896, his fifth model (weighing twenty-six pounds and covering sixty-eight square feet) became the
125 Langley, S. P., “The Internal Work of the Wind,” (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution, 1893), 1. 126 Walcott, 253. 127 Langley, “Internal,” 22. 128 Ibid., 22. Langley borrows the nautical term “see the wind” from Louis Pierre Mouillard, who experimented with gliders prior to Langley’s research career in aeronautics. See his L’empire De L’air: Essai D’ornithologie Appliquée A L’aviation (Paris: Ulan Press, 2012). 129 Langley, “Internal,” 3, 14. 212 world’s first successful motorized flying machine, achieving a distance of 3,000 feet.130 While quite the accomplishment, Langley knew that such a feat was far from the daily successes of the planet’s albatross, seagull, and buzzard populations. Langley’s aeronautic research, since the publication of Experiments of Aerodynamics, relied on the idea of birds; however, to further his research, he needed to take his work one step further. Langley decided that he should not depend upon the idea of these “soaring birds,” but should study the actual, living birds themselves. And the presence of the National Zoological Park made this possible.
Samuel Langley’s examination of zoo birds did not end with the measuring instructions he sent to Frank Baker and William Blackburne. This marked only the beginning of his reliance on a zoo laboratory. Between 1901 and 1903, Langley again asked Baker and Blackburne for a favor, this time requesting photographs of buzzards in flight.131 Originally, since the captive buzzards could not “soar” within their cages, Baker decided to attract “wild” buzzards from outside the zoo to the park’s rock face promontory by exposing carrion. After “extensive but fruitless trials,” Baker realized that there was no need for setting bait to attract buzzards because buzzards were “quite frequently seen flying about over” the bird cages within the zoo, eyeing the smaller captive birds as potential (yet unattainable) prey. The zoo itself, in this case, functioned as bait, operating as a peculiar medium between the encaged and the wild. And to capture soaring, wild buzzards on film, Baker immediately had scaffoldings constructed for the sole purpose of photographing.132 The zoological park not only functioned as a storehouse and purchasing center
130 Walcott, 253-254. 131 R. Rathbun to Doctor Frank Baker, 8 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8; Frank Baker to Mr. W. H. Blackburne, 9 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. 132 Frank Baker to Mr. S. P. Langley, 9 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. 213 for Langley’s experiments, but it also operated as a malleable laboratory, which could alter its infrastructure according to the needs of his “experiments.”133
While the towers were in construction, Langley, of course, sent Baker further instructions concerning their design to ensure that these structures were inscribed with the Secretary’s fingerprint. He requested that their roofs be raised eighteen inches higher, that a weathercock (of very specific dimensions) be placed on top of the western tower, and that a compass card be attached to the base of the weathercock. He even included a sketch [below] in case Baker found his directions confusing.134 To conduct these “photographic experiments,” Baker hired local photographer E. L. Geyer at a rate of eighty dollars per month to assist National Museum photographer T. W. Smillie.135 And after he had electrical lines routed to the towers for the powering of a helio-photographic apparatus, Baker had the western tower fitted with a chronograph, protected by the elements with a specially made wooden covering, and immediately ordered a chronometer, two Anastigmatic photographic objectives, and all the parts needed for a fully functional camera.136 Baker and Blackburne were not simply building makeshift towers; they were building and designing a well-equipped photographic laboratory nestled alongside the bird cage. This equipment itself proved mobile and malleable, able to provide support for
133 Note on costs of scaffolding, 6 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. Two towers, fifty feet tall, were constructed at the cost of $110, and one smaller tower was built for $25. 134 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 8 February 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. The entire world of the Smithsonian was at Langley’s fingertips. For example, Langley requested that Mr. A. B. Johnson, Chief Clerk of the Light-House Board of the Treasury Department, make the compass cards that would be placed in the towers. First, this demonstrates the influence and power Langley commanded within the greater Smithsonian community. Second, it underscores the important point made throughout this dissertation that the National Zoological Park was a collaborative enterprise. Frank Baker to Mr. A. B. Johnson, 11 February 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. 135 A. B. Baker to Dr. Frank Baker, 26 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8. S. P. Langley to P. W. Hodge, 13 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 136 Note, 29 April 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9; S. P. Langley to Mr. T. W. Smillie, 8 February 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8; S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 12 February 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 8; S. P. Langley to Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, 29 April 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9; S. P. Langley to Bausch and Lomb Optical Company, 7 May 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9; S. P. Langley to The Rochester Optical and Camera Company, 5 June 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 214 research beyond Langley’s. The camera purchased by the zoo was occasionally loaned to others around the Smithsonian pursuing different types of research. For example, Langley’s camera was loaned to the zoo’s Astrophysical Observatory and to Mr. Paul Bartsch of the National Museum, who studied nesting birds.137
Image 4.3: Weathercock Langley’s sketch of the weathercock to be placed on top of the western tower.
Yet the primary purpose for all this equipment was to take pictures of buzzards circling overhead. To follow their movements, Langley had the camera attached to the wheel-work of gunstocks, enabling it to rotate a full 360º.138 Also, the cameras in both towers were connected by an electric wire that enabled them to fire simultaneously, producing two images of a given
137 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 13 May 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 138 S. P. Langley to Mr. C. M. Manly, 8 October 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 215 buzzard, from two different angles, at the exact same moment.139 These towers truly represented an ad-hoc laboratory designed to meet the specific needs of aeronautic research.
From atop these towers, Langley studied birds in flight. In the words of Rene Bache, who wrote a paper about these experiments:
These soaring birds point their heads against the wind, spread their wings in a certain way and are lifted by the wind straight up into the air without any exertion on their part. They can progress against the wind by falling forward and slightly downward. When they go with the wind it holds them up by catching in the hollows beneath their wings. To an observer on the ground these birds appear to sail through the air for miles without moving a wing.140
Surely seeing and photographing majestic birds navigating the currents above inspired Langley.
Nature’s greatest fliers expended almost no energy in flight. Why should man not be able to do the same? A buzzard “is sustained by the wind in just the same manner as a boy’s kite is upheld in the air.”141 While watching the buzzards’ soaring, Langley specifically focused on the angles of their wings in relation to the wind, for he had long realized, since he published “The Internal
Work of the Wind,” that the question of flight is only a question of mechanics.142
As Langley pursued his buzzard research within the National Zoo, he was simultaneously building the Great Aerodrome. The birds studied from the towers shaped Langley’s engineering priorities, for during the construction of the Great Aerodrome, he was most concerned with studying “how air currents act in supporting plane surfaces.”143 He hoped to design artificial plane surfaces that could replicate the natural planes surfaces of buzzards, yet balancing artificial wings proved to be one of the most difficult tasks.144 The captive soaring birds, specifically the caged condors, next to the towers also provided Langley with another insight. Since these condors were
139 Bache, Rene, “Photographing Wild Birds on the Wing to Find Out How to Make a Flying Machine for Man” (June 19, 1902), “Scrapbook, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3, 1. 140 Bache, 2. 141 Bache, 2-3. 142 Ibid., 3. 143 Ibid., 3. 144 Ibid., 4. 216 caged, they lacked the space for a running start, so instead, caged condors would simply drop from the top of the cage and “soar” to the bottom. This observation sparked an idea that if his
Great Aerodrome could not produce the force needed to push the flying machine into the air, it may be able to create enough force to fly after being launched from a height.145 In this way,
Langley designed his Aerodrome with lessons learned from both wild and caged birds, both within the National Zoological Park.
Image 4.4: Langley’s Aerodrome Langley’s Aerodrome on the Potomac, piloted by Charles Manly.
Langley’s research and zoo experiments attracted scientific interest outside the National
Zoo—even years later in 1908. Interestingly, some of this interest focused not on human flight or flying machines, but on buzzards themselves. C. William Beebe of the New York Zoological
Park wrote to A. B. Baker, Assistant Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, to ask whether he could have ten or twelve wild buzzards captured and sent to New York to support an
145 Bache, 5. 217 experiment in acclimatization.146 Unfortunately for Beebe the laws of the District, Maryland, and
Virginia prohibited the capture of turkey buzzards.147 To remedy this legal issue, though, Baker directed the request to Professor T. Gilbert Pearson in Greensboro, North Carolina, where animal protection laws were more lax.148 Pearson, American conservationist and founder of the National
Association of Audubon Societies (which would become the National Audubon Society), promised Baker and Beebe the desired buzzards, claiming that the local animal collector E. F.
Basnight (who Baker had heard rumors about through a commission merchant in Washington) was trustworthy and could obtain the specimens.149 Six years after Langley’s buzzard experiments and long after Langley had become known for aeronautics (and even two years after Langley’s own death), zoo men elsewhere thought about the National Zoological Park as the perfect place to purchase buzzards for both zoo purposes and experimental purposes. Langley’s photography, aeronautic pursuits, and laboratorial towers, gave the zoo a reputation for the study of birds, especially soaring birds. Even though the NZP could not meet Beebe’s request for the birds he desired, it could (as it always had been able to do) transfer the request through the animalia network to the appropriate individual. The National Zoological Park, in this way, functioned not just as a laboratory itself, but also as a weigh station for science, a connective medium that processed requests for living materials, tethering the world of science to the populist world of animal collecting while simultaneously navigating the legal labyrinths that began to structure this world in the twentieth century.
146 C. William Beebe to Dr. Baker, 27 May 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 147 Baker to Mr. Beebe, 22 May 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 148 Assistant Superintendent to Professor T. Gilbert Pearson, 28 May 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 149 Assistant Superintendent to Professor T. Gilbert Pearson, 28 May 1908; Baker to Mr. C. Wm. Beebe, 11 June 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. For more on Pearson see Oliver H. Orr Jr.’s Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1992). 218
Langley’s research on buzzards in the National Zoological Park lasted until his death in
1906, but due to the longevity of Langley’s legacy, scientists and zoo men outside Washington continued to send queries about soaring birds to the zoo. Even as late as 1922, Charles H. Rogers, curator of the Princeton Museum of Zoology, sent the following question to the zoo:
An English correspondent of mine says he has a note to the effect that the fore part of the crown of the Turkey Vulture is whitish in life. That doesn’t sound just right to me. Would it be too much trouble for you to look at your living specimens and let me know what you find in this connection? Please let me know which subspecies you base your answer on, and, if you have more than one, whether they differ in that respect.150
The National Zoological Park was still known for soaring birds long after Langley’s experiments, and questions like Rogers’s would occasionally be sent to the zoo well into the 1920s. For example, in 1924 F. C. Kirkwood, author of A List of the Birds of Maryland, asked then
Superintendent Alexander Wetmore whether he was familiar with the existence of black vultures in Maryland.151 Those interested in soaring birds knew they flew in and above Langley’s outdoor laboratory.
Langley utilized the National Zoological Park as a laboratory to support and further his research on aeronautics, and this laboratory proved quite adaptable. Langley used zoo birds to attract wild birds to the zoo. He built new structures, laboratorial towers, alongside bird cages, forging photographic laboratories within a larger zoological laboratory. Langley instructed the zoo to purchase the animals he needed no matter where in the world they might be found, and he did the same with equipment and materials. For Langley, the National Zoological Park offered a convenient and timely opportunity to think through human aviation by examining those creatures that already could fly. In so doing, Langley infused aeronautics, aerodynamics, physics, and meteorology with life science, with life itself. Even though this important point may often be
150 Charles H. Rogers to Hollister, 22 May 1922, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9; N. Hollister to Mr. Charles H. Rogers, 29 May 1922, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 151 A. Wetmore to Mr. F. C. Kirkwood, 15 December 1924, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 9. 219 forgotten by others, Langley knew that life existed at the core of all sciences, no matter how mathematical, theoretical, and anthropocentric. Beneath all equations, lay a swallow’s fluttering wings. And once a man of science realized this humbling fact, suddenly human capabilities could reach into the heavens.
Dead Animals, Raw Material, and Living Laboratories
Fittingly, the animals of the National Zoological Park, an institution born out of taxidermy, served science in death as well as in life. This fact, in many ways, has already been established through examination of William Temple Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals.
The precedent Hornaday set for sending dead animals to the National Museum for taxidermic resurrection remained the commonplace practice of the NZP throughout the first decades of the zoo’s existence. In addition to this practice, around 1900, the NZP forged a second practice of sending dead zoo animals to the Bureau of Animal Industry, where they underwent routine autopsies to determine their exact cause of death. Often times, then, after this second practice was established, animals that died in the zoo were immediately shipped to the Bureau and then either carted to the Museum or disposed of. However, in the growing and specializing world of
American science, the carcasses of exotic animals began to gain a growing market value, and institutions started competing for the dead. The National Zoological Park, throughout the first two decades of its existence, had established itself as a legitimate scientific institution, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, the zoo began to routinely send their dead to all sorts of research laboratories that were lobbying for expired zoo animals. Thus, the National Zoological
Park began to live up to the hope, established by both its original boosters and Congressional legislators, that it would function as a “storehouse” for science.
On December 11, 1914, Dr. William Bebb, wrote to Vernon Bailey, Chief Field
Naturalist of the Biological Survey, to ask whether it would be possible to obtain the heads of
220 dead zoo animals.152 Former Dean of the Dental College in Los Angeles and currently teaching dentistry at Northwestern University, Bebb wanted animal heads in order to study their teeth.153
Bailey forwarded Bebb’s request to A. B. Baker, and A. B. forwarded it to Frank Baker, who replied to Bebb in the affirmative, informing him that
A considerable part of the animals that die here are sent to the Pathological Laboratory of the Agriculture Department [originally referred to as the Bureau of Animal Industry] for autopsy, and in many cases the skin or skeleton and sometimes the skull is taken for the National Museum. Of the animals that are sent to the Agricultural Department for autopsy only those would be available for your purpose that are not wanted for the National Museum, and arrangement for securing such material would have to made with the Laboratory. Where animals die from some cause that is evident without autopsy and the animals [are] not wanted by the National Museum, it could be used for other purposes, and in that case we could probably arrange to send the head to you.”154
Just like the animalia network that supplied Hornaday with living and dead animal specimens, the
National Zoological Park became enmeshed in a similar type of peculiar animal-trading circuit, where researchers and scientists would informally communicate with the zoo to enquire about their dead-animal byproducts. Whereas the Department of Living Animals often received the leftovers and “junk deals” (to use Hornaday’s words) of animal traders nationwide, now research laboratories received the leftovers of the National Zoo, the leftovers of leftovers, so to speak.
Seen in this manner, the zoo functioned as a medium that temporarily restored meanings and values to animal bodies previously emptied of such significances. Animals that proved useless to animal dealers gained value within the Department-turned-Zoo, and when these animals lost this acquired value by dying, they were then eventually shipped to laboratories and (re)invested with value. Animals, living and dead, functioned as a flexible currency of and for science, mediating between various actors—animal traders, museums, zoos, pathology laboratories, and research laboratories of all kinds. Research laboratories often represented the last stop, or final vault, so to
152 W. Bebb to Mr. Bailey, 11 December 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 153 Vernon Bailey to Mr. A. B. Baker, 21 December 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 154 Frank Baker to Dr. Wm. Bebb, 4 January 1915, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 221 speak, for this animal currency. More than one year after Bebb’s original request for animal heads, the National Zoological Park sent the heads of an Angora goat, common skunk, chamois, alpaca, nilgai (that died from tuberculosis), Japanese deer, gray fox, black bear, and coyote to
Chicago for the edification of Northwestern dental students.155 More than two years later, Bebb’s request was remembered, and the zoo sent him the head of a recently deceased lioness to add to the school’s head collection.156 Relationships forged by the parts of zoo animals often proved long-lasting.
Other laboratories desired the heads of deceased zoo animals, including the lab of C. H.
T. Townsend of the Bureau of Entomology, under the direction of the Department of Agriculture.
In 1917, Townsend spearheaded a research project to explore the bots of large American game animals that frequently plagued their heads and throats. These bots, the parasitic larvae of botflies, were often found in the “nasal and frontal passages, pharynx, larynx and gullet” of not only deer, wapiti, caribou, and pronghorn sheep, but also of moose, mountain sheep, mountain goats, and musk-ox. “The flies which are the parents of these bots [were] very rarely seen and
[were] little known even to entomologists,” but Townsend and his research team hoped to remedy this situation by examining the bots of the “freshly killed carcasses” of zoo animals. However,
Townsend, unlike Northwestern’s dental school, did not require the animals’ entire heads; he only required the bots derived from these heads.157 Ned Hollister, who recently replaced Frank Baker as the Superintendent of the National Zoo, received the request for bots, and responded
155 Frank Baker to Dr. Bebb, 30 March 1916, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15; Frank Baker to Dr. Wm. Bebb, 25 April 1916, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 156 Ned Hollister to Dr. Wm. Bebb, 16 June 1918, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 157 L. O. Howard to Ned Hollister (?), 15 February 1917, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. L. O. Howard served as the Chief of the Bureau of the Bureau of Entomology, and he was writing this letter on behalf of Townsend’s research team. 222 optimistically, confirming the likelihood that the Bureau of Animal Industry could extract the bots and ship them to the Bureau of Entomology alive for study.158
The National Zoological Park sent heads to Chicago and the bots encased in heads to the
Bureau of Entomology. The practice of sending dead zoo animals to institutions engaged in scientific research became increasingly commonplace as the twentieth unfolded. Some of these specimens went to research facilities that were funded by the federal government, and others, that were private laboratories. Although the specific line of research remains unknown, in 1920, the
NZP sent Charles F. Silvester of the Army Medical Museum American monkeys and Australian marsupials to support his anatomical research and publication. When finished with these bodies,
Silvester was instructed to ship the animals to the National Museum, where they could permanently contribute to science while on display.159 Later, in 1923, the zoo offered semi-free access to animal brains to N. D. C. Lewis, Director of Psychiatry and Neuropathology at the Saint
Elizabeth Hospital in Washington. Assuming the Museum had no claim on the brains of recently dead zoo animals, Lewis only had to send a preparator down to the zoo to obtain as many brains as death made available.160 In particular, to support research in comparative anatomy, the hospital hoped to acquire the brains of snakes, alligators, kangaroos, and monkeys.161 That same year,
Adolph H. Schultz of the Carnegie Laboratory of Embryology, located within the Johns Hopkins
Medical School, made a large request of the National Zoo for himself and his colleagues. One of his peers “was badly in need of marsupials” and also hoped to obtain a wolf, badger, otter, mongoose, hyena, sea lion, and llama. Another colleague presented a much more general request, open to receiving “any mammals, except rodents, and any birds or reptiles.” Schultz himself
158 Ned Hollister to Dr. L. O. Howard, 10 March 1917, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 159 Charles F. Silvester to Mr. N. Hollister, 1 June 1920, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15; Ned Hollister to Capt. Charles F. Silvester, June 1920, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 160 N. Hollister to Dr. N. D. C. Lewis, 21 June 1923, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 161 Nolan D. C. Lewis to Hollister, 23 June 1923, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 223 desired “as many primates as possible,” a coatimundi, and a peccary.162 Hollister responded that
“[w]e are hoping that the death rate will be very low, but wish to have the material utilized as much as possible.” Beyond referring to animals-not-yet-dead as future material, underscoring the commonplace assumption within the zoo that living animals would indeed end up in local laboratories as raw materials, Hollister also added that he had Schultz’s “list of wants” and would send them to him as fast as the animals died.163
As the years passed and the twentieth century continued, the dead animals of the National
Zoological Park increasingly found their way to research laboratories to serve as the raw materials for science. Alexander Wetmore, the zoo superintendent that replaced Hollister, stated in 1925 through another correspondence exchange with Adolph Schultz, “It is my wish always to make proper scientific use of anything that we have when it finally dies and I am very glad to cooperate with you in this matter.”164 This became the standard philosophy of the National
Zoological Park, and most other American zoos, regarding the dead. And, in turn, scientists increasingly looked toward the National Zoo, and other American zoos, for dead specimens.
Schultz gave Hollister’s successor an even longer “wish list,” including: any marsupial, any insectivore, any edemtate, almost any carnivore (except a lion or tiger), a wild boar, wart hog, peccary, hippopotamus, Guanaco, llama, tapir, elephant, rhinoceros, and any primate. Schultz added that even though he was not interested in lions, he knew some specialists at Johns Hopkins
Medical School who would “come over [to the zoo] some day soon” to study its sick lioness.165
Scientists, like Schultz, in need of animal bodies were not shy. Yet why should they be? The
National Zoological Park, as announced before Congress, was their zoo too.
162 Adolph H. Schultz to Mr. Hollister, 6 June 1923, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 163 N. Hollister to Doctor Schultz, 11 January 1923, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 164 A. Wetmore to Dr. Schultz, 11 February1925, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 165 Adolph H. Schultz to Dr. Wetmore, 30 January 1925, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 15. 224
Scientists craved the byproducts, the waste, of the National Zoo—carcasses, heads, brains. These valuable leftovers, though, included far more than either whole bodies or the organs and extremities popular in studies of comparative anatomy. They also included overlooked organs like blood. In 1904, Edward T. Reichert of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical Laboratories scribbled the following note to Frank Baker:
I am engaged in an elaborate research on the crystallography of hemoglobin, and have received a front of $1000 from the Carnegie Institution to meet the attendant expenses. A sample outcome of the work depends largely on my ability to secure samples of blood from a large number of different species of animals. Through the hearty cooperation of Mr. Hornaday of the N. Y. Zoo, & of Mr. Brown of the Phil. Zoo, I have secured specimens of blood from all animals that have died in the gardens since I began my work. I shall be greatly obliged to you if you will arrange with one of the employees of the garden to aid me in my needs. I shall be glad to pay the attendant a small fee for his help, and I can furnish the necessary means of shipping the blood so that the time and labor involved will be reduced to a minimum (a few minutes).166
Reichert would accept “blood from every species attainable,” and he promptly sent the zoo a box full of test tubes to be used for collecting.167 Of course, Baker was “very glad” to provide
Reichert with blood.168 A few minutes of a zookeeper’s time would be a small price to pay for supporting cutting edge hematology. Consequently, animal blood poured into Reichert’s lab, including that from zoo species as diverse as barn owls, kangaroos, and prairie dogs.169 In return, publications eventually poured out of the same lab, including The Differentiation and Specificity of Corresponding Proteins and Other Vital Substances in Relation to Biological Classification
166 Edward T. Reichert to Frank Baker, 15 November 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. The word scribbled where “crystallography” is written above was not discernible in the letter footnoted here. I used the word “crystallography” based on a letter written to Frank Baker by the president of the Carnegie Institution about the work of Reichert. See: R. S. Woodward to Dr. Frank Baker, 1 July 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. 167 “Copy of Doctor Edward T. Reichert’s instructions with regard to obtaining blood from animals from the National Zoological Park,” 26 November 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. 168 Frank Baker to Edward T. Reichert, 16 November 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. 169 Frank Baker to Edward T. Reichert, 21 January1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14; Frank Baker to Edward T. Reichert, 18 February 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14; Frank Baker to Edward T. Reichert, 25 February1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. 225 and Organic Evolution: The Crystallography of Hemoglobins.170 As one letter by Frank Baker made clear, the practice of sending blood to scientific laboratories became commonplace not only for the National Zoological Park, but for zoos generally, for Frank Baker redirected one inquirer to other zoological parks that could be “addressed regarding specimens of blood.” According to
Baker, the zoos of New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati offered the “best field for investigation,” but zoos in Atlanta, Auburndale, Augusta, Buffalo, Chattanooga, Chicago,
Cuyahoga Falls, Denver, Detroit, Jacksonville, Minneapolis, and Springfield, Massachusetts also held potential as blood suppliers.171
Reichert’s hematological research proved completely dependent upon zoological parks.
In the Introduction of The Differentiation and Specificity of Corresponding Proteins, Reichert
(and Amos Peaslee Brown, Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of
Pennsylvania, coauthor of the book) explained that he had collected the blood samples of two hundred species of animals, “most of them received from the zoological gardens,” especially the
National Zoological Park. Both Charles D. Walcott and Frank Baker received acknowledgements in the work’s Introduction, due to their contribution in animal-blood donations. However,
Reichert not only thanked the National Zoological Park, but also thanked the zoological parks of
Rochester, Seattle, St. Joseph, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as acknowledging a commissioner of the parks and boulevards of Detroit, the Wistar Institute of Anatomy, the New
York Aquarium, the State zoologist of Pennsylvania, as well as the chief of the division of pathology in charge of the Bureau of Animal Industry.172 Such acknowledgements underscore the importance of the American zoo movement to the world of professionalizing science. Zoological
170 Reichert, Edward Tyson and Amos Peaslee Brown, The Differentiation and Specificity of Corresponding Proteins and Other Vital Substances in Relation to Biological Classification and Organic Evolution: The Crystallography of Hemoglobins (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1909). 171 Frank Baker to Professor R. S. Woodward, 13 April 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 14. 172The Differentiation and Specificity of Corresponding Proteins, xvi-xvii. 226 parks not only contributed to the popular sciences chattered about in the zoogoing public sphere.
They also directly assisted the most esoteric of laboratorial sciences, exemplified perfectly through a 300-page monograph on hematology, complete with 600 photographs of microscopic images. The National Zoological Park played an important role in Reichert’s research project, but more important than the impact of this specific scientific contribution, are the trends this scientific relationship reveals. Clearly by 1909, zoological parks from coast to coast had already been initiated into hematological networks, an emerging branch of biology dependent upon the extraction, transmission, and sharing of blood. Through blood samples, zoo-animal extracts served as the hidden raw material for cutting-edge research about the biological cornerstone of both human and animal life—blood and its components. The waste of the National Zoological
Park directly contributed to a large scale transition in how scientists conceived of life.
In many ways, the central argument of this chapter relies upon thinking of the National
Zoological Park itself, and public zoos generally, as raw material for science. This chapter has not narrated a simple story of cause and effect. The National Zoological Park was born, but its birth did not instantly produce a Revolution. The presence of a zoological park along the Rock Creek did not lead directly to any single transformation in scientific thought—a zoo never commanded the influence of a Manhattan project. The relationship between a zoo and the worlds of science could never be neat and simple. Nonetheless, even though the National Zoo did not by itself change the world, so to speak, it did become instantly enmeshed with very different types of scientific endeavors. Science and the National Zoological Park developed a symbiotic relationship from the beginning. The National Zoo offered diverse scientific projects all types of raw materials—living animals, dead animals, animal collectors, public support, international trade networks, outdoor and indoor laboratories, the scientific expertise of its employees, unique enclosed environments, popular audiences, and zoo stories for advertising. In return, Science gave
227 the National Zoological Park many of the same materials—the expertise of scientists, stories for advertising, laboratories beyond the zoo that furthered zoological knowledge, new networks through which to gain supplies, and the support of intellectual communities. In addition to these, though, Science provided the zoo with Purpose that legitimated its very existence. As demonstrated previously, the National Zoological Park was built as a symbol of Education,
Knowledge, Progress, and Imperialism. And despite the menagerie-like, heterogeneous organization of this chapter—dealing with Frank Baker, Richard Garner and primate speech, science in the public sphere, Samuel Langley and flying machines, and dead zoo animals—the four ideals of education, knowledge, progress, and imperialism bind these zoo stories and science stories together. By opening up the National Zoological Park, the historian fails to find a neat story of cause-effect, but, instead, can discover the beginnings of many different stories that previously lay hidden behind laboratory-centered histories of science. By opening up and unearthing a new institution like the National Zoological Park, the historian uncovers not a
Revolution, but a crossroads along which science and popular culture collided.
228
Chapter 5 Environments and Ecologies in the National Zoological Park
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum constructed a living desert exhibit, showcasing the complexities of arid grasslands. Some associated with the museum wanted the display to include living pronghorn, but due to the difficulties of keeping these large animals, grasshopper mice instead served as the exhibit’s animal inhabitants. These rodents, while not as popular in the public imagination as the antelope of the Rockies, were equally as interesting, for they would stand on their hind legs and howl at the moon. More intriguing than wolf-like mice, though, for the purposes of the Museum, was the variety of desert grasses highlighted by the exhibit. Through this display, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum hoped to teach museumgoers that their desert was indeed no ecological wasteland, but was, in fact, vibrant and alive. The museum’s commitment to environment and ecology proved so strong that when discussion eventually arose about possibly attaining a jaguar for the desert landscape, museum officials decided that other animals played a larger ecological role in the desert and, therefore, concluded that there would be no place for a jaguar in the exhibit. Debate, then, ensued about creating a separate forest-display for the jungle cat, since its presence proved more central to the ecology of tropical deciduous forests than to that of the deserts of the American Southwest, but the museum never followed through with the plan.1
Summarized from David Hancocks’s A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future, the above tale demonstrates how an animal display prioritized environment before animals, foregrounding grass while sidelining charismatic fauna— all for the
1 Hancocks, David, A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and their Uncertain Futures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001): 115-117. 229 sake of ecological honesty. The Arizona museum was not unique in its devotion to environment and ecology. Hancock used the commitments exemplified by the desert exhibit to preface the concept of “landscape immersion,” which became central to zoo architecture and design in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through “landscape immersion,” zoo exhibits sought to achieve “a landscape of more perfect illusion than had been achieved before, with no sense of separation between animals and people.” Zoo exhibits designed by the concept of landscape immersion placed “the same landforms and plantings in both the public and the animal areas . . . exhibiting animals in landscapes that closely resembled their natural habitat in every possible detail and by immersing the viewer within that same wild habitat.” Such exhibits would theoretically teach zoogoers about the “interdependence” of animals, plants, and places.2
The gorilla and African savanna enclosures of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo were the first landscape-immersion exhibits in the world, created in the 1970s. However, the idea quickly spread to other zoos, from the Bronx to Toledo to Zurich to Melbourne. Landscape immersion made environments, not animals, the subject of a given display. Through realism, a landscape- immersion exhibit attempted to give an accurate portrayal of an animal’s environment, placing emphasis on the floral and geological features that would surround the animal in its natural context.3 The movement towards landscape immersion in zoo design calls attention to a turn, in the last few decades, towards Environment, a concept more holistic than the idea of the Animal.
2 Hancocks, 117-118. 3 Ibid., 118. For more on “landscape-immersion” see Jon Coe’s “The Evolution of Zoo Animal Exhibits;” Grant R. Jones, Jon Charles Coe, and Dennis R. Paulson’s Woodland Park Zoo: Long-Range Plan, Development Guidelines and Exhibit Scenarios (Seattle: Jones & Jones for the City of Seattle, Department of Parks and Recreation, 1976); and Jeffrey Hyson’s “Jungles of Eden: The Design of American Zoos.” David Hancocks was the director of the Woodland Park Zoo when landscape-immersion was introduced. His book above represents a fantastic zoo history written from the perspective of not only a zoo director, but also from the perspective of a zoo architect. Hancocks had a hand in creating “landscape immersion,” but the term itself was coined by architect Grant Jones. Also, for a historical account of zoos’ movement towards naturalistic enclosures, see Hanson, Animal Attractions, 145-161. These pages continue to explore some of the themes presented in this chapter, examining the bear enclosures, monkey islands, and reptile houses of the 1920s through the 1990s. 230
Institutions like the Woodland Park Zoo and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum decided that it did not make sense to make an isolated animal the center of attention, for nowhere in the world did an elephant or a lion exist alone in a cage or behind a fence or decorative wall. Creative landscape immersion exhibits blurred the viewer and the viewed (the human and the animal, the human and the flora, or the human and both flora and fauna) by situating all subjects within a common environmental setting. The emergence of these innovative enclosures revealed a fundamental shift in zoo design philosophy from animal-centeredness to biocentrism.4 We must not think about animals by themselves, for they are inseparable from their environments. This lesson rings loud and clear through the animal displays of zoos and museums today, but in the
1970s these institutions were still learning how to make this lesson implicit in their displays.
While zoos, aesthetically and architecturally, directed the gazes of zoogoers to the environments of animals during the closing decades of the twentieth century, this would not have been possible without attempts at the beginning of the century to reconstruct these environments.
Interest in and about environment pervaded the history of the modern zoo. Before zoos could showcase their environmental sensibilities, they had to experiment with building and modeling environments, ecosystems, and biomes that could support animal life. Historian Nigel Rothfels in his classic study of Carl Hagenbeck and nineteenth-century German zoos narrates the first shift towards environment within the international zoo movement. The Hagenbeck Revolution,
Rothfels describes, marked the first attempt by zoos to create enclosures in which “park visitors could observe ‘exotic’ animals and even peoples in their ‘native habitats’—the African jungles,
Russian steppes, American plains, and Arctic ice—without ever encountering a bar or visible barrier and without ever leaving the comfort of their own ‘civilization.’”5 After Hagenbeck
4 Hancocks, 118. See also Anne Elizabeth Powell’s “Breaking the Mold,” Landscape Architecture 87, no. 10 (October, 1997). 5 Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts, 9. 231 popularized enclosures that modeled environments, zoogoers could imagine animals in their natural worlds, not simply gawk at animal objects paraded outside these worlds. Environment mattered. Historian Lynn Nyhart in her Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in
Germany took this reasoning one step further, arguing that the first German zoos not only attempted to place animals in proper environments, but also hoped to recreate the “world in miniature.” If exhibits functioned as microcosms of specific places, collectively they should replicate the planet, giving zoogoers the opportunity to take a metaphorical stroll through the continents, all in a leisurely spent afternoon.6 Both Rothfels and Nyhart underscore the emerging importance of environment to the history of zoological parks, yet neither discusses how zoos created these environments in the first place.
Constructing environments for zoo animals proved difficult. Zoo historians have explained why zoos began to replace the cages of their past with more spacious enclosures that sought to replicate natural settings. However, just because a zoo desired to place a bison, polar bear, or mountain goat in an enclosure that provided grasslands, polar waters, or rocky precipices, respectively, does not mean that this desire always led to successful outcomes. Zoos forged exhibits through trial and error, constantly learning what animals needed to survive. The venture of manufacturing wild landscapes within a zoo, from the very outset, proved little more than fantasy. Clearly, no location on earth could simultaneously possess natural arctic, desert, marine, forest, savannah, steppe, mountain, and swamp environments. The environments of zoo enclosures always failed to be natural. No matter how healthy and happy their inhabitants remained, zoo enclosures and their environments remained artificial—imagined, assembled,
6 Nyhart, Lynn, Modern Nature, 92-107. According to Nyhart, the tradition of organizing a zoo around world geography instead of the systematics of biology began in Philipp Leopold Martin’s zoo layout which divided a zoo into “four different realms: Europe (in the center of his plan), Asia, inclusive of Australia and New Zealand . . . Africa and the New World of the Americas” (97). This began the tradition of partitioning zoos into sections representative of different regions of the world. 232 manufactured, and imposed on zoo lands by human architects, zookeepers, zoo directors, and laborers. Zoo environments were built environments, and the way in which they were put together taught all associated with zoos valuable lessons of ecology.7 As ecologists, sociologists, and philosophers questioned whether Nature truly had an “economy,” those who managed zoos learned firsthand that if it did, this “economy” often proved elusive.8
This chapter will survey some of the ecological lessons learned in and taught through the
National Zoological Park, contending that even though zoos did not visually showcase the centeredness of environment to the lives of animals until the 1970s, “environment” had always been central to animal display within the modern zoological parks emerging at the close of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this chapter will outline the complex processes utilized by early zoos when fashioning animal environments. These processes, in many ways, extended those used when forming museum displays. Just as William Temple Hornaday forged the Department of
Living Animals of the United States National Museum by collecting through a far-reaching animalia network, Frank Baker gave rise to the environments of the National Zoo’s exhibits by collecting sands, rocks, grasses, foods, animals, air pumps, shrubberies, flowers, seaweeds, pebbles, manufactured items, medical supplies, and knowledge through all sorts of strange networks that peddled zoo capital around the world. The story of this chapter will be told in three stages. First, it will open up the National Zoological Park’s aquarium, looking closely at how the
7 A voluminous literature exists concerning the concept of “built environment.” This interdisciplinary literature, important to economics, public health, public policy, geography, technology studies, and environmental studies, examines how humans shape the world around them. The idea of “built environment” possesses a crucial importance to environmental history. For a few beginning reads about how this concept influences the field of environmental history see: G. Dupuy and J. A. Tarr’s (eds.) Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), Steven Graham and Simon Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (New York: Routledge, 2001), or Matthew Klingle’s Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 8 Worster, Donald, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 233 zoo formed its aquarium environment. The aquarium will serve as a detailed case study
(representing all zoo exhibits) that emphasizes the difficulties that accompany the creation of modern zoo enclosures. Second, it will discuss briefly the role of animals in shaping their own zoo environments by exploring the issue of animal resistance and agency within the zoo. This section will argue that animals were active agents in their own history and will gesture towards new lines of research for those interested in the intertwined histories of animals, zoos, conservation, ecology, and environment. Last, this chapter will explore how built zoo environments promoted animal resilience and encouraged behaviors formed, in the wild, through millennia of evolution. This final section will argue that built environments, animal resistance, and animal resilience made the zoological park a lyceum and a laboratory for the study of ecology.
From Parlor to Smithsonian: Context for the Aquarium of the National Zoo
In 1856, Phineas T. Barnum established the United States’ first public aquarium at his
American Museum in New York City.9 An advertising sketch published in Merry’s Museum and
Parley’s Magazine described this aquarium as “[o]ne of the greatest novelties” and “the greatest attraction . . . ever presented to the public.”10 Three years later, in 1859, James Cutting opened the
Boston Aquarial Gardens, which became the Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens in 1860.
The aquatic creatures on display there included only an alligator and two trained seals. However, the next year, Cutting acquired three beluga whales, a bottlenose dolphin, and a gray shark. The aquarium, in total, consisted of fifty-five tanks and a mounted walrus.11 In 1862, Barnum, though, purchased Cutting’s aquarium and renamed it the Barnum Aquarial Gardens, yet in 1863, it
9 Kisling, Jr., Vernon N., "Zoological Gardens of the United States," In Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens , ed. Vernon N. Kisling, Jr. (New York: CRC Press, 2001), 155- 156. 10 "Uncle Hiram's Pilgrimage: The Aquarium," Merry's Museum and Parley's Magazine (July 1, 1857): 137-42. 11 “Boston Aquarial + Zoological Gardens,” May 27, 1861, “Broadsides Small Transport Box,” Massachusetts Historical Society. 234 closed and all the inhabitants were moved to Barnum’s New York aquarium, only to be destroyed by fire in 1865.12 While these first public aquariums proved short-lived, they never lacked public support. In fact, the origins of enthusiasm for public aquariums, can be found submerged in a wild aquarimania surrounding their smaller prototypes—the parlor aquarium, wildly popular in the decade prior to the Civil War. The technology of the parlor aquariums led directly to the later, larger and public versions of these enclosed marine environments.
On September 18, 1852, an anonymous article entitled “Parlor Aquarium” was published in the Friends’ Weekly Intelligencer. In this article, the author described the remarkable scientific accomplishment of the “Aquatic Plant Case,” referred to colloquially as the “parlor aquarium.”
This aquarium represented a “combination of the Wardian case [terrarium] and gold-fish globe, the object being to illustrate the mutual dependence of animal and vegetable life.”13 The Aquatic
Plant Case was filled with approximately twelve gallons of water and was topped with a muslin cover to prevent atmospheric air, often the polluted and sooty air of cities, from entering freely into the case, thus contaminating the water. The cover possessed a small hole through which a small copper tube was placed into the water below. This tube would control the flow of air into the globe, maximizing its cleanliness. At the bottom of the case was placed “sand and mud, together with loose stones of limestone,” into which a small plant, in this case the Vallisneria spiralis, would be rooted. Also, a gold fish and five or six snails would be placed inside. The snails would clean the case by removing the waste of the fish and the rotting leaves of the
Vallisneria, “thus perfecting the balance between the animal and vegetable inhabitants, and enabling both to perform their functions with health and energy.”14 This was the basic design of a
12 Kisling, 155-156. 13 Wardian cases were early terrariums invented in the 1830s by English doctor Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. Just like the later aquariums, many articles were written about these cases. See, for example: "Wardian Cases," Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (June 1, 1854): 283-84. 14 "Parlor Aquarium,” Friends' Weekly Intelligencer (September 18, 1852): 203. 235 standard parlor aquarium. Aquariums from their beginning housed marine environments that included water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments. Furthermore, to make these environments sustainable, they also required technologies that controlled airflow in and out of the encasement, ensured the cleanliness of the water, disposed of animal excrement, and broke down decomposing floral and fungal material. Although their populations would be larger in number and greater in diversity, public aquariums housed, generally, the same composition of living and nonliving inhabitants—water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments. They would also require technologies that could perform the same functions as those of the parlor aquarium.
The parlor aquarium brought aquatic environments to the table tops of a nation, serving to display the inherent order of the natural world, or at least the order that many naturalists hoped to find in this world. The author of “Parlor Aquarium” stated that the Aquatic Plant Case demonstrated the “perfect adjustment in the economy of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, whereby the vital functions of each are permanently maintained, [a balance that] is one of the most beautiful phenomena of organic nature.” The equilibrium demonstrated within the globe, the author then emphasized at length, allowed this new technology to serve a great purpose for the advancement of scientific knowledge. The author maintained:
The Parlor Aquarium affords valuable, we might say invaluable, facilities to the naturalist in prosecuting his researches. The botanist can now conveniently watch the development of aquatic plants under conditions not unnatural, throughout the entire period of their existence from their germination to the production of flowers and the perfection seeds; and we are in hopes that much of the obscurity that invests many aquatic vegetables will in consequence be cleared up. The zoologist is, perhaps, even more indebted to the invention.15
In this way, the parlor aquarium can be viewed as a living text book and laboratory for natural history, marine biology, and zoology. What better place for an aquarium, then, than a zoological park also passionately devoted to science? An aquarium within the National Zoo would function
15 “Parlor Aquarium,” 1852. 236 as a living textbook within a living textbook, teaching zoogoers specifically about life under water.
Aquariums immediately offered their support to the sciences. In an 1853 article published in the American Journal of Science and Arts, entitled “Observations on a Newly Discovered
Animalcule,” J. W. Bailey described a newly discovered amoeba he found at the bottom of an aquarium, an organism he named and classified Pamphagus mutabilis.16 The next year, the anonymous author of “Customs and Manners Under the Water” explained how aquariums suddenly revealed a world of aquatic life previously unknown to nineteenth-century biology. The author opened the article by asserting that “[s]cience has become intimate with animal life on the land—even those creatures that are too minute to be seen with the naked eye; but, till recently, the ocean appeared to baffle its researches.” The aquarium, though, the author added, allowed the creatures of the oceans to be examined for the first time. Just as the author of the 1852 article above emphasized, yet with greater specificity regarding chemical transfer, this writer explained that “[t]he principle upon which the Aquarium is constructed . . . [is] the mutual dependence of animal and vegetable life, the former supplying the carbonic acid [carbon dioxide] essential to the latter, and the latter the oxygen essential to the former.” This writer continued to list the types of animals that the aquarium allowed him to study – cephalopods, black gobies, strawberry crabs, sea mice, soldier crabs, and cockles.17
An 1855 article entitled “The Aquarium” also underscored its scientific utility, stating,
“The Marine Aquarium bids fair to supply the required opportunities of study, and to make us acquainted with the strange creatures of the sea, without diving to gaze on them.”18 Aquariums
16 Bailey, J. W., "Observations on a Newly Discovered Animalcule," American Journal of Science and Arts 15, no. 45 (May 1853): 341. 17 "Customs and Manners Under the Water," Littell's Living Age 6, no. 536 (August 26, 1854): 414. 18 "The Aquarium," Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (July1, 1855): 302. 237 were used to study the behavior of “water-spiders.”19 They were used to examine the interconnected ecological issues of overcrowding, disease, respiratory gases, and fish-plant health.20 Aquariums were used to demonstrate how starfish devour their oyster prey.21 And they were used to advance medical science by providing a conservatory for leeches.22 Scientific questions surrounding early aquariums filled the journals, magazines, and newspapers of the
1850s.
Parlor aquariums infatuated publics around the Atlantic Ocean. As one article put it,
“[t]he aquarium . . . [was] a common source of amusement and instruction.”23 As another stated, it was “the toy of the day.”24 And as a newspaper of Trenton, New Jersey, announced, “The
Aquarium epidemic has got into Germany. It is undoubtedly one of the most laudable rages of the last few years.”25 Parlor aquariums were not just symbols of upper class wealth; they were also desired items for the middling and lower classes. Aquariums gripped the imagination of every sector of society. They were not just bought, sold, and shipped by genteel America; they could also be cheaply put together by those of moderate income. According to one article, all one needed to build an aquarium were the basic supplies of glass, wood, and screws. In two pages, this article gave step-by-step instructions on how to assemble a plebeian parlor aquarium. To supply the aquarium with aquatic residents, the author suggested attaching a net to a walking stick and catching insects or shellfish from a local pond.26 As soon as parlor aquariums were built in mass, they were immediately put toward scientific ends, as well as for the advancement of public
19 "A Spider-Tank," Littell’s Living Age 19, no. 709 (December 26, 1857): 788. 20 "Marine and Fresh Water Aquariums," Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine 56 (January, 1858): 51. 21 "The Star-Fish and the Polyp," Friends' Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal 11, no. 31 (April 10, 1858): 494. 22 Allchin, Alfred, "On the Construction and Management of Aquaria for the Preservation of Leeches," American Journal of Pharmacy 4, no. 3 (May, 1856): 222. 23 "Aquarium," American Journal of Pharmacy (March ,1858): 181. 24 "Aquariums-- No. 1," Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine 54 (June, 1857): 525. 25 "The Aquarium Epidemic," Daily State Gazette and Republican, (January 23, 1858): 1. 26 "Aquariums-- No. II," Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine 55 (July, 1857): 45. 238 knowledge. Their popularity within American material culture in the 1850s marked an important chapter in the history of science, generally, and the history of marine biology and aquatic ecology, specifically. They also created a space within American culture for larger aquariums that could excite the zoogoing multitudes. However, before public aquariums could excite anyone, they and their environments had to be first constructed. And this proved a monumental task.
The Aquarium of the National Zoological Park: Building (Marine) Environments
At the height of the aquarimania surrounding parlor aquariums in the 1850s, and as the first public aquariums were opening in New York and Boston, the Smithsonian Institution, in
1857, briefly supported its own public aquarium. Little is known about this aquarium, for no record of it exists within the Smithsonian Institution Archives. However, a few publications in
1857 and 1858 mentioned the opening of an aquarium, somewhere within the Institution, that was
“simply a glass tank, erected on a table, and filled with sea-water, in which flourish marine plants and animals without any aid, or even changing the water.” This aquarium’s environment, slightly more complex than the one described of parlor aquariums above, consisted of a floor of “silver sand, coarse sand and pebbles” and a “mass of rock” that provided shelter to three hundred specimens, representing “thirty-eight species of fishes, molluscae, crustacea, and polyps.”
Apparently, crabs, jellyfish, seahorses, and a single flounder were among the creatures housed in the encasement, which appeared to be an aquarium halfway between the standard parlor aquarium and the large public aquarium that the Smithsonian Institution would support within the National
Zoological Park.27 What happened to this aquarium-in-transition remains a mystery. Either the
Civil War distracted its keepers, the salinized water became too murky to support life since it was never changed, or the three hundred inhabitants became embroiled in a high-casualty Darwinian
27 “The Smithsonian Aquarium at Washington,” Scientific American 13, no. 15 (December 19, 1857): 113. 239 war of their own. Behind the glass of early aquariums, Nature’s economy proved difficult to model, remaining only a chimerical ideal refracting in a submerged, artificial environment.
Four decades later, the Smithsonian Institution received a second chance at successfully running an aquarium. By peering into the aquarium of the National Zoological Park, this section will discuss the first important dynamic to the creation of zoo exhibits—the establishment of environmental networks, or, more precisely, networks of environmentalia, that is to say, networks that bought, sold, and exchanged the living and nonliving objects essential to building the environments of the zoological park. Public aquariums differed from their parlor predecessors in many ways, yet both types built marine environments with a parallel structure. Public aquariums everywhere, like parlor aquariums everywhere, required water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments. Each of these characters represented one of the classical elements of the built aquatic environments of aquariums. However, attaining these materials never was a foregone conclusion.
Frank Baker and the National Zoological Park had to curiously seek and creatively find these elements, establishing new networks that complemented and supported the American animalia and international exotic animal trades that brought animals to the zoo in the first place. The networks forged by Frank Baker and the National Zoo became more coherent, dependable, and efficient over the first decade of the aquarium’s history. These networks also became increasingly far-reaching, supporting the environments of private and public aquariums and government sponsored fisheries around the world. Deconstructing the built environments of the National
Zoo’s aquariums will salvage a story drowned in the past—the story of how backwoods fishermen, ocean-bound sailors, broke object dealers, aquarium directors, Floridian entrepreneurs, boardwalk gamblers, seaweed collectors, as well as a long list of aquatic actors from seahorses to eels to dog fish shaped the vicissitudes of the Smithsonian’s first successful aquarium. By briefly examining the water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments of the National Zoo’s aquarium, this
240 section, through synecdoche, will not only represent the processes of supporting aquariums elsewhere, but will, more importantly, underscore the processes of supporting all zoo exhibits.
The elements needed to build an environment for muskox, snakes, waterfowl, and pachyderms, differed greatly from the classical elements of aquariums, yet the networks established to collect the needed environmentalia for any given exhibit appear remarkably similar to the ones revealed below.
------
After the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, the U.S.
Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries kindly donated to the National Zoological Park the tanks used for the exposition’s fish display. In 1897, the zoo, which had neither an aquarium nor funds to build an aquarium building, placed these tanks temporarily into a shed that served previously as a makeshift carpenter workshop.28 Placing animals into ramshackle buildings like this one was commonplace procedure in 1897, for Congress did not allocate its zoo enough financial support to build proper animal houses, appropriating $57,000 to the zoo that year. Even though this figure marked the highest appropriation received since legislators first deliberated about the zoo’s establishment, $57,000 was barely enough to keep the animals healthy in the buildings in which they currently lived. It surely was not enough to build real animal houses. For the sake of comparison, around the same time, the Pittsburgh Zoo devoted $200,000 to buildings alone. The new zoo in New York City (the Brooklyn Zoo) dedicated $125,000 to readying the grounds of their zoo and $250,000 to constructing animal houses and exhibits.29 The zoo’s animals surely could have been housed in safer, cleaner, and more aesthetically intriguing buildings, but the zoo
28 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 1; Baker to Mr. Geo. H. Selkirk, 20 December 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 14. In this letter, Baker recounted, unofficially, the history of the aquarium for Selkirk’s benefit. Selkirk was the Secretary of the Park Commissioners of Buffalo, New York, who wanted advice about how to start an aquarium. 29 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1897, 5. 241 needed money. Secretary Samuel P. Langley found the situation deplorable, complaining, in
1898, that “[n]o grant has ever been approved for any permanent structure for the animals in the
Park, other than the small Animal House and the log cabin for the elks. Nearly all animals after eight years are still sheltered in temporary sheds which are rotting and ready to fall.” The next year, as the tanks of the Department of Fish and Fisheries began attracting zoogoers’ attention, the funding situation worsened as Congress reduced the appropriation to $55,000, of which
$5,000 would be earmarked for laying a driveway.30 The aquarium emerged in an all but ideal financial situation, but how could a zoo turn down free fish tanks?
Despite the substandard environment within which the zoo’s first aquarium was situated, no other exhibit, in the words of Langley, attracted “more attention or interest than this [one].”31
As already demonstrated almost a decade earlier in the Department of Living Animals, closed and crumbling quarters did not keep the schools of zoogoers from flooding into the confines of a popular animal display. The donated tanks, with beautifully hand-crafted Georgia pine framing, filled the room, and each was lifted for display as it rested upon posts, placed into the floor of the shed, similarly carved from yellow pinewood.32 These aquaria, at first, were fairly inexpensive; only $200 was spent on their upkeep during the first full year of their tenancy within the carpenter shed. They were also fairly simple to maintain. In 1898, the Civil Service Commission held a competitive examination for the purpose of finding a qualified person to manage the affairs of the aquarium.33 The person appointed was D. C. Turner, a man of humble origins, neither professor nor scientist, but a local man with hands-on expertise in collecting specimens, a man who can be credited with the early success of the aquarium. Turner did not always transition well into the
30 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1898, 1. 31 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1898, 3. 32 Baker to Mr. Geo. H. Selkirk, 20 December 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 14. 33 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 1. 242 overly deferential and hierarchical world of the Smithsonian, occasionally neglecting to refer to his superiors by their proper titles. Nonetheless, he almost single-handedly acquired and cared for all the marine animals that found their way into the aquarium.34 Even though, at one point,
Turner’s lack of academic credentials threatened his job when Baker, in 1902, courted an ichthyologist to become the manager of the aquarium, he held onto his leadership position until he left the Smithsonian for unknown reasons sometime in 1905.35 For the early years of the aquarium, D. C. Turner got his hands wet as he collected specimens, cared for fish, and operated as a go-between linking Frank Baker with the actors of all sorts of aquatic environmentalia networks. Turner was considered the keeper of the aquarium, and was eventually given one helper to assist in aquarial matters.36
In total, the Department of Fish and Fisheries gave the National Zoo twenty-eight tanks, but due to the lack of space, only sixteen of these were set up in the shed. The two longest tanks were fourteen feet long; the others, either seven or five feet in length. All of the tanks were three
34 Baker to Mr. D. C. Turner, 17 May 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. In this letter Baker wrote the following to Turner: “I have observed that when you send communications requiring my attention you frequently address them either to Mr. A. B. Baker or simply “to the office.” You are directed to hereafter address such communications to Dr. Frank Baker, Superintendent, National Zoological Park. You are not authorized to leave the Park, during working hours, without permission duly asked and obtained.” D.C. Turner to Baker, 18 May 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. In this letter, Turner acknowledges all Baker’s criticisms and apologizes for his behavior. On several occasions, throughout correspondence between these two men, issues of deference seem to be lingering in the subtext. Turner often did as he pleased, when he pleased. He did, however, always accomplish tasks assigned to him. 35 Baker to Professor H. A. Surface, 13 April 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 14. A series of letters exist between Baker and Surface, who was a professional ichthyologist. Baker really wanted to hire Surface in order to place a “man of science,” so to speak, in charge of the aquarium. Langley, however, disagreed with Baker—possibly just to prevent Baker from exercising authority in managerial decision- making. Practical issues of wages also obfuscated the whole issue. Baker to Mr. J. C. Robinson, 13 May 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 8. This letter alludes to Turner’s absence, yet it is unclear whether Turner left his job on his own volition or whether he was dismissed or fired. 36 Baker to Mr. Geo. H. Selkirk, 20 December 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 14. While Baker managed the aquarium and established most of the relationships needed to create the aquarium, D. C. Turner did, in fact, do almost all the day-to-day chores associated with operating an aquarium. These day- to-day operations can be seen explicitly in a work journal that Turner kept. It can be found in Box 3 of Record Unit 74. This journal provides details about running an aquarium, including information about food purchased, the temperature of water in the tanks, and the levels to which the tanks were filled every day. 243 feet high. The back glass of these tanks curved inward, creating an aquarium space that was wider at the top (five feet) than at the bottom (two feet). The curved glass would also have refracted incoming light, causing it to glimmer and speckle through the water. In addition to these sixteen tanks, the zoo also ordered an extra tank constructed with the following dimensions: twelve-feet long, five-feet high, and six-feet wide (at both top and bottom). This tank, encasing 360 cubic feet, became the largest tank in the crowded aquarium. All tanks, resting on Georgian pine posts and foundations, were also fittingly built of cypress wood, a material evolved perfectly to last in wet environments.37 Such was the surrounding environment which encased the built environments of the aquariums. These aquarial environments brought together water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments. Each of these needed to be supplied, and this need led to the creation of new trade networks that served to build the environments of the National Zoo’s aquariums and meet the challenges posed by those environments as they surfaced.
------H2O ------
The aquarium’s first tanks contained fresh water and freshwater fish alone. At first, this water was simply supplied by city water mains; however, since it frequently became turbid, alum filters were soon used for purification. The basic technology employed in supporting fresh water fish, though, possessed an inherent danger—salt. Alum filters required constant surveillance, for their use increased the likelihood of double sulphate salts seeping into the water and killing the fresh water fish.38 To address this problem, in 1899, two wells were dug near the Rock Creek, and a hydraulic pump was used to direct this water, through recently-laid pipes, to the aquarium. The water of the Rock Creek proved cleaner than city water until Washington built a general filtration
37 Baker to Mr. Geo. H. Selkirk, 20 December 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 14. 38 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 1. 244 plant. Then, the water source switched back to the public city water.39 Manipulating and altering the built macro-environments of the entire zoological park enabled fish to survive in the micro- environments of that zoo’s aquariums.
By 1899, both Secretary Samuel P. Langley and Frank Baker hoped to incorporate sea life into their aquarium. Indeed, only then, could the National Zoological Park boast a legitimate aquarium, one that could be recognized throughout the United States. Salt water, however, proved to be a difficult liquid to obtain in large quantities. Those who owned small parlor aquariums often purchased seawater stored in milk-cans and sold in local stores or through nearby seashore merchants. This method of obtaining seawater, though, was impractical for large aquariums. In
November, 1899, Frank Baker typed the following note to Langley:
I wish to ask you to consider whether some special arrangement cannot be made, more practical than the supply of water from milk-cans, for which cans you ask me to appropriate $140. I will do so if you still advise it; but I should be glad to know if, in view of the coming demand for relatively large supply of salt water, some method costing more perhaps immediately, but decidedly cheaper in the end, cannot be provided; such as for instance, the possible provision of light tanks, which could be hauled on the cars directly from the Potomac to the Chevy Chase road entrance and there either wagoned down or piped down to the aquarium. If we were never to have more than the present small tank, this system of milk-cans might do: it will almost certainly be insufficient when we come to provide, as I hope we will need to provide, ten times the present quantity of water.40
Baker’s vision of transporting large quantities of saltwater eventually reached fruition, and when it did, the feat demanded public attention. Sometime in the winter of 1902, The Washington Times published “Sea Water for the Zoo.” Even though many zoogoers believed seawater was piped from either the Atlantic coast or the Chesapeake directly to the aquarium (an idea apparently not too outrageous since Baker considered it three years earlier), the permanent method established depended on tanks and wagons. Large tanks of seawater would be carried by schooners and
39 “Aquarium, 1980;” Baker to Mr. Geo. H. Selkirk, 20 December 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 14. 40 Baker to Langley, 17 November 1899, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 245 sloops and delivered to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, near Norfolk. There, the water from the tank would be transferred into ten to twelve- gallon vessels and placed aboard wagons and carried to the zoo.41 Occasionally, D. C. Turner himself would collect his own seawater while traveling to
Florida and New Jersey for animal or plant specimens, but rarely was this the case.42
Seawater surprisingly stayed fresh for a long time if kept in a cool place. Transportation and storage rarely posed any threat to the vitality of the water. On average, the aquarium water was changed twice every month, and in order to ensure a dependable and efficient supply, the seawater of the aquarium was contracted out for the best price. Through the aquarium’s first years, this contract was usually won by an oysterman, fisherman, or boater from eastern
Virginia.43 To further guarantee the stability of the aquarium’s water and thus guarantee the safety of its marine-animal investments, the newest and most accurate salinometers were kept on hand in order to measure a tank’s salinity.44 The aquarium also stored bags of salt, gathered from
Turk’s Island (now, known as Salt Cay, part of the British Turks and Caicos Islands territory, north of Haiti), in case the salinity of a tank needed slightly adjusted for whatever reason.45
Rarely, though, did the aquarium use artificially made seawater, for, as Baker once put it, “this substitute is not satisfactory for keeping fish.” Only one European aquarium (probably the one in
Naples, Italy) was successful in using artificial seawater, but this success required employing a professional chemist as a full-time water-maker.46 Finally, like fresh water tanks, saltwater tanks possessed pumps; however, these pumps, along with the piping, valves, and other metal
41 “Sea Water for the Zoo” (The Washington Times, Unknown Date, 1902 (?)), Scrapbook 1896-1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 42 Wm. Googhegan to Frank Baker, June 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 11. 43 Ibid. 44 Baker to Tagliabue, 28 July 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 45 Baker to Messrs. Alexander Kerr, Bro. & Co., 27 December 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 10. Many orders for “Turk’s Island” salt exists in Boxes 55 and 56 in the above Record Unit. Salt Cay played an important and interesting role in the salt trade of the early 20th century and would make an interesting study in its own right. 46 Baker to Mr. C. W. Parker, 13 April 1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 12. 246 apparatuses were carefully built with materials that would not react chemically to salt, for neglecting to consider chemical reactions was one of the leading causes of fish death in early aquarium ventures.47 While the top aquariums of the world at Plymouth, Naples, and Berlin, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, began using self-sustaining closed circulation systems that circulated the water for an entire year before needing replaced, such an expensive and expansive system was never installed in the National Zoological Park.48
All this meant that the zoo’s aquarium was high maintenance in regards to its most important resource— water. Even though D. C. Turner and Frank Baker seemed to easily stabilize saltwater for their fish, attaining water, disposing of water, and replacing water became an unceasing expense and chore, placing structural limits on the size of the Aquarium and its multiple aquaria tanks. The water always needed to be just right, and D. C. Turner had to discover the exact amount of air and salt that the water required. If even just a little too much air was pumped into a tank, air bubbles could stick to the fish, possibly causing their eyes to protrude too far from their heads, leading to their death.49
Concern about seawater represented an investment in the lives of saltwater fish. The more stable the water, the longer the fish lived. D. C. Turner echoed this assertion, penning to Baker in
1901, “Now Dr. . . . I would suggest that the balance of the aquarium be set up . . . I do believe if
I could have the salt water as I wish it I could keep the fishes much longer time than I do at present.”50 In many respects, such reasoning is common sense. Saltwater fish lived in and depended completely upon saltwater. Therefore, a successful aquarium always needed a stable supply of water on hand. Common sense, though, historians discover frequently, is not always easy to put into action. In order to obtain water for its fish, the National Zoological Park tapped
47 Baker to Mr. C. W. Parker, 13 April 1907. 48 C. H. Townsend to Frank Baker, 15 April 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 13. 49 Baker to Mr. Richard Rathbun, 17 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 11. 50 D.C. Turner to Dr. Frank Baker, 17 March 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 11. 247 into the water supply of both the city of Washington and the Virginian coast. It established an infrastructure to ensure the steady procurement of this resource, ushering oystermen, fishermen, boaters, and wagon drivers into the zoo enterprise. It created a method to guarantee the replacement of water, requiring the labor of new zoo employees. It built aquariums and aquarium parts that could last in submerged environments. And it accumulated the knowledge assembled and lessons learned through aquarium-building already done elsewhere in the world. Once the aquarium of the National Zoological Park secured a water supply, it could introduce plants and animals into the tanks.
------PLANTS ------
Once the National Zoo’s aquariums could be filled with ocean water, sea plants and animals could be placed into the aquariums as well. Of the five types of inhabitants that made up aquarial environments—water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments—the plants seemed to be the easiest to gather. The marine plants purchased for the aquarium were usually just described monolithically as “seaweed;” however, this group, in reality, represented a wide diversity of marine algae, ranging in color from red to brown to green. Seaweed, like saltwater, was usually purchased from the Virginian coast, especially in the early years of the aquarium’s existence.
Throughout these years, Frank Baker often paid J. T. Boyhan of Phoebus, Virginia, to send seaweed to the National Zoo. Boyhan, most likely a local fisherman, frequently found a “nice lot of sea-weed [containing] . . . as much variety as possible in shape and color,” and he would ship it to the zoo in metal tubs.51 These tubs needed to be filled with seawater and covered with a
“durable but not too thick” cloth; otherwise the seaweed would not survive transport.52 Overall, though, this process proved fairly simple and straightforward. When the aquarium needed more
51 Baker to Mr. J. T. Boyhan, 8 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 15. 52 Baker to Mr. T. M. Boyhan, 23 March 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 5. Baker to Mr. R. H. Hegan, 6 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 248 seaweed, Baker would write to Boyhan requesting another shipment. A few days later, new plants for the aquaria would be ready. Only the occasional hurricane or northeaster could delay this process.53
Sometimes, Frank Baker would purchase seaweed from a marine shells and coral collector in Florida, rather than from Boyhan, in hopes of gathering marine plants that did not typically grow along the Atlantic coast of Virginia. Floridian coasts possessed a greater diversity of seaweeds, and Baker always emphasized that “the more brilliantly colored kinds would be preferable.”54 Furthermore, the winter season in Virginia usually killed local seaweed, forcing
Baker to find marine plants from further south between October and March.55 Yet, usually, if
Baker desired seaweeds from Florida, he would simply instruct D. C. Turner to gather some while on a trip collecting marine animals.56 It made more sense to utilize a zoo employee already on a trip for the zoo to collect plants than to hire a third party to do so.
Baker soon discovered, though, that not all seaweeds from Florida could survive in aquarium tanks, for some of the waters around Florida were not pure salt water, but were brackish—for example, the waters of Biscayne Bay.57 In fact, another Florida contact informed
Baker that most of the seaweeds around and north of the Biscayne Bay were only dark mosses, not the flamboyant marine plants needed for aquariums. This person suggested that Baker solely seek seaweeds from around Miami and the Florida Keys, which Baker learned to do when wanting seaweeds that Boyan could not collect from Virginia.58 In addition to retrieving them from the Virginian and Floridian coasts, Baker also bought seaweed from the New York
53 J. T. Boyhan to Dr. Frank Baker, 7 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 15. 54 Baker to Mr. Gilbert S. Warner, 6 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3; G. S. Warner to Dr. Frank Baker, 12 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 55 Baker to Mr. R. H. Hegan, 6 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 56 Baker to Mr. D. C. Turner, 6 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 57 R. H. Hegan to Dr. Frank Baker, 14 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 58 J. J. White to Dr. Frank Baker, 13 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 249
Aquarium, packed alongside the primary objects of purchase—marine animals and corals.59
Frequently, seaweed could be purchased from the same venders that sold saltwater fish. It made sense financially to purchase marine plants with fish when possible. For this reason, seaweed also arrived to the National Zoo from the U.S. Fish Commission’s Station in Gloucester,
Massachusetts, packed alongside sea anemones.60
Seaweed was fairly easy to procure. One obvious reason for this was that it only needed to be gathered, not caught. Therefore, anyone who spent a significant amount of time working along the shore could make a quick buck by harvesting some seaweed and selling it to a zoo that lacked its own shoreline. Another reason for the simple purchasing of seaweed, though, has to do with the function attributed to marine plants in aquarium-building, namely, as explicated in a letter from Baker to D. C. Turner, “to decorate our . . . aquarium tanks.”61 Seaweed was purchased to visually enhance the aquarium and to situate its fish and animals into an aquatic environment that looked natural and realistic. The seaweeds themselves were never the center of attention within the aquariums, and therefore, the specific types and species of seaweeds showcased was never a concern. They merely served as props around which the real protagonists of the aquarium could swim. Therefore, to a certain extent, for the purposes of the National Zoo’s aquariums, seaweed was, in many senses, simply seaweed. Any would do. Brightly colored and interestingly shaped seaweed took preference, but all seaweed played the same aesthetic role, encouraging zoogoers to believe that they were gazing into real aquatic environments.
Of course, in actuality, seaweed played far more than an aesthetic role within aquariums.
The aquarium literature, even regarding early parlor aquariums, had long acknowledged the ecological function of seaweed within aquariums. By consuming carbon dioxide and emitting
59 Baker to Mr. D. C. Turner, 19 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 60 Baker to Mr. C. G. Corliss, 19 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 61 Baker to Mr. D. C. Turner, 6 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 250 oxygen, marine plants helped to provide a self-sustaining chemical balance within an aquarium, making up for the deficiencies of the manmade pumps that also circulated liquids and gasses.
Surely Frank Baker and D. C. Turner were aware of this important ecological role that seaweed played in aquarium environments, but this knowledge just meant that their aquariums needed seaweed of some sort. Whether they purchased eelgrass, bull kelp, palm kelp, sea lettuce, or sea grapes did not matter. All underwent photosynthesis. All turned the exhalations of fish into a fresh supply of oxygen. And all brightened and decorated the aquariums. Frank Baker and the
National Zoological Park reached to the shores of Virginia, Florida, and Massachusetts, as well as to the built environment of the New York Aquarium to retrieve seaweed for the new aquarium in
Washington. Each of the animal exhibits of the National Zoo possessed its own type of
“seaweed,” living entities whose primary purpose was to surround the animals on display, giving them a “world” to exist in while simultaneously disguising both the animal’s captivity and the artificiality of their built environments. The seaweed of the aquarium, the trees of the monkey exhibits, the pond of the hippopotamus enclosure, and the grasses of the bison pastures all played similar performative roles.
------ANIMALS ------
If seawater stretched the aquarium of the National Zoological Park to the shores of
Norfolk, Virginia, and seaweed to Phoebus, Virginia, Miami, Florida, and Gloucester,
Massachusetts, the animals of the aquarium connected the zoo to rest of the world. Not all of the animals dropped into the NZP’s aquaria, though, were necessarily the protagonists that swam among a swaying backdrop of seaweeds and marine plants. In general, the aquarium brought three types of aquatic animals together within the same environment—protagonist animals, feed animals, and decorative animals. The last two of these groups played supportive roles for the protagonist animals that captured the most public attention. Each of these three animals, however,
251 proved crucial to the built environments of aquariums, and each connected the National Zoo, through different trade networks, to the rest of the world.
At first, before the aquarium’s saltwater tanks were established, it specialized mostly in the freshwater fishes that could be caught in nearby lakes, rivers, and streams. These freshwater fish included specimens like large-mouthed black bass, yellow perch, crappie, common sunfish, long-eared sunfish, stone rollers, mullets, white catfish, Mississippi catfish, freshwater ells, gar pikes, and German carps.62 These local fish were often caught by D. C. Turner himself, who was sent by Frank Baker, on collecting expeditions to the nearby Potomac River or other close
Virginia water bodies.63 Other times, Baker would instruct Turner to travel to Piney Point and
Point Lookout, Maryland to catch sheepshead.64 Such trips represented a large portion of Turner’s job description, and he seemed to enjoy the meandering errands that an aquarium required.
Usually, the zoo rented a boat, paid for an oarsman, hired a helper, and allowed Turner to just lean back and fish for specimens to place in the aquarium. What a job!
Not long after the aquarium was established, though, salt water began pouring into the aquarium tanks, and saltwater fish were needed to fill them. No aquarium could attract the attention of a nation by displaying the fish it caught and ate every day. Saltwater protagonists were essential, but these protagonists were easier to envisage than to acquire. Frank Baker tried several methods to obtain ocean animals. First, he continued to send Turner on jaunts to nearby ocean waters, for example, directing him in April, 1900, to spend the week in Fortress Monroe,
Virginia, at the southern tip of the Virginian Peninsula, to catch saltwater fish.65 Second, to acquire specific high profile ocean animals, Baker and those associated with the aquarium sought
62 Richard Rathbun to Colonel J. E. Jones, 30 July 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 63 Baker Mr. D. C. Turner, 16 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 11. This letter stated, “You are hereby directed to proceed at once to Old Point and Norfolk, Va., and vicinity, for the purpose of procuring specimens of fish for the aquarium of the National Zoological Park.” Many short directives to Turner, for the purpose of collecting freshwater fish, fill the archival collections listed above. 64 Baker to Mr. D. C. Turner, 15 September 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 10. 65 Baker to D. C. Turner, 14 April 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 252 out and organized specific transactions for specific specimens. For example, to obtain an octopus,
Baker wrote to E. E. Saunders & Co., a fishing operation based in Pensacola, Florida, about the likelihood of a fisherman catching one in their nets and sending it north to the capital.66 These transactions could take less direct routes too. For example, Anton Dohrn, Director of the
Zoological Station in Naples, Italy, informed Richard Rathbun, Acting Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, that his friend who was a captain of a steamship would gladly send the
National Zoo an octopus caught off deck.67 Like octopi, seahorses also captured the public imagination, and Baker tried buying them from the brother of a Brooklyn shopkeeper that served his acquaintance.68 Seahorses, though, were quite difficult to collect. They were occasionally procurable in Norfolk, Virginia, but even there, their numbers could never be predicted from season to season. In addition to the issue of scarcity, seahorses proved fragile, vulnerable to shipment, even over short distances.69 Octopi and seahorses, the heroes of the ocean. As soon as salt water tanks were established, Baker immediately tried to buy these animals himself, making individual offers to those wading around American coasts. The third way that Baker tried to acquire saltwater fish was through trade. Since the aquarium possessed a plethora of freshwater fish, Baker would offer these to individuals like Colonel J. E. Jones of the U.S. Navy in exchange for Bermuda fish, for example, caught along naval voyages.70 The aquarium tried to catch, purchase, and trade for saltwater animals as soon as it could support them in their tanks.
However, none of these three methods of procurement worked satisfactorily. Throughout the aquarium’s existence, animals would occasionally be obtained in all three of these ways, but rarely in large numbers. For a burgeoning aquarium that needed a lot of fish and a lot of diversity,
66 Baker to Messrs. E. E. Saunders & Co., 14 March 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 67Richard Rathbun to Professor Doctor Anton Dohrn, 8 March 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 68 Baker to Mr. Washington I. Dellyse, 5 May 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 69 Baker to Mr. Richard Rathbun, 1 April 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 11. 70 Richard Rathbun to Colonel J. E. Jones, 30 July 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 253 all in a timely manner, trying to hunt down an individual octopus, seahorse, and Bermuda fish one at a time propelled the zoo into uncharted waters. Finding someone with an eel when one was wanted, or trying to catch a dogfish when one was desired always required a large degree of luck.
If the aquarium was to be successful, the National Zoological Park would need to fashion new connections in the exotic animal trade, if not for any other reason than to ameliorate a
Smithsonian secretary who kept nagging D. C. Turner about the imbalance between freshwater and saltwater fish.71 To address the problem of stocking the aquarium with ocean animals, Baker needed to find venues that distributed these animals in bulk, places he could consistently depend on for saltwater creatures. He discovered one such venue in Young’s Ocean Pier in Atlantic City,
New Jersey.
John Lake Young, a leading entertainment and boardwalk mogul along the United States’ eastern seaboard at the turn of the twentieth century, bought a pier and entertainment pavilion in
Atlantic City in 1891. Soon, he transformed this purchase into a Boardwalk Empire. Vacationers traveled to Young’s Ocean Pier to watch theater performances, listen to music, gamble, dance, fish, swim, and watch the new game of basketball. In 1905, Young built a new pier that was
1,775 feet long and made of solid concrete. This new “Million Dollar Pier,” as it was called, included a new concert hall, theater, and aquarium. Young became far more than a tycoon and
71 D. C. Turner to Baker, 17 March 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 11. In this letter, Turner informed Baker that Langley wanted to see more saltwater fish in the aquarium. Also, this letter, written in a colloquial style riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors, not only demonstrates Turner’s unprofessional demeanor, but also underscores how the issue of water, saltwater fish, and procurement were all intertwined problems the aquarium needed to address. Turner, in his sloppy handwriting, reported to Baker, “The Secretary called at the fish house March 16th. Wanted to know why I had no crabs and other salt-water fishes . . . I told him the salt-water was in bad condition he wanted to know why it was in bad condition I told him it was only erected temporarily and he said I see he also said that he thought I did not have as good a showing of salt-water fishes as I did at first. Now Dr. L would suggest that the balance of the aquarium be set up and that would give more room for salt water and a complete overhauling of the salt-water system that I might try to keep the salt-water fishes and crustacea a longer time for we cannot get them in cold weather unless I go farther south and the farther I have to bring those animals the more difficult it is to get them to the aquarium alive. I do believe if I could have the salt water as I wish it I could keep the fishes much longer time than I do at present.” 254
Gilded Age entrepreneur.72 He also took great interest in marine life. His reputation apparently preceded him, and Frank Baker got wind of Young’s aquarium through an employee of the
Smithsonian Institution at the end of 1901.73 Immediately, Baker established contact with Young, and Young cordially made Baker feel “perfectly welcome” to any ocean animals Baker might want from his aquarium.74 These specimens were fairly priced, and all Baker had to do was send
D. C. Turner to Atlantic City to pick up the desired specimens. The National Zoo’s relationship with Young’s Ocean Pier blossomed, and soon many of the animals ending up in the aquarium could say that they had entertained both zoogoers and boardwalkers, both the masses of a nation’s capital and the gilded gamblers of a nation’s coast. Baker purchased many kinds of ocean animal protagonists from John Young and his enterprises. Not only did Baker buy animals from Young’s aquarium, but some of the fish were sent to Washington straight from the nets cast from the boats that docked at the pier.75 The first order demonstrated the number and diversity of ocean animals that could be gotten from Young—striped sea robin, sting ray, spade fish, sheepshead, bog shark, small red drum, horse shoe crab, devil-fish, cow nose ray, pompano, trigger fish, pilot fish, skate fish, rudder fish, and butter fish.76 These animals legitimated the National Zoo’s aquarium. The shimmering, silver bodies of the pompano, the zebra stripes of the pilot fish, the cartilaginous contortions of the ray, and the scuttlings of horse shoe crabs all enhanced the popularity of the
NZP’s aquarium. They were the lions and elephants of the continental shelf, most caught right offshore from Atlantic City.
72 Campbell, Ronald, "A Brief History of the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City," Suite101, Accessed July 4, 2013. http://suite101.com/article/a-brief-history-of-the-million-dollar-pier-in-atlantic-city-a323861. John Lake Young and his “Boardwalk Empire” deserve an historical study of its own. 73 Baker to Captain Young, 30 September 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12. 74 John L. Young to Frank Baker, 5 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12. 75 Baker to Mr. W. A. Watson, 13 May 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 8. W. A. Watson operated the aquarium at Young’s pier, so many of the communications were between him and Baker. 76 J. G. Traylor to Mr. Turner, 23 September 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12. 255
After Frank Baker established relations with Young’s Ocean Pier, he networked with another aquarium, one that would become an even more important supply center for the NZP’s aquarium. The New York Aquarium opened at Castle Garden in Battery Park, New York, in
1896. In 1902, the first significant transaction between the New York Aquarium and the National
Zoo’s aquarium was forged through a trade—fresh water fish for saltwater fish, one of the three methods of procurement that Baker first experimented with. In this trade, the zoo gave New York one leather carp, two mirror carp, twelve ring perch, eighteen crappie, eight mullets, seven stonerollers, and eleven long-eared sunfish in exchange for twenty-eight Bermuda fish, five groupie, six angelfish, three striped grunt, one trigger, two surgeon fish, two trinity fish, five gray snapper, two hunid, and two princess rock fish.77 By 1903, Baker and Townsend communicated frequently, and Baker began purchasing many ocean animals from the massive aquarium, depending on this aquarial hub more than any other. Unlike the fish and ocean animals acquired from Young’s Pier, however, the animals purchased from Townsend often originated from all over the country and world, functioning as the Tierpark Hagenbeck of the United States for aquatic animals. Fish from around the world found themselves in the New York Aquarium, and this entrepôt connected the NZP’s aquarium to the wide worlds of fish-, shark-, and crustacean- trading.
Of course, not all the ocean animals of the National Zoological Park were purchased from
New York and Atlantic City. Some were still caught and procured directly by D. C. Turner on fishing expeditions in Florida. Others were still procured through individual animal dealers and fishermen. For example, Baker often purchased moray eels and octopus from Captain William
Cuddy of Charleston, South Carolina, who seemed especially skilled at harvesting these
77 D. C. Turner to Frank Baker, 19 July 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 15. 256 invertebrates.78 Japanese gold fish on the other hand were always purchased from Henry Bishop, a Baltimore shopkeeper.79 Different traders, fishermen, and collectors had different niches and specialties. Based on a confusing calculus of economics, geography, and ecology, individuals along different segments of the American coastline could corner-the-market, so to speak, on unique live specimens. This trade in aquatic animals was gaining a life of its own. The National
Zoo’s aquarium was receiving many different types of specimens, from many different natural environments around the world. Yet all these diverse species met within the shared environments of the zoo’s aquarium.80
Not all the animals acquired for the aquarium, though, were the ocean protagonists featured behind its glass. Some of the animals played supportive roles. This did not mean they were any less important, however. Decorative animals commanded a lot of attention, especially from Samuel Langley who seemed to take special interest in making the aquarium beautiful for the public, even complaining in November of 1902 that the sea fans were not placed on the sloping backs of the tanks.81 Langley, Baker, Turner, and all associated with the aquarium of the
National Zoo put a lot of thought, energy, and anxiety into decorating the aquarium with
“animals” that, like the plants of the aquarium, would serve to situate protagonist animals into a realistic-looking aquatic environment. These “animals,” though, were often treated as or referred to as plants since they lacked the phenotypical traits usually associated with animals—eyes, mouths, etc. Decorative animals included a wide diversity of Gorgonians, corals, sea anemones, and sponges. Neither Gorgonians nor corals are singular, self-contained entities, but instead are
78 Baker to Captain William Cuddy, 10 April 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. Correspondence between Cuddy and Baker occur frequently in Boxes 55 and 56. This is one representative letter. 79 Henry Bishop to Dr. Frank Baker, 11 May 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. Correspondence between Bishop and Baker occur frequently in Boxes 55 and 56. This is also one representative letter. 80 This phrasing alludes to Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 81 Baker to Mr. S. P. Langley, 1 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 257 colonies of polyps that live collectively, symbiotically, with each other. Sea anemones, on the other hand, are actually singular polyps that often, with many tentacles, appear to be multiple beings. In addition to these, sponges are sessile animals that lack tissues and organs, gaining nourishment by maintaining unceasing water flow through their porous bodies. Some sponges actually possessed plant-like qualities since some underwent photosynthetic processes, but they all challenged commonplace notions of animality. Indeed all four of these invertebrates often escaped classification as “animal,” and within aquariums they functioned, in many ways, as
“charismatic plants” of sorts.
Their acquisition also proved difficult, in many ways more challenging than the acquisitions of many protagonist ocean animals. First, decorative animals were always difficult to ship due to their fragility. Coral and Gorgonians frequently broke during transport.82 Sea anemones and sponges, on the other hand, could only live in circulating water, so sitting in a crated and stagnant pool was often the cause of their demise.83 Sometimes they could be revived when placed into the aquarium, but usually a dead anemone resisted resurrection.84 Second, most of these brightly colored decorative animals could only be collected in large quantities in distant tropical waters. While some could be found along the American coastline, J. J. White of
Rockledge, Florida, advised that corals, sea fans, and other “curiosities” could only be purchased from the Bahamas.85 Decorative animals did not fare well during transport, and the distances they needed to travel to Washington were great. Despite these difficulties, Baker found avenues of supply for decorative animals by regularly communicating with many different types of people in southern Florida, who probably acquired decorative animals even further south. He ordered sea
82 Baker to Mr. R. R. Hegan, 9 September1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 83 James A. Smith to Frank Baker, 15 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 84 Baker to The Honorable George M. Bowers, 22 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 85 J. J. White to Dr. Frank Baker, 5 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 258 fans and corals from a Key West weather observer.86 He inquired about the price of sea fans from
G. W. Warner of Palma Sola.87 And he frequently depended on Robert Hegan, in charge of the
Royal Palm Gardens, for different assortments of corals and decoratalia.88 Baker also continued to utilize institutions that served as aquarial supply centers, hubs that collected decorative animals along with other marine creatures. For Gorgonians, corals, sea anemones, and sponges, these hubs included Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, the New York Aquarium, unsurprisingly, and the U.S. Fish Commission’s Station in Gloucester.89 Even though these animals passed through these aquarial marketplaces, just like the protagonist animals, most were probably first extracted from their natural environments by individuals sailing the tropical waters south of Florida. Their weathered hands formed an often overlooked, yet important, segment of the exotic animal trade, and they were crucially important in building the aquarium of the National Zoological Park, as well as other aquariums around the world.
The third and last type of animal that lived in the aquarium of the National Zoological
Park was the feed animal. In order to support life, Baker and the aquarium needed to secure a steady supply of fish to feed the protagonist animals. At first, and unsurprisingly, Baker instructed D. C. Turner to catch minnows in nearby streams.90 However, it soon became clear that the waters around the zoo and the fishing power of Turner would not alone be able to feed the mouths of the ever-expanding collection of fish. By December, 1901, Baker began shopping
86 Baker to Mr. W. U. Simons, 1 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 87 Baker to Mr. G. W. Warner, 1 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 88 Baker to Mr. Robert Hegan, 1 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. Correspondence between Bishop and Baker occur frequently in Box 56. This is one representative letter. 89 Baker to Mr. Frank A. Ward, 1 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2; Baker to Mr. C. G. Corliss, 19 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. Frank Baker did not always just order “coral” from venders. Sometimes, he was more specific. In the letter to Ward, Baker wrote, “The Park wants to get for use in decorating a couple of aquarium tanks some Gorgonias and other sea-fans. We can also use, perhaps, some corals such as the mushroom, brain coral, Astraea, Madrepora, palmata, etc. . . .” He also specified that he did not want coral larger than nine inches in diameter, nor sea fans that were longer than two feet, six inches. 90 D. C. Turner to Baker, 31 May 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 259 around for fish dealers that could handle the daily demand of the aquarium.91 Eventually, after purchasing fish from several dealers, he decided upon J. C. Robinson of Hampton, Virginia, for supplies of fish feed.92 While Turner still caught minnows, the fish being shipped as food for the aquarium included herring, menhaden, trout, bluefish, and butterfish.93 These fish were not only used to feed the aquarium inhabitants, but they were also used to feed other zoos animals. Baker learned that the aquarium always needed different types of feed fish on hand because the
“animals have developed a capriciousness in their appetite which has made it necessary to select fish with especial care.”94 While feed animals were usually dropped into the aquaria dead, not alive (with the exception of minnows and some living saltwater feed fish that were probably stored alive in a concrete tank, with a glass roof, that was built, in 1902 on the north side of the aquarium, for the purpose of storing saltwater), they played the most important role in the aquarium’s built environment, making life behind glass possible.95
The need for protagonist animals, decorative animals, and feed animals forced Frank
Baker to innovatively reach into waters far beyond the Rock Creek. Freshwater protagonists came from the nearby lakes and rivers of Virginia, but the true saltwater heroes came from around the world, funneled into the NZP’s aquarium through various way stations that met the demands of exploding aquarimania. Decorative animals often arrived in Washington through those same way stations, but no matter where they were purchased, they almost always originated in the tropical waters south of Florida. Feed animals came from either local, fresh waterways, or they were caught off the Virginian coastline. No matter where these animals were born or where their
91 Baker to Messrs. Odell Brothers, 18 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12; Baker to Messrs. Hurst and Fass, 18 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12; John W. Buchanan & Sons to Dr. Frank Baker, 28 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 12. 92 Baker to Mr. J. C. Robinson, 21 May 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. 93 J. C. Robinson to Baker, 12 May 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. 94 Baker to J. C. Robinson, 15 May 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. 95 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 3. 260 species could usually be found, they all shared the built environment of the aquarium. Like all zoo exhibits, the animals of the aquarium were acquired through the extensive networks of the animal trade, which by 1900 stretched across every corner of the globe, incorporating humans of all sorts—aquarium directors, naval officers, fishermen, weather observers, sailors, vacationers, and boardwalk tycoons.
------ROCKS AND SEDIMENTS ------
No aquarium environment, whether parlor or public, could be complete without rocks and sediments, so Baker had to acquire these too. Once, while travelling along the Hudson River in
New York, Baker visited the Soldiers Home in Irvington-on-Hudson and was so impressed by the calcareous tufa, a pervious and lightly-colored limestone, used in its design, that he ordered one ton of this rock for the aquarium.96 The lower Hudson was a hotbed for this type of porous limestone, also known as travertine, and when Baker needed more rocks for the aquarium, he would contact a rock dealer from that region.97 Travertine served as both an ideal decorative rock and a solid “sea floor” for the aquaria. In addition, Baker would brighten this rock base with colored marble stones, sold locally in Washington.98 In a similar manner, white quarts rock would be mixed into the bases of the aquaria, and silicified wood placed atop these rocks to conjure up images of either driftwood or sunken ships.99 Sediments, on the other hand, arrived to the NZP in the form of sand, usually ordered in large supply from Norfolk.100 Occasionally, specific requests were made for white sand that would look like that of the tropical beaches along which many of
96 Baker to Messrs. Lord & Burnham Co., 27 October 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 1. 97 Baker to Mr. Allen, 6 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 98 Baker to Washington Granite Monumental Co., 16 January 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 4. 99 Baker to Mr. C. H. Townsend, 2 November 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 10. 100 Baker to Norfolk Sand Company, 5 June 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 15. 261 the fish and decorative animals were gathered. This sand could also be used as a base for some of the bird cages.101
Aquarium-goers would rarely have commented on the rocks and sediments of the aquarium. These elements of built environments lay below perception. Their purpose was not only to provide a base at the floor of the aquarium in which plants could grow, upon which algae could stick, and along which fish could swim, but the rocks and sands of the aquarium were also meant to place the protagonist animals into a manmade world that resembled their natural environments. Like the water, plants, and animals of the aquarium, the rocks and sediments were environment-forming. Together, these elements modeled underwater nature. Individually as elements, water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments represented many species and types. None could be taken for granted when building an aquarium. Water, plants, animals, rocks, and sediments each have their own complex histories. Each connected Frank Baker, D. C. Turner, the
Smithsonian Institution, the National Zoological Park, the Washington public, and the nation, to peculiar environmentalia trade networks that reached not only to American shorelines, but also to the world’s oceans.
The aquaria, like all zoo exhibits and enclosures, were built environments, and the more they began to resemble “real” Nature, the more layered and alive they became—the more environmentalia they required.102 Frank Baker forged relations with unlikely individuals to gather the materials needed for his aquarium, and in so doing, he brought the world closer together.
Within the aquarium, seawater and sand from Norfolk, seaweed from Gloucester, minnows from the Potomac, sea anemones from the Bahamas, animals from around the world, and travertine from the Hudson River collided. Every zoo exhibit in every modern zoo served as a microcosmic
101 Baker to Messrs. R. H. Richardson & Son, 10 October 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 7. 102 Mitman, Gregg, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 262 stage upon which Alfred Crosby’s production of The Columbian Exchange could be reenacted with new characters and new plot twists.103 Zoo exhibits created new types of environments, formed from elements usually separated by continents and oceans. In zoos, unlikely actors found themselves living together. Zoo exhibits brought the world closer together, and they brought zoogoers closer to the world.
By peering into the aquarium of the National Zoological Park, we learn an important lesson about the environments and ecologies of zoos. Creating zoo exhibits required establishing networks of environmentalia. We only took a glimpse into some of these networks, but each was expansive, ushering thousands of unlikely human actors and innumerable numbers of plants and nonhuman animals into the public zoo movement, as well as other large scale zoological and capitalistic endeavors. Laboratories, fisheries, hotels, boardwalks, and bourgeois parlors all built aquariums, and all would have utilized similar networks when purchasing Gorgonians or octopus, for example. If canal, railroad, and communication networks built the American nation in the
1820s, as posited by historian Daniel Walker Howe, then, by the end of the century, networks like the ones described above supported the globalized America emerging into the twentieth century.104 Zoos and aquariums embodied the values of this new America. The significations inscribed into the idea of a zoological park by a globalizing United States led to the creation of a national zoo in the first place. In many ways, then, the peculiar (and usually overlooked) trade networks illuminated above can be viewed as symptoms of the United States’ new Gilded and
Progressive cultural projects. A fisherman could fetch high prices for a piece of coral only because this polyp colony was previously baptized with a globalizing Purpose.
103 Crosby, Alfred, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972). 104 Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 263
It must not be forgotten, however, that each of the elements used to build new zoo environments previously came from natural environments. And the vicissitudes of Nature sometimes exerted agency on human aquarium-building. Of course, weather influenced all types of collecting.105 Storms could stall any type of collecting errand. Climate and the wheel of the seasons also structured the rhythms of collecting. As climate systems cooled the waters of the northern hemisphere in the autumn and winter, living environmentalia needed to be procured from warmer waters. Furthermore, animals themselves shaped collecting practices. Many, for example, contested the power of collectors, proving difficult to locate or troublesome to capture.
Irascible animals fought back. Elusive animals vanished into depths and over horizons. Baker frequently received letters from collectors and fishermen about how a given species of animal, say octopus, had “been very scarce for the last two months.”106 Some ocean animals had been severely overfished by 1900, and their populations were greatly diminished. Others migrated according to patterns unknown to humans. In either scenario, the aquarium always existed, to a certain degree, at the mercy of Nature.
When looking at the aquarium of the National Zoological Park, we focused on the process of building a specific zoo environment. The next exhibits on our stroll through the
National Zoo will reveal the second important dynamic of the creation of zoo exhibits—that, no matter how built they were, no matter how much effort was spent in creating the perfect enclosure, zoo animals resisted and zoo enclosures changed. The National Zoological Park had to learn by trial and error how to circumvent some of the unforeseen hazards that accompanied the building of artificial environments. The animals of the zoo had evolved to survive in faraway environmental settings. Extracting animals from their natural habitats and placing them along the
Rock Creek inevitably presented challenges to animals and their bodies. To stay alive, animals
105 Wm Cuddy to Mr. Baker, 25 December 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 3. 106 Wm Cuddy to Mr. Baker, 12 April 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 6. 264 proved resilient and adaptable. Evolution did not stop at the zoo’s entrance. Yet the survival of animals within zoo environments was also the doing of human keepers, who studiously examined the living and the dead in order to learn how to maximize life. The next section will deemphasize the human trade networks used to initially form the built environments of the zoo and will instead focus on the role that zoo animals played in causing these built environments to change.
Furthermore, these next exhibits will self-reflexively highlight their own malleability. Zoo exhibits were constantly altered and adjusted as animals came and went.
------THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NATIONAL ZOO AQUARIUM ------
The aquarium of the National Zoological Park never became one of the grand aquariums of either the world or the United States. Surely, Secretary Samuel Langley had the highest hopes for the small aquarium along the Rock Creek. In 1902, after travelling around Europe, Langley hoped that the National Zoo could design an aquarium built in the image of the aquarium at
Naples, Italy. In fact, he seemed obsessed with the Naples Aquarium, writing to Baker, when he returned from Europe, “I saw nothing which impressed me so much as the fishes and marine life at the Naples Zoological Station.”107 He raved about Naples to Baker for months, frequently referring to it when micromanaging details about the aquarium.108 For Langley, the Naples
Aquarium was the Platonic ideal of aquariums. All aquarium-building projects needed to look at this beacon along the Tyrrhenian.
Even though Langley’s perfectionism surely aggravated Frank Baker, who was trying his best to acquire all the materials needed to form a proper aquarium in the NZP, the Superintendent also surely shared Langley’s dreams in creating a world class aquarium. Frank Baker was quite
107 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 14 October 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. 108 See, for example, S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 15 November 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 56, Folder 2. In this letter, Langley critiqued the budget proposal Baker created in regards to the aquarium. He told Baker to “refer” to the Naples catalogue. He told Baker that he might need to get supplies from Naples. And he informed Baker that some of the fish and animals that swam in the aquaria at Naples needed to be procured for the NZP’s aquarium. 265 knowledgeable about the greatest aquaria of Europe, and he frequently communicated with their directors. Besides the Naples Aquarium, other leading aquariums included ones in Amsterdam,
Paris, Berlin, and the famous Brighton Aquarium in London, with which Baker was especially familiar.109 Unlike these aquariums, though, the one crammed into a shed in the National
Zoological Park lacked sufficient funding from the beginning. Baker and Langley, though, had grandiose plans for their aquarium. As early as 1899, they made designs for a new building. The
National Zoo could not expect to host a world class aquarium from an old carpenter workshop, so
Baker and Langley hired architects that completed the official designs. And if their blueprints would have been put into action, the National Zoo could have boasted one of America’s leading public aquariums, like the ones established in New York and Detroit. This aquarium imagined would have been arranged around an intricately-designed central dome riddled with large windows that poured natural light into the tanks below.110 Featured on the main floor of the building would have been six large tanks for, respectively, whales or porpoises, sharks, sturgeon, sea turtles, West Indian seals, and manatees. Below the aquarium, there would have been a heating plant that warmed both the building and the waters within, and alongside the aquarium, there would have been two rooms built for keepers and one built for spare tanks.111 Situated around the central tanks for the largest of protagonists, would have been placed myriad smaller tanks, filled with an eclectic diversity of life. The building itself would have been so drowned in light that the aquarium-goer could not help but be carried away by the “illusion of . . . being under
109 Bashford, Dean, “Public Aquariums in Europe,” Popular Science Monthly 50 (November, 1896): 16, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 101, Folder 9. Most of this folder in the collection, presumably material collected by Baker himself, contains documents about the design of the Brighton Aquarium in London. 110 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 2. 111 “Memorandum as to requirements for a new aquarium building,” 14 March 1899, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 266 the general level of the water, or as if walking in a transparent tunnel under the sea.”112 However, reality prevented all these dreams from reaching fruition.
And the dead truth of the matter, a truth that kept determining the life of the aquarium, was that nothing could be done without the blessing of Congress. As The Washington Times heralded in 1899, “There are many kinds of people who are interested in the fish in special ways, but over and above all these stand the populace. It is the people that would be most keenly interested in the national aquarium. A visit to the great tank-house of a mammoth aquarium would be a source of amusement, instruction, and recreation.”113 And zoogoers indeed loved the zoo’s aquarium. Caught up in an aquarimania born decades earlier with the invention and mass sale of parlor aquariums, the zoogoers of Washington wanted their own public aquarium. Langley realized this when he described the aquarium as a “large interest” that “seem[ed] pressing.”114 At the same time, citizens of New York City were daily reading newspaper articles about their own aquarium, articles with titles like “Aquarium Eels of Most Ancient Lineage,” “The Black Bass and Her Young,” and “Rare Fish from Bermuda.”115 Washington, and the nation, wanted its own fish, gilled heroes that could swim from enclosed waters, to margined newsprint, into the endless
112 S. P. Langley to W. R. Emerson, Esquire, 15 March 1899, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 8. 113 “Collecting Rare Fish” (The Washington Times, August 20, 1899), Scrapbook 1887-1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. This article explained that “a national aquarium, well stocked with every obtainable specimen of fresh and salt water fish would engage the interest of almost everyone.” This included the ichthyologist. The article continued, “The ichthyologist who delights to study the ways and haunts of the finny tribes that infest the waters of American rivers and seas could not fail to find pleasure in observing all kinds and conditions of fish through the transparent sides of numerous aquaria. Then there comes the patient and devoted disciple of Izaac Walton, Prince of the Rod, eager to watch the manner in which the object of his desire, the succulent bass, the spotted trout, the soft-finned sunfish, or some other favorite fish cavort in the water. The epicure should not be forgotten. He may pride himself upon his ability to distinguish between the flavor of a Mississippi catfish and the ordinary Potomac species of the same genus, but his pleasures would not end there were he offered the opportunity to watch the striped and spotted beauties of river waters swimming in the aquarium tanks just as they do before they are hooked and netted for the markets of the country.” In this way, the aquarium of the National Zoo, just like the National Zoo itself, was advertised as a place for all people—individuals of science, sport, and business. 114 S. P. Langley to Doctor Frank Baker, 22 May 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 55, Folder 9. 115 “Aquarium Eels of Most Ancient Lineage” (The New York World, November 19, 1899), “The Black Bass and Her Young” (Unknown Newspaper, June 11, 1899), “Rare Fish from Bermuda” (Unknown Newspaper, July 19, 1899), Scrapbook 1887-1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 267 mindscapes that had been stretching, for a century, to accommodate more and more of life on earth. For a few years, District zoogoers’ wishes were granted. Despite the makeshift qualities of the National Zoo’s aquarium, the building became a leading attraction of the zoo.
However, no matter how much the public craved an aquarium, no matter how hard Frank
Baker and D. C. Turner worked, and no matter how many networks of environmentalia supported the aquarium, no expansions could happen without a Congressional appropriation. In 1901,
Congress was asked to approve $25,000 for a new building, but this request was denied. Later requests were also rejected. Improvements to the makeshift aquarium were made. Frank Baker did his best. In 1903, skylights were installed, increasing the amount of light in the old building.
The tanks were decorated as beautifully and intricately as possible, and they were, in fact, teeming with life. In many ways, the aquarium was truly a success. Nonetheless, an old carpenter workshop was no place for a national aquarium. In 1908, the foundation of the building began sinking. The walls, made temporarily out of Virginia pine, were beginning to rot. By 1909 or
1910, the building was no longer safe for either its human visitors or aquatic inhabitants, and the aquarium of the National Zoological Park was closed. Built environments needed maintained, and
Congress refused to maintain the walls that made the built environments of the zoo’s aquarium possible in the first place. The exact day or year that the aquarium shut its doors has evaporated into the winds of time. No records exist after 1909.116 Failed experiments often do not receive epitaphs. Yet, historians can still study their remains to learn that building zoo enclosures first required the creation of an environmentalia trade that brought the natural world and the human world closer together.
116 “Aquarium, 1980,” report authored by Sybil E. Hamlet and mailed to Dr. Theodore H. Reed, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 34, Folder 4, 3-4. 268
Animal Resistance and the Malleable Nature of Zoo Environments
Since the very beginning, the National Zoological Park needed to pay special attention to its environments. Usually, though, zoo animals captured the attention of zoogoers as the anthropomorphized protagonists that filled the pages of newspaper and magazines while their respective zoo environments remained hidden in the margins. However, this general trend was not always the hard and fast rule. Occasional publications did indeed marvel at zoo environments.
For example, an article published in the The Miami Herald entitled “National Zoo at Washington:
Is One of the Most Attractive and Interesting Institutions of that Wonderful City” gave its readers a panoramic glimpse of the zoo, calling attention, in the following order, to the NZP’s lion house, monkey house, bird house, antelope house, bear dens, wolf-fox-dog kennels, beaver and otter pools, water fowl ponds, elk enclosure, llama-camel-yak paddocks, and the cages “containing animals so hardened to changes of climate that they can remain out all winter.”117 In this way, by calling attention to the built environments (even emphasizing their builtness by referring to these environments solely as structures), The Miami Herald provided Floridians with an imaginative stroll through the national zoo that they themselves equipped with sea weed and sea anemones.
This article inversed the typical literary equation, making zoo environments its subject and zoo animals its subtext. Rhetorical strolls like this one had long appeared in publications concerning zoological gardens. Yet even though zoo inhabitants faded behind the places they inhabited, these places still appeared only simple and static. Sometimes, zoo exhibits were just that, oppressively simple, but in the case of the National Zoological Park and other modern zoos, the enclosures were becoming more dynamic, interacting with its animals in complex ways. Animals, in many ways, demanded that dynamism themselves, and to meet their demands, zoo environments became malleable.
117 "National Zoo at Washington: Is One of the Most Attractive and Interesting Institutions of that Wonderful City," Miami Herald, June 23, 1915, 6. 269
This section makes the simple, yet previously ignored, point that zoo animals served, with human architects, like Frederick Law Olmsted, as codesigners of their own enclosures.118
Zoo animals possessed needs, demands, tendencies, inclinations, natural behaviors, learned behaviors, tastes, and peculiarities of all sorts. In order to keep animals healthy, satisfied, and presentable, zoos needed to listen to their animals and meet their demands. Otherwise, these zoos would never transcend their menagerie predecessors. The problem, though, was that animals
“spoke” in unknown tongues. They asserted their agency in necessarily inhuman ways. Therefore, zoo leaders, keepers, and workmen needed to remain flexible, and zoo enclosures, plastic. For the
National Zoological Park to reach its goals and fulfill its destiny, it had to adapt to its inhabitants.
Certainly, the modern zoo remained a symbol of nationalistic and imperialistic power and human dominion over the natural world. However, the “reality” lying beneath the mimetic meanings that humans inscribed upon their zoos was that the animals, despite their captivity, held a partial dominion.
Zoo animals exerted their agency in many ways. When they escaped and attacked, newspapers publicized and popularized the ferociousness and unpredictability of wild animals.
Zoo keepers admitted their respect for and caution around these animals. And Gilded Age zoogoers collectively tipped their top hats to the animals that escaped out of captivity and into wild stories. However, animals did not need to run away in order to assert their agency. Zoo animals constantly made their voices heard. Even though the masses loved the roars of lions and
118 In 1890, Frederick Law Olmsted provided “preliminary counsel” for planning the National Zoological Park. Letters to and from Olmsted frequently appear throughout Record Unit 74, as he was occasionally solicited for advice. At the end of the nineteenth century, Olmsted was the leading landscape architect in the United States. Most famously, he was known for his work on Central Park. He also helped lay out the Central Park Zoo, the Capitol grounds of Washington, as well as the city streets of Washington. In addition, in 1890, Olmsted was busy planning the grounds of Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House near Asheville, North Carolina and designing Stanford University’s campus. Olmsted’s step-son, J. C. Olmsted, though, planned much of the National Zoo and remained closely involved throughout the 1890s. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1890, 6-7. For more on Frederick Law Olmsted see Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (New York: Scribner, 1999). 270 the trumpetings of elephants, they actually rarely heard these animals’ demands. When animals forced the zoo to alter their environments, these modifications were almost always remembered as products of human ingenuity and “progress,” fitting neatly into a popular narrative about enlightened zoo men improving their zoo every day. While surely the Frank Bakers, William
Blackburnes, Samuel Langleys, and D. C. Turners of the zoo played important roles in fashioning zoo environments, the parts played by the animals themselves have been masked by human stories of “improvement.” To free captive animals from the chains of history, the historian must read zoo records “against the grain.” When done so, zoo enclosures appear as they should— as lively, active, and negotiated environments.
Beginning in 1900, Frank Baker had to prepare, at the end of July, an official document entitled “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” which would record all the significant happenings and expenses of the zoo during the previous fiscal year, ending the last day of June. In these reports, the Superintendent detailed where the zoo spent money and why.
These documents were the most likely to reveal the agency of animals because if a given animal forced the zoo to make an alteration or “improvement” to its exhibit, Baker could then cite this reason to show that the expenditures he approved were needed and legitimate. The “improvement for improvement’s sake” narrative magnified the zoo as a progressive institution in the eye of the public, but for the eyes of his Smithsonian superiors (especially the ever observant Langley),
Baker needed to be more forthright. This meant acknowledging, at least in part, the role of animals in shaping their own environments.
Between July, 1899, and June, 1900, “[t]he strong iron fence built for the bison [had] been found unsatisfactory as it [had] been much bent and injured by the frequent plunging and butting of these powerful animals.” To remedy the situation, the zoo placed a new “Page wire fence stretched between iron posts” around the bison paddocks. Strangely, bison proved less
271 likely to ram into these more pliant fences even though they were, in theory, easier to trample.
The sturdier structures, for some reason, enticed and encouraged smashing, whereas the flimsier ones did not. Bison responded to their zoo environments in a particular way, and once their preferences were discerned by zoo officials, a substantial $1,000 was spent for a new fence that would last longer, reduce destructive behavior, and be less likely to hurt the animals if they did decide to occasionally test their boundaries.119 Bison asserted themselves. No matter what caused these animals to destroy the sturdier fences, the bisons’ behavior forced the zoo to alter their environment to fit their liking—or at least to pacify their aggression towards fences. Of course, if this new fence was discussed in a public newspaper article, most of these details would have been ignored. Most likely, the new fence would have simply been described as an “improvement,” for the Page woven-wire fence could have certainly been depicted as a less intrusive and more aesthetically pleasing barrier separating zoogoers and zoo animals. Whether or not Frank Baker and other zoo employees bragged about the fence upgrade as a progressive step towards a more
“natural-looking” enclosure is hard to say, but no matter what they said about the new fence, official documentation clearly cited the bison themselves as the instigators of the “improvement.”
Zoo animals frequently shaped their own environments. The following year, the bison did so again when the zoo found it “necessary to separate the buffalo paddocks by double partitions in order that the males may not fight through the partition fences.”120 Buffalo consistently wreaked havoc on their fences, so these repairs and upgrades were regular.121 After both the prairie dogs and the woodchucks burrowed out of their respective enclosures, both were
119 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1900, p. 4, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 1, April 2, 1900- January 28, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27, Folder 2. 120 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1901, p. 7, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 2, January 29, 1901- November 27, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27, Folder 3. 121 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1908, p. 4, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 8, January 15, 1908- September 2, 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 1. 272 reconstructed with cement bottoms. The prairie dogs were especially such voracious burrowers that their exhibit was excavated to a depth of four-and-a-half feet.122 And when the deer had
“worn the ground so much by the constant attrition of their hoofs,” they forced the National
Zoological Park to build new paddocks.123 Animals lived actively in their environments, and the way the engaged their surroundings could never be predicted.
Not only did individual animals and individual species of animals force zoo authorities to alter specific enclosures, sometimes, large collectives of animals pushed the National Zoo to make large scale changes as well. For example, in the report for the year ending on June 30, 1900,
Baker acknowledged an unlikely expression of resistance, recording the following complaint:
Animals from widely different regions, accustomed to different surroundings, temperature and protection, are crowded together in a single building with the same conditions of heating, lighting, ventilation and shelter. While the Park has the nucleus of an excellent collection of aquatic birds, there are no suitable quarters for them during winter and they are then deprived of the proper bathing facilities. In consequence of this the whole of the fine group of flamingoes received from Cuba was lost. The parrots and macaws are necessarily placed during winter on top of the other cages within the principal animal house. In this situation they are not properly protected and the mortality is consequently far above what it should be.124
In this manner, Frank Baker advocated for the voiceless collective of zoo animals held in his zoo, citing death as a primary reason environments needed enlarging and improving. Just like ramming into iron fences, dying was a different way that animals and their bodies responded to environmental circumstances. On the one hand, the death of zoo animals symbolized subjugation, not resistance. It would be difficult to posit that animals controlled when they let themselves die, so an asseveration that zoo animals, at times, chose to die in the zoo rather than live in the zoo
122 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1905, p. 3, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 6, February 25, 1905- June 2, 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 28, Folder 3. 123 Report to Charles D. Walcott, For the Year Ending June 30, 1912, no page #, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 9, September 6, 1910- April 5, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 2. 124 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1900, p. 17, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 1, April 2, 1900- January 28, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27, Folder 2. 273 would be, at best, without empirical evidence and, at worst, a base projective anthropmorphization.125 It would further be impossible to argue that zoo animals died, like humans, for a Cause. Nonetheless, while literal animals may not have been able to consciously resist by dying, metonymic animals could. Frank Baker, through the above report, harnessed the rhetorical power of dying animals and employed this power for their benefit. From the perspective of a zoo superintendent, animals dying within the zoo functioned as a form of resistance. When viewed collectively, animals dying within zoo environments stopped the zoo in its tracks, making its most essential task—keeping animals—impossible.
Dying was the most dramatic and successful way that animals collectively resisted the built environments of the National Zoological Park. If a given enclosure failed to keep its inhabitants alive, it would be altered as soon as feasibly and financially possible. When the night herons, for example, “interfered with the nesting of other birds” in the aviary, they (114 of them) were promptly removed from the environment.126 No national zoo meant to embody the greatness of a nation could be littered with dead bodies, so deadly zoo environments were reformed quickly. Of course, these alterations achieved varying degrees of success, for, as evidenced above with the aquarium, building environments proved difficult, and animals often died from unknown or complex causes. Nonetheless, though, death caused zoos to change its environments.
125 Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to assume that bored, miserable, lethargic, and unhappy animals were more likely to die than wild, active animals. Animals, like humans, experience emotion, including various types of melancholia. Elephants do mourning marches. Dogs and horses grieve the death of their owners, a trope long recognized in literature and folklore. And all sorts of animals experience sadness over the loss of other animal companions and mates. It seems likely, then,—even probable— that miserable zoo animals would have less “will to live” than lively, satisfied animals, and therefore, the death of unhappy zoo animals could likely be some sort of rudimentary form of partially-conscious resistance. This line of reasoning either flirts with problems of projection and anthropomorphization or it opens up the impossible question about whether “resistance” requires “intentionality” and “consciousness” (a problem exacerbated especially when “resistance” is applied to nonhuman animals). Since I lack the historical evidence to make the argument that some individual zoo animals may have died to “resist” (especially primates), I will instead just let this idea linger provocatively in this footnote . . . 126 Report to Charles D. Walcott, For the Year Ending June 30, 1913, no page #, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 10, April 7, 1913- January 27, 1916, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 3. 274
Likewise, zoo environments that prevented animals from performing activities characteristic of their respective species were also frequently altered. Just as Frank Baker spoke on behalf of dying animals, he similarly advocated for suppressed animals, species that he thought were denied vital behaviors. In the June 30, 1901 report, for example, the Superintendent stated that “[a] large cage for eagles should be built in some suitable locality in the Park, as, since this bird has been selected as the national emblem, it would seem that in a national collection it should be made an especial feature.” The eagle, he argued, needed a “commodious cage where there is sufficient room for short flights.”127 To be an eagle, an eagle needed to fly. Similarly, the sea-lions required new ponds. The ones first built became incessantly turbid, and the sea-lions’ eyes became so sore with mud, that the creatures were placed temporarily in the old bear dens, where they were unable to swim.128 To be a seal, a seal needed to swim.
Examples like these, of animals unable to fulfill basic functions like flying and swimming, appear in Baker’s official reports. And while surely these repressions could easily symbolize exploitation, Baker, through his written advocacy, transformed the negative connotations of a bird unable to fly and a sea-lion unable to swim into weapons to combat his very own zoo, or, more precisely, the financial structures supporting the zoo. In this way, he similarly transformed the bird’s inability to fly and the sea-lion’s inability to swim into forms of protest. By not flying or not swimming, individual birds and sea-lions clearly were not practicing an intentional resistance; however, by not living up to their imagined potential within their enclosures, it was easy to imagine the metonymic doubles of these birds and sea-lions resisting their environments and their natures. From zoogoer perspectives, these birds and sea-lions were
127 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1901, p. 15, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 2, January 29, 1901- November 27, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27, Folder 3. 128 “Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park,” For the Year Ending June 30, 1901, p. 16, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 2, January 29, 1901- November 27, 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 27, Folder 3. 275 not-quite-birds and not-quite-sea-lions. Through the voice of Frank Baker, what could be viewed, on the one hand, as neglect became a form of rhetorical resistance. Within the National
Zoological Park, the environments of enclosures and exhibits needed to allow animals to be themselves.
Zoogoers in modern zoological parks wanted to see animals in environments that modeled their natural ones. Seeing parrots crowded into cramped cages, stacked on top of each other, and giant tortoises from the Duncan and Albermarle Islands pushed into an empty office proved too jarring for progressive sensibilities.129 Many of the “improvements” of the National
Zoological Park sought to create more spacious and dynamic enclosures for its animals, spaces filled with environmentalia that served to make zoo exhibits more complex, sustainable, healthy, and aesthetically-pleasing. Yet, often times, the justifications given for these improvements failed to acknowledge this environmental context. When the tapirs were given a yard of 1,700 square- feet in size and a “good-sized bathing pool 6 feet deep” no mentioning of environmental needs appeared in the primary sources.130 Surely, though, tapirs behaved more as tapirs when not crammed into small, barred cages.
Yes, the National Zoological Park built environments for its animals, and these built environments required the creation and support of far-reaching networks of environmentalia.
However, these built environments, though, should not be viewed as a works of art created by zoos for its animals. Built environments had no single author, no single architect. They were spaces negotiated by zoo animals and humans alike. Unfortunately, the primary sources often overlooked the role that animals played in shaping the zoo environments that needed to accommodate them. Yet traces of animal agency remain, lying beneath human interpretation. The
129 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1900, 9. 130 Report to Charles D. Walcott, For the Year Ending June 30, 1912, no page #, N.Z.P. Correspondence to the S.I., Volume 9, September 6, 1910- April 5, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Folder 2. 276 diary of a zoo laborer, for example, frequently referenced saving willow branches cut from areas of the park under construction and hauling them to the beaver enclosure, for, apparently, beavers had quite the palate for willow.131 Several letters sent between the National Zoological Park, other zoos, and bear breeders deliberated on how to create a bear enclosure, or “yard,” that could encourage these animals to both hibernate and breed.132 And a 1903 byline commented “Bear Pits
Give Ursine Family a Range Fitted to Their Disposition.”133 Animals had agency within zoo enclosures, and a considerable portion of the history of the public zoo movement up to the present day has been devoted to building environments that accommodate and encourage the agency of animals so that humans could learn about and from animal expression and behavior. Throughout this history, zoo animals always practiced resistance. One headline captured this perfectly—“The
Water Animals Made a Fierce Resistance When Taken From Their Summer Home.”134 Animals never fit neatly into the stories about humans dominating and replicating Nature. Zoo animals constantly challenged such myths, forcing modern zoos to adapt to their needs if these zoos wanted to keep up with their own ideals.
Nonetheless, these built environments should not be seen as Edenic paradises. In fact, many enclosures within the National Zoological Park remained incommodious and unsanitary for decades. Frank Baker himself was always aware of and distressed by the shortcomings of the zoo he managed. The dreams that he and others had for the National Zoological Park were clear from the beginning, and environment figured prominently into those dreams. However, putting dreams into action proved difficult. The turn to environment within the National Zoological Park did not
131 See, for example, the January 6, 1896, entry of the “Diary of Construction and NZP Grounds Improvement, 1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 4. The author of this diary remains unknown, but this laborer frequently cut, saved, and hauled willow for the beavers when he worked on construction projects elsewhere in the park. 132 See letters in Record Unit 74, Box 57, Folders 6-7 of the Smithsonian Institution Archives. 133 “New Features at Zoo” (The Washington Post, October 23, 1903), Scrapbook, 1896-1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 134 “Zoo’s Baby Sea Lion” (The Washington Times, September 19, 1896), Scrapbook, 1896-1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 277 happen overnight, and as this chapter has demonstrated thus far, creating zoo environments took time, money, innovation, and trial and error. A zoo could not redesign, rebuild, and renovate all its exhibits simultaneously. It first had to prioritize its own needs, usually giving high profile animals more attention than others. Then, it needed to lobby for funding. If this campaign was successful, the zoo had to plan out and construct the new enclosure, forge networks of environmentalia, learn how to keep animals in this enclosure, and pray that nothing would go awry. Tragically, animals were victims of and through this process. They could do little about their grand predicament—that they found themselves trapped in a zoo. Many died. Many lived miserable lives. Yet, despite, the condition of captivity, animals resisted how they could.135
Ernest Thompson Seton: Animal Resilience and Behavior Within Zoo Environments
Thus far, we have learned two broad lessons about environment-forming within the
National Zoological Park. First, the built environments of zoo enclosures required Frank Baker and the National Zoo to forge far-reaching trade networks in all sorts of environmentalia, the fundamental building blocks of any given zoo exhibit. Second, once these environments were constructed, they were maintained and constantly redesigned to meet the needs of their
135 This section could have used the stories of animal resistance to bolster simplistic and anachronistic understandings of zoo history. It could have pointed toward animal resistance as proof that zoological parks were evil institutions bent on torturing animals for human pleasure. Or, it could have pointed toward animal resistance as evidence that zoological parks did learn to listen to animals and their needs, that zoos transformed themselves into safe havens for animals while also pushing humankind, through conservation efforts, away from exploiting them. Both of these narratives are false, saying more about popularly constructed polemics created in the 1980s and 1990s than about zoological parks around the turn of the century. The truth of the matter was that zoological parks, around 1900, were slowly transitioning to environmentally-centered enclosures, and that animal resistance played an important role in shaping and reshaping malleable zoo environments. As animals asserted their agency, expressed their idiosyncrasies, adapted to changing circumstances, and evolved in the zoo, they not only changed their environment, but they instructed humankind in lessons of zoology and ecology. More than anything, this section, by emphasizing animal resistance, calls attention to hundreds of untapped and untold stories. Histories of zoo animals that emphasize their changing relations with zoological parks, wild counterparts, and popular culture have the potential to uncover many unheard tales of environmental history, intellectual history, and the history of science. Understanding the coevolution of flamingos, prairie dogs, and condors with modern Americans can uncover much about the environmental state of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century world.
278 inhabitants. Exhibits and enclosures were malleable, and the forms they took in any given moment of history were determined by humans and animals alike. Animals constantly exerted their agency, and they occasionally acted out. In either scenario, human keepers responded to animal demands. Thus, humans and animals always acted in partnership as the architects, planners, and managers of zoo built environments.
The third dynamic of building zoo environments concerns animal adaptability. Zoo animals not only resisted, demanding that their exhibits be altered to their liking. They also adapted, applying old behaviors within new environments, a process that transformed these built environments into home. Like humans, animals also engage in place-making, establishing behaviors that make strange places familiar. Rather than “opening up,” or deconstructing, a specific enclosure, and rather than “reading” primary sources against the grain in search for animal agency, this section will examine the thoughts and observations of a famous wildlife artist who spent considerable time studying and drawing the animals of the National Zoological Park, taking special notice of their behaviors within their built environments.
In the previous chapter, we briefly saw Ernest Thompson Seton at work drawing animals from a small house in the zoo, built solely to support his art. Born in northern England, Seton immigrated to Canada in 1866, where he spent most of his childhood. After gaining skills as an artist in Toronto, he moved to New York City to develop his career.136 Quickly, Seton emerged as a major figure in American literature, becoming a central author to the developing genre of animal fiction. Most famously, he published Wild Animals I Have Known in 1898, which was printed nine times in the following eighteen months. The stories in this book were individually published in the leading magazines of the day. Century published the famous “Biography of a
136 For general biographies of Seton see Hugh Allen Anderson’s The Chief or David Witt’s Ernest Thompson Seton. Also, for larger and interesting context about Seton, others like him, and environmental sensibility see Lisa Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics. 279
Grizzly,” and Ladies’ Home Journal published “Billy, the Big Wolf.” Seton’s stories captured the imaginations of a nation. However, the popularity of Seton’s fiction also catapulted him into the national “nature-faker” controversy. This debate was ignited by John Burroughs in 1903, claiming that imaginative writers like Seton represented the degradation of natural history. This controversy, covered by famous magazines like Science, dragged on for five years, eventually including President Theodore Roosevelt on the hit list of “nature-fakers.”137 Seton’s genre of animal fiction nonetheless became wildly popular, and he wrote voluminously. He also became famous for the role he played in the establishment of the Boy Scouts of America (an organization in which William Temple Hornaday also played a formative role), as well as for becoming the first Chief Scout in the organization’s history.138
Ernest Thompson Seton became famous for his animal fiction, but he also authored plenty of works in natural history and other genres of nonfiction concerning wild animals, environment, and conservation, generally. Around 1900, Seton found himself in the nation’s capital, where he devoted many days to studying the animals of the National Zoological Park. By then considered a leading zoological park in the country, the NZP could lure cultural figures of
Seton’s caliber to its gates for the purpose of studying the interactions of captive animals with their built zoo environments. In 1900, just as the NZP’s aquarium was taking off, Seton, writing under the name “Ernest Seton-Thompson” (for unknown reasons, he changed the order of his last two names a few times), published “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in
Relation to Their Natural Environment” in Century Illustrated Magazine, one of the leading magazines of the day. Published in two installments, Century was clearly expecting that the topic
137 Dunlap, Thomas R, "The Realistic Animal Story: Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles Roberts, and Darwinism," Forest & Conservation History 36, no. 2 (April 1992): 56-62. 138 Scott, Davis C., “The Origins of BSA’s 1910 Handbook,” International Scouting Collectors Association Journal 6, no. 4 (2006): 6-13; Scott, Davis C., "Ernest Thompson Seton and BSA: The Partnership Collapse of 1915," International Scouting Collectors Association Journal 6, no. 2 (2006): 10-16. 280 of animal ecology and the National Zoo, embellished by Seton’s literary eloquence, would greatly intrigue their readership.139
Seton’s two-part article, as made explicit in the subtitle, focused on the topic of animals within “natural environments.”140 Interestingly, though, Seton devoted more space to discussion about wild animals in zoo environments than to discussion about zoo animals in the “wild” environments they lived in prior to captivity. Whether Seton believed both environments to be equally “natural,” or whether he viewed “natural” as a signifier with multiple valences remains difficult to say. Nonetheless, the text of “The National Zoo at Washington” teemed with active animals embedded in surrounding environments, built or otherwise. Seton was not interested in how zoo environments were built or rebuilt, according to the initiatives of either humans or animals. He was instead fascinated by animal behavior within those environments. For Seton, zoo environments only provided a stage for the animals, yet he realized that the unique environments that the NZP provided enabled its animals to live out animal lives in ways often stifled in other zoological parks.
Within the National Zoological Park, animals, despite their captivity, retained many of their wild behaviors, and Ernest Thompson Seton wanted to learn what zoo animals had to teach
Americans about their wild counterparts. For Seton, the National Zoo functioned as a lyceum in which animals instructed humans about environment and ecology. Seton opened “The National
139 Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 649-660, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17; Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 60, no. 5 (May, 1900): 1-10, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17. 140 Many artists during the decades around 1900 were interested in drawing animals in their natural environments, and Seton was not the only one to work in the National Zoo. Charles R. Knight, J. M. Gleeson, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes also drew animals in the National Zoological Park. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1900, 12. Photographing animals within zoos also became popular. For more on this see Elizabeth Hanson’s Animal Attractions, 138-140. Concerning photography within the National Zoological Park see SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 114, Folders 1-7. 281
Zoo at Washington” by informing his readers about why they should care about the extinction of animals. Even though he echoed many of the sentiments expressed by zoo boosters during the foundation of the National Zoo a decade earlier, he focused most directly on reasons not
“sentimental” or “esthetic”—arguments that casted the animals of North America as either symbols of a nation, representatives of past times, or creatures that possessed inherent value in and of themselves. To begin, instead, Seton emphasized two utilitarian reasons that “the extinction of a large or highly organized animal is a serious matter.” First, Seton believed that
“[i]t is always dangerous to disturb the balance of nature by removing a poise. Some of the worst plagues have arisen this way.” Second, he reminded that “[w]e do not know, without much and careful experiment, how vast a service that animal might have done to mankind as a domestic species.”141
Both of these reasons were essentially opposite sides of the same coin. The first posited that the disappearance of animals always held deleterious effects for the nation and humanity.
Using clear literary hyperbole, after expounding at length on the negative results of extinction,
Seton asserted that “we to-day, therefore, who deliberately exterminate any large and useful, possibly domesticable, wild animal, may be doing more harm to the country than if we robbed it of its navy.” In a more sober, philosophical, and ecological manner, he continued,
Evidently one cannot comprehend the nature of a wheel in a machine by study of that wheel alone; one must consider the whole machine or fail. And since it is established that man is merely a wheel in the great machine called the universe, he can never arrive at a comprehension of himself without study of the other wheels also. Therefore to know himself man must study not only himself, but all things to which he is related. This is the motive of all scientific research. . . . There is no part of our environment that is not filled with precious facts bearing on the “great problem,” and the nearer they are to us the more they contain for us.142
141 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 649. Historian Mark Barrow lays out the seven original arguments for preserving species in Nature’s Ghosts, 6-13. 142 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900), 650. 282
Just like many early aquarium builders, Seton believed in the sacred “economy” of Nature; however, instead of using the mechanistic language of economics to describe “balance” as the natural state of things, he employed Industrial imagery, likening the natural world to a “machine.”
According to Seton’s reasoning, Man is only one cog of a “great machine” composed of many parts. If Man ignored the other parts of this machine, which included many animals, it would be incapable of truly “comprehending” itself.
In this way, Seton argued that Americans needed to consider their surrounding environments by studying the environments of animals. If Americans neglected to consider environmental concerns, they would invite a host of unknown negative ramifications, one of which included disease. Yet, in the inverse, if Americans did take environment seriously, they would herald unknown advances into the nation. Seton imagined that “[h]e who will explain the
House Sparrow’s exemption from bacteriological infections, the White Bear’s freedom from troubles that we attribute to uric acid in the blood, or the Buffalo’s and the Flamingo’s immunity from the deadliest malaria, is on the way to conferring like immunities on man.”143 The overarching lesson was clear: Americans needed to think with environment; otherwise, there would be hell to pay.144
Seton knew that Americans needed to think with environment, and the National Zoo seemed like a good place to start. Even though he began “The National Zoo at Washington” in a boosterist and editorial tone, casting the zoo as a potential savior of America, he quickly transitioned into a naturalist’s mode of writing as he began to delve into the topic of zoo animals and their environments. The built environments of the National Zoological Park offered the perfect setting to study animal behavior. Seton described the NZP as the “first zoological
143 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 650. 144 I am using the idea of “thinking with environment” as a way to gesture to Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman’s important edited collection Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 283 collection in which each kind of animal was to have a park of its own, where it could live as its race should live, among natural surroundings, with as little restraint as was compatible with its safe-keeping.” The “glory of the place is in” these “individual parks,” and Seton continued,
The fencing used is of the invisible kind, which rarely intrudes itself on the observer, and yet is strong enough to restrain the biggest Buffalo. The ample stretches of woods and hills in each inclosure are unmarred by its lines, and the effect is as nearly as possible of seeing animals in the open. Here they live, and no doubt enjoy their lives, and the observer has a chance to see them pretty much as they were in their native range. They group themselves naturally among trees and rocks, while the uneven ground induces attitudes of endless variety, and the close imitation of natural conditions causes the animals to resume the habits native to their lives in a wild state, thus affording the zoologist and the artist an opportunity for study never before equaled among captive animals.
Seton marveled at the unique and diverse environments that existed along the Rock Creek. Every enclosure featured an environment built for the specific type of animal enclosed. The antelope were given a plain. The deer were given woodland. And the bison were given a prairie.145 Each enclosure was built for and tailored to each animal, and this gave Seton the opportunity to study their behavior from new vantage points.
By studying zoo animals, Seton could draw conclusions about wild animals. He, for example, took great interest in the zoo’s Virginia deer, one of the first exhibits zoogoers saw upon entering the National Zoo from its West Gate. While extinction did not threaten the Virginia deer to the extent that it threatened buffalo, elk, antelope, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, or mule deer, the animals’ numbers were still fast dwindling by 1900. Seton studied these animals closely, and concluded that even though they were held in a zoo, and even though some of the deer were born in the paddock, “they show many of their wild habits.” Seton studied these habits intently. Just like their wild counterparts, the deer, during the day, took advantage of the shade provided by the trees at the back of the enclosure. During the morning or evening, on the other hand, the deer would wander throughout the paddock, especially gathering around the “watering-
145 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 653. 284 place” located in the center of the exhibit. Seton observed, though, that if something frightened the deer while exposed in the open, they would behave just like wild Virginia deer, “raising” the
“white flag famous in all hunting lore” right before retreating to the trees.146
The zoo environment of the Virginia deer paddock allowed the deer to behave as deer.
While such a statement may seem, on its surface, fallacious, indeed the ability of captive animals to engage in behaviors that even in part resembled the actions of their species in the wild was relatively new. In the age of menageries and circuses, where keepers simply kept animals in cages and carted them around for entertainment, captive deer would never have been able to navigate a landscape of trees, open spaces, and watering holes. They would never have been able to behave as deer, only as animals reduced to breathing objects. In the National Zoological Park, though,
Seton received the opportunity to study the behaviors of Virginia deer, and he took great interest in their raising of white tails when feeling threatened. The National Zoo enabled Seton to formulate new conclusions about this peculiar behavior. By studying deer in the zoo, Seton solved the mystery about why deer would raise a white tail at the very moment that they desired to dodge the attention of a predator. The environment of the deer paddock allowed Seton to view the deer’s “white flag” in terms of signs and symbols, concluding that
This conspicuous action might seem a mistake in an animal that is seeking to escape unnoticed; but the sum of advantage in the habit is with the deer, or he would not do it, and its main purpose will be seen in one very important and frequent situation. A mother deer has detected danger; she gives a silent but unmistakable notification to her fawns by raising the “danger-flag,” a white one in this case; and then when she leads away through the woods, they are enabled to keep sight of her in the densest thickets and darkest nights by the aid of the shining beacon, which is waved in a way peculiar to this species, and is not, therefore, liable to be mistaken for the white patch on any other animal.
Within their paddock, the Virginia deer would often, at the hollers of zoogoers, become frightened, raise their tails, and run for cover in the trees. The built enclosure of the paddock
146 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 654-656. 285 allowed captive Virginia deer to retain this wild behavior. Of course, just as the previous section emphasized, the paddock needed to be modified to accommodate deer culture. “It was found,” for example, as Seton made evident, “that the animals . . . sometimes . . . dashed along the invisible fences, until suddenly met by another at right angles, and in this way several were hurt.” In order, to prevent deer from sprinting into fences when frightened and running towards the trees, the
NZP learned to curve all the fence corners. By building a malleable environment that could accommodate deer culture, Ernest Thompson Seton discovered new found truths about deer behavior.147
The built environments of the National Zoological Park allowed Seton to observe the wild behaviors of other zoo animals as well. The peacock enclosure, situated not far from the deer paddock, originally held only six peacocks, shipped to the NZP from India. By 1900, though, these six birds naturally increased until there were one hundred peacocks in the several-hundred- acre enclosure. These brightly-plumed birds, according to Seton, seemed to be at home in their wooded landscape, which resembled as closely as possible, considering the environment of the
Rock Creek, their homeland Indian jungles. Just like with the Virginia deer, Seton studied their natural habits, commenting:
During the winter they roam about in promiscuous troops, but when the early spring comes, and the cock is in his full regalia, the mating instinct prompts them to scatter, and each family withdraws to a part of the jungle—the Park, I mean— that is understood to be theirs, and to defend which the cock is ready to do battle with all feathered intruders.
In this way, Seton watched the peacocks employ peacock culture within their zoo environment, and Seton himself, intentionally, in rhetorical fashion blurred the peacocks’ zoo environments
147 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 656. The “white flag” of the Virginia deer was a well-known nineteenth-century hunting trope, as evidenced, for example in an article entitled “The White Flag,” published in Forest and Stream; A Journal of Outdoor Life, Travel, Nature Study, Shooting, Fishing, Yachting 52, no. 13 (April 1, 1899): 1. This article begins in the following manner: “The white flag . . . today is one dear to the heart of many sportsman . . . as it travels here, there and everywhere over this land, will call up ten thousand memories of days afield.” 286 with their wild environments. Even though peacocks found themselves in an artificial environment, its artificiality faded from view since this artificiality, from Seton’s perspective, did not obstruct peacock behavior. Peacocks could live up to their peacockness within the NZP.
Within their enclosure, peacocks retained their same mating rituals. They still allowed their viewers “to see the geometric perfection of the pattern made by the “eyes” when [their] train
[was] raised.” And they even responded to “the dynamite explosions in a near quarry” with “a peculiar bizz,” just as they responded to “the far-away call of some rival” with a “defiant qua.”
Peacocks were resilient and adaptable, morphing their wild behaviors to fit their captive, metropolitan environments.148
In “The National Zoo at Washington,” Seton continued to call attention to the relation of zoo animals to their environments, both zoo and wild. To Seton, animals appeared to engage either type of environment as if they were “natural,” and this gave him the unique opportunity to study the wild behaviors of animals without having to devote months to following them in
Virginian forests or Indian jungles. Found in “the middle and more open part of the Park,” the antelope prairie enclosure especially fascinated the artist. This exhibit, maybe more than any other, hid the barrier separating the antelope from the zoogoers. Seton described the antelope prairie in this manner:
They [the antelope] seem to be grazing along their native upland prairie, not far from timber, and the visitor, if he have any of the feeling of the hunter-naturalist, is sure to feel the same little thrill that would come if he met with them thus in the wild West. He has ample time to admire and watch their changing and picturesque grouping before he realizes that between him and them is the slight, but necessary, wire fence. The effect of this invisible fence is seen on the animals if they have been undisturbed for some hours, as well as on the onlooker; for the sudden appearance of a human being close at hand, with no massive screening barrier between, causes them to behave for a moment much as they did when wild and free; and their startlement is expressed in pose and act exactly as it might have been on their native wilds.149
148 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 656. 149 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 657. 287
The National Zoo built an environment that fostered a temporary dual illusion that encouraged zoogoers to “feel” as though they were gazing upon wild antelope while also causing these antelope to forget that they were not alone. While exhibits like this one could not yet be constructed by zoo designers that explicitly adhered to “landscape immersion” architectural philosophy, they clearly set the stage for this 1970s aesthetic.
Yet Seton’s fascination with the antelope prairie did not end with marveling at its
“invisible” boundaries. He also, as with the Virginia deer, wanted to use the zoo to solve a puzzling natural quandary that had been irking him since “[s]ome years ago,” when “riding across the upland prairie of the Yellowstone, not very far from where these very Antelope had been captured.” Here, Seton “noticed certain white specks in the far distance. They showed and disappeared several times, and then began moving southward. Then, in another direction [he] discovered other white specks, which also seemed to flash and disappear. A glass showed them to be Antelope, but it did not wholly explain the flashing or the moving which ultimately united the two bands.” Seton continued to explain that he “made note of the fact, but found no explanation until the opportunity came to study . . . in the Washington Zoo.” The National Zoological Park helped Seton solve the mystery. In his typical picturesque style, he painted the following scene for his readers:
I had been quietly watching the grazing herd on their hillside for some time; in fact, I was sketching, which is quite the best way to watch an animal minutely. I was so quiet that the Antelope seemed to have forgotten me, when, contrary to rules, a dog chanced into the Park. The wild Antelope habit is to raise its head every few moments while grazing, to keep a sharp lookout for danger, and these captives kept up the practice of their race. [Emphasis added.] The first that did so saw the dog. It uttered no sound, but gazed at the wolfish-looking intruder, and all the long white hairs of the rump-patch were raised with a jerk that made the patch flash in the sun like a tin pan. Every one of the grazing Antelope saw the flash, repeated it instantly, and raised his head to gaze in the direction where the first was gazing. At the same time I noticed on the wind a peculiar musky smell—a smell that certainly came from the Antelope.150
150 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 657-658. 288
Not long after making these observations of living antelope within the zoo, Seton had the opportunity to dissect an antelope that died somewhere near Jackson’s Hole. The physiological explanation for the antelopes’ flashing and odor lay within the animal’s rump.
Seton included a diagram (see Appendix Image G.6) to explain the phenomenon in question. The rump hair near (A) appeared long and graded towards (B). The hair near (B), on the other hand, appeared “snowy white” and always pointed towards the rear. Beneath the skin of the rump, the antelope possessed a “broad sheet” of muscle, which grew thickest and strongest immediately under (B). Immediately, when alarmed, this muscle contracted, causing the short, white hair near (B) to stand straight out from the rump. This created a “flash,” a “twin chrysanthemum of white.” Also, when this rump muscle contracted, a brown musk-gland lying beneath (B), between the muscle and the skin, became suddenly and partially exposed as it released its piquant stink. Together, the white flash and the stench, like the “white flag” of the
Virginia deer, operated as a “message,” to “all those that have noses to read,” that danger is near.
Seton solved the mystery of the flashing, and he concluded, tellingly, that “the observations on the captive animals living under normal conditions prove the key to those made on the plains, and
I know now that the changing flecks in the Yellowstone uplands were made by this Antelope heliograph while the two bands signaled each other, and the smaller band, on getting the musky message, ‘Friends,’ laid aside all precaution and fearlessly joined their relations.”151
Again, the built environments of the National Zoo enabled Ernest Thompson Seton to learn about wild animals. Antelope, like peacocks and Virginia deer, retained their own behaviors and maintained their own culture within the zoo, giving Seton and all zoogoers the opportunity to observe the habits of animals in ways previously impossible. The built environments of the
National Zoological Park created new types of laboratories that allowed all to see how animals
151 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 658-659. 289 related to their surroundings, to each other, and to other animals—human or otherwise. The zoo gave Seton the opportunity to see how stray dogs, antelope, rump hair, glands, odors, and rolling prairies all became ecologically intertwined in Nature. Seton devoted “The National Zoo at
Washington” to more than just deer, peacocks, and antelope. He pondered the behaviors of raccoons, which were held in a “coon-tree” exhibit in the center of the park, contending that
“[t]hey have all the good things that their wild brethren have, excepting only that there is a limit to their liberty.152 And he commented at length about how examining the National Zoo’s “fine collection of wolves” facilitated an understanding of wolf, jackal, and dog evolution.153 Seton also stated that he believed the National Zoo to be a fine place for “restoring the proper surroundings, animate as well as inanimate” of mountain sheep in order to learn more about these animals, which, for unknown reasons, had a poor history of surviving in zoological parks.154
Seton hoped that building an environment that closely modeled the rocky landscape of wild mountain sheep would change their zoo fate. Similarly, he looked forward to the opportunities that the “restored environment[s]” of bears (caves and cliffs), buffalo (grasslands), and water fowl
(ponds) would offer.155 Seton realized that the malleable, built environments of the National Zoo made this zoo different than others, making zoogoing an educational experience for zoogoers and making zooliving a better experience for zoo animals.
152 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (May, 1900): 4. Early zoos frequently showed interest in dog evolution. By putting dogs on display, the National Zoo not only could increase the size of its collection, but it also could easily teach zoogoers about variety within species. Early in the 1890s, the National Zoo displayed Russian wolfhounds, Peary Eskimo dogs, collies, St. Bernards, cocker spaniels, terriers, retrievers, and pointers. In 1896, as a result of a scheme to encourage animal donations (since the National Zoo could not yet purchase animals), twenty-six dogs were donated. The dogs were placed in a temporary kennel near the primary animal house, but the kennel was relocated when neighbors of the zoo complained about incessant barking. Over time, interest in displaying dogs within zoos lessened. While they may have instructed in evolutionary principles, dogs were too familiar to intrigue zoogoers. By 1915, the National Zoo only displayed Eskimo dogs. By 1924, the zoo had no dogs at all. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1896, 1-4. 153 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (May, 1900): 8-10. 154 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (May, 1900): 7. 155 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (May, 1900): 7-8. 290
Ernest Thompson Seton’s “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in
Relation to Their Natural Environment” was the longest and most well-developed commentaries about the National Zoo, its built environments, and the implications that these held for advancing ecological knowledge and conservation efforts in the twentieth century.156 Eventually, by mid- century, these topics will be commonly associated with zoological parks and will eventually become central to a burgeoning literature about zoos and zoo-building. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, as “landscape immersion” became a coherent philosophy, zoo exhibits were consciously and regularly designed with environment in mind. During the first decade of the
National Zoo, though, discourses about environment and ecology were new to the public sphere, especially in how they related to the modern zoo. Individuals like Seton were among the first pioneers to think about, and with, zoo environments. However, his article’s general thesis—that the built environments of zoos mattered to understanding animals—was echoed repeatedly in prior newspaper articles about the National Zoo.
These articles, like Seton’s, similarly demonstrated that zoo animals did, in fact, retain many of the behaviors that characterized their species in the wild. They also suggested this assertion’s corollary that, therefore, the zoo functioned as a perfect laboratory to study zoological, environmental, and ecological questions. In all of these articles, zoo environments provided important context for discussion of animal behavior. In November, 1895, The Washington Post printed an article that described how some animals were preparing for winter within their enclosures. The badgers bored holes into the ground of their exhibit, and the owls created winter nests in the treetops of theirs.157 Another article in the same newspaper casted the sea lion pond as one of the most popular enclosures of the zoo, describing sea lions not only swimming through
156 For more on this topic of conservation see Noah Cincinnati’s dissertation “Arks for Empires.” 157 “Arrivals at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, November 4, 1895), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 291 their pond, but also sunning themselves on the “rocky miniature beach” built for them.158 And an
1899 article published in The Evening Star discussed how the raccoons chose, during the winter, to stay “ensconced” in the “warm interior” of one of the logs placed in the “coon hollow” enclosure. This article also informed its readers that “[t]he deers lay with their heads in the air, huddled close together and apparently very comfortable,” that “[t]he elk was wandering about in the woods,” and that “[t]he swans were paddling about in a piece of swift-flowing water.”159
These accounts of zoo animals situated within their unique zoo environments appeared in the zoo stories that filled Washington newspapers. As the 1890s progressed, and as the National Zoo received time and funding to build and improve more of its environments, portrayals of zoo animals embedded in their surroundings appeared with greater frequency and in increasing detail.
While on the surface, mentioning elk walking in the woods or swans paddling on flowing water may seem mundane or insignificant, when compared to the representations of the elephant slaves and pampered parrots of eighteenth and early-nineteenth century animal displays, these simple descriptions mark the beginnings of a transformative environmental turn in American sensibilities toward animals, both captive and wild.160
If the previous section emphasized animal resistance by showing how zoo animals forced zoological parks to alter built environments to meet their demands, this section demonstrated animal resilience. Animals acted out in many ways. Of course they ran away and attacked, but the animals above never acted out against humans. Instead, they acted against their enclosures and fellow inhabitants for environmental reasons. For these zoo animals, dissatisfaction with surroundings encouraged territorial and aggressive behavior within their respective enclosures,
158 “Zoo’s Baby Sea Lion” (The Washington Post, June 29, 1897), Scrapbook, 1896-1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 159 “Scenes at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, February 14, 1899), Scrapbook, 1896-1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 160 Robbins, Louise E., Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 292 forcing zoo managers to alter these environments in ways that would pacify their inhabitants. The idea of animal resilience, as opposed to resistance, on the other hand, calls attention to how animals, despite their captivity within artificially constructed environments, retained many of the characteristics and behaviors produced in the wild through millennia of evolutionary history. In fact, the built environments of the National Zoo allowed zoo animals to express their culture in ways that the cages of previous animal displays prevented. The enclosures of the National Zoo, then, functioned as platforms upon which animals could enact their cultures before audiences of thousands of curious human onlookers. The built environments of the National Zoo brought the cultures of humans and animals closer together. Neither, of course, as the ‘cultural turn’ has made indisputable, remained static. And surely, animals exercised agency despite captivity. Human and animal cultures informed each other. Human zoogoers learned about wild animal behaviors, and zoo animals learned about the behaviors of humans, occasionally altering wild behaviors to benefit from human culture—for example, begging for peanuts.
I have used the word “culture” when referring to behaviors of zoo animals that resembled the behaviors of their species in wild environments. Unlike Edmund Russell who recently emphasizes the distinction between genes and culture as two different modes of inheritance, I use term more openly, allowing “culture” to encompass both learned and genetically encoded behavior. Surely, as Russell himself demonstrates, “genes” and “culture,” that is DNA-driven behavior and learned behavior are always closely intertwined and evolving together.161 Therefore,
I find it fitting to refer to the “white flag” of the Virginia deer, the bizzing of the peacock, and the
“flashing” of the antelope as expressions of deer, peacock, and antelope “culture,” respectively.
Whether or not these behaviors were primarily learned and passed on to offspring or whether they were primarily expressions of genes, they still defined Virginia deer, peacocks, and antelope as
161 Russell, Edmund, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 97. 293 living entities in and of themselves. These behaviors functioned as “culture” in any sense of the word, drawing members of the same species closer together while simultaneously demarcating that species from others—especially humans. “White flags,” bizzing, and “flashing” set these animals apart from human onlookers. They allowed these animals to express themselves and communicate. They enabled animals to transcend pure objectification, making them more than the limp, docile, and defeated bodies stuffed into carts and cages. And most importantly, these behaviors allowed captive animals to retain a degree of wildness. The ability of a zoo animal to express elements of its culture proved monumental for human and animal history. By observing animal culture in the zoo, humans advanced knowledge about animals. By expressing animal culture in the zoo, animals could live lives defined by their specific animalities. Eventually, some zoo animals became so successful at living according to their wild species’ culture that they could be released back into wild populations. The built environments of zoological parks facilitated this process.
The term “culture” also holds two particular resonances that make it a thought provoking construct to employ in understanding the behavior of zoo animals in built environments. First, biologists, zoologists, anthropologists, sociologists, evolutionary theorists, and scholars associated with the burgeoning field of “animal studies” have been thoroughly exploring, over the last decade, the cultures of various animals. The narratives, controversies, questions, and hypotheses surrounding this examination of “animal culture” are voluminous and varied, but in the very least, this search for “culture” among nonhuman animals has greatly challenged anthropocentric conceptions of the term.162 Monkeys, whales, and birds, especially, have received
162 For a great survey of this debate see Kevin N. Laland and Bennett G. Galef’s (eds.) The Question of Animal Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 294 considerable attention.163 On the human side of things, “culture” has long saturated the academic fields devoted to studying the human experience, past and present. Historians, especially, have placed much energy in unearthing the cultures of all past peoples, placing extra emphasis on societies and groups that have been typically subjugated, defeated, marginalized, and ignored.
Just as the researchers mentioned above are currently investigating “animal culture,” throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, similar effort was spent finding the cultures of African slaves in the Atlantic
World. “Slave culture” itself became the term of the day.164 And voluminous research uncovered the vast and diverse cultural world of enslaved Africans and African Americans, emphasizing the point that a repressive system of bondage never stamped out the agency, creativity, passion, and cultural expression of the enslaved. Slaves always retained elements of their cultures and always exercised resistance and resilience despite their chains.165 In closely examining the built environments of captivity for different forgotten, subjugated species, it is interesting to note that ideas of “culture,” “retention,” and “resistance,” still prove useful, illuminating, enlightening, and theoretically provocative.
We began this chapter observing the process of a zoo (aquarial) environment in construction. Then, we watched myriad zoo animals demand that their built environments be
163 See, for example, W. A. Hillix and Duane Rumbaugh’s Animal Bodies, Human Minds: Ape, Dolphin, and Parrot Language Skills (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004), Philippa Brakes and Mark Peter Simmonds’s (eds.) Whales and Dolphins: Cognition, Culture, Conservation and Human Perceptions (New York: Routledge, 2011), John T. Bonner’s The Evolution of Culture in Animals (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1983), or Cecilia M. Heyes and Bennett G. Galef, Jr.’s (eds.) Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture (New York: Academic Press, 1996). 164 Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 165 There is a vast literature about the cultures of the enslaved, a topic I have been interested in since doing a minor field in the Black Atlantic in graduate school. Four great introductions to some of the large controversies surrounding the search for slave cultures include: Michael Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton’s Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), James H. Sweet’s, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African- Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 295 altered. Finally, we glanced at the implications that built, malleable zoo environments held for animal behavior, human understandings of animal behavior, as well as for ecological knowledge, generally. The environments of the National Zoological Park allowed animals to retain wildness, and in so doing, they strangely became less exotic and “wild” to the public eye. Ernest
Thompson Seton seemed to believe that humans, by studying animals, not only learned more about other species, but also more about themselves. At the end of the first installment of “The
National Zoo at Washington,” Seton acknowledged that “[i]f the great philosopher had been with me in the Washington Zoölogical Park that day his puzzle would have been solved for him.”166 In context, Seton was referring, specifically, to the “great philosopher” of Charles Darwin. The
“puzzle” referenced was the evolutionary history of antelope horns, an animal accessory that baffled him. Taken out of context, though, the allegory of great philosophers, strolling through the National Zoological Park, is a fitting one. Surely, philosophers have long been interested in zoological matters. Seton himself referenced Goethe’s influence on the development of zoological thought when likening Samuel Langley to the eighteenth-century poet.167 While this exact comparison may have been an exercise in hyperbole, Seton would not had to have looked far to find philosophers in the zoo, for everyday Washington zoogoers used the National
Zoological Park not only to address ecological and environmental concerns, but also to answer questions of ethics, metaphysics, and ontology.
While these issues of pure intellectual history will be tabled for the Conclusion, it is important to note that building, maintaining, and observing the environments of the National Zoo, and surely all zoological parks, literally brought the world closer together. Built zoo
166 Seton-Thompson, “The National Zoo at Washington” (March, 1900): 660. 167 For more on Goethe and science see, for example, Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward a Conscious Participation in Nature (Aurora, Colorado: Lindisfarne Press, 1996) or David Seamon’s Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 296 environments required establishing global trade networks in animals and environmentalia from around the world. Built zoo environments required constant maintenance in order to keep animals alive and publics interested. Built zoo environments attracted throngs of human zoogoers from around the world, populations that would quickly begin to think about and with both the animals and environments of their vast planet. And built zoo environments encouraged these ponderings to be encoded into knowledge, both through written discourse (evidenced in Seton’s writing and in newspaper articles) and through the more abstract public mind (circularly evidenced through the zoo’s own popularity). Constructing environments for zoo animals proved a difficult and complicated task, but once this task was accomplished, zoogoers could think about their bound world in new and novel ways.
297
Chapter 6 Animal Activism and the Zoo-Networked Nation
Despite its current significance to global politics, cultures, conservation efforts, and food ways, the history of animal activism prior to the Second World War remains largely unknown and unexplored.1 By focusing attention on the public space of the zoo, this chapter seeks to
1 The very few who have approached the topic have done so with solely the British and French context in mind. For works on animal activism in Europe see Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate, Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World, Moira Ferguson’s Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), or Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). A few scholars have written expansive histories about animal activism, discussing its early history only briefly. For two examples see James Turner’s Reckoning with the Beast or Gerald Carson’s Men, Beasts, and Gods: A History of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972). Another expansive history on the history, politics, and philosophy of “animal rights,” one that largely relies upon methods in social theory, is Keith Tester’s Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991). Particularly important and interesting, yet a more abstract intellectual history on ethics, not activism, is Roderick Frazier Nash’s The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). And some others have written institutional histories about the humane movement, yet these works only narrowly examine the twentieth- century movement and its key figures without putting either into larger social and cultural contexts. This historiography includes Sydney Coleman’s Humane Society Leaders in America (Albany, New York: American Humane Association, 1924), William Shultz’s The Humane Movement in the United States, 1910-1922 (New York: AMS Press, 1968 [1924]), William Swallow’s Quality of Mercy: History of the Humane Movement in the United States (Boston: Mary Mitchell Humane Fund, 1963), and Charles Niven’s History of the Humane Movement (New York: Transatlantic Press, 1967). In addition, historians who have written within the subgenres of “animal history” devoted to the domesticated creatures of the nineteenth- century, the animals of early scientific laboratories, or animal conservation movements have managed to shed light onto certain aspects of animal activism without systematically exploring that activism in broad terms. On domesticated animals in early America see works like Clay McShane’s and Joel Tarr’s The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) or Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the animals of the turn-of-the-century laboratory, most importantly concerning vivisection, see books like Nicolaas A. Rupke’s edited volume Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1987), Richard D. French’s Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), or Theodore G. Obenchain’s The Victorian Vivisection Debate: Frances Power Cobbe, Experimental Science and the “Claim of Brutes” (New York: McFarland, 2012). And on early conservation see Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s Nature’s Ghosts; Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s A Passion for Birds; Karl Jacoby’s Crimes against Nature; Lisa Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics; Andrew C. Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison; James A. Tober’s Who Owns the Wildlife; and Richard W. Judd’s Common Lands, Common People. 298 demonstrate what concern for animals first looked like on the ground and argues that this concern was far more widespread in the decades surrounding 1900 than previously understood.2 Zoos surely functioned as a site of violence towards animals, but they simultaneously functioned as an incubator of compassion and concern. Zoos networked all associated with them into larger discourses about animal welfare. Making a zoological park the centerpiece in a story about
“activism,” though, challenges contemporary conceptions of this term. There were few pure activists in the first zoos. There were no rallies, parades, and mass protests, few petitions, and little politicking, lobbying, and debating. Activism looked different from a zoo perspective, from the zoo up. The zoological park served as a space in which common zoogoers could enact the activism, speak the discourses, and ponder the narratives they absorbed outside the zoo’s fences.
2 Only two scholars have closely examined the history of American animal activism prior to 1945—Gary Jarvis and Diane Beers. Jarvis, through his dissertation “The Road Not Taken: Humanitarian Reform and the Origins of Animal Rights in Britain and the United States, 1883-1919” (The University of Iowa, 2009), recently uncovered the contradictory, nineteenth-century origins of animal rights rhetoric by studying British and American humanitarianism’s contested relationship with Romantic naturalism and Darwinian science, both key components of radical humanitarian philosophy. Jarvis argues that humanitarians often took paradoxical and ironic positions with science, castigating vivisection and vaccination while simultaneously profiting from the advances of evolutionary biology. Beers, on the other hand, has recently filled many of the chasms of animal rights historiography with her classic For the Prevention of Cruelty The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006). In this work, she details the development of American “animal advocacy” between 1865 and 1975, positing that this movement gained far more success in its first century than historians have previously acknowledged. Furthermore, Beers argues against both the dominant interpretation forged by Harriet Ritvo, who claims that nineteenth-century concern for animals in England functioned as bourgeois rhetoric meant to control the lower orders, and argues against a second interpretation posited by Kathleen Kete—that affect extended towards animals in Paris served as a subconscious release of social anxiety caused by the marginalizing effects of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. Beers contends that animals represented more than power and release. Animals actually mattered to the advocates she studied. Jarvis and Beers together make significant contributions to the intellectual and social history of animal activism in the United States; however, both works are limited by the specific human and animals they examine. Jarvis prioritizes intellectuals (like Thoreau and Shelley) who contributed to the most radical branches of humanitarianism and the rising vegetarian movement. Beers pays attention to a broader group of actors, yet she restricts her study to those who were explicitly involved with formal organizations. Neither Jarvis nor Beers examine “laypeople,” so to speak, who advocated for animals on their own time and terms. Furthermore, the animals that fill the pages of these works rarely fall outside the categories of domesticated animals, lab animals, butchered animals, or the overhunted exploited for their fur and feathers. For discussions of zoos and animal rights, situated later in the twentieth century, see Hanson, Animal Attractions, 179-184; Bostock, Stephen St. C., Zoos and Animal Rights: The Ethics of Keeping Animals (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Bryan G. Norton, Michael Hutchins, Elizabeth F. Stevens, and Terry L. Maple’s edited collection Ethics on the Ark: Zoos, Animal Welfare, and Wildlife Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 299
Peering into the first two decades of the National Zoological Park, though, reveals an activism-in- action, which demonstrates the great extent to which animal concern had indeed transformed zoogoers between 1890 and 1910.3
This chapter is composed of four sections. The first presents a case study of two elephants, Dunk and Gold Dust, and shows how zoogoers’ concern for their wellbeing resulted in formal activism that led to the halls of Congress. The second section takes a wider look at zoo activism in Washington and argues that most zoogoers, knowingly or not, participated in conversations about animal welfare. The third section demonstrates how early zoological parks nationwide were networked together and how these parks facilitated the spread of animal activism throughout American society. Through its fourth section, the chapter concludes by pondering larger trends within the intellectual history of “animal rights.”
“Dunk,” “Gold Dust,” and Animal Activism in the National Zoological Park
Dunk, a large male Asiatic elephant, arrived in the District of Columbia in the spring of
1891 as a gift presented by James E. Cooper, the owner of the Adam Forepaugh Show. A few years previously, Adam Forepaugh himself, before his death, donated the skeleton of an elephant named Romeo to the Smithsonian Institution so that it could be enshrined in the halls of the
United States National Museum. Now the Show gave the Smithsonian a living elephant to adorn its new zoological park.4 The transaction received much public fanfare and was treated as a grand philanthropic gesture, for as The Evening Star reported, “Mr. Cooper makes this present to the
National Zoological Park because it was the policy of Mr. Adam Forepaugh during his life to encourage such institutions.” The great showman also gave elephants Tippo Saib and Bolivar to
3 My use of “activism-in-action” gestures towards Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 4 “Uncle Sam’s Elephant” (The Washington Post, April 21, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 300
Central Park and Philadelphia, respectively.5 Yet beneath its generous packaging, the Dunk donation proved to be more pragmatic than altruistic, for the four-ton, almost nine-foot tall pachyderm had a long history of charging other male circus elephants.6 Although Mr. Cooper exclaimed that he hoped his actions would prompt other enlightened citizens to make similar donations for the “immense benefit to students and scientists” and for the purpose of “preserving these objects of interests” as “civilization” was “driving from the face of the earth the larger members of the animal kingdom,” in all practical terms, Cooper was simply discarding a troublesome brute, displacing its burden from his business onto the Smithsonian in the name of patriotism.7
Not only did Cooper give the National Zoo Dunk, but he simultaneously loaned the zoo two other elephants that would accompany him to Washington.8 Tellingly, one of these elephants, named Gold Dust (who, unsurprisingly, ended up staying in the National Zoo for years), also possessed an irascible character, having previously killed at least one of his keepers.9 For Cooper, the National Zoological Park served as the perfect correctional institute for fractious elephants. If an animal proved too costly and difficult to control, he gave it, as a “most generous gift,” to the
Smithsonian’s zoo. If he thought there was a chance an elephant could be reformed, he would only lend it to the zoo, with the hope that a zoo hiatus would pacify the circus animal. In any case, despite the true motives behind the Dunk transaction, the gift captured public attention
5 “An Elephant for the Zoo” (The Evening Star, April 21, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 6 “Presented to the Zoo” (The Evening Star, April 30, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2; Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1891, 11. 7 Untitled Article (The Washington Post, May 1, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 8 “An Elephant at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 1, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 9 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1891, 11. 301 because, in the words of Elizabeth Hanson, “a zoo was not a zoo unless it had an elephant.”10
William Blackburne, the Head Keeper of the National Zoo, led a three-elephant parade, before throngs of District children, “along New Jersey Avenue to S street, to U, to 13th and out on the hill and thence by way of the old quarry road down into the valley of Rock Creek.” Upon arrival, the roof of the elephant’s makeshift enclosure still needed to be completed. Although the floor and the granite posts, buried eight feet underground and fixed with an iron ring to which the pachyderms’ feet would be chained, were finished, the octagonal, pagoda-like building itself was being built around its new inhabitants.11 The zoo was not ready to keep elephants. Within days, animal activists already objected to the elephants’ quarters. Even The Evening Star published an editorial that complained,
There is altogether too much “air apparent” . . . for these mammoth pachyderms, and unless the S.P.C.A. [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] prods Uncle Sam’s conscience and urges more humane treatment of these captives, not only his own “Dunk,” but Dunk’s inseparable and boon companion, “Gold Dust,” will be cadavers for the dust ere the temperate summer sun can cherish these tropic exotics.12
Concerns like these would reverberate around the National Zoo for years.
Most District citizens, however, were more concerned with the elephants’ deviance than with their wellbeing. Society had long depicted captive elephants as dangerous and savage mammoths precariously subdued—antagonists within a dramatic Darwinian narrative about the struggle between man and behemoth, a story that popularized elephants and bolstered their ticket-
10 Hanson, Animal Attractions, 44. Hanson also presents an interesting discussion about how the elephants of Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo built “civic unity.” See Hanson, Animal Attractions, 59-67. 11 “An Elephant at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 1, 1891) and “A March to the Zoo” (The Evening Star, May 2, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. Untitled blurb (Unknown Newspaper, Undated), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285; Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1891, 9-11. 12 “The Zoo Elephants” (The Evening Star, May 19, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 302 selling potential.13 Shortly after Dunk and Gold Dust arrived in Washington, before construction on their house was even finished, Tippo Saib, another Forepaugh elephant donated benevolently to the Central Park menagerie, captured headlines across the nation and emphasized the dangers that an elephant could pose to a zoological park. “Tip,” while charging the wooden wall separating his exhibit from the neighboring elephant exhibit, attacked the keeper trying to calm him. The “rogue” “seized” the keeper with his trunk, thrusted at him unsuccessfully with his shortened tusks, and then “threw him violently on the ground,” knocking him unconscious. The elephant tried to crush the keeper, but fortunately the man’s limp body was just out of the reach granted by the chain secured to Tip’s leg. The keeper survived, but the story riddled headlines as
Tip almost added “another human victim . . . to his record of eight keepers that he ha[d] already killed.” Newspaper columns about this episode not only narrated the attack itself, but also emphasized its aftermath—when the “wicked” Tippo Saib became “chained ‘fore and aft’; a chain also from each tusk . . . attached to a strong chain that goes around the body of the beast.” 14
As Washington zoogoers welcomed Dunk and Gold Dust to their new home in the Rock
Creek they (like the American public at-large) were also well acquainted with the danger posed by captive elephants. They not only read about the continued aberrancy of Tip, who attempted to again knock down the wall of his enclosure just a few months after the above incident, but they
13 For more on the history of elephants in America see Susan Nance’s Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus. According to Nance, viewing elephants as “troublesome brutes” was especially common during the Gilded Age. Earlier in the nineteenth century, though, elephants were commonly seen as the “sagacious” “actors” of circuses. Also, see Nance’s thorough bibliographic essay on elephants and history—Entertaining Elephants, 281-283. In particular, see Sujit Sivasundaram’s “Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain,” Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (2005): 27-63; Dan Wylie’s Elephant (London: Reaktion, 2008), and Eric Scigliano’s Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-Old Relationship between Elephants and Humans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). 14 “Tip at his Old Tricks” (Unknown Newspaper, Undated), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. The report that Tip had killed eight keepers is most surely an exaggeration. As William Conklin, the director of the menagerie, commented (according to the article entitled “Tip’s Character is Bad” listed below), Tip was only previously responsible for the deaths of two keepers, both of whom were “careless in the way they were handling him.” Nonetheless, the hyperbolic tendencies of popular culture transformed fictions into the “facts” from which elephantine images were fashioned. 303 also read articles about how Miss Fanchon, a Boston elephant, somehow escaped her stable and ended up in the kitchen of his keeper’s wife; about how Royal, an elephant employed in the El
Dorado grounds of Weehawken Heights, New Jersey, went on a destructive and expensive escapade around the gardens when frightened by a firecracker; and about how Chief, the man- killing elephant of Cincinnati, was put to death by the zoo, receiving a total of twenty-four bullets.15 Elephants, by nature, acted out, and zoos could only hope that their chains were strong enough.
Dunk and Gold Dust proved no exception. In fact, The Washington Post declared Gold
Dust the “meanest elephant on earth” in less than a year after his arrival to Washington, publicizing his reputation for “breaking the arms, legs, and mortally injuring more men than any other elephant in the country.”16 On the last day of October, 1891, Gold Dust attacked his keeper,
Charles Lewis, knocking him to the ground with his trunk. The elephant, then creating quite the spectacle for onlookers, charged around his exhibit until he was subdued by a “judicious use of pitchforks” and a “liberal supply of ropes and chains.” Keepers of the zoo threw Gold Dust to the ground, securing him until “the only things free about him were his ears, his trunk and his tail, and all these waved furiously for some time until the soothing effects of the sharp-pointed prongs began to be felt.”17 Gold Dust required force to be contained. “His trunk [was] raised against every man,” as an 1893 Post article reminded the public.18 And even Dunk, who was known to be the more tranquil of the two elephants, despite his troublesome record with the Forepaugh Show,
15 “Tip Smashes Furniture” (New York Herald Tribune, June 20, 1891), “Tip’s Character is Bad” (New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1891), “Naughty Miss Fanchon” (Boston Herald, February 21,1891), “Damaged by an Elephant” (New York Herald Tribune, June 9, 1891), “Vicious Elephant Shot” (Unknown Newspaper, December, 1891?) “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 16 “Keeper and His Pets” (The Washington Post, January 12, 1892) “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 17 “Gold Dust on the Rampage” (The Evening Star, September 1, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 18 “Spring Opening at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, April 3, 1893), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 304 occasionally acted out. In July of 1898, Dunk “pulled up the stake to which he was chained and succeeded in making his escape.” After frightening zoogoers and destroying some of the zoo’s trees, Dunk submitted to the keepers in pursuit, one of whom was armed and ready with a rifle.
The elephant was placed back into his exhibit and was unsurprisingly “chained fore and aft.”19
Even as elephants enacted their prescribed roles as the pernicious antagonists of
American zoo dramas, concern for their wellbeing still increased throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century. On June 3, 1891, barely a month after their arrival to the National Zoo, The
Evening Star printed a column entitled “More Room for the Elephants.” The anonymous author, writing under the anonym “G,” typed the following in defense of Dunk and Gold Dust:
I don’t know what the plans of those in charge of the Zoological Garden are, but I venture to suggest that some better provision should be made for the elephants than they now enjoy. I saw them Saturday—a warm day—as they stood sweltering, chained like malefactors to the floor of a sort of house that shelters them and excludes them from the air. It occurs to me that an acre or two should be fenced off for them, with access to the creek. The fence need not be expensive, though it should be strong. Wooden beams buried in the ground to a sufficient depth and connected by a single iron rope such as is used in connection with the derricks, at the height of four or four and a half feet from the ground, would be all-sufficient. Elephants are not addicted to jumping fences nor to crawling under bars, so that one iron rope, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness would hold them. The posts might be twenty or thirty feet apart and should be scotched by a prop on the outer side. The high, natural wall of stone on the opposite side of the creek would answer in place of a fence on that side, and the creek could be spanned by the iron fence in the way proposed. Elephants are fond of water, and it would be delightful to see them revel in the creek. They would keep themselves clean and would save the attendant all the trouble of carrying them water. Their present situation is wretched and no humane person can see them with pleasure. If females should be added to the garden and should bring forth young it might be necessary to have a separate inclosure for each pair.20
This elephant advocate, likely a member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, was clearly acquainted with both the habits of elephants, generally, as well as the
19 “Dunk’s Little Outing” (The Washington Post, July 12, 1898), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 20 “More Room for the Elephants” (The Evening Star, June 3, 1891), “Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1890-1896,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 305 constraints of Dunk and Gold Dust’s enclosure, specifically. This editorialist primarily complained about the elephant’s limited mobility, for they were “chained like malefactors to the floor.” Yet rather than simply admonishing the zoo for improperly keeping elephants, this writer suggested a seemingly simple way to redesign the elephants’ exhibit in a way that would allow for the animals’ movement, strategically using a fence and the cliffs along the creek to create a controlled space over which the pachyderms could wander. Not only would the author’s suggested reform allow Dunk and Gold Dust to live an unchained life, but it would also create a more “natural” and self-sustaining environment where the elephants could clean themselves.
On April 16, 1902, a decade and a year after the zoo received Dunk (Gold Dust died in
1898), The Washington Post printed an article which amplified the concerns of animal activists regarding the National Zoo’s treatment of its celebrity elephant.21 Two days earlier, after a series of deliberations about the pachyderm’s wellbeing, the executive committee of the Washington
Humane Society decided to forward a protest letter to the District’s Board of Commissioners.
This letter, printed verbatim in the paper, attacked the National Zoo for its oppression of Dunk, who served as a “living monument of the cruelty that can be thoughtlessly committed by a rich and civilized government.” The article described Dunk’s exhibit, which was “hastily prepared for temporary occupancy” and “falling into decay,” as cruel and unsuitable. Dunk still lived in the elephant house that was originally prepared for him, the exhibit that originally captured the ire of some activists before it was even completed. The enclosure still could barely “keep the temperature in winter as high as forty degrees, which is much too low for the animal’s comfort,” yet in the summer, its conditions proved sweltering and “unbearable.” Of greater concern, though, was the manner by which Dunk was tethered to this environment. For eleven years, “fastened by
21 “Gold Dust Passes Away” (The Evening Star, November 7, 1898) and “Elephant Gold Dust Dead” (The Washington Post, November 7, 1898), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 306 the leg with a chain not three feet long,” Dunk received little exercise, only able to pace around a circle with a diameter of six feet. In fact, according to the editorial, because of the deviant stigma attached to him during his life with the Forepaugh Show, the National Zoo only allowed him to be exercised after hours when the park was “cleared of people.” This ensured that he would not endanger innocent zoogoers and allowed the “whole force of the establishment” to be present for his long walks, in order “to guard against his escape.” Although surely exaggerated for rhetorical effect, the author(s) depicted Dunk as though he was serving a prison sentence. While captive animals frequently acted out against the chains of their confinement, the magnitude of Dunk’s previous crimes, as well as the crimes of the entire class of zoo elephants to which he belonged, coupled with his image as charismatic yet deadly fauna at the center of urban popular culture, made his previous expressions of agency unforgettable. And although Dunk never proved as dangerous as his former companion Gold Dust, he was still an elephant and therefore could not be trusted.22
The executives of the local Humane Society, though, contended that “under the influence of such confinement, it would not be strange if he were as vicious as he is said to be.” Although seemingly simple, such a statement delved into an aspect of elephant signification that usually lay below public perception—the fact that society (in this case, the National Zoo) molded elephants into the very deviant characters that were popularly imagined. Through its inhumane treatment of
Dunk, the National Zoological Park sustained the very malevolent elephant they feared, and something had to be done. The letter sent to the Commissioners (and to the public through the medium of The Post), emphasized that
[i]t is a matter of indifference to the Humane Society whether the government keeps an elephant on exhibition or not, or, indeed, whether it maintains its Zoological Park. But if it sees fit to do either, the thing ought to be done well,
22 “Pleads for Elephant” (The Washington Post, April 16, 1902), “Scrapbooks, 1900-1919,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 287. 307
and no such cruelty continued as has existed in the case of this animal so long. We are not insensible to the interest and enjoyment which such a park affords to the inhabitants, especially the children; and we have no idea that the proper care of it, and of the animals in it, is an extravagance that the United States or the District of Columbia cannot afford. But it is clear to us that it would be far better to have no animals at all, or only stuffed specimens, than to keep them throughout changing seasons under improper conditions, and at the cost of their discomfort or suffering.
These animal activists wanted the zoo and the public to know that the Humane Society was not a collective of radicals opposed to the convention of animal display. In fact, they agreed with the very rhetoric that zoo boosters used to establish the National Zoo in the first place. However, if the United States government “is going to keep live animals for the amusement or instruction of the inhabitants, they should be kept in a proper manner, and nothing savoring of neglect or cruelty should be allowed to exist in such a public undertaking.” To address the situation, Humane
Society members requested that Congress approve $20,000 for the purpose of building a pachyderm house, asking legislators directly to consider Dunk’s wellbeing. If Congress could not approve this request to better the living conditions of its nation’s elephant, Dunk should either be donated to another zoological park “where proper accommodations already exist[ed],” or “he should be humanely killed.”23
Petitions for Dunk’s wellbeing did not just originate with the local Humane Society.
“Mrs. Clark,” presumably an everyday yet concerned citizen of the District, published an editorial entitled “A Plea for Dunk” in The Evening Star that demanded justice for reasons different than the ones stated in the Humane Society’s plea. She contended that
All other animals, of less intelligence, are provided with comfortable quarters, inasmuch as they have freedom of action and are capable of moving around in the spaces, cages or inclosures allotted to them; whereas the elephant, that is not only the largest animal in size, but in intelligence as well, is given the smallest
23 “Pleads for Elephant;” “In Behalf of Dunk” (The Evening Star, April 16, 1902), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1902, 5. 308
space possible, and burdened with heavy chains which only allow him to take one step forward or backward, restraining any other motion.
Like other public entreaties for Dunk, Mrs. Clark similarly expressed concern about his limited mobility, calling attention to the infamous shackles. However, for this concerned citizen, Dunk’s intellectual ability somehow made him more in need of humane treatment. She continued to explain that “[t]he intelligence of the elephant is classed as being superior to that of other animals, in some instances almost bordering upon human intellect and reasoning power.” Since the elephant possessed a more humanlike intelligence, it, although “patient by nature, becomes in time vicious and vindictive, and usually seeks revenge by killing his keepers, as happened but recently in New York, as well as in other instances.”24
Like the Humane Society’s editorial, Mrs. Clark emphasized the point that the malevolent reputation of elephants did not truly reflect their “nature,” but instead should be seen as a symptom of captivity. Whereas the Humane Society blamed the chains and the conditions of
“such confinement” for the elephants’ deviant behavior, Mrs. Clark took this reasoning one step further by extending intentionality to the elephants. Elephants became “vicious and vindictive” because of their intellectual ability. An elephant “seeks” revenge. For Mrs. Clark, the inhumane captivity of the elephant provided the context for the animal’s acting out, but the animal only acted out because it was intelligent, aware of the inhumane context in which it lived. And because
Dunk was aware of his chains, he possessed an even greater claim to the humane concerns of the
National Zoological Park, the District of Columbia, and the nation at-large. Dunk was “not an object of interest, but of pity,” and the National Zoological Park needed to provide him with an enclosure that he would find suitable.25
24 “A Plea for Dunk” (The Evening Star, November 8, 1903), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. I believe this article was misdated in the scrapbook; it should be, I believe, dated in the year of 1902. 25 “A Plea for Dunk.” 309
The above story about the intertwined sagas of Dunk and animal activism between 1891 and 1902 illuminates three important dimensions of the role that zoological parks played in the formation of animal activism at the turn of the century. First, the story of Dunk shows how animal activists could and did directly influence national politics, making fiscal claims on
Congress for the wellbeing of an elephant. Although Congress did not approve and pass the
Humane Society’s request for $20,000, they did allocate half that amount for the purpose of providing Dunk with a new elephant house.26 Dunk’s new enclosure, which was completed at the beginning of 1903, allowed him to move about without chains both in and outside his building.
His house, a 35 by 65 foot “barn-like structure of brick,” greatly increased his space, and connected to this structure was now a 79 by 96 foot outdoor yard, equipped with a bathing pool six feet deep and twenty feet in diameter.27 While Dunk’s new home was not built around the
Rock Creek itself, as the 1891 animal advocate and editorialist had suggested, his exhibit did free him from chains and allowed him to “enjoy one of the greatest delights of jungle life—the bath.”28 After complaining for more than a decade, animal activists eventually managed to influence national policy, and while this kind of direct appeal to Congress by outspoken zoogoers of the District of Columbia proved the exception, not the rule, these advocates commonly influenced policy at the local, that is, the zoo level. Animal activists consistently made demands on the behalf of zoo animals, and throughout the first two decades of the National Zoo’s existence, these demands encouraged the zoo to improve the conditions within which their animals lived.
26 “But Two Have Escaped” (The Evening Star, November 22, 1902), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 27 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1903, 1. 28 “The Pet of the Zoo” (The Evening Star, Summer, 1903?), Scrapbooks, Vol. 3, 1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 310
Second, the Dunk story demonstrates how the National Zoological Park created myths, personalities, and meanings for the animals it kept while, at the same time, problematizing these very facades. When the zoo purchased elephants, they not only bought their literal bodies for the purpose of visual display, but they also acquired all the meanings attached to their metonymic bodies, for the purpose of cultural display. Dunk and Gold Dust captured public attention because they were deadly and formidable symbols of Nature, and by acquiring its first elephants, the
National Zoological Park legitimated itself as a modern zoo by demonstrating its ability to keep the most formidable mammals of all. The National Zoo needed to underscore these animals’ treacherous reputations, for in so doing, they were implicitly advertising their ability to keep, contain, and pacify the creatures who most exemplify that which is antimodern, wild, and unpredictable. Such a rhetorical project placed the new National Zoological Park among the greatest zoos of the world while simultaneously bringing in urbanite zoogoers who had been voraciously consuming narratives of progress, refinement, control, and nationalism for decades.
However, within the space of the zoo, the narratives associated with animals quickly changed.
Zoo workers, zoogoers, zoologists, and activists alike fashioned new narratives for the animals displayed in Washington. Quickly, the animals of the National Zoo told many stories with many messages and meanings. Some of these plots directly informed the metanarratives employed by animal activists, encouraging zoogoers and publics to view animals as more than Other, as beings, personalities, and agents deserving of moral consideration— an ethical position usually associated with mid-twentieth century animal rights language. Many of the stories told of and by zoo animals, however, may not have led directly to the goals of activists, yet, they always problematized the animal as a singular entity expressing a single and identifiable symbolism.
Zoos placed an Animal on display for a public to see, and in the process of seeing, these publics ripped the Animal and its Meaning apart, into myriad pieces. These pieces were always
311
(re)assembled in multifarious ways. Nonetheless, the zoo gave zoogoers an opportunity to make up their own minds about the animals they were amused by, and in so doing, collapsed, on a popular stage, that Enlightened hierarchy separating humans and animals. Indeed, Dunk’s intelligence, in the words of Mrs. Clark, “border[ed] upon human intellect and reasoning power.”
Last, the story of Dunk and his advocates directs attention to a component of early animal activism largely ignored by historians—the animal mind. As stories of all sorts reverberated through the animal houses of the National Zoo, challenging long held assumptions about nonhumans, a specific conversation about the minds of animals emerged from the laboratories of the life sciences and found a new pulpit in the public sphere, especially the zoological park. In the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, all associated with the
National Zoo began pondering the intellectual abilities of different species. What do animals think? What do they feel? Can they speak? Can they dream? These musings, no matter where they led, attempted to explain the zoo animals that told so many stories to zoogoers. By thinking about animal minds, zoogoers and scientists alike tried to find a place for animals in relation to humans and hoped to ground (or tether) the problematized animal to some sort fixed truth. Of course, these projects often failed, and the truths they sought proved impartial, incomplete, or even false. Nonetheless, by pondering animal minds, zoogoers expressed a desire to make sense of what did not make sense—that beings behind bars could demand so much from their onlookers.
Zoo Activism in Washington
Prior to the establishment of its National Zoo, Washington, D.C., possessed an untapped potential for cruelty. In 1887, Smithsonian taxidermist William Temple Hornaday fashioned the
Department of Living Animals on the grounds of the Washington Mall. At first this animal collection was meant to assist Hornaday in his art of making the dead look alive by giving him
312 living specimens to use as models, but soon the Department became a nationally known collection that would evolve (after intense Congressional debate) into the National Zoological
Park, the first American zoo funded by the federal government. Even in the zoo’s embryonic stage, District citizens acted out against animals. At the beginning of 1889, The Washington Star printed an article entitled “Cruelty to Animals at the ‘Zoo’” with the subtitle “Visitors Who
Torture the Brutes Will Be Taken to the Police Court.” According to this article, the spitting of tobacco juice into the eyes of monkeys proved so endemic to the Department of Living Animals that Mr. W. C. Weeden, the head watchman, had to arrest several culprits. They were usually released with a simple warning, but the problem grew to such serious proportions that Hornaday began sending zoogoers caught spitting at animals directly to the fourth precinct station, where they would be fined five and eventually twenty dollars.29 Hornaday hired Weeden in the first place “to compel the small-boy element,” as well as the “ragamuffin element” (those viewed as the most likely to act violently towards animals) “to depart after reasonable time.”30 There was something about caged animals that compelled onlookers to submit to their sadistic natures.
After the National Zoo officially opened its gates, Washington zoogoers continued to act violently toward the animals. In the summer of 1889, Hornaday told The Washington Post that “It is strange how much deviltry one person can hatch, and their achievements in this respect will hardly be balanced by the good deeds of ninety-nine persons who are above torturing dumb brutes.” In particular, during the zoo’s first summer, one visitor, on multiple occasions, amused himself by coaxing his mastiff close to the bars of the cages so that it would snap at the animals.
During one of these incidents, according to Hornaday, “the dog worried a young antelope presented to us by Senator Stanford, of California, and the animal, not knowing that it was safe
29 “Cruelty to Animals at the “Zoo”” (Washington Star, January 10, 1889), “Scrapbook vol. 2, 1888-1891” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 30 Hornaday, W. T., “Report of the Department of Living Animals,” 20-21, SIA, Record Unit 158, Box 5, folder labeled “Department of Living Animals, 1887-1888.” 313 from the dog, beat its head against the fence in a vain attempt to escape.” The antelope suffered a concussion and died, and Hornaday promised that in case of repeat offense the man “will find himself under lock and key at the station-house.” That first summer multiple zoogoers also enjoyed feeding lit cigars to the buffalo, for like the other animals of the park, they were used to being fed the “succulent stalks of green grass” or daisies that grew along the walkways. A smoldering cigar, though, produced surprised reactions by all parties involved and became a frequent form of entertainment.31
Sometimes mistreatment encouraged retaliation. On June 8, 1890, when a group of children “amused themselves” by teasing and trying to annoy the buffaloes, “an attempt which is usually futile for the big brutes are ordinarily too lazy to lose their tempers,” one of the cows charged and broke through the fence around its pasture. The buffalo bolted into a crowd of zoogoers and headed horn-first toward a group of girls that included three-year-old Rosie Fillins.
As two of the older girls “ran shrieking in opposite directions,” little Rosie stood frozen “almost paralyzed by fear.” To save the helpless Rosie, Annie Howard, “a colored girl, employed as a nursemaid,” and clothed in a “bright red jersey,” ran toward the petrified three-year-old and
“caught the infuriated animal’s eye.” Annie tried to dodge the buffalo, but she was “struck full in the small of the back and lifted bodily into the air.” After falling to the ground, the buffalo jabbed
Annie in the arm and threw her again. Before striking a third time, some men armed with sticks successfully drove the animal back into its enclosure. Annie was “so badly bruised she could scarcely walk,” but she became “quite a heroine for her presence of mind in saving the little girl’s life.” The incident terrified the other children in the crowd, and their parents unsurprisingly
31 “Sunday at the ‘Zoo’” (The Washington Post, June 23, 1889), “Scrapbook vol. 2, 1888-1891” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 1. 314 demanded that the zoo make the buffalo enclosure “more secure.”32 Teased or not, buffalo should not be able to get out of their enclosure. Even though such animal escapes proved inevitable with the establishment of a zoo, the parents of stampeded children rarely accepted this inevitability.
The above incident captured the headlines of The Washington Post the next day.
However, despite the clear and present danger of runaway bison, the newspaper never published an editorial or follow-up article that either blamed the National Zoo for the incident or demanded that a stronger fence be placed around the buffalo enclosure. Instead, three days later, the District public read the following headline—“Don’t Bother the Animals.” This article opened with the following assertion: “It is not in human nature to bear teasing. At least there is a limit to its unresisting endurance, and animal nature is of about the same quality, though more patient and submissive.” After this comparison of human and animal character, the author argued that the
“buffalo cow who broke out of her pen at the National Museum the other day and produced such a panic among the assembled bystanders is entitled to public sympathy, for all the evidence goes to show that her ladyship had been taunted and tantalized until forbearance was no longer a virtue.” The author casted the buffalo as a victim, believing that she expressed virtue through her choice of violent escape over stoic passivity. Furthermore, the journalist continued to contend that the strength of the perimeter should not be considered the primary issue because the “mischief is on the outside, not on the inside.” If zoo “authorities are at fault at all it is in not properly policing the menagerie, so that its four-footed wonders may not be everlastingly poked at, prodded and
32 “Tossed by a Buffalo Cow” (The Washington Post, June 9, 1890), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. It is also important to note that the zoological park was a less discriminatory place than other locations in the city. While surely racism existed in the National Zoological Park, the zoo welcomed African American zoogoers. For example, in 1906, the National Zoo allowed African American children to take part in an Easter egg-rolling event since they were excluded from the traditional, whites- only egg-rolling that took place at the White House. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1906, 6-7. 315 provoked in cyclones of wrath [produced] by the . . . small boy.”33 Despite palpable hyperbole, the above zoo story successfully directed District attention to a serious problem in its zoo, the mistreatment of animals by entertainment-seeking crowds. Runaway zoogoers were on the loose.
Zoogoers frequently enacted violence against zoo animals, and these misdeeds often appeared in newspapers. On August 6, 1890, for example, James Doyle was fined five dollars for spitting tobacco juice into the eye of a bear.34 On November 13, 1893, when the zoo sponsored a
“Receiving Day” that attracted fifteen thousand visitors, The Evening Star commented on the large number of “urchins” armed with “sticks and missiles of all sorts.” Luckily, “none of the animals suffered perceptibly.”35 On May 26, 1895, a man unintentionally poisoned a famous
Diana monkey when he handed it a laurel sprig (deadly to primates) as an incentive to continue the “funny antics” that were entertaining his small son.36 Five months later, some construction workers responsible for the building of a Rock Creek intercepting sewer accidentally killed a sea lion when they mistakenly exploded six sticks of dynamite.37 At the end of 1913, violence in the park became such a problem that a zoo employee had to keep a list of the “lawless, troublesome boys who have been repeatedly warned by Head Keeper and Sergeant of Watch.” The next time
Eugine Kilby, Darrell Bancroft, Lowell Bancroft, Morris Johnson, Carrol Tiffany, Jas Beagle, or
33 “Don’t Bother the Animal” (The Washington Post, June 11, 1890), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 34 “He Spat in the Bear’s Eye” (The Evening Star, August 6, 1890), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 35 “Zoo’s Receiving Day” (The Washington Post, November 13, 1893), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 36 “Diana is Dead” (The Evening Star, June 1, 1895), “Diana and the Laurel” (The Outlook, June 22, 1895) “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. Laurel proved deadly to many zoo animals. In 1891, zoogoers also killed several Angora goats by feeding them leaves of laurel. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1891, 16. 37 “Dynamite Made Them Roar” (The Washington Post, October 24, 1895), and “Killed by the Explosion” (The Evening Star) “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 316
Harry Johnson were caught in acts of “disorderly conduct,” they were supposed to be taken straight to the police station.38
Newspapers reported intentional acts of violence, but they also called attention to all sorts of perceived situational violence and systemic neglect caused by zoo environments. The environments of the zoo channeled the attention of onlookers to the topic of animal wellbeing.
For example, as temperatures reached beyond 100° Fahrenheit during the scorching July of 1892,
Washington newspapers concerned themselves not with the dangers of zoogoing publics, but, instead, with the dangers of extreme heat. Zoo employees spent “the greater part of their time with sprinkling pots wetting the interior of the cages, dens, and enclosures.” Dunk and Gold Dust were even taken on excursions to bathe in the Rock Creek.39 Yet, popular concern for the welfare of zoo animals, in this case for the polar bears, black bears, elk, and wolves in particular, was expressed through daily print culture.40 And this concern was not unwarranted because occasionally zoo animals did succumb to overheating, as a cinnamon and black bear did in the summer of 1893.41 During the hot days of summer, the public wanted to know that their favorite polar bears were receiving their daily rations of ice blocks.42 During the cold days of winter, however, they wanted reassured that Dunk and Gold Dust’s building would be heated, that the llamas could take shelter in a warm stable, and that the alligators would have a place near the stoves. William Blackburne worried especially about the monkeys, for, as he reported to The
Evening Star, “[t]hey suffer terribly from the slightest exposure, and they go into a consumption
38 Scribbled Note, 29 November 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 39 “Keeping the Animals Cool” (The Washington Post, July 28, 1892), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 40 “Animals at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, August 13, 1892), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 41 “Baby Elk Born in the Zoo” (The Washington Post, June 26, 1893), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 42 “Fraternalism at the Zoo” (The Washington Post, August 22, 1892), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 317 which takes them off in a hurry.”43 As the wheel of the mid-Atlantic seasons turned, discussion about how zoo animals fared filled newspapers columns for two decades. Climate and zoo-animal wellbeing marked a popular theme within the wider world of zoo stories.
Situational violence toward and systemic neglect of zoo animals riddled zoological parks, and in all these circumstances, no singular person or persons could be held fully responsible for the animals’ misfortune and maltreatment. Instead, “the zoo” as a collective, public space proved culpable, implicitly fostering, enabling, or encouraging harmful behaviors towards its inhabitants.
In fact, much of this structural violence lay below perception. Visitors, for example, often saw nothing wrong with feeding the animals, and they frequently tossed peanuts into the elephant enclosure and candies into the monkey cages. Encouraging and legitimating such deviant behavior, zoo animals universally learned the art of begging, manifested, of course, in species specific ways. Buffalo would sulk near their fences and chimpanzees would reach their outstretched palms into crowds of snacking onlookers. Frank Baker knew that public feeding harmed the animals. In a letter to Buffalo mayor Conrad Diehl concerning his city’s new zoo and the quality of its curator, Baker admitted that “confinement even under the most favorable conditions will impair their [the animals’] health to some extent. This is particularly the case if indiscriminate feeding by the public is allowed.”44 Baker failed to emphasize, though, how difficult it was for the zoo to police the errant food-tossing ways of zoogoers. Head Keeper W. H.
Blackburne was even convinced that this feeding not only caused health problems, but also provoked zoo animals to fight each other as they competed for both the zoogoers’ food and attention.45 Surely some knew that zoo officials viewed the feeding of animals as deviant behavior. Nonetheless, newspaper articles, with bylines like “Small Boy and His Sister Amuse
43 “Zoo in Winter Quarters” (The Washington Post, October 17, 1892), “Scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 2. 44 Frank Baker to Mr. Conrad Diehl, 29 October 1900, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 96, Folder 3. 45 W. H. Blackburne to Dr. Frank Baker, 2 January 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 96, Folder 3. 318
Themselves Feeding Animals and Gathering Chestnuts,” that idealized images of “Dunk . . . opening his mouth for the peanuts” of young children encouraged zoogoers to make the animals happy.46 In this way, the problem of public feeding represents one way in which the space of the public zoo fostered a type of systemic neglect.
Zoogoers did not just poke, prod, abuse, and feed zoo animals, though; they also advocated on their behalf. In the words of Tappan Adney, writing about the National Zoo for the
ASPCA’s magazine Our Animal Friends, “[t]here are some persons to whom the sight of any animal in captivity can afford no pleasure,” and these individuals inevitably made their voices heard.47 On February 1, 1905, Mrs. Bertha A. Mulhall wrote to Frank Baker, asking, “Is there any reason for keeping the coyotes and [a] black wolf in small boxes? Of course you know they are natives of our north-western plains and run over great spaces and it seems unnecessarily cruel to keep the poor creatures confined in such a small space.”48 Baker replied quickly, assuring Mrs.
Mulhall that the coyotes would only be held in the wooden boxes temporarily until construction was finished on the new animal house. However, in an attempt to assuage Mulhall’s worry, Baker concluded by stating that the “general health” and “personal appearance” of the coyotes are
“decidedly better in the small quarters.”49 These coyotes captured the concerns of other
Washington citizens. Mrs. William Anderson Miller communicated with Baker about the
46 “Big Crowds Throng Zoo” (The Washington Post, October 15, 1906), “Scrap books, volume 4, 1896- 1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 47 “The National Zoological Park” (Our Animal Friends, undated, but probably from 1890), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1902,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. Even though Our Animal Friends was the magazine of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, by no means was this two-page article an attack on the NZP. In fact, Adney almost spoke like a booster of the zoo, explicitly distancing zoological parks from their circus and menagerie predecessors. 48 Mrs. Bertha A. Mulhall to Dr. Frank Baker, 1 February 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. Folders 1-6 of Box 102 are labeled “Complaints, appreciation, and replies, 1904-1930.” Unfortunately, no similar folder exists for years prior to 1904. Any correspondence that concerned the wellbeing of NZP animals prior to 1904 are scattered throughout the various and voluminous collections of correspondence present within Record Unit 74. 49 Frank Baker to Mrs. Bertha A. Mulhall, 3 February 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. 319
“horrors” of the coyotes “shut in those small boxes.”50 On October 8, 1907, the National Zoo received a letter by Mrs. Julia L. Langdon Barber that extended the worry about the coyotes to all the zoo animals, lamenting their “pitiful” housing. “If Zoos must exist,” Barber concluded, “then this one at the Nation’s Capital should be a model for all others to copy.”51 The National
Zoological Park failed to meet the very standards that justified its own existence in the first place.52 The National Zoo could not be a zoo on a hill if its animals were shoved into cramped quarters. Zoogoers of all sorts wrote for zoo animals of all kinds. Miss Mannie Boyd Miller, for example, asked Baker to “try to make the poor lives of those Eskimo dogs a little less miserable.”
Specifically, she was worried about the “foul greenish material” that filled the dogs’ eyes.53 And
Colonel C. A. Williams worried about the rat nests nestled along the bears’ den because once the weather turned cold, the rats would inevitably relocate inside.54
The zoo also received correspondence sent on the behalf of animals not held in the zoo, and one strange incident involving a runaway pet cat clearly shows how the National Zoo functioned as a nucleus of animal activist language in the District, a discourse not solely structured around zoo animals, but animals in general. Ann C. Raub typed a long letter to Charles
D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in “vigorous protest against the wanton killing . . . of [her] beautiful and valuable pet cat at the hands of the clerk of the National
Zoological Park, presumably under the direction of the Superintendent,” Frank Baker himself!
50 Mrs. William Anderson Miller to Doctor Baker, February (?) 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. 51 Mrs. Julia L. Langdon Barber to Gentlemen, 8 October 1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. 52 Baker responded to Barber’s complaint by calling attention to the political restraints of funding, stating, “I fully appreciate your earnest wish that the animals here might be given better quarters, but as you probably know appropriations for such purposes come very slowly and, for the present, we have to put up with such accommodations as the funds at our command will provide.” Frank Baker to Madam, 21 October 1907, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. 53 Mannie Boyd Miller to Dr. Baker, December 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. After receiving this letter, Baker asked William Blackburn to wash the Eskimo dogs’ eyes out. Blackburn was not sure if this would remove the greenish matter. Nonetheless, Miller’s complaint did cause the zoo to take action. W. H. Blackburn to Dr. Baker, 13 May 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 54 C. A. Williams to Superintendent of the Zoo, 7 July 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 320
According to Raub, whose house bordered the Park, her cat wandered into the zoo, and an authorized zoo employee shot and killed the cat while it was resting under a tree—information she gained “upon inquiry.” She complained that various zoo employees had treated her rudely, telling her different stories about where her cat was buried. She was even told that her cat was tossed upon a pile of manure and then partially devoured by a group of buzzards.55 Frank Baker did not deny that the cat was indeed killed, for in a letter to Walcott he expressed that he did not know how the zoo could be expected to keep squirrels, rabbits, and birds, the typical animal ornaments of urban parks, without “hunting stray cats.” He added that Raub was “most exasperating and hysterical.”56 Despite the truth of the matter, the incident sparked Raub to posit that the zoo had no “right to kill a harmless and gentle pet.” She continued to argue that her
“well-fed pets would not harm the squirrels,” and suggested that the zoo was engaged in
“common sense discrimination” by choosing the cats to be killed, for the zoo itself kept felines of jungles, forests, and savannahs. She concluded her obloquy by explaining how a few weeks earlier she had discovered a dead cat with a bullet wound lying on her property. This cat must have been shot in the zoo as well, and she wrote, “This I presume happens more than once and the poor animals crawl off and suffer long before they die. I really feel this whole matter should
55 Ann C. Raub to Charles D. Walcott, 18 December 1909, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 56 Frank Baker to Mr. Secretary, 20 December 1909, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. Not only did stray cats wander through the zoo, but feral dogs also frequently wandered through the park. Occasionally, these dogs killed and injured zoo animals, and they often frightened zoogoers. References to the “wild” dogs of the NZP appear often in correspondence regarding the zoo. For more on feral dogs see Abe Gibson’s online article "Dog Days at the Zoo, Part I," Smithsonian Institution Archives (September 11, 2012), Accessed January 31, 2014, http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/dog-days-zoo-part-i. For more on squirrels in urban parks see Etienne Benson’s “The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (2013): 691-710. In 1902, the National Zoo received eight black squirrels and fifty gray squirrels from Crown Lands, Ontario, and the zoo released them in the park, allowing them to live on the grounds and propagate naturally. This set the precedent. Throughout its early years, according to Hamlet, the National Zoo released thirty-six mountain chipmunks, 205 black, gray, and albino squirrels, thirty-two fox squirrels, and nine prairie hens. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1902, 3. 321 be reported to the Humane Society.”57 In fact, Raub presumed correctly. According to a letter
Baker sent to the Secretary of the Smithsonian two years later, several neighborhood cats died in the National Zoo.58 Yet, while Raub advocated for these cats, others complained about them.
Even Augustus Octavius Bacon, senator from Georgia, sent Secretary Charles D. Walcott a letter, typed on official Congressional letterhead, urging the Smithsonian to kill the stray felines that roamed the park.59 Even if some saw cats as urban vermin not welcome in the Rock Creek, Raub never gave up her fight. The entire episode began again five years later, in 1914, when she suspected that another cat was lost to the zoo.60
Complaints like these did not simply inform the zoo about the mischievous behaviors of zoogoers, nor did they simply criticize the zoo for the way it kept a particular species of animal.
Ann Raub’s letter depicted the National Zoological Park as an institution characterized by hypocrisy and cruelty— hypocritical for caring about some felines while shooting others, cruel for both its hypocrisy and the indifferent way it treated nearby residents who lost housecats to zoo-sponsored rifles. Whether or not Raub’s criticisms were fairly assessed, she clearly connected her complaints to larger tropes concerning the ethical integrity of zoos. Her description about the
“wanton killing” and “discrimination” of the zoo suggests a larger context. The shooting of the housecat, at least in its owner’s mind, was not a lone incident; it was the standard and acceptable behavior of an unethical institution.
Of course, other Washington citizens more clearly developed this line of attack, not just encouraging the zoo to make some sort of change regarding how it kept its animals, but instead,
57 Ann C. Raub to Charles D. Walcott, 18 December 1909, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 58 Frank Baker to Mr. Secretary, 2 December 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. In this letter, Baker explained that “[t]he Park has been considerably troubled by vagrant cats and guns are kept constantly at hand to dispose of them whenever seen. They nest and breed in the gutter pipes and are as wild as any animals of the woods. . . . The neighbors are fully aware of our difficulty as we have had several complaints from them because of the shooting of pet cats.” 59 A. O. Bacon to Hon. Charles D. Walcott, 6 December 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 60 Mrs. A. C. Raub to Mr. Chas. D. Walcott, 6 November 1914; Frank Baker to Mr. Charles D. Walcott, 9 November 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 322 calling the very idea, the very structure of the zoo into question. On July 28, 1910, Miss M.
Gunderson mailed Frank Baker a scathing letter (see Appendix B) packaged with a book entitled
The New Ethics, “which heralds the revolutionized ethics of civilized man to come.” The letter penned by Gunderson exemplified a radical tone, rhetorical maturity, and philosophical depth lacking in the letters of most concerned zoogoers. Excerpted below, Gunderson’s letter demonstrates the pure discourse of animal activism, the type usually associated with 1975 and after (when Peter Singer published Animal Liberation). In clear chirography, after the greeting,
“To you, the superintendent of a not very honorable institution,” Gunderson blistered:
By what “right,” by what demon’s right, I ask, do you condemn your victims to their cages? You point to the “tiger’s tooth and claw” but are you tigers—you gentle men? If the ethics of the jungle is the only ethics comprehensible to you who call yourselves men, even gentle men and civilized—well then, live up at least to the standards of that ethics; do not fall below it. If the tigers and the lions in your pitiless claws were as swiftly killed as [the] more merciful tiger and lion kill their prey, they . . . [would be] better off . . . When you drag them from distant places, capture, transport, and imprison them, you engage in deeds of such moral infamy as no animal but man, the king of bandits, has ever stooped to.61
Gunderson elaborated for another half-page about how Baker deserved to be eaten by a tiger, and then she transitioned to the topic of “animal rights,” a term rarely used in 1910.
While a few European philosophers like Jean–Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant problematized the idea of the animal in the eighteenth century, and while reformists of all kinds had focused increasing attention on the welfare of animals throughout the nineteenth century, there had been little talk about animal “rights,” in particular, throughout the early history of animal advocacy.62 Rousseau briefly thought about the idea of “natural rights” in the context of
61 M. Gunderson to Frank Baker, 28 July 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2, 1-2. 62 Rousseau contended in his Discourse on Inequality that " it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, [animals] cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility wherewith they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes.” I discovered this quote in Mary Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 62. For more on Rousseau and the animal see Francis Moran III’s “Of Pongos and Men: “Orangs-Outang” in Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality,” The Review of Politics 57, no. 4 (Autumn, 1995), 641-664. Kant, on 323 the animal, and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (opposed to the concept of “natural rights”) famously argued that humans, in a just world, did indeed have responsibilities to animals. The coupling of
“animals” and “rights,” though, only occurred in the occasional radical treatise, usually written in the context of the rising British-inspired vegetarian movement, inspired by Thomas Taylor’s 1792 publication A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes.63 Miss M. Gunderson, however, ten years before the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, employed the rarely discussed idea of “rights” in a new, zoo way. 64
She continued her letter attacking Baker’s character in the following manner:
Have other animals no rights that you can . . . ignore the simplest plea for justice? “Naturalists” pointing to “nature red in tooth and claw” often assert that “man need not be kinder than God”; but why then do you fly into fits when bombs are dropped beneath buildings & ban anarchists from the bomb as well as the gods when they choose to hurl their devastating thunderbolts at helpless man and his conceit, or when, there’s an earthquake shock, they cause cities teeming with human life to be destroyed without the slightest regard to the “rights” of screaming man or to the “sanctity” of human life? The creatures in the jungle have ample share in the pains of life; but that certainly is not the slightest reason why you should further oppress them. “That there is pain and evil is no rule, That I should make it greater like a fool.”65 the other hand, in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, argued that humans did not have direct responsibilities to animals, but should nonetheless refrain from acting violently towards them since violence would bring out the bad qualities of mankind. For more on Kant and the animal see Lara Denis’s “Kant’s Conception of Duties Regarding Animals: Reconstruction and Reconsideration,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 17, no. 4 (Oct., 2000), 405-423; or Allen W. Wood and Onora O’Neill’s “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 72 (1998), 189-228. 63 Morton, Timothy, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13-56. 64 Roderick Frazier Nash, in the first chapter of his The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, concisely maps the “expanding concepts of right” in America, from its origin in Lockean “natural rights” through its extension to English Barons (Magna Carta, 1215), American colonists (Declaration of Independence, 1776), American slaves (Emancipation Proclamation, 1863), American women (Nineteenth Amendment, 1920), Native Americans (Indian Citizenship Act, 1924), American laborers (First Labor Standards Act, 1938), African Americans (Civil Rights Act, 1957), and American Nature (Endangered Species Act, 1973). Obviously, such a trajectory oversimplifies the complexity of “rights” evolution. Nonetheless, it does suggest that a 1910 discussion of “rights” within the NZP is indeed surprising when compared to the broader political narrative of “rights” in American society at-large. However, Nash makes clear that Gunderson was not completely unprecedented, for John Muir extended rights to animals in the 1860s—“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of creation!” See Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 9. 65 M. Gunderson to Frank Baker, 28 July 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2, 2-3. 324
In this assault, Gunderson condemned Baker, and thus the National Zoo itself, as needlessly violent. In her usage of the Darwinian imagery of “nature red in tooth and claw,” Gunderson posited two larger contentions about human morality. First, she claimed that the naturalists’ acknowledgement of a violent Darwinian world could not justify human violence against animals.
Second, she added that any person who used such logic to “oppress” animals could not speak of
“rights” or the “sanctity” of life. Neither concepts, for Gunderson, could find a place in a
Darwinian world, so if Baker (and everyone he stood for) believed in “rights” at all, he would have to treat animals differently.
Gunderson, then, continuing her dramatic style, transitioned her soliloquy from gods, anarchists, and men to animals themselves, claiming that “[t]here is suffering enough among the inhabitants of the wildwoods . . . but in spite of struggle and hardships, intermingled with hopes and joys, they are happier there by far in their native haunts than in the claws of pitiless man.”
Concerning “rights,” she exclaimed, “Theirs is the right [emphasis added] to breathe the air of freedom in the forests of their fathers. Their home is there, their heart is there, their happiness is there, where they wish to live and love and struggle for their own sake and their dear ones.”
Despite her obvious anthropomorphizations, Gunderson clearly believed that animals possessed the right to live in their natural habitats.66
She concluded her five-page diatribe to Baker by diving into philosophy in a way that strangely anticipated the works of critical animal studies almost a century later. Gunderson used this space to viciously attack religion, while, at the same time, leveling something akin to a death threat towards Frank Baker.
Are you Cartesians? Have the revelations of Darwin and of Copernicus no significance to you? Are you “king by divine right?” Are you in medieval darkness? Think you still that the heavens revolve around you, that gods take
66 M. Gunderson to Frank Baker, 28 July 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2, 3-4. 325
interest in your affairs, that you were made for eternal glory, and tiger and lion and eagle and deer . . . were made simply to suffer to furnish for “the king by divine right,” sport or a degraded livelihood for him? If you belong to that class of benighted "naturalists" who fail to see the kinship between yourself and your prey, if you “think” that you were made for other worlds but that lion and tiger and elephant and deer and bear and ape were made for this, well then give to the creature whose home and heart and all is here, their share in the world to which they belong. If you belong to fairer worlds why not depart from this one, and relieve our world of a curse, the sooner the better! Surely, you are not making fit “preparations” . . . If, on the other hand, the delusion is not cherished by you, and you know that in all probability the only world to which man and other creatures of the earth have access, is this pitiful world . . . why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest right in this world[?] They are not machines, but our brothers, whether we are too blind and bigoted to see it or not and whether we will it or not, in the great evolutionary surge of life. Shame on the garden where lone and tortured and outraged captives pine their gloomy lives away to furnish degraded pastime for thoughtless onlookers who here learn anew the lesson of cruelty alone.67
In closing, Gunderson predicted that the “shameful garden of cruelty and wrong will no longer exist . . . [for] the more enlightened children of the coming day” will not support “twentieth century barbarisms.”68
In this passage, Gunderson continued her assault on Baker, welcoming the superintendent’s own death because his passing would “relieve our world of a curse.” “The sooner the better,” she cried. Nonetheless, despite the vile tone, Gunderson used this passage to advance some radical claims about animals, elaborating on the idea, already stated, that animals possessed “rights” of their own. First, in asking the question, “Are you Cartesians?” Gunderson not only revealed that she was speaking to an audience larger than just the recipient of her letter
(notice the plural!), but she also showcased her knowledge of Western philosophy. René
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was credited with formulating the predominant opinion about animals for the Age of Enlightenment and after—namely, in the words of Nicolas
Malebranche, that “[t]hey eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they
67 M. Gunderson to Frank Baker, 28 July 1910, 4-5. 68 Ibid., 6. 326 desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes believed that while animals constituted living, organic beings, they possessed no capacity for reason and could not feel pain; animals were simply “automata.”69 By asking Baker to reflect upon his Cartesian assumptions, Gunderson created a rhetorical threshold into the topic of “the animal” similar to those used by critical theorists and philosophers concerned with the “question of the animal” in the last decades of the twentieth question, who quite often began their thinking by dealing with Descartes’ anthropocentrism. Gunderson’s referencing of Descartes, and then Copernicus’ heliocentrism, demonstrates that everyday zoo criticizers could and did employ advanced philosophical reasoning for the purpose of attacking the convention of animal captivity while simultaneously problematizing long held assumptions about the relationship between humans and animals.
Specifically, by calling Baker a Cartesian and a “benighted naturalist,” Gunderson challenged what she viewed as an arrogant inability to empathize with zoo animals, Baker’s “fellow mortals.” Baker failed to see the “kinship” between himself and his prey.
After displaying her command of philosophy and berating Baker for acting as if the heavens revolved around him, Gunderson expanded her notion of the “kinship” between humans and animals. “They are not machines,” she asserted, referring to the Cartesian paradigm, “but
[are] our brothers.” Gunderson advocated for zoo animals in a different way than most animal activists concerned about cruelty. Many activists believed that acting cruelly towards animals encouraged cruelty, generally, and thus would cause humans to treat humans inhumanely; there was no place for cruelty in either the cult of sensibility or the refined city. Other activists took this reasoning one step further, believing that animals themselves deserved, as living beings, to be treated kindly. Rarely, though, did activists explain exactly why animals required humanity’s moral consideration. Gunderson claimed that Baker (and thus zoos themselves) denied animals
69 Harrison, Peter, "Descartes on Animals," The Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 167 (April 1992): 219. 327 from “their simplest right in this world”— “access” to the world, however “pitiful” it may be.
Animals, a category of which humans were members, all had the right to “their share in the world to which they belong.” Zoos fundamentally denied animals these rights, and thus could be viewed as nothing other than institutions of “torture” and “cruelty.” Zoo animals deserved to be in the world, an idea which captured Gunderson in a literal way. Animals should not be held in zoological parks; they should be free in their natural environments.
Few zoogoers wrote letters to Baker like the one presented above. Gunderson’s invective reveals the discursive limit of popular animal activism surrounding the National Zoological Park in 1910. Most who advocated for zoo animals did so in a simple way, calling attention to a structural defect in a given enclosure or the misdeed of a given zoogoer. Yet occasionally, activists ignored the particular cruelties of the zoo, and, instead, attacked the very foundation which supported those cruelties, disrupting the ballast of the zoological park by delving into what it meant to be human and animal. Critiques produced by these reformers expressed the potentials and limits of activism at the beginning of the twentieth century. They also gestured toward a type of philosophical questioning that would eventually usher “animal rights,” as an established idea, into the popular lexicon of Americans. Through the penned words of those like Miss M.
Gunderson in 1910, we see how a contentious discourse based around “animal rights” first emerged in the American public sphere.
All of this should not suggest that the entirety of Washington, D.C., advocated for zoo animals, for some sent letters complaining about the animals themselves, not the conditions in which they lived. Dr. Cecil French mailed a letter directly to Frank Baker that bemoaned the
“tormenting barking” of the sea lions that kept him awake at night in his nearby residence. French suggested that if the zoo “shut them up tight inside a building, be it ever so small, they will mind
328 their own business at night time, and never utter a sound.”70 Mr. William W. Bride also complained to Baker about the sea lions’ barking. Bride made sure, though, to emphasize that he
“appreciate[d] the park very much” and that his “objections” were not those of a “crank.” Bride even donated some red foxes to the zoo a few years earlier, but no matter how much he believed in the zoo, the sea lion’s barking in the early morning hours severely disrupted his sleep.71 Even in its annoyances, though, the zoo challenged its neighbors to think critically about animals.
Baker admitted to Bride, “To be entirely frank in this matter I must acknowledge that I do not now know of any practicable way of quieting this animal, but the matter will be kept in mind with the hope that, by watching his habits, we may presently arrive at some means of controlling him in this respect.”72 In his response, Bride informed Baker that he “notice[s] that the animal stops his barking for an hour or so shortly after six in the morning,” and while he “frankly know[s] nothing of the habits or characteristics of the animal,” he suggested that maybe feeding the sea lions an hour earlier might ameliorate their appetite and lessen the early morning barking.73 In offering this advice, Bride took part in the formulation of knowledge about zoo animals while simultaneously gently critiquing these animals.74 Most who complained about zoo animals were not as kind as Bride. Of course, they rarely worried about the welfare or “rights” of the animals that annoyed them. Many demurred the sea lion’s early morning pleas for breakfast, but zoogoers
70 Cecil French to Doctor Baker, 8 November 1908, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 1. 71 W. W. B. to Frank Baker, 31 May 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 72 Frank Baker to Mr. Wm. W. Bride, 9 June 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 73 W. W. B. to Frank Baker, 3 June 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 74 Unfortunately, no record exists concerning whether or not the NZP altered the feeding times of the sea lions. However, whether or not the sea lions were fed earlier, and whether or not giving the animals’ an earlier breakfast solved the barking problem, the fact that Bride even made a suggestion demonstrates that the NZP was his zoo, and, therefore, he could take part in constructing knowledge about zoo animals. In addition to the above letters between Bride and Baker are these: Frank Baker to Mr. Bride, 2 June 1911, and W. W. B. to Frank Baker, 31 May 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 3. 329 complained about other animals as well. Similarly, Mr. Alfred H. Venable grumbled to Baker about the annoying sounds of the bears.75
Mr. M. L. Halteman wrote to Baker to inform him about how “Mr. Mandrill” reached through the bars of his cage, took his top hat, and ripped it into “99 pieces.” While Halteman insisted that the incident “was no actual hardship,” he instead worried about what would happen if a child broke away from its parents and wandered too close to the mandrill’s cage, for “[h]e can get his teeth partly outside the cage!”76 District citizens even worried about the idea of zoo animals. When a picket fence on the nearby Cathedral Avenue appeared to be torn down, neighbors contacted Baker worrying that a lion had escaped from the park, for large tracks were found near the scene of the crime. Upon complaint, William H. Blackburne immediately went to inspect the tracks and declared them to be the paw prints of a large dog.77 The zoo also took roll call and declared that its animals were indeed in their rightful enclosures. Nonetheless, the residents of Cathedral Avenue were not as easily convinced. Some even claimed that they saw the animal. The next day The Washington Times ran an article entitled “Panic in Suburbs Over Zoo
Animals,” but despite the frenzy, no zoo animals ever turned up outside their cages.78 Throughout his career as Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, Frank Baker’s office was always flooded with complaints against animals, zoogoers, zoo employees (himself included), and the zoo as an institution in general. While these letters differed drastically in whom they reprimanded, they all centered on the issue of wellbeing and justice. Whether zoogoers were angry about how their zoogoing peers treated animals, furious about the authorized killing of stray cats, disturbed at the zoo’s violation of the “rights” of animals, or simply annoyed that the
75 Frank Baker to Mr. Alfred H. Venable, 6 October 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 76 M. L. Halteman to Frank Baker, 17 August 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 77 Frank Baker to Richard Rathbun, 2 September 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 78 “Panic in Suburbs Over Zoo Animals” (The Washington Times, September 2, 1910), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2. 330 noises of the park disturbed their slumber, complainers necessarily had to think about wellbeing and justice in terms of zoo animals. The National Zoological Park forced the nation’s capital to consider the wellbeing of the encaged. Even those who poked, prodded, and teased the animals, who on the surface seemingly rejected any idea of an ethical claim made by the animals they objectified, still had to first (at least subconsciously) come to terms with the animals they subsequently dismissed. Only, then, could choosing to poke, prod, and tease be worthwhile, producing all the potential pleasures that “acting out” and “misbehaving” created for deviants.
Zoos forced all to answer this question: How should I treat the animal before me? No matter how zoogoers answered this question, its asking encouraged them to think about animals in new ways.
From the beginning, the danger that zoogoers posed to zoo animals was widely known.
As early as 1892, the National Zoological Park requested that Congress pass an appropriation bill to increase the amount allocated for the maintenance of the park. To justify the request, zoo proponents emphasized to legislators that funds were desperately needed to pay watchmen to protect both visitors and animals alike. An unnamed zoo official told The Evening Star that not only did the zoo require watchmen to protect families and children from dangerous animals, but they were also needed “to insure the safety of the animals constantly endangered by malicious or thoughtless persons when not under incessant guard or by dogs, numbers of which found their way into the insufficiently patrolled grounds in spite of regulations, causing in several cases death of the more helpless animals.” In this article, like the one above told about Annie and the runaway buffalo, zoo animals were described as “helpless,” vulnerable to the cruelty of rogue zoogoers. Animals and humans both required protection within the National Zoo. While advancing this justification for watchmen, the article simultaneously advocated for the zoo’s famous elephants, Dunk and Gold Dust, calling attention to their inadequate quarters, “[a] shell of pine wood . . . hastily built,” in which “they would perish in a single winter’s night should the fire
331 kept in a rude stove be overlooked.” Within the confines of one column of newsprint, the author married two different denunciations of cruelty toward animals—violence exerted by zoogoers onto animals and neglect on the part of the National Zoo itself. Then, the activist author argued that both types of cruelty were, at least partially, symptoms of the zoo’s financial need, and, therefore, responsibility for correcting these wrongs fell, at least partially, upon Congress. In choosing to finance a zoo in the first place, Congress willingly inherited the moral responsibility of protecting the animals and humans that filled their zoo. The welfare of zoo animals became a matter of governmental duty in 1889; spending done to improve the wellbeing of the National
Zoo’s animals should only be considered an uncontroversial “maintenance” expense. By employing this logic, animal activists, both inside and outside the zoo, cloaked the radical languages of associations like the ASPCA and the Humane Society in the more accepted language of political responsibility.79
No other zoo in the United States commanded the attention of a national government.
Even though situations like Dunk’s direct claim on Congress proved rare, in many respects, the conversations about animal wellbeing within the National Zoo cannot be understood as removed from national politics since those politics sustained the very life of the zoo itself, and thus lives in the zoo. When zoogoers deliberated about the welfare of zoo animals and the ethical integrity of the National Zoological Park, they ipso facto engaged the larger political discourses that structured the zoo. The National Zoological Park and its animals had inevitably stood as symbols of Government and Progressivism. Gunderson’s radical diatribe against Baker could be read as displaced commentary on the hypocrisies of Progressive ideology, Patriarchy, and Science writ large, and Raub’s attack on Baker for his cat-extermination policies could be seen as a conservative response to the government’s intrusion into the wealthy lives of those who owned
79 “The Zoo Appropriation” (The Evening Star, April 15(?), 1892), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 332 property along the Rock Creek that bisected the zoo’s grounds. The National Zoological Park, in this way, linked politics and culture, entertainment and ethics, humans and nonhumans, and as these linkages were made, zoo animals became relevant to new types of thinking, acquiring new symbolisms and making new demands.
Animal Activism Beyond the National Zoo: Philadelphia and New York
The National Zoological Park was not the first American zoo to provide zoogoers with an opportunity to enact violence upon zoo animals, nor was the National Zoo the first to provide animal activists with a medium through which to criticize this behavior. Almost twenty years earlier, the voices of animal activists reverberated around the Philadelphia Zoo, the first public zoo of the United States, which opened in 1874 after a failed start just prior to the Civil War.
Within weeks of opening, one journalist contended that “[a]n observant visitor” to the zoo may be fascinated with the:
comicality of the prairie dogs in their village . . . but he will [also] be impressed with the extraordinary unanimity with which everybody who enters the place manifests an irresistible desire to poke the animals. Everyone seems to think that his money’s worth cannot be obtained unless he be permitted to stir up the beasts, and induce them to exhibit unwonted activity. Men irritate the wild cat and the leopard with their canes; young women titillate the lynx with their parasols; energetic old women jab the opossums with their umbrellas; mischievous boys harass the wolves with their sticks, enrage the monkeys with torpedoes and drug the elephant with tobacco, while one man was detected the other day holding the lighted end of a cigar to the nose of the raccoon. The officers who are stationed in the grounds spend most of their time apparently in interfering with these efforts and stopping them; but as the officers are few in number and the visitors are many, the animals have a rather hard time of it. It would not be a bad notion if the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would interfere in behalf of the persecuted opossum and the agitated wild-cat, by inducing the Zoological people to compel visitors to surrender their umbrellas and canes upon entering the grounds. Then the monkeys would have peace and the raccoons permanent repose.80
80 Untitled Article (Bulletin, July 16, 1874), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archives. 333
On the one hand, this account casted the zoo as a bulwark of anthropocentrism, a site that, for the first time, brought animals from faraway lands into unnatural and unequal encounters with
Philadelphians. For many (or as the author would say, for “everybody who enters the place”), the
Philadelphia Zoo offered opportunities for men of all social rank, even the upper class that carried canes and parasols, to exploit zoo animals. Philadelphian zoogoers had poked sloths to death, poisoned baboons with “lucifer matches,” and squirted tobacco juice at “wild-cats,” and
Washington zoogoers continued this precedent. Also, like the National Zoo later on, the
Philadelphia Zoo required the presence of watchmen in order to ensure the safety of its animals, and watchmen always seemed to be in short supply.81
While the leadership of the Philadelphia Zoo prohibited violent behavior toward the animals, these encounters proved irresistible to the many visitors who needed to bolster their self- esteem by asserting dominance over the kings of the jungles. In a rapidly urbanizing world, maybe zoo animals served as the tabula rasas lost individuals could etch their names onto, as they retreated from the bustling multitudes into the illusory escape that the zoo (like other parks, arcades, and amusements) hoped to be. Many journalists, though, saw through the zoo’s facades and criticized the recklessness of the nation’s first zoogoers. The writer of the above diatribe even called upon the ASPCA to assist the Philadelphia Zoo in keeping its animal collection safe from the egregious behavior of poking publics. The animals in the Philadelphia Zoo may have been viewed as more deserving of concern than the other animal inhabitants of Philadelphia, but the rhetoric of animal activism within the first zoo did not fully escape the mockery often leveled at it outside the zoo. For example, one article entitled “More Foolish Legislation Coming” detailed a legislative bill that intended to “prohibit living animals [from] being fed to snakes,” specifically referring to the rats and mice consumed by the Philadelphia Zoo’s serpent collection. The author
81 “The Zoological” (Bulletin, July 20, 1874), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archives. 334 criticized the legislator who presented the proposal for wasting the taxpayers’ time and then sarcastically warned his readers to be wary of future bills that might “prevent the keeping of turkeys because they catch and eat live grasshoppers.”82 Protecting zoo animals was a contested issue from the beginning, and it would remain a controversial issue for a century, yet since the rise of the zoo movement, many Americans recognized that the animals of their zoos needed advocates. Between 1874 and the 1890s, public critiques of public zoos became commonplace beyond Washington, D.C. Nonetheless, mischievous zoogoers through the turn-of-the-century refused to back down. While there is no way to quantify the rate at which zoo animals across the
United States were poked, mocked, spat at, and targeted by food-slingers, the records of zoos nationwide show that public violence toward captive animals was etched into the very structure of the zoo. Even fourteen years into the twenty-first century, zoos still place placards around their grounds to remind visitors how to treat and not treat the animals.
On August 27, 1894, The World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American publisher known for also owning the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, building the New York World
Building, financing the future namesake book prizes with money willed to Columbia University, and forging (with others like William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal) “yellow journalism,” published an exposé entitled “Sufferings of Central Park Animals: A Legalized
Institution of Torture.”83 The article was crafted by Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, who under the pseudonym “Nellie Bly” became famous in the late 1880s for circumnavigating the globe in record time (modeling her trip off Jules Verne protagonist Phileas Fogg’s infamous eighty-day trip) and for feigning insanity in order to study the workings of an asylum. Wherever The World travelled so did Bly’s columns, showcasing her undercover journalism and activist messages to
82 “More Foolish Legislation Coming” (Unknown Newspaper, 1876?), Scrap Book (1866-1903), Item #PUB R1, Philadelphia Zoo Archive. 83 For more on the influential life of Joseph Pulitzer see James McGrath Morris’s Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). 335 urban audiences around the United States, surely those of the nation’s capital. “Nellie Bly” became a household name by the 1890s, and in 1894 she casted her critical gaze upon the Central
Park Zoo, and in so doing, redirected the attention of readers everywhere to their own local zoological parks.84
The article covered two full pages of newsprint and presented New York and the world with a scathing diatribe against the zoo in Central Park. Nellie Bly began her exposition informing her readers that she visited the zoo frequently because “the menagerie affords such a splendid opportunity to study man, his civilization, his humanity and his peculiarities.” However, despite these opportunities, Bly then underscored a hypocrisy lurking beneath both the
“menagerie” and the city at-large; indeed, “one must remember that the same city which supports the menagerie supports a Humane Society; the one to prevent cruelty to animals, the other to promote it.” After making this claim, Bly continued to present a long list of atrocities committed in the zoo. First, Bly dedicated more than one full column to the abhorrent conditions of the bird house, where the birds were constantly fighting sickness and refusing to lay eggs (except for the canaries, but their eggs usually spoiled). While visiting the bird house, Bly witnessed a boy hit a robin with a pebble, a second boy peg an owl with a paper wad, and an adult man give chewing tobacco to a cockatoo.85
Of course, in the standard muckraking and editorializing style, Bly saturated her prose with hyperbole, even employing personification when quoting a robin red-breast that apparently told her,
I am sick, and I have lost hope. I have not had a clean bath this summer, and my longing for freedom has mastered every other feeling. I want to sit in the sun; it never reaches me here; I want to breathe the pure air instead of this horrible
84 On the biography of “Nellie Bly” see Brooke Kroeger’s Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (Pittsburgh: Three Rivers Press, 1995). 85 “Nellie Bly’s Inferno: Sufferings of Central Park Animals: A Legalized Institution of Torture” (The World, August 27, 1894), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 336
stench; I want to see God’s sky and build my nest in a green tree and bathe in a running brook. Oh, I want to be free! What have I done to man that I should be kept prisoner in this unclean cage?86
Through an anthropomorphized soliloquy, Bly not only employed the ancient convention of extending human voice to nonhumans, but she used this convention to communicate the activist message that zoos were institutions of “cruel imprisonment.” By making animals speak, Bly gave them a “voice,” and in so doing, also gave them a moral claim that her readers would be more likely to take seriously. Bly allowed anthropomorphic animals to demand ethical consideration.
By making animals speak in human tongue, she did not have to convince her readers that they— those other living beings over there—deserved her readers’ concern. Instead, through simple personification, zoo animals underwent a metamorphosis into literary characters speaking on their own behalf, reiterating the complaints of animal activists. Bly’s literary overstatements would have been palpably obvious to her readers, as would have been her moralizing thesis. Her readers may have rolled their eyes at musings like these: “What was it to them [the birds] if the sun shone without, if the air was balmy and the trees green? What if other birds flew from tree to tree and sang and mated and built nests? God had intended that they should do likewise, but man, civilized man, had changed God’s plan.” Nonetheless, no matter how Bly’s readers felt about her “yellow” journalistic style, they at least entertained the idea that, first, zoos harmed the animals they kept, and, second, that those animals deserved moral consideration.
Throughout the rest of her article, Bly continued, in the same style, to elaborate on the horrific conditions in which other animals lived. She described “torture in the monkey house,” where zoogoers threw peanuts, “waste paper,” “pieces of string,” “ends of cigarettes,” and
“lighted matches” into the cages, where a man handed his lighted cigar to a monkey, and where
86 Ibid. 337 another spat tobacco juice into a monkey’s eyes.87 Bly detailed, of course, the misery of the elephants, “fastened to the wall with a three-foot chain,” noting their cramped conditions and their inability to bathe, for they were “covered with a coating of filth.”88 Even though she acknowledged that it was “needless to specify each animal in the park to tell a tale of civilized cruelty,” she concluded her jeremiad by telling stories about polar bears and Alaskan dogs suffering heat strokes, Angora sheep lacking water or grass, foxes and wolves crammed into small pens, and bison covered in grime. All the animals of the zoo, Bly emphasized, were
87 “Nellie Bly’s Inferno.” In each major section of the expose, Bly allowed an animal to speak. She quoted one of the monkeys, whom she called “a dear little woman from Africa,” in the following dialogue: “It’s the same old story,” she says, folding her wee black hands on her knees. “Either foul air or a draught. It is that draught that carries so many of us off. If they must make prisoners of us I think they might look a little to our health and comfort. Why should we be constantly tortured? Does it add to their amusement, for which you say we are kept here? You know it is our nature to exercise, and from the lack of it we sicken and die. We cannot exercise in these small cages. You know why Kitty Crowley died, don’t you?” “I heard she had consumption,” I explained. “No, indeed! She died of enlargement of the liver. That was brought on through lack of exercise. You see, a man had an office above her cage and he complained that when she tried to exercise, and all the poor thing had was a little swing, she shook the floor, so her swing was taken away and Kitty lost her appetite, and shortly afterwards died. Poor Kitty! But she is out of misery now.” “I heard a woman to-day calls us ‘dirty things,’” my little friend continued. “I wonder how she could expect us to be clean when we never get a bath. We are lucky to get enough water to drink. And we do so love bathing. Oh, how I swam and played in the water when I was free! It is no wonder we are always sick here, and that so many of us die. No exercise, no bathing, either foul air or draughts, and detestable food. It is a happy day for us when consumption carries us off.”” Like the other personification presented in the text, Bly used these fictionalized accounts to communicate radical activist messages to her readers. 88 Ibid. Bly also quoted the elephant, which proved especially dramatic. In his soliloquy, the elephant lamented, “Isn’t it lovely? I can almost forget my tortures when I gaze on the blue sky. If I could only take a run across that green! How it would take the cramp out of my legs and how the soft earth would heal my poor feet! Is there water beyond? I might get a bath. Oh, the thought of standing throat deep in a cool pool is almost more than I can endure. And how I would drink! You know I can easily drink ten gallons at a time, and what do I get? Most times none at all, and if any it is one wee bucketful. Oh, this life of torture is too unjust! I wish I were dead.” Then, while deliberating on his peer, the infamous Tip (discussed above), he exclaimed, “Is there any hope of bettering our surroundings and getting more humane care? We have done nothing to merit torture from man, and if man is determined to keep us in captivity, don’t you think it would be humane if he built us proper houses . . .” 338
“[b]adly fed, wretchedly watered, miserably housed, [and] shamefully neglected” – “[t]o tell the case of one is to tell it of all.”89
Surely, in the minds of both animal activists and general readers, the same lesson rang true for zoos. Reading about the Central Park Zoo as a “legalized institution of torture” created an activist lens through which the public could view all zoological parks. Animal activist writing always provoked responses, creating an established and ever-growing discourse about the welfare of zoo animals. Less than one month after Nellie Bly’s feature, The World printed “Why These
Cruelties?” which published three individuals’ responses to Bly’s tirade, those of George Bird
Grinnell (editor of Forest And Stream), an anonymous author writing under the name “Suffering and Discomfort,” and Mrs. E. C. Halcott. To soften Bly’s critique, Grinnell defended the general integrity of the zoological park. However, agreeing with Bly, he emphasized that zoos must keep their animals healthy, and in order to do this, the animals’ “surroundings” needed to “resemble those to which they are accustomed in a state of nature.” They also needed the “food best suited to them,” and they “should have as much room as practicable and every attention should be paid to relieving them from the ailments which must necessarily follow the unnatural conditions of their existence in captivity,” that is, they should be given the best of medical care. Grinnell then gave examples about how to make the animals’ enclosures and diets more “natural.”90
89 “Nellie Bly’s Inferno.” 90 “Why These Cruelties?” (The World, September 13, 1894), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. Grinnell contended that covering the ground of the buffalo enclosure with gravel and broken stones, for example, would allow the buffalo to wear down their hooves, just as they are worn down daily in the wild, preventing them from growing too long and turning up. He recommended a similar remedy for the goat exhibit. The bears, on the other hand, should be fed less bread and, instead, be given more carrots, turnips, and parsnips, for bears’ natural diets rely heavily on roots. And the prairie dog enclosure should be relocated occasionally so that the dogs could rid themselves of the fleas that infested the established tunnels and so that they could exercise by digging new burrows beneath ground that had not been completely stripped of grass. Generally, Grinnell agreed with Bly’s criticism of the Central Park Zoo, but he ended his article optimistically, praising Philadelphia and Cincinnati for successfully providing healthy environments for the animals in their zoos. 339
The anonymous “Suffering and Discomfort” criticized the Central Park Zoo in a different manner. Rather than blame the zoo as a faceless and abstract institution, this author pointed a condemnatory finger at the inexperience of the new superintendent who replaced William A.
Conklin. According to this anonymous writer, the departure of Conklin marked the downfall of the Central Park Zoo because his replacement had “no more fitness than a man would need who was a member of Tammany Hall.” Mrs. E. C. Halcott, the last editorialist published in “Why
These Cruelties?,” took an approach more aggressive than both Grinnell and “Suffering,” stating simply that “[i]t is time that all zoological gardens [emphasis added] were done away with, for there is always much suffering and discomfort among the birds or animals there confined.”91
American zoos were closely connected in many ways, and as zoogoers critiqued their own city’s zoo, they frequently thought about zoos elsewhere. Sometimes one zoo stood as a symbol for all zoos. Other times, zoos were compared and contrasted. Editorials about the atrocities in Central Park continued to hit New York presses. Nellie Bly even published a follow- up, two-column feature that described Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld’s tour of Central
Park’s zoo. In her typical detailed and dramatic style, Bly informed the public about the governor’s horrified reaction to the zoo, who apparently exclaimed, “How frightfully mismanaged! What neglect and what useless cruelty!”92 Altgeld saw something deplorable in
Central Park that he did not see in his own Lincoln Park Zoo.
The National Zoological Park never figured far in the minds of zoogoers around the nation. Shortly after Governor Altgeld toured the Central Park Zoo, the National Zoo’s own superintendent, Frank Baker, made the trip from Washington to New York in order to assess the zoo that had been making headlines. Zoo directors commonly monitored each other regarding the
91 “Why These Cruelties?” 92 “Gov. Altgeld at the Zoo” (The World, September 16, 1894), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 340 welfare of animals, establishing a peer-review system of sorts, and zoos around the nation looked frequently to Frank Baker for approval, advice, and legitimation. During the inspection of the
Central Park Zoo, a Globe journalist interviewed Baker about his thoughts, and one month and three days after the first Nellie Bly anti-zoo malediction, The Globe printed an article, entitled
“Poor Beasts, If You Knew,” that contrasted the scandalous image of the Central Park Zoo with the pristine image of the National Zoological Park. Despite the ongoing activism that had surrounded the zoo since its foundation, the author depicted it as the perfect example of a zoo done right. The byline of the article described the difference between these two institutions as
“the Difference Between the Bowels of Compassion and the Bowels of Tammany.” A second byline declared that “Grass, Trees, and Air Are Theirs.” And a third byline exclaimed, maybe speaking to the animals themselves, that “Everything That New York Denies You Washington
Gives Its Captives.”93
The Globe heralded the National Zoological Park as a zoo upon a hill. According to this article, which was clearly influenced by Baker’s desire to use the newspaper for advertising purposes, the National Zoo was “not a stuffy, cramped, ill-smelling menagerie, where dumb brutes suffer that the public may be amused.” Misinformed by Baker, who would not have spoken about the numerous complaints made against his zoo, the journalist depicted the National
Zoological Park as a paragon of virtue, stating that “[n]o one [t]here is crying out for another
[Henry] Bergh [founder of the ASPCA].” When asked for his opinion about the state of the
Central Park Zoo, Baker simply told the reporter that “I will do anything I can. I have taken much interest in the article published by The World. The principle upon which we work is simply to place our animals, so far as is compatible with the condition of captivity, under the conditions peculiar to them in their wild state.” Rather than discussing how to improve the Central Park Zoo,
93 “Poor Beasts, If You Knew!” (The World, September 30, 1894), “Scrapbooks, 1887-1900,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 341 the article devoted two full columns to vividly detailing the greatness of the National Zoo— the spacious and well ventilated enclosures, the abundance of water, the cleanliness of the park, and the advanced medical care. However, Baker cloaked the zoo’s self-promotion in an activist guise, for the article concluded with the only other quotation and passage that concerned improving the
Central Park Zoo: “I would suggest that perhaps some of the most important obstacles of Central
Park may be in the difficulty of securing proper keepers. It is only possible to do this where the full power of dismissals and changes is absolutely vested in the superintendent, unaffected by any political influence.”94 Baker’s boosterism proved casuistical. Even though the conditions of the
National Zoo proved far better than the deplorable conditions of the Central Park Zoo, activists still frequently complained about the way animals were kept in Washington. Baker surely could not be honest about the weaknesses of his zoo, nor would he want to call attention to the universality of animal activist campaigns surrounding all American zoos for fear that such candor would tarnish the reputation of his zoo and zoos everywhere.
Yet Baker’s honesty is beside the point. Baker travelled to New York as an ironic animal activist, as a symbol (whether rightly or wrongly) of the noble zoo. Usually, animal activists served as critics of and bad publicity for zoological parks. In the day-to-day operations of a zoo, activists would have often been viewed, by the superintendents that could never live up to activist standards, as nuisances that questioned the very legitimacy of the zoological park. However, by inspecting the Central Park Zoo, Baker became an activist himself, reappropriating animal activism for zoo endeavors. By playing the role of zoo critic, Baker drew a distinction between a
“good zoo” and a “bad zoo,” extolling the National Zoological Park, in particular, and the idea of the zoological park, in general. Baker may not have told the Globe reporter about the chains that tethered Dunk and Gold Dust to their exhibit, but he did successfully laud, and therefore
94 “Poor Beasts, If You Knew!” 342 exemplify, the characteristics that defined the ideal zoo. Of course, these ideals always remained illusory objects to strive for rather than objectives obtained. By speaking about these ideals in a forum as public as The Globe, though, Baker made the rhetoric spoken in the halls of Congress a few years earlier during the process of establishing the National Zoo suitable for the largest metropolis in the United States. The Central Park Zoo, Baker argued, needed to look to the
National Zoological Park for salvation.
Zoos and Shifting Attitudes Toward Animals: Larger Trends
The National Zoological Park proved unique in many ways. No other American zoo arose from taxidermic practices. No other American zoo commanded the attention of a national government. No other American zoo was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, giving it such privileged access to the nation’s elite scientific community. And no other American zoo was ordained with a conservation mission like the one William Temple Hornaday and the United
States Congress bestowed upon the National Zoo. However, despite its uniqueness, the National
Zoological Park was still only one member of an expansive zoo network. The lessons learned about the animal activism surrounding the National Zoo apply to all American zoos, and these lessons are simple and threefold, corresponding to the three sections above. First, the case study of Dunk and Gold Dust makes the simple point that zoological parks did indeed command the attention of the animal activists usually associated with the humane movement, the ASPCA, and similar organizations. Second, newspaper articles about the National Zoo and letters of complaint written to the zoo demonstrate that zoogoers, even if not consciously participating in formal activism, often concerned themselves with the welfare of zoo animals. This broadens the category of “activist” to include informal advocates of animals and stretches the category of “activism” to move beyond politics and policy and into the realm of thought, discourse, concern, and affect, all of which became tangibly encoded in newspaper ink and communicated to vast urban audiences.
343
Third, animal “activists” and animal “activism” pervaded the American zoo movement. Just as zoos were networked together, so were their accompanying “activists.” The American zoo movement began in Philadelphia, spread to New York City, Chicago, Providence, Washington,
D.C., Cincinnati, Binghamton, and Baltimore, and continued on to almost twenty other cities by
1900. As zoos became a centerpiece of the American city, they simultaneously established public forums for the rethinking of animals.
This chapter did not make a case for causation. It did not contend that the twentieth- century animal rights movement arose out of the zoo movement, nor did it argue the inverse.
Animal rights and zoos both possess long histories that trace back into the eighteenth century.
However, animal rights (originating in natural and utilitarian philosophy as well as radical vegetarianism) and zoos (first forged as imperial symbols of the “nation”) have very different, even opposed, creation stories. While this chapter did not narrate creation nor argue for causation, it did make visible a previously hidden context. By opening up the National Zoological Park, it showed animal activism in action. Most everyday zoogoers did not consider themselves activists, enrolled in philanthropic and political organizations for the protection of animals. Most everyday zoogoers did not consciously develop a nuanced metaphysics concerning the “nature” of rights, the universality of emotion, the interspecies experiences of pain and pleasure, or the implications of evolutionary theory. Yet zoogoers thought about animals. They looked through the bars of zoos, over the walls of enclosures, and between the interstices of fences into the eyes of awaiting animals. These gazes required responses, and these responses could manifest themselves in many ways. Humans enacted and extended compassion toward animals, and processes of affect, projection, and otherization inevitably wrapped into each other, establishing a mutual
344 reinforcement.95 No matter how zoogoers engaged zoo animals, these interactions, at the largest scale, created a new discourse of animal welfare.
The National Zoological Park should be seen as both a laboratory, where zoogoers could think about and experiment with animals, and a lyceum, where the results of these myriad experiments could find an audience. The results, of course, were multifarious. The man who spat tobacco juice into the eye of a monkey, the girl charged by a buffalo, and the woman who pondered animal rights when a keeper shot her housecat all had something different to say about both zoos, in general, and animals, in particular—but significantly, they had something to say.
Newspapers played an important role in this process, serving an amplificatory function, transforming individual experiences into public experiences. Newspapers also structured these experiences around larger discourses about animals, animal welfare, animal rights, conservation, and ethics. Zoos ushered their publics into these discourses, infusing these conversations with the voices, experiences, and energies of the masses. Zoos also gave these discourses a different kind of palpability and materiality. Few of the episodes described above dwell in the realm of abstractions, of signs and symbols, of high intellectualism, where the Discursive usually resides.
Instead, the episodes above, embodied in the chains of elephants and the early morning barkings of sea lions, show how discourses come to earth, where they are reformulated to express the thoughts of the people. And the people of Washington, as they strolled through the National
Zoological Park, thought about the welfare of animals, not the horses that pulled their carriages or the dogs that slept at their bed ends, but elephants, chimpanzees, cockatoos, and wolves.
95 For a critical exploration of cross-species gazing see Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). In the process of seeing humans become animal and animals become human. Inevitably, both humans and animals, in the minds of humans at least, always hold an ambiguous status, somewhere between pure “human” and pure “animal.” For Derrida, “compassion,” seeing oneself in the Other, creates human “disempowerment.” Such “disempowerment” could lead to acts of violent otherization, which in turn, reinforces compassion. For another example of how these processes influence history see Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir. For a useful analysis of Derrida’s thoughts on gazing see Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 345
Zoos marked an important feature on the changing landscapes of human-animal sensibilities. As the horizon of the nineteenth century faded into the threshold of the twentieth century, animals came into view for many reasons. The literatures of environmental history and animal studies have offered some reasons for this transition, but they have overlooked the centrality of zoos to the story. This chapter has captured the voices of those concerned with zoo animal welfare as they reverberated throughout the Rock Creek between 1887 and World War
One, but these voices were surely only part of the larger cacophony directed by a zoo-networked nation.
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The Ngram graphs below help situate the voices of Washington zoogoers within larger
American discursive trends.96 While correlation does not equal causation, it is worth considering the pattern by which the phrases “National Zoological Park,” “zoological garden,” and “animal rights” moved in and out of the popular lexicon.97 The American zoo movement began in
Philadelphia in 1874 (after an unsuccessful start in 1859, prior to the Civil War) and spread from city to city between 1874 and 1910, reaching its most rapid pace between 1895 and 1905. The
National Zoological Park opened its gates in 1891, after its emergence from the Department of
Living Animals. By the summer of 1895, the National Zoological Park became one of the most known zoological gardens in the world, consistently capturing the attention of Washington’s public and print media. While the term “animal rights” was supposedly, according to its historiography, only occasionally uttered by a handful of activists and philosophers (few of whom
96 http://books.google.com/ngrams. Google Books Ngram Viewer. 97 “Zoological garden” proves to be the most effective term to track the concept of “zoo” since the latter term was slang not commonly used until after World War Two (with the exception of a few titles in British popular culture earlier in the nineteenth century) and since “zoological park” was trendy, correlating with publications dealing with the NZP, not zoos in general. “Animal rights” sufficiently tracks the culmination of animal-welfare thinking. As discussed above, this term was rarely used; therefore the frequency of its use does not effectively represent the numbers of people who considered the welfare of animals. However, its pattern can still be instructive. 346 were American) prior to Peter Singer’s publication of Animal Liberation in 1975, apparently, the term experienced an explosion between 1887 and 1902, peaking in 1895. This unbeknownst efflorescence deserves a study of its own, but for now, it is safe to conclude that when mapping the larger trends of American discourse, the language of Miss M. Gunderson seems a little less surprising, when she asked Frank Baker, “why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest right in this world?”
Graph 1: Usage of “National Zoological Park,” 1820-1930
Graph 2: Usage of “zoological garden,” 1820-1930
347
Graph 3: Usage of “animal rights,” 1820-1930
Graph 4: Usage of “animal rights,” 1800-1980
348
Chapter 7: The Zoonotic Nature of Tuberculosis
The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope. His jointed tongue that lies beneath A hundred curious rows of teeth; His seven tufted tails with lots Of lovely pink and purple spots, On each of which a pattern stands, Composed of forty separate bands; His eyebrows of a tender green; All these have never yet been seen— But Scientists, who ought to know, Assure us that they must be so . . . Oh! Let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about! - Hilaire Belloc1
Roosevelt’s Gifts
On January 6, 1905, The Evening Star announced the deaths of two zoo celebrities, a lioness and a male baboon, both given as gifts by King Menelik of Abyssinia for President
Theodore Roosevelt. Even though the lioness, prior to her transport, lost an eye in an unfortunate accident, according to a post-mortem examination, the feline finally succumbed to “inflammation of the kidneys and liver, and other causes, which were evidently of long standing.” The baboon, on the other hand, represented a “well-defined case of tuberculosis,” apparently displaying all the signature symptoms. Authorities believed the baboon had long suffered from the disease, but the
“change of climate from Abyssinia to America,” coupled with “recent severe weather,” worsened
1 Belloc, Hilaire, Complete Verse: Including Sonnets and Verse, Cautinary Verses, The Modern Traveller (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1970). This was also quoted at the beginning of Part III of Thomas M. Daniel’s Captain of Death: The Story of Tuberculosis (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). 349 the tuberculosis to its deadly “climax.” In both cases, a pathologist employed by the Bureau of
Animal Industry of the Department of Agriculture performed the autopsies. When completed, the bodies, unsurprisingly, were enshrined in the National Museum.2
The lioness and the baboon were not the contagion’s first zoo victims. Previously, a mule deer from New Mexico, two pinamons from South America, a large elk, and a rattlesnake died from the teeth of tuberculosis, and in all cases, their bodies were closely examined by physicians who echoed the hypothesis that climate change exacerbated the effects of the ailment. Despite these casualties, though, zoo officials felt “gratified to find comparatively such a small amount of tuberculosis among the animals, birds and reptiles in the government institution here as is reported from other Zoos.” The tuberculosis that officials did find in their zoo was usually, they believed, contracted before the animals left for America, often in the “unsanitary places where they were kept by dealers in animals.”3 Nonetheless, zoo animals killed by disease offered researchers unique opportunities for study. The National Zoological Park, as well as zoos around the world, institutionalized, routinized, and sacralized the autopsy as an essential post-mortem procedure for explaining and preventing the death of zoo animals.
The autopsy, however, transcended its primary diagnostic function. In the wake of the lioness and baboon’s death, one zoo representative reported to The Evening Star,
The post-mortem work brings about interesting and important results and conditions in animal life under which diseases occur and the adoption of preventive measures. For instance, it has been found by experience at the Washington Zoo, as well as at other places, that it is almost impossible to keep the moose in captivity. These animals usually die from chronic inflammation of the stomach and bowels from the lack of some element in their food. You know on their native heath they live upon the branches of trees and other foliage. [If] [t]he kind of food necessary cannot be supplied to them, their condition grows worse and death results.4
2 “Tuberculosis at the Zoo” (The Evening Star, January 6, 1905), Scrapbook “1896-1907,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 350
The National Zoo used the autopsy as a medium through which it could construct knowledge about “animal life” (zoology), “disease” (pathology), and “preventive measures” (medicine and public health). In addition to these various epistemological functions, the autopsy also served as connective tissue joining the zoo’s multiple organs. Post-mortem work brought surgeons, pathologists, zoologists, veterinarians, and zookeepers into a shared laboratory space, where they wrote about and publicized the deceased through diverse publications and for diverse audiences.
The autopsy not only brought together the heterogeneous actors within the zoo, but it also connected the zoo to publics outside—scientists, medical professionals, animal dealers, and, most importantly, the zoogoing and newspaper-reading masses who regularly read about the deaths of their favorite animals. The autopsy gave the many lives in the zoo a structure and the many voices of the zoo a cadence. Every human associated with the zoo scrutinized the dead in order to preserve the living. These myriad voices underscore the importance of the National Zoological
Park as a new type medical institution dedicated to both human and animal welfare. Often, however, the zoo’s many actors attempted to contain disease and control health only to discover that all lived precariously at the mercy of contagion.
The National Zoological Park, generally, and the zoo autopsy, specifically, created a constructive space in and through which knowledge about diseases, ailments, and health conditions were forged. Zoo animals frequently died from pneumonia, aspergillosis, enteritis, gastro-enteritis, intestinal coccidiosis, nephritis, and quail disease. Less frequently, zoo animals succumbed to rabies, abscesses, cancers, impactions, nematode worms, duodenal obstructions, and emotional “shocks” (when an external stimulus produced a traumatic, life-ending experience).5 The list of conditions plaguing zoo inhabitants expanded as years passed. The
5 For example, in 1895, seven foxes succumbed to an outbreak of rabies within the zoo. And in 1897, most of the foxes and dogs died from an outbreak of distemper. Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National 351 professionalization of human and veterinary medicine in society at-large provided an ever- expanding lexicon for diagnosing and describing both bodies and maladies, and the technological developments that accompanied this professionalization propelled medical knowledge along a path of constant change. Each of the disorders, syndromes, and conditions listed above, along with countless others, possessed their own complex histories. Rather than generalize about all the health conditions the zoo faced between 1890 and 1920, this chapter explores the history of one disease within the National Zoological Park—tuberculosis. This chapter, then, functions as one synecdoche embedded within another. The NZP as a medical institution serves as a window into zoos everywhere, and the history of tuberculosis within the NZP serves as a window into the history of other diseases within the same zoo, and thus, also as a window into the grand history of
“Disease” within the international zoo movement. This chapter demonstrates that zoo archives offer untapped storehouses of information for historians of medicine to integrate into histories of disease, public health, and medical understanding.6
Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word-processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, “1895,” 4, and “1897,” 4. 6 Of course, this story, like all historical narratives, will remain incomplete. Even though the history of tuberculosis within the NZP surely began with the establishment of William Temple Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, evidence regarding the health of zoo animals poses particular challenges for the historian tracing the history of a particular disease. Knowledge about tuberculosis at the turn-of-the- century always was contested; experts in Germany, London, and New York, for example, frequently disagreed about some of the disease’s fundamental qualities. Furthermore, research occurred in different places and at different times, and dissemination of the knowledge produced by this research took time. Therefore, the ability to detect and diagnose the disease evolved piecemeal and always proved limited. Many zoo animals undoubtedly lived and died with undetected tuberculosis, especially before 1900, and there is no way for the historian to calculate definitively how many of these animals there were. While conjecture and suggestive evidence may help create hypotheses to fill in the sources’ silences, ultimately undiagnosed diseases must remain undiagnosed and lost to history. Tuberculosis surely proves elusive to historians, but it also proved so to medical professionals of the past as well. Sometimes, the infected (both humans and animals) could live with the disease for decades. Other times, the infected would die within weeks of contraction. Tuberculosis is mysterious. While the detectability of the tubercle bacillus under the lenses of microscopes eventually became indisputable evidence for the presence of the disease, many humans and animals with lifelong tuberculosis died from other maladies that masked the systemic tuberculosis that exacerbated their health problems in the first place. The “cause of death,” as listed on an autopsy report, for example, could be listed as peritonitis or endocarditis without acknowledging the presence of a long-lasting tuberculosis that worsened the symptoms of the primary cause of death. The evidence is not only constrained by the limits of medical knowledge, but is also limited by institutional 352
This chapter presents a series of moments in the history of tuberculosis. The first foregrounds federal policies concerning public health and education, explaining how government sought to subdue the “Great White Plague” within federal institutions. This section focuses on popular conceptions of the disease as well as on the public policies derived from them. It uses the zoo as a window into federally organized public health programs, but, at the same time, gestures towards the limits and flaws of their policies. The second moment describes the “discovery” of tuberculosis within the National Zoological Park and outlines the numerical prevalence of the disease among the zoo’s inhabitants. This section details the symptoms of tuberculosis in myriad animals, and shows how these animals were diagnosed. The chapter then turns to the year of
1912, when the Washington public began to worry about tuberculosis within their zoo. The fourth section examines the correspondence of zoo officials about tuberculosis and highlights both the contested nature of the disease and the interconnectivity of zoo networks. The chapter concludes by showing how the zoo functioned as a medical institution that not only gathered statistics about tuberculosis’s deadly nature, but also formed knowledge about the disease itself.
In 1967, Herbert L. Ratcliffe, Director of the Penrose Research Laboratory of the
Zoological Society of Philadelphia (located in the Philadelphia Zoo) and Professor of
Comparative Zoology at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a paper before the American
Philosophical Society entitled “Contribution of a Zoo to an Ecology of Disease.” Operating from the assumption that “organisms are self-regulating, self-perpetuating physicochemical entities, which in health maintain dynamic equilibrium with environment through neural and neuromuscular responses which, in sum, constitute behavior,” Ratcliffe argued that zoological gardens, as “experiments by which mammals, birds, and other vertebrates are assembled into . . .
factors particular to the zoological park as a new institution. Before autopsies could be performed, funding for autopsies, medical buildings, and medical equipment had to be allocated and infrastructures that handled, moved, and cut open dead animals needed established. 353 densely populated urban areas,” unavoidably promoted “disturbed behavior” in their animals.
This “disturbed behavior,” as a symptom of zoo environments, caused and sustained disease among zoo populations. Ratcliffe contended that even though the improved diets of zoo animals after 1935 lessened malnutrition in zoos, and thus lowered disease rates generally, zoo environments still caused “disturbed behavior” that made animals susceptible to diseases. For example, Ratcliffe explained that throughout the history of the Philadelphia Zoo, the grouping of white-tail deer within a single exhibit, despite their typically “nongregarious” personality in the wild, caused these animals to experience “wasting, dwarfing, diarrhea, and deformed antlers” due to “disturbed behaviors” and their accompanying physiological responses. Most significant,
Ratcliffe’s paper demonstrated that zoo records can be used to “develop methods of disease control,” for “[i]maginative use of the zoo may also aid man as he attempts adjustment to his self- induced dilemmas, both of survival as a member of mass society and in developing explanations for disease; that is, in developing an ecology of disease.”7 This chapter continues down the methodological path forged by this 1967 zoologist, exploring the records of a different zoo in order to deepen understanding about disease in past human and animal societies. This chapter also shows that Ratcliffe was not the first zoo man to believe that the ailments of zoo animals can teach us about the ailments of human animals.
“Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees”
Tuberculosis had long plagued American society. As historian Sheila Rothman has shown, tuberculosis, for most of the nineteenth century, was known as “consumption” and was defined by “readily observable physical changes.” These changes included coughs that began as
“frequent and harassing,” continued as “hollow rattles,” and concluded as “graveyard coughs.”
Paleness, weakness, fatigue, and mucous accompanied the symptom of the cough, and as coughs
7 Ratcliffe, Herbert L., “Contribution of a Zoo to an Ecology of Disease,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 4 (1968): 235-244. 354 worsened along its spectrum, mucous also simultaneously shifted from green to bloody in color.
Even though “consumption” was generally thought to be “hereditary and noncontagious,” it affected a large proportion of the population over the course of the century. In 1882, after Robert
Koch discovered the bacillus that caused the disease, “tuberculosis” slowly replaced
“consumption,” and a pervasive yet mysterious ailment transformed into an identifiable pandemic with a specific microscopic cause. Fear of tuberculosis soon gripped the masses, and this fear sparked campaigns to educate the public in how to prevent and contain the tubercle bacillus. This fear consumed Americans in the two decades surrounding the turn-of-the-century.8
Almost one year after the deaths of his lioness and baboon, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order, inspired by a resolution of the National Association for the Study and
Prevention of Tuberculosis, that established a committee of three Surgeon Generals responsible for conducting an “inquiry [into the] sanitary conditions existing in all Government offices and workshops where a large number of persons are employed, especially with a view of recommending, if necessary, measures for the prevention of tuberculosis therein.” This committee also needed to prepare a plan that could make the federal government tuberculosis-free. Soon
8 Rothman, Sheila M., Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 3-6 and 180-193. There is a robust historiography focused on the history of tuberculosis in American and European society, exploring the shift from “consumption” to “tuberculosis,” as well as examining issues of class, public policy, state power, popular reaction, germ theory, bacteriology, microscope technology, and food safety. This chapter prioritizes the role of the National Zoological Park and will only discuss these larger historiographical issues as illuminated by the specific zoo sources. For more on the topic of tuberculosis see Michael Worboys’s Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David S. Barnes’s The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth- Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); René and Jean Dubos’s The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Linda Bryder’s Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Peter Baldwin’s Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Katherine McCuaig’s The Weariness, the Fever and the Fret: The Campaign Against Tuberculosis in Canada, 1900-1950 (Montreal: Mcgill Queens University Press, 1999); Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); F. B. Smith’s The Retreat of Tuberculosis, 1850-1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988); Barbara Bates’s Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876-1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Thomas Dormandy’s The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 355 after, another executive order demanded that each Executive Department adhere to the guidelines established by the above committee. Every Department needed “to ascertain the names of any person . . . with tuberculosis, and to present to them the printed rules prescribed . . .” Furthermore, this second order required a “thorough sanitary inspection of [all] public buildings and workshops,” resulting in a list of all unsanitary conditions “immediately remediable” and all unsanitary conditions “requiring structural changes.”9 Like other federal buildings, the animal houses of the National Zoological Park, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, would also be subjected to this inspection.
Tuberculosis raged throughout both the District and the United States. According to the report that the above executive orders culminated in, entitled “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among
Government Employees,” phthisis (the ancient Greek term for the disease) was “the most widely spread and deadly disease that affect[ed] humanity.”10 The cause of the disease was supposedly a
“living germ, a minute plant called the bacillus of tuberculosis, which enters the body in various ways and there causes change of structure, destruction of tissue, and very often constitutional symptoms of a general bodily infection, with wasting away and ultimate death if not checked at the beginning.” If these “minute plants” entered the skin, sometimes the tuberculosis would remain localized in specific parts of the body, or when ingested they could produce an intestinal form of tuberculosis. Most commonly, though, humans inhaled these “minute plants” into their lungs, where “consumption, phthisis, pulmonary tuberculosis, or tuberculosis of the lungs” would develop. This type of tuberculosis, also known as the Great White Plague, afflicted the United
9 “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” Prepared and issued in accordance with Executive Order of December 7, 1905, Folder entitled “Animal Research: Correspondence – NZP and similar organizations – Tuberculosis among animals and employees 1905-1916,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12, 3-4. 10 Thomas Daniel (see Captain of Death, page 17) gives a brief etymology of “pthisis,” stating that while the exact derivation of the word is unclear, it probably stems from either the Classical Greek verbs for “to spit” or “to consume.” The word “consumption,” itself, is the Old Testament term for tuberculosis, still used today in modern Bibles to translate schanhepheth. 356
States and Europe, responsible for about “one death in every four occurring between the ages of
20 and 50” and killing “young boys and girls just entering upon the serious work of life, fathers and mothers of families, breadwinners, and citizens at the most useful period of their lives.”
Consumption was not only the most dangerous and deadly of the various types of tuberculosis, but it was also the most contagious. Mass expectoration transformed public spaces into cesspools of disease.11
“Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees” called particular attention to the dangers of sputum, stressing that “[t]he disgusting habit of spitting upon the sidewalk, floors of public buildings, hallways, porches, the floors of carriages, cars, boats, etc., when the offender is consumptive, distributes day by day millions of disease germs in all directions.” After drying, the dribble of the tuberculated released its germs into the air, where the healthy could breathe them in and become sick. “Moist sputum,” especially “virulent,” abounded with germs, and the report suggested that everyone should avoid contact with the everyday vectors that could have touched the mouths of others—drinking glasses, towels, handkerchiefs, soaps, tableware, and toilet articles. The slaver of the sick proved so contagious that “[i]f it were not for the power that very vigorous people, living healthy lives, possess to resist disease in general it is probable that consumption would kill off whole communities, because it hardly seems possible that any single inhabitant of a city, where many have consumption, can for long escape breathing into his lungs some of the germs of the disease.” Surprisingly, the report emphasized the threat of spittle and phlegm drying on the sidewalk over the dangers of coughing directly into the air. However, in 1905, medicine had not yet fully grasped the central role of the “cough” in spreading pathogens.12 It would not be until the 1930s and 1940s, with the research of William Firth Wells, and the 1950s and 1960s, with the work of Richard L. Riley, that tuberculosis would become
11 “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” 5-6. 12 Ibid., 6-7. 357 known primarily as an airborne pathogen, spread through minuscule water droplets hacked into the air. These droplets could hold tubercle bacilli, and the bacterium was so light that it could float in the air for hours by itself even after its water encasement evaporated. With this understanding, by the mid-twentieth century, coughing would trump spitting in importance.13
Nonetheless, in 1905, contagious sputum caked the walkways of America’s growing cities, and surely if the ill flâneur felt inclined to spit, he would not hesitate to do so upon zoo walkways or into zoo exhibits.
Typically the “[p]eople most liable to be infected are those who live unhygienic lives, or who are compelled, in order to get a livelihood, to work amidst unhealthful surroundings.” The report continued to depict a disease of the working class, for “[o[vercrowded, unventilated dwellings, offices, and workshops, sedentary occupation with lack of exercise, trades causing much dust which by irritating the lungs produces favorable conditions for the growth of the germ, poor food and insufficient clothing, uncleanliness of person and surroundings are all factors predisposing persons to consumption . . .” The report emphasized, though, that tuberculosis did not spontaneously generate among the destitute and “uncivilized” lower orders, a classist notion that would have been commonly accepted by medical experts in the early-nineteenth century, nor was tuberculosis a mysterious miasma that emanated from polluted urban environments. Instead, in the wake of the likes of John Snow, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch, as germ theory (or the pathogenic theory of medicine) became commonly accepted, the government report made sure to specify that “nothing can actually cause consumption except the entrance of the germ into the body.” While the lower or working classes may have been more likely to contract tuberculosis due to their work, diets, living conditions, and access to medical care, and while some individuals may inherit a predisposition to the disease, the bacillus itself proved a
13 Daniel, 92-93. 358 democratic “plant.” Indeed, in 1906, the only way to prevent the spread of tuberculosis was to
“destroy all the sputum of every consumptive, for it is almost always by means of the sputum that a consumptive infects another person.” No matter where it lay—“floors, sidewalks, vehicles, on clothing or utensils”—sputum must be annihilated.14
“Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees” concluded optimistically, emphasizing that humans need not fear and tremble. Tuberculosis could be cured “when intelligent treatment is undertaken early in the disease.” Many who could afford to do so often traveled to the warmer and drier climates of southern California and Colorado, places defined by
“sunshine, equable temperature, and absolutely pure air.” However, consumptives could convalesce in any location if they found respite in local sanitariums. “It is to be hoped,” the report pleaded, “that before long all communities will understand that, to provide for indigent consumptives in their midst, sanitarium treatment at the public expense is not only a humane measure of the first order but an economical self protective [sic] measure in which every citizen has a vital interest.” In the meantime, until the nation embraced the mass construction of sanitariums, Americans (specifically, in this case, government employees) needed to practice good hygiene.15
Even though the workplaces of government civil servants were rarely unhygienic, some employees would surely contract the disease either in public spaces, like a zoo or museum, or from close friends and relatives, and for these individuals fifteen hygienic practices were prescribed. The following treatment plan could “be understood by anyone with ordinary intelligence,” and taking these steps supposedly would not only enable the consumptive’s recovery but would also halt the spread of both sputum and bacillus:
1. Sleep alone.
14 “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” 7-8. 15 Ibid., 8-9. 359
2. Use no hangings, upholstered furniture, or useless floor coverings in your sleeping room. 3. Whitewashed or painted walls are preferable to those covered with wall paper. 4. Expose the bedroom freely to outside air when not occupied, and sleep with the windows open. Spend as much time as possible in the open air, and use the bedroom only at night. 5. Do not be afraid of cold weather as long as the body is protected, and be especially careful to keep the feet dry. 6. Keep the body warmly clad and guard against sudden changes in the weather. 7. Take plenty of nourishing food. Consumptives often need more nutriment than they are inclined to take. Milk, eggs, and fatty foods are especially valuable when they can be assimilated. 8. There is no known medicine that can cure consumption. Medicines for the relief of cough and other symptoms of disease should be taken only on the advice of a physician. 9. Lead a temperate life in all things. 10. Be scrupulously careful not to infect the other members of your family by distributing the germs contained in your sputum. Refrain from coughing as far as you can; but when it is necessary turn your head aside and hold a handkerchief over your mouth. 11. Use a destructible portable spit receiver, which can be bought for a few cents; use one or even more a day and destroy them by burning. 12. Never swallow the material brought up from the lungs; it may cause infection of the digestive tract. 13. It is not best to use handkerchiefs to receive the sputum. Japanese paper napkins or squares of old linen, to be burnt when soiled, may be used; but these are not as cleanly as the portable spittoons. 14. Scrupulously avoid dust, disorder, dampness, and darkness, and bad air in your home. 15. Be hopeful and expect a cure.16
The above regimen represents, in 1905, the most up-to-date understandings about how to treat tuberculosis. On the one hand, the report was correct in its judgment that these commonsense prescriptions were intelligible and accessible to the masses, and many of the fifteen suggestions could be made for any person with any illness. However, a government employee with tuberculosis might have skeptically read such a list as a gilded placebo. Rule #9 and Rule #14 vaguely instructed the sick in how to lead a “good life” in the Gilded Age, but failed to offer any tangible formula for getting better. Rule #13 directly contradicted Rule #10. Rule #14 failed to define what constitutes “disorder” and neglected to explain how one could adhere to Rule #1
16 “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” 9-11. 360 while simultaneously avoiding “darkness.” And Rule #8, hidden in the middle of the list for the careful reader, encouraged the ill to grasp at Rule #15, knowing that the cure hoped for may remain elusive. These almost comical recommendations may provide little more than hope alone.
Yet the primary purpose of “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees” was, realistically, to provide just that—hope. As tuberculosis raged across the United States and through the District of Columbia, government employees, who all certainly knew someone suffering from the disease, needed their fears assuaged and their confidence that the federal government was concerned with the consumptive plight of America bolstered. However, the report sought to implement more than a rhetorical program; it also established a plan of action for all government “buildings, offices, and workshops.” In order to lessen the effects of tuberculosis on the federal government, every federally funded building was required to enforce the following regulations:
1. All persons in Government employ are positively forbidden to spit upon the floors. 2. Rooms, hallways, corridors, and lavatories shall be freely aired and effectually cleaned at least once a day and not during working hours. 3. Spittoons shall receive a daily cleansing with very hot water and when placed ready for use must contain a small quantity of water. 4. Dust must be removed as completely as possible by means of dampened cloths or mops. It should never be needlessly stirred up by a broom or duster, as this practice only spreads the dust and germs. 5. Floors of tiling, brick, or stone must be frequently scoured with soap and water. 6. The senior clerks in charge of workrooms will take measures to secure during working hours the admission of as much fresh air and sunshine as the conditions will permit. 7. The use of individual drinking glasses is recommended. 8. Persons in Government employ who suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis shall be separated when possible from others while at work. 9. Such persons will not be permitted to use the public spittoons, but must provide themselves with individual sputum receivers, preferably of easily destructible material, and carry these with them on arrival and departure. They will be held strictly responsible for the disposal and destruction of their own sputum, so that no other person’s health may be endangered therefrom. 10. Such persons must provide their own drinking glasses, soap, and towels and shall not use those provided for the general use. 361
11. Plainly printed notices, reading as follows: “Do not spit on the floor; to do so may spread disease,” shall be prominently posted in rooms, hallways, corridors, and lavatories of public buildings.17
These regulations imposed tangible, straightforward guidelines that not only sought to cleanse the federal government of germs, but also strove to provide a protocol of behavior for consumptive employees. Specifically, if these employees failed to comply with Rules #1, 9, and 10, they could,
“in the discretion of the head of the[ir] Department,” be dismissed from the civil service.18 While the report only offered abstract notions of hope coupled with commonsense hygienic advice, it did make an explicit attempt to improve the cleanliness of government buildings in order to halt tuberculosis in its tracks.
The National Zoological Park, like all federally funded institutions, received the above report. Shortly after, circulars about preventing tuberculosis were disbursed to all zoo employees
(numbering around eighty-two people) and signs informing zoogoers of the prohibition against spitting placed throughout the park.19 Manual laborers, groundskeepers, mechanics, and zookeepers, whether on salary or paid at daily rates, were expected to comply with the regulations established by the White House. Any violation whatsoever, as communicated directly from
Superintendent Frank Baker to the head foreman, chief machinist, and head keeper, needed to be
17 “Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” 11-12. 18 Ibid., 12; Roosevelt, Theodore, typed by “The White House,” “Executive Order,” February 28, 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. Interestingly, this Executive Order commanded that “[w]henever there is a doubt with regard to any person in the Government service, as to whether said person is afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, an order shall be issued for said person to present himself (or herself) at one of the government laboratories for examination, and to present the Department, from the Director or other authorized officer of the said laboratory, a certificate showing the result of said examination. If a government laboratory is not accessible, the laboratory investigation shall be made at government expense.” 19 Richard Rathbun to Frank Baker, May 26, 1906; Frank Baker to Richard Rathbun, June 22, 1906; SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12; Hamlet, Sybil, “History of the National Zoological Park, 1805-1987,” Word-processed and unpublished manuscript, Undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, “1905,” 2-3. According to Hamlet, in 1905, there were eight administrators, twenty-nine keepers, twenthy mechanics, eighteen groundskeepers, and seven watchmen permanently employed with the NZP. 362 immediately reported to the office of the Superintendent.20 However, it seems as though the circular was well received by the employees who were all too acquainted with the grave seriousness of tuberculosis. W. H. Blackburne, the head keeper, responded to Frank Baker’s assertive support of Roosevelt’s Executive Order, “I will instruct the men under my charge to comply with the regulations as have been posted in the different buildings + do my utmost to see they are carried out accordingly.”21 Filled with thousands of diverse animals (held in exhibits, enclosures, pastures, cages, tanks, and reconstructed microenvironments of all sorts) and diverse humans (from every echelon of society and every corner of the world), the National Zoological
Park was a federal institution far different than the others that riddled the District of Columbia, and the zoo needed far more than the latest spittoon technology to contain phthisis. While
Roosevelt’s Executive Order may have achieved limited success in raising awareness of tuberculosis among both government employees and publics alike, the National Zoo faced unique consumptive dilemmas that would require thinking about the disease in new ways.
Tuberculosis in the National Zoological Park
Tuberculosis gained the attention of the National Zoological Park prior to the dissemination of Roosevelt’s report throughout the federal community of the capital city. By the first years of the twentieth century, autopsies on zoo animals were frequently performed by the
Bureau of Animal Industry, a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture, and tuberculosis increasingly appeared as the diagnoses given in autopsy reports as it simultaneously plagued a growing proportion of District inhabitants. On March 19, 1903, the zoo shipped the body of a young agouti to the Bureau, and after the discovery of small lesions through microscopical examination, the surgeon diagnosed the rodent with “miliary [characterized by
20 Frank Baker to Mr. J. H. Born, June 22, 1906; Frank Baker to Mr. L. E. Morgal, June 22, 1906; Frank Baker to Mr. W. H. Blackburne, June 22, 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 21 W. H. Blackburne to Frank Baker, June 23, 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 363 lesions that resemble millet seeds] tuberculosis in the lungs and mediastinal lymph glands.”
Corroborating this diagnosis was also the presence of a four-inch, multilocular tumor, embedded in the omentum, that contained a “yellow semi-fluia pus [that] also proved to be tubercular,” that is, containing the tubercle bacillus. Due to this assault of tuberculosis, the agouti also experienced extreme swelling of the “sublumbar and superficial inguinal glands,” located in the pelvic region of mammals. This description was typical of zoo animals that died from “generalized tuberculosis,” yet Daniel Elmer Salmon, Chief of the Bureau and the first Doctor of Veterinary
Medicine in the United States (a degree earned at Cornell University in 1876), curiously wanted to know more about the agouti, and asked Frank Baker, “Will you kindly inform me of the origin of this animal, the length of the period of its captivity, and how long the animal had been sick before its death.” In this same report to Baker, Salmon also presented the post-mortem diagnoses of a monkey that died from “broncho-pneumonia” and a lynx that succumbed to “gastro-intestinal catarrh,” yet for neither of these did Salmon desire to know more about their lives. Typically, the autopsy reports provided information instead of demanding more. Something about an agouti with tuberculosis sparked intrigue.22
In May of that same year, Salmon concluded that “miliary tuberculosis of the lungs” killed a peccary. However, unlike the agouti, the telling miliary lesions were not present, and, instead, the animal’s “intensely congested” lungs seemed to signal that acute bronchitis could have been the culprit. Closer examination under a microscope, though, “revealed the presence of the tubercle bacillus in great abundance.”23 Diagnosing a dead zoo animal with tuberculosis usually required the microscopic confirmation of the bacillus. Sometimes the millet-like lesions
22 D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 26, 1903; Frank Baker to D. E. Salmon, April 3, 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 3. Baker responds, “The agouti was received May 1, 1902, from Guayaquil, Ecuador, and had evidently been in captivity, as it was very tame. It ate well on the morning of March 18, but in the evening appeared dull and stupid, and died during the night. No signs of sickness had been noticed prior to that date.” 23 D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, May 22, 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 3. 364 that often accompanied tuberculosis would appear under the microscope, but other times, they would not. Sometimes yellowish pus would be found in tissues contaminated with the bacillus, but other times the indicative purulence would be absent. And often tuberculosis would cause the visible swelling of various glands of the lymphatic system; however, this symptom could also be produced by other diseases and ailments that put systemic stress on the body. Therefore, knowledge about tuberculosis in zoo animals relied heavily on the microscopes of the Bureau of
Animal Industry, and as knowledge about tuberculosis increased simultaneously with the advancement of microscope technology and the spread of the disease itself, the number of zoo animals (as well as humans) suffering from the disease exploded by 1905, when the federal government became concerned with the disease’s spread among civil servants.
In 1903, a Philippine deer, possessing visible and soft masses, filled with “soft yellowish white purulent material,” dotted along its lungs, tested positive for tubercle bacilli and was diagnosed with “pulmonary tuberculosis.”24 In 1904, a South American female raccoon, with yellowish material in its thoracic cavity, died from “generalized tuberculosis” of the diaphragm, lung, and liver.25 A baboon died from tubercular pulmonary nodules and various tubercular glands in the folds of the mesentery; a male monkey died from tuberculosis in his “lungs, spleen and the lymphatics of practically all of the viscera;” a diamond rattlesnake died from tuberculosis, the lethal baccili housed in its lungs and lymph nodes; and the death toll went on and on like this, ever-increasing.26 For the remainder of 1904, the National Zoological Park lost a raccoon,
24 A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, October 21, 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 3. 25 A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, February 15, 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 4. 26 A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, April 27, 1904; D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, July 13, 1904; A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, July 30, 1904 , SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 4. 365 macaque, elk, kinkajou, and five various types of deer to tuberculosis.27 In 1905, the victims included a sooty mangabey, buffalo, European deer, Sambur deer, coatimundi, baboon, and two wallabies.28 In 1906, as Frank Baker dispersed circulars about the prevention of tuberculosis among government employees throughout the zoo community, the death toll expanded, claiming the lives of a kangaroo rat, monkey, roughed fox, camel, macaque, beaver, rat kangaroo, snowy owl, houti, great gray kangaroo, elk, two pigtailed monkeys, three rhesus monkeys, three rat kangaroos, and eight baboons.29 And in 1907, tuberculosis killed a large number of newly purchased monkeys, including a rhesus monkey, two baboons, a pigtail monkey, and two other monkeys of unknown species. That same year, three Hungarian quail, three crested pigeons, and a giant king fisher, Esquimau dog, snake, nilgai, kinkajou, and beaver succumbed to tuberculosis.30
27 A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, August 6, 1904; A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, August 24, 1904; D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, October 13, 1904; A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, October 20, 1904, A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, October 26, 1904; A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, November 17, 1904, D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, December 15, 1904, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 4. 28 A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 14, 1905; A. M. Harrington to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 30, 1905; D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 24, 1905; D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, June 13, 1905; D. E. Salmon to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, July 28, 1905; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, December 5, 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 5. 29 A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 8, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 10, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 17, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 2, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 7, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 23, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, April 18, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, April 19, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, May 14, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, June 16, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, June 26, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, August 8, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, August 28, 1906; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, October 24, 1906; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, November 23, 1906; A. D. Melvin to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, December 11, 1906; SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 6. 30 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1907, 2. John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, January 30, 1907; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 11, 1907; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, March 13, 1908 [Snowler meant to type “1907]; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, April 8, 1907; Henry J. Washburn to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, April 30, 1908 [Washburn meant to type “1907”]; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, May 16, 1907; Henry J. Washburn to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, May 9, 1907; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, June 6, 1907; Henry J. Washburn to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, August 23, 1907; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Letter , November 2, 1907; John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, November 4, 1907; 366
Usually zoo animals were only diagnosed with tuberculosis after death, when autopsies could be performed by the Bureau of Animal Industry. The exact number of animals living with tuberculosis, then, remains unknown. Yet since the specific pathogeneses of tuberculosis depended greatly on the “resistance and susceptibility” of an individual host, and since some of the inflicted could live full lives with the disease while others would die within weeks of contraction, it can be assumed that at any given time during these years the number of living animals with tuberculosis far surpassed the number of tuberculated carcasses.31 Occasionally, though, living animals were diagnosed by the Bureau. For example, in 1907, the zoo sent a living pigeon with “nodular formations noticed under the eye and unfeathered parts of wing and on the feet.” The chief of the Pathological Division of the Bureau confirmed that the nodes indeed housed the bacillus.32 Animals living with systemic tuberculosis, though, rarely received diagnoses since usually the bacillus lay within the viscera. However, even when external nodules or sputum (in the case of animals, especially primates, with pulmonary tuberculosis) could be tested, the cost made these living diagnoses rare phenomena.
Zoo animals died frequently from infections, diseases, and ailments of all sorts, for diagnoses of pneumonia, enteritis, gastritis, nephritis, gastric catarrh, and liver cirrhosis often appeared on the autopsy reports. Zoo animals also died from all kinds of parasites and occasionally from injuries sustained either in shipment or by altercations with other animals.
However, as tuberculosis spread through the human society of Washington, it simultaneously reached the animal community of the zoo, becoming a significant and commonplace disease. The
National Zoological Park needed to learn how to deal with and contain this contagion.
John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, Autopsy Report, December 21, 1907; SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 7. 31 Daniel, 101. 32 John R. Snowler to Frank Baker, March 23, 1907; SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 98, Folder 7. 367
Graph 5: Death Toll by Tuberculosis in the National Zoological Park, 1903-1916 33
1912: A Year for Research
Tuberculosis continued to take the lives of zoo animals, and by 1912 leaders in the
National Zoological Park began to systematically study the disease and how sick, dying, or dead zoo animals exacerbated the tuberculosis problem in the District. In a letter sent to Frank Baker,
33 These statistics come from two sources. First, the statistics for 1903-1907 come from the autopsy reports sent from the Bureau of Animal Industry to Frank Baker. (Usually, Frank Baker received between two and four reports every month.) The first autopsy report to discuss tuberculosis was written in 1903. Second, for the years 1908-1916, the data comes from the official reports, entitled "Report of the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park," written by Superintendent Frank Baker at the end of every fiscal year. In 1908, Baker began listing the number of zoo animals killed by particular diseases the previous fiscal year. This list, for example, could detail the numbers taken by pneumonia, liver cirrhosis, uterine carcinoma, nephritis, etc., etc. The first collection of sources is footnoted above. The second collection of sources can be found in an archival collection entitled “Letters to the Smithsonian Institution, Director’s Outgoing Correspondence to Smithsonian Institution Administrators, 1900-1931,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 29, Volumes 8, 9, 10, and 11. 368
Frederick William True, a specialist of whales, dolphins, and porpoises and the first head curator of biology in the United States National Museum, raised a concern about the transportation and handling of zoo-animal carcasses. Expressing urgency and alarm, True typed the following words to Baker:
The enclosed letter of Mr. Geo. B. Turner [the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist], dated September 16, 1912, relates to the menace to the health of Museum employees and others which may be involved in the handling of animals that have died in the Park from tuberculosis. In so far as his remarks relate to the practice (if it be one) of transporting the carcasses of animals which have died from infectious diseases in the same wagon that carries supplies to the living animals, I think his point is well taken. The practice, if it exists, should be stopped at once, and other means found for carrying the dead animals. I am certain that you are fully alive to the importance of preventing the spread of disease among the animals in the Park, or from the animals to the employees, if that be possible.34
True followed this concern with a series of questions for Baker, suggesting that he “prepare a full report on the subject.”35 True added that he believed the practice of sending dead animals to the
Museum should be abolished for the sake of public health, unless, of course, in cases concerning specimens of “considerable scientific value.” He then leveled a terse critique against Baker, claiming, “I have understood you to say that no steps are taken at present to disinfect the animal cages in the Park, and that it would be impracticable to do so . . .” Although True admitted that he might not have the “right impression” of Baker’s philosophy of cleanliness, he concluded his diatribe alluding to the possibility of mass infection emanating from the National Zoo by calling
34 F. W. True to Dr. Baker, September 26, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 35F. W. True to Dr. Baker, September 26, 1912. True raised five points that he wanted Baker to address. 1.) “The percentage of animals dying of tuberculosis in the National Zoological Park, as compared with the total mortality, and similar statistics for other zoological parks.” 2.) “The percentage of employees of the Park, past and present, who have been affected or who have died of tuberculosis, compared with percentages of infection or death from tuberculosis in Washington as a whole. As regards the Park, there should be a separation, if practicable, of the figures for those directly concerned in the care of the animals, and those who work in the grounds but do not care for the animals.” 3.) “Similar statistics for other zoological parks as far as available.” 4.) “The consensus of opinion, based on the latest scientific researches, as to the possibility or probability of the spread of tuberculosis from animals to man.” 5.) “Recommendations in relation to improving the sanitary conditions of the Park, for the welfare of both animals and employees, with some practices prevailing in other zoological parks.” 369 attention to the many parents in Washington who refused to send their children through its gates
“for fear of contagion.” True shared the trepidation of local mothers and fathers, for the fate of the animals as well as for the wellbeing of the “thousands of people in the buildings and in the grounds, who handle the railings, door-knobs, etc., in common.”36
Baker responded to this letter by first describing the process of disposal initiated upon the discovery of a lifeless body in one of the zoo’s exhibits. When an animal died, its carcass would be transported from the Rock Creek to the National Museum in “covered wagon with tight bottom” that presented “no danger whatever of scattering contagious material on the streets.” To prove its cleanliness, Baker emphasized that “[f]ood supplies [were] transported afterwards in the wagon[,] placed in boxes, barrels, cans or other receptacles so there is little or no danger of contamination,” surely unaware of the logical fallacy embedded in reasoning of this sort.
However, to strengthen his tenuous argument, Baker mentioned that the wagon was washed out frequently and stressed that he knew “of no case of disease traceable to this source.”37
Once he dismissed the possibility that carting dead zoo animals through the streets of
Washington could contribute to the spread of germs from zoo to city, Baker then informed True about tuberculosis specifically. First, Baker maintained that in 1911, the previous year, tuberculosis was responsible for eight percent of animal deaths and promised True that he would
“at once endeavor to obtain,” for the sake of comparison, similar statistics from zoos elsewhere.
Second, he explained that since the zoo’s founding, only two employees had died from tuberculosis, “one a laborer who never had anything to do with the animals, the other a keeper who was probably infected before employment, as his father died of the disease.” In fact, many of the National Zoo’s employees had been working on the payroll for years, demonstrating to Baker that the park must be a sanitary place; otherwise these workers would have fled long ago. Indeed,
36 F. W. True to Dr. Baker, September 26, 1912. 37 Frank Baker to Dr. True, September 30, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 370 whether due to naïve reasoning or idealistic rhetoric, Baker clearly overestimated the ability of
American laborers, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to escape the unsanitary jungles of the workplace. Third, Baker again promised to ask the other zoos of America for more data and information about the disease. However, Baker, through his fourth point, seemed unsure about whether tuberculosis even possessed the ability to pass from beast to man:
Koch [Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch and the first to isolate the tuberculosis bacillus under a microscope], only recently dead, and who when living was the highest authority of his time on this subject, declared after repeated experiments that the transmission of tuberculosis from animals to man did not take place. Many American authorities dissent from this opinion, and the general consensus seems to be that infection occurs only by the mouth.
Baker failed to take a decisive stand on this debate, one that roared in Britain, especially, as researchers studied the implications of bovine tuberculosis and its possible contamination of the meat supply; his remembrance, though, of Robert Koch as the “highest [tuberculosis] authority of his time” suggests that Baker remained skeptical about the disease’s zoonotic nature. Finally,
Baker concluded his answers to True by recommending that all dead animals be first sent to the
Bureau of Animal Industry, where their bodies could be both tested for disease and properly destroyed if contaminated. While the National Zoo had been sending potentially diseased flesh to the Bureau for quite some time, Baker’s recommendation hoped to regularize this practice, varying away from the longstanding convention, fashioned by Hornaday himself in 1887, of shipping the dead immediately to the National Museum for resurrection.38
After addressing True’s concerns about tuberculosis in the zoo, Baker added some of his own suggestions about public health in the park, possibly to defend himself from True’s assault.
Once the National Zoo’s financial state proved healthy, Baker hoped that a hospital and quarantine station would be established, a place “where sick animals [could] be isolated and new accessions kept until it [could] be ascertained that they have no infectious diseases.” Typically,
38 Frank Baker to Dr. True, September 30, 1912. 371 diseases were, Baker continued, “brought into the Park, not bred here.” In addition to a hospital and quarantine station, Baker desired a pathological laboratory, equipped with a professional pathologist, inside the park so animals would not have to be wheeled around Washington. The
Superintendent concluded his letter to True by reemphasizing the zoo’s cleanliness. The zoo’s cages and exhibits were routinely washed and disinfected, making the “buildings compare favorably with many hospitals.”39 (Due to fiscal reasons, Baker’s dream for an actual hospital within the park would not come to fruition until 1915, when construction for a 30 by 56 foot hospital and laboratory building, placed “very judiciously” away from the animal houses, began.)40
Whether True was correct in believing that Baker had failed in prioritizing the wellbeing of the animals, failed in taking the threat posed by tuberculosis seriously, and failed in upholding a general standard of cleanliness can never be known for certain. Certainly, the National
Zoological Park, frequently ignored the welfare of the animals for a variety of reasons. However, in 1905, almost seven years earlier, Frank Baker did try to persuade Congress to allocate funding for the construction of the buildings he mentioned—a hospital, quarantine building, and laboratory. In fact, in support of this project, he proclaimed (in a manner similar to zoologist
Herbert Ratcliffe in 1967), that “very little is known concerning the diseases that affect wild animals and the parasites that associate themselves with them. An extension of our knowledge in this direction would undoubtedly be of benefit to those who are studying the diseases of man.”
Baker further pleaded that
In other countries the most significant scientific function of collections of living animals has been the advancement of knowledge with regard to the structure, habits and activities of animals. Nearly all such knowledge has been derived from zoological collections of a character similar to that of the National
39 Frank Baker to Dr. True, September 30, 1912. 40 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 3, 1915, 4. 372
Zoological Park. For example, in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, investigations have been carried on since the middle of the eighteenth century by men who achieved, in this way, a world-wide fame, such as Duverney, Daubenton, Buffon, Cuvier, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, and Milne Edwards; in the garden of the Zoological Society of London worked Owen, Flower, Huxley, Sclater, Beddard, and many others; the garden at Berlin afforded Hartmann material for his work on anthropoid apes, and it was the Amsterdam garden that Fürbringer was able to prepare his monumental work on the structure of birds. The collections of the National Zoological Park should be utilized in a similar way.41
In a statement like this Baker cited prominent life scientists; however, Baker and other men of science knew that knowledge about “animal life” (zoology), “disease” (pathology), and
“preventive measures” (medicine and public health) could be formed mutually behind the same laboratory walls. True may have been correct in his assessment of Baker’s failings, but the zoo director surely desired to improve his zoo and update its infrastructure in order to center the institution within the intellectual worlds of science and medicine. Baker long believed in the zoo’s potential for advancing knowledge about disease. However, in 1912, tuberculosis was still a contested contagion, and Baker simply did not see a reason to become infected with panic. He was not even convinced that tuberculosis could spread from humans to animals and was uncertain whether Robert Koch himself argued for such a zoonotic understanding of the tubercle bacillus.
True was not the only person who wanted answers about the risk that the National Zoo, and the tuberculosis therein, posed to the nation’s capital. Richard Rathbun, geologist, paleontologist, zoologist, and Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in charge of the
National Museum, received the polite and eloquent letter from Geo. B. Turner that inspired the above assault on Baker when Rathbun eventually forwarded it to True:
There has never been, in the history of man, a time when science has made such a determined effort toward public health as at the present; we hear it on all sides, fine foods, isolation of contagious diseases, precautions against tuberculosis, etc. Now the question arises in my mind are we, as an institution, doing all we can
41 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1905, 3-5. 373
toward betterment of public health? Are we doing things we ought not to do? Let us look + see + form a definite conclusion as to whether we are right or wrong.42
He continued by informing Rathbun that “a doctor said to me recently that about 90 percent of the deaths at the zoo [were] due to tuberculosis,” and while he assumed that this estimate was most likely too high, Turner did suspect that “a very large percentage of deaths at the zoo [were] due” to the disease in question. Tuberculosis, most likely, did play a role in killing more than eight percent of zoo deaths, and tuberculosis surely resided undiagnosed in many living zoo animals.
The rest of Turner’s original complaint paralleled the issues explored above—namely, the problem of moving carcasses.43
Yet beneath rotting carcasses lay an evolving and uncertain germ theory.
A Contested Contagion: Tuberculosis, Its Zoonotic Nature, and the Zoo Movement
Frank Baker believed that Turner and True’s concern about tuberculosis in the zoo arose from popular exaggeration and misconception. Nonetheless, he kept his promise, and on October
19, 1912, Baker hastily typed a letter to his zoo-leader peers that asked for a description of tuberculosis’s effects in other zoos. The letter stated,
A question has been raised here as to the extent to which tuberculosis exists among the animals in the collection of the National Zoological Park and the possible danger of infection of employees of the Park from such animals. In connection with this, I have been asked to ascertain, so far as such information is available, what the percentage of mortality from tuberculosis is in other zoological collections as compared with the total mortality, also the percentage of the employees of zoological gardens who have been affected or have died from tuberculosis as compared with the same figures for the city as a whole. It is also desired for this purpose to consider separately employees who are directly connected with the care of the animals and those employed on other work, such as grounds, construction, etc. It is further desired to know what special precautions are taken to prevent the communication of tuberculosis from infected animals to others, and, also, to employees. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that there seems to be on the part of those not acquainted with the actual conditions in zoological gardens a greatly exaggerated opinion as to the extent to which tuberculosis prevails among the
42 Geo. B. Turner to Mr. R. Rathbun, September 16, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 43 Turner to Rathbun, September 16, 1912. 374
animals that are kept there. The percentage of death here has varied in recent years from 8% of the total mortality to considerably less than that proportion. Any information or statistics that you can give along this line will be cordially appreciated.
Baker mailed this letter to some of the prominent zoo men in the English-speaking world, Dr. P.
Chalmers Mitchell, London; Dr. W. B. Cadwalader, Philadelphia; Dr. W. T. Hornaday, New
York; and Mr. S. A. Stephan, Cincinnati.44
These zoo superintendents largely affirmed Baker’s stance on the role of the disease within the zoo. Stephan, General Manager of the Cincinnati Zoological Company, informed
Baker that Cincinnati’s zoo was “very fortunate in not having many of [the] animals affected with tuberculosis,” possessing death rates, in Stephan’s estimation, easily less than six percent. When an animal did contract tuberculosis, he explained that it would be quarantined in an isolated building. If the case proved severe, the animal would be destroyed and cremated to ensure the destruction of the bacillus. However, these cases proved rare in the Cincinnati Zoo, and Stephan provided an environmental explanation for this-- “Our grounds [are] very high and rolling and drain very quickly. Our enclosures are always dry a couple of hours after a heavy rain. Animals do better on high rolling ground than on flat ground.” As far as humans were concerned, Stephan, in the thirty-seven years he devoted to the zoo, did “not remember . . . an instance where any of the employees or keepers were affected with tuberculosis.” Even though Stephan dismissed the possibility of zoo-humans contracting tuberculosis, he quickly referenced the prevalence of tuberculosis among their anthropoid ancestors, stating, “[o]f course you are well aware that there are more cases of tuberculosis found among the monkeys.”45
44 Baker to Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, Baker to Dr. W. B. Cadwalader, October 19, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. Baker to W. T. Hornaday, Baker to Mr. S. A. Stephan, October 21, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 45 S. A. Stephan to Dr. Baker, October 25, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 375
Hornaday, now Director of the New York Zoological Park, echoed Stephan, estimating that the tuberculosis death rate, calculated for the five-year period between 1905 and 1909, was almost exactly five percent. And according to Hornaday, “only one employee,” which he underlined for emphasis, had died from tuberculosis. However, this individual, a Frits Dahl, had been hired directly from the Spanish War with deeply infected lungs and placed in the Reptile
House as an Assistant Keeper with the hope that the arid environment might save his life.
Unfortunately, he died shortly after his hire, yet Hornaday confidently asserted that Fritz neither contracted tuberculosis from nor gave tuberculosis to any zoo animals. In fact, tuberculosis concerned Hornaday so little that he did not “regard it as necessary to take any special precautions to prevent any of our keepers, or other employees, in the Zoological Park from contracting tuberculosis from any of our captive animals.” Even the keepers, Hornaday insisted, did “not associate with their charges sufficiently close to render infection a possibility.” Hornaday sarcastically informed Baker that “[i]f there is any proof on record that any human being ever acquired Tuberculosis from any animal in captivity, I would like to see it, and be furnished with all the facts in the case.” Like Stephan, though, while Hornaday dismissed tuberculosis as a serious concern for the zoo, he admitted that some of the monkeys and baboons acquired the disease, whom in all likelihood obtained it from coughing visitors breathing “directly into the faces of captive monkeys.” In fact, Hornaday believed that “the animals [were] in one hundred times more danger of infection” than the keepers.46
Cadwalader, of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia, failed to give Baker statistics about tuberculosis in the Philadelphia Zoo, but he did contend that tuberculosis had not killed a zoo employee since 1874. His three-sentence response answered few of Baker’s questions; however, the letter’s terseness was probably itself an indication of the degree to which
46 W. T. Hornaday to Dr. Baker, October 25, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 376 consumption consumed Cadwalader’s priorities.47 Three of the four zoo men with whom Baker corresponded, sent responses that could certainly defend him against the critiques of Turner,
True, and other hypochondriacal citizens of the District. Stephan, Hornaday, and Cadwalader did not view the zoo as a threat to public wellbeing, for all dismissed the possibility of zoo employees contracting tuberculosis from the animals. Furthermore, these zoo men also contended that tuberculosis in their zoos caused death rates of less than the eight-percent-rate estimated by Baker for the National Zoological Park. A disease with such a low death rate certainly could not represent a plague or epidemic that warranted panic, or even immediate reprioritization. Stephan and Hornaday both acknowledged mild concern for primates (Hornaday in an interestingly nonanthropocentric tone), but neither seemed worried about tuberculosis in their zoos. Dr. Peter
Chalmers Mitchell, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, on the other hand, told a different story than his American counterparts.48
Instead of providing precise death rates associated with tuberculosis, Mitchell instead offered Baker the total casualty numbers, showing that the “[m]ortality from tuberculosis in our
Gardens amongst the animals has . . . been going down in the last few years.” These numbers proved astounding, especially when contrasted with the scant attention given to the matter by
Mitchell’s American peers. In 1908 Regent’s Park lost 164 animals to tuberculosis, and in 1909,
1910, and 1911, lost 94, 190, and 147 animals to consumption, respectively. Mitchell, like
Stephan, Hornaday, and Cadwalader, expressed little anguish over the risk posed to zoo
47 W. B. Cadwalader to Dr. Baker, November 7, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 48 Peter Chalmers Mitchell served as Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1903 to 1935, and he established the Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, a safari park located in Bedfordshire, England, 30 miles north of London, in 1926. Interestingly, Mitchell’s inspiration for this safari park derived from a visit to Hornaday’s zoo, which functioned as a conservation center in the midst of the Bronx. Mitchell was also a significant zoological author, publishing Thomas Henry Huxley: A Sketch of his Life and Work (1900), The Nature of Man (1904), The Childhood of Animals (1912), and Materialism and Vitalism in Biology (1930). Very little scholarly work has focused on this highly accomplished and influential scientific mind. Of recent noteworthiness D. P. Crook published “Peter Chalmers Mitchell and Antiwar Evolutionism in Britain during the Great War,” Journal of the History of Biology 49, no. 2 (1989): 325-356. 377 employees; however the data he gathered on the topic differed greatly from that garnered for
Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia. Mitchell revealed,
With regard to our employees, we have altogether, with keepers, gardeners, and labourers, a staff of about 130. The only cases of tuberculosis of which I know in the last ten years, were one keeper, who died; one indoor clerk, who as a matter of fact had nothing whatever to do with the animals, who died; and one gardener, who was sent to a sanatorium, and has been released, and is back at work apparently practically cured. Even if there is a greater chance of infection from contact with the animals, which I doubt, I think this is more than compensated for by the large amount of outdoor work which the Gardens staff[s] have to do. Certainly tuberculosis is not one of our troubles with the staff, and it is being much reduced with the animals.
While optimistic that tuberculosis was becoming less prevalent among the animals and incredulous about the ability for zoo animals to infect humans, Mitchell’s letter demonstrated that tuberculosis could indeed claim a significant number of animal lives. Also, this letter at least opened the possibility that, in the case of the dead zoo keeper, tuberculosis could be zoonotic, shared between human and nonhuman animals.49
Mitchell ended his letter by depicting the process initiated in the Park for halting the spread of tuberculosis. The methods described underscored the importance of quarantine, cleanliness, and disinfection, all issues that troubled Frederick William True in Washington.
Mitchell informed,
So far as possible any new arrivals are observed in the quarantine house for some time before they are put into the Gardens, and if we have any reason to believe that an animal in the collection is suffering from what may be tuberculosis, it is removed to the sanatorium. Every time an animal dies in the collection, the cage or the enclosure in which it has been living is cleaned and disinfected, but it is part of the routine of the pathological department to give information every morning after the deaths are looked at to the Superintendent if there is any case which seems to require special care in disinfection. The house in which the smaller monkeys are kept every now and again we have emptied, the walls scraped and washed, and then disinfected, by burning formalin cartridges, and leaving it shut up for twelve hours.50
49 P. Chalmers Mitchell to Dr. Frank Baker, October 29, 1912, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 50 Mitchell to Dr. Frank Baker, October 29, 1912. 378
While Mitchell may have been optimistic, he would not have deliberated about sanatoriums and formaldehyde unless tuberculosis did indeed present a threat to his zoo. Also, unlike the three
American zoo men, Mitchell cited large numbers representing the total tuberculosis casualties within his zoo in the recent past. And he was the only zoo director to not completely dismiss the possibility of humans (in this case, a keeper) contracting tuberculosis from captive animals.
Overall, of the four individuals with whom Frank Baker corresponded, Peter Chalmers Mitchell was the only one to tip his top hat to tuberculosis, a disease to be reckoned with.
What sparked differing reactions towards tuberculosis? Why did people like Turner and
True express concern about the disease while Baker seemed insouciant? Did tuberculosis take a greater toll in London than in other cities? How could tuberculosis take hundreds of lives in one zoo, demanding a specific protocol for limiting its spread while proving inconsequential in other zoos, especially when zoos everywhere bought and sold exotic animals through the same networks devoted solely to the animal trade? Were American zoo directors managing their zoos irresponsibly by not worrying about tuberculosis? Or was Mitchell the most irresponsible director, since hundreds of consumptive animals and one keeper died under his watch? The above correspondence demonstrates the contours and limits of medical knowledge in the early years of the twentieth century and highlights the contested nature of tuberculosis, clearly a disease that
“nobody is sure about,” as the poem at the beginning of the chapter rhymes.
On the one hand, Frank Baker, Williams Biddle Cadwalader, William Temple Hornaday, and S. A. Stephan may have been reluctant to publicize data about tuberculosis within their zoos for fear that acknowledging the presence of the tubercle bacillus could be bad for their business and reputation. These zoo men could have, either intentionally or subconsciously, denied tuberculosis its agency in order to preserve their own. While such an interpretation may make sense in their discussion of tuberculosis on a public or semi-public stage, a stage that Baker was
379 forced onto by Smithsonian employees, it does not seem likely that these leaders would downplay tuberculosis to their zoo-leader peers if the disease was indeed taking hundreds of lives, as was definitely the case in London. If all of these individuals perceived tuberculosis as a significant threat to their zoos, they would most likely, even if only for self-interest, have dialogued openly with each other in order to protect the parks they managed. Their different responses were probably not motivated by prideful rhetoric, a “saving face” of sorts, but rather, were symptoms of popular, scientific, and medical uncertainty about the disease itself. In 1912, knowledge about tuberculosis remained contested and multifarious, especially in understanding how the disease spread.
Comparative medicine, which led to the rise of veterinary schools in the eighteenth century, no longer remained an esoteric pursuit of veterinarians, progressive medical doctors, and agrarians conscious of the epizootics of the countryside, with its enormous cattle, sheep, and swine populations. By the end of the nineteenth century, publics were generally aware of the zoonotic potential of many animal diseases and the zoonotic origins of many human diseases.
Surely humans, when contemplating disease, have long considered animals in complex ways, and the importance of animals in ancient and “pre-enlightened” understandings of health mark a rich line of research for scholars interested in the history of medicine. However, as Lise Wilkinson argues, thorough and systematic examinations of animals as they relate to disease began with the
English cattle plagues of the early eighteenth century, continued through the rise of the veterinary discipline, and exploded with controversies surrounding rabies, glanders, and anthrax through the mid-nineteenth century.51 Tuberculosis research appeared at the end of this timeline, and its
51 It has been well-established that zoonotic diseases have shaped human history since the opening of the Rift Valley and have particularly impacted human history during the beginning of the world’s agricultural revolutions. For a good survey of this expansive literature, see John L. Brooke’s forthcoming Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). However, histories about the human understanding of zoonotic diseases represent a fairly new and 380 zoonotic nature was still being contemplated by researchers during the rise of the zoo movement in America.
Since the 1870s public health officials in Britain had worried about the contamination of both meat and milk by bovine tuberculosis, and they took systematic efforts to eliminate this threat. They increased, for example, the regulation and inspection of dairies, abattoirs, and farms in order to ensure higher hygienic standards. The pasteurization of milk played a central role in decreasing the spread of tuberculosis from cows to humans. While the zoonotic nature of tuberculosis had been recognized by 1912, it was generally agreed upon by medical authorities that less than one percent of the human deaths caused by tuberculosis could be traced to the bovine strand of the disease. Even J. M’Fadyean and G. S. Woodhead, coauthors of “On the
Communicability of Tuberculosis from Animals to Man,” published in 1891, claimed that cows, beef, and milk were certainly not the force propelling the Great White plague.52 Yet they did set a
still growing branch of the history of medicine. For an excellent introduction on this topic see Lise Wilkinson’s Animals and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Comparative Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) or Anne Hardy’s “Animals, Disease, and Man: Making Connections,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 200-215. For more on rabies, or hydrophobia, see Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy’s popularly-written Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (New York: Viking, 2012), or Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys’s newly published Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830- 1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For more on anthrax see Susan D. Jones’s Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 52 Worboys, 221-225. Others, however, thought that bovine tuberculosis might be more deadly. One figure was that 6.44 percent of tuberculosis death (at least of tuberculosis deaths in England and Wales) was caused by bovine tuberculosis: Frederick Hobday, “Certain Diseases of the Cow and their Interest to the Physician,” British Medical Journal (February 24, 1923): 314. For more specifically on bovine tuberculosis see Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode’s “An Impossible Undertaking: The Eradication of Bovine Tuberculosis in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 64, No. 3 (September, 2004): 734- 772; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode’s “The “Tuberculosis Cattle Trust”: Disease Contagion in an Era of Regulatory Uncertainty,” The Journal of Economic History 64, No. 4 (December, 2004): 929-963; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode’s “Not on my Farm! Resistance to Bovine Tuberculosis Eradication in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 67, No. 3 (September, 2007): 768-809; Barbara Orland’s "Cow's Milk and Human Disease: Bovine Tuberculosis and the Difficulties Involved in Combating Animal Diseases," Food & History 1, no 1 (2003): 179-202; and Barbara Rosenkrantz’s “The Trouble With Bovine Tuberculosis,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 155-175. A good primary source that situates this historiography within the District of Columbia itself is W. Hickman’s "The Eradication of Cattle Tuberculosis in the District of Columbia," In Yearbook 1910, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Washington, DC: GPO, 1911. 381 precedent for the later zoonotic fears that concerned those around the National Zoological Park.
The public knew that tuberculosis had previously spread from animals to humans by way of food; therefore, imagining animals transferring tuberculosis to humans in other ways seemed reasonable and likely. The National Zoological Park, situated within a city plagued with tuberculosis, amplified the zoonotic anxieties first sparked by the bovine tuberculosis scare.
Despite these zoonotic anxieties, Frank Baker expressed confidence that tuberculosis presented no threat to the zoo laborers who worked closely with the animals. In fact, he remained skeptical of the idea, held by many bacteriologists and pathologists in both the United States and
Europe, that the tubercle bacillus could spread from animals to humans at all. Since the
Washington public commonly understood saliva as the pathogen’s primary vehicle of transport, many could not even imagine the possibility of animal-human contraction since zoo workers and zoogoers rarely shared utensils and spittoons with the encaged. One individual, presumably within the Smithsonian community, scribbled an anonymous note, later in 1912, to another unnamed person associated with the zoo. After reading Baker’s report, this individual chose to undertake a research project of his own for the purpose of corroborating Baker’s findings.
He presented his findings in a scrawl of hurried script, full of cross-outs, editing arrows, and marginalia of all sorts. He penned,
I have taken the trouble personally to look into the record of the taxidermists and other persons whose duties have involved handling the dead animals from that establishment [the NZP], except those in the Division of Physical Anthropology to whom I shall refer again below. A few persons may have been overlooked, and the records of a small number are either inaccessible or obscure. It may safely be asserted, however, that the persons whose names are included in the following list comprise practically the entire number, and that the records of the few that are lacking would not . . . affect the general conclusion.53
Clearly the writer knew that he was about to posit a disputed hypothesis, for otherwise, he would not have so carefully and anxiously explained the number and limits of the human cases used as
53 Anonymous Letter, 3-4, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 382 the experimental group for his research. Unwilling to asseverate a conclusive truth, the author instead gestured towards an instructive correlation that would support the zoo superintendent’s stance and the public’s popular opinion about tuberculosis within the National Zoological Park.
This researcher admitted that “a few persons may have been overlooked” and that “the records of a small number are either inaccessible or obscure.” Nonetheless, the author examined the lives and life histories of “practically the entire number” of people who had worked closely with the animals of the National Zoological Park, creating a list of twenty-seven names. Among this group, only two people were listed as victims of tuberculosis— Jenness Richardson and G. B.
Turner, the Smithsonian’s Chief Taxidermist who raised the concern about the zoonotic nature of tuberculosis in the first place. Taxidermist Richardson “died of tuberculosis,” but, according to the researcher, “[h]e was a frail-looking man when I first saw him and I have been informed, (by
Dr. Benedict I think) that he contracted tuberculosis before he came to Washington.” The author’s accusatory annotation under Turner’s name revealed the bias of the research performed, for he described the taxidermist as “rather thin and pale, but seems very full of energy, and has not been sick very often, so far as I am aware.” After emphasizing Turner’s vitality, this individual stated that “whether he [Turner] has tuberculosis is uncertain. He seems to have the disease very much on his mind and this may be due to his fear of it or to symptoms which he himself has noticed.”
Although this writer expressed skepticism of Turner’s tubercular conditions, he confidently diagnosed the chief taxidermist with a severe case of hypochondriasis, indirectly casting Turner as a hysteric stirring up needless mania.54
The scribe’s desire to dismiss the zoonotic nature of tuberculosis as mere fiction pervaded his letter, and he clearly made no attempt to substantiate his position with any medical precision. Taxidermist George Marshall, who “has done all kinds of taxidermic work for the last
54 Anonymous Letter, 3 and unnumbered pages, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 383
25 years and has probably been exposed as much as anyone to tuberculosis,” for example, was described as healthy only because “there [was] no reason to suppose that he [had] contracted it.”
The researcher asserted similar circular reasoning (Person A has no tuberculosis because there is no “reason to suppose” that Person A has tuberculosis) in regards to D. B. Mackie, assistant in the Division of Mammals, despite mentioning his “fits,” which supposedly and mysteriously arose after getting hit “on the head by a cannonball when young.” The researcher failed to describe what he meant by “fits,” a word often used to describe a consumptive’s coughing episodes, and how these so-called “fits” could be sparked by this perplexing cannonball incident.
Taxidermist Henry Marshall “never showed any signs of tuberculosis so far as [the researcher] was aware,” so he was considered nontubercular. Taxidermist A. H. Forney was considered nontubercular because he died from gastric enteritis, and Osteological Preparator J. W. Scollick, because he “suffered . . . from bad eyesight,” as if a taxidermist could only be inflicted with one ailment at a time. W. L. Halen of the Division of Mammals was casted as nontubercular because he died of drowning as others fell into the same category simply because they were “not known to have tuberculosis.” Indeed, taxidermist A. H. Cloves was “frail looking,” but the writer never entertained the possibility that tuberculosis caused this appearance even though Richardson, the only person the author admitted died from the disease, possessed a similar “frail” appearance. A.
B. Thorne, a zoo laborer who moved many dead bodies from the park, looked thin, yet was “not known to have tuberculosis,” and, therefore, never considered to be a victim of the bacillus.
Clearly, the anonymous researcher defending Baker’s claim about the unlikelihood of tuberculosis spreading from animals to humans, did not look for tuberculosis among taxidermists nearly as thoroughly as the surgeons of the Bureau of Animal Industry looked for tuberculosis
384 among zoo animals. Instead, this author simply molded (or invented) his data in order to assuage fear and praise both the zoo and its superintendent.55
The crude research above was certainly constrained by evolving discourses of disease and diagnoses themselves, for, as previously discussed, tuberculosis manifested itself differently in different people. Tuberculosis could remain undetected for decades, masked by other ailments, or could produce symptoms of varying severity in different periods of a victim’s life, creating an inconsistency that made straightforward diagnoses difficult. Tuberculosis was also inherently undetectable (except in the cases of severe symptoms that signaled a classic example of consumption) without evidence of the tubercle bacillus, discovered under the lenses of microscopes. In 1912, such evidence could simply be attained more easily from dead animal bodies than from living human bodies, and the tuberculin skin tests (created by Austrian physician Clemens Freiherr Baron von Pirquet in 1907) used to detect the disease would not become widely accepted, accessible, and commonplace until the 1930s.56 Also, the sputum- centered understanding of tuberculosis may have encouraged the researcher to downplay its zoonotic potentials since zoogoers and zoo animals rarely shared handkerchiefs.
Despite this context, however, the unknown author forced a thesis while lacking sufficient evidence. He could not claim that zoo animals did not spread tuberculosis to humans.
At best, his data was inconclusive. At worst, his results shed doubt on the very argument he was advancing, for the fingerprints, however “frail,” of tuberculosis were scattered throughout the sparse information he provided. From either perspective, the research successfully demonstrated two truths about tuberculosis in 1912. First, death was central to understanding tuberculosis.
Americans feared dying from tuberculosis, and, therefore, if someone did not clearly die at the hands of the contagion, their experience with the disease was overlooked and dismissed. Death
55 Anonymous Letter, 5, 6, 9, 10, and unnumbered page SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 56 Daniel, 115-117. 385 made tuberculosis visible. Second, even though tuberculosis’s zoonotic nature remained contested in 1912, conversations about the zoonotic potentials of the disease echoed around the National
Zoological Park. Even as zoo men insisted that tuberculosis was not zoonotic and posed no threat to zoogoers, they simultaneously bolstered the place of zoonotic thinking to discussions of the
Great White Plague. The zoo made the zoonotic nature of tuberculosis relevant. Some citizens of the District even worried about the zoonotic nature of other diseases. Two years later, pet store owner Edward S. Schmid, perhaps remembering the tuberculosis controversy, wrote a letter to an unknown zoo employee that discussed a misconception, among some local businessmen, of diphtheria as a zoonotic disease. This misunderstanding arose when a faction of accusers blamed
Schmid for his daughter’s death from diphtheria, claiming that the disease originated with the monkeys, rabbits, and squirrels of his store.57 Clearly, the National Zoological Park was the logical place to deliberate about any and all zoonotic issues.
Zoo men and Smithsonian officials of 1912 were not the only Americans worried about tuberculosis within public zoos, for popular newspapers around the nation had printed articles on this very topic since the 1890s. These articles prove that everyday Americans were aware of both the prevalence of tuberculosis within their new urban institutions as well as the zoonotic threat that this prevalence may pose to the public. Anxiety about tuberculosis had long transcended the politicized issue of meat and milk. On July 16, 1898, the New Haven Evening Register published
“Illness at the Zoo,” which discussed the many ailments that plagued the animals of the London
Zoo, including lion and bear cubs with mumps and teething pain and camels with kidney complications. However, the article stressed that the “monkey tribe is the hardest to keep in sound health [because] . . . [t]hey are all liable to catch pneumonia or develop tuberculosis in a single night.” The unknown author of this article concluded eloquently,
57 Edw. S. Schmid to unknown zoo employee, May 8, 1914, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 386
After all, animals are a good deal like human beings. They get their blood heated during the winter and are susceptible to colds and such like in the variable weather of early summer. Most people don’t know it, but animals have coughs and colds, and even asthma and consumption, while pneumonia is as common among certain kinds as measles in a boarding school. Paralysis attacks others; some mammals have cancerous ailments, some teeth hard and all of them lose their appetite and get nervous and restless.58
Before 1912, zoo leaders and zoogoers alike were not only aware of the presence of tuberculosis within zoological parks, but they also recognized the affinities between human and animal bodies.
Yet tuberculosis and zoos frequently found themselves sharing headlines from coast to coast. On May 28, 1893, the Idaho Statesman published an article entitled “Tuberculosis In
Monkeys” that described an outbreak amongst the primates of the Central Park Zoo, more than
2,000 miles away. Interestingly, this article hypothesized that tuberculosis could have been spread by rats and mice contaminating the zoo’s food supply.59 The Philadelphia Inquirer informed the public of a famous hippopotamus of the Philadelphia Zoo, named Princess Agwan, who succumbed to tuberculosis and was discovered by her keeper, “cuddled up in a corner of the cage dead.”60 The Fort Worth Morning Register informed its readers about tuberculosis death rates in the London Zoo among four categories of animals—“monkeys, antelopes, deer, and kangaroo” in one category, “lions, wolves, felidae” in a second, “granivorous birds” like ostriches and grouse in a third, and carnivorous birds in a fourth.61 The Daily Express of San Antonio, Texas, featured two columns about how the “unnatural life led by the snakes in the park [referring to the New
York Zoological Park] is the cause of many cases of illness.” Most of this article explored the challenges of caring for the lethal king cobra; however, the article ended mourning the death of a
58 “Illness at the Zoo,” New Haven Evening Register, July 16, 1898, 6. 59 "Tuberculosis In Monkeys," Idaho Statesman, May 28, 1893, 3. 60 “Princess Agwan Dead,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6, 1899, 14. 61 Untitled, Fort Worth Morning Register, August 4, 1899, 4. The death rates in these categories of zoo animals were listed as 20%, 3%, 30%, and 11%, respectively. 387 tubercular boa constrictor held in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.62 The Kansas City Star reported on the deaths of hundreds of birds with tuberculosis, also caged in Lincoln Park, which supposedly communicated the disease to human zoogoers.63 The Evening Herald of Bellingham,
Washington, similarly reported on a tuberculosis problem with birds in New York’s zoo, also emphasizing the spread of the disease from avian to humans.64 And Duluth citizens read about the deaths of Roosevelt’s gifts from King Menelik a few days after Baker had their corpses shipped away.65 Americans, even those half-a-continent away from the nearest zoo, read about tuberculosis and the deaths of zoo animals. News about tuberculosis outbreaks in America’s zoos proved contagious, spreading through the closely-knit journalistic networks established since the
Civil War. When a single animal perished from tuberculosis in New York, Philadelphia,
Washington, D.C., or Chicago, the nation was informed a few days later. The National Zoological
Park not only focused the attention of the nation’s capital to the role of their zoo animals in spreading disease, but they directed the gazes of the entire nation to these same nonhumans.
Consumptive Monkeys: The Zoo as a Medical Laboratory
Primates in particular attracted attention, for they proved highly susceptible to tuberculosis as well as other diseases. One day in 1912 or 1913, Baker scribbled the following note on a Smithsonian memo pad:
Usually 40 to 50 monkeys + lemurs have no anthropoid apes not able average length of life in captivity. Some monkeys come here which evidently have already been in captivity for a long time, others die within a short time after arrival as the result of hardships experienced during transportation or from diseases contracted while in the hands of dealers.
62 “He Is Doctor to Wild Beasts,” The Daily Express, September 22, 1901, 17. 63 “Zoological Parks Barbarous,” The Kansas City Star, November 10, 1903, 12. 64 “Would Abolish Zoos,” The Evening Herald, November 11, 1903, 3. 65 “Menelik’s Gifts To President Die,” The Duluth News Tribune, January 7, 1905, 2. 388
To calculate the average longevity so that the figures obtained represent the real viability of each species in captivity requires very careful work, and we have not as yet prepared such figures.66
For whom this missive was scribbled remains unclear, but surely, judging by its informality, it was meant for someone within the Smithsonian community who inquired about the zoo’s primates’ vulnerability to disease. Inquisitions like these originated outside the Smithsonian as well.
Pearle Rea Hutson, secretary of an Illinois branch of the American Red Cross, while researching the relationship between diet and pulmonary tuberculosis, asked Baker for “statistics concerning this disease among the Quadrumana.” She had three questions. First, “How many monkeys, apes, gorillas or other Quadrumana have you in the zoo?” Second, “What is their average length of life in captivity?” Third, “What percentage die[s] of pulmonary tuberculosis?”67
To the first question, Baker replied that the National Zoo usually possessed between forty and fifty monkeys and lemurs. To the second question, also evident from his scribbles above, Baker pleaded ignorance, claiming, “[t]o calculate the average longevity, so that the figures obtained will represent the real viability of each species in captivity, requires, therefore, very careful work, and we have not, as yet, prepared such figures.” To the third question, Baker informed Hutson that in 1911, out of eighteen monkeys to die, five had tuberculosis; in 1912, out of twelve monkeys to die, four had tuberculosis. Baker then detailed the exact diet of all the monkeys in his zoo, but he admitted that he could not be precise about the quantity each monkey consumed because individual monkeys, like individual humans, had individual preferences and appetites.68
66 Untitled Memo, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 67 Pearle Rea Hutson to Baker, January 21, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 68 Baker to Miss Pearle Rea Hutson, February 10, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. On diet, Baker stated, “The monkeys here are fed twice a day. In the morning they are given boiled rice, evaporated milk mixed with raw egg, apples, bananas, and other fruit. In the afternoon they are given vegetables, either cooked or raw; after this, sunflower seed or wheat. About twice a week they get a little cooked meat, often on the bone. They prefer roasted meat to boiled, and are particularly fond of the fat. The bill of fare includes rice, onions and sweet potatoes boiled, sweet potatoes and white potatoes baked, apples, bananas, 389
Hutson thanked Baker for the information and promised to send her conclusions as soon as she completed her research.69
Not only did the National Zoological Park foster both the tubercle bacillus itself and popular discourse about the disease, but the institution soon became central to the most current and cutting-edge tuberculosis research in the nation. In the summer of 1913, Bertram H. Waters, one of the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, communicated with Frank Baker, through the
War Department’s Office of the Surgeon General, and promised to personally mail his own recently published paper about treating tuberculosis with pentane ozonide.70 Waters served as the medical director of the Ferry Boat Middletown Day Camp sanatorium, serving both Manhattan and the Bronx, and occasionally between 1904 and 1910, he acted as the physician-in-charge at three New York dispensaries and as the director of Middletown’s Tuberculosis Camp and Open
Air School for children.71 Waters worked to contain tuberculosis in America’s largest metropolis and published several papers on the disease—most famously, “Destruction and Repair in
Pulmonary Tuberculosis.” This paper explained how tuberculosis lesion sites could heal and how healed lesion sites could be reactivated, explaining, for the first time, why tuberculosis frequently ebbed and flowed in severity throughout the lifetime of an individual.72
Often, when tuberculosis specialists contacted Baker, they desired data about the primates of the National Zoo. By 1914, the autopsy reports on dead monkeys were quite thorough. When “Dusty,” a Mangaby monkey, became extremely ill, he was sent for diagnosis
onions, sweet potatoes, carrots and beets raw, a little stale bread, cooked meat, cabbage, lettuce in season, wheat, sunflower seed, and evaporated milk, sweetened slightly, and raw egg mixed with it.” 69 (Mrs.) Pearle Rea Hutson to Baker, February 15, 1913, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 70 T. H. Garrison to Doctor Baker, August 6, 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 71 National Tuberculosis Association, A Tuberculosis Directory: Containing a List of Institutions, Associations and Other Agencies Dealing with Tuberculosis in the United States and Canada, compiled by Philip Peter Jacobs (National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 1911), 47, 107, 136. 72 Waters, B. H., "Destruction and Repair in Pulmonary Tuberculosis,"The Journal of the American Medical Association 75, No. 18 (1920): 1187-1190. 390 and surgery. Unfortunately, Dusty died on the operation table from a lethal dose of chloroform.
The surgeon, a Dr. Harrington, “use[d] a great deal in order to obtain the physiological effects sufficient” for a proper examination. In hindsight, he regretted the decision, but in the moment it did not seem “practical to use cocaine and induce local anaesthesia only in this instance, as is my intention in the future with human subjects.” Humans, though, unlike Mangaby monkeys, will not
“bite and claw” while being anaesthetized. Nonetheless, in performing operations on Dusty,
Harrington advanced his own knowledge about tuberculosis and its effect on primate anatomy, no matter the species.73
Upon opening the body, Harrington found “that about all the organs . . . [show] evidence of a general miliary tuberculosis." Along with the report, the surgeon sent Baker an X-ray photograph that showed a missing left lung, which was “largely, if not wholly, obliterated . . . due to its destruction by the pulmonary form” of tuberculosis. Dusty’s right lung, on the other hand,
“had not suffered to any appreciable extent, the upper lobe showing only superficial infection or small necrotic areas involved here and there.” On the X-ray image, the surgeon marked an “X” on a location “between the first and second ribs” where “the slowly soluble iodine cartridge, or mass, was inserted by the hypodermic needle at a point directly into the apex of the lung.” For photographic purposes, argyryol (a solution containing silver used to treat gonorrhea) was employed to pigment the iodine solution so that Baker could clearly see the effects of tuberculosis on the Mangaby. The surgeon ended the report with the following statement: “I am taking this opportunity of thanking you for your kindly help in this matter, and for the scientific interest you have shown in the proposed method of treating pulmonary tuberculosis, and the words of encouragement given me.” Then, he added, “[a]dditionally, my thanks are also due to Chief
Keeper, Blackburne, for his skillfulness in handling the animals, and in aiding me in many ways
73 Harrington to Doctor Baker, July 1, 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 99, Folder 12. 391 during the experiment, and he has indeed proven himself to be “a graduate of the Great
University of Experience” in this regard.74 In this instance, the National Zoological Park played an important role in shaping Harrington’s understanding of tuberculosis. Frank Baker provided
Harrington with advice about how to treat pulmonary tuberculosis, and William H. Blackburne assisted Harrington in handling the patient.
While it remains unclear exactly what “proposed method” Baker offered Harrington, he clearly passed along Bertram Waters’s method of treating tuberculosis with pentane ozonide, an ozone compound that liberates iodine from potassium iodide in order to create a pure iodine cartridge capable of being injected into the lungs. At the very least, Baker, Blackburne, and their zoo functioned as a medium through which medical knowledge about tuberculosis became contagious, spreading from one doctor to another. However, Baker may have also offered
Harrington his own opinions about how to treat tuberculosis, formulated from his own research and observation of primates. Yet whether Baker added his own insights to the research of Waters or whether the “method” Baker “proposed” was simply making Harrington aware of Waters’s recent research, this process of knowledge-translation and knowledge-dissemination was inevitably coupled with knowledge-production. Baker and Blackburne showed Harrington how to apply Waters’s treatment, designed for humans, to primates.
The National Zoological Park was not the only American zoo situated at the center of tuberculotic discourse. In 1910, Burton J. Hendrick, muckraker journalist for McClure’s
Magazine and future Pulitzer Prize winner, published an article entitled “Oxygenizing a City: An
Attempt to Make Two and a Quarter Million People Work and Play Under Sanitary Conditions” that emphasized the importance of zoo primates in advancing tuberculosis research and rejuvenating Chicago’s air supply. Hendrick opened this article by remembering that in Chicago’s
74 Harrington to Doctor Baker, July 1, 1914. 392 zoo “a few years ago, tuberculosis was a more destructive disease than it is to-day in the East
Side tenement sections of New York,” where Bertram Waters spent much time dealing with tuberculosis outbreaks. He then emphasized that “[v]irtually no animal seemed to be immune.
Lions, tigers, mountain-sheep, reindeer, buffalo, ostriches, pythons—all frequently fell victims to the disease.” The monkeys proved “especially virulent,” and Hendrick explained that next to fighting, for “monkeys are persistent fighters,” tuberculosis was responsible for almost all the deaths of the monkey house.75
Through this article, McClure’s vast readership learned about the Lincoln Park Zoo’s centrality to national conversations about tuberculosis. Just like the NZP, the Lincoln Park Zoo, specifically zoo pathologist William A. Evans, performed autopsies on dead animals, and according to his records (as reviewed by Hendrick), “there were from fifty to sixty deaths every year, and . . . eighty per cent of these were caused by tuberculosis.” This shocking death rate surprised both Hendrick and the public, for the zoo’s superintendent, “Cy” DeVry, “enjoyed a national reputation as an intelligent animal-keeper.” DeVry, when interviewed, stated that he did all he could to reproduce “the same physical conditions under which animals lived in their native lands. Those that had come from a cold climate were kept in a cold atmosphere; those accustomed to a moderate temperature were supplied with moderately warm air; and those that lived naturally in the tropical zone were conscientiously provided with tropical heat.” As mentioned above, susceptibility to tuberculosis had often been linked to climatological factors, and, therefore, given DeVry’s careful effort in creating the appropriate microclimates for each animal, the high tuberculosis death rate proved all the more shocking. Was this death rate “the
75 Hendrick, Burton J., "Oxygenizing a City: An Attempt to Make Two and a Quarter Million People Work and Play Under Sanitary Conditions," McClure's Magazine 35, no. 4 (1910): 373-387. 393 result of ignorant training, of malnutrition, [or] of inconsiderate exposure to the disease?”
Hendrick queried.76
The monkeys demanded the greatest concern, and Hendrick relayed a vivid scene from his interview with DeVry for his readership:
Just take my monkeys, for example,” said Mr. DeVry. “I find that the average temperature of the places from which they come is eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Now, the thing to do, of course, is to keep them always in eighty- five-degree air. In the summer-time they get this easily in the open. When winter comes, I take them all inside, turn on the steam, and keep their quarters at about eighty-five degrees. They like it, too. Look here,” and he led the way into one of the modern steam-heated monkey apartments. Here twenty or thirty shivering creatures were making heroic efforts to keep warm. In one corner, a larger radiator was sending forth enormous gusts of hot air, and a wooden shelf on top of this radiator was the most popular quarter of the cage. Every inch was filled with huddling monkeys, rapturously basking in the heat, which was not far from one hundred and twenty-five degrees.
Evans commented to DeVry that the “scheme seems logical enough . . . You are simply trying to do for your monkeys here what nature does for them in their own homes. But it doesn’t seem to work very well. I think we had better try something else.”77
DeVry indeed took Evans’s advice. The next fall when a new shipment of monkeys
“fresh from the tropics” arrived in Chicago, Evans proposed an experiment. He suggested that twenty healthy monkeys be taken inside the monkey house while five sick monkeys be quarantined outside. “It will be interesting to see what will happen,” Evans exclaimed. As winter approached, the sick monkeys were “kept in a place where they were constantly exposed to . . . chilling drafts.” The zoo provided these ill primates with a thatched shelter, lacking artificial heat but still offering protection from the wind. However, oddly “the invalids seemed to care little for this shelter” except at night, when they slept under it. These ailing monkeys “showed as natural an inclination for the cold open air as their healthy brothers did for the hot drafts inside the
76 Ibid., 373. 77 Hendrick, 373. 394 monkey house.”78 In fact, the outdoor monkeys grew “thick brown furry coats” and these previously “sluggish creatures” suddenly “started into life,” resurrected from sickness to health.
The monkeys’ muscles “had grown large and strong; they ate eagerly, and manifested an increased desire for the favorite simian pastime—fighting.” These monkeys underwent a metamorphosis and quickly became “the most popular curiosities of the Zoo.” Zoogoers in
Chicago delightedly watched their tropical ancestors, sitting atop snow banks enjoying bananas.79
The twenty healthy monkeys placed in the heated house, however, did not experience the joys of an equatorially warm winter. By springtime, every individual in the shelter had died from tuberculosis. The artificial environment created to reproduce the climate of their native lands “had killed them, as it had killed hundreds of their predecessors.” The five sickly outdoor monkeys not only adapted resiliently to a harsh winter environment by growing protective coats, but they overcame their lethargy. Furthermore, not one of the outdoor monkeys contracted tuberculosis.
Five years later, two of these five outdoor monkeys were still alive and in good health, enjoying a longevity rare for zoo primates in 1910. The three outdoor monkeys that died within the five years following Evans’s experiment succumbed to causes that were not disease-related. One broke its back, another died giving birth, and the last became unexpectedly paralyzed. The monkeys forced to endure the fierce winter of the Windy City escaped the consumption that plagued their zoo peers.80
This experiment, staged in the Lincoln Park Zoo, not only demonstrated the communicability and contagiousness of tuberculosis, but it also revealed, albeit unknowingly, that the tubercle bacillus could be passed through the air, a basic fact that would not be accepted and understood scientifically for several decades. In the classic experiment that firmly established
78 Ibid., 373-374. 79 Hendrick, 374. 80 Ibid., 374. 395 tuberculosis as primarily an airborne pathogen Richard R. Riley, William Firth Wells, and fellow researchers in Baltimore, as explained by tuberculosis expert Thomas M. Daniel,
established a study center adjacent to a six room tuberculosis ward, and for two years the air from these rooms was evacuated through a chamber containing cages for guinea pigs. Thus, they were able to study the infectiousness of the air from the environment of these patients. Seventy-one of one hundred and fifty-six exposed guinea pigs became infected, an average of three each month. Two of sixty-two patients in the tuberculosis ward contributed the infections of nineteen of these animals. Some patients did not infect any guinea pigs. Breathing the air surrounding infectious tuberculosis patients was clearly established as a route to infection.81
And while Riley and Firth’s experiment led to the publication of the landmark 1959 essay “Aerial
Dissemination of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: A Two-Year Study of Contagion in a Tuberculosis
Ward,” Evans and DeVry’s zoo experiment demonstrated similar conclusions more than fifty years earlier.82 Their investigation demonstrated that monkeys held in artificially-heated buildings contracted tuberculosis at astronomical rates. These zoo men, of course, could not make the ultimate conclusion that the heating system of the monkey house recirculated tuberculosis bacteria, captured and encased in water droplets exhaled from primate lungs, simply because they had neither the microscope technology nor the bacteriological expertise and pathological knowledge to make such claims. All Evans, DeVry, McClure’s subscribers (thanks to the journalism of Hendrick), and presumably other zoo leaders active in the communicative network of the international zoo movement could know for certain was that there was something malignant about the very structure of the monkey house.
While a pathologist, zoo superintendent, and journalist could not redefine tuberculosis as an airborne pathogen, they could rethink zoo planning and exhibit layout in response to the threat posed by the disease, despite its elusive bacteriological properties. Cy DeVry, immediately
81 Daniel, 92-93. 82 Riley, R. L., C. C. Mills, W. Nyka, N. Weinstock, P. B. Storey, L. U. Sultan, M. C. Riley, and W. F. Wells, "Aerial Dissemination of Pulmonary Tuberculosis. A Two-Year Study of Contagion in a Tuberculosis Ward," American Journal of Epidemiology (1959):142 (1): 3. 396 following the experiment, “at once revised his philosophy of animal hygiene; he recognized that the point was, not to make the climate adaptable to your animal, but to make your animal adapt itself to the climate.” After the trauma of the monkey house and tuberculosis, the Lincoln Park
Zoo became “an open-air, cold-air zoo.” The heating systems were removed from all the buildings, and the windows opened. After the monkey house trauma, zoo animals in Chicago spent their days outside, in the fresh air. Sacred cattle and antelope from India, wild pigs from
Mexico, kangaroos from Australia, and ostriches from Africa all adapted successfully to the snowy winter environment of Chicago. Through the agency of five sick monkeys and one deadly microbe, the animals of the Lincoln Park Zoo freed themselves from their indoor enclosures and reshaped the philosophy of zoo-planning in a major metropolis.83
The above reform virtually eliminated tuberculosis from the zoo. Five years after Evans’s experiment and its subsequent reform, for example, zoo animals still died at the hands of disease, but tuberculosis was eradicated from the list of killers for that fiscal year. In fact, Chicago’s animals generally enjoyed an “increased vitality.” The reform even encouraged primate reproduction. Although uncommon, “monkey babies [became] by no means rare” in Chicago.
One infant even “spent the entire winter outdoors, with a most invigorating effect.” Buffalo calves also became such a common sight that the Lincoln Park Zoo emerged as a leading bison exporter, supplying the world’s zoos with the very animal Hornaday saved two decades earlier.84
The elimination of tuberculosis within the Lincoln Park Zoo catapulted William A. Evans from the world of the zoo laboratory into the very center of the public sphere. Hendrick ushered his readers into the recesses of the pathologist’s mind, imagining what Evans must have thought after single-handedly banishing tuberculosis from the previously plagued ark of Chicago.
Emphasizing the monumentality of Evans feat, Hendrick typed:
83 Hendrick, 374. 84 Ibid., 374. 397
Naturally this experience produced an impression upon Dr. Evans, the man responsible for the change. It had been possible to exercise despotic power over these animals—to make them do precisely as he wished; and the intelligent exercise of this authority had caused the elimination of tuberculosis. Conceive, for a moment, the possibility of having such despotic control over human beings, and of making them live according to stipulated conditions: would it not be entirely probable that the same results would be accomplished?85
Of course, by attributing “despotic power” to Evans, Hendrick failed to give credit where credit was due, for if the monkeys did not grow warmer coats, the experiment would have inevitably proven inconclusive, for the entire stock of monkeys would have met their demise that winter, whether from tuberculosis or the fierce elements. Surely the hardships of ancient equatorial environs coupled with millions of years of natural selection endowed the monkeys with the fortitude to survive the blistery winters of Lake Michigan. Nonetheless, scientifically-minded
Evans, with expertise refined in the pathological laboratory, forged new ways to think about animal disease within the zoo. Evans’ ingenuity, along with both DeVry’s encouragement and the monkey’s adaptability, transformed understandings of tuberculosis both inside and outside the zoo’s gates. And in this instance, a crude experiment performed in the Lincoln Park Zoo altered the public health of a city.
In 1907, in the midst of a scarlet fever outbreak, Fred A. Busse became mayor of Chicago and appointed William A. Evans as Health Commissioner. With his experience in eliminating tuberculosis from Chicago’s zoo, Evans quickly became the president of the Chicago Medical
Society as well as a foremost expert on tuberculosis. Evans could not “have found a more suitable place than Chicago in which to apply, on a large scale, the lesson taught by the animals in the
Lincoln Park Zoo,” as Hendrick emphasized for readers worldwide. This lesson emphasized the importance of air flow in containing tuberculosis. Evans realized that “[h]eaven never gave a community of men a more abundant or more unfailing supply of clean, fresh atmosphere,” but
85 Hendrick, 374. 398 throughout the seventy years of Chicago’s history, “man had steadily worked to obscure these natural advantages.” Lake Michigan “provides the air with indispensable moisture” and, in theory, should act “as a huge filtering plant, picking up dust particles and bacteria and leaving for human consumption the unadulterated oxygen.” In reality, however, black smoke “filled the city with a sooty cloud,” and filtered “into the nostrils, the mouths, and the lungs of nearly two and a quarter millions of people.”86
Critiques of the metropolis had long relied upon the suffocating imagery of air pollution to highlight the dark side of industrialization and urbanization. However, Evans (as well as
Hendrick in relaying the story) emphasized the role that air ventilation (and the lack thereof) played in the spread of tuberculosis, offering a perspective far different than the sputum-centered
“Prevention of Tuberculosis Among Government Employees,” approved by the President
Roosevelt five years earlier. In Chicago, the lessons learned from the Lincoln Park Zoo’s monkeys encouraged Evans to take a different stance on consumption, and not surprisingly, he redesigned the reform initiated within the zoo to fit the entire city. Just as Evans opened his zoo to fresh air, removing heating units and opening windows, he forced similar action onto the city of Chicago, becoming “Chicago’s militant apostle of fresh air.” These reforms began in the street cars, where “he insisted on the recognition of two fundamental principles: Some apparatus must be contrived to force the used-up warm air out at the top of the car; and the fresh cold air must be introduced at the bottom. Clearly, if the hot air could be pumped out at the ceiling line, a vacuum would be created, and the fresh air introduced at the car floor would immediately rise, and there would be a steady upward stream of life-giving, non-bacterial atmosphere.”87
Evans, then, carried this philosophy and technology to public schools, where he additionally formulated the idea of a humidifier. By taking his monkey-house research to the
86 Hendrick, 375-376. 87 Ibid., 378. 399 schoolroom, Evans discovered that the air circulated through Chicago’s schools was far less humid than the air outside. The lack of humidity created indoor atmospheres that extracted moisture from the throats and lungs of children, producing coughs, sneezes, and soreness while simultaneously depositing bacteria. To remedy the problem, Evans not only called for schools to be heated in the same manner as street cars but also introduced a humidification process that directed heated air “through jets of water or of steam” before entering the classroom. Many schools, though, embraced an even more direct lesson from the Lincoln Park Zoo and became open air schools, filled with teachers and students wearing thicker coats, just like their banana- holding cousins who played atop mountains of snow. Evans transformed the Windy City into an open air city as he reformed, one-by-one, the ventilation systems of hotels, nickel theaters, penny arcades, department stores, factories, and even the underground bakeries. In the process of replacing and remaking heating systems, various enterprises chose to open the windows and doors instead of sitting in the “hot, thirsty air” in which bacteria festered. Chicagoans now thrived in the cold air, for “too much fresh air is just enough.” The schoolchildren and street car passengers took “the lesson home to the tenements,” and as Chicago breathed the rhetoric of the ventilation revolution, tuberculosis (and pneumonia) decreased drastically. From a simple yet innovative zoo experiment arose a popular “discourse on the atmosphere, on breathing, on fresh air, oxygen, CO2, dust and microbes, the prevention of tuberculosis, the sin of spitting in street cars and on pavements, and the need of cooperation in the fight for a clean, healthful city.” This discourse originated from the screeches of five resurrected zoo monkeys, found life through the translation and amplification of a zoo pathologist, and was carried and printed in the colloquial
English, Czech, Polish, Greek, and Lithuanian that captured the spirit of the American working
400 class, the very group who strolled the pathways of their zoo, amused by the very animals who saved them from tuberculosis.88
Of course this story is oversimplified. Tuberculosis was never eradicated completely from Chicago. Hendrick’s boosterism undoubtedly exaggerated the role that Evans played in reshaping the heating and ventilation systems of the city, a process that necessarily involved a multitudinous number of actors deserving a thorough study of their own. Nonetheless,
“Oxygenizing a City” underscores important facets about the intertwined histories of tuberculosis and the public zoo movement. First, zoos functioned quite literally as laboratories where experiments were conducted, operations performed, diseases diagnosed, and where medical knowledge was formed, contested, and transmitted. Second, no simple intellectual history of tuberculosis exists. Knowledge about the disease was not assembled along the neat trajectory of a timeline, but was instead fashioned throughout an elusive skein of time and place. In 1912, as
Baker, Cadwalader, Hornaday, Stephan, and Mitchell deliberated about the prevalence of tuberculosis in their zoos, the proper methods of cleaning and disinfecting zoo exhibits, the death rates caused by the disease, and the possibility of tuberculosis spreading from animals to humans, the Lincoln Park Zoo had already redesigned itself to prevent the spread of tuberculosis through the air, even though an understanding of the tubercle bacillus as primarily an airborne pathogen would not become commonly accepted until well after the World War II. Knowledge about tuberculosis formed piecemeal, and information about the disease always spread quickly throughout zoo networks, producing a confusing and contradictory discourse about a disease that
“nobody [was] sure about.” Third, the zoo as a public institution truly sat at the center of both popular discourse and public policy. Policies formed inside zoos shaped the policies beyond its
88 Hendrick, 380-387. 401 fences, and vice-versa. Last, as zoo animals lived and died at the mercy of contagion, they prompted zoo officials to think about tuberculosis in new and innovative ways.
402
Conclusion Being-in-the-World After the Zoo Movement
From its very beginnings, the National Zoological Park captured the attention of the nation and the world. It first attracted the peddlers of animalia located throughout the forests, mountains, swamps, deserts, and backwoods of North America, and quickly thereafter lured the leading animal dealers of the international animal trade. It snared the legislators sitting atop
Capitol Hill, enamoring some and enraging others. It excited the populous as it released wild animals into the streets of Washington and the dark alleys of the public imagination. It intrigued scientific Americans—professional scientists, popular showmen of science, and a growing body of private citizens increasingly interested in the life sciences. It reeled in the diverse cast associated with the burgeoning environmentalia trade that reached from coast to coast while also enticing the keepers, workers, zoogoers, ecologists, artists, and animals associated with the built environments of zoo enclosures. It seized the attention of animal activists and convinced the public to think about the welfare of animals. And it encouraged zoo leaders, surgeons, doctors, medical experts, and policymakers to think about the zoonotic possibilities of public contagion.
The National Zoological Park drew in all sorts of Americans, for all sorts of reasons.
These stories only begin to show how and why so many were drawn to the Rock Creek.
The National Zoological Park and its animals meant different things to different people. And these myriad significations breathed life into the zoo, transforming an institution, born within
William Temple Hornaday’s Department of Living Animals, into an organism of a peculiar genus. The National Zoological Park, through its animals, gained its own collective agency and became a thing-in-itself. The zoo achieved its own momentum, hosting thousands of unique
403 experiences to different zoogoers daily. No individual, newspaper, or animal could structure these zoogoing experiences, for each human who entered the zoo held different assumptions about animals, drawing from the many animal-centered discourses that circulated throughout the nineteenth century. Of course, the humans and animals that filled the National Zoo each exercised their own individual agencies, building and shaping the zoo in creative, self-determined, and species-specific ways. Yet none of these characters, whether a Smithsonian Secretary, zoo superintendent, United States Senator, zoogoing child, or runaway wolf, could determine the life of the National Zoological Park. No agent, human or otherwise, could predict or harness the innumerable meanings that the zoo and its animals offered the nation. Therefore, the National
Zoo possessed an unpredictable life of its own, creating encounters among people, animals, objects, and ideas that had never before shared space within the timelines of history. In housing a vast heterogeneity of organisms, the National Zoological Park presented needs, made demands, took lives, showcased opportunities, and challenged commonplace assumptions in ways unforeseen. The National Zoological Park became an organism in its own right— and a wild one at that.
The Zoo and the Nation
Zoological parks transcended their institutional origins and the intentions of the individuals who developed and directed them. Within the imaginations of Americans, zoological parks gained autonomy. They captivated different people for different reasons and impacted everyone in different ways. Americans came away from their zoological parks with diverse questions and conclusions. However, by forcing Americans to question and conclude, the zoological parks that arose in American cities gave the nation a popular zoology that enabled
Americans to think about humans, animals, and environments in new ways. In this manner, zoological parks transformed outmoded humanistic traditions, giving everyday Americans a site
404 where they could both interact with other species and contemplate those interactions. Zoological parks catapulted the world’s animals into the center of the American public sphere, and the resulting encounters proved powerful.
The National Zoological Park was a key actor in this drama. Before bestowing agency upon the National Zoo, though, and declaring that this zoo altered an intellectual current forged and fueled by several centuries of the most brilliant philosophers, credit must first be given to a single human who made the zoo a central player in the public zoo movement and a key institution in the spread of popular zoology. Superintendent Frank Baker gave the National Zoological Park a national significance. Baker communicated with zoo directors from around the world as they shared advice about zoo-building and data about zoo animals. Unlike the business executives of the day, who kept information to themselves to ensure a competitive advantage in the marketplace, zoo directors freely and openly shared knowledge. Zoological parks rarely competed with one another, for a city could not support more than one public zoo. This meant that a single zoo always cornered the local zoological market and tried as best it could to satisfy local demand. In the marketplace of zoos, then, sharing information almost always proved beneficial. And zoo men took advantage of this fact by communicating with one another frequently. In fact, the relationships that emerged from this communicative network proved quite cordial. Zoo men often viewed each other as friends, as members of a small gentlemen’s club built upon shared interests. Baker consistently engaged these zoo directors to better his zoo and improve others. However, Baker reached out to zoological parks for an even higher purpose.
Superintendent Frank Baker hoped to create a zoo-networked nation and world.
In the summer of 1901, G. A. Parker, the chairman of the American Park and Outdoor
Art Association (APOAA) and superintendent of Keney Park in Hartford, Connecticut, sent Frank
Baker a letter regarding the recently compiled census of parks in the United States. Parker and the
405
Census Committee of the APOAA created a list of two thousand known “park areas” that existed in more than 150 American cities. However, Parker lacked the “full information . . . in regard to the Zoological parks of the world.” He remembered Baker from a visit to the National Zoological
Park two years earlier and decided to ask his old acquaintance for a list of the world’s zoos.1
Baker responded by sending a list of “all the zoological collections of which I have definite knowledge,” but he admitted that this knowledge was surely incomplete and asked Parker to
“give me data regarding any [animal collection] which I have not included.”2 The list Baker forwarded to Parker included seventy-seven zoological parks from around the world, in places as distant as South Perth, Sofia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and Constantinople. Of the seventy-seven zoos listed, thirteen were founded in American cities—Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati,
Detroit, New York City (which had one in Central Park and one in Brooklyn), Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Providence, San Francisco, St. Louis, and, of course, Washington, D.C.3 However,
Baker seemed pretty certain that there were far more living animal collections dispersed throughout the United States than the ones he listed.
Three months later, Baker received a letter from D. B. Dyer, the president of the Augusta
Railway and Electric Company, asking, “if you can tell us where we can secure a book treating on the care and maintenance of birds, beasts, reptiles, etc. We have lost many of the living things at our Park, and, we think, through not knowing how to care for them. Possibly, the Government publishes such a book, and if it does I will be very much obliged if you will give me the title of it, and where it can be secured.” Dyer closed this letter inquiring about the cost of a black bear.4
Apparently, Augusta, Georgia, possessed a zoological park that Baker either forgot to add to the
1 G. A. Parker to Dr. Frank Baker, 12 June 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 2 Frank Baker to Mr. G. A. Parker, 15 July 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 3 “List of Zoological Gardens,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1, 1-9. 4 D. B. Dyer to E. S. Schmid [forwarded to Baker], 28 September 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 406 list of zoos he had just sent to G. A. Parker, or more likely, that Baker never knew existed. No reply to Dyer’s question exists in the record. Baker may have decided not to respond since the government printed no book that could assist Dyer. Or maybe Baker simply felt embarrassed that both the federal government and the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park were ignorant of the number of zoos in their nation.
A few weeks later, at the end of October, 1901, Baker exchanged letters with Stanley S.
Flower, the director of the Ghizeh Zoological Gardens, near Cairo, Egypt. What prompted this exchange remains uncertain. However, Baker and Flower exchanged information about their zoological parks. Baker hoped for a “more complete account of the Ghizeh Zoological Gardens,” and Flower desired the annual reports of the National Zoological Park from 1888 until 1900.5
Information about zoological parks was in high demand, yet low supply. And unfortunately, to
Baker’s increasing frustration, no compendium concerning zoological parks existed.
Frank Baker took action immediately. He contacted the Census Office in Washington,
D.C., and requested a list of American cities with populations of 25,000 people or greater.6 Then, he sent the following letter to the mayor of each of those cities:
Dear Sir, I am endeavoring to secure, for probable future publication in the reports of this Institution, reliable data with regard to the different zoological collections in the United States, and I should be glad if you would inform me if there is a wild animal collection in or near your city. If so I should like to know when it was established, its size (number of acres), the number and size of the buildings and the number and species of animals comprised in it; also whether it is maintained by the city or by private parties. If you issue an annual report giving information relative to the city’s pleasure grounds and its animal collection, I should be pleased to receive a copy. I appreciate the fact that this is making a considerable demand upon your time and courtesy and should not feel at liberty to ask for this information if it was not expected to serve by it the interests of the public.
Very respectfully,
5 Baker to Honorable Stanley S. Flower, F.Z.S., 21 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 6 Edward W. Canley to Dr. Frank Baker, 29 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 407
Frank Baker [Signed] Superintendent, National Zoological Park7
The feedback he received surprised him.
Frank Baker was right to suspect that his list of thirteen American zoological parks was indeed incomplete. However, he did not realize how incomplete that list actually was, for he discovered quickly that zoological collections riddled the nation. On November 16, 1901, Robert
R. Wright, Jr., mayor of Denver, Colorado, replied to Baker.
Dear Sir: In answer to yours of October 31st, we have no zoological collection in this city at the moment. We have a small collection “mostly of the Rocky Mountain fauna” in our City Park. It was commenced about nine years ago in a very small way and finding them very attractive to the public, we have added them from time to time. Our City Park encloses 320 acres; the animals are parked irregularly and take up about forty acres. We have no buildings for wintering them, therefore, the collection as you see it, is composed of the hardy species. The Park is maintained by the City. In addition to our collection there is a small one in the Northern suberbs [sic] of our City known as “Elitch’s Garden[”]; it is small and unimportant but I am unable to give you a list of the animals there. A letter addressed to Mrs. Elitch Long, Denver, Colorado, would, no doubt, give you the information. We are just now breaking ground for a museum in our Park, which we hope will be an attractive addition to our great pleasure resort.
Very respectfully, R. R. Wright, Jr. [Signed] Mayor8
Denver lacked a formal zoological park like the one in Washington, yet it still supported two living animal collections. In fact, even though Mayor Wright stated that the collection held in
City Park was “small,” it still maintained three bison, fourteen elk, four black-tailed deer, two white-tailed deer, eight pronghorn antelope, one moose, one grizzly bear, two black bears, five cinnamon bears, two puma, three gray wolves, two swift fox, three badgers, four raccoons, two
7 Frank Baker to “The Honorable The Mayor,” Newark, N. J., 30 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1; Hanson, Animal Attractions, 197. This is the standard wording for all the letters sent, in the autumn of 1901, to the mayors of American cities with populations of at least 25,000 persons. 8 R. R. Wright, Jr. to Frank Baker, 16 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 408 mink, a prairie dog village, two golden eagles, two American swans, twenty-six wild duck, three
Mongolian pheasants, and six Canadian geese.9 Small indeed! Impressed, Frank Baker thanked
Wright for the information and stated that he was “pleased to know that your zoological collection has already reached such considerable proportions and shall be interested to learn of its further development.” He also informed Wright that the National Zoo was “very anxious” for pumas, in case the City Park ever acquired more than it wanted.10
The city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, also possessed, a “considerable zoological collection.”11 J. M. Trimble, Secretary of the Board of Park Commissioners, responded to Baker’s letter promptly.
Dear Sir:— I am requested by the Hon. A. W. Chambliss, Mayor of Chattanooga, to reply to your letter of the 25th inst., making inquiries regarding collection of wild animals, &c. The City of Chattanooga has a small collection of wild animals at East Lake Park in one of the suburbs of the city. The earlier records of the Park Commission were lost or destroyed, and I have not at hand the exact date when the collection was established: it has been, however, four or five years—The present Park Commission having had it in charge a little over two years. The size of the Park is about ten acres. There are only two buildings devoted entirely to housing the animals, and all the animals except the deer are in those buildings. A new building is now contracted for and will probably be built within the next month or two. There are other buildings for green house purposes, etc., in the Park, but I suppose your inquiry does not relate in any way to them. The main building is about 90 x 30 ft., a one-story frame building. The other building is nothing more than an outside shed with an open yard, the shed being not over 12 x 15ft. The new building will be 24 x 60 ft. and will also be a frame building. The Park is maintained by the city. We have never yet issued an annual report, not feeling that the magnitude of our work was sufficient to justify us in doing so. The animals in the collection are as follows: Two lions, three bears, ten monkeys, four wild cats, four coyotes[,] two large grey Mexican wolves, five raccoons, three grey foxes, four red foxes, one ape, one baboon, five deer, three Angora goats, one puma, on martin, one zebu,
9 “List of Zoological collection now at City Park, Denver, Colorado,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 10 Frank Baker to Honorable Robert R. Wright, Jr., 21 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 11 Frank Baker to Mr. J. M. Trimble, 5 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 409
one skunk, fourteen squirrels, two guinea pigs, three alligators, eighteen rabbits, one Mexican dog, six rattle snakes, four common snakes, one Gila-monster, thirteen owls, one vulture, four eagles, three hawks, three macaws, five cocatoos [sic], eight pigeons, one parrot, one red bird, five ring neck doves, two geese, seven ducks, two guineas, one pea fowl, one fowl unknown species, currently reported to be a cross between a chicken and a guinea, six pheasants, one mud hen, five chickens, two night herons, two sea gulls, one parrot. No attempt is made to provide the animals with anything like natural surroundings, and none can be made on account of the limited amount of funds furnished for their care. They are simply confined in cages. We hope during the present season, or rather in the Spring, to add something to our collection, but do not know at the present time what will be most suitable under the conditions surrounding us. A few days since we lost a very fine leopard from unknown causes, but we suspect either from catching cold or over-feeding while confined in a small cage. If we can give you further information concerning the matter, we shall be very glad to do so. Yours truly, J. M. Trimble [Signed] Secretary12
Like Denver, Chattanooga also had an extensive collection of living animals. Neither J. M.
Trimble nor R. R. Wright described these collections as formal zoological parks. The collection in Denver’s City Park lacked buildings. Chattanooga had two animal houses, and another on the way, but it kept animals only in cages, not enclosures modeling “natural surroundings,” like the ones eventually created in the National Zoo. The collections in Denver and Chattanooga were, in the eyes of their own authorities, not-quite-zoos. However, they were more formidable than the collection that the National Zoological Park emerged from, the Department of Living Animals.
Also, neither of these collections was new; both were established in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Chattanooga’s collection dated to the time of the NZP’s establishment.
Denver and Chattanooga were impacted by the same zoo movement that led to the National Zoo.
These cities, though, just lacked the key ingredients that transformed the Department of Living
Animals into a large-scale zoological park— Congressional attention that sparked mass publicity,
12 J. M. Trimble to Frank Baker, 27 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 410 a Smithsonian Institution with both money and connections, and an ambitious William Temple
Hornaday.
The National Zoological Park, though, gave other zoos inspiration and opportunities to become something more. J. M. Trimble, especially, expressed a desire to improve Chattanooga’s proto-zoo, recognizing its housing deficiencies and admitting its inability to keep a leopard alive.
Now, though, due to Baker’s decision to search the United States for unknown animal collections,
Denver and Chattanooga were welcomed into the nationwide zoo-network. Baker wasted no time.
He not only asked Denver for pumas, but he also sent the annual report of the NZP to
Chattanooga. As Baker discovered new animal collections and zoological parks, new cities became hubs for animals and information.
Denver and Chattanooga represented only the beginning. Between the autumn of 1901 and the spring of 1902, letters from all over the nation flooded Frank Baker’s desk, informing him of the unbeknownst array of living zoological collections in the United States. Mayor Marshall
Hicks of San Antonio, Texas, informed Baker that the city’s San Pedro Park hosted a large, private zoo, which had been first established in 1888. This zoo, spread over two acres of land, maintained a significant animal collection of more than one hundred specimens—including two black bears, one jaguar, one puma, one boa constrictor, a prairie dog village, and other staples of the American zoo.13 S. N. Williams, mayor of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, informed Baker that though his city’s “pleasure park” held no animals, a park in nearby Clinton County kept three hundred deer, nine Russian red deer, and fifteen elk.14 William C. Clark, mayor of Manchester,
New Hampshire, informed Baker that there was a collection of wild animals at Corbin’s Park, near Newport.15 And the mayor of Augusta, Georgia, directed Baker’s attention again to that
13 Marshall Hicks to Dr. Frank Baker, 6 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1. 14 S. N. Williams to Dr. Frank Baker, 4 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 15 Wm. C. Clarke to Dr. Frank Baker, 24 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 411 city’s private zoo, “maintained by the Augusta Railway & Electric Company of which D. B. Dyer is President.”16 Now, Baker finally decided to contact Dyer, and he learned that the Lake View
Park was free to the (white) public and showcased a moderate collection of birds and animals and several hundred prairie dogs.17
Mayors and city employees the nation over quickly responded to Baker’s inquiry, and he continued to discover previously unknown zoological parks. The mayor of Akron, Ohio, directed
Baker’s attention to a private park owned by R. H. Lodge, just north of the city in Cuyahoga
Falls.18 Little did Baker know at the time that this Silver Lake Park would become the nation’s center for captive black bear breeding.19 An employee of Easton, Pennsylvania, writing on the mayor’s behalf, told Baker that even though no zoo existed in Easton, there were two wild animal preserves in northern New Jersey, one in Sussex County and one in Warren County.20 The mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, sent Baker’s inquiry to a member of Omaha’s Park Commission, who informed Baker of a large animal collection in Riverside Park.21 The mayor of Grand Rapids,
Michigan, told Baker about the zoological park, established in 1895, in the John Ball Park.22 The city auditor of Salt Lake City, Utah, wrote to Baker about a deer park within the city and a buffalo herd on an island in the Great Salt Lake.23 The mayor of Elmira, New York, informed
16 Jacob Phinzy to Dr. Frank Baker, 18 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 17 Baker to Col. D. B. Dyer, 20 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2; D. B. Dyer to Dr. Frank Baker, 6 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 18 Wm. B. Doyle to Dr. Frank Baker, 16 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3; Baker to The Honorable William B. Doyle, 23 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 19 For more on the relations between the Silver Lake Park and the National Zoological Park see: SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 57, Folders 3-12. Letters to, from, and about R. H. Lodge fill these folders, mostly concerning black bears, black bear trading, and black bear breeding. It is clear that Lodge’s Silver Lake Park was the place that Frank Baker looked to for information regarding black bears. He even directed the attention of famous zoologist C. Hart Merriam to the Silver Lake Park regarding the birth of black bears in captivity. C. Hart Merriam to Doctor Baker, 4 March 1914, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 57, Folder 12. 20 Edgar H. Green to Dr. Frank Baker, 15 January 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 21 Frank E. Morres to Dr. Frank Baker, 15 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3; Baker to Mr. E. J. Cornish, 25 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 22 Geo. R. Perry to Dr. Frank Baker, 4 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 23 Albert S. Reiser to Frank Baker, 20 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 412
Baker about a small zoo called Eldridge Park, established in the 1880s and equipped with a
$4,000 bear pit.24 And the Park Commissioner of Indianapolis made Baker aware of a small animal collection in his city, including only a few bears, deer, foxes, wolves, and birds.25
Letters continued to be piled upon Frank Baker’s desk. Some of these letters presented data about animal collections that Baker never knew existed. Others simply let Baker know that the city in question possessed no zoological park at all. For example, the city clerk of Troy, New
York, admitted that “the City of Troy has not and never had a collection of wild animals, excepting the time when the elephants belonging to the Barnum circus broke loose and ran through the streets for two or three days.”26 However, in all cases, mayors, city clerks, and government officials from cities coast to coast found time in their busy schedules to respond to the Superintendent of the National Zoological Park regarding zoological collections in their cities.
Baker received letters from places as diverse as Wilmington, Delaware; Oakland, California;
Butte, Montana; and Spokane, Washington.27 He opened correspondence from cities like
Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Schenectady, New York; Galveston, Texas; and Jackson, Michigan.28
As Frank Baker read and responded to these letters, he stitched together a zoo-networked nation.
And he did so resiliently. When many city officials failed to respond to the first letter of inquiry sent in the late autumn of 1901, Baker sent a reminder letter in March, 1902. Baker knew
24 Frank H. Flood to Dr. Frank Baker, 28 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5; Crowley to Mr. Frank Baker, 24 September 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5; F. H. Flood to Dr. Frank Baker, 29 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 25 Mr. J. Clyde Power to Baker, 7 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 26 Charles Hagen to Dr. Frank Baker, 28 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 27 Wm. L. Hamann to Frank Baker, 8 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1; Ansorn Barstow to Dr. Frank Baker, 9 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 1; Mayor to Dr. Frank Baker, 23 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2; P. S. Byrne to Mr. Frank Baker, 30 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 28 John J. Fitzgerald to Hon. Frank Baker, 23 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2; Baker to “The Honorable The Mayor,” Schenectady, New York [scribbled response in margins], 26 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2; Charles F. J. Artz to Dr. Frank Baker, 23 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2; F. E. Palmer to Dr. Frank Baker, 10 December 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 2. 413 that he could not compile an accurate database of American zoos unless he received information from every corner of the United States, for as his survey had already proven by New Years of
1902, no town proved too small for a living animal collection. The gentle reminder was successful, encouraging more responses from more mayors and the discovery of more zoological parks.
A secretary for the Executive Department of Scranton, Pennsylvania, told Baker about the small animal collection in his city, comprised of one alligator, two North Carolina black bears, three Florida red deer, three opossums, three monkeys, six raccoons, and four fox squirrels.29 The city clerk of Dayton, Ohio, informed Baker that his city possessed no wild animals, but that the nearby National Soldiers Home had an animal collection on site.30 A clerk of the City Treasurer of Norfolk, Virginia, made Baker aware of a newly established zoological park in that city, complete with an animal house and a three-acre deer park.31 Also, the chairman of the
Parks Department of Seattle, Washington, informed Baker of three Seattle parks that housed animal collections. One of the city parks held deer, eagles, and an owl. Another displayed a wild cat, pheasant, and more owls. And the Leschi Park, owned by the Seattle Electric Railway
Company, contained a collection more akin to a large zoological park, showcasing seals, bears, wolves, monkeys, peacocks, coyotes, marten, and elk. This Seattle chairman also added that, “I am an ‘ardent’ on the matter of municipal parks, and regard them, not as pure luminaries involving unnecessary expense, but an essential necessity to the betterment of humanity . . .”32
Interestingly, these Seattle collections were not new. The public animal collections were
29 Mark K. Eager to Dr. Frank Baker, 25 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 3. 30 John A. Halmer to Frank Baker, 28 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 4. 31 R. C. Steed to Dr. Frank Baker, 28 June 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 32 Melody Choir to Dr. Frank Baker, 19 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5; A. F. Haas to Melody Choir [Sent to Baker], 21 November 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 414 organized in 1897, and the Leschi Park collection was forged in the 1880s.33 The United States not only hosted far more animal collections than Frank Baker previously imagined, but it seemed that many of these collections had been created alongside the National Zoological Park, as symptoms of a zoo fever that swept the country from coast to coast, from Philadelphia to Seattle.
Between 1902 and 1905, Baker continued to receive information about animal collections dispersed throughout the United States, most formed in the nineteenth century. Mobile,
Alabama.34 Binghamton, New York.35 Toledo, Ohio.36 Springfield, Massachusetts.37 Portland,
Oregon.38 Portland, Maine.39 Glen Island, New York.40 Frank Baker learned about animal collections in these cities and others. The amount of animals and funding, the number and size of buildings, and the types of species in these zoological collections varied from city to city. Some of these collections looked more like established, “modern,” zoological parks (like the thirteen
Baker listed for G. A. Parker of Keney Park in 1901) than others did. However, the publics that visited these animal collections clearly considered them to be zoos. Citizens expressed pride in their “zoos,” and considered the animals in these collections to be local symbols. These zoogoers, like the citizens of Washington that first frequented the Department of Living Animals, cherished their zoos and hoped they would grow with their cities. Zoogoers around the country wished they could stroll through a zoo like the National Zoological Park, and they all hoped that their local animal collections might someday mature into premier zoological parks. This desire might explain why so many cities contacted Frank Baker at the dawn of the twentieth century.
33 Melody Choir to Dr. Frank Baker, 11 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 34 Baker to Honorable W. F. Walsh, 17 March 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 35 Frank S. Smith, “Binghamton, N.Y.,” 2 November 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 36 Geo. W. Hillard to Frank Baker, 15 July 1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 37 Charles E. Ludd to Dr. Frank Baker, 31 October 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 38 H. Lowitz, “Portland, Oregon,” 12 November 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 39 A. W. Smith, “Portland, Maine,” 4 November 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 40 John H. Starin, “Glen Island, N. Y.,” 9 November 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 415
Frank Baker’s suspicions, in 1901, that he lacked knowledge about the existence of certain American zoological parks proved more than accurate. In fact, Baker had no idea how many animal collections his nation hosted. He admitted in an unofficial report that he compiled in
1903, entitled “Zoological Collections of the United States,” that “[t]he lack of accurate and definite information with regard to the zoological gardens of the United States and their collections has long been apparent and has made it seem to me desirable to collect for publication all facts concerning these institutions which could be directly or indirectly obtained.”41
Originally, in 1901, Baker told G. A. Parker of Keney Park that there were thirteen zoological parks in the United States. After sending his survey letter to more than 150 cities, though, he realized that this number was far too small.42 When his survey was complete, he counted no fewer than fifty-six living zoological collections.43 Frank Baker recorded the information he received in a makeshift chart (see Appendix Image J.1) that, while originally typed, was riddled with pencil markings, strikethroughs, corrections, and blank spaces. Surprisingly, though, it seems that Baker never published the results of his survey. After three years of writing letters to and reading letters from mayors, city clerks, and government officials from every city in America, only a ragtag chart stood as a tangible testament to Baker’s work.
A makeshift chart, though, probably serves as the most accurate reflection of the nature of the American zoo movement at the turn of the twentieth century. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, living animal collections became integral components of the American
41 “Zoological Collections of the United States,” Compiled by Doctor Frank Baker, Superintendent (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, National Zoological Park, 1903), “Preface,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. Only the preface of this report exists. The rest of the report (if it exists) cannot be found anywhere in Box 100 of Record Unit 74. I suspect that the report was never completed for publication. 42 “Twelfth Census of the United States” (Washington, D.C.: Census Bulletin, October 25, 1900), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. According to this census, in 1900, there were 159 American cities with populations greater than 25,000 persons. Frank Baker sent letters to all of these cities, inquiring about their living zoological collections. 43 “Statistics of Zoological Collections,” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 416 city, yet they were institutions in rapid flux. Within a few short years, a collection of dead animals could transform into an assemblage of living animals. And these could quickly lead to established living animal Collections (Departments even!), which, in turn, could evolve into zoos.
Zoos themselves could take many forms. Some looked like the menageries of old, riddled with chains and cages. Others appeared to be something new, parks with sprawling enclosures and developed environments meant to maximize the potential of animal life. These zoos themselves could change quickly, and, of course, these changes were often facilitated by fluctuations in funding. A small menagerie-like zoo nestled within an urban park or a modest collection of living animals held in a building behind a museum could become an established zoological park almost overnight.
Of course, local circumstances, like funding, mattered to the destiny of individual animal collections. Zoos followed no maturational teleology. Some zoos faltered and collapsed. Others became the National Zoological Park or the New York Zoological Park. Most were somewhere in between. Yet all zoos, of course, whether they were viewed as fledgling or grand, proved unique.
Despite these realities, though, Frank Baker created possibilities for zoological parks around the nation. By corresponding with all animal collections, Frank Baker deliberately forged a nationwide communicative network that both circulated knowledge about building, managing, and keeping a zoological park and circulated resources that could support these endeavors. By locating and communicating with animal collections from around the United States, Baker threw open the doors of the zoo-men gentleman’s club, creating a zoo network suitable for a nation that would host more than one hundred zoos by World War Two.44 Furthermore, through this process,
Frank Baker placed the National Zoological Park at the center of the American zoo movement.
44 Hanson, Animal Attractions, 3. 417
Frank Baker did not create a zoo network simply to improve his own zoological park. He organized this network to improve the nation. As Superintendent of the National Zoological Park, he perceived it his duty to support zoo-building everywhere. Once he fashioned this sprawling zoo network, directed through and by his zoo, Baker wasted no time before helping zoos elsewhere. On May 22, 1905, Dr. James H. Morgan from Wilmington, Delaware, scribbled Frank
Baker the following letter:
Dear Sir As a lover of wild animals I write you relating our little Public Free Zoo asking you kind information regarding the possession of some small animals for the [illegible]. We have an ideal park and lake and desire a small collection of wild animals & birds. I know you can not sell your surplus, but will you advise me how we can obtain something for our Park[.] Our Senator [illegible] will testify to our worthyness [sic] and if you will give us a little information maybe it would result in our getting some help. I hope you interest yourself in our behalf.
I remain resp. Dr Jas Morgan [Signed] Wilmington[,] DE45
Baker responded cordially, “We have at one time or another obtained mammals and birds from most of the people in the United States who supply such specimens and I shall be glad to send you the address of these dealers or furnish any other information which we have available that would be of service to you.”46 Three days later Baker proceeded to send Morgan a list of animal dealers.47
45 Dr. Jas.Morgan to Baker, 22 May 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 46 Baker to Dr. James H. Morgan, 24 May 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 47 The names on this list represent the leading animal dealers in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Some of these names have appeared throughout the chapters above. Others do not. Nonetheless, these animal dealers, together, deserve a study of their own. Baker’s list goes as follows: Frank B. Armstrong (Brownsville, Texas), A. H. Nicholson (Orlando, Florida), Mrs. C. F. Latham, Grant (Brevard County, Florida), Chester A. Lamb (Kansas City, Missouri), Charles Payne (Wichita, Kansas), C. E. Mallory (Buffalo Center, Iowa), C. P. Forge (Carman, Manitoba), Howard Eaton (Wolf, Wyoming), William Bartels (New York City), Louis Ruhe (New York City), and Cecil French (Washington, D.C.). Baker concluded the letter: “This list includes all of the people from whom we have obtained any considerable number of specimens, but in case you should want some particular mammal or bird which none of them can supply, we may be able to refer you to someone not on the list who could furnish the specimen wanted.” Baker to Dr. James H. Morgan, 27 May 1905, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 418
The practice of corresponding with and assisting other zoological parks had always been important to Baker, but after extending the zoo network to all of the animal collections of the
United States, this philanthropic mission became easier to fulfill. George W. Clarke of East
Liverpool, Ohio, corresponded with Baker about forming the “nucleus upon which to build . . .
[a] proposed small Zoo.” Specifically, Clarke asked for information about the National Zoo’s
“Raccoon Tree,” an enclosure that would be fairly inexpensive to replicate in an upstart zoological park.48 MIT professor William Lyman Underwood, who was involved in the establishment of a zoo in Middlesex Falls, sent Baker an inquiry about the National Zoo’s bear enclosures.49 Baker responded with photographs and a two-page detailed description of building materials and dimensions.50 Otto Widmann of St. Louis, Missouri, not only informed Baker that the citizens of that city were raising funds for a zoo, but he specifically wanted advice about the types of birds to place in the bird cages of the animal collection.51 Baker responded by sending St.
Louis “a dozen or so” free night herons.52 And General Smith of Bangor, Maine, looked to Baker for assistance in starting a zoo there.53 Anyone involved in starting a new zoo looked to Frank
Baker for guidance.
On April 11, 1906, W. A. Stinchcomb, Chief Engineer of Parks in Cleveland, Ohio, mailed Frank Baker a letter that demonstrated the centrality of both the National Zoological Park and its superintendent to the American zoo movement. After informing Baker that Cleveland was
“about to establish a new and modern zoo,” and that a controversy had emerged about where this zoo should be located, Stinchcomb asked Baker if he could answer some questions regarding zoo- building. In a tone of urgency, Stinchcomb concluded his letter, “Hoping that you may be able to
48 George W. Clarke to Mr. Arthur B. Baker, 26 November 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 49 Wm Lyman Underwood to Dr. Frank A. Baker, 2 January 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 50 Baker to Prof. Wm. Lyman Underwood, 25 January 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 51 Otto Widmann to Dr. Frank Baker, 12 September 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 9. 52 Baker to Mr. Otto Widmann, 15 November 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 9. 53 Baker to Mr. W. H. Blackburne, 24 September 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 9. 419 furnish me this desired information, and assuring you of my willingness to reciprocate in any way in which I can, I beg to remain, . . . Very truly yours.” The accompanying questionnaire posed many questions. Number of acres included in the zoo? Is there a stream of running water or a lake included within its limits? Is there a deer park included in the area? Is the greater part of the collection of animals housed in one large central building, or do you have small separate houses for each kind or class of animals? The questions continued in this manner.54 And, of course,
Baker replied to Stinchcomb with thoughtful answers, teaching Cleveland how to model its zoo after the National Zoological Park.55
After this initial letter, individuals associated with Cleveland’s rising zoo frequently contacted Frank Baker as a zoo expert. However, Baker himself made this relationship possible.
Five years before Stinchcomb typed his 1906 questionnaire, Baker had sent a survey about
American animal collections to the mayor of Cleveland.56 Eventually, this survey ended up in the hands of Cleveland’s Director of Public Service, Stinchcomb’s superior. The information that
Baker originally received was that Cleveland had a living zoological collection that was first organized in 1886— a collection that Baker never knew existed.57 Yet the zoo world was changing quickly. By 1906, the animal collection in Cleveland was bursting at its seams, and the city was ready to establish a large zoological park. For advice in these matters, Stinchcomb (quite possibly with the direct advice of his superior) turned to the National Zoo superintendent who showed interest in Cleveland’s animal collection years earlier. Frank Baker made himself the director of the nation’s zoos, and he made his own zoo the storehouse of knowledge regarding
54 W. A. Stinchcomb to Dr. Frank Baker, 9 April 1906, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 55 Questionnaire Answers, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 56 Frank Baker to “The Honorable The Mayor,” Cleveland, Ohio, 30 October 1901, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 5. 57 D. E. Leslie to Mr. Frank Baker, 26 September 1903, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 7. 420 zoo formation and management. Due to the groundwork laid by Frank Baker, the American zoo movement moved through its capital, Washington, D.C.
The above interactions only begin to demonstrate how Frank Baker situated the National
Zoological Park at the epicenter of the American zoo movement. Throughout his entire tenure as
Superintendent of the National Zoo, Frank Baker poured his energies into improving his own zoo.
However, his ultimate vision proved outward-looking, toward the United States that the National
Zoological Park was established to serve. The above chapters concerned the National Zoological
Park, specifically. However, in opening up the National Zoo, this dissertation also peered into zoological parks everywhere. The National Zoological Park was more than simply representative of other zoos. This dissertation was more than a case study. Due to the leadership of Frank Baker, the National Zoological Park made other zoos possible. The fingerprints of Frank Baker can be uncovered beneath the foundations of all zoological parks established in the two decades around
1900. Like the National Zoo, though, once these zoological parks became established, they seized a transcendent life of their own, untethered to the human fingers that managed their direction on the ground.
Popular Zoology in America
In many ways, due to the ambition and vision of its superintendent, the National
Zoological Park brought direction and energy to the American public zoo movement. In this way, the National Zoo indeed possessed a national significance. However, its national significance went far beyond the supportive role it played in the establishment of other zoological parks. In becoming a zoo upon a hill, the archetypal American zoo, the National Zoological Park served as a blueprint for all American animal collections. The National Zoo inspired these collections to make themselves in its image—to increase the number of animals, to establish walkways and buildings, to attract masses of zoogoers, to campaign for funding, and, of course, to educate and
421 entertain. The National Zoological Park, though, also encouraged these collections to become more than urban spectacles of entertainment or institutions of genteel education. The National
Zoo showed animal collections how to create a versatile institution that spoke to different zoogoers in different ways. The National Zoo taught other zoos to throw open their gates to all
Americans, to all American discourses, to all American curiosities. The National Zoo instructed other zoos to embrace all American “zoo stories,” for through the multifarious stories of the
People, a zoological park could gain its own life and ensure its own longevity.
Together, the stories told within zoological parks constitute the kind of zoology envisioned by William Temple Hornaday when he penned “The Right Way to Teach Zoölogy” in
1910. As shown in Chapter One, after William Temple Hornaday established the Department of
Living Animals, and after he spent two decades leading zoological parks in Washington and New
York City, he became an outspoken advocate for zoological education. He believed that zoologists should teach their students broadly about animals instead of letting the specializing trends experienced in the life sciences corrupt their curricula. For Hornaday, the ideal zoology classroom should function as a zoo. In the zoology classroom, students should learn about as much of the animal kingdom as possible. In the zoology classroom, students should become more engaged with the natural world.
Formal zoological education never became what Hornaday hoped it would. The specializations of the laboratory continued to shape instruction in the life sciences until ecology became a subject for undergraduate study after World War Two.58 The zoological park, though,
58 Bowler, Peter J. and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 226; Worster, Donald, Nature’s Economy, 340-433. For a broader examination on the history of ecology see Peder Anker’s Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Anna Bramwell’s Ecology in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), Stephen Bocking’s Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), Gregg Mitman’s The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900- 1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, 422 far exceeded (even beyond his own recognition) Hornaday’s expectations, becoming the bastion of everything he dreamed should be exemplified in zoological instruction. All of the stories told within and around the National Zoological Park should be seen as lessons in and of a popular zoology that captivated Americans at the end of the nineteenth century.
For most of its history, the term “zoology” simply meant the “study of animals.” In this basic sense, then, zoological thought probably began prior to the first animal domestications, and it certainly commenced by the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution. Thereafter, zoology became a human universal. All societies, from ancient Mesopotamia and dynastic Egypt to Shang China and pre-Socratic Greece, studied animals. The zoo in “zoology” originated in Greece, from zoion, meaning “animal” or “living being”; and “zoo” became joined with the Latin root logia (“study”) in the seventeenth century. Even though Aristotle and his Classical contemporaries, as well as physicians and philosophers in the medieval Islamic world, systematically studied animals, it was not until the seventeenth century, near the end of the Renaissance, that zoologia came to signify the “scientific” examination of animals.59
Throughout the eighteenth century, “zoology” marked one of the two broad fields of study composing the life sciences—the other being botany. The word “zoology” was necessarily a broad term that encompassed all examinations of and discussions about animals. However, despite this meaning of “zoology,” the term more commonly used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when referring to writings about animals was “natural history.” The meaning of “natural history,” though, was even more elastic than “zoology,” referring to the study of not
Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1980), and Joel B. Hagan’s "Organism and Environment: Frederic Clements's Vision of a Unified Physiological Ecology,” In The American Development of Biology, edited by Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Maienschein, 257-80 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 59 For a more thorough examination of the early history of zoology and the life sciences see Lois N. Magner’s A History of the Life Science (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2002) or Ernst Mayer’s The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985). 423 only animals, but plants as well. Therefore, both botanists and zoologists were considered
“naturalists,” and their writings were considered “natural history.”60
The rhetorical landscape of the nineteenth century became even more confusing with the birth of the word “biology,” which emerged around 1800. According to historian Lynn Nyhart,
“biology was coined . . . to mean a general science of living things that would unite the study of botany and zoology over against the study of nonliving nature.”61 After 1860, the usage of
“biology” skyrocketed in American culture. On paper, both “natural history” and “biology” meant the same thing—the scientific examination of plants and animals, of all living things. However, in actuality, “biology” came to connote the scientific study undertaken by academic scientists, often in laboratories, whereas “natural history” came to connote the study of plants and/or animals undertaken by educated amateurs, often in outdoor, natural environments. As the nineteenth century progressed, these significations became more entrenched. “Biology” became academic, elite, and precise— concerned mostly with the physiological processes of organisms. “Natural history,” on the other hand, became “popular,” democratic, and wide-ranging—concerned with the geographical distribution of organisms, their classification, and their (ecological) relations with other plants and animals.62
60 Coleman, William, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), 1-3. 61 Nyhart, Lynn K., Modern Nature, 20-21; Coleman, Biology, 1. According to historian William Coleman, the word “biology” first appeared “in a footnote in an obscure German medical publication of 1800.” Then, two years later, it was used by Gottfried Treviranus, a German naturalist, and the famous French zoologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. By 1820, “[t]he new word had gained some currency in the English language.” However, it was Auguste Comte, and those influenced by him, who truly popularized the term “biology” in the 1830s. 62 Coleman, Biology, 3. For a greater discussion of American “natural history” and “biology” see Philip J. Pauly’s Biologists and the Promise of American Life. For more on the cultures of American natural history that preceded the rise of “biology” see Brooke Hindle’s The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, Thomas P. Slaughter’s The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York: Knopf, 1996), Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchards’s (ed.) Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Charlotte Porter’s The Eagle’s Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812-1842 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986), Christoph 424
“Zoology” was never lost amidst this linguistic fray. Americans used the term throughout the nineteenth century, and it still functioned as an all-encompassing signifier that referred broadly to the scientific study of animals. However, “zoology” never absorbed specific overtones that delimited the term to a particular approach. “Natural historians,” “naturalists,” “biologists,” and the specialized scientists that emerged throughout biology’s fragmentation all employed the term “zoology.” In fact, its usage increased markedly over the course of the century. The Ngram graphs below help demonstrate the nineteenth-century elocution of “natural history,” “biology,” and “zoology.”63
Graph 6: Usage of “natural history,” 1780-1920
Irmscher’s The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), and Andrew J. Lewis’s A Democracy of Facts. 63 http://books.google.com/ngrams. Google Books Ngram Viewer. 425
Graph 7: Usage of “biology,” 1780-1920
Graph 8: Usage of “zoology,” 1780-1920
Throughout the nineteenth century, “zoology” bridged the increasing divide between natural history and biology, uniting all who studied animals. As “natural history” declined between 1800 and 1915, “zoology” took its place. On the other hand, as “biology” fragmented into specializations like morphology, cytology, hematology, ornithology, herpetology, ethology, and systematics, “zoology” reminded specialized scientists that they (unless they studied plants) shared the same object—the animal. “Zoology” resonated with all Americans and operated on all semiotic registers. In the academic school year of 1890 and 1891, just as the Department of
Living Animals was becoming the National Zoological Park, Harvard University opened its
426
Zoölogical Department, the first in the United States. That year, the new Department offered courses entitled Zoölogy, Morphology of Animals, Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates, and
Microscopical Anatomy to undergraduate students. Graduate students, in addition to the last two of these, could take Comparative Osteology, and Anatomy and Development in Animals.64 That same year, the New York Evangelist published “The Children at Home: Lessons in Zoology.”65
The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts published a review of the book Curious
Creatures in Zoology.66 And Puck published “Figurative Zoölogy.”
Little Harold for the first time saw a tame rabbit twitching its lips as it munched a cabbage leaf. “Oh, look, Mama!” he cried; “the rabbit’s winking at me with its nose!” —Kate Field’s Washington67
Throughout the nineteenth century, “zoology” became the lingua franca for all Americans interested in animals.
While the popularization of zoology preceded the emergence of the zoological park in the
United States, zoos fueled this popularization. As demonstrated above, the National Zoological
Park established both public laboratories in which zoogoers could experiment with animals and public lyceums through which they could announce their findings. Some of these experiments looked like those done by biologists in their new research laboratories. Others looked like the observations done by naturalists, taking notes about the curiosities of Nature. Yet other experiments took new forms as zoogoers asked new questions about animals, designed new research methodologies, and translated their findings to fit the numerous narrative modes of “zoo stories.” All of the episodes described in the above dissertation should be seen as episodes in not
64 “Information Concerning the Zoölogical Department, 1890-91,” 4-7, HUC 8598.2, Harvard University Archives. For more on Harvard zoology see Mary P. Winsor’s Reading the Shape of Nature. 65 "The Children at Home," New York Evangelist (October 15, 1891): 6. 66 "Curious Creatures in Zoology," The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts 15, no. 376 (March 14, 1891): 134. 67 Fields, Kate, “Figurative Zoology,” Puck 29, no. 744 (June 10, 1891): 253. 427 only the history of the National Zoological Park, but also as episodes in the history of popular zoology. Everyone that entered the National Zoological Park necessarily and inescapably studied animals. As Frank Baker and the National Zoo became central figures in the American public zoo movement, they not only facilitated the spread of zoological parks throughout the United States, but they also facilitated the spread of popular zoology.
And popular zoology proved contagious to the nation’s zoogoing multitudes.
Unfortunately, no records exist regarding yearly attendance in the National Zoo’s early years.
Nonetheless, it is known that in 1892 an average of around 7,000 visitors entered the park every day.68 Also, as a frame of reference, for the first eight months of its existence, the Philadelphia
Zoo attracted 227,557 visitors. In the next twelve months, 419,776 people attended, to be followed by 657,295 over the following twelve months.69 On a national scale, zoological parks around the United States impacted tens of millions of Americans between the Philadelphia Zoo’s foundation in 1874 and the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.70 Each person that entered a zoological park studied animals, practiced zoology, in some manner, and the millions of the resulting experiments were transformative.
Over the last two decades, historians and sociologists have begun to study the importance of science to the world “outside” of laboratories and scientists. Their works have examined public places where science was practiced and exhibited, public mediums through which scientific knowledge was transmitted to mass audiences, and they have examined the reasons why these
68 Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1892, 5. 69“Attendance Grand Totals,” Box #ZHA1, Item #15, Philadelphia Zoo Archives. These attendance figures are for July 1, 1874 – February 25, 1875; March 1, 1875 – February 28, 1876; and March 1, 1876 – February 28, 1877, respectively. 70 American zoo attendance proves impossible to calculate. However, it is clear that by 1910 zoos had sold at least tens (if not hundreds) of millions of tickets. Hanson, in Animal Attractions, notes, “By 1903, well over a million people toured the New York Zoological Society’s Bronx Park each year, and in 1909 the Bronx Zoo’s attendance was twice that of New York’s more centrally located American Museum of Natural History.” She adds that in 1927, the Toledo Zoo sold 1,216,400 tickets— “four times the city’s population” (3). Zoos reached vast audiences! 428 audiences sometimes became exceedingly interested in certain types of science, like mesmerism and phrenology in the early nineteenth century. Much of this scholarship depicts “popular science” through a model of diffusion. In this model, scientists do true Science. Then, various cultural media like books, lectures, and museums disseminate Science to the public, where it becomes “popular” and less “scientific.” In this model, Science and Culture can be envisioned as inhabiting two separate and unequal spheres. Science bestows its knowledge upon Culture, yet receives nothing in return.71 “Popular science,” then, is studied as an interesting cultural phenomenon, as an amusement of the People, but rarely is it studied as important to the Science from whence it came.72 Never, is “popular science” examined as transformational to society writ large, for transformational ideas are born from above, not from below.73
71 Bowler and Morus, 368. Despite the problems with the diffusionist model, there are many important classics of “popular science” that adhere to the standard narrative of diffusion. See, for example, Roger Cooter’s The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Alan Morton’s Public and Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 72 Not all scholars who study science adhere to the simple diffusionist model outlined above. Particularly, historians and sociologists born in the tradition of the “social construction of science” (an important paradigm of what is now called STS—Science and Technology Studies), have collapsed the diffusionist chasm between Science and Society. Indeed, these scholars have emphasized the point that the production of scientific knowledge is always produced from within society. Some classics of the “social construction of science” include Barry Barnes and Steve Shapins’s (eds.) Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, Bruno Latour’s The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social. The methodologies of the “social construction of science” have produced many new works about how all types of sciences have been created within and by the public and its popular culture. An example of a book of this genre is Andrew Pickering’s Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). The “social construction of science” has done much in collapsing the standard “diffusionist” model central in studies regarding “popular science.” However, oddly, very few scholars in social constructionist circles have examined “popular science” directly. Also, those who have deconstructed the elite science of the ivory tower in order to “reassemble” it in society, have often overstated the embeddedness of Science within Society. While science is always influenced by society, it still frequently removes itself from society. This critique is developed in Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Finally, another trend in the history science locates Science within Society without relying on the “deconstruction” and “reconstruction” methods developed in STS. This second trend looks for practical, less abstract, ways of contextualizing science within larger society. Robert Kohler through his All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of 429
Several historians have recently tried to remedy this situation by taking “popular science” seriously. James Secord, Bernard Lightman, and Aaron Sachs, for example, have argued that the function of “popular science” in the nineteenth century was to combat the overspecialization of professional science, as well as its accompanying detachment from religious and metaphysical concerns. Throughout the nineteenth century, “scientists” could still write for broad audiences by appealing to widespread values—although this became increasingly difficult as the century progressed.74 In addition, other historians have studied “popular science” as not only the popularization of professional, “elite” science, but as science that originated within the public sphere. The women of Boston worked as “scientists” in natural history.75 The laborers of
Lancashire worked as “scientists” in botany, as did African slaves and indigenous American men and women.76 Amateur birders worked as “scientists” in ornithology.77 This dissertation belongs
Chicago Press, 1994) has shown that science is always connected to society in very tangible ways. However, works that search for these practical connections to larger society still rarely examine “popular science,” the science that captivates the public. Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), on the other hand, represents a balanced hybrid between STS methods and those of Kohler to show how science addresses practical concerns in everyday society. 73 While social and cultural historians frequently do not subscribe to this, historians of science and intellectual historians are only now beginning to take society seriously. Transformational ideas are not only created by scientists, philosophers, and theologians, but they can also arise from the public sphere. 74 Nyhart, 15. See James A. Secord’s Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Bernard Lightman’s Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Aaron Sachs’s The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth- Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006). 75 Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, “The Nineteenth-Century Amateur Tradition: The Case of the Boston Society of Natural History,” In Science and Its Public: The Changing Relationship, edited by G. Holton and W. Blanpied, 173-90 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976). This article is a classic history of “popular science,” possibly the first attempt at looking at the role of laypeople in the formation of scientific concerns. Also see Kohlstedt’s Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 76 Secord, Anne, “Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth-Century Natural History,” British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 383-408; Secord, Anne, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire,” History of Science 32 (1994): 269-315; Schiebinger, Londa, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 77 Barrow, Mark V., A Passion for Birds. 430 to this movement towards “popular science” by examining both the popularization of professional life sciences for the public and the role of that public in shaping those sciences.
This dissertation departs from this movement in one important way. Historians of science now acknowledge that a society’s “public sphere,” “popular culture,” and proletariat all take part, with professional scientists, in shaping Science. The laboratory and the world outside have always shared a symbiotic relationship. The laboratory, in the typical diffusionist way, shaped the world, popularizing sciences and challenging commonplace assumptions. In turn, as historians and sociologists of science have now established, the world “outside” also shaped the laboratory.
Indeed, the laboratory is in the world. No external world exists beyond its beakers. However, despite this knowledge, historians and sociologists of science still depend upon laboratory-world rhetoric, even while simultaneously challenging the assumptions of which this dichotomous rhetoric is a symptom. The undertone of theses in the history of science is still frequently one of surprise. Surprise! Leviathan shaped the air pump.78Surprise! Ministers shaped understandings of electricity in the early American republic!79 Surprise! “Swashbuckling” collectors shaped paleontology!80 Surprise! Female citizen observers shaped seismology!81 The juxtaposition between (what appears to be) “scientific” and “unscientific,” between the “laboratory” and the
“world,” infuses these narratives with intrigue, and narratives like these help us more fully understand the historical development of different sciences by looking at how these sciences reached over and beyond their walls. Yet by beginning and ending with overly-structured definitions of “science,” these histories are incapable of envisioning the full embeddedness of
78 Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 79 Delbourgo, James, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 80 Brinkman, Paul D., The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in American at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 81 Coen, Deborah R., The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). 431 science within society and of society within science. If science and society are intimately fused, then some of the byproducts of this amalgamation should not look like the standard elements of
Science. Some should look like elements of Culture. Others should look like something new.
Histories of popular science should not just lead back to “science.” They should also lead to “the popular.” And they should lead to everywhere in-between.
Rather than seeking to tell the story of the history of a Science, this dissertation instead sought to tell the history of an institution. In opening up the National Zoological Park, though, a surprising history of science emerged. This history, though, took a place and its constituents, not a Science, as its starting point. In so doing, the popular zoology that emerged from the ballast of the National Zoological Park appeared less familiar than the “sciences” discussed by other historians. However, this zoology appears as it would have to nineteenth-century zoogoers—as a wide-ranging “science,” a hybrid of biology, natural history, and popular culture, devoted to the study of animals. “Zoology” meant different things to different people and therefore manifested itself in different ways. Everyone who visited the National Zoological Park necessarily thought about and experimented with animals. All of the “zoo stories” in the above dissertation stand as a testament to these experiments. Together, these diverse experiments constituted popular zoology at the turn of the century.
Zoo guidebooks were tangible symbols of the zoology popularized by zoological parks.
Zoogoers acquired zoological knowledge by studying animals in action, but they also received information through the guidebooks they purchased upon entrance. These guidebooks, small pamphlet-like books meant to provide information about zoo animals, were as old as American zoos themselves. The author of a Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article about the newly established Philadelphia Zoo maintained in 1879 that
A good zoological garden is not only a very important succursal to all the schools in the vicinity, but it is a grand medium of education to all the people, even to the 432
mere gazers. People go to see—merely to see—and in the course of every visit some question is certain to arise, discussion to ensue, followed by a consultation of the guidebook. And that of the Philadelphia society, it may be said in passing, is a model in all respects. It is superior even to the fine guide-book of the London society, because it contains—expressed in a polite and scholarly manner—a very valuable “introduction” addressed to the “large class of visitors who desire to find in a zoological collection means of instruction as well as amusement.” An admirable synopsis of the whole subject of zoological classification is contained in this introduction.82
The Philadelphia Zoo, established in 1874 as the first zoo in the United States, fashioned a new type of outdoor lyceum and laboratory, where an informal textbook alongside personal experiences allowed zoogoers to study animals and take part in zoology.
The majority of zoogoers did not read the works of famous biologists and naturalists.
Most strolled along their zoo’s pathways without knowledge of the likes of Louis Agassiz,
William Broderip, or Georges Cuvier. However, as these Americans stood before enclosures, with guidebooks in hand, they took part in zoology. The first guidebook of the Philadelphia Zoo set the precedent for the guidebooks of the National Zoological Park, which, by the hands of
Frank Baker, were disseminated throughout the zoo-networked nation. The Illustrated Guide and
Hand-Book of the Zoological Garden of Philadelphia (1875) was democratically given to all who entered the park. No longer was knowledge about animals accessible only to those of a particular class, age, gender, and educational background.
On the page devoted to prairie dogs, subtitled by its Linnaean classification, Cynomys ludovicianus, the Philadelphia zoogoer read that prairie dogs were
found in great abundance on the plains west of the Missouri river. The little animal is confined strictly to the prairies, where its burrows are so numerous and deep that riding through “dog-town” is a matter of danger to horse and rider! The Western Indians called it the “Wish-ton-wish;” but travelers gave it the name of “Prairie Dog,” on account of the sharp tone of its chatter, which sometimes resembles the yelp of a dog. / If the past winter has not been too severe, there should be some forty or fifty of these cunning rodents now residing in the Society’s “dog-town.” / When they were first introduced to the Garden, their
82 Howland, Marie, "The Philadelphia Zoo," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 58 (1879): 710. 433
enclosure was walled to a distance of some ten or twelve feet deep; but such burrowers are the “Dogs,” that they have undermined their wall, and a new, deeper, and larger enclosure has been prepared. / The Zoological Garden is the only institution in the world which embraces a “Prairie Dog Village.”
The brief passage surely fell short of the literary standards of both formal natural history and professional science. However, many of the details in the Hand-Book echoed facts noted by naturalists for decades: the prairie dog’s Indian name, the dangers that prairie dog tunnels posed to those on horseback, and a description of the piercing “yelp” of the prairie dog.83
Passages throughout early zoo guidebooks often began by weaving together the seemingly disparate information that surrounded the metonymy of any nineteenth-century animal.
Then, these accounts would often provide data about the history of the animal within the zoo itself, as the above prairie dog passage demonstrates. Many accounts concluded in the manner that they began, with commonplace assumptions of the animal in question—resulting in the framing of “new” knowledge with “old” knowledge. While this general organization served as a template for the accounts in the Philadelphia zoo guide, it did not systematically apply to each and every animal entry. Some accounts inverted the above organization, framing “old” knowledge with new zoo-related knowledge. Other accounts presented no organization at all and appeared as a random assemblage (sometimes only a collection of a few sentences) of “facts.”
The Hand-Book, though, consistently joined multiple discourses into a single, new and popular, zoological discourse, one that depicted animals both inside and outside zoos, while collapsing the inside and outside within a single account.
The Tasmanian Devil (Diabolus ursinus) entry began by relaying the “innate ferocity of this beast” experienced by Tasmanian colonists and then described how the animal consistently attacked the zookeepers that fed it. The entry ended with precise description of the animal’s
83 Ewin E. Hulfish, Illustrated Guide and Hand-Book of the Zoological Garden of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane, and Scott, Publishers and Printers, 1875), 62, Philadelphia Zoo Archives. I added the backslash in the block quotation to show where new paragraphs began. 434 nocturnality. The Java Porcupine (Hystrix javanica) entry dispelled the common myth that this animal would use a “supposed power . . . to launch its quills at its enemies.” The Porcupine was
“not at all aggressive” unless provoked, in which case it could use its tail to kill a panther or leopard. The entry concluded with information about how the Porcupine was geographically distributed around the globe. The brief entry about the Capuchin (Cebus capucinus) began by describing the monkey as “cunning.” It located it geographically, explained why zoogoers enjoyed watching it, and concluded by detailing the anatomical function of its tail. Clearly, truncated accounts of animals provided by the Hand-Book of the Philadelphia Zoo did not adhere to the style of either natural history or biology, yet the guidebook’s style brought together myths, truisms, and “facts” that made zoology accessible, relevant, and popular.84 The Hand-Book of the
Zoological Garden of Philadelphia was the first zoo guide in American history, yet as the zoo movement raced through American cities, zoo guidebooks followed, becoming an important educational tool, together reaching (at least) hundreds of thousands of zoogoers each year.
The 1894 Guide to the National Zoological Park looked quite similar to Philadelphia’s guidebook. Costing ten cents, the guide provided Washington zoogoers with maps of the park, suggested routes through the grounds, and, most significantly, “[a] brief description of the animals.” These descriptions proved briefer than those in Philadelphia’s 1875 guide, but its content was similar, presenting a heterogeneous collection of information drawn from various discourses surrounding the animal in question. When zoogoers reached the Prairie Dog Town in the National Zoo, they read the following:
The Prairie Dog, or Marmot (Cynomys ludovicianus), named on account of the frequent utterances of a sound like the barking of a young puppy. Prairie Dogs are found in large numbers on some of our western prairies. They are gregarious in their habits, burrowing in the ground and throwing up mounds of dirt. The
84 Hulfish, Guide, 23-25, 30. 435
stone wall forming the enclosure is extended by a wire netting about eight feet under ground to keep the little fellows from digging their way out of their city.85
Like the account of prairie dogs found in the Philadelphia guide, this passage informed zoogoers about prairie dog traits long noted by naturalists. Also, like its predecessor, the National Zoo’s guide educated its readers about prairie dogs both inside and outside the zoo.
Guide-toting visitors meandered along the Rock Creek and gazed upon animals they had never seen before, yet, in the process of zoogoing, these creatures slowly became more familiar and less exotic. Washington zoogoers learned that the Sooty Paca (Coelogenys paca) was one of the world’s largest rodents and also lived in underground burrows.86 They learned that the
Cacomistle (Bassaris astuta), known as the American Civet Cat, lived in both Mexico and the southwestern United States, that it resembled a raccoon, and that it could be easily domesticated as a pet.87 They learned that the Gila Monster (Heloderma suspectum), native to Arizona, was the only known poisonous lizard on earth.88 And they learned that the Kangaroo (Macropus) only lived in Australia and its neighboring islands and that there were many species of kangaroo, ranging “from the size of a rabbit to that of a man.” Like the bison of North America, kangaroo were disappearing from Australia due to the popularity of their skin for clothing and “kangaroo tail soup” for fine dining.89
By providing basic descriptive data, the Guide to the National Zoological Park gave zoogoers context for the animals before them. Zoo guidebooks stood as symbols of popular zoology. Through their heterogeneous and truncated accounts, guidebooks, like zoological parks themselves, presented hybridized information drawn from biology, natural history, and popular
85 Orme, George W., Guide to the National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C. (1894): 8, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 36, Folder 7. 86 Orme, 10. 87 Ibid., 11. 88 Ibid., 12. 89 Ibid., 13. 436 culture. They educated zoogoers about zoo animals, but the information presented was far from definitive. Zoo guidebooks were not meant to give exhaustive accounts of animals; they simply sought to acquaint zoogoers with animals and to spark curiosity about them. And guidebooks encouraged zoogoers to quench this curiosity by studying animals, thus engaging in zoology— making observations, raising questions, and forming hypotheses. Zoogoers should examine enclosures and their occupants with inquisitive eyes, paying close attention to ecological detail, phenotypical characteristics, and species-typical behavior— important categories of zoological thought.90
As the years passed, zoo guidebooks became more elaborate in order to satisfy zoogoers who became increasingly familiar with and conversant about the animals inhabiting their zoo. As
District citizens grew accustomed to zoogoing, they required more information to satisfy their zoological appetite, for exotic animals grew less exotic as their countenances grew recognizable.
The 1902 Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (dedicated to William T.
Hornaday) demonstrates the degree to which zoogoers’ zoological palate had become more complex over the course of the National Zoo’s first decade. In addition to vivid photographs, this guidebook presented longer descriptions than the 1894 guide. While gazing upon the moose enclosure, zoogoers read the following:
The next range is tenanted by a young bull moose from Manitoba, Canada. This animal is the largest member of the deer family, and is remarkable for its immense wide-spreading palmated antlers, which are shed annually, and for its long legs, and the unusual development of its nose. Nature gave him his great stride in order to enable him to wade swamps in search for succulent stems and lily pads, and his half-prehensile nose is to assist it in gathering the twigs and branches of birch, maple and other trees, which form the greater portion of its food. It is very difficult to keep a moose in captivity, as they very seldom survive
90 Haraway, Maury M., and Ernest G. Maples, Jr., "Species-Typical Behavior," In Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, edited by Garry Greenberg and Maury M. Haraway (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998): 191-97. 437
beyond three years. This is probably owing to the impossibility of providing them with their proper food.91
Like the 1875 guide to the Philadelphia Zoo and the 1894 guide to the National Zoo, the 1902 guide provided information about animals both inside and outside zoos. However, the accounts of the 1902 guidebook generally proved less colloquial and more thorough. They also read in the more coherent, and less multifarious, manner that characterized the emerging discourse of popular zoology.
In 1902, as National Zoo visitors viewed moose, a species that had been rapidly disappearing from the United States over the course of the preceding century, they also had the privilege of observing a living zebra wolf on the eve of its extinction.92 Zoogoers, with the
Illustrated Guide in hand, learned about this bizarre-looking carnivorous marsupial by reading the passage below:
This is the rarest animal at the Zoo, and is found only in the island of Tasmania. Although it resembles the wolf in appearance and habits, it does not belong to that family, but is a true marsupial, and carries its young in its pouch like the kangaroo. This peculiarity can be observed in the specimens at the Zoo, which consists of a female with young. They are the only ones ever exhibited in this country. Owing to its destructiveness to sheep, which it attacks at night, this animal has been almost entirely exterminated, and will soon be as extinct as the dodo.93
Those who strolled through the National Zoological Park were among the last few in world history to read descriptions of this animal while simultaneously studying it in life. The zebra wolf became extinct around 1930, when the last known wild individual was shot in Tasmania.94
91 Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902): 8 SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10. 92 In 1902, the National Zoological Park received two zebra wolves from F. W. Goding, the United States Consul at New Castle, Australia. One of these lived for seven years. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 2, 1902, 6-7. 93 Evans, 20. 94 The zebra wolf was also known by the names “Tasmanian tiger,” “Tasmanian wolf,” or by the Linnaean Thylacinus cynocephalus for “dog-headed pouched one.” A controversy still surrounds the extinction of this animal. Some Tasmans claim that a few zebra wolves still exists, but all its sightings are unsurprisingly unconfirmed. For more on the fascinating story of the zebra wolf see David Owen’s Tasmanian Tiger: The 438
Zoo guidebooks were products and are symbols of popular zoology at the turn of the century. Just as guidebooks provided zoogoers with context for exotic zoo animals, the zoo movement itself, by introducing millions of zoogoers to hundreds of species, set the stage for the emergence of zoology in American history. In 1910, Ina Capitola Emery, a Washington citizen and zoogoer, asked Frank Baker whether she could produce, on behalf of the National Zoo, a new guidebook “with illustrations and such facts as will aid the visitors to the park to a greater knowledge of what the park stands for.”95 Even though Baker informed Emery that the Secretary preferred to assign the task of updating the zoo guide to an employee of the Smithsonian
Institution, the very fact that a District zoogoer believed that the zoo needed a new guide in order to live up to its purpose demonstrates the degree to which the zoo functioned as a “zoological” site by and for the People.96 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans, from scientists to schoolchildren to laypeople, craved information about animals. Popular zoology was in high demand.
The National Zoological Park sparked the curiosities of the People by ushering them into a wider world teeming with animals, ambassadors from the unknown. Although runaway animals frequently found their way beyond confines, the walls of zoo enclosures generally remained
Tragic Tale of How the World Lost Its Most Mysterious Predator (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) or Robert Paddle’s The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A history of animals displayed in early zoological parks that later became extinct has yet to be written, but it would be an important and interesting contribution to the history of conservation. To what extent did early zoos protect animals on the brink of extinction? To what extend did early zoos actually facilitate the extinction of certain species? Questions like these should be embraced by a historian of conservation. Along with Tasmanian tigers, the National Zoological Park also, in 1897, kept West Indian seals (also called monk seals), which would soon become extinct. In fact, when a Pensacola fishery firm offered the National Zoo these seals, which frequented the shores around the Yucatan, zoo officials were shocked, for it was believed that these creatures had long perished. Unfortunately, the West Indian seals died quickly within the National Zoo because they would not eat mid-Atlantic fish. Hamlet, Sybil E., unpublished manuscript concerning the history of the NZP, undated, SIA, Record Unit 365, Box 37, Folder 1, 1897, 3-4. 95 Ina Capitola Emery to Dr. Baker, 12 October 1910, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10. During the previous year, Emery produced a guide to the Washington Monument, so it is indeed possible that her interest in the National Zoo was based around personal gain as much as it was based around genuine interest in the zoo and its animals. 96 Baker to Miss Ina Capitola Emery, 12 June 1911, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10. 439 sturdy. Although occasionally an aquarium might sink into the ground, usually walls remained intact and buildings lasted for decades. Zoological parks and their environments were built. They were entrenched in many ways. For animal activists, this permanentness made the fate of zoo animals appear dire, for in their eyes, zoo animals were truly captive beings trapped in inadequate environments. In actuality, zoo structures were more adaptable than they appeared. Cages never turned into jungles, and pastures never became savannahs. Nonetheless, enclosures proved malleable over time. Humans and animals constantly made alterations. Collectively, though, in the context of human experiences within zoological parks, seemingly entrenched enclosures created highly malleable institutions.
Zoological parks and their inhabitants fostered unique experiences for individual zoogoers. The individuals who strolled through this dissertation saw different things in the animals of the National Zoo. They found different animals intriguing, different behaviors surprising, and different happenings engaging. Each animal held unique potentials for unique zoogoers. One might wonder about the ecological function of antelope flatulence or awe over the soaring behaviors of buzzards. Another might fear the fangs of a runaway wolf or find amusement in the palate of a monkey begging for the sweets purchased at a nearby concession stand or for the grasses pulled alongside a nearby walkway. Versatility defined both the zoological park and popular zoology. Americans could mold both to fit their purposes. Yet human experiments on living animals usually produced surprising results. Living animals, and their multiple ontologies, rarely lived up to the preconceived expectations of zoogoers. Zoological parks and popular zoology enabled all Americans to study animals for themselves and learn that life itself was unpredictable, mysterious, surprising, and unknown—maybe even tenuous.
This history of the National Zoological Park is also a history of popular zoology because all who chose to enter the zoo, knowingly or not, also chose to study animals. By toting
440 guidebooks, reading placards, listening to keepers, engaging in light-hearted conversation, and especially by observing and engaging animals for themselves, zoogoers were baptized in and by popular zoology. These zoogoers then carried zoology into the public sphere, where it impacted professional science, popular culture, and everything in-between. Exotic animals were now near at hand, and everyday Americans, these acolytes of “civic zoology,” inherited a working vocabulary about animals and their lives.97 This lexicon in popular zoology was not simply forged within the physical space of zoological parks. Zoos’ symbiotic relationships with newspapers and magazines amplified the lessons learned behind zoo gates. Some of these lessons were, on the surface, more “scientific” than others, but in all zoo animals were central characters.
One day, Washington citizens might read a two-column article in The Washington Post that reported on four topics— children zoogoers’ knowledge (expressed with remarkable pronunciation) about Himalayan bears and zebu, a zookeeper’s methods in weighing a Kadiak bear, a keeper’s photograph collection of wild buffalo, and a lengthy description of the Cariama, a
Brazilian bird that belonged to a genus (Microdactylidae) that only encompassed one species.98
The next day, the same citizens might read a Post article about the “peculiarities” of the South
American sloth, including a newly discovered variety that lived in Columbia and the Isthmus of
Panama.99 Or, they might read an article in The Washington Times filled with “little stories, odd and amusing,” about zoo animals, like a tale of a whooping crane “ready to dance with his
97 Lynn K. Nyhart coins this term “civic zoology” as it relates to Germany in her article “Civic and Economic Zoology in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The ‘Living Communities’ of Karl Mobius,” Isis 89, No. 4 (December, 1998): 605-630. 98 “At the National Zoo” (The Washington Post, September 6, 1903), “Scrapbooks 1896-1907” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 99 “South American Sloth” (The Washington Post, October 19, 1902), “Scrapbooks 1896-1907” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 441 keepers.”100 The National Zoological Park placed previously obscure species at the center of popular conversation, and in so doing transformed Americans into popular zoologists.
Sometimes, the National Zoo even transformed the careers of Americans as it trained them to think zoologically. As the public zoo movement raced through the United States, a new career was inevitably born—the zookeeper. Surely, this position shared commonalities with the hypermasculine figures of the “lion tamer,” “elephant man,” or “superintendent of animals,” all central to the American circus and traveling menagerie that entertained Americans throughout the nineteenth century.101 Indeed, the National Zoo’s Head Keeper himself, William H. Blackburne, learned to deal with animals in the world of the ring, where he braved “the most thrilling and dangerous feats” associated with a “wild beast show.”102 The zookeeper, though, was a new type of career that evolved to meet the needs of a new type of institution. Although a zookeeper surely, at times, needed to exemplify courage, the most important trait about a zookeeper was knowledge. In order to care for the zoo’s thousands of inhabitants, a zookeeper needed to have spent years studying animals.
All sorts of people sent Frank Baker letters of application requesting a zookeeper position within the National Zoological Park. Charles Brinkmann of Manassas believed that he was perfectly qualified because he not only worked as a gamekeeper and forester, but he also spent three years in Africa killing “plenty of game, big and small.”103 William Brown of the District believed that he was qualified because he received “considerable experience in the handling of
100 “Little Stories, Odd and Amusing, of the Animals at the Zoo” (The Washington Times, May 22, 1901), “Scrapbooks 1896-1907” SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 286, Folder 3. 101 Nance, Susan, Entertaining Elephants, 120. 102 Moffett, Cleveland, “Wild Beasts and Their Keepers: How the Animals in a Menagerie are Tamed, Trained, and Cared for,” 545, “Scrapbook 1887-1902, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 285. 103 Chas. Brinkmann to Director of the Zoological Garden, 9 February 1898, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 5. 442 animals” while growing up in Western Kansas.104 David Davis of the District believed that he was qualified because he had “extensive experience in the care of domestic animals on my fathers
[sic.] farm in Virginia and also on the ranches of Robt. Taylor and ‘Two Bar Cattle Co’. of
Wyoming.”105 John E. Worsley of Asheville believed that he was qualified because he not only owned a wolf, bear, sheep, eagle, parrot, and St. Bernard, but he also had tried to open a public zoo of his own in North Carolina.106 Sylvester Judd of New Jersey believed he was qualified because he held a college degree in natural history and worked as an assistant in the Department of Agriculture.107 And William Tower of Westdale, Massachusetts, believed that he was qualified for a keeper position related to the managing of the aquarium due to three years of study in the nation’s first zoological program at Harvard University. As references, Tower presented N. S.
Shaler, E. L. Mark, C. B. Davenport, and G. H. Parker, all the leading life scientists at Harvard and among the leading zoologists in the world.108 Competing for this aquaria keeper position was
N. B. Schofield, a Masters student under C. H. Gilbert of the Zoological Laboratory at Stanford
104 Wm. P. Brown to Dr. Frank Baker, Undated but probably in February 1899, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 5. 105 David M. Davis to Dr. Henry [sic.] Baker, 7 April 1897, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 7. 106 John B. Worsley to Mr. Frank Baker, 8 June 1895, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 15. John Worsley applied for a zookeeper position in the National Zoo. However, it seems quite unlikely that he had, in fact, tried to open a zoo of his own. His letter is worth reading. It not only demonstrates the wide range of personalities who applied to be a zookeeper, but it also underscores the way in which the “zoo movement” reached Americans in all places and of all backgrounds. In one long paragraph, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, Worsley wrote: “I wrote to you some time ago in reference to a combination I had of animal wolf bear and a sheep that would stay in the cage with each of them also a St. Bernard Dog would stay with wolf and sheep and a large eagle and a McKar bird that taulk. And in your answer you say the Park has no funs to buy with. So I wish to make this statement. I am a poor man have a home and had started a Zo here but had a set of Aldermen that never sow any thing of the kind and they broke me up. I had a good assortment in small native animals and birds. Sold some and lost a good many. Love to manage a thing of that kind and be with them so I wish to say this much if you could give me a posisian I will come and bring my stuff and donat them to the government. I assur you I can fill a good place to Superintend or on this ground or at the Disk in the office have had considerable experience in office life have been a acting Justice of the Peace for 15 years and as to integrity and moral character can give as reference such men as Ex. Senator T. J. Jarvis. Col. Harvy Skinner a member of Congress now from 1st. district my native county Pitt or either of the names ar the head of this paper. Would like to come to Washington. So you can help me and I would be glad to get a situation and make my name with you.” 107 Cleveland Abbe to Dr. Baker, 4 June 1896, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 10. 108 Wm. L. Tower to Dr. Frank Baker, 2 September 1896, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 15. 443
University, and L. M. McCormick, curator of the Glen Island Museum of Natural History and former manager of the public aquarium in New York City.109 These were just a few of the diverse individuals that asked Frank Baker to consider them for zookeeper positions. Americans looked upon the National Zoological Park as their zoo, and people from all types of animal-centered backgrounds, whether Harvard zoology graduate or Virginian farmer, thought that they might have a chance to become a zookeeper.
The zookeeper, like the zoo guidebook, also serves as an appropriate symbol of turn-of- the-century popular zoology. Zookeepers were both new and held in high esteem. The zookeeper mediated the worlds of animals, zoo managers, and zoogoers, just as guidebooks amalgamated the discourses of those worlds. Zookeepers addressed everyday concerns, but could converse with scientists, veterinarians, breeders, collectors, and medical doctors. Zookeepers knew more than anyone that individual animals transcended, even resisted, their categorization as members of species, or even their categorization as “animal.” Zookeepers knew more than any scientist or any zoogoer that a lion or an elephant or a cockatoo could not be dealt with as a representative of a larger category. Individual animals possessed individual needs and individual personalities, a message often communicated through guidebooks, even by the simple naming of zoo animals.
Zookeepers complemented the zoogoers’ encounters with animals, giving meaning to exotic behaviors. Zookeepers and zoo guides performed similar roles in support of the zoological park, and both gained their importance by being products of popular zoology. Just as popular zoology created insatiable demand for the zoological park, giving it life in the mentalité of Americans, zookeepers literally kept the institution alive. Scientists, farmers, ranchers, hunters, and collectors wanted to become zookeepers in the National Zoo, but, tellingly, the individuals often most prepared for the job received their training within the zoological park.
109 C. H. Gilbert to Dr. Frank Baker, 15 March 1897, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 13; L. M. McCormick to Dr. Frank Baker, 23 April 1897, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 41, Folder 12. 444
Harry Dean was hired by the National Zoological Park in 1899 as a part time laborer. He was paid $1.50 per day. By 1915, he was promoted to zookeeper, making $840 per year. By
1928, he was earning a salary of $1,680.110 Charles Lewis, hired as a laborer in 1890, just as the zoo’s foundation was being dug along the Rock Creek, had a similar work history.111 Albert
Barnes, hired as a laborer in 1898, Rodney Rose, hired as a laborer in 1900, and John Turner, hired as a water boy in 1890, all rose through the ranks to become national zookeepers.112 And the keeper chosen to manage the aquarium was not trained in a top graduate program in zoology, nor was he a museum curator or former manager of the largest public aquarium in the United States.
Instead, the humble D. C. Turner, local fisherman and collector, took charge of the zoo’s aquarium. In the National Zoological Park, laborers learned about animals through hands-on experience. By working with and around animals, everyday Americans gained zoological knowledge and expertise that could not be received by any other means. The National Zoological
Park was not simply a zoo. It was a laboratory and lyceum for the American people, a place where zoogoers could experiment with animals, a place where they could announce their findings to their fellow citizens. The National Zoological Park operated as a crucible for a popular zoology that placed the world’s animals at the center of everyday conversations. The animals themselves surely felt the impact of their discursive relocation, as they were utilized by Americans in novel ways. Animals, though, never remained silent. Americans heard their unique voices—their squawks, roars, and whistles. This new, multispecies dialogue transcended the zoo from whence it came and reverberated through the heavens as it forged fissures in long held assumptions.
110 Retirement card for Harry C. Dean, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 150, Folder 9. 111 Retirement card for Charles W. Lewis, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 150, Folder 9. 112 Retirement card for Albert C. Barnes, Rodney Rose, and John J. Turner, SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 150, Folder 9. 445
The Zoo and the World
Through his recently published The Nature of the Beasts, environmental historian Ian
Jared Miller has presented a study of Tokyo’s Ueno Park Imperial Zoological Garden, the first modern zoo in Japan, founded in 1882. Like this dissertation, Miller’s work “opens up” the Ueno
Zoo in order to examine larger societal forces associated with “modernity.” Miller’s “principal argument holds that when the Ueno Zoo made caged animals into representatives of pristine
‘nature’ it instituted a separation between people and the natural world, introducing a break between humanity and animality that recast Japanese—together with Westerners—as the rational masters of a new natural history based on Linnaean nomenclature and the tenets of evolutionary theory.”113 He assigns the label of “ecological modernity” to this “doubled process of intellectual separation and social transformation.”114 For Miller, the Ueno Zoo, as a symbol of “ecological modernity,” sought “to alter how people saw themselves by changing how people saw the animal world.” The “nature of the beasts” at the zoo, Miller argues was “to substitute a single ‘modern’ or ‘civilized’ vision of animals and nature for diverse early-modern cosmologies, and to give that new vision convincing form in the nation’s largest and most diverse collection of exotic animals.”115
Similarly, the “beasts” of the National Zoological Park also changed how people saw both themselves and the animal world. As Chapter Two demonstrated, the inhabitants of the
National Zoo, like those of the Ueno Zoo, also advanced “ecological modernity.” As William
Temple Hornaday established the Department of Living Animals, and as Congress deliberated over the utility of a national zoo, animals were employed, collectively, as symbols of “modernity” and “civilization.” The animals of the National Zoological Park frequently embodied Americans’
113 Miller, Ian Jared, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 2-3. 114 Ibid., 3. 115 Miller, 4. 446 removal from Nature.116 Storing exotic animals in the American capital signified the nation’s ability to not only conquer the natural world, bringing its animals to the doorsteps of common
Americans, but also to protect that world. Indeed, Hornaday’s original purpose within the halls of the United States National Museum was to educate about, and hopefully reverse, the rapid disappearance of North American species like the American bison. Hornaday infused the
Department of Living Animals and the National Zoological Park with the same purpose.
Therefore, the National Zoo, like the Ueno Zoo, also stood at the center of “ecological modernity,” as the nation’s watchtower over Nature.
“Ecological modernity,” though, as Miller admits was only “one mode of living with and thinking about nature” represented through and by zoological parks.117 As symbols of “ecological modernity,” zoological parks tell a haunting story about humanity’s shameless desire to order things and exert destructive power through the creation of taxonomies.118 The lesson of
“ecological modernity” is an important one:
Humanity itself has somehow been lost in the triumph of mankind. The stunning objective of modernity, that of liberating humanity from its subjection to a natural order, has incarcerated human beings in a disorienting hall of mirrors, where nearly everything in our field of vision looks like a reflection of ourselves. Very large natural phenomena (earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons) still defeat the controls that humankind has asserted, as do the very small (retroviruses, prions). But creatures on the scale of zoo animals, earlier bespeaking immediate physical
116 Nature, as such, and as has been long established by environmental historians, has never been anything beyond a mere fantasy-object. Nonetheless, the idea of “nature,” a discrete entity removed from humanity has been and continues to be a powerful and influential idea. Countless works establish this point. See for example, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis; or Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). For a work in philosophy and eco-criticism that makes the same point about the chimerical nature of Nature see Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature. 117 Miller, 12. He also qualifies in the Introduction’s Endnote #8, “Ecological modernity was one culture among others in a contested ideological and institutional field. It was, as I show, a culture of considerable influence and scope, but I make no assertion of universality despite the claims of many of my actors along these lines” (242). 118 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 447
danger or the living mystery of the natural world, have now become emblems of a precarious and destructive human sovereignty.119
In many ways, zoological parks (the National Zoo included) did stand as emblems of “ecological modernity.” Just as historian Harriet Ritvo describes zoo animals as symbolizing elite control over the lower orders, reflecting Britain’s control over its empire, Miller emphasizes an additional valence of bourgeois signification surrounding zoo inhabitants—one that emphasizes meanings of ecological imperialism.120 In this way, zoo animals symbolized state power over the underclasses, the subaltern, and the environment. These viewpoints, though, focus on the master narratives projected onto zoo animals, narratives constructed in and for society writ large. Rarely were these narratives written within the zoo itself. Zoological parks stood as symbols of “ecological modernity,” but they stood for far more than that.
This dissertation depicted the history of the National Zoological Park through multiple vantage points. Together, the animals of the National Zoo (like the animals of zoological parks in
Japan, England, or Germany) acted as symbols of and for the nation. This was especially clear when the National Zoological Park was discussed as a national institution, funded by the people, for the people. However, the zoogoers strolling along walkways, the keepers feeding animals, the collectors shipping specimens, the citizens fearing runaways, and the scientists conducting research, rarely saw the animals of the National Zoological Park as mere signs of nationalism. In reality, zoo animals meant different things to different people. Everyone who entered the National
Zoological Park experimented with animals, and each experiment was unique – privileging different species, asking different questions, and formulating different conclusions.
As symbols of “ecological modernity,” the “mastered” species of the National Zoological
Park should have no longer been seen as dangerous or mysterious. According to the imperialistic
119 Miller, 238. 120 Ritvo, The Animal Estate; Crosby, Alfred W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, New Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 448 and civilizing rhetoric of the Gilded Age, these retentions of the early-modern period should have died with the rise of the modern. Yet, the animals of the National Zoo were frequently dangerous and remarkably mysterious. They often escaped from their enclosures and ran away from zoo officials. The zoological park was a place filled with surprises. Bruno Latour has famously exclaimed that “we have never been modern,” and the animals of the supposedly “modern zoo” give evidence to this proposition.121 In the realm of semiotics, zoo animals imagined always exceeded the expectations inscribed upon them. In the realm of the everyday, zoo animals also pushed up against the boundaries, spilling over into all corners of American culture. Zoo animals crept into Congress, climbed into headlines, slithered into the life sciences, dove into ecology, swung into ethics, and snuck into medicine. And they did not stop until they found their way into virtually all the extra-zoo endeavors to which American zoogers were devoted. As zoological parks opened across the United States, Americans became acquainted with thousands of animals from around the world. Earlier in the nineteenth century, most Americans encountered the same animals on a regular basis—the domesticated animals that worked on their farms and in their cities, wild animals that meandered along the boundaries of their homes, and the pets that slept at their bed ends. By the end of the century, though, these same Americans could frequent a local zoo and, in a single afternoon, exchange glances with hundreds of creatures from the farthest reaches of the world. In a few short decades, the zoological park had shrunk the world yet expanded the animal kingdom.
Historians’ obsession with standard categories of analysis—nation, empire, modernity, industrialization, race, and the exotic— has placed the zoological park into interpretive straightjackets, overemphasizing singular meanings bestowed upon the institution, not the multitudinous meanings born within it. The animals of the National Zoological Park were surely
121 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, Translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 449 symbols of “ecological modernity,” representing “destructive human sovereignty” over global environments. Most of these animals were, after all, stolen from faraway ecosystems and held prisoner in Washington, D.C. However, zoo animals lived multiple lives and possessed multiple ontologies. If these captive animals, collectively, marked the rise of a dark “modernity” in global environmental history, these same zoo animals, when viewed through their multiple ontologies, signified the beginnings of an intellectual transformation in humanistic thought that would eventually counteract modern forces.
Zoo animals, then, should be read as embodied texts symbolizing the “modernity” that their literal bodies ran away from. On the ground, zoo animals escaped their “modern” meanings and instead embraced the new meanings given to them by zoogoers. As these animals became subjects in/through the diverse experiments done within the zoo, they prepared zoogoers to think about animals in new ways. By not living up to expectations, by becoming-more-than-zoo- animals, animals within the zoo directed attention to the fault lines that undergirded an outmoded humanistic tradition.122
Of course, this tradition was far from static. The Renaissance humanism born in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries surely differed from the Enlightenment humanism of the eighteenth century. These, in turn, differed from the Romantic humanism of the nineteenth century, as well as the liberal humanism and Nietzsche’s (anti)humanism of the twentieth century. Humanism took many forms in many times and places, and a vast historiography documents its history. Even reducing the term “humanism” to a definition proves difficult, if not
122 Here I draw off the language of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), specifically from their chapter entitled “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible. . .” 450 impossible, for as literary critic Tony Davies states, “[h]umanism is a word with . . . an unusually wide range of possible meanings and contexts.”123
Literary theorist Cary Wolfe recognizes this situation, yet argues that most contemporary definitions of “humanism” look like this one:
Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities—particularly rationality. It is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems and is incorporated into several religious schools of thought. Humanism entails a commitment to the search for truth and morality through human means in support of human interests [emphasis added]. In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, humanism rejects the validity of transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on belief without reason, the supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine origin. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting the solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.124
Like all who follow ethical positions and adopt universal worldviews, advocates of humanist positions (whether conscious of their “humanist” tendencies or not) always and inevitably fell short of their ideals. Surely, “the human” at the core of humanism, like the gods of theism and the
“happiness” of utilitarianism, had never been more than, to use philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s phrase, a “sublime object of ideology.”125 As a category, “the human” had always been problematic one, and as a variety of scholars in the burgeoning field of the posthumanities have demonstrated, “the
123 Davies, Tony, Humanism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. Davies’s book is a wonderful and concise introduction to the history of humanism. The historiography of humanism is a large and old one. For more a beginning look into this historiography see: H. J. Blackham’s Humanism (Hassocks, England: Harvester Press, 1976), Alan Bullock’s The Humanist Tradition in the West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), A. G. Dickens’s The Age of Humanism and Reformation (London: Prentice, 1972), A. W. Levi’s Humanism and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), Robert Mandrou’s From Humanism to Science (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1979), Jim Herrick’s Humanism: An Introduction (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005), Charles G. Nauert’s Humanism and Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Zachary S. Schiffman’s Humanism and the Renaissance (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), Giuseppe Toffanin’s History of Humanism (New York: Las Americas Pub. Co., 1954), Wallace K. Ferguson’s The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), Peter Gay’s The Party of Humanity: Essays in French Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), or Giustiniani Vito’s "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of Humanism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, vol. 2 (April – June, 1985): 167 – 95. 124 Wolfe, Cary, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi. Wolfe extracted this definition from Wikipedia in the summer of 2008. 125 Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 451 human” had never and can never delineate Homo sapiens sapiens from that which is “not human”—technologies, environments, animals, and things.126 However, in the long history of an idea, there are occasional moments when individuals become conscious of the chimerical nature of beliefs and the epistemological limits of belief systems. Ethical and metaphysical stances exist as long as they prove useful, and when they lose their usefulness, they rupture.127
The zoological park sits upon the doorstep of an important rupture in humanistic thought.
This dissertation has shown a few ways in which the inhabitants of the National Zoological Park found homes in politics, print media, science, environmentalism, ethics, and medicine. In many ways, each of these intellectual endeavors was born (or at least became more publicly visible) alongside Renaissance humanism and its virtues and cabinets of curiosities. Championing reason, these diverse enterprises were self-consciously built by humans for humans, and were often
126 I use the term “posthumanities” broadly, borrowing it from a movement endorsed by a book series supported by the University of Minnesota Press. I choose this term simply because it resonates well with a discussion about humanism; however, many scholars in animal studies, science studies, ecocriticism, and disability studies further the goals of the “posthumanities” without explicitly adhering to this term. The University of Minnesota Press states this: Posthumanities situates itself at a crossroads: at the intersection of “the humanities” in its current academic configuration and the challenges it faces from “posthumanism” to move beyond its standard parameters and practices. Rather than simply reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge, posthumanists confront how changes in society and culture require that scholars rethink what they do—theoretically, methodologically, and ethically. The “human” is enmeshed in the larger problem of what Jacques Derrida called “the living,” and traditional humanism is no longer adequate to understand the human’s entangled, complex relations with animals, the environment, and technology. Great introductions to the diverse posthumanities, published with this press, include Michel Serres’s The Parasite (2007), Roberto Esposito’s Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008), Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (2011), and Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012). These four books represent very different approaches to thinking in a “posthuman” manner. A few other important and representative works in this growing field include Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Kenan Malik’s Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), and Neil Badmington’s Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (London: Routledge, 2004). 127 My use of rupture draws off the ideas of philosopher Louis Althusser (who was himself dependent upon Gaston Bachelard). The ideas of “ruptures” and “epistemological breaks” are commonly used in intellectual history and cultural criticism (especially criticism that employs psychoanalytic methods). For concise summaries see Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn forged similar ideas in his conception of a “paradigm shift.” See his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 452 thought to elevate humanity out of the “wildernesses” of its barbaric pasts. Indeed, humanism made perspectives of “ecological modernity” possible in the first place. Of course, throughout humanism’s history, animals were enlisted as tools to work with and objects to study.128 As humanistic thinking adapted to the principalities of the Prince, the empires of the early modern period, the nations of the Enlightenment, and the industrial cities of the nineteenth century, animals inherited more roles to play in the “advancement” of humanity. However, throughout this history, humans rarely approached animals on their own terms. They rarely listened to their voices and worried about their wellbeing.
The zoological park, though, not only functioned as a laboratory and lyceum for zoogoers, enabling millions to experiment with animals and announce their findings to larger publics, but it also functioned as a laboratory and lyceum for animals as well. Within the zoological park, animals experimented with zoogoers, built environments, and other animals.
Also, within zoological parks, animals’ voices could be heard. Of course, zoogoing listeners often muffled or muted these voices, hearing only what they wanted. Many forced zoo animals to sing in humanist choirs, lifting the praises of humanity, authored by humans for humans. These odes, while diverse in their messages, usually fit humanist models—playing on themes of nation, imperialism, refinement, knowledge, and amusement. At other times, though, even if only occasionally, zoogoers asked a question of a zoo animal “and [said] the animal responded.”129
Critical theorists today might argue whether an “animal” can ever truly respond to the question of
128 For an excellent discussion of animals during the Renaissance see Erica Fudge’s edited collection Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Other must-reads about animals in the early-modern world include Erica Fudge’s Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002) and Karen Raber’s Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). On animals during the Enlightenment see Matthew Senior’s edited collection A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). 129 I am drawing off the language of Jacques Derrida’s “And Say the Animal Responded?” Trans. By David Wills, In Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 453 a human zoogoer, or whether the “trace” of the zoogoer always stains animal language.
Nonetheless, the intellectual historian who finds zoogoers believing that the animal responded, who finds zoogoers changing their presuppositions about animals because of new experiences with them, who finds zoogoers surprised by animal behaviors, who finds zoogoers solving one mystery only to unearth another, and who finds zoogoers convinced that animals make ethical demands upon humans can argue that he or she has found evidence of a disintegrating humanism emanating through the zoological park.130
If on their surfaces, zoo animals represented an “ecological modernity,” as well as other humanist endeavors that placed humans above or outside nonhumanity, beneath their surfaces, zoo animals stored potential challenges to the humanism they were enslaved by. When animals ran away, they took on new meanings and seized multiple lives. The zoological parks that arose at the end of the nineteenth century fostered multiplicity—a multiplicity of animals, humans, animal-human encounters, and animal-human “contact zones.”131 This sheer multiplicity, evidenced historically by both the sheer popularity of zoological parks and by the essence of popular zoology itself, cannot be reduced to a singular interpretation. At times, though, the sheer multiplicity produced by the zoo ran away from humanist models of knowing. The National
Zoological Park directed the attention of humans to nonhumanity—to peacock feathers, to monkeys in the snow, to gorillas that could talk, to invisible bacilli, to chained elephants and dead bison, to murdered housecats, to ferocious dog-wolves, to seaweed, to sea anemones, to sand from Norfolk, to fences and fields, to missing beavers and arctic foxes. The list goes on and on
130 I am not arguing that the institution of the public zoo, by itself, sparked the disintegration of Humanism. I am simply suggesting that the zoological park serves as a useful window into the dissolution of the centuries-old humanistic tradition. Other intellectual-cultural arenas could surely function as similar windows. Like the problem of “species,” the problem of “race” displays the limits of Humanism at the dawn of the twentieth century. See Kay Anderson’s Race and the Crisis of Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2007) for an excellent discussion of race and humanism around 1900. 131 Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet. 454 and on and on. Within the National Zoo, nonhumans engaged humans in unexpected ways, forcing some to take nonhumans seriously.132
By embracing multiplicity, heterogeneity, and diversity within zoological parks, historians might be able to see the zoo as one prelude to the well-known assaults on humanistic thinking that reverberated through the American public sphere in the 1970s and after. Zoo historians have long described the zoological park as a microcosmic world through which zoogoers could stroll and at which zoogers could gaze, emphasizing the nationalist, imperialist, and humanist implications that undergirded this collective gaze-upon-the-world. This dissertation, though, suggested another implication of late-nineteenth-century zoogoing. Zoological parks not only allowed the masses to gaze-upon-the-world, but allowed them to be-in-the-world in new ways. As millions of zoogoers visited newly opened zoological parks in the decades surrounding
1900, they became more capable of imagining faraway lands, environments, and animals. They became more capable of envisioning the countenances of animals. They became more capable of hearing their voices. They became more capable of both awe and fear inspired by the formerly exotic. They became more capable of seeing possibilities in and through other animals and more likely see the limits of human understanding about those animals. This shrinking of the human world and expansion of the animal world for millions of zoogoers surely impacted popular conceptions of humans and animals.
132 An overarching assumption of this dissertation is that all “things” and “objects” are inherently “withdrawn” from human comprehension. They can only be known indirectly. And all “things” are accessed by different people differently. This holds true for both the past and present, to zoogoers in the National Zoological Park and to historians studying the National Zoological Park. Accepting this, opens up new ways to “read” past interactions between “humans” and “things,” “animals” and “things,” and “humans” and “animals”—indeed, “things” and “things.” This approach embraces multiplicity for multiplicity’s sake, rather than seeking to reduce multiplicity to oversimplified historical explanations. My thinking is still developing on how historians should deal with these basic tenets of what is being called object-oriented-ontology (OOO), but I am indebted to the works like Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002) and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (Sydney: Open Humanities Press, 2011). 455
Zoological parks at the turn of the century prepared the way for later environmental, conservation, and animal rights movements. They prepared the way for later cultural entanglements with evolutionary theory, like the Scopes Monkey Trial. Zoological parks functioned as theaters that first demonstrated simple lessons about animals that would soon capture the attention of the ever-expanding and ever-specializing body of scholars devoted to the study of animals throughout the twentieth century. And they functioned as the first public tutorials in post-humanist thinking. Before the research of scientists and philosophers could impact everyday Americans later in the twentieth century, these Americans first needed to think about and experience these “categories” for themselves. The zoological park offered laboratories and lyceums for the public rethinking of humans and animals, humanity and animality. In the laboratories and lyceums of the zoological park, and through the popular zoology that bound zoo and society, zoogoers and zoo animals weakened the foundation of Humanism. Eventually,
Americans would need to find new lords to sit upon Nature’s throne.
456
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Appendix A: Tables
Listed in “Report of the Department of Living Animals”: October 8, 1887 to June 30, 1888
Table 1: Mammals in the Department of Living Animals
Animal (#) Taxonomical Donated or Place of Origin Name Purchased Buffalo (2) Bison Donated E. G. Blackford, NY americanus Virginia Deer Cariacus Donated Dr. P. Glennan, virginianus Washington, D.C. Virginia Deer Cariacus Donated Capt. R. L. Hoxie, virginianus Montgomery, AL Jaguar Felis onca Donated J. W. Riddle, Eagle Pass, TX Black Bear (2) Ursus Donated J. J. E. Lindberg, El americanus Paso, TX Grivet Monkey Cercopithicus Donated L. Moxley, Washington, engythithea D.C. Red Fox Vulpes fulvus Donated O. V. Davis, Mandan fulvus Dakota Cross Fox Vulpes fulvus Donated John Melville, Portland decussatus Oregon Red Fox Vulpes fulvus Donated Dr. C. W. Higgins, Salt fulvus Lake City, UT Gray Fox Urocyon Donated Geo. E. Brown, virginianus Alexandria, VA Coyote Canis lutrans Donated Fred D. Nowell, North Platte, NE Prairie Dog Cynomys Donated Carl Steinmetz, Helena, ludovicianus MT Badger (2) Taxidea Donated Dr. C. W. Higgins, Salt americana Lake City, UT Grey Squirrel Sciurus Donated Fred C. Ohm, carolinensis Washington, D.C. Opossum Didelphys Donated Dr. C. Hart Merriam, virginianus Washington, D.C. Opossum Didelphys Donated J. O. Boggs, virginianus Washington, D.C. Opossum Didelphys Donated W. J. Yaste, Bureau of virginianus Ethnology, Washington, D.C. S. Gray Squirrel(3) Sciurus Donated Joseph Palmer, carolinensis Arlington, VA carolinensis continued 484
Table 1: Continued Ferret (2) Putorius furo Donated Louis Schmid, Washington, D.C. Cavy Guinea-Pig Cavia aperia Donated G. H. H. Moore, U. S. Fish Commission Opossum Didelphys Donated Eppa Hunton Coumbe, virginianus Washington, D.C. White Rat Mus rattus Donated Master Clinton Thorne, Washington, D.C. Raccoon Procyon lotor Donated Geo. Boulding, Washington, D.C. Opossum Didelphys Donated Clifford U. Smith, virginianus Washington, D.C. Tame Hare Lepus vulgaris Donated Louis A. Schmid, Washington, D.C. Tame Hare Lepus vulgaris Donated Jos. Mace, Smith. Inst., Washington, D.C. Woodcock Philohela minor Donated W. F. Johnson, Bladensburg, MD Red Squirrel Sciurus Donated Orlando G. Wales, hudsonius Washington, D.C. Opossum Didelphys Donated W. H. Babcock, virginianus Washington, D.C. Grey Squirrel Sciurus Donated R. H. G. Bouis, carolinensis Washington, D.C. Fox Squirrel Sciurus niger Donated H. E. Hinman, cinereus Cleveland, OH Chipmunk (2) Tamius striatus Donated Alex. McVeigh Miller, Alderson WV Porcupine Brithizon Donated Pettit & Dripps, dorsatus Washington, D.C. Woodchucks (3) Arctomys monax Donated T. L. Ostrander, Wells, NY White-Tailed Deer Cariacus Purchased Helena, MT virginianus Columbian Black- Cariacus Purchased R. C. Hewitt, Tailed Deer columbianus Media, WA Mule Deer Cariacus Purchased Dr. C. A. Gay, macrotis Lewiston, ID Spotted Lynx (2) Lynx maculatus Purchased Dr. C. W. Higgins, Salt Lake City, UT Panther Felis concolor Purchased Capt. Henry Romoyn, Ft. Keogh, MO Cinnamon Bear, Cub Ursus Purchased Helena, MO americanus cinnamomum Grizzly Bear, Cub Urus horribilis Purchased R. T. Allen, Billings, MO Gray Fox Urocyon Purchased Macon, GA virginianus virginianus continued 485
Table 1: Continued
Prairie Dog (4) Cynomys Purchased Geo. L. Taylor, ludovicianus Cheyenne, WY Raccoon (2) Procyon lotor Purchased Macon, GA Jacksonville, FL Opossum Didelphys Purchased Atlanta, GA virginianus Gray Squirrel (2) Sciurus Purchased Prince George County, carolinensis MD Flying Squirrel (2) Sciuropterus Purchased Prince George County, volucella MD volucolla Flying Squirrel (7) Sciuropterus Purchased Prince George County, volucella MD volucolla Opossum Didelphys Purchased Dr. W. T. Owsley, virginianus Glasgow, KY Opossum Didelphys Purchased Geo. F. Pollock, virginianus Washington, D.C. Woodchuck (2) Arctomys monax Purchased L. D. Terrell, U. S. Fish Commission Carolina Black Bear Ursus By Exchange G. E. Menigault, americanus Charleston, SC Tame Hare (4) Lepus vulgaria Bred In Department of Living Animals
486
Table 2: Birds in the Department of Living Animals
Animal (#) Taxonomical Donated or Place of Origin Name Purchased Golden Eagle Aquila Donated Dr. C. W. Higgins, chrysactus Salt Lake City, UT Golden Eagle Aquila Donated President Cleveland, chrysactus Executive Mansion Bald Eagle Haliaectus Donated Col. Shutt, leucocephalus Virginia Gt. Blue Heron (2) Ardea herodias Donated U. S. Fish Commision Turkey Vulture (2) Cathartes aura. Donated G. L. Machenheimer, Forest Glen, MD Macaw Ara macao Donated Alfred W. Cochran, Alabama Rough-legged Hawk Archibutes Donated Vinal Edwards, sancti-johannis Wood’s Hole, MA Red-Tailed Hawk Buteo borealis Donated R. H. Boswell, Washington, D.C. Cooper’s Hawk Accipiter Donated John J. Sellner, cooperi Prince George Co., MD Sparrow Hawk Falco sparverius Donated John W. Reed, Gaitherburg, MD Red-Tailed Hawk Buteo borealis Donated Miss Lizzie Kuehling, Fairfax Co., VA Sparrow Hawk Falco sparverius Donated Alfred Heitmuller, Brightwood Road, D.C. Red-Tailed Hawk Buteo borealis Donated G. L. Machenheimer, Forest Glen, MD Barred Owl Strix nebulosa Donated Jacksonville, FL Screech Owl Megascops asio Donated J. E. Brown, Washington, D.C. Gt. Horned Owl Bubo Donated Mr. Robt. Ridgway, virginianus U.S. National Museum Screech Owl Megascops asio Donated August Gedz, Washington, D.C. Barn Owl Strix flammea Donated Walter H. Stoutenberg, Washington Insane Asylum Long-Eared Owl Anio Donated W. S. Anderson, wilsonianus Washington, D.C. Barred Owl (2) Strix nebulosa Donated Geo. A. Riker, Alexandria, VA Screech Owl (4) Megascops asio Donated C. Edgar Uber, Falls Church, VA Screech Owl Megascops asio Donated Mr. Alfred Ray, Forest Glen, MD Gt. Horned Owl Bubo Donated Dr. J. Schneck, virginianus Mt. Carmel, IL
continued 487
Table 2: Continued
Barred Owl (2) Strix nebulosa Donated Mrs. J. B. Eustis, Washington, D.C. Loon Colymbus Donated Chas. B. Gant, torquatus Washington, D.C. Crow Corvus Donated Nelson R. Wood, americanus National Museum Crow Corvus Donated Jos. Palmer, americanus U.S. National Museum Gambel’s Partridge Callipopla Donated Louis Schmid, (2) gambeli Washington, D.C. Bob-White (6) Colinus Donated Jas. W. Walker, virginianus Washington, D.C. Va. Quail (9) Colinus Donated (?) virginianus Red Crossbill Loxia Donated Dr. Fisher, Department curvirostra of Agriculture Red Crossbill Loxia Donated (?) curvirostra Turkey Vulture (3) Cathartes aura Purchased G. L. Machenheimer, Forest Glen, MD Cooper’s Hawk Accipiter Purchased Washington Market cooperi Homing Pigeon (2) Columbia livia Deposited N. R. Wood, National Museum Quail (2) Colinus Deposited N. R. Wood, virginianus National Museum Ring Doves (2) Columba sp. Deposited N. R. Wood, National Museum Australian Grass Melopsittacus Deposited N. R. Wood, Parroquet (2) undulatus National Museum Black Fantailed Columba sp. Deposited W. C. Weeden, Pigeon (2) National Museum Common Pigeon (2) Columba sp. Deposited W. C. Weeden, National Museum Ground Dove (2) Columbigallina Deposited N. R. Wood, passerina National Museum Homing Pigeon (4) Columba livia Deposited N. R. Wood, National Museum
488
Table 3: Reptiles in the Department of Living Animals
Animal (#) Taxonomical Donated or Place of Origin Name Purchased Box Tortoise Cistudo Donated Alex. McVeigh Miller, Carolina Alderson, VA Gray Monitor (2) Varanus griseus Donated W. A. Conklin, Central Park Menagerie, NY Three-toed Box Terrapene Donated Robt. T. Hill, U.S. Tortoise (2) triunguis Geological Survey Collard Lizard Crotaphytus Donated Department of Reptiles, collaris National Museum Banded Rattlesnakes Crotalus Donated Department of Reptiles, (3) horridus National Museum Scarlet King Snake Ophibolus Donated W. C. Weeden, National doliatus doliatus Museum Black Snake (2) Bascanium Donated Joseph Palmer, constrictor National Museum Garter Snake Eutaenia sirtalis Donated William Palmer, sirtalis National Museum Garter Snake Eutaenia sirtalis Donated Miss Gertrude Johnson, sirtalis Washington, D.C. Blowing Viper Heterodon Donated Dr. E. S. Rheem, platyrhinus National Museum platyrhinus Water Moccasin (5) Tropidonotus Donated W. C. Weeden, sipedon sipedon National Museum Garter Snake (5) Eutaenia sirtalis Donated W. C. Weeden, sirtalis National Museum Box Tortoise Cistudo Purchased Dr. W. T. Owsley, Carolina Glasgow, KY
489
Appendix B: Miss M. Gunderson Letter
I discovered M. Gunderson’s letter in a folder entitled “Administrative: Complaints, appreciation, and Replies, 1910” (Record Unit 74, Box 102, Folder 2). There were six folders with the same heading that held documents dating from the years 1904 to 1940. And the complaints that were held in these folders addressed all sorts of matters.
The complaint I read prior to finding the Gunderson letter, for example, concerned a zoo employee who was contracted to renovate a local lawn and who had apparently not finished the task. The letter directed Superintendent Frank Baker’s attention to his employee’s misdeed and asked him to encourage his employee to right the wrong. The complaint that appeared after the Gunderson letter discussed a mandrill who reached through its bars, grabbed a man’s $8.00 hat, and ripped it to pieces. As these six folders (and other correspondence collections) demonstrate clearly, the concerns of zoogoers proved quite heterogeneous. Some cared about pricing. Others cared about customer service. Still, others cared about animal welfare. Among the thousands of documents held in the Smithsonian Institution Archives that dealt with the National Zoo, the Gunderson letter proved unique.
In Chapter Six, I hope I conveyed clearly the historical significance of this letter. “Animal rights,” according to its historiography, was rarely discussed in 1910, and it is especially surprising to find a diatribe like the one below hastily scrawled on six pages of paper and sent to a zoo director. Everything I know about M. Gunderson lies within both the letter below and in Frank Baker’s simple response to this letter. Nowhere else within the Smithsonian archives have I found reference to M. Gunderson. Here is Baker’s response: Madam:— I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of July 28 with regard to wild animals in captivity and three publications. These have been placed in the permanent files of the Park. Respectfully yours, Superintendent In the bottom left of the letter, as was the convention of the day, Baker placed the recipient’s name and address. The name he listed was “Miss M. Gunderson.” The address was the same as the one listed below.
I decided to provide this transcription of the M. Gunderson letter for several reasons. First, the letter is an important primary source for its chapter’s argument, so I thought I would give you the opportunity to read the letter in its entirety. Second, I wanted to raise awareness of this letter so that other historians interested in human-animal interactions in the nineteenth and twentieth- century could keep lookout for similar types of archival material. I suspect that, between 1890 and 1910, there was a greater discussion of “animal rights” than previously understood. Third, and most importantly, I hoped to make this letter available to the teachers and students of Animal Studies courses. Miss M. Gunderson raised many topics that are now central to the field of animal studies— zoos, ethics, animal rights, natural rights, Christianity, Enlightenment, Darwin and evolution, cruelty, political radicalism, racism, feminism, and anthropomorphization, to name a few. I hope that this novel letter provides an entryway into larger discussions. I kept all the letter’s original errors and attempted to keep the spacing as it appeared on the original pages. 490
1310 Wallach Pl. N.W. Washington, D.C. July 28, 1910
Dr. Frank Baker, Superintendent of The Garden of Hell, Washington, D.C.
Sir: To you, the superintendent of a not very honorable institution, I take the liberty to send a paper relating to the Zoological Garden, together with a book – The New Ethics – which heralds the revolutionized ethics of civilized man to come. By what “right,” by what demon’s right, I ask, do you condemn your victims to their cages? You point to the “tiger’s tooth and claw”; but are tigers – you gentle men? If the ethics of the jungle is the only ethics comprehensible to you who call yourselves men, even gentle men and civilized – well then, live up at least to the standards of that ethics; do not fall below it. If the tigers and the lions in your pitiless claws were as swiftly killed as more merciful tiger and lion kill their prey, they are better off by thousand times. When you drag them from distant lands, capture, transport, and imprison them, you engage in deeds of such moral infamy as no animal but man, the king of bandits, has ever stooped to. If without any provocation from your side, you should really be pursued by man-eating Fijian or man-eating tiger (the the worst of fates would serve you right), and you then should resort to decent self-defence, very well; but when it is you, a pretentiously ethical being, who plays the part of a fiercer pursuer and tormentor on a vastly more gigantic scale, then if you receive no condemnation for your deeds, the reason is simply that the society in which you live is in reverse – at least as far as morals are concerned – in advance of societies of Fijians or of wolves. Have other animals no rights that you can thus ignore the simplest plea for justice? “Naturalists” pointing to “nature red in tooth and claw” often assert that “man need not be kinder than God”; but why then do you fly into fits when bombs are placed beneath buildings & ban anarchists from the bomb as well as the gods when they choose to hurl their devastating thunderbolts at helpless man and his conceit, or when, there’s an earthquake shock, they cause cities teeming with human life to be destroyed without the slightest regard to the “rights” of screaming man or to the “sanctity” of human life? The creatures in the jungle have ample share in the pains of life; but that certainly is not the slightest reason why you should further oppress them.
“That there is pain and evil is no rule, That I should make it greater like a fool.”
There is suffering enough among the inhabitants of the wildwoods to be sure – the difficulties with which they have to struggle are such that there is not much “danger” of their “overrunning” – as the Caucasian Savage has done – ; but in spite of struggles and hardships, intermingled with hopes and joys, they are happier there by far in their native haunts than in the claws of pitiless man – the most terrific and oppressive enemy alike of tiger and of deer. Theirs is the right to breathe the air of freedom in the forests of their fathers. Their home is there, their heart is there, their happiness is there, where they wish to live and love and struggle for their own sake and their dear ones.
491
Are you Cartesians? Have the revelations of Darwin and of Copernicus no significance to you? Are you “king by divine right”? Are you in medieval darkness? Think you still that the heavens revolve around you, that gods take interest in your affairs, that you were made for eternal glory, and tiger and lion and eagle and deer, + his [illegible] with nervous and aching feelings, were made simply to suffer to furnish for “the king by divine right,” sport or a degraded livelihood for him? If you belong to that class of benighted “naturalists” who fail to see the kinship between yourself and your prey, if you “think” that you were made for other worlds but that lion and tiger and elephant and deer and bear and ape were made for this, well then give to the creatures whose home and heart and all is here, their share in the world to which they belong. If you belong to fairer worlds why not depart from this one, and relieve our world of a curse, the sooner the better! Surely, you are not making fit “preparations” through the vile imprisonment of innocents. If, on the other hand, the delusion is not cherished by you, and you know that in all probability the only world to which man and other creatures of earth have access, is this pitiful world, which however might be greatly improved, why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest rights in this world[?] They are not machines, but our brothers, whether we are too blind and bigoted to see it or not and whether we will it or not; in the great evolutionary surge of life. Shame on the garden where lone and tortured and outraged captives pine their gloomy lives away to furnish degraded pastime for thoughtless onlookers who here learn anew the lesson of cruelty alone. As for “knowledge” “Sit her know her place[.] She holds the second, not the first” [Your] “knowledge” which does not yield [and give] the higher moral law is but “Some wild Pallas From the brain of demons.” If wisdom and nature shall ever come to man, if darkness shall be displaced by day, this shameful garden of cruelty and wrong will no longer exist, but be placed side by side of against barbarisms. By the more enlightened children of the coming day, the “civilization” and [illegible] of twentieth century barbarisms will not be highly respected. Hoping the thoughts of this letter as well as of the literature I sent may furnish to you and your co-guilty (as Messrs. A. B. Baker, C. D. Walcott, W. H. Blackburn, etc.) some needed food for reflection, if truth may be spoken not.
Very respectfully yours M. Gunderson
492
Appendix C: Images for Chapter One
Image C.1: Hornaday’s Bison
The bison display in the South Hall of the United States National Museum, mounted by William Temple Hornaday in 1887. This photograph was taken in 1902.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MNH-16062.
493
Image C.2: South Hall of the USNM
South Hall of the United States National Museum in 1902. Hornaday’s bison exhibit is in the foreground, surrounded by other displays of animalia – carcasses, antlers, and other products of the taxidermic laboratory.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2004-10370.
494
Image C.3: Hornaday’s Bison Family
Hornaday’s bison display as it appeared to museumgoers. These three bison were displayed in what was called a “family group,” an arrangement that modelled American notions of family more than the behaviors of bison herds.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MNH-4323.
495
Image C.4: William Temple Hornaday
William Temple Hornaday: Chief Taxidermist of the USNM, Creator and Head of the Department of Living Animals, and the first Superintendent of the National Zoological Park. This photograph was taken around 1890.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-19661.
496
Image C.5: Hornaday and the Taxidermic Laboratory
William Temple Hornaday (center) in his Smithsonian taxidermic laboratory. He is working on a mountain lion specimen while surrounded by all sorts of tools, mounted specimens, and animalia. This photograph was taken sometime after Hornaday’s hire in 1882.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MNH-3662.
497
Image C.6: Hornaday and Baby Bison
William Temple Hornaday with a baby bison (known as Sandy) on the grounds adjacent to the Smithsonian Castle. Most likely, Hornaday brought Sandy back from his 1886 collecting trip in Montana. Sandy was a member of the Smithsonian’s bison herd. She did not live long enough to become an inhabitant of the National Zoological Park.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 74-12338.
498
Image C.7: The Smithsonian Bison Herd
Two members of the herd of bison that Hornaday placed in the South Yard behind the Smithsonian Castle. This herd, along with the Department of Living Animals, functioned as the nucleus of the National Zoological Park. This photograph was taken sometime between 1886 and 1889.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH8008A.
499
Appendix D: Images for Chapter Two
Image D.1: Surveying Zoo Grounds
Secretary Samuel P. Langley (center with white beard and turned towards the camera) surveys the land around the Rock Creek, just after the establishment of the National Zoological Park. He is accompanied by (listed from left to right) James W. Traylor, C. W. Schuermann, Frederick Law Olmsted, Dr. Frank Baker, William Temple Hornaday; Harry W. Dorsey; and W. C. Winlock. In the top right corner sits the house of George Brown Goode. The Columbia Road passes by this house.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 75-1755.
500
Image D.2: The Rock Creek
The Rock Creek around 1870.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# RU7177_Box14a_F26_Merrill07 [SPI_1686].
501
Image D.3: The Rock Creek Valley
The rolling hillsides and vibrant woods nestled along the Rock Creek, where the National Zoological Park will soon be built.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-5381.
502
Image D.4: Fields along the Rock Creek
Fields along the Rock Creek that will soon be used as pastures for buffalo, deer, and antelope.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-5387.
503
Image D.5: Early Model of the NZP
An early model of the National Zoological Park, built by William Temple Hornaday.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2002-10703.
504
Image D.6: Road Running Through the Rock Creek Park
Road running through the Rock Creek Park, which will soon function as a thoroughfare into the National Zoo.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 16290.
505
Image D.7: The Woodlands of the Rock Creek Park
Woodlands along the Rock Creek.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 16288.
506
Image D.8: Bird’s-Eye View of the Rock Creek Park
These are the grounds of the Rock Creek Park that will become the center of the National Zoo. Clearly, by no means were these lands previously “untouched” by human hands. Even park benches had already been placed along the roads and sidewalks that cut through the valley.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2002-12214.
507
Image D.9: Woodlands and Holt House
More woodlands of the Rock Creek Park. Upon the hill, sits the Holt House, which would soon become the administrative offices of the National Zoological Park.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2002-12217.
508
Image D.10: Samuel P. Langley
Samuel P. Langley. This photograph was taken on August 22, 1887.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 10610.
509
Image D.11: Frank Baker
Dr. Frank Baker. He was appointed as Acting Manager of the zoo in 1890 and was given the official title of “Superintendent” in 1893, a title that he would hold until 1916.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2003-19546.
510
Image D.12: Plans for the National Zoo
Early plans for the National Zoological Park, created by Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape architecture company in September, 1890. Most of the zoo buildings are placed in the middle of the proposed park, on a developed plateau. More buildings and enclosures emanate outwards from this central portion. Many enclosures are envisioned along the banks of the Rock Creek.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2011-1447.
511
Image D.13: The Zoo in Washington, D.C.
The location of the proposed National Zoological Park within Washington, D.C. The White House compound and the National Mall can be seen in the lower right.
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 74, Series 4, Box 6, Folder 8.
512
Image D.14: “Sharing The Expense”
A political cartoon that exemplifies the controversy about funding the National Zoo. While the District of Columbia is weighed down by the burden of carrying an elephant, Uncle Sam stands proudly with only a monkey and bird on his shoulders.
“Sharing the Expense” (The Sunday Herald, May 4, 1890), “Scrapbook, 1887-1902,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 74, Box 285.
513
Appendix E: Images for Chapter Three
Image E.1: Admiral George Dewey
Admiral George Dewey, owner the famous suspect in the wolf-dog debacle.
Neil, Henry. Exciting Experiences in Our Wars with Spain and the Filipinos. Chicago: Book Publishers Union, 1899. Library of Congress Call# E 715.N39.
514
Appendix F: Images for Chapter Four
Image F.1: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, located in the South Yard behind the Smithsonian Castle. This observatory was built in 1890, as Hornaday’s bison herd grazed in the same yard. This photograph was taken in 1899.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 80-12955.
515
Image F.2: Richard Lynch Garner
Richard Lynch Garner. Photograph on the inside cover of his Apes and Monkeys.
Garner, R. L., Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900), inside cover.
516
Image F.3: Garner in His Cage
Richard Garner in his outdoor cage laboratory. Illustration in his Apes and Monkeys.
Garner, R. L., Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900), 69.
517
Image F.4: Garner Attracting Monkeys
Monkeys looking upon Garner in his outdoor cage laboratory. Illustration in his his Apes and Monkeys.
Garner, R. L., Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900), 75.
518
Image F.5: A Gorilla Subject Approaches Garner’s Laboratory
A female gorilla, carrying a baby upon her back, approaches Garner in his cage. Illustration in his his Apes and Monkeys.
Garner, R. L., Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1900), 257.
519
Image F.6: Langley Observing a Buzzard
Langley observing a soaring buzzard from the rooftop of the Arts and Industries Building. This photograph was taken sometime between 1901 and 1902, just as he began studying the birds of the National Zoo.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-21444.
520
Image F.7: Langley’s Zoo Tower
One of Langley’s two observation towers built inside the National Zoological Park at the end of 1901.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2002-12172.
521
Appendix G: Images for Chapter Five
Image G.1: Young’s Pier
Young’s Ocean Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. John Lake Young, a leading entertainment and boardwalk mogul along the United States’ eastern seaboard at the turn of the twentieth century, bought this pier in 1891. Soon, he transformed this purchase into a Boardwalk Empire. This pier also became an important fish supplier for the aquarium of the National Zoological Park.
Fisher, Joy, Penny Postcards from New Jersey: USGen Web Archives, Accessed January 27, 2014, http://www.usgwarchives.net/nj/atlantic/postcards/ppcs-atlantic.html.
522
Image G.2: Net Haul on Young’s Pier
Large nets casted from Young’s Pier. Most of these fish were consumed in Atlantic City restaurants. Occasionally, though, fish were sent to aquariums, large and small.
Fisher, Joy, Penny Postcards from New Jersey: USGen Web Archives, Accessed January 27, 2014, http://www.usgwarchives.net/nj/atlantic/postcards/ppcs-atlantic.html.
523
Image G.3: Seton’s Study of Antelope Heads
Ernest Thompson Seton was particulary fascinated with the antelope of the National Zoological Park. The antelope prairie enclosure created an ideal environment for studying the anatomy and behaviors of antelope.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 658, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
524
Image G.4: Seton’s Study of Antelope Rumps
Seton was also interested in the rump of the antelope. Within the rump lay explanations to mysterious antelope behavior.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 658, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
525
Image G.5: Seton’s Study of Antelope “Flashing”
Seton realized that the white “flashing” of the antelope rump hairs, combined with the release of a strong odor, functioned as a type of language for antelope.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 659, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
526
Image G.6: Seton’s Study of Antelope Glands and Rump-Patches
Seton realized that inside an antelope’s rump lay the secrets to its language. The rump hair near (A) appeared long and graded towards (B). The hair near (B), on the other hand, appeared “snowy white” and always pointed towards the rear. Beneath the skin of the rump, the antelope possessed a “broad sheet” of muscle, which grew thickest and strongest immediately under (B). Immediately, when alarmed, this muscle contracted, causing the short, white hair near (B) to stand straight out from the rump. This created a “flash,” a “twin chrysanthemum of white.” Also, when this rump muscle contracted, a brown musk-gland lying beneath (B), between the muscle and the skin, became suddenly and partially exposed as it released its piquant stink. Together, the white flash and the stench, like the “white flag” of the Virginia deer, operated as a “message,” to “all those that have noses to read,” that danger is near.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 659, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
527
Image G.7: Seton’s Study of the Peacock Train
Seton also found the peacock enclosure to be a great place to study peacock behavior and anatomy.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 59, no. 5 (March, 1900): 660, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
528
Image G.8: Seton’s Study of Ostrich Movement
Seton thought many of the enclosures in the National Zoo were ideal environments in which to study animals and ecology. Another animal he studied in the NZP was the ostrich.
Seton-Thompson, Ernest, “The National Zoo at Washington: A Study of Its Animals in Relation to Their Natural Environment,” Century Illustrated Magazine 60, no. 5 (May, 1900): 1-10, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 365, Box 35, Folder 17.
529
Image G.9: Ernest Thompson Seton
Ernest Thompson Seton.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Call Number# LC-B2- 455-9 [P&P].
530
Image G.10: Bison Grazing
Bison grazing in their enclosure shortly after their barn (the first building in the National Zoo) was constructed in 1891. These bison were the originals collected by Hornaday and held on the Smithsonian lawns. An elk is visible in the background.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MNH-9039.
531
Image G.11: Elk Enclosure
Lighlty-wooded elk enclosure of the National Zoo.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MNH-9037.
532
Image G.12: Swans in the Rock Creek
Swans in the Rock Creek, 1895.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2004-10368. .
533
Image G.13: Eagle Cage
Bald and golden eagles in the Eagle Cage, built in the 1890s.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-15431.
534
Appendix H: Images for Chapter Six
Image H.1: Blackburne with Dunk and Gold Dust
William Blackburne with Dunk (right) and Gold Dust (left). Most likely, this picture was taken when Blackburne was leading these elephants to the Rock Creek for a bath.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2011-1032, 2003-19538.
535
Image H.2: Gold Dust, Dunk, Blackburne
The trio again on a walk. Note the chains binding Dunk and Gold Dust together.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2011-1032, 2003-19538.
536
Image H.3: Elephant House
Brick Elephant House, completed in January, 1903. Finally, Dunk and Gold Dust had an enclosure in which they could wander chainlessly.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# MAH-15533.
537
Image H.4: Secretary Charles Walcott
Charles Doolittle Walcott, fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1907-1927).
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 82-3142.
538
Image H.5: Blackburne and a Camel
William Blackburne bottle-feeding a baby camel.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2008-3016.
539
Appendix I: Images for Chapter Seven
Image I.1: Tubercle Bacillus
Early photograph of the Tubercle bacillus taken by Robert Koch.
Becker, Barbara J. Accessed January 28, 2014. http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/PlaguesandPeople/lecture16.html.
540
Image I.2: Robert Koch
Robert Koch, discoverer of the bacillus.
Kruif, Paul de, Mikrobenjäger (Zurich: Orrel Füssli, 1927).
541
Image I.3: Frederick William True
Frederick William True, specialist of whales, dolphins, and porpoises and the first head curator of biology in the United States National Museum.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# 2002-32245.
542
Image I.4: William Temple Hornaday and a Greater Kudo
William Temple Hornaday, Superintendent of the New York Zoological Park, feeding a greater kudo. This photograph was taken in 1920, thirty years after he helped create the National Zoological Park.
Library of Congress Manuscripts: An Illustrated Guide. http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/guide/ms052065.jpg.
543
Image I.5: Peter Chalmers Mitchell
Peter Chalmers Mitchell, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London and director of the London Zoo. This photograph was taken in 1920.
Agence de presse Meurisse. Bibliothéque nationale de France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Chalmers_Mitchell_1920.jpg#filelinks.
544
Image I.6: Cy DeVry
Cy DeVry of the Lincoln Park Zoo holding two peccaries. This photograph was taken around 1903.
DN-0000297, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.
545
Appendix J: Images for Conclusion
Image J.1: “Statistics of Zoological Collections”
“Statistics of Zoological Collections,” created by Frank Baker. This “makeshift chart” was one of the products of his zoo survey, which he began in 1901.
“Statistics of Zoological Collections,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 74, Box 100, Folder 6. 546
Image J.2: Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park, 1902
Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
547
Image J.3: Guide Book: Lion
The Lion
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
548
Image J.4: Guide Book: Carnivora House
Carnivora House
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
549
Image J.5: Guide Book: Moose
The Moose
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
550
Image J.6: Guide Book: Caribou
The Caribou
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
551
Image J.7: Guide Book: Antelope
The Antelope
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
552
Image J.8: Guide Book: Grizzly
The Grizzly Bear
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
553
Image J.9: Guide Book: The Bird Cage
The Bird Cage
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
554
Image J.10: Guide Book: Elk
The Elk
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
555
Image J.11: Guide Book: The Buffalo
The Buffalo
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
556
Image J.12: Guide Book: Beaver
Beavers
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
557
Image J.13: Guide Book: Tiger
The Tiger
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
558
Image J.14: Guide Book: Bear Dens
Bear Dens
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
559
Image J.15: Guide Book: Rocky Mountain Sheep
Rocky Mountain Sheep
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
560
Image J.16: Guide Book: Puma and California Condor
Puma, or Panter, and California Condor
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
561
Image J.17: Guide Book: Philippine Buffalo
Philippine Buffalo
Evans, Victor J., Illustrated Guide Book to the National Zoological Park (Washington: Henry E. Wilkens Printing Company, 1902), SIA, Record Unit 74, Box 120, Folder 10.
562
Image J.18: Tasmanian Zebra Wolf
Tasmanian zebra wolf on display in the National Zoological Park, c. 1904.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image# Neg0139_ Dig2564-67.
563